WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Hello and welcome to Politics and Science. I'm your host, John Barkhausen. 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Today we're dipping back into the archives when I had a show back at WGDR in the 1999-2000 time period. 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:24.000 And once again, this is Dr. Raymond Peat, and this is a more philosophical show talking about the origins of life, 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.000 the work of Lamarck, Darwin, Vernadsky, up here in the show. So I hope you'll enjoy it. 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:40.000 For those who don't know, Dr. Raymond Peat has a PhD in biology, and he has specialized in physiology and endocrinology, 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:44.000 and he has extensive knowledge about the history of science and philosophy. 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:51.000 You can find out more about Dr. Raymond Peat and also read a lot of his articles. 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:55.000 He has a newsletter that goes out six times a year. It's fascinating. 00:00:55.000 --> 00:01:04.000 And many of them are published on his website, raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com. 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:08.000 It was a call-in show, and the number may be given out in this. I'm not sure. 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:13.000 But it's happened more than ten years ago, so you can't call in. 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:18.000 And I should also add that this is an abridged show. The original show was around an hour and a half long. 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:31.000 And I'm going to try to post the entire show at the website, and the website is Radio4All.net. 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:35.000 And when you get there, search for "politics and science." 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:40.000 So how should we start this, Ray? We were thinking of talking about the origins of life. 00:01:40.000 --> 00:02:02.000 I think it's necessary at some point to think about the philosophical things that have fed into controversies about the origin of life and national cultural differences. 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:22.000 I've studied quite a bit of the Russian tradition, starting with Mendeley, the guy that invented the way of ordering the elements in the periodic table. 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:43.000 He referred to himself as a cosmic realist. Later, about a generation younger than Mendeley, V.I. Vernadsky called himself a biogeochemist. 00:02:43.000 --> 00:03:03.000 He also thought of himself as a cosmic realist. What they meant by this was that you have to always think back, think of the context of the problem that you're dealing with, 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:13.000 and try to think of as many levels of the problem at the same time as you can. 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 What year are we talking? 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:36.000 He completed his table in 1869, or in that period, his idea of the periodicity of the elements. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:54.000 During the late 1800s, Vernadsky was traveling around Europe, talking to people, and got to know all the interesting people in Europe. 00:03:54.000 --> 00:04:08.000 Every time he met someone, he would incorporate their ideas, and even literature fed into Vernadsky's way of looking at the world. 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:35.000 He thought of Tolstoy's brain as a geochemical event. Sanchonoff and Pavlov set out to try to explain human consciousness in realistic and physical terms, 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:39.000 so that they didn't have to leave anything out of the system. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:48.000 They didn't think of the material world without consciousness, or a conscious world without material. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:58.000 It was a tradition of looking at the hidden assumptions behind everything. 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:18.000 From that perspective, there are one or two attitudes in American and German science that I think have limited the way people think about the origin of life. 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:38.000 In a way, Pasteur is selected by American educators and science people as a way to obscure thinking about the origin of life. 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:49.000 His famous experiment demonstrated that life didn't arise from decaying organic matter. 00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:53.000 His principle was that life comes from life. 00:05:53.000 --> 00:06:04.000 People seized this who didn't want to accept that life came from non-living matter. 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:14.000 They wanted to dispose of the idea of the origin of life in the world and say that life came only from life. 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:30.000 So there's kind of a deliberate obscuring principle going on when people try to place Pasteur's thinking at the top. 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:33.000 It sounds like they don't want to discuss it. 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:36.000 The same thing happened to Pavlov. 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:47.000 This man named Watson, who I doubt even studied with Pavlov because he totally misrepresented what he claimed to have learned from Pavlov. 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:58.000 J.B. Watson was the founder of behaviorism in America, and he denied the existence of consciousness. 00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:12.000 Even my professors in the university psychology department, some of them were still denying consciousness, or at least denying it to children. 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:20.000 They said that consciousness was only present in speech. 00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:34.000 This picture of Pavlov as studying conditioned reflexes goes back to Watson's misrepresentation of Pavlov. 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:45.000 The translation of Pavlov's phrase even was deliberately misleading. 00:07:45.000 --> 00:08:05.000 If you translate it back into Russian, it says something like "health resort reflection" rather than what Pavlov actually said, which was "conditional reflex," meaning that you reflect all the conditions around you. 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:20.000 In other words, consciousness was the meaning of Pavlov's term, and consciousness was explicitly defined out of his system. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:33.000 The same sort of attempting to hide the problem has been going on in genetics and everything else. 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:53.000 Genetics has attempted to evade the problem of where life came from in the first place simply by emphasizing that units are passed on which are identical to the units that preceded them. 00:08:53.000 --> 00:09:04.000 When you are forced to recognize change, very strange devices have developed. 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:22.000 The idealization of randomness, random change, random mutation, for about 80 years or so, just totally took over biological genetic thinking. 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:42.000 If we are going to have to admit that life changes, and maybe even that life originated from non-life, we are going to have to say that it is random because we don't really want to admit that it happens. 00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:52.000 The big controversy between the neo-Darwinists and the Lamarckians was this same thing. 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:57.000 The neo-Lamarckians even rewrote Darwin. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:12.000 They took out the Lamarckian inclinations of Darwin, and that's why they call it neo-Darwinism, because Darwin would be too Lamarckian for their preferences. 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:19.000 Maybe for our listeners you should give a little bit of a brief synopsis of Lamarckian and Darwinism. 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:40.000 Lamarck basically said that life is purposeful and that the intention to do something is part of the process of physiological adaptation, 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:53.000 and that this attempt to adapt to an environment is part of what is passed on to the offspring. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:11:04.000 Darwin accepted that there were many sources of variation, including the Lamarckian type of variation. 00:11:04.000 --> 00:11:10.000 Darwin didn't say that variation was just by chance. 