Atom Smith

February 4, 2015 “Darwinian evolution is a law of physics, not just an organizing principle of biology - an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems.  If so, life was inevitable, not a fluke.”  Manfred Eigen - Nobel Laureate

“No person has been more responsible for more drastic modifications of the average person’s world view than Charles Darwin.”  Ernst Mayr - renowned 20th C. bologist

“Darwin founded a new branch of the philosophy of science.  He introduced historicity.”

• E. Mayr

“A Christianity of miracles or one of natural truth?” - Matthew Arnold( 1822-1888)

Darwinism: Time, chance and contingency at work - no God required

Darwinism: Nothing is pre-determined as a final cause.  Life is NOT working toward a known end,

“Mid-Victorian evangelicals were the proper heirs of the Reformation and 17th century Puritan divines.”

“The Evangelical emphasis on an imaginative and emotional experience of Christ made this form of Protestantism a religious equivalent and stimulus of English Romanticism.  It made belief a living factor in people’s lives, not a dour or restrictive force.  The fact is , it provided an emotional, imaginative form of belief that endowed adherents with a sense of their own identities.”

“Darwinism dissolves Victorian Christian typology.”

- George Landow - Brown University

Christian contempt for the temporal world slowly dissolved over the course of the Victorian era.

Mid-Victorian zeitgeist, the philosophical underpinning, the idea-air being breathed by  Victorians contained molecules of Smith, Lyell, Malthus, Bentham, Carlyle, Arnold and Lamarck along with a turbulent broth of residual Puritan Christianity.  From this air Darwin precipitated his notion of evolution.

There are four key parts of Darwin’s theory:

1. Non-constancy of species - i.e. species evolve over time ( an outrageous noton in early-mid  Victorian era)
2. Evolution begets branching of organisms, descent from common ancestor of all species.
3. Gradualism - The gradual, accumulated effects of daily events observable in real time over vast amounts of time - tens, hundreds of millions of years.
4. Natural selection upon individuals of a species as the primary mechanism of change in organisms.

Four men formed the molten core of the Victorian zeitgeist, all of particular significance to Darwin:  Adam Smith, Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham.

General notions floating in Mid-Victorian air included the idea of civilization working inexorably  toward progress, man’s conquest of and dominance over nature and Man’s preeminent position at the top of the animal hierarchy.  There was a bourgeois-upper class awareness of unprecedented transition - of change - of evolution in the air.  All of society was evolving very rapidly toward a better condition ( it couldn’t get no worse !).  The pressure against “Steady-State” Evangelical Christianity of the day became immense.

Adam Smith (1723-1790)  In his iconic tome “The Wealth of Nations”  Smith makes the following observations: People are motivated by self-interest.  People work harder for personal gain.  All groups interacting and competing with one another produce the best goods at the cheapest price.  Creativity emerges as people strive to meet the needs of a supply and demand economy.  Darwin expanded these ideas to the realm of all organisms forming the core of his theory.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875) “The present is the key to the past.” - foremost Victorian geologist, brought to light the vastness of geological time with forces working continuously on Earth and the effects of  time to transform small change into very large effects: “Uniformitarianism”  Darwin used this idea to explain the effects of eons on the relatedness of all living things. The extension of processes seen in present time back through to their origin, their gradual change, their evolution.

Thomas Malthus ( 1766-1834) “An Essay On the Principle of Population”

“The increase of population is limited by the means of subsistance.”  “The actual population is kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice.”

Malthus  illuminated the effects of large populations on their members as they compete for scarce resources.  Darwin noted that this pressure has the effect of selecting for the fittest.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

“People will lean toward that which is beneficial in the long term.”

“Individual rational decision making would promote greater happiness-felicific calculus.”

“Law without a legislator”

“Greatest happiness for the greatest number is the foundation of moral legislation.”

“Self interest - pleasure over pain”

Darwin’s paradigm-shifting book:  On The Origin of Species, published in 1861, was saturated with the ideas percolating through his Victorian zeit.  Adam Smith for the notion of  groups left to ther own devices, Charles  Lyell,  for the immensity of geological-evolutionary  time and the gradualism and uniformity of change, for Thomas Malthus on the pressure of individuals in a population on one another as they compete for food, shelter, sex, prestige - the stuff of life. Jeremy Bentham - the advantage of being left alone.

For Darwin the central battle for life on Earth was played out by individual members of different species.  The individual human, tiger, rose bush, microorganism was the causal agent of evolution, the center of the action, the nexus.  150 years later Stephen Jay Gould proposed that the nexus was at the next level up the taxonomic ladder- the species,  Richard Dawkins asserts it is a level lower than that preferred by Darwin- the gene.

Perhaps the causal level is at the atom.  At the carbon, hydrogen and or oxygen atoms in the base pairs composing  RNA and DNA molecules.  It is the atom which, if left to its own devices, will evolve toward function,  toward survivability.  “Decisions” made by atoms in bond formation during metabolism or replication are the crux of evolution.  Atoms struggle for dominance.  Atoms thrive or starve.  Atoms change launching an act of symbiosis or competition that proves useful and gets locked into the sustem or proves of no use or destructive and gets rejected.  “The Invisible Hand” made visible today by Non-contact Atomic Force Microscopy among many other methods of seeing at the atomic scale.

“Thoughts escape the brain and enter the environment bya coding process that converts them from a neural form into rhythmic,mechanical displacements of soft tissue ( mouth movement or fingers on a keyboard or pen on paper)” - Paul King -computational neuroscientist -  MIT

JB questions:

1. When does a parasite become a symbiont?  A.  when its presence is obvious it remains a parasite, when it blends well and its effect is primarily positive,  it is a symbiont.
2. Are “good” bacteria always “good” ?  Do “good” bacteria ever go bad - turn against their host?
3. Do numbers of bacterial individuals effect goodness or badness?  Does one’s immune system keep numbers in check throughout the host organism’s life?  say “good” unit 500 million then bad at greater than this number - you become ill.  Phagocytes gone ineffective.
4. Can “bad” microorganisms be tamed to do good work.
5. Do antibiotics kill all bacteria in my gut or just some of them?
6. What antibiotics have the worst ill effects on human digestion?
7. Do bacteria affect glandular activity? Protein synthesis?  Hormone synthesis?
8. Do all of the antibiotics given to American cattle wreck their digestive process?
9. Are atomic constituents of a protein molecule motivated by self interest or cooperation?  How about “motivation” of nucleic acids?
10. Do people work harder for personal gain than they would if whipped by a slavemaster?
11. Do cell nucleii have slavemaster molecules that drive the other cell components?
12. Does the cytoplasm have a slavemaster or a choir director?  A timekeeper, a boss organelle?
13. Are gold and or silver human micronutrients?
14. What would Adam Smith’s “government regulation” be in a cell?
15. What represents the ‘central government’ in a cell?
16. Is the ‘central government’ composed of neurons?  are they nearby?  Are they at the brain?
17. If so, are these neurons chiefly electrically activated or chemically activated?
18. Are there any neurons that carry only chemical signals and no electrical signals?
19. Is there a fine network of nano-dendrites that reach every cell in the body?
20. Do the liver, kidney, gall bladder, adrenal gland, pancreas,spleen, heart, lungs have neurons?
21. Do each of these organs / glands have a specific assigned zone in the brain separate from all others for organ coordination and regulation?

“All groups interacting and competing with one another produce the best and cheapest goods.” - Adam Smith

22.  Do cells in a single organ or organ system compete with one another in any way, for nutrients or space or a role in organ function?
23.  Do kidney cells compete with heart cells under any circumstances?
24.  If starving of any nutrient what is the hierarchy of service among organ systems?
25.  Does the brain eat first or last?
26.  Is there inter-organ cannibalism in any instance?
27.  Is there a gland or a protein that functions as the director of cannibal dining order of service.  Is it first come-first served?  Is there any evidence of altruism at this level?

“Creativity emerges as people strive to meet the needs of a supply and demand economy.” - Adam Smith

28.  does genetic mutation, symbiosis, parasitism emerge as cell parts or entire cells strive t meet the needs of supply and demand?
29.  There are thousands of different proteins in a cell.  How are needs assessed and by what organelle or metabolic process / structure?
30.  what is “need” at a cell?  mitochondria need oxygen.  Cells need to expel CO2 and other waste.
31.  what is cell waste?  Is any of it a nutrient for other cells or metabolic systems?
32.  Is all cell waste ejected from cell by the same process?  If not, how many different methods of “taking out the trash”

“When one group organizes to dominate a market it is beneficial to the entity but does little of no good for society.” - Adam Smith

33.  Does existence imply dominaton?  Is there a positive amount of “unionism” or “corporate behavior”  at the cell?
34.  Cancer cells form a corporation and expand to dominate their market.
35.  How are cell corporations regulated?  How are cell unions held in check?  Is there a ‘correct’ amount of cancer?
36.  Do all mammals possess cancer cells or cancer causing mechanisms at all times with cancer only manifest when system is compromised?  Is there any system other than the immune system involved in fighting cancer?
37.  Do we “get” cancer or catch cancer?  does cancer emerge from our life-long microbiota?

RNA dominates its market - especially when locked up in the form of DNA in the chromosome, mitochondria and spirochetes ( sperm tails).

38.  what is the function of uracil?
39.  why does RNA have uracil and DNA doesn’t have it?
40.  Might uracil provide a dynamic imbalance - a drive toward action in RNA whereas DNA with its A-T, G-C just sits and waits to be courted, counted, copied, coerced, manhandled, abused, violated, raped, chopped, channeled, routed, modified, tacked onto.
41.  How did golgi apparatus evolve?  What was its precursor form?
42.  Might golgi precursors remain among the living as free microorganisms?
43.  If so, are they hidden in a deep ocean trench or all around us in the soil, our water, our bodies?  Might we each have free / maneuverable / assignable as well as locked up golgi apparatus?
44.  What is the earliest bacteria, archaea, protista with the golgi  or pre-golgi apparatus?

