WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization. 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Okay, we'll cut that off and tell you that the following show does present the viewpoints of its participants. 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:20.000 The following program represents the view of its participants and 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.000 That's just what I was saying and does not necessarily represent an official opinion of WMRW or any other person or organization. 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:37.000 And you are listening to WMRW and Politics and Science with your host John Barkasin. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:41.000 And my guest today is Dr. Raymond Peat. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000 And I'm happy to have him back again. 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000 And Dr. Peat, can you hear me? 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:49.000 Yeah. 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:50.000 Excellent. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:53.000 We're going to talk about your recent newsletter. 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:59.000 It was entitled How Do You Know? Students, Patients, and Discovery. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:03.000 And the scope of the newsletter, I thought, was pretty enormous. 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:13.000 It ranges from discussing a unifying self-ordering principle concerning the nature of the universe, which you can't get much bigger than that, 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:25.000 and talks about how the same principle is reflected in our learning processes, in our culture, and in all other functional goal-directed systems in our world. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:32.000 You use the quote, "One thought fills immensity" by William Blake, the motto of the newsletter. 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:40.000 And I thought that's very apt for this newsletter because it's such a profound subject you're bringing up. 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:51.000 And I thought just as a way to bring people into this, it would be useful if you could tell us some of your personal experience as a student and then as a teacher, 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:55.000 and how this has formed your outlook toward the world. 00:01:55.000 --> 00:02:01.000 My parents had quite a few interesting books. 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:11.000 I got some from their parents, 19th century books like, I think it was a second or third edition of Darwin's Descent of Man. 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:20.000 And they had a little collection of the Little Blue Books that were published, I think, in Kansas. 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:28.000 And they were the classics in five and ten cent versions. 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:33.000 There really was quite a variety of reading material when I was a little kid. 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:48.000 And in encyclopedias, the older Encyclopedia Britannica and others, were pretty objective at that time on issues like Darwin versus Lamarck. 00:02:48.000 --> 00:03:17.000 And gave the research done in the early part of the 20th century in different countries that gave me an orientation that I began preferring the non-genetic version of the adaptation of individuals to the environment. 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:29.000 And so by the late 1940s, when the genetics doctrine was being imposed politically very powerfully through the US, 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:39.000 that made me start seeing the political significance of science in general, and especially biology. 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:44.000 Can you give us some sense of time? What year were you reading the Little Blue Books? 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:55.000 Oh, right after I learned to read Aliaupe and such, I went right to the Little Blue Books, probably 1940. 00:03:55.000 --> 00:04:15.000 And then all through the 40s, my parents knew about Peter Kropotkin's political writings as well as his mutual aid, The Factor of Evolution. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:27.000 And so that was my first political book, was really Kropotkin's biological work on evolution. 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:34.000 And from that he drew his anarchist political ideas. 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:56.000 And that fit in with the other stuff I had been reading on the true Darwin, not the pseudo-Darwinism that was promoted after the 1940s. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:03.000 Neo-Darwinism really was pretty much anti-Darwin. 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:10.000 In Darwin's introduction to The Descent of Man, he pointed out that his ideas were being distorted, 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:23.000 and that he didn't say that the struggle for survival and natural selection was the basic power of evolution. 00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:30.000 He named several other more Lamarckian factors in evolution. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:34.000 That's more in line with what Kropotkin was saying. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:46.000 Yeah. Kropotkin emphasized cooperation within species and even between species in symbiosis and such. 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:52.000 So I was interested in science before I went to college. 00:05:52.000 --> 00:06:03.000 Even by the time I was in college, I was convinced that there was really something wrong with American and British science in particular. 00:06:03.000 --> 00:06:12.000 And so I concentrated on the humanities and did my master's thesis on Bogeyman's Plague. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:25.000 And that gave me a chance to spend years reading on the history of philosophy and philosophy of science and so on. 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:32.000 So when I, years later, finally did go back to a degree in science, 00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:49.000 I had sort of inoculated myself against being indoctrinated and forced to believe the very dogmatic ideas that make up American science. 00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:56.000 What gave you the clue that it was dogmatic and not based in actuality? 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:12.000 Oh, you hear the joke about Aristotle having counted the number of teeth in a donk or something and that being repeated for hundreds of years. 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:18.000 The same thing happened in American chromosome study. