Winning a total war : its about building a Big Tent of all possible talent, not in draining down your gene pool

Early to mid September 1940 were undoubtably the darkest weeks of WWII.

Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.

There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.

Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.

That would have meant a quick successful invasion of Germany by a British army made up mostly of the "inferior" darkies of India and Africa and Asia.

No way was that about to happen : Churchill would rather have lost to Hitler first.

It was same around the world : populations transfixed more over issues of who they shouldn't let into their war efforts against Hitler, than in widening the scope of just who they should invite in.

All of them seemingly more intent on shrinking their gene portfolios of possible new talent and ideas than on diversifying their gene portfolios to include anyone who could possibly help.

In Dr Henry Dawson's own America, he had already had almost a decade of his nation repeatedly rejecting requests to help the small peoples of the world against naked aggression.

Now, in September, he learned his medical colleagues had a new excuse to reject requests to help the small people at home while other scientific colleagues were rejecting requests to enlist some of the smallest (and most despised) small organisms to aid the Allied medical cause.

We can all fantasize about turning a big ocean liner clean around - and the stated Allied war aims was a very big ocean liner indeed.

Or we can do what we can, with the tools at hand.

This is what Dawson chose to do.

Acting perhaps only semi-consciously, Dr Dawson gradually molded his colleague Karl Meyer's own penicillium juice synthesizing project into becoming Dawson's personal response to the lack of any 'Big Tent' thinking he saw all around him.

I doubted much if Dawson ever had any illusions about what he could achieve.

But then the kindly fates intervened and Dawson's project did indeed ultimately turn the Allied war aims around in some very important areas.

And their consequences live on to this day....

biological High Flyer stock or Diversified Portfolio ?

If there was one creature that got more dismissive pats on the head over the years than any dog or cat, it was little old ladies with dogs and cats.

For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.

Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.

All our children are distinctly different, said their much more observant mothers.

(Ever wonder how so many men, who can't see beyond their own nose at home, ending up directing the whole world based on - wait for it ! - their deep observations into Nature ?)

Scientists today (maybe because more scientists are women and mothers, who knows ?) are much more willing to accede that animals have personalities and individual animals all have different ones.

So perhaps now, we humans are finally reduced to differing from our fellow beings only in that we seem to worry much more about the future than they do.

Worrying about futures, really.

What will happen to me, my parents, my grandchildren, my hometown, my religion, my ethnic group, my language group, my world.

We only get to sleep at night when we finally settle in on a plan that is very much like our own retirement investment plan - because both plans in the end reflect our basic personality, as found on a wide continuum of variety.

The financial advisor basically asks us to decide if we want our pension plan to focus on a few (high yielding) high flyer stocks or should we hedge our bets and diversify our holdings over a wide variety of (lower yielding) stocks.

Similar is our own internal mental choice in deciding how best we humans should plan for an uncertain future.

Hubristic Reductionism

Some of us may be so confident in the ability of the human will to overcome great physical odds that we even quibble about the future being seen as 'uncertain'.

We feel confident we can predict the future's winners and losers now, confident we can discard the losers, certain we know the winners best suited to our efforts to make the future as happy as possible.

We are from the old school, the school of Progress and Modernity, when great effort went into dividing the world world into two mutually exclusive boxes : the useful and the useless.

We are Penicillin's Howard Florey.

We eagerly gathered up the fastest growing plant types that gave us the sweetest fruit and binned all the smaller, slower maturing, less tasty "heirloom" species --- we want to 'reduce' biodiversity to a few certain winners.

We did similarly with humans, attempting to greatly 'reduce' the gene pool and focus on a few best human types, by both positive and negative eugenics.

Progress and Modernity were indeed the Era of Reductionism, in the widest possible meaning of that term.

The Precautionary Principle

Others of us were much more cautious and skeptic by nature. We took a jaundiced view of the abilities of the human will, as evidenced by history.

And we remained unconvinced that the past, present and future were as unchanging as Sir Charles Lyell and his fans among the scientific elite always claimed.

We were content merely to survive, not to fly high in success and possibly later crash and burn on the ground, to adapt the concepts of Margaret Atwood first used by her to contrast Canadians to Americans.

We could only sleep at night if we had not just a Plan B, but a Plan C,D,E,F and onward.

The more diversified our portfolio the better --- the more biodiversity in nature and human society, the better.

We didn't think we should discard heirloom varieties of tomatoes, or mentally and physically challenged humans, or aboriginals, Jews and Negroes, or bacteria and fungus.

We are Penicillin's Henry Dawson...

"a Nazi's work is never done"

I know, I know, the phrase is usually "a woman's work is never done".

It refers to the repetitious nature of traditional women's work done in the home .

Woman know well its endless cycle of cleaning house, shopping, cooking, cleaning up dishes, washing clothes, washing children and ironing hubbie's clothes ---- on and on.

