Marx and Darwin: Two great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century
Part 1
By Chris Talbot
17 June 2009
This is the first of a three-part series comprising a lecture by WSWS correspondent Chris Talbot to meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in Britain.
We have organised these meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in honour of Charles Darwin from a different standpoint from the many other bicentenary events. We want to bring out the connection between Darwin and that other great thinker of the mid-19th century, Karl Marx.
Charles DarwinThe importance of Marx hits you when you take in the events of the last few months. We are now in a world economic crisis comparable to, if not more severe than, that of the 1930s, which will have a major effect on all of our futures. Current economic theory completely failed to predict this crisis. The economists cannot explain how it happened and have no answer to it [1]. In contrast, Karl Marx spent much of his life developing an economic analysis that explains the inherent instability of capitalism and provides a scientific basis for the development of the socialist working class movement.
Superficially, it may seem there is not much of a connection between Darwin, the retiring English gentleman, and Marx ,who along with Frederick Engels, was involved in revolutionary communist activity for most of his adult life. But Marx and Engels themselves immediately recognised the significance of Darwin’s theory when On the Origin of Species appeared 150 years ago. Engels wrote to Marx in 1859, just after he had read the first edition of Darwin’s book [2]:
Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.
The last sentence is a reservation that Engels and Marx held—only in private it must be stressed—regarding the methodological approach of Darwin. But throughout their lives they insisted on the importance of Darwin’s work. Teleology, meaning a divine purpose which was working itself out in nature, had been demolished.
Most importantly, Darwin’s theory could “demonstrate historical evolution in Nature.” Here was the most significant development in natural science in the 19th century, the culmination of the revolution in science that began 200 years earlier. Science was at the core of the Enlightenment, the liberation from religious and dogmatic thought that had developed in the preceding century, the outlook of “Dare to Know” in Kant’s famous dictum.
However, the tremendous strides that science had made were largely in physics and chemistry and they did not really involve evolutionary development, or history. It is true that geology, a science that does involve history, had become established, and work in evolutionary biology had begun, but it was still lacking a scientific basis. Darwin had brought about a revolution in thought that would place biology alongside the other natural sciences. And at its core was an explanation of historical development in nature.
Marx and Engels were well aware that to develop a scientific outlook on society—which was the only way that the emerging movement of the working class could establish socialism—a historical approach was needed. When Marx wrote in 1861 on Darwin he stressed this [3]:
Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.
This historical approach is the essence of Marx’s method. It is derived from the dialectical approach of the great German philosopher Hegel, another product of the Enlightenment. By the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels had firmly established a materialist and scientific analysis of the historical development of human society, but throughout their lives they continued to develop this work, especially in Marx’s great contribution to the politically economy of capitalism.
In parenthesis it can be pointed out that there was something of a division of labour between them and it was Engels who tended to lead their studies in the natural sciences, as the 1859 letter shows. Even so, we now know from research done on the extensive libraries of Marx and Engels by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam [4] that Marx read widely in the natural sciences after 1870.
Most of you are familiar with the key mechanisms of Darwin’s historical theory of nature that is now regarded as central to the whole of biology. There are the two sides to it—Natural Selection and Modification by Descent. As Darwin explains himself in the first edition of On the Origin of Species [5]:
Can it, then, be thought improbable . . . that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations I shall call Natural Selection. (Chapter IV)
Several classes of facts . . . seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent. (Chapter XIII).
Perhaps in parallel to presenting this core idea of Darwin’s theory, I can briefly set out Marx’s historical approach to society by quoting a footnote that Marx adds in Chapter 15, Section 1, in the first volume of Capital [6]:
Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
I hope this quote establishes briefly the mechanism of social development understood by Marx and the central role played by labour, “the productive organs of man.” As Marx explains, the social relations of society—fundamentally class relations—and the ideology that flows from them are rooted in the process of production. I will add also the second part of this footnote, as it very much relates to the subject matter of this talk.
Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty.
Marx took a scientific materialist position, particularly in relation to religion. I will come back to the question raised about abstract materialism in the last sentence.
