“….the materialist-scientific method uses abstraction as a method for ascertaining scientific laws whereby nature’s complexes can be isolated for analysis and investigated. Moreover, if there is any meaningful approach to examining nature it lies in recognizing that the world is in a constant state of flux…”
How Astronomer Anton Pannekoek Planned To Storm the Heavens 07/02/2021
Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek combined the roles of an important socialist thinker and a prominent scientist. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There has always been a healthy crossover between Marxism and the natural sciences. Frederick Engels kept abreast of the latest scientific knowledge in his own time. In his work
Dialectics of Nature, Engels warned that no matter how far humans were able to perfect their forms of social organisation, a time would inevitably come when the Earth could no longer sustain organic life:
And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the Earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.
This article was originally written in Japanese. Article in Japanese is here.
Almost a century ago in 1929, a 27-year-old young researcher, who would later make a name for himself as a leading authority in molecular biology, wrote his first book while working in a laboratory at Cambridge University, England. The title of this work was The World, the Flesh and the Devil (Japanese translation by Yasuo Shizume, published by Misuzu Shobo: the same hereafter). The text begins with the following words.
âThere are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate.â
As a young scientist who embodied the zeitgeist, John Desmond Bernal boldly predicted humanityâs âfuture of fateâ that lay ahead of human reason and scientific rationality. Humans would fuse with machines, allowing them to move beyond their biological limits. They would advance into outer space, live in space colonies, and evolve into super individuals whose brains would all be connected togeth