As I have said before, the key ideology of the Era of Modernity,1870s to the 1960s, was popular or vulgar Uniformitarianism, lying never far beneath western liberal capitalism democracy and fascism/nazism and socialism/communism.
In its popularly understood form, uniformitarianism claimed tomorrow would be like yesterday and yesterday was like today : and you know what today is like here in the earthquake/famine free western world.
Life and Nature today, here, is calm, peaceful, predictable and basically open to anything humanity might throw at it.
Controllable by humanity to such an extent that one could pick future winners (ideas, nations, technologies) with quiet confidence because in the unlikely evident one winner proved a dud, humanity could quickly make a mid-course adjustment.
Nature won't bite, indeed couldn't bite.
Reductionism of gene and idea pools (and hence of possible alternative visions) quickly followed : pick the scientifically determined winners and bin the rest, with Zyklon B if need be.
Showing posts with label reductionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reductionism. Show all posts
Friday, September 25, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Winning a total war : its about building a Big Tent of all possible talent, not in draining down your gene pool
Early to mid September 1940 were undoubtably the darkest weeks of WWII.
Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.
There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.
Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.
Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.
There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.
Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Defeating WWII
By September 1945, the Axis had been decisively defeated.
End of story --- or was it?
Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.
End of story --- or was it?
Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Eggs in a basket : too many or too few?
On a continuum of human personality types, there will always be those of us who uncomfortable about the numbers of eggs in the basket - even there are just two eggs, one black and one white, they'd still like them in separate, non touching, baskets.
And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.
And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
unpredictable small atoms, small microbes... and small children
'Pop' reductionism was the real (underlying) ideology of the Era of Progress.
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Murderous Enlightenment Project sought to reduce all Reality to a 'clearcut' list of the things worthy and unworthy of continued existence
If we ever did succeed in 'cleansing' the ocean of all of its germs (either by a deliberate Mikrobefrei Aktion or simply by continuing our limitless consumption of most of the world's resources) the atmosphere would fairly quickly lose half of its oxygen and humanity would rapidly die out.
This fact still isn't widely known by laypeople today - nor was it known by many scientists back in 1940.
I mention this only because the world in 1940 was as consumed with killing off all the germs in general, including those found in sea water, as the Nazis were about killing of all the Jewish 'germs' in particular.
The civilized world in 1940 widely supported the effort to greatly reduce biological diversity by ridding the world of all kinds of "pests", an idea that spilled over into the minds of the ordinary Nazi (and their ordinary/silent tolerators) when thinking about a possible solution for the 'problem' of the Jews.
Among the most annoying pests in 1940 was household mold - particularly the blue green penicillium slime found on fruit, leather goods and basement walls.
It seemed clear - in early 1940 - that the penicillium slime "would not be missed", to recall the words of the Lord High Executioner.
But by late 1944, it all wasn't at all so clear that the penicillium won't be missed.
During the Enlightenment Project, we assumed that via reductionism we would actually eventually fully know Nature and upon knowing it, evaluate its worth, bit by bit.
What bits to keep and what bits to dispose of.
This fact still isn't widely known by laypeople today - nor was it known by many scientists back in 1940.
I mention this only because the world in 1940 was as consumed with killing off all the germs in general, including those found in sea water, as the Nazis were about killing of all the Jewish 'germs' in particular.
The civilized world in 1940 widely supported the effort to greatly reduce biological diversity by ridding the world of all kinds of "pests", an idea that spilled over into the minds of the ordinary Nazi (and their ordinary/silent tolerators) when thinking about a possible solution for the 'problem' of the Jews.
The Sixth Extinction linked to the Sixth Genocide
Among the most annoying pests in 1940 was household mold - particularly the blue green penicillium slime found on fruit, leather goods and basement walls.
It seemed clear - in early 1940 - that the penicillium slime "would not be missed", to recall the words of the Lord High Executioner.
But by late 1944, it all wasn't at all so clear that the penicillium won't be missed.
During the Enlightenment Project, we assumed that via reductionism we would actually eventually fully know Nature and upon knowing it, evaluate its worth, bit by bit.
What bits to keep and what bits to dispose of.
To judge by the number of beetle species, God never put all the eggs in just one basket - so why should we ?
But we didn't really know Nature and we never will - the 1940 world thinking that it 'knew' the useless penicillium slime and the ocean's useless germs being but two sobering examples from the recent past....
Monday, July 20, 2015
WWII but a significant 'blip' in the eternal war between natural historians and natural philosophers
From their lofty olympian heights in front of their chalkboards and computer screens, or up in their labs, the coin of the realm for the natural philosopher is always plenticide .
These scientists secure their fame within their tribe by reducing the plentitude of say the 150,000 very diverse species of beetles (God's favourite being) down to a few neat columns in a textbook.
So the tiger beetle : Domain Eukarya. Kingdom Animalia. Phylum Arthropoda. Class Insecta. Order Coleoptera. Family Carabidae. Genus Cicindela. Species tranquebarica.
The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.
But it is the directly opposite objective.
Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.
To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".
While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.
It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.
But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.
They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.
On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.
During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.
Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.
They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.
I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....
These scientists secure their fame within their tribe by reducing the plentitude of say the 150,000 very diverse species of beetles (God's favourite being) down to a few neat columns in a textbook.
So the tiger beetle : Domain Eukarya. Kingdom Animalia. Phylum Arthropoda. Class Insecta. Order Coleoptera. Family Carabidae. Genus Cicindela. Species tranquebarica.
