First, turn of the century high school science teachers lecture school kids that bacteria and mold only destroy, and never sustain, life and so they must be all killed.
Then when they grow up, politicians quoting science insist that humans at the bottom of the human tree of life (Negroes, Jews, Slavs, etc) are also solely destructive and ---
---- and we all know what happened : Auschwitz and WWII ....
Friday, April 29, 2016
all Biology is syncretic symbiosis --- the rest is just stamp collecting
It has long been established that all life on earth lives in a state of involuntary global commensality.
That is, we all dine at a common table -- dining off each other's table scraps consisting of a few precious materials (water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, etc) biologically recycled through the world over and over.
But what is this "we" thing anyway - does it mean 'humans collectively' or does it not refer to the "we" of a single human body, that is in fact made up of trillions of cells from many widely differing species ?
And if we probe deeper, do we not find that even the "human" genome of the-surely-still-solely-human part of the human body is also a chimera, a syncretic assembly of genome bits from a variety of other species ?
Life is really very convoluted together : from dining together to dying together...
Methinks its time for a bit of an Evolutionary Reboot, Charlie ....
That is, we all dine at a common table -- dining off each other's table scraps consisting of a few precious materials (water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, etc) biologically recycled through the world over and over.
But what is this "we" thing anyway - does it mean 'humans collectively' or does it not refer to the "we" of a single human body, that is in fact made up of trillions of cells from many widely differing species ?
And if we probe deeper, do we not find that even the "human" genome of the-surely-still-solely-human part of the human body is also a chimera, a syncretic assembly of genome bits from a variety of other species ?
Life is really very convoluted together : from dining together to dying together...
Methinks its time for a bit of an Evolutionary Reboot, Charlie ....
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Hitler's antipathy to a Manhattan he never visited stemmed from his pre-war memories of polyglot multi ethnic Vienna
Hitler's hatred for a Manhattan that he had never even visited is quite remarkable.
Even in the failing days of his Reich, his regime wasted much scarce time and resources on trying to create ever more fantastic new weapon delivery systems to bomb and burn Manhattan to the ground from many thousands of miles away.
The best explanation for all this was that for Hitler, this hatred, as was so often with Hitler, was both deeply personal and deeply private.
It all actually stemmed from all those down on his luck years, roughing it on the street, in a city far far away from the Hudson River : pre-war Vienna.
Vienna was as big as Berlin and had been a big cheese for much much longer and why not, for it had ruled a vast and diverse empire for many centuries until the 1920s.
There this teenaged race-proud Aryan would have to see many talented and hard working members of the Astro-Hungarian empire's many smaller minorities making a good living, all the while wearing their strange garb, eating their weird food, cackling away in tongues he couldn't begin to understand.
Based on the experiences of his civil servant father, Hitler had grown up expecting a good job as a mere birthright of him growing up speaking German as his native tongue and had no skill at speaking other languages or in meeting strangers half way.
The comparatively small city where Hitler grew up, Linz, had only about four percent of the population of greater metro Vienna, though it was the third biggest city in Austria.
Linz did have a few Jews but they looked and acted very much like their German-speaking neighbours, while Vienna had far more Jews than Linz had citizens of every sort and in addition, many of the capital's Jews lived distinctly Jewish lifestyles.
Hitler knew little of Manhattan but what little he knew was accurate enough --- it also was the polyglot centre of a vast - if informal - empire, filled with many ambitious and striving peoples from every corner of the world.
Hitler, so deluded in thinking himself far more talented than he really was, failed totally to see that this closely packed diversity is what gave these cities and their empires their real strength.
He saw them only as conspiracies of secret cabals of sneaky Jews, controlling every organ of influence from behind the scenes and working always to see that no talented native born person ever got a chance above the ground level.
Metropoles dedicated to cutting down all the native born tall poppies.
Once in power, Hitler was unwilling to bomb and burn the real centre of his pent up hatred which was prewar and no long gone Vienna, so he forward projected that old hatred onto a new city that came closest to pre-war Vienna in its demographics and empire status.
That wasn't Paris, whose somewhat large Jewish population was submerged below Paris's larger reputation for being a magnet of all sorts of refugees from all sorts of milieu (in particular, the arts).
Hitler greatly admired cities dedicated to the fine arts and if that wasn't inter war Paris, what city ever was ?
But Manhattan and environs had only its millions of Jews and swarthy immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe, together with an ever growing population of southern American Blacks.
In addition, Manhattan was particularly noted, and not just by Hitler, as the soulless global capital of materialism with its Wall Street bankers and all its ever-higher ever newer gaudy skyscrapers.
Being the natural capital of international soulless materialism was just something that Vienna, Paris or even London could never really pull off.
(Though 1920s Berlin might have !)
"Skyscrapers, Jews, Negroes, what is there not to dislike --- - bomb them, burn them, to the ground - into the ground, totally exterminate them", one can easily imagine Hitler screaming at the end of another of his post supper rants.
But Manhattan's well known atomic Project was filled with immigrants fleeing from Hitler's vision of racial pure empire centres, as was Manhattan's much lesser known penicillin project.
Leo Szilard and Karl Meyer could have both stayed on to work their atomic and penicillin magic in 1930s Berlin, which since the late 1920s was already well on the road to becoming the leading global city, but Hitler pushed these talented Jews away and so 'pure' Berlin's loss became 'impure' Manhattan's gain....
Even in the failing days of his Reich, his regime wasted much scarce time and resources on trying to create ever more fantastic new weapon delivery systems to bomb and burn Manhattan to the ground from many thousands of miles away.
The best explanation for all this was that for Hitler, this hatred, as was so often with Hitler, was both deeply personal and deeply private.
It all actually stemmed from all those down on his luck years, roughing it on the street, in a city far far away from the Hudson River : pre-war Vienna.
Vienna was as big as Berlin and had been a big cheese for much much longer and why not, for it had ruled a vast and diverse empire for many centuries until the 1920s.
There this teenaged race-proud Aryan would have to see many talented and hard working members of the Astro-Hungarian empire's many smaller minorities making a good living, all the while wearing their strange garb, eating their weird food, cackling away in tongues he couldn't begin to understand.
Based on the experiences of his civil servant father, Hitler had grown up expecting a good job as a mere birthright of him growing up speaking German as his native tongue and had no skill at speaking other languages or in meeting strangers half way.
growing up in Linz is not good training for ruling a world empire
The comparatively small city where Hitler grew up, Linz, had only about four percent of the population of greater metro Vienna, though it was the third biggest city in Austria.
Linz did have a few Jews but they looked and acted very much like their German-speaking neighbours, while Vienna had far more Jews than Linz had citizens of every sort and in addition, many of the capital's Jews lived distinctly Jewish lifestyles.
Hitler knew little of Manhattan but what little he knew was accurate enough --- it also was the polyglot centre of a vast - if informal - empire, filled with many ambitious and striving peoples from every corner of the world.
Hitler, so deluded in thinking himself far more talented than he really was, failed totally to see that this closely packed diversity is what gave these cities and their empires their real strength.
'the Jews of Manhattan control FDR and through him, the world'
He saw them only as conspiracies of secret cabals of sneaky Jews, controlling every organ of influence from behind the scenes and working always to see that no talented native born person ever got a chance above the ground level.
Metropoles dedicated to cutting down all the native born tall poppies.
Once in power, Hitler was unwilling to bomb and burn the real centre of his pent up hatred which was prewar and no long gone Vienna, so he forward projected that old hatred onto a new city that came closest to pre-war Vienna in its demographics and empire status.
That wasn't Paris, whose somewhat large Jewish population was submerged below Paris's larger reputation for being a magnet of all sorts of refugees from all sorts of milieu (in particular, the arts).
Hitler greatly admired cities dedicated to the fine arts and if that wasn't inter war Paris, what city ever was ?
But Manhattan and environs had only its millions of Jews and swarthy immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe, together with an ever growing population of southern American Blacks.
In addition, Manhattan was particularly noted, and not just by Hitler, as the soulless global capital of materialism with its Wall Street bankers and all its ever-higher ever newer gaudy skyscrapers.
Being the natural capital of international soulless materialism was just something that Vienna, Paris or even London could never really pull off.
(Though 1920s Berlin might have !)
"Skyscrapers, Jews, Negroes, what is there not to dislike --- - bomb them, burn them, to the ground - into the ground, totally exterminate them", one can easily imagine Hitler screaming at the end of another of his post supper rants.
pure Berlin's loss became impure Manhattan's gain ...
But Manhattan's well known atomic Project was filled with immigrants fleeing from Hitler's vision of racial pure empire centres, as was Manhattan's much lesser known penicillin project.
Leo Szilard and Karl Meyer could have both stayed on to work their atomic and penicillin magic in 1930s Berlin, which since the late 1920s was already well on the road to becoming the leading global city, but Hitler pushed these talented Jews away and so 'pure' Berlin's loss became 'impure' Manhattan's gain....
the children of modern minor aristocracy all have PhDs, but still can't ward off the untutored genius
In the old days, even when you became a hereditary aristocrat because you sort of 'earned' your great power and wealth by your sheer talent, drive and aggression, deep down you knew it was very unlikely your kids and grandkids were going exhibit all that drive.
In part because growing up wealthy and established tends to take the edge off of drive and aggression.
So in the past, for tens of thousands of years, you ensured your dumber and lazier kids and grands would share in your own achievements long after you were dead by investing in lands, lots of it.
("Buy land - they don't make it anymore.")
The rural family manorial estate, home of the minor aristocracy.
(Think of owning lots of stock market bluechip shares as being today's manorial estate.)
This land was rented out to others to work and your dumb/lazy kids and grandkids lived high off the rents these tenants returned to them.
But the mid-19th century development of massive areas of good farmland overseas, combined with far cheaper ocean transport, put such pressure on minor aristocratic estates that it soon seemed that its income could no provide the expected wealthy lifestyle for the principal son, let alone the rest of the family.
Worse, after voting in the 1830s was expanded to include the upper middle class, these ingrates exerted pressure to see that the traditional sinecures for the younger sons of the minor landed aristocracy - the military, civil service, established church and professions - were now open to them.
Open to them, via competitive exams among university graduates who had truly earned their degrees.
(Before the 1840s, only would-be clerics went to university to actually learn, the rest - the spawn of the landed gentry - just went to party.)
Soon it became clear that continuing to invest your wealth in increasingly less valuable agricultural land to secure the future of your children faced yet another major hurdle - on your death, when it was finally handed over to your children, more and more of its value was being taxed away.
But if you instead took your existing wealth and invested it - now - in 25 years of your children's education - from governess and Montessori at birth to subsidizing your mid twenties children's wandering postdoc hand-to-mouth existence until a suitable tenured job opened up - you could make them permanent members of the new (minor) aristocracy and escape death taxes.
With all that exposure to the very best in education and by 25 years of sheer rote of repetition, they would to absorbed at least a bit of it.
Enough to make them part of the "fettered talented", safe with their expensive PhD from a good university, safe in their own narrow discipline silo and consistently hitting discipline-oriented targets few ordinary mortals could hit.
But they were still unlikely to succeed at the truly megalevel.
And thus to become members of today's top level aristocracy.
Because that was the exclusive home of the unfettered and untutored genius : because, as Schopenhauer noted long ago, only they could contrive hit targets that no one else can even see.
Which Ivy League university did Satchmo ever go to ? Which topranked college did Steve Jobs ever graduate from ?
The genius has talent and drive, yes for sure, but in addition they have a willingness and even eagerness to transgress boundaries and to miscegenate all the speciated silos of disciplines that the limited-in-talent 'new minor aristocracy' uses to secure their precarious positions near the top of the human hierarchy.
It was the ability of the Jews to fill and succeed in the difficult new niches (mostly because they were denied entry into the easier but closed traditional avenues to success) that made them so feared within academic silos around the world from the 1870s to the 1960s.
One thinks of Jewish success in new hybrid cultural industries like movies and their success in new hybrid sciences like bio-chemistry.
For in a way these Jewish left field successes represented to the new minor aristocracy the new face of their most feared bugaboo : the unfettered genius.....
In part because growing up wealthy and established tends to take the edge off of drive and aggression.
So in the past, for tens of thousands of years, you ensured your dumber and lazier kids and grands would share in your own achievements long after you were dead by investing in lands, lots of it.
("Buy land - they don't make it anymore.")
The rural family manorial estate, home of the minor aristocracy.
(Think of owning lots of stock market bluechip shares as being today's manorial estate.)
This land was rented out to others to work and your dumb/lazy kids and grandkids lived high off the rents these tenants returned to them.
The prairies killed the minor aristocracy
But the mid-19th century development of massive areas of good farmland overseas, combined with far cheaper ocean transport, put such pressure on minor aristocratic estates that it soon seemed that its income could no provide the expected wealthy lifestyle for the principal son, let alone the rest of the family.
Worse, after voting in the 1830s was expanded to include the upper middle class, these ingrates exerted pressure to see that the traditional sinecures for the younger sons of the minor landed aristocracy - the military, civil service, established church and professions - were now open to them.
Open to them, via competitive exams among university graduates who had truly earned their degrees.
(Before the 1840s, only would-be clerics went to university to actually learn, the rest - the spawn of the landed gentry - just went to party.)
Soon it became clear that continuing to invest your wealth in increasingly less valuable agricultural land to secure the future of your children faced yet another major hurdle - on your death, when it was finally handed over to your children, more and more of its value was being taxed away.
Minor aristocracy reborn as tenured profs
But if you instead took your existing wealth and invested it - now - in 25 years of your children's education - from governess and Montessori at birth to subsidizing your mid twenties children's wandering postdoc hand-to-mouth existence until a suitable tenured job opened up - you could make them permanent members of the new (minor) aristocracy and escape death taxes.
With all that exposure to the very best in education and by 25 years of sheer rote of repetition, they would to absorbed at least a bit of it.
Enough to make them part of the "fettered talented", safe with their expensive PhD from a good university, safe in their own narrow discipline silo and consistently hitting discipline-oriented targets few ordinary mortals could hit.
But they were still unlikely to succeed at the truly megalevel.
The top of world aristocracy is always the unfettered genius
And thus to become members of today's top level aristocracy.
Because that was the exclusive home of the unfettered and untutored genius : because, as Schopenhauer noted long ago, only they could contrive hit targets that no one else can even see.
Which Ivy League university did Satchmo ever go to ? Which topranked college did Steve Jobs ever graduate from ?
The genius has talent and drive, yes for sure, but in addition they have a willingness and even eagerness to transgress boundaries and to miscegenate all the speciated silos of disciplines that the limited-in-talent 'new minor aristocracy' uses to secure their precarious positions near the top of the human hierarchy.
It was the ability of the Jews to fill and succeed in the difficult new niches (mostly because they were denied entry into the easier but closed traditional avenues to success) that made them so feared within academic silos around the world from the 1870s to the 1960s.
One thinks of Jewish success in new hybrid cultural industries like movies and their success in new hybrid sciences like bio-chemistry.
For in a way these Jewish left field successes represented to the new minor aristocracy the new face of their most feared bugaboo : the unfettered genius.....
