Engels Was Right, There is a Dialectic in Cosmic Evolution

Orientation

Overcoming the “Ecological Garden of Eden”, “Harmony of Nature” Ideology

From the 1960s to the 1990s and beyond the ecology movement, consciously or unconsciously, socialized us to imagine ourselves not only as separate from Nature but as a hinderance or a curse on Nature. We are, they say, invaders, as if from outside of Nature, who have contributed only destruction to it. If we just left Nature alone, all would be fine, as their story goes, because Nature operates harmoniously. The best we can do is to minimize our footprint – producing less, consuming less and populating less. This is argued in the Club of Rome study, Limits To Growth. There they claim that any human-made alterations in the biosphere must automatically be to its detriment. This is the predominant belief about ecology in the capitalist West. It has captured the hearts of not only mystics, neopagans, feminists, and anarcho-primitivists but even of a large portion of those claiming to be Marxists, led by the Frankfurt school.

A brief history of “the dialectics of Nature” in Marxism
When Hegel described the dialectical evolution of consciousness in history he always included a systematic dialectic within nature, in The Phenomenology of Spirit and other works. When Marx and Engels critically integrated Hegel’s work into their own, they turned his work from an idealist to a materialist conception of history. Yet they always discussed how biophysical Nature interacted with society, with Marx calling Nature our “inorganic body”.  In fact, Engels, in two books – Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature – attempted to supplement Hegel’s work with examples of dialectics in Nature already evident in the sciences of his time. Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, well knew that the emergence of quantum physics at the end of the 19^th century posed a threat to dialectical materialism because some philosopher-scientists like Ernst Mach argued that matter had disappeared into subatomic particles. After Lenin dialectical materialism was reduced to a static and dogmatic ideology under Stalin. Soviet scientists became closed to or slow to incorporate new scientific findings in the West about macro nature, such as General-Systems theory, Complexity theory and Non-linear mathematics.

Meanwhile, Western Marxists understandably reacted against the USSR dogmatism, but “threw the baby out with the bathwater”. The Frankfurt school, never appreciative of natural science, threw down the gauntlet, declaring that there was no dialectic in Nature at all, and that Marx’s and Engels’ work was best understood as “historical materialism”. The small book I will be describing in this article, by Karl Seldon, Crises By Nature: How Humanity Saved the Biosphere argues that the latest scientific findings show abundant dialectics in Nature, stretching all the way back to the epoch of subatomic particles at least: Crisis by Nature

 Where are we going?
This article is divided into four parts. First I describe the assumptions of ecology movement ideology that Nature is harmonious and that humanity is a plague on Nature. Second, I expose the Big Oil forces funding the ecology movement since 1970. Third, I demonstrate two instances of natural evolution on earth in which Nature was not self-regulating and ran into created crises. In the latest crisis, humanity, instead of being a plague on Nature, saved the biosphere from an icy death. The last part of the article generalizes from these two instances of past crises by nature. In all stages of cosmic evolution there arise crises of reproduction consisting of a rise in a relevant, key population, a depletion of that population’s resource base and an accumulation of toxins. A new, rising part of Nature seizes on those toxics and transforms them into a new resource base that resolves the crisis for the new epoch that it opens. The appended table summarizes the dialectical nature of cosmic evolution in a visual form.

Why should you care?
I expect that socialists, especially Marxists, will find evidence of a dialectic in Nature very provocative. But if you are not a socialist, why should you read this article? Firstly, you may find it surprising and disturbing that the “ecology” movement is largely funded and controlled by capitalist oil and banking oligarchs, who are terrified of advancing nuclear fusion technology replacing oil as a global resource base. These oligarchs created a boogey man, nuclear fission radioactive waste, to panic the “ecology” movement into anti-nuclearism. Secondly, you should care because the Marxist dialectic of nature upholds a place in Nature for humanity that:

• Does not hold humanity as separate from Nature, as in “Christian” ideologies;
• Does not hold humanity as nothing but a pollutant in Nature and
• Does not melt humanity into Nature as in mystic and Neopagan beliefs that humanity can contribute nothing to Nature.

We are neither above Nature nor below it. Human societies and their individuals are ‘Nature squared’ or ‘Super-Nature’.

I The Ecology Movement and Capitalism
Author Karl Seldon asks, does the ecology movement in the end go with or against the movement of capital today in its decadent phase? Is the ecology movement nothing more than an innovative extension of the whole toxic stream of contemporary capitalist ideology, or does it truly break with that current, veering upwards toward a new, higher region of social negentropy, a new, higher organization of society? Does the “ecology” movement represent a fruition of a new relationship between humanity and Nature, or a diversion? Do the conceptions of the laws of social and biospheric reproduction prevalent in the “ecology” movement point toward a new state of society, historically conscious, ecologically responsible, spiritually and materially prosperous? Or do they, however unconsciously, promote a disaster for the whole biosphere? By serving the prolongation of decadent-phase capitalism?

Often “ecologists”, instead of talking about capitalism as a system, seize upon one of its defects and then reify and demonize that defect, claiming that it can be reformed separately, apart from any transformation of the capitalist system as a whole. For example, categories like “technology” or “urbanism” are not meaningful if they are discussed apart from their shaping by the capitalist system. Those categories are, in fact, specifically about the nature of capitalist technology, and of capitalist urbanism, not about technology and urbanism in general. They are about technology and urbanism as constituted by the inherent system-properties of capital. The looting and polluting of nature which we experience today can only be truly comprehended as a lawful outcome of the nature of capitalism, an inevitable result of its systemic feedbacks.

The ecology movement raises a valid demand by insisting that ecological damages by capitalist industry should be repaired by the capitalists who produce them, its costs internalized into their capital cost accounts as a cost to them. But, for capitalists, in no way are the costs of ecologic repair and restoration for the damages that they inflict as costs of social reproduction ever to be charged to them in their accounting books. Capitalist accounting excludes recognition of such ecological costs, calling them “externalities”. Capitalists systematically “loot” Nature that they appropriate and consume without meeting the costs of biospheric and social continuity which their “externalities” impose.

Capitalist growth, ecological de-growth and dialectical pro-growth

Capital growth, in capitalism’s ascendent phase, can correspond to socialist growth: to increases in goods and services beneficial to society, and to a development of the creative powers of human beings. But this kind of growth is an expression of the drive to accumulation inherent in the Capital-relation. Furthermore “growth” during capitalism’s descending phase is a whole different story. Ecologists are right to complain about the mania for “growth” exhibited by some capitalists who produce useless, insipid products wrapped in plastic for plastic people. They are right to criticize the rapacity of modern society upon the natural world. But the actual “growth” benefit claimed by capitalists is growth of Capital alone. Such “growth” doesn’t expand social use-value or social reproduction at all. Capital growth can mean increases of “goods” detrimental or wasteful to social reproduction,  for example weapons of mass destruction or, as with speculative financial profits, to no goods at all. Further, such capitalist “growth” often leads to destruction of the creative powers of the working population, to looting of wages and social services for private capitalist ‘profit on destruction’.

Ecologists are right to criticize capitalist growth but propose de-growth as a “solution”. They echo Jimmy Carter’s White House speech, demanding that humans [but not oligarchs] make do with less. After training middle class and working class people for over 200 years to expect prosperity, an expansion of goods and services accessible to them, to suddenly demand that they make do with less is completely unrealistic. As it is, people would prefer to go into debt than to face their falling living standards. The perpetuators of the “ecology” ideology, owing either to their pervasive ideological blindness or to their vagueness about capitalist relations of production, offer only Malthusian moralism, not real political solutions. Their proposed policies imply lowering the negentropy of human society. They call for a dismantling of human-species use-value, actual and potential, that has been built up by the human labor for centuries. They want to enforce a contraction of social reproduction and a genocidal contraction of the global human population. The oil and banking oligarchs behind these impositions seek to dismantle all of its virtues and values, the structures, psychic and social of ascendant-phase capitalism. They want to take us back to preindustrial times while they myopically imagine they can live a life of luxury with minimum industry and enjoy an endless accumulation of finance capital. They are so drunk with finance capital they don’t understand it produces no real wealth. They think stock options and derivatives are real.

