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....
Monday, June 15, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
The inevitable dislike of science theorists for naturalists
A compelling scientific theory cum law is simple and consistent : all carbon atoms throughout the universe have six - and six only, no more or less - protons.
But in reality, there are very few science theories or laws that are that simple and consistent.
Exceptions always abound and become a nightmare for science theorists - their brain structure is not set up to easily handle uncertainties and probable possibilities and unknowabilities.
(I include experimentalists among the theorists because experiments are specifically designed to greatly simplify the reality found outside the laboratory --- many sciences have fierce internal conflicts between those big on lab work versus those pro field work.)
Theorists' brain = Conservatives' brain is a good rule of thumb (again, only a probability, not a dead certainty.)
If theorists make a living, win fame and fortune, by creating laws that simplify reality, naturalists do the exact reverse.
They win special fame and fortune by discovering the single one species in a vast genus that does not reproduce sexually.
Exceptions to the rule are their coin of fortune -- they seek out and see things that most of the rest of us either don't see or don't want to see.
Henry Dawson was a naturalist ---- but the kings of the science world, back in 1940 as today, were the theorists , the terrible simplifiers.
Wartime Penicillin, the conflict-driven drama between naturalists and progress-oriented theorists, was thus born to happen.....
But in reality, there are very few science theories or laws that are that simple and consistent.
Exceptions always abound and become a nightmare for science theorists - their brain structure is not set up to easily handle uncertainties and probable possibilities and unknowabilities.
(I include experimentalists among the theorists because experiments are specifically designed to greatly simplify the reality found outside the laboratory --- many sciences have fierce internal conflicts between those big on lab work versus those pro field work.)
Theorists' brain = Conservatives' brain is a good rule of thumb (again, only a probability, not a dead certainty.)
If theorists make a living, win fame and fortune, by creating laws that simplify reality, naturalists do the exact reverse.
They win special fame and fortune by discovering the single one species in a vast genus that does not reproduce sexually.
Exceptions to the rule are their coin of fortune -- they seek out and see things that most of the rest of us either don't see or don't want to see.
Henry Dawson was a naturalist ---- but the kings of the science world, back in 1940 as today, were the theorists , the terrible simplifiers.
Wartime Penicillin, the conflict-driven drama between naturalists and progress-oriented theorists, was thus born to happen.....
Galton, unlike God, was inordinately fond of Man ...
By contrast, God, as Galton's friend Thomas Huxley drily noted, was inordinately fond of beetles.
More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.
Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.
Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.
Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.
Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?
Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?
Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....
More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.
Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.
Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.
Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.
Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?
Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?
Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....
Progress = Plenticide
In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
Friday, June 12, 2015
Hearst Corporation & Penicillin Pulitzers : twice lucky ??
At the beginning of August 1943 (despite it being 15 years since it was first discovered) the word penicillin remained either unknown or a matter of total indifference to 99% of the world's newspaper reading public.
By the end of September 1943 (and despite heavy wartime censorship that kept news from freely circulating between the Allies, Axis and Neutrals) 99% of the world's newspaper reading public knew the word penicillin and wanted some of it.
Yesterday, if not sooner.
And suddenly inspired by an old fashioned newspaper crusade of the kind that only Citizen Hearst could sustain, Pfizer boss John L Smith was hell bent for leather on supplying that demand.
Smith ultimately would do so in spades - his own firm alone providing 85 % of all the penicillin landing on D-Day.
It all began when a crippled Italian-American surgical resident called Dr Dante Colitti conspired with a Jewish-American journalist (Hearst's New York Journal American city editor Paul Schoenstein) to bring the story of a baby girl dying for lack of penicillin before the general public.
All in a successful attempt to embarrass the nation's wartime scientific elite (non-Italian/non-Jewish) into getting serious with penicillin.
Because didn't they know there was a war on ---- and people were dying from infections by the zillions ?
The story of innocent little Patty Malone touched the heart of a world at war and did indeed embarrass the Allied governments.
They abandoned their intention to keep penicillin a secret war weapon for as long as possible by withholding civilian supplies and by withholding news of its medical miracles.
Quite right then that the New York Journal American and Paul Schoenstein got the 1944 Pulitzer prize for general reporting.
Still this recognition was a stunner to all journalists with long memories.
No one could ever remember a desk-bound city editor ever receiving any sort of award for shoe-leather reporting - let alone the top prize in journalism.
And no one expected the Pulitzer Committee (set up deliberately to promote quality journalism over Yellow Journalism) would reward its top prize to the very font of the evil yellowness itself - William Randolph Hearst's flagship, the Journal-American.
This October 16th 2015 will mark the seventy fifth anniversary of history's first ever injection of penicillin - an event that ushered in our current age of antibiotics.
Since 1940, ten billion of us have directly benefitted from this age of (cheap) (abundant) penicillin-based antibiotics which has given all of us a form of herd immunity from once endemic infectious diseases.
A big deal indeed.
And here, well into this article, is where I "bury the lede" , if you happen to be a editor at anyone of today's Hearst media.
Because one of that historical pair, a teletype operator named Charles Aronson, was employed at Hearst's very same New York Journal-American !