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:31.000 Even though Germans were able to count and investigate the effects of chromosomes way back in the early 20th century, 00:07:31.000 --> 00:07:44.000 they were thinking of chromosomes as the carriers of heredity and disturbances in chromosomes as being the cause of cancer and so on. 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:54.000 Major American biologists didn't even believe that chromosomes had to do with heredity until the early 1920s. 00:07:54.000 --> 00:08:01.000 And in the 1940s, well, all the way up until 1956, 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:08.000 Americans and English were still saying that humans have 48 chromosomes. 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:17.000 And I had read enough in the 40s to know that people vary somewhat in their numbers, 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:25.000 but by far the most common number of chromosomes was 46 in normal humans. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:33.000 And somehow, as this fixed idea once said, it was with great authority. 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:40.000 So Americans and British just kept saying it over and over for decades. 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:46.000 Did you have some good teachers yourself personally going through the school system? 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:58.000 Oh, yeah, I had three good teachers, I think, in the 19 years in college, university, out of about 60, I guess. 00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:03.000 I don't think that's a bad average as from my own personal experience. 00:09:03.000 --> 00:09:05.000 Yeah. 00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:08.000 Probably did pretty well there. 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:14.000 You've been teaching, I'd say, and you're still teaching at this point. 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:24.000 I was reading in a newsletter, and I should have said that Ray Peat is a physiologist and a science historian, 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:29.000 and I think also going with that is a philosophy historian. 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:34.000 You write in this newsletter, "How do you know about teaching literature?" 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:40.000 And I was wondering if you could just recount your experience trying to follow the school regulations 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:42.000 and then finally giving up on that. 00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:48.000 That year I was teaching two different kinds of composition. 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:57.000 In freshman composition, the department had a little list of how we had to grade the paper. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:03.000 Three types, grammatical or spelling mistakes or dictums. 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:13.000 You would mark off so many points, and the purpose was to fail about 90% of the freshmen, 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:17.000 and that was called keeping up the standard. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:24.000 And I saw that after doing that for a few weeks that the students were writing worse and worse 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:38.000 because they thought that they tended to make mistakes when they didn't have everything under very constant control. 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:42.000 So they started writing like first graders. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:56.000 And I had to read several dozen of their papers to save myself the suffering of reading first grade papers. 00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:07.000 I told them that I would from then on ignore the spelling, punctuation, and the things on that list, 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:17.000 but that I would grade them entirely on their ability to communicate something of interest to me. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:23.000 Within just a couple of weeks, everyone was writing much better. 00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:31.000 I had my office partner who was teaching similar classes following the same rules. 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:38.000 I had to read some of the before and after papers and grade them. 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:50.000 And he found that when I wasn't grading for errors, the students were writing better according to his and the department's standards. 00:11:50.000 --> 00:12:03.000 So they were supposedly keeping up standards while actually degrading the work output of the students. 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:10.000 Yeah, that sounds like a dysfunctional system, and I'm glad you were able to find a solution to that. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:17.000 Ray, we just got an email, and I think it's true that saying that your voice is being clipped all the time. 00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:23.000 So I think we should probably hang up, and I'll try to reconnect with you and get a better connection. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:24.000 Okay. 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000 So I'll call you right back in about a minute. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:27.000 Okay. 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:33.000 Okay, sorry about that. 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:56.000 We are going to go to a song for just a second, and I'm going to call Ray back. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:58.000 All right, we're back. 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:01.000 Politics and Science with Dr. Raymond Peat. 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:11.000 We were talking about your teaching experience and how you actually let the students write about things that were important to them. 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:18.000 And suddenly their performance improved, even on the grammatical criteria that the college was so worried about. 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:19.000 Is that right? 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:21.000 Yeah. 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:28.000 And when I asked them to put their emphasis on communicating something and to not think about the mechanics of it, 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:35.000 suddenly the mechanics improved as well as the content. 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.000 And did you know about Carl Rogers at that point, or is that somebody you read about later? 