Less Is Less

  Scottish poet Robert Browning in his 1855 poem “The Faultless Painter”  writes the following line  “Well less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged” The words were adopted by German architect Mies van der Rohe in 1947 to reflect his slant on Modern architecture. “Less is more” has been a potent meme in contemporary architecture from 1950 to the present. The phrase is a corollary to the Adolf Loos 1910 lecture and essay titled  “Ornament and crime” and soon became “Ornament is a crime” adding a moralizing element to Modern architecture that expanded like an ecclesiastical tumor upon the movement. A generation of young turks in the Western world made a big, fat moral issue of their slimmed-down Modernist esthetic - swallow our astringent, soulless Kool Aid or you are a Victorian degenerate throwback and deserve to be run out of town.

“Nothing in excess” - Ancient carving at the Greek temple at Delphi

“A man must know how to choose the mean and avoid extremes” -       -Socrates

For over one hundred years the shedding of 19th Century gingerbread esthetic has reigned on all man- made things from lamps, chairs and tables to buildings (though violated by Frank Lloyd Wright who assigned “organic” truth to his carbuncular detail. Most Modern architects and industrial designers have endorsed a machine esthetic - form follows function or Form and function are one. The steamship, the airplane, the locomotive as early 20th Century examples of a more honestly conceived design.

In the realm of painting, the notion that every visible component of a scene must be faithfully rendered as seen by the eyeball-occipital axis of “reality” evaporated with the impressionists in 1870 and has remained in a gaseous state ever since;  exceptions for throwback obsessives  Richard Estes and John Currin noted. Total abstraction launched by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich in the early 20th century  became comfortable to the contemporary mind. Non-objective Painting by Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Larry Poons is old hat. Less courses through this work but is there adequate “more” ?   There is more in Stella but a more deficit  in Kelly. Kelly has taken a ride on the easy train with his large monotone shaped canvases. The license to do away with ornament spawned artists who do not search for the essence of less while delivering less itself.

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JB Questions and comments:

1. Has epigenetics been an accelerator of geographic realpolitik over the past 3,000 years?  In his Pulitzer Prize winning book about the origins of cultural dominance, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,  UCLA Professor Jared Diamond asserts the foundational role of geography alone in creating the technological headstart for some peoples of the Earth. Diamond’s idea of primacy of geography contains the subsets:edible wild plants that are easily domesticated and large wild animals that can be domesticated to become beasts of burden as well as transportation in peace and war. Perhaps there is more to the story. Once a tribe or a kingdom gets a headstart from its food and animal resources it’s conceptual tools such as writing and language development get hardwired epigenetically forming a synergy of brain and geography resulting in cultural acceleration and domination. The causation is not geography alone as Diamond so forcefully asserts prior to 25 years of intense genetic research since publication of “GGS”.
2. Did ancient Andean or New Guinea ancient mountain populations invent the wheel and discard it due to steep trails and lack of brakes? Perhaps wheels made of thin sections of logs or rings of bamboo slathered with rubber that would  have decayed leaving no evidence. Archaic wheels do not need to follow the Fred Flintstone model.
3. Is American ghetto violence simply the chaos that always exists between opposing paradigms as these neighborhoods waffle between the tribe political organizational paradigm and the kingdom paradigm?  I.E. indefinite borders, ambiguous membership, scope of political unit?  There is no clear political definition in these communities thus no political stability. Drugs, poverty, lack of education are the result of paradigm ambiguity. Is it one group per block as some assume or one per four or eight blocks as others define it or the border between housing and train tracks, freeway, river? Who knows? Ambiguity results in perpetual  battle.
4. The Chinese have had a compulsion for innovation stifling top down social control for thousands of years due to a lack of trust among themselves. Is the widespread lack of trust among the Chinese an epigenetic trait peculiar to the Chinese? Are black Africans any different? Whites? Melanesians? Polynesians? What brain area and neurological mechanisms harbor trust, ability to trust, trust response, the trust connection with one’s family, friends, neighbors, fellow countrymen so vital to cultural development.
5. Rank the nations of the word not by gross national product but by per capita debt.
6. Apropos of little - Differences in highrise office towers the world over are like different dog breeds. Nothing genetic happening. No mutations of import. All highrise towers share 99.999% of their DNA. These buildings are not analogous to lions, tigers, bears or crocodiles but to  spaniels, labradors, shepherds and weiner dogs. High rise architects are like a league of dog breeders - no evolution just superficial change. Some elevators are more efficient than others, some enclosure systems are more versatile - so what? Highrise architecture is a crashing bore - no genetic change since the curtain wall was invented in 1909 ( Boley building, Kansas City, MO, architect:  Louis Curtiss.
7. Are schizophrenia, manic depression and hypomania degrees of the same parasitic disease of the brain? Perhaps amoebae Toxoplasma gondii or N. fowleri?
8. Are the tension-sensing proteins at work in microtubules during mitosis the same proteins as those in trees and all branching plants that sense tension and or compression forces caused by asymmetrical limb growth and sending grow signal to opposite side of tree to maintain equilibrium?
9. Is cilia rotation at embryonic notochord cells counterclockwise at southern hemisphere in marsupials? It is clockwise in northern hemisphere in animals.
10. What signals the proteins that signal the start of the embryonic ectoderm’s  production of neural tissue?
11. JB neolog: “Stochastic Differentiation”: Adjacent cells correct one another thus avoiding catastrophic errors that would result if a single overall masterplan blueprint were used to direct cell activity. Stochastic Differentiation implies bottom up causality as opposed to top down causation.

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11/7/15  11:51 AM

Coronet Effect

  In 1936 M.I.T. physics professor Harold Edgerton created an ultra high-speed photograph he named “Milkdrop Coronet” in it, a single drop of milk causes a “coronet”  (an expanding ring) of 25 distinct droplets to explode up simultaneously ( thus the “coronet”)  from the surface of the milk bowl encircling the point of impact of the larger drop. One large event, the milkdrop in this example, causes many smaller events. This is the Coronet effect. A cue ball striking another ball or two would not be an example of the coronet effect. One cause-one effect is not coronet causality. A coronet is not a cascade. The resulting smaller events do not cause one another to occur nor do they initially interact with one another. they are all caused by the single large event not by one another. When the droplets forming the coronet fall back into the medium from which they sprang, they DO begin to interact with one another but not in mid-air to any noticeable degree other than via quantum spook.

Example of Coronet Effect:  A mountain of copper and gold deep in the jungle of Irian Jaya ( Western New Guinea) is slated for mining, the big drop. The following list of droplets are coronet effects:

1. marginalization of Indonesian leader Sukarno by C.I.A.
2. JFK assassination
3. ascendancy of LBJ
4. dislocation of indigenous mountain tribes
5. the Vietnam War
6. a prospering U.S. mining company

A coalesce is the opposite of a coronet. A coalesce occurs when several separate events combine to create a single, larger thing, a whole larger than its parts.  Twelve equal segments of TNT in an atom bomb explode simultaneously in order to drive two previously separated chunks of plutonium together detonating the plutonium causing an  explosion  magnitudes larger than the sum of the 12 segments of TNT.

Consider the work of the following geniuses coalescing to form Postmodernism from an aging Modernism ca 1912, the year the Titanic sunk-symbolic !: Mieles( motion pictures), Wright Brothers ( pitch, yaw, roll), Frank Lloyd Wright ( asymmetric balance of form and space), James Joyce ( stream of consciousness) , Isadora Duncan (anti-baroque free dance), Tesla ( AC current, radio waves ), Braquasso ( Braque and Picasso roped together like climbers on Mt. Cezanne inventing Cubism i.e. Cezanne for Dummies) Einstein- deconstructing Newtonian mechanics, Schoenberg-atonal music composition, Edison-recorded sound, Duchamp- redefinition of capital “A”  art. The emergence of the Postmodern zeit, a colossal paradigm shift is a reverse coronet, 12 smaller drops coalesce  into a single culture-wide drop of zeit-welt (zeitgeist-weltanschauung) characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity and contradiction. The ultra-democratic rhizome appears counterbalancing all things of The Descended Grid, The Enlightenment Project i.e. The Modern, symbolized by Charles Darwin’s branching tree.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roger Taney presiding,  had a vast Coronet effect as it initiated the reification of the key assertion of  the Declaration of Independence:  “All men are created equal”: The U.S. Supreme Court decision is the big coronet drop causing the following droplets: The Civil War, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Reconstruction, Jim Crow era, contemporary African-American struggle for justice.

The emergence of bilateral symmetry from radial symmetry in animals was a coronet event. Once the “decision” was made for bilateralism in Cambrian fishlike organisms, a cornet of causality followed; now every animal has a left side and a right side; a front and a back and with that -implied velocity ( motion with direction). The birth of the idea in animals of action over stasis - advantage is immediate and widespread -  the Cambrian Explodes. There is oscillation from drop into droplets creating the coronet and from droplets into single drops creating the coalesce. What is the connection between the coalesce: Picasso and his fellow geniuses launching Postmodernism and the coronet of the Dred Scott Decision & aftermath?  Do phenomena comprising a coronet often coalesce and vice versa? Is droplet formation from a single drop always energy dissipating? Does coalescence always require energy input? Is there more coroneting or coalescing in nature? The eukaryotic cell is a coalescence of previously free-floating microorganisms, higher animals are a coalescence of organ systems and of other organisms ( bacteria and viruses). Are coronet-coalesce events like waves or like yin-yang, chicken-egg, object-shadow dualities, one automatically implying the other?  Will a cornet always be a part of a coalesce? Every wave has a trough and a ridge. It is not that one causes the other but that they are two parts of the same thing. If you drop a rock in a pond causing a coronet, the droplets will coalesce upon impact causing waves. Life on Earth is a coronet,  plants, animals and microorganisms are droplets in gradient reduction theater to be followed, in billions of years, by coalescence back into singularity.

Coronet-coalesce oscillation  in human affairs follows the same rules of causality as seen in larger and smaller arenas of the natural world,  from intergalactic events to sub-atomic activity. This explains why we get nervous when good things happen and why most believe it is darkest before the dawn. A pea-brain squirrel knows that a pile of nuts is too much of a good thing and will run away if it encounters such an unnatural cluster of seductive goodies on a fence rail. Humans set traps for one another using this universal causal logic. Buy this car, see this movie, eat this food, drink this alcohol-The Big Drop, and a coronet of good things will ensue….not…. as car and other payments coalesce into a stack of bills each month.

People, at times, mistake a big drop as the final outcome unmindful of the coronet effect. The conspirators behind five years of Dred Scott shenanigans: Roger Taney, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas,  believed they were solving the slavery problem once and for all by ensuring the survival of slavery via federal law. Their One Big Drop: a Supreme Court judgement. This One big drop created many droplets spreading effects in all directions. In some cases droplets grow into big events spawning a new generation of effects both positive and negative.

Around the locus of 1912 there was one big Western Culture-wide drop with 10 subsequent droplets, one each in physics, biology, politics,  painting, dance, fiction, music, electricity, manned flight, and architectural space, each droplet creating its own path of events and subsequent droplets over and over dissipating energy and adding complexity all the way. Looking at the paradigm-shifting drop of 1912 ( initiating our Postmodern world) one can follow a single droplet such as Duchamp’s reinvention of capital “A” art and follow this capital “A”  Art droplet  through several generations of art innovation revealing a “bouncing ball” pattern.

Questions and Theories:

1. Is every big drop at the center of a coronet also a small drop from an even larger coronet event?
2. Is the human capacity for written language coded in genes or by some RNA modification?
3. JBT - Human epigenetic machinery such as MYSM1 does not distinguish between creating a new molecule to battle an invading microbe from creating a new molecule to transmit a byte of experience ( emotional or rational) language, music, math. It’s all the same. The DNA-gene making machinery will sort it out over time i.e. encode or discard. New stuff gets a trial period of perhaps a few thousand years or millions when the new feature is encoded in DNA or discarded onto evolution’s trash heap.
4. Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller ( over one million copies sold) refers many times to “human evolution” to describe cultural developments that led to language, guns and steel stuff, sidestepping the fact that all human “progress” i.e. development of the past 50,000 years has emerged from the same neocortical gene group not from any human evolution in the Darwinian sense with ‘evolution’ meaning change to the human genome i.e. changes to nucleotides as they sit on strands of human DNA. One might say that humans have, over time, learned to use their inflated neocortices to greater effect as they learn from one another and store information in myth, tradition, libraries and social patterns learned by children. Diamond wants it both ways: to claim that societies evolve in a Darwinian sense while asserting in his main thesis,  that we humans are not differentiable genetically from one another as if humans the world over would have all changed in evolutionary terms ( unlike any organism ever)  into identical phenotypic expression from an identical genotype. In Diamond-speak, societies evolve while humans all remain the same genetically i.e. share the same brain. One excuses Diamond- logic in light of its time of writing in mid-1990s when epigenetics was simply discredited Lamarckism and not the established science it is today.
5. The very large human neocortex is a big evolutionary  coronet drop caused by the mutation of a single gene. This increased brain capacity has resulted in so many useful coronet droplets in our struggle for survival such as language, tool making, social complexity, animal/plant domestication that it appears so far to be a mutation worth conserving. The big brain is in its infancy in geological time.
6. Jared Diamond juggles different meanings of the word evolution. His topic employs much life-science evidence where evolution has a strict meaning related to mutations in DNA affecting an organism’s genome-genotype-phenotype. He uses the term evolution interchangeably: formal - informal. the informal meaning is  far more casual meaning simple change for the better or change itself with no connection to actual modifications to nucleotides. This may seem trivial but when Diamond’s thesis revolves around his assertion that all humans the world over have no discernable  genetic differences that might be the source for vast differences in language acquisition, tool use, plant / animal domestication, social complexity, war-making capability, it becomes important to point out Diamond’s essential fuzziness in his definition of evolution. He likes it fuzzy. This fuzz is essential to Diamond’s thesis. Twenty years of epigenetic science blows away fuzz. There may be thousands or millions  of heritable pathways to cultural complexity and these may or may not involve DNA ( rather than RNA, histones, proteins etc).
7. True evolution versus accrued human culture. There was a single evolutionary event - the big brain mutation, all else is not evolution but the much simpler “change” Many things change without evolving.  The stuff of culture changes it does not evolve. Aircraft changed from biplanes to supersonic jets they didn’t evolve. If Guns, Germs, And Steel is based upon biology-living things such as people and their culture then Diamond’s thesis: “The ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human culture” evaporates. Epigenetic change accrues immediately as well as over a few thousand years and contributes, along with geography to cultural diversity.  Diamond asserts the reason that one culture has all the cargo is strictly geographic happenstance; in light of the past 20 years of genetic research, this is not so.
8. Diamond and many anthropologists list several societies that did not invent writing. Perhaps these societies invented writing AND paper thus any evidence has decayed into dust say: animal blood ( ink) on animal skin ( paper) both organic and gone in 100 years let alone 3,000 to 5,000 years. Maybe not all societies wrote on rocks or into wet clay. Diamond relies too heavily on anthro dogma on the subject of writing as a marker for place in time or time in place.
9. To study: The relationship between risk-taking behavior of Western peoples induced by Toxoplasma gondii parasites as cysts in neocortex due to association with domestic cats and Western  dominance of Third world  indigenous peoples.
10. The chicken-egg heuristic is exhausted - use yin-yang simultaneity that accelerates or slows, as in autocatalysis. Autocatalytic def: A process that speeds up over time at an increasing rate.
11. Entropic thermodynamic theory-gradient reduction as causality for increased social complexity with war serving a cosmic compulsion toward stasis through growth of living things: plants, animals, empires.
12. Did humans migrate from the Olduvai Gorge across what is now the South pole into Australia then on up to China when the Earth was oriented differently on its axis, when the equator was plus or minus 90 degrees from its present location? - no
13. Jared Diamond discusses language in an historic manner using it to trace the migration of races across continents and oceans and islands. Language is treated as one now treats genetics as a means of establishing primacy in a locale. In Saussurean terms, this is diachronic linguistics. To study language laterally in terms of grammar and syntax and its neurological origin is synchronic. Noam Chomsky is a synchronic linguist.
14.  We spend our lives trying to close the gap between what we know intuitively ( a lot !) and what we are surrounded by in the real world (our lot in life, Lalena) with its thin crust of the whole pie of life and other things. Humans who get all peaceful and dreamy believing they have closed the gap between self and cosmos have simply learned to modulate hypothalamic flow of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
15. Was Dred Scott a hired double-agent of Southern slave interests led by “Dough Face” president John Buchanan manipulated to create a case that would ensure the perpetuation of slavery in the U.S.?

“Authority has a nose of wax, it can be twisted in either direction.”

                                                                                       -Alain de Lille

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10/27/15  1:41 pm

Squid Rasslin'

  In Tim Burton’s 1994 feature film “Ed Wood” Martin Landau, playing silent screen legend Bela Lugosi, enters a dark “swamp” and dramatically, feverishly rassles a rubber squid into submission for a B-movie film crew. A faux opponent is subdued after an exaggerated struggle.

Squid Rasslin’ - definition: To drag a trivial or misconstrued opponent into your arena and proceed to dismantle it point by point in front of your rapt, admiring audience. A favorite argumentation trope of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond.

Bout #1     Richard Dawkins is Stephen Jay Gould’s rubber squid in Gould’s 1,300 page rasslin’ match, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.  A gene in its place on a chromosome is a string of inert goop, a slime library with a spatio-hierarchio-taxonomically remote, though vital, role in evolutionary, as opposed to biochemical, outcomes in the cell and not a warrior in the animal-scale arena of natural selection fighting against environmental forces including conflict with members of the same species for food and sex.

The gene, as it rests as a long sequence of nucleotides forming a small link of either the left or right strand of the interminably long DNA molecule, is like a lounging odalisque in the steambath fastness of the palace, far from the essential action of evolution. This gene lays about waiting to be courted-transcripted by the ever-active RNA. If any component of heredity is selfish or altruistic or manifesting any anthropomorphized quality, it is RNA, busy as a bevy of beavers throughout much biochemical intracellular activity. To assign evolutionary primacy to this layabout gene can now be seen as an error borne of a dearth of information at the time of its writing. That SJ Gould saw fit to rassle this Dawkins gene-meme squid for 350 of 1,300 pages in his masterwork appears to be the result of professional annoyance at being upstaged in the arena of public opinion.

Both SJ Gould and Dawkins trying their damndest to put a dent in Darwin’s key notion of the primacy of the individual organism in the struggle for survival in natural selection. Dawkins likely inspired by an avalanche of early 1970s genetic research that gave the gene star quality. Dawkins celebrating the gene is like Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol valorizing Marilyn Monroe - low hanging celebrity fruit.

