Darwin

[Jay Rothermel]

http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=366
excerpts:
February 6, 2009


Charles Darwin and Materialist Science
By Ian Angus.

February 12, 2009 is Darwin Day, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His masterwork, On the Origin of Species, was published 150 years ago, in November 1859, initiating a revolution in science that continues to this day....
.....

Marx and Engels and Darwin

Outside official scientific circles, Darwin’s ideas found strong support in the workers movement. Friedrich Engels said Origin was “absolutely splendid,” and Karl Marx called it “the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”

Marx’s friend Wilhelm Liebknecht later recalled that “when Darwin drew the conclusions from his research work and brought them to the knowledge of the public, we spoke of nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries.”

In Origin, Marx and Engels found a materialist explanation of nature’s history to complement and strengthen their materialist explanation of human history. They particularly valued Darwin’s demonstration that nature has a history that can be explained in materialist, natural terms. In Anti-Dühring, Engels wrote:
“Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically … she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.”

A triumph for humanity

Darwin spent most of the rest of his life researching evolution and natural selection, while his supporters defended his ideas against the most influential opinion leaders of his day. By the time he died in 1882, few scientists still disputed the fact of evolution — but it took much longer for most to accept the materialist core of Darwin’s work, that variation and natural selection are the processes that drive evolution. For decades scientists searched for an alternative to natural selection that would be compatible with the idealist conception that God, or some equivalent progressive tendency in nature, guided evolution upwards until humans emerged as the pinnacle of creation.

But twentieth century genetic research proved that Darwin was right all along: that variations occur naturally, and that natural selection is the main force determining which variations survive and spread.

Darwin’s commitment to naturalist science has triumphed. No modern scientist, not even one with deep religious convictions, would today suggest that “then a miracle happened” is an acceptable explanation for anything in nature, including the origins, immense variety and constant changes in life on our planet.

This materialist victory in science is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. For that reason alone, no matter what his hesitations, delays or prejudices, Charles Darwin deserves to be remembered and honoured by everyone who looks forward to the ending of superstition and ignorance in all aspects of life.

The idea that nature has a history, that species come into existence, change and disappear through natural processes, is just as revolutionary, and just as important to socialist thought, as the idea that capitalism isn’t eternal but came into being at a given time and will one day disappear from the earth.


Ian Angus is an associate editor of Socialist Voice, and editor of the online journal Climate and Capitalism. He is currently writing a book on Darwin and materialism.

[Jay Rothermel]

http://www.workers.org/2009/world/marx_darwin_0219/


By Sam Marcy


Marx, Darwin, and the upheaval in the biological sciences

excerpt:


Lenin on evolution

It should be noted that Lenin (who was only 24 years old at the time) in his polemic entitled “What the ‘Friends of the People’ are,” summed up the relation of Marxism to Darwinism as follows: “Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, ‘created by God’ and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows for all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities (or, if you like, at the will of society and the government) and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.” (From Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 1, page 142.)

For all of those in the scientific community who are looking for links between Marx’s view and that of Darwin, Marx stated in the preface to the second edition of “Capital” that from his standpoint, “the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history.” This clearly underlines the relationship between Marxism and Darwinism—the common methodology employed by both Marx and Engels, who have both drawn the parallel between their scientific historical method in approaching social evolution and Darwin’s in organic evolution, have sometimes been subjected to criticism for going too far. For example, see McClellan’s “Karl Marx” in which he criticizes Engels for saying in his graveside speech on Marx: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that humankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.”

McClellan presents it as though Marx and Engels had no reservations about Darwin. Of course they did, especially where Darwin unnecessarily draws in the doctrine of Malthus.


The reactionary evolutionism of Malthus

Engels in his withering criticism of Duhring, who erroneously attacked Darwin’s theory of the struggle for existence on the ground that Darwin had adopted the Malthusian theory lock, stock, and barrel so to speak, said: “Now Darwin would not dream of saying that the origin of the idea of the struggle for existence is to be found in Malthus. He only says that his theory of the struggle for existence is the theory of Malthus applied to the animal and plant world as a whole. However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are needed to perceive the struggle for existence in nature—the contradiction between the countless host of germs which nature so lavishly produces and the small number of those which ever reach maturity; a contradiction which in fact for the most part finds its solution in a struggle for existence—often of extreme cruelty.”

