What Romney forgets about the resourceful "r-selected" 47%

r-selected SURVIVORS

The best article, by far,  on Romney's "47%" remarks - and I have read over one hundred of them - is by Ezra Klein,  in gulfnews.com , working off a riff first developed by poverty researchers, Banerjee and Duflo, in their book, Poor Economics.

This article - once filtered through the language of my blog (ie once converted in SVEse) - says that the poor instinctively use cautious "grounded" science to survive, while the rich delude themselves by thinking "blue sky" science really makes sense.

The rich do not take responsibility for their basic daily lives  - instead they pay other people to look after them - but the poor do make many decisions and do take responsibility for their daily lives.

In fact, the poor must make so many tough decisions every hour of every day that they wind up so "cognitively exhausted" that they can't begin to think of future plans --- an area where the cocooned rich excel.

"My child is sick and we both work at low paying jobs - one of us stay home and lose pay to look after child - but then how to get the extra money to buy the antibiotics the child really needs to get better, when we will actually have less take-home pay this week ?"

"Money on fertilizer to improve my soil for a better crop in the Fall or spend it on food now so I can have the strength to plow what quality of soil I have now ?"

Being poor makes you resourceful and flexible, just to survive - makes you r-selected in practise.

It also makes you r-selected in philosophy : you see Reality as constantly presenting you with unexpected surprises, most of them unpleasant, so it is best to travel light and stay flexible as to what you'll must do to survive.

By contrast, the upper middle class white protestant male of the 1840s and the 1940s (and probably the 2040s as well) was totally cocooned in a support system.

The efforts of his wife and servants meet his basic physical needs .

His parents' wealth and connections along with his expensive professional education all came together with his ethnicity, religion and gender to ensure his formal and informal privileged status when it came to his chances of entering  the"gated occupational communities" like Med School or the Military Academy that were the stepping stones to success.

His take on Reality is likely to be K-selected : I am totally fit to totally fill Nature's biggest single niche : Planet Earth. The world is Man's oyster, it is my oyster : Reality is, underneath its false surface complexity, basically simple, repetitive, stable and above all, ultimately controllable by Man.

Romney told the now infamous Florida audience exactly the same Big Self-Lie that Charles Darwin told himself in his unpublished autobiography : I inherited nothing ( says son of  automobile industry CEO and governor of the world's leading automotive industry state) - anything I have, I earned it the old fashioned way.

By contrast, Darwin's most exhaustive biographer, Janet Browne, details how Darwin's doting father lavished microscopes on his child, just as toys, each which cost far more than the annual income of a working class family.

Family wealth made Darwin the excellent amateur scientist he became.

It gave him lots of time and energy for his hobby because he already had a secure daily living without work. Wealth gave him plenty of  space and equipment for his experiments as well as giving him an excellent scientific education with the scientifically powerful.

Above all, it gave him the means to control his scientific image - worldwide - from his rural sick bed ,via the new postal service system.

Again Darwin could afford to spend, just on stamps, more than what a family full of industrial workers earned all year ,working themselves to exhaustion from dawn to dusk.

The ungrateful Charles Darwin - a really nasty piece of goods - dissed his doting father in his autobiography and claimed his success all came from his own efforts.

I don't like Darwin and I don't think I like Romney - I simply don't like those who are so selfish and so self-centered that they have no insight into how they got to where they are.

Yes, both men are clever and are hard working - but their rise to the very top was also engineered by their standing on the shoulders of giants --- their parents......

As a EUGENICIST, Romney exceeds even Hitler , who never thought 47% of Germans were 'unfit'

the UNFIT vote democrat

Social Darwinism - the Ayn Rand variety - has dominated the world's headlines this week as the GOP president-in-waiting, Mitt Romney, defined his take on the world in a secret video : half of us pay federal income taxes and are the makers, Nature's 'fit'.

The other half of us pay no federal taxes and are the takers, the moochers, the dependents,the self-defined victims, Nature's 'unfit.'

Victorian 'culture wars' re-emerge into 21st century presidential election

Out in the real world, before Victorians brought in sentimental campaigns to protect children, slaves, women and animals, these 'unfit' would die a short and natural death.

But now soft-headed (Democrat) governments have kept this half of us alive artificially   --- under Romney all this would change.

But some years, perhaps even Romney fits into these 'unfit'  ---as in some years he too may have paid no taxes.