00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:16.000 In fact, he enumerated a whole bunch of mechanisms that could cause variation. 00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:32.000 But then after Mendel's silly work with peas, which people have pointed out wasn't even truthful, he fluttered his results to make it look more mathematically perfect. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:48.000 After he was resurrected or invented, people reinvented Darwin to support their position that change and evolution are random. 00:11:48.000 --> 00:12:03.000 One of the recent manifestations of this strange religion of random changes evading the thought of purpose in the universe, 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:21.000 there has been a craze about the idea of chaos, and there are really close parallels between the genetics of random change and this idea of chaos. 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:37.000 What they are doing is using purely numerical processes to argue that you can't predict the future. 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:51.000 The whole argument of these chaos people is based on numerical sequences and computer events. 00:12:51.000 --> 00:13:00.000 Then they say, "Well, particles, atoms, and things in the real world are just like numbers." 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:03.000 That's what the genetics people did. 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:16.000 They said, "The particles we are dealing with are just like numbers, and individual particles don't know where they are going, so they can only change randomly." 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:38.000 What they are doing is reducing everything to the most meaningless unit, in one case totally abstract, immaterial numbers, and in the other case almost abstract and immaterial entities called genes. 00:13:38.000 --> 00:13:57.000 Meanwhile, these other people were thinking about the actual physics, chemistry, history, geology, and cosmology that are operating in everyday life 00:13:57.000 --> 00:14:12.000 that would tend to produce the various phenomena of organisms and organic chemicals and so on. 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:27.000 Oparin is one of the people that is well known in the theory of the origin of life. 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:40.000 He is talking about the types of physical processes that can create things equivalent to cells, 00:14:40.000 --> 00:15:01.000 the idea of coacervation or clumping in complex colloid-like systems that find organization in a complex way that is stable, 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:10.000 and allowing complex structures to appear out of what seem to be simple, random solutions. 00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:31.000 The first to introduce the idea of self-organization and self-structuring, 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:42.000 which is a process in which entropy decreases according to ordinary physical processes. 00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:57.000 Once you add a few complexifying ingredients to a solution of starch, oil, or protein molecules, 00:15:57.000 --> 00:16:02.000 order starts appearing. 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:09.000 The strange idea is about entropy only increasing. 00:16:09.000 --> 00:16:18.000 You have to see that whole history of denying that entropy can decrease in the universe. 00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:29.000 You have to see that as part of this philosophy of idealizing randomness and chaos and the unpredictability of things. 00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:49.000 Oparin was working along his synthesizing route. 00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:59.000 He was working on his picture of the place of consciousness in the cosmos, 00:16:59.000 --> 00:17:13.000 showing that according to well-recognized principles, consciousness is basically generated by physical forces. 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:21.000 He used the ideas of the biosphere and the noosphere. 00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:30.000 Teilhard de Chardin happened to be in Paris, I think it was, where Vernadski was lecturing. 00:17:30.000 --> 00:17:42.000 He popularized the idea of the noosphere, but actually it was this cosmic realist philosophy of the biogeochemist 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:55.000 that really generated the central idea of what the noosphere is in relation to the biosphere and material world. 00:17:55.000 --> 00:18:01.000 So Chardin, he used the word noosphere, but he didn't really come up with the final meaning of it? 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:13.000 He turned it into a fairly revolutionary religious idea. 00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:27.000 It has been very stimulating to a lot of people, but he left out the physical principles that explain it, really. 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:36.000 He left it in a very abstract form. 00:18:36.000 --> 00:18:47.000 One of the outcomes of Oparin's work and the people who worked on Coasservation, 00:18:47.000 --> 00:18:57.000 the American Sidney Fox, was kind of the fruition of some of these particular experiments 00:18:57.000 --> 00:19:12.000 with how physical conditions affect the appearance of order out of disorder. 00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:23.000 I should mention that one of the people that Vernadski knew in Paris was Henri Le Chatelier. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:36.000 In chemistry, everyone hears about Le Chatelier's principle of the restoration of the disturbed equilibrium. 00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:49.000 Anything you do to disturb an equilibrium causes the system to adjust in a way that restores equilibrium. 00:19:49.000 --> 00:19:50.000 He invented that concept? 00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:53.000 Le Chatelier did, yes. 00:19:53.000 --> 00:20:00.000 He first phrased it in very complex ways, and over the years he got it simpler and simpler. 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:07.000 Now they state it in very simple but sort of misleading ways in chemistry textbooks. 00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:21.000 It's a principle that really can be applied anywhere to organic physiology, brain processes, social processes, and so on. 00:20:21.000 --> 00:20:34.000 It's simply an inescapable way of seeing things once you apply it in a few cases. 00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:48.000 If you have a system and you disturb it by adding energy to it or pressure or changing the conditions in any way, 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:58.000 the system adjusts and restores a new equilibrium. 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:10.000 Vernadski, thinking cosmologically, seeing the earth as something in the universe, 00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:22.000 realized that heat is coming out of the inside of the earth and that the sun is constantly adding energy to the system. 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:36.000 If you're constantly pushing on the system, both from volcanic energy and solar energy, you don't have a closed system. 00:21:36.000 --> 00:21:47.000 In other words, energy is driving the system, disturbing the equilibrium in very powerful ways. 00:21:47.000 --> 00:21:59.000 The system is being driven and directed and steered by this constant pressure of energy flowing into it. 00:21:59.000 --> 00:22:10.000 Vernadski said that the system will adjust in ways that restore equilibrium. 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:22.000 He showed why organisms would adjust their complexity to use the energy that's available 00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:32.000 and that this would make bigger and smarter, more intensely metabolizing organisms 00:22:32.000 --> 00:22:44.000 to basically equilibrate the energy that's being added to the system. 00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:57.000 I've never heard that Sidney Fox was a student of Vernadski's, but he in effect was because he used Vernadski's principles 00:22:57.000 --> 00:23:01.000 and was able to perceive what happened. 00:23:01.000 --> 00:23:10.000 Everyone at this time, about 40 years ago, everyone then and most of them still are, 00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:29.000 talking about life originating in a tepid pond or a warm ocean or an atmosphere sparked by lightning and various things, 00:23:29.000 --> 00:23:45.000 atmospheric sparks causing organic molecules to fall into an ocean in which they accumulate and then by random events, etc. 00:23:45.000 --> 00:24:02.000 Sidney Fox intended to rethink the question of how proteins come into existence when the equilibrium, 00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:16.000 if you have a protein floating in water, is to degrade to various products such as the individual amino acids that it came from 00:24:16.000 --> 00:24:20.000 or other small molecules. 