polsci-150304-evolution.vtt

WEBVTT

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:05.560
 Hey, this is Politics and Science, and I'm your host, John Barkhausen, and this is the

00:00:05.560 --> 00:00:15.200
 special extended interview with Ray Peat, done on the 4th of March, 2015. With Ray from

00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:25.280
 the studios is WMRW, and the subject was evolution and Lamarck, although that hardly gets mentioned.

00:00:25.280 --> 00:00:33.640
 Anyway, just a few things about the show. I had some technical problems, so I think

00:00:33.640 --> 00:00:42.640
 there's some distortion throughout. Ray was recording at too high a volume, and I apologize

00:00:42.640 --> 00:00:49.160
 for that. Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the interview with Ray Peat, and I hope you

00:00:49.160 --> 00:00:50.640
 enjoy it. Thanks.

00:00:50.640 --> 00:00:56.840
 It's all right again. Okay.

00:00:56.840 --> 00:01:01.760
 But now you have the echo. No, I don't think there's an echo. There's

00:01:01.760 --> 00:01:09.680
 a faint echo, but a slight hum. Okay, well, if you can live with it.

00:01:09.680 --> 00:01:16.960
 Yeah, the hum isn't bad. Okay. All right, so Ray Peat, as I said, I guess

00:01:16.960 --> 00:01:24.920
 nobody heard this, has a PhD in biology and has a speciality in physiology, and if you

00:01:24.920 --> 00:01:28.560
 wouldn't mind, Ray, maybe you could introduce yourself a little more.

00:01:28.560 --> 00:01:38.520
 Okay. My dissertation was on reproductive physiology, female aging influence on the

00:01:38.520 --> 00:01:49.080
 oxidative processes in the uterus, actually. But I went to graduate school in biology after

00:01:49.080 --> 00:01:56.080
 having studied literature and linguistics previously with the intention of studying

00:01:56.080 --> 00:02:07.200
 the brain and how the brain can create language, because the brain biology people were the

00:02:07.200 --> 00:02:13.640
 most dogmatic next to the genetics people. I looked around and found that the reproductive

00:02:13.640 --> 00:02:22.920
 physiology professor was actually a scientist, so I did my work in that area.

00:02:22.920 --> 00:02:27.000
 I see, and you've been interested in science your whole life. It's fairly impressive that

00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:36.320
 as a child you were reading many scientific texts. And when did you first run into the

00:02:36.320 --> 00:02:44.360
 subject of the origin of life and evolution, which is what we'll be talking about today?

00:02:44.360 --> 00:02:57.080
 We had a little old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia. My parents got it around 1930, I think, and

00:02:57.080 --> 00:03:03.040
 that was where I first ran into some of the really interesting science things when I was

00:03:03.040 --> 00:03:16.280
 seven or eight or nine years old. Then in 1950 we got the new Britannica, which had

00:03:16.280 --> 00:03:24.760
 bigger articles, but both of them were very objective on the issue of Lamarckism versus

00:03:24.760 --> 00:03:36.480
 Darwinism. So I had heard about the inheritance of acquired traits when I was probably eight

00:03:36.480 --> 00:03:48.200
 years old or so. One of the stories that struck in my mind was done by Michael Geyer at the

00:03:48.200 --> 00:03:57.880
 University of Wisconsin. I think he ground up the eyes of rabbits and injected them to

00:03:57.880 --> 00:04:08.760
 produce antibodies and treated pregnant rabbits so that they became immune to the eyeball

00:04:08.760 --> 00:04:21.400
 tissue. The babies were born with defective eyes and then he cross-mated these offspring

00:04:21.400 --> 00:04:32.920
 and found that the defective eyes were inherited as if they were genetic traits in subsequent

00:04:32.920 --> 00:04:45.680
 generations. No one really repeated that as far as I know, and it was pretty widely accepted.

00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:55.280
 He was a very standard, mostly Darwinian biologist. I think some of his articles are available

00:04:55.280 --> 00:05:07.480
 on the internet. He was doing that research around the same time that Paul Kammerer in

00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:19.120
 Vienna was experimenting with some marine invertebrates and with toads. I think he used

00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:30.400
 salamanders to show that when they acquired an adaptation, mating them, the offspring

00:05:30.400 --> 00:05:42.720
 would show traits that had been acquired by the parents. Paul Kammerer was viciously attacked.

00:05:42.720 --> 00:05:54.240
 He committed suicide in 1926 in the midst of a very intense attack against his midwife

00:05:54.240 --> 00:06:06.120
 toad. Someone had apparently injected ink into the spot that was supposed to be an inherited

00:06:06.120 --> 00:06:18.800
 mating pad on the toad's feet. The person who mostly condemned him as a fraud, William

00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:30.040
 Bateson, a hardline English geneticist, when Kammerer sent samples of his specimens to

00:06:30.040 --> 00:06:40.720
 England, he invited the biologists to examine them. Several well-known biologists did examine

00:06:40.720 --> 00:06:46.580
 them and reported that they were convincing, but William Bateson refused to go to the meeting

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 to examine the specimens. Then he immediately resumed his attacks. So Bateson really didn't

00:06:57.400 --> 00:07:05.680
 want to look at the evidence because he knew it was not there.

