[lbo-talk] Biology again

[andie nachgeborenen]

I stand by what I said. The "central dogma" of molecular genetics is precisely that biology and the environment are not mutually determinative. DNA transcribes to RNA to protein, never backwards. Obviously biological dispositions encoded in DNA are only manifested in environments. Obviously different dispositions are manifested in different environments. Obviously it makes no sense to talk of biology being a "precedent" or a "substrate" if that means that biology abstracted from an environment is an independent variable. There is no such thing as biology abstracted from an environment. Even if you have DNA in outer space, that is an environment. 

But "biology", by which I here mean genetic encoding, has a kind of explanatory primacy that is expressed among other places in the central dogma. That only places "too much emphasis on biology" if you ignore everything that I and every knowledgeable biologist says and further reason, fallaciously, that biological = genetic = natural = supports and justifies the existing order = cannot be changed, and equally fallaciously that social = nonbiological (interesting, all those nonbiological social beings running around = artificial = challenges and undermines the existing order = easily changed. 

This is all tommyrot. We do not place too much emphasis on biology, we place too little.

--- On Wed, 4/23/08, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:


> From: Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] To each according to work
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 9:46 PM
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> 
> > Our biology gives us certain dispositions that can be
> manifested in
> > different ways in different circumstances. We can be
> competitive
> > under capitalism, deferential under feudalism, maybe
> cooperative
> > under communism.
> 
> This is granting too much priority to biology. It is not
> accurate to 
> state that a biological substrate creates dispositions;
> rather, social 
> relations and biological features are mutually
> determinative.  For 
> instance, brain development shapes and is shaped by social
> interactions 
> in early childhood.  I know that andie has made this very
> point in LBO 
> posts in the past, but the phrasing above could be easily
> misconstrued 
> as the claim that biology is the precedent.
> 
> A minor point, perhaps, but I take every opportunity to
> undermine the 
> pernicious and misleading notion that there is some
> biological substrate 
> modified by a sociocultural veneer.
> 
> Miles
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

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