Hi, everyone
Steve, I haven't finished reading all your posts, yet, but just thought I'd throw this in...does what you describe here have an analogy/correlation to phase transition? Engles is mentioned in a highly deprecatory fashion, however, there is some definite insight in his work.
From Wiki:
Dialectics of Nature, by
Friedrich Engels (1883), is an
unfinished work which applies Marxist ideas, and in particular the principles of
Dialectical Materialism, to science.
One 'law' proposed in the Dialectics of Nature, is: 'The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
and vice versa'. Probably the most commonly cited example of this is the change of water from a liquid to a gas, by increasing its temperature (although Engels also describes other examples from chemistry). In contemporary science, this process is known as a
phase transition. There has also been an effort to
apply this mechanism to social phenomena, whereby population increases result in changes in social structure [1].
Dialectics and its study was derived from
Hegel who had studied the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus. Heraclitus taught that everything was constantly changing and that all things consisted of two opposite elements which changed into each other as night changes into day, light into darkness, life into death etc.
Engels's work follows on from what Engels had said about science in
Anti-Dühring. It includes the famous
The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, which has also been published separately as a pamphlet. Engels argues that the hand and brain grew together - an idea supported by later fossil discoveries, though it seems the
foot came first. (
See Australopithecus afarensis: Bipedalism.)
Most of the work is fragmentary, but it has points of interest. In biology, he says:
Vertebrates. Their essential character: the grouping of the whole body about the
nervous system. Thereby the development of
self-consciousness, etc. becomes possible. In all other animals the nervous system is a secondari affair, here it
is the basis of the whole organisation.