In fact, one of Charles' jobs in August-September 1943 was keeping up with requests for variants on the the original Penicillin-Patty Malone series coming in over the wire from the various papers and magazines in the Hearst chain and from subscribers to Hearst's wire service, the International News Service or INS.
Aronson couldn't help but recall how Dr Martin Henry Dawson's homemade penicillin in 1940 had saved him from then invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that kills people inflicted with serious Rheumatic Fever).
Or that Patty Malone's hospital, the Lutheran Hospital in upper Harlem, was but a mile from Dawson's own hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian.
That simply couldn't be a coincidence.
And it wasn't.
The Lutheran and Columbia shared the same small pool of nearby patients and GPs, which allowed the censored word of Dawson's successes with penicillin to spread by wartime censorship's eternal foe (face-to-face gossip).
In addition, Colitti ,who had severe arthritis of the spine since childhood and lived very near Columbia Presbyterian, had earlier been a patient at Dawson's arthritis clinic.
What goes around, comes around and soon Hearst teletype operator Charles Aronson was once again back at Columbia Presbyterian; once again under Dawson's care and being treated with massive amounts of Pfizer-made* penicillin to arrest a second bout of SBE.
(*Dawson had originally got soda pop supplier Pfizer into the penicillin business.)
And once again, Aronson failed to die as expected.
He had survived at least four previous brushes with death and this time not only survived the SBE but also a potentially lethal stroke.
His brave body - basically battered from birth with all variety of life-threatening disease - hung on until he died at around age 40, in 1951.
Since so many of those diseases affected his motor skills, it is a minor miracle in itself that he had the speed and control to be a teletype operator at America's largest and busiest daily newspaper.
So what sort of latterday Hearst journalist is going to give the Hearst empire a second shot at a 'Penicillin Pulitzer' by writing a series on the amazing life of one the media chain's own employees ?
By the end of September 1943 (and despite heavy wartime censorship that kept news from freely circulating between the Allies, Axis and Neutrals) 99% of the world's newspaper reading public knew the word penicillin and wanted some of it.
Yesterday, if not sooner.
And suddenly inspired by an old fashioned newspaper crusade of the kind that only Citizen Hearst could sustain, Pfizer boss John L Smith was hell bent for leather on supplying that demand.
Smith ultimately would do so in spades - his own firm alone providing 85 % of all the penicillin landing on D-Day.
It all began when a crippled Italian-American surgical resident called Dr Dante Colitti conspired with a Jewish-American journalist (Hearst's New York Journal American city editor Paul Schoenstein) to bring the story of a baby girl dying for lack of penicillin before the general public.
All in a successful attempt to embarrass the nation's wartime scientific elite (non-Italian/non-Jewish) into getting serious with penicillin.
Because didn't they know there was a war on ---- and people were dying from infections by the zillions ?
The story of innocent little Patty Malone touched the heart of a world at war and did indeed embarrass the Allied governments.
They abandoned their intention to keep penicillin a secret war weapon for as long as possible by withholding civilian supplies and by withholding news of its medical miracles.
Quite right then that the New York Journal American and Paul Schoenstein got the 1944 Pulitzer prize for general reporting.
Still this recognition was a stunner to all journalists with long memories.
No one could ever remember a desk-bound city editor ever receiving any sort of award for shoe-leather reporting - let alone the top prize in journalism.
And no one expected the Pulitzer Committee (set up deliberately to promote quality journalism over Yellow Journalism) would reward its top prize to the very font of the evil yellowness itself - William Randolph Hearst's flagship, the Journal-American.
Hearst's second chance at a Penicillin Pulitzer ?
This October 16th 2015 will mark the seventy fifth anniversary of history's first ever injection of penicillin - an event that ushered in our current age of antibiotics.
Since 1940, ten billion of us have directly benefitted from this age of (cheap) (abundant) penicillin-based antibiotics which has given all of us a form of herd immunity from once endemic infectious diseases.
A big deal indeed.
And here, well into this article, is where I "bury the lede" , if you happen to be a editor at anyone of today's Hearst media.
Because one of that historical pair, a teletype operator named Charles Aronson, was employed at Hearst's very same New York Journal-American !
In fact, one of Charles' jobs in August-September 1943 was keeping up with requests for variants on the the original Penicillin-Patty Malone series coming in over the wire from the various papers and magazines in the Hearst chain and from subscribers to Hearst's wire service, the International News Service or INS.
Aronson couldn't help but recall how Dr Martin Henry Dawson's homemade penicillin in 1940 had saved him from then invariably fatal SBE (the form of endocarditis that kills people inflicted with serious Rheumatic Fever).
Or that Patty Malone's hospital, the Lutheran Hospital in upper Harlem, was but a mile from Dawson's own hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian.
That simply couldn't be a coincidence.
And it wasn't.
The Lutheran and Columbia shared the same small pool of nearby patients and GPs, which allowed the censored word of Dawson's successes with penicillin to spread by wartime censorship's eternal foe (face-to-face gossip).
In addition, Colitti ,who had severe arthritis of the spine since childhood and lived very near Columbia Presbyterian, had earlier been a patient at Dawson's arthritis clinic.
What goes around, comes around and soon Hearst teletype operator Charles Aronson was once again back at Columbia Presbyterian; once again under Dawson's care and being treated with massive amounts of Pfizer-made* penicillin to arrest a second bout of SBE.
