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 progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
unpredictable small atoms, small microbes... and small children
'Pop' reductionism was the real (underlying) ideology of the Era of Progress.
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
WWII Europe : Ethnic Cleansing was next to Godliness, for small and big nations alike
Not all the world violently reduced their ethnic minorities at the point of a gun during and at the end of WWII : only its most civilized portion : Europe !
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity
They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Hitler's "Symmetry of Progress" : good Aryans at the top triumph only if evil Jews baccilli at bottom are defeated
One wonders if Hitler's Nazis had succeeded and had eliminated every last Jewish-communist-international banker on Earth, just who then would they blame for their problems ?
The Nazis would have kept on killing the 'unfit' until the end of time, but they never credited any of the 'unfit' with being the invisible and super-smart enemy that so hobbled the Aryan Race.
The defectives were just inept and so life unworthy of life --- the Jews were only life unworthy of life because they were so adept at exercising pure evil.
Like Man-oriented Progress in general, with its real life microbes at the bottom of life, Hitler's Hyped-up idea of Progress desperately needed something totally bad and useless at the bottom to contrast with (and hence confirm) the relative good and useless humans at the top.
This ultra high valuation of math-based concepts of symmetry over the joyous yet messy diversity of actual reality is yet another evil sin Hitler got from the theoretical physicists ---- the reason why he and Einstein had much more in common than either was willing to admit...
The Nazis would have kept on killing the 'unfit' until the end of time, but they never credited any of the 'unfit' with being the invisible and super-smart enemy that so hobbled the Aryan Race.
The defectives were just inept and so life unworthy of life --- the Jews were only life unworthy of life because they were so adept at exercising pure evil.
Like Man-oriented Progress in general, with its real life microbes at the bottom of life, Hitler's Hyped-up idea of Progress desperately needed something totally bad and useless at the bottom to contrast with (and hence confirm) the relative good and useless humans at the top.
This ultra high valuation of math-based concepts of symmetry over the joyous yet messy diversity of actual reality is yet another evil sin Hitler got from the theoretical physicists ---- the reason why he and Einstein had much more in common than either was willing to admit...
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?
Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
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....
Sunday, August 9, 2015
HP Lovecraft's "helpful monsters" : how the Slime saved more kids than Civilization bombed or gassed
In 1937, the world's most honoured cultural hero was invariably some sort of a medical researcher.
Probably someone with a German accent, gained from years of study at the world's best research universities ---- someone who researched on children's illnesses, someone invariably photographed giving candy to kiddies.
Someone rather like Dr Josef Mengele in fact.
In that same year, the world's scariest monster was usually a foul smelling shapeless giant blob of slime, terror on the the classic HP Lovecraft model.
A blob that was always less than a real object than rather a metaphor representing the horrific dissolving of Progress's reassuring certitudes ("science's terrible simplicities").
Certitudes that a huge number of us need to daily get through a messy actual world of instability, uncertainty and change.
(Insert here links to research on the 'conservative brain'.)
Yet by 1946 and The Doctors' Trial, Dr Mengele's medical research on children had become the last word in evil and horror.
And the child-saving albeit foul smelly penicillium slime was the surprise medical hero of the hour, the only truly Good News Story to ever come out of WWII's Bad News War.
HP himself had died back in 1937 and so never got to live long enough to see his expectations confounded.
And upended...
Probably someone with a German accent, gained from years of study at the world's best research universities ---- someone who researched on children's illnesses, someone invariably photographed giving candy to kiddies.
Someone rather like Dr Josef Mengele in fact.
In that same year, the world's scariest monster was usually a foul smelling shapeless giant blob of slime, terror on the the classic HP Lovecraft model.
A blob that was always less than a real object than rather a metaphor representing the horrific dissolving of Progress's reassuring certitudes ("science's terrible simplicities").
Certitudes that a huge number of us need to daily get through a messy actual world of instability, uncertainty and change.
(Insert here links to research on the 'conservative brain'.)
Yet by 1946 and The Doctors' Trial, Dr Mengele's medical research on children had become the last word in evil and horror.
And the child-saving albeit foul smelly penicillium slime was the surprise medical hero of the hour, the only truly Good News Story to ever come out of WWII's Bad News War.
HP himself had died back in 1937 and so never got to live long enough to see his expectations confounded.
And upended...
Thursday, July 30, 2015
"multi stage rocket" Evolution versus Evolution "in situ"
I was raised on the multi-stage rocket form of Evolution--- you probably were too.
You all know the drill : the lowly bacteria climbed out of the primordial slime, evolved into slightly large microbes and then froze evolution-wise, preserved as in aspic, unchanged, for the next 3.5 billion years.
The microbes evolved into slightly larger amoebas and froze evolutionarily as well.
And so on and so on, ever so slowly up the evolutionary ladder of increasing size and complexity culminating in Civilized Man in the top capsule.
Leaving behind down below ,to float about forever like space junk, countless earlier stages of life.
But as Dr Martin Henry Dawson early demonstrated - the bacteria never actually stopped evolving and are evolving still.
They didn't evolved into something else and then hung about as living fossils - they continued to evolve, as all lifeforms do, 'in situ'.
