But this is to get carried away with the categories. Abstraction is an intellectual process, but it is not intellectual only. When men laid down stores for the coming year they abstracted from their immediate, natural hunger, to imagine a future beyond the immediate. It is not activity alone we talk of, but work, the transformation of nature, according to a preconceived notion, i.e. activity guided by mental abstraction. Yes, it is absurd to say that science *alone* is unnatural. In fact all labour is "unnatural", in the sense that it sublates natural laws.
(Incidentally, is 'concrete' the opposite of 'abstract'? The concrete only mean made up of many abstractions, surely. The task of science is to conceptually distinguish the different elements, that of reason to reconstruct many-sided reality, in thought.)
Shane seems to say that only with the advent of communism will man make the evolutionary destiny of the human species the practical object of human conscious activity. But that is to pose the question in a Kantian-ethical way. If there were no collective endeavour before Communism, it would not arrive out of nowhere.
Modern industry is already transforming human conditions. As Engels says: 'The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally. ...[the] solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm