Mark, nice to meet a true 'son of Madison'. I only knew transients from
Michigan State and University of Chicago in my brief post-doctoral stint. I
worked with Jack Gorski, the biochemist who discovered the estrogen
receptor.......my work on the effect of cortisol on lung development was
buoyed by such science for the next 20 years. Madison was an interesting
transition from my MSc/PhD in Experimental Medicine, taught by the
discoverers of cortisol, aldosterone and prolactin, and Hans Selye, the
clinician-scientist who coined the term 'stress' while at McGill, a bastion
of Eurocentnrism, back to the US en route to Harvard (from which I was
thrown out after 15 years of hard labor), which may explain my own
worldview academically, which is quite eclectic, but in a very different
way from yours. I have spent 50+ years doing the science of the
establishment, chasing my tail studying physiologic mechanisms and chasing
my intellectual tail, always in the hope of 'linearizing' the story by
latching on to a tale that would take me from the superficial and mundane
to the fundamental......what else would I have expected, given that a
simple molecule like cortisol could flip a switch and save life at its
inception- the implementation of cortisol for prevention of the death of
preterm infants was profoundly inspiring, to this day. But as I had said,
it made no 'logical' sense that hormones would or should have anything to
do with lungs....but now it makes all the sense in the world; I just hadda
turn the whole process around 180 degrees, at least for my own 'sanity'.

So to your question about the biological relevance of Communism, I start
with the premise that multicellular organisms evolved through metabolic
cooperativity, so 'from each according to their abilities, to each
according to their needs' makes sense as an operational principle. I think
that all fell apart in the transition from Hunter Gatherers to agriculture
and ownership of land, acting as a driver for human avarice and greed
instead of cooperativity. There is a biological underpinning to that in the
transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture due to the ready source of
food year round increasing subcutaneous fat, producing the hormone leptin,
which promotes the 'arborization' of the brain, the formation of
ever-increasing numbers of synapses. That mechanism usurped the gut-brain
mechanism by which food would distend the gut, increasing leptin and
ghrelin production by the gut, affecting brain development along a
different trajectory from the steady infusion of leptin provided by the fat
depot. There are those who say that the dominance of the CNS over the gut
brain has been our undoing, and I think that's correct in that the CNS
mechanism tends to lend itself to neuroticisms that the gut-brain doesn't
due to the abstractions of the CNS vs the pragmatism of the gut, if you get
my drift. Along these lines, there was an interesting paper (Cochran G,
Hardy J, Harpending H. Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. J Biosoc
Sci. 2006 Sep;38(5):659-93) the hypothesis of which was that Ashkenazi Jews
have higher IQs, but an excess of neurodegenerative diseases, and that this
is an example of balancing selection, too much of a good thing being a bad
thing, myelinization of neurons increasing IQ but too much leading to
pathology.

But I digress. Not to 'chest beat' too much on my part, but I find it
energizing in my 8th decade to think that a) maybe we got it wrong, and b)
how can we 'fix' it, given what we're doing to ourselves and our planet. As
I had said previously, my sense is that what I have stumbled onto is the
realization that what we think of as evolution are all
epiphenomena........the so-called complexity of life is actually a
by-product of the core mission of life, to maintain and sustain its
originating ability to remain at equipoise, like the Red Queen, which
sounds counterintuitive because we are using the wrong intuition. BTW, my
idea that Quantum Mechanics is highly relevant to biology, but hasn't been
integrated with it for lack of the right perspective, i.e. that the Cosmos
and biology emerged from the same Singularity/Big Bang, so that's the way
in which Pauli, Heisenberg, non-localization, coherence have to be viewed
biologically......then it works, at least in my simplistic way of
understanding those two domains. And that sits at the core of the problem
in the sense that our system of logic is founded on the way in which we
understand how and why we exist; given that, if we got it backwards, of
course we would have inherent problems in our personal comportment and that
of the societies that we constitute. We're still stuck with Descartes
(witness Hameroff and Penrose fixated on microtubules in the brain, when
there are microtubules in the viscera too!) and Michaelangelo's Vitruvian
Man when we should be devising ways of reintegrating our big brains in a
more holistically win-win way. Have you read Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathic
Civilization". In it he makes this same plea, if only.....

Again, hubris and braggadocio aside, what I have offered is a step-wise,
scientifically-based means of devconvoluting our own evolution in a way
that is 'testable and refutable', linking physics and biology together
mechanistically for the first time. That relationship is buildable- I have
suggested merging the Elemental Periodic Table with a Periodic Table of
Biology to form an algorithm for all of the natural sciences....what a
dynamic search engine that would be. I just have to figure out how to
mathematically express evolution....Work in Progress. But of course I am
curious as to how all of this 'fits' with what makes the hair on the back
of *your* neck stand up? Because CRISPER and AI aren't our salvation,
they're just more of the same ambiguity/deception paradigm as far as I am
concerned......John

