Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 01:49:10 -0500 (EST) From: bhandari at mmp.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari)
While I am still thinking about one of Doug's question, a quick reply to Jim F
For Cohen superstructural
>elements (i.e. the state, the law, religions, ideology) function
>so as to stabilize the economic base with a differential selection
>that favors those superstructural elements most suitable for
>stabilizing the base over those that are lest suited.
Jim, did GA Cohen (whose lectures here last semester I unhappily missed) ever reply to Derek Sayer's Violence of Abstraction in which it is argued that Cohen's basic concepts-- such as forces, relations, mode of production--are either too thin to sustain a universal theory of history or are surreptiously invested with the meaning/forms that they take specifically in bourgeois society and thereby hypostatised because they are then passed off as actually transhistorical concepts in a universal theory of history? For example, Sayer draws from Godelier to show how in so called kin based societies, seemingly superstructural elements can themselves be relations of production. Sayer gives example of forces of production that may seem otherwise to be relations or superstructures.
>
>Outside the realm of Analytical Marxism writers like Dawkins
>with his memetics have argued that selection processes
>work to explain the evolution of myths, legends and religious
>beliefs. Dawkins has even proposed that religion can be
>understood as a memetic virus.
Don't know what to make of memetics as a theory of cultural transmission. But it sure seems unable to explain variation over time and space in rates of social evolution. I haven't read Blackmore's book because she doesn't seem to even touch on the question I find most interesting.
>That raises as you point out below the issue of what Dawkins
>calls the evolution of evolvability.
Or the evolvability of evolution?!
>Remember Darwin attributed his discovery of the principle of natural
>selection to his reading of Malthus.
Yet Malthus had no idea of non fortuity in survivorship once overfecundity ran up against a limited resource base. And in fact evolution is possible without intraspecific competition on a competitive exclusionary basis--the Malthusian population scenario.
> And of course political economy
>did not become a distinct discipline until after the rise of capitalism.
Nor did art???
Isn't that Robert Wright book inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, Bergson through the back door? It seems so 20th century.
rb