This is all fascinating! I found another Brooks article at the bottom of this one that seems more hopeful:
The Rise of the Amphibians
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/the-rise-of-the-amphibians.html
Truth can be messy?
Corinne Diop
Professor of Art
________________________________________
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 7:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dear ToKers
Cool to see you guys finding resonance.
Speaking of a sense of a core problem (or a core of problems), see this op ed piece from David Brooks, who interviewed young adults on the current state of affairs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/opinion/millennials-college-hopeful.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
One comment especially stood out to me:
“We don’t even have a common truth.”
This is what this list is about.
How is this for a starting point for a common truth?
There is an Energy-Information line from the Big Bang and the creation of Matter into Life into Mind into Culture into this exchange amongst us as deliberative persons.
Perhaps we can call it the line of awakening….
Peace,
G
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 8:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dear ToKers
Chance, I think we've found 'resonance' in identifying a core problem in society, marching to the beat of someone else's drum beat (Madison Avenue, other). I like the notion of syncing the digital medium to local and individual biorhythms......my initial reaction was 'stopping to smell the roses', and beyond that, what art, music and literature does for us, allowing us to find ways to escape the din of the machine. I always taught my children that this is a great country, but it's like a roller coaster....if you're on the coaster there are huge ups and downs, whereas if you observe the coaster, you can maximize the ups and minimize the downs. Or at least I would like to think so....
And I hope we can think out of the box in April. After all, for me that's what a liberal education should do for us, though that seems to have been worn thin/out, but maybe we can bring it back? I've been writing about the evolution of consciousness, particularly the feasibility of what Bucke called Cosmic Consciousness, which would perhaps present opportunity to think big again?
On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 7:40 PM, Chance McDermott <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
John,
It was refreshing to read your reaction, and I'm grateful for these efforts towards clarity. The themes you brought in and the ways in which you wove them together indeed 'resonate.' I am now wondering if a "fix" is syncing the digital medium to local and individual biorhythms rather than the other way around. I feel when I go in that direction, I get a lot of "Polo!" back when I shout "Marco."
Your assessment about the "box" losing its connection to its history is spot on. I think that there is a significant opportunity to build a bridge across mediums and phylogenetic timelines in a way that is respectful and regenerative.
On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 7:24 AM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Chance and ToKers, thank you for your perspective on what I have offered. I have also wondered about how neoteny might fit into the physiologic evolution of humans. I hope we can discuss that in April if the opportunity presents itself because it may present a nexus between my tangential way of thinking about evolution and the concrete problems you and your peers in psychology face. And if I understand your comments about 'time' correctly, the dissociation of our 'selves' from our biologic beings messing with our minds (sorry to use such technical terms) is of interest because if we at least understood our origins in ambiguity (The resolution of ambiguity as the basis for life: A cellular bridge between Western reductionism and Eastern holism. Torday JS, Miller WB Jr.Prog Biophys Mol Biol. 2017 Dec<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov_pubmed_28743585&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=xDVTVJBoH-a3MkCRB5kchcb40bntR9ZrDsHU5N99BFg&s=CmZWRjHR_dmsiJR5m3rahMR18bBGpNanOjMl4edYGWg&e=>) and our deceptive practices (Trivers,"The Folly of Fools) as the way we cope with ambiguity perhaps we could at least become aware of our unnatural and natural motivations, not as inherent foibles, but unfortunate consequences of how and why we got to this stage in 'human being'. To put it more bluntly, not as 'sinners' who've fallen out of grace, but as the recipients of Consciousness of who, what and why we are in order to make informed decisions, not just live 'lives of silent despiration'. I allude to HD Thoreau because he was the one who taught us that Descartes was wrong about the Mind/Body dichotomy, and that by going back to Nature, Thoreau could live his life 'deliberately' (I don't think he had a clock in his cabin at Walden). If nothing else, the pervasive fear of death that I sense is driving much of our behavior (getting back to your clock thing) might be better coped with through our recognition of our place in the Cosmos. In this mind space I am reminded of the the movie "Before Midnight" in which the female lead played by Julie Delpy flips out and goes ballistic on the Ethan Hawk character for no apparent reason, despite her seemingly perfect life, which is framed on a Greek island that's like 'Eden'. All I could think was that she was being plagued by the fear of death. If we don't address this and other aspects of our being as the consequences of our evolved trajectory, and instead expediently go the way of Artificial Intelligence and Crisper I think we will become more and more of a silicon-based life form rather than remaining faithful to the First Principles of Physiology that have allowed us to think along the lines we are talking about, out of the box, because there will only be the box without the connection to the Cosmic Consicousness. I think that's what you are talking about in your clock allusion Chance.....did I get it right? When you stated that what I had said 'sounded' like neoteny, etc, etc, did what I had to say 'resonate'?
