CB: The below should read that Michelson and Morley demonstrated that there is NO ether, thereby giving a remarkable empirical confirmation of the dialectical materialist fundamental principle that Engels had pronounced. This is the type of thing that should be featured in characterizing Engels discussions of natural science. The socalled gaffes pale in comparison with the insights.
In general, my problem with referring to socalled gaffes that Engels makes in _The Dialectics of Nature_ and otherwise is that such a statement should always be coupled with a statement to the effect that Engels also made some extraordinarily prescient and profound observations about nature and scientific principles, many of which anticipate later major and fundamental scientific discoveries. It is not at all the case that Engels' discussions of natural science are only characterized by "gaffes". Such a characterization is half-truth, quarter-truth even, that amounts to a misrepresentation. It is especially misleading given the level of development of natural sciences in Engels' day. The other thing about _The Dialectics of Nature_ is , of course, that it is notes in preparation for a book. It is very unfair to ignore that Engels was very likely thinking out loud and musing over issues, and may have removed or modified some of his statements. It's like listening to a brainstorm 100 years later and "gaffing" at someone's trying to work things out in their mind. On a lot of it, the gaffers may end up gaffed at in the end. I'd like to see a list of the socalled gaffes, and then I'll prepare a list of the amazingly insightful observations , and put them along side of each other. The other thing is that the socalled gaffes sometimes turn out to be not gaffes. One of my areas of some expertise is anthropology, and I would say that Engels' _The Role Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man_, another fragment, not published by Engels, so rough notes, has an error in its conception, but it is certainly not a gaffe. The error is to conceive of "labor" as the main cause of the transition from ape to man. What happened was that the transition from ape to man was a transition in labor. In the first place , it was a transition in which labor became more and more _social_ labor, and cultural labor, that is guided by tradition passed on from previous generations. It wasn't that some group of apes started to work harder or more hours, and that caused them to differentiate themselves from other apes, as the title of Engels' article might imply. Obtaining upright posture was not the key element in the transition from ape to man. It was the origin and establishment of culture and language that caused labor itself to transform or "transition", to become radically different from the labor of apes. Yet Engels' essay is relatively sophisticated, not a gaffe , in terms of modern paleoanthropological science. And Engels _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ is a remarkably valid thesis even in modern ethnology and archeaological terms. In biology, punctuated equilibrium is another remarkable confirmation of dialectical materialism in positive science. Of course, biologists Levins and Lewontin declared that Engels gets it wrong, but gets it right when it counts. Hardly something people should be gaffing at. I think that plate techtonics in geology is another one. I recall listening to a PBS presentation on the history of geology, and thinking that the discovery of the theory of plate techtonics or rather the structure of the theory is quite dialectical when compared with the thinking in geology that preceded it. As I study the various disciplines of natural science, and continue to do so, I regularly am struck by dialectical aspects of the various theories CB: When you say "justify" scientific claims what do you mean ? In some ways, it is the reverse. For example, Engels said "there is nothing but matter and its mode of existence is motion." Along come Michealson and Morley in their famed empirical experiment, and demonstrate that there is no ether, i.e. nothing is at absolute rest, a scientific and empirical confirmation of the principle Engels enunciated. As has been said on this list a number of times, a dialectical approach can serve as a heuristic for scientific enquiry. Engels is not always correct, but what I often find is that sometimes he's correct when "modern" critics think he is wrong. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
