If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...

Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.

This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.

Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.

But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.

All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.

Ditto for us humans generally.

God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.

We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.

Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.

A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.

So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.

Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.

If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.

Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.

If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.

But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.

And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.

Hence this book ...

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....

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...

The MORAL miracle of WWII's Penicillin-for-All

In the context of WWII's values (on both sides) , the reality* of wartime Penicillin-for-All truly was a miracle - a moral miracle.

Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this  miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.

For scientifically (sic) dividing the world into the healthy and fit versus the misfits and unfits was simply the normal way of thinking, in the era of modernity, for almost anyone with an education.

Luckily - and incidentally decisively refuting the idea of the worthlessness of the 'abnormal' - a few people outside the blessed circle of normalcy could see inside it and see its flaws.

They then laboured to successfully expose them.

With the acceptance of the reality of wartime Penicillin-for-All (marked above all by the critical and popular success of 1949's The Third Man and by the 1945 defeat of the anti-penicillin-for-all British Conservatives) our own era of post-modernity and its privileging of diversity and variety began ...

* The Atlantic Charter talked the same talk of Penicillin-for-All but that's all it was - just talk - the various Allies on various issues had absolutely no intentions of taking it seriously - during or even after the war.

That the moral concept of Penicillin-for All was put into practise during a total war in 1943-1944 truly is astounding - spelling the death knell of Modernity's values even before the revelations of Auschwitz in 1945-1946 ....