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:43.000 Were you influenced by him? 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:56.000 For a while I was majoring in psychology in the 1950s, and I read his client-centered therapy sometime in the late '50s. 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:02.000 What was his influence on education, Carl Rogers? 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:15.000 He went from his work showing that it's the coherent personality of the therapist that makes a difference in therapy situations 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:29.000 and not any psychiatric technique that they might apply, simply the validity of their communication with the client. 00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:40.000 He established that that was actually the thing that made psychological therapy work, 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:53.000 and then he extended that and began popularizing the idea of student-standard education. 00:14:53.000 --> 00:15:05.000 So it was actually the psychiatrist or therapist allowing the person to self-direct their own recovery, emotional recovery, that was working? 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:18.000 Yeah, it was the process of listening deeply that the patient in effect began hearing what they were saying themselves 00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:23.000 by having someone understand what they were saying. 00:15:23.000 --> 00:15:30.000 And he also applied the same idea, it seemed like, to the entire world. 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:33.000 He talked about it in terms of culture? 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:41.000 Yeah, he published a book on the philosophy of science with a co-author whose name I forget, 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:50.000 but it's probably a good introduction to Carl Rogers' work to start at the philosophy of science. 00:15:50.000 --> 00:16:06.000 But at the end of his book, "Client-Centered Therapy," there's a philosophical section that makes very explicit the philosophy behind the method. 00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:07.000 And how was he received? 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:25.000 Oh, well, even other psychiatrists, since he showed empirically that people recovered in proportion to the coherence of the therapist's personality 00:16:25.000 --> 00:16:38.000 and manner of communication and that it had nothing to do with whether they were a Freudian or a behaviorist or whatever. 00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:48.000 And so all of the doctrinaire psychologists said that isn't possible because they really believe in their theories of therapy. 00:16:48.000 --> 00:17:06.000 And especially the medical psychiatrists just totally said he isn't even a psychologist and much less a psychiatrist. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:11.000 The medical people were the most rejecting of his approach. 00:17:11.000 --> 00:17:18.000 Considering what he was saying, that's not too surprising because it sounds like it was threatening to them. 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:33.000 Yeah, and professors in general didn't like that approach because the point of being a professor is to demonstrate that you know it all. 00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:53.000 If a person goes into, say, a physics class, the assumption is that the professor is going to sort of transmit bit by bit his textbook in physics 00:17:53.000 --> 00:18:03.000 into the mind of the student so that it's an absolute filling up of an empty space in the mind of the student 00:18:03.000 --> 00:18:11.000 and as if the professor knows everything for sure and absolutely. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:24.000 Back at that time when I was teaching English and literature and studying a variety of things, 00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:30.000 I talked to quite a variety of physics people because that was one of my interests, 00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:43.000 how physics underlies biology, which underlies the way we make language and how consciousness works. 00:18:43.000 --> 00:18:55.000 So as part of my understanding of language and consciousness, I felt I had to have satisfaction that there was some rational physics behind it. 00:18:55.000 --> 00:19:06.000 So I talked to a lot of physics professionals and invariably when I would ask them a question, 00:19:06.000 --> 00:19:14.000 they would quote verb word for word right out of their textbook or physics course 00:19:14.000 --> 00:19:29.000 and simply couldn't conceive what I was asking if it was an attempt to know anything other than what is in the physics book. 00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:36.000 Really the most dogmatic people in science seem to be in physics. 00:19:36.000 --> 00:19:47.000 One of my professors that I thought was intelligent said that the average physics graduate student 00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:57.000 has trouble knowing whether a ball will roll up or down an inclined plane because they've been trained so abstractly. 00:19:57.000 --> 00:20:00.000 That's a little discouraging. 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:13.000 The physicists who tend towards the mathematical side dislike applied mathematics. 00:20:13.000 --> 00:20:17.000 I've talked to some of those. 00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:27.000 One of the local professors who was very famous explained some physical reactions, 00:20:27.000 --> 00:20:43.000 particle, nuclear particle interactions as being explainable by a particle coming from the future 00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:51.000 and meeting the nucleus at the moment that the nucleus emits a particle. 00:20:51.000 --> 00:21:02.000 Just a most fundamentally confused person who thought time could run both ways at the same time. 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:09.000 Well, it's perhaps the influence of quantum physics on the scientific culture. 00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:15.000 Yeah, it's the abstract way everything is taught. 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:26.000 Even getting someone to look at the history of where the idea of quantum thinking came from 00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:32.000 as a historical and cultural thing. 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:41.000 There have been a couple of books treating the German physics community at that time 00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:50.000 and showing how important idealistic philosophy was in their cultural context. 