Comments on: Marxism, Darwin, and Jerry Fodor’s Flying Pigs

By: Juan Valle Lisboa

Juan Valle Lisboa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:29:13 +0000

I want to comment on the assertion “Lots of nonsense put forth under the guise of ‘evolutionary psychology’ is a good example”, for Fodor has already been dealt with (I wanted to write an article called “The language of irrational belief” but I have many things to do before that).
With respect to evolutionary psychology (EP), the concerns are misguided and illfounded. We are, as species, different from any other and have special attributes, including cognitive ones. You can take cognitive science seriously or not. If you don’t, you might be missing an important part of science, and doing that in the name of (innocent) Marx would be a revival of Lysenko, but I guess someone has to learn from their mistakes.
Yet if you take cognitive science seriously, we have many cognitive capacities that are hard-wired, meaning not that there is a blueprint of them in our genes, but that our genes constrain the cellular machinery to develop an organism having these traits in most natural environments. It turns out that many of those could have had an adaptive value in our evolutionary history. So there is a legitimate quest to understand how our genes have these properties in terms of our evolutionary paths.
Whatever comes out from that, if it is well done is science, and history should have thaught us not to question science in the name of ideology.
What we should question is philosophical or political misinterpretation of science. If it is true that we are programed to develop modules for language, kin identification, sexual preferences, etc. that doesn’t mean that we have to stick to the mean behavior that “module” shows in the present time. I think that what EP posits allows for an infinite -but constrained- set of possibilities. A metaphor shall help to clarify what I mean. It has alwasy been claimed (as Chomsky demonstrates) that our language capacity has the potential for infinite utterances using only finite media. With a limited vocabulary, and limited mental machinery (so limited rules) you can create an unlimited amout of utterances. I think that having a set of limited modules for cognitive capabilites allows for an infinite amount of ways oc organazing society. History is the unfolding of these infinite possibilites, and so culture, technology and political strugles are at the same time created by one possibility of human nature, and modifying the expression of this human nature in a way not too different from what Marx envisaged. In essence, I think that there is room for a Marxist account of Evolutionary Psychology.
Regards

By: Hans Bicker

Hans Bicker — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 19:09:29 +0000

I just read “Why pigs don’t have wings” of Jerry Fodor and I am shocked about the fact that this intelligent man apparently never understood the essence of Darwinism. His writing is so overtly ludicrous, that only a layman in this matter might take it seriously.
The fact that Thomas Riggins tries to understand the mind of this earlier man of science is a sympathatic gesture. And he does that nicely without becoming unpolite. But if you really understand evolutionary adaptation, there are two consequences, that you must accept. The first is that in nature nothing has a premedited purpose nor that there is somekind of intelligent design and the second is that men (homo sapiens) is just a weird but logical abberation in the evolutionary proces. If you can live with that, you have the right attitude to understand something simple and profound as the evolutionary process.

By: John Landon

John Landon — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:20:01 +0000

http://darwiniana.com/2007/10/29/there-is-no-darwinian-left/

That’s a link to Darwiniana blog. I see you already have a trackback link.

It seems to me that the left should be critiquing Darwinism, not defending it. Marx is often made to seem a Darwin fan, but the truth is that his first reaction was to see the ideology (see Bellamy’s Marx’s Ecology) in Darwinism.
As to dialectics, this was once used to propose punk eek style objections to Darwin, what happened to all of that.
For an approach to social evolution that looks at Marx, Darwin, economic theories, and evolution, see my history & evolution site at
http://history-and-evolution.com

By: » There is no Darwinian left

» There is no Darwinian left — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:58:36 +0000

[...] Marxism, Darwin, and Jerry Fodor’s Flying Pigs I will comment later on this one, but it is downright sad that the left is so stuck on Darwinism. Dialectics of natural selection? C’mon. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature? I will be polite. Actually, if you want dialectics, why not an Hegelian account of NS? Or a natural selection of leftisms. It’s time for the left to simply drop Darwin and pick up where Marx left off: this theory is the prime ideology of the bourgeoisie. The ruling ideas of the epoch are those of the bourgeoisie…and they have apparently ruled Marxists to boot. This article will look at his arguments as presented in “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” from the 18 October 2007 issue of The London Review of Books. I will try to establish that his arguments against natural selection are not convincing and are based a mechanical interpretation of Darwin that is a characteristic of contemporary Western thought. That when Darwin is read dialectically, as he was by Marx and Engels (cf. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature) the objections to natural selection as the main motor of evolutionary change evaporate. [...]

By: gerald spezio

gerald spezio — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:01:51 +0000

After Fodor squandered his precious brain cells scribbling philosophy, what was left of his brain was adequate to make a complete fool of himself by childishly attacking Darwinian natural selection for mechanism, no less.

Mr Riggens’ claim that Darwin “should” be read dialectically spoils an otherwise tight and tough criticism of Foder’s philosophizing.

Hegel’s preposterous philosophical dialectics couldn’t have been more crippling to Marx’s valiant labors in the cause of materialistic social science.
Marvin Harris called Marx’s use of Hegelian dialectics and the disasterous results to Marx’s un-scientific epistemology – “the Hegelian monkey.”