The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.
But it is the directly opposite objective.
Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.
To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".
While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.
It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.
But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.
They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.
On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.
"Love your neighbour - no matter how scary or slimy or smelly - as you love yourself" - the naturalists' credo
During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.
Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.
They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.
I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....
Monday, June 22, 2015
Why do the stupid fungus use 'inefficient' fermentation in preference to efficient respiration ?
Let us be clear - virtually all common lifeforms can provide energy for themselves by both respiration and fermentation.
Respiration uses oxygen to efficiently extract all the energy from the chemical bonds found in sugar like substances.
Fermentation does not use oxygen and hence can only extract some of the energy from some of those chemical bonds.
Many bigger beings, like us humans, only use low efficiency fermentation when we can't get sufficient oxygen for high efficiency respiration - the classic case for humans is during long, hard, fast physical activity like running in the Boston Marathon.
But why then do a whole lot of 'primitive' microbes perversely continue to use low efficiency fermentation --- even when lots of oxygen is available ?
This is the so called Crabtree Effect - first widely noted by university scientists post 1929.
(And first noticed by brewing types back in 10,000 BC !)
The discovery of this fact by chemists during the Age of Progress was the key reason why my parents and I were duly taught in school that beings like the fungus were but primitive relics of simpler, stupider times --- living fossils.
Today the scientific consensus is that at the very beginnings of Life, simple respiration came first and complex fermentation came later !
Admittedly, this news hasn't reached most scientists not involved in this specialized area of research and the bulk of them still think of fermentation as simple and stupidly inefficient.
We humans greatly profit from this 'stupidity', of course.
Because instead of the sugars being reduced to low energy CO2 and water 'waste', it goes out as relatively high energy ethanol 'waste' --- beer, wine and spirits. And the secret that makes bread rise.
But of course chemists are not really evolution experts.
Because real evolution experts must explain why such stupid behavior has been so well rewarded by the natural selection gods.
After all, fungus having been on earth for hundreds of millions of highly successful years versus the human chemists' very brief sojourn on Earth.
We can start by noting fungus only move to fermentation mode when the amount of available sugar to eat is high, regardless of the amount of oxygen about.
Going at that mountain of sugar with oxygen yields the most energy per unit of sugar, but it takes a lot of time and needs a lot of cellular machinery and cellular surface space.
Fungus can't really increase their factory size* endlessly, unlike our human companies.
Instead they shift to using their existing limited cellular surface space and machinery so as to increase their energy-gaining throughput,in terms of units of time, even if it results in a low yield per unit of sugar.
So they certainly do waste the sugar, but after all there is lots and lots of it about ---- and in doing so, they gain more energy per minute for themselves than by the slow, bulky but efficient respiration route.
As the lucky individuals closest to the mountain of sugar, they bulk up quickly all set to reproduce lots of spore children when the time comes --- even if their reproductive success comes at the cost of denying useful sugar to their fungal distant cousins.
(During the process of bulking up, the fungus does use some of the readily available oxygen all right - but as a structural material rather than as part of an energy extracting process.)
As is usual, once scientists (and economists) move beyond a reductionist way of viewing reality - looking instead at the whole picture at the top level of an ecosystem, the benefit of behavior that seems stupid and 'inefficient' at the level of the reductionist chemists' atoms and molecules, becomes much clearer...
* It is known that microbes do change the shape of their cells to a limited extent, to alter their surface to volume ratio to economically maximize food intake in times of extreme starvation or extreme abundance : long and thin, small and round, large but flat & shallow , etc.
Respiration uses oxygen to efficiently extract all the energy from the chemical bonds found in sugar like substances.
Fermentation does not use oxygen and hence can only extract some of the energy from some of those chemical bonds.
Many bigger beings, like us humans, only use low efficiency fermentation when we can't get sufficient oxygen for high efficiency respiration - the classic case for humans is during long, hard, fast physical activity like running in the Boston Marathon.
But why then do a whole lot of 'primitive' microbes perversely continue to use low efficiency fermentation --- even when lots of oxygen is available ?
This is the so called Crabtree Effect - first widely noted by university scientists post 1929.
(And first noticed by brewing types back in 10,000 BC !)
The discovery of this fact by chemists during the Age of Progress was the key reason why my parents and I were duly taught in school that beings like the fungus were but primitive relics of simpler, stupider times --- living fossils.
Today the scientific consensus is that at the very beginnings of Life, simple respiration came first and complex fermentation came later !
Admittedly, this news hasn't reached most scientists not involved in this specialized area of research and the bulk of them still think of fermentation as simple and stupidly inefficient.
We humans greatly profit from this 'stupidity', of course.
Because instead of the sugars being reduced to low energy CO2 and water 'waste', it goes out as relatively high energy ethanol 'waste' --- beer, wine and spirits. And the secret that makes bread rise.
But of course chemists are not really evolution experts.
Because real evolution experts must explain why such stupid behavior has been so well rewarded by the natural selection gods.
After all, fungus having been on earth for hundreds of millions of highly successful years versus the human chemists' very brief sojourn on Earth.
We can start by noting fungus only move to fermentation mode when the amount of available sugar to eat is high, regardless of the amount of oxygen about.
Going at that mountain of sugar with oxygen yields the most energy per unit of sugar, but it takes a lot of time and needs a lot of cellular machinery and cellular surface space.
Fungus can't really increase their factory size* endlessly, unlike our human companies.
