Becoming Species

“There is religion when the sacred is distinguished from the profane”

- Emile Durkheim

Humans resist states of being at the heart of evolution: separation, isolation, freakishness, outlying but new species are born of weirdness, cataclysm, getting lost, change, mutation of molecule, cell, body, local environment and ecosystem. When the Earth moves - animals and plants evolve.  Continuity and comfort means equilibrium, balance, regularity, harmony, sameness. Nature does not embrace change unless change is vital for survival. Our nucleic acids battle efforts to change them 24/7. Most of this DNA / RNA change is bad and almost all is edited out of the genome prior to inheritance.

A species is a group of organisms that interbreed. Robins don’t interbreed with cardinals thus- two different species. Japanese people can and do interbreed successfully with caucasians thus they are the same species. All humans are the same species and there is only a single one-Homo sapiens. There are over 800,000 species of beetles, 20,000 species of bony fish.

Species evolve when and if they must otherwise they do not evolve. Species maintain their equilibrium over eons. A mosquito of today is almost identical to a mosquito that pestered the dinosaurs. There has been no evidence that a single higher animal has evolved in any way since Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1861. Evolution, when it happens, is almost always abrupt on a geological scale, intensely slow in human terms.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in 1974 asserting multicell organisms ( non-bacteria, non-virus, non-archaea) evolve when confronted with large environmental change such as an ice or heat age, grand geologic shifts-new islands and continents forming, a meteor impact’s negative effect on the atmosphere. This punctuation may take ten million years to play out giving rise to new species then stasis returns to this species for 100 or 500 million years. The fossil record confirms punctuated equilibrium. Stasis is data. Darwin proposed that all organisms are evolving continuously. This has been proven false. Organisms may change with each new generation ( your face is different than that of your parent) but change is not evolution. Evolution implies change for the better. DNA has evolved for four billion years to resist change - to edit mutation away from its double helix before conception. There is evidence for evolution of plants and animals over the past 3.5 billion years but it has not been continuous and the evidence itself is not at all continuous.

Pathways to speciation are many. During the 1960s bioscientist Lynn Margulis proposed the symbiotic path to species evolution where two different species merge creating a new, more formidable species. When the single-cell energy engine mitochondria merged with other, less energetic single cell organisms three billion years ago many new species of microorganism emerged. When proto-organ systems merged many good things happened within an organism: fluids were synthesized, pumped, filtered, properly timed and the creature remembered where the food lived.  Mergers and acquisitions were ( are?)  a key pathway to speciation. Organisms under great pressure forced to merge with one another in shrinking crowded conditions miles below global ice sheets, speciation occurring next to warm vents from deep within the Earth’s mantle. Population pressure - creatures breaking into one another’s skin and happy with the result. More energy, more motility, more durability, bigger teeth.

Three pathways, of many, to evolution:

1. Rolling the dice 1,000 times per hour under UV bombardment,  testing new combinations and features against all environments - intracell on up the hierarchy of systems out into the primordial ooze - the Darwin method: mutation followed by natural selection.
2.  Accidents of fate, genetic drift,  a population disperses throughout the realm, those creatures most remote find themselves on a broken off piece of continent, a new island where they live for eons in isolation from their fellows. Their genes have drifted, initiating evolution of new species. Natural selection was not the primary cause.
3.  Epigenetics - evolution occurs as DNA, RNA, histones, heritable proteins receive signals between every single cell division among 10 trillion cells throughout a higher organism’s reproductive years. Countless micro-events with evolutionary consequences at each cell division, once a week not at each lifetime. Evolution occurring as each cell divides not as each organism has more fit or less fit offspring. New information re: fitness relayed to the germline: eggs and sperm for inclusion in next year’s model. One thousand trillion evolutionary events per lifetime - not just an array of  random nucleotide mutations passed from parent to child. Non-stop evolutionary feedback-feedforward loops throughout trillions of moments in a single life.

***

JB Questions and observations:

Reading: “Elementary Forms of Religious Life” - Emile Durkheim

4. Is a television a totem? Does television fill a totemic role in American ( Western) culture?  How about a laptop or an I-phone or a car?
5. Claude Levi-Strauss patterned his book “the Savage Mind” on Durkheim’s “The Elementary forms of Religious Life”. Both men used the same strategy of assembling published papers in anthropology-social science acting as clearing house for the ideas of many in neat, summaries that became foundational texts.
6. Types of american totemism within our religion of Capitalism: a.infototems: TV,laptop, I-phone b.Utilitotem; Washer, dryer, range, refrigerator-freezer c. Statustotem: auto, espresso machine
7. The quark as The God Particle is 100% totemism.
8. ToDo: Reinstate animal / plant totemism in USA. Assign each animal and plant species in the world to groups of school children investing them with the responsibility to care for their totem organism throughout their lives.
9. Why would one animal species select another species as a totem?
10. Note:  Durkheim espousing contextuality in 1912. Contextuality didn’t hit the realm of the built environment ( City planning and architecture) until 1960 in the work of Jane Jacobs. Have architects EVER been on the cutting edge of the ideas of a given era? Not after the era of the Gothic cathedral.
11. Did the thought of Ruskin and Morris have any direct effect upon Le Corbusier and Mies or was it always filtered through Frank Lloyd wright via the Wasmuth Portfolio? Can one get the full import of an idea second or third hand? That we can, forms the backbone of modern education.
12. Architecture coughs up its Jencksian history hairball in the mid-1970s lame swerve on hardcore French Postmodernism in the work of Charles Moore, Michael Graves and other pasticheurs of the time. Ughh, such a superficial, desolate and highly publicized dead end for architecture - suckered again.
13. If snowball Earth had an ice sheet 20 miles thick one billion years ago this must have had an additive effect upon mutational effects of UV radiation as warm pools at top of this high ice were exposed to sunlight at 20 miles up, beyond any filtering atmosphere. Did this high ice push exisitng atmosphere up with it or leave it behind?
14. JB neologism: “Stochastic Targeting”: to send a barrage of speculative detail. Target mind adjusts this barrage with details known to recipient so it appears that you were 80% correct instead of shooting in the dark.
15. Can a recessive gene become active during one’s lifespan if the dominant gene fails? How might an activated recessive gene attract RNA polymerase to begin midlife transcription? How does RNA polymerase know which is the dominant gene in the first place?
16. Sewall Wright gets a lot of credit for adding to our knowledge of evolution as a key generator of the Modern synthesis that combined Darwinism with modern genetics. In retrospect, is this credit deserved?  Was Wright seeing evolution at work with his guinea pigs or observing minor breeding changes?
17. Our dominant genes are expressed during fetal development affecting sex, height, eye and hair color and many metabolic processes. Do all 46 chromosomes come into play postnatally regarding such things as hormone production and all manner of transcription-translation regulatory process? why not? All 46 chromosomes are part of the chromatin. why would an RNA polymerase not wander over to a recessive gene and put it to work? Especially if the dominant gene was damaged or working inefficiently. Perhaps the distinction between dominant and recessive evaporates after fetal development allowing the environment to call all shots regarding which genes are active among all 40,000 genes not just the human haploid 20,000.
18. Genetic change has been conflated with, confused with evolution throughout the latter half of the 20th century and the 21st. Calling allele frequency change “evolution” is like calling a grain of pollen a pine tree - well…..it sort of is and sort of isn’t with a 99.9999 % chance that the pollen grain is just another allergen - a sneeze at most. Fisher, Haldane and Sewall Wright explored genetic change. that their theories have been framed as evolution was to jump to conclusions. The core notions of the Modern synthesis are about micro-evolution  - no evolution discernable / provable,  just variation, just change. Variation is not evolution. Discerning pathways of phenotypic change is not discerning pathways of evolution. The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is not ALL wrong, just ALL too narrow.
19. Might a bacterium or a virus take a few nucleotides / base pairs from one species of mammal and insert this DNA from mammal One into mammal Two which is a different species from mammal One? Scenario:  Buffalo dying of a viral infection - 50% of his 30 trillion cells have this toxic viral DNA mixed with buffalo DNA in a diseased chromatin soup in 15 trillion cells. A mosquito bites this dying buffalo then it bites a man on his balls infecting a few million germ cells / sperm / gametes with both viral DNA and buffalo DNA, any notable consequences?
20.  Natural selection does not “cause” evolution any more than an academy award “causes” a fine motion picture or a Nobel Prize “causes” brilliant research. Natural Selection is an outcome not a cause.
21. Genetic drift explains sports dynasties  - see: Roger Penske and four-wheel genetic drift.
22. Investigate founder effects on JB “The Ugly Gene” in New England Settlers-17th century Puritans.
23. Evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher, a Darwinian gradualist - key player in Modern Evolutionary Synthesis misconstrued the rate,time and degree of the evolution of animal complexity. Fisher was fooled by outward appearances as 90% of vital biochemical pathways were in place before the Cambrian Explosion at 550 million years ago. All else has been biochemical window dressing, couture for bacteria bags: mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds i.e. experiments in fashion, trivial in scope. Compare the number of microorganisms to the number of multicell organisms on Earth today. Fisher actually believed a bear is different than a snake.
24. What was the last common ancestor of the chloroplast and the mitochondria?
25. Test for correlation of high fructose corn sweetener to mitochondrial fission at fat cells and at kidney, hepatic and gut tissue.
26. Curing a person of cancer is like curing the Earth of humans. what would be an effective strategy?

1. introduce unfriendly microorganism
2. add excess heat or cold interrupting metabolism
3. add dust to interfere with breathing
4. eliminate food supply

20. How does one target a single species? what is unique about this cancer family of cells? What is unique about this organism? In humans - the neocortex
21. At cancer cells  interfere with mitochondrial energy production, dissolve cancer cell membrane, dissolve cancer cell nuclear membrane.
22. Is the cell outer membrane made of identical lipid bilayer as its nuclear membrane?
23. Age-old problem: how to direct cancer battle to cancer cell mitochondria only?
24. Do different tissues have unique mitochondrial DNA? Is liver mito DNA different from that in lungs,heart or kidney?
25. Review DNA/RNA methylations - differences in various tissue cells. How is a hepatocyte mitochondrial methylation different from a lung cancer cell mitochondria methylation?
26. To do: Examine 1,000 different cancer cell types to determine differences in their mitochondrial DNA/RNA epigenetic modifications.
27. This must all be old hat: Target DNA-RNA promoters that are unique at cancer mitochondria to interrupt energy/metabolic process thus killing the cell - starve cancer cells of their glucose.
28. Do brain tumor cells have unique mitochondria from the brain area tissues of origin. Does each brain area generate unique tumors each with its own signature?
29. What is the cancer equivalent to the effects of disruption of neocortical function, neocortical links with brainstem, striatum etc. intra-cortical links re: sensory perception. Inter-cortical links re: efferent signaling between neocortex and hypothalamus, thalamus, globus pallidus, putamen, pons, medulla, cerebellum, hippocampus? Cancer-human analogy.
30. Cancer cure? 24/7 low level ultrasound or uv/infrared light ( something besides traditional radiation-chemo) bombardment geared to upsetting cancer cell mitochondria reproduction i,e, cell division / proliferation. to do: determine quantum level electrical processes/pathways at mitochondria. Halt methylase and or polymerase proliferation.
31. bio-friendly coated Nano pulsing device inserted into tumor-wireless operation with belt battery pack. Call it the BQMD: Blake Quantum Mitochondrial Disruptor.
32. Cure cancer by disrupting RER (rough endoplasmic reticulum) adhesion at ribosomes during translation to disrupt lipid production and thus disrupting cell membrane formation. Reverse the hydrophilic property at carcinomal lipid membrane. If there is no hydrophila there will be no cell wall - get to the root.
33. Cure cancer by control of TOR target -  rapamycin regulation of cell growth. TORC2 regulates cell surface area by influencing lipid production and intracellular turgor. Interrupt TORC2 transcription, translation or transport.
34. Cure cancer by stopping golgi apparatus from packaging proteins for export to adjacent / daughter cancer cells.
35. Cure cancer by inhibiting normal cell function at any and or all organelles and all biosynthetic, transcription, translation and lipid production one organelle at a time.. disrupt one-disrupt all. determine the most fundamental metabolite and disrupt it with a wavelength of sound or light.

***

January 25, 2015    10:53 am

Selfish Chromosome ?

At early Earth, 3.8 billion years ago, there were trillions of free-floating small strands of DNA comprising only a few dozen base pairs. This DNA evolved over the course of 200 million years from free-floating RNA that had coalesced within the primordial soup 4.0 billion years ago. Is a 48 base pair strand of DNA a living thing? When this DNA is split apart by static electricity it becomes two pieces where before there was one. Lightning strikes and the population doubles as each cleaved part restores itself to wholeness. The notion of free-floating DNA or RNA molecules coalescing in the primordial soup  four billion years ago or tumbling around in hot vent pools two billion years ago deep within a ten mile thick ice crust for 500 million years until a reason to exist materializes  makes as much sense as a quarterback with his 500 plays wandering around in a Mardi Gras parade. DNA is a part of a system, part of a team. The system begins as a simple colony of actors evolving into a more complex system. The DNA system comprises many different types of molecules and many types of organelles: the cell nucleus, the nuclear membrane, the cell membrane, golgi apparatus, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, the nucleolus, chloroplasts, microtubules, vacuoles, promoters, enhancers, tRNA, RNA polymerase, mRNA, etc. All are part of the DNA system.

The cell itself and all of its components is part of the DNA system: plant or animal. Was there once an array of organettes, precursors of organelles? Did organettes combine forces one by one and two by two,  over hundreds of millions of years of symbiotic mergers? It was not only the symbiotic merger of  mitochondria with the cell  but all organelles/organettes merging via symbiosis in the dense, crowded, high pressure world of snowball Earth’s dark hot pools, warm lakes, cool seas  or surface pools exposed to sunlight 2.3 BYA. The organettes formed colonies in the primordial pockets. Colonial structures held together by porous webs of microtubules followed by total lipid membrane enclosure.

The first life on Earth emerged 3.5 billion years ago ( BYA) seen now as biogenic graphite. The second life on Earth evolved 3.48 BYA and is seen in fossilized microbial mats. All living things have DNA. DNA comprises four small molecules: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. Three of these components of DNA: guanine, thymine and cytosine, have an oxygen molecule:. Oxygen did not occur in the Earth’s atmosphere until 2.8 BYA. Question: How did life, with its core genetic component of DNA evolve for 700 million years without oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere? Was the oxygen derived from rocks or from water condensing from volcanic gas? Did earliest life evolve on the surface of rocks where it could suck the oxygen needed for nucleotides from within the stone? did early life send microtubules ( straws)  into this rock to suck in oxygen?

The systemness of DNA replication- transcription-translation argues against a bunch of free-floating molecules colliding with one another in the primordial soup to positive evolutionary effect. Systems don’t work when the important parts are not present. Absence of oxygen is a theory crippler.  Perhaps the DNA got its oxygen from the water thus an argument for first life being waterborne and eventually spongy-corally-clammy-fishy. Did all aerobic life emerge from the water not the land? The land had no significant oxygen in the air above, not enough to accelerate evolution, until 1.8 BYA.

During the Huronian global glaciation 2.4 to 2.1 BYA the entire Earth was an iceball with ice five to twenty miles thick all over the Earth’s surface. The Earth’s ice crust was pocked by thousands of volcanic vents creating warm pools-lakes-seas in the darkness deep within the ice sheet. The intensity of molecular activity in these pools, each with its own chemical signature, accelerated collisions of all molecules raising the chances of positive symbiotic effects.

Is the DNA system is the product of bioengineering by an advanced species on a distant planet - a designed system invented  by creatures whose bodies do not use DNA in their life processes? Perhaps The DNA system  didn’t evolve in nature anywhere in the universe or in an adjacent universe accessible via quantum string tunneling. The DNA system emerged from generations of experimentation and calculation - alien thought. Was Earth seeded with its DNA system? Perhaps a few million archaea  released in the primordial soup 3.5 BYA from a spacecraft long dissolved or not. Check those streaks of color in the polished marble next time you’re standing near the restroom wall in a major airport. Due to its systemness,there is no such thing as a selfish chromosome or a selfish DNA molecule. A selfish cell? We know that cells work very well with others. If the DNA is not selfish, the gene is not selfish.

***

JB Questions-Observations:

1. What proteins regulate intracell proliferation of mitochondria? Are these mitochondria-regulating proteins from the cell nucleus or from the mitochondria DNA?
2. Imagine a wheatstalk as thick and tall as a redwood. One stalk the source of 10,000 loaves of bread.
3. What part of the human brain carries epigenetically conserved ideas about myth, religion, cosmology, etc.?
4. Experiment: Analyze past 90 years of Hollywood motion pictures noting the elapsed time between cuts and between scenes - note change in implied audience attention span over the decades. Note the elapsed time of either Joey Bishop or Sammy Davis,Jr standing or sitting doing absolutely nothing in Sinatra’s Rat-Pack movies.
5. Do Christians harvest ( destroy ) their tall poppies ( prominent people) as some sort of sacrifice to their God? See: Durkheim “Elementary Forms of Religious Life”
6. Was the 3-in-One oil marketing machine trying to capitalize on Christian dogma to sell lubricant for squeaky doors?
7. RE: distinctions between the sacred and the profane. If mankind has access to it, has power over it -is comfortable with it or enjoys it  then it is profane - all else is sacred. The Woody Allen Club Membership Test is at the root of all religions.
8. Profile all people who see themselves as leaders of a cult with at least 50 members - New Age, Self-Improvement, Witchcraft, etc. A breed of self-assessed “higher” consciousness folks - the plant intelligence-shamanic-tantric crew holing up along the Santa Cruz-Monterey coast. Are these cultists on to any incipient religion? Yes,  but which will endure?
9. Emile Durkheim was splitting hairs in 1912 when describing the difference between magic and religion. the difference is as follows: Since one hundred percent of humans create/crave/lean-in to the notion of the sacred and profane, magic is any and all of those practices not officially sanctioned by the dominant party-approved religious order. Those not in line with the governing religion are witches, magicians, outliers, Others and probably mentally ill and in need of medication or institutionalization ( see: Foucault “Madness and Civilization”. Magic and religion have nothing to do with a practitioner’s tendency to socialize. Durkheim is naive and narrow regarding his distinction between magic and religion.
10. The sacred is Yin, the profane is Yang, they define one another. Each is necessary in order to define the other, to supply le differAnce. See: Jacques Derrida “Grammatology”.
11. “Green Beard” effects as epigenetic behavior transmitted via neocortical spiny neurons. Green Beard behavior is that in which people favor their own sort. You gotta green beard like me? Yes - you’re in like Flynn.
12. What did young Le Corbusier learn from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio projects by 1914? What seeds were planted  by Wright’s Prairie-Style buildings?
13. RE: origins of first spoken language: afferent sensory neural network reaches critical mass i.e. overloads from intense stimulation of hand on a burning coal and a word spontaneously pops out of the neocortex-voicebox-mouth such as AWE or OWW !  which transforms into Hot. YAWEH ! into God. BRRR - shivver into hiver ( fr)- winter- cold. Infant’s first sounds: goo goo, dada.
14. Investigate multi-sense stimuli from sense apparatus to basal ganglia to signals @ neocortex. What is the neural network synaptical critical mass required to stimulate word formation?
15. Each of the sciences, social sciences, arts, politics and law has created its own dense rhizomic mat comprising myriad symposia, documents and experiments, thousands of theories, some credible dogma and plain BS  to protect students and practitioners from the void. There are over one million scientific research papers published in the past thirty years whose contents have not been verified due to the busyness of all scientists with their own work.
16. Review the structure of the slime mold vertical pod-net structure as a small bag for proto-organs 600 million years ago, organs jostling for position within this useful prefab structure that eventually evolved a backbone and symmetry-body morphology stored in HOX genes. It grew fins and swam into deep water in search of a meal.
17. Were there ever  free-floating precursors to the kidney, liver, heart, brain or pancreas and or sex organs that discovered advantages by sharing skills. “I’ll pump your blood if you’ll filter mine.” “If you help digest my meals I’ll increase your oxygen supply.” “I’ll be your operations center if you’ll fight off the big bad guys.”
18. Why would two nucleotides ever want to link up to form a base pair? Was this a forced marriage? A marriage of convenience? Just because they could? A happy accident? An unhappy accident? Crazy kids? Did they break apart soon after for a million years alone then reunite?
19. Has there ever been a living cell without a bilayer lipid membrane? with just a hairnet sort of enclosure surrounding its organelles?
20. A key reason for mitochondrial symbiosis was to provide a source of cell energy when DNA is locked up busy preparing to divide at mitosis-meiosis and not able to engage in protein transcription-translation. All protein synthesis must taper off while cell is dividing and re-starting its scheduled protein production. Mitochondria provide interim energy due to its separate genome not tied up in the cell’s general chromosome duplication.
21. Is there a unique RNA transcriptase for each different protein produced by a cell or does a single RNA transcriptase molecule start all protein production with intron-exon editing or protein tagging via methylation/ phosphorylation providing the proteinic variation? How unique must a protein be in order to warrant its own unique RNA transcriptase that is present prior to start of transcription?
22. What cell type has the most mRNA types? JB guess: auditory hair cells.
23. Do auditory hair cells require many hundreds of alternate splicing pathways diverging from a small number of tRNA and or RNA polymerases directing the synthesis of the range of proteins needed to detect 500 different pitches?
24. Religion or magic” The cult of genetics central dogma; what’s not to believe? Dig the dogma -it’s life and lab-tested.