00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:31.000 So the equilibrium is obviously not favorable for the occurrence of large molecules if they're floating in water. 00:24:31.000 --> 00:24:50.000 He put dry amino acids or almost dry amino acids deficient in water, put them on hot lava in a model of volcanic energy being added to organic molecules 00:24:50.000 --> 00:25:03.000 and then added a little water and showed that the heat in the absence of water creates protein-like long polymerized molecules. 00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:15.000 So the equilibrium is absolutely the opposite in the deficiency of water than in an excess of water. 00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:27.000 One of my professors, Sidney Bernhard, revolutionized cell physiology, but no one seems to have noticed. 00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:40.000 He demonstrated that the glycolytic enzymes are at a higher concentration in cells than the substrate sugars that they work on. 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:50.000 Everyone had been diluting these enzymes in water and then describing the rules of interaction with substrate 00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:56.000 when there was an excess of substrate and water and a deficiency of enzymes, 00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:05.000 but he showed that actually there are more enzymes per cubic unit than sugar molecules. 00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:12.000 And the concentration totally changes the equilibrium situation. 00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:27.000 And Sidney Fox demonstrated not only does the relatively dry heat create order and protein-like molecules out of free amino acids, 00:26:27.000 --> 00:26:39.000 but when he added water, the proteins spontaneously formed tiny bacteria-like particles, 00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:53.000 almost all the same size, about the size of a bacterium, and a very orderly appearance of cell-like structures. 00:26:53.000 --> 00:27:08.000 And then over, I guess, about 20 years, the end of students demonstrated that these protein-like molecules have enzyme-like properties, 00:27:08.000 --> 00:27:10.000 catalyzed reactions. 00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:17.000 The amino acids polymerize in a nonrandom fashion. 00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:26.000 It depends on what's present in the growing molecule and in its environment. 00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:33.000 The growing molecule, in effect, selects certain amino acids to be the next one to add, 00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:37.000 so it isn't growing in a random fashion. 00:27:37.000 --> 00:27:46.000 And once it has grown, then it has this same selective pressure over other reactions, 00:27:46.000 --> 00:27:59.000 and there's enzyme-like catalytic action in these artificially made spontaneous protein-like molecules. 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:08.000 And so he added the precursors of genetic material and showed that these would be catalyzed into chains. 00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:20.000 And so you have the reverse situation in which genes come last after you've already created nice, neat little cells that can metabolize, 00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:25.000 and they can even reproduce themselves without the genes in them. 00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:28.000 He basically originated life. 00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:38.000 Yeah, yeah. And you put the proteinoid microspheres, he called them, in a solution with amino acids, 00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:52.000 and the proteins keep going in the growth process because they've concentrated a relatively water-free environment in which they do grow. 00:28:52.000 --> 00:29:02.000 And so they assimilate nutrients from the water environment, grow, and then when they reach a size at which they are no longer stable, 00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:09.000 they bud or divide and produce new cells, as long as there's food available, I guess. 00:29:09.000 --> 00:29:21.000 And he did this in the '60s, and it was mentioned in my Leninger's biochemistry textbook, 1968 edition, I think it was, 00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:33.000 and now the new so-called Leninger biochemistry book with the same title deleted that most interesting stuff 00:29:33.000 --> 00:29:38.000 that Leninger had included as an important biochemical principle. 00:29:38.000 --> 00:29:41.000 Because it doesn't fit their concept? 00:29:41.000 --> 00:29:42.000 Yeah, apparently. 00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:48.000 Yeah. Well, I would think that would be, what Sidney Fox did would be headline news. 00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:54.000 Yeah, it was for me. 00:29:54.000 --> 00:30:00.000 I didn't quite understand your professor, Sidney Bernhard. 00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:07.000 He showed that the concentration of glycolytic enzymes was higher in cells than the amount of sugar would want? 00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:19.000 No, than the absolute amount of sugar, like there would be more than one enzyme per molecule of sugar 00:30:19.000 --> 00:30:32.000 and a very deficient relative amount of water so that the enzymes can bind a molecule of sugar as it appears 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:39.000 and then directly hand the product over to another enzyme. 00:30:39.000 --> 00:30:53.000 It isn't a random, the molecules are so close together that the reactants can go from one enzyme directly to the other 00:30:53.000 --> 00:31:02.000 without going back into watery solution and that drastically alters the equilibrium. 00:31:02.000 --> 00:31:16.000 And if you think of Le Chatelier, the concentration governs the equilibrium and the system adjusts accordingly. 00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:18.000 So he showed that there was an order to it? 00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:31.000 Yeah, the glycolysis was essentially an ordered process where all of the test tube biochemists dissolving cells. 00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:41.000 Before Bernhard had been working on that, I had gone around to all of the chemistry professors 00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:53.000 and to feel out ways for studying those processes without dissolving the cells. 00:31:53.000 --> 00:32:08.000 Basically their reaction was just to laugh and get rid of me because they said you don't have biochemistry if you don't squash and dilute cells. 00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:21.000 It seems to me this whole divide between the two philosophies is it's like the reductionist versus the, 00:32:21.000 --> 00:32:28.000 I don't know what you call them, you have a word for it, I'm sure, the holist or the somebody who looks at the whole organism 00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:32.000 rather than just dividing it into a mechanistic little parts. 00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:35.000 Yeah. 00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:40.000 It also seems like science is afraid of sounding religious or something. 00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:42.000 Yeah. 00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:46.000 Did you happen to read my Generative Energy book? 00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:48.000 Yeah, I read some of the stuff on Vernadsky. 00:32:48.000 --> 00:32:49.000 Yeah. 00:32:49.000 --> 00:32:56.000 Fred Hoyle, I quote both Blake and Fred Hoyle at the top of one of the chapters. 00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:10.000 Fred Hoyle says that the cosmos would be, it would be hard to avoid thinking of the cosmos as essentially a biological thing 00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:20.000 except that people can't stand the thought that the universe itself is purposeful and alive. 00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:26.000 And I really wonder why, I mean it almost seems like science is reacting against religion in that sense because-- 00:33:26.000 --> 00:33:27.000 Yeah. 00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:34.000 --as far as a lot of people are drawn to religion and that's because it does give a purpose to life. 00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:45.000 Yeah, that was where Teilhard de Chardin made a big contribution to French and American civilization 00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:54.000 by being both a scientist and a religion thinker. 00:33:54.000 --> 00:34:08.000 His noosphere got people thinking about the meaning of consciousness in the material world 00:34:08.000 --> 00:34:14.000 and how that relates to spiritual growth. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:29.000 And unfortunately some of the ecologically minded people have replaced even the noosphere of Teilhard 00:34:29.000 --> 00:34:35.000 but even worse they've completely reversed the noosphere of Vernadsky 00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:40.000 with the idea, the Gaia or Gaia hypothesis. 00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:41.000 Right. 00:34:41.000 --> 00:34:50.000 Which basically it's like the idea of homeostasis versus creation. 00:34:50.000 --> 00:35:03.000 And the Gaia hypothesis says that the earth is, it's sort of like a conscious being 00:35:03.000 --> 00:35:08.000 except it's not going anywhere, it's trying to maintain itself. 00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:26.000 And one of the implications of the randomness thinking is that random events have wiped out many species in the past 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:31.000 and that that just has to be accepted. 00:35:31.000 --> 00:35:40.000 Species might take four billion years to evolve but it's okay if they're wiped out by industry or whatever 00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.000 because that's a normal event in history. 00:35:44.000 --> 00:35:57.000 But when you look at it from the Vernadsky point of view, the earth and the sun are driving evolution as a system 00:35:57.000 --> 00:36:13.000 in which the microorganisms, soil organisms, vegetation and animals and culture are all being driven forward as a system. 00:36:13.000 --> 00:36:20.000 If you delete parts of the system, the whole four billion years might go to waste. 00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:21.000 Right. 00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:35.000 Where the people inclined towards the Gaia hypothesis and the random evolution tend to say whatever happens is okay. 00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:42.000 So I always thought the Gaia hypothesis was more of the earth is a being, is an organism 00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:49.000 but I felt like the people, the proponents of that idea were not accepting of man's, 00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:53.000 basically hurting the organism on which we live and are a part of. 00:36:53.000 --> 00:37:03.000 Well, they say that the organism is a self-repairing system and that you just, you don't want to kill it 00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:15.000 but that it will repair itself and restore what was but they don't see it as a growing and evolving purposeful organism 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:20.000 and being driven in a specific direction by specific energy. 00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:22.000 With a specific purpose. 00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:23.000 Yeah. 00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:26.000 I see. 00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:37.000 And the principles that Vernadsky developed were really extensions of Le Chatelier's principle 00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:52.000 but he showed that the migration of atoms and the use of energy, the intensity of metabolism, 00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:59.000 all of these he made as subdivisions of Le Chatelier's principle 00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:17.000 but it basically showed why large brain, warm-blooded animals had to evolve as the world system evolved. 00:38:17.000 --> 00:38:32.000 Sort of another level but really parallel and probably for similar cosmic realist philosophical positions, 00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:45.000 an astronomer, Nikolai Kozyrev, did his doctoral dissertation around 1950 on the energy of stars 00:38:45.000 --> 00:39:00.000 and he, like these other people who pointed out that order tends to appear anytime you have a system 00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:07.000 which is receiving energy from the outside. 00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:21.000 In just the more abstract concept, Kozyrev said what if we assume that the universe is not necessarily running down 00:39:21.000 --> 00:39:32.000 and that within a system, entropy does tend only to increase 00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:43.000 but there's no such system that we know of so why should we say that that is the ruling effect of entropy. 00:39:43.000 --> 00:39:51.000 What if we assume that the universe is not just running down, 00:39:51.000 --> 00:40:00.000 that it wasn't created at one moment like someone winding up a clock only to run down. 00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:07.000 He said time seems to us to move in one direction 00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:16.000 but these people who were working out why the universe seems to be running down 00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:22.000 incorporated the assumption that time is not real 00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:32.000 that time abstractly on the physical level is reversible. 00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:45.000 Kozyrev said what if we assume that time physically is a real asymmetric factor in all systems 00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:58.000 then the mere passage of time distinguishes one state of a system from another state in a real physical way 00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:07.000 and he said what if we apply this using standard Einsteinian arguments 00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:20.000 what if we apply this to the energy of stars and say that the passage of time introduces something 00:41:20.000 --> 00:41:25.000 every moment of time that passes something is being added to the system 00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:33.000 rather than time being as much downhill as uphill 00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:40.000 and just by that simple assumption that what if time is real 00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:50.000 he showed that that assumption leads to increasing energy being produced through time 00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:55.000 by a mass in proportion to how big the mass is 00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:04.000 and so he said okay now we can suppose that time itself is the source of stellar energy 00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:11.000 what if we scale that down to Jupiter for example 00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:22.000 and he back in the early 1950s before people were measuring the energy and temperature of the planets 00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:31.000 he had predicted that Jupiter and Neptune would be emitting more heat than they receive 00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:37.000 and that each planet would have internal heat in proportion to its mass 00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:41.000 and scaling it down to the size of the moon 00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:51.000 he said that the internal energy of the moon is likely to produce an occasional volcanic eruption 00:42:51.000 --> 00:42:55.000 or emission of very hot gases 00:42:55.000 --> 00:43:04.000 and so he trained his spectrometer through a telescope on the dark phases of the moon 00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:09.000 and recorded various hot emissions 00:43:09.000 --> 00:43:18.000 and other people had recorded these but he found them according to the prediction 00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:23.000 of how much heat should be generated inside the mass 00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:29.000 simply by his reasoning because of the passage of time 00:43:29.000 --> 00:43:39.000 and so his physics I think should be taken into account in thinking about volcanic energy 00:43:39.000 --> 00:43:42.000 huh, that's very interesting 00:43:42.000 --> 00:43:44.000 I'd like to go back to that but we 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:46.000 is the call on the line? 00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:47.000 yeah 00:43:47.000 --> 00:43:49.000 do you have a question or comment? 