Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.


He and they basically rejected his key idea that evolution was totally directionless and that the variants that selection acted upon were thrown up totally by chance.

But elites everywhere seized upon the idea that they and not Darwin had actually invented : that Life was not a linked chain of being with every species needed to keep all the other species alive, as supposed for centuries.

Instead they took up the new claim that life was actually an enormous one-time track meet, entitled the Survival of the Fittest ---- with all the losers destined to slowly starve away.

That simply wasn't so - or at the very least, Darwin never actually said that.

Admittedly, in a very long lifetime of words, he totally buried the lede, but ultimately Darwin did say that Life was actually about a million races a year, each and every year, from the beginnings of Life in the yesteryear on into eternity.

Darwin-the-scientist said that each tiny little niche held its own race and as the niche changed, so a new race was run within it.

But Darwin-the-Manchester-Liberal, like almost all modern elites in the 1860s, tended to deny these claims and instead to fall in with Herbert Spencer's views about the survival of the fit instead.

Why ?

Cruel Timing

I believe it can all, Auschwitz,Hunger Plan East and all, can be put down to an unfortunate coincidence in timing - or mis-timing.

Mid Victorian families, like all earlier families, had lots of pregnancies because most kids died before birth or before the age of five.

Ten pregnancies to get five kids to survive to youth, so their labour could add to the income of the family farm or other human labour oriented family business.

Now in the 1860s, more of the traditional ten pregnancies were surviving to birth and even beyond the age of five, because of fewer reoccurring national famines and purer drinking water,etc.

National populations were soaring.

But once families realized that (a) more kids were surviving to their teen years and (b) less and less labour, including child labour, was going to be needed, they would reduce their pregnancies way way down.

But connecting the dots would take time - introducing a critical "lag".

Overcoming that demographic lag in understanding changing circumstances could take decades - it took exactly 100 years  for birthrates to fall in rural Antigonish, for example, as my partner Rebecca can personally attest!

At the very same time, smart minds among the greedy and ambitious were realizing that with cheap abundant hydrocarbon energy about, machines (machine energy slaves) would be much cheaper, much more reliable, much less tireless, much less likely to demand unions or vote for anti-capitalist governments, than human slave labourers.

But the rising national human survival rates were producing much more human labourers at the exact time the elites were deciding they needed much less.

A much older, much less hypocritical age might have just led the surplus labourers out into a wintry howling wilderness to die out of sight, but modern mass media and modern photography made that solution, as marxist-latte-lapping-academics are wont to say, "problematic".

The optics - and there would always be optics ( Aylan Kurdi as a recent example) - would look as "bad", as morally bad as this effort really was.

So Evolution cum 'The Survival of the Fittest' emerged just at the right time.

Now Evolutionary failure and Mother Nature could be blamed for Man's evil doings --- basically his finding as many ways as possible to speed Nature's reduction in the number of human "useless mouths", without getting caught at it.

But of course, as Hitler, Stalin and Tojo discovered during WWI and as we are still re-discovering in 2015, humanity's replacement, the mechanized slaves, can't always do many things (usually downmarket manual things, ironically enough) as well as people paid minimum wage and kept on unpaid 'call' for all hours.

Human Labour Shortage Looming

In fact, I predict that by the 2060s, the world will  face a simply enormous human labour shortage.

Another mistimed coincidence, in fact the exact reverse side of the 1860s situation.

Only now we will be running out of (cheap) hydrocarbons to do our dirty hard work just at the very time as our world fills up with retired ancients like me, demanding to be maintained in the swell lifestyle to which cheap hydrocarbons have accustomed us ...

Era of Progress mental blinkers refused to recognize very early pre-modern-human Art,hidden in plain sight

This is the story of a possibly missed opportunity to prevent the 1940s Holocaust , a story that began way back in 1891-1892.

Dutchman Eugene Dubois was the first scientist to deliberately look for the beings that existed between 'the apes and modern humans' .

