Muscular Modernity, Muscular Eugenics, Muscular Darwinism : survival of the FIT

Like Charles Darwin, I have come to see that the term "survival of the fittest" is a useful shorthand, but ringed with at least as many shortfalls as advantages.

The biggest by far being the incredibly large number of otherwise intelligent-appearing people who once mistook the survival of the 'fit' as being fully equal to the survival of the 'fittest' ---- when actually they were 180 degrees opposed.

Still the original term remains a useful term ; one well worth salvaging.

A short term to describe a very long and very complex process.

One that sees a tendency, in general and over the long term, for individuals with phenotypes (physical bodies with all their attributes) (created through a peculiar mix of their species' pool of genes) that are better suited to their currently constituted niche in Nature to have more surviving and reproducing offspring.

Over time, this means their descendants tend to outnumber those other individuals in the same population of a particular species whose bodies aren't so suited to that current niche.

Their gene mix and resulting body type, better suits (better fits) their niche in Nature, as it currently exists.

Note that their fellows' keys also 'sort of' fit the lock that is their shared niche.

However, currently at least, our particular individuals are the fittest, the bestest, keys for this lock.

So they tend to get more food and tend to survive long enough to reproduce healthy offspring who (and this is key) inherit the same - currently lucky - mix of genes.

So they also experience extraordinary success in getting enough food and living long enough to produce healthy fertile fecund offspring.

So on and so on --- as long as their niche doesn't change.

Which it always does --- but that is another story.

The term 'niche' brings with it the sense of small, specialized, one among many : as in 'niche marketing', for example.

In Nature, there are not just many different geography-based niches at any current moment in time, there are many different niches over time, based on changes in climate, etc as well as based upon changes in geography.

So the 'fittest' key for a hundred million tiny niche locks means a hundred million tiny niche keys.

The population of "fittest keys" is large and very diverse - as diverse as can be imagined.

By way of contrast, remember what that nagging phys ed teacher always tried to drum into you about the all around virtues of having a healthy fit body.

Mine, both Brits of the old pre-Commonweath mold, were always insisting a healthy body would make us better students, fight off diseases, better soldiers, more attractive employees, better lovers, husbands and fathers, as well as better 'team' players on the field and off.

All around better off - equipped to work hard, play hard, fight hard, love hard, whether in Arctic cold, an air conditioned centrally heated office or Jungle heat.

My phys ed teachers were very old school - they felt that a fit males' natural niche was the entire world. Newer marks of their type would no doubt insist the Universe is our natural niche.

A 'fit' body was an all rounder 'master key' that would fit all locks and all niches. Read master key for master race and you are bang on.

They wanted the human gene pool to be sharply reduced to just two basic types : lots of docile but well built worker bees, bees of color, and then a smaller group of physically well built big brained boss/officer types who could, in theory do hard work or fight hard etc - but rarely did.

Darwin, at least when it came to that part of Nature that didn't include the human animal, never said that or foresaw that.

He saw a world of many many niches and a need for many different gene mixes to survive successfully in each. Perhaps he erred most in seeing these niches changing far more slowly than they actually do, but in general he saw the world (and hence lifeforms) as very diverse.

For him, 'survival of the fittest' meant 'survival of the diverse', not the survival of just one supra-fit being to handle all of one big supra-niche.

The sudden rise of the appeal of big muscles for the ruling elites ("the survival of the fit") did not occur by chance just at the point when muscles meant less than ever in war or on the job ( per the rise of accurate long range rapid fire rifles and labour-saving machines).

In fact, it arose precisely in response to those facts.

We can start by recognizing that the difference between violence and force is that the successful use of force implies successfully bluffing others that one will be violent, and violently success, if the need arises.

For it was no longer morally acceptable, in the late nineteenth century, for lords of the manor, colony or factory, to simply string up unimportant nobody, whenever a small problem arose.

And given the ability for the unhappy-with-a-rife to snipe and assassinate the lord, from a safe distance away, behind some rock ,in the dim of the evening, it was no longer even safe to try it on.

But the big well muscled man who was 'fit' and who looked 'fit' and who exuded the self confidence of someone who was part of the ruling elite, with the force of an entire 'fit' empire behind him, could still usually intimidate others to get his own way, in normal day to day situations.