In the spirit of Atom Smith let’s review some devices for looking at atoms at work:

1. Atomic probe - grain boundaries
2. 3DAP - scaning probe microscope
3. Atomic Force microscope
4. Scanning-tunneling microscope: measures changes in electric current between top and sample
5. Magnetic force microscope - tip senses change in the magnetic structure of the surface at the atomic level.  Microscope tip can be used to snag individual atoms and move them around.

JB Experiment:

1. Find bacteria that withstand sub-freezing temp.
2. Freeze them
3. Shift carbon atom at thymine at single base pair in a hox-type gene that codes for membrane continuity i.e. plasmid hydrophobic/phylic.
4. See what happens
5. Does membrane fail to form?
6. Do lipid tails lose hydrophobic tendencies?

When walking through a grove of trees, most of what one sees is the remains of events from many years ago.  One sees only the residue of biological process.  Like looking at a distant galaxy whose light left millions of years ago.  Most of the important stuff that is happening now in the grove is at an invisible scale.  there is intense action but it is microscopic or smaller for the most part.

cutting down a tree is like a supernova explosion in terms of organism causality.  The event is a big one, it is visible, its effects cascade all the way down the hierarchy of causal agents creating a big phase shift.  The tree changes from being fed to being food.

Cutting the tree was an external cause for tree’s demise.  Demise could have resulted from a deadly mutated gene, a bacterial infection, a viral attack or insect infestation.  Is there anything smaller than a virus that can kill a tree or a human?

Daily life as we see it in our temporal world is like seeing cities from 30,000 feet in an airliner.  general structures only, no indication of human movement or our physical existence, let alone myriad dramatic human interactions occurring day and night.

To Investigate: ( from BRUKER slide shows):

1. Self-assembling cartwheel proteins at centriole dimerization: adhesion-topography correlation
2. Multiparametric correlation NS Matlab toolbox

Bruker instruments:

1. Atomic force microscopy
2. Fluorescence
3. Tribiology
4. Stylus Profilometry
5. Nano-indentation

See:

“Modulus mapping across individual br monomers

1.  Lipid bilayer formation
2. Langmuir-bloggett deposition
3. Tip functionalization protocol - biotin labelled antibody
4. Common binding chemistries
5. Molecular recognition mapping
6. PF-QNM of mammalian cells - the role of mechanical forces in disease
7. Stem cell migration
8. Spleen, Gall Bladder, Lymphocyte
9. BRUKER - Gunther Laukien - NMR expert
10. See: Bruker optics, bio-spin

JBQ:  Are lymphocytes descended from ancient bacterial symbionts?

Just as Charles Darwin swam in a Victorian sea, we swim in a Postmodern sea that allows / encourages / forces  ideas such as Eldredge-Gould’s Punctuated Equilibrium and Lynn Margulis’ Symbiotic evolution.  We live in different air - the power and nature of this air transcends science and art - it determines what science and what art gets done and how it is received.  It is what we believe; It is how we believe, how we know, what we are able to know.  We now live in an age of nonlinearity, the inversion or dispersion of hierarchies, uncertainty is for certain, change is relentless, seeing from multiple simultaneous viewpoints is derigeur.  Odd as it may seem, we still see a great deal of victorian style Modernism in our thinking-feeling-knowing i.e. rigid hierarchy and linearity.

By studying the “water” Darwin swam in,  we can be more attentive to the restrictions of our water - our zeit.  To realize that we swim in water at all is a major step toward a deeper truth.  Examine all that you take for granted, it requires 150 years for a social paradigm to fully shift from one nexus to that following.  The Postmodern epoch began with a bang ( or a sinking) in 1912.  It is now well underway but still shared with the core of The Descended Grid of Modernism.  Be kind to those harboring the historic worldview - it has much value.  We will have to just all get along in our now deeply multivalent world that is simultaneously Modern and Postmodern.

Darwin had his blacksmith.  We shall have our atom smith, she who works with a scanning-tunneling microscope to move the building blocks of matter.

• 2/4/15  4:57pm

Flock You

colonies, schools, flocks, clubs          January 31, 2015 A school of 10,000 fish swims as if the entire cohort is a single organism. The school moves at the same speed and in the same direction. The entire school changes direction and speed simultaneously.  How do they communicate?  Is there an envelope of electrically charged ions that surround them all and any change is transmitted at the speed of light? Is it simply a domino effect with a change in one body cascading to them all in short order?  Is the dorsal fin an antenna picking up a radio signal from the most alarmed fish that would be the one closest to a predator?

A single termite wandering away from its colony will push around a tiny clod of dirt in a random wander.  A million of these creatures will build a remarkable, large “urban” structure comprising 1,000 cubic feet of earth filled with tunnels, caves, air vents, temperature control, gardens, etc.

Interchangeable leadership in fish and geese vs fixed leadership in ants, pistol shrimp termites and bees, no apparent leadership in corals, stromatolites, fungi, pterobranchs, pyrosomes, bryozoans, hydrozoans

Do schooling fish use the same neurochemistry as flocking geese?  as clubby humans? herds of reindeer?  What are the various forms of communication? Do humans use any capability other than language in order to gather in groups, cliques, gangs?  Smell? Pheromones? visual cues? propinquity rules?  Is gossip among humans a flocking mechanism?

Humans select leaders vis long drawn out processes, wolves decide the “A” male among themselves, among wild African dogs, pack leadership is inherited from a leader-mother.

At what age is a male human signalled to follow leaders rather than to make the extra effort to be a leader?  Is this learned from a parent or is it genetic or is it both? Is leadership potential worked out in schoolyard fights?  bullying outcomes?  Is the leadership drive in humans the result of a protein added to a hormone present in the neurons? Is it simply a memory of some sort?

Any flock of birds appears to have a pecking order.  Is there a pecking order among schooling fish?

At what juncture is a school of fish or a flock of birds a single individual?

Is a mammal a flock of once separate individual organs presently working in harmony?

Is the difference between a kidney and a liver different than that between fish “A” and fish “B” in a school of fish?

“Exclusivity of organismal selection is the raw nerve of Darwinism.” S. Gould

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Art-Making and Evolution

January 29,  2015 Painting is more than a metaphor for evolution it IS evolution.  As a painter explores, making new marks on a painting, testing viability of each new move in relation to those previously born, colors, lines - If the new mark survives it generates its own context for future new gestures.  If the new mark fails to add value and becomes painted over, it has become extinct.  The finished painting is a new organism to be tested in the wider world of family, friends, gallery owners, museum curators, auction houses and history.  Nature does not begin with the answer - the answer evolves from highly organized action.

Nature preserves its successes locking them away in the genome for continued expression from generation to generation.  All is not up for grabs at all times as Darwin proposed.  Nature is extremely conservative.  The idea of replicating molecules (RNA followed by DNA)  is over three billion years old - RNA and DNA are working just fine, as they have for eons - leave them alone.  Genes comprise base pair sequences over 1,000 base pairs long, each gene has been conserved over tens of millions of years. Change does not happen constantly, most genetic change is tossed by cell police and that which finds its way into an organism is 99% likely to cause a problem.  Most mutations are not advantageous.  Each cell in your body experiences mutations 10,000 times each day, almost all are discarded.

How does a mutation survive the gene police in order to find phenotypic expression?

Do these police ever sleep? go away on vacation? get deactivated by a transitory chemical event?  Evolution happens when it must,  otherwise things are quiet, stable, in equilibrium-in stasis.  After an extinction event, nature gets busy experimenting with new forms - new packages for her soap.  DNA has survived all mass extinctions.  Mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects and birds are just different size, color and shape boxes for the same soap.  The difference between a tiger and a human are like the difference between a box of Tide and a box of Tide with a “new and improved” label printed on the front - virtually same stuff inside the box.  Darwin thought nature acted like an angry adolescent throwing spaghetti on every available surface day and night - not so.   Nature is like the old guy on the porch who sometimes “Just sits” and sometimes “Just sits and waits”.

The human brain - a mind boggler.  It has been breaking all the rules regarding rate of change.  It has evolved very rapidly in evolutionary terms - a few million years from not much upstairs to the whole crazy  package.  Using Richard Dawkins’ analogy of the printing plates for an edition of an encyclopedia ( Dawkins uses a single book).  The plates are the human genome.  If there is a change,  every subsequent copy gets this update.  Once the edition has been printed every new individual carries a set of the original plates ( in EVERY cell - except sex cells).

JBQ:    Which sentence in which one of these 20,000 pages contains the message that the brain will listen?

JBQ:   Does this sentence in the genome also code for harmonic sensitivity? for rhythm?

JBQ:  At what point does the brain register that random sound has become music? That speech has become lyric and song?   What page contains the “words” for perceiving visual, tactile or taste harmony?

JBQ:  do the Irish and Italians tend to be excellent songwriters because the rhythm of their speech is close to melodic music as is?  Are there any great German songwriters?  does German speech lend itself to operatic expression as opposed to the less dramatic pop song?

JBQ:   Does each sensory reception address in the brain have its own judgemental cells with their olfactory, audio or visual recognition proteins? Are they proteins at all?

JBQ:    Does every cell in the body participate in making these judgements of suitability? even the liver, kidney, heart and lung cells?  Do they make judgements or simply receive the results of judgements from a higher point in the neural hierarchy?

JBQ:   Can the stomach or heart  originate an esthetic judgement like that dispensed by that cell group in the brain?  I have a gut feeling that it might.

