SCIENCE WARS: two-bodied POSITIVISM versus three-bodied COMMENSALISM

Michael Marshall

It must truly be a shock to be praised all your entire working life as a 'savior of humanity' for your work in advancing "scientific and industrial progress", only to find in your retirement that your peers think your earlier work is actually leading to the destruction of humanity.

No wonder that the vast majority of the climate-cum-nearly-everything-current DENIER spokesmen are retirees.

Retiree scientists (of a sort) .

Yes they are also predominantly male (even predominantly DOMINANT MALES (!) ), predominantly white, protestant, middle to upper middle class , native born.

But let us also admit that most of the DENIER spokesmen are scientists within a generous definition of scientist that widens it to include anyone with a BSc or a BA in a social science who were hired and paid to do a science-oriented job because of that science-oriented degree.

It is dangerous and misleading to assume that to be 'a scientist' one needs a PhD, post-doc experience at leading institutions, grants from recognized agencies, a series of publications in key journals, tenure-like status, and recognition from the important societies in the area you work in.

So this expanded definition includes a lot of people - most of who were in the broader applied science and technology field  - or have retired from careers in the those fields.

Add to the numbers of my expanded definition of scientist their largely supportive/defensive spouse and children.

This expansion of the definition of a 'scientist' moves their percentage of the entire population from well less than one percent to something like ten percent - if you defined them as voters or as subjects of a poll, donors to causes, etc.

You should know that my only really valuable,marketable, expertise is in electoral politics - immodestly I think I am damn good at it and I tend to view reality through its prism.

Electoral politics' use of numbers is dead simple in pure math terms but rather sophisticated in its interest in the excluded middle - we back room operatives tend to only see the grays between the black and whites.

We can connect a political/ideological/social position to a particular age cohort from a hundred paces.

Its our job, it is what we do.

A well educated,well connected,well-off, articulate ,confident ten percent of any population is one heck of a nucleus to build a social movement around.

So while I basically agree with DAVID ROBERTS  that "Climate Deniers won't change, but they will die" , I worry that their ranks will be steadily replenished.

Replenished from the pool of  positivist scientists we are still generating through our truly horrible science education structures at the senior high school and 101 undergraduate university course level.

Neat ,clean ,clear, quick results oriented exam questions demand a particular - and peculiar - type of teaching approach to science.

It requires a peculiar kind of science as well.

Blunt-simple: DENIERS are positivists/modernists/progressivists: people who live in a two-body world.

By contrast, we now know that the real world is a three-bodied science problem - and increasingly basic science questions examine that three bodied world.

But for a single teacher to train (and test) 20 to 100 students, 15 to 22 years old, in many scientific fields in a few months, with very little sophisticated equipment or techniques , only two-bodied science will do.

This linear , Newtonian-Daltonian science is NOT how the real world works , not how real science works.

But it is the sort of science  that we teach people who never venture much past a cursory MSc from an undemanding university but who still end up working in 'science-oriented' jobs.

In my mind, a science class is only truly successful if the student is less sure of the subject than when they entered the course.

Please God ! I hope they know a lot more about the subject as well - but always,always,always, pray they be less sure of what they truly know.

Only this sort of education will produce truly 'scientific' minds - the rest is mere technique and they might as well learn that via on-the-job-training....

My target is highly respectable DENIALISM , not the cranks ...

Michael Marshall

My denialist target is the unconscious bias still lurking within mainstream science and mainstream scientists.

I am not after, in the main, the cranks who deny HIV-AIDS/9-11/the Holocaust/Evolution/Climate Change etc.

I have much bigger fish to fry.

My target is The Enlightenment Project and its offshoots : Modernity/Positivism/Scientism and their collective claim that there is nothing in the universe we can not and will not know - eventually.

Scientists who say this are DENIERS all right, deniers of the possibility of limits to Certainty.

They freely admit the space trip to Perfect Certainty will be very long, very expensive, filled with disappointments and errors - but that Science will ultimately arrive.

I ,on the other hand feel ,we can never know or control much of Reality --- in part, simply for lack of money.

To take an example we all talk about but no one ever does anything about, the weather will never be perfectly known.

 It is simply too expensive to fund all the observation posts and computing power needed to do even a reasonably close-to-perfect prediction job.

The Science is there, has been there - but the money has not and never will be.

Partly it is a size issue.

Humans are simply too Big for quarks and too small for Quasars to know much about either without spending an inordinate amount of money that we haven't got to spend, not when more pressing human-sized problems face us.

If this sort of scientific DENIALISM is sheer Blue Sky/ Castles in Spain/ Pie in the Sky wishful thinking , the COMMENSALIST science alternative is refreshingly down to earth.

It cheerfully accepts limits and strives instead to see just how far we can push them along,  for the betterment of life on Earth.

I am aware of many other scientist authors/bloggers out there working to refute crank denialism.

 But I currently know only of a few scientists (insider agitators as it were) who are tackling my definition of denialism from inside their institutional home of mainstream science and mathematics.

That takes a high level of intellectual bravery and I salute them.

In upcoming blog posts I will discuss some of these pioneers' work to explore whether it parallels my own efforts....

POSITIVISM:MODERNITY:SCIENTISM:DENIALISM

Michael Marshall

Re-brand that old Platonist dreck all you want, it is still just  junk science under the hood.

Denying that there are limits to what humanity can know and do about Reality/the Universe/Life is not going to make those limits, those complexities, those uncertainties go away.

Pushing pseudo-certitudes to feed yours and our addiction for certainty, isn't go to help either.

Instead, dip your feet into the Diracian Sea of Uncertainty - the water is not as bad as you think.

Explore, enjoy, engage, challenge yourself.

Why deny yourself and others of one of Life's greatest pleasures: a sense of venturing into the unknown to see whatever can be seen....

This century's IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE : the 'denier scientists' versus the 'commensalist scientists'

Michael Marshall

I'd hate to be among all those young academic social scientists who have invested all their professional lives in studying yesteryear's battle between capitalism and socialism.