Tall, well built, well off, self confident men of the elite ethnicity still usually successfully intimidate even policemen at a traffic stop, as well as women, children, employees, etc that are physically smaller and financially less wealthy than themselves.

Muscular Christianity and the well muscled biceps holding a hammer (that were almost the only iconography of trade union imagery until very recently) shows how this cult of the muscle spread to all parts of the culture --- even to groups that might have ordinarily resisted the use of elite led violence.

But the breeding of all rounder fit types, pure of all 'defects', one size key fits all locks and niches, would never let humanity survive for very long.

We can see this with the deliberately inbreed noble families of Europe - we can even look to the deliberately inbreed family tree of Darwin himself.

We can see the results with the deliberately inbreed, 'pure' breeds of horses and dogs that came to be popular in the UK and the USA at the very same time as the rise of muscular modernity and muscular eugenics.

Like their owners, these animals were actually disease prone physical disasters and frequently infertile.

Their owners knew the score yet they still promoted the idea of narrow gene pools --- and amazing example of the intellectual disconnect that is possible  in humans and perhaps even particularly possible in university educated humans....

Anti-Vax patients 2016 = Anti-Natural-Penicillin doctors 1940

I believe that Anti-Vax (unwarranted) concerns about heavy metals in vaccines and heavy money controlling vaccine approvals are just an unconscious smoke screen to hide these patients' free-floating fears and phobias.

Just as I believe that (unwarranted) concerns about the 'impurity' of natural penicillin among most of the world's doctors and scientists in early 1940s was equally an unconscious smokescreen to hide their similar free-floating fears and phobias.

We easily grant patients as being irrational --- but doctors and scientists, too ? Yep !
While society is quite comfortable talking about 'invasive' surgery, it hasn't been as open in accepting that receiving needles or drawing blood are also invasive, as are most microbial infections and all knife attacks, etc.

Most people, quite rightly, set initial firm limits on invasions past the boundaries of their body and psyche.

But many--- quite irrationally --- hold onto an initially rational fear about taking in unknowable 'foreign' objects to well past the point of common caution.

There are different concerns for each individual as to what is a potentially 'foreign object' and further, their fear level varies widely over each foreign object, by time and place.

Their free floating fear never really goes away, even if they can be reluctantly convinced to take this or that foreign object, on this or that occasion.

And that irrational fear is listened too and acted upon, whenever an occasion arises that allows people to guise this fear as really a quite rational objection based on hard evidence.

After all one faked medical article fanned by one air-headed TV personality was all that was needed to set off our current anti-vax pandemic of irrationality.

In the case of natural penicillin, doctors who had never previously balked at injecting 'deadly toxic but medically useful' serums and synthetic drugs into patients, suddenly ignored the hard evidence that natural penicillin's impurities seemed almost as harmless as did this extremely non-toxic medicine itself.

But the timeless and general revulsion against the melting and dissolving work of fungus because it so reminded humanity of their certain death and decay, the only species with this foreknowledge of their fate, had only heightened during the Era of Pure Modernity.

For a fungus body on a log dissolved not just the bark and fibre into gooey wetness, it dissolved Pure Modernity's passion for pure divisions, such as between wet and dry, solid and slime.

Such that, in the same decade as penicillin's discovery quintessential Pure Modernists A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft both found the gooey slimy fungus to be their extreme example of all encompassing evil.

If the thought of the slimy smelly body of the penicillin-producing penicillium fungus wasn't bad enough, the knowledge that penicillin itself was a secondary metabolite (basically fungus piss and poop) was even worse.

Doctors who had balked at eating mushrooms as kids were not about to welcome the idea of injecting fungus into the temple of the human blood supply, not in an age that still thought the genome resided in the 'blood' rather than in chromosomes inside each cell nucleus, not when 100% pure synthetic Sulfa medicine was working so well.

They felt this, but they weren't about to say it aloud - not publicly or even privately.

So the Big Lie about 'potentially' 'dangerous' 'impurities' in impure natural penicillin were trotted out instead.

Even when, as readers of medical journals, they knew better....

Pure Neo-Darwinism just dog whistle code for pure WASP ?

It is always interesting to discover that the most ardent and 'purest' of Neo-Darwinists are seemingly likely to also be English and Protestant (middle class and male, too, but we'll overlook that for the moment!)
European biologists, for example, are always being faulted by them for failing to adhere to every last jot and tittle of their Neo-Darwinist dogma.

