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 postmodernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postmodernity. Show all posts
Friday, September 25, 2015
Monday, September 21, 2015
Big Tents always welcome in the small - don't they ?
After 1945, western democracies couldn't extend civil rights and a greater share of the economic pie to well fed and well educated affluent anglo saxon white men - those lucky guys already had it all and more.
No, it seems prima facie evident that increasing human and biological diversity inside a Big Tent always means inviting the small inside.
Or does it ?
This blog is about a wartime Manhattan-based project, from the small side of life, that aimed to create a Big Tent to fight not just WWII but the causes of WWII, and to invite everybody in - small, big and the in-betweeners ...
No, it seems prima facie evident that increasing human and biological diversity inside a Big Tent always means inviting the small inside.
Or does it ?
This blog is about a wartime Manhattan-based project, from the small side of life, that aimed to create a Big Tent to fight not just WWII but the causes of WWII, and to invite everybody in - small, big and the in-betweeners ...
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Surviving in Lifeboat Earth requires a coalition of all talents, small as well as great.
Similarly, in the fall of 1940, winning the military and moral war against the Axis nations and their fellow travellers among the world's Neutral nations (remember, at that time, they formed the majority of the world's nations !) would also take a 'coalition of all talents', or so thought an obscure doctor in a New York hospital.
Dr Henry Dawson's resulting "small" penicillin Manhattan Project was intended to serve as both as a rebuke to the Allied leadership for editing out most of the world's beings from their coalition plans and as a pilot project example of all the good things that happen when a coalition of all talents is really set to work.
Dr Henry Dawson's resulting "small" penicillin Manhattan Project was intended to serve as both as a rebuke to the Allied leadership for editing out most of the world's beings from their coalition plans and as a pilot project example of all the good things that happen when a coalition of all talents is really set to work.
Monday, August 31, 2015
The Age of Progress was inevitably also the Age of Big
Michael B Schiffer (The Portable Radio in America) is fighting an uphill battle and he knows it.
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Sunday, August 16, 2015
WWII : an old way of thinking busy dying, a new way of thinking busy being born
My WWII book isn't really about the big highly visible military conflict, a conflict that ended in a century old way of thinking tearing itself apart.
A zillion books have already been written (almost all by men) on that military conflict, with some giving a nod to an old way of life dying but almost none seeing a new way being born during the war.
My interest instead is in a tiny, almost invisible, new way of thinking that was busy being born upon the moral ruins of the old.
I fully expect my book to be far more popular among women than among men.
That's the male gender's loss.
Progress, Modernity, The Enlightenment - what ever ! - was hit during WWII by a moral double whammy - boxed in from both sides.
Civilization never acted so despicable, never was more fully devoted to life-taking among the innocent, as it did during WWII.
A huge world war, yet a war where most people who died, died non-combat deaths - either as civilians or as military personnel dying like civilians.
The millions of Soviet prisoners murdered by bullet or starvation in Nazi POW camps, alone, all by themselves outnumber the combat deaths of any combatant nation but the Russians themselves.
And the primitive and simple, supposedly only fit to kill and decay life, to do evil, never acted more admirably than when the penicillium naturally produced all the war's lifesaving penicillin (and is still naturally producing the base of almost all our antibiotics).
Its a dramatic story, a heart warming story, a three hankie story - a Good News Story.
From the truly awful Bad News War....
A zillion books have already been written (almost all by men) on that military conflict, with some giving a nod to an old way of life dying but almost none seeing a new way being born during the war.
My interest instead is in a tiny, almost invisible, new way of thinking that was busy being born upon the moral ruins of the old.
I fully expect my book to be far more popular among women than among men.
That's the male gender's loss.
Progress, Modernity, The Enlightenment - what ever ! - was hit during WWII by a moral double whammy - boxed in from both sides.
Civilization never acted so despicable, never was more fully devoted to life-taking among the innocent, as it did during WWII.
A huge world war, yet a war where most people who died, died non-combat deaths - either as civilians or as military personnel dying like civilians.
The millions of Soviet prisoners murdered by bullet or starvation in Nazi POW camps, alone, all by themselves outnumber the combat deaths of any combatant nation but the Russians themselves.
And the primitive and simple, supposedly only fit to kill and decay life, to do evil, never acted more admirably than when the penicillium naturally produced all the war's lifesaving penicillin (and is still naturally producing the base of almost all our antibiotics).