I don't know this for a fact admittably, but I am hardly alone in strongly suspecting it, if only from his most electorally costly decision: the decision NOT to reveal his past income tax returns.

But there is another view of Darwin and Herbert Spencer that doesn't throw out their baby with the bathwater: it is this that "the fittest will survive".

OOOOOOH !!! Did I say a bad thing ?

I don't think so and here is why:

'Fit' or 'fittest' : what's the difference ?

A tiny jockey doesn't seem particularly 'fit' versus a football quarterback but try to 'fit' that quarterback on the backside of a horse in a horserace and we begin to see that while the term 'fit' (and hence un-fit) is static, permanent and eternal, the term 'fittest' is highly contingent and varies from time to time and place to place.

In a world of the First Law (of thermodynamics), the fit will survive : it is stable and permanent and static.

But if the world is better described by the Second Law (of thermodynamics) and is is in constant and dynamic and chaotic change, then sometimes and somewhere , the small and the small eaters (those frequently judged unfit) will actually often do much better than the big and big eater.

Fantasy says that "God is on the side of the battalions of the biggest eaters", but the Earth's long history, grounded in ancient dead giant dinosaur bones and huge healthy present day populations of tiny bacteria, suggests otherwise.

Blue Sky fantasy or Grounded reality : no guess as to which world Mr Romney drinks the Kool-Aid in.....

If Alexander Fleming had to publish today : would systemic natural Penicillin have languished for 15 years ?

Worth more than GOLD

Most of today's biggest , most influential, most sought after scientific and medical journals demand that any article author(s) agree in advance to post all their notes and data (good and bad) online, before the journal will publish their concentrated (and usually upbeat) thesis in the article itself.

If this is done while the research project is ongoing, it is called "OPEN NOTEBOOK SCIENCE" , but some variant of it is increasing felt essential for fully credible research in highly contested areas of science. (And what area of science isn't ?)

So if Alexander Fleming's famous June 1929 article on penicillin was published today, he and his colleagues' note books would also have to have been online.

In Fleming's mind, he just had to leave in his private notebooks (aka : "massage the data") all the awkward evidence on penicillin's abject failure as a systemic.

He felt that revealing it would have diminished any serious attention being paid to penicillin's considerable - if more modest - possibilities as an antiseptic (if synthesized) and as an useful clearing agent when working with specimens of the 'flu' bacteria (sic).

Medicine's biggest ever boo-boo ?

This dismal "evidence" remained in his private notebooks and he never referred to them in his lifetime because (a) until 1943 he believed his original assumptions were still correct (b) after 1943 and until his death in 1955,  he lacked the guts to admitting he had made one of medicine's biggest ever boo-boos.

But if his notebooks had been nakedly exposed, some readers might have felt Fleming was right - his "in vitro" assumption against natural penicillin as a systemic lifesaver was fully correct.

 But some other readers might have asked, "why don't we get a definitive answer ; let's test the theory "in vivo" , in an actual patient (human or animal) ?"

Because if in 1929 some researchers had seen from Fleming's notebooks that he hadn't undertaken these vital "protection tests" and decided to make good this obvious shortfall, by 1930 penicillin might have been saving lives, not gathering dust in some British curio museum.....

Sulfa's Alexander Fleming : Paul Gelmo, winner of 1939 medical Nobel for discovery of Sulfa

Sulfa the MIRACLE drug

Alas Paul Gelmo , discoverer of Sulfa, is not likely to ever be as famous as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin and it is a mystery worth investigating to ask why not.

(And in truth Paul Gelmo did not win the 1939 Nobel in Medicine for his discovery. Gerhard Domagk, the actual winner, deserved his Nobel for sulfa about as much as Ernst Chain did his Nobel for penicillin --- which is to say "still in doubt".)

Gelmo invented cum discovered  sulfanilamide in 1908 as part of his PhD in organic chemistry, doing what Germans of his generation did best : churn out endless synthetic variants of dyes.

It had no known uses, although 11 years later it was found to have some anti-bacterial quantities by American biochemist Michael Heidelberger.

Voices off, unheard  : the cries of the dying

But Heidelberger didn't feel any moral urgency to push to have it tested clinically, to see it it might actually save lives.

(Heidelberger, a later colleague of Martin Henry Dawson , similarly declined to assist Dawson in the development of penicillin - thus missing on the ground floor action of the century's two biggest lifesavers.

