Warsocialism?

Speaking of founding criminals..., I gladly yield the floor to the ultra hardcore Jay Hanson who in various lists and newsgroups over the past decade or so has laid it all out for your collective consideration.

Nowhere is there to be found a more succinct and damning appraisal of what precisely has gone wrong with the path chosen for us by those who we have permitted to rule us.

Our Founders, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded [1] a government that was controlled by the rich. It’s based on three core assumptions:

1: The best way to solve social problems is through economic [2] growth.

2: Individuals know best how to improve their lives.

3: The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do!

In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will keep increasing the size of the pie.

That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how public policy is made today:

“The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are identified as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are enacted and implemented.” – William Domhoff

Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured by spending [3] – the more, the better. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical sense – not GDP), all of our Founders’ core assumptions are known to be wrong …

Which hardcore appraisal is why - in a nutshell - I'm not wetting my pants about the prospects for genuine or lasting change. I have yet to hear a single policy initiative that deviates from the core warsocialist modus operandi.

How about you?

Sonoluminescence

Bro. Makheru sends me to the stacks - to dust off something I haven't looked at in about 7 years;

Brother Nulan, Do you see any validity in the Cold Fusion Theory?

To which I enthusiastically though somewhat crabbily respond; Do you think these humans will be "allowed" to put a star in a jar given their nasty, brutish, killer-ape mentality and behaviours?

Bro. Makheru, on purely superstitious and curmudgeonly grounds, my answer to you is that I am confident that it is possible, but I am even more confident that our species will not be permitted to achieve it - given our current level of consciousness. I believe that we will be tantalized by the prospect, - because it appears to be so simple - but nothing more than that.

here is a summary of what I would consider to be the state of the art - along with a little history of how long folks have known about this enigmatic phenomenon.
The mechanism of the phenomenon of sonoluminescence remains unsettled. Theories include: hotspot, bremsstrahlung radiation, collision induced radiation and corona discharges, non-classical light, proton tunneling, electrodynamic jets, fractoluminescent jets (now largely discredited due to contrary experimental evidence), and so forth.

What do you think about Cold Fusion Makheru? What do you believe our prospects are for breaking through to harness the power of the sun?

How Harvard students perceive rednecks: The neural basis for prejudice

I've been saying this for longer than I can remember, and have caught no end of grief from fundamentalist victims of the racist memeplex - mechanically spouting their unfalsifiable theories of the world via obsessive, compulsive, addictive, circular arguments founded in childish deductivism.

The source of many of the world's woes might be tracked to a specific brain area responsible for identifying people that are not of our ilk. If so, a study on the neural bases of prejudice and its modulation (read abstract or download the pdf), by Jason Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji, of Harvard University, and C Neil Macrae, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, published in Neuron in May 2006, could be as important to the burgeoning field of social cognitive neuroscience as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech was to the American civil rights movement.

Southern Fried, Extra Crispy...,

The Christian Science Monitor weighs in on the southeastern drought;

How the South responds to the improbably dry weather may affect the broader US economy, since the region's booming metro areas and job growth have so far fended off a national recession.

"The coincidence of having [potential] recession plus drought is a tough one for the economy," says Jeff Humphreys, an economist at the University of Georgia in Athens. "It's coming on top of the housing recession and the oil price shock, making our economy more vulnerable than would otherwise be the case. I don't think the drought alone is able to produce a recession, but it adds to negative forces that are already out there."

And on it drags, as recent rains have failed to refresh exhausted reservoirs. As an unusual bank of fronts in the West channeled the South's usual rains into deluges in Texas and the Midwest, the drought interfered with rural baptisms and put landscapers out of work, with losses in that industry totaling nearly $1 billion. A pool ban alone would wreck Georgia's $150 million pool-maintenance industry, experts say.

"The economic impact of long-term water shortages could be profound because water is so central to daily living, power generation, and manufacturing," noted a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

Some nuclear power plants in the Southeast, which require huge amounts of water to operate, could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes used to cool the reactors, the Associated Press reported last month. Such shutdowns probably wouldn't cause blackouts, utility officials say. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities could be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

Trickle down from bursting economic bubbles, global warming, and the karmic laws of unintended consequences.....,

Energy War

So we go from total subject matter obscurity to panoramic coverage at the fringes of the mainstream almost overnight. Energy War now showing on the Sundance Channel. Enjoy!



