Harold Darke - O Brother Man

 

 

 

Boston Trinity Church Choir

 

O Brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was " doing good " ;
So shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
Of wild war music o'er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

 

John Greenleaf Whittier  

I resolved to post more music this year and I haven't been keeping it yet. 

given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true

FOR THIS NEXT TO LAST post on Denis Noble's short lecture The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, I'll comment just a little on his summary of why he believes that the actual, detailed molecular chemistry of life supports concepts of free will that the old-fashioned, cartoonish view of DNA and even cruder concepts of life and reproduction and evolution are used to actively refute in service to the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism.  Not that I couldn't point out the relevance of many of his points to what I'm interested in, political, legal and social implications of this but I'll wait to do that seeing how I must have strained your tolerance for that in my last couple of posts.   Later, I might risk posting my transcript of his talk without my commentary some time in the future along with a link to the video in which you can compare what I've typed out to what he said and, don't forget, his, for once, extremely useful slides.    

Nerve cells are densely packed with ion channels in their membranes.  And those channels are also continuously jiggling around in a stochastic dance.  Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance. Just as the immune system can distinguish between the forms of DNA variation to enable it to latch on to a new virus or a new bacterium so our nervous systems can latch on to the neural mechanisms that satisfy the criterion of social choice.  This is not a new idea incidentally, it was originally formulated by Gerald Edelman who won the Noble prize in 1972 for his discovery of the structure of the immune system's immunoglobulin proteins.  He went on to suggest the same harnessing of chance could be operating in the nervous system. He even called it "neural Darwinism" in a book he published many years ago.

So, I've pursued this question together with my brother zoologist and philosopher Raymond Noble to ask the question, does that enable values to influence physiology?  The choice of what we should do.  And where, in those articles, I argue that conscious organisms have the ability to match up their behavioral routines with the constraints of social interactions.  Including, for example, the concepts of fairness and for many other values for which we all live our lives.  If that is so then we have a process by which natural stochasticity, chance can be harnessed, that is used to enable us to act with what philosophers call the only free will worth having.  But can conscious choice influence our biochemistry?  Can it control the genome that way?  

Passing up the temptation of the phrase "neural Darwinism" in line with my skepticism about the existence of natural selection, I'll point out that this series of posts really began back with my posting of Thomas Merton's short essay "What is Liberty?"  in which he defined the basic level of liberty, freedom as being the ability to choose what was good over what was evil.  Certainly, in my context of political, social and legal use of freedom as a good thing, opposed to the kind of libertarian freedom which, under "liberal democracy" holds that all kinds of evil actions and oppression and even killings are permissible as "liberty,"  that IS the most important question. 'Liberal democracy" as it is encoded in most political and legal systems facilitates individuals to harm others, other People, other animals, the environment we all depend on as "liberty."   Egalitarian democracy depends on our choosing to restrain our inner two-year-old brat to allow others to live a decent, safe life.  But even more than that is under attack from the ideological choices and decisions of many influential People presented to us by the publishing media and industry.   As I will never stop pointing out, the kind of denial of the possibility of free thought, "free will" that is all the rage among materialist-atheist-scientistic academics and babblers and scribblers is rightly seen as a basic and direct attack on democracy as much as anything the billionaires, especially those with political control of some of the largest and richest countries on Earth are financing, today.  

Considering the use of "twin studies" by those whose Darwinism turns to eugenics and scientific racism, concentrating on seemingly uncanny similarities in twins separated a birth, this use of more detailed studies of twins by Denis Noble is very welcome.  

Now I come to a very interesting study that physiologists have done over many years looking at identical twins.  Identical twins have nearly identical genomes.  There are small differences but they're very slight.  Now imagine that one of them is brought up in an environment that leads him to choose to train as an athlete and the other does not.  Not surprisingly, as shown in the photo here, the body builds are completely different.  And in an extensive study of such cases of identical twins, physiologists have been able to identify the control RNAs in the athletic ones that enable their muscle proteins to grow so much.  So, the decision to train as an athlete, provided that decision is implemented in practice, leads to precisely those changes at the molecular level that enable the athlete to succeed.

Now, what is impressive about this study is that it identifies the small RNA molecules that control the genome.  And, in fact, this is happening all the time.  Our decisions to do whatever we do are inevitably controlling our genomes because similar physiological processes must be involved.   There are armies of small RNAs, of control RNAs wait to do just this.  

Now, is this what we call free will?  What I have shown is the harnessing of stochasticity, the use of stochasticity or chance clearly enables a form of creativity in behavior that allows social constraints the ideas of value and judgement that go with them to influence the physiology of our bodies.  But why should we call this "free will?"   Doesn't it mean that,  after all, we are determined but just by social interaction processes rather than physical processes?   

Well, yes, that's true in a sense. But what surely would disturb us as a challenge to our ability to choose would be a demonstration that there we are always impelled to do what we do by purely physical processes.  "My Genes Made Me Do It" is even the title of a book.  

So, being physically compelled and socially influenced are very different forms of determination.  Being influenced, even feeling compelled by the social influences of shared values and judgements surely does not worry us in the same way.  We can even observe the same processes in other species.  Packs of dogs illustrated in my image here, and groups of monkeys have both been shown in careful studies to be capable of discriminating against the members of the pack who are not cooperating.  These distinctions, therefore, between the physical and the social influences are surely the basis for what many philosophers   refer to when they talk about the kind of free will worth having.

You see, as the person, Denis Noble, I'm not worried by the fact that my upbringing and my social interaction has greatly influenced my values and, therefore, my actions.  Why ever should I wish it to be otherwise?

So, social freedom is the form of freewill worth having.  Furthermore, influence by social factors does not imply compulsion.  Social factors and the reasons we may give for our actions are what philosophers call defeasible.  Meaning, that in retrospect we may give the reasons for what we do.  Legal processes in our law courts illustrate that process all the time.

The concept of defeasibility was developed as a legal concept as well as having a philosophical basis.  

Now, clarifying what kinds of free will are worth having is, indeed, a philosophical question.  But what I hope I have done is to outline a way in which physiological processes, dependent upon the stochastic properties of water and, in turn, the stochastic properties of all the molecules that are in and dissolved in or suspended in water can exist and enable that kind of free will to occur.  Indeed, I would go further.  Given what we know of the chemistry of life, of its dependence on these interesting properties of water and the ability of water to give us the variability that we need to make choices, given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true.

All of this is certainly welcomed by an egalitarian democrat like me because it gives a physical mechanism by which we can exercise free thought, free choice and it should be welcomed by anyone who has any esteem for human thinking, human reasoning, the long and large academic heritage and, even in its frequently decadent and self-destructive forms current in academia today, it defeats the simplistic, cartoon of physical determinism that is the default ideology imposed by the social and intellectual coersion that has hegemonic control of academia, the media and, increasingly, the legal and political mainstream.  Even those hardest of hard core physical determinists, and almost all of them are some species of materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, don't want the logical conclusions of their ideological holdings because, as I've pointed out, it can't but help undermine any esteem that their professional product is held in.  

I don't, however, think that what Denis Noble says goes far enough, though as a scientist he is properly keeping in bounds with what his profession can honestly say about any of this.  You might have noticed that in the beginning of this section of his talk, Denis Noble said, "Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance."   In that "almost" is the formal reticence of a scientist who knows his science cannot determine if even something so reasonably concluded to have been a product of design because the design would require a designer.  Whether that designer is in line with the traditional concept of God, the Creator or if it is the design of an individual, overseeing living mind that does what he attributes to the molecules and cells and systems of cells in the body, harnesses the physical properties of water and fats and other molecules to do things toward an end, witnessing such a process makes it intellectually allowable, maybe even respectable to conclude that someone is in control of it all just as someone would have to make the choice above even the social influences and coercions, in the end.  

Having been steeping myself in the late plays of Eugene O'Neill during this same time as I've been doing this series, plays in which addition to alcohol and opiates are at the center of the tragedies he presented, plays about his family members and himself, we aren't only given one set of social influences to choose among, we are not compelled to choose one or another even on that level.  And the choices we make are not determined by our environments, those are defeasible as well.  We can reject or accept what our families and communities present as a better choice.   Listening to Long Days Journey Into Night, I heard the excuses the mother gives for her remaining addicted to morphine and recognized every excuse that the alcoholics in my family gave for not giving up alcohol.  I have said here before that when my brother refused to try AA because he "rejected a higher power" I could tell him he had chosen a higher power in the form of the ethyl alcohol molecule, that was his higher power to which he had sacrificed his health, his mental health, his job, his family, his home and car and everything else.  It's a rather bitter joke to me that ideological atheists have adopted a cartoon picture of an atom as the equivalent of a cross or star of David or a crescent moon.  To me that choice says everything there is to know about the choice that they have made and why it is incompatible with life.  