Likewise, Marx in a letter to Kugelmann dated June 1870 says, “Herr Lange, you see, has made a great discovery. The whole of history can be brought under a single great natural law. This natural law is the phrase (in this application Darwin’s expression becomes nothing but a phrase) ‘the struggle for life.’ And the content of this phrase is the Malthusian law of population, or rather over-population. So instead of analyzing the struggle for life as represented historically in varying and definite forms of society, all that has to be done is to translate every concrete struggle into the phrase ‘struggle for life’ and this phrase itself into the Malthusian population fantasy. One must admit that this is a very impressive method—for staggering sham scientific bombastic ignorance and intellectual laziness.” (Marx & Engels Selected Correspondence, pages 239-40) Nevertheless, the relationship between Marx and Darwin was one of mutual respect for each one’s discipline.

Darwin wrote to Marx on Oct. 1, 1873, “Dear sir; I thank you for the honor that you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital and I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, but understanding more of the deep and important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Charles Darwin.”
Yes indeed, the years 1982-83 should have been a double commemoration of both Marx and Darwin. However, 100 years after the death of these two giants of modern science, the bourgeoisie is less disposed than ever to commemorate Darwin, let alone to take note of Marx, whose diagnosis of the capitalist system is being confirmed by the profoundest capitalist crisis in more than half a century.

[Jay Rothermel]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1912/marxism-darwinism.htm


Anton Pannekoek 1912


Marxism And Darwinism




CONTENTS




Darwinism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S1)
Marxism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S2)
Marxism and the Class Struggle (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S3)
Darwinism and the Class Struggle (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S4)
Darwinism versus Socialism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S5)
Natural Law and Social Theory (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S6)
The Sociability of Man (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S7)
Tools, Thought and Language (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S8)
Animal Organs and Human Tools (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S9)
Capitalism and Socialism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=1357072#S10)

excerpt:

I.
Darwinism




Two scientists can hardly be named who have, in the second half of the 19th century, dominated the human mind to a greater degree than Darwin and Marx. Their teachings revolutionized the conception that the great masses had about the world. For decades their names have been on the tongues of everybody, and their teachings have become the central point of the mental struggles which accompany the social struggles of today. The cause of this lies primarily in the highly scientific contents of their teachings.


The scientific importance of Marxism as well as of Darwinism consists in their following out the theory of evolution, the one upon the domain of the organic world, of things animate; the other, upon the domain of society. This theory of evolution, however, was in no way new, it had its advocates before Darwin and Marx; the philosopher, Hegel, even made it the central point of his philosophy. It is, therefore, necessary to observe closely what were the achievements of Darwin and Marx in this domain....

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Unfortunately, Marx cooled considerably in his enthusiasm for Darwin, and so did Engels.

As Steven Jay Gould argued in an article about Ray Lankester, who was one of the few individuals to attend Marx's funeral):


"If Lankester showed so little affinity for Marx's worldview, perhaps we should try the opposite route and ask if Marx had any intellectual or philosophical reason to seek Lankester's company. Again, after debunking some persistent mythology, we can find no evident basis for their friendship.

"The mythology centres upon a notorious, if understandable, scholarly error that once suggested far more affinity between Marx and Darwin (or at least a one-way hero worshiping of Darwin by Marx) than corrected evidence can validate. Marx did admire Darwin, and he did send an autographed copy of Das Kapital to the great naturalist; Darwin, in the only recorded contact between the two men, sent a short, polite, and basically contentless letter of thanks. We do know that Darwin (who read German poorly and professed little interest in political science) never spent much time with Marx's magnum opus. All but the first 105 pages in Darwin's copy of Marx's 822-page book remain uncut (as does the table of contents), and Darwin, contrary to his custom when reading books carefully, made no marginal annotations. In fact, we have no evidence that Darwin ever read a word of Das Kapital.

"The legend of greater contact began with one of the few errors ever made by one of the finest scholars of this, or any other, century -- Isaiah Berlin, in his 1939 biography of Marx. Based on a dubious inference from Darwin's short letter of thanks to Marx, Berlin concluded that Marx had offered to dedicate volume 2 of Kapital to Darwin and that Darwin had politely refused.

"This tale of Marx's proffered dedication then gained credence when a second letter, ostensibly from Darwin to Marx but addressed only to 'Dear Sir,' turned up among Marx's papers in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. This letter, written on October 13, 1880, does politely decline a suggested dedication: 'I Shd. prefer the Part or Volume not be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as it implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.' This second find seemed to seal Isaiah Berlin's case, and the story achieved general currency....

