Darwin on the left

I've been meandering lately though some musings on the relationship between human evolution and social life. Some recent posts have looked at how Darwin's ideas were received and celebrated on the political right. A look at how Darwin was received on the left seems to be in order now.

One lefty contemporary of Darwin's who eagerly received his ideas was none other than Karl Marx, who saw some similarities between the former's ideas his own materialist theory of history. He wrote in a letter to another radical leader that

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history.

Marx was also amused to find that Darwin projected the workings of capitalism onto nature:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening-up of new markets, 'inventions,' and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.'

(Marx had snarky things to say about everybody.)

It seems, though, that Marx believed that once people became human, social relations of labor and interaction (including especially economic relations) were the decisive factor. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he wrote that

the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

His sidekick Friedrich Engels followed suit in viewing humans as uniquely developing through conscious production, which he believed "makes impossible any immediate transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human ones."

This basic denial of human nature was to become a dogma of the communist movement, with disastrous consequences.

RIGHT WING BACKLASH? This writer doesn't think so.

"THE WAR ON ARITHMETIC." Paul Krugman was not impressed with the "Pledge to America."

SIX MONTHS DOWN. Here's a look at what health care reform means, with a special focus on primary care. And here's is coverage of a press conference on the same from the Gazette and WV Public Radio.

A NOD TO THE BOSS. This book excerpt celebrates Bruce Springsteen.

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Survival of the what-est?

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." He doesn't look all that fit to me.

It is a great irony of contemporary politics that social Darwinism is alive and well amongst political conservatives who believe in a literal six day creation.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Darwin's ideas--or what people thought were Darwin's ideas--were first seized upon by people on the political right. Such people were quick to draw public policy conclusions from the "survival of the fittest."

As the idea was popularly conceived, evolution worked for the good of all--or at least all the survivors--by weeding out the weak. Therefore, any aid to people who were poor or otherwise disadvantaged was counter-evolutionary.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that one thing that has enabled humans to survive and thrive is our tendency to care for the sick and weak. After all, every human is born pretty helpless and stays that way for several years. Women in or near childbirth are pretty much out of the game and anyone at any time may become sick or injured and require the help of others.

There is even some interesting archaeological evidence along this line from our human ancestors. A severely deformed skull of someone at least five years of age was found dating back to around 530,000 years ago. This finding suggests that early humans at least some of the time cared for the disabled members of their group despite deformities.

This suggests that at least some early or pre-humans knew some things that some modern humans have forgotten.

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION AGAIN, one researcher thinks our Neanderthal cousins were smarter than generally thought.

MILESTONE. Today marks six months since the passage of health care reform. Some key changes kick in today.

UNEMPLOYMENT. West Virginia's unemployment insurance system could avoid going broke by making key reforms.

TALKING REDNECK. Here's an excerpt from Joe Bageant's new book about the white underclass.

REALLY NOT WANTING TO TALK. Massey Energy officials have filed suit to keep from being interviewed in the Upper Big Branch disaster investigation.

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A law of nature

Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by means of natural selection were first taken up (with many misunderstandings) by those on the political right. Part of the reason for this was that early expositions of Darwinism emphasized competition. It would take a while for evolutionary biologists to look at the other side of the equation by investigating cooperation and altruism.

More to the point, in the Gilded Age, robber barons and financial aristocrats found in them a great rationalization for their own wealth and power.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote that while capitalist competition may harm some individuals, "it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."

(That phrase "survival of the fittest," by the way, has its origin in the writings of British philosopher Herbert Spencer rather than Darwin himself.)

In a similar vein, John D. Rockefeller Jr. wrote that

The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest...This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working our of a law of nature and a law of God.

As the Church Lady would say on the old Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that convenient?"

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION, this article suggests that our relationships with animals helped make us human.

FORECLOSURES. Here's Dean Baker and what the government could do about the foreclosure crisis but isn't (so far).

FUN LIST. From The Nation, here's a list of the 50 most influential progressive leaders of the 20th century.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB ON STEROIDS. A spider in Madagascar weaves the world's biggest webs with the toughest natural material yet discovered.

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Facts and values

Shortly after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, he wrote to a scientific friend that

I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib, showing that I have proved might is right and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is right.

That unknown Manchester journalist may have been one of the first--but far from the last--to make some kind of leap from the fact of evolution to the idea that this makes something right. From then on partisans of the privileged and powerful seized on evolution to "prove" that cutthroat capitalism was a law of human nature.

