Dawson felt that God, Nature, Life, What have you, favoured the small as well as the big battalions ---- in fact, upon the evidence, favoured the small much more than the big.
It was only the hubris of civilized man that made him dispute the clear scientific evidence....
Showing posts with label hubris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hubris. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Friday, September 11, 2015
Capital Punishment was Modernity just as its abolition was Post-Modernity
A new take on why 'abolition' and 'postmodernity' arrived together in the same taxi, back in 1965...
If Modernity was all about Grand Narratives, then there was no grander narrative than actually carrying out a capital punishment.
Modernity is best known now for its hubris over its total faith in its predictions about events in the near future.
But imposing capital punishment really is also about being totally certain, certainty about (often hidden) events in the near past.
Certain enough about your reading of them to kill a fellow being, with no chance to revive them, if you are subsequently proven wrong.
But Modernity simply couldn't conceive it might ever be wrong - not about the past and not about the future.
Postmodernity is really all about being less certain , about the past and the future.
Uncertain enough to never want to close all doors to doubt by executing people for crimes that we can't usually see on instant replay video and so remain always open to new evidence and motives.
Technological Man exalts the Big same time Science says Universe dominated by the small
In the 1930s peer-reviewed science increasingly revealed that solid (metal atom-oriented) planets like Earth actually represented a blindingly small slice of one percent of even the visible Universe, a visible universe that mostly consisted of tiny bits of non-solid non metallic vapourware (plasma gas).
But at the exact same moment in time, popular science and technology media culture was at its apogee of exalting all the biggest, fastest, tallest etc examples of the (solid) (metallic) Man-made world.
And the public couldn't get enough of it.
Coincidence ?
But at the exact same moment in time, popular science and technology media culture was at its apogee of exalting all the biggest, fastest, tallest etc examples of the (solid) (metallic) Man-made world.
And the public couldn't get enough of it.
Coincidence ?
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Penicillin, as from the Old Testament : capricious to the greedy and the hubristic ; malleable to the righteous
Psalm 51:7 ----- Purge me with Hyssop
To the large (government and industry supported) research teams privately committed to turning natural penicillin into a highly profitable patented MAN-MADE drug with a long shelf life, crude penicillin was a capricious, labile substance with a habit of disappearing as soon as it was produced.
As both their contemporary scientific articles and their later memoirs and biographies made abundantly clear.
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, for example, were for once fully in agreement on this accord.
But to the small unofficial clinically-oriented teams solely concerned with saving lives in the here and now, penicillin's reputation for instability was vastly overrated .
One even gets hints that they wondered if this well-publicized reputation of instability was a deliberate lie fostered by people like Florey, Fleming, Merck and the OSRD to keep later competing teams from seriously investigating the wonder drug.
The clinically-oriented teams' contemporary articles found first that the varying PH requirements of the rapidly growing and then hard starving penicillium fungus had to be well regulated, if the penicillin was not to be accidentally destroyed by the fungus itself, as fast as it was produced.
And then if the resulting crude penicillin liquid was kept very cold in a refrigerator, at the appropriate PH for penicillin, it would easily last the few days or weeks needed for it to be used externally or injected via IV/IM drip, on site at their hospital.
Any competent lab tech could handle the whole affair, is how one Australian team described what they felt was the largely routine growing, extraction and storing process.
Amazingly, both accounts of crude penicillin behavior are actually fully correct.
For example, by at least keeping their impure penicillin free of any external chemical reagents, the clinically oriented teams ensured their patients didn't suffer from the many man-made chemical impurities so commonly found in the supposedly purer commercial penicillin !
And they certainly didn't routinely lose most of the crude penicillin - and consume much scarce people-power - trying to extracting all of the harmless water in crude penicillin, merely to later add it all back in again as part of the injection process.
Because one can't inject dry penicillin ----- or dry anything.
Injections need plenty of fluids - basically water dressed up in a fancy name.
And in particular, penicillin works best if very very slowly dripped into a person's blood stream --- that means that crude penicillin is itself already at the right proportions of medicine and water to work well as a slow drip IV or IM.
Impure penicillin is a lot like the impure orange juice that traditionally supplied us with our Vitamin C needs - that tasty fruit juice works at least as well as today's little white synthetic Vitamin C pills do --- and has done so for millions of years.
So what was the reason for the endless mantra (cum lame excuse) of the Allied medical world needing pure penicillin and needing dry penicillin before it could begin to save the dying ?