What are the geopolitical consequences of the price of oil? As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman contends in Shuchen Tan, Ijsbrand van Veelen and Rudi Boon's documentary, as the price of oil rises, petro-states like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran hinder democracy's pace and ignore complaints of human rights abuses from countries in need of energy. ENERGY WAR forecasts the primary struggle of the 21st century will be a fierce contest to discover alternatives to oil and gas and ensure a nation's place as an energy superpower.

Ever See An Iceberg From Top To Bottom?

update: thanks to Cobb, I now know that I've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, played like a dub, caught bent over trying to retrieve the soap - and I bet that all I hadda do was run that joint through snopes.com.

This came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

They actually have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships!

Anyway, in this particular case the water was calm and the sun was almost directly overhead so that the diver was able to get into the water and click this pic.

Clear water huh?!

They estimated the weight at 300,000,000 tons.

Hat tip to my buddy Davera for sending this to my attention.

What If: The Oil Runs Out

A watershed event has made its way to mainstream teevee. (well sort of...,)

The Science Channel is running a 60 minute special that actually does a pretty good job of depicting some of what is yet (soon?) to come.

Check your local listings then check out this show.

Slowly a consensus has emerged. Oil, the lifeblood of modern societies, is going to peak then decline irreversibly. Oil will be used for decades to come, but the era of surplus, conventional oil is ending, and we are not prepared.

Pop Go the Cables

Update: Fourth cable "broken".

Coincidence?

Cable reported cut Friday off Dubai in Persian Gulf. An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Extensive Internet failure has affected much of Asia, the Middle East, north Africa

What's going on here? What are the military, financial, and communication implications of something like this?

Is it just me, or does a cluster of three transoceanic "backhoe incidents" effecting this large region of the world at a time of very interesting political foment seem peculiar?

You'd think these types of events happen everyday judging from occurrences this past week. But as you can see from the cross sectional view of the cable, it's more than a notion to take out one of these cables. The idea that a trawlers anchor got to it just seems a little implausible. In view of the fact that trawlers cross the ocean constantly-- Internet companies would be sure to construct cables that would not be destroyed that easily or be that accessible to anchor dragging when the connection to a whole continent depends on them. And what is even harder to believe is that these cables are cut in separate incidents---a couple days apart(map of cuts below)

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables, said repairs were expected to be completed by February 12. France Telecom, part owner of the other cable, said it was uncertain when repairs on it would be repaired.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the cables off Egypt were likely damaged by ships' anchors.

The loss of the two Mediterranean cables -- FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies -- has snarled Internet and phone traffic from Egypt to India. Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's FALCON cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.

The two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.

Za'irajah

A branch of the science of letter magic, (practiced) among the (authorities on letter magic), is (the technique of) finding out answers from questions by means of connections existing between the letters of the expressions (used in the question). They imagine that these (connections) can form the basis for knowing the future happenings they want to know. Here we have something like puzzles and trick problems.⁸³⁵ There are many discussions of the subject by them. The most comprehensive and most remarkable discussion of it is as-Sabti's Za'irajah of the World. It has been mentioned before. Here, we shall explain what has been said about how to operate it. We shall quote the poem that, it is thought, as-Sabti wrote on the subject.⁸³⁶ Then, we shall give a description of the Za'irajah with its circle and the table written on the verso.^836a Finally, we shall reveal the truth about it. It is nothing supernatural; (the indications derived from it) result from an agreement in the wording of question and answer. It is (just) one interesting way among others, and a curious one, for finding out the answer from the question with the help of the technique called the technique of "breaking down."

