Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alan Archibald - Testimony

 Testimony 

We speak of truth. We speak of the whole truth. We speak of nothing but the truth. Where then in the long run does the truth lie? The truth is, the truth lies everywhere. It always lies. It is always unwholesome. It is anything but.

Testimony is a tense two-hander in which a middle-aged couple ruminate on the small and sombre detail of a tragic death in the family in the hope of finding light and life at the end of an endless post-mortem involving a culprit as well as a casualty.

Written by Alan Archbold

Andrew Bennett and Cathy Belton star as Michael and Sandra

Sound Supervision Mark Dwyer and Damian Chennells

Produced by Aidan Mathews

Betty Carter - Geri Allen Stardust / Memories of You

 

I never get tired of this, two great artists interpreting two great songs.

I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees -Instead Of Just Another Darwinism Post

IN THE BOOK recommended by me last month, Living Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson wrote a section about the difference between studying things and studying living beings.  Much of what he writes he attributes to the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel who I have never read - the paperback publishing industry in the United States and Britain were far more apt to push materialist-atheists like Sartre and Camus than religious existentialists so that's the existentialism I was exposed to and which formed my judgement of it.  I can say that if I'd read the kind of ideas Johnson gives in this section my opinion of existentialism, as a whole, would be far more positive than it has been.  

I'm going to give you much if not all of this section with some commentary about it before I give you the material I mentioned in my last post because the difference between an authentic way of learning People (and, I assert, other living beings) and learning things in the way that the sciences and pseudo-so-called-social sciences do makes all the difference in how someone will understand the intersection between Darwinism and eugenics, both "mild" eugenics (there really is no such thing) and genocidal eugenics.  Johnson's proposal for studying, for "learning" People is wiser and more honest than any scientifically based study of them.

Here is where LTJ begins on page 57:

A good place to begin is with the recognition that all learning between people involves a process so complex and opaque as almost to defy analysis.  For humans to learn about things is fairly straightforward, even though we cannot yet claim to understand such cognition in its entirety.  Insofar as the things themselves stand still, however, and insofar as we can devise fair and accurate tests, we can determine - in the case of numbers and forms and ancient languages and all sorts of historical data - that people take things into themselves, as it were, and eject them again pretty much intact, not noticeably affected by having passed through a human brain.  Things that live and move and grow, however, are much trickier, and learning them requires quicker feet.  The more life and movement involved, in fact, the more complex the process of learning.  The more such complexity of life involves interiority and some form of consciousness, the more the gap between how we are learning and what we are learning gets closed, the more critical become the changing positions of observer and observed, and the more flexible and responsive must be the learner.  And when it is a matter of learning from and about another human person, then the process is difficult and delicate, indeed.

It is important to emphasize here that I am not referring to the knowledge of humans claimed by certain proponents of the so-called social sciences, who proceed on the basis of dismissing considerations of freedom and interiorty and treat humans collectively, as though they were only a slightly more disorganized hive of bees.  I am not interested in challenging the validity of knowledge reached by such premises and procedures, but only in pointing out that such knowledge is gained by reducing people to the level of things and is,therefore, of limited value to those who seek to learn other human beings as people - that is, precisely as creatures possessing interiority and freedom.  Although the social sciences tend to treat people as problems to be solved, people are in fact  best learned whey they are viewed as mysteries to be experienced.

The distinction between "problem" and "mystery,"  which I touched on briefly in Chapter 1, came to my attention through the writings of the French Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  He distinguishes between the kind of thinking that is appropriate when people respond to a problem and that which is appropriate to a mystery.  A problem is something that lies outside us and has certain objective character, with enough energy, time and intelligence, we can solve a problem. [I would say we can sometimes solve a problem.] In that solution seeking process, furthermore, it is important not to get personally involved.  Budgets are best dealt with by folks who treat them as financial problems rather than a measure of their personal worth, for example, and broken carburetors are best fixed by mechanics who have no string opinions about the place of internal combustion engines in the cosmos.  In contrast, mysteries enter into those dimensions of human existence in which we are by definition very much involved; situations of heath and sickness, birth and death, alienation and reconciliation, Because our selves are already deeply involved, we cannot detach ourselves from such situations without distorting them.  If we treat grief as a problem to be solved rather than as a mystery to be experienced, then we will relate to grief in unhelpful and possibly destructive ways.  In the ream of mystery, it is not the calculating intelligence of problem solving that is called for, but the meditative intelligence of reflection.  

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If LTJ had not so carefully couched the reliability with which he asserts the possibility of solving problems and the appearing objectivity with which things about numbers, . . . historical facts unaffected by the "human brain" they pass through I might argue those points, though I'll settle for pointing out that he is subtle in discussing their reliability and freedom from coloring by human minds and expressions.  I'm a lot less apt to grant that as a given, maybe having read the physicist A.S.  Eddington on the philosophy of physical science* and the early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum on the fact that what we claim to know is, fundamentally based on beliefs has something to do with that.  But I'll let that go for now.

What he said about the allegedly scientific study of living beings, especially human beings, especially those aspects of interior human experience and that experiences effect on actions by individuals in the world - the actual thing that can be seen by an outside observer is entirely more intellectually honest and responsible than anything I have read by any champion of or claimed practitioner of the scientific nature of any study of human minds or, in fact, from any biological scientist of any kind.  

Including those who I greatly admire and respect.  Richard Lewontin came close to it a number of times such as his essay debunking sexology and opinion surveying and surveys allegedly discovering data about individuals' actions as they report those things but he didn't get close to the kinds of distinctions that Luke Timothy Johnson lays out within what is a theological essay. His essay was based on the absolute fact that all interiority of human minds can only be viewed through the claims People made about that internal experience.  He also pointed out the same thing Johnson did, that without means of testing anything People report about their interior experience, there was no way to verify it or to even test its truthfulness.  

Every single proposed study of human minds, individually in Psychology, collectively in Sociology, Anthropology, with pretty fMRI and other images, Neuro-and Cog Science, and by making up retrospective fiction about them and our forever unviewable and unknowable ancestors, human and otherwise, long-jumping over hundreds of millions of years to assert common-traits  in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology is based on the absolutely known to be false premise that they have means of overcoming the impossibility of objective observation of that interiority, the false claims that they "can devise fair and accurate tests" of their claims and hypotheses or even of what is taken to be their raw data.  There is simply no way to do that without direct, somewhat objective observation of that interior experience and continuing, constantly changing lives and much else that can never be had, no more than the lives of the 99.9999999999. . . percent of living beings over about three and a half billion years of life on Earth can ever be observed.  All proposals to do science about what cannot be observed even indirectly is a fraud and it always has been since the first such claims based on the ideology of materialist monism and its related dishonesty were published.  

This passage from Living Jesus is among the most succinct and profound expositions of the difference between an honest way of learning about People and other living, behaving creatures and the dishonesty about that which pervades modern culture.  Not that Johnson's observations are not modern in the sense that it is part of current instead of ancient culture.  I would say it is an example of the kind of jumping over and out of so-called "enlightenment" materialist-atheist-scientism which is necessary for us to escape that as well as all previous cultural cul-de-sacs.

It was one of those things I discovered when I started reading theology in a serious way twenty nine years ago that what I found, especially in more modern theology, was often far more persuasive and, so, impressive than what I read in secular philosophy or, in fact, any of the alleged sciences that deal with human interiority and which, almost inevitably, deny the reality of human freedom.   And, as I am always at pains to point out, we can at least experience the world as human beings and we can learn what other human beings say about their interior lives, we have no such access to the experience or reporting of other living beings, animals, micro-organisms, etc.  Any claims made about their interior experience or lives is pure lore masquerading as science even as so much of what is claimed about human beings by other human beings, as seen through the methods and lenses of scientific method (much of which in the case of the behavioral sciences is anything but scientific) is not much more reliable.  If Johnson will not fight about that in the context of his essay, I will not leave that without saying.  It is exactly on the kind of "science" that Luke Timothy Johnson describes here that the scientific beliefs of the Nazis rested on, with that, the bases of their genocides and other crimes against humanity.  We know that because that is what they claimed, right up and including the reason given by Reinhardt Hydrich to kill even those Jews who somehow didn't die through the Nazis attempts to enslave them unto death because he thought such Jews would be biologically superior and could restart an even more formidable Jewish population, something he got directly from the theory of natural selection, something which starts with the first publication of On the Origin of Speices and, especially, as was claimed in The Descent of Man.  