(*Dawson had originally got soda pop supplier Pfizer into the penicillin business.)
And once again, Aronson failed to die as expected.
He had survived at least four previous brushes with death and this time not only survived the SBE but also a potentially lethal stroke.
His brave body - basically battered from birth with all variety of life-threatening disease - hung on until he died at around age 40, in 1951.
Since so many of those diseases affected his motor skills, it is a minor miracle in itself that he had the speed and control to be a teletype operator at America's largest and busiest daily newspaper.
So what sort of latterday Hearst journalist is going to give the Hearst empire a second shot at a 'Penicillin Pulitzer' by writing a series on the amazing life of one the media chain's own employees ?
When a scientific consensus was proven wrong : DNA and Penicillium
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was widely considered a minor medical researcher, all because he had bet on two clearly losing horses.
In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.
In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.
So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"
But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.
And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .
For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.
Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.
Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.
Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.
During WWII, many scientists again thought Dawson had backed the wrong horse.
They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.
For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.
Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.
So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.
Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.
We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.
And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)
If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.
Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.
But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.
Totally, totally, totally wrong ....
In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.
In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.
So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"
But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.
And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .
For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.
Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.
Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.
Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.
Kitchen Mold
They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.
For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.
Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.
So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.
Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.
We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.
And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)
If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.
Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.
But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.
Totally, totally, totally wrong ....
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Painting a picture of Reductionism
Reductionism, a theory of extreme simplicity that seeks to account for everything in the universe, is, as usual with such "terrible simplicities", itself a very complicated piece of philosophical and scientific reasoning.
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Blockheaded Publishing : "OPEN ACCESS" in all senses
It is a telling example of our debased (and post-religious) moral culture that no reputable reviewer today would ever review a book that was made available free as a 'tract for our time'.
'Review a book offered up free by an author merely to contribute to the collective public debate on important issues, without any thought of personal gain or fame ?'
People who self consciously call themselves "Book Reviewers" - whether professional or amateur - pride themselves on considering all books written without thought of personal gain as likely to be the rambling rantings of almost lunatics, unworthy of serious attention.
(Add here, in defence of their response, the well known words of Samuel Johnson who said anyone who wrote not for money was a blockhead.)
No doubt these "Reviewers" might even consider the actions of a doctor who freely gives his life to better others' lives, without any thought to personal gain or fame, as also bordering upon the lunatic.
So a serious book freely offered up to tell the tale of a doctor who willing offers up his life for general humanity is somewhat doubly cursed - if it seeks to be seriously reviewed by serious reviewers.
And a serious book, on serious issues, published in serial fashion - as a series of tracts or pamphlets -stands even further outside today's book trade.
For tracts and pamphlets are usually published by being shoved through someone's letter slot and reviewed, it at all, by the person behind that door.
But in George Orwell's day, pamphlets were the 'containers' for almost all the serious thought about the serious issues thrown up by the crisis of the Great Depression - which is why he collected them to stimulate his own writing.
But new young pamphleteers and tractarians are today probably all bloggers ; globally-minded digital pamphleteers no longer content to merely push a few paper pamphlets into mail slots along their own street.
I am not young, but I certainly am one such blogger.
Because I want my tracts read by everybody in the world, of every income group, any hour of the day, and in any language that Google Translator will handle.
I will make printable versions of longer blog posts available to suit those who still prefer print - just as I will do likewise for those who prefer to read longer E-Pub files offline.
But really I think the web browser-based book or pamphlet (aka "the Blog") is the true wave of the present ....
'Review a book offered up free by an author merely to contribute to the collective public debate on important issues, without any thought of personal gain or fame ?'
You're joking aren't you ---- even Thomas Paine charged for his pamphlets !
People who self consciously call themselves "Book Reviewers" - whether professional or amateur - pride themselves on considering all books written without thought of personal gain as likely to be the rambling rantings of almost lunatics, unworthy of serious attention.
(Add here, in defence of their response, the well known words of Samuel Johnson who said anyone who wrote not for money was a blockhead.)
No doubt these "Reviewers" might even consider the actions of a doctor who freely gives his life to better others' lives, without any thought to personal gain or fame, as also bordering upon the lunatic.
So a serious book freely offered up to tell the tale of a doctor who willing offers up his life for general humanity is somewhat doubly cursed - if it seeks to be seriously reviewed by serious reviewers.
And a serious book, on serious issues, published in serial fashion - as a series of tracts or pamphlets -stands even further outside today's book trade.
For tracts and pamphlets are usually published by being shoved through someone's letter slot and reviewed, it at all, by the person behind that door.
But in George Orwell's day, pamphlets were the 'containers' for almost all the serious thought about the serious issues thrown up by the crisis of the Great Depression - which is why he collected them to stimulate his own writing.
But new young pamphleteers and tractarians are today probably all bloggers ; globally-minded digital pamphleteers no longer content to merely push a few paper pamphlets into mail slots along their own street.
I am not young, but I certainly am one such blogger.
Because I want my tracts read by everybody in the world, of every income group, any hour of the day, and in any language that Google Translator will handle.
I will make printable versions of longer blog posts available to suit those who still prefer print - just as I will do likewise for those who prefer to read longer E-Pub files offline.