He and many other scientists were convinced there was only one intermediate species and that it must exist only in the tropics because they felt that humanity was most closely related to Orangutans and Gibbons and these species are found only there.

Gibbons walk upright far more often and far more easily than do chimps for example.

But Darwin stuck to his counter intuitive conviction that humanity was closest to the knuckle-walking chimps and since the chimps live only in Africa, humanity must have emerged there first. (Again Darwin was eventually proven right !)

So determined was Dubois that he shifted careers and got himself posted to remote Dutch Indonesia.

In 1891, at Trinil on the island of Java, he did indeed discover very early humanity - the famous "Java Man", now known to be an (estimated 500,000 year old) example of Homo Erectus.

Homo Erectus lived throughout Africa and the warmer parts of Eurasia between 2 million years and 70,000 years ago.

By contrast our own species, the Homo Sapiens species, are seen as becoming modern (in anatomy and in behavior) only about 50,000 years ago.

The first claim is based on comparing the shape and heft of ancient and recent human skeletons from before, during and after that important 50,000 year divide.

Since the presence of ancient human skeletons "fossils" is absolutely key to claiming that a site once held humans, this is not a controversial argument - human bones are one of the most preserved and undisputed artifacts of early human life.

But human artifacts of cloth and leather, even paint on rock walls are rarely found intact from hundreds of thousands of years back.

So that means that one of the key problems about also claiming that people dead hundreds of thousands of years ago could hold abstract thoughts like we do today is that few abstractly thought out objects survive that long a period of time.

But artwork carved into stone, bone or ceramics is a rare form of abstract thought made visible as art that can survive the ages.

Seeking such art marks was thus - or rather it should have been thus - Job One for everyone seeking Early Man.

But that presumes that in the Age of Progress that anyone was eager to find out just how far back modern-human-like behavior had existed and that simply wasn't so.

Metaphor of Progress as abrupt ladder steps rather than gradual ramp

Humanity in the Age of Progress created the metaphor of a long ladder, rather than a long ramp, to describe how they imagined 'Progress' had proceeded upwards, throughout time, from the ancient simple stupid bacteria to the big complex smart civilized European male.

Ladders presume wide distinct ('clearcut' - to use a term much favoured by Howard Florey) gaps between each ladder step - rather than the infinitely gradual continuum of a ramp.

This allowed human elites in the Era of Progress to see what they wanted to see : wide yawning gaps between men and women, educated and uneducated, white and black, man and animals, man and ape, man and the stone age men.

Seeing a common humanity between Stone Age Man and modern Man might have forced Aryans to also see a common humanity with their Jewish neighbours.

So despite Dubois's specimen of extremely early man being an unique find for a very long time, it wasn't studied as intently as one might think.

In fact, most scientists dismissed it outright, sight unseen -- tending to feel it was a late model of ape or an early model of modern homo sapiens - not an intermediate stage human at all.

But if they had looked at all seriously at the relatively few mollusc shells left by these extremely rare early human remains, they would have seen clear and unusual marks that couldn't have been done by Nature or ape-like beings.

Very sophisticated tools and reasoning were used to open the shellfish without ruining the meat inside.

And abstract art marks were scratched on one shell.

Both of these were hidden ----- in plain view.

But it isn't ever enough for science to merely discover things - what unconscious preconceptions scientists bring to bear upon their discoveries hampers what they will see.

A hundred and twenty years later, a new generation of scientists looked at the same shellfish and finally saw the clearly visible tool marks and art marks.

Because they were open to the possibility that modern humans weren't in fact as unique as human hubris had long thought.

Because they were willing to at least ask if ancient humans might have had abstract thoughts.

One can at least wonder if the Holocaust would ever had happened if the Age of Progress had been open - 50 years before the Holocaust - to seeking to see if early Intermediate Man could possibly share a common humanity of abstract thought with such exalted Aryan philosophers like Hegel and Kant....

Synthetic Horses

We have not traditionally regarded 'horsepower' that has been provided by steam, gasoline or electrical motors rather than by actual horses as coming from objects that are man-made, artificial and synthetic.