And then start it all over again the next day ---- and for all the days, weeks, months, years and decades after that.

Futile --- like trying to sweep back the ocean.

But the Nazi men self-selected for themselves the sort of work normally reserved for women in a very real sense when they took on the task of keeping both 'the home' of Germans and the German Volk 'family' 100% pure and 100% clean --- free from any sort of human 'germs'.

And it would have been a task that would never ever have stopped, even if Nazis had won the war and they had killed off all the world's Jews.

A new bogeyman would have been invented, to blame, to fear and to seek out and kill.

Meanwhile even if the Aktion T4 had killed all the defectives and even if the concentration camp system had killed off the 'politicals' and the 'asocials', each new generation would just breed some more, to be once again hunted down and killed.

And smelling out all the mixed babies created by illicit sex in dark corners, between Germans and forbidden races and ethnicities - between dark haired pure Germans and impure blonde Poles - oh don't get me started on that one says Himmler.

As G&S once sang, a compulsive obsessive mass murderer's lot is not a happy one.....

October 1940 : purifying or preserving the Gene Pool of 'useless' penicillium & SBE genes

Is the world safer by minimizing or maximizing the Gene Pool ? 

In the Fall of 1940, American Science renewed its century long efforts at triaging and then discarding much of the world's gene pool; this time under the new guise of a sudden need for "American Military Medicine Preparedness".

It was a movement, ironically enough, that was mostly led by conservative Isolationists among the scientists, men who had long opposed military intervention to help the little peoples of Europe from the evil axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

These conservative Isolationists had long opposed intervening to help the little peoples of America as well (opposing Social Medicine for example) so they could not be accused of inconsistency, merely of heartlessness.

That Fall, they gave off plenty of indications that the stripping down for military preparedness meant the final death of Social Medicine.

No good news for the young patients suffering from then invariably fatal SBE.

The conservative isolationists considered that even if the SBEs survived one bout, eventually another would certainly kill them.

Meanwhile the SBEs just consumed lots of scarce medical resources without any prospects they would recover enough to become useful servicemen or do productive work in war industries.

With many conservative doctors believing that SBE, along with most diseases afflicting the poor and minorities, were highly genetically based, it could even be asked why even bother keeping them alive long enough for them to breed and pass on their defective genes to another generation of the collective human gene pool ?

Weren't the SBEs' genes something rather to purify and discard out of the human gene pool ,by a strict policy of deliberate government neglect, and wasn't the excuse of a planning for a Total War the best time to start doing so ?

Even lower on the conservatives' scale of genes worth retaining than those of the SBEs were the genes of that common household pest, the blue green penicillium mold.

If obtaining adequate amounts of lifesaving penicillin meant keeping the genes alive of the slimey mold that originally made penicillin, many were against it.

Better that human chemists, the smartest in the universe, quickly bested the slimey little chemists and made better penicillin cheaper and faster and far more predictably.

Synthetic man-made penicillin in this war or no penicillin, said Howard Florey, while Alexander Fleming and the Allied medical establishment cheered assent.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly disagreed.

He felt the world would be better off, enriched even, if SBE patients like Bobby Darin was allowed to live, perhaps even to sing, dance and act, rather than to squalidly die from deliberate government neglect.

And his entire scientific career had been devoted to proving up his belief that the small and the weak and the useless 'gene carriers' all had something to bring to the commensal table of global Life.

Dawson had demonstrated more than enough examples showing that the microbe chemists were far far smarter than anyone had ever imagined.

He was not at all sure that the penicillium chemists hadn't polished the production of penicillin to a fine velvet sheen over hundreds of millions of years of trying -- and that the smartest chemists in the universe mightn't be able to beat them in a few frantic months of trying.

No matter how much money and labs and bombast was thrown at the problem.

So on October 16th 1940, a day the nation specifically set aside to triage all the 1A young men in America, Dr Dawson injected natural, freshly squeezed, orange colored penicillium juice into two 4Fs of the 4Fs patients, SBE sufferers Negro Aaron Leroy Alston and Jew Charles Aronson.

A product from rejected microbe genes injected to save some rejected human genes, as Dawson sought (against the grain of 1940s thinking on the topic) to preserve and protest the existing gene pool, not purify it and shrink it.

So began our present Age of Antibiotics - in a wartime scientific dispute over whether it was better to reduce or preserve the world's gene pool.

Dawson and Florey certainly weren't the only ones to dispute this issue : on the wider stage, Hitler certainly had his own take, as did Europe's Jews.

But, as is well known, the Dawson-Florey dispute was the only one that ended happily for humanity ....

Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity

They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.

Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.

Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.

It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.

Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.

So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.

Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.

In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.

Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.

He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...

COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift

Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.

Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.

But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.

Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.

Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.

So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.

Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names

When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.

But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.

And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.

Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.

It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.

Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.

You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....

* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .

It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.