Majorityrights Central > Category: Science & Technology

A colleague of mine passed away yesterday.  My relationship with him began while he was at Interval Research circa 1996.  This link is to a paper of his written shortly after we met on the basis of my interest in relational over functional description.

I came upon the work of Frederick Parker-Rhodes in my quest for the ideal computer language, which I have elsewhere on MR discussed in relation to Heidegger’s “as” structure and GW’s ontology project.  Recent work in theoretical physics has provided empirical validation to his “wildly eccentric” views—which managed to provide a priori derivations of the dimensionless scaling constants of physics from his ontology detailed in his book “The Theory of Indistinguishables”.  To be brief, there is his “combinatorial hierarchy” that derives from FRP’s attempt to find the underlying mathematical structure of what he called “wholesight”.

Below the fold is an excerpt from “Wholesight: The Spirit Quest” by Frederick Parker-Rodes…

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A recent conversation with what might be thought of as an American Brahmin, (which seem to be coming back into vogue) included the following exchange (paraphrased):

Me: The problem with central planning is the problem with all the social sciences—the failure to respect experimentation over argumentation.  That’s why I support greater State autonomy. 

Me: No, I’m saying that the philosophy of science is the proper basis for Polity…

And so forth…

The thing that struck me about this conversation is the attitude of the American Brahmin toward experimentation—as though Polity—or to cast another light on it, Politeness—rendered experimentation somehow less than Civil.

That’s when it struck me that true science is in fact Barbaric and will always be treated thus by ruling elites of any Polity because Polity depends on faith in a set of—usually unstated—hypotheses in human ecology adopted by religious faith as pragmatic enforcement of elite powers.

CHEM Trust, a charity “with a mission to protect humans and wildlife from harmful chemicals” has issued its well-trailed report on the effects of man-made endocrine-disrupting, or “gender bending”, chemicals in the environment.

These are:-

... chemicals which block the male hormone androgen, the so-called anti-androgenic chemicals, can cause un-descended testes and can feminise males. Similarly, some sex hormone disrupting chemicals can mimic oestrogen, the female hormone, and also feminise males. Many man-made chemicals can block androgen action, and these include several pesticides and some phthalates, used in consumer products to make plastics flexible. Worryingly, a study of effluents from UK sewage works has found that around three-quarters of these discharges have considerable anti-androgenic activity, and investigations are underway to identify the chemicals to blame.

The four-part report is not confined or focussed upon the known effects of pollutants upon human males.  It reviews effects upon the males of all vertebrate life.  Nonetheless, the underlying concern is for our male offspring:-

Taken together, the effects seen in wildlife should raise concerns for contaminant induced genital disruption in human male infants. Indeed a condition called testicular dysgenesis syndrome, including birth defects of the penis of baby boys, cryptorchidism (undescended testes), reduced sperm production and testicular cancer, has been suggested, because there is evidence to indicate that these effects may be interlinked in causation (Skakkebaek et al.,2001; 2007; Sharpe and Skakkebaek,2008). Moreover, in many studies these disorders or demasculinization effects have been associated with exposure to certain contaminants or sex hormone.

All of the chemicals associated with these effects are to be found in the developed world.  They are generally less evident in the developing world.  Male children born to Third World migrants in the West are as at risk as those born to settled populations here.

In two days time the British government will oppose proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have “gender-bending” effects.  In total, there have been over 100,000 new chemicals introduced in recent years.  Ninety-nine per cent of them are not properly regulated, and eight-five per cent are devoid of accompanying safety information.

The full report, which follows studies in Italy and America, can be downloaded in pdf form here.

The leading weekly science journal Nature has taken it upon itself to publish a series of articles on what science has to say about being human.  The first contribution, published this week, is on religion, and I am going to quote a little from it.

First, though, here is a quote from the editorial that announced the series.  It talks about the difficulties for evolutionary scientists of:-

... being objective about a topic as philosophically, politically and ethically charged as human nature. Take the sociobiology wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Left-wing scholars rejected biological explanations for phenomena such as gender roles, religion, homosexuality and xenophobia, largely because they feared such explanations would be used to justify a continuation of existing inequalities on genetic grounds. The resulting debates became hugely political.

The combustibility of the interface between science and society is one major reason for the extraordinary fragmentation of research that tackles human behaviour. In part because of the sociobiology battle, most social scientists still steer clear of using evolutionary hypotheses. And even researchers who do work under the unifying framework of evolution tend to fall into distinct camps such as gene–culture co-evolution or human behavioural ecology — their practitioners divided by differences of opinion on, say, the relative importance of culture versus genes.

Alright, this guy - obviously an eminent science writer - can’t say that the “sociobiology wars” were really an ethnically-motivated attack on good science by Jewish race warriors.  We understand that he has to have a job to go to tomorrow morning.

But I was quite amazed that, in this genomic age, it is still necessary to call those monsters “scholars” and to portray their motives as “fear” of justifying inequalities.  Why so?  Gould and Co agitated for anti-science.  If, on the contrary, sociobiology had demonstrated some aspect of human nature in a way favourable to Jewish ethnic interests, they would have been praising it from the rooftops.  They were liars.  They were wrong.  They were divisive.  They were destructive to careers.

Can’t the editor of Nature plainly state that anti-science is not what is expected of supposed men of science?  In the very next paragraph he regrets the damage done by these creatures.  He could call for an end to fear, an end to division.  But he doesn’t.

Anyway, to move on to the piece on evolution and religion, by the memory specialist Pascal Boyer.  He has this to say:-

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A study by Professor John-Dylan Haynes, who is the Bernstein Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute, has cast fresh doubt upon the existence of free will.

Unconscious decisions in the brain

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown by a study of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.”

... In the study participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look what happens when the decision is made, but not what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a striking finding.

This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.

... Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts even up to 7 seconds ahead of time how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: “Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. Especially we still need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed.”

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I am indebted to onlooker for the following story, which is also the story of European Man’s questing mind.  On another thread onlooker posted a link to an innovation blog where the tale - perhaps tall, perhaps not - was told of John Kanzius and his radio frequency transmitter.

In an important sense it does not matter whether Kanzius’ little idea has at a single stroke cured every cancer and solved the energy crisis.  He is demonstrating the daring of the Western intellect.  Tens of thousands of men like Kanzius - not necessarily geniuses or giants of the scientific world - have set their eyes beyond the known horizon, and started walking.  Enough of them have found something new and useful to make our civilisation what it is, and set it far above all its forebears.  Half the world would rejoice in its destruction, such an affront to their self-respect is our ascendency.

The creativity of a Kanzius defines us.  We are not as spiritual as the Indian or as given to faith and hope as the Arab.  We are not as ethnocentric as the Jew, or as rooted in tradition.  We are not as bound to instinct as the African.  We are innovative.  We are restless.  We are takers of risks, albeit ones calculated to free us from sorrow, and raise this extraordinary European life still higher.