This century's IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE : the 'denier scientists' versus the 'commensalist scientists'

Michael Marshall

I'd hate to be among all those young academic social scientists who have invested all their professional lives in studying yesteryear's battle between capitalism and socialism.

Granted, there is still lots of life left in that subject - if you are a historian or a archaeologist , studying ancient artifacts.

But the social scientists are definitely not  that - they like to be as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines.

 And socialism versus capitalism it is so yesterday.

Denier scientists versus Alarmist scientists ( aka  Commensalist scientists) is what heats up the blogosphere today -- and it is their battle that provides the life-sustaining bile that feeds the "Oldstream Media" and its columnists.

Denier scientists like to imagine themselves in white lab coats, floating about 'up there' , like quasi archangels in some sort of theological Space, above and outside our physical Universe.

(But angels without archangel-like white wings - because they deny God  - as well denying any other impediment that might cramp their style.)

Spread out below them and beyond them , like some vast petri dish, is Life - filled with 'dots'  as HARRY LIME so lovelessly described all of us, in THE THIRD MAN.

'Harry Limes in a lab coat', coolly, logically, rationally, objectively, disinterestedly, the Denier scientists take measurements and make corrective adjustments --- but somehow these events never grievously damage the petri dish and its contents.

Archangels at the Right Hand of a God that in their minds at least,  Does Not Exist .

Masters of the Universe,Sky Gods, Sun Gods, Phaeton-Men .

Fundamentally, they believe that Man could survive and indeed soar to new heights, on a planet devoid of competition from all other life - even on a planet devoid of all the materials created by life.

"Man's Mind (and Minerals) Is Enough" is the banner they march under.

But like Phaeton himself, they are trying to ride a machine they can not control and it is alternatively burning up or freezing up parts of our world.

The commensalists are down-to-earth scientists, literally and figuratively earthlings.

What on earth have they been doing, mucking about down in the dirt ?

Well, just for starters, they have discovered that most of the minerals that we can get at , in or just below the Earth's surface, were created via biological activity.

Yep, I will repeat that - most compounds and minerals came from life and either won't exist or would exist in tiny amounts without Life on Earth.

We humans have created a few unique minerals and a lot more unique compounds , but in relatively small amounts - we simply haven't been here long enough , or in large enough numbers, to do much.

We get very little in the way of totally new amounts of elements from outer space - at least over human-oriented time periods.

Nor do volcanoes really bring up new matter.

Instead almost all of the important elements are recycled back and forth endlessly - up into the sky and back into the land and water.

 Some goes on down, way down, down into the ocean bottom and then into the Earth's sub surface interior and eventually back up via volcanoes.

They do not recycle as pure elements but as bits of various compounds - and solar radiation and geological processes unite with biological activity to ceaselessly break up those compounds to make new ones, and so on and on forever.

Think of these recycling efforts as vast wheels.

But Commensality Science begs us not to think of them as vast independent wheels as the Deniers would claim.

Instead they say think of them as a couple dozen big wheels that all constantly bumping up against each other, throwing each other off kilter - usually mildly, within tolerable limits for continuing life, but sometimes - and unexpectedly - in dramatic horrific fashion.

Denier scientists are pusher scientists - they know humanity is addicted on certainty  (and they are the most addicted of all of us - that is why they became denier scientists ) and they peddle quasi-certitudes.

They are  NOT  lying when they say they think we shouldn't do anything  about our environmental crisis until we are 100% sure of the facts, all of the facts.

Because the truly scary thing about these scientists is not that they are liars (I don't believe they are) but theat they truly believe that Reality is knowable to the point of 100% certainty.

In light of 100 years of sound basic science that says it is not, that is Bad Science, Bad Faith Science.

I agree they have a problem, but I just don't think remaining as practicing (practicing on us) scientists is the best solution to that problem...

The Pleomorphic Strep versus The Mecanno Set

Readers of my various blogs probably already know the names Robert Solow and Trevor Swan.

They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.

(Sic ---- very very Sic....)

Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.

These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of  things like capital and labour and resources.

So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can,  in effect, "get along without any natural resources".

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.

He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.

I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.

That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".

When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.

There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.

They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.

That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.

Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.

An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.

Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.

Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.

This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.

Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.

But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?

All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.

This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.

But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).

Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.

He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.

But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.

His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.

Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....

Who was right?

In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.

Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."

PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.

But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .

Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????

 Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.

They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.

So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.

 As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...