A Marxist Biology
On the hidden influence of dialectical materialism in the biological sciences.
Several years ago, I found myself on a dinner date attempting to present as a normal human person while also being honest about the fact that I was, at the time, a graduate student who spent his days researching tiny parasitic mites. The mites were parasites of fruit flies, not people, but I was worried about how my date might react to hearing about them, especially considering that she seemed like such a normal human person. As I told her about the mites I braced for what I assumed was the worst — worried questions about my lab’s decontamination procedures perhaps, or even an on-the-spot rejection. But her actual reaction turned out to be even worse than I had feared: with apparently genuine curiosity, she simply asked me what “role” my mites played in nature.
The question was confounding. What was the “role” of parasitic mites? They didn’t pollinate crops, or control agricultural pests, or decompose plastic, as far as I knew. The biosphere probably wouldn’t collapse in the wake of their sudden extinction. And they were incidental to the survival of polar bears, or monarch butterflies, or manatees, or any other creature whose “role” goes without question.
This, in turn, raised the larger problem, which was that the question was clearly premised on a philosophy of nature that I did not share. Just like manatees, in my view, my mites were simply a part of nature: no one “role” could possibly define them. They existed because of historical accident, not for any one explicable reason. And they were contextual, and dynamic — in fact I was studying them precisely as a means of learning about evolutionary processes.
Whether I decided to launch into all of this in the opening minutes of the dinner date, or whether I panicked and said that my mites decomposed plastic, is not important here. The point, is that I was so surprised by her question. Despite an extensive formal education in biology, I was entirely unprepared for a philosophical discussion about nature. In fact, I don’t remember the subject ever being directly addressed in any of my classes. Perhaps if it had been, I would have been better prepared for my date’s question. And I may also have realized, as I do now, that my conception of nature was (and still is) actually distinctly Marxist.
This realization was surprising because I have always thought of Marxism as an economic and political ideology that had little relevance to the biological sciences. And it was particularly surprising considering that the closest I was taught to associate Marxism with science was via “Lysenkoism” — an Stalin-era Soviet school of thought that contested Mendelian genetics and embraced Lamarckism to the great detriment of Russian biologists. I was taught nothing, in contrast, about “dialectical materialism” — the analytical method foundational to orthodox Marxism1 — even though its relevance to contemporary “Western” biological science, it turns out, is far greater than that of Lysenkoism. In fact, proponents of a dialectical materialist approach to biology include giants like J.B.S. Haldane and Stephan Jay Gould.
The dialectical materialist view of nature that these and other influential biologists had, apparently, helped instill in me, can be contrasted with either an “economistic” or “deep ecology” view — popular alternatives which, according to the sociologists Brett Clark and Richard York, can lead not only to awkward first dates but also to
“a systematic misunderstanding and mismeasurment of natural processes.”
A convenient point of distinction between these three views is provided by the question of a parasitic mite’s “role” in nature, which, in either of these alternative views, actually makes sense. In the economistic view, nature is a collection of resources, and thus it might be presumed that even parasitic mites have an economic “role” to play. In the deep ecology view, on the other hand, nature is a perfect system in which all creatures are presumed to play a seemingly preordained ecological “role”.
In many ways, of course, the economistic and deep ecology views are diametrically opposed. As Clark and York explain, the former is anthropocentric while the latter is ecocentric; the former commodifies nature and looks to market forces to solve the environmental crisis (aka “green capitalism”) while the latter deifies nature and urges the end of industrial civilization. In philosophical terms, economism is materialist but mechanistic and reductionist while deep ecology is dialectical but idealist.
But both views fall short of the task of confronting the global ecological crisis, write Clarke and York. For while economism undervalues nature and overestimates its resilience, they write, deep ecology abandons any critique of the economic and material forces currently driving the crisis, instead vainly imploring people to “wake up”.
Dialectical materialism addresses these respective deficiencies, they argue, by at once recognizing the dialectical relationship between the economy and the environment and the materialistic reality that this interaction takes place within; it recognizes both that the economy is nested within nature, and also that nature exists in a state of constant change; and it recognizes both that the value of nature is incalculable in every sense of the word, and yet also that
“nature includes processes that operate on their own terms and that have no inherent ‘purpose.’”
“Western Lysenkoism”
This persuasive demonstration that Marxism has something valuable to offer biological science flies in the face of the popular sentiment that political ideology and science do not mix well. Indeed, Lysenkoism, which also attempted to apply dialectical materialism to nature, is often cited as the ultimate demonstration that science and ideology — and especially Marxism — don’t mix. The absurdity of the position is expressed in its purest form by “green-is-the-new-red” establishment conservatives like Peter Ferrara, who once condemned the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as “Western Lysenkoism”.
But the notion that good science lacks a political ideology is idealistic: in reality, one cannot be subtracted from the other. Facts require interpretation, and interpretation introduces bias. Climate change deniers have a political ideology too, as should be obvious; and as the evolutionary biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin state flatly in The Dialectical Biologist (1985):
“Modern science is a product of capitalism.”
According to Levins and Lewontin, the true failing of Lysenkoism is not simply that it views nature through an ideological or Marxist lens, but that it inverts that lens, like someone looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The irreconcilable conflict it thus perceives between dialectical materialism and genetics is false, they write; in fact
“nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction.”
Lysenkoists transgress this truism, explain Levins and Lewontin, by applying dialectical materialism prescriptively rather than as a guide. This proves that the tool can be misused, they grant, but not that it is useless:
“Dialectical materialism is not, and had never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, ‘Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and no lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated.’ And above all else, ‘Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.’”
The lesson, of course, is not aimed entirely at die-hard Lysenkoists but also those for whom Lysenkoism epitomizes the shortcomings of Marxism. In their backwards approach to dialectical materialism, after all, the two are actually aligned: the former celebrating its imagined prescriptive power and the latter condemning it on the same flawed basis. The case against mixing Marxism with biological science is thus made by many supporters and detractors alike, write Levins and Lewontin; with neither side appreciating dialectical materialism’s true potential.
Indeed, it is tempting to draw from this conclusion that the true form of “Western Lysenkoism” is not Marxist at all but capitalist and economistic; that it is not in denial of genetics but environmental science. And it is tempting to point to its rejection of dialectical materialism and inversion of theory over reality — even in the face of climate change, ocean acidification, and an unprecedented rate of extinction — as also recommending it for the title.
But this, as the reader can now surely appreciate, would be a convenient lapse in dialectical thinking.
It is worth noting that Marxism is a diverse 150-year-old tradition, and dialectical materialism is a complex and abstract idea: both are subject to interpretation. And their relationship is likewise complex: for example, many “Western Marxists” believe that dialectical materialism does not apply to nature but human society only.