Dark forests in the ecology movement

“Zero-growth”, “back-to-nature” ecologism is supported by pro-decadence oil and banking capitalists. The “grassroots” ecology movement has been led astray by massive funding from the richest international capitalist circles; in particular, by the Rockefeller group. The table below lists some foundation grants to environmental organizations, just for 1979–1981. Grand Total: $23,187,111. Funding from Rockefeller agencies: $9,201,810.; and from two other plutocratic agencies: $13,985,301.

Recipient of Funding	Amount Received (1979-1981)	Funding Provider
Population Council	$3,650,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Population Council	$3,015,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Aspen Institute	$313,000	Rockefeller Foundation
National Resources Defense Council	$210,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Population Resource Center	$200,000	Rockefeller Foundation
National Center for Policy Institute	$140,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Environmental Policy Institute	$130,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Northern Rockies Action Group	$120,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
New Alchemy Institute	$120,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Conservation Law Foundation of New England	$120,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Center for Law and Social Policy	$115,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Sierra Fund Legal Defense Fund	$110,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis [Club of Rome]	$108,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Wilderness Society	$60,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis [Club of Rome]	$60,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Aspen Institute	$60,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Environmental Defense Fund	$55,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Zen Center [San Francisco]	$50,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Natural Resources Defense Council	$50,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
National Audubon Society	$50,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Conservation Foundation	$50,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Citizens for a Better Environment	$40,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Zero Population Growth Foundation	$37,500	Rockefeller Foundation
World Watch Institute	$35,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Lindisfarne Association	$35,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Massachusetts Audubon Society	$34,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Survival International	$25,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Natural Resources Defense Council	$25,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Community Nutrition Institute	$25,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)	$25,000	Rockefeller Brothers Fund
John Muir Institute	$24,310	Rockefeller Foundation
World Wildlife Fund	$20,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
National Wildlife Foundation	$20,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Environmental Action Foundation	$20,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Southwest Research and Information Center	$15,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Conservation Institute	$15,000	Rockefeller Foundation
Public Land Institute	$10,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Environmental Law Institute	$10,000	Rockefeller Family Fund
Population Council	$7,408,000	Ford Foundation
Natural Resources Defense Council	$1,740,000	Ford Foundation
Alaskan Native Foundation	$1,436,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Alan Guttmacher Institute	$1,000,000	Ford Foundation
Native American Rights Fund	$600,000	Ford Foundation
Environmental Defense Fund	$404,000	Ford Foundation
New England Natural Resources Center	$335,500	Ford Foundation
Wisconsin Center for Public Policy	$268,000	Ford Foundation
Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund	$170,000	Ford Foundation
Washington University Center for Biology of Natural Systems	$79,443	Ford Foundation
Consumer Energy Foundation of America	$76,546	Ford Foundation
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)	$75.417	Ford Foundation
Survival International	$60.000	Ford Foundation
Center for Law and Social Policy	$50,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Conservation Foundation	$30,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Aspen Institute	$29,395	Ford Foundation
Conservation Foundation	$25,000	Ford Foundation
Hawaiian Coalition for Native Claims	$25,000	Ford Foundation
World Wildlife Fund	$25,000	Ford Foundation
Alaskan Native Foundation	$20,000	Ford Foundation
Aspen Institute	$20,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest	$16,000	Ford Foundation
Alan Guttmacher Institute	$15,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Environmental Defense Fund	$15,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Center for Law and Social Policy	$12,000	Ford Foundation
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)	$10,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Hawaiian Coalition for Native Claims	$10,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Massachusetts Audubon Society	$10,000	Ford Foundation
Youth Project	$10,000	Ford Foundation
Consumer Energy Foundation of America	$5,000	Atlantic Richfield Foundation
Institute for Democratic Socialism	$5,000	Ford Foundation

