The left needs to re-examine its darwinian views. Sadly, they are frozen in place (although Marx was suspicious of darwinism) even as the old paradigm is collapsing. However, paradigms come and go and there is need for a completely generalized view of evolution that stands above the biochemical substrate. No matter how hard you try you can’t reduce evolution to chemistry (in its current form). The issue isn’t complex: the causal mechanics of chemistry is not able to explain how life emerges and it can’t even discuss the issue of consciousness.
The left is so confused it can’t read anything that isn’t hard core scientism and yet marxists struggling with Hegel should know better. Our approach has nothing to do with Hegel but that philosopher was alert to the way some ideation factor must exist. We don’t have to get into Hegel or debates over idealism and materialism. Our account speaks on its own terms at a metalevel, as afar as it can.
This account smacks of idealism, but it is nothing of the kind: the point is that some form factor emerges in evolution and this is behind the reifications of life. However we don’t see that directly.
Our discussion is like describing some process on a scratch note book, an eyewitness account of what we see and an inference that we don’t see everything. It is totally baseless to call that ‘idealism’.
The equations of physics would then be idealism…
In the end the question of evolution is intractable for the reasons above and yet we can see how easily we can at least provide a overall model. The result is simple, elegant and adapted to specifics…
Note that the ‘evolution of freedom’ applies to history and see the way in which free action and system action ‘tutor’ freedom as it were and more directly show democracy, socialism and communism as ideas emerge in periods of transition.
1848+: The End(s) of History 