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
steam trains, ships & border guards invented together
Let us try to capture the full blown sexual-political panic never far below the surface of your average middle class Victorian paterfamilias :
"The deeper that the miscegenating steam ship and train try to penetrate into our hitherto virgin territories around the globe, the faster we must have border guards and passports erected to parry their thrusts and keep those territories pure."It might all be just a big coincidence that nationalism rhetoric became rampant at the very moment when easy international travel for the masses first became practical , but as the TV detective says, 'I don't believe in coincidences'....
Pure Modernity's silos of specialization and speciation : Aryan & Jew, Political Science & Economics, Professional & Laity
Panic-stricken wealthy educated Victorian era humanity invented Pure Modernity (a counter-revolution against impure reality) with its rigidly separated silos of pure races, pure breeds, pure nations, pure species, pure food & water, pure professions and pure academic disciplines, all in the same day.
Nay, all in the same afternoon....
Nay, all in the same afternoon....
Manhattan was the place, '45 was the date : pure modernity becomes impure modernity
R.I.P. Pure Modernity : 1875 - 1965
In 1945, with the twin failures of Auschwitz to liquidate Manhattan and of chemists to best the slimy penicillium, Pure Modernity ascended from its apogee down down in an abrupt death dive, down to its nadir in 1965.
We now live in a new era, an era of Impure Modernity.
The era of Evolution by Exclusion has been replaced by the era of Evolution by Inclusion.
No longer do our scientists and academics seek to purify and drain the gene poll but only to expand it and diversify it.
In response, our university-oriented voting precincts have gone from being the best areas of support for the politics of intolerance and now are the most reliable bases of political support for tolerant values.
We've changed, profoundly, from our grandparents' and great grand parents' day....
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
scientifically public versus scientifically popular
Despite many 'just so' stories to the contrary, an even half way determined scientist trying to change a current paradigm can always get scientifically published - even if only as one of the published abstracts of papers verbally delivered at a minor local meeting of a nationally important scientific society.
I am thinking specifically of a particular scientist from 1930s upstate NY and his paper "Virulence for mice of certain pneumococcus strains following induced specific type transformation".
This long forgotten and quietly rebellious scientist, Dr Albert H Harris of Slingerlands NY, at least got his views published. IE, it was scientifically public, so I was at least able to find his paper's abstract online seventy five years later.
But as an indication how token this 'scientific publication' really was, all the dozens of abstracts from all these local meetings were bundled under one heading at the back of the journal, meaning they'd only be found by someone reading the entire issue, every issue, from cover to cover.
Or by a modern search engine "whole word search" which how I stumbled on it, by sticking in a lucky and random selection of my key words.
Anyway, Harris was employed in life-saving but also boringly routine pneumonia typing work for the NY state government lab at Albany when he decided to conduct a bold freelance experiment, presumably during his off hours.
On April 29th 1938 he gave a verbal paper about the results before a minor local meeting of the "Eastern NY" branch of the American Bacteriological Society.
An abstract of his paper, as was routinely done for all of such obscure meetings, was nonetheless then printed in the journal of that organization, a journal and a society that were very prominent in its then very important field, both in the Americas and overseas .
In his paper he claimed he had successfully induced Dawson & Warbasse styled HGT between two very different strains of capped and virile ("S") type pneumococcus.
I can well imagine the silent response of his elders : "Oh no, a confirmation of the successful transforming of S into S, just as Dawson & Warbasse had claimed".
In other words, an unwanted confirmation of something they found extremely intellectually threatening.
For his new report sharply challenged the current scientific paradigm wherein HGT transformation was quietly dismissed as merely 'restoring' the inherent ability of all pneumococcus to produce all 90 different types of pneumococcus external capsules, something that had been temporarily lost in the defective "R" types.
This silly notion clearly contradicted the scientific elite's most fundamental scientific paradigm : that the tiny bacteria, being at the very bottom and very beginnings of Darwin's Tree of Life, ipso facto had to be incredibly simple beings, genetically speaking.
Yet this daft explanation for HGT said that these supposed primitive and energy-starved tiny beings carried, as a mere metabolical dead weight, a truly extraordinary number of mostly unused genes.
Our current explanation - which has near universal scientific support - is that one S type bacteria deliberately insert some of the DNA from another S type into its own genome.
Between the 1920s to the 1950s, about the easiest new gene to detect as a result was the one that gave that these bacteria a new and highly specific external goo capsule.
The intellectual problem this minor report raised for the senior scientists & elite society of the day was that it suggested that Life's weakest beings had genetic skills far beyond the expertise of Life's supposedly most advanced beings, European scientists.
(And that was almost as transgressional as suggesting that darkies (like Vivien Thomas) could do difficult heart surgery better than whities (like Afred Blalock.)
Despite the popularity of the current paradigm among the frightened scientific elite, Harris was able to at least 'put his dissenting views on the public record'.
Most scientific rebels do much better than he, at least in getting scientifically published.
They are published in well regarded, albeit specialist, national scientific journals with some circulation to the very largest of research libraries overseas.
But regardless if they are 'scientifically public', they are doomed by not being 'scientifically popular'.
For there is a world of difference between those two phrases.
To start with, their rebel notions are publicly ignored, which is a fate far worse than being hotly and publicly critiqued.
In private and in semi secrecy, their views are dismissed so vehemently that they don't get ever good job offers, or tenure, or the good grants, the big invites to big conferences, or get invited to write big review articles and become journal editors or society presidents.
They don't become department heads at big universities or named to high prestige endowed chairs, they don't sit on the big grant committees, they don't get invited to comment on science news in the big prestige lay media, they don't get to write chapters in the big textbooks.
They don't get asked to hold conferences on their subject or even to teach a intro course in it, let alone found an entire new scientific sub-field on it at some ambitiously expanding university.
Above all, the criteria for rejecting their hubris-threatening thesis - 'not sufficient data' - is unevenly applied.
For when the hubris of scientists and elite educated society likes what it hears about a new theory or discovery, much less data backup is required before it is 'splashed about' worldwide.
Trust me, older science may only occasionally speaks to us today in telling us something accurate and complete about the outer real world.
But it always - always - tells us all we ever need to know about the inner mental world of the scientists and elite society of that period of time ...
I am thinking specifically of a particular scientist from 1930s upstate NY and his paper "Virulence for mice of certain pneumococcus strains following induced specific type transformation".
This long forgotten and quietly rebellious scientist, Dr Albert H Harris of Slingerlands NY, at least got his views published. IE, it was scientifically public, so I was at least able to find his paper's abstract online seventy five years later.
But as an indication how token this 'scientific publication' really was, all the dozens of abstracts from all these local meetings were bundled under one heading at the back of the journal, meaning they'd only be found by someone reading the entire issue, every issue, from cover to cover.
Or by a modern search engine "whole word search" which how I stumbled on it, by sticking in a lucky and random selection of my key words.
Harris confirms Dawson & Warbasse
Anyway, Harris was employed in life-saving but also boringly routine pneumonia typing work for the NY state government lab at Albany when he decided to conduct a bold freelance experiment, presumably during his off hours.
On April 29th 1938 he gave a verbal paper about the results before a minor local meeting of the "Eastern NY" branch of the American Bacteriological Society.
An abstract of his paper, as was routinely done for all of such obscure meetings, was nonetheless then printed in the journal of that organization, a journal and a society that were very prominent in its then very important field, both in the Americas and overseas .
In his paper he claimed he had successfully induced Dawson & Warbasse styled HGT between two very different strains of capped and virile ("S") type pneumococcus.
I can well imagine the silent response of his elders : "Oh no, a confirmation of the successful transforming of S into S, just as Dawson & Warbasse had claimed".
In other words, an unwanted confirmation of something they found extremely intellectually threatening.
For his new report sharply challenged the current scientific paradigm wherein HGT transformation was quietly dismissed as merely 'restoring' the inherent ability of all pneumococcus to produce all 90 different types of pneumococcus external capsules, something that had been temporarily lost in the defective "R" types.
This silly notion clearly contradicted the scientific elite's most fundamental scientific paradigm : that the tiny bacteria, being at the very bottom and very beginnings of Darwin's Tree of Life, ipso facto had to be incredibly simple beings, genetically speaking.
Yet this daft explanation for HGT said that these supposed primitive and energy-starved tiny beings carried, as a mere metabolical dead weight, a truly extraordinary number of mostly unused genes.
Our current explanation - which has near universal scientific support - is that one S type bacteria deliberately insert some of the DNA from another S type into its own genome.
Between the 1920s to the 1950s, about the easiest new gene to detect as a result was the one that gave that these bacteria a new and highly specific external goo capsule.
stupid bacteria best the smartest geneticists in the universe
The intellectual problem this minor report raised for the senior scientists & elite society of the day was that it suggested that Life's weakest beings had genetic skills far beyond the expertise of Life's supposedly most advanced beings, European scientists.
(And that was almost as transgressional as suggesting that darkies (like Vivien Thomas) could do difficult heart surgery better than whities (like Afred Blalock.)
Despite the popularity of the current paradigm among the frightened scientific elite, Harris was able to at least 'put his dissenting views on the public record'.
Most scientific rebels do much better than he, at least in getting scientifically published.
They are published in well regarded, albeit specialist, national scientific journals with some circulation to the very largest of research libraries overseas.
But regardless if they are 'scientifically public', they are doomed by not being 'scientifically popular'.
For there is a world of difference between those two phrases.
What not being "scientifically popular" doesn't look like
To start with, their rebel notions are publicly ignored, which is a fate far worse than being hotly and publicly critiqued.
In private and in semi secrecy, their views are dismissed so vehemently that they don't get ever good job offers, or tenure, or the good grants, the big invites to big conferences, or get invited to write big review articles and become journal editors or society presidents.
They don't become department heads at big universities or named to high prestige endowed chairs, they don't sit on the big grant committees, they don't get invited to comment on science news in the big prestige lay media, they don't get to write chapters in the big textbooks.
They don't get asked to hold conferences on their subject or even to teach a intro course in it, let alone found an entire new scientific sub-field on it at some ambitiously expanding university.
Above all, the criteria for rejecting their hubris-threatening thesis - 'not sufficient data' - is unevenly applied.
For when the hubris of scientists and elite educated society likes what it hears about a new theory or discovery, much less data backup is required before it is 'splashed about' worldwide.
Trust me, older science may only occasionally speaks to us today in telling us something accurate and complete about the outer real world.
But it always - always - tells us all we ever need to know about the inner mental world of the scientists and elite society of that period of time ...
Darwinism fails to explain Aryan defeat in two wars
When you combine military prowess, scientific and industrial strength, national cohesiveness, demographic numbers and strategic location, it is clear, that in both world wars, all the world regarded the Germans as the single most fit 'race' on Earth.
So according to popular Darwinism's view of existence as being an eternal enlarged case of mortal man to man combat, with the best man always winning and the weaker man always dying, Germany was scientifically bound to win out.
But Germany didn't -- instead it lost to an alternative (non-Darwinian) form of evolution - a large group of smaller weaker races succeeding by working together in a form of mutualism, rather like a bacterial biofilm or a colony of social insects.
But saying so was anathema in the Age of Modernity.
But the results of WWI should have been a wake up call, reminding the world of many similar examples from Nature, as when a clearly superior massive bear is lay low by a large pack of small, weak, but cooperating dogs.
It is not strange that Hitler-the-rhetorician evoked his highly selective memories of WWI to support his claim that war was the surest way for the strongest races to rise up over the weak.
But what was strange was that so many well educated people (and not just in Germany either), people with much wider memories of WWI and its outcome, choose to believe him.
But what we need to remember is that until the mid 1960s, the strongest polling districts for right wing conservative parties world wide were the university towns, among the professors and students - drawn from the most privileged in society.
By any moral gauge,neither prof nor student really deserved their highly privileged positions and a rigorous commitment to logic and self examination, the supposed virtues of a college education, would have soon revealed that.
So Modernity's educated choose instead to believe an amazing number of illogical - but self-serving - theories.
Since around 1965, the strongest poll districts for left wing liberal parties world wide are those same university towns ---- the strongest possible signal that self-satisfied Modernity definitely ended and self-examining Post Modernity had began...
So according to popular Darwinism's view of existence as being an eternal enlarged case of mortal man to man combat, with the best man always winning and the weaker man always dying, Germany was scientifically bound to win out.
But Germany didn't -- instead it lost to an alternative (non-Darwinian) form of evolution - a large group of smaller weaker races succeeding by working together in a form of mutualism, rather like a bacterial biofilm or a colony of social insects.
But saying so was anathema in the Age of Modernity.
But the results of WWI should have been a wake up call, reminding the world of many similar examples from Nature, as when a clearly superior massive bear is lay low by a large pack of small, weak, but cooperating dogs.
Hubris almost always trumps Logic, among the highly cosseted educated
It is not strange that Hitler-the-rhetorician evoked his highly selective memories of WWI to support his claim that war was the surest way for the strongest races to rise up over the weak.
But what was strange was that so many well educated people (and not just in Germany either), people with much wider memories of WWI and its outcome, choose to believe him.
But what we need to remember is that until the mid 1960s, the strongest polling districts for right wing conservative parties world wide were the university towns, among the professors and students - drawn from the most privileged in society.
By any moral gauge,neither prof nor student really deserved their highly privileged positions and a rigorous commitment to logic and self examination, the supposed virtues of a college education, would have soon revealed that.
So Modernity's educated choose instead to believe an amazing number of illogical - but self-serving - theories.
Since around 1965, the strongest poll districts for left wing liberal parties world wide are those same university towns ---- the strongest possible signal that self-satisfied Modernity definitely ended and self-examining Post Modernity had began...
Monday, April 25, 2016
Dawson knowlegable only about bacteria colonies : but this was a FEATURE, not a bug
Back in the bad old days, most scientists thought bacteria existed as most senior university tenured bacteriologists had willed them to exist : as a conveniently pure strain of free living planktons in an ocean of tasty lab medium.
Much lower ranking scientists also interested in bacteria frequently saw them mostly out in the 'real world' (say on our teeth or as pond scum) living in densely crowded mixed colonies.
Who was 'more' right ?
Dr Henry Dawson inhabited both worlds - both as a lab scientist and as a clinical doctor.
But in the end, he seemed mostly interested in the behavior of bacteria as exhibited while alive in big colonies.
Partly this was because even the very best microscopes he had to work with, microscopes that work with visible light, work best examining living bacterial colonies closely for gross changes, not peering deep inside the bodies of individual bacteria.
Electron microscopes did exist while he was alive - one even examined his prize standard strain but the images revealed little that was new and anyway, both the big colony had to be destroyed and the individual bacteria killed, to be examined successfully by the electron microscope.
Later generations of molecular biologists sneered at Dawson's generation for focussing on colonies of bacteria living in the real world, rather than getting down to the nitty gritty at molecular level inside the bacteria inside the lab.
Here I need to point out that is in fact how their brand of biology still works in practise - they all end up working their magic on colony sized samples, despite their disclaimers, though the colonies remaining alive is often irrelevant.
But if in fact bacteria basically live as social beings in co-ordinated colonies most all of the time and further, that it is only their gross features that should worry us, Dawson's bug becomes a feature.
(What I mean about their gross features is the fact that a few deadly bacteria individuals can't kill us as readily as a large number of less deadly bacteria will do: quantity not quality. So we wash our hands not to kill all bacteria, only to kill enough of them so that ingesting the small remainder wouldn't make us ill.)
Seeing bacteria primarily as colonies, visible through the eye of any low priced and lower-powered microscope, begins to make sense...
