Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....

SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...

Michael Marshall

My last blog, contrasting NORDEN MODERNITY to GEOSMIN COMMENSALITY was very long - and longwinded.

Maybe I can be more succinct.

Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.

Heavy stuff !

One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.

Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied  4F civilians.

The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.

(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of  Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)

But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' :  call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.

All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.

(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)

Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.

The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics,  was just a start on this bold vision.

Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.

In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.

Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.

Down into the earth, actually.

 This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.

So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.

 These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.

All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.

But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.

His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.

Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.

 But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.

But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.

Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better,  much cheaper and much much more plentiful.

A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.

Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.

It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.

Great !

Or was it ?

Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.

Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.

So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.

Now that seriously looked the business !

But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.

(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)

So A-bombs and Penicillin:  two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?

And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????

NORDEN Modernity versus GEOSMIN Commensality

Michael Marshall

Do you remember the most famous scene in THE THIRD MAN movie?

(It is usually on somebody's top ten films of all time list.)

The villain HARRY LIME ,standing in for the Devil , takes the naive narrator HOLLY MARTINS to the top of Vienna's famous Ferris Wheel.

 Lime tells Martins that from this height, all the people in the world look ant-sized and that's all they're worth - ants to be crushed.

 'So Martins, why get all upset about a few kiddies dying from my adulterated penicillin --- just look the other way and go with the flow.'

(Harry Lime's diluted penicillin fails to save children with MENINGITIS whose lives could have been readily saved  - but only if enough Penicillin "G" is injected into them right away.

The fact that Pfizer chief "John L"  Smith's daughter had earlier died of meningitis that Martin Henry Dawson said his naturally grown penicillin could have cured, was probably the number one,two and three reasons we got WWII penicillin before D-Day ---- and not two years later.)

But in the movie, Martins, rather like Jesus, doesn't accept the 'high level' bribe and later on sets up Lime for his doom.

I often think of Harry Lime whenever I think of the men peering into the NORDEN BOMBSIGHT in some Allied bomber, coolly preparing to exact collective punishment on some enemy or occupied civilian population from 15,000 feet.

At that height, people aren't even ant-sized - they are bacteria or fungi sized - invisible.

Japanese microbes at Hiroshima.

When these people burn to death from your bombs, you don't hear their screams or smell their burning flesh.

Murder - Pierre-Simon Laplace style - from a remote outsider/ observer's position, coolly peering through the glass before pushing the button.

Like the way they did it as Auschwitz as well.

The overmen killing off the undermen , like ants under one's feet.

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON had his war too, but it was not a few hours spent at 15,000 feet above the ground --- he lived it from a position 5 feet below the ground, for months at a time - in a WWI trench.

Here the always present smell of the Earth was mixed with the smell of dead men and dead horses, feces and old mustard 'gas' .

You couldn't help hearing men from the raiding parties scream out their last on the barbed wire of No Man's Land or avoid seeing conrade's headless bodies still upright beside you - while their heads flew off to serve as a projectile to kill some other poor sod.

Here you saw Nature close up and raw - sunrise creeping up, sunset going down - rain, wind, midday heat - all the elements of the weather chilled your bones and soaked your clothes.

The most famous artwork from that war was a humble cartoon - it has two Tommies in a crude foxhole, trying to survive an intense bombardment.

One guy isn't happy about their chances in that particular hole - but the other says in effect, look around, shells exploding everywhere above ground - yes we're like rats in a hole in the earth, but its secure from all but a direct hit so, "if you know a better 'ole - go to it !"

We're like that today - we're stuck here on a crumbling Earth and some guy has the bright idea that life would be better if NASA flew all of us off to Mars or something.

I hope I speak for you when I say, "go ahead sonny - if you think you know a better 'ole, then go to it - I am staying here and muddling through".

I can smell the Earth and I like it - and its all we've got.

Commensality in the Trenches ????

It multiplied in the trenches - your mates - and the rats - were as close as girlfriends back home - and body lice were so plentiful that they literally changed the color of your skin by their massed presence there.

And above all you could smell your ever present commensal companions, the fungi and bacteria, in the soil all around you.

You know that smell of freshly turned soil we sometimes smell after a rain ?

 We also can smell it on grapes/wine or in  beets or in the flesh of catfish.

Some love it, call it 'earthy' ; others hate it and call it 'musty/moldy'.

But all humans can smell it - at levels as few as a few parts per trillion.

For some reason it is a critical smell to our survival.

Here is maybe one reason why:

When an infantryman hugs the earth, literally, trying to survive, he knows that of all his tools for survival it is his entrenching shovel and a few feet of soil around him that is a better protector of his personal safety than his side's tanks, artillery or bombers.

He loves the smell of the soil that his shovel has freshly turned over.