Sometimes evolving into becoming more complex with bigger active genetic codes, sometimes dropping bits of their genetic code to become less complex ---- and more parasitic.
Rather like us, in fact.
For the ancestors of humans once used to make their own Vitamin C, like almost all other lifeforms still do - but then we dropped that ability - became less, not more complex - and now get our life-supporting Vitamin C by living off the avails of others.
Prostitution - the world's third oldest profession ...
You all know the drill : the lowly bacteria climbed out of the primordial slime, evolved into slightly large microbes and then froze evolution-wise, preserved as in aspic, unchanged, for the next 3.5 billion years.
The microbes evolved into slightly larger amoebas and froze evolutionarily as well.
And so on and so on, ever so slowly up the evolutionary ladder of increasing size and complexity culminating in Civilized Man in the top capsule.
Leaving behind down below ,to float about forever like space junk, countless earlier stages of life.
But as Dr Martin Henry Dawson early demonstrated - the bacteria never actually stopped evolving and are evolving still.
They didn't evolved into something else and then hung about as living fossils - they continued to evolve, as all lifeforms do, 'in situ'.
Sometimes evolving into becoming more complex with bigger active genetic codes, sometimes dropping bits of their genetic code to become less complex ---- and more parasitic.
Rather like us, in fact.
For the ancestors of humans once used to make their own Vitamin C, like almost all other lifeforms still do - but then we dropped that ability - became less, not more complex - and now get our life-supporting Vitamin C by living off the avails of others.
Prostitution - the world's third oldest profession ...
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Primitive lifesaving penicillium and Advanced Auschwitz lifetaking put the Post into Progress
I suggest we replace the widely used term 'Post Modernity' with 'Post Progress' because it is both much more descriptive of what is actually going on and much more easily understood by the majority of the population who live outside academia.
I hope we all can at least agree on the second point : that far more people understand the term Era of Progress, 1875-1965 than do they the term Era of Modernity 1875-1965.
Now onto the first point.
All the many and varied postmodern -isms have at least one key element in common : they involve hitherto verboten mixing.
Be it of high and low (say in art) or normal and abnormal (say in sexual cum civil rights) or central/official/dominant or local/periphery/subculture (as in imperial/hegemony relationships).
I used high and low as my first example deliberately because the Era of Modernity was also the era of Social Darwin defined Progress.
Everything and everyone was slotted in one universal and eternal vertical hierarchy.
In/out, normal/abnormal etc were really just variants of the all important high/low distinction in worth.
The elements of that ladder were never allowed to touch, let alone intermingle : for it was a heavily modified 'survival of the fittest' version of the old Great Chain of Being, only now leaning forward forty five degrees.
To the bottom left, were the oldest, smallest, weakest, stupidest beings destined - by 'the iron laws of nature', to quote a highly typical modernity cum progressive phrase - to be replaced by the newer, bigger, more complex and smarter beings at the top right - Civilized Man.
(Man as in, definitely not a woman.)
Any sort of mixing of any of the rungs of this vertical ladder or chain of 'worthiness to continued life' was definitely not allowed.
Instead, being half breeds, mixed breeds, sterile and defective hybrids, engaging in miscegenation, being of mixed bloods and 'passing' were Progress's most extreme crimes.
Now it is well known that most civilized people in the Era of Progress regarded the advanced civilization on Earth, when measuring both culture and technology, was Germany.
As is well known, the horrific postwar evidence coming out of Auschwitz immediately put paid to the exalted status of eighty million Germans as the most civilized and the most progressive nation on earth.
In a much slower fashion, it also put paid to the two billion of the rest of us in our easy lazy unexamined notions of exactly what was civilized and progressive behavior.
In 1945, we suddenly had the top of the Great Chain of Being being revealed as cold blooded mass murderers of humanity, something usually described as the behavior of life at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the bottom of the Great Chain had also become the mass lifesavers of humanity in the form of fungus made penicillin, something you would normally more expect from advanced German chemists at the top than from primitive penicillium slime at the very bottom.
1945 : Progress upended and mixed - the low high and the high low.
In a sense, it was a return to an earlier way of thinking, when it was assumed and accepted that good and bad intermingled in every being, in every society, in every time.
Added to this - a new feature - was a growing understanding that all lifeforms had to intermingle to keep the biosphere running smoothly - that global commensality was a fact, not a choice.
If Art today is a pastiche, so too is Life.
Life does not always imitate Art : sometimes Art, post 1945 Art as an clear example, rushes forth in catchup mode, trying to imitate Life ....
I hope we all can at least agree on the second point : that far more people understand the term Era of Progress, 1875-1965 than do they the term Era of Modernity 1875-1965.
Now onto the first point.
All the many and varied postmodern -isms have at least one key element in common : they involve hitherto verboten mixing.
Be it of high and low (say in art) or normal and abnormal (say in sexual cum civil rights) or central/official/dominant or local/periphery/subculture (as in imperial/hegemony relationships).
I used high and low as my first example deliberately because the Era of Modernity was also the era of Social Darwin defined Progress.
Deductive Progress : absolute universals in an absolutely closed universe yielded absolutely correct results
Everything and everyone was slotted in one universal and eternal vertical hierarchy.
In/out, normal/abnormal etc were really just variants of the all important high/low distinction in worth.
