There are unexpected pleasures in seeing the success of otherwise junk capitalist economic theories in the explanation of natural phenomena. At any rate, Maynard Smith is not applying "game theory to the social relations in which people are embedded" but to bacterial plasmid, parasitic hymenoptera (wasps and ichneumonids), lions, hamadryas baboon, etc, It is also surely not correct that Maynard Smith believes that "poverty is a matter of where you end up on the genetic roulette wheel"--see his careful deflationary critiques of recent attempts in sociobiology in his Did Darwin Get It Right which is also a defense of the gene centered view of evolution. The latter (basically a gene can increase its frequency only by making the organism in which it finds itself more likely to survive amd reproduce) does not imply acceptance of biologically reductionist explanations of social phenomena.
By the way, Rose argues that Haldane would not have been amused by Hamilton's development of his off handed comment about about kin selection As for Haldane's tortuous political path, marked by violent involvement in WWI, see Gary Werksey's Invisible College ( a book about Britain's Communist scientists--Levy, Hogben, Haldane, Bernal). It is true that Haldane thought the mean intelligence of Britain was declining due to the overproduction of the working class (another kind of overproduction crisis); his background was elite beyond elite, yet the actual policy recommendations he made were radically egalitarian. His political twists and turns seem quite complex. And all this is little help in determining the apparently monumental significance of his applications of mathematical reasoning to the understanding of biological phenomena.
The always thought provoking and eloquent Mr Grimes concluded: "the biology of the cell is richer in relationships than any assembly of ideologies or theoretical designs. That's the problem." This is exactly Rose's argument for rejecting an assembly of reductionist theoretical designs which he thinks are retained for ideological reasons only despite the great obstances they present to the explanation of complexity in the biological world. Maynard Smith also notes: "The history of my own science of genetics has persuaded me that people who decide issues on the basis philosophical views are likely to get it wrong. Consider Karl Pearson, whose positivist philosophy led him to deny the existence of genes, and T.D. Lysenko, who Marxism led him to espouse the inheritance of acquired characters." This seems to me a good warning against the invocation of dialectical materialism to settle any issue.
Yours, Rakesh
>Listers might be interested in the excellent paper by Phil Gasper on
>Marxism and
>Science at:http://www.littleprints.free-online.co.uk/pubs/isj79/bookwatc.htm
>
> Sam Pawlett