[Paleopsych] Re: Paleopsych
Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.
ljohnson at solution-consulting.com
Sun May 22 22:15:19 UTC 2005
Val, this is a fascinating contribution. Did you cc it to Lipton
himself? I read the book a few months back and found it stimulating, but
I was out of my depth, so I appreciate your adding such background. The
story about Goldschmidt's books being removed was particularly
disturbing but all too familiar.
Lynn Johnson
Val Geist wrote:
> Dear Howard,
>
>
>
> Steve in a recent posting pointed to Dr. Bruce Lipton's work and book
> on the Biology of Belief. And Stephen is right in judging this an
> important development. I have not read the book, but opened up
> Lipton's website, read an essay and heard an interview, and I think I
> understand what Lipton is all about. Three cheers for his emerging -
> however, I found absolutely nothing new in principle, only in
> particular. He is in a line of brilliant "epigenetisits" to emerge,
> and he has apparently gotten much the same treatment eminent
> epigenticists before him have received. And that is what I want to
> deal with first.
>
>
>
> I was disappointed looking into his list of readings that none of
> these eminent men were cited be they Richard Goldschmidt, C. H.
> Waddington (who coined the word epigenetics over half a century ago)
> or more recently Soren Lovtrup. All challenged the conventional wisdom
> that heredity is deterministic, all challenged the conventional
> Neo-Darwinian wisdom - most shamelessly championed currently by
> Richard Dawkins - and all suffered severe rejection by Evolution's
> elite, none more than Richard Goldschmidt (1942). When I looked for
> that book, having heard all along how terribly mistaken Goldschmidt
> was, I could not find it in my universities library. I discovered that
> his books had been systematically removed. That this should happen to
> one of the centuries truly great cytogeneticists, was puzzling. At
> that time I suddenly ran into a fresh edition of Goldschmidt's book,
> reprinted at the behest of Stephen J. Gould. It is highly instructive
> to read from his pen just how the great Richard Goldschmidt was
> suddenly shunned. It boils down to three young turks going after him
> and destroying him: Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson and Bernhard
> Rensch. The means of destruction was ridicule using phrases out of
> context. There was little attention paid to the possibility that a
> great mind using his enormously rich experience and background at the
> end of a long life and prolific publication record was struggling
> trying to tell us something that he considers vitally important, but
> which clashes with conventional wisdom. To expedite matters:
> Goldschmidt's denigration robbed all but a few of us of the idea of
> flexible gene expression controlled by environment as fundamental to
> understanding speciation and thus evolution. And without that, there
> is no way that flexible environmentally controlled gene expression
> could enter into other fields - such as medicine!
>
>
>
> Next in line to be denigrated was the great embryologist, scholar of
> evolution and during WWII father of operations research on behalf of
> the British defense establishment C. H. Waddington. That's the father
> of Epigenetics. Note the title of one of his books: 1957 The Strategy
> of the Genes. If my memory serves me right, he was haughty and did not
> mince words and was openly contemptuous of Neo-Darwinism where
> Goldschmidt tried to be polite. When during a conversation with Enst
> Mayr I mentioned Waddington, Mayr became irritated, in fact
> noticeably so and dismissed Waddington as someone who would not fit
> in. That is remarkable as Mayr cites Waddington repeatedly in his own
> magnum opus, but in a remarkably limited way. The huge irony is that
> Mayr then writes in one of his last books on the Great Synthesis that,
> tragically, the embryologists have been left out of this great
> evolutionary synthesis. Having read Waddington, Ernst Mayr, a mind not
> to be trifled with - but also Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould could not
> see what Waddington saw, namely that phenotype plasticity was
> profoundly important to explain much of evolution that neo-Darwinism
> did not. I am totally puzzled by that conceptual blindness.
>
>
>
> Next in line is the great Swedish epigeneticist Soren Lovtrup. He
> wrote 1974 Epigenetics: A Treatise on Theoretical Biology and The
> Phylogeny of Vertebrata(1977), and Darwinism: The Refutation of a
> Myth, (Sören Lövtrup, Soren Lovtrup) 1987 Croom Helm
> ISBN 0-7099-4153-6, 469 pages. He is a vociferous, but highly
> substantive opponent of Neo-Darwinism, and it totally ignored! I had
> the pleasure of meeting him a number of times and spending together
> nearly a fortnight in South Africa and Botswana's Okavango Delta. He
> has given up trying to communicate with the older generation, pinning
> his hope on the younger - which is also ignoring his excellent
> scholarship - see Bruce Lipton! Unfortunately, Lovtrup is not the best
> communicator, as well as being a very angry old man. However, taking
> time and effort to read him is rewarding.
>
>
>
> Lipton is a re-discoverer of epigenetics, as was I. He is dead on, but
> his discoveries are in principle not new and it's a pity he does not
> integrate his discoveries with earlier findings, strengthening his
> case and given due credit where credit is due. As I age I see again
> and again the same wheels being reinvented under different names - and
> Lipton is a case in point. I was delighted to hear that he in the are
> of health identified some of the same processes that I did and
> reported on in my 1978 Life Strategies.. book. After all the subtitle
> of that book is: Towards a biological theory of health. Independent
> re-discovery greatly strengthens the case for epigenetics, as this
> concept is played out with different facts. And I am delighted that
> Lipton pulled this concept into the area of health. In short: bring
> epigenetics into our understanding of Paleopsychology and quality of life.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: HowlBloom at aol.com <mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com>
> To: paul.werbos at verizon.net <mailto:paul.werbos at verizon.net> ;
> paleopsych at paleopsych.org <mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org>
> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 9:51 PM
> Subject: [Paleopsych] Paul--is this yours?
>
> I ran across the following today while doing research for a
> national radio show--Coast to Coast--I'm about to do in 70 minutes
> (2am to 5am EST the night of 5/21 and morning of 5/22). It's
> exciting and sounds like the space-borne solar array you were
> talking about in an email several days ago.
>
> Is it one of the projects you've helped along? Howard
>
> Modules of the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences
> Institute (ISI) proposed half-mile-long Space Solar Power System
> satellite self assemble with what the researchers call "hormonal"
> software,.funded by a consortium including NASA, the NSF, and the
> Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
>
> ----------
> 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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