Biology¶
Core Argument¶
In his chapter on biology, Engels develops a dialectical materialist critique of both mechanistic natural science and the ideological misapplications of Darwinian theory. Life, he argues, is not a static property but a process inherently containing its own negation: “living means dying.” Death is not an external accident but an essential element of life, a dialectical contradiction that abolishes the superstitious notion of an immortal soul. This principle governs the organic body, where reaction is independent and mediated by assimilation, unlike the passive reactions of mechanical or chemical systems.
Engels engages directly with contemporary debates on the origin of life. He dismisses the old assumption of spontaneous generation from decomposition as belonging to the epoch of immutable species. Chemistry now shows that decomposition produces products increasingly closer to the inorganic world, and protein—the essential vehicle of cell-formation—decomposes first and has never been rebuilt. It is therefore foolish to attempt to explain the origin of even a single cell directly from dead matter rather than from structureless living protein. He rejects the theories of Liebig, Helmholtz, and Wagner, who proposed that life is eternal and its germs transported through space; protein, being the most unstable carbon compound, could not endure such conditions. Metabolism is the essential element of life in protein bodies, and if protein could be prepared chemically, it would exhibit life—but that is not yet possible.
Turning to evolution, Engels insists that the concept of the individual is purely relative, and that the whole of organic nature proves the inseparability of form and content. He delivers a sharp polemic against the Malthusian core of Darwinism: the struggle for existence must be strictly limited to struggles resulting from over-population. Darwin’s mistake is lumping together two separate things—selection by over-population pressure and selection by greater capacity for adaptation to altered circumstances. The entire Darwinian theory, Engels argues, is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and bourgeois economic competition. Man produces, whereas animals only collect, making an unqualified transference of animal laws to human society impossible. Under capitalism, the struggle for existence assumes the form of the socialist revolution to protect productive forces from the destructive effects of the capitalist social order. The conception of history as class struggles is richer than reducing it to the struggle for existence.