This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.

We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.

But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.

Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.

That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".

They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.

Disposing of living ex-machines

Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.

For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.

It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.

In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.

So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.

Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.

At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.

Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.

As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.

1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.

I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.

Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.

For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.

The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.

(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)

Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.

Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.

For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.

And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.

'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...

"A Small Triumph" --- wartime's natural penicillin-for-all a triumph FOR the small, BY the small

During the Error-of-Modernity (circa about 1875-1965), most educated humans sincerely believed that "Evolutionary Progress" had only one possible pole of measurement : basically, it boiled down to the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles published annually.

Naturally that meant that the oldest, smallest and least apparently complicated beings, like the microbes, were at the very bottom left of this "45 degrees to the right" Pole of Progress.

It was the era of 'Might is Right', 'Biggest is Best' and 'God and Evolution is on the side of the Biggest Battalions'.

And so at the top right were the newest, biggest and most complex human civilizations like those of the Germans, British, Americans, Russians, French and Japanese.

As a Law Of Nature and as a Fact Of Biology, this was a doozy.

Even Darwin had tended to restrict evolutionary success to reproductive success, rather than to a nation's citation index in the journal Nature.

Darwin's measure needs a bit of further defining.

After all, it would seem that the ultimate in evolutionary success is best measured by finding the beings with the most offspring that survive, in the most habitats and for the longest period of time.

In which case, Biology borrows from the Bible to proclaim that the Last indeed are First, as by this definition the microbes sweep all before them in an Alberta Orange-Crush-like manner.

But still, why judge Evolutionary Progress by only one pole anyway, particularly when only one group gets to pick the pole and does so in a manner to suit their particular talents and hide their many biological weaknesses ?

One particular measure that then force all other biological talents to be judged defectives and so worthy of being eliminated ?

In a multi-poled world of Evolutionary Progress, one can imagine hundreds of different poles.

Some assessing all life on its ability to swim faster or fly longer.

Or on its ability to burrow quicker or live under great pressures or flourish in acidic conditions or reproduce under conditions of great cold, heat or drought.

On and on and on.

In this multi-pole world, sometimes the First (biggest,strongest, most seemingly most complex) would indeed be first, but sometimes they might finish in the middle or even foot the tail of the race.

And the Last (the smallest and weakest, seeming the simplest) might finish in the middle or even first.

It would  all depend.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, building upon his school day phenology studies that revealed the infinite variety of life, found that the supposedly stupid simple bacteria actually bested the smartest human scientists in the universe in an interwar period area of hot scientific interest --- directed genetics.

His 1920s-1930s pioneering studies of what was then called bacterial variation - HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicking, biofilms - had already suggested to him that the small and the weak weren't as useless or as uncomplicated as then generally viewed.

In 1940, this led him to two then highly controversial conclusions : that the human small and the weak weren't as useless as both the Allies and the Axis blandly assumed AND that the small and weak fungus currently producing all the world's penicillin might actually do a better job at it than all the smartest human chemists in the universe.

Against his own dying body and the Allies' fiercely resisting medical establishment, he held on long enough to see naturally penicillin succeed when human synthetic penicillin efforts failed AND to see the medical establishment reluctantly bow to public pressure and make wartime penicillin available to all, on all sides, whose lives would be saved by it.

A small triumph maybe - unless it was your kid or spouse that was saved - but also a triumph for the small , by the small ...

Postmodern Science came from postwar kids : the question is WHY ?

Postmodern science began in the 1980s as postwar kids got tenure and became journal editors, society presidents, lab chiefs and department heads - replacing all those who were young adults during the heady war years of Big Science, Reductionism, Determinism and who were educated in the classical science of Newton, Dalton, Darwin and Lyell.

But why didn't these kids - call them Boomer kids if you wish - simply carry on the tradition as their scientific fathers and grandfathers had done for centuries before them ?

Why such an abrupt shift in a scientific worldview ?

What had these postwar children learned about the real - actual - world that led them to so disbelieve the explanations provided by the classical models of science being taught within the cloistered walls of their High School.