Gould writes at enormous length and passion trying to sell us his argument to unseat iconic, entrenched, musty old godhead of bioscience-religion-popular discourse, Charles Darwin. Gould’s 1,300 page argument for the species as the key actor in natural selection rather than Darwin’s individual is feverishly opposed to Dawkins’ gene-centered causality. Charles Darwin would have been easily convinced by either Gould’s or Dawkins’ elaborate, informed arguments but STOP !  All three of you are wrong !  It is busy little RNA molecules in their role not only in transcription and translation of proteins - standard Neo-Darwinist central dogma, but the role of RNA as a hitchhiker in meiosis-mitosis carrying its small collection of books ( information coded as sequences of nucleotides but not yet encoded into cell’s DNA books) that are separate from the DNA library at chromosomes. RNA carries provisional manuscripts in the process of auditioning for inclusion into the DNA code at some point. This RNA carries new ideas from recent life experience, experience not yet coded in the genome at chromosomes but actively carrying new information from one life into a new life to be translated into new proteinic configurations and new neuronal ideas. Ideas, emotions, skills, fears, and blisses carried by phosphorylated RNA molecules into fetal minds to grow with the newborn child-adolescent-adult. New ideas that might someday be encoded in DNA as a new gene or discarded after a few hundred generations as a fad, a disposable meme, a situational feature not to be conserved for the duration.

Of course it is not fair to look back at a 30 year old rasslin’ match and judge it as disingenuous. It appears today that Gould and Dawkins were only rasslin’ in light of an intervening avalanche of genetic research,  but it was a death-match at the time in the late 1970s.

Bout #2   Jared diamond in his million-selling Pulitzer Prizewinning book Guns, Germs and Steel,  asserts that human genetics re: intelligence played no part in the devastation of indigenous peoples by Europeans from the 17th century onward.

“We have now traced how food production arose in a few centers and how it spread at unequal rates from there to other areas. Those geographic differences constitute important ULTIMATE (my bold) answers to Yali’s ( Diamond’s inquisitive friend, a New Guinea remote mountain tribesman) question about why different peoples ended up with disparate degrees of power and affluence.”  p.195

In his chapter “Apples Or Indians” Diamond  sets up one of his big rubber squids when asserting that the “failure” of indigenous people in several agriculture-friendly parts of the globe to produce their own crops and domesticate local animals is a problem in the first place. he writes: “Problems with the local people” “Problems with local wild plants” “Problems with big local wild animals” The biggest problem for the Native Americans of the West Coast in Diamond-speak is that there was no problem. They had plenty of food, plenty of space and had no need to domesticate any wild plants or animals. Life was just dandy. Writing in 1996 with 150 years of 20-20 rear-view vision, Diamond wrestles his rubber squid in assigning “problems” where there were none at the time.  How is an Indian tribe supposed to know that at some point in the future white men with their guns, germs and steel are going to arrive? A foundational cause of natural selection is that there is no intention on the part of the player. The individual ( microbe, monkey or tribe) lays its phenotype on the table and nature takes its course. A devastating problem in one historical outcome might be the key to survival in another - time will tell.

To look back in time at the peoples of the world and assign problems is to grossly misunderstand the essence of Darwinian dogma. Modern civilization with its guns, germs and steel might go up in nuclear smoke someday and the ways of the Salish tribe of Puget Sound may revive and prevail for another 100,000 years. One of Diamond’s big problems is his lack of understanding of the notion of geological time, its vastness and the incredible slowness, the equilibrium of much of evolution. He confuses, throughout his book, cultural changes in human populations with evolutionary changes and he speaks throughout of cultural innovation as evolutionary developments as if Modern Man has reached some sort of high point and shreds and shards of devastated indigenous peoples are left in the “evolutionary” dust. Certain populations have learned to use their unique ( to mammals and all life) giant neocortex in additive ways, some have been more modest in creating rhizomic spectacular networks. To look back on only 5,000 years of human change and hand out gold stars is premature and typically human. If Diamond could not rassle this rubber squid there would be no book.

Guns, Germs and Steel reads like one of those Ivy League brainiac stock analysts in 1998 railing against the idiots who are not sinking their life savings into Dot Com investment opportunities. The book is a thorough explication of missed opportunity and unfortunate circumstance  that may easily turn out to be wisdom. One million years is the blink of an eye in species evolutionary terms.The fat lady has yet to sing.

JB Russell's Teapot: Differing accumulation of patterns of use for our identical human neocortical neuron DNA package has generated global  race bias. Neocortex imprinting for the exploitation of social networks, farming and technical innovation is inherited by mechanisms separate from DNA and conserved genes.  All races share 100% of the human genome thus there is very little difference at genes but there is what, in human terms, turns out to be much difference from accrued heritable transmission of acquired characteristics. Race bias via Lamarckism. Diamond wrestles a lot of squid to assert otherwise. Human populations along Diamond’s highly touted and bountiful East-West geographic axis stores different epigenetic data and it is additive thus it becomes easier for their descendants to learn about the matters that have become important - social stratification and steel stuff. Storing and sharing data on a widespread uber-tribal, pancultural level. Whole populations of American men build train sets and model airplanes independent of any societal demand for their effort - it is in their RNA.

Professor Diamond tries hard using his palette of logical fallacies and cognitive biases to reinforce academically fashionable, dogma-infused assertions in order to erase race. If one is going to erase race as a parameter of social “evolution” one must dissipate fog not thicken it. Behind every bold unproven assertion ( Russell’s Teapot) lurks a slippery squid. Professor Diamond is a subtle and astute politician and a scientist with a big bag of tropes and tricks.

Some other questionable tropes of argumentation:

1. Metaphor Stretch:  To use a metaphor that disguises the nature of your subject in order to give your dialectical dog more heft in the discourse ( fight).  Dawkin’s use of oarsmen ( in 8-oared modern racing shells as seen at the Henley Regatta) for his gene- actors racing for effect on the river of evolution when in actuality genes lay about like obese whores in chromatin goop with their fat thighs spread waiting for the messenger RNA to snatch information and carry it away through a nuclear pore to a waiting ribosome for translation into a functional protein.
2. Flogify: To beat one’s point into submission using copious, often specious detail, arcane-archaic-biblical-Shakespearean-latin language, obscure scientific papers and endless repetition.
3. Hotdogify:  Stuffing filler that is void of nutrients into a skin of assertion wrapped in a fluffy bun of statistics lacking food value. The stuffing often involves devious tricks decipherable only by insiders, shell games, obscure scientific papers mixed-matched-switched-clumped together in mandelbrotian abandon.
4. Gould’s Glu-Stik: the opposite of Occam’s Razor. When using the Stik, one rarely passes up an opportunity to add adjectives, pronouns, sentence fragments, whole long sentences filled with redundant adjectives, paragraphs, additional entire book sections wherever possible. To always use the word with the most letters.

JB Questions:

1. How many people have both autism and schizophrenia? Of these, how many are math, art or language savants? Perhaps the first cohesive human languages were assembled, articulated, sussed out by individuals who had contracted schizophrenia from domesticated cats in ancient Sumeria or Mesoamerica. Who but a savant could ever comprehend all of the variables of a language from scratch? Who but a schizophrenic would even try?
2. Does the message of successful politicians penetrate into our brainstem ( a brain area shared by all mammals-source of visceral, primitive, reflexive response)  bypassing the uniquely human neocortex; a brain area  containing our higher faculties of reason? The brainstem is the source of our primal instincts regarding territory, dominance, charisma, boldness. It ignores policy details and rationality as the stuff of egghead losers.
3. War is melted religion
4. History is not the heart of culture ( as proposed by Guy Debord in “The Society of the Spectacle” as if it might also be the kidney or the liver or even the brain of culture. History is culture - culture is history. Culture drifts to the bottom of Life Lake and accrues in layers of sediment, layers that interact with one another swapping influence sending thermal vents (information) up through the sediment: Language written and spoken, kinship structures, social mores, Christianity, Marxism, Darwinism, and Capitalism are all powerful vents; warming-feeding-poisoning. There is a taxonomy, a hierarchy of these convection engines  around which the culture of an historical moment ( say the 1960s) assembles. In Saussurean terms: synchrony is the the lateral consideration of a single layer; diachrony is the historical consideration of many layers and their effect on one another.
5. Wisdom is distilled truth. Truth is situational depending on-referring to-inspired by-paying obeisance to -  its operative paradigm. Wisdom encompasses three paradigms simultaneously: past, present and future.
6. The cultural calibration of time is a marker of human social evolution-devolution. In 2015 at the beginning of the digital epoch we are ruled by the nanosecond and in 2025 it will be the femtosecond. In the bronze age it was phases of the moon. in the 19th century time was measured in days. In the early to mid 20th century it was hours and from 1950 to 1970 it was minutes and then seconds until 1990.
7. The inseparable, contiguous, spectacular continuity of private, public and political life is rolled into one at the toilet bowl - vote with your ass; The exigencies of public utilities: sewer and water are primary and they even rule our rulers - the oligarchy and their puppets holding elective office. Roads, bridges, tunnels, railroads, airports are secondary and the tertiary are the public spectacles of sports, entertainment, internet, radio, books and magazines.
8. Were seed dispersal and germination changes in domesticated foodstuff such as wheat, from its wild state pre-9000 BC to its contemporary state,  genetic changes i.e. changes in base pairs at plant’s DNA or were these changes, that are called “evolutionary” by Jared Diamond,  epigenetic? i.e. changes to plant’s RNA or to other heritable nuclear proteins?
9. How can physicists know anything with such certainty re: isolated mathematics ( see: Stephen Hawking chalkboard calculations on black holes)? I can add 2+2 and see by the equals sign on my chalkboard  that 2+2 equals 4,  but 4 what? I know nothing-zip-nada-nil about 4 of anything - is it 4 pounds, 4 planets, 4 galaxies, 4 quantum strings, 4 adjacent universes or 4 dimensions? What does Hawking’s chalkboard full of equations really tell anyone? Are we simply projecting imagined, wished for results on a gassy mathematical matrix?
10.  Social thermodynamics - cultural convection: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
11. Reflection on evening news: Parricide as gradient reduction between sybaritic, self-absorbed wealthy parents and lost late adolescent son -  unanchored, flop in school, filled with festering anger, sexually frustrated, no developed talent, over indulged as a child, access to guns - BOOM! BOOM! Out go the lights.
12. What are the economic uses  of Christianity’s conceptual trope of  “The Last Judgement” on commodity Capitalism? i.e. the “Time’s-A-wastin’” The end is near  “Better get crackin’” “Time is money” “Plow deep while sluggards sleep” usefulness. What are the advantages to the majority of Christian believers of this Religio-Economic yin-yang?
13.  Does any form of RNA travel outside of its own cell in order to influence another cell of its own type or a cell in a different organ system? i.e. might  liver cell RNA travel via the blood stream into a heart cell or a neuron where it plays a role at its new home in protein synthesis or regulation?

If you have a large point to make - find a squid and rassle it.

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October 18, 2015 - 3:41 PM

Dutch Hairbrush

  Note to reader: In this essay I am going to mimic Pulitzer Prize-winning author-educator Jared Diamond’s writing trope of stringing together bold unprovable assertions as if they were fact mixed with accepted knowledge for easy access reading and fun !

When American Founding Father John Adams arrived in Holland in 1782 to negotiate a loan to cover expenses incurred by The Revolution, he noticed that Dutch mothers  were beating their boys more often than seemed necessary. Why the excessive Dutch corporal punishment? What forces of human natural selection are in play in this intrademic child abuse?

By damping the Dutchboy spirit with hard hairbrush handle across the bottom,  the Dutch mother creates an obedient young animal that learns his place in the social order;  she is simultaneously creating a spiritual-psychological demon in this boy that will radiate a grudge against the world to be exercised and perhaps exorcised in faraway lands as the boy becomes a man sailing out into the world to fight, conquer, dominate, explore the Malaysian-Java-Melanesian archipelago killing-dominating-governing indigenous people, returning home with shiploads of pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon,vanilla beans, cocoa, ginger, turmeric exotic spices that will enrich a noble class of Dutchmen coddled as entitled little merchant princes in their own childhood, who will comfortably  assume primacy in the intensely stratified Dutch social order, becoming guild masters, shipowners and merchants.  Dutch society is glued together  by memic spank- logic and groupthink worthy of termites, ants and bees.

See: Willem de Kooning “Woman” series -1951- 1953: oil paintings on canvas for physical artistic expression of daemonic rage against Dutch Mother corporal punishment historically channelled into commercial pursuits.  For study: The correlation between the re-direction of rhizomic links between a good childhood ass-whipping, commercial exploitation of indigenous peoples and the loss of Dutch colonies in Melanesia ( West Papua)  to Indonesia ( and New Orleans mining interests) in 1969.

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” - Dr. Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning book:  Guns, Germs and Steel

The quote above sums up Jared diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel in a nutshell. In light of 20 years of evolutionary biology and genetics since the publication of this book in 1997, a different story is now told.  Human cultural differences, learned things ( gun making, steel making, farming, animal husbandry and the specifics of political organization, accrue in genome-proteome-RNA-ome as a result of inherited post transcriptional modifications upon nucleotides and proteins.

If the Dutch can implement the spread of corporal punishment of boys among themselves as a powerful meme that has its use in stratifying the Dutch social order i.e. keeping 90% of children as hardworking bourgeoisie, then guns, germs and steel form a meme to guide the dirty work of civilization without Diamond’s heavy reliance on geographic causality.

100,000 Dutch mothers play a key role in structuring  the Dutch socio-political hierarchy. Spanking is a behavior meme transmitted via methylated histones throughout the Dutch deme - the Dutch gene pool. During the 18th century when the practice of spanking was at its zenith in keeping Dutch men in their place in the hardworking adventurous middle of the social order, the geographical context had very little to do with it. Prof. Diamond’s environmental forces may have started the Dutch ball rolling 3,000 years prior but after that distant point in time, epigenetics assumed the role of fine-tuning Dutch society and its government of absolutist and then democratic memes,  travelling from France, England and Scotland and then France again post French Revolution as Dutch Absolutism collapsed into a mercantile democracy. The Dutch were meme-magnets for the salient new ideas of European civilization, always anxious to get on board.

***

Old school access to meme distributors: TV networks, major record labels, big New York publishing houses was difficult to achieve but access meant wide distribution of one’s idea. Today everyone is his/her own meme distributor. It’s hard to tell Joe Blow’s website from that of Sony Pictures or Random House. One billion people have easy access to the tools for global meme distribution but alas, you see the problem. An overcrowded memeosphere. we needed those filters to create a booklist, a dependable radio playlist, TV shows we all could watch, remember “Dobie Gillis” and “Bonanza”? News from a reliable talking head, either Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite - the news was real news. Now everyone is cocooned in their own memosphere access no one can communicate beyond their rhizomic patch of tangled connections.  We are swamped by communication theater. We are entangled in our webs of facebook friends and relatives ( relative friends that is) with a narrow, spotty, personalized newsfeed IV drip of some sort and are led to think that we are connected. Ha !  an artful swindle, swapping old school memology for the new faux meme regime. We are faux-meming at the mouth rabid starving info dogs. Of course everyone wants to see my selfie.

Question Set A:

1. When DNA unspools after mitosis in a pool of chromatin goo, are genes from each parent present and accessible?
2. If there is a dominant gene ( sequence of nucleotides on one of the halves of the DNA double helix) and a recessive gene floating in some neighboring goop, how does mRNA distinguish between recessive and dominant genes if mother’s DNA and father’s DNA are all mixed together in the soup? Is the info pre-coded in some RNA during mitosis or is the info coded into the two different sequences ( genes) themselves?
3. Is genetic crossing-over related to qualities of dominance or recessiveness?
4. A hemocyte has 46 chromosomes, 23 from mom and 23 from dad. How does the mRNA know which gene ( mom or dad) present in chromatin is the dominant one that will code the protein in question at a particular transcription event? How does mRNA get “wised up” as to which is the dominant gene?
5. Is the dominant gene the only one of the two that gets unspooled and unpaired ( two rails of DNA ladder are separated down the middle to allow access to a row of nucleotides  from double helical strand of DNA? The other gene for the same trait remaining tightly wound up with its histones?
6. How is a recessive gene silenced during transcription?
7. For example: At the cochlear cell (or is it a cluster of brainstem neurons?) that governs pitch perception - mom has perfect pitch and dad is tone deaf. Is there a perfect pitch gene sent by mom at the chromatin of this cell? Is there a tone deaf gene from dad at the same cell? Is there a cochlear HOX-type gene, a bauplan controller gene that locates the placement of hair cells for reception of various pitches? example of such a gene barking orders “hair cell for middle C you go over there!  Hair cell for A above middle C you go over there!
8. Does the human genome contain 3 billion bases or 3 billion base pairs? Since the genetic code is read from the series of bases ( series of letters ACGT)  on a strand of DNA and reading can go in 2 directions on each one of two strands, does the human genome actually have 12 billion bases available for transcription? Does DNA only get read from 5’ to 3’ and not vice versa?
9. During meiotic recombination are entire genes swapped when swapping occurs? If entire genes are always swapped how does a gene identify itself as an entity for the recombination. What prevents only a percentage of a gene from getting swapped? If only a percentage of a gene is swapped during a recombo event might this be a source of mutation and potential evolution of a superior trait. i.e. a new gene X-prime that is shorter than X and codes for a longer pair of canine teeth ( without the extra nucleotides, the stop growing instruction is missing when transcription happens in the following cell division ( and for all of history until extinction in tar pit)

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond confuses species variation with species evolution. He also vastly overestimates expected rates of plant and animal evolution. As has been established in contemporary evolutionary theory, change is not usually evidence of evolution. Think of a graph of daily fluctuations of the stock market over the course of 50 years. There is an enormous amount of change but a single overall trend up or down to health or disease, survival or extinction. Several classic examples of species evolution in textbooks are not evolution at all but simple species change. See: Darwin’s Galapagos finches or Kettlewell’s peppered moth-industrial melanism. Most human initiated change in plants is trivial ( though useful) intra-species swerves that are as likely to revert to pre-human form as to survive as evolutionary improvements in the currently domesticated varieties. Humans have created freak plants removed from most age-old forces of natural selection. Change is not often evolution in the natural world and 99% of genetic change is unhealthy. Bodies of plants and animals go to great lengths to edit change OUT of the genome prior to replication.

***

To say that learning and memory occur in a synapse between a dendrite and an axon is like saying a million year old glacier is made of drops of water. It is true the glacier IS made of drops of water, but a lot transpires to create the perceived result.

