Meaning Golden Mean

July 17, 2015 “Rhythms apparent to the eye are at the root of artistic creation. They resound in man by an organic inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned.”

• Le Corbusier

“Desirable middle between two extremes” - Aristotle

“Doctrine of the mean” - Confucius

“The Middle Way” - Buddhism

“Nothing in Excess” - Delphic temple carving- Ancient Greece

“Proportion is related to beauty and goodness” - Plato

“The pure crystals that harness, guide, enable and valorize cosmic forces:  salt” - JHB

There is part of the human brain that just sits back and laughs / cries at the hodge-podge “self” you have constructed ( ended up with). It sends you dreams to mock you. It wakes you up to piss.

In my dream I toss a rock against a steel door and the noise wakes me up to micturate.

I dream of a colossal wave and the fear wakes me up to piss

I dream of wading in a flooding river and wake up to urinate

I have a jolting mini-nightmare to wake me up to take a leak

RE: A Thousand Plateaus-capitalism and schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The purulent oscillation between brilliance and logorrheic garbage is dizzying. Two thirds garbage and one third brilliant insight. It is worth the crappy, sophomoronic, quasi-scientific, marxist, homophilic outsider clap-trap to get the rhizomatic refrain such as it is - refried Straussian structuralist dualism, Saussurian synchronic-diachronic reframing, Chomsky-nods, the usual suspects of Western philosophy Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, et al.

I have an inborn sense of the golden proportion. I can create a golden rectangle at will time after time without using a ruler, by “eyeballing” only - .618:1.00 every time.  I can sense when a graphic design, a painting or a work of architecture is “IN” proportion. This is a blessing and somewhat of a curse as so much of the built environment is out of proportion thus always a little jarring. This visual acuity may be related to perfect pitch in the audio realm - who knows? This sense allows me to create building designs and artworks that please most viewers - those with an esthetic sense. I know “where to put the lines” when designing buildings. I also have a sense of color harmony. I can tell when colors are harmonious or not. I know how to mix colors in 10,000 hues to achieve color balance in a painting, if balance is desired - sometimes it is not. Knowing color allows a painter to orchestrate harmony and dissonance for emotional effect. I am developing the ability to do this in music. I am a beginner in music but can make some small delights by manipulating keynotes, fourths, fifths, thirds - minor and major simple progressions.

My question is this. How are the senses linked in the brain to make esthetic judgements? It seems as if the visual and audio senses share the same fundamental proportional rules i.e. a piece is either in harmony or not independent of good or bad criticism which is always a matter of fads, movements, fashion, style. During the Mannerist era  artwork was elongated i.e. out of proportion. Out of proportion was in style. Nowadays art is independent of much visual criteria - it meets a political-racial-gender program or it doesn’t.

If the brain has an “esthetic control center” when and why did it evolve? Does the ability to sense proportion help one to choose a healthy mate thus enhancing the quality of the species genome? Did it help during the hunt? A fat or skinny animal was more vulnerable to being tracked down and killed than an animal that is in proportion. An animal that is in proportion, signaling good health, will be stronger and better able to hunt the hunter. The brain developed the capacity to make fine proportional distinctions that send life or death information. Is the control center in the neocortex or in the brainstem-basal ganglia?

Do other mammals have esthetic sensibility? Do birds, fishes and insects and arachnids have it? A spider web is one of the world’s most sublimely beautiful structures. Could a spider web be woven without an esthetic sense?  If so, what genes are involved? Is there a set of broadly and deeply conserved genes such as the HOX group that enable animal brains to make esthetic-survival judgements? Have humans taken a survival skill and exapted it into our neocortical artistic realm with accompanying social agenda? Hey! this esthetic sensitivity works for hunting but look at this -I can paint a beautifully proportioned  herd of bison on the wall of our cave for the amusement of all and to enhance my status in the clan as an artist, a shaman who can re-create important real things in paint for use in animal abundance rituals. Prehistoric bird-like animals evolved feathers for insulation and discovered that they could be used for flight. did humans discover a new use for their esthetic survival package?

What does the golden mean mean? It is a baseline for all sensory judgement?  Is there a golden mean for smell and taste?  How about touch? or vomeronasal sense? The ideally proportioned pheromone that signals great interpersonal chemistry and true love-lust. Is there a universal donor pheromone as in blood type? A person who is magnetic to all? Is this what charisma is all about? Are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama chemically charismatic? What percentage of their personal power comes from their esthetics, their “lookin’ good” factor. What makes people of both sexes want to give charismatics whatever they want? Is there a lock on to one’s golden mean sensitivity?

Is there a deep knot of neurons that govern all senses that serves as a thalamic-type clearinghouse for afferent neuronal connection-distribution from sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, vomeronasal sense? Is there a rhizomatic network that interconnects all senses so that they work together to make judgments for further action. A pre- neocortical assembler that gives a “go-no go” opinion to the higher neocortical reason at prefrontal lobe? The brain gives the person or the matter at hand the “smell” test. My foamcore architectural model has helped me make judgements about the proportions of my building. I can sniff around the relationships of the various formal elements. What looks better four arches or five? Should this tower be an additional fifteen feet tall?

Late 19th Century American architect H.H.Richadrson stood in front of his masterpiece Boston’s Trinity Church as the tower was being constructed and quite independent of his office construction drawings, instructed the contractor to remove built stonework and make the church tower fifteen feet taller  because it “felt’ different in real life at full scale than it “felt” as building elevations on the working drawings.

A good architect makes 1,000 esthetic judgements most of which are beyond the threshold of normal sensitivity that all contribute to a house feeling just right to clients.

Have you seen a photograph of someone that made them look attractive only to be disappointed in your real life encounter? They looked as good as in the photo but something wasn’t clicking.

Charles Darwin colleague T.H. Huxley on human consciousness:

“As the steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.”  JB corollary: …..unless three toots on the whistle signal anarchists to blow up the whole train.

JB Theory: The human mind ( the animal mind - perhaps the plant mind) makes aesthetic-type judgements using every sense at many levels of review for countless judgements guiding action, belief, opinion and executive function in humans. There is a golden mean at work, our structuralist waffle iron,  in the fastnesses of the thalamus,  the batter of the exterior world is cooked cross-checking, filtering and coordinating this sensory input and in so doing,  enacting consciousness. The Golden Mean is the key to human consciousness, the fountainhead of perception.

• 1:38 pm - 7/17/15

Rejection-Creation

July 6, 2015 American culture is designed from top to bottom to make 50% of American men believe they are living TOTALLY independent lives.  These men all have the following traits:

1. They are employed
2. They own property
3. They are college educated
4. They pay all of their bills every month
5. They own stocks and bonds
6. Their children are raised and doing well
7. They paid for their children's college education
8. They have paid for daughter’s weddings
9. They host regular family get-togethers in a generous loving manner
10. They don’t “lean” on the Federal Government for anything
11. They own two or three cars and a few other devices with motors
12. They go on road trips to Branson and Las Vegas, often driving  Winnebagoes towing $60,000  tricycle Harleys
13. They are all still married to their first wives who they try hard to please
14. Eighty percent of these men are overweight with cholesterol and heart problems
15. They are amused by bolder men but envy no one.

American culture allows this myth of independence to thrive. These men are independent of little. They are piglets on the teat of our myth.  calves on an ideological udder, well-behaved puppies rollicking in a litter. They are mama’s boys and more than a few are motherfuckers. In the words of Sir Paul McCartney “.....and his mother said: “Ted be good’.....he would”  If you follow all of the rules all of the time and behave yourself 100% of the time - remaining under the juridical radar with your nose to your corporate grindstone ( or is it a hamster wheel?) within which you have risen into the executive ranks,  you can tell yourself you are an independent “self-made” man. If you stumble once you are dead. You cease to exist. You float in limbo, an untethered astronaut.  You are a non-person. You are pitied and ignored. If you dare to respond to a single urge emanating from your mid-brain, your basal ganglia, your nature center - you’re a fuck-up. 100% of your marching orders must derive from your female cultivated, mama-groomed prefrontal lobe, your culture center, Our myth center. The center of the big lie, the consensus trance. The lie that if you behave yourself rigorously, control yourself religiously, deny any and all animal urges howling at you from 4.5 billion years of evolution - you will be saved. You will win the game. You will have achieved the right to claim that you are an “independent” man. You fucking loser. You coward. You drip-squirt-smear. I’ll take Henry Miller and Picasso while you risk your life diving for metaphorical vaginas - the coy abalone hidden beneath the turbulent surf of mother-ocean.

How does experience become form? How does the life experience of a sea snail cause the development of its lethal, retractable proboscis-syringe? or the dancing fleshette-fishing lure built into the snapping turtle tongue? or the mega neocortex of the human? What is the interstitial process? Is it mutation-natural selection over 20 million years? This theory does not cut deep enough either for those features listed ot any of ten million others in plants and animals

JB THEORY OF TERMINAL EVOLUTION:

Most animals and plants have reached the end point of their evolution. they dominate their respective niches with their sophisticated array of terminally evolved tricks of their respective trades. They now have little competition for sexual access and have no problem projecting their genome into the future i.e. they are done, finished, no place else to go in terms of any further adaptation. They are now perfectly adapted and they most likely have been for the past 10 to 20 million years. Is there a single shred of evidence that anything has evolved in the past one million years other than the human neocortex?

It is obvious that many species haven’t evolved for 50 or 100 million years: sharks, dragonflies, hagfish, clams. So what now? We are surrounded by perfection, by immaculate biochemical metabolic process. It works ! DNA gets scrubbed each generation, ATP gets metabolized, HOX and FOX genes unfold. Why would any of these organisms or their marvelously packaged processes change? They could change. New mutations could find favor but with what? A destroyed global environment, an inferior environment? Now that would be de-volution

*

Growing Season

I was bombarded by country music hits from 1954:  Webb Pierce, Jim reeves and Hank three nights before my psychotherapist  of twenty years Anne Hemming  declared me cured of bipolar disorder. My high school therapist diagnosed schizophrenia and there it stood through graduate school. When I began therapy with Anne she called it manic-depressive disorder and ten years ago it became schizoaffective disorder and a few years ago,  bipolar. Same brain spectacle. Mental health professionals waffle. This “disorder” gives me creative energy and a slant on reality I have leveraged to my benefit. My ‘cure’, in the eyes of Anne, coincided with my announced retirement from a quasi-lucrative career as a high-end residential architect. Life had become frenetic. I don’t do frenetic. I have newer, fresher fish to fry. The waiting list at BlountSpace has grown to outsize proportions in the past five years, must be thinning gray hair and snappy Calvin Klein blazer Anne suggested.  Anne screwed up her face in disdain upon hearing my retirement news.  She sighed slumping in her Morris-chintz Edwardian armchair crossing her size 4 Jacques Levine black suede slippers on the matching footstool. “Am I going to have to choke a bitch?” She said

I described my dual vocation with fervor:  songwriting-neuroscience.  I  would henceforth be living on Social security payments until......whenever, studying and writing my songs and bioscience essays.

“Chase two tigers and they both get away Frank. You know this.”

“It’s a passion reborn from high school, I scored the top grade on the biology final senior year and my dad enjoyed country music when I was growing up. He always had a radio on, stuff’s in my blood.”

“Passion closes out of town Frank. You’ve got to make a living for God’s sake!. We’ve got connections now. You don’t even know how to play guitar. Survival as an adult requires mature social relationships not a mind on fire, grow up!. We worked  hard to get your business out of the Bush Dump and you casually discard it. We didn’t go to 150 dinner parties in this city for goddamned nothing!

You've got a case of the dick-arounds Frank and you must get over them. For Christ’s sake Frank  GET REAL !  You were so….so…. coming into focus.

“Don’t forget the Chateau Montelena tomorrow night” she softly intoned as she closed her office door.

We had been flirting mildly at our sessions for the past several  years. I had aired the darkest of my memories during our first seven years during which we de-fanged many demons. There were six or seven more years of OK Stupid Dot-Bomb romance frustrations and workplace  trivialities that I could afford to discuss. We attended social events together. Her husband begged off. Her friends thought I was gay.

*

I dug up many bones in Anne’s office, from shallow graves, more like scraping out encysted worms writhing under my skin, hidden between my toes and curled up in their fastnesses inside my caudate nucleus, stories  from my life up to and including 365 weird days of my sixteenth year after which things calmed around the house, our eighth address in seven years. Daisuke, my mother’s  ghost, called it quits,  leaving us to our own dysfunctional devices. This ghost, Daisuke, we never got a last name,  entered mom’s sub-subconscious in 1961,  a gift from  my father during their last violent shouting match before the divorce. I was there. I saw the scuzm-plasm exit dad and enter mom as she held the butcher knife to dad’s right eyeball - scared the hell out of me - the plasm transfer,  not the knife.  I had seen the butcher knife wielded in anger many times. Mom liked to wave it around in her jealous rages. Daisuke had followed dad around for seventeen years after a fiery and immensely loud  kamikaze crash onto dad’s destroyer, 225 miles per hour to full stop - a shock to a young Japanese soul  and to the sailors standing nearby on The USS Gwin, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Daisuke infected dad’s moods like a Melanesian fungus. His buddies thought it battle fatigue. Dad was highly respected by his shipmates as fleet champion heavyweight boxer and chief mineman making heroic, eardrum crushing, free dives to set mines forty feet below the surface of the South Pacific. Daisuke’s head was shattered like a coconut, as leader of the fire crew, dad was the first sailor to pull parts of the broken, charred body from the wreckage. Most of it had merged into the aluminum airframe. Daisuke “walked in” to dad immediately after the fiery, immensely loud crash. My grandmother, dad’s mother, said he was never the same after the war. Who is?  Dad was first of the Gwinn crew on the scene.  I unloaded a lot of Daisuke induced family baggage in Anne’s office on Amsterdam Avenue,  enough to fill the cargo hold of an airliner.

*

I was on my thrice weekly  Long Island  midnight swim  ensuring my manic and  depressive remain under control.  Do what it takes, burn calories, stay calm when serving, the ultra-rich, our leaders. They desire elegant homes. Homes for these rich people are a competition and BlountSpace delivers victory. I was one hundred yards from turnaround time, slowly powering through a medium chop, blowing stinging water out of my nose at every other deep breath. I swam hard for one nautical mile straight out into the moonlit ocean from Jones Beach. I was a mile out when I sensed another consciousness. I thought for a moment it might be a squid brushing across my back. Things had slithered across my skin  before. This was different, this was  similar to being fish-slimed but this contact  was across my entire upper back and neck, driving  a fear-flight electrochemical  jolt from amygdala to every muscle, reversing course with no conscious input. The intense neurochemical charge fuelled a churning Aussie crawl back to shore. I staggered  through the soft sand up the moonless beach,  breathing hard and fast,  lungs hot, sitting on the edge of the concrete walk under the steel rail, I lean forward and retch saltwater,  heart thumping. The fright will not subside.  I had not been this fearful since my solo encounter with Daisuke at age twelve 1964, sleeping in the basement of our third “new” house in a year. Some entity, some unfriendly consciousness down there in the dark hovering near.  I kneeled, silently howling into my pillow. I gathered my wits to force it away, back into the darkness and hurried upstairs dragging my bedding to spend the rest of the night on the sofa. I refused to sleep in the basement. My two older sisters thought I was a chicken, my younger sister knew what I was talking about. She was awakened in the middle of the night the previous year by an acrid  sulfuric waft through her summer bedroom window and she ran to a neighbor’s house in unexplained terror at three in the morning in her flannel nightgown - two blocks away.

My breathing returned to normal. Another oppressive force was hitching a ride on my mind. I could now hear Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” Very quiet at first then the music in my head got louder then it was  Jim Reeves singing “Bimbo” over and over. This old-time country music is different and deeper, more strange than a Daisuke prank. It swirls around my  brain stem. It is not ordinary ghostly pineal-hippocampal  ping-pong, like a normal spirit dicking around in the fourth layer neurons of my temporal lobe.  Ghosts enter by merging the ghostly spirit-essence ( a cloud of pi-mesons - stuff a million times smaller than atoms) of their undispersed soul,  with their subject’s quantum architecture in the “junk” base pairs in claustrum neurons, quark charges rearranged by the billions, enough to maintain the spirit identity while altering the behavior of the violated as a misguided effort is made to serve their misaligned spiritual purpose. It’s all very sloppy and ineffective quantum chemistry for the ghosts. Not many are friendly, most are pernicious pests. The lost souls of evermore forever lost forever.

*

The boundary between doctor and patient with  Anne blurred seven years ago,  soon after her husband Peter’s law firm became involved in a colossal product liability case against a  Fortune 5 corporation. “The People of Argentina vs Texxxan Oil” Smart money was on “The People” and a $200 million payout. Anne’s cut would be $12 million. Peter, a principal in the firm,  was the lead attorney. She was already spending like a sailor.  Her marriage had been disintegrating for years.  We violated her professional oath  when turning up the heat on our growing friendship. She joined me on Freud-Sofa three sessions prior to my final visit as her psychiatric patient,   her displeasure at my career pivot still a week away.

I thought I was doing her a favor when our higher society explorations began,  escorting her to events her husband had no interest in. The benefits to my architecture practice began to accrue. I was moving up in the world. Anne’s visions of her share of her husband’s share of the Texxxan payout  imbued her with an adventurous free-spending confidence. Her financial worries were about over. She could smell the money and it made her happy.  One U.S. Supreme Court ruling and  years of legal drama and her upper, upper middle class financial straits would be over.

*

In 1964 Daisuke was in a playful mood. He materialized in a black trenchcoat pretending to steal  mom’s taxi on a foggy night in seattle. She was returning from a weekend stay at King County Hospital mental ward after a four day drinking binge at the end of a haywire affair with her married boss. The romance ended when her boss’s daughter, a highschool classmate of Maureen my elder sister, accosted Mo in the hallway at school angrily demanding that sis put a stop to mom’s home-wrecking behavior. The same taxi mom thought had a fare, stopped to pick her up. It was empty. Another Daisuke stunt was to materialize on mom’s  chest in the middle of the night. There were  blood curdling howling screams waking me from my sleep upstairs. When I arrived in her bedroom ( this happened four times in a single year)  Mom, shaking and sweating and breathing hard, complained of her chest being crushed by an incubus. Daisuke played this game when mom was drunk. It drove her deeper into alcohol. She went from a sixpack a night to eight beers and a half pint of scotch. Daisuke often jumped ship into  Maureen and caused her to drive mom’s old Chevy into Green lake or crash into parked cars and smartmouth cops, so unlike her. Daisuke loved car mayhem. Maybe it allowed him to relive his plane crash while messing with outcome. He walked into me in the spring of 1966 and things got rough.

*

Daisuke grew up in the pottery making village of Onta in a narrow gorge high in the evergreen forested hills of Eastern Kyushu. In early 1942 Daisuke kissed his lover Sukio goodbye and travelled by rattletrap bus down the treacherous mountain road and out across many vegetable farms to the prefecture Army induction center. After his basic training he volunteered for the Kamikaze corps. After three months of training he reported to Japanese carrier group gathered near the South Pacific island of Kwajalein.They sailed to the Leyte gulf into the most intense naval action in the War in the South Pacific. Daisuke was lounging on deck  thinking about winter days back home in the mountains, of a secret place miles from the village where Sukio and he would hike deep through the dark forest with wind whistling through the high branches up to a steam pool in the snow. They were sitting in the warm water stroking one another’s arms in the moonlight when something cool and soft and wet  brushed against the back of Sukio’s neck. She screamed  springing high out of the water when they saw It was a deer trying to nudge its way to the warm water they laughed and hugged.  Daisuke and Sukio were deeply in love when he left the happy, industrious village for the Navy. He volunteered for the kamikaze corps out of a deep sense of honor for his country and for his true love.  He knew they would meet again in the afterworld. He was so wrong.

*

At the instant of impact Daisuke knew he wasn’t going to heaven and that his only chance to reunite with Sukio was to hitch a ride on the living. Frank Blount Sr. was nearby looking and acting capable. He mogrified into Frank and tried to make himself inconspicuous. He failed. The weight of his loneliness for Sukio infused Blount’s soul doubling the mineman’s tendency toward the blues. Frank Blount Sr. served with honor and distinction as the final months of the war played out. HIs work as an underwater guy was put to a task of Homeric proportions for which he won a bronze star. He was to perform a sequence of forty free dives, hard, black rubber swim fins only-no air other than holding breath into cold, silty Tokyo Bay where the U.S. fleet was convening to sign the peace agreement two weeks hence. Frank volunteered to inspect a network of Jap[anese mine cables radiating from two power stations at opposite ends of the shore, one in Kawasaki  and one at Kisarazu  extending out many thousands of yards out into the bay. His cardiovascular prowess from boxing training was taxed to the max.

The Japanese had mined the Bay for the immanent arrival during wartime of the U.S. forces. Frank Sr’s job was to dive into the cold murky water and lift every foot of these two inch diameter heavy black cables up out of the mud at every inch from shore to one thousand yards out ensuring that the mine detonating signal cables had been severed properly. Some of these cables were more than fifty feet under the surface in the benthic slime. Blount had to spend up to four minutes thirty seconds per dive,  feeling around in the cold dark water with his ears bursting in order to do his duty. If he failed, the battleship carrying Douglas MacArthur could be lifted from the water by expanding column of explosive-driven water, fractured from port to starboard, keel to gunwale and sunk by a Japanese mine, a possible fate for any one of twenty U.S. Navy ships due in Tokyo Bay to observe the signing of the Japanese surrender document on the aft deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. Daisuke was down in that cold dark water with Blount every inch of the way and Blount was ecstatic down there. Daisuke was waterproof and trying to help.

The day following the treaty signing ceremony,  Blount and a small cadre of U.S.sailors went ashore to meet three friendly , now defeated Japanese soldiers who showed them to the mine control structures in order for the U.S. team  to dismantle the mine control stations. This would be Daisuke’s chance to jump “ship” from Frank and enter a Japanese person and hopefully piggyback his way closer to his home in the distant mountains on a different island and to Sukio. He needed a weakened spirit to make this transfer and the few times he tried with the Japanese soldiers escorting Blount and Company he was rebuked, repelled and resisted,  cast back into the soul of Blount where he dwelled in loneliness for the next eighteen years until he switched over to Lorraine, my mother,  Frank’s now soulshot wife. Frank had gained enough spiritual strength from a rejection / individuation scene with his clutching, clawing, possessive mother, my grandmother, after her 18 years of meddling in her son’s marriage. One she never approved.  He now had the spiritual independence and strength  to cast off his ghost. I was there.  I saw it. Dad was free, mom was not. Daisuke was patient, mischievous and nimble. Who knows why he thought his chances of reuniting with Sukio were better with mom. She wore silk kimonos every night for five years  that she won at auction along with the classic Wurlitzer bubbling arch juke box in which she was buried, face-out,  lips and fingertips pressed tight against the glass between columns of bubbling colored alcohol. It was unplugged following the first silver-plated shovelful of dirt.

end

Interorgan Signals

June 4, 2015 For simplicity focusing on big six: Lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, stomach and  intestines ( large and small). Given that the brain sends and receives chemical and electrical signals from all organs, sensory and others.

Do the lungs communicate with the kidneys in any way? Does the heart communicate with the liver? The stomach with the lungs?

Rather than hierarchical communication centered on the brain, a rhizomatic system between all organs in constant, precise communication.

How does stomach tissue signal the heart-lungs that it is dying from lack of oxygen?

Does lung disease cause oxygen deprivation problems in all organ systems? what happens when the blood cannot carry enough oxygen for ATP production and all cells become energy-starved?

Does oxygen deprivation accelerate cancer onset and growth?

Miscellaneous Questions:

1. RNA codes for some proteins that return to act upon the genome itself - the originating DNA molecules. Does this mean that a protein re-enters the cell nucleus from its point of production on a ribosome at nucleus-encircling rough endoplasmic reticulum. Is this protein assembled within the cell nucleus from ribosomes that did not migrate from their zone of origin at nucleolus out to the rough endoplasmic reticulum or is there rough endoplasmic reticulum within the nucleus?
2. Are all 20 amino acids present in every cell type? One would think that only those amino acids required for a particular cell type’s proteinic product.
3. Are amino acids imported into cells or created from scratch within each cell?
4. Oneiric question: How many different brain areas must our dream machine tap into in order to create those scenes in places we have never been, populated by people we have never seen, with buildings of a type never imagined, living through social roles never experienced? Is this dream-stuff located in a long-term memory zone of the hippocampus,  mixing and matching from previous experience to create a unique movie? Must some dream nucleus reach out with its dendritic rhizomatic web into various sensory regions of the neocortex for every sight, smell, sound, color, face, weather condition, assembling these into a coherent though still mysterious story.
5. Might prehistoric DNA have cannibalized itself to create an origin event for a new kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus or species? Say an ancient organism one billion years ago  had only one chromosome with 100 million base pairs. 80,000 base pairs of these 100 million split down their center i.e. unzip,  break off from main strand and end up ejected from this cell as two strands of RNA and then excreted by  the organism itself. Extracellular environment is such that this nuclear material can float freely, remaining intact and multiplying.

Hapleate, hapleated, hapleation, haplioid: A JB neologism that means to remove 23 of 46 chromosomes of any somatic cell from any organ in order to create a new haploid cell that is not a germ cell.

1. Experiment One: Insert 23 chromosomes from a colon cell into a hapleated kidney cell nucleus. adjust each of these haplioids prior to insertion through post translational modifications so that they are pluripotent
2. Insert hapleated kidney cell chromosomes into hapleated stomach cell nucleus. Has a viable zygote has been created?
3. Experiment Two: Variation on #6 Knock out various combinations of regulatory accessory DNA in hippocampal neuron, hapleate, merge with hapleated liver cell nucleus to create Neo-germ cells
4. Experiment Three: Relocate half of mouse neocortex to a zone just below the cerebellum of target mouse - see if new neuronal connections are made thus increasing brain power of target mouse. Is target mouse smarter after six months of synaptic growth?
5. Experiment Four: Relocate neocortical mouse-one neurons into thalamic ventricle of same mouse - see if these neocortical neurons add value to hippocampal function.  Mix and match various brain cell types into different brain areas to see if brain cells can be re-purposed.
6. Experiment Five:  Plant a slab of neocortex of healthy, young recently deceased ape,Party One, across the lower back of a healthy living ape, Party Two- - initiate axonal links from relocated ape neocortex into spinal cord of of Party Two - see if this transplanted neocortex has added consciousness to Party Two. Try neocortical transplant at various regions closer to the head, say at back of neck. try this on rats, mice, other primates, dogs, cats etc. Has any memory from Ape One been transmitted to Ape Two? A maze pattern or Pavlovian response unique to Ape One into Ape Two?
7. Experiment Six: Replace cerebrospinal fluid at lateral ventricle(s) with new neuron population. Check for increased caudate nucleus or hippocampus function. Perform this neuron relocation to 3d, 4th ventricles with specific neuron types involved in specific signalling or hormonal process.
8. Experiment Seven: Transplant brain cells from the pons or medulla to the lateral ventricles. Attach axons to any deficient brain area injured in battle or accident or genetic mishap. Whichever brain area is deficient could receive 200,000 additional neurons / brain cells to assist in restoration of brain function.
9. Experiment Seven-A: Switch on or off specific DNA regions at these relocated    ( new) brain cells in order to customize function for specific tasks.
10. Must any or all interorgan signaling travel through the brainstem like afferent-efferent signal from sensory organ to and from brain?
11. Is interorgan signaling reflexive bypassing brain and even perhaps the spinal cord - direct organ to organ signal.

The following is a letter to Cal Tech Professor Elliot Meyerowitz re: interorgan signaling in a tree:

Dear Professor Meyerowitz,

I encountered a brief description of your work on structural forces effects upon patterns of plant growth while reading an article about Professor Jennifer Zallen and mechanical forces on Drosophila embryo growth.

I have wondered lately about the large scale growth of primary branches of an 60 foot tall oak tree in my rear yard (6 acre farmette in Lebanon, TN). I was trained as an architect at the Harvard GSD where I was introduced to D'Arcy Thompson so was primed to think about such things.  My questions are as follows:

1. How does a big tree signal the amount of new growth in order to maintain its structural equilibrium? The compressive and tensile forces can be very large in a big tree under equilibrium ( compression) and tension resulting from regular lateral forces of wind and traumatic force induced after losing a major branch during lightning strike or pruning.

2. Say a big branch on the left side of this big oak got blasted off by lightning one night;  the tree would have a lot of new compressive force in the cells on the side opposite the loss and lots of new tensile force in the cells on the side that lost the big branch.

3.  My question: Is it the strain ( deformation measurable via strain gauge - a common structural engineering tool) of the compression force or the strain of the tensile force that initiates compensating new growth thus ensuring the balance of the entire tree in its new configuration? new growth that may be initiated by pathways you describe for Arabidopsis growth patterns i.e. PIN1 - Auxin or Ms Zallen's myosin-actin(cell adhesion under tension) biochemical process.

4. Whatever these forces are at work on the large deformed tree, they must be similar for a plant sensing tensile or compressive forces in its hierarchy of stems as it grows from seed to maturity.

5. I wonder if different chemical pathways are involved in compressive strain as opposed to those at work under tension forces. Each side of a plant having its own chemistry depending on tension or compression stress OR one side of a big tree ( or small plant) sending signals from one side to the other.

I'm using basic statics- architectural-structural engineering definitions for stress ( pounds per square inch, or whatever units force divided by area) and strain  (deformation in inches, fractions thereof)  in relation to tensile force.

6. It would be interesting to measure relative amounts of PIN1 and auxin before and after an amputation of a large tree limb to investigate chemical changes.

Good luck in your researches

Warm Regards,

Jim Blake -Harvard GSD '79

Reply: Dear Mr. Blake,

All very good questions.  To the degree that we have answers, you can read them in the Wikipedia article on reaction wood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wood).  We don’t know the signaling mechanism that leads to this adaptation to stress (or strain) - initially something must strain (a protein molecule, a membrane, who knows) and it is thought that auxin is involved, so PIN proteins probably are part of the mechanism.  The response depends on the type of tree - tension wood at the top of the branch in angiosperms, compression wood at the bottom in gymnosperms - but as far as I know, no one has the least idea why.

Just one more area open for research!

It is surprising sometime how little we know about plants, given their importance to us, but as you know our federal science agencies are very much slanted toward animal research in service of medicine, and in applied, not basic, plant studies.  The good part of this is that plenty of interesting phenomena are barely studied, so are open for new investigation.  The bad part is that there aren’t a lot of resources for such investigations, or many available answers to even simple questions about plants.

One area my lab studies (and not mentioned in the article), in a similar vein, is grafting in plants - no one knows why it works (or fails when it doesn’t work), despite large parts of agriculture relying in it.  I enclose a recent review and a research paper, in case you are interested.

Elliot Meyerowitz

Elliot M. Meyerowitz

George W. Beadle Professor of Biology

HHMI-GBMF Investigator

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering

Mail Code 156-29

California Institute of Technology

1200 East California Boulevard

Pasadena, California 91125, USA

• 6/4/15

Extremes Proliferate

May 28, 2015

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest of Los Angeles is real. It is a deterrence machine set up to rejuvenate the fiction of the real.”              -  Jean Baudrillard

“It is the market not nature that generates poverty.” - M. Sahlins

Darwinian Natural Selection asserts:  normal members of a species thrive in an existing  environment while the abnormal are denied membership,  forced into the periphery into a strange and challenging environment. The nature of this remote environment is such that the mutant thrives,  becoming the new norm.  In some instances the old comfortable environment changes catastrophically in a direction that favors an outlier, an extreme variant. This relationship holds in all human endeavor. It is those who do not “fit in” who become pioneers. They are the avant garde, the pathfinders in science, art, technology and land development as they make the best of a new niche. The niche becomes the norm and its population proliferates to create a new generation of freaks, mutants and oddballs in a new left field.

When the going gets weird - the weird get going.

Pioneers at Jamestown between 1607 and 1630 lived a brutal existence - few survived.

Many real estate developers have a bold, brash and fearless personality type. They are the first to establish a foothold in new territory and they almost always go down in flames, leaving further development to more sober personalities.

There was single prisoner in a jail cut deep into the rock at the base of Mt. Pele, a volcano forming the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. In 1902 Mt. Pele erupted burying the capital city of Saint Pierre, killing 30,000 people. The prisoner who was deep in his dungeon survived and walked away from the carnage.

Humans, bacteria and cancer are extreme proliferates. Maggots proliferate to extremes in rotted meat. Nuclear arms proliferate and decay as cobwebs are woven around ICBMs rotting in missile silos across the U.S.A. Cancer is proliferation squared. The nature of the stuff is extreme proliferation. We poison the human environment and this proliferation proliferates. Too much of a bad thing creates a synergy of dissolution, a vortex, a black hole, an accelerator of negative force. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing - ask a celebrity with drug issues. The word celebrity implies drug issue as fame itself is a drug and one that typically initiates a cascade of other, less potent drugs; nicotine, heroin, cocaine, etc.

A guitar wizard shreds too many notes limiting the possibility of musical meaning. Peter Max and Paul McCartney overuse sweet colors and hyperglycemia follows, reputations are diluted. The mutants on the freak frontier take to the vile swamp like ducks, gaining a foothold, they begin to proliferate. Back home, the well has gone dry and the crops die. Back home where millions, who once swarmed are now dying. The center shifts. A new species emerges from the chaos along the interface of old and new.

“Every dog has his day.” - anon

“The times, they are a-changin’” - Bob Dylan

Please tell me something I don’t know from instinct or experience. Extreme locales are rich in unexplored places revealing opportunity. Pioneers beware, the second mouse gets the cheese.

What’s so funny? Cruelty and mishap are good for a laugh. People falling on their asses and faces and stumbling into pools. An alligator eating its neighbor gator’s hatchlings is not funny, nor is a lion ripping apart the pre-existing cubs of its new mate.

Two  different ideas here in the words “extremes proliferate”

1. The Darwinian notion that speciation occurs among the outliers.
2. The Malthusian notion that populations proliferate until resources are exhausted.

We are propelled by myth. There is no passion or greed without a context providing fuel for the accumulation of wealth, honor and perhaps fame. I have two options, one with a high resonance context and one with low resonance:

1. I can work myself to death behind a team of mules trekking across a Nevada desert to no one’s notice.
2. I can work equally hard training to throw the discus at the Olympics where my gold medal earns international honor and product endorsement income. Mule skinners get no medals and little pay.

Looking closely at many phenomena causes them to evaporate. It is easy enough to debunk the founding beliefs of any religion, so what? By the time of your debunking, a great web has been woven around this lie-myth-void and the web now has strength and resonance. It can start or stop a conversation, send men to die in war, make men wealthy or strip them of dignity and property.

Once you accept basic tenets of the Freudian or Darwinian myths you can discuss the relative merits of  Jung and Reich,  Mendel and Crick and entertain yourself debunking them ( Jeffrey Masson and Stephen Jay Gould respectively) Good luck ! It’s like trying to debunk the English language. Its screwy, goofy, illogical, always changing, saturated with unscientific tradition, habit and prejudice but it’s all we have and it gets the job done - see: Shakespeare and Thomas McGuane.

Once a web of myth has formed and people are traipsing back and forth building careers and reputations along filaments, it is too late to debunk the founder. She may have been vulnerable when first proposing her wild, paradigm-shifting theory due to its error and misconception but once the web has been woven, there is substance afoot. It is not necessarily scientific. Scientific evidence may be a single component of this web of myth, maybe not. Myth trumps science.

In the 154 years since the publication of Darwin’s “On The Evolution of Species” there has not been one single shred of evidence that a new vertebrate species has emerged or the tiniest shred of evidence that one has evolved in any way, changed for sure but evolved?  Domestic animal  breeds change but this is not evolution. The standard response ( hardline Neo-Darwinism) is that evolution works very slowly and very gradually - one wouldn’t notice it in a human lifetime. It has been proven that mutations ( the stuff of evolution) occur thousands of times per second in a vertebrate body and that new species, when they evolve at all, emerge in a flash ( a “flash” in evolutionary time may be ten million years), in a single moment, a punctuation followed by eons of stasis - no discernable change,  nothing gradual here. This has been proven. Yet we cling.  Darwin’s still the man, disparage his theory, even today with reams of evidence contradicting many of his fundamental notions,  and suffer snickering ignominy. the myth lives on. Darwin was right that organisms have evolved but many other aspects of his theory wobble.

Capitalism, private property, The Magna Carta, Democracy and Rule of Law are all myth but they served to launch the Hubble telescope by which much wonderful science has been explored. Operative myth trumps science always. Scientists have difficulty understanding that all science is a subset of myth. All myth contains a black hole at its center. Don’t go there. There is little to be gained. People don’t care if it isn’t “true”. People want to believe and shall believe.

It’s myth all the way down, just like guru turtles, a cascade of belief from Christianity, through our language, our anthrocentrism. Darwinism and quantum mechanics are webs of myth. the scientific enterprise is all myth but such a fine one, so much excruciating, obsessive detail and those charts,  graphs and formulas! - all so seductive and it works half of the time to cure illness, almost all of the time to fly a plane.  Learn to excruciate minutiae and earn a PhD. Most things can be proven up to a point and anything under the sun can be hypothesized, boldly asserted and vigorously defended.

The Myth Engine:

1. The hippocampus is a key brain area in mammals used for long-term memory storage. the neurons of the hippocampus have 46 chromosomes as do all 50 trillion of our cells except for sperm and egg with their 23. These non-germ cell  chromosomes comprise six billion base pairs. The operative genome has three billion base pairs. 2 billion nine hundred forty million of these base pairs exist within what is called “junk” DNA. There are 18 base pairs for each histone giving us 160,000,000 “junk” histones along with the “junk” DNA -  AT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF 40 million hippocampal  neurons !  Current memory theory assigns NO role for these DNA, histone targets. As current theory stands,  memory is a product of the strength of synaptic connections between dendrites - HA ! Look to the “junk” lads, there are a trillion places to store a memory in each neuron at DNA and histones in the hippocampus and in every one of 200 brain areas.
2. Do hippocampal neuron nuclear membranes dissolve to allow tighter memory formation i.e. more room to move, maneuver, more neuronal geography to inhabit in order to create sensory distinctions i.e. memory.
3. Do humans ( mammals, vertebrates) have neuron super cells? i.e. large neurons with many nuclei thus more opportunity for rhizomatic interaction between post translationally modified histones and RNA-DNA? There could be 10,000 memory-making interconnections within a single cell membrane!
4. Long, non-coding RNA regulates gene expression. How much long-coding RNA at hippocampal neurons?

Oppositions- moving parts of the reciprocating American Myth Engine:

1. Boomer - Very Oldster
2. Boomer-gen X,Y,Z
3. Obese - normal
4. Diabetic - healthy
5. Ill - healthy ( note: typography failure as cap I (eye) and l ( ell) are identical)
6. Environmentally concerned - not concerned
7. Liberal - conservative, Conservative-fundamentalist
8. Prisoner - Not a prisoner
9. Employed - unemployed
10. White - non-white
11. Straight - Gay
12. Veteran - Not Veteran
13. Speak english - Do not speak English
14. College education - no college education
15. Rational - Intuitive, Left Brain-Right Brain
16. Normal - insane
17. Gun owner/enthusiast - No guns
18. Urban - rural
19. middle class - upper class
20. middle class - lower class
21. upper class - lower class

All are created equal here in America but we go to ferocious, relentless length to differentiate ourselves in every conceivable way.

*

May 27, 2015

Quantum Datum

May 19, 2015 RE: Memory storage at brain ( hippocampus)

Jim Blake Theory -  A BFRT - Big Fat Russell’s Teapot:

If a bird brain can locate itself across a hemisphere of the Earth via its sensitivity to magnetic information why couldn’t the geography within a single brain area function using such a mechanism?

Jim Blake speculative neologisms as of this text:

Quantum Datum ( QD)

Hemylation:  an epigenetic post translational modification that adds an iron ion tag thus creating a memory bit, a sign part, a grammatical unit,  a sub-component of a single memory like a phoneme is part of a single word.

Subatomic electromagnetic signaling ( SES)

Quantum Electro Links ( QEL)

Quantum Datum Pulse ( QDP)

There is a point of orientation ( think: USGS brass benchmark) at the middle commissure of the thalamus called the Quantum Datum (QD)  that works in conjunction with iron-rich epigenetic tags at unspooled DNA in chromatin in memory neurons in the hippocampus  that differentiates molecules by their orientation in space on XYZ axes; think: aircraft: pitch-yaw-roll establishing a point definable by its place on this XYZ grid. Each memory bit can precisely locate / measure its distance  to all other memory bits at  other hippocampal neurons, as well as measure its distance from,  and orientation to,  the central thalamic benchmark, the Quantum Datum. This iron-rich marking of neuron histones associated with memory genes is called Hemylation similar to other post translational modifications:  methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, citrullination, etc). The iron-tagged histone molecule, now a memory bit,  is the airplane that has become frozen in space.

One reason neurons are not typically replaced during one’s lifetime is that they have locked hemylations at nano-specific locations,  each location defining a sub-unit of memory in relation to the quantum datum. The histone molecule has tumbled into and become locked into a very specific orientation with its iron tag now a very definite point in space in relation to QDatum and all other memory neurons at hippocampus. There is a stochastic quality to this positioning of the hemylations in relation to one another as well as to the QD.

New memory is stored by new hemylations at neuron DNA and these new tags are immediately linked in space to 100,000 existing tags. These tagged neurons read one another’s quantum signature via Subatomic Electromagnetic Signalling SES  forming Quantum Electro Links ( QEL). Each memory bit ( hundreds at a single neuron)  has two different capabilities both related to its location: #1. Its relations in the QD network #2. Its dendritic relation to all related neurons involved in this memory.

QD addendum #1

The Quantum Datum at thalamus radiates a microwave pulse (QDP) ( 24/7/365 birth to death)  in all directions like a motion detector. This pulse is detected and reflected  by the memory bits ( hemylated histones)  allowing the Quantum Datum  to “understand” where each hemylation is located in relation to all other memory bits using iron atoms enabling rapid neuronal intercommunication.

QD addendum #2

Cerebral spinal fluid not only cushions the brain but acts as an efficient fluid medium for thalamic sonar pulses triangulating via neuronal histone hemylations that have accrued in the process of storing  memory. These pulses are re-radiated from the interior surface of the lateral ventricles.

QD addendum #3

dreams are the result of QDP activity while sleeping as undirected, unfocused random connections are assembled between voxels at hippocampus and processed through neocortex storytelling-myth making neural architecture. when awake, the cerebral cortex directs this activity in relation to “reality”

QD addendum #4

The Quantum Datum emits a QD Pulse day and night  linking new experience with memory. Quasi random Connections continue to be made at hippocampus between stored memory day and night as the neocortex processes the stuff of daily life. Thus our subconscious mind works on a problem while we tend to routine activity.

QD addendum #5

Check the relative viscosity of new and old neurons. As histones in chromatin are locked up as memory bits they are re-secured into the DNA. Twenty years of this would create a less viscous chromatin at neurons.

