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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 .

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.

What Romney forgets about the resourceful "r-selected" 47%

r-selected SURVIVORS

The best article, by far,  on Romney's "47%" remarks - and I have read over one hundred of them - is by Ezra Klein,  in gulfnews.com , working off a riff first developed by poverty researchers, Banerjee and Duflo, in their book, Poor Economics.

Two thirds of humanity are "Littorally" commensalists - and don't even know it !

   Two thirds of humanity lives along the edges of waterways - oceans, rivers, lakes : living in the Littoral Zone, as biologists and ecologists like to call it.
   Seaforth, along the Chezzetcook Lake/River/Inlet system is an example of but one such community drawn to the littoral.

   That place of half water/half land --- that highly biologically productive co-mingling of bodily fluids, that highly productive miscegenation of land and water - that bastard,mongrel, metis, half breed of  terra firma and H2O.
   It is that very high productivity that led humanity to the water's edge and kept it there - even in the days of Galton and Darwin when Social Darwinism proclaimed the degenerate dangers of mixing and half-breededness.
   But few within humanity are well taught in the public school system of the importance of water's-edge-living in the history of mankind and that is to be pitied.
   Because land and water mixing and sharing of each other - fresh and salt water mixing and sharing of each other ---- they are a textbook case of global commensality : littorally ....

DARWIN at his ethical worst : the Janet Browne biography

   Admitably GCR did rather hit out at Thomas Huxley in the blog post about Bernie Lightman at Kings College University.

   But no one was more critical of the hierarchical nature of Victoria Science than Thomas Huxley - and rightly so !

   Janet Browne, Darwin's biographer, frequently takes a useful forensic accounting approach to her subject's efforts.
    Pointing out that the cost of even the basic microscope his doting father gave him as a boy, was worth the annual income of *several* farm labourer families.

   Their kids might have better powers of observation that Charles, but were unlikely to make much of them without the ability to own a basic microscope.

   Darwin, not Wallace, got the fame for the Theory of Evolution, she points out, in part because the incredibly high cost of scientific illustrations favoured the rich amateur over the poor amateur -- both scientist and average reader responded better to lavishly illustrated articles in an age starved for visual information of distant or obscure events.

   And because Darwin could afford to use the (private) letter post to further his public aims by spending what was then the equivalent of a large middle class annual income simply on postage and paper.

   GCR asked Browne on a her visit to Dal whether some of the revelations* she uncovered had lowered her estimation of the personal character of Darwin, as it had done for us, and she was less than fulsome in her defense of Darwin it seemed.

   *Such as him stealing/borrowing a document he particularly wanted from the grieving widow of a poorer colleague, because he was sure he could get away with it. 

   Huxley's oblique response to rich amateurs (like his friend Darwin) was to publicly urge that if institutions (and thus ultimately the public) provided the equipment and lab rooms (and salaries), and individual scientists simply provided the brain power to use them, Society could then make use of the best brains around .

   Then the British would no longer be simply 'getting by' scientifically , by being content to just use 'good-to-average brains, but with rich daddies' ....

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall

Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what I  take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....

2011: creation of clash of 1840s darwin/dalton versus 1940s dirac/dawson

The "Four Ds" are not "The Four Divas" but two groups of conflicting scientists who laid the ground for the world most of us are destined to live , reproduce and die in - the 21st century.

John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.

But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.

Plenty of irony in the latter pair.

Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but  the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.

In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.

Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.

From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...

In a crisis, r-selected COPYRIGHT is better than K-selected

Here I go again, "Arguing From Nature!"

I am going to borrow the kernel of a very complicated and subtle theory from biology and apply it , as a metaphor, to a critical issue in human culture.

Metaphors have a habit of climbing away from their Doctors Frank-n-Steins and developing an independent existence of their own, so there is always a danger to this kind of activity.

None the less, let's try out r- and K- for size.

A generation of disinterested Art and Commerce undergraduates have tried to slither through the exams in a scientific subject they didn't really like, by recording the following mnemonic :

K-selected/K-strategists = K-oncentrated

r-selected/r-strategists = r-adiated .

In stable,narrow, niches in ecology, K-selected species are competitively successful by doing only one thing (being rigid in their ways of surviving) but doing it better than anyone else.

