Sixiang
7th February 2012, 22:14
Hello scientific people of revleft. I request your help and information.
I am taking a class called Biodiversity, Conservation, and Development. It's an interdisciplinary class taught by a Biology professor working with evolutionary ecology (let me just say that he's a badass who trolls the creationists like a boss). Anyways, we're supposed to be working on a big research project throughout the semester within our majors. I'm a history major myself and want to do something historical. So I'm going to be writing up a 10 page essay at the end after I compile all this information and put it together.
So I want to do something with Darwin's findings and evolution because I am interested in it. I'm throwing ideas out at my professor and he helps guide me but I really need to narrow it down to something specific.
Here are the ideas we're looking at:
-Take a specific concept, idea, or point in the Origin of Species and see how it has been studied, researched, tested, interpretated, and maybe even changed over time. Maybe something involving natural selection and how since then scientists have defined and worked with it.
-See how politicians, sociologists, and philosophers have used Darwin's findings to support their ideologies. For example, that disgusting ideology Social Darwinism that the capitalists love to use to justify their actions, the nazis had some stuff about how the Germans were the most highly evolved people and Jewish people are the parasites of the Earth that must be destroyed (ironically parasites play an important part in biodiversity and evolutionary ecology), and communists have talked about how evolution helps prove dialectical materialism and have applied it to society moving forward and upward in a sort of "evolutionary" path.
-Something about the relationship between Marx, Engels, and Darwin (and maybe other contemporary scientists) and how evolution has been a part of communist thinking.
So, does anyone know of any books that I can read that will help me with this? Are there any books on the relationship between Marx and Darwin? Are there any good books that sum up how political ideologies have interpreted and tried to adopt Darwin's findings? I could really use a lot of help because biology is not my expertise at all but this can be a great thing to research.
Thank you for all your time, help, advice, and information.
I am taking a class called Biodiversity, Conservation, and Development. It's an interdisciplinary class taught by a Biology professor working with evolutionary ecology (let me just say that he's a badass who trolls the creationists like a boss). Anyways, we're supposed to be working on a big research project throughout the semester within our majors. I'm a history major myself and want to do something historical. So I'm going to be writing up a 10 page essay at the end after I compile all this information and put it together.
So I want to do something with Darwin's findings and evolution because I am interested in it. I'm throwing ideas out at my professor and he helps guide me but I really need to narrow it down to something specific.
Here are the ideas we're looking at:
-Take a specific concept, idea, or point in the Origin of Species and see how it has been studied, researched, tested, interpretated, and maybe even changed over time. Maybe something involving natural selection and how since then scientists have defined and worked with it.
-See how politicians, sociologists, and philosophers have used Darwin's findings to support their ideologies. For example, that disgusting ideology Social Darwinism that the capitalists love to use to justify their actions, the nazis had some stuff about how the Germans were the most highly evolved people and Jewish people are the parasites of the Earth that must be destroyed (ironically parasites play an important part in biodiversity and evolutionary ecology), and communists have talked about how evolution helps prove dialectical materialism and have applied it to society moving forward and upward in a sort of "evolutionary" path.
-Something about the relationship between Marx, Engels, and Darwin (and maybe other contemporary scientists) and how evolution has been a part of communist thinking.
So, does anyone know of any books that I can read that will help me with this? Are there any books on the relationship between Marx and Darwin? Are there any good books that sum up how political ideologies have interpreted and tried to adopt Darwin's findings? I could really use a lot of help because biology is not my expertise at all but this can be a great thing to research.
Thank you for all your time, help, advice, and information.