Much lower ranking scientists also interested in bacteria frequently saw them mostly out in the 'real world' (say on our teeth or as pond scum) living in densely crowded mixed colonies.
Who was 'more' right ?
Dr Henry Dawson inhabited both worlds - both as a lab scientist and as a clinical doctor.
But in the end, he seemed mostly interested in the behavior of bacteria as exhibited while alive in big colonies.
Partly this was because even the very best microscopes he had to work with, microscopes that work with visible light, work best examining living bacterial colonies closely for gross changes, not peering deep inside the bodies of individual bacteria.
Electron microscopes did exist while he was alive - one even examined his prize standard strain but the images revealed little that was new and anyway, both the big colony had to be destroyed and the individual bacteria killed, to be examined successfully by the electron microscope.
Are today's molecular biologists' sneers justified ?
Later generations of molecular biologists sneered at Dawson's generation for focussing on colonies of bacteria living in the real world, rather than getting down to the nitty gritty at molecular level inside the bacteria inside the lab.
Here I need to point out that is in fact how their brand of biology still works in practise - they all end up working their magic on colony sized samples, despite their disclaimers, though the colonies remaining alive is often irrelevant.
But if in fact bacteria basically live as social beings in co-ordinated colonies most all of the time and further, that it is only their gross features that should worry us, Dawson's bug becomes a feature.
(What I mean about their gross features is the fact that a few deadly bacteria individuals can't kill us as readily as a large number of less deadly bacteria will do: quantity not quality. So we wash our hands not to kill all bacteria, only to kill enough of them so that ingesting the small remainder wouldn't make us ill.)
Seeing bacteria primarily as colonies, visible through the eye of any low priced and lower-powered microscope, begins to make sense...
Bacteria with a body, in the human sense, no nucleus required
Today I want to consider the wider implications of the discovery of a bacteria strain that does not live, as many bacteria do, in a co-ordinated colony of many closely packed bacterial cells under specific conditions but then normally lives as a dispersed group of fully independent separate individuals.
Instead this particular strain of cyanobacteria (earlier known as blue-green algae) is an obligate multi-celled being, which means that it looks and acts rather like us humans ---- at least for bacteria.
These bacteria cells all live inside a single outer skin just like us, and the cells adhere to each other, like ours, and communicate with each other - again like us.
In addition, the cells are differentiated into doing different things, just as ours do. Finally, the various bacterial cells within the skin are now dependent on each differentiated other and could not survive on their own.
Now I have long ago stopped being amazed about what bacteria are really capable of or of the capacity of us humans to walk away from confronting such awkward facts.
But consider this : we are taught , on the very first day of BIO 101, that the biggest and most fundamental division in all life, is between those beings with nucleus and those without.
None of today's bacteria have nucleus but on the past a few developed one after a some big bacteria swallowed up (or was invaded by a) smaller bacteria and failed then to eat them or kill them as intended.
Because some of these new 'internal beings' had highly useful specialized abilities that worked best (safely) behind a barrier, natural selection kept them on, inside the bacteria cell but behind their own membrane and retaining the most unique of their DNA genes.
One bacteria invader turned sunlight, water and air into food and oxygen and is found inside plant and algae cells today.
The other bacterial invader scooped up potentially harmful oxygen so the bigger bacteria isn't harmed and then uses the oxygen to provide far more energy per unit of 'food' - powering the new chimera cell to take on much bigger body-building challenges, food supply permitting - it is found inside all animals today.
Possibly another of the small bacteria invaders even became the overall main nucleus of this new chimera, but most scientists currently think this unlikely.
I have never doubted what the advantages of adding these bacterial symbionts powerhouses to existing tiny lifeforms did to putting them on the eventual road to obligate multi-celled existence.
But I never could find a reason why a nucleus was deemed so necessary to the process.
Helpful yes, but not essential.
And this little obligate multi-celled bacteria suggests that this is truly so....
Instead this particular strain of cyanobacteria (earlier known as blue-green algae) is an obligate multi-celled being, which means that it looks and acts rather like us humans ---- at least for bacteria.
These bacteria cells all live inside a single outer skin just like us, and the cells adhere to each other, like ours, and communicate with each other - again like us.
In addition, the cells are differentiated into doing different things, just as ours do. Finally, the various bacterial cells within the skin are now dependent on each differentiated other and could not survive on their own.
Nucleus-obsessed science
Now I have long ago stopped being amazed about what bacteria are really capable of or of the capacity of us humans to walk away from confronting such awkward facts.
But consider this : we are taught , on the very first day of BIO 101, that the biggest and most fundamental division in all life, is between those beings with nucleus and those without.
None of today's bacteria have nucleus but on the past a few developed one after a some big bacteria swallowed up (or was invaded by a) smaller bacteria and failed then to eat them or kill them as intended.
Because some of these new 'internal beings' had highly useful specialized abilities that worked best (safely) behind a barrier, natural selection kept them on, inside the bacteria cell but behind their own membrane and retaining the most unique of their DNA genes.
Endosymbiosis
One bacteria invader turned sunlight, water and air into food and oxygen and is found inside plant and algae cells today.
The other bacterial invader scooped up potentially harmful oxygen so the bigger bacteria isn't harmed and then uses the oxygen to provide far more energy per unit of 'food' - powering the new chimera cell to take on much bigger body-building challenges, food supply permitting - it is found inside all animals today.
Possibly another of the small bacteria invaders even became the overall main nucleus of this new chimera, but most scientists currently think this unlikely.
I have never doubted what the advantages of adding these bacterial symbionts powerhouses to existing tiny lifeforms did to putting them on the eventual road to obligate multi-celled existence.
But I never could find a reason why a nucleus was deemed so necessary to the process.
Helpful yes, but not essential.
And this little obligate multi-celled bacteria suggests that this is truly so....
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Stalin & Darwin agree : "Evolution in One Country"
Nice to see good old Charlie & Joe finally paired up.
Joe is famous for advocating socialism within a single country --- Charlie for advocating evolution only within a single species.
Horizontal socialism and horizontal evolution simply wasn't on.
Charlie was dead set against species breeding with different species - he applied that thought with full force in his personal life because he and his family preferring to only breed with their very closest relatives, within their own species.
Inbreeding was what Charlie was into - and then waiting for the slow slow drip drip of incremental Progress and Evolution by tiny point mutations among individuals within that inbreed population.
Charlie then said that the full force of naked competition, red in tooth and claw,would ensure that those individuals with the superior mutations would become the new alpha dogs and over time their offspring would slowly slowly replace all the unfit within that species.
Species never ever miscegenate - this is Evolution by strict Exclusion.
This stuff definitely happens - particularly among the bigger beings on Earth - the ones that keep getting bumped off when the times get tough.
But the smaller beings, the long term survivors, "the Lifers", don't hold to it exclusively.
They thrive partially because they also have Evolution by Inclusion : they'll take up a good new biochemical survival tip fron any old pond scum and incorporate in their own genetic library.
HGT and Endosymbiosis : take up a few genes from another foreign species or even enter into complete matrimonial union with another foreign species.
Its all done PD, no exclusive patents here.
By this method, good ideas quickly spread across the microbial world ,thus allowing at least some of it to survive every threat the world has thrown at it in four billion years.
Advanced human civilization is what , four hundred years old ? - and now about to face a huge global climate disaster, albeit of its own making.
There is one school of thought - Republican and Conservative - that usually denies there is even a problem at all, but if there is one, industry will solve it, one exclusive patent at a time.
I am of the other school of thought --- the one that says lets take a page from the microbes' handbook, let's listen to anybody and everybody when it comes to potential solutions and when one works really well, lets tell everyone, make it PD, put the info into the public domain.
Because my mantra is that 'when we are willing to listen to anyone, everyone benefits' ....
Joe is famous for advocating socialism within a single country --- Charlie for advocating evolution only within a single species.
Horizontal socialism and horizontal evolution simply wasn't on.
Charlie was dead set against species breeding with different species - he applied that thought with full force in his personal life because he and his family preferring to only breed with their very closest relatives, within their own species.
Darwin & Inbreeding
Inbreeding was what Charlie was into - and then waiting for the slow slow drip drip of incremental Progress and Evolution by tiny point mutations among individuals within that inbreed population.
Charlie then said that the full force of naked competition, red in tooth and claw,would ensure that those individuals with the superior mutations would become the new alpha dogs and over time their offspring would slowly slowly replace all the unfit within that species.
Species never ever miscegenate - this is Evolution by strict Exclusion.
This stuff definitely happens - particularly among the bigger beings on Earth - the ones that keep getting bumped off when the times get tough.
Evolution by Inclusion
But the smaller beings, the long term survivors, "the Lifers", don't hold to it exclusively.
They thrive partially because they also have Evolution by Inclusion : they'll take up a good new biochemical survival tip fron any old pond scum and incorporate in their own genetic library.
HGT and Endosymbiosis : take up a few genes from another foreign species or even enter into complete matrimonial union with another foreign species.
Its all done PD, no exclusive patents here.
By this method, good ideas quickly spread across the microbial world ,thus allowing at least some of it to survive every threat the world has thrown at it in four billion years.
Advanced human civilization is what , four hundred years old ? - and now about to face a huge global climate disaster, albeit of its own making.
Republicans want to patent crisis solutions
There is one school of thought - Republican and Conservative - that usually denies there is even a problem at all, but if there is one, industry will solve it, one exclusive patent at a time.
I am of the other school of thought --- the one that says lets take a page from the microbes' handbook, let's listen to anybody and everybody when it comes to potential solutions and when one works really well, lets tell everyone, make it PD, put the info into the public domain.
Because my mantra is that 'when we are willing to listen to anyone, everyone benefits' ....
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Evolution by Inclusion : taking and receiving
In the world of HGT ( the horizontal gifting of genetic material between different strains or species) there is a big but frequently un-remarked difference between symbiogenesis and natural transformation versus conjugation and transduction.
In the first two instances, the receiving being voluntarily took up the foreign DNA itself, either by swallowing a living being whole or by gulping down some of the DNA from a dead or secreting foreign being.
In the latter two cases, an invader forces some foreign DNA upon the receiving being, a situation frequently called 'infectious heredity'.
Now HGT, either type, is always very risky for the individual receiving being - though I argue that it is strongly beneficial for that species' overall membership (all trillion x trillion of them) as a whole.
With numbers like that, bluntly put, the group can afford to see a billion individuals OD from "Bad HGT" on the off chance that just one individual lives on with an extremely valuable new gene function.
That individual doesn't need to take over as the new alpha bacteria either, it is just enough that this freak, along with millions of other freaks, is allowed to live on, waiting for that day when they can turn on their new gene function and win the day when a global crisis erupts for the group.
Microbes don't seem to have evolved to the level of us civilized beings, where we created Aktion T4 killer groups to set about reducing our human gene pools of all its freaks.
The microbes let their freaks and defectives (their avirulent R types) live on among them, because one day that genetic defect might just turn out to be a genetic benefit in changed circumstances.
The Nazis ran out of time before they could gas everyone with CF, sickle cell and excessive iron disease etc.
Just as well, because the milder versions of these defects are now considered to have saved the human race from otherwise all dying in sudden pandemics.
Evolution by Inclusion tolerates freaks and defectives.
It seems to have worked for the microbes for four billion years.
Maybe we humans should give try it just this once, to ensure we at least get through the next four tee years ....
In the first two instances, the receiving being voluntarily took up the foreign DNA itself, either by swallowing a living being whole or by gulping down some of the DNA from a dead or secreting foreign being.
In the latter two cases, an invader forces some foreign DNA upon the receiving being, a situation frequently called 'infectious heredity'.
Now HGT, either type, is always very risky for the individual receiving being - though I argue that it is strongly beneficial for that species' overall membership (all trillion x trillion of them) as a whole.
With numbers like that, bluntly put, the group can afford to see a billion individuals OD from "Bad HGT" on the off chance that just one individual lives on with an extremely valuable new gene function.
That individual doesn't need to take over as the new alpha bacteria either, it is just enough that this freak, along with millions of other freaks, is allowed to live on, waiting for that day when they can turn on their new gene function and win the day when a global crisis erupts for the group.
Microbes don't seem to have evolved to the level of us civilized beings, where we created Aktion T4 killer groups to set about reducing our human gene pools of all its freaks.
The microbes let their freaks and defectives (their avirulent R types) live on among them, because one day that genetic defect might just turn out to be a genetic benefit in changed circumstances.
The Nazis ran out of time before they could gas everyone with CF, sickle cell and excessive iron disease etc.
Just as well, because the milder versions of these defects are now considered to have saved the human race from otherwise all dying in sudden pandemics.
Evolution by Inclusion tolerates freaks and defectives.
It seems to have worked for the microbes for four billion years.
Maybe we humans should give try it just this once, to ensure we at least get through the next four tee years ....
Dawson's Evolution by Inclusion vs Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion
Neo-Darwinism aka Modernity claimed Evolution only happened by Exclusion.
So individual plants and animals only gained new genetic material - just for their offspring - by breeding with other strictly of their own species, while the Neo-Darwinists cum Modernists themselves, in their personal lives, went much further.
Much much further.
They only gained new genetic material - again just for their offspring - by breeding only with the members of their own ethnic and religious group and within their own social and economic class.
They claimed that no adult being - anywhere - gained new genetic material horizontally by a gift of genetic material freely offered to all by other adults.
That meant they dismissed - flat out - scientists' claims in the 1920s of endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis - saying there was no way to gain enormous amounts of vital new genes by simply engulfing another entire being that already had a working set of such genes.
Just as quickly they dismissed, right out of hand, Henry Dawson's 1920s claim that the ability (via what we now call HGT) of one type of strep pneumococcus to take up the genetic characteristics from the dead of another strain of strep pneumococcus had 'biology-wide implications'.
Simply put, if a being could swallow up an entire being from a distant branch of life and put all of its genome to work, why not also the ability to swallow a a few genes from another distant being and put them to work ?
Dawson's claims of significance seemed easier - not harder - to swallow than that of the proponents of symbiogenesis because he had actually shown it to happen in a test tube.
The Neo-Darwinists didn't - in this case , unlike with symbiogenesis - claim that Dawson's HGT never happened - just that it was like being 'a little bit pregnant'.
IE, it was an uniquely rare exception to Darwin's general rule --- but the rule still stood unchallenged.
This was total nonsense and deep down they must have uneasily sensed it - for their orthodoxy was as much defensive as it was self confident.
The history of science was rife with one-off exceptions to general rules that soon revealed many more fundamental exceptions to would-be universal and eternal dogmas.
For the only person who loves dogmas more than a God-fearing priest is a God-denying scientist.
Dawson was gently suggesting that in addition to Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion, common among Life's minority of beings - today's plants and animals, there needed to be added Evolution by Inclusion , common among the majority of Life's beings, the microbes, in the distant past right through to today....
So individual plants and animals only gained new genetic material - just for their offspring - by breeding with other strictly of their own species, while the Neo-Darwinists cum Modernists themselves, in their personal lives, went much further.
Much much further.
They only gained new genetic material - again just for their offspring - by breeding only with the members of their own ethnic and religious group and within their own social and economic class.
They claimed that no adult being - anywhere - gained new genetic material horizontally by a gift of genetic material freely offered to all by other adults.