00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:52.000 yeah it's more in the nature of a question I guess 00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:59.000 I'm curious about the idea of consciousness itself 00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:03.000 and its relationship to the brain 00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:10.000 and its relationship to matter outside the brain 00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:18.000 as I understand it the scientific paradigm about consciousness is that 00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:25.000 it's a sort of epiphenomena of physicochemical processes in the brain 00:44:25.000 --> 00:44:29.000 and that it's more or less self referential 00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:39.000 in other words what I think or feel doesn't interface with anything outside myself 00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:41.000 or anyone outside myself 00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:44.000 but it's entirely self referential 00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:51.000 there seem to be a lot of problems with this idea if I've understood it correctly 00:44:51.000 --> 00:44:58.000 the first thing which is my understanding is somewhat limited about this 00:44:58.000 --> 00:45:01.000 I may be making a fool out of myself 00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:07.000 but that no one's been able to locate memory in the brain 00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:14.000 the person who did the initial research that showed a relationship between different areas of the brain 00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:24.000 and the existence of specific memories of either olfactory or auditory or whatever 00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:33.000 operated on epileptic patients who remained conscious during brain surgery 00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:40.000 yet he came to espouse the idea of interactionism 00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:49.000 that mind and brain are two different but interactive structures or forces 00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:58.000 that thoughts or rather memories weren't stored in the brain per se 00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:03.000 but existed in some type of field 00:46:03.000 --> 00:46:13.000 my personal history is part of where my ideas on this have come from 00:46:13.000 --> 00:46:21.000 before I discovered that thyroid was very important in my metabolism 00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:25.000 I was a hyper metabolic individual 00:46:25.000 --> 00:46:32.000 and I had probably I would burn 10,000 calories in a day 00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:38.000 and I had an electrical field around my body 00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:46.000 that would affect physical things like millivolt meters 00:46:46.000 --> 00:46:50.000 about two feet away from my body 00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:55.000 so I for years was very conscious of this 00:46:55.000 --> 00:46:59.000 sometimes really annoying electrical field 00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:02.000 I couldn't operate the apparatus 00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:07.000 I had to have my lab partner do it because it would go off scale when I got near it 00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:12.000 and all of this stopped when I took the right amount of thyroid 00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:19.000 my metabolism became more normal and regulated 00:47:19.000 --> 00:47:25.000 but I saw that oxidative metabolism generated this 00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:32.000 potentially very immense and disturbing field around cells and the whole body 00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:46.000 and this has inclined me more than people who haven't had those actual personal experiences 00:47:46.000 --> 00:47:49.000 with bioelectric fields 00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:57.000 it has inclined me to see the importance of bioelectric fields in development and physiology 00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:05.000 and I still use this kind of field thinking 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:10.000 for example there's a field concept of cancer 00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:18.000 which traditionally the definition of the field has been left open 00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:28.000 but a lot of research shows that it is an electromagnetic field or a bioelectric field 00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:38.000 at least in part that creates the precancerous and cancerous conditions in a tissue 00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:41.000 that governs the development of an embryo and so on 00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:48.000 yes and that idea has been taken up by people like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake 00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:54.000 who came up with a theory which he calls formative causation 00:48:54.000 --> 00:49:04.000 that if I understand it correctly that information can be shared among members of a specific species 00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:16.000 from Vernadsky's perspective I think the supplementary context for that is that 00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:28.000 things are ready to be discovered and that when you change components in the system 00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:34.000 many things are contributing not just the individual's consciousness 00:49:34.000 --> 00:49:42.000 but the preconditions are tending to make that certain behavior probable 00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:54.000 so that Vernadsky would emphasize multi-causal factors rather than just conscious factors 00:49:54.000 --> 00:50:00.000 and I also wondered you seem to have been scooting around something 00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:03.000 which is sort of a scientific taboo 00:50:03.000 --> 00:50:12.000 and I wondered what you thought of the evidence for the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics 00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:23.000 definitely they are a fact and Darwin knew it, Lamarck 00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:28.000 I'm familiar with Dr. Kammerer, the Viennese biologist 00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:30.000 which is a fascinating story 00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:38.000 his work was real and a lot of people have met similar fates 00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:46.000 people slandered Lamarck and took him down because of the implications 00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:54.000 of his really empirical physiological approach to life 00:50:54.000 --> 00:50:58.000 people couldn't stand that in 1820 or 1830 00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:03.000 and so they had to disassemble his reputation 00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:10.000 same thing happened to Kammerer and everyone who violates the taboos 00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:16.000 Carl Lindegren wrote a book called Cold War in Biology 00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:22.000 it's the best American book on the subject that I know 00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:24.000 C.C. Lindegren 00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:28.000 what I've been seeing at least on the level of the popular media 00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:32.000 and the way the idea of genetics is presented 00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:35.000 is a kind of genetic determinism 00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:39.000 which the public at large is being led to believe 00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:43.000 that a gene is sort of an individual 00:51:43.000 --> 00:51:48.000 almost like an organism itself 00:51:48.000 --> 00:51:51.000 the self is a gene and all that sort of thing 00:51:51.000 --> 00:51:57.000 which then is responsible for a specific quality or characteristic 00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:01.000 and as far as I know no one has ever proved that genes do anything 00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:04.000 except organize the synthesis of proteins 00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:13.000 I have been interested in the subject for more than 50 years 00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:19.000 and so I've noticed the things going on 00:52:19.000 --> 00:52:23.000 and tried to find out where they came from 00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:32.000 in some of my newsletters I'll be talking about related issues 00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:42.000 but the motivation for a lot of these ideas around 1910 to 1920 00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:49.000 were to stop immigration of Eastern Europeans 00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:53.000 and Southern Europeans to the United States 00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:57.000 so they created IQ tests 00:52:57.000 --> 00:53:04.000 and showed that Russians and Jews and the various people 00:53:04.000 --> 00:53:07.000 that they didn't want to immigrate 00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:11.000 