I will give you links to the two videos that I was going to post instead of getting into this again in September, from Yad Vashem Holocaust Education 

Roots of Nazi Ideology

and

The Main Principles of Nazi Ideology

While they go very far in coming clean about the fact that the Nazis had every reason to believe that they based their ideology on scientific fact because they got their ideas largely from the claims of scientists.  Mostly from the 19th and early 20th century,  Darwinism. the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that followed on almost immediately as a logical conclusion drawn from the theory of natural selection.  I will fault the two videos for making common errors so as to get out of not having to attribute the Nazis eugenics and genocide to the theory of the person of Charles Darwin.  Those are the:

The common dodge of attributing such eugenics and genocidal ideas to Herbert Spencer's "Social Darwinism,"  encapsulated in his phrase "Survival of the Fittest."  We know to an absolute certainty that such a distinction is false because no less a figure than Charles Darwin, himself, in the fifth edition he wrote of On the Origin of Species says, at length, that not only did he consider "Natural Selection" to be identical to Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest," his co-creator of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace encouraged him to make that clear.

There is the dodge that eugenics was derived from the naive view of genetics held at the time.  We know that to be false, to an absolute certainty by what the inventor of Eugenics, Francis Galton said in Chapter Twenty of his lengthy Memoir of My Life in which he said his inspiration to invent eugenics was his reading of On The Origin of Species, which led him to do research which resulted in two lengthy articles in Macmillan's Magazine and the book Hereditary Genius, which he counted as his first works on eugenics.  And from that same chapter we know that Charles Darwin approved of Hereditary Genius because he wrote Galton, his cousin, with his. his wife (and cousin) Emma and their son George's delighted acceptance of the claims made in the book.*  That was decades before Galton or, in fact, anyone within Darwin's' inner circle knew anything about genetics.  Gregor Mendel had sent his 1866 paper to Darwin who seems to have never read it because nowhere does he acknowledge a knowledge of genetics.  Galton doesn't seem to have known of it as he developed a non-Mendelian theory of heredity of characteristics, interestingly, he was opposed to the Lamarckian ideas of Charles Darwin, he being more in the Weismann school of thought on that. But the invention of eugenics proceeded from the theory of natural selection.

There is the unfortunate slip of attributing Nazism's genocidal eugenics to "the theory of evolution" in the second of the videos instead of the more limited and accurate attribution of it to the theory of natural selection and the eugenics that flowed as naturally from that as  the approval of any elite flattering and championing theory by the members of the aristocracy and those who wish to join that economic class.    There is nothing intrinsically eugenic or genocidal within the theory of evolution, or as I agree with about a man I agree with about little to everything else about,  Jerry Coyne, the fact of evolution.    Eugenics didn't come from previous theories of how evolution was supposed to happen, it was almost an immediately arrived at logical conclusion with the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection, as soon as On the Origin of Species was published.  It was a huge boost to both the Malthusian economics of anticharity,  scientific racism,  other science-supported claims of bigotry and the demotion of human beings to things in exactly the way critisized above by Luke Timothy Johnson.  

The first video also has the virtue of coming up with a distinction I've called for being made for a number of years now, distinguishing between the biological hatred of Jews, antisemitism, and the distinctly different, though still evil practice of Christian antijudaism.  There is all the difference in the world between wanting to murder all Jews and wanting Jews to convert to Christianity and join Christians as being Christians, as, in fact, Jews have since the very start of Christianity, as virtually every named disciple of Jesus in the New Testament were Jews.   It is very likely the entire New Testament is written by Jews who considered themselves to be Jews.   Antisemitism is a biological theory, the exact analogue to scientific racism,  antijudaism is the mistaken idea that the People of the Covenant were to all convert to Christianity and to disappear as a distinct People by assimilation.  The violence and killing and coercion of antijudaism was a sin which most Western Churches have confessed and repented of,  antisemitism has been successfully published as peer-reviewed science both before WWII and which was cited by Nazi literature and as late as the 1990s when Kevin MacDonald and others were doing to little to no objection within evolutionary psychology.  MacDonald was appointed as a professor of science, the editor of professional journals, etc. and I have seen no evidence of science ever issuing the kind of confession and ban on such stuff being published as science even after it was humiliated by having MacDonald's work exposed to the wider world when the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving had him testify in his infamous suit against Deborah Lipstadt.   I have mentioned that the high priest of neo-Darwinism,  Richard Dawkins praised another such antisemtic scientific publication by a champion of MacDonald's antisemitism, John Hartung in his antireligious screed, The God Delusion.  I don't know if Dawkins has edited that out of subsequent editions of that book.

* We can also know for an absolute fact that Darwin supported Galton's and Ernst Haeckel's eugenic claims because of his many repeated endorsements and citations of those in his second major work on natural selection,  The Descent of Man. 

Those absolute facts obtained by reading the very words of people like Darwin and Galton are far more absolutely knowable than any claim made in the science based on natural selection or the derivative claims of eugenicists or in any of the so-called social or behavioral sciences, sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, included.
 

Lilian Saba - La Arenosa

 

Lilián Saba, piano

Colo Belmonte, drums

House Keeping

I'VE BEEN unusually busy this last month getting ready to go back to work after a year of involuntary part-time employment.   I don't expect to ever be able to retire but that's my problem, not yours. 

I have been working on a major post, something I started quite a while ago in response to the usual whining about what I say about Darwinism,  though I'd really rather be talking about the election.  It's almost ready and after that I will leave the topic aside until perhaps next year.  

In short, I'm not dead yet and haven't been told to expect that in the foreseeable future.  

Max Roach - Moon Face Starry Eyed

 

Ray Brant, piano

Bob Boswell, bass 

Max Roach, drums 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Luxembourg Gardens

Luxembourg Gardens 

For the last five years of her short life, Katherine Mansfield struggled to find a cure for her pulmonary tuberculosis. Very ill, and sometimes hallucinatory, she spends her last day in Paris before resolving to stop writing while she finds a cure. A Mansfieldesque play about Katherine Mansfield.

Cast
Hattie Morahan ..... Katherine Mansfield
Clare Corbett ..... Ida
Olivia Ross ..... Waitress
Charlotte East ..... Laura
Luke Nunn ..... Bill
Carl Prekopp ..... Lawrence
Ian Dunnett Jr ..... Gardener
Sue Rivers ..... Grandmother
Eliza Pearce ..... Girl
Orla Pearce ..... Boy

Written by Katie Hims
Sound by Peter Ringrose
Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Katie Hims is one of my favorite writers of drama.  I'd say one of my favorite writers of radio drama but she's one of the best living playwrights, period.   This isn't the usual kind of drama I post but it's excellent even for someone like me who is generally opposed to using real People in literary work.   The description from the BBC kind of implies it's appropriate in her  In case.  And it's Katie Hims.

Brad Mehldau Trio - August Ending - And My Cure For Nostalgic Tendencies And Warning Of Some Recent Bad Experience

 August Ending

 

  Brad Mehldau – piano
  Larry Grenadier – bass
  Jorge Rossy – drums

For some reason Blogger's not letting me post Youtubes directly again.   This is the kind of week I've been having.  I always feel kind of nostalgic about my school years around this time, which is odd because I generally hated school.   I won't tell you how many years it is, sometime early in September, that I performed for the first time in college,  I'm a lot older than my advisor and my piano teachers were then.   

But that's enough of that.  I recently took an old Raspberry Pi Zero I bought five years ago as a back up and stuck an old Raspbian imaged SD card in it and found the Sonic Pi program for composing electronic music.   I hadn't much tried Raspbian though I'm using the newer Raspberry Pi OS in the 400 I recently bought expecting this fifteen year old junker I've been using since shortly after I started blogging is about to conk out, completely. 

I think I'd taken a look at Sonic Pi quite a while back, heard the samples of pop music and figured it wasn't anything I needed to learn.  Was that ever a stupid mistake.  I've been looking into it and can say, without any reservation that this free program, on a micro-SD card about the size of one of my smaller fingernails, on a five dollar computer (it would set you back a whopping ten dollars, these days) can do more than must about all of the stuff that was in the electronic music lab I worked in back then.  No, it can actually do a lot more, a lot more precisely and a lot easier and you'll probably have a better sounding and more interesting recording at the end of it.   

I gave someone the tape of my creations from back then, I doubt he kept them so they're lost to the world - probably just as well.  But if I had the resources available today,  for free, this program,  the MuseScore music printing program, even just the basic level of word processing, not to mention the enormous catalogues of scores available from sites like IMSLP,  and the enormously better access to scholarship than we ever got even with the best of inter-library loans, I'd have made a lot more progress than I did.  Though the world in general would probably have been as indifferent as it proved to be.  Not that I'd give up having done music, I just wish I'd done it in a more wise way.

I hope beginning music students have some small amount of appreciation as to how much more they have to learn from than we did.   

That said, don't make the mistake I did, major in Music Education because you will need a job and NO ONE IS GOING TO WANT TO PAY YOU TO DO MUCH OTHER THAN TEACHING.  One of the reasons for that is I was an out-of-the closet gay man when that was still a major professional liability, especially in teaching.  Another was I had the stupid idea that I wanted to teach on the university level,  before I realized how unhappy most of the college teachers I knew were.  I rented from a couple of them, they weren't Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf bad but they drank way too much.  

I hope music majors now and into the future will have jobs with a decent income, good insurance, dental, especially, and the possibility of some security.   I wish you well, I wish you dental health.  Don't drink, it's more dangerous than you think.  

Be careful of Ibuprofen, it's way more dangerous than you think, too.  It should never have been released for over-the-counter sale. 

Another Answer To A Facist Commentator

Vandiemenlander commented on "I Only Saw One Saturday Night Live Coneheads Skit"
5 hours ago
When you are raised in a broken, violent home,

I wonder how many People of Color or, in fact, people who are Democrats you'd use that as an excuse for, but I don't have to wonder very hard because I've been reading your comments for a number of years now.  You wouldn't.  It strikes me that Vance's upbringing, father left the family, mother decided to send him home to her folks,  raised mostly by his grandparents was held far more against Barack Obama. 

I will not go into whether or not the portrait of his family "JD" (no Democrat who had changed their name multiple times would ever, ever be allowed to live that down, "JD" hasn't gotten any real flack from it) is true or not because I have never seen any verification of it or refutation of the accusations that he misrepresented it.  As is generally the case with middle-class and, especially, upper-class straight, white men he rather unexceptionally landed on his feet.   From what I've seen, his "Hillbilly" book would seem to be what so much memoir is, more of a novel than reliable.

and then actually go to a war zone, (and not just brag about doing it when you really retired early to avoid it) yeah, sometimes you don't ever recover and act, "normal."

My father was wounded in battle during WWII and had a permanent disability.  He grew up hard-scrabble in the lower class suburbs of Philadelphia to parents who never went past 8th grade in a family riddled with alcoholism and he "recovered" and could act, "normal."  But, then, he had empathy for those who weren't as fortunate as he was, detested self-pity in himself,  and he wasn't in the habit of lying about his past to suck up to billionaires like Peter Theil and millionaire criminals like Donald Trump hoping to get an escalator ride to the top.   He never would have written a memoir so as to promote a picture of himself, he'd never have exposed his family, subjecting them to false charges and shame in the way that a Vance or a Clarence Thomas did.

Of course, if he was Dem, and filming himself fucking whores, doing crack, knocking up strippers and abandoning them and the baby...

You'd defend him because that [D] is all that matters.

Give me names and let's see who I've defended with that CV because they were Democrats.  I doubt anyone's been harder on Bill Clinton, that is without lying about what we know he did.  If it's Hunter Biden I'd point out I've said if he were guilty of any crimes and convicted of them, I'd have no problem with him going to prison for it.  So, who is it you're referencing so salaciously?

Yes, I know Hunter, despite Joe's best efforts, isn't running for anything.

"Despite Joe's best efforts?"  When has Joe Biden ever, ever suggested that his son Hunter run for office?  When has he promoted him as a candidate for even appointed positions?  Unlike your man-god, Trump who put his gangster son-in-law and daughter (no Democrat could so creepily and incestuously drooled over his daughter and gotten the nomination of the Democratic Party like Trump did) into actual positions of power.  Not like the Bush would-be dynasty who ratfucked the 2000 election with the help of five out of the seven Republicans on the Supreme Court.  Not like many others I could name.  The Sununu family of N.H. for example. 

But if he were, your defense would be identical. Hell, you were one of the true believers who thought Biden's cognitive decline was a media myth! You probably believe he dropped out of his own accord and without any persuasion.

And I thought Republicans who called Bush II intelligent were naïve.

What about the ones who believe Trump or, for that matter, Vance are smart enough to be president?    Vance ain't exactly a Thomas Jefferson,  or a Barack Obama, generally considered two of the smartest to have ever been president.  Though I'd put Lincoln and Biden a lot higher than they're put in those rankings, they generally get the stupidest ones in the lower positions. 

While intelligence can be useful, it's more important to be good.  I've never known of a good person people would think the world would be better off without, I can name hundreds of smart people who would go on that list.   J. D. Vance is not in any danger of goodness, his self-promoting hypocrisy alone would ensure that. 

I've called-out the current moral situation of the Republican Party in terms of total and complete amorality of the kind that the Republican tech-bros like Thiel, the degenerate anti-democrats of the Heritage Foundation, the Leonard Leo, billionaire financed court capture groups demonstrates so fully.  Trump is, beyond any doubt, the stupidest man to have ever been made president.  Previous contenders such as Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Cal Coolidge, didn't have the generally debilty of those raised on American TV, movies and time-wasting. reality dissolving internet to work with.  Yet you think Trump, beyond doubt among the most criminal of men ever to get the presidency, the only one actually convicted of felonies, should become our dictator, as he has stated he intends to be and which the present day Roberts Court has made a real possibility. 

Your party went from a proto-fascist party under Nixon to an indisputably fascist party under Trump.  That's the truth of it.  It is Nixon harnessing America's indigenous fascism of white supremacy after Johnson got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed that paved the way for Trumpism.   Though there were Republicans who peeled off after Nixons' crimes, as the crimes of the Bushes and the policies of Reagan were made manifest, anyone who didn't peel off before or even after Trump's actual intentions, acts and character were known is, in fact, a fascist.  Including the entire Republican caucus of Congress and the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court.  If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don't win this election, if Democrats don't control the Congress, American democracy is dead.  Even America as an anti-democratic republic is dead.  And you're OK with that. 

Geezer Gossip - This Won't Take A Minute

OK NOW I KNOW you're an old Eschaton regular if you can remember when "Freki" and I used to duke it out regularly.  That was more than twelve years ago!

I had no idea she's persona non grata there anymore,  and you tell me it's over her objections to TransPeople?    I expect I might disagree with her on the issue, figuring People get to define themselves but I'd at least want to know what she actually said.   As I recall one of her good buddies there identified as a shit-eating Aztec goddess.   As for the eejits of Eschaton,  it's essentially a bunch of elderly members of a jr. high clique.  I noted that far more than a dozen years back.  

Now, unless you have something interesting to tell me about something that matters,  you don't need to keep telling me about them.   

Wait?  Is that you "Freki?"  Who else would remember? 

I Only Saw One Saturday Night Live Coneheads Skit

but it's what I thought of when I saw the video of J. D. Vance at the doughnut shop.   If he wasn't so dangerous and so awful I'd almost feel sorry for him, he's clearly not used to human beings.  No wonder he appealed so much to Peter Thiel and Little Donnie.

"Well, it's simply not true" Denis Noble Demolishes The Foundation Of Neo-Darwinism

IF YOU PAID attention to what was in the textbooks and what the teachers taught in biology in high school and college in the past fifty years, and before that, you probably would have learned a lot of things taught as hard scientific facts which turn out to not only be wrong but from very to completely wrong.*  Some of the errors were based on chemistry that was true, in so far as they partially knew it but their conclusions were not only wrong but in many ways, very dangerously wrong.  In one of the talks by James Shapiro I transcribed from the past year, he talked about how the Surgeon-General of the United States in the late 1960s, based on the latest current reigning dogmas concerning the fixed nature of DNA within bacteria, said there was no danger of generating antibiotic immunity in bacteria so there was no danger in, for example, prescribing tetracycline freely,  in reality, putting the usefulness of a very useful antibiotic at risk as bacteria developed resistance to the drug. 

When I heard that I recalled how my doctor during those years did just that, he gave out prescriptions for tetracycline as if they were no more consequential than a box of Good and Plenty you'd buy at the movie theater.  And some of the economic dogmas of market economist idiots (sorry for the tautology) like Milton Friedman seemed to be feeding off of the same then seemingly good but, actually, bad science.  so he advocated overturning huge parts of the regulation of drugs and controlling what got released to the public.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of that fed into the contemporary judicial idiocy that led the increasingly Republican dominated Supreme Court into the disastrous decision to allow direct marketing to potential patients by the drug industry, something which the idiot civil liberties industry figures such as from the ACLU also had a hand in.  If I had the time I'd go back to look at the various amici briefs submitted to the court to see if the dead hand of that wrong science might be visible in the claims made.  

If you paid close attention to more than the surface claims made in biology classes in high school and then kept up with what actual experimental and observational evidence showed in the past sixty years, you'd realize how shocking the most recent science dealing with the central ideology of biology and the alleged sciences and social sciences that parasitize it, still, really is.  How much of what included Neo-Darwinism as its basic ideological assumption has to fall with it.   That's something that even a secular reading of current science forces you to conclude, how much of what my and subsequent generations were taught as hard science - the entirety of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, among the most publicly influential** - is just plain wrong and its conclusions a misrepresentation of reality.  I will get to some of the other readings possible from it after I give you the next section of the talk Denis Noble gave.