Its a dramatic story, a heart warming story, a three hankie story - a Good News Story.
From the truly awful Bad News War....
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Theory explaining inexact weather predicting is salient : theory explaining dual slit particle-wave experiment is not
It is quite easy to spot the difference between "political scientists" and "scientists".
The Poli Sci types are always on about saliency or lack thereof --- the boffins never ever are.
Never never never never ever are.
Any theory that claims that the stock market or the economy or the weather is virtually impossible to predict accurately can be tested - for free - by the seven or eight billion of us.
The results affect all of us - daily - and we ourselves can conduct the experiment.
But most of the supposedly epoch breaking experiments, the type that scientists love to bang on about, we can only take on the word of well educated journalists making sense of long articles in journals like Nature or Science.
We can't even follow the logic of a written report on a written report of an experiment, let alone conduct the experiment ourselves and besides nothing it claims to report seems to make a bit of difference to our lives.
It totally lacks saliency.
It is really nothing but 'science porn' - fun for a few minutes to relieve the stress of our day to day lives, but nothing more.
We can respect the fact that without proven quantum theories, GPS systems won't be accurate enough to safely land the planes that billions of us have flown in.
But we still tend to more admire the applied technology of GPS than the basic science behind it.
Truly epoch breaking changes in the basic tenets of physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy all occurred in the first half of the 20th century without really changing the classical - Newtonian and Platonic - ways we ordinary people were taught to view reality.
My book argues that it rather took changes in the way we viewed (a) biology in general (b) human and social activities like consciousness and the economy in particular and (c) 'the weather' to really change us --- to really make us post-progress, post modern, post Newton, post Plato after 1945.
(I include with 'the weather' such events as earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, pandemics : ---- all of the globe's massive, sudden and unpredictable catastrophes.)
The three things these items all had in common is that they are close at hand, they envelope us daily and most importantly, they happen over relatively short (in terms of an typical human life) time periods.
Yes, tectonic plates move, but extremely slowly - yes, the universe is expanding and cooling, again seemingly slowly - yes, the Earth's radioactive atoms are decaying and diminishing in number, but oh so slowly.
WWII was a catastrophe by any measure, particularly to people who make confident predictions for a living, and served as the catalyst to put the fatal post into modernity and progress and the enlightenment project.
I won't spend much time in my book arguing that Auschwitz and Hiroshima played a key role in modernity's demise - gazillions have already trotted down that path before me.
I obviously want to add the unexpected success of penicillium slime poo (standing in as the very mental image of 1940's anti-civilization) to help account for WWII's upending of progress and civilization.
But I also want to give a fuller account of the hundreds of embarrassing failures in supremely confident prediction - that very hallmark of left brain science - that so marked that unexpectedly long six year war.
Like the drip drip drip of water torture, they too played a big role in the sense of fatigue against anymore Progress Talk that so marked post 1945 intellectual and artistic thought and eventually became the commonplace of many ordinary folks as well.
One prediction made about the coming war, made by most people in the years 1931-1939, certainly was proven true - millions of civilians did die and did die by gas.
But they certainly did not die, as was generally predicted, in the first few days of a sharp short war.
Because I know of no one notable who claimed the war would last six years because all such predictions of quick successes (and from all sides) would fail time and time and time again.
So parallel to Dawson and Meyer's daily work on penicillin-for-all, I will watch these two frontline veterans of WWI parse the news of the unexpectedly long course of WWII, as seen from by far the best served city in the world for abundant wartime media, New York ....
The Poli Sci types are always on about saliency or lack thereof --- the boffins never ever are.
Never never never never ever are.
Any theory that claims that the stock market or the economy or the weather is virtually impossible to predict accurately can be tested - for free - by the seven or eight billion of us.
The results affect all of us - daily - and we ourselves can conduct the experiment.
But most of the supposedly epoch breaking experiments, the type that scientists love to bang on about, we can only take on the word of well educated journalists making sense of long articles in journals like Nature or Science.
We can't even follow the logic of a written report on a written report of an experiment, let alone conduct the experiment ourselves and besides nothing it claims to report seems to make a bit of difference to our lives.
It totally lacks saliency.
It is really nothing but 'science porn' - fun for a few minutes to relieve the stress of our day to day lives, but nothing more.