From the Science of Letter Magic THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun

Very few people share the (self-scrutiny) of the Sufis, for negligence in this respect is almost universal. Pious people who do not get that far perform, at best, acts of obedience 464 freed from the juridical study of how to be satisfactory 465 and conforming (in the execution of the acts of divine worship). The (Sufis), however, investigate the results of (acts of obedience) with the help of mystical and ecstatic experience, in order to learn whether they are free from deficiency or not. Thus, it is evident that the Sufis' path in its entirety depends upon self-scrutiny with regard to what they do or do not do, and upon discussion of the various kinds of mystical and ecstatic experience that result from their exertions. This, then, crystallizes for the Sufi novice in a "station." From that station, he can progress to another, higher one.

From the Science of Sufism THE MUQADDIMAH Abd Ar Rahman bin Muhammed ibn Khaldun

America - The Broken Bubble Machine

February Harpers - Eric Janszen + The Next Bubble

What's next? More asset-backed bubbles. The dot-com '90s created $7 trillion in market value. The housing boom created $12 trillion in "fake wealth." Janszen predicts the next great bubble will be a $20 trillion "alternative energy" bubble.

In fact, Wall Street's already hustling biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric as the new alternative energies destined to replace oil, gas and coal in this next new economy.

Timing? The new "alternative energies" bubble will last about 8 years, from a 2005 launch till a peak around 2013, when it will "creatively destruct," when all possible "fake wealth" is squeezed out, when investors wise up to the scam, when that new bubble pops.

In his finale, Janszen admits that when the "alternative energy" bubble finally self-destructs around 2013, "we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry," while Wall Street "will already be engineering its next opportunity."

But be warned: Even before we near the end of the "alternative energy" bubble, the law of unintended consequences will trigger a meltdown, not of the bubble but of the "bubble-making machine" itself! The machine will implode, taking down Wall Street, Washington, Corporate America ... and with it, the "new economy," the "new paradigm" and the "bubble-making machine!"

(the photo is not actually a bubble, it's a Harold "Doc" Edgerton rapatronic photo of the initial burst of a nuclear weapon)

The Four Figures of Ars Generalis Ultima

Undulipodium

There are a large number of systems that single-celled organisms use to move or swim. Those systems that work by sticking something large out of the cell and moving it are often called "flagella." The word flagellum

was originally the latin word for whip.

Although the same term is used, there are three (known) kinds of "flagella" that are very different in detail. They are often confused because terminology is often used inconsistently.

• Bacteria have flagella. The motor is at the base and they rotate. They are always called "flagella" or "bacterial flagella".

• Archaea (also known as archaebacteria) have flagella. The motor is at the base and they rotate. But, despite early assumptions of relatedness to bacterial flagella based on these similarities, they are very different in detail. They are always called "flagella" or "archaeal flagella".

• Eukaryotes have a tubulin-based organelle that does not rotate. Instead, this organelle bends all along its length, powered by hundreds of dynein motor proteins. This organelle is called variously a flagellum, cilium, or undulipodium, or sometimes other names. This leads to a great deal of confusion for people new to the topic. Usage typically works like this:

Most microbiologists call it a "flagellum" if the eukaryotic cell has one or a few long appendages (such as sperm cells), and call it a "cilium" if the cell has many shorter appendages (such as a paramecium)

Some people point out that eukaryotic flagella and cilia have fundamentally the same 9+2 tubulin structure (usually), dyneins, etc., and are really essentially the same thing. They propose that the word "cilium" be used for both kinds of structures, and that "flagellum" be reserved for the prokaryote organelles.

This is the position and usage of Cavalier-Smith, and this usage is followed by Behe in Darwin's Black Box - Lynn Margulis and her followers (relatively few but published widely) call the eukaryotic structure a "undulipodium", both in order to distinguish it from the prokaryote organelles and to emphasize their symbiotic theory for the origin of the organelle.

Neuroeconomics - Dopaminergy in the Individual Brain

A couple months ago, I introduced the concept of neuroeconomics in the context of collective psychology. It's time to take that a step further - a la the philosopher Daniel Dennett, channeling the late ATL Gurdjieffian prankster Jan Cox.