A vast range of developments have been made in biology since Darwin’s day and the excerpts presented here are only intended to present the essential elements of his theory. But it must be stressed that the synthesis with genetics that took place in the 1930s and 1940s and then the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and the understanding of the biochemical basis of genes since then have only validated Darwin’s basic theory.
We could make the same point about Marx. The development of imperialism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century that led to two world wars and fascism has had to be extensively studied and explained from the Marxist standpoint. The 1917 Russian Revolution was a tremendous confirmation of Marx’s theory. It established the first workers’ state. The rise of Stalinism and the bureaucratic degeneration and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union called for extensive analysis, which our movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International has carried out.
The two great historical theories of the 19th century, of Darwin and Marx—the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought—have fundamentally changed our understanding of the world. They were part of the development of science in its broadest form—the desire to comprehend the natural and social worlds in order to change them for the benefit of mankind.
Consider the letter from Darwin to Marx in 1873. Marx had sent him a copy of Capital, and it is true, as cynical writers today such as Francis Wheen in his biography of Marx have pointed out, that Darwin’s copy only has the first 100 or so pages opened. But Darwin had a fiercely exclusive focus on his own specialized study and seldom strayed outside it. He wrote [7]:
Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of mankind.
This approach—to extend knowledge for the benefit of mankind—was taken for granted by both Marx and Darwin and was widely accepted by intellectuals and scientists in that period. I maintain it is possible to retain it today despite all kinds of arguments that it is naïve, or utopian, that it doesn’t take into account so-called human nature, and so on. The many attempts, stemming from the Frankfurt School of social theory and developed by poststructuralists and postmodernists in the last two or three decades, to deny the objective materialist basis of science and to pour scorn on the achievements of the Enlightenment do not diminish the fundamental importance of this approach to knowledge.
This is a vast subject area that is central to the development of a socialist movement in the twenty first century. In this talk I just want to focus on two contemporary Darwinian issues that relate to these many attempts to attack science.
Firstly, I want to look at how evolutionary science is actually viewed today and how it is being dealt with by the political and religious establishment. Secondly, I want to look at controversies that have arisen over the last three decades or so relating to Marx and Darwin and that have created much confusion in understanding the important relationship between these two great thinkers.
To be continued
Footnotes:
[1] See for example John Kay, “How economics lost sight of the real world,” Financial Times, April 21, 2009.
[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/letters/59_12_11.htm
[3] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/letters/61_01_16.htm
[4] http://www.iisg.nl/imes/mega-summ.php#iv-31
[5] cited in Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest, Quercus, London, 2008.
[6] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S1 (footnote 4)
[7] cited in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, London, 1999.
Marx and Darwin: Two great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century
Part 2
By Chris Talbot
18 June 2009
This is the second of a three-part series comprising a lecture by WSWS correspondent Chris Talbot to meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in Britain. Part 1 was posted on June 17 and Part 3 on June 19.
Charles DarwinThere is a wealthy and powerful movement of the Christian right in the United States that has, and still is, attempting to stop Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution being taught in schools as the basis of all biological science. It has done this by putting forward a completely unscientific defence of religious obscurantism, generally based on literal interpretations of the Bible. At first this was known as creationism. By the 1980s as many as 27 states in the US had proposed legislation that, whilst it couldn’t oppose Darwin being taught, demanded that so-called creation science was taught as well. Creationism was obviously religious. It proposed creation of the universe a few thousand years ago, a big flood, etc., so in 1987 its teaching was ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court. As a result of the American Revolution, there is a separation of church and state and religion cannot be taught in schools, as it is in Britain.
The religious right in America found a way round this ban. They rewrote their material, avoiding any explicit religious references and simply replaced the word creationism with the phrase “Intelligent Design.” In this they received the backing of the Bush administration, which saw the Christian right as a key constituency.
In 2005 there was a famous federal court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Right-wing fundamentalists had taken over a school board in Pennsylvania and attempted to put Intelligent Design on the syllabus along with Darwinian biology. In the course of this case it was established beyond all doubt that Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been fully vindicated, is scientifically proven and is the basis for all biology. Moreover, the continuity between creationism and Intelligent Design was established as it was shown that the original Creationist text, Of Pandas and People, had been merely modified and that references to creationism had been replaced by “Intelligent Design.”