P.S. I have thought for a long time that one of the reasons that the Earth seems to be spinning faster and faster is because digital time forces us to think in discrete, precise' intervals, whereas analog time lends itself to more of an 'it's about blah blah o'clock', which tends to 'blur' time, if you get my drift.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:36 PM, Chance McDermott <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
What John is describing sounds to me like principles of neotenization, which I observe consistently at the psychological level of complexity within myself and in others. My idea at this time is that this is a healthy and adaptive process that is often undervalued because it defies expectations of consistency in our personalities and the regimentations of clock time.
The biologists and geneticists I have met often, and not always, have a belief structure that implicitly assumes the superiority of linear evolutionary process, but then rejects any spiritual or transcendent attractor. I casually attribute that to the combination of a social rejection of popular, juvenile concepts of god, and an unchallenged belief in newtonian linear time.
The metaphor that I return to is that dolphins and whales, when they were land mammals, decided, "Let's go back into the water." This is not a "de-evolution," but the manifestation of a preference. In my brief time as a mental health provider, I have perpetually witnessed psychologists and health practitioners interrupt longer-term adaptive change processes because the intermediary period of transformation deviated from social norms or the conceptual capacity of the administrator.
Spontaneous, passionate, self-driven, and playful behavior is often pejoratively labeled a "regression," or "mania." In reality such expression is the necessary rejection of impositions caused by living within a culture centered on the creation of compliant factory workers, or the effects of organismic attempts to efficiently integrate new information into old information.
Furthermore, I currently believe that our adherence to a newtonian perspective on linear time is the echo effect of the advanced development of the justification system. As we increasingly felt pressured to express and interpret concise justifications, our entire view of the Universe began to take the shape of a beginning, middle, and end formats. While such a view might be convenient for the meeting of immediate human need in a complexifying social atmosphere, it may not be the most accurate, or fun, model of what's really going on around us.
From this perspective, much of the variance in consensus seems attributable to individual discrepancies in beliefs about when the story begins and where it might end. For example, the TOK starts at the Big Bang, which is really just a convenient conception until we know more (if we even WANT to know more, as we now have enough material now to justify emphasis on the experiential consolidation of knowledge into wisdom).
In summary, human beings do not eat when they are hungry, but because it is "lunch time." They do not go to bed when they are sleepy, but go to bed because they looked at a box that had the characters "10:00 p.m." flashing at them in red. They do not wake up when they are fully rested, but because they have been irritated into wakefulness by the honking of an alarm.
There is no greater wrath I have experienced from my fellow human beings than disobeying the clock and its regimentations. I wonder if it is similar to the fuss that proto whales and dolphins encountered from proto meerkats and clock-makers.