Now I want to come to some proofs that 20th century gene-centric biology - the idea that genes are the blue-print for life, that they, alone can develop into us - is necessarily wrong.  And there are four major dogmas.

First is the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, I'll explain that in just a moment.  The second is a dogma called The Weismann Barrier, again, I'll explain that in a moment. The third dogma is that DNA can replicate itself "just like a crystal." And the fourth dogma is that DNA is separate from its vehicle, that is the cell that carries it and I'll just go through these very simply.  

The central dogma of molecular biology is, in fact, a very simple chemical fact, that from DNA we make another kind of nucleotide called RNA and that enables our bodies to make proteins.  Proteins are the real driver of activity in living organisms.  Now, that's a simple chemical fact, DNA forms RNA that forms proteins. But that simple chemical fact does not prevent the organism editing and changing its genes.  What the standard biologists will tell you is, well, it does prevent that because you can't go backwards, you can't go from proteins to make DNA.  The point is that you don't need to, the body knows how to control its genes without that being the case.  So, first point, the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology does not prevent organisms changing their DNA when they need to.

The second dogma, the second foundation stone of modern evolutionary biology is the Weismann barrier, this is the idea, introduced over a hundred forty years ago by a geneticist called August Weismann, it's the idea that the egg cells and sperm cells in the reproductive organs are totally isolated from the rest of the body.  So there's no way in which my body learns during its life can be transmitted to the egg and sperm to form the future generation.  Well, I have to tell you that little molecules called "control RNAs," but don't' worry about the technical term, little molecules called control RNAs are shown to communicate body characteristics like whether your metabolism is this way-round or that way-round to the germ cells via tiny little packets of molecular information.  There is no Weismann barrier.  It's not able to prevent transmission  from the body to the egg cell.

CJ: Are you referring to epigenetics here or something else?

DN: Good point. It is to some extent epigenetic.  

So, the third major assumption of standard evolutionary biology is that not only is DNA the source of everything that's needed to create  us, it accurately self-replicates, it doesn't need anything to control that. Well, it's simply not true.  It is true, coming back to the four types of nucleotides [what is generally given as"A,T C and G"], A will attract a T and G will attract a C, that is true and that helps the replication of DNA but the error rate of that is such that there would be hundreds of thousands of errors in the DNA as one of our cells divides to form two new cells.  And what happens is amazing. The cells, themselves, contain the proteins necessary to cut and paste the DNA and to correct all of those errors.  So, the replication of DNA depends upon that ability of the living cell.  And only a living cell can do that.

And the final fundamental dogma is that the replicator, that is DNA is separate from its vehicle which is the cell or, if you like, our bodies.  The fact is since self-replication of DNA is impossible in our genomes the replicator cannot be seen as separate from its vehicle.

So, the correct interpretation of the molecular biological evidence  shows that all of these four fundamental assumptions of modern biology are incorrect.

So, just to summarize where I've got to in this part of the talk:

Living organisms can change their DNA.  And, incidentally, you and I were experiencing exactly that during the pandemic. How else could our immune systems be able to change the DNA coding for what are called immunoglobulins, that's a long technical term, the part of our immune system that grabs the virus and neutralizes it, how is it possible for the immune system to do that?  It's because the immune system, like other systems in our bodies is capable of changing the DNA.  It actually creates millions of new possible shapes of that protein that captures the virus.  So we know that organisms can change their DNA and the Central Dogma clearly does not prevent that and as I said this is precisely what was happening during the pandemic.

Second major point in the summary here is DNA itself is not a self-replicator it needs the living cell to do that.

And the third take-home message from this part of the talk is that body characteristics can be communicated to the germ-line, that is the future eggs and sperm via small particles that transmit from the body to those cells.  The Weismann barrier is not really a barrier.  

Now, why is this all important?

Denis Noble went on to give scientific reasons that's important and, far more importantly, what that will mean for those trying to save the biosphere and life in the future that neither he nor I will live long enough to see much of.  Denis Noble would not seem to be a religious believer, as I have mentioned he takes the step outside of science make the claim that you "don't need God" because the membranous structures of the cell can provide so much of the regulatory function that the old-fashioned naive view of genetics and biology assigned to DNA.

I, though, look at the same science and don't just take the membranous structures of cells as a given, I have to ask where those came from and how those have the abilities they have as parts of living organisms, abilities which no non-living molecular structures would seem to have.  Both Denis Noble and James Shapiro have pointed out that when non-living crystalline structures are made there are large numbers of "errors" in the molecular formation of the forming crystal, things such as, I'd imagine, those chemical inclusions of metallic molecules within diamonds that give them different colors which works for a pretty rock but which would never allow life functions to continue in a living organism unless the crystalline structures making those up were corrected to a stunningly lower percentage of errors. Such a high percentage of errors in that chemical-physical process is incompatible with life processes, which both of them readily point out.   Clearly those couldn't have come from any known properties of inorganic chemistry or even much of organic chemistry, certainly not as features of elemental chemistry as that exists in a natural setting.  So that would have come from somewhere which I doubt reductionist materialism will ever be able to account for.  

I'm fully prepared, considering what is known about life processes and the replication of life, that it has to happen within not only some kind of membrane BUT A COMPLEX, BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE MEMBRANE that that would have been true for the theoretical first organism of life on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy or universe - if it is a line of life anything like our own to have ever existed.  I can't find any reason to believe such a complex structure could possibly have just come about through random chance interactions between molecules, even supposedly naturally occurring amino acids, in the presumably very life-hostile atmosphere and surface of the early Earth.  Not in the numbers of molecules it would have taken to form a "very simple" living organism's containing membrane as it just happened to enclose the other complex molecules and structures necessary for "very simple" life to have come about.  The seemingly random chance probability of that happening in the first place and a very high chance against its long-term survival in those conditions is matched with added factors of improbability against its continued metabolism and the incredible improbability of it reproducing the molecular and other structures within its body the correctly dividing into two or more of itself, resealing its containing membranes, correctly, the first and most all of every subsequent time and I think the idea that it just happened by random chance, itself, plummets into irrational faith based on materialism and the gods of materialism.  

It was one of the selling points of the ever more seemingly absurd materialist-reductionist cartoon of how life began that it was assumed to be what we ever more surely know it was not and could not have been, simple in the way that chemists can describe inorganic and non-living chemical bonding.  The plausibility of 18th, 19th, 20th century materialist-atheist-scientism depended and still depends on that unrealistic assumption of simplicity, I'd say that line of the ideological use of such assumed simplicity goes all the way back to the ancient and classical atomists and the ancient atheists who based their claims on that mistaken faith in such simplicity.   Without that simplicity, what they really have is what I've called atheism of the gaps, presumed "simplicity" supplying the gap in what is known.

Though they'd deny what they're doing, today they turn "random chance" from a process of probability mathematics into a creator god of infinitely greater implausibility than the God of Moses, Jacob and Jesus or many of the other names and stories told about God in other traditions.  I find the "God" of the fundamentalists, who I don't believe in, more plausible than the creator god of atheist materialism and I think the morality derived from even that anti-Christian god is superior to that which materialism leads to.  I'd rather take my chances with a lot of the anti-LGBTQ+. old-order anabaptists, especially those of the peace churches over and above the gods of materialism and atheism.  

Though, as I mention at the top of this post, I think even the secular consequences of that ideological abuse of science are dangerous enough so we should all throw the old line into the boneyard of discontinued science I'll also point out that the deadly enemies of this most recent biology include many of the big names in current anti-religious polemics. That presence of some of the most vicious opponents of current biology within science is a good indication of the ideological character of the gene-centric, neo-Darwinist orthodoxy and the actual motives of much of why it is retained as their central ideology.  The online war that Jerry Coyne waged against his University of Chicago colleague James Shapiro include some of the most vicious attacks on science in recent times.  And the same words and phrases were echoed in the sciencey new-atheist blogopshere.  For example, I read any number of scienctist written blog posts deriding and ridiculing "junk DNA" even as Shaprio and others proved that a more up to date and evidenced view of that molecule showed it was nothing like "junk" but was vital in some of the most important workings of the very molecule, itself.  "Junk DNA" figured highly as one of the favorite online arguments against the existence of God as well as championing an already antiquated view of molecular biology.  I think it was in response to one of those that I noted they were arguing for atheism of the gaps, those gaps being in previous ignorance of the function of those long chains of amino-acids.  Only some the atheists who understood any of it from the start got that point, the sci-ranger boys and gals were clueless.  It's remarkable how many of those who were credentialed by colleges and universities only know how to toss around phrases as club slogans without having any real idea of what they mean.

