File spoon-archives/marxism-psych.archive/marxism-psych_1996/96-12-11.201, message 24


From: Paul Gallagher <pcg-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: On-line writings plus information about distance learning programmes at Sheffield
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 09:01:48 -0400 (EDT)


> This warm feedback is perhaps a sign that people would like this 
> list to develop in rather different ways to other marxism lists!

Well, ruthless polemicizing is fun too!
> 
> But I would like to ask Paul, or anybody else to give a little 
> detail about what he liked about Bob Young's contributions
> so we can get a little more into checking out our shared
> foundation matrix of this list.
>

It's rare that an author makes his published work freely available.
That alone makes the Web publication of these texts admirable.
My guess is that the biggest obstacle toward the Internet becoming 
the world's best reference library, as it is sometimes touted to be,
is the matter of intellectual property. Most authors and publishers
would rather earn money from texts than give them out freely.

I have almost no knowledge of psychology or psychoanalysis,
and little knowledge of the history of biology. Prof. Young presents
these topics in a way I find very accessible.

In particular, having studied biology, I for a long time have been
interested in the problems of genetic reductionism, genetic determinism,
and selectionism. But it's only recently that I've become interested in
how these topics apply to humans. I became interested after seeing
how popular human sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, etc., are on
the Internet.  I've looked around for good critiques of these ideas,
and Prof. Young's are especially useful and nicely complement the
writings of Lewontin, Rose, and Hubbard.

For example, whereas I found the identification of complex social
phenomena with genes implausible, identifying (seemingly) elementary
psychological phenomena with the genes (and considering them innate
and fixed throughout the whole human species) struck me as more plausible,
although difficult to test. I was happy to find that Prof. Young's 
texts address this topic in detail, but in a way that I, without any
background in psychology or psychoanalysis, could understand.


Paul
pcg-AT-panix.com



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