Ancient Anatolia: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind

arkeonews  |  “Our findings change the perception, still seen in schoolbooks across the world, that settled life resulted from farming and animal husbandry,” he said at a September presentation of the site. “This shows that it begins when humans were still hunter-gatherers and that agriculture is not a cause, but the effect, of settled life.”

The region of these settlements is named “Taş Tepeler,” literally meaning Stone Hills. Covering an area of 200 kilometers from one end to the other, Taş Tepeler is an Anatolian and Upper Mesopotamian territory that hosted the earliest settled communities.

As far as we know, Taş Tepeler is the first example of sedentism and social union on earth. Sacred and secular spaces were built simultaneously at Karahantepe, where humans dwelled year-round for about 1,500 years, and no remnants of farmed vegetation have been found.

Göbekli Tepe, which was previously thought to be the only place where nomadic people came to worship, is now considered a part of simultaneous settlements. Recent work has also revealed domestic structures at Göbekli Tepe. “In this region, we encounter monumental structures for the first time in the oldest villages of the world,” Karul says.

Scientists have long assumed that the domestication of plants and animals approximately 10,000 years ago pushed people to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the increase in food production enabled them to establish complex communities and build the groundwork for civilization. However, emerging evidence that Stone Age people erected permanent buildings for spiritual, rather than technically necessary, activities are challenging the conventional wisdom that they lacked a large-scale civilization with the division of labor and common ceremonial themes.

The Neolithic era, which coincided with the end of the Ice Age, symbolizes humanity’s tremendous transition from foraging to farming.

“It will take time for the scientific community to digest and accept this game-changing research,” says Mehmet Özdoğan, the professor emeritus of archaeology at Istanbul University.

“We must now rethink what we knew—that civilization emerged from a horizontal society that began raising wheat because people were hungry—and assess this period with its multi-faceted society. The foundations for today’s civilization, from family law to inheritance to the state and bureaucracy, were all struck in the Neolithic period,” Özdoğan says.

In Taş Tepeler, which is thought to be the beginning of the process where the shelter turned into a dwelling and real villages emerged 12 thousand years ago, there are finds on humanity’s first use of pottery and the ability to carry out basic trade initiatives. The monumental structures in the region are believed to be communal spaces where people come together.

Karahantepe rises within Şanlıurfa’s interesting limestone authentic land structure. These limestone rocks are the main material of the finds.

 

Died Suddenly: Zeta Potential And Covid-19

amidwesterndoctor |   One mission of this Substack has been to bring the concept of zeta potential to the awareness of the general public as I believe it is critical for understanding many different diseases including COVID-19 and both spike protein and non-spike protein vaccine injuries. A detailed summary of the concept can be found here:

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

What Makes All Vaccines So Dangerous?

In the first part of this series, I discussed how diseases frequently emerge that before long affect many people, and how in many cases conventional medicine cannot acknowledge what happened. Instead, these diseases will often be labeled as “syndromes…

When a substance is mixed in water, it has three options, not mix with it (typically either floating to the top or settling to the bottom), dissolve like salt, or form a colloidal suspension. Stable colloidal suspensions are typically finely dispersed microparticles and as that stability is lost, the particles clump together in larger and larger agglomerations which eventually will separate out from the surrounding water.

The colloidal stability of biological solutions however is mostly overlooked in modern physiology (other systems like Chinese medicine through blood stasis hold a greater focus to it). When the colloidal stability of a living organism is sufficiently impaired, severe diseases, such as those created by blood cells clumping together and impairing circulatory function can occur (similarly early researchers showed malaria causes death by creating severe blood clumping in the largest blood vessels, something Pierre Kory has also observed occurs in critically ill patients via IVC ultrasound immediately preceding their deaths).

A key factor that determines if colloidal solutions clump together or remain dispersed is the balance of electrical charges present (positive charges agglomerate, negative charges disperse). Zeta potential provides a way to model this immensely complex balance and explains why tiny amounts of positive ions with high charge densities (e.g. aluminum) are capable of agglomerating colloidal suspensions (e.g. sewage or blood), and why microstrokes often follow injections of these substances (similarly, poor zeta potential increases the viscosity of the blood, and when it is improved, a variety of cardiovascular or circulatory disorders also improved).

When COVID-19 started, I realize that many of the unusual symptoms reported by colleagues were identical to what I would have associated with an agent severely impairing the zeta potential of the body as so many different fluid circulations appeared to be impaired or showing signs of agglomeration (e.g. the frequent blood clots). After some research, I concluded the spike protein had the most likely electrical composition to account for these facts, at which point I became extremely apprehensive over vaccine designs which mass produced spike protein within the body (much of what is now known about the spike protein’s toxicity was not known then).

