Star Larvae

Getting Riveted

2020-01-05T06:04:00.000-11:00

Two iconic figures meet head to head in this post. Below is the inspirational wartime gal, Rosie the Riveter. On the right, Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan. The juxtaposition of these two figures should focus our attention on Rosie's accomplishments with the tools of production and her somewhat masculinized appearance, her lunch pail, boots and biceps, and on a McLuhanesque account of what's going on.

Rosie the Riveter

McLuhan studied technologies as environments and the ways in which they reshape the inhabitants of those environments. One generalization he explores in "The Mechanical Bride" has to do with cultural developments, typically (at least when McLuhan was writing) directed by men, and the peculiar effect of feminizing their users. They concentrate power behind interfaces. The interfaces, a keyboard to finger or a screen to swipe, put the genders on more equal footing, because they undercut advantages otherwise enjoyed by physique. In the push-button age, button pushers rule. So what's the masculinized Rosie, trudging off to the factory, up to?

She seems to have been a portent. Out of step with the times, and having allowed the tools of her time--factories of whatever sort--to shape her, she patriotically tends to the job. But her tools fall back on their habits and relate to her as they would to a man, turning any feminine flow she might possess into masculine regimentation. The popular rendering shown here casts her as somewhat comical, putting on airs and posturing in a way traditionally reserved for men

Pay attention to the tools you use, ladies and gents, professionally and personally, because they will mold your attitudes, opinions and values (and your posture!). Her tools shaped Rosie into some kind of pseudo-man. The riveter carries on husbandless and so is an apt symbol of a wing of feminism.

(Thanks to the graphic designer who spiced McLuhan's photo with the quote.)

The Miseducation of America

2019-01-13T15:29:00.000-11:00

My career as a public school pupil, then student, and finally university graduate was an enjoyable excursion into fascinating and useful topics.

These topics included, sounding out printed words, knowing what a square root is and how enzymes work, and other stuff. Professional educators crafted this training, er . . . education to prepare my peers and me for some kind of life—some kind other than a life of wealth and its financial security.

Rather, my schooling prepared me to be a productive employee. And that I have been ever since. During my schooling the thought occurred to me many times that schooling is good for many things, but turning middle-class kids, like me, into financially independent adults is not one of those things.

The observation was underscored recently, somewhat painfully, when I acted on the advice of an acquaintance who recommended the book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” by investor Robert Kiyosaki. The book contains advice on investing and wealth acquisition and management. It offers simple, understandable explanations of income, expenses, assets, liabilities, balance sheets and the various ways in which these things relate to one another and how to manage those relationships. The book might be a useful component of a public-school curriculum.

But, besides the sounding out of printed words, the derivation of square roots and the chemistry of enzymes, there is no room, evidently, in public schooling curricula, for instruction in achieving competence managing financial investments and achieving financial security. Public schooling might have worthwhile objectives, but the financial savvy and independence of its graduates are not among those objectives. Regrettably.

Regrets aside, it’s time to bring on the derivatives, rehypothecation, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles, and even the securitization of subprime mortgages. And teach kids what this [bleeping] stuff is!

The Gurus of Pop

2019-01-13T14:58:00.000-11:00

Hollywood blockbusters, top-forty radio, printed pulp at the supermarket, kitsch, camp, corn, schlock, idiocy and worse bombard us from every angle. What to do?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s the water we swim in. Pop amusements compose a milieu that well-adjusted people relate to as, well . . . culture.

But look closely at the slew, the slop, the mess of mass media, instead of staggering through it, and you'll back away, then turn and run. What is culture, anyway?

I’m thinking not so much about the targets of high-brow derision—pro wrestling, movies with explosions, Readers’ Digest, and that sort of thing—but the refined filth, the sludge that the highbrows regard highly. I’m thinking about the content that fills the free time of people with college degrees and who fancy themselves connoisseurs of culture. That is, we should not imagine that PBS nor NPR nor other “public” outlets edify. They don’t elevate anyone. They are pop for the high-brow herd, selling an illusion of superiority, membership in a fake elite. Culture, per se, is a distraction that occupies and disarms the mind.

Remember the Avant Garde? One chunk of that cultural quirk had “composer” John Cage, working with a collaborator, put out a recording called HPSCHD, a “musical” composition, the LP of which came with a printed sheet of bass and treble settings. The listener was to participate in the playing of the piece by, with the help of a timer, adjusting the stereo’s bass and treble levels at regular intervals.

Auditory navel gazing.

Similar examples of cultural gunk oozed and ooze their way into modern and postmodern painting, dance, letters and the rest of it in a pervasive coarsening and dumbing down of culture and all who imbibe it.

Mass-manufactured music, movies, magazines and online digital info lock down the mind, which then sprouts flab. Every time that mp3 file plays it’s the same sequence of sounds. Every time you watch that Harry Potter movie it’s the same sequence of sounds and images. The stuff on TV is called programming for good reason. Such critiques of recorded media go back to Plato, who warned against cultural forms that cannot be engaged in dialog.

But culture can’t be all bad. It includes, after all, the classics.

But if it’s tied to the patronage of a client, or created on commission, or offered by the benevolent for the edification of the masses, then it’s propaganda. A culture is what you have when the simpler forms of life enjoy a comfortable, accommodating environment—like in a suburban development or a petri dish or wherever life has become enculturated.

We cultured plebes live under the patronage of patricians who for the most part remain unseen. And culture is the roof over us and the walls around us—a container built by elites to tame and contain thoughts and feelings so that pesky proles stay in line. Culture keeps us sleepwalking (a highly motivated state, as Marshall McLuhan observed.)

The misanthropes at the top know how to concoct an addictive time suck. Mass media content lures into its maw eyeballs, ears, and wallets, because that’s what it’s engineered so skillfully to do. Meanwhile, the culture engineers fabricate new episodes of media content, attaching to them bows of cool detachment, and releasing them into the flow of fads.

But pay attention, and mass media will reveal their true nature as phenomena to monitor and dissect, not consume. A mentally healthy person in this environment will ween him- or herself from the cult of mass media. One less episode this week, one less download next week, and let the deprogramming begin. A few steps along this path, and the sojourner will notice free time on his or her hands that media otherwise would consume.

The prospect of being troubled to figure out what to do with free time should not deter anyone from seeking more free time. It’s an opportunity to turn culture on its head. As McLuhan pointed out, media content is the juicy steak held out by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. But who, in this metaphor, is the burglar? The privileged inbreeders who husband the rest of the population?

Don’t cast yourself as the lead in The Truman Show. There are other options. The container called culture has a hole in it, a loophole. The little remarked solution to the seeming dilemma of mental containment is simply to ignore the cage of culture. Most of it can be ignored with little effort. Most of it should be ignored.

The task is to redefine oneself, to redirect one’s time and talents from consuming to creating culture.

But you won’t have Steven Spielberg’s budget. You’re not a pop guru, yet.

Distributed Content Agglomeration

2017-07-23T14:18:00.005-11:00

As content management across the Internet matures, to where, as of this writing, content gets retrieved and distributed on the fly routinely from disparate sources, each of which might hold only a small part of the requested content. The retrieval sequence proceeds according to rules of modal logic operating on content metadata. The agglomerated content gets synthesized and sequenced at the point of end-user delivery. BitTorrent manages content by this model.

The biological cell manages content the same way. Each protein molecule synthesized is content delivered according to a request. The cell is the end user. But the delivery of the proteinaceous content occurs by way of a vast content management system behind the scenes. It’s hard to find in the processes of that system anything resembling a one-to-one correspondence—between anything and anything else—as in the old one-gene, one-protein model of genetic expression. The protein delivered does not correspond to any contiguous sequence of genes in the cell’s DNA, but is a product of genetic snippets gathered from many places, and edited and re-arranged before the final sequence is fed into the ribosome. This has been going on, on Earth alone let alone elsewhere, for a few billion years.

Nature is the apotheosis of technology. Our evolutionary and historical path already is well trod. Nature has done it. Events of the temporal world unfold along a metabolic pathway that leads from the organic to the inorganic and back again inside the feedback loop of the stellar life cycle. Human technology and its industry, seemingly antagonistic toward nature, constitute a phase of nature’s reproductive cycle. Taking the step to the next phase is the immediate opportunity.

Intelligent Design + Darwinian Evolution = Dead End

2017-06-29T14:37:00.000-11:00

By casting nature in the role of machinery, the notion of Intelligent Design (ID) shows itself to be an anthropomorphizing tool. The designer-artifact lens through which IDers see nature projects onto nature the general shape of the human-artifact relationship. ID anthropomorphizes the supernatural, by making deity out to be a kind of super tinkerer, thereby, I suppose, filling theists with a feeling of familiarity with the divine, even if the tinkerer lacks eyes, hands, etc.

And . . .

By casting physical nature in the role of de-novo miracle, science shows itself to be a religious tool. The occurred-by-fiat lens through which scientists see natural law projects onto nature the general shape of the human-deity relationship. Science sanctifies the natural, by making physical laws out to be a kind of super miracle, thereby, I suppose, filling atheists with a feeling of familiarity with the divine, even if nature lacks mind, soul, etc.

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis - a moderate step in the right direction

2016-10-16T10:12:00.000-11:00

A discontent grows among the practitioners of evolution theory.

Research results keep outrunning the theory’s capacity to herd them—the results, that is, but the practitioners, too—and corral them inside the Modern Synthesis.

Evidence of discontent keeps piling up. For example, in July 2008 researchers from various fields of biological science convened in Altenberg, Switzerland, to formalize a so-called Extended Synthesis of evolutionary theory. MIT Press published the conference papers as a sourcebook, Evolution - the Extended Synthesis.

The book's contributors reassure readers that the findings presented pose no fundamental threat to the Darwinian model. The collective attitude seems to be that new discoveries in genomics, epigenetics, ecology and related fields merely complicate—without undermining—the natural selection model of evolution. These reassurances reek of cover, of maneuvering to avoid the label, “fringe” or the academic equivalent. Maybe, “Traitor.”

More recently, some of the Altenberg attendees, among others, launched a web site, The Third Way, as an organizing tool for scientists working on a model of evolution that accommodates the research findings that are stretching the Modern Synthesis. More recently the The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a major grant (£5.7m or $8m) to an international team of leading researchers for a three-year research program “to put the predictions of the extended evolutionary synthesis to the test.” The Royal Society in 2015 published an article, The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions that provides additional background information. And in November 2016 the Society hosted a scientific meeting on the topic, entitled, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives”.

A discontent among those working in the evolution biz is brewing if not already boiling over.

It seems that the evolution theory we learned in school is getting an earnest retooling. The breadth and depth of that retooling divides scientific opinion. It might involve tightening a few knobs, or it might involve a fundamental rebuild—a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Which way things shake out remains to be seen.

Whichever way things do shake out for mainstream evolution theory, the new developments embolden the star larvae hypothesis. The new developments describe a convergence of development and evolution, insofar as the new ideas describe development and evolution as sharing a common set of internal mechanics, of endogenous formative processes. In aggregate, the new discoveries make development and evolution seem to be processes of differentiation, or descent with modification, distinguished primarily by their spatial and temporal scales, not by their causal mechanisms. The following table summarizes the congruence of processes.

Discovery	Evolution of species in ecologies	Development of cell types in organisms
Conservation of DNA	Much less genomic variability across species than phenotypic variability suggests	Much less genotypic variability across cell types than phenotypic variability suggests
Epigenetic regulatory networks	Conserved DNA produces diverse phenotypes via epigenetic regulation of gene expression	Conserved DNA produces diverse phenotypes via epigenetic regulation of gene expression
Genomic mosaicism	Despite a general conservation of DNA across species, organisms in an ecology exhibit a degree of genetic variance	Despite a general conservation of DNA across tissues, cells in a complex organism exhibit a degree of genetic variance.
Pre-Adaptation, or "Anticipatory" Genes	Some unexpressed sequences code for tissues needed by descendant species.	Unexpressed sequences code for proteins needed by descendant cell types.