JBQ:  What proteins code for esthetic discernment? What proteins switch it off and on? Is” off “the default or is “on” the default.  do we need an extra protein to sense beauty or do we ech have it and it is overridden in many? To hear sound is a primary level of perception, to judge sound as friend or enemy is a secondary function, to judge sound harmonious from cacophony is a tertiary capacity.

JBQ:    Do each of the five senses possess levels of response, each with its own esthetic component?  Does each of the five senses have its component of 500 different protein variations to make fine distinctions?  How did the Golden Mean develop as a standard for beauty ( .618 to 1.0)?   Do other animals besides humans care about this?  It his proportion in use when a female giraffe sizes up a suitor?

JBQ:   Does any animal care that a tiger may appear to be better proportioned than a hippo?  Does a human have proportions superior to those of a hog?  Is there an interspecies level of knowing?  There must be a raw esthetics at work when an animal distinguishes a starving, thus weak,  animal from a well-proportioned strong one that might put up a fight.

JBQ:  Do neurons at the receiving end of sense organs make judgements about such things or is all the action within the brain?  If there is a protein that codes for sense of proportion can it be switched off?  Why do many lefties have a greater esthetic sense than righties?

JBQ:  Are there different genes for each of the five senses for each type of sensory neuron that are in the genome i.e. carried by every cell or are different senses sorted by protein modification at dispersed ribosomes at various end points within the brain - tongue, fingertip, eyeball, ears?  In other words, do separate cells “read the book” and put their own spin on the basic story line?  If so - doesn’t this capability have to be ‘written’ in the primary  pages somewhere?

Maybe the ability to hear evolved 500 million years ago and the ability to distinguish harmony from dissonance evolved 200 million years ago and since the genome was already locked up for sound, this new capability had to be coded elsewhere, perhaps in some RNA blank page that lingers at the rough endoplasmic reticulum in every cell and is activated by a protein in the neuron or the sense organ for a role in natural selection.

The basic story, the one that is contained in the primary printing plates has been locked up for hundreds of millions of years and guarded closely, subsequent improvements in the system are coded via RNA that yet remain protected within the cell nucleus but are floating free of a chromosome and not part of the DNA-genome.

Humans may not have as many genes as a much simpler creature but we could easily have many thousands more encoded heritable messages.  See: epigenetic heritability via chromatin remodeling-ALC1,PARP1, paramutation, bookmarking, imprinting, transvection, teratogenic effects, X chromosome inactivation, position effect, regulation of heterochromatin,  DNA methylation at microRNA, CpG islands, small RNA, friendly prions, a fungus among us that won't go away.  the underlying gene sequence is preserved but repress / express proteins may be preserved through generations.

JBQ  Do the sensory neurons in the brain code and synthesize  their own protein independent of the genome?

JBQ: where does the sense of “I think she’s pretty” originate? Which bunch of neurons and how do they “know” that this real world array of line, colors, form, smell and sound is harmonious?  This know-how is not learned anew by each generation though obviously fine-tuned as fashions change in ideal body type it is hardwired in one’s consciousness.

JBQ:   Can people with a switched off sense of proportion still discern harmonious color?

JBQ:  How much physical distance in brain geography separates the sensory package of cells from the judgement package?  Are they adjacent?  Are there any processes that modify the signal prior to or after its reception?  She’s pretty but….she’s English, Irish, Muslim, African, under/over educated, too rational, too tall - I thought she was so much further away when I first laid eyes on her.

“Proteome remodeling underlies behavioral plasticity.  Targeted disruption of signaling molecules that regulate protein translation interfere with long-term synaptic or behavioral memories.”  Costa-Mattioli et al., - 2009

“Protein synthesis and long-term memory”  Davis and Squire - 1984

“Neuronal patterning at embryo” Martin and Ephrossi - 2009

Neurons are capable of local information processing.

In order for synapses to change they need new proteins.

If the mechanism is epigenetic then it is by definition easier to create a heritable change in RNA or some other molecular device  than DNA.  Many tertiary changes that may last a few thousand or just a few million years get a shot at the big show, the genetic major leagues of natural selection via heritability that may one day be stored in the genes for the duration as were the structural body parts of the fruit fly thorax some wings, some telomeres, some legs.  Perhaps my “Ugly Gene” is inherited in this manner.  Perhaps this more flexible system for inheriting  information uses epigenetic mechanisms to create heritable behavioral traits from direct life experience.

Perhaps musical, drawing, dancing, computational skill is heritable via modified RNA that works its way from sense organ memory into the germ cells - no genes involved yet inherited.

Back To Nature

January 28, 2015 We love the watercolors of Prendergast, Demuth, Burchfield and Hopper but when I see a smoke plume rising from a chimney or  burn pile in autumn or reflections in a mud puddle, I think of Ted Kautzky.  He may have lacked subtlety or evidence of years in Paris but he defined a macho-deep response to simple and beautiful effects of light.

Cool Duchamp may have launched a million interesting works of art during the past 100 years but let’s take a breather from ironic erudition and return to nature for a breath of fresh air.  Nature is not a square.  there is a colossal cornucopia of raw material to fuel inspiration.  You, the artist, may have done apprentice work drawing trees and barns but there is more to be learned out of doors.  Don’t deny yourself the richness of a new phase of looking closely at the wonder of a bosque of trees, a flower, animals at the zoo.

Take a stack of rice paper and a Flair pen to draw animals, 30 seconds per species and see what happens.  share your wealth.  Note to galleries - open your minds and exhibit space to the new take on nature - straight-no chaser.

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The Rule of Fouche'

January 27, 2015 The rule: “Don’t use one drug to counteract the ill effects of another”.  Example:  Jack your nervous system with caffeine, sugar, carbohydrate and or chocolate then smoke a cigarette or drink a glass of wine to calm your agitated nerves or vice versa.  You are violating your biorhythm.  You are intensely hyped from a great performance for 30,000 screaming fans.  You shoot up heroin in the tour bus to calm down then snort cocaine the following night to prepare for another show - a vicious cycle.  The Rule of Fouche’ - don’t leave home without it.

Drugs come in many forms - neurochemistry 101.  If you endure elation and or depression undrugged you will snap out of any ill effects soon enough and after a good night’s sleep, a nutritious meal and some exercise - you’re good to go.

1. Balance - mind and body
2. It is difficult to exist in excited state of mind
3. Bliss is excitement
4. Horror is excitement
5. Wavering between two poles - go too far and fall off the cliff
6. Too much bliss is flyiing too close to the sun - Icarus
7. Drink coffee-get wired,
8. Too much adrenalin - drink beer, whiskey, wine to relax
9. Get stressed-drink alcohol - begin cycle of dissolution
10. What is a cycle of solution?  Sleep 8 hours a night, eat nutritious food, get as much exercise as possible
11. Establish a cycle of SO-lution not DIS-solution
12. Love, Power, Fame, Music, TV-Movies and Art are all drugs-not all of them are destructive-all in moderation
13. Entertainment is a drug that fills the void created by the absence of personal power: no local influence in love, family dynamics, local politics or much of anything.
14. Lack of local power results in a spiritual void to be filled with entertainment, televised sports, unhealthy food.
15. Local power position would leave little time to get lost in television:Seek The Grange, Boy Scouts, Church, Gun Club, model railroad or radio-controlled model aircraft  group
16. TV has become hyper-customized to lure one and all into its druggy delight.
17. Power and influence are their own drugs - the loss of these launches spectatorship and excessive alcohol intake.
18. All living is the modulation of one’s neurochemistry, moods, expectation of reward; i.e. neurochemical balancing act throughout the day.
19. The following are drugs: love, alcohol, opiates,nicotine, cannabis, refined sugar, carbohydrate, music, drama, tv-movies, painting, food prep, religion, responsibility for others, altruistic acts, kindness to animals
20. One improves at musical skill when practice becomes pleasure and it entrances the player with finger stimulation, compelling cadence, rhythm, melody
21. Music and art are drugs for creators as well as their audience.  One wishes to remain enthralled  and when the art  is over sadness ensues, a void in the heart and mind.
22. One is driven to replace the now absent music drug with another less ephemeral drug but these are usually expensive and destructive to one’s health
23. Desire:  At age 20 I want respect, love,money, power, fame, music and art - you name it - I desire it.  It ALL looks good.  What will it all cost?  DNA must have its histone core.
24. Consequences of desire - the cat seeks to inhabit the interior of the big glass jug, once inside it wants out.
25. The grass is greener on the other side - once on the other side,  the grass is not so green - conclusion: My presence diminishes the color of the grass i.e. wherever I go, I reduce the quality of the environment a la Woody Allen when he remarked: “I would not want to belong to a club that would accept me as a member”  My presence in the club diminishes the club.
26. How to prevent the Woody effect?  How does one reverse this effect once it sets in?

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Clam to Man

January 26, 2015 Clams evolved 500 million years ago and have survived two global mass extinctions.  Life had existed on Earth for 3 billion years before clams evolved, that’s three thousand million years of evolution from single cell organisms to clams.  At one point in Earth history clams were the absolute crown of creation - the top of the food chain, rulers of the primordial sea and like most royalty, didn’t move much.

What was happening during the first one billion years? organic molecules ganged up to form RNA.   RNA had an incredible feature,  the capacity to replicate - the sea was soon swimming with RNA.”Soon” being one or two hundred million years.  Why not stop there?  Happy RNA forever?  Too easily damaged thus added second coil to make DNA - now not so easily attacked by free-floating enzymes.  Where and why enzymes? Why would an enzyme have any interest in fouling an RNA molecule?  Law of life - all things fuck with one another - it’s deeper than genes - it’s in the molecules - keep things shook up - it’s healthy - it’s a drive toward diversity - a drive to take advantage of opportunity.