( And still are being so taught ! )

Modern to Post : why did MO go PO ?

Virtually everyone who thinks about it at all agrees that Modernity (1875-1965, R.I.P.) has morphed into Postmodernity, MO has gone PO, gone Postal.

Almost all of the serious thought ever since has gone into determining 'what exactly is this new Post-Mo thing anyway?'

But I am much more interested in asking why, after a 500 year long successful run, did the Enlightenment Project (Modernity simply being its latest variant) fail ?

And fail so abruptly too --- just after its supposed greatest success : winning WWII, against great odds, defeating the supposed Axis of Anti-Modernity.

If I had to describe the general tenor of postmodernity - down among the non-academic types, among the little people like you and me - I 'd describe it as a sense of being at ease with variety, diversity, the plentitude of life and reality.

Nay - more - a craving to taste as much of that variety as possible.

PostMO = Plentitude

By contrast, great-grandma's generation was only comfortable with a synthesized simple predictable order being judged worthy of life.

Complex unpredictable natural chaos was greatly feared and judged unworthy of life - hence subject to being plenticided as quickly and quietly as possible.

MO = Plenticide

Modernity arose in an era - and against an era - of Romanticism , which tends to welcome plentitude.

It might even be seen as mere re-fried Classicalism --- done up in the new Modern Science's clothing.

Modern Science's industrious spadework had revealed a much greater natural plentitude than hitherto known .

This process of discovery started ,not at all coincidentally, in the same mid-1870s that churned up the scientific ideology of anti-plentitude Modernity.

Buecause all that new plentitude was not what modern scientists had expected or wanted.

In response, they reluctantly manned-up and said they hadn't actually reached the innermost core of pure simplicity as they had originally thought - that the true core actually lay much deeper.

'Just give us more tax money for more expensive equipment and we will yet find that core of ultimate simplicity that our Faith tells us must be there'.

I am Catholic, but let me tell you, I've never met anyone who displays half as much faith as an atheist scientist convinced - beyond all the current evidence to the contrary - of the inner simplicity and order of reality.

Forget Darwin - Plato is the true GOD of the atheist and the scientist.

(Am I not being a tiny bitter harsh ? Aren't some scientists also Christians and other religions ?

No --- they are naturalists , more attuned to Natural history than Natural Philosophy.)

So after atoms turned out not to be the ultimate building blocks of reality, new equipment was brought in and layer by layer, the onion of physical reality was slowly peeled back.

Each time, the innermost core soon proved to be anything but and ever more expensive equipment was ordered up to reach the innermost sanctum.

Hadron Collider world's largest and most expensive religious building

I'm betting replacing today's already incredibly expensive and already outdated Hadron Collider will approach the F-35 fighter aircraft project in terms of cost.

I even could cheer to think governments are actually now willing to spend as much on peaceful science machines as on war machines.

But if the Hadron replacement does ever produce a theory of everything, knowing that all the known forces in the universe are united in some fundamental sense may produce little immediate change in life on earth.

Bits and pieces of general scientific advance have always been highly valuable at the level of giving us the very useful machines now found in all homes.

The billions of smart phones found even in the poorest nations being a prime example.

But whether a unified and simple model combining both the tiny sub-sub-sub atomic world and the massive supra-galaxy world will give us new household wonders is to be greatly doubted.

But won't Plato and all his modernity disciples be cheering in their graves ?

But at the level of lived life, physical reality is and always will be a plentitude - complex, chaotic, as unpredictable and as unknowable as the weather four days from now ...

'Noir Science' of the 1940s

Compared to the complex , indeterminate and unresolved plots of 1940s Noir films, mainstream Hollywood plots - then and now - tend to look like they had all been successfully predicted centuries in advance by Isaac Newton or Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Predictable, determinist, reductionist, logical, elegant : words of praise in Science - and in mainstream Hollywood.

It as if news of the 20th century revolutions in probability theory, quantum theory, contingency theory et al has never reached mainstream Hollywood.