They tend to be very large in size and few in number; producing relatively few offspring late in life, which they then tend carefully to maturity.

What energy they do collect they mostly devote to keeping themselves alive and growing bigger than other competitors and then, late in life, they K-oncentrate what little energy they can give to reproduction, towards producing a very few offspring which they nurture to maturity.

Humans are mostly K-selected in our biology - in our culture we are a mixture of K- and r- . We have a choice. More on this later.

Bell Aliant is an typical example of a K-strategy human institution - it has one successful strategy that has worked well for them in the stable niche-period of the Industrialized West during the last 150 years and they are almost biologically- reluctant to change.

Species that are r-selected tend to be extremely small - think of bacteria, other microbes and many rodents and insects.

They flourish best in unstable niches - unstable in conditions and in time. Regard them as Nature's weeds and opportunists. They do many many things, none of them very well -- jacks of all trades.

They are very numerous and reproduce early, releasing (r-adiating) thousands and millions of their offspring widely all over the environment.

In point of truth, they abandon their offspring when they are (a) very small & weak (b) and floating into mostly hostile territories.

It seems to be both cruel and an unsuccessful strategy, in our contemporary /western/ urban/ middle class/ eyes.

But we are the ultimate in K-orientation and we are living, moreover, on borrowed time and space.

Color us ignorant and arrogant.

We fail to realize that throughout most of human existence, let alone for the rest of Life's creatures' existence and and let alone the rest of earth history, the world, in sum, has been more unstable than stable.

Whether as human peasants or as bacteria, r-selected jack-of-all-trades fecundity tends to work better than the alternative, over the long haul and over the enlarged range.

In fact, while your professors of biology will rarely tell you this because their interest is almost always animals or plants, most of life on Earth has always been r-selected, not just in numbers, but in weight of living biomass and in 'space and time'.

By 'time' in the phrase, 'space and time' , I mean that over the roughly four billion years of Life on Earth, the r-selected have always been around while the k-selected have only appeared intermittently and then only stayed for a short time.

The blue green algae we see in every stagnant pool of water are actually bacteria and have been found, as massive fossil collections, in the oldest rocks on earth.

They may be even older - we simply haven't found any older rocks yet.

Found everywhere water pools and collects, around for almost four billion years - as a strategy, r-selection looks pretty good on our blue-green pals.

By 'space' in the phrase ' space and time' , I mean the fact that while K-selected creatures like blue whales,elephants and even humans can only exist (unaided by fossil fuels) in a few small corners of the world, r-selected microbes exist everywhere.

Inside us, for a start, their cells outnumbering ours many fold - though most of "them" are "us", as we would die and cease to be human without our helpful commensal bacteria and their services.

But bacteria exist miles underground, without any sun, living off the chemical energy in minerals - perhaps having unexpectedly profound consequences in the creation of petroleum and natural gas, among other semi-minerals.

They exist high into the atmosphere.

They can flourish on ice at the Poles, and in extremely hot and extremely harsh chemical-waters pouring out of volcanic structures.

Now this is biology, not culture, and may seem to be totally deterministic, beyond all interest to humans who can alter their cultural practices.

But the r-selected amongst us are deterministically flexible - and this seems almost an oxymoron, but is actually the key to their ongoing successful domination of Life on Earth throughout history.

While in stable times, the expert/specialist/professional earns the best incomes, in times of crisis, they flounder while the poor freely adapt and go on surviving.

We see this during every world war, in the worst affected countries.

The problem in a crisis, for the specialist and the K-selected, is that they have intellectual assets that cost them plenty to obtain and of which they are very proud.

The fact that those assets no longer work during the crisis is only half realized and this inertia in adapting is often fatal.

By contrast, bacteria and other small celled creatures have very good mechanisms for correcting errors in reproducing DNA - during stable conditions.

They are thus acting in a strictly K- fashion with regards to their precious intellectual property - in times of stability.

But when their world goes into an unstable crisis, they stop repressing their other built-in repair mechanisms that are extremely careless in reproducing their original DNA.

Strange and wonderful mutations emerge - most are useless or even worse, fatal.

But a few are the way forward to surviving under these troubling new conditions.

Waiiit ! There is more !