But really I think the web browser-based book or pamphlet (aka "the Blog") is the true wave of the present ....
wartime penicillin's Progressives vs Naturalists
The Progressives (people such as Sir Howard Florey, the OSRD and Merck) literally intended to RE-FORM things, wholesale - the human body in particular.
They advocated a sort of 'synthetic autarky' with Man replacing everything that came from Mother Nature with a better and cheaper & quicker to make artificial form.
But such re-forming, in practise, often broke down the very old fashioned farming practise of culling out whatever was regarded as 'unfit' and selecting and favouring whatever was regarded as the 'fittest'.
(Here cue the word : Eugenics.)
But with eyes only for the future, no Progressive would ever publicly admit to using such old fashioned farming techniques.
Clinging to such vestiges of the past were supposed to be the preserves of their opponents, the Naturalists, people such as Florey's opponent, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the OPRD and Pfizer.
But all efforts - by hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe with money to burn- to synthesize commercial penicillin failed.
Instead, a few Naturalists, with very little resources, patiently picked the best of the best of the best of the best penicillin producing penicillium molds to greatly up penicillin yields at the point of the cow's utter rather than in improving the machinery in the milk factory.
Only near the end of the war, did a scientist finally get the chance to set a $20 UV heat lamp (bog ordinary variety !) upon a sample of the naturally best penicillin producing molds.
All this to deliberate fry the poor penicillium's DNA with UV rays, in the hope that among the dead and living dead offspring, a few fully alive cells' DNA might be altered (re-formed) to produce even more penicillin.
He indeed found these winners by the old fashioned farmers' method of patiently picking the most likely big producers and putting them to it - the proof was in the penicillin they did produce.
Against the Progressives' 'terrible simplicities', my brief account shows the unexpected wartime success of natural penicillin was a bit more complicated than might be expected ----- as usual ....
But such re-forming, in practise, often broke down the very old fashioned farming practise of culling out whatever was regarded as 'unfit' and selecting and favouring whatever was regarded as the 'fittest'.
(Here cue the word : Eugenics.)
But with eyes only for the future, no Progressive would ever publicly admit to using such old fashioned farming techniques.
Clinging to such vestiges of the past were supposed to be the preserves of their opponents, the Naturalists, people such as Florey's opponent, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the OPRD and Pfizer.
But all efforts - by hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe with money to burn- to synthesize commercial penicillin failed.
Instead, a few Naturalists, with very little resources, patiently picked the best of the best of the best of the best penicillin producing penicillium molds to greatly up penicillin yields at the point of the cow's utter rather than in improving the machinery in the milk factory.
Only near the end of the war, did a scientist finally get the chance to set a $20 UV heat lamp (bog ordinary variety !) upon a sample of the naturally best penicillin producing molds.
All this to deliberate fry the poor penicillium's DNA with UV rays, in the hope that among the dead and living dead offspring, a few fully alive cells' DNA might be altered (re-formed) to produce even more penicillin.
He indeed found these winners by the old fashioned farmers' method of patiently picking the most likely big producers and putting them to it - the proof was in the penicillin they did produce.
Against the Progressives' 'terrible simplicities', my brief account shows the unexpected wartime success of natural penicillin was a bit more complicated than might be expected ----- as usual ....
Monday, June 8, 2015
Why zoologists vote Republican .... and microbiologists vote Green
Even today - even in the 21st century ! - many best selling zoologists continue to dismiss the tiny, immobile and ancient microbes as simply incredibly primitive, incredibly alike, incredibly boring.
Give them but a token line or two in their many big books devoted to the wonders of the bigger animals, only to just as quickly dismiss them.
We shouldn't really be surprised that in their private lives, these conservative-minded scientists also feel the same about smaller and weaker humanity as well.
One can almost surmise that unconsciously the children of the big, rich and powerful in our society, if they choose to become biologists, unconsciously gravitate to the big powerful animals, biological subjects rather like themselves.
(About as close to true empathy towards others as conservatives ever get.)
And that those science students born within the smaller, weaker parts of humanity, or with strong empathy for the weak and small, gravitate to biological subjects that are also - wrongly - viewed as small, weak and uninteresting ....
Give them but a token line or two in their many big books devoted to the wonders of the bigger animals, only to just as quickly dismiss them.
We shouldn't really be surprised that in their private lives, these conservative-minded scientists also feel the same about smaller and weaker humanity as well.
One can almost surmise that unconsciously the children of the big, rich and powerful in our society, if they choose to become biologists, unconsciously gravitate to the big powerful animals, biological subjects rather like themselves.
(About as close to true empathy towards others as conservatives ever get.)
And that those science students born within the smaller, weaker parts of humanity, or with strong empathy for the weak and small, gravitate to biological subjects that are also - wrongly - viewed as small, weak and uninteresting ....
Synthetic Horses
We have not traditionally regarded 'horsepower' that has been provided by steam, gasoline or electrical motors rather than by actual horses as coming from objects that are man-made, artificial and synthetic.
This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.
We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.
But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.
Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.
That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".
They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.
Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.
For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.
It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.
In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.
So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.
Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.
At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.
Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.
As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.
1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.
I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.
Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.
For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.
The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.
(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)
Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.
Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.
For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.
And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.
'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...
This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.
We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.
But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.
Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.
That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".
They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.
