On Friday here at the Templeton fellowship conference, we had a terrific session with Dame Gillian Beer, who lectured on how Darwin's work was interpreted by Victorian literary and popular culture. This served as a springboard for a broader discussion among us about how science relates to popular culture in any time.
Dame Gillian said that some saw "Origin of Species" as doing away with racism, because it revealed the fundamental unity of mankind. Indeed, said Dame Gillian, in answer to a question, Darwin's family had been quite involved in the abolition movement.
I pointed out that Darwin's work was subsequently cited by eugenicists (including, as Dame G. said later, Darwin's own relative Francis Galton) as providing the basis for classifying human beings according to race, and justifying racist policies on the basis of science. I asked her to explain how people came to "misuse" Darwin.
She replied that to say Darwin was misused by the eugenicists is sadly not accurate -- that there is in Darwin's writings legitimation of those views. This was one interesting thing about Darwin, she said: that he often walked a fine and dangerous line in his ideas.
It seems to me that we today are in such awe of science, and its authority, that we accept its pretensions to dispassion and objectivity with far too little skepticism. Dame Gillian said that we must remember that Darwin worked during the height of British imperial expansion -- her point being (if I understood her correctly) that it was all too easy for the British of Darwin's day to adopt his theories as a rationale for their colonialism. I wonder too how Darwin himself was affected by his culture -- and how any scientist is affected by the larger cultural currents in which they work. It's worth remembering too that Darwinism made its way into popular culture during the Industrial Revolution ("On the Origin of Species" was first published in 1859). What was the relationship between Darwinism and the ideologies of the Industrial Revolution?
Mind you, I'm not trying to dump on Darwinism. That his discoveries led to some people putting them to malicious and destructive use doesn't invalidate the discoveries. I'm simply saying that if we are not careful to place scientific theories and discoveries in cultural context, and to be skeptical of how they are used once they are taken up by the broad culture, we could do real damage. Dame Gillian showed us how the Victorians were by no means hostile to Darwinism, at least not uniformly, but they also had a good laugh at it too. That seems to be a healthier response, in general, to the challenges posed by science than the grim pieties we are forced to adopt today, at the risk of being thought a troglodyte who stands in the way of Progress (N.B., what role did Darwin's work have in informing and shaping the ideology of Progress? Discuss.)
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"and I do think that Marx has some worthwhile insights."
Half Sigma does too:
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/03/postmarxism.html
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/03/the-four-postmarxist-social-classes.html
Cecilia,
I do think that Marx had a number of excellent insights, but we have gone beyond that in our understanding of society and economics. It is the modern-day Marxists who have become tedious and meaningless when they don't bother to bring other insights from other social scientists into their understanding.
captcha ate my name at 8:36.
Razib at Gene Expression:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003969.html
"Addendum: An acquaintance of mine mentioned offhand that he had a strong suspicion that the Manchester School of liberal economics had a strong influence on the individual-centric competitive perspective that colored early Darwinian evolutionary theory (Malthus was also a strong influence). Though my acquaintance abhors individualistic capitalism and the Manchester School's neoliberal descendents, he admitted that evolution seems to work on just those principles (this is most clear after the work of William D. Hamilton and George C. Williams in the 1960s that placed the individual, as opposed to the species or group, front and center in evolutionary theory). The moral of the story is that even if a social milieu has a powerful shaping influence on the models that science might produce: that does not necessarily imply that the model is flawed (most models are flawed after all). In contrast, deep into the 1980s the Japanese promoted theories about primate ethology (in particular macaques) that emphasized unselfish behaviors "for the good of the species" as opposed to intraspecies competition. In the end, such models had to cede ground to the data. In the end the data trumps culture."
Freelunch: thanks for the recommend. I've seen that book at the library and I will definitely put it on my list.
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