-Chance
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:38 PM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
.....Just one more thing that bears repeating. There is no Central Theory of biology, which is why you (Gregg) and I share the goal of providing such for psychology as a biologic discipline.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:22 PM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
......you may or may not realize that most of the treatments for organic diseases today merely make the symptoms go away, but don't address the actual etiology because we don't know what it is, nor are we rewarded for such knowledge when technology can mask the disease. This is very bad science that will blow up in our faces like a time bomb in my opinion. I have been criticized by my research colleagues for thinking that cures are possible anymore. I think that the reason for this is because we don't really understand the basic causes of organic diseases in the way that the evolutionary perspective offers. By looking at the problems from their appearance instead of their etiology we may be serving Managed Care, but not society.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:01 PM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Modern biology remains descriptive, post-dictive, non-mechanistic and non-predictive. It only appears to be effective because it is associated with the actual mechanisms involved. Look at the story of ulcer, which was thought to be due to stress for centuries. Turns out its caused by H Pilori, a gut bacterium, and sure the infection can be brought on by stress, but that's not the primary cause. And all the money spent on cancer research and treatment for a disease we don't know the cause of. By analogy, biology is where chemistry and physics were as alchemy and astrology. So for example, the human genome was predicted to be at least 100,000 genes.....last I looked we are down to 19,000 and counting. Biology and medicine remain associations and correlations, whereas the way that I have reduced evolution to cell-cell communication, ascribing to the First Principles of Physiology, diseases can now be seen as cellular maladaptations, not gene mutations. Only ~3% of human genetic diseases are Mendelian (1 gene,=1 disease); the other 97% are probably epigenetic. Other than trauma and infectious disease, medicine based on biology is not predictive. Why do you think that the breakthroughs in medicine have been counterintuitive and serendipitous, almost without exception? The only discipline in medicine that is rational is infectious disease because we know what causes it, so we can use Koch's Postulates to diagnose and treat it. You know the old saw about the guy who is given a clean bill of health by his Cardiologist, and walks out of the office and drops dead of a massive coronary.
I created a clinical laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School in 1976. It was dedicated to predicting whether newborns had mature lungs or not, the rate-limiting factor for survival at birth. I devised a sensitive and accurate biochemical test that was 97% predictive because we knew that Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the disease the Kennedy baby died of in 1962, was due to lung surfactant deficiency. The test was published as the lead article in the New England Journal of Medicine in September, 1976. When I left Harvard in 1991 the lab was performing 5,000 tests for lung development annually, whereas conventional labs do about 200 tests. Fast forward to 2008. I get a phone call from one of my former lab technicians who is now the Pathologist in charge of all of the biochemical testing at Brigham and Women's Hospital (it's a long story). He tells me that he is being forced to change the lung maturity testing from the biochemical assay I developed in 1976 to a faster, cheaper, but highly inaccurate method I am quite familiar with (so the hospital could make more money because the assay is not as labor intensive). In telling me this, he says that the only tests in the entire suite of tests run in his labs are my assay and the assays for heart enzymes that indicate whether and how intense an heart attack was. All of the other tests are confirmatory, not predictive. This is the state of the art in 'evidence-based' medicine. I maintain that if medicine were not essential for society we wouldn't be expending such huge amounts of money on such a non-scientific discipline.
As I have said before, the difference between Darwinian and Epigenetic evolution is like the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian Gravity Theory, the former being descriptive, the latter mechanistic. So Newtonian physics describes how bodies attract one another, but does not fit with Relativity Theory. Einsteinian Gravity Theory, on the other hand, is consistent with Relativity Theory, explaining that gravity is the result of deformation of the fabric of space-time. allowing for a cohesive way of thinking about physics rather than anecdotes. Based on Occam's Razor, or parsimony, the Einsteinian perspective is correct because it is the simplest, most parsimonious way understanding the two ways of explaining the same phenomenon. The same would be the case for Darwinian vs Epigenetic evolution as I have described it. Genes are not what sense changes in the environment that signal for evolutionary change, cells are. You may argue that what I have described is the same as Darwinian evolution in that even 'internal selection' will ultimately comply with survival of the fittest, but its not about the adults selecting one another for reproduction, and the number of offspring being the measure of evolutionary success, which are proxies for what actually occurs during evolution. it's the quality of the fit with the environment as determined by the phenotype interacting with the environment to collect epigenetic marks that is the mechanism that underlies adaptation. So it's really 'apples and oranges' when it comes to Darwinian v Epigenetic evolution.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:22 PM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
So what, exactly, are you saying about the modern evolutionary synthesis? Are you saying it is incomplete or are you saying it is completely wrong?
I just finished the book, The Gene: An Intimate History. A great book, IMO, that describes the enormous developments in biology over the past 150 years or so. The fundamental point of the book is that the merger of Darwin’s theory of natural selection with the science of genetics led to huge advances in our understanding. That seems to be a justifiable statement to me.