"To shorten a long story, two scholars, working independently and simultaneously in the mid-1970s, discovered the almost comical basis of the error (see Margaret A. Fay, 'Did Marx offer to dedicate Capital to Darwin?' Journal of the History of Ideas 39, 1978, and Lewis S. Feuer, 'Is the "Darwin-Marx correspondence" authentic?' Annals of Science 32, 1975). Marx's daughter Eleanor became the common-law wife of the British socialist Edward Aveling. The couple safeguarded Marx's papers for several years, and the 1880 letter, evidently sent by Darwin to Aveling himself, must have strayed into the Marxian collection.

"Aveling belonged to a group of radical atheists. He sought Darwin's official approval, and status as dedicatee, for a volume he had edited on Darwin's work and his (that is, Aveling's, not necessarily Darwin's) view of its broader social meaning (published in 1881 as The Student's Darwin, volume 2 in the International Library of Science and Free-thought). Darwin, who understood Aveling's opportunism and cared little for his antireligious militancy, refused with his customary politeness but with no lack of firmness. Darwin ended his letter to Aveling (and not to Marx, who did not treat religion as a primary subject in Das Kapital) by writing:


"'It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science.'

"Nonetheless, despite this correction, Marx might still have regarded himself as a disciple of Darwin and might have sought the company of a key Darwinian in the younger generation -- a position rendered more plausible by Engels's famous comparison (quoted earlier) in his funerary oration. But this interpretation must also be rejected. Engels maintained far more interest in the natural sciences than Marx ever did (as best expressed in two books, Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature). Marx, as stated above, certainly admired Darwin as a liberator of knowledge from social prejudice and as a useful ally, at least by analogy. In a famous letter of 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin's Origin of Species: "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

But Marx also criticized the social biases in Darwin's formulation, again writing to Engels, and with keen insight:


"'It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division pf labour, competition, opening up of new markets, invention and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.' It is Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes [the war of all against all].' [Marx to Engels, 18/06/1862.]

"Marx remained a committed evolutionist, of course, but his interest in Darwin clearly diminished through the years. An extensive scholarly literature treats this subject, and I think that Margaret Fay speaks for a consensus when she writes (in her previously cited article):


"'Marx...though he was initially excited by the publication of Darwin's Origin...developed a much more critical stance toward Darwinism, and in his private correspondence of the 1860s poked gentle fun at Darwin's ideological biases. Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, compiled circa 1879-81, in which Darwin is cited only once, provide no evidence that he reverted to his earlier enthusiasm.'" [Gould (2002c), pp.123-25. Spelling altered to conform to UK English.]

It is odd, however, that Gould does not quote a letter Engels wrote which is far more negative in its opinions about Darwin:


"1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin#s time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature -- inanimate as well as animate -- includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meagre phrase 'struggle for existence,' a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis [with a grain of salt -- RL], such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

"...I should therefore attack -- and perhaps will when the time comes -- these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

"The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

"4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies....

"At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence -- if we permit this category for the moment to be valid -- is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -- what sense is their left in all this talk of 'struggle for existence'? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

"...Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the 'struggle for existence.' I would therefore never do this favour to these false naturalists....

"6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the 'bellum omnium contra omnes' was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case...." [Engels to Lavrov, 17/11/1875. Spelling altered to conform to UK English.]

Which seems to me to get things about right. So, there is little substantial affinity between Marxism and Darwinism, despite what you have been told.

Gould's article can be read here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_7_108/ai_55698600

Engels's letter can be read here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_11_17-ab.htm

[Jay Rothermel]

http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/26/evolution-of-intelligent-design

The strange evolution of "intelligent design"
Scott Johnson reviews a new book that traces the debate over
intelligent design--and its anti-materialist roots.

February 26, 2009

THE RALLYING cry of the intelligent design (ID) movement is that
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "only a theory" and that
schools should "teach the controversy." They then go about attempting
to poke holes in this mere "theory"--ignoring that relativity and even
Newtonian mechanics are also "theories"--with little to show for their
own theory.

Every attempt to explain a presumably unexplainable adaptation by
evoking the theory of an "intelligent designer" eventually collapses
under the weight of research that shows the evolutionary roots of the
organism or its trait.

In spite of--or probably because of--the weaknesses of their
arguments, ID supporters prefer to focus on the "gaps" in Darwinian
evolution, no matter how small, rather than talk about the background
to their own theory. Many biologists who provide brilliant and
devastating critiques of ID tend to keep the argument on this ground
as well, reluctant to take on the philosophical implications behind
either theory.