As these parallels (and perhaps others, such as might involve “junk” DNA) dovetail into a developmental model of evolution, the star larvae hypothesis stands ready as a paradigm within which the seemingly anomalous data—the coincidences and incommensurabilities—can reside. They can live comfortably as neighbors, having been reconciled. That contention is more fully developed at http://www.starlarvae.org/Star_Larvae_Ontophylogeny.

A recent paper, cited earlier, elaborates on this contention, incidentally to the intentions of its authors. The paper, The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions, includes a comparison of the core assumptions held by the Modern Synthesis and by the upstart Extended Synthesis [Table 1]. Each of the six observations to which the authors call attention happens also to make evolution, in its mechanical operations, resemble a process of development. Here are the points to which the authors call attention:

1) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes the pre-eminence of natural selection, the Extended Synthesis assumes that “Developmental processes, operating through developmental bias and niche construction, share with natural selection some responsibility for the direction and rate of evolution and contribute to organism–environment complementarity.”

That is, natural selection gets marginalized as endogenous processes and niche construction in the Extended Synthesis get a (perhaps equal?) slice of the credit for originating species. Niche construction has to do with organisms altering their environments in ways that have evolutionary consequences. An ontogenetic parallel occurs when cells in an embryo release morphogens, which influence the forms and functions of descendant cells as those cells differentiate, a case of ontogenetic niche construction.

2) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes that inheritance is genetic only, the Extended Synthesis assumes that “Inheritance extends beyond genes to encompass (transgenerational) epigenetic inheritance, physiological inheritance, ecological inheritance, social (behavioural) transmission and cultural inheritance.”

It’s not clear how literally “cultural inheritance” applies to evolution broadly, but the other considerations apply as much to cells differentiating in a body as they do to species differentiating in an ecology (at least if chemical communication among cells can be considered a social behavior). Inclusiveness in the context of cellular differentiation includes inheritance of cytoplasm and organelles, in addition to genes and epigenetic markers.

3) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes that genetic variation is random, the Extended Synthesis assumes that variation is non-random, “which means that some phenotypic variants are more likely than others.”

This also is the case with cell phenotypes as cells differentiate in a body.

4) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes that evolutionary change is gradual, the Extended Synthesis assumes that rates of change vary, depending on actions of regulatory systems or when “coordinated suites of traits” are managed by developmental processes.

This also is the case when cells in a body differentiate; e.g., some stem cells remain stem cells and some mature into their fully specialized (adult?) form. Rates of change can be very variable.

5) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes a gene-centric perspective; i.e., evolution is about changes in gene frequencies, the Extended Synthesis assumes an organism-centered perspective; i.e., evolution is about changes in phenotypic trait frequencies—whatever is going on with the genes.

This is the perspective assumed with regard to cellular differentiation in a developing organism. (That said, some degree of change in gene frequencies characterizes both the descent of species and that of cell types in a body, the latter, somewhat recent, discovery taking the name, “genomic mosaicism.”)

6) Unlike the Modern Synthesis, which assumes that macroevolution reduces to microevolution; i.e., selection, drift, mutation, and gene flow, the Extended Synthesis assumes that “Additional evolutionary processes, including developmental bias and ecological inheritance, help explain macro-evolutionary patterns and contribute to evolvability.”

Cellular differentiation during development also incorporates these circumstances / mechanisms.

What but spatial and temporal scale is left to distinguish evolution from development—the origin of species in an ecology from the origin of cell types in an organism?

The paper’s authors also compare the ways in which the Modern Synthesis and Extended Synthesis interpret various factors that impinge on the evolutionary process [Table 2.]

These factors are developmental bias, phenotypic plasticity, inclusive inheritance, and niche construction. The Modern Synthesis downplays the significance of these factors in shaping evolutionary outcomes. By contrast, by assigning a considerable significance to these factors as shapers of evolutionary outcomes, the Extended Synthesis funnels the dynamics of the evolutionary process into channels already recognized as facilitators and directors of cellular differentiation during development. Developmental bias, phenotypic plasticity, inclusive inheritance, and niche construction all factor into cellular differentiation.

This analysis of this particular paper might be applied to any number of publications that explicate the Extended Synthesis. The new data always point in the same direction: Evolution is a developmental process. That observation invites teleological assessments, because development is teleological—the outcomes are inherent in the process. If the process is spared meddling from disruptive outside influences and endogenous pathologies, then it can complete its life cycle, the life cycle of an organism, in the case of evolution that would be the stellar organism. But that recognition should cause no discontent.

Mass Media Constitute One Big Selfie?

2016-02-20T04:34:00.000-11:00

Update: on Feb 27, 2016, I posted this book review, minus the hyperlinks, to Amazon. The next day I received the following reply via email:

Your review could not be posted. Thanks for submitting a customer review on Amazon. Your review could not be posted to the website in its current form. While we appreciate your time and comments, reviews must adhere to the following guidelines: http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines

No specifics were given regarding my violation of the guidelines. After reading the guidelines, my best guess is that, because my review included the word, "turd," Amazon’s filterbot flagged the review as obscene or somehow otherwise objectionable.

So I removed the offending syllable and re-posted the review. I changed the phrase, "turd duly polished" to "spin duly spun" -- not sure if that makes sense, if spin can be spun, but it's no less coherent than much of what circumvents the filters and gets posted. In any case, I hoped that that might do it.

Well, spinning the turd did no good. The next day, March 3, I got another rejection email from Amazon, a duplicate of the original. The revised review still violated some undisclosed aspect of Amazon's Customer Review Creation Guidelines. Amazon provides zero guidance as to what precisely violated what in those guidelines, so I am (as are, I suppose, other reviewers in the same boat) left guessing as to how to remedy the situation.

Having said that, I have to wonder if the sentiments I expressed in the review were the real cause of the censorship. Here's what I attempted to post:
________________________________________________

The author of The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone, works for National Public Radio (NPR), which means that she is linked financially to the patronage of grant-bequeathing foundations, those social-engineering tools wielded by the wealthy, who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, which explains why the author of this psy-op artifact (which is delivered in dumbed-down comic book format for easy digestion by the semi-literate) is so intent on defending and rationalizing and justifying things as they are, on leaving an ostensible well enough alone.

The book is a transparent apologia for mainstream media and the media’s version of journalism (namely, the parroting of pronouncements of politicians and bureaucrats and their agents). But anyone who dives into today's online alt media with a mind toward objectivity (an elusive thing that the author seems to think is forever out of reach) will find plenty of primary documentation and reasoned analysis and skilled presentation of political, economic and cultural occurrences—and outright plots—that the mainstream media and its government cohorts would rather keep from public view. And the curious delver into alt media also will find plenty of garbage. And so one has to keep one’s wits about one. But underscoring such a practical approach is no part of this author’s agenda. Her mission is to provide cover for the powers that be.

Dear friends, when you imbibe mass media you are not gazing into a mirror, as author Gladstone contends. You are internalizing an image of the world and a set of concerns manufactured by the wealthy for the purpose of maintaining a certain socioeconomic distance between themselves and you. They are the guys who, in effect, employ this author, and they are interested in nurturing, so as to maintain, class distinctions.

The book kicks off with a familiar bromide, namely that if you suspect an organized malfeasance lurking, then you're mentally ill. This is the takeaway implied by the story of Natalija A. a turn-of-the-(20th)-century psychiatric patient who happened to be deaf and mute and is said to have written about a machine that used some kind of broadcast signal to influence her thoughts and behaviors. If you suspect that mass media constitute such an influencing machine, then you're not just a reasonably observant person. No. You are damaged goods and psychological kin of Natalija and in need of psychiatric attention. You fail to understand that when you amuse yourself with media you are absorbing your own neuroses projected outward, creating a tightening gyre that you have no business complaining about. Your suspicions about someone else writing the script and zooming the camera can be swept aside with a broad brushstroke of watered-down psychobabble.

So advances the argument of this book, in effect.

By the way, Natalija's psychotherapist,Victor Tausk, the man who popularized her concept of an “influencing machine” as a syndrome of mental illness, was so mentally stable himself that he ended his life by simultaneously hanging and shooting himself. So we probably should believe that his bizarre reports about the tormented, challenged woman are trustworthy.

Aside from its usefulness as an insult to media critics, however, the influencing "machine" metaphor also is useful for the purposes of the author in that it manages perceptions, and the metaphor makes the mission of the book clear from the outset. If the influencing entity is a mere machine, even an imaginary one, then how can we point a finger at human agents, such as the corporate/foundation chieftains who program and steer that machine, when there’s a bad outcome? What's implied in the book is that human agents outside of the media audience are absent from the social-engineering equation, and so no culpability is to be had for bad outcomes. How convenient for the media industry and its defenders. Isn’t it curious at least that the book was not titled, “The Myth of the Influencing Machine”?

So, the underlying message here is that everything is hunky-dory in the land of popular mass media, and if you don’t buy that then you’re nutty. After all, the media just reflect us, the imbibers, the audience. Unlike Narcissus, however, who fell in love with his reflection, we fear ourselves as reflected in media, according to the author. So the conspiracy theorists are right: the media contribute to society's chronic jitters; the media fan the flames of suspicion, suggest impending disasters. The author’s escape clause is her contention that we’re not ingesting content engineered to unsettle and undermine, but only our own neuroses, delivered to us by the mirrors of media. In other contexts this is known as blaming the victim.

Of course—I’ll say it again—no culpability can land at the feet of the owners of the media, because they just drift around inside their offices like atoms of inert gas. It's us, the viewers and listeners, who cast a reflection of ourselves that the media empires merely bring into focus. (In the book "journalism" and "media" seem to be conjoined twins, interchangeable even, a handy equivocation.)

The author trots out a mainstream defense team to run interference, lest anyone wander from the authorized path: author Nicholas Carr, communications theorist Neil Postman, author Douglas Adams, transhumanist Ray Kurzweil and the ever engaging Cass Sunstein, with an obligatory tip of the hat to Marshall McLuhan. These guys really know what’s going on and are eager to make sure that everyone internalizes the (politically) correct understanding of what’s up. Thanks, guys.

In a thinly disguised jab at alt media, Gladstone cautions against the dangers of the “echo chamber” effect, in which people consistently turn to a small set of sources for information, which sources themselves tend to cite and reflect one another. You, dear reader, decide for yourself whether the mainstream authorities she assembles constitute their own version of an echo chamber.

The author cautions that “media are beset by biases” (the media or journalism? Well, I guess precision of thought is out the window in the 21st Century). F’rinstance, there’s the “commercial bias,” which means that reportage has to be about new stuff, because, “We crave novelty.” There’s also “status quo bias,” which means the exact opposite, namely that we prefer that things “stay the same.” How these biases duke it out in the newsroom is anybody’s guess.

Outright errors in news reportage? Not a problem. The author suggests that we news consumers should “chalk up most inaccuracies to sloppiness. Let's at least assume that usually reporters don’t know for sure that their facts are wrong.” Golly, could you set the bar for journalistic professionalism any lower? & You know what you do when you assume.

As Gladstone explains, “journalism has entered a new era of openness, all in the interest of building trust with news consumers.” (Really?) With the turd duly polished, the author minimizes whatever shortcomings cannot be denied with a sigh and a reminder that, alas, it's always been that way. (Really?) So much the worse for journalism. No wonder it belongs in a museum.

Intelligent Design: A Case Study in Cherry Picking

2016-01-01T07:30:00.000-11:00

Intelligent Design (ID) theory proposes that her complex workings make nature look so much like an artifact that we should take her to be one, one that, according to ID discourse, was willed into being by a pre-existing creative intelligence. This is in distinction to the prevailing explanation of nature offered by science.