That smell is called GEOSMIN : think of it as geos min ,literally meaning 'earth smell'.

It is produced, mostly, by bacteria that live together with fungus in the soil.

 They look and act a lot like fungus but aren't.

In fact the fungi probably copied them not the other way around.

We tend to lump both together and call them mold - and this is not too inaccurate - because they both do much the same thing from a lay person's point of view.

Those bacteria are the streptomyces - the soil lovers that directly produce much of the world's antibiotics - and produce most of the rest indirectly - by transferring the crucial genes to make penicillin to the penicillium fungus about 370 million years ago.

The soil fungus and the streptomyces bacteria grow by joining together as filamentous multi-celled super organisms.

Not exactly like a human multi-celled organism - these guys, particularly the bacteria, remain semi-independent in the sense that all continue to reproduce themselves by cloning.

So a trillion bacteria or fungus cells in a teaspoon each with potentially different DNA - because they are designed to be unstable genetically - producing many similar but slightly different offspring.

Even the fungus offspring don't always combine their DNA sexually like we do , instead they sometimes exchange some of their DNA with each other - horizontally - as well as with other non-fungus beings near by.

The filamentous (thread-like) nature of these soil creatures - dozens of feet of incredibly tiny threads of life in each tiny colony - allows them to find nutrients in every nook and cranny in a nutrient poor world .

The competing filamentous strands of bacteria and fungi mean they lie together in extensive,intimate, personal contact - allowing both to make the most of the very rare opportunities to exchange DNA between the seeming wide divide between the animal kingdom (fungus) and the bacteria kingdom.

(Wide if you believe Darwin and his fans - but I don't.)

Dawson worked hard at Bacterial Transformation (aka horizontal gene transfer) (aka recombinant DNA), from 1928 to 1933 at least, long before the rest of science ever did.

 But I doubt that even he knew for sure that the penicillin he worked with from 1940 to 1945 was the result of  some earlier Bacterial Transformation experiments ----done by the microbes themselves !

But he might have suspected something - he knew that Selman Waksman at nearby Rutgers University had already shown that these soil bacteria produced a lot of antibiotic materials while it was rare to see antibiotics from fungus in general - except for the fungi closest in lifestyle to the soil bacteria.

Commensality between fungus and bacteria in the soil gave us penicillin.

No, I stand corrected.

It was Dawson's openness to those moldy musty smells, from his World War One trench experiences 25 years earlier, that brought penicillin out of the trench and into the hospital ward.

I mean that not as a metaphor but as reality : penicillium and streptomyces are found in the earth, literally in the trenches.

And just as the earth once acted as a barrier to shell fragments and saved many an infantryman's life during WWI, now trench earth bacteria and fungus gave us antibiotics to again save the infantryman in WWII , if he was hit by a shell fragment.

Dawson saw the war and the world down at ground level, at the level of the MOS 745 - the bog ordinary Grunt,GI or Tommy,  not from some Olympian Height of indifference.

 And this is why he gave his life, so some bog ordinary 4F patients and 4F grunts could live....

COMMENSALITY: Two Bodied or Many-Bodied ?

Michael Marshall

Modernity, NEWTONIAN Modernity, was a simple-minded ideology, asking simple questions and expecting even simpler answers.

The NAIF philosophy of a NAIF-minded age.

Newton more or less correctly predicted the short term stability of the biggest objects in our Solar System, after they had stopped their earlier ,dangerously irregular ,behavior when the Solar System was in its youth.

He could correctly predict the future paths a single big object and a single small object would make, considering only that both attracted each other via the force of gravity.

Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon : Newtonian Science's triumph : 'Solving the Two Body Problem'.

But the really dangerous objects in the Solar System these days are those tens of thousands of various-sized irregular chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt.

Because they are so small they reflect little sunlight and so are dark and nearly invisible to even today's best human observation tools and skill sets.

All those semi-equally-sized thousands of irregularly shaped rocks tumbling about relatively near to each other leads to highly unpredictable summing of the gravity forces acting on each other, minute by minute, let alone decades in advance.

This means the asteroids' paths through space are highly erratic in normal times.

 Even worse, they can fall into a sort of avalanche-waiting-to-happen mode where a tiny unexpected twitch could send a huge high speed missile headed for Earth with the force of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of H-Bombs.

If we don't see them in time, and if we don't send up a rocket and a nuclear bomb to divert their path away from Earth, its game over civilized Humanity and maybe even game over all Life on Earth bigger than a microbe as well.

Preventing this should have been JOB ONE in the 300 plus years that Newtonian Science has been around, but it's scientific theories simply weren't up for the job.

Fair enough I say: admit it, and let someone else do the job right.

But no.

Newtonian Science was proclaimed - and taught - (is still taught) as all that a practical man needs to order his world.

