I want to know why I've never heard anyone but me call him Ronnie Go-Go Boots DeSantis.
Update: Not funny? The pictures of him in white go-go boots is funnier than anything John Waters put Divine in because it's a real politician making himself look extremely funny.
I don't guess you found Trump in tennis shorts to be especially funny, either.
MY FAMILY affairs are at a critical point right now so this is being typed hastily and with transcription done on the fly. The transcription is taken from the masterful lecture of James Shaprio posted here recently, What DNA Teaches About Evolution, given as the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture 2012-13. I would love to transcribe the whole thing and go over it, it is one of the best lectures on these topics I've ever listened to, finding more honesty and nuance than most lecturers present.
In the unusually well structured lecture, after a short exposition about the two formerly known types of cells, the eukaryotic cells, cells with a well-defined nucleolus within a membrane, such as our bodies and amoebas are made of and prokaryotic cells without a well defined nucleus and that there is also the archaea cell type discovered about half a century ago. Dr. James Shapiro said:
Carl (Woese) set out to examine relationships (among cells) by looking at the ribosomal RNA. And when he did he discovered, at the end of the 1970s, less than forty years ago, was that there are not two kinds of cells, there are actually three kinds of cells. They found that bacteria which produce methane and live in certain extreme environments have ribosomes that are as different from those of (prokaryotic) bacteria and eukaryotes as bacteria and eukaryotes are from each other. So less than forty years ago we found out that our view of life was inadequate and there are actually three kinds of cells that make up life. And that discovery has a lot of very important implications. Among them is the implication that we really don't know what the early history of life was like. There might have been dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of different kinds of cells which went extinct before they could leave any record that we can discern in fossils and in rocks today. And we just don't know how many types of cells there were and whether there was one single type of cell at the very beginning, which is what many people believe, or, in fact, there were multiple cell types.
But this was a very important discovery and this put the study of relationships between organisms on a very firm molecular, empirical basis and it was hard to argue with this and identify organisms by extracting their RNA and looking at them. People use this today to go out and do what is called "meta-genomics," that is you just take a sample from the environment, this has been done in the oceans, in soils, on the human body, in different places on the human body, in our intestines, recently in the upper atmosphere and just take all of the DNA and ask what kinds of ribosomal DNAs are there. And in this way we can describe the organisms that are present even though they haven't been cultured in a particular environment. And we've learned a lot about that, a lot that is relevant to our own health because we've learned a lot about the microorganisms that live with us and affect our health. But one of the things we've learned that's very important and very humbling is that we've cultured in the laboratory about one percent of all the organisms that are present in nature. So, most of life is there, we can detect it but it's relatively unknown to us and we've got to do a lot of work to learn more about it.
I will point out to you what he says about very early life on Earth not being known to us BECAUSE THERE IS NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE ON WHICH TO BASE THAT KNOWLEDGE. He didn't say it but if there was one kind of cell near the beginning of life as might be reasonable to surmise, it could have been of such a different type that we could never know what it was like. As our ancient mammal and pre-mammal ancestors from much more recent epochs, so many of which are extinct as a species and of which we have no trace, so may that cell type. If there was one original organism from which all life now is evolved, that evolution would have included into those different cell types. All current cells which these types are known from are almost certainly a product of an evolution far longer and far less in evidence. Modern single and multi-cellular animals are as evolved as we are, the relationship of their physiology to the earliest life on Earth is unknowable.
Considering that unknowable early life would have to be what was the basis of all later life which is available to us to study in fossils - though no where near even a hundredth of one-percent of the total of life before the rise of modern biology is actually known to us. If not even one-percent of life on Earth now, when it is available for study, is known to science today, then that would be true for the entire period of life on Earth going back more than three billion years ago, so what is not known as opposed to what is known is an enormous though unknowable multiple of what is known today. The farther back you go, the less fossil and other evidence is likely to have survived, very possibly that's true also of the resolvable genetic information these scientists can interpret to tell us what we can't see directly.
