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

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