January 13, 2016    5:49PM

Kuchen's Dam

Beyond the Base Pair

  DNA comprises four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. these bases pair with one or another into base pairs. There are two options for these four bases as thymine only pairs with adenine and cytosine only pairs with guanine. Each of the nucleotides is represented in writing as A,T,C,or G. A only pairs with T and C only pairs with G. The human genome as it occurs on our 20,000 protein coding genes  comprises only these four bases in an infinitude of possible sequences. the average gene is 1,500 base pairs long. The average chromosome ( they are all a unique length) has 139 million base pairs. Only two percent of the human genome codes for protein. the rest has either a regulatory function or it is dormant. If the average DNA molecule ( one DNA molecule per chromosome) was one sixteenth of an inch wide ( a piece of string) it would be two miles long. Each one of a human’s 10 trillion cells has a full component of 23 pairs of chromosomes, forty six total in each cell. Every gene occurs twice - one from mother one from father. there are 3.2 billion base pairs in the human genome, 6.4 billion bases.

If you have studied biology in the past 45 years you are familiar with the appearance of our 46 chromosomes all coiled up into wormy looking pairs, aligning at the center of a dividing cell and travelling to opposing sides of what has become two different cells. DNA is only bundled up into worm-ish chromosomes when replicating; at all other times this DNA is unspooled into a gooey mass of glop. A  few hundred ( of 20,000 plus) locations where the base pairs have been enzymatically separated to allow genetic information to be transcribed from the DNA in the cell nucleus to a ribosome sitting on the rough endoplasmic reticulum surrounding the nucleus where the proteins specific to that cell’s tissue type and the proteins needed for the cell’s shared metabolic needs are manufactured from amino acids suspended within the cell. Amino acids are building blocks of protein and protein is the building material for muscle, nerves, bone, blood and brains, all sensory organs and all hormones. We are protein. Protein is amino acids, the sequence and shape of amino acids is determined by DNA:  the specification for each plant, animal, bacterium, virus, archaea, fungi and mold.

There is ten years of research into the addition of a third base pair to the organism genome. E.coli bacteria are the medium of choice to date for these experiments. Bacteria multiply at an intensely high rate. E.coli bacteria double their population every 17 minutes by binary fusion in geometric progression. Bacterial growth is exponential: 1,2,4,8,16,etc If a third base pair is accepted into the blueprint of life and it enters via bacteria. this mutant DNA could spread to every living thing on Earth within a few years. Is it prudent to experiment with a fundamental building block of all life in such a cavalier manner - no. Life works fine most of the time - why wreck a good thing, a great thing. Just because life can be fooled to accept this UBP ( unnatural base pair) this third base pair, does not mean that good things will ensue. A third base pair integrated in all of the DNA of the human genome would be to throw ten thousand wrenches into our DNA spokes upsetting all inheritance of internal and external physical characteristics and any metabolic process - the whole works. Old turkish proverb: Any fool can throw a turd into the well  but it takes 20 wise men to get it out.

***

Questions and observations:

1. We live in the age of the network aka the rhizome. the age of the hierarchy is over. Look at the map of the major cities of the USA on the back page of your in-flight magazine. Note the connections between cities indicated by multiple webs of red lines radiating from each city. This is the heuristic of our time. The hierarchical ladder no longer functions for us. Imagine this map in real time and space, as pulsing intracity networks, our population on I-Phones, the traffic patterns, the infrastructure patterns: water, sewer, gas and electric lines, fiber optic cables, telephone lines, social networks: school boards, little league teams etc etc.
2. American tribal ritual of intercity flight within aluminum tubes at 40,000 feet. Sit back and relax, absorb the insane zeit from security paranoia theater at the airport to kidney and liver-killing soft drinks and alcohol in a jam-packed microorganism airshare,  pandered to with peanuts and the latest Disney movie as the wonders of the universe pass below little noticed.
3. All life on Earth is a video game played in an alternate universe operating within our quantum emptiness filling each living thing: plant, animal, bacterium. Myriad hands in gloves guiding all to victory.
4. When eating an egg, a person ingests a lot of DNA, ribosomes, rough endoplasmic reticulum, golgi apparati, RNA of all stripes, mitochondria, lipids etc etc - a smorgasbord !  Protein of many varieties in this broad mix of nutrients.
5. Compare and contrast: “The Good woman of Szechuan” by Bertolt Brecht and “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet.
6. JB essay title: The Mystification of Repressed Myth (bubbling up from archaic depths ( 1940s)  into consciousness via Turner Classic films.
7. JB essay title: “Corrosive Reification-Sinatra’s Rat Pack” or “Why does Joey Bishop Just Stand There?”
8. Is there a gene that accelerates epigenetics? that accelerates the acquisition of acquired rather than evolved characteristics?
9. Did gene transfer occur between horses and humans allowing the proliferation of epigenetic pathways to evolution?
10. Did horse teeth, enabling grass chewing, evolve via epigenetics?
11. Did the human outsize neocortex evolve via epigenetics?
12. JB neolog: Pooze or P.ooze or Primordial ooze: ancient sea/swamp/tideflats/ponds 4.0 to 4.5 billion years ago where the ground rules for organism metabolic process were established. See: Krebs cycle etc.
13. A wild-ass guess: There were 2 million donkeys on the North American continent 2 million years ago.
14. Humans may or may not have killed off the horse in North America - humans scared the entire horse population away across the Siberian land bridge. The horse did not go extinct in North America, it left the premises. Horses are smart.

***

12/31/15  7:20PM

Disposable Sublime

  Riddles, allusions, elisions, omissions - dreams, jokes, slips and symptoms

all the stuff of bucolic self come bubbling up for neural health.

JB

“Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.

Monty  Python - “The Meaning of Life”

Sublime: exalted, elevated, noble, awe-inspiring, majestic, glorious, transcendent.

Fecund:  Able to produce many offspring

499,999,999 sperm are wasted in every sex act that gives rise to a new human life and 500 million in each one that doesn’t result in fertilization. Cosmo ( JB God)  does not care about this incredible waste. Cosmo throws a colossal avalanche of spaghetti against the wall hoping one piece will stick. Cosmo is oblivious to the value of a single individual even though it expresses Cosmo’s own wonder-beauty-sublimity.

A sea turtle lays 150 eggs, 75 of these eggs survive bird and lizard and raccoon predation hatching in a timely manner. The baby turtles crawl a hundred yards across the sand to the surf and swim forward into the open sea where they immediately become food for sharks, dolphins and any fish that can lock its jaws around them. Two or three individuals from each nest will live through infancy in the open ocean growing to maturity to reproduce.

A baby sea turtle is a sublime thing comprising a multitude of miraculous biochemical pathways, complex organ systems and physical beauty evolved over 250 million years yet its existence on earth is tenuous, filled with danger with zero guarantee for a full life. Only a few of these small  miracles survive to produce their own offspring thus boosting their evolutionary potential.

Fecundity-disposability of the sublime is played out in most species of plants and animals. It is sadly wasteful but who would want to see the ocean jam-packed with shore to shore sea turtles or look out to the horizon across a salty writhing mass of 100,000 species of sea animals and plants. Balance requires brutality. Brutality ensures balance and it ensures some open ocean for the strong and lucky survivors to fight-flee seduce and mate.

Species not only dodge, fight and flee from predatory species but also fight and flee their own kind for survival and the opportunity to reproduce. One of the larger questions  for chordates is “Who gets the girl?” Intraspecies conflict is a big driver of evolution.

People create sublime things in the manner of nature: great paintings, music compositions, films, aircraft, I-pads and disposable razors. Only a very tiny percentage of sublime creations ever have a public moment. For the one tenth of one percent that do go into our public arena as products vying for mental shelf space, this glorious debut moment passes and the sublime thing is soon forgotten. A small army of talent creates a movie,  this cinematic treasure spends ten days at the multiplex then it’s gone. It is sublime. It is disposable. Sublime disposability drives people to madness. An architect works for three years on a big contract for the Navy - one million square feet of office and warehouse space. The project is shelved - forever. A composer working as a music professor draws out his finest musical ideas for years  writing his symphony and no one ever hears it. Disposable sublimity occurs so often in the arts, the professions and industry that it is cruel to even bring it up. A difficult subject on all counts. It fills psychiatrist’s couches.

There is intense intraspecies competition among humans to write the music that reaches the public, the book that finds a publisher and a public,  to design the building that gets built and used by a family or by millions of people. The 10,000 screenplays submitted to Hollywood movie studios each year  that never reach the cineplex are brothers to those  499,999,999 sperm that didn’t fertilize the egg. Funny how important we think our screenplay, novel or symphony is when it is one gazillionth as complex, as miraculous as a single sperm or any one of a million species of single cell animal or plant or bacterium or virus.

It is easier for us to adjust to the inequities of small turtle travails, the brief life of a cherry blossom or the waste of sperm than to the brief  life of one’s cherished artistic creation. How many wannabe  “Great American”  novels have hit the remainder bin after selling 500 copies ensuring the brilliant, imaginative author will remain a wandering nobody in the bustling halls of academe  not only not in the canon but not even a particle of gunpowder.

Life is brutal-pass the bottle

bein’ brilliant isn’t what’ll

get me up into the bracket

where I just can’t  hear the racket

• Mr. Gasoline lyrics

Media professionals design their product to hit the market and get out. A movie studio knows that its 75 million to 300 million dollar product has the shelf life of a baguette. They know the entertainment ecosystem  is shark infested, a relentless, vicious, winner take all competition every weekend. Movies, music and theater are designed to seduce immediately in order to simply get to the starting gate. Sublimity is always lost. Sex with no love, violence with no purpose, stories with no roots in the heart. Form with very little content. Delivering a shred of honest emotion  earns a Grammy, Emmy or Academy Award nomination.

Humans are miracles of nature little different from sea turtles or any organisms. We are all sublime beauty and wonder all the way down to the biochemical interactions of our molecules and beyond, yet entire populations of humans are allowed to waste in squalor without cleanliness, health, education or any degree of welfare. Entire classes of Americans become prison industrial complex fodder,  lost to financial predators in the loan-sharking or the wall street banking class, poisoned by the manufacturing class and brainwashed by the media class.  We are  sublime. We abuse and bury our sublimity.

God throws you against the wall of life like so much spaghetti,

it’s up to you to figure out how to stick

JB

We insist upon and try to cultivate our own sublimity once we know it is our resposibility. Cosmo turns away at birth and family loosens reins during adolescence.  Cosmo does not care if you are the turtlette who gets snatched by a crab as you flipper-flop through the dangerous sand to the dangerous surf or if you are the sea turtle who survives in the open ocean for 30 years reaching reproductive maturity dodging sharks, killer whales, boat propellers, shrimp nets and plastic pollutants mistaken for food. Cosmo does not care if you endure a stunted human life through psychological abuse, physical violence, obesity, alcoholism, drug addiction, hate, jealousy, assault or wither within the corrosive prison  of a troubled marriage. Cosmo don’t care, don’t give a damn, you are on your own. Are ya feelin’ lucky?

There are many thousands of sublime works created each year that will never see the light of a coffee shop wall or resonate on a streetcorner. Sublimity and self-promotion are mutually exclusive yet we demand that a single person harness  tools of self promotion to capitalize their sublime works. This is the stuff of the schiz-mind fry for Modernists - those who can handle lots of ambiguity, uncertainty and change, the pitch-yaw-roll of Postmodern life will thrive.

***

Poststructuralism:

Poststructuralism is a precursor to  1965/1980 postmodernism that focuses specifically on linguistic matters of a synchronic sort emerging from Saussure. One’s text must contain a dollop of rebellion from mid-century social sciences icon Claude Levi-Strauss, himself a disciple of Saussure. A postructuralist never writes so clearly that multiple interpretations cannot be fussed out of the text.

“Language is not a pane of clear glass”

“Priority belongs to language itself. We learn to mean.”

“Meaning is an effect of the signifier”

It is asserted by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida that the idea is not independent of the word and to suggest such makes one logocentric. If one brands the word “Hot” onto the surface of a person’s thigh does the brandee need to know the definition of the word hot, it’s spelling and pronunciation in order to understand the heat and pain?

“The trace of otherness lays all oppositions open to deconstruction, leaving no pure or absolute concepts to be taken as foundational. Meanings, not only art, democracy, terrorism, human rights are not individual personal or subjective since they emanate from language but they are not given in nature or guaranteed by any existing authority either.” Catherine Belsey summing key Poststructural concept.

Art, democracy, terrorism and human rights are evidence of mankind trying to establish  sublimity. Terrorism in the service of sublimity is an irreconcilable opposition.

JB Questions-Observations:

1. Can your flu catch a cold? Can your Toxoplasma gondii cerebral parasites catch a virus? Do viruses infect other viruses for ill effect on one’s health. Could this cascade of infection go 5 organisms deep given they are only inserting RNA or DNA into one another?
2. Did Hungarian Communist party apparatchik art cop, Georg Lukacs have a role in Trotsky’s assassination during his stay in  Russia?
3. Did anything ever de-fang capital “A” Art as much as 30th century interwar communist politics: prole as audience vs oppressive capitalist - UGH ! see: Lukacs-Brecht-Adorno dialectics
4. Is there such a thing as an “archaic” myth? Aren’t all myths ingrained at different levels in the history of a culture and also at different levels of present consciousness-unconsciousness. Do myths come and go or accrue?  When and how might a myth die, dissolve, evaporate? When will the myths surrounding The Bill of Rights evaporate?
5. Review the evolution of the definition of myth from Benjamin-Adorno to Jung to Barthes - Joseph Campbell et al.
6. Piling on the commie way: Perry anderson on Adorno, Adorno on Lukacs, Adorno on Benjamin: A Marxist Brothers comedy.
7. There is a sort of philosophical discourse whose purpose is to register membership in a club rather than to explore ideas. Adorno writing to Benjamin is like a kid sending a secret club code or giving the secret handshake. He peppers his text with as many commie buzzwords as his light ideas can carry. The Brecht-Adorno-Benjamin axis of 3d generation commie claptrap of mid-late 1930s re: commodity capitalism, division of labor, use-value proving to one another they have been good boys and done their Marx homework. Perry Anderson as a 4th generation Marxist  is even more pompously prolix.
8. Aztec-Inca gold financed the European Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution as it financed manufacturing throughout europe of weapons, tools, ships, textiles and global exploration. War and commerce flourished with the avalanche of Aztec capital. The engine revs up on central American fuel. Bottom line: Latin American booty enables Commodity Capitalism to evolve with great vigor in Baroque Europe.
9. It is human nature to project the death of one’s own neurons onto the entire culture as one notes the dissolution, the catastrophes, the failure of much that was good: millennial unawareness of Sergeant Pepper, the loss of factory jobs to digital technology, the replacement of wood with plastic, the computerization of cars and all communication. As neurons enter necrosis-apoptosis, the individual affected begins to see loss of quality all around. We project our loss out to the world forgetting that renewal is all around.
10. Compare and contrast two concepts of myth: the Levi-Strauss-Joseph Campbell strain ( all-encompassing, transcultural, one story serves all) vs the Roland Barthes-Gilles Deleuze-Baudrillard version that ascribes myth to all aspects of a culture system: religion, law,philosophy,art, advertising, entertainment, car sales - commodity manufacturing, use and fetishization. The deep vs the deep and shallow together.  Levi-Strauss: Myth can be separated from marriage rites, plant medicine, lineage tracking where Barthes et al it is ALL myth all the time. If humans believe it, watch it, eat it, do it then it’s myth.
11. Hegel’s idealism-dialectical materialism defangs Christian Fundamentalism at pre-Victorian era. Hegel provides rocket fuel for Victorians Carlyle, Marx, Darwin, Ruskin and later Nietzsche. Cracking the Christian hegemony at European Zeit opens the door for emergence of Jewish thinkers into late 19th century discourse and their major role as members of the Titanic 12.  Adam Smith vs Marx: choose sides - yin or yang - commie or cappie - Christian or Jew. ultramodernist or citramodernist. Richard Meier or Frank Gehry?
12. As dogmatic Christian belief dissolved across the 19th century due to secular Enlightenment notions gaining traction previously marginalized jews saw an opening encouraging emergence from the cloistered shadows of the arcade ( see: Benjamin) and compete for center stage in intellectual discourse. Judeo-Christian Yin Yang was thus animated for all 20th and 21st century discourse.

***

December 21, 2015  10:54PM

Name That Zeit

  Signs are commodities - JB

Mythology: Roland Barthes and Poststructuralist’s definition -  “The common practices of our society that are neither true nor false but carry meaning and values we may not have consciously chosen.” - Catherine Belsey

Culture:  The unspoken ( mythology) and the spoken ( ideology) - JB

Modernism: The features of the descended grid: fixed station point and all it enabled: double-entry bookkeeping, cartesian navigation, musical notation, linear perspective, scientific method, rights of man,

Postmodernism: The ideas discovered, cobbled, invented by the Titanic Twelve in 1912 -  all ideas here are products of the unpinned station point - a deep, fundamental difference from modernism

Citramodernism: Postmodernism between Titanic Postmodernism and the postmodernism spawned by One twelfth of the Titanic group - Ferdinand Saussure - postmodernism between 1912 and 1966. Postmodernism from 1966 to its demise in 2000 let’s call PoMo. Without names for this stuff we’re sunk !

Ultramodernism: Modernism ( The stuff of The Descended grid) manifest between 1912 ( when it lost its primacy) to the present day where it flourishes in combination with all things Postmodern in a new episteme driven by the digital world/social media and the 8 second attention span

Structuralism: The search for eternal man, for overarching definitions, for binary oppositions: the raw- cooked, legitimate-forbidden, nature-culture, hostility-reciprocity i.e.  for the universal. “Nothing between the universe and a bean” Barthes on the absurdity of Structuralist thought of Levi-Strauss. Note: Levi-Strauss swam in Saussure’s lake as did Barthes but at a greater depth with less light and more pressure. Barthes is light, sunny, witty, humorous, arch, wry, ironic, snarky, looser, more playful. Dolphin vs whale Levi-Strauss had a more serious project, a larger point to make. Barthes lived to deconstruct Levi-Strauss as he filled in the colorful details of our various myths that bring them to life.

Poststructuralism: The search for specific man, for the detailed story, for the specific - see: Roland Barthes.  Replace all active usage and usage back to 1966 of the word Postmodernism with Poststructuralism; any use of the word postmodern that implies or asserts origins of Postmodernism begin with the Fab French invasion of 1966.

Bottom line: Postmodernism began in 1912 with the Titanic Twelve: W. Wright, Freud, F.L.Wright, Saussure, Einstein, Schoenberg, Melies, Tesla, Duncan, Joyce, Cocteau, Cezanne-Braque-Picasso,  not in 1966 with  the French Eight i.e. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, Debord, Baudrillard, Deleuze and or Guattari.

Foucault, like Venturi can claim: “I am not a Postmodernist”  as he, Foucault, was, like Venturi, all about a critique of notions born of the Enlightenment - JB

“Lacan reinterpreting Freud in the light of Saussure and Levi-Strauss” (Belsey) is like Frank Lloyd Wright reinterpreting himself ( Prairie Style) in the neo-Loosian terms of Neutra and Schindler via Corbu and Mies @ Wesselhoff. Get thee to a scorecard ! - JB

Note to self (JB) Poking holes in recent ( since 1966) definitions of Postmodernism and Poststructuralism is taking away the toys of a generation of intelligent, well-read, hard-thinking ( though occluded) imaginative, high-spirited academics.

Did a feminist or a gay rights activist ever claim to be a postmodernist?  How did this become a part of postmodernism? It occurred during the PoMo era 1966-2000.

Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers and Soviet worker realism - both paintings of totalizing ideologies.

Human culture is a tall tub with a convection current circulating around in a giant ring from surface to depths. This grand convection moves in time through history and individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities whole populations, nations rise and fall at varying rates in the turbulence. Each zone of this tub has qualities that may be seen as modern or postmodern in character. Mo and PoMo are happening somewhere in this current at all times and have been since plants were domesticated in southwest Asia 10,000 years ago. there were postmodern Assyrians and modern ancient Egyptians. PoMo ideas such as multiculturalism and defiance against the powers that be are always afloat in steerage where they give birth to a wealth of new ideas that are carried up on social convection currents and locked into the zeit of dominant rationalists - the purveyors of power. The tenets of 1960s-90s PoMo are not even new with the Titanic 12. These ideas were popular when Irish and Jewish immigrants sailed to America in the 19th century. They were not new with either Marx or Darwin or Freud or Saussure. they are part of the phenomenon of individuals and classes falling into depths ( see USA sinking middle class 1980-2015) of the silent majority. Treating the concepts of PoMo.