“Synaptic plasticity requires rapid synthesis of proteins.”

“Proteins are made to order at the synapse”

“Which RNAs get translated into protein to form memory is still a mystery.”

“There are 1,000 to 3,000 mRNAs at each dendrite”

JBQ:  Are proteins synthesized at dendrite for hippocampal long-term memory storage of childhood trauma ( Dutch hairbrush across butt and thighs). Are these punishment protocols enculturated as post transcriptional modifications of nucleotides or histones or RNA or other protein molecules?  Are these “hairbrush memories” transmitted to following generation of spankee via epigenetics or must each generation of Dutch boy get spanked anew?  Is the spanking of follow-up generations simply a cultural booster or is mom starting from scratch with each new generation to instill this key social behavior she learned from her parents re: status in relation to a dominant upper class, a class that is essentially sedentary and must be fed from the hard work the spankees? Hey Hey we’re the Spankees ! Spankee and Our Gang.

How much of human development of past 20,000 years is actual genetically conserved evolution and how much is simply RNA modifications - easy come-easy go.  Humans may be at an evolutionary dead end given our measly numbers of different species-one,  opposed to 600,000 living species of arachnids and 40,000 species of fish.  We are new here on Earth and unwelcome given our record. There are one million microorganisms currently planning our extinction.

JBQ - Was the emergence of the bourgeoisie in 18th century Europe a manifestation of thermodynamic gradient reduction between Capital ( cold, darkness) and Laboring humans ( warm, light). A Capital-labor dualism similar in type to the entropic dualism between the hot sun and cold dark outer space that causes differential reduction using life forms - plant animal, microorganisms? Answer: Yes

Given that these dualities are similar, do Marshall McLuhan’s cold and hot media reflect this entropic duality?  TV is hot, books are cold a differential giving rise to information growth - information as life. Information convection caused by two different temperatures. Commie convection between Bakhunin and Marx.

Jared Diamond asserts the following as causes of European domination of less tech-savvy peoples of the Americas:

1. Military technology and tools : guns, steel weapons, horses
2. infectious disease thin indigenous ranks
3. European maritime tech: shipbuilding, navigation
4. European absolutist political organization ( monarchy)
5. Writing for quick and detailed communication

JBQ - Are any of the above items more than cultural memes that are learned and are handed down between generations i.e. individuals tap into the pool of advantages using a hard-won, expensive education rather than absorbing their culture carrying inborn hardwired ( structuralist) intellectual  tools for art, technology and language?  Answer: Carrying a pathogenic microorganism harmful to others but not to one’s self is more than a meme - it’s a vector.  Essay topic: “Vectors versus Memes” Guns and steel are memes, germs are vectors.

Society in comfortable times is like unspooled DNA stewing in chromatin. It is diffuse, flexible, open to forces of change. In stressful times, in times of siege, society closes ranks, tightens up, assumes its form, a rigid organization suitable for transfer of hereditary information ( wars of conquest) - chromatids from chromatin.

“Stalin, a ruler directing the energy of memory” - Guy Debord

The idea of the farm is the root of property and thus of war. One must remain stationary, define an area of operation create and defend their border, become a cell with a definite membrane evolved ( devolved)  from protoplasmic wanderer-gatherer-hunter.

Question Set B:

1. Did the intense concentrations of RNA, free-floating aminos and miscellaneous organic molecules at freezing and melting of “Snowball Earth” events ( 5 total) force the evolution of borders ( cell membranes) thus introducing the idea of private property - the idea of life itself, allowing the conflict that defines all LIVING things to begin? Cells then team up, form alliances, symbiotic relationships by intention or by force to form communities first and then hierarchies of dukedoms moving toward a world of absolutist states ruled by royal brains - higher animals, life on land, birds, mammals, apes, humans ! The cells of a tribal, hunter-gatherer society multiply into a highly stratified civilization - uncontrolled growth.
2. What has been quicker, the spread of food production around the globe or the spread of Christianity?  What is a bigger meme, food production or Christianity? How are farming and Christianity connected? What percentage of farmers are Christians? Are food production and religion yin-yang operations? One must develop religious hierarchy to ensure the distribution of food to priests-kings and to soldiers. what is the best religion for efficient food distribution and subsequent cultural development-war making capability? Religion is war. Religion is different from war the way that ice is different than water i.e. not essentially different. War is melted religion - religion is frozen war. Another hot-cold thermodynamic gradient in search of reduction-acceleration toward entropy.
3. Are plant pollination-seed distribution / animal collaboration a duality hardwired into specific sequences of nucleotides in each organism?  or is this partnership simply a function of RNA activity or post transcriptional modifications that are heritable?
4. What is the ratio of living organisms changing one another’s selective conditions for evolution-extinction and the inanimate world changing selective conditions via weather patterns, continent formation-deformation, ice ages, comet impact etc. Is this ratio 50-50 or 90-10 ?
5. Are germination inhibitors at seed plants post transcriptional modifications or are they coded by genes?
6. What were the effects of the ancient ( 10,000 years ago) rodent feces bacteriome-virome on human health? Rat virome effects on human gut microorganisms in relation to  digestion, immune system function. When humans began farming and storing grain and attracting rodents to human habitation were there positive results? we know of bubonic plague. Did rats make humans more intelligent? were humans better wayfinders after rodent collusion-collision-cohabitation? Did segments of rat neuronal DNA find their way into the human genome? We know they did. which ones? What useful  neuron DNA or RNA did humans receive from their domesticated animals and plants? Did dairy products and beef make humans more intelligent by accelerating neural electrical transmission due to better insulation at myelin sheath? was there ANY evolutionary genetic advantage from human relationship to plants and animals other than nutrition and obvious memic developments such as civics, urban planning, war-making?
7. Is  industrial melanism (seen in Kettlewell’s peppered moth observations recorded for textbook posterity in his doctored photos in mid 1950s as classic example of Darwinian natural selection) a result of genetic mutation thus Darwinian, as asserted by Sewall Wright or the result of epigenetics?  - inheritance of an acquired characteristic thus Lamarckian NOT Darwinian? If it turns out that Kettlewell’s theory holds water despite his fraudulent photo and moth gluing onto tree bark, I vote for epigenetics due to superficiality of this variety-making that is not evolution, remember the stock market graph.  It is odd that Jared Diamond would use this raggedy, much debated, sloppy science as an example of evolution in his book.

Conclusion:  Is the Dutch Hairbrush a vector or a meme? genetic or epigenetic? Is beating one’s children learned or inbred behavior? Are efforts to control the destiny of children by interfering with their self-esteem ultimately productive? Is there a difference between immediate and ultimate productivity? Something workable in the 18th century is no longer necessary, there is room in the contemporary Dutch social order for everyone to excel, to rise into the middle class somewhere.  Forms of soul-killing have their uses in maintaining status quo of religion and social order. Let the rich brats get away with murder and satisfy their every whim. They will grow into adults expecting royal treatment. A nation of arrogant unspanked asses.  See: Fifty Shades of Gray for upper class predilection for ass spanking for hire. Spare the hairbrush and the sickness of stifled potential.

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10/11/15  2:13

Sinatra Syndrome

“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain

My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve travelled each and every highway

and more, much more than this, I did it my way.”

First verse of “My Way” music: Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux - lyrics: Paul AnkaSecond most covered song in history after “Yesterday”-The Beatles-Paul McCartney

The code for doing things “My Way” in every cell in any organism is contained in the DNA. The actual doing, the acting, the making, the action component during cell life is RNA. DNA lies in its mass of chromatin goo inside the cell nucleus,  like a partially gutted fat worm while RNA does most of the work outside the nuclear membrane in the cytoplasm.  DNA is the deep brains of the outfit doing things “My Way”

Sinatra Syndrome:  A condition of annoyance at confusion observed in other scientists who do not see the matter “My Way”

Examples:

1. Stephen Jay Gould railing against dogma-bound neo darwinists who fail to acknowledge the obvious phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium so clearly visible in the work of Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge. Gould’s point is that Darwin’s idea that species evolve gradually over vast eons does not hold up in light of lots of evidence to the contrary.
2. Lynn Margulis railing against these same neo darwinists who failed for many years to acknowledge the fact of speciation by symbiosis rather than genetic mutation-natural selection as Central Dogmatists would have it using Mendel and Watson-Crick to flesh out the Darwin theory of evolution. Professor Margulis’ idea of symbiosis also covers the idea of cell complexity resulting from symbiosis rather than genetic mutation using the unique genetics of each cell’s mitochondria that is distinct from the nuclear genome of an animal cell.

“Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.” - Auguste Comte

Positivism-Key Features:

1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements.
2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements.
3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, amenable to being verified, confirmed or shown to be false by the empirical observation of reality.
4. The belief that science is cumulative
5. The belief that science is trans-cultural
6. The belief that science is not associated with personality or social position of the investigator.
7. The belief that science may incorporate new ideas discontinuous from old ones.
8. The belief in the unity of science, that underlying various disciplines, there is one science about the real world.
9. The belief that science is nature and nature is science and out of this duality all theories and postulates are created, interpreted, evolve and are applied.
10. The belief that all things are ultimately measurable.
11. The belief that entities of one kind are reducible to entities of another: societies to individuals, mental events to neural phenomena.
12. The belief that processes are reducible to physiological, physical, or chemical events.
13. The belief that social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals.
14. The belief that biological organisms are reducible to physical systems.
15. The belief that natural science and social science are members of the same genre.

Our social order gave the medical profession power over the mentally ill in the early 19th century when a medical certificate became mandatory for confinement. No one ever relinquishes power, it must be torn away by revolution or dissolved by humiliation.

RE: French Postmodern philosophy - Debord’s “Spectacle” Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizomatic Network” Baudrillard’s “Simulacrum” are the same thing. The weltanschauung-zeitgeist of our contemporary culture of the commodity.

The human neocortex is a personal device used to tap into an array of cultural programs prepared by history; programs of language, religion, philosophy, kinship, science, art, law, etc. The neocortex also has a little-used capacity to feedback into these programmed systems and change them. You get brainwashed by movies but you can also write a screenplay. The culture needs more from you than your purchasing pattern and your daily use of public utilities and infrastructure. You signify in the culture by default by your physical presence but you can also signify by launching a social-political revolution.

The combined complexity of all 20th, 21st technology from microprocessors to jet engines and mars landers amounts to one billionth the sophistication of a single one of a million species of invisible bacteria. We think we are such hot stuff and that we are smart enough to continue to poison the planet and get away with it. The stinkiest bacterium outshines all human creations by a power of 7.

Questions:

1. Is the RNA at the ribosomes in kupffer cells ( at liver) identical throughout 1,000 ribosomes in a single kupffer cells?
2. Does the RNA-eome ( genome, proteome) at ribosomes in hepatocytes correlate to the proteins made in this cell type?
3. Are there 500 different types of RNA in the mammal liver one for each of 500 liver functions?  Are there 500 varieties of ribosome in the liver or do ribosomes perform multiple duties?
4. Does messenger RNA copy exactly - base for base at nucleotide string at separated DNA strand in the nucleus or does it record the opposite nucleotide? i.e. A to A or is it A to T?
5. Do nuclear pores open and close to allow passage of tRNA or are these pores always open i.e. the same diameter?
6. At what point in embryo development does RNA begin its work of cell-specific synthesis? The hepatocytes in the developing liver specifically.
7. Is RNA carried separately from DNA in sperm at fertilization?  Yes, there are thousands of types of RNA in the sperm outside of the paternal haplotype sperm chromosomes at fertilization that carry a wide array of genetic information into the new life independent of DNA or even epigenetically modified DNA.
8. Perhaps the methylation of uracil at RNA forms TTT memory ( traumatic transmission of bad memories across generations as at Holocaust survivor to child) and this methylated RNA is inherited transgenerationally.

One of the great ironies of the 20th century was JFK’s great speechwriter Ted Sorensen writing the eulogy delivered by JFK’s purported assassination conspirator LBJ at JFK’s funeral.  Smooth transition indeed. Did either JFK or LBJ do “it” their way?

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10-3-15  5:45pm

Albedo Logic

  “The solar magnetic field has long been known to cause the sunspot cycle. The physical shape and activity in the corona also varies with the sunspot cycle. The solar magnetic field is known to be able to transfer large amounts of energy to the solar atmosphere. It is possible that the solar magnetic field is the ultimate source of physical heating of the corona.” -NASA website

The sun’s surface is 6,000 degrees celsius. The sun’s corona is one to two million degrees Kelvin.  Note the two temperature measuring systems.

Albedo: Reflection coefficient - the reflecting power of a surface. The ratio of reflected solar radiation from the surface of the Earth to incident radiation upon it. Albedo is expressed as a percentage and is measured on a scale from zero for no reflection ( charcoal) to one for perfect reflection of a white surface - fresh snow is close to one on the scale.

The albedo effect is the tendency of highly reflective,  ice covered Earth to cool as it reflects sunlight and conversely, the tendency of less bright, more absorptive landforms and plants to absorb light/heat and to warm up. The cool get cooler, the warm get warmer. Note economic albedo effect as rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Warming and cooling economic and subsequent physical effects of “warming” and “cooling” on residential and commercial neighborhoods.

Precession: Axial and Apsidal:  The wobble of the Earth’s axis is axial precession, the Earth wobbles through 360 degrees every 25,000 years. Axial precession affects the Earth’s weather.  The rotation of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun is apsidal precession, this also affects the earth’s weather.

Do sun cycles of heating-cooling caused by its magnetism or other mechanism affect Earth's climate?

The Earth has experienced five major ice ages in the past 3 billion years. During three of these ice ages: the Huronian, Sturtian and Karoo, the entire Earth was a giant snowball. This ice-snow was up to five miles thick. The volcanoes and hot vents in the Earth’s surface did not cease to exist when covered in ice, they created large and small lakes, pools, ponds, rivers and streams teeming with microorganisms in the total darkness. There were places where columns of heated water penetrated the surface of the deep ice where life was exposed to sunlight and the atmosphere. There were convection currents in these extremely tall water columns as warm water rose and chilled water descended. This turbulence allowed much intermixing of organisms and some synthesis of molecules large and small and biosynthesis of entire single-cell organisms: bacteria, viruses, archaea, molds, algae, and much larger single-cell organisms the protists: amoebas. A great merging of DNA, RNA.

Many amino acids required for life were present in subterranean pools during the Huron ice age. Proto-RNA molecules evolved a code for each of these so that a protein could be assembled at a cell rather than assembled willy nilly from the soup.

An organism has a system for creating RNA code for an organic molecule it encounters and a capacity to store this info at its RNA. RNA  reverse engineers a code from free-floating molecules and assigns a code to recreate a desired molecule.

How does non-coding RNA install the code representing a new protein into its string of nucleotides? The code is cut from a visiting microorganism and pasted onto the RNA of the host.

Pocked Snowball - Imagine a spherical chocolate chip cookie made with very small chips. This would be the surface of snowball earth with the chips being geothermal puddles, ponds and lakes, all separated from one another and each containing its own variation for the recipe of life. Thousands of distinct microenvironments. The ice melts in a band around the equator linking 1,000 of these separate petri dishes. There is a microbial barn dance, a carnival of symbiosis, when mixing and matching and shacking up result - biosynthesis. more complex organism evolve from the simpler models of the pre-glaciation epoch.  The glaciation forces dense concentrations of a wide variety of microorganisms into one another as their ecosystems shrink during the approach of the big freeze. They thaw in this state of togetherness in a very crowded environment during the snowball melt. As ice recedes, their territories expand.

Imagine 100,000 separate pools around the globe resulting from meteorites bearing amino acids, pools created at thermal vents, pools surrounding volcanoes. Every volcano has its surrounding lake on or below the surface of iceball Earth. The lakes do not merge all at once. first two then three then 1,000 or 1,000,000 years later a fourth pool is added then  10,000,000 years later, a fifth. Pools and lakes merge four by four during next 10 million years until there is an ocean.  Lots of time for small groups to get to know one another before merging into a more varied assembly. Earth was not one big interconnected primordial soup during glaciations, it was 100,000 different organic assemblies for life. As the ice melts, as Earth’s atmospheric chemistry changes, still more cause for evolution. There were myriad different micro-environments for 10 times myriad recipes for primordial soup. Each volcano erupts through a unique geological core chemistry to seed its isolated lake with the chemicals of life.

Imagine a geothermal pocket, a “Hot Pocket” or call it a “Steam Dome”  four miles below Earth’s ice surface, a pocket half filled, say 1,000 feet deep, with water and a void between the inside surface of the ice dome and the surface of the subiceerranean lake the ice dome filled with a warm, humid atmosphere. Each one of the countless steam domes has its unique chemical-atmospheric environment, Each hot pocket and its magma pocket, linked by cracks in the Earth’s crust is like a glass tube in a lab with two bulbs, one at each end - one molten rock the other warm gas hovering over melted ice. A test tube for life. Imagine the large array of micro-environments in such a steam dome and the fluid temperature gradient from the hot vent to the cooler fluid of the edges. The drippy underside of the dome - stalactites of concentrated chemicals, new surfaces for life. Pressure builds up within the vast dome and cracks find their way to the ice surface as they zigzag up through three miles of the stratified ice cover to the surface and sunlight.

One deep dome creates 50 small lakes at the surface. The dome expands to vast proportion and then it breaks the surface allowing sunlight every day and whatever atmospheric cocktail is at hand to influence the microorganisms. Imagine the Pantheon in Rome with an ice/ice water floor and a dome of ice and the oculus. The hole in the dome expands. In 500 years a very large lake has formed. Many of these large lakes, former domes, merge at the equator as the Earth emerges from its ice age due to reverse albedo - a warming due to larger and larger expanses of sunlight absorptive plant life and exposed rock. A band of blue water encircles snowball Earth. This equatorial band of water has two shorelines that encircle the Earth a north shoreline  and a south shoreline, a widening band teeming with microscopic life in between.

The ring of blue water expands and twists and turns as new continents are revealed. The very thick ice is thinning always changing the chemistry of its pools. New comets and meteors strike and new chemicals of life are delivered from space. Imagine an under-ice lake 500 miles wide with an oculus five miles wide with the solar heated patch of water on the lake surface. What sort of ecosystems would evolve from such a structure with its geothermal vent issuing hot water 10,000 feet below? It would have warm humid air at the center and cool humid air above  the 1,570 mile perimeter, clouds and rain below the ice dome.

