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Re: The Limits To Growth



Jim Wright <jwright@agt.net> wrote:

>"Mike Asher" <masher@tusc.net> wrote:.
>
>> Competition and predators decrease,
>>while food supply increases.  Larger, slower-breeding fish will decline in
>>demand as lower-priced, more efficient species dominate the market.
>
>That's an interesting application of economic ideology to biological 
>systems.  There was a guy named Lysenko who tried the same thing in the
>USSR with disappointing results. 
 
Demonstrating that Wright would like to impress us with name dropping,
but in fact knows nothing about Lysenko.  Lysenko's fallacies were
two, "his "vernalization" nonsense, a variety of Lamarkian
evolutionism, and his convenient and conventional public Marxism.
 
Neither has anything to do with what Asher quite accurately says about
the response of consumers to the change in relative prices of various
fish in the market.  

"Application of economic ideology to biological systems" is also not
an accurate characterisation of Lysenko's mistakes, although it is
certainly the case that like any Soviet careerist he dressed his toys
in Marxist clothing.  I suspect that Wright's way of describing
Lysenko has its own roots in American right-wing propaganda.  The
amount of garbage that got (and gets) taught in American schools in
order to bring children to hate and fear Russia and Cuba is the wonder
of the rest of the world.
 
                                      -dlj.
 




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