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.

What cherishing human and biological diversity isn't

It isn't about post-1945 efforts to extend civil rights to healthy and wealthy, well educated, white Anglo Saxon males - but rather about post-1945 efforts to extend civil rights to visible minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, gays and the handicapped.

It isn't about protecting the seed stock of high yielding patented corn hybrids but rather in protecting the dozens of hardy but low yielding traditional native varieties in the public domain.

biodiversity is on the side of the small battalions

Greed and Privilege may be on the side of the Big Battalions, but biodiversity always is on the side of the small battalions...

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.

Dawson's "small penicillin", a cure for a disease forty years in search of a name

Until the very end of WWII, Sir Charles Lyell ruled the intellectuals' world unchallenged.

The 19th century victory of his claim about the uniformity of the past, present and future geological worlds, over other scientists who said the world had faced past global catastrophes, laid the groundwork for Modern Science's hubristic confidence about a predictable future much like the present and the past.

But the technological development of unstoppable V2 rockets and of atomic bombs, together with evidence from Auschwitz of no limits to human evil, led a small number of people to begin to doubt the impossibility of planet wide catastrophes.

a Diversified biological Portfolio or placing all our genetic bets in one basket ?

Do you feel lucky Humanity, do ya ?

Do you think you can accurately predict now what genes, species, geniuses we will need in the future ?

Do ya, do ya ?

Accurately enough to pick the most productive corn variety in America and bin all the underproducing heirloom varieties ; enough to pick the most Aryan children in Europe and eliminate all the rest together with all the adult defectives and asocials ?

Da ya, do ya ?

Think then of the resulting 1970s Corn Blight ; think if mass murder has ever really brought mass happiness.

biological High Flyer stock or Diversified Portfolio ?

If there was one creature that got more dismissive pats on the head over the years than any dog or cat, it was little old ladies with dogs and cats.

For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.

Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.

Valuing biodiversity implies we think the Reality they must survive is also diversely dangerous ....

I have based my claim that the world of Science was totally upended during WWII by pointing out that Science circa 1940 valued purity above all else while today's science values diversity above all else and that these two values oppose each other in every possible way.

I am not limiting myself to shallow definitions either : not just to yesterday's eugenic notions of racial purity versus today's natural biodiversity and civil rights supported human social diversity.

I mean that the scientific theories that won near universal support before 1940, regardless of the often tiny amount of physical evidence supporting them, all tended to exalt the pure --- ie the simple, the linear, the stable, the symmetrical and systems in equilibrium in their visions of Reality.

So if Reality was really as simple, stable, consistent, understandable and predictable as these theories claimed, then we could indeed see into the Future and pick the one simple 'right' answer to solve all possible of today's and tomorrow's problems.

We could thus safely and sharply purify and reduce the world's gene pool - by picking the single best corn species and discarding all the second best, for example - confident that nothing could ever go wrong.

Simply pure and definite certitudes for a purely simple certain world.

But then, just for an example, in 1970 America's most important industrial material (their corn crop) was almost all wiped out by a fungus that was finely tuned into killing only this high yielding monoculture crop.

Panic !

Suddenly even the Koch Brothers of this world could see the virtues in gathering and protecting all the bio-diversity found in the many ancient and hitherto 'useless' variants of corn, just to cover all bets in what was suddenly looking to be a world of highly diverse dangers....