Disposing of living ex-machines
Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.
For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.
It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.
In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.
So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.
Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.
At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.
Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.
As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.
1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.
I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.
Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.
For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.
The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.
(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)
Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.
Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.
For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.
And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.
'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...
Friday, June 5, 2015
The race to produce D-Day's penicillin was WWII's only real 'Clash of Cultures'
If Fred Bridgham had to survive off of writing about WWII's "Clash of Cultures", the poor bugger would quickly starve to death.
There simply wasn't any - not at the nation to nation level anyway.
And don't talk to me of Hitler and Stalin - the two admired each other as much as they hated each other - they understood each other.
Instead WWII's real ideological clash occurred almost as 'noises off' - buried within the little known race to produce D-Day's penicillin.
Would it be "The Smartest Chemists in the Universe", assembled in dozens of Allied labs and swaddled in money and resources, convinced that as a result synthetic penicillin would now be a piece of cake ?
Or would it be crude natural penicillin made by the despised basement Slime - old and slow and small and dumb ?
We did mention 'dumb', didn't we ?
If PROGRESS (all bow) meant anything at all, it certainly meant that university-educated Man could create better, cheaper, faster penicillin than the Slime ever could.
(For 'slime' , feel free to substitute Negro, Oriental, Homosexual, Woman, Unfit, etc.)
Except Man couldn't (and still hasn't !) - and from then on the Path of Progress, as the doctors say, took an irreversible downhill course......
There simply wasn't any - not at the nation to nation level anyway.
And don't talk to me of Hitler and Stalin - the two admired each other as much as they hated each other - they understood each other.
Instead WWII's real ideological clash occurred almost as 'noises off' - buried within the little known race to produce D-Day's penicillin.
Would it be "The Smartest Chemists in the Universe", assembled in dozens of Allied labs and swaddled in money and resources, convinced that as a result synthetic penicillin would now be a piece of cake ?
Or would it be crude natural penicillin made by the despised basement Slime - old and slow and small and dumb ?
We did mention 'dumb', didn't we ?
If PROGRESS (all bow) meant anything at all, it certainly meant that university-educated Man could create better, cheaper, faster penicillin than the Slime ever could.
(For 'slime' , feel free to substitute Negro, Oriental, Homosexual, Woman, Unfit, etc.)
Except Man couldn't (and still hasn't !) - and from then on the Path of Progress, as the doctors say, took an irreversible downhill course......
Conservative Fears : drowned under Plentitude or abandoned after Plenticide
The 1990s were filled with books about one, two or ten humans left all alone on a vast empty Earth after a too-successful effort at human Plenticide (usually an all-out nuclear war).
Nominally about issues of abandonment, they were often secret conservative 'wet dreams' about all their liberal leftie neighbours all being wiped out so that one (American) heterosexual family can re-create a Right-thinking, gun-touting, Right-voting paradise.
But in the 1890s, a century earlier, the fear was all about Plenticide's opposite, Plentitude.
But if a physically empty Earth was the conservative fear of the 1990s, 1890s conservatives feared a mentally-filled , not an physically-filled, Earth.
Yes there were more people on Earth in 1890, if rather less plants and animals.
But that very real population increase went unnoticed, the human population still so small and resources-undemanding and the Earth still seeming so big.
What was much noted and more feared by conservatives were all the humans leaving rural areas (where they could be observed and contained) and heading for the overcrowded dark tenement areas of the world's biggest cities, where they live out of sight and beyond upper class control.
Worse, in those tenement areas, they were free to hear the ideas of the troublemakers of all the world's nations.
But this real Plentitude of humanity in the inner big cities wasn't the only thing noted at the time though it is all that we tend to remember of the 1890s.
But conservative observers back then were actually much more exercised about where all those new city poor had come from - and that was the newly depopulated and de-stabilized, declining farm areas : modernization had Plenticided the farm community.
All this, however, was a conscious conservative reaction to a localized (urban) form of physical Plentitude.
But I argue that the largest conservative reaction against 'drowning' under a flood of Plentitude was actually against a new virtual Plentitude of ideas and facts thrown up by modernization and this reaction was largely unconscious.
It soon emerged out the other end - quite self-consciously - as we know today as Modernity and what 1890s reformers would have called simply "Progress".
Progress would stop the parts of this plentitude the upper classes feared and channel the parts of the plentitude it wanted to encourage.
What do I mean by a "virtual", rather than a physical plentitude ?
When an educated person at the end of the 19th century looked up in the night sky, they saw no more stars than they did as children.
But Science had told them (and they fully trusted Science) that the number of stars in the sky had actually increased a billion fold and their age extended back from a few thousand or a few million years to a few billion years.
The same with the deep dark woods, deep dark seas and deep blue daylight skies : Science said that far far more plants, animals, microbes and minerals had been discovered to lurk in their depths than had been imagined, although they still looked as opaque as ever.
More human languages, more human societies, more human history than ever before imagined had been discovered by Science - though looking out your Manhattan brownstone on a bright May morning, they remained as invisible as ever to your eye or ear.
But to your mind - oh my !
How your brain ached with the fullness and the plentitude of all reality.
Progress's plenticide would drastically prune it back to an improved version of reality as you knew it as a child...
