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Dialectical Evolutionary Biology

Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2020 12:20 am
by LapTopPhilosopher
See: Zaid Orudzhev (Заи́д Ору́джев) (b. 1932)

Sorry to quote from Wikipedia here, but I was just reading about Orudzhev's dialectical approach to Darwinian evolution and wanted to post it here as a reminder to look into this further:
Orudzhev has been studying the emergence of man from the animal world (a problem identified by Darwin), and has developed the concepts of “the past” and “factors of the past”, as well as the concept of the “accumulated past”, as substantial concepts in “human nature”. Orudzhev defines the past, according to Nietzsche, only humans possess, as a unity of time that has already passed and a human being's accumulated activities. This view of the past enabled humans to include internal time in their life activities, as a result of which they also started to grasp logic. Incidentally, Aristotle wrote: “What is past cannot possibly be other than it is, as Agathon has well said, saying – one thing alone not even God can do, to make undone whatever hath been done”. But humans did indeed emerge from the “accumulated past”, from a source to which even gods have no access.

Contrary to most attempts to solve this problem on the basis of “pure naturalism”, and specifically using biological methods, Orudzhev believes that the problem of the shift from animal nature to a qualitatively different nature – human nature – can only be solved through a philosophy that relies on results obtained not only through biology, but also through psychology, linguistics, sociology and other sciences. The problem must be formulated with attention being paid to the relevant intermediate links, which are not taken into consideration by individual sciences. Orudzhev believes that Darwin's theory still (almost 150 years since the 1871 publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex) cannot prove the natural origin of man in the proper sense, because it does not depart from “pure biologism” in its understanding of human nature.

Re: Dialectical Evolutionary Biology

Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2020 5:49 am
by HegelonTV
Thank you for posting this. Hegel came out against evolution in the Philosophy of Nature (in pre-Darwinian times, of course), which is unfortunate since it seems like he could have gone either way (but ended up on the wrong side) but it's interesting to think of evolution in dialectical terms, as Orudzhev proposes. In a genuinely dialectical relation, humanity would arise naturally out of the animal world, rather than stand in opposition to it as something wholely separate.