Life evolves in order to erase the gradient between heat of the sun and cold of empty space.  There is inevitable, powerful, relentless  drive toward greater complexity to create more gradient-resolving entities - organisms.  As new niches occur on Earth, new life evolves to take advantage.  there is urgency to remove the gradient ASAP.  Living things help to restore entropy - nothingness - cold, dark emptiness - the desired condition of an adjacent warring cosmos that is happier without stars, planets, people.  We exist in order to speed our own demise.

This universe was created against the will of a mind greater than that of our cosmos.  Gods at war.  One god wants a new universe and another wants things as they were - dark, cold, empty.  Maybe the child of the original adjacent universe set off a firecracker that was Our “Big Bang”  and God-1, the one we do not know, is trying to undo the damage of this explosion with entropy restoration devices - living things-us.  So what is our purpose in life?  Restore darkness.

Could this dark drive be at the root of mental illness? Our continuing loss of 27 year old rock stars? our Goth teen population?  Thrash-metal music? Our species-wide aversion to bliss?   Religion counteracts this deep, dark  illogic of nature - this drive to restore emptiness.  Thus we have the reciprocating engines of the social order.  Whether Christian, Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, Muslim the battle is the same:  Light vs dark - each religion fuels an engine of creation - get on board or you will be sucked into nothingness.  Every non-religious person, every atheist has their special engine to counteract the darkness.  Religion tries to identify the dark and the light - to create a path through the conundrum.  Let there be light.

In chemical and genetic terms, there is not two cents of difference between a clam and a human, maybe three cents worth between a pine tree and a person.  A lot happens in these few cents.  What kind of natural selection generated organelles? Free-floating mitochndria, membrane-wrapped DNA?, Prokaryotic organisms,a rchaea? On what terms were these battles for survival fought?  were they battles at all or simply agreements to cooperate as proposed by Lynn Margulis?  What was the definition of fittest?

Evolution from clams to humans and a million other species is the easy part - Darwin explained this phase in principle and it is not significant in terms of elapsed time of life on Earth - clam to man not a big difference both use the standard model of genetic reproduction - nucleotides, codons, amino acids, proteins, metabolic regulation, developmental timing, etc.

Genes mutate at a great rate but most of these changes close out of town - get wdited out, removed as trash by cell policing proteins.  Any important change in a specific generation of human happens prior to age 18 - prime reproductive year.  From age 20 onward not much of real significnce happens.  this explains the volatility of adolescence and the drive for individuation.  Last chance to get a word in.  All learning, especially fear-based is epigenetically registered in gamete base pairs at fertilization are heritable forever after.

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Shift, Swerve, Juke

January 24, 2015 A sharecropper sits on his front porch near Tunica Mississippi playing a song on his battered old guitar and launches the soundtrack to a cultural revolution played out by Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Paul Butterfield - the butterfly effect.

Every human life engages hierarchies of causation from nanoscale events far below the visual threshold up through the  small gestures that influence family and friends that may in turn lead to local trends and international effects.  Pick up mom’s guitar, look closely at the salamander and the stars.

Changes within a single person may cascade into larger effects, some are willful and many without intention.  Pete Townsend’s willful songwriting affected millions, and millions of people driving through the streets of London affect Pete Townshend. One million people buy a hit record and one million people buy a gallon of milk creating increasing tension at the farm- suburbia interface driving up rock star housing expense.

The general population buys automobiles - a generic item.  Advertising makes the generic specific.  I don’t just want a car, I want a Bugatti.

People crave wider effects than those available at the level of family and friends.  Adolescents want to control the world, old folks want to control their bladder.  As we grow up we discover hierarchies of our potential effect.  We strategize in arcs wide enough to make a living by providing society a useful skill - entertaining family and friends won't pay the rent.  Formal education is a conduit to the larger world where one earns a living.  After college what is my next challenge?  In science,  a small discovery will expand one’s influence, as in art, find a fresh way to convey the same ol’ same ol’.

Thomas Kuhn introduced the world to the nature of a paradigm shift in his 1962 classic “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”  In it he discusses change in scientific frameworks at a large scale: Copernicus, Newton,Darwin.  Imagine a hierarchy of revolution - a taxonomy of change,  the larger being the “shift” followed down the taxonomic scale by the swerve, the juke and then that smaller revolution that occurs once every two years in pop music - the jink.

Ideas cascade down and up the taxon, large affecting small and vice versa.  A gamma ray strikes an oxygen atom initiating a base pair mutation in a gene causing a woman’s IQ and EQ  to improve by ten points each.  She leverages her intelligence into the leadership of the free world.  A comet strikes the Earth and countless species become extinct.  An obscure, ugly little rodent-like mammal that eats snails and worms has been released from an evolutionary prison of total domination by dinosaurs and sixty million years later has evolved into humans.  After little rat,  we have ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Indus Valley, China and Rome - we have history.

There is a difference between paradigm shifts described by Kuhn that are within a single social realm such as science, not necessarily affecting art or religion - Newton in physics, Darwin in Biology, Freud in psychology. There are much larger changes in the zeitgeist as happened ca 1912 when eight different  paradigms shifted at once in art, physics, literature, music, dance, architecture, transportation (powered  flight)  and psychology.  Today as we evolve rapidly from our short-lived (at 100 years) Postmodern world,  to a Cybermodern society-we experience changes larger than a shift.  Searching for a single term  that would include many simultaneous paradigm shifters:  Braque-Picasso, Freud, Wright, Schoenberg, Joyce and Einstein in 1912 and that would need to define the Grove-Moore, Wozniak-Jobs-Gates and Google-Zuckerberg shifts that coalesced around in 2012.  How about Zeitshift?  then, working down the scale to the simpler single realm  shift, then down to the swerve, the juke and jink - OK.

A zeitshift is when the zeit hits the fan in every walk of life.  The entire game has been changed for everyone - for example,  the 1912 zeitshift from the 500 year epoch of The Descended Grid to the 100 year age of uncertainty known as Postmodernism and now another zeitshift from the Postmodern into the age of Cybermodernism.  Einstein’s 1905 “Theory of Relatvity” - iinitiates a paradigm shift in physics.  Picasso and Braque initiate a paradigm shift in Art.  Frank Lloyd Wright defines a shift in architecture - together, the combined mass of their innovation signals a zeitshift.

A zeitshift changes everything.  It was the 1912 Postmodern zeitshift, gaining wider traction in the 1960s,  that  allowed the Stephen Jay Gould-Niles Eldredge notion “Stasis is Data” to gain traction in the scientific community. The Postmodern zeitshift made it OK to think that the key force of speciation is cooperation not competition-Lynn Margulis.  the PoMo zeitshift shift,  codified by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” eased the way for gays - out in parades, occupying whole urban zones, many TV and movie roles, marriage, for blacks to dominate pop music with rap and hip hop, to make it OK to be the “other”, the  formerly ignired, the underprivileged, the underclass is recognized and even celebrated- see PoMo economics, history, anthropology, literature theory. Zeitshifts allow full respect and consideration for ideas that a previous zeit disallowed.

Zeitshifts now occur at a rapid rate.  They used to occur once  every 300-500 years now they’re every 100 years or less.

What are the analogs between organism genetic evolutionary causality and social causality?  How did / does Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism once localized in bio-science and geology,  widen its effect on public consciousness, a higher, broader level of the taxon.  How did Darwin effect lower, narrower levels of scientific inquiry in genetics, embryology, biophysics, geology, anthropology, mathematics, psychology?

Great thinkers who acted first on a lower taxon level and affected great change throughout the taxonomic hierarchy: Kingdom, phylum, class,family, genus, species and individual.  In politics see: Napoleon, Churchill, Stalin, FDR, LBJ

Trace the history of rock and roll from sub-saharan tribal African rhythms to slave chants, to Robert Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis,  Louis Jordan, Jackie Brenston, Bill Haley, Elvis,  Little Richard, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Stones, Zep, Iggy Pop The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Duran Duran, Metallica, REM, Nirvana et al. The skin- tonal transformation from black to white is interesting and now that whites have totally subsumed rock and roll, ever-inventive blacks juked again into rap and jinked into hip hop - now also subsumed by whites.

*12:32pm

Bend It Like Nature

January 21, 2015 Art-making is like evolution.  The artist experiments, searches consciousness, habit, skill, experience, history. Hold on to the good stuff, throw out the bad.  An artist tries 1,000 different ideas during years of work, shares 100 of these ideas with other people, two of the works are selected for exhibit and critical scrutiny, one of these ideas dominates,  giving rise to:

1. ”BLAM !”-Roy Lichtenstein
2. ”Crazy” - Willie Nelson
3. “Woman One” - deKooning
4. “Hey Baby” - Bruce Channel
5. ”Folsom Prison Blues” - Johnny Cash
6. “American Flag Painting” - Jasper Johns
7. “Watch Your Step” - Bobby Parker
8. “Love Potion #9” - Leiber & Stoller
9. “String Quartet in F” - Hayden
10. “School of Athens” - Raphael

All deliver bold, simple, rhythmic, colorful, spicy, and as of 1963-70: camp.

Emotion-laden expressions rarely endure critical stress.  They may be “true” and ‘heartfelt”  They may be “honest” and many are technically obsessive but they do not generate impact, traction or staying power.  Save the sap for the memoir where people might be interested in ephemera, juvenalia, sincerity.

Most picture makers are locked into mediocrity from a strong dose of early approval.  Aunt Mildred says ‘Oh ! -  It is just wonderful dear” upon viewing “Waikiki Sunset with palms” painted when you were fifteen.  Art fairs across the land are stuffed to the gills with Thomas Kinkade wannabees. The following are the rules for traction in capital “A” art world - 2015.