A volcano would create an entirely different 500 mile diameter lake on the ice Earth surface with its volcano at the center and unique weather circulating around the active cone. A volcanic ice bowl. Perhaps much warmer water in this lake with sloping walls up to the rim of the ice. The Earth would have 1,000s of these volcanic lakes in the ice - another type of pock.

Foundational diversity from the following:

1. Desperate marriages-symbioses as organisms try to stay warm, conserve energy as the Earth cools, ecosystems shrink and great ice sheets spread.
2. As ice spreads microorganisms become more concentrated in smaller unfrozen environments. They cannot avoid one another and soon they are crawling all over one another, smooshed against and forced into one another as ice grows. 
3. Microorganism enter dormant deep freeze state while merged during Huronian glaciation -compressed genomes are not united at this point -  just trying to stay warm and failing. After sharing the same lipid membrane, frozen in the ice for five million years as one, they thaw and believe ( chemically) that they were always one thing and proceed through evolution as such. Not only mitochondria entering and aiding protists but 1,000 organisms entering 100,000 others - myriad combinations - mixing and matching toward the big freeze and while emerging from the big thaw millions of years later or evolving continuously if near a warm spot.  Is there a metabolic cycle affected by a freeze-thaw cycle that accelerates symbiosis?

Scenario One:  Chicxulub-scale meteorite striking the three mile deep ice of the Huronian glaciation. It would send a cloud of ice around the entire globe causing a great acceleration of the cooling albedo. A deep dive into iciness. Ice dust in orbit for many years and ice dust storms all over the surface of the Earth. Albedo out of control getting colder. Visualize rings of ice orbiting the Earth like the rings of Saturn.

Scenario Two:  All life on Earth began in Yellowstone Park near a large cluster of vents that prevented total ice coverage. The park was surrounded by a slope of ice that stretched at forty-five degrees for 4.24 miles to the ice crust rim. A comet impact at the thick soup of Yellowstone microorganisms spread bits of life  along with ice particles to all parts of the globe. Raining life onto ice water pocks the world over where countless emergent genomes diverged from those of Yellowstone. Life gets a one billion year head start at Yellowstone before spreading around the world,  seeds planted in the ice.

*

Addenda:

Economic albedo effect: Growing poverty / disarray begets poverty and disarray until hell freezes over - must have volcanic input into moribund system to reverse economic cooling.

See: Multi-strand woven steel wire cable as metaphor for rhizomic culture. Note cable cross-section of concentric bundled, varying diameter steel strands. One of the world’s great engineering developments: Albert, Smith, Newall, Roebling,Hallidie, Stone et al. Envision core cultural “givens” strands of language, religion, plant-animal classification, marriage-kinship, definitions of mental illness and crime, ethics, etc.

Liberal theory and politics and policy has, as its core notion, the dissolution of the  family. No father - black or white, rich or poor - dad is marginalized or gone. In anthropological terms, liberalism is a product of the matrilineal mind.

A thought inspired by Foucault @ “Madness and civilization” Children as gradient reducing elements between lonely parents  and the cosmic void; to be nurtured like the surface of the Earth nurtures plants, animals and microorganisms in order to span the differential between the hot sun and cold, dark nothing much, reducing the gradient.

At one bioscience website 3 billion is written as the approximate number of nucleotides ( single bases) at another bioscience website it is 3 billion base pairs. One of you is off by 3 billion. Can we come together on this?

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September 27, 2015  5:07  pm

Kodalithic Kodalogic

  Kodalith is photographic film (obsolete) once used by printing companies and commercial photographers. Kodalith film reduced 10,000 gradations of tone, perceivable in nature by the human eye, to black or white only, all gray is washed out to either end of the scale. If a surface reflected less than 50% gray this film recorded it as pure white. If the surface reflected more than 50% gray, it became black. When developed, the photos taken by this film had no gray whatsoever,  just bold black and white.  Something is kodalithic if its complexities have been reduced to black and white.

Black and white are qualities of the visual world but all sensory, intellectual-philosophical phenomena can be reduced to polar terms.  The matter at hand is either black or white, conservative or liberal, hawk or dove, scientist or artist. Music is either tonal or atonal, food tastes good or bad, the skin feels good or bad.

The human brain turns as much as possible into black or white; sometimes in an instant, sometimes over years.  Shades of gray or gradations of hue will be added upon recall as time allows. First impressions and gut reactions tend to be kodalithic.

Kodalogic: An heuristic turning all audio, visual, olfactory, tactile, vomeronasal, intellectual, political, philosophical  subtlety to black or white. It is instinctive in humans to do this - probably a characteristic of all vertebrates. We all do it, we’ve all done it. It saves time and perhaps your life. The dog is not well - it is not dead - it’s not going to get well without a $500 trip to the vet - shoot it, thus making it one or the other - alive or dead - in between is expensive. The three young men walking toward me on the sidewalk at night may be angels or devils - probably something in between, shades of gray. I must make a decision to cross the street to avoid them ( they’re devils) or walk forward through them ( they’re angels). Walking in the middle of the street, having split the difference,  would look stupid.

Kodalogic can save your life and it can make your life black and white boring with no subtlety. Kodalogic ought to be used sparingly but it isn’t. Kodalogic gets waay over-used in contemporary America. Overuse of kodalogic is a characteristic of Americans. Kodalogic is so comfortable,  like the latest Lee Child-Jack Reacher novel in which there are good guys and bad guys and the principal  good guy drinks a lot of coffee.

When we are young we see every shade of every sense. As we get older brains turn millions of wonderful, ever-changing-evolving things into  black and white to make room for the necessary facts of life so facts can be easily retrieved. Memories are a file of dehydrated sponges, flat as crepes, wafer-thin, and upon recall they fill out to their fullness and make you happy. Writing a memoir is retrieving a stack of dry, flat sponges all black or all white  and exposing them to clean water to reconstitute them  revealing their color - your wise adult mind is clear, cool water. Look for the humor, the sympathy. Now you see things from mom’s point of view. That evil nun who locked you in the basement laundry room to scrub bed sheets at the orphanage and then pulled you by the ears up to a dinner of overcooked dried out beef liver and mooshy, pale canned peas washed down before gagging with  fizz-tablet root beer served in a scratched up spun aluminum “glass”  has a third dimension. She was the Betty Page of Topeka, Kansas in her youth;  black or white, reasonable or insane. Just add water.

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9/26/15

Packaging Organisms

September 15, 2015 Line up every virus on Earth end to end and they stretch for 200 million light years, far beyond the Andromeda galaxy.  There are10 to the 31st power of viruses on Earth,  ten million times the number of stars in the universe. There are 100 Trillion flu viruses in the body of a person with a three-day old flu. There are 10,000 times more viruses than people on Earth.

There are far fewer bacteria than viruses on Earth, by a power of 10, however, there are many millions of bacterial species on Earth. There are 20,000 SPECIES of bacteria in a quart of seawater and one million bacteria in a single gram of soil. Estimates of microorganism populations vary greatly in the scientific community. By the most conservative estimates there are two million species of oceanic bacteria, four million species of soil bacteria and four million species of atmospheric bacteria.

Scientists have no idea how many viruses and bacteria there are - there are only rough ways to count them, estimates among experts vary to a laughable degree.  There is debate about whether a virus is even a living thing or whether bacteria can be identified as having different species  There is only one single species of Homo sapiens - humans. The human population is a rounding error in relation to the total number of organisms on Earth. The total mammal population on Earth is a rounding error. We are few, like an algal bloom says Lynn Margulis. Here today -  gone tomorrow?

Microorganisms have a collective consciousness. They invented proto-charismatic animals ( animals larger than a wasp) in order to populate emerging ecosystems on a warming earth after the great Sturtian-Marinoan ice age 650 million years ago. Charismatic animals are flexible, versatile, adaptable packages of microorganisms. Each package contains billions of bacteria and trillions of viruses, most of which are beneficial or benign. Fifty percent of the human genome is of viral origin. We are mobile homes to our vast populations of microorganisms. One credible theory of evolution asserts that speciation is caused by the mixing of microorganism genomes rather than by mutation-natural selection and that speciation is not, as Darwin proposed, gradual but abrupt, a punctuation event linking a million generations. Speciation does not appear to be gradual. There is much evidence that speciation happens all at once. Genomes merge, voila ! a new species. Further refinements to the cat, dog, alligator, tuna, Eagle, Bee and Beetle are the result of neo-Darwinian mutation-natural selection but speciation results from mergers and acquisitions.

The Earth is 5 billion years old. Life in the form of reproducing single cells has been evolving for 4.5 billion years. The Earth experienced the second of its 5 major ice ages 850-580  million years ago. The Sturtian ice age covered the entire globe in ice resulting in “Snowball Earth”. Microorganisms lived under a global ice sheet surviving near geothermal vents on the seafloor or in water under the ice. When snowball Earth began to thaw,  an equatorial band of warmer  blue water appeared exposed to direct sunlight. Life thrived here and soon became very  densely concentrated.  A reverse albedo occurred and the ice receded. The close packing of organisms in the narrow warm band of water  forced the merging of genomes. Organisms and their genes merged, fused, incorporated, cohabited, recombined and matched creating an abundance of new species with myriad new capabilities - This emergence of multi celled life forms after snowball Earth  is called The Cambrian Explosion. This explosion of variation on the theme of life occurred between 560 and 540 million years ago. This is the age of trilobites, clams, starfish and snails - our ancestors.

If the charismatic animal is a shrewd, aggressive ambulatory bag for harboring viruses and bacteria, the cell itself was a bag for bits of RNA, DNA for two billion years prior to the Cambrian explosion.  Inanimate amino acids and proteins entered Inanimate globules of fat floating in the primordial soup. Concentrated populations of microorganisms forced mergers during and after an ice age. short strips of RNA squeezed into a hollow sphere of fat. these RNA filled lipid spheres did not multiply by orderly cell division they simply multiplied and the fat globules exploded when they got too full. This was an inefficient way to propagate even though the fatty cell membrane offered a bit of protection from the harsh environment of young Earth.

Inanimate hollow fat globules float around by the trillion in archaic seas. Inanimate nucleic acids, sugars, phosphates, aminos, proteins floated with them, merging in myriad combinations below deep ice sheets up to several miles thick or in equatorial bands of seawater exposed to the sun. DNA strands containing 5 or 15 or 1,500  base pairs get pulled apart and each strand finds  new mates from the freezing, slushy soup of melting snowball Earth - replication!  It’s still not alive. It was an accident. Short strands of RNA attract nucleotides floating freely in the soup becoming double helices - still dead.  A fat glob fills with short strands of DNA a catalyst enters the membrane, the glob breaks into two, some DNA goes left, some goes right. Microtubules enter the scene after they have evolved for a billion years - still no life, a flagellum pushes around a dead glob of fat to keep its head warm.  Another 500 million years of random mixing and matching. A metabolic component here and functional feature such as the light-sensitive protein there. Fat globs fill and explode for 300 million more years - 100,000 fascinating chemical-structural combinations occur -  still no life - no reproduction of the package. Hold that thought - for 500 million more years of random mixing and matching - still dead as a doornail.

JBT -  Rhizomatic design: ( in place of Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, symbiosis)  Interaction between organelles, cells, organs cause change-evolution of parts giving rise to wholes.

The man-made machine heuristic; a tool to examine speciation. The taxonomic level of the Order( as in order-family-genus-species) using example of transportation vehicles: space, air, land, water, underwater. Rockets, jets, cars-trains, ships, submarines. Looking closer at the family of aircraft. there are several highly conserved features shared by all aircraft regarding their power to weight to lift requirements. There are conserved features regarding control surfaces: vertical stabilizer, ailerons, flaps.  There are minor shared characters: landing gear and windscreens. The size and shape of the nose of an airplane is the result of many separate contingencies, each with its own map, plans, requirements. There is no specific “gene” for nose shape in an airplane. The nose shape and size are residual - they emerge from the mix. How does one tell a lion from a bear? The shape of their noses is a big cue. The mammal nose is the product of the evolution of 10,000 not-nose elements that evolved over eons in concert with one another. The nose is residual, not a thing in itself, although we see it as such. There is no single gene for noseness.  Take one of many variables: volume. The 747 nose is the result of tens of thousands of decisions around aerodynamics and storage-packing challenges. When a person says they have never seen evidence for speciation i.e. a shared ancestor giving rise to a cat and a bear, this does not mean that one million mutations, all of which have undergone tens of millions of years of evolution have not been stored in the genome for ultimate observable expression as a lion or a bear. Who is to say when a 707 nose will evolve into a 747 nose? Reasons accrue for this expressed difference. More passengers, more need to conserve expensive fuel, longer runways available, stronger lighter materials available for construction. The resulting shape and volume of the nose though not trivial in regard to capacity to smell are minor in the overall causal cascade.

Who can say how many internal, gradual changes occur in one of Gould’s benthic snail fossils across eons prior to a shell’s abrupt vertical extension, his evidence for speciation? The shell shape may be trivial even though it is the only remaining evidence in the fossil record. It should be no surprise that it is an abruption, a punctuation. This shell shape difference doesn’t mean that evolution is abrupt, only that the appearance of the “nosecone” shell distention was abrupt.

Easily identifiable, outward features are conserved while organ system structures and their metabolic patterns undergo constant, relentless, feverish evolution 24/7/365. Why bother with the catness or bearness? Package details are beside the point. It is the stuff in the bag that means life or extinction. It will express at the exterior in the fullness of time if ever.

JBQ - Do methylations, citrullinations, phosphorylations get copied at cell division as they piggyback on the DNA molecule during mitosis during lifespan of an organ?

Madness is often ( always?) equated with unreason. The human neocortex is the seat of our reason. Does a virus interrupt neural links that comprise reason? Do viruses clog the rhizome of reason?

JBE ( Experiment) - Study effects of 100 species each of virus, bacteria, worms and protozoans on 25 brain areas re: mental disorders. This involves 10,000 labs around the world for two years. Let’s find out how many mental disorders of the DSM-5 big 900 are caused by microorganisms. A hysterical man sits in his psychiatrist's office with a brain infected by tapeworm cysts driving him to madness and the shrink asks to hear about the poor man’s relationship with his mother.

What are the VBP ( viral, bacterial, parasitic) effects on neuron-synaptic electrochemical communication? Can a single virus short-circuit a synapse? Perhaps a single virus can extend the gap between synapse ends thus making it impossible for electrical charge to pass this juncture thus stopping an afferent or efferent nerve impulse in its tracks. Identify chemical exude of 100 species of virus - test their effect on the following: neuron firing, neuron signaling,  ability to form new thoughts, connect new thoughts to one another and to memory, connect sensation ( visual, audio, tactile, vomeronasal, taste) to memory, to connect sensation to reasoning ability, to higher levels of abstract thought - morality, ethics, altruism, math and language skills.

To Do: In examining those with mental illness: 1. Check for VBPs 2. Once the VBP has been identified after searching for many species,  remove them.

JBQ - does viral DNA penetrate neurons? Is there a toxic viral exude with negative effect on cognitive function? Same for bacteria and worms. A brain is infected with pinworms, roundworms, schistosoma or tapeworms would be subject to physical dislocation of brain mass and suffer the effects of worm waste and the effects of its consumption of brain matter i.e. the total metabolic impact of the parasite.

JBQ - Is madness  the result of the human brain testing an array of potential advantageous effects of viral, bacterial, parasitic involvement in brain function? If it helps - keep it. If the potential symbiont or gene sequence doesn’t help ( see: “madness”) omit it.

JBQ - Were the hippocampus, thalamus, cerebellum, pons, globus pallidus, putamen and amygdala once upon a time parasites of our archean neural nodules that  proved useful? they each now have  a unique structure and purpose in the brain having evolved from a tight little club of parasites formerly swimming freely in the Silurian sea. Each symbiont provided a selective advantage. Fish to itself “I’m going to have to begin coughing once I crawl up onto the land I’d better keep this little parasitic knot of cells ( future Medulla oblongata).

JBQ - what microorganism initiated the tendency in vertebrates to aggrandize one’s self, to strut around and flash feathers, sing, dance, howl, growl and roar? Drawing attention to one’s self was once considered madness among humans in  medieval times and is now rewarded in all American children? “Raise your hand ( separating yourself from  your classmates)  if you know the answer.” What virus removed our fear of standing out from our fellows removing our prehistoric fear of being a tall poppy? Toxoplasma gondii virus removes fear of cats in mice. FACT: viruses are known to make certain types of fear disappear in some mammals. What viruses,  what fears in humans?

JBT - If fear expression is the result of a methylated histone, perhaps a virus de-methylates this histone during lifetime, thus epigenetically reducing  fear in a small segment of the population. This fearless population is our avante-garde. A deme’s fearless pioneers. Were pioneers of the Oregon Trail all infected by a midwest virus that reduced their fear of the unknown and or initiated wanderlust? Same question for Jamestown settlers, Pilgrims - all emigrants to North /America in 17th-20th century. Catch a virus - go directly to the New World, sever roots and explore, thus participating in a viral evolutionary experiment on the human brain. Get these brains out into new ecosystems for viral-bacterial proliferation. Do viruses remove fear in bacteria or larger parasites? Do worms feel fear? Are protozoans afraid of anything? If viruses are experimenting with the human brain, as humans set out for parts unknown, what part of the brain is involved? the neocortex, amygdala, brainstem, hippocampus? Travelling to the New World in the 17th century was definitely crazy-dangerous and wrought with doom.

Michel Foucault and others assume that human reason emerged during the Renaissance and came to flower during the 18th century - the “Age of Reason” These thinkers imply that ancient times and the Dark Ages were bereft of reason. This is a misconception. Every age is filled with as much reason as any other. The architects, engineers and administrators of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Gothic Europe were obviously reasonable men. Reason wasn’t invented in the 18th century by Voltaire and David Hume. It simply became more fashionable among a noble few as reason became a meme.

JBQ - Does DNA have more than one way of quieting or erasing a trait? Imagine a word you have written on paper - you can erase it or scratch it out or scratch it out and then cover up the whole mess with white out. Does the cell have a 2 or 3-tier system of gene suppression? - the scratch out, the cover-up and the erasure? Are there various levels of removal? Erasure from operation during a lifetime and erasure from the genome at germ cells i.e. gone forever. Once a gene has been omitted can it be reinstated a million years or a day later?

JBQ - Are viruses the primary mechanism enabling the evolution of human consciousness? Do viruses stir the cranial pot putting behavioral options on the table for natural selection - social selection? Are memes  inherited via changes to neural chemistry? or simply learned / absorbed from parents, friends, teachers, television and the internet?

JBE - Explore viruses as DNA mutagens in the manner of UV radiation or traditional Neo-Darwinist mechanisms for mutation.