Nominally about issues of abandonment, they were often secret conservative 'wet dreams' about all their liberal leftie neighbours all being wiped out so that one (American) heterosexual family can re-create a Right-thinking, gun-touting, Right-voting paradise.
But in the 1890s, a century earlier, the fear was all about Plenticide's opposite, Plentitude.
But if a physically empty Earth was the conservative fear of the 1990s, 1890s conservatives feared a mentally-filled , not an physically-filled, Earth.
Yes there were more people on Earth in 1890, if rather less plants and animals.
But that very real population increase went unnoticed, the human population still so small and resources-undemanding and the Earth still seeming so big.
What was much noted and more feared by conservatives were all the humans leaving rural areas (where they could be observed and contained) and heading for the overcrowded dark tenement areas of the world's biggest cities, where they live out of sight and beyond upper class control.
Worse, in those tenement areas, they were free to hear the ideas of the troublemakers of all the world's nations.
But this real Plentitude of humanity in the inner big cities wasn't the only thing noted at the time though it is all that we tend to remember of the 1890s.
But conservative observers back then were actually much more exercised about where all those new city poor had come from - and that was the newly depopulated and de-stabilized, declining farm areas : modernization had Plenticided the farm community.
All this, however, was a conscious conservative reaction to a localized (urban) form of physical Plentitude.
But I argue that the largest conservative reaction against 'drowning' under a flood of Plentitude was actually against a new virtual Plentitude of ideas and facts thrown up by modernization and this reaction was largely unconscious.
It soon emerged out the other end - quite self-consciously - as we know today as Modernity and what 1890s reformers would have called simply "Progress".
Progress would stop the parts of this plentitude the upper classes feared and channel the parts of the plentitude it wanted to encourage.
What do I mean by a "virtual", rather than a physical plentitude ?
When an educated person at the end of the 19th century looked up in the night sky, they saw no more stars than they did as children.
But Science had told them (and they fully trusted Science) that the number of stars in the sky had actually increased a billion fold and their age extended back from a few thousand or a few million years to a few billion years.
The same with the deep dark woods, deep dark seas and deep blue daylight skies : Science said that far far more plants, animals, microbes and minerals had been discovered to lurk in their depths than had been imagined, although they still looked as opaque as ever.
More human languages, more human societies, more human history than ever before imagined had been discovered by Science - though looking out your Manhattan brownstone on a bright May morning, they remained as invisible as ever to your eye or ear.
But to your mind - oh my !
How your brain ached with the fullness and the plentitude of all reality.
Progress's plenticide would drastically prune it back to an improved version of reality as you knew it as a child...
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Pictou's Dawsons and Fungi
Medical scientist Martin Henry Dawson (his dad was from Pictou town) is today best known for being the first to inject an antibiotic (the fungus metabolite penicillin) into a patient.
But a century earlier, another famous scientific Dawson from Pictou town (and a possibly a relative of Henry's) Sir John William Dawson, also became famous for his work with fungi.
He was credited with discovering the giant 25 foot tall fungus (Prototaxites) that dominated the world before today's trees took over.
(Though Dawson admittedly thought it was a weird giant lichen - as did the rest of the scientific community until very recently.)
Again only recently, other scientists discovered that the largest living being on Earth is a single fungus individual occupying 4 square miles of Oregon forest soil.
Even more so than their tiny neighbours the bacteria, these biological Rodney Dangerfields don't get the respect they deserve....
But a century earlier, another famous scientific Dawson from Pictou town (and a possibly a relative of Henry's) Sir John William Dawson, also became famous for his work with fungi.
He was credited with discovering the giant 25 foot tall fungus (Prototaxites) that dominated the world before today's trees took over.
(Though Dawson admittedly thought it was a weird giant lichen - as did the rest of the scientific community until very recently.)
Again only recently, other scientists discovered that the largest living being on Earth is a single fungus individual occupying 4 square miles of Oregon forest soil.
Even more so than their tiny neighbours the bacteria, these biological Rodney Dangerfields don't get the respect they deserve....
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Modernity failed (and eventually faded) when synthetic penicillin failed
Forget what books and movies, your teachers, professors, parents and grandparents all tell you about WWII's "hands across the water" holy war against the utterly evil Nazi values:
A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.
Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.
But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.
But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.
That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.
On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.
On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.
A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.
That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.
It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .
So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.
It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !
But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.
Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.
But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.
And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.
If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...
because no nation in WWII ever went to war against the Axis unless and until they were first directly attacked by the Axis : on the factual evidence, they warred against the Axis solely in self defence.Except, of course, for the empires of England and France --but :
if the peoples of these two superpowers still claim that they went to war solely on behalf of the small victims of the Axis, their subsequent actions would hardly prove that assertion -- as generations of Polish (and Jewish) academics are rightly eager to point out.The problem was that the values of the Axis were but an extreme form - but still fully recognizable - of the same values of Modernity espoused by the middle class of every 'modern' nation on earth in that era .
A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.
Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.
But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.
WWII's ideological war that didn't parallel the military war
But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.
That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.
Synthetic Penicillin to be the Poster Boy of WWII's Terrible Simplicities
On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.
On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.
A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.
That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.
Reductionism was the ideology of Modernity.
It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .
So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.
It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !
But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.
Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.
But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.
And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.