*

Stealing Ideas

May 19, 2015 Forty Rules of Art:

1. Don’t stand at your desk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with an open copy of the latest “Glossy Architecture Periodical” cribbing from the hippest published work. School is too expensive and life is too brief for short circuits.
2. Do not steal ideas from your classmates or your peers unless you are a declared “Appropriation Artist” such as Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. When you break this rule do it with intensity, brilliance, synthesis as you make this stolen idea your own. Give back more than you take. Fetishizing thievery is passe’
3. When early in career as you search for inspiration from precursors try to skip a generation or two. Stealing  becomes a more astute reference or a wittier pastiche the further back one reaches.
4. All creative people who can read must read and understand ( this means re-read) Harold Bloom’s masterpiece The Anxiety of Influence. Every painter, sculptor, poet, architect must understand and internalize the ideas of knowing history and swerving into originality.
5. If, as a youth, you did not spend hundreds of hours at the foot of mother nature drawing rocks, trees, bees, birds, landscapes, do not despair - lean on those who did: Raphael, Leonardo,  John Ruskin, William Morris,  Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, - read their words and study their work closely. Steal all of their great ideas. If you haven’t done your 1,000 nature hours, you are crippled,  admit it and drive on, doing the best with what you’ve got. It is never too late to profit from a sketchbook.
6. Picasso was notorious for stealing ideas from his own cohort and from anything painted or sculpted he ever set eyes on. Picasso replied, when accused of thievery “I steal from everyone - I try not to steal from myself.” A great creative mind is a desperate idea vacuum.
7. Synthesize as you steal. Take five great works from a few generations ago and and disassemble them to explore their generating ideas. Recombine for original effect. Great artists are magpies: Raphael, Chardin, Cezanne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Paul McCartney.
8. If stealing, steal those portraits and manufactured objects and household products that have been the beneficiary of thousands of man-years of research, millions of advertising dollars and star-making machinery. Jump on a bandwagon already at full speed like Duchamp, Warhol and Koons.
9. Nature is a shameless thief, parasite, copycat, predator, devious, malicious, invasive beast who knows that nice guys go extinct. Humans evolved a neocortex to tame this beast, make it work for you. Be relentlessly polite with impeccable manners on the outside and seek the fullness of nature on the inside.
10. If you are intuitive steal logic and rationality. If you are rational, steal intuition, i.e. if you are a scientist-steal art; if an artist, steal science.
11. Nature doesn’t give a hoot if you steal from her as she is a vast storehouse of undiscovered ideas.
12. If you are a painter, don’t steal the look of things but the very being of things. Before you know it you are a biologist, then a chemist then a physicist and a cosmologist-astrophysicist - all artists.
13. If using oil base paint - ventilate.
14. “Trumbull’s Rule” Start with a mop - finish with a number 2 filbert.
15. Be like nature, make a lot of big mistakes early ( see: dinosaurs) conserve all that works ( see: DNA)
16. After you start a painting, let the painting take over, it knows what it needs - be a good listener to your art.
17. Don’t be afraid to play God/Cosmo - painting is creation, architecture is creation, poetry is creation
18. Charles Darwin noted that it is the outliers, mutants and misfits that launch a new species. At least one of them will a perfect fit for a strange new world. Today’s perfectly fit are tomorrow’s forgotten.
19. Make your art convincing. It is not about the impeccable beauty of the subject it is about intensity and care in the making.
20. Obsession obscures truth and discovery, it is the crutch of the uninspired, fearful and believe- it -or- not, the lazy.
21. Vulgarity and overt sex in art is ordinary. We know it sells - so what.
22. Touch the essence of something - anything
23. Much of the man-made world is ordinary - seek extraordinary
24. Make a second version of your excellent idea t prove it isn’t a fluke
25. Swerve from your own work - evolve - follow your outliers and mutants.
26. Save money on psychotherapy - allow your art to analyze you.
27. Art is an athletic pursuit - treat your body well with nutrition and exercise
28. When afraid move forward.
29. It is hard to ruin an artwork - make a bold new gesture with a lot of white paint - see what new doors open.
30. Savor your obscurity - to work uninterrupted is a treasure. It is hard to concentrate when strobes are flashing and microphones are pushed into your face.
31. Bore yourself - bore your audience.
32. Every artist has an original vision - swim beyond the shore.
33. If you have run out of ideas and are at a dead end and still under 23 years of age, join the military. It will provide much new material. Take a sketchbook.
34. Before taking an art professor ( anyone professing to know more than you) seriously enough to hurt your feelings or redirect your instincts, get to know their operative paradigm. Study what they studied for a minute. Most teachers wish to transmit the outcome of their pain and embarrassment to you.  Don’t be a lump of clay - do some research on their sources and push back.
35. Don’t mimic nature, be nature. Be the volcano, earthquake, thunderstorm, the forest, flower or buffalo, the field of grass, the electricity. Nature will play levels of the game against one another atoms against tectonic plates.
36. Make the myths that constitute human culture work for you. Myths are tools.
37. Don’t mistake being “one with nature” with being one with human nature - they are very different.
38. Honor small things - they get bigger and many that don’t get bigger will multiply and kill you ( see: microorganisms) Ideas usually start small - give them a chance to grow.
39. Any fool can start a painting, it takes a master to know when to stop.
40. Be open to serendipity - sometimes art is easy.

BREAK THE RULES

*

Kodalithic-Epigenetic

May 17, 2015

JBT - Jim Blake thought or theory

JBQ - JB question

JBE - JB experiment

JBN - JB neologism, new acronym

JBN - I am hereby retiring the term “Junk DNA” there is no such thing, henceforth Junk DNA will be called Accessory DNA or simply ADNA. Note that the “A” is capitalized, ADNA is  not “junk” at all. It is very important. This DNA was named “Junk” in the genomic dark ages 20 years ago. The age of the genome is no longer dark thus ADNA rather than “junkDNA”.

JBN - Genes carry the fundamental instructions, secondary cell function is carried out by post translational modification to both genes and the histone proteins they wrap and unwrap around. These modifications have many names: methylation, acetylation, ubiquitination, ADP ribosylation, citrullination etc. Henceforth these will be called PTMs. They will be referred to often throughout this essay. They are vital to life. they are now the key mechanism of Natural Selection as of 150 million years ago genes are finished evolving now evolution is left to  PTM. Epigenetics is carried out by PTM. Epigenetics is the active key to all living things. Think of DNA as our founding fathers and epigenetics / PTM  as elected leaders doing the daily work of government.

There are many plant species, worms, birds and reptiles that have larger genomes ( more genes that code for specific proteins)  than humans but the proportion of an organism’s ADNA is in direct proportion to species complexity and of course humans have the most ADNA in our genomic trunk with 98% of our DNA non-coding for protein. We play a few genetic notes at each cell type but we do so with great feeling, like B.B. King, famous for playing in a  small box or two of notes the guitar neck but to tremendous effect. How did he do it? He added bends and trills and exquisite timing eliciting deep expression from every note, maximizing the potential of each without wasting energy zipping up and down the neck like a shred-wizard. Zipping up and down creates opportunity for error, activating a lot of genes to do the work of life creates room for mutation and most likely -  error. Our genetic machinery has developed a system of modifications to DNA and genetic material that leave the genome relatively uninterrupted.

JBT - Nature loves stochastics. The crap shoot. The tossing of genetic spaghetti against the wall. Some will stick and become 3-D wallpaper with mold growing on it and crud collecting in the groove where round spaghetti sticks tangent to the flat wall. This groove will be difficult to clean and elbow grease expended in cleaning may cause spaghetti to drop to the floor. Every target has its bullseye. We shoot our 20 arrows and none hits the bullseye but the target is full of holes. We have achieved our intention.

We are what our grandparents and parents ate as well as what we eat. See: “Dutch Hunger Winter” http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/142195/beyond-dna-epigenetics

We have our genome, a hardworking epigenome and a proteome. Think of the genome as a library with 20,000  1-2 billion year old books ( treasures for certain) Each organ system cell group carries the entire library within its membrane. Each cell type checks out its book during a life and reads its own story. The check out and reading portion of this story is called epigenetics. Each of our cells can activate its small region of this vast library and keep all other “books” locked up tighter than a drum head - inaccessible, not in play, every book in every cell. At the liver there are  111 genes for liver function switched on in 175 billion liver cells and few others - most others remain inaccessible no need for neurons or heart muscle, bone or epithelial cells at the liver. Think of a war game: Each of the four branches of the military gets the entire battle plan notebook. The Air force version has a  tight band around the Army Navy and Marines pages.

Definitions:

1. Kodalith: A photographic film that turns a photographic image into black or white -  no shades of gray.  Zero subtlety, the world is either black or white with Kodalith. The tone-scale of a human face or a landscape has a thousand shades of gray,  from just above black to just below white. Kodalith film will turn every tone less than 50% gray into white and every tone more than 50% gray into black,  creating an image that is boldly black and white. Think of this as a switch: on / black and off / white.
2. Epigenetics: Inheritance that cannot be explained by genetics.
3. Epigenetics ( more recent) Molecular change but not to base pair sequence.
4. Epigenetic processes dominate cell function. If a human/mammal body is the Roman empire, the genome gives a general his marching orders from Rome and all other actions of the army all the way up into northern Britain are defined, described and carried out via the epigenome using PTM.These are modifications to DNA, RNA and histones that are exposed for further action by the loosening of the tightly wound chromosome. This now active, unwound stretch of DNA is a very small percentage of the total DNA present in a given cell.
5. Epigenetics: The greek prefix “epi” means “upon” upon genetics. An epigenetic event changes the expression of a gene WITHOUT changing the DNA i.e. without changing the sequence of nucleotides. Using Nessa Carey’s analogy, imagine checking out a library book for three days. This book is a part of our total DNA, the library. The book is a gene. While we use this book we place post-it notes on several pages to clarify the meaning of certain passages, to add the detail of our thought. When we return the book we have removed the post-it notes and the gene and the total genome remain unchanged. No DNA has been changed, no base pairs have been added, subtracted, edited or changed in any way. My epigenetic work was upon the gene but did not change the gene. If the gene is changed it is NOT epigenetics, it is a gene mutation.

Epigenetics, though becoming a popular field of research in bioscience only 20 years ago is  known to be THE process that differentiates one cell from another during pregnancy. A zygote, the fertilized egg,  has 46 chromosomes with their 6 billion base pairs the moment the sperm penetrates the egg. A fertilized egg is a single cell and before the cell divides for the first time,  this cell can become Any cell in the body among hundreds of basic types. All cell differentiation that follows is epigenetic.

This set of library books begins to get post-it notes assigning organ function and metabolic tasks soon after fertilization, as the cells in a fetus begin to differentiate. As cells in the fetus differentiate the entire library carrying the code for the entire body and everything in it,  is present in every one of what will become 37 trillion cells. The tasks characteristic of each cell type: heart, lung, brain, skin, blood will be activated by PTM.

A cell becomes unique as soon as it checks its book from its cell library that contains 20,000 books. To check out a book i.e. to begin the process of cell differentiation is itself an epigenetic action. Think of checking out a book as placing a post it note on the cover of the book thus acknowledging that it is a brain book and not a liver or heart book The liver cells check out the liver book and leave the other books undisturbed. The brain cells check out the brain book and leave all other books on the shelf alone. Remaining on the shelf means that the DNA remains tightly wound up and thus inaccessible to the specialized tasks surrounding it and that have been activated by the checked out / activated / enabled / switched on kidney book. During pregnancy the books begin to get read and collect the notes that further describe their function. Many post-it notes are applied as organs begin to do their specific jobs in the growing fetus.

The cells of the  fetus check out their unique book depending on assigned organ system during fetal development at a specific moment. The body plan book is checked out early so the baby’s head is at one end and the budding feet at the other end and then arms and legs appear as buds in the proper geometric alignment i.e. bilaterally symmetrical not radially symmetrical. There is a head librarian book  checked out early that orchestrates the development of the entire organ system. Though the brain book gets checked out early in fetal development, all  primary post-it notes are in place at birth but Post-its continue to be stuck to brain cell pages until death as sensations are sensed and memories are formed and retrieved. Many neocortical functions may undergo structural differentiation through childhood.

All cells have many structures and metabolic functions that are identical. All cells, no matter what organ,  must process energy and expel waste and, unless a neuron, reproduce itself. The genes that control these foundation functions are active in every cell with minor exceptions. For this library analogy it is assumed that the books ( genes) carrying out common cell functions are in play from the beginning and are not epigenetic simply normal gene-protein synthesis cycles.

1. Transgenerational Inheritance: Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.

JBT - Our brains can take a field of black and white dots and transform them into 1,000 shades of gray. The tiny dots that make up the fully-toned black and white halftone images in a newspaper are either black tiny dots or white newsprint - no gray involved in this printing process but we perceive many of the rich tones of the real world present in a normal black and white photo. The sensory effect of kodalithing is transformed as the scale of the field of action changes.

JBT - Kodalithic - black or white, present or absent, on or off. The core idea for the computer age, digital technology is binary, biology is also binary. binary-ness is at the core of all living things. The halftone newsprint image comprising black dot or not to obtain the elaborate gradation of a black and white newspaper photograph is analogous to cellular biological process. PTM adds the entire gray scale to the foundational information delivered by the expressed gene. This gene, as it is switched on or off, launches a cascade of action that lasts until the cell dies; 13 days for white blood cells, 30 days for top layer of skin cells, 120 days for red blood cells, 18 months for liver cells and a lifetime for neurons.

The gene that differentiates a pluripotent cell into two types of cochlear nerve cell is switched into its cochlear-ness  at ten weeks during pregnancy. In a 2-step process of cellular events there is the primary epigenetic event that commands activation of cochlear cells and silence from  other sensory cell types ( we don’t smell with our ears or taste with our eyes). Once the cochlear nerve cells have become black dots in our halftone image, we no longer have a cell blank slate with pluri-potential. These cells are now dedicated to the audio club for as long as they live.

You have seen the big photo collages that take 10,000 pre-existing photographs and arrange them all as if each were a tiny splash of color. There are two levels of picture-making at work here, one for the first, smaller image and the second where the small pic is put to use as only a patch in the large image. Think of an organ’s cells like one of these larger images. Step one is to make a picture - a cell differentiated for a specific organ step two is to assemble an array of these each with its own special character into a big picture - the audio picture or the liver, kidney, lung, brain picture. The big picture is that we can listen to Beethoven and look out across the Grand Canyon and taste a fine meal as we cough, sneeze and sweat at the right time.

JBT - Effective communicators simplify ideas for better comprehension losing detail in the process. This abstraction for communication is Kodalithing. If Kodalithing is at a small scale it is barely seen as such, George Washington has a memo drafted by his aide Alexander Hamilton and sends it to Congress as his own. The historian says this memo was from George Washington to Congress, Alexander Hamilton is lost in the Kodalith. If all events involved in a history of the American Revolutionary War were told at the level of the Washington-Hamilton memo source, the history book would be 15,000 pages instead of 500. To omit  mention of French participation in the American victory over the British would be excessive Kodalithing, too much meaning is lost but we don’t say the American-French forces defeated the British. We say the Americans defeated the British.

JBQ - Did methylation replace mutation as the key driver of a finer-tuned Natural Selection in the Darwinian model? Say about 150 million years ago? Genetic mutation was key when the fundamental chemical-structural operating system was being born from 4.5 BYA to 150 MYA then PTM took over as a finer,  more flexible system of evolving. Errors were not so irreversible with methylation. John Trumbull begins his large painting with a mop ( DNA sequence) and finishes it with a fine brush:  methylation, acetylation etc. Perhaps there is a hierarchy of finality beginning with the nucleotide sequence itself then to the methylation etc of the nucleotides at the gene site, then down the ladder to histone modifications, all of which can be heritable as cells replicate during one’s life and across generations. may look junky but all of this ADNA is storing the actors in the histone story in order to survive meiosis-mitosis. A gene mutation is a VERY big deal and at this juncture in evolution almost always a bad idea but gene methylations and histone mods are just fine and more easily corrected or erased. Cosmos to organisms “Don’t mess with a good thing, we’ve made it this far, do not screw this up. Leave DNA alone. Use PTM to secure change.

JBT - Once a Kodalithed image is encoded into our neurons it is difficult to change. For example let’s look at “Waddington’s Hill”, an heuristic developed in the 1970s by Professor C.L.Waddington to describe epigenetic cell development. The geography of this hill is such that as a ball rolls down there is a dividing hillock where the ball will roll either left or right. Once it has rolled to the left or right at the first juncture, a major causal path is established, as the ball rolls further down there is another outcropping that presents another left or right option and so forth until the ball is at the bottom of the hill in stasis. The ball will want to remain in stasis. It will require energy to move the ball, either back to the top of the hill or to an adjacent valley.  Think of the descent from the top as the transition to greater complexity in a cochlear hair cell. An empty brick warehouse will make a fine office space. As we begin, there is one vast empty volume. All space is undifferentiated. We are at the top of Waddington’s hill. As this undifferentiated space becomes offices, conference rooms, kitchenette, toilets we approach the bottom of the hill. Walls have been built, lights installed, plumbing is in place. Here at the bottom of W-Hill it is costly to change the interior architecture.

JBT & N - The opposite of Kodalithing is TMG ( Too Much Gray). To be TMGd is to be buried in detail, in so many shades of gray that the truth that may reside at either pole of an argument becomes fogged. As Stephen Jay Gould knocks Charles Darwin from his pedestal, a Kodalith moment, he disguises the paradigmatic violence in 1,000 shades of meaning with his jargon,history lessons, apologies, false encomiums, goofy science, impenetrably sloppy diagrams, straw-man attacks, squid rasslin and much else. Its all good, a great stimulant for thought.

JBT - There is much Kodalithing at work when credit for a great discovery is assigned. Newton-Leibniz, Picasso-Braque, Ellington Strayhorn, Jones-Jagger, Lennon-Parker. The individual with the best historical PR team wins the credit sweepstakes. “Satin Doll” everyone knows it as a Duke Ellington not as a Billy Strayhorn song even though Billy wrote it. History loves Kodalith as do historians. Shades of gray nowadays mean shades of dividing up profits.

JBT - The human brain Kodaliths for many reasons. It is the only way to store a memory. The histones surrounding the DNA in a neuron are either methylated ( black) or not (white). these neurons can accrue into patches containing many  thousands for a single vivid memory that includes sight, sound, vome, taste and touch i.e. the dotscreen at a newspaper image ( each momentary sensation is its own dot and they arrive in groups from different senses)  but it is still kodalithing. As the total number of memories cascade into larger realms kodalithing must occur in order to make room i.e. those 100,000 sensations from a great first date get kodalithed as all ON-Black and filed as a single great memory in a bank of 100 date memories. It may be parsed out-remembered in detail,  later at will.

JBT - Kodalithing concentrates meaning into essence ( see: Kara Walker cutouts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Walker

Sometimes essential meaning  is lost during this process. It would be difficult to contain the meaning of a watercolor painting with kodalith film as it is the fluid-induced shades of tone that are the essence of this medium.

JBT - Structuralism asserts that our brains arrive on Earth containing a waffle iron,  a neural appliance with six structural grammars enabling more than screams, grunts, chirps, scowls, howls and arm-waving though all of these are still very much in use. Imagine that our built-in, ADNA coded waffle iron contains six different grammars, one each for spoken-written language, music, smell, touch, taste, graphics and architectural space and that our neocortex gives us the brain volume to add coded cultural specifics to each of these structural capabilities for communication. Sensation is processed by each of six different brain areas of sequential evolutionary age from oldest to newest: brainstem, amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus  hippocampus,  neocortex.

Each of these six brain areas has its unique method of judging sensory information, its own version of a waffle iron. We have the viscero-emotional grammar of our limbic system expressed along the Papez circuit, emotional grammar, logical ( written/spoken) grammar. We have a grammar of pleasure and one of pain, one of smell and taste. We are born knowing the decayed-dangerous-don’t eat from the sweet-fruity or fatty-bloody edible.

JBT - That lines are ever points is a fluke of human perception. That continua may be parsed into singular events is a myth, a misperception always leading to error. We make this error as a matter of course. There are no points. Points are kodalithic phenomena, the mind’s effort to create meaning via abstraction. Beware of all that is lost when time or space are stopped. Nothing ever stops. Nothing is ever still. There are no points in time or space. Our mind creates points in time and space for convenience, to get a handle on living. We call these points memories, each memory has a unique combination of sensory information.

JBT - Our idea of a house, what a house is, the very nature of any house is a point in our memory, a fixed idea locked into our brain at an early age. All memories are fixed and revisited only when necessary - as Eldredge and Gould pointed out, stasis reigns until evolution is required. Our ideas about the nature of art and science are as fixed as those of houseness. “Science is rational requiring experiment and proof” “Art happens on a canvas and is displayed in a museum or gallery.” After we buy these notions close to the symbolic foundation, we can add detail. Human consciousness is a collection of paradigms for 1,000 things; art language, dance, all systems for processing sensation and storing memory.

JBT - A memory is a dot screen, a patch of tissue with 1,200 available loci each of which has been turned on or left off i.e. kodalithed. 200 dots each register sight, sound, smell, vome, taste, touch and each sensation has an intensity tag. Imagine a six section waffle with each section formed in its own area of the brain followed by stacking into a single more abstract, more compact package for storage. When you remember Paris now and then you won't remember 200,000 sensations you will remember “nice”

JBT &N - DeAcetylating seven histones at a gene in 1,000 neurons storing a hurtful memory is DA Therapy(DAT) . DAT is 50% couch analysis and 50% lab work-chemical adjustment, detaching PTM that codes for intensity as we change the memory of a violent beating from father into a love tap, freeing the mind to accrue self esteem. The PTM we removed is evacuated from the neuron as cell waste where this dark memory maker will be flushed by the kidneys and pissed into oblivion.

JBQ - Is there a structural difference between a heritable acquired characteristic TTT (Transgenerational Transmission Trauma) and a run- of- the- mill very bad memory during a life? if the TTT is locked via PTM then there must be a location in a neuron for this and that is visible at least in theory. Some tangible molecular thing must lock into the genetic material in the germ cell in order for inheritance to occur. Is there a threshold where a very bad memory gets transported to the germ cells by some increased voltage from the brain through the spinal cord to the uterus or testes?

JBQ - Are not all epigenetic post translational modifications at germ cells heritable?

JBT - All bees are born identical and differentiation into queen or worker happens as a result of diet. All begin their lives eating royal jelly, the workers are weaned from it to a diet of sucrose after a short while. The queen continues to eat royal jelly her entire life thus remaining a queen throughout. Perhaps human military leaders are selected in a similar manner with normal men separated in every physical way from their mothers by age 18 whereas a future military leader’s mother will follow him to West Point and iron his shirts and succor him during stressful periods -see:Supreme Commander Southwest Pacific  Douglas MacArthur.  A disproportionate number of  corporate,  military and political  leaders had close physical attachments to their mothers.

JBT - Perhaps trauma such as that experienced by concentration camp survivors during World War II  interferes with PTM scrubbing as the zygote becomes daughter cells resulting in trauma that has been stored in ova at brain genes( perhaps as ubiquitinated histone #3)  to remain at this chromosomal location during fertilization and fetal development in the nervous system and growing brain as this memory is transmitted to children.

JBT - Sustained neuronal voltage spiking during the formation of long-term trauma causes DNA to unwind from a nucleosome at several neurons creating  neuronal chromatin available for modification that would otherwise be tightly wound around histones and thus inaccessible.  Perhaps the voltage spike allows histone modification to occur in a tightly wound gene through brute force with no unwinding required or the DNA itself simply gets coated with the modifications with no histones involved.

JBT -Epigenetic activity is spread from its initial neuronal site via very small RNA delivering epigenetic response from one location to distant parts of the organism, to the germ cells perhaps, where epigenetic change is inherited. “Plants use epigenetic modification to regulate 1,000s of genes helping to maintain appropriate but “short term” response to the environment” N. Carey

What is “short term” one single moment in time, say a single season or a single organism lifetime or short term as in the life of the species rather than the life of the entire clade, say 5 million years instead of 250 million years. Epigenetic activity as a way to cycle gene expression during a single lifetime on-off i.e. one cycle per lifetime.

JBT - RE: effects of protein folding on phenotypic expression. To do: get 200 copies of “Mad” magazine with the folding back cover that, when folded, creates two distinct pictures. See what percent  of pictorial space became shallower and percentage of deeper pictorial space i.e. does it become a close-up or a further away image?

JBT - All new brass keys of a certain brand produce blanks of a general configuration. Each of 100,000 blanks has exactly the same relative percentages of copper, zinc, mercury etc. They are all the same shape and weight and chemical composition but minor variations in shape at only one edge create 100,000 different key identities for 100,000 different locks. If this holds at such a gross level then surely it works at the cellular-molecular level with DNA, histones,RNA of all sorts and  proteins.

JBE -  Examine experiment results noting the presence of a molecule and its time of arrival or departure tells us something but not nearly the whole story. It is the actual 3-D shape of each molecular variation that begins to tell the story. Look to histone shape for info re: memory not simply the fact of PTM. OK, histone H2B is citrullinated and a neuronal gene involved in memory  is suppressed. This is like picking up Moby Dick and noticing that it is about a whale. Look to molecular shape for additional story. SHAPE AND MEMORY. A traumatic memory has a unique shape as does a blissful memory. These shapes combine and affect one another creating an overall color to the memory is it bright springtime pastels or is it mud and gravy with 90 years of grime.

JBT - Perhaps we have a system that reads electromagnetic radiation from a specific shape of molecule giving added information - another, deeper level of on-off switches, another level of dot pattern, another layer of Kodalith and after shape is detected and categorized we move to the next adjacent deeper level, orientation to magnetic north or body north or some reference point say at the center of the thalamus there is a ground zero a GPS marker, a USGS benchmark, a reference point. Our own Greenwich Observatory - home base for all global ( brain-case ) neuronal navigation. every molecule involved in neuronal memory storage sits in a specific 3-D relation to this quantum point in the center of our brain and position becomes information. Thus a single cut key ( ubiquitinated histone 2A) can have its own 1,000 positions - variations storing much memory. So a bash to the head erases memory, jiggles a brain full of specifically oriented molecules. Some jiggle back into place and others do not, amnesia ensues.

“Waddington’s Hill”  A sloping conceptual landscape with an array of channels one nearest the top splitting the field into two follwed downhill by two splitting into three possible options, decision points in time for a growing thing. These channels guide a ball rolled from the top into either one of two, this happens twice resulting in four possible end locations at the bottom of the hill.

“Blake’s River” begins as a beautiful mountain stream near its source where one can easily step across,  it gradually becomes a mile wide muddy river filled with crocodiles that is difficult and dangerous to cross. This could be one’s river of education think how simple it is to go to college along with 90% of the college population and how difficult  to matriculate as a mid-career working person. Evolution of an organism follows Waddington's HiIl ( he called it a “landscape” hill is not only a shorter word it has the grade change built in) as complexity increases options narrow and it becomes difficult to roll back uphill. As in Blake’s river it also becomes dangerous. the deep history of an organism has a lot of genetic mutation as it evolved from simple to terminally complex but at present 99% of genetic mutation spells  malformation and disease.  Due to the imperative that genes are to be conserved,  our DNA has evolved epigenetic process allowing  phenotypic difference in cell expression without changing the DNA. Blake’s River, like the Mississippi, Amazon, Danube or NIle has eddies, swamps, backwaters, hidden sandbars and snags i.e. it will often fool you, it is not always what it seems, it has force and power and inevitability and risks obscured by its easy nature.

JBT - What if one’s neuron PTM pattern got re-distributed along the brain DNA and neurons began to pulse like heart muscle cells, your brain now pumping out great ideas?

JBT&N - If a memory is locked in at a neuron group as methylated neuronal DNA or neuronal histone mod at hippocampus, it then has 60 years (plus or minus) to sit there and do any number of things such as sending information via methylated miRNA down to an egg via axon microtubules at spinal cord and out to ovaries thus locking this memory into a germ cell neuron nucleosome as a DGM ( Deep Genetic Memory-jb neolog)

JBT&N - 99% of conscious experiential memory is epigenetic and stored in brain neurons. The memory required of cells to distinguish their purpose at specific organ or tissue or hormone is epigenetic ocurring just after conception and removed from the genome with each generation to begin again as totipotent zygote. The species uses DNA as memory storage system. It is rarely interrupted and usually by detrimental mutation. Traumatic memory appears to have a pathway to permanent storage as heritable. To do: check for N. Kellerman’s TTT in mouse population. Specifically, check DNA / histone PTM patterns at mouse hippocampus-ovary-germ cell axis, the HOA axis, a JB neologism.

JBT - If we have neurons outboard of the brain at heart, lungs, gut perhaps these neurons are relay stations for memory shipping from hippocampus to testes and ovaries.

JBT - We may inherit the fears of the past few generations as a matter of course, no need to wait for browbeating from parents, siblings,  teachers and media. We don’t need a slap in the head to be afraid of being the “tall poppy” or a follower rather than a leader due to pre-wiring so when on the analyst’s couch we shouldn’t restrict blame to parents but must include gramps and granny though deceased, still bearing the psychic burden that has interrupted our rise to social significance and spiritual enlightenment.

Fun Fact-1:  Two highly specialized cells, egg and sperm merge to create a totally un-specialized cell capable of becoming any one of 200 different primary cell types in the human body and each of these 200 has many subtypes. there are more than 70 types of neurons. Most epigenetic memory gets wiped from the genome just after fertilization. A quick wipe for sperm, a slower wipe for the egg.

Fun Fact- 2:  42% of human genome comprises transposons probably viral residue. 1AP retrotransposons do not get erased during meiosis-mitosis-zygote-fetal development.  Perhaps retrotransposons are the site of Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic memory.

JBQ - What if 30-40% of human DNA is virus, bacteria, fungi or mold and is currently shut down by PTM? Humans as seed banks for microorganisms.

JBT - Cezanne had great admiration for Chardin and tried to capture Chardin’s magic in his later work. It was Cezanne’s failure at Chardin that created his great victory for a new painting - Cubism

JBT - Investigate the reading of color of a molecule by a second molecule  for operational cues, its electromagnetic signature, the electromagnetic wavelengths it reflects or absorbs as signals for further metabolic or structural activity.

JBT- At neurons involved in memory storage look for lots of unspooled DNA at chromatin as it prepares to receive and encode memory.

JBQ - What is the viscosity of mature chromatin at a 55 year old neuron? Does mature adult chromatin at hippocampal neurons get less viscous as memories fill up space at histones and ADNA as memories lock into place? We know that we die with the neurons we are born with i.e. neurons are not replaced as are skin or liver cells. does this mean that the chromatin in neurons never gets replaced, renewed, recycled or in some way refreshed? Does a 70 year old person have 70 year old chromatin? might this old substance be getting sour or debased / infected in some way as it is invaded by bacteria, virus, archaea,  fungi or mold even if not subject to Alzheimer’s effects i.e. there may be a spectrum of ways to interfere with normal youthful neuron function.

JBE - Does neuron chromatin get more firm with age as memories lock up chromatin? Is viscosity of neuronal chromatin affected by a rat’s accrued experience running mazes and learning tricks? Does a highly trained rat with a brain full of maze memories have more firm neuronal chromatin than a tyro rat?

JBQ - What is the correlation between ADNA and the Structuralist phenomena asserted by Saussure( signmaking) Levi-Strauss(classifying plants and animals) Barthes(myth making), Chomsky ( grammar) i.e. the stuff of our humanness?

JBQ&N - How is an emotion memorized? How many steps in the cascade of on-off switches at work while storing sadness or happiness? Must there be visuals? If five senses are involved,  are five brain areas alerted when this memory is recalled or have the sensations been packaged as gestalt and stored as a unit - a MU - memory unit. A memory unit is a single retrievable thought comprising ten thousand separate inputs from all sensory systems as well as neocortical judgement / analysis tags that have decreed this experience rich, full, complex, worth remembering.  Are songs or paintings symbolic storage devices relieving our brains of having to store all aspects of a certain sadness by giving an appropriate song that perfectly captures the zeit. Edith Piaf packaged a lot of emotion in her day.

JBQ - Does a cluster of neurons storing a particular memory get an intensity tag scaled from one to one hundred? Has our brain ranked every person we know in a hierarchy of importance so that there are two tags with every emotion one for intensity and one for importance of person involved?  Is there a primordial circuit in the brainstem that combines importance of person ( who, in this example,  is a nobody) with the overall intensity of an incident? I experience  a huge beer-spilling intentional bump in a crowded bar causing a pulse straight to my amygdala-motor axis  signaling:  “Mama said knock you out”?

JBT&N - Quantum Memory Transfer (QMT) - A memory comprising 100,000 sensations over a hard year resides in the brain as a neuronal bundle of ADNA stored at a small part of a specific voxel ( one cubic millimeter) in the hippocampus as a long-term memory. This potent bundle can be sensed-read-felt-known by another person in some detail. Perhaps a child is not born with a holocaust induced traumatic memory from parent but the child is  hardwired by its inherited ADNA to receive this traumatic memory. This child is born with a PTM histone that does not contain this entire evil memory but only half of the abstraction of it,  like half of a DNA molecule. A child  of traumatized parent, grandparent or great grandparent will add the complimentary half of this ADNA-Histone thus recreating the whole memory just as the ribosome constructs a protein from a stretch of mRNA. The child, after reconstituting this traumatic memory has been Kodalithed. An experience that played out over two years in a concentration camp with billions of sensations stored by the experiencer as a million PTM neurons and inherited as a single bundle of PTM histone in a germ cell ( ovum) where it became a incipient brain cell in the fetus and grew into a mature neuron cluster ready for activation.

JBN - A memory bundle ( MB) - The kodalithic abstraction, the sign, the stored experience, the switch is on, the myth emerges from stored experience generated by six senses and many neocortical judgments. The sixth sense being vome, short for vomeral-nasal our pheromone response:  “chemistry” as opposed to “The Smell Test”.

JBT - Epigenetics is to genetics as post-Hubble astronomy is to looking at the moon through binoculars. Our genetic code with its 3 billion base pairs is only the starting point. This fact, like the universe itself, is overwhelming. Humans continue to underestimate the complexity of life. Imagine the human brain as big as Rhode Island, now let’s take a drive to the hippocampus and watch a memory unfold.

JBT - “A Taxonomy of Culture” All human cultures have created a tissue of myth in order to defuse a gnawing insignificance. The micro-totemic quality of many of our current mythical referents has become flexible. Studying The Beatles or Bob Dylan at a university, not to mention our obsession with entry level celebrities. there is a taxonomy of cultural concern but in the big picture it is all the same stuff whether Beyonce’ or Catherine The Great, Winston Churchill or Chubby Checker, Goethe or Seinfeld. One gets more credit for name-checking an Ancient Greek than a 1950s rock and roll star but they are not essentially different. The former is swathed in time. One day Beyonce’ and her retinue will be studied in universities and revered as if Cleopatra.

JBQ - Phosphenes are the brilliant, psychedelic color patterns you see when you press on your eyeballs while lying in bed at night. How are humans able to see the explosive array of brilliant light and color of phosphenes in total darkness, no light whatsoever, no electromagnetic sensation, no photons striking the retina?. Are phosphenes a chemical light only? Pressure on the eyeball releases calcium or potassium ions  activating neurons?  Do these sensations find their way back to the occipital lobe for neocortical processing or does this sensation stop at the brainstem? We don’t really need a neocortical opinion about the meaning of it all. Do phosphenes involve memories of color stored in the brain?

JBT - Every atom in our universe is connected to an alternate universe via a nano black hole in its innermost center at the sub boson-quark level. This subatomic connection to our next adjacent but unseen universe is the source of gravity.

JBT - Human culture vaccinates us from the affliction of our insignificance, giving us a scale of being, a starting point with which to face the universe. Our neocortex  is a mechanism enabling us to play off against one another in an invented, wholly arbitrary and myth-riddled social engine, a coded system of symbol whose turbulent convection creates intra and inter-tribal  social stratification. Conflict of one sort or another is the lubricant for all cultural motion from relationships between nations and lovers.

***

May 17, 2015    6:35pm

Contagious Emotion

  May 13, 2015

The human brain has three parts: the new part, the neocortex, 2.5 million years old and the two older parts;  the limbic system and brainstem. The limbic system and the brainstem are shared by all mammals. the brainstem  is our reptilian brain.  It is 250 million years old. When we catch a contagious emotion it is the result of communication  between our reptilian brains. Emotions are much more primitive than reason.

While some emotion is initiated by the inanimate or nonhuman, most emotion is the result of “catching” it from the action or inaction of other people. Such a large percentage of human emotion is the result of a contagious human interaction it is unnecessary to qualify it as contagious, emotion is 99% contagious. We catch emotions from other people through sight, sound and touch primarily, perhaps via smell / vome  vome refers to the vomero-nasal system wherein pheromones are sensed. Vomes are not smells. The vomeronasal apparatus is a separate sensory organ from the olfactory apparatus. Pheromones are not smells but they enter our bodies through our noses to reach our jacobson’s organ, a microscopic hole in the nasal septum through which pheromone molecules travel to reach the vome neurons.

The bulk of the neocortex interprets social signals adding layers of meaning via memory and detailed interpretation of sensory input. Humans are emotional instruments, pianos with keys played every hour of the day in real time interactions with other people. Our piano is played by our subconscious in our imagination and dreams. Who plays your piano?

Our brainstem is  the first brain area to receive sensory input but it is the emotion processing role of the neocortex makes us rational humans. The brainstem/ basal ganglia  is a set of drums  played by the people we meet,  but the melody,  harmony and cacophony happens in our neocortex, our Modern, uniquely human brain, the pink, wrinkly part. The neocortex adds layers of meaning by which we stratify ourselves in all relationships as we post-process all signals from other people with our added subtle neocortical interpretation . It is this capacity for sign-making, as language, written and spoken that has enabled culture to develop. The neocortex allows ultra-fine levels of social stratification to be acted, sounded, smelled, vomed out and enforced in every human interaction  allowing role diversity via shared emotion.

Human role differentiation-stratification enables the turbulent engine of social convection  to operate. As a result of an infinitude of neocortical social interpretations among tribal populations, we operate as societies. Neocortical emotional information accruing through life  gives us each our definition in society. We learn our places at various levels,  public and private and live these roles as developed and defined by the infinite web of responses to emotion.  When people tire of their assigned roles, that emerge from their own actions, rebellion, divorce and revolution ensue.

Claude Levi-Strauss, in his seminal book on human culture, The Savage Mind -1962

presents evidence for shared strategies among all societies that ensure tribal cohesion,  that all members are on the same ideological-emotional-mythical-totemic page, that tribe-specific cultural contagion is homogeneous among  members. Tribes, whether Christians in Minneapolis, Muslims in Tehran or Yanomamo in Brazil share, among themselves,  tribal rules encoded by emotion in the stone talisman or library that reveals the story of tribal origin.

All social experience is an emotional web. Emotion begins as gumbo and is rapidly sorted by the brainstem into shrimp, sausage, tomatoes, potatoes and rice i.e. love, hate, fear, envy, joy, contentment, sadness, worry, shame, guilt and curiosity.

When President Lyndon Johnson wanted a colleague in the U.S. Senate to share his emotional attachment to a piece of legislation he would walk beside this legislator, drape his long arm around his shoulder and lean into his ear to speak creating a full multi-sensory bath to accompany his words. LBJ using the languages of sight, touch, smell, vome as well as speech to ensure emotional contagion. To feel the size of the man, the pressure of his large hand,  his cigarette breath along with words creates a reptilian impression accompanying later neocortical logic.

Contagious: Capable of being easily spread to others causing other people to feel or act a similar way.

• Able to be passed from one animal to another by touching.
• Having a sickness that can be passed to someone else by touching.
• Communicable by contact
• Exciting similar emotions or conduct in others - contagious enthusiasm
• Transmissible, transmittable

Emotion: Biologically innate agitation of the feelings universal to all humans displayed primarily through facial expression, increased heart-rate, perspiration and blushing while experiencing any of the following or combinations thereof: Love, hate, anger, fear, disgust, shame, contempt, frustration, pride.

“He who begins by steeping himself  in the allegedly self-evident truths of introspection never emerges from them.” - Claude Levi-Strauss

“It is easily forgotten that each of the tens of thousands of societies which have existed side by side in the world or succeeded one another since man’s first appearance has claimed that it contains the essence of all the meaning and dignity of which human society is capable and reduced, though it may have been, to a small nomad band or a hamlet lost in the depths of the forest, its claim has, in its own eyes, rested on a moral certainty comparable to that which we can invoke in our own case. Whether the remote case or our own, a good deal of egocentricity and naivete is necessary to believe that man has taken refuge in a single one of the historical or geographical modes of his existence, when the truth about man resides in the system of their differences and common properties.” - Claude Levi-Strauss - The Savage Mind - 1962

“Emotional contagion is the tendency for two individuals to emotionally converge. One view, developed by Elaine Hatfield et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mimic their companions' expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions' emotions. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many different ways both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon.  Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon was suggested by Schoenewolf: "a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes".  -Wiki

“Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but

as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational ad-

juncts superimposed on an already given order of things. They are collective

products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human

beings constitute and articulate their world.” -  Ferdinand de Saussure

“If the central task of art history is the study of visual images, the issue of "word and image" focuses attention on the relation of visual representation to language. More broadly, "word and image" designates the relation of art history to literary history, textual studies, linguistics, and other disciplines that deal primarily with verbal expression. Even more generally, "word and image" is a kind of shorthand name for a basic division in the human experience of representations, presentations, and symbols. We might call this division the relation between the seeable and the sayable, display and discourse, showing and telling (Foucault 1982; Deleuze 1988; W.J.T. Mitchell 1994).

Great songs are emotionally contagious. Listening to the first verse in Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” one has most  senses engaged immediately:

“Nibblin’ on sponge cake” - taste

“Watchin’ the sun bake” - sight

“all of the tourists all covered in oil” - sight, smell, touch

“Strummin’ my six string” - sound-music

“On my front porch swing” - kinesthetic - motion

“smell those shrimp-they’re beginnin’ to boil” - smell,

If one has sympathy for boiling creatures, the kinesthetic drama of being boiled.  We’re viscerally-emotionally hooked in the first verse. There is the rhythm, melody, prosody, vocal mood of the song itself added to the epiphenomena of the things sung about - a double whammy.

“Consider, for instance, the words you are reading at this moment. They are (one hopes) intelligible verbal signs. You can read them aloud, translate them into other languages, interpret or paraphrase them. They are also visible marks on the page, or (if read aloud) audible sounds in the air. You can see them as black marks on a white background, with specific shapes, sizes, and locations; you can hear them as sounds against a background of relative silence. In short, they present a double face to both the eye and the ear: one face is that of the articulate sign in a language; the other is that of a formal visual or aural gestalt, an optical or acoustical image. Normally we look only at one face and ignore the other: we don't pay much attention to the typography or graphic look of a text; we don't listen to the sounds of words, preferring to concentrate on the meaning they convey. But it is always possible to shift our attention…..” Mitchell-1996

*

Spontaneous popular uprisings shake the world in 1968. U.S. anti-Vietnam War protests are a contagion for youth of all Western nations. How does this happen?  Did the French have an issue with U.S. involvement in Vietnam or were they simply itching to protest, to get in on the action? What tumblers in the lock line up to open this door of collective consciousness, of shared emotion between two people or two million people? Minds align via theory,smell, sound, taste, vome and touch.

This idea passes the smell test

• That idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
• I can see your point..
• This idea stinks
• That idea sounds crazy.
• This idea just doesn’t feel right.

Large groups under the influence of contagious emotion:

• French Revolutionaries at Bastille 1789
• Pittsburgh steelworkers vs Pinkertons at Homestead Steel Works - 1892
• Woodstock 1969
• The Pope at St. Peter’s square addresses Easter throng
• Greek ruler Alexander battles Persian King Darius
• Millions listen to FDR “Fireside Chats” on radio
• WWII victory celebration in Times Square 1945
• Race riots of 1960s U.S.
• Beatles at Shea Stadium 1965
• NFL Football game

Howard Gardner's “Eight Intelligences”  as mechanisms of emotional contagion.

If emotion is contagious what is the emotional virus? what actually transpires between people? See: Dawkins' meme, Gladwell’s tipping point

Process: Romance viral pathway

1. I am alone
2. I see an attractive person
3. I speak, we converse, we smell, listen, see, vome-out (JB neolog for pheromone exchange a bit too close to vo-mit)
4. I pay professionals to stimulate senses on first date

a.To drive taxi to restaurant

b.To cook a fine meal

1. to entertain via sight and sound - Concert

I enlist as many senses as possible from myself and others in my effort to win a second date.

Process: Race Riot viral pathway:

1. I am alone and unemployed and a member of a race that has been marginalized.
2. I am negated, harassed by police for years
3. I lust to  share my sense of injustice, alienation, victimhood.
4. I tear the f-ing place apart using sight, sound, muscle

In each of these two cases,  contagious emotion flows through the Paleolithic brain’s Papez Circuit delaying rational, neocortical functions - postponing them as secondary as I enlist primitive basal ganglia at most direct sensory level with little or no symbolic abstraction, little signage. that which is signified is olfactory, visual, audio, vomeric,

tactile, not neocortical.

Emotional contagion is primal. The more senses involved,  the speedier the contagion spreads. Totems signifying wealth stimulate reptilian instinct for sex ( not a newsflash)

Snarky wisdom: The money you make by marrying it will be the hardest money you will ever earn.

The advertising industry revolves around discovering new ways to stimulate the Papez circuit as traditional paths become exhausted in the greater population, just as use of drugs necessitates increasing doses until the system collapses.

Mechanisms:

A child sees, hears, is touched by a grief-stricken parent and the sadness is easily transferred. The younger the child, the stronger, deeper, more permanent the effect.

This also applies to any emotion: anger, bliss, remorse, love, humor, embarrassment.

Parent fears are contagious. Children catch them all to one degree or another. So unfair for a young human to be saddled with an array of second hand fear. Why not start fresh with each generation? Adolescents are hardwired to rebel from this oppressive catalog of emotional burden that has been absorbed from parents, siblings, friends, teachers and the media.

How does the child catch an emotional virus?