The elements of that ladder were never allowed to touch, let alone intermingle : for it was a heavily modified 'survival of the fittest' version of the old Great Chain of Being, only now leaning forward forty five degrees.
Supposedly 'Iron' Laws of Nature : absolute determinism and absolute reductionism
To the bottom left, were the oldest, smallest, weakest, stupidest beings destined - by 'the iron laws of nature', to quote a highly typical modernity cum progressive phrase - to be replaced by the newer, bigger, more complex and smarter beings at the top right - Civilized Man.
(Man as in, definitely not a woman.)
Any sort of mixing of any of the rungs of this vertical ladder or chain of 'worthiness to continued life' was definitely not allowed.
Instead, being half breeds, mixed breeds, sterile and defective hybrids, engaging in miscegenation, being of mixed bloods and 'passing' were Progress's most extreme crimes.
Now it is well known that most civilized people in the Era of Progress regarded the advanced civilization on Earth, when measuring both culture and technology, was Germany.
As is well known, the horrific postwar evidence coming out of Auschwitz immediately put paid to the exalted status of eighty million Germans as the most civilized and the most progressive nation on earth.
In a much slower fashion, it also put paid to the two billion of the rest of us in our easy lazy unexamined notions of exactly what was civilized and progressive behavior.
In 1945, we suddenly had the top of the Great Chain of Being being revealed as cold blooded mass murderers of humanity, something usually described as the behavior of life at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the bottom of the Great Chain had also become the mass lifesavers of humanity in the form of fungus made penicillin, something you would normally more expect from advanced German chemists at the top than from primitive penicillium slime at the very bottom.
1945 : Progress upended and mixed - the low high and the high low.
In a sense, it was a return to an earlier way of thinking, when it was assumed and accepted that good and bad intermingled in every being, in every society, in every time.
Added to this - a new feature - was a growing understanding that all lifeforms had to intermingle to keep the biosphere running smoothly - that global commensality was a fact, not a choice.
If Art today is a pastiche, so too is Life.
Life does not always imitate Art : sometimes Art, post 1945 Art as an clear example, rushes forth in catchup mode, trying to imitate Life ....
Monday, July 27, 2015
Inductive field-historians cum philosophers versus Deductive reductive lab philosophers
The era of Modernity and Progress was a deductive era, seeking the one and only absolutely correct and complete answer to every question ---- a great time to be a determinist, reductionist 'scientist'.
And thus a terribly bad era for historians, be they historians of nature (naturalists) or of humanity. Or indeed, if they are frontline medical clinicians like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, writing up a patient's history in a hospital setting.
Not a time then for them to be offering up an ever growing number of probable reasons possibly contributing to a given situation.
For Modernity and Progress hated diversity or plentitude, only hating probabilities and possibilities even worse : as Einstein opined, "(My) God does not play dice."
Einstein's era was a gassy Era (Zyklon B, if you have it, please), an era of "Terrible Simplicities", certainties, certitudes, normalcy.
Yet to the inductive natural historian (naturalist), out in the field, ever more possibilities and plentitude was their ticket to fame.
Oh to find a yet another tit mouse species (purple-colored even !) when the experts had claimed all tit mouses had been found and all were brown or gray !
Meanwhile the only philosopher type the majority of other philosophers recognized as truly being a philosopher, was sitting behind a desk in the lab.
Hard at work, trying to become famous in their branch of intellectual activity, trying to plenticide all this new plentitude as fast as it was being created.
Ignoring the warning of King Canute.
Seeking to reduce all of Reality down to a single paragraph long "Law of Everything".
Finally explaining the redheaded waitress's elliptic smile yesterday as being the result of the mechanical motion of a certain tiny sub atomic particle, in a distant part of the universe, eleven billion years earlier.
But historians are also fully philosophers : albeit philosophers who 'explain' but do not 'explain and predict specific actions'.
A natural historian will 'explain' why a very modern jet unexpectedly crashed in a lightning storm in a remote jungle airstrip by explaining that the weather is terrible hard to predict very accurately ----- even in big urban centres where expensive weather staff are plentiful, let alone in remote and poor parts of the world.
Most of us, still brainwashed from school, will argue that really is no explanation at all.
But the inductive historians' philosophy does fully explains Reality, as something simply being too vast and too complicated to ever be fully predictable for humanity.
They differ from the deductive philosophers only in not following up their explanations with specific predictions.
They thus fail to the test of being 'scientific' and
philosophers', at least in the self definition of those two as given by the lab-bound deducers.
But being economists in the way that few deductive scientists and philosophers are capable of being, the inducers hold fast to their view.
They insist the evidence shows that predicting future Reality accurately is simply far too expensive.
At least when set against the large amount of our limited waking hours and limited earthly resources (aka limited "money") we must devote to merely staying alive and warm.
By contrast, most our deductive philosophies still predict we will eventually make accurate and yet cheap predictions, if only we keep searching for the ultimate and absolute baseline truths that negate the need for all of today's topline expensive fact gathering and calculating.
(Translation of 'search' : you taxpayers continue to fund me doodling around in my lab.)
That Reality is ultimately 'knowable' in the sense of being predictable is not a fact though --- merely an opinion - and the opinion that predicting Reality is beyond our price range is another.