We can respect the fact that without proven quantum theories, GPS systems won't be accurate enough to safely land the planes that billions of us have flown in.
But we still tend to more admire the applied technology of GPS than the basic science behind it.
Truly epoch breaking changes in the basic tenets of physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy all occurred in the first half of the 20th century without really changing the classical - Newtonian and Platonic - ways we ordinary people were taught to view reality.
My book argues that it rather took changes in the way we viewed (a) biology in general (b) human and social activities like consciousness and the economy in particular and (c) 'the weather' to really change us --- to really make us post-progress, post modern, post Newton, post Plato after 1945.
(I include with 'the weather' such events as earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, pandemics : ---- all of the globe's massive, sudden and unpredictable catastrophes.)
The three things these items all had in common is that they are close at hand, they envelope us daily and most importantly, they happen over relatively short (in terms of an typical human life) time periods.
Yes, tectonic plates move, but extremely slowly - yes, the universe is expanding and cooling, again seemingly slowly - yes, the Earth's radioactive atoms are decaying and diminishing in number, but oh so slowly.
WWII : inducing epoch-making changes in the way we view Biology, human/social behavior and catastrophes like The Weather
WWII was a catastrophe by any measure, particularly to people who make confident predictions for a living, and served as the catalyst to put the fatal post into modernity and progress and the enlightenment project.
I won't spend much time in my book arguing that Auschwitz and Hiroshima played a key role in modernity's demise - gazillions have already trotted down that path before me.
I obviously want to add the unexpected success of penicillium slime poo (standing in as the very mental image of 1940's anti-civilization) to help account for WWII's upending of progress and civilization.
But I also want to give a fuller account of the hundreds of embarrassing failures in supremely confident prediction - that very hallmark of left brain science - that so marked that unexpectedly long six year war.
Like the drip drip drip of water torture, they too played a big role in the sense of fatigue against anymore Progress Talk that so marked post 1945 intellectual and artistic thought and eventually became the commonplace of many ordinary folks as well.
One prediction made about the coming war, made by most people in the years 1931-1939, certainly was proven true - millions of civilians did die and did die by gas.
But they certainly did not die, as was generally predicted, in the first few days of a sharp short war.
Because I know of no one notable who claimed the war would last six years because all such predictions of quick successes (and from all sides) would fail time and time and time again.
So parallel to Dawson and Meyer's daily work on penicillin-for-all, I will watch these two frontline veterans of WWI parse the news of the unexpectedly long course of WWII, as seen from by far the best served city in the world for abundant wartime media, New York ....
Monday, August 3, 2015
October 16 1940 : upending the team's protocol
To put it bluntly, twice-wounded Lieutenant Dr Martin Henry Dawson (MC with citation for bravery) was very far from being given to routinely performing bold, brave and lonely gestures.
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
Collective Cognitive Dissonance
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
The injecting only took a New York Minute - but it changed everything
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Ending the Enlightenment Project with deeds, not words
There are two academic puzzles in dating the ending of the Enlightenment Project precisely to 1945.
One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.
The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.
No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.
Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.
Both men of deeds, not of words.
Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....
One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.
The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.
No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.
Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.
Both men of deeds, not of words.
Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Microbes evolve into civilized Man, uncontroversial --- Microbes evolve while remaining microbes, heresy
In 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a scientific heretic.
His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.
In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.
Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.
Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.
But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.
How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.
Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.
Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.
All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.
In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.
Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.
Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.
He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.
Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.
Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.
It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?
Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.
The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.
You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.
I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".
But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...
His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.
In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.
Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.
Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.
But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.
How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.
Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.
Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.
All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.
In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.
Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.
Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.
He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.
Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.
Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.
It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?
Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.
The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.
You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.
I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".
But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...
Monday, July 20, 2015
Why Adorno and Horkheimer got it partly wrong
I believe that Adorno and Horkheimer only got part of the correct explanation for why the Modernity Project so abruptly started dying in 1945, supposedly the moment of its greatest triumph.
Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.
Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.
Old, at least relative to school age children.
For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.
In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.
It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.
At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.
And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.
I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.
My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.
From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.
That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.
Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.
Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.
Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.
Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.
When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...
Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.
Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.
Old, at least relative to school age children.
For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.
In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.
It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.
At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.
And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.
I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.
My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.
From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.
That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.
Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.
Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.
Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.
Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.
The "Penicillium Kids"
When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity
Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?
Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?
Not on the evidence.
