[Paleopsych] From Eshel--A Glitch in Genetic-centrism
HowlBloom at aol.com
HowlBloom at aol.com
Sun Apr 3 23:50:17 UTC 2005
This is wonderful material, Val.
Remember that I applied bacterial information and your concept of
maintenance and dispersal phenotypes to history and came up with five social modes that
reflected your phenotype model? Those were the fleeing, fasting, feeding,
questing, and conquering modes.
When a society was under severe stress and had no sense that its leaders or
form of social organization provided hope for control over its persistently
catastrophic conditions, it went into the fleeing mode. Its members
scattered, ran, and become refugees in other cultures where they begged for
admittance. We saw this in Bosnia a few years ago.
When a society was hit with persistent disaster, but still had faith in its
leaders, its beliefs, and its form of social organization--its way of life--it
hunkered down in something like the population biologist's k mode--the
fasting mode. It went into self-denial, making things like gluttony cardinal
sins. We saw this in the dark ages, when any form of pleasure or consumption
was a slap in the face of god. And it happened with the Pacific Northwest's
Yurok Indians, who lived on a tiny swatch of land and made self-denial the
primary stamp of virtue. Yurok babies, for example, weren't breast fed whenever
they cried. Instead they were given tiny amounts of gruel on micro-spoons
made of acorn shells. They were taught to endure a state of perpetual hunger.
When a society hit a new strategy that turned an old pile of junk into a
motherlode or when it ran into a motherlode of food or other resources that
yielded easily to the existing way of doing things, it focused on using the
fashionable means of the moment to mine the new resources for all they were worth.
It became conservative and stressed conformity to the prosperity-producing
mode of the day. This was the feeding period. It happened in America in the
1950s. It happened in Athens after the end of the wars with Persia in
roughy 470 bc.
But when the motherlode and its wealth was assured that it had lasted a
genration or two and seemed like it would go on forever, some of the kids of the
feeders became like Socrates. They challenged the old way of doing things.
They rebelled and raised questions. They hunted down new meanings. They
became questers.
Then came the stage I found hard to define. When a society was riding high
on an ascending pattern of prosperity whose acceleration seemed like it would
never stop, it became convinced that its way of life was god-given, endorsed
by history, deity, and the rain of riches as the one way of life that should
be imposed on everyone in sight, including on societies near and far. This
sort of conquering mode hit Athens in the generation of Socrates pupils.
Pericles had turned the defensive Athenian League from a coalition into an
Empire. Then on of Socrates' students, Alcibiades, went off to conquer Syracuse.The
conquering mode hit England in the days when it grew rich from steam engine
technologies and built the Victorian Empire. Late in the 19th Century it
hit Germany and the United States, both of which experienced a rapid rise in
wealth thanks to the railroad train, new electrical technologies (think Thomas
Edison and Seimens), and the new chemical industries (think Bayer). Both
nations caught a serious case of manifest destiny--the sense that they, their
race, and their culture should rule the world. This is the conquering mode.
Your description of the generation-by-generation alteration in body type
helped trigger this entire conceptual framework. Your outline of it below adds
to the concept.
All thanks--Howard
In a message dated 3/28/2005 10:40:27 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
kendulf at shaw.ca writes:
Dear Howard,
Eschel is right. This is exciting stuff, especially if the RNA hypothesis
holds. However, there is something in mammals that relates to reverting to the
grand-parental genetic expression, or great- great parental genetic
expression , or great- great- great parental genetic expression - and not to the
parental one! And we have no clue about the mysterious mechanism. The phenomenon
was dubbed - not surprisingly - the "grand parent effect". It showed that he
adaptive expression of genes in individuals was not that to their immediate
environment, but to that of their grand or great-grand or great-great ..etc.
parents. How is it possible that the ova and sperm retain the environmental
memory of up to four generations past? Or is it something about the phenotype
incubating in gestation its progeny that affect it? We do not know! The
phenomenon was first discovered in the late 1930's by an exceedingly gifted amateur
biologist, though chemist by training, when he was experimenting with red
deer, trying to increase trophy size. Quite unexpectedly, the deer did not
respond fully to the luxury food he offered, rather they responded with increases
in body and antler size stepwise, each generation being larger in size than
the preceding one - for five generations! About 30 years later it was
re-discovered in mice and rats, showing that the nutrition experienced by grand
parents and earlier generation still affected the phenotype of the
now-generation. In short, genetic expression was based on phenotypic experiences and was
stored for several generations, and this multi-generational gene-environment
communication affected the offspring.
Now, there is a wonderfully logical - adaptive - explanation for this.
Remember the maintenance - dispersal phenotype axis? (or, if you prefer
paedomorph - hypermorph, efficiency - luxury etc). The norm in populations is
maintenance conditions that is of hunger, shortages, severe intra- and
inter-specific competition for resources etc., to which the maintenance, paedomorph or
efficiency phenotype is closely and effectively adapted. However, nature's
ecological vagaries are such that now and a gain a year or two of abundance and
luxury comes along. An individual conceived then - clearly - must not be a
dispersal, hypermorph or luxury phenotype because it would be woefully
maladaptive under the regular conditions of shortages and severe competition for
resources. The adaptive thing to do is to wait and see and alter offspring towards
dispersal, hypermorph or luxury phenotypes only if luxury conditions continue
to prevail. That, however, is the signal for the very rare - excruciatingly
rare, but supremely important - case of vacant habitat being available where
the dispersal phenotype is highly adaptive to spread the parental genomes!