G R E E D & H U B R I S ---- impure and un-simple.
The only reason why 'pure' penicillin was needed was that pure penicillin is the only form of penicillin that can then be successfully broken down into its constituent parts - and only its constituent parts.
With all - and only all - of its parts known, chemists then thought they could quickly make a patented highly profitable analogue of natural penicillin, much much cheaper than the fungus could.
Americans and the English would hold those patents and then hold the rest of the world to ransom after the war.
But vast amounts of crude penicillin were accidentally destroyed in the processing along the way to yield up a gram or two of nearly 100% pure penicillin.
Then the chemists deliberately destroyed all that pure penicillin, to then look at the resulting constituent sub-parts.
Every one of their many experiments, from start in processing to finishing in destruction, wasted much clinically useful penicillin that could have saved many many precious lives.
Again, for example, briefly in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's leading penicillin producer - but almost all of that penicillin was then deliberately destroyed in the chemists' fruitless efforts to do something better than stupid little fungus.
Because, yes, old men in white lab coats and sporting PhDs from the best universities, in the middle of a deadly war, are just as capable of indulging in a useless pissing contest as a bunch of teenage louts.
All because they were determined not to let 'stupid' 'simple' fungus (their words) best 'the smartest chemists in the universe'.
Rather than simply buckling down to work with the fungus, as chemists, in an all out effort to make as much natural penicillin as possible - right now ! - to save all the war's dying.
For twenty long wasted years (1928-1948) the world of chemists tried to do something better that the tiny penicillium was already doing perfectly well, before finally publicly admitting defeat.
And the obsession with dry penicillin ?
Well, perfectly dry and hence perfectly stable penicillin was essential if a few huge drug factories were to supply all the vast world's continuing penicillin needs.
Most of the world's penicillin would have to remain viable for months or even years, as it waited to be transported around the world and then sit on warehouse shelfs until needed.
The same reason why most of our food is stuffed with preservative chemicals and shipped in, using much fossil
fuel, from warehouses a world away ----- the greed for seeing all the profits of the food business sit in fewer and fewer hands.
As a Christian, I like to think God took an early private revenge on all these greedy and hubris souls, before a second and more final round at Judgement Day.
Because Man has never been able to commercially best the humble fungus in making penicillin and crude penicillin is still the substrate for 90% of all of today's antibiotics .....
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers
In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Non-Aryans under Modernity : from ally to enemy to input
One can't imagine youthful (second generation) Nazi scientists being content with merely removing the hair, teeth and skin from all the world's 'unfit', before burning their bodies for fuel, in the manner it was done way back in papa's day.
Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.
There second generation Nazi physicists would ensure that these 'unfit' bodies would be reduced down (again that quintessential Modernity concept) to pure simple atoms.
Then each element's atoms would be collected separately, using the same technique that separated and gathered the fissionable uranium for the Bomb.
These pure atoms could then be be reassembled by second generation Nazi chemists into any synthetic material their blond beastly minds could imagine : artificial foodstuffs, in the form of 'Fuhrer Burgers', even.
What the Nazis and their kin would be so willing to do with all the humans that failed 'out of the medals' in The Race of Progress, other youthful modern elites would be even more eager to do to Nature.
For let us look at the visual material that helped formed the intellectual world of these second generation modernity elites : the futuristic illustrations from all the world's Science fiction magazines and Popular Science non-fiction magazines.
Near universally they display future human existence as consisting of living under vast glass domes on barren planets devoid of anything green or of any animal and insect.
(And certainly no microbes either).
No shade trees because shade is now better provided for by artificial means. And besides shade trees were potential enemies competing for the valuable trace elements in the rocky soil of this planet that are better converted into the substances that humans really want.
So any new planet invaded by Aryan Man would be quickly stripped of anything biological that might form a threat or be a competitor for the planet's valuable minerals and energy sources.
Modernity's Aryan Man is just so smart, the Future's gotta get out of his way or at least hide in the shadows and wear Shades.
No need anymore for humanity (what's left of it, after the Great Winnowing of the unfit) to modestly live commensal-style within Nature.
No need to supplicant oneself and gracefully accept good ideas coming from anywhere and everywhere, be it Jewish science, Roma music or microbial antibiotics.
For Hubris and Scientism be the only gods now ...
Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.