* A couple of years ago a friend told me about her uncle who was still alive and cognitively sharp quite past the age of a hundred who learned scientific racism from the textbooks he had in high school and college before WWII and still believed it because "it's science."  I would assume those might well include the same Civic Biology textbook which featured in the Scopes Trial.  It was one of the most widely used high-school textbooks of the period and it explicitly taught scientific racism and eugenics as science.  The imaginary champions of science who believe Inherit the Wind was a history lesson were unwittingly championing that kind of science.  That is the kind of thing that came back after its temporary discrediting from the scandal of what the Nazis did with that science.  From the 1970s onward as the Darwinist fundamentalism of Sociobiology and evo-psy took hold.  I think the naive view of genetics starting with the generation of Karl Pearson and the last years of Francis Galton inevitably leads to those, especially when tied to the theory of natural selection.  That will be the case until all of that stuff is junked.  In one of the slides that Denis Noble showed it references the 40th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, apart from wondering if Dawkins still includes the "first bird to call out" fable which is an epic example of really, really bad scientific lore. I'd bet he does.  But I wonder, far more, if in his God Delusion he still lauds the antisemitic scientific claims of John Hartung which seem to be derived from the overt scientific antisemitism successfully reinserted into science by Kevin MacDonald.   I have written in the past about such antisemitism being inserted into science by such luminaries of Darwinism as Karl Pearson in the run-up to the Nazi's "final solution." 

I might add that in his very last months, E.O. Wilson seems to have admitted there were problems with Sociobiology, which he invented, much to the displeasure of the large number of scientists who had professional interests in his 1970s theory and its progeny, evolutionary psychology.  I haven't looked deeply into why he did that so I don't know what his motives were.  I expect it will take at least two generations of younger biologists dying off before the bad science involved will be quietly pushed to one side.  It will take longer for them to admit that natural selection is an ideologically motivated imaginary "force" of nature which can't be demonstrated to have actually, ever, been a thing.

** It isn't any mere coincidence that Richard Dawkins' famous "selfish gene" idea figures so strongly in what both Denis Noble and James Shaprio have to argue against.  The theory of natural selection which is, actually, what neo-Darwinism was invented to rescue, is the original idea that selfishness is the basis of progress in evolution.  That was realized within the first decade after On The Origin of Species was published.  The "struggle for existence" that figured so highly and explicitly in the theory of natural selection from the time of its invention was intrinsic to the idea, in short.  The struggle for organisms to survive and dominate within their species, the opposite of what secularists know as "altruism" and charity which constitutes the moral basis of many religions.  

That made, in academic-scientific terms, "altruism" an unsolvable problem for Darwinists,  some of whom didn't want to give up the idea that altruism was good and many others who realized that replacing generosity, charity, especially doing for those who are less fortunate or strong or intelligent among us would be a very hard sell to the general public which were largely culturally, at least, Christians.  The latter group dominated in the scientific view of natural selection as they invented eugenics and started trying to talk, first the educated class who were comprised then mostly of the rich, the well-off, the favored by the very unnatural civil law and economic culture, and from that basis, the rest of society to give up the moral content of Christianity, Judaism and, I guess, other religions that didn't much figure into the thinking of that class in the West.  

It wasn't a hard sell to many of the rich and privileged to give up the idea that they had some kind of durable moral obligation to support the lives and even dignity of the least among us, that was the opposite of the difficulty of convincing the rich and powerful that they had that obligation throughout the history of Abrahamic monotheism, late classical and feudal Christianity in the first place.  That was true, in no small part, to the fact that once held by a family great wealth was made very easy for them to hold on to, whatever struggling required could be done through hiring solders and others to carry out the violence or by forcing underlings to do that, to less or no danger to the ones holding that wealth. The structure of civil law figured heavily in that, even during the worst empires and monarchies.  The hierarchies and norms of imperial systems and monarchy and economically and socially stratified republics are designed to do that, among other things.  It's little to no surprise that the aristocracy of Victorian era Britain, America, Prussia, etc. who would never have to actually engage in a struggle to the death found, first, Malthusian style economics and then its child, natural selection, so appealing.  Especially as it not only absolved them from an obligation to share their wealth with the poor and destitute, it made selfishness into a virtue, driving the progress of the human species to ever higher levels,  It's no wonder that the idea appealed to the likes of John Rockefeller.  Darwin explicitly said that in The Descent of Man and so did virtually all others who adopted natural selection even as they hypocritically claimed to not believe that evolution was a progressive force of nature - speaking out of both sides of their mouths is among the most obvious but least recognized characteristics of Darwinian ideology.  Such a population and the emerged upper-middle class that aspired with some hope to that level, largely made up the university and college educated class that were the first ones Darwinism was marketed to.

But the population in general, culturally Christian, Jewish, etc. were a harder sell on the idea that the least among us should be left to suffer and perish in a "struggle for existence."   Even more so that they should be harried out of existence, actively, another immediate conclusion that rose within Darwinism with Darwin's active support.  That remained as a problem, probably especially as the 20th century progressed and larger numbers of the working class and even those from poverty rose academically through public education to go to and flourish academically at colleges and universities.  In the neo-Darwinian synthesis years, that problem was dealt with through mathematical modeling by W. D, Hamilton who, through some typical Darwinian double-speak, claimed, in effect, that altruism was, in fact, a part of that "struggle for existence" (a phrase that was deemphisized within the genteel post WWII generation of academic Darwinists, even as it never stopped being the basis of the theory) in that acts of altruism were made to enable the survival of the genes which the "altruist" shared with those who benefitted from their acts of self-sacrifice, had an imaginary better chance of being propagated in the next generation.  Though the scientific racism which was supported by the theory of natural selection was often a far easier sell even among the working and lower classes.  Racism was a pre-existing mental illness among so many in every class.  The theory of natural selection exacerbated that in many ways.

Hamilton and his disciples seem to forget that for natural selection to work, at all, such "traits" as they imagined-up couldn't be held universally within a species but would have to have been absent from a significant number of the members of that species in order for "nature" to have anything to "select" by.  A universally held "trait" within a species couldn't be the object of natural selection.

So any "genetic altruistic" sacrifice by those holding that imagined genetic trait would have benefited the breeding potential of those which didn't carry that imaginary self-sacrificing gene.  That oversight was the basis of both socio-biology and evolutionary psychology in the next decade even as the idea, itself, is mathematical nonsense because, to repeat that point,  every time one of their imaginary "altruism gene carrying" altruists died it would, actually, have slightly lessened the percentage of those in the species carrying such genes and it would have removed a potential source of that gene from the breeding population of that species.  The more Hamiltonian "altruism" worked, the lower that percentage in the population would have been, actually benefiting those in the species that didn't carry "genetic altruism."  I have presented that point to a number of evo-psy believing people with even that low level of mathematical awareness and not one of them has been able to tell me what is wrong with my critique of the idea.  And there are other things wrong with the most popular fables of it.  I think that, if anything, it would have to conclude that any such "genetic altruism" would, over eons, have been obliterated by natural selection.  

I also, by the way, think it's absurd to base any conclusion about observed behaviors in animals such as ants so far removed from, for example, human beings as being relevant to quite different behaviors among those very distantly related animals with entirely different lives and means of reproduction.  For a start, we have no way of knowing how ants see their own behavior, we could be reading it entirely wrongly and any such "reading" of the observations so as to support any particular theory or ideology is bound to determine what it is claimed is being seen.  To attribute such behavior to genes, the idea of "a gene" being a rather troubled abstraction, itself, is hardly science.  Yet enormous amounts of current putative biology is based on such conjecture removed from any possibility of actual confirmation.  

For a different, detailed critique of "Hamilton's rule" this paper, of which E.O. Wilson is a co-author, states that it cannot make any prediction, whatsoever. 

Note this passage in the summary:

In short, there is a startling discrepancy between the common intuitive understanding of Hamilton’s rule and the derivation of this rule that has been described as exact and general. In some cases, this discrepancy can be seen within a single paper. For example, ref. 7 uses 18 different variations of “Hamilton’s rule correctly predicts…” in reference to HRG, which makes no prediction at all.

But because, as Denis Noble says, Richard Dawkins can write convincingly, which I admit he can on a popular and even a rather mid-brow academic level, that idea sold well to the academics and those in the media and high-school teaching class that the idea dominated even though it had little to no actual evidence and it was, in fact, irrational in many respects.  There were those even within Darwinism who rejected it, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Ruth Hubbard, . . . but their reasoned arguments were harder to grasp even when such fine writers as they were explained them.  And those criticisms went against the general cultural movements descending into the period of Thatcher and Reagan era economic fantasies - in no small part an aspect of the culture of Darwinism that dominated so much of the imagination of those in the media and within academia and big business.  I read and understood the arguments they made against it, I read the literature that came from their Sociobiology Study Group and realized that sociobiology and its immediate successor, evolutionary psychology were just more of the same eugenics level bad science of which Darwinism has contributed more of than any other scientific ideology that I'm aware of.  