The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.
It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.
No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.
But they altogether still weren't enough - all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.
What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.
Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.
Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?
Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?
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 ...
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Manhattan natural penicillin Project a psychological antidote to the mental horrors unleashed by the Manhattan synthetic nuclear Project
In 1945 and 1946, many thoughtful people began realizing that human ingenuity had produced a nuclear bomb system powerful enough to kill an entire planet - a green (rather than merely a mineral-containing) planet that they had never really regarded as alive enough and fragile enough to be killed , until now.
For they began realizing that what Manhattan's Bomb's explosive force, searing heat and mutation-causing radiation could do to humans it could also do to all other living things.
They began to realize that meant that the few humans lucky enough to survive both the nuclear blasts and the following radiation clouds would still slowly starve to death .
The instantly blast & heat-killed would end up being the truly lucky ones.
Because if all the plants and animals were totally dependent on our good sense not to be burned and boiled to death in a human nuclear holocaust, we were still as equally dependent upon them, for our basic survival needs.
For all that bold talk of replacing natural foods, water and biologically-produced materials with synthetic substitutes was just windy talk : it was all highly dependent on there remaining a civilized, industrial, scientific, technological, world left to produce those chemical synthetics.
Fortunately, Mother Nature still had a lot of low tech surprises of her own to offer us : one had only to look at Manhattan's natural penicillin and all those other powerful life-saving antibiotics emerging from jungle dirt and spoiled market fruit.
These thoughtful people began to relax - at least a little : there was hope and there was an alternative to the modern science's madness.
Janus Manhattan : home to the modern and to the postmodern science Projects ....
For they began realizing that what Manhattan's Bomb's explosive force, searing heat and mutation-causing radiation could do to humans it could also do to all other living things.
They began to realize that meant that the few humans lucky enough to survive both the nuclear blasts and the following radiation clouds would still slowly starve to death .
The instantly blast & heat-killed would end up being the truly lucky ones.
Because if all the plants and animals were totally dependent on our good sense not to be burned and boiled to death in a human nuclear holocaust, we were still as equally dependent upon them, for our basic survival needs.
For all that bold talk of replacing natural foods, water and biologically-produced materials with synthetic substitutes was just windy talk : it was all highly dependent on there remaining a civilized, industrial, scientific, technological, world left to produce those chemical synthetics.
Fortunately, Mother Nature still had a lot of low tech surprises of her own to offer us : one had only to look at Manhattan's natural penicillin and all those other powerful life-saving antibiotics emerging from jungle dirt and spoiled market fruit.
These thoughtful people began to relax - at least a little : there was hope and there was an alternative to the modern science's madness.
Janus Manhattan : home to the modern and to the postmodern science Projects ....
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
The 'sixth' extinction was supposed to be the Jews ...
Natural history (also known as pre-modernity and post-modernity) wears muddy boots and does fieldwork, cumulatively demonstrating the existence of 400,000 different species of beetles - so far.
They are always filling up the gene pool.
Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.
Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...
They are always filling up the gene pool.
Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.
Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...
Postmodern God's inordinate fondness for Beatles
Perhaps the old folks were right after all, and the deconstructionists wrong : perhaps popular postmodernity did not slowly and silently seep into our world like rising damp but instead arrived suddenly , on the Radio and the TV, with a noisy bang or a clang.
Because while the plenticidal modern world showed a decided un-fondness for beetles (and all other forms of exuberant natural fecundity), the postmoderns just as conversely show a decided fondness for the ever varying diversity of Nature.... and Beatles.
Putting the "pop" back into dating the rise of "popular" postmodernity : Beatlemania, November 1963
Because while the plenticidal modern world showed a decided un-fondness for beetles (and all other forms of exuberant natural fecundity), the postmoderns just as conversely show a decided fondness for the ever varying diversity of Nature.... and Beatles.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
How HGT helped end Modernity
It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.
But is this in anyway accurate ?
True, postmodernist thought does typically say things like this : "the matriarch of an extended aboriginal family is as smart in her own way as is the boss of a New York brokerage firm".
But is this nothing more the evoking two forms of one absolute, 'smartness' ?
Contrast this with a typical modernity claim, that that 'the bigger and more complex are inevitably smarter than the small and the less complex, just as the newer is always smarter than the ancient'.
So : the header of a current brokerage firm is inevitably smarter than the head of an ancient aboriginal family.