Even Americans aren't as quintessentially 'pushy' in this area as these folks from Home Counties England.

Now that they've lost the Empire, Europe and soon Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well, one supposes that Darwin (along with Shakespeare and Britpop) is about all they have left to offer world culture.

If I was reduced to my intellectual uppers, I, too, would fight like the Devil to remain the high priests of Evolution theory....

WWII's 'war of ideas' ran at subterranean right angles to its 'war of weapons'

It is comparatively easy to sort out WWII's 'war of weapons' (particularly if one is allowed to view that war moment by moment, region by region), much less so for its 'war of ideas'.

True, the weapon war has its classification difficulties.

After all, many countries that were originally Germany's friends on the battlefield (such as Italy, Russia, Hungary and Finland) eventually ended up being savagely attacked by their erstwhile friend.

Even Britain seriously thought about bombing Russia ---- but then later decided to sent it bombers instead.

(We also mustn't forget that originally Britain fought side by side with the French military, only to kill thousands them at Oran Algeria in 1940 and then by late 1944 was once again fighting side by side with the French.)

And of course, not so very long after the war, Germany became Britain's new bosom friend and Russia its new sworn enemy.

The cases of France, Italy and Hungary reminds us that for many (perhaps even for most) nations, WWII was often as much a deeply divided civil war, fought over ideas, as it was a war of weapons fought by the entire (fully united) population of a nation simply intent on resisting foreign invasion.

But fundamentally, I believe that WWII's war of ideas was mostly fought, almost invisibly and mostly silently and inaudibly, inside billions of individual minds.

Over the seven long years of the war and its immediate aftermath, most people became far less certain than they were in 1939, about a collection of unexamined assumptions that we now call Perfectionist Modernity.

It was proving far harder than once thought to perfect perfection and there were increasing doubts that the version of perfection that had been put about really was perfect.

Humanity, Nature, Reality ---- they all proved to be far less amenable to suggestions from 'the smartest civilizations in the Universe', than anyone suspected.....

SCIENCE purifies intellectual 'gene pool' : TECHNOLOGY diversifies it

I want to suggest a totally different way of looking at the vast difference between Science (theories) and Technology (tools).

Usually it is claimed by scientists (in deliberate error) that Science first accumulates new additions to the human body of knowledge and then Technology, the applied application of scientific knowledge, simply creates new products from that new knowledge.

But there is little hard evidence that most technology was the direct result of proceeding basic science theories.

It is rather very often that it is directly the other way around, with the new better tools made by technology greatly expanding and securing the factual base of Science, far beyond the limits of its traditional mere mind-experiment based theories.

No, to my way of thinking, the key difference is that tools, often made for a single purpose originally, often turn out to have many  uses with open-ended and highly unpredictable results for humanity, while a truly successful 'scientific' theory always imposes narrow limits on a piece of reality once thought to have wide variants.

Which is to say that that any academic paper that claims, with much evidence footnoted, that life and reality is inordinately and extremely complicated is likely to be accepted by a philosophy journal ----- but not by any science journal.

Thomas Kuhn famously described how water and alcohol mixed in any proportion was once considered a compound by all scientists ----- until Dalton showed a compound can only be formed by the combination of atoms in definite, fixed, simple whole number proportions : water always has just two atoms of hydrogen for every one of oxygen, full stop.

Dalton's theory's success at limiting made his name a household word.

But Darwin and Galton are more this blog's area of interest.

So I now wish to dismiss the claims that Eugenics was always seen as a pseudoscience by scientists or that it was a once fully accredited member of Science but now is totally discredited, proposing instead that all Science is Eugenics ---- and that Technology is Eugenic's antithesis.

Further, that Science/Eugenics is fundamentally a subset of humanity's primeval fear of the unknowable and the uncontrollable.

Science's job, 24/7 year in and out, is to be a lethal chamber cum refiner's fire, an Auschwitz, an Aktion T4, to all manner and sizes and shapes of ideas ---- subconsciously hoping to produce, not one small elite Master Race, but rather a single simple Theory of Everything.

Science is not at all objective - its bias is always to purify and simplify ----- regardless of the facts

I suspect that this hardly seems to fit your vision of how science really works - I know it does not fit mine.

Scientists always seem to be adding to our knowledge base - expanding rather than trimming it.