Though it isn't directly relevant to my use of Denis Noble's lecture, I will try to get around to typing out the last five or so minutes in which he makes a highly moral and laudable choice to concentrate on the politics, laws and social aspects of the provision of clean water which is as much in danger as egalitarian democracy is under the various gangster legal regimes from the worst dictatorships to the less corrupt liberal democracies which allow millionaires and billionaires to buy "water rights" and deprive People of the very basis of life, itself.  I think it's telling about the limits of traditional biology that this is the first time I've heard or read an in-depth analysis of that fact, that our bodies are mostly water, the substance that all of my previous reading in biology and related sciences just considered as if it was there to fill up space while the larger, more complex molecules operated independent of it.  Such a basically simplistic and incompetent view of life has been what has dominated the culture of biological sciences in my experience.  For that alone, this is a landmark lecture in my understanding of science.   

Spring Cleanin' Getting Ready To Blog - With A Response

LOOKING AT yesterday's posts this morning, I notice that I'd accidentally posted a rough draft of the long post instead of something more like one I'd want to post.   I've gone through it and added some things that got deleted in the rough edit and fixed a couple of problems with verb agreement,  something that's bound to happen when you decide to change a single or plural subject around.    

Since materialism is a monistic ideology, holding that everything that exists is a product of material causation in line with what science claims about that, in responding to the real-life consequences of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology I have every right to relate that to the very real political situation in which egalitarian democracy is thwarted and prevented and endangered, especially as those with academic credentials and a platform are undermining the very foundations of equality and democracy on behalf of that ideology,  denying the reality of the possibility of freedom of thought.   That seemingly academic polemical self-impeaching ideological struggle does have real life consequences, as can be seen in that ideology being held, either formally or loosely by some of the worst despots and mass murderers in history.   Having Robert Sopolsky out there promoting the belief that free thought is impossible as Trump, with the neo-Stalinist, Putin's and Xi's support, is trying to destroy democracy in the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere has to count as among the most irresponsible antics by an academic yet in  this century. 

And it's on the basis of old-fashioned, outmoded, refuted biological orthodoxy which started to crumble about eight decades ago. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Neill - Hughie

 Hughie

Jason Robards - Erie

Jack Dodson - Night Clerk 

Jason Robards was a great O'Neill actor,  Jack Dodson, the only thing I ever saw him in was as Howard Sprague on the Andy Griffiths Show.   I think this is the audio of the stage performance that was shown on Great Performances more than thirty years ago.   It works really well as an audio play because it's mostly the monologue of Erie with a little bit of interaction with Hughes, the night clerk who has a few short monologues himself. 

I've been binging on O'Neill and needed something a little more upbeat.  When he was writing his first plays, his father, the famous actor James O'Neill asked him if he were trying to get his audience to go home and commit suicide. 

The Honest Slogan Of The "Civil Liberties" Industry Isn't Never Again, It's Always Again. Part Two

I AM AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC ABSOLUTIST.   That is my political ideology and the politics I put my greatest hope in to produce a viable, decent life for everyone.  That is my political morality, a product of  the particular form of Christianity I hold with, informed by the history of my time and that of my parents and grandparents.   That is I am an absolutist in regard to the equality of People, I am not an egalitarian about all of the ideas that People may have, though any idea compatible with equality and democracy is rightly held as sound and safe to be expressed.  I don't hold with the current idiocy of the civil liberties industry and those they suckered that Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other holder of ideas that have produced genocides and mass causalities have any right to promote those ideas so as to give them another try.  Any preening civil libertarian or "First Amendment absolutist" who claims there is a right for Nazis to get another chance by promoting their ideas has to be considered someone who is fully prepared for that history to repeat itself.  Such a person is an idiot.  Such "civil libertarians" have no problem with giving our own, way too powerful, very successful, very oppressive and murderous forms of the same thing, white supremacy, male supremacy, etc. a continual chance to do the same thing that they have, in fact, done here throughout the entire time that the lauded First Amendment has been the supreme law of the land, are giving aid and comfort to the oppressors of Women, Black People, Native Americans, and many other groups who have been the targets of those dangerous ideologies.   That is not only insane, it is morally depraved.    Any oppressive, murderous, anti-egalitarian or anti-democratic ideology which has ever influenced enough people to hold sway either over a lynch mob or over an entire state or country is of proven dangerousness that it could do the same thing over again and can be expected to get that chance.

The unstated slogan of the current concept of "civil liberties," the hollowly hallowed ACLU and the corrupt Supreme Court, isn't Never Again, it is Always Again.  Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, American style white supremacy, male supremacy,  neo-Nazism it is all to forever more be allowed the chance to do what it has proven to be capable of having done, despite the absolute proof of experience that it can take power and oppress, enslave and murder even scores of millions and enslave billions.   And that is done on the basis of nothing more than an abstraction that refuses to consider those lessons of hardest experience as mattering as compared to the seeming simplicity of choosing not to consider that part of it as determinative.   The easy slogan of First Amendment "even handedness" "objectivity" etc. is a false front to what it really means, that it is some kind of perverted virtue to allow any or all of those a chance for a redo into perpetuity.  It's so much easier to be egalitarian for ideological abstractions, it costs to be egalitarian when it comes to People in reality.  So much easier to disregard the consequences for People, that is other than the elites of the law faculties and courts and lawyers who are in the business of getting those with the most more.  

That that lawyerly nonsense didn't die in the first decade after the Nazis were overturned and their crimes exposed and even as our own form of that in white supremacy controlled not only a large number of states but held sway in the Congress only shows how much that daffy thinking was a product of privileged, elite white guys and gals who didn't have much of a prospect in ending up as the victims of it.  That idiocy is the most damning thing there is about post-WWII secular liberalism, liberal democracy.  That any of those whose families and groups had been the victims of Nazism or our home-grown fascism of white supremacy could have even entertained such talk without hooting it down and deriding it shows how powerful the slogans of the likes of the ACLU are to override the hardest of reality.  Ideas are not equal, a person's ideas are not living beings, they don't have rights.    THAT IS CERTAINLY TRUE OF IDEAS WHICH HAVE BEEN PUT INTO PRACTICE AND WHICH HAVE PROVEN THAT THEY, IN FACT, CAN ENSLAVE, OPPRESS AND GET MANY PEOPLE KILLED, MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.  Some ideas are so dangerous to equality and rights their suppression is mandated by the protection of equality and democracy.  Democracy must hold that PEOPLE have a right to the blessings and a decent life that are made possible by democracy, a right as absolute as the right TO TELL THE TRUTH.  That is what even Nazis and white supremacists have a right to, personal equality and democracy even as they would like to destroy it WITH THEIR LIES.  All People have a right to the blessings that result from egalitarian democracy and the decent life which it has the potential to produce.  There is no right to destroy equality and democracy.  I have my doubts that those are possible without a high degree of economic leveling, certainly more than exists or is intended to exist under so-called "liberal democracy" but that's for another post.

Certainly not in the perverted system in the U.S. in which "contracts" real or created out of sheer imagination by the Supreme Court and lower courts, is a license for the more powerful, the richer is able to do all manner of immoral things on that basis.  Extreme personal wealth held by even a large number of billionaires and multi-millionaires may be as deadly to equality and, so, democracy as hate speech whipped up in the mass media with legal impunity, in the American context.  The billionaires and millionaires are the ones who fund the hate speech and lies which brought us to Republican-fascism and Trump.  

Another issue is the incredible idiocy of the lawyers, judges and "justices" who invented that "right to lie,"  handing the billionaires, millionaires and the mass media they own a carte blanche to propagandize against equality and democracy and, their base motive, against economic and environmental justice, taking every advantage of human character at its worst to undermine equality, democracy and any possibility of a decent life.  The depraved and corrupt Roberts Court is ready to sacrifice the entire biosphere to such Court invented law as they are the Voting Rights Act on behalf of Republican-fascist white supremacy. 

