Our Neurogenetic Archives: A Few Notes

I have a guitar student, and she had a high school assignment to write on John Locke and was worried. I piped up, unwisely: "Ask me anything about John Locke! I'm here to help ya!" She had the vaguest notion of what Locke was up to, but she did know he influenced the risk-takers and revolutionaries who established Unistat. I told her Locke has been shown to be pretty far-wrong with his notion of our minds at birth as tabula rasa. Already, I had lost her.

But aye...I think the jury has come in with a unanimous decision on this: we come equipped, fully loaded. For presumably many but not all imaginable things. This has been established, in historical time, a few seconds ago. Or say 1950-now.

But to what extent are we loaded? Is it only activated with experience in-the-world, with language, with education? Certainly we inherit a shuffled deck of genes from mom and dad. Is that it?

(Aside: this genetic inheritance, modified by drugs, learning, changes in environment, bombardment by cosmic rays, alterations in diet, etc: this is my best unpacking of "Plato's Problem" as mentioned briefly in the review of Knight's book on Chomsky, below.)

In his lecture after winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968, Marshall Nirenberg talked about "genetic memories." Well of course, our genes can be said to have "memories" in a certain metaphorical sense, but details about this metaphorical sense? As I tried to read his lecture (quite technical...but it turns out Nirenberg was wrong about "nonsense codons"!), I can't get a line on it. He's certainly not going off about how the Akashic Records were "right after all!" or anything like that. Nirenberg gets as close to mentioning the astral plane as Keanu Reeves gets to winning Best Actor.

But that was way back in 1968.

Since then, there's been an explosion of knowledge about epigenetics: it turns out experience-in-the-world of our immediate forebears does have influence on our genes/lives. Poverty has been linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness, for example. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get expressed, and the more I read about it the more my head spins. RNA has much ado about gene expression. It's not merely a "messenger," as many of us were told in skool. Some genes get turned on or off like a binary light switch; others get modulated like a rheostat, gradually becoming more and brighter, or less and dimmer.

Here's another example from the past year: the methylation of the genes coding for the hormone oxytocin - a hormone linked to nurturing, trust and social skills - can get taxed by intense emotional experiences. What a wonderful example of the new reality of understanding biology: a gene that helps us do very important things such as falling in love with baby as soon as she is born? It's processed in the brain, like a drug. (Hell: I see oxytocin as one of the more interesting endogenous drugs we have, and we can synthesize it too!) This hormone/drug, via social interaction in the world, affects our behavior, and the social world/environmental feedback can alter the expression of the gene. This circular-causal feedback looping of nature/nurture ---> nature/nurture, ad infinitum, till death do us part - seems like a microcosm of how Everything works. (And remember: then the epigenetic effects can get inherited by the next generation, via what happened historically in the environment, and just, wow. So: death is not the end of our story. We're connected in ways we didn't know before.)

Gosh dad!: Father may pass down more than his genes: his life experience too?
Oh, my: a bad night's sleep can epigenetically alter your genes.
Our genetic cups runneth over: epigenetic drugs are in the works.
Not fair: Study of Holocaust survivors show trauma passed on to children's genes.

Think of how all this impacts the roiling and boiling issue of income inequality...

There's plenty more where that came in. A fine readable book for non-specialists that I can point to 'cuz I read it and was enthralled: Nessa Carey's The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

Combine this with a few books on the new synthetic biology, CRISPR techniques, and what the hell: quantum computing and ye head shall be spaghettified.

But back to the neurogenetic archives. They seem to have some ontological status outside the drawing room where the Theosophical expert waxes on about past lives. But to what degree?

Darold Treffert is a psychiatrist who's been studying savants and autistic people with extraordinary abilities in some domain of life. He's been at it for many decades. He became personal friends with Kim Peek, the person "Rain Man" was based on (though that character was a composite of many savants, says Treffert). In the beginning he was a traditional scientist who read Jung and thought it wasn't science: too soft. Now he thinks Jung was on to something; he thinks we may have genetic memories of things experienced in the past by others whom we often cannot identify. See his two books (mentioned in the text linked to) and give us a better explanation.

How wild this is! We can inherit knowledge? We can get bashed in the head and suddenly write symphonies, when before we couldn't even carry a tune? (Being somewhat conservative in certain areas, I'd rather not get my head bashed in and instead risk continuance of not being a genius.) Treffert says we inhabit a metaphorically left-brain (linear, rational) society; maybe activate latent abilities by spending more time doing what the Kulchur is telling us as "wasting time": doing art. (Here's yet another argument for Basic Income?)

Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson have a collectively dizzyingly rich series of speculations on neurogenetic memory, based on their reading in genetics, mythology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and literature; they scattered their ideas throughout their many books, and I'd point to Leary's Info-Pyschology and Wilson's Prometheus Rising for starters...

David Foster Wallace, in an essay on David Lynch collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, riffs on our topic, saying our internal impressions and moods are, "An olla podrida of neurogenetic predisposition and phylogenetic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop culture iconography." (p.199 in my copy) I hadda look up "olla podrida."