Epochs get new names such as Medieval, Modern, Postmodern after an accretion of new ideas in religion,human rights,  politics, economics, art, literature, science and technology. It is the combined power of a few of the more prominent of these ideas that launches the naming of a new era, typically many years after the ideas emerged. As a new epoch progresses there are many changes throughout a society. Change itself is a given. Change is continuous. Change during the past few hundred years has been accelerating at an asymptotic rate. All change in an era is not necessarily in the spirit of that age but gets included. It goes along for the ride. Postmodernism is about things fundamentally unpinned not anything that occurred between 1966 and 2000 or between 1912 and 2000.

Scholars have confused the ideas, innovations and inventions that are the core of much subsequent change with the thought-trends that get the most attention during  early academic careers. Scholars define their operative zeit as if it were foundational when its status  is tertiary or secondary but rarely primary. We now have the much tortured, misnamed  postmodernism and poststructuralism both spawned by the Titanic Twelve.

The core marker for the Postmodern, the unpinned station point is best seen in analytical cubism was also expressed in a cluster of secondary and tertiary signs such as gender, ethnicity, sex, and race. These are qualities of late 1960s politics. They are expressions of the 1912 PoMo idea in a non-visual realm. There are no PoMo principles as these all reside with the titanic Twelve. there are only features not principles.

Modernism, in one of its more fundamental definitions ( there are sooo many), began when Filippo Brunelleschi pinned the station point in 1412 as he established the core idea of his great invention linear perspective. This fixing of man in a single spot allowed  many aspects of the real world to come into focus: cartesian navigation, double-entry bookkeeping, the picture plane as window, the scientific method, musical notation. If you just hold still - you can see a lot. This towering, paradigm-shifting event PSP meaning the pinned station point - mankind remains stationary and looks out at the world and begin to define it and to measure it and to catalog and analyze its contents. Man creates an array of  grids for making sense of the world; the navigation grid of longitude and latitude, the music grid of pitch and duration, the numerical grid of money spent and money owed, the spatial grid in two dimensions that allows the conception of buildings in an abstraction of 3-D space.

During the 19th Century the station point was unpinned by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. This grand unpinning was manifest in ten realms in 1912. These 12 realms and their associated genius are as follows: 

The Titanic Twelve:

1. Wilbur Wright - Pitch-yaw-roll controlled flight
2. Arnold Schoenberg - Atonal music composition  
3. Albert Einstein - Post-Newtonian physics
4. James Joyce - Post narrative fiction
5. Jean Cocteau - Post 3-act drama  
6. Nicola Tesla - Radio-A/C current
7. Georges Melies - Motion pictures
8. Sigmund Freud - subconscious realms
9. Ferdinand Saussure - Lateral linguistics ( synchronic)
10. Isadora Duncan - Post Baroque dance
11. Cezanne-Picasso-Braque - Unpinned pictorial space
12. Frank Lloyd Wright - Dynamic symmetry

Note that Charles Darwin and Karl Marx’s shift of locus of Victorian culture from the ecclesiastical to  the temporal secular realm of science, industry, labor and class conflict as the arena of mind-soul-heart of Western man precedes the reifications of The Titanic Twelve. See the writings of Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin and Morris for details of this shift. The  scarifying of the zeit, the plowing aside of the reigning Modern episteme for new spiritual-intellectual growth.

The Edwardian blossoming of human innovation in 1912, the year the Titanic sank. The work of The Titanic Twelve  is at the core of half of 20th century thought,  including Poststructuralism and Postmodernism.  The loss of the Titanic symbolic of the loss primacy of The Enlightenment Project. The world’s stage is shared from 1912 onward to today. Due to the continued dominance of enlightenment ideas, the postmodern should be seen as a diverging arrow that is one third the width of the Modern but growing rapidly.

Our age became schizoid in 1912 as two parallel tracks emerged from WW One evolving in tandem, giving rise to two Modern architectures; one pinned and one unpinned i.e. one based on classical Brunelleschi orthography ( plans, sections and elevations) and one based on Cubism ( pitch, yaw and roll around the object, best represented in models). Two modern paintings: One born of Cezanne’s deconstructed picture plane ( Mondrian, Malevich, Pollock, de Kooning, Schnabel)  and one informed by Freud and Marx: Duchamp, Surrealism, Dada, Warhol, minimalists, gendo-politico-sexo art projects 1970-2015.  Of course Venturi is not a Postmodernist as he always cleaved to Brunelleschi and the rationalities of The Enlightenment though his works are coated with pastiche born of notions unpinned from Modernist dogma. Though Le Corbusier is seen as a founder of hard line Modernism, he was a Cubist at heart and after his butchering by that motor yacht  while swimming in the mediterranean in 1953 his Cubist soul  became manifest in his late work best exemplified by Ronchamp and Carpenter Center.

One cannot clearly discuss either Poststructuralism or Postmodernism or any aspect of either without understanding, incorporating and addressing one’s root precursor(s) among The Titanic Twelve.

The great bifurcation from the PSP episteme into the age in which PSP (pinned station point)  is shared with UPSP (unpinned station point) was at 1912 not at 1946 ( Levi-Strauss) 1957 ( Barthes) or 1962 ( Foucault) 1966 ( Derrida) or 1971 ( Deleuze, Baudrillard). The Postmodern world did not begin with Barthes, Derrida, Venturi or Jacques Derrida as architecture historian Charles Jencks or Paul DeMan or Richard Rorty might lead one to think the postmodern began at the great bifurcation, the birth of the Titanic Twelve, the sinking of the Titanic. The whole 1960s version of Postmodern semiotics was a development of only two twelfths of the idea package, that of Saussure and his followers of the next 50 years in Germany and the USA.

In locating the birth of Postmodernism at 1912 rather than mid 1960s one can resolve the scatter of anomalies, inconsistencies and exceptions that riddle PoMo thought from 1965 to the present as its demise is now widely heralded.

To further clarify Modernism as it continues through the 20th century colored by all things PoMo let's call all post 1912 Modernism ( given that MOdernism began in 1412 with Brunelleschi)  Ultramodernism in order to distinguish it from any shades of pre 1912 manifestations of which there are countless. Without names there is chaos. All this naming may seem precious, obsessive, annoying but without names there is muck, mud, confusion as is seen in 100% of ALL writing on Postmodernism.

Since a misconception of the start point of Postmodernism is now enmeshed, ensconced, solidified into the discourse, we need a name for Postmodern stuff between 1912 and when the misinformed began to hold forth in the mid-1960s. Call PoMo between 1912 and 1965 CitraModernism.  OK - Modernism split apart in 1912 under the paradigm shifting force of the titanic Twelve creating two Modernisms: UltraModern = traditions extended ( Gropius and Mies were UltraModernists) and CitraModern = unpinned, Cubist, ambiguous, Contradictory, complex world of Russian Constructivists, late Corbu and Frank Gehry.

As for ideas such as the dissolution of grand narratives, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the all- inclusive multiculturalism of the visual arts and anthropology, sociology, these are social evolutions-revolutions that took place in the water-episteme-spectacle of the unpinned station point but are not directly tied to a single one of The Titanic Twelve though they DO manifest CitraModern notions. The gas emitted by The Titanic Twelve colors everything, even the Modern, creating the UltraModern The water of the new paradigm was first poured by Darwin and Marx ( The Towering Two)  followed 50 years later by the reifications of The Titanic Twelve and then all members of Western civilization  as we all swim in this water no matter what our unique concerns.  No wonder so much PoMo writing is confused - some write of Darwin / Marx,  some of the Titanic Twelve and their followers and some of those simply swimming in the PoMo water. They were on the floodplain when the river flowed  and got wet but were not otherwise close to foundational ideas of the fourteen. The whole group that includes Darwin and Marx -  henceforth:  The all-inclusive Fab-14.

At least two generations of literary theorists, critics, architects and artists have tried to package these social developments as Postmodernism. they have tried to place Roland Barthes in the same corral as Michel Foucault. They don’t belong together other than as generational cohorts. Barthes has direct ties to one of The Titanic Twelve in Saussure, Foucault has no direct link. Foucault is a critic of the Enlightenment not a founder of the Postmodern. Barthes and Derrida have direct links to Saussurean semiotics, Deleuze has links to both Saussure and Wilbur Wright. Deleuze ( with Guattari) weaving their rhizomic cocoon all around the towering commodity capitalism and its contingent myths.Any scholar delving into the current morass of contemporary discourse that I have parsed as  Mo, UltraMo, CitraMoPoMo must ask the following questions:

1. Is the idea / subject at hand pinned or unpinned? How can one tell?

1. Pinned is the stuff of Brunelleschi, the Descended Grid, Rationalist thought, the Scientific method, hierarchies, power centers, exceptionalism
2. Unpinned is the stuff of Darwin, Marx, The Titanic Twelve, relativity, free dance, Cubism, multivalence, ambiguity, pitch-yaw-rolling around the subject from multiple points of view.  

2. Which of the Titanic Twelve most fits your area of exploration? Pick three or more.

In the realm of Saussure if I am involved in any of the following:

1. Culture as text, culture as myth - Barthes
2. Any aspect of synchronic linguistics including all of Chomsky
3. Semiotics in lit-crit, architecture

In the realm of  Wilbur Wright ( simultaneity, pitch-yaw-roll forming multiple viewpoints

1. Into gender, feminism, race, ethnicity
2. multiculturalism
3. Aeronautics, aircraft manufacturing-fixed wing

If I write novels I read Grant’s civil War Memoir, Twain, Hemingway, Nabokov. I seek a swerve from these precursors and their spawn ( see: Harold Bloom for the mechanics of poetic invention) Pynchon, Delillo, Barth ( not Barthes) Coover. Do the PoPoMo.

A lesbian feminist artist would go all the way back to Marx, mix in a bit of Wilbur for a contemporary swerve on power narratives and to Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould for notions of evolutionary change ( it’s not all the same - different strokes for different species, some change is abrupt ( saltational) some is by invasion of another ( symbiosis) and some from genetic mutation. All living things evolve. You have returned to the roots of the roots.

Note to academics: Please stop trying to cram the women’s and gay rights movements into the Saussure-Barthes-Derrida bag as it does not fit. Try Foucault and his Modern, post 1412,  antagonists.

Is everything and anything that happened between 1965 and 2001 postmodern? Can one describe any development in economics, politics, art, science, liberal arts during this time as postmodern?  Many try. There ARE qualities of postmodernism other than simply the place in time of an event. We are too close to the rich sources of postmodernism to lose all meaning so soon. The word modern is long gone and must be qualified-explained on a few levels before proceeding. Postmodern is a dumb word to begin with as every age considers itself modern i.e. what’s happenin’ now thus every age forever has had its own postmodernism. It’s a total garble but I try. By my definition in this essay is everything between 1912 and 2001 postmodern? NO you haven’t been paying attention. The modern was cleaved by The Titanic Twelve plus Two i.e. The Fab 14. into UltraModern and CitraModern then in 1965 into faux-provisional-misnamed, phony-ass, superficial Postmodern.

It is painful to read any text on postmodernism from richard Rorty to Perry Anderson and Richard Butler and watch all of these men try to cram every social-political-artistic idea from 19654 to 1980 into the Saussure bag. It’s always at least ten pounds of ideas in a five pound bag. One must encompass at least one or two of  the other Titanic Twelve if not the whole Fab-14. Turn to Marx for foundational text re: power narratives and social stratification to Darwin for notions of evolutionary change, to Gould and Eldredge for notions of abrupt change as all living things evolve or go extinct. Explore the roots of the roots.

When poster boy of postmodern architecture Robert Venturi decries on the cover of top architecture magazine “I Am Not A Postmodernist” he means just that. Venturi’s work, though of pastiche, parody and snark, seen by many as hallmarks of postmodernism, is essentially of the grid, the ethos of the enlightenment, the orthogonal and defined clearly by orthographic projection: Plan, section and elevation. Venturi is of the PSP not the UPSP. Venturi swims in Ultramodernism the branch that has not been colored by Cubism at all. Venturi is a child of Brunelleschi not of Cezanne. for UPSP Citramodern architecture see the Russian Constructivists and late Corbu ( after his motor yacht trauma that re-arranged his creative consciousness via big brass propeller to the head ( and body). For more Citramodern see: Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas and Wes Jones.

To reiterate:

1. Address your subject
2. Locate its link among the Titanic Twelve and at least one of the Towering Two. Darwin is connected to every thought of the past 150 years and Marx to at least half of them.
3. Identify the proponents in the generation preceding your own and ideally practitioners and theorists in every 20 year period between your founding genius member of the 12 Titans
4. Do not confuse the flurry of French philosophers, all children of Saussure for all 12 Titans. Allow the Titans first to exist in their hard won pantheon and then the breathe with intellectual space around each one. they are all foundational to 20th century thought and achievement in all matters of culture: Art, Science, technology, law, ethics, entertainment. Ask yourself the deepest meaning of maneuverability for man on all three axes. That third dimension of movement was revolutionary in the deepest sense and Wilbur Wright invented it as well as patented it.
5. Easy rule of thumb. 1412 saw the birth of the modern. It grew for 500 years to maturity. In 1912, the year the titanic sank, is the year the modern sank ( more accurately, was joined by a new episteme) The two running side by side in parallel from 1912 until they merged during the new millennium as digital tech and social media have rewired the human mind.

When Picasso referred to his partner in paint Georges Braque as mon frere Wilbur, after french aviator Charles de Lambert circled the eiffel tower in 1909 in a Wright Brothers Flyer using Wilbur’s great invention: linked aileron-rudder assembly that allowed controlled flight in three dimensions, Picasso was (unwittingly?) acknowledging the essence of analytical Cubist ideas he and Braque ( together and henceforth-Braquasso) were then exploring: 1. moving around the subject to capture its three dimensional essence from multiple points of view and capturing this multiplicity on a single canvas thus spawning the idea of simultaneity. Analytical Cubism i.e. Cezanne shorthand at the root of all post Edwardian 20th century notions of multiple, simultaneous seeing. Seeing all cultures simultaneously, all religions, all skin colors, all sexual orientations. Claude Levi-Strauss synthesized Braquasso and Saussure in his analysis of hundreds of ethnographies of indigenous peoples from melanesia, South America, Australia, North America and Africa and noting equal cultural complexity in one way or another in all cultures. Jared Diamond drives home the point in his Pulitzer Prize winning book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” noting the primacy of geography and timing over any innate neuronal wiring in defining differential cultural fates.

It is difficult for literature academics to relinquish credit for what they believe to be the foundational ideas of 20th century thought, the core of their field of study to masters of the visual arts or to a scientist ( Darwin) but alas, they must.  Primacy of mid 20th century lit theory-semiotics belongs to Brunelleschi and Darwin and then to Cezanne and Braquasso not to the Beatles of 20th century philosophy - the French Invasion of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The American intellectual establishment was permanently seduced ne, overpowered in 1964-1966 when Paul DeMann of Yale opened the doors. to paraphrase Victor Hugo speaking of the Renaissance. “It was the setting sun all Europe mistook for dawn.”

Braquasso were popularizers of the more foundational Cezanne as Barthes and Derrida were explainers of Saussure. Neither Braquasso nor Barthes were founders, they were explainers-synthesizers. Frank Lloyd Wright was a great synthesizer of John Ruskin and William Morris as well as of everything he laid eyes on as a young architect. Founders shift paradigms, entire bodies of thought get re-visioned in a new lens, the world is seen in a new way forever after. Foundational thinkers deliver new tools, new heuristics. Several of the Fab-14 generated their great new idea by synthesizing and explaining many ideas composing their operative episteme. Whether one is foundational like Darwin and Saussure or secondary like Barthes and Derrida has to do with scale of synthesis. Darwin summed up 150 years of enlightenment science from geography to animal husbandry. Barthes explicated one aspect of the work of a single thinker. Matisse was foundational. He synthesized the Enlightenment achievement in 100 different ways. Secondary figure richard diebenkorn ( no slouch in the annals of modern painting) based his entire career on the background of a single Matisse painting. Ocean Park series riffing on background of “Zora On the Terrace”

The system invented by Wilbur Wright from his intense study of birds in flight enables a man to move along three axes all around a place or an object such as the Eiffel Tower. Wilbur’s system remains a part of every single fixed-wing aircraft in the world.  It was from imagining themselves flying around the eiffel Tower that enabled Picasso and Braque to imagine flying around a kitchen table with its newspaper, pipe, cup of coffee and clarinet.

In closing: go to the source. Go to the expansion valve that transforms fluid into vapor, that changes states of substance. The expansion valve of 20th century expansions of the modern both ultra and citra - pinned and unpinned was the combined effect of the Fab 14 with an especially useful focus on the Titanic Twelve who delivered useful tools for translating zeit into the stuff of life. The expansion valve for what is commonly if erroneously called Postmodernism was the Titanic 12 not the Fab French Four or Six or Eight.  I write this to supply a tool for unjamming the modern-postmodern discourse. As long as one thinks postmodernism began in the mid-1960s the discourse is confused chock full of exceptions, excuses, pulled punches, qualifications, reservations. It’s time to pull the detritus from the weir to make way for still another swerve on modernism, that of the eight second attention span. Remodernism: 2000-Present

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December 3, 2015   6:24 PM

Less Is Less

  Scottish poet Robert Browning in his 1855 poem “The Faultless Painter”  writes the following line  “Well less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged” The words were adopted by German architect Mies van der Rohe in 1947 to reflect his slant on Modern architecture. “Less is more” has been a potent meme in contemporary architecture from 1950 to the present. The phrase is a corollary to the Adolf Loos 1910 lecture and essay titled  “Ornament and crime” and soon became “Ornament is a crime” adding a moralizing element to Modern architecture that expanded like an ecclesiastical tumor upon the movement. A generation of young turks in the Western world made a big, fat moral issue of their slimmed-down Modernist esthetic - swallow our astringent, soulless Kool Aid or you are a Victorian degenerate throwback and deserve to be run out of town.

“Nothing in excess” - Ancient carving at the Greek temple at Delphi

“A man must know how to choose the mean and avoid extremes” -       -Socrates

For over one hundred years the shedding of 19th Century gingerbread esthetic has reigned on all man- made things from lamps, chairs and tables to buildings (though violated by Frank Lloyd Wright who assigned “organic” truth to his carbuncular detail. Most Modern architects and industrial designers have endorsed a machine esthetic - form follows function or Form and function are one. The steamship, the airplane, the locomotive as early 20th Century examples of a more honestly conceived design.

In the realm of painting, the notion that every visible component of a scene must be faithfully rendered as seen by the eyeball-occipital axis of “reality” evaporated with the impressionists in 1870 and has remained in a gaseous state ever since;  exceptions for throwback obsessives  Richard Estes and John Currin noted. Total abstraction launched by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich in the early 20th century  became comfortable to the contemporary mind. Non-objective Painting by Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Larry Poons is old hat. Less courses through this work but is there adequate “more” ?   There is more in Stella but a more deficit  in Kelly. Kelly has taken a ride on the easy train with his large monotone shaped canvases. The license to do away with ornament spawned artists who do not search for the essence of less while delivering less itself.

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JB Questions and comments:

1. Has epigenetics been an accelerator of geographic realpolitik over the past 3,000 years?  In his Pulitzer Prize winning book about the origins of cultural dominance, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,  UCLA Professor Jared Diamond asserts the foundational role of geography alone in creating the technological headstart for some peoples of the Earth. Diamond’s idea of primacy of geography contains the subsets:edible wild plants that are easily domesticated and large wild animals that can be domesticated to become beasts of burden as well as transportation in peace and war. Perhaps there is more to the story. Once a tribe or a kingdom gets a headstart from its food and animal resources it’s conceptual tools such as writing and language development get hardwired epigenetically forming a synergy of brain and geography resulting in cultural acceleration and domination. The causation is not geography alone as Diamond so forcefully asserts prior to 25 years of intense genetic research since publication of “GGS”.
2. Did ancient Andean or New Guinea ancient mountain populations invent the wheel and discard it due to steep trails and lack of brakes? Perhaps wheels made of thin sections of logs or rings of bamboo slathered with rubber that would  have decayed leaving no evidence. Archaic wheels do not need to follow the Fred Flintstone model.
3. Is American ghetto violence simply the chaos that always exists between opposing paradigms as these neighborhoods waffle between the tribe political organizational paradigm and the kingdom paradigm?  I.E. indefinite borders, ambiguous membership, scope of political unit?  There is no clear political definition in these communities thus no political stability. Drugs, poverty, lack of education are the result of paradigm ambiguity. Is it one group per block as some assume or one per four or eight blocks as others define it or the border between housing and train tracks, freeway, river? Who knows? Ambiguity results in perpetual  battle.
4. The Chinese have had a compulsion for innovation stifling top down social control for thousands of years due to a lack of trust among themselves. Is the widespread lack of trust among the Chinese an epigenetic trait peculiar to the Chinese? Are black Africans any different? Whites? Melanesians? Polynesians? What brain area and neurological mechanisms harbor trust, ability to trust, trust response, the trust connection with one’s family, friends, neighbors, fellow countrymen so vital to cultural development.
5. Rank the nations of the word not by gross national product but by per capita debt.
6. Apropos of little - Differences in highrise office towers the world over are like different dog breeds. Nothing genetic happening. No mutations of import. All highrise towers share 99.999% of their DNA. These buildings are not analogous to lions, tigers, bears or crocodiles but to  spaniels, labradors, shepherds and weiner dogs. High rise architects are like a league of dog breeders - no evolution just superficial change. Some elevators are more efficient than others, some enclosure systems are more versatile - so what? Highrise architecture is a crashing bore - no genetic change since the curtain wall was invented in 1909 ( Boley building, Kansas City, MO, architect:  Louis Curtiss.
7. Are schizophrenia, manic depression and hypomania degrees of the same parasitic disease of the brain? Perhaps amoebae Toxoplasma gondii or N. fowleri?
8. Are the tension-sensing proteins at work in microtubules during mitosis the same proteins as those in trees and all branching plants that sense tension and or compression forces caused by asymmetrical limb growth and sending grow signal to opposite side of tree to maintain equilibrium?
9. Is cilia rotation at embryonic notochord cells counterclockwise at southern hemisphere in marsupials? It is clockwise in northern hemisphere in animals.
10. What signals the proteins that signal the start of the embryonic ectoderm’s  production of neural tissue?
11. JB neolog: “Stochastic Differentiation”: Adjacent cells correct one another thus avoiding catastrophic errors that would result if a single overall masterplan blueprint were used to direct cell activity. Stochastic Differentiation implies bottom up causality as opposed to top down causation.