If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...
The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare
To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.
A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.
Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.
So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.
A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.
It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.
But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.
Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.
But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.
It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.
Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.
Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.
First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.
Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.
Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.
Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...
A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.
Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.
So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.
A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.
It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.
But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.
Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.
But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.
It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.
Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.
Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.
First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.
Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.
Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.
Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...
Friday, May 29, 2015
History's first ever antibiotics injections were expected to be of pure synthetic penicillin
Back at the start of the 1940s, two highly skilled biochemists (Karl Meyer and Ernst Chain) both confidently expected to quickly synthesize artificial penicillin, as they knew natural penicillin was a relatively small biological molecule of only about 350 Daltons.
After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.
Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.
Why did Dawson uncharacteristically proceed to Plan B so very much quicker than Florey?
Partially it was because Dawson was so angry on his return to his medicine school from his vacation in September 1940 to discover that all American medicine was using the excuse of preparing for war medicine to drop their feeble efforts at social medicine aimed at improving the health care of the poor and the weak.
But it also seems from Dawson's own words that it was a civil rights activist and dying SBE patient, Aaron Leroy Alston from Harlem, whose angry eloquence on this neglect of the poor and minorities that so moved Dawson.
Moved him to defiantly thumb his nose at an uncharitable world by deliberately treating two 4F SBE patients with this historical first ever injected antibiotics, on the very day when all of the rest of America was focused only upon its 1A population ...
After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.
Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.
Why did Dawson uncharacteristically proceed to Plan B so very much quicker than Florey?
Partially it was because Dawson was so angry on his return to his medicine school from his vacation in September 1940 to discover that all American medicine was using the excuse of preparing for war medicine to drop their feeble efforts at social medicine aimed at improving the health care of the poor and the weak.
But it also seems from Dawson's own words that it was a civil rights activist and dying SBE patient, Aaron Leroy Alston from Harlem, whose angry eloquence on this neglect of the poor and minorities that so moved Dawson.
Moved him to defiantly thumb his nose at an uncharitable world by deliberately treating two 4F SBE patients with this historical first ever injected antibiotics, on the very day when all of the rest of America was focused only upon its 1A population ...
WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues
In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.
They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.
The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.
The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.
Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.
So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .
Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.
For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?
I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.
It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.
Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.
For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.
So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....
They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.
The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.
The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.
Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.
So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .
Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.
For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?
I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.
It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.
Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.
For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.
So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
E M Forster on Merck's mis-use of scientific writing
E M Forster is a name you pretty well have to come across if you have ever been formally taught how to write better sentences, paragraphs and articles ---- and today that includes virtually all of us with a high school education or better.
Even senior scientists and academics. When those two deliberately ignore what they've been taught for decades, you should always expect foul play is afoot.
If we recall Forster at all, is is mostly because in his classic 1927 university don-oriented work, Aspects of the Novel, Forster gave such a simple but apt example of the difference between most students' initial writings and how they really should write that writing teachers everywhere seized upon it and most of us writing students can still recognize his phrases decades later.
"The Queen dies and the King dies" is not even good enough to be called a story, Forster points out --- it is simply misleading, because in point of fact, the King died first.
Give it an "F" for failure.
In the correct chronological order, "the King dies and then the Queen dies", is at least what we might call a story.
Give it a passing "C".
But if we write "the King dies and then the Queen dies of grief ", we have a full blown plot.
Give it at least a "B-".
Or to use a phrase that even scientists might recognize - now we have determinacy - cause and effect.
Every time I try to read the text of a 1980 scientific article called "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States" while also trying to connect that text to the chronology of the footnotes below, I get a massively painful headache.
Because all I get is a huge jumble of unconnected facts presented out of correct chronological order- just one dam thing after another.
If I was a writing teacher, I would be forced give scientists cum academics WH Helfand, HB Woodruff, KMH Coleman and DL Cowan a big fat collective "F".
That's a pity, because this is a truly invaluable article, just full of earnestly documented dates,places, people and events from the early days of the American development of wartime penicillin - stuff that one can't find gathered together anywhere else.
But the exciting and conflict-filled cause and effect of the actual wartime penicillin 'plot', apparent if the fulsome footnotes are separated and re-assembled in their correct chronology , is totally obscured in this peer-reviewed scientific article's text.
I am left feeling that this was quite deliberate : 75 years later, we still can't admit that wartime penicillin wasn't all 'hands across the water' lovey-dovey allies working in full cooperation.
In this case, the article was also designed to better conceal Merck science advisor A N Richards' curt decision to abandon Merck's pioneering natural penicillin efforts and then to gild Richard's later career as the head of America's wartime medical science efforts, when he supposedly championed natural penicillin to the hilt.
In fact, Richards and Merck-the-company were always chemistry obsessed and always chasing the profitable, exclusive patents that come from the manmade chemical synthesis of natural products.
So in reality, they left effective, available natural penicillin to fallow - at the height of wartime's millions of dying and wounded - to chase the profitable mirage of synthetic penicillin.
They never got commercial synthetic penicillin - 75 years later no one else ever has either - and a much smaller and much less respected company called Pfizer made almost all of WWII's penicillin by natural means.
Pfizer got all the money and all the glory and Merck has been smarting ever since and is still ever intent to re-write penicillin history to minimize their errors and gild their few successes.
