Apologies: I missed what is, I think, only a semantic point, but miss it I did. I believe that given the complexity of the natural world, and time, life could a) occur spontaneously from the primordial soup, and b) evolve into a myriad of more complex forms.

If we are making new forms of life in the lab, consider this: “we” are part of the natural world as well, as is the lab. It’s just nature, making new life forms in an on-going process, not “creation” in the “above it all” sense.

Bill:

Yes, but more as a principle (the exchange-value of a commodity turns on the labour that went into making it, not on mystical notions of inherent value; the latter can, of course, affect price, which is not the same as value). I don’t think the LTV has much use as a quantitative economic tool, though.

Damn.

Would you hang on to the Labor Theory of Value too?

Personally, the whole discussion is neither here nor there to me, as I’m one of the chosen few who understands that the universe and all life in it was created by a guy named Bernie, who drives an Eldorado and is constantly adjusting himself. It’s not too late to be saved if you pony up now.

But it is. That’s the whole point.

Incidentally, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. I wouldn’t put anything past it. : )

As our understanding of science and microbiology and genetics accelerates it is the evolutionists’ argument, ironically, that begins to unravel a bit. As we learn more about genetic code and the chemical properties therein we are facing the prospect of creating new forms of life in a lab. At that point evolutionists, if they’re being honest, would no longer be able to absolutely discount the notion of creation without in effect suggesting that we are capable of creating life, but that the engine room of the natural world, unfathomably complex relative to us, somehow is not.

The so-called social sciences suffer from that very same conceit—the notion that observing and labeling process means that one can then draw a hard wall around what’s found and explain everything from within those parameters. To the extent that politics and corporeality meet in the name of such an endeavor it is indeed a “dangerous, anti-human conceit.”

Collectivism works for small human groupings in uncomplicated social settings ( like survival) but as a national premise in a technical and capitalist mega state it is too primitive and narrow a political premise to cope with the billions of nuances and anomolies in such a large diverse population, economy and markets.

One of the reasons I avoid conversations with unionist dogmatists is that they are blind to realities so it becomes simply a one sided reaffirmation of political illusion.

It can happen…

Now, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

If by “the fundamental premise of Marxism” you are referring to unilinear social evolution, rather than physical evolution, then you haven’t been keeping up. There aren’t too many Marxists these days who would hold to the former. Marx and Engels did their best with what they had: they depended heavily on the research of Lewis Morgan. Since then, anthropology itself has, er, evolved. The teleology of Marxism has been largely abandoned.

The notion of social evolution is at best an analogy to physical evolution, and further confounded by ideas like “social Darwinism.” It’s also clearly based upon racism and Eurocentrism: the “their present is our past, our present is their future” kind of thing; the idea of the primitive. Johannes Fabian marked a turning point with his Time and the Other, and that work is now a quarter of a century old.

But I’d hang onto historical materialism. Class interests are real and demonstrable; world-views are generated by complex webs of such interests (no serious Marxist these days buys into the mechanistic “superstructure/base” dichotomy; I’m not sure that Marx did either). One can, at least grosso modo, point to aspects of our own culture that appear “natural” but which are actually constructs, conceived in social life and the outcome of power relations.

But my quarrel in the instant case is with sociobiology, which is reductionist to the point of sheer crudeness. It started, I guess, with Skinner’s superstitious pigeons, or maybe much earlier with Gobineau (sociobiology is attractive to racists), but these days it’s E.O. Wilson. It’s a fascist doctrine, in my opinion, and that suspicion is borne out in part by Kevin MacDonald’s rubbish, a stream of anti-Semitic quackery (so-called “evolutionary psychology”). MacDonald considers Wilson a mentor. And the racial scientists over at GeneXpression just love E.O. Wilson.

Human beings aren’t reducible to genes and evolutionary imperatives. But that doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that we can’t talk about class.

Just to say in closing, Jay, that, as usual, I’m on the side of the angels. No apostasy here, I’m afraid—just the ability to adapt to new learning and new circumstances.