Cry not for Michael - he outlived Gelmo and Dawson and died showered in laurels, apparently for never uttering an unconventional thought over his long, long life : an all around, don't-rock-the-boat, team player.)

Domagk did two things with Gelmo's sulfa , one good one bad.

The good thing is that he did what Ernst Chain did ,but which Fleming refused to do : he tested the substance at hand "in living creatures ("in vivo") despite it have failed earlier test tube tests ( "in vitro tests").

Once inside animals, surprise, surprise, it did work and it did fight off the deadliest of infections.

The bad thing he did is that he went along with his employer, I G Farben, when it delayed telling the world about this life-saving drug (the only one available at the time, mark you) for years, while it sought to invent a patentable analog of it.

Neither I G Faben or Domagk felt any moral urgency to put the drug they did have at hand on the market at once, profitably-patentable or not.

The actual dye that Domagk was originally charged with testing consisted of two separate molecules ( one of them sulfa) loosely bonded together to form a beautiful ruby-red dye---- a totally new dye and hence very patentable.

Ie potentially very profitable as a dye - but not as a drug.

This was because "in vitro", bonded together inside a test tube, the two molecule "patentable" ensemble did nothing medically.

 But once in a living body,"in vivo", the body's enzymes quickly cleaved the bonds between the two molecules and the sulfa portion - once on its own, quickly brought bacteria growth to a stop.

Sulfa could and did save tens of millions of lives.

 But as sulfa was now Public Domain (PD) 25 years after its original discovery, it would make no real money (only worldwide gratitude and acclaim) for I G Faben, and so they stalled releasing this life-saving miracle.

But as they never could find an analogue for sulfa , I G Faben finally and reluctantly released the original 2 molecule dye without telling anyone that it cleaved apart in living bodies and the active ingredient was a dirt cheap, abundant (and PD) byproduct of many dyeing operations.

Domagk-the-hero has to be forever tainted for his part in this delay.

Fleming also never tested his penicillin in a living being with a disease - he just did "in vitro" testing that told him that penicillin killed bacteria slower than it was secreted out of the body - thus to the never-one-to-waste-a-motion Fleming it seemed so useless as a systemic that it was not even worth testing "in vivo".

He felt no moral urgency in "just double checking" his hunch.

When Howard Florey - pushed hard by Chain - did finally test penicillin almost 12 years after it had been first discovered , he found it did kill artificial infections inside animals - it did work , "in vivo" !

But while he was an editor of the journal that Fleming's original 1929 article appeared in and so could have demanded Fleming do the "in vivo" tests to double check Fleming's hunch, he never did so.

That he did so only 12 years later - and this when pushed hard by Chain - hardly displays any moral urgency on his part to test this potential life-saver.

Sulfa and penicillin - successes "in vivo", failures "in vitro".

Like I G Faben , though not because it could be profitably patentable as a result, Fleming and Florey put all their priorities to see penicillin made synthetically before it was given mass distribution.

Martin Henry Dawson was all alone in believing that natural penicillin was perfectly acceptable to be mass produced and put to work right away, because people all around were dying daily without it.

Dawson thus invented a moral reason why natural penicillin should be mass produced "today - if not sooner".

It was this 'moral urgency' that Dawson alone brought to its invention, that finally led to the development of mass produced life-saving systemic penicillin.

 A moral urgency that Fleming, Florey,Heidelberger and I G Faben all so obviously lacked.....

"Little Belgium" : Floor "G" Columbia Presbyterian Hospital , Oct 16th 1940 - Feb 4th 1945

"LITTLE BELGIUM"

On October 16th 1940, the first day of registration for America's WWII Draft, Belgium was well past defending from the Boche.

Like Czechoslavia, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxenbourg and Norway, Belgium was one of many small nations of Europe that had already fallen to Nazi Germany, without America so much as putting up a squeak.

WWII was not like WWI - if the Great War had been dominated by Victoria sentimentalism - WWII was Victorian social darwinism's war : a cold, hard-faced, ruthless war.

No "poor bleeding Belgium" this time - no "poor bleeding Poland" either.

Belgium was not an area of vital political or economic interest to America and so 'sentiment be damned' : America was not about to waste money and lives defending the small and the weak on the basis of mere humanitarian sentiment : 'we're living in the Modern Age, not the Victorian Era'.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson had earlier felt much differently.