JBQ - How would the human brain conserve a positive viral effect on social behavior or any behavior?  Is altruistic behavior, a notoriously counter-intuitive animal trait, a virus-borne aberration that has proved beneficial to the species, thus conserved? If so, by what chemical process and reproductive pathway? A proposal 1. Virus rearranges neural protein at amygdala 2. this modified protein geometry is somehow relayed to germ cells.

JBQ - Is melancholy a viral affliction? Melancholy, a recognized mental ‘illness” of the 16th-19th century,  recast as depression in the 20th.

JBQ - Are Conservatism and Liberalism caused by different virus species? If so, can either be cured?  Is religion a species-wide microorganism infection?

JBQ - Does inheriting a virus via sperm-head  epibontics (piggybacking) have the same effect on a new life as if that virus caused a mutation at the DNA or initiated a heritable post-translational modification? Are the effects of a specific virus identical, independent of method of transport into new life? Are effects different and are the effects related to their means of arrival?

1. Epibontic transport of virus “X” causes disease “A”
2. Base pair disruption from virus “X”  causes disease “B”
3. Virus “X”  initiates a histone phosphorylation that is inherited via “junk” DNA or inherited via  a protein-coding gene causing disease “C”

Bottom line proposal: One virus may cause multiple health outcomes, for instance:  “A” affects hippocampal function - long term memory “B” erases fear at amygdala “C” affects the nature of Structuralist language capabilities such as inborn tendency to comprehend  grammar or ways of organizing the visual field re: size-closeness.

JBRT ( Russell’s Teapot logic: I can say anything and it’s up to you to prove me wrong - Bertrand Russell asserts that his teapot is orbiting Mars - he dares you to prove it isn’t.) All aspects of human consciousness, self-awareness, behavior, language, altruism, social skills  that are related to the emergence of our outsize neocortex are initiated and modulated by microorganisms and resulting  long term advantages are locked into the human genome  by the acquisition in our DNA of viral, bacterial genes or by permanent and heritable post transcriptional modifications.

JBT - Mental illness is the ( now negative) manifestation of unprocessed, viral-initiated neocortical options presented by nature for possible use in future generations to positive social effect.  It was crazy then - it’s normal now.  This happens all the time. As new behavioral  options become manifest in people,  this unique  behavior, that could have 100 different names, is all classified as schizophrenia.  To Do: Look for 100 sources for 100 unique behaviors now all lumped together by psychiatrists as schizoid.  Look at schizoid behavior as a source of new possibility for mankind.  As in all evolution,  99% of the new is rejected outright. We are surrounded by the surviving 1% aka 9 million successful animal species. Nature makes an enormous number of mistakes. If one percent of schizophrenics manifest a productive behavior they are par for the course. Crazies are an important  source of human evolution.

JBT - The gradient between reason ( the sun) and madness ( the cold dark void) is modulated by living organisms. A listener advances on madness with language. Language is life. Language modulates the gradient between madness(bliss) and reason.

Find a gradient and reduce it for money, fame and glory.

JBQ - What social gradient did Rock and Roll reduce? Was it strictly the gradient that always exists between adjacent generations and always subject to reduction or was there more to it? Rock and Roll reduced the terrible gradient between Black Americans and White Americans post JIm Crow,  paving the way, more than any social force,  for civil rights. Norman Mailer reduced the gradient between hipsters and squares.

“Random mutation hones already extant species that originated via symbiosis”-Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan

JBT - It is said that a gene has so and so number of base pairs yet the mechanism for transcripting-translating genetic information involves RNA reading the code off of one side only of a DNA molecule separated down the middle. The two sides of this sequence of now split apart base pairs, each side ( each column of bases) carry genetic information. Seems like one side of the DNA sequence could code for eye protein and the opposite side for glomerular cells ( kidney filters) so it’s never base pairs that code but rather sequences of bases stacked on one side of the now opened double helix.  A gene does not have a number of base pairs. It has a number of bases - 3 bases per codon not 3 base pairs per codon. Verify. I’m failing to understand something here. It’s base(ic).

Analogy - Imagine a copy of “War and Peace” in your left hand and a copy of “Infinite Jest” in your right. Now shuffle these two doorstops like two decks of cards - this is a section of a strand of DNA. At transcription the pages of the two books are separated so that RNA has access to one of the books only ( say “War and Peace”), to one string of letters, one series of codons ( not both -as they are no longer linked at the center as base pairs but simply as strings of bases) The RNA reads from either “War and Peace” or from “IJ” not from both simultaneously,not from base pairs - just a sequence of bases. Genes are always characterized as having so and so number of base pairs when actually they are so and so number of bases - no pairs at this point and time of transcription. If the human genome has 3.2 billion base pairs wouldn’t it have 6.4 billion  letters to work with? 3.2 billion bases per side of the double helix? Someone tell me what I’m not seeing here.

JBQ - What are the genes that govern our power to reason and dream? Perhaps not genes at all but methylations locked into heredity.

JB Universe model: 1.  Imagine a sine wave at 30 to the minus 15th power  cycles per second 2. Rotate this continuous wave to form a long series of pulsing  3-D volumes - expanding-narrowing-expanding 3. Now pack countless waves  adjacent to one another, slipped for a snug fit. One cycle in one wave is our universe and we are halfway through our own cycle like a wave passing thru water - time being the wave and the universe being the water. 4. Bundle countless waves adjacent to one another out to infinity - like a muscle and its fibers, one fiber being the history of our particular sequence of universes-pulses. One pulse takes 30 billion years. Our universe is at the midpoint of its cycle.

Filling a primordial cell membrane after the Huronian global ice age 2.4 billion years ago was like filling a shopping cart while pushing it through ancient pet shop-nursery. “I’ll take some of these and some of those.” The wonders that grew from these early associations!....in ten million shopping carts.

The immune system and the cell membrane work together to prohibit entry of viruses into the organ cell. the membrane is the wall with many closely guarded portals the immune system is the military chasing down terrorists and killing them before they enter the cell. Does a cell membrane prevent the operation of the organism immune system i.e. does the cell membrane protect the virus from phagocytes once inside? Is the cell a safe harbor all viruses, friend or foe?

JBQ - Does DNA really split down the middle when it replicates during mitosis? Is splitting really necessary? It makes a cool explanation but does it really replicate in this way? Could DNA double helix not remain locked and activate a switch to attract like bases from the cytoplasm? It turns switches on and off for 1,000s of other DNA functions-processes why not replication? Stay locked into a double helix and signal moment for replication when free-floating nucleotides form a mirror molecule that floats away on its spindle?

JBQ - what percentage of a DNA molecule spreads apart in order to be copied by RNA during transcription in a specific organ tissue - kidney, liver, heart, etc.?

JBQ - Do we catch diseases when invaded by microorganisms or do we catch environmental toxins that destroy our resistance to organisms already present in our bodies?

Organisms hijack one another’s DNA. Viruses and bacteria are promiscuous. They are continually swapping DNA with one another and among themselves and higher organisms such as vertebrates. Half of the human genome has its source in microorganism DNA.

Evolution means: annex, attract, amend,  absorb,merge, fuse, co opt, convert, incorporate, encompass, cohabit, combine, recombine, integrate, interface, tie-in, throw-together, hitch on, hook up, team-up, tack on, tie-in, transfigure, transform,  plug in, bind, bond, blend, unite, absorb, swallow, subsume, meet, mix, mingle, marry, meld, merge, centralize, coalesce, converge, conjugate, consolidate, conjoin, cohere, fuse, federate, join, meld, weld, enfold, amalgamate, amalgamete! assimilate, agglomerate, transmute, re-style, re-fashion, revamp, revise,  remodel, re-cast, re-shape, shack-up, play house…..ad infinitum…..oh !.... and DNA mutation.

•  September 15, 2015  2:29pm

Memes, Demes and Genes

September 6, 2015 Meme: An idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.

Deme:  A local population of closely related interbreeding organisms

Gene: A sequence of nucleotides in DNA or RNA. The gene is the functional unit of inheritance controlling the transmission and expression of one or more traits or metabolic processes by specifying the structure and composition of a polypeptide, especially a protein. The gene may also control the function of other genetic material.

Meme example: Neo-Darwinism i.e. organism evolve via genetic mutation - natural selection

Deme example: The population of scientists who believe adamantly  in neo-darwinism

Gene example: The genes for catness vs dogness or bearness. It’s in the ears, snout, movement, color, size

All learned components of human culture are memes: language, cultural norms, widely shared notions of justice, sanity, ethics. Each deme has its version of the memes. For a catalog of demes from around the world see: “The Savage MInd” by Claude Levi-Strauss. Memes change, evolve, devolve. There is a hierarchy of meme causality from the larger changes in law of land to trivial changes in hairstyle, music, art. Memes form a rhizomatic shared consciousness among people.

The human gastrointestinal tract is home to ten trillion bacteria. They are a vital part of digestion. There are 60 virus phages for every single bacterium. Each of these organisms contains its genome.  Our bodies contain 1,000 demes of microorganisms, each with its meme- rhizome interconnectedness with neighbors. The human genome with its 20,000 genes is a tiny fraction of the operative genome in every human body. We live with a Ka-trillion genes - too many to count - all working together for our health or not working together,  causing disease. 

Were our organs early symbionts? Entire creatures that specialized in blood filtering, fat breakdown, Oxygen-blood transfer, pumping, various hormonal capabilities that have merged into a single animal that evolved as these systems became adjusted to one another and to different environments over eons - over one billion years? Archaic kidney as an acquired entire genome working with others of the sort with 99% of evolutionary time being used for internal inter-system coordination distant from the light of day; like a busy engine room in a cruise ship i.e. traits are expressed and subject to natural selection without confronting another species. This internal selection occurs over thousands of generations of cell growth-death-birth in the life of a single organism The creature they called the swimming liver is long extinct. A billion years ago there were a million different single cell organisms each with a specialty: thinking-connecting,filtering, pumping, fat metabolizing - mix n’ match across eons. Much of the heavy lifting of organ system coordination occurring when the systems were simple, primitive, pliable, flexible. First organelles  merge then a billion years later the organs merge - two distinct levels of organization: intra and inter-cellular with the gene-switching capabilities of viruses and bacteria lubricating the emergence of complexity.

Symbiogenesis: Long-term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change.

All characteristics are acquired - JB

What was the first animal to have all of the following: heart, liver, kidney, lungs, neural cluster.

Stomach cells have a nine day lifespan, 40 generations of cells per year over 80 years. 3,200 generations of stomach cells in a single lifetime. It would take 80,000 years for an equal number of human life generations at 25 years per generation. Most evolution happens at cell level as  systems coordinate and evolve together in a million different species. Stomach cells receiving epigenetic signals for immediate expression from hundreds of organ components and metabolic processes as organs adjust to the lifestyle of a specific person and to their own development as systems throughout the entire body prior to germ cell involvement for effects on heredity i.e. DNA adjustment.  3,200 generations of cell division using epigenetic tags for gene expression-modification independent of DNA mutation. These intra-lifespan changes are from sensory-chemical signals with sources throughout body not from solar radiation or environmental mutagens.

Effects of environmental mutagens on intra-lifespan phenotypic proteinic expression-regulation i.e. a cell deme at an organ gets derailed genetically say via histone poisoning that is then epigenetically heritable within lifespan ( 3,200 generations) of individual  independent of sexual reproduction of entire organism. Genes get modified, mutated, disrupted as well as coordinated, refined.

Coorganation: the evolution-coordination of organ systems and metabolic processes among organs via epigenetic ( post-translational) modification - heritable within a single lifespan. Coorganation can be slowed, interrupted by environmental mutagens, toxins. Affect one organ and you affect them all.

To study: Ratios of inter organ effects. Example: I poison liver-kidneys with alcohol; what coorganate signaling is negatively affected at the following organ systems: brain, heart, lungs, endocrine, immune. does cell trauma at kidneys signal neurons at pons to phosphorylate?

Given Neo-Darwinian mechanisms of mutation-selection and observed species evolution, there has not been enough time by a factor of 1,000 for animals to have evolved into present forms from Earth formation from orbiting dust. Thus the argument for coorganation - intra-life mutation-selection cycles.

The modification of a gene is a big deal and the body has sophisticated systems in place to prevent it - DNA repair, cleansing. A mutation is a big deal if it signals an improvement in the system. This novelty gets played out 1,000 times prior to formal encoding in DNA for transfer via germ cells at germ cell genome.

To do: analyze the human  “genome” at 20 cell types throughout life of an animal - are the genomes identical in all 20 cases? probably not as each organ system is accruing its changes through hundreds of cell divisions. How are these distant changes assembled in the germ cells? Do viruses or bacteria relay genetic info to germ cells as they accrue. Do we have messenger viruses that act as relays between heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and germ cells?  Some mechanism for keeping sperm up to date with latest  organ improvements in the event of a DNA transfer via sex?

Explore: the ratio of intra-life coorganation beneficial mutation events to actual heritable base pair changes-mutations. Is it 10,000 to 1, 100 to 1 would be a lot.

JBQ - How would the advantage of longer fangs get worked out at intra-life level if only one set of teeth per life? Answer: It wouldn’t - some things must undergo whole-life generational testing and perhaps 1,000 of these much longer organism generations. Advantage of longer fangs is a gross example - look for the advantage of one of 500 folding options in a protein that acts as a molecular gate at membrane lipids.

Who-what-how is intra-life coorganation performed? Is it all done via chemical signaling? Is there an area within the limbic apparatus that acts as a command center for these options at distant organs? A zone of judgement at the brain or does each organ system have its own judge-jury- executioner. “This is an improvement” “This is not an improvement” you die ! One of 100,000 options tossed onto the evolutionary trash heap in a single mammal lifespan.

what is the role of viral-bacterial DNA-RNA etc. in coorganation? A non-pathogenic virus can visit every organ in the body in half an hour and relay info back and forth between systems, deposit chemicals, new proteins, enzymes, fats.

JBE - Look for intercell messengers between organs and germ cells. How are hard-won evolutionary advantages at organs relayed to germ cells as novel  heritable traits? How does the organism avoid wasting the benefits of hundreds of generations of evolution at billions of cells?

According to neo-darwinist dogma,  only mutations at germ cells can be transmitted to a new generation producing a mutant swerve for testing via natural selection.

The great speciations occurred in deep pre-cambrian epoch a billion years ago as symbiotic aggregations took root then forever after until the present,  it’s all coorganation. Most evolution is internal as organs evolve and coorganate with one another with their highly conserved foundational genes locked in where they are protected from casual mutation.

A three week old human fetus replays-expresses renal features it has remained in touch with for 500 million years for the first 3 weeks after fertilization then - “oops” not this one! as the pronephric proto-kidney dissolves allowing the mesonephric version to develop for 5 weeks - no go ! not this one either. Finally, on the third try the metanephric kidney develops and it’s off to the races for life.

JBQ - Is the prostate a command center for the relay of epigenetic information from all organ systems to sperm cells? Is there an analog in females? Does nuclear DNA at sperm dematerialize into chromatin? Is there a daily cycle of receptiveness when new genetic info is added to latest batch of sperm. To do: Look for chromatin cycles at germ cells.

JBQ - where are the free-living mitochondria ? Have they gone extinct?

JBT - Seems like mutations at vomeronasal chemistry would most likely cause interruption in mating continuity leading to sexual isolation - speciation. New mutation doesn’t  pass the smell test. Is vomeronasal change inherent in all speciation?  Who could know? There has been no new species evolution observed - ever.

JBQ - Why would a bird care if its mate had a red-tufted head or webbed feet if the pheromones were still attractive and why would it mate with a look alike if vomeronasal chemistry had changed?

Note:   All myth is truth - all truth is myth.

“Speciation is a property of nucleated organisms. Speciation began with the earliest protoctists 2 billion years after first bacteria and viruses.” -  Lynn Margulis

JBQ - How do newborn animals depending on a diverse microbiota in their gastrointestinal tract and many other locations, restore, reanimate the wide variety of bacteria and viruses during gestation-birth-life?  It can’t be all via mother’s milk.

JBQ - How much non-human DNA ( viral, bacterial) enters an ovum at fertilization? Does this new generation of microorganisms  hitch a ride on the surface of sperm head or sperm mid section? We now know that mitochondria travelling in sperm midsection enter the egg, contrary to widespread previous belief. How much viral DNA is carried inside the head of the sperm to grow along with blastula-fetus into new life?

*

9/6/15   3:57pm

Gentlemen Start Your Kidneys

A living organism contains every component of its entire evolutionary history. We comprise 99.9% ancient - archaic - primordial stuff. Animals, plants, bacteria, viruses and archaea are living histories of all they / we have ever been since life’s origin and long before as molecules in the primeval stew. It is not simply that every human cell once had the potential to be any organ or tissue but it has the potential to be any creature that ever was since the beginning of life on Earth. Send our little “human’ blastomere an instruction to become a Devonian fish and voila! Mom gives birth to a coelacanth.

The spectacle of stem cells receiving instructions to develop into neurons, epithelium, nephrons, cardiac tissue, lungs, bones, blood, hormones -

You - do this

You - do that

Not now! - wait 10 seconds until x,y,z is complete then it is your turn

A cellular headquarters at blastomere  like a busy general writing orders to 1,000 colonels

Gentlemen - Start your kidneys !

The kidney begins in deep time 400 million years ago give or take 100 million years. The kidney begins to grow in each new life of mammals, birds and reptiles. The human kidney recapitulates this early form in our fetal growth sequence. For the first three weeks a human has the kidney of a 400 million year old hagfish. It disappears after a few weeks replaced by a second version that became extinct 100 million years ago. This second kidney actually functions in the human fetus as a filter for a few weeks.  At week fifteen our final form kidney emerges to serve its filtering, blood pressure regulation, secretion, excretion  services throughout a life.

There are many who disparage Darwinian evolution-natural selection using examples of specific animal features such as eye parts, kidney-heart system to make their case against. Their question is some form of  “How could these systems function at 10% eyeball or 20% kidney? They fail to acknowledge 99% of evolution occurs at the quantum-atomic-cell nucleus level i.e. not apparent to cursory examination of obvious animal features or the fossil record.  the vast ocean of process that drives any phenotypic expression ( i.e. a part or process you can see) is not readily apparent. The stuff we can see: feathers, fins, limbs, organ systems, metabolic processes are the residue of much finer process not the heart of the matter, not the essence, the guts of evolution-mutation-selection. Evolution is not only not at the level of the individual life as Darwin asserted it isn’t at the gene level as Dawkins proposed 39 years ago in his iconic book "The Selfish Gene".