As I've pointed out several times in my discussion of the talk by Denis Noble I'm going through this week, I come at this from the point of view of how the recent popularization of the academic and pseudo-scientific denial of free thought, "free will" is a danger to the pursuit of and protection of egalitarian democracy which is under active attack here and around the world.  I don't think that attack and the weakening of democratic resolve in the so-called liberal democracies is unrelated to the academic and scientific attack on the very reason that democracy is better than authoritarian governments, that People are capable of freely thinking for themselves what decisions they should collectively make  instead of having those who will have a personal, vested interest in doing the decision making for them, whether it be King George III, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin or Putin or Donald Trump.  If they can be convinced by a Richard Dawkins or a Robert Sopolsky that they don't have that freedom, why should they bother with democracy?  Why should they take risks to defend it?  That's especially true in the majority population which would not have the greatest risk from an authoritarian government, especially the affluent white, straight men who dominate in most academic fields and have enough control of it that they can cause others in academia to regulate their expressed thoughts through professional and peer pressure.  The anti-democratic effect that the ease with which one can be a member of the favored majority under a dictator or other oppressive system, the torpor that comes from even relative privilege has been too little considered as contributing to the undermining of the possibility of egalitarian democracy.  If you don't feel under any kind of moral obligation towards that, you can have a very easy life, that is until the consequences of that grow to unbearable levels, for you and your loved ones.  Those fall first and foremost on unprivileged populations.  The United States in 2024 show that those levels of intolerable consequences for the middle-class and affluent must reach far worse levels than they have, as can be seen in the babbling of the DC press corps, those in NYC and other places during this election season.   I've always held that professionalizing the media so that you had to have gone to an elite university or college to get an influential job in it was a huge mistake, such People almost never have enough at risk to care about equality and democracy.  Are there bigger boobs than most of those credentialed air-heads on the air or who have the few byline jobs left in ink on paper?  

I don't think that the second careers in aggressive atheism of some of those scientists involved in that effort, such as Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, is at all unrelated to their attack on free will and the inevitable degrading of a culture that can support democracy in its only potentially stable form, egalitarian democracy. The idea of free will, free thought is entirely incompatible with their basic ideology.  That attack among those within the scientific Darwinist community goes back to the start of it, best documented in the genocidal scientific racism of Thomas Huxley and the declaration by Darwin's closest European continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel who said that the theory of natural selection was overtly supportive of an aristocratic system and overtly opposed to democracy in a book which we know Darwin read and which he declared he agreed with completely.  Ironically the title of that book was "Freedom in Teaching and Science," which indicates what an interesting career the word "freedom" has had among those who deny the possibility or desirability of freedom on the basis of their materialist, atheist, scientistic ideological holdings as if those could constitute science.  That such people could ever get away with adopting the name "free-thinkers" has to count as one of the most dishonest efforts in dishonest labeling there has been.  It's not different in the processes that lead to that from those who use the label "Christian" when they refuse to put the Gospel into practice in their lives.  

Darwin, himself, understood the most basic implications of his theory, to which Haeckel attributed, with Darwin's knowledge, the triumph of materialist monism in the culture of science and beyond.  Darwin wondered why he should have any confidence in his own thinking if it was merely a different line of material development from the thinking of apes and other animals (Darwin had a naive, 19th century aristocratic materialists' concept of animal minds. He clearly barely thought most human minds were reliable.). He realized that if his own mind were the product of the material causation that he claimed was the thing which produced us body and mind, then his ideas, no doubt foremost in his thinking, his theory of natural selection, could never be of any known worthiness of being believed.  I will point out that both Darwin, in The Descent of Man and in letters he wrote and Ernst Haeckel in his History of Creation asserted there were positive effects of murder and genocide of those they deemed and named as being inferior for the survivors, FOR THOSE DOING THE MURDERING AND CARRYING OUT THE GENOCIDE.  That is the central idea of Nazism, it is where Nazism got that idea.  Though there were other materialists who came up with the same idea in other lines of materialist thinking.  I don't think that their materialism is at all unrelated to their willingness to consider murder and genocide in positive terms anymore than it did in Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's or the Nazi's thinking.  In the case of the Nazis, steeped in the popular understanding of science in late 19th and early 20th century Germany, the theory of natural selection is the likely origin of their genocidal thinking.   One follows easily on the other as if it were a logical conclusion from the assumption.  But, as Darwin felt as a qualm about his own mind, the logical conclusion following on from materialsm must impeach all ideas that People have.  That was something that the demented Nietzsche faced but almost no other materialist is willing to do.  In Nietzsche's depraved genius, he realized that when any morality or even any aspect of "civilization" is made suspect by materialism, mere power and superior strength to dominate and crush was the only thing replacing it.  I believe he probably got that idea from earlier 19th century science in which forces cause things to happen, forces as imagined by all-too-human imagination simplifying cartoonishly what later science would discover was anything but so simple.  If you hold that is the basis of all reality then it's easy to come to that conclusion about human beings and their actions and choices singly or in societies.

If "free thought" is impossible then all forms of human judgement and thought are, as well, nothing but a result of physical causation, having no intrinsic truth value to it, no more than any mundane physical or chemical reaction can be held to have truth value.  Under materialism truth, itself, must be as delusional as they claim free will, free thought, etc. are illusions.   That would be true of the choice of moving a finger, as in some entirely dishonestly misrepresented experiments so beloved of materialst-athest polemicists, to believing either Jerry Coyne's claims or those of Denis Noble.  Or those of Richard Dawkins or Michael Behe.  There would be no truth involved, at all, except as an illusion of the brain.   Even a belief based, or so it would seem to the one believing either side of that current scientific debate, on the arrangement of chemicals in the brain would just be a more complex chemical reaction any "truth value" as illusory as a Coyne or Dawkins would claim "free will" would be under their materialist-monist system.   The entirety of science, mathematics, the pseudo-sciences of and flowing from psychology and sociology, would be no more significant than anything else coming out of the materially modeled "brain-only" mind.  Consciousness, itself, is denied by the worst of them, though most of those tend to be materialist-atheist philosophers though I've heard those credentialed as scientists babble that line, too.

As I've said materialism in the form of scientism is among the most decadent of all lines of academic or intellectual assertion because scientism can only be true if it's false, the claim of scientism not being vulnerable to scientific validation.  The self-contradictions of materialism are more varied and a more attenuated line of assertion and analysis but, in the end, it, as an intellectual structure, is no less self-defeating because it undermines any reason to be confident in any such product of intellection.

THAT REALITY IS REAL Post Script:   

Reading this through, again, I am sure someone, somewhere would point to this or that Sociobiologist or evo-psy guy or materialst-atheist devotee of scientism and claim that they were a liberal who voted for Democrats or Labour or this or that party deputed to be democratic, to which I would say that such a person is clearly engaged in double-speak because, as Haeckel pointed out in regard to a belief in natural selection, such an idea cannot sustain a belief in democracy.  I wouldn't be surprised at a member of a science faculty or even someone who has a job in academic philosophy would miss the problem between their professional and personal ideology for whatever nominally democratic political position they might hold as a lesser item of their passionate devotion.  Haeckel also pointed out that materialism is a rigidly monistic ideological position in which everything, everything that is demonstrably related to it or which exists without any possibility of that demonstration being made, is reducible to the physics and chemistry of material substances, though very little can, actually, have any demonstrable connection to the findings of physics and chemistry as important as what can be known that way sometimes is.  It is the ultimate joke of that ideology, scientism,  that it cannot ever be the product of the methods of science, it cannot be demonstrated with physics or even the most enormous equations of chemistry, that most anti-faith ideology is, itself, held only as a matter of faith.  That is when it's held onto through quite unsophisticated, non-intellectual and inevitably angry emotions.  Neither can the absolute basis of scientific method, the superiority of observation, measurement and logical analysis of those observations yields a superior level of knowledge or even, in fact, that telling the truth about that within science is better than lying about it.  Science, itself, depends on morality that scientism undermines.  
 
I have recently pointed out the problem of having an effective, viable "left" which relies on college teachers and students because (along with the puerility of so many of them) that cultural milieu is a virtual guarantee of such a "left" being counter-productive.  I think that they are among the population most indoctrinated and habituated to thinking in materialist-scientistic terms is among the greatest reasons that such a "left" is undependable - as can be seen in the backlash among them potentially aiding the Trumpian fascists in this years election  even after the hard lessons of the experience of his first term and his attempt to violently overthrow the duly elected President, Joe Biden.   Materialism, atheism and scientism taken together are an especially naive ideology among those considered as having the highest credentials and those who hold it don't tend to be especially mature in their analytical abilities.  Just as an example, neither atheism nor materialism are demonstrable with science, either.

I trust a left led by members of the Black Church who moved the United States to adopt the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts more than I do the mostly white, mostly middle-class to affluent members of university faculties who flirt with some species of socialism* or secular liberalism.  The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, were reality that is real.  The white-affluent, university based "left" produced nothing, in comparison except the undermining of that progress and the exaggeration of what part they pretend they played in things.  I distrust anything coming out of such dolts as go to the Left Forum, that annual circus of futility founded by academics and maintained by them and college kiddies.  It was the product of elite prep-schools and universities on the Supreme Court and other Courts and millionaire-billionaire financed law firms who have been destroying that progress bought with the struggle and blood of so many deprived of access to that kind of credentialing.  I don't trust much of anything coming out of those elite universities, anymore.  