But I repeat : new tools bring new domains into the orb of scientists, forcing them to widen earlier theories that always, always, always are now seen as too limited.

Cast your mind over any area of Science and try to tell me differently.

Where, for just one example among many, do you ever find any earlier scientists proposing that the age of the Earth was twenty billion years old and that the Universe was 100 billion years old when we know feel the Earth is only a little over four billion years old and the Universe just about fourteen billion years old?

Science, particularly late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Science, was a counterrevolution against the chaotic and fecund consequences thrown up by the steady advance of more and more technologies in that period.

Only recently have we seen some scientists who positively accept , indeed welcome, the fecundity of reality and the limits of knowledge and perhaps in time we will see that reflected in what constitutes a legitimate scientific theory......

Dawson's Unwashed Penicillin for the Great Unwashed or Florey's Pure Penicillin for the Pure & Fit ?

Wars, externally, may involve the clash of guns, but inside, they're really about the clash of ideas

You may think that the seventy five year old conflict over how best to make and distribute wartime penicillin was simply not capable of being freighted with the key clash of ideas and values behind WWII, but I am here trying to convince you that it was.

Let's start with Truth Time : for all the highly technical industrial processes of 'purifying' of sophisticated antibiotics such as the penicillins, (whether they are made by microbes or by man) when you actually get down to it, they're pretty much downhome and domestic, basically consisting of a long series of repeated 'washings' by various liquid solvents.

And in point of fact, in the very early days of penicillin production, each washing by these strong chemicals tended to remove only a little of the relatively harmless impurities and a great deal of the scarce (and very fragile-seeming) penicillin intended for the dying patient

To be actually able to save lives (now !) rather than merely compete in the Alpha Dog contest to be the first to reach the Mount Everest of 100% pure penicillin, Dr Dawson's pioneering 1940 penicillin 'homebrew' had to be decidedly radical.

So his "Impure Manhattan" was not just the 'rushed' application of the naturally grown rather than waiting for the man-made stuff, it was also highly 'impure', because it had been deliberately under-washed.

Dawson's reasoning, set against the doubts of even his closest friends, was that in this way, more of his precious penicillin could be saved for his dying patients.

Dawson reasoned that the remaining impurities didn't seem to do more than offer a short term fever spike. Since penicillin itself remains about the most un-toxic lifesaver ever discovered, Dr Dawson sensed it all would balance out in the end.

(And for similar humanitarian reasons, Brisbane's Dr Vincent Duhig's homewbrew penicillin, three years later, was totally unwashed - merely strained once through a cheesecloth, no bigger than a perizoma loincloth. But with it, he saved many seemingly hopeless cases.)

To his doubting colleagues, Dr Dawson's sins were producing Underwashed Penicillin, for the Great Unwashed

In the eyes of Dawson's colleagues worldwide, his rush to put deliberately dirty penicillin into the holy temple of the human bloodstream (for this was an era when even scientists seemed to hold that our genome resided more in our 'blood' than within each cell) was only his first great sin.

His bigger sin was just who he choose to give these very first, very precious doses to, the very first doses of our present Age of Antibiotics.

To a Negro ! - and to a Jew ! - both members of the working class ! , both dying from hitherto invariably SBE, already judged by the Anglo-American medical establishment as a condition of 'no military importance' and so unworthy of scarce medical resources in wartime.

Dawson was proposing that the government had to see to the mass production of natural and impure (but good enough for dying patients) penicillin right now, and make enough for all the world in need of it.

A positive concrete example of the pious sentiments behind the Atlantic Charter and the four Freedoms : make penicillin the biggest possible of all Big Tents and invite all in.

Dr Dawson was no longer a religious believer but rather a lapsed Protestant like most of his colleagues, so no one seemed to have noticed the ironic Christian echoes in all this.

For one of Jesus's chief rhetorical styles was to deliberately compound the breaking of one social taboo by doing it in conjunction with another breaking of a social taboo --- all to reinforce his main point.

So Jesus choose not just to invite publicans, sinners and all manner of the socially marginalized into his new Big Tent Kingdom of God, he also did so at the communal dining table, hitherto a pure and safe pious Jews only sanctuary against the sin of the outer world introduced when they became a small part of the global Roman Empire.