00:21:50.000 --> 00:22:04.000 When you look at, for example, Einstein's photoelectric theory, at the time that Einstein thought of 00:22:04.000 --> 00:22:14.000 the necessity to quantize light to explain the way a certain frequency of light rather than intensity 00:22:14.000 --> 00:22:20.000 is needed to liberate electrons, at the time he thought that, 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:28.000 he was absolutely and simply mistaken about the electronic nature of matter. 00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:37.000 Twenty or thirty years later, he learned otherwise, but at that time he subscribed to the idea that 00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:48.000 matter is an assemblage of atomic particles, each one of which is electrically discreet 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:55.000 and that there is no electrical blurring across the substance. 00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:02.000 When Michael Polanyi, in 1915, coming from Hungary, 00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:16.000 presented in Berlin a description of his work in absorption of gases onto solid surfaces under pressure, 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:22.000 Einstein was one of the people at the meeting that said, "Sorry, that isn't possible. 00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:31.000 You're thinking in some kind of primitive Hungarian way, but here in Germany we know that 00:23:31.000 --> 00:23:42.000 electrons are discreetly attached to atoms and you don't get these things smearing out through space." 00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:52.000 And it was that kind of thinking that was background to the quantized physics that took over the world, 00:23:52.000 --> 00:24:02.000 and Einstein, who was very instrumental in it, was simply mistaken about how matter works. 00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:06.000 I see. So even great minds can go astray. 00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:11.000 Did he try to call it back when he realized his error? 00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:26.000 Yeah, it was about 1930 or so when the absorption people, they never admitted that Polanyi was right, 00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:37.000 but they started creating alternative ways to explain the experimental evidence that he had demonstrated. 00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:45.000 So Polanyi's evidence was vindicated, but they told a different story about how it worked, 00:24:45.000 --> 00:25:00.000 and from about that time on, Einstein began saying he couldn't really accept the whole quantum approach to physical reality. 00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:09.000 I see. We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat, who's a physiologist, and Eugene Weirgon, a science historian, 00:25:09.000 --> 00:25:20.000 and it sounds like that's an example of how dogma gets legs of its own and walks off from even the people who originated the ideas. 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:27.000 And we're also talking about learning and how it works best if it's self-organizing. 00:25:27.000 --> 00:25:34.000 And Carl Rogers was postulating that that's an essential trait of everything in nature, 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:43.000 that things tend to be self-organizing and they tend to try to live up to their fullest potential. 00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:58.000 Well, it's in the biological idea of what a cell and an organism is where you see the greatest, 00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:10.000 the clearest demonstration of that principle in sociology and therapy and so on. 00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:25.000 People think those aren't really very scientific anyway, and in physics the dogma is so strong that there's no possibility really to talk sensibly to the believers. 00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:42.000 But in biology there has been such a huge amount of data accumulated showing that things are open and flexible 00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:55.000 and that trying to explain them in terms of these quantized eternal parts just doesn't work. 00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:03.000 But that's where molecular biology and the dominant theory of genetics came from, 00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:21.000 a belief in an otherworldly nature of the gene, that what they were doing was agreeing with the theological rejection of evolution. 00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:36.000 And Mendel was a monk who gained his own professional standing by seeming to have disproved evolution 00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:43.000 by showing that traits are eternal even though the organism seemed to change. 00:27:43.000 --> 00:27:49.000 He showed that they're only changing their appearance, but their essential nature is timeless. 00:27:49.000 --> 00:28:00.000 So the church people liked Mendel's work, but then English biologists found it and took it up again for the same reason, 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:07.000 that they hated some of the things that Darwin said which agreed with Lamarck, 00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:13.000 which was that organisms can be changed by their experience. 00:28:13.000 --> 00:28:27.000 And that has racial overtones. If you say that working class people can radically change their nature and become philosophers, 00:28:27.000 --> 00:28:35.000 that messes with the whole authoritarian social system. 00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:48.000 And so the English ruling class biologists loved the Mendelian approach because it said Darwin and Lamarck 00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:55.000 were both profoundly mistaken about how evolution worked. 00:28:55.000 --> 00:29:00.000 That's fascinating. So really genetics just grew out of a way, 00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:06.000 scientists found a way to appease the church who didn't like the idea of evolution, 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:11.000 but genes represented something eternal that God could create. 00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:18.000 Yeah, one of the things in the 50s that made me think American biology was ridiculous 00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:28.000 was that they believed that genes would specify everything, including the way we thought 00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:37.000 and the way each synapse, every nerve cell was supposed to be genetically determined as to location 00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:42.000 and the way it synapsed with other nerves. 00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:51.000 And someone calculated how impossible, when they realized how many brain cells there were, 00:29:51.000 --> 00:30:03.000 people started rethinking that and said it wouldn't be possible to have enough genes in a cell to specify how it works. 