Granted, there is still lots of life left in that subject - if you are a historian or a archaeologist , studying ancient artifacts.

But the social scientists are definitely not  that - they like to be as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines.

 And socialism versus capitalism it is so yesterday.

Denier scientists versus Alarmist scientists ( aka  Commensalist scientists) is what heats up the blogosphere today -- and it is their battle that provides the life-sustaining bile that feeds the "Oldstream Media" and its columnists.

Denier scientists like to imagine themselves in white lab coats, floating about 'up there' , like quasi archangels in some sort of theological Space, above and outside our physical Universe.

(But angels without archangel-like white wings - because they deny God  - as well denying any other impediment that might cramp their style.)

Spread out below them and beyond them , like some vast petri dish, is Life - filled with 'dots'  as HARRY LIME so lovelessly described all of us, in THE THIRD MAN.

'Harry Limes in a lab coat', coolly, logically, rationally, objectively, disinterestedly, the Denier scientists take measurements and make corrective adjustments --- but somehow these events never grievously damage the petri dish and its contents.

Archangels at the Right Hand of a God that in their minds at least,  Does Not Exist .

Masters of the Universe,Sky Gods, Sun Gods, Phaeton-Men .

Fundamentally, they believe that Man could survive and indeed soar to new heights, on a planet devoid of competition from all other life - even on a planet devoid of all the materials created by life.

"Man's Mind (and Minerals) Is Enough" is the banner they march under.

But like Phaeton himself, they are trying to ride a machine they can not control and it is alternatively burning up or freezing up parts of our world.

The commensalists are down-to-earth scientists, literally and figuratively earthlings.

What on earth have they been doing, mucking about down in the dirt ?

Well, just for starters, they have discovered that most of the minerals that we can get at , in or just below the Earth's surface, were created via biological activity.

Yep, I will repeat that - most compounds and minerals came from life and either won't exist or would exist in tiny amounts without Life on Earth.

We humans have created a few unique minerals and a lot more unique compounds , but in relatively small amounts - we simply haven't been here long enough , or in large enough numbers, to do much.

We get very little in the way of totally new amounts of elements from outer space - at least over human-oriented time periods.

Nor do volcanoes really bring up new matter.

Instead almost all of the important elements are recycled back and forth endlessly - up into the sky and back into the land and water.

 Some goes on down, way down, down into the ocean bottom and then into the Earth's sub surface interior and eventually back up via volcanoes.

They do not recycle as pure elements but as bits of various compounds - and solar radiation and geological processes unite with biological activity to ceaselessly break up those compounds to make new ones, and so on and on forever.

Think of these recycling efforts as vast wheels.

But Commensality Science begs us not to think of them as vast independent wheels as the Deniers would claim.

Instead they say think of them as a couple dozen big wheels that all constantly bumping up against each other, throwing each other off kilter - usually mildly, within tolerable limits for continuing life, but sometimes - and unexpectedly - in dramatic horrific fashion.

Denier scientists are pusher scientists - they know humanity is addicted on certainty  (and they are the most addicted of all of us - that is why they became denier scientists ) and they peddle quasi-certitudes.

They are  NOT  lying when they say they think we shouldn't do anything  about our environmental crisis until we are 100% sure of the facts, all of the facts.

Because the truly scary thing about these scientists is not that they are liars (I don't believe they are) but theat they truly believe that Reality is knowable to the point of 100% certainty.

In light of 100 years of sound basic science that says it is not, that is Bad Science, Bad Faith Science.

I agree they have a problem, but I just don't think remaining as practicing (practicing on us) scientists is the best solution to that problem...

Neo-Romantic ? So now you're calling COMMENSALITY 'neo-romantic' ?

Michael Marshall

When we compare it to the Modernist Science of 100 years ago ( the science of just before World War One ), Commensal Science does appear to be a near-perfect exact opposite.

Appearances can be deceiving, but in broad strokes, it does seem to oppose the basic tenets of Modernity root and branch.

But venture back two hundred years ago,  and Commensal Science at first blush seems to be an awful lot like the Romantic Science of the era ( from roughly the 1790s to the 1840s).

But appearances are deceiving, once again, and Commensal Science both agrees with and disagrees with Romantic Science enough to be more fairly called Neo-Romantic Science.

I don't really like using terms like neo- or post- , they seem so loose, so cliched.

But like everyone else, I use them when no other term appears to convey what I mean any better.

The very self-consciousness in the use of the term neo- is exactly what I want to convey --- because so many of today's Green or Commensal scientists do deliberately hearken back to Romantic Science (and Romanticsm generally) for inspiration with which to attack The Enlightenment Project and Modernity.

Like Plato and Aristotle, these things ebb in and out of fashion:

Classicalism/Romanticism/Positivism/Commensalism.

On and on and on - ever onward - like the eternally alternating ins and outs of election results in a democracy.....

KEPLER 22-B, write back if you read this.....

Michael Marshall

It will be at least 1200 years before we get your fastest reply, so I might not be around to read your missive.

Still, don't they say that it is the thought that counts ?

There may well be human-like life on planet KEPLER 22-B but it is 600 light years away from us --- which is probably why they don't come to visit us very much.

But writing?  Is it too much to ask that you at least write your fellow-humanoids once in a while?

Tell us how things are on KEPLER 22-B, or least how they were , 600 years ago.

It'll be like us getting a note from 800 AD Gaul talking about the start of the Dark Ages but by the time we get it, we're seeing the start of the Renaissance and the end of the Dark Ages.

Worse, by the time they get our reply, they are in  21st Century France and are so, homme, post this Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modernity thing.

"We're all so commensal now, mec."

Humanoid to Humanoid conversation can get a little disjointed at such long distances apart - talk about your troubling long distance romances !

His picture is of a young handsome guy and you get your hopes up , until you remember he's been dead, for like what ? - at least 550 years !

