Lamark and other things

[Dave B]

TWC

 

I am a bit baffled.

 

You said yourself quoting Engels;

 

 

Fred speaks ;  But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity….[and hence through the influence of the predominant use?]………..; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.

 

 

TWC says;

 

Now all of this, especially the bit in bold, can be read in Lamarkian terms. 

 

 

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/hunter-gatherer-violence?page=23

 

Well ‘can be read' is a bit of an understatement I think given that Lamark had two laws the second being pretty much a restatement of the first.

 

Second Law:

 

All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant useor permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck

 

If you are talking about a more general, broad and all encompassing Lamarkism that would be another issue.

 

I think Lamarkism in the 19th century was a logical speculative best guess or  ‘working hypothesis’.

 

A ‘hypothesis’ that was even ‘considered’ by Darwin himself?

 

[Darwin’s]…. pangenesis theory was criticised for its Lamarckian premise that parents could pass on traits acquired in their lifetime

 

 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangenesis

 

I think Engels was a Lamarckian and recent developments in research, probably over less than the last twenty years, is proving him correct.

 

No one I think is completely throwing out the standard modern post 1900 cosmic ray mutation model.

 

It is just that the ‘Lamarckian’ model is returning; well into the ‘debate’ anyway?

 

 

…….. Scientists have debated whether advances in the field of transgenerational epigenetics mean that Lamarck was to an extent correct, or not……….

 

Even from my side of the debate.

 

(are you on the other?)

 

I think it is mean spirited and ungenerous given what we know now and what Engels and Lamark knew then to say that they were only “to an extent correct”.

 

 

The whole epigenetic thing might be a bit skewed because it is so much easier to observe in ‘real time’ and ‘scientifically reproduce’.

 

As we are also on hunter gatherer violence elsewhwere?

 

There was a seminal paper produced as recently as 2010?  by Franklinthat plunged into the area of  ‘behavioural’ transgenerational epigenetics as regards violence and aggression in mice  

[Dave B]

In the swirling pot of ideas of the time Engels may well have taken his ‘Lamarkian’ idea from other places; or even the same places Lamark got them?   “Huxley pointed out the similarities of pangenesis to the theories of Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnetbut eventually wrote encouraging Darwin to publish: "Somebody rummaging among your papers half a century hence will find Pangenesis & say 'See this wonderful anticipation of our modern Theories—and that stupid ass, Huxley, prevented his publishing them'".  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Variation_of_Animals_and_Plants_under_Domestication

[Dave B]

I think Engels was remarkably up speed on all scientific developments in his time. I remember reading something he wrote on chemistry type stuff in ani Duhring, and perhaps not being as well up on the history of my own subject as I should be, was surprised that ‘we’ had quite got to that level at that point in history. I think we should be up to speed on what is going on and be aware of the resurrection of 'epigenetic Lamarkism' or ‘meta-Lamarkism’ and its very recent history given our ‘hero’ is still lampooned by our behind the times and out of date Weismannist/neo-Darwinists. There may also be some grist for our L bird ideology of science in this. Around 1979 an Australian scientist produced the ‘first epigenetic’ work. He was dragged before the neo-Darwinist papacy excommunicated for ‘Lamarkism’ and eventually sacked from his academic position. Starting from around 2000 epigenetics started to take off and is now mainstream and is increasingly attracting attention. I raised it as a subject on our old forum around 2005 I think. Going back to the beginning. Darwin came up with his theory or whatever in 1859+ but what people often don’t appreciate is that it did not include any ‘causal’ mechanism for the ‘mutations’. There were various hypotheses including the ‘Lamarkian’ one which as it happens Darwin also tentatively considered in his pangenesis idea. It was a good hypothesis which increasingly looks as though it is was correct. Although Lamark did ridiculously promote it to a ‘Law’; I think Darwin and Engels sensibly kept it at the hypothesis level. It is generally thought incorrectly I think that Engels took his ‘Lamarkian’ idea from Lamark rather than Darwin.  There is a reason for this I suspect; after the ‘Darwinian’ Wiseman in 1896, or whatever, ‘Lamarkism’ was progressively trashed and the embarrassing Darwinian pangensis ‘Lamarkism’ was ‘expunged’ from the literature and sent down the Darwinist memory hole. As Lamark became the easier whipping boy for Wisemanism. Hence we know of the Lamark idea from Lamark and not from Darwin. Or in other words Engels was perhaps expressing pangeneisist ideas rather than Lamarkian ones? But we wouldn’t know that if pangeneisis had been ‘wiped from the pages of history’. Of course epigenetics could still collapse but that is not the point really.

[Dave B]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Steele 

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

There may also be some grist for our L bird ideology of science in this.Around 1979 an Australian scientist produced the ‘first epigenetic’ work.He was dragged before the neo-Darwinist papacy excommunicated for ‘Lamarkism’ and eventually sacked from his academic position.

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'?

[Dave B]

I think the reputation when it comes to the pure sciences like chemistry and physics is much better. And we do like, Mancunian  Brian Cox, take the piss out of  ‘the biologists’. We have the advantage though of being more easily performing and reproducing experiments etc. And are less likely to quickly dismiss the outrageously unconventional and think the unthinkable. Eg in Manchester; It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford There was another classic one re the age of the sun before any comprehension of nuclear energy etc etc. Assuming that the sun’s energy was from chemical energy and somekind of burning lump of coal or something and it was half way through it life. They calculated that it was about 40 million years old? The gravel monkeys and Darwinists were horrified. To the credit of the cross discipline understanding of chemists and physicists however they accepted they probably had a problem and that there must be something else going on that they knew nothing about. The first Dark energy. We now have Dark Energy II.