but 85% of them were feeble minded 00:53:11.000 --> 00:53:17.000 naturally they gave the tests in English 00:53:17.000 --> 00:53:22.000 but these tests were very explicitly designed 00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:26.000 for racist exclusionary purposes 00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:32.000 and many of these people have persisted in universities 00:53:32.000 --> 00:53:37.000 the Bell curve for example a real idiot at Harvard 00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:41.000 was one of the last hangers on 00:53:41.000 --> 00:53:48.000 and these people had great success in getting published in Science 00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:54.000 the leading American science magazine 00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:59.000 when I sent a tiny letter criticizing 00:53:59.000 --> 00:54:06.000 one of these genetic determination of intelligence 00:54:06.000 --> 00:54:09.000 I think it was an 8 or 10 page article 00:54:09.000 --> 00:54:11.000 I sent about a two sentence letter 00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:17.000 they sent me pages of anonymous referees 00:54:17.000 --> 00:54:20.000 one of them the only evidence that was cited 00:54:20.000 --> 00:54:25.000 for not publishing my little letter critical of the conclusions 00:54:25.000 --> 00:54:31.000 I just said the conclusions have nothing whatsoever to do with the text of the article 00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:40.000 these pages of anonymous referees rejecting my comment 00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:49.000 the only data cited was from Hitler's racial hygiene institute 00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:53.000 and that got me interested in studying what was going on there 00:54:53.000 --> 00:54:56.000 and I saw that by studying that period 00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:04.000 I saw that Conrad Lorenz was the architect of the racial hygiene 00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:11.000 that he created the rationale based on American IQ 00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:13.000 and racism 00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:17.000 he created the rationale for exterminating inferior people 00:55:17.000 --> 00:55:19.000 Conrad Lorenz was a Nazi 00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:22.000 and I think it was his last book 00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:28.000 he repeated exactly the arguments of his 1942 00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:33.000 and the founding papers of genocide 00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:39.000 he repeated the exact arguments except he replaced exterminate 00:55:39.000 --> 00:55:42.000 with some slightly milder translation 00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:49.000 but he never repented from this idea of eliminating genetic inferiority 00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:53.000 I think the ideology has survived apparently 00:55:53.000 --> 00:55:55.000 but it's been shorn of certain terms 00:55:55.000 --> 00:55:58.000 one for instance never hears the word eugenics anymore 00:55:58.000 --> 00:56:03.000 I went to a lecture in the 70s 00:56:03.000 --> 00:56:08.000 all the professors from my biology department were there 00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:15.000 nodding happily as Gunther Stent who was a Jewish refugee from Hitler 00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:21.000 as Gunther Stent presented Conrad Lorenz's argument for genocide 00:56:21.000 --> 00:56:28.000 as the ultimate in understanding the brain genetically 00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:35.000 and all of my professors were there happily agreeing that this was wonderful stuff 00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:44.000 and when my friend and I pointed out some of the logical irrationalities 00:56:44.000 --> 00:56:54.000 such as he was saying that a person's life and work are genetically determined units 00:56:54.000 --> 00:56:58.000 suddenly they said are you saying that the fact that he was a Nazi 00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:02.000 had anything to do with the validity of these ideas 00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:10.000 and the whole point of the lecture was that every cultural feature is genetically determined 00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:17.000 well one of the sort of interesting side light on this is that in the Indian tradition 00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:20.000 there were these so called laws of Manu 00:57:20.000 --> 00:57:30.000 which were basically governed the questions of occupation, heredity 00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:37.000 and the creation of a caste system based on certain ideas about that 00:57:37.000 --> 00:57:42.000 and my understanding was originally the caste system was not hereditary 00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:49.000 but it was rather simply the recognition that certain people had certain proclivities 00:57:49.000 --> 00:57:53.000 or natural abilities or interests or capacities 00:57:53.000 --> 00:58:01.000 and that they could be best sorted out according to those in various occupational groups and so forth 00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:04.000 but that it was possible to move from one to the other 00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:09.000 and then gradually it became modified into a hereditary system 00:58:09.000 --> 00:58:15.000 in which if your father was a leather worker or something you would be one 00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:17.000 or if he was a farmer you would be one 00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:29.000 and there was no mobility and no possibility of actually assimilating anything new so to speak 00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:37.000 I think one of the driving forces of the caste system was the 3500 years ago 00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:46.000 the Nordics, the Indo-Europeans invaded and enslaved the dark native people 00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:59.000 and I think that was the racial caste difference became the power that stayed in force 00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:08.000 and tended to rigidify the occupational system 00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:19.000 So do you think this whole caste system and emphasis on genetics as being the set in stone basis for your status in life 00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:24.000 Do you think that people are justifying survival of the fittest? 00:59:24.000 --> 00:59:36.000 No, the whole idea of survival of the fittest is basically saying that whoever is in power is the fittest 00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:43.000 and whoever is able to say it with most force is the fittest 00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:48.000 and if you object and they can kill you, they are the fittest 00:59:48.000 --> 00:59:57.000 and it basically is tending to create a ruling class of inferiors 00:59:57.000 --> 01:00:08.000 if they keep their status only on the basis of saying things like "if you are so smart why aren't you rich like me" 01:00:08.000 --> 01:00:13.000 pretty soon the ruling class becomes degenerate 01:00:13.000 --> 01:00:22.000 What do you think of the misappropriation, I mean it seems like the modern, the official ideology you might call it 01:00:22.000 --> 01:00:32.000 of the ruling classes in this country is compounded of misinterpretations of Darwin and Adam Smith basically 01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:44.000 and I personally don't find the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution intellectually convincing at all myself 01:00:44.000 --> 01:00:54.000 but whenever I bring this up, people look at me as if I suggested to the earth is flat 01:00:54.000 --> 01:01:03.000 because it constitutes so to speak the very pillar of their thought about how the world is organized and operates 01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:16.000 If you start pointing out any of the thousand hidden assumptions or thousand facts that they are trying to cover up 01:01:16.000 --> 01:01:24.000 you get to about two or three of them and then they remove you in some way from the discussion 01:01:24.000 --> 01:01:34.000 Right, and interestingly Adam Smith's ideas interface with Darwinism very much I think 01:01:34.000 --> 01:01:39.000 and they are always misrepresented in economics textbooks 01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:51.000 For instance, we all know that Adam Smith believed that self-interest was the appropriate form of being so to speak and acting 01:01:51.000 --> 01:02:00.000 and that if everyone pursued their own self-interest to the maximal degree that would result in the maximal degree of happiness for all 01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:13.000 