They don't hold onto this wonderful news, this Gospel, they radiate it far and wide as Open Source DNA, not demanding copyright royalties from other species and variants of bacteria that take it up.

As my good friend Dr Dawson demonstrated way back in 1930, bacteria, when hit by a crisis, "Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek" in the form of 'cassettes' of DNA encoding a new or underused function and send it out onto the bacterial Internet (the fluids surrounding them) for any species to take up and use.

Generally these different species bacteria not being (by definition) exactly the same as the original bacteria releasing these Open Source Genes, they have to mash up their own DNA to get the Gene to work.

What emerges - to the benefit of the whole of bacteria-dom - is two variants on that gene. One is the original gene, the other is the new mash-up version. Both work well - but under different conditions.

All bacteria-dom benefits under these loose copyright rules.

Lets look at a concrete example : the worldwide bacterial collective response to the billion-fold increase in antibiotic bactericides after 1945.

Antibiotics are natural bactericides, found in nature in terms of hundreds of millions of microgram-sized amounts annually worldwide - widely dispersed in tiny amounts all over, but only lethal to what bacteria had to be extremely close by.

We humans - by giving antibiotics freely to humans and farm animals - upped the annual outpouring into the waters of the world to levels of hundreds of millions of kilograms of antibiotics.

A billion-fold increase - now antibiotics were killing all sorts of bacteria under all sorts of situations.

Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance was how humans saw the resulting response.

Bacteria had worked out ways to ruin the effects of antibiotics eons ago, but they usually leaves the genes that encode for this ability way in the background - very few bacteria have these genes and even fewer among them are using them at any point in time.

It costs precious energy to create these gene products and bacteria are successful above all for being the most frugal creatures on Earth.

They travel lean - devoting all their free energy to reproducing and as little as possible to storing tools, "just in case it needs them".

But in their unstable and crisis-oriented world, they do need those tools - perhaps not minute by minute, but over periods as short as every few weeks.

Their solution is to create a worldwide library of Open Source Genes that aren't needed for basic daily life, but are life-saving on occasion.

A bacteria that daily faces and defeat antibiotics might also daily leak out into the environment the genes that can ruin antibiotics.

Other bacteria that have no need that gene's function, right now, have excellent systems for detecting unwanted DNA - they simply 'eat' the antibiotic-destroying gene rather than incorporating it into their chromosome.

But when antibiotics flood the area, for both types of bacteria, threatening all, the bacteria start up a collective response.

The antibiotic destroying bacteria starts producing more of their gene product and starts leaking more of the gene that produces it, into the environment.

The bacteria without the capability to destroy antibiotics suddenly throttle their foreign DNA check system and start taking up all sorts of foreign DNA into their chromosome, including the antibiotic-destroying gene.

At the micro level ,this process isn't pretty - billions and billions of bacteria die trying to get it right, but eventually some do and flourish and bacteria-dom, as a whole, survives.

Multi-antibiotic Resistance Killed Charles Darwin's

Evolution Theory Stone Dead

Well not all of it - his core idea of survival of the fittest still survives unchallenged within science.

But his ideas of slow and steady vertical inheritance of slow and steady change has been dealt its deathblow in recent years.

The sudden existence of multi-antibiotic resistant bacteria in populations as isolated as uphill tribes in New Guinea, only a few years after all these various antibiotics were first manufactured by Man, couldn't mathematically be explained by

accidental small mutations accumulating over millions of years.

Ask any math major the odds that a bacteria in a human in uphill New Guinea, could by a very slow (10 to the minus nine rate of random DNA coding error, so called point mutations) process, randomly create the dozen genes needed to destroy four antibiotics first manufactured only 6 years earlier in London !

Talk about monkeys typing up all the works of Shakespeare....

No ,what happens is that some bacteria collected up all the various antibiotic-destroying genes floating out in the waters around them and re-packaged them in larger cassettes of bacterial resistance software - and then returned them to the waters for other bacteria to take up as one unit, if they really needed them , say in hospital or farm settings.

Collectively, bacteria already have all the genes to destroy any known antibiotic - or they can quickly mash up a variant to deal with a new variety.

But all this takes up precious energy - so only a few individuals, at any one time, holds an active copy of any particular method of destroying antibiotics.

