[lbo-talk] Samuel Bowles's turn?

[Auguste Blanqui]

There's an article in today's Science Times by Nicholas Wade (the
Times's leading promoter of race-biology-gene stuff) pumping up what
sounds like a really silly book on the transition to
capitalism/industrialization.  It's a kitchen-sink mix: uncritical
Malthusianism, culture-of-poverty theory, genetic transmission of
cultural ideas, and what looks like sandbox application of
evolutionary theory.  Quote: "Dr. Clark says the middle-class values
needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally
or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward
evolution as the explanation. "Through the long agrarian passage
leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically
more adapted to the modern economic world," he writes. And, "The
triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our
genes as in ideology or rationality."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?ref=science&pagewanted=print

I had to blink a couple times when I saw Samuel Bowles's name in the
article praising the book.  It's indeed the same Samuel Bowles.  I
don't know much about what he did after the height of URPE.  Does
anyone know?  Did his views/assumptions change?