So the supposedly anti-establishment “ecology” movement has some strange bedfellows! Does it surprise you that the “Small is Beautiful” and supposedly anti-Oil-company ideology of “environmentalism” is being massively supported and controlled by three “elite” capitalist groups who rake in oil profits while using the ecology movement as an attack-dog against competition from nuclear fusion? The “ecology movement” started out as a grassroots movement of the people against capitalist pollution, against the unchecked imposition of increasingly lethal, ever-mounting “externalities” upon a defenseless public. But what grass-roots, people-funded organization can compete with these massively funded front-groups for the Rockefeller “invisible dictatorship”? Is it far-fetched to expect that “grassroots” organizations receiving such massive amounts of money would succumb to the “strings” that are “attached” to that money? Is it any wonder that the grassroots ecology movement has been perverted by massive infusions of Rockefeller, Ford and the Atlantic Richfield foundation money, into a social scarcity as a virtue along with Malthusian, “People Are Pollution” ideology?

II How Humanity Saved the Biosphere: The Photosynthesis Crisis

If the capitalist oil and banking oligarchs want to control our perceptions of Nature why would they want us to believe that Nature is closed and self-regulating rather than open and humanity-evolving? The reason: these capitalists want “to have their cake and eat it too”.

• For capitalists Nature is not closed but wide open to their exploitation without limit.
• Meanwhile they tell the vast majority of humanity that Nature is off limits to us. Here they do a switcharoo.
• Suddenly what these capitalists do to Nature is slyly blamed upon all of humanity (except them!). Humanity, they say, is the polluter of Nature, not these capitalists!

In the next section I will be following the extraordinary work of Karl Seldon in his book Crisis By Nature. In the next two sections I will challenge the notion that pre-human Nature was a “Garden of Eden”, arguing instead that:

• The evolution and reproduction of life on earth before humanity was not some “perfect harmony”. It was prone to self-induced crisis-upheaval, not once, but many times.
• In the recent case of the Earth’s biosphere, humanity saved the biosphere from a final return to a dead “snowball Earth”.

The law of the tendency of the rate of photosynthesis to fall
The rate of photosynthesis for the biosphere as a whole is proportional in part to the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentration. The rate of photosynthesis fundamentally determines what ecologists call “the primary productivity” of new living matter for all living organisms. We are told to think that the amount of carbon dioxide in our present atmosphere is high. But, in earth’s deep past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were much higher. These conditions made CO₂ levels a paradise for most plant species in the Carboniferous Period. For prior to the evolution of large numbers of plants there were few biotic users of CO₂ on Earth. Then, as plants evolved, multiplying in the ocean waters and covering most of the land, CO₂ levels were lowered by the photosynthesis activity of these plants. The relationship of photosynthesis and CO₂ is not some static equilibrium. The book Crisis in Nature by Karl Seldon tells us:

Photosynthesis progressively depletes the atmosphere of carbon in its oxidized gaseous form (CO₂) and gradually accumulates much of it in a non-gaseous form, a form unavailable for photosynthesis. That is, this non-gaseous form of carbon is ‘entropy’ for photosynthesis — ‘entropy’ from the standpoint of photosynthesis considered as the leading form of ‘biospheric power’, what is called “free energy” [negentropy]…. Thus, photosynthesis itself causes a progressive lowering in the rate of photosynthesis — photosynthesis slows itself down, brakes itself by lowering its rate-determining concentration of atmospheric CO₂. If this process were to continue…, without any innovation in the foundation of life in the natural means of production of biomass, …then the totality of the biosphere must eventually pass out of existence, as the rate of photosynthesis, and with it the “productivity” of the biosphere, decelerated toward zero.

What growing biospheric instabilities showed up before the emergence of the super social species of humanity?  What were signs of this crisis in “primary productivity”, in the reproduction rate of bio-mass?

Spirals of glaciation: jungles, forests, grassland, desert, tundra and ice
What was really happening in the last 280 million years of biospheric history? The biosphere, in its photosynthesis-centered stage, already reached its biomass peak in the Carboniferous, long before appearance of humanity, and was in “primary productivity” decline ever since. Karl Seldon paints its bleak final scenario:

We can readily envision the final scenario: The climate continues to deteriorate as the CO₂ level continues to fall. Glaciations grow more frequent and more severe. The ice retreats for a time after each onslaught. … But each time it gathers greater force, laying siege anew to the tropics and cutting deeper into the last fastness of the once great forest. Finally, the twin equator-ward pincers of the two polar caps meet, clanging shut like frigid, icicle-fanged jaws over the world of life they have just devoured. Having broken through the last defenses of the plant world, marine and continental alike …of the life-world, of the biosphere, as a whole… In the end: a sterilized planet, alternately frozen or arid, but shaved clean by an ice-edged razor of that mantle of life which once adorned it with such luxuriance and promise!

