It happens to ideologies, as to all human productions, to run through, in their cycle, the arc: birth, development, senescence.

There was a time when theoretical consciousness could delude itself that it had freed itself from the limits imposed on it by History. Philosophy had lost its greyness because in all its manifestations life was blossoming anew: the revolutionary bourgeoisie, Jacobin in politics and materialist in ideas, could then attribute a universal and permanent meaning to its historically ephemeral class ideology. A happy epoch, one in which a class inebriated by its theoretical, political, and military successes could fantasise that it had escaped the iron meshes of its own time! Reason had made short work of the obscurantist prejudices of medieval scholasticism and the fables of the country clergy; the democratic revolution had swept away religious illusions and the phantoms of the old demonology along with feudal barriers, tributes, and guilds, clearing the way for the development of science, manufacture, and modern industry, of free competition and of democracy. An era of general progress was opening, carved on the pediments of the new social order, and symbolised by the proud republican emblem sealing the new ark of the covenant.

But, alas, the awakening was abrupt and sudden! History took it upon itself to bring back to reason this bourgeoisie, which, in its exuberant triumphalism, had mistaken its own class prejudices for timeless principles; in reality, its victory was overshadowed by the appearance of another class, which cast its shadow over it, and which was destined to be its antagonist and its gravedigger. In order to ward off the new dangers which, on account of its class limits, it had carried with it since birth, the bourgeoisie too began to fantasise and, to better exorcise its fears, took refuge in the superstitions of the past.

In its revolutionary phase, its philosophy of nature was founded on materialist and determinist bases. As early as the 17th century, the Englishman Locke had shown that ideas arise from our contacts with the external world, while Toland took up again the old thesis of Democritus. In France, La Mettrie beat a path opened by the materialist Gassendi and defined man as a perfected machine, without needing to bring in any transcendent force (soul, spirit, or consciousness), since he judged ‘thought to be so little incompatible with organised matter that it seemed to be a property of it’. This current culminated in the systems of Helvétius and d’Holbach who, repudiating the religious surrogates of innatism, demonstrated that knowledge is the result of our relations with the external world and is only its reflection in the form of ideas: at birth, man possesses only the faculty of feeling, which is the basis for the subsequent development of all his intellectual faculties. They also emphasised the role played by education and environment on the formation of character and personality.

As for the social philosophy, the bourgeoisie, to the divine principle, guarantor of the feudal order and the stability of the division into three estates, substituted the Democratic Principle, founded on an anthropology that wanted equal laws for men equal in right, and which well expressed its class domination based on free competition and the buying and selling of labour power. This principle in reality masked the real antagonisms that the nascent opposition of the fourth estate with its claim to formulate its own demands put on the table. In its revolutionary phase, the bourgeoisie thus had a dualist ideology: materialist insofar as the development of the productive forces implied the postulate of objectivity inherent in scientific knowledge; idealist insofar as before it there already arose a new revolutionary class, the proletariat.

The end of the cycle of bourgeois democratic revolutions in the European area is accompanied by the stabilisation of capitalist relations of production. And whereas in its anti-feudal phase the bourgeoisie had championed an essentially materialist world conception, in its current period of reactionary imperialism the relationship has been reversed. Faced with the historical necessity of its own disappearance, it attempts to exorcise it by denying determinism, not only in its social doctrines, but even in its conception of matter and life. Resisting the proletariat, this is its only programme, the fundamental principle of its entire ideology; preserving its political power, this is now the essential problem for it. Here is the secret of its formidable theoretical retreat. The cycle of bourgeois ideology is finally closed. At the end of the arc, it goes back to its origins, to the old idealism common to all social orders always in search of an impossible and illusory stability. Its categories bear the names of contingency, freedom, critical epistemology, Humanity... Poor and derisory witnesses of a class with no way out, incapable of mastering the productive forces it has set in motion and powerless to understand the meaning of History, which as a whole escapes its grasp!

It is in this light that the attacks brought against dialectical materialism by J. Monod, Nobel Prize winner for medicine, in his essay ‘Chance and Necessity’ must be understood.

This museum of the horrors of bourgeois scientism is of twofold interest. First of all, it crudely reveals the sad state of affairs in which the natural sciences (especially biochemistry) are harnessed by the metaphysics that infiltrates them from all pores, decomposing them and pushing them towards unprecedented theoretical catastrophes. The theory of evolution can thus quietly become the realm of the omnipotent ‘chance’, just as from every corner they harp on to us about the invariant transmission of a purported genetic ‘code’ ⁽¹⁾, because one forgets the elementary truth: it is only in the artificial experimental conditions of the laboratory that species exist in themselves, as artefacts, as exhaustive formulas, as ‘monsters’. By contrast, they are to be studied in their natural environment, where they constitute but one of the poles of the relationship that links them to their biotope in a dialectical continuum in which they react reciprocally, transforming and evolving. It is disheartening to have to reiterate such obvious things, which are within the grasp of a ten-year-old child, but become mysterious to ‘scientists’ of metaphysical categories and mired in the insoluble contradictions of the idealism of their social environment.

The second reason for the essay’s interest is given by the fact that it will allow us to rediscover a text that is always new, even if it is a century old, and that, in this idealist court of miracles, will be for us a bath of theoretical youth. It, addressing the mechanisms of human evolution, demonstrates that labour is the material factor in the transformation and transition from ‘ape’ to man. With this, the patriarch of revolutionary communism, Friedrich Engels, places himself well above the ‘crude’ novelties of bourgeois ‘science’.

But first, let us get to know our Don Quixote of molecular biology and dwell on the critique he directs at Marxism, a critique that reveals a gross misunderstanding – no matter whether real or intentional – that basically boils down to three accusations.

1 – Having abandoned the postulate of objectivity (!) under the pretext of wanting to apply dialectics to the phenomena of nature, and thus ending up ‘projecting onto inanimate nature the consciousness that man has of the intensely teleonomic (i.e. finalist, ed.) functioning of his central nervous system’. As we can see, our braggart has not realised that Marx has once and for all set back on his feet that Hegel whose ‘huge and heavy monument’ Monod derides with the laughable superciliousness of the bourgeois ‘man of science’.

For us, inelegant realists, knowledge is the doctrine of reality, of all natural and social phenomena without any ‘extraneous additions’. If our method is dialectical, this does not at all derive from the fact that we would seek, as Monod rebukes Engels (!), to discover in nature ‘an ascending, constructive, creative project (for the purpose) of finally making it decipherable (?) and morally significant (?!)’, but derives from the incontestable fact that the law of matter and life is becoming, that becoming is in things as in thought: dialectics.

We quote here a party text that leaves no doubt in this regard: ‘Dialectics is valid for us insofar as the application of its rules is not contradicted by experimental control. Its use is certainly necessary, since we must also treat the results of every science with the instrument of our language and of our reasoning (aided by mathematical calculation: even the mathematical sciences for us, however, are not based on pure properties of thought, but on real properties of things). Dialectics, that is to say, is an instrument of exposition and elaboration, as well as of polemic and didactics; it serves as a defence against the errors engendered by traditionalistic methods of reasoning (italics ours) and to achieve the quite difficult result of not unconsciously introducing arbitrary data based on preconceptions into the study of questions. But the dialectic is itself a reflection of reality and cannot claim for itself to oblige or generate it. Pure dialectics will never reveal anything to us of itself, yet it has an enormous advantage over the metaphysical method because it is dynamic, whereas the latter is static (...) In conclusion, the dialectic serves us, both (as Marx says in the afterword to Capital) to expose what analytical research has established, and to destroy the obstacle of traditional theoretical forms (i.o.). Marx’s dialectic is the most powerful force of destruction. Philosophers toiled to construct systems. Dialectical revolutionaries forcibly destroy consolidated forms, which want to bar the way to the future. The dialectic is the weapon to break the barriers that, once broken, break the spell of the eternal immutability of the forms of thought, which unveil themselves as incessantly mutable, moulded by the revolutionary change of social forms’.⁽²⁾

2 – Having doggedly persisted in repudiating all forms of Kantian-style critical epistemology, and this from Marx all the way to... Zhdanov. One would think one were dreaming! Let us pass over Zhdanov, immortal theorist of ‘socialist realism’ and other such gimmicks: one cannot expect a petty-bourgeois biologist to understand the difference between one of the fathers of communism and a pale Stalinist falsifier or innovator in the pay of the pan-Russian People’s State; but what one cannot pass over in silence is the attack on the repudiation of critical epistemology.

For some years now, a new virus has struck the implausible theoretical province that is literary Paris: epistemology is to ‘thought’ as pollution is to everyday life: a fashion, a worldly preoccupation. We owe to the ever-so-serious Althusser this unexpected infatuation for an intellectual current that is nothing more than the modernised version of an ill-digested Kantianism. According to this ideologue of the P.C.F., ‘Marxist philosophy’ ought to place itself at the service (how chivalrous!) of the ‘objective’ and above all ‘neutral’ sciences, i.e. hovering above classes, with the aim of defending them from the assaults of ideology and thus favouring their development. For this castrator of Marxism, with whom we settled accounts in due course ⁽³⁾, dialectical materialism becomes the theory of modes of production... of knowledge, a bastardised criticism of the bourgeois sciences enfeoffed with capital. We show, on the contrary, that if the sciences are nothing more than recipes aiming at maximum profitability, if their development is uncertain, stagnant, or even recoiling, if entire branches of research do not correspond to any of humanity’s real needs, if indeed those that would meet these needs cannot develop, the cause is not so much ‘ideological’ as social, since the choice of the objects and objectives of science bears, even more than its constructions, a class character. Only the revolution will liberate ‘science’, along with all the other social activities of humanity.