Well, now I said to myself, "I think I write too much for this texting world. I'll try to make this OG spew a short one," and so I'll end with a quote from my favorite cognitive neurolinguist, George Lakoff:

"When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia, beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above, plus the immeasurably vast constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all."
Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, p.11

Thanks for bringing your immeasurably vast constitutive framework of your cognitive unconscious to the OG: see ya!

                                      художник Боббі Кемпбелл зробив цю графіку для мене

Pound Notes: (Ezra), Paideuma and You

I just finished re-reading 1992's Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity and the Resacralization of the World, a collection of far-out-there "trialogues" between the chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, the late hyperarticulate psychonaut Terence McKenna, and the arch-Heretic of Biology, Rupert Sheldrake. These conversations about eschatology, climate crisis, morphological fields, comparative religion, discarnate entities in world history, wellsprings of creativity, educational reform and metaphors about "light" - among other things - seemed ancient. With the acceleration of information and experienced time, I revisited this book that I'd read soon after it came out. I had forgotten how NeoPlatonist all three thinkers were. One riff that runs pretty much through all these conversations - held at Esalen - was: what do we need to do to re-think what got us into this predicament? And they all seem to agree we need an updated archaic revival: of partnership society (not patriarchy), of getting back into nature and connecting in a deep way with plants and life. We need to find ways to lessen our own toxic egos, dissolve boundaries between each other, and sex is really healthy and good. Psychedelic mushroom use was one thing they all agreed was a potentially powerful way to catalyze all this.

                               this photo of Pound seems to have originally appeared in the 
                               New York Daily News with the caption: "Jew Hater"

By 1939, Pound had gone over the edge. He'd lost his center, but he didn't know it yet. He had been driven...mad? into paranoid antisemitic conspiracy thought? into deep delusions? It's up to The Reader to decide. Having a great number of artist-friends killed in the 1914-1918 World War...for what? The Poet - who, let's face it: was probably born an extra-ordinary person - decided to investigate the ultimate reason(s) this war happened. And he soon got into economics: money, banks, bankers, usury, and...oy!

Ezra Pound thought pretty much the same things about an "archaic revival" as the three Wiggy Thinkers I mentioned above (except for the drugs, which about which, later, below): In 1939 Pound wrote:

What we really believe is the pre-Christian element which Christianity has not stamped out. The only Christian festivals having any vitality are welded to sun festivals, the spring solstice, the Corpus and St. John's eve, registering the turn of the sun, the crying of "Ligo" in Lithuania, the people rushing down to the sea on Easter morning, the gardens of Adonis carried to Church on the Thursday.

Soon after, Pound wrote:

Paganism included a certain attitude toward; a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium. The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion can not return to the hearts of the people.

["Ligo" here is not to be confused with the recent news that Einstein's gravitational waves have finally been found by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Waves Observatory. Pronounced "leegwa," Ligo here is the summer solstice as celebrated in Latvia and Lithuania; it's like their xmas.]

Put blood simple, Mad Ol' Ez was for the sex goddess Aphrodite, and Helios: the sun god. Fucking outdoors in Nature: that's the true religion for those of us in Europe and the West. It gets to the heart of Pound's idea of paideuma, which was the semantic unconscious of a people; the deep tangles of ideas that form a culture and make it unique.

 I've been reading A.David Moody's third volume of biography of Pound, Ezra Pound: Poet Vol III,  and it's magisterial. I've long regarded Pound's life as the most compelling, dramatic, spellbinding, weird and tragic of all 20th century artists. This bio covers "the tragic years 1939-1972," to Pound's death. Moody confirms some of my ideas about the inexhaustible Ez. It extends almost all of my ideas about the guy who edited The Wasteland. It's the sort of biographical subject-writing that a street intellectual who maybe had only "heard about" Pound might still thrill at reading. It's almost like Pound was "made up" by some other Mad Poet-Genius, in order to compete with a figure like Faust. But Ez wuz real!

Around the time the Trialogues book came out, Ray Muller produced a fantastic documentary film about Hitler's favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Pound's life was at least as wonderful and horrible as Riefenstahl's.

The term paideuma was coined by Leo Frobenius, who I wrote about HERE.

In her terrific book on lost writings by Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings, Maria Luisa Ardizzone has a long footnote about Pound and his understanding and use of Frobenius's term which is worth repeating here:

Pound's idea of culture as Paideuma is crucial for understanding his virulent anti-Semitism from the 1930s onward and for his treatment of aesthetics. Frobenius's idea that there is a connection between, for instance, the form of a bed which certain people make and use and the kind of economy (agricultural and sedentary, or nomadic)(see Frobenius, Anthology, 9) is crucial for Pound's idea that an economy of usury will influence art: "form." Pound summarizes this idea in a single assertion, variously reiterated: "The form of objects is due to CAUSE" In Guide to Kulchur, 57, Pound explains the meaning of "Paideuma" as follows: "To escape a word or a set of words loaded up with dead association Frobenius uses the term "Paideuma" for the single or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period." In "For a New Paideuma" he writes, "The term "Paideuma" as used in dozen German volumes has been given the sense of an active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time." (Selected Prose, 284; emphasis [Ardizzone's]. I have stressed the importance of the word "complex," which in Pound's work belongs to the idea of a unity that is one and plural. - pp.44-45, note #45, Machine Art