Problem is, the putative intelligence responsible for nature is, alas, a stunningly peculiar species of intelligence. According to the IDers, it is unlike any intelligence anyone ever has encountered anywhere outside of theology (or science fiction). IDers propose a brainless intelligence and an omniscient one at that.

Somehow, despite all inductive evidence to the contrary, there exists, they argue, an intelligence that requires no brain, nor even solid-state circuitry, for it to attend its business. Nature’s intelligent designer doesn’t need a body of any sort at all. The designer belongs to a unique class of intelligences, of which it is the sole member.

This odd construct, a disembodied supermind, derives from a faulty analogy. IDers observing human invention, notice that nature in suggestive ways looks and acts like a high-tech machine. They reason that since explaining machinery requires reference to an intelligent designer (or several), then so must explaining nature. This line of analogical thinking constitutes a case study in the disreputable practice known as cherry picking.

Accounting for human inventions requires that we refer to intelligence, yes, but the account also must entail brains, eyes, ears, hands, language, note taking, experimental methodologies, use of tools, and so forth. Intelligence per se is not going to accomplish anything. Manufacturing impressive technologies requires more than thoughts, more than ideas, no matter how insightful or inventive they might be. It requires more than intelligent design.

From among the many various requirements needed to produce complex technologies, IDers pluck the cherry of intelligence from the milieu that normally accompanies the design and manufacturing of artifacts and plops it into a context in which, otherwise, we never find it, namely in a discarnate immortal entity that produces physical phenomena simply by willing them to occur. Nothing in human experience supports the idea that intelligence might operate in such a manner. It would be a uniquely special case.

Nonetheless, despite its logical shortcomings, the ID position possesses merit, because it begs a question that the star larvae hypothesis is eager to see answered. If it’s kosher to declare that intelligence can exist without a brain, then maybe there’s no real objection to the proposal that a complicated physical structure or process can exist without a designer/creator. The begged question is thus: If an intelligent creator can be invoked by fiat, then why cannot a physical universe as readily be invoked by fiat, obviating the extra step? If we can declare special cases, then we don’t need a designer to explain nature. Nature herself can step in as the special case.

Human innovators study nature’s ways and, applying what they gather from their observations and experiments, craft technologies that embody specified complexity, thereby simulating nature. Unlike human technologies, however, nature need not require any pre-existing intelligence, omnipotent, omniscient, or otherwise. It can assert itself as ontological bedrock. The intelligent design argument ingeniously shoots itself in the foot.

Is YouTube Omitting Comments on Videos Selectively ?

2015-11-15T07:50:00.000-11:00

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

This screenshot shows the same YouTube page in two browsers: Google Chrome at left and Mozilla Firefox at right (tho which is which is not important - I don't think). Notice that the comments are for the same video, which is the premier Unspun show with Jan Irvin and Joe Atwill. When I first watched this vid, I left what I thought was a reasonably thoughtful comment. And it posted just fine. No reason to think anything was screwy. There it was.

But when I went back to re-watch the vid the other day, being not logged in, the comments for the vid did not include mine. Puzzled, I opened a second browser, went to YouTube, and logged in. And then, there was my comment.

So, displaying the same vid simultaneously in two browsers--one, where I'm logged in and one where I'm not logged in--gives me two different displays. When YouTube knows it's me, because I'm logged in, it includes my posted comment. When it doesn't know (at least by way of log in) who's watching, then my comment doesn't appear.

Notice that each screen gives a different count for ALL COMMENTS. One gives five and one gives six. The latter count includes my comment. So, whether the comment shows is not a function of whether my comment is among the newest or most popular.

Given the subject matter of the show and of my comment--the machinations of the ruling class--it's tempting to believe that the selective display of the comment is a function of some algorithm's politically calculated filtering.

Anybody else notice selective editing of ALL COMMENTS by YouTube--your comments displayed in ALL COMMENTS only when you're logged in?

Nature as Machine: Inverting the Assumption

2015-10-25T05:24:00.000-11:00

Intelligent Design (ID) advocates call attention to the ways in which nature works. They says it looks like a complex machine. And, they have a point. Photosynthesis in plants, nucleosynthesis in stars, complicated nanoscale assemblies, and so on, make nature look like a high-tech science project.

But the metaphor—nature as machine—does not reveal nature as having been intelligently designed. It’s a metaphor.

Invert the assumption: Maybe it’s not the case that nature is a machine, with an implied design (as if technology was primordial and nature modeled on its principles). Maybe it’s the obvious case that nature came first, with humans being smart enough to study nature’s ways and apply that experience to building tools and towns and space stations. Nature inspires. But that does not make it an example of what it inspires.

Technicians make progress when their designs harmonize with natural law, but that does not mean that nature itself, with all its laws, was designed. Nature is just ground level, ontological bedrock. It does not come with a requirement that something supernatural, behind the scenes, got it started or propels it along.

Certain chunks of nature resemble humanly crafted artifacts, and so some people conclude that nature must itself be an intelligently designed artifact. But many things resemble things that they are not. Sometimes the similarities are striking.

A bat is in striking ways similar to a bird. Both are warm-blooded vertebrates, send out distinctive vocal signals, eat insects, flap wings to fly, congregate in social groups and so on. But an expedition in search of bat eggs will end up with egg on its face.

The God of classical theology, a deity that preceded and designed the physical universe, is a kind of bat egg.

The conclusion that bat eggs and a classical God must exist is justified if bats are birds and nature is an artifact. But if the similarity between bats and birds and between nature and high-tech is just a resemblance, then both conclusions land in the dump.

You don’t need intelligence to create life, as every parent knows. My wife and I did not pore over CAD drawings or consult engineering tables when we started a family. Creatures can occur in the absence of technical acumen, because living is just what nature does.

But isn’t nature too complicated not to have a blueprint behind it? Its sheer strangeness and its seeming unlikeliness—that “specified complexity” to which ID advocates direct our attention—argue for a supernatural designer. So generally runs the theistic rebuttal.

But if the issue of origins is settled by discovering a thing that exists without itself ever having come into existence, as, for example, the classical God, then the cosmologists’ supposed multigenerational ensemble of universes, called the multiverse, is the more parsimonious candidate for the unoriginated entity, because it is simpler than God.

No strangeness of nature can compare to that of an immaterial all-powerful entity that wields an infallible omniscience; was neither born, crafted by a predecessor, nor will pass away; passes judgement on the deceased; and so on. Classical theism asserts the existence of something more fantastic than the specified complexity of nature, so that if nature needs to be explained by way of a designer, so does that designer. Classical theism proposes something so outré, so unparsimonious, that it deserves to be ruled out of contention. It is at best superfluous.

Nonetheless, the star larvae hypothesis acknowledges in nature many grades of subjectivity, with that of greatest scope being entitled to the name, God. But a mind does not precede its body. Mind and body feel and impart influences mutually from and to one another. But no mind designs its own body

But for Adaptations: Inverting the Assumption

2015-10-18T05:53:00.001-11:00

Evolution theorists seem to assume that a successful creature marches into its environment equipped with an armamentarium of adaptations. Such a creature inherits its adaptations from its parents. The adaptations bestow fitness upon the creature. This fitness in turn bestows reproductive success, at least relative to that of the creature’s local conspecific peers/competitors. The reproductive success conveys the creature’s DNA to its progeny, who thereby themselves enjoy an armamentarium of adaptations similar to that of their parents (unless a changing environment turns those adaptations into neutral or even deleterious traits).

Point is, reproductive success is taken to be an effect caused by adaptations.

This position, stated otherwise, contends that, but for the adaptations, the creature would experience reproductive failure relative to its local conspecific peers.

But we can invert the assumption: Maybe the default position ought to be that organisms normally enjoy reproductive success, absent any factors, endogenous or exogenous, that undermine that success.

Organisms are integrated wholes, adapted, but not possessing adaptations. Organicism suggests that a creature doesn’t possess adaptations any more than an atom possesses protons. A proton, or a fused bundle of them, just is an atom. Atoms typically come decked out with other particles, the neutrons and electrons, but no protons, no atoms.

Similarly, a creature does not possess anatomical and physiological adaptations. It simply is its anatomy and its physiology. It comprises them, and they compose it. No physiology or anatomy, no creature.

In the case of a bird, for example, wings might be called an adaptation, but lay a couple on the ground and not much will happen. Lay a wingless bird on the ground and not much will happen beyond the suffering and demise of the bird. Whatever gets designated as an adaptation contributes no more to the rest of the creature than the rest contributes to it. Without the wings there just is no viable “rest of the bird,” that happens not to own wings. For evolutionary purposes, there just is no critter.

So, does the presence of adaptations enable or the absence of lethal/sterilizing circumstances allow a creature to live and reproduce?

In any case, if evolutionary theorists insist on retaining the notion of adaptation, then they should clarify the term as designating not things that an organism has but the whole organism. Nature doesn’t select traits, thereby turning them into adaptations, and then assemble the traits into adapted organisms. Nature selects whole developmental physiologies and the resulting creatures’ characteristic behaviors. That’s all it has to work with.

A simple way to operationalize natural selection would be to count progeny, or more specifically, to count viable, fertile progeny. If this is the understanding—that natural selection means relative reproductive success in the same way that hunger means two or more days without food, that is, if natural selection is operationalized in terms of empirical observations and statistical thresholds—then the term would have a noncontroversial conventionalized usage (with potentially other thresholds established to define genetic drift, and maybe others bad luck or acts of God). But if “natural selection” denotes a process that cannot be operationalized in this or some other way, then the concept of natural selection, whatever merits it might possess, is not a scientific concept, but an example of the nominal fallacy, in which the christening of something with a name (e.g., natural selection) mistakenly is taken to be an explaining of the thing (e.g., evolutionary outcomes).

Rational thinkers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your adaptations.

The Twin Phantoms: Genes and Information

2015-07-18T10:17:00.000-11:00

Ongoing research in molecular biology has delivered to the world the peculiar finding that the term gene refers to no determinable thing at all. Gene is an idea. It grew from an assumption. The assumption, implied by the prevailing scientific philosophy of reductionism, is that there must be a smallest unit of biological expression. And a smallest unit of biological inheritance. And that atomic entity was called a gene.

Despite gene losing its power to denote, the science of genomics continues to advance and looks determined to keep doing so. And this is also despite reductionism’s shortcomings increasingly becoming apparent, as research reveals the seemingly intractable interwovenness of the processes and subprocesses of biological metabolism.

Reductionism fails because everything that goes on inside a living cell depends on—is caused by, directly or indirectly–everything else that goes on inside the cell. And then, adding more complication, there are exogenous influences. And above it all, no locus of control. There is a lacuna of control. The cell has no brain. The sequencing of the human genome, that recent triumph of reductionism, like the cataloging of elementary particles, provides a compendium, but it resides far from the macrostructure, far from an accounting of gross outcomes. Structures and processes that define the macro world do not map readily onto elementary bits.

Once causality is recognized as a two-way street (or a multidimensional interchange), then neither top-down nor bottom-up models of nature will suffice. And whatever somethings we want to denote by gene they cannot be point origins of causal chains but only links in such chains. And what vital essence ensures that the cellular machinery runs smoothly? Somebody’s got to manage the store.

Enter then the latest applicant for the position of deus ex machina, that magical, mystical sort-of-something called information.

Arrange the atoms just right, and . . . presto! A (kind of) causal agent arrives, the untouchable information.

This property or characteristic or emergent attribute of variously arranged bits of matter (or is it just another name for the geometrical arrangement itself of the atoms in space and the distribution of electrical charges among them?) supposedly explains why at least some events occur as they do and not in some other way. Such explanations of natural forms, those that invoke information and its affiliates, the codes and programs, compose a fine metaphorical stuff, but in the world of databases and information management, what corresponds to a nucleotide or a codon or a gene? Information is just today's phlogiston.

Nonetheless, we probably should expect information talk to enjoy a resilience comparable to that wielded by gene talk. Information is a secular god of the gaps, shoveled in to smooth over the reductionist model of biology.