Instead they shift to using their existing limited cellular surface space and machinery so as to increase their energy-gaining throughput,in terms of units of time, even if it results in a low yield per unit of sugar.
So they certainly do waste the sugar, but after all there is lots and lots of it about ---- and in doing so, they gain more energy per minute for themselves than by the slow, bulky but efficient respiration route.
As the lucky individuals closest to the mountain of sugar, they bulk up quickly all set to reproduce lots of spore children when the time comes --- even if their reproductive success comes at the cost of denying useful sugar to their fungal distant cousins.
(During the process of bulking up, the fungus does use some of the readily available oxygen all right - but as a structural material rather than as part of an energy extracting process.)
As is usual, once scientists (and economists) move beyond a reductionist way of viewing reality - looking instead at the whole picture at the top level of an ecosystem, the benefit of behavior that seems stupid and 'inefficient' at the level of the reductionist chemists' atoms and molecules, becomes much clearer...
* It is known that microbes do change the shape of their cells to a limited extent, to alter their surface to volume ratio to economically maximize food intake in times of extreme starvation or extreme abundance : long and thin, small and round, large but flat & shallow , etc.
Friday, June 19, 2015
"last of Polio & Arsenic under lock and key in Atlanta" - headline
A headline we will never see is some news release from the science folks in Atlanta proudly announcing that some dangerous element (arsenic and plutonium come to mind) have been newly almost totally eliminated.
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Painting a picture of Reductionism
Reductionism, a theory of extreme simplicity that seeks to account for everything in the universe, is, as usual with such "terrible simplicities", itself a very complicated piece of philosophical and scientific reasoning.
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare
To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.
A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.
Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.
So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.
A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.
It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.
But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.
Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.
But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.
It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.
Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.
Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.
First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.
Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.
Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.
Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...
A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.
Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.
So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.
A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.
It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.
But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.
Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.
But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.
It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.
Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.
Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.
First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.
Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.
Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.
Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide
Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.
It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.
Perhaps, you might argue, they hoped to find lots of new companions from among the little green people kitted out in metallic scales and bearing two heads that would surely be found on places like Mars.
But does that wash ?
In a culture consumed with fears that "black" men, black because one drop of black blood was enough to define them as negro and not because they looked in anyway black, might marry their daughters and then perform unspeakable crimes of miscegenation ?
Could a species that regarded it as a serious crime for its members to marry other members of that same species if they looked at all different (the felony of miscegenation) and trying to kill off all other of the familiar lifeforms on planet Earth, ever find something in common with the unfamiliar lifeforms from planets with physical conditions so different from that of Earth ?
Not the ray guns would be blasting all those seductive little green women to death faster than you can say Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon, a Yale educated WASP, didn't even truck with consorting with alien women from this planet (ie recent Catholic or Jewish immigrants to America) - so why expect him to indulge in miscegenation with aliens from other planets ?
No we can only account for this new emphasis on plenticide in the modern era by seeing it as the result of two simultaneous reactions combining.
One was a near universal 'revulsion inwards' reaction among educated humanity to science's 'natural history' revelations that the totality of reality and lifeforms was far far greater than ever imagined and far far more entangled together in complicated ways.
A revulsion against miscegenation in every sphere and in every dimension.
Living and marrying only within one's ethnicity and class seemed far more simple and predictable.
But this inwardness and sense of go-it-alone autarky seemed only realistically possible because other branches of science were, at the same time, claiming that below the surface complexity of reality, it was actually extremely simple and predictable and even controllable.
Scientific reductionism promised that all that now existed or could ever exist, Man could easily synthesize from the atoms of useless rocks, with the limitless energy of the splitting atom.
Not only did WASP males of circa 1930 now feel revulsed at the thought of having sex with their black female slaves, they also no longer needed the strong backs of black male slaves either, as machines had replaced them.
Neither was wanted or needed on this pure voyage into the progressive future.
Hence : Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide.
It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.
Perhaps, you might argue, they hoped to find lots of new companions from among the little green people kitted out in metallic scales and bearing two heads that would surely be found on places like Mars.
But does that wash ?
In a culture consumed with fears that "black" men, black because one drop of black blood was enough to define them as negro and not because they looked in anyway black, might marry their daughters and then perform unspeakable crimes of miscegenation ?
Could a species that regarded it as a serious crime for its members to marry other members of that same species if they looked at all different (the felony of miscegenation) and trying to kill off all other of the familiar lifeforms on planet Earth, ever find something in common with the unfamiliar lifeforms from planets with physical conditions so different from that of Earth ?
Not the ray guns would be blasting all those seductive little green women to death faster than you can say Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon, a Yale educated WASP, didn't even truck with consorting with alien women from this planet (ie recent Catholic or Jewish immigrants to America) - so why expect him to indulge in miscegenation with aliens from other planets ?
No we can only account for this new emphasis on plenticide in the modern era by seeing it as the result of two simultaneous reactions combining.
One was a near universal 'revulsion inwards' reaction among educated humanity to science's 'natural history' revelations that the totality of reality and lifeforms was far far greater than ever imagined and far far more entangled together in complicated ways.
A revulsion against miscegenation in every sphere and in every dimension.
Living and marrying only within one's ethnicity and class seemed far more simple and predictable.
But this inwardness and sense of go-it-alone autarky seemed only realistically possible because other branches of science were, at the same time, claiming that below the surface complexity of reality, it was actually extremely simple and predictable and even controllable.
Scientific reductionism promised that all that now existed or could ever exist, Man could easily synthesize from the atoms of useless rocks, with the limitless energy of the splitting atom.