And your love letter is going to be read by his descendants 600 years later - that is if they can still read that old-fashioned version of their language.

I - personally - couldn't care less if there are rafts of livable planets out there, filled with people almost exactly like us --- except they are dead/were dead 600 years earlier.

But clearly this sort of stuff gets a lot of SKY GOD scientists excited - a lot more excited apparently than tidying up the ecological mess they - and they alone - created on this planet.

This earthling find this disaster-bound planet exciting enough to handle ---- I don't want to waste time visiting  -or even trying to talk to - to any other planet that is 600 or more light years into my distant past....

HERMANN MULLER versus the LONG LANCE : two failures of MODERNITY

Michael Marshall

During the WWII era, scientist HERMANN MULLER advocated using x-ray beams to create useful human mutations - the accuracy required would be, over a left-right distance, about 40 trillionths of a metre - the width of a hydrogen bond on a strand of DNA.

For that same war, the Japanese Navy created the LONG LANCE torpedo ( and long range naval guns) - expected to be accurate enough to sink a ship 40,000 metres away.

(While Allied bombers, using the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, were expected to be much, much more accurate ---albeit from about 4000 metres up.)

The two accuracy distances desired ( Japan's & Muller's) were a thousand trillion times different, but neither proven possible in practice.

WWII's military ended up bombing entire metropolitan populations, in the faint hope that the collateral damage might also destroy any military targets within.

Some useful penicillium mutations were achieved during the war in much the same way - by blasting trillions of fungi spores with radiation from above, in the equally faint hope that a few of the survivors might possess useful mutations.

SKY GODS - boys with toys, deadly toys .....

Initial precision matters - both at closest and furthest imaginable distances

Michael Marshall

Imagine altering the human genome by aiming a radiation ray at an individual hydrogen bond in an individual gene on a single human chromosome, to produce a mutation.

Sounds wacky, but that was what was seriously proposed as the way of the future by science cheerleaders (sorry -journalists) in the first half of the twentieth century.

A laser perhaps.

Even the tiniest miss-aiming of the tiny laser beam at the incredibly tiny chromosome would result in zapping the wrong  hydrogen bond or even the wrong gene, producing heavens knows what.

All this would be done over the shortest imaginable distances  and aiming at a hydrogen bond about 40 trillionths of a metre in size - so any shifting of the laser beam angle at all to the left or right would spell disaster.

Now imagine we want to send a signal to a likely looking livable planet circling the nearest suitable star to us after the Sun itself.

This would be Alpha-Centauri, about 40 trillion kilometres away.

This distance is a thousand trillion trillion times further away, so our laser beam might seem to have more latitude to be off to the left or the right in its aiming.

In fact, it would probably work out to be pretty much the same margin of error - ie none.

If you remember your high school geometry, two lines that appear to be perfectly parallel but are in fact just ever so slightly off ,will eventually arrive at entirely different galaxies.

We humans can never get the precision we crave if we let physicists do the job - they simply aren't up for it.

That laser beam in an odd sort of way is heading out on a ballistic flight - in the sense that it works by 'fire and forget' - once aimed we humans do nothing to correct its path  even when we see the need.

The same way we 'fire and forget' artillery guns, after setting them by tables drawn up by Newtonian physicists and mathematicians .

No aiming device is ever 100% accurate and no flight path can ever calculation for the changing nature of the forces affecting the projectile's travel.

Only some sort of pilot can correct for inflight changes and errors.

By trial and error - the way all science and all human activity works best .

If we could only get scientists to admit it ....

MAE WEST on Modernity : rubes....

Michael Marshall

The hallmark of  THE AGE OF MODERNITY ( aka THE AGE OF MASCULINITY) was to mistake size for sophistication, which as MAE WEST once famously quipped, is the mark of the male rube and the unsophisticated .

God, said Modernity, not Viagra, was on the side of the Big Battalions, if you know (wink,wink,nudge,nudge) what I mean.

Mae said, in essence, "'taint the meat, its the motion..."

Still, to hear Modernity talk, the very best way to be sure to sink a 70,000 ton battleship was to send in a half dozen battleships, each with thousands of crew, and all bristling with guns and armour.

 Then use their very long range naval guns with their very big shells, to safely sink the 70,000 tonner from 25 miles away.

To destroy a mile square chemical plant ?  Just send in a few hundred heavy bombers ,(battleships of the air) , bristling with men, machine guns and armour, to safely drop lots of large bombs on it from 25,000 feet above it.

But any cursory reality check of WWII reveals that very different methods were required for real results.

One small submarine or one small dive bomber (or one sea mine, for real economy) getting in very close,time and again, proved to be much more accurate and hence much more lethal in sinking battleships and aircraft carriers.

Lethal often as well to the submarine or dive bomber.

But hot courage, not cool science, seems to work out better for this particular human activity.

Similarly, a single light, unarmed and unarmoured wooden bomber, the Mosquito, seemed to do much better than the vast air armadas when it came to halting the production of chemical plants.

Sneaking in low and unobserved - something that can not be said for a stream of hundreds of large aircraft dozens flying in a formation that is dozens of miles long and wide, the Mosquito
got in 'close and personal' with the chemical plant's key bottleneck
building - perhaps its power plant or cat converter.

A single bomb, delivered close and accurately, could do the job.

The air armanda, by contrast, usually ended up dropping most of its bombs from so high up that they landed instead on civilians' homes.

In addition, that unsuccessful raid frequently cost 10% of those aircraft.

With their large crews ,that meant the lost of hundreds of young lives.

And the need to constantly build more replacement bombers  represented a large percentage of the economic output of their entire nation back home, because they were so large and complex.

They consumed resources that then could not be devoted to more useful and economic ways to end the war and save lives.

Which is to say: smaller aircraft/vessels, with their smaller crews to end up dead.

Now a chemical plant, a human chemical plant, at first glance seems to be very big and sophisticated.

Big and complex and expensive yes --- but hardly sophisticated.