As a very young man, he abandoned his promising university career to join up the same day (October 16th 1915) that he first read in the North American newspapers that Edith Cavell had been executed for aiding the Belgians.

That meant that today marked his 25th year in Medicine, because he had initially joined up for a year in the medical corps, despite being a non-medical student.

Then, later, as first an infantryman and then as an artilleryman, he had spent most of the rest of the war in and out of hospital because he had twice been seriously wounded and won the Military Cross with Citation for bravery for his efforts while wounded.

Now, giving up his established career and family in still neutral America to get a Canadian Medical Corps desk job in England (as a middle aged/ middlingly healthy bacteriologist that was all he could hope for) didn't seem to be much in the way of help for Belgium and all the other small poor weak people being stomped upon by the Mighty and the Powerful .

Besides, the poor and the weak here at home in America were once again be stomped upon by the Mighty and Powerful of their own nation using the pending threat of war as an excuse to do so.

"We can't afford to waste scarce medical resources on Nature's 4Fs : eugenics teaches us that we need to preserve our best and that means our 1A fighting men".

So the few timid attempts at what was then called Social Medicine were halted and the money re-directed into War Medicine : research on the unique problems and diseases of fighting a modern world-wide war.

Social Medicine had its origins in the ferment around the Great Depression and the New Deal .

It combined directing more money on traditional public health measures aimed at the poorest citizens together with discussions on how best to ensure working class and middle class people had insurance against major medical emergencies.

All the powerful - from the AMA leadership on down - saw this as a giant intellectual threat to individualism and unfettered business enterprise.

The universities, then Republican Party hotbeds, led the charge against Social Medicine : and Columbia University-Presbyterian Hospital loyally signed up in the Fall of 1940 : directing its School of Medicine to put more teaching dollars into War Medicine courses without offering any new dollars to pay for it.

Guess what was hinted could be usefully cut,  to pay for the new courses ?

So the dawn of October 16th 1940 and all eyes of the media were on Columbia University's two campuses on Manhattan.

Columbia  was widely seen as a bellweather on whether American students, who had earlier talked about refusing to fight anymore wars, would obey their elders and register for the Draft.

To ensure all did, the university closed the two campuses and cancelled all classes for the day. Almost all the students and professors of young enough age, did indeed march off obediently to register before the lights and motion cameras of the newsreel crews.

(Including undergrad Jack Kerouac, who took time off from hefting big mysterious blocks of something or other for Fermi and Szilard's Atomic Pile in the basement of the Physics building.)

On October 16th 1940 and until the Actual Belgium's total liberation on February 4th 1945, Floor G became a defacto "Little Belgium"

But in Dawson's tiny team on Floor G of the Presbyterian building , no member had to go register : two (Hobby and Chaffee) were the right age and health, but as women were not valued as potential draftees.

Karl Meyer, like Dawson, was a Great War veteran but was now overage : Dawson was not only overage, his war wounds made him even more unattractive, even as a potential volunteer recruit.

The team's two patients (Aronson and Alston) were young men of the right age, so had to be registered in theory , despite being universally regarded as terminally ill.

I think that the draft officials might well have regarded it as a waste of time and needlessly cruel to register the two clearly dying boys , only to send 4F notices to their grieving parents two months later.

But I suspect Dawson would have urged the draft officials to register the two lads, because he believed that hope - along with his untried penicillin - was the best possible cure for their "invariably fatal" SBE.

"Register the boys - please - because I intend to have them up and in fighting trim in no time !"

(Those would have to be words for the boys' ears only, because no army ever knowingly took anyone with damaged heart valves , "cured" or not.)

SBEs, to be brutally frank, were the world's 4Fs of the 4Fs, probably the first victims of any rollback of Social Medicine .

To start their cure on the very day that North America's eyes were all focussed on War medicine's much touted 1As , had to be Dawson's silent rebuke to a nation and a medical community eager to overlook the poor and weak , in Poland, in Belgium and at home.

Morever, Dawson was rebuking Big Pharma's focus on the big as well, because they saw no reason to help Dawson and his foolish crusade to inject crude natural penicillin into humans.

So his medicine was not made in any huge factory by man-made techniques, but produced by billions of tiny fungus factories at the bottom of a handful of flasks in Dawson's own lab.

Verily, the weak and the foolish would have to come to the aid of the small and the weak, if the Mighty and the Wise were unwilling.