[Quick observation: I agree totally with Ardizzone about Pound's desire to see a paideuma as a unity that is plural. Pound had metaphors for aesthetic growth and movement in culture before World War 1, such as "the vortex." His Imagism was a deliberate attempt to revolutionize Modern Art. Hell, all of his aesthetic manifestoes and books sought Rev. The plurality within a unity metaphor seems isomorphic to Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, which are invisible fields that carry memories of both themselves and other morphogenetic fields. It's similar to Leibniz's "monads" and Jung's collective unconscious. It also bears a family resemblance to the sociology of "ideologies" which have a public face of claims to rationality, and to being above the fray of power and politics yet are quite likely a special interest. All of these ideas have often been presented as a unity with much plurality "carried" within. Sorry for the digression!- the OG]

So: Pound fell in love with this invention by Frobenius and sought to extend it. But for a "sick" mind such as Pound's what it meant had to do with what got us into WWI: war profiteering, banking crooks, and bad ideas that Pound saw were complexly rooted in an alien paideuma: the Semitic one. It had infected Europe and his United States. He needed to wake us all up to this invisible but deeply rooted menace.

Quick Glance Into Pound's Paranoia: Drugs
I wrote above that Pound was not in line with McKenna, Abraham, and Sheldrake about drugs. And this gives a hint. Moody tells us that Pound said he "knew" since 1927 the Commies were drugging us as a political weapon. Yep: "drugs" - no delineation between mescaline or cannabis or amphetamines, just "drugs" - were being used by Jew-Commies to corrupt and destruct the goys. Get a load of this, Ez in a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, August, 1954, Pound in the loony bin at St. Elizabeth's in DC:

heroin is pushed/ and the negro attendant knows that big chews are back of it...AND the kikes go for the WHOLE of the more sensitive section of the younger generation/ 'all' jazz musicians on marijuana/which 'is not habit forming' and leads to heroin/ and 'Benzadrine is harmless, they give it to aviators'/ so that after carpet bombing they will go on with some drug habit or other. - Moody's vol 3, p.317

[Brief comment: talk to Mezz Mezzrow, a jew-turned black about marijuana among jazz musicians!]

On with it...

Now, because I could go on for another 2000 words but won't, I want to end by floating out this idea: If we look at Frobenius's life: he was proto-fascist, but was one of the first Modern Europeans to raise up Africa as filled with brilliant and genius traditions, or as Frobenius's biographer Janheinz Jahn wrote, Frobenius gave to German people a counter-idea about Africa: an "insignia of nobility: human dignity, culture, art, literature, and history...it helped Africans and Afro-Americans to find a new consciousness of themselves within the African tradition." - from a short bio titled Leo Frobenius: The Demonic Child

Now: inventing the notion of certain geographical areas as living organisms and works of art and ideas seems fine on the surface, but it's an old trap, innit? If WE are one thing, THEY are another. And we may see beauty or value in the OTHER, but reading history for the last 30 years: far too often: THEY are simplified into a threat. "They" become demonized...

And there are other ideas like paideuma floating around out there. I guess the trick is to see the human race as one family (actually, we are: see "Everyone On Earth Is Actually Your Cousin" and note any changes in your consciousness after you've understood it). We're all in this together, the world is getting smaller and smaller, eh?

And THEN let's think about the human collective unconscious, or paideuma, or mazeway, or whatever you want to call it. It's an idea seemingly tailor-made for Generalists. What are your preliminary diagnoses? Where did we get the idea we must always be armed to the teeth? Why do men rule over women? Why must "my" version of the Sky-God have a bigger dick than your Sky-God? What about money? What about ownership of land? Please feel free to add ones that puzzle you.

See what you can make of it before we realize what Pound thought had already happened: he thought we'd made a "botched civilization." How do we use our imaginations to get out of this? Take your time, even though we sorta are pressed, no?...

                                           art: Bobby Campbell

Irritate In Chic Bug: Notes on Four Articles

I. A year ago in National Geographic David Dobbs published a piece on "Restless Genes" in human history, and I recently re-read it. What marvelous science writing. Two models of "genes" and the expression of curiosity, restlessness, and risk-taking in history are put forth: a gene called DRD-4 has been implicated in learning and reward and it modulates dopamine, the most basic endogenous "reward" neurotransmitter. We all want a little dopamine fix every now and then. Actually, closer to now.

But researchers have repeatedly noted a variant on the gene, DRD-7R, seems highly correlated with history's risk-takers: people who are eager to explore new places and drugs, try new relationships, including sexual ones. They seem more eager to try new foods and ideas. They seek change and adventure and they were the ones who lit out for the frontier, the new territory. In non-human animals the maverick gene DRD-7R relates to more exploration of territory and novelty-seeking. In humans it's also related to ADHD. Chuaseng Chen of UC-Irvine has done research showing the DRD-7Rs are found more concentrated in migratory cultures than in settled ones. Other research suggests that DRD-7Rs wither in settled cultures: they need a cultural outlet for their expression of restlessness and neophilia.