1. Kind words plus a big hug, angry words plus a beating
2. Tender voice or shouting
3. Abandonment to orphanage, cheerful family vacation
4. Being ignored, being included
5. Addressed with respect, subjected to silent treatment
6. Watching parents show affection, watching parents fight and scream.
7. Love is in the air, vomero-nasal fear and loathing in the household air

The strata of emotional memory read like the walls of the Grand Canyon. We remember all emotional events and they all combine to shape our landscape.

when a current scenario trips a layer of our emotional sediment we have a reptilian response beyond reason issuing from the basal ganglia. We all share a primitive instinct to gather as a tribe. This instinct has outlets in sporting events, rock shows, symphony-ballet-theater. The tribe gathers over a dim nighttime light to hear stories and to see stories unfold. Soccer riots, race riots, war protests, flash mobs at the mall. We are driven to experience the emotional contagion of our tribal gathering in order to confirm our identity as a member of our tribe in good standing.

Alas, we have priced the bulk of our population out of its rightful participation in shared tribe-wide rituals of gathering / bonding. A day for two at a baseball game can exceed $150. Rock concerts and football games are expensive. This exclusion from public tribal bonding further exacerbates the rich-poor divide in America as it separates the middle- middle class from the lower-middle class.  Middle-middle is bonded via public spectacle, lower middle does without, an alien in his or her own land. Americans are forced to forego rightful tribal bonding even at the neighborhood cineplex. Isolated individuals and families sit at home, a growing void where tribal inclusion should thrive.

Some viruses are a healthy part of one’s necessary biota. the emotional virus is a double-edged organism. Like many viruses we need just the right amount for beneficial effects and depend on our immune system to maintain this stasis by killing viral excess. what systems do we use to maintain balance of our emotional virus population? If too much emotional virus, nervous breakdown brings social life to a halt.  Some people lack an emotional governing mechanism, thus are subject to intermittent overload.

*

It is a long-established fact that humans perceive signs, language and their entire external world in terms of differences. The letter Q is slightly different from the letter O or the number 0. One neuron has a methylated histone sitting adjacent to a phosphorylated histone on unspooled DNA,  having lost its twin-sock form to become a mass of chromatin with many DNA sites exposed for post translational modification at euchromatin - memory formation, labelling, storage, recall.

A memory is a difference coded as a few molecules added to or subtracted from DNA, RNA, histones, etc. Perhaps this coding occurs in the rough endoplasmic reticulum surrounding the nuclear membrane. Perhaps each memory has its own specific ribosome with its unique molecular signature that sends memory messages as proteins until death or dementia. Ribosomes pick up signals incoming from any of 1,000 points on a more or less spherical 360 degree, imagine a 3D compass with every degree 360 x 360 capable of coding a specific memory depending on what part of the brain sent the message. OK, now we have our memory - vive la difference! step II Now code for intensity and quality select from a menu of 500 add-ons to code from bliss to terror so that this memory can be filed in its proper memory bank and safe deposit box. Each memory as a manila folder with some sight, smell, sound, vome or taste associated with it,  each in varying degrees of intensity from one to five hundred. Are these intensity tags aminos attached to the previously modified histone or ribosome? We’ll get to the bottom of this !

One still distills at da still then toasts de Stijl on de stilts.

Is there an array of proteinic tags for DNA or histones or ribosomes that describe emotion just as there are ones to discern musical pitch, smell and taste? Say 500 shades of joy - emotion from bliss (#3)  to terror (#495). OK, Sally annoyed me and I will never forget her nasty remark though I would like to. It is coded as intensity #273 up from bliss where it is now registered as bothersome. This memory will be shipped to long term memory and shorter term memory. One remembers who one’s friends are. This Sally event is now taking up my brainspace as a doubly tagged piece of genetic material. Tagged the first time as it registered and a second time to register its severity. The severity tag is read by still other neurons at the brain logistics center and freight-forwarded with a chemical bar code indicating its final destination. This chemical barcode will be read at each of five stops on the Papez circuit: thalamus, hippocampus, cerebellum, amygdala and finally the cingulate gyrus where the buck will stop.

Snarky aside: Novels written by people who do not read good fiction and have not read good fiction ALWAYS suck ! ! There has been no such thing as natural talent after Fielding’s Tom Jones written in the 18th century. Do your homework tyros ! There are far too many excellent novels around to waste time on junky, ignorant, trite, smarmy, hackneyed, narrow scribbling, even if this paperback novel did take you years to write. A great story is NOTHING without excellent writing, at least one sympathetic character, clear, concise, imaginative, fresh analogies and metaphors.

How many separate times do methylations occur by the time an experience is stored as a memory in its proper brain area? What is the method of transmission, a chemical or electrical signal or both? Are protein molecules actually moved around in the brain during sensation - memory formation? What is transmitted around the Papez circuit? actual physical things or a sign, an abstraction or a meta-abstraction?

When storing a memory of a single encounter with another person:

1. Is this information stored at a single brain cell or a cluster of brain cells?
2. Is this single cell a neuron or an astrocyte?
3. Is it one neuron and five glial cells?
4. How many different types of brain cells are involved in this process?
5. Do we use our hearts, lungs and or stomachs for long-term memory storage?
6. Do neurons in our fingers store memories? Do any muscles store memories at the arms or legs? Is muscle memory in the muscle or the brain?
7. Are microglia interneuron messengers with their ameboid characteristics ( similar to macrophages). Neurons vary in size from 4 to 100 microns in diameter
8. Neurons at the hippocampus can regenerate.
9. There are hundreds of different types and subtypes of neurons
10. There are four parts to the brain: Cerebrum, Cerebellum, Diencephalon, Brain-stem. There are 100 billion neurons
11. The brain first appeared in fish 500 MYA (Million Years Ago)
12. In the most advanced reptiles 250 MYA
13. The Limbic system first appeared in small mammals 150 MYA
14. the human neocortex greatly expanded in primates 2.5 MYA @ humans
15. Is helplessness an emotion?
16. A genome is itself  a memory device. It remembers that you must remember and codes for structures to enable this. Genes remember the big stuff - that the head sits on top of the shoulders not below. Acetylated histones remember to take out the trash.
17. What is the difference between division and multiplication? A cell divides into two. Each of these two grows larger, after a certain point it is said that the cell has multiplied. The difference between division and multiplication is an arbitrary agreed upon point in a continuum.
18. The Boys In The Boat - nonfiction bestseller. Intercollegiate rowing transforms emotional bonding, through shared adrenalin addiction,  into religion. One could be addicted to worse.
19. Rowing: passion, intensity, relentless hard work of a band of brothers / sisters without music but with great rhythm, little  glory. One drug supplants all others in rowing - adrenalin - go out and make some of your own.

“Judge not that ye be not judged” - Holy Bible - Try telling this to your basal ganglia.

***

Addendum #1 - Saussure in a nutshell

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of general linguistics in Geneva from 1896-1911 appearing in his posthumous assemblage of class notes Course In general Linguistics, published in 1916. In contrast with most of his predecessors who focussed on the historical evolution of languages, Saussure emphasizes the primacy of SYNCHRONIC analysis to understand their inner functioning. Synchrony ( history is a SYN with synchrony).

A diachronic approach to linguistics  considers the development and evolution of a language through history. The word is built on the ancient Greek words for “through” and “time”. Historical linguistics is typically a diachronic study.

A synchronic approach to linguistics considers a language without taking its history into account. The word is built on the ancient Greek words “with” and “Time”. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing language rules at a specific point in time ( usually the present) even though they may have been different in the past. Middle-school grammar uses a synchronic approach.

This Saussurian dualism has spread into  the roots of all post- WWII thought in many fields other than linguistics: Anthropology ( Levi-Strauss) Contemporary linguistics ( Chomsky in his swerving from it- Chomsky’s teachers were steeped in Saussure: Bloomfield, Jakobson, Harris, et al) Psychoanalysis ( Lacan) Architecture ( The entire Modern movement) Sociology, History itself, Philosophy: Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Debord, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Literary Criticism - DeMann, etc. If 20th century bioscience belong to Neo-Darwinists, all else was Saussurian.

“Do mythical representations correspond to an actual structure that models social and religious practices or do they translate only the congealed image by means of which native philosophers give themselves the illusion of fixing a reality which escapes them?”

-Levi-Strauss

This is the 64 thousand dollar question for everyone in any culture, not just the philosophers. Every member of a society buys into its myth structure to one extent or another. Perhaps schizophrenics are missing the gene ( gene translation?)  for myth- making and myth- believing. Schizophrenics are unable to buy into the game being taught, learned and played in every society with its countless, complex layers of agreed upon belief. The more sensible among these abnormals become our tricksters playing us against ourselves and one another from their perch beyond myth.  The tricksters are the ones who had no taste for the Kool Aid and no means to digest it.

Much of this mythical belief is coded by the academic community at expensive institutions so that full myth comprehension is unavailable even to intelligent, fully functioning members of the tribe.  One purchases a secret code with which to  navigate Wall Street, Corporate Capitalism and academia itself.

*

The “Neo” in Neo-Darwinism is Saussurean synchrony introduced into the Darwinian program by Mendel and the blossoming study of genetics,  thus creating a productive dialectic between the Lyellian evolutionary continuum and the breadth of genetic inquiry in real-time cell biology, genetics, genomics, embryology, proteomics, neuroscience and all other bio-sciences.

Embryology is by definition a synthesis of diachrony and synchrony at its most concentrated. Diachrony-history stays in the picture,Synchrony -factor out history, examine in real-time for lateral relationships not historically linear ones.

Syntagmatic Chain: Implies surface analysis as opposed to deep paradigmatic analysis. Syntagmatic means one element selects another element to precede or to follow it. A syntagm is a chain that leads to understanding how a sequence of events forms a narrative. “A syntagmatic analysis can describe a spatial relationship of a visual text such as posters, photographs or a filmed scene.” - David Lodge, Susan Spiggle

Saussure is the father of Structuralism, a key concept in most 20th century thought. The central notion of Structuralism is that there are constant laws of abstract culture at the root of local variations of expressed phenomena. Saussure expanded this concept in linguistics.

JB “Waffle Iron” analogy  for Structuralism.  Structuralism is now manifest in many realms of thought but I’ll use language in this analogy as it was the first use of the concept by Saussure. Waffles are languages.  Humans are born with a waffle iron in their brain. This waffle iron is in the neocortex. The architecture of the waffle iron is coded in our DNA at the FOXP2 gene. Structuralism asserts that this waffle iron contains a code for sign-making. The language waffle iron is ready to receive waffle batter soon after birth. The batter is  language specifics such syntax and vocabulary, etc. This waffle iron is dedicated to symbolic communication, we are born with it.

The notion of Structuralism was conceived in relation to linguistics but spread during the first half of the 20th century to anthropology, sociology, philosophy and literary theory, each with its specific waffle iron pre-installed in the neocortex.  In anthropology during the 1950s, Claude Levi-Strauss proposed that many phenomena that organize human culture besides language had their own discrete waffle irons such as kinship, exchange systems, plant and animal classification, stories of origin, myth making. He concluded that every culture on Earth whether “primitive” or “modern” has the same set of inborn waffle irons with the only differences between cultures being different recipes for the batter. The batter being traditions that develop and are passed to new members within each of tens of thousands of tribes all around the world, tribes deep in the jungle mountains of New Guinea and tribes in Manhattan and Los Angeles. In the 1960s Noam Chomsky asserted that grammar was an inborn component of our sign-making waffle iron.

*

The following are Miscellaneous Thoughts on The Savage MInd- Levi-Strauss-1962

The Saussurian concept of “opposition” seems an odd term for the “differences” described as they rarely involve opposite or opposing entities / concepts but adjacent ones with very small differences. “Oppositions” is bombast, exaggeration for effect, self-dramatizing, a cooler sounding word for the trivial distinctions possible in the sensible world.

Every artwork contains its own myth. It is up to each artist to make it convincing. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Malevich, Hopper, Warhol, de Kooning and Wyeth constructed convincing myths.

Levi-Strauss on tribal sacrifice: “Once the relationship between man and the deity is secured by sacralization of the victim, the sacrifice breaks it by destroying this same victim.”  See: U.S.A. star-making machinery.

Re: Saussure: How can one comprehend an innately historical construct like totemism using an heuristic that, by definition, denies history i.e. Saussure’s synchrony which became Structuralism for Levi-Strauss’ and a generation of others in the social sciences.

Levi-Strauss milks Saussure’s synchronic / diachronic heuristic beyond its carrying capacity. This dualism was invented to describe aspects of the study of linguistics not necessarily all other ethnographic aspects of a culture: totemism, marriage, medicine etc. Though his use is imaginative in its re-purposing in discussing tribal naming strategies, he overdoes it, resulting in excessive squid rasslin’. Like taking a hammer to your Nikon lens to illustrate Cubism’s multivalent station point then using this lens to catalog the inhabitants of villages around the world. Gee, they all look so, so .....multivalent.

Right-Left brain cross-checking always at work regardless of one’s hardwired leaning of reality analysis: linear vs lateral, language vs form, rational vs intuitive. We are hardwired to cross-check all stimuli with reason and intuition. We are all artists and scientists to one degree or another all day.

The achilles heel of mid-20th century French philosophy  was to take Sartre too seriously, to give him a foundational import his ideas did not warrant. In lean post WWII times one made do with what was at hand. Sartre was the only squid in the room with which to rassle as one made intellectual-academic-philosophic bones.

Levi-Strauss’ use of “dialectical” reason to penetrate an unreasonable realm - human culture. Is Levi-Strauss’ dialectic between Totemic- Modern holding down one side of the the dialectic with Scientific- Modern on the other side thus giving primacy to Western reason either way - like Gould’s inability to marginalize Darwin, though he had 1,000 pages of evidence with which to do so. Levi-strauss cannot bring himself to marginalize rational thought in his explanations of systems containing very little.

Idea: Store memories in the alveoli of our lungs as puffs of gas that could be read by their gas molecular signature like the camera in the nosecone of a sidewinder air to air missile that reads the chemistry of jet aircraft exhaust signatures to discern friend from foe.

Chomsky asserts that many of the properties of generative grammar arise from a universal grammar innate in the human brain. If this is the case, at which gene is this capacity coded? Is it the FOXP2 gene or a cluster of methylated histones at neurons in Broca / Wernicke zones of the neocortex? Is the cluster of neurons coded for grammar present at birth? at age two? age four? Age six? What percentage of this total inborn grammar package is present at birth? Is it all present by age 13? What is the chemistry / biosynthesis involved in translating the core genetic material into a functioning grammar instinct?

Why is the FOXP2 gene ( for language) expressed in heart, lung, gut as well as the brain?

When did Chomsky’s human grammar package evolve in Homo erectus? Did it emerge as a functional entity or did it accrue serviceability over millions of years of development. Is it finished evolving? Is there a better grammar in our future?

I doubt that our capacity for grammar, even if present at birth, is important enough on the evolutionary scale to warrant a dedicated gene. There is probably a cluster of neurons at Broca or Wernicke areas possessing methylated histones that coalesce remote from the cell nucleus, perhaps on a stretch of rough endoplasmic reticulum in neurons at the fourth layer of the Broca-Wernicke axis of the neocortex.

RE: Francis Crick and the purpose of the claustrum. Perhaps the claustrum mixes audio visual signals for language perception.

Addendum #2

The “ Tub-O-Balls” analogy for available theoretical space in a field of study. A tub is the operative paradigm in a field of study:  bioscience, anthropology, quantum physics or cosmology. The balls of varying sizes are the men and women who have asserted the nature of the operative paradigm. The bigger the ball, the closer to the foundational idea. There is only room for one basketball per tub. Place one basketball in the tub and the tub is full of basketballs but there is room for tennis balls. Founding fathers are “basketballs” : Darwin, Saussure, Freud, Marx, F.L. Wright. First generation disciples are “tennis balls”: Mendel, Levi-Strauss, Jung, Lenin, Le Corbusier, Mies, Gropius. Tennis balls must work very long and hard with obsession often matching that of basketballs, formulating their own theories that share the basketball idea. A tennis ball is an interpreter of a big idea, not its generator.  Each tennis ball spawns a dozen ping pong balls - unquestioning true believers who would have their families sit on uncomfortable modern furniture paying homage to the tennis ball ( see: noted author Donald Barthelme,Jr. - son of a rabid Modern architect, Barthelme, Sr. who designed a Modern home for his family and filled it with uncomfortable Modern furniture). Ping pong balls can do very big work with vast influence -  see: Noam Chomsky. Ping pong balls don’t shift paradigms they flesh them out.  Every basketball attracts an army of ping pong balls. In Modern linguistics Saussure is the basketball, Jakobson, Bloomfield and Zellig Harris are tennis balls. Noam Chomsky is a ping pong ball, albeit a broadly influential one. PhD students are grains of sand filling remaining interstitial tub-space. When the tub is full someone turns it upside down, empties the tub and the process begins again with a new basketball. The overturning tub causes much discomfort as suddenly old-fashioned balls fly off to become particles in the rings of Saturn.

Note: If Saussure is the basketball in the tub of linguistics then Charles Sanders Peirce is the tub itself.

Addendum #3 - Academic-Intellectual tricks n’ tropes, hairy heuristics, devious devices employed in constructing an argument ( as noted in the work of Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, CLaude Levi-Strauss and others).

1. Smokescreen at deep dive ( usually more than a few chapters)-  Levi-Strauss dives into totemic naming strategies of indigenous people. Stephen Jay Gould dives into benthic mollusks of the Caribbean. These dives are filled with neologisms, jargon, qualifiers, wild speculation, enthusiastically founded-boldly asserted notions: orbiting Russell’s Teapots.
2. Cohort Clash: Similar to “Squid Rasslin” ( see: #4) but person-specific as researchers in the field under examination are named and held up to faux-ish scrutiny or exaggerated scrutiny. Author taking an opportunity to name a name and cite a study as the web must be woven from hundreds of these minor clashes. There is always one degree or another of disagreement,disparagement, argument, diminishment for this work that is fogged, fuzzy, inaccurate, narrow-minded,  w h a t e v e r  might possibly add substance to author’s bold assertion. The Key clash is saved for end of book with whomever is the reigning thinker in one’s field. The Key Clash is often a redirected  Basketball clash with oedipal overtones. The Basketball is too ensconced in his lofty perch for assault, though he deserves it mightily. It makes one look like a child with authority issues, a yapping small dog, to in any way disparage the shopworn, moldy, crumbling but bronzed ideas of the grand old man of one’s field but it is always open season on one’s peers for the second tier tennis balls entertaining visions of nothing but net..
3. Spiderwebbing: Sitting in one’s office surrounded by a tall stack of scientific papers from respected journals, books by colleagues that are used to construct the thesis from these filaments from different cultures primitive and modern from around the world, catalogued and analyzed in the work of notable researchers.  Example: Levi-Strauss compares an extinct North American tribe, the Algonquin ( extinct in the sense of their pre-19th century myth and ritual) to a fully functioning remote mountain tribe in New Guinea as he sits in his swivel chair integrating vastly disparate people into a single theory.

• Squid Rasslin’ From feature film “Ed Wood” in which Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi wades into a dark forbidding swamp ( pool of shallow water on a movie set) and proceeds to do fierce “battle” with a large rubber cephalopod. The “battle” is, of course, cooked up in Lugosi’s physical  imagination as he fights for his life flinging tentacles here and there, the inanimate “squid” being vigorously manhandled,  is oblivious to any battle. See: “In The Ring” an essay on rasslin’ in Mythologies - Roland Barthes - 1957

• MOHARE’(MO-Missouri HA-nd RE-ading): A self contained system of fabricated “reason” and analysis of a group  of relationships with its own peculiar logic, diagrammatic analysis, jargon, neologisms and meaning system. The notion of money would be MOHARE’ if it were not so well established. Astrology is a form of MOHARE’ as is Psychotherapy, Quantum Physics and Darwinian Evolution. ( not a creationist!)  Note: New MOHARE’ like Scientology is derided, old, established  MOHARE’, like Christianity is the stuff of large wars.

• Guru-Tagging: Peppering text with off- the-wall use of the vocabulary, concepts and the name of the conceptual father of one’s profession. In the case of Levi-Strauss in The Savage MInd, the guru often tagged is Saussure. Noam Chomsky rarely Guru-tags leaving himself available to be tagged as the guru of his field, though he has at least three generations of significant precursors back to genuine Basketball of Modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. See: Chomsky’s antecedents: Harris, Bloomfield, Jakobson (the whole Prague School), Barthes and Saussure none of whom he credits when he, Chomsky, is referred to as the “Father of Modern Linguistics”. Chomsky’s contributions are broad and vastly influential but they are not foundational. Calling Chomsky the “Father of Linguistics” is like calling James Watson or Richard Dawkins the “Father of Evolution”. Always tackle the biggest lion in the field at the end of the book after setting countless traps throughout with every reference and notion. For Levi-Strauss this lion was Jean Paul Sartre, for Stephen Jay Gould it was Richard Dawkins. Much ink is spent on the big lions. Chomsky proposed the grammatical nature of part of this waffle iron grid but the appliance itself is Saussure and probably Charles Sanders Peirce.

• Ballooning: To take a minor phenomenon like the totemic assignation of tribal names and expand it into the core of an important study of mankind and along the way inventing terms and discovering relationships that may or may not exist in the minds of those under the ethnologist’s  Western gaze. One “balloons” when there is a bit of evidence on this particular topic in 1,000 papers on indigenous cultures from around the world, a robust, if slender, thread of evidence, Levi-Strauss inflates tribal naming patterns into a large balloon  demonstrating his grasp of all things Saussure re: myth, symbol, totemism, signs, signifiers and signified, his secret Sauss. Levi-Strauss’ obsession with naming is an assertion of his Saussiness, gems from his deep synchronic dive spread out like cowrie shells on a Melanesian frond mat. These chapters on naming protocols from indigenous tribes from around the world seem, not so much for our knowledge, as Levi-Strauss demonstrating his comprehension and inspiration by the ideas of Saussure. It is a clubby insider gesture from one French intellectual to his brethren, Jean Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes.

***

3:26 pm May 7, 2015

Filling Niches

April 29, 2015

“The implications of  Ferdinand de Saussure's technique for dealing with linguistic analysis extend far beyond the boundaries of language in ways that make his seminal book Course In General Linguistics  (1916)  without a doubt, one of the most far-reaching works concerning the study of human cultural activities to have been published at any time since the Renaissance.”  - Prof. Roy Harris, Oxford University

Roland Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Debord, Baudrillard knew they had a bird nest on the ground with Saussure. Many new intellectual / academic avenues soon evolved from Saussure’s paradigmatic shift toward viewing language as signs without history.

NIche (JB) = spandrel (Gould-Lewontin).  “In evolutionary biology a spandrel is a phenotypic characteristic that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic rather than a direct product of adaptive selection.” -Gould,Lewontin

A spandrel is leftover space or  structure or organ-component-metabolic process  in a living thing.  A spandrel is secondary occurring at the adjacency-intersection of two always larger or more important primary forms. The dome of the great cathedral Hagia Sophia in Istanbul sits upon a pendentive and by the exigencies of geometry alone,  four spandrels, one at each of four corners are formed by definition.   A niche/spandrel is interstitial by nature and it happens as a fact of the two adjacencies i.e. it’s simply, unavoidably present as a result of larger decisions / adaptations / symbioses,  may as well put it to use. For this essay let’s call the most fundamental units, as a nod to architecture, the BASE and the DOME. It is their adjacency that creates the NICHE; thus we have in each example a BASE, a DOME and a NICHE or niches in the case of the four niches resulting from a dome on a square base. BASE-DOME-NICHE.

The human neocortex has been referred to as spandrel-esque (i.e. a NICHE).  A cranial mutation occurred resulting in a big head (BASE) , cerebral  cells multiplied to fill the cranial void thus creating the neocortex ( 6 layers comprising 100 billion brain cells -  20 billion neurons)

BASE - larger cranium - The result of random mutation 75,000 years ago.

DOME - neocortex - The human  brain expands to fill the void perhaps simultaneous with increased volume.

NICHE- human culture: semiotics (including language), myth-making, the arts, tool use occur as new neurons are utilized.

The outermost, wrinkly layer of the brain-the neocortex is the DOME, using the Hagia Sophia model. The expanded cranium and this new slab of brain cells are the two primary interacting adjacent structures: BASE and DOME, the NICHE is all subsequent human culture:  language, tool use, myth-making, etc. the NICHE is filled with sculptural details.  The NICHE- spandrel is utilized.

Just as sculptors have employed the spandrels of Hagia Sophia and San Marco (Gould-Lewontin example)  for decorative information,  humans have used their relatively recent  brain volume mutation for a little of this and a little of that.  Remember, humans and our antecedents had evolved just fine for the previous 4.4 billion years without this new slab of brain-bacon.  We have used this neuron- spandrel to broad effect while still relying heavily on our primordial brain: the limbic system-brain stem.

Using the Hagia Sophia heuristic:

1. BASE: key structure, first structure, foundational structure or process
2. DOME: Second addition for direct interaction with no.1
3. NICHE: Results automatically from combo of BASE- DOME adjacency and is    often put to good use in organisms.
4. BASE-DOME-NICHE: BDM henceforth

What niches were created when mitochondria symbiosed with primeval protists? One could say that all multicellular animal  life is a spandrel - niche event. The eukaryotic single cell organism is a BASE , the free-swimming mitochondrion is a DOME, the two major elements become adjacent when the mito penetrates the membrane of the proto seeking safety from proterozoic gobblers and the new, unintended mobility via new energy is the NICHE,  resulting in all subsequent wonders of animal life.  The mitochondria- energized protozoan  is a signal structure just as the neocortex but more fundamental.

There is a hierarchy of Base-Dome-Niche conflations at each punctuation-speciation of animal evolution.  The mito-proto is more fundamental and earlier  than the cranial-cortical. More vital things happen first and are conserved in the genome paving the way for further improvements.

Is all evolution the product of BDN causality?  Gould and Lewontin suggested that NICHE events were not the norm they happened from time to time. Birds evolve feathers for insulation and discover that feathers-wings can be used for flight.

All life is a NICHE event, a secondary set of phenomena to fundamental metabolic exigency.  It is the metabolism of animals and plants in their role as Entropic Gradient Reduction Mechanisms (EGRMs) that is primary. That animals run around fighting, reproducing, talking, singing, making art and war  is exaptive, secondary, spandular to this fundamental  EGRM raison d’etre.

All mutations are DOMES in relation to their context giving rise to Niche developments-advantages in natural selection. If the evolution of the neocortex and its subsequent uses is seen as a spandrel or BDN event then what phenotypic expression would NOT be such a thing?  Walking upright?, opposable thumb?, binocular vision?, wide array of brainstem/CNS ( Central Nervous System) function? Where or how would one draw the line? Something primary exists, something secondary is added, opportunity is revealed, one of 1,000,000  of these new things (mutations)  turns out to be advantageous - species evolve…...slowly.

“Spandrels are necessary to achieving transition.”  - Prof. Ian Kluge

Spandrels ( NICHEs) are built in, unavoidable, part of the geometry, not up for debate. If you inscribe a circle in a square there will be leftover space.

To make the transition from veldt dwelling, bone-swinging man-ape  to civilized man, humans needed a transition vehicle - the neocortex.

Did the neocortex expand at the same geological moment ( simultaneously)  as the expanded cranium i.e. bigger head-smarter human thus gaining immediate survival advantage. Seems like one wouldn’t want small brain flopping around in big skull for long.

The brain as a bacterial / viral steering mechanism that evolved to guide the global microbial population into its most viable ecological niches.  Microbes fight their own evolutionary battles influencing the direction of the host organism. All organs, all proteomes, all metabolic process has evolved to assist and protect the brain and its latest addition, the neocortex ( the part housing our cooler features) as it guides the bacteriome to fitness and survival.  New bacteria try to get on the raft ( organism, mammal, human)  and are destructive rather than constructive so do battle with immune system. If the organism dies still other species of microorganisms pile on to deconstruct the body.

***

Semiology: “Any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, music, objects and the complex associations of all of these which form the content of ritual, convention, public entertainment systems of signification.”

- Roland Barthes

Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist 1857 - 1913 invented the field of semiology and revolutionized the field of linguistics making it, among many other things, ahistorical.

“Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology.”

• Roy Harris ( Saussure translator) on Saussure.

One could argue that our capacity for symbolic language is a key niche use of this neo brain space, this neocortex. The study of our capacity to communicate via symbols-language written and spoken  is called semiology, a field invented by the Galileo-Isaac Newton-Charles Darwin-Einstein of all things language, Paradigm shifter, inventor extraordinaire of entire new fields of intellectual endeavor Swiss theorist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Sussure is under-acknowledged in contemporary linguistic study as much foundational credit is mis-directed to Noam Chomsky hunched like a privileged, presumptive, credit-greedy troll   (gnome?) on Saussure’s  corpus of paradigm-shifting thought. Chomsky claims to have never read this work but alas,  it was the water his professors and the authors of his texts were all swimming in.  This privileging of Chomsky is as blatantly, strangely unfounded as French claims for Braque’s primacy as the inventor of Cubism over the role of Picasso, just plain weird and wrong.  Chomsky is the Juan Gris of linguistic invention.  He was in the room but his contribution as a paradigm shifter has been greatly exaggerated. This being said with no intention to minimize Chomsky’s towering contributions to the field of linguistics but simply t put him in proper relation to his field’s foundational conceptualizer.  In hydro terms, Saussure built a big pool, filled it with water and swam in it to great effect.  Chomsky is the Olympic swimmer forty years down the line, with many gold medals hanging from his neck. How many of today’s bloviators on language have even read a good translation of Saussure’s  “Course On Linguistics”  Probably as many as biologists who have read Darwin’s “On the Origin Of Species” or physicists who have read Newton’s texts.  It’s OK to skip the often obscure, musty, dated, no longer accurate original texts but it’s not OK to forget who wrote them or to be slinging around all this “foundational”  encomia around latecomer Chomsky.

“Causes of historical origin must always be separated from current utility.” - Chomsky or Saussure? I think it’s Chomsky cribbing Saussure.

“Changes in language endure by sheer luck ( un effet du hasard) the instability of language stems from time alone.” - Saussure ( inventor of the word “ethnicity”)

Example:  “All Pinker and the connectionists are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskyan Revolution.”  This should, of course, read “Saussurian Revolution”  To give Chomsky such credit is like saying the Rolling Stones invented the blues. Chomsky didn’t theorize or initiate a revolution, a  war perhaps, ten thousand battles for sure, countless continuing debates undeniable but “Revolution” - sorry, Saussure is the only revolutionary here.

“The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics. Linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge.”                         - Saussure

“A liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.” - Left-Brain Harvard Professor Steven Pinker

This marginalization of magic, correlation and coincidence is why Harvard’s art department has always been second rate,  though taught in the greatest single work of art in North America, Le Corbusier’s masterpiece, The Carpenter Center.

“By considering rites, customs etc. as signs, it will be possible to see them in a new perspective. The need will be felt to explain them as semiological phenomena and to explain them in terms of the laws of semiology.” - Saussure ( see: Roland Barthes’ essays in “Mythologies” as an excellent example.

***

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) One of Saussure’s five disciples, (Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Chomsky) A French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of Structuralism and Structural Anthropology. He held the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "Father of Modern Anthropology" - @ Wiki

Anti-historical approach was in the air in 1912 and greatly accelerated as a component of all Modern thought by the horrors of WWI. Screw history - it got us into this mess.  A key component of Saussurean thought and all subsequent structuralist, post-structuralist thought is its anti-historicism.  The goofy nod to historical motifs in “postmodern” architecture notwithstanding ( see: Charles Jencks).  Many things postmodern have their roots in Saussure as they offer explanations based on semiotics as related by the Saussure disciples Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Chomsky in the mid-60s.

Saussure gained enormous cred-clout due to the fact that he did not publish his own work.  His key text Course in General Linguistics-1916, was assembled from his notes and published after his death by admiring colleagues and students.  Almost as powerful as Mendel’s modest and explosively fortuitous entry into the canon of 20th century thought. Blowing one’s own horn is usually counterproductive to sustained reputation though good for buzz-factor during one’s lifetime. See: Mailer, Chomsky, Dawkins, Pinker. The quality of one’s idea is always in inverse proportion to the amount energy it takes to keep it in the public eye - see global toxins Coca Cola or Kardashians.

Snarky Aside - apropos of little:  4 Steps to scientific-academic prominence:

1. Steal a core idea from an obscure, diligent, brilliant precursor or colleague.
2. Invent your MOHARE’ ( MissOuri HAnd-REading) self-contained, self referential system of signs, symbols, definitions, relational strategies, connections, interpretations, diagrams, orientations with which to reinterpret the world or one’s operative paradigm - always flexible by founder and insider cultists, acolytes, disciples, Kool-Aid drinkers.
3. Much Squid Wrestling ( see: Johnny Depp as Ed Wood wrestle the giant rubber squid in a battle of “life or death” in “Creature From Below”. One must assemble a group of squid/straw men and wrestle them to the mat using one’s MOHARE’.  Leading authorities, theorists are the first to go down, professional colleagues next in line, then all dissenters burned at the stake.
4. Jargon Juggling: self explanatory. Always important to invent some of your own jargon as you pretend to shed light on muddy ideas, unproven assertions, baloney.

The very interesting fallout from all of this legerdemain is that it inspires an enormous amount of  genuine thought and research so one must not disparage these purveyors of perplexity as they are important contributors. Even if 90% wrong, they inspire intelligent opposition, they get conversations started.  these people are scientific firestarters if nothing else and for this we give them pre-eminence.   If those foundational ideas were not stolen they would have remained as obscure.

In his iconic book The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss wrestles a squid every few pages to exhibit his willingness to take on all-comers with his bold analytical, ahistorical,  interpretation-application of the grand Saussure’s structuralism. Structuralism  means that people are born with a slate in place that has the rudimentary patterns for grammar, for sign-making,  language acquisition, tendency to totemize, make-myth, socialize, tribalize, create dualities of everything sensed i.e. there is a structure in place at birth - Structuralist believe.

Saussure’s MOHARE’:  “Signified-Signifier-Sign   It opened many a 20th century door to excellent effect.

Levi-Strauss’ great MOHARE’: Man’s innate propensity for myth making

Chomsky’s MOHARE’ -Man’s  innate propensity for language-grammar ( a riff on Saussure)

Darwin MOHARE’ - Organisms evolve via Natural Selection

Levi-Strauss based his theory of culture on the work of Saussure in treating all social organizing systems, myth, totem,talisman, language, and related  symbols as ahistorical components of an overarching system of signs.  All human social organizations have sets of shared belief with operative rules for these sets just as a language has its syntax and grammar.

“Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."  -wiki

Levi-Strauss struggles as if an indigenous tribesman as he tries to name these discerned / observed / reported / quantified / emotional / political / interpersonal sensations ( neurons firing under an avalanche of circumstance?) His results are capricious as the native and often illogical, naive, even dopey but will become locked  into the professional jargon of anthropology as foundational wisdom.

In “The Savage Mind” Levi-Strauss names all of the animals in his self-developed menagerie of the Rabbinical-Claude, each with its own sub-realm of indigenous tribes from around the world. In his fever of classification, gives order to his new universe with his Saussurian semiotic heuristic of sign-signified.

Niches form in hierarchical cascades from big ideas to small ideas.  If a system fills up with small ideas there will be no room for big ideas.  Using the big glass jar heuristic.  First fill it to the brim with large ideas - tennis balls when the jar is 100% full of 1st echelon  tennis balls there is still room for 20 ping pong balls as they fill second echelon niches in between the tennis balls. when there is no more room for ping pong balls pour in 500 3d echelon peas that fill the niches left by the ping pong balls, then pour in 10,000 grains of 4th echelon sand, then 10,000,000 5th echelon  molecules of water.  If a particular diameter of object is put in out of turn, the cascading opportunity stops and the jar is filled preventing further insertion.

Two things are apparent

1. Relative size creates opportunity - the NICHE
2. Capacity can be thwarted by early entry into the system of non-sequential-size smaller unit.

The following are 1st echelon  “Basketballl” ideas in human culture: BASES

1. Law of gravity
2. Laws of thermodynamics
3. Evolution
4. Relativity
5. 3-D space on 2-D surface see: Brunelleschi for rules of perspective / Decon of this: see: Cezanne
6. Laws of inheritance
7. Symbiosis
8. Semiotics: innate language, culture as myth making, etc
9. God is dead-deaf
10. Credit cards, ATMs
11. Automobiles
12. Personal computer

Using the automobile as an example, its 2d echelon DOMEs are stoplights, motels, auto repair industry, rubber industry, unions, carhops, drive-in theaters, motels, head-on collisions, making out in backseat.

Now, taking the level two DOME the “stoplight” and identifying its third echelon NICHEs: placement protocol at intersections, light color change timing, color of glass ( red=stop), chemistry of glass lenses, metallurgy of steel enclosure, chemistry of paint, electronics for switches, wires, etc.

The level three components are now operational, the stoplights are fully functioning opening the level three NICHEs: people running red lights, kids hanging tennis shoes from wires, switches corroding necessitating late night repairs, lights sway in hurricane, factories employing hundreds of workers to manufacture 1,000,000 traffic lights for intersections across the land.

Color signification at stoplight is now highly conserved.  Hard to imagine the day when a group of lighting engineers of the International Society of Illuminating engineers gathered around a table in Geneva in 1911  and decided that green will henceforth mean go and red will mean stop for automobiles ( this red=stop, green=go had been in effect in railroads since the 1830s). The idea of changing the meaning of traffic light color in 2015 is absurd.  In any set of cascading niches things at the higher levels are in play and then they are not but…..all things were once in play and this was at the time their niche was being filled, once filled, once filed - any further change is most likely to be destructive, non-adaptive and hopefully edited out of the genome by gene police during one’s lifetime.  If you must be sacrificed to stop this unruly change so be it.

There will always be residual space/gaps/voids/niches  between named levels. In the ball example, between classes of  ball diameter. There is a hierarchy of niches coexisting with every hierarchy of balls / objects / animal parts / plant parts / chemical reactions, tribal incursions-invasions.  These hierarchies are smooth gradients that must have a scale attached.  We have attached scales to tones perceptible to the human ear: the 7- tone musical scale,  to levels of heat: degrees fahrenheit, celsius, kelvin, to weight, to mass. See the niche as a graphic designer would see negative space as a phenomena in its own right with its own identity. When is a niche a ball? Is a niche always a ball? Are all balls niches? They sit in the same space - it will depend on what framework your mind is using at a particular moment - see: Necker cube reading or the vase-profile duality.

Perhaps the hierarchy of niches has primacy and the balls are a secondary adjacent cascade. The mind can switch back and forth.  All information has a double reading as Base-Dome or Niche.  What if the spandrels of San Marco were the vital message-bearing component and the stone base and dome were built to showcase these sublime, smaller elements.  Niches have a way of subsuming the Base-Dome into servitude. Who are the wealthy 1% but a very small niche of the population trying to convince the masses of their primacy. The middle class is the great base, Capitalism itself is the dome, The 1% are a self-important niche that could be erased with a few swipes of the chisel - kaput! next !

The humanities are a cascade of thinkers with basketball Saussure filling most of our jar. He is surrounded by Duchamp, Loos,  Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault,Chomsky, Pinker, Eisenman who are in turn surrounded by Mailer, Wolfe, Breslin, Talese and these by Taibbi, Gladwell, Godin,

The biosciences are a cascade comprising perennial indestructible  jar fillers Darwin-Mendel surrounded by Crick-Watson-Franklin then McClintock, Margulis, Lovelock, Gould, Dawkins, 100,000 brilliant researchers.

When is it time to re-synthesize one’s paradigm?  What is the difference between a synthesizer, a big ball, and a sand-grain niche-filler?  If the water goes in first all else floats away.

The big ball, just smaller ball debate implies a Hegelian dialectic of thesis ( big ball) antithesis (adjacent big ball or  just smaller ball) and synthesis (the niche). Is it possible to have a dialectic between a tennis ball and a sand grain? Not effectively, the Rodney Dangerfield conundrum “I don’t get no respect” The sand grain must inflate self-pet idea via four horsemen of the academolypse 1. theft 2. Mohare’ 3. Squid wrestle 4. Jargon juggle  If all of this exercise works,  then one’s peers may allow a dialectic to ensue however, when one is no longer around to keep this beach ball ( dueling with iron ball) inflated, it goes dwindles ( see: Gould-Eldredge Punctuated Equilibrium).

Basketball  thinkers synthesize raw, unfiltered nature mixing it with the most far-reaching  thought of their day to generate a cleaner, more high-power lens to view the world: Copernicus, Darwin, Cezanne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Saussure and Duchamp-all Basketballs.

Tennis Ball thinkers take this new lens as a given and by adding their own imagination, talent and energy deliver the Basketball message to the masses. Popular songwriters in 2015 are still operating to the beat of the bounce of Robert Johnson and Hank Williams respectively for Rock and country music. The Basketball is the paradigm shifter, the Tennis Ball is the acolyte, the explainer,  always a great communicator often for profit. The acolyte thrives on talent and salesmanship - genius would only get in the way. Genius is painful. Genius upsets apple carts. Genius puts people out of work.

Ping Pong Balls are the acolytes - the army of talented folks all swimming in an ocean of ideas whose source is beside the point, they have absorbed its rules through the zeit, it’s simply in the air. Any song enthusiast around a campfire can easily write a three chord, 12-bar song.

Is the Saussure(Basketball)-Derrida/Chomsky( Soccer Balls) opposition a Hegelian dialectic? Can a true dialectic occur between precursor-progenitor-founder and his intellectual descendents?  Of course, it happens all the time.  It is the stuff of academic tenure and reputation. Wrestle a squid in print - get tenure ( see: Stanford physics professor Leonard Susskind wrestling with Stephen Hawking’s basketball  assertion in “The Black Hole War”).  Yale literature professor Harold Bloom outlines six strategies for such battles with hefty precursors in his seminal book The Anxiety of Influence-1973

Does one enter into dialectic with the founding father of one’s field of study or is it more a conversation among unequals? In any hierarchy there is, by definition, by geometric inevitability there will be an adjacent hierarchy of niches-negative space - A and S-holes ( see: Bakanowsky’s discussion of the negative space within letterforms of the alphabet). The initiating entity is primal - the Basketball - the great synthesizer of an Age, a primal responder, key interpreter of Nature. The first person to see the key elements of a new synthesis. This person, on the power of their barely comprehensible idea will inspire a group of disciples - soccer balls, tennis balls, ping pong balls, B-Bs.

Is there a difference between a second echelon disciple and a second echelon rebel? Say Saussure is the basketball in the jar. Two of six  tennis balls,  Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes are acolytes, tennis ball Chomsky is a rebel claiming not to know of the basketball of his own field of study. Like Pesky Boykins claiming not to know of Kobe, Kareem or Wilt.  Whether acolyte or rebel,  both are similar level two echelon players.  Perhaps one is positive space and the other, the rebel is negative space or vice versa. Note that the rebel confirms the basketball grand synthesis in his rebellion as thoroughly and effectively as the acolyte in his adoration. Foucault is a Saussurian acolyte, Derrida is a rebel struggling to individuate a la Bloom-swerve daemonization, kenosis or apophrades.

“The essence of language has nothing to do with the audible nature of the linguistic sign” - Saussure

True, if by “essence”  Saussure is referring to the single conserved human gene for communication and its huge array of 1,000  methylated histones that program is for language instinct i.e. sorting out signifiers, signifieds and signs as this all happens in the brain a few inches away from the hair cells of the cochlear apparatus. This package is in place at birth and becomes fully fledged in 18 months.  Along with this population of methylated, ubiquitinated, phosphorylated lingo- histones is what will become a vast storehouse of third tier niche molecular proteinic events registered as one’s grammar, syntax and vocabulary in the neurons at Broca and Wernicke areas of neocortex ( 75-150 million neurons) . All areas of the neocortex involved in language processing, analysis, vocalization, writing, reading neocortex contain five billion neurons and each neuron lasts your entire life and each one is a participant.

This is an exaggeration even for 1912 as essence implies integration of components into a whole which would mean the core gene (FOX2P)  function, its related controlled genes ( CNTNAP2, CTBP1, SRPX2) and all of their post translational proteins and their effects in preparation to process language in the toddler then including the learning of words and incipient grammar-syntax - the whole shebang - the shebang is the “essence” - the aroma of meaning wafting  from this diabolically complex array of physical and electrochemical activities like the smell of a dirty diaper.  The spoken word is the essence of language.