00:07:05.680 --> 00:07:13.240
 So maybe just backing up a little bit, maybe you could tell us why it's important, the

00:07:13.240 --> 00:07:20.280
 debate over the theories of evolution and what's going on. Why are people getting so

00:07:20.280 --> 00:07:29.320
 upset about this? It's really an essentially religious or political

00:07:29.320 --> 00:07:41.540
 argument. The whole mystique of science wants to say that there is a simple objective science.

00:07:41.540 --> 00:07:50.560
 You follow a certain method and you get an absolute result. If you don't get what you

00:07:50.560 --> 00:08:01.320
 should get, then it has to be pseudoscience or fraud. But the context is very closely

00:08:01.320 --> 00:08:14.100
 related to your social, economic, political, religious background and beliefs. If you look

00:08:14.100 --> 00:08:29.020
 at Darwin, for example, he was a pretty progressive thinker in a lot of ways. He was against slavery,

00:08:29.020 --> 00:08:42.500
 for example. I think he went to the Unitarian Church even though his father wanted to bring

00:08:42.500 --> 00:08:58.820
 him up as a Church of England mainliner. He was essentially from the upper class, had

00:08:58.820 --> 00:09:09.780
 the habits and way of life of the ruling class. Even though despite his progressive traits

00:09:09.780 --> 00:09:17.740
 in some ways, he was really in the mainline of nineteenth century British imperialist

00:09:17.740 --> 00:09:34.380
 thinking. That quality stuck with the idea of Darwinian evolution and the social Darwinists

00:09:34.380 --> 00:09:45.940
 actually developed what was an essential part of Darwin's thinking. That was a little later

00:09:45.940 --> 00:10:02.660
 taken up by the fascists. Eugenics had a Darwinian genetic basis, racial improvement and so on.

00:10:02.660 --> 00:10:12.980
 People who want to claim Darwin as sort of their intellectual ancestor don't like to

00:10:12.980 --> 00:10:25.900
 recognize that he was a pretty crazy imperialist racist. He believed that even English plants

00:10:25.900 --> 00:10:34.300
 were better than plants in other countries and would displace them if given the opportunity.

00:10:34.300 --> 00:10:44.700
 Just like the English people and Europeans would finally exterminate and eliminate by

00:10:44.700 --> 00:10:58.780
 competition the intermediate races between the higher apes and the civilized Europeans.

00:10:58.780 --> 00:11:04.940
 He believed that even the higher apes along with Australians and Africans would go out

00:11:04.940 --> 00:11:18.940
 of existence because of the superiority of Europeans. When you see people in the twentieth

00:11:18.940 --> 00:11:28.940
 century like William Jennings Bryan denouncing evolution, they were really against the whole

00:11:28.940 --> 00:11:38.140
 racist fascist inclination of so many people. The eugenics movement was very distasteful

00:11:38.140 --> 00:11:52.300
 to some of the traditional middle and lower class Christian thinking.

00:11:52.300 --> 00:12:03.340
 So the idea of where we all came from is a very powerful one in manipulating people to

00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:08.900
 be on your side of your ideology, I suppose. It's about as inarticulate as I could possibly

00:12:08.900 --> 00:12:20.040
 say that. It seems like it's a very key idea that people are wrestling over to win the

00:12:20.040 --> 00:12:32.340
 argument over whose ideology is best. Yes, the way science is taught, it really

00:12:32.340 --> 00:12:46.440
 doesn't free itself from ideology. And so whatever the ideological system that existed

00:12:46.440 --> 00:12:59.860
 around your physics professors and their professors, this ideology gets built into a belief of

00:12:59.860 --> 00:13:11.780
 how science works, how the brain works even. It is a philosophy of the nature of being,

00:13:11.780 --> 00:13:19.340
 the nature of the universe, the creation of the universe, and all of that is built into

00:13:19.340 --> 00:13:28.340
 these so-called objective things that students are taught.

00:13:28.340 --> 00:13:38.340
 My professors in all of the sciences just didn't want to think about their philosophical

00:13:38.340 --> 00:13:45.580
 commitments. It was scientific and that was that.