Several people have sent me notes about their problems and apparent failures, and have attempted to attribute a psychological basis to them. This is one of the great cutoff points. It is an immediate slap in the intellectual face: to a Revolutionist there is no such thing as "psychological." It is a flawed piece of data. It is as outmoded to a Revolutionist alive today as is the idea of a "capital-g" god. What is called "psychological" is serving, and has served, a purpose with some people. But you must see that any apparent psychological pressures arising from influences apparently "out there" -- your boss, your mother, your mate -- have to enter in through the five senses. Always stop and remind yourself of that even if you can't do anything else. If one or all of your senses were knocked out, you would not be suffering this "psychological pressure." You have to face up to that. Whatever is going on in you is chemical. There are really no such things as drunks; it is people with an alcohol deficiency. Absolutely religious people have a chemical deficiency. The same with people who have phobias, as they are called. It is a chemical imbalance outside the normal bell curve of the populace at their time and place. Jan Cox

From that earlier article I stated that "For decades it has been known that these neurons and the dopamine they release play a critical role in brain mechanisms of reinforcement. Many of the drugs currently abused in our society mimic the actions of dopamine in the brain. This led many researchers to believe that dopamine neurons directly encoded the rewarding value of events in the outside world."

Today's post is one of those hidden in plain sight elaborations on that theme, this time addressing the rewarding value of events in the INSIDE WORLD, the world comprised of the neurons making up your brain. Think about it. That's all I ever ask you to do, and in the process, you will inevitably be led to draw your own validating conclusions. Here's Dennett;

brain cells — I now think — must compete vigorously in a marketplace. For what?

What could a neuron "want"? The energy and raw materials it needs to thrive–just like its unicellular eukaryote ancestors and more distant cousins, the bacteria and archaea. Neurons are robots; they are certainly not conscious in any rich sense–remember, they are eukaryotic cells, akin to yeast cells or fungi. If individual neurons are conscious then so is athlete’s foot. But neurons are, like these mindless but intentional cousins, highly competent agents in a life-or-death struggle, not in the environment between your toes, but in the demanding environment of the brain, where the victories go to those cells that can network more effectively, contribute to more influential trends at the virtual machine levels where large-scale human purposes and urges are discernible.

I now think, then, that the opponent-process dynamics of emotions, and the roles they play in controlling our minds, is underpinned by an "economy" of neurochemistry that harnesses the competitive talents of individual neurons. (Note that the idea is that neurons are still good team players within the larger economy, unlike the more radically selfish cancer cells. Recalling Francois Jacob’s dictum that the dream of every cell is to become two cells, neurons vie to stay active and to be influential, but do not dream of multiplying.)

Intelligent control of an animal’s behavior is still a computational process, but the neurons are "selfish neurons," as Sebastian Seung has said, striving to maximize their intake of the different currencies of reward we have found in the brain. And what do neurons "buy" with their dopamine, their serotonin or oxytocin, etc.? Greater influence in the networks in which they participate.

So simple, elegant, and obvious. Selective governance via the natural tendency of the brain's neuronal circuits to Do What They Do..., what could be easier, more powerful, and more durable than that. The lengths to which some folks will go to furnish elaborate post hoc rationalizations of What It Do - and how that basic fact is exploited by those with the wherewithal to "engineer" values in the outside world - just crack me up.

Why Cognitive Activism?

It is clearly evident that some ‘ways of knowing’ actively abhor the biosphere, and all forms or assemblies of organism in general. Perhaps more surprising is that a vast portion of the ways of knowing we commonly credential actively abhor human beings, and hate or attack all human children — merely by the nature of their character and function in the imaginal and real worlds. Why would we select or empower such modes, when an infinite garden of choices are immediately at hand?

Quoth Bro. Makheru;

As far as these Power Structure Apocalyptic’s are concerned, they have this world on a collision course with barbarism and ecological disaster. Whatever their underpinnings are, they have to be neutralized right now.

The Cognitive Activist response;

We will gain no advantage from any activism that creates dogmas and bureaucracies of itself — and must instead assemble new ways of learning and knowing together. Ways which by their changing and playful nature empower us to lift each other into a place of direct experiential access to new experiences and expression of mutual uplift, exploration, and the celebration of the real potentials of our anciently conserved and miraculously elaborated organismal sentience.

