Coffee!! Marxists celebrate Darwin, denounce design - and line up all afternoon for sausages, unless they are Party members, in which case ...

Oh, wait. The Marxists who sponsor this site probably live in an oppressive capitalist state where one can just go buy sausages on the way home from work. Beef, pork, turkey, veggie, stuff I couldn't even name ...

Anyhow, in this year of all years when tax burdens celebrate Darwin, Marxists pile in. A friend points me to this:

November marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This book revolutionised thinking about the living world because for the first time it provided an explanation for the evolution of species, something that was long suspected by scientists. Darwin's simple idea  change by natural selection  is arguably the single most important foundation-stone upon which all modern biology is based. The Origin of Species was a triumph of the materialist world outlook, even if Darwin himself didn't quite put it that way, and for that reason its publication was celebrated by Marx and Engels.

For the first time, Darwin gave a coherent and consistent explanation for evolution. Moreover, it was based on chance and random developments in the natural environment and not in the slightest on any cosmic purpose. There was no place in Origin, in other words, for God.

- John Pickard, "Darwin's Science vs 'Intelligent Design'" (24 November 2009)

If I were invited to one of their Marxfests, I would auction off bricks from the Berlin Wall.

Proceeds to "open society" causes only, not to Marxism.

Changes of last 10 000 years too great to be explained by Darwinian mechanism?

Here's a 2005 article by Eric Hobsbawm defending history, "It is fashionable to say 'my truth is as valid as yours'. But it's not true".

Hobsbawm is defending Marxism, and it is hard to imagine a political system more exploded than Marxism (though its professors are busy chipping away at civil liberties wherever they can).

But curiously, he says,

DNA analysis has established a firmer chronology of the spread of the species from its original African origin throughout the world, before the appearance of written sources. This has both established the astonishing brevity of human history and eliminated the reductionist solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology.

The changes in human life in past 10,000 years, let alone the past 10 generations, are too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not genetic mechanisms.

What he is saying is that trying to figure out what Alley Oop might have done or why he might have done it 20,000 years ago is not a useful approach to understanding life today. That is probably true, even if a Marxist says it. But then, of course, he goes on to say,

In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific, historical, method of studying the evolution of the human species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a world history. History is the continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by other means.

which leads me to wonder, naturally enough, what "other means" he has in mind. He also insists,

Secondly, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the distinction between history and the natural sciences and bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a science. (Eric Hobsbawm is author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991. This is an edited extract from a speech to the British Academy Colloquium on Marxist historiography, first published in Le Monde diplomatique )

Why is a debate on whether human history is a science bogus? Actually, that is an important question, and a lot is at stake. In any event, if human history is not a science, then evolutionary biology is not a science either. I happen to think that neither is a science for that exact reason. But that doesn't mean that neither is a source of useful information. If I want to know what happened during World War II, I consult a historian, and expect factual answers. And the historian's information is not rendered more accurate by describing it as a science.