Date: Wed, 14 Aug 96 08:08:58 GMT
Subject: Re: Darwin ( dialectics ? )



In time honoured fashion, I shall reply to myself.

I was listening to a tape on the Dialectics of Nature by
Paul McGarr at Marxism 96. During it, he explains the process
of focusing on a small part of nature, abstracting general rules
>from this small part of nature, and then explaining why specific
cases deviate from these general rules ( He gives the example 
of gravity : if you drop a feather and a lead weight from a tower,
they do not hit the ground at the same time - but Newtonian 
mechanics can explain why not ).

He goes on to argue that these rules, however general they seem, in fact
only have limited validity. This is for two reasons : firstly, they are
by definition abstractions of a small part of nature, secondly, even this
small part of nature itself has a history. Euclid thought he had the rules
of geometry worked out, but even space has a history.

Paul McGarr talked about the undialectical nature of Newton's world view :
although he had correctly worked of the laws of motion, they didn't give
rise to an undialectical view of the universe simply because these rules 
didn't work for very small things and very fast things, it was also that
they posited a system which didn't have a history. So while the planets
obey rules, they started moving because God set them moving. Once set
moving, they continued moving in the same way for ever. Newtons laws
of motion have a static aspect to them - undialectical, and innacurrate, 
as we now know.

I think perhaps this relates to the lack of the third law of dialectics, the
negation of the negation, being immediately apparent in Origin of the species.

Given that life exists, and that his laws explain how it evolves, he can
explain how it develops from there - and his explanation involves the
interaction of procreation and extintion to drive that development ( ie the
second law ). Since this development consists of a succession of qualititative
forms, this explanation is inherently more dialectical than Newton's laws
of motion.

But Darwin's concern is not with the origins of life. Nor is it, scientifically,
anyway, with human society, ie those animals to whom natural selection no longer
applies. He has uncovered the laws of development of  life - but he does not
( cannot ) explain how and why life first developed. For instance, he ( tentatively,
admittedly ) puts forward a rule which suggests that there are always more or less
the same number of species at any one time. He also explains that were there are
no mammals, other animals have taken their place - tortoises in the Galapagos islands,
large flightless birds in pre human New Zealand. These rules are probably true, given 
a certain type of underlying ecology, given a starting point similar to most of geologically
recent history. But as life was developing, it simply cannot have been true - in the
beginning, there must have been one, or at most a very few, single celled organisms.

When I cast around for an example from Marx of the third law, the law of the negation
of the negation, I picked on the way the working class, the negation of the capitalist
class, by becoming the ruling class, negates itself. I picked this example, I suppose,
because, I want to change the world. But there is another, related example, to do the
rise and fall, ie the history,  of class society : class society developed out of 
a classless society ( negation ) and has produced a class which can ( under the right
circumstances ) get rid of class society ( negation of the negation ). By considering
the HISTORY of class society, we arrive immediately at an example of the third law
of dialectics.

Newton does not give us a little one liner saying "of course, for subatomic particles,
these laws won't work". Darwin does say something like "of course, the more primitive
the life form, chemical and physical laws assume more and natural selection assumes
less importance". But neither give us a history of the circumstances which give rise
to their laws in the way that Marx and Engels do for human society.

Darwin does not present us with an explantion of the history of life itself, only an
explanation of its dynamics once life has got going. He cannot tell us why the law
of Natural Selection started, and why it no longer applies to humans, even though it
gave rise to humans. I think this is one reason why obvious examples of the third
law of dialectics are not immediately apparent from his work.

Adam.




Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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