1. Obsession
2. Duchamp-Benjamin-Warhol genuflection
3. Machine-slick displaces touch
4. Scale - make it too big for the living room
5. Content - too sexy, too violent for living room
6. Theme: gender and race still rule the roost - use wit and irony

Bend it like nature -read the working genetic code - insect or mammal; Duchamp or Picasso.  Make a move any move but respect the genetic history - the genome, as you share your mutations, subject your creation to your own harsh gauntlet of  natural selection, make additional moves by addressing your success as your new work progresses - what does the genome suggest?  What does your latest layer or splash of paint suggest?  If loss ensues, make another bold move bolder than the first - shift, swerve, juke as required.  If this fails, let extinction run its course and begin again and again and again.  there is no blueprint suggesting the final result.  Nature had no idea that humans would evolve when it relocated the skeleton to the interior of its animal du jour.  there was no human-vector intention 100 million years ago - just the intention of the second law of thermodynamics - restore entropy and use animals to do it.  One thing led to another under the bold, playful and demanding eye of a broader natural selection.  The dog hunts or it don’t.  If it hunts,  keep it, store its information on a DNA molecule - don’t mess with the good things.

Artists who imagine an end result and direct effort to a preconceived notion work against the grain of evolution and their own nature, their inborn gift  for exploration, adventure, something new, effective and powerful.  In nature the good stuff is built upon not ignored or discarded.  As much as nature loves to experiment, it does not like to start from scratch.  Nature keeps the good stuff and builds upon it.  Nature has been adventurous in overall process but conservative in protecting moves that bear fruit.  Nature locks success into chromosomes.

“I asked the brick what it wanted to be.  It said: I want to be an arch.”  Louis Kahn

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Word Badge

January 20, 2015 “In the last analysis” was a word badge in 1964, paradigm and stochastic in 1974, reify and conflate in 1984, privilege and marginalize shared the spotlight in 1994.  A single word or phase identifies a half- generation of intellectuals, scientists, artists - a hipoisie, not crazy enough to be the avant garde but surely had a taste of what it was up to. Academic buzz words that transcend the jargon of a single field.  these words are hot stuff for a few years as they pass from professors on the cutting edge to their graduate students then through journals and conferences out to the rest of academia ending up on the lips of an entire cohort.  Are you in or out?

Why do these signifiers of the inside scoop matter?  How do they work?  Why do they evaporate into uncoolness after a few years of omnipresence?  they are generational markers that with a single word signal an entire Kool Aid cocktail of authorities endorsed, novels read, humor shared, scientific, literary, artistic dogma ingrained.

Just say stochastic in 2015 and one knows that advanced degree in whatever was received in mid- late 1960s-early 1970s and this person carries the full-Boomer package: Modern Synthesis Darwinism, early Elvis, Beatles-Stones with a side of Simon and Garfunkel, love JFK, hate LBJ and Nixon, don’t connect with pop music after James Taylor, CSNY and Carole King, read Thomas  Kuhn’s first edition, snickered snidely at Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey, smoked a little weed while reading Carlos Castaneda to a paramour with Dead on the stereo and a half-written thesis stewing over at the Smith corona. “Catch-22” and anything by Vonnegut.  If into the humanities: One swerved along with Harold Bloom, thought McLuhan was indecipherable but wouldn’t admit it, strained to understand the five frogs: Delueze, Debord, Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault.  If into art - Camp was getting moldy, minimalists were cool, race and gender render was getting traction, Richard Prince was stealing, Cindy Sherman and David Salle were the last of the line then it all gets fuzzy.  One word - stochastic - unlocks this whole package that need not be spoken - it is taken for granted.

When one hears “In the last analysis” Dave Brubeck and Kingsley Amis pop into the brain along with a Mort Sahl and Leny Bruce comedy LP,  deep respect for Freudian psychoanalysis and use of the term psychoneurotic if English.  One gets Francis Bacon and Franz Kline, acknowledging de Kooning as an all-time master while totally mystified by current auction prices, feared the Soviet Union and the nuclear threat  but jury still out on Stalin - he DID defang Hitler.  Brainworms consist of “Doggie In The Window” “Ghost Riders In the Sky” and “Hot diggity” along with some “Chewing gum Losing Flavor”  and “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands”.  Graham Greene and John Le Carre said it all. First plane ride was in a DC-7 and one got dressed up for the occasion.

James Bond is too cool for words.

Reify and conflate bring up early Zep, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Watergate, semiotics, deconstruction, Julian Schnabel’s broken plate extravaganzas, study in Verona or Barcelona, six months at The American Academy in Rome.

One reads an Op-Ed piece by a shiny face thirty year old assistant professor who introduces the language of gender-filtered marxist postmodernism and one can almost name his graduate thesis advisor and the University where she teaches - smell the burnt spandex of the bra and spy the tattered Sontag paperback with the cat pee stain next to the avocado plant.

Here in Nashville in 2015 there is a language of fundamentalist Christianity that I have yet to penetrate.  I hear the words “brother” and “amen” in otherwise normal conversation between very hip, intelligent people and wonder about the scope, the scale of the belief that it signifies.  One hears a man refer to his conversation mate as “brother” and it means they both believe God created the world in six days 5,000 years ago not because it’s true but because it signifies.  They are part of a very large southern family that does not involve northerners, big city slickers, jews, blacks or non-believers - no offense to these folks - hey! we love ‘em all - work with ‘em every day - they just don’t belong among the elect.  They rarely miss a chance to thump the Bible.  Mention of The Bible will come up in an otherwise normal conversation - weird.

Word badges are not jargon though they may have evolved from it nor are they buzzwords or slang.  A word badge has the power to signify the core beliefs of an entire demographic: its zeitgeist, its genius loci, literature, humor, athletic and political heroes, hot cars, movies, songs - the whole ball of wax.  Say one word and we know you - “Ducky” - child of depression, WWII vet or teen, the whole 1950s atomic consumer suburban “LIFE magazine” deal. “Stochastic”-academic heyday in 1972, genetic drift, computational modeling. “Camp” - Sontag, Warhol, Batman on TV, the closeted gay subtext opera/ballet, Judy Garland, Busby Berkley musicals.

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Bacteria God

January 19, 2015 Vast populations of single-cell organisms ( bacteria, fungi and archaea) have consciously created reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals thus humans.  this creation was not a long series of random acts of natural selection working through previously evolved metabolic systems or a friendlier serial endosymbiosis of simple organisms into the complex  but a willful act by a vast  colonial mind, the total Earth population of bacteria, archaea and fungi  are a single mind that created the human brain and in so doing, our sentience.  God is inside each of us - indeed.  Each human supports a population of thousands of species of bacteria.

Microorganisms have existed on Earth 800 times longer than humans.  They are smarter than we are.  Four billion years for bacteria compared to five million years for humans.  There are millions of species of single cell organisms now living in a multitude of environments across the globe. There are 10,000 different species of bacteria in a spoonful of soil.  The human body contains more than a trillion bacterial individuals guiding each of us across the landscape of life doing our small part in restoring pre-Big Bang cosmic stasis.

Nature abhors a gradient.  A gradient is a disparity in temperature, pressure, electrical current, chemistry or other physical force across a distance. Organisms on Earth play a key role in diffusing the gradient between the sun’s heat and a cold universe, just as a tornado resolves the gradient between adjacent, differing atmospheric pressure systems.

365 Million Years Ago (MYA)  during the Cambrian Explosion (of plants and animals) following a global ice sheet melt, hundreds of thousands of new species of land animals suddenly appeared, taking advantage of another of their recent creations - plant life. 10-20 million years is “sudden” in geological time - the Earth is 5,000 million years old, life, in one form or another,  has existed for 4,000 million years.   A large cohort of the pelagic bacterial population migrated from free-floating in primeval soup to life on land staying  busy fueling and managing their new vehicles - animals.  their large new tools allowing emigration from the oceans into a vast array of  ecosystems, passengers in their new, less intelligent  hosts, doubling their impact in restoring the thermodynamic balance of the cosmos that plays out in our infinitely tiny corner here on Earth.

The human brain, cool as it is, is nothing special in the vastly abundant cornucopia of life.  It is a collection of cells  created to handle enormous synapto-electrical load imposed by social demands of an easily frightened, easily herded animal. Reading body language including facial expression and vocal intonation required increased neural metabolic rates.

Processing religious ideas in order to reverse natural selfish instinct, demands a lot of chemical energy -  brain power. The brain is a muscle working hard 24/7 to override our instinctive, natural selfishness. Religion demands that the human think altruistically, to turn the other cheek.  Dredging up an unnatural meekness takes a lot of synaptic activity, a lot of neurochemicals must be transported - put those mitochondria to work!

Wheat may not be the most nutritious food but it has been widely popular as a crop enabling the formation of complex human societies. It is an excellent drug for short-term energy supply needed for neural demands of living in a hierarchical society.  Wheat is the crack of the food pyramid.  They don't call them crackers for nothing.

The greater the trend to social organization and resulting complexity of all types of language ( speech, body, written), the greater has been the demand for brain power.  Hey !  this little human experiment appears to be working with this cave-dweller clubhouse and city-agriculture deal - let’s give ‘em a bigger brain and see what happens…………….oops, they’re now wrecking all our hard work - send in the clowns er, the Ebola and AIDS virus, get those fungi to do their share before it’s too late.  Humans have messed up our experiment.

1. Does god exist?
2. yes - god is microorganisms

1.  Are humans more special than other animals
2.  no - sorry

1.  What is more correct, Darwinian evolution or this theory of bacteria - god creationism?
2. Both adhere to natural selection but bacteria -god supplies the more fundamental causal unit.

1.  How can tiny things like bacteria have a mind?
2. They were on earth so much longer than humans they must be smarter - more devious, self-serving by tenure alone.  They work together not unlike all the neurons in our brain.