That meant they dismissed - flat out - scientists' claims in the 1920s of endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis - saying there was no way to gain enormous amounts of vital new genes by simply engulfing another entire being that already had a working set of such genes.
Just as quickly they dismissed, right out of hand, Henry Dawson's 1920s claim that the ability (via what we now call HGT) of one type of strep pneumococcus to take up the genetic characteristics from the dead of another strain of strep pneumococcus had 'biology-wide implications'.
Simply put, if a being could swallow up an entire being from a distant branch of life and put all of its genome to work, why not also the ability to swallow a a few genes from another distant being and put them to work ?
Dawson's claims of significance seemed easier - not harder - to swallow than that of the proponents of symbiogenesis because he had actually shown it to happen in a test tube.
The Neo-Darwinists didn't - in this case , unlike with symbiogenesis - claim that Dawson's HGT never happened - just that it was like being 'a little bit pregnant'.
IE, it was an uniquely rare exception to Darwin's general rule --- but the rule still stood unchallenged.
This was total nonsense and deep down they must have uneasily sensed it - for their orthodoxy was as much defensive as it was self confident.
The history of science was rife with one-off exceptions to general rules that soon revealed many more fundamental exceptions to would-be universal and eternal dogmas.
For the only person who loves dogmas more than a God-fearing priest is a God-denying scientist.
Evolution by Inclusion
Dawson was gently suggesting that in addition to Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion, common among Life's minority of beings - today's plants and animals, there needed to be added Evolution by Inclusion , common among the majority of Life's beings, the microbes, in the distant past right through to today....
"Pushing Air" : pushing my agenda
Yep, surely no surprise here : I have a personal agenda I am pushing.
And it is not just air.
In my view, no matter how useful, science that is merely 'published' is frequently ignored, and forever --- only when the new becomes 'popularly scientifically published' does it start doing things and changing things.
Determined wannabe scientific article writers are never successfully denied the right to be published by scientific editors, viewed as a as a collectivity.
We read all the time about how future Nobel Prize winning work was turned down by the editors and reviewers of 15 major journals.
Yes but a sixteenth journal, a journal with a respected but narrow and small readership did take to it, largely as original written.
Yes, the large funding agencies can turn the original request for funding down, but then they turn down a lot of worthy and unworthy requests, usually in favour of what is currently trendy.
But some funds, often via self-funding, can be found.
Exciting, expensive and unproven scientific ideas are like exciting new and unproven movie ideas - they are never going to be quickly or easily funded.
Scaling back to a small, initial ,self-funded "proof of concept" effort usually works.
The most effective censorship of daring new ideas is usually the informal and un-documented "quiet talk" pressure on untenured grads and postdocs, from potential future colleagues and from current lab bosses and thesis supervisors : think of it as being the dark side equivalent of science's "invisible college".
Again, sometime an idea must be delayed until a move is made to work under a semi-established tenured professor at a lower status university in the rural boondocks.
No scientific consensus is ever 100% complete - there always a few established figures who refuse to swallow the current party line.
So Science can always defend itself - 'we allow even the most 'out there' ideas get their chance in the sun' - be published' it proclaims.
But scientifically public is not scientifically popular : the published article, questioning the current paradigm in a particular field, is lucky if it even gets put down for being 'intriguing but lacking sufficient confirmation'.
(When is there ever enough data --- the answer is never, not if you opposing something. Think of the current debate over man-made climate change.)
Usually it gets just dead silence and eyes that look away when the author turns up at conferences.
Established, comfortable, middle aged elite scientists are just as likely to bury their heads in the sand as are ostriches : no one wants to see a lifetime of research suddenly discredited, their funding and prestige reduced or to have to start learning new techniques and concepts late in life.
The editorial pages of top journals won't push these too-new too-threatening concepts onto the majority of their general readers who never read any articles beyond their own field.
Major conferences won't be organized to evaluate this exciting and wholly new concept and top scientists in their dotage won't write big articles in the prestige non-scientific newspapers and magazines, alerting the powerful outside science to this breakthrough.
Department heads and deans won't demand it be added to course material and the big standard textbooks won't add even a small chapter on it.
The author must be prepared for half a lifetime of slogging : usually beginning by giving the concept an attractive catchy name claiming it to be a new field of scientific endeavour .
Next by organizing a new journal and a new society around this would-be field, pushing to get a course on it added somewhere, anywhere.
Taking it to the corridors of ever possible conference, seeking to attract grad students to the field, seeking an definite experiment that will convince doubters.
Failing all this, yes many new good ideas are published but not popular and so go on being ignored and unused.
Case in point ---- basic research from the 1920s to 1950s had shown constant positive ventilation was superior to the current use of brief and negative ventilation to save lives in many many situations.
This material was published but was ignored and no doctors were taught it.
Even when two doctors in California tried it in a small polio outbreak and found it worked and published this fact in a major American west coast medical journal (which rarely got any attention in New York and other points easy, let alone in London or Paris.)
But a Danish doctor happened to be over working in a major American east coast medical centre with an excellent medical library, read the Californian article, put it in the back of his head and went onto other things.
On the boat trip home, his wife impressed the wife of a much more senior danish doctor, while chatting on about her husband's new found skills.
A few years later, unexpectedly asked by the same senior doctor to give advice to the nations' leading medical lights about the nation's huge polio crisis, this young doctor dared to contradict his seniors as to the nature of the crisis (!) and offered an equally radical way (!) to implement his very radical solution (!)
He then displayed both courage under fire and an unexpected skill in organizing the massive effort.
His dramatic and unexpected (because no working doctor had actually read all that research from twenty years earlier) solution to an equally dramatic crisis excited doctors worldwide, along with all the globe's scientific and popular media editors.
Overnight, the idea of pushing, not pulling air won popular scientific favour, not just dutiful scientifically published status --- along with the totally new idea of very expensive but life-saving ,purpose-built ICU units.
Henry Dawson pushed the importance of HGT as hard as he could, as long as he could but it never did burst on the scene as a popular scientific - it still hasn't almost ninety years later.
By contrast, he pushed the wartime use of natural penicillin now over synthetic penicillin maybe tomorrow without much success.
Until, literally overnight,the sympathetic actions of two of Dawson's former patients combined with a former ally of his to make it all happen.
The actions of the first, a young medical resident made penicillin-in-any-form suddenly greatly sought after the world over.
The other patient (mega-industrialist Floyd Odlum) moved a massive government agency to take up Dawson's vision of providing natural penicillin for everybody in a war-torn world in need of it.
The third, the usually highly cautious head of a small manufacturer decided to break ranks with its much more established competitors and thrown everything into natural penicillin production on a massive and untried scale.
Penicillin went from published to popular overnight, thanks to Dr Dante Colitti and a baby girl called Patty Malone --- then Odlum's WPB , the usually much maligned war agency, moved mountains to secure a supply sufficient to save not just the infected of America, but also the infected of an entire world, and in record time.
The third was Brooklyn housewife Mae Smith and her husband, John L Smith, head of then tiny Pfizer, both moved by the saving of little Patty Malone because it reminded them of Dawson's long claim that their own daughter needn't have died of Meningitis in 1934, if only doctors and drug companies had seen the potential of penicillin back in 1928-1929.
I think Dawson's HGT is a much bigger story than even penicillin but it seems too diffuse to ever become scientifically popular, unlike the dramatic stories of wartime penicillin and 1952's pushing air to saving polio victims.
But actually the story of Dawson's dramatic penicillin success in WWII and the dramatic story of microbial resistance to Dawson's penicillin today is infused with Dawson's interest in HGT.
But that is a story for my next post ...
And it is not just air.
In my view, no matter how useful, science that is merely 'published' is frequently ignored, and forever --- only when the new becomes 'popularly scientifically published' does it start doing things and changing things.
Determined wannabe scientific article writers are never successfully denied the right to be published by scientific editors, viewed as a as a collectivity.
We read all the time about how future Nobel Prize winning work was turned down by the editors and reviewers of 15 major journals.
Yes but a sixteenth journal, a journal with a respected but narrow and small readership did take to it, largely as original written.
Yes, the large funding agencies can turn the original request for funding down, but then they turn down a lot of worthy and unworthy requests, usually in favour of what is currently trendy.
But some funds, often via self-funding, can be found.
Exciting, expensive and unproven scientific ideas are like exciting new and unproven movie ideas - they are never going to be quickly or easily funded.
Scaling back to a small, initial ,self-funded "proof of concept" effort usually works.
The most effective censorship of daring new ideas is usually the informal and un-documented "quiet talk" pressure on untenured grads and postdocs, from potential future colleagues and from current lab bosses and thesis supervisors : think of it as being the dark side equivalent of science's "invisible college".
Again, sometime an idea must be delayed until a move is made to work under a semi-established tenured professor at a lower status university in the rural boondocks.
No scientific consensus is ever 100% complete - there always a few established figures who refuse to swallow the current party line.
So Science can always defend itself - 'we allow even the most 'out there' ideas get their chance in the sun' - be published' it proclaims.
But scientifically public is not scientifically popular : the published article, questioning the current paradigm in a particular field, is lucky if it even gets put down for being 'intriguing but lacking sufficient confirmation'.
(When is there ever enough data --- the answer is never, not if you opposing something. Think of the current debate over man-made climate change.)
Usually it gets just dead silence and eyes that look away when the author turns up at conferences.
Established, comfortable, middle aged elite scientists are just as likely to bury their heads in the sand as are ostriches : no one wants to see a lifetime of research suddenly discredited, their funding and prestige reduced or to have to start learning new techniques and concepts late in life.
The editorial pages of top journals won't push these too-new too-threatening concepts onto the majority of their general readers who never read any articles beyond their own field.
Major conferences won't be organized to evaluate this exciting and wholly new concept and top scientists in their dotage won't write big articles in the prestige non-scientific newspapers and magazines, alerting the powerful outside science to this breakthrough.
Department heads and deans won't demand it be added to course material and the big standard textbooks won't add even a small chapter on it.
The author must be prepared for half a lifetime of slogging : usually beginning by giving the concept an attractive catchy name claiming it to be a new field of scientific endeavour .
Next by organizing a new journal and a new society around this would-be field, pushing to get a course on it added somewhere, anywhere.
Taking it to the corridors of ever possible conference, seeking to attract grad students to the field, seeking an definite experiment that will convince doubters.
Failing all this, yes many new good ideas are published but not popular and so go on being ignored and unused.
Case in point ---- basic research from the 1920s to 1950s had shown constant positive ventilation was superior to the current use of brief and negative ventilation to save lives in many many situations.
This material was published but was ignored and no doctors were taught it.
Even when two doctors in California tried it in a small polio outbreak and found it worked and published this fact in a major American west coast medical journal (which rarely got any attention in New York and other points easy, let alone in London or Paris.)
But a Danish doctor happened to be over working in a major American east coast medical centre with an excellent medical library, read the Californian article, put it in the back of his head and went onto other things.
On the boat trip home, his wife impressed the wife of a much more senior danish doctor, while chatting on about her husband's new found skills.
A few years later, unexpectedly asked by the same senior doctor to give advice to the nations' leading medical lights about the nation's huge polio crisis, this young doctor dared to contradict his seniors as to the nature of the crisis (!) and offered an equally radical way (!) to implement his very radical solution (!)
He then displayed both courage under fire and an unexpected skill in organizing the massive effort.
His dramatic and unexpected (because no working doctor had actually read all that research from twenty years earlier) solution to an equally dramatic crisis excited doctors worldwide, along with all the globe's scientific and popular media editors.
Overnight, the idea of pushing, not pulling air won popular scientific favour, not just dutiful scientifically published status --- along with the totally new idea of very expensive but life-saving ,purpose-built ICU units.
Henry Dawson pushed the importance of HGT as hard as he could, as long as he could but it never did burst on the scene as a popular scientific - it still hasn't almost ninety years later.
By contrast, he pushed the wartime use of natural penicillin now over synthetic penicillin maybe tomorrow without much success.
Until, literally overnight,the sympathetic actions of two of Dawson's former patients combined with a former ally of his to make it all happen.
The actions of the first, a young medical resident made penicillin-in-any-form suddenly greatly sought after the world over.
The other patient (mega-industrialist Floyd Odlum) moved a massive government agency to take up Dawson's vision of providing natural penicillin for everybody in a war-torn world in need of it.
The third, the usually highly cautious head of a small manufacturer decided to break ranks with its much more established competitors and thrown everything into natural penicillin production on a massive and untried scale.
Penicillin went from published to popular overnight, thanks to Dr Dante Colitti and a baby girl called Patty Malone --- then Odlum's WPB , the usually much maligned war agency, moved mountains to secure a supply sufficient to save not just the infected of America, but also the infected of an entire world, and in record time.
The third was Brooklyn housewife Mae Smith and her husband, John L Smith, head of then tiny Pfizer, both moved by the saving of little Patty Malone because it reminded them of Dawson's long claim that their own daughter needn't have died of Meningitis in 1934, if only doctors and drug companies had seen the potential of penicillin back in 1928-1929.
I think Dawson's HGT is a much bigger story than even penicillin but it seems too diffuse to ever become scientifically popular, unlike the dramatic stories of wartime penicillin and 1952's pushing air to saving polio victims.
But actually the story of Dawson's dramatic penicillin success in WWII and the dramatic story of microbial resistance to Dawson's penicillin today is infused with Dawson's interest in HGT.
But that is a story for my next post ...
Friday, April 22, 2016
must see Danish movie, "Pushing Air" : when're you willing to ask anyone for help, everyone benefits ...
One Prob.
They haven't actually filmed it yet -- in fact they don't know that they are going to do so.
But they will.
That's because it is an uplifting true story from backward Copenhagen of 1952 with so many dramatic but true events in it, all just made for the cinema screen that even Hollywood couldn't dreamt them all up.
Its about a real famous guy named Ibsen - no,no, not the Swedish one, the Danish one : Dr Bjorn Ibsen, 1915-2007.
In 1952, Ibsen was 'just' a freelance anesthetist, without hospital post at even the most humble of hospitals.
Not the sort of consultant normally invited to the big Med Chiefs powwow when they go into full crisis mode - as when 6000 Danes suddenly got polio and 300 of them started dying from an inability to breath on their own.
This in a country with only one or two iron lungs for all of them.
The iron lung pulls air out of patients and it clearly wasn't working --patients were still dying left and centre ---- it might even be killing rather than helping them.
Luckily and surprisingly, bog ordinary Ibsen actually knew of the many advances made at the research lab level about how to correctly respirate patients - even if all the worlds' doctors,medical students and med school professors clearly did not.
'Why not,' Ibsen gently suggested, 'why not push air into the patients instead of pulling it out - they won't then die of too much CO2 in the blood.'
'Simply cut a hole in their neck, insert a simple rubber tube attached to a simple rubber bellows and have a strong but simple young med student push air into the dying patients - around the clock, for days - until they have time to stabilize.'
To his great credit, the big Chief of Medicine Henry Lassen bought into his radical idea totally.
Ibsen was soon proven right, and thanks to the help of over a thousand students and their hundreds of thousands hours of relentless pumping, Ibsen's idea saved about a hundred young Danes who otherwise would have died .
If Ibsen's idea sounds familiar - a room, with round the clock specialists, set aside specifically to ventilate and feed people until they can breath and eat on their own, that is because it is.
We call it it 'the ICU'.
And don't tell me that you, your friend or a family member has never had their live saved in one, because I won't believe you.