Not only did WASP males of circa 1930 now feel revulsed at the thought of having sex with their black female slaves, they also no longer needed the strong backs of black male slaves either, as machines had replaced them.
Neither was wanted or needed on this pure voyage into the progressive future.
Hence : Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
A Complicated Triumph
The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.
For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.
One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.
We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.
A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms - scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.
Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.
Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.
So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.
And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.
And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.
In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.
And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.
And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.
So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.
But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...
For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.
One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.
We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .
WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.
A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms - scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.
Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.
Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.
So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.
And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.
And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.
In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.
And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.
And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.
So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.
But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...
Thursday, April 30, 2015
COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift
Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.
Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.
But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.
Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.
Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.
So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.
Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.
But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.
Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.
Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.
So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers
Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".
And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.
(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).
A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.
Seeing under his microscope that some of the supposed last (bacteria) were in some ways the First (in abilities to do genetic manipulation) led scientist Martin Henry Dawson to conclude the results of this sort of backwater microbial research would have a profound effect on the whole wide science of biology.
And as the key intellect memes in the Era of Modernity were all really just 'applied biology' , the impact could, in theory, go much, much wider.
It didn't, not then at least : for Dawson wasn't the one to lead any sort revolution of words and ideas - only perform a quiet revolution of deeds.
But today the idea that a deep wide genetic pool, well stocked with the intelligence from all possible sizes, complexity and types of beings, is Humanity and the Earth's best insurance against destruction is a commonplace.
It is the meme that holds up the entire intellectual structure that we call postmodernity ...
And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.
(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).
A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.
Seeing under his microscope that some of the supposed last (bacteria) were in some ways the First (in abilities to do genetic manipulation) led scientist Martin Henry Dawson to conclude the results of this sort of backwater microbial research would have a profound effect on the whole wide science of biology.
And as the key intellect memes in the Era of Modernity were all really just 'applied biology' , the impact could, in theory, go much, much wider.
It didn't, not then at least : for Dawson wasn't the one to lead any sort revolution of words and ideas - only perform a quiet revolution of deeds.
But today the idea that a deep wide genetic pool, well stocked with the intelligence from all possible sizes, complexity and types of beings, is Humanity and the Earth's best insurance against destruction is a commonplace.
It is the meme that holds up the entire intellectual structure that we call postmodernity ...
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
"The Last May be First." Or Last. Or anything in between. It all depends.
Unparalleled horrific cruelties befell the world immediately before, during and after WWII .
That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.
In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".
Scientism can be best defined as science, at least as half remembered by middle aged, educated, powerful people ---- based on memories of their High School science education decades earlier.
High School science, unfortunately has always been and will always be a simplified, glorified, triumphantist, Whig account of Science with all of its real world complexities and unsolved issues swept under the carpet.
And the governing axiom of that pre-war scientism, and to some extent the entire science of Modernity, was "Hard Reductionism".
This was the faith - as yet unsupported by sufficient evidence - that all of reality can be explained, predicted and altered/improved by understanding the few simple universal and eternal laws that explained the physical motion of the smallest basic units of reality : atoms.
They (and their biological equivalent, the basic cell) occupied the lower left hand corner of the upward arrow of progress : being small, unchangingly simple and incredibly ancient.
By contrast, at the top right hand corner of that arrow of progress, everything was very new, very big and and incredibly and dynamically complex.
A complex bigness, but based simply upon being assembled from modules made up of multiple modules from the level of complexity just below them. And so on and so on back down to the original basic atoms.
So Life began when a few atoms attached around a single carbon atom becoming the small basic molecules of organic chemistry which then became, in turn, parts of much bigger biological molecules which became part of cells which became ever bigger multi-celled beings.
If re-defined as Soft Reductionism, the belief that much in reality can be explained this way, most of us still hold this view.
But in humanity's postwar view of science and in the scientists' Post-Modernity Science, we have decidedly rejected Hard Reductionism, explicitly or implicitly.
Scientists explicitly no longer see reality as a linear arrow ever upwards , but talk instead of non linear systems, non equilibrium physics, complexity science, chaos theory.
Basically they mean that after creating a modules of say 1000 atoms, it simply fails to display the known behavior of one atom multiplied 1000 times over - its actions are novel but unpredicted.
Further, even a handful of tiny different modules interact in extremely unpredictable fashion (unpredictable given the limited amount of world resources we can devote to computing) - let alone much bigger systems of interacting modules - such as the weather or the stock market.
Scientists say such things explicitly - we mere civilians tend to to more feel this sort of reasoning in our bones - believing less and less big things will turn out anything like the way experts, professionals and the powerful say they will.
So, back to WWII and its cruelties.
In a world believed to be totally predictable, things can be said to happen totally inevitably, with us unable to change them, even if we wanted to.
This belief is called Determinism, a higher level axiom in educated humanity's thought system, circa WWII.
It followed upon Reductionism, and it meant that while we might want to (our moral sentiment) save the Indian tribes in Canada, science had proven that the laws of nature had determined that these small ancient and simple societies would inevitably be replaced by the bigger and more modern structures of western civilization.
Regrettable to be sure, but one simply can't stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress : the 1940s Mosaic law of Robert Moses.
The arrow of progress is noticeably titled at a 45 degree angle - hard to square, at first glance, with another axiom of modernity : Darwin's claim of vertical only inheritance .
Darwin - wrongly - claimed we only inherit genes from our parents and they from their parents - vertically and linearly right on down to the tiny cells that first began life on Earth (this being the biological version of Reductionism).