We are cognitive animals, in a hypercognitive environment. Our human activisms will fail, unless they can address the sources of our ancient confusions and failures to discover the clearly present ways and means of mutual prosperity inherent in the problems our broken access magnifies into our experience and history.

Perhaps we might thus agree that we desire an activism so general, that it’s different from anything we’ve ever considered or been exposed to. Possibly even something that doesn’t have or require a name. A game of activism so like what we are and become that rather than fashioning us into the likeness of some model it proposes — it empowers us to choose and celebrate together that which we actually are and may become.

o:O:o

All of human activism has arisen primarily in opposition to broken ways of knowing — employed and empowered by people who agree to believe ideas. But these ideas are ‘cached tokens’ of the experience of distant others. If circumstance is even moderately different according to the moment and the place — this ‘belief’ is too often far more logically false than what literalists might refer to as ‘the false position of faith’.

We’re about to assemble a form of activism with the potential to overwhelm the source of human atrocity — because rather than wasting time in opposing anything — it empowers us to become more than models of some idea. I am also certain we will experience this together, learning in ways beyond the possibilities of our wildest and most hopeful imaginings. When we have unity, access to our birthrights, and the protection of our unique human, personal and cultural diversity we accrue the power to openly oppose atrocity without reference to or memory of combat. We can now explore and become something together that there is no modern model even vaguely alike with — an experience of unity so liberating that its momentum gains speed and effect at unopposable velocities.

Most of our confusion and suffering at the hands of our foibles is the result of an accident. It’s the kind of an accident we’ve never heard a decent story about — and hearing a few radically altars our potential to notice and interact together with novel domains of co-operative play. Since no one had any way to speak of this accident, or the time before it, the best thing we have are badly mistranslated analogs. When we get to play with toys of knowing that are more like what we are and represent, the way our minds arrange and experience knowledge changes dramatically.

My personal sense is this comprises an entirely unexplored universe of human potential, primarily in the domain of an incredible new way of learning — and of human unity in mutual exploration — that will lead us to terrains of knowledge so vast an unexpected that they could entirely re-write most of what we consider to be fact within the next 5 years. Science, religion, and philosophies — are about to face an insurmountable opponent to their primacy and credentialing-power: pure organismal sentience, in liberated coemergence.

And this is what ‘Life’ is actually about. All of organismal reality is ‘attempting to recapitulate something’ in the same way our own genesis and experience as an embryo was recapitulating all of the terrestrial genesis of life. Something is being assembled by and with(in) physical organismal expression and activity...that is not physical at all in the way we would match with this idea. It is hyperconnective, self-elaborative, and it plays a unityGame that binds all participants ever more closely into something we have no metaphor of: Our world is a distributed organism...

[a multiply atemporal psybiocognitive hyperstructure]

And all of this has a lot to do with how we know, what we know, and what we can do with and about these gardens...in a radically new way: a way that makes new ways, instead of trying to preserve itself and children of itself at all costs.

o:O:o

This is why I support local, nuclear centres of activity free of the thanaturgic taint. It is also why any and everything short of that achievable objective, I discount as idle conversation, or worse still, a doctrinal recapitulation of the thanaturgic ethos that I detest. Those death-loving parasites are contagious and their modus operandi is addictive, repetitive and plainly discernable in operation...,

The Most Amazing Thing...

“...of course the term relates to a luminous disc hovering over a scalarly transdimensional tree with its arms upraised... in the gesture of sentient communion...” — overheard at velocities exceeding c to the third.

Contrary to our activity, the discovery and production of more interesting or useful machines is not the penultimate goal of our species. Whatever it was we came to be and experience together definitely has more to do with animals than it does machines — in every possible way. It probably has a lot more to do with trees than machines, too. It defintely has to do with each other.

There are certainly hidden potentials in our human theory and technology we have not yet guessed the shapes or opportunities of — but there are also potentials in other domains we commonly ignore that far outweigh the power of those we are generally habituated to pursue, defend, value and emulate. This ‘library’ of opportunities is vast beyond our wildest imaginings, however our access is blocked by our insistance on mechanical approaches and technological ‘advancement’. The very ways of knowing we look to for enlightenment are consuming us (and our world) while systematically pretending to a heroism their enactions consistently deliver the opposite of.