In Fleming’s previously mentioned presentation which discussed the prion domain within the vaccine spike protein, he also provided one of the best examples I have seen of how a small amount of a zeta potential reducing agent can rapidly cause blood cells to clump together. This was done by showing the immediate effects of each of the spike protein vaccines on healthy blood.

The South African researchers quoted earlier in this article likewise observed the same phenomena:

Blood incubated with spike protein showed erythrocyte agglutination, despite the very low concentration of the spike protein. An increase in platelet hyperactivation, membrane spreading, platelet-derived microparticle formation were noted due to spike protein exposure.

Further as detailed here, this clumping is also consistently seen on the blood smears of vaccinated individuals:

This rapid clumping process is most likely what causes sudden death immediately following vaccination in susceptible individuals, such as this recent example where this ardent advocate of vaccination died 7 minutes after receiving the new booster in the pharmacy.

As we circle back to Died Suddenly and the abridged version presented here, consider the scenes where the blood of these deceased individuals is shown (I am putting this video in again here so you don’t need to scroll up).

 

 

The Future Is Here Already: It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...., (Nor Will It Ever Be)

NPR  |  Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee still remembers the first cell he cultured: It was an immune cell from a mouse, and he had grown it in a petri dish. As he examined it through a microscope, the cell moved, and Mukherjee was fascinated.

"I could sense the pulse of life moving through it," he says. "You suddenly realize that you're looking at the basic, fundamental unit of life and that this blob that you're seeing under the microscope — this glimmering, refulgent blob of a cell — is the basic unit that connects us and plants and bacteria and archaea and all these other genera and taxa across the entire animal and plant kingdoms."

As an oncologist, cell biologist and hematologist, Mukherjee treats cancer patients and conducts research in cellular engineering. In his new book, The Song of the Cell, he writes about the emerging field of cell therapy and about how cellular science could one day lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, HIV, Type 1 diabetes and sickle cell anemia.

Mukherjee has a particular interest in T cells — a type of white blood cell and part of the immune system activated to fight disease. He's been treating patients in India who have certain types of cancer with genetically engineered T-cell variants, and the results have been striking: "One day the cancer's there. The next day the cancer is virtually gone, eaten up by these T cells," he says.

Siddhartha Mukherjee: Can We Reimagine Our Approach To Treating Disease?

Genetically engineered T cells, known as CAR [chimeric antigen receptor ] T cells, have become a staple in the treatment of certain kinds of leukemias, lymphomas and blood cancers. But, Mukherjee says, the cells have not yet proven effective in combatting the solid tumors, like those associated with lung and prostate cancer. His hope is that further research might change that.

"It's hard for me to convey the excitement that's sweeping through the whole field of cell biology ... the kind of headiness, giddiness, the madness, the psychic power that grips you once you get into the field," Mukherjee says.

---

Interview highlights

On using CAR-T cell therapy to treat Emily, a child with leukemia

[The treatment is] we extract the T cells from the from a patient's body. And then we use a gene therapy to basically weaponize them, to activate them and weaponize them against the cancer. We grow the T-cells in flasks in a very, very sterile chamber. And then ultimately when the cells have grown and activated, we re-infuse them into the patient's body. So it's sort of gene therapy plus cell therapy — given back to a patient.

In Emily's case, she was about 7, I think, when she was first treated. She had a complete response. She also had a very terrifying course. When the T cells get activated, they release an incredibly inflammatory cascade, sort of like, as I say in the book, it's sort of like soldiers on a rampage. And you can get so much of a rampage of T cells killing cancer that body goes berserk, it can't handle this kind of attack. Now, Emily, fortunately, was treated with a medicine to dampen down that attack so that she ultimately survived. She was the first child treated with this therapy to survive and serves an icon for this kind of therapy. ... She still is alive today and applying to colleges, I hear.

Uselessly Eating Muggles Are Using Up All Of Our Personal Fossil Fuels...,

 surplusenergyeconomics  | TIMING THE MOMENT OF FRACTURE

When and how can we know that a change of direction is fundamental and lasting, rather than a temporary departure from established trends?

That, in essence, is the call we need to make now. Far from being “transitory”, current conditions – including rising inflation, surging energy prices and the over-stressing of supply-chains – are indicators of a structural change.

Ultimately, what we’re witnessing is a forced restoration of equilibrium between a faltering real economy of goods and services and a drastically over-extended financial economy of money and credit.