                                      four explorers on the Nimrod expedition to the
                                      South Pole. Harrowing! Shackleton is the second
                                      from the left.

But it's not that simple: the macro-version of the gene story here is explained in Dobbs's article by evolution and population geneticist Kenneth Dodd of Yale, who was part of the team that first isolated the DRD-7R variant 20 years ago. He says the picture is far more complex than one gene variant giving rise to the various Ages of Exploration. There must be a group of genes involved, and furthermore: for the pioneering types to do their thing, the culture needs to have produced tools and incorporated other traits for the novelty-seekers first, which has led to this macro picture of human innovation and exploration: DRD-7R is an exciting feature in the story of human derring-do, but we first needed genes that built limbs and brains like we have! If you're going to be the first to mount an expedition to walk out of the known territory and over those hills in the distance to see what other tribes may live there, you needed long legs (like we have) and hips configured and conducive to long walks (like we have). It helps to have dextrous hands to grasp and manipulate tools (like we have), and it no doubt helped to have a very large but slow-growing brain that spent a lot of time imagining possible behaviors and playing games between 3-18 years old. (That's all of us, virtually.) As Dobbs writes, "Our conceptual imagination greatly magnifies the effect of our mobility and dexterity, which in turn stirs our imagination further." Feedback loops inside of feedback loops, churning and seeking, spreading information and firing more imaginations.

But read the article if you haven't already. You'll get accounts of Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton, mutant genes for tolerating lactose, and pioneering Quebec logging communities. And what was most fascinating to me: the latest research on how people who live on all those tiny islands in the South Pacific got there. I was used to reading Out of Africa stories that headed north and "made a left" toward southern Europe...probably because of my ego? That would be my ancestors's earliest route out of Africa. But others made a right, and that has made all the difference.

II. In May of 2013 a study in Psychological Science appeared, conducted by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and UC Santa Barbara, which studied attitudes about redistribution of wealth among men in Denmark, Unistat, and Argentina, all of which have welfare systems very different from each other. A high correlation was found between men with strong upper body strength who disliked redistributive schemes (welfare ideas) and men with less upper body strength, who favored more redistribution. The researchers think there may be something quite ancient (and unconscious?) in political ideology. When I read the piece I realized I had intuited their findings a long time ago, but it was only intuition. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides were involved in the study, and I still find their book The Adapted Mind most interesting among the books that Stephen Jay Gould charged were "Darwinian Fundamentalism." An earlier version of this study appeared in late 2012, and Natasha Lennard, one of writers at Salon that I find not-execrable, articulated my thinking fairly accurately HERE.

                                         So. Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where a
                                         disagreement over Kant led to a shooting

III. Last September, a story appeared out of southern Russia which appealed to a dank corner of my own sense of mordant humor: two guys in their twenties were waiting in line for beer at an outdoor event in a beautiful city, Rostov-on-Don. The topic of Immanuel Kant came up and there was a fierce disagreement over some aspect of the philosopher well-known for his writings on ethics and a universal morality within humankind. Things escalated and one guy shot the other in the head with an air gun, sending him to the hospital but not killing him. The assailant faces 20 years, and the author of this brief article suggests 20 years is a long time to better get to know Kant's ideas about ethics and morality. The short piece is HERE.

IV. So there was apparently this star male philosophy professor who seduced a beautiful and brilliant student. Rumors and gossip raged, then she began to show her pregnancy. It was a huge scandal, and the student's uncle's anger was boiling at the professor. The professor thought the best thing to do would be to marry the student. She was against this. But they did anyway, in secret. The results of improprieties around sex were so scandalous the professor hid his new bride in a nunnery. Then the uncle had some thugs break in to the professor's house and cut off his penis while he was sleeping; an earlier version of Bobbitizing a guy. (The most unkindest cut of all. But of course I'm horribly, clangingly biased.) The professor, now a eunuch, took up a life in a monastery. He and his wife exchanged letters for the rest of their lives and these letters have kept scholars busy ever since.

You may have heard of the professor and his student: they were Abelard and Heloise, and the action took place 900 years ago. I mention it because I enjoyed reading this book review by Barbara Newman of a new edition of versions of the letters. I hadn't known about dificilio lectio, which says, when faced with anomalous and competing versions of the "same" text that had been copied by hand by scribes, choose the "more difficult" one, because it's more likely to be authentic. This seems like a proto-inchoate intuition about information theory, in which longer messages, when passed from person to person via memory, get shorter.

I find it very intriguing that Heloise may have been a sort of 21st century feminist, according to one reading of translations of her letters.

Synthetic Biology: Potentials Perilous and Promising

"Synbio," or synthetic biology, is here. It's alive!:

It's already been three years since Craig Venter's team made a species that was self-replicating...and its parents were not a mom and dad, but a computer.