If , by “essence”, Saussure means the prime mover, the big basketball in the jar of language then he is talking about the silent but far-reaching influence of the FOX2P gene as it “speaks’ among its own kind the molecular language of genetics comprising the following:

letters= nucleotides,

words=amino acids-codons

sentences = genes / proteins

books= chromosomes

Library= genome ( all 46 human chromosomes)

Saussure's bold assertion signals the primacy of a single,  recently ( 5 million years) conserved gene, the FOX2P gene  at chromosome number 7. One of this genes’ many tasks is to instruct four additional genes to in turn encode many hundreds of proteins at neocortical neurons to produce, learn and interpret symbols related to outside world-stuff  and stuff within the mind, symbols unique in every tribe on Earth.

Foundational quote from Saussure:

“Signs are not physical objects. We cannot study them as we can plants or animals or chemicals. Signs are not to be equated with sounds uttered or marks on paper or gestures or visual configurations of various kinds. These are merely the vehicles by which signs are expressed. To confuse the two would make it impossible to establish a science of signs at all, whether in the domain of language or any other.”

Signs are clusters / clumps / patches / swarms / colonies of epigenetically modified proteinic substance in the neocortex. Epigenetic modification via post translation: amination, methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitination of proteins and histones. No sign making / interpreting at limbic system-brain stem as this is the key higher function of humans and our widely admired ( among humans)  neocortex.

Questions:

1. Can a mammal form a memory without using a sign, symbol or set of signs?
2. Where in the neocortex do signs become language; spoken and written?
3. Do apes use signs for memory?
4. Humans develop blank sign panels early in postnatal development but with no information on the surface thus no sign. Experience adds text / meaning onto the sign panel surface. All is in place for communication except the message itself and the key for cracking the code, one’s language grammar, syntax but even a non-vocal ( except crying, goo-goo ing) toddler could register meaning from tone of voice, angry facial expression. A toddler understands the language of sound levels and angry-happy looks.
5. Do mammals other than humans have language? All mammals must have groups of methylated histones acting epigenetically throughout a lifetime as memory with no signage in play i.e. squirrels, tigers, apes have no written or spoken language i.e. signs. Are not squeals, grunts roars, howls a language of sound?

If, as Saussure asserts, there is no history then the fact of passage of products of signs into history, into future are not in the semiological-sign making equation thus putting all mammals, most animals on the same playing field as all store coded experience as epigenetically modified cellular products; histones, RNA, proteins, etc. and all act on memory and all vocalize to an extent. See: prairie dogs smelling a snake chirruping to warn others.

“No sign exists independent of the other signs united in the same system of structural constraints” - Saussure The “structural constraints” are post-translational modifications to proteinic substance in the neocortex and possible at brain stem, cerebrum. The “structural contrasts” give rise to signs as humans communicate.

“Language makes it possible to identify and describe constituent parts.” - Saussure  The “constituent parts”  begin as patches of methylated neurons

A small, vicious dog yaps ( speaks?) and a 4” diameter patch of excited neurons flashes in the back of my neck at cerebellum-medulla involving say one million brain cells.  4” diameter is a continent of effect in relation to the size of a single cell. Dog speaks, my brain automatically responds - did language happen?  The neocortex was probably not involved in this incident, brainstem only thus no higher language center, ancient brain had its own “language” capability just as every mammal, reptile, amphibian and bird has its system today.  The neocortex allows for finer distinctions like relax its the owner’s dog and though annoying it is only doing its job and if you touch it you’ll be banned from household. It’s someone’s treasured pet - no fight or flight required, that electrified patch in the back of your head will subside in a few seconds.

Language is a cascading coded loop with the following components: base pairs, methylated proteins, neuron clusters, other clusters of conserved grammatical structure potential and learned language and the links with neuron clusters. The slate upon which a particular grammar will be written in early childhood which is blank at birth is inherited as part of the human genome ( see: FOX2P) this has neural connections via dendrites to neural reservoirs of stored language data gathered from birth. the reservoir grows and its links with the now fleshed out grammar slate strengthen into childhood

Brain geography for language:

1. Zone A: Grammar, syntax cabinet -language specifics fill pre-existing but empty cabinet during childhood
2. Zone B: Vocabulary memory - word sounds and later letterforms and meaning
3. Zone C: word sound mixes with word meaning here
4. Zone D: Letterforms as words mix with word meaning here
5. Zone E: Spelling, letter shapes i.e. the alphabet
6. Zone F: Mixing bowl - grammar-syntax matched to vocabulary to form sentences
7. Zone G: motor cortex - vocalization
8. Zone H: motor cortex - writing

“Linguistic signs do not exist independent of the complex system of contrasts implicitly recognized in the day-to-day vocal interactions of a given community of speakers. The linguistic sign is intrinsically arbitrary, identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature, which together constitute a structural system. By taking this position Saussure placed modern linguistics in the vanguard of 20th century structuralism.”  - Prof. Roy Harris

Diachronic: Evolutionary, historical

Synchronic: Non-historical, of the present only

To what extent was the ahistorical approach of the Modern Architecture program influenced by Saussure’s ahistorical synchronic heuristic of 1916? At the Harvard Graduate School of Design 1975-1979 and at The University of Washington School of Architecture 1973-1974 the history of architecture was taught well ( Sekler-Harvard, Hildebrand-UofW) historical reference in one’s work other than to the Wesselhoff Housing project in Weimar Germany was frowned upon. There was a crack in this ahistorical facade with the PoMo swerve introduced by Robert Venturi with his influential book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” - 1966 gained traction as catalogued by Charles Jencks. Ahistoricism was in the air, the zeit, I doubt that it was invented by Saussure. He grabbed his piece of it for linguistics as Frank Lloyd Wright grabbed his share for architecture along with Adolf Loos ( “Ornament is a crime”).

Saussure’s influence seeped into architecture during the mid-1970s via the semiotic theory of the Yale lit- critters inspired by the Frog Fab Five: Barthes, Derrida, Debord, Deleuze, Foucault as well as by architect theorist Gladwell-connectors Peter Eisenman, Tony Vidler, Jorge Silvetti, Mario Gandelsonas et al,  ahistoricism was reinforced.

Is color variation on a dog’s jowls and ears a function of the HOX gene,  which codes for the bilateral symmetry of the head and its location at the front of the dog ( rather than the middle),  or is this hair color variation a function of a skin gene?

As human culture evolved in complexity we required the ability to synthesize social cues that were incoming at longer and longer intervals. We had to remember that wannabe big kahuna tossed his potlatch six months ago and with his latest beneficent sharing of the bear meat  he and his buddies brought back to the village, he deserves his presumption of clan leadership. The brainstem perceives and  the neocortex synthesizes.

In order for humans to lock any fact / phenomenon / sensation of nature or tribe it must / will be anchored in each one of the following zones of the brain:

1. amygdala
2. hippocampus
3. globus pallidus
4. thalamus
5. caudate nucleus
6. cerebellum
7. claustrum
8. cerebrum
9. neocortex

The left side of the brain registers phenomena in a logical manner, the right side of the brain in an intuitive manner. The brain cross-references all input just as the eyes cross reference visual cues to determine location in space. The two lobes of the brain triangulate all input for logic and intuition. The very fundamental physical structure of the brain is hardwired for dialectics; left perception-processing is thesis,  right perception processing is antithesis with synthesis at the claustrum.  Our Hegelian brain: thesis - antithesis - synthesis occurring at every waking ( sleeping?) moment. All sensory input at all levels of abstraction or taxonomic level is being cross referenced for logic and intuitive sensibility. Our brain synthesizes from two points of view on everything, all environments, all social phenomena, all imagination, all dreams past present and future.

Why synthesize? Why does the brain perform this relentless synthesis? because synthesis can be stored clearing the deck for new input.

Zone(s) of instant synthesis at brainstem -  the visual field: distance, rate of approach, color, form, texture.  Example: an angry barking dog is approaching rapidly from 320 degrees I’d better stomp my foot, stand my ground and bark back at it to scare it into reconsidering the attack that is underway - nt a split-second to lose here.

Zone(s) of longer term synthesis at neocortex: input in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months apart. example: she was nice to me last week and she smiled at me today thus she might be open to friendly conversation. Remember, the neocortex is only the wrinkly wrapping around our much older ( by 150 million years)  and more fundamental ( to life itself not necessarily to human culture or to higher consciousness)  brainstem.  think of the neocortex as icing on the cake-brainstem.

Dual synthesis at all levels of perception as brain synthesizes to create a fully fleshed image from its two different modes of knowing, the rational and the intuitive at instantaneous scenarios of life-love-death and at long-term social and ecological environments - I got married last summer!  or I buried my nuts under these trees last summer.

The facts of the case: A bear is running toward me growling with exposed canines this is how I feel about it - let’s make friends with one of god’s magnificent creatures or let’s run like hell or die.  This example re: different brain processing zones not necessarily left-right duality.

Every sensible phenomena has its thesis and antithesis requiring synthesis prior to thoughtful action.  no time for synthesis if fight or flight amygdala / hippocampus reaction. If there is no obvious antithesis to a perception the brain will assign ne so that proper processing can ensue.

Sensation doesn't limp into central processing /synthesis solo, unaccompanied by ts antithesis.  This foundational brain structure is projected out onto the world via  organizing totemic systems of classification involving plants, animals, political affiliation and traditional modes of thought-being: romantic vs classical, scientific vs artistic, rational vs intitive. This totemism is conserved across all human culture from New Guinea headhunters to Manhattan headhunters.

The Music analogy re: brain function.  the score is the genome, our DNA. The organs and glands are the instrument sections:

Brass        Musculoskeletal

Woodwinds    Lungs

Strings    Heart

Choir        Brain

Endocrine    Percussion

Epithelial    Piano

We are a classical composition from conception to birth - every move of millions is strictly scripted - it’s all in the score -read the music as it's written then we are jazz forever after - an ensemble requiring careful listening-interaction-improvisation.

Each organ system can be seen as an entire ensemble.  Looking at the brain, the brainstem-limbic system would be the symphonic portion of the program i.e. all processes are highly conserved, programmed. The neocortex is our jazz ensemble, a few key program patterns ( standard songs)  established at birth and during infancy then a life of improv on these few standard tunes. these songs are your  operative myth: language, law, belief, ritual, totems,stories, tool use specifics.

The patterns of intra-brain communication i.e. between neocortex and limbic system-brainstem is the same pattern / hierarchy / opposition / duality / dialectic seen n all language-kinship-totemism and all other systems for classifying anything AND this dialectic is cross-checked at each of two lobes of the brain the right lobe and the left lobe for rational sense as well as intuitive sense.

What part of our brain or what neurochemical imperative makes humans seek perfection / resolution in love, art, science, politics? What does the neocortex or the claustrum think perfection is? Is the golden mean ratio of .618 to 1.00 hardwired as a matrix from which all sense is compared. Cinderella’s slipper is our hardwired golden mean and we ty to stuff all the world of sense into it checking for fitness. When the shoe fits we draw back in fright, the bliss is unbearable.  We must see this perfect fit as unobtainable - it’s the myth we come into the world with - unobtainable love, sublime perfection in art. If it were obtainable it would be, by definition, imperfect for we will have touched it. The Woody Allen conundrum re: club membership.

Where in the brain is the heart?

Two realms of consciousness:

1. Is it going to affect my physical well-being? -see: brainstem-limbic system aka the paleomammalian brain.
2. Is it going to affect my social status? - see: neocortex

The neocortex is itself a metonymic for human’s own assumption of primacy in that the neocortex takes up a great deal of cranial real estate but is a latecomer and peripheral to a larger picture of organismal survival. The primary function of the neocortex is to think itself into being.

The Savage MInd - Claude Levi-Strauss - 1962 is drawn from 1,000 instances of tall white man with notebook and portable typewriter is dropped off in a remote village of indigenous people where he asks the most willing fool in the tribe in English about his food, marriage system, lineage rules, warfare, medicine, totems, myths, etc. Levi-Strauss then assembles all of this “scientific” stuff from around the world adding his quasi-Saussurian neologisms, squid wrestling-jargon juggling along with a heavy dose of MOHARE’ and calls it science. Why not ?

Levi-Strauss uses his mythical imperative to recreate arbitrary dogma ( as the ancient Hebrew scribes during composition of Torah) from the notes of many dozens sets of notes from ethnographers as he weaves his own goofy illogic, random connections, teapot assertions and Saussurean misreading to weave his wacky web o’ wisdom, throwing lots of spaghetti against the wall and in an era of little competing overarching spaghetti. In a formless profession a lot of this stuff stuck to the wall, not unlike Freud’s achievement. All of it good conversation starters. Hey! it’s BTN.  Levi-Strauss ends up doing exactly what his hundreds of indigenous subjects did - toss a totemic framework over the “real” world in order to extract meaning. In Levi-Strauss’s case - other academics and intellectuals.  Levi-Strauss like Darwin and Freud each had one big core idea with a lot of resonant truth surrounded by a pile of what has turned out to be wrong or at least inaccurate or just plain retroactively dopey assertions. We forgive them their imperfections.  Big ideas as follows:

Darwin: Things evolve ( all the rest is debatable if not disproven)

Freud: People have accessible, malleable inner lives that can be re-framed to their benefit.

Saussure: Humans have an innate capability for creating systems of symbols.

Levi-Strauss: Human culture is essentially the same around the world and none need be called primitive.

Praxis: German for practice, also a lived synthesis of theory with practice, a learning experience that refines one’s theories as they are lived in the real world, taking conceptual theorizing and making it empirical thus intelligible. Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson or skill is enacted, embodied, realized. The act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing or practicing ideas. It is a recurrent idea in philosophy discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. augustine, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Freire and Mises. It has meaning in political, educational and spiritual realms.

“The development of the study of infrastructures proper is a task which must be left to history.” Levi-Strauss …..because it would mean CL-S getting off his ass in his cushy Paris/NYC office and going out into the steaming, fungoid jungles of Micronesia and Sub- Saharan Africa to find out. No latte, croissant, Pernod, no admiring coeds - alors ! mon dieu !  Levi-Strauss did notoriously little field work for all of his wide-ranging global in scope theorizing about everything under the sun.

What is the difference between a brand and a totem? Is a $150. team jersey worn to a football or hockey game a brand or a totem or a talisman or none of the above? Can a totem / talisman be carried on one’s person? Is a northwest pacific coast native american totem pole a stack of the personal animals of past tribal chiefs or do these stacked animals have a broader pan-tribal significance?

Corporate brands as totems: Nike, Pepsi, Izod, GE, CBS

Automobiles as totems: Mustang, Jaguar, Eagle, Taurus, Barracuda

Totemic clothing / shoes: Loubiton red sole, Hermes silk scarf, Kate Spade handbag

It is not just that people go to great length to separate themselves from one another on every conceivable level but we go to any length, do anything, propose any ilogical foolishness to do so. Religion is only the beginning. The biggest myth of all is “We’re all in this together.” A crock by 100% of evidence. The entire saga of anthropology is how all cultures segregate via totem, tabu, talisman, marriage custom, eating prohibition, ritual, castes, clans, tribes, cults, societies, clubs, gangs, rules prohibitions, regulations, punishment, banishment.

The human brain at birth is as sensitive as photographic film or the light reader on a digital camera but more by a power of 100. Every sensory perception is locked into memory where like is bundled with like, differences are registers, catalogued, sorted and acted upon.  Once a child is six or seven all core beliefs about the physical world ( things get smaller as they recede) and social relations are established ( mom’s nice and dad’s cool or not) fixed as the layers of emulsion on exposed Ektachrome. Deep structures of the neocortex determine political propensity, ethics, type of Gardnerian intelligence. A human is not clay as clay is much slower to mod and, at least before firing, much easier to change, exposed film never changes but to be destroyed by burning, melting, scratching, dissolving in acid - all change leaves scars.

As the mammal brain evolved did it undergo a stage where it comprised colonies of single cell eukaryotes who were trying to centralize and systemize colony decision making? The termite dirt grain pusher, when a member of a colony becomes a cathedral builder. Who or what provides the overall design logic for such a complex structure as a termite mound? Is the structure simply the mandelbrotian accrual of unitary action and the nature of mud molecules and gravity? i.e. these individuals are going to push dirt and they will dig a tunnel in order to do it. Tunnels can only be so close to one another as they descend or they will collapse upon one another - no designer necessary - all is exigency of the behavior of individuals. Is this the same mechanism used by a tree in knowing where and when to branch in order to maintain balance. Is there a signal that flows between compressive strain and tensile strain at opposite sides of a growing trunk or branch? Why don’t all tree branches grow on the sunny south side? How does a termite know where to deposit hs dirt? Is there a construction manager if not a designer? Is there mound logic.

The human (mammalian) brain as as a bacterial nodal point, a stage manager for a global logistics corporation ( all microorganisms) . Coalescing neurons at mammal brains are the nodal points that emerge from any densely-trafficked system, see: “break-of-bulk” concept as generator of intermediate size cities in a nationwide distribution network. New York City is BASE, Los Angeles is DOME and Kansas City is NICHE.

Is there a protist precursor to the neuron i.e. was the neuron with its axon and dendrite tree once a free-swimming microorganism say around 800 MYA  that merged with mitochondria and 9-2 flagellants, formed colonies, grew a tail  and swam into history and the animal brain? Was the vertebrate brainstem once a fish?

If 9-2 microtubules were affixed to separate liver cells could they reproduce and swim around in a pond as they process bile?

The 9-2 microtubule axoneme has at least two key functions: propulsion and sensation.  Was either of these a NICHE event? an exaptation?

The BASE-DOME-NICHE relationship exists throughout  nature, animate and inanimate, something happens first, another thing happens, there is space between them that is filled creating four entities 1. Base 2.Dome 3. Niche 4. that which fills the niche.  An unfilled niche is an opportunity. The silence between musical notes is an unfilled niche full of meaning. The unfilled niches in a work of art may carry as much meaning as the work itself. Knowledgeable patrons of the arts know the meaning of the space between whether music, painting, sculpture or dance.The niche and its Base-Dome are inseparable. Between every Base and Dome there is a niche.

Discovering Niches is like discovering easter eggs. Revolutions create a cornucopia of new niches. When a paradigm shifts a large array of secondary and tertiary ideas are now in play. Revolutions clear the air. Revolutions create vast realms of opportunity.  Niches are continually bubbling to the surface of our individual and our collective awareness. We choose to fill them or leave them empty or to be filled by others. When all niches in a society become filled this fullness invites revolution as all opportunity is gone and stagnation ensues. We now live in stag-nation.  The civil unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore are the result of a lack of Niches for normal, middle of the road African American  high school graduates. No new niches equals pressure on law enforcement, breakdown of respect for the law and for the people served by the law and for those who enforce the law. The system crumbles. A society cannot create new Niche opportunity by expanding the BASE or by arming the DOME to the teeth.  Fill every Niche, poison the population with manufactured food and pharmaceuticals add a drought or earthquake, an oil spill or three and voila ! Revolution and a plethora of new Niche opportunities. Every job sent overseas is a niche removed from our pool of niches. Our population continues to grow and our niches are sent away. Something has got to give.

*

Distill The Zeit

April 16, 2015 Part One

Distill:  To concentrate, to extract the essential elements.

Zeit: A neologistic abbreviation of zeitgeist.  Zeitgeist has too many syllables. It has a harsh sound. Let’s shorten zeitgeist to zeit,  still meaning the temper of the age, the tenor of the times, the water we all swim in like it or not, rebel or not, winner, loser, guru, boozer.  Zeit is the more flexible layer of our  operating myth, containing  many shadows of myth memory.  Every generation has its zeit, a feel, a conglomeration of values - many unspoken and many enforced by law to ensure that you get the message.

Zeitgeist: The spirit of the time.  The trend of thought and emotion characteristic of a particular period. The beliefs, ideas and spirit of a time, its intellectual, moral and cultural climate.

Humans have a great strength and a great weakness, these are that everyone lives by the spirit of their times and does so with intensity. Each zeit has a foundation of reinforced concrete, a flexible wood frame, moveable partitions,  a leaky roof, conditioned air, hot air, cold air, moldy air, stuffy attic, invisible spirits, voices from the past,  smoke and mirrors.  Each generation has an avante garde trying to open windows or saw holes in the wall or tear the whole house down.  Maybe it’s still wintertime in the soul of the culture,  maybe it has been springtime for weeks.

“You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.” - Bob Dylan

You get weathermen - like ‘em or not.

Somewhere in the sunny Caribbean there are three young fish swimming side by side.  An older fish swims along and asks: “How’s the water fellas?  They respond in unison: “What the hell’s water?

“Creativity begins in the imaginative grasp of a world of relationships hitherto obscured by clouds of received notions. Anomalies in the received tradition are detected, discrepancies observed, and then one discovers a composite, integrated world that lain hidden - complex, multitudinous: like fictional worlds of Proust or Faulkner. In a rising excitement the discoverer sets out to explore it all, to show its details, its interconnections, and its vitality. That recovery of a hitherto submerged world and the capacity to conceive of it as a whole, form the essence of historical creativity.”

• Bernard Bailyn

Zeit: Our world of relationships

“Magic: A treasury of ideas” - Franz Boas

“Mythical thought can be capable of generalizing and so,  be scientific, even though it is still entangled in imagery.” - Claude Levi-Strauss

The primary role of the human neocortex is to translate sensory input into biochemical patterns and to conserve these chemical changes  as culture, memory and conserved matrices for language, social interaction, altruism, curiosity, tool use i.e. sentience, raw material for Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Rachel Maddow.

Biochemical patterns unique to an individual are created in the brain and other organs by adding small groups of molecules to core genetic sequences as copied onto RNA. This process is called Post Translational Modification.  Translation is the copying of a sequence of base pairs ( a gene) from a strand of unravelled DNA floating in nuclear soup in each of our 15 trillion cells.  Once this primary, highly conserved information is copied by the RNA from DNA. it is transferred from the cell nucleus out into the rough endoplasmic reticulum surrounding the cell nucleus where the RNA passes the gene- info to a ribosome where is has modifications installed.  If it’s a liver cell it is going to need to be adjusted to process bile. If it is a retina cell, it must be set up to distinguish color or,  if an auditory cell - sound. If a brain cell it will produce neurotransmitters.

I don’t  want liver cells that beat or heart muscle that produces hair or the cells in my eyeball struggling to distinguish between 15,000 olfactory stimulants. The DNA for an audio cell is captured by the RNA in the nucleus of a cell already assigned as cochlear and in passing through the ribosomes of a cochlear cell, sequences of DNA  created from the same gene gets a unique molecule attached or is folded in a unique twist giving it the ability to distinguish between A flat and A and B and C and C sharp and so on. This unique feature is installed by a specific histone specifically evolved for this task. Remember, for each of our 20,000 protein coding genes there are 10,000 associated histones for adding specificity.   If Watson, Crick and Mendel are in the DNA then God is in the histones.

Where in our genome ( as this detailed info must be in there somewhere) are these hundreds of audio fine points coded?  Given, that this final coding of pitch specificity occurs at the cochlea in a specifically cochlear cell. We know that a 33 week fetus can hear music.  It must be that the source gene is unlocked on two occasions - once to code for the cochlear ( audio) cell and then again later for its specific pitch - one small translation to create the cochlear cell and then 700 additional translations from DNA at a second uncoiling of histones to reveal the audio gene(s) with all of their pitch-code now made available.  What gives the cochlear cell the signal to unwind its DNA for this renewed access to the codons for pitch. There must be at least 700 different codons in the chromatin ( unravelled thus accessible DNA) for this pitch information that will be locked into the 700 different hair cells - some hear the piccolos and some hear the bass and some will be capable of hearing a plucked cable of the Golden Gate Bridge ( lowest limit of audio perception)

1. What genes code for hearing?
2. How many genes code for the cochlear hair cells
3. Is it 2 genes and 700 histones or vice versa required to make the human hearing apparatus.
4. Are the same few genes re-visited for additional higher level distinctions?
5. How many trips back to the DNA are made by hair cell operators
6. Just a second trip with all subsequent translation performed at RER within ribosomes?
7. Are there perhaps 700 different ribosomes - one for each different hair cell capable of listening for its specific pitch?
8. Is there a cascade of operators? One Gene, say 2,000 bp of this gene code for protein with 198,000 bp of “junk” and 10,000 histones along this DNA sequence.
9. Perhaps only 2% of the base pairs here code for protein identifying a cell as one for hearing but the other 98%  of the DNA may simply capture the histones required for hair cell differentiation for pitch once the cochlea has developed in the fetus say between weeks 25 and 34.
10. Perhaps “junk” DNA codes for molecular tags for pitch sensitivity at yung ribosomes as they emerge from synthesis at nucleosome.  The ribosomes thus tagged proceed to the rough endoplasmic reticulum where they manufacture 700 distinct pitch chemistry for cochlear hair cells.

or to distinguish between cantaloupe orange and burnt butterscotch, or to remember to wipe your feet before entering grandma’s house or to salute the oncoming soldier. Your cochlear membrane has 15 thousand cells that have been adjusted by post translational modification to distinguish pitch.  learning when and whom to salute gets encoded at age nineteen by a drill sergeant activating some post translational activity in your neocortex.

How could these PTMs be passed on to following generations without affecting the genome?  Our FOX2 gene is mighty flexible.  It captures minor PTMs ( methylation, phosphorylation etc) with glue-like promiscuous histones.

Book title: “Our Promiscuous Histones”  The ones at our  FOX2 and ARHGAP11B genes. Among several genes coding for the  mighty neocortex, the part of our brain that makes us human, the source of our sentience.  Several genes encode 20 billion neurons for fire, art,  language, manners, music, technology, much memory, self reflection, altruism, self-control. The histones around which these two  genes wrap are involved with many partners as they express the zeit.

1. How might a FOX2 gene convey a culture-induced modification to a following generation?
2. Are FOX2 and ARHG AP11B ( henceforth: FOXAR) genes more likely to be carried across a few generations than mutations at any of our other 20,000 genes?
3. Do FOXAR have immunity to gene self-correction during lifetime i.e. more flexibility? more tolerance for innovation to their molecular structure?  How minor is a stored memory?, a memory conserved across a few generations as in TTT ( Transgenerational  Transmission of Trauma @ N.Kellerman)
4. How does FOXAR resist the gene police avoiding being tossed into the vesicular trash bin?
5. Is blood part of the trash removal system at cortical neurons?

1. How does blood get past the blood-brain barrier?
2. FOXAR gene police more lenient than the police at all other organ tissues therefore cultural change acquired during lifetime are more likely to be passed on. How would ANY mutation avoid being acquired during a lifetime at some point in organism’s evolutionary history thus exhibiting Lamarckism?
3. Minimal FOXAR policing absent where a child inherits an entire suite of acquired characteristics: Picasso, Mozart.
4. How to explain Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius for architecture.  His father was a preacher.  His mother willed him to be an architect from gestation.  A suite of skills planted by a supernatural entity in parental DNA or FLW in utero with his embryonic neural DNA invaded by a spirit-walk-in.  Cue: “Twilight Zone” theme.
5. FOXAR susceptibility to short-lived ( 1 to 35 generations only) If this does occur then the factors that pass on talent must evaporate after the original occurrence. Wright’s sons were not gifted architects though John Lloyd Wright invented Lincoln Logs.  Picasso’s children were not notable painters.
6. Henceforth I am going to use the term “methylated” for all post translational modification - PTM ( there are dozens, hundreds? thousands? of varieties) PTM changes a heritable gene after cell division and outside of the chromosome in order to produced a protein or an array of proteins not specifically carried in DNA code i.e. the genome.
7. Methylated histones at outermost layers of neocortical neurons migrate via blood and tagged for destination at germ cell by golgi apparatus.  As these neurons may last for one’s entire life, there is plenty of time to send such chemical messages to the germ cells, maybe by a means of transport much slower than blood, lymph perhaps or simply winding their way across the vast landscape of the body with each tissue reading the destination address and forwarding as necessary like a chemical Pony Express.  Perhaps passed from neocortex to thalamus-midbrain-pons-medulla-spinal cord to uterus where these cortical neurons that have been methylated with music talent ( abstracted clusters of trained-interconnected neurons i.e. 500,000,000 synaptic interconnections coded into a single cell for transport to the germ ( and where might this packaging of experience occur?  let’s say - the hippocampus, the putamen, lateral ventricles or caudate nucleus, possibly the thalamus.
8. Perhaps there is a cascade of operations involving a few of these structures - each adding a layer of decipherable abstraction.) One methylated protein carries a lifetime of music skill down to an egg or perhaps to all of the eggs and a couple of day’s worth of sperm where it works its way into some unravelled DNA-histone zone where it will get locked in and wrapped up after fertilization and meiosis-mitosis and passed onto to the child of the craftsman where this skill headstart will flower into full-fledged genius - prodigal expression and a concert tour of Europe at age nine.
9. There are six layers of cortical neurons in the human brain. Do these layers correspond to the rapidity with which a sensory input is dispatched to other parts of the brain?  If one experiences a rude push on the crowded sidewalk this message follows a synaptic path originating in the amygdala via level three whereas when stopped by a mugger and struck in the face, the message is sent express from amygdala along a closer pathway level six to the proper processing zone at cerebellum i.e. the different levels of the neocortex from I to VI are lanes of neuronal traffic each with its own speed of travel - the lower - inner-closer levels for connections that must be made instantly - locked into very short term memory for a few seconds - like remembering the direction of a blow so that the following punch might be slipped.
10. Transmitting axons originating at level VI have dendrites extending to each of the six levels so that this axon can forward a message to the proper lane / layer i.e. fast lane or slower lane or slowest lane - take your time,  don’t crowd the system unnecessarily.  Analyzing the Weigert stain, the Golgi stain.
11. Is it the topmost layer one that is the fast lane? to be nearer great surface area for immediate cooling of neural-synaptic heat from electrical pulsing and inner layers five and six are slower?  A big brain debate - lane six for shortest distance or lane one for greatest cooling?
12. Experiment: Check for relationship between amount of blood flow and most vital brain communications - life or death.  Check oxygen consumption and CO2 production as it occurs in a 9-zone voxel cluster as evidence of priority.
13. Is the neocortex outer surface corrugated only to pack a lot of neurons or is it corrugated in order to cool the neurons and glial cells it contains? Folding doesn’t necessarily create more total volume but the six-layer limit may argue for folding as a surface area provider. As neurons are already packed six layers deep, perhaps brain folds at gray-pink matter at top layer for cooling only - like a radiator that has lots of surface area - not to hold more water but to cool the water it has.
14. What type of brain cell would require more cooling, a neuron or a glial cell?
15. analyze brain for heat with night-vision scope - may be more telling than electrical activity or are they coincident?  Electrical activity equals heat generated?

1. Where is brain blood warmest when thinking - the limbic system or the neocortex? In considering the limbic system is it then at the thalamus or the putamen or hippocampus? To do: track heat intensity and differential throughout brain and central nervous system under 1,000 circumstances.
2. Do layer one neurons have more mitochondria than other layers? Mitochondrial density may be a sign of greater activity over time.  which of the six layers of brain cells of the neocortex has the most mitochondria? The most Golgi apparatus? The most rough endoplasmic reticulum?
3. If layer VI has the most mitochondria in its neurons then maybe this is a sign that this is the fastest lane for relaying signals.
4. Do the six layers of the neocortex reveal a gradual pattern from I to VI re: blood vessel density?
5. To do: Relate brain function to blood supply, heat generated, amount of waste generated.  Track 2000 substances produced in the brain in relation to specific function.

1. At Weigert-stain at neocortex that shows all six layers, why do most axons extend upward from soma rather than down or sideways?  Does this directionality relate to importance or type of signal?
2. Is this axonal directionality real or simply a quirk of the slice location / direction or some other quirk of the stain process and representation? “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.” -Palladas
3. Where in the brain are the shortest term memories stored?  Is this somewhere in the neocortex or elsewhere? perhaps in the cerebellum or brainstem?
4. Using the example of touching a hot coal where does the hot memory get locked to avoid an additional burn?  If in a fistfight or a boxing match - remembering that opponent swings from his right after slipping a straight-right jab, this among 500 other vital details of style in a conflict.
5. This short term memory of an opponent’s fighting quirks is not important enough to be conserved for a future generation but would be important for later encounters with this particular person or others from his tribe.
6. What is the role of intra or inter-cortical signaling in relation to role in long-term memory. A memory of a poison plant would be useful to all future generations.  Is this lousy taste stored for epigenetic transmission immediately or is it sent to germ cells after a deadly encounter by another member of the tribe looking over a dead body and a half-eaten plant?

1. Does a foul taste take a different path through the six layers of the neocortex and or limbic system-brain stem  than a pleasant, seductively delicious taste or the path of an ordinary taste encountered often?
2. It seems like a very bad taste-larger negative effect ought to be sent on its way to the germ cells sooner rather than later.
3. As this epigenetic information arrives at the chromatin of an egg. how does it find its way to the appropriate collapsed puddle of DNA for storage and transmission?
4. If a vital genetic message is sent to a sperm it has only a day or two to find an egg or the important message is lost.
5. Epigenetic messages accrue in women and are very transitory in men.  Maybe people have more sex in times of catastrophe or social upheaval in order to fire both barrels toward the bookkeeper of the species, the DNA memory bank.
6. How soon can a particular  synapse reboot in order to send another signal?
7. How might this repeat-rate affect the number and type and distance of interconnections of dendrites?
8. If I am in a fight with a wildcat and the blows are flying fast and I want to remember the details of this animal’s head bobs, incoming paw direction and speed, my level V pyramid cells that are receiving signals re: blows landing intensity and direction I might want several avenues to my “fast lane” memory storage.
9. Determine the part of the brain that creates the most CO2 or that uses the most blood in an amygdalan - fight or flight emergency and see if this is related to the type / location / destination of the memory and its pathway(s).
10. Memory might be divided up by the brain as follows:
    1. VSTV…..very short term vital
    2. VSTT…..very short term trivial
    3. VLTV…..very long term vital - individual or group-tribe-clan survival
    4. ILT……..intensely long term for clade, phylum, kingdom survival

How does a signal get stored to reflect its probable future use. Where does the incoming signal get tagged for immediate vital recall.  Perhaps electrical signal, accompanied by a tag of adrenalin, stands alert  in memory for split-second retrieval.  In the examples above: a through d, each needs a tag to indicate the duration of memory from:

1. hyper- long for species level effects: I must remember to hibernate.
2. very long for generational effect: Salmon run at this fork in the river.
3. long for single life duration effects: Remember my mama’s birthday.
4. medium- Where I parked the car at the mall.
5. short - Stochastic directionality of flying paws with claws.

40.  If an individual human had an experience or a thought whose memory and subsequent genetic conservation was crucial to the survival of life on Earth including all 5 kingdoms: animal, plant, bacteria, virus, archaea, how would this knowledge, this memory, be conserved? What are the neural-genetic pathways and mechanisms: spatial and chemical.  Written language and mathematical equations would be too abstract - best to hardwire this into the genome and not depend on Google - Wikipedia-Facebook.  How is this accomplished? INH-epigenetics, LIF-epigenetics. INH refers to Lamarckian INHerited acquired traits, LIF refers to non-heritable factors such as histone modification and DNA methylation as source of gene expression that are not necessarily heritable.

41. According to Neo-Darwinism all species memory i.e. genetic change is rooted in mutation whether by chance ( Darwin) or by internal forces ( Galton, Kimura, et al) This mutation ( according to Darwin) occurs in an individual providing immediate reproductive advantage.  This life-saving thought would not be manifest for two generations.  How can we sidestep Darwinian causation to ensure that this life-saving wisdom in not lost?
42.  There must be alternate pathway(s) to conservation of mutation than natural selection acting on individuals during their lives.

42.  Perhaps inputs have options given how crowded a particular neural pathway may be.  Say level III, the usual path is crowded trying to process a problem with the waiter when an owl flies in to snatch puppy from lap and an alternate route to Pons must be used.
43.  Which situation would result in more  mitochondria ( i.e. cell energy) a few large neurons or many small neurons?
44.  Are the nuclei in larger neurons proportionally larger than those in small neurons?
45.  It seems like it would be harder to evacuate waste ( products from metabolism)  from central area of a larger cell, thus larger neurons not used for very rapid response signalling that would require high ATP consumption.
46.  Are cortical layers with the smaller neurons used for fight or flight response?
47.  Do larger neurons produce more proteinic variety than small neurons? Perhaps a larger neuron would produce only GABAergic proteins whereas the smaller would produce serotonin, acetylcholine and norepinephrine.

49.  Due to longer voyage to outer membrane and more evacuoles needed, it seems like larger neurons would produce fewer different proteins, as this would result in fewer errors / waste during production.  So, counterintuitively - small neurons mean more protein variety not less - easier to take out the trash ( broken strands of nucleotide, CO2 sent to blood vessels ( vein capillaries)

50.  Which is warmer given equal amounts of blood - veins or arteries?
51.  Perhaps cortical temperature is related to
52.  What radiates more heat: Oxygen or CO2?
53.  Science and art are both about noticing the world.  Drawing as a child helps one to stretch the capacity for observation of any kind.  Don’t wait for science class in high school to begin noticing small stuff.
54.  Does a human smell his / her own fear?  Does this smell affect behavior i.e. external stimulus augments internal signal to get the hell outta Dodge.
55.  Is fear “smelled” by olfactory system or detected by one’s jacobson's ( vomeronasal) organ as a pheromone.  Is there a fear pheromone? Any sort of fear signaling chemical transported by air produced by a frightened organism?

56.  Are there two kingdoms of genes: one active only during gestation and one set postpartum for remainder of life?
57.  Is there a gene coding for the neocortex soon after fertilization then additional involvement from this same gene at 3d month, 6th month, 8th month, birth and so on until puberty or late adolescence when the final neocortical gene expresses itself as teen rebellion from parents?

58. Are there only one or two genes for all of this neuronal / behavioral differentiation with PTM ( post translational modification) saying- methylation responsible for 1,000 different expressions?
59. Would Romulus have a blank neocortex if raised by wolves with no Remus or other humans to socialize with?
60.  If a human grew up isolated from other humans with no living things other than non-humans,  would its neocortex remain unused and empty - the blank slate remaining blank with all  brain function handled nicely by limbic system, brain stem.  Would social interaction with wolves or horses stimulate development in the neocortex?

61.  The beauty of the Kardashians isn’t so much their butts or money as their gift to us that celebrity is often dopey and deserving minor consideration.  Most celebs would be the first to agree. This gift becomes clear when watching legendary newsman Walter Cronkite interviewing Frank Sinatra in the early 1960s,  asking Frank many stupid questions, as if Sinatra were an alien in his great celebrity. Cronkite seems foolish asking the questions and Sinatra is obviously  perplexed trying to answer them.

Part Two

“Mythical thought builds ideological castles out of the debris of social discourse.”

• Claude Levi-Strauss

A Mythical thought:  On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin

The following list is Debris of mid-Victorian social discourse:

1. Adam Smith
2. Charles Lyell
3. Thomas Carlyle
4. Thomas Malthus
5. Jeremy Bentham
6. John Ruskin
7. Matthew Arnold
8. Cuvier and Lamarck
9. Goethe

Humans, like termites,  push around their little clod of dirt ( activities for earning a living, gaining social status, reproducing, killing time) all the while creating an urban architecture possessing complex mathematical properties.

“All myths tell a story.”  Claude Levi-Strauss

“Myth starts from a structure by means of which it constructs a set.” - CLS

“Set” equals Zeit.

Our initiating structure is a set of genes coding for neocortical activity on two levels; that of the social order and that of each person.  Every culture cherrypicks its keepers. The following list contains some of our keepers.

1. U.S. Constitution
2. George Washington - the idea
3. Primacy of contracts and other law established by Marshall court.
4. The myth of progress, myth of Wild West, Hollywood
5. Our writers: Grant, Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, Heller, DF Wallace, S.J. Gould, Karr, Shteyngart

The individual weaves the fabric of his / her identity from the multi-hue thread of family and friends, teachers, internet, movies, tv and books.

One can’t just say “Cubism is Cezanne for Dummies” or “Cezanne is the source for 20th, 21st century art without discussing what exactly it was that Cezanne did.  He painted in a slow, tortured anti-bravura manner ( for bravura manner see: Joaquin Sorolla 1863-1923) that involved one hour of looking for each single minute of applying paint to canvas. He painted in a way that creates the simultaneous perception of deep space ( think Mt. St. Victoire) and the actual surface of his canvas - an odd thing to do as it begs the following questions as it answers them; what is pictorial space? Why always a window? Why always an open window? Cezanne destroys the window as he celebrates the surface of the canvas. There are no windows either opened or fogged with Cezanne. It’s just you and the wild outdoors or you standing in his dining room or kitchen. Cezanne destroys the window.  He performs this magic act with passage and facture.  Passage is those large patches of sky that appear to be locked into the midground tree branches and the foreground dirt road.  Facture is those small fields of actual brush strokes about half inch by half inch used to render sky or cloud or tree foliage, little patches of paint that scream “This is paint ! This is the surface it is painted onto! and….This is sky mutha-fuckkka!

Cezanne asks trope-defying questions while delivering a deep, soulful, depiction of nature and in so doing, a view of his own humble, durable, tenacious, hardworking spirit.  He has simultaneously removed the ground rules of 350 years of Western painting and gives in return an art of depth, belief and imagination.  Cezanne demonstrates the superficiality of the previously unquestioned rules of myth making in paint, their fallibility.

Cezanne opened the door to countless experiments, Cubism among them - Cezanne is the source of all Art- isms postdating 1905.  Cubism toys with only one or two of Cezanne’s many facets but not all.  After Cezanne, all Art is about art - no longer about “nature” nature: i.e. trees, rivers, sunlight on flowers or sunlight on anything other than the canvas itself.  See: Malevich “Red Square”  Cezanne is the perfect Christian, a good man in tune with nature and free of zealotry, dogma and petty catechisms.

Does art ever get transformed into a scientific instrument, an heuristic? or is our cosmic path toward entropy always from technology to art from the factory to the art gallery? Answer: All art is science.

If Lyell, Carlyle, Malthus, Smith, Ruskin, Dickens, et al were the zeit-threads of Darwin’s Victorian cloth  who are the thought-weavers of our zeit?

1. Woz-Jobs
2. Moore-Grove
3. Brin-Page
4. Gates
5. Zuckerberg
6. Jenny Blake
7. Seth Godin

Synthesize the aforementioned for a big new theory of “What It Is”

How might the ideas of these people be united into an idea that would refresh art, science and philosophy?  Who were the great zeit distillers of the Christian era?  Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?

1. Jesus ( is not buried in Grant’s tomb)
2. Martin Luther
3. Adam Smith-Thomas Jefferson
4. U.S. Constitution
5. Darwin’s “On Origin of Species”
6. Wozniak et al

1. Do creeping plants like ivy share any chemical process with axons as they both seek a columnar or cortical / limbic destination?
2. Zeit is distilled on a hierarchy of levels from bottom to top and from top to bottom.  Sometimes small ideas accrue to large effect creating an idea avalanche changing all in their path - both directions are constantly at work, up and down the taxonomic ladder or along its mobius strip. These are phenomena whose effects are beyond intention i.e. if 6 billion people drink water every day there are effects on a vast scale that are beyond intention.  The same goes for taking a crap or driving a car.  The large effects will happen beyond individual intention as a result of numbers alone, as properties  of combined effects.  The zeit defines itself over and over again.  when the number of suzerainties in Western Europe reached critical mass, nations emerged and absolute monarchs reigned.
3. Zeit is also distilled at the more local levels of person, family, friends, profession, community, state, nation
4. Does Snoop Lion distill any zeit?  We know the Kardashians do
5. Each decade has its zeit-distilling TV shows: “Jackie Gleason” and “I Love Lucy” “Bonanza” “All In the Family” “Mash” “Cheers” “Sopranos”, “Lost”, “Breaking Bad” “Nurse Jackie”
6. ….and its zeit-ey books: Mailer, Wolfe,Breslin,Talese, Roth, Sontag, Heller, Updike, Didion, Pynchon,McGuane, DF Wallace, Shteyngart, Ford.
7. In order to be ziet-worthy,  music must be simply structured, melodic, harmonic, danceable and bearing a message: “da do ron ron - da do ron ron” or more recently “Mama say knock you out”
8. Stick to the big zeits or this is going to take all night.

What are the effects of a single person on their zeit?  Imagine a gear that is the diameter of a pea engaged in a larger gear the diameter of the Earth’s orbit or vice versa depending on one’s ability to distill.

Why discuss zeit?  In order to parse our operative myth, to split it apart, to gut it like a fish and go over it with a magnifying glass or a scanning tunneling electron microscope. All this in order to understand the context of our idea so that we may evaluate it effectively. The act of observation affects the thing observed.