This is where confidence in continuity crumbles, where the delusions of ‘growth in perpetuity’ succumb to the hard reality of resource constraint, and where ‘shocks that are no surprises’ shake the financial system.

If you want just two indicators to watch, one of these is the volumetric (rather than the financial) direction of the economy, and the other is the behaviour of the prices of essentials within the broader inflationary situation.        

The economics of stress

In the science of materials, it’s observable that fractures happen quickly, even if the stresses that cause them have accumulated over a protracted period. We can spend hours, days, weeks or even years gradually increasing the tension applied to an iron bar, but the ensuing snap in that bar will happen almost instantaneously.

Economics isn’t a science, but there’s a direct analogy here. Anyone who understands the economy as an energy system will be well aware of a relentless, long-standing build-up of stresses.

They’ll be equally aware that this cannot continue indefinitely.

Two things matter now.

First, when will these cumulative pressures bring about the moment of fracture?

Second, what should we expect to see when this snapping-point is reached?

The answers to the second question are pretty clear.

The Fraternal Order Of Police: America's Killer-Ape Alternate Reality/Legality

vanityfair |  This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”

These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

Another Example Of Government Crony Self-Dealing And Insider Profiteering

Little Man: Why Wall Street Gets A Bailout And You Don't!!!

mattstoller |  Three weeks ago, the government passed a giant multi-trillion dollar bailout. Supposedly, it was money for a host of stakeholders, including hospitals, states, Wall Street banks, big business, the unemployed, and small businesses. Today the Federal Reserve built on top of Congress’s framework, announcing yet another multi-trillion dollar set of facilities, on top of what it already put out, to help cities, states, small businesses, main street businesses, and so on and so forth. 

So what has happened so far? This is today’s change in stock price of a real estate venture run by one of largest private equity funds in the world. 

A thirty five percent jump in a day is… a lot. The reason the stock skyrocketed is because investors believe the new measures from the Federal Reserve will bailout the debt of this private equity fund. There’s a ‘monetary bazooka’ aimed at the economy. And yet there’s a puzzle. If there’s money for the entire economy, why is that normal people and small businesses can’t access unemployment insurance and lending programs? To put it another way, why is the money meant for everyone only showing up in the stock market? 

The reason is because money has to travel through institutions, and right now, the institutions for the powerful function well, and those for the rest of us are rickety and broken. So money gets to the rich first. Eventually, some money will get to the rest of us, but in the interim period before that money fully circulates, the wealthy can use their access to money to buy up physical or financial assets.

An 18th century French banker and philosopher named Richard Cantillon noticed an early version of this phenomenon in a book he wrote called ‘An Essay on Economic Theory.’ His basic theory was that who benefits when the state prints a bunch of money is based on the institutional setup of that state. In the 18th century, this meant that the closer you were to the king and the wealthy, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed. Money, in other words, is not neutral. This general observation, that money printing has distributional consequences that operate through the price system, is known as the “Cantillon Effect.”

Rape Culture: $6-10 Trillion Additional Federal Debt Taken On To Bailout Predatory Speculative Parasites

sicsempercomments |  Below is a link to the growth in the Fed's balance sheet over the past few months. You will note that the Fed began expanding its asset purchases by $500 billion in the last quarter of 2019 even before the China virus hit our shores and shutdown our economy. Credit was already leaking and the Fed which has given itself the mandate to backstop financial speculation was already delivering on the Fed put. The China virus has brought out the bazooka adding nearly $2 trillion to their balance sheet just in the last 30 days.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=qGqH

The Fed has announced several new programs in addition to the repo program it had already initiated last year for liquidity squeezed banks. One is the purchase of investment grade corporate bonds many trading close to junk. The second announced today is the purchase of junk bonds via ETFs. This allows financial investors holding these credit instruments to sell them to the Fed enabling them to essentially not take or reduce their losses. The Fed will now hold credit instruments that could default. The third is to provide dollar liquidity to foreign banks with dollar liabilities through their central banks. Essentially the Fed is now willing to buy assets no matter how dodgy with significant credit risk.

An example is the shale patch debt. Shale companies raised junk bond financing to explore and produce oil & gas. With the crushing of the oil price, much of that debt got downgraded. Investors holding that debt were sitting on significant losses. The Fed will now buy that debt from investors with an opaque pricing essentially making them whole.

This is very similar to what they did during the 2008 mortgage credit crisis when they purchased mortgage-backed securities from investors enabling them to get out from their underwater positions. At that time Bernanke said that it was emergency action to prevent the collapse of the financial system and they would reduce their balance sheet by selling all the securities they acquired when the financial system was able to stand up again. Now they're significantly higher than at the peak of the 2008 crisis.