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11/7/15  11:51 AM

Coronet Effect

  In 1936 M.I.T. physics professor Harold Edgerton created an ultra high-speed photograph he named “Milkdrop Coronet” in it, a single drop of milk causes a “coronet”  (an expanding ring) of 25 distinct droplets to explode up simultaneously ( thus the “coronet”)  from the surface of the milk bowl encircling the point of impact of the larger drop. One large event, the milkdrop in this example, causes many smaller events. This is the Coronet effect. A cue ball striking another ball or two would not be an example of the coronet effect. One cause-one effect is not coronet causality. A coronet is not a cascade. The resulting smaller events do not cause one another to occur nor do they initially interact with one another. they are all caused by the single large event not by one another. When the droplets forming the coronet fall back into the medium from which they sprang, they DO begin to interact with one another but not in mid-air to any noticeable degree other than via quantum spook.

Example of Coronet Effect:  A mountain of copper and gold deep in the jungle of Irian Jaya ( Western New Guinea) is slated for mining, the big drop. The following list of droplets are coronet effects:

1. marginalization of Indonesian leader Sukarno by C.I.A.
2. JFK assassination
3. ascendancy of LBJ
4. dislocation of indigenous mountain tribes
5. the Vietnam War
6. a prospering U.S. mining company

A coalesce is the opposite of a coronet. A coalesce occurs when several separate events combine to create a single, larger thing, a whole larger than its parts.  Twelve equal segments of TNT in an atom bomb explode simultaneously in order to drive two previously separated chunks of plutonium together detonating the plutonium causing an  explosion  magnitudes larger than the sum of the 12 segments of TNT.

Consider the work of the following geniuses coalescing to form Postmodernism from an aging Modernism ca 1912, the year the Titanic sunk-symbolic !: Mieles( motion pictures), Wright Brothers ( pitch, yaw, roll), Frank Lloyd Wright ( asymmetric balance of form and space), James Joyce ( stream of consciousness) , Isadora Duncan (anti-baroque free dance), Tesla ( AC current, radio waves ), Braquasso ( Braque and Picasso roped together like climbers on Mt. Cezanne inventing Cubism i.e. Cezanne for Dummies) Einstein- deconstructing Newtonian mechanics, Schoenberg-atonal music composition, Edison-recorded sound, Duchamp- redefinition of capital “A”  art. The emergence of the Postmodern zeit, a colossal paradigm shift is a reverse coronet, 12 smaller drops coalesce  into a single culture-wide drop of zeit-welt (zeitgeist-weltanschauung) characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity and contradiction. The ultra-democratic rhizome appears counterbalancing all things of The Descended Grid, The Enlightenment Project i.e. The Modern, symbolized by Charles Darwin’s branching tree.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger Taney presiding,  had a vast Coronet effect as it initiated the reification of the key assertion of  the Declaration of Independence:  “All men are created equal”: The U.S. Supreme Court decision is the big coronet drop causing the following droplets: The Civil War, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Reconstruction, Jim Crow era, contemporary African-American struggle for justice.

The emergence of bilateral symmetry from radial symmetry in animals was a coronet event. Once the “decision” was made for bilateralism in Cambrian fishlike organisms, a cornet of causality followed; now every animal has a left side and a right side; a front and a back and with that -implied velocity ( motion with direction). The birth of the idea in animals of action over stasis - advantage is immediate and widespread -  the Cambrian Explodes. There is oscillation from drop into droplets creating the coronet and from droplets into single drops creating the coalesce. What is the connection between the coalesce: Picasso and his fellow geniuses launching Postmodernism and the coronet of the Dred Scott Decision & aftermath?  Do phenomena comprising a coronet often coalesce and vice versa? Is droplet formation from a single drop always energy dissipating? Does coalescence always require energy input? Is there more coroneting or coalescing in nature? The eukaryotic cell is a coalescence of previously free-floating microorganisms, higher animals are a coalescence of organ systems and of other organisms ( bacteria and viruses). Are coronet-coalesce events like waves or like yin-yang, chicken-egg, object-shadow dualities, one automatically implying the other?  Will a cornet always be a part of a coalesce? Every wave has a trough and a ridge. It is not that one causes the other but that they are two parts of the same thing. If you drop a rock in a pond causing a coronet, the droplets will coalesce upon impact causing waves. Life on Earth is a coronet,  plants, animals and microorganisms are droplets in gradient reduction theater to be followed, in billions of years, by coalescence back into singularity.

Coronet-coalesce oscillation  in human affairs follows the same rules of causality as seen in larger and smaller arenas of the natural world,  from intergalactic events to sub-atomic activity. This explains why we get nervous when good things happen and why most believe it is darkest before the dawn. A pea-brain squirrel knows that a pile of nuts is too much of a good thing and will run away if it encounters such an unnatural cluster of seductive goodies on a fence rail. Humans set traps for one another using this universal causal logic. Buy this car, see this movie, eat this food, drink this alcohol-The Big Drop, and a coronet of good things will ensue….not…. as car and other payments coalesce into a stack of bills each month.

People, at times, mistake a big drop as the final outcome unmindful of the coronet effect. The conspirators behind five years of Dred Scott shenanigans: Roger Taney, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas,  believed they were solving the slavery problem once and for all by ensuring the survival of slavery via federal law. Their One Big Drop: a Supreme Court judgement. This One big drop created many droplets spreading effects in all directions. In some cases droplets grow into big events spawning a new generation of effects both positive and negative.

Around the locus of 1912 there was one big Western Culture-wide drop with 10 subsequent droplets, one each in physics, biology, politics,  painting, dance, fiction, music, electricity, manned flight, and architectural space, each droplet creating its own path of events and subsequent droplets over and over dissipating energy and adding complexity all the way. Looking at the paradigm-shifting drop of 1912 ( initiating our Postmodern world) one can follow a single droplet such as Duchamp’s reinvention of capital “A” art and follow this capital “A”  Art droplet  through several generations of art innovation revealing a “bouncing ball” pattern.

Questions and Theories:

1. Is every big drop at the center of a coronet also a small drop from an even larger coronet event?
2. Is the human capacity for written language coded in genes or by some RNA modification?
3. JBT - Human epigenetic machinery such as MYSM1 does not distinguish between creating a new molecule to battle an invading microbe from creating a new molecule to transmit a byte of experience ( emotional or rational) language, music, math. It’s all the same. The DNA-gene making machinery will sort it out over time i.e. encode or discard. New stuff gets a trial period of perhaps a few thousand years or millions when the new feature is encoded in DNA or discarded onto evolution’s trash heap.
4. Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller ( over one million copies sold) refers many times to “human evolution” to describe cultural developments that led to language, guns and steel stuff, sidestepping the fact that all human “progress” i.e. development of the past 50,000 years has emerged from the same neocortical gene group not from any human evolution in the Darwinian sense with ‘evolution’ meaning change to the human genome i.e. changes to nucleotides as they sit on strands of human DNA. One might say that humans have, over time, learned to use their inflated neocortices to greater effect as they learn from one another and store information in myth, tradition, libraries and social patterns learned by children. Diamond wants it both ways: to claim that societies evolve in a Darwinian sense while asserting in his main thesis,  that we humans are not differentiable genetically from one another as if humans the world over would have all changed in evolutionary terms ( unlike any organism ever)  into identical phenotypic expression from an identical genotype. In Diamond-speak, societies evolve while humans all remain the same genetically i.e. share the same brain. One excuses Diamond- logic in light of its time of writing in mid-1990s when epigenetics was simply discredited Lamarckism and not the established science it is today.
5. The very large human neocortex is a big evolutionary  coronet drop caused by the mutation of a single gene. This increased brain capacity has resulted in so many useful coronet droplets in our struggle for survival such as language, tool making, social complexity, animal/plant domestication that it appears so far to be a mutation worth conserving. The big brain is in its infancy in geological time.
6. Jared Diamond juggles different meanings of the word evolution. His topic employs much life-science evidence where evolution has a strict meaning related to mutations in DNA affecting an organism’s genome-genotype-phenotype. He uses the term evolution interchangeably: formal - informal. the informal meaning is  far more casual meaning simple change for the better or change itself with no connection to actual modifications to nucleotides. This may seem trivial but when Diamond’s thesis revolves around his assertion that all humans the world over have no discernable  genetic differences that might be the source for vast differences in language acquisition, tool use, plant / animal domestication, social complexity, war-making capability, it becomes important to point out Diamond’s essential fuzziness in his definition of evolution. He likes it fuzzy. This fuzz is essential to Diamond’s thesis. Twenty years of epigenetic science blows away fuzz. There may be thousands or millions  of heritable pathways to cultural complexity and these may or may not involve DNA ( rather than RNA, histones, proteins etc).
7. True evolution versus accrued human culture. There was a single evolutionary event - the big brain mutation, all else is not evolution but the much simpler “change” Many things change without evolving.  The stuff of culture changes it does not evolve. Aircraft changed from biplanes to supersonic jets they didn’t evolve. If Guns, Germs, And Steel is based upon biology-living things such as people and their culture then Diamond’s thesis: “The ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human culture” evaporates. Epigenetic change accrues immediately as well as over a few thousand years and contributes, along with geography to cultural diversity.  Diamond asserts the reason that one culture has all the cargo is strictly geographic happenstance; in light of the past 20 years of genetic research, this is not so.
8. Diamond and many anthropologists list several societies that did not invent writing. Perhaps these societies invented writing AND paper thus any evidence has decayed into dust say: animal blood ( ink) on animal skin ( paper) both organic and gone in 100 years let alone 3,000 to 5,000 years. Maybe not all societies wrote on rocks or into wet clay. Diamond relies too heavily on anthro dogma on the subject of writing as a marker for place in time or time in place.
9. To study: The relationship between risk-taking behavior of Western peoples induced by Toxoplasma gondii parasites as cysts in neocortex due to association with domestic cats and Western  dominance of Third world  indigenous peoples.
10. The chicken-egg heuristic is exhausted - use yin-yang simultaneity that accelerates or slows, as in autocatalysis. Autocatalytic def: A process that speeds up over time at an increasing rate.
11. Entropic thermodynamic theory-gradient reduction as causality for increased social complexity with war serving a cosmic compulsion toward stasis through growth of living things: plants, animals, empires.
12. Did humans migrate from the Olduvai Gorge across what is now the South pole into Australia then on up to China when the Earth was oriented differently on its axis, when the equator was plus or minus 90 degrees from its present location? - no
13. Jared Diamond discusses language in an historic manner using it to trace the migration of races across continents and oceans and islands. Language is treated as one now treats genetics as a means of establishing primacy in a locale. In Saussurean terms, this is diachronic linguistics. To study language laterally in terms of grammar and syntax and its neurological origin is synchronic. Noam Chomsky is a synchronic linguist.
14.  We spend our lives trying to close the gap between what we know intuitively ( a lot !) and what we are surrounded by in the real world (our lot in life, Lalena) with its thin crust of the whole pie of life and other things. Humans who get all peaceful and dreamy believing they have closed the gap between self and cosmos have simply learned to modulate hypothalamic flow of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
15. Was Dred Scott a hired double-agent of Southern slave interests led by “Dough Face” president John Buchanan manipulated to create a case that would ensure the perpetuation of slavery in the U.S.?

“Authority has a nose of wax, it can be twisted in either direction.”

                                                                                       -Alain de Lille

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10/27/15  1:41 pm

Squid Rasslin'

  In Tim Burton’s 1994 feature film “Ed Wood” Martin Landau, playing silent screen legend Bela Lugosi, enters a dark “swamp” and dramatically, feverishly rassles a rubber squid into submission for a B-movie film crew. A faux opponent is subdued after an exaggerated struggle.

Squid Rasslin’ - definition: To drag a trivial or misconstrued opponent into your arena and proceed to dismantle it point by point in front of your rapt, admiring audience. A favorite argumentation trope of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond.

Bout #1     Richard Dawkins is Stephen Jay Gould’s rubber squid in Gould’s 1,300 page rasslin’ match, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.  A gene in its place on a chromosome is a string of inert goop, a slime library with a spatio-hierarchio-taxonomically remote, though vital, role in evolutionary, as opposed to biochemical, outcomes in the cell and not a warrior in the animal-scale arena of natural selection fighting against environmental forces including conflict with members of the same species for food and sex.

The gene, as it rests as a long sequence of nucleotides forming a small link of either the left or right strand of the interminably long DNA molecule, is like a lounging odalisque in the steambath fastness of the palace, far from the essential action of evolution. This gene lays about waiting to be courted-transcripted by the ever-active RNA. If any component of heredity is selfish or altruistic or manifesting any anthropomorphized quality, it is RNA, busy as a bevy of beavers throughout much biochemical intracellular activity. To assign evolutionary primacy to this layabout gene can now be seen as an error borne of a dearth of information at the time of its writing. That SJ Gould saw fit to rassle this Dawkins gene-meme squid for 350 of 1,300 pages in his masterwork appears to be the result of professional annoyance at being upstaged in the arena of public opinion.

Both SJ Gould and Dawkins trying their damndest to put a dent in Darwin’s key notion of the primacy of the individual organism in the struggle for survival in natural selection. Dawkins likely inspired by an avalanche of early 1970s genetic research that gave the gene star quality. Dawkins celebrating the gene is like Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol valorizing Marilyn Monroe - low hanging celebrity fruit.

Gould writes at enormous length and passion trying to sell us his argument to unseat iconic, entrenched, musty old godhead of bioscience-religion-popular discourse, Charles Darwin. Gould’s 1,300 page argument for the species as the key actor in natural selection rather than Darwin’s individual is feverishly opposed to Dawkins’ gene-centered causality. Charles Darwin would have been easily convinced by either Gould’s or Dawkins’ elaborate, informed arguments but STOP !  All three of you are wrong !  It is busy little RNA molecules in their role not only in transcription and translation of proteins - standard Neo-Darwinist central dogma, but the role of RNA as a hitchhiker in meiosis-mitosis carrying its small collection of books ( information coded as sequences of nucleotides but not yet encoded into cell’s DNA books) that are separate from the DNA library at chromosomes. RNA carries provisional manuscripts in the process of auditioning for inclusion into the DNA code at some point. This RNA carries new ideas from recent life experience, experience not yet coded in the genome at chromosomes but actively carrying new information from one life into a new life to be translated into new proteinic configurations and new neuronal ideas. Ideas, emotions, skills, fears, and blisses carried by phosphorylated RNA molecules into fetal minds to grow with the newborn child-adolescent-adult. New ideas that might someday be encoded in DNA as a new gene or discarded after a few hundred generations as a fad, a disposable meme, a situational feature not to be conserved for the duration.

Of course it is not fair to look back at a 30 year old rasslin’ match and judge it as disingenuous. It appears today that Gould and Dawkins were only rasslin’ in light of an intervening avalanche of genetic research,  but it was a death-match at the time in the late 1970s.

Bout #2   Jared diamond in his million-selling Pulitzer Prizewinning book Guns, Germs and Steel,  asserts that human genetics re: intelligence played no part in the devastation of indigenous peoples by Europeans from the 17th century onward.

“We have now traced how food production arose in a few centers and how it spread at unequal rates from there to other areas. Those geographic differences constitute important ULTIMATE (my bold) answers to Yali’s ( Diamond’s inquisitive friend, a New Guinea remote mountain tribesman) question about why different peoples ended up with disparate degrees of power and affluence.”  p.195

In his chapter “Apples Or Indians” Diamond  sets up one of his big rubber squids when asserting that the “failure” of indigenous people in several agriculture-friendly parts of the globe to produce their own crops and domesticate local animals is a problem in the first place. he writes: “Problems with the local people” “Problems with local wild plants” “Problems with big local wild animals” The biggest problem for the Native Americans of the West Coast in Diamond-speak is that there was no problem. They had plenty of food, plenty of space and had no need to domesticate any wild plants or animals. Life was just dandy. Writing in 1996 with 150 years of 20-20 rear-view vision, Diamond wrestles his rubber squid in assigning “problems” where there were none at the time.  How is an Indian tribe supposed to know that at some point in the future white men with their guns, germs and steel are going to arrive? A foundational cause of natural selection is that there is no intention on the part of the player. The individual ( microbe, monkey or tribe) lays its phenotype on the table and nature takes its course. A devastating problem in one historical outcome might be the key to survival in another - time will tell.

To look back in time at the peoples of the world and assign problems is to grossly misunderstand the essence of Darwinian dogma. Modern civilization with its guns, germs and steel might go up in nuclear smoke someday and the ways of the Salish tribe of Puget Sound may revive and prevail for another 100,000 years. One of Diamond’s big problems is his lack of understanding of the notion of geological time, its vastness and the incredible slowness, the equilibrium of much of evolution. He confuses, throughout his book, cultural changes in human populations with evolutionary changes and he speaks throughout of cultural innovation as evolutionary developments as if Modern Man has reached some sort of high point and shreds and shards of devastated indigenous peoples are left in the “evolutionary” dust. Certain populations have learned to use their unique ( to mammals and all life) giant neocortex in additive ways, some have been more modest in creating rhizomic spectacular networks. To look back on only 5,000 years of human change and hand out gold stars is premature and typically human. If Diamond could not rassle this rubber squid there would be no book.

Guns, Germs and Steel reads like one of those Ivy League brainiac stock analysts in 1998 railing against the idiots who are not sinking their life savings into Dot Com investment opportunities. The book is a thorough explication of missed opportunity and unfortunate circumstance  that may easily turn out to be wisdom. One million years is the blink of an eye in species evolutionary terms.The fat lady has yet to sing.

JB Russell's Teapot: Differing accumulation of patterns of use for our identical human neocortical neuron DNA package has generated global  race bias. Neocortex imprinting for the exploitation of social networks, farming and technical innovation is inherited by mechanisms separate from DNA and conserved genes.  All races share 100% of the human genome thus there is very little difference at genes but there is what, in human terms, turns out to be much difference from accrued heritable transmission of acquired characteristics. Race bias via Lamarckism. Diamond wrestles a lot of squid to assert otherwise. Human populations along Diamond’s highly touted and bountiful East-West geographic axis stores different epigenetic data and it is additive thus it becomes easier for their descendants to learn about the matters that have become important - social stratification and steel stuff. Storing and sharing data on a widespread uber-tribal, pancultural level. Whole populations of American men build train sets and model airplanes independent of any societal demand for their effort - it is in their RNA.

Professor Diamond tries hard using his palette of logical fallacies and cognitive biases to reinforce academically fashionable, dogma-infused assertions in order to erase race. If one is going to erase race as a parameter of social “evolution” one must dissipate fog not thicken it. Behind every bold unproven assertion ( Russell’s Teapot) lurks a slippery squid. Professor Diamond is a subtle and astute politician and a scientist with a big bag of tropes and tricks.

Some other questionable tropes of argumentation:

1. Metaphor Stretch:  To use a metaphor that disguises the nature of your subject in order to give your dialectical dog more heft in the discourse ( fight).  Dawkin’s use of oarsmen ( in 8-oared modern racing shells as seen at the Henley Regatta) for his gene- actors racing for effect on the river of evolution when in actuality genes lay about like obese whores in chromatin goop with their fat thighs spread waiting for the messenger RNA to snatch information and carry it away through a nuclear pore to a waiting ribosome for translation into a functional protein.
2. Flogify: To beat one’s point into submission using copious, often specious detail, arcane-archaic-biblical-Shakespearean-latin language, obscure scientific papers and endless repetition.
3. Hotdogify:  Stuffing filler that is void of nutrients into a skin of assertion wrapped in a fluffy bun of statistics lacking food value. The stuffing often involves devious tricks decipherable only by insiders, shell games, obscure scientific papers mixed-matched-switched-clumped together in mandelbrotian abandon.
4. Gould’s Glu-Stik: the opposite of Occam’s Razor. When using the Stik, one rarely passes up an opportunity to add adjectives, pronouns, sentence fragments, whole long sentences filled with redundant adjectives, paragraphs, additional entire book sections wherever possible. To always use the word with the most letters.