1.  How do bacteria make plans?
2.  How do bacteria communicate with one another - up close or at great distance?

1.  What language do bacteria use to communicate with one another?

1. Chemical, electrical

1.  Any audio or tactile communication between bacteria?  If so, with what feature do they listen?

1.  How might an individual bacterium process an audio signal without a brain of its own?

1. There is efficacy / agency / capacity in numbers.  This is like asking if a single termite can build a city in the dirt or if a single neuron can solve a quadratic equation.

1.  Do bacteria improve as they evolve? or do they just get different?
2.  It is now widely subscribed in the scientific community that our intracellular mitochondria were once  free-living microorganisms.
3. was the golgi body also a free-floating organism?
4. Was the rough endoplasmic reticulum a long wormy organism that joined forces inside the cell for a better chance at survival?
5.  Was there a time in deep history when the ribosome and endoplasmic reticulum were bonded and swam around independently of other organisms cranking out proteins that floated away?
6.  Did these two, ER and Ribosomes,  enter the cell as a pair or was there a ten million year gap before they learned to work together synthesizing essential proteins - skin, heart muscle, lung tissue, etc.
7.   Are there still free-floating organelles in the Earth’s oceans?  If not - why not? Is there a proto-lung or heart or brain  floating in the deep somewhere?
8.  were there proto-liver, kidney, heart, adrenal, testicular, ovarian, pancreatic organelles?  If so, how much of their future character was manifest prior to their joining forces with other systems?  If this agglomeration occurred, did it happen all at once?  Did all of these organs and glands evolve as neutral tissue was assigned tasks appearing during mutation / bio-association followed by phenotypic expression?

end-5:31pm

Quantum Camp

Quantum Camp: The Genealogy of the Postmodern  Membrane January 10-Saturday, 2015-5

Marcel Duchamp reified Oscar Wilde’s notion of celebrating the ordinary with his iconic sculpture “R Mutt” in 1913 when camp emerged as the sensible membrane filtering capital “A”  from all other art.

“The camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense but this is not the familiar split level construction of a literal meaning on the one hand and a symbolic meaning on the other.  It is the difference between the thing as meaning something, anything and the thing as pure artifice.” -  “Notes On Camp-#16 ” - Susan Sontag - 1964

Camp  celebrates that which is required to swerve from the philistine-straight zeit however that might manifest,  past, present and future.  The definition is always in flux.  When the straight world has it ingrained,  the rules change, swerving as required.  New manifestations in painting, opera, film, fiction, methods of scientific and all cultural inquiry will entice with a superficial reading and lose you with a deeper one. In any event you remain subject to the membrane’s power to restrict entry.

Susan Sontag spelled it out to widespread effect in her “Paris Review” essay “Notes On Camp”- 1964 and  her 58 theses stood  nailed to the door of contemporary culture for 50 years: The rules of the road.  Anderson Cooper is the new camp, mainstream to the max.  Gay sensibility has been completely assimilated in 2015.  Sontag’s camp has dissolved as an avant garde idea.  All 58 of her criteria for camp are now  water we swim in, not the spear tip of the avant garde as they were in 1964, when camp was the membrane separating .01 percent from the uncool.   Her 58 theses now separate blue states from red,  a hundred million people  on a side, a broad brush, however, the inside scoop of 1964 remains the all-purpose membrane for any art aspiring to capital A status in any city around the world - now a given, not an insider code.

Architect-philosopher Robert Venturi proposed a feature of the Postmodern ethos he called “Both And” - a  quantum notion of a thing being in two places at once, being two things at the same time, a quality that, under the jurisdiction of The Descended Grid aka Modernism,  was denied, corrected, rejected, straightened, glossed, denied, derided or ignored but now acknowledged, with a PoMo permission slip, embraced, allowed by the expansion of our zeit, our new late 20th and 21st century rules formalized in academic PoMo texts by the four frogs of the new apocalypse: Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Foucault in the mid 1960s.  A building, a scientific experiment, an idea, emotion and or their components  may be simultaneously BOTH interior AND exterior.  Stasis IS data.   The dialectical, rhetorical membrane separating interior from exterior, up from down, good from bad, slick from rough has dissolved.

Membranes are selective barriers allowing some things to pass while stopping others.  Barriers may be physical as in orbiting electrons separating the inside from outside of an atom on up the taxonomic ladder to human emotions- manners allowing certain people into one’s social orbit while excluding others, the psycho-editorial board manifest at the nucleus of a neuron, a molecular modification to a peptide stored in the fastness of the hippocampus.  It is all “Both And” now.  We  sail in a fully postmodern ocean now. Membrane navigation is the key to success. The molecule is the message.

Membranes are boundaries, without a membrane one could become the adjacent, a neo-parent, a star-clone or float around indiscriminately without definition.  A gift that dissolves or penetrates  membranes is to be nurtured.  All things have their cherry,  pop the Abrams tank with an armor-piercing sabot.

What’s in? What’s out? What’s up? What’s down? What’s cool? What’s hot?  Membranes are gatekeepers.  A cell membrane comprises a landscape of lipids. Protein molecules are interspersed throughout this barrier allowing passage of the specific.  A work of art is analogous to a molecular port.  A work of art is a channel into the heart, a gate at the membrane of your soul.  To understand a thing locate ports of entry, explore the nature of its membrane.

Where is the membrane when a single fish in a school influences the direction of 1,000 individuals. Is the reaction of a single fish  an external cause or an internal cause?  Consider termites, birds and humans with their gangs and social classes  flocking, feverishly clustering - where is the membrane?  does it surround the entire school of 1,000 or is it at the level of the single organism responding to imminent threat?  An individual sees the shark, endures the sensible experience as all the rest respond to a meme as they change course.  The connector individual acts as the entry molecule for the social membrane - the human gatekeeper. In Gladwellian terms, cool Freddie in his role as connector to his crew  gets new shoes and voila, a new footwear line gains traction all over the world.   Martin Luther King was in the street breathing tear gas and living with direct threats to his life for many years sending a message to many eventually initiating a widespread change of course for a society.  The key fish.

“A living thing is a deterministic unfolding of inherent potential under internal biological principles” - Plato

“Variation is undirected” - Darwin - Variation turns out to be VERY directed

Is there a membrane separating the different levels of the taxonomic hierarchy?  The inanimate, the living, the ecosystem,  the species, the individual, organ, cell, nucleus, protein molecule, atom, atomic nucleus, ad infinitum.  Is there a membrane separating a species from its ecosystem?

Each taxon is affected by evolutionary forces primarily from its adjacent levels and secondarily from other levels.  There is causal flow in both directions up and down the taxonomic ladder.  When and how do levels of causation skip levels?  When might a genetic mutation erase an entire species? or a bolide erase an entire kingdom of life?  What happens at the biotic / abiotic membrane?

1.  What comprises a membrane?
2. orbiting electrons
3.   Hydrophobic/phylic molecules
4.   skin
5.   manners
6.  religion
7.   weapons

Humans are educated to give substance and strength to their social  membranes.  Math and science are bone cells, art is marrow, manners are motion.

Enzymes-membrane penetrators:

The protein that forms a gateway through a cell wall

How many different proteins fill this function?

Is there a different gate protein for each of 1,000s of cell products travelling out into the body?

What are the gatekeepers in the cells of the adrenal gland?  the pineal gland?  the kidney cell?  Liver cell?

How many different types of liver cells?

Protein evolution:  3.5 BYA,1.5 BYA, 250 MYA, 20 KYA last year, ten minutes or ten seconds or ten nanoseconds ago - proteins evolve relentlessly.

In science:  Stephen Jay Gould struggles for 1,343 pages in the chaos of adjacent paradigms.  He shifts away from the Modern zeit exemplified by Charles Darwin, notions of forward progress, the prevailing doctrine of the scientific method etc. toward   the Postmodern exemplified by Einstein and Picasso, S-holes and A-holes the validation of negative space.  In Gould’s terms “Stasis is data’ i.e. no data is data.  The void defines the solid.  Gould, due to strictures of his scientific milieu pays obeisance to Darwin while surrounding himself with the tools of postmodernism to make his grand point re: the true nature of evolution.

New paradigm means a new membrane to filter new attitudes comprising species wide behavior, skin, cell membrane, electron orbit.  How deep does the new zeit penetrate?

Can a new frame be consciously created by a small group or an individual or is a new frame simply a response to a general mood held by millions?  Mood shifts-cell divides, new membranes are formed.  Cell grows, decays, gets subsumed, ejected, recycled, trashed, killed, disrespect is the first step toward oblivion - no wonder it launched duels to the death.

Booster Rocket

Don’t throw  grandpa out with the bathwater.  His ideas, music and manners are no longer in fashion but they worked in his day and have served all of his descendants. He is the foundation of our slice of existence.  Adolf  Grunbaum dismantles Freud, Stephen Jay Gould flays Darwin.  It is sensible and kind to acknowledge the locus of one’s presence on the shoulders of giants.  It is easy and slyly entertaining to criticize. An iconic thinker remains a giant though their ideas become vulnerable to new science and new art. Who can resist finding fault in an icon?  Dismantlers imagine standing side by side with leviathan while running their knife through his kidney or perhaps they  marinate in single malt and cigar smoke during a warmly imagined fireside debate with the master - as if he would allow them onto the grounds of his estate.

It’s Oedipal:  men dismantle fathers and all surrogates, substitutes, deputies and proxies,  wherever a paternal head emerges:  whack-dad-mole.  whether swerving from or kneecapping the icon.  Questioning dogma is an important phase toward maturity but must one be a dog?

The male dreams of hierarchies of assault from the adolescent coursing with new testosterone  gunning down an abusive father to renowned scientist SJG spending 1,300 pages to contradict Darwin.  There are many levels of the game from the personal to professional and  maybe just for the hell of it.