I distrust the "left" that staffs a lefty magazine such as In These Times, despite their romantic attachment to and ineffective promotion of organized labor.  They were part of throwing the 2016 election to Trump who are risking the same thing eight years later by trying to undermine Biden and Democrats.  And with that preening, incredibly short sighted stupidity, the strengthened Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court who are about to entirely destroy organized labor and the regulation on the federal level.   I not only reject that "left" I despise it and wish its demise with all my heart.  I suspect James Weinstein would deeply regret having founded it if he knew what it was doing so many years after his death.  That play-left has been doing that my entire life, over and over again.  They never, ever learn a damned thing.   Democrats and Socialist Democrats should dump them and mock them into an ineffective marginal non-entity.  

* The only socialism worth anything is the socialism that holds that workers are the rightful owners of the means of production and what species of that socialism which tries to put the economics of The Law and, most radical of all, the Gospel into effect.  Though I am certain there are other religious traditions which could do the same thing.  Such socialism is, first and foremost, egalitarian and democratic or it is a criminal parody of socialism.  Unfortunately, in the history of that label, from Nazism to Marxism such criminal, oppressive, mass-murdering parody has accounted for the majority of what that word is used for, nothing worthwhile can profitably go by that label anymore.    Fabianism is a similar case which is inevitably tied to the British class system, about which Marilynne Robinson wrote so well in her suppressed book Mother Country.  

If I had the time I'd try to research any possible critiques of the 19th century Christian socialists by non-Christians and atheists to see what they had to say against it.  I believe that a socialism that informed itself out of that tradition instead of out of Marx and his materialist colleagues may have succeeded in the United States and elsewhere.  It would have cut the legs out from under the Nazis, the "national socialists," just as a real adherence to the Gospel would doom the "Christian nationalists," who are trying rather well to destroy the flawed liberal democracy in the United States.   The idea of "nationalism" being involved with both of those manifestations of anti-equality and anti-democracy is certainly worth investigating and pondering and taking seriously.  The "Christianity" of "Christian nationalism" is an emblem of nationalist identity, it has nothing to do with the radical egalitarianism of the Gospel of Jesus, of Paul, James, etc.  Christianity wedded to nationalism forfeits its Christian identity as socialism has in its attachment to that and other categories of secularism.  Socialism as it should have been has been the victim of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology, largely under the handling of academics and taken up by those with a dictatorial mindset. 
  

FOX Lies and Jesse Waters should be criminally liable for jury tampering and intimidation.    In a rational legal system they would be. 

Deport the Murdochs,  Deport Gavin McInnis.  Deport any of the Trumpzi criminals who came here from abroad. 

"that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory" Part

STARTING WHERE this left off:

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.  So, what happens?  What happens is simply marvelous.  Organisms ensure that, normally, that degree of DNA damage does not occur.  And how they do it is ingenious and only living systems can do it.  Each and every one of those errors is corrected by the living cell, itself, employing many DNA cutting and splicing proteins to do the job.  And the outcome is so accurate that it can reduce an actual, crystal-like error rate of one in ten to the four to one in ten to the ten. that is a one million fold change.  

And only a living cell, not DNA alone, can achieve this.  To use Richard Dawkin's language, "the replicator DNA" is not, therefore, separate from "its vehicle" the living organism.  And that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory.

I will break in here to say that I don't understand one of those sentences but I won't insert what I think he probably meant without being able to look into it more.  What I think is obvious from what he said is that DNA, if it "self-replicated" like a crystal (as is imagined by the central dogma of molecular biology and every claim that built on it) would have an error rate that couldn't produce a viable organism but that DNA as it is really replicated by the cell has those errors of such non-biological reproduction corrected at an amazing rate and at an amazing speed BY THE LIVING CELLS. I will forego the argument that such a process cannot happen without intelligent choice being involved, though I think what follows makes that more obvious.  What I will point out in that regard is that the merely seeming simplicity of such things WAS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF CLAIMS OF ATHEISM THAT RESTED ON THAT NAIVE CONCEPTION OF THE BASIS OF LIFE, foremost in the so-simple-as-to-be-cartoonish presentation of first Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism.  And, I will point out, that anyone who thinks they sense that such a thing would require intelligence to carry out that operation, as it really is, has every right to think that.  Especially with what Denis Noble and his colleagues discovered, as he continued with.

Not only does the living cell perform this miracle, if you want to call it that, of the preservation of its DNA sequence, it can choose to regulate the error correcting process.  If the error [correction rate] is down-regulated the result could be many, many new DNA sequences from which the living organism can choose.  It can even choose which part of the genome to protect and which to change.

This was shown many, many years ago by a very famous Woman geneticist, Barbara McClintock.  Her experiments in the 1950s on the plant maize showed that this ability to change a genome when the plant, or the organism is under stress is universal.  Under stress  all organisms can, as it were, spin the wheel of chance in the hope of finding a solution to the problem of survival.  Bacteria can also do it, that was shown by the bio-chemist James Shapiro. In fact, all organisms can do it.  They use this ability to regulate degree of the correction of the genome to generate new sequences when they need to do so.

I call these processes the harnessing of stochasticity, control of stochasticity, control of chance. It is the control of chance enabling organisms to be creative.  The article was published in the journal Interface Focus in 2017 and has consequences in evolutionary biology and in the philosophy of choice in organisms.  A series of articles that I published in the last five years, they can be downloaded from the website as my slide shows.

That gives openness and flexibility to living organisms.  

Because it is dependent on naturally occurring stochasticity, it is very different from the openness and flexibility of solid state computers made of silicone and metal. Because we, the living organisms, are the natural miners of chance this enables us to be so creative in what we do.  Enable us to be creative?  Could that also happen in our nervous systems?  You bet it does!

Again, not only does it destroy the central assumption of Dawkins' theory, it overturns any such theory that depends on the belief in an all-powerful of DNA as a total determinant of physical bodies and of minds.  FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT for the continuation of life in the world and human history, it totally overturns huge parts of the basis of current and often extremely dangerous human culture and law and politics, the product of that double-edged sword, the "public understanding of science."  Much of that saturated in the naive and now overturned lore surrounding a cartoonish, iconic conception of what we imagine "DNA" to be and do.  DNA doesn't replicate itself, it can't even maintain its own integrity, which is accomplished by the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry which are not created out of DNA.  

Remember that such important molecules as the fats that account for so much of so many of the cell's structures and chemistry are not coded for in DNA.  After I started learning such things that were known even quite a lot earlier during my lifetime, I was astounded at how much of the presentation of biology in my high school and university years seemed to entirely ignore such basic facts that all organisms that reproduce sexually inherit an entire egg cell with those structures along with the genetic material in the sperm cell.  What structures the sperm cell also contributes to the new organism, apart from DNA is, as well, worth considering because just about all presentations of such "public understanding of science" entirely ignores those facts.   Selfish-gene theory is only one of many such theories that are or have recently been current in science and in the college-credentialed "public understanding of science."  Including that dangerously believed in by those in the law and sitting as judges and "justices."  Everything from the homicidal "Darwinian economics" that was the pseudo-scientific basis of Covid-19 non-policy during the Trump regime and of the Swedish government to Neo-Nazism as seen in the screeds and scribblings of William L. Pierce are among the earliest adopters of that just as Nazi "race hygine" (eugenics)  and Lebensraum theory was based on earlier iterations of natural selection and similarly naive conceptions of biology.  

The fact that the cell chemistry that is independent of the DNA molecule is necessary to maintain the structural and functional integrity of the molecule does, really, overturn the entire line of neo-Darwinism, which includes the most extreme form that Dawkins and his colleagues have made the conventional view of evolutionary science since the 1970s, including his selfish-gene dogma.  An entire field which has representation in science departments of universities around the world and which has real and very bad consequences in the popular understanding of science, rests on a basic fallacy which science has known about since more decades than Dawkins and his colleagues have been active in public science.  That alone tells you there's something seriously wrong with the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and with the integrity of science.  And why the lag time in changing thinking to keep up with new discoveries is so dangerous.  It's not only that progress in science is measured in the deaths of scientists and professors who refuse to adopt new findings overturning their conception of their science, the retaining by the general public of what they were sold as valid science in their youth and, especially through the mass media but which was overturned has a deeper and potentially more dangerous effect. 

 That PBS and the BBC have sold neo-Darwinism so hard, along with its distortions in the popular understanding of science - and Lord only knows what things like the cable channels and cabloid like internet "documentaries" have done with that - has a really dangerous political effect.  I doubt the high-up Nazis had any more developed an idea of what the university professors were telling them about natural selection than your typical non-specialist high school or college student has about such matters, today. But, as can be seen in the notes of the Wannsee Conference, in which Reinhardt Heydrich gave a natural-selection argument to advocate for murdering every Jew they could, such a "popular understanding of science" can easily be genocidal.  Lord protect us from the Republican-fascist conception of such things are, what the Stephen Millers' conception of science is, or the likes of the Peter Navarro's idea of scientific fact.  If you don't think such as those are capable of recapitulating what came out of the Wannsee Conference with other groups targeted for genocide, you are far less intelligent than you like to think you are.  Watch the movie Der Untergang and listen to what came out of the mouths of Hitler and Goebbels - based, as I have read, on the reports of those who were there in the bunker with him- for an easily accessed example of what can come of a smattering of science among the ignorant with power.   I'd love to know what Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's conception of science was because I think it would explain a lot.

