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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. <br>
Lynn Johnson<br>
<br>
Val Geist wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">Dear Howard,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">Steve in a recent posting pointed to
Dr. Bruce Lipton’s work and book on the <i style="">Biology of Belie</i>f.
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. </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">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). <span
style=""> </span>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! </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">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 <i style="">The Strategy of the Genes</i>. 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.<span style=""> </span>When during a conversation with Enst
Mayr<span style=""> </span>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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman"><font size="3">Next in line is the great
Swedish epigeneticist Soren Lovtrup. He wrote 1974 <i>Epigenetics: A
Treatise on Theoretical Biology</i> and <i>The Phylogeny of Vertebrata</i>(1977),
and<b> </b><i style=""><span style="">Darwinism: The Refutation of a
Myth</span></i><b>, </b></font><span style="font-size: 10pt;">(Sören
Lövtrup, Soren Lovtrup) </span></font><font face="Times New Roman"
size="3">1987 Croom Helm<br>
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 <st1:country-region><st1:place>South Africa</st1:place></st1:country-region>
and <st1:country-region><st1:place>Botswana</st1:place></st1:country-region>’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. </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><font
face="Times New Roman" size="3">Lipton is a re-discoverer of
epigenetics, as was <st1:place>I.</st1:place> 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 <i style="">Life Strategies</i>.. book. After all the
subtitle of that book is: <i style="">Towards a biological theory of
health</i>. 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.</font></p>
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<div
style="font-family: arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size-adjust: none;">-----
Original Message ----- </div>
<div
style="background: rgb(228, 228, 228) none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; font-family: arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size-adjust: none;"><b>From:</b>
<a title="HowlBloom@aol.com" href="mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com">HowlBloom@aol.com</a>
</div>
<div
style="font-family: arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size-adjust: none;"><b>To:</b>
<a title="paul.werbos@verizon.net"
href="mailto:paul.werbos@verizon.net">paul.werbos@verizon.net</a> ; <a
title="paleopsych@paleopsych.org"
href="mailto:paleopsych@paleopsych.org">paleopsych@paleopsych.org</a> </div>
<div
style="font-family: arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size-adjust: none;"><b>Sent:</b>
Saturday, May 21, 2005 9:51 PM</div>
<div
style="font-family: arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size-adjust: none;"><b>Subject:</b>
[Paleopsych] Paul--is this yours?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<font id="role_document" face="Arial" color="#000000" size="2">
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Is it one of the projects you've helped along? Howard</div>
<div> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size: 12pt; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Modules of
the <b>USC</b> School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute
(ISI) proposed half-mile-long<b> Space Solar Power System satellite
self assemble</b> with what the researchers call "hormonal"
software,.funded <span style=""> </span>by a consortium including
NASA, the NSF, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)</span></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font lang="0" face="Arial" size="2" ptsize="10"
family="SANSSERIF">----------<br>
Howard Bloom<br>
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<br>
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University;
Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.howardbloom.net">www.howardbloom.net</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.bigbangtango.net">www.bigbangtango.net</a><br>
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.<br>
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.paleopsych.org">www.paleopsych.org</a><br>
for two chapters from <br>
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History, see <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer">www.howardbloom.net/lucifer</a><br>
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the
Big Bang to the 21st Century, see <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.howardbloom.net">www.howardbloom.net</a><br>
</font></div>
</font>
<p> </p>
<hr> _______________________________________________<br>
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<p> </p>
<hr> No virus found in this incoming message.<br>
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.<br>
Version: 7.0.322 / Virus Database: 266.11.14 - Release Date: 5/20/2005<br>
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