This kind of leap from an "is" to an "ought" is a fallacy pointed out as early as 1739 by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. One way this shows up in popular culture is the conflation of the idea of "nature" or things that are natural with that of "goodness." One doesn't have to turn over too many rocks, however, to find quite a few things in nature that seem downright nasty to most people. At the ancient sage Lao Tzu put it, "Heaven and earth are not humane."

Evolution by means of natural selection, then, isn't good or right. It just is. People have to decide questions of value form themselves.

THE CLOCK IS TICKING on a program credited with creating 240,000 jobs in the recession. The Emergency TANF program, part of the Recovery Act, will expire at the end of the month unless it is reauthorized. This item highlights efforts in the Senate to keep it going. If you haven't done your good deed for the day, getting in touch with your senators' offices on this would fit the bill.

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Tabula rasa?

John Locke, an influential British philosopher of the 17th century, believed that all knowledge comes from experience and that the human mind was a "tabula rasa" or blank slate.

Every so often, I've been blogging about the possible connections between human evolution and social life, an area often fraught with controversy and misconceptions. For years, I was biased towards the view that social conditioning and environmental factors were the decisive force shaping what is frequently called human nature.

Plus, when I was young, I was attracted to the philosophy of existentialism, which in some forms emphasized human freedom to choose. As Jean Paul Sartre put it, we were (supposedly) "condemned to be free." I still have a soft spot for those views and don't think they are entirely wrong, but the tide of science has been pulling the other way.

I'd like to give a shout out to two books, one big and one little, that deal with this subject in interesting ways. The big one is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and the little on is Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation.

Pinker takes aim at three cherished myths: the idea that humans are silly putty totally moulded by social influences; the idea of the "ghost in the machine," i.e. that the mind is somehow independent of the brain; and the idea of the Noble Savage, which idealizes people in an imaginary "state of nature."

Singer argues that while we do carry evolutionary baggage that makes a peaceful egalitarian utopia a bit problematic, this doesn't mean we can't successfully work for a more just and fair society.

More on that to come.

DYING TO WORK. Jim Hightower takes aim at death on the job.

TAX THIS. House minority leader John Boehner made headlines this weekend when he said he might accept letting Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy expire as a compromise if cuts for the middle class were preserved, something no one else in his party seems prepared to do. A recent Gallup poll found strong support for ending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE for the coal industry to deny. A new study of the health effects of coal-fired power plants found West Virginia to be the hardest hit state in the country, as the WV News Service reports. Here's another article on the topic and here's a link to the full report.

IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM BIAS. A study of jury verdicts found that penalties for damages go down when the number of victims go up. It seems that people are more likely to impose severe penalties when the injured party is someone concrete rather than a bunch of unknown people. This reminds me of a characteristically evil remark attributed to Stalin that when one person dies it's a tragedy but when a million die it's a statistic.

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Nature and nurture

Random animal picture.

For the past week or so, I've been thinking and blogging first about human evolution and lately about political and social ideas. I'm about to wade into the murky swamp where these may or may not overlap.

As I mentioned here yesterday, one difference between the political left and right has to do with their respective views of human nature. Those on the right tend to view it as something fixed, whereas those on the left tend to see it as something malleable and shaped by social conditioning.

It seems to me that there's a little truth in both--although both views when taken to extreme have done a lot of harm. Radical utopians after a number of revolutions have killed or harmed lots of people in misguided efforts aimed at moulding new and better people. Those on the other end of the spectrum have likewise done lots of harm, using their fixed view of human nature to justify class, caste, gender, racial, ethnic and colonial domination.

AFTER UNEMPLOYMENT, new jobs often pay less.

WHAT NEW JOBS? Here's a look at what kind of jobs are opening up in the post-recession private sector.

UNEMPLOYMENT. Here's Robert Reich on why it's civilized to extend unemployment benefits.

PARTY ON. The first known example of collective feasting amongst early humans (s0 far) happened around 12,000 years ago. I'll bet they really started long before then.

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The struggle for existence

Thomas Malthus, 1766-1834.

I've been musing off and on here lately about Charles Darwin and the legacy of his thought. If you like that kind of thing, check out some of last week's posts.

As Darwin began to build his theory of evolution, he struggled for some time with finding the mechanism that might drive it. He found a clue in reading Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population, which incidentally became very popular amongst Victorian era reactionaries who opposed any improvement in the condition of the working classes.

Malthus' basic idea was that production of food and other necessities could only increase arithmetically (think 2+2+2...), whereas population tended to increase geometrically (think 2*2*2...). As he put it,

I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are...

Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

(Malthus' ideas caused all kinds of political mischief, but I'll leave that for another day.)

For Darwin, the basic dynamic Malthus discussed was useful in looking at the evolution of species. The tendency of plants and animals to produce more offspring than could possibly be supported led to a "struggle for existence" with which natural selection could work. Given that struggle, those organisms best adapted to environmental challenges would be more likely to live to maturity and produce offspring.

As the saying goes, even a wild hog can dig up something useful sometimes. More on Malthus to come.

INTOLERANCE. Here's a photo essay on intolerance in America by way of Time Magazine.

SOLAR ENERGY might be getting more affordable soon.

CRY, CRY, CRY. It seems to serve an evolutionary purpose.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL is the topic of this NY Times editorial. I don't think they're for it.

THE GROWING GAP. America's widening class divide is the subject of this Gazette rant.

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God, wasps and caterpillars

I wouldn't want to be the green guy. That wasp has the unsportsmanlike habit if laying eggs in live caterpillars so they'll have a nice warm meal when they wake up.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species kicked off a battle between science and religion that is still raging. Darwin's own religious views went through quite an evolution of their own from moderate Anglicanism to agnosticism.

Ironically, it wasn't so much his theory of natural selection that killed his religion as much as the difficulty of reconciling the idea of a benevolent God with suffering.

As he put it in a letter to American biologist Asa Gray,

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.– I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I [should] wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

The problem of theodicy, or reconciling the justice of God in a world full of suffering, is an ancient one. It was probably old when the Book of Job was written. And it hasn't been neatly resolved since Darwin's day.

SPEAKING OF SUFFERING, here are some stale excusing for not dealing with the kind caused by unemployment.

WHICH, BY THE WAY isn't looking real good right now.

YOU ALREADY KNEW THIS, but poverty is bad for your health.

URGENT ANCIENT BIG MEAN BIRD UPDATE here.

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Doesn't everbody do barnacles?

One of the things that makes Charles Darwin admirable as a scientist was his ability to do detailed grunt work as well construct groundbreaking big picture theories. He also belonged to the last generation of gentleman naturalists, i.e. non-academic private individuals of some means doing scientific work in their Victorian homes.

As a prime example of detailed grunt work, Darwin spent fully eight years engaged with a study of barnacles, eventually producing four large volumes on the subject. I get bored just thinking about it.

The barnacle business was such an accepted part of the growing Darwin household that his children came to believe that every adult male did the same in his spare time. There is a great anecdote that his son Francis once asked his friend, "Where does your father do his barnacles?

A WAY OUT? Here's an op-ed by a friend of mine on the economic mess and how to get out of it.

COUNTRY LIVING. This item about country living in the New Yorker seemed familiar to me.

SOFT STYLE. Score another therapeutic point for tai chi.

ZOMBIE ANTS, ANYONE? This is just plain weird.

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A reluctant revolutionary

Like some of history's best revolutionaries, Charles Darwin was a reluctant one. He disliked controversy and delayed publishing his main ideas for years until he was nudged into action when the younger scientist Alfred Russel Wallace came up independently with the idea of natural selection.

Although he was ignorant of contemporary developments in the science of heredity-- such as the experiments of Gregor Mendel--and grasped for an explanation of its mechanism, his key ideas of natural selection have stood the test of time. His later work on the similarity of emotions in humans and animals was also ahead of its time and has received significant backup from studies of human and animal brains as well as behavior.

It's another discouraging sign of the times that many Americans deny evolution, which is regarded by scientists as the unifying theory of biology. These are often the same people who deny the science of climate change. I could probably think of any number of snarky Darwinian comments about that but will spare the Gentle Reader.

JUST FINES. Massey Energy led the coal industry in fines and citations in the last quarter, the Charleston Gazette reports.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Progressive billionaire George Soros' hedge fund just increased its ownership of Massey stock to 2.2 million shares.

MEDICINE CABINET BLUES. It looks like El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is the most medicated in the country.

OUR FAMILY TREE. Mitochondrial DNA research suggests a common mother for humanity around 200,000 years ago.

URGENT ANCIENT TURTLE UPDATE here.

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A good gig

I have always been a big Darwin fan. I've been both fascinated by his big ideas and his personal life and habits. He had a lot of things going for him, starting with luck. As Cervantes said, "To be lucky in the beginning is everything."