If gradualism was  important to Darwin as homage to his esteemed colleague Lyell, then it becomes more penetrable, more vulnerable to challenge than if the idea of gradualism arrived from on high, from some cosmic truth accessible only to a mighty mind.

Gradualism, as conceived by charles Lyell,  is the idea that small things accrue for large effect over vast amounts of time.  The silk sleeves of sorrowful maidens leaning plaintively on travertine windowsills wear a groove that holds a grail of tears. The activity of a trillion earthworms over one billion years creates six feet of topsoil in Illinois. The lives of countless tiny corals over  eons create The Great Barrier Reef.  As Darwin interpreted Lyell, small mutations accrue over the ages that give a selective advantage to an organism as these changes accrue, new species emerge.  Turns out that little species evolution follows this pattern but it was the zeit.  Gradualism was in Darwin’s air, it was boldly asserted and plausibly maintained until Eldredge and Gould arrived in 1972 to blow gradualism out of the water. They actually put a pinhole in the hull of the great ship Neo-Darwinism but the leak has been growing-gradually. The Big Boat is taking on water now for many reasons.

If the result of random mutation-natural selection has as its source the broad strokes of Malthusian population dynamics and not nature’s genetic experiment then random mutation becomes less fixed as a principle.  It can be seen as an intellectual fashion statement of Victorian vintage and becomes less fiercely conserved  dogma. If the advantage of natural selection and environmental forces simply running their course perform all the weeding of the unfit thus resulting in a beautifully adapted system, say a Tiger,  is Darwin merely tipping his hat to Adam Smith’s laissez faire economics? If so, then perhaps these aspects of Darwin’s thought ought to be revisited in light of a new zeit. This has actually been going on among biologists since the late 19th century. Every bio-scientist takes a swipe at Darwinism.  Some of the big swings of the 1920s and 1930s, discredited at the time are returning with credibility, see: Galton’s internal causality, Sewall Wright’s theory of species selection.

It has been said by many of our now renowned, formerly maverick, contemporary scientists that it is important to review one’s “incontrovertible doctrine” as little more than a distillation of popular ideas and not as inviolable, scientific principle that is beyond questioning.  “Hard Science”  implies the malleability characteristic of any zeit i.e. no science is hard through and through.

Zeit hardens into myth under the pressure of subsequent generations. Zeit-coal compressed into Myth-diamond or decomposed into molecular building blocks for new life.  It is prudent to question “accepted” wisdom on all possible levels prior to buying into the Myth or its zeit.  Kicking the tires is Job One for anyone over twelve years old.

Every avant garde has its spear points. In painting they have been Delacroix, Turner, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Duchamp, Malevich as well as the army of obscurities who provided a bohemian milieu for the geniuses.  For every  Yoko Ono or Andy Warhol there is a cohort of peers who “get it”,  who challenge one another  with intense competition, commentary, criticism, enthusiasm, comradeship, backbiting, gossip, swapping lovers.  Picasso had his “Bande au Picasso”, Warhol had his Factory to generate and carry out ideas in colorful company.

Prime task for the avant garde is combing the zeit from every point on the compass,  dismantling decaying dogma. The avant garde is good bacteria digesting dead ideas  making room for the living.

Contemporary science in the West resists the idea of an avant garde in its own community. It conserves  process and procedure, habit and tradition, assuming  self-correction at all levels: all credible experiment under senior guidance, intense peer review, publication in respected journals.  In theory the system cleans itself, no avant garde needed. Contemporary science is like a big steel tub of crabs crawling over one another trying to pull back down the ones who have made it to the upper edge for escape to the realm of a new idea.  Science must nurture a class of dedicated zeit-pickers, rebels by definition. Science abhors an avant garde as fiercely nature abhors a vacuum.  Every researcher knows they are the next Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Margulis, McClintock or Watson. As Tom wolfe reminds us in The Right Stuff regarding test pilots and astronauts; if you don’t believe you are the greatest of them all, you crash.

Zeit manifests Myth.  Myth is the operating system, Zeit is the array of Apps.  Myth evolves gradually for the most part undergoing abruptions every 115 years caused by political, scientific, artistic or technological revolution.  Sometimes a perfect storm.  An abrupt shift in Myth would be a paradigm shift in Kuhnian terms ( see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn - 1962)

“Science is a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.”  Thomas Kuhn

Myth trumps zeit. Smaller abrupt shifts in Myth are Kuhnian paradigm shifts. Paradigms are a subheading of over-arching, prevailing myth including religion and language of a people. Neither Newton nor Einstein nor Picasso changed the religion or language of their people in order for their ideas to launch great change. There is change and then there is CHANGE.  A bolide impact at 50 to 250 million year intervals creates CHANGE.

Myth includes all features of a culture including those that have been highly conserved ( Christian, Muslim or Buddhist doctrine, Scientific method, American Democracy, Western legal tradition: contract primacy, private property rights, storytelling tropes ( 3 to 5 acts and out) Humor( other people’s pain), music( 7 tones in tune), literature (begin and an end with conflict in the middle).  The operative Myth of a people contains everything - the whole ball of wax. Each group has an operative paradigm  always open for a good shift, swerve or juke. The paradigm defining document for the U.S. Government is “The Constitution” For our contemporary Capital “A” art world it is Duchamp’s reposition of R. Mutt. In physics it’s the Feynman diagram  in bioscience its the double helix.  Note that as the idea described gets more complex, its defining document becomes simpler.  What is more complex than life? What could be simpler than a base pair?  If a new nation cannot write its Constitution on a single sheet of typing paper it is doomed. E=MC2….The whole shebang!

Every scientist, engineer and artist ought to be required to generate a proposition that pokes a hole, however preposterous, in her branch of science or art. A hole in the prevailing paradigm, demonstrating her comprehension that she is not only swimming in water in the first place,  but  that she might know something of its temperature and chemical composition, its operative dogma, its governing paradigm, its local expression of The Myth.  This probe ought to be formalized. A part of the curriculum.  If the young person’s proposition does not induce snickers, frowns, anger or laughter in the faculty, (who all made their bones by drinking the Kool aid of their teachers)  she must return to her drawing board until she finds a way to annoy these people.

Well, you say, every scientist, fresh PhDs among them, is probing the unknown all day long.  Hey! It’s what we do - perhaps,  but rarely beyond the parameters of your professors, peers and publishers.  Myth and its multitude of manifestations are required in order to function. To discover truth,  Myth must be busted and all myths are bustable - look deeper.  It takes talent, tenacity, imagination, hard, sustained work and a bit of seduction along with a sexy idea like gravity or relativity or DNA structure or symbiosis.

A swerve on the Myth, an abruption, gains traction like airborne bacteria attracting H2O molecules to become drops of water and rain. Rain created The Grand Canyon.

1. Perhaps huge genomes of the broadfooted salamander ( 65.5 billion base pairs) the African Lungfish ( 132 billion base pairs) and the Paris Japonica flower ( 149 billion base pairs)  humans clocking in at only 3.2 billion base pairs, are used as storage lockers for 1,000 other organisms - life libraries.
2. Investigate:  individual’s “junk”DNA coding for features of other organisms.  Do we warehouse the DNA of other species in the event of a catastrophe that wipes out 90% of individuals on the planet so Cosmo doesn’t have to start life again from scratch?
3. If we do store the DNA of other organisms, are they the same species, clade, phylum or kingdom?
4. Might “junk” DNA code for bacteria or viruses vital to the host for various functions including digestion or ph regulation, metabolism, earlier forms of The Krebs Cycle before all of its efficient metabolic steps evolved?
5. Humans evolved from apes, rats, fish, sponges and protists. Perhaps “junk”DNA is left over from our previous incarnations. HOX genes are conserved over hundreds of millions of years,  perhaps our fish gill DNA is also conserved but switched off for now as it sits in long-term storage on one of our chromosomes in the event we need to devolve like the whale.
6. Scenario: Earth gets struck by a colossal ice ball that vaporizes upon impact, vapor condenses creating a global ocean.  the catastrophe initiates much dramatic re-switching of genes from off to on - our prehistoric gills are re-expressed and we swim away.  Hey boys! How’s the water?
7. Our “junk” DNA is the old crap in the attic that may turn out to be great grandma’s priceless tintypes of Lincoln.
8. Why would our genomic sensibility toss something that was most recently expressed one billion years ago that it spent 2 billion years creating?
9. If this “junk” DNA doesn’t jive with any known living creatures - this is to be expected.  The organisms it jives with have been extinct for a billion years but like the Terminator - They’ll be baaack!
10. Maybe ‘junk” DNA is used by microbes during decomposition - a reason for them to get involved in the process, harvesting useful aminos.
11. Title for new Paul McCartney album:  “Re-Evolver”
12. Perhaps “junk” DNA is used during gestation as timing mechanism  thus appearing “junky” postpartum.

The steps involved in zeit-search.  It’s part of every curriculum listed as: History, English Literature, Anthropology, etc.

1. Acknowledge that there are such things as Myth and  zeit ( must read Kuhn TSOSR-1962). Myth is  capitalized in this essay because it includes all manifestations uniquely human. If it happens in the neocortex it is the stuff of Myth.  If Myth is a big sockeye salmon, zeit is a golden trout. They’re both fish.
2. That your present milieu has a distinct character that is different than those previous and will be different from those in a rapidly approaching future. Acknowledge that each contains its own swerve on morality, ethics, professional dogma and associated jargon, shibboleths and laughingstock etc.
3. Study your zeit - what are its key features both strong and weak?
4. All hindsight is through tinted glasses.
5. Search for and examine source-zeit or Mythical roots for current beliefs that have been conserved by either popular demand or because they are useful to a powerful group with potential or expressed nefarious intention.
6. What is Postmodern zeit? How is it different from Modern zeit?
7. Postmodernism is the flowering of the ideas of the apostles of turn of the century French linguist  Ferdinand de Saussure during the mid-1960s in American academia ( Yale, Department of English Literature) that spread within a decade to architecture, anthropology, sociology, paleontology and other academic realms. These apostles  are inspired by: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida,  Deleuze, Debord, Baudrillard. See: The three Hs ( Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) and Saussure for the see saw significance of sign and signifier. The Fab Six.
8. Modernism in a nutshell- left brain, PoMo -  right brain.
9. Connect the dots of this cascade of art world causality: Cezanne-Duchamp-Warhol-Sontag-Koons
10. And this one in bioscience:  Lyell -Darwin-Galton-Mendel-Watson-Margulis-The Fab six, Eldredge/Gould(1972)-Dawkins-Gould ( 2002)-Quantum biologists(2015)

In his towering novel ( see: JB essay #25 -  “Gould’s Great Novel”) on everything under the sun with a focus on evolution:  The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould goes to great length repeating the mantra that every era has built-in prejudice that is difficult to notice and that limits the scope scientific exploration.  This prejudice marginalizes mavericks.

Every zeit has two opposed components providing instant dialectic but rare synthesis.  the linear ( left-brain-Modern) and a lateral ( right brain-Postmodern) interpretation of all phenomena at all levels of abstraction. This omnipresent, hardwired into the neocortex difference will always spark deep disagreement, conflict, bickering, scoffing with snort- flehmen response as the vomeronasal excitatory waft of a pomo juke on the topic at hand hits the jacobson’s organ of a left brainer.

The Modern / Postmodern dialectic has been with us since the dawn of civilization.  It is renamed with every new zeit: see: Apollonian-Dionysian, Romantic, Academic, Jacques Louis David vs Delacroix, Stendhal vs Dickens. Structuralist-Poststructuralist, Hemingway-Fitzgerald, Mailer-Vidal, Nirvana vs Coldplay, graffitist vs easel painter. Whoever comes up with the cleverest new name for this timeless duality achieves fame. The Left-right dialectic is the perpetually setting sun we misread as dawn. See: Victor Hugo on the Renaissance.

Any individual will possess only or two or three of Howard Gardner's nine intelligences ( two too many, Gardner should have stopped at seven, lose “cosmo” and “self” as these are implied in the others) The Gardner Nine: Nature, Music, Math, Cosmos, EQ, Kinesthetic,Language, Self, Art. The Art-smart person will be a temporal-spatial learner and will be drawn to a different set of tools than a computational learner. Some people smell the beans, some people count the beans;  both know beans.

Two 25 ounce cans of beer produce a pleasant hangover conducive to thought.  How?  Perhaps ethanol, as excitatory, stimulates reasoning, problem-solving in the associated cortical zone.  Perhaps ethanol as inhibitor calms the ambition, new-seeking, research hungry neurons allowing synthesis of existing knowledge and creative speculation into unexplored realms.  How many days in a row will this new productivity last before neural pathways become saturated with Budweiser?  I wonder about the quality of the ideas produced under this influence.  I would guess that it is the inhibitory effect on jumpy layer III neurons at insula- neocortex allowing synthesis of mental activity into written word.

Large-scale random mutation will have little meaning to an organism-species in its later stages of evolution.  John Trumbull said of his painting method “I begin with a mop and finish with a one-hair brush.” When nature swings a mop late in evolution the organism dies;  however, following a catastrophic bolide impact - see” Chicxulub meteor ( wiped out dinosaurs) mops are flying every which way,  doing their foundational work.  Splattering random paint may be an effective way to begin a painting but as the work progresses and especially as it nears completion too many effective decisions are in place with their purpose intact.  The painted realities are now calling the final phase shots as the painting and the organism control their own evolution with little outside help cherrypicking only the finest refinements.  A bear isn’t going to decide to become radially symmetrical after 2000 million years of bilateral evolution but there was a time when this organism’s bauplan ( now expressed as a bear) was on the table and a choice was made between bilateral and axial symmetry. The painting suggests to its creator how it wants to be resolved re: color, texture, tone.  After the dramatic initial stages of evolution, whether art or animal,  the creator is primarily listening to the work speak. The work completes itself using the momentum of prior decisions and a core logic of all art regarding qualities of completion. So, as an organism is further along its evolutionary continuum, it is less likely to welcome any mutation at all regarding not only its core structure and metabolism but mutation to any one of ten levels of established, road-tested fact.

So who are the “gene police”? Might “junk”DNA serve a policing function for the 10% of our DNA that has a protein coding function?  Is this 10% evenly distributed spatially along 43 chromosomes or around a locus within chromatin soup, in order to be close to its DNA policeman?  Perhaps ‘junk” DNA merely acts as police ensuring that extinct DNA remains switched off. One extinct trait per “junk” cop, or 10 or 100 or 1,000.

Re: consciousness and our 10 billion neurons.  If you have 10 billion anyting ( jumping beans, Pop Rocks, insects, oxygen molecules) in one small place ( like inside a skull) things are going to happen - see: compressed gas molecular motion - things speed up - its a law of nature - thermodynamics. Interactions happen, patterns emerge with a little prodding from the environment.

Distill the zeit because all great thinkers have done this. Their theory closes the door on one era and opens the door on a  fresher, more inclusive one.  In order to close the door on a zeit, one has a deep understanding of the door being closed.  the Beatles are considered revolutionary while the Rolling Stones are simply a great band because The Beatles understood so much of the music they were synthesizing into their compelling new sound,  whereas The Stones were exclusively a Chicago Blues-based band. The scope of The Stones was too narrow to be revolutionary. The Stones were a juke on the Blues. the Beatles were a zeit shift away from yet including all Rock and Roll that preceded them.

Charles Darwin understood in detail much of the natural science he was synthesizing:  French naturalists Cuvier and Lamarck,  geologist Charles Lyell, the work of countless fossil hunters-classifiers, taxonomists, plant and animal breeders. Darwin’s theory of evolution wasn’t such a great leap of imagination for him. It was a reasonable conclusion seen from his broad cone of vision on the shoulders of an army of scientists among whom were a giant or three. Darwin was a great synthesizer of the ideas of others just as were The Beatles.

Distilling the zeit opens doors of inquiry. If stasis is data as Eldredge and Gould assert then 10,000 research projects gain new validity. Distillation is creation. The distillation of existing ideas  will precipitate the new idea.

How does one distill? Is list-making distillation? Is enumeration distillation?  The Beatles had a repertoire comprising 200 rock and roll, R&B and Broadway show tunes from which they drew setlists; 12 to 15 songs per set, five to seven sets a night.  The Beatles played and sang through their song-zeit for 8 hours a night for two years in Germany prior to breaking big. Zeit-shifting can be searching for something to break the boredom.  Innovation for its own sake.

The Beatles shifted the entire paradigm of pop music, not just a part of it due to the width of the net they cast. Their repertoire covered entire shimmering shoals of fish not just the blues, however, The Blues were the basis for much of The Beatles 200 song knowledge base  making the lads second level synthesizers as they worked with material that had already undergone one distillation, a creative swerve from this endlessly fruitful fount,  Mississippi Delta Blues-Gospel songs i.e. the music of black people.

The Beatles, like their co-paradigm shifter of the mid-1960s art scene, Andy Warhol, had the instinct to use, as a source material, that which had already emerged from an intense refinement-distillation-synthesis cycle. Each one of The Beatles primary inspirations, the songs that landed a slot on the Beatles Star Club Hamburg setlist was a proven innovation, a synthesis in its own right: Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lieber-Stoller, the Everlys, Goffin-King, Ellie Greenwich, Bert Berns.

The challenge for Darwin and The Beatles was how to synthesize that which had been refined once already  by big talent.  Using a math concept, let’s call it the challenge of synthesizing a second derivative of nature i.e. synthesizing the products of other talent.  In Darwin’s case: Charles Lyell, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus all of whom had already gone to school on raw nature or in Thee Beatles’ case, the raw nature of Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Elvis,  each of whom had received a higher education on mother nature of pop music early 1950s R&B. The Stones were a first derivative, the Beatles, a second derivative i.e. more concentrated by an order of magnitude.

An explorer synthesizing that which has been distilled, works with more potent raw material by definition. Raw material that is hardly “raw”. It has been very well cooked.  Little Richard and Charles Lyell manufactured bricks; Charles Darwin and the Beatles designed and  constructed towering beacons.  In Darwin’s case, shining a light on 150 years of civilization - a near Myth.  The Beatles illuminated their own generation to transcendent effect - a rock solid zeit shift.

Picasso understood the tropes of western painting when he accepted the challenge of distilling Cezanne. The Salon Cubists barely understood Picasso. Gris did not understand Cubism at all. He was making 15th-19th century realistic renderings of Cubist-like subjects.  Hint: anytime you see an “X”-type intersection with four different hues at each quadrant, you know you are seeing the work of a pretender. Gris’ “Cubist” paintings are rife with this goofy space-splitting device.

Did Andy Warhol perform an act of synthetic magic similar to that of The Beatles with their magic potion 200 song setlist, stirring his pot with Campbell’s, Brillo, Marilyn, Liz and Mao? or was he doing something other than synthesis? Is repositioning ( see: Duchamp) an iconic cultural artefact an act of synthesis or is it anatomically different, requiring a new category, but on the same level of abstraction i.e. once removed from nature?  There are two classes of second derivative: true synthesis i.e. deriving essence from an oeuvre for some new thing and  there is repositioning.  Duchamp repositions the urinal “R.Mutt” from the men’s restroom to the iconic Armory Show-1913. Warhol repositions Campbell’s soup from supermarket shelves to the art gallery.  Has anything been synthesized by either Duchamp or Warhol?  In repositioning their common objects into rarefied Art-space they synthesized the Idea of reposition.  Andy and Marcel’s second derivative was something even more densely concentrated than The Beatles’ own hit songs - an idea itself - the idea being, that one could gain traction, make a statement, get acceptance in the capital A art world by an act of reposition an idea that has spawned 100 years of art to date and is going strong. To give Paul McCartney his due,  Sergeant Pepper is a towering reposition of a rock and roll band into an 1890s dance hall combo, see: Edwardian era poster advertising the “Benefit for Mr.Kite” btw, contrary to popular belief, Paul was easily the Beatle most tuned into 60s Art-zeit, not hipper than Yoko,  but among The Beatles, the most in tune with the currents of the 20th century zeit stuff.

Duchamp, and Warhol to a lesser extent, shifted paradigms ( OK, let’s call Andy’s a swerve - smaller than Duchamp’s shift) without performing an act of extraction of essence from an existing body of work. Duchamp and Warhol redefined the pursuit of meaning in Art.  For fundamental zeit-shift in music one would have to credit the atonalists and  John Cage whose composition “Four thirty Three” frames the ambient sounds of wind in trees, raindrops, whispering and muttering,coughing and program rustling while a classically trained concert pianist intermittently raises and lowers the lid on a grand piano for four minutes and thirty three seconds without playing a single note.  After the premier at Maverick Concert Hall in woodstock, NY on August 29, 1952 the audience was in an uproar and Cage entered the history books. Cage is dealing with an idea about the nature of music itself more than with any expectations built into his zeit at any level;  from infant auditory neural programming of the 7-tone western scale to the expectation of an audience versed in the avant garde for something new and exciting, but not this new or this “exciting”.

“I am frankly embarrassed that most of my musical life has been spent in the search for new materials. The significance of new materials is that they represent the incessant desire in our culture to explore the unknown.  Before we know the unknown, it inflames our hearts.  When we know it, the flame dies down, only to burst forth again at the thought of a new unknown.  This desire has found expression in our culture in new materials, because our culture has its faith not in the peaceful center of the spirit but in an ever-hopeful projection onto things of our own desire for completion.” - John Cage

"Many people taking a walk would have their heads so full of preconceptions that it would be a long time before they were capable of hearing or seeing. Most people are blinded by themselves. Thus, the goal of the composer is revealed to be primarily that of the missionary. Music is about changing the mind -- not to understand, but to be aware.

Many people in our society now go around the streets and in the buses and so forth playing radios with earphones  and they don't hear the world around them. They hear only what they have chosen to hear. I can't understand why they cut themselves off from that rich experience which is free. I think this is the beginning of music, and I think that the end of music may very well be in those record collections.” - John Cage

Duchamp: This stuff that was not previously considered Art is now Art, we know this because it is located at an art exhibition.

The Beatles: This is art because it distills the very best of the recent past. It is art concentrate - white lightnin’.

Darwin, Duchamp, Warhol and The Beatles shifted their zeit. Darwin and The Beatles via distillation; Duchamp and Warhol by reposition.

A urinal is like a tree in its unassuming naturalness, in it’s humble, low-key manufacturedness,  whereas CocaCola, Marilyn and Elvis were intensely advertised- commodities.

Commode vs commodity, commode is commodity albeit quiet. The urinal and the Coke bottle are familiar objects.  Drink the Coke, take a leak.

Distillation vs reposition, what mechanisms did Newton and Einstein use? Newton distilled his theories from the great spectacle of nature: the things of this Earth and celestial bodies. Einstein drew from his imagination.

Who was the greater paradigm shifter,  Picasso, with his distillation of Cezanne or Duchamp in his reposition of the manufactured object?  Picasso revolutionized all painting. Duchamp revolutionized all Art.

“Warhol took Marilyn Monroe as his subject in different mediums, silkscreening the actress’s image multiple times in a grid in bright colors and in black and white. By repeating Monroe’s image (and that of other celebrities) over and over again, Warhol acknowledged his own fascination with a society in which personas could be manufactured, commodified, and consumed like products.” - anon @ web

Levels of commodification can be measured by counting advertising dollars spent and from income generated by a movie star or a rock star.  How much money has changed hands as a result of Coke in all of its manifestations or Marilyn, considering gross box office receipts and auction prices for Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of Marilyn. Box office gross receipts for “Some Like It Hot” - $8 million, auction price of “White Marilyn”  Warhol silkscreen - $12 million,  one of hundreds of “Marilyn” silkscreen paintings. The commode is advertized in industry catalogs and at trade shows. Billions of dollars are spent advertising Coke around the world. Warhol, as a child of The Great Depression, was drawn to things involving a lot of money. Duchamp, the aristocrat, would be comfortable with the ordinary. The ordinary carrying, for him, built-in irony.

Copernicus distilled observations of planet orbits into a new theory of planetary motion.  Newton distilled his observations of apples and planets and heat into laws of nature.  what are “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”  if not compact laws of nature - explosive impact on a generation.

Great minds are like expansion valves on an air conditioner condensing unit.  This valve transfers pressurized liquid into vapor which has a much greater capacity to store heat i.e. to do useful work of removing heat from indoor air.  The trait shared by all zeit distillers is their discovery of new realms of opportunity whether by distillation, reposition or some other strategy.

Has reposition accomplished anything useful beyond the Art world? The internet / Arpanet repositioned from a useful military tool to public use. The breakfast drink Tang repositioned from Astronaut fare to popular breakfast drink. Feathers repositioned from thermal insulators to flight enablers. See: exaption: features evolved for one reason and used by an animal for a different reason.

Might reposition add value to bioscience? What if non-coding “junk” DNA is repositioned  as vital stuff ( as has been proven for some “junk” DNA) as Duchamp repositioned his urinal from a piece of discarded ceramic junk translating it into an iconic talisman inspiring 100 years of artmaking. Once this reposition of “junk” DNA has been repositioned to uDNA  (undiscovered function DNA) becomes an accepted trope, it will open doors for new experiments and add significance to 1,000 previous ones.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould repositioned stasis in their landmark 1972 paper  on “Punctuated Equilibrium”, overturning Darwinian gradualism in species evolution, opening  new realms of meaning for data gathered in the last decades of the 20th century. 

Selling the synthesis:  Stephen Jay Gould spent considerable, if intermittent effort during  his 40 year career selling this idea of Punctuated equilibrium( stasis IS data).  It was a hefty idea in that it contradicts the key Darwinian notion of gradualism.  Andy Warhol attended 10,000 parties to ensure that neither his visage nor his work would be soon forgotten.  Linnaeus sent twenty of his most brilliant and devoted students to distant regions of the globe classifying plants and animals using his system of taxonomy, still in use today though modified. The Beatles played 1,000 shows to sell their innovations in pop songwriting, performance, haberdashery and haircuts. It is never enough to have a great idea, one must sell it.  Myths insists upon perpetuation. They have momentum, much energy is required  to reverse, shift, swerve or juke them. Myth tolerates the juke but will kill to resist a shift. Myth is an organism continually interacting with all aspects of evolutionary causation. When does Myth-speciation occur? As in nature, after catastrophic events,  just like plants and animals.

Gregor Mendel squirrelled his zeit-shifting work away where it was undiscovered for 40 years then BLAMMO ! ! Mendel’s ideas were so powerful they propelled themselves into the heart of bioscience.  Mendel is the Neo in Neo-Darwinism i.e. evolution seen in light of genetics. Genetics threw and it continues to throw a lot of light.

Is zeit-shiftiness  in inverse proportion to the energy required to sell it? Warhol was the tip of  zeit-spear Coca Cola upon which billions of dollars had been spent in advertising and he advertised his persona to remarkable effect. He wanted to be famous. Stephen Jay Gould spent 1,340 pages to try to sell his ideas of stasis data and species-clade centrality in natural selection.  Does this mean Gould’s ideas do not sell themselves? They may be simply a bit before their time or in light of an avalanche of data gathered from contemporary genomics perhaps trivial by now.  They seemed important at the time. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is a labyrinthine, emotionally complex veiled, camouflaged, tortured plea to the public for Gould’s own enshrinement next to Darwin as a discoverer of two primary evolutionary processes after 40 years of getting too little respect from his peers in the scientific community.  In 1972,  poleaxing Darwin was a bigger deal than it is these days.

“I Want To Hold Your Hand” is four minutes and six seconds long and it sparked a musico-social revolution.  It inspired a cascade of events and attention, each propelling the next until 50 million boomers were eating out of John Lennon’s hand.  Perhaps one of these boomers will write: “I Wanna Eat Out Of Your Hand”

As is the case with the air conditioner expansion valve, pressure is a key component in  zeit-distillation.

Distill the Zeit: A command, a request, a duty, an obligation, an opportunity, a challenge. Every individual is a distillation of their zeit without trying.  One distills by falling off a log.  Every person carries the language and an array of core values, beliefs, ideas, prejudices.  How many Baby Boomers didn’t like rock and roll? It’s the water.

Is zeit the same for all? Do we end up, after all of this distillation with the same jar of hooch?  Why were Darwin, Einstein and Freud’s white lightnin’ enduring, so effective in changing the temper of their time?  It is  hard to say whose hooch will rule -  much easier to rank the participants in retrospect and then write the story of precursors.  Who were William-Adolphe Bouguereau's 19th century academic precursors? Whose work did he distill in his masterworks? Who cares? He perfected all tropes distilling none.  He shifted no zeit. His masterpieces have been forgotten.  He had total comprehension of the water he was swimming in with zero vision for the future. In trying to perfect academic painting he killed it. Pioneers are, by definition, outliers. Those celebrated in their own time, as Bouguereau was, are hailed because they are intensely well behaved.

Picasso was a well known painter in Parisian art world in 1920 but not yet canonized.  One hundred artists take a conscious shot at distilling their zeit, say there are fifteen genuine candidates.  One simply cannot tell at the time the work is created who will prevail.  It’s like trying to predict which species of lemur will survive extinction when Madagascar breaks away from Africa by forces of continental drift - who could possibly know which of 10 species will survive this long, slow, catastrophic change in habitat? - The winners will be determined in part by future climate patterns.  Which species is best adapted to the desert?  Which one to the rainforest?  which one can best endure hunger, drought, new predators, a new bacteriome, who swings with the most agility through the forest canopy? In a forest that will not evolve on the new island for five million years?  There is no way to know which species might be controlling the direction of the zeit or what avant garde painter will prevail - it is a matter of future, unpredictable forces.  The most adaptable will survive.  Evolution is “Moneyball” Buy me the player who gets on base. I don’t care what they look like or how they do it.

Who will be our zeit-defining writers? Mailer,Wolfe, Updike, Frantzen, Sedaris? Vonnegut, Heller, Castaneda? Ford, McGuane, DeLillo? Shteyngart, Foster-Wallace, Gould? Each has made contributions. Mailer cast a brawling, wide net and advertised for himself to the max  but his subjects were pre-cooked like those of Warhol and often relied upon  the same pre-cooked legends for “raw” material: Kennedys, Ali, Astronauts, Marilyn and then Mailer’s own prefab crew of Gilmore, Jesus, Picasso and Hitler. Tom Wolfe’s net is as wide as Mailer’s, not as deep but more fun. Updike tried too hard to seduce-got smarm?. Vonnegut just didn’t write enough, though he touched a big Boomer nerve. Heller hit the jackpot and added a term to the zeit-vocabulary, Catch-22, but he was a distiller with little shift.  Castaneda who? Find your spot.  Ford-articulates the ephemerally morose. Mcguane only writes about social inferiors and people in more hot water than he’s in -remains disconnected.  Montana is a mile high and there is little oxygen in the air required for neural effulgence. Montana-The Craftsman State, if you want artists go to the big cities.  DeLillo is disconnected though deep, wide and cold, glacial, Pynchon without the kookie-scramble. Shteyngart nails it but as a definer not a shifter and a only a small nail. Foster-Wallace, a towering presence but that 400 page section on the international war game- tennis match scotched the deal, repelling 20,000 potential readers. Gould’s masterpiece demonstrates the non-utility of Gould’s Glu-Stik ( see: Occam’s razor) Someone must edit 500 pages away before we can see the stumps of the trees in the forest levelled to print this heart-tugging, mind expanding and deeply moving 1,300 page doorstop. Gould’s Glu-Stik:Never miss an opportunity to say something five times and using all adjectives that pop into mind, let the reader sort them out.

Zeit-distillation  isn’t a pissing contest  with contemporaries or precursors. It is ideally the unassuming precipitation of events. Events are raindrops forming around someone’s bright idea-microbe, will it become a rivulet, a river or a tsunami?  Preening in the spotlight may create zeit-flash but is a sign of Myth marginality. One does his or her thing (see: Gregor Mendel, the quiet monk) - Your work ends up shifting the zeit or not. As in quantum things, the act of seeing disturbs the nature of that seen.  Zeit-shifting is like running for President in the 18th century.  One has big ideas, deep capability and vast ambition but any sign of ambition works against you. See: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  John Adams’ biggest problem and the main reason his face is on no currency, is his failure to hide his ambition at a time when this was a key feature of public life.  Hamilton had a similar problem. Where is the Alexander Hamilton Monument in Washington D.C.?  He deserves one in spades. You’ve got to nurse your milieu, allow those smacked by your greatness to sing your praises.  If they’re not singing loud enough and you’re dying of cancer, you’ve got to write the big book and explain your achievement yourself.  Gould’s big book is so great because it is so sad.

There is a cabin high in the Hartz Mountains of southern Germany with a gable roof whose ridge splits a raindrop. Half of this drop becomes the Rhine and half becomes the Danube.

This you know from all evolution, if your work does not contain a mutation it has no chance to launch a new species.  Evolution follows the errors.  It is the static ones who get swallowed up, subsumed, erased by evolutionary forces from natural selection to symbiosis to quantum effects.  Your adversaries study and steal  your moves,  no matter how successful at one time - they’re on to your game. They know your hiding places. They dig you out, your number is up.  That weirdo we kicked out of the troop for playing with fire is far away now, on his own, fifty miles upriver with not a tree or banana in sight, hunting with his new girlfriend spearing and cooking rats and hiding in the grass.  He had a mutation in his curiosity gene - dude was out of control, dangerous, he couldda burned down the whole forest with his hot stuff.

Distill the Zeit:  Stephen Jay Gould did an astounding job describing the water he was swimming in re: evolutionary theory.  Gould knew in great detail what “stasis is data” was shifting away from.  His “shift” turned out to be a credible swerve or perhaps only a juke.  Punctuated Equilibrium and species selection have both been buried in an avalanche of science that perforates Neo-Darwinism. It is time for a new term for species evolution. there appears to be little natural selection or gradualism at work.

It is every scientist’s job to say no as loud and as often as possible to a new idea. This gauntlet is as much science tradition as hypothesis-experiment.  It is a hazing ritual not essentially meant to offend so much as to sort. Don’t take offense all you innovative thinkers and proto-paradigm shifters, every great paradigm shifter is required to have their satchel stuffed with snickering, nay-saying, turned backs, whispers and sneers, maybe a bit o’ persecution but hopefully not  exile, prison, burning at the stake. These tales of mighty opposition are as much a part of myth-making as the original experiments that proved your paradigm shifting theory.  Picasso’s friend Braque thought he had drunk gasoline upon first seeing the zeit defining-shifting painting  “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon”. Matisse, leader of the Paris avant garde,  scoffed  at Picasso’s bold African-inspired tortured, fractured abstraction saying: “This will ruin us all” referring to Picasso taking the Paris avant garde into a realm that frightened even Matisse, the leader of the avant garde for the previous five years with his wild and crazy Fauves. Picasso’s feelings were hurt. He rolled up this canvas and put it in the back of his closet for twelve years.  It is now the centerpiece at MOMA where it has held sway since the late 1930s as ground zero for 20th century painting. Remember: Duchamp-Art, Picasso-Painting.  Not the same thing.  Painting is a subset of Art, therefore Duchamp is more important than Picasso.

Did you set the course for the future or was your bold assertion simply the luckiest?. Your spaghetti sticks to the wall because the wall was sticky from a recent wipe. You become canonized - a lucky shot,  but you DID throw some spaghetti.  One gets credit for making and throwing, the sticking is left to the course of history. Your toss affects this course ( see: Pea size gear - Earth orbit around Sun) and the course of history affects your toss. Creation is a discourse with the future.

Frank Lloyd Wright distilled the zeit big time. He was the Darwin and darling of Modern Architecture ( actually PoMo architecture  but this is a long argument for another essay)  Wright took the best of nature boys John Ruskin and William Morris, both in fashion in Chicago design circles at the turn of the century. Wright sang the praises of the previously reviled ( by Morris and clique) machine as he deconstructed the American home as a stuffy, claustrophobic hellbox. Wright grew up in near poverty in a hot, stuffy, drafty, freezing attic bedroom (the box upstairs) with an oft-abused( beaten by his psychotic mother) mentally ill sister locked in the basement ( the box downstairs). He had lots to hate about these clapboard torture chambers.  Wright’s mantra during his Prairie School years was “The Destruction of The Box”.

Wright was born with perfect visual pitch re:proportion, a bold imagination and a capacity for hard work, schmoozing self-promotion.  He had good hired help.  Marion Mahoney’s brilliant perspectives of Wright’s best Prairie School work as showcased in his “Wasmuth Portfolio” rocked a generation of young Modern architects in Europe. Voila ! Wright’s ( and Mahoney’s) portfolio shifts the zeit of 20th century architecture.  Wright was accused of being the “greatest architect of the 19th century” by Philip Johnson-speaker at my Harvard GSD graduation in 1979 advising us to marry money adding that he never hired Harvard grads because they all want to be boss. The core of Wright’s genius is the zeit-distilling esthetic theorist of Victorian age, John Ruskin for the Organic Architecture storyline Ruskin developed in response to Gothic architecture. William Morris for the woody tectonics of all things Arts and Craftsy. Matthew Arnold for the relaxation of Wright family Puritanism of his Welsh forbears.  Wright’s largest gift to 20th century architecture is not the impact of his 700 built works as much as his effect on the three towering Modernists: Le Corbusier, Mies, Gropius, Wright’s apostles by proxy. His actual apostles save only two ( Schindler and Neutra) were incinerated in the heat of propinquity including latecomer Paul Rudolph ( one of my Harvard critics) Poor Paul incinerated as a young architect by a Wright encounter of the too close kind. Wright was viciously dismissive,  poisoning Rudolph as a critic.

Part Three

The water in 2015 - Distilling The Zeit as hierarchies - a Linnaean taxonomy.

Life:  The inventors of our grammar and syntax, the inventor of the Golden Rule, Plato-Socrates, Zorastrians, Hindus etc.

Kingdom: Jesus-Plato-Socrates: the biggest, identifiable by name, zeit-distillers.

Phylum:  Newton- Martin Luther - Darwin - Edison - Henry Ford - Marconi - Tesla

Subphylum:  Mendel-Freud-Cezanne-Einstein-Planck-Bohr-Feynman-Weinberg

Class: Moore-Grove-Woz-Jobs-Gates-Page-Brin-Zuck axis.

Order: Juridical system - The law of the land: “The Constitution”, vast libraries of case law i.e. the “book” as it will be thrown at you.

Family: Your defining entertainment: movies,tv, music, internet stuff

Genus: Your community, neighborhood, school, church, bar n’ grill

Species:  your family and friends

Individual:  Your own mind

Continuing the experiment,  extending the Linnean heuristic (JB neologistic addendum) to  deeper loci within the individual to describe the causality of human myth.  The “um” suffix is a nod to phylum, subphylum.

Orgum….. organs in a single body - heart/gut memory?

Cellum…...cells within a single organ, cells throughout an organism not  protists

Cromum... organelles,chromosomes (as physical entity w/ DNA, histones etc) golgi structures, endoplasmic reticulum rough and smooth, ribosomes, etc, etc-not proteins

Protum….. DNA molecule,  all proteins, peptides, polypeptides, lipids, etc

Genum…..individual genes (as parts of DNA affecting one another) and immediate intermediaries within process of protein synthesis and cell metabolism

Parum…....base pairs in position at DNA

and so forth down the line to quarks etc.

Computer science wasn’t shifting much zeit in its first 50 years - waiting for Woz-Jobs the great synthesizers with their great idea: computers to the people.

Zeit-locus shifts among realms of thought, each different realm seated in a unique cluster of voxels in the neocortex. A neocortical volume containing a dash of conserved  Myth (methylated DNA) then onto another realm of myth-making, all of this Myth n’ zeit genetically secured in the DNA.:  An early era centers on philosophy - Plato begins as zeit grows into Myth,  for the next era the locus of our Myth is religion - Jesus begins as zeit then grows into Myth. Jesus becomes useful as a benevolent front for powerful political leaders Constantine and a long parade of Popes. If JC had not proved a useful frontman for avaricious politicos we would not know his name. If you buy into the Myth of Christianity there is work to go around for everyone. Every church needs an architect, a groundskeeper, a few priests, deacons, aldermen, youth counselors, missionaries, monks, painters, sculptors, musicians, stained glass artists, stonemasons,, quarrymen, printers, Bible salesmen, crusaders, weapon makers, horsemen, stable boys, blacksmiths, iron miners, real estate brokers and managers, accountants, investment advisors. Religious Myth is a big job creator. Jesus was a sort of Mother Teresa for the Middle Ages, established here and there to pave the way for power - just as Jesus reified as missionary and surrounded by the most opulent seductions of the human mind: Suger, Martini, Cimabue, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, Borromini, et al.

On to astronomy - Copernicus: heretical zeit, then stored as heritable myth, physics - Newton he’s the zeit, a kingpin with the Royal Mint, The Royal society then onward as his ideas are locked into Myth. Then the spotlight of Myth accrual shifts to  bioscience - Darwin as alarming  zeit (Apes!!) then into avuncular Myth. Moving on now to Art, there is old man  Cezanne and then Einstein brings the ball back into the arena of science.

Our local zeit comprises them all to one degree or another Copernicus to Kimmel. Remember when architecture mattered?  zeit-guy Abbot Suger in 1150, his Gothic cathedral - spirit of the age, sadly, no longer, we live in the age of the  tweet, Gordon Moore you and your microchip are ancient history, Zeit-shifter Bill Gates hangs out with geezers. We’re drowning in Zuckerwater.  Alas, architecture has been over for 750 years.

Darwin distilled his zeit and launched a new one.  Evening talk show joke writers distill the zeit-lite of the day. Over the course of three decades Letterman tells a story by accretion not by a synthetic act.

Where will the Myth-hammer fall to crack-a-paradigm,wack-a-zeitmole to release fresh air for mankind? There are now a billion people on facebook most of whom have never heard of either Charles Darwin or Paul Cezanne. You don’t have to know the chemical composition of water to swim in it but you do need to know if you’re going to change it in ways larger than the fact that you eat and crap and maybe drive a car.

Zeitshift is rarely an act of will though it may take great willpower to create a body of work that will catalyze a population, distill the idea of a people into something manageable, something clear.

What is the difference between Myth and zeit?  Myth has broader scope, deeper roots. Myth comprises the deep levels of language, its grammar and syntax ground rules shared by all, that humans are driven to speak and write. Myth is conserved across generations, zeit has flex and is shifted by minds like those of Newton, Darwin, Cezanne, Wright and McCartney. If Cezanne hadn’t shuffled the zeit of Western painting there would have been no Cubism, no Duchamp, no Le Corbusier. We would only now be hearing such things as “Ornament is a crime” “Form and Function are One” “Less is More” “God is in The Details”  “I asked the brick what it wanted to be, the brick said “I like an arch.” Such ideas would have had no context or not enough context, not enough enabling soil, no critical, contextual mass.  Question: Who shifted more zeit for architecture, Cezanne-Picasso with Cubism or Frank Lloyd Wright and his destruction of the box?

Darwin relocated Christianity from inaccessible Puritan, Protestant Myth into the less tightly conserved Victorian zeit, opening it up for a bold re-interpretation of its creation dogma. Conservative Christians have never bought this reposition of their belief system from its locus of primary Myth to the much more flexible zeit. Young people of the mid-Victorian era wanted more flex in their system. Their grandparents were executed for apostasy.  An idea must be demythologized in order to be changed.  De-mythologizing is like uncoiling the DNA molecule from its core of histones so that specific genes may be copied or changed. Things  tightly wound are not easily accessible. Darwin loosened the bindings of the shifting Victorian Christian myth launching a thousand manifestations of fresh air.

People try to de-mythologize one another with alcohol - works every time.

Police ought to test drivers with a mythologizer to see if they have reassembled their comprehension of the myth of traffic rules and regulations before driving home.

Contextual voltage:  Stored intellectual charge as accruing  electrical charge, charging a capacitor or a battery,  setting the background, backstory, backdrop, the stage, the platform  for the jolt of a new idea. Adam Smith, Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus charged Darwin’s battery that would not have lit a lamp  25 years earlier. The Beatles music would have been rude cacophony in the decade 1945-1955.  Beatlemania required the modulating, pump-priming effects of the early R&B:  Louis Jordan, Jackie Brenston, the Treniers, Jimmy forrest, Ray Charles as distilled  by Bill Haley, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. The evolution of style is like a line of rats undergoing peristalsis in a crawling kingsnake.  Each pooped out in its own time into the light of day to fertilize the dreams of a new generation.