Okay - a commonplace criticism of Hollywood plot-making.

But what if we reversed the criticism : searched scientific theories to see if some of them displayed the makings of a well-made Hollywood plot and others  displayed more Noirish plotting ?

I can think of many.

For example , the 1920s saw a fierce and highly personal counterattack by the geological establishment defending Charles Lyell's vision of a slow gradual orderly geology against the new unpredictable geology revealed by young Harlen Bretz's theory of a sudden massive Missoula Flood in ancient times .

To his critics, Bretz's explanation for the some highly unusual geological features seemed positively Noirish -- suggesting a hidden dark unpredictable side to what their own Breen Office had always portrayed as a cheery sunlit orderly process.

Others ?

Obviously Martin Henry Dawson's new vision of the chaotic random horizontal genetic transfers found in the microbe world versus the universal and orderly vertical genetic inheritance scheme proposed by his (intellectual) rival Charles Darwin....

Mary Douglas : modernity VERSUS darwinism

One of the hallmarks of the Era of Modernity (1870s-1960s) was a sudden worldwide urge among the 'progressive' nations to begin to closely regulate and restrict immigration , a move I argue was directly contrary to the co-current move to embrace Darwin's theory of Natural Evolution as the best engine of Progress.

Now there is no solid proof that having an university education, or having lots of money or coming from prominent families actually makes one more logical or rational when fiercely defending a privileged existence , so we needn't be too surprised at this contradiction in actions among society's powerful.

In Evolutionary theory , a successful sub species (success being defined in evolutionary terms by the number of offspring who live to reproduce) will tend to flow outward , to completely fill all examples of its biological niche.

To a consistent Darwinist (do they even exist ?) reproductive success is the only form of success.

Mankind, according to progressive Darwinists , can't really stop this biological success and really shouldn't - not if Mankind , as an overall species, is to survive and flourish.

So - in evolutionary terms - what could be more natural than the more fecund Chinese and Indians flowing forth to occupy new biological niches in places like downtown New York and London that were once fully occupied by the now reproductively-failing Anglo Saxon race ?

A worldwide trend to increased emigration had began in the 1880s as ocean travel became safer, faster and cheaper ---- soon outbound Indians and Chinese were heading for the mother-cities of the Anglo-American empire.

But Modern Progressives, Mary Douglas fans before the poor lady was even born , said no to this unexpected consequence of Anglo-American modernization.

Just as Douglas said we humans regard dirt as useful matter that is simply 'out of place' or 'doesn't know its place' , so too with these would-be migrant Indians and Chinese.

Chinese and Indian migrants as useful human matter 'out of place'

Two very nice useful races - manufacturing things for us at dead-cheap wages in their native India and China - but once 'out of place', they were simply dirty Pakis and Chinks.

Now the older theory that Darwin's dynamic Evolution was supposed to replace was that of God's Great Chain of Being.

This theory held that there was a permanently static and unique place for every species and sub species in the great scheme of things -- and that all would remain well for everyone , as long as everyone 'knew their place' and kept to it.

That is to say, that the poor and powerless must accept their lowly position in life as God-given and not try any levelling-up social revolutions.

God and Nature had ordained that the poor were poor and the rich rich -----suck it up.

Just as , according The Great Chain of Being, God had also ordained that the Chinese should remain in China and the Indians in India.

(Returning momentarily to Darwin, his theory was simultaneously used to explain why the English were allowed to leave England to rule in places like India and China.)

If the harsh new immigration restrictions from the 1890s to the 1920s were simply the Great Chain of Being re-born, I contend that they were thus far less Social Darwinian than they have seemed to historians.

That is, that they weren't simply designed to keep out those judged 'unfit' because of mental , moral and physical disabilities.

They were really intent on keeping out the biologically successful fecund Indian and Chinese races along with the fecund poor from Eastern and Southern Europe, and thus they were more designed to keep out the biologically super-fit than the biologically unfit.