So we end up with a plentitude of opinions - and in the plenticidal era of Progress and Modernity, one had to be squashed - like a bug....
And thus a terribly bad era for historians, be they historians of nature (naturalists) or of humanity. Or indeed, if they are frontline medical clinicians like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, writing up a patient's history in a hospital setting.
Not a time then for them to be offering up an ever growing number of probable reasons possibly contributing to a given situation.
For Modernity and Progress hated diversity or plentitude, only hating probabilities and possibilities even worse : as Einstein opined, "(My) God does not play dice."
Einstein's era was a gassy Era (Zyklon B, if you have it, please), an era of "Terrible Simplicities", certainties, certitudes, normalcy.
Yet to the inductive natural historian (naturalist), out in the field, ever more possibilities and plentitude was their ticket to fame.
Oh to find a yet another tit mouse species (purple-colored even !) when the experts had claimed all tit mouses had been found and all were brown or gray !
Meanwhile the only philosopher type the majority of other philosophers recognized as truly being a philosopher, was sitting behind a desk in the lab.
Hard at work, trying to become famous in their branch of intellectual activity, trying to plenticide all this new plentitude as fast as it was being created.
Ignoring the warning of King Canute.
Seeking to reduce all of Reality down to a single paragraph long "Law of Everything".
Finally explaining the redheaded waitress's elliptic smile yesterday as being the result of the mechanical motion of a certain tiny sub atomic particle, in a distant part of the universe, eleven billion years earlier.
But historians are also fully philosophers : albeit philosophers who 'explain' but do not 'explain and predict specific actions'.
A natural historian will 'explain' why a very modern jet unexpectedly crashed in a lightning storm in a remote jungle airstrip by explaining that the weather is terrible hard to predict very accurately ----- even in big urban centres where expensive weather staff are plentiful, let alone in remote and poor parts of the world.
Most of us, still brainwashed from school, will argue that really is no explanation at all.
But the inductive historians' philosophy does fully explains Reality, as something simply being too vast and too complicated to ever be fully predictable for humanity.
They differ from the deductive philosophers only in not following up their explanations with specific predictions.
They thus fail to the test of being 'scientific' and
philosophers', at least in the self definition of those two as given by the lab-bound deducers.
But being economists in the way that few deductive scientists and philosophers are capable of being, the inducers hold fast to their view.
They insist the evidence shows that predicting future Reality accurately is simply far too expensive.
At least when set against the large amount of our limited waking hours and limited earthly resources (aka limited "money") we must devote to merely staying alive and warm.
By contrast, most our deductive philosophies still predict we will eventually make accurate and yet cheap predictions, if only we keep searching for the ultimate and absolute baseline truths that negate the need for all of today's topline expensive fact gathering and calculating.
(Translation of 'search' : you taxpayers continue to fund me doodling around in my lab.)
That Reality is ultimately 'knowable' in the sense of being predictable is not a fact though --- merely an opinion - and the opinion that predicting Reality is beyond our price range is another.
So we end up with a plentitude of opinions - and in the plenticidal era of Progress and Modernity, one had to be squashed - like a bug....
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
'Advanced' Auschwitz doctors and 'Primitive' penicillium lifesavers exchange places as postmodernity replaces modernity
Progress 1945 : German medicine, long regarded as the most modern and advanced, gives us human guinea pigs dissected alive and the white coats who gave the lethal needles and monitored the fatal gas.
Non-Progress 1945 : the much despised primitive basement mold and slime, the ultimate horror in a modern Lovecraftian world, gives us the life-saving penicillium.
Me, a boomer kid and an elementary student in 1950s North America, trying hard to reconcile what my teachers and the media told me about progress versus slime ....
Non-Progress 1945 : the much despised primitive basement mold and slime, the ultimate horror in a modern Lovecraftian world, gives us the life-saving penicillium.
Me, a boomer kid and an elementary student in 1950s North America, trying hard to reconcile what my teachers and the media told me about progress versus slime ....
Monday, June 29, 2015
Progressive plenticide : the Poor will no longer always be with us, just like the Smallpox Virus, Newfoundland Beothuks, Tasmanian Blacks, the Unfit and the Jewish Bacillus ...
Eugenicists around the world, in every country, once planned to do to the physically and mentally 'unfit', the 'work-shy' poor and the entire Jew and the Roma populations what civilized society had already done to many small aboriginal populations and would later do to the smallpox virus - eliminate them for all time.
And not necessarily by gas and bullet : just ensuring there was not enough food, medicine, housing, jobs and land worked wonders on what was left of the world's dwindling aboriginals in 1940....
And not necessarily by gas and bullet : just ensuring there was not enough food, medicine, housing, jobs and land worked wonders on what was left of the world's dwindling aboriginals in 1940....
almost capital Free Enterprise vs capital-heavy Franchise Enterprise
One of the biggest bilge streams feeding into Era of Progress's emphasis on plenticide and synthetic autarky was 'capitalism' -- which I define as making money off of your rare access to large lumps of capital in an economic culture that really needs large lumps of capital to function.
Capitalism needs two things to really flourish : scarce physical/scarcity bottlenecks controlled by 'franchises' and the necessity for capital-intensive factory processes to successfully operate those franchises.