"Surely not !", you exclaim, still trusting that old high school chemistry teacher.

"Just look at all those incredibly sturdily built massive reactor vessels and tubing and the incredibly elaborate instrumentation dials."

Oh yes, all those vast amounts of fossil fuels going in to heat things up, to cool things down, to heat them up again, to cool them down again.

And yes, all that energy devoted to increasing pressures to hundreds of atmospheres - hence the need for very thick and sturdy ( read: very expensive) reactor vessels.

Still not convinced ?

Well let use make some totally man-made synthetic penicillin then, using today's best chemistry.

One caveat - we will make it at factory sized scale, not in a flask like some academic with one eye an article for NATURE and another on a Nobel prize - we want to make this a profitable venture.

We will start with lots of very complicatedly made chemical reagents - themselves the products of factory-sized operations.

We will heat them up/cool them down and pressure them up/pressure them down, from reactor vessel to reactor vessel,  chemical step by chemical step.

The basic ingredients of penicillin itself cost pennies , but the reagents needed to make it are very expensive so we need to recover them , as well as very expensively separate them from the chemical results at each step of the process.

In fact purification is the most expensive part of this whole business - we will end up sticking this in someone's bloodstream after all.

But purification isn't the fatal step - it is the level of yield after one run through ( infinitely tiny) versus the total sunk and operating costs (huge).

We can run the results of one batch back through the system to increase the yield a bit ,and so on over and over, but it is still very expensive for each iteration.

This is how the world made most of its nuclear weapons, cascading the tiny initial yields of the gaseous diffusion process, back into the system over and over, in plant buildings about a mile square.

It cost trillions but cost is no object when it comes to killing people; however if we want to save lives, we need be practical and prudent and make a profit.

Synthetic man-made penicillin would be too expensive to use - we would be shifted - as patients and doctors - to using cheaper but less effective drugs.

Or ?

Or we could switch to the chemical equivalent of the tiny submarine, dive bomber and Mosquito.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a decorated soldier of the First World War --- but in the Second World War, he was a civilian.

His 'war work' was not directly in the weapons business - he designed no dive bomber or submarine - he was a medical doctor not a PhD.

But he come up with the medical equivalent of the small, cheap dive bomber, submarine or Mosquito .

The living fungi cell, far too small to see, is a complete penicillin producing plant in itself.

It does the job without huge heavy reactors or heavy outlays of energy - because it makes penicillin in ordinary temperatures, at ordinary atmospheric pressure, in relatively few steps.

Best of all, these factories, when they are not making penicillin, will make duplicate chemical factories of themselves, out of agricultural waste and a little dirty water !

In fact from one tiny cell or spore, invisible to all but the best microscopes, using only a few pennies worth of agricultural waste and tap water, you will quickly see trillions of tiny chemical plants springing up, producing useable amounts of the life-saving penicillin.

Rather than using huge amounts of scarce and expensive stainless steel reactors and complicated and expensive instrumentation equipment, penicillin could have been made in underused rural milk plants using underemployed and unskilled rural workers living in their already built homes.

(For new urban housing for tens of thousands of new urban workers was one of the scarcest materials in every nation's war effort.)

Sophistication, I am saying, includes lateral thinking outside the box, and is frugal and economical not simply big for the sake of impress-the-locker-room bigness.

May I suggest that the women who grew most of the natural penicillin that we used in WWII appreciated this fact much quicker than the men ever did ?

WWII  demonstrated one thing for sure: God - the God of sophistication - is on the side of the Small Battalions.....

Wendell Willkie, early COMMENSALIST...

Michael Marshall

In my last blog entry I mentioned that many inter-continental attacks were launched by both sides in WWII.

I deliberately brought in ICBMs (and inter-continental attacks in general) to this blog on commensality to re-emphasize that commensality can be a two-edged sword: all life on Earth can just as easily die - as dine - at our planet's common table.

WWII brought this fact home to many people the world over --- but not in some highly dramatic - instant - fashion, but in a sort of slow drip manner throughout the six years of war.

People tend to forget that Japan and Germany did not just sink ships right off North America public beaches and lob a few deadly shells at coastal harbour facilities and personnel - they actually invaded and held  bits of North America for years.

Greenland held German weather stations and westernmost Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska were held by the Japanese.

Two thousand men died on the Allied side alone in the campaign to remove the Japanese from North America.

In turn, the Americans used the western Aleutian islands to raid the northern and westernmost islands of Japan by bomber and ship - well before the much better known B-29 attacks of almost 2 years later.

The island by island by island by island hop from Seattle or Edmonton to Fairbanks Alaska onward and onward to Siberian Russia or northern Japan, island by island, reminded North Americans that this trip cut both ways and Asia could invade the Americas as easily as we could do the reverse.

Similarly the island-hopping ferrying of Allied bombers from mid west America  via Gander-Greenland- Iceland -Orkneys- Faroes- Shetlands to the mainland of the UK and Europe reminded us that the ocean safety we had imagined would protect the new world from the wars of the old was not as vast and safe as we had thought.

Wendell Willke, the unexpected presidential candidate of those arch isolationists the Republicans, (deluding themselves that they could isolate themselves from Nature as well as from other humans), travelled around the world by plane ,in wartime, to publicize his theme "Its All (One World) Now."

I count Willke very much as an early commensalist.....

ICBMs have actually been around for centuries - as have overwrought science journalists with a poor grasp of arithmetic ...

Michael Marshall

It is not really very hard to stand on the edge of one continent and fire a cannon ball at the edge of another continent  - this is all ,technically, that a minimalist Inter-Continental-Ballistic-Missile has to do to qualify.

At their furthest edges, most continents tend to touch (or almost touch) a few of the other continents.

Europe touches Asia at the Urals, and almost touches Africa at the straits of Gibraltar. And North America to Europe is the closest space between Iceland and Greenland.

North America and South America touch at Panama. The westernmost island of Alaska is very close to the easternmost island of Asia.