The last 3 million years of earth’s history has hosted, not any Garden of Eden but an unusually harsh climate. The Quaternary Period was an exceptional period in the history of our globe. The relentlessly, rapidly repeated advance and retreat of glaciation is a phenomenon specifically restricted to this period. Seldon continues:

We see within and leading up to this pattern of devastation a prolonged trajectory of decay, a movement of dense jungle giving way to temperate forest, thence to grassland, and finally to desert, barren tundra, and ice; a movement, thus, toward the denudation of the continental land surfaces — toward the scraping clean of the film of biotic matter from the underlying lithosphere upon which it had grown up.

What drove these vast ecological and climatic movements? Strange as it may sound the vast forests themselves, together with their marine counterparts caused their own demise through their own lowering of their own rate of photosynthesis, by their depletion of atmospheric CO₂. Their own inherent mode of interaction with the rest of Nature was also their own undoing. The glaciers overwhelmed the trees.

Seldon poetically closes:

The flood-tide of white which overwhelmed the once-dominant inter-continental carpets of forest green, was a ‘self-reflexion’ of the forest itself, the rebound of its pre-eminence, the mirror image of its burgeoning growth… The real domination of photosynthesis is the harbinger of the end of that photosynthesis-dominance.

In summary, chillingly, our biosphere’s history has been that of one long decline since the Carboniferous.  A ‘turning-point crisis’ in the Early Permian was followed by a ‘terminal crisis’ beginning at the end of the Cretaceous with the demise of the dinosaurs. This continued into the glaciered conditions of the Tertiary and Quaternary, potentially fatal conditions for the biosphere. Post-Pleistocene humanity was not born into any “Garden of Eden”, but into a biospheric desolation, born of internecine warfare within Nature herself.

Only an innovation in and by the biosphere itself could turn that photosynthetic entropy back into energy for life. What could that biospheric innovation be? Humanity!  Post-Pleistocene humanity was born into the ruins of biospheric desolation.

Humanity co-creates a new level of nature: the noosphere

Its socio-historical evolution into humanity was the ontological innovation whereby the biosphere saved itself. The accumulation of carbon in the bodies of trees, plants and animals of land and sea gradually transformed into coal, oil and natural gas while waste for photosynthesis carbon bodies eventually became negentropy for human, social-reproductive, industrial practice. By such practice I mean the totality of human mental and physical labor culturally accumulating in the form of tools and systems for harnessing energy stored across generations which, in part, consciously but mostly unconsciously reheated the biosphere. The slow-spreading, planet-surrounding socio-historical layer made by humanity created a new Earth envelope that Vernadsky and Chardin named the “noosphere”.  A novel age of fossil-fuels-burning returned carbon accumulations to the atmosphere as CO₂ helped revive those fragments of photosynthesis that survived the Pleistocene succession of Great Ice Ages. Humanity started by burning living vegetation in slash-and burn horticulture, then much later, in industrialized societies, powered itself by burning products of Nature’s fossilized ancient vegetation.

For the ideology of “back to nature” ecologism, humanity always only “upsets” the “balance of Nature”.  But, in fact, the “balance of Nature” continually upsets itself. As Seldon wrote, it is not primarily “outside agitators” but ‘inside agitators’ that “disturb” Nature. Humanity, the socialized arm of Nature, can set Nature right as well as wrong.  Biospheric Nature is no paradise. She is in trouble without us. Humanity is an outgrowth of Nature. Without us, Nature would be unbalanced, incomplete and doomed to an asteroidal or glaciered demise.

As we shall see in the next section, just as the innovation of humanity saved the biosphere from photosynthetic decline, so photosynthesis itself solved an earlier Nature-crisis, the heterotrophic or fermentation crisis.

