Re: The 'formalising' of dialectics.

On Jul 2, 3:04=A0pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Jul 1, 4:38=A0pm, scottpsolo...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > please give an example of how a study of the dialectical method led to
> > a practice that led to a great scientific discovery in the past 50
> > years.
>
> > please quote the great scientist who attributed his discovery to his
> > understanding of the dialectical method
>
> > On Jul 1, 6:23=A0pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > > On Jul 1, 2:28=A0pm, scottpsolo...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
> > > > These are very, very, very, profoundly, profoundly, profoundly and
> > > > very profound contributions. =A0Up until now, Trotskyism has been
a
> > > > failure because more time hasn't been spent understanding
Dialectics=
..
> > > > Nobody who has made a real scientific contribution in the last
fifty=

> > > > years
>
> > > Not actually true, and I'm surprise you would think it. Even if
> > > dialectics were utterly worthless, some scientists surely would
> > > embrace the dialectical method, as some scientists have always
> > > gravitated to every manner of superstition.
>
> > > srd
>
> > > =A0or who has built a successful political party gives a **** about
>
> > > > Dialectics, but that doesn't mean a profoundly profoundly profound
> > > > deeply deep study of this im****tant area of study would have
propell=
ed
> > > > humanity much farther in every area of human endeavor if Dialects
ha=
d
> > > > been the first order of business before any other sort of
intellectu=
al
> > > > pursuit.- Hide quoted text -


> Stephen Gould, the evolutionary biologist, expressly connected his
> theory of punctuated equilibrium to dialectical materialism.

> Remember, you asked. I'm not saying this proves anything.
> srd

Here is an extract of an article giving a good summary of the
relation****ps between Marxism and Punctuated Equilibrium. Note that
the original paper (1972) was JOINTLY written by SJ Gould and Niles
Eldridge, though the former was the popular publicist. Note also the
critical role the theory played in =93rescuing=94 Darwinism from attacks
by neo-creationists who pointed to the =93lack=94  of missing links as
evidence against Darwinism (in fact Darwinist gradualism). And also
that the original hypothesis (though not =93proof=94) was derived directly
from dialectical materialism (revolutionism versus gradualism);
=93proof=94 was established by reasoning from palaeontologic studies.

Punctuated Equilibrium
Cliff Conner Socialist action
In 1972, Gould and his colleague Niles Eldridge published a paper
entitled =93Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic
Gradualism.=94 They suggested that the standard Darwinian model of
evolution was in need of amendment. Darwin and those who followed him
had always assumed that new species develop by means of a process of
gradual uniform change.

It must be emphasized that the gradualist assumption was not an
inference derived from physical evidence; it was a theoretical
construct that was considered to be obvious and scarcely given a
second thought. But in fact the primary physical evidence of evolution
=96 the fossil record preserved in time sequence in geologic strata =96
does not present a picture of gradual change.

The fossil record consists of series of distinct species with few
intermediate life forms to fill in the gaps between species.
Evolutionary theorists, before Gould and Eldridge, traditionally
believed that the gaps in the fossil record were simply an indication
of its incompleteness =96 that the =93missing links=94 between known
species=

had indeed existed but had either not been preserved in fossil form or
had not yet been unearthed.

Gould and Eldridge, however, made the opposite assumption: that the
fossil record is a fairly accurate reflection of the way evolution has
actually occurred. They proposed that speciation takes place not
slowly and continuously, but in bursts of relatively rapid activity.

Populations of organisms, they asserted, tend to remain stable for
long periods of time until =96 perhaps prodded by some environmental
****ft =96 they undergo swift transformation into different kinds of
organisms. These transformations, they say, require not millions of
years, as had formerly been thought, but perhaps as little as several
thousand years =96 a mere blink of the eye on the scale of geologic
time.

According to Gould and Eldridge, then, the typical history of a
population of living organisms is a story of long periods of
equilibrium that are punctuated by rapid incidents of speciation.

Anyone familiar with the general precepts of Marxist philosophy will
immediately recognize the compatibility of Gould and Eldridge=92s theory
with dialectical materialism. Both conceive of change as occurring in
=93qualitative leaps.=94

It might even be suspected that the idea of punctuated equilibrium
originated in an insight inspired by Marxist thought. Daniel Dennett,
repeating earlier critics of Gould, has taken that suspicion and used
it as a polemical club. In doing so, Dennett has jumped to an
unwarranted conclusion about Marxist methodology with respect to the
natural sciences.

The a priori Method

There are both legitimate and illegitimate ways to apply Marxist ideas
to the investigation of problems in biology. The illegitimate way =96
which Dennett implicitly attributes to Gould =96 is to treat the tenets
of dialectical materialism as a set of inviolable axioms from which
all the details of biology (or any other science) can be deduced.

This method, known since antiquity as a priorism, is in fact
antithetical to Marxism because it is based upon idealism (in the
philosophical sense) rather than materialism. The a priori method
attempts to discover the workings of the material world by means of
reasoning rather than by methodical observation or experiment; it
thereby gives mind priority over matter.

Some scientists who professed to be Marxists have indeed attempted to
utilize dialectical materialism as a set of =93first principles=94 from
which to deduce the workings of the world. This was especially common
in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, when many crimes were
committed in the name of Marxism.

The most egregious example is the notorious case of Trofim Lysenko, a
prot=E9g=E9 of Stalin who claimed to have deduced the laws of plan
genetics from the principles of dialectical materialism, and reached
erroneous conclusions that had painful social consequences.

But Gould=92s approach is quite the opposite of a priorism, and he does
not deserve to suffer from guilt by association with Stalinist hacks.
It is fully legitimate to use Marxist philosophy as a general
framework for understanding the world =96 and not only the world of
human society but the natural world as well.

Gould=92s familiarity with Marx=92s ideas may have (DT: DID in fact and
Gould says so in one of his earlier books) brought to his attention a
parallel between patterns of human social change (revolutionary
explosions separated by periods of apparent stability) and the way
species appear in the fossil record to have evolved.

It surely never crossed Gould=92s mind, however, to announce the
discovery of a new truth that could be proven by deduction from a set
of abstractions. What he did was to propose a new hypothesis that was
unlikely to have occurred to biologists (like Darwin and most non-
Marxists) whose social conditioning predisposes them toward gradualist
assumptions.

When it was announced 25 years ago, Gould and Eldridge=92s ideas was
resisted by most of their colleagues. The measure of its success in
standing up to the test of evidence is that today it is hardly
considered controversial at all. It still has some opponents, but its
adherents outnumber them by a wide margin.

In short, while punctuated equilibrium has not attained the status of
an unchallengeable =93scientific fact,=94 it has been absorbed into the
framework of orthodox evolutionary theory. All in all, this episode
provides an excellent example of how the Marxist worldview can
stimulate advances in the natural sciences.

full article at http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/darwin.html