Claiming that these 'races' were morally unfit as reason to reject them was simply a Social Darwinist ploy to ignore their obvious Darwinian reproductive super-fitness.

All this as part of a series of defensive mechanisms put in place by Protestant middle class elites of Northern European origins desperate to maintain their high social and economic status.

Elites deeply uncomfortable that they were even then were failing to reproduce themselves in their own lands , let alone 'go forth and multiply' in others ...

Why, after 4 billion years, most bacteria STILL can't swim

Back in the Modern Era (1870s -1960s , gone but hardly lamented) a strong proof for Darwin devotees' claims that bacteria were incredibly primitive was the established fact that after 4 billion years of existence, most bacteria still couldn't swim.

Couldn't move at all in fact , most of them.

Forced to go wherever currents of wind or water moved them.

How unbearably crude !

Actually, of course, a moment's reflection suggests that what these ardent Darwinists were actually saying was that Evolution didn't really work.

Because a few bacteria species actually do move under their own power - and many other species threw up mutations in the past that could move.

But in terms of evolutionary (reproductive) success , over an entire world, over 4 billion years , on the evidence , bacteria that had to rely on sheer caprice and chance to find food, water and shelter did far better than bacteria that could deliberately move with precision to where their senses' predicted food would be.

That should have served as a warning to Modern humanity but of course it didn't.

(Cue WWI and WWII's dashed war plans and ill-founded war predictions).

The bacteria results would be as if a handful of USAAF fighters had been sent out on random sweeps over Germany in early 1945 (and told to strafe any defenceless train they came across by chance).

And postwar studies indicated that these chance encounters, impossible for the harried Germans to counter, did far more than destroy the heavily leveraged German transportation system than did all the costly and carefully planned 1000 bomber raids plodding along predictably to massively defended Ruhr rail marshalling yards.

(Yes ? Oh the postwar studies do suggest that the fighters did do more ??!!)

But humanity ignored the bacteria and instead retained an absolute faith was put in our human abilities to beat the odds of chance by basing our distant future on precise and predictive plans.

In physics, still really emotionally wedded to Newton despite the quantum revolution , this was best seen in the science of ballistics.

The point of pride was the Norden bombsight, supposedly able drop a bomb in an enemy pickle barrel from 15,000 or more feet up.

From a plentitude of non-military objects below, the Norden would precisely destroy only the military target that bomber leadership planned to takeout today.

In chemistry, a similar urge to "plenticide the plentitude" was seen in the science of synthesis.

Chemists would replace all the many 'imperfect' natural materials in one particular area (women's fabrics for example) with one perfect, human-made, plastic substitute.

In biology, almost all agreed that while God might have an inordinate fondness for beetles ,
most biologists did not.

So planned precise genetics would weed out all the imperfect beetle species and aid the reproductive efforts of the few remaining - perfect - beetle species judged useful to Man.

After the beetle surplus had been cleared up, more precise plenticide would weed out the plentitude of humanity as well.

If natural evolution can be compared to a global stock market, then it can be said that Modern Era humanity really didn't trust the judgement of the marketplace .

The Moderns, in capitalist America or Stalin's Russia, both preferred a natural economy devised down to the nth detail using planned, precise, predictable evolution.

Soon it was expected , all children would be IQ tested not long after birth and the best - the geniuses-in-waiting - would be heavily tutored , sparing no expense.

Those falling below a certain IQ score would be 'put to sleep' (by lethal injection).

No more would we fear the untutored genius bubbling up energetically from the underclass , putting all the highly educated offspring of the well-off to shame.

In this perfect world, we would have Pat Boone singing Tutti Fruiti but not Little Richard , Paul Whiteman playing West End Blues but not Louis Armstrong.

Oh Joy !

By contrast, (Martin) Henry Dawson's quixotic efforts to save the 'unfit' SBE patients consigned to a Code Slow death by a heartless Allied medical establishment could be best explained by examining his lifelong interest in 'unfit' bacteria.

Dawson seemed to have felt the human species can't accurately guess what genetic skills might be useful, moment to moment, in a dynamically uncertain world , no more than the much older and much larger number of bacteria species ever could.

