Oh yes. R.A. Fisher was writing in the 1930s, not the 1830s. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 15 Aug 1998 00:10:27 -0400 (EDT) Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at PHOENIX.Princeton.EDU> wrote:
> I am forwarding this.
> What great discussion on this list so far!
> Yours, Rakesh
>
> > Isn't it interestng how Malthus struck a vain for both Marx and Darwin.
> > Regards.
> > Ed EVans
>
> I think Darwin's debt to Malthus is much exaggerated. However, it is true
> that the Malthusian overpopulation scenario of acute, immediate human
> struggle on the basis of a competitive exclusion principle over a limited
> food supply did help Darwin discover that survivorship is non
> fortuituously linked to intraspecific heritable differences. Darwin's
> possible debt to Malthus is no recent discovery; August Weismann had
> suggested it before the publication of Darwin's notebooks in which Darwin
> does announce that Malthus finally gave him a theory to work by. But note
> first that logically the theory of natural selection does not depend on
> Malthusian populaton foundations. Competition need not be a matter of
> differential deaths; it could result from differential fecundity based on
> comparative efficiency in the use and partition of resources, factors such
> as better ability to find mates, to enjoy longer reproductive years, to
> have more offspring. That was pointed out by RA Fisher. I think in 1837
> Darwin had already entertained the possibility of "benign replacement of
> one form by another without explicit struggle"! Moreover, as a polemic
> against Godwin and Condorcet, Malthus' Essay on Population was more
> interested to demonstrate how overpopulation rendered change impossible;
> Darwin's vision of species divergence and incessant continuous change is
> at odds with the parson's conservative vision. For Darwin death is a
> creative force, not a stabilizing one as with Malthus. Perhaps Darwin
> thought that natural selection would take too long to work if operated
> solely through differential fecundity--that is "benign replacement".
>
> Perhaps it was easier to imagine
> descent with modification if we we keep foremost in our minds the active
> and relentless operation of the Malthusian checks of mass starvation
> deaths of the greater number of descendants, disease and famine.
> And so Darwin urged his readers (along with brilliant use of the
> metaphor of animal breeding, though Wallace urged him to dispath
> that metaphor)
>
> Darwin's theory was challenged because the ascertained age of the earth
> was too young to have allowed descent with modification. My guess is that
> Darwin thought the invocation of the Malthusian competitive exclusion
> principle made it more believable that natural selection could have
> effected observable modifications in descent in the little time the earth
> was thought to have possibly supported life. Lord Kelvin had laid down the
> challenge to Darwin that earth was simply not old enough for natural
> selection to have done so much work. But this is only my guess, I don't
> know if it washes, I haven't seen it argued anywhere else.
>
> I think economists get pretty obnoxiously puffed up contemplating the
> scientific revolutionary's possible debt to one of their own. But as I
> have suggested, the theory of natural selction does not depend logically
> on Malthus' overpopulation scenario, however realistic or paradigmatic
> that may be in the natural world; Darwin predicts "wedging" and incessant
> change at odds with Malthus' static world view; and Darwin's theory is
> much more fundamentally based on the analogy to artificial
> selection/animal breeding to comprehend natural selection as a force and
> for awareness that intra-specific variety as the material of selection
> (much is made of Malthus' emphasis on intra-specific competition as
> crucial to Darwin).
>
> best, rakesh
>
> ps unrelated note: what a period of scientific creativity, the mid-19th
> century: Darwin, Mendel, Maxwell and Marx!
>
>
>
>
>
> --- from list marxism-theory at lists.econ.utah.edu ---
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu