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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   35001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The analogy falls short of conveying the rich irony of reality because, as Faulkner said, «The past is never dead. It's not even past» Or Panasenkov: «It's the same slogans; moreover, it's even the same people». Nothing has changed since the 1950s; piling new deboonks on a doctrine unshaken by the fall of Lysenkoism is an exercise in futility.

Obligatory Maynard Smith:

Why is it that Hamilton, having had the sort of essential notion, really ran with it, really made it an important part of our biological understanding, whereas Haldane had the notion and did nothing with it, I understood the notion and did nothing with it?

And I do think I have to put it down to some extent to political and ideological commitment. Hamilton had the advantage over us in a sense, a) that he was passionately interested in social insects and knew something about them and wanted to explain them. He saw them as a problem to be explained. And he had clearly no reluctance in his mind about the idea that notions about the evolution of altruism in social insects might possibly have a relevance to humans. Neither Haldane, nor I, knew anything much about social insects at that time, though Haldane did become interested in them later.

But more importantly, we at that time – and we're now talking about '56, '57 I suppose when we were discussing this idea – if you look at it in the context of where Haldane publishes it in an article in New Biology, it's very much in the context of trying to understand human behaviour and human altruism and people going out and winning the VC or joining monasteries or what you will.

And neither he nor I at that stage were at all willing to entertain the notion that such behaviour would be anything other than culturally determined and influenced. We were, I think, very reluctant, as Marxists would be, to admit that anything genetic might influence human behaviour. And I think that it wasn't– we didn't say consciously to ourselves «this would be un-Marxist so we won't do it». I mean, that's not the way that the mind works. But I think it was a path that our minds were not, so to speak, prepared to go down in a quite almost unconscious sense, whereas Bill was very prepared to go down it. And he also had the natural history background and knowledge to enable him to go down it, which we both lacked.

And so what I'm really trying to say is that to make big breaks in science, which Hamilton did, it's not enough to have the technical understanding of some technical point. You've got to have the… it's got to fit in with your world view that you should pursue this road. And I don't think it did for Haldane and myself at that time. It would have done later.

Maynard Smith, of course, was the archetypal Anglo communist professor; but also a genuine intellectual, capable at least in principle of deep self-reflexion and contemplation of ideas (this is clear enough in how he speaks). Most scholars continuing the good fight against bigoted facts today are social – indeed, oversocialized – insects in comparison. Like this. «If U get eugenic, i'll fight U.»

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