3 – Of being impotent, by reason of its philosophical a priori, to understand any scientific theory, in this case that... ‘of the gene, as an invariant hereditary determinant (sic!) in the course of generations and even of hybridisations’. We shall return to this point later. For now, we will simply note that the above quotation on the dialectical method suffices to do justice to this accusation, which is at best valid against Stalinism (a youthful sin of Monod’s!) of which we said in the same text that ‘tied to the conformism of established positions, lacks any possibility of continuing this struggle (of the dialectic against metaphysics, ed.) even in the scientific sector’.

As we can see, the ‘critic’ is very harsh: dialectical materialism is, in his eyes, nothing more than an ‘animism’, an essay in the ‘subjective ordering of nature’, and as such a pure patchwork of ‘confusion’, ‘nonsense’, ‘absurdity’, and so on. It sounds like Dühring, already silenced by Engels in the last century. But let’s not get discouraged: as Lenin taught in his polemic at the beginning of the century against the empirio-criticists Mach, Avenarius, Bogdanov and associates: ‘behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society. Recent philosophy is as partisan as was philosophy two thousand years ago’.

The quotation fits like a glove to the alleged ‘mechanistic materialism’ of which Monod is so proud, to his vain efforts to floor the dialectic, as well as to his metaphysics of chance, which we now have to take head-on, continuing against bourgeois ideology a century-long party struggle.

‘Today, when one needs to comprehend the results of natural scientific investigation only dialectically, that is, in the sense of their own interconnection (...) today natural philosophy is finally disposed of. Every attempt at resurrecting it would be not only superfluous but a step backwards’.

This famous judgement by Engels from his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy finds resounding confirmation in ‘Chance and Necessity’, a militant bourgeois work that, under the pretense of rejecting dialectical materialism, has simply slipped below the level of bourgeois science itself.

Stripped of the ideological envelope in which Monod encloses and disguises them, the results in question, obtained thanks to the use of electron microscopes ‘capable of magnifications of up to 500,000 times and revealing ultramicroscopic structures the size of 1 millimicron’ (a micron is a thousandth of a millimetre), can be summarised as follows:

‘1) in spite of its infinitesimal size, the cell displays an extraordinary complexity that far exceeds that of the most modern calculators and 2) cell organisation is characterised by nucleic acid-protein dualism, a dualism that roughly corresponds (italics ours) to the nucleus-cytoplasm pair’ ⁽⁴⁾.

If, as Lenin said, ‘The correctness of (...) dialectics must be tested by the history of science’, our dialectical materialism has nothing to fear from electron microscopes. There could not be a more resounding confirmation of the brilliant anticipation of Heraclitus, which Lenin himself formulated thus: ‘The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence (one of the essentials, one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics’⁽⁵⁾.

To construct his ‘natural philosophy’, Monod uses three procedures: firstly, he forces out the objective meaning of the observed facts in his particular field; secondly, he claims to explain all the complex phenomena of evolution on the basis of the ‘principles’ of molecular biology alone, which, it must be stressed, are not only partial facts established in a particular field of that vast whole that is biological science, but are facts distorted by ideology; thirdly, by substituting pre-Hegelian metaphysics for rational dialectics, from the banal empirical observation that alongside regular phenomena explained by science there exist fortuitous (or simply new) facts far more difficult to explain, he draws the idealist conclusion that it is Chance that governs the entire Universe, into which the spirit of man arbitrarily introduces an order and a necessity, as well as the nihilist conclusion that, looking at things closely, the entire biosphere and its ultimate result, thinking man, might as well not have existed! Just like that, the Professor, as if he were God, abolishes, by sheer force of thought, if not the Universe itself, at least the actual history of the last three billion years that, starting with the first single-celled organisms, far simpler still than the bacteria in his laboratory, has led to ‘wise man’, that is, to a new world, that of society. In this perfect pedant, bourgeois society recognises one of its intellectual peaks!

‘The nucleus, thanks to the genes on its chromosomes, directs specific synthesis and heredity; the cytoplasm, with its structure proteins and protein-enzymes, is the seat of functional and synthesis activities. The cytoplasm receives orders from the nucleus, and both form an indissoluble pair on pain of death’ ⁽⁶⁾.

Thus, an indissoluble dialectical pair of two ‘opposites’ defined by different functions: our materialism has no criticism to make.

We continue: ‘How is the transmission of orders carried out as far as protein processing is concerned? It is in fact a coded transmission that is recorded by a fixed element on a mobile element that is fixed at the point where the orders are to be carried out; these elements are nucleic acid macro-molecules and are of two species: DNA, which affects the genes in the nucleus, and RNA, which is more commonly found in the cytoplasm’.

Criticising the mania of scientists to identify movement (‘which is modification in general’) with change of place, i.e. with mechanical movement, Engels noted: ‘This is not to say that each of the higher forms of motion is not always necessarily connected with some real mechanical (external or molecular) motion, just as the higher forms of motion simultaneously also produce other forms (...) organic life without mechanical, molecular, chemical, thermal, electric, etc., changes. But the presence of these subsidiary forms does not exhaust the essence of the main form in each case. One day we shall certainly “reduce” thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?’ (Dialectics of Nature, Forms of Motion of Matter).

The mechanical motion spoken of above, even if not necessarily inadequate, cannot, however, ‘exhaust’ cyto-physiology, which, according to biologists, poses ‘extremely difficult problems’: as for Monod, he will be a mechanist on principle!

‘Information inscribed on punched cards (the DNA of the genes) is carried by copies of these cards (the messenger RNA) to semi-automatic programmed machines (the ribosomes) that assemble the proteins of the species; these machines are fed in detached parts (the amino acids) from the messenger RNA’.

Here one falls into ‘computer’ symbolism and a cartoonish reverie. Descriptions cannot be more evolved than the science that formulates them! Again:

‘The products manufactured by the cell themselves control their manufacture...: when necessary, the operator agent that triggers protein synthesis is blocked by a repressor agent. The operator is a specific gene, while the repressor is a specific protein synthesised by a regulatory gene. The latter has a counter-reaction, the former a positive reaction.... The positive reaction has the effect of constantly accelerating the movement, while the counter-reaction constitutes the reverse phenomenon’.

We will return to this. Finally: ‘Another aspect of the self-constructing power of living beings is duplication. At the moment of mitosis (cell division of the bacterium), the mother-cell attaches to each of the two daughter-cells a duplicate of its nuclear genetic make-up (the DNA); the daughter-cell is an exact copy of the primitive element: this is self-reproduction, the basis of heredity’.

And that is all.

From all this, the glorious Prof. Monod draws three conclusions:

1 – ‘The translation mechanism (of the information inscribed in the DNA, ed.) is strictly irreversible. Information is never seen being conveyed in the opposite direction – i.e., from protein to DNA – nor is there any conceivable way in which it could be. This certitude rests upon an accumulation of observations by now so complete and so well verified – and (italics ours) its consequences, especially for evolutionary theory, are so important – that it may be considered one of the fundamental tenets of modern biology (...) there exists no conceivable mechanism whereby any instruction or piece of information could be transferred to DNA. Hence the entire system is totally, intensely ⁽⁷⁾ conservative, locked into itself, utterly impervious to any “hints” from the outside world’.

2 – ‘Through its properties, by the microscopic clockwork function that establishes between DNA and protein, as between organism and medium, an entirely one-way relationship, this system obviously defies any “dialectical” description. It is not Hegelian at all, but thoroughly Cartesian: the cell is indeed a machine’.

3 – ‘And so it would seem that by virtue of its very structure this system ought to resist (...) all evolution. Resist them it assuredly does, and we have there the explanation for a fact which is indeed far more paradoxical than evolution itself: namely, the prodigious stability of certain species which have been able to reproduce without appreciable modification for hundreds of millions of years’ (italics ours) ⁽⁸⁾.

Who is that imbecile who once said: ‘The form of development of natural science, in so far as it thinks, is the hypothesis’? We would have changed all that, we bold pioneers of intermolecular travel! On the contrary, we affirm that, precisely in so far as it thinks, natural science takes good care not to lose itself in vain suppositions, but daringly advances by dint of peremptory assertions! Brace yourselves: ‘the duty which more forcibly than ever thrusts itself upon scientists to apprehend their discipline within the larger framework of modern culture, with a view to enriching the latter (...) with what they may feel to be humanly significant ideas’ (from the preface to ‘Chance and Necessity’). Out of love for modern culture, then, Monod does not hesitate for a moment to rehabilitate Descartes, who died in 1650, and to bury, posthumously, Hegel who died in 1831. Then, satisfied with the duty accomplished, he clearly lets us understand that the touching invariance of the marine horseshoe crab, this hero among ‘a few’ others of Non-Evolution ⁽⁹⁾, seems to him much more significant, humanly speaking, and in any case much more paradoxical than all that so-called ‘orthogenesis’ that, from Lamarck (1809) and Darwin (1859) onwards, has been foisted onto us to no end.

No electron microscope is needed to follow the mechanism of ideological construction. When Monod, heroically defying ridicule, claims that the relations ‘between organism and environment are one-way’, he is belied by the same naive description that macro-cybernetics provides of the process. When the repressor protein blocks the synthesis ordered by the operator gene, it does so neither by ‘chance’ nor as a function of its ‘free will’. Jacob tells us that this phenomenon of ‘repression’ or ‘blocking’ is the response of the colony of bacteria to certain changes in the composition of the solution liquid that constitutes its environment. This ‘counter-reaction’ depicts precisely, albeit in a caricaturally rigid form, that dialectical relation between organism and environment that Monod wants no part of, but without which life would be inconceivable. The ‘principle’ of the bacterial cell (which will of course be found in another form in complex organisms) is organic centralism, not anarchy. But the cell is not a machine. It defies the Cartesian description that Monod gives of it, and for which molecular biology in general is not responsible. First ideological distortion.

Turning now to the much more delicate question of the nucleus-cytoplasm or DNA-protein relation, the claim that there is ‘no doubt’ that by virtue of its structure ‘the system must oppose ... any evolution’ seems outlandish, whereas if there is one thing beyond all doubt, it is precisely evolution, under the pretext that the observation of bacteria with three billion years of evolution behind them would not allow modern scientists to ‘conceive’ how ‘any information whatsoever’ could pass from protein to DNA! Second ideological distortion.

If the aim is to scientifically explain the apparent relative stability of species over the course of millions of years, the statement that between organism and environment ‘the relationship is one-way’ completely misses the mark.

If, on the other hand, it is a matter of experimentally verifying the theory of the non-heritability of somations ⁽¹⁰⁾, to claim that the nucleus is ‘totally conservative’, whereas it is well known that mutations occur in it, is to go well beyond the scope. In both cases, the only result is to ridicule oneself unnecessarily. In reality, these excesses prove that this is not what it is all about. If Monod ‘augments information’, i.e., in plain terms, alters the already meagre scientific data, it is because his aims are ideological.

It matters little to this ‘scientist’ that ‘observations’ cannot by definition be either ‘complete’ or ‘reliable’ for the excellent reason that molecular biology dates back twenty years while evolution has been going on for... three billion years, so that there is not even the slightest possibility of observing under the prestigious microscope even a single bacterium whose genetic ‘code’ has not been ‘corrected’ over the course of an astronomical number of cell divisions! Little does it matter! The notion of the irreversibility of the transmission of ‘information’ from DNA to protein is in any case not in doubt: ‘its consequences, especially for evolutionary theory, are so important – that it may be considered one of the fundamental tenets of modern biology’. Why treat experience and scientific theory so shamelessly? Because the important thing is to come to terms with the theory of evolution once and for all. Above all. A notion so indispensable to Professor Monod in order to carry out such a daring enterprise cannot but be a pillar of science. From now on, all biologists without exception will have to act accordingly. The professor dishes out the whole thing to us with the minimum of indispensable words. What ideological density!

Faced with this unprecedented challenge from the Anti-Stalin of the molecule, how did the palaeontologists, embryologists, anthropologists, in short those who by trade had hitherto been able to adorn themselves with special rights over the theory of evolution, react? Practising the democracy of minds, they wrote an essay to defend determinism and a preface ⁽¹¹⁾ to proclaim the nullity of Science and their own personal failure in the matter... of evolution. Never was such a disastrous balance sheet drawn up so serenely. So they entitled the whole thing ‘The Anti-Chaos’. With this kind of defender, the principle of objectivity has, as we can see, nothing to fear from the diktats of molecular biology, the Science of philosophical speculation, the determinism of Chance, or the pedantic democracy of Monod’s anti-communism.

First conclusion: The Professor has succeeded in his first ideological attempt. He has succeeded in first transforming the living cell into a cell-machine, then into the pure idea of a cell, into a monad beyond all profane comprehension. Going back up the course of History, he has in short, returned to the source, to Greek speculation, to the atoms of Epicurus. No one is therefore better qualified than he to explain biological Evolution to us scientifically, ‘since Science itself proclaims its bankruptcy’.

On the basis of the ideological cell, it will be child’s play to proceed to the creation of entire ideological organisms. It will suffice to abstract from all those complicated and idle empirical details that only risk distorting the pure scheme of autarkic DNA centralism. ‘Science is analysis’, for heaven’s sake! ⁽¹²⁾.

When ordinary ⁽¹³⁾ scientists want to give a general definition of living organisms, what do they say?

‘Organised beings: – live by assimilating external, energy-providing matter (self-preservation); – generate other organisms that perpetuate the species (reproduction); – permanently control and synchronise their activity (self-regulation); – change over the course of years (evolution)’ (from Biological Evolution or the Anti-Caos, The Biological Basis of Evolution).

In Monod’s philosophy, nothing could be more natural. At stake is nothing less than the programming of a computer on behalf of the Martian NASA (Monod has betrayed his true vocation) so that a horse and a car, a bee and a quartz crystal are not shoved into the same class of objects: an eminently biological starting point!

Three properties will suffice: autonomous morphogenesis – teleonomy – reproductive invariance. This is the Holy Trinity of ideological organisms ⁽¹⁴⁾.

Autonomous morphogenesis: consists in the ‘autonomous and spontaneous character of the morphogenetic processes that build the macroscopic structure of living beings’. An ‘autonomous’ process does not merely obey its own laws: it is independent of any other reality. Applying this concept to the self-construction of living beings ⁽¹⁵⁾, the biosphere would be completely removed from the laws of the rest of nature. Let us follow the edifying reasoning with which our ideologue claims to prove such an extraordinary assertion.

Quite simply, he begins by opposing ‘the majority of natural objects whose macroscopic morphology largely results from the influence of external agents’ to living beings, whose ‘structure (...) owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything (!), from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to “morphogenetic” interactions within the object itself’. Here Monod outdoes himself! On the subject of natural objects, he scrupulously points out to us that their morphology is only largely due to the action of external agents: if, to follow him, we try to think, for example, that certain erosive agents (such as rain and frost, the waves of the sea, the myriads of grains of sand lifted by the desert wind) shape the same forms in rocks as diverse as granite and limestone, what a responsibility his! Without even realising it, he pushes us to consider the relief of a rock as the... dialectical result due partly to its structure and partly to the erosive agents which act on it as a function of its geographical situation. It is indeed true that, however inert and passive, rocks find themselves in a dialectical relationship ⁽¹⁶⁾ with erosive agents, while they are perfectly ‘autonomous’ with respect to the extinction of species and the collapse of empires by which they are absolutely untouched.

With respect to living beings, on the contrary, our singular biologist displays a brazenness that borders on impudence. (This strengthens our conviction that his ‘natural philosophy’ is the worthy product of the imaginary collaboration of an Earthling obsessed with cybernetics with a ‘Martian ignorant of biology’, as he himself hypothesised). And the influence of external forces on their structure? ‘Almost nothing’. And that of internal forces? To it is due ‘everything’. In short, attributing a 2% to the first leaves a... 100% for the second. Having thus given logic, arithmetic, and the public the assurance of his deepest contempt, Monod concludes: ‘[A]n internal, autonomous determinism guarantees the formation of the extremely complex structures of living beings’. Why is this ‘determinism’ ‘autonomous’? Why, because it is ‘internal’, by golly! Just think about it for a moment. Unfortunately for our metaphysician, if (to use his jargon again, the expression adequate to his thought) ‘the determinism that guarantees the formation of the infinitely less complex structures of most natural objects’ is not at all autonomous, as moreover he himself admits (‘largely results’), the reason is not to be sought in the fact that it is ‘external’, but in the fact that between these ‘objects’ and the external forces that act upon them there exists a dialectical relationship.

Monod could not, moreover, ‘prove’ the autonomy of morphogenesis in the chapter preceding the one on the cell, of which it is, naturally, a logical consequence. On the other hand, he has succeeded in a stunning feat: abhorring the Marxist idea that reality as a whole is dialectical, he has effectively admitted that although totally passive, although destined without defence to a slow but inexorable degradation, the ‘beings’ of the mineral world are themselves subject to this dialectic. But he has theoretically ruled out such an eventuality for living beings, which, moreover, transform with their environment and evolve on pain of death! A perfectly explicable paradox. Our great philosopher makes for himself this little argument: living beings are active and capable of reproducing the genotype in a new being with each generation: that is, they are less dependent on the destructive forces of nature than the non-living are. As a good metaphysician, he immediately deduces from it that it is ‘autonomy’ that distinguishes living beings from inanimate beings. It evidently cannot enter the heads of these dinosaurs of the evolution of human thought that are the non-dialecticians that ‘autonomy’ and ‘dependence’ are by no means absolute opposites, that the more a being is ‘autonomous’ in one respect, the more it must be ‘dependent’ in another respect. Should a profound modification of the climate, and therefore of the flora and fauna, occur, who is more likely to disappear: the animal, in one respect ‘autonomous’, but nevertheless bound to the environment by an infinity of diverse connections, or the mountain, totally ‘dependent’ on the multi-millennial cycles of erosion, but for which the notion of ‘environment’ has no meaning, because it is too rich in determinations? The answer leaves no doubt and shows that, without dragging in any Hegelian devilry, it is the most ‘autonomous’ that appears the most ‘dependent’ – and inversely so ⁽¹⁷⁾.

Conclusion: To claim that the biosphere constitutes an ‘autonomous’ sphere within the domain of nature means transforming it into a supernatural sphere in defiance of all scientific knowledge. To assert that the morphogenesis of living beings depends on ‘internal interactions’ totally freed from the laws of the external world means attributing to them a mystical origin and transforming their adaptation to the conditions of life on earth into an impenetrable enigma. In addition to being anti-dialectical, this thesis falls below the very level reached by bourgeois science ⁽¹⁸⁾.

Teleonomy: this encompasses, but is not reduced to, the notion of appropriation (or adaptation) of living beings with respect to the environment in which they live and as it manifests itself in their structures and activities. It means that living beings are ‘objects endowed with a (...) project’ (Monod) ‘which no intelligence has conceived... and no will chosen’ (Jacob). This ideological category attests exclusively to the fact that the archaic 18th-century debate against theology and fideism, long since closed for us Marxist materialists, is still relevant for our bourgeois ideologues. Teleonomy, in short, outlines an anti-clerical biology: as you can see, the height of modernity!

Having said this, we find that teleonomy is only ‘a secondary property deriving from invariance – alone seen as primary’: any other conception would be ‘[incompatible] with the postulate of objectivity’. To say ‘objective’ is the same as saying that living beings become adapted to environmental conditions because they reproduce in an invariant manner! But they do not do so. And even if they did, it would not change the issue one iota: invariance can conserve, but produce nothing whatsoever. If it has the power to ‘derive’ adaptation (teleonomy) from the ‘genetic code’ it conserves, this can happen because the latter is already inscribed in it: that is, adaptation derives not from invariance but from the ‘code’. But how does the ‘code’ ‘inform’ adapted organisms? How, since it is autonomous, has it itself been ‘informed’ before even forming itself, given that the biosphere has not always existed? In other words, what is its origin? This is the problem. But ‘instead of a problem it ought rather to be called a riddle’, replies the professor. So teleonomy too remains ‘enigmatic’! Anti-clerical biology merely limits itself to displacing mysteries, it does not dispel them. Its whole ‘scientific’ exploit reduces to replacing the biblical saying: ‘In the beginning was the Word’, with the para-biblical saying: ‘In the beginning was the genetic programme’.

Reproductive invariance (or invariance tout court): according to the ‘ordinary’ scientists cited earlier, among the characteristics of living beings one must count the fact that they ‘change in the course of age (evolution)’. Deprived of the scientific certainties of molecular biology and the enlightenment of ‘natural philosophy’, those wretches went so far as to hypothesise not only that living beings have evolved, but that they had the aptitude to do so! Monod does not conceal his disdain for such theoretical simplism: ‘For modern theory evolution is not a property of living beings, since it stems from the very imperfections of the conservative mechanism which indeed constitutes their unique privilege’. In a few short words, Monod lays down the seven dazzling theses that mediocre spirits will have to assimilate to make themselves worthy of ‘modern theory’:

1. The conservative mechanism (of reproduction) is the unique privilege of living beings;
2. ergo, it is also their unique property;
3. since, scientifically, it is the privilege that distinguishes living beings from all natural objects and artefacts (proof of this is that even a Martian computer finds them unusual);
4. as privileged beings, they cannot count any imperfection whatsoever among their properties;
5. since the source of privilege is perfection;
6. but since no being is perfect unless it is immutable, it follows that
7. invariant reproduction is nonetheless still the unique property that can be scientifically recognised in living beings: as was to be demonstrated.

The rest is talk ⁽¹⁹⁾.

If Monod had only been a specialist obnubilated by the study of the mechanisms of heredity, he could, thanks to democratic freedoms, have campaigned quietly in favour of his ‘invariant reproduction’. A matter of no small importance, given the ‘grandiose changes that had for their theatre the geological eras and the surface of the planet’. But from the point of view of a modern philosophy, such modesty would have been indecent. Enjoying total immunity, Monod has dealt a new masterstroke: with a simple inversion of the order of terms, he has replaced ‘invariant reproduction’ with ‘reproductive invariance’. (Official Philology had no say in the matter: this was a problem of substance and not of form. Language must remain pure, but thought is free, in a democracy). And Monod’s thought is crystal clear: it is invariance and not reproduction that has ensured the continuity of descent. Taking place at the beginning by simple cell division and only much later by the fusion of two gametes, reproduction was merely the cunning means used by Invariance to prevent (setting aside all finalism) the thread that binds the men of today to the ancestral Bacterium from breaking (we will not go into the merits of the variation from bacterium to man here, which will be examined later on). The proof that invariance is undoubtedly the primary characteristic of the living is given by the fact that the adjective ‘reproductive’ can be eliminated without the slightest inconvenience. The concept thus appears in all its rigour. If the thesis was meta- or even para-physical, the French was, on the other hand, impeccable: the right of citizenship was not contested to ‘reproductive invariance’ in the ‘clearest’ of all civilised languages!

This is how, in the middle of the 20th century, a professor at the Collège de France has, on the basis of a science of heredity, improvised a philosophy that reduces reproduction to the status of a removable adjective, as if it were the most natural thing in this world! This is what the supernatural feats of 20th-century atheists are reduced to!

Conclusion: when ideology proclaims: ‘Life is Invariance’, it is bizarre, grotesque, repugnant. But bourgeois society means: ‘Variation is death’. And since the movement of history carries it irremediably toward annihilation, albeit with a slowness that sorely tests the patience of proletarian revolutionaries, it recognises a class truth even within a repugnant oddity.

And now, how to bridge the abyss that ‘natural’ philosophy has dug between itself and the real? How to derive movement from an invariance? How to deduce biological evolution from the ‘total conservatism of the DNA replicating mechanism’ and from the ‘absolute autonomy’ of the nuclear microcosm? Monod will achieve this feat by seizing upon an ideology found ready-made – the so-called ‘synthetic’ theory, offspring of neo-Darwinism, codified by biologists in the 1950s – and by superimposing on it a metaphysics that it did not imply, but which was, on the contrary, certainly contained in his ‘doctrine’ of absolute reproductive invariance.

Generalising the results of the work of De Vriès (theory of mutations in plants, 1901/1903) and above all of the founder of genetics T.H. Morgan, student of Drosophila flies (1910/1945), the ‘synthetic’ theory owes its name to the claim to explain evolution on the one hand with the aid of gene mutations, the cause of variations, and on the other hand by recourse to natural selection, the cause of the adaptation of species to the environment through the elimination of organisms carrying harmful mutations.

On a strictly scientific level, the inadequacies of this theory have been pointed out more than once: 1) though admitting that mutations have causes, it nevertheless denies knowing them; 2) it reduces all macro-evolution to micro-evolution, claiming to explain, with the aid of a series of regular gene mutations, all those transformations which palaeontology, for example, studies with the methods of comparative anatomy, and that are linked together by an obvious internal logic, by a philosophical principle of correlation. But if mutations are now widely demonstrated facts, they cannot for all that explain the embryogenesis of a precise structure (one heart, two lungs, such-and-such vertebrae, etc.) since they manifestly answer to a general plan ⁽²⁰⁾; besides, it is clear that evolutionary mechanisms cannot have been the same at all taxonomic levels, so that what might hold for single-celled beings becomes absolutely insufficient once one wished to apply it to the variation of highly differentiated organisms. The monism applied to the explanation of mutations is therefore inadmissible. Lastly, 3) it completely ignores the relations obtaining between germ and soma, since it flatly excludes the integration of somations into the genetic make-up. In short, this theory is reproached for taking account exclusively of the differentiation of species, without explaining either the genesis of extremely complex organs such as the eye or the brain (which, if they were the result of genetic mutations, would have entailed an infinite number of them) nor the constitution of classes and orders (for the same reason).

Monod’s first feat consisted in proclaiming perfectly and totally satisfactory this poor little scientific theory, so controversial. He therefore deserves to have levelled at him the classic objection made against mutationism, formulated by his colleague Jacob himself thus: ‘To extract from a roulette wheel, spin after spin, subunit after subunit, each of the hundred thousand protein chains that can span the body of a mammal, would require a time that exceeds, and by far, the duration allotted to the solar system’. But what does it matter to our ideologue of the calculus of probability.

Seizing upon the data of synthetic theory – mutation and selection – Monod will transform them into concepts – chance and necessity – constructing, on the already weak basis of that theory, a pre-Hegelian type of metaphysics. Finally, evoking for pages and pages the so-called ‘gratuitousness’ of phenomena recently observed by microbiology (such as the biosynthesis of a given ‘galactosidase’ by the agency of given ‘galactosides’, such as the hydrolysis or the assembly of protein sequences that seem to contradict every law), he indulges without restraint in a fit of Sartrean delirium in the typical lyrical-vulgar style à la Camus: ‘chance alone (...) [p]ure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution’!

To ‘chance’ are due the world, the biosphere and, of course, society itself. Centuries of determinism thrown to the nettles! This is the worthy crowning achievement of Monod’s ideological efforts, a faithful reflection of the theoretical decomposition of that counter-revolutionary class that is the bourgeoisie! The time has come to see how the rational dialectic explains the categories of ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’ and in what relationship they stand with the concepts of invariance and mutation.

In Dialectics of Nature, our Engels (that same Engels whom Monod considers naive, to say the least) has not only clearly posed, but definitively resolved the problem that Monod so pitifully entangles:

‘Natural science (...) as regards theory, has persisted on the one hand in the barrenness of thought of Wolffian metaphysics, according to which a thing is either accidental or necessary, but not both at once; or, on the other hand, in the hardly less thoughtless mechanical determinism which in words denies chance in general only to recognise it in practice in each particular case (...) In contrast to both conceptions, Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just as much also has no cause because it is accidental; that the accidental is necessary, that necessity determines itself as chance, and, on the other hand, this chance is rather absolute necessity. (Logic, II, Book III, 2: Reality.) Natural science has simply ignored these propositions as paradoxical trifling, as self-contradictory nonsense’ ⁽²¹⁾.

Just as the metaphysician Monod continues to do, more than a century after Hegel!

Having established, on the one hand, an absolute principle of invariance (fixity of the genetic heritage) and, on the other hand, a principle of variance likewise absolute (small fortuitous perturbations, and therefore imperceptible and unpredictable), Monod thinks that this opposition is unresolvable with the sole aid of the categories inherited from the old idealist metaphysics: chance (as the negation of necessity) and necessity (as the negation of chance). He thus finds himself doubly refuted as a mechanistic materialist who has taken refuge in the arms of metaphysics (see Engels’ passage quoted above). To such a pseudo-biological Manichaeism, Marxists oppose the concept of relative variance or invariance: invariance and mutation do not exclude each other, but are each the condition of the other. They reserve the same treatment for Laplace-style determinism, according to which necessity radically negates chance: following Hegel, Marxists understand not only that necessity is the cause of chance and that chance is the cause of necessity, but that the dialectically superior category into which this apparent, ‘external’ opposition is resolved is none other than real possibility or, as we say today, probability. As we can see, dialectics plays its full role here in preventing metaphysicals a prioris that for bourgeois scientists always remain the cause of relapses into the old feudal-scholastic mode of thought!

The same overcoming of the opposition absolute necessity-absolute chance is found again in physics, and it is precisely because of his failure to understand this that Monod attempts to present his biological anti-determinism as a simple aspect of the general anti-determinism, towards which, according to him, we ought to be pushed by ‘a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter’! The laws of physics – laws of conservation or of invariance – apply, he explains ⁽²²⁾, to these elementary uncertainties. Moreover, all particular laws have their foundation in one great law, that of the inexorable degradation of energy, which finds formulation in the second principle of thermodynamics, a principle absolutely not understood by that naive Engels ⁽²³⁾. Apply all this to the biological world and you have the solution!

Unfortunately for our metaphysician, quantum mechanics is by no means ‘indeterminist’ as the bad bourgeois philosophical literature claims: the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is always dragged in to affirm the contrary, serves only to dissolve absolute determinism ⁽²⁴⁾, along with a certain number of sclerotised notions ⁽²⁵⁾, into a wholly rigorous determinism of probability. Mechanics serves to predict, on the basis of the mechanical state of a system at a given moment and of the forces acting on it, its ‘state’ at a later given moment. If it cannot do this, it is good for nothing, and quantum mechanics claims unhesitatingly to know how to do this. The legend about its ‘indeterminism’ arose from the fact that the point of departure was given by the conceptions accredited by classical mechanics (Newton) and valid within its framework. Classically, the ‘particle’ is a ‘point mass’ or ‘material point’ whose mechanical state is described by the coordinates of position and velocity. This conception could no longer be of any help for the study of the phenomena observable at the microscopic scale of electrons and photons, the ultimate constituents of matter and light. Indeed, at this scale, not only do absolute definitions (‘substance of things’) resolve themselves into relative definitions (it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘substance’ and its ‘attributes’: the electric corpuscle, for example, is no longer ‘a small body charged with electricity’), not only does the notion of mass lose its absoluteness (corpuscles can only be defined as states and their relations only as inversions from one state to another state), but, as the foregoing shows, it becomes impossible to determine rigorously and simultaneously the position and velocity of the ‘particle’ (or the spatio-temporal location and energetic specification).

Quantum mechanics therefore replaces the classical ‘categories’ with a new category: the wave function, which designates the probability of the presence of the electron, for example, at a point in space subject to the nucleus’ force field. Quantum mechanics is therefore nothing more than the set of laws and theorems ⁽²⁶⁾ that make it possible to predict the wave function at any instant (if it is known at a given instant), as well as the forces acting on the ‘particle’. Heisenberg’s famous ‘uncertainty relations’ invalidate determinism so little (!) that they serve, on the contrary, to define precisely the margins of uncertainty, such as, for example, the position of a corpuscle whose velocity is known (or inversely), where it is not possible to know both data simultaneously: it is clear that if the rule of physical phenomena were... ‘fundamental uncertainty’, ‘gratuitousness’, and a fortiori ‘freedom’ (!) so dear to the Sartre-Monods, this operation would be wholly arbitrary and doomed to failure. But it is not so!

In conclusion, the use Monod makes of quantum physics fully confirms what Lenin said decades ago concerning the impotence to think dialectically that, on the logical level, is at the basis of the idealist exploitation of the crisis of this science at the beginning of the century, an exploitation which, on the social level, perfectly serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. We shall therefore dedicate to our philosopher of dead reaction this passage from Materialism and Empirio-criticism: ‘The error of Machism (Monodism) (...) is that it ignores (...) the distinction between metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism. The recognition of immutable elements, “of the immutable substance of things”, and so forth, is not materialism, but metaphysical, i.e., anti-dialectical, materialism’.

This is the man who, in the name of Science, condemned not only Engels, but the whole of dialectics.

Attacking Engels on the 2nd principle of thermodynamics, Monod wanted to establish the thesis of the incompatibility of dialectics and science ⁽²⁷⁾. But, to his misfortune, contemporary science has proved Engels right. Let us see how.

The first principle of thermodynamics is ultimately nothing more than the principle of the conservation of energy. And since it is a conservation principle, it does not allow for a direction of evolution. But experience teaches that physical processes always take place in one direction and never in the opposite direction. To give a classic example, consider a copper bar whose ends are in contact with a block of ice on one end and a flame on the other. A thermal gradient then becomes established in the bar, that is, a temperature that varies according to the section considered. By abruptly isolating the bar from its external environment, it is found to evolve towards a state of equilibrium with uniform temperature in all its parts. Supposing that the total energy remains constant, the spontaneous appearance of a thermal gradient in an isolated bar (or other system) does not contradict the first principle: but in the light of experience this never occurs.

‘An isolated system that has undergone an evolution never returns to its initial state’: this is the definition of the 2nd principle of thermodynamics, which experiments precisely of this kind have generalised and raised to absolute truth. It is in these ‘absolute and definitive’ terms that thermodynamics enunciated the 2nd principle, which thus became a principle of irreversibility of natural processes, since the ‘entropy’ (a quantity whose direction of variation expresses irreversibility) of an isolated system can only increase or at most remain constant, with a tendency towards a state of maximum entropy.

In short, it was an attempt to apply the 2nd principle not only to steam engines, but to the entire universe. An attempt that in the last century led to this result: the universe is an isolated system (sic!); therefore it must tend towards a final state of equilibrium in which all matter and all radiation will be uniformly distributed and in which nothing will be able to happen any longer (in other words, in which entropy will be at its maximum). The prediction of this state ‘of final equilibrium’ of the universe, or, as it was called, of its ‘heat death’, moreover presupposed an ‘original’ state of total imbalance, i.e., in another form, the idea of the... creation of the world. Contrary to what Monod insinuates, this conception was far from being accepted by all scientists, bourgeois though they were, of the last century. This is not going to be subtle, since it is a question of imputing to Engels the crime of ‘lèse-science’. Indeed, had he not dared to formally deny the 2nd principle by saying, in the Dialectics of Nature: ‘Clausius’ second law, etc., however it may be formulated, shows energy as lost (...) The world clock has to be wound up, then it goes on running until it arrives at a state of equilibrium from which only a miracle can set it going again. The energy expended in winding has disappeared (italics ours), at least qualitatively, and can only be restored by an impulse from outside (italics Engels’) (...) hence, the quantity of motion, or energy, existing in the universe was not always the same’. But then, Engels further noted, ‘the whole theory of the “conservation of force” is nonsense’, as are absurd ‘all [Clausius’] conclusions from it (...) hence, (...) energy must have been created, i.e., it must be creatable, and therefore destructible. Ad absurdum!’ And he concluded that ‘in a way that it will be up to the scientists of the future to bring to light’ the contradiction between second principle of Clausius and the principle of the conservation of energy had to be overcome. For us, those ‘scientists’ already belong to the past (or at most to the present): they have transformed the second principle into a simple theorem of statistical mechanics, i.e. they have removed every absolute character from what was nothing more than an extrapolation and generalisation of experience, leaving it only with a statistical meaning. Let us see how, very schematically.

Underlying this question is the fact that matter is not a continuum, but is constituted of discrete elements, say molecules, a definition that here may suffice. It is normal that the ‘laws’ or principles governing the behaviour, for example, of a mass of gas, must be explicable on the basis of the theorems of the dynamics of material systems. But we come up against a difficulty here: the number of molecules that come into play in current experiments is so enormous that it is out of the question to study the movement of each of them taken individually: statistical mechanics must be used.

Let us take the limiting case in which the quantity of gas tends to zero, such as, for example, the one in which a reservoir A containing only ten gas molecules is put in communication with reservoir B. Supposing that there is no interaction between the molecules (if there were, the result qualitatively would not change, but it would just be a little more complicated), each molecule would have the same likelihood of finding itself indifferently in either A or B, and this regardless of where the others are. The most probable eventuality is the one corresponding to equilibrium: 5 molecules in A and 5 in B. Nevertheless, eventualities that deviate from the state of equilibrium must necessarily occur, even if the probability of their occurrence is lower the greater the deviation. It is a bit like the game of heads or tails played with 10 coins. The probability of obtaining 0 (zero) ‘heads’ and 10 ‘tails’ (or vice versa) is 1/1024, whereas it is 252/1024 for 5 ‘heads’ and 5 ‘tails’. This does not detract from the fact that if one were to flip the coins 1,024,000 times, that very low probability would have to be realised approximately 1,000 times: there is thus an essential difference between a probability as small as you like and a null probability! Roughly speaking, the second principle as it is now understood derives from this ‘probabilistic’ aspect, which has nothing to do with the rejection of determinism in favour of who knows what ‘free will’, but is simply another form of determinism, as Engels, unlike so many scientists, had perfectly seen. Practically speaking, in all current experiments, putting into play a number of molecules of the order of 10²³ (1 followed by 23 zeros), and a total number of concatenations of the order of 10 to the power 10²³ (1 followed by 10²³ zeros), the probability that all the gas spontaneously concentrates itself in one of the two reservoirs is so ridiculously low that, in practice, over spaces and times observable by us, we can accept the second principle in its classical form. But if we step outside the limits to which human visual capacity and lifespan are subject in order to observe things on the cosmic scale, the perspective changes completely: in infinite space and time, every possible phenomenon must take place. So the overall representation that we must make of the behaviour of the universe is completely different from that which descended from the second principle as understood classically: even supposing that the universe is finite, it can no longer be said that it must evolve ‘one way’ towards a state of equilibrium of maximum entropy: all that can be said is that the state of equilibrium is the most probable, but that necessarily all possible states must present themselves (albeit increasingly rarely as we move away from equilibrium). In reality, the universe is infinite, so that to speak of ‘its entropy’ makes no more sense than to speak of its volume or mass! The only thing that can be defined is, at most, a local density of entropy, which must fulfil two requirements: 1) to vary, at the same instant, from one place to another and, in the same place, in the course of time; 2) to be constant on average, provided that this average is taken over large spaces for a short time, and vice versa, where ‘large’ is naturally to be understood on the cosmic scale.

Engels refused to let his hands be tied by the second principle, warned against drawing ‘philosophical’ conclusions from it and predicted that it would have to be changed. But in the name of what? Why, in the name of metaphysics, of course, Monod assures us, saddling poor Engels with the epithet ‘animist’, and putting it all down to the... Dialectic! Bollocks! What Engels was opposing to one of the laws of physics was the overall conception of physics. He called into question a particular affirmation of science in the name of the general affirmation of science.

Only dialectics is, therefore, scientific.

Having seen before what kind of ‘supernatural’ philosophy the bourgeois world, with the Nobel Prize winner at its head, bows down to, we will examine how our worshipper of the irrational conceives of a rational social order, what, in opposition to profane proletarian socialism, he christens ‘true socialism’.

In the last chapter of his book, Monod notes with satisfaction that science has conquered a prominent place in ‘modern societies’, but laments that the latter, whether ‘liberal or Marxist’ (?!), remain deaf to ‘its message’ (?), because they want to use it to produce greater wealth, but refuse to put themselves at its service. Monod does not hide his profound disapproval and deems it urgent to remedy this through a total... ideological reversal! After all, ‘science’ is the activity assigned to the professor by the social division of labour and which he, with a fairly widespread aberration, because it stems from that very division, considers to be the only true activity. From here to thinking that science is also the only activity that can justify the existence of society itself is a short step, and Monod takes it jauntily, flinging himself into the description of a social order founded (sic!) on the ethics (sic!!) of knowledge, ‘It [ethics of knowledge, ed.] prescribes institutions dedicated to the defence (...) of the transcendent kingdom of ideas (...) which is within man where progressively freed (...) from material constraints (...) he could at last live authentically’.

The organisation of the human species into stable societies, which responded to the need to survive, was the result of its characteristics as the only producing species, without the need for other ‘justifications’. Moreover, the formation of a given type of society, its development, its transition to a higher type are not governed by the desires of men, even if they are Nobel laureates, but by objective laws, such as the development of the productive forces, the class struggle, the revolutionary victory of the oppressed class; of course, the placement of any social activity, including noble scientific activity, within the ensemble of human activities is itself also, directly or indirectly, subordinated to those material and brutal factors. But Mr. Monod does not want to know about all this, or rather he is unable to understand it, not only because he is, on the whole, in solidarity with the bourgeoisie, but also because of the limited vision that his limited social activity imposes on him: this explains the secret of the fibs that he is peddling to us to the effect that in a rational society it would not be science that would be at the service of the species, but, on the contrary, the species at the service of science (?!), perhaps with the aid of... repressive institutions suited to the need! Here it is then, but in the historical and social field, that ‘animist projection’ that Monod has reproached Marxism with wanting to introduce into the natural sciences, repeating with suspicious insistence this baleful accusation for pages and pages! In other words, Mr. Monod who, like all his cronies, viscerally rejects the application of scientific determinism to society, history and hence the future of the species, ends up dreaming of a society modelled according to the particular prejudices of his caste: mere ideological paranoia!

In keeping with 20th century fashion, Monod presents his ‘transcendent Kingdom of ideas’ as the only ‘true socialism’. But he is anxious to point out that the way through to this Eden lies... ‘not in a “revision” of the ideology that has been dominating [socialism] for better than a century, but in completely throwing that ideology over’. In other words: death to scientific socialism, to its accursed theoretical dialectic and to its still more accursed practical revolution. But what does he propose to the revolutionary proletariat in return? Nothing. Or rather the magical transmutation of his personal ethics into a real society and (hear!) a real State, and the transubstantiation of men of flesh and blood into... pure spirits, under the effect of a ‘liberation from material constraints’ whose ways and forms this great scientist has not deigned to reveal to the likes of us, poor ‘animists’. How can a reactionary and idealist bourgeois understand that the real problem is that of the liberation of the proletariat, and ultimately of the whole species, from the barbaric constraints imposed on it by the domination of capital?

The time has finally come to turn our backs on this priest of chance, on this ‘socialist’ of the protein, on this classic, perfect representative of bourgeois decomposition in order to study, as we had promised, Engels’ text on the ‘part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’. It will clearly show the reader that, after more than a century, the application of the theses of dialectical materialism to the problems of evolution has led to results far more significant than the ‘modern’ neo-Darwinist (so-called synthetic) theory has obtained and, all the more, than the metaphysics of a molecular biologist sick with presumption.

It is important first of all to reconstruct the struggle carried out by Human Palaeontology against the religious and rationalist resistances, against two ideological and historical conceptions both expressions of very definite class interests: on one side, the theological and theocratic feudal conservatism that cannot accept the great historical and evolutionary categories that call into question the idea of an immutable natural and human order, fixed once and for all by the divine will along the iron lines of a pre-established plan. On the other, bourgeois speculative idealism, which, if it is true, as it is true, that it historically produced geology and palaeontology, both of which revolve around the concepts of ‘historical becoming’ and ‘evolution’, this is owing to the fact that the vulgar materialism of its ideologues reflected the world conception of an entire class intent on putting an end to the way of producing, exchanging and, for what interests us here, thinking typical of a social formation which, having by then exhausted all its possibilities of development, had become fundamentally reactionary.

Nonetheless, these theories too could not fail to meet even stronger resistance due to the radical conclusions implicit in the great discoveries of anthropology, and which were an expression, at the very heart of contemporary scientific thought, of the class interests of a social stratum that, having the levers of command of society in its hands, could not, and, in the last analysis, would not do anything but turn a blind eye to the significance of those conclusions.

It is a classic Marxist thesis that bourgeois sciences are compelled, as they develop, to confirm the laws of Dialectical Materialism; but, a fact even more important, bourgeois ideologues are led to continually deny the dialectical character of the results of their own science. Conscious or not, this ‘rejection’ has a precise political meaning: it expresses the limits beyond which bourgeois speculation cannot go without denying the very foundations of its ideology, i.e. the general conception of the world that embodies its class interests.

This phenomenon has been particularly evident as regards the development of Human Palaeontology.

Already a century ago, Engels had formulated, in a short but dense study, the hypothesis that labour, understood essentially as technical activity, had been at the basis of the development of the human species. Let us note that this hypothesis rested on no certain ‘material’ basis, given the ignorance of the ‘specialists’ of the time and scattered indications from excavations.

Let us summarise Engels’ hypothesis in its most important points:

1. The erect gait (bipedalism) constitutes the decisive fact for the ‘transition’ from ape to man and is accompanied by the liberation of the hand, itself also correlative to the division of functions (locomotion and prehension) between the forelimbs and the feet;
2. The hand is the organ and product of labour;
3. By virtue of the law of correlation of development, according to which ‘the individual parts of an organic being are always bound up with certain forms of other parts that apparently have no connection with the first (...) Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the body, although we cannot explain this connection’;
4. The development of labour guaranteed by the liberation of the hand and the locomotor function gave rise to relationships of assistance and communication among the members of primitive groups. From technical activity there thus descends the birth of language considered as an instrument of production: ‘First labour, after it and then with it speech’.

These four theses formulated by Engels have been carefully ignored by official bourgeois science, which, in the general question of the determination of the specific characteristics of man bound up with the problem of the evolutionary mechanism, has preferred to venture into the quicksands of idealism. Indeed, Human Palaeontology in the 18th century started from the idea of man’s affinity with the great primates; and could do no more than take the middle path between the apes known to it and homo sapiens.

The most serious and persistent mistake was to establish a direct line connecting us, through the Neanderthals, to the quartet of present-day anthropoids: gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan, and gibbon.

The reason for this attitude is to be sought in the idealist presuppositions of bourgeois ideology forever in search of a ‘degree zero’ of human consciousness.

Rousseau, in his ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, gives a typical exemplification of this: man, who in the state of nature is endowed with all the ‘present-day’ attributes, moves away from the initial zero, invents little by little, whether through the imitation of animals or through reasoning what, in the technical and social field, leads him to the present world.

