Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Darwinian Evolution and Human History' 33k
In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was very involved in trying to make both scholarly and libertarian Marxist ideas available to a wider public than the academic one in which I had been trained and in which I worked until 1975. I was at that time deeply involved in the 'Crucible: Science in Society' television series. I also did several things for the Open University, including this radio talk. In it I tried to work through the relationship between ideas of nature and human nature, on the one hand, and left-wing Marxist ideas about nature and knowledge, on the other. This piece is a close relative of several others, e.g., 'Science Is Social Relations', 'How Societies Constitute Their Knowledge', 'What if Human Nature Is Historical?', 'Second Nature: The Historicity of the Unconscious'. I also did a course unit, 'The Naturalisation of Value Systems in the Human Sciences' and a film, 'Skull'. The talk was broadcast on BBC Radio Three in association with the course, 'Science and Belief: Darwin to Einstein', 1980.