That's all in Chapter six of my 1978 Lifestrategies .. book entitled "How
Genes Communicate with the Environment - the Biology of Inequality".
Coming back to humans: it is possible that the phenomenon of secular growth,
in which the offspring generations over a long time span exceed the parent
generation in size, is part and parcel of this gene-environment communication,
with old environmental information stored for influencing the next
generations ontogeny. Secular growth can be predicted to come to a halt when we have
reached, on average, the body mass, size and development of our Upper
Paleolithic Ice Age ancestors. That is, it will stop when men average a bit over six
feet in height (and brain size exceeds our by about 20%) - and we are some
time off from that! Five- eight, so I understand, is the height of men
currently in North America. Secular growth has been going on since the middle of
the 19th century, the nadir having been reached during the preceding
industrial revolution. As stated befoer, there is no clue as to mechanism!
Sincerely.
Val Geist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science
----- Original Message -----
From: _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com)
To: _paleopsych at paleopsych.org_ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org) ;
_kurakin1970 at yandex.ru_ (mailto:kurakin1970 at yandex.ru) ; _ursus at earthlink.net_
(mailto:ursus at earthlink.net) ; _paul.werbos at verizon.net_
(mailto:paul.werbos at verizon.net)
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2005 10:48 PM
Subject: [Paleopsych] From Eshel--A Glitch in Genetic-centrism
_Deinococcus radiodurans_ (http://deinococcus.allbio.org/) is able to
withstand the shattering and spattering force of radioactivity by keeping many
apparently super-condensed backup copies of its genome, then rebuilding whatever
genomic sequences that have been destroyed.
If a genome is the most economical summation of a species past possible, how
can it be condensed into a backup copy? Is there, as Joel Isaacson suggest,
an Ur pattern, an implicit pattern from which a mashed gene can be
re-extracted? Does the deciphering of an ancient pattern, an implicit pattern, an
Ur-pattern, change as the context that extracts it changes?
Is the context of the still-unfazed genome, of the cytoplasm, of the cell
membrane, and of the signals coming from neighboring and distant cells an
extractor capable of re-deducing the implicit healthy gene when a mutated gene has
gone off-track?
Can evolution take a step back to retrace its earlier moves?
Is the radiodurans backup mechanism an after-the-fact condensation of the
genome--a symbolic representation of the genome? Or is it a remnant of
something that preceded the genome?
Eshel, you speak of RNA as the possible backup mechanism. RNA is the
evolutionary precursor of DNA if the RNA-world hypothesis is true. Do you think
that what was once derived from RNA can be derived again?
Is this pattern a sort of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny?
And if the complexities and intricate forms and functions of the present
have been pulled from the implications of the past, what even more elaborate
futures will be extracted from the implications of today? Howard
In a message dated 3/24/2005 10:07:42 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
eshel at physics.ucsd.edu writes:
Hi, Interestiing news, Eshel
I sent yesterday the message below to several people in the Weizmann
following a paper in Nature that I think is a most important discovery. personaly I
feel very good as it supports my long objection to the current Neo-darwinian
paradigm. It also indicates that the community in biology is now finally open
to revolutionary ideas related to evolution. These discoveries might also
ilustrate one example of organisms learning not through the DNA sequence.
{Attached is a new paper that appear in Nature. Being myself against the
central paradigm I find the discoveries potentially a mark of a new era. I
might be dramatizing but may be not. I am quite surprised and pleased that Nature
let them publish the paper and if you note the dates within 6 weeks from
receiving it. Note also the possible connection with microRNA .
It will be interesting if the media will realise the revolutionary aspects
or not.
If they do, it will probably lead to a flood of serious and "vitalistic"
reactions.
In this regard I also attached a paper entitled "New biology for a new
century"
I apologize if I am carried away but felt like sharing with you my
excitement about these discoveries. There are many open questions. The first one is if
it is a special mechanism for plants only or shared by animals as well (it
is known that smallRNA have different mechanisms in plant).
Eshel
Eshel Ben-Jacob.
Home Page: _http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/_ (http://star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/)
Professor of Physics
The Maguy-Glass Professor
in Physics of Complex Systems
_eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il_ (mailto:eshel at tamar.tau.ac.il)
_ebenjacob at ucsd.edu_ (mailto:ebenjacob at ucsd.edu)
Former President of the Israel Physical Society (IPS)
Head the scientific board of PhysicaPlus _http://physicaplus.org.il_
(http://physicaplus.org.il/)
The IPS Online Bi-lingual Magazine
School of Physics and Astronomy 10/2004 -10/2005
Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel Center for Theoretical
Biological Physics
Tel 972-3-640 7845/7604 (Fax) -6425787 University of California San
Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0354 USA
Tel (office) 1-858-534 0524 (Fax) -534 7697
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core
Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org;
executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core
Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org;
executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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