But demands for Intelligent Design to be taught in US schools or introduced into academia did not end. There is a lot of financial backing for reactionary religious ideology. We reported in 2005 on the World Socialist Web Site that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, which is state-funded and the most prestigious natural history museum in the US, agreed to the showing of a documentary on Intelligent Design put out by the main body funding this attack on Darwin, the Discovery Institute based in Seattle. [8] January’s edition of Scientific American, which is devoted to evolution, discusses the work of the Discovery Institute and the campaign to demand “academic freedom,” portraying teachers who take up their agenda as unfairly victimised. They insist on being able to “teach the controversy” and to use “critical analysis” regarding evolution, as though Intelligent Design can be put on a par with Darwinism.
There are many influential voices in Britain who would like to promote the same strategy, and I’m not just referring to Biblical literalists. Writing recently in the Spectator, journalist Melanie Phillips attacked one of the scientists who played a key role in the Dover trial, Professor Ken Miller.[9] Miller explained how the religious right had repackaged creationism as Intelligent Design. “The court was simply wrong,” writes Phillips, “doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.”
Instead she demands that we accept the claims of the Discovery Institute, or, as she states: “Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science.”
Tony Blair and the Labour government recognized there were potential supporters on the Christian right, following, as in every aspect of politics, the Bush regime. They pioneered faith-based schools and allowed state schools to attract private cash by becoming academies. The Emmanuel Schools Foundation controls four of these academies in the North East of England. They are state schools, but they are effectively run by a Christian fundamentalist, Sir Peter Vardy, who made his money through the Reg Vardy Group of car dealers. The Foundation claims it no longer teaches creationism, but it certainly did do so for several years, as the British Centre for Science Education revealed.[10] It is only as a result of campaigns by such bodies, and because of lobbying from scientists, that the Labour government, after 10 years in office, eventually put out a statement in 2007 stating that “creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science.” It can still presumably be taught in other subject areas. I am sure that if Blair had got his way we would have Intelligent Design taught in schools everywhere.
Evidence for evolution
Perhaps I can digress slightly here by referring briefly to the wealth of material—some of it presented in the Dover case, some of it very recent—that confirms Darwin’s theory. This has been called the golden age of biological science, compared to the golden age of physical science in the early 20th century and I think that assessment is correct.
One can certainly recommend as a starting point the recent BBC documentary by David Attenborough, “Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life,” in which he tackles the standard arguments against evolution in a clear and informative manner.[11] One of the issues raised by the Christian fundamentalists is the question of how the eye evolved. Nobody has ever seen a creature with half an eye, they say. Attenborough shows creatures with eyes or proto-eyes in various stages of development and refutes that objection to Darwinism.
Another common argument against evolution is the supposed gap in the fossil record between the Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian period. The fossil record shows what is often referred to as the Cambrian explosion of diverse species. Creationists claimed that some nonmaterial intervention is necessary to explain this phenomenon. But there is now an increasing body of fossil evidence from the Pre-Cambrian period. Attenborough shows some fossils from Charnwood near Leicester, 560 million years old, some of the oldest in the world, from well before the Cambrian period.
There does appear to be a considerable increase in the number of species dating from the Cambrian, found, for example, in the Burgess Shale formation in Canada, and involving some very strange looking creatures. When the famous paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that our conventional idea of evolution would need to be modified to explain this phenomenon, the Intelligent Design people seized on his remarks. However, one of the main experts on the Burgess Shale, Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University, has demonstrated that the Cambrian “explosion” can be explained by conventional Darwinian theory.[12]
This is just one example of the way in which scientific understanding of evolution has increased in the last few years. By comparing the DNA of many creatures, a vast mine of information has been built up that helps explain much more about evolution, giving a new kind of “fossil” record in the genes themselves. It is even possible to construct a “tree of life,” based on the hundreds of genomes that are now available, as well as the human genome.[13]
We have come to understand that the genes controlling the making of an insect’s body and organs are the same as the genes that control the making of our bodies. It is how these genes are used that determines the vast range of creatures stemming from the Cambrian. Sean B. Carroll, an expert in what is called “evo-devo,” has written popular books on this area of study. [14]
We should also briefly mention the important work done on bacteria, such as E.coli.[15] They make up 1 percent of the bacteria inside us, some million million (one and twelve zeros). Professor Richard Lenski and his team at Michigan State University have been studying evolution in the laboratory by investigating how E.coli breed under different conditions. They have found 100 beneficial mutations in 40,000 generations of bacteria, showing evolution actually at work. Scientists have also unravelled the metabolic pathway in E.coli, involving 1,260 genes and 2,077 chemical reactions, allowing them to construct computer models of these creatures.