This parson's egg of an article is just part of that eternal effort ....
Even senior scientists and academics. When those two deliberately ignore what they've been taught for decades, you should always expect foul play is afoot.
If we recall Forster at all, is is mostly because in his classic 1927 university don-oriented work, Aspects of the Novel, Forster gave such a simple but apt example of the difference between most students' initial writings and how they really should write that writing teachers everywhere seized upon it and most of us writing students can still recognize his phrases decades later.
"The Queen dies and the King dies" is not even good enough to be called a story, Forster points out --- it is simply misleading, because in point of fact, the King died first.
Give it an "F" for failure.
In the correct chronological order, "the King dies and then the Queen dies", is at least what we might call a story.
Give it a passing "C".
But if we write "the King dies and then the Queen dies of grief ", we have a full blown plot.
Give it at least a "B-".
Or to use a phrase that even scientists might recognize - now we have determinacy - cause and effect.
Every time I try to read the text of a 1980 scientific article called "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States" while also trying to connect that text to the chronology of the footnotes below, I get a massively painful headache.
Because all I get is a huge jumble of unconnected facts presented out of correct chronological order- just one dam thing after another.
If I was a writing teacher, I would be forced give scientists cum academics WH Helfand, HB Woodruff, KMH Coleman and DL Cowan a big fat collective "F".
That's a pity, because this is a truly invaluable article, just full of earnestly documented dates,places, people and events from the early days of the American development of wartime penicillin - stuff that one can't find gathered together anywhere else.
But the exciting and conflict-filled cause and effect of the actual wartime penicillin 'plot', apparent if the fulsome footnotes are separated and re-assembled in their correct chronology , is totally obscured in this peer-reviewed scientific article's text.
I am left feeling that this was quite deliberate : 75 years later, we still can't admit that wartime penicillin wasn't all 'hands across the water' lovey-dovey allies working in full cooperation.
In this case, the article was also designed to better conceal Merck science advisor A N Richards' curt decision to abandon Merck's pioneering natural penicillin efforts and then to gild Richard's later career as the head of America's wartime medical science efforts, when he supposedly championed natural penicillin to the hilt.
In fact, Richards and Merck-the-company were always chemistry obsessed and always chasing the profitable, exclusive patents that come from the manmade chemical synthesis of natural products.
So in reality, they left effective, available natural penicillin to fallow - at the height of wartime's millions of dying and wounded - to chase the profitable mirage of synthetic penicillin.
They never got commercial synthetic penicillin - 75 years later no one else ever has either - and a much smaller and much less respected company called Pfizer made almost all of WWII's penicillin by natural means.
Pfizer got all the money and all the glory and Merck has been smarting ever since and is still ever intent to re-write penicillin history to minimize their errors and gild their few successes.
This parson's egg of an article is just part of that eternal effort ....
Monday, May 25, 2015
In an era that worshipped the Big, the Fast and the New, he championed the small, the slow and the old - and changed our whole world not just once but twice
The small and the slow and the old
A Canadian newspaper recently touted some Canadian based scientists as saying that the new techniques allowing the mass sequencing of genomes in test tubes, from DNA gathered up from all over the world, is letting science reveal hidden secrets from the distant past.
Hurray for Man !
Not mentioned is the fact that it is actually bacteria and their enzymes that do all the heavy lifting or that it was a Canadian (Martin Henry Dawson) who first put bacteria and DNA to work in a test tube eighty five long, dusty years ago.
DNA
But bacteria slicing and dicing didn't really become popular until sixty years after it first was discovered in the early 1920s.
Instead all interwar genetic efforts (dominated by the big animal oriented zoologists) were focused at the other end of the ladder of progress - on larger beings.
Now we must partially thank the two men usually 'credited' for the discovery and development of bacteria genome splicing for creating this disconnect : because in truth Fred Griffith and Oswald Avery tried very very hard not to publish their results or those of their associates !
But blame the pair only partially.
Because Dawson did publish and broadcast about the importance for all biology of this bacteria gene splicing for the rest of his short life.
And doing so basically ruined his career.
For daring, in an era devoted to the Big, Fast, and the New, to proclaim to anyone who would listen and to most that would not, that the small, slow and old could do things (genome splicing) that the most advanced human civilizations could not.
And that is precisely what between-the-wars western civilization did not want to hear.
PENICILLIN
And when in 1940-1944, Dawson said that the small and the slow and the old (penicillium cells) could make life-saving penicillin cheaply and abundantly when the assembled Smartest-Chemists-in-the-Universe couldn't even make it at all, again Science did not want to hear it.
But to this very day, penicillium cells still make all the basic penicillin that forms the base material for virtually all our life-saving antibiotics.
Microbiology technology is the current flavour of the age, with synthetic chemistry very much bringing up the rear.
No scientific discovery will ever go 'unpublished' in the technical sense of the word, if the discoverer wants it published.
But what makes an important new discovery or theory quickly popular ( popular in the sense it is taught in all the major science textbooks from high school to advanced study) is how well it gels with the spirit of the age.
Only in our post modern age, when the idea of a linear ladder of progress with its easy to pick winners and losers has been firmly rejected by most of the educated public , was it possible for Dawson's scientific claims to win wide scientific acceptance ..
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