I don’t know if this is going to speak to many here, I hope it does, but it’s good anyway in the process of trying to understand what dialectical science would look like, as opposed to our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.
By which I don’t mean the scientific method, or scientists themselves, but science as a whole and as itself. If we hold that it doesn’t exist outside society (and of course it doesn’t), then science has a philosophical character. Metaphysics being the contradiction to dialectics, it’s also not the philosophy of the bourgeoisie but rather the philosophy that was the most advanced, the most usable for people’s needs, before we discovered dialectics. Much like we first learned to make stone tools before we learned to make them with metal, we first had to know metaphysics and idealism before we could know dialectics and materialism.
Today, science is taught metaphysically; it is seen metaphysically, it’s practiced metaphysically, and we take that as fact. We have trouble seeing science any other way because this way makes sense to us, it’s all we know.
If you were already aware of this character (studying in isolation, with observations and facts plucked out of their dialectical process and studied by themselves), this question should make sense to you. How do we rethink science in a way that is dialectical. Basically, in a way that we are still doing and studying science, but dialectically?
And of course I don’t mean generalities like “it would be placing dialectics back in science”, I want to see how far we can struggle with it.
https://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Biologist-Richard-Levins/dp/067420283X
I can’t find an online PDF of it, but you’d like Richard Lewontin. He was an evolutionary biologist and dialectician who wrote a few great books and has some really neat lectures on youtube.
Like Engels originally said, nature is the proof of dialectics. It’s extremely relevant in fields like ecology, soil science, horticulture, geology, and geography where you have two parties in a material/social relationship. Predators and prey are a dialectic, plants and soil are a dialectic, rivers and canyons are a dialectic, raccoons and cities are a dialectic. A dialectical understanding of raccoon ecology would involve studying things like:
the socioeconomic factors that influence their population size, how their population size impacts human health and the desirability of that area, and how human population size impacts the inverse
the availability of food and habitat on them and how much food they provide for predators
the ways their social groups form in response to their environment and the way their metabolic activity shapes that environment
the history of city-raccoon interactions and how that has shaped the evolutionary development of the raccoon, geographic distribution of them, and the societal defenses against them
By the end of that inquiry, you have the most holistic understanding of raccoons situated in their environment possible. When I use it daily in horticulture, I’m considering the full growing environment and social/material/historical/genetic significance of both the plant and land. It’s just applying as many angles of analysis as I can and situating both organism and environment in the context of their development.
edit: And the primary difference between dialectical and non-dialectical science isn’t idealism so much as it is the Cartesian model where materialist observations are isolated. The river and the canyon can’t have a “social” relationship as neither are sentient under a simple understanding of water impacting minerals. The dialectical understanding brings all elements of that environment into the equation. The river shapes the canyon and the canyon influences the hydrology of the river, BUT the river also gets its shape because a surplus of wolves is suppressing the population of elk and they aren’t compacting the soil around its banks. The glacier at the headwaters is decreasing the flow because of its dialectic with the atmosphere’s dialectic between greenhouse gases and the sun. A dialectician can seamlessly integrate all those things and consider them in an interdisciplinary way between social and material sciences, going as large as the sun and earth or as small as genes and atoms with a sense of continuity.
Think I found an epub, I’m going to be uploading to prolewiki’s library in a minute 😎
Ayyy, thanks for uploading it. That, Biology Under the Influence, and Biology as Ideology were all huge influences on my dialectical materialism.
It’s up: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_Dialectical_Biologist
The equations were absolutely horrible to go through lol, but I did it
This is so amazing man, thanks very much!
This sounds cool and exactly what I’m looking for, thanks! But keep answers coming 😃
edit: is it accessible to laymen? I’m not a scientist haha
I just flipped through my copy and it’s about as accessible as a pop science article. He uses a few graphs and tables with technical parts of his studies, but explains it all in normal English without much Marxist vocabulary.
Another really great book is James O’Connor’s Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism: https://www.academia.edu/48811710/OConnor_1998_Natural_Causes
Because it’s an essay collection it can be repetitive. There’s one neat chapter in it where he studies Monterey Bay in California as a Marxist ecologist. It’s not just the present conditions of the bay or the wildlife or the people or the structures framing those things, but a wonderfully dynamic natural history that merges with sociopolitical theory and political economy and the physical sciences. It’s a coherent picture of where things came from, how they presently exist, and how the principal/secondary contradictions could rupture.
You should request an account and upload all those books lol, we recently started a science section on the library and really wanted to start filling it in. We have a library editor role that is easier to get; you still have to answer all the questions, but we’re more lenient lol
We could also start an ecology category!
I only have the physical copies unfortunately. They’re probably online or at least on torrent trackers.
I was surprised how easy it was to find a copy of the dialectical biologist, I just googled it and found a website called Ebin, and it was right there. Gonna join my list of free epub providers
I’m fifteen and I thought it was pretty good.