There are a number of excellent books upholding the science of natural
selection and criticizing the pseudo-science of intelligent design,
but few look the philosophy behind the ID movement square in the face
and challenge it on those terms. Critique of Intelligent Design by
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York attempts to rectify
this situation.

The modern roots of the intelligent design movement lie in the 1987
Supreme Court ruling Edwards v. Aguillard, which ruled that teaching
Biblical creation as an alternative to evolution was an
unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The vague notion of an
intelligent designer--possibly but not necessarily a God or other
supernatural force, but not requiring a religious commitment to the
Garden of Eden or Noah's Ark--suddenly became the new theory of
creationists.

A creationist book in the making called Creation Biology was renamed
Of Pandas and People, with the word "creationism" crudely substituted
with "intelligent design" throughout, a fact that would expose the
religious roots of the ID movement in a 2005 trial.

An even bigger exposé, however, occurred with the publication of the
Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document"--an explicit multi-year battle
plan documenting the actual goals of the movement's leading
think-tank. Never meant for public eyes, this document was "liberated"
in 1999 by a part-time worker entrusted with copying it and his
tech-savvy friend who posted it on the Internet.

In one key passage quoted by Bellamy et al., we find that "The
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural
legacies." Elsewhere, the document states that their goal is to change
attitudes on "sexuality, abortion and belief in God."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SO IT is clear that the background and purpose of ID are religious,
but a further theme of Critique of Intelligent Design is the
anti-materialist roots of the ID arguments. These neo-creationists are
opponents of all of the obvious figures in materialist philosophy and
the scientific revolution such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud. But they also have a particular bone to pick with
Epicurus, the ancient Greek materialist philosopher who was a
contemporary of Plato and Aristotle.

According to leading ID ideologue William Dembski, "All roads lead to
Epicurus and the train of thought he set in motion." Apparently, this
is a grudge going back many centuries before Christ.

ID proponents despise Epicurus because he rejected the interference of
the Gods as explanations of the material world and even had a crude
theory of evolution to explain the development of life. While he
avoided engaging in politics in favor of contemplating philosophy in
his academic "Garden," he admitted women and slaves to study as
equals--unlike other Greek academies. Karl Marx, who was impressed by
his philosophy, would later write his doctoral dissertation on
Epicureanism.

In return for his philosophical contributions, as Critique explains,
Western thinkers have attacked and downplayed the ideas of Epicurus
for centuries. Dante's Inferno "consigned Epicurus and his followers
to an eternity of torture in open coffins in the sixth circle of
Hell."

The Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas rejected Epicurus in favor of
the idealist Plato because Epicurus "denied that there is any
providence" and "held that the world came about by chance." Aquinas
also argued that the material world was directed by some
"intelligence...like an archer giving a definite motion to an arrow to
wing its way to the end."

The book provides a specifically Marxist perspective that the authors
employ in an attempt to avoid the traps of either ceding too much
ground to religious ideas (as they argue radical paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould did) or simply retreating to a "crude atheism" that
dismissively snubs its nose at religion:

As a materialist, Marx opted not to invest in the abstraction of God
and religion. At the same time, he did not attempt to disprove the
supernatural existence of God, since that transcended the real,
empirical world and could not be answered, or even addressed, through
reason, observation, and scientific inquiry...[A]s Marx observed in
his Theses on Feuerbach, a crude atheism that sought to establish
itself alongside traditional religion "as an independent realm in the
clouds" had relatively little to offer. The critique of religion was
therefore socially meaningful only to the extent that it...[was]
rooted in "revolutionary practice."

Much of Critique of Intelligent Design discusses this centuries-long
battle between materialists and anti-materialists. Fortunately, even
though the book is more about philosophy than science and politics, it
is not an unreadable tome of abstract ideas.

Rather, this slim volume is meant as an intervention in the discussion
around intelligent design, giving a philosophical underpinning to the
debate in a way that most scientific discussions do not. The book also
provides a valuable and brief introduction to the history of
materialist philosophy and its detractors.

What is surprising is how often the book is able to show that the
battles against materialist ideas have invoked evidence of
"intelligence" and a "designer," much like the arguments taking place
in the classrooms and courtrooms today. The authors are quite
convincing in using this fact to make the point that these arguments
are not new not, are not going away, and are about even more than
whether evolution is taught in the classroom.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Review: Books
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of
Intelligent Design [2]. Monthly Review Press, 2008, 240 pages, $16.95.