A problem that Modernist Science couldn't solve wasn't explained away as 'being in God's hands', (because of course Modernity didn't believe in God.)

No, it simply wasn't talked about as all.

Newton's laws could tell us that Mars wasn't about to crash into the Earth - which none of us had thought would ever happen anyway, even before Science chimed in with its me-too-ism.

(I say 'Mars isn't about to crash into Earth' because newer computer models show a very slim chance it could happen someday if the variety of gravity forces in the entire Solar System happen to hit a not-so-sweet resonance point.)

That was Newtonism's 'triumph' and it was the hollowest triumph ever touted this since of Madison Avenue hucksterism.

Newtonian Science's failures were many (predict the weather or turbulent current flows anyone ?) but the failure to predict an asteroid killing us all while we sleep overnight has to be its biggest single failure.

The real world, outside the tenured offices and laboratories of basic science, is the home of applied science and this is where Newton hit a snag.

The Sun and the Earth have an infinite number of gravity and electromagnetic forces impacting on them, from all angles, at all
levels of energy, and varying independently minute by minute.

There is no real world 'two body problems' .

I repeat, no real world 'two body problems'- all problems  in this universe/ in this reality are many-bodied.

Admitably all those forces upon the Earth normally are tiny, even when summed in some unholy alliance, compared to the attraction the giant Sun has for the tiny Earth.

So a 'two body problem' is really like the relationship between that of parent and child, man and woman, master and slave,human host and microbe.

I hope one can begin to see the social/economic/ideological attraction for the modernist male for saying that the important problems in the physical world are all 'two body problems'.

It can neatly be carried over to all of life's problems.

And , of course, everything that happens seem to happen as seen through the larger object's eyes.

For example.

We tend to think and act as if the microbes upon us are either predators (parasites) or spongers (commensal) or at best creatures we endure because we give them lots of free food and they give us back a few vitamins (mutualists).

We are the HOSTS and they mostly unwanted guests eating at our table: its another two bodied problem, big Sun-like Host and tiny parasite-like Earth.

But in fact, we humans can only breath air, survive in a moderately stable climate and find food to live off of, because of microbes.

(My definition of microbe is all life forms too small to see with the casual naked eye --- effectively they are invisible to us.)

Remove just them, but all of them, and Humanity would start dying off in a few months and I do not see any way we could do much about it.

They have not just been on Earth for a thousand times longer than humanoids have - and a million times longer than civilized humanity has , they live everywhere --- from miles underground to high in the sky, in frozen ice and scalding hot chemical waters.

And size ?

Individually invisible, collectively they well outweigh all other life on Earth - not just humans but giant whales and giant trees as well.

They are our Host globally and we are their Host locally (on or in our individual bodies.)

But once we look with our new commensally-oriented eyes, we quickly find there are many Hosts and Guests interacting throughout the Earth's biosphere.

We could claim that "we get our oxygen through trees" (not true but partially true - we get some from them) - "we don't need microbes after they taught the trees to split water and give us oxygen".

But in fact most trees could not survive if the microbial fungi that co-exist by their roots weren't there, these two lifeforms are simultaneously Host and Guest, clinging to each other closely for continued life.

Consequences quickly multiply unexpectedly in a many-bodied commensal world: when a fungicide ends up killing the fungi on those roots and the trees start dying, for example.

But that is a problem relatively easy to avoid.

However all the various recycling of scarce nutrients that keep the earth livable and edible react with one another in complex and unpredictable ways that are well beyond our understanding let alone our controlling at the present time.

By this I mean they react sort of consistently with each other up to a point in a sort of 'varying mildly around a midpoint equilibrium' and then suddenly shift to a wholly new equilibrium point that could leave the world very different indeed.

As in puff - all human are gone.

Nothing dramatic seems to happen for a long time as we alter the ratios of the various nutrients (oxygen,nitrogen,carbon,sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, etc) flying about around us until they reach that point in an avalanche's life when the slightest breeze causes a landslide.

Mars suddenly does crash into Earth or the polar ice caps suddenly do all melt in 25 years.

We can't solve any many-bodied problem in physics with the entire global economy devoted to the computer trying to solve it.

And basic science craves exact solutions and reproducibility as basic tenets of whether something is scientific.

Unexpectedly, I totally agree with them.

Most of the 'science' successes that we humans talk about today , and most of them from the past, hasn't been pure science, but rather trial and error technology, informed massively by the near successes of pure science.

Many bodied problems - the problems of the real world, can not be solved in the exact meaning of scientists and math professors.

But we can often get in real close, coming up with a tentative, approximate, temporary solution, provided we also keep our eyes open for any signs of a sudden change possibly coming up in the near future.