We are faced with a ‘cerebral’, and therefore idealist, conception of human evolution, which stands at the antipodes of Engels’ thesis according to which man is not defined by head, consciousness, and spirit, but by the specific and social faculty of producing the instruments of production in order to transform nature and bend it to his needs.

The nonchalant dove of idealism does not bother to rest its wings on any well-founded basis, and theorises its own class interests, sublimating them into ‘concepts’.

It is not our intention to retrace the misadventures of bourgeois Palaeontology, powerless to integrate into its ‘rationalist’ vision even the most conclusive material discoveries, but we must nevertheless surrender to the evidence: the discovery of the clan of the ‘Australopitheci’, and in particular of the remains, found in Kenya, of Zinjanthropus, a great australopithecine that already made use of stone tools, has definitively disproved the idiocies that have been written on the subject over the last two centuries.

With this great ancestor, an image of man took shape that is, to say the least, disconcerting to the petty-bourgeois academic and democrat who conceives of himself and the human individual in general only through the head: that of a real man with a small brain and not a super-anthropoid with a big cranial box.

But fortunately facts are stubborn, so that dialectical materialism always ends up penetrating even the most obtuse brains. And in the field of science, there is only one way: precisely that materialist dialectic, which sooner or later comes to impose itself. This is what the specialist on duty, Leroi-Gourhan, implicitly recognises in his study on the relationship between technics and language: ‘A little more than a century after the discovery of the Gibraltar skull, what picture can we form that will meet all criteria common to all humans and their ancestors? The first and most important criterion is erect posture: As we have seen, it was also the last to be accepted. This meant that for several generations the problem of human origin was posed upon a false premise.

‘All known fossils, including the oddest among them such as Australopithecus, show humans to have had erect posture. Two further criteria are corollaries of the first: They are a short face and a free hand during locomotion. Not until the last few years, bringing as they did the discovery of the pelvis and femurs of Australopithecus, did it become possible to understand the connection between erect posture and a short face (which Engels had clarified more than a century ago, ed.) (...) Freedom of the hand almost necessarily implies a technical activity different from that of apes, and a hand that is free during locomotion, together with a short face and the absence of fangs, commands the use of artificial organs, that is, of implements.

‘Erect posture, short face, free hand during locomotion, and possession of movable implements – those are truly the fundamental criteria of humanity. The list includes none of the characteristics peculiar to monkeys and makes the midway form of human, so dear to pre-1950 theoreticians, completely unthinkable.

‘The fact that my list does not include a large brain may be thought surprising (prick up your ears, bourgeois gentlemen, you have been betrayed by precisely one of your most disinterested specialists, forced to admit the validity of Engels’ theses!). Of course it is difficult to assign preeminence to any particular characteristic, since in the development of species everything is interlinked, but I believe that there can be no doubt that to some extent cerebral development is a secondary criterion. Once humanity has been achieved, the brain plays a decisive role in the development of human societies. In terms of strict evolution it is undoubtedly a correlative of erect posture and not, as was thought for a long time, primordial’.

It remains to specify the role played by labour in the successive transformations of our species, in the light of the latest discoveries in Human Palaeontology. We shall see that, far from contradicting the classic Marxist conception, for which labour created humanity, they fully confirm Engels’ hypothesis and the dialectical materialist method.

Let us begin by analysing the Marxian category of ‘labour’. After having clarified in Part II of Book I of Capital the bourgeois capitalist relation of the buying and selling of labour-power, Marx goes on to define the meaning of labour in its most general form as: ‘abstracted from any particular imprint that this or that phase of the economic progress of society may imprint upon it, that is, thought of not as an activity producing commodities (under the outward aspect of exchange-value), but of use-value, that is, of tools or non-exchangeable objects necessary for everyday consumption. Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature [and] develops his slumbering powers’.

What characterises humanity both on the level of the species, as a factor of biological maturation, and on the individual level, in its singular relation with nature, is therefore technical labouring activity, since: ‘The use and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human labour-process’. This is why Franklin calls man ‘a tool-making animal’. At this stage of the analysis of the labour process in its simple and abstract moments, ‘man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, sufficed (...) [and it is] not necessary to represent our labourer in connexion with other labourers (...) [for it is] human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase’.

To the shame of the idle and degenerate petty bourgeois who sees in labour the ‘curse of the species’, from which the ‘communist’ society would free him (allegory of the original fall and the paradise regained), we shall conclude with a luminous quotation that well expresses that material necessity felt in the flesh and assimilated in his small brain already by our distant ancestor: ‘So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature’ (Capital, I, 1).

It is precisely on this cardinal thesis – technical activity, labour defined as the specific characteristic of man – that the most recent research in Human Palaeontology converges, as we shall see.

The ultimate problem around which the great debates that have inflamed the science of human fossils over time have revolved hinged on the significance to be attributed to the transformations of encephalic capacity and cerebral possibilities that occurred in the course of the development of the species.

For the idealist thesis, the gradual spread of homo sapiens is to be understood in the sense of an uninterrupted growth towards a point of maximum consciousness. In this conception, in which humanity is defined starting from the head, culture would emerge little by little from the uncertain mists of animality so as to give life to a being endowed with a lucid consciousness and inclined to a vague religiosity. This, in broad strokes, is the perspective of a Teilhard de Chardin, who discovers in the ‘human phenomenon’ a kind of vector launched towards the acquisition of spiritual faculties. Of course, as things stand today, it is absolutely impossible to give this great idealist fresco the slightest probative material basis, contrary to the dialectical-materialist conception that now rests on a complex of irrefutable evidence.

In fact, the thesis that emerges from this research in the paleontological field attests that, far from preceding the evolution of techniques and the body, the becoming of ‘consciousness’ is to be discerned in its close link with adaptive capacities, which are, in the case of man, of an essentially technical order. It is fitting, however, to reach agreement on the term ‘consciousness’. For the idealist philosophical tradition, from Aristotle to Hegel, via Descartes and Kant, ‘Reason’ represents the sole distinctive criterion between man and animal. Language is considered as a reality, a screen that masks thought through which, in some way, we could identify with God. Thus, according to Aristotle, man ‘is a rational animal’ and words are ‘the symbols of states of mind’. For Descartes, Reason is the ensemble of our clear and distinct ideas, the totality of what divinity, in its infinite Grace, willed that we might conceive. In this tradition, now in its death throes, language represents the mask of the spirit, the veil that must be torn away in order to grasp thought in all its purity. For Dialectical Materialism, on the contrary, humanity (it is still fitting to ‘relativise’ this idealist abstraction) is not determined by the head or by consciousness, i.e. there exists no consciousness other than that expressed in a dual materiality, as language and as a social product: ‘Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men’ (from Marx, The German Ideology).

Language, cranial capacity, and technicity must be understood in their parallel development and in their mutual interaction, that is, as the different aspects of one and the same dialectical process: this, let the most recalcitrant idealists grieve over it, the most recent research and material facts objectively confirm.

The cardinal concepts of the idealist tradition in the palaeontological field, according to which our most distant ancestors, the Anthropians, would be akin to the present-day ape family from which they would have separated at the end of the Tertiary, can now be considered outdated. The series of categories such as Pithecanthropus, Prehominid, Australopithecus have had their day, reflections of an anti-materialist mentality for which human evolution expressed the maturation of consciousness or of ‘spirit’.

Quite the opposite, we know today that Anthropomorphism constitutes a family distinct from that of the apes, as the group of Anthropians attests, and is characterised by the adaptation of the body structure to gait on two feet. This postural definition of the first ‘humans’ is expressed in a functional scheme radically divergent from that of present-day anthropoid apes: the pelvis is adapted to the trunk, which must keep itself in balance, the spinal column possesses compensatory curves whose resultant is a vertical, the foot takes on a particular disposition (parallel toes); finally, the head is balanced at the top of the spinal column and the occipital foramen is at a right angle.

The old hypothesis of an affinity with apes, too, is impossible, unless we look for our most distant ancestor in the very middle of the Tertiary. But then we can no longer speak of ‘great apes’ in the current sense of the term.

While we know almost nothing about the Oreopithecus, an ape with humanoid tendencies that can be traced back to the Miocene, we do possess a relatively detailed body of knowledge about the existence, between the end of the Tertiary and the beginning of the Quaternary, of an African population of bipedal creatures that already made use of tools, catalogued under various names (Plesianthropi, Australanthropi, Zinjanthropi). The general image these beings offer us is fairly coherent: they walk in an erect position, they have normal arms, they cut themselves stereotyped tools by striking a few blows on the end of a pebble, they have a partially carnivorous diet. This depiction, common for humans, bears no relation to that of any ape; the only important difference, in degree however and not in nature, lies in the size of the brain, incredibly small (500/600 cm³).

Australanthropi are thus ‘humans’ for all intents and purposes with a reduced braincase, corresponding to their rudimentary technique: the orbital barrier has not yet fallen and the frontal part of the skull continues to be very limited: it is the last obstacle to disappear before the present-day type.

But the interesting thing that emerges from all these finds is the presence of tools alongside the remains of bone evidence, confirming the thesis that technique is a specific human characteristic that has played a decisive role as an agent of evolution. From the deep past of the Anthropians up to the stage preceding the present level, from the Zinjanthropus up to the Neanthropians of the Cro-Magnon race (~30,000 years), the evolution of the human species, based on bipedalism, appears as the resultant and the recoil of the effects of labour on skull morphology and encephalic capacity, with the progressive disappearance of the supraorbital prominence, the opening of the cortical fan and the refinement of the cortex – modifications that in turn react dialectically upon the technical possibilities of the species.