Anyone who believes anything Simps says without fact checking

is too stupid for me to worry about.   And that includes the rump remnant of geezer grousers of Duncan's idea of an Athenaeum.   I can't even care enough to try to remember the HTML for a digraph to make fun of that anymore.  Even Duncan never really believed it but many at the "brain trust" (they really called it that) do.

Are you the one who used to tell me what was said about that but who stopped?  You don't need to, Simps does that, though I often ignore it because he's so needy for attention.

Goddamn 1970s Era Maine Liberals - And I Used To Be One

got our absurdly easy ballot-access laws in.   Those have been used, repeatedly, by Republican-fascists here and nationally to get play-lefty spoilers and just plain nut cases on the ballot to the benefit of some of the worst Republican-fascists in the country.   The putrid Paul LePage, the vile, racist 38 percent Governor,  Trump before Trump, human bowling-jacket (nod to Charles Pierce) is just one of the products of that 70s era liberal stupidity. 

Now it's gotten the egotistical false prophet Cornel West on the ballot.   I think it's unlikely to benefit Trump and Republican-fascists because Cornel West is too fringy even for our stupidest play-lefties here but we've been burned, over and over again from the firngiest of the fringe before.   Cornel West is someone I once respected and took seriously but that was decades ago.   Anyone who enables Trump in 2024 is someone who I doubt could ever win back my good will and he is just such an enabler.    If someone wants to know if there is an ego bigger than Trump's in American life, West would be in the running.  That his ego is being stroked by his enablement of the most racist figure and campaign and party in modern American history should burn to the ground his entire, previous legacy.

I didn't notice

until this morning that I'd posted an earlier draft of what I posted yesterday, complete with incomplete editing and later additions to the last draft.   I need to come up with a different procedure for writing these things.

I'm Wild About A.J. Levine

LAST YEAR I WROTE a piece  pointing out that the translators of the the widely used Greek translations of Jewish scriptures current in the Jewish world around the time of Jesus and the New testament, the Septuagint, translated by presumably Jewish scholars in Alexandria, they probably chose the translation of that famous passage from Isaiah "a virgin will give birth" because they figured that "a sign" would have to be something more noteworthy than a young woman giving birth.  It's a passage that the current common received wisdom claims is an intentional false translation in order to support the Virgin Birth of Jesus. the accusation that it's one of a number of Christian appropriations of Jewish scriptures,  only it was translated that way centuries before Jesus by Jewish scholars.   And that translation was found entirely acceptable to First Century Jews and those both earlier and later because the Greek translation not only was widely used but the legend of how it was translated, identically, by seventy scholars working independently was widely believed by both Jews and, later Christians.   Those who believed that must have seen it as divine favor for the translation as well as the Hebrew original.

When I wrote that  someone asked me if I'd ever read Amy-Jill Levine, a well known Jewish New Testament scholar.  Well, I hadn't and I still haven't read her but I've listened to a number of her lectures and talks on Youtube and she's terrific.   I had been listening to a number of Jewish scholars give their takes on the New Testament and early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism and the interactions between them and found them to be enormously interesting and helpful in understanding some aspects of what the New Testament means and how post-Temple Judaism developed often in tension with early Christianity even as Jesus, Paul and all of the named disciples and very possibly all of the authors of the New Testament were and considered themselves to be Jews. 

I might go into some of what she says more but I've decided to link to two of her shorter talks and interviews which show she not only is a really fine scholar but that she's got a great sense of humor, the kind that supports a refreshingly practical point of view about religion.

Here's a sort of Ted-Talky short one on the afterlife

Here's one on how you need to understand Jewish practice and belief to understand Jesus and Paul

I love her pluralistic take on things and can say that I won't think about these issues from now on without wondering how she'd see them.   I intend to put her on my to-read list from next year so don't be surprised if she starts showing up here more.   One of the things she says in the second one is something I've pointed out, that far from it being a terrible injustice for Christians to "appropriate" things from the Jewish Scriptures that that practice was rampant within the Jewish Scriptures, themselves,  later Prophets putting their own interpretation on earlier passages from the Torah,  something that A.J. Levine points out is a practice at the very heart of Jewish practice and religion.   I think it would be far better for Christians to understand Christianity as a part of the same faith family as Judaism than to endlessly create dishonest and needless strife where an appreciation and respect for differences in reading things is more helpful and appropriate. 

Is Darwinism, Itself What Has Been Killed Off: Denis Noble And Curt Jaimungal 2

IN THE LONGER version of the multi-part podcast from Curt Jaimungal with Denis Noble from which I transcribed a passage last week, Denis Noble gave a half hour or so presentation that obliterates the neo-Darwinian synthesis which is the absolutely dominant ideology within biology and from there extends through other would-be sciences and is vastly influential in societies, governments and legal systems to such disastrous results for equality and democracy and even life on earth.  

I will say that it is inspiring and no-end of impressive that someone as old as Denis Noble, fast closing in on ninety, is so much on the cutting edge of current science.  How much of what we were taught more than fifty years ago he's had to change his mind about as new experimental evidence has been published in that period, how few of those in even the next generation of biologists have been able to make the changes to what they believe and assert as knowledge.  I did well in my biology classes in high school and in college but it's impressive to me how much of what I was taught then has been overturned.  I think that residual "knowledge" among my age cohort and those even far younger trained in that antiquated, hegemonic ideology of biology is still currently governing and influential in the world, much of it to very bad consequences.  I think his knowledge of computers mixed with his study of physiology may have kept him much fresher than someone like Richard Dawkins who spends most of his time with scribbling words and not on any kind of scientific activity.

I've decided to transcribe his short summary in which he does that, first because I believe it's true and  also because I think in doing that Denis Noble may have come up with a crucial refutation of the other half of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Darwinism.  Though I don't think that is something he was planning on doing.

This will  take at least two posts but I'll start out with the basis of Noble's demolition of the reigning ideology within biology.

How did the genome become described as the Book of Life, creating us "body and mind" as Richard Dawkins' would say in his book The Selfish Gene?  Because if that were so the conditional logic of life would have to be found in the genome. But it's not there.

You see, I'm a computer programmer amongst other things because the way I do systems biology is to model cells, tissues and organs.  And I know as a computer programmer that if you look for where all of those conditional expressions are "if this," "then that," "else," "something else," if you look for all of those control routines that computer programmers are very familiar with you won't find them in the genome. 

Now, there are switches in genomes.  Every sequence of DNA that is a gene has another bit of DNA which is its switch.  But those switches are controlled by other physiological processes not by the genome itself.  So, I asked the question, where are life's control routines?  Well, they're in our cells. Because our cells - this is a figure showing a complicated diagram of a cell, you don't need to understand the details of the diagram.  What you can see, though  is that it's absolutely packed with structure.  And that structure is formed of what we call fatty membranes, lipid membranes with protein channels in them.  And those routines that control the genome depend on those protein channels in the lipid membranes. Those are our conditional on-off decision processes and they're sensitive to chemical and electrical processes that we experience in life. Without those membrane processes, there could not be choice between various behavioral options.  And, yet, choice is an essential element in any theory of the ability to be either selfish or cooperative.  Moreover, all of our nerve cells have these controllable on-off switches, so do all the other cells. 

But now I come to something that may surprise you, THERE ARE NO GENES CODING FOR THOSE MEMBRANES. We inherit all of those membrane structures from the egg-cell of our mother.  Every single one of us depends on that inheritance, there are no genes controlling and forming membranes.

CJ:  Sir, before you move on do you mind briefly expanding on how membranes come only from the mother and not the genome?

DN:  The important thing about the membranes in our cells is that there are no genes coding for membranes. And yet all of those membrane structures are inherited in the egg cells of our mother.  You see, when a sperm with its DNA enters an egg cell, it not only enters an egg cell to fuse its DNA with the DNA from your mother but it also enters a complete cell from the mother.  That is the egg cell.  And that contains, just as all other cells in our bodies do, all the membranous structures that get inherited automatically with the egg cell. So, when, for example, a couple of years ago Richard Dawkins told me, Denis, we can keep your DNA for ten thousand years and in ten thousand years we'd be able to recreate you.  I said, no you won't, Richard, and he said, well, why not?  I said, where will you find the egg cell from my mother as it was in 1936 when I was born?   You see, there's no way we can avoid the fact that we inherit the membranous structures and those membranous structures are where all the control of the genome lies.     