Africa touches Asia near the Suez canal.

Australia is very close to the closest island of Asia.

Westernmost Africa is relatively close to Easternmost northern Brazil.

South America is even relatively close to Antarctica.

But Australia isn't close to North or South America, Europe or Africa or even Antarctica.

 This is why the famous anti-nuclear novel "ON THE BEACH" gained credibility by setting its only remaining humans alive after a nuclear war on this distant-from-everybody continent.

WWII actually had many intercontinental attacks between warring nations on separate continents.

What was truly new by 1962 was that a missile launched from the middle of any one continent could hit a city in the middle of any other continent.

What for centuries had been safe heartlands, free from initial conquest from a surprise invasion coming across national borders by sea or land, now were as vulnerable as any seaport close to enemy waters.

Chicago - home of some of  WWII's least patriotic Isolationists ( hell lets call them traitor-wannabes - right Colonel McCormick ?) - had had no pity for Warsaw's Poles when they almost instantly fell victim to an sudden invasion.

Now, after 1962, the same thing could also to happen to Chicago.

Who could blame Chicago's large Polish population for feeling that turnaround was fair play .....

SKY GODS versus the earthlings : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

There is a famous story - possibly part of Hollywood's  Apocrypha -  about how the dross that we used to see on TV actually came to be.

"I have a vision, a vision", says the bigtime TV producer as he 'does lunch' with some hapless TV writer , "I see a man in a dusty pickup truck somewhere in the South West". "Can you write a series around that?"

And of course Mr Big Time will later make the big dough and the big fame as the 'creator' of the series concept, while the writer ends up eating baloney in some low rent motel.

Well I ,too, "have a vision, a vision" for my book - in particular - the book cover.

The book cover background is a gradient of subdued blood red at the top changing slowly into a subdued green yellow at the bottom.

In big letters across the top, filling the width - in the garish colors of every 1940s Sci Fi cover - will be the words:

SKY GODS

(All in upper case.)

In fact, everything about the book cover is designed to evoke and guy-up those over-the-top 1940s Sci Fi covers : from the unsubtle flat bright primary colors to the razor-jawed heroes and ravishing women.

Immediately below and under that lettering will be three bombers, equipped with the supposedly war-winning NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, rising in an arc from left to right, filling the width, dropping bombs into the blood red sky,flames and smoke.

Inside the bombers, of course, are all those 20 year old Pierre-Simon Laplace-like bombardiers, coolly sealing the fates of tens of thousand of invisible civilian 'dots', from 25,000 feet up.

Next are these words, in a little smaller type and only occupying the center of the width:

versus

And a line below them , again in smaller type but this time filling the width:

the earthlings

(Yep, all in lower case.)

Below and under the words is an image of three patients in wheelchairs, arms linked upwards in a victory gesture, surrounded by  three cheering friends.

On the left, its Charlie (Aronson) the first ever patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic, with Dr Tom Hunter (polio survivor) to the left of him, leaning on his ever-present crutches.

Despite his polio and those crutches, American student Hunter still coxed the Cambridge team against Oxford , at a time and place when winning the Nobel prize was almost as good as winning the rowing cup...

Charlie is a life-long sucker for any life-threatening illness the strep bacteria can throw at him but has survived them all - including his second bout of the normally invariably fatal SBE - once again responding well to Dawson's penicillin.

This cat may have used up a lot of his nine lives but he is about to need one more - a severe stroke (which he will again survive) awaits him a week or two from now - but for today, he is grinning broadly.

A shit-eating grin. And why not?  There is much to celebrate and Charlie has been along for the long ride, right from the start.

 Charlie has a penicillin bottle IV and the over-sized bottle is well above him, casting a big yellow circle of light against the subdued green (1930s hospital green) background.

If the glow looks like a solar monstrance in some dimly lit Orthodox church, well that is no accident.

In the center is Doctor D (Martin Henry Dawson) the doctor who brought the world the naturally grown penicillin that we still use today.

He had worked for years with the musty-moldy smelling soil bacteria and fungi that give us natural penicillin and his lab and office literally had a freshly-turned earth smell so calling his tiny team 'the earthlings' seems oddly appropriate.

He is dying, dying of MG (Myasthenia Gravis) , has been dying  almost ever since he started this penicillin project back in September 1940.

One characteristic of MG is that patients with really severe cases undergo many life-threatening Myasthenic Crises , where breathing becomes almost impossible.

 Even after they are stabilized, they remain on Oxygen Bottle Assist and are kept in a wheelchair until the crisis has truly passed. This is one of those times.

Dr Hunter is not just Dawson's clinical assistant in the penicillin project, he is also Dawson's personal physician - helping his boss save others' lives or saving his boss's own life, as circumstances dictate.

But today is Dr Dawson's personal day of triumph.

He has heard that his arch opponents, Dr Alfred Richard and Dr Chester Keefer, have finally thrown in the towel and will now permit penicillin to be used in thousands of American and Canadian civilian hospitals.

It is late April 1944, and penicillin has yet to undergo its first mass clinical trials ( that will only come about on June 6th, on the beaches of Normandy) but already, thanks to Dawson's example, PFIZER is producing more naturally-grown penicillin than anyone could ever have thought possible just months earlier.

Meanwhile Dr Richards's fair haired child, synthetic penicillin, still seemed as distant an illusion as ever, despite all the taxpayers' money thrown at the problem.

Behind Dawson is his wife Marjorie - born with a bad hip, which no amount of painful operations have helped and she must often use a cane to get about - today is one of those days.

Over to his right, also hooked up to a strangely glowing yellow penicillin IV bottle high above her, is HH , the young woman for whom Dawson broke the law and took on all his colleagues and the wartime American government --- all in an effort to save her.

The stolen penicillin was never enough and the course of her illnesses, as Dawson was wont to say, was 'stormy' .

