http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=11 http://reason.com/0012/rb.the.shtml
Claiming Darwin for the Left: an interview with Peter Singer Interview by Julian Baggini
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So once again, what Singer really wanted to say was overshadowed by his reputation. Which is a pity, because in his LSE lecture, A Darwinian Left?, which formed the centrepiece of his visit, Singer challenges a rather different taboo: the exclusion from left-wing thought of the ideas of Charles Darwin.
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CB: This seems substantially false. Marx and Engels said Darwin's work represented their method as applied in natural history. J.B.S. Haldane. Marx had a concept of species-being.
Even for all historically revolutionary changes in the ensemble of social relations, Marxists would affirm that many characteristics of homo sapiens as taught by biological anthropology would persist, comprising a human nature - long childhood, bipedal, mammalian, unique genome, language, et al. Marxism considers humans an animal species, in Darwin's sense.
Culture operates as a LaMarckian-like mechanism, i.e. allowing cultural or extra-somatic/non-bodily inheritance of acquired characteristics.. In this sense, human history goes beyond Darwinian natural history. But culture doesn't obliterate human au naturelle history.
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Singer argues that the left's utopianism has failed to take account of human nature, because it has denied there is such a thing as a human nature. For Marx, it is the "ensemble of social relations" which makes us the people we are, and so, as Singer points out, "It follows from this belief that if you can change the 'ensemble of social relations', you can totally change human nature."