Organisms evolve within themselves throughout a single life via intra-signaling: limb to nucleic material, organ to nucleic material. Intra-lifespan epigenetic activity across 50 cell generations or 500 or 5,000 cell generations  prior to registration as a change in DNA base pair number or sequence i.e. traditional sense of a mutation and subsequent transfer to a new generation of germ cells. Thousands, tens of thousands of mutations accrue within tissue cells  before a gene is modified. Nature is more carefully conservative  than we have assumed. there is a dialogue that occurs throughout the life of an individual - messages for improvement of a process or the coordination of an organ component with other organ systems. These  post-translational signals are registered in histones-junk DNA  and when a threshold is reached, a message is formally encoded into DNA for conservation. The histone acts as capacitor storing a charge for change and then relaying a signal to DNA molecule at germ cells. What is the pathway from organ cell to germ cell? Perhaps “junk” DNA is stored information that has yet to reach the point where it signals a change in protein production - regulation.

The old model of a nucleotide getting zapped by a UV ray, mutating and causing a new expression to be tested in the following generation(s) for fitness-survival is grossly over-simplified. During the span of a single lifetime there are 10 million or a billion mutations, tryouts, experiments in every organ in every metabolic process, in every cell in the body. It is the sum of these multitudes of mutations that we see as an improved blood pump. Organ and metabolic systems within a single body during a single lifespan communicate myriad small changes that become encoded in DNA. The following is a partial list of cell types and their lifespan in a human body:

1. Heart muscle cells            40 million replaced each year of 4 billion total
2. Epithelium-small intestine        2-4 days average lifespan of cell
3. Stomach                2-9 days
4. White blood cells            2-5 days
5. Platelets                10 days
6. Sperm                    60 days
7. neurons                lifetime
8. bone cells                10% per year
9. eye-lens                lifetime
10. female gametes ( eggs)        lifetime
11. Red blood cells            100 million new ones per minute of 9 trillion

Look at Darwinian evolutionary process re: fecundity-mutation-natural selection within a single body not where a base pair mutates, expresses a longer claw-dominant bear-wins mating battle, makes more offspring with longer claws and over a million years all bears have longer claws. the viability of the longer claw gets resolved 10,000 times at the cell level. It must make sense here as an advantage for 1,000 generations before this mutation gets transferred into the DNA as either an expressed or a conserved trait.

TOE (Theory Of Evolution) skeptics ask how an entire system like the kidney could evolve as a result of the accepted model of mutation-natural selection. How does an animal use 10% of a kidney even if a simple archaic pronephric model as seen today in the hagfish (and surprisingly, in early fetus of humans, though non-functioning and dissolved after three weeks). How or why does one have only one half of a filter even if it is a primitive one? There are structures other than kidneys or proto-kidneys that perform a filtering function - every cell membrane is a filter. It is a kidney in a sense if it keeps some things in and others out. It is easy to visualize an ancient kidney - a ten percent kidney working in concert with fifteen percent blood and a twenty percent heart. Every cell with a membrane is at least a ten percent kidney by definition. There was a point in time where where a few cells combined to accelerate this filtering process i.e. the cell membrane handles X and Y and the incipient kidney handles  Z.

Many TOE critics whether knowledgeable Creationists, educated, rational science-trained sceptics  lack imagination. There ought to be a branch of bio-science “Incipient Organ Systems” that explores archaic organ interaction, patterns scalable into greater complexity like a landscape painting transitioning from foggy late Turner into precisely rendered  Frederic Edwin Church.

The time is two billion years BCE. there are twenty multicell organisms at the starting gate. The primordial ooze has become toxic. Who will survive?  Gentlemen start your kidneys !*

August 29, 2015  2:36 pm

Ball O’ String - Ball O’ Rubber Bands

August 18, 2015 A single thread of our grand rhizomatic myth-mat-braintangle, our consensus trance is often seen as madness  but when these madnesses, after some culling,  are bundled together into a single rope of shared consciousness comprising our shared wisdom, our history, laws and favorite music, books and  films - culture ensues.

Imagine two balls the diameter of a golf ball at the top of a big hill. They have 1,000 features coded as base pairs in DNA  at the top of the hill start point,. The orange ball rolls left and the green ball rolls right. These two balls have the capacity to replicate. The hill is covered with myriad pieces of string, the left side of each string fragment is different in small and large ways. The right side of the hill is covered with  rubber bands of  many qualities. New rubber bands and string are features that may or may not promote survival.  If the red ball rolls over a piece of string it adheres. If a green ball rolls over a rubber band it conveniently wraps around. The red ball is an animal. The green ball is a plant.  It will take three billion years for the DNA in the two balls to get to the bottom of the hill. As string or rubber bands are added, new DNA is created or existing DNA is struck by a UV ray creating a mutation forcing a ball to pick up a new type of string or rubber band.

Life has so much momentum, so much back-pressure ( historical momentum-heritage) as well as adaptive-reproductive pressure in real-time and real space. Life possesses such urgency and fecundity over vast scales of time-space,  like water being forced through a cracked rock formation - where are the hairline fissures in the rock? The openings will be discovered by these organisms as they struggle for existence. The new niche will be discovered.

Are individual organisms programmed with intention? Once the cat idea is in place, is it cats all the way down. Once the reptile happens, is it reptiles forever. It appears to be thus.  If there is a point in this “Ball-O- String” analogy where one could begin to wrap string around a rubber band trending ball or rubber bands around a ball that begins as stringy. At what point in evolutionary history does the idea of cat become expressed? Is it gradual? Is it punctuated, i.e. does it occur in less than 20 million years? Is there such a thing as “punctuation” within a pre-phenotypically expressed collection of what have been gradually accrued variations? Which of the following features would be considered the core of the balls  i.e. pre-string or pre- rubber bands? 1. live young parturition 2. quadrupedal 3. chordate 4. radially symmetrical 5. bilaterally symmetrical.

How does a ball know to pick up string and not rubber bands when it possesses neither at the early stages of development? Perhaps it does not “pick up” string or rubber bands, it picks up an undifferentiated substance and its food and transforms nutrients into string or rubber bands as a precursor cat or bear or crocodile that one day will become a fully expressed family.

How are traits conserved to such widely varying degrees in DNA? Are there kryptonite locks on certain histones - no access, little access, regular access, promiscuous depending on methylation type?

Lamarxism: Inherited acquired wage slavery.

Vastly different organisms could develop from identical amounts of both string and rubber bands depending on which of the pieces of string or rubber bands are expressed during fetal development. Maybe a ball at the bottom of the hill has 50% string and 50% rubber bands but only the string is expressed. The rubber bands are silent. Vastly different organisms could grow from identical genomes with expression controlled by post-transcriptional activity only.

What is the next step up the evolutionary ladder after bacteria or if not a ladder, which app is being selected among hundreds, as the most useful improvement for the organism? Was there ever a two-cell organism? or four, eight, twelve? or did we advance from one to hundreds of cells in a single step? Imagine a billion years of evolution happening in 24 hours - a museum exhibit.

One can create blinding bright light in a pitch dark room by pressing on one’s eyeballs. This is obviously a cold chemical light not involving photons. Must be phosphor atoms or calcium ions releasing energy at afferent neural pathways from eyeball to optic nerve through optic chiasm then into occipital lobe? who knows? maybe this light is experienced before the afferent signal gets to the occipital lobe say in the midbrain or the pons. This chemical light never needs to arrive at any more remote brain area for added meaning - no need for 3-D space to be imagined to complete a scene - just light alone. Is this light in the darkness similar to the cold light of lightning bugs or deep sea glowing fish appendages?

Do cell membrane lipids share the same chemistry as mitochondria lipid or vesicle membrane lipids? One size fits all? Is the hydrophilic-phobic connection reversed at either?

What propels and or guides a protein molecule from the golgi exit to the interior surface of the cell membrane? How is it guided to the proper zone of this 360 degree quasi-sphere? How is shipping information conveyed re: destination: bloodstream, adjacent cell, intracell goo?

Liebig's law: Barrel capacity determined by the lowest stave. Organism success determined by the most scarce resource.

8/18/15 9:40am

Capacitor Effect

August 7, 2015

A capacitor stores increasing electrical charge over time until an instant when it releases all stored charge. A speciation event following this pattern would suggest a contradiction of Darwin’s notion of gradual change in small increments. Countless small changes have been occurring intra-organism but these reach a “debut” point where it appears on life’s big stage for interspecies action.

Note the amount of work of all sorts from design through construction that goes into a new building before opening day. It is not that nothing was happening or that things were in “equilibrium” or “stasis” during this block of time simply that the changes were not public.

Nature is a great showman saving up eons of hard work for dramatic debuts on life’s stage. She likes to bring her fighters up through anonymous ranks and myriad hours in the gym before sending them into the ring for well attended battles.

Stephen Jay Gould and NIles Eldredge mistake these vast periods of species “stasis” as equilibrium when activity is continuous and intense at all times. They overstate the importance of opening night. Note: “Opening night” in evolutionary timescales may be 10 million years long over the course of a billion years of existence as a discreet organism.

If a dam breaks due to forces of water in reservoir does it matter if it rained for one day or one year? The resulting flood has the same disastrous effect on the village below in either case.  Each raindrop creates femto change at its own micro- level perhaps knocking a frog on the head reminding it to have sex. Tadpoles then clog the spillway screens, water and thus horizontal force builds up against the dam, the stress in the concrete builds up beyond its capacity, the dam bursts - every level of the taxonomy is in play.

There is no big change without accrued small change somewhere in the chain of causality, even singular, catastrophic events. A comet works its way across the solar system toward Earth. Hitting the Earth is just another moment in its millennial travels from the Oort cloud and back. It is when one system in which change has slowly accrued, impacts another system that an event might appear to be punctuated, abrupt, saltational.

Ten million base pair mutations occur in one organism then in a single “moment” ( perhaps in geo-time) this series of genes affects shell color, shell shape. The change in the shape of the shell is just the manifestation of countless smaller changes, just another in a long line of changes not essentially larger, though far more noticeable than those that unfolded at the base pair level.

This interior-exterior expression dynamic occurs throughout nature, throughout the universe on every scale and throughout human society and through individual lives. It is what anger management is all about - channeling abrupt expression into socially constructive, personally advantageous action.

“....When a system reaches its own limits and becomes saturated, a reversal is produced - something else takes place…..”  Jean Baudrillard

Every cell membrane is a capacitor.

Many small changes accrue reaching a critical mass, a breaking point at which new phenotypic expression occurs.

Things build up and then they burst, emptying to fill again; spores, emotions, cells, the universe itself is a capacitor,  a regulator of change enabling a regular, dependable filling and emptying of charge, of change.

An election is a social capacitor, a built-in device for regulating and balancing social pressure. An election creates a sensation of change when much that is vital remains the same. There are highly conserved genes across kingdoms of organisms that are not available for mutation at every generation. These  base pair sequences are guarded more than others lest we have our  stomachs filled with brains. Each new generation is a biological election, a newer slate of variables to test itself against the forces of natural selection: capacitor-election-birth - storage-release-refilling. The female reproductive system in mammals is a capacitor when it fills up with a growing fetus and is emptied to fill again.

The animal and plant cell membrane is a capacitor with a low charge on one side and a higher charge on the other. positive charge outside - negative charge inside creating a differential that is used to convey sensory and motor information in neurons and other functions in other cell types.

On the ethnographic scale, adolescent male natives are restless, the village is overcrowding, the chief demands fealty, a revolt ensues. The village-capacitor discharges a few ocean-going sailing outrigger canoes filled with young sailors out into the South Pacific to find their own territory

Release via pressure excess

Release via catalyst

population growth from cell division - birth

population growth via immigration

A movie theater is a capacitor filling and emptying. Your stomach fills and empties - is it a capacitor as it churns away at the various products of sunlight doing its part to restore entropic balance from imbalance caused by the great temperature difference between the sun and the coldness of space in a cascade of causality first the plant then the stomach evolved as capacitors to accelerate entropic gradient reduction.

When there are transformations within the “capacitor”, if the medium doing the filling is transformed does the capacitor become something else? a transformer?

RE: Reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” @ page 99 of “Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard - .  The reproduction reminds the brain of the glorious sensuality of the original oil painting though it is missing the aura itself it trips the memory of the original aura as we look at this simulacrum so all is not lost, perhaps little is lost with this glossy poster of Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire” thus the original is not lost.

The Panama Canal locks are capacitors - they fill, they disgorge carrying information ( ships-products, raw materials) to a new level.

JB Hypothesis:  Gradual change is stored internally using “junk”DNA until all organ systems and all metabolic systems have been coordinated. After a million years or 15 million years of invisible but regular internal evolution via adjustment-coordination there is an expression event - a coming out party, a period of a few thousand years, a debut, a punctuation. Punctuation being the outward expression of a continuous gradual evolution.

Imagine a crew team spending 99 percent of its time, thousands of hours, in grueling workouts for several months to prepare for five six minute races. One would not assert that the rowing team was in stasis during its vital months of preparation with its intensity reaching race levels of intensity but with no spectators only the watchful eye of the coach.

Stasis is a mirage. If Gould wants to transfer the bookkeeper as agent of speciation heuristic to the next higher taxonomic level from Darwin’s level of the individual to Gould’s level of the species then he must accept the baggage - no cherry picking of features allowed. The route to speciation is:  gestation to speciation not as Gould-Eldredge assert: punctuation to speciation.

My corollary to “punctuated” equilibrium fleshes out Gould’s argument for raising the taxonomic level of natural selection and adds quotation marks for what can be seen as only a superficial but highly visible “punctuation” - punctuation for the spectators only but not for those with inside knowledge of the entire process, the grueling, highly selective regimen of the oarsmen, stage actors, artists including nature itself. Why would nature showcase an unfinished, untrained, uncoordinated product i.e. to allow it to play a role before its time - too dangerous. Nature has pride and conservative character in not wanting to place entire development process in the arena as animals and especially humans revile and attack the unfinished, seen as weak as it often is. why would a species, in its gradual evolution oppose this fact of life. Keep changes under wraps until ready for action and under wraps does not imply stasis. Think of the vast scope of activity in a growing fetus. Birth is the celebrated punctuation event but it is part of a continuum.

Biologists should search for genetic-proteinic mechanisms for of genotypic storage-warehousing and the mechanics of release. These ‘releases” occur over spans of millions of years in some cases.

To do:  Create experiments that seek to reveal mechanisms for warehousing useful base pair mutations to be triggered as phenotypic expression only when levels of internal balance is achieved re: component size, metabolism, process, timing etc. Internal “practice” prior to expression on nature’s battlefield.

• 12:46pm

Creation-Abruption

July 31, 2015 Nothing is ever abrupt. Everything has its history, a backstory, a build up, an evolution. You may not see the development but it happened nonetheless. Nothing is abrupt. Things are small for 1,000 years then you can feel them, see them, then they kill you. Take cholera for instance.

Sometimes things appear abrupt because the intermediate stages have been lost, removed, stolen, ignored, simply not seen. How many times have we heard the following from an artist “My overnight success took thirty years.” or twenty years or ten years i.e. this person’s success only appeared to be abrupt. Ask anything that seems to happen all at once. Nothing happens all at once. Nothing is abrupt.

Some things seem abrupt due to a change of background. You didn’t see the green apple on the green grass but when it is seen against a red picnic cloth it is in your face. Shift the background and things “abruptly” appear. Relocate the object to a new background and it looks different all of a sudden. If you want to see the unseen, change the background noise. Killing big game for sport was a sign of masculinity in the 1920s. In the 2015 it is pathological cruelty, senseless, egomaniacal destruction.

While you were busy looking elsewhere this phenomenon became present. Some things gestate, hibernate remain out of sight and in stasis; other things are always growing, getting bigger, gaining definition, clarity, power and then you see them and then they explode.

1. Bacteria invented the animal ( human)  gut just as humans invented agriculture and writing.
2. Ethanol ( whiskey, vodka, gin etc.) dissolves gut biofilm making one more susceptible to viral, bacterial infection, cancer, ulcers, etc.
3. Ethanol dissolves myelin sheaths at axons-neurons making one more quick tempered, depressed, angry, violent i.e. less sociable.

Things only appear to be created when they are merely stuff being re-arranged or noticed for the first time. People who are identified as “creative”  re-arrange more stuff than others. They break more rules and dig deeper into processes. Mozart’s melodies were always sitting there among the seven tones. He was the one to notice them. Picasso and Braque looked closer at the late work of Cezanne to discover the reason for all the fuss.

There is no creation and there is no abruption. there is unfolding at various rates or uncovering or finally seeing. A snail evolves from one species to another over the course of ten million years and Stephen Jay Gould calls this “punctuation” a singular event across geologic scale time i.e. hundreds of millions of years claiming this abrupt speciation an argument against Darwin’s gradualism.

Being born is an abruption. Sure it’s just another chemical event on a 4.5 billion year continuum but to another human it is an abruption. If it is your child, it is a big abruption. Humans have their unique realm of what is abrupt and what is continuous. Avocado dip turns brown after an hour sitting on a picnic table but if one makes a sport out of watching it. It seems to take forever. The mayfly lives for a day as a flying insect.

Abruption-abrupt punctuation as dramatic climax in dramatic text paving way for third act. Shift characters into a new context, a new background to reveal something hidden

*

5:34  7/31/15

Bend It Like Nature

  January 21, 2015

Art-making is like evolution.  The artist experiments, searches consciousness, habit, skill, experience, history. Hold on to the good stuff, throw out the bad.  An artist tries 1,000 different ideas during years of work, shares 100 of these ideas with other people, two of the works are selected for exhibit and critical scrutiny, one of these ideas dominates,  giving rise to:

1. ”BLAM !”-Roy Lichtenstein
2. ”Crazy” - Willie Nelson
3. “Woman One” - deKooning
4. “Hey Baby” - Bruce Channel
5. ”Folsom Prison Blues” - Johnny Cash
6. “American Flag Painting” - Jasper Johns
7. “Watch Your Step” - Bobby Parker
8. “Love Potion #9” - Leiber & Stoller
9. “String Quartet in F” - Hayden
10. “School of Athens” - Raphael

All deliver bold, simple, rhythmic, colorful, spicy, and as of 1963-70: camp.

Emotion-laden expressions rarely endure critical stress.  They may be “true” and ‘heartfelt”  They may be “honest” and many are technically obsessive but they do not generate impact, traction or staying power.  Save the sap for the memoir where people might be interested in ephemera, juvenalia, sincerity.