Chamath and others like Jack are upset because if the Fed really wanted to help the actual economy they could monetize (print money to buy up) infrastructure bonds issued by the various state, and local municipalities that could run various construction projects. They could also monetize Treasury, state and municipal debt that could be used to pay all those locked down and unable to earn a paycheck. What they're doing here as they did in 2008 is to backstop speculative losses of the financial sector.

The other story is that post-2008 it became clear to large speculators that risk taking is rewarded as long as the scale was large enough. The use of debt to buyback stock to the outsized benefit of management was immense in scale. So too was the revived CLO and other structured debt product financings. The impending downgrade of much of this corporate debt to junk meant that all those securities would have to be ejected from the portfolios that could only hold investment grade. Like most pension funds and life insurance portfolios. This was a huge crisis for the massively leveraged funds.

I work at an investment advisory firm providing services to pension funds and insurance companies. The word on the street is to expect the Fed balance sheet to be expanded by $6-$10 trillion.

Unfortunately Mom & Pop businesses most hard hit by the shutdown have no ability to get a Wall St bank to underwrite a junk bond offering that could be sold to the Fed.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with this story. This is why some are getting angry.

https://prospect.org/economy/hospital-bailouts-begin-for-those-owned-by-private-equity-firms/

RIP: The Late Great Otis Rush

Counterpunch |  Otis Rush was born in 1934 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, one of the most racially mixed towns in the Delta. In Rush’s youth the population of Philadelphia was almost equally divided between whites, blacks and Choctaw Indians. As a consequence, Philadelphia was also one of the most racist towns in Mississippi, a hotbed of Klan activity and, of course, site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. In 1980, Reagan picked the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia as the locale  to give his first post-convention speech, an attack on the federal government that launched his own race-baiting “Southern Strategy.” J.L. Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Ronald Reagan shouting  that “‘the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion.’ The square came to life, the Klu (sic) Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America.”

Like many black youths in the Delta, Otis sat near the radio every day at 12:15, tuning in to KFFA, broadcast out of Helena, Arkansas, for the King Biscuit Time show, hosted by Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, Jr. For half an hour Williamson and Lockwood played live in the studio, often featuring other rising stars of the blues, such as B.B. King, James Cotton and Pinetop Perkins (who was an original member of the studio band, called the King Biscuit Entertainers.) Otis decided he wanted to be a blues player. He began playing the blues harp at the age of six and later his father rigged him a makeshift one-string guitar out of a broom handle and baling wire.

Rush’s father was a sharecropper, toiling in the parched red clay soils of eastern Mississippi. But mechanization was slowly drawing this brutal way of life to a close. In 1948, Rush’s father moved the family (there were 8 Rush children) to Chicago. At the age of 14, Otis began working 12-hour days in the stockyards. At night he played the blues with two other young stockyard workers, Mike Netton, a drummer, and “Poor Bob” Woodfork, a guitar player recently migrated up from Arkansas. The band began to get some paying gigs in some of the new clubs springing up on Roosevelt Avenue.  One night when Rush was 18, Willie Dixon walked into the Alibi club on the West Side of town. Dixon, one of the true geniuses of American music, had just left Chess Records in a bitter dispute over royalties. The great bassist and arranger had taken a job with the new Cobra Records, a small Chicago label run by a TV repairman. Dixon was enthralled by Rush’s uniquely expressive, almost tortured guitar-style and signed him on the spot.

In the studio, Dixon, the real architect of the Chicago Blues sound, assembled a small talented R&B combo to back Rush, featuring Shakey Horton on harmonica, Harold Ashby on tenor, veteran drummer Odie Payne,  Little Brother Montgomery hammering the piano and Dixon himself on stand-up bass. The first song Rush recorded was Dixon’s “I Can’t Quit You, Baby.” Dixon said he wrote the song about an obsessive relationship Rush was having with a woman at the time. Dixon wanted to provoke an emotional response from the singer and he got one. “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” opens with a chilling falsetto scream, then Rush launches into a staccato guitar attack unlike anything heard before it. Led Zeppelin (and dozens of other bands) would cover Rush’s version of the song but never capture the excrutiating fervency of the original. The recording was released in the summer of 1956 as Cobra’s first single. The song hit number 6 on the Billboard R&B charts.