Toward Radical Organicism: A Rant on the Philosophy of Nature as Creature

2015-06-19T14:11:00.001-11:00

The processes that operate inside a living cell might tempt us to credit for their organized complexity some kind of executive intelligence. And any such intelligence as might be involved in the metabolic churnings of a cell must reside either beyond this world (i.e., in deity) or within this world (e.g., in DNA). Admittedly, the former conjecture asserts intelligence literally, while the latter attributes it more or less figuratively.

Nonetheless, such speculations invite philosophizing:

Can a nonphysical anything wield intelligence?
Can intelligence reside in a mere, albeit complex, molecule?

Cutaway illustration of the living cell. Neither divine artifact nor improbable chemical machine.

Point is (aside from the prospect that intelligence is no natural kind at all but a construct of human definitions and usages) recommending either approach toward understanding nature’s organized processes is to anthropomorphize: Both approaches, metaphysical and merely material, project human capacities onto things that are not human. To project intelligence onto supernatural entities or onto master molecules is to anthropomorphize, a conceit that inquiries into nature ought to avoid.

To suppose that a deliberating mind is needed to design or operate the biochemical levers that trigger or impede processes inside a cell is to anthropomorphize. To suppose that somewhere physically inside the cell is a something that makes such decisions as are made is to anthropomorphize. This latter observation is particularly the case now that research into gene regulatory networks demonstrates that the biochemistry inside a cell operates as an organic whole. There are dependencies and interdependencies, but no executive intelligence sits atop a hierarchy of control.

We have “intelligent” and “design,” “master genes,” “control switches,” “codes” and “programs” from which to construct an understanding of the cell as a representative organism. Such concepts are fine work-a-day metaphors, but literalizing and projecting them onto nature is a detour into anthropomorphism. Nature is not designed or programmed by an intelligence or anything else. Nature is not a whew! of chance. Nature is not of gods or fortunate happenstance. Nature is neither a miracle nor a machine.

Peel back the curtain, and there’s nothing to see. Nature, in all its messy complexity, in all its nurturing and desolation, in all its unlikely satisfactions is all there is: Organism. Nature earns its living by weaving novelty, habit, objects and subjects into ever more intense, elaborate and sublime aesthetic processes and experiences. It suffers the setbacks inherent in being alive. Its animate soul inspires each new universe it bears. Nature is ontologically animate, exuberant, irreducible, and non-contingent. This is the broad sense of organicism, the last philosophy left standing once dumb dead matter and disembodied consciousness have slapped one another silly.

Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs): Major Collision at the Intersection of Evolution and Development

2015-06-09T14:41:00.000-11:00

Q: How does a fertilized egg cell give rise to such a variety of cell types as compose the body of a complex organism?

A: That fertilized egg cell’s DNA arrived pre-loaded with the genetic information needed to craft the specialized cell types that compose the body of that complex organism.

Although each cell in that body inherits all of the fertilized egg cell’s genes, specific genes get switched on and off by other genes that produce regulatory molecules, and those genes are switched on and off by other genes and the molecules they produce according to what is needed for each type of cell. And all of this biochemical management occurs by feedback loops. The biochemistry that oversees the differentiation (and stabilization) of cell types in the developing organism is organized into gene regulatory networks (GRNs), very elaborate chemical feedback loops.  

The point to be made about GRNs is that, by regulating gene expression, the cellular machinery can coax from a highly conserved set of genes (those of the original fertilized egg) a liberal diversity of cell types (skin, muscle, nerve, etc.).

So far so good. But one noteworthy development is the increasing significance that evolutionary theorists ascribe to GRNs. Gene regulatory networks, not the acquisition of new genes, manage the differentiation of species from their common ancestors in much the same way as they manage the differentiation of cells in a body from their common ancestor, the fertilized egg cell. Diverse descendant phenotypes lurk within the DNA of ancestral genomes and genotypes alike, waiting to be switched on.

The science of comparative genomics confirms a fundamental conservation of DNA across species, a finding that came as a surprise to everyone. The genetic similarities seen across species are too striking to sweep under the rug, and at least some researchers are candid about the new data’s impact on evolutionary theory.  

Charles R. Marshall, a biological science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, observes in a book review in the September 20, 2013 issue of Science,

"In fact, our present understanding of morphogenesis indicates that new phyla were not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes"

This observation does double duty, because it also describes how a fertilized egg cell gives rise to descendant cell types. The descendant cell types emerge through the rewiring of gene regulatory networks.

Evidently, we can say that the genes for descendant species were there already in remote ancestors, or that the GRNs for descendant species were there already, or both were there already. In any case, what were they doing there? If they functioned one way, or were silent, in ancestors, how is it that they just happened to be re-wirable to produce highly dissimilar, yet “adapted,” descendants? That seems far fetched. But it makes sense and is to be expected if evolution is a case of development. It looks like GRNs manage the differentiation of species in an ecology in some manner similar to that in which such networks regulate the differentiation of cells in a body, namely by rearranging patterns of development.

Consider this adaptation of the quote above, "In fact, our present understanding of cellular differentiation in developing organisms indicates that new cell types are not made by new genes but largely emerge through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) of already existing genes."

In Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa (Cell Cycle 6:15, August 2007) researcher Michael Sherman also argues that diverse species develop from a common, conserved, genome. His case rests largely on the presence of anomalous genes in ancestral species that are needed by descendant species, a circumstance called, pre-adaptation. He summarizes,

“In thinking about metazoan evolution, one should realize that any evolutionary event represents changes in developmental programs, rather than changes in a developed organism. [. . . .] This hypothesis postulates that (1) shortly (in geological terms) before [the] Cambrian period a Universal Genome that encodes all major developmental programs essential for every phylum of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism; (2) The Metazoan phyla, all having similar genomes, are nonetheless so distinct because they utilize specific combinations of developmental programs. In other words, in spite of a high similarity of the genomes in phyla X and Y, an organism belonging to phylum X expresses a specific set of active developmental programs, while an organism belonging to a different phylum Y has a distinct set of “working” programs specific for phyla Y. This seemingly trivial statement changes the whole perception of evolution, claiming that the placement of an organism to a particular taxon depends on expression of a specific set of pre-existing developmental programs, rather than on difference in the genetic information per se. Therefore, within the Universal Genome model, what we perceive as a sequential evolution is actually a reflection of expression of one or another combination of programs from the Universal Genome. These postulates explain a simultaneous emergence of Metazoan phyla during [the] Cambrian period, as well as similarities of genomes and a dramatic increase in genome complexity in Metazoan phyla. [emphasis added]”

On just how it happened that the major developmental programs essential for every phylum of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism the author does not speculate. But their presence there is to be expected, if evolution is an instance of development. The author’s characterization, elsewhere in the article, of developmental algorithms that wait in the wings as harboring “excessive” genetic information might be rendered more accurately as their harboring anticipatory genetic information.

Already in 1999, researcher W. H. Holland in an article that appeared in Nature (Vol 402, Supplement, December 2, 1999) titled The Future of Evolutionary Developmental Biology recognized a common genome across species. He writes,

 "So many examples of [DNA] conservation have now been found that it is no longer considered surprising. We can now state with confidence that most animal phyla possess essentially the same genes, and that some (but not all) of these genes change their developmental roles infrequently in evolution [emphasis added]."  

When and where ecological conditions become hospitable, the highly conserved nucleotide sequences of the animal kingdom launch into existence new species, as needed, via the rewiring of developmental patterns. This is the developmental model of evolution proposed by the star larvae hypothesis. Evolution (phylogeny) shares with development (ontogeny) raw materials (a highly conserved set of nucleotides), operating mechanisms (gene regulatory networks), and outputs (highly diverse phenotypes).

Whether we’re talking cells in a body or species in an ecology, phenotypes diversify, or differentiate, from variously regulated but shared genes. Natural selection can cull the herd in an ecology, filtering from the pool genes that lead to reproductive incompetence, just as it can with cells in a body. As philosopher Jerry Fodor summarized it, natural selection can at most tune the piano. It cannot compose the melody.

The role of composer, or at least of conductor, seems to fall to endogenous gene regulatory networks.

 But if evolution is an instance of development, then what strange creature is developing?

Trailing Psalms

2015-04-12T13:48:00.000-11:00

I. Parallel lines like
Prisoner stripes

Rendered low
Now feathery, wild.

Jet’s tail
Blooms, a fog of spicules.

II. Millipedes occult
Crescent moon.

III. New geometry of sky
Suspends
A vault of heavy metals,

The Kubrick sky,
The spinal dust . . . .

Final stroke
Splits a sky’s
Ribs apart.

IV.   Plane plumes diffuse
Like watercolors
Migrating through parchment.

Blue sky erased

      Line by line.

V.   Across veiny, steel wool
Sky, silvery
Rotting skeleton
Nudged to horizon's edge.

Density of particulates.

Dispersal fields from hard
Lines, clouds
Shed their hair
Everywhere.
Pilots feed the new blanket,
Of silken gauze, rended.

Milk
Soup
Hangs

And rains.

Secular Totem: Natural Selection

2014-12-08T09:01:00.001-11:00

During the past few weeks I'd been enjoying an engaging exchange about evolution theory on an online science forum. One of the threads I was posting in posed the question as to whether evolution theory adheres to scientific method. My comments in the thread focused on the veracity of the concept of natural selection. I implied that natural selection theory was lacking.

Things seemed to be going well, but then *Kablooey*, the moderator recognized, rightly, that I had diverted the conversation into a rabbit hole. I had wandered off script. And he threw me in the penalty box --- my posts in this thread were relegated to the Trash Can.

Given the unpopularity of my posts -- my arguments won no converts -- it's tempting to believe that their final resting place in the Trash Can had something to do with that unpopularity. Nonetheless, the moderator did recognize that I was not addressing the topic of scientific method directly and deserved some kind of rebuke. But the Trash Can?

For the curious, you can judge for yourself whether my comments are Trash-Can worthy:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/86744-starlarvaes-thread-hijack-from-does-evolution-follow-the-scientific-method-if-so-how/page-1

Reconceptualizing Evolution as an Instance of Development - Phylogeny is its own Ontogeny; Start with the Zygote.

2014-09-21T07:22:00.000-11:00

During the development of a complex organism, a fertilized ovum, or zygote, divides in two, then again into twice as many cells and eventually into all the cells that compose the organism's body. As the cells proliferate, they differentiate in form and function into the various cell types of that particular kind of body. This differentiation into skin, stomach, nerve, and other cell types occurs even though the cells of a developing body all share a common genotype, that of the original zygote. The paradox of one genotype yielding many cellular phenotypes has been resolved, in a general sense, through the mechanisms of epigenetics. A relatively new branch of molecular biology, epigenetics addresses issues related to gene regulation and gene regulatory networks. The new discipline aims to explain how, during development, genes get turned on and off and when (as in larval or adult forms of organisms) and where (as in spleen or kidney) they do.

The new discipline is an upstart. Epigenetics would seem to demote DNA from being the cell's chief executive to its merely utilitarian, dumb server. DNA includes an archive of messenger-RNA templates (and the messenger RNA molecules transcribed from the templates still pass through an editing suite before being escorted to the ribosome, where they get translated into proteins). The molecular machinery of epigenetics, through normal chemical bonding, excites or inhibits DNA "expression" or "action." The countless combinations of sections of DNA that can be expressed and repressed here and there in sequence or in tandem produce multiform cellular phenotypes from the highly conserved DNA of the original zygote.

From a complex database a skilled operator can extract many kinds of reports, by slicing the data this way then that. DNA is such a complex database, responding to many and diverse calls for data. The creatures of the Earth are reports summoned from DNA, not expressions of any executive talent that resides in the DNA. This is the new view of things from the world of epigenetics.

But epigenetic mechanisms do more than regulate cellular differentiation during development. What is particularly significant, from the perspective of the star larvae hypothesis, is that epigenetic mechanisms also are implicated, increasingly, in the diversification of species from a conserved genome during evolution.

"Conserved genome" is taking a liberty, admittedly, but how much of one? As statistical genomics continues to reveal, the conservation of DNA across species is far more extensive than anyone had expected. Because genomes differ among species far less than had been anticipated, some commenters even have coined the phrase, "universal genome" to underscore the striking commonalities among genomes shared by diverse species. Evolution increasingly seems to be an instance of development, the two processes of development and evolution sharing a reliance on epigenetic mechanisms to pull forth diverse forms from a shared database. Even though development and evolution differ markedly in scale, they grow increasingly mechanically similar as research proceeds. The star larvae hypothesis suggests the term ontophylogeny to designate biology's generic process of differentiation/diversification (an appropriation from J-J. Kupiec).

Let the chips fall, but the star larvae hypothesis continues find encouragement in new discoveries in molecular biology that pertain to "descent with modification," whether the descent is of tissues during development or of species during evolution. The hypothesis watches for new breakthroughs in this area, because the trend line continues to dovetail with its prediction that evolution will come to be recognized as an instance of development.

That's when things get interesting. That's when the hypothesis directs attention to an elephant in the room. Namely, if evolution becomes mechanically indistinguishable from development, or at least so dependent on the same mechanisms that issues of spatial and temporal scale become the last refuge of defenders of the old paradigm, then potentially troubling issues arise for normal science. (These troubles don't pertain in the context of the star larvae hypothesis, however. Just saying.)

One: Development proceeds in a preferred direction. Given an accommodating environment, an adult chicken, and not an adult penguin, will be called forth from a chick embryo. Development has a teleological character. If evolution is an instance of development, then it, too, must have a teleological character, a preferred direction. This will be a tough pill for science to swallow.

Evolution coming to be seen as a process that depends on endogenous factors as much as does development raises the challenge of applying the new understanding. What might it say about evolution on exoplanets? Theorists of evolution should have something predictive to say about questions such as these: Given an Earth-size planet in some solar system's "habitable zone," i.e., at the requisite distance from the system's central star, or sun, and which planet finds itself steward of viruses and bacteria, what exogenous contingencies will influence the descent of phenotypes and to what extent and in which directions? And to what extent will endogenous physiology influence the descent of phenotypes and to what extent and in which directions? Although, such predictions might soon be forthcoming.

For its part, the star larvae hypothesis predicts that endogenous gene regulatory networks will generate phenotypes along the lines of the types of body plans that have evolved on Earth. The "tree of life" on exoplanets that bear complex life will include essentially the same major divisions, classes, orders, and phyla as those seen on Earth and probably a few platypus-like oddball assemblies as well. Incorporating the assertions of panspermia, the star larvae hypothesis assumes that diverse planets will share in the "universal genome."

>Two: Development, or ontogeny, typically is characterized as advancing through the stages of a life cycle, with the post-reproductive adult occupying the terminal stage. If evolution is an instance of development, then what is the adult form of the organism that's developing? And what events constitute a complete reproductive life-cycle of that organism?

Conceiving of life on Earth as being engaged in a process of development, a planetary ontogeny, might seem less crazy if the sceptic appreciates that the bodies of complex organisms are themselves ecologies. Most cells in a human body, for example, are bacterial cells. Each human body is a constantly evolving ecosystem of microbial symbionts, parasites and stowaways. The fellow travelers constitute the "microbiomes" that compose human bodies. Development is ecological and evolution is developmental. The same relationships seem to pertain at all scales.

The strain that humankind is putting on the Earth—particularly in light of nuclear mishaps, geoengineering, weaponized microbes, and the seemingly suicidal sociopathy of the various factions of would-be global oligarchs—might tempt observers to render a harsh verdict against humankind, to liken humans to a deadly, havoc-wreaking, ecosystem-wrecking, cancer. But such a condemnation would be misguided.

Humankind doesn't represent a global cancer that needs to be treated, but a burgeoning new life, one, however, that can distinguish itself from a cancer only by engineering its own delivery into the weightless environment of outer space.

Evolution as Development and the Demise of Darwin's Natural Selection Theory

2014-08-21T07:03:00.000-11:00

The inhumanities of the Holocaust swept from public view the until-then popular cause of eugenics. But before World War II eugenics thrived as a civic cause in the United States and the United Kingdom. Improving human stock through selective breeding and the sterilizing, or even the euthanizing, of the "unfit" had come to be regarded widely as scientifically sound public policy. The Wikipedia entry for "eugenics" provides an introduction to this mostly forgotten fashion of the times, which Nazi ideology took to extremes of horror and which today is banished, at least in its overt forms, from policy discussion, though social critics continue to uncover its covert forms & see embedded video below:
Advocacy of eugenics continues under the banner of population control and similar euphemisms.

The Anglo-American eugenicists of the early 20th century invoked Darwinian natural-selection theory to gird their ideological bent. But, according to the arguments and evidence that Alan Bennett presents in "Evolution Revolution", these social engineers did not hijack Darwinism, nor twist it into service in a way to which Darwin would have objected. On the contrary, Darwin embraced the eugenicist agenda from the outset. Not only did Darwin himself promote eugenics, but the agenda's advocates also included Darwin's half-cousin, Francis Galton, who formalized the concept and propounded it as civic duty; Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog"); and Huxley's grandsons, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Julian serving for a time as president of the British Eugenics Society and Aldous sketching a blueprint for a caste society in his "Brave New World."

The objective of the Darwinian offensive was twofold, as Bennett summarizes:

Cast the working class in the role of the unfit.
Denigrate religion.

This history, the dark heart of Darwinian theory, presented in thoroughly referenced detail, makes up the first major portion of the book.

But the anti-Darwinian angle of Bennett's argument unwinds in a complicated way and extends beyond discrediting the motives of Darwin and his acolytes. That is, the attack is not merely ad hominem. Bennett establishes it as a point of historical fact that the concept of "descent with modification" had been around for some time prior to Darwin. Victorian society was not hostile to the idea of evolution, which it saw as evidence of God's wisdom, in His having crafted natural law so as to give rise to the diversity of life.

Neither was the mechanism of natural selection original with Darwin. It too was a concept familiar to Victorian scientists. But natural selection failed to gain traction as a scientific idea, before Darwin and his propagandists took up the cause, because the scientists of the day perceived that it was inadequate to account for the diversity of life. Under the influence of an optimizing mechanism, such as natural selection, they reasoned, phenotypes should converge, not diverge, with the passing of generations.

Natural selection theory never has rested on solid scientific evidence or reasoning. Although, by appealing to statistics and common prejudice, Darwinians grafted onto natural selection theory the trappings of a science. As a result, the sequentially amended theory became almost infinitely elastic in its capacity to absorb anomalous findings. It managed consistently to re-describe "how nature works" in ways contrived to preserve a niche for itself in the explanatory scheme. From the time Charles Darwin foisted it upon the world, natural selection theory effectively served the ideological ends of diverse brands of racists and elitists, despite its lack of scientific rigor.

However, if we follow Bennett in rejecting natural selection as the primary engine of evolution, then we are left with a process minus any explanation as to how it works. We still have to account for evolution's particular outcomes. Bennett proposes to fill the void, but the mechanism that he nominates to serve as evolution's centerpiece arrives with its own baggage.

One thrust of Bennett's revision of evolution theory borrows from ideas that competed early on with Darwin's own. The author combines the structuralist approach of Darwin's contemporary and rival, Richard Owen, with the "Lamarckian" approach of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. This hybrid model has much to recommend it.

Naturalist Richard Owen ascribed the particulars of evolutionary change to natural laws (endogenous factors); whereas Lamarck ascribed the particulars to heritable changes in an organism that are caused by environmental stresses (exogenous factors). Bennett presents a history of these ideas, then summarizes:

"As we saw, the idea that the natural world emerged through a process of 'self-development,' or 'self-organization,' had been gestating in Western thought for over 2,000 years, stretching from Owen and the 'structuralists' to Aquinas, Augustine and on back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks."

The Lamarckian component of Bennett's integration keeps this "self-organizing" process from being wholly deterministic. Environmental contingencies impinge on organisms, influencing their bodies and/or behavior, with some of these changes being heritable. This is Lamarckism. During much of the history of evolution theory, biologists dismissed the Lamarckian model, a standard argument against it referencing the blacksmith's arm: Are the blacksmith's children born with one conspicuously developed arm? But Lamarckian effects can in some cases be observed, and new findings in the field of epigenetics provide an ostensible mechanism whereby acquired traits might be passed on to offspring. So, the door has opened to re-introduce Lamarckian thought to evolutionary theory.

In Bennett's model, evolution is an unfolding of inherent potential that absorbs or reacts to the environment's influences. And so evolution, or phylogeny, in his formulation takes on the character of development, or ontogeny. This parallelism is touched upon in the book but not developed thoroughly. We will return to it after examining Bennett's case from a broad perspective, that of complexity theory.

Bennett recruits complexity theory to serve as a general, overarching framework within which to understand evolutionary change. By situating evolution in the context of complexity theory, Bennett minimizes distinctions between biology and other sciences, which maybe is as it should be. Here is language typical of that which he uses to characterize his view of how nature works:

"In an unfolding sequence, quarks, guided by nothing more than the relationships between themselves, form atoms, which in time organize themselves into stars, solar systems and entire galaxies. These naturally developing relationships formed increasingly complex patterns which held the information for making stars, planets and eventually entire galaxies. These patterns contained the information for making the universe complex."

I share the author's conclusion that something is missing from evolution theory, that natural selection cannot do what it is supposed to do, and that some other mechanism is needed to pull up the slack. But I do not share Bennett's faith that the building blocks of complexity theory —emergence, patterns, relationships, self-assembly and other abstractions, as he constellates them—will do the job satisfactorily. Explanations in terms of patterns, self-organization, etc., smell like disguised appeals to vitalism, which is the notion that an undetectable, animating "life force" or similar construct accounts for biological processes. Vitalism long has been discredited as a scientific idea, but now it's back, camouflaged by the quasi-technical argot of complexity theory. Bennett writes, "Emergence is one manifestation of an even more transforming concept about nature: immaterial things can bring material things into existence. [. . . .] This is the third key to the new understanding of evolution: much of nature and evolution emerges from immaterial things, like relationships, and patterns."

It's not clear what such contentions bring to the table. Explanations of the particulars of the physical world in terms of gravity, thermodynamics, fluid flow, radiation, kinetics, and so on—normal scientific concepts—lend themselves to units of measure, to being quantified. Complexity theory offers no units of measure. And its reliance on "immaterial" causes makes it akin to a theology.

Nor does complexity theory articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions under which an assembly of parts will organize itself spontaneously into a self-regulating complex system. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't? And how can patterns, or relationships, be causal agents? I would argue that patterns and relationships are what we observe after causal agents have acted.

In short, complexity theory begs the question as to whether it explains what it purports to explain in terms of causality or just describes what is observed.

Nonetheless, complexity theorists claim vast explanatory powers that transcend biology to include everything from the particulars of chemistry and cosmology to sociocultural organization. The borders among the disciplines get fuzzy. A kind of conceptual freefall accompanies the adoption of complexity theory, and this is particularly highlighted when we pry natural selection theory from evolution.

Natural selection theory attached itself specifically to the biological world, not to other areas of science. The other disciplines don’t get jostled when it gets abandoned, nor when it gets replaced by complexity theory. But, once the peculiar mechanism of natural selection is set aside, what is left to distinguish biological evolution from other kinds of successive change? Without natural selection, is "evolution" just a multisyllabic synonym for "change"? Does biology become just another process that expresses the principles inherent in complexity theory?