Better that we should let 'all life to live', rather than risking our futures by putting all our predictive eggs in one slender genetic basket : a small 'pure' genetic pool was actually a weak genetic pool.

The huge plentitude of life chances seems - on all the evidence that Dawson had  -to demand an equal plentitude of life forms , if life was to survive in the long term.

Because the world actually doesn't change incredibly slowly and so Darwin's predicted incredibly small and slow genetic changes simply couldn't be the main engine of Evolution.

Instead every species is always throwing up a vast variety of varying individuals - many that merely manage to barely survive their species' niche without actually perfectly fitting it.

But when that niche changes rapidly, some of those existing (and formerly ill-fitting) keys now fit this new keyhole much better and now flourish grandly rather than merely surviving.

I shall not credit Dawson with insights beyond the evidence.

I merely observe that Dawson always acted through the twenty years of his prematurely brief scientific career as if he felt that all of life's 'unfit' were worth studying for lessons for 'fitter' humanity , were worth helping to survive.

He always acted as if he suspected carefully planned experiments that had worked in vitro mightn't continue to work as well in vivo - out there in the real world.

The really dynamically complex and fluid real world....

Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related

So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.

Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.

Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.

Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).

Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.

Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.

That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....

Restoring the small , to a monoculture of the Big, 1939-1945

As a moral argument it was very old , with lots of powerful support still.

Maybe not an argument as old as Methuselah, but surely as old as Jesus.

But as a scientific argument it was quite new, without any influential scientific supporters.

It argued that there was no hierarchy of worth in biology based on bigger size or greater physical complexity : big and small were but equal variations on Life, each cast to better fit particular niches.

And it said that that, strictly speaking, the small were much more successful than the big in terms of sheer survival --- the only criteria that biology, rather than ethics or theology , could legitimately measure .

They been around  much, much longer, had vastly greater numbers of individual members, inhabited more niches and had survived all the worst disasters that Nature had thrown life on Earth, unlike the Big.

The biological sense of the survival of the fittest for each particular niche had morphed , by the 1930s, into the belief that it was the survival of the fit ( one size to fit all niches), with fit being code for big and powerful.

The small, human and non human , were becoming seen as losers and a waste of space  - life unworthy of life.

Henry Dawson joined many many others in opposing this idea on moral grounds.

But he was basically all alone in contesting it scientifically, based on what he had discovered in his small lab.

He was far too cautious a personality to be successful contesting the opposing vision by mere words.

But his is a biography of deeds --- against all odds, he succeeded in fatally shattering that vision.

He did so by simply embarking on an attempt to save the lives of just ten people, over the opposition of his own colleagues, his own wartime Allied government and his own failing body.

But thanks to the quixotic effort that Dawson began in 1940, ten billion of us, so far, have had our lives immensely improved : Bread cast Upon Waters, indeed !

"Nature Made Me Do It" : All mass killings were Mercy Killings in the Modern Era

If you were fully Modern and truly believed that Nature and Darwin and Evolution had revealed the inevitability of the strong replacing the weak and the big the small, then can it ever  be said that you murdered the small and the weak ?

Weren't you simply tugging gently, tenderly, at their ankles, to hasten a merciful end, at a hanging that Mother Nature herself had ordained ?

Shouldn't you be thanked by their families , not despised ?

being Modern means never saying "The Devil Made Me Do It"

And why drag the Devil and the whole question of morality and evil into this : aren't we just talking about speeding up a scientific inevitability ?

Weren't most of the war deaths of the 20th century not military deaths at all but rather medicalized violence : death as therapy and death as mercy killings ?

Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...

The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.

This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.

It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would  inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .

By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.

But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.

But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up,  while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.

Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.

He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .

Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing  of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.

But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.

In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...

Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII

England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war,  not all on their tiny , tiny own.

Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.

Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.

In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.

In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.

If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.

Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".

The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.

But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.

Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.

They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese  until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.

Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.

But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.

Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.

Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.

The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.

Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.