There second generation Nazi physicists would ensure that these 'unfit' bodies would be reduced down (again that quintessential Modernity concept) to pure simple atoms.
Then each element's atoms would be collected separately, using the same technique that separated and gathered the fissionable uranium for the Bomb.
These pure atoms could then be be reassembled by second generation Nazi chemists into any synthetic material their blond beastly minds could imagine : artificial foodstuffs, in the form of 'Fuhrer Burgers', even.
What the Nazis and their kin would be so willing to do with all the humans that failed 'out of the medals' in The Race of Progress, other youthful modern elites would be even more eager to do to Nature.
For let us look at the visual material that helped formed the intellectual world of these second generation modernity elites : the futuristic illustrations from all the world's Science fiction magazines and Popular Science non-fiction magazines.
Near universally they display future human existence as consisting of living under vast glass domes on barren planets devoid of anything green or of any animal and insect.
(And certainly no microbes either).
No shade trees because shade is now better provided for by artificial means. And besides shade trees were potential enemies competing for the valuable trace elements in the rocky soil of this planet that are better converted into the substances that humans really want.
So any new planet invaded by Aryan Man would be quickly stripped of anything biological that might form a threat or be a competitor for the planet's valuable minerals and energy sources.
Modernity's Aryan Man is just so smart, the Future's gotta get out of his way or at least hide in the shadows and wear Shades.
No need anymore for humanity (what's left of it, after the Great Winnowing of the unfit) to modestly live commensal-style within Nature.
No need to supplicant oneself and gracefully accept good ideas coming from anywhere and everywhere, be it Jewish science, Roma music or microbial antibiotics.
For Hubris and Scientism be the only gods now ...
Monday, February 9, 2015
Environmentalism : HOPE, as well as fear ...
It is easy - too too easy - to credit fear, fear of Fifties nuclear war and fallout in particular, as the main reason for the Early Seventies worldwide rise of the Environmental Movement.
As one of those young 1950s Boomers who did join the formally organized environmental movement early in the 1970s and who now has a great interest in the history of the early days of the Environmental Movement, may I beg to differ?
Not seeking tenure, I offer up only my memories as the primary archival source for my historical thesis.
I was an unusually small and skinny kid, very nearsighted, hated formal sports and loved books.
This might have been alright - I boldly loved to physically explore my neighbourhood and was a bit of a wiseapple in class, but for the fact that we moved frequently, or so it seemed.
( I attended three different schools in both Grade Three and Grade Eight.)
I got bullied as a result.
My dislike of the big and the strong and my sympathy for the weak and the small developed right there on the playground.
I enjoyed the stories my teachers told of how the antibiotic medicines that had saved the lives of kids like me that had come (could only come) from small and primitive weak microbes living in sewer water, basement slime and the jungle mud of primitive lands.
I really enjoyed this unlikely triumph of these microbial davids over the Chemist Goliaths of smug modern science.
For while the salad days of the Chemist and Chemical Synthesis had faded by time I first went to school, their unaltered hubris has merely transferred out to another school - that of the physicist.
So while our Fifties collective motivation was rather shallow and utilitarian (we valued Mother Nature's other beings only from the fear that their extinction might rob us of our rightful access to something useful and profitable) I joined in to the general view that we must treasure - not destroy - even the smallest and most slimy of beings.
I hope I went beyond that .
Beyond that to a belief that the smart aren't always as smart as they seem nor the dumb as dumb as they seem and that all life has a form of high intelligence merely by being able to survive and flourish so long and had a right to exist on its own terms.
I know for a fact this was the reason I so enjoyed all the franker, more revisionist, books about WWII that had been coming out in a flood by the mid 1960s - books I dearly loved as a pre-teen.
Mostly by accident, they were much less 'rah rah' than the first wave of postwar military histories.
They still thought they were celebrating bravery but , unconsciously, by providing many new details, they tended to reveal the unflattering sides of military operations the propaganda ministries had earlier successfully concealed.
I saw WWII revealed as six long years of the supposedly smart nations and leaders humbled and the supposedly dumb nations and leaders exalted.
In 2004, I stumbled upon the little known WWII tale of the supposedly smart chemists' synthesized penicillin humbled and the supposedly dumb natural penicillium exalted ---so given my history, how could I resist making it much better known ??
As one of those young 1950s Boomers who did join the formally organized environmental movement early in the 1970s and who now has a great interest in the history of the early days of the Environmental Movement, may I beg to differ?