I believe that the most incredible discovery our species will make will grant us new and complexly evolving experiences of personal, social and cultural liberty. It will be something we do together, for and with each other — all the time — a very general thing. Having found such a new way of experiencing ourselves and our world we will remember our earlier selves as ‘having nearly perished in the attempt to conserve heartful intentions in heartless vehicles and transports of relation’.

That liberty looks like unity. Not an formalized unity, but one that grows in waves of explosive abundance and regeneration — beyond all definition — any time it is experienced and elaborated by any interaction at all. It looks like impossible movement, that grows more impossible and amazing with each motion.

In assembly and form — this movement would be much more akin to an explosively positive game — than a religion, theory, law, philosophy, government, or formal way of knowing.

Formal vehicles resist change and are far too interested in their own reproduction and conservation to deserve our undivided attention. Informal vehicles are made to dissolve themselves, in order to provide access to a transport.

What sort of ‘thing’ could relate to knowledge the way that E=mc2 has come to relate to physics? A discovery of this magnitude would awaken the sleeping potential for the opposite of an atomic bomb: a sort of star exploding in the domain of human sentience, instead of a way of unfolding matter to create horror. We might expect to have direct experience, for the first time in modern history, of a way of being together that would encourage and empower us to share, grow and receive real understanding and access to our potentials — instead of predatory copies of these things masquerading as heroes, while copying themselves endlessly into every possible terrain.

I realize that I repeat myself. In part because I am at pains to solidly convey that I am not referring to a theory, religion or dogma — I am speaking of a transport — an ‘ever-growing set of ways’, to which we will at last have clear and common access, and the powers of mutual uplift, rescue and celebration that will arise in the wake of such a ‘disc over y’.

Am I speculating? No. I speak as though I am for the sake of achieving agreement to explore. What I am speaking about is accessible now, and it has the power to end war, and to allow us to transcend some broken toys that have kept us trapped in games of mutual annihilation, in general.

Something got broken in our species, a long time ago. And we can repair this something, together, now.

A long time ago an expanding ramp of barriers got set up between us and our inherent potentials with knowledge and relation. The time has arrived when we can surpass those barriers together, rapidly, and even turn some of them to the advantage not only of our peoples, but of the delicate nursery in and with which we proceed toward our hidden purposes, potentials, and powers.

o:O:o

Phase Two of the Project is Now Complete...,

There go my boy again....,

Working with only the four basic nucleotides that make up all DNA—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine—he has assembled an entirely new chromosome for an entirely new one-celled creature. Insert that genome into a cell—like inserting a disc into a computer—and a new species of living thing will be booted up. Venter hasn't done that yet, which is why even he won't say that he has technically invented life. He has, however, already shown that a genome transplanted from an existing cell to another will shut down the host's genetic programming and bring its own online. If that cellular body-snatching works with an ordinary chromosome, there's little reason to think it won't with a manufactured one. "The fact that this is even possible is mind-boggling to most people," Venter says.

That's not an overstatement. The genome in Venter's lab in Rockville, Md., could revolutionize genetics, introducing a new world order in which the alchemy of life is broken down into the ultimate engineering project. Man-made genomes could lead to new species that churn out drugs to treat disease, finely tuned vaccines that target just the right lethal bug, even cells that convert sunlight into a biofuel.

"Dangerous" Idea Indeed.....?

Why is the concept that our sensitivities evolved directly from swimming bacterial ancestors of the sensory cilia so dangerous?

Several reasons:

1. We would be forced to admit that bacteria are conscious
2. That they are sensitive to stimuli in their environment and behave accordingly.
3. We would have to accept that bacteria, touted to be our enemies, are not merely neutral or friendly but that they are us.
4. They are direct ancestors of our most sensitive body parts.