III The Fermentation Crisis
The heterotroph hypothesis

Present-day plants are “autotrophs”, meaning “self-feeders”. The term “heterotroph”, on the contrary, describes organisms drawing their nourishment from sources “other-than-themselves”, such as the hypothesized primitive single cells, dependent for their food on ‘atmosynthesis’. Thus, the name “Heterotroph Hypothesis” given to Oparin’s and Haldane’s model of biospheric origin. The multicellular-organisms-dominated, photosynthesis-based biosphere, which came to its crisis in the geologically latest epoch of the history of earth-life, was itself a solution to a much more ancient crisis, a crisis of the pre-multicellular, pre-photosynthetic biosphere whose life, in this hypothesis, was confined to the warm primeval ocean and to exclusively unicellular life-forms.

The ‘Heterotroph Hypothesis’ ,dominant at the time Seldon wrote Crises By Nature,, the original form of the biosphere was based, not on respiration as today for both higher plants and ‘higher animals’, but on fermentation.  Respirative metabolism requires ‘breathing’ oxygen. Fermentation, on the contrary, is anaerobic – oxygen-less – and a much less energy-efficient metabolic ‘technology’.  Large organic molecules represent “food” for heterotrophic living cells — sources of biological free energy, ‘bio-negentropy’, for their fermentative metabolism. Molecules such as acetic acids (vinegars) and alcohols are its excreta; poisonous for fermenting organisms. These molecules could be utilized as energy sources only after free gaseous oxygen (O₂) was released into the atmosphere by photosynthesizing plants, making respirative metabolism possible.

Atmo-photosynthesis
The synthesis of organic molecules that fed the slowly growing heterotrophic populations of the early ocean was accomplished by the primitive, oxygen-less atmosphere itself. Seldon calls this process ‘atmo-photo-synthesis’. This process was driven by molecular energy input derived ultimately from sunlight, perhaps also from self-heating of the Earth due to nuclear decay of heavier, radioactively unstable atoms that it contained. Gaseous methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water (vapor) were, in the Heterotroph Hypothesis, the main constituents of the early atmosphere. They combined into larger, heavier carbohydrates molecules whose weight precipitated them into the ocean because. Out of that resulted the warm, brothy solution which accumulated, concentrated and promoted within itself further molecules-building and molecules-expanding reactions.

The Crisis of ‘atmo-synthesis’
As this process of the primitive biosphere continued, waste products of fermentation accumulated in the primeval sea as a growing reservoir of “toxic pollution” relative to the fermentative metabolic technology of primitive unicellular life. This threatened to poison the mounting swarms of heterotrophs populating that sea. Seldon notes that the analogy to today’s fermenting bacteria and yeast, which die in their own alcoholic excretions in the process of winemaking. Furthermore, life-sustaining need for organic molecules of this mounting population eventually outstripped their supply-rate from ‘atmosynthesis’ causing a relative depletion of food resources and a worsening scarcity of metabolizable molecular matter.

As Alexander Oparin wrote:

Sooner or later this process must have come to a natural end with the complete exhaustion of organic nutrient material and the death of all living things. That this did not actually happen is due to the fact that some micro-organisms had acquired the ability to utilize light energy by virtue of their pigmentation.

Photosynthesis to the rescue

At least one lineage of primitive organisms, under this mounting constraint internalized the process of atmospheric synthesis of organic molecules. Evolution branched in the direction of internal synthesis of food molecules. The more perfected forms of photosynthesis involve release of free gaseous oxygen. Free oxygen, bubbling up out of the ooze of the primitive sea, transformed the chemical nature of the atmosphere from a “reducing” (electrons-donating) to an “oxidizing” (electrons-grabbing) state, and thereby terminating ‘atmosynthesis’. Oxygen ended ‘atmosynthesis’ by disrupting its key chemical reactions. Oxygen formed an ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, shutting out much of the ultraviolet photon flux that had driven ‘atmosynthesis’.