In 2003 the human genome was sequenced. It costed billions of dollars to sequence and took up the energies of people in over 160 labs. Now you can buy a sequencing machine for a few thousand and sequence your own genome overnight. Or pay 23 and Me $99. By this time next year it'll probably be half that.

Synthetic biology, according to Venter, will change everyone's life at some point. Its upside: we can make microbes that eat carbon dioxide. We can generate flu vaccines almost overnight. Tiny critters that generate clean biofuels that are cheaper and as efficient as fossil fuels seem possible. The brilliant Drew Endy of Stanford is gung-ho about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, claiming it already constitutes 2% of the Unistat economy and is growing at 12% annually.

Venter commissioned a panel to study the potential issues in public health and national security arising from synbio. Two big problems jumped out at us:

1. Synthetic biological work had become so cheap that most of the people who were doing it weren't even trained biologists, so there was no understood consensus about standards, ethics or safety.

2.) What standards existed by governments and international bodies were ten years old and so may as well have been 100 years old.

You're probably wondering what I'm wondering: when will someone get hold of some genome of a relatively benign virus or bacteria, tweak it using known methods, then use it as a bioweapon?

You can email a genetic sequence to someone else. You need to buy a few things to tinker with, but it's doable. I'm trying to spook you for Halloween. Is it working yet?

In the 18th century, Giambattista Vico, countering Rene Descartes, asserted that humans can only know what they have made. Only true understanding can come from something the mind makes, and Descartes's notion about "distinct ideas" in the mind as a basis for philosophy was flawed because we did not make the mind; Descartes was doing metaphysics. Vico called his principle, verum factum. That which is true and that which is made convert into each other; anything else is an abstraction. (I linked Vico's idea to Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics HERE, in case anyone wants to see how bent I can get.)

Back to biology, there's the GOF, which is also growing at an exponential rate, or at least ultra-quickly. It's short for Gain Of Function. Here's how it applies to the Pandora's Box of synbio: biologists attempt to combat some potential horrific pathogen by creating it in the lab, so then they can figure out a way to develop a vaccine for it. We can only know what we have made, as Vico said.

At a conference for scientists a researcher said that he'd tinkered with the H5N1 virus then being talked about as a potential killer of millions, if it mutated. It's a simple coronavirus, but he tinkered with it so a host could infect another via transmission through the air. Then another researcher said he'd done the same thing. They both published their papers, in bigtime journals Science and Nature. They knew what they had done could be interpreted as reckless, and indeed: both journals were persuaded to omit the part of each biologist's work that detailed the techniques by which they took a dangerous virus and made it far more dangerous, because who knows which band of deranged and sick mo fos would read this stuff and get ideas? And carry it off? (Beside The State, of course, by which I mean Google "Tuskegee Syphilis Study.")

But...can you really keep info under wraps? ("Paging Mr. Snowden! Mr. Edward Snowden; Please come to the white courtesy phone...")

In reading about the uncooperative governments (SARS in China, anyone?), the paranoia about Western governmental power (read up on Indonesia and their lethal coronaviral outbreaks), governmental snafus, international differences between countries, and just how hopelessly behind the curve biosecurity experts are in Unistat alone...I'm not sanguine, friends. It's only a matter of time. Let us pray the international bioterrorists make a crucial mistake and the deaths are limited.

However, when it does happen? There's nothing more paranoia-inducing than a massively-social-mediated group of people terrified of the invisible death-bringing entities that may be in the very air they're breathing. All bets are off, and it seems just the thing to get Ted Cruz elected President. (Then: watch out, "liberals": all that NSA data could be gunnin' fer ya!)

With seven billion on the planet now, even if a pandemic arose "naturally" and killed off 3-5% of the population (like the Spanish Flu of 1918 did), how much more paranoid are we now than then? Many people who didn't die will go to their grave convinced the Other was responsible...

I hope you're scared now, or I'm not doing my job, on this, October 29...

The old Biology: you observed life from outside that life, wondered about details and behavior and then dissected to see how it worked, or placed the life in some environment and observed.

The new Biology: You're an engineer: you know the life-form because you created it, from genomic information and computer models. Now you watch to see how it plays out. If it moves, eats, respirates and replicates, you've created a new species!

So...yea. The scary part is anyone with a serious political beef, or simple hatred, can align with others and send away for stuff and do what's called 4-D printing: those microbes that were just info on a screen are now ready to be released into your enemy's territory. You send away for stuff, you use steganography (al-Qaeda left a code in a porn video). Sequencers are cheap. The data is there. One fleeting problem: many biotech companies are keeping track of "nucleotides of concern": any known dangerous sequences are tracked: who is it that wants this info?

So: we have bioterror security experts who aren't sure how to determine threats, or if a threat is all that important; they don't know how to surveil those who'd go the whole nine and release something unspeakable, and they're not sure how to combat the pathogens anyway. Supposedly the International community is getting their act together along these lines. But...let's recall some sobering facts: in 2002 at SUNY Stony Brook, researchers took the genetic code for polio and made that virus. Because...verum factum, and Gain Of Function (GOF). If we truly know these bad boys we stand a chance of combating them when they come at us.