Our culture's terminology about bacteria is that of warfare: they are germs to be destroyed and forever vanquished, bacterial enemies make toxins that poison us. We load our soaps with antibacterials that kill on contact, stomach ulcers are now agreed to be caused by bacterial infection. Even if some admit the existence of "good" bacteria in soil or probiotic food like yogurt few of us tolerate the dangerous notion that human sperm tails and sensitive cells of nasal passages lined with waving cilia, are former bacteria. If this dangerous idea becomes widespread it follows that we humans must agree that even before our evolution as animals we have hated and tried to kill our own ancestors. Again, we have seen the enemy, indeed, and, as usual, it is us.

Social interactions of sensitive bacteria, then, not God, made us who were are today.

The Origins of Cognition?

Bacteria are not the solitary, simple organisms as they are usually depicted. Under natural growth conditions, certain bacterial species self-organize into hierarchically complex structured colonies containing from a billion to over a trillion organisms. To coordinate such cooperative ventures, these bacteria have developed and utilized various methods of biochemical communication, by using a variety of mediators, which range from simple molecules to polymers, peptides, complex proteins, genetic material, and even "cassettes of genetic information" such as plasmids and viruses. The resulting colony patterns reflect cooperative survival strategies. The colony behaves much like a multi-cellular community. It has been proposed that these fundamental cognitive functions, the colony can perform collective sensing, distributed information processing collective gene-regulations of the individual bacteria. And consequently it can change its spatio-temporal organization (engineered self-organization) for better adaptability to changes in the environment. In addition colonial internal sensing is crucial since the complex patterns emerge through the communication-based interplay between individual bacteria (the micro-level), as well as sensing characteristics of the collective, i.e., the colony (the macro-level).

What is the difference between the meaning-based natural intelligence of organisms vs. information-based artificial intelligence?

Are the two essentially different?

If so, what are the special features of organisms that afford them capabilities beyond current man-made machines?

Wht information-based or meaning-based capabilities exist at the level of very small, very, very, ancient genomic organisms?

Ultimate Reality

"Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking" (i.e., by cooperation), and Darwin's notion of evolution driven by natural selection is incomplete" Prof. Lynn Margulis; Margulis, Lynn and Sagan (2001). "Marvellous microbes". Resurgence 206: 10–12.

"I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it." Richard Dawkins

Lynn Margulis: At any fine museum of natural history — say, in New York, Cleveland, or Paris — the visitor will find a hall of ancient life, a display of evolution that begins with the trilobite fossils and passes by giant nautiloids, dinosaurs, cave bears, and other extinct animals fascinating to children. Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last five hundred million years. But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly four thousand million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals — including, of course, people. All very interesting, but animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. It's as if you wrote a four-volume tome supposedly on world history but beginning in the year 1800 at Fort Dearborn and the founding of Chicago. You might be entirely correct about the nineteenth-century transformation of Fort Dearborn into a thriving lakeside metropolis, but it would hardly be world history.

By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four out of the five kingdoms of life. Animals are only one of these kingdoms. They miss bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants. They take a small and interesting chapter in the book of evolution and extrapolate it into the entire encyclopedia of life. Skewed and limited in their perspective, they are not wrong so much as grossly uninformed.

GAIA is a Tough Bitch...,

Contagious?

Emotional contagion is the tendency to express and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. One view of the underlying mechanism is that it represents a tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally. A broader definition of the phenomenon was suggested by Sigal G. Barsade- "a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes"



Social contagion is imitative behavior based on the power of suggestion and imitative influence.

Social contagion operates on four levels - emotional, behavioral, ideational, and hysterical - and depending on which level appears to be predominant, psychologists categorize social contagion accordingly:

• emotional contagion - infectious moods and sentiment (aggression, depression)
• behavioral contagion - infectious behavior (ranging from yawning and laughing to crime)
• ideational contagion - infectious ideas spread by suggestion (rumor, urban legends, irrational belief)
• hysterical contagion - somatic illness spread by the power of suggestion (depression/anorexia)

But is that really all there is to it? Do we err fundamentally by ascribing "psychological" rather than "physiological" causes to these modalities of contagious mass behaviour? Where exactly does agency reside within our composite organism? What again, is the optimal unit of selection driving our "species" behaviour?