Over the next two years Rush and Dixon would release eight more records, each of them dazzlingly original. The sound was aggressive and confident, like the hard-charging jump blues “Violent Love,” where Rush’s slashing guitar chords seem to be engaged in a romantic combat with the horns. Rush’s own composition, “Checking on My Baby,” is an eerie, minor key blues that sweats sexual paranoia. This is not the blues of despondency and despair, but of defiance and, at times, rage. It’s music with an edge, sharpened by the metallic sounds of urban streets, of steel mills, jail cells and rail yards.

Robert Mercer: Brainbug and Moneybag Behind the Trump Presidency

NewYorker |  In 1993, when Nick Patterson mailed Robert Mercer a job offer from Renaissance, Mercer threw it in the trash: he’d never heard of the hedge fund. At the time, Mercer was part of a team pioneering the use of computers to translate languages. I.B.M. considered the project a bit of a luxury, and didn’t see its potential, though the work laid the foundation for Google Translate and Apple’s Siri. But Mercer and his main partner, Peter Brown, found the project exciting, and had the satisfaction of showing up experts in the field, who had dismissed their statistical approach to translating languages as impractical. Instead of trying to teach a computer linguistic rules, Mercer and Brown downloaded enormous quantities of dual-language documents—including Canadian parliamentary records—and created code that analyzed the data and detected patterns, enabling predictions of probable translations. According to a former I.B.M. colleague, Mercer was obsessive, and at one point took six months off to type into a computer every entry in a Spanish-English dictionary. Sebastian Mallaby, in his 2010 book on the hedge-fund industry, “More Money Than God,” reports that Mercer’s boss at I.B.M. once jokingly called him an “automaton.”

In 2014, Mercer accepted a lifetime-achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. In a speech at the ceremony, Mercer, who grew up in New Mexico, said that he had a “jaundiced view” of government. While in college, he had worked on a military base in Albuquerque, and he had showed his superiors how to run certain computer programs a hundred times faster; instead of saving time and money, the bureaucrats ran a hundred times more equations. He concluded that the goal of government officials was “not so much to get answers as to consume the computer budget.” Mercer’s colleagues say that he views the government as arrogant and inefficient, and believes that individuals need to be self-sufficient, and should not receive aid from the state. Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for Mercer and Brown’s translation project, they secured additional funding from DARPA, the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercer’s disdain for “big government,” this funding was essential to his early success.

Meanwhile, Patterson kept asking Mercer and Brown to join Renaissance. He thought that their technique of extracting patterns from huge amounts of data could be applied to the pile of numbers generated daily by the global trade in stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. The patterns could generate predictive financial models that would give traders a decisive edge.

genes: convenient tokens of our time

ecodevoevo |  Our culture, like any culture, creates symbols to use as tokens as we go about our lives. Tokens are reassuring or explanatory symbols, and we naturally use them in the manipulations for various resources that culture is often about.  Nowadays, a central token is the gene.

Genes are proffered as the irrefutable ubiquitous cause of things, the salvation, the explanation, in ways rather similar to the way God and miracles are proffered by religion.  Genes conveniently lead to manipulation by technology, and technology sells in our industrial culture. Genes are specific rather than vague, are enumerable, can be seen as real core 'data' to explain the world.  Genes are widely used as ultimate blameworthy causes, responsible for disease which comes to be defined as what happens when genes go 'wrong'.  Being literally unseen, like angels, genes can take on an aura of pervasive power and mystery.  The incantation by scientists is that if we can only be enabled to find them we can even cure them (with CRISPR or some other promised panacea), exorcising their evil. All of this invocation of fundamental causal tokens is particulate enough to be marketable for grants and research proposals, great for publishing in journals and for news media to gawk at in wonder. Genes provide impressively mysterious tokens for scientists to promise almost to create miracles by manipulating.  Genes stand for life's Book of Truth, much as sacred texts have traditionally done and, for many, still do.

Genes provide fundamental symbolic tokens in theories of life--its essence, its evolution, of human behavior, of good and evil traits, of atoms of causation from which everything follows. They lurk in the background, responsible for all good and evil.  So in our age in human history, it is not surprising that reports of finding genes 'for' this or that have unbelievable explanatory panache.  It's not a trivial aspect of this symbolic role that people (including scientists) have to take others' word for what they claim as insights. 

genes without prominence...,

inference-review |  The cell is a complex dynamic system in which macromolecules such as DNA and the various proteins interact within a free energy flux provided by nutrients. Its phenotypes can be represented by quasi-stable attractors embedded in a multi-dimensional state space whose dimensions are defined by the activities of the cell’s constituent proteins.¹

 

This is the basis for the dynamical model of the cell.