00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:17.000 And as the genetic people learned more about DNA, it turned out that the great bulk of the DNA isn't there for genetic purposes. 00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:28.000 The genes that make up a person or a yeast are a very small part of the DNA that's present. 00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:36.000 Our DNA isn't very different from that of a monkey or a yeast cell, 00:30:36.000 --> 00:30:41.000 but something is very different in our reality. 00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:48.000 It sounds like it's not just a prejudice among educators and other therapists against the self-ordering idea, 00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:53.000 but that it goes across all the professional trades. 00:30:53.000 --> 00:31:00.000 Yeah, I happen to be teaching a linguistics course in the 60s, 00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:12.000 and just about the time that Noam Chomsky was coming out against the Vietnam War, 00:31:12.000 --> 00:31:23.000 I had been pointing out how there was absolutely no evidence in Chomsky's type of linguistics. 00:31:23.000 --> 00:31:27.000 He totally ignored evidence. 00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:38.000 He used an absolutely idealistic doctrine, saying that we have genes that specify the way we talk. 00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:48.000 And there's almost no difference in Chomsky's idealistic genetic idea of language 00:31:48.000 --> 00:31:55.000 and Conrad Lorenz's genetic explanation for all behavior, 00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:07.000 which Conrad Lorenz designed specifically for Hitler to justify racial extermination. 00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:11.000 Chomsky wouldn't like that comparison, 00:32:11.000 --> 00:32:19.000 but in fact they're both committed to ignoring the actual evidence 00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:25.000 and believing that genes explain everything. 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.000 I'm not sure where Chomsky's motive came from, 00:32:29.000 --> 00:32:38.000 but Lorenz's was obviously to say that society is constituted the way it should be, 00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:44.000 except for the mongrels with the bad genetic traits, 00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:55.000 such as liking jazz music and things that were culturally unpopular and should be exterminated. 00:32:55.000 --> 00:33:02.000 I must admit I'm a little confused because I hear the dogmatists saying that 00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:06.000 everything is laid out and determined by genes, 00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:11.000 and yet they also, which seems like something that's completely set in stone, 00:33:11.000 --> 00:33:15.000 and yet they're also proposing things like chaos theory. 00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:29.000 Yeah, that was the idea of randomness goes way back into the 19th century. 00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:34.000 It was sort of a compromise. 00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:39.000 That if anything changes, it changes only randomly. 00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:51.000 And so when Muller started showing that he could mutate fruit flies with x-rays, 00:33:51.000 --> 00:33:58.000 the change was seen to deteriorate almost always. 00:33:58.000 --> 00:34:02.000 Any mutation made the animals defective. 00:34:02.000 --> 00:34:07.000 And that was because change is random. 00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:14.000 And so if you're going to have change, it can't be meaningful. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:20.000 You can't say that if you feed poor people that they will have healthier babies 00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:22.000 who will be more intelligent, 00:34:22.000 --> 00:34:31.000 because that would say that you have a directional change being caused by the environment. 00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:41.000 The whole point of genetics is to say environment can't change the reality of the organism. 00:34:41.000 --> 00:34:46.000 And if you change it, it's only going to make it worse. 00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:53.000 So don't bother trying to improve the traits of a population. 00:34:53.000 --> 00:34:58.000 I see. So it really is political, not only a theological response, 00:34:58.000 --> 00:35:01.000 but a political response. 00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:11.000 Yeah, I think the doctrine of randomness led into this loving of chaos theory. 00:35:11.000 --> 00:35:18.000 You said that neo-Kantian philosophy has dominated U.S. universities for more than a century. 00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:24.000 And it argues that our senses are limited, so we can't really know the world. 00:35:24.000 --> 00:35:27.000 Does that tie into that? 00:35:27.000 --> 00:35:32.000 Yeah, our senses are determined by our genes. 00:35:32.000 --> 00:35:40.000 And even for the Chomsky point of view, and a lot of the biologists, 00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:48.000 even our thought and behaviors are determined by our genes. 00:35:48.000 --> 00:35:53.000 You were talking about Chomsky, and he's famous for theorizing about languages. 00:35:53.000 --> 00:35:58.000 How do languages fit into how we learn? 00:35:58.000 --> 00:36:07.000 Chomsky says that we really don't learn our language in the structural sense that we're born with it. 00:36:07.000 --> 00:36:20.000 All we do is learn some of the minor details of vocabulary and pronunciation and such from our culture. 00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:37.000 The neo-Kantians at the extreme say that our perceptions are shaped by our genes. 00:36:37.000 --> 00:36:44.000 Many of them revive the Leibnizian idea of monads, 00:36:44.000 --> 00:36:51.000 that all of our knowledge and experience is in our genes, 00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:58.000 and so we aren't really experiencing anything. 00:36:58.000 --> 00:37:09.000 George Wald, who was a famous professor who investigated vision, 00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:19.000 he explained that color vision is based on the difference of frequencies rather than an absolute color. 