JB Questions:

1. How many people have both autism and schizophrenia? Of these, how many are math, art or language savants? Perhaps the first cohesive human languages were assembled, articulated, sussed out by individuals who had contracted schizophrenia from domesticated cats in ancient Sumeria or Mesoamerica. Who but a savant could ever comprehend all of the variables of a language from scratch? Who but a schizophrenic would even try?
2. Does the message of successful politicians penetrate into our brainstem ( a brain area shared by all mammals-source of visceral, primitive, reflexive response)  bypassing the uniquely human neocortex; a brain area  containing our higher faculties of reason? The brainstem is the source of our primal instincts regarding territory, dominance, charisma, boldness. It ignores policy details and rationality as the stuff of egghead losers.
3. War is melted religion
4. History is not the heart of culture ( as proposed by Guy Debord in “The Society of the Spectacle” as if it might also be the kidney or the liver or even the brain of culture. History is culture - culture is history. Culture drifts to the bottom of Life Lake and accrues in layers of sediment, layers that interact with one another swapping influence sending thermal vents (information) up through the sediment: Language written and spoken, kinship structures, social mores, Christianity, Marxism, Darwinism, and Capitalism are all powerful vents; warming-feeding-poisoning. There is a taxonomy, a hierarchy of these convection engines  around which the culture of an historical moment ( say the 1960s) assembles. In Saussurean terms: synchrony is the the lateral consideration of a single layer; diachrony is the historical consideration of many layers and their effect on one another.
5. Wisdom is distilled truth. Truth is situational depending on-referring to-inspired by-paying obeisance to -  its operative paradigm. Wisdom encompasses three paradigms simultaneously: past, present and future.
6. The cultural calibration of time is a marker of human social evolution-devolution. In 2015 at the beginning of the digital epoch we are ruled by the nanosecond and in 2025 it will be the femtosecond. In the bronze age it was phases of the moon. in the 19th century time was measured in days. In the early to mid 20th century it was hours and from 1950 to 1970 it was minutes and then seconds until 1990.
7. The inseparable, contiguous, spectacular continuity of private, public and political life is rolled into one at the toilet bowl - vote with your ass; The exigencies of public utilities: sewer and water are primary and they even rule our rulers - the oligarchy and their puppets holding elective office. Roads, bridges, tunnels, railroads, airports are secondary and the tertiary are the public spectacles of sports, entertainment, internet, radio, books and magazines.
8. Were seed dispersal and germination changes in domesticated foodstuff such as wheat, from its wild state pre-9000 BC to its contemporary state,  genetic changes i.e. changes in base pairs at plant’s DNA or were these changes, that are called “evolutionary” by Jared Diamond,  epigenetic? i.e. changes to plant’s RNA or to other heritable nuclear proteins?
9. How can physicists know anything with such certainty re: isolated mathematics ( see: Stephen Hawking chalkboard calculations on black holes)? I can add 2+2 and see by the equals sign on my chalkboard  that 2+2 equals 4,  but 4 what? I know nothing-zip-nada-nil about 4 of anything - is it 4 pounds, 4 planets, 4 galaxies, 4 quantum strings, 4 adjacent universes or 4 dimensions? What does Hawking’s chalkboard full of equations really tell anyone? Are we simply projecting imagined, wished for results on a gassy mathematical matrix?
10.  Social thermodynamics - cultural convection: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
11. Reflection on evening news: Parricide as gradient reduction between sybaritic, self-absorbed wealthy parents and lost late adolescent son -  unanchored, flop in school, filled with festering anger, sexually frustrated, no developed talent, over indulged as a child, access to guns - BOOM! BOOM! Out go the lights.
12. What are the economic uses  of Christianity’s conceptual trope of  “The Last Judgement” on commodity Capitalism? i.e. the “Time’s-A-wastin’” The end is near  “Better get crackin’” “Time is money” “Plow deep while sluggards sleep” usefulness. What are the advantages to the majority of Christian believers of this Religio-Economic yin-yang?
13.  Does any form of RNA travel outside of its own cell in order to influence another cell of its own type or a cell in a different organ system? i.e. might  liver cell RNA travel via the blood stream into a heart cell or a neuron where it plays a role at its new home in protein synthesis or regulation?

If you have a large point to make - find a squid and rassle it.

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October 18, 2015 - 3:41 PM

Dutch Hairbrush

  Note to reader: In this essay I am going to mimic Pulitzer Prize-winning author-educator Jared Diamond’s writing trope of stringing together bold unprovable assertions as if they were fact mixed with accepted knowledge for easy access reading and fun !

When American Founding Father John Adams arrived in Holland in 1782 to negotiate a loan to cover expenses incurred by The Revolution, he noticed that Dutch mothers  were beating their boys more often than seemed necessary. Why the excessive Dutch corporal punishment? What forces of human natural selection are in play in this intrademic child abuse?

By damping the Dutchboy spirit with hard hairbrush handle across the bottom,  the Dutch mother creates an obedient young animal that learns his place in the social order;  she is simultaneously creating a spiritual-psychological demon in this boy that will radiate a grudge against the world to be exercised and perhaps exorcised in faraway lands as the boy becomes a man sailing out into the world to fight, conquer, dominate, explore the Malaysian-Java-Melanesian archipelago killing-dominating-governing indigenous people, returning home with shiploads of pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon,vanilla beans, cocoa, ginger, turmeric exotic spices that will enrich a noble class of Dutchmen coddled as entitled little merchant princes in their own childhood, who will comfortably  assume primacy in the intensely stratified Dutch social order, becoming guild masters, shipowners and merchants.  Dutch society is glued together  by memic spank- logic and groupthink worthy of termites, ants and bees.

See: Willem de Kooning “Woman” series -1951- 1953: oil paintings on canvas for physical artistic expression of daemonic rage against Dutch Mother corporal punishment historically channelled into commercial pursuits.  For study: The correlation between the re-direction of rhizomic links between a good childhood ass-whipping, commercial exploitation of indigenous peoples and the loss of Dutch colonies in Melanesia ( West Papua)  to Indonesia ( and New Orleans mining interests) in 1969.

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” - Dr. Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning book:  Guns, Germs and Steel

The quote above sums up Jared diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel in a nutshell. In light of 20 years of evolutionary biology and genetics since the publication of this book in 1997, a different story is now told.  Human cultural differences, learned things ( gun making, steel making, farming, animal husbandry and the specifics of political organization, accrue in genome-proteome-RNA-ome as a result of inherited post transcriptional modifications upon nucleotides and proteins.

If the Dutch can implement the spread of corporal punishment of boys among themselves as a powerful meme that has its use in stratifying the Dutch social order i.e. keeping 90% of children as hardworking bourgeoisie, then guns, germs and steel form a meme to guide the dirty work of civilization without Diamond’s heavy reliance on geographic causality.

100,000 Dutch mothers play a key role in structuring  the Dutch socio-political hierarchy. Spanking is a behavior meme transmitted via methylated histones throughout the Dutch deme - the Dutch gene pool. During the 18th century when the practice of spanking was at its zenith in keeping Dutch men in their place in the hardworking adventurous middle of the social order, the geographical context had very little to do with it. Prof. Diamond’s environmental forces may have started the Dutch ball rolling 3,000 years prior but after that distant point in time, epigenetics assumed the role of fine-tuning Dutch society and its government of absolutist and then democratic memes,  travelling from France, England and Scotland and then France again post French Revolution as Dutch Absolutism collapsed into a mercantile democracy. The Dutch were meme-magnets for the salient new ideas of European civilization, always anxious to get on board.

***

Old school access to meme distributors: TV networks, major record labels, big New York publishing houses was difficult to achieve but access meant wide distribution of one’s idea. Today everyone is his/her own meme distributor. It’s hard to tell Joe Blow’s website from that of Sony Pictures or Random House. One billion people have easy access to the tools for global meme distribution but alas, you see the problem. An overcrowded memeosphere. we needed those filters to create a booklist, a dependable radio playlist, TV shows we all could watch, remember “Dobie Gillis” and “Bonanza”? News from a reliable talking head, either Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite - the news was real news. Now everyone is cocooned in their own memosphere access no one can communicate beyond their rhizomic patch of tangled connections.  We are swamped by communication theater. We are entangled in our webs of facebook friends and relatives ( relative friends that is) with a narrow, spotty, personalized newsfeed IV drip of some sort and are led to think that we are connected. Ha !  an artful swindle, swapping old school memology for the new faux meme regime. We are faux-meming at the mouth rabid starving info dogs. Of course everyone wants to see my selfie.

Question Set A:

1. When DNA unspools after mitosis in a pool of chromatin goo, are genes from each parent present and accessible?
2. If there is a dominant gene ( sequence of nucleotides on one of the halves of the DNA double helix) and a recessive gene floating in some neighboring goop, how does mRNA distinguish between recessive and dominant genes if mother’s DNA and father’s DNA are all mixed together in the soup? Is the info pre-coded in some RNA during mitosis or is the info coded into the two different sequences ( genes) themselves?
3. Is genetic crossing-over related to qualities of dominance or recessiveness?
4. A hemocyte has 46 chromosomes, 23 from mom and 23 from dad. How does the mRNA know which gene ( mom or dad) present in chromatin is the dominant one that will code the protein in question at a particular transcription event? How does mRNA get “wised up” as to which is the dominant gene?
5. Is the dominant gene the only one of the two that gets unspooled and unpaired ( two rails of DNA ladder are separated down the middle to allow access to a row of nucleotides  from double helical strand of DNA? The other gene for the same trait remaining tightly wound up with its histones?
6. How is a recessive gene silenced during transcription?
7. For example: At the cochlear cell (or is it a cluster of brainstem neurons?) that governs pitch perception - mom has perfect pitch and dad is tone deaf. Is there a perfect pitch gene sent by mom at the chromatin of this cell? Is there a tone deaf gene from dad at the same cell? Is there a cochlear HOX-type gene, a bauplan controller gene that locates the placement of hair cells for reception of various pitches? example of such a gene barking orders “hair cell for middle C you go over there!  Hair cell for A above middle C you go over there!
8. Does the human genome contain 3 billion bases or 3 billion base pairs? Since the genetic code is read from the series of bases ( series of letters ACGT)  on a strand of DNA and reading can go in 2 directions on each one of two strands, does the human genome actually have 12 billion bases available for transcription? Does DNA only get read from 5’ to 3’ and not vice versa?
9. During meiotic recombination are entire genes swapped when swapping occurs? If entire genes are always swapped how does a gene identify itself as an entity for the recombination. What prevents only a percentage of a gene from getting swapped? If only a percentage of a gene is swapped during a recombo event might this be a source of mutation and potential evolution of a superior trait. i.e. a new gene X-prime that is shorter than X and codes for a longer pair of canine teeth ( without the extra nucleotides, the stop growing instruction is missing when transcription happens in the following cell division ( and for all of history until extinction in tar pit)

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond confuses species variation with species evolution. He also vastly overestimates expected rates of plant and animal evolution. As has been established in contemporary evolutionary theory, change is not usually evidence of evolution. Think of a graph of daily fluctuations of the stock market over the course of 50 years. There is an enormous amount of change but a single overall trend up or down to health or disease, survival or extinction. Several classic examples of species evolution in textbooks are not evolution at all but simple species change. See: Darwin’s Galapagos finches or Kettlewell’s peppered moth-industrial melanism. Most human initiated change in plants is trivial ( though useful) intra-species swerves that are as likely to revert to pre-human form as to survive as evolutionary improvements in the currently domesticated varieties. Humans have created freak plants removed from most age-old forces of natural selection. Change is not often evolution in the natural world and 99% of genetic change is unhealthy. Bodies of plants and animals go to great lengths to edit change OUT of the genome prior to replication.

***

To say that learning and memory occur in a synapse between a dendrite and an axon is like saying a million year old glacier is made of drops of water. It is true the glacier IS made of drops of water, but a lot transpires to create the perceived result.

“Synaptic plasticity requires rapid synthesis of proteins.”

“Proteins are made to order at the synapse”

“Which RNAs get translated into protein to form memory is still a mystery.”

“There are 1,000 to 3,000 mRNAs at each dendrite”

JBQ:  Are proteins synthesized at dendrite for hippocampal long-term memory storage of childhood trauma ( Dutch hairbrush across butt and thighs). Are these punishment protocols enculturated as post transcriptional modifications of nucleotides or histones or RNA or other protein molecules?  Are these “hairbrush memories” transmitted to following generation of spankee via epigenetics or must each generation of Dutch boy get spanked anew?  Is the spanking of follow-up generations simply a cultural booster or is mom starting from scratch with each new generation to instill this key social behavior she learned from her parents re: status in relation to a dominant upper class, a class that is essentially sedentary and must be fed from the hard work the spankees? Hey Hey we’re the Spankees ! Spankee and Our Gang.

How much of human development of past 20,000 years is actual genetically conserved evolution and how much is simply RNA modifications - easy come-easy go.  Humans may be at an evolutionary dead end given our measly numbers of different species-one,  opposed to 600,000 living species of arachnids and 40,000 species of fish.  We are new here on Earth and unwelcome given our record. There are one million microorganisms currently planning our extinction.

JBQ - Was the emergence of the bourgeoisie in 18th century Europe a manifestation of thermodynamic gradient reduction between Capital ( cold, darkness) and Laboring humans ( warm, light). A Capital-labor dualism similar in type to the entropic dualism between the hot sun and cold dark outer space that causes differential reduction using life forms - plant animal, microorganisms? Answer: Yes

Given that these dualities are similar, do Marshall McLuhan’s cold and hot media reflect this entropic duality?  TV is hot, books are cold a differential giving rise to information growth - information as life. Information convection caused by two different temperatures. Commie convection between Bakhunin and Marx.

Jared Diamond asserts the following as causes of European domination of less tech-savvy peoples of the Americas:

1. Military technology and tools : guns, steel weapons, horses
2. infectious disease thin indigenous ranks
3. European maritime tech: shipbuilding, navigation
4. European absolutist political organization ( monarchy)
5. Writing for quick and detailed communication

JBQ - Are any of the above items more than cultural memes that are learned and are handed down between generations i.e. individuals tap into the pool of advantages using a hard-won, expensive education rather than absorbing their culture carrying inborn hardwired ( structuralist) intellectual  tools for art, technology and language?  Answer: Carrying a pathogenic microorganism harmful to others but not to one’s self is more than a meme - it’s a vector.  Essay topic: “Vectors versus Memes” Guns and steel are memes, germs are vectors.

Society in comfortable times is like unspooled DNA stewing in chromatin. It is diffuse, flexible, open to forces of change. In stressful times, in times of siege, society closes ranks, tightens up, assumes its form, a rigid organization suitable for transfer of hereditary information ( wars of conquest) - chromatids from chromatin.

“Stalin, a ruler directing the energy of memory” - Guy Debord

The idea of the farm is the root of property and thus of war. One must remain stationary, define an area of operation create and defend their border, become a cell with a definite membrane evolved ( devolved)  from protoplasmic wanderer-gatherer-hunter.

Question Set B:

1. Did the intense concentrations of RNA, free-floating aminos and miscellaneous organic molecules at freezing and melting of “Snowball Earth” events ( 5 total) force the evolution of borders ( cell membranes) thus introducing the idea of private property - the idea of life itself, allowing the conflict that defines all LIVING things to begin? Cells then team up, form alliances, symbiotic relationships by intention or by force to form communities first and then hierarchies of dukedoms moving toward a world of absolutist states ruled by royal brains - higher animals, life on land, birds, mammals, apes, humans ! The cells of a tribal, hunter-gatherer society multiply into a highly stratified civilization - uncontrolled growth.
2. What has been quicker, the spread of food production around the globe or the spread of Christianity?  What is a bigger meme, food production or Christianity? How are farming and Christianity connected? What percentage of farmers are Christians? Are food production and religion yin-yang operations? One must develop religious hierarchy to ensure the distribution of food to priests-kings and to soldiers. what is the best religion for efficient food distribution and subsequent cultural development-war making capability? Religion is war. Religion is different from war the way that ice is different than water i.e. not essentially different. War is melted religion - religion is frozen war. Another hot-cold thermodynamic gradient in search of reduction-acceleration toward entropy.
3. Are plant pollination-seed distribution / animal collaboration a duality hardwired into specific sequences of nucleotides in each organism?  or is this partnership simply a function of RNA activity or post transcriptional modifications that are heritable?
4. What is the ratio of living organisms changing one another’s selective conditions for evolution-extinction and the inanimate world changing selective conditions via weather patterns, continent formation-deformation, ice ages, comet impact etc. Is this ratio 50-50 or 90-10 ?
5. Are germination inhibitors at seed plants post transcriptional modifications or are they coded by genes?
6. What were the effects of the ancient ( 10,000 years ago) rodent feces bacteriome-virome on human health? Rat virome effects on human gut microorganisms in relation to  digestion, immune system function. When humans began farming and storing grain and attracting rodents to human habitation were there positive results? we know of bubonic plague. Did rats make humans more intelligent? were humans better wayfinders after rodent collusion-collision-cohabitation? Did segments of rat neuronal DNA find their way into the human genome? We know they did. which ones? What useful  neuron DNA or RNA did humans receive from their domesticated animals and plants? Did dairy products and beef make humans more intelligent by accelerating neural electrical transmission due to better insulation at myelin sheath? was there ANY evolutionary genetic advantage from human relationship to plants and animals other than nutrition and obvious memic developments such as civics, urban planning, war-making?
7. Is  industrial melanism (seen in Kettlewell’s peppered moth observations recorded for textbook posterity in his doctored photos in mid 1950s as classic example of Darwinian natural selection) a result of genetic mutation thus Darwinian, as asserted by Sewall Wright or the result of epigenetics?  - inheritance of an acquired characteristic thus Lamarckian NOT Darwinian? If it turns out that Kettlewell’s theory holds water despite his fraudulent photo and moth gluing onto tree bark, I vote for epigenetics due to superficiality of this variety-making that is not evolution, remember the stock market graph.  It is odd that Jared Diamond would use this raggedy, much debated, sloppy science as an example of evolution in his book.

Conclusion:  Is the Dutch Hairbrush a vector or a meme? genetic or epigenetic? Is beating one’s children learned or inbred behavior? Are efforts to control the destiny of children by interfering with their self-esteem ultimately productive? Is there a difference between immediate and ultimate productivity? Something workable in the 18th century is no longer necessary, there is room in the contemporary Dutch social order for everyone to excel, to rise into the middle class somewhere.  Forms of soul-killing have their uses in maintaining status quo of religion and social order. Let the rich brats get away with murder and satisfy their every whim. They will grow into adults expecting royal treatment. A nation of arrogant unspanked asses.  See: Fifty Shades of Gray for upper class predilection for ass spanking for hire. Spare the hairbrush and the sickness of stifled potential.

*

10/11/15  2:13

Sinatra Syndrome

“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain

My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve travelled each and every highway

and more, much more than this, I did it my way.”

First verse of “My Way” music: Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux - lyrics: Paul AnkaSecond most covered song in history after “Yesterday”-The Beatles-Paul McCartney

The code for doing things “My Way” in every cell in any organism is contained in the DNA. The actual doing, the acting, the making, the action component during cell life is RNA. DNA lies in its mass of chromatin goo inside the cell nucleus,  like a partially gutted fat worm while RNA does most of the work outside the nuclear membrane in the cytoplasm.  DNA is the deep brains of the outfit doing things “My Way”

Sinatra Syndrome:  A condition of annoyance at confusion observed in other scientists who do not see the matter “My Way”

Examples:

1. Stephen Jay Gould railing against dogma-bound neo darwinists who fail to acknowledge the obvious phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium so clearly visible in the work of Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge. Gould’s point is that Darwin’s idea that species evolve gradually over vast eons does not hold up in light of lots of evidence to the contrary.
2. Lynn Margulis railing against these same neo darwinists who failed for many years to acknowledge the fact of speciation by symbiosis rather than genetic mutation-natural selection as Central Dogmatists would have it using Mendel and Watson-Crick to flesh out the Darwin theory of evolution. Professor Margulis’ idea of symbiosis also covers the idea of cell complexity resulting from symbiosis rather than genetic mutation using the unique genetics of each cell’s mitochondria that is distinct from the nuclear genome of an animal cell.

“Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.” - Auguste Comte

Positivism-Key Features:

1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements.
2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements.
3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, amenable to being verified, confirmed or shown to be false by the empirical observation of reality.
4. The belief that science is cumulative
5. The belief that science is trans-cultural
6. The belief that science is not associated with personality or social position of the investigator.
7. The belief that science may incorporate new ideas discontinuous from old ones.
8. The belief in the unity of science, that underlying various disciplines, there is one science about the real world.
9. The belief that science is nature and nature is science and out of this duality all theories and postulates are created, interpreted, evolve and are applied.
10. The belief that all things are ultimately measurable.
11. The belief that entities of one kind are reducible to entities of another: societies to individuals, mental events to neural phenomena.
12. The belief that processes are reducible to physiological, physical, or chemical events.
13. The belief that social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals.
14. The belief that biological organisms are reducible to physical systems.
15. The belief that natural science and social science are members of the same genre.

