Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...

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

But these differences are only apparent , not real.

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

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

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

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

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

But only if we are prepared to listen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And more than a century later, still is.

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

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

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

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

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

the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945

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

These actors can't be said to lack ambition.

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

(!!!!!!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always the OPTIMIST

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


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

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

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

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

And we're just letting it all happen.

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

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

You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think so....

Deniers: it is all about CONTROL not CLIMATE ...

Michael Marshall

No climate denier or skeptic is really claiming that Newtonian Science has no impact upon the physical world.

Newtonian Science's ability to impact the physical world , even the ability to blow it all to pieces, is never seriously denied by the deniers.

Impacting the physical world is the raison d'etre of Newtonian Science, after all.

What they violently deny is the claim that their science could ever become uncontrollable and unpredictable.

Oh, the horror , the horror !!!!!

Newtonian science, please remember, was only secondly a useful tool to better physically control our world.

First and foremost it was a mental health tool, to help some of us better control the scary demons of uncertainty, ambiguity ,mystery and imprecision that haunt the inner recesses of our unconscious.

It promised bromides of certitudes to its addicts and none were more addicted to it than the many scientists who became scientists precisely because Newtonian Science promised a way through an scary uncertain world.

Its never about climate with the deniers, its always about control --- we offend their core being when we say their entire life's work is out of control and destroying us.

They have spent their entire lives fending off the darkness of ambiguity and uncertainty with the nightlight nostrums of Newton and Dalton , and yes even Einstein .

Now in the twilight of their careers, they are terrified that our 'out-of-control' claims just might be right....

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

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

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

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

Plenty of irony in the latter pair.

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

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

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

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

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