Science (the resulting name for the 150 year old victory of Natural Philosophy over Natural History) is widely accepted to be primarily pedagogical in nature.
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.
Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.
By contrast, parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences, continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.
High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.
High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.
'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.
But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .
Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.
All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.
Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.
Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.
My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.
Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.
The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.
In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.
And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...
During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.
And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.
Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.
Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.
There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
But only if we are prepared to listen.
Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons, in spades.....
Friday, May 10, 2013
1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science
Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.
But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly) modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.
Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.
Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.
DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all as actual products of that war.
But let us look at these claims more closely.
Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.
It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.
This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.
I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of all Modern Science : strong determinism .
This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.
Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.
In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.
(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)
Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.
Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.
(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)
In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.
This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.
HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.
Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.
Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.
But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.
Cheek !
In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.
So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....
But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly) modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.
Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.
Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.
DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all as actual products of that war.
But let us look at these claims more closely.
Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.
It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.
This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.
I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of all Modern Science : strong determinism .
This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.
Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.
In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.
(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)
Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.
Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.
(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)
In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.
This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.
HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.
Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.
Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.
But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.
Cheek !
In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.
So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations
The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.
Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.
My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.
Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.
As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.
In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.
Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.
Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !
Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.
An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.
Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.
The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.
If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case) could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.
In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.
In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.
(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)
America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.
One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.
Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?
I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.
The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.
A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.
In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.
It saw the then new idea of Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.
One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.
Nature ruled !
And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.
So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.
It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.
But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.
As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.
Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.
Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....
Monday, May 6, 2013
Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"
Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....
The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.
Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.
They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's single navy arsenal.
The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.
The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.
But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.
So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.
Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...
May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :
Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.
The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.
Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.
But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.
Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists : like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.
But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.
Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.
They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's single navy arsenal.
The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.
The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.
But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.
So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.
Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...
May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :
Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.
The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.
Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.
But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.
Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists : like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.
But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.
WWII : began with "Bigger is Better - Inevitably" and ended up in "Global Commensality"
At the 1939 New York's World Fair , it seemed only common sense that life started out as tiny simple-minded microbes and inevitably ended up both bigger and smarter, with beings like us being the prime example.
After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.
True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?
Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?
These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions, even if they only accepted them resignedly.
Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.
So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.
But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists - didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.
The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.
The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.
But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.
And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .
For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.
With all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .
As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.
But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.
Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.
Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.
So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.
Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.
Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.
The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.
But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.
To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.
Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.
Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.
Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us, (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).
Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.
because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.
But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.
Just too damned bureaucratical, just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.
The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species, ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.
Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.
The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.
Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.
But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.
Together with WWII itself.
Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.
His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....
After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.
True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?
Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?
These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions, even if they only accepted them resignedly.
Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.
So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.
But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists - didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.
The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.
The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.
But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.
And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .
For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.
With all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .
As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.
But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.
Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.
Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.
So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.
Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.
Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.
The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.
But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.
To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.
Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.
Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.
Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us, (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).
Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.
because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.
But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.
Just too damned bureaucratical, just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.
The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species, ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.
Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.
The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.
Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.
But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.
Together with WWII itself.
Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.
His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....
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