Dan,
 
Dan,
 
Though there are aspects of Darwin's writings that one might not WANT to
work in the analogy with culture, there's no point in commenting until I
have read it. Thank you,
 
Richard.
 
>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
>102 Blackstone Blvd. #5                 University of Rhode Island
>Providence, RI 02906                    Kingston, RI 02881
>Tel.: 401 453-3027                      Tel.: 401 874-4659
>email: [log in to unmask]            Fax:  401 874-2580
 
 
 
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Dr Richard Read                            Email [log in to unmask]
Senior Lecturer
School of Architecture and Fine Arts
The University of Western Australia
Nedlands WA 6009                        Tel +61 8 9380 2140
Australia                               Fax 8 9380 1082