>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 02/02/00 06:57PM >>That raises as you point out below the issue of what Dawkins
calls the evolution of evolvability. And Carling does address
the issue in terms of using his version of historical materialism
to explain why capitalism emerged in the West rather than
the East - a question that has long bedeviled scholars, Marxists
and non-Marxists alike (i.e. Max Weber). Carling draws a distinction
between Western feudalism and the Asiatic mode of production
(shades of Wittfogel) and he sees the former as having been
particularly suited for the generation of new variations in the
relations of production by virtue of its decentralized nature.
China in contrast is seen as having been saddled with a
centralized bureacratic control which stifled the appearances
of new variations, so the pace of social evolution was necessarily
slower than in the West.
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CB: Anthropology has a neo-Morganian school of evolution which it seems may be similar to this model. Sahlins and Service wrote _Evolution and Culture_ ( circa 1961) which uses analogies to biological evolutionary theory, concepts such as adaptation, et al. In that book, Service discusses the law of evolutionary potential, which is sort of like the Lenin/Trotsky idea of the weakest link in the chain as the explanation for backward Russia being the locus of the first socialist revolution. The law of evolutionary potential is that the least specifically adapted area in the current stage has the greatest potential to be the locus of the next leap in general adaptation to the next stage.
So, Asia's "centralized" systems may have made Asia the most stable and well adapted in the previous stage ; and conversely Europe was less stable and less adapted. Thus, Europe had the most evolutionary ( revolutionary) potential to be the locus of the next leap, the leap to capitalism
CB