Even as she beat off the SBE , the spread of its infectious fragments through her blood stream had cost her an eye and the use of her ovaries. But now thanks to new bigger supplies of penicillin there seemed to be no more pockets of infection hiding anywhere in her body and she would soon be discharged home.

She too had the same shit-eating grin as Charlie and all the others. Again, why not ?

It was the story of  her dramatic recovery - and of the normally meek and mild Dr Dawson actually stealing wartime government penicillin to save her - that had spread like wildfire through the 10,000 member strong medical community in tri-state New York and had led to further dramatic incidents that finally broke the penicillin story worldwide and brought PFIZER on side.

To her right is an unremarkable looking man - an accountant of a man - also holding onto his two crutches for support.

His name is Floyd Odlum and he is one of the richest men in the world  ---- and one of the best known  husbands-of  in the world.

An odd combination.

His wife is Jackie Cochran - glamerous, smart, tough, one of the world's fastest, best, pilots - winning all kinds of speed records and even beating the world's best test pilots at their own game.

Floyd?

He may look like a mild accountant but who said accountants can't also be smart ?

For he made all his money during the Great Depression, when everyone else was losing their shirts.

Super-Rich, a strong Republican - but also a real patriot with an eye for  helping the little guy.

So the Big-Corporation-Owner-to-end-all-Big-Corporation-Owners has the unlikely job of trying to see that small businesses got a few crumbs from the war contracts going almost exclusively to the nation's top fifty corporations - because without contracts and their material allotments these small businesses would have to fold up.

The awesome stress of trying to work inside The Beltway has given him an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which brought him to Dawson, because Dawson's, real, day, job is to head up a famous Arthritis Research Clinic.

 Odlum began getting involved in the beginnings of a patient-centred American Arthritis organization -- which kept him connected with Dawson.

 He had grown interested in, and supportive of, Dawson's small pioneering home-grown penicillin project: even helping him to recover, after a grave operation that failed to cure Dawson's MG.

So, the image I wish to leave you with is six cripples - six people who should be 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' . Losers.

 Losers and worthless 'dots' , in the eyes of the SKY GODS in particular.

But far from being despondent with their fate - the six 'crips' are grinning ear to ear  ---- and why not ?

For the wartime triumph of naturally-grown penicillin is a signal Triumph of the Weak , well set to rebuke the Triumph of the Strong doctrine promoted by Sky Gods all over the world during the war.

Finally, at the bottom of the book cover, in as big a font as the one used for SKY GODS is:

1939-1945

Now, let's see if that very tiny visual artist stuck inside of me is actually capable of pulling this all off...

Original of SKY GODS versus the earthlings:1939-1945

Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...

Michael Marshall

In the 1930s, when FDR and the Democrats were racking up their impressive majorities ,about the only place the twosome couldn't catch flies was in college towns ---- they voted Republican.

Yep.

Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.

For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.

(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)

Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.

But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.

The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.

As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.

What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.

In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.

But look it up - they did once.

In spades....

The Science of CERTITUDES to the Science of UNCERTAINTY : no wonder conservatives dislike the new science...

Michael Marshall

It is a given that conservative personalities crave certitudes and fear uncertainty.

(To be clear - this means, for example, that Russian conservative personalities yearn for the good old days of Stalin and fear greatly
the fact that tiny Estonia isn't under Russia's firm thumbs.)

Modernist Science was full of certitudes - all lies of course, the sort of self-flattering lies we humans delude ourselves with.

As those lies were exposed - by further scientific activity - scientists gradually abandoned modernist science and became more commensal and green --- and more and more willing to accept that humanity's knowledge had its limits and human uncertainty would always exist about life and reality.

Conservative personalities naturally found this hard to take and abandoned post-modern science and this age of commensality and sought out the old science of certainty in whatever elderly nooks it could be still found in.

Conservative personalities haven't changed - never can and never will - that is what makes them conservative.

But scientists have ....

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall

Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what I  take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....

SCIENCE , not conservatives or moderates or liberals, has changed since 1973

Michael Marshall

A study of almost 40 years of public polling data has set the print-o-sphere and the blog-o-sphere aTwitter.

Gordon Gauchat published his study in the April 2012 issue of The American Sociological Review.

He says that after the 1973 Oil Crisis, people started to change how they viewed Science.

I disagree - totally.

Science is not the reified entity that scientists like to claim it is - universal, eternal, unchanging : sort of God-Without-The-Beard .

It is a human social system and as subject to change as any other human collectivity.

Scientists and hence Science changed after 1973 for two major reasons.

First, scientists in powerful positions but born in the modernist era started to retire and die.

Secondly, the scientists born after Hiroshima and Auschwitz who gradually came to positions of power within industry and academia no longer believed in the tenets of modernity, or at least no longer believed them as strongly as their elders.

Yes, liberals/lefties/greens also started to abandon the old modernist science and embrace the new post modern commensality science while religious conservatives, in reaction , joined old line modernists in defending the old time scientific religion all the stronger .

Enemy of my enemy must be my friend is the name of that  scientific theory.

There are two very different types of Science and scientists out there --- we need to be always very clear which ones we are talking about...

Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....

SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...

Michael Marshall

My last blog, contrasting NORDEN MODERNITY to GEOSMIN COMMENSALITY was very long - and longwinded.

Maybe I can be more succinct.

Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.

Heavy stuff !

One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.

Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied  4F civilians.

The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.

(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of  Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)

But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' :  call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.

All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.

(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)

Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.

The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics,  was just a start on this bold vision.

Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.

In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.

Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.

Down into the earth, actually.

 This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.

So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.

 These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.

All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.

But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.

His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.

Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.

 But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.

But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.

Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better,  much cheaper and much much more plentiful.

A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.

Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.

It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.

Great !

Or was it ?

Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.

Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.

So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.

Now that seriously looked the business !

But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.

(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)

So A-bombs and Penicillin:  two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?

And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????

NORDEN Modernity versus GEOSMIN Commensality

Michael Marshall

Do you remember the most famous scene in THE THIRD MAN movie?