The idea that there is possibly even a general understanding of the evolution of life on Earth in hand is as absurd as the rantings of that wacky online flat-Earther, the parodying of whom I posted last week. Wrong as she is, though, at least she is talking out of her own limited, uninformed and badly reasoned observation. Which is evidence of a sort. Though you can certainly pretend evidence of the nature of early life is in hand and teach science at any modern university, today, the fact is it isn't. Anyone who believes that natural selection is the sole mechanism of the evolution of species or even an important one does that without admitting that's what they're doing. As James Shapiro also said, "It's not reducible to simple formulas. There is no two-word summary for the processes that go on in evolution. We can't use just a phrase and say we've explained such an immense and important set of events that have occurred over such a long period of time." I'm sure he knew that the most well known of those possible two-word phrases, "natural selection" would have come to many minds, though "genetic-drift," "Lamarckian evolution" "Mendelian genetics" or other such explanations of evolution would certainly have to be included in insufficient explanatory ideas.
I hope someday to get around to transcribing the subsequent parts of his lecture, especially the next section about the work of those like Lynn Margulis who figured out that eukaryotic cells are evolved from symbiotic combinations of previous independent cell types, one of the most important refutations (as I prefer to think of it) or modifications of the old neo-Darwinian synthesis. The complexities of that certainly don't fit very well in to that just-so tale as I learned it in biology classes in high school and in college.
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I can't not talk about that without going through one of the questions and the brilliant answer given to a typical materialist ideological qualm about consciousness where only automatic, deterministic chemistry is supposed to operate. I will note, first that during just that section a drastic change in the sound quality of the video happened which makes coming up with a near verbatim transcript impossible with my equipment. And I'll also point out that James Shaprio's masterful management of including both hard science and far more philosophical handling of the consequences of our own cognitive equipment and language as it must mitigate what we find out and how we find that out which is certainly not good news for the old-fashioned automatic materialist causative ideology which is dominant in science and the general culture of 20th century style modernism. I think James Shapiro must be one of the most brilliant and honest scientists I've ever encountered.
Questioner: About halfway through your lecture, where the use of the term "cells know"?
James Shapiro: Well, I was quoting Barbara McClintock but. . .
Questioner: Ok, but just the term, you know, I guess I have trouble with the idea of a cell being so self-directed. I mean, fundamentally, it's all bio-chemistry. That they would know in a cognitive sort of way, because that's kind of like I understand it.
James Shapiro: Well, "cognitive" is the word I like to use and cells are always sensing what's going on inside of them and outside of them and responding to that sensory information and they do it pretty well. I mean cell division is a pretty complicated process, more complex than any human manufacturing enterprise. Millions, hundreds of millions, billions of events have to be coordinated sometimes very quickly. E coli replicates DNA two thousand base-pairs a second and makes less than one in a billion mistakes because it has sequential proof-reading mechanisms which are based on monitoring the DNA and picking up those errors and directing them. So this is a form of cognitive behavior and I know we're taught not to anthropomorphize, although, I do it all the time, it's the only way I can understand what my bacteria are experiencing.
I will break in here to point out a post I once did in response to reading a casual statement by the geneticist Richard Lewontin about the experience of bacteria, in which he asserted that for a bacteria Brownian motions were far more relevant and for their experience gravity is non-existent, which makes sense but my question was how can we know what bacteria experience? Though even as sophisticated a materialist as Lewontin had to anthropomorphize a bacterium so as to come up with an understanding of it, which, in fact, any scientist of any kind has to do when trying to explain any animal's behavior because they are the only ones who could explain anything about their experience, and they don't. Even if they could explain it, for us to understand it they would have to bridge the chasm from their scale of experience to ours for us to understand them. Even with the self-reporting of other humans in a language we share with them, you have no possible way to check to see if they're accurate about their own experience or if they are misrepresenting it in some way.
It is one of the biggest lies of materialist-scientism that that kind of interpretation of nature as if it is conscious doesn't lie at the very base or at least in the background of everything scientists discover and report. It is impossible for us to filter how we think out of our thinking apart from some very crude, very general, very unevenly and unreliably applied rules of thumb to get rid of only some of the most obvious of sources of distorting bias. It is, from a small to complete extent the way we comprehend even the most inanimate of objects. I think Shapiro's admission that he does that about even the enormously complex organisms that bacteria are is shockingly honest. It also goes pretty close to the whole way to answer why such ideological scientists as Jerry Coyne and his gang go totally nuts over the science he articulates. It is a violation of another of those ways that humans think, out of our ideological preferences. Admitting that you inevitably think the way you do is denied by that ideology.