Our social order gave the medical profession power over the mentally ill in the early 19th century when a medical certificate became mandatory for confinement. No one ever relinquishes power, it must be torn away by revolution or dissolved by humiliation.

RE: French Postmodern philosophy - Debord’s “Spectacle” Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizomatic Network” Baudrillard’s “Simulacrum” are the same thing. The weltanschauung-zeitgeist of our contemporary culture of the commodity.

The human neocortex is a personal device used to tap into an array of cultural programs prepared by history; programs of language, religion, philosophy, kinship, science, art, law, etc. The neocortex also has a little-used capacity to feedback into these programmed systems and change them. You get brainwashed by movies but you can also write a screenplay. The culture needs more from you than your purchasing pattern and your daily use of public utilities and infrastructure. You signify in the culture by default by your physical presence but you can also signify by launching a social-political revolution.

The combined complexity of all 20th, 21st technology from microprocessors to jet engines and mars landers amounts to one billionth the sophistication of a single one of a million species of invisible bacteria. We think we are such hot stuff and that we are smart enough to continue to poison the planet and get away with it. The stinkiest bacterium outshines all human creations by a power of 7.

Questions:

1. Is the RNA at the ribosomes in kupffer cells ( at liver) identical throughout 1,000 ribosomes in a single kupffer cells?
2. Does the RNA-eome ( genome, proteome) at ribosomes in hepatocytes correlate to the proteins made in this cell type?
3. Are there 500 different types of RNA in the mammal liver one for each of 500 liver functions?  Are there 500 varieties of ribosome in the liver or do ribosomes perform multiple duties?
4. Does messenger RNA copy exactly - base for base at nucleotide string at separated DNA strand in the nucleus or does it record the opposite nucleotide? i.e. A to A or is it A to T?
5. Do nuclear pores open and close to allow passage of tRNA or are these pores always open i.e. the same diameter?
6. At what point in embryo development does RNA begin its work of cell-specific synthesis? The hepatocytes in the developing liver specifically.
7. Is RNA carried separately from DNA in sperm at fertilization?  Yes, there are thousands of types of RNA in the sperm outside of the paternal haplotype sperm chromosomes at fertilization that carry a wide array of genetic information into the new life independent of DNA or even epigenetically modified DNA.
8. Perhaps the methylation of uracil at RNA forms TTT memory ( traumatic transmission of bad memories across generations as at Holocaust survivor to child) and this methylated RNA is inherited transgenerationally.

One of the great ironies of the 20th century was JFK’s great speechwriter Ted Sorensen writing the eulogy delivered by JFK’s purported assassination conspirator LBJ at JFK’s funeral.  Smooth transition indeed. Did either JFK or LBJ do “it” their way?

*

10-3-15  5:45pm

Albedo Logic

  “The solar magnetic field has long been known to cause the sunspot cycle. The physical shape and activity in the corona also varies with the sunspot cycle. The solar magnetic field is known to be able to transfer large amounts of energy to the solar atmosphere. It is possible that the solar magnetic field is the ultimate source of physical heating of the corona.” -NASA website

The sun’s surface is 6,000 degrees celsius. The sun’s corona is one to two million degrees Kelvin.  Note the two temperature measuring systems.

Albedo: Reflection coefficient - the reflecting power of a surface. The ratio of reflected solar radiation from the surface of the Earth to incident radiation upon it. Albedo is expressed as a percentage and is measured on a scale from zero for no reflection ( charcoal) to one for perfect reflection of a white surface - fresh snow is close to one on the scale.

The albedo effect is the tendency of highly reflective,  ice covered Earth to cool as it reflects sunlight and conversely, the tendency of less bright, more absorptive landforms and plants to absorb light/heat and to warm up. The cool get cooler, the warm get warmer. Note economic albedo effect as rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Warming and cooling economic and subsequent physical effects of “warming” and “cooling” on residential and commercial neighborhoods.

Precession: Axial and Apsidal:  The wobble of the Earth’s axis is axial precession, the Earth wobbles through 360 degrees every 25,000 years. Axial precession affects the Earth’s weather.  The rotation of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun is apsidal precession, this also affects the earth’s weather.

Do sun cycles of heating-cooling caused by its magnetism or other mechanism affect Earth's climate?

The Earth has experienced five major ice ages in the past 3 billion years. During three of these ice ages: the Huronian, Sturtian and Karoo, the entire Earth was a giant snowball. This ice-snow was up to five miles thick. The volcanoes and hot vents in the Earth’s surface did not cease to exist when covered in ice, they created large and small lakes, pools, ponds, rivers and streams teeming with microorganisms in the total darkness. There were places where columns of heated water penetrated the surface of the deep ice where life was exposed to sunlight and the atmosphere. There were convection currents in these extremely tall water columns as warm water rose and chilled water descended. This turbulence allowed much intermixing of organisms and some synthesis of molecules large and small and biosynthesis of entire single-cell organisms: bacteria, viruses, archaea, molds, algae, and much larger single-cell organisms the protists: amoebas. A great merging of DNA, RNA.

Many amino acids required for life were present in subterranean pools during the Huron ice age. Proto-RNA molecules evolved a code for each of these so that a protein could be assembled at a cell rather than assembled willy nilly from the soup.

An organism has a system for creating RNA code for an organic molecule it encounters and a capacity to store this info at its RNA. RNA  reverse engineers a code from free-floating molecules and assigns a code to recreate a desired molecule.

How does non-coding RNA install the code representing a new protein into its string of nucleotides? The code is cut from a visiting microorganism and pasted onto the RNA of the host.

Pocked Snowball - Imagine a spherical chocolate chip cookie made with very small chips. This would be the surface of snowball earth with the chips being geothermal puddles, ponds and lakes, all separated from one another and each containing its own variation for the recipe of life. Thousands of distinct microenvironments. The ice melts in a band around the equator linking 1,000 of these separate petri dishes. There is a microbial barn dance, a carnival of symbiosis, when mixing and matching and shacking up result - biosynthesis. more complex organism evolve from the simpler models of the pre-glaciation epoch.  The glaciation forces dense concentrations of a wide variety of microorganisms into one another as their ecosystems shrink during the approach of the big freeze. They thaw in this state of togetherness in a very crowded environment during the snowball melt. As ice recedes, their territories expand.

Imagine 100,000 separate pools around the globe resulting from meteorites bearing amino acids, pools created at thermal vents, pools surrounding volcanoes. Every volcano has its surrounding lake on or below the surface of iceball Earth. The lakes do not merge all at once. first two then three then 1,000 or 1,000,000 years later a fourth pool is added then  10,000,000 years later, a fifth. Pools and lakes merge four by four during next 10 million years until there is an ocean.  Lots of time for small groups to get to know one another before merging into a more varied assembly. Earth was not one big interconnected primordial soup during glaciations, it was 100,000 different organic assemblies for life. As the ice melts, as Earth’s atmospheric chemistry changes, still more cause for evolution. There were myriad different micro-environments for 10 times myriad recipes for primordial soup. Each volcano erupts through a unique geological core chemistry to seed its isolated lake with the chemicals of life.

Imagine a geothermal pocket, a “Hot Pocket” or call it a “Steam Dome”  four miles below Earth’s ice surface, a pocket half filled, say 1,000 feet deep, with water and a void between the inside surface of the ice dome and the surface of the subiceerranean lake the ice dome filled with a warm, humid atmosphere. Each one of the countless steam domes has its unique chemical-atmospheric environment, Each hot pocket and its magma pocket, linked by cracks in the Earth’s crust is like a glass tube in a lab with two bulbs, one at each end - one molten rock the other warm gas hovering over melted ice. A test tube for life. Imagine the large array of micro-environments in such a steam dome and the fluid temperature gradient from the hot vent to the cooler fluid of the edges. The drippy underside of the dome - stalactites of concentrated chemicals, new surfaces for life. Pressure builds up within the vast dome and cracks find their way to the ice surface as they zigzag up through three miles of the stratified ice cover to the surface and sunlight.

One deep dome creates 50 small lakes at the surface. The dome expands to vast proportion and then it breaks the surface allowing sunlight every day and whatever atmospheric cocktail is at hand to influence the microorganisms. Imagine the Pantheon in Rome with an ice/ice water floor and a dome of ice and the oculus. The hole in the dome expands. In 500 years a very large lake has formed. Many of these large lakes, former domes, merge at the equator as the Earth emerges from its ice age due to reverse albedo - a warming due to larger and larger expanses of sunlight absorptive plant life and exposed rock. A band of blue water encircles snowball Earth. This equatorial band of water has two shorelines that encircle the Earth a north shoreline  and a south shoreline, a widening band teeming with microscopic life in between.

The ring of blue water expands and twists and turns as new continents are revealed. The very thick ice is thinning always changing the chemistry of its pools. New comets and meteors strike and new chemicals of life are delivered from space. Imagine an under-ice lake 500 miles wide with an oculus five miles wide with the solar heated patch of water on the lake surface. What sort of ecosystems would evolve from such a structure with its geothermal vent issuing hot water 10,000 feet below? It would have warm humid air at the center and cool humid air above  the 1,570 mile perimeter, clouds and rain below the ice dome.

A volcano would create an entirely different 500 mile diameter lake on the ice Earth surface with its volcano at the center and unique weather circulating around the active cone. A volcanic ice bowl. Perhaps much warmer water in this lake with sloping walls up to the rim of the ice. The Earth would have 1,000s of these volcanic lakes in the ice - another type of pock.

Foundational diversity from the following:

1. Desperate marriages-symbioses as organisms try to stay warm, conserve energy as the Earth cools, ecosystems shrink and great ice sheets spread.
2. As ice spreads microorganisms become more concentrated in smaller unfrozen environments. They cannot avoid one another and soon they are crawling all over one another, smooshed against and forced into one another as ice grows. 
3. Microorganism enter dormant deep freeze state while merged during Huronian glaciation -compressed genomes are not united at this point -  just trying to stay warm and failing. After sharing the same lipid membrane, frozen in the ice for five million years as one, they thaw and believe ( chemically) that they were always one thing and proceed through evolution as such. Not only mitochondria entering and aiding protists but 1,000 organisms entering 100,000 others - myriad combinations - mixing and matching toward the big freeze and while emerging from the big thaw millions of years later or evolving continuously if near a warm spot.  Is there a metabolic cycle affected by a freeze-thaw cycle that accelerates symbiosis?

Scenario One:  Chicxulub-scale meteorite striking the three mile deep ice of the Huronian glaciation. It would send a cloud of ice around the entire globe causing a great acceleration of the cooling albedo. A deep dive into iciness. Ice dust in orbit for many years and ice dust storms all over the surface of the Earth. Albedo out of control getting colder. Visualize rings of ice orbiting the Earth like the rings of Saturn.

Scenario Two:  All life on Earth began in Yellowstone Park near a large cluster of vents that prevented total ice coverage. The park was surrounded by a slope of ice that stretched at forty-five degrees for 4.24 miles to the ice crust rim. A comet impact at the thick soup of Yellowstone microorganisms spread bits of life  along with ice particles to all parts of the globe. Raining life onto ice water pocks the world over where countless emergent genomes diverged from those of Yellowstone. Life gets a one billion year head start at Yellowstone before spreading around the world,  seeds planted in the ice.

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Addenda:

Economic albedo effect: Growing poverty / disarray begets poverty and disarray until hell freezes over - must have volcanic input into moribund system to reverse economic cooling.

See: Multi-strand woven steel wire cable as metaphor for rhizomic culture. Note cable cross-section of concentric bundled, varying diameter steel strands. One of the world’s great engineering developments: Albert, Smith, Newall, Roebling,Hallidie, Stone et al. Envision core cultural “givens” strands of language, religion, plant-animal classification, marriage-kinship, definitions of mental illness and crime, ethics, etc.

Liberal theory and politics and policy has, as its core notion, the dissolution of the  family. No father - black or white, rich or poor - dad is marginalized or gone. In anthropological terms, liberalism is a product of the matrilineal mind.

A thought inspired by Foucault @ “Madness and civilization” Children as gradient reducing elements between lonely parents  and the cosmic void; to be nurtured like the surface of the Earth nurtures plants, animals and microorganisms in order to span the differential between the hot sun and cold, dark nothing much, reducing the gradient.

At one bioscience website 3 billion is written as the approximate number of nucleotides ( single bases) at another bioscience website it is 3 billion base pairs. One of you is off by 3 billion. Can we come together on this?

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September 27, 2015  5:07  pm

Kodalithic Kodalogic

  Kodalith is photographic film (obsolete) once used by printing companies and commercial photographers. Kodalith film reduced 10,000 gradations of tone, perceivable in nature by the human eye, to black or white only, all gray is washed out to either end of the scale. If a surface reflected less than 50% gray this film recorded it as pure white. If the surface reflected more than 50% gray, it became black. When developed, the photos taken by this film had no gray whatsoever,  just bold black and white.  Something is kodalithic if its complexities have been reduced to black and white.

Black and white are qualities of the visual world but all sensory, intellectual-philosophical phenomena can be reduced to polar terms.  The matter at hand is either black or white, conservative or liberal, hawk or dove, scientist or artist. Music is either tonal or atonal, food tastes good or bad, the skin feels good or bad.

The human brain turns as much as possible into black or white; sometimes in an instant, sometimes over years.  Shades of gray or gradations of hue will be added upon recall as time allows. First impressions and gut reactions tend to be kodalithic.

Kodalogic: An heuristic turning all audio, visual, olfactory, tactile, vomeronasal, intellectual, political, philosophical  subtlety to black or white. It is instinctive in humans to do this - probably a characteristic of all vertebrates. We all do it, we’ve all done it. It saves time and perhaps your life. The dog is not well - it is not dead - it’s not going to get well without a $500 trip to the vet - shoot it, thus making it one or the other - alive or dead - in between is expensive. The three young men walking toward me on the sidewalk at night may be angels or devils - probably something in between, shades of gray. I must make a decision to cross the street to avoid them ( they’re devils) or walk forward through them ( they’re angels). Walking in the middle of the street, having split the difference,  would look stupid.

Kodalogic can save your life and it can make your life black and white boring with no subtlety. Kodalogic ought to be used sparingly but it isn’t. Kodalogic gets waay over-used in contemporary America. Overuse of kodalogic is a characteristic of Americans. Kodalogic is so comfortable,  like the latest Lee Child-Jack Reacher novel in which there are good guys and bad guys and the principal  good guy drinks a lot of coffee.

When we are young we see every shade of every sense. As we get older brains turn millions of wonderful, ever-changing-evolving things into  black and white to make room for the necessary facts of life so facts can be easily retrieved. Memories are a file of dehydrated sponges, flat as crepes, wafer-thin, and upon recall they fill out to their fullness and make you happy. Writing a memoir is retrieving a stack of dry, flat sponges all black or all white  and exposing them to clean water to reconstitute them  revealing their color - your wise adult mind is clear, cool water. Look for the humor, the sympathy. Now you see things from mom’s point of view. That evil nun who locked you in the basement laundry room to scrub bed sheets at the orphanage and then pulled you by the ears up to a dinner of overcooked dried out beef liver and mooshy, pale canned peas washed down before gagging with  fizz-tablet root beer served in a scratched up spun aluminum “glass”  has a third dimension. She was the Betty Page of Topeka, Kansas in her youth;  black or white, reasonable or insane. Just add water.

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9/26/15

Packaging Organisms

September 15, 2015 Line up every virus on Earth end to end and they stretch for 200 million light years, far beyond the Andromeda galaxy.  There are10 to the 31st power of viruses on Earth,  ten million times the number of stars in the universe. There are 100 Trillion flu viruses in the body of a person with a three-day old flu. There are 10,000 times more viruses than people on Earth.

There are far fewer bacteria than viruses on Earth, by a power of 10, however, there are many millions of bacterial species on Earth. There are 20,000 SPECIES of bacteria in a quart of seawater and one million bacteria in a single gram of soil. Estimates of microorganism populations vary greatly in the scientific community. By the most conservative estimates there are two million species of oceanic bacteria, four million species of soil bacteria and four million species of atmospheric bacteria.

Scientists have no idea how many viruses and bacteria there are - there are only rough ways to count them, estimates among experts vary to a laughable degree.  There is debate about whether a virus is even a living thing or whether bacteria can be identified as having different species  There is only one single species of Homo sapiens - humans. The human population is a rounding error in relation to the total number of organisms on Earth. The total mammal population on Earth is a rounding error. We are few, like an algal bloom says Lynn Margulis. Here today -  gone tomorrow?

Microorganisms have a collective consciousness. They invented proto-charismatic animals ( animals larger than a wasp) in order to populate emerging ecosystems on a warming earth after the great Sturtian-Marinoan ice age 650 million years ago. Charismatic animals are flexible, versatile, adaptable packages of microorganisms. Each package contains billions of bacteria and trillions of viruses, most of which are beneficial or benign. Fifty percent of the human genome is of viral origin. We are mobile homes to our vast populations of microorganisms. One credible theory of evolution asserts that speciation is caused by the mixing of microorganism genomes rather than by mutation-natural selection and that speciation is not, as Darwin proposed, gradual but abrupt, a punctuation event linking a million generations. Speciation does not appear to be gradual. There is much evidence that speciation happens all at once. Genomes merge, voila ! a new species. Further refinements to the cat, dog, alligator, tuna, Eagle, Bee and Beetle are the result of neo-Darwinian mutation-natural selection but speciation results from mergers and acquisitions.

The Earth is 5 billion years old. Life in the form of reproducing single cells has been evolving for 4.5 billion years. The Earth experienced the second of its 5 major ice ages 850-580  million years ago. The Sturtian ice age covered the entire globe in ice resulting in “Snowball Earth”. Microorganisms lived under a global ice sheet surviving near geothermal vents on the seafloor or in water under the ice. When snowball Earth began to thaw,  an equatorial band of warmer  blue water appeared exposed to direct sunlight. Life thrived here and soon became very  densely concentrated.  A reverse albedo occurred and the ice receded. The close packing of organisms in the narrow warm band of water  forced the merging of genomes. Organisms and their genes merged, fused, incorporated, cohabited, recombined and matched creating an abundance of new species with myriad new capabilities - This emergence of multi celled life forms after snowball Earth  is called The Cambrian Explosion. This explosion of variation on the theme of life occurred between 560 and 540 million years ago. This is the age of trilobites, clams, starfish and snails - our ancestors.

If the charismatic animal is a shrewd, aggressive ambulatory bag for harboring viruses and bacteria, the cell itself was a bag for bits of RNA, DNA for two billion years prior to the Cambrian explosion.  Inanimate amino acids and proteins entered Inanimate globules of fat floating in the primordial soup. Concentrated populations of microorganisms forced mergers during and after an ice age. short strips of RNA squeezed into a hollow sphere of fat. these RNA filled lipid spheres did not multiply by orderly cell division they simply multiplied and the fat globules exploded when they got too full. This was an inefficient way to propagate even though the fatty cell membrane offered a bit of protection from the harsh environment of young Earth.

Inanimate hollow fat globules float around by the trillion in archaic seas. Inanimate nucleic acids, sugars, phosphates, aminos, proteins floated with them, merging in myriad combinations below deep ice sheets up to several miles thick or in equatorial bands of seawater exposed to the sun. DNA strands containing 5 or 15 or 1,500  base pairs get pulled apart and each strand finds  new mates from the freezing, slushy soup of melting snowball Earth - replication!  It’s still not alive. It was an accident. Short strands of RNA attract nucleotides floating freely in the soup becoming double helices - still dead.  A fat glob fills with short strands of DNA a catalyst enters the membrane, the glob breaks into two, some DNA goes left, some goes right. Microtubules enter the scene after they have evolved for a billion years - still no life, a flagellum pushes around a dead glob of fat to keep its head warm.  Another 500 million years of random mixing and matching. A metabolic component here and functional feature such as the light-sensitive protein there. Fat globs fill and explode for 300 million more years - 100,000 fascinating chemical-structural combinations occur -  still no life - no reproduction of the package. Hold that thought - for 500 million more years of random mixing and matching - still dead as a doornail.

JBT -  Rhizomatic design: ( in place of Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, symbiosis)  Interaction between organelles, cells, organs cause change-evolution of parts giving rise to wholes.

The man-made machine heuristic; a tool to examine speciation. The taxonomic level of the Order( as in order-family-genus-species) using example of transportation vehicles: space, air, land, water, underwater. Rockets, jets, cars-trains, ships, submarines. Looking closer at the family of aircraft. there are several highly conserved features shared by all aircraft regarding their power to weight to lift requirements. There are conserved features regarding control surfaces: vertical stabilizer, ailerons, flaps.  There are minor shared characters: landing gear and windscreens. The size and shape of the nose of an airplane is the result of many separate contingencies, each with its own map, plans, requirements. There is no specific “gene” for nose shape in an airplane. The nose shape and size are residual - they emerge from the mix. How does one tell a lion from a bear? The shape of their noses is a big cue. The mammal nose is the product of the evolution of 10,000 not-nose elements that evolved over eons in concert with one another. The nose is residual, not a thing in itself, although we see it as such. There is no single gene for noseness.  Take one of many variables: volume. The 747 nose is the result of tens of thousands of decisions around aerodynamics and storage-packing challenges. When a person says they have never seen evidence for speciation i.e. a shared ancestor giving rise to a cat and a bear, this does not mean that one million mutations, all of which have undergone tens of millions of years of evolution have not been stored in the genome for ultimate observable expression as a lion or a bear. Who is to say when a 707 nose will evolve into a 747 nose? Reasons accrue for this expressed difference. More passengers, more need to conserve expensive fuel, longer runways available, stronger lighter materials available for construction. The resulting shape and volume of the nose though not trivial in regard to capacity to smell are minor in the overall causal cascade.

