Engels on Human Evolution

September 1, 2010

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.

Pathfinders

August 21, 2010

How scientific are scientists?

Understanding history

August 20, 2010

The materialist conception of history was first outlined publicly 150 years ago this month.

 This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin The Origin of Species but also of the publication of Marx’s first economic writings after his more detailed study of the workings of capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

Cooking The Books 1: Marx and corals

In his latest book, Coral, A Pessimist in Paradise, the biologist and popular science writer Steve Jones attributes to Marx the statement that we see mighty coral reefs rising from the depth of the ocean into islands and firm land, yet each individual depositor is puny, weak, and contemptible. Marx was something of a polymath, but an expert on corals?

Jack London’s The Iron Heel

August 19, 2010

London’s widely read book of this title was published a hundred years ago.
 But how realistic was it and how much of a socialist was Jack London?