It is not enough that that there are only a few potential sites to produce sizeable amounts of hydroelectricity in any given nation and that governments get to give them away as exclusive "franchises" --- to the people who bribe them best.
It is also necessary that these few hydro sites require billions in capital before they can deliver a single amp of energy.
One of the best forms of an exclusive franchise is a 'patent' , hopefully one that also requires licensors to pony up a billion or two to put their license to work - for then the patent practically polices itself.
(After all few potential competitors will bother to evade patent royalties if doing so still requires coming up with tons of money to get the pirated process to produce output.)
Let us see how my claims work out in a specific example.
Wool was once manufactured, cleaned and carded in hundreds of millions of tiny almost capital free enterprises quaintly called "farms".
The wool itself was actually manufactured in even smaller factories called "sheep" (or lamas etc) --- factories dirt cheap to buy and that replicated themselves so you hardly ever needed to buy another.
But if synthetic wool was ever even semi perfected, only a few people would own the right (the patent) to make it and only a few factories would actually make it worldwide, partly because of the high cost of patent royalties but even more importantly because of the inability to pony up the billion dollar cost of the huge lumbering clumsy factory set to make the synthetic wool.
I almost said "and don't forget the additional billion dollars in ad dollars needed to fool people into thinking inferior synthetic wool was better than natural wool", but I didn't.
Because that job was done, totally for free, by thousands of deluded scientists and science 'journalists' (cheerleaders), drunk on their own synthetic Kool-Aid.
Over all, this shift from millions of tiny efficient factories to a few huge inefficient factories was called "Progress".
You gotta love it !!!!!
Capitalism needs two things to really flourish : scarce physical/scarcity bottlenecks controlled by 'franchises' and the necessity for capital-intensive factory processes to successfully operate those franchises.
It is not enough that that there are only a few potential sites to produce sizeable amounts of hydroelectricity in any given nation and that governments get to give them away as exclusive "franchises" --- to the people who bribe them best.
It is also necessary that these few hydro sites require billions in capital before they can deliver a single amp of energy.
One of the best forms of an exclusive franchise is a 'patent' , hopefully one that also requires licensors to pony up a billion or two to put their license to work - for then the patent practically polices itself.
(After all few potential competitors will bother to evade patent royalties if doing so still requires coming up with tons of money to get the pirated process to produce output.)
Let us see how my claims work out in a specific example.
Wool was once manufactured, cleaned and carded in hundreds of millions of tiny almost capital free enterprises quaintly called "farms".
The wool itself was actually manufactured in even smaller factories called "sheep" (or lamas etc) --- factories dirt cheap to buy and that replicated themselves so you hardly ever needed to buy another.
But if synthetic wool was ever even semi perfected, only a few people would own the right (the patent) to make it and only a few factories would actually make it worldwide, partly because of the high cost of patent royalties but even more importantly because of the inability to pony up the billion dollar cost of the huge lumbering clumsy factory set to make the synthetic wool.
I almost said "and don't forget the additional billion dollars in ad dollars needed to fool people into thinking inferior synthetic wool was better than natural wool", but I didn't.
Because that job was done, totally for free, by thousands of deluded scientists and science 'journalists' (cheerleaders), drunk on their own synthetic Kool-Aid.
Over all, this shift from millions of tiny efficient factories to a few huge inefficient factories was called "Progress".
You gotta love it !!!!!
Sunday, June 28, 2015
1940 : majority of world opposed Progress but resigned to it as inevitable
In 1940, energetic elites, at every social level and in every nation and colony on Earth, tended to automatically see themselves as 'advanced' and 'progressive' - though they divided sharply over the details of what constituted 'advances' in 'Progress'.
For too long a time after 1940, we have focused on these vocal minorities' rhetorical differences, rather than what unconscious assumptions that they all held in common.
So we know all about the rhetorical differences between those claiming to seek liberal democratic mixed economies in each nation and those seeking scientific socialism (in one nation !) or those seeking scientific national socialism/fascism for one nation.
We fail to notice their actions differed only in degree not kind.
Meanwhile the majority of the world's population were more frightened than glad about the prospects of yet more Progress, but they weren't about to fight it.
(True, other sizeable traditional elites (the Catholic church for one) had lots of tested older intellectual tools to bring to their opposition to Progress thus defined .
But in practise they had no convincing or current intellectual tools to defeat this anthropocentric definition of Progress.)
The silent cowed majority had long ago become convinced by a generation of intellectual heavyweights, and by the intellectuals' journalistic popularizers, that the continued panzer-like Progress of the new/fit/mighty over the bodies of ancient/unfit/weak was an inevitable fact of Nature, proven beyond a doubt by Science.
So the continuous slow starvation and TB-hastened deaths of the America's original ancient native populations was regrettable --- but also inevitable.
I believe you can divide up the entire wartime world into Axis and Allied camps, even if only in their lean towards one or the other camp, country by country, year by year.
And that all of those countries, among their energetic young elites anyway, the belief in the inevitable Progress of the big over the small did not differ at all between the Allied and Axis, except in degree....
For too long a time after 1940, we have focused on these vocal minorities' rhetorical differences, rather than what unconscious assumptions that they all held in common.