Who can say how many internal, gradual changes occur in one of Gould’s benthic snail fossils across eons prior to a shell’s abrupt vertical extension, his evidence for speciation? The shell shape may be trivial even though it is the only remaining evidence in the fossil record. It should be no surprise that it is an abruption, a punctuation. This shell shape difference doesn’t mean that evolution is abrupt, only that the appearance of the “nosecone” shell distention was abrupt.

Easily identifiable, outward features are conserved while organ system structures and their metabolic patterns undergo constant, relentless, feverish evolution 24/7/365. Why bother with the catness or bearness? Package details are beside the point. It is the stuff in the bag that means life or extinction. It will express at the exterior in the fullness of time if ever.

JBQ - Do methylations, citrullinations, phosphorylations get copied at cell division as they piggyback on the DNA molecule during mitosis during lifespan of an organ?

Madness is often ( always?) equated with unreason. The human neocortex is the seat of our reason. Does a virus interrupt neural links that comprise reason? Do viruses clog the rhizome of reason?

JBE ( Experiment) - Study effects of 100 species each of virus, bacteria, worms and protozoans on 25 brain areas re: mental disorders. This involves 10,000 labs around the world for two years. Let’s find out how many mental disorders of the DSM-5 big 900 are caused by microorganisms. A hysterical man sits in his psychiatrist's office with a brain infected by tapeworm cysts driving him to madness and the shrink asks to hear about the poor man’s relationship with his mother.

What are the VBP ( viral, bacterial, parasitic) effects on neuron-synaptic electrochemical communication? Can a single virus short-circuit a synapse? Perhaps a single virus can extend the gap between synapse ends thus making it impossible for electrical charge to pass this juncture thus stopping an afferent or efferent nerve impulse in its tracks. Identify chemical exude of 100 species of virus - test their effect on the following: neuron firing, neuron signaling,  ability to form new thoughts, connect new thoughts to one another and to memory, connect sensation ( visual, audio, tactile, vomeronasal, taste) to memory, to connect sensation to reasoning ability, to higher levels of abstract thought - morality, ethics, altruism, math and language skills.

To Do: In examining those with mental illness: 1. Check for VBPs 2. Once the VBP has been identified after searching for many species,  remove them.

JBQ - does viral DNA penetrate neurons? Is there a toxic viral exude with negative effect on cognitive function? Same for bacteria and worms. A brain is infected with pinworms, roundworms, schistosoma or tapeworms would be subject to physical dislocation of brain mass and suffer the effects of worm waste and the effects of its consumption of brain matter i.e. the total metabolic impact of the parasite.

JBQ - Is madness  the result of the human brain testing an array of potential advantageous effects of viral, bacterial, parasitic involvement in brain function? If it helps - keep it. If the potential symbiont or gene sequence doesn’t help ( see: “madness”) omit it.

JBQ - Were the hippocampus, thalamus, cerebellum, pons, globus pallidus, putamen and amygdala once upon a time parasites of our archean neural nodules that  proved useful? they each now have  a unique structure and purpose in the brain having evolved from a tight little club of parasites formerly swimming freely in the Silurian sea. Each symbiont provided a selective advantage. Fish to itself “I’m going to have to begin coughing once I crawl up onto the land I’d better keep this little parasitic knot of cells ( future Medulla oblongata).

JBQ - what microorganism initiated the tendency in vertebrates to aggrandize one’s self, to strut around and flash feathers, sing, dance, howl, growl and roar? Drawing attention to one’s self was once considered madness among humans in  medieval times and is now rewarded in all American children? “Raise your hand ( separating yourself from  your classmates)  if you know the answer.” What virus removed our fear of standing out from our fellows removing our prehistoric fear of being a tall poppy? Toxoplasma gondii virus removes fear of cats in mice. FACT: viruses are known to make certain types of fear disappear in some mammals. What viruses,  what fears in humans?

JBT - If fear expression is the result of a methylated histone, perhaps a virus de-methylates this histone during lifetime, thus epigenetically reducing  fear in a small segment of the population. This fearless population is our avante-garde. A deme’s fearless pioneers. Were pioneers of the Oregon Trail all infected by a midwest virus that reduced their fear of the unknown and or initiated wanderlust? Same question for Jamestown settlers, Pilgrims - all emigrants to North /America in 17th-20th century. Catch a virus - go directly to the New World, sever roots and explore, thus participating in a viral evolutionary experiment on the human brain. Get these brains out into new ecosystems for viral-bacterial proliferation. Do viruses remove fear in bacteria or larger parasites? Do worms feel fear? Are protozoans afraid of anything? If viruses are experimenting with the human brain, as humans set out for parts unknown, what part of the brain is involved? the neocortex, amygdala, brainstem, hippocampus? Travelling to the New World in the 17th century was definitely crazy-dangerous and wrought with doom.

Michel Foucault and others assume that human reason emerged during the Renaissance and came to flower during the 18th century - the “Age of Reason” These thinkers imply that ancient times and the Dark Ages were bereft of reason. This is a misconception. Every age is filled with as much reason as any other. The architects, engineers and administrators of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Gothic Europe were obviously reasonable men. Reason wasn’t invented in the 18th century by Voltaire and David Hume. It simply became more fashionable among a noble few as reason became a meme.

JBQ - Does DNA have more than one way of quieting or erasing a trait? Imagine a word you have written on paper - you can erase it or scratch it out or scratch it out and then cover up the whole mess with white out. Does the cell have a 2 or 3-tier system of gene suppression? - the scratch out, the cover-up and the erasure? Are there various levels of removal? Erasure from operation during a lifetime and erasure from the genome at germ cells i.e. gone forever. Once a gene has been omitted can it be reinstated a million years or a day later?

JBQ - Are viruses the primary mechanism enabling the evolution of human consciousness? Do viruses stir the cranial pot putting behavioral options on the table for natural selection - social selection? Are memes  inherited via changes to neural chemistry? or simply learned / absorbed from parents, friends, teachers, television and the internet?

JBE - Explore viruses as DNA mutagens in the manner of UV radiation or traditional Neo-Darwinist mechanisms for mutation.

JBQ - How would the human brain conserve a positive viral effect on social behavior or any behavior?  Is altruistic behavior, a notoriously counter-intuitive animal trait, a virus-borne aberration that has proved beneficial to the species, thus conserved? If so, by what chemical process and reproductive pathway? A proposal 1. Virus rearranges neural protein at amygdala 2. this modified protein geometry is somehow relayed to germ cells.

JBQ - Is melancholy a viral affliction? Melancholy, a recognized mental ‘illness” of the 16th-19th century,  recast as depression in the 20th.

JBQ - Are Conservatism and Liberalism caused by different virus species? If so, can either be cured?  Is religion a species-wide microorganism infection?

JBQ - Does inheriting a virus via sperm-head  epibontics (piggybacking) have the same effect on a new life as if that virus caused a mutation at the DNA or initiated a heritable post-translational modification? Are the effects of a specific virus identical, independent of method of transport into new life? Are effects different and are the effects related to their means of arrival?

1. Epibontic transport of virus “X” causes disease “A”
2. Base pair disruption from virus “X”  causes disease “B”
3. Virus “X”  initiates a histone phosphorylation that is inherited via “junk” DNA or inherited via  a protein-coding gene causing disease “C”

Bottom line proposal: One virus may cause multiple health outcomes, for instance:  “A” affects hippocampal function - long term memory “B” erases fear at amygdala “C” affects the nature of Structuralist language capabilities such as inborn tendency to comprehend  grammar or ways of organizing the visual field re: size-closeness.

JBRT ( Russell’s Teapot logic: I can say anything and it’s up to you to prove me wrong - Bertrand Russell asserts that his teapot is orbiting Mars - he dares you to prove it isn’t.) All aspects of human consciousness, self-awareness, behavior, language, altruism, social skills  that are related to the emergence of our outsize neocortex are initiated and modulated by microorganisms and resulting  long term advantages are locked into the human genome  by the acquisition in our DNA of viral, bacterial genes or by permanent and heritable post transcriptional modifications.

JBT - Mental illness is the ( now negative) manifestation of unprocessed, viral-initiated neocortical options presented by nature for possible use in future generations to positive social effect.  It was crazy then - it’s normal now.  This happens all the time. As new behavioral  options become manifest in people,  this unique  behavior, that could have 100 different names, is all classified as schizophrenia.  To Do: Look for 100 sources for 100 unique behaviors now all lumped together by psychiatrists as schizoid.  Look at schizoid behavior as a source of new possibility for mankind.  As in all evolution,  99% of the new is rejected outright. We are surrounded by the surviving 1% aka 9 million successful animal species. Nature makes an enormous number of mistakes. If one percent of schizophrenics manifest a productive behavior they are par for the course. Crazies are an important  source of human evolution.

JBT - The gradient between reason ( the sun) and madness ( the cold dark void) is modulated by living organisms. A listener advances on madness with language. Language is life. Language modulates the gradient between madness(bliss) and reason.

Find a gradient and reduce it for money, fame and glory.

JBQ - What social gradient did Rock and Roll reduce? Was it strictly the gradient that always exists between adjacent generations and always subject to reduction or was there more to it? Rock and Roll reduced the terrible gradient between Black Americans and White Americans post JIm Crow,  paving the way, more than any social force,  for civil rights. Norman Mailer reduced the gradient between hipsters and squares.

“Random mutation hones already extant species that originated via symbiosis”-Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan

JBT - It is said that a gene has so and so number of base pairs yet the mechanism for transcripting-translating genetic information involves RNA reading the code off of one side only of a DNA molecule separated down the middle. The two sides of this sequence of now split apart base pairs, each side ( each column of bases) carry genetic information. Seems like one side of the DNA sequence could code for eye protein and the opposite side for glomerular cells ( kidney filters) so it’s never base pairs that code but rather sequences of bases stacked on one side of the now opened double helix.  A gene does not have a number of base pairs. It has a number of bases - 3 bases per codon not 3 base pairs per codon. Verify. I’m failing to understand something here. It’s base(ic).

Analogy - Imagine a copy of “War and Peace” in your left hand and a copy of “Infinite Jest” in your right. Now shuffle these two doorstops like two decks of cards - this is a section of a strand of DNA. At transcription the pages of the two books are separated so that RNA has access to one of the books only ( say “War and Peace”), to one string of letters, one series of codons ( not both -as they are no longer linked at the center as base pairs but simply as strings of bases) The RNA reads from either “War and Peace” or from “IJ” not from both simultaneously,not from base pairs - just a sequence of bases. Genes are always characterized as having so and so number of base pairs when actually they are so and so number of bases - no pairs at this point and time of transcription. If the human genome has 3.2 billion base pairs wouldn’t it have 6.4 billion  letters to work with? 3.2 billion bases per side of the double helix? Someone tell me what I’m not seeing here.

JBQ - What are the genes that govern our power to reason and dream? Perhaps not genes at all but methylations locked into heredity.

JB Universe model: 1.  Imagine a sine wave at 30 to the minus 15th power  cycles per second 2. Rotate this continuous wave to form a long series of pulsing  3-D volumes - expanding-narrowing-expanding 3. Now pack countless waves  adjacent to one another, slipped for a snug fit. One cycle in one wave is our universe and we are halfway through our own cycle like a wave passing thru water - time being the wave and the universe being the water. 4. Bundle countless waves adjacent to one another out to infinity - like a muscle and its fibers, one fiber being the history of our particular sequence of universes-pulses. One pulse takes 30 billion years. Our universe is at the midpoint of its cycle.

Filling a primordial cell membrane after the Huronian global ice age 2.4 billion years ago was like filling a shopping cart while pushing it through ancient pet shop-nursery. “I’ll take some of these and some of those.” The wonders that grew from these early associations!....in ten million shopping carts.

The immune system and the cell membrane work together to prohibit entry of viruses into the organ cell. the membrane is the wall with many closely guarded portals the immune system is the military chasing down terrorists and killing them before they enter the cell. Does a cell membrane prevent the operation of the organism immune system i.e. does the cell membrane protect the virus from phagocytes once inside? Is the cell a safe harbor all viruses, friend or foe?

JBQ - Does DNA really split down the middle when it replicates during mitosis? Is splitting really necessary? It makes a cool explanation but does it really replicate in this way? Could DNA double helix not remain locked and activate a switch to attract like bases from the cytoplasm? It turns switches on and off for 1,000s of other DNA functions-processes why not replication? Stay locked into a double helix and signal moment for replication when free-floating nucleotides form a mirror molecule that floats away on its spindle?

JBQ - what percentage of a DNA molecule spreads apart in order to be copied by RNA during transcription in a specific organ tissue - kidney, liver, heart, etc.?

JBQ - Do we catch diseases when invaded by microorganisms or do we catch environmental toxins that destroy our resistance to organisms already present in our bodies?

Organisms hijack one another’s DNA. Viruses and bacteria are promiscuous. They are continually swapping DNA with one another and among themselves and higher organisms such as vertebrates. Half of the human genome has its source in microorganism DNA.

Evolution means: annex, attract, amend,  absorb,merge, fuse, co opt, convert, incorporate, encompass, cohabit, combine, recombine, integrate, interface, tie-in, throw-together, hitch on, hook up, team-up, tack on, tie-in, transfigure, transform,  plug in, bind, bond, blend, unite, absorb, swallow, subsume, meet, mix, mingle, marry, meld, merge, centralize, coalesce, converge, conjugate, consolidate, conjoin, cohere, fuse, federate, join, meld, weld, enfold, amalgamate, amalgamete! assimilate, agglomerate, transmute, re-style, re-fashion, revamp, revise,  remodel, re-cast, re-shape, shack-up, play house…..ad infinitum…..oh !.... and DNA mutation.

•  September 15, 2015  2:29pm

Memes, Demes and Genes

September 6, 2015 Meme: An idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.

Deme:  A local population of closely related interbreeding organisms

Gene: A sequence of nucleotides in DNA or RNA. The gene is the functional unit of inheritance controlling the transmission and expression of one or more traits or metabolic processes by specifying the structure and composition of a polypeptide, especially a protein. The gene may also control the function of other genetic material.

Meme example: Neo-Darwinism i.e. organism evolve via genetic mutation - natural selection

Deme example: The population of scientists who believe adamantly  in neo-darwinism

Gene example: The genes for catness vs dogness or bearness. It’s in the ears, snout, movement, color, size

All learned components of human culture are memes: language, cultural norms, widely shared notions of justice, sanity, ethics. Each deme has its version of the memes. For a catalog of demes from around the world see: “The Savage MInd” by Claude Levi-Strauss. Memes change, evolve, devolve. There is a hierarchy of meme causality from the larger changes in law of land to trivial changes in hairstyle, music, art. Memes form a rhizomatic shared consciousness among people.

The human gastrointestinal tract is home to ten trillion bacteria. They are a vital part of digestion. There are 60 virus phages for every single bacterium. Each of these organisms contains its genome.  Our bodies contain 1,000 demes of microorganisms, each with its meme- rhizome interconnectedness with neighbors. The human genome with its 20,000 genes is a tiny fraction of the operative genome in every human body. We live with a Ka-trillion genes - too many to count - all working together for our health or not working together,  causing disease. 

Were our organs early symbionts? Entire creatures that specialized in blood filtering, fat breakdown, Oxygen-blood transfer, pumping, various hormonal capabilities that have merged into a single animal that evolved as these systems became adjusted to one another and to different environments over eons - over one billion years? Archaic kidney as an acquired entire genome working with others of the sort with 99% of evolutionary time being used for internal inter-system coordination distant from the light of day; like a busy engine room in a cruise ship i.e. traits are expressed and subject to natural selection without confronting another species. This internal selection occurs over thousands of generations of cell growth-death-birth in the life of a single organism The creature they called the swimming liver is long extinct. A billion years ago there were a million different single cell organisms each with a specialty: thinking-connecting,filtering, pumping, fat metabolizing - mix n’ match across eons. Much of the heavy lifting of organ system coordination occurring when the systems were simple, primitive, pliable, flexible. First organelles  merge then a billion years later the organs merge - two distinct levels of organization: intra and inter-cellular with the gene-switching capabilities of viruses and bacteria lubricating the emergence of complexity.

Symbiogenesis: Long-term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change.

All characteristics are acquired - JB

What was the first animal to have all of the following: heart, liver, kidney, lungs, neural cluster.

Stomach cells have a nine day lifespan, 40 generations of cells per year over 80 years. 3,200 generations of stomach cells in a single lifetime. It would take 80,000 years for an equal number of human life generations at 25 years per generation. Most evolution happens at cell level as  systems coordinate and evolve together in a million different species. Stomach cells receiving epigenetic signals for immediate expression from hundreds of organ components and metabolic processes as organs adjust to the lifestyle of a specific person and to their own development as systems throughout the entire body prior to germ cell involvement for effects on heredity i.e. DNA adjustment.  3,200 generations of cell division using epigenetic tags for gene expression-modification independent of DNA mutation. These intra-lifespan changes are from sensory-chemical signals with sources throughout body not from solar radiation or environmental mutagens.

Effects of environmental mutagens on intra-lifespan phenotypic proteinic expression-regulation i.e. a cell deme at an organ gets derailed genetically say via histone poisoning that is then epigenetically heritable within lifespan ( 3,200 generations) of individual  independent of sexual reproduction of entire organism. Genes get modified, mutated, disrupted as well as coordinated, refined.

Coorganation: the evolution-coordination of organ systems and metabolic processes among organs via epigenetic ( post-translational) modification - heritable within a single lifespan. Coorganation can be slowed, interrupted by environmental mutagens, toxins. Affect one organ and you affect them all.

To study: Ratios of inter organ effects. Example: I poison liver-kidneys with alcohol; what coorganate signaling is negatively affected at the following organ systems: brain, heart, lungs, endocrine, immune. does cell trauma at kidneys signal neurons at pons to phosphorylate?

Given Neo-Darwinian mechanisms of mutation-selection and observed species evolution, there has not been enough time by a factor of 1,000 for animals to have evolved into present forms from Earth formation from orbiting dust. Thus the argument for coorganation - intra-life mutation-selection cycles.

The modification of a gene is a big deal and the body has sophisticated systems in place to prevent it - DNA repair, cleansing. A mutation is a big deal if it signals an improvement in the system. This novelty gets played out 1,000 times prior to formal encoding in DNA for transfer via germ cells at germ cell genome.

To do: analyze the human  “genome” at 20 cell types throughout life of an animal - are the genomes identical in all 20 cases? probably not as each organ system is accruing its changes through hundreds of cell divisions. How are these distant changes assembled in the germ cells? Do viruses or bacteria relay genetic info to germ cells as they accrue. Do we have messenger viruses that act as relays between heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and germ cells?  Some mechanism for keeping sperm up to date with latest  organ improvements in the event of a DNA transfer via sex?

Explore: the ratio of intra-life coorganation beneficial mutation events to actual heritable base pair changes-mutations. Is it 10,000 to 1, 100 to 1 would be a lot.

JBQ - How would the advantage of longer fangs get worked out at intra-life level if only one set of teeth per life? Answer: It wouldn’t - some things must undergo whole-life generational testing and perhaps 1,000 of these much longer organism generations. Advantage of longer fangs is a gross example - look for the advantage of one of 500 folding options in a protein that acts as a molecular gate at membrane lipids.

Who-what-how is intra-life coorganation performed? Is it all done via chemical signaling? Is there an area within the limbic apparatus that acts as a command center for these options at distant organs? A zone of judgement at the brain or does each organ system have its own judge-jury- executioner. “This is an improvement” “This is not an improvement” you die ! One of 100,000 options tossed onto the evolutionary trash heap in a single mammal lifespan.

what is the role of viral-bacterial DNA-RNA etc. in coorganation? A non-pathogenic virus can visit every organ in the body in half an hour and relay info back and forth between systems, deposit chemicals, new proteins, enzymes, fats.

JBE - Look for intercell messengers between organs and germ cells. How are hard-won evolutionary advantages at organs relayed to germ cells as novel  heritable traits? How does the organism avoid wasting the benefits of hundreds of generations of evolution at billions of cells?

According to neo-darwinist dogma,  only mutations at germ cells can be transmitted to a new generation producing a mutant swerve for testing via natural selection.

The great speciations occurred in deep pre-cambrian epoch a billion years ago as symbiotic aggregations took root then forever after until the present,  it’s all coorganation. Most evolution is internal as organs evolve and coorganate with one another with their highly conserved foundational genes locked in where they are protected from casual mutation.

A three week old human fetus replays-expresses renal features it has remained in touch with for 500 million years for the first 3 weeks after fertilization then - “oops” not this one! as the pronephric proto-kidney dissolves allowing the mesonephric version to develop for 5 weeks - no go ! not this one either. Finally, on the third try the metanephric kidney develops and it’s off to the races for life.