You got it, Ibsen set up the first informal ICU and next year, the first formal ICU.
Meanwhile his original simple idea - "push in, not out" - was also instantly a sensation among doctors worldwide because they saw it could work in many other medical circumstances.
Soon it was generally adopted and it , along with ICUs has probably saved maybe millions of lives worldwide in the sixty years since.
This is probably the most dramatic story ever to come out of Denmark since Hamlet, so I just know some bright spark among its filmmakers will run with it...
They haven't actually filmed it yet -- in fact they don't know that they are going to do so.
But they will.
That's because it is an uplifting true story from backward Copenhagen of 1952 with so many dramatic but true events in it, all just made for the cinema screen that even Hollywood couldn't dreamt them all up.
Its about a real famous guy named Ibsen - no,no, not the Swedish one, the Danish one : Dr Bjorn Ibsen, 1915-2007.
In 1952, Ibsen was 'just' a freelance anesthetist, without hospital post at even the most humble of hospitals.
Not the sort of consultant normally invited to the big Med Chiefs powwow when they go into full crisis mode - as when 6000 Danes suddenly got polio and 300 of them started dying from an inability to breath on their own.
This in a country with only one or two iron lungs for all of them.
The iron lung pulls air out of patients and it clearly wasn't working --patients were still dying left and centre ---- it might even be killing rather than helping them.
Luckily and surprisingly, bog ordinary Ibsen actually knew of the many advances made at the research lab level about how to correctly respirate patients - even if all the worlds' doctors,medical students and med school professors clearly did not.
'Why not,' Ibsen gently suggested, 'why not push air into the patients instead of pulling it out - they won't then die of too much CO2 in the blood.'
'Simply cut a hole in their neck, insert a simple rubber tube attached to a simple rubber bellows and have a strong but simple young med student push air into the dying patients - around the clock, for days - until they have time to stabilize.'
To his great credit, the big Chief of Medicine Henry Lassen bought into his radical idea totally.
Ibsen was soon proven right, and thanks to the help of over a thousand students and their hundreds of thousands hours of relentless pumping, Ibsen's idea saved about a hundred young Danes who otherwise would have died .
If Ibsen's idea sounds familiar - a room, with round the clock specialists, set aside specifically to ventilate and feed people until they can breath and eat on their own, that is because it is.
We call it it 'the ICU'.
And don't tell me that you, your friend or a family member has never had their live saved in one, because I won't believe you.
You got it, Ibsen set up the first informal ICU and next year, the first formal ICU.
Meanwhile his original simple idea - "push in, not out" - was also instantly a sensation among doctors worldwide because they saw it could work in many other medical circumstances.
Soon it was generally adopted and it , along with ICUs has probably saved maybe millions of lives worldwide in the sixty years since.
This is probably the most dramatic story ever to come out of Denmark since Hamlet, so I just know some bright spark among its filmmakers will run with it...
Microbes are doubly secret
Firstly, and by definition, microbes are unusually secret to us humans because they can't be seen by our naked eyes.
Their colonies are often quite visible - one fungus ,in fact, is far and away the biggest organism on earth - about four square miles in size, albeit mostly underground.
But microscopes have been around for hundreds of years, so viewing the tiny microbes as a single individual isn't an unsurmountable problem.
But the microbes' second secret is that they seem extraordinarily boring and stupid if seen alive by an ordinary light microscope and hardly less boring if seen dead and stained by a high powered electron microscope.
We need the chemical probes of chemists to reveal the hidden complexity buried inside them - the thousands of literally Earth-sustaining enzymes that only microbes - and not Man - have.
Remove Man and the Earth would go on, in far better shape than she is right now.
Remove the microbes (and their Earth-sustaining invisibly small enzymes) while keeping all other life and soon Earth would be as barren as Mars.
If you vote Conservative or Republican, you probably don't believe any of this.
You can't.
At least not without suffering a nervous breakdown.
Like H P Lovecraft, your mental health literally depends upon believing in a rigid hierarchy with Man on the top and woman on the bottom, followed by children, darkies, the deformed, degenerates, animals, plants.
Way way way down at the very bottom are the microbial slime, the horrible slime ....
Their colonies are often quite visible - one fungus ,in fact, is far and away the biggest organism on earth - about four square miles in size, albeit mostly underground.
But microscopes have been around for hundreds of years, so viewing the tiny microbes as a single individual isn't an unsurmountable problem.
But the microbes' second secret is that they seem extraordinarily boring and stupid if seen alive by an ordinary light microscope and hardly less boring if seen dead and stained by a high powered electron microscope.
We need the chemical probes of chemists to reveal the hidden complexity buried inside them - the thousands of literally Earth-sustaining enzymes that only microbes - and not Man - have.
Mother Earth can live without Man - but not without the Slime
Remove Man and the Earth would go on, in far better shape than she is right now.
Remove the microbes (and their Earth-sustaining invisibly small enzymes) while keeping all other life and soon Earth would be as barren as Mars.
If you vote Conservative or Republican, you probably don't believe any of this.
You can't.
At least not without suffering a nervous breakdown.
Like H P Lovecraft, your mental health literally depends upon believing in a rigid hierarchy with Man on the top and woman on the bottom, followed by children, darkies, the deformed, degenerates, animals, plants.
Way way way down at the very bottom are the microbial slime, the horrible slime ....
Bacteria best Humans in on/off Switches
There are many many reasons why microbes were the first,will be the last and are currently the most dominant life-form on Earth and throughout the entire Universe.
Being so very tiny, they naturally need very little food to sustain each unique individual life.
But even if all but only one of those tiny lives dies in a global holocaust , it (without need for any mate from the same species or any mate whatsoever) can quickly rebuild to incredibly huge numbers of unique individuals, in mere days and weeks - their populations can double every ten minutes, at times.
While each microbe is a perfect clone of its ancestor in theory, in practise they all differ slightly as the reproduction of anything, including life, is never near perfect.
Microbial evolution actually seems to favour imperfect reproduction by design, to widen their gene pool.
That they are usually immobile further reduces further the amount of food needed to survive.
They can get away with this kingdom-wide idleness because being basically very tiny balls, their food intake can be by non-energy-requiring (but short distance only) passive diffusion rather than by energy-needing active transport.
Thus they use far less energy in gathering in their food than any other being, further reducing their overall food intake requirement per weight.
In addition, they have learned to slow down as well as speed up reproduction - in dire times they curl up in a little hard ball and sleep for hundreds and thousands of years until more food arrives.
They will eat anything, if they must.
Each individual can't immediately eat everything - the chemical equipment to do so would require lots of material to build and lots of energy to run.
In addition, it would burst their tiny spheres ---- which are required to remain small so that the short distance force of passive diffusion of food molecules still works.
So each species and individuals has only some of the chemical machinery needed to eat strange foods and survive in hostile environs.
Collectively though they have a massive collection.
They then proceed to share this collectively huge number of machines amongst themselves by HGT --- the horizontal gifting of unique genes from microbe to microbe.
Being so small, microbes have been swept up over land and seas by the strong winds and then dropped all over the world ever since life began, quickly spreading the bounty of HGT everywhere.
But even all this won't be enough to reduce their material and energy demands down to a small enough level to survive out the normal hungry conditions of life on Earth.
So they multi task their genes - so that these genes do various food-consuming tasks only when that sort of food is about - they switch their genes' various capabilities on and off with genetic switches.
This is where so many human biologists frack up the equation.
They feel the bacteria, having no arms and legs, ears, eyes, noses, mouths etc are incredibly primitive.
The bacteria biologists seem it totally differently.
They see no on/off switches in all our wonderful complex bodies - all need to be kept turned on and fed , all the time.
The real sophistication of any microbe is that all the chemical various machinery inside are only turned on (and in the case of proteins, only grown) when needed.
Turning on a petroleum-eating enzyme only happens when petroleum is about - and the new supply of petroleum is what supplies new energy to this additional bit of energy-consuming machinery.
(In addition, perhaps, the energy-consuming glucose enzyme is turned off, because there is no glucose about to provide it energy.)
Despite our big brains, in any massive global crisis, us great big naked hairless fastidious eating humans will be among the first to starve, freeze or bake to death.
The nimble microbes will briskly shut of and turn over various genetic switches and win --- again ...
Microbial advantages : where to begin ?
Being so very tiny, they naturally need very little food to sustain each unique individual life.
But even if all but only one of those tiny lives dies in a global holocaust , it (without need for any mate from the same species or any mate whatsoever) can quickly rebuild to incredibly huge numbers of unique individuals, in mere days and weeks - their populations can double every ten minutes, at times.
While each microbe is a perfect clone of its ancestor in theory, in practise they all differ slightly as the reproduction of anything, including life, is never near perfect.
Microbial evolution actually seems to favour imperfect reproduction by design, to widen their gene pool.
Microbes turn passivity into a high artform
That they are usually immobile further reduces further the amount of food needed to survive.
They can get away with this kingdom-wide idleness because being basically very tiny balls, their food intake can be by non-energy-requiring (but short distance only) passive diffusion rather than by energy-needing active transport.
Thus they use far less energy in gathering in their food than any other being, further reducing their overall food intake requirement per weight.
In addition, they have learned to slow down as well as speed up reproduction - in dire times they curl up in a little hard ball and sleep for hundreds and thousands of years until more food arrives.
They will eat anything, if they must.
Each individual can't immediately eat everything - the chemical equipment to do so would require lots of material to build and lots of energy to run.
In addition, it would burst their tiny spheres ---- which are required to remain small so that the short distance force of passive diffusion of food molecules still works.
So each species and individuals has only some of the chemical machinery needed to eat strange foods and survive in hostile environs.
Collectively though they have a massive collection.
They then proceed to share this collectively huge number of machines amongst themselves by HGT --- the horizontal gifting of unique genes from microbe to microbe.
Being so small, microbes have been swept up over land and seas by the strong winds and then dropped all over the world ever since life began, quickly spreading the bounty of HGT everywhere.
But even all this won't be enough to reduce their material and energy demands down to a small enough level to survive out the normal hungry conditions of life on Earth.
So they multi task their genes - so that these genes do various food-consuming tasks only when that sort of food is about - they switch their genes' various capabilities on and off with genetic switches.
This is where so many human biologists frack up the equation.
They feel the bacteria, having no arms and legs, ears, eyes, noses, mouths etc are incredibly primitive.
Biologists among the bacteria see things totally differently
The bacteria biologists seem it totally differently.
They see no on/off switches in all our wonderful complex bodies - all need to be kept turned on and fed , all the time.
The real sophistication of any microbe is that all the chemical various machinery inside are only turned on (and in the case of proteins, only grown) when needed.
Turning on a petroleum-eating enzyme only happens when petroleum is about - and the new supply of petroleum is what supplies new energy to this additional bit of energy-consuming machinery.
(In addition, perhaps, the energy-consuming glucose enzyme is turned off, because there is no glucose about to provide it energy.)
Despite our big brains, in any massive global crisis, us great big naked hairless fastidious eating humans will be among the first to starve, freeze or bake to death.
The nimble microbes will briskly shut of and turn over various genetic switches and win --- again ...
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Seven - seven only - living bacteria cells discovered on Mars
Despite dozens of probes sent to Mars annually for the next forty years, no more bacteria was ever found.
How should mainstream science assess this discovery?
This is actually only my thought experiment, but the way I feel sure this news would be assessed by most scientists is that it definitely and triumphantly disproves that odious religious claim that life is unique to Earth and by extension, it disproves all religion as well.
(And, by the by, what religions, and where, ever claimed to know for sure Life only exists on Earth ? My religion likes to say that the ways of the Creator are mysterious and unrevealed in the main.)
Still, almost with one voice, the science community would sing out "Life on Mars exists, more examples will eventually be found eventually (keep those cards and grants coming in !) and Life will soon be found on other planets - potentially hundreds of millions of them throughout the Universe - some with lifeforms as multi-celled and complex as us.
All based on seven little blobs.
Whenever people - and I include scientists in that group - really really want to believe something, they will twist the few facts this way and that in their favour.
But if they really really want to dis believe something, they are just as skilled to find ways to twist the few facts against itself.
By way of example :
HGT and Endosymbiosis , two - now well established - major additions to the dog eat dog republican-conservative-free-enterprise-cum-Darwin version of Evolution were both proposed as major biological phenomena by a few scientists way back in the 1920s, albeit based on only a few well established examples.
Think of the evidence for these theories as being much better established in the 1920s than are those seven lonely bacteria cells on Mars at the top of my thought-experiment, but no where as widely established as these theories are today.
So back in the 1920s, they were not - nor could not - be dismissed as having never happened, but they were instead 'explained away' as being but 'rare' exceptions to Darwin's universal theory and so they were justified in being ignored as a consequence.
But even one sustained exception is a billion too many when it comes to any theory - it means the theory must be re-tooled ---- as those seven lonely living bacteria from Mars would do to any theory holding Life to be exclusive to this "Rare Earth".
(Let me be clear - those seven tiny blobs from Mars would force me to strongly consider Life all through the Universe as distinctly likely.)
But the real objection to these twin theories back then was that Twenties elite scientists and Twenties elite society could not abide the thought that Man (them) had not come about strictly by His own efforts, mutating His way ever upwards out of the primeval slime.
The thought that instead the supposedly primitive slime had freely offered up human complexity by horizontally inserting their genes into larger beings was unbearable to think about.
It would be like proving that some darkie slave boy had actually taught Newton the entire Theory of Gravity !
Again, may I add before hostile scientists do it for me, that these new theories were published in well regarded journals back in the 1920s.
They were not informally censored (but plenty of scientists were and still are by their lab chiefs), but only because their authors stuck to their guns, ignored their senior colleagues and shopped around for a journal editor willing to take them in.
But making something public is never the same as making it popular and thus part of mainstream science and taught to students.
This is the real power of senior elite scientists (yesteryears' rebels), to be able to prevent new ideas taking this further step --- at least until the seniors guys are all dead.
In my view, 99% of middle-aged scientists never ever change their minds about their core beliefs from their early adult years and that as a result, science only advances as fast as each new golden watch and funeral.
As I have said many times and will keep on doing so, post-Auschwitz & Penicillin science often did not really discover much that wasn't already known by 1940.
They just re-assessed its importance through new eyes.
Sometimes - often - we mean by this literally as the physically new eyes of those so young that they have no institutional history to defend.
But in this specific case, I mean that new Baby Boomer scientists metaphorically saw the world with new ideological and intellectual eyes, after growing up on the consequences of the top and bottom assaults on Modernity by Auschwitz and Penicillin...
How should mainstream science assess this discovery?
This is actually only my thought experiment, but the way I feel sure this news would be assessed by most scientists is that it definitely and triumphantly disproves that odious religious claim that life is unique to Earth and by extension, it disproves all religion as well.
Scientists, just like they are people, will do anything to hold cherished beliefs and diss fearful new ideas
(And, by the by, what religions, and where, ever claimed to know for sure Life only exists on Earth ? My religion likes to say that the ways of the Creator are mysterious and unrevealed in the main.)
Still, almost with one voice, the science community would sing out "Life on Mars exists, more examples will eventually be found eventually (keep those cards and grants coming in !) and Life will soon be found on other planets - potentially hundreds of millions of them throughout the Universe - some with lifeforms as multi-celled and complex as us.
All based on seven little blobs.