Not seeking tenure, I offer up only my memories as the primary archival source for my historical thesis.
I was an unusually small and skinny kid, very nearsighted, hated formal sports and loved books.
This might have been alright - I boldly loved to physically explore my neighbourhood and was a bit of a wiseapple in class, but for the fact that we moved frequently, or so it seemed.
( I attended three different schools in both Grade Three and Grade Eight.)
I got bullied as a result.
My dislike of the big and the strong and my sympathy for the weak and the small developed right there on the playground.
I enjoyed the stories my teachers told of how the antibiotic medicines that had saved the lives of kids like me that had come (could only come) from small and primitive weak microbes living in sewer water, basement slime and the jungle mud of primitive lands.
microbial davids vs Chemist Goliaths
I really enjoyed this unlikely triumph of these microbial davids over the Chemist Goliaths of smug modern science.
For while the salad days of the Chemist and Chemical Synthesis had faded by time I first went to school, their unaltered hubris has merely transferred out to another school - that of the physicist.
So while our Fifties collective motivation was rather shallow and utilitarian (we valued Mother Nature's other beings only from the fear that their extinction might rob us of our rightful access to something useful and profitable) I joined in to the general view that we must treasure - not destroy - even the smallest and most slimy of beings.
I hope I went beyond that .
Beyond that to a belief that the smart aren't always as smart as they seem nor the dumb as dumb as they seem and that all life has a form of high intelligence merely by being able to survive and flourish so long and had a right to exist on its own terms.
WWII as a study in the smart humbled and the humble exalted
I know for a fact this was the reason I so enjoyed all the franker, more revisionist, books about WWII that had been coming out in a flood by the mid 1960s - books I dearly loved as a pre-teen.
Mostly by accident, they were much less 'rah rah' than the first wave of postwar military histories.
They still thought they were celebrating bravery but , unconsciously, by providing many new details, they tended to reveal the unflattering sides of military operations the propaganda ministries had earlier successfully concealed.
I saw WWII revealed as six long years of the supposedly smart nations and leaders humbled and the supposedly dumb nations and leaders exalted.
In 2004, I stumbled upon the little known WWII tale of the supposedly smart chemists' synthesized penicillin humbled and the supposedly dumb natural penicillium exalted ---so given my history, how could I resist making it much better known ??
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
"Climate Hubrists" : deniers of any limits to human ability to control reality
I separate Holocaust deniers from Climate Change deniers, I really do.
Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.
But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.
What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.
The denier/hubrists don't really read the bible and they don't really read many books.
But if you do the arithmetic, you will see that all active "climate change deniers" (I prefer to call them "Climate Hubrists") under the age of eighty-five had to grow up reading super hero comic books.
Those super hero ideas and conceits (along with Fox TV News, Talk Radio and the commentators on the sports channels) have in practise become the common intellectual currency of our age for people of an anti-intellectual cast, replacing things like the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the King James Bible.
Why else would Googling Climate Change and Manhattan Project produce 1.5 million results ?
A new Manhattan Project can't stop any global environmental crisis : in fact the old one produced - via worldwide strontium 90 fallout from local testing - the very first man-made global environmental disaster we ever knew.
But millions - and probably ultimately billions of people world wide - still take it as a comforting solution to our current climate change crisis.
It is a pity then that the names Robert Jewett , John Sheldon Lawrence and H Bruce Franklin are not better known among those combating the climate deniers/hubrists.
I recommend to all of us who are wondering why we are losing the public battle of opinion over the existence (or not) of harmful human climate change to spend some time reading , in combination, Jewett's & Lawrence's many books and articles on the "American (superhero) Monomyth", together with Franklin's classic "War Stars", about the enduring belief in a single superweapon ending all wars.
(Geo-engineering, in this context, might be regarded as the latest high tech superweapon - this time against incoming weather rather than incoming aliens.)
Instead of looking to wartime Manhattan's nuclear Project, we need rather to look to wartime Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project for a pathway showing how when we work with Mother Nature, enduring good things happen.
Work with Nature instead of against her ? Unimaginable to denier/hubrists.
Because the only thing the deniers ever really deny is any limits to the human ability to control physical reality --- and that reads as Hubris in my book....
Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.
But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.
What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.
The denier/hubrists don't really read the bible and they don't really read many books.