JBQ - Is the prostate a command center for the relay of epigenetic information from all organ systems to sperm cells? Is there an analog in females? Does nuclear DNA at sperm dematerialize into chromatin? Is there a daily cycle of receptiveness when new genetic info is added to latest batch of sperm. To do: Look for chromatin cycles at germ cells.

JBQ - where are the free-living mitochondria ? Have they gone extinct?

JBT - Seems like mutations at vomeronasal chemistry would most likely cause interruption in mating continuity leading to sexual isolation - speciation. New mutation doesn’t  pass the smell test. Is vomeronasal change inherent in all speciation?  Who could know? There has been no new species evolution observed - ever.

JBQ - Why would a bird care if its mate had a red-tufted head or webbed feet if the pheromones were still attractive and why would it mate with a look alike if vomeronasal chemistry had changed?

Note:   All myth is truth - all truth is myth.

“Speciation is a property of nucleated organisms. Speciation began with the earliest protoctists 2 billion years after first bacteria and viruses.” -  Lynn Margulis

JBQ - How do newborn animals depending on a diverse microbiota in their gastrointestinal tract and many other locations, restore, reanimate the wide variety of bacteria and viruses during gestation-birth-life?  It can’t be all via mother’s milk.

JBQ - How much non-human DNA ( viral, bacterial) enters an ovum at fertilization? Does this new generation of microorganisms  hitch a ride on the surface of sperm head or sperm mid section? We now know that mitochondria travelling in sperm midsection enter the egg, contrary to widespread previous belief. How much viral DNA is carried inside the head of the sperm to grow along with blastula-fetus into new life?

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9/6/15   3:57pm

Gentlemen Start Your Kidneys

A living organism contains every component of its entire evolutionary history. We comprise 99.9% ancient - archaic - primordial stuff. Animals, plants, bacteria, viruses and archaea are living histories of all they / we have ever been since life’s origin and long before as molecules in the primeval stew. It is not simply that every human cell once had the potential to be any organ or tissue but it has the potential to be any creature that ever was since the beginning of life on Earth. Send our little “human’ blastomere an instruction to become a Devonian fish and voila! Mom gives birth to a coelacanth.

The spectacle of stem cells receiving instructions to develop into neurons, epithelium, nephrons, cardiac tissue, lungs, bones, blood, hormones -

You - do this

You - do that

Not now! - wait 10 seconds until x,y,z is complete then it is your turn

A cellular headquarters at blastomere  like a busy general writing orders to 1,000 colonels

Gentlemen - Start your kidneys !

The kidney begins in deep time 400 million years ago give or take 100 million years. The kidney begins to grow in each new life of mammals, birds and reptiles. The human kidney recapitulates this early form in our fetal growth sequence. For the first three weeks a human has the kidney of a 400 million year old hagfish. It disappears after a few weeks replaced by a second version that became extinct 100 million years ago. This second kidney actually functions in the human fetus as a filter for a few weeks.  At week fifteen our final form kidney emerges to serve its filtering, blood pressure regulation, secretion, excretion  services throughout a life.

There are many who disparage Darwinian evolution-natural selection using examples of specific animal features such as eye parts, kidney-heart system to make their case against. Their question is some form of  “How could these systems function at 10% eyeball or 20% kidney? They fail to acknowledge 99% of evolution occurs at the quantum-atomic-cell nucleus level i.e. not apparent to cursory examination of obvious animal features or the fossil record.  the vast ocean of process that drives any phenotypic expression ( i.e. a part or process you can see) is not readily apparent. The stuff we can see: feathers, fins, limbs, organ systems, metabolic processes are the residue of much finer process not the heart of the matter, not the essence, the guts of evolution-mutation-selection. Evolution is not only not at the level of the individual life as Darwin asserted it isn’t at the gene level as Dawkins proposed 39 years ago in his iconic book "The Selfish Gene".

Organisms evolve within themselves throughout a single life via intra-signaling: limb to nucleic material, organ to nucleic material. Intra-lifespan epigenetic activity across 50 cell generations or 500 or 5,000 cell generations  prior to registration as a change in DNA base pair number or sequence i.e. traditional sense of a mutation and subsequent transfer to a new generation of germ cells. Thousands, tens of thousands of mutations accrue within tissue cells  before a gene is modified. Nature is more carefully conservative  than we have assumed. there is a dialogue that occurs throughout the life of an individual - messages for improvement of a process or the coordination of an organ component with other organ systems. These  post-translational signals are registered in histones-junk DNA  and when a threshold is reached, a message is formally encoded into DNA for conservation. The histone acts as capacitor storing a charge for change and then relaying a signal to DNA molecule at germ cells. What is the pathway from organ cell to germ cell? Perhaps “junk” DNA is stored information that has yet to reach the point where it signals a change in protein production - regulation.

The old model of a nucleotide getting zapped by a UV ray, mutating and causing a new expression to be tested in the following generation(s) for fitness-survival is grossly over-simplified. During the span of a single lifetime there are 10 million or a billion mutations, tryouts, experiments in every organ in every metabolic process, in every cell in the body. It is the sum of these multitudes of mutations that we see as an improved blood pump. Organ and metabolic systems within a single body during a single lifespan communicate myriad small changes that become encoded in DNA. The following is a partial list of cell types and their lifespan in a human body:

1. Heart muscle cells            40 million replaced each year of 4 billion total
2. Epithelium-small intestine        2-4 days average lifespan of cell
3. Stomach                2-9 days
4. White blood cells            2-5 days
5. Platelets                10 days
6. Sperm                    60 days
7. neurons                lifetime
8. bone cells                10% per year
9. eye-lens                lifetime
10. female gametes ( eggs)        lifetime
11. Red blood cells            100 million new ones per minute of 9 trillion

Look at Darwinian evolutionary process re: fecundity-mutation-natural selection within a single body not where a base pair mutates, expresses a longer claw-dominant bear-wins mating battle, makes more offspring with longer claws and over a million years all bears have longer claws. the viability of the longer claw gets resolved 10,000 times at the cell level. It must make sense here as an advantage for 1,000 generations before this mutation gets transferred into the DNA as either an expressed or a conserved trait.

TOE (Theory Of Evolution) skeptics ask how an entire system like the kidney could evolve as a result of the accepted model of mutation-natural selection. How does an animal use 10% of a kidney even if a simple archaic pronephric model as seen today in the hagfish (and surprisingly, in early fetus of humans, though non-functioning and dissolved after three weeks). How or why does one have only one half of a filter even if it is a primitive one? There are structures other than kidneys or proto-kidneys that perform a filtering function - every cell membrane is a filter. It is a kidney in a sense if it keeps some things in and others out. It is easy to visualize an ancient kidney - a ten percent kidney working in concert with fifteen percent blood and a twenty percent heart. Every cell with a membrane is at least a ten percent kidney by definition. There was a point in time where where a few cells combined to accelerate this filtering process i.e. the cell membrane handles X and Y and the incipient kidney handles  Z.

Many TOE critics whether knowledgeable Creationists, educated, rational science-trained sceptics  lack imagination. There ought to be a branch of bio-science “Incipient Organ Systems” that explores archaic organ interaction, patterns scalable into greater complexity like a landscape painting transitioning from foggy late Turner into precisely rendered  Frederic Edwin Church.

The time is two billion years BCE. there are twenty multicell organisms at the starting gate. The primordial ooze has become toxic. Who will survive?  Gentlemen start your kidneys !*

August 29, 2015  2:36 pm

Ball O’ String - Ball O’ Rubber Bands

August 18, 2015 A single thread of our grand rhizomatic myth-mat-braintangle, our consensus trance is often seen as madness  but when these madnesses, after some culling,  are bundled together into a single rope of shared consciousness comprising our shared wisdom, our history, laws and favorite music, books and  films - culture ensues.

Imagine two balls the diameter of a golf ball at the top of a big hill. They have 1,000 features coded as base pairs in DNA  at the top of the hill start point,. The orange ball rolls left and the green ball rolls right. These two balls have the capacity to replicate. The hill is covered with myriad pieces of string, the left side of each string fragment is different in small and large ways. The right side of the hill is covered with  rubber bands of  many qualities. New rubber bands and string are features that may or may not promote survival.  If the red ball rolls over a piece of string it adheres. If a green ball rolls over a rubber band it conveniently wraps around. The red ball is an animal. The green ball is a plant.  It will take three billion years for the DNA in the two balls to get to the bottom of the hill. As string or rubber bands are added, new DNA is created or existing DNA is struck by a UV ray creating a mutation forcing a ball to pick up a new type of string or rubber band.

Life has so much momentum, so much back-pressure ( historical momentum-heritage) as well as adaptive-reproductive pressure in real-time and real space. Life possesses such urgency and fecundity over vast scales of time-space,  like water being forced through a cracked rock formation - where are the hairline fissures in the rock? The openings will be discovered by these organisms as they struggle for existence. The new niche will be discovered.

Are individual organisms programmed with intention? Once the cat idea is in place, is it cats all the way down. Once the reptile happens, is it reptiles forever. It appears to be thus.  If there is a point in this “Ball-O- String” analogy where one could begin to wrap string around a rubber band trending ball or rubber bands around a ball that begins as stringy. At what point in evolutionary history does the idea of cat become expressed? Is it gradual? Is it punctuated, i.e. does it occur in less than 20 million years? Is there such a thing as “punctuation” within a pre-phenotypically expressed collection of what have been gradually accrued variations? Which of the following features would be considered the core of the balls  i.e. pre-string or pre- rubber bands? 1. live young parturition 2. quadrupedal 3. chordate 4. radially symmetrical 5. bilaterally symmetrical.

How does a ball know to pick up string and not rubber bands when it possesses neither at the early stages of development? Perhaps it does not “pick up” string or rubber bands, it picks up an undifferentiated substance and its food and transforms nutrients into string or rubber bands as a precursor cat or bear or crocodile that one day will become a fully expressed family.

How are traits conserved to such widely varying degrees in DNA? Are there kryptonite locks on certain histones - no access, little access, regular access, promiscuous depending on methylation type?

Lamarxism: Inherited acquired wage slavery.

Vastly different organisms could develop from identical amounts of both string and rubber bands depending on which of the pieces of string or rubber bands are expressed during fetal development. Maybe a ball at the bottom of the hill has 50% string and 50% rubber bands but only the string is expressed. The rubber bands are silent. Vastly different organisms could grow from identical genomes with expression controlled by post-transcriptional activity only.

What is the next step up the evolutionary ladder after bacteria or if not a ladder, which app is being selected among hundreds, as the most useful improvement for the organism? Was there ever a two-cell organism? or four, eight, twelve? or did we advance from one to hundreds of cells in a single step? Imagine a billion years of evolution happening in 24 hours - a museum exhibit.

One can create blinding bright light in a pitch dark room by pressing on one’s eyeballs. This is obviously a cold chemical light not involving photons. Must be phosphor atoms or calcium ions releasing energy at afferent neural pathways from eyeball to optic nerve through optic chiasm then into occipital lobe? who knows? maybe this light is experienced before the afferent signal gets to the occipital lobe say in the midbrain or the pons. This chemical light never needs to arrive at any more remote brain area for added meaning - no need for 3-D space to be imagined to complete a scene - just light alone. Is this light in the darkness similar to the cold light of lightning bugs or deep sea glowing fish appendages?

Do cell membrane lipids share the same chemistry as mitochondria lipid or vesicle membrane lipids? One size fits all? Is the hydrophilic-phobic connection reversed at either?

What propels and or guides a protein molecule from the golgi exit to the interior surface of the cell membrane? How is it guided to the proper zone of this 360 degree quasi-sphere? How is shipping information conveyed re: destination: bloodstream, adjacent cell, intracell goo?

Liebig's law: Barrel capacity determined by the lowest stave. Organism success determined by the most scarce resource.

8/18/15 9:40am

Capacitor Effect

August 7, 2015

A capacitor stores increasing electrical charge over time until an instant when it releases all stored charge. A speciation event following this pattern would suggest a contradiction of Darwin’s notion of gradual change in small increments. Countless small changes have been occurring intra-organism but these reach a “debut” point where it appears on life’s big stage for interspecies action.

Note the amount of work of all sorts from design through construction that goes into a new building before opening day. It is not that nothing was happening or that things were in “equilibrium” or “stasis” during this block of time simply that the changes were not public.

Nature is a great showman saving up eons of hard work for dramatic debuts on life’s stage. She likes to bring her fighters up through anonymous ranks and myriad hours in the gym before sending them into the ring for well attended battles.

Stephen Jay Gould and NIles Eldredge mistake these vast periods of species “stasis” as equilibrium when activity is continuous and intense at all times. They overstate the importance of opening night. Note: “Opening night” in evolutionary timescales may be 10 million years long over the course of a billion years of existence as a discreet organism.

If a dam breaks due to forces of water in reservoir does it matter if it rained for one day or one year? The resulting flood has the same disastrous effect on the village below in either case.  Each raindrop creates femto change at its own micro- level perhaps knocking a frog on the head reminding it to have sex. Tadpoles then clog the spillway screens, water and thus horizontal force builds up against the dam, the stress in the concrete builds up beyond its capacity, the dam bursts - every level of the taxonomy is in play.

There is no big change without accrued small change somewhere in the chain of causality, even singular, catastrophic events. A comet works its way across the solar system toward Earth. Hitting the Earth is just another moment in its millennial travels from the Oort cloud and back. It is when one system in which change has slowly accrued, impacts another system that an event might appear to be punctuated, abrupt, saltational.

Ten million base pair mutations occur in one organism then in a single “moment” ( perhaps in geo-time) this series of genes affects shell color, shell shape. The change in the shape of the shell is just the manifestation of countless smaller changes, just another in a long line of changes not essentially larger, though far more noticeable than those that unfolded at the base pair level.

This interior-exterior expression dynamic occurs throughout nature, throughout the universe on every scale and throughout human society and through individual lives. It is what anger management is all about - channeling abrupt expression into socially constructive, personally advantageous action.

“....When a system reaches its own limits and becomes saturated, a reversal is produced - something else takes place…..”  Jean Baudrillard

Every cell membrane is a capacitor.

Many small changes accrue reaching a critical mass, a breaking point at which new phenotypic expression occurs.

Things build up and then they burst, emptying to fill again; spores, emotions, cells, the universe itself is a capacitor,  a regulator of change enabling a regular, dependable filling and emptying of charge, of change.

An election is a social capacitor, a built-in device for regulating and balancing social pressure. An election creates a sensation of change when much that is vital remains the same. There are highly conserved genes across kingdoms of organisms that are not available for mutation at every generation. These  base pair sequences are guarded more than others lest we have our  stomachs filled with brains. Each new generation is a biological election, a newer slate of variables to test itself against the forces of natural selection: capacitor-election-birth - storage-release-refilling. The female reproductive system in mammals is a capacitor when it fills up with a growing fetus and is emptied to fill again.

The animal and plant cell membrane is a capacitor with a low charge on one side and a higher charge on the other. positive charge outside - negative charge inside creating a differential that is used to convey sensory and motor information in neurons and other functions in other cell types.

On the ethnographic scale, adolescent male natives are restless, the village is overcrowding, the chief demands fealty, a revolt ensues. The village-capacitor discharges a few ocean-going sailing outrigger canoes filled with young sailors out into the South Pacific to find their own territory

Release via pressure excess

Release via catalyst

population growth from cell division - birth

population growth via immigration

A movie theater is a capacitor filling and emptying. Your stomach fills and empties - is it a capacitor as it churns away at the various products of sunlight doing its part to restore entropic balance from imbalance caused by the great temperature difference between the sun and the coldness of space in a cascade of causality first the plant then the stomach evolved as capacitors to accelerate entropic gradient reduction.

When there are transformations within the “capacitor”, if the medium doing the filling is transformed does the capacitor become something else? a transformer?

RE: Reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” @ page 99 of “Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard - .  The reproduction reminds the brain of the glorious sensuality of the original oil painting though it is missing the aura itself it trips the memory of the original aura as we look at this simulacrum so all is not lost, perhaps little is lost with this glossy poster of Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire” thus the original is not lost.

The Panama Canal locks are capacitors - they fill, they disgorge carrying information ( ships-products, raw materials) to a new level.

JB Hypothesis:  Gradual change is stored internally using “junk”DNA until all organ systems and all metabolic systems have been coordinated. After a million years or 15 million years of invisible but regular internal evolution via adjustment-coordination there is an expression event - a coming out party, a period of a few thousand years, a debut, a punctuation. Punctuation being the outward expression of a continuous gradual evolution.

Imagine a crew team spending 99 percent of its time, thousands of hours, in grueling workouts for several months to prepare for five six minute races. One would not assert that the rowing team was in stasis during its vital months of preparation with its intensity reaching race levels of intensity but with no spectators only the watchful eye of the coach.

Stasis is a mirage. If Gould wants to transfer the bookkeeper as agent of speciation heuristic to the next higher taxonomic level from Darwin’s level of the individual to Gould’s level of the species then he must accept the baggage - no cherry picking of features allowed. The route to speciation is:  gestation to speciation not as Gould-Eldredge assert: punctuation to speciation.

My corollary to “punctuated” equilibrium fleshes out Gould’s argument for raising the taxonomic level of natural selection and adds quotation marks for what can be seen as only a superficial but highly visible “punctuation” - punctuation for the spectators only but not for those with inside knowledge of the entire process, the grueling, highly selective regimen of the oarsmen, stage actors, artists including nature itself. Why would nature showcase an unfinished, untrained, uncoordinated product i.e. to allow it to play a role before its time - too dangerous. Nature has pride and conservative character in not wanting to place entire development process in the arena as animals and especially humans revile and attack the unfinished, seen as weak as it often is. why would a species, in its gradual evolution oppose this fact of life. Keep changes under wraps until ready for action and under wraps does not imply stasis. Think of the vast scope of activity in a growing fetus. Birth is the celebrated punctuation event but it is part of a continuum.

Biologists should search for genetic-proteinic mechanisms for of genotypic storage-warehousing and the mechanics of release. These ‘releases” occur over spans of millions of years in some cases.

To do:  Create experiments that seek to reveal mechanisms for warehousing useful base pair mutations to be triggered as phenotypic expression only when levels of internal balance is achieved re: component size, metabolism, process, timing etc. Internal “practice” prior to expression on nature’s battlefield.

• 12:46pm

Creation-Abruption

July 31, 2015 Nothing is ever abrupt. Everything has its history, a backstory, a build up, an evolution. You may not see the development but it happened nonetheless. Nothing is abrupt. Things are small for 1,000 years then you can feel them, see them, then they kill you. Take cholera for instance.

Sometimes things appear abrupt because the intermediate stages have been lost, removed, stolen, ignored, simply not seen. How many times have we heard the following from an artist “My overnight success took thirty years.” or twenty years or ten years i.e. this person’s success only appeared to be abrupt. Ask anything that seems to happen all at once. Nothing happens all at once. Nothing is abrupt.

Some things seem abrupt due to a change of background. You didn’t see the green apple on the green grass but when it is seen against a red picnic cloth it is in your face. Shift the background and things “abruptly” appear. Relocate the object to a new background and it looks different all of a sudden. If you want to see the unseen, change the background noise. Killing big game for sport was a sign of masculinity in the 1920s. In the 2015 it is pathological cruelty, senseless, egomaniacal destruction.

While you were busy looking elsewhere this phenomenon became present. Some things gestate, hibernate remain out of sight and in stasis; other things are always growing, getting bigger, gaining definition, clarity, power and then you see them and then they explode.

1. Bacteria invented the animal ( human)  gut just as humans invented agriculture and writing.
2. Ethanol ( whiskey, vodka, gin etc.) dissolves gut biofilm making one more susceptible to viral, bacterial infection, cancer, ulcers, etc.
3. Ethanol dissolves myelin sheaths at axons-neurons making one more quick tempered, depressed, angry, violent i.e. less sociable.

Things only appear to be created when they are merely stuff being re-arranged or noticed for the first time. People who are identified as “creative”  re-arrange more stuff than others. They break more rules and dig deeper into processes. Mozart’s melodies were always sitting there among the seven tones. He was the one to notice them. Picasso and Braque looked closer at the late work of Cezanne to discover the reason for all the fuss.

There is no creation and there is no abruption. there is unfolding at various rates or uncovering or finally seeing. A snail evolves from one species to another over the course of ten million years and Stephen Jay Gould calls this “punctuation” a singular event across geologic scale time i.e. hundreds of millions of years claiming this abrupt speciation an argument against Darwin’s gradualism.

Being born is an abruption. Sure it’s just another chemical event on a 4.5 billion year continuum but to another human it is an abruption. If it is your child, it is a big abruption. Humans have their unique realm of what is abrupt and what is continuous. Avocado dip turns brown after an hour sitting on a picnic table but if one makes a sport out of watching it. It seems to take forever. The mayfly lives for a day as a flying insect.

Abruption-abrupt punctuation as dramatic climax in dramatic text paving way for third act. Shift characters into a new context, a new background to reveal something hidden

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5:34  7/31/15

Bend It Like Nature

  January 21, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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