Darwin and Marx

From EvoWiki

Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 External Links 6 References 7 Further Reading 8 Related claims 9 See Also 10 Acknowledgments

Claim

Karl Marx admired, and corresponded with Darwin. He sent him a personally inscribed copy of the 2nd edition of Das Kapital and wanted to dedicate it to him, but Darwin wrote a letter politely declining.

Source

• Morris, John D., 1989. The Long War Against God Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, p. 82-92
• Creation Science Home Page [1]

Responses

1. Not only is it of no consequence whether or not Darwin corresponded with Marx, there is also no evidence to support such a claim.
2. Darwin did, however, correspond with Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who offered to dedicate to him a book about atheism, The Student's Darwin. Marx's daughter, Eleanor, inherited her father's papers and some of these got confused with those of her husband. [Anon, 2000] The rumour that Darwin corresponded with Marx was then propagated in Soviet Russia.
3. This is, of course, as relevant to science as Newton's belief in creation and alchemy or Stephen Jay Gould's and Stephen Hawkings' appearances on The Simpsons.
4. While it is true that Marx admired Darwin, Darwin did not return the admiration. Darwin was in no way a political or economic radical, and wanted absolutely nothing to do with Marxism.
5. This claim directly contradicts another claim, made by the same creationists, that far right-wing political ideologies such as fascism, eugenics, Nazism and Social Darwinism were inspired by evolution. Marxism-Leninism is a far left-wing political ideology and has historically been opposed to far right ideas such as Nazism. How could evolution be linked to far right-wing and far left-wing ideologies?
6. The creationists who make this claim are painfully ignorant of the fact that many of the 20th century proponents of Marxism, namely Joseph Stalin, were Anti-Darwinists, having been convinced by one Trofim Lysenko, that both Darwinian evolution, and the very idea of Mendelian genetics ran counter to party doctrine and was biased in favor of the bourgeois and capitalism.
7. The claim that Marxist philosophy (in particular class conflict theory) was inspired by Darwinism is simply impossible due to chronology. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, by which time Marx had written the works detailing his philosophical and political beliefs (i.e The Communist Manifesto, The Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology etc) and was working on Das Kapital, a book on economics which was relatively light on philosophy and that philosophy (e.g Commodity Fetishism) had absolutely nothing to do with Darwin's thought. Post-1859 Marx would write political economy and history, not philosophy.
8. add more responses

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Guilt by Association (Darwin and all of his research are tainted by contact with Marx)
• Rumor (this came from dubious sources)
• Poisoning the Well(Discredit someone through negative information, be it true or false)

External Links

• Mark Isaak's page for this claim [2]
• CreationWiki's comments [3]

References

1. Anon., 2000. Marx of Respect. [4]

Further Reading

• Ball, Terence, Nov 1979 Marx and Darwin: A Reconsideration. Political Theory, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 469-483.
• Colp, Ralph Jr. (Winter 1982) The myth of the Darwin-Marx letter. History of Political Economy 14(4):461-482.
• Dawkins, Richard, 2000. There's more to books than titles. [5]
• Young, Robert M., 1985. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. [6]

Related claims

• Evolution is the foundation of an immoral worldview
• Survival of the fittest implies might makes right
• Evolution leads to social darwinism
• Darwinism encourages communism

See Also

• Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?

Acknowledgments

• Steinsky