I have based my claim that the world of Science was totally upended during WWII by pointing out that Science circa 1940 valued purity above all else while today's science values diversity above all else and that these two values oppose each other in every possible way.
I am not limiting myself to shallow definitions either : not just to yesterday's eugenic notions of racial purity versus today's natural biodiversity and civil rights supported human social diversity.
I mean that the scientific theories that won near universal support before 1940, regardless of the often tiny amount of physical evidence supporting them, all tended to exalt the pure --- ie the simple, the linear, the stable, the symmetrical and systems in equilibrium in their visions of Reality.
So if Reality was really as simple, stable, consistent, understandable and predictable as these theories claimed, then we could indeed see into the Future and pick the one simple 'right' answer to solve all possible of today's and tomorrow's problems.
We could thus safely and sharply purify and reduce the world's gene pool - by picking the single best corn species and discarding all the second best, for example - confident that nothing could ever go wrong.
Simply pure and definite certitudes for a purely simple certain world.
But then, just for an example, in 1970 America's most important industrial material (their corn crop) was almost all wiped out by a fungus that was finely tuned into killing only this high yielding monoculture crop.
Panic !
Suddenly even the Koch Brothers of this world could see the virtues in gathering and protecting all the bio-diversity found in the many ancient and hitherto 'useless' variants of corn, just to cover all bets in what was suddenly looking to be a world of highly diverse dangers....
Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity
They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Monday, July 20, 2015
WWII but a significant 'blip' in the eternal war between natural historians and natural philosophers
From their lofty olympian heights in front of their chalkboards and computer screens, or up in their labs, the coin of the realm for the natural philosopher is always plenticide .
These scientists secure their fame within their tribe by reducing the plentitude of say the 150,000 very diverse species of beetles (God's favourite being) down to a few neat columns in a textbook.
So the tiger beetle : Domain Eukarya. Kingdom Animalia. Phylum Arthropoda. Class Insecta. Order Coleoptera. Family Carabidae. Genus Cicindela. Species tranquebarica.
The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.
But it is the directly opposite objective.
Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.
To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".
While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.
It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.
But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.
They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.
On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.
During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.
Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.
They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.
I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....
These scientists secure their fame within their tribe by reducing the plentitude of say the 150,000 very diverse species of beetles (God's favourite being) down to a few neat columns in a textbook.
So the tiger beetle : Domain Eukarya. Kingdom Animalia. Phylum Arthropoda. Class Insecta. Order Coleoptera. Family Carabidae. Genus Cicindela. Species tranquebarica.
The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.
But it is the directly opposite objective.
Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.
To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".
While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.
It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.
But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.
They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.
On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.
"Love your neighbour - no matter how scary or slimy or smelly - as you love yourself" - the naturalists' credo
During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.
Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.
They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.
I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Why deny something (extinction of others) you secretly HOPE is happening ?
It is generally agreed that no climate denier publicly denies the Sixth Extinction because they never ever regret other species disappearing - only if their own specie* is vanishing.
(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)
Truth be told, they yearn to see the world get drastically simplified - down to its basic mineral groups.
Call them modernists or plenticiders --- same thing : reduce, eliminate, destroy.
They really resent the way evolution has put humanity as the top dog, but not the only dog, on the planet.
Diversity - in the workforce or in the workforest - is their bete noir - if extinction can remove unpredictable diversity and replace it with predictable simplicity , the Inofes from the netherworld say 'bring it on' ...
(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)
Truth be told, they yearn to see the world get drastically simplified - down to its basic mineral groups.
Call them modernists or plenticiders --- same thing : reduce, eliminate, destroy.
They really resent the way evolution has put humanity as the top dog, but not the only dog, on the planet.
Diversity - in the workforce or in the workforest - is their bete noir - if extinction can remove unpredictable diversity and replace it with predictable simplicity , the Inofes from the netherworld say 'bring it on' ...
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Oh Oh , Diversity & WWII : have I said a bad word ?
My claim that Martin Henry Dawson championed diversity in both microbiology and in humanity during WWII strikes many as simply incredible and non-credible.
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"
We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't
An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.
In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.
And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.
But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.
And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.
We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.
But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?
I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)