Establishment religion
After considering the issue of Intelligent Design, right-wing opponents of Darwinian science and its teaching in schools, let us consider the position of the established Christian churches. They claim to be supporters of Darwinian evolution. Provided it is recognized that natural science applies only to the material world, they claim they can happily coexist with and even encourage Darwin’s theory. For the Church of England this was the position it had largely adopted by the time Darwin’s Origin was published. God had set the natural world in motion in biology, just as he had done before in Newtonian physics. However, the spiritual world, the world of morality and human consciousness, was the legitimate domain of the Church.
It would seem that science could happily coexist with this religious position in a sort of division of labour. I think this view is profoundly mistaken. It is not just religion as a private matter that is involved here. In the case of individual belief, we stand for freedom of opinion and are opposed to all forms of religious oppression. But what is involved here is the ideology of the religious establishment, an integral part of the ruling elite. Unlike the US we have in Britain a state-funded church, unelected Bishops in the House of Lords, and daily religious services are compulsory in schools. We also have church-run schools of many denominations.
The religious establishment’s claim to support science is misleading. The Theos think-tank,[16] backed and well funded by the Church of England and the Catholic Church, recently commissioned an opinion poll asking the question: Do you agree with the statement: “Evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”? Fifty-one percent of those questioned agreed with the statement, while 32 percent agreed that “God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years.”
The cause for this level of ignorance is not hard to find. Science is taught in schools according to the Labour government’s National Curriculum and has suffered a longstanding decline. Evolution is not taught in schools at all, apart from the small numbers who specialize in biology. The science syllabus for Key Stage 4, which is taught to all 14 to 16-year-olds, does not mention Darwin’s theory. The low-level educational standard is reflected in a poll taken last year showing one third of science teachers thought that “creationism should be given the same status as evolution in the classroom.”
Theos is not about to take up the case for science education or to criticize the government. Instead the think-tank has used the results of the poll to promote a campaign against atheism. They have concluded, “Darwin is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.”
Since virtually no prominent scientist apart from Richard Dawkins is widely reported speaking out against religion, we have the astonishing argument that ignorance about evolution is supposed to be caused by just one atheist academic. We should point out as well that Dawkins spends much of his time writing about and teaching Darwin’s theory, his post at Oxford being Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Compared to the huge number of media hours devoted to religion, his atheist views get negligible coverage.
Dawkins is not a Marxist and we have disagreed with some of his political views, but his materialist outlook and vigorous defence of science is what brings down the wrath of the Church.
Theos then followed up their poll by organizing a letter to the press, calling on “those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin’s theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so, as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.”
To their shame, it was signed by a number of prominent scientists and philosophers, persuaded to take up the Church’s cause.[17]
Expressed in the Theos letter is a definite anti-Enlightenment agenda that wishes to control and restrict science. It reflects a definite ideological outlook. Consider the approach taken by Simon Conway Morris, who is undoubtedly a very good paleontologist, but who belongs to that minority of scientists who are devout Christians.
In his recent book Life’s Solution, [18] he expresses the reactionary outlook of the religious establishment. Conway Morris says we must acknowledge there are limits to knowledge and science and there are areas that are “too dangerous in our present level of understanding to explore.” He warns that the “architecture of the universe need not be simply physical” and “unrestricted curiosity and the corruption of power are not necessarily fables.”