Respect for a flawed elder is a corollary of “Dance with the one who brung ya.” Your grandpa brung ya to this dance of life - this alone warrants respect. ( even if he abused your mother and caused subsequent generations a living hell, cursed with a stain  that religion cannot erase)  Sometimes it’s hard to tell when an icon is prime for debunking and when they continue to deserve  genuflection, The  zeit ( zeit: definition: zeitgeist, atmosphere, climate, realm of the acceptable)  of that which is open to debunkery changes through generations as rejection, shock, dismay, resistance to the curious iconoclast’s new ideas transforms into respect then awe, a new formula,  gospel, installation into the canon, idea becomes axiom.  A generation swims in the new, clean water but over time new research tools and a new social milieu bring penetrating questions followed by slicing up of received wisdom  like lunch meat, patronizing acknowledgement of contribution,  reassembly into legend and finally the bronze statue in the hall of fame.

It is not crucial that a theory be “correct” only that it rattle cages, turn the soil, swerve the zeit i.e. that it inspire thought and action.

Follow the paths of two great works:  Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and Picasso’s “Demoiselles D’ Avignon” from shocking outlier, to centrality, to the dusty pedestal.*

Studying the physical structures of animals and plants with the naked eye in comparison to todays research tools is analogous to making a 19th century nature painting and a feature film.  One looks closely at things to the best of one’s ability.  Perseverance and obsession reap a golden harvest.

The significant activity of the operation other than its residual structure and effects occur at lightning speed at microscale in every cell of an organism ( so what else is new?)  Thirty years of biophysics, biochemistry, genetic research reveal operations within cells that are like feature film vs 19th century realism.  We get closer to the real nitty gritty.  There are big surprises here that in some very prominent cases, contradict key features of iconic theories.  Organisms do not evolve gradually contradicting Darwin, Water has a fourth state other than solid, liquid and gas.  Acquired traits CAN be inherited - allowing Lamarck back into the fold after 150 years of derision.

rewiring dogma brings to mind the role of the booster rocket from space flight cast off as detritus shortly after launch, once vital - now detritus.  Who is doing booster rocket duty these days?  Who is stirring the pot?  Starting the fertile conversations, dialogue, dialectics.  Does it matter if someone is right or wrong if their ideas, possibly harebrained, launch a new realm of science or a new way of seeing?

We underestimate the importance of our philosophers.  America has no philosophers as such, no job description - philosopher,  seems a bit presumptuous, uppity, high falutin, impractical by definition - we couldn’t need that.  Norman Mailer,a prize-winning novelist and essayist our greatest recent contemporary philosopher had no professional locus as the philosopher that he surely was. The French have a job title - Philosopher and it is revered, rewarded, recognized by honored institutions.  A wide-ranging mind such as Mailer’s should not have to wander about a public landscape searching for a job title. When he had to be described, it was as a “Public Intellectual”  Why do Americans keep philosophy caged in academia?  Norman Mailer was a pot stirrer.  He was first and foremost a philosopher.  He may have been full of BS as often as not but he kept the national pot stirred as much with his error as with his deep perception and writing skill.  If he could have been labelled: Philosopher there would have been a perfect fit, as it was, he had to concoct the notion of “The Great American Novel” in which he was in constant pursuit.  This G.A.N. was synecdotal of the large hole in his soul from the missing role in America.

….. He stirred civil rights, anti war protest, morality

…..The young fish ask “what’s water?”  a variation of booster rocket theory. Social digestion of big ideas from alien dye to the color of the water.  Best to change the color of the water with a new idea rather than trying to work backwards dismantling precursors for anything other than educational purpose.

…..Booster rocket ideas of 18th century now taken for granted as the water we swim in: “All men are created equal”, “Separation of church and state”

to do: Read more Bernard Bailyn and  track the growth of these two ideas in America through 125 years 1650-1775

Our founders at Boston, Plymouth, Providence had little notion of either idea with their strong belief in “natural” social hierarchies i.e. noble birthright - hey! we were still very northern euro - royal-centric.

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The Ugly Gene

Why are many of our buildings ugly when simple beauty is easily achieved? In the words of my Harvard GSD architecture professor Ed Baum “Good proportions are free.” There is a compulsion suspended like a toxic vapor through the American zeitgeist to seek, propagate and live easily with that which lacks proportion, coordinated color and pleasing composition. Our built environment trends toward collisions of the ill-formed: trainwrecks, in common parlance. This is not a newsflash. Urban physical disorder has been noted by our finest writers of the past century. Steinbeck complained in Travels With Charley - 1962. Robert Venturi celebrated with irony in Learning From Las Vegas - 1972. We are surrounded by it in 2015.

Every city in the United States is blighted by a cancerous skein of ugly streets, bleak vistas, esthetically vacant mini malls, endless commercial strips stretch for hundreds of miles, linking cities with colossal polypeptides of architectural disturbance, 100,000 base pairs comprising fast food joints, each vying to be the Taj Mahal of its block, gas stations, tire stores, payday loan sharks, liquor stores, car lots united by a glowing tissue of jetsam, a chaos of neon and plastic backlit signage. Drivers crawl along a molecule of a madness born of fear.

We are comfortable with ugliness. Building designers working for fast food and auto supply franchise owners propose these structures, planners approve or ignore them, contractors build as instructed and we all tolerate them, comforted by this swamp of banality defining us, from the scenic fringes of the heartland in Bozeman nestled in the high lonesome to vibrant Nashville, from Boston to Washington down to Miami absorbing weird comfort from fingernails scratching down the suburban blackboard. Open your eyes on commercial boulevards across America and see the garbage.

I find a parking place near the Vanderbilt campus in my adopted city of Nashville, a part of town with a long history of smart, well educated, sensitive people, a part of town containing many hospitals, health care clinics and mid- size hotels. Student dormitories reminiscent of Bulgarian worker housing face West End avenue. I sit for a few moments in my car, two blocks away, looking out upon urban formal chaos. The willfully, comfortably hideous layers of ugly buildings poison my cone of vision. Half-baked, uninspired buildings collide with one another in sour formlessness. This collision of built form is necrosis. How could this happen among fine folks? Why did it happen? Nashville is a friendly, comfortable, amenable city with an intelligent, hard-working population. This lack of esthetic honesty typifies large zones of each American city.

Looking closely at a single building, one sees that this single structure is ordinary and uninspired in all aspects of causation. A common excuse among architects, when pressed to answer for uninspired form, reply that their design was driven by economics ( so were countless beautiful buildings lining the shores and hillsides of the Mediterranean). When one includes the nearest hulking neighbors of this ugly building in the line of sight, several of these fear-riddled piles combine causing a synergy of negativity the “ Additive Negative” - two wrongs combine to create a situation geometrically more dissolute than the effect of both wrongs simply added together. A single airliner flight control component fails - perhaps the aircraft remains airworthy, a second failure brings catastrophe. So it is with a cityscape. Isolated, uninspired buildings randomly scattered throughout the urban-suburban fabric and there is little harm or foul, when added together there is permanent visual turmoil, fear-generated and fear-reinforced piles, negatives have been added, darkness settles among us. Let’s drink to this or not, alcohol exacerbates. the sensitive are driven to madness.

More than half of all Americans are hard-wired for ugliness, in possession of a deep, active fear of beauty resulting from color harmony, resolved proportion, graceful line or sublime use of material. Like interesting and dangerous animals -the esthetically pleasing is best experienced in the safe confines of an art zoo (museum). Teams of educated, experienced, licensed professional building designers, armed with time-honored theory still create many ugly buildings. If a design survives its architects in possession of esthetic quality, it will suffer when placed into its urban context, most often ignoring neighboring buildings thus poisoned by them. Every building in American cities is reviewed and approved by city planners yet the tortured logic of the aimless collage prevails. This new building is anchored in a part of town with its own kind creating an esthetic dead zone. All is well - Protestants rule, ugly prevails. We are comfortable and safe.

Ninety eight percent of new buildings constructed in the United States have no architect involved. Our professionals, trained to deliver visual coherence are not even on the case. So what? They have filled our cities with banality with arguments of an optimistic Modernism, Postmodernism or Greenism, styles easily subverted, denatured and derailed. From the top of our form-giving administrative and professional hierarchy down, politicians and urban designers charged with envisioning entire cities, planners, landscape architects, architects and contractors, the cohort charged with delivering our built environment to the citizens who finance and approve it, live and work in it - all is as it should be. We are in stasis We are surrounded by the manifest response to a powerful fear instilled by our ancestors, a fear overriding our innate mammalian attraction to beauty. We tolerate an avalanche of the ordinary, we seek it.

Note: the following thesis falls into the logical category of “Russell’s Teapot” wherein Bertrand Russell asserts that there is a teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars and it is up to you to disprove it. If I were forty years younger with a degree in bioscience, a fume hood, an electrophoresis device, a centrifuge, I would experiment. This must be left to others.

North America was settled by Europeans fleeing religious oppression. As the 16th century unfolded, the Protestant Reformation launched by Martin Luther in 1517 became as violently restrictive as the Roman Catholicism it replaced “Not only were Papists persecuted but Protestant founders in England, Switzerland, the German region, Scandinavia and the Netherlands prosecuted all secondary Protestant sects as infidels.” - Hughes

“Queen Elizabeth is on record for the burning at the stake of two Anabaptists in 1575...Henry VIII had a score of them burned on one day in 1535.-Durant

“There were 800 public executions for heresy per year during the last half of the 16th century and punishment often included disembowelling, drowning, beheading and burning. It was forbidden to keep religious images even in private houses, under pain of severe punishment”-Hughes

“...He brought about the entire suppression of the mass at Augsburg. At his ( Bucer’s) instigation, many fine paintings, monuments and ancient works of art in churches were wantonly torn, broken and smashed. Whoever refused to submit and attend protestant worship was obliged to quit the city.” - Grisar.