Climate 'hubrists' a more accurate term than 'deniers'
But if you do the arithmetic, you will see that all active "climate change deniers" (I prefer to call them "Climate Hubrists") under the age of eighty-five had to grow up reading super hero comic books.
Those super hero ideas and conceits (along with Fox TV News, Talk Radio and the commentators on the sports channels) have in practise become the common intellectual currency of our age for people of an anti-intellectual cast, replacing things like the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the King James Bible.
Why else would Googling Climate Change and Manhattan Project produce 1.5 million results ?
A new Manhattan Project can't stop any global environmental crisis : in fact the old one produced - via worldwide strontium 90 fallout from local testing - the very first man-made global environmental disaster we ever knew.
But millions - and probably ultimately billions of people world wide - still take it as a comforting solution to our current climate change crisis.
It is a pity then that the names Robert Jewett , John Sheldon Lawrence and H Bruce Franklin are not better known among those combating the climate deniers/hubrists.
I recommend to all of us who are wondering why we are losing the public battle of opinion over the existence (or not) of harmful human climate change to spend some time reading , in combination, Jewett's & Lawrence's many books and articles on the "American (superhero) Monomyth", together with Franklin's classic "War Stars", about the enduring belief in a single superweapon ending all wars.
(Geo-engineering, in this context, might be regarded as the latest high tech superweapon - this time against incoming weather rather than incoming aliens.)
Instead of looking to wartime Manhattan's nuclear Project, we need rather to look to wartime Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project for a pathway showing how when we work with Mother Nature, enduring good things happen.
Work with Nature instead of against her ? Unimaginable to denier/hubrists.
Because the only thing the deniers ever really deny is any limits to the human ability to control physical reality --- and that reads as Hubris in my book....
Monday, December 29, 2014
Enough already about War's impact on Nature : what about Nature's impact on War ?
With only the very best of intentions, environmentalists have tended to focus on what war does to nature - say for example, in reviewing the impact of leaking oil from the thousands of oil tankers sunk at the sea during war in the last 120 years.
But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.
But in fact, the reverse is true.
History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.
But bad weather leading to bad harvests works just as well : the course of the Nazi Holocaust follows more exactingly the wavering course of the annual German domestic harvest results than it ever does the wavering course of the brain chemicals inside Adolf Hitler's head.
In 1939, no side expected WWII to last so long and cost so much in lives and material : what really prolonged it on both sides was modernity's failure (in peace as in war) to calculate in the truly awesome powers of climate and geography compared to the still puny powers of man's ideologies, demographies and technologies.
Viewed this way, WWII becomes less a contest of man against man, of ideology and technology against ideology and technology and more an unequal donnybrook between man-the-feeble and Mother-Nature-The-Mighty.
My blog and book series, un-superheroes, will provide many such weather/climate/geography examples from our LAST global disaster, WWII, because our current global disaster is once again a man versus climate fight - one where the speedy application of any past learned lessons could literally save our lives ...
But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.
But in fact, the reverse is true.
History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.
But bad weather leading to bad harvests works just as well : the course of the Nazi Holocaust follows more exactingly the wavering course of the annual German domestic harvest results than it ever does the wavering course of the brain chemicals inside Adolf Hitler's head.
In 1939, no side expected WWII to last so long and cost so much in lives and material : what really prolonged it on both sides was modernity's failure (in peace as in war) to calculate in the truly awesome powers of climate and geography compared to the still puny powers of man's ideologies, demographies and technologies.
Viewed this way, WWII becomes less a contest of man against man, of ideology and technology against ideology and technology and more an unequal donnybrook between man-the-feeble and Mother-Nature-The-Mighty.
My blog and book series, un-superheroes, will provide many such weather/climate/geography examples from our LAST global disaster, WWII, because our current global disaster is once again a man versus climate fight - one where the speedy application of any past learned lessons could literally save our lives ...
Monday, October 20, 2014
Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names
When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.
But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.
And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.
Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.
It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.
Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.
You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....
* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .
It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.
But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.
And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.
Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.
It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.
Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.
You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....
* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .
It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.
Monday, August 25, 2014
Chemistry PhD = Hubris ?
As penicillium mold spores drift about through the air, the fortunate ones land on a suitably moist food supply.
The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.
But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.
Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.
Technically, the key part of the penicillin molecule - the famous strained beta lactam ring - must always be there , for it to work as a antibiotic .
