File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-09-05.145, message 19


Date: Thu, 15 Aug 96 08:24:24 GMT
From: Adam Rose <adam-AT-pmel.com>
Subject: Re: Darwin ( dialectics ? )



> 
> Ralph:
> 
> >This is embarrassing confusion and nonsense.  Must we lower
> >ourselves to this?
> 
> Be honest, Ralph. Don't Marx and Engels share a reasonable portion of the
> responsibility for our lowering ourselves like this?
> 
> Rahul
> 
> Adam, you might want to ponder the fact that Newton and Darwin didn't have
> much to say about origins because there was no conceivable way they could
> do more than the airiest speculation about them, while Marx and Engels
> didn't let this fact stop them, or even slow them down.
>

Oops ! Sorry, I thought for a moment there I was talking to people at least
sympathetic to marxism.

1. I wasn't criticising Newton and Darwin for not pondering the origins of 
the Universe and Life more. Newton and Darwin, while their theories were
"in the air" so to speak, were a huge step forward for human understanding
of the natural world. I was just saying that the relative "historicalness"
of the three sets of theories seems to have a relationship to their
relative "dialecticalness".

2. You are of course wrong about Newton and Engels ( but not Darwin ).
You can quite easily get a solar system with a history out of Newtonian
mechanics and a primal soup of gas ( apparently Kant + Liebnitz tried to
do this ). Such developments were not looked into, did not gain in popularity,
I think for ideological reasons - they did not fit in with the dominant
spirit of the age. Darwin DID produce a book "The Descent of Man" , which
I have not read ( yet ) , at a similar time as Engels wrote "The Role of
Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" ( which makes an excellent charade,
I have found ). [ I actually think the reason Darwin published "The Descent of Man"
quite so late were basically political - while the immediate contrevery around
Origin of the species was very much about the consequences for human evolution,
Darwin deliberately avoided the subject for as long as he could. Even when
he did publish, he was critisized for publishing in the aftermath of the
Paris Commune. ]. When Engels wrote OFPPS and the "Role of Labour . . . ",
he did so on the basis of the same "gentleman collector" tradition as Darwin.
So if you think Engels was out of order, you should be consistent and have a go
at Darwin.


Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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