Timing is of the essence. Will the flame of a new idea gutter and die or start a raging forest fire creating its own turbulent weather? Every idea needs conceptual kindling, prime the pump, humans do not like to be shocked, but we all enjoy a good buzz…..and then there are the savants -  people out of step, living in their own bubble, worlds of their own making,  the outsiders, the crazies who invent a language spoken only by themselves, creating their hermetic, always obsessive art and music ( see: Captain Beefheart, Martin Ramirez, Joseph Cornell) setting few fires outside of their own flaming minds but evidence that our broadly shared myth-making instinct is at work.  Sometimes a private language will fuel a larger fire due to its undeniable inventiveness or delight, Isadora Duncan comes to mind.  Cezanne  was considered an oddball outsider for much of his painting career and he slides into home plate in Paris at age 65 for the game-winning home run. Our kingmakers enjoy bestowing accolades on a few of these geniuses toward the end of their lives or post-mortem, escorting them through the looking glass into the public eye and into the history books - big shows, reviews, auction clout. Zeitshift requires not only combustible intellect but a sales pitch.  Every painter needs a pocket apologist-a sympathetic, articulate critic or three. Zeitshift begins with a juke, then a swerve - prime the pump, fresh water flows, all is cleansed.

How does one know when the pump has been adequately primed?  Hard to say - go ahead - toss your spaghetti. If it slides to the floor ignored,  you will have left a tomato stain.

Does a culture go into estrus, signalling readiness to be impregnated with a new idea? Does it get twitchy, ill-at-ease, more curious? Does it stay out late to hang with dangerous friends, aching to get its paradigm shifted,  Its Myth modified?

Every generation produces  unique zeit-signs in art, science, philosophy, music, dance, humor, religion and language. That one of these expressions might shift its zeit is always a possibility. Fascinating how the young generation of 1912 shifted paradigms in physics, philosophy, art, dance, technology (motorized flight,radio,autos), architecture, bioscience, entertainment ( movies, recorded music) A generation every bit as fertile as the flagship class at “Saturday Night Live” with Morris, Newman, Belluschi, Chase, Ackroyd, Radner, Curtin, Murray - boggles the mind. Think British invasion mid 1960s: The Beatles, The Zombies, The Stones, The Who, The Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, The Dave Clark five, Gerry and The Pacemakers, funny name - perfect for a boomer band in 2015.

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Brain Gene

April 7, 2015 “The law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained” - Aaron Burr

…..and so it is with the law of nature - JB

“Genes do not specify cognitive or behavioral outputs.  Genes are the information for building proteins which carry out functions inside the cells of the body.” - Fisher, et al

There are 2,000 genes of our total of 20,000 that code for proteins related to the function of the mammal central nervous system - one of these genes makes us human.

Once our mammal HOX genes establish our nervous system architecture,  one gene remains, launching a cascade of chemical events resulting  in our susceptibility to being humanized.  the events of this cascade are triggered by a single gene. This gene  codes for “Protein Zero” ( like “ground zero” - a foundational event or place).  The PTM ( post translational modification) of this molecule propels us toward our humanness -language, tool use, altruism and reasoning.

The majority of human brain components are shared with all mammals but humans have a larger neocortex.  If the only thing separating humans from apes and other mammals is our neocortex, it follows that human genes coding for the neocortex must also code for language, reasoning, and tool use.

JB Single-Gene (FOXP2) Theory - witchcraft as heuristic:

Uniquely human function is initiated by post-translational modification(PTM)  of nucleotides  coded by  genes  conserved across all mammal species. There is a single gene unique to humans but there are many thousands of PTMs unique to humans.  The key to our humanity is Post Translational Modification of RNA and histones in postpartum maturing cortical neurons-until age 20.  At birth we may as well be a chimp, as our cortical neurons have yet to be post translated inducing humanity.

1. Methylation of histone H3 @ pyramid cells:         tool use
2. Phosphorylation of tasiRNA @ granular cells:     language
3. Acetylation of tRNA @inhibitory cells:             reasoning
4. Hydroxylation of siRNA @ non-spiny bipolar cells: mythmaking / Religion
5. Malonylation of LncRNA @ double bouquet cells:     tribal intensity
6. Proteolytic Cleavage of G2phase chromatin @ cajal-retzius cells: music
7. Deamidation of cisNAT @ spiny stellate cells :             painting
8. Ubiquitin Modification of S-phase chromatin @ chandelier cells: altruism

Once again for effect:

“Genes do not specify cognitive or behavioral outputs. Genes are the information for building proteins which carry out functions inside the cells of the body.”   

1. What is the source of the neuronal change resulting in language, tool use, etc?
2. Assume the FOXP2 gene codes for language and fine motor control required for mouth movement to form words.  FOXP2 is The Mythmaker, the only gene we need to be fully human.
3. To do:  Explore quantum effects in neuronal gene expression
4. Is the manufacture, vesicle-ization and transmission through synaptic membrane of neurotransmitters the only  or even the primary form of inter-neuronal communication?   Seems slow.
5. There are 1,000 different chemosensory odorant receptors in human olfactory system.  does this mean there are 1,000 different post translational modifications to a single protein or 10 proteins or 500?  One gene per protein?
6. To do: Subject mammalian vestibular hair “supporting type” cells to various pitches of sound from VHF to UHF to see if the sound ( electromagnetic radiation) induces support cells to become hair cells where hair cells have been damaged.  Birds are sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic effects using them to navigate, perhaps a bird’s proteomic tools for magnetic ( or is it electromagnetic?) perception also assist in vestibular hair regeneration.
7. Do birds have iron-rich protein storage enabling them to read Earth’s magnetic field for long-range navigation?
8. Was Picasso really radical in 1910 as he experimented with Cubism or simply a sly little magpie standing on the shoulders of truly radical Cezanne?
9. What is E sharp minor re: Bach.  Isn’t E Sharp minor simply F Minor?
10. Andy Warhol was a manipulator of American myth: Coke, comics, dollar bills,Campbell’s Soup, Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Mao, Brillo, i.e. don’t touch it if it isn’t already famous.  He proceeded from famous brands to wealthy, obscure socialites, famous in their own minds  for 1,000 slapdash silkscreen portraits.
11. Perhaps there are many more acoustic insects than we know due to their ultrasonic song-pulse-chirp, inaudible to humans.
12. Are insect chirp rate and pitch coded by two different genes or are they two varieties of post translational modification of a single conserved gene - say the FOXP2?
13. A predatory mammal - lion, bear, wolf and 99.99% of all organisms, elicit zeeero sympathy-empathy-altruism for the small, weak, slow - i.e. to any life other than its own , all else is killable without conscience.  In humans this is called psychopathology.
14. The idea of water is a great one but don’t bet the farm on a single drop.  Humans respect numbers and effects not principles.
15. Perhaps there is an entirely separate bio-mechanism for protein translation and regulation separate from the effects of the DNA molecule or chromatin.  Genetics may not be the only game in town though it is the only one we can presently detect.
16. To do: Search for quantum signaling effects upon DNA / RNA. Genetic Central Dogma becomes a sideshow after performing its duties in cell division.  The cell divides followed by quantum effects managing histone architecture for tissue-specific products and process.
17. Try this: intracellular electromagnetic signaling-coding protein synthesis by color. Organelles send and receive signals re: protein synthesis and protein regulation via energy from the electromagnetic spectrum - visual range ( or UV or Infrared).  Green=excite, Red=inhibit, Cerise=delay 5 seconds, mauve=delay 10 seconds, chartreuse=delay two years.  Color combinations have signal meaning like the bands of color on a military uniform theater badge.
18. Do ribosomes detect and interpret electromagnetic radiation during protein synthesis to affect translated properties?
19. Explore: temperature induced intracellular signaling - effects of temperature on Ca2
20. Imagine our 20 billion neocortical neurons with no outer membranes - neural soup with each voxel ( a cubic millimeter) possessing its own designation, like a city name in this globe of smart goo. In each voxel there are 1,000,000 addresses.  signaling between all 10 trillion nodal points suffusing the goo, speeding up thought process by 1,000-fold and our depth of intelligence to infinity.
21. Investigate: Alignment of cascading effects for protein regulation: quantum, followed by electromagnetic followed by chemical, followed by electrical and then reverse this taxonomy of effect.  It is the sequence that creates meaning i.e. the syntax (  order of occurrence)  of causality not the grammar( the meaning) i.e. where this molecule fits.
22. The American home is an arena for the display and use of the artifacts, trinkets, totems and tokens honoring our prevailing myth of consumption: appliances, fixtures, fittings, cars, TV, bed, bedding and towels and factory produced food.
23. Roland Barthes misreads the meaning of bourgeois and petit bourgeois assuming that the characters of the bourgeois myth are willful or under the control of the bourgeois mind - they are not. These reifications of myth ( toasters, ball games) accrue in a culture like the conserved genes of flies ( and humans) with a contemporary residue of specificity.  The core remains the same ol’ - same ol’ structuralist mail slots filled by the mode- O- day thus not a target for disdain. Barthes disdains the bourgeois mind on every page of his “Mythologies”
24. “The intensity of your dudgeon is in inverse proportion to the validity of your case Mr. Lathrop - please calm down - revenge is a dish best served cold.” - Prof. Picault
25. Le Corbusier was the finest Cubist of them all.  He could swallow little Picasso, Metzinger, Gleizes, Leger, Gris, Duchamp - the whole circus in one bite.  Braquasso’s Cubism is “Cezanne for Dummies” The rest of the Cubist circus, save Leger, are copycats.  As one considers the source of Cubism, the case for Le Corbusier’s  preeminence becomes clear.
26. Humans are but a minor cluster of dendrites growing from the universal mind among trillions of other living things. Humans are very late to the party but interesting and destructive guests,  poisoning one another as they burn the place down.  Humans need more conserved genes to manage their neocortex in ways that allow the existence of the others.
27. Note: L.A. is a different place than Los angeles. L.A. is hip,ironic,semitic, gay-ish, linked to New York City and the capitals of Europe.  Los Angeles is the vast sprawl, the 405 parking lot, the beaches, the aircraft industry, the colleges and universities, the endless banal housing, the power lines, LAX, etc.
28. @ Easter - On grief: A Religion with a foundation of grief is sick by definition.  “Good” Christians want to others to share in the Big Grief of crucifixion and they will shove it down your throat.  If you don’t swallow,  you will be exiled, jailed, marginalized.  People unload, or try to unload,  their grief onto others in convoluted, surprising ways.  An originating event, say crucifixion or untimely death in the family, may be 20 years or two thousand years in the past but still moiling like magma.  A trivial request or offhand remark eliciting a response dramatically out of proportion, launching a cascade of ill will, ill effect, illness, awkwardness, embarrassment and weirdness. One struggles to recall the original sadness to explain the envy of the grief stricken for those who don’t bear the burden.  the current toxic vapor stems from an uncontrollable compulsion to share, to unload, to lighten their perpetual unbearable weight.  “No one gets out of this room happy”  “Your happiness is a slap in our face.”  “Your good cheer is an assault that will be avenged.”  Grief seeks entropy.  the gradient between the grieved and the innocent is large and shall be reduced.
29. Myth, like important DNA is conserved and like DNA it is continually mutating.  there is a dialectic of conservation - mutation -synthesis.  the history of science is the story of the dissolution-evolution-transformation of myth.  the history of history is the mutation of the social order.  Gradual on the small scale i.e. barely noticeable frog boiling temperature change in the water we all swim in - the zeit   at the small end and wars and revolutionary Rock groups at the grand scale, WWII, The Beatles.  Conserved myth is language, birth-marriage-death ritual, money, education, religious dogma  Myth up for grabs: music trends, fashion in clothing, professional jargon, comedy, film styles.
30. Atonal music ensures grief - it is a most astringent sound.  Traditional 7 tone music from classical to rock to rap has always made an effort to seduce - there is always a sales pitch at work whether for the Catholic Church or for the latest pop song.  Bach , Mendelssohn, Handel, were great pitchmen for Christianity ( a pun!) There is seduction and sublime sexuality in the Romanticism of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin. In 12 tone music and most other 20th century avant garde music, it’s straight grief -  no chaser.  Take your religion straight like a man.  Taste the bitter purity of Christian redemption, suffering, self-flagellation.  With Schoenberg, Bartok, Varese,Cage, Riley, Reich you become Christ.  You are nailed to the cross at your ears by dissonance.
31. The genes of the human limbic system must be much more highly conserved than those of the neocortex:  The highly conserved - neurochemical-electrical process, central nervous system bauplan, limbic system functions.  Moderately conserved: Structuralist mythmaking re: language, custom.  Up for grabs every day - the higher functions of the neocortex - qualities of sentience, what constitutes intelligence, subjects for emotional expression / repression, one’s individuality.
32. The Myth and the Lie: Myth: Americans are intensely socially stratified, more than citizens of 18th century France or England.  Lie: All men, all Americans, are created equal.
33. the Myth is what you cannot help believing. Myth is your core knowledge about the world, your culture, your entire milieu, your mind - This zeit-stuff controls your behavior at all times. You can’t help it any more than you can think in a language foreign to you.
34. The lie is what you consciously  tell yourself and others in order to align your comprehension of the myth with expressed social norms and religious dogma. The lie is a kid glove for the deadly myth. The glove doesn’t always fit.
35. Without myth there is no movement.  We would be frozen in fear and ignorance.  Without myth we have no model for the world, for our behavior, our belief, our being.  Myth is the matrix for exploration and we have little choice in the matter.
36. Many of Darwin’s thoughts about the mechanics of evolution have been proven wrong or trivial but the myth he created has fueled 150 years of fruitful scientific exploration.
37. So it is with the DNA myth.  No question that it delivers an important function but it most likely does not dominate causality as our myth now asserts.  We must now look elsewhere for deeper answers.
38. Myth is BTN ( better than nothing) Is post-translational modification a myth?  What is the difference between myth and truth.  All truth revolves around its own myth.  Myth is the core. Truth is the following inner layer wrapped around the Myth-core.
39. Is Newtonian mechanics a myth because Relativity holds water?
40. Don’t tell a cement contractor who has just poured a 50,000 square foot foundation slab that the Earth isn’t flat. If you are pouring concrete ( for anything other than the two-mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator) the Flat Earth Myth serves just dandy. If you are sailing to a new world it doesn’t tell the whole story.
41. Totem, Token, Talisman, Trinket are tools for myth reification.
42. We are no longer governed by politicians in Washington D.C. but by tech legions at Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
43. Any system designed by humans in order to make other humans seem to have more meaning to themselves is inherently corrupt ( though often entertaining and often fun! - most corruption is fun at first) i.e. it’s gonna cost you.  It will ultimately do the opposite of what you expected - you expected to be made whole and you were further diluted, obscured from yourself, minimized, put in your place filed away in your bourgeois mailslot - another brick in the wall.
44. To do:  Compare human junk DNA to the DNA of 10,000 species of microorganisms: bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea to see if these microorganisms are using the human genome for their private storage facility - banking their DNA for future use.  Parasitic gene banking. One day they will return to your body and turn you into their private factory.  Keep immune system boosted.
45. Is junk DNA present to the same degree in every single human cell?
46. Is junk DNA simply DNA that is not coding at a specific organ tissue?  What cell type  was being investigated when the “junk” label was applied?
47. “Myth transforms history into nature.”-Roland Barthes…..See: Founding Fathers: Washington and Jefferson have been transformed but  not so much Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe or Marshall.
48. African tribal myth 19th century: “Hey! our ritual works ! We dance, we chant and sick man gets better.  All is right with the world.  Modern scientific myth: “Hey ! our ritual works ! We irradiate and poison patient with chemo and cancer growth slows., sick woman gets better,  Myth functions,  all is right with the world.  In each case the patient was OK for awhile then died-as could be expected.
49. Our myths provide a safety net of shared belief that blots out the cold neutrality of the void.
50. Using a microscope and a diatholizer instead of a chant and a rattle does not mean you are not partaking of myth.
51. Science, like any bourgeois art, suffers from an obsession with detail.
52. One’s myth evaporates with age like the elasticity of neurons, leaving old folks a little sad as they see the fragile skein of their lives and the optimistic jitters of the young, whose myth has yet to coalesce.
53. Madness is seeing through the charade of myth-making prior to old age.  Old people are mad by definition due to the obsolescence of their faded generation's operative myths.
54. Schizophrenics are myth-resistant, thus,.....  out of their minds.  Their neocortexes spare them the effort of either personal myth making or respectfully addressing the myth of their milieu.
55. The Beatles dissolved both the myth of Elvis and that of Sinatra as they dried up the pond of Frankie Avalon, The Everlys, Dion, Neil Sedaka, Dion and the 4 Seasons. The Beatles reversed the signification of our myth of hair and thankfully, the myth that being serious was crucial to being successful.
56. The human neocortex is first and foremost  a myth making machine. The neocortex uses language, social behavior and memory to construct a functional myth that requires deep connection with prevailing mythical zeit.
57. Darwin was a mythbuster and a myth maker. He was great because, while dismantling one myth, Biblical Creation,  he created another, Evolution,  to fill its place.  Darwin’s theory has worked well for 150 years but is proving shaggy in the details.  That organisms evolve is rock solid - all mechanisms of causality are up for grabs with most of Darwin’s notions either disproven or on shaky ground.
58. Bioscientists live in fear of the vast realm of causality that would be laid open if we demythologized the role of DNA in biology’s gene-centered Central Dogma.
59. Don’t sniff your own myth - the tautology will make you delirious.
60. DNA and RNA are to cell function what the U.S. Constitution is to law practice. The Constitution establishes the ground rules that have guided countless legal cases as DNA has for myriad aspects of organ systems.  Think of organ systems as branches of law each governed by a library of its specific case law,  practices and traditions specific to it.
61. The DNA in the nucleus of each cell of our organ systems is a metaphor for the Constitution - the ground rules. Details are organ-tissue specific.
62. Our DNA is “The Constitution” present for reference and use in each of 37 trillion cells in a human body. Procedural details exist in each organ’s own “law library” read: It’s QUANTOME ( JB neologism) A quantome is like a genome but one million times as large, maybe 100 million and comprising quantum effects on nucleotides, cell compounds, elements, atoms, etc.  The word quantome is new not the idea that quantum events affect life process.
63. If ribosomes attached to RER (rough endoplasmic reticulum) are the site of protein synthesis are these RER-secured ribos also the site of post translational modification? or does PTM occur elsewhere,perhaps at other ribos floating closer to their point of use say at the tip of a neuron growth cone.
64. Are GABA and glutamate manufactured at dedicated ribosomes - one for each?
65. Must a neurotransmitter always arrive at the growth cone zone contained in a vesicle or do some arrive free-floating?  Do any arrive via microtubules?  Can vesicles travel within microtubules?
66. Whoever plays the most insufferable asshole or neurotic harpie in the movies is a shoe-in for big kudos and often an Academy Award.
67. Historic disasters exist in the cosmic ether as bubbles of residual energy that can be detected by certain people like an antenna detects a radio signal only it may be decades removed from the source event.  This might explain some of the popularity of Civil War reenactment. Beware of hovering grief.

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Heritable Fracture

March 29, 2015 The focus of life science from ancient Greece to the early 20th is on animals and plants.  The development of the microscope brought microorganisms into the picture during late 17th century.   Botany Zoology and Geology ruled the study of life until the laws of Genetics were discovered by Mendel and much later Thomas Morgan.  The 20th century was the age of genetics, cell biology, biochemistry and informatics. We are now entering the age of biophysics where most significant science will be explored in the realm of quantum effects.  The locus of action goes further beyond the realm of molecules far into forces at the quantum level.

Ancient Greece - early 20th C……..Botany, Zoology

20th Century………………………....Genetics,Biochemistry

21st Century………………………….Quantum physics

Important explorations of the nature of life will be inside the atom and close interaction with sources at quantum level.  See: Luca Turin on olfactory mechanism.

"The Central Dogma" of molecular biology, which states that biological information is transferred sequentially and only in one direction (from DNA to RNA to proteins).

The ramification of buying into the central dogma is that it leads to belief in absolute determinism, which leaves you utterly powerless to do anything about the health of your body; it's all driven by your genetic code, which you were born with.

However, scientists have completely shattered this dogma and proven it false. You actually have a tremendous amount of control over how your genetic traits are expressed—from how you think to what you eat and the environment you live in.

You may recall the Human Genome Project , which was launched in 1990 and completed in 2003. The mission was to map out all human genes and their interactions, which would then serve as the basis for curing virtually any disease. Alas, not only did they realize the human body consists of far fewer genes than previously believed, they also discovered that these genes do not operate as previously predicted.

In the featured article, Eriksen describes the experiments of John Cairns, a British molecular biologist who in 1988 produced compelling evidence that our responses to our environment determine the expression of our genes. A radical thought, for sure, but one that has been proven correct on multiple occasions since then. - Dr. Mercola

“...So, information flows in both directions, from DNA to proteins and from proteins to DNA, contradicting the "central dogma." Genes can be activated and deactivated by signals from the environment. The consciousness of the cell is inside the cell's membrane. Each and every cell in our bodies has a type of consciousness. Genes change their expression depending on what is happening outside our cells and even outside our bodies." - Konstantin Erikson

“ plants don't age in the way that animals do and similarly plants have a way of being able to produce germ cells from their stem cells throughout development and that's another key thing. So plants are much more sensitive to the environment, and the environment might even have genetic or epigenetic effects on the germ cells. This is almost heresy! This is like Lamarck …”  -Robert Martienssen

Eva Jablonka (personal

communication) writes: “We have good reasons to believe

that epigenetic marks can be inherited between generations,

including marks that affect gene expression patterns

in the nervous system. Of course, we need evidence that

this actually happens in the case of human PTSD, but

we do know that the effects of psychological stress are

inherited in mice and rats. It would therefore not surprise

me if we find out that the disposition to PTSD is inherited

via an epigenetic route, and that traumatic experiences

of parents lead to extra-sensitivity to traumatic inputs in

offspring, and this may linger for some generations. If the

effects of trauma are inherited we shall have to find out

for how many generations (this may vary, depending on

genetic background, type of trauma, and the persistence

of traumatic experiences) and whether the effects make

the descendants more prone to develop PTSD. -

• Eva Jablonka via Natan Kellerman -”Israeli Journal of Psychiatry”

Hello Natan,

I just finished reading your paper "Can A Child Remember....." March 28, 2015

It is an excellent summary of current thinking on heritable emotional characteristics.

I am perplexed by two entirely ( vastly) different mechanisms at work under the rubric "epigenetics" and this confusion appears to saturate the field, leading to confusion. Without proper language there can be no understanding for hardcore scientists or any enthusiasts.  At present the language of epigenetics is clouded, clotted, inky, obscured, confusing - perhaps it's just me.

In one sense (appearing to be the most broadly established in the traditional scientific community detailed in countless papers published in respected scientific journals in a dozen fields of bio-science during 15 years of hardcore research ) -To this community of scientists,  the word epigenetic refers to a vast realm genetic modifications during the single life of a single, specific individual organism plant or animal, bacterium, virus, fungus that cause a particular gene to become expressed one of many possible chemical  responses as a result of life encounters with specific phenomena Allow me to call this LIF( for lifetime)-Epigenetics -LIF Epigenetics

The second realm of epigenetics involves Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characters between two adjacent generations - parent-offspring and second, third, fourth generation expression of that acquired characteristic.

LIF-Epigenetics is a Big F-ing Deal !!  It contradicts the heart of Darwinism, it contradicts  the guts of Neo-Darwinian Dogma that reigned throughout the mid to late 20th Century.  It contradicts Natural Selection, it contradicts Random Mutation, it contradicts Darwin's key External / Environmental causality.  As you may recall, Lamarck was subject to derision throughout the 20th century for his "foolish" idea that giraffes had long necks because of his "cornball" assertion that the stretching of giraffe  necks to reach high foliage was passed to offspring. Lamarck was derided in my biology textbooks as Darwin was deified.

As we know, there is now a great deal of hard science published in respected journals that supports the notion of heritable traits. Allow me to call this realm of epigenetics INH( for inherited)-Epigenetics - INH Epigenetics.

LIF epigenetic gene expression-specialization is common in all tissues -ovary, testes, retina,  brain, heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, adrenal gland, epithelium and LIF-Epigenetics has its own TWO LEVELS  hierarchical levels of causation (LIF- ONE: embryonic stem cell differentiation-expression) and (LIF- TWO): specific gene regulatory events during organism lifetime stimulated by specific environment)  Organism genes have the potential for a wide vocabulary of potential expression-regulation. Environmental conditions, psycho-social events initiate and lock a certain switching pattern ( methylation, phosphorylation, etc.) i.e. differential expression not only at level of organ system during embryonic development but within a specific organ system say Hearing - cochlea-auditory neurons types I and II and the audio cortex are subject to culture-specific epigenetic modification.

Example One Lif-Epigenetics: The auditory cortex of a Chinese person is patterned to enjoy 5 tone music, the Persian ear-24 tones, the Western ear - 7 tones from early lullabies to pop music in each region, these musical patterns are epigenetically developed in the types I and II auditory neuronal pathways at the auditory cortex i.e. a Chinese baby if it heard western music from birth would have the 7 tone system epigenetically imprinted.

Your papers cite many examples of INH-Epigenetics.

I find the two papers you have written fascinating.  The entire realm of epigenetics, either LIF or INH variety, is intensely interesting and INH epigenetics is a paradigm shifter that may replace Darwin on his pedestal with Lamarck.  Epigenetics frightens people.  It frightens scientists.  Any scientist who develops a case that calls Darwinism into question scares themselves and colleagues.  It took Stephen Jay Gould 1,300 pages of hemming and hawing and pussyfooting to suggest that Darwin's favored level of continuous, gradual causation for natural selection- the individual organism,  might be replaced by Gould ( and Niles Eldredge) idea of punctuated equilibrium at the species or clade level, not the individual level.  Dissing Darwin is dangerous - it can derail serious careers - put a person in the realm of nutcases.

This fear of contradicting Neo-Darwinism infects epigenetic science and the reason my two distinct realms are now always piggybacked - one ( INH)  is wild-ass career wrecker and one(LIF) makes perfect sense and has been experimentally proven for decades.  To separate epigenetics into my two distinct realms LIF ( OK   ) and INH (hmmm-this guy/gal's eccentric).

It boggles me that we still have only one word for these two realms of genetic modification.  Each with vast implications - as vast as Darwinism itself in the Mid-Late Victorian era and to this day.  There is a lot at stake here.

Your papers mix and match the LIF and INH very freely thus, though deeply compelling, still carry the common confusion.  This confusion saves careers in science and the professions so it is understandable though lamentable in the spirit of truth and clear thinking.

At this point, there is too much hard science to support your strong thesis for heritable nightmares and you use a towering, indisputable example in the Jewish holocaust.  To support your assertions you could very easily include 2,000 years of Jewish persecution - a long trail of heritable genetic modification.

If you have not read "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" by Stephen Jay Gould I strongly suggest it.  You are on the verge of your own Evolutionary Revolution and a bit of background on others in your position during the past 150 years will be helpful.  Hang on -  it's going to be a bumpy ride.

A few editorial items:

1. " past ( passed) their 60s..."

2."seeing a tattoo remind(S) them..."

3.  No "ed" at manifest - the "ed" is implied in my experience here in U.S.A.
4.  You use the word "coating" in both papers as in "Chromosome coating" to describe causality for inherited emotional trait - the word coating implies that the entire gene ( 35 cm long DNA molecule) or the entire chromosome has been covered in some sort of chemical syrup thus modifying it.  I suggest a different word that might more easily convey that just a single gene or small group of genes are participating in this epigenetic trait i.e. a few hundred thousand base pairs not 171,115,000 base pairs as are present on say chromosome #6.  Perhaps  " tag" or "mark".  There may be a specific term from genetics for this.
5.  "allusive" i.e. alluding to - perhaps "illusive" ( involved in illusion - misreading)?
6.  Might re-think the "DNA genotype as hardware and RNA phenotype as software"-Maybe OK for high school analogy.  there are so many organelles and molecules involved in phenotypic expression that to single out RNA appears dicey - not up to standard of thought-knowledge in rest of paper.  i.e. If an amateur like myself can see that it's shaky then your scientist audience may have issues.  Sometimes a small detail like this would cause a realm of influencers to shake their heads.  Histones, ribosome and RER chemical composition and timing may have more to do with phenotypic expression than RNA.
7.  The last few sentences beginning with "clearly however..." then advising skepticism about power of thought  muddies your fascinating paper - no need for warnings or scolding - hey ! if a wild Darwin knee-capping idea like INH epigenetics holds water why couldn't the power of thought modify one's genome?

As for dismantling Darwin don't miss "Microcosmos" by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Warm Regards,  Jim

March 29, 2015

Hello Natan,

Thank you for your careful and very thoughtful reading of my paper "The Ugly Gene"  It was refreshing to get a second opinion.  Your points are excellent.  I'm throwing a lot of spaghetti against a wall that may or may not be present.

Intensely interesting to think about your essay and to try to help develop a clear language so that you can keep these revolutionary thoughts in order.  As for your omitting the paragraph re: TTT - only a good idea to omit because the language is still fuzzy. When you get the terms organized and ordered then certainly revisit this idea as it is at the core of your thesis

I have a suggestion that will help me to think and discuss your idea.  Let us each provide a few term to this discussion of these two key pathways at the core of  the matter.

TTT - Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma: DNA mutation that is heritable ( example: a germ cell chromosome in a female Buchenwald prisoner's ovum had one of 1,200 genes ( the gene that directs anxiety thresholds in the amygdala ( limbic system) undergo a post translational modification via phosphorylation while standing in line at a gas chamber.  This woman's anxiety was so intense, her fear was so deep that a torrent of adrenalin flowed into every cell in her body including her gametes-ova-sex cells.  This overload of adrenalin caused this woman's Amygdala Fear Response Threshold Gene ( AFRTG)  to violate its rules of evolutionary conservation and three base pairs  were modified  when a phosphorus atom bonded with a hydrogen atom- at a base pair-at a codon on a DNA molecule ( a gene)  - at a chromosome - in the DNA -in the chromatin -  in the nucleus of her germ cell - Her ovum DNA has now been LIF-EPIM.  ( LIFetime only-EPIMgenetic mutation/modification.)   along with 37 trillion of her cells - i.e. every cell in her body was subject to adrenalin overload.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_transduction#/media/File:Signal_transduction_pathways.svg

BECAUSE THIS WOMAN'S OVUM WAS SUBJECT TO MUTATION AS WELL AS COUNTLESS OTHER CELLS SHE IS NOW CARRYING  A TTT-EPIM  in her eggs as well as LIF-EPIMs in billions of other cell nuclei - DNA throughout her body has mutated but only the DNA in her eggs will be inherited by her children and only through the typical roulette of genetic inheritance.  One of her children might inherit the gene for amygdala fear threshold regulation from a very happy father while another of her children inherits her gene carrying the trauma effects.  This second child will have a mutated AFRTG and be more susceptible to anxiety throughout his life.

The Holocaust survivor is now living in Tel Aviv.  It is 1950.  Her ova are all carrying the TTT-EPI mutation AND all of her cortical neurons and all of her Limbic neurons and all of her 200 million gut neurons and every cell in her body is experiencing some effect from her holocaust trauma.  It is only her AFRTG that is heritable.   Her limbic and cortical neural pathways are hardwired with nightmare memories of Buchenwald, her reflex response to authority figures is not normal, standing in lines causes anxiety,  etc.  Her hormonal balance is  permanently changed by her camp experience - these are her own LIF-EPI effects that will not be passed GENETICALLY to her children but may be passed on to them during their lives via LIF-EPI processes as the child senses his mother's relentless anxiety about a wide array of life experience.

To do: Follow the germ cell ( 10,000 careers in research) for "Nature" - TTT-EPIM

To do: Follow the effects of parental behavior on children  ( 1,000,000 careers in research) for "Nurture" - LIF-EPIM

It appears that research  the realm of LIF-EPIM is now well represented in several branches of biology -embryology, biophysics, biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience etc.

The entire realm of Post Translational Modification is LIF-EPIM process.  The word epigenetics is used freely among these scientists.

The realm of heritable traits i.e. TTT-EPIM is still a minefield.

The 800 pound gorilla in the living room here is that if any one of a person's 37 trillion cells can be affected during the individual's lifetime by the behavior of a parent by any number of post translational modifications then that person's germ cells are among those 37 trillion..... so....any LIF-EPIM via post translational modification can theoretically be passed on to one's offspring through the affected germ cells.

Our body tends to clear itself of the great majority of LIF-EPIM as cells divide.  Because most neurons do not replicate and because a woman's eggs are all present at birth - these cells are different than the vast majority.

The neuron LIF-EPIM remain throughout one's life and must be addressed.

The egg LIF-EPIM  are TTT-EPI heritable genetic mutations.  Women are far more likely to carry LIF-EPIM due to longevity of eggs thus to pass on a wider array of trauma by Mendelian laws of inheritance without resorting to the many ways a mother can influence a child through her behavior palette. An ovum records the blows of life for many years and may pass these effects on to children - a sperm stores experience for only 48 hours then new recruits arrive.

Have faith that NOTHING is beyond your understanding and certainly no aspect of your topic until perhaps it arrives at quantum mechanics or string theory causality.  It is a complex but penetrable idea and you have expressed it more clearly than any I have read to date with your  powerful and revealing subject matter - the Holocaust.

TTT  turns Darwinism on its head which is VERY big deal for trained scientists and the entire educated population of the Western world.  One could easily lose standing in the intensely competitive and ferociously rigorous ( to a fault) realm of traditional science by getting on board with TTT-EPI too soon.  You are a brave explorer here.  Feel free to invent terms that help your case - after all - throughout history that's what every pioneer has done.  Stephen Jay Gould pulled "Punctuated Equilibrium" out of his *** and now it's in all the textbooks and papers on evolution.

A problem with de-throning Darwin in the U.S.A. is that it immediately opens one up to charges of being a religious fundamentalist who does not believe in evolution at all and thinks God created the world in six days 5,000 years ago - ugh.  Contradicting Darwin can be a third-rail here.

I was thinking you might apply for a grant to study your thesis of TTT-EPI.  Perhaps a drosophila or mouse " holocaust"  with ( excuse me for making somewhat light of a subject that doesn't work too well with light) thousands of flies or mice subject to traumatic conditions then breeding and examining for  inherited effects on their amygdalian / primitive fight-flight response.  It seems like all lab primates experience an ongoing holocaust of sorts - perhaps compare and contrast primates from the wild with lab monkeys for AFRTG effects.

Big questions:

1.   Does all LIF-EPI end up in a woman's eggs thus become heritable?
2.  How does the body sort out the LIF-EPIM that will be stored in germ cells from that which is discarded.

Your idea gives rise to 1,000 avenues of experiment.  Your two papers that I have read could be foundational documents for the work of a generation of bio-scientists.  Your big challenge at this point is to go into this herd of ideas like a cowboy rides into a big herd of cattle and select a few cows at a time and explore, clarify for yourself to the best of your ability ( and Google).  At present it is a revolutionary herd of ides that will excite a generation.  You are the Darwin for a new paradigm - be fearless - in the words of American Founding Father Aaron Burr.

"The Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained."

All Best,  Jim

Questions from notes March 23 thru March 28, 2015

1. Perhaps non-coding DNA, let’s call it TUN DNA not “junk” DNA is a warehouse where 1,000,000 species of bacteria and viruses have stored their own DNA for future use in humans or elsewhere.  Some of it is going to make us sick or  kill us. One day, when the owner comes to collect his “stuff” from his evolutionary storage shed.    In humans 98% of the DNA in our genome is non-coding.  In bacteria only 2% is non-coding.
2. JB neologism - HMP for Histone Modification Pathways: methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation, ribosylation, ubiquitination,citrullination etc.
3. Are cilia at the tips of olfactory receptor cells dendrites?
4. The neocortex evolved, increased in size in response to greater pressure for better cooperation - substitute “increased social harmony with greater capacity to endure social atonality.
5. One makes a living in society by finding a gradient and reducing it.
6. Is there a protein in a tree or any plant that measures strain ( deformation in inches per pound per square inch of force) under the force of gravity - compression on one side of the tree that sends a grow signal to opposite side of tree in order to balance entire mass of tree with new growth?
7. Is there ribosome signal relay across the neuron soma using electromagnetic quanta effects or other cells?
8. A molecule may be changed ( like anything) by addition or subtraction.  A thing is very particular about what it will accept as an “add-on” but any number of forces can subtract, damage or destroy:  activation by addition, activation by subtraction, damaging via bending, re-folding, breaking apart.
9. Cezanne was revolutionary because he courted ambiguity in his interpretation of pictorial space.
10. “There is an overload of intention in bourgeois art” - Roland Barthes
11. “In bourgeois art there is intimidation by detail.”  R. Barthes
12. “It is by the scope of his transformations that a man measures his power.” - R. Barthes
13. “The great bourgeois task: to reduce being to having.” - R. Barthes
14.  “On plastic: For the first time in history artifice aims for the common.” - Barthes
15.  JB: Duchamp and Warhol were to fine art what plastic is to material - privileging  the ordinary.
16. Ubiquitin irregularities - cancer etiology - must be an army on this
17. See: “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment” - Frances Yates
18. Do wiggling tails of sperm strike dendrites at increasing rate and force as they mature causing intensifying effects at limbic or cortical region?
19. Test TTT(Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma)-Epigenetics w/ drosophila holocaust.

• 4:08 pm

Gametic Embryology

March 22, 2015 “The Biogenetic Law is a theory of development and evolution proposed by Ernst Haeckel in Germany in 1866. It is one of several recapitulation theories which posit that the stages of development for an animal embryo are the same as other, less complex animals' adult stages or forms.The Biogenetic Law, commonly stated as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, theorizes that the stages an animal embryo undergoes during development are a chronological replay of that species' past evolutionary forms.”

Stasis IS data

Rejection IS selection / creation

Less may or may not be MORE

Species level selection carried out via the mechanism of art critic

The art critic visits bohemian art ghetto and selects only one of 1,000 painters to write about, to celebrate and in so doing redirects the course of art history.  Each of the 1,000 painters is creative, they are all testing their individual strength in the face of their environment using inborn and acquired gifts / skill every day and night  as Charles Darwin would expect in their struggle for survival but it is this external force of the influential art critic at his/her higher taxonomic level who is doing the culling, the selecting. It ain’t natural.

Questions:

1. At what point is a fertilized egg capable of receiving new information from its environment?
2. Does a mother’s mood affect the DNA or other polypeptides in her ova. Would her teenage depression affect her germ cell DNA?  Would her depression during pregnancy affect the DNA of the zygote-blastula-fetus?  Is a mother’s depression heritable by her baby?
3. What array of chemo-electrical signals does a neuron receive independent of its specific neurologic function?  The basic functional menu for each of two types of cells: a.  Those that reproduce until death of individual or late years b. Those cells that get reproductively switched off, i.e. do not reproduce i.e. no new cells during all of post adolescent years- neocortical neurons.
4. JB idea - rename “junk DNA” to “Tun DNA”  Tun DNA is used at neurons to store memories / knowledge using standard epigenetic histone modification pathways: methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation, ribosylation, ubiquitination, citrullination, phosphorylation, etc.
5. Re: golgi apparatus - How is delivery address for vesicle contents exiting the trans face of the golgi apparatus “read” through a translucent or opaque vesicle membrane? Is it read from the surface of the membrane? Is the address label read by chemical or electrical means?
6. Is there any significance to where a protein-packed vesicle exits the golgi?
7. Is there any significance to when a protein-packed vesicle exits the golgi i.e. its elapsed time of final assembly and logistical activity within the golgi apparatus?
8. Do different proteins under production at a single golgi exit in different ways?
9. Do several different proteins get manufactured at single specific golgis?  Say one for GABA, a different golgi apparatus for glutamate logistics and one each for cell regulatory functions re: glycolysis, CO2 removal?
10. What causes RER ( rough endoplasmic reticulum)  to rotate slowly around the centroid of the cell nucleus?
11. Does the movement of the RER reverse direction in the southern hemisphere? does this affect genetic expression re: more marsupials? or poisonous snakes?
12. Does the slow rotation of the RER play a role in the distribution of ribosomes throughout the 360 x 360 x 360  degree  sphere of influence in the cytoplasm?  as it delivers new ribosomes throughout the X-Y-Z axis  of the soma?
13. What mechanism controls the velocity of the RER layered sphere surrounding the nucleus?
14.  If there is one protein for each one of 500 different pitch levels in the cochlear membrane of the inner ear,  are these proteins all made in the same cells i.e. can one cochlear cell manufacture all 500 different pitch proteins or are different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum produced in separate arrays of cochlear cells?  Is there one ribosome type for each of these 500 different proteins? or does a single ribosome type create all of the different proteins?
15. Golgi apparati get broken down into hundreds of vesicles at mitosis and then reassemble into edgerton layers after cell division is complete. Do golgis still perform any protein packaging function when in their dispersed phase?  For instance supplying tubulin for microtubule fabrication at metaphase / anaphase?
16. Upon reaching maturity do the chromosomes in a neuron break down into chromatin and remain in this condition for forty more years, or 20 or 60 years with half of them unravelled and half still wound tight around their histones?
17. What is the percentage of DNA that a  neocortical neuron must unravel to perform its lifetime functions? There appears to be a lot of dormant DNA in a specialized nerve cell - say at olfactory bulb or cochlear membrane.
18. Experiment: Exchange DNA in a mature neuron from a fifty year old human into both sperm and egg.  Inspect for lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics in offspring.
19. Rejection is creation - organism failures in their environment fuel natural selection
20. JB neologism: Kodalithic:  All tonal variation is abstracted to black and white from the 50% gray tone - half to white, half to black.
21. Once a neuron synaptic receptor becomes filled do neurotransmitters get backed up at the transmitting nerve end.  Do neurotransmitters crowd together like a pushy crowd at a bus stop at the synapse and cause problems due to overload?  Vacuoles fail to evacuate fast enough
22. Has the entire range of dendrite tip geometry / topology been catalogued? i.e. pointed, cupped, hemispherical, donut,  etc. What are the tip geometry distribution ratios among our one trillion dendrites?
23. How are different signal processing functions related to dendrite tip geometry?
24. WTF are dreams?  Dreaming dissolves barriers between all knowledge of the physical world and its inhabitants and all behavior and re-assembles it into new stories about people you have never seen in places you have never been, architecture styles from another world,  all rendered in 100% veracity of form and movement, voice and gesture as well as storyline, plot development, outcome.
25. Dreams reconstruct reality creating an alternate reality for ten minutes to an hour - why?  To keep neurons in shape, warmed-up, ready to act-react to next day’s challenges or middle of the night challenges from midnight marauders i.e. many neurons are locked and loaded at all times.
26.  Dreas prevent the collapse of one’s world picture into brain soup during sleep - heart beats 24/7/365 brain must be alert 24/7/365
27. “I dream therefore I still am”- JB
28. In the absence of dreams,  neurons break down causing schizophrenia, nervous breakdown, loss of self in daytime.
29. Do GABA containing vesicles travel from soma to end of axon via microtubules? or do they need more room and flow toward end in space between microtubules and axon membrane?
30. Why bother with inhibitory charge at presynaptic zone? Why not simply ignore, leave it alone i.e. no input?
31. Do dendrites of different types of brain cells transmit using different action potentials?
32. Could a single neuron respond to ten different action potentials and sort out the sources for each?  How about for three or three hundred?
33. What would be the mechanism for such sorting? is there a gene for it?
34. Does increased rate of photoreceptor electrochemical events ( isomerization) not only stimulate retina but also trigger adrenaline, oxytocin or some other excitatory neurotransmitter at a region of the brain remote from visual cortex? say at the amygdala.  Question is raised re: sexiness of impressionist paintings and their vast popularity - is something at work other than typical eye-brain connections at work during most painting observation?
35. If a single neuron can last for forty or fifty years what components of the cell get replaced and when?  All components all the time?  Stasis at neurons may be a misreading, a misunderstanding.
36. All cells in the human body get turned over every 7 years.  does this include neurons?  What does it mean or matter that there are no new neurons after age 18 if every one of 10 billion of them gets replaced in its entirety on a regular basis until death.
37. How do memories get replicated in new neurons or other brain cells?
38. Is a memory a base pair array / sequences or some chemical attached to a codon(s)?
39. Does the membrane temperature of a dividing cell rise higher than normal in order to affect the lipid bilayer of the cell outer membrane?  The nuclear membrane?  the mitochondrial membrane? vacuole membrane?
40. Does a cell ‘take out the trash” i.e. empty all vacuoles containing cell impurities, by-products, decommissioned protein prior to mitosis?
41. RE: culture - We gather around the campfire and each of us adds a small chunk of stew stuff to the steaming pot. It all adds up.  No need to rank any of it.  Remember to stir up the old stuff at the bottom of this yeasty gumbo once in awhile to review and re-use grandmother’s  old swerve on what you might imagine is a new idea.
42. Do dendrites or axon terminals ever penetrate the membranes of neighboring neurons to increased, more direct effect? or might this penetration be an illness - weak cell wall, penetration, misfiring, haywire at neural neighborhood?
43. DNA doesn’t grow - it multiplies.  The molecule is the same essential scale whether in a bacterium or a blue whale.
44. Termites, once grown do not grow any further - they multiply - they diversify their colonial roles.
45. DNA size/amount  is approximately constant through long expanses of geological time.  At one time in primordia  ( JB neologism for billion(s) of years ago) DNA molecule was smaller but the organism was simpler i.e. human was a proto-rat, a fish, a sponge, a bacteria colony, a free-floating protist, a mass of free-floating polypeptide DNA, simply RNA, lipid sheets, blastulae of fat, carbon atoms, quarks.
46. At what point in a lifetime do most  useful mutations occur? Are they life-phase specific?
47. Do mutations that might help fetal growth occur while a fetus or when we are eighteen or twenty eight?
48. Are all potentially beneficial mutations simply down the drain if they occur after age 18-40?
49. Couldn’t any histone modification pathway -  HMP ( JB neologism)( methylation, phosphorylation etc.) initiate a heritable mutation?
50. What is the site of most histone modification? At nucleus? At RER? At Mitochondria?
51. Since mitochondria are involved in vital cell energy production perhaps it has more HMPs than nucleus?
52. Isn’t RER really an integral part of the nucleus given how pores at RER and nuclear membrane must interact, line up, coordinate? RER as a very thick nuclear membranous enclosure?
53. Is gestation a natural realm for natural selection to play out?
54. Organism as spandrel (unavoidable, inherent, leftover stuff -  see: Stephen Jay Gould) that results from the evolution of the all-important, vital, central DNA molecule.  Evolution is all about the DNA molecule not the organism.  Organisms come and go,  DNA has been around since life’s inception. DNA is life!.  All plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea and viruses are just so much interchangeable, frangible, fuzzy stuff compared to this gooey indestructible, self-serving core of all life - the DNA molecule.