The current molecular genetic or machine model of the cell, on the other hand, is predicated on the work of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. Mendel framed the laws of inheritance on the basis of his experimental work on pea plants. The first law states that inheritance is a discrete and not a blending process: crossing purple and white flowered varieties produces some offspring with white and some with purple flowers, but generally not intermediately colored offspring.² Mendel concluded that whatever was inherited had a material or particulate nature; it could be segregated.³

According to the machine cell model, those particles are genes or sequences of nucleobases in the genomic DNA. They constitute Mendel’s units of inheritance. Gene sequences are transcribed, via messenger RNA, to proteins, which are folded linear strings of amino acids called peptides. The interactions between proteins are responsible for phenotypic traits. This assumption relies on two general principles affirmed by Francis Crick in 1958, namely the sequence hypothesis and the central dogma.⁴ The sequence hypothesis asserts that the sequence of bases in the genomic DNA determines the sequence of amino acids in the peptide and the three-dimensional structure of the folded peptide. The central dogma states that the sequence hypothesis represents a flow of information from DNA to the proteins and rules out a flow in reverse.

In 1961, the American biologist Christian Anfinsen demonstrated that when the enzyme ribonuclease was denatured, it lost its activity, but regained it on re-naturing. Anfinsen concluded from the kinetics of re-naturation that the amino acid sequence of the peptide determined how the peptide folded.⁵ He did not cite Crick’s 1958 paper or the sequence hypothesis, although he had apparently read the first and confirmed the second.

The central dogma and the sequence hypothesis proved to be wonderful heuristic tools with which to conduct bench work in molecular biology.

The machine model recognizes cells to be highly regulated entities; genes are responsible for that regulation through gene regulatory networks (GRNs).⁶ Gene sequences provide all the information needed to build and regulate the cell.

Both a naturalist and an experimentalist, Darwin observed that breeding populations exhibit natural variations. Limited resources mean a struggle for existence. Individuals become better and better adapted to their environments. This process is responsible for both small adaptive improvements and dramatic changes. Darwin insisted evolution was, in both cases, gradual, and predicted that intermediate forms between species should be found both in the fossil record and in existing populations. Today, these ideas are part of the modern evolutionary synthesis, a term coined by Julian Huxley in 1942.⁷ Like the central dogma, it has been subject to controversy, despite its early designation as the set of principles under which all of biology is conducted.⁸

The modern synthesis, we now understand, does not explain trans-generational epigenetic inheritance, consciousness, and niche construction.⁹ It is possible that the concept of the gene and the claim that evolution depends on genetic diversity may both need to be modified or replaced.

This essay is a step towards describing biology as a science founded on the laws of physics. It is a step in the right direction.

Why does life exist?

quantamagazine |  Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

your brain is not a computer...,

aeon |  No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections.

A healthy newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions to certain stimuli that are important for its survival. It turns its head in the direction of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth. It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effectively with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their distant ancestors faced.

Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Computers, quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop – is represented by a very specific pattern of a million of these bytes (‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters that tell the computer to expect an image, not a word.

Computers, quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different physical storage areas etched into electronic components. Sometimes they also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph. The rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside the computer. Together, a set of rules is called a ‘program’ or an ‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help us do something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an ‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.

Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

Entropy and the Self-Organization of Information and Value

mdpi |  Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Rudolf Clausius, and Léon Brillouin considered certain “values” as key quantities in their descriptions of market competition, natural selection, thermodynamic processes, and information exchange, respectively. None of those values can be computed from elementary properties of the particular object they are attributed to, but rather values represent emergent, irreducible properties. In this paper, such values are jointly understood as information values in certain contexts. For this aim, structural information is distinguished from symbolic information. While the first can be associated with arbitrary physical processes or structures, the latter requires conventions which govern encoding and decoding of the symbols which form a message. As a value of energy, Clausius’ entropy is a universal measure of the structural information contained in a thermodynamic system. The structural information of a message, in contrast to its meaning, can be evaluated by Shannon’s entropy of communication. Symbolic information is found only in the realm of life, such as in animal behavior, human sociology, science, or technology, and is often cooperatively valuated by competition. Ritualization is described here as a universal scenario for the self-organization of symbols by which symbolic information emerges from structural information in the course of evolution processes. Emergent symbolic information exhibits the novel fundamental code symmetry which prevents the meaning of a message from being reducible to the physical structure of its carrier. While symbols turn arbitrary during the ritualization transition, their structures preserve information about their evolution history. 