Whenever people - and I include scientists in that group - really really want to believe something, they will twist the few facts this way and that in their favour.
But if they really really want to dis believe something, they are just as skilled to find ways to twist the few facts against itself.
By way of example :
HGT and Endosymbiosis , two - now well established - major additions to the dog eat dog republican-conservative-free-enterprise-cum-Darwin version of Evolution were both proposed as major biological phenomena by a few scientists way back in the 1920s, albeit based on only a few well established examples.
Think of the evidence for these theories as being much better established in the 1920s than are those seven lonely bacteria cells on Mars at the top of my thought-experiment, but no where as widely established as these theories are today.
Science's 'rare exception' Big Lie
So back in the 1920s, they were not - nor could not - be dismissed as having never happened, but they were instead 'explained away' as being but 'rare' exceptions to Darwin's universal theory and so they were justified in being ignored as a consequence.
But even one sustained exception is a billion too many when it comes to any theory - it means the theory must be re-tooled ---- as those seven lonely living bacteria from Mars would do to any theory holding Life to be exclusive to this "Rare Earth".
(Let me be clear - those seven tiny blobs from Mars would force me to strongly consider Life all through the Universe as distinctly likely.)
But the real objection to these twin theories back then was that Twenties elite scientists and Twenties elite society could not abide the thought that Man (them) had not come about strictly by His own efforts, mutating His way ever upwards out of the primeval slime.
The thought that instead the supposedly primitive slime had freely offered up human complexity by horizontally inserting their genes into larger beings was unbearable to think about.
It would be like proving that some darkie slave boy had actually taught Newton the entire Theory of Gravity !
Public is not Popular - that is where Science censors
Again, may I add before hostile scientists do it for me, that these new theories were published in well regarded journals back in the 1920s.
They were not informally censored (but plenty of scientists were and still are by their lab chiefs), but only because their authors stuck to their guns, ignored their senior colleagues and shopped around for a journal editor willing to take them in.
But making something public is never the same as making it popular and thus part of mainstream science and taught to students.
This is the real power of senior elite scientists (yesteryears' rebels), to be able to prevent new ideas taking this further step --- at least until the seniors guys are all dead.
In my view, 99% of middle-aged scientists never ever change their minds about their core beliefs from their early adult years and that as a result, science only advances as fast as each new golden watch and funeral.
Post 1945 science reassesses the old in light of Penicillin & Auschwitz twin shocks
As I have said many times and will keep on doing so, post-Auschwitz & Penicillin science often did not really discover much that wasn't already known by 1940.
They just re-assessed its importance through new eyes.
Sometimes - often - we mean by this literally as the physically new eyes of those so young that they have no institutional history to defend.
But in this specific case, I mean that new Baby Boomer scientists metaphorically saw the world with new ideological and intellectual eyes, after growing up on the consequences of the top and bottom assaults on Modernity by Auschwitz and Penicillin...
12 photos of Martin Henry Dawson from the 5 decades of his life
From conception to premature death, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, 1896-1945, was on this earth for half a century and I have found a dozen or so photos of him (below this brief intro),
with at least one from each decade of his life.
He was a very serious and very studious man.
Very diffident, polite and modest in his dealings with his seniors (a man easily and perpetually under-estimated) but earnest and intense in public presentations and in private he had a dry biting wit and could always see the ironic humour in various situations.
Almost all the photos that I have found to date, from a wide array of social settings, reflect that that he seemed to have been inwardly serious from a very young age.
It may be that his facial appearance reenforced this part of his nature - compared to his parents and four older brothers, he was noticeably wider in the jawline than them, even as a child.
But his family did find one photo of him relaxed, laughing and holding a drink. And not surprising for a young boy from a very pious evangelical Presbyterian family who went away to the trenches of WWI, he even sometimes played poker and let the other players call him "Hank"!
His wive Marjorie was the near total opposite, a social charmer and so a good foil to Henry, usually able to get him to unbend and laugh.
with at least one from each decade of his life.
He was a very serious and very studious man.
Very diffident, polite and modest in his dealings with his seniors (a man easily and perpetually under-estimated) but earnest and intense in public presentations and in private he had a dry biting wit and could always see the ironic humour in various situations.
Almost all the photos that I have found to date, from a wide array of social settings, reflect that that he seemed to have been inwardly serious from a very young age.
It may be that his facial appearance reenforced this part of his nature - compared to his parents and four older brothers, he was noticeably wider in the jawline than them, even as a child.
But his family did find one photo of him relaxed, laughing and holding a drink. And not surprising for a young boy from a very pious evangelical Presbyterian family who went away to the trenches of WWI, he even sometimes played poker and let the other players call him "Hank"!
His wive Marjorie was the near total opposite, a social charmer and so a good foil to Henry, usually able to get him to unbend and laugh.
 |
| Young Martin Henry Dawson in the early 1900s |
 |
| McGill Resident 1920s Martin Henry Dawson |
 |
| very sick Martin Henry Dawson, age 45, May 1942 |
 |
| Martin Henry Dawson McGill 1919 |
 |
| Yearbook Business Manager Martin Henry Dawson 1912 |
 |
| Martin Henry Dawson 1915 Cdn Medical Corps |
 |
| 1916 soldier Martin Henry Dawson |
 |
| Martin Henry Dawson McGill Med grad 1923 |
 |
| 1936 Passport Martin Henry Dawson |
 |
| relaxed Martin Henry Dawson late 1930s |
 |
| Blackstone portrait Martin Henry Dawson 1938 |
 |
| to attract Society patients 1938 Martin Henry Dawson |
Modernity, R.I.P. 1945 : its delusions destroyed by human scientific "magical thinking" at the top and "microbial intelligence" at the bottom
Germany was long considered both the most scientific and the most cultured of all major human civilizations --- the very apogee of Modernity.
Proof positive, proclaimed Modernity's leading lights, that all the intelligence and civility in the Tree of Life was at the very top among the leading human nations --- and that all its stupidity and murderous intent was at the very bottom with the pathogenic microbes.
Until WWII, when Germany scientists, along with the Allies, totally failed to best the microbes' intelligence when it came to making life-saving penicillin.
We can't synthesize penicillin anywhere near as easily, safely and cheaply as the humble fungus slime can - and that's still the case seventy five years on.
Probably nobody in Germany noticed this failure, because its leading scientists and intellectuals were indulging themselves instead in some wildly magical thinking.
Theses "smartest beings in the universe" somehow deluded themselves - without any scientific evidence - that their murderous draining of Europe's gene poll of all its Jews, Roma, Gays, Handicapped, Socialists, etc could only make Germany bigger and smarter, not smaller and stupider.
These twin failures doomed Germany ----- and all Modernity.
Its Era of Exclusion ended and our present Era of Inclusion began....
Proof positive, proclaimed Modernity's leading lights, that all the intelligence and civility in the Tree of Life was at the very top among the leading human nations --- and that all its stupidity and murderous intent was at the very bottom with the pathogenic microbes.
Microbial "Intelligence"
Until WWII, when Germany scientists, along with the Allies, totally failed to best the microbes' intelligence when it came to making life-saving penicillin.
We can't synthesize penicillin anywhere near as easily, safely and cheaply as the humble fungus slime can - and that's still the case seventy five years on.
Probably nobody in Germany noticed this failure, because its leading scientists and intellectuals were indulging themselves instead in some wildly magical thinking.
Scientific "Magical" Thinking
Theses "smartest beings in the universe" somehow deluded themselves - without any scientific evidence - that their murderous draining of Europe's gene poll of all its Jews, Roma, Gays, Handicapped, Socialists, etc could only make Germany bigger and smarter, not smaller and stupider.
These twin failures doomed Germany ----- and all Modernity.
Its Era of Exclusion ended and our present Era of Inclusion began....
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
How scientistst lick ass to prosper : Koch's Postulates (for help making microbes look stupid as your bosses need them to be)
Most of pre-Auschwitz "Mainstream Science" (not its technology - its technology was wonderful !) was Junk Science.
Modernist Mainstream Science, to put it in military terms, secured its place at the right hand of Civilization's throne by successfully mis-interpreting (at the strategic/big picture level) the new data it gathered up so accurately at the operational and tactical level.
Rather like Hitler's military, it won every battle and lost every war.
The superstructure upon which the whole fragile edifice of Modernity uneasily rested was a false and artificial separation of the stupid self-replicating blobs of culture-destroying protein (germs) at the bottom
versus the big complex culture-making and culture-bearing human civilizations at the top.
It had long seemed that the very best way to prove that the top human civilizations had a right to enslave the human beings slightly below them was to focus our attention away from those unfortunate humans and turn our eyes instead towards the supposedly stupid, evil and primitive little blobs at the very bottom of life, originating from the very start of life.
Seen this way, Progress was the steady growing ever upwards growth from stupid little killers to big intelligent culture-producing civilizations, with our morals growing in tandem.
(Against this is the facts as we know them today - but also 'publicly' known but not 'popularly known' in the those pre-Auschwitz days - that much of what allowed trees , animals and human to grow to the size they have, were the results of the direct horizontal gifting of unaltered unimproved microbial genes into these larger beings.)
So the powerful desperately needed someone like Koch who ripped microbes out of their parallel complex little multi-species civilizations and stuck pure samples of them in laboratory oceans of water and then convincing shout out"there - see! - I told you ! - solitary planktonic blobs, totally incapable of any social or complex behavior."
Koch had his critics then, people unknown today - who showed that microbes were capable of complex behavior - but their voices were never raised up in honour and taught to every school kid - very far from it.
I am struck - or and over - that almost all the so called "new" discoveries about just how sophisticated and intelligent microbes are were in fact discovered much much earlier.
Very pre-Auschwitz, even published in the scientific literature, but all ignored and dismissed by the elites of mainstream modernist science.
Most of those elite scientists are long forgotten nonentities today, but in their day they made good coin by routinely dismissing any new scientific idea that threatened the mental universe of the rich and powerful.
They trafficked - mostly - in what I call 'popular science' not 'published science'.
For almost any well researched scientific effort by a determined scientist would eventually find some sort of home in published science, even back then.
Home or tomb - in practise, anything scientifically threatening won't be censored but merely deeply buried in some well regarded but narrow little scientific journal read by a hundred specialists in just one country.
To become 'popularly known' in scientific terms, your article had first to be not just published in a handful of leading global journals but also mentioned in the editorial pages of those same journals - the only bits of those leading journals likely to be read by most scientists around the world.
Even more importantly, your vision has to be subscribed to by the scientifically powerful who are always being quoted in the New York Times, the Daily Express, Life Magazine and the like; the men who wrote the leading textbooks taught to new generations of scientists and to the new generations of teachers of undergrads and high school kids.
In other words, your vision had to become part of the doggerel of science known to all even half educated people worldwide.
And not much socially subversive stuff passed through that narrow needle.
The holders of that needle, after all, were hired and maintained by the world's powerful.
And what those powerful wanted most was a worldview that said the surface of Reality (their known visible world) was indeed as complex and as unpredictable as they feared but that reassuringly the deep structure of reality below them really was simple-minded, knowable, controllable.
In a word, not just the aboriginal but also the atom was perfectly enslave-able.
And that given enough time and resources, Reality's deep structure's simplicity and order can be re-stored to the surface of Reality as well.
Scientists generally then voted Conservative and Republican back then, just as most today vote Democrat and Liberal-Socialist.
That was because voting and thinking Conservative was precisely how most got hired as fulltime tenured academic scientists in the first place, at a time when such jobs were as rare as hen's teeth and the hiring bodies for them were controlled by the rich and powerful.
To keep their sinecures, they like Koch knew they had to sing for their supper - a task made much easier by the fact that most of them genuinely thought as a Conservative, not just play-acted as such....
Modernist Mainstream Science, to put it in military terms, secured its place at the right hand of Civilization's throne by successfully mis-interpreting (at the strategic/big picture level) the new data it gathered up so accurately at the operational and tactical level.
Rather like Hitler's military, it won every battle and lost every war.
The superstructure upon which the whole fragile edifice of Modernity uneasily rested was a false and artificial separation of the stupid self-replicating blobs of culture-destroying protein (germs) at the bottom
versus the big complex culture-making and culture-bearing human civilizations at the top.
It had long seemed that the very best way to prove that the top human civilizations had a right to enslave the human beings slightly below them was to focus our attention away from those unfortunate humans and turn our eyes instead towards the supposedly stupid, evil and primitive little blobs at the very bottom of life, originating from the very start of life.
Seen this way, Progress was the steady growing ever upwards growth from stupid little killers to big intelligent culture-producing civilizations, with our morals growing in tandem.
(Against this is the facts as we know them today - but also 'publicly' known but not 'popularly known' in the those pre-Auschwitz days - that much of what allowed trees , animals and human to grow to the size they have, were the results of the direct horizontal gifting of unaltered unimproved microbial genes into these larger beings.)
So the powerful desperately needed someone like Koch who ripped microbes out of their parallel complex little multi-species civilizations and stuck pure samples of them in laboratory oceans of water and then convincing shout out"there - see! - I told you ! - solitary planktonic blobs, totally incapable of any social or complex behavior."
Koch had his critics then, people unknown today - who showed that microbes were capable of complex behavior - but their voices were never raised up in honour and taught to every school kid - very far from it.
I am struck - or and over - that almost all the so called "new" discoveries about just how sophisticated and intelligent microbes are were in fact discovered much much earlier.
Very pre-Auschwitz, even published in the scientific literature, but all ignored and dismissed by the elites of mainstream modernist science.
Most of those elite scientists are long forgotten nonentities today, but in their day they made good coin by routinely dismissing any new scientific idea that threatened the mental universe of the rich and powerful.
They trafficked - mostly - in what I call 'popular science' not 'published science'.
For almost any well researched scientific effort by a determined scientist would eventually find some sort of home in published science, even back then.
Home or tomb - in practise, anything scientifically threatening won't be censored but merely deeply buried in some well regarded but narrow little scientific journal read by a hundred specialists in just one country.
To become 'popularly known' in scientific terms, your article had first to be not just published in a handful of leading global journals but also mentioned in the editorial pages of those same journals - the only bits of those leading journals likely to be read by most scientists around the world.
Even more importantly, your vision has to be subscribed to by the scientifically powerful who are always being quoted in the New York Times, the Daily Express, Life Magazine and the like; the men who wrote the leading textbooks taught to new generations of scientists and to the new generations of teachers of undergrads and high school kids.
In other words, your vision had to become part of the doggerel of science known to all even half educated people worldwide.
And not much socially subversive stuff passed through that narrow needle.
The holders of that needle, after all, were hired and maintained by the world's powerful.
And what those powerful wanted most was a worldview that said the surface of Reality (their known visible world) was indeed as complex and as unpredictable as they feared but that reassuringly the deep structure of reality below them really was simple-minded, knowable, controllable.
In a word, not just the aboriginal but also the atom was perfectly enslave-able.
And that given enough time and resources, Reality's deep structure's simplicity and order can be re-stored to the surface of Reality as well.
Scientists generally then voted Conservative and Republican back then, just as most today vote Democrat and Liberal-Socialist.
That was because voting and thinking Conservative was precisely how most got hired as fulltime tenured academic scientists in the first place, at a time when such jobs were as rare as hen's teeth and the hiring bodies for them were controlled by the rich and powerful.