So we know all about the rhetorical differences between those claiming to seek liberal democratic mixed economies in each nation and those seeking scientific socialism (in one nation !) or those seeking scientific national socialism/fascism for one nation.
We fail to notice their actions differed only in degree not kind.
Meanwhile the majority of the world's population were more frightened than glad about the prospects of yet more Progress, but they weren't about to fight it.
(True, other sizeable traditional elites (the Catholic church for one) had lots of tested older intellectual tools to bring to their opposition to Progress thus defined .
But in practise they had no convincing or current intellectual tools to defeat this anthropocentric definition of Progress.)
The silent cowed majority had long ago become convinced by a generation of intellectual heavyweights, and by the intellectuals' journalistic popularizers, that the continued panzer-like Progress of the new/fit/mighty over the bodies of ancient/unfit/weak was an inevitable fact of Nature, proven beyond a doubt by Science.
So the continuous slow starvation and TB-hastened deaths of the America's original ancient native populations was regrettable --- but also inevitable.
I believe you can divide up the entire wartime world into Axis and Allied camps, even if only in their lean towards one or the other camp, country by country, year by year.
And that all of those countries, among their energetic young elites anyway, the belief in the inevitable Progress of the big over the small did not differ at all between the Allied and Axis, except in degree....
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Modern penicillin made by the powerful, for the powerful - Ancient penicillin, made by the humble, for the humble
Sometimes I am at one with all those TV detectives whose constant riposte is "I don't believe in coincidences".
Perhaps it all was a big coincidence that the same people who were so insistent that penicillin had first to be made in the big companies' chemical plants before it could begin saving lives, were equally insistent that wartime penicillin be preserved solely for saving the lives of the fittest 1A troops.
But I don't think so.
Just as I don't think it is a coincidence that the people who were perfectly content to use penicillin as made by the humble microbes were equally determined to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all - particularly to the humble and to Life's 4Fs, the weak and vulnerable.
But don't you dare call these differing opinions on how to make and distribute wartime penicillin just a 'moral' battle for the soul of WWII .
Because it was much scientific as it was moral : almost all these people based their moral beliefs upon their scientific beliefs.
So that being unwilling to go to the aid of small countries unable to fight off the bigger, stronger German military was as much an erroneous science based decision ("Progress sees the bigger best the smaller") as it was an erroneous moral decision....
Perhaps it all was a big coincidence that the same people who were so insistent that penicillin had first to be made in the big companies' chemical plants before it could begin saving lives, were equally insistent that wartime penicillin be preserved solely for saving the lives of the fittest 1A troops.
But I don't think so.
Just as I don't think it is a coincidence that the people who were perfectly content to use penicillin as made by the humble microbes were equally determined to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all - particularly to the humble and to Life's 4Fs, the weak and vulnerable.
But don't you dare call these differing opinions on how to make and distribute wartime penicillin just a 'moral' battle for the soul of WWII .
Because it was much scientific as it was moral : almost all these people based their moral beliefs upon their scientific beliefs.
So that being unwilling to go to the aid of small countries unable to fight off the bigger, stronger German military was as much an erroneous science based decision ("Progress sees the bigger best the smaller") as it was an erroneous moral decision....
Friday, June 19, 2015
No one who ever sold VCRs believes scientists who insist complexity equals progress
Confession time : for ten years (1980-1990), the early pioneering years, I hand sold thousands of consumer VCRs.
Our little camera shop (Reid Sweet) also repaired them as well- I never actually did so but I sometimes watched.
A very painful experience is was then, looking inside the guts of early VCRs -- rather like watching sausages being made.
Early VCRs were fabulously big and fabulously heavy and fabulously expensive and filled with many (just barely) moving mechanical parts - a right some pain to operation successfully or repair quickly and economically.
By the end - just before electronic companies switched their efforts to the new DVD players - the VCR was small, light, dirt cheap, almost trouble free --- and had very few moving mechanical parts.
In mid twentieth century comics, incredibly complex machines to do the simplest of things, dreamed up by artists Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, mercilessly satirized the Age of Progress's inane belief that greater complexity always spelt greater progress.
Living through the VCR evolution from big complex and stupid backwards to small simple and smart just confirmed for me that while zoologists may have big degrees based on complex research, in their Ladd-ite belief that biologically size matters, they are just as dumb as a sack of bricks.
Maybe dumber.....
Our little camera shop (Reid Sweet) also repaired them as well- I never actually did so but I sometimes watched.
A very painful experience is was then, looking inside the guts of early VCRs -- rather like watching sausages being made.
Early VCRs were fabulously big and fabulously heavy and fabulously expensive and filled with many (just barely) moving mechanical parts - a right some pain to operation successfully or repair quickly and economically.
By the end - just before electronic companies switched their efforts to the new DVD players - the VCR was small, light, dirt cheap, almost trouble free --- and had very few moving mechanical parts.
In mid twentieth century comics, incredibly complex machines to do the simplest of things, dreamed up by artists Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, mercilessly satirized the Age of Progress's inane belief that greater complexity always spelt greater progress.
Living through the VCR evolution from big complex and stupid backwards to small simple and smart just confirmed for me that while zoologists may have big degrees based on complex research, in their Ladd-ite belief that biologically size matters, they are just as dumb as a sack of bricks.