Entropy: Special Issue "Information and Self-Organization"

mr. miracle the blueprint, the foundationstone, the embodiment of the paradigm...,

jhu |  Hustle's most revelatory chapter focuses on black churches. And it's illuminating precisely for how Spence connects the content of "prosperity gospel," a variant of evangelical Christianity, to the political imaginations of churchgoers. Rarely do academics—or journalists for that matter—look at what is presented in churches as political content, outside of how churchgoers impact elections. (For example, the emergence of the Christian right as a voting block in the 1970s.) Spence argues that what is said in church from the pulpit represents a neoliberalization of the black church.

The chapter opens with a brief discussion of two New York Times articles from the Detroit area following the 2008 economic crash that hit the automotive industry and the region hard. One, "Detroit Churches Pray for 'God's Bailout,'" was a report from the Greater Grace Temple, one of Detroit's many churches that, at the time, held special services to help its congregations through a difficult time. Spence notes that in the photo that ran with the article, three white luxury SUVs shared the stage with the church's leader, Bishop Charles H. Ellis III. The article reported that the vehicles were on loan from local dealerships and that Bishop Ellis, "urged worshipers to combat the region's woes by mixing hope with faith in God." Spence sees the vehicles as having two symbolic values. For those who worked in the automotive industry, it was a symbol of what they depended on to survive. For those who didn't work making automobiles, the SUVs were status symbols, reminders of what they could have if they would only hustle harder.

The following year, another Times reporter visited Pontiac, about 30 miles outside Detroit, to write about the automotive industry's role in creating a black middle class in that area, and how the industry's collapse was decimating those families. Titled "GM, Detroit, and the Fall of the Black Middle Class," the article told its story through a profile of Marvin Powell, a longtime autoworker, one of the 600 who still worked making trucks at General Motors' Pontiac Assembly Center. Powell worked the only shift the plant maintained after getting rid of nearly two-thirds of its workforce through buyouts, early retirement, and layoffs.

Prosperity gospel frames the problem of poor people as a problem of those who do not improve their human capital, not as something wrong with the system in which they must live.

During the reporting of the story, Powell learned that GM was planning on shutting down all of its factories for 10 weeks, which would leave him without his $900-per-week paycheck for that period. Powell said he might use the freed-up time to try and become a chef and start a catering company, adding that he had never intended to be a "GM lifer."

He attributed his positive outlook in trying circumstances to being a Greater Grace congregant, where he led a Sunday school class and was one of the church's armor bearers, an honorary position. His leadership role in Greater Grace had made him an esteemed figure at the auto plant, and his co-workers had encouraged him to run for a union leadership role. He demurred from that, but they sought him out for advice, nevertheless. What was he going to do when the plant closed? Powell told them that he couldn't control the plant's closing, so he didn't worry about it. He also said, "I tell them that God provides for his own, and I am one of his own."

That leapt out at Spence. Born and raised in Detroit as the son of a Ford autoworker, he was struck by Powell's resilience in the face of so much economic upheaval. But he was also taken aback by the way Powell conceptualized the situation. The autoworker didn't consider a union leadership position as providing him with an opportunity to fight for his and his co-workers' jobs. Instead, as Spence writes, "in Powell's opinion those who choose God will be saved from the worst of the economic crisis while those who don't, won't." Spence identifies this idea as part of the message spread by prosperity gospel, a doctrine that started in white churches in the 1950s and sprang to national attention through 1980s televangelism. It has taken strong root in black megachurches over the past two decades. Spence visited a black church in Baltimore County led by a charismatic prosperity gospel preacher who argued that everything associated with the economic crisis—debt, poverty, unemployment—was caused by a "poverty mindset." The minister reasoned that this mindset causes people to spend their money instead of saving it, causes "them to lay around when they should be hustling." And this mindset was the direct result of somebody having a bad relationship with God.

Spence writes: "Note the logic here. People are materially poor because they don't think right. Their inability to think right makes it impossible to receive God's blessings"—which can come in the form of spiritual or material reward. And the only way to right that bad personal relationship with God is for a person to change how he or she thinks—to improve their human capital through spiritual pursuits. These spiritual pursuits, it should be noted, often take the form of sermons and books that congregants can buy and workshops they can pay to attend, in addition to supporting the church by tithing.

For Spence, prosperity gospel, through prolific and celebrated pastors such as Creflo Dollar, founder of the mammoth World Changers Church International in Georgia, transforms "the Christian Bible into an economic self-help guide people can use to develop their human capital." It's a way to make questions about who lives comfortably and who lives in poverty a matter of which one spiritually deserves to do so. This notion, Spence writes, represents a neoliberalization of the black church—not only because the prosperity gospel frames the problem of poor people as a problem of those who do not improve their human capital (not as something wrong with the system in which they must live), but also in how the increasingly multi-millionaire leaders of black megachurches compete for their congregants' tithes and spiritual consumerism. Such a practice not only creates vast economic disparities between ministers and congregants—Spence notes an AtlantaBlackstar.com news website article that named eight black preachers who make more than 200 times what their churchgoers do—but it shapes parishioners' political imagination.

