I maintain a site on blogspot that consists almost entirely of reposts from this site. This site is a backup, so that I won’t lose too much of my work in case something happens to WordPress. As of now, there is little reason for anyone to read that site.
Every so often, a person offers a comment on the blogspot site. I rather feel for these people, since there is virtually no chance that anyone but me will see what they have written, and I will occasionally go for weeks or even months on end without checking. So, early in July, someone posting under the screen name “erplus” wrote this, in reply to my notes on an essay on theoretical studies in biology that Miriam Markowitz wrote for The Nation magazine last year:
please see the reader letter below which The Nation refused to publish neither in print nor online; tell me about esprit du corps.
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Miriam Markowitz did not do her home work for an article that contains way too many platitudes imported from secondary sources. Just two examples.
A) Markowitz writes that Darwin’s “only explanation for the evolution of sterile insects was the good of the group.” This is a lie long peddled by Hamilton and his sycophants. In the The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote clearly that “This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end. Breeders of cattle wish the flesh and fat to be well marbled together. An animal thus characterized has been slaughtered, but the breeder has gone with confidence to the same stock and has succeeded” [www.classicreader.com/book/107/59/]. Here “the family” does not stand for the mafia and “stock” does stands for a kin group. These passages and others by Darwin about “kin selection” are highlighted and justly celebrated in DJ Futuyma’s textbook of reference Evolutionary Biology and in EO WIlson’s Sociobiology. This intellectual heist by the late Hamilton and his sycophants is perhaps the most brazen ever, since it’s literally Darwin whom they insist(ed) in trying to rob!
B) Markowitz treats Dawkins as a scientist but he is not. In the said “Evolutionary Biology” textbook, e.g., Dawkins’ popular-science books are cited for the metaphoric syllogism about genes with intentionality; otherwise there is only a citation for a paper with trivial applied math. Dawkins indeed has never made a discovery. Had Markowitz talked to say E.Sober or even Futuyma, she would have written a much better article.
Given the above and much much more, Nation readers stand warned that almost nothing in Markowitz article has any depth, especially her cheapo-melodramatic pieties towards the end (albeit certainly not because Dawkins and Co. are right about anything).
I didn’t see this comment until Sunday, almost two months after erplus posted it. I felt bad about that, especially since he had asked us about the original posting before turning to the blogspot site. I apologized for my negligence there, and repeat that apology here. Sorry, erplus! I hope you find it in yourself to forgive me.
I have served a couple of other commenters slightly better, at least to the extent of reading their comments in a timely fashion. Charles J. Shields gave us the following:
Just a note to let you know about a book blog I’ve started with a different twist: “Writing Kurt Vonnegut.” Every Saturday, I post another excerpt from my notebook as Vonnegut’s biographer— profiles of the people I met, the difficulties encountered, and the surprises, such as finding 1,500 letters he thought he had lost forever. It’s a blog written in episodes about being a literary detective.
Perhaps you’d like to give it a look at http://www.writingkurtvonnegut.com
All the best,
Charles J. Shields
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Holt, November 2011)
That was in response to my repost of “Kurt Vonnegut, Junior, on Extended Families.” Writing Kurt Vonnegut is worth a look, and so I thank Mr Shields for letting me know about it.