How many people in life get the chance for a perfect job right out of school? The budding natural historian (as people interested in life science were then called) was a reluctant clergyman-to-be on completing his studies. He was saved from a life as a minor character in a Jane Austen novel by an offer to travel around the world as a scientist on H.M.S. Beagle on a five year voyage.

It was the mother of good gigs.

He then had the tenacity and persistence to work methodically through his specimens, observations and ideas for years to come as he developed his theory of natural selection. He could go micro as well as macro, not only pondering the evolution of all life but getting down to the nitty gritty studying humble creatures like barnacles and earthworms.

He was also a devoted family man, truly in love with his wife Emma and a doting father to his children. The kids even got into the act. There are delightful anecdotes about his children playing musical instruments to the earthworms to see whether they responded to such stimuli (they didn't as far as anyone could tell).

More on this to come.

ONE, TWO, MANY HERBERT HOOVERS. Job losses at the state and local level are threatening the economic recovery.

FALSE CHOICES. Dealing with the joblessness crisis will require overcoming deficit mania--at least until the economy improves..

WHACKADOODLE NATION. Here's a look at the top 10 conspiracy theories on the far right.

OFF THE HOOK. Here's what happens when a group of scientists go unplugged in the wilderness to study the effect of technology on the brain.

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A little Elizabethan trivia

Quick, apply the makeup!

El Cabrero has been reading and thinking a good bit about social status these days, a subject that can be both funny and sad. Today I'm going for a little of both.

It was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England that sugar first became widely available, at least to those who had the money to buy it. Given that people weren't too big on dental hygiene then, lots of folks who ate a lot of it had teeth go bad and turn black.

But one difference between then and now was that then black teeth were cool--they showed you could afford to eat lots of sugar. Some people not "fortunate" enough to have the real thing cosmetically blackened their teeth to look like they did.

Thinking about that--and about the political economy of sugar plantations in the "New World"--gives a whole new meaning to the phrase about being "slaves of fashion."

You can find lots more Elizabethan and Jacobean tidbits in Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage.

CLIMATE CHANGE. While the coal thugs around here are all singing the same tune, the NY Times reports that energy companies are all over the place on proposed climate change legislation in the Senate.

HOLY MARKET FAILURE, BATMAN! A new study looks at the hidden costs of coal. Will this set off another coal-fired hissy fit or are they already too busy having one?

NATURAL SELECTION in real time here.

FOOD FIGHT. Here's another salvo from the food revolution.

GOD, MONKEYS AND MORALS. Here's another item by my favorite primatologist.

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It was only a stamp

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, this month marks my 20th anniversary of working for the American Friends Service Committee. There's a lot of water under that bridge.

I still remember reading the want ad looking for a person to work on economic justice issues in West Virginia and having trouble believing my eyes. I was vaguely aware of the AFSC but didn't know much about it. West Virginia, after all, is not widely known as a hotbed of Quakerism, although I later learned they had some interesting history here.

My own religious background was Episcopal, with healthy dashes of Taoism and Buddhism thrown in. I don't think I'd ever knowingly met a Quaker, but then as now people connected with AFSC come from a wide variety of religious backgrounds, provided they share some basic values.

That could have been an issue. The one thing I knew about Quakerism was their "peace testimony" or commitment of nonviolence. Although I'm fairly placid, I happen to have come from a long line of those Scotch-Irish people who enjoy a good fight, a trait that I seemed to inherit.

My ancestors fought in most of this country's wars, generally, although not always, on the side of the United States (I seem to recall a minor exception in the 1860s). I came close to enlisting myself as a young man. The two things that held me back were my political mistrust of the Reagan administration and the timing of the birth of my first child. Aside from that, I'd been a devotee of the martial arts since junior high.

On the plus side, I was totally down with working for justice for poor and working people, having been there and coming from a place that has been hard hit by many economic trends and bad actors.

I decided it was a long shot but worth a try. It was only a stamp, right?

CROCODILE TEARS have been shed in copious amounts about the supposed threat to "the secret ballot" posed by the Employee Free Choice Act. (Since when did big corporations care about workers' rights, anyway?) Now even the Wall Street Journal admits that is isn't so.

BUDGET BATTLE. As the struggle over President Obama's budget and the federal deficit heats up, Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities makes some good points here.

ON THAT NOTE, here's what economist Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress has to say on the subject.

A "SOLIDARITY ECONOMY." Some people are responding to hard times by forming common security clubs that combine study and reflection on what is happening and why with common action to make things better.

ANIMAL ARMS RACE. Nature has equipped many animals with elaborate weapons, but they seem to be mostly for display.

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