Re: [OPE-L] Retraining Laid-Off Workers, but for What? By LOUIS UCHITELLE

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2006 - 01:30:48 EST


>>
>Hi Rakesh, I agree with you totally.  Not In Our 
>Genes, in my view,  is a book quite important 
>and essential for any Marxian scholar. What is 
>your dissertation about?

It was a critique of the Bell Curve, though I 
tried to show to what extent many of its critics
shared in some of its dubious assumptions and to 
what extent its gloomy ideology was the way (as
Mattick suggested) in which bourgeois society 
comes to some self understanding of its actual 
(non harmonic) nature.





>Have you papers (from you) on the relationship 
>between social sciences and "natural" sciences?


Yes I sent you offlist my paper on Darwin; I 
argue that the formative influence of Malthus'
population  dynamics on Darwin's theory has been exaggerated.


I am a bit skeptical of Dickens' important 
argument that class inequality is manifesting 
itself in and reproducing itself through 
biological inequality. I think here of Jerome 
Kagan's skepticism about the determining 
importance of prenatal and perinatal experience.

By the way, people will probably be interested in 
Margaret Schabas' Natural Origins of Economics.
I haven't read it yet, but it seems to be part of 
the attempt to embed economics in the natural
world. Isn't this what Paul Seabright is trying to do as well?

Yours truly, Rakesh


>Yours
>Alejandro
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