Further : that a modern civilization is far smarter (because it is so big/complex and created so recently) than a tiny simple bacteria that first existed billions of years ago.
This is the Continuum of relative Progress that formed the base for all the towering modernist-scientism thought that lay above it.
A straight arrow of progress and smartness, ever upward towards today's biggest and the newest.
Anchored - in the minds of modern scientism at least - by the obvious smartness of today's biggest and newest human civilizations versus the obvious stupidity of the shapeless, immobile tiny bacteria first born billions of years earlier.
The real target of this line of thinking was not the bacteria, so very far beneath the pale, but humans in the middle of this continuum : the natives of the many overseas colonies held captive by western nations claiming to be their 'moral stewards' using this scientific argument.
Now as it happens, one of the smartest beings in the Modernity universe, an American scientist named Herman J Muller, had been busy at work studying genetic mutations beginning at Columbia University in 1918 , trying to alter the genetic makeup of living beings.
He zapped the multitudes of these assembled beings with overdoses of deadly radiation.
Now most died right away but some lived a little while longer while being deformed into useless mutations as the radiation altered their genes.
By once in a while a being survived into old age but with a mutation that was either harmless or even possibly helpful.
He became famous overnight when he gleefully telegraphed his results at the end of 1927.
The Swedes, belatedly impressed by the mis-shaped mutations that the wartime A-Bombs had coughed up amid all the dead and dying, gave Muller a Nobel Prize in 1946.
Now that same month as Muller announced his attempts at gene modification, a British scientist named Frederick Griffith very reluctantly submitted a paper on his discovery (made in 1923, just as Muller had done his first radiation experiments) that primitive, ancient, tiny, simple bacteria could also affect gene change.
Albeit without millions of bystanders being killed in the process.
His news was totally ignored - first by scientists and thus by their syncopants*, the so called science 'journalists', and then by ordinary journalists and their readers.
(*I have always wondered why football team cheerleaders are not similarly called sports 'journalists'.)
Unlike Muller, Griffith did not expand upon his research and nor did anyone else , except a Canadian-born scientist named Martin Henry Dawson.
His work too got little attention.
No wonder !
The Moderns has replace their parents' belief in a personal God with a belief in an Impersonal Science but that did not mean an end to needing to believe in dogmas.
They needed more of them - now more than ever.
We all know them - as historical relics, albit still taught to innocent high school kids by the old Faithfuls.
Such as "One gene = One protein", the famous central dogma of biology.
In Dawson's own skill areas, bacteriology and immunology, 'Strain-Typing' was the operating philosophy.
It was based on another famous dogma, Koch's First Postulate, that a specific disease-causing strain of bacteria will always be found in a person suffering such a specific disease but never in a healthy person.
Simply examine the various bodily fluids of a sick person possibly suffering from an unknown-for-certain disease, find within it lots of strain x of bacteria Y that always causes a particular disease Z and you are done.
Possibly a cure is known and the patient lives --- or possibly the disease hasn't yet a cure and they die - but your job, as a typing bacteriologist at the hospital lab is all done , 'where's my pay cheque ?'
Let the frontline doctors on the wards deal with the emotional fallout from this definitive diagnosis.
What Dawson boldly dared suggest - unlike the timid and disbelieving Griffith - was that the harmless strains of bacteria carried by almost all of us in our throats and noses at sometime in our lives - could be changed into dangerous strains by HGT.
This meant that simply typing a patient as having only non-pathogen bacteria in them wouldn't ensure they couldn't get a new pathogen disease when thus harmless strains took up harmful genes from other bacteria.
The professions of Bacteriology and Immunology were less than a generation old but now Dawson's suggestion of infinite bacteria genetic plasticity threatened their members' only recently attained job security and new high status within medicine and science.
He actually called his process by the plain-spoken term "bacterial transformation", but today we use the more descriptive term "horizontal gene transfer", hence HGT.
For - contrary to the God-disbelieving Charles Darwin's own personal dogma- Evolution isn't all about vertical descent from parent to child.
Sometimes Evolution actually arrives horizontally, when bits of DNA from one strain of microorganism are incorporated into the "adult" DNA of another strain or even another species of microorganism - and possibly even into the DNA of complex beings like us .
The ancient stupid/simple microorganisms have evolved ways to painlessly insert foreign DNA into their own DNA - and the new clever/ complex human civilization hadn't .