Darwin claimed that we never get genes from our uncles or from total strangers - total strangers like viruses etc.
What he never claimed ,but that people assumed he claimed, was that each smaller module of life was, in the medium term, gradually replaced entirely by a slightly larger module and so on and so.
So horses started out small and then over time mutated slowly into ever bigger horses while the smaller older horse versions all died away.
This is the way that the world's best natural museums (I am not making thus up - God Help us !) illustrated the arrow of progress in the world of horses.
But it wasn't true and Darwin had never said it would be - success for any species, new or old, was in seeing its offspring survive because they were well suited to the niche they lived in.
So, in fact, in cold climates, horses are small, stout and well covered in fur - in deserts they are tall and thin.
Humanity's prewar arrow of 'evolutionary' progress, unwittingly I believed, was really based on a scale that measured only the progress of human type book learning and record keeping.
On this scale, yes, it seemed the first (the biggest, newest) were always first and the last (the smallest,oldest) were always last.
But evolution should really be measured by survival success, full stop.
Here the record is more clouded for big creatures like humans.
Microbes, thanks to the ability to exchange genes between themselves operate more as a single super organism, somewhat the way we humans are made up of trillions of co-operating cells.
Yet, on the surface, they seem so weak : a usually immobile tiny sac of mostly water : the smallest, oldest and weakest form of life.
But in terms of survival, they are the champions bar none.
The microbes as a collectivity have existed for 4 billion years when most single species, like humanity, survive for a million years at best.
They live everywhere imaginable on Earth - extremities of cold, heat, drought, acidity, starvation, radiation they toss off with ease.
In numbers of different individuals (because yes, like all forms of life and contrary to the tenets of reductionism, each individual of life ever born has always been uniquely different in subtle but important ways), they far outnumber all the rest of life put together.
They may represent the largest mass/weight of life in terms of biomass, though the term biomass is very hard to define (do dead tree trunks count ?)
These small and the last, may survive when the first and the big die, precisely because they are small - when niches get small and thin - only the small and thin get enough to eat to survive and reproduce.
And because, again contrary to Hard Reductionism, they are small but dynamically complex .
(Just as modernity's scientists soon discovered of the not-indivisible after all atoms. For each is made up instead of a complex seething soup of matters dark and anti, of spin and top and color. So much so that if anyone claims they truly understands the sub-atomic world, they're lying.)
Simply put, if mutations are needed if a species is to survive rapidly changing conditions, a small being that produces a new generation every twenty minutes instead of every twenty years that big beings need to reproduce, works its evolutionary magic more than 500,000 times faster.
Particularly when microbes are not biological racists like humanity circa 1940, instead being perfectly willing to take genes, horizontally, from anyone and anything.
The openness of commensality rather than the exclusivity of racism so that their gene pool gets ever deeper and they don't try to constantly drain it via eugenic murder.
In terms of reading a newspaper, yes the first (educated humans) are first and the last (bacteria) are last.
But in terms of making penicillin, WWII discovered - to its horror and surprise - the last ( the tiny slimy penicillium fungi) shall be first and the first (the world's best chemists) shall be last.
In terms of speed, neither the last (rare bacteria with limbs) nor the first ( obese urban university employed humans) are particularly fast in terms of body lengths travelled per second - that goes to the medium (cheetah and such).
Today instead of a single simple scale of worthiness with the new big and complex at the top inevitably, we accept that all forms of life excel at some things and do poorly in others.
We no longer believe that some life - inevitably, by laws of nature - must be life unworthy of life and so can be legitimately burned up in smoke at Auschwitz....
That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.
In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".
Scientism made them do it
Scientism can be best defined as science, at least as half remembered by middle aged, educated, powerful people ---- based on memories of their High School science education decades earlier.
High School science, unfortunately has always been and will always be a simplified, glorified, triumphantist, Whig account of Science with all of its real world complexities and unsolved issues swept under the carpet.
And the governing axiom of that pre-war scientism, and to some extent the entire science of Modernity, was "Hard Reductionism".
Hard Reductionism
This was the faith - as yet unsupported by sufficient evidence - that all of reality can be explained, predicted and altered/improved by understanding the few simple universal and eternal laws that explained the physical motion of the smallest basic units of reality : atoms.
They (and their biological equivalent, the basic cell) occupied the lower left hand corner of the upward arrow of progress : being small, unchangingly simple and incredibly ancient.
By contrast, at the top right hand corner of that arrow of progress, everything was very new, very big and and incredibly and dynamically complex.
A complex bigness, but based simply upon being assembled from modules made up of multiple modules from the level of complexity just below them. And so on and so on back down to the original basic atoms.
So Life began when a few atoms attached around a single carbon atom becoming the small basic molecules of organic chemistry which then became, in turn, parts of much bigger biological molecules which became part of cells which became ever bigger multi-celled beings.
If re-defined as Soft Reductionism, the belief that much in reality can be explained this way, most of us still hold this view.
But in humanity's postwar view of science and in the scientists' Post-Modernity Science, we have decidedly rejected Hard Reductionism, explicitly or implicitly.
Post-modernity Science
Scientists explicitly no longer see reality as a linear arrow ever upwards , but talk instead of non linear systems, non equilibrium physics, complexity science, chaos theory.
Basically they mean that after creating a modules of say 1000 atoms, it simply fails to display the known behavior of one atom multiplied 1000 times over - its actions are novel but unpredicted.