Note:

“The difference between bacteria and protists is founded on the complexity of a cell's organization. The cellular organization of bacteria is particularly simple -they do not have membranes binding their nuclear material- and for this reason they are also named prokaryotes ("before-nucleus"). The cellular organization of protists is more complex -they have a membrane-bound nucleus (and other organelles distinct from the cytoplasm)- and they are therefore called eukaryotes ("true-nucleus"). Animals, plants and fungi, being derived from protists, are also eukaryotes.” - Yahoo Question site

55.  DNA sends out its avant garde: probes, hairs, feelers, fingers; armies of organisms  into the sunlight across the surface of the Earth, above and below the earth and oceans in order to reduce the entropic gradient.  Genomic variety is no more than the mix n’ match of superficial addenda to the core DNA - Life is a vast array of experiments each in its own way,  investigating options for improved entropy.
56.  Considering protein that governs metabolic timing. Is there a single master gene that gives rise to many signal variants generated by epigenetic activity- HMPs -  phosphorylation etc., or are there 100 genes that code for metabolic timing - “Do it now!” “Do it later!” “Do it again and again!”
57.  Does each organ and each gland have its own specific gene (s) for metabolic regulation or does each of the different types of tissue produce its own specific array of metabolic regulators at the liver-kidneys-heart-brain-adrenal gland-testes, bone marrow from a master gene or master on-switch protein shared by all with organ-specific chemistry initiated by epigenetic events peculiar to each organ?
58. How / when did this aster gene evolve? Is it conserved throughout the entire animal kingdom, all living things? What are sponge homologs to kidney metabolites? Are they the same metabolic pathways? Krebs cycle etc.
59. Are kidney metabolic pathways still susceptible to mutation / improvement by natural selection or symbiosis? Does natural selection even work at this level at this time?
60. How would tiny improvements in the Krebs Cycle be manifest in a tiger attack on a water buffalo or during an encounter with another tiger during mating season? i.e. How would such fine chemical procedural distinctions even show up on tiger radar for selection or rejection-extinction amid so much more dramatic activity with such a multitude of variables at larger scales of causality. Wouldn’t minor evolutionary adjustments to ATP metabolism get lost in the shuffle?
61.  Oh! this generation of tigers has the abc mutation that accelerates the conversion of pyruvate to acetylCo- A, that pyruvate decarboxylation is delayed now for five nanoseconds or the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase is early to the Krebs party, the two electrons that are removed from pyruvate don’t make their exit as soon.
62. Are these micro-nano mutations going to affect whether a river dries up and no zebras show up to be eaten or grass is more rigid thus slowing attack launch of tiger.
63. There are 10,000 factors involved in whether or not the tiger eats on time.  There must be some other evolutionary mechanism at work doing the “selection” even if epochal timescales are at work. This selection must be at non-individual levels of the taxonomy i.e species- clade or gene-quantum.
64.  Is the Krebs cycle at work in a 5 day old fetus? 5 week? 5 months?
65.  Which gene codes for the Krebs cycle?
66. Mandelbrotian causality of taxonomic hierarchical realms of selection.  How many animal characteristics have been selected against prior to organism birth? 90%, 5%, 99.99%?  Look at birth as Sewal Wrightian speciation with gestation as the “valley” phase and birth-subsequent life as the plateau.
67. The active zone of natural selection is tertiary i.e. minor - see: Darwin's finch beaks, domestic animal breeds, corn kernel coloration - All key components and their processes are ferociously conserved i.e. not in play for any evolutionary forces. Nature doesn’t  mess with a good thing.
68. JB neologism: Genota: The combined genomes of all things that ever lived;  extinct genota referred to as E-genota,  present day living things plant, animal, bacteria, virus, archaea, fungi referred to are P-genota or Present Genota.
69.  does the fetus of an insect or reptile appear to recapitulate its phylogeny as appears to happen in mammals?
70.  Tree analogy: Big old Tree is conserved DNA - leaves occurring and dying annually are organisms.
71.  How might a valuable mutation become shared by all living things in 2015?.
72.  How long would it take for a new metabolic epicycle that provides a 2% increase in ATP efficiency to work its way from gorillas in which the mutation occurred down and up to all animals and plants i.e. to become useful and then conserved in the genes of ten million species?  Is this even possible? for useful traits to trickle up, down and sideways?
73.  Has nature shut the door on any further kingdom-wide improvements on metabolic process?
74.  Would it be a virus’s job or a bacteria’s job to read this good metabolic news at the gorilla mutation and copy it - spread it among 1,000,000 species around the world?
75.  It would be interesting if this metabolic breakthrough worked great for 75 % of species of plant and animal and wiped out the rest as they suffered disease not benefit.
76.  what if genes at retinal cells began to switch on digestive genes that are normally switched on in the stomach and  eyes gets digested?  Has this ever happened? Genetic mis-reading.
77. Where is the nucleus in a sperm cell? Where is the RER? does the sperm cell manufacture protein on its journey to the egg? or additional mitochondria for swimming energy? There must be a lot of mitochondria at sperm.
78.  Perhaps the colors on butterfly wings are spandrel effects of totally unrelated neuronal signalling.
79.  Neuron DNA phosphorylation stimulated by butterfly response to humidity also affects the expression of the chitin chemistry of wings, reorienting crystals at the wing in geometric zones / patterns to create color differences none of this related to mating.  Who knows?
80. 80. What creates a permanent circuit in the brain? what makes a path well worn? made stronger?
81. What do Malcolm gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice physically change in the brain cells of the neocortex and other brain locations?
82.  To do: Explore reverberation across an entire neuronal population resulting from the clustered action potential firing i.e. waves of effect as they diminish moving away from the neuronal source.

. “Memory is the dynamic state of the brain circuit.” Dr. David Tank - Princeton

Question:  What is “Gametic Embryology”?

Answer: I still don’t know….but searching for a meaning launched a few questions.

*

Response Time

March 12, 2015

In a dynamic and self-organizing state,  open-endedness is most pronounced at the point of bifurcation: the critical or singular moment when a system has the potential of entering one or two or more available states.   - Nigel Clark

Painting, Architecture,Literature, Dance and Theater were invented to reduce the anxious gradient between the dionysian joy, passion, terror and sublimity of nature and civilization.

The arts are analogous to life;  both are meant to reduce gradients: for life, it is the gradient between solar energy and cosmic darkness, for art it is the gradient between the terrifying freedom of nature and the somewhat benevolent prison of community.

A Hollywood maxim purports that one can measure status in the entertainment industry by measuring the elapsed time between placing a call and having it returned. Spielberg calls and his call  is returned within a minute.  If you are Mary Schmo you  wait for months and probably until you stop caring,  i.e. you do not exist in Hollywood.

If you call your new honey and she returns your call in a minute or two,  you might think less of her - was she hovering by the phone?  Is she needy?  If she returns your call in half an hour or in a few hours - all’s cool - you’re still a happening couple.  If she waits until the following day or two or three,  she is sends a message across her ocean of silence that howls like a rime-encrusted banshee:  “minimize this man”   Timing carries a heavy freight of  meaning in all things: embryo development, protein synthesis, house building, watercolor painting and human relationships.

In a growing fetus, the brief window of  time during which neurons emerge in the head are, of course,  critical.  How does the fetus know when to start making brain cells, when to differentiate them into their respective 160 brain regions,  each with its own vital function?  Is there a clock?  Is the clock in the mother’s chemical messaging?  Is the clock inside the placenta or outside?  Are those extra genes on that longer second Y chromosome regulating fetal development?

Timing is crucial in all phases of all orders of  life.  The sequence of events in living cells is measured to the femtosecond in all of them.  If the timing is off,  a less than ideal message is conveyed, perhaps a disease is initiated, a mutation, a shock to the system, a seed is planted.  Humans have 100,000 unique proteins each with a specific time-sensitive function. You wouldn’t call in the finish carpenter before the wiring is installed.  You wouldn’t frost the cupcakes before they are cooked or while they are piping hot.  Imagine a kitchen at a fancy restaurant where there are 100,000 ingredients in play 24 hours a day - each playing a role in a nutritious,  flavorful menu.That a substance exists or words are spoken is an armature but useful meaning is a product of timing.  See: Good Timin’ - Jimmy Jones - 1960

Information is timing.  “Stasis IS data”.  The brain had to evolve before the neocortex

When the scientific establishment in a  specialty gets excited by a new discovery or theory  they go into kill mode not out of hostility,  but out of love, excited that the new idea may be true.  They must test the idea and its bearer with loving blasts of doubt, derision and denial.  The  author ought not take offense at this natural testing process-the world is rooting for you and your new baby.  See: All paradigm shifters: Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, McClintock, Margulis.

Questions:

1. Is RER (rough endoplasmic reticulum) a constantly moving conveyor belt? does it revolve around the nucleus in a clockwise direction north of the equator and counterclockwise south of the equator?  Does this movement have an effect on phenotypic expression?
2. Do proteins under construction at the RER shift to more than one location once at the RER? as pieces in an assembly line?  Or does the entire matrix of RER move to drop off proteins at the golgi apparatus or when just sending them on their way outside the cell?
3. Why do scientists refer to the K-Pg extinction ( meteor @ Chicxlub 65MYA) as a catastrophe when it threw 10,000 doors wide open for the evolution of mammals?  It was a propitious event for many.
4. If the moon had not broken off from the earth due to meteor impact and the Earth still contained the moon’s mass - would life have evolved on this much heavier planet?  would this greater mass have changed Earth’s orbit diameter around the sun?
5. We should breed several new species of bacteria, archaea and viruses that could create an atmosphere on Mars as they did for Earth 3 billion years ago and turn the red planet green.
6. Might some of our “junk” DNA be DNA stored by ancient and more recent  viruses in our genome for activation by relatives of those viruses when revisited today and now manifest as transposons/jumping genes?
7. Did Gene Vincent or Gene Autry know of Gregor Mendel or of Crick-Franklin-Watson?
8. Quantum effects in biology are like a geared sphere the size of a pea spinning at the speed of sound in 10,000 directions in constant contact with a larger geared sphere the diameter of Earth orbit around the sun - the nucleotide.
9. DNA is the alphabet, proteins are the words,  the individual is the work of fiction, the individual’s interaction with the total taxonomic hierarchy of environment is the author from the cosmic ray to the Milky Way.
10. I love the way nature says: “OK - Let’s roll with it!   A frog, cougar, pine tree, human, praying mantis or squid then she pulls out ALL the stops for 100 million years if necessary to ensure its success.  We end up with a lot of weird animals and plants but by god they work !
11.  Can neuronal cortical input be transmitted to inguinal neurons and mutate this DNA into heritability?
12.  In a toxic environment for bacteria and viruses all of their DNA, formerly highly conserved, gets thrown into play - it is now loose, accessible, mutations occur and play out in the toxin - one of ten million survive - let’s go with it !  Onward.
13. Do golgi apparatus work in both directions to assemble proteins travelling away from the nucleus and dis-assembling them back to reusable aminos and nucleotides as they migrate or get sucked back toward the nucleus?
14. Do ribosomes shift once they travel from the cell nucleus into the RER or do they move within the cytoplasm via whole continents of RER drifting? or both?
15. RE: NEURONS - Does the point at which incoming signals arrive ( dorsal, ventral, caudal, distal) affect the nature of the neuron’s response i.e. its outgoing signal? If so by what mechanism? How does it distinguish in order to send the correct neurotransmitter.  Where in the cell is the array of neurotransmitters stored?  Are they floating free near the open end ( say nucleus is the brain) of the synaptic microtubules and axonal microtubules or do they just float around anywhere between nuclear membrane and cell membrane?
16. If there are up to 100,000 inputs to a single neuron, then the neuron must count these and locate stochastic locus of origin of these signals in relation to location on neuron membrane in order to prepare proper biochemical response via phosphorylation, methylation, pseudouridylation to send to ,RNA to RER to Golgi to microtubule end - up the axon to terminal/growth cone.
17. How do neurons count / measure incoming signals? tally them up? as to rate, volume ( frequency of occurrence) amplitude ( strength of electrochemical signal, etc.?
18.  Is this counting-measuring performed at neuron nucleus? At RER?, SER? Golgi? or other location?
19.  How does a neuron know which of hundreds of neurotransmitters to produce?
20.  Does single neuron register pain as well as pleasure?  sweet as well as sour? loud as well as quiet?  hard and soft? rough and smooth? fight or flee? etc ad infinitum.
21.  Bottom line: Does it matter where on a neuron’s global surface its geography a signal arrives from beyond the neuron?
22.  Do neurons form school’s like herring or locusts and work in unison?  Do they use electricity or chemistry or both?
23.  Can a signal be sent away from a neuron back out the dendrite? or are ALL outgoing signals through the axon?
24.  Can a synaptic terminal at end of axon shaft receive signals?
25.  IDEA:  If incoming nerve signals cluster at lower-right rear quadrant of neuron then “X” molecule is prepared for transit up axon, if incoming signals aggregate at upper left front then this neuron prepares ( using alkylation) neurotransmitter “Y” from this quadrant’s assigned menu of  W, X, Y, Z
26.  Does the point of impact on neuron’s membrane geography determine which neurotransmitter is sent and its amount?
27.  Do neurons send signals, either electrical or chemical using other than known neurotransmitters?
28.  Is any signal that crosses the synaptic gap by definition a neurotransmitter?
29.  How many different neurotransmitters are named?  Are they all proteins?
30.  Is all neurotransmitter transport up the axon via microtubule?
31.  Does the neuron nucleus move within the cell?  does this movement relate to any protein activity - synthesis, de-construction, delivery to axon?
32. Do adjacent neurons have awareness of one another only via dendrite contact?  Any signalling via membranes touching?  they are jam-packed in all cases ver very tightly - never as shown in diagrams all spread out like fingers of a hand.
33.  Does the location of the nucleus within the neuron affect the products of a particular cell? or rate of production of anything -protein, lipids?
34.  Are neurons in cerebral cortex stacked top to bottom i.e. skull to center? how many layers of neurons?  just one or 100,000 ?
35.  When does the last neuron in a chain of neurons receive the messsge?  what is its response time? knee-jerk quick, pull hand from red hot stove quick, call from gf-return call - slow
36.  Are all neurons voltage-gated ion channels?
37.  Do all neurons use sodium, calcium and potassium to control action potential?
38.  How can dendrite morphology be shaped by intrinsic programs with the cell’s genome if it is still a stem cell?  what starts the neuron development ball rolling in fetus?  an adjacent organ?  the mother?
39.  How many golgi bodies in the average neocortical neuron?
40.  Axon terminals must touch dendrites  if they are so densely packed unless there is some magnetic force repelling them.
41.  30 billion neurons in human brain with 1,000 synapses each for a total of 30 trillion synapses
42.  Does action potential arriving from one side of the neuron have to travel all across the cell and through all stuff to reach the axon?  or does it travel around the surface of the neuron avoiding the intracell congestion?  somehow guided to the axon - how would the incoming signal know the shortest route or does it matter?
43.  Are all ribosomes in a given cell identical? if not…
44.  How many different types in the typical neocortical neuron?
45.  One ribosome type for each one of 10,000 different proteins?
46.  Can the function of a single ribosome be changed during the life of a single neuron?
47.  Are ribosomes the seat of most  heritable genetic mutation?
48.  Are ribosomes the seat of epigenetic program for a neuron’s function
49.  Is GABA produced by a specific type of ribosome i.e. one ribo-one product?
50.  Easy to get “mandelbrotted”  (JB neolog) while researching - Russian doll syndrome - the internet rabbit hole / rabbit warren of information links
51.  Could a chunk of fresh neurons from a young child be installed in a void in alzheimer’s brain and begin to function?
52.  Do tissue cells other than neurons use microtubules for protein transport within the cell?
53. Sad to report:  discerned from drippy “Plant Intelligence” by Stephen Buhner.  Now that the terms psychedelic and psychoactive have been stained by proven idiots like Timothy Leary et al and subsequent widespread disparagement of entire hippie, drugs as path to enlightenment project,  there has emerged a new term for the same old shit: “neurognostics”  god help us all.  The neurognostic crew has also hijacked the term Gaia and tainted it with their toxic swarm of new-age claptrap divorcing it from honorable roots in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s writing.
54.  We need a word for a three dimensional web, a spherical network.  How about a Gleb, Sphweb or Beb?  Think globular spider web - to describe things like Internet global connections or while-earth webs of causality.
55.  How will the Earth restore its biomass once the rainforests and northern evergreen forests are gone?
56.  Perhaps our entire universe is a gradient reducing entity between a verrrry hot place we have no knowledge of and truly empty space - no dark matter, no stars, no gas, no nothin’
57.  I wonder why humans and other animals have such small roles to play in their own lives?  What do animals actually do? eat, fight, reproduce, die with most behavior driven by instinct.  we seem to be along for a wildly complex and stunningly beautiful ride but mostly as passengers, very minor players.  the heavy lifting is done automatically and it’s taking 200 years and millions of smart people to figure out what happens inside a single cell.  OK, we’ve spouted consciousness to enable us to even ask this question.  Living stuff may be inanimate - why animate anything?  What’s the point?  does animation accelerate solar gradient reduction?  The onset of entropy?  Couldn’t this be achieved by non-life? say a cork-like rock?
58.  Do humans do one single positive thing for the planet after entertaining themselves and generally screwing things up? Many of our “greatest”  minds have been enablers of the greatest destruction: Einstein, Bohr, Fermi.
59.  Does methylated always mean switched off?  i.e. not active in cell for duration of particular cell’s life.  can methylation be reversed in the life of a single kidney cell?
60.  Is it methylation that keeps a kidney doing kidney functions and a liver doing liver things?
61.  Do methylation or phosphorylation control or affect in any way instinct or behavior learned or otherwise?
62.  Is OCD syndrome a behavior controlled by motor neuron post-translational modification  irregularities?
63.  NOTE:  More methylation = less cell activity.
64.  Are the nerves activated in nose hair pull pain the same as those used for smell?
65.  There are 200,000 neurons in the human gut. Is gut post-translational modification at gut initiated by bacteria or viruses?
66.  Are certain gut microbial translations related to particular stages of digestion?
67. JB experiment: 1.  Get a vat of human liver cells 2.  In sequence - add post-translational modifiers  3.  get liver DNA to produce fresh neurotransmitters as if the liver cells were neurons...or….does a specific organ cell’s genome become completely deactivated upon its maturity.  If so, could it be re-activated?
68.  Is the electrical signal set along the axon to vesicles specific for particular neurotransmitters?  i.e. voltage level “Alpha” means serotonin, voltage A+1 = acetylcholine, X=2 = dopamine etc.
69.  Does memory involve some factor ( molecule or group of molecules)  shifting to long term storage in a new brain location - the memory locker zone or does the memory remain in the neuron cluster where the external-real-world event was registered?
70. Is all memory epigenetic?
71.  What is memory?  Is it a stored rearrangement or addition to base pairs at DNA or RNA?
72.  Is there specific RNA at neurons to store memories?
73.  Does each sense organ have its own zone for storage of its memories? i.e. music, smell, sights, emotions
74. Is there a base of olfactory knowledge - inborn instinct that enables olfactory distinctions i.e. to distinguish rot from food - must not be learned knowledge.
75.  There must be fields of sensory instinct neurons that are immediately accessible for registration / comparison / judgement and action.
76.  Does smell- taste sense matters of proportion related to the golden mean .618:1.00 or to the fibonacci series? or some mandelbrotian sensation of order? as exists with sound and vision ( music and architecture)

Response time is a fundamental aspect of all cell function, all life function.  He was a day late and a dollar short.

A large part of anyone’s good luck is a fine-tuned sense of timing.  Making microseconds matter in all human interaction, all business interaction.  Successful Wall Street brokerages relocate their sales force from Manhattan to New Jersey  to be closer to warehouse in new Jersey containing servers for stock transactions in order to save nanoseconds in computer-driven financial transactions.

A human brain is larger than a chimp brain so the human can make timing judgements crucial to success in a fundamentally stratified social order.  One in which a person can be relegated to the bowels of a lower class due to a poorly articulated phoneme.  “He comes in late with the suffix on his chesterfield, he’s not of our school” therefore no promotion, no bonus, no kids to Eton, life goes completely to hell.

The lower taxonomic levels in our hierarchy of causation are inaccessible but for theory.  Who knows what is happening when a UV ray strikes a carbon electron?  One can only guess.  Things change.  we  see one in a million of these changes as it is manifest at much larger orders of scale.  We live in a world of atomic residue - the aftermath of an ongoing storm that dances through the cosmic keeping immaculate time.  We live in the pink crust on the inside of the cotton candy machine with our growing understanding of the fluff of life.

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Evolution Of Instinct

March 1, 2015 Instinct is species-wide built-in behavior - automatic, no need to think too much about it, It is hardwired, it’s just there - deal with it, you will be getting a lot of help from parents, teachers, co-workers, friends and siblings throughout your life.  Animal instinct evolved for an array of reasons across 3.5 billion years.  Our current set of human-centric  instincts have proven roadworthy for 65 million years, since we were rats .  The genes that code for instinct are conserved i.e. they change very little over eons.  Any attempts to mutate are dealt with instantly and harshly.  Conserved also means that these genes for instinctive behavior are shared throughout thousands of species of animals and plants.  Fill in the blanks for your language specifics, acknowledge the existence of your relatives, respect those with more social clout, note your God of choice and worship it, tell stories about your origins in deep time, make art, music and dance, find a mate, take care of the kids, fight or flee.  Education among humans is filling in details of instinct specific to one’s cohort, club, swarm, pack, gang, class.  Find a belief system and show  respect, pay dues, show the signs and hopefully you won't be ejected from your group. Humans share a strong instinct to cut the tall poppies, marginalize the “other”, If someone is not strictly  with the tribal program they are by definition “mentally ill”. isolate them, silence them before they infect the tribe.  See: Catholic Inquisition, Protestant sectarian violence in the age of the Puritans Quakers, Baptists, Hugenots of 17th century Europe.

Animals, especially humans,  have an instinct to innovate, to risk, to explore, to find a rule and break it, to walk the line, the razor’s edge, to explore outside the box, the envelope, the comfort zone.  Hominids evolved in Africa and spread across the biosphere.  There has been a lot of exploration mixed with our hardwired conservative tribalism.

There is a hierarchy of hardness to our instinct wiring - some things are more ingrained than others, more pliable, flexible, mutable, variable.  It is this mutable behavior that is unique to humans,  or so it seems without going Garciorrea ( hippie new age unscientific woo-woo speculation-a conflation of Uber hippie Jerry Garcia and logorrea) with the assertion  that humans have no traits not shared by plants, fungi or any animal. Let’s say that our ability to rationalize, use tools and make plans are unique to humans - a pre-Gaian notion but just for argument’s sake. The Gaia paradigm, that the Earth is a single organism, makes  sense. The new-age fringe sap it up. Cue the George winston muzak.

The  tribal population ideal is a hard-wired instinct.  At numbers greater than 80 there is lack of leadership and thus lack of  tribal cohesion. The likelihood of some young Turk able to knock off the chief becomes too great. Chief turnover isn’t good for tribe strength leading to success in battles with neighboring tribes or in disputes requiring wisdom, stealth or the ability to engage in Machiavellian behavior.  That 10% who never get the word becomes too many wayward, potentially rebellious or otherwise dangerous souls for tribal health.  Before efficient communication and government systems emerged it was 80 persons max, then 160 then 1,500 then 5,000.  As communication and administration evolved, viable group size expanded.  we now have groups of global scope.  From 4.5 million to 5,000 years ago,  when village population critical mass was reached, a new cohort of young people was sent away to take root elsewhere, to start a new village, allowing a new leader to emerge.

A chimp size cortex is fine if no Machiavellian behavior is afoot - It takes a lot of high-level brainpower to outsmart other humans. That single genetic mutation resulting in the doubled cranial capacity was put to immediate use and conserved, though strange at first, it was no defect.

Tribal leaders emerged as a result of intense intra-tribal competition between males - duels to the death, relentless maneuvering, showboating, constant spending on potlatches, celebrations, gift exchange.  He who gave the biggest parties with the fattest roasted pigs and yams eventually became the chief.  People reward  generosity and respond with enthusiasm to free food.

The human cortex evolved to its present large size in order to sort out the avalanche of social cues needed to compete in human intra tribal social competition and village defense from other humans; any odd men out were consigned to the wilderness. Social skills, the ability to read body language, to get with whatever program was in style was a matter of life or death though life was, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, ”solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Humans - the only species to attack its own kind just for the hell of it. The healthier and stronger the tribe the more frequent its attacks on neighbors.

Two primary questions.

Number One:  Why are humans so poorly served by their instincts today?  We have devastated the environment for all plants and animals in ten thousand ways and continue to do so at an alarming rate.  When any species of plant or animal becomes extinct, the entire biosphere suffers,  humans suffer.  When a forest or a bacterial or viral  biome is destroyed, life giving oxygen production is negatively impacted.  This is not news.  We poison our food, our water and one another.  What instinct,  if any, drives  this global destabilization?

Number Two:  If humans have such marvelous brain capacity, why do we allow global environmental destruction to continue?

Secondary questions:

Is Capitalism, The Enlightenment Project, Judeo-Christianity,  a cancer on humanity, all life? on the planet?

Are humans the cancer?  the disease itself?

If so, can the disease cure itself?

“The Earth has a disease -  humans.”

Humans now need to make an evolutionary leap regarding our instincts.  A colossal pivot must occur in human behavior immediately or we are doomed.  99% of the Earth’s individual organisms will not even notice that we have left the building.  Humans may live in every corner of the globe but our actual  numbers of human individuals are a rounding error in terms of organisms on Earth.  We have been grossly insensitive for 200 years.  The piper must be paid.

Current manifestations of instinct in America:

1. Desire to own property
2. Desire to get married
3. Desire to raise a family
4. Desire to fit into a community: Church attendance, sport or music event attendance, theater, dance,movie attendance, dining out, art museum, science museum attendance,
5. Elections: a social ritual designed to raise collective serotonin levels permitting moderate swarm function in humans in order that we may select leaders that will hopefully serve community, state and federal interests in a hierarchy of causality.
6. participating in avante garde or avante garde lite: art, music, dress, tattoos, speech.  What is “heavy” avante garde today? Probably not art-making which has become very mainstream - a career path with hierarchy more rigid than career progress up the corporate ladder at G.E.
7. securing old guard-garde: Poorly modulated capitalist-Industrial-banking behavior, military spending, free ride for the One percent, gun rights, acknowledging Ted Nugent, flag-waving, unhealthy diet, respect for predatory institutions though a victim of them all.  Old Guard security is active at all socioeconomic levels.
8. What is at the root of Capitalism? ( if it is a part of our cancer) Property rights, Inviolability of the Contract, the Newtonian-Mechanistic paradigm, the Descent of the Grid.

Overpopulation is reversing the epochal intention of much instinctive human behavior resulting in untenable enviro-catastrophe. Instincts that served the organism well over eons now have the opposite effect. Instead of helping us, they are causing our extinction.

Can we blame instinctive human-mammal-animal-organism instinctive behavior for our demise or is it  simply the mathematics of over-crowding,  of excessive numbers derailing our relationship with nature,  reversing the meaning of much of human behavior - instinctive or learned.

The tipping point for human population on Earth has been reached.  If the rainforests and the northern evergreen forests are destroyed, which appears imminent, the Earth’s aerobic bacteriome will be forced to multiply in an effort to restore atmospheric oxygen balance and in so doing mammal immune systems will be overwhelmed by bacterial variety and numbers.  Mammals are on Earth exist in light of  bacteria and viruses’ good graces as we help them fill some of Earth’s niches - if one of us “higher” animals misbehaves, goes rogue ( as humans have already done) - it’s curtains for us all .  But only a  minor mass extinction as mass extinctions go.

Innaism: A philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge therefore the mind is not a “blank slate” at birth as empiricists such as John Locke claimed.  Innatism assets that not all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses.

Nativism:  Grounded in the fields of genetics, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, nativists hold that certain beliefs are in some way genetically programmed to arise in our mind - that innate beliefs are the phenotypes of certain genotypes that all humans have in common.

What if the extra 21 billion brain cells in our unique  neocortex turn out to be a big evolutionary misstep and we have filled nature’s marvelous gift of added brain space with destructive nonsense independent of instinct and common sense?  It is only a very small gene sequence that gives humans our neocortex rather than the chimp’s much smaller brain. A slip up 5 millions years ago that separated humans from our innate mammalian good sense and launched this cosmic hayride called civilization.

Questions:

1. Do colonies of bacteria or colonies of virus get cancer or other diseases?

1. Is 250 years of Western science any more than heuristics?  tools for learning about the real deal.
2. When did the chromosome as an integrated structure evolve?
3. When did autonomic brain function evolve?  How?
4. Do mitochondria have their own golgo apparatus enclosed within the mito-membrane?
5. When did calcium ion process / mechanism evolve in hearing?  In vision?  what were its precursor forms?  Did it evolve all at once or gradually as Darwin would have it?  did this calcium ion process have a previous unrelated function and get re-assigned?  does it exist in bacteria or viruses or archaea?
6. How many rigorous chemical, photo-chemical processes such as the Krebs Cycle that are now vital, begin as nature’s horseplay to be harnessed later?
7. Why would DNA molecule EVER team up with histones? Is this a form of symbiosis or parasitism?
8. Is there a difference between symbiosis and parasitism? Was all currebnt symbiosis once parasitism?
9. Has a plant ever evolved into an animal or vice versa?
10. Are worms just highly evolved chromosomes?
11. Yin-yang-animal / plant
12. Yin -yang - animal / climate
13. Yin-yang - animal / air chemistry
14. Yin-yang mandelbrot: trending yin, trending yang  A cascade of trends - as in human history or crummy urban neighborhoods, whole cities
15. East SF Bay - broken membrane between rich and poor
16. Menlo Park and Palo Alto: membrane intact  (though permeable) via septum highway 101
17. Organism as an entire ecosystem - a Margulis theme
18. Does any living thing infect a virus?  Are they home free so to speak?
19. Might there evolve a directly sentient plant i.e. plant with cerebral cortex?  We know plants have some sort of large brain already
20. What was birth order of DNA molecule and other polypeptides and organelles? Can we get within one hundred million years on this?
21. Do viruses of different species enter into symbiosis/parasitism with one another?
22. If so, where might we find such organisms?  Ha anyone looked for them?
23. Have three, four, five or more different virus species ever formed a colony?
24. Do viruses have swarm-non swarm capability like the locust?  Do bacteria?
25. Are there any candidates in the human bacteriome for a role as a new organelle?
26. One that filters out stupidity in neurons?
27. Humans harbor thousands of species of “good” bacteria.  Do we also harbor “good” viruses.
28. Can the same bacteria or virus that is typically “good” go bad?  How many human bacterial symbionts are neutral for the most part i.e. take ‘em or leave ‘em?
29.  Are cholera, TB, whooping cough, tetanus,syphilis, bubonic plague, leprosy bacteria present in our bodies at all times but inert?
30. Are one or two or all them engaged in constructive roles until they go bad?
31. Are we invaded by these pathogens or do we carry them 24/7 with our white blood cells and other immune mechanisms keeping  them inert? or perhaps even providing useful proteins or catalytic services in certain cells?

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The Noble Hox

February 20, 2015 Nobility is a social class that possesses more conferred or acknowledged privileges or eminence than most other classes in a society, membership thereof typically being hereditary.  The privileges associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles, or may be largely honorary ( e.g. precedence), and vary from country to country and era to era.

Historically, membership of the nobility and the prerogatives thereof have been regulated or acknowledged by the monarch or government, thereby distinguishing it from other sectors of a nation’s upper class.  Nonetheless, nobility per se has rarely constituted a closed caste; acquisition of sufficient power, wealth, military prowess or royal favor has occasionally or often, enabled commoners to ascend ( descend-jb) into the nobility. - WIKI

Hox Genes ( aka homeotic genes) are a group of related genes that control the body plan of an embryo along the anterior-posterior ( head-tail) axis.  After the embryonic segments have formed, the Hox proteins determine the type of segment structures  e.g. hands, legs, antennae and wings or different types of vertebrae in humans,  that will form on a given segment.  Hox protein thus confers segmental identity, but do not form the actual segments themselves.  In many animals, the organization of the Hox genes of the chromosomes is the same as the order of their expression along the anterior-posterior axis of the developing animal.  Wiki

“The 1995 Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine;  Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, Eric F. Wieschaus,  are developmental biologists who have discovered important genetic mechanisms which control early embryonic development. They have used the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as their experimental system. This organism is classical in genetics. The principles found in the fruit fly, apply also to higher organisms including man.

Using Drosophila,  Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus were able to identify and classify a small number of genes that are of key importance in determining the body plan and the formation of body segments. Lewis investigated how genes could control the further development of individual body segments into specialized organs. He found that the genes were arranged in the same order on the chromosomes as the body segments they controlled. The first genes in a complex of developmental genes controlled the head region, genes in the middle controlled abdominal segments while the last genes controlled the posterior ("tail") region. Together these three scientists have achieved a breakthrough that will help explain congenital malformations in man.”

Hox genes prevent your lung from flapping below your tricep, your head from being reversed with a kidney. The Hox genes establish our ground plan, the fundamental rules of the road and rules for all bilaterally symmetrical animals including insects, reptiles and mammals.  These genes are highly conserved i.e. they are the same in tens of thousands of species and have been conserved over hundreds of millions of years.

Hox is an idea comprising inviolable, defining instructions that cannot be ignored without a freakshow.  Using Hox as a metaphor, there is a cascade of levels of cause and effect in my life as follows:

1. Western  culture: Greek-Roman-Medieval-Enlightenment-Modernism-Postmodernism
2. Judeo-Christian, Deist
3. American materialism - commodification of everything
4. Liberalism and other myths
5. My personal values: be creative, work hard, study always, don’t follow leaders - watch the parking meters

Are these five items really a cascade in that they affect one another in important ways in  sequence from top to bottom or are these a hierarchy of things that may have outside causation rather than cascading causation by adjacency? First assuming a cascade followed by a non-cascade, more random causation. If a cascade then my Western culture has directly informed my Christianity, American materialism etc.  If a non-cascading hierarchy then I might be a born and bred liberal citizen of the West, of Christianity but have a powerful streak of Puritanism from a grandparent or parent who missed the liberal train.

So much of our selves are Hox generated, i.e. intensely strict, no room for experiment, play, revision.  why would we think we have free will on the tail end of this severely disciplined  cascade of humanhood: our bodies, our sensory mechanisms, our innate instinctive behavior? - after the elephant it’s turtles all the way down.  Perhaps what we see as free will is just the wiggle of a cilia at the tail end of a  billion regimented cells.  Sure we have a bit of free will,  sure we can exercise it,  but to what end?  does a person ever do anything that is not determined by our larger colony? by the collective need expressed by the collective hierarchy?  If we did perform this unique act wouldn’t it be ignored?

Root Hox

The Protestant Reformation as a re-assertion of Old Testament Judaic ideals into the fabric of the incipient Enlightenment into a Western culture softened by Papal ritual or disgusted with trials of Inquisition.

Catholicism  Papism - The Church had gotten too Greek ( all puns and ironies accepted) too sensual, too temporal in its art and architecture and literature.  It was no the paying of benefices or listening to Latin that torpedoed the Pope in Northern Europe but the laxity of it all, the sensuality, the beauty, the lofty, inaccessible holiness of it al  the Church had become spectacular.

Effects of The Scottish Enlightenment on the Victorian Zeit. i.e.

Blakescope Invention Proposal:

A very high resolution microscope for viewing real-time intracellular activities on a Sony-esque jumbotron with stop action image-capture capability

1. Use Large Hadron Collider for cell imaging
2. Use Hubble Telescope for cell imaging
3. Use Cray supercomputer linked array for cell imaging
4. Use Imax-Omnimax-Jumbotron  tech for cell imaging
5. Step-1 aquire CADD 3-D models of all known human proteins or Drosophila proteins  or mouse proteins
6. Step-2 Build a CADD 3-D model of a neuron with analogous organelles and other structures throughout
7. Step-3  Look at a living neuron that has had several proteins stained or tagged with each tag signalling its big cell model analog.
8. Step-4 Observe cell structures interact in real time
9. Use a different stain for each type of atom in the cell: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen
10. Stochastic re-resonance - scan the feld and watch DNA unzip at uncoiled histones in real time
11. Use digitized organic molecules: DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA, miRNA, all 20 amino acids, 1,000 most common molecules
12. Identify carbon atoms only in each of the CADD models of the above molecules, 8 positions per molecule: ventral, dorsal, coronal plane, cranial, caudal, sagittal plane, transverse plane, etc.
13. The supercomputer cross checks its view of the living cell via its carbon-tagged atoms and then search database followed by the projection of the whole molecule onto the jumbotron screen
14. Using color, abstract graphics one sees in real time when DNA-RNA interacts - read, copied, protein assembly at ribosome, protein at lipid zone, crossing through the cell wall at proteinic site.
15. The whole thing is stochastic i.e. best guess in the spirit of Feynman
16. Print stop-time frames at femtosecond intervals to study chemical events at nanoscale - get close, guesstimate
17. Use Hubble tech for clarification strategies for fuzzy images
18. Study neurulation, migration, proliferation, differentiation at neural crest stem cells
19. Skip the microscope-Cray assembly and wire the scientist’s brain to imaging equipment @ protein level for real-tme view of cell activity.

OUT OF THE BLUE:

20.  Perhaps our Solar System is in an elliptical orbit around the Milky Way black hole center and when it is nearing apogee and the black hole event horizon there is more catastrophe at Earth causing major extinctions.

21.  Perhaps the dinosaurs were poisoned by the iridium from bolide ( comet, meteor, whatever)  itself prior to Earth’s  loss of photosynthesis from smoke cover, etc.

22.  Is iridium toxic to vertebrates?

23.  Perhaps Chicxulub bolide ( 65 MYA) caused tidal wave only thus dinos living near prehistoric shoreline near jungle plants got dosed

24. RE: essay #1 “The Ugly Gene”  John Ruskin tried to undo the negative effects of The Protestant Reformation on english esthetics - he failed.

25.  Teddy Roosevelt was John Ruskin reified  ( to reify means to make an abstraction real)

26.  Philistine: A person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts or who has no understanding of them.  In ancient history, the Philistines were  Israelites most dangerous enemies.

27.  To begin to get a handle on the complexity of the Hox gene ( any of a group of genes whose function is to divide the early embryo into bands of cells with the potential to become specific organs and tissues) assign four body zones with major cities: the head is Boston, the trunk is New York City, the arms and legs are Philadelphia, the internal organs and glands are Washington D.C.

28.  Track the growth of these cities over the past 200 years as if replaying the Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny scenario with the cities in their current expanse representing the organ fully developed doing its a job.  There are far more things happening in a single human brain than in all of the physical components of boston.  Assign one brain zone and its function to one place in Boston and its urban-social function.

29.  Review the current applicability of David Marr’s theories of brain function: computational, algorithmic and physical levels.  See: MIT Vision Group

30. See: “Neural correlates of Consciousness” - Crick, Koch

31.  Matthew Arnold on poetry:  “The dialogue of the mind with itself.”  “Escape from the prison of consciousness”

*

Taxonomic Gearbox

February 13, 2015 People divide reality into categories,  hierarchies based on origin in time, relations in space, levels of complexity, etc. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Iconic-pioneering-paradigm shifting Swedish taxonomist- botanist- zoologist, developed a system for classifying living things,  by their observable physical characteristics,  in a nested hierarchy that has evolved from his 18th century  “Linnean Taxonomy”  to our current “Scientific Classification”  It is an evolving system incorporating new information revealed by genetic studies.

A single organism is currently a member of at least nine  different levels of this Scientific Classification:  Using the dog as an example, starting at the broadest category that also happens to include the organisms eukaryotic bacteria, slime and molds - Eukaryota: organisms with a nucleus in every cell.

Dogs:

Domain……..Eukaryota

Kingdom…....Animalia

Phylum……...Chordata

Class………...Mammalia

Order………...Carnivora

Family…...…..Canidae

Genus……….Canis

Species……..Canis lupus

Subspecies….Canis lupis familiaris

Note: In the Linnaean - Scientific  system currently in use,  the first of the two names of the organism is always capitalized, the second of the two is always lower case and the latin name is ALWAYS in italics - Canis lupis, Homo sapiens

Most people associate Charles Darwin with the Victorian Zeitgeist solvent,  that Monkeys and humans are very similar - note the following quote from a 1747 letter:

“It does not please you that I’ve placed man among the anthropomorpha, perhaps because of the term human form but man learns to know himself.  Let us not quibble over words.  It will be the same to me whatever name we apply.  but I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that follows from the principles of natural history.

I absolutely know of none.  If only someone might tell me a single one!  If I would have called man a simian or vice versa I would have brought together all the theologians against me.  Perhaps I ought to have by virtue of the law of discipline.”              - Carl Linnaeus-1747 in a letter to critic Johann Gemlin

A human comprises quarks, atoms, nucleotides, amino acids, molecules, cells, organs, organ systems, a body and mind, each with a definite boundary (or not), a family, a social group, a community, a city, a county, state, nation, a continent, a hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, Milky Way, our nebular cluster, our Universe, each one, a level of the taxonomic hierarchy, all equally important.

Linnaean system stops at the organism level on the lower end and at the upper end with single cell organisms. A bit confusing when imagined as a ladder.  A ladder with the same stuff at the top and the bottom is perplexing.  It might be more clear  to use a ring or a mobius strip as the heuristic rather than a ladder for the  taxonomy of living things as we arrive full circle with small stuff at each end or, if a circle,  the starting point.  We need names for the lower as well as the higher levels so that we may discuss them in evolutionary terms.  It is tedious and confusing these days as each scientist  uses his or her own peculiar array of terms for the taxonomic levels of causality and the associated components within each organism.

Taxonomic Symmetry - Top and bottom - “The Blake Addenda”

I propose the following names for levels descending from the Species  down the taxonomic ladder to  the Radus and up the ladder from the Domain to the Radus.  I have added ten levels to the bottom and the same ten new levels to the top of the ladder. The new terms  represent the same things at each of the two ends-symmetry.

