Richard,
 
On just one of your points, viz.: "Also, I'm not sure that Darwin
>remains Darwin or Selection is still Natural once transposed onto the
>cultural plane."  May I remind you that Richard Dawkins, author
of the immensely popular, neo-Darwinian "The Selfish Gene,"
contributed the idea of the "meme," the cultural equivalent of
the gene, as subject--on the highly accelerated historical
plane--to pressures of natural selection analogous to the
biological?
 
==Dan
 
 
At 11:30 AM 10/29/98 +0800, you wrote:
>I appreciate your distaste for rivalry, Dan - and thanks for your remarks.
>Though I suppose there are some one-to-one relationships between biological
>malfunction and volitional behaviour of 'the man who mistook his wife for a
>hat' variety, I wouldn't want to argue any more than you that an artistic
>form reflects a biological predisposition directly - there are too many
>mediating institutional and other factors to be taken into account, and
>bourgeois biological universalisms of the Peter Fuller variety have been
>well critiqued by Tony Bennett, for example. I like the way you turn up the
>heat for reconsideration of abstract metacritical perspectives, though note
>that 'predisposed, pre-cracked minds' implies some absolute criterion of
>sanity that PERHAPS militates against that reconsideration (perhaps though
>sanity is transhistorical in some sense). Also, I'm not sure that Darwin
>remains Darwin or Selection is still Natural once transposed onto the
>cultural plane. Was it not Darwin who expressed surprise at discovering
>that works of art were useless for investigating the physiological basis of
>emotional expression in man and animals? That's slightly beside the point,
>I concede, and in thinking that I see what in general you mean, would rush
>- if I knew enough about them - to a plethora of political and sociological
>schemes (Simmel, Weber, Ellias(?)) to shore it up.
>
>Richard
 
Dan Pearlman                    Office: Department of English
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