Maybe dumber.....
"last of Polio & Arsenic under lock and key in Atlanta" - headline
A headline we will never see is some news release from the science folks in Atlanta proudly announcing that some dangerous element (arsenic and plutonium come to mind) have been newly almost totally eliminated.
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Confounded Progress : a book about "Penicillins, Ancient and Modern"
A book about WWII's warring penicillins, Ancient and Modern
The genes that make penicillin reside today inside members of the comparatively recent fungus family, but these genes actually began their existence inside bacteria, those tiny creatures ancient beyond all time.
Ancient they might well be and simple too, but these microbes somehow do a very, very, very efficient job as chemists.
Again and again they are found to be very rapidly making complicated molecules, in the correct stereo image, and without impurities, at normal temperatures and pressures, without need for heavily built reactor vessels or expensive reagents.
All this not unnaturally makes human chemists jealous and resentful - never more than in the late unlamented Era of Progress, when human chemists were at the very top of the food chain and small stupid microbes were supposed to foot the very bottom.
Together, top chemists and bottom microbes were to support the whole Progressive Era 'scientific/natural' hierarchy that allowed whites to repress blacks, adults children, men women, the healthy the cripples.
All predicated on the claim that Life formed one seamless and vertical 'Great Ladder of Progress'.
A ladder stretching from the stupidest,oldest and smallest to the newest, biggest, smartest white human civilizations at the very top.
So the news that such a very great boon to humanity like penicillin could only be made by the stupidest and couldn't be made at all by the very smartest, threatened this whole tissue of lies.
Which is why that for twenty years (1928-1948) the 'smartest chemists in the universe' sought, in war as in peace, to make an improved modern version of the fungus's ancient penicillin.
They even placed their psychological need to shore up the idea of Progress before the medical needs of millions of dying patients, crying out in vain for any sort of penicillin --- be it ancient or modern .
So much so that when the last projects to try and produce man-made synthetic penicillin finally failed, so, to a large extent, did the very idea of Progress...
Monday, June 15, 2015
Highly successful scientists are many things --- but being a scientist often isn't one of them
How scientific are scientists-as-a-collective - are they ever scientific ?
I mean on the really really big scientific issues - not as individual scientists dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s along the day to day edges - they do that job perfectly well.
I mean why do they collectively so often badly mis-interpret widely known and widely accepted evidence - or when the evidence isn't known, why do they so often ignore the more probable answer for one much less probable ?
argue this is because the most successful scientists are not those were are good scientists or even good accountants but rather those who are truly great poets ; those with a real gift for crafting metaphors that describes existing scientific data in such a way that best flatters their paymasters.
The most successful scientists are those who are best as singing for their supper, best at singing whatever tune is currently most popular in the society that funds them and fames them.
For my example, let us look back at the scientific claims for evolution displaying a steady linear progress to ever greater complexity.
There never was any real evidence to support this audacious claim, usually submitted as a simple 'fact' during the Era of Progress, or that civilized white European males were its current glorious culmination.
They generally began by positing what they felt was the exact opposite of both "Today" and "Man" ---- bacteria who first saw life 3 billion years ago.
These microbes were and are incredibly tiny compared to Man, incredibly simple physically compared to Man, incredibly slow compared to Man --- so collectively scientists seemed to feel confident in claiming they came from the 'childhood of life'*.
(*Just as the aboriginal peoples of Australia were said, by the same scientists, to be from the 'childhood of Man'. This meant that they represented an older way of life than European civilization.
All this was an insightful twisting of the scientists' own normal use of 'age' logic.
Because they had otherwise tended to call people old in years "elders" ; as people who represented the collective gathered wisdom of society, not representing the behavior of infants.
In fact, this same normal age logic was why the heads of university science departments were more likely to be nearer the age of sixty than the age of twenty.)
But on the physical evidence available during the Age of Progress, were not the many legged octopus and centipede more complex physically than Man ?
Was not the whale bigger, the tortoise capable of living longer, the elephant heavier, the cheetah faster ?
Did not fishes swim faster, badgers burrow faster, bird fly ?
Could not scorpions live in hotter drier climates, penguins in colder climates ?
Did beavers and termites not build fabulous homes too, did not wasps make paper (and made it first ?)
On and on ---- oh yes Man did dream like dogs and made tools like apes but did so with much greater complexity.
But then Man made use of these cognitive skills to write beautiful music (at least we humans thought it was beautiful - but that is hardly a scientifically objective test !) and to wage horribly brutal war.
Call that a draw then, in terms of evidence of greater 'progress'.
And even at the turn of the last century there was plenty of hard evidence that microbes were often better chemists than Man - breaking open and reassembling complex molecules very rapidly, at normal temperature and normal pressure - feats Man couldn't duplicate in huge and hugely expensive refractory vessels.
In successfully filling their own peculiar niche, all living things seemed to have possessed peculiar and unique skills - so scientists were really reduced to comparing between diverse skills by seeking some overarching criteria to better judge winners and losers in biology.
Interestingly, Darwin had said Evolution was all about (and only about) success ---- success as defined as the numbers of viable offspring over time.