Genus…….as known

Species…..as known

(continuing down the taxonomic ladder) ( and up beyond the Domain)

1. Orgum….. organs in a single body
2. Cellum…...cells within a single organ, cells throughout an organism not  protists
3. Cromum... organelles,chromosomes (as physical entity w/ DNA, histones etc) golgi structures, endoplasmic reticulum rough and smooth, ribosomes, etc, etc-not proteins
4. Protum….. DNA molecule,  all proteins, peptides, polypeptides, lipids, etc
5. Genum…..individual genes (as parts of DNA affecting one another) and immediate intermediaries within process of protein synthesis and cell metabolism
6. Parum…....base pairs in position at DNA
7. Tidum…... nucleotides not at DNA molecule - free-floating
8. Unitum….single atoms composing a molecule or free floating
9. Nucum…..particles that exist within the atomic nucleus: quarks, mesons, pi-mesons, leptons, gluons, bosons, etc.
10. Wavum..…..particle or wave of radiation @ electromagnetic spectrum that enter the nucleus during lifetime of an atom

A mutagenic cosmic ray that launches a new species could strike at any level of the taxonomic hierarchy  from a free-floating quark to any component at any level of an organism.  A quark direct strike would have a different effect than a strike that first hits a carbon atom then a quark or nucleotide-carbon atom-quark or human skin, organ, cell nucleus, chromosome, nucleotide, carbon atom and then quark.  So we must have a name for each level of causation or confusion reigns.  The cosmic ray intervention might occur in a symbiont or parasite having evolutionary effects on the subject organism - there are many many pathways to mutation-evolution.

Without new categories added to scientific taxonomy, it is a chore to discuss the causal effects of one level of living ( organic, pre-organic) matter on another.  One has only  a yeasty broth of confusion with every theorist using his or her own batch of terms-that must be defined and clarified and specified and customized anew in every single book on an important evolutionary subject. Scientific hog-slop is the result.  This is seen at its muddiest when reading hundreds upon hundreds of pages of Stephen Jay Gould trying to make a case for his bold swerve away from Neo-Darwinian dogma up to species level evolutionary causality in his towering tome “The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory”  and even more so in the convoluted intensities of Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”.  both men have fascinating insight into levels of evolutionary causation  that becomes confusing for lack of simple taxonomic  terminology.

Going back in evolutionary-Lyellian  time one proceeds from large animals to smaller animals to microscopic organisms to anaerobic bacteria in primordial soup to pelagic amino acids to a world of only  molecules of sulphur, hydrogen, methane to dust particles orbiting the sun in bands like Saturn’s rings over 5 billion years ago

Note an interesting correlation moving UP the taxonomic ladder to more inclusive groups of animals and plants classified by their  visible structures:  the larger, more inclusive taxon, gradually  includes  SMALLER things.  At the highest current Linnean level, that of  the Domain are the single cell organisms ( eukaryotes, prokaryotes and archaea)   Now!  using The Blake Addenda, continue UP the taxonomic ladder.  Note that categories expand their scope, their coverage of invisible Earthly stuff  as smaller things with far earlier origins come into view.

Domestic dogs evolved half a million years ago

Rats evolved 100 million years ago,

Sponges 500 MYA

Free floating amino acids arrived 4 billion years ago

Atomic molecules coalesce of Earth from orbiting dust 5 BYA

Quarks emege from The Big Bang 13.5 BYA

So, you see, we need twenty new taxonomic levels ( 10 at the top and 10 at the bottom) in order to describe /discuss the evolutionary interrelations between all  levels.  Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins made careers out of adding a single taxonomic level apiece modernizing The Theory of Evolution.  Dawkins’ gene-centric theory and Gould’s  species-centric.  With these two notable scientists duking it out in the captain’s tower,  it’s not difficult to extend their powerful but convoluted arguments to the whole shebang throughout and at BOTH ends of the taxonomic ladder - to the bottom, wherever that might lurk,  as well as the top,  as we seek levels more inclusive than those traditionally mentioned. Currently, the taxon most inclusive of all organisms is the Domain.  I propose ten levels up the Linnean ladder beyond the Domain and these are the very same ten levels below the Species and Individuals level.

As one can see, the stuff from the very highest realm of my proposed extended ladder is all around us.  It is the stuff we are all made of, quarks and all,  We live in a world of primordial stuff,  as has been noted by others.

Neither linnaeus nor Darwin knew of things smaller than a single cell.  Now that we have tools for studying subatomic particles there is no reason not to admit the evolutionary causal effects of ALL realms of the Taxonomy on one another as well as their equality.  Gould, Dawkins and Kimura have made tight cases for extending evolutionary causality to those beyond the  Neo- Darwinian level of the individual but until now, we did not have a taxonomic lingo for such discussion.

In deference to Japanese scientist Motoo Kimura- Neural Theory of Molecular Evolution - 1968 let’s call the group containing Chromum, Protum, Genum and Parum -all together as  Kimurum when discussing these levels as one.  Kimurum is non-Darwinian in its causality so strict Darwinism must be restricted to the activity of organisms in their temporal environment, ecosystems at real world scale.  Darwinian details of evolutionary causality don’t hold up well under either Dawkins or Gould’s theories and dissolve altogether at the Kimurum sub-gene levels.

There are trillions of events per second at the quark level, billions at the atomic level, thousands at the nucleotide level, hundreds at the cell level, dozens at the organ level

several at the organism level.  One a day at the species level, one a month at the genus level, one a year at the phylum level, one per millenium at the Kingdom level.

These zones of causality are all interrelated, each with its immediate neighbors and each with all others in a boggling network of effect.  The neural network of the human brain is a micro-model of this all-cosmic realm and style of information-swapping  All levels are linked to one another just as the gears in a gearbox.  Think of the action of the quarks on orbiting electrons as a gear the diameter of a pea meshed with a gear the diameter of the Earth.  the pea is revolving at hyper speed, the Earth is crawling.

The gearbox of organic causality.  Effects up and down the amended taxonomic ladder.  Small things creating big changes.  small events adding up over time for big effects.  Small drive large - large drive small - intermediate drive both ways up and down.  Events within a cell effect one billion atoms in that cell and also the organ system in which it acts thus the body, the family, the society, the race and the biosphere.  The Butterfly Effect.  There are no small moves.

At the top end of this taxonomic system the protists are free-floating, towards the bottom end most protists live within animals and plants in symbiosis of one degree or another from mitochondria to food digesting bacteria in the gut.  Imagining the entire history of evolution as a large, wide cylinder, larger animals form a thin film on the outside of a vast tub of microorganisms that in turn sits in a large pond of microorganisms.  Sub-atomic particles are the end units at the lowest rung, hidden inside each organism.  Sub-atomic particles are ALSO the end units at the TOP beyond the Kingdom and Domain floating free in the earth, the ocean, the air and beyond in their new categories: Tidum, Unitum, Nucum and Wavum.

Questions:

1. What is the message of this top / bottom taxonomic symmetry?
2. At what levels of this hierarchy does life happen?
3. Is it really an hierarchy or some other system of organization that defies hierarchical order?  Perhaps a mobius
4. Are large animals in the middle of a ladder?
5. Are large animals a zone in a ring or a band on a mobius strip?
6. Are large animals just another node in a global 3-D network?
7. The heuristic of a taxonomic ladder has large flaws.
8. Are there really no “levels” at all - just one large entity - Gaia?
9. At what point in evolutionary time did the population of bacteria reach its maximum?
10. Was bacterial overcrowding the reason large animals evolved - to carry bacteria into previously unfriendly territory
11.  It would be interesting to classify all living things with DNA only - nothing more and see what shakes out.
12.  We know that solar and cosmic radiation causes genetic mutation, is there internal radiation coming up from the sub-atomic particles that causes genetic mutation?  Internal vs external radiation or re-radiation from deep within  cell nuclear components
13.  A UV ray from sunlight strikes an electron then a quark in a carbon atom, can this ray ricochet in various ways for a variety of effects on the DNA
14.  Is there a language of re-radiation - UV-1, UV-2, UV-3, Gamma-1, Gamma-2, Gamma-3, each with its own likelihood of causing a mutation?
15. Mutagenic-speciation initiating radiation arrives from within or without the individual i.e. evolutionary mutation’s causal agents might come from lower interior levels acting up the ladder of causation
16. Thus radiation initiates gene mutation - Kimuran random variation from outside and inside, up and down the taxonomic ladder
17. Even with internal causation of mutation from atomic level, all causation is ultimately external from sunlight or other cosmic radiation or even from a laboratory energy source.  Thus Dawkins’ and Gould’s notion of two adjacent interacting levels, those of bookkeepers and causal agents, works as we find adjacent pairs all the way down to the lowest level of the taxonomic ladder.
18. The primary mutator is the gamma ray, the secondary mutator is the atom, the tertiary mutator is the disturbed nucleotide and on up the ladder to the species and clade
19. One gamma ray may not be sufficient to launch a new species but a billion gamma rays might do the job-
20. Investigate  cumulative effects of radiation, thresholds of tolerance, rates of genetic repair.
21. Cancer cells exceed the rate of repair or avoid repair.  Once cancer cells form a colony they have their own identity and are not seen as “different” thus left to their own devices.
22. Search for “identity-destroying agents - try Stochastic Resonance techniques in order to “harmonize”  with the disease-causing agent thus diffusing it.

Question re: Epigenetics:

23.  If an atom can be modified  by radiation from sunlight or changed by an electron that has been dislodged from an adjacent atom,  that was in turn struck by an external ray, could not this subject atom be changed by an electrical or chemical signal from a neuron?  If so, then one’s own mind can be the source for permanent, heritable, evolutionary effects in the genome.  See: “The Ugly Gene” essay in this series - essay #1.

24.  If the electrical signal passing through a synapse can excite orbiting electrons of the carbon atom in a thymine molecule initiating a “random” mutation i.e. change at the base-pair level, could not an emotion easily initiate a gene mutation?  i.e. an acceleration of random events that would increase chances of a stochastic cluster of neuronal events resulting in a gene mutation - a heritable trait?  The initial synaptic signal launching this signal might be a burn from a fire or a burn from romantic rejection. or perhaps the  pleasure of love won.

25.  Rather than the Linnean model of classification by observable structure perhaps a taxonomic system that uses the principle of first appearance during evolutionary history would be more precise and so,  more useful.

26.  If Richard Dawkins makes a widely read case for the gene as the key actor in speciation then the gene ought to have its own designation in the system of scientific classification.  If the gene is in play as the most important level, as asserted by Dawkins,  the floodgates open and  we go down through all levels to the chromatin, its atomic constituents and the sub-atomic building blocks of the hydrogen atom. After all, it is the atom that takes the hit from the UV photon.

27.  To say the gene is the most important level and the center of the evolutionary show, of speciation is like saying the man died because he was shot in the brain - so far so good ( except for the man) but what part of the brain was hit? It was the GA-22 region of the audio cortex.  Can he still hear? Yes, but not as many frequencies as before the wound.  What part of the basilar membrane was damaged? and so on you get it.  Names for all levels of cause and effect ease discussion and guide experiment, examination, treatment.

27.  Using “The Blake Addenda” to the current system of scientific classification let’s look at the realm of the Nucum ( that which is within the atomic nucleus).  The Higgs particle is to the carbon atom, whose nucleus is its playground,  as a human is to the Milky Way galaxy.  It is the interrupted Higgs particle that launches the “Butterfly” chain of causality resulting in a mutated gene.

28.  The amount of random “Kimuran neural modifications in a single gene is ten to the 20th power.  The Higgs particles in a gene provide a lot of opportunity for evolutionary selection at ALL higher taxonomic levels.  If the Higgs is the “God” particle then “God” did / does create our world via sunlight and other cosmic radiation.

29.  Random speculation ( from old reading notes in this set)  apropos of another subject altogether: Methanogenic archaea causing prehistoric methane explosions that proved to be saltational catastrophes at a time when 99% of organic matter was free-floating.  there is a theory of Bermuda Triangle disasters being caused by colossal methane gas bubbles.  Bolide impact strikes a trapped methane bubble causing bacterial disintegration-recombination 4 BYA.

30.  The difference between an insect and a human is cosmetic compared to the difference between a guanine molecule and a carbon atom or the difference between an electron and a proton or a proton and a gluon or a gluon and a Higgs Boson.

31.  The diversity of animal and plant life is a vast exercise in product packaging, candy wrappers for the Gaian Snickers bar that must sell itself in myriad environments, on, above, below the Earth and its oceans.  DNA to Arctic Ice “You don’t like Mastodons?  Try these Polar Bears, seals and Inuits.”

32.  Fact: Eukaryotes ( things whose cells have nuclei such as ALL plants and animals) represent a tiny minority of the numbers of living things ( not biomass-just numbers).

33.  Fact:  there are ten times more microbes than cells in the human body but due to size their biomass is about equal.

34.  first prokaryotes - 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago
35.  First eukaryotes - 1.6 to 2.1 billion years ago
36.  Normal human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 46 except for the sperm and egg ( gametes) that have half as many
37.  Are all synapses at neurons?
38.  Can a liver cell have a synapse?  An adrenal cell?

*

Back-To-Bacterial

February 10, 2015 What is symbiosis?  Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan sell it as a kinder, gentler form of species evolution in contrast to Darwin’s bloody tooth and claw scenario.  Is this so?  One organism penetrates the boundary of another thus violating many contemporary legal principles, among them, breaking and entering, kidnapping, assault, thievery as the symbiont seeks safety, food, energy from the host.  This is “kinder” than traditional Darwinism?

1. The invader may bring an advantage to the party but this does not erase the original crimes.  The entire Margulis assertion of symbiosis is based on action that can easily be interpreted as invasion and thievery, thus violation not cooperation.  That the invader might make itself useful to the host after one or one hundred million years doesn’t undo violation number one, the first move breaks Commandments
2. Margulis tries to sell her theory as cooperation opposed to Darwinian competition.  I see her countless scenarios of one becoming two as invasion, transgression, violation.  It results in progress for both she says.  The organism is “improved” as the two organisms now work now as one - a friendly team.
3. Like a rapist saying to a woman “Work with me on this - it’ll be good for both of us”  - hey rapist was right - the child of violence was great grandmother x 10,000 to a Scholastic high school art award gold medal winner.
4. Advice to Margulis - best to leave the touchy-feeling, feel good tint out of the argument for organism combination, though the theory itself makes perfect sense, the happy circumstance is debatable.
5. In two of her books on the subject “Symbiotic Planet” and “Microcosmos” Margulis uses the example of one largish bacterium being penetrated by a single smaller bacterium for a positive outcome - always only a single guest-invader who makes the host better off.  In case after case after case there is always a happy host who eventually, somehow creates a membrane around its own previously free-floating DNA ( bacteria have no nucleus-thus: eukaryotic) that now contains some DNA from guest who has stayed for more than three days and the two become one organism with a nucleus - a paradigm shifting event in the evolution of life on Earth.
6. JBT ( Jim Blake theory)  The large bacterium is attacked by two smaller bacteria - meaner, harder than host, like Perry and Dick invading the Clutter household in Capote’s “In Cold Blood”  These two little meanies want to steal the cell membrane of the big guy because it has the ability to filter out poisonous new molecule in the air - oxygen !  A poison in primordial times ( 2 billion years ago), they will die if they don’t find refuge soon.
7. Margulis is always fuzzy on the formation of the new nucleus after “symbiosis” she always assumes that the host retains its identity and is happy about the new situation AND this happy scenario, as opposed to “red in tooth and claw” Darwin plays out all over and for all time - it’s the way of the world to her.
8. OK, here’s what really happened.  Two invaders instead of the single new friend penetrate the membrane of the big oxygen resistant “host” they immediately dissolve the hosts DNA into small usable codons.  The cell now has it’s nucleus. IT’S LITTLE DICKIE !  It is not some magic new nucleus formed around the host’s happy DNA - the host is now history - out of the loop - selected against, extinct perhaps, so much clutter if not ejected altogether by the old membrane’s two new owners.
9. Little Perry happens to be the energy package that can produce lots of ATP.  he immediately begins to reproduce inside old hosts membrane and big Dick takes care of the multiplication of the overall works - no need for new nuclear membrane to evolve - it is present at the creation.
10. Two billion years ago there were millions of species of bacteria that had been evolving since shortly after to coalescense of the Earth itself from orbiting particles say 4 billion years ago ( 4BYA)
11. By the time Perry-mitoch ( call him Mitoch for mitochondria - the energy pak) and Dick-A ( “A” to sort him from other bacteria species “B” “C” etc) invaded poor Clutter-Host there were 100,000 species of bacteria on Earth maybe more - 99% anaerobic ( oxygen is waste, poison to them)
12. One thousand of these Dicks teamed up with Mitochs and invaded viable ( oxygen tolerant softies) tolerant hosts, all eviscerating hosts DNA ( but saving the genes for oxygen use)  they formed 1,000 new species of eukaryotes, precursors to 1,000 perhaps a million or 10 million different species of plants and animals.
13. This was a violent predatory process like most of evolutionary activity - the beginning of life as we know it - all plants, al animals, fungi and molds i.e. all life composed of cells with nuclei
14. If two can invade a cell, why not three or a gang of four?
15. Perhaps all five “symbionts”  were smashed into one another as they crowded together several feet deep in an ancient tideflat that was struck by a meteor.  Every single one of millions of hadean airstrikes smashed bacteria together all over the globe killing most of the ones under the impact but causing some interesting combos in the ones just a bit deeper,  for better and for worse till death do them part.
16. Getting stomped by a dinosaur foot crushes ten thousand bacteria together breaking many membranes, cresting a stomp-goop of cellular material that has an unexpected opportunity to recombine n random, accidental and ultimately fruitful ways.
17. A rock falls from a cliff creating a mortar-pestle effect for mixing and matching bacterial DNA.  How many times did a rock calve and fall into soft bacteria filled ground for drop-goop.  surrounding bacteria not affected by the rockfall see a feast of nutrient no longer protected by hard bacterial membrane - DNA, RNA - protein!  Try the bacteria mash-up-re-combo experiment in a lab near you.
18. In primordial sea there was a gang comprising four bacteria: proto-ER ( endoplasmic reticulum) proto-Golgi, proto-ribo ( ribosome) and the leader, the little napoleon of the bunch, the incredible energy package proto-mitochondrion, many had a proto-plastid and they became photosynthetic plants.
19. This gang invaded thousands, millions of the big, fat, lazy oxygen loungers launching a million new species of beetle, fly, lizard, frog, cat, dog, dinosaur, ape, pine tree, orchid, prairie grass.
20. Bottom line JBT - Every one of today’s plant and animal species is the result of primordial bacterial speciation.  The big explosion in speciation was 2BYA not 540MYA.  The big speciation (TBS) began when oxygen first became a noticeable toxin to anaerobic bacteria 2 BYA, not as oxygen became its current and prehistoric  full 20% of the atmosphere at 540MYA.
21. It is said that 99.9% of all species that ever lived are now extinct.  The clade-fan beginning with the  emergence of eukaryotes is now shown as mostly dead ends.  NO - the clade-fan ( at least that for multi-cell organisms)  is 99.9% continuous as all plants and animals can trace their history for 2 billion years back to bacterial speciation.

• 4:00 pm  2/10/15

Baseball Synecdoche

February 11, 2015

Americans love baseball because it is nine against one - nine men trying to defeat a single person - the intention of the nine is concentrated in their representative, the pitcher making this a one on one spectacle , the pitcher is the assigned killer in single-combat - like medieval knights jousting or two fighter pilots in a dogfight over Korea in 1953.

If the batter hits a home run player “A” wins the battle outright

If it’s a strikeout - player “B” wins outright

If its a base hit - call in the troops to try to “kill” player “A”

To mix the metaphor - cells ( athletic teams)  as species

There are many of these skirmishes in a battle ( a single game)

The “war” is played over the course of a single season

Victory in war means that speciation has been achieved

Every World Series winner is a new species - a new peak has been reached in the terms of evolutionary theorist Sewall Wright

1A.  Where is each player ( audio cell)  born?  Where and when does an audio neuron become distinct from other neurons - embryonic stage.

2A.  How does each player find his way to the major leagues( audio cortex

3A.  Does evolution play out at a taxon above the gene( See: Dawkins) but below the organism( see: Darwin)  at the cell level?  the organ level?

4A.  Does survival of fittest / natural selection / symbiosis occur among cells as occurs among individual animals and plants?

JBT ( Jim Blake Theory)  on evolution of human-mammal-vertebrate ear.

1. 560 million years ago two tiny, primordial crayfish with their hairy, touch sensitive tails tried to lay eggs in a lethargic camouflaged sea urchin-esque organism.
2. Urchin started to devour the little crayfish and had trouble digesting the arthropods so it sent an army of its own symbiotic bacteria to dissolve the shell of the crayfish visitors while keeping them alive and fresh
3. It secured the visitors with some epithelial tissue so they couldn't escape and began feeding them a tasty brew of ATP from Urchin tissue mitochondria to keep them happy prisoners.
4. Urchin secured the visitors with a web of nerve tissue that created a circuit to Urchin's nerve-knot brain.
5. Now whenever the water vibrated from the approach of a predator, Urchin could camouflage itself quicker thus gaining a selective advantage over others of its species. F. due to crayfish tissue cells' closeness to adjacent Urchin cells, the Cray DNA got mixed up with Urchin DNA and it was off to the races-proto ears locked into the Urchin genome. By the time Urchin crawled onto land ten million years and 5 million generations later where it evolved into a proto-mammal, it had clusters of hundreds of these crayfish tail hairs on each side of its bilaterally symmetrical head.
6. Lo and behold ! they were sensitive to vibrations in the air. It could see AND hear. Lets call this the Helen Keller moment in our vertebrate evolution.

Metaphor, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche;  Neither baseball nor any sport is a metaphor for life or for Darwinian struggle “red in tooth and claw”.  Competitors are actually engaged in Darwinian struggle - very little if anything metaphorical about it.  winners get girls, vanquished don’t feel as “A” male, women feel better when they win like any other living thing.  Outcomes from sport have real-world consequences which leads us to the human ear, the mammalian ear, the vertebrate ear as far down the taxonomic ladder as ears go just before they branch off into touch-sensitive hairs.

Using a baseball metaphor to try to trace audio brain function in humans.  Baseball or any sport is not in and of itself a metaphor but sports makes for excellent metaphor-making, synecdotal thinking  the part re presents the whole. He’s a good hand.  You’ve got her ear for you’ve got her full attention.  How do we hear?  How does the brain turn vibrations in the air to a sense of having heard snapping twigs, human speech, music, noise or musical noise.  The real question is how do we sense anything from any of our five senses but perhaps if we make headway with the ear some insight re the others will ensue.

The mechanics of the human ear are extremely clever but they are  graspable in terms of electricity and mechanical engineering - valves open when moved by levers that are moved by changes in air pressure, chemicals flow that change the electrical charge of fluids sending an electrical pulse along a conduit - an audio nerve - so far, so simple.  the nerve delivers its impulse to the cortex.  The sound gets distributed to 25 neural centers for interpretation the CIA, the NSA the FBI the local cops, the Wife and kids.   The sound may have some important survival value input from each. Electrical-chemical signal passes along, among, between neurons from synapse to synapse until it reaches its many destinations in the cortex.

Now what?  There must be a library of inherited interpretations for the sound that this impulse gets cross checked against - if its a click,  its a poisonous insect - wake up,  look for little black thing, if you hear a baby crying, search for food etc.  The sound must get processed early in the audio cortical sequence by the amygdala group for reptilian deep response, just after the autonomic muscle jerk launched by the first impact of the sound.

JB Questions and miscellaneous rambling:

1. Can RNA read protein from invading organism and work it into genome of host?
2. Might a host cell borrow / steal/ use metabolic systems of invader that leave no physical form such as a flagellum, mitochondria or chloroplast?  Steal ideas from other organisms and toss any evidence.  How many of our current cell processes originated this way, like stolen patents, blueprints or melodies.
3. Watching hundreds of cell components: organelles, cytoplasm, proteins, membranes etc through an electron microscope is like watching roadies scramble around for hours before a big rock show ( cell division)  Where’s the music?  Name the roadies: Kim Payne, Red Dog, Mike Callahan.  Identify their array of tasks, some do several different things.  Describe the “music” - the chemical reactions.  Check the doormen - the protein gatekeepers in the plastid cell membrane.  Who has a backstage pass? ( backstage = nucleus)  Who knows the “band” - DNA, RNA, mRNA, trNA
4. There are four master tropes in language: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony - simultaneous understanding.  In synecdoche, the part represents the whole as in “He’s a good hand” “Must get boots on the ground.”
5. There are many types of synecdoche:

a.part for whole

1.  whole for part
2.  container for contained
3.  sign for signified
4.  material for thing made
5.  cause for effect
6.  effect for cause
7.  genus for species
8.  species for genus
9.  disease for cure
10. microcosm for macrocosm

6. Is the following statement true: “Natural Rights are nonsense and Inalienable Natural Rights are nonsense on stilts.”  - Jeremy Bentham
7.  Four types of analogy:

1. allegory,
2. catachresis ( abuse, semantic misuse, error such as using alibi for excuse or chronic for severe or “I’m ravished” for “I’m famished”
3. parable
4. pun

8.  Is it possible to see a layer in the stratigraphy of The Grand Canyon that marks the onset of a fully oxygenated Earth atmosphere?
9.  Do humans think better during summer when photosynthesis is at a maximum thus oxygen levels in atmosphere are a bit greater than the 21% of the  other nine months?
10.  Magdalen is the name of one of the 30 colleges that compose Oxford University.  It is pronounced “Maudlin” - don’t be screwing this up.
11.  “The Oxygen Catastrophe” was 2 billion years ago plus or minus a few million.  99% of living things on Earth at this time were poisoned by newly forming atmospheric oxygen.  These bacteria were all anaerobic ( and prokaryotic i.e. without a cell nucleus) they breathed other gasses such as methane and CO2.

.  Sport is not metaphor, sport IS Darwinian struggle in real time with real results, real outcomes, consequences

We have been in a state of violent, rapid change on all taxonomic levels for the past four billion years.  we remark on the rate of change when our lives shift from a quiet corner to a public battleground or get caught in catastrophe. Our bodies are a nexus as violent as any other and as constant.  Our brain evolved to filter exigencies of violence, of violent change so that we might get some sleep and est in peace and plan ahead.  It’s OK to be filtered from some or even most of this relentless violet change but one mustn’t resist all of it or one is no longer fully human.  Sometimes you have to go looking for the action, for kicks.  A human life is designed to be a cycle of fighting and resting from birth to death.  Most of social life is thinly disguised fighting.  You are probably getting your share and on a more relentless schedule than any animal in all evolutionary history.  The forty-sixty hour week is insane.

One can examine  system of individuals over time finding 1,000s of examples of impressive outcomes that may support a theory while ignoring or failing to find 100 million years and a billion examples of the very thing reported going haywire.  For every gainfully employed member of The Screen Actor’s Guild who has achieved even very minor celebrity status there is a valley full of talented anonymous actors.

When everyone is a brand we will have returned to anonymity.  the idea of branding is an example of a few enterprising types doing something that becomes effective only because it is rare

More Questions:

12.   How might an organism steal a metabolic process from an invading or invaded other?
13.  Today’s cell may appear identical to a 100 million year old cell while having a far more sophisticated metabolism and reproductive process.
14.  Stealing process not structure that might be seen in fossil record.
15.  Perhaps symbiotic mergers such as mitochondria, flagellum, chloroplasts are only 10% of all successful symbiotic events
16.  Gene regulation via symbiotic history.  today’s cells are like today’s American culture - a melting pot of countless acquisitions i.e. nothing ever evolves gradually - it simply pops into being and gets stolen.
17.  Is any part of the human brain or any one of its functions unique among mammals or is the critical mass alone, the greater number of the same types of cells the reason for our “higher” consciousness, our sentience?
18.  What prevents a neuron from parenting a liver, kidney or muscle cell?
19.  What are the many roles of neuron histones besides DNA loosening/tightening?

20.  How do neurons listen, see, smell, taste, feel pain and pleasure?
21.  When did these various capabilities evolve?
22.  What were the structures of these neuronal packages at various points in time: 600, 500, 400, 300, 200, 100, 50, 25, 10, 5, 3, 2,1 million years ago?  One hundred million years is nothing to sneeze at, not chopped liver or methylated hemoglobin.
23.  Were these neuronal packages and components ever whole separate organisms?
24.  When did any symbiosis / parasitism occur?
25.  Was it parasitism for 100 million years then a gradual change to welcome guest or was the invader useful from the get-go?
26.  Are  capabilities of our five senses stored in our DNA?
27.  Are there genes for seeing, hearing, smelling or are these capabilities activated by histones, cytoplasmic proteins or other cytoplasmic stuff?
28.  Histones loosen small  portions of the DNA from its incredibly complex coiling- upon coiling so that bp sequences can be read by RNA transferase particular to each cell function.

Imagine a DNA molecule one inch in diameter and 480 miles long if uncoiled, carrying 3,000 genes ( each with dozens to hundreds of variations activated without DNA).  a few of the 10s of thousands of  histones of this chromosome’s DNA have directed 3 genes  to get ready for continuous lifetime of action in Mary’s neuron, an audio cortex neuron in the limbic cortex.

Three histones have given the command for two miles of our 480 mile long DNA molecule  to relax in the sun, uncoil, loosen up, reveal itself to the audio neuron’s mRNA

29.  How did these specific histones, of the thousands on this strand of DNA receive the message to direct the troops( codons)  to uncoil?
30.  What quality of these codons attracts the mRNA for specific protein synthesis, proteins for hearing, processing sound

1. reflex action
2. dangerous insect - move away or kill it
3. process speech
4. listen to jungle drums for call to dance or tribal melody
5. locate voices in space - in front, behind, high, low
6. re-process for fight or flight response
7. send message to vocal chords-speech center for audio response

31.  Is there a different protein or protein group for each one of these audio functions?
32.  Has there ever been a bacteria species with only the capacity to hear of the five animal senses? to smell? to taste? to see?
33. If not then how many cells does a creature need in order to possess these sensory capabilities?
34.  What was the brainiest proterozoic organism?
35.  Does fungus have a mind?  A mat of mold? A colony of bacteria? archaea?
36.  Was there a bacterium with sensory neuron number one?

Theory:  All life has always been symbiosis.  All metabolic process is like bubbles on the surface of a vast glass of champagne popping into the air releasing “ideas” chemical ideas.

Bacteria were like diners at a colossal smorgasbord taking what they needed from the myriad simple processes popping up into the sunlight-carbon-nitrogen-oxygen making combinations.  One atom then two.  One molecule then two until there are 123 basic structures or 1,200 combining and being integrated into larger molecules.

Once the lipid membrane evolved the cell becomes “the big city” attracting or sending its army to conquer other smaller yet effective combinations of chemical process.

The DNA sequence lounging in the park analogy, say four audio genes, those detecting / processing  pitch, timbre, volume and rhythm.  There are 19,629 genes present in the DNA of this neuron, 19,625 will be dormant regarding this neuron’s specific function for hearing the four features.  Focusing on the gene for pitch, it is active in a small package of 100,000 neurons ( verify)

Note: This neuron DNA molecule is not making hemoglobin, lactase,norepinephrine or lignin it is only making audio protein.  It is only expressing features of sound cognition and processing BUT the basic cell functions must all still occur, functions shared by every cell in Mary’s body - the metabolic processes even though this cell is specializing in audio.

37.  Do a cell’s unique sensory function genes ( sound, sight, smell, touch, taste)  occur on one particular chromosome of the 23 pairs?
38.  Are neural-sensory functions aggregated on one unique chromosome or distributed throughout the 46?
39.  What chemical shuts down 99% of our genome at every single mature cell?
40.  What chemical activates 1% of our genome at every mature cell?
41.  Mary’s 100,000 pitch neurons will have their pitch capabilities turned on
42.  These neurons are now sensitive to pitch signals arriving via nerve pathways
43.  Are these signals all electrical?
44.  Are these signals all chemical?
45.  Are these signals both electrical and chemical?
46.  Does pitch perception rely only on the rate of synapse firing or rate and intensity i.e. amps and volts of electrical and or chemical signal?
47.  What structure inside the pitch neuron receives the first pitch signal?
48.  How does it “know” what this signal is or what to do with it once received?
49.  How does this neuron “know” pitch from tone? pitch from shinola?
50.  Are  filtering/enhancement  processes involved to boost signal for pitch?
51.  do all 100,000 pitch neurons receive entire audio signal components - pitch, tone, rhythm etc and sort them out at each of the 100,000 cells?
52.  Probably a pre-sort neuron complex that distributes a range of say 500 different pitches to cells primed to receive each of 500 pitch tones.  Are these cells along the basilar membrane of the cochlea or within the cortex?  How many cells for each of 500 distinct pitches?  Say 200 ( verify)
53.  Are the  cochlear cells adjacent to the basilar membrane: cells of Claudius, Hensen, Dieters and Boettcher all involved in pitch?
54. What is the function of the tunnel of Corti?
55.  Is there a histone directly assigned to DNA pitch functions
56.  How are pitch range distinctions doled out in the 500 different pitch sensitive neuron clusters? How is the distinction made?  by an amino acid sequence added to the pitch protein coded directly from DNA-RNA?
57.  How might an amino acid or two distinguish one pitch from another?

To do:  Expand role of histones in cell differentiation - focus on neurons - focus on pitch assignment.

60.  Is there a protein molecule or other cell molecule that can make a distinction between middle C( 262 Hz ) played on a violin and middle C# ( 278 Hz) played on a guitar?
61.  Do nodules on the neuron coded for 262 Hz make the finer distinctions?
62.  Might 50 nodules on a single middle C neuron make other distinctions re: timbre, rhythm or are these distinctions made on distinctly different neurons?
63.  Might there be only a specific neuron for many mid-range pitches with pitch-sorting occurring at several nodules along an axon with each nodule containing the protein add-on for a specific pitch
64.  Basic question - Do sound sorting functions occur at axon nodules at all?
65.  Might the spatial sequence of nodules along say 12 inches of axon detect rhythm by their place in the cue for receipt of the electrochemical signal - like jungle drummers relaying a coded message over hundreds of miles only at the speed of light ( electron excitement) thus rhythmic distinctions made.  i.e. sound doesn’t all arrive at cell body at once to be processed as rhythm or pitch
66.  Might pitch be distinguished by location of receipt of signal at protein-charged nodular receptors along axon?  Low frequency sound has a signal rate of reception as do all frequencies that would arrive at nodules at different times over a few femtoseconds.

THE SPORT-BASEBALL HEURISTIC:

Each cell type is a different sport:

liver…..    golf

heart…..    basketball

brain…..    baseball

kidney    …..    rowing

bone…..    tennis

skin…..    equestrian

cartilage…..    auto racing

epithelium…..wrestling

Basic cell functions are shared by all different sports - metabolic process, reproduction

Baseball is analogous to the Brain:

Harmony processed by The American League

Pitch processed by The National League-Central

Rhythm and volume by National League East and West respectively

Each of the 30 professional baseball teams is a different type of brain cell

The higher frequency ( UHF, VHF, HF) audio neurons are the Chicago Cubs

There are ten interconnected  audio functions - nine while fielding plus batting

The shortstop is the audio neuron for medium frequency: 3MHz - 300 KHz. The whole team works together to fully process any sensory input from any of the five senses but when the sense is Medium Frequency sound, the shortstop gets the incoming info first.  Is it romantic music or the snapping twigs of a rapidly approaching lion?  Let’s get this sorted out…….in a hurry.

Now:  Each player has a history in a specific game, on his team, in the profession, in the sport, in his life since birth and his family genealogy back through Lucy(3 MYA), Ardi(4.5 MYA), (MYA is Million Years Ago)  Chimps, lemurs and land rats(400 MYA), fish, sea squirt(700 MYA),sponge, bacterial mat,free floating bacterium(2,000 MYA i.e. 2 billionMYA), free-floating RNA, Free-floating nucleotides, carbon, hydrogen, helium, sulphur atoms(4.5BYA), free electrons, quarks, pi-mesons ad infinitum to big bang(13.5BYA). for now he’s a shortstop on the brain team listening for any and all things audio.

67.  Are nodules on audi axons evenly spaced anywhere? or spaced in any pattern related to electromagnetic spectrum?
68.  How does a neuron hear?  listen?
69.  Synecdoche - the part represents the whole.  the pitcher represents the team
70. A part signifying the whole requires an imaginative leap it is not direct like the link of the pitcher to his eight teammates
71.  does baseball represent the U.S. or does it signify the U.S.? or neither?
72.  Does baseball represent Darwinian “bloody tooth and claw” or des baseball signify Darwinian “bloody in tooth and claw”?
73.  Is baseball an actual, direct “red in tooth and claw event ( many events per season) with real life ( natural) results to be tallied such as mate selection, genes passed on to next generation, species sorted, species going extinct?

Is baseball a three level phenomenon?  It does select genes -players meet mates.  teams are synecdochal for their  cities: “Pittsburgh beat Chicago”  Hey! it was only their respective baseball teams not the whole damn city!

74.  Does an audi neuron function on more than one level?  It must
75.  How does a protein hear?
76.  Can audio neurons detect gamma, x ray, UV, NIR, MIR, FIR, EHF, SHF, UHF, VHF, VLF, SLF, ELF radiation?  UV radiation? visible light waves?
77.  A wave is a wave is a wave.  See: transduction: sound pressure into electrical impulse carried along auditory nerve fibers.  Impedance matching - cochlea is a frequency analyzer.
78.  How many fibers in an audi nerve bundle?
79.  Are different pitches carried by dedicated fibers?
80.  Potassium ion concentration in perilymph at scala tympani determines what? pitch and volume?

JBT - Perhaps with loud rock and roll, the bass and drum sound avoids the ear for the most part and goes directly to the gut, heart, adrenal gland then to the audio processing neural cortex( hippocampus, BA41, BA42, BA22.  review ability of those born deaf to hear any aspect of loud rock.

OK reader - take a break for a day or two - this could get tedious - sorry - doesn’t really fit into a second essay.

81.  Are astrocytes and or oligodendrocytes exclusively involved in sound perception?  If so, which aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, location, rate of approach?
82.  Are memories of music and brain-worms from annoying songs processed at the same zone of the cortex?

JBT - All features of all plants and animals are from symbiosis or parasitism at some point in the organism’s recent to very deep origin, none are from mutation / natural selection.  Individual and paired bacteria of 10 million different species contained all future cell types: epithelial, liver, heart, brain, muscle, bone, blood.  there once existed a microbial tag-team for every cell process and type, a smorgasbord of life-tools waiting for merging, mating, complexifying protists.

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan propose three obvious and relatively large organelles as symbionts, ignoring 3,000  30,000   3 million symbiotic chemical processes aquired over eons from methane sniffing primordial oozers to our present shebang of cell biochemistry in all organisms.

To Sort:

83.  Histone-DNA @ audio neuron clusters at cochlea and various zones of audio processing at cortex
84. Cortical Network Nodes (CNN) - JB neologistical naming system for audio-cortical geography ( erase if this has already been done - don’t want to confuse the matter.

ZOC…..Zone Of Cooper

ZOA…..Zone Of Amanopour

BOB…..Band Of Banfield

ZoCU….Zone Of Cuomo

COCu...Curve Of Curnow

FOEl….Field Of Elam

GOGa...Granules Of Ganam

NoNew...Nodes Of Newt

GOGa...Granules Of Garani

see notes for 20 more

85.  Is there a central fresh ( new) neuron dispatch zone( at hippocampus or elsewhere) where a protein-esque tag with address is attached,  indicating molecule route-destination?  Call it a MTRD ( Molecular Tag: Route and Destination) a JB neologism ( to be erased if this already exists)
86.  Perhaps a zone at hippocampus that can identify 200 or 2,000 cortical destinations for new neuron?  Like a logistics warehouse in tennessee putting a bar code sticker on a package that codes for destination.
87.  Neural stem cell destination code n a 3 amino acid tag, like putting a tag on a t-shirt of a kid at summer camp
88.  The summercampus - The zone at hippocampus where MTRD is synthesized and attached to neuron progenitor - the future neuron for detection of middle-C
89.  Note: New neurons follow radial ganglia, travelling via chemical signal adhesion molecules at the surface of the neuron.  Only ⅓ reach destination, others die? or get re-routed for purpose other than that intended?
90.  Do genes at nuclear DNA code for neuron migration or is it done by “sub-genes” - tacked on info from cortical dspatch zone.
91.  Does the spinal cord have the ability to remember?
92.  Does the spinal cord have any sensory processing capability”
93.  Might you hear something through your lower back?
94.  Let’s say a hair cell replacement

A Scenario for audio cell replacement:

1. Hair cell at cochlea for detection of middle-C must be replaced - stem cell to the rescue
2. Signal to hippocampus from occipital BA-22 that it no longer receives signals at 262 Hz from cochlear hair cell - call it “Midsey”
3. Hippocampus selects a stem cell and sends it to the hippocampus logistics and distribution center to receive its MTRD
4. Precursor to new hair cell for detection of midde-C is on its way
5. Send off procedure at BA-22 for long, winding trip up to cochlea ( hey !  it’s not all the way to a kidney!
6. New cell arrives at cochlea.  How does it know from all of the other specialized tone-sensitive hair cells arrayed along the basilar membrane where to stand in this meta-choir that receives instead of sends audio information.

95.  Stochastic resonance - locate previous use of word in essay - google docs wont do it like MS word does.
96.  Is mammal audio organ system inherited from arthropods? from their touch sensitive hair cells, filiform hairs at cerci?
97.  Can mammal eyelashes detect electromagnetic radiation at any frequency? especially in audible ones?
98.  How is touch analogous to sound?
99.  Is there a kinesthetic link between touch and sound?
100.  How does cannabis effect audio neurotransmitters?
101.  Why do so many musicans believe they perform better with weed?
102.  Sound and touch are evolutionarily analogous: the membrane covered hair pit that a spider uses to sense movement is very similar to the membrane-audio hair of the human ear.
103.  Is tinnitus at the ears or the brain only - cochlear or cortex?

A Creepy Ghost Story:

If neurons can live indefinitely and their age is only limited by the age of the body then dead people whose brains were not poisoned by embalming fluid or incinerated may still be lying in their coffins wide awake after 300 years.  This might explain ghosts or light balls of neural energy rising from grave and floating around coalescing a few air molecules to make an “appearance” and returning intermittently for a recharge from living brain.

energy for all of this post-vivo activity is drawn from the mitochondria of vast colonies of bacteria that decompose organic matter - new symbionts ( R U laughing yet?) forever!  these supposed brain decomposers become guardians in the ground for the still-living cortex.  OK, dad’s dead - buried - bacteria converge to do away with him - turn him into CO2 and methane - to decompose his body but….those trying to digest dad’s brain form a compact with the still functioning ( though resting) mitochondria ( we know they are primordial bacteria - brothers of the decomposers) to preserve dad’s brain function - dad, though presumed  “dead” still lives inside his coffin as trillions of bacterial mitochondria take instruction to supply ATP for dad’s neurons, astrocytes and dendrocytes.  Cue:  Theremin - solarize.

104.  Does the audio signal, as it arrives in the audio processing part of the cortex enter as a sine wave or is it some other code?
105.  When did hearing evolve on Earth?
106.  Does the audio cortex recognize middle-C ( or any audible tone) for its unique quality or only as an electro-chemical impulse relative to other tones?
107.  If  a baby was born hearing only middle-C for thirty days and no other tones or voices or sounds could it then identify middle-C from all other tones that would now be new to it at day 31?
108.  Does audio signal get reviewed by the amygdala?  If so, in what order re: all other audio processing nodes?

A slant on symbiosis:

Imagining Lynn Margolis’ version of first effective symbiosis - say the entry of a mitochondrion-like bacteria into a larger host that is more protected from poisonous oxygen in atmosphere.  Call mitochondrial bacteria “Mitoch”.  The Margulis scenario has Mitoch entering the host through its membrane to take up residence, after a while the host builds a membrane around its DNA to create the very first eukaryotic cell ( one with a nucleus).  The host and its new energy supply “Mitoch” evolve happily ever after, giving rise to millions of new species of plants and animals all of whose cells contain mitochondria as energy source.

109.  Why would host ever have to build a membrane for its DNA.  It survived abd thrived for 2 billion years with free-floating DNA?
110.  How soon after Mitoch residence did host develop a nuclear membrane?
111.  Did host need to spearate its DNA from Mitoch?
112.  Was host DNA or Mitoch DNA too promiscuous with one another?
113.  Nuclear membrane develops to protect host DNA from toxic oxygen
114.  Margulis says little about how this new nuclear membrane evolved.  It is the distinguishing characteristic of entire kingdoms of organisms.
115.  Host is anerobic, Mitoch uses oxygen in its metabolism
116.  Seems like if host is anerobic it can never thrive in atmo of increasing oxygen with or without Mitoch
117.  Does this grand new invention, the nuclear membrane, just coalesce out of cytoplasmic spare parts?  I don’t think so.

• 2/11/15  4:45pm