Maybe so. And I am glad to join Bennett in discarding biology's specialness as a natural kind. But Bennett is not as vigilant as he ought to be in retaining distinctions among certain processes internal to biology's vast, ongoing complexification. He is out to proffer a totalizing metanarrative that accounts for change. But in doing so, he tends to gloss over distinctions among evolution, development, and plain old change. He would seem not to think that there was much difference in meaning among statements such as, "Look, that complex system is organizing itself" and "Look, that thing over there is developing" and "Look, that thing over there is evolving."

The difference between the latter two characterizations is critical. It must not be swept aside. To use evolution and development more or less interchangeably, as Bennett tends to do, muddies the waters precisely where clarity is needed, if we are trying to sort out the causal mechanisms that produce the particular outcomes that we observe. Consider this passage:

"The daunting challenge for Darwinists is this: if evolutionary change in every science - physics, chemistry, cosmology, geology and all the others - is predictable, why would evolution in biology be unpredictable? If the evolution of atoms, molecules, minerals, stars, planets, continents, mountains and oceans are [sic] predictable, why would the evolution of plants and animals suddenly be unpredictable?"

The processes inherent in the other disciplines don't qualify as instances of evolution, at least not in the usual sense of multigenerational descent with modification. But they might, so long as we're stretching definitions, qualify as instances or processes of development. Let's back up.

The word development attaches itself, for example, to the sequence that runs, egg >> hatchling >> hen. The egg-to-hen sequence is influenced genetically in a way that predisposes it to unfold in a predictable sequence: the process has a preferred direction. Given an accommodating environment, the internal energetics of a chicken proceeds along a predictable path. That's how development works.

The sciences have to deal with change, per se, of various kinds. But the term “evolution,” as specific to Bennett’s chosen target, biology, typically isn't used to designate change per se, but change of the type specifically that occurs during a sequence of generational turnovers. It's not clear how the normal usage of "evolution" would apply to the quarks of physics, the molecules of chemistry, or the mineral formations of geology.

That said, most readers, I suspect, will want to maintain distinctions among the related notions of evolution, development, growth, assembly, and just plain change. It's not clear that Bennett sees value in maintaining these distinctions.

In this light, consider that, as it has come to be used, "evolution," as distinct from "development," designates a nonteleological process. That is, the evolutionary process is taken by scientific officialdom to proceed without a preferred direction. It is extemporaneous and not developmental. Development, on the other hand, is predictable. It proceeds, so long as the environment accommodates it, along a preferred direction, toward the adult form of the species. It has a teleological character as it unfolds in its predictable sequence.

Bennett's other point in the passage cited earlier has to do with natural selection theory’s lack of forecasting prowess. And Bennett rightly points out that if natural selection theory were properly scientific, then it would lend itself to making predictions that were more than trivial. Because it doesn't do much by way of making predictions, it doesn't lend itself to falsification, weakening its status as a scientific theory.

Darwinian Theory, through all of its variously evolved forms, certainly failed to predict the intriguing findings that have come out of genomic sequencing and subsequent cross-species genomic statistical comparisons. The conservation of DNA across species? That was a stunning finding, at which a scientific theory of evolution might at least have hinted. But no. Did textbook evolution theory get ANYTHING right in this regard? If the theory is supposed to account for gene distributions, then why did it fail so miserably when given the chance to prove itself? Did natural selection theory belly up to the bar and say, "Well, now that you have the technology to sequence genomes and conduct detailed cross-species statistical analyses on the resulting databases, let me tell you beforehand what observations you shall make." No. It did not belly up. It sat on the sidelines, mute, unable to articulate anything that would vouchsafe itself as a usefully predictive tool of science. Natural selection theory? Bah-humbug.

If we take the ball from Bennett and run with it, emphasizing the developmental character of evolution--as an endogenously driven process, being variously facilitated and constrained by its environment--and re-categorize it explicitly as an instance of development, then we introduce implications that Bennett might not want to see commingling with his ideas. Namely, we imply that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes a succession of stages in the life cycle of an organism, with the ensuing teleological implications.

Framing evolution as a developmental process preserves the elements that Bennett wants to include in his revised theory and gathers those elements under a familiar heading: Development. Insofar as it simplifies the conceptual scheme and claims bragging rights to parsimony, re-classifying evolution as an instance of development is a move that leapfrogs natural selection theory to propose a more scientifically credible hypothesis.

But this move raises more questions. What is the adult form of a developing planetary biosphere? And, once we show up--we high-tech primates--do we have any obligations to the historical/developmental process? Are we obliged to play any kind of predetermined role in the unfolding of the historical program? As the zygote harbors the adult, does the caveman, or the amoeba for that matter, harbor the space colonist? And, if so, can creatures refuse their callings, and what happens if they do? The developmental model of evolution forces into the open issues of historical meaning, purpose, and obligation.

The foregoing remarks might seem to arrive from far out in left field, but they are of the moment. As endogenous factors continue to infiltrate evolutionary theorizing, evolution increasingly looks like an instance of development. If the theory continues in this direction, then at some point the notion of "life cycle" will need to be scaled up and applied to planetary biospheres. And then humankind's cosmic calling will assert itself as the elephant in the room, we must hope.

Admittedly, this review presents only an overview of an ambitious book. My copy is dog-eared from much note-taking, as I found the ideas and references presented required mindful consideration, page after page. The book delivers a wealth of insight into the history of evolution theory, (the retelling of the story of Ota Benga, the pygmy displayed in New York's Bronx Zoo in 1906, with a chimpanzee for a companion, reminds us of Darwinian theory's racist utility), documenting the gyrations that the theorists put the theory through with each new problem that scientific discovery threw at it. The anomalies continue to pile up, however, and if Thomas Kuhn got it right in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, then natural selection theory's elasticity at some point will give way, with a conceptual SNAP, and scientists will be left to assemble a new evolutionary paradigm, one that we must hope will be devoid of utility to racists.

Chemtrails over Minneapolis, May 5, 2014

2014-05-11T09:54:00.000-11:00

This was the sky over Minneapolis, the view from my alley.

I hiked over to the Ford Bridge, which connects Minneapolis and St. Paul, for a better view.

The planes kept coming. This fellow had a curious flight plan. Maybe he forgot his lunch.

Sunsets never looked like this before.

Social Darwinism is Alive and Well, and it Dwells Between the Covers of this Book.

2014-04-19T04:23:00.000-11:00

"The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down."

— Henry George, Progress and Poverty

Move over 1984 and Brave New World. Tyler Cowen conjures his own bleak, dystopian future for humankind. Writing fiction is not his intent, but we have to hope that fiction he writes.

Cowen is an economist at George Mason University. He achieved fifteen minutes of fame via an e-book, The Great Stagnation in 2011. The e-book created a buzz loud enough to grab the attention of a publisher with a printing press. Stagnation insinuated its way between hard covers, from where it continued to make the case that a low-wage, slow-growth economy is something that the world had better get used to. It’s the new normal.

Average is Over, evidently a hurried sequel to Stagnation, reprises Cowen’s message: Extreme income inequality is here to stay. We can't tax the rich, after all, because they have too many channels through which to transfer the burden to the middle class and the poor.

Cowen offers up education as a tool that sub-millionaires might use to elevate themselves economically, but such education as Cowen conceives of might more candidly be called instruction, or schooling, or obedience training. So, operating in a bimodal economy—one that concentrates wealth at the tippy top and diffuses poverty across the broad bottom of the barrel, with no middle between—how does the top dispose of the barrel bottom? Cowen seems to think that that’s a problem to be solved and that he has a solution:

“What if someone proposed that in a few parts of the United States, in the warmer states, some city neighborhoods would be set aside for cheap living?”

Cowen describes the housing in these cheap zones as being modest but not ramshackle, and it all seems fuzzily commonsensical. But then,

“We also would build some makeshift structures there, similar to the better dwellings you might find in a Rio de Janeiro Favela. The quality of the water and electrical infrastructure might be low by American standards, though we could supplement the neighborhood with free municipal wireless (the future version of Marie Antoinette’s famous alleged phrase, “Let them watch internet!”) Hulu and other web-based TV services would replace more expensive cable connections for those residents. Then we would allow people to move there if they desired. In essence, we would be recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment in part the united States, although with some technological add-ons and most likely greater safety.”

Ok, so let’s fill another flute with bubbly and kick back to get a good look as the great unwashed descend ever deeper into collective poverty. It’s a kind of spectator sport for the well heeled, really. Let’s anticipate this decline in quality of life and contain the newly impoverished in ghettos modeled after Brazilian slums. If we call these habitats for impoverished humanity camps maybe they’ll seem almost recreational. Maybe FEMA would do a good job running these camps, keeping everything orderly and responding to emergencies. They might even cook up a motivational slogan. Maybe something like Arbeit Macht Frei.

No one should find the favela prospect objectionable, Cowen opines, after all, “no one is being forced to live in these places. Some people might prefer to live there. I might prefer to live there if my income were low enough.” He goes on to remind readers that some neighborhoods deteriorate naturally into shantytowns: “The end result is no different from the deliberate shantytowns already discussed.”

Deliberate shantytowns.

Let that cute phrase rattle around inside your skull.

Deliberate shantytowns.

What a striking public policy objective. Cowen wants his manufactured ghettos to be modeled after Brazilian favelas. So, how is it going for the residents of those South American slums? Maybe not so good. Could be better.

To say that poor people “choose” to live in rundown neighborhoods evinces a staggering callousness on the part of the author and an atmospheric detachment from the world outside the ivory tower. The poverty stricken could simply load up their limousines and relocate to nearby mansions? Why they don’t exercise the option, evidently, is just a matter of personal preference. Poor people are so eccentric.

Piercing the callousness, however, Cowen reveals a sliver of heart when he concludes the book with a ray of hope:

“Rather than balancing our budget with higher taxes or lower benefits, we will allow the real wages of many workers to fall and thus we will allow the creation of a new underclass. We won’t really see how we could stop that. Yet it will be an oddly peaceful time, with the general aging of American society and the proliferation of many sources of cheap fun. We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx’s Communist utopia, albeit brought on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.”

Let us unpack that doozy of a condescending pat on the head. “We,” evidently the overclass, will enjoy the tranquility brought on by the emergence of a broad underclass, the odd peacefulness of the times a byproduct of generous allotments of Bread and Circuses. Marx’s Communist “utopia” consists of a herd of underclass laborers wallowing in cheap or free fun? This passage from the book is downright bizarre. If it’s offered tongue in cheek, then it’s merely in bad taste. If not, it’s worrisome.

The condescension continues:

“Conscientiousness is especially valuable in two other important parts of the labor market: health care and personal services. Most healthcare workers are not doctors, and many of them are not geniuses. Nonetheless, you want to make sure these workers wash their hands when necessary, write down the correct information on the patient’s chart, and measure the lab quantities correctly. Again, that’s conscientiousness and due to population aging the number of healthcare jobs will continue to grow. It is no accident that female workers are especially well represented in these fields, as they are in education.”

Yeah, dem chicks really know how to wash der hands and take notes and measure stuff. Dey’re, like, real conscientious, yeah, ya know. You got somethin’ what don’t take no brains, a chick’ll do it great, man. Dey really know how to follow directions.

Cowen sets out not merely to lower middle-class expectations, but to bury them. His skip-to-my-Lou matter-of-factness about the inevitably dismal fate of the masses—a dumbed-down, droidlike existence for the majority of humanity—is chilling. The economist’s humanity must have been surgically removed.

Let’s continue the tour of Cowen’s less-than-rosy future.

“As workers are displaced by smart machines in manufacturing and other areas, more individuals will be employed as personal trainers, valets, private tutors, drivers, babysitters, interior designers, carpenters, and other forms of direct personal services. These area all areas where a patron—often a family or individual—expects a commission or request to be followed. ‘Pick up my kid from school.’ ‘Fix the electrical wiring.’ ’Show up for my lesson at six o’clock.’ Most of these jobs require some applied skills but not monomaniacal commitment at the highest levels of world-class achievement. The premium is on conscientiousness, namely whether the worker can follow some straightforward requests with extreme reliability and basic competence. If you are looking to hire a concierge butler, the person really does have to be trustworthy.”

