One of my favourite theorists is the Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. In books like The Dialectical Biologist and Biology as Ideology, he studied the dialectic between organism and environment to understand biology in its wider context. The role of a Marxist scientist is to be anti-Cartesian, pushing for a broader intersectional understanding of a subject with the intent of changing something through political means instead of reductively isolating things until they reinforce existing power structures. My horticulture and socioecology work is doing Marxist geography with plants that I understand through Marxist ethics/biology. Nature is the proof of dialectics and each plant is nothing but internal and external dialectics across spacetime. The praxis of the work is creating the most scientifically valid space that achieves the greatest socioecological mission over time, transforming the city’s greenspace in line with my Marxist urbanism, art theory, and pedagogy views. Nothing has been more important for my work than a formal and applied understanding of dialectical materialism.

I think there is a mistake people make (those both for and against dialectics applying to nature and non-social sciences), where they expect nature to “follow” dialectical schema, as if a molecule had to open a tiny book of communist theory to know when to dissociate. I think this understanding of dialectics comes from a long history of using scientific phenomena as examples when explaining common tools of dialectical thinking. It’s a little crude.

Rather, dialectics is about how to think better, without reifying or being one-sided. There is no reason it shouldn’t apply to everything we can think about. To claim that dialectics apply to science means that using dialectics gives us a better understanding than a “metaphysical” view (or whatever you want to call the opposite of a dialectical view), and from personal experience I very much believe it does.

Im the sense that scientific debate can be seen as a form of dialectics, yes.

In the sense that the krebs cycle or gravity are somehow subject to hegelianism, and you can discover scientific principles by just applying hegel hard enough at it? No. That’s just Engels getting over his skis and you can call me a menshevik for that if you want.

Yes.

This too is a great read:

At the heart of Dialectical Physics lies a radical yet rigorously grounded proposition: that contradiction is not merely a feature of our descriptions of the world, but a fundamental property of being itself. Reality, according to this framework, is not a static assemblage of immutable entities, but a continuously evolving field of oppositional forces in dynamic tension. These contradictions are not errors to be eliminated or logical inconsistencies to be corrected; rather, they are the generative principles of change, motion, and transformation. This view redefines existence not as something fixed, but as processual becoming—a ceaseless unfolding driven by the internal polarities embedded within every phenomenon.

A striking example of this ontological contradiction is the relationship between mass and space. In classical physics, mass is treated as substance—an intrinsic property of matter, dense and cohesive, capable of exerting gravitational pull. Space, conversely, is conceived as an inert background—an empty arena in which objects reside and events transpire. But Dialectical Physics reconceptualizes space as a material field in its own right, albeit one that expresses the opposite tendency of mass: instead of cohesion and concentration, space manifests decohesion and extension. Mass pulls inward; space pushes outward. Their dialectical opposition is not antagonistic but constitutive—it is through their tension that the curvature of spacetime, gravitational dynamics, and the very architecture of the cosmos arise. Gravity itself is not merely a force among others, but the dialectical negotiation between mass-induced cohesion and the expansive tension of space.

This dialectical insight extends seamlessly into the quantum realm, where the most celebrated puzzle—wave-particle duality—can be reinterpreted as an ontological unity of opposites. Quantum entities are not “really” waves or “really” particles; rather, they embody both modes of being in a unified yet internally contradictory totality. The wave aspect reveals a continuous, probabilistic, and field-like character, while the particle aspect reveals localization, discreteness, and interactional finitude. These are not separate identities, but dialectical poles within a singular, dynamic process. The apparent paradox is a reflection of our attempt to describe a dialectical reality using static classical categories. Only when we accept that the electron, the photon, or the quantum system is both continuous and discrete, depending on context, do we begin to grasp the depth of dialectical unity in quantum phenomena.

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Thus, Dialectical Physics affirms that contradiction is not a breakdown of logic—it is the logic of breakdown and breakthrough, the method through which systems evolve, transform, and generate novelty. Whether in the behavior of subatomic particles, the formation of stars, the evolution of life, or the dialectics of society, it is through the struggle of opposing forces that reality moves forward. Motion, structure, complexity, and emergence are not byproducts—they are expressions of contradiction-in-process. To engage with the universe truthfully, we must learn not merely to observe it but to think it dialectically—to embrace contradiction as the ontological engine of all that is, was, and is yet to become.

Everything can be studied dialectically because everything has external and internal contradictions

Yes, or, at least in practice it does. You can debate if that means just that we understand everything diallectically because that’s just how our perception and knowledge faculties are or because things “actually” are that way in some metaphysical way if you really want to. But I think that is an irrelevant meaningless question/distinction, the kind that Marxism, as a philosophy, does away with.

ITT: What too much theory does to a mfer

I think the Kuhnian “normal science --> anomalies --> paradigm shift” model of scientific progress can be seen as a kind of dialectical process.

Dialectics can only change how we interpret the material, not the material itself. Its just an epistemology.

There are plenty of types of coevolution with predators and prey. The lifecycle of bacteria, fungi, worms, and viruses can elucidate a food web by showing where different parts of their maturation happen. So immune systems and virulence create a super structure in a sense.

There’s competition for binding for receptors in natural environments as far as biochemistry is concerned. Something about the sensitivity and number of receptors being a super structure.

But generally science has no obligation to make sense. The higgs field probably doesn’t exist in response to some other force in a sense that is readily attributes to Hegalian dynamics. The scientific method is a different way by which you can observe the way things happen.

As there are no positive feedback loop systems, everything is dialectical (acting agent or process with a negative feedback loop is synthesized into describing system as a whole, both the actor and the limit, providing new holistic view)

But no, dialectics is about processes, not facts, and thus in science a sane way for dialectics is theory developments among community (purely socially idealistic theory of science, if we take hegelian) or searching for limits of something (where “antithesis” starts to play a role), even in thought experiments, to find the counteracting forces or logic. Particle moving in empty space is not, per se, a process, in its own frame it’s stationary and without any reference you can’t even determine if it’s moving. not everything is useful to be thought about as a system or process, sometimes models do just fine job of describing stuff

Like say a light reflection, without thinking too much about how it works you can perfectly well construct a shitty telescope, just knowing that angle of incidence and angle of reflection are equal. But then you can start thinking about process of reflection, would it work with 1 atom thin mirror (no), would it work with very thin stripes of metal (oops, got a rainbow), would it work with non metal (yes, but weird stuff with polarization), would it work with light intensity bigger than heat dissipation (also no), the process of reflection contains within it the limits of what you can do, but most of the time you don’t care about them, and simple law gives you enough info (but doesn’t describe those limits, and thus you construct a new law or model when you run into them, meanwhile underlying process was always the same)

just as well you can construct materialistic social dialectics of science, for example you can’t make a looking glass without material advances in glass making and polishing stuff by some nerds in venice. you can invent most beautiful theories of light imaginable in ancient egypt, won’t bring you any closer to making lasers. science and applied engineering/materials exist in very tight (dialectical) relationships, you invent new stuff to investigate something, than new stuff is used somewhere else to discover something else, they coexist and push each other and limit each other

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