I had originally written this as a far longer piece but I don't want to load even more on the important ideas of Denis Noble than he might welcome so I will post most of that material in a second part to this post.

How Dare You Use Science In Arguing For Religion or something to that effect

IF SCIENTISTS WANT to publish their thinking to the general public the general public has a right to use what is said in their thinking about other things.  Religion is certainly not a part of science, it is a separate entity by the formal rules of science which is supposed to not consider many of the matters that religion deals with.  It's kind of funny to complain about using science to support religious belief as one of the lines of modern atheist attack on religion is the criticism of those within religion NOT basing their conclusions on science.  It would seem that's OK with atheists ONLY WHEN THE EXTRA-SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION IS THE ONE THEY LIKE.  

How can you fault me from doing with science what an equally religious ideology, atheism, does with scientific ideas all the time?  Atheism is no more a legitimate part of science than a belief in God, Jesus, saints, angels, etc.  It is no more capable of supporting that religious idea (anti-religion being no less a religious belief than a belief in religion) than it is a belief in God or gods or any of the other beliefs that might be itemized in a more extensive list.

It's no less legitimate to use the valid findings of science to assert a belief in the intelligent design of life OUTSIDE OF SCIENCE than it is to use valid findings of science to assert a disbelief in an Intelligent Designer.  I haven't used arguments from Michael Behe,  I am sure I'd disagree with him on many things within religion but as long as he's not lying about things, as long as his lines of reasoning from the findings of science are at least as sound as those within conventional science (or more sound, perhaps) what he's doing is intellectually valid.   If it's valid science, I may have my doubts but that would only be a matter of clerical correctness I'm willing to leave to scientists to argue, not of valid intellectual belief just as I choose not to cite him. 

I doubt that Denis Noble would accept all of my conclusions based on what he says, I doubt that James Shapiro or Richard Lewontin or Stephen J. Gould or George Ellis might accept all of my conclusions based on what they say but I know that they probably don't agree with everything an ideological materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism would say about it, either.  Look at how Shaprio and Noble have disagreed with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins within science and I'm not claiming that my extra-scientific conclusions are scientific but I have every right to base them in valid science and to assert them.  

I don't see my use of science in thinking about free thought and free will and egalitarian democracy or, yes, the intelligent design of life by God as being in any way illegitimate.   And the outcome of my use of science in egalitarian democracy is so much less dangerous than what the materialist-atheists have done with science.  Nazism and Communism are both applications of would-be science in politics, their body counts and rates of oppression and enslavement, alone, dwarf that of the Inquisition which would likely have been far less infamous if it had access to legitimate science. Though it had a rate of acquitting the accused that is far higher than under any self-consciously "scientific" regime of the alleged "enlightenment" period.  Or, indeed, the United States "justice" system under a regime of secular liberal democracy.  The United States will probably soon, if it can't be said to, have already surpassed the execution rate of the infamous Spanish Inquisition in its far longer existence in a far shorter time.*  The actual rate of execution under the Spanish Inquisition is far lower than the popular misunderstanding of history imagines that to have been.  And I doubt anyone of any repute in Catholicism would ever express anything but abhorrence for the it, today.  Though you might find a few ultramontanist, integralist nut cases in the billionaire AstroTurf "traditional Catholic" cult or at Harvard Law School who might, most of even that bunch wouldn't.  

*  Just since 1973  1,584 people have been executed in the U.S.  It's estimated  that between three thousand and five thousand people were executed during the Spanish Inquisition, which, by the way, was conducted under the authority of the Spanish monarchy, not the Church. 

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task

CONTINUING ON with Denis Noble's 2022 lecture, The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, he said something which, if true, could generate even more problems for the explanation of how the earliest life, as a cell, could have come about by random chance but it does more to undercut one of the mainstays of the current conception of biological science as popularized by Richard Dawkins and his colleagues.

So when did intelligent life on Earth begin?  Well I suggest it began with membranes.  It's when the first cells emerge with their membranes during the evolutionary process and that is when intelligence became possible in living systems. The intelligence of life, therefore lies in our membranes and the processes they enable, not in our genomes.  Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membranous structures are inherited independently of DNA.   Remember, the decision making processes cannot be in the genome.   

The level of complexity of cellular membranes is certainly a huge problem for any of the simplistic schemes of "earliest life" that are dreamed up by those allegedly doing science about it.  And I really wonder if any simpler conception of such membranes could work for such a model, it's a lot more than an imaginary plastic bag.  Cell membranes don't just contain the contents of a cell.  I wonder if any knowable anatomy of any organism could ever be conceived of without the necessary functions that such structures perform under the close observation of organisms, now.  I don't think that it's possible for scientists to come up with anything that is knowably relevant to a non-cellular earliest organism on any other basis and its origin seems to necessarily get more and more improbable as the complexities of "simple life" are discovered.  

Such ideas as are contained in Noble's last paragraph may seem extremely odd to us but that's not based on any kind of observation and real understanding of what intelligence is or how it could possibly come about by the instilled concept that it would have happend by random chance assemblages of molecules forming what would have to be biologically active structures.  That's especially true of what is probably the uniform conception of biology among all but the very oldest living People who would have studied biology before the structure of DNA was discovered and been so many enormously over-sold as a universal explanation of everything about us.  That short paragraph by among the current authoritative scientists in this field should show how over-sold DNA has been.  "Moreover, there are no genes for the fats, lipids in our bodies.  All the membraneous structures are inherited independently of DNA." That's a heck of a lot of the physical structures and parts of our bodies that had to come from something or things other than our DNA, yet I'll bet that hardly anyone outside of this very specialized branch of one field in science would have ever been introduced to that idea by whatever popularized source of information they believed they got their "public understanding of science" from.  You'd certainly not get it from the major sources of that in the past fifty years, since the invention of Sociobiology and "Evolutionary psychology" especially due to the merely persuasive writing of those like Richard Dawkins who sold a gullible public and, in fact, the academic fields where such would have relevance on the suprmacy of DNA.  It's an irony that the man whose name was, due to a tech billionaire's funding, made synonymous with that "public understanding" may be responsibile for one of the most widely believed distortions in the presentation of science.    

That's especially true if, as Denis Noble asserts, that the intelligence of organisms has its physical component in those parts of our bodies not coded for in DNA.  If that's the case then the entirety of evolutionary psychology with its imagniary basis in DNA is entirely wrong.  In that exercise I did of asking materialist-atheist devotees of scientism and the assertion that our consciousness was a product of our brainsm, an epiphenomeon of physical causation in the molecules in our brains, how any of us could come up with a novel idea in the time we experience that and it becomes active enough to, for example, make us put on the breaks or swerve the steering wheel when we see a car coming close onto us or any of a thousand things that happen to us during any of our waking hours.  "DNA" was one of the atheist gods that was grasped onto as if it explained anything about it, even though it's impossible for DNA to construct a novel structure in our brain to be the physical basis of a novel idea fast enough to account for the near immediate experience of that happening to us.  Another one that was gasped onto was by that most inept of all analogies, to the circuitry of a computer.   That one starts out being inept because computers are models of a human conception of how our minds work to start with so if it seems plausible that it can be a model of how a "brain-only" explanation of how our minds work, it is merely because the dolt making that proposal forgets what it was constructed to do, to start with.   That, interrestingly, becomes relevant to what Denis Noble said about computers later in his talk.  But there's a lot to get through first.


Now, I come to two other major properties of water that are very important in my story.

Another very unusual chemical fact is that the frozen form of water, ice floats.  And that's because water freezes in a very unusual way.  Ice is lighter than liquid water so it floats    on lakes, seas. All other possible solvents do the reverse.  Their frozen forms sink. But since ice floats, large expanses of water, in lakes, seas, remain open to living systems.   They continue to flourish, even beneath the ice.  The ice even acts as a barrier to heat loss because water ice is actually a good insulator.  That's why we think live on Earth survived long periods when the Earth was frozen over like an ice-ball.  Life may, therefore, exist elsewhere in the solar system.  On planets or moons that are completely iced over.  

Now I come to a fourth very important property of water and one that is really relevant to the question of why organisms have free action.  It's Brownian motion.

It was first observed in 1827 by a scientist called Robert Brown, which is why we call it "Brownian motion."   He ground up pollen grains to form even smaller particles, pollen dust if you like. He then sprinkled that fine dust onto the surface of water under a microscope and he saw all the particles were continually jiggling around in a random way and they were hardly ever stationary.  Nearly a century later, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that the movements of the dust particles were due to their continual buffeting by the incessant movement of the water molecules.  So the jiggling of the dust particles was due to the random movements of the water molecules.