So we can anticipate a militarization of the workplace: Officers barking orders and grunts snapping to attention. But what’s described isn’t even a modern workplace. It’s the castle of a Duke. Drivers, valets, tutors? Pick up my kid and fix the wiring? The employer morphs into a patron, a lord of the manor, and employees endure demotion to plantation slaves.

And the egos of the “earners” and “achievers” will need constant grooming,

“It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future. At some point it is hard to sell more physical stuff to high earners, yet there is usually just a bit more room to make them feel better. Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved."

Are you gagging yet? If you’re unlucky enough to find yourself outside the inner circles, you are likely to find yourself considered barely a human being, but rather some unit of economic value, that is, a "human resource." Something made to be drained and discarded.

And the inhumanity continues.

"The forces outlined in this book, especially for labor markets, will force a rewriting of the social contract, even if it is not explicitly recognized as such. We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care.”

What a quaint Malthusian dog-eat-dog nightmare he imagines. It is one in which a hollowed-out middle class leaves behind a socioeconomic gulf, with an oligarchy tended to by armies of technicians on one side and on the other side a poverty-stricken class of serfs fending for themselves. The future, in Cowen's vision, looks downright medieval, a post-middle-class society only technologically distinguishable from pre-middle-class society. Why is it a pretense that everyone be given an okay standard of living? It should be an objective.

There is so much that is contemptible in this book that conscience must pray it already has been remaindered.

On with our dystopian misery tour:

“It’s clear: The world is demanding more in the way of credentials, more in the way of ability, and it is passing along most of the higher rewards to a relatively small cognitive elite. After all, the first two categories of earnings winners—namely those with advanced degrees—account for only about 3 percent of the US population.”

Let us blow up once and for all the myth that today’s oligarchs and plutocrats, the finance-capital market manipulators and fraudsters, the pseudo-meritocratic “earners” who leach wealth from the economy are doing anybody any favors or by any rationale can be said to deserve their rewards. They present themselves as “job creators,” a hollow legend, but hammered into a public myth by mainstream media. Where exactly are all these jobs that they supposedly are creating? Where’s the next wave of innovation, the rising tide that lifts all boats? The “earners” have been doing something other than earning.

But Cowen isn’t done. He pushes his vision to its fascistic conclusion.

"The framing of income inequality in meritocratic terms will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy individuals will in fact rise from poverty on a regular basis, and that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind. The wealthy class will be increasingly self-motivated, will be larger over time, and—precisely because we are selecting ever more for self-motivation—will have increasing influence. It is their values that will shape public discourse, and that will mean more stress on ideas of personal ambition and self-motivation. The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility” [emphasis added].

No it won’t. Family connections will remain the best way to predict upward mobility. The Darwinian reference to “selecting for” gives away the game. “We are selecting ever more” for some worthy trait? Given the Darwinian trope, there’s no escaping the breeder/bred relationship implied. The slogan “Average is over” suggests that a broad swath gets rubbed out.

The desired outcome, desired presumably by the "we" who will do the selecting, is the elimination of the unfit, those who lack sufficient "self-motivation" (i.e., eagerness to please the overlords) and/or sufficient capacity to make machines more productive (i.e., the way people did in the Matrix movies, where they allowed the machines to drain them like batteries).

Say goodbye to American exceptionalism.

Say hello to the soft, and maybe not so soft, eugenics of finance capital.

You Are Being Stagnated: The social engineers are managing your standard-of-living expectations downwardly.

2014-02-23T15:53:00.000-11:00

A pair of insidious memes is making the rounds in the mainstream media. These memes have to do with your standard of living, and they declare that the "Great Recession" is here to stay. George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen calls the persistent economic anemia, "The Great Stagnation," and in his book of that title he argues that we had better get used to hard times. The second meme of the pair is a corollary and is one of the primary legs on which Cowen's argument rests. This meme concerns "the end of innovation." All of humankind's potential inventions evidently already are with us. Or, at least we've picked all of the technological "low-hanging fruit." Innovations currently occupying the pipeline consist of embellishments; they are not game changers, like the inventions of the last century.

This assertion, about technological innovation, admittedly, invites debate, given the ongoing computerization of pretty much everything. Nonetheless, say the pessimists, for whatever reason, recent breakthroughs lack the economic potency of the technological breakthroughs of the early to middle twentieth century. Those innovations fueled deep and broad economic gains. More recent breakthroughs are of a different nature. They are hood ornaments glued onto tried-and-true technologies, and they concentrate their relatively meager economic gains selectively in the pockets of the already rich. Evidently, the "New Normal" applies only to the middle class and the poor. Cowen seems too cavalier about this implication of the new economic order: It's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Columnist Paul Krugman attributes much of the economic stagnation to a lack of demand for goods and services, essentially telling us that the legendary "job creators" won't be creating jobs any time soon, not until they see more cash in the pockets of prospective customers. If that's a major hold-up, keeping the economy from recovering, then putting cash in the pockets of consumers might be a good thing--the kind of economic stimulus that might work. If only that were the objective of the professional theoreticians and technicians "working" on the problem.

Despite these implications of Cowen's and Krugman's diagnoses, the prescription from both sides is simple: Get Used To It. Krugman glowingly cites economist and political advisor Lawrence (Larry) Summers as having arrived at the same conclusions about the New Normal and The End of Innovation. Now, there's a champion for the working bloke.

Push-back from the contrarians, those who reject the end-of-innovation premise, predictably cites the ubiquity of computing and communications technologies. The new devices have reshaped thoroughly the habits of consumers and big business alike. Computers streamline manufacturing and make comparison shopping as simple as swiping a touchscreen. The impact of the more recent technologies can hardly be said to pale next to that of the twentieth century's marvels. Nonetheless, the scope of their impact is easier to appreciate when one looks under the hood and sees that tiny little integrated circuit, or IC.

This technology, the IC, is a universal labor-saver and process-accelerator. Imagine how the Human Genome Project would have ground to a halt if its staff had no access to computers. It would remain a dream. But there's a reason why this revolutionary technology, the IC, has not lifted all ships. It is because the crash of the U.S economy and its aftermath are the consequences of hostile economic engineering. A ruling class that we might refer to simply as The Reptiles, given their rapaciousness and cold-bloodedness, executed the project.

"Big government and big business have long marched together in American history. You can call one good and the other bad (depending on your point of view), but that's missing their common origin and ongoing alliance." -- Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation

The engineering ran something like this: The 401K “revolution” sucked money out of its secure place in pension funds and deposited it in risky equity markets, under the guise of letting employees manage their own retirements. In 1999, President Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which tore down the wall that had separated commercial and investment banks. Now banks could gamble as recklessly as they liked with their depositors' money. But the banks had to securitize the toxic subprime mortgages that they had concocted to take advantage of the deregulated environment, so they invented bizarre new packages of derivatives to hide the toxic junk. And none other than Larry Summers, at the time President Clinton’s chief economic advisor, along with Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, worked overtime to dissuade Congress from heeding the warnings of a minor bureaucrat, Brooksley Born, about the dangers of the newly created, unregulated, opaque instruments (PBS Frontline story examining this episode is here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/) What was it about the contents of the opaque instruments that made these guys so concerned about concealing the contents from the public? And Fed Chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke had to keep interest rates anomalously low for an extended period to make available all the cheap borrowing needed to inflate the housing bubble. And Congress had to pass legislation forcing banks to underwrite mortgages for people who otherwise wouldn't qualify. And the George W. Bush administration egged everyone on to borrow recklessly with its cheerleading slogan, "The Ownership Society." Along the way, Congress and the Bush administration made bankruptcy laws more stringent, as if girding for a wave. And the ratings agencies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's, gave triple-A ratings to the toxic junk. And the SEC turned a blind eye to all the bogus ratings. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for their part, at the same time had to abandon their competencies and/or scruples and securitize their share of subprimes. All of this set the stage for the Fed, Wall Street, and the bureaucrats in charge of the U.S. Treasury to loot the Treasury to cover the bankers' losses, protecting them from the risks of their leveraged investments and dropping the burden on taxpayers. And the Obama administration, once most of the dust had settled, and it became clear what had happened, ignored the blatant fraud committed by the Wall Street banks, including the rampant robo-signing of thousands of mortgage agreements. Let us be grateful that President George W. Bush failed in his attempt to privatize Social Security, that is, to suck the Social Security trust fund into the equities market, or that too would have been gifted to the upper circles. This number of contributing factors, this magnitude of coincidence, could not have aligned by chance. This recession was planned and executed with reptilian callousness.

Writer/editor Don Peck is disarmingly blunt when he observes in Pinched, How the Great Recession has narrowed our Futures and What We Can Do about it, that

"[F]or the very rich in particular, global affinities and global ambitions are quickly supplanting national ties and national concerns. Increasingly, the very rich see themselves as members of a global elite with whom they have more in common than with other classes of Americans. Politically influential and economically powerful, they are becoming a separate nation with its own distinct goals."

(Ensconced in the mainstream as an editor at The Atlantic, Peck must feel secure enough in his rank to offer such alarming observations without fear of ostracism for being an alarmist. Observers outside the mainstream who observe essentially the same thing do so at the risk of joining the company of sad souls dismissed for peddling conspiracy theories.)

Peck does concede that, "[P]eople should of course be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their honest labor. As a society, we should be far more concerned about whether most Americans are getting ahead than about the size of the gains at the top." How can the two be unrelated if those at the top are siphoning off money that could be used to create demanding consumers?

O, why quibble?

Peck continues, "Yet extreme income inequality causes a cultural separation in society that is unhealthy on its face and corrosive over time. Ultimately, it is prone to reaction, particularly when much of society is struggling." What kind of "reaction" does Peck seem to want to avoid?

Possibly the kind hinted at by history professor Jerry Z. Muller in his essay, "Capitalism and Inequality" (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2013). Muller acknowledges the staggering inequality of income that separates the rich and the rest and is duly bothered by it but not because poverty causes suffering. He is concerned because, "[I]f left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at large." The problem with having lots of unemployed poor people around is not the severe hardships that those people are forced to endure, evidently, but rather the prospect that they might organize themselves into a resistance and fight for their share of the pie. In the past this was called class struggle.

Though seemingly sensitive to the plight of the victims of the Great Recession and while acknowledging that the elites push policies from which they themselves benefit financially, Peck covers himself against alienating his own in-group by referring (over and over and over again) to the oligarchy as the "meritocracy" or "meritocratic elite." Their ranks consist of "winners" imbued with an "entrepreneurial spirit" which guides them to "success." Bound up in all this selective diction is the notion that the privileges of the ultra wealthy have been earned. No thought is given to distinguishing the earners from the heirs.

Another aspect of the problem, according to Peck, is just kids these days. He references Ron Alsop's book, "The Trophy Kids Grow up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up The Workplace," and comments,

"[Alsop] says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many twentysomethings. They're used to checklists, he says, and 'don't excel at leadership or independent problem solving.' Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, 'need almost constant direction' in the workplace. 'Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.'"

In other words, the U.S. public education system is delivering what it was engineered to deliver: docile, submissive, obedient, pliant, noncreative, dependent, childish, servile, easy-to-manage rule-obeyers. This guiding objective of the U.S. public education system was laid down a century ago. The history of this covert social engineering project has been ferreted out from primary sources by John Taylor Gatto, who as a public schoolteacher was multiple times named New York City Teacher of the Year and once New York State Teacher of the Year, during which year he resigned with an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he said he would look for new career, one that didn't require him to hurt children. Charlotte Iserbyt also has put together a troubling history of the U.S. public education system. She is in a position to survey the field, having been Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), in the U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan administration and a staff employee of the U.S. Department of State. Try out her tome, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. If Millennials are floundering in the workplace, as per Alsop's assertion, in a way that compromises the further concentration of wealth among the already wealthy, then maybe this piece of social engineering, to a degree, backfired.