Are you saying that this is all a mirage? That the whole foundation of modern biology is completely misguided? If so, this feels hard for me to believe. It seems much more palatable to say that it is incomplete. How can we possibly explain all the progress that has been made? Granted the picture might change quite fundamentally as we pull in cell bio-physiology and other insights (e.g., perhaps analogous to how quantum mechanics and general relativity changed our understanding of physics). But you seem dismissive here of cornerstones of biological knowledge. Can you help me sort that out?
Best,
G
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2018 12:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Dear ToKers
Sure, be glad to expand on my approach to evolutionary biology. I have never bought in to random mutation and Natural Selection in principle, both because as a developmental cell biologist, I know that mutations are not readily incorporated into the gene pool; in fact just the opposite, they cause still births and abortions. And Natural Selection is a metaphor, not a mechanism, so how can it be tested experimentally. Furthermore, we know that processes of evolution are reversible based on work by Jean Guex on Ammonites, for example, showing empirically that such invertebrates were impacted by environmental changes, causing them to revert to earlier stages in their development and phylogeny, indicating that the processes that generated the developmental/phylogenetic changes could not have been random because there would be know 'trail' in a random event, so consequently there must be some organizing principle(s) that determined those changes in order to allow them to recapitulate the process. And work in my laboratory has shown that chronic lung disease is actually 'reverse evolution' when seen at the cellular-molecular level. What we see pathologically are step-by-step reversal of the developmental and phylogenetic changes that formed the alveoli of the lung under physiologic stress due to various agents- mechanical, oxidative, bacterial. Just to be clear, I have made the case for 'internal selection' through remodeling of structure and function. Under stress to tissues they generate Radical Oxygen Species (ROS) due to the shear force on the microvasculature....the cells involved in the affected structure will mutate due to the production of the ROS, and because of the prevailing homeostatic control, will remodel the structure/function until they come up with a new cytoarchitecture that doesn't produce ROS any longer....which is what we refer to as evolution (hope that was clear.....it's also referred to as the Baldwin Effect). As for the First Principles of Physiology concept, based on the cell-cell signaling mechanisms known to determine the development and phylogeny of the lung, I was able to trace the process of alveolar evolution from the swim bladder of fish forward to amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in a step-wise fashion. From there, the trail becomes somewhat more difficult to follow backwards because there hasn't been a systematic study of organisms prior to vertebrates, assuming that their physiology wasn't pertinent (WRONG), but we know that the skin is the most primitive organ of gas exchange, so using knowledge of skin development and phylogeny offered the means of tracing the gas exchange mechanism all the way back to the unicellular cell membrane. That was achieved in large part by recognizing the central importance of lipids throughout the process, starting with the exploitation of cholesterol in the cell membranes of eukaryotes (organisms with a nuclear membrane), our ancestors, facilitating gas exchange by thinning out the cell membrane, culminating in the mammalian lung with the use of cholesterol (and other lipids) to maintain the structure and function of the alveolus by synthesizing and secreting lung surfactant into the thin walled alveolar space, reducing surface tension, preventing collapse of the alveolus upon exhalation (called atelectasis). As proof of principle, if you delete the cholesterol synthetic mechanism from the alveolar cells that make the lung surfactant, the embryonic lung compensates by forming more of the connective tissue cells (lipofibroblasts) that evolutionarily facilitated the evolution of the lung from the swim bladder. As for the concept of First Principles of Physiology- namely negative entropy (Free Energy), chemiosmosis (bioenergy to sustain negative entropy) and homeostasis (to monitor the capacity of the organism to adapt to an ever-changing environment)- those three elements are the essentials for maintaining and perpetuating life. Those elements evolved due to the self-referential, self-organizational nature of life, emerging from the Cosmic Singularity/Big Bang, the recoil caused by Newton's Third Law of Motion- every action having an equal and opposite reaction- giving rise to both physical (Black Holes, Stellar Evolution) and chemical (balanced chemical equations) phenomena, as well as to life itself, beginning with the unicell. As a reality check, all of this relates to Hughlings Jackson, the 19th Century Neurologist's observation that dissolution of brain structures due to various brain diseases are characterized by the reversal of the order in which various brain structures appeared during development/phylogeny.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:21 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
John,
Thanks very much for this summary of your work. As you note, I have been fascinated to learn about your perspective since November. I was wondering if you could share some how you see your work in relationship to the modern evolutionary synthesis, the idea that biological complexity evolves as a function of natural selection operating on genetic combinations through time.