When one new lifeform became a thousand species, filling niches all over the world, in huge numbers and for long periods of time, they are an evolutionary success.
One such lifeform (the dinosaurs), as big and physically complex as Man, was so successful --- for a long time.
But then they disappeared. This suggests that the length of time of a lifeform's existence was at least as important as the number of viable offspring, both as sheer individuals and numbers of different but related species.
Enter the bacteria : a lifeform that seems physically simple but chemically complex, that has been around for 3.8 billion years, filled every possible niche with hundreds of thousands of different species and trillions upon trillions of individual members.
Scientists in 1900 knew all this - and this is the very reason they chose to call their era the Age of Progress, not an Age of Success --- this despite living in a success-obsessed period !
Telling your white european upper class male paymasters that they were far less biologically successful than the tiny, immobile, simple, ancient, microbes (here feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, female or working class) was no way to secure well paid endowed university chairs or become knighted and feted.
Like authors and book reviewers seeking to be paid, scientists who speak for pay, sing for their supper - consciously and unconsciously flattering their expected customers.
Which why I deliberately choose to be a blockheaded pamphleteer in pjs....
I mean on the really really big scientific issues - not as individual scientists dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s along the day to day edges - they do that job perfectly well.
I mean why do they collectively so often badly mis-interpret widely known and widely accepted evidence - or when the evidence isn't known, why do they so often ignore the more probable answer for one much less probable ?
argue this is because the most successful scientists are not those were are good scientists or even good accountants but rather those who are truly great poets ; those with a real gift for crafting metaphors that describes existing scientific data in such a way that best flatters their paymasters.
The most successful scientists are those who are best as singing for their supper, best at singing whatever tune is currently most popular in the society that funds them and fames them.
For my example, let us look back at the scientific claims for evolution displaying a steady linear progress to ever greater complexity.
There never was any real evidence to support this audacious claim, usually submitted as a simple 'fact' during the Era of Progress, or that civilized white European males were its current glorious culmination.
They generally began by positing what they felt was the exact opposite of both "Today" and "Man" ---- bacteria who first saw life 3 billion years ago.
These microbes were and are incredibly tiny compared to Man, incredibly simple physically compared to Man, incredibly slow compared to Man --- so collectively scientists seemed to feel confident in claiming they came from the 'childhood of life'*.
(*Just as the aboriginal peoples of Australia were said, by the same scientists, to be from the 'childhood of Man'. This meant that they represented an older way of life than European civilization.
All this was an insightful twisting of the scientists' own normal use of 'age' logic.
Because they had otherwise tended to call people old in years "elders" ; as people who represented the collective gathered wisdom of society, not representing the behavior of infants.
In fact, this same normal age logic was why the heads of university science departments were more likely to be nearer the age of sixty than the age of twenty.)
But on the physical evidence available during the Age of Progress, were not the many legged octopus and centipede more complex physically than Man ?
Was not the whale bigger, the tortoise capable of living longer, the elephant heavier, the cheetah faster ?
Did not fishes swim faster, badgers burrow faster, bird fly ?
Could not scorpions live in hotter drier climates, penguins in colder climates ?
Did beavers and termites not build fabulous homes too, did not wasps make paper (and made it first ?)
On and on ---- oh yes Man did dream like dogs and made tools like apes but did so with much greater complexity.
But then Man made use of these cognitive skills to write beautiful music (at least we humans thought it was beautiful - but that is hardly a scientifically objective test !) and to wage horribly brutal war.
Call that a draw then, in terms of evidence of greater 'progress'.
And even at the turn of the last century there was plenty of hard evidence that microbes were often better chemists than Man - breaking open and reassembling complex molecules very rapidly, at normal temperature and normal pressure - feats Man couldn't duplicate in huge and hugely expensive refractory vessels.
In successfully filling their own peculiar niche, all living things seemed to have possessed peculiar and unique skills - so scientists were really reduced to comparing between diverse skills by seeking some overarching criteria to better judge winners and losers in biology.
Interestingly, Darwin had said Evolution was all about (and only about) success ---- success as defined as the numbers of viable offspring over time.
When one new lifeform became a thousand species, filling niches all over the world, in huge numbers and for long periods of time, they are an evolutionary success.
One such lifeform (the dinosaurs), as big and physically complex as Man, was so successful --- for a long time.
But then they disappeared. This suggests that the length of time of a lifeform's existence was at least as important as the number of viable offspring, both as sheer individuals and numbers of different but related species.
Enter the bacteria : a lifeform that seems physically simple but chemically complex, that has been around for 3.8 billion years, filled every possible niche with hundreds of thousands of different species and trillions upon trillions of individual members.
Scientists in 1900 knew all this - and this is the very reason they chose to call their era the Age of Progress, not an Age of Success --- this despite living in a success-obsessed period !
Telling your white european upper class male paymasters that they were far less biologically successful than the tiny, immobile, simple, ancient, microbes (here feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, female or working class) was no way to secure well paid endowed university chairs or become knighted and feted.
Like authors and book reviewers seeking to be paid, scientists who speak for pay, sing for their supper - consciously and unconsciously flattering their expected customers.
Which why I deliberately choose to be a blockheaded pamphleteer in pjs....
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