As a religiously devote child in the Fifties, I somehow got the impression that WWII only ended because the penicillium fungus (David) was saving more kids than Civilization (Goliath) was capable of gassing or bombing.
As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.
From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.
And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.
But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.
I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.
And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...
Showing posts with label Dawsonian Revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dawsonian Revolution. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2015
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...
Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...