Most picture makers are locked into mediocrity from a strong dose of early approval.  Aunt Mildred says ‘Oh ! -  It is just wonderful dear” upon viewing “Waikiki Sunset with palms” painted when you were fifteen.  Art fairs across the land are stuffed to the gills with Thomas Kinkade wannabees. The following are the rules for traction in capital “A” art world - 2015.

1. Obsession
2. Duchamp-Benjamin-Warhol genuflection
3. Machine-slick displaces touch
4. Scale - make it too big for the living room
5. Content - too sexy, too violent for living room
6. Theme: gender and race still rule the roost - use wit and irony

Bend it like nature -read the working genetic code - insect or mammal; Duchamp or Picasso.  Make a move any move but respect the genetic history - the genome, as you share your mutations, subject your creation to your own harsh gauntlet of  natural selection, make additional moves by addressing your success as your new work progresses - what does the genome suggest?  What does your latest layer or splash of paint suggest?  If loss ensues, make another bold move bolder than the first - shift, swerve, juke as required.  If this fails, let extinction run its course and begin again and again and again.  there is no blueprint suggesting the final result.  Nature had no idea that humans would evolve when it relocated the skeleton to the interior of its animal du jour.  there was no human-vector intention 100 million years ago - just the intention of the second law of thermodynamics - restore entropy and use animals to do it.  One thing led to another under the bold, playful and demanding eye of a broader natural selection.  The dog hunts or it don’t.  If it hunts,  keep it, store its information on a DNA molecule - don’t mess with the good things.

Artists who imagine an end result and direct effort to a preconceived notion work against the grain of evolution and their own nature, their inborn gift  for exploration, adventure, something new, effective and powerful.  In nature the good stuff is built upon not ignored or discarded.  As much as nature loves to experiment, it does not like to start from scratch.  Nature keeps the good stuff and builds upon it.  Nature has been adventurous in overall process but conservative in protecting moves that bear fruit.  Nature locks success into chromosomes.

“I asked the brick what it wanted to be.  It said: I want to be an arch.”  Louis Kahn

*

Meaning Golden Mean

July 17, 2015 “Rhythms apparent to the eye are at the root of artistic creation. They resound in man by an organic inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned.”

• Le Corbusier

“Desirable middle between two extremes” - Aristotle

“Doctrine of the mean” - Confucius

“The Middle Way” - Buddhism

“Nothing in Excess” - Delphic temple carving- Ancient Greece

“Proportion is related to beauty and goodness” - Plato

“The pure crystals that harness, guide, enable and valorize cosmic forces:  salt” - JHB

There is part of the human brain that just sits back and laughs / cries at the hodge-podge “self” you have constructed ( ended up with). It sends you dreams to mock you. It wakes you up to piss.

In my dream I toss a rock against a steel door and the noise wakes me up to micturate.

I dream of a colossal wave and the fear wakes me up to piss

I dream of wading in a flooding river and wake up to urinate

I have a jolting mini-nightmare to wake me up to take a leak

RE: A Thousand Plateaus-capitalism and schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The purulent oscillation between brilliance and logorrheic garbage is dizzying. Two thirds garbage and one third brilliant insight. It is worth the crappy, sophomoronic, quasi-scientific, marxist, homophilic outsider clap-trap to get the rhizomatic refrain such as it is - refried Straussian structuralist dualism, Saussurian synchronic-diachronic reframing, Chomsky-nods, the usual suspects of Western philosophy Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, et al.

I have an inborn sense of the golden proportion. I can create a golden rectangle at will time after time without using a ruler, by “eyeballing” only - .618:1.00 every time.  I can sense when a graphic design, a painting or a work of architecture is “IN” proportion. This is a blessing and somewhat of a curse as so much of the built environment is out of proportion thus always a little jarring. This visual acuity may be related to perfect pitch in the audio realm - who knows? This sense allows me to create building designs and artworks that please most viewers - those with an esthetic sense. I know “where to put the lines” when designing buildings. I also have a sense of color harmony. I can tell when colors are harmonious or not. I know how to mix colors in 10,000 hues to achieve color balance in a painting, if balance is desired - sometimes it is not. Knowing color allows a painter to orchestrate harmony and dissonance for emotional effect. I am developing the ability to do this in music. I am a beginner in music but can make some small delights by manipulating keynotes, fourths, fifths, thirds - minor and major simple progressions.

My question is this. How are the senses linked in the brain to make esthetic judgements? It seems as if the visual and audio senses share the same fundamental proportional rules i.e. a piece is either in harmony or not independent of good or bad criticism which is always a matter of fads, movements, fashion, style. During the Mannerist era  artwork was elongated i.e. out of proportion. Out of proportion was in style. Nowadays art is independent of much visual criteria - it meets a political-racial-gender program or it doesn’t.

If the brain has an “esthetic control center” when and why did it evolve? Does the ability to sense proportion help one to choose a healthy mate thus enhancing the quality of the species genome? Did it help during the hunt? A fat or skinny animal was more vulnerable to being tracked down and killed than an animal that is in proportion. An animal that is in proportion, signaling good health, will be stronger and better able to hunt the hunter. The brain developed the capacity to make fine proportional distinctions that send life or death information. Is the control center in the neocortex or in the brainstem-basal ganglia?

Do other mammals have esthetic sensibility? Do birds, fishes and insects and arachnids have it? A spider web is one of the world’s most sublimely beautiful structures. Could a spider web be woven without an esthetic sense?  If so, what genes are involved? Is there a set of broadly and deeply conserved genes such as the HOX group that enable animal brains to make esthetic-survival judgements? Have humans taken a survival skill and exapted it into our neocortical artistic realm with accompanying social agenda? Hey! this esthetic sensitivity works for hunting but look at this -I can paint a beautifully proportioned  herd of bison on the wall of our cave for the amusement of all and to enhance my status in the clan as an artist, a shaman who can re-create important real things in paint for use in animal abundance rituals. Prehistoric bird-like animals evolved feathers for insulation and discovered that they could be used for flight. did humans discover a new use for their esthetic survival package?

What does the golden mean mean? It is a baseline for all sensory judgement?  Is there a golden mean for smell and taste?  How about touch? or vomeronasal sense? The ideally proportioned pheromone that signals great interpersonal chemistry and true love-lust. Is there a universal donor pheromone as in blood type? A person who is magnetic to all? Is this what charisma is all about? Are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama chemically charismatic? What percentage of their personal power comes from their esthetics, their “lookin’ good” factor. What makes people of both sexes want to give charismatics whatever they want? Is there a lock on to one’s golden mean sensitivity?

Is there a deep knot of neurons that govern all senses that serves as a thalamic-type clearinghouse for afferent neuronal connection-distribution from sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, vomeronasal sense? Is there a rhizomatic network that interconnects all senses so that they work together to make judgments for further action. A pre- neocortical assembler that gives a “go-no go” opinion to the higher neocortical reason at prefrontal lobe? The brain gives the person or the matter at hand the “smell” test. My foamcore architectural model has helped me make judgements about the proportions of my building. I can sniff around the relationships of the various formal elements. What looks better four arches or five? Should this tower be an additional fifteen feet tall?

Late 19th Century American architect H.H.Richadrson stood in front of his masterpiece Boston’s Trinity Church as the tower was being constructed and quite independent of his office construction drawings, instructed the contractor to remove built stonework and make the church tower fifteen feet taller  because it “felt’ different in real life at full scale than it “felt” as building elevations on the working drawings.

A good architect makes 1,000 esthetic judgements most of which are beyond the threshold of normal sensitivity that all contribute to a house feeling just right to clients.

Have you seen a photograph of someone that made them look attractive only to be disappointed in your real life encounter? They looked as good as in the photo but something wasn’t clicking.

Charles Darwin colleague T.H. Huxley on human consciousness:

“As the steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.”  JB corollary: …..unless three toots on the whistle signal anarchists to blow up the whole train.

JB Theory: The human mind ( the animal mind - perhaps the plant mind) makes aesthetic-type judgements using every sense at many levels of review for countless judgements guiding action, belief, opinion and executive function in humans. There is a golden mean at work, our structuralist waffle iron,  in the fastnesses of the thalamus,  the batter of the exterior world is cooked cross-checking, filtering and coordinating this sensory input and in so doing,  enacting consciousness. The Golden Mean is the key to human consciousness, the fountainhead of perception.

• 1:38 pm - 7/17/15

Rejection-Creation

July 6, 2015 American culture is designed from top to bottom to make 50% of American men believe they are living TOTALLY independent lives.  These men all have the following traits:

1. They are employed
2. They own property
3. They are college educated
4. They pay all of their bills every month
5. They own stocks and bonds
6. Their children are raised and doing well
7. They paid for their children's college education
8. They have paid for daughter’s weddings
9. They host regular family get-togethers in a generous loving manner
10. They don’t “lean” on the Federal Government for anything
11. They own two or three cars and a few other devices with motors
12. They go on road trips to Branson and Las Vegas, often driving  Winnebagoes towing $60,000  tricycle Harleys
13. They are all still married to their first wives who they try hard to please
14. Eighty percent of these men are overweight with cholesterol and heart problems
15. They are amused by bolder men but envy no one.

American culture allows this myth of independence to thrive. These men are independent of little. They are piglets on the teat of our myth.  calves on an ideological udder, well-behaved puppies rollicking in a litter. They are mama’s boys and more than a few are motherfuckers. In the words of Sir Paul McCartney “.....and his mother said: “Ted be good’.....he would”  If you follow all of the rules all of the time and behave yourself 100% of the time - remaining under the juridical radar with your nose to your corporate grindstone ( or is it a hamster wheel?) within which you have risen into the executive ranks,  you can tell yourself you are an independent “self-made” man. If you stumble once you are dead. You cease to exist. You float in limbo, an untethered astronaut.  You are a non-person. You are pitied and ignored. If you dare to respond to a single urge emanating from your mid-brain, your basal ganglia, your nature center - you’re a fuck-up. 100% of your marching orders must derive from your female cultivated, mama-groomed prefrontal lobe, your culture center, Our myth center. The center of the big lie, the consensus trance. The lie that if you behave yourself rigorously, control yourself religiously, deny any and all animal urges howling at you from 4.5 billion years of evolution - you will be saved. You will win the game. You will have achieved the right to claim that you are an “independent” man. You fucking loser. You coward. You drip-squirt-smear. I’ll take Henry Miller and Picasso while you risk your life diving for metaphorical vaginas - the coy abalone hidden beneath the turbulent surf of mother-ocean.

How does experience become form? How does the life experience of a sea snail cause the development of its lethal, retractable proboscis-syringe? or the dancing fleshette-fishing lure built into the snapping turtle tongue? or the mega neocortex of the human? What is the interstitial process? Is it mutation-natural selection over 20 million years? This theory does not cut deep enough either for those features listed ot any of ten million others in plants and animals

JB THEORY OF TERMINAL EVOLUTION:

Most animals and plants have reached the end point of their evolution. they dominate their respective niches with their sophisticated array of terminally evolved tricks of their respective trades. They now have little competition for sexual access and have no problem projecting their genome into the future i.e. they are done, finished, no place else to go in terms of any further adaptation. They are now perfectly adapted and they most likely have been for the past 10 to 20 million years. Is there a single shred of evidence that anything has evolved in the past one million years other than the human neocortex?

It is obvious that many species haven’t evolved for 50 or 100 million years: sharks, dragonflies, hagfish, clams. So what now? We are surrounded by perfection, by immaculate biochemical metabolic process. It works ! DNA gets scrubbed each generation, ATP gets metabolized, HOX and FOX genes unfold. Why would any of these organisms or their marvelously packaged processes change? They could change. New mutations could find favor but with what? A destroyed global environment, an inferior environment? Now that would be de-volution

*

Interorgan Signals

June 4, 2015 For simplicity focusing on big six: Lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, stomach and  intestines ( large and small). Given that the brain sends and receives chemical and electrical signals from all organs, sensory and others.

Do the lungs communicate with the kidneys in any way? Does the heart communicate with the liver? The stomach with the lungs?

Rather than hierarchical communication centered on the brain, a rhizomatic system between all organs in constant, precise communication.

How does stomach tissue signal the heart-lungs that it is dying from lack of oxygen?

Does lung disease cause oxygen deprivation problems in all organ systems? what happens when the blood cannot carry enough oxygen for ATP production and all cells become energy-starved?

Does oxygen deprivation accelerate cancer onset and growth?

Miscellaneous Questions:

1. RNA codes for some proteins that return to act upon the genome itself - the originating DNA molecules. Does this mean that a protein re-enters the cell nucleus from its point of production on a ribosome at nucleus-encircling rough endoplasmic reticulum. Is this protein assembled within the cell nucleus from ribosomes that did not migrate from their zone of origin at nucleolus out to the rough endoplasmic reticulum or is there rough endoplasmic reticulum within the nucleus?
2. Are all 20 amino acids present in every cell type? One would think that only those amino acids required for a particular cell type’s proteinic product.
3. Are amino acids imported into cells or created from scratch within each cell?
4. Oneiric question: How many different brain areas must our dream machine tap into in order to create those scenes in places we have never been, populated by people we have never seen, with buildings of a type never imagined, living through social roles never experienced? Is this dream-stuff located in a long-term memory zone of the hippocampus,  mixing and matching from previous experience to create a unique movie? Must some dream nucleus reach out with its dendritic rhizomatic web into various sensory regions of the neocortex for every sight, smell, sound, color, face, weather condition, assembling these into a coherent though still mysterious story.
5. Might prehistoric DNA have cannibalized itself to create an origin event for a new kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus or species? Say an ancient organism one billion years ago  had only one chromosome with 100 million base pairs. 80,000 base pairs of these 100 million split down their center i.e. unzip,  break off from main strand and end up ejected from this cell as two strands of RNA and then excreted by  the organism itself. Extracellular environment is such that this nuclear material can float freely, remaining intact and multiplying.

Hapleate, hapleated, hapleation, haplioid: A JB neologism that means to remove 23 of 46 chromosomes of any somatic cell from any organ in order to create a new haploid cell that is not a germ cell.

1. Experiment One: Insert 23 chromosomes from a colon cell into a hapleated kidney cell nucleus. adjust each of these haplioids prior to insertion through post translational modifications so that they are pluripotent
2. Insert hapleated kidney cell chromosomes into hapleated stomach cell nucleus. Has a viable zygote has been created?
3. Experiment Two: Variation on #6 Knock out various combinations of regulatory accessory DNA in hippocampal neuron, hapleate, merge with hapleated liver cell nucleus to create Neo-germ cells
4. Experiment Three: Relocate half of mouse neocortex to a zone just below the cerebellum of target mouse - see if new neuronal connections are made thus increasing brain power of target mouse. Is target mouse smarter after six months of synaptic growth?
5. Experiment Four: Relocate neocortical mouse-one neurons into thalamic ventricle of same mouse - see if these neocortical neurons add value to hippocampal function.  Mix and match various brain cell types into different brain areas to see if brain cells can be re-purposed.
6. Experiment Five:  Plant a slab of neocortex of healthy, young recently deceased ape,Party One, across the lower back of a healthy living ape, Party Two- - initiate axonal links from relocated ape neocortex into spinal cord of of Party Two - see if this transplanted neocortex has added consciousness to Party Two. Try neocortical transplant at various regions closer to the head, say at back of neck. try this on rats, mice, other primates, dogs, cats etc. Has any memory from Ape One been transmitted to Ape Two? A maze pattern or Pavlovian response unique to Ape One into Ape Two?
7. Experiment Six: Replace cerebrospinal fluid at lateral ventricle(s) with new neuron population. Check for increased caudate nucleus or hippocampus function. Perform this neuron relocation to 3d, 4th ventricles with specific neuron types involved in specific signalling or hormonal process.
8. Experiment Seven: Transplant brain cells from the pons or medulla to the lateral ventricles. Attach axons to any deficient brain area injured in battle or accident or genetic mishap. Whichever brain area is deficient could receive 200,000 additional neurons / brain cells to assist in restoration of brain function.
9. Experiment Seven-A: Switch on or off specific DNA regions at these relocated    ( new) brain cells in order to customize function for specific tasks.
10. Must any or all interorgan signaling travel through the brainstem like afferent-efferent signal from sensory organ to and from brain?
11. Is interorgan signaling reflexive bypassing brain and even perhaps the spinal cord - direct organ to organ signal.

The following is a letter to Cal Tech Professor Elliot Meyerowitz re: interorgan signaling in a tree:

Dear Professor Meyerowitz,

I encountered a brief description of your work on structural forces effects upon patterns of plant growth while reading an article about Professor Jennifer Zallen and mechanical forces on Drosophila embryo growth.

I have wondered lately about the large scale growth of primary branches of an 60 foot tall oak tree in my rear yard (6 acre farmette in Lebanon, TN). I was trained as an architect at the Harvard GSD where I was introduced to D'Arcy Thompson so was primed to think about such things.  My questions are as follows:

1. How does a big tree signal the amount of new growth in order to maintain its structural equilibrium? The compressive and tensile forces can be very large in a big tree under equilibrium ( compression) and tension resulting from regular lateral forces of wind and traumatic force induced after losing a major branch during lightning strike or pruning.

2. Say a big branch on the left side of this big oak got blasted off by lightning one night;  the tree would have a lot of new compressive force in the cells on the side opposite the loss and lots of new tensile force in the cells on the side that lost the big branch.

3.  My question: Is it the strain ( deformation measurable via strain gauge - a common structural engineering tool) of the compression force or the strain of the tensile force that initiates compensating new growth thus ensuring the balance of the entire tree in its new configuration? new growth that may be initiated by pathways you describe for Arabidopsis growth patterns i.e. PIN1 - Auxin or Ms Zallen's myosin-actin(cell adhesion under tension) biochemical process.

4. Whatever these forces are at work on the large deformed tree, they must be similar for a plant sensing tensile or compressive forces in its hierarchy of stems as it grows from seed to maturity.

5. I wonder if different chemical pathways are involved in compressive strain as opposed to those at work under tension forces. Each side of a plant having its own chemistry depending on tension or compression stress OR one side of a big tree ( or small plant) sending signals from one side to the other.

I'm using basic statics- architectural-structural engineering definitions for stress ( pounds per square inch, or whatever units force divided by area) and strain  (deformation in inches, fractions thereof)  in relation to tensile force.

6. It would be interesting to measure relative amounts of PIN1 and auxin before and after an amputation of a large tree limb to investigate chemical changes.

Good luck in your researches

Warm Regards,

Jim Blake -Harvard GSD '79

Reply: Dear Mr. Blake,

All very good questions.  To the degree that we have answers, you can read them in the Wikipedia article on reaction wood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wood).  We don’t know the signaling mechanism that leads to this adaptation to stress (or strain) - initially something must strain (a protein molecule, a membrane, who knows) and it is thought that auxin is involved, so PIN proteins probably are part of the mechanism.  The response depends on the type of tree - tension wood at the top of the branch in angiosperms, compression wood at the bottom in gymnosperms - but as far as I know, no one has the least idea why.