And let's not forget that in 2005 researchers sequenced the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. They sequenced it...and then of course they made it. And the speed and cost of doing this is becoming ever-quicker and ever-cheaper. Just think: the Spanish Flu killed 50 million, but its lethality was only 2.5%. On the other hand, the H5N1 killed 59% of the people it infected. Can you imagine a huge batch of H5N1 tweaked (like two researchers have already done) to become transmissible via air?

(By the way: now is not the time to read this article about how Unistat labs are insecure. Just don't read this, or it might even bum your Halloween.)

Other Bad Signs: in Unistat the CDC and NIH don't have the infrastructure to develop massive amounts of vaccine for something that might appear. How many would need that magic shot or pill? Not as many as those hundreds of millions who'd take Lipitor or Viagra, paying for it all and making investors happy. Big Pharma is in the Big Money game; they cannot afford to spend an estimated $700 million to $1 billion to develop a vaccine or pill, when maybe after the bioterror attack quarantine and international cooperation stops the spread. There's no money in that! (SARS was stifled largely because of quarantine and cooperation.)

To sum up: synbio offers incredible promise, but just one really "successful" bioterror attack by angry young men who take their own version of a merciless God and some old border dispute very seriously...and life on Earth will have truly changed, and not in a good way. Because we have cops and monitors on one hand, but cheap technology, sheer fluid-like information and motivated ingenuity on the other hand. (Please make sure you wash both hands, thoroughly, when you're done reading this morose report.)

Dr. Frankenstein's imperative makes every day from here on out all the more fraught with drama, eh?

Happy Halloween! Muahahahahaha<cough>ahamuahahaha! Okay that's it: I may have failed to scare you, but in writing this - consulting 13 articles and taking notes - I've grown pallid, anemic and weak in my anxiety attack, and it further sickens me to say, "Well, I just hope that all happens after I'm dead and gone, 'cuz..." What kind of morality is that? It's like saying, "I hope all-out nuclear war happens after I'm dead, while your children are still around to experience it."

Now if you'll excuse me. I need to go rest. Oy! (No, but seriously: don't drink and drive on Halloween.)

Where The Hell Am I?

Often, when meditating whilst sitting quietly or even walking alone with "my" thoughts, I often use the gimmick of thinking about the Bohr Model of the atom (leave aside that it can be viewed as a "flawed" model for now), and how we're made up of atoms, which have a tiny nucleus with neutrons and protons "inside." And inside that are just all sorts of quarks and other surrealist "material" shenanigans.

And I read once in some popularization of quantum mechanics that the nucleus is so small relative to the electrons buzzing around in discrete "orbits" or "outer shells" that, if the nucleus were an orange put at the center of the 50 yard line at the Rose Bowl, then the electrons are whirling around - relatively speaking - outside the entrance gates, all around. What's "inside" all that "space"? It's empty! (But it's probably "really" not...no time to get into it now, here.)

Hell, every-thing else on this planet seems subject to the same laws of physics, and as Stephen Dedalus said, we are "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." (Ulysses, p.697, "Ithaca")

[Interestingly to me, Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1915-1922; it was published in 1922. Quantum physics would show there was a physical basis for this poetic line, but not until 1925-27 or so.]

And therefore "I" am mostly empty space. "I" just seem solid because "I" can only make investigations with the sensoria Nature gave me: clunky stuff. Gigantic, really. And seemingly a plenum of bone, skin, blood, lymph, viscera. But - and "I" still think on one level this model "is" legitimate - "I" seem really quite ghost-like. "I" only bump into stuff because the stuff "I" bump into has roughly the same levels of non-emptiness that "I" have. What a world!

Usually this has served me well: thinking of myself, as Bucky Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb." Yea: what's not all about the empty space seems more about electrons and energy exchanges between "me" and my surrounding environment. I meditate on this physics and get outside of my (mostly empty?) "self."

I end up summoning some picture of myself as a cloud of energy, with a module near the top that seems to want to make everything into some solid "meaning." But that module seems utterly foolish and but one of the modules that make up what Marvin Minsky called The Society of Mind: what's going on seems a "booming buzzing confusion" of energies, everywhere and everywhen. When I do this I've entered what the phenomenological sociologists call a "finite province of meaning." This particular province of meaning seems about blissful meaninglessness, and it's a second cousin to being stoned on cannabis, only it's still legal. For now...

Going "Up" One Level
But lately - say, the last 24 months - I've been trying to understand the human genome. It turns out to be  absurdly complex, for the OG. But it's abecedarian compared to what I found out about epigenetics. HERE's an amusing short explanation about some of what is entailed by epigenetics. He does it far better justice than I could; I'm afraid I'd bore you with my explanations about methyl groups and histones and how your grandmother's smoking habit effects your health. My favorite metaphors so far for the genome and the epigenome are this: the genome is the hardware; the epigenome tells the genome what to do with its information, and when. Talk about complexity!