To keep their sinecures, they like Koch knew they had to sing for their supper - a task made much easier by the fact that most of them genuinely thought as a Conservative, not just play-acted as such....
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
antivivisectionists among Modernity's earliest, loudest critics - supporters of microbial intelligence among its last, quietest ---- and most effective
Life-saving doctors killing and inflicting pain upon the weakest of sentient beings (animals) in the interests of "Science" began in the 1850s with Claude Bernard.
It thus well proceeded life-saving doctors doing the same to the weakest of humanity (the poor, weak and minorities) in the name of "Eugenics" beginning in the 1910s.
I use scare quotes around Science and Eugenics to emphasize that we must always ask who is really being served and who is being hurt in all these interactions, not just take the claims of their proponents as face value that they are merely furthering abstract causes.
What it is worth noting is that Eugenics in its heyday never received anything like the fierce public opposition than vivisection got in its prolonged heyday (which indeed is still underway more than 150 years after it first began.)
But anti-vivisection soon ran up against its own limits.
It always faced a hard sell in rural areas, at a time when rural populations were much larger than today and when the virtues of rural values over big city values were taught as given truths.
Rurals routinely killed pests, as well as partaking in the mass killing of animals for food from fishing, hunting and agriculture. More importantly, they treated long term farm animals from laying hens and milk cows to plow horses and oxen like broken old machinery.
To be quickly disposed of when too old to work and produce, or when potential vets bills exceeded their future worth.
Rural people knew they acted a lot like pro-vivisectional scientists at these times.
Groups of scientists fiercely defending the killing of lowly animals in experiments designed to benefit only their killers, no matter how painless the experiments and deaths supposedly are supposed to be, is the far side of the coin from groups of scientists regarding the lowly microbes capable of forms of intelligence and complexity at times superior to that of civilized mankind.
For all that science and medicine was dominated in the years of Modernity by pro-vivisectional and pro-eugenics sentiment, it is well to remember that smaller numbers were seeing the weakest forms of life in a far far different light.
Dr Howard Florey was in the first camp with Dr Henry Dawson in the latter.
I am sure this added an extra intensity over their conflict as to how best to deliver massive amounts of penicillin to a hurting world at war.
Florey touted civilized Man as the only possible route while Dawson said that it is just possible that the weak little fungus slime might do the job better, faster, cheaper.
Florey failed totally but got the Nobel prize anyway (because it is well known that the Nobel Committees' toast always lands butter side down).
Dawson's method is actually what delivered the war's live-saving penicillin in the nick of time and is still the way we produce the base of almost all our live-saving antibiotics, seventy five years on.
We must accept that one hundred and fifty years of strong antivivisectionist protests didn't lay a glove on Modernity.
Instead a combo of Auschwitz's life-destroying disaster at the top and the triumph of life-saving penicillin and other other microbe-produced antibiotics at the bottom killed Modernity stone dead in twenty years, around the mid-Sixties.
And interesting date, that.
Because with it, it is now possible to connect all three movements.
A growing belief in microbial intelligence, starting in the mid-sixties with a renewed interest in microbial symbiosis and bacterial HGT, means regarding the lives of the microbes at the very bottom of life as still being as worthy of as much respect as the civilized man at the top of Modernity.
Just as anti-vivisectionists have always regarded mid-level life, animals, as having lives worthy of as much respect as civilized man at the top of Modernity.
These beliefs in turn became the moral and ethical basement under the post-Auschwitz opposition to eugenics.
That grew, by the mid 1960s, into the movement for extending full rights to all humans - such as aboriginals, people of color, women, children, gays , the handicapped, the poor etc.
All traditionally regarded as unworthy lives at the bottom of Modernity's pecking order, but now regarded as lives worthy of having as much respect as civilized man at the very top of Modernity.
In ordering all this by a sort of dateline, I believe that the popularly supported and renewed campaign for animals rights followed , by about thirty years, the success of human rights campaigns.
Those campaigns in turn followed the growing belief among child boomers that the microbes at the bottom of life were a whole lot smarter and a whole lot nicer than Civilized Man at the top (insert here Hiroshima and Auschwitz).
Far nicer and far smarter than their modernist grandparents had ever accepted....
It thus well proceeded life-saving doctors doing the same to the weakest of humanity (the poor, weak and minorities) in the name of "Eugenics" beginning in the 1910s.
I use scare quotes around Science and Eugenics to emphasize that we must always ask who is really being served and who is being hurt in all these interactions, not just take the claims of their proponents as face value that they are merely furthering abstract causes.
What it is worth noting is that Eugenics in its heyday never received anything like the fierce public opposition than vivisection got in its prolonged heyday (which indeed is still underway more than 150 years after it first began.)
But anti-vivisection soon ran up against its own limits.
It always faced a hard sell in rural areas, at a time when rural populations were much larger than today and when the virtues of rural values over big city values were taught as given truths.
Rurals routinely killed pests, as well as partaking in the mass killing of animals for food from fishing, hunting and agriculture. More importantly, they treated long term farm animals from laying hens and milk cows to plow horses and oxen like broken old machinery.
To be quickly disposed of when too old to work and produce, or when potential vets bills exceeded their future worth.
Rural people knew they acted a lot like pro-vivisectional scientists at these times.
Groups of scientists fiercely defending the killing of lowly animals in experiments designed to benefit only their killers, no matter how painless the experiments and deaths supposedly are supposed to be, is the far side of the coin from groups of scientists regarding the lowly microbes capable of forms of intelligence and complexity at times superior to that of civilized mankind.
For all that science and medicine was dominated in the years of Modernity by pro-vivisectional and pro-eugenics sentiment, it is well to remember that smaller numbers were seeing the weakest forms of life in a far far different light.
Triumph of wartime natural penicillin, set against civilized disasters of Auschwitz & Hiroshima
Dr Howard Florey was in the first camp with Dr Henry Dawson in the latter.
I am sure this added an extra intensity over their conflict as to how best to deliver massive amounts of penicillin to a hurting world at war.
Florey touted civilized Man as the only possible route while Dawson said that it is just possible that the weak little fungus slime might do the job better, faster, cheaper.
Florey failed totally but got the Nobel prize anyway (because it is well known that the Nobel Committees' toast always lands butter side down).
Dawson's method is actually what delivered the war's live-saving penicillin in the nick of time and is still the way we produce the base of almost all our live-saving antibiotics, seventy five years on.
We must accept that one hundred and fifty years of strong antivivisectionist protests didn't lay a glove on Modernity.
Instead a combo of Auschwitz's life-destroying disaster at the top and the triumph of life-saving penicillin and other other microbe-produced antibiotics at the bottom killed Modernity stone dead in twenty years, around the mid-Sixties.
And interesting date, that.
Because with it, it is now possible to connect all three movements.
Auschwitz and Penicillin led Boomers in time to fill Human Rights campaigns, followed by Animal Rights campaigns...
A growing belief in microbial intelligence, starting in the mid-sixties with a renewed interest in microbial symbiosis and bacterial HGT, means regarding the lives of the microbes at the very bottom of life as still being as worthy of as much respect as the civilized man at the top of Modernity.
These beliefs in turn became the moral and ethical basement under the post-Auschwitz opposition to eugenics.
That grew, by the mid 1960s, into the movement for extending full rights to all humans - such as aboriginals, people of color, women, children, gays , the handicapped, the poor etc.
All traditionally regarded as unworthy lives at the bottom of Modernity's pecking order, but now regarded as lives worthy of having as much respect as civilized man at the very top of Modernity.
In ordering all this by a sort of dateline, I believe that the popularly supported and renewed campaign for animals rights followed , by about thirty years, the success of human rights campaigns.
Those campaigns in turn followed the growing belief among child boomers that the microbes at the bottom of life were a whole lot smarter and a whole lot nicer than Civilized Man at the top (insert here Hiroshima and Auschwitz).
Far nicer and far smarter than their modernist grandparents had ever accepted....
'Gene Pool' dates from after Auschwitz, says NGRAM VIEWER
Google's wonderful little Ngram Viewer lets you plot variations in the number of published references to a term over time.
Its results are not perfect but usually strongly suggestive.
It says it could find no references to the use of the term "gene pool" until the early 1950s (but does find scientist L C Dunn using it in a 1946 book).
This confirms my sense that the term was very rare before Auschwitz because the concept behind the term was viewed negatively until then.
Viewed negatively by almost all, except for a few old fashioned fundy-duddys like GK Chesterton.
Certainly viewed negatively by almost every 'with it' 'up to date' modern progressive educated member of the middle class.
They assumed we be much better off if we sharply decreased the variety of genes within the human gene pool, while at the same time increasing the absolute numbers of the people holding the few - 'the right' - remaining genes.
Popular Eugenics, whatever the setbacks among the leading genetics research centres scientific eugenic research was currently experiencing,was becoming more and more popular (not less and less) right up to at least 1943.
Segregating the genes, not pooling them, was the progressive mantra in those besotted pre-Auschwitz days.
Only a few boldly claimed that greater diversity led to greater productivity and creativity - that only with the help from all, could there be hope for all in times of global crisis.
The global middle class mind, circa 1939, was like a close parachute, preparing to jump out of a plane : little wonder then for the six years of disasters that followed....
Its results are not perfect but usually strongly suggestive.
It says it could find no references to the use of the term "gene pool" until the early 1950s (but does find scientist L C Dunn using it in a 1946 book).
This confirms my sense that the term was very rare before Auschwitz because the concept behind the term was viewed negatively until then.
Viewed negatively by almost all, except for a few old fashioned fundy-duddys like GK Chesterton.
Certainly viewed negatively by almost every 'with it' 'up to date' modern progressive educated member of the middle class.
They assumed we be much better off if we sharply decreased the variety of genes within the human gene pool, while at the same time increasing the absolute numbers of the people holding the few - 'the right' - remaining genes.
Popular Eugenics, whatever the setbacks among the leading genetics research centres scientific eugenic research was currently experiencing,was becoming more and more popular (not less and less) right up to at least 1943.
Segregating the genes, not pooling them, was the progressive mantra in those besotted pre-Auschwitz days.
Only a few boldly claimed that greater diversity led to greater productivity and creativity - that only with the help from all, could there be hope for all in times of global crisis.
The global middle class mind, circa 1939, was like a close parachute, preparing to jump out of a plane : little wonder then for the six years of disasters that followed....
How closed-minded is YOUR parachute ?
As Liverpool's Hugh Mosher reminds us (and the wartime 'natural or synthetic' penicillin battle between Henry Dawson and Howard Florey rather confirms) our minds are like parachutes.
They can only save lives when they are fully open - while a closed mind, like a WWII closed parachute, totally fails to save...
They can only save lives when they are fully open - while a closed mind, like a WWII closed parachute, totally fails to save...
Monday, April 18, 2016
Dynamic racially "impure" Manhattan : Sterile racially "pure" Auschwitz
Hitler, along with much of the educated world at the time, felt that America was certain to go down the tubes because of its free and easy racial mixing, above all in Manhattan.
Hitler was convinced that once his murderous programs had made Germany fully Aryan and fully racially pure, it would soar even higher than it already had, in culture and in technology.
The results of WWII - and the seventy years since - hasn't confirmed those beliefs, far from it.
By contrast, during that same time period Henry Dawson encouraged DIY penicillin by all and sundry, convinced that only that would spur the production of "impure" natural penicillin needed to help a war torn world crying out for succour.
He felt sure that greatest possible amount of diversity was in and of itself highly dynamic and creative.
His mantra was along the line of "with help from all, there hope for all".
Today, as we face an even greater global crisis than WWII, it still looks like a rule to live - and to go on living - by .....
Hitler was convinced that once his murderous programs had made Germany fully Aryan and fully racially pure, it would soar even higher than it already had, in culture and in technology.
The results of WWII - and the seventy years since - hasn't confirmed those beliefs, far from it.
Draining the gene pool never makes you smarter - just dumber
By contrast, during that same time period Henry Dawson encouraged DIY penicillin by all and sundry, convinced that only that would spur the production of "impure" natural penicillin needed to help a war torn world crying out for succour.
He felt sure that greatest possible amount of diversity was in and of itself highly dynamic and creative.
His mantra was along the line of "with help from all, there hope for all".
Today, as we face an even greater global crisis than WWII, it still looks like a rule to live - and to go on living - by .....
Aristocracy as the thermosetting plastic of social positions
The first person in any exalted aristocratic line got there by doing something notable, at least in the eyes of then currently powerful.
But those talented people's children and children's children needn't do something notable to retain that exalted position.
That after all is the whole point of any aristocracy : it is the outward physical expression of a secret mental belief in the sheer randomness of great talent and of the rare chance that a particular great talent will be in perfect sync with the wishes of the contemporary powerful.
Only the hotly talented ( think of them as hot Bakelite) are poured into the initial mold of a particular aristocratic lineage but soon the family talent cools and hardens into dumb rigid solidity.
From then on, the lineage remains permanently in the shape of the original heroic mold, no matter how thick and useless is the actual current title holder.
A title, rather than transient wealth, is the permanent legacy given to one's offspring by the talented who know that statistically, their offspring are likely to be far less talented than they.
Titles are still around, as big, if not bigger, than ever.
But no longer is it Sir William Howard of Oxfordshire --- now it is Dr W Howard, PhD (Oxford University) .....
But those talented people's children and children's children needn't do something notable to retain that exalted position.
That after all is the whole point of any aristocracy : it is the outward physical expression of a secret mental belief in the sheer randomness of great talent and of the rare chance that a particular great talent will be in perfect sync with the wishes of the contemporary powerful.
The Bakelite of Heredity
Only the hotly talented ( think of them as hot Bakelite) are poured into the initial mold of a particular aristocratic lineage but soon the family talent cools and hardens into dumb rigid solidity.
From then on, the lineage remains permanently in the shape of the original heroic mold, no matter how thick and useless is the actual current title holder.
A title, rather than transient wealth, is the permanent legacy given to one's offspring by the talented who know that statistically, their offspring are likely to be far less talented than they.
Titles are still around, as big, if not bigger, than ever.
But no longer is it Sir William Howard of Oxfordshire --- now it is Dr W Howard, PhD (Oxford University) .....
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Future Nobel for Soren Overballe-Petersen ?
Followers of this blog will know that Henry Dawson began pushing the importance of the fact that bacteria could take up loose bits of genetic material (now known to be DNA) from their environment and incorporate in their genome, way back in 1928.
Dr Overballe-Petersen claimed much the same thing in 2013, eighty five years later.
So why should the world even care ---- let alone give the man not just a medal, but the most valued medal around ?
There are at least a hundred different strains of strep pneumonia bacteria, based simply on their differing outer wall of sugar slime alone, and Dawson and others showed that if any one strain was left alone with the dead bodies of any other strain, it would soon have outer walls of the exact same composition as those of the specific dead bacteria.
Even in the inadequate genetic knowledge of the 1920s, that could only mean the living bacteria flawlessly taking up the entire and exact gene off the dead bacteria - genes were known not to be swiss army knives or all purpose entities but rather highly specific things - bungle them a tiny tiny bit and they don't work.
Dawson probably focussed his promoting of the importance of this activity on what it revealed of the unexpected sophistication of the supposedly stupid microbe ---- rather than what their taking up of random genes from the environment could mean for evolution.
After all, he could only see the results of entire genes being taken up and then used as intended but in a different being.