but what they leave out is that Smith believed also in benevolence as a counterpoint to self-interest, to naked self-interest 01:02:13.000 --> 01:02:21.000 and that you could say his idea of benevolence was a kind of social capital you might say 01:02:21.000 --> 01:02:35.000 and his comment for instance on businessmen is "they neither are nor ought to be the rulers of mankind" 01:02:35.000 --> 01:02:45.000 and yet his ideas are promoted, one half of his ideas are promoted, the other half is ignored 01:02:45.000 --> 01:02:47.000 similarly Darwin, you know 01:02:47.000 --> 01:03:00.000 It isn't just neo-Darwinism and the Smith disorders but it's basically everything in our intellectual history 01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:07.000 I've had a habit of reading textbooks in many different fields over the years 01:03:07.000 --> 01:03:21.000 and really 99 plus percent of them are ideological distortions, rewriting of history 01:03:21.000 --> 01:03:28.000 leaving out everything interesting or threatening to the established system 01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:33.000 every field of knowledge has been distorted 01:03:33.000 --> 01:03:45.000 art, literature, every part of culture you can think of has its threatening aspects 01:03:45.000 --> 01:04:00.000 and in education it happens that the potential meaningfulness that some of these ideas give to life are very exciting to students 01:04:00.000 --> 01:04:14.000 and so education has been very powerfully trimmed down to become nothing but as far as the system can manage it 01:04:14.000 --> 01:04:19.000 to be nothing but an indoctrination in these distortions 01:04:19.000 --> 01:04:31.000 because Adam Smith, Darwin, Pavlov, everyone that's treated, if they were good they have to be distorted 01:04:31.000 --> 01:04:35.000 if they were too good they have to be left out entirely 01:04:35.000 --> 01:04:42.000 Right, for instance I remember my biology textbook talked a little bit about Darwin and Wallace 01:04:42.000 --> 01:04:49.000 and contrasted their basically coincident discovery of so-called natural selection 01:04:49.000 --> 01:05:06.000 but a radical difference between Darwin and Wallace is that Wallace simply could not accept the idea of an entirely mechanical evolutionary process driven by randomness or chance 01:05:06.000 --> 01:05:08.000 Darwin didn't either though 01:05:08.000 --> 01:05:15.000 Yeah, right, and Wallace actually went to the extent of writing a book which I have never been able to locate 01:05:15.000 --> 01:05:25.000 in which he tried to work on the idea that there was consciousness and will and even perhaps, this is really going over the edge 01:05:25.000 --> 01:05:38.000 of angelic intelligences as he calls them who were guiding the evolutionary unfoldment of people or humans 01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:42.000 You know, of course they wrote him off 01:05:42.000 --> 01:05:43.000 Can't have that 01:05:43.000 --> 01:05:46.000 Yeah, can't have that 01:05:46.000 --> 01:06:01.000 But I'm turning the discussion a little bit back, why is there, there seems to be, you know science developed as a reaction against what I guess you could call religious provincialism 01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:15.000 or metaphysical speculation, you know by giving people a concrete method by which they could prove or disprove certain phenomena and repeat them and you know, like that 01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:26.000 But then it seems to have turned into an ideology, I mean science as a method is one thing, science as an ideology, scientism is something else altogether 01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:46.000 Well, my view is that they got one little success but then they decided to give in to the forces which were also driving the backward cultural forces 01:06:46.000 --> 01:07:10.000 which at one time were very closely identified with religion but these same forces took over and most scientists have accepted the fundamental assumptions of the people who used those assumptions for what they called religious purposes 01:07:10.000 --> 01:07:16.000 Right, it's a kind of surrogate religion for the materialists you might say 01:07:16.000 --> 01:07:37.000 How it works is by eliminating all of the troubling, complexifying other things and reducing everything to a few principles of random variation for example and chance and survival of the so-called fittest 01:07:37.000 --> 01:08:02.000 Well you know what's interesting about that is that, I mean I'm not a mathematician but my understanding is that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution basically posits random mutation and natural selection as the driving factors in the creation and you know the dominance of certain species and the death of others 01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:26.000 But randomness is based on the idea of infinite time, in other words given enough time if you throw bricks at random they will organize themselves into a building or if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters they will eventually write "the sun also rises" or "war and peace" or something 01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:44.000 That's where Vernadsky shows that very quickly species will arise to the limits of the resources available, that evolution is driven in a relatively practically instantaneous way 01:08:44.000 --> 01:09:06.000 There is such a powerful guiding influence coming from this energy disturbing the old equilibrium that the variation, whatever the stimulus might be, there might be some random event 01:09:06.000 --> 01:09:18.000 But the driving environmental force is so powerful that evolution is relatively fast and directional 01:09:18.000 --> 01:09:43.000 And one of the puzzling things is if you posit mutation as one of the principle driving forces, most mutations are regressive and Sheldrake points out you might be able to get a insect, say a precursor of a fly that couldn't fly 01:09:43.000 --> 01:09:59.000 And it might somehow through genetic mutation produce one wing, but what are the probabilities that it could produce two wings and then what are the probabilities that those two wings would be functional and actually allow it to fly etc. etc. etc. 01:09:59.000 --> 01:10:10.000 In other words it seems like a series of probabilities linked together to explain how we get flies 01:10:10.000 --> 01:10:33.000 But if you look at it in the context of energy added to the system and look for rules of stability, many different physical principles that are well accepted like hysteresis, the system memory 01:10:33.000 --> 01:10:44.000 Every system that is undergoing change has a certain memory of the changes it has gone through 01:10:44.000 --> 01:11:09.000 And long range order, a surface projects a sort of field or ordering influence into for example the surrounding water or air or vacuum and orders its environment 01:11:09.000 --> 01:11:27.000 Michael Polanyi's adsorption isotherm came prematurely for western physics and so it was ignored but he showed that surfaces project their influence into the environment 01:11:27.000 --> 01:11:38.000 One of my professors posted electron microscope pictures but as far as I know never published about them 01:11:38.000 --> 01:12:04.000 He showed that you can lay a plastic membrane, a sheet of plastic over a crystal and in a vacuum evaporate a different chemical on top of the crystal and the first accumulation of atoms appears ordered 01:12:04.000 --> 01:12:29.000 It takes on the ordering characteristics of the crystal under the plastic layer showing that the crystal isn't working just atom to atom but is projecting a field through space that orders the way atoms of another substance fall and stick to the membrane 01:12:29.000 --> 01:12:39.000 So in other words there paradoxically is some type of consciousness inherent in so called matter and in life forms 01:12:39.000 --> 01:12:57.000 The principle that explains Polanyi's and several other people, a man devised a way of measuring this optically 01:12:57.000 --> 01:13:10.000 The ordering influence that could be projected through membranes and devised a lot of interesting techniques that no one is using 01:13:10.000 --> 01:13:25.000 Alexander Rothen, I think he died about 1980, he was applying a lot of these long range ordering principles 01:13:25.000 --> 01:13:46.000 The mechanism seems to be partly that the electrons on an atom are resonating such that one atom will induce a field in whatever the next atom is which then induces a field off into space 01:13:46.000 --> 01:14:08.000 If these can be ordered rather than going simply away from the surface out in space, if the surface reinforces this in the other dimension horizontally then you can project for amazing distances this ordering field 01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:25.000 Yes, a related thing is the discovery several years ago that human heart cells which were put in close proximity but not actually touching or what not 01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:36.000 appeared to influence the physiological processes in other cells even though