[lbo-talk] Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robinson

[c b]

As the Socialist Barbarian pointed out, this in fact is what
biologists have done with Darwin. In fact Darwin didn't even have
Mendel's theory of inheritance to work with but had to cook up one of
his own, which turned out to be quite wrong.

^^^^^
CB; Which is why I wrote "Darwin/Mendel". Mendel's work wasn't
discovered until after he was dead, and he wrote after Darwin.
Biologists have not discarded  Darwin's natural selection thesis.
Darwin entered the idea that Lamarckian mechanism's operated in
natural selection. Mendel's thesis is anti-Lamarckian.

In other words, when I say "Darwin/Mendel" I mean " natural
selection/independent assortment".

There is no corresponding error in Marx's thesis that bourgeois
political economists have corrected.  For example, if Joan Robinson
disdains the labor theory of value/value theory of labor/law of value,
she disdains exploitation in capitalism.  Marx's theory of
exploitation is not an error.

^^^^^

 (And it took biologists quite some time to fit together Darwinism
with Mendelian genetics anyway). Also, Darwin, to the end, continued
to subscribe to certain Lamarckian ideas, which have long since been
discarded by biologists. What Darwin would have considered to be
Darwinism is not necessarily what most contemporary biologists would
consider Darwinism to be now a days.

^^^^
CB: Correct : "Mendel's ideas were rediscovered in the early twentieth
century, and in the 1930s and 1940s the modern synthesis combined
Mendelian genetics with Darwin's theory of natural selection".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel