I think that Marx hit the nail on the head when he wrote in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle:
"Darwins work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. ... Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, teleology in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained." As Marx recognized right away, Darwin's work struck a fatal blow against the use of teleological explanations in the natural sciences. In that sense, Darwin's work completed the revolution in the life sciences that had been initiated by Descartes in the 17th century. However, Jscot is right that Darwinism leaves untouched the teleomonic character of living organisms, and indeed it provides an explanation of why living organisms should have the appearance of being purposive and goal-directed. All this is explained quite lucidly in Richard Dawkins's book, *The Blind Watchmaker*, which takes note the fact that Darwin, as a divinity student at Cambridge, had studied quite intensively the works of the British theologian and natural historian, William Paley, whose writings placed great emphasis on the appearance of purposiveness in organic nature as evidence for the existence of a divine creator. Darwin's own work showed that this apparent purposiveness could be explained naturalistically in causal terms without the positing of a divine or supernatural intelligence. Having said that, evolutionary biologists do debate such things as whether evolution, viewed on a broad scale, has any inherent trends or tendencies over time. Stephen Jay Gould was rather skeptical about that, arguing that if we could somehow rerun the "rewind the tape" of evolutionary history we would get quite different results each time. Other people, such as Dawkins, do argue that there are certain longterm trends inherent in evolution. Thus, Dawkins, as I understand him, argues that there is a longterm tendency for intelligence to develop over time. This and other related trends are seen as being driven by the existence of predator-prey relationship which leads to "arms races" as organisms evolve to become either more effective predators or better protected prey. Likewise, one could argue that human history, while lacking an inherent purpose is not necessarily lacking a certain directionality. There does seem to be a longterm tendency for the forces of production to become more and more developed, a trend that seems to be driven by competition between human societies, with those societies with the better developed forces of production, everything else being equal, being more likely to prevail in political/economic/ military competition with rival societies. This tendency for the forces of production to develop, in turn tends to drive the evolution of modes of production as various regimes of production rise and fall on the basis of their acting to either facilitate the development of the productive forces or their acting as fetters on such development. A given mode of production may act to promote the development of the productive forces during one period of time, while acting as fetters at a later time. When that happens, further development is not likely to occur until that mode of production has been replaced by a new one that is better suited to promote further development. Jim F. ---------- Original Message ---------- From: jscotl...@aol.com To: farmela...@juno.com Subject: [Marxism] On "progressive evolution": Was: End of short unhappy life of"engagement"withIra Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 00:10:19 EDT Shane: Once you deny any immanent teleology to nature, then no natural phenomenon, including organic evolution, can be "progressive" Reply: Not teleology, teleonomy: the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms that derive from their evolutionary history and adaptation for reproductive success. ________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Free information on the latest patio furniture trends. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTK9v4SOTXDBwdUCrt4vbIkMf84q8b6bc1kqgWDo1nEBS8gYrT2B9W/ ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