they weren't physically touching or chemically linked 01:14:36.000 --> 01:14:45.000 In the 1930s the Gurwitsch were demonstrating this process but again they were ridiculed 01:14:45.000 --> 01:14:55.000 They would demonstrate that you could put a quartz window between cells and they could communicate through that quartz window 01:14:55.000 --> 01:15:05.000 which was very similar to what my professor demonstrated with a crystal influencing gas molecules through a plastic membrane 01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:11.000 In this case a thin quartz window would transmit the influence 01:15:11.000 --> 01:15:31.000 I think we are probably circling around the phobia if you want to call it about how research is directed and how people understand these processes and linkages to happen 01:15:31.000 --> 01:15:54.000 because we don't have as far as I know a mechanism that can explain communication between cells or communication between organisms that are not linked in some kind of concrete, material, chemical, electrical fashion that you can measure and show 01:15:54.000 --> 01:16:01.000 There is a missing piece 01:16:01.000 --> 01:16:13.000 Usually the missing piece is just that the researcher is too dull minded to think of measuring what might be relevant 01:16:13.000 --> 01:16:23.000 They have in mind that only atom to atom forces, only mechanical processes are relevant 01:16:23.000 --> 01:16:34.000 so they simply don't measure other conditions such as the phase of the moon or the outside the room conditions 01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:42.000 Things that are actually physically affecting the process that they are measuring 01:16:42.000 --> 01:16:52.000 On a similar note I understand that they recently discovered the presence of magnetite in human brain tissue which is of course a form of iron 01:16:52.000 --> 01:16:56.000 I think some people have it in some zone according to the experiments 01:16:56.000 --> 01:17:09.000 You can put some people out in the woods and I think about 15% of them know always where north is and the rest of them have no clue 01:17:09.000 --> 01:17:21.000 I've sort of rambled on and on but you can see I'm trying to link some of these ideas and get your feeling about it 01:17:21.000 --> 01:17:29.000 There are two more aspects of this origin of life that I wanted to mention before we finish 01:17:29.000 --> 01:17:40.000 The submarine vent biologists, if you link them with Vernadsky and Sidney Fox's work 01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:53.000 It is very suggestive that the volcanic processes are creating organisms 01:17:53.000 --> 01:17:59.000 rather than organisms simply have chosen to live in this incredibly hot environment 01:17:59.000 --> 01:18:15.000 One of Mendeleev's early perceptions was he happened to be melting, dissolving iron in acid 01:18:15.000 --> 01:18:23.000 and he noticed the smell of crude petroleum 01:18:23.000 --> 01:18:32.000 This happened to be the year that petroleum was discovered or started to be mined in Pennsylvania 01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:48.000 He sent samples of this oily material to various petroleum chemists, I think it was '59 or '60 01:18:48.000 --> 01:18:55.000 and they identified it definitely as petroleum from a certain region 01:18:55.000 --> 01:19:05.000 It was simply the carbon molecules, atoms that had been dissolved in the hot iron 01:19:05.000 --> 01:19:14.000 were catalyzed into what everyone agreed smelled exactly like natural petroleum 01:19:14.000 --> 01:19:25.000 Thomas Gold is an American, basically a geologist 01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:34.000 He has argued that petroleum is being constantly created by a mechanism 01:19:34.000 --> 01:19:41.000 such as Mendeleev's iron-acid reaction 01:19:41.000 --> 01:19:48.000 Since volcanoes have plenty of acid and the earth is rich in iron 01:19:48.000 --> 01:19:58.000 this Mendeleev reaction would essentially have to produce petroleum in the depths of the earth 01:19:58.000 --> 01:20:06.000 Thomas Gold has pointed out that you can find petroleum miles down in granite 01:20:06.000 --> 01:20:13.000 where it absolutely shouldn't be unless it's being synthesized from the depths of the earth 01:20:13.000 --> 01:20:17.000 rather than being a fossil material 01:20:17.000 --> 01:20:19.000 But bacteria, is it what he believed? 01:20:19.000 --> 01:20:32.000 The traditional idea is that petroleum is a marine biological fossil residue 01:20:32.000 --> 01:20:43.000 but the Thomas Gold-Mendeleev-Vernadsky interpretation is that the earth is generating new petroleum 01:20:43.000 --> 01:20:48.000 and these processes, if you think of Sidney Fox's work 01:20:48.000 --> 01:20:53.000 in which cells are generated by volcanic heat 01:20:53.000 --> 01:21:05.000 you have organic sources of energy, fats and oils and carbon dioxide being released 01:21:05.000 --> 01:21:15.000 and organisms that are able to eat carbon dioxide as a raw material 01:21:15.000 --> 01:21:19.000 These submarine-vent bacteria live on carbon dioxide 01:21:19.000 --> 01:21:31.000 You have many factual things that have to be considered in relation to the origin of life 01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:43.000 It basically looks increasingly as if not only petroleum but simple organisms are being generated volcanically 01:21:43.000 --> 01:21:47.000 and emitted into the depths of the earth 01:21:47.000 --> 01:21:59.000 That interfaces interestingly with these bion experiments of Dr. Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s 01:21:59.000 --> 01:22:06.000 where he claimed to have found an intermediate type of life form 01:22:06.000 --> 01:22:10.000 that was intermediate between matter and biological life forms 01:22:10.000 --> 01:22:12.000 He called bionds 01:22:12.000 --> 01:22:22.000 Sidney Fox's organisms, any high school student can produce little cells that will eat and reproduce 01:22:22.000 --> 01:22:28.000 It just takes a few hours in the lab to make organisms 01:22:28.000 --> 01:22:34.000 So the spontaneous generation idea is not completely bad altogether, right? 01:22:34.000 --> 01:22:39.000 Not at all. I think volcanoes are churning out life all the time 01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:42.000 Wow, that's amazing 01:22:42.000 --> 01:22:45.000 Okay, well I didn't want to monopolize everything 01:22:45.000 --> 01:22:48.000 You've done very well and I went for a long walk 01:22:48.000 --> 01:22:52.000 You guys have taken care of yourselves 01:22:52.000 --> 01:22:54.000 Okay, well I'm going to hang up now 01:22:54.000 --> 01:22:56.000 Let somebody else have an opportunity 01:22:56.000 --> 01:22:58.000 Thank you very much for calling 01:22:58.000 --> 01:23:00.000 Thank you 01:23:00.000 --> 01:23:02.000 So did you get to say everything you needed to say? 01:23:02.000 --> 01:23:11.000 Yeah, briefly I think I touched everything that has to be thought about in connection with the origin of life 01:23:11.000 --> 01:23:14.000 That was extremely interesting 01:23:14.000 --> 01:23:18.000 I might mention the work of Lancelot Law White 01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:24.000 who wrote books on sort of the philosophy of physics and biology 01:23:24.000 --> 01:23:29.000 He was, I think, an important thinker along those lines 01:23:29.000 --> 01:23:38.000 Talking about the formative principle as something that has been overlooked by the conventional science community 01:23:38.000 --> 01:23:40.000 Are his books available? 01:23:40.000 --> 01:23:42.000 Oh, they're in good libraries 01:23:42.000 --> 01:23:46.000 They haven't been in print for 40 years, I guess 01:23:46.000 --> 01:23:49.000 Okay, his name is Lancelot Law White? 01:23:49.000 --> 01:23:51.000 Yeah, W-H-Y-T-E 01:23:51.000 --> 01:23:54.000 Okay, a Y-T-E 01:23:54.000 --> 01:23:59.000 Well, that was really fascinating and I want to thank you for coming on again 01:23:59.000 --> 01:24:01.000 Okay 01:24:01.000 --> 01:24:03.000 Alright, well we're going to have to leave it there 01:24:03.000 --> 01:24:11.000 That was Dr. Raymond Peat circa 2001 on WGDR in Plainfield, Vermont 01:24:11.000 --> 01:24:14.000 You are now listening to WMRW LP Warren 01:24:14.000 --> 01:24:17.000 and you're listening to the show Politics and Science 01:24:17.000 --> 01:24:19.000 I've been your host, John Barkhausen 01:24:19.000 --> 01:24:24.000 and this will be posted on the website 01:24:24.000 --> 01:24:26.000 radionumeralforeall.net 01:24:26.000 --> 01:24:30.000 radio, the number 4, and then all.net 01:24:30.000 --> 01:24:34.000 and when you get there, search for Politics and Science 01:24:34.000 --> 01:24:40.000 Raymond Peat has a PhD in biology and has specialized in physiology and endocrinology 01:24:40.000 --> 01:24:43.000 and he has a website, rayPeat.com 01:24:43.000 --> 01:24:46.000 R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com 01:24:46.000 --> 01:24:51.000 where you'll find many, many extremely interesting articles 01:24:51.000 --> 01:24:55.000 fully referenced that will keep you busy for months to come 01:24:55.000 --> 01:24:57.000 Thanks for listening to Politics and Science 01:24:57.000 --> 01:25:00.000 and tune in again next week for another edition