Lamark and other things

What!!!'Scientists' and 'academics' not following their very own 'neutral scientific method', of 'openness', of 'merely following the data', of  'bluesky research', of refusing 'theory and ideology'…This can't be true, Dave, and the "materialists", physicists, physicalists and positivists just won't believe you!You're questioning the honour of science, of academics everywhere, who ceaselessly and impartially struggle to 'reveal The Truth', to merely detail 'the empirical facts', and to save science itself from the anti-scientists of Marx, who want workers to run the world, and want 'democratic science'.That is, those who proclaim the necessity for the proletariat to criticise what exists, to think creatively in new ways, organise themselves and produce class consciousness, and finally defeat the bourgeoisie, on every level, both philosophically and politically. Science is an ideological strut for capitalism, just like 'individualism' and 'the market'."No, No, No!", say the materialists. "We must stick with 19th century thought. We must trust and listen to bourgeois academics, who don't use ideology. Physics does not involve ideology, and the rocks talk to us! We can't hand human thinking over to the workers."That's what passes for the 'role of the party in relationship to the proletariat', here, Dave.It comes down to giving the advice to workers to 'Trust the Bourgeoisie and their academics'. Have a look at the 'Hunter Gatherer' thread, and the arse-kissing to 'academics', "who surely, must know what they are doing, and we must employ their categories!"Whatever happened to the notion of 'revolution', of 'The World Turned Upside Down'?

Not according to physicists like Einstein, Rovelli and Smolin, Dave!Never mind philosophers of science like Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos.Or even, indeed, Marx.Still, it keeps the workers docile, to believe that the 'academics' (especially those in the 'hard sciences' [sic]) actually know what they are doing……just like those clever economists and mathematicians, eh?

Yeah, I tried explaining that the notion of 'the earth going round the sun' fits your argument, but it wasn't well received.Of course, we're talking philosophy, here, but many prefer 'hard science' which supposedly produces 'truth'.The things that you've said are more obvious when we look at other sciences, like sociology or history, but we're always met by the 'materialists/physicalists' who think that the only 'real' science is physics, and so I always aim my arguments at physics, because I know from experience that that's where we'll end up, when we argue that 'all scientific knowledge is tentative'.As for 'maths', that's a human creation, and doesn't have to have any relationship to 'external reality', and so 'proofs' of maths are much like insisting fairies exist, and that constitutes their 'proof'.

Thanks Dave B.I unreservedly acknowledge the open scientific nature of your attribution of Lamarckianism to Engels’s Transition notes.I mistook Alan Johnstone’s attribution of phrenology as being yours and, in that light, saw your later attribution of Lamarckianism as a follow up putdown.Please accept my apologies.But, on Engels’s transition argument for hands-free bipedalism as (1) the actual pathway and (2) a necessary precondition for our essential cerebral sociability:Actual pathway.  This is amply confirmed by the fossil record.Necessary precondition.  This is more difficult to demonstrate.[Evolutionary necessity, like historical necessity, is constrained by contingency in both the  environmental stressors that enforce it and in the plastic material to hand that it can shape.For example, I have just returned from close proximity to another hands-free bipedal social grasslands species, the kangaroo, but see little prospect of this polygamous marsupial, lacking simian intelligence, embarking upon a palaeolithic mode of production over the next ten million years or so.Mind you, its gentle reproductive cycle and intimate mother–child bonding have much to recommend themselves to us humans, could we so choose, although human mums may demur at the prospect of having to lick up young joey’s faeces inside their own belly pouch in order to keep it sterile.]Regarding Engels’s scientific credentials, I incline toward the generous assessment made by the young Stephen Jay Gould in his essay “Posture Maketh the Man” [in Ever Since Darwin] almost 40 years ago.

Engels’s essay is equally remarkable for its ecology, and reveals how “pre-adapted” his materialist social science was for situating the ethnographical science of Lewis Henry Morgan almost a decade later.

Dave,You misrepresent Steele’s dismissal from Wollongong as the revenge of an offended scientific establishment.That representation, at least in the specific dismissal incident, is quite false.Champion of whistleblowers, Brian Martin, then Steele’s colleague at the University of Wollongong, wrote perhaps the best current account of Steele’s dismissal, and it has nothing to do with his scientific “heresy” over retrogenes.  http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/02aur.html.Brian Martin makes it clear that Steele’s dismissal arose from Steele’s public allegation that staff at Wollongong University laboured under a policy to mark full-fee paying international students more “softly” than local students—because they constituted golden-egg laying geese that brought in more money than the locals.Steele’s allegation went to the heart of the University’s intellectual integrity and—economically damaging—financial probity, and so forced the University’s hand.Martin discusses the dismissal from the point of Steele’s “soft marking policy” allegation alone, even though Martin is quite familiar with Steele’s on-going scientific battles over neo-Lamarckian inheritance.No-one can rightly accuse Brian Martin of involuntarily siding with the establishment.  One look at his fascinating website dispels that myth:  http://www.bmartin.cc.

Steele may have been sidelined by scientifically dissenting colleagues, but not dismissed from Wollongong University thereby.He was dismissed for publicly alleging a policy of “soft” examination marking;  not for proposing “soft” epigenetic inheritance.