It is all rather like a single planet-wide huge, multi-billion volume, free public library that does not exist in big government-owned buildings but in the homes of all humans.

Each human only has a few, but unique, selection of books, but because they freely share them without demanding copyright fees, collectively humans have access to a far bigger library than if they were selfish and didn't share their books.

Oh, and another thing - each human is both an author and a book reader - reading a lot of books before writing their own variant on the vast body of already existing thought.

What does this mean for us humans in crisis?

The habitually poor human being, having few assets to protect or to lose, are promiscuous in taking up new ideas and tools and adapting them in unexpectedly creative ways.

They 'mash-up' a variety of unrelated technologies, careless of the fact that their owners or creators don't want them mashed up that way.

In doing so, they come up with new takes on old ideas - some, a few,very few, turn out to be strokes of sheer unfettered genius - and help point the way ahead for a society in crisis.

And we are a definitely a society and a world community in profound crisis.

The depletion of natural resources, from the end of Cod to the beginnings of the downhill slope of Peak Oil, threatens both our cozy way of life and the fate of all Life on this Planet, through Global warming and habitat destruction.

Expressed in terms of economic 'business models' , this crisis can be described as 'the old business models are no longer working.'

The most K-selected amongst us - Conservative Parties , the Telcos and the record & movie labels - have responded in true K- fashion: they have drawn up their intellectual wagons in a circle and are decided to defend what they already have, rather than venture out into scary un-charted waters.

In copyright law terms, that means the K amongst us, the wise and the mighty, have sought and won longer and longer terms for the copyrights they already own, and also won the right to greatly restrict the creative mis-use of those copyrights by others.

And it is no surprise that it is the poor (the weak and the foolish r-selected) around the world who have led the way in mash-up copyright, from scratching, sampling to today's video mash-ups

We humans face a similar serious crisis to what bacteria face frequently and we need the same sort of solution - we need to loosen, not tighten, our copyright/patent/building code rules.

Unleash the Chiang Kai-Shek amongst the poor and small and remote parts of the world where the inhabitants are flexible and versatile by necessity.

My own region, the Maritimes, is small, poor and remote and are famous (infamous) for its rural citizens being masters-of-no-trades .

Maritimes are not paragons of 4-H agriculture , but rather of 4-F agriculture: farmin',fishin',forestin', and factoryin' .

They get by, they improvise.

When the crisis hits ,they'll get by.

But why wait till a crisis hits, with all its suffering, wars and misery ?

Loosen up our rules on house-building, on copyright and patents - let's see what emerges - it will benefit the 'suits' in Toronto as much as the fisherman down in Cape Sable.....

Janet Browne, Darwin's mega-volume biographer, to speak at Dal

While everyone is ignoring the 300th anniversary of Copyright (sigh !) we are all supposed to be guyed up to mark the 200th B-day of C. Darwin.

Yawn - I just don't like the guy.

Ironically, the reason why I do not like Charles is because of the tireless efforts of Janet Browne, who went way down deep in the dusty archives and came up with biographic gold on Mr Darwin.

Ironically, because I believe Professor Browne was and remains a big fan of Darwin, warts and all.

Her two volume mega-kilogram bookstops ( "Voyaging" and "Power of Place") reveal that Darwin thought nothing of stealing valuable documents from grieving widows or of slandering opponents, through the use of surrogates ,so Darwin could keep his reputation of high moral character.

Worse of all, in his brief autobiography, Darwin denied any credit to his doting father for helping Charles to claw his way to the top of the world of science.

Doted upon ? Spoiled is a better word.

Charles Darwin was given extremely expensive scientific equipment for his hobbies as a child - such as a microscope that would cost the annual income of a half dozen farm labourers for example.

Without all the support that his mega-millionaire father and wife (mega-millionaire in in 2010 dollars) gave him, Darwin would never had been credited with discovering evolution.

Then he goes and denies that his unique access to these and other scientific aids gave him any leg up over his poorer scientific competitors.

Ingrate ! Spoil your child and he'll bite your hand in thanks, I always say.

Anyway , Janet Browne speaks at Dal's Ondaatje Hall October 15th 8pm --- and I will be there.....