We do it by trial and error, caution, openness, humility - muddling through.

Similarly with Life on Earth and its 'many bodied commensality' - we can't perfectly solve it or perfectly predict it, but we can muddle through it, with caution mixed with openness to change and humility to admitting failures....

Pierre-Simon Laplace is NOT a Commensalist

Michael Marshall

Well if I am a commensalist and you are too, just who exactly is not a commensalist ?

Well Stephen Harper is not and neither is Ricky Santorum , but you probably already guessed that.

More importantly, people like Albert Einstein, that icon of the tired old left, isn't one either.

Nor is his intellectual mentor, Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Laplace, and Einstein, thought of themselves as fully Modernist and firm advocates of the Enlightenment.

Laplace famously claimed that since he believed he already stood above and outside Nature and Reality for all practical measure, only a current lack of sufficient calculating power prevented him from perfectly predicting the present, past and future right down to the atomic level.

But both Chaos Theory (Henri Poincare) and Quantum Theory (Paul Dirac) show that if you are in anyway a participant within the system you are studying (and we finite humans are definitely within the Universe --- as even Einstein and Laplace would have readily admitted that), then even your tiniest efforts to measure it, act upon it and feedback to alter those measurements.

Thus, as with the food we eat and the air we breath , "all measuring instruments (and the beings operating them) dine at a common table" ---  that is they are embedded fully into the systems they are tryong to measure -- thus, in point of fact, they are commensalist with it.

But until someone accepts this, emotionally as well as intellectually, they do not act upon that knowledge or try to temper their hubris.

I do not believe that Einstein would have ever found it easy to accept that a small weather measurement taken in the brazilian jungle could trigger a big twister in Texas....

SMARTEST creature in the world, pound for pound: BACTERIA hands down !

Michael Marshall

No contest !

This morning, I got to wondering about the ratio of the mass of a being's genome to the mass of its body.

You know how Modernist Man is always oozing on and on about the great size of humans and dinosaurs and blue whales, compared to that of the bacteria, as proof of our greater complexity and hence, presumably, of our intelligence.

I was convinced I won't find any information on this ratio genome mass to body mass, because it won't flatter us humans at all.

I was right -- nobody seems to have asked the question.

If someone has - please feel free to correct me in spades.

(And by the by - somebody please sequence the genome of the giant blue whale and compare that mass to its body mass.)

The average bacteria weighs about 1 pico gram and its genome weighs about one thousand of a pico gram, for a ratio of about one thousand to one.

By way of contrast I should say the human genome, purely in terms of number (and hence mass) of basepairs, is about only 1000 times the size of the larger bacteria genomes.

 In addition, the genes of a bacteria make up a far greater total of  its genome than seems to be the case in that of humans, so we actually mightn't have many more genes than the bacteria does.

But the jury is still out - scientists find it hard to believe all the non-protein coding DNA inside of us humans is totally useless baggage.

Now when we weigh the human genome it weights about six pico grams and let us assume that the average human weighs about 60 kilograms (60,000 grams) (132 lbs), just for the ease of the math.

A one thousand to one ratio of genome to body mass should mean that a human genome should weigh 60 grams, not 6 pico grams.

In plain English, the human ratio ratio of genome mass to body mass is one to a trillion.

That is a ratio one billion times worse than that of the bacteria.

We humans, compared to bacteria, have big bodies but with comparatively small 'genome' brains.

Yes the organ we humans call a brain is very big, in ratio to our body weight, but the giant sulfur bacteria might considering it just another vacuole, only this time holding memories instead of sulfur.

To them, perhaps, the 'real' brain is the genome, because it allows a being to do more different things, rather than just doing a few things extraordinarily well as in the case of the human brain.

Good point - we have a K-selected genome - much more successful than the bacteria's in stable times.

Their genome, by contrast, is an r-selected genome - much more flexible than ours when times get tough and survival not success, is the key.

Think of it as the Margaret Atwood Law of Nature ( you might wanna look up her classic book called Survival to see what I mean ....)

The healthiest, most terrified Generation in history

michael marshall

If you were a child between July 1945 and October 1963, you were literally part of the "BOOM" generation.

"BOOM" as in the large loud bang made when an above-ground atomic bomb test went off somewhere and yet more fallout drifted down in your morning glass of milk.

(And studies have now confirmed that the more of that life-giving, much-advertised, fresh milk you drank in the 1950s, the better your chances become to die of cancer today.)

But we thought then, not of a slow death by cancer when we were old, but of our entire world all expiring one sunny day, whenever the West and the East chose to go CODE RED.

Terrified we were, yes - but also very healthy - thanks to all those "antibiotics-before-bacterial-resistance".

O Manhattan ! , island home of  both the manhattan project and natural penicillin, you sure have a lot to answer for....