Fighting poverty, debt, and whatever economic adversity a congregant faces thus becomes only a spiritual matter for the individual, not the collective concern of a political organization. And getting people to see the political content in a church service is something Spence hopes readers will take away from the book. "What I want is for people to read it and see their world through new eyes," he says, adding that he hopes that by pointing out how prosperity gospel reproduces neoliberalism's disparities, readers might begin to seek other solutions to dealing with it.

There are possibilities for finding ways out of the neoliberal situation other than simply buying into the hustle, Spence says. Throughout the book, he offsets his charting of how neoliberalism seeped into black politics by citing contemporary instances of grassroots activism and political organizing to combat neoliberal advances. They may be modest, they may be temporary victories, but the examples he cites—the Urban Debate League that cultivates policy debate among city high school students; the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement that organizes communities to develop more equitable public policies; the Baltimore Algebra Project and Leaders of the Beautiful Struggle that in 2008 blocked Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's attempt to spend $108 million in taxpayer money to build a new prison to house juveniles charged as adults—actively oppose the neoliberal turn in public policies.

do you ever wonder what your anthropocene antics look like from the bacterial apex?

pnas |  In most ecosystems, microbes are the dominant consumers, commandeering much of the heterotrophic biomass circulating through food webs. Characterizing functional diversity within the microbiome, therefore, is critical to understanding ecosystem functioning, particularly in an era of global biodiversity loss. Using isotopic fingerprinting, we investigated the trophic positions of a broad diversity of heterotrophic organisms. Specifically, we examined the naturally occurring stable isotopes of nitrogen (¹⁵N:¹⁴N) within amino acids extracted from proteobacteria, actinomycetes, ascomycetes, and basidiomycetes, as well as from vertebrate and invertebrate macrofauna (crustaceans, fish, insects, and mammals). Here, we report that patterns of intertrophic ¹⁵N-discrimination were remarkably similar among bacteria, fungi, and animals, which permitted unambiguous measurement of consumer trophic position, independent of phylogeny or ecosystem type. The observed similarities among bacterial, fungal, and animal consumers suggest that within a trophic hierarchy, microbiota are equivalent to, and can be interdigitated with, macrobiota. To further test the universality of this finding, we examined Neotropical fungus gardens, communities in which bacteria, fungi, and animals are entwined in an ancient, quadripartite symbiosis. We reveal that this symbiosis is a discrete four-level food chain, wherein bacteria function as the apex carnivores, animals and fungi are meso-consumers, and the sole herbivores are fungi. Together, our findings demonstrate that bacteria, fungi, and animals can be integrated within a food chain, effectively uniting the macro- and microbiome in food web ecology and facilitating greater inclusion of the microbiome in studies of functional diversity.

the future of ethereum?

ethdev |  To research, design and build software that, as best as possible, facilitates, in a secure, decentralised and fair manner, the communication and automatically-enforced agreement between parties.

The facilitation will necessitate the building of tools to aid users and developers alike to utilise the back-end systems and make them as effective as possible in their facilities. It is anticipated that these tools will include the development of consumer-grade end-user components (the so-called Ethereum Browser) together with IDE-like components and associated tools. It will also mean the provision of certain high-level (on-the-system) functions, modules, examples, templates, standards and live services without which development and interoperation would suffer.

Security will likely entail use of strong cryptographic technologies, but could also use various other technologies including, but not limited to verifiable computation, computational steganography, complex-systems modelling and formal proof systems.

Fairness must be absolutely guaranteed throughout. We agree that this is pure technology and must make no affordances to the beliefs of any single actor against any other. The system must never even have the possibility of disadvantaging a single user or organisation over any other. We accept that full decentralisation is pivotal in accomplishing this.

Forward-enforceable agreement between arbitrary sets of parties is a core goal, however to achieve this goal, parties must be able to determine the existence and volition of the other. Communication methods must be provided, on the same technological basis, to facilitate this.

It is anticipated that the use of consensus-based blockchain technology using a Turing-complete VM within its transaction resolver and an arbitrarily large state space, such as that first proposed by Buterin (2013) and an evolution of which was formalised by Wood (2014) will be pivotal in the initial delivery.

It is also anticipated that additional research will need to be conducted, both internally and externally in order to deliver solutions of increasing concordance with these broad goals.