So it was on Day One of the start of the Age of Antibiotics.

And as Dawson abruptly lifted the needle into the air before sinking it gently along the skin of the boys' arm, the Italian in us might have seen it as a medical "up yours !".

And looking back from almost 75 years later, would we be so wrong.....

Thermodynamics laws for laypeople (the Entropy of War)

First Law : Fool's GOLD !

I am frequently called upon to explain the two main laws of thermodynamics that are my two lead characters in SVE and I generally try to explain them in a pared down sort of way.

 I begin by saying that the First law deals exclusively with the quantity of mass and energy in the universe : that quantity can never get bigger or smaller --- it can merely change its state ( ie character).

By contrast, the Second law deals exclusively in quality not quantity : it says that the quality (ie the character) of mass and energy becomes steadily less useful (to K-selected creatures like humans) as parts of it become more and more widely dispersed.

"Useful" for giant K-selected beings like humanity, is really code for "concentrated" : being giant in size and hunger and few in number, one molecule of sucrose every few miles along a trail won't keep us alive.

(Thus the concept of "lack of physical concentration as an biological limiting factor" is anathema to classical economists ,who have bathed exclusively in the Kool-aid of the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Tell us, about ALL the gold in seawater...

Glad you asked, because 'Gold molecules in seawater 'is the classic 'dividing' example.

 People of the First law always proudly *deny* that we can be running out of gold - 'gosh, the amount in the oceans alone will last us folks for, oh say, billions of years at least.'

True, predictably sigh the folks of the Second law sardonically : only too true - if we but had the trillions of trillions in dollars needed to recover those molecules of gold scattered ocean wide!

But bacteria, being widely dispersed themselves (and thus being the ultimate in r-selected lifeforms) can profitably recover those widely dispersed gold molecules : they may only need a few dozen atoms of gold to make enough copies of a vital enzyme to survive and reproduce.

We humans demonstrate the superiority of the fundamental second law to the  derived first law every time we go to war.

The embodied energy in the artillery shell and gunpowder used to propel it along and blow it up, along with the embodied energy in the building it destroys , will never cease to exist as a quantity.

But as a quality, we can never usefully use them ever again : the energy has gone off to heat up the air and ultimately the Universe.

And the tiny fragments of shell body? They are now widely scattered and rusting in the soil. The building fragments have been used as rubble to fill holes in the ground.

That ,my friends, is a very uniquely human form of entropy : a wide - and useless - dispersing of once-usefully concentrated energy and matter.....

K-selection dominates history, First Law of Thermodynamics claims

Triumph of the K-selected ?

Nothing buttressed Victorian England's famous optimism and self-confidence more than that the fact that they understood the First Law of Thermodynamics far too well (and didn't understand or accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all !)

That First Law implies just one thing : that Reality is, on the whole and in the long term, simple, predictable and stable.

In other words, Reality is generally at or approaching Equilibrium.

In such conditions it seemed only natural that "the K-selected of all the K-selected", Man, would totally dominate "the niche of all niches",the Universe, a niche so vast that growth and expansion of man's domain was effectively infinite.

The K or the r : who has dominated history ?

Victorians didn't use the term "K-selected" but they knew, used and believed in the concept.

Bigger is better, might is right, law of the jungle, God is on the side of the bigger battalions.

 Never ending -ever upward - progress of ever bigger and more complex beings.

Bigger cities, bigger empires, bigger companies, bigger profits : ever onward and upwards : a tumour with "room to grow" (as if cancer chose to mate with Ontario premier Bill Davis).

But some Victorians - more sentimentalists than social darwinians, chose (consciously or unconsciously) to focus on the more fundamental of the two laws of thermodynamics : the Second Law.

And it portrayed a Universe of constant, but uncertain, change : progress yes, but downwards.

A niche that steadily was getting smaller over time, with beings constantly forced to adjust to less and less incoming "useful" resources of matter and energy.

Who was right ?

Have K-selected giants dominated the world's history of life over the last 4 billion years ?

Or have tiny nimble r-selected survivors successfully endured whatever reality has thrown at them , for the last 4 billion years ?

Dinosaurs or bacteria : who has been around the longest, dominated more habitats, had more individual unique members, had the greater biomass .

The K or the r ?

Put it like that to the libertarian think tanks of Washington and even they, they of the intellect a mile wide and an inch deep, even they squirm in embarrassed silence ....