Now, I want to come to some simple proofs that 20th century gene-centric biology, the idea that genes are the blueprint for life, that they alone can develop into being us, is necessarily wrong.

He doesn't go into it here but there is a basic change in the conception of biological inheritance that undercuts the neo-Darwinian conception of the inheritance of "traits" including conclusive experimental evidence which Denis Noble presented in another of his lectures which I linked to seven years ago, which shows that there is an influence of the egg-cell's structures on the transmission of anatomical structure.  In an experiment in which the entire DNA of an egg cell of one species of fish was replaced with the DNA of another species of fish, the rare, living organism that resulted had a number of vertebrae larger than one species but smaller than the other and was clearly not anatomically the member of the species which the DNA was taken from. 

In thinking more about what I transcribed and posted the other day I remembered a crucial point made by the biologist H. Allen Orr in refuting some of the late Daniel Dennett's rather stupid claim that natural selection also reigned supreme outside of biology, making it a supreme law of nature, that natural selection cannot work without strict particulate inheritance of traits being its basis.  That "blended inheritance" such as would come from any Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired traits would undermine the basis of natural selection. 

This substrate neutrality argument is supremely important to Dennett. It—and nothing else—explains why selection can be lifted from its historical base in biology. It is what makes Darwinism so dangerous. But Dennett slips here. While it is true that many different kinds of substrate can be selected, it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can’t even explain old-fashioned biological evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn’t behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-of-the-century biologists—all fans of blending inheritance—concluded that Darwinism just can’t work. Modem evolutionary genetics was born in 1930 when Sir Ronald Fisher [a key co-inventor of the neo-Darwinian synthesis] cracked this problem: Population genetics shows that particulate Mendelian inheritance saves the day. It is just the kind of substrate needed for evolution by natural selection to work.

What, then, about Dennett’s memes—all those “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of  making pots or of building arches.” Do they show particulate or blending inheritance? Do street fashion and high fashion segregate like good genes, or do they first mix before replicating in magazines or  storefronts? Does postmodern architecture reflect a blending of the modernist and classical or the inheritance of distinct LeCorbusier and Vitruvius genes? I do not know the answers to these questions. And neither does Dennett. And neither does anyone else.

But it’s worse than this. As Dennett reluctantly admits, memes and genes differ in other fundamental ways. Species, once isolated, almost never exchange genes, [something which Noble, Shapiro, et al disprove, one of the reasons for declaring the neo-Darwinian synthesis dead] while exchange between long-isolated cultures is immensely important in the history of ideas. Moreover, new ideas—but not genes—are produced by a sort of directed mutation. Newton did not uncover the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus by conceiving millions of random ideas. In addition, the fitness of memes is strangely  tautological. While we can often point to ecological reasons why certain genes are fitter than others, a meme is deemed “fit” only because it is common. (“Elvis is alive” is certainly a fit meme, but it is neither true nor helpful. It is merely popular.) Last, Dennett confesses that memes often show a Lamarckian, not Darwinian, style of evolution, in that acquired traits get passed along.

Despite Dennett’s assurance, then, that “concepts from population genetics transfer quite smoothly”  to “population memetics,” it is far from clear that Darwinism can account for the percolation of ideas, styles, and songs through culture. In fact, there is a basic problem with any such claim—we are very ignorant of how humans hold ideas in their heads and of how the ideas in your head influence the ideas in my head. So how can we possibly conclude that the process “must be” Darwinian? As Searle  emphasizes, it is this ignorance of how things actually work that makes the pretensions of these wild theories possible: “Such claims live in the holes of our knowledge.”

I agreed with Orr when I read that because it made sense to me.  I am not that familiar with the literature of the several crises that natural selection passed through in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, first from the challenge of August Weissmann whose claims about the inability of the organism and environment to alter the "germ line" became the basis of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, one of those things which Denis Noble and James Shapiro obliterates with the far more founded experimental and observational evidence they present.  I agreed with Orr because I could see his point, that Darwinism which is based on the inheritance of "traits" and the "selection" of nature favoring some traits over others as the driving force in the evolution of species, could not work without the inheritance of discrete "traits."  A number of times here I noted that there was no such thing as a "trait" that existed outside of an organism which would exhibit many other "traits" which would be hardly uniform in appearing with each other across any species.  I came to the conclusion that "traits" were, by and large, an artificial categorization and that there would be no possibility of coming to any kind of conclusion that "nature" selected organisms to die younger or leave fewer descendants on the basis of those "traits" that Darwin et al understood as the raw material of evolution.  My skepticism about those discrete particles to be worked on by "nature," "traits," preceded any knowledge I had of the work of recent biologists disproving the "DNA" hegemony of naive genetics.  But I haven't combined the two ideas until right now.   In the terms that H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett were talking about in the 1990s, anyone who sees the child of two parents would know that nothing about them could lead to the whole child being seen as a selection of discrete packets from one or the other parent, though individual aspects of their anatomy or physiology might be TALKED ABOUT as if that were the case.   It is a matter of the most extreme irony that anyone within science could have fallen for that inherent limitation of language as the supreme determinant of "biological destiny."   But it has long appeared to me that is exactly what has happened within science.

I would love to have someone explain to me how natural selection could be real if that were not the case because I can't see how it could happen except on the level of individual organisms dying if their package of "traits" was either incompatible with survival or reproduction but I don't see how that can drive change in a species as a whole.  The persistence of some extremely disadvantageous traits in species (fatally disadvantageous in some circumstances and not in others) would seem to support that point.  I knew, as apparently Orr may have forgotten, that not only Charles Darwin but his foremost disciples, apart from August Weismann and his disciples, believed in Lamarckian inheritance of traits.  Probably none of them more so than his most illustrious continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel, who declared late in life that not only had he and Darwin agreed on the inheritance of acquired characteristics (something which I know Noble and some of the other renegade biologists on the cutting edge of these issues is aware of) but that to not accept them was as unscientific as believing in the Scriptural story of creation. 

Before understanding this better I would need to go look at the controversies surrounding the adoption of the Weissmann ideology which proved to be so compatible and persuasive under the naive, early view of genetics - I'd like to know more about both the adopters of that and their opponents as well as those who motivated the ideological inventors of the neo-Darwinian synthesis were opposed by. 

If I could I'd like to ask Noble's colleague James Shaprio if that was included in his remark that there is no "two word" description of how evolution happened.  I am certain he expected the first such two words his informed audience would think of are "natural selection," I doubt that the first one that would come to mind would have been "genetic drift," or even "punctuated equilibrium." 

I'm hoping to be able to look more into the dependence of natural selection on the kind of inheritance that is overturned in this recent science but which will probably rule the teaching and writing of biology for far longer than I'm alive (progress in science is measured in the deaths of the old-school, not in the publication of experimental research). 

It wouldn't surprise me if Charles Darwin and his Lamarckian colleagues during his lifetime were unable to see the problem for his theory that Lamarckian inheritance would cause because I don't think they were especially philosophically astute.  They didn't see the problems with using the entirely artificial model of animal husbandry and the development of agricultural strains to stand in for what they claimed happened without intelligent design and without teleology, both of which are vital to animal husbandry and crop selection.  Nor with using the crudest and most obviously ideological and self-interested theories of economics as a model of the same thing.  I have pointed out that for all his ideological liking of the materialism of natural selection, Karl Marx had the philosophical chops to understand what Darwin had done in that regard.

But I think this new research may well kill off more than Denis Noble realizes it will.  I think the world will be a lot better off if Darwinism dies and the scientific study of evolution continues without that overriding ideological framing.  A framing which has had the most disastrous consequences within the lives of the oldest among us and still does.  Darwinism is behind much, if not most of the worst of the academic and popular claims made today.  It was behind the "Darwinian economcs" that led both the United States under Trump and the so-called social democrats of Sweden to adopt deadly and stupid lassaiez-faire policies during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the white-supremacist theories that congeal in shit like the 2025 Project and its putrid theorists.  Scientific racism and eugenics were part of Darwinism starting with Charles Darwin and his most devoted disciples through the hey-day of eugenics and scientific genocide and extending up through the ultra-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology.  Both the scientific antisemitism that Kevin MacDonald successfully reinserted into late 20th century "science" and the racist economics of The Bell Curve are a continuing and dangerous manifestation of Darwinism.  It is one of the supreme ironies of our lived experience that even the foremost and most rabid of enemies of evolution and Charles Darwin are thoroughly in league with that aspect of his evolutionary theory which reigns in hegemonic orthodoxy.  The nexis of that is in the inegalitarian economics that Darwin based his theory on. But, then, little of it has made any sense when reviewed with determined honesty. 