But the extra bit on the side of that key component - the side chain - can vary widely and will tend to produce various kinds and strengths of antibiotics.
Many of them offer different - useful - qualities - from the original penicillin (type G).
Now, in Nature , all these marvellous variants are mere happy accidents induced by the chance of varying wind currents and drifting spores.
In the Lab, biologists and chemists feed the penicillium spores all sorts of extra food treats , (fancied up ,the technical word for these humble food supplements is precursors) hoping to see a useful variant emerge.
When the new improved variants do emerge , the chemists tend to glorify this 'brute force' approach to the discovery of new chemicals by daring to call the results "semi-synthetic" penicillin.
But this just hubris and hooey.
It is merely a way for human chemists - who tried and failed to make penicillin from scratch* like the tiny mold spores so readilyand so easily did - to regain some lost luster for their profession.
(*To chemists , this is their holy grail of "total synthesis".)
Because it is really no different than the ancient practise of farmers trying out plants on differing soil mixtures and cultivation techniques and running with the methods that gave the best yields.
The chemists, rather like the British , lost really big in WWII.
Partly to physics (the A-Bomb) and partly to biology (natural penicillin triumphing over the chemists' failure to make synthetic penicillin) .
And like the British, they've been trying to re-write the history of WWII ever since ....
The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.
But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.
Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.
Technically, the key part of the penicillin molecule - the famous strained beta lactam ring - must always be there , for it to work as a antibiotic .
But the extra bit on the side of that key component - the side chain - can vary widely and will tend to produce various kinds and strengths of antibiotics.
Many of them offer different - useful - qualities - from the original penicillin (type G).
Now, in Nature , all these marvellous variants are mere happy accidents induced by the chance of varying wind currents and drifting spores.
In the Lab, biologists and chemists feed the penicillium spores all sorts of extra food treats , (fancied up ,the technical word for these humble food supplements is precursors) hoping to see a useful variant emerge.
When the new improved variants do emerge , the chemists tend to glorify this 'brute force' approach to the discovery of new chemicals by daring to call the results "semi-synthetic" penicillin.
But this just hubris and hooey.
It is merely a way for human chemists - who tried and failed to make penicillin from scratch* like the tiny mold spores so readilyand so easily did - to regain some lost luster for their profession.
(*To chemists , this is their holy grail of "total synthesis".)
Because it is really no different than the ancient practise of farmers trying out plants on differing soil mixtures and cultivation techniques and running with the methods that gave the best yields.
The chemists, rather like the British , lost really big in WWII.
Partly to physics (the A-Bomb) and partly to biology (natural penicillin triumphing over the chemists' failure to make synthetic penicillin) .
And like the British, they've been trying to re-write the history of WWII ever since ....
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
WWII as a preview of the Sixth Extinction
The most frequent contribution most of us (scientist or laity) make to the public debate about the Climate is to discuss our beliefs about changes that may (or may not) happen sometime in the future , when human hubris collides with natural reality.
Unfortunately , that leaves more than enough "ifs and maybes" for many other citizens to permanently tune out on this all important public debate.
By contrast, The Mills of Nature discusses what actually did happen in the recent past , when pure human hubris really did get seriously stuck axle deep in the dirt of natural reality.
To protect the guilty and the inept , WWII history has normally been told back to front : 'the Allies won the war in 1945 --- and here is how it all happened'.
It becomes distilled down a human drama between six extremely ham-ish actors, all judged more than capable of eating the scenery.
Cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors"
Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, FDR and Tojo were still better known for extraordinarily skills in speech-making and morale-raising than for any administrative prowess they might have had.
But the current historical consensus about WWII argues they were just the kind of leadership needed to fight this sort of war.
So we end with this intimate human drama , a clash between the six men fronting the six biggest civilizations, played out for us above the footlights .
Meanwhile, far back at the ranch , Mother Nature is nothing but an uninteresting and inert painted backdrop.
However, there is another way to tell the story of WWII.
It proceeds more conventionally, from front to back, detailing what Allies, Axis and Neutrals actually thought would happen, day by day, and then contrasting that with what actually did happen.
As a result, it ends up telling a far more downbeat story.
Now we can clearly see human ambitions, on all sides, stymied time and time and time again by natural forces.
And by humans that each side regarded as less than fully civilized and thus less than fully human - people in some sense also seen by most as 'just another part of the natural world.'
