Book Reviews
November 19, 2010
Hitting them where it hurts
Search Results for: Darwin
Pathfinders: Chimps, Chumps and Cheetahs
September 21, 2010
As evolved and unintelligently-designed bald chimps everywhere must surely know, this year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. However they may be less aware that it is also claimed to be the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the 300th anniversary of the start of the industrial revolution and, perhaps less debatably, the 50th birthday for the Mini automobile (www.culture24.org.uk/history/art66265).
Crowning all these trivial achievements this month is of course the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What can one say of this historic event? At the time it was hard to overhype. One small step for a man, one giant poke in the eye for the Russians, it supposedly gave us velcro, teflon and digital watches, but more to the point, it promised to launch the bone-throwing chimp species, Kubrick-like, into the galaxy.
Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones
September 11, 2010
Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW!
The position of the I.L.P. A parallel and a moral
September 7, 2010
The means by which the defenders of an established order seek to retain supremacy and resist progress are always interesting, not merely from an abstract point of view, but also because of the valuable lessons which can be learned by a thoughtful observer, and applied with advantage in the future. Such a case occurred when the theory of Natural Selection, so intimately associated with the name of Darwin, burst like a thunderclap over the old ideas of a special creation, with each human individual, as distinct from the lower animals, endowed with a “soul” or “spirit”. These modern notions were met on the one hand with a conspiracy of silence, on the other with a venomous outpouring of abuse. But, of course, neither method proved to be any great barrier to the progress of an idea that was bound to grow and spread, by reason of its intrinsic truth and logic.
Book reviews
September 1, 2010
Politics of Apathy
Why We Hate Politics. Colin Hay. Polity Press.
Colin Hay is a Professor of Political Analysis and has produced a book typical of the academic genre – tightly argued and well referenced if somewhat dense, and at times, abstract. His main focus is that politics is ‘an increasingly dirty word’ and he sets out to examine why.
Engels on Human Evolution
Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin “The Descent of Man”.
Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rô…le of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.
Pathfinders: We won’t be back
August 31, 2010
We won’t be back
Browsing through the science pages of any newspaper or online journal is to take an entertaining flight of fancy through the world of journalistic prediction. That is not to say, wild stories dreamed up by journalists and fed to a credulous public, but wild stories dreamed up by scientists and fed to a credulous press.
Some of these are just harmless fun, like the evergreen notion of life on other planets, (Galaxy has billions of Earths, BBC Online, 15 February).
Harmless fun, and like as not hopeless fantasy, based as it is on the formulation known as the Drake Equation, a well-known exercise in piling unknown suppositions upon each other and arriving at a number. With just
Marx and Engels on The Origin of Species
August 30, 2010
Engels bought a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species as soon as it was published.
Two books of importance were published in 1859, one in June and the other in November. Each one stands at the opposite pole of popularity at the time they were published. And this contrast has persisted up to the present day. One hundred and fifty years after their publication, one is being celebrated as one of the most significant and audacious books ever to be published; the other is virtually forgotten.
Both were written with some degree of reluctance by their authors, requiring pressure from theirs friends and supporters. Great things were expected of both. However, only one of them fulfilled them.
Materialism v. Spiritism
August 27, 2010
The October 1926 Socialist Standard reviewed a pamphlet by a Communist Party sympathiser entitled Is Materialism the Basis of Communism? The case against Materialism from the Revolutionary Standpoint. The author replied. We republish our reply as a still valid exposition of the scientific method.
Dear Comrade,
Someone kindly sent me a copy of THE SOCIALIST STANDARD yesterday containing your review of my pamphlet. As you have honoured me with a front page notice, I think you might have got the title of the pamphlet correct. It is, “Is Materialism Basis of Communism?” Not “communion,” as you print it. And, by the way, if, as you say, the pamphlet contains its refutation, why didn’t THE STANDARD accept an advertisement of it?
Pathfinders
Why Gould was wrong, and why Dawkins might be even more wrong
A science writer who knows how to communicate to a lay audience is a rarity. But to find two in the same field, battling each other’s ideas in the public domain, is a real treat, and the long-running contest on evolutionary theory between the late Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the Oxford ethologist and biologist Richard Dawkins was a gem of the first rank. If the modern science-inclined public has better than a cartoon Darwinist grasp of the complex story of evolution it is in no small thanks to these two outstanding writers.