Whether by instinct or as partial remembrance of his many years of early church going, Dawson had taken much the same rhetorical approach.

Florey's 100% Pure Penicillin, to which only the Pure & Fit are worthy

Opposing Dawson's ideas on penicillin was most of the scientific community and behind them, most of the educated world.

Their assumption was that microbial penicillin simply had to be as crude as they were, while man-made penicillin simply had to be as good as the best in human civilizations.

German chemists, for example, were widely viewed as the best in the world, and probably, in the Universe.

But as it happened the best of German chemists couldn't make life-saving penicillin, instead making only Auschwitz's life-taking Zyklon-B gas.

Florey and Fleming and the rest of the Anglo-American scientific establishment soldiered on, in part because synthetic penicillin also meant patented, controllable penicillin -- a tightly controlled and rationed penicillin that could be used, in wartime, to further the eugenic aims lacking popular support in peacetime.

Under the guise of wartime necessity, and via an artificially created scarcity, life-saving penicillin was meant to be kept for only the best of their citizens and also kept from from all those people judged eugenically as lives unworthy of penicillin.

But natural PD penicillin could be made by any old silly sentimental Hippocratic Code quoting doctor anywhere, so intent on saving the worthless dying that they were fatally undercutting the scientific establishments' eugenic intentions.

We view the clash of ideas behind WWII totally differently than 1940 did

Dawson's opening gambit in October 1940 had a much wider significance than just being seen as a in-house tiff over how best to produce and distribute wartime penicillin.

His opposition to the approach taken by Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming and the Anglo-American scientific establishment foreshadowed the approach most of us now take, seventy five years now, to the war of ideas that lay behind WWII's mass killing.

In a nutshell : we think that the war of ideas behind WWII was over whether most people back then preferred either our existing world of wide diversity or wanted a new utopian world of strict symmetrical uniformity and perfection.

But it is very important to realize that almost no one saw it that way back then ---- almost all felt a world of pure symmetrical uniformity was better scientifically and hence morally.

Simply put, Humanity changed, between how most felt in 1940 and how most feel today.

And someone and some event had to start that change.

Almost all historians will agree that the main reason why natural Biology is so much the leading science today when it was manmade Chemistry back in 1940, was as a result of the unexpected success of microbe penicillin making against the failed attempt to make commercially viable man-made penicillin during WWII.

Scientists, as a result, had to re-consider their unquestioned assumptions about the supposed lack of abilities among the weak and the small and the
simple.

This at the same time that the new knowledge of Auschwitz forced them and all the world to also consider whether we really want to remove all the small and the simple and the mis-formed to create a future utopia of perfection and uniformity.

In 1945, those seemed totally separate questions - one scientific and one moral.

But over time, we have come to see them as fused - just as Dr Dawson did, way back in 1940 : welcoming the widest possible diversity not only feels morally right, it is also now well established, scientifically, as the most successful means of ensuring longterm evolutionary survival.

Dawson's Paradox : move over Fermi : why are microbes still here ?

Dawson's two decades of studies of the unimaginably wide scope of bacterial diversity had suggested an explanation for a profound paradox : "Why are microbes still here ?"

Why is it that the creatures at the very bottom of the progressive Tree of Life, the dumb, small, weak microbes, are also the most successful form of life, surviving four billion years against all odds when some of the biggest and toughest of beings, like the dinosaurs, are long gone ?

Dawson found that microbes tolerated their defectives and mis-formed members , finding them highly useful for survival when circumstances changed and their disadvantages suddenly become advantages.

Microbes even had a unique way (HGT) to see that these once-useless now invaluable genes could be quickly pass around the entire microbe community world wide, from species to species.

Microbial genes, in effect, are PD - Public Domain, not figuratively patented and held in guarded exclusively as human genes are.

We today think these sorts of approaches to safeguarding diversity against sudden disaster and the sharing of life-saving ideas as eminently sensible.

But few realize that they originated first among the simple microbes or that it was one man, Dr Henry Dawson, that first highlighted their worth...

The greater evolutionary success, circa 1944 : Microbial diversity or Aryan uniformity ?

To Dr Martin Henry Dawson, after two decades of research into the astonishing and under-travelled scientific world of four billion years of microbial diversity, versatility and survival, the scientific answer to the secret of long term evolutionary success seemed perfectly clear.

This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.

But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.

For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.

he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....