He might have suspected bacteria might take up bits of others' genes and use them in new altered ways, but the technology back then was far too primitive to see those sort of events.
Eventually, seventy years later, it was increasingly accepted that many microbes take up DNA from all sorts of beings and slipped them into all sorts of beings - in both cases, that includes us.
But it was still thought that, more or less as Dawson had observed, that they only took the rare big - hence new - pieces of fragile DNA and put them into their genome --- the far more abundant smaller (ie older) bits they simply ate.
Enter young Danish post-doc Overballe-Petersen and the question he sought to answer:
"Let us check to see if all of the short bits of DNA are simply eaten or are some also taken up into the genome."
After all, Soren reasoned, while short bits of DNA are far too short to hold entire genes they are plenty long enough to hold things like stop and start buttons - and putting those buttons in places where they have never been before sometime gives us entirely new genes, not just an old gene in a new place.
He found (probably much to his own surprise and soon rising excitement) that indeed they did.
Not just short new undamaged pieces either but short damaged new pieces and short ancient pieces and even short, ancient and damaged pieces.
So, an extinct Ice Age animal could die and its DNA lie frozen in the ice for tens of thousands of years, then river melt waters could carry it down to the soil home of present day bacteria, hundreds of miles away, tens of thousands of years later, in another kingdom of the Dominion of Life - and still be put into the bacteria's genome and do something.
And on a rare occasion, even do something quite new and quite useful - driving the entire course of global Evolution.
No wonder the tiny weak microbes survived for four billion years - Overballe revealed that all the world's genome, past and present, near and far, whole or damaged was part of their own personal scrapyard of DNA.
Huge new scientific visas now open up in front of us --- all because young Soren dared ask, and then answer, an unexpected question ...
Dr Overballe-Petersen claimed much the same thing in 2013, eighty five years later.
So why should the world even care ---- let alone give the man not just a medal, but the most valued medal around ?
There are at least a hundred different strains of strep pneumonia bacteria, based simply on their differing outer wall of sugar slime alone, and Dawson and others showed that if any one strain was left alone with the dead bodies of any other strain, it would soon have outer walls of the exact same composition as those of the specific dead bacteria.
Even in the inadequate genetic knowledge of the 1920s, that could only mean the living bacteria flawlessly taking up the entire and exact gene off the dead bacteria - genes were known not to be swiss army knives or all purpose entities but rather highly specific things - bungle them a tiny tiny bit and they don't work.
Dawson probably focussed his promoting of the importance of this activity on what it revealed of the unexpected sophistication of the supposedly stupid microbe ---- rather than what their taking up of random genes from the environment could mean for evolution.
After all, he could only see the results of entire genes being taken up and then used as intended but in a different being.
He might have suspected bacteria might take up bits of others' genes and use them in new altered ways, but the technology back then was far too primitive to see those sort of events.
Eventually, seventy years later, it was increasingly accepted that many microbes take up DNA from all sorts of beings and slipped them into all sorts of beings - in both cases, that includes us.
But it was still thought that, more or less as Dawson had observed, that they only took the rare big - hence new - pieces of fragile DNA and put them into their genome --- the far more abundant smaller (ie older) bits they simply ate.
Enter young Danish post-doc Overballe-Petersen and the question he sought to answer:
"Let us check to see if all of the short bits of DNA are simply eaten or are some also taken up into the genome."
After all, Soren reasoned, while short bits of DNA are far too short to hold entire genes they are plenty long enough to hold things like stop and start buttons - and putting those buttons in places where they have never been before sometime gives us entirely new genes, not just an old gene in a new place.
He found (probably much to his own surprise and soon rising excitement) that indeed they did.
Not just short new undamaged pieces either but short damaged new pieces and short ancient pieces and even short, ancient and damaged pieces.
So, an extinct Ice Age animal could die and its DNA lie frozen in the ice for tens of thousands of years, then river melt waters could carry it down to the soil home of present day bacteria, hundreds of miles away, tens of thousands of years later, in another kingdom of the Dominion of Life - and still be put into the bacteria's genome and do something.
And on a rare occasion, even do something quite new and quite useful - driving the entire course of global Evolution.
No wonder the tiny weak microbes survived for four billion years - Overballe revealed that all the world's genome, past and present, near and far, whole or damaged was part of their own personal scrapyard of DNA.
Huge new scientific visas now open up in front of us --- all because young Soren dared ask, and then answer, an unexpected question ...
Henry Dawson, Scientific 'Persister'
First, let me explain my little in-house joke.
You see, "persister" bacteria were first discovered by Gladys Hobby and others, while working as part of Henry Dawson's wartime "impure penicillin" team.
And so perhaps discovered by Dr Dawson as well. Though his name wasn't on the original paper, as he was away receiving major medical treatment when it was first publicly presented.
The concept of "persisters" is fairly well known in Science - but only among microbes, not among scientists themselves.
In early 1942, Dr Hobby had discovered than no matter how much penicillin was poured onto bacteria ordinarily very vulnerable to it and for no matter how long - a tiny percentage always seemed to survive and re-emerge later once treatment was ended.
It was a valuable - and totally new - explanation as to why some germs could resist attacks not just from penicillin and other drugs but also from the body itself and so go on to create chronic or reoccurring infections.
In the Dawson team's mind, one such important chronic illness was the SBE disease they were trying so hard to cure with their home-brewed penicillin.
Sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, as its name suggests, is a long term low grade infection of the heart valves that always ended in the premature death of the patient.
SBE was the key reason why the various diseases associated with Rheumatic Fever made it so much dreaded before 1960 as the leading killer of school age children.
In the case of SBE, the persisters survived on the valves of the heart in biofilms then called vegetations.
Persister-survivors (they are found all through the Kingdom of Life - including we humans) are a big part of the reason so many diseases soon resist the antibiotic that was discovered to cure them completely only a few years earlier.
They don't get the attention they deserve because scientific journalists are currently fixated on HGT, the horizontal spreading of genes (including those of antibiotic resistance to antibiotics) rapidly all through the microbe world.
HGT is done by microbes - and only by microbes - though much of their work with it is claimed as being done/invented/discovered by us humans.
From bacterial PCR to bacterial CRISPR, (superstars on Wall Street and with government funding agencies) we act as if we invented this stuff - we did not - it all came about due to Dawson's persistent and lonely promoting of bacteria's use of HGT as something very very very important, from 1928 onwards.
Yes, HGT was not discovered by Dawson but rather by the very-reluctant-to-publish and doubting Fred Griffiths.
But it was only made widely known to the scientific world through the dogged persistence of 'persister' Dawson, against a strong headwind of elite scientist resistance, resistance that is by no means dead today.
I have discovered that his campaign of new articles and talking it up alone kept the concept of HGT alive, at least between mid 1928 to at least late 1943 (he died soon after), when very very few were interested and none of them ever produced more than one article on it.
Now Dawson is considered to have discovered a few important biological events - in particular Quorum Sensing : the chemical and electric communication between large populations of bacteria - even between widely different species.
But in general, Dawson didn't discover things --- rather he persistently connected together a lot of microbial events that were not connected by their discoverers and not treated as at all important in themselves by all others.
The pioneering and persistent Dawson was in very early - and stayed in - on now-important matters like HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-Form Bacteria, Biofilms and Persisters.
(In Dawson talk, he worked on the R,S,M,L,V and P forms of oral commensal Strep ---- in a very narrow farrow, he plowed very deep indeed.)
(For example : not just in curing the incurable and always fatal SBE, but also being the first in history to inject penicillin into the bloodstream of a human patient, thus birthing our Age of Antibiotics.)
All these various biological activities are just some of the ways that Life's smallest and weakest beings have - nevertheless - survived for four billion years against all that has been thrown at them.
They all form part of what is now called Microbial Intelligence.
Again, Dawson didn't discover penicillin - that was the work of another reluctant Briton , Alexander Fleming.
All Dawson did was to quickly put it to work saving lives right away, unlike Fleming, and in publishing all his results early and widely.
Even (or even particularly) his failures.
We honor - way way too much - the first person to get a discovery into print because confirming that publication date is easy (and lazy) scientific journalism.
Even when ,like Griffiths, the discovery was only published because a friend threatened to do so himself. if Griffiths did not.
Griffiths did nothing more with HGT.
We totally fail to do the hard work needed to properly honour those who labour hard to make something useful out of scientific discoveries that are so new and unexpected that almost no one - including their discoverer - realizes they are epoch-launching.
The Nobel Prize for the rushed wartime mass production development of life-saving natural penicillin (at a time when it was really needed )should not of gone to either Fleming or Ernst Chain, though it should have fulsomely praised their efforts.
It should have gone to Howard Florey, as it did, for persistently pushing penicillin against much early scientific and medical indifference.
But also to Dawson, for persistently pushing the ultimately successful natural penicillin route as all that was needed - now! - to save lives today!
He was the one who got then-tiny Pfizer to make natural penicillin -and notably, they alone made over 80% of WWII's penicillin.
Dawson persisted in this, even while dying of a terrible disease.
Persisted against the now-powerfully-allied Florey and Florey's useless and harmful obsession with first producing commercial synthetic penicillin (something which has never yet happened) even at the cost of failing to mass produce penicillin in time to save a starving stressed out world at war.
Dawson was dogged and dull and while dogged is always welcome in news stories and myths, dull is never popular.
Florey was very colorful, very ambitious, very sharp-edged as well as very persistent - and while he never really achieved much of world importance as a bench scientist and did better work as a scientific administrator, he has made for some great myths.
As in untruths.
The publicly dull-as-dishwater, very understated Dawson (the semi-private Dawson was much more verbally biting) would never had made for good copy, not without a determined effort from an admiring journalist.
In any case, he died early, at war's end, before censorship was lifted enough to make his side of the story better known.
I have made it my job to make his story better known.
I do so because I consider that it was he - via his work on bacterial HGT DNA and fungus-made penicillin antibiotics - who was more responsible than anyone else for making Biology, not Physics or Chemistry, the Queen of All Sciences today....
You see, "persister" bacteria were first discovered by Gladys Hobby and others, while working as part of Henry Dawson's wartime "impure penicillin" team.
And so perhaps discovered by Dr Dawson as well. Though his name wasn't on the original paper, as he was away receiving major medical treatment when it was first publicly presented.
The concept of "persisters" is fairly well known in Science - but only among microbes, not among scientists themselves.
In early 1942, Dr Hobby had discovered than no matter how much penicillin was poured onto bacteria ordinarily very vulnerable to it and for no matter how long - a tiny percentage always seemed to survive and re-emerge later once treatment was ended.
It was a valuable - and totally new - explanation as to why some germs could resist attacks not just from penicillin and other drugs but also from the body itself and so go on to create chronic or reoccurring infections.
In the Dawson team's mind, one such important chronic illness was the SBE disease they were trying so hard to cure with their home-brewed penicillin.
Sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, as its name suggests, is a long term low grade infection of the heart valves that always ended in the premature death of the patient.
SBE was the key reason why the various diseases associated with Rheumatic Fever made it so much dreaded before 1960 as the leading killer of school age children.
In the case of SBE, the persisters survived on the valves of the heart in biofilms then called vegetations.
Persister-survivors (they are found all through the Kingdom of Life - including we humans) are a big part of the reason so many diseases soon resist the antibiotic that was discovered to cure them completely only a few years earlier.
They don't get the attention they deserve because scientific journalists are currently fixated on HGT, the horizontal spreading of genes (including those of antibiotic resistance to antibiotics) rapidly all through the microbe world.
HGT is done by microbes - and only by microbes - though much of their work with it is claimed as being done/invented/discovered by us humans.
From bacterial PCR to bacterial CRISPR, (superstars on Wall Street and with government funding agencies) we act as if we invented this stuff - we did not - it all came about due to Dawson's persistent and lonely promoting of bacteria's use of HGT as something very very very important, from 1928 onwards.
But it was only made widely known to the scientific world through the dogged persistence of 'persister' Dawson, against a strong headwind of elite scientist resistance, resistance that is by no means dead today.
I have discovered that his campaign of new articles and talking it up alone kept the concept of HGT alive, at least between mid 1928 to at least late 1943 (he died soon after), when very very few were interested and none of them ever produced more than one article on it.
Now Dawson is considered to have discovered a few important biological events - in particular Quorum Sensing : the chemical and electric communication between large populations of bacteria - even between widely different species.
But in general, Dawson didn't discover things --- rather he persistently connected together a lot of microbial events that were not connected by their discoverers and not treated as at all important in themselves by all others.
The pioneering and persistent Dawson was in very early - and stayed in - on now-important matters like HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-Form Bacteria, Biofilms and Persisters.
(In Dawson talk, he worked on the R,S,M,L,V and P forms of oral commensal Strep ---- in a very narrow farrow, he plowed very deep indeed.)
(For example : not just in curing the incurable and always fatal SBE, but also being the first in history to inject penicillin into the bloodstream of a human patient, thus birthing our Age of Antibiotics.)
All these various biological activities are just some of the ways that Life's smallest and weakest beings have - nevertheless - survived for four billion years against all that has been thrown at them.
They all form part of what is now called Microbial Intelligence.
Again, Dawson didn't discover penicillin - that was the work of another reluctant Briton , Alexander Fleming.
All Dawson did was to quickly put it to work saving lives right away, unlike Fleming, and in publishing all his results early and widely.
Even (or even particularly) his failures.
We honor - way way too much - the first person to get a discovery into print because confirming that publication date is easy (and lazy) scientific journalism.
Even when ,like Griffiths, the discovery was only published because a friend threatened to do so himself. if Griffiths did not.
Griffiths did nothing more with HGT.
We totally fail to do the hard work needed to properly honour those who labour hard to make something useful out of scientific discoveries that are so new and unexpected that almost no one - including their discoverer - realizes they are epoch-launching.
The Nobel Prize for the rushed wartime mass production development of life-saving natural penicillin (at a time when it was really needed )should not of gone to either Fleming or Ernst Chain, though it should have fulsomely praised their efforts.
It should have gone to Howard Florey, as it did, for persistently pushing penicillin against much early scientific and medical indifference.
But also to Dawson, for persistently pushing the ultimately successful natural penicillin route as all that was needed - now! - to save lives today!
He was the one who got then-tiny Pfizer to make natural penicillin -and notably, they alone made over 80% of WWII's penicillin.
Dawson persisted in this, even while dying of a terrible disease.
Persisted against the now-powerfully-allied Florey and Florey's useless and harmful obsession with first producing commercial synthetic penicillin (something which has never yet happened) even at the cost of failing to mass produce penicillin in time to save a starving stressed out world at war.
Dawson was dogged and dull and while dogged is always welcome in news stories and myths, dull is never popular.
Florey was very colorful, very ambitious, very sharp-edged as well as very persistent - and while he never really achieved much of world importance as a bench scientist and did better work as a scientific administrator, he has made for some great myths.
As in untruths.
The publicly dull-as-dishwater, very understated Dawson (the semi-private Dawson was much more verbally biting) would never had made for good copy, not without a determined effort from an admiring journalist.
In any case, he died early, at war's end, before censorship was lifted enough to make his side of the story better known.
I have made it my job to make his story better known.
I do so because I consider that it was he - via his work on bacterial HGT DNA and fungus-made penicillin antibiotics - who was more responsible than anyone else for making Biology, not Physics or Chemistry, the Queen of All Sciences today....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)