I think one of the most important things which this new research which reduces the DNA-centric view of life is that increasing the importance of our non-genetic inheritance from the long, long line of mothers who contribute all of the cellular basis of life has to force a more egalitarian view of life than the clearly patriarchal view of it that reigns now.  Finding out that most of our inheritance comes from the female in reproduction, half of the genetic inheritance plus the entirety of the controlling cellular structure, can hardly have any other consequence than that, I'd think.  No wonder so many of the boys are in a tizzy over it.

P.S. I'll add that I can't fully trust anyone who could contemplate the situation of an ant which has been displaced  from the possibility of finding its way back to the nest, to wander looking for it until they die alone without feeling pity for the poor creature. 

 

I'd Really Rather Go Over Somethign That Pushes The Envelope Than Go Over Things I Answered Decades Ago

I'M SURE DENIS NOBLE would probably not agree with the use to which I will put something he said in an extremely interesting interview he gave to Curt Jaimungal, a scientific podcaster earlier this year but I can't see how my use of it outside of science is wrong.  Science isn't a self-contained activity anymore than history or any other intellectual activity is.  I think it's entirely legitimate for us to listen to what scientists say and draw inferences from it that about things which could not be properly a part of science.  I don't think there's anything illegitimate in what I'm about to do.  I'm as sure of that as I know that I disagree with Denis Noble about natural selection. 

At almost the one hour mark in the video after the host asked about the relationship of holism and the molecular reductionism of neo-Darwinism (Denis Noble is, as I stated the other day, a Darwinist though he has declared the neo-Darwinist synthesis of the mid-20th century to be dead) he made some very interesting points which are relevant to one of the issues in science I've gone over a number of times, the extraordinarily improbable chance of a cell's containing membrane to have come about and come to contain the necessary molecules for life to happen, just happening by random chance in nature.

My somewhat informal transcription of the video leaves out something said by the man conducting the interview which I've noted below.  I won't break into it.  At about 59:25, Denis Noble says

D.N. Let me also say something about holeism.   I know the neo-Darwinists in particular will dismiss me as completely off my head, when I talk about holism. they will think it's all terribly vague.  Actually it's a mathematical necessity.  And this may surprise people, about, let me see, it's 2016, so it's about eight years ago I published a book called "Dance To The Tune Of Life" . . . But I published a book subtitled "Biological Relativity."  . . . Biological relativity is the idea that there is no privileged level of causation within a biological system.  

Now, that is a mathematical necessity for the following reasons.  And I can illustrate it best by how I modeled the heartbeat, oh, over sixty years ago when I was a research student.  I was looking at ion channels in the heart cells,. characterizing those so we could fit equations to characterize their physical properties.  And then you could work out how that influences the overall electrical potential in the heart cell because the heart rhythm is an electrical process.  The voltage on the cell literally goes up and down like that [he makes a hand gesture going up and down].  Now, what I showed there was that you could not explain the rhythm from the molecular elements alone.  If you take those proteins and you put them in a solution with no membrane around them,. in other words, not in a cell, they will not oscillate.  There is no rhythm.  If, therefore, you remove the cell membrane and its electrical potential it doesn't work.  Incidentally, that's also true of mitochondria, our energy factories in our bodies.  If you remove the electrical potential across the membranes the system no longer works. So that's not, itself, a new discovery.  

Now, then, what I came up with is a very simple point, you can fit differential equations, sorry to be technical for a moment.

At this point the host interrupted to tell Denis Noble that he and his typical podcast audience were able to handle the technical content he was about to give. To which Noble said he was delighted.

The point is very simple.  However many details you put into the equations, or the differential equations and the functions used in those equations, you need the boundary conditions.  Otherwise there's no solution to those equations.  Every mathematician knows that.  Where do those boundary conditions come from?   

Well, in a sense the word gives it away, doesn't it.  In the case of a cell it's what the membranes constrain the molecules to do.  Those are the boundary conditions.  

So, a holistic view is simply the enumeration of the boundary conditions in a differential equation model.  So, that's why I call it a mathematical necessity.  And I think that your listeners who would understand the mathematics here, will readily understand when I say that there's no solution to a set of differential equations without the boundary conditions being put in.  Those are the influence from the higher levels of organization.  Because it is those higher levels of organization that constrain what the molecules themselves are doing.

Think of how life must have emerged long ago, in, we don't know exactly where - perhaps in the minute fissures and cracks in thermal vents - who knows?   But until the living system, the networks of interactions which were forming autocatalytic sets, meaning chemical reactions that could continue indefinitely,  until they were enclosed within membranes they would have just dispersed.  So, somehow or another, that constraint, the forming of a membrane around a catalytic set would have been a key element in any form of evolution of what we call life.  So, right from the very beginning the boundary conditions by the structure in which the molecules are to be found are a critical element in determining how they behave.  And so there's nothing terribly surprising in that. The principle of biological relativity is simply that you will always need the boundary conditions as well as the differential equations.  
 

C.J. So, that's extremely interesting, are you making an analogy between the evolution laws and reductionism and the boundary conditions and holism?

D.N. I am saying the boundary conditions are what give the system its whole, yes, that's right.  If what you are referring to as the whole is the structure of the system, then it is that structure that creates the boundary condition.  Cells are packed with structures that do that.  The molecules are not free to move easily from one compartment to another. They're restricted to various compartments.  That is, itself a structural imposition of constraint on the molecules involved.  All I'm saying is all molecules in living systems are constrained in the same kind of ways.  So, yes, if you want to say that holism is the existence of boundary conditions from structure, then I think that's absolutely right.  But, then, you've got to look at the whole to see the structure.

None of it works without a containing membrane and the containing membrane of any living, reproducing organism is extremely complex, it may well have been the most complex structure BEFORE THERE WAS ANY LIVING ORGANISM CONTAINED BY IT.  It, itself would have to have been a part of the whole structure or there would never have been any life.

It was way back in the days that I was enjoying getting into brawls with materialists on the Scienceblogs that I first brought up the problem of the containing membrane that would have had to contain the theoretical first organism of life on Earth which I am fully prepared to believe in though I hold there will never be a way for us to know about live that far back or to have any real idea of what it was like.  I described the necessity of the membrane of the first organism in terms less explicit and detailed than what Denis Noble says though he leaves out the extraordinarily hard to comprehend matter of that first organism dividing successfully, rupturing its membrane and resealing itself, enclosing the internal molecular structures that would result in two living organisms instead of one and a host of other incredibly complex actions. the extreme improbability of which lead me to believe that that could only happen as a result of intelligent intent not found within the organism, itself.  I know that Denis Noble and his colleagues doing some of the most important and fascinating research into these areas of cellular physiology reasonably and probably correctly attribute far mor in the way of intelligent action to individual cells as they can observe them, both as individual organisms and, far more elaborately, as parts of multi-cellular organisms but surely, as Denis Noble says and implies throughout this interview and his talks, that individual molecules not contained within cell membranes and within living organisms exhibit no such intelligence, it could not have been there before there was a living cell to organize that molecular behavior.  

I do think there is an artificial boundary at the same place in physical reality which prevents science from taking that step to considering the possibility of the Creator of life being part of that but I don't think there is anything wrong, at all, with someone taking that step outside of science.  It makes entirely more sense to me than the materialist-atheist-scientistic claims that a mechanistic view of the start of life is a fact and that that removes the necessity of God from any respectable discussion.  They can't even sustain their model within science, as Denis Noble points out at the beginning of the interview, the four basic assumptions of the latest attempt to come up with a reductionist description of evolution have all fallen to recent scientific research.  I don't think trying to make a holistic model of that will be either successful or widely convincing.  They'll have to overcome the materialist-atheist reductionist fever dream that they've put the last nail in the coffin of God.  I do agree with him that Cartesian dualism got it wrong just as those who figure the Creator of the universe, somehow, had nothing to do with the physical creation God created.  The Cartesian-scientific concept of that in terms of humanly created machines was incredibly naive no matter what it motivated in the further effort to come up with such means of controlling stuff and forces.  People are so ready to forget that their metaphors are just metaphors and not real think the mistaken philosophical imaginings of those who favored that ideology has had little to nothing to do with the actual success of science and technology, getting things we wanted and which would achieve our intentions has more to do with that, which accounts for why it is also destroying us and life on Earth.  

Update:  Simps, you really want to accuse me of "candor" in responding to you?   

1 : unreserved, honest, or sincere expression : forthrightness
the candor with which he acknowledged a weakness in his own case—
Aldous Huxley
2 : freedom from prejudice or malice : fairness
… a heavy accusation … from a gentleman of your talents, liberality, and candor.—
Noah Webster

Merriam Webster Online

Not only do you not know how to read, you don't know what words mean.