And I think what McClintock is trying to tell us is we have to realize both the cell is a sensory, a sentient entity and it's using that sentience for its own needs and requirements and functions. And sometimes that involves changing its genetics, changing its DNA.
Breaking in again I'll point out that given the enormous survival and successful reproductive power given to perception, understanding and acting in accord with those which is an intrinsic part of Darwinism, which are taken as basic to the conception of natural selection, it's remarkable how that claim, especially among such Darwinian fundamentalists as Coyne, Dawkins, and especially all true believers in "smart genes" it's astonishing how they are the first to claim that all of life other than human beings and maybe a few other "highly evolved" multicellular creatures, probably by a huge percent the largest number of species that have ever existed, are unconscious.
Given the claim for the Darwinian efficacity of not only consciousness but also the necessity of "superior" intelligence in human terms in escaping being selected out of the future by nature, you have to wonder how they explain the persistence of organisms, single cell as well as multicellular ones, if they aren't not only conscious but highly cognitive. How do they explain that for not only the large majority of the history of life on Earth that signal aspect of Darwinian selection was absent from the entire epoch of life on Earth, in fact, the extreme fundamentalists of that faith hold that it would have to be irrelevant to the evolution of almost every species of life that has ever existed on Earth. Yet all of those species survived Darwin's mechanism of culling.
When you consider what James Shapiro said about the working of the cell being more complex than the most complex human manufacturing enterprise, it's a lot harder for a materialist, Darwinian fundamentalist to explain why we shouldn't interpret that as consciousness and cognition. It's certainly more difficult for the school of the most extreme Darwinism such as Daniel Dennett became, he attributed natural selection to aspects of the univere outside of living organisms, who also is an eliminative reductionist denying the reality of consciousness even to human beings. I would like to know from him how something which isn't real could, in the classical exposition of natural selection, then be a factor relevant to the working of natural selection. His Darwinism might find itself in the embarrassing situation of being a Darwinism with no use for Darwin's thinking.
But, there's a whole school of study, one of the pioneers is in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Lee Hartwell who got the Nobel Prize I think about seven or eight years ago for studying control of how the cell cycle progresses and you may know about that. And the cell cycle, the eukaryotic cell cycle involves lots of different things that have to happen and they all have to happen in a coordinated way. And the cell is monitoring how all of those things are happening. The operation of the cell is being monitored, it sends out signals that says "stop, don't go through cell division." That's how we finished our [unintelligible] of DNA.[unintelligible] If a chromosome doesn't line up in the right way cell division cannot occur because a signal is sent out that prevents it. These are checkpoints, so they're based upon sensory, internal sensory information, I'm not talking about metabolic regulation or something that involves external sensing or morphogenesis which involves getting signals from other cells. There is all of this information coming in from other cells and its very common language now to talk about a cell making this decision or that decision. Sometimes cells decide to undergo cell death. And that's conditioned by what cells find in the environment. A tumor necrosis factor. . .
I will leave it to you to try to hear more of the impressive reasoning BASED ON PHYSICAL EVIDENCE and some very impressive science that leads one of the finest biologists of our time to say what he does. His point that "anthropomorphizing" is essential to coming to an understanding of what's going on within and among cells, either independent organisms such as bacteria or cells within multi-cellular organisms, to understand what these scientists see as cognitive and sensory activity within them is certainly as central to that science as the just-so stories that, in fact, ALL OF EVOLUTIONARY LORE IS FOUNDED ON far more directly that than the mathematical analysis of subatomic particles. As I recently pointed out the entire theory of natural selection is based on telling stories about not only single organisms we imagine in the lost past but stories about their parents and children for many, many generations. Only what James Shapiro is narrating is based on exactly what the theory of natural selection will never have, actual close, careful, rigorous direct observation and measurement and analysis of actual organisms and cells which are available.
IF GOVERNOR JANET MILLS of my state follows through and does what she proposes her explanation of her controversial veto of, LD 2004, concerning the status in relation to the Federal Goverment of Native American Tribes in Maine, her veto will be proven to have been made in good faith.
