Once again, my EMERGENCE BLOG: http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/emergence-blog.html
As for current objectives, one ought to consider refining one's tools rather than repeating the same old crap from a century ago. Marxism-Leninism continues to wreak its harm from beyond the grave--what a shame.
At 01:18 PM 3/9/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
As I, hopefully with some success, indicated above, method cannot be divorced from the objectives. The theory of Natural Selection certainly works. Combined with population genetics it has become the foundation of some of the most dramatic and disturbing social and cultural changes yet encountered by man (including even the effect of Newtonian physics and 18th and 19th century chemistry on industrial process in the early 19th century). Yet it is a very simple (and very abstract) theory that is almost entirely restricted to explaining the fact of change without any value for understanding the formal changes in the development of organisms. It is the very modesty of the objectives of Darwin's theory that lies at the heart of its gradualism. If you wish to explain how the relative distribution of populations of species changes over time, Natural Selection is a more than adequate model. In Natural Selection theory everything having to do with formal changes or even in adaptive interaction of life forms with their environment is relegated to absolute chance and therefore totally outside the ken of serious investigation. Even the integration of evolutionary theory with genetics does no more than explain the changes in the relative distribution of known genes and genetic combinations. The actual development of anatomical and behavioural formations is regarded as the function of improbable mutations and of equally fortuitous environmental conditions completely external to the useful interaction of statistically measureable inputs and outputs of the selective process.
I doubt whether punctuated equilibrium alone is an adequate basis for introducing the dialectic into evolutionary theory. By and large it is based on the same kind of statistical considerations that are important to standard evolutionary theory. Dan Dennett in his Darwin's Dangerous Idea does a fairly thorough job on Punctuated Evolution (see chapter 11, 3, Punctuated Equilibrium: A hopeful Monster pp. 282 -298 and 4, Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Burgess Shale Double-Play Mystery pp 299-312. Rather I see the potential for a dialectical understanding of evolutionary process in the research on the mechanisms of adaptation, coevolution, and organic symmetry (both in anatomical form and in activity). Stuart Kauffman is the most prominent of theoreticians in this field, but far from being the only one. Others, including Varela and Maturana (Maturana uses some dialectics - Marxist dialectics in his formulations) on autopoiesis, Salthe's (also much influenced by Hegel) on hierarchies of being and emergent systems, and Mark Bedau who formulates conditions for artificial life. Despite the nearly frantic exploration for the theoretical formulation that will unite the disparate and far-ranging investigations on the development of life forms, we have yet to see a thinker in this area on the level of Marx who can produce a satisfactory general paradigm for the development of life forms. I suspect that the philosopher of science who will effect such a synthesis has already been born and may be even well on his way to producing such a theory.
Dennett, always the champion of evolutionary theory, argues that Stuart's ideas do not really contradict "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", since the object of his work concerns the restrictions on the development of organic design rather than the changes in the relative distribution of genetically defined populations over time. Just as the gradualist model of the transformation of liquid to gas doesn't contradict the negation of Magnitude by Quantity, nor should the gradualist theory of Natural Selection contradict a dialectical theory of the development of organic form, the practical objectives of these theories (and the circumstances involved in the realization of these objects) are entirely different. Lenin's idea of a unified, universal science is engendered by his failure to realize that adherence to an uncompromising theory of the material nature of being was in fact in direct contradiction with Marx and Engel's view that labour, the unity of thought and activity, is the paradigm for the understanding of the development of human activity, collective and individual, in human history. To argue that all practice must be based on dialectical method is much like asserting that one needs to adopt the same factory system for boiling a pot of tea for guests as for the production of teapots for marketing purposes.
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