True, we eventually wised up and borrowed the tools of the bacteria to do the job for us - we call it recombinant DNA and PCR.
We then have the sheer nerve to give Nobel Prizes to their mere human discovers rather than their true inventors, the bacteria !
But if HGT demonstrated the bottom end of an upward-oriented continuum of relative 'smarterness' was actually smarter in the area of recombinant DNA than the very top, could that continuum be said to actually exist ?
However remaining stands of Scientism - tenured up to the hilt and marxist cum modernist to the core - doesn't like facing up the the fact that their own central dogma, the Continuum of Progress, has no basis in fact.
Instead, modern big complex human civilization is just as smart - in its own way - as is that of ancient as ancient simple small microorganisms.
Just as the postmodernists claim ...
But is this in anyway accurate ?
Postmodernism's Absolutes
True, postmodernist thought does typically say things like this : "the matriarch of an extended aboriginal family is as smart in her own way as is the boss of a New York brokerage firm".
But is this nothing more the evoking two forms of one absolute, 'smartness' ?
Modernity's Continuum of relative Progress
Contrast this with a typical modernity claim, that that 'the bigger and more complex are inevitably smarter than the small and the less complex, just as the newer is always smarter than the ancient'.
So : the header of a current brokerage firm is inevitably smarter than the head of an ancient aboriginal family.
Further : that a modern civilization is far smarter (because it is so big/complex and created so recently) than a tiny simple bacteria that first existed billions of years ago.
This is the Continuum of relative Progress that formed the base for all the towering modernist-scientism thought that lay above it.
A straight arrow of progress and smartness, ever upward towards today's biggest and the newest.
Anchored - in the minds of modern scientism at least - by the obvious smartness of today's biggest and newest human civilizations versus the obvious stupidity of the shapeless, immobile tiny bacteria first born billions of years earlier.
The real target of this line of thinking was not the bacteria, so very far beneath the pale, but humans in the middle of this continuum : the natives of the many overseas colonies held captive by western nations claiming to be their 'moral stewards' using this scientific argument.
Muller vs Dawson on Evolution and Progress
Now as it happens, one of the smartest beings in the Modernity universe, an American scientist named Herman J Muller, had been busy at work studying genetic mutations beginning at Columbia University in 1918 , trying to alter the genetic makeup of living beings.
He zapped the multitudes of these assembled beings with overdoses of deadly radiation.
Now most died right away but some lived a little while longer while being deformed into useless mutations as the radiation altered their genes.
By once in a while a being survived into old age but with a mutation that was either harmless or even possibly helpful.
He became famous overnight when he gleefully telegraphed his results at the end of 1927.
The Swedes, belatedly impressed by the mis-shaped mutations that the wartime A-Bombs had coughed up amid all the dead and dying, gave Muller a Nobel Prize in 1946.
Enter Griffith and Dawson
Now that same month as Muller announced his attempts at gene modification, a British scientist named Frederick Griffith very reluctantly submitted a paper on his discovery (made in 1923, just as Muller had done his first radiation experiments) that primitive, ancient, tiny, simple bacteria could also affect gene change.
Albeit without millions of bystanders being killed in the process.
His news was totally ignored - first by scientists and thus by their syncopants*, the so called science 'journalists', and then by ordinary journalists and their readers.
(*I have always wondered why football team cheerleaders are not similarly called sports 'journalists'.)
Unlike Muller, Griffith did not expand upon his research and nor did anyone else , except a Canadian-born scientist named Martin Henry Dawson.
His work too got little attention.
No wonder !
The Moderns has replace their parents' belief in a personal God with a belief in an Impersonal Science but that did not mean an end to needing to believe in dogmas.
They needed more of them - now more than ever.
We all know them - as historical relics, albit still taught to innocent high school kids by the old Faithfuls.
Such as "One gene = One protein", the famous central dogma of biology.
In Dawson's own skill areas, bacteriology and immunology, 'Strain-Typing' was the operating philosophy.
It was based on another famous dogma, Koch's First Postulate, that a specific disease-causing strain of bacteria will always be found in a person suffering such a specific disease but never in a healthy person.
Simply examine the various bodily fluids of a sick person possibly suffering from an unknown-for-certain disease, find within it lots of strain x of bacteria Y that always causes a particular disease Z and you are done.