Furthermore, this screening of harsh ultraviolet rays also facilitated invasion of the exposed land surfaces by biological organisms. Free oxygen allowed the metabolism of fermentation to be upgraded into the much more bio-energy-profitable, “aerobic” or oxygen-consuming metabolism of respiration. Once respiration came into play, the formidable oceanic accumulations of ‘heterotrophic pollution’ – ‘waste’ or ‘entropy’ for fermentative life –  became energy resources for respiration. Molecules, including alcohols and lactic and butyric acids, could be mined as food, become biological “free energy” or ‘material negentropy’, for reparative life.

Thus photosynthesis ‘solved’ the fundamental contradiction of the heterotrophic biosphere. The ‘fermentation crisis’ revealed a ‘law of the tendency of the rate of fermentation to fall’ just as there later arose a tendency of the rate of photosynthesis to fall. Photosynthesis became the basis of a tremendous expansion in the energy available to sustain and advance the living process and thus of a powerful growth of the biosphere itself. The photosynthetic activity of biological agents remade the atmosphere, the entire biosphere and the rocky face of the earth itself. The ‘ozonic’, atmospheric and other geologic consequences of photosynthesis opened the land to life for the first time, bringing the continental surfaces, the outer surfaces of the lithosphere, as well as the whole of the hydrosphere, into the biosphere. Both then grew under the biospheric blanket of life.

IV The Pattern Common to the Two Crises
We see a pattern common to both the photosynthetic and ‘atmosynthetic’ epochs of the biosphere. In both epochs it was the accumulation of a relative entropy by continuation of their own central self-reproduction processes that spelled the end of each’s particular reproduction-process. The entropy accumulation of the previous mode of reproduction then formed part of the essential resource base, the “negentropy”, for the superseding one, the ‘launching-pad’ from which it leapt. Chardin himself couldn’t have identified this pattern more poetically than Karl Seldon:

The smoldering ash in the bowl of the torch of life leaps into flame again as it passes to new hands. With each such passage, the crisis is resolved by an expansion in energy-appropriation. A wider sphere of Nature is drawn into denser self-connection, integrated into the web of ecologic inter-relationship. A higher, more inclusive and more intensive self-organization and interconnection of Nature is born. Yet each of these ‘solutions’ or levels of relationship…is inherently unstable – self-attacking in the long run, because each such “solution” is founded upon a relatively finite constituent of nature…

Each new level produces a new relative negentropy, which the core life process of that “solution” appropriates. But that life process also consumes and gradually depletes its basic resource, converting that resource into a new entropy relative to that level. But what is poison at a lower level becomes a potential resource for the next higher level.

V The “Dialectics of Nature” in Cosmic Evolution
All of these formulations hinge on the meaning of ‘evolution’. Herein it means increase in the ‘density’ and ‘intensity’ of the self-organization of matter. It means change toward increasing negentropy or complexity – taking into account that “negentropy” is a measure of degree of organization and of the “information content” of material organization.

Each of the successive stages of the biosphere’s evolution rests upon an appropriation of a part of the non-biosphere, of the rest of Nature outside it, which is limited and exhaustible. Therefore, each of these stages cannot stand forever. Each is vulnerable to demise.  On one side, it is vulnerable to using up that ‘external’ basis of its reproduction.  On the other, to an accumulation of results of its own operation which are also ‘outside’ of its appropriation, even toxic to it. The latter is either not usable to it or even an obstacle to its continuation. Each stage is therefore self-negating. Each terminates its own operation after a time if left to its own devices. Further continuation demands transformation, supersession of that stage, a qualitative leap. Only a new morphology, one no longer restricted to the old resource basis; one capable of utilizing, instead of being blocked or damaged by, the accumulated results of the old reproduction-process, can provide continuity of life in a novel way. Each successive crisis resolves itself by an expansion of living nature, bringing a wider sphere of the cosmos into a richer interconnection with itself.

We are not talking about absolutely repetitive “cycles” here, but about spirals. These spirals do not automatically ascend but endure crises, which can also result in devolution, not only further evolution. But evolution is also irreversible. In an evolutionary continuum the photosynthesis-respiration biosphere will not turn back into the atmosynthesis-fermentation biosphere. The present biosphere will not revert to the photosynthetic-respiratory one but will go to something new, more evolved or devolved. We work for our noosphere – for humanity – evolving to a new, higher stage of negentropy, likely based upon fusion power. The idea is that nature does have a history, that the biosphere as a whole, the planet as a whole and the universe as a whole self-evolves, continually, irreversibly, and cumulatively.

What and where is the dialectic in nature? It is in:

• depletion of finite resources,
• accumulation of relative toxics, and
• increases in the depleting, polluting population’s size and density which together produce a crisis of self-reproduction (antithesis).

The synthesis that then results is an emergent process whereby the accumulation of toxics is transformed into a new energy base as this emergent process actualizes a new resource basis, as the population is advanced and transformed by a new complexity in its interconnections with exobiotic nature, which are deeper, richer and more energizing.

Please see the table posted below, entitled: ‘Cosmogenesis and the Dialectic of Nature’. As Heraclitus might have said, only that which becomes can be. This table might seem overwhelming without any guidance, so here is what I would suggest.

• First, notice the world is divided into 3 scales: micro, macro and meso at the top in caps.
• Second on all. Three scales of cosmic evolution are driven by three processes; depletion of resources, accumulation of toxics and a rising population. They are labelled “process input” across the page, in the micro, meso and macrocosms and create a crisis.
• Third, these crises are solved by an emergent invention labelled in micro, meso and macro scales across the top of the page
• Fourth, notice that cosmic evolution moves from simplicity in the lower left to complexity in the upper left, from sub-atomic, galactic to the human social noosphere.
• Fifth, in the last column are the time scales from 14 billion years to 150-220 thousand years ago.
• Sixth, beginning at the lower left, move across to the lower right to see how cosmic evolution moves as if it were a snapshot of a level.
• Seventh, move vertically up the page to see how cosmic evolution emerges to higher and higher orders of complexity as if cosmic evolution were a movie.

                                                                                          Cosmogenesis and the Dialectics of Nature

	MICROCOSM			MACROCOSM			MESOCOSM
LEVEL OF COMPLEXITY	PROCESS INPUT; PROCESS DEPLETION OF RESOURCES	EMERGENT INVENTION	PROCESS OUTPUT. PROCESS ACCUMULATION	PROCESS INPUT; PROCESS DEPLETION OF RESOURCES	EMERGENT INVENTION	PROCESS OUTPUT. PROCESS ACCUMULATION	PROCESS INPUT; PROCESS DEPLETION OF RESOURCES	EMERGENT INVENTION	PROCESS OUTPUT. PROCESS ACCUMULATION	TIME RANGE
Human Social noosphere					Biosphere III		Wood, metals, coal, oil, natural gas   Animal and human slaves	Hunting, gathering,  Domestication of animals, agriculture industry	Human synthesized chemicals,  Natural and social alienation	150k-200k
Multicellular Metabiotic  Biosphere	CO2 Chlorophyll,  Hemoglobin 02	Photosynthesis Respiration	Ox solid h20 Toxic to Atmo-synthesis	Atmosphere Co2, 02 Continents	Biosphere II Ocean and land life	Coal, oil, Natural gas Glaciers, storms, earth-quakes, vulcanism		Individual Multi-cellular  (proto social groups)		1 Billion years
Uni-cellular  biosphere	Liquid H20 Gas molecules	Fermentation Atomo- Synthesis	Urea, alcohol Butyric acid O2	Atmospheric oceans, Star light	Biosphere I Oceans alive with cell population	Cellular Waste products				2 billion years
Molecular Chemical Planetary	Uranium, thorium, other radioactive. Other radio-active fissionable atoms	Fission Drives planetary chemical evolution	Fission products heat	Enriched interstellar medium	Stars and planets ; Crises in planetary Interior  vulcanism	Massive crystals, magma				4.5 billion
Atomic Stellar	Protons (hydrogen atoms) Four basic forces	Fusion: production Of atoms’ Electrostatic vs nuclear forces	Heavy nuclei Heavy atoms Iron	Galactic Hydrogen Gas clouds (protons)	Galaxies Stars Production And destruction of stars	Higher chemical Elements: Enriched interstellar medium				8 billion
Sub-atomic Galactic	Free  Fields	Time-Space Continuum Inflation	Four basic forces		Galaxies					14 billion