(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)

The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.

 Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.

 'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'

(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved  - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.

The fact that Pfizer chief "John L"  Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)

But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.

I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.

At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.

Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.

When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.

Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.

Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.

The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.

Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .

You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.

Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.

The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.

One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"

We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.

I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".

I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.

Commensality in the Trenches ????

It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.

And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.

You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?

 We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in  beets or in the flesh of catfish.

Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.

But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.

For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.

Here is maybe one reason why:

When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.

He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.

That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.

It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.

 They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.

In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.

We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.

Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.

The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.

Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.

So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.

Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.

The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .

The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.

(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)

Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.

 But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of  some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !

But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.

Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.

No, I stand corrected.

It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.

I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.

And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.

Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy,  not from some Olympian Height of indifference.

 And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....

COMMENSALITY: Two Bodied or Many-Bodied ?

Michael Marshall

Modernity, NEWTONIAN Modernity, was a simple-minded ideology, asking simple questions and expecting even simpler answers.

The NAIF philosophy of a NAIF-minded age.

Newton more or less correctly predicted the short term stability of the biggest objects in our Solar System, after they had stopped their earlier ,dangerously irregular ,behavior when the Solar System was in its youth.

He could correctly predict the future paths a single big object and a single small object would make, considering only that both attracted each other via the force of gravity.

Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon : Newtonian Science's triumph : 'Solving the Two Body Problem'.

But the really dangerous objects in the Solar System these days are those tens of thousands of various-sized irregular chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt.

Because they are so small they reflect little sunlight and so are dark and nearly invisible to even today's best human observation tools and skill sets.

All those semi-equally-sized thousands of irregularly shaped rocks tumbling about relatively near to each other leads to highly unpredictable summing of the gravity forces acting on each other, minute by minute, let alone decades in advance.

This means the asteroids' paths through space are highly erratic in normal times.

 Even worse, they can fall into a sort of avalanche-waiting-to-happen mode where a tiny unexpected twitch could send a huge high speed missile headed for Earth with the force of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of H-Bombs.

If we don't see them in time, and if we don't send up a rocket and a nuclear bomb to divert their path away from Earth, its game over civilized Humanity and maybe even game over all Life on Earth bigger than a microbe as well.

Preventing this should have been JOB ONE in the 300 plus years that Newtonian Science has been around, but it's scientific theories simply weren't up for the job.

Fair enough I say: admit it, and let someone else do the job right.

But no.

Newtonian Science was proclaimed - and taught - (is still taught) as all that a practical man needs to order his world.

A problem that Modernist Science couldn't solve wasn't explained away as 'being in God's hands', (because of course Modernity didn't believe in God.)

No, it simply wasn't talked about as all.

Newton's laws could tell us that Mars wasn't about to crash into the Earth - which none of us had thought would ever happen anyway, even before Science chimed in with its me-too-ism.

(I say 'Mars isn't about to crash into Earth' because newer computer models show a very slim chance it could happen someday if the variety of gravity forces in the entire Solar System happen to hit a not-so-sweet resonance point.)

That was Newtonism's 'triumph' and it was the hollowest triumph ever touted this since of Madison Avenue hucksterism.

Newtonian Science's failures were many (predict the weather or turbulent current flows anyone ?) but the failure to predict an asteroid killing us all while we sleep overnight has to be its biggest single failure.

The real world, outside the tenured offices and laboratories of basic science, is the home of applied science and this is where Newton hit a snag.

The Sun and the Earth have an infinite number of gravity and electromagnetic forces impacting on them, from all angles, at all
levels of energy, and varying independently minute by minute.

There is no real world 'two body problems' .

I repeat, no real world 'two body problems'- all problems  in this universe/ in this reality are many-bodied.

Admitably all those forces upon the Earth normally are tiny, even when summed in some unholy alliance, compared to the attraction the giant Sun has for the tiny Earth.

So a 'two body problem' is really like the relationship between that of parent and child, man and woman, master and slave,human host and microbe.

I hope one can begin to see the social/economic/ideological attraction for the modernist male for saying that the important problems in the physical world are all 'two body problems'.

It can neatly be carried over to all of life's problems.

And , of course, everything that happens seem to happen as seen through the larger object's eyes.

For example.

We tend to think and act as if the microbes upon us are either predators (parasites) or spongers (commensal) or at best creatures we endure because we give them lots of free food and they give us back a few vitamins (mutualists).

We are the HOSTS and they mostly unwanted guests eating at our table: its another two bodied problem, big Sun-like Host and tiny parasite-like Earth.

But in fact, we humans can only breath air, survive in a moderately stable climate and find food to live off of, because of microbes.

(My definition of microbe is all life forms too small to see with the casual naked eye --- effectively they are invisible to us.)

Remove just them, but all of them, and Humanity would start dying off in a few months and I do not see any way we could do much about it.

They have not just been on Earth for a thousand times longer than humanoids have - and a million times longer than civilized humanity has , they live everywhere --- from miles underground to high in the sky, in frozen ice and scalding hot chemical waters.

And size ?

Individually invisible, collectively they well outweigh all other life on Earth - not just humans but giant whales and giant trees as well.

They are our Host globally and we are their Host locally (on or in our individual bodies.)

But once we look with our new commensally-oriented eyes, we quickly find there are many Hosts and Guests interacting throughout the Earth's biosphere.

We could claim that "we get our oxygen through trees" (not true but partially true - we get some from them) - "we don't need microbes after they taught the trees to split water and give us oxygen".

But in fact most trees could not survive if the microbial fungi that co-exist by their roots weren't there, these two lifeforms are simultaneously Host and Guest, clinging to each other closely for continued life.

Consequences quickly multiply unexpectedly in a many-bodied commensal world: when a fungicide ends up killing the fungi on those roots and the trees start dying, for example.

But that is a problem relatively easy to avoid.

However all the various recycling of scarce nutrients that keep the earth livable and edible react with one another in complex and unpredictable ways that are well beyond our understanding let alone our controlling at the present time.