In her statement about her veto she said, "I want to focus on the specific problems and the specific Federal laws the Tribes may not be benefiting from, and work together with them and Maine’s Congressional Delegation, and make those laws apply where we think they make sense,"
The purpose of the bill was, as she put it, "ensuring the Wabanaki Nations can access benefits that are generally available to other Federally recognized Tribes." While I agree with the intention of the legislation and was initially very angry that she vetoed it, if she sincerely tries to do what the bill intended while avoiding the legal tangles she said would come of it as written, that would be to the good of everyone. The outcome of the landmark 1980 settlement with the Tribes in Maine does, in fact, make things somewhat different and more complicated in Maine than it would otherwise be. Though we will have to see how this works out, too.
The comment I heard from another person angry about the veto attributed to her the racism against indigenous people which is shockingly present in much of Maine. But that is contradicted by the other bills she did sign into law last week but which the media has not concentrated on nearly as much:
"I signed into law the historic Mi’kmaq Restoration Act to extend to the Mi’kmaq Nation the same rights and benefits enjoyed by other Wabanaki Nations in Maine. I signed into law the Maine Indian Child Welfare Act to preserve the rights of Indian families during custody and child welfare proceedings involving Indian children. And I signed into law An Act Regarding the Maine Indian Tribal State Commission to improve the functioning of the Commission at the request of the Tribes and legislative leadership."
The electronic media in Maine, including public radio and TV, is mostly controlled by partisan Republicans, so it's not surprising that they would try to discredit her with her constituents, though the Republicans they support would almost certainly never have signed the law she vetoed, either. I doubt under Republicans as they are today any of those laws would have been adopted.
I don't think attributing to her the often crude racism that I heard on the playground in Southern Maine when I was a kid is valid on that basis. The points she made in her explanation of the veto are things that an experienced lawyer like her is would think of. Those wouldn't occur to most non-lawyers, even those in the legislature who supported the bill as it was written. As she explains herself, though, and if she really does want to do what the bill intended while avoiding the problems she anticipates, she will try to pass a bill as soon as possible which will do that.
After suffering through the putrid two terms of the vile and flagrantly racist Paul LePage, the incompetent Jock McKernan, I've had so many instances to be grateful we had her as governor instead of the alternatives, especially during Covid, that I'm willing to see if she does or just tries to do what she committed herself to doing. I am certain that now that she has said that's what she wants to do, that she will carry through, though its success depends on the others working toward that end, as well.
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Thinking about this in the wake of the Roberts Court's recent actions, especially the comment on the flagrant racism that is too common in Maine, remembering how shocked I was to hear not only university students at the University of Maine but, also, white collar professionals, particularly from Northern Maine sounding like the crude little brats I used to hear spouting racism on the playground when I was a kid, it got me thinking about the stereotype of "racist white trash," and how it stigmatizes poor white people as a group while letting off the worst racists who are affluent and who never use racist language, themselves.
Some of those who always have a clean shirt on and who would never use a racial invective are, in fact BY THEIR PROFESSIONAL ACTIONS the most damaging racists there are.
John Roberts and his Supreme Court Colleagues by destroying the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action have done more to harm more Black People, Native Americans, and members of other discriminated against minorities than all of the crude blue collar and near destitute racists I've ever heard in my lifetime combined. And it should never be forgotten that not all of those who did that were Southerners like Roberts. Some of the worst have been from the North East, Mid-West and West, though all of them on the Court had an Ivy League, prep-school education. If they didn't start out as affluent and privileged, they certainly worked or pimped themselves to attain that status. None of them started off as poor or destitute, they got their vicious racism from those with money, probably all or most of them had been to elite schools. Much of the racism most vicious in its impact is as thoroughly genteel as can be.
I think Roberts, Alito, George H W Bush,* . . . certainly should be thought of as "rich white trash" or some other such construction. Rich whites are a smaller group than poor whites and far more accepting of the racists among them so why shouldn't they all suffer that stigma? They've certain escaped the stigma of "white trash" through being considered to be well spoken and educationally credentialed -it is worth wondering why anyone would consider a racist lie delivered in proper English as being "well spoken"** - and affluent and successful in their elite careers, though there are certainly those who have made that THE major focus of their professional lives.