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 2:15 AM, Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> John:
>
> This is *all* very exciting -- as in skin-tingly, even more than
> head-shaking (and, yes, mine was going up-down, not side-to-side) . . . <g>
>
> I grew up in Madison, where both of my parents were on the UW faculty.
> Madison West then undergraduate 1966-70, followed by a brief stint at
> UofChicago Divinity School (for a rare deferment, when only "ministers"
> escaped the draft lottery), then back to Madison for a year in a PhD
> program in Molecular Biology, which was aborted by the collapse of
> NSF-funding post-Vietnam.  Then I moved to NYC in 1972 and started an early
> mini-computer software company (while playing "revolutionary" and studying
> Renaissance history &c) -- which was the basis of my later career on Wall
> Street &c.
>
> "Genetics" seemed to me to be barking-up-the-wrong-tree with its
> over-emphasis on DNA (and "information," trying to equate life to
> computation) -- which meant I was looking for epi-genetics before that was
> quite a thing yet.  Marshall McLuhan, as it turns out, is *all* about
> psycho-technological environments and our "adaptation" to them (although,
> for various reasons, he never elaborated a "psychology," which is what we
> are now doing at the Center, with Aristotle's help.)
>
> I suspect that what you mean by "consciousness" -- say at the
> cellular-level -- is what Aristotle meant by the "soul" (aka *entelechy*)
> and what Leibniz meant by "monad."  Have you had a chance to look at
> Leibniz in this way?
>
> Throughout, this "being-at-work-staying-itself" (as Joe Sachs translates
> it), is in conflict with the urge to dissolve that "individuality" (i.e.
> Freud's "oceanic feeling" and the various "mysticisms") by trying to
> "be-something-else-destroying-yourself" which, in theological terms, is
> called *gnosticism* (aka "self-deification.")  Btw, this was Plato's "World
> Soul" and it was directly in conflict with Aristotle (yes, his most famous
> student), much as Spinoza's *pantheism* was in conflict with Leibniz.
>
> This anti-balance, get-me-outta-here, clean-things-up urge (shown in
> Voltaire's satire of Leibniz's best-of-all-possible-worlds) -- giving rise
> to English "Puritanism," and thus the USA-as-proto-Eden (being celebrated
> today, as it was in Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" lyric, "We gotta get back
> to the Garden"), as well as "Communism" (via F. Engels and his German
> "puritanism"), speaking of ironies -- likely also has a "biological"
> explanation, which I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts about (perhaps
> linked to "mutation") . . . !!
>
> Mark
>
> P.S. Eventually, we'll also have to drag the Chinese into all this and, in
> particular, Daoism and the Yijing -- since, in the world today, theirs is a
> much more dynamic (and coherent) "sphere" than the West, in which the
> *balance* we are describing is institutionalized in the Communist Party of
> China (once again, noting the irony involved) -- all of which developed
> under *very* different psycho-technological conditions, with a writing
> system (i.e. the key to human self-aware "consciousness") radically unlike
> our alphabetic one.
>
> P.P.S All of this is what some call "outlying thinking" (without a "home"
> since the 13th-century).  I remember one day when I was participating in a
> National Academy of Science meeting when the chairman described me to the
> group as a "very unusual scholar" (and, no, I wasn't invited back).
> Aristotle was Greek but he wasn't Athenian -- which meant that he had to
> leave twice, his Lyceum school was outside the city-walls and in 307BC his
> followers were banished, taking up in Rhodes and then largely
> disappearing.  Likewise, Leibniz was almost completely expunged after his
> death, then mocked by Voltaire (on behalf of Newton &al) and slandered by
> Bertrand Russell.  There is something psycho-technological about trying to
> "expel" the approach we are taking -- raising questions, as Spengler would
> put it about "Man and Technics" as well as the current drive to "merge"
> humanity with the robots (aka, Ray Kurzweil &al's hoped-for "Singularity.")
>
>
> Quoting JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> Hi Lonny, interesting comment about what I assume you mean is the ability
>> of individuals to 'fit' with their environment, cultural and otherwise. I
>> think that becomes particularly relevant in the context of the cell as the
>> first Niche Construction (see attached), or how the organism integrates
>> with its environment as a function of its internal 'resources' .......or
>> not. I am thinking of identical twins, for example, whom we know don't
>> share the same epigenomes. Deconvoluting all of that would surely help us
>> better understand what makes us 'tick'. John
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 7:24 PM, Lonny Meinecke <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi John and Mark,
>>> I am following your discussion with interest... thank you both for this
>>> thread. I like the term endogenization. A curious thing about each
>>> individual carrying the environment around inside, is that the common
>>> world
>>> is unlikely to be the same as each private version. These often seem
>>> substitutes for the external, when that unaffectable commons becomes
>>> untenable (or inaccessible) to the creatures that must somehow dwell in
>>> it
>>> anyway.
>>> --Lonny
>>>
>>> ############################
>>>
>>> To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
>>> write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
>>> or click the following link:
>>> http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
>>>
>>>
>> ############################
>>
>> To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
>> write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
>> or click the following link:
>> http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
>>
>
> ############################
>
> To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
> write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
> or click the following link:
> http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1
>

############################

To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list:
write to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
or click the following link:
http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1