Further, even a handful of tiny different modules interact in extremely unpredictable fashion (unpredictable given the limited amount of world resources we can devote to computing) - let alone much bigger systems of interacting modules - such as the weather or the stock market.
Scientists say such things explicitly - we mere civilians tend to to more feel this sort of reasoning in our bones - believing less and less big things will turn out anything like the way experts, professionals and the powerful say they will.
So, back to WWII and its cruelties.
In a world believed to be totally predictable, things can be said to happen totally inevitably, with us unable to change them, even if we wanted to.
Determinism
This belief is called Determinism, a higher level axiom in educated humanity's thought system, circa WWII.
It followed upon Reductionism, and it meant that while we might want to (our moral sentiment) save the Indian tribes in Canada, science had proven that the laws of nature had determined that these small ancient and simple societies would inevitably be replaced by the bigger and more modern structures of western civilization.
Regrettable to be sure, but one simply can't stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress : the 1940s Mosaic law of Robert Moses.
The arrow of progress is noticeably titled at a 45 degree angle - hard to square, at first glance, with another axiom of modernity : Darwin's claim of vertical only inheritance .
Darwin - wrongly - claimed we only inherit genes from our parents and they from their parents - vertically and linearly right on down to the tiny cells that first began life on Earth (this being the biological version of Reductionism).
Darwin claimed that we never get genes from our uncles or from total strangers - total strangers like viruses etc.
What he never claimed ,but that people assumed he claimed, was that each smaller module of life was, in the medium term, gradually replaced entirely by a slightly larger module and so on and so.
So horses started out small and then over time mutated slowly into ever bigger horses while the smaller older horse versions all died away.
This is the way that the world's best natural museums (I am not making thus up - God Help us !) illustrated the arrow of progress in the world of horses.
But it wasn't true and Darwin had never said it would be - success for any species, new or old, was in seeing its offspring survive because they were well suited to the niche they lived in.
So, in fact, in cold climates, horses are small, stout and well covered in fur - in deserts they are tall and thin.
What the arrow of progress really measured
Humanity's prewar arrow of 'evolutionary' progress, unwittingly I believed, was really based on a scale that measured only the progress of human type book learning and record keeping.
On this scale, yes, it seemed the first (the biggest, newest) were always first and the last (the smallest,oldest) were always last.
But evolution should really be measured by survival success, full stop.
Here the record is more clouded for big creatures like humans.
Microbes, thanks to the ability to exchange genes between themselves operate more as a single super organism, somewhat the way we humans are made up of trillions of co-operating cells.
Yet, on the surface, they seem so weak : a usually immobile tiny sac of mostly water : the smallest, oldest and weakest form of life.
But in terms of survival, they are the champions bar none.
Post 1945 : we realize this world is really made for microbes, not humans
The microbes as a collectivity have existed for 4 billion years when most single species, like humanity, survive for a million years at best.
They live everywhere imaginable on Earth - extremities of cold, heat, drought, acidity, starvation, radiation they toss off with ease.
In numbers of different individuals (because yes, like all forms of life and contrary to the tenets of reductionism, each individual of life ever born has always been uniquely different in subtle but important ways), they far outnumber all the rest of life put together.
They may represent the largest mass/weight of life in terms of biomass, though the term biomass is very hard to define (do dead tree trunks count ?)
These small and the last, may survive when the first and the big die, precisely because they are small - when niches get small and thin - only the small and thin get enough to eat to survive and reproduce.
And because, again contrary to Hard Reductionism, they are small but dynamically complex .
(Just as modernity's scientists soon discovered of the not-indivisible after all atoms. For each is made up instead of a complex seething soup of matters dark and anti, of spin and top and color. So much so that if anyone claims they truly understands the sub-atomic world, they're lying.)
Simply put, if mutations are needed if a species is to survive rapidly changing conditions, a small being that produces a new generation every twenty minutes instead of every twenty years that big beings need to reproduce, works its evolutionary magic more than 500,000 times faster.
Particularly when microbes are not biological racists like humanity circa 1940, instead being perfectly willing to take genes, horizontally, from anyone and anything.
Open commensality versus closed racism
The openness of commensality rather than the exclusivity of racism so that their gene pool gets ever deeper and they don't try to constantly drain it via eugenic murder.
In terms of reading a newspaper, yes the first (educated humans) are first and the last (bacteria) are last.
But in terms of making penicillin, WWII discovered - to its horror and surprise - the last ( the tiny slimy penicillium fungi) shall be first and the first (the world's best chemists) shall be last.
In terms of speed, neither the last (rare bacteria with limbs) nor the first ( obese urban university employed humans) are particularly fast in terms of body lengths travelled per second - that goes to the medium (cheetah and such).
Today instead of a single simple scale of worthiness with the new big and complex at the top inevitably, we accept that all forms of life excel at some things and do poorly in others.
We no longer believe that some life - inevitably, by laws of nature - must be life unworthy of life and so can be legitimately burned up in smoke at Auschwitz....
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Less than 4 years separate the world's fairs at Flushing Meadows and Woodstock ...
If 1965's world's fair at Flushing Meadows NY was everything the 1940 New York's World's Fair's "World of Tomorrow" had predicted, the same could hardly be said for the world's fair at Woodstock held less than four years later.
For its design style was far less Robert Moses and far more Scott Nearing.
So much so in fact that we are forced to ask just what on earth in 1940 could ever be said to have predicted Woodstock and the rise of a counterculture so diametrically opposed to everything that the 1965 World Fair had on offer ?