00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:30.000 And he, by testing people who had had their lens removed from their eyes because of cataract, 00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:38.000 he found that they could see patterns in ultraviolet light the same way bees can. 00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:43.000 And that's one of the favorite examples of the neo-Kantians, 00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:48.000 that we are determined to see the world in a certain way. 00:37:48.000 --> 00:37:56.000 For example, bees see a pattern in flowers reflecting ultraviolet light that humans don't see. 00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:04.000 But when the thick lens is removed from the eye, the ultraviolet light gets to our retina, 00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:08.000 and humans can see it. 00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:14.000 So it's just a matter of the intensity of stimulus and such that makes the difference 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:19.000 between what a bee sees and what a human sees. 00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:26.000 And very similar things apply to how we think about the senses. 00:38:26.000 --> 00:38:37.000 Some people say that bees and birds and other animals, each has its genetically programmed way of thinking 00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:47.000 about what it experiences, and so we can never really know what a bee or an ant is thinking 00:38:47.000 --> 00:38:52.000 because they are only following genetic rules. 00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:02.000 But people who really are willing to look at the animals in their natural setting, 00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:08.000 and in other words, who are studying them in an intelligent way, 00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:15.000 see that the bees and the ants are solving problems, unique, original problems 00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:24.000 that have never happened before in a manner that rivals human thinking. 00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:36.000 For example, given a setup of instructions and arrangements in space, 00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:46.000 ants were able to learn and transmit information as competently as trained air traffic controllers 00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:53.000 in discretely defined informational situations. 00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:04.000 There are lots of demonstrations that show that animal thinking isn't genetically determined 00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:13.000 and unconscious, but behaves almost identically to the way human thinking works, 00:40:13.000 --> 00:40:19.000 perceiving the situation, analyzing it, and communicating it. 00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:24.000 I've never understood why we separated ourselves from the animals to begin with, 00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:27.000 because it just seems like another form of elitism. 00:40:27.000 --> 00:40:37.000 It's obvious that we're very related to all the other beings on this earth, especially mammals. 00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:45.000 It seemed like some insecure elitism that drove us to put us on a pedestal. 00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:53.000 Yeah, just a few decades ago, some of the most famous professors in the country 00:40:53.000 --> 00:41:01.000 were saying that there are subhumans and real humans, 00:41:01.000 --> 00:41:05.000 and that working class people are genetically inferior, 00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:17.000 and that with an improved society, there won't be any exceptions to the stratification, 00:41:17.000 --> 00:41:24.000 and so that working class people will all go to the bottom genetically, 00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:31.000 and that the talented people will all rise to the top, 00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:40.000 that people will never change status once the society sorts things out, 00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:47.000 so that poor people will never try to get a college education. 00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:50.000 So it's kind of like the old European world attitude, 00:41:50.000 --> 00:42:00.000 where people are relegated into their careers at a very young age by how they test in schools. 00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:09.000 Yeah, wasn't the bell curve co-authored by Herrnstein and Murray? 00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:18.000 Yeah, Herrstein was a famous Harvard professor who said that we needed a proper meritocracy, 00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:28.000 where there wasn't the confusion of trying to educate working class people. 00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:32.000 Yeah, well it sounds like the same system that you were teaching in, 00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:37.000 where they wanted to eliminate a certain number of the students from the student body by the time the course was done. 00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:42.000 So it's more of a filter than an education device. 00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:49.000 Ray, I was wondering if you could address some of the other aspects of the article you recently wrote, 00:42:49.000 --> 00:42:53.000 the newsletter, How Do You Know? Students, Patients, and Discovery. 00:42:53.000 --> 00:43:02.000 You talked about Alfred Korzybski, I believe, and also Paolo Freire, 00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:08.000 both pointing out the use of language and the use of abstractions in education, 00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:12.000 and how that's a help and a hindrance. 00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:21.000 Yeah, Paolo Freire was a person who had an empirical view of reality, 00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:30.000 and that when people realized that they could define the words of their language, 00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:43.000 it caused them to start thinking rather than simply accepting what their betters wanted to impose on them. 00:43:43.000 --> 00:43:56.000 So he asked people to choose a vocabulary that they wanted to investigate and to define the terms themselves, 00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:05.000 and then to test their definitions, and a true empirical approach to reality. 00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:21.000 And Korzybski pretty much got stuck in the idea that there were gradients of concreteness and generality, 00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:30.000 and that truth involved getting down to the specific concrete fact. 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:45.000 And he was basically an enemy of the idea that there could be a critical approach on the general level, 00:44:45.000 --> 00:45:01.000 and that general perceptions and concepts were ultimately just as valid as concrete naming of individual situations. 00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:07.000 He wanted the proper scientific language. 00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:21.000 He wanted it to have a coefficient or diacritical mark indicating the particular individual and the particular time you're referring to, 00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:28.000 and implying that generalities were always farther from reality. 00:45:28.000 --> 00:45:44.000 If you realize that all of the facts are, whether you're talking about an atom, here and now, an organism, or a process, 00:45:44.000 --> 00:45:49.000 we're talking about patterns of experience. 00:45:49.000 --> 00:46:00.000 And if a person doesn't look for a pattern on the scale of generality, naturally they're not going to find it. 00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:08.000 And it's the same thing as assuming that everything an ant does is stupid. 00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:18.000 Like the famous E.O. Wilson, I think his name is, who has written famous books on ants, 00:46:18.000 --> 00:46:26.000 basically believes ants are stupid, but it's simply because he investigated them in stupid ways 00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:32.000 that failed to look at their unique response to unique circumstances. 00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:41.000 So if a person doesn't look for a general phenomenon, naturally they're not going to find it. 00:46:41.000 --> 00:46:56.000 But if you look with scale for general behavior, then you're going to see things that are maybe of maximum importance. 00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:06.000 For example, when people are studying cancer, the genetic people don't look for field phenomena, 00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:09.000 and so they can't see them. 00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:18.000 But whenever someone looks for such a thing as a cancer field, they see that it's there. 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:28.000 For example, the definitive cancer cells are surrounded by a field of precancerous cells, 00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:35.000 and it fades off into simply inflamed or stressed cells. 00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:41.000 And without seeing the field phenomenon in any process, 00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:49.000 you're going to get stuck with a reductionist jumble of the meaningless particles. 00:47:49.000 --> 00:48:02.000 And the government has some amazing giant computers that they stuff with the observations of what enzymes and genes 00:48:02.000 --> 00:48:09.000 and signal substances are doing, and think that they'll come up with something. 00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:16.000 But they're failing to simply look intelligently at the field behavior 00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:22.000 or the way the thing is functioning as a whole through time and space. 00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:31.000 And that's sort of the difference between the way von Bergelandsee looked at systems theory 00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:43.000 and the way P.K. Anokin derived his more cybernetic kind of approach to systems thinking. 00:48:43.000 --> 00:48:50.000 You said Anokin came up with the concept of feedback, something we all use today. 00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:59.000 Yeah, it came in English. It became popularized by Norbert Wiener. 00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:07.000 But all of the concepts were developed about 15 years before that by P.K. Anokin, 00:49:07.000 --> 00:49:11.000 who was one of Pavlov's colleagues. 00:49:11.000 --> 00:49:23.000 Anokin saw that it was what was able to explain the development of an embryo meaningfully 00:49:23.000 --> 00:49:30.000 instead of the embryo being guided blindly by genetic reactions. 00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:40.000 Each of the cells and systems was responding to the situation it found itself in at any moment 00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:49.000 and adjusting itself, changing its metabolism and restructuring itself. 00:49:49.000 --> 00:49:57.000 Every time the situation changed, the particles changed to suit the situation. 00:49:57.000 --> 00:50:07.000 The genetic theory has this infinitely complex idea that all of these constantly changing 00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:14.000 developmental processes have to be spelled out in the genes somehow and somehow read 00:50:14.000 --> 00:50:22.000 at the proper time. It's just impossible when you try to guide it like clockwork from the inside. 00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:29.000 But when it's a matter of responsiveness to the presently perceived situation, 00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:32.000 it will explain how an embryo develops. 00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:46.000 And Anokin then applied it for many years to all of the aspects of learning, brain development, 00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:52.000 and physiology in general. 00:50:52.000 --> 00:50:55.000 We're running out of time, so we should probably sum up. 00:50:55.000 --> 00:51:01.000 But my interest was piqued by one thing you wrote, which was that Anokin found principles 00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:06.000 that would explain the origin of organs and their functions, and that would also apply 00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:08.000 to the interactions between individuals. 00:51:08.000 --> 00:51:13.000 So he saw the micro and the macro principles of self-organizing. 00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:17.000 Some of his books are available in English. 00:51:17.000 --> 00:51:24.000 One of the interesting things about his understanding of brain function was that 00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:34.000 he argued that it's impossible to explain the basic processes of hearing and seeing 00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:45.000 and learning in terms of an on or off, all or none function of nerve communication. 00:51:45.000 --> 00:51:55.000 He said that each nerve basically has an intelligent awareness of what's happening, 00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:58.000 much more than just being a switch that goes on and off. 00:51:58.000 --> 00:52:07.000 He said that each nerve is receiving complex signals from its extremity to its center 00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:15.000 and adjusting the way the developing organism does at other levels. 00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:22.000 So everything is self-organizing from the whole right down to the cells. 