on ball, "marx and darwin: a reconsideration"

On Ball, "Marx and Darwin: A Reconsideration"Author(s): Mark WarrenSource: Political Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1981), pp. 260-263Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/190717 .

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On Ball, "Marx and Darwin: A Reconsideration" (Volume 7, No. 4, November 1979)

Insofar as Professor Ball's article intends to salvage Marx from the scientistic ossification of Marxism it is a serious and worthy piece of work. It is unfortunate, however, that he chooses to make Darwin the scapegoat for the various naturalistic fallacies smuggled into turn-of- the-century Marxism. Professor Ball misunderstands the nature of Darwin's unique contribution to evolutionary theories of history, and for this reason misses the real and fruitful methodological connections between Marx and Darwin.

Professor Ball dissolves the methodological connection by linking the explanatory postulates of Darwin's theory to what he takes to be Marx's decisive distinction between human and natural history. Where- as natural history (Darwin) is governed by "selection through chance and accident," human history (Marx) is characterized by "purposive human selection." Marx "admired and agreed with Darwin for having finished off teleology in the natural sciences." Even so, claims Pro- fessor Ball, Marx relegated the applicability of Darwin's theory to "prehuman, preconscious natural history." Darwin's theory "does not apply to the epoch of human history in which men consciously trans- form nature and thereby themselves." Resting on the distinction between "purpose" and "chance," Professor Ball concludes that Darwin's theory is "passe" where Marx's view of human history is concerned.

Put in this way the distinction does not hold, at least in part because Professor Ball has misunderstood the explanatory claims of Darwin's theory. The theory does not explain natural evolution as a product of "selection through chance and accident." Neither does it a priori exclude conscious means of historical transformation. Allow me to be more exact by referring to Lewontin, the well-known evolutionary biologist, who has summarized the central postulates of Darwin's theory as follows: (1) Different individuals in a population have different mor- phologies, physiologies, and behaviors (phenotype variation). (2) Dif- ferent phenotypes (or individuals) have different rates of survival and reproduction in different environments (differential fitness). (3) There is a correlation between parents and offspring in the contribution of each to future generations (fitness is heritable).

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Note that the theory is limited not by its subject matter, but by its pattern of explanation. Here it is rather modest: it simply points to functional correlations between groups of entities and their environments over time. It does have the virtue of generating explanations concerning the survival of particular entities in particular environments, together with the contribution of this survival to future generations. Ex post facto, it tells us to look at the relations between an entity and its environment to explain long-term change in entities of its type.

With regard to Professor Ball's distinction between human and natural history, it is crucial to note "chance and accident" have nothing to do with "selection" in Darwin's theory. For the biologist, chance and accident refer to one possible source of variation in the genetic make-up of biological entities. The biologist calls this "random mutation" and distinguishes it from selection. "Random mutation" simply refers to one possible source of individual difference. There could be other sources-like conscious design. "Selection," on the other hand, explains the effects of these variations on the survival of entities. If a variation (random or consciously achieved) functions in a particular environment so as to allow the entity to replicate itself, then the variation survives and is in some way transmitted to the next generation. The theory does not explain where a variation comes from in particular instances. It is simply irrelevant to Darwin's theory whether an entity relates "acci- dentally" or 'purposively" to its environment. The theory is only in- terested in whether or not the variations that do occur are functional for replication. Darwin's theory does not rule out the (real and effective) possibility of individual variation of behavior by conscious means because it does not address the problems of the origins of variation. Thus, Darwin's conception of historical determination, like Marx's, makes the important distinction between the actual origin of an entity and the function it subsequently assumes in some kind of environmental system.

A further point can be made concerning the applicability of Darwin's theory to different kinds of subjects. Again, the generality of the theory is important to notice. It says that historical assimilation of entity and environment through selective adaptation will occur wherever entities exist that replicate themselves in some manner. Unfortunately, we have been taught by sociobiology to think of gene replication when we hear this. But the proposition is more general. The replication might be of any type, at any level of organization. In language, for example, signs, gestures and speech acts survive and evolve in relation to their



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environments of grammar and experience because they are replicated through mimesis. And, in the capitalist periods of history, units of capital are replicated through the production and realization of surplus value. In each cycle, there occurs a selective relation between the unit of capital and its market environment, favoring the evolution of certain kinds of productive organization. I mention these examples only to point out that Professor Ball has confused one possible elaboration of the theory in biology with the theory as a kind of functional explanation.

Turning to Marx, then, the differences between his "human" history and "natural" history are not to be found in the absence of "Darwinian" selective processes in the former. The functional relations occurring in historical development are not removed by the fact that humans can act in accordance with purposes. Marx's several references to Darwin in Capital-especially concerning the development of human technical skills and capacities-indicate his awareness of this (see, e.g., vol. 1, Moscow, 1977, pp. 323, 352; and Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, Moscow, 1971, pp. 294-295). Animal and human history are distin- guished for Marx not only by the human's ability to act in accordance with conscious design, but by the fact that the environment confronted by the human is both social and cumulatively modified, as Professor Ball does indeed point out. But this simply raises the selective relations between individual and environment to higher levels of complexity. For Marx, the fact that humans can act purposively does not abrogate the fact that to be realized in practice, even purposes must come into functional (and therefore selective) relations with their environments. Selective adaptation of ideas, tools, and cultures to natural, technological, and social environments is central to the human making of history.

It is also important to note (Professor Ball does not) Marx's distinction between prehistory and history in this regard. For Marx, of course, until human control over the social process as a whole is established, the social and technological environment behaves as a natural environment, hostile to the human intentions that give rise to it. In class society, the selective pressures of this environment devolve harshly on particular individuals in spite of their ability to act purposively. Even in the future, however, should Marx's human history proper emerge, human intentions would still come into selection relations with their environments in practice, and this would have a bearing on their historical survival and subsequent effects. Although the historical con-



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nection between Marx and Darwin is tenuous, the methodological connection is interesting and deserves more serious attention.

-Mark Warren University of Toronto



on ball, "marx and darwin: a reconsideration"

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