First let us look at the scientific and cultural ethos of the 1940 World's Fair (The World of Tomorrow).
In a word, it was Reductionism : uniformitarian reductionism and synthetic autarky.
It believed that the predictable simple motions of the small (atoms) totally explained the predictable Big and complex.
So with only 'too cheap to meter' atomic energy and a pile of rocks, Man could confidently expect to readily replicate everything Mother Nature had to offer - only better - negating any further need for Nature - or even Earth itself.
We could hope to abandon the fecund green Earth in the near future, to live in a more advanced civilization under domes on sterile grey rock of planet Mars.
By contrast, in that same year, a scientist at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, set about exalting the smallest and the weakest over the biggest and the strongest.
Using a medical miracle created by some of life's smallest and most humble beings, Dawson deliberately gave History's first ever antibiotic shots to some of humanity's smallest and most humble, a young black and a young Jew from New York's working class, just days before the giant 1940 World's Fair closed.
Dawson had earlier spent decades vainly trying to convince his fellow scientists that the supposedly simple and predictable small bacteria were, in fact, extremely complex and unpredictable.
Being incredible tiny and defenceless, microbes had not succeeded in taking over the world in the way in the way Man was currently attempting, being content merely to survive upon it.
And they had done so in spades.
For four billion years, in incredibly dense numbers, in all possible biological niches ---- when bigger and more complex beings had only occupied narrow niches and had then quickly gone extinct.
That surprising amount of success really needed explaining.
Rather than confront and simplify their external environment in the way that human Reductionism did, Dawson demonstrated that the microbes simply conformed to all the world's incredibly varied and fluid circumstances - displaying their own plastic willingness to change, adapt and co-exist -- an ethos that I call Commensality.
While the futuristic science displays at the 1965 world's fair still strongly treated Nature was as stupid and as unneeded at the 1940 world's fair had thought, the world's fair at 1969's Woodstock clearly differed - strongly believing that there was lots and lots of wisdom to be found in fecund Mother Nature.
Dawson had had his own brief back-to-the-land experiences in the Depression years in rural Armonk NY, a 100 miles south east of the Woodstock site.
If he had still been alive in 1969, he might not have understood the clothing and hair lengths choices made by Sixties back-to-the-landers but nevertheless , Joni Mitchell's famous "Child of God" could just as accurately be described as "Children of Dawson" ....
For its design style was far less Robert Moses and far more Scott Nearing.
So much so in fact that we are forced to ask just what on earth in 1940 could ever be said to have predicted Woodstock and the rise of a counterculture so diametrically opposed to everything that the 1965 World Fair had on offer ?
Reductionism
First let us look at the scientific and cultural ethos of the 1940 World's Fair (The World of Tomorrow).
In a word, it was Reductionism : uniformitarian reductionism and synthetic autarky.
It believed that the predictable simple motions of the small (atoms) totally explained the predictable Big and complex.
So with only 'too cheap to meter' atomic energy and a pile of rocks, Man could confidently expect to readily replicate everything Mother Nature had to offer - only better - negating any further need for Nature - or even Earth itself.
We could hope to abandon the fecund green Earth in the near future, to live in a more advanced civilization under domes on sterile grey rock of planet Mars.
Commensality
By contrast, in that same year, a scientist at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, set about exalting the smallest and the weakest over the biggest and the strongest.
Using a medical miracle created by some of life's smallest and most humble beings, Dawson deliberately gave History's first ever antibiotic shots to some of humanity's smallest and most humble, a young black and a young Jew from New York's working class, just days before the giant 1940 World's Fair closed.
Dawson had earlier spent decades vainly trying to convince his fellow scientists that the supposedly simple and predictable small bacteria were, in fact, extremely complex and unpredictable.
Being incredible tiny and defenceless, microbes had not succeeded in taking over the world in the way in the way Man was currently attempting, being content merely to survive upon it.
And they had done so in spades.
For four billion years, in incredibly dense numbers, in all possible biological niches ---- when bigger and more complex beings had only occupied narrow niches and had then quickly gone extinct.
That surprising amount of success really needed explaining.
Rather than confront and simplify their external environment in the way that human Reductionism did, Dawson demonstrated that the microbes simply conformed to all the world's incredibly varied and fluid circumstances - displaying their own plastic willingness to change, adapt and co-exist -- an ethos that I call Commensality.
Woodstock : Dr Dawson's Children
Now let us jet forward a generation after 1940.
While the futuristic science displays at the 1965 world's fair still strongly treated Nature was as stupid and as unneeded at the 1940 world's fair had thought, the world's fair at 1969's Woodstock clearly differed - strongly believing that there was lots and lots of wisdom to be found in fecund Mother Nature.
Dawson had had his own brief back-to-the-land experiences in the Depression years in rural Armonk NY, a 100 miles south east of the Woodstock site.
If he had still been alive in 1969, he might not have understood the clothing and hair lengths choices made by Sixties back-to-the-landers but nevertheless , Joni Mitchell's famous "Child of God" could just as accurately be described as "Children of Dawson" ....
Friday, March 20, 2015
When the upward causation of 'invariably fatal' SBE meets the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin
Let us accept - for the sake of the argument - the unproven assumption that many kids could even get SBE disease out there in the Social Darwinists' belovedly savage "Nature" that existed before Christian compassion peed on their picnic.
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Monday, December 1, 2014
AKA Modernity : the era of parsimonious plenticide , 1875-1965
The art of denial is not a new 21st century thing.
Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.
While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.
Why they feel so excessively this way (because we all feel overwhelmed by plentitude at times) is a mystery.
It may be due to a combination of unique body chemistry that handles stress badly and their parents (with similar body chemistry) being obsessed with dirt and order.
One of the most satisfying intellectual ways for them to deal with 'overwhelming' plentitude is to deny its very existence.
Its real - substantive - existence.
'Oh yes, the surface complexity is there all right - we shan't deny that.'
'But most of it is rubbish, useless, worthless, dirty, dangerous - and to claim that all of it is valuable is a form of false consciousness.'
'Once you properly separate out what is valuable, worthy , clean and stable and discard - eliminate/liquidate - the rest , life becomes much simpler and happier.'
Or so the plenticidial modernists claimed.
Modernity then was a great era for classification & then binning.
To its proponents, parsimonious plenticide was the best intellectual way to deal with the abundant scientific evidence that reality was much much more complex, older, wider, deeper than anyone had ever previously thought.
This fact was materially thrust in their faces every day by the effects of co-current globalization cum modernization - seemingly the planet and all its beings were daily arriving at the customs and immigration gates of their country.
So : normal vs deviant , normal vs degenerated, normal vs deformed, normal vs unfit , normal vs dirty - on and on the classifying and destruction went.
No gene pool was ever shallow enough for them - any and every gene pool could always do with a little more draining.
The surface rubbish was complex but the solution wasn't : a little quick painless culling by some super heroes (and super nations) dressed up in capes and tights and it would all be resolved.
One might think evolution and progress as having been invented expressly to allow a moral mechanism for killing off one's new neighbours with a clear conscience.
Yes the world is a plentitude , but of mostly also rans and a few winners and the also rans will be quietly liquidated after the results of the marathon have been announced.
In the physical sciences , reductionism was the parsimonious plenticide equivalent : claiming all reality could be reduced to the reliable and predictable assembling and re-assembling of a handful of atoms of a handful of elements , all obeying a handful of knowable, simple, eternal and universal laws.
For this was the great age of Erector and Meccano sets - vividly expressing how parents and grandparents thought their young should view the world.
But Modernity's big problem would not go away - because reality is really and truly complex and dynamic - and everything science has discovered since 1875 renders this more not less so.
In our new era of global commensality we (most of we , anyhow) see the interconnectedness of everything on Earth : many ,many things and events all interacting with each other is some direct, some distantly indirect ways.
But many of us don't, still in denial that the era of modernity was wrong or that it has ended.
And this attitude is fueling - petro fueling - the destruction of this planet.
For on all of the world's Wall Streets, the Alpha Male 'Masters of the Universe' lead the way in denying that we can't really master the universe ....
Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.
While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.
Why they feel so excessively this way (because we all feel overwhelmed by plentitude at times) is a mystery.
It may be due to a combination of unique body chemistry that handles stress badly and their parents (with similar body chemistry) being obsessed with dirt and order.
One of the most satisfying intellectual ways for them to deal with 'overwhelming' plentitude is to deny its very existence.
Its real - substantive - existence.
'Oh yes, the surface complexity is there all right - we shan't deny that.'
'But most of it is rubbish, useless, worthless, dirty, dangerous - and to claim that all of it is valuable is a form of false consciousness.'
'Once you properly separate out what is valuable, worthy , clean and stable and discard - eliminate/liquidate - the rest , life becomes much simpler and happier.'
Or so the plenticidial modernists claimed.
Modernity then was a great era for classification & then binning.
To its proponents, parsimonious plenticide was the best intellectual way to deal with the abundant scientific evidence that reality was much much more complex, older, wider, deeper than anyone had ever previously thought.
This fact was materially thrust in their faces every day by the effects of co-current globalization cum modernization - seemingly the planet and all its beings were daily arriving at the customs and immigration gates of their country.
So : normal vs deviant , normal vs degenerated, normal vs deformed, normal vs unfit , normal vs dirty - on and on the classifying and destruction went.
No gene pool was ever shallow enough for them - any and every gene pool could always do with a little more draining.
The surface rubbish was complex but the solution wasn't : a little quick painless culling by some super heroes (and super nations) dressed up in capes and tights and it would all be resolved.
One might think evolution and progress as having been invented expressly to allow a moral mechanism for killing off one's new neighbours with a clear conscience.
Yes the world is a plentitude , but of mostly also rans and a few winners and the also rans will be quietly liquidated after the results of the marathon have been announced.
Reductionism as parsimonious plenticide
In the physical sciences , reductionism was the parsimonious plenticide equivalent : claiming all reality could be reduced to the reliable and predictable assembling and re-assembling of a handful of atoms of a handful of elements , all obeying a handful of knowable, simple, eternal and universal laws.
For this was the great age of Erector and Meccano sets - vividly expressing how parents and grandparents thought their young should view the world.
But Modernity's big problem would not go away - because reality is really and truly complex and dynamic - and everything science has discovered since 1875 renders this more not less so.
In our new era of global commensality we (most of we , anyhow) see the interconnectedness of everything on Earth : many ,many things and events all interacting with each other is some direct, some distantly indirect ways.
But many of us don't, still in denial that the era of modernity was wrong or that it has ended.
And this attitude is fueling - petro fueling - the destruction of this planet.
For on all of the world's Wall Streets, the Alpha Male 'Masters of the Universe' lead the way in denying that we can't really master the universe ....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
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