Now I want to ask an interesting question. Could silicon or metals in your computer do the same?  because this could explain why liquid is important. You see the atoms in silicon and metal structures may be vibrating but they are not moving around as they do in water based systems.  All the molecules in water based systems, dissolved or suspended in water, all have shown Brownian motion.  And this is a fundamental difference between living organisms and solid state computers.   

Now we come to another important fact, our genetic material, DNA, it cannot be exempt from Brownian motion because its being continually buffeted by water.  The DNA threads must, therefore, also experience that random motion.  They exist in a water based environment, they are threads suspended in the water based environment.  And what happens sometimes is what we call DNA breakage.  

Now, my opponents in evolutionary biology, the neo-Darwinists, they call themselves, they also say, yes, there is chance, there is stochasticity but I don't think they understand it.  Importantly, they will say it's blind chance because during our lifetimes none of those blind chance events   can be used by us or other organisms in any functional way.  As a consequence, they say, there can be no physiological basis for free choice based on molecular level stochasticity.  That's why neo-Darwinists like Jerry Coyne, illustrated here, conclude that free choice is just a magnificent illusion.  He writes, actually, and I'll quote from his book, "The illusion of agency     is so powerful that even strong incompatibilists like myself will always act as if we had choices even though we know we don't.  We have no such choice in the matter," he says. "But we can at least ponder why evolution might have bequeathed,us given us, such a powerful illusion."  

Incidentally, notice the striking contradiction, who is this "we" that can ponder why?  Because from Jerry Coyne's viewpoint why are we even capable of doing that and to choose either to agree or disagree with his statement?   

But I will leave that contradiction to one side because I want to explain why this is such a common idea taken by neo-Darwinists.  Because, even though neo-Darwinism makes blind chance a cornerstone of its case, it denies that applies to DNA replication. On the contrary,   DNA is claimed to be a highly accurate "self-replicator" only occasionally suffering chance variations.  The claim is that it does so by replicating like a crystal.

So, does DNA replicate like a crystal?  Well, that would be possible and, indeed, it happens but that process alone produces many, many errors. Because replicating like a crystal can only occur if the individual components, the nucleotides C, G, A and T, can automatically insert themselves into the correct position in a DNA sequence.  Now, to some extent that does happen, C likes to combine with G, T likes to combine with an A,  This is straight forward chemistry, we can call it "crystal-like" if we wish,  But stochasticity insures that every so often the wrong nucleotide gets inserted.  And we actually know the frequency with which that happens it is one mistake in roughly ten thousand nucleotides.  Now, that may not sound very much.  If you or I wrote an article of ten thousand words it corresponds to just one typing mistake in ten thousand words.  But our genomes are three billion nucleotides long.  The error rate of natural, crystal-like formation would generate hundreds of thousands of errors, no organism would survive that degree of damage to its DNA.

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.

I have a major qualm about the idea that any aspect of our minds are a product of stochastic or chance motions in molecules and particles, though I think the idea,  in the context that Denis Noble uses it, is very useful to refute a different, fixed, modeling of consciousness based on what is imagined as a more or less fixed crystalline structure.  I don't experience my mind to be anything much like Brownian motion, it is too directed by itself to be a product of mere randomness on the level of experience.  But his idea is useful for one thing.  That imaginary model of DNA is certainly invalidated by the more developed and far more complex knowledge of what DNA is and how it actually is part of the biological actions within our cells and within our bodies.  As he points out, if DNA, as it really is, as it really functions in life acted as a crystal, independent of the vast cellular chemistry and structures that use it to carry out life functions, that life would soon end because of the number of errors that would result. Clearly that imaginary life of a DNA molecule is wrong.  But I doubt that the mere fact that the physical system is far more dynamic and far less satisfyingly held in the imagination or told in a few words (no matter how elegantly written or easily persuasive) doesn't tell us much more about how our experience of our minds originates or acts.  He does say some extremely interesting things about that in the next part of his lecture which I hope to transcribe soon.  

I might be able to have some faith in the assertion that our minds use the randomness inside our bodies or take advantage of it, that could give us some clue as to how an incorporeal mind could interact with what we conceive of as the mindless physical structures of our bodies, crudely thought of as "the mind-body problem."   Though I don't think that science could ever demonstrate anything like that because, in that case, one part of the system would escape the limits of physical causation.  

But the issue of freedom of thought, free will, and freedom in general doesn't interest me as anywhere as much as a philosophical brawl as it does what it means in human reality, in societies, in laws, in politics and in using the force of concerted intent to change our lived reality.   Any university based dolt who doesn't realize the catastrophic consequences of convincing People that living beings, People included, are no more than machines needs to have the hard lessons of life from the past century drilled into their thick skulls that have been focused on their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology instead of reality.   Materialism has had the most deadly and genocidal consequences in its relatively elite forms as well as in its deadly vulgar form in Mammonism.

I'd like to tie this into the questions of freedom in human life and how there is freedom which is good and must be allowed and freedom which is anything but good and has to be constrained or, if the human is unwilling to constrain themselves, prevented by isolation or force.  That's the kind of freedom that really has to be addressed by politics and, one hopes, the laws that are adopted and enforced by an egalitarian democracy in which a majority of voters are People of good will possessing sufficient accurate information.  I'm not at all in favor of freedom for People of bad will, in so far as their actions are harmful or dangerous, I don't think that can be left to chance, random or otherwise believing, as the stupidest of those in the "enlightenment" seemed to, that nature would sort it all out for us.  I don't think with more than two centuries of seeing that stupid idea in action that we can depend on it, anymore.  

How Molecular Biology Overturns The Current Materialist-Reductionist Attack On The Possibility Of Free Thought And So Democracy

And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology

AS HAS BEEN COMPLAINED OF by a recent whiner, the question of cell membranes, especially in regard to the necessity of containing the internal structures and biologically active molecules to allow for the processes of life, metabolism, change within a range that permits life to be sustained, the incredible process of the original organism or, if you insist is possible, even more incredibly, original organisms dividing and producing two and then many living organisms has been a recurring feature of my skepticism about the materialist-atheist-scientistic orthodoxy about the origin of life.  

Originally, I intuited that as a major hurdle for any mechanistic, random-chance creation of life on Earth while still holding what was, even then, a rather naive and simplistic view of cellular biology. Despite that naive conception of it, no died in the wool materialist atheist devotee of scientism ever came up with anything like an answer to how such a structure could have formed by mere random-chance assemblage containing exactly the internal chemistry and structures to exploit it to utter perfection the first time that an organism became alive, sustained its life and, most incredibly of all, manipulated the membrane it just happened to be contained in to make a copy of itself.  If that happened by random chance even once in the known universe, it would be so stupendously improbable as to constitute a miracle more incredible than any one described in Scripture.

I doubt that the great biologist Denis Noble would necessarily agree with my use of the science he and his colleagues have done on the issues I use, they certainly have given me a lot more to go on since I started making reference to cell membranes twenty years ago during the new atheist fad of the 00's.  It wasn't long ago that I listened to a lecture he gave in 2022 which relates the biology of cell and organism membranes to the issue I'm so interested in as an ideological egalitarian democrat, free thought, free will, free choice*.  Given the complaint that recently came in I'm going to go over his talk over this week, as I get a chance to transcribe it.  I will point out that he touches on something that I have become more interested in going over, as can be seen in my recent post about Thomas Merton's essay on "Liberty," what we mean when we carelessly talk about "freedom" and "liberty" as if those are abstractions which can be considered good without considering the context in which they are talked about.  He talks about the only kind of freedom that philosophers think is worth having, which might be a good point of departure on an investigation of that from a secular point of view.  I'll have more to say about that after I present my attempt at a transcription of the video.

The Chemistry of Life begins with Water
how it forms the basis for our freedom (freewill) as living organisms by Denis Noble from the University of Oxford given to the 22nd Congress of the Iranian Society of Biology

Denis Noble is one of those pioneering the deeper, far more science-based, far less ideologically driven ideas about evolution right now, what I think of as the long overdue overturning of the dominant ideology of biology and its parasites, mid 20th century Neo-Darwinism.  It needs to be said at the start that I'm far more skeptical than he is in regard to natural selection, which I don't believe exists.  He does, quite firmly, though, refute much of the current form of that that hegenonically controlls the relevant sciences, the mid-20th century Neo-Darwinian synthesis and its further developments in scientific dogmas derived from it by such as Francis Crick.  I don't see how the dominant conception of that can withstand the discoveries covered by him and such other eminent biologists as James Shaprio.  Their work so often cites the work of Barbara McClintok that I'd put her in the same group of those unafraid to find things that undermine the dominant ideology of their science, something which still rules the field and, certainly, does the largely illusory "popular understanding of science."  Even the conventional scientists opposed to these new discoveries and their meanings and implications need to be questioned on their professional understanding of science.  After a brief introduction, Denis Noble began:
 
I'm going to talk about how the chemistry of life, biology, begins with water and how it also forms the basis for our freedom, that is our freewill, as living organisms.