Over the course of my study, I have came to see that biology consists of three big ideas: 1) natural selection; 2) genetics, and 3) cell bio-physiology. And one of the reasons I have been drawn to your work is that, prior to meeting you, I too had (a more intuitive) sense that cell physiology was not really woven into the picture. Your work clearly does this. However, I still am sometimes a little unclear on where your ideas of first principles of physiology and related concepts stands in relation to the modern synthesis. Can you say a bit about that?
Best,
Gregg
From: tree of knowledge system discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 2:41 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Dear ToKers
Dear ToKers,
Gregg has asked me to introduce myself in anticipation of my contribution to the April meeting. I am a Professor of Pediatrics, Ob-Gyn and Evolutionary Medicine at UCLA. I have a PhD in Experimental Medicine from McGill University, my first Faculty position was at Harvard Medical School, then at U Maryland, and now at UCLA.
I began an email correspondence with Gregg several months ago, finding common ground between us in our mutual desire to bring new order to both psychology and biology/medicine. My current perspective emerged via the realization that I could exploit the cell biology of embryonic development and phylogeny (my research career) to trace the evolution of the mammalian lung back to its unicellular origins. But when I turned to the evolution literature on developmental biology, or EvoDevo, there was literally no cell biology, initially due to a historic glitch caused by the absence of cell science to propel evolutionary biology in the 19th century; so instead the evolutionists embraced genetics, and never let go. But cell biology underpins all of contemporary biology and medicine. I have made efforts since that realization to introduce my cell biologic perspective on evolutionary biology to the evolution of physiologic traits such as the lung, kidney, skin and bone.
There are certain key concepts that have helped me to recapitulate physiologic evolution from the unicellular state forward, primarily the principle of cell-cell communication mediated by growth factors and their receptors as the mechanism for embryologic structure and function, to which I have contributed beginning in the early 1970s. That, in combination with the observation that evolution is a series of pre-adaptations or exaptations or co-options, offering the opportunity to see the interrelationships between different physiologic adaptations based on cell-cell communication mechanisms. But above all, the theory that the cellular internalization of external factors in the environment such as ions, gases, heavy metals, bacteria, gravitational forces, compartmentalizing them and making them useful as physiologic traits is key to understanding the origins of life, not as the Anthropic Principle that sees us in this environment, but rather the realization that we are ‘of’ this environment. The “Endosymbiotic Theory” can be understood based on the unicellular origins of life and the subsequent cell-cell communication mechanisms that fostered complicated physiology of multicellular organisms.
I mention all of this because I am of the opinion that all of the organs of the body, including the brain/perceptual consciousness evolved in tandem with the visceral organs. For example, there was a big breakthrough in understanding the evolution of the brain back in 2003 (Holland ND. Early central nervous system evolution: an era of skin brains? Nat Rev Neurosci. 2003 Aug;4(8):617-27) when Holland showed that there was a continuum from the central nervous system of worms to vertebrates based on its phylogenetic origins in the skin, or the skin-brain hypothesis. The skin is a highly underappreciated organ, which was hypothesized to be the origin of all complicated physiology in vertebrates (Torday and Rehan. Evolution, the Logic of Biology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
It is here that I share interests with the folks on this lis. I know Gregg has become quite interested in the view of the human as an extended cell and the braiin as the skin, folded inward. I have been able to exploit the idea that the first cell evolved from the immersion of lipids in water, both components coming from the frozen asteroids that pelted the early Earth before there was an atmosphere that could oxidize them. But that raises the question as to what was the basis for the spontaneous formation of lipid-based protocells? Traditionally, that has been attributed to the self-referential, self-organizational properties of life, giving rise to the First Principles of Physiology (FPP), which were generated by the protocell defined by its lipid membrane, distinguishing the internal and external ‘environments’. The FPP are constituted by negative entropy, or negative Free Energy within the cell, chemiosmosis, the most primitive way of generating bioenergy, intracellular membranes partitioning negative and positive ions on either side of them to generate an electrical current to sustain negentropy, and homeostasis as the monitoring mechanism for the interrelationship between the entropy within and outside of the cell.
