Marx "admired" Darwin

Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu
Tue Aug 18 14:45:05 PDT 1998


The book is _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities_, 1991, Boston/Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers. I am working on the second edition at this time and it deals with a number of other topics as well. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 18 Aug 1998 16:27:11 -0400 Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:


> Must be a case of convergent
> evolution of thought. What's the name of
> the book ?!!
>
> Charles Brown
>
> >>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb at jmu.edu> 08/17 5:57 PM >>>
> I know that this is a very annoying thing to do, but
> since several people have been kind enough to compliment my
> article in JEBO in 1992, I shall simply note that the issue
> of continuity versus discontinuity of evolution, both
> economic and ecological, is the central issue discussed in
> that paper. Indeed, I have a whole book on the subject.
> Sorry, but I am not going to provide a two sentence summary.
> Barkley Rosser
> On Mon, 17 Aug 1998 16:57:02 -0400 Charles Brown
> <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
> > The dialectical is me looking at what Gould
> > is saying and analyzing it. I have never
> > heard Gould use the term to describe it.
> > However, Engels says somewhere that
> > most good scientists then ( and now we might add)
> > proceed dialectically but without knowing
> > it. I will look for the statements from
> > Engels and maybe Haldane, if you like.
> >
> > The principle in question is the interpenetration
> > of quality and quantity. Darwin describes
> > evolution as continuous (gradual). The punctuations
> > would make it continuous with rare discontinuities.
> >
> > What say you ?
> >
> > Charles Brown
> > Detroit
> >
> > >>> <WolfSave at aol.com> 08/17 4:49 PM >>>
> > In a message dated 8/17/98 1:34:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> > CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us writes:
> >
> > << Stephen Jay Gould's thesis of punctuated
> > equilibrium modifies Darwin's gradualism
> > and makes a dialectical version of Darwinism.
> > >>
> > Would Gould agree with the "dialectical." I ask, because this is a curious
> > statement to make, or least it's a new way of considering Darwin. However,
> > George Herbert Mead, not to change the subject, uses a dialectic of the self
> > to explain the individual and such; he had Darwin's natural selection in the
> > back of his mind as he wrote, as I recall. I had not thought of natural
> > selection in human or anthropocentric terms such as "dialectical," but for
> > Mead.
> > Just thinking out loud.
> > Regards.
> > Ed Evans
> >
>
> --
> Rosser Jr, John Barkley
> rosserjb at jmu.edu
>
>
>

-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu



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