It is true that without foresight and careful planning, and certainly under the agenda set by corporations to maximize their profits, there can be unintended side effects resulting from technological developments. But what Conway Morris is saying is that science must be kept within narrow limits and to recognize that there are areas beyond its remit. Instead of a vision of human consciousness as the highest product of nature, understanding its laws and controlling it for the benefit of all, we are being enjoined to return to the fearful religious outlook from before the 17th century Scientific Revolution and before the Enlightenment. It is a perspective that expresses the inherent conflict between developments in biological science and the religious establishment.
To be continued
Notes:
[8] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/smit-j20.shtml
[9] http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3573761/creating-an-insult-to-intelligence.thtml
[10] http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/
[11] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1589429273035937450
[12] Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.
[13] See e.g. http://www.physorg.com/news152377707.html
[14] Sean B. Carroll, loc.cit., see also Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Pheonix, London, 2007.
[15] See Carl Zimmer, Microcosm, Heinemann, London, 2008.
[16] http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/
[18] Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Marx and Darwin: Two great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century
Part 3
By Chris Talbot
19 June 2009
This is the conclusion of a three-part series comprising a lecture by WSWS correspondent Chris Talbot to meetings of the International Students for Social Equality in Britain. Part 1 was posted on June 17 and Part 2 on June 18.
Evolutionary Psychology versus Marxism
Now we turn to areas where there have apparently been conflicts between Darwinian biology and Marxism. Firstly we consider those scientists who claim that biology can be used to explain all social phenomena. This was a strong tendency in the 19th century after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared.
Charles DarwinHere we link up to Marx’s comment in the footnote I cited at the start. Marx writes about what he calls “the abstract materialism of natural scientists.” He had in mind such figures as Ludwig Buchner, the German scientist who popularised atheism and a crude version of materialism. He attempted to apply concepts from natural science to history, of which he understood little. For Marx, social and ideological processes needed to be understood in terms of the “productive organs of man” and a materialist theory of history, and not by the application of abstract biological concepts.
Buchner was one of the first to apply Darwin’s theory to society, and by no means the most reactionary. There developed theories of society, often grouped under the heading of Social Darwinism and associated with Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement. These views became popular in establishment circles towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. It was claimed that the ruling class had come to the top of society because it was biologically fitter and that the poorer specimens in the working class, who tended to breed faster, needed to have their numbers curtailed. Such noxious views were often associated with racism in the period of the rise of colonialism and were later espoused by the Nazis.
The application of biology to social science was opposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later Marxists and the broader socialist movement that developed in the wake of the Russian Revolution. It was generally accepted, even by those who were not Marxists, that society could not be crudely equated with the natural world, and that society has its own specific characteristics. You wouldn’t attempt to apply particle physics directly to analyze the molecular processes in the cell—why should you attempt to apply biological theories to society?
Since the 1970s there has been a revival of attempts to apply biology directly to social questions. First there was sociobiology and later Evolutionary Psychology came on the scene. Why did this discredited agenda re-emerge? That is a complex question, but fundamentally I think it can only be explained as a result of the decline in socialist consciousness in the period after World War II, particularly resulting from the betrayals of Stalinism [19].
This is not the subject of this talk, but it is important to note the considerable amount of ignorance concerning history and society among scientists in the field of Evolutionary Psychology, which probably exceeds that of Buchner and his contemporaries.
Consider the much publicised views of Steven Pinker. In The Blank Slate [20] he demonstrates his ignorance of Marx and Engels’ work. Pinker lumps them together with Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, holding them responsible for millions of deaths in the manner of a Cold War ideologist.
Pinker puts forward the view that much of social theory—and he includes Marxism in this—sees the human mind as a blank slate that can simply be moulded by society. This is a caricature of the views of Marx and Engels. They explained as early as 1845 that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”
They rejected the idea that human society could be understood on the basis of abstract individual nature, but they never denied that some features of human behaviour could be inherited and even descended from our animal past. They insisted, however, that this was not the “essence” of the question. Engels’ unfinished draft, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man [21], is important in this respect. Engels clearly conceived of humans, with their distinctive use of tools, as evolving from apes by natural selection. Labour and also speech, argued Engels, gave an advantage to a large brain and consciousness in emerging man. He was perfectly clear about the biological basis of human behaviour, but when society emerged, “a new element” had come into being.
The 1970s saw the revival of abstract theories of “intelligence” and IQ testing. Most notoriously there were attempts to correlate IQ with race. These theories and their long history were completely dissected and demolished by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man [22], but they have had something of a revival with Pinker and others in the new guise of Evolutionary Psychology, responding no doubt to the wave of free market individualism that became widespread after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Pinker expounds a popular version of Evolutionary Psychology, claiming that “human nature” is made up of various psychological mechanisms or “mental organs” that evolved when humans were hunter-gatherers in the Pleistocene Period (1.8 million to 10,000 years ago). He claims that it is scientifically proven that there is:
The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom [23].
It is also proven, he claims, that there is “primacy of family ties in all human societies”, that there is a “universality of dominance and violence across human societies” and that there exists “ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies.” [24]
Needless to say, when the methodology behind these “proven” assertions is taken apart, it is found to be as suspect as the earlier theories that Gould demolished. David J Buller, a Professor at Northern Illinois, goes through four fallacies of Evolutionary Psychology in January’s special Evolution edition of Scientific American. For example, evolutionary psychologists claim that there is a built-in difference between men and women in regard to jealousy. They argue that a higher proportion of men find sexual infidelity to be more distressing than emotional infidelity. Buller challenges this. He demonstrates that this view is based on surveys carried out in the United States. But in Germany only about a quarter of males find sexual infidelity worse than emotional infidelity.
Buller calls for an “accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution” [25]. He is not a Marxist, but we would agree with his conclusion that we should “abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself,” in the sense of the fixed “psychological mechanisms” espoused by popular Evolutionary Psychology.
Radical scientists generate confusion
Evolutionary psychology and its antecedent socio-biology were vigorously opposed by radical scientists, often calling themselves Marxists. Biologists like Richard Lewontin in the US and Steven Rose in the UK, as well as the US palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, were part of an organization called Science for the People. In 1975 they sent a letter to the New York Review of Books accusing socio-biology of fascistic tendencies redolent of the Nazis. Demonstrations were held and lectures interrupted. It was a hysterical response. The leading sociobiologist E. O. Wilson was one of the victims of their campaign. He had water poured over his head in a famous protest at one of his lectures. He was not a fascist at all, but a good natural scientist with very little understanding of human society. His specialism was social insects.
Science is necessarily a controversial business and the radical scientists raised many important biological questions on which I do not intend to comment. What I want to raise here are the questions that relate to Marxism. I believe that Lewontin, Rose and Gould put forward a distorted viewpoint that is contrary to Marx and Engels’ attitude to science. Their intervention has created a lot of confusion. Their approach to the question of science arose out of the radical politics they espoused. They were influenced by a form of Maoism, and by the ideas of the Frankfurt School that we have been giving some attention to on the World Socialist Web Site after attacks on us from this direction. Gould moved away from his earlier radical politics, but Lewontin and Rose still hold such views today.
Here is Richard Lewontin in his book, The Doctrine of DNA [26]:
Despite its claims to be above society, science, like the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch.
In his most recent book [27], co-authored with Richard Levins, we find science described as “a commoditized expression of liberal European capitalist masculinist interests and ideologies.” The last section of the book is a paean to what is called “Cuban socialist science”, contrasted to the “bourgeois” science in the western world.
Lewontin even goes so far as to say that the capitalist ideology of individuals competing with one another has predominated throughout science from the Scientific Revolution to the present day. In The Doctrine of DNA he writes:
This atomized view of society is matched by a new view of nature, the reductionist view . . . the individual bits and pieces, the atoms, molecules, cells and genes are the causes of the properties of the whole objects and must be separately studied . . .[28]
Perhaps there is a grain of truth here in that the mechanical outlook from the first most successful branch of science, physics, did tend to predominate throughout science, at least up to the first part of the 19th century. When Marx complained about “abstract” materialists, he saw them as the degenerate outcome of this tradition. Engels explains in his writings on philosophy the limitations of the mechanical version of materialism that had developed in the Enlightenment. This was why the historical natural science of Darwin was of such importance to Marx and Engels.