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

I think the reputation when it comes to the pure sciences like chemistry and physics is much better.

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?

[Dave B]

If you mean by Einstien his disbelief in quantum mechanics; I don’t ‘believe it’ either. He postulated a thought experiment on faster than light speed electron entanglement called the spooky effect I think that would disprove quantum mechanics. They did it fairly recently and it passed the quantum mechanics theory test. [The anti quantum mechanics Einstienist then moved the goal posts and claimed it wasn’t really an exchange of information or something.] Quantum mechanics is firming up and has passed every kitchen sink test that they have thrown at it. Pure scientist do not believe in ‘scientific truth’; that is label that is invented by non pure scientists. We do not prove things to be true. In the all important progressive negatation;  we demonstrate that existing ideas are false or based on an incomplete understanding. EG .As below? mentioning twc’s Gould.  “If a good scientist says that a theory has been proved, then he's speaking informally. Mathematics deals in proof, but scientific theories are not proved. Ever.(It is sometimes claimed that the "laws" of thermodynamicsare proved. That is a partial truth. The mathematical part of the "laws" is indeed mathematically proved. The science part is not.)The basic credo is that all scientific knowledge is tentative. Nothing is so firmly known that it cannot, in principle, be overthrown by new evidence. In practice, of course, there have been scientists who clung to old theories. Creationism, for example, hung on at many universities for decades after Darwin. The standard student joke was that evolution spread "one funeral at a time".But belief being tentative does not mean that all theories are equal. Evidence is weighed: belief comes in gradations. For example, Roger Penrose puts theories in four categories: Superb, Useful, Tentative, and Misguided.So, where does the Theory of Evolution fit? There are Creationist claims that scientists feel evolution is in crisis. Others say it's "just a theory", by which they mean Tentative. However, I personally testify that the scientific community rates it Superb.Stephen Jay Gould has said that the evidence is to the point where it would be perverse to treat Common Descent differently from a fact. The most prestigious scientific journals agree, and regularly publish articleswhich assume that Common Descent is a fact. The Theory of Evolution is the theory they useto explain that fact.http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/proof.html

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

The basic credo is that all scientific knowledge is tentative. Nothing is so firmly known that it cannot, in principle, be overthrown by new evidence.

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'.

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[twc]

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.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

This idealistic tradition [that thought is more noble and important than the labour it supervised] dominated philosophy right up to Darwin’s day.  Cerebral primacy seemed so obvious and natural that it was accepted as given, rather than recognised as a deep-seated social prejudice related to class position of professional thinkers and their patrons.Engels writes:“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain.  Men became accustomed to explain their actions from their thoughts, instead of from their needs. … And so there arose in the course of time that idealistic outlook on the world which, especially since the decline of the ancient world, has dominated men’s minds.  It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.”

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.

[twc]

Apologies for sticking my neck out—like a Lamarckian giraffe—but we should spell Jean-Baptiste Lamarck correctly, by reinstating the “c” before the “k”.

[twc]

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.

Brian Martin wrote:

This site deals with attacks on dissenting views and individuals.  The general field of “suppression of dissent” includes whistleblowing, free speech, systems of social control and related topics.  The purpose of the site is to foster examination of these issues and action against suppression.  It is founded on the assumption that openness and dialogue should be fostered to challenge unaccountable power.

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.

[pgb]

Spot on twc.  I was about to say the same myself.  Steele was not sacked for his "Lamarckism" by a "neo-Darwinist papacy". I will only add that Steele took his case to the Australian Federal Court which found against the University, and he was subsequently reinstated. The University appealed against the Court's decision but lost a second time. It eventually settled with an undisclosed payout to Steele. As far as I am aware, he chose not to return to the Uni of Wollongong but took up a position at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

[Dave B]

That would depend on whether or not you are a conspiracy theorist or not I suppose. Background to the case from Brian Martin  Ted Steele has a long history as a dissident biologist. He proposed a molecular biological mechanism for environmentally induced changes in certain organisms to be passed on to progeny, and expounded this idea in a book more than 20 years ago (Steele, 1979). Much of his time since then has been spent pursuing this fundamental idea, through experimental work, theoretical elaboration and seeking acceptance from other scientists, including confronting critics and attacking researchers who did not give him what he thought was suitable acknowledgment. That environmental influences could affect genetics has long been rejected in biology. Steele was like a bull battering at the gates of the establishment. http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/02aur.html Epigenetic Inheritance through Sperm Cells, the Lamarckian Dimension in Evolution  Steele and his fellow researchers were vehemently dismissed and attacked by the establishment throughout the 1980s and 1990s when they continued pushing back the frontiers [8], and are now in danger of being fully vindicated. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/epigeneticInheritanceSpermCells.php    When such a person is then sacked for; ………..just chipping in on a national debate about Australian university standards when he told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had been told to upgrade student marks……….. http://www.proofs.com.au/proofs-articles/2008/8/23/man-of-steele/

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