Now, first of all, the question of why that question, the question of do we have freedom, we organisms, living organisms have freedom, why is that so controversial.  And I think that is because it may seem obvious that since organisms are made of and evolved from chemical compounds and processes, they cannot escape being chemically determined. Because we don't expect purely chemical processes to be capable of making responsible decisions.  That's one of the reasons why we're cautious about driver-less cars on our streets. Because the ethical and legal problems don't depend on the science but on attributing legal responsibility whether to owners of cars or to the car makers.  In both cases though, the ultimate responsibility is attributable to humans, organisms, not to the machine.

Now, what I'm going to do is to show you that precisely because of the kind of chemistry that enables organisms to exist, they cannot be determinate machines.  And that conclusion is the exact opposite to the central dogma of molecular biology formulated by Francis Crick in 1956.  That dogma says we are formed by our genes, its the idea of a very famous book, "The Selfish Gene."  That from the genome alone we could predict the organism.  I will show that it's just the other way around.  Organisms, themselves, control their genomes. I showed this in my book, "Dance to the Tune of Life,"  published just six years ago, and I'm going to explain why.  

What is our chemistry?  What exactly are we made of?  Well, life is largely made of the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.   And they're combined in an unimaginably large number of possible ways. DNAs RNAs and proteins are all long polymers made of those elements.  Threads of sequences of either nucleotides or amino acids. Human DNA, yours and mine, is about three billion such nucleotides in length.  And genomes are unique to each individual because there wouldn't be enough stuff in the whole universe for every possible sequence of three billion genomes to exist.  The mathematics of that can be found in my little book "The Music of Life" published in 2006.  There could actually be ten to the seventy thousand combination of different interactions from our genes but there are only about ten to the eighty atoms in the whole visible universe.  Each of us, therefore, is unique and a highly improbable, specific organism with its own unique DNA.

Now, each of us might be just a highly unique and improbable machine, but we might still be machines determined by our genes and proteins.  

So why am I arguing that can't be the case.  Well, it comes back to water, again. Because water is a very unusual form of chemical. First of all, the range over which it is liquid.  Those two elements, hydrogen and oxygen, combined to make the smallest and the great majority of the molecules in our body, that is water molecules.  They depend on the fact that water is liquid in a range of temperature way above the maximum temperatures at which both of its atoms could be liquid. Oxygen vaporizes at minus 90 centigrade, hydrogen at minus 253 centigrade. So the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen is responsible for an enormous increase in the temperature of condensation, that's why water is liquid at the kind of temperature at which life can occur.

The second reason why it's a very unusual chemical is it's a good solvent for most chemical compounds. It's flexible and nearly all the molecules can be dissolved in it.  But the ones that can't are very important to my talk, they are the fats. Fats cannot be dissolved in water.  They can exist in a water suspension. Every good cook knows how to make a sauce by whisking up an oil-water suspension, which we call a sauce. But the fats in us are not like suspensions, they're more like soap bubbles than fat globules and those bubbles form the vast structures of membranes in our cells, tissues and organs. And those membranes are where nearly all the control processes in our bodies are located. Those proteins in our lipid membranes are important.

So the book of life, the genome?  How did the genome come to be described as the book of life creating us body and mind?  as Richard Dawkins says in his Selfish Gene. If that were so the conditional logic of life would have to be found in the genome, but if, as a computer programmer, like me for example, you look for where all of those conditional logic statement are, the if-then-else control routines, if you look for where those are in a genome you will not find them in the genome.  There are switches in genomes, places where genes are switched on or off, but those switches are controlled by other physiological processes. So there is no book of life in the genome.   

So, where are life's control routines? In those fatty membranes and their protein channels.  Those are our conditional on-off switches.  Those are the processes that are sensitive to electrical-chemical processes in the world around us and within us. And without those membrane processes there could not be choice between various behavioral options.  Choice is an essential element in any theory of variable free action.  Also interestingly, all our nerve cells have these controllable on-off switches. So do all the other cells in our bodies.      

So when did intelligent life on Earth begin?  Well I suggest it began with membranes. . .  

I'll continue on from there in the next of these posts.  I will say that as a scientist, Denis Noble presents the possibility of freedom, free will, in terms of the molecular chemistry of bodies.  Considering the denial of the possibility of free thought, free will, of free action is based in the molecular chemistry of our bodies, that refutation is a necessary step, though I think minds are not, actually, governed by the same rules  as molecules are governed by, though that can never be demonstrated by science because such an entity cannot be fit into the rules and methods and object of science since it would have to escape the limits of material existence.  I think minds use bodies but minds are not the products of bodies.

I will say that what's coming is bound to be controversial because I will link the conventional denial of free thought, free will and free action, the ideology of material determinism to political oppression, scientific racism, scientific sexism and everything up to and including totalitarian governments.  I think such a link is the unadmitted to consequence of the dominant ideology of academia and secular culture, materialism and scientism.  Just as I am confident scientific racism and eugenics is inevitable if those retain a belief in natural selection, I think it is inevitable that materialism, atheism and scientism will lead to oppressive government in a de-moralized society.  I also think it's why a college-student-faculty based "left" is bound to be counterproductive because that ideology is so embedded, so deeply in that cultural milieu.  I don't know if Denis Noble would agree with me but I think his thinking is an essential line in protecting egalitarian democracy from its cultured enemies, some of whom believe they're anti-fascists when their ideology leads right back to it.

There Can Be No Right To Do What Is Wrong But Our Liberal Democracy Says There Is

THE ASSERTION THAT there was a "right to lie" which I noticed was being talked about by even liberal lawyers late last year has been a key that I believe unlocks one of the origins of what has put democracy in such danger.  In the case of the form of so-called democracy that most people fret about when they bemoan the collapse of democracy in the past decade or so, it is the inferior "liberal democracy" which has such nonsense as a "right to lie" embedded in it.  Such a "democracy" in which there are all kinds of misnamed privileges, for certain people, mostly those with money, well-off families, resources and, so, under such "liberal democracy," power to do bad things are called "rights" corruption accumulates, as under our so-called democracy and, when those surpass a limit under which civil government might prevail over corruption, we get a Trump or a government such as has had control of Britain for the past few decades or which has had control of the Israeli government for, now, most of that state's existence.  Various, so-called "liberal democracies" have various timelines of such corruption but I believe all of them have inherent corruptions that will always decay their institutions, laws and societies.

In each case the problem lies in legal and constitutional orders which, likely on purpose, confuse meanings so as to make evils into ersatz virtues, a right to speak which doesn't state that such a right doesn't include a right to lie and slander, to con and cheat is the first one.  The virtue that comes from being able to say whatever you want to say is when what is said is true.  The first time I ever got into this someone brought up the hypothetical of lying to Nazis about hidden Jews in which things are so degraded by lies that it turns lying to Nazis into a virtue.  But it was lies freely by Nazis and their allies that brought things to that state.  The fact is that that hypothetical doesn't do what those who want to protect "a right to lie" wants it to because it was those lies freely told that put the Jews in danger to start with, it only serves to prove the danger of allowing such lies.  Our First Amendment is stupidly written to not make that distinction a part of our laws, no doubt such protected lies under "free speech" served the purposes of our indigenous fascists well, the white supremacists when they lied about Native Americans and Black People.  It served the allied branch of that in 19th century WASP "nativism" when they lied about other minority groups, it served their later developed form, the eugenicists when they lied about Jews and other would-be immigrants fleeing Nazism and it served those who heard the lies of Lou Dobbs regarding Latinos, something that did so much to bring us to Trumpian fascist ascendancy and the danger we face right now.

Yet our First Amendment, set in stone by the First Congress under the reluctant fatherhood of James Madison, and the idiotic idolatry of it prevents any kind of remedy to make such lies even punishable by civil law.  Republican-fascists, overt white supremacists AND THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ESTABLISHMENT OFTEN STUPIDLY DEPUTED TO BE "LIBERAL" really hate hate-speech laws and fascists on courts will prevent any disruption of the tsunami of hate speech which has swept over the country in the freest of free media in history.  


But the inadequacies of the First Amendment don't stop there.  A right to assemble doesn't include a right to form a lynch mob or an insurrection against the winner of the presidential election.  A right to freedom of religious belief and, worst of all, for the "freedom of the press" that assigns "rights" to corporate entities which cannot have rights because those only inhere to living beings.  In the case of the United States with its horrifically badly written Bill or Rights, the Second Amendment only being the most obvious of those dangerous and badly written abbreviations, those have given corrupt and merely short-sighted Supreme Courts to bend the meaning of the Constitution into weapons to use against rights and freedoms.

