Shopping for answers from Marx and Spencer

Finding a moral compass . . . without a compass

“…Meanwhile, Marxism and other social-evolutionary theories made equity the ultimate goal of the ineluctable social process. As I have noted over the years, 1,9,10 these and other contemporary writers envisioned an endpoint, which in some fitness sense was consistent with natural law and hence, an ultimate physical as well as moral truth. The arguments haven't really changed.…”

The geodesic paths of space and the “Biodesics” of life

“…Notions of law‐like social change even including claims of inevitable endpoints have been proffered. These have ranged from utopian dreams in France and various social destinies posited by Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx to Thomas Malthus' dire predictions of perpetual overpopulation and many others in the twentieth century, including proponents of more recent Darwinian theories of culture in which memes play the role of genes . Most of the earlier theories were so wrong as to be wishful thinking, but more recent versions have been so nonspecific or imitative of Darwinian biology as to provide descriptive generalities rather than new understanding.…”

The red queen and her king: Cooperation at all levels of life

“…Ethnologists have long recognized that cultures evolve on their own terms, and that there are various aspects that seem to reflect understandable processes (e.g., Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Cavalli‐Sforza and Feldman, 1981; Harris, 1968; Laland et al, 2010; Lumsden and Wilson, 1981; Weiss, 2010b; Weiss and Hayashida, 2002; White, 1969), However, consensus has not been reached about the process, and the rather direct transfer of Darwinian‐derived concepts of natural selection and units of inheritance (e.g., “memes”) that has been made is often far less justified and has led to countless strong assertions or even assumptions that are backed by very little hard evidence. If geneticists have been far too simplistic in their hypothesized scenarios, eliding the known complexity of the way cellular life is organized, the connections among genes and memes are even more tenuous.…”