“In 1529 the council of Strassburg ordered the breaking to pieces of all remaining altars, images and crosses and several churches and convents were destroyed. In Scotland John Knox passed legislation in which it was forbidden to say mass or be present at mass with punishment being loss of all goods, flogging and banishment and for repeated offense-death.” - Hughes

Many American pioneers at Jamestown, Plymouth, the Chesapeake, the Hudson River Valley and other settlements throughout the Eastern seaboard, emigrated from a violent cauldron of religious intolerance. All protestants share ancestral roots in 16th century public spectacles of torture of Bishops, priests, monks and Protestant outliers. Destruction of religious icons: paintings, sculpture, stained glass and the churches and monasteries containing them was the order of the day.

During the 16th century thousands of citizens of England, The Netherlands, Germanic lands, Scandinavia and Switzerland who emigrated to the new world watched in horror the agonizing spectacle of men and women tortured to death in public for their religious belief. The genes of these traumatized European ancestors mutated at that time from an innate mammalian positive esthetic response into a fear of harmonious color and good proportion. We suffer from Suppressed Esthetic Response ( S. E. R.) We carry a base pair sequence now in a gene that ensures S.E.R. We now experience a deep-seated, biochemical resistance, encoded during the Reformation in our genome by the effect of severe nervous alarm. This rearranged code now protects us from life-threatening expressions of beauty, from dangerous sublimity and bliss. Many of our ancestors began their journey on this continent afraid of the beautiful and we remain hardwired for banality.

Mammals possess neurons that perceive, analyze, judge and act upon esthetically filtered visual information. An individual discerns healthy, fully-fleshed, strong, capable organisms from those that are unhealthy, emaciated and weak, incapable of defense or likely to pass viable genes to offspring i.e. out of proportion. When a creature is in proportion it receives respect from the observer. Quality and fitness have been perceived. The dreaded B-word - beauty has registered. Our capacity for esthetic discretion in works of architecture and art in our everyday environment has been switched off in the genetic code of Protestants descended from Europeans of the 16th century. This includes a large percentage of contemporary Americans. To sense beauty is to be human - to deny beauty is to be Euro- American.

Architects, our sanctioned saviors from perversions of built form, have been marginalized. Their respect in the community of built-form providers has dwindled over the century from a time when there were such persons as “Master Builders”. Architects have become obsessed with awarding one another for having swallowed sustainability Kool Aid. If a building is environmentally sensible and it satisfies an often esthetically challenged owner, the architect considers his or her work complete. Architecture, our culture’s only professional locus of hope for a delightful urban environment has become self-referential. Our finest graduate schools of urban design, landscape design and architecture throughout the Ivy League (source of all design school marching orders) have become high strung cults (see: “8 signs your child is in a cult”) bound by obscure jargon, dominated by a cloistered, priesthood disdaining the grubby, local, contentious, real-world of building delivery, herding their privileged flock of the children of the global one percent, stroking and abusing them under the archaic and arcane tutelage of grand old men and women who were bloviating, ill-tempered gasbags 35 years ago and remain such. Need an architect? they toil on the sidelines with buggy whip makers next to the disco balls. We are on our own.

A traumatic experience 450 years ago affects our population. The effect is achieved by the same mechanics of evolution that increased fur density on mammals forced to endure frigid climates. The innate esthetic sensibility of land animals was locked into our genome 250 million years ago. Soon after crawling from Pre-Cambrian waters to explode into countless species, among them were rat-like precursors of our lineage. A bio-mechanism has clouded a very long held esthetic sensibility with fear. Was this gene sequence permanently switched off? Can we reactivate it?

The idea that a population can inherit physical change or behavior from the real-time life experience of recent ancestors has been a bugaboo of evolutionary thinkers since Darwin dismissed Lamarck’s notion that giraffes affected the length of the neck of their immediate offspring by stretching to reach the high leaves. This notion is called “Inheritance of acquired characters” Darwin’s assertion was that a character such as a long neck is the result of a gradual process playing out over millions of years of competition for survival during which giraffes with longer necks would achieve greater success than relatives with a shorter neck due to their ability to reach a food source, the higher leaves. Darwin’s natural selection is a long, slow, gradual unfolding of fitness. For Lamarck the giraffe lineage would see results of a stretching effort in its offspring - for Darwin the results may not be seen for an epoch. Natural selection must play out, external forces of evolution will act upon every single component and behavior of every organism at all times, gradually, slowly and most of all, uniformly, over the fullness of geologic time: tens or hundreds of millions of years. Larmarck = immediate results, Darwin = results in due time - a very long time in the terms of a single human life, spans of incomprehensible time.

According to renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, three key branches of Darwinism have been marginalized by forty years of research in several biosciences, primarily genetics, embryology, biophysics and paleontology. Darwin’s three theoretical branches beyond the main trunk, that organisms evolve at all, are as follows: 1. Species evolve gradually and continuously in very small increments over the wide expanse of an epoch(s) Any change whatsoever will be insensible in a dozen or even a thousand human lifetimes. 2. Species evolve due to natural selection ( survival of the fittest and weirdest) caused by forces external to the individual. These external forces of causation act upon mutations manifest in individual organisms. These external forces of selection are: A. competition within species for sexual access B. adjusting ( or not ) to climate C. competition with other organisms in its ecosystem for food and dominance. 3. The primary taxonomic level in a hierarchy of causation for plant and animal evolution is the individual organism, not down a level to the gene (Dawkins) or up a taxonomic level, or three, to the species, clade or the phylum (Gould).

Newsflash: (Shhhhh - don’t tell Creationists) Darwin has been denied, demoted, contradicted: 1. Evolution is characterized by punctuated equilibrium, short periods of speciation ( great change) followed by eons of stasis. Evidence described in hundreds of published scientific experiments and exploration during past 50 years. There do exist species that evolve gradually, but most, as seen in the 350 million year fossil record, do not. 2. It has been proven by genetic research of the past thirty years that the bulk of our genome has been chemically locked into its chromosomal place for many millions of years. Humans share genetic sequences for metabolism and organ development with many chordates, vertebrates, mammals and especially primates. Very little of our genome is available for Darwin’s version of natural selection. The majority of genetic change is internally driven by genetic and physical constraint, not driven by forces external to the individual, as Darwin asserted. 3. The individual is not the primary causal level, in the Linnaean taxonomy, for natural selection. Gould and others assert that the key entity in the evolutionary drama is the species not the individual. Entire species survive and diversify or become extinct in response to rare catastrophic forces of climate change, bolide ( comet, meteor, asteroid) impact and or plate tectonic effects on ocean currents, weather patterns and vegetation growth as continents shift.

Lamarck, renowned in his day but discredited for the past 150 years, the butt of every biology text explaining evolution in our lifetime, is back. Recent studies have shown that electrical impulses from neurons can affect the sequence of base pairs in DNA. If a traumatic emotion can send an electrical charge to an orbiting electron on the carbon atom of a thymine molecule on a DNA strand tucked into gene 123-XYZ on the twelfth chromosome in a gamete ( ovum or sperm), it can be inherited.

Every mutation has an origin - a first move proving beneficial to an individual, population or species or not. This mutation becomes preserved and used or is proven ineffective and is selected against or ignored ( see: nipples on men). As noted, many of our northern European ancestors observed or directly suffered public torture of religious heretics for over a century, this population carried, within its biochemical architecture a fear of attracting attention to its religious beliefs, avoiding expressions of support for soul-stirring architecture, sculpture and painting. Individuals so stirred were disembowelled and burned in front of their eyes. The agonies of dissent were fused into the genetic chemistry of the audience. Electrical signals coursed violently through nerve networks, all cells were affected including gametes, the rest is locked firmly into our history, registered by the bookkeeper of natural selection, the gene. Genes keep the books while natural selection acts upon individual organisms, species and clades.

Organisms comprise a hierarchy of causal realms of evolution from sub-atomic particles subject to laws of quantum mechanics to atoms and molecules behaving under laws of physics and chemistry discerned in the 18th and 19th century, DNA and chromosomes cause effects noted in the 19th century and verified in detail through the 20th and 21st centuries. Darwin asserted the individual as the taxonomic star actor at the causal center. Richard Dawkins asserts the gene as the major player - see: The Selfish Gene-1975, Gould asserts that the species or clade ( 10,000 species of birds in the clade of birds, 5,416 species in the clade of mammals) is the primary locus of evolution. btw- homo sapiens exist in a clade of one.

Our ancestors, a sub population from a corner of the Eurasian continent, developed a trait that allowed it to survive barbarous times in the old world: aversion to esthetics and and along with it, an associated trait of religious tolerance. It is unfortunate that the tolerance feature appears to have over-ridden our capacity for esthetic discernment.

The United States contains millions of descendants of this once small, harassed population carrying a silenced base pair sequence born of trauma. How might Americans discover ways to re-activate our collective esthetic sense now that the danger has passed? How might we swerve the tone of our zeitgeist toward delight? It would be an interesting avenue of research to explore ways in which the damping of our esthetic sensibility may have also reduced our capacity for any sort of common happiness. Americans behave as if repelled by bliss, resistant even to ordinary cheerfulness not induced by weird entertainment, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, weed, crank or pills. We appear to be blind to the reigning lack of proportion in our chubby population, including our ill-nourished children. If we can engineer our genome to control heritable disease, perhaps we can do some genetic research that might encourage a more delightful cityscape. We must see in order to act.

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January 3, 2015

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"Croissette"

"Heat and Light"

"Desert Stretch"

"Sunset in the Pines"

"Eighteenth Century"

"David Foster Wallace - Talk Bubble"

"DeLillo - Talk Bubble"