Just one more area open for research!

It is surprising sometime how little we know about plants, given their importance to us, but as you know our federal science agencies are very much slanted toward animal research in service of medicine, and in applied, not basic, plant studies.  The good part of this is that plenty of interesting phenomena are barely studied, so are open for new investigation.  The bad part is that there aren’t a lot of resources for such investigations, or many available answers to even simple questions about plants.

One area my lab studies (and not mentioned in the article), in a similar vein, is grafting in plants - no one knows why it works (or fails when it doesn’t work), despite large parts of agriculture relying in it.  I enclose a recent review and a research paper, in case you are interested.

Elliot Meyerowitz

Elliot M. Meyerowitz

George W. Beadle Professor of Biology

HHMI-GBMF Investigator

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering

Mail Code 156-29

California Institute of Technology

1200 East California Boulevard

Pasadena, California 91125, USA

• 6/4/15

Extremes Proliferate

May 28, 2015

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest of Los Angeles is real. It is a deterrence machine set up to rejuvenate the fiction of the real.”              -  Jean Baudrillard

“It is the market not nature that generates poverty.” - M. Sahlins

Darwinian Natural Selection asserts:  normal members of a species thrive in an existing  environment while the abnormal are denied membership,  forced into the periphery into a strange and challenging environment. The nature of this remote environment is such that the mutant thrives,  becoming the new norm.  In some instances the old comfortable environment changes catastrophically in a direction that favors an outlier, an extreme variant. This relationship holds in all human endeavor. It is those who do not “fit in” who become pioneers. They are the avant garde, the pathfinders in science, art, technology and land development as they make the best of a new niche. The niche becomes the norm and its population proliferates to create a new generation of freaks, mutants and oddballs in a new left field.

When the going gets weird - the weird get going.

Pioneers at Jamestown between 1607 and 1630 lived a brutal existence - few survived.

Many real estate developers have a bold, brash and fearless personality type. They are the first to establish a foothold in new territory and they almost always go down in flames, leaving further development to more sober personalities.

There was single prisoner in a jail cut deep into the rock at the base of Mt. Pele, a volcano forming the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. In 1902 Mt. Pele erupted burying the capital city of Saint Pierre, killing 30,000 people. The prisoner who was deep in his dungeon survived and walked away from the carnage.

Humans, bacteria and cancer are extreme proliferates. Maggots proliferate to extremes in rotted meat. Nuclear arms proliferate and decay as cobwebs are woven around ICBMs rotting in missile silos across the U.S.A. Cancer is proliferation squared. The nature of the stuff is extreme proliferation. We poison the human environment and this proliferation proliferates. Too much of a bad thing creates a synergy of dissolution, a vortex, a black hole, an accelerator of negative force. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing - ask a celebrity with drug issues. The word celebrity implies drug issue as fame itself is a drug and one that typically initiates a cascade of other, less potent drugs; nicotine, heroin, cocaine, etc.

A guitar wizard shreds too many notes limiting the possibility of musical meaning. Peter Max and Paul McCartney overuse sweet colors and hyperglycemia follows, reputations are diluted. The mutants on the freak frontier take to the vile swamp like ducks, gaining a foothold, they begin to proliferate. Back home, the well has gone dry and the crops die. Back home where millions, who once swarmed are now dying. The center shifts. A new species emerges from the chaos along the interface of old and new.

“Every dog has his day.” - anon

“The times, they are a-changin’” - Bob Dylan

Please tell me something I don’t know from instinct or experience. Extreme locales are rich in unexplored places revealing opportunity. Pioneers beware, the second mouse gets the cheese.

What’s so funny? Cruelty and mishap are good for a laugh. People falling on their asses and faces and stumbling into pools. An alligator eating its neighbor gator’s hatchlings is not funny, nor is a lion ripping apart the pre-existing cubs of its new mate.

Two  different ideas here in the words “extremes proliferate”

1. The Darwinian notion that speciation occurs among the outliers.
2. The Malthusian notion that populations proliferate until resources are exhausted.

We are propelled by myth. There is no passion or greed without a context providing fuel for the accumulation of wealth, honor and perhaps fame. I have two options, one with a high resonance context and one with low resonance:

1. I can work myself to death behind a team of mules trekking across a Nevada desert to no one’s notice.
2. I can work equally hard training to throw the discus at the Olympics where my gold medal earns international honor and product endorsement income. Mule skinners get no medals and little pay.

Looking closely at many phenomena causes them to evaporate. It is easy enough to debunk the founding beliefs of any religion, so what? By the time of your debunking, a great web has been woven around this lie-myth-void and the web now has strength and resonance. It can start or stop a conversation, send men to die in war, make men wealthy or strip them of dignity and property.

Once you accept basic tenets of the Freudian or Darwinian myths you can discuss the relative merits of  Jung and Reich,  Mendel and Crick and entertain yourself debunking them ( Jeffrey Masson and Stephen Jay Gould respectively) Good luck ! It’s like trying to debunk the English language. Its screwy, goofy, illogical, always changing, saturated with unscientific tradition, habit and prejudice but it’s all we have and it gets the job done - see: Shakespeare and Thomas McGuane.

Once a web of myth has formed and people are traipsing back and forth building careers and reputations along filaments, it is too late to debunk the founder. She may have been vulnerable when first proposing her wild, paradigm-shifting theory due to its error and misconception but once the web has been woven, there is substance afoot. It is not necessarily scientific. Scientific evidence may be a single component of this web of myth, maybe not. Myth trumps science.

In the 154 years since the publication of Darwin’s “On The Evolution of Species” there has not been one single shred of evidence that a new vertebrate species has emerged or the tiniest shred of evidence that one has evolved in any way, changed for sure but evolved?  Domestic animal  breeds change but this is not evolution. The standard response ( hardline Neo-Darwinism) is that evolution works very slowly and very gradually - one wouldn’t notice it in a human lifetime. It has been proven that mutations ( the stuff of evolution) occur thousands of times per second in a vertebrate body and that new species, when they evolve at all, emerge in a flash ( a “flash” in evolutionary time may be ten million years), in a single moment, a punctuation followed by eons of stasis - no discernable change,  nothing gradual here. This has been proven. Yet we cling.  Darwin’s still the man, disparage his theory, even today with reams of evidence contradicting many of his fundamental notions,  and suffer snickering ignominy. the myth lives on. Darwin was right that organisms have evolved but many other aspects of his theory wobble.

Capitalism, private property, The Magna Carta, Democracy and Rule of Law are all myth but they served to launch the Hubble telescope by which much wonderful science has been explored. Operative myth trumps science always. Scientists have difficulty understanding that all science is a subset of myth. All myth contains a black hole at its center. Don’t go there. There is little to be gained. People don’t care if it isn’t “true”. People want to believe and shall believe.

It’s myth all the way down, just like guru turtles, a cascade of belief from Christianity, through our language, our anthrocentrism. Darwinism and quantum mechanics are webs of myth. the scientific enterprise is all myth but such a fine one, so much excruciating, obsessive detail and those charts,  graphs and formulas! - all so seductive and it works half of the time to cure illness, almost all of the time to fly a plane.  Learn to excruciate minutiae and earn a PhD. Most things can be proven up to a point and anything under the sun can be hypothesized, boldly asserted and vigorously defended.

The Myth Engine:

1. The hippocampus is a key brain area in mammals used for long-term memory storage. the neurons of the hippocampus have 46 chromosomes as do all 50 trillion of our cells except for sperm and egg with their 23. These non-germ cell  chromosomes comprise six billion base pairs. The operative genome has three billion base pairs. 2 billion nine hundred forty million of these base pairs exist within what is called “junk” DNA. There are 18 base pairs for each histone giving us 160,000,000 “junk” histones along with the “junk” DNA -  AT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF 40 million hippocampal  neurons !  Current memory theory assigns NO role for these DNA, histone targets. As current theory stands,  memory is a product of the strength of synaptic connections between dendrites - HA ! Look to the “junk” lads, there are a trillion places to store a memory in each neuron at DNA and histones in the hippocampus and in every one of 200 brain areas.
2. Do hippocampal neuron nuclear membranes dissolve to allow tighter memory formation i.e. more room to move, maneuver, more neuronal geography to inhabit in order to create sensory distinctions i.e. memory.
3. Do humans ( mammals, vertebrates) have neuron super cells? i.e. large neurons with many nuclei thus more opportunity for rhizomatic interaction between post translationally modified histones and RNA-DNA? There could be 10,000 memory-making interconnections within a single cell membrane!
4. Long, non-coding RNA regulates gene expression. How much long-coding RNA at hippocampal neurons?

Oppositions- moving parts of the reciprocating American Myth Engine:

1. Boomer - Very Oldster
2. Boomer-gen X,Y,Z
3. Obese - normal
4. Diabetic - healthy
5. Ill - healthy ( note: typography failure as cap I (eye) and l ( ell) are identical)
6. Environmentally concerned - not concerned
7. Liberal - conservative, Conservative-fundamentalist
8. Prisoner - Not a prisoner
9. Employed - unemployed
10. White - non-white
11. Straight - Gay
12. Veteran - Not Veteran
13. Speak english - Do not speak English
14. College education - no college education
15. Rational - Intuitive, Left Brain-Right Brain
16. Normal - insane
17. Gun owner/enthusiast - No guns
18. Urban - rural
19. middle class - upper class
20. middle class - lower class
21. upper class - lower class

All are created equal here in America but we go to ferocious, relentless length to differentiate ourselves in every conceivable way.

*

May 27, 2015

Quantum Datum

May 19, 2015 RE: Memory storage at brain ( hippocampus)

Jim Blake Theory -  A BFRT - Big Fat Russell’s Teapot:

If a bird brain can locate itself across a hemisphere of the Earth via its sensitivity to magnetic information why couldn’t the geography within a single brain area function using such a mechanism?

Jim Blake speculative neologisms as of this text:

Quantum Datum ( QD)

Hemylation:  an epigenetic post translational modification that adds an iron ion tag thus creating a memory bit, a sign part, a grammatical unit,  a sub-component of a single memory like a phoneme is part of a single word.

Subatomic electromagnetic signaling ( SES)

Quantum Electro Links ( QEL)

Quantum Datum Pulse ( QDP)

There is a point of orientation ( think: USGS brass benchmark) at the middle commissure of the thalamus called the Quantum Datum (QD)  that works in conjunction with iron-rich epigenetic tags at unspooled DNA in chromatin in memory neurons in the hippocampus  that differentiates molecules by their orientation in space on XYZ axes; think: aircraft: pitch-yaw-roll establishing a point definable by its place on this XYZ grid. Each memory bit can precisely locate / measure its distance  to all other memory bits at  other hippocampal neurons, as well as measure its distance from,  and orientation to,  the central thalamic benchmark, the Quantum Datum. This iron-rich marking of neuron histones associated with memory genes is called Hemylation similar to other post translational modifications:  methylation, acetylation, phosphorylation, citrullination, etc). The iron-tagged histone molecule, now a memory bit,  is the airplane that has become frozen in space.

One reason neurons are not typically replaced during one’s lifetime is that they have locked hemylations at nano-specific locations,  each location defining a sub-unit of memory in relation to the quantum datum. The histone molecule has tumbled into and become locked into a very specific orientation with its iron tag now a very definite point in space in relation to QDatum and all other memory neurons at hippocampus. There is a stochastic quality to this positioning of the hemylations in relation to one another as well as to the QD.

New memory is stored by new hemylations at neuron DNA and these new tags are immediately linked in space to 100,000 existing tags. These tagged neurons read one another’s quantum signature via Subatomic Electromagnetic Signalling SES  forming Quantum Electro Links ( QEL). Each memory bit ( hundreds at a single neuron)  has two different capabilities both related to its location: #1. Its relations in the QD network #2. Its dendritic relation to all related neurons involved in this memory.

QD addendum #1

The Quantum Datum at thalamus radiates a microwave pulse (QDP) ( 24/7/365 birth to death)  in all directions like a motion detector. This pulse is detected and reflected  by the memory bits ( hemylated histones)  allowing the Quantum Datum  to “understand” where each hemylation is located in relation to all other memory bits using iron atoms enabling rapid neuronal intercommunication.

QD addendum #2

Cerebral spinal fluid not only cushions the brain but acts as an efficient fluid medium for thalamic sonar pulses triangulating via neuronal histone hemylations that have accrued in the process of storing  memory. These pulses are re-radiated from the interior surface of the lateral ventricles.

QD addendum #3

dreams are the result of QDP activity while sleeping as undirected, unfocused random connections are assembled between voxels at hippocampus and processed through neocortex storytelling-myth making neural architecture. when awake, the cerebral cortex directs this activity in relation to “reality”

QD addendum #4

The Quantum Datum emits a QD Pulse day and night  linking new experience with memory. Quasi random Connections continue to be made at hippocampus between stored memory day and night as the neocortex processes the stuff of daily life. Thus our subconscious mind works on a problem while we tend to routine activity.

QD addendum #5

Check the relative viscosity of new and old neurons. As histones in chromatin are locked up as memory bits they are re-secured into the DNA. Twenty years of this would create a less viscous chromatin at neurons.

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Stealing Ideas

May 19, 2015 Forty Rules of Art:

1. Don’t stand at your desk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with an open copy of the latest “Glossy Architecture Periodical” cribbing from the hippest published work. School is too expensive and life is too brief for short circuits.
2. Do not steal ideas from your classmates or your peers unless you are a declared “Appropriation Artist” such as Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. When you break this rule do it with intensity, brilliance, synthesis as you make this stolen idea your own. Give back more than you take. Fetishizing thievery is passe’
3. When early in career as you search for inspiration from precursors try to skip a generation or two. Stealing  becomes a more astute reference or a wittier pastiche the further back one reaches.
4. All creative people who can read must read and understand ( this means re-read) Harold Bloom’s masterpiece The Anxiety of Influence. Every painter, sculptor, poet, architect must understand and internalize the ideas of knowing history and swerving into originality.
5. If, as a youth, you did not spend hundreds of hours at the foot of mother nature drawing rocks, trees, bees, birds, landscapes, do not despair - lean on those who did: Raphael, Leonardo,  John Ruskin, William Morris,  Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, - read their words and study their work closely. Steal all of their great ideas. If you haven’t done your 1,000 nature hours, you are crippled,  admit it and drive on, doing the best with what you’ve got. It is never too late to profit from a sketchbook.
6. Picasso was notorious for stealing ideas from his own cohort and from anything painted or sculpted he ever set eyes on. Picasso replied, when accused of thievery “I steal from everyone - I try not to steal from myself.” A great creative mind is a desperate idea vacuum.
7. Synthesize as you steal. Take five great works from a few generations ago and and disassemble them to explore their generating ideas. Recombine for original effect. Great artists are magpies: Raphael, Chardin, Cezanne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Paul McCartney.
8. If stealing, steal those portraits and manufactured objects and household products that have been the beneficiary of thousands of man-years of research, millions of advertising dollars and star-making machinery. Jump on a bandwagon already at full speed like Duchamp, Warhol and Koons.
9. Nature is a shameless thief, parasite, copycat, predator, devious, malicious, invasive beast who knows that nice guys go extinct. Humans evolved a neocortex to tame this beast, make it work for you. Be relentlessly polite with impeccable manners on the outside and seek the fullness of nature on the inside.
10. If you are intuitive steal logic and rationality. If you are rational, steal intuition, i.e. if you are a scientist-steal art; if an artist, steal science.
11. Nature doesn’t give a hoot if you steal from her as she is a vast storehouse of undiscovered ideas.
12. If you are a painter, don’t steal the look of things but the very being of things. Before you know it you are a biologist, then a chemist then a physicist and a cosmologist-astrophysicist - all artists.
13. If using oil base paint - ventilate.
14. “Trumbull’s Rule” Start with a mop - finish with a number 2 filbert.
15. Be like nature, make a lot of big mistakes early ( see: dinosaurs) conserve all that works ( see: DNA)
16. After you start a painting, let the painting take over, it knows what it needs - be a good listener to your art.
17. Don’t be afraid to play God/Cosmo - painting is creation, architecture is creation, poetry is creation
18. Charles Darwin noted that it is the outliers, mutants and misfits that launch a new species. At least one of them will a perfect fit for a strange new world. Today’s perfectly fit are tomorrow’s forgotten.
19. Make your art convincing. It is not about the impeccable beauty of the subject it is about intensity and care in the making.
20. Obsession obscures truth and discovery, it is the crutch of the uninspired, fearful and believe- it -or- not, the lazy.
21. Vulgarity and overt sex in art is ordinary. We know it sells - so what.
22. Touch the essence of something - anything
23. Much of the man-made world is ordinary - seek extraordinary
24. Make a second version of your excellent idea t prove it isn’t a fluke
25. Swerve from your own work - evolve - follow your outliers and mutants.
26. Save money on psychotherapy - allow your art to analyze you.
27. Art is an athletic pursuit - treat your body well with nutrition and exercise
28. When afraid move forward.
29. It is hard to ruin an artwork - make a bold new gesture with a lot of white paint - see what new doors open.
30. Savor your obscurity - to work uninterrupted is a treasure. It is hard to concentrate when strobes are flashing and microphones are pushed into your face.
31. Bore yourself - bore your audience.
32. Every artist has an original vision - swim beyond the shore.
33. If you have run out of ideas and are at a dead end and still under 23 years of age, join the military. It will provide much new material. Take a sketchbook.
34. Before taking an art professor ( anyone professing to know more than you) seriously enough to hurt your feelings or redirect your instincts, get to know their operative paradigm. Study what they studied for a minute. Most teachers wish to transmit the outcome of their pain and embarrassment to you.  Don’t be a lump of clay - do some research on their sources and push back.
35. Don’t mimic nature, be nature. Be the volcano, earthquake, thunderstorm, the forest, flower or buffalo, the field of grass, the electricity. Nature will play levels of the game against one another atoms against tectonic plates.
36. Make the myths that constitute human culture work for you. Myths are tools.
37. Don’t mistake being “one with nature” with being one with human nature - they are very different.
38. Honor small things - they get bigger and many that don’t get bigger will multiply and kill you ( see: microorganisms) Ideas usually start small - give them a chance to grow.
39. Any fool can start a painting, it takes a master to know when to stop.
40. Be open to serendipity - sometimes art is easy.

BREAK THE RULES

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