Darwin - 2/6

Godfrey Cramer delivers a lecture (serialized here in 6 short parts) on Darwin's "The Origin of Species." 2009 Marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of this natural scientific landmark.

Although Darwin himself was a conservative figure in his personal life, his scientific work is nothing short of revolutionary, showing conclusively that biological species had not simply been created as they were (as was the previous metaphysical and religious conception), but had evolved. The world, even living organisms, then, are simply complex and beautiful forms of matter in motion.

In proving Evolution as fact, Darwin not only dealt a body blow to these religious conceptions, but published a great work of dialectical materialist reasoning. Engels, in his classic work "the dialectics of nature" welcomed Darwin's weighty contribution, and pointed out that the logical extension of this method into the realm of human society was historical materialism.

It is the capitalist class's antipathy to the social implications of Darwin's work, as demonstrated by Marx and Engels, that has led to the neglect of dialectics as an explicit method within modern science, yet the concepts of dialectics are frequently 're-discovered' in diverse fields of enquiry - simply because all phenomena are essentially matter in motion, and dialectics describes the fundamentals of this motion.

Namely that all phenomena arise, develop and decay (whether species, or social systems); that phenomena must be understood, not in isolation, but in their relations with their environment; and that change takes place as a product of antagonistic forces (competition between organisms and their environment in nature, but between social classes in human society)

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