Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.

"multi stage rocket" Evolution versus Evolution "in situ"

I was raised on the multi-stage rocket form of Evolution--- you probably were too.

You all know the drill : the lowly bacteria climbed out of the primordial slime, evolved into slightly large microbes and then froze evolution-wise, preserved as in aspic, unchanged, for the next 3.5 billion years.

The microbes evolved into slightly larger amoebas and froze evolutionarily as well.

And so on and so on, ever so slowly up the evolutionary ladder of increasing size and complexity culminating in Civilized Man in the top capsule.

Leaving behind down below ,to float about forever like space junk, countless earlier stages of life.

But as Dr Martin Henry Dawson early demonstrated - the bacteria never actually stopped evolving and are evolving still.

They didn't evolved into something else and then hung about as living fossils - they continued to evolve, as all lifeforms do, 'in situ'.

Sometimes evolving into becoming more complex with bigger active genetic codes, sometimes dropping bits of their genetic code to become less complex ---- and more parasitic.

Rather like us, in fact.

For the ancestors of humans once used to make their own Vitamin C, like almost all other lifeforms still do - but then we dropped that ability - became less, not more complex - and now get our life-supporting Vitamin C by living off the avails of others.

Prostitution - the world's third oldest profession ...

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.

No one who ever sold VCRs believes scientists who insist complexity equals progress

Confession time : for ten years (1980-1990), the early pioneering years, I hand sold thousands of consumer VCRs.

Our little camera shop (Reid Sweet) also repaired them as well- I never actually did so but I sometimes watched.

A very painful experience is was then, looking inside the guts of early VCRs -- rather like watching sausages being made.

Early VCRs were fabulously big and fabulously heavy and fabulously expensive and filled with many (just barely) moving mechanical parts - a right some pain to operation successfully or repair quickly and economically.

By the end - just before electronic companies switched their efforts to the new DVD players - the VCR was small, light, dirt cheap, almost trouble free --- and had very few moving mechanical parts.

In mid twentieth century comics, incredibly complex machines to do the simplest of things, dreamed up by artists Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, mercilessly satirized the Age of Progress's inane belief that greater complexity always spelt greater progress.

Living through the VCR evolution from big complex and stupid backwards to small simple and smart just confirmed for me that while zoologists may have big degrees based on complex research, in their Ladd-ite belief that biologically size matters, they are just as dumb as a sack of bricks.

Maybe dumber.....

Galton, unlike God, was inordinately fond of Man ...

By contrast, God, as Galton's friend Thomas Huxley drily noted, was inordinately fond of beetles.

More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.

Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.

Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.

Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.

Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?

Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?

Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....

Why deny something (extinction of others) you secretly HOPE is happening ?

It is generally agreed that no climate denier publicly denies the Sixth Extinction because they never ever regret other species disappearing - only if their own specie* is vanishing.

(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)

Truth be told, they yearn to see the world get drastically simplified - down to its basic mineral groups.

Call them modernists or plenticiders --- same thing : reduce, eliminate, destroy.

They really resent the way evolution has put humanity as the top dog, but not the only dog, on the planet.

Diversity - in the workforce or in the workforest - is their bete noir - if extinction can remove unpredictable diversity and replace it with predictable simplicity , the Inofes from the netherworld say 'bring it on' ...

Teach "intelligent warming" demand W. Virginia legislators

Ah yes, the mouth breathing Protestants down in West Virginia's legislature.

Maybe it was something Francis, the whorish Pope of Babylon, recently said against human hubris destroying God's green Earth that got them so fired up.

As usual, they wildly mis-read their bibles but never the six figure election campaign cheques from their state's all-powerful coal industry.

So now the legislators have demanded that their state's public school science courses be re-written to deny the possibility of any harmful climate change from burning coal.

It is not clear what type of fossil fuel the Devil uses to burn the hypocrites in the innermost circle of Hell ; but if given a choice, my fellow Christians in Ole Virginny seem to prefer the local option...

Mite is Right - Might is Right. Both ? Or Neither ?

There are niches enough for all : the large, medium and the small.

There is no evidence in the Earth's current environment that contradicts the idea that there won't always be room for some big and medium creatures,  above the size of the ever-present microbes.

But the scientific assumption  that the trend of evolutionary Progress is moving in a direction that indicated that only Big beings - ie humans and their herds - will dominate the Earth is hardly borne out by long term evidence.

Or by the current evidence that humanity is well equipped, mentally and technologically, to instantly blow itself all up.

This idea of evolutionary Progress was , in practise , further defined into the assumption that the only thing Big and complex, in an otherwise simple universe, were upper class western-oriented males .

People of colour, and other minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, children, the handicapped --- all were absorbed under the rubric of being potentially small and weak and unneeded on this evolutionary voyage.

This assumption guided the leadership of the Allies, Neutral and Axis nations of WWII - until it ended in disaster for all.

Instead we must accept that we are all, Big and small, stuck here together on Lifeboat Earth , willy nilly,  family : we Big can't divorce the small - and they can't divorce us.

We don't have to love each other - lambs and lions lying down together - but we must learn to accept the inevitably and agree to get along.

Accepting the fact is step one on Humanity's long course of post-Hubris recovery....

"Nature Made Me Do It" : All mass killings were Mercy Killings in the Modern Era

If you were fully Modern and truly believed that Nature and Darwin and Evolution had revealed the inevitability of the strong replacing the weak and the big the small, then can it ever  be said that you murdered the small and the weak ?

Weren't you simply tugging gently, tenderly, at their ankles, to hasten a merciful end, at a hanging that Mother Nature herself had ordained ?

Shouldn't you be thanked by their families , not despised ?

being Modern means never saying "The Devil Made Me Do It"

And why drag the Devil and the whole question of morality and evil into this : aren't we just talking about speeding up a scientific inevitability ?

Weren't most of the war deaths of the 20th century not military deaths at all but rather medicalized violence : death as therapy and death as mercy killings ?

Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...

The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.

This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.

It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would  inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .

By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.

But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.

But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up,  while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.

Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.

He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .

Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing  of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.

But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.

In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...

In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science

During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.

Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with   its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.

It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that  Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.

Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.

In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.

Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.

Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.

So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."

Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.

But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.

By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.

By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.

Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many  opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.

Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.

 But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.

This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).

So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.

If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.

But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....

Evolution of tanks - like the Evolution of Life - is all about compromises and niches

Reality is so varied and changing (in ways we humans will never ever be able to totally control or predict) that Evolution continuously throws up many successful ("fittest") evolving life forms to fill its many and evolving niches.

I was reminded, again,  of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.

The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.

High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line,  thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.

Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.

To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.

But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.

Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.

They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.

It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.

With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.

In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.

Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".

It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.

But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.

Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.

And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.

They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.

And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.

But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.

Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.

The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....