>I note R's new, wild extrapolation of my
>remarks. I think that if I said I smelled
>some flowers this morning, he would launch
>into my misunderstanding of the Dialectics
>of Nature.
Oh, no, Max. I thought your point was a good and interesting one. Didn't I say that? The diatribe was clearly (?) not directed against you but the economists (Cox?) we have been criticizing here.
You are getting way too touchy, rather like the witty and terse Max (he is one of the excellent models of writing on this list). Sad that you stopped responding to my clearly provocative posts on the WTO and China (just thought I would chart out a position against the EPI, the Nation editors, Z magazine and Monthly Review just because I enjoyed the abuse so much last time I attacked a popular movement--the Black Radical Congress; remember how kind you were to me then?) At any rate, thought you weren't reading me anymore.
As for Engels' dialectics of nature, probably the greatest attempt to defend it against the criticisms of Monod and lesser thinkers is of course Lewontin and Levins' Dialectical Biologist (dedicated to Engels who got it right most of the time). As Sam has pointed out, arch reductionist JBS Haldane of all people wrote the very favorable intro the British reissue of Engels' DoN!
An important criticism of the Engelsian effort is by Peter Manicas in Engels After Marx, ed. Manfred Steger (Penn State Press, 1999). And what's the relationship between E's Dialectics of Nature and OT1.Marx's own project and OT2. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature? There are those who argue that the latter anticipates Stuart Kauffmann's theories about self-organizing systems which I have not studied but is all the rage (soon economics may be conquered by it, no?)
So I don't know enough to launch into this discussion about the dialectics of nature. As for flowers, the Enrique Coen book is excellent from the point of view of developmental genetics.
Best, Rakesh