So getting back to trying to find out where "I" am: who and what I seem to be is not only atoms and the void, but information inherited roughly 50/50 from mom and dad, plus the environments I've accidentally been born into or found myself in, the choices I made about what environments to go into (and "environments" here means something closer to what McLuhan meant than saying "I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County"). Although geography does seem to matter quite  a lot. But what my parents worried about, what they ate, what their parents experienced...and just an enormous amount of CHANCE occurrences seem to be a lot about where "I" am.

Then I found out something wonderfully disturbing that makes what I've mentioned so far seem trivial.

Going "Up" Another Level
In the 20th century, modern medicine finally arrived. O! The things we learned! About surgery (lots of insanely brutal war wounds provided ample practice), and what worked and what didn't, and doctors caught up to the washing their hands dealio. And we began to merge our physics (harnessing light) and chemistry with technology and imaging, and...we're on our way! We even found out we'd been acting like superstitious fools for millenia: if we wipe out bacteria, we'd live a lot longer, and healthier. And so: antibiotics (miracles!), antiseptics of all sort, cleaning products in every modern home. But we were wrong about bacteria: we need Them to maintain a healthy immune system. And oh wow: just sooooo much more.

You know this "I" that I'm trying to find? Turns out "he" is part of a system that's not only genome and epigenome, but microbiome. 90% of the cells in "me" are bacteria. And I'm healthy! "I" took a long bike ride today, got all kinds of work done, had some Big Laffs. But if "I" am 90% bacteria...I'm not sure what to think. And it turns out bacteria in my gut influences what I think and feel.

Who is running the show here?

Preliminary Ideas About Where the Hell "My" "I" "Is"
I understand the history of modern "self" hood had to do with rationalistic ideas about agency and law and responsibility. It was a convenient fiction. If some crime was committed, we want to gather the evidence and convict that rational actor for his wrongdoing and make that person "pay" a debt to another convenient fiction: The State. Or "society." But if we're driven by things our ancestors did and we're mostly empty space or bacteria, as the kids say, WTF?

At this point I take a deep breath and remember what Robert Anton Wilson said, in generalized account of what the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics: every model we make to account for some aspect of "reality" tells us as much about our own minds as it does Nature, or what's "out there." As we grew up, toddling around some environment, as mostly empty space, our genes being played by histones and methylations and other Damned Things, we were constantly ingesting atoms and incorporating them into our "selves" without knowing it. Most of us still seem blase about the whole schmeer! And even then we were mostly bacteria. And if our parents found out this fact, they probably would've killed us. Literally. With antibiotics and a lot of scrubbing.

We're toddling around and our brains are receiving signals and ignoring others, setting up our nervous system to perceive the world a certain way and - this is crucial - not other possible ways. But some kid on the other side of the world was making grooves in his brain, connecting neural clusters in a different schema. That kid was "learning" a different language, for one thing. And language, being part of the world, also influences further how we'll "see" the world, and take action. (Sorry anti-Whorfians! You're on the outs, now.)

And yet: many of us grow into adulthood and enjoy enduring alliances and deep, satisfying relationships with someone from a remote (relative to "us") region of the world. We're terrifically malleable, plastic. But not infinitely so. Yep: I was born in LA, grew up there, lived in Colorado for a a few minutes, then moved back to LA, lived in a few areas in the vast sprawling metropolis around La-La Land, then moved to a different state within the state of California, a place called "Berkeley." And yet: I have friends who speak Chinese, who are also mostly empty space and bacteria. And it's good.

Okay, okay. I'm starting to feel better now. "I" accept my verbishness, my existence as a dissipative structure, and don't really care all that much where "I" am. Because, not being a solipsist, I assume you're reading this now, and you are enough like me, so what does it matter? How do I know I'm not being dreamed by some gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft? I don't. Hell: maybe YOU are dreaming all this? And "I" don't care. This seems like a cosmic funhouse to me. All of it. What the hell: I'll just assume we sort of exist, and that it matters, bacteria and all.

Bigfoot: Impressions On Charles Fort's 139th Birthday

Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti), has been included in the set of beings called Cryptids, and some cryptids have turned out to be "real." I have no idea if Bigfoot (about 1/3 of all "sightings" in the Pacific Northwest, the rest scattered all over the globe, except for Antarctica), "is" real, but, like Jane Goodall, I hope they're real. Around 10 years ago she told NPR's Ira Flatow she was "sure" Bigfeet were real; recently she admits there's no evidence, but still has hopes. (Video, bad sound, but skip ahead to 7:20)

In the last 24 months, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of Texas, a veterinarian turned animal geneticist, has asserted she saw Bigfoot, obtained DNA that shows Bigfeet are a separate species that arose when males of some previous hominids (unnamed) had sex with female homo sapiens around 15,000 years ago, somewhere in or near Europe, then crossed the Bering Sea land bridge before the last Ice Age thawed ("they're very fast"), and are a sensitive, inquisitive but very shy species. And they need legal protection from Man.

                                                    Dr. Melba Ketchum

HERE's how Live Science reported on it.

