> on 9/1/00 5:28 AM, Carrol Cox at cbcox at ilstu.edu wrote:
>
> Since Carrol has said that he will not defend the above, I'll just step up
> and take a few free potshots...
>
> I find this little slip both revealing and disturbing.
>
> The idea that we should espouse scientific theories based on whether they
> lend support to an ideology, rather than their conformity to facts,
> expanatory usefulness, and conceptual simplicity is one that I find
> repellant.
Bill, I think you're reading too much into Carrol's post.
Carrol and I have 'known' each other via various mailing lists for something like 4 years now - as a result, we have got to know a bit about each other. We're both Marxists (of different stripes - I consider myself an autonomist Marxist these days - I'm not sure what Carrol sees himself as), and both are interested in how Marx's ideas are a tool not just in the field of political economy, but also offer a powerful philosophical framework for addressing problems in all sorts of areas.
By 'philosophical framework', what I'm trying to get at is that there is something pretty fundamental about how we relate to - understand - think about - the world which Karl Marx got right. Marxists are hardly unique in seeing similar paradigms 'echoing' through various fields - Edelman's talk at ISMB 2000, for instance, drew on certain ideas about the nature of information in biological systems which were similar Manfred Eigen's keynote at ISMB 99 on 'The Origin of Biological Information'.
Carrol, like myself, is interested in these 'echoes'. I, unlike Carrol, work with biologists on a day to day basis (I'm currently employed as a bioinformaticist, offering computer support to a group of genetic research scientists, amongst other things), and have a passing knowledge of some areas in neuroscience. So, Carrol wanted me to take the debate forward by contributing further - he knows that I often hold back from contributing due to time pressure.
All he was doing was trying to coax me into putting some ideas on the table. Two Marxists do not a conspiracy make (particularly when they are as different as Carrol and myself).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844