One of the worst things about the United States Constitution is that it does not specifically define rights as being held equally by all People living in the country and require that Courts apply the laws on an equal basis.  Under the lie of "equal justice under law" those with the most money to hire corrupt lawyers will always have a disadvantage under the rules constructed by courts.  Unless that inequality is leveled out of practice, the rich and powerful will always get away with crimes such as Trump still does.  Judges and "justices" are not only in the habit of deferring to the rich, the white, the male, the powerful, etc. their culture considers that a virtue in most cases.  All of this was rather obviously done on purpose because such People as Native Americans, Black People held in slavery, Women, white men without property were intended by the framers of the Constitution to be excluded from what would have been real equality.  The history of the United States, everything from the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800, the "Jackson revolution" (which served to empower white men to the exclusion of others), the great abolitionist movement, the movement for Women's suffrage, the struggle for the rights of workers, various other movements demanding equality and fairness for other minority groups and those held in wage and debt slavery is a history of struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER AS THAT WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED.   That is why today's Republican-fascists on the Corrupt Court, in lower courts, in congresses and legislatures, holding executive positions on the federal and state levels are so hot for the "originalist" or "textualist" assertions about that document, because it is a dangerously anti-egalitarian thing as it was originally written.  One of the things that has become obvious during the corruptions of the Rehnquist and, even more so, the Roberts Court is that as long as that thing has the same language in it as it does now, the thing is a danger to whatever progress all those groups listed above and anyone else seeking equality and fairness have bought with their struggle, bloodshed and lives.  

The "originalist-testualist" reading of the Constitution has been an ongoing insurrection conducted by the well manicured, black-robed product of elite law schools for the past several decades.  The insurectionary act of the Rehnquist Court in Bush v Gore led directly to the Court today which has enabled Republican-fascist vote suppression and gerrymandering and rigging in order to overturn those rights previously gained and to thwart every future attempt to turn our corrupt system into a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy.  

I strongly suspect that any democracy will only be one AND REMAIN ONE for the extent to which real equality WITHOUT PRIVILEGES FOR THE RICH, THE WHITE, THE MALE, THE STRAIGHT, ETC. and their families is the real law of the land.  Those descriptions will need to be amended for the particular circumstances in other places and countries.

One of the problems for achieving real democracy, egalitarian democracy is that one thing embedded into our and most modern Constitutions is incompatible with egalitarian democracy, the amorality of modern legalese and academic babblage.  REAL DEMOCRACY IS A PRODUCT OF MORALITY OF A SPECIFIC KIND.*  It is a product of fulfilled responsibilities of individuals and groups of individuals to other people, to other living beings, to the environment.  Any "liberty" any freedom that is exercised under a democracy has to be limited by the rights of others, at all times.  While those items of moral action may be inconveniently large to fit into a constitution, that's the truth of the matter.  If the slave-holding framers had been serious in their claims of what they were constructing, they'd have had to give up holding People in slavery.  The land speculator-genocidalists among them would have had to give up murdering, expelling and stealing the land of Native Americans.  Those who made money off of the labor of others would have had to treat their workers not only "fairly" but well, cutting into their profits.  Men would have had to treat Women as equals.   Education would have had to be made universal and of equal quality, etc.  

That short essay "What Is Liberty" from Thomas Merton posted here the other day begins rather starkly by setting "the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good."

He said, "To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom."  

Merton was concentrating on what freedom and liberty meant to an individual who might choose good or evil, but there is one thing that is certain, someone privileged and permitted to choose evil will seriously damage, not only the liberty or freedom of others, but considerably more than that.  There is no such a thing as a permitted choice to do evil which does not injure or destroy others.  Yet our legal system under the Constitution lets those with money, many lawyers, and privileges do that every single day.  Donald Trump's history of cheating and stealing, conning and duping, even before he started into politics is a history of courts and judges and "justices" allowing him to do that and his fully licensed lawyers held it to be their job to make sure that he not only got away with it, they instructed him in the ways to manipulate the courts into doing what he wanted to do, to cheat, steal, etc.  It's no wonder that he said what he did on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he had every reason to believe he could get away with sexual assault because the got away with everything.   And it wasn't only the legal profession and the courts who let him get away with it, the "free press" was in on that act too, enhancing his con game thousands of times more than the best door-to-door or street corner con man ever could have.  The free press in the wake of his disastrous regime AND HIS INSURRECTION AND ELECTION STEALING ATTEMPT IS HELPING HIM EVERY WAY INTO GETTING ANOTHER CHANCE TO DO IT AGAIN.

The United States Constitution, the most worshiped and idolized part of it, the Bill of Rights has failed because it has been the vehicle for doing far worse than the words in it specify through Supreme Court rulings and other rulings and the legal and cultural code and lore and culture surrounding it and the results are that not only is liberal democracy in (entirely predicable) trouble, but the very claims of what they were doing when they framed the document is being overturned.  This is not a "more perfect union" it does not produce any of the "blessings" that they claimed their Constitutional order would produce, in the fullness of time it produced the Confederacy, the Civil War, the Jim Crow period of terror enforced de facto slavery, it produced the bodily subjugation of Women, it produced a Supreme Court that stole an election for a member of the party of a simple majority of its members* in 2000 and was packed with lawyers who worked on that election stealing scheme,  it produced Donald Trump.  Remember that the next time you hear someone talking about how the founders or framers would be appalled if they knew that the country would ever get a president like Donald Trump.  One wonders the extent to which, if they could have foreseen that, what items of that privilege embedded into the Constitution they'd have given up to prevent that.

I think it's well past time for us to care about, never mind speculate as to what those long, long, long dead men would have thought about any of it.  They're dead, the dead don't have rights here and now, the living do.  We have to make a choice to change things if there's to be anything like even a "liberal democracy" in the future.  I'd be all in favor of making that attempt to come up with a constitution that takes into account the entire range of experience in the centuries of life under that thing, that is I'd be in favor of it if the results were an egalitarian democracy.  One of the great lessons of this particular hour is that mere liberal democracy doesn't cut it, it's not safe, it's too liable to ratfucking and undermining and sabotaging and insurrection BECAUSE IT IS NOT BASED IN THE BASIC MORALITY THAT IS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF EQUALITY.   It is not based in moral obligations as a condition to the exercising of liberty, the possession of freedom.  Liberty to do what?  Freedom to do what?  Those can't exist as free-floating abstractions like Euclidean figures that can be moved anywhere, they are embedded in real life and pretending they aren't is one of the main stupidities in our law and our legal system.  

*  That the five Republicans who were in the majority in Bush v Gore put the son of a powerful, rich, aristocratic white family into the presidency which his father had held, on the basis of political ratfucking of the Florida election under Jeb Bush, overturning the decision of the Florida Supreme Court to count all of the ballots cast was the successful Republican-fascist insurrection against the Constitution.  And the "free press" went along with it.  That the Trump insurrection twenty years later happened is directly a result of what had been building in Republican politics and actions and Supreme Court rulings for years.   I have absolutely no doubt that the Republicans on that Court, in their gun rulings, had just such a possibility of a Republican-fascist insurrection if not a civil war, this time the white supremacists winning it, in mind.  With the talk by Republican-fascist politicians of "Second Amendment remedies" for them losing elections is them just saying the quiet part out loud.   The oligarchs who met at Trump's golf bordello a while back shows the big money is all in for overt fascism in the United States.  Don't expect the courts and the lawyers to save us from it, they'll be all in, too.

* While I think the lauded and fabled Athenian "democracy" was the original inadequate and bad kind of oligarchic "democracy,"  I think the attack on religious symbols that was the first stage of the putsch of the aristocrats against it may be related to the fact that morality is the foundation of any real democracy.  You can't get the ideas and thoughts and feelings necessary for democracy from abstract rationality or math or science, it is certainly not something that is found in any notions of biological science as that stands now - Darwinism is, as Haeckel claimed with Darwin's assent, aristocratic, not democratic.  Clearly not even all Christianity will maintain the ideas of equality and charity and justice to maintain democracy as can be seen in the popularity of fascism among the "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" as well as indifferent and nominal "Christians" not under those.  Such "Christianity" has no use for the Gospel and only for some of the most dubious parts of The Law.  Thus you get "Christian nationalists" who, copying those in Germany who wanted Christianity to be compatible with Nazism, reject Jesus, Paul, etc. as they are in Scripture.  I am fully convinced that modern democracy, certainly in its egalitarian aspirations, is directly attributable to the Jewish-Christian Law and Gospel.  Certainly in the Americas and Europe that's the case.  Though I think it's possible to derive them from other religious traditions, that hasn't been the case in any instance I've seen.