Peck looks primarily to technological innovation to lift us out of the doldrums. Unfortunately as seers Cowen, Krugman and Summers inform us, we've reached the end of innovation. Cowen pointedly advises, "Have realistic expectations. We are living in the new normal."
In The Great Stagnation, Cowen rests his case on three arguments:

The first is Free Land. No doubt undeveloped real estate itself can fuel economic growth. Homesteading was an essential element of the economic development of the United States. Entrepreneur Peter Thiel and others can continue to advocate seasteading--homesteading the oceans with floating cities. But for this writer's money, the long-term solution, the real real-estate frontier is space, where (solar) energy is free and abundant, and communities can plant considerable distance between themselves and the established oligarchies. (And where weightlessness catalyzes rapid evolution.)

The second leg of Cowan's argument addresses the rapid deceleration of innovation. The pace of change has slowed dramatically from the 1880-1940 period, which gave us electric lights, autos, airplanes, mass production, mechanization of agriculture, communications mass media. Since then, the only comparable development has been the internet (or, more precisely, the IC), otherwise we've seen mostly tweaks to existing technologies. Cowen doesn't consider that intense concentration of wealth stifles innovation. Who's hoarding the money that ought to be funding far-ranging R&D projects?

The third leg of the stool is education. Mass education has spread about as far and wide as it can reach. From single-digit high-school and college graduation rates to double digit rates, the peak in high school and college graduation rates is behind us. Most everyone capable of graduating now has the opportunity. There's no longer a large untapped pool of prospective graduates who don't have access.

"A lot of the gains from recent financial innovation are captured by a relatively small number of individuals. Top American earners are increasingly concentrated in the financial sector of the economy. [. . . .] In [2004] the top twenty-five hedge fund managers combined earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning over $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public-company executives earning that amount. When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen." -- Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation

"Job creator" is a cute piece of political rhetoric, but as a mask for oligarchy it no longer passes the snicker test. A more clinically poetic term for oligarch might be Richard Grove's coinage, "Intraspecific klepto-parasite." But let's not stoop to name calling.

That said, Cowen's characterization strains the bankable meaning of "earners." But the point about financial innovation underscores the observation that innovation actually has been rampant. In the financial sector. The financial-services industry has rolled out an impressive array of innovative instruments during the past decade, including credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles, securitization of subprime mortgages, and rehypothecation. Anyone who says that innovation has slowed is not paying attention. The financial services industry is surging with innovation. If you don't see it, you must be too busy looking the other way.

Whatever the motivations of Cowan and others who opine on the sad, stuck state of the economy, the insidious effect of their writings is that they condition the American middle class to accept a dwindling standard of living.

In that vein, then, let's prognosticate. How frequently in the coming months and years will the audience for mainstream media be fed human-interest "news" stories about middle-class families that have absorbed an economic hit? These families will have "adjusted" successfully to their new hardship. They will have found "new meaning" or "a new satisfaction" in their relative impoverishment, implicitly inviting the rest of the middle class to join them in the unanticipated rewards of character-building hardship. At the extreme, this development dovetails with the hearty, self-reliant, noble savage archetype.

Hunger Games, anyone?

____________________________________________________

More commentary on the great stagnation and the end of innovation:

Paul Krugman column on America's long-term economic stagnation.

Larry Summers here muses on the prospect of massive multi-month-long power outages and the economic boom following the eventual lights-on. Hmmmm.

Video of Summers talk at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYpVzBbQIX0&feature=youtu.be

The Economist, Jan 12th, 2013: The great innovation debate: Fears that innovation is slowing are exaggerated, but governments need to help it along

The tech website quartz.com offered a scathing review of the state of recent technological innovation (Dec 26, 2013).

Not much of a debate, but this Oxford Union event lays out the basic lines of thought that compose the Innovation-Stagnation memetic.

And then there's Bloomberg

Another case of evolutionary "pre-adaptation"

2013-12-21T09:24:00.000-11:00

Rapid evolution of novel forms: Environmental
change triggers inborn capacity for adaptation

Let's see. A protein normally inhibits expression of genotypic "mutations" (that is, their expression into variant phenotypic traits). But under stress, production of the protein itself becomes suppressed and, as a result, more of the genotypic "mutations" become phenotypically expressed. And those "mutations", which have been riding along silently in the genome of this fish, having originated we know not how, just happen to include variants (when phenotypically expressed) that are adaptive in the environment that produces the stress.

It's just too pat. Carrying around a reservoir of unexpressed mutations? Just for fun? Just "in case"? Just "by chance"? I don't think so.

See report at http://wi.mit.edu/news/archive/2013/rapid-evolution-novel-forms-environmental-change-triggers-inborn-capacity

Breaking Bad Chemtrails

2013-08-29T05:43:00.000-11:00

The scene at right occurs a few minutes into the episode, "Say My Name," in Season 5 of the cable TV show, "Breaking Bad".

In the screenshot, the lower right quadrant of the sky features four or more more-or-less parallel white streaks. Maybe stunt pilots just finished an air show. Who knows?

Maybe the streaks are just oddly configured cirrus clouds. Nah.

They can't be normal jet-engine contrails, because those dissipate too quickly. They wouldn't hang around long enough to share the sky with the next flights to come along in the same path.

Hmmmm . . . .

One thing these pop culture insertions accomplish is to help normalize the new sky.

The camera doesn't linger, so we can't know whether or not in an hour or so these streaks unfolded themselves into feathery, striated, filamentous, fields of rippled gauzy gray haze that finally swallow the sky.

The Braindead Megaphone. Or not.

2013-07-21T05:49:00.000-11:00

The Braindead Megaphone is George Saunders' metaphor for mainstream corporate news and related media. Saunders' problem in crafting the metaphor is that he aims at, and hits, the wrong target. The braindead voice that irritates him is not an organic creature, but a connivance. Saunders acknowledges as much in the title essay, at least implicitly, and thereby undercuts the metaphor.

Saunders acknowledges that the media's braindead incantations are agenda driven: "[. . . ] it's clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven." So, he's got himself into a contradiction, though you have to untangle the essay to get a good look at it.

He continues, "It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral . . . ."

Why would he characterize the deliberate undermining of an accurate picture of the world as reflecting braindeadness? The propaganda ministers who employ the megaphone are hardly braindead. How about crazy like a fox?

Saunders aims too low. He mistakes the messenger for the composer, the program for the programmer, the on-air personality reading a teleprompter for the executive directors of the telecommunications conglomerate who employ the teleprompter reader. The collage on the cover of the first paperback edition makes clear his target: the on-air script readers.

But these poor toilers are just reciters, pieces of the corporate complex's manufactured public face. Why does Saunders fail to target the people who write the scripts that the on-air personalities are forced to read? Or their bosses? Or theirs? He calls the on-air personalities "informants," as if they possess information and share it in a spirit of civic mindedness, in a marketplace of ideas, hobbled only by their stupidity. Oh, and the profit motive. But they don't possess anything like information. They possess a knack for projecting an amiable facade. Witting or unwitting, they serve nonbraindead masters.

At one point Saunders editorializes about media coverage during the buildup to the Afghan invasion: "Megaphone guy, it seemed had gone a little braindead. Or part of him had. What had gone dead was the curious part that should have been helping us decide about the morality and intelligence of invasion [. . . .] Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn't. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?" Later he gives us this: "There is, in other words, a cost to dopey communication, even if that dopey communication is innocently intended."

Problem here is that nothing went dead, nothing got stupid, nothing got dopey, as far as the media content to which he refers. Everything went off pretty much according to script, that is, in a way that served the moneyed/corporate/oligarchic interests that run the mass media (and Wall Street, Big Oil and most of the government). The ostensibly braindead/stupid/dopey-but-innocent media deliberately dumbed down the American people in support of the megaphone guy's boss's boss's boss's agenda. If Saunders doesn't get that, then he shouldn't be tackling these topics. (In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Saunders bows to his wealthy patrons: "Also, I would like to thank the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation: it would be impossible to overstate how much your generous support has meant to me and my family." I don't doubt that he receives generous financial support from moneyed/corporate/oligarchic interests. It shows in the book.)

He goes on, "the media is [sic] complex and stratified" No, it isn't. It is simple and monolithic. Five or six corporations control about 90 percent of everything that Americans see, hear, and read through media. The megaphone's corporate infrastructure is monolithic. The situation brings to mind the word, charlatan.

Now, Saunders evidently doesn't want to be accused of accusing anyone of genuinely dastardly motives, so he covers himself with an obligatory C-word disclaimer: "There's no conspiracy at work, I don't think, no ill will, no leering Men Behind the Curtain: just a bunch of people from good universities, living out the dream. . . ."

No conspiracy at work. Really? But wait, what about that "agenda-driven" part? Do the people with the agenda to shape the perceptions and opinions of the American people declare their intentions publicly? No? Golly, smells like a conspiracy to me. But Saunders evidently needs to polish his lefty street cred. No tinfoil hat for him. Come on, "leering Men Behind the Curtain"? Could he have served up a cliche more trite and stale than that? Once the word "conspiracy" is uttered, all standards of intellectual discernment drop off the map. It's like bug spray.

As for Saunders undermining his own argument (braindead/stupid/dopey vs. agenda-driven), he does something similar in the essay, The New Mecca, a travelogue of a romp through Dubai. In it, he credits global mobility (and amusement-park spectacle) with breaking down traditional barriers among demographic slices: "All differences will be bred out. There will be no pure Arab, no pure Jew, no pure American American. The old dividers—nations, race, religion—will be overpowered by crossbreeding and by our mass media, our world Culture o' Enjoyment."

But Saunders spots a demographic schism in Dubai, a society that, he tells us, consists of "a small, insanely wealthy group of capital-holding Haves supported by a huge group of overworked and underpaid Have-Nots, with, in Dubai's case, the gap between Haves and Have-Nots so wide as to indicate different species." So, evidently, the global melting pot lacks the power to homogenize across economic strata.

When he suggests that "we will all be brothers," his "we" must be restricted to the less than insanely wealthy. As far as the insanely wealthy are concerned, the rest of us can crossbreed ourselves to mutt-dom. They are not likely to crossbreed with us. Socioeconomic class is an old divider that won't be "bred out." And so up in smoke goes Saunders' homogeneous global society. Well, it was a pretty picture.

AirFrance Advertisement for Chemtrails

2013-07-14T05:58:00.001-11:00

You are looking at a photo of a sheet from the June 9, 2013, edition of the StarTribune newspaper, published in Minneapolis, MN. Left-hand page is page A8. Right- hand page is page A5.

Notice the advertisement that occupies the bottom half of page A5. It is an airline ad for AirFrance.

The grid of trails in the sky evokes patterns commonly associated with chemtrails, with the ropes from the swings contributing to the aerial coverage. The ad does not include any headline or body copy that references playground activity, vacationing, family travel, or anything to create a context for the kids on swings. They are context-free props, but for the chemtrail ropes. Since this ad ran, the skies over the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have received extensive, repeated trail coverage.

What went through the mind of the graphic designer who laid out this ad, or the art director who approved it, or the agency rep who sold it to AirFrance? It is implausible to suppose that the reference to chemtrails is unintentional. If similar ads appear where you live, you might want to prepare for a heavy dose of heavy metals.

A couple other points:
Such images help normalize a conspicuously hash-marked sky. NASA already is working to shape the perceptions of children, by conflating chemtrails and ordinary contrails. See here: http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/804-2/contrail-watching-for-kids/

A common rebuttal to warnings about chemtrails is that they are equal-opportunity toxifiers, that not even the perpetrators could avoid inhaling the contents of the spays. It might be that through advertisement, the perpetrators signal their cohorts as to where the whammy will fall, giving them fair warning to take a vacation or other leave of absence.