By this I mean they react sort of consistently with each other up to a point in a sort of 'varying mildly around a midpoint equilibrium' and then suddenly shift to a wholly new equilibrium point that could leave the world very different indeed.

As in puff - all human are gone.

Nothing dramatic seems to happen for a long time as we alter the ratios of the various nutrients (oxygen,nitrogen,carbon,sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, etc) flying about around us until they reach that point in an avalanche's life when the slightest breeze causes a landslide.

Mars suddenly does crash into Earth or the polar ice caps suddenly do all melt in 25 years.

We can't solve any many-bodied problem in physics with the entire global economy devoted to the computer trying to solve it.

And basic science craves exact solutions and reproducibility as basic tenets of whether something is scientific.

Unexpectedly, I totally agree with them.

Most of the 'science' successes that we humans talk about today , and most of them from the past, hasn't been pure science, but rather trial and error technology, informed massively by the near successes of pure science.

Many bodied problems - the problems of the real world, can not be solved in the exact meaning of scientists and math professors.

But we can often get in real close, coming up with a tentative, approximate, temporary solution, provided we also keep our eyes open for any signs of a sudden change possibly coming up in the near future.

We do it by trial and error, caution, openness, humility - muddling through.

Similarly with Life on Earth and its 'many bodied commensality' - we can't perfectly solve it or perfectly predict it, but we can muddle through it, with caution mixed with openness to change and humility to admitting failures....

Pierre-Simon Laplace is NOT a Commensalist

Michael Marshall

Well if I am a commensalist and you are too, just who exactly is not a commensalist ?

Well Stephen Harper is not and neither is Ricky Santorum , but you probably already guessed that.

More importantly, people like Albert Einstein, that icon of the tired old left, isn't one either.

Nor is his intellectual mentor, Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Laplace, and Einstein, thought of themselves as fully Modernist and firm advocates of the Enlightenment.

Laplace famously claimed that since he believed he already stood above and outside Nature and Reality for all practical measure, only a current lack of sufficient calculating power prevented him from perfectly predicting the present, past and future right down to the atomic level.

But both Chaos Theory (Henri Poincare) and Quantum Theory (Paul Dirac) show that if you are in anyway a participant within the system you are studying (and we finite humans are definitely within the Universe --- as even Einstein and Laplace would have readily admitted that), then even your tiniest efforts to measure it, act upon it and feedback to alter those measurements.

Thus, as with the food we eat and the air we breath , "all measuring instruments (and the beings operating them) dine at a common table" ---  that is they are embedded fully into the systems they are tryong to measure -- thus, in point of fact, they are commensalist with it.

But until someone accepts this, emotionally as well as intellectually, they do not act upon that knowledge or try to temper their hubris.

I do not believe that Einstein would have ever found it easy to accept that a small weather measurement taken in the brazilian jungle could trigger a big twister in Texas....

SMARTEST creature in the world, pound for pound: BACTERIA hands down !

Michael Marshall

No contest !

This morning, I got to wondering about the ratio of the mass of a being's genome to the mass of its body.

You know how Modernist Man is always oozing on and on about the great size of humans and dinosaurs and blue whales, compared to that of the bacteria, as proof of our greater complexity and hence, presumably, of our intelligence.

I was convinced I won't find any information on this ratio genome mass to body mass, because it won't flatter us humans at all.

I was right -- nobody seems to have asked the question.

If someone has - please feel free to correct me in spades.

(And by the by - somebody please sequence the genome of the giant blue whale and compare that mass to its body mass.)

The average bacteria weighs about 1 pico gram and its genome weighs about one thousand of a pico gram, for a ratio of about one thousand to one.

By way of contrast I should say the human genome, purely in terms of number (and hence mass) of basepairs, is about only 1000 times the size of the larger bacteria genomes.

 In addition, the genes of a bacteria make up a far greater total of  its genome than seems to be the case in that of humans, so we actually mightn't have many more genes than the bacteria does.

But the jury is still out - scientists find it hard to believe all the non-protein coding DNA inside of us humans is totally useless baggage.

Now when we weigh the human genome it weights about six pico grams and let us assume that the average human weighs about 60 kilograms (60,000 grams) (132 lbs), just for the ease of the math.

A one thousand to one ratio of genome to body mass should mean that a human genome should weigh 60 grams, not 6 pico grams.

In plain English, the human ratio ratio of genome mass to body mass is one to a trillion.

That is a ratio one billion times worse than that of the bacteria.

We humans, compared to bacteria, have big bodies but with comparatively small 'genome' brains.

Yes the organ we humans call a brain is very big, in ratio to our body weight, but the giant sulfur bacteria might considering it just another vacuole, only this time holding memories instead of sulfur.

To them, perhaps, the 'real' brain is the genome, because it allows a being to do more different things, rather than just doing a few things extraordinarily well as in the case of the human brain.

Good point - we have a K-selected genome - much more successful than the bacteria's in stable times.

Their genome, by contrast, is an r-selected genome - much more flexible than ours when times get tough and survival not success, is the key.

Think of it as the Margaret Atwood Law of Nature ( you might wanna look up her classic book called Survival to see what I mean ....)

The healthiest, most terrified Generation in history

michael marshall

If you were a child between July 1945 and October 1963, you were literally part of the "BOOM" generation.

"BOOM" as in the large loud bang made when an above-ground atomic bomb test went off somewhere and yet more fallout drifted down in your morning glass of milk.

(And studies have now confirmed that the more of that life-giving, much-advertised, fresh milk you drank in the 1950s, the better your chances become to die of cancer today.)

But we thought then, not of a slow death by cancer when we were old, but of our entire world all expiring one sunny day, whenever the West and the East chose to go CODE RED.

Terrified we were, yes - but also very healthy - thanks to all those "antibiotics-before-bacterial-resistance".

O Manhattan ! , island home of  both the manhattan project and natural penicillin, you sure have a lot to answer for....