And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.

Who would have won WWII then ?

Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...

During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.

But these differences are only apparent , not real.

His career in the Infantry showed him the distinct limits to the uses of Newtonian physics, just as his academic research in Horizontal Gene Transfer suggested Darwin's Vertical Gene Transfer was by no means the whole picture.

And his support for the ultimately successful Naturally-produced Penicillin highlighted the spectacular failure of Daltonian Chemistry's claim to be able to synthesize anything and everything, including Penicillin.

Hubris is a terribly addictive drug and WWII turned out to be its largest, longest and most brutal clinical trial to date.

Only to date, because with Global Warming we appear headed to a rematch between Hubris and Reality, only with this time much worse than the last.

There are lessons - lessons unlearned - both good and bad - we can apply from WWII to the current rematch that might help us avoid the worst of it.

But only if we are prepared to listen.

Henry Dawson can certainly give us some of the good lessons , while his many opponents can provide us with all the bad lessons,  in spades.....

A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'

Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.

This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.

So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.

Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.

By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public  (scientifically published) Science .

They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.

Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality,  were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.

In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.

Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.

By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.

And more than a century later, still is.

In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .

Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.

Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.

 But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.

Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....

"This key is fit". Bad grammar but good modernity.

This key is 'fit'.

One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.

When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.

The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.

The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.

 "Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.

 But the phrase "the key is fit",  with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.

Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).

But it does not.

That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?

The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.

In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.

It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.

I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.

But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.

It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.

Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.

No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.

Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.

Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....

the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945

WWII started out on a note of uplift in 1939, with its three actors (Scientific Racism, Scientific Capitalism and Scientific Socialism) all united in eating the scenery but ended in farce in 1945, as the scenery proceeded to eat the three actors.

These actors can't be said to lack ambition.

Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.

(!!!!!!)

These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.

Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.

But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !

In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.

In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms  had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.

 Hitler, among others,  was reassured that  no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"

In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.

In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.

Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.

Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.

Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.

But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.

America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.

Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.

The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.

The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic  precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother,  and burned thousands of babies to death.

Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.

And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.

Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.

But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.

So, in the end,  penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.

In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.

In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.

Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all,  as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.

Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.

Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .


The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody  - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars  - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.

The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.

It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .

(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)

But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.

1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......

All Optimists - without exception - are Social Darwinists ; all Pessimists are Altruists

Always the OPTIMIST

Its a Fact. Its a Dogma, a Law, a Commandment you can carve in stone - by definition, all 'blue sky' optimists must be Social Darwinists. Just as, again by definition, all cautious, skeptic, 'grounded' pessimists must be altruists.


An optimist believes that there is only one simple, perfect, permanent solution to each of Life's relatively few difficulties.

Someone more skeptical and cautious sees many possible solutions  to each of Life's many and complex problems: all imperfect, impermanent and all highly contingent.

Yesterday's wild-eyed optimistic science - that of Newton, Dalton & Darwin - is still worshipped in High Schools around the world

And right now , wild-eyed cock-eyed optimism ,(aka Yesterday's Science - the science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin still worshipped in High School laboratory chapels around the world) , is killing this planet - destroying tomorrow's world for our kids and grandkids.

And we're just letting it all happen.

When there is only one possible - simple - certain - permanent - solution to every problem, what do you do with the rest - the imperfect solutions ?

Those mouchers, those useless mouths, those "unfit" ideas, those takers not makers , those 47% type ideas ?

You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.

But when you doubt that this or any solution will work perfectly and permanently in each and every set of circumstances, what do you do with today's less than perfect solutions ?

Like a pack rat, you preserve them for another day and another situation - you redeem them - see if they can serve the community with pride under different circumstances.

You don't write them off forever - you don't toss them aside like a used condom - you treat them them like those people who are down today, but not out - because, with a little help and sympathy, they might be up and about tomorrow.

Mitt Romney says his action plan actually consists of nothing more than free floating optimism.

Should we really be surprised then about his secret speech writing off the 47% as 'useless mouths' ?

I don't think so....