This process has spanned hundreds of thousands of years, but we possess sufficient material evidence to retrace, with the help of other data (brain localisation theory, brain anatomy and physiology), its major stages.

The structure of the hominid brain is thus closely related to the exercise of technique present in the crudest human forms. But technical activity itself is both cause and product of the postural situation which, by freeing the hand from the demands of locomotion, renders it available to the needs of relational life.

Thus, in contrast to the anthropoid apes, the erect position, as early as the Zinjanthropus, has as a corollary an increase in the surface area of the cranial vault in the medial fronto-temporo-parietal region. This increase is gradual and it is possible to follow its development from the ape to each of the anthropian forms. In fact, if from the earliest Australanthropi the bodily evolution can be considered complete, by contrast the cerebral evolution is only just beginning and is expressed by the continuous increase in the surface area of the cortex in the medial fronto-parietal regions.

The evolution of technique and the parallel evolution of the brain’s structure are conceivable only within one and the same dialectical process, which unfolds in this way: labour rebounds upon brain function, which, refining itself, gives rise to a more elaborate and complex technicity that entails a richer life of relationships, the cause, in turn, of a new differentiation of the encephalon, and so on, until the attainment of the present-day profile of average cerebral equilibrium.

That said, in order to establish the synchronic evolution of tools and brains, we must compare the different chronological states of their becoming within the zoological group of the ‘Anthropians’.

The notion of ‘brain expansion’ and especially that relating to the medial cortex is of fundamental importance since the latter is the seat of primary motility. Like that of higher mammals, the human brain has, along the fissure of Rolando, on the ascending frontal convolutions, a primary motor zone in which it is possible to distinguish with precision, from base to vertex, the groups of neurons that control the face, the fingers of the hand, the upper limb, the trunk, and the lower limb.

There we find the inverted image of the bodily machine, of which the area in question constitutes the control panel. The amount of neurons assigned to each region of the body is proportional to the complexity of functions required of it: in today’s man, 80% of the neurons in the area under consideration are assigned to the motor control of the head and upper limbs, in other words, the two poles of the relational field mobilise 4/5 of the primary motor apparatus. The tongue, lips, larynx, and fingers alone account for almost half of this area.

Another fact is of considerable interest, and it is the contiguity of the areas of the face and hand in the area in question and their common topographical situation, which reveals the close coordination existing between the action of the hand and that of the anterior organs of the face. Simians and Anthropians thus possess the same cortex, which presides over the movement of all parts of the body, in which the face and hand play a predominant role. In apes, the primary motor area is accompanied by a premotor area acquired through the early development of the cortical fan, whereas in present-day man the cortical apparatus is constituted, as far as the motor part is concerned, by the primary motor area, in front of which the premotor area is located, as in apes. Further on, an additional area has come to be added, distinguished by an intermediate structure between that of the premotor area and that of the frontal lobes, which lack motor neurons. Evolution proceeds in the direction of an opening of the cortical fan.

Another fact to be emphasised is that in the higher apes, the area of cortex that presides over language is practically non-existent, so that the very physical possibility of constituting a language is lacking. Conversely, an erect posture and a free hand that can make use of movable tools, hence a skullcap considerably disengaged in the medial vault, can only correspond to a brain that is already equipped for speech.

The extension of the brain is thus the corollary of postural stance and of technical activity, the correlative of labour, as the evolution of tools among the Anthropians goes on to indicate.

The evolution of tools in the Stone Age occurred in four stages: ‘at the beginning’, cutting tools, scrapers, are obtained through the simple shattering of two pebbles. In a second moment, the instruments are ‘cores’, from which flakes have been removed, most of the time on both faces using a stone striker. The third time sees the production of tools made by striking the ‘core’ with cutting instruments in which the chips are worked on one face only. Finally, the fourth episode in this history of stone toolmaking is that of the production of tools through the shaping of the flakes.

This evolution in the working of stone in the Palaeolithic covered hundreds of thousands of years and is the result of the acquisition of a series of supplementary gestures which already imply a high degree of foresight in the performance of technical activities.

The notable slowness of tool differentiation must evidently be paralleled with the characteristic slowness in the transformation of the anthropian skull: as we have seen, evolution is synchronic insofar as the mechanical effects of posture and labour interact on the physiology and general morphology of the species, since the essential transformations occur by reshuffling the proportions of the different parts of the brain through increased cell density and multiplication of connections.

As for language, the material expression of ‘consciousness’, it is neurologically linked to the ability to manufacture tools and its degrees of evolution correspond to the different moments in the development of anthropian technique.

The Australanthropus must have possessed a language on a level parallel to that of its tools, no doubt little developed, but certainly superior to those simple vocal signals ‘required’ by situations and determined by the environment: these are already a set of available symbols.

The Archanthropi, with their twofold series of gestures, certainly possessed a language with a more elastic syntax, but in all probability still limited to the expression of concrete situations.

In the Neanderthals, the externalisation of the first non-’concrete’ symbols occurs due to the deferred transmission of information in the form of stories and the expression of still imprecise feelings.

Although extremely risky and vague, because they are unverifiable, these hypotheses are formulated on the basis of the undoubted link existing between language and technical motility, the two principal anthropian characteristics involving the same brain pathways.

Let us summarise: the hand, product of labour, the evolution of brain structures, the shortening of the face, the opening of the medial cortex, the suppression of the orbital barrier, these are the incontestable and materially verified facts.

The structure of man’s genetic make-up must therefore have been modified in the course of his evolution in parallel with the use of tools. The fact that the complex mechanisms of this transformation are not yet fully clarified is of secondary importance, since by now no further new data could contradict the general scheme proposed by Engels; and all the Monods of this world, in their idealist fury, can do nothing about it. The dialectical-materialist view of the ‘transition from ape to man’ is broadly correct.

For now, that’s enough for us.

The refutation provided by Engels’ theses to the theory of ‘creative chance’, the ultimate principle of the transformation of the species according to Monod, although insufficient, given the limited knowledge available, to shed light on all the mechanisms of evolution, will nevertheless allow future research in these areas of the natural sciences to be oriented on quite different dialectical-materialist bases from those proposed hitherto. But it will be necessary for research to free itself from idealism, which presupposes the dissolution of its economic and social bases, the withering away of bourgeois relations of production. This will make the sciences take an enormous leap forward, without losing sight of the practical satisfaction of the real needs of man ⁽²⁸⁾.

The ‘secret’ of the mechanisms of evolution is not to be sought in the partial bourgeois theories that are under the influence of the metaphysical way of thinking of which Monod’s ‘natural philosophy of modern biology’ is a resounding expression. The sciences do not develop autonomously, nor do they choose their field of inquiry for themselves nor do they self-produce their concepts. With all their contradictions, they are merely the most abstract manifestation of the way of producing, living, and thinking of the various forms of society and of the ideology of the ruling classes.

Thus, until the 18th century, the feudal category of stability is the abstract image of an immutable feudal order and the explanatory matrix of the totality of nature’s phenomena: species are considered in their fixity as having appeared once and for all and, endowed with their timeless attributes, enduring in an eternity without history; the idea of evolution does not even brush the mind of the scientists of the ‘classical age’, whose thought remains strictly captive to the dominant ideological models. Thus, if for Buffon, for example, the lion is ‘the king of animals’, this is owing to the fact that it symbolises, within the animal kingdom, the sovereign power of royal majesty. Thus Linnaeus provides, in his ‘Systema Naturae’, a methodical and hierarchical classification of living beings, which he spatially juxtaposes outside of any historical perspective.

It is to the historical merit of the revolutionary and materialist bourgeoisie to have introduced the concept of the evolution of species with the updating, parallel to its conquest of political power, of the philosophical category of history, to which the name of Hegel remains attached.

But if evolution as a real phenomenon was immediately accepted by bourgeois science, the same was not true of its mechanisms, which, we had a hint of it with Monod, still remain rather obscure and mysterious to it. For Lamarck, evolution is the result of the transmission of characters acquired during existence in the process of adaptation to the environment and its changes. His ‘Zoological Philosophy’ is based on two laws regulating the action of ‘circumstances’: 1) ‘Frequent and sustained use of an organ fortifies and enlarges it; non-use weakens it, deteriorates it, and causes it to disappear’; 2) ‘All that is acquired lost in this way acts on reproduction’.

Darwin explains the evolution of species on the basis of the struggle for existence, mercilessly eliminating the less fit, and operating selection through the small differences that exist between individuals. De Vriès is the father of mechanical ‘mutationism’, according to which variations are the result of transformations of the genetic heritage by qualitative leaps or ‘mutations’, without the acquired traits being able to be transmitted hereditarily. But this theoretical scheme, which represents the current landing place of bourgeois science, serves to explain nothing more than... evolution, without at all explaining the great results acquired by it, such as, for example, the modification of the skeleton, because one would have to resort to successive mutations affecting a large number of bones.

As we can see, for bourgeois biologists the problem is far from being resolved, on the contrary – as Monod teaches – there is a recoil onto the indeterminist terrain of the absolute role played by chance.

We therefore do not even remotely dream of ‘updating’ Engels, whose global vision remains qualitatively far superior to the idealist and anti-dialectical partial solutions of molecular biology. Dialectical Materialism, beyond bourgeois idealist fashions, remains as new as can be in the general conception of nature and human society; product of the class antagonisms and science of the revolutionary proletariat, it will be the system of thought of the communist society of tomorrow and, for this reason, it opposes the half-truths and lies of today’s bourgeoisie, which, in denying its imminent and ineluctable end in History, evidently cannot read it in Nature!