I have hypothesized that the origin of self-referential self-organization was the Singularity of the Big Bang, given that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s Third Law of Motion). With that cellular molecular mechanistic linkage from contemporary physiology, referring all the way back to its origins in the Singularity/Big Bang, I have speculated that that is the origin and continuum of Consciousness itself, or the Hard Problem (David Chalmers), how we ‘know that we know’. Hameroff and Penrose have speculated that the brain integrates information through the microtubules of the cytoskeleton of neurons. Yet all cells have cytoskeletons, so it is feasible that there is integration of the somatic and CNS microtubules, which Head and Holmes [1911], and more recently Haggard and Wolpert referred to as "Disorders of Body Scheme?"
The other breakthrough idea that may form common ground between physiology and psychology is the concept of the ‘Phenotype as Agent’ (Phenotype as Agent for Epigenetic Inheritance.<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov_pubmed_27399791&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=9b6-Whll2uErOHRlZZa8ChznUHOERyKe4VKjG2ay8IM&s=0WNA0rZjxBg3g7BZYjz7NwLopdPMNFoaiEOI3van09U&e=> Torday JS, Miller WB. Biology (Basel). 2016 Jul 8;5(3)). That notion emerged from the hypothesis that the unicell was the first Niche Construction (NC), NC being the concept that organisms generate their own immediate environments. So by combining endosymbiosis with NC, hypothesizing that the unicell internalized its environment (The Cell as the First Niche Construction.<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov_pubmed_27136594&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=9b6-Whll2uErOHRlZZa8ChznUHOERyKe4VKjG2ay8IM&s=NyrSjKZhogyEQf8D8Kz05MmildVpKMLOmoRbTJ8GJdc&e=> Torday JS. Biology (Basel). 2016 Apr 28;5(2)) as described above, that the process of evolution can be seen as a continuum from its origins to present day physiology, consciousness being the manifestation of that process at the level of being aware of one’s surroundings, both internal and external.
Just to be more concrete, as mentioned, the cytoskeleton may act as the structure within the cell that acts to communicate between cells throughout the body. Penrose has shown that anesthetics bind to the catalytic site within tubulin, inhibiting its formation, linking the cytoskeleton to consciousness. And when yeast, primitive unicellular relatives of vertebrates, are put in zero gravity they lose their abilities to polarize (unaware of up/down/left/right) and cannot reproduce due to collapse of their cytoskeleton. So depriving this organism of its sense of gravity renders it dissociated from its ‘consciousness’ of its surroundings, i.e. it is unconscious. Thus the putative link between the cytoskeleton, consciousness and Cosmic Consciousness.
This way of thinking about the continuum from physiology to our immediate perceptual consciousness of being, to the Consciousness of the Cosmos, conventionally referred to as something greater than ourselves, as the product of the iterative internalization of the environment, or the endosymbiosis referred to above, offers an opportunity to understand these processes mechanistically. And as I have proposed to Gregg, the ‘joints’ in his ToK can be understood as part and parcel of the same continuum mechanistically, merging his scheme with mine. For example, I have previously used the cell-molecular approach to ‘predict’ the evolution of endothermy (A central theory of biology.<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov_pubmed_25911556&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=9b6-Whll2uErOHRlZZa8ChznUHOERyKe4VKjG2ay8IM&s=H-CqJb-JiKg0wEsfV0Zyab7VRT69LWebGj5yeqZJB8I&e=> Torday JS. Med Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), largely based on the opposite effects of physiologic stress on ‘fight or flight’ versus meditation/hibernation. Such ideas may help to further elucidate the nature of consciousness, and the continual line from the Bigh Bang, through the FPP of the unicell, all the way to this email exchange.....Please don't hesitate to comment/critique......Best, John Torday
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