One thing that struck me in following up this story: there is no end of articles from two groups on Ketchum: 1.) the True Believers, but even moreso; 2.) the sarcastic group Robert Anton Wilson called "fundamentalist materialists," or "skeptics," who knew her data must have been contaminated, or she was some nut, an attention hound, delusional, naive, a fraud out to cash in. I thought the Live Science article was fair. But HERE seems the fairest article I've seen, in my present state of ignorance.

Ketchum took her evidence to a forensic scientists, and note why Timmer sees this as a problem, a big one. Forensic scientists are very good at finding what they want to find, and presenting it in court. Also, I learned about how DNA breaks down over time. But the idea that Ketchum's team was coming up with human DNA that looks like it had coupled with something far more remote genetically from the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - primates we homo sapiens probably did/could have mated with...gave me pause. And yet Timmer thinks Ketchum's sincere in her beliefs that Bigfeet are human.

On the other hand, Bigfootologist Dr. Brian Sykes will release his study of DNA evidence collected from European sources in the Fall. So...Six or Eight weeks from now, we may get a Big New Wrinkle in the Bigfoot Story. Or maybe a wart or a zit...

                                              Charles Fort, proto-phenomenologist,
                                               surrealist, data-collector

A Procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
-Charles Fort, at the beginning of Ch.1 of his The Book of the Damned. A book that you may find works magick on your nervous system, simply by taking up and reading randomly: The Complete Books of Charles Fort: over 1100 pages of data he'd culled from newspapers or High Weirdness, and an overweening sense that the Scientists were too too enamored of, and blind to, the metaphors they were systematically sifting through to eliminate what Can't Be from What Is.

For (Robert Anton) Wilsonologists, it's indispensible, especially if you want to mine his stances on epistemology, his poetic humanism, his style in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, which seems fed heavily by Fort and Swift. (His epistemology was also, of course!, heavily influenced by quantum mechanics, Hume, Korzybski, Nietzsche, Husserlian phenomenology, the most current neuroscience in perception, and literary modernists. And Charles Fort! Etc.)

                                         Our Man in the Pacific Northwest

Vico's Bestioni
Noah's sons, according to Vico who died in 1744, neglected their dad's one true God after The Floodwaters receded. They then scattered and wandered "like brutes through the earth's great forest." Where did Ham go? Through Southern Asia, into Egypt and the rest of Africa. What about Japheth? Through Northern Asia, into Europe. Shem? Central Asia to the Near East. (Vico is writing in Naples, Italy.) It's nice that the brothers, while "brutes," could divide the known world up so strategically.

To be fair, once they went their separate ways, within this great Vast Forest, they were pushed further away from each other by "wild beasts which abounded." And in seeking pasture and water, they were further separated. Vico also tells us the brothers "pursued women who in that state were wild, timid and intractable." (These must have been women who survived The Flood and were just wandering around the Great Forest in packs. Those are the best kind, I've found. So I have something in common with Noah's brutish sons. I also dig the vast forests. What's left of 'em, anyway.)

Here's Vico, in the section of The New Science, on "Poetic Wisdom":

(It's after the Flood):

Since mothers abandoned their children, they grew up without hearing any human speech, or learning any human behavior, and sank to an utterly bestial and brutish state. In this case, mothers merely nursed their infants and let them wallow naked in their own feces, abandoning them forever once they were weaned. Wallowing in their feces (whose nitrous salts wonderfully enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood. And as their muscles expanded and contracted in this struggle, the children absorbed more and more nitrous salts. At the same time, these children lacked that fear of gods, fathers, and teachers which tempers the most exuberant phase of childhood. As a result, their flesh and bones must have grown inordinately large, and they became so vigorous and robust that they turned out to be giants.

...Vico then goes on to elaborate his theory of giants by citing Caesar, Tacitus, Procopius, Jean Chassagnon's treatise On Giants, archaeology (such as it was in Vico's 18th century), Greek and Latin myths...and he's sure most accounts are exaggerations! People tend to go on and on and let their poetic ingenium go wild. Let's be more sober-minded about giants. Clearly though, they interbred and covered the Earth. (I'm drawing from 369-371 from the Marsh translation.)

The Jews - Noah's clan - were taught cleanliness and fear of fathers and so they remained of normal stature.

Okay: so, for Vico, after the Flood, Noah's sons forgot all about the Jewishness, caroused about the Forests of the Earth, shitting everywhere, fucking any Wild Women they could find, and behaving like Freshmen from State on Summer Break, for a long, long time. They were, after all, hopped up and fortified by nitrous salts from all the shit in the soil, which, we all know, makes you huge like Andre the Giant. Or Lou Ferrigno. (Or Barry Bonds?)

The "poetic wisdom" here, as I glean it, not being descended from Jews myself, is this: I am descended from Bigfeet. It's a long story and Vico and tell you a lot more about it - or ask me about my ancestors, according to Vico! -  but right now I'm hungry for something nitrous, a timid and intractable woman, and maybe a Pop-Tart and some wrestling on the telly.

So: The Bigfoot Q: I don't know. Let's see what Prof. Sykes comes up with?