Possibly a cure is known and the patient lives --- or possibly the disease hasn't yet a cure and they die - but your job, as a typing bacteriologist at the hospital lab is all done , 'where's my pay cheque ?'
Let the frontline doctors on the wards deal with the emotional fallout from this definitive diagnosis.
HGT
What Dawson boldly dared suggest - unlike the timid and disbelieving Griffith - was that the harmless strains of bacteria carried by almost all of us in our throats and noses at sometime in our lives - could be changed into dangerous strains by HGT.
This meant that simply typing a patient as having only non-pathogen bacteria in them wouldn't ensure they couldn't get a new pathogen disease when thus harmless strains took up harmful genes from other bacteria.
The professions of Bacteriology and Immunology were less than a generation old but now Dawson's suggestion of infinite bacteria genetic plasticity threatened their members' only recently attained job security and new high status within medicine and science.
He actually called his process by the plain-spoken term "bacterial transformation", but today we use the more descriptive term "horizontal gene transfer", hence HGT.
For - contrary to the God-disbelieving Charles Darwin's own personal dogma- Evolution isn't all about vertical descent from parent to child.
Non-vertical Evolution
Sometimes Evolution actually arrives horizontally, when bits of DNA from one strain of microorganism are incorporated into the "adult" DNA of another strain or even another species of microorganism - and possibly even into the DNA of complex beings like us .
The ancient stupid/simple microorganisms have evolved ways to painlessly insert foreign DNA into their own DNA - and the new clever/ complex human civilization hadn't .
True, we eventually wised up and borrowed the tools of the bacteria to do the job for us - we call it recombinant DNA and PCR.
We then have the sheer nerve to give Nobel Prizes to their mere human discovers rather than their true inventors, the bacteria !
But if HGT demonstrated the bottom end of an upward-oriented continuum of relative 'smarterness' was actually smarter in the area of recombinant DNA than the very top, could that continuum be said to actually exist ?
However remaining stands of Scientism - tenured up to the hilt and marxist cum modernist to the core - doesn't like facing up the the fact that their own central dogma, the Continuum of Progress, has no basis in fact.
Instead, modern big complex human civilization is just as smart - in its own way - as is that of ancient as ancient simple small microorganisms.
Just as the postmodernists claim ...
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Wartime Manhattan's "Double V" triumphs
Synthetic plutonium ( in the world's biggest killing machine) and non-synthetic penicillin (in the world's smallest lifesaver) were the twin - and Janus-like - triumphs of wartime's two Manhattan Projects.
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
a Janus-headed Victory
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A counter culture well over thirty and that has become "The Man"
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
The personal is political, is public
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The telethon that changed my life
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
At Columbia-Cornell Medicial, pre-war modernity ain't dead yet
The website for New York City's Columbia-Cornell medical centre is finally touting the two famous universities' involvement in the triumph of wartime's natural penicillin.
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.
For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.
Oh yes, they did produce incredibly small amounts of real penicillin but the yield was so tiny one might almost think it was an unexpected impurity in another process altogether.
Which in a sense it was : in chemical terms their synthesis did indeed produce a molecule, but it was not the beta lactam molecule fragment that gives penicillin and all subsequent beta lactams (still 75 years on, our major antibiotics) their ability to destroy bacteria without harming humans.
A very mixed result then for this attempt at fulfilling prewar modernity's dream of synthetic autarky.
What Columbia-Cornell has not yet honoured and will never yet honour (not until we can proclaim for sure that modernity is fully dead and buried) is that at Columbia, a small team led by Martin Henry Dawson worked in commensality with the tiny penicillium spores to create the world's first natural penicillin pilot plant.
And that on October 16th 1940, they gave the very first needlefuls of penicillin-the-antibiotic to a black lad and a Jewish lad dying from then invariably fatal SBE.
Eventually their penicillin cured SBE and prevented the disease that caused it : Rheumatic heart Disease : the leading killer of school age minority, poor and immigrant kids until the 1960s.
(Clearly not a triumph any rich donor-seeking medical centre wants to tout, obviously.)
Further : that this then led a small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn to make most of the war's penicillin by natural means - the means we still use to start the production of all the beta lactams that still dominate the world we call antibiotics.
In fact, very first signal triumph for what was to become today's huge and postmodern microbiology and microtechnology !
Shameful really...
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