Starting out

[degringolade]

 

One of the thing that I have noticed about the nature of knowledge and discussion of late is the inability to separate the foibles of the individual researcher from the work that he did.

So, Since I am currently reading a lot about endosymbiosis, I started out in the wayback machine and started Reading about Constantine Mereschowski.  In the article in Wikipedia, more time is spent discussing his perversions and general shitheadiness that is spent on his theories.

Now, most of the time, this wouldn't bother me and I would gloss over such fripparies, but in today's climate, I wonder how such things will play out?  Look te guy was a real piece of work, and if anything is true about what is described about his non-scientific life, he should have probably been castrated with a belt sander.  But what concerns me is that when so much time is spent lovingly outlining someones perversion in his personal life, what will that do with the good done by his ideas?

We have always been an all-or-nothing kind of people here in the US.  Nothing good can come out of someone we have decided is a bad person.  There is a saying out there, which has been hijacked by the positive people.  "He was a man of parts".  But the positive strokes, only wishing to see the "positive" it has degenerated into a form of panegyric where all the things that a person does well is highlighted.  I kind of look at it in the old fashioned way, where it can recognize the complex nature of any man, where the good is co-extant with the evil. 

I wonder how this effects everything that we do?  I wonder how much this applies to our lives in general and how much that effects our day to day ability to deal with the world around us.  It seems as though sometimes we want to pretend that the world is run by saintliness instead of people.  Gotta take the good with the bad

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

According to Margulis and Sagan], "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.

This is an example of someone going crazy with the idea of “survival” in connection with natural selection. Margulis and Sagan may be smart, but they are clueless and misguiding when they use the term “combat”. They must be scientists and they should stick to describing their experiments instead of trying to guess what the result means. Science isn’t the problem; it is the view/expectation of science that misguides.


Nothing involved in a process of natural selection is in any sense involved in combat as the term is commonly used. This is an example of anthropomorphism misdirecting the view from the first step. Combat is as wrong as a description of natural selection can get, because it misses the whole point and paints the wrong picture. Step one must be to remove anthropomorphism which is impossible; but to describe natural selection as combat, shows no effort at all.

I suggest that the word “networking” should be abolished from any serious discussion of anything. As soon as Margulis and Sagan use the term “networking” in an explanation, everybody should stop reading right there and look elsewhere. It is like exclaiming that an animal is breathing.

The term “networking” applies to everything that happens to everything everywhere. The term “networking” is the fundamental way of being that allows a scientist to think that they should be a scientist. To say “networking” in science is to say nothing, literally.

I am not saying that a good first step is to assume that everything offered by the science of biology is wrong, which it isn’t, but that it is irrelevant in the sense that its view is way too small – so small that it has a completely wrong idea of what it is looking at. Like in a cartoon where a character is looking closely at something that looks interesting, and then they realize that it is a speck of dirt on the shoe of a giant. In other words, they would have known a lot more about what is important if they stopped looking in a microscope.

Combat

[mschmidt]

Natural selection can be said to involve combat, if combat is redefined.

When a human takes a steak knife and cuts into a nice piece of meat, they are combating the meat on their plate. If the steak is tough, the combat is intense.

nature and combat

[mschmidt]

The anthropomorphic view of nature is that other things need to be in "combat" while humans only have to cut their meat with a steak knife. Probably "combat" would be a roughly equivalent requirement for everything if the environment were to be in some state of balance - which is probably the ultimate goal if there is one. Everything is capable of doing what it must to eat, otherwise it would not exist. Things that are supposed to be involved in "combat", are cutting their meat with their steak knife.

Also

[mschmidt]

The human cutting the steak went to work for 40 hours during the week so that they could buy the steak and have a place to eat it. Probably we are the inefficient ones.