However, taken for the whole of science under capitalism I think that Lewontin’s conception is false and it leads to a view, now very prevalent in the humanities, that objectivity in science is not possible.
Individual scientists hold all kinds of political and philosophical views, often reflecting their position in society as middle class academics. Many of them are pillars of the establishment. It is also true that, as Trotsky once explained [29], the ideological outlook of the capitalist class can influence the direction of science. This is especially so in the social sciences, where the need to justify current society means that little is accomplished. We can see that very clearly in economics. But Trotsky stressed that in the natural sciences:
the need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the property of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. [30]
The approach of Lewontin et al has had its concomitant in the history of science. Here there have emerged schools of thought such as the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) that have placed enormous weight on the social context in which science is carried out. This often has the result of making scientific knowledge appear to be entirely relative to particular classes or social groups, undermining all objectivity and challenging the materialist basis of scientific thought and the conception that science does reflect, to some degree of approximation, the world that exists outside human thoughts and sensations.
One example of this overwhelmingly ideological approach to science and scientists is to be found in the book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, by Daniel Gasman, professor of history at CUNY [31]. It gave a one-sided biography of Ernst Haeckel, the 19th century German biologist. Stephen Jay Gould was heavily influenced by this book.
Gasman attempted to:
trace certain key features of National Socialism back to the conception of science and to the social Darwinism of Ernst Haeckel, Germany’s most famous nineteenth-century biologist. [32]
By placing all emphasis on Haeckel’s social and political views and making him partly responsible for Nazism, there is no hope of making an objective assessment of the scientific contribution of this important scientist or of biology in general in that period. Many of the biologists of the late 19th and early 20th century were in favour of eugenics and many held views on race that we would find abhorrent. The rise of fascism in Germany can only be adequately dealt with by analyzing the economic and political developments of the 20th century [33]. Fortunately, other biographies of Haeckel have recently appeared and it is possible to gain a more objective view of his scientific contribution [34].
It should be pointed out that once responsibility for Nazism is placed on Haeckel, it can be easily extended to Darwin himself. This is the view of historian Richard Weikart who has written a book entitled From Darwin to Hitler [35]. Here we have turned full circle. Weikart is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, the main centre for the propagation of Intelligent Design.
I hope that I have been able to show you something of the connections between Darwin and Marx and to see them both as central to the development of science in the 19th century, which of necessity, had to take a historical standpoint in relation to both biology and society. I have also insisted that it is necessary to revive the approach to science in its wider social significance, that dates back to the Enlightenment, as an approach to nature and society that enables mankind to understand their laws, causes and mechanisms in order to change them.
Biology has made enormous strides in the last decade and there has been some growth of interest in Darwin, despite the government’s educational policies. But I think that a renewed interest in the vast work of Marx and Engels is also essential, and the application of Marxist theory to build a socialist movement is most urgent, given the huge social issues we face—massive social inequality, poverty for much of the world, the growing impact from global warming, and now a massive recession with a future of unemployment and economic stagnation.
Concluded
Footnotes:
[19] See David North, “After the Demise of the USSR, The Struggle for Marxism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”, Fourth International, Vol 19, No 1, 1992.
[20] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Allen Lane, London, 2002.
[21] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm
[22] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Revised Edition), Penguin, London, 1997.
[23] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p 294.
[24] ibid.
[25] David J. Buller, Adapting Minds, MIT Press, London, 2005.
[26] Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, Penguin, London, 1993, p 9.
[27] Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2007, p 93.
[28] Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, p 12
[29] Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism,
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/cult-o23.shtml
[30] Leon Trotsky, Dialectical Materialism and Science, in Problems of Everyday Life, Pathfinder, New York, p 209. Also
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/trotsky/1925/09/science.htm
[31] Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Elsevier, New York, 1971.
[32] ibid, p ix.
[33] see David North, Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Holocaust: A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen’s "Hitler’s Willing Executioners", Labor Publications, 1997.
[34] Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, and Sander Gliboff, HG Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2008.
[35] Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.
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