Much of the media who have promoted racism, paving the way for the Roberts Court destruction of the legal progress against racism are as worth thinking of as "rich white trash" because the media, especially the entertainment division of it, is pervaded by racism. Some of it is overt though much of it is somewhat covert. The racist history of The New Republic has been commented on extensively though I would doubt there are many long standing media companies which don't have at least a significant record of racism, as well. The news divisions of all of the networks certainly have questionable practices in their past and many in their present. Though, of course, few can match the record of FOX New. . . no, as proven by their recent massive libel settlement they should forever more be called "FOX Lies," CNN and the past of even the far improved MSNBC. Even PBS and NPR which have featured such genteel ones as William F. Buckley and at least such rich ones as Tucker Carlson, so them too. The cabloids and the current "conservative" media are a throwback to the worst of our media past and they have certainly brought the rest of it along to more and lesser extents. The direction the corporate media can generally be counted on to take only goes down. That some of them, like the rich white trash Republican criminals who put Clarence Thomas on the court, have hired black faces to deliver their racism, that is a long standing practice of white supremacy in America just as male supremacy has often solicited females to reinforce the worst of misogyny to the public.
I think, given the long history of both promoting racism among "poor white trash" by writers, playwrights, screen writers, directors, producers, etc.*** who certainly have promoted it as the way to be for poor whites (all those "redneck" movies which inevitably featured the American swastika, the Confederate flag) and who, then, use that stereotype as a cover for the really effective white racism among the affluent, the powerful, the white collar professionals, owe it to us to really do a deep and long investigation into the John Roberts, Bush family, Ivy League racists.
They certainly have promoted racism to, especially, the white middle class as well. If they hadn't paved the way Trump would never have gotten out of the criminal rackets where he and his father prospered. And by them I would include the owners and producers of the New York Times and other media in the North East who publicized Trump and thereby sold Trumpism to the country. His style was sold to his cult by the media, to start with, just as that of Ronald Reagan - certainly another major figure in the revival of rich white trash racism - they were sold through the media, entertainment and the "news" divisions, too.
* Just off the top of my head, Charles Murray, Marty Perez, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Desantis, . . . pretty much anyone prominent in the Republican Party and in most of the conservative and in most of the "moderate" media. I doubt a real anti-racist could remain there long because they couldn't agree to cover up for their colleagues, and, more so, their bosses. They'd get fired if they didn't quit or leave the party or company in disgust. They probably wouldn't be able to stand working in Hollywood, though so many swallow their mildly held morals for the money there.
** It's worth considering how any kind of well-spoken racism would be considered intellectually or academically respectable and deserving of the bestowal of respectability, such as that given to those credentialed by the grad schools and law schools of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc." Academic racism is pervasive, I know it is at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, etc. though that's only through familiarity with their faculties and what they and their alums and faculties write. The racism in academic guise, the social sciences, etc. is some of the most damaging exactly because it is camouflaged in language that's supposed to mark something as more worthy of belief. Hardly anyone mistakes it for what it is when it's expressed in non-standard grammar and avoids crude words but sell it as scholarship or science and even those tending towards non-racism are suckers for it. I think the way that "academic freedom" functions as a protection for racism is certainly worthy of some academic attention. Such freedoms can cut both ways, the freedom allowed promote racism is certainly cannot morally protected from the informed criticism of it.
Though there are certainly anti-racists who can, somehow, stand working at or going through the Ivies. It has to come as a shock to them as much as it was to me as a student at the University of Southern Maine a half a century ago.
*** It's such a staple of entertainment media that it's used by self-regarded liberal anti-racists in the media who think they can diminish it by ridiculing "white trash." It was intended to be that by those who did "All In The Family" though they never noticed it doesn't work to do that. No more so than the similar show biz insulting stereotyping of "Amos and Andy" changed anyone's behavior. If you want to point out that Amos and Andy were done by white people presenting negative stereotypes, well, those who produced All In The Family considered themselves outsiders of the milieu they ridiculed, too. The constructive use of comedy as a means of social, political and legal reform is one of the most extravagantly proclaimed and fervently believed in myths current among academically credentialed suckers.
When you present that kind of stereotype to even the comparatively privileged poor whites, you give those among them so disposed the permission to repeat what they hear and expand on it even as it provokes their resentment of the mostly wealthier white guys who ridicule them. I don't think there is any great mystery in why the expression of racism in America became MORE regularized and steadily rose in frequency for the more than fifty years after All In The Family aired. It was either entirely ineffective in its intentions or it actually was counterproductive. Media works to peddle anything, especially bad things. Even what is promoted between commercials. Even what is unintended by those who write it. Comedians aren't generally the brightest bulbs, I learned that when I heard the playground comics of my childhood mentioned above.
