The recognition of the pioneering role of dialectical materialism is long overdue. The theory of chaos, and its derivatives complexity and ubiquity, has provided a striking confirmation of many of the main tenets of dialectical materialism, but this debt has never been acknowledged. This is unfortunate, since knowledge of the dialectical method would have helped avoid a number of pitfalls into which science has occasionally strayed as a result of incorrect assumptions. This fact was acknowledged by the late Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote that if scientists had paid attention to Engels’ The Role of Labour in the Transition of Ape to Man, they could have avoided a hundred years of errors.
The great advantage of dialectics is that it deals with things in their motion and development, and moreover shows how all development takes place through contradictions. The dialectical method explains how quite small changes can, at a critical point, produce enormous transformations: the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. The importance of this law has only recently been recognised by science through chaos theory. Engels deals at length with the three fundamental laws of dialectics, which he specifies as:
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation.
This does not mean, of course, that philosophy – any philosophy – must dictate to science, as did the Church in the Middle Ages, or as the bureaucracy in Stalinist Russia. Science has its own methods of investigation, observation and experiment, and must follow these and these alone. Engels writes in The Dialectics of Nature:
“All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic, in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most important part of his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human thought. If we turn the thing round, then everything becomes simple, and the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday.” (My emphasis, AW.)
Scientists necessarily approach their subject matter with certain assumptions, of which they are usually unaware. These assumptions invariably have a philosophical character. Behind every hypothesis there are always many assumptions, not all of them derived from science itself. For example, what led geneticists to conclude that humans possessed far more genes than is, in fact, the case? It is the method of reductionism, which flows from the mechanical assumption that nature knows only purely quantitative relations. Biological determinism considers humans as a collection of genes, and not as complex organisms, processes, the product of a dialectical interrelation between genes and the environment.
In reality, in nature changes in quantity eventually end in a qualitative leap. Very small modifications can produce huge changes. Tiny genetic mutations can give rise to huge differences. This is what explains the apparent contradiction between the size and complexity of humans and the relatively small number of genes involved. In Reason in Revolt, this was our criticism of the method of Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Later, Dawkins himself retreated from his earlier position, shocked by the way in which it had been used by right-wing reactionaries.
The genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is less than two per cent and most of the genetic material present in modern humans is very old. Organic matter has evolved from inorganic matter, and higher life forms have evolved from lower ones. We share most of our genes, not just with monkeys and dogs, but with fishes and roundworms. This is quite sufficient to demolish all the arguments of the Creationists and “intelligent design” merchants.