John:

I was off kayaking (and eating lobster salad at Pop's restaurant) yesterday, so I'll take your comments one-at-a-time (the last of which was in a private email).

#1 "Communism" has nothing to do with "cooperation."  Instead, it was an expression of the Protestant *evangelical* expectation of an Armageddon that would end human biology once-and-for-all.  Marx was a hired-gun by F. Engels (paid for by his father's factory), who was actually responsible for all this nonsense.

Engels was raised in Barmen, Germany, where his youthful experiences were of itinerant preachers raising the roof with "Repent the End is Near" -- whereas Marx came from Trier, where he identified with the local farmers.

"Communism" is a fundamental *rejection* of "equipose" and instead an attempt to end this world with a "material" version of the 2nd Coming.  How familiar are you with the Book of Revelation . . . ??

Furthermore, what we would now call "human" didn't exist until roughly 500BC (and then only in a few places), or what Karl Jaspers called the "Axial Age."  Hunter Gatherers were the same species but not at all the same "phenotype" that is today encountered by anyone who understood that term.  This is the topic of Jaynes and Donald, which I will wait for Greg to return to elaborate.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_Axial-5FAge&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=GHCgWRTvDK4nxxOO9mUcZOXeKqbTrkLmHYR2JQzUcdQ&s=k-1yHhOxtVZDQg50L5F8zha5fvPEThxP1XM1qLGmLwA&e=

#2 As an "outlying thinker," you will need to learn about Leibniz.  All in due time.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Leibniz-2DIntellectual-2DMaria-2DRosa-2DAntognazza_dp_1107627613&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=GHCgWRTvDK4nxxOO9mUcZOXeKqbTrkLmHYR2JQzUcdQ&s=aSiHYiwqsVcVrVR5hyEV7NBzagdNR_GJoX2mOvp4VEQ&e=

#3 Without McLuhan, there is no "up-to-date" regarding technology.  Also a topic for future elaboration.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.amazon.com_Understanding-2DMedia-2DExtensions-2DMarshall-2DMcLuhan_dp_1584230738&d=DwIDaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=GHCgWRTvDK4nxxOO9mUcZOXeKqbTrkLmHYR2JQzUcdQ&s=QWaAiedWWRHK_bXLzdPPeeVtFOcVHHiFpuDwZGwgB1k&e=

--> What you didn't address is the biological process for *destroying* "equipose" (i.e. "progress," "communism" &c) and its relationship to "mutation" (and/or other processes, like cancer, for instance) . . . !!

Mark

Quoting JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>:

.....Oh, and no, I have not read Leibnitz, just little snippets here and
there.....to be honest, as long as the thinking is related to biology as
Lego Blocks (descriptive) it is unfortunately immaterial to my way of
thinking because it reflects the logical construct being used......I liken
 it to the difference between Newtonian Gravity theory v Einsteinian, the
former describing the attraction of bodies, the latter that gravity is due
to the distortion of space-time. Like Twain said,“The difference between
the *almost right* word and the *right* word is really a large matter. ’tis

the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”😀

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 6:26 AM, JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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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