"That the solar system has a history is a dialectical principle. That the universe has a history is a dialectical principle. The punctuated equilibrium idea is exactly what a dialectician would predict that paleontology would come to as a modification of Darwin's totally gradualist evolution. Another name for "dialectics" is basically "evolutionism". Engels' discussion of the dialectic of chance and necessity reminds of modern chaos theory."
I think this is taking things a little far.
If the universe had a history which embodied a type of dialectical movement of negation and negation of negation, that would be one thing. The history of the universe could also be a history in which non-dialectical principles hold sway. That the universe has a history is not in itself a dialectical principle. Rather, the fact that the universe has a history is only a necessary precondition for the possibility of a universe which operates in some way "dialectically."
Second of all, evolutionism is not dialectics, not in the least. I cringed when I read this, because it harkens back to the postivistic, neo-Kantian formulation of Marxism given by the labor burearcracy and reformists in Social Democratic parties across Europe before and as they forgot their Marx as they marched into WW1. Evolution and dialectics are two different types of mechanisms which become operative in different types of processes. Evolutionism, as I think most people think of the word, is simply another word for gradualism, and perhaps could be summed up as the idea that 'cumulative accumulation of small quanitative differences eventually effecgts a qualitative change,' while dialectics alone holds out the possibility for qualitative difference precisely without evolutionism.
Just another way to see how different dialectics and evolutionary processes are: think of how the end product of a dialectical process relates its starting points in comparison to how the end product of an evolutionary process compares with its start. Dialectics always implies both progress over the old yet also a retention of it -- a retaining while changing -- while evolution has no such interest in retention, except accidental. A synthesis, insofar as it is possible for dialectically related claims to synthesize, retains some of what was originally posited just as it retains some of what negated that which was posited. An end-product of evolution is contingently and accidentally related to its origins. Dialectical movement is precisely NOT contingent and accidental - it is necessary.
This points to yet a third difference between dialectics and evolutionism. Evolution usually describes what happens to a given system while that system is being battered by external/outside factors over any given time period. Dialectics describes, on the other hand, how a given system develops from itself, how any posited (seemingly consistent) system develops from its own innner inconsistency. Dialectics is always the story of how one whole develops into different wholes from itself. Evolution is the story of how one whole interacts with other wholes to become a wholly different whole.
On "punctuated equilibrium," this seems to be a model which decribes, apparently, natural selection very well. It also has obvious parallels with dialectical materialism's view of civilization: P.E. allows a place for contingent yet qualitativly important shifts in ecosystems - revolutions in the natural community - just as D.M. allows for such change in civilizations. Yet is this any more than two parallel but non-identical mechanisms? More particularly, I could note just one way in which they do not seem similar: dialectics is directional, while there is no guarantee of such with P.E.
Of course, this can be seen as a question of "Whose Dialectics?"
Hegel though that the movement which displayed dialectics was a movement between the states of (historical) consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a movement making way for Absolute Knowledge. Later in his career, in his Logic, dialectics held a somewhat different place in his system (though he never repudiated the Phenomenology as an introduction to his perspective) -- as the name given to the process by which the basic categories of the Absolute (being, nothing, becoming, determinate being, substance, etc.) relate to and unfold into each other. In any case, dialectics as a process is something which is internal or mental -- one state of consciousess gives way to another, as one negates the other, in the case of the Phenomenology, or in the case of the Logic, one concept gives way to another from the perspective of Absolute Knowing.
Marx essentially endorses the dialectical perspective, of course, and yet sees that what negates is not consciousness per se, as in the objective idealism of Hegel, but humans. For Marx, one class negates another. His phrase "expropriate the expropriators" gives evidence to this basic shift from Hegel to Marx, the shift from idealism to materialism. Alexandre Kojeve gives, in this sense, a Marxian introduction to dialectics at the beginning of his very influential "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" in that one of the first things he notes is that ACTION, human action, NEGATES. Thinking does not negate, only action does. This is Marx's "inversion" of Hegel's idealist dialectics, insofar as I've come to understand it.
So one human action negates others, while still other action negates this negated state still. Yet Marx, to my understanding, never makes the further claim, that all of natural processes happen dialectically. The essence of dialectical movement, it seems to me, could be simplified into the idea that "one world-view, followed through to its fullest extent, produces the opposite world-view" for Hegel or "one material interest, followed through to its fullest, inevitably provokes the opposite interest" for Marx. Why should we assume all of nature to operate by such a principle?
More importantly, it seems to me, we should ask if leftists need to prove whether all of the natural realm operates dialectically? Marx's point was that the realm of civilization -- with its history of class struggle -- is where dialectics lives. This point hasn't even been accepted yet. Dialectics hasn't even been accepted yet! Why should Marxists venture all-too-boldly into speculative sciences whose models change more rapidly than others, such as particle physics, before all the evidence is in, if only to set themselves up to later get egg on their face?
I don't know, maybe none of this made sense? I'm very curious about this topic, considering that I have just re-read Marx's early manuscript which forms his essential critique of Hegel - of what is both good and bad in him -- and have been comparing it to how Kojeve understands dialectics/negativity, and both of these positions to the seemingly pre-Marxism/idealist-inspired Zizekian dialectics, though I have been interrupted by this task when I received a new, historically-driven reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
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