00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:23.000 Yeah. 00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:30.000 And one of my professors of biochemistry, Sidney Bernhard, I took reading and conference 00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:37.000 courses from him where I would bring him a book by Albert Szent-Györgyi, for example, 00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:42.000 and he would read it and say, "Not scientific enough." 00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:46.000 And he would suggest I read something. 00:52:46.000 --> 00:52:53.000 And he was a very bright but very skeptical person. 00:52:53.000 --> 00:53:05.000 He published a series of papers showing that all of the basic assumptions of biochemistry, 00:53:05.000 --> 00:53:15.000 which the idea is that you squash up a cell, float the enzymes in a solution of water and salt, 00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:24.000 and that by diffusion the particles will meet the enzyme and react and so on. 00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:37.000 He showed that in the glycolytical metabolism in which glucose enters and lactate or pyruvate 00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:47.000 or carbon dioxide comes out, he showed that the enzymes outnumber the substrate molecules 00:53:47.000 --> 00:53:58.000 and the reaction involves one enzyme handing off the product of its reaction to the next enzyme. 00:53:58.000 --> 00:54:07.000 So it isn't a random diffusion of material through water randomly finding an enzyme, 00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:16.000 but it's a totally organized enzyme-to-enzyme handoff of the material that they're working on. 00:54:16.000 --> 00:54:23.000 And he did that simply by counting molecules, which anyone could have done, 00:54:23.000 --> 00:54:33.000 but they were so committed to the idea of randomness in a watery solution 00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:38.000 that they totally missed the point of what's happening in the cell. 00:54:38.000 --> 00:54:41.000 We have a number of questions that have come in by email. 00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:44.000 Two of them are pretty similar. 00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:49.000 One is, "What would you recommend to a young person who wants to study biology?" 00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:51.000 He has a degree in English. 00:54:51.000 --> 00:54:58.000 And the other person was wondering, "What research we can trust?" 00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:03.000 Oh, well, don't trust anything. 00:55:03.000 --> 00:55:07.000 Just read it carefully and think about what they're doing 00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:12.000 and even think about who they are and what they're trying to do. 00:55:12.000 --> 00:55:22.000 For example, I recently saw some discussion of the anti-cancer drug called Ukraine, 00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:29.000 and some English researchers offered to give it an objective test, 00:55:29.000 --> 00:55:33.000 and the producer enthusiastically agreed. 00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:37.000 But then when he learned what they were going to do, he said, 00:55:37.000 --> 00:55:42.000 "Well, no, I want an independent evaluation." 00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:47.000 And they wrote articles in Lancet saying he, the producer, 00:55:47.000 --> 00:55:51.000 was unwilling to submit it to an objective test. 00:55:51.000 --> 00:55:57.000 But when I looked at their 200 or so previous publications, 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:06.000 they were absolutely aligned with the cell toxic chemotherapy industry, 00:56:06.000 --> 00:56:19.000 and they were going to test his substance in violation of the standard research procedures 00:56:19.000 --> 00:56:23.000 for the European Union. 00:56:23.000 --> 00:56:29.000 But that got into the literature as the producer of the substance 00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:32.000 being unwilling to have an objective test, 00:56:32.000 --> 00:56:38.000 and they were the ones trying to put it through a non-objective situation. 00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:43.000 Reading about the history of the person making the claim is part of the process 00:56:43.000 --> 00:56:46.000 of finding out what they're doing, 00:56:46.000 --> 00:56:52.000 and just carefully looking at the nature of their work will, 00:56:52.000 --> 00:56:58.000 about nine times out of ten, show that they have some ulterior motive. 00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:09.000 And about where to start, probably Gilbert Ling is a good place to reorient 00:57:09.000 --> 00:57:15.000 to how the biological community works 00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:24.000 and how they have ignored Ling for almost 60 years now. 00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:30.000 And I've looked at the literature citing Ling 00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:36.000 and see that when someone misquoted, totally misstated what Ling said, 00:57:36.000 --> 00:57:42.000 his misquotation went down through about a dozen repetitions 00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:51.000 in which people claiming to have read Ling were simply quoting a misstatement about Gilbert Ling. 00:57:51.000 --> 00:58:03.000 So that one error led to deliberate misrepresentations of Gilbert Ling's work. 00:58:03.000 --> 00:58:06.000 So when you really pay attention to Gilbert Ling, 00:58:06.000 --> 00:58:14.000 what you're doing is seeing a lot of corruption in the biological community. 00:58:14.000 --> 00:58:16.000 We'll have to leave it there, Ray. We're out of time. 00:58:16.000 --> 00:58:23.000 And another person asked if you put a book out with all of your dietary recommendations laid out in one place 00:58:23.000 --> 00:58:28.000 so people could gain a clearer understanding of what to eat and what not to eat. 00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:32.000 No, not really. It's coming out gradually in my newsletters. 00:58:32.000 --> 00:58:35.000 Okay, and I'll give that information out right now. We're out of time. 00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:37.000 Thanks so much, Ray. 00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:39.000 If you have any questions for Politics and Science, 00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:45.000 you can direct them by email to politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:58:45.000 --> 00:58:50.000 That's politicsandscience@madriver.com. 00:58:50.000 --> 00:58:55.000 Archive shows can be found at radio4all.net. 00:58:55.000 --> 00:58:59.000 That's radio the number 4 all dot net. 00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:02.000 Politics and Science presents the viewpoints of its participants 00:59:02.000 --> 00:59:08.000 and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of any other person or organization.