Nature (and 'these people of the natural world') turned out to be very far from inert --- for six long years it resists Civilized Man's vaulting ambitions at every turn.
So for but one example , over and over again a bad - natural - harvest of the lowly potato in Germany led to the human decision to see that more Slavs and Jews further East were starved or shot to death.
Even now, few us really believe it was Generalissimo Stalin , rather than General Frost and General Mud, who really saved Russia in 1941.
So once again cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors".
But this time , read it with the accent on scenery and not on actors .
I hope you find this Green history of WWII a humbling and healing affair.
Yes it does cut us down to size before the vastness of an ever turbulent Mother Nature .
But hopefully it will also help us give the lesson on the dangers of Climate Change, before we get to the final exam....
Unfortunately , that leaves more than enough "ifs and maybes" for many other citizens to permanently tune out on this all important public debate.
By contrast, The Mills of Nature discusses what actually did happen in the recent past , when pure human hubris really did get seriously stuck axle deep in the dirt of natural reality.
To protect the guilty and the inept , WWII history has normally been told back to front : 'the Allies won the war in 1945 --- and here is how it all happened'.
It becomes distilled down a human drama between six extremely ham-ish actors, all judged more than capable of eating the scenery.
Cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors"
Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, FDR and Tojo were still better known for extraordinarily skills in speech-making and morale-raising than for any administrative prowess they might have had.
But the current historical consensus about WWII argues they were just the kind of leadership needed to fight this sort of war.
So we end with this intimate human drama , a clash between the six men fronting the six biggest civilizations, played out for us above the footlights .
Meanwhile, far back at the ranch , Mother Nature is nothing but an uninteresting and inert painted backdrop.
However, there is another way to tell the story of WWII.
It proceeds more conventionally, from front to back, detailing what Allies, Axis and Neutrals actually thought would happen, day by day, and then contrasting that with what actually did happen.
As a result, it ends up telling a far more downbeat story.
Now we can clearly see human ambitions, on all sides, stymied time and time and time again by natural forces.
And by humans that each side regarded as less than fully civilized and thus less than fully human - people in some sense also seen by most as 'just another part of the natural world.'
Nature (and 'these people of the natural world') turned out to be very far from inert --- for six long years it resists Civilized Man's vaulting ambitions at every turn.
So for but one example , over and over again a bad - natural - harvest of the lowly potato in Germany led to the human decision to see that more Slavs and Jews further East were starved or shot to death.
Even now, few us really believe it was Generalissimo Stalin , rather than General Frost and General Mud, who really saved Russia in 1941.
So once again cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors".
But this time , read it with the accent on scenery and not on actors .
I hope you find this Green history of WWII a humbling and healing affair.
Yes it does cut us down to size before the vastness of an ever turbulent Mother Nature .
But hopefully it will also help us give the lesson on the dangers of Climate Change, before we get to the final exam....
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Technology makes planes that fly ; Science merely makes claims that MIGHT fly
The DC-3 , a plane that technologists designed 80 years ago, is still flying in commercial airlines around the world despite the fact that the last civilian units were built over 70 years ago.
Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !
This is why I have the highest possible regard for small "s" science , as broadly defined as possible - and that definition includes all of us who have ever tinkered, by trial and error and careful observation of existing actions , to make something better.
But I regard the exalted claims of the successes of capital "S" Science,Scientists and Scientism with the attitude of a critic from Missouri : "Show Me !" ....
Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !
This is why I have the highest possible regard for small "s" science , as broadly defined as possible - and that definition includes all of us who have ever tinkered, by trial and error and careful observation of existing actions , to make something better.
But I regard the exalted claims of the successes of capital "S" Science,Scientists and Scientism with the attitude of a critic from Missouri : "Show Me !" ....
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
the long AND the short AND the tall : the eternal commensality of the big and the small (and God blesses 'em all)
It is typical of the hubris of us individual humans and our individual human societies to always imagine that we alone are big and mighty and wise and that all other beings are small, weak and foolish.
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.
Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.
From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.
Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.
Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.
Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.
For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.
The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.
Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.
That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.
Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.
From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.
Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.
Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.
Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.
For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.
The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.
Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.
That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....
the long AND the short AND the tall : the eternal commensality of the big and the small (and God blesses 'em all)
It is typical of the hubris of us individual humans and our individual human societies to always imagine that we alone are big and mighty and wise and that all other beings are small, weak and foolish.
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...
During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.
Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.
Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.
There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons, in spades.....
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