00:13:45.580 --> 00:13:58.860
 They wouldn't look at any of their preconceptions? Yes. The extent of philosophy might have been

00:13:58.860 --> 00:14:07.540
 to have read Percy Bridgman's operationalism approach to saying that if you can't measure

00:14:07.540 --> 00:14:19.580
 it, it isn't real. Some professors with a philosophical mind saw that as their philosophical

00:14:19.580 --> 00:14:25.220
 foundation. You are the reason this show is called Politics

00:14:25.220 --> 00:14:32.720
 and Science because I think like many people, before I read your writings, which by the

00:14:32.720 --> 00:14:39.940
 way are available at Raypeat.com, many of your newsletters are up there, I thought science

00:14:39.940 --> 00:14:47.540
 was science and it was an objective art that was practiced by dedicated people with lots

00:14:47.540 --> 00:14:54.020
 of integrity. I didn't think business interests or corruption, which is also business interests,

00:14:54.020 --> 00:15:02.780
 or vanity played any role in it, but it turns out it's just as subject to all the human

00:15:02.780 --> 00:15:11.940
 vices as any other field. Early in the 20th century, you could trace

00:15:11.940 --> 00:15:27.980
 the personality of the academic culture to the 19th century conflicts between the different

00:15:27.980 --> 00:15:41.060
 attitudes towards religion, whether the old pre-enlightenment religion should still be

00:15:41.060 --> 00:15:51.660
 in power in government and education or whether a newer 18th, 19th century loosening up of

00:15:51.660 --> 00:16:04.580
 religious ideas should be the rule. But it didn't go beyond either of those. The missing

00:16:04.580 --> 00:16:16.300
 thing was to see that there is a conflict between essentialism, which was the old absolutist

00:16:16.300 --> 00:16:25.980
 religious approach, the platonic thing that, for example, species never change because

00:16:25.980 --> 00:16:36.060
 they are these timeless identities, and the conflict between that essentialist and the

00:16:36.060 --> 00:16:45.300
 empirical or existentialist looking at the actual historical situation that you see in

00:16:45.300 --> 00:16:55.980
 front of you, that's where the real difference in interpreting science comes in.

00:16:55.980 --> 00:17:08.620
 You can see it in every field of science. The anti-essentialists tend to be on the fringe

00:17:08.620 --> 00:17:19.340
 and not fully accepted by any of the sciences. For example, in cosmology, you have the electric

00:17:19.340 --> 00:17:36.540
 universe people, very good, coherent descriptions of observed facts against the big bang mechanistic

00:17:36.540 --> 00:17:53.780
 type of universe. And Halton Arp, the astronomer who made pictures of galaxies that were visibly

00:17:53.780 --> 00:18:01.660
 connected to each other but moving at very different velocities, tremendously different

00:18:01.660 --> 00:18:11.460
 velocities that you can't have things tied together that are moving at extremely different

00:18:11.460 --> 00:18:19.500
 speeds, meaning that they're at extremely different distances according to the redshift

00:18:19.500 --> 00:18:32.420
 big bang theory. The reason that he was able to see and think about that sort of thing

00:18:32.420 --> 00:18:42.940
 was that he wasn't committed to an essentialist idea that every atom is the same at every

00:18:42.940 --> 00:18:52.380
 moment of time and every place in the universe. If you start by observing things, then you

00:18:52.380 --> 00:19:00.500
 might conclude that atoms aren't the same at every time and place.

00:19:00.500 --> 00:19:07.540
 Right. And you've talked about him before on my show and probably others. It's interesting

00:19:07.540 --> 00:19:15.020
 that it all boils down, I guess, even in the field of biology to your school of thought,

00:19:15.020 --> 00:19:23.020
 whether you've started off, I think as you've explained it, with the essentialist form or

00:19:23.020 --> 00:19:29.180
 the empirical form. And you said before, I think, that Aristotle was the founder of the

00:19:29.180 --> 00:19:40.020
 empirical movement? Yeah. I think he was just about as fully developed

00:19:40.020 --> 00:19:52.780
 as anyone as a thinker. The philosophers of the scholastic period a thousand years ago

00:19:52.780 --> 00:20:04.820
 did some fairly ridiculous things in the name of Aristotle worship. But people like Leibniz

00:20:04.820 --> 00:20:15.700
 were still thinking in some of Aristotle's ideas. For example, the analyzing cause into

00:20:15.700 --> 00:20:28.300
 the different types of causality, including final cause, the condemnation of teleological

00:20:28.300 --> 00:20:39.620
 explanations has been a big part of the essentialist mechanistic science.

00:20:39.620 --> 00:20:50.140
 But Leibniz was able to, for example, explain the physics of optics using Aristotelian final

00:20:50.140 --> 00:21:01.660
 causes in his mathematical descriptions and showed that it worked just as well as the

00:21:01.660 --> 00:21:11.060
 mechanical billiard ball kind of causality. One thing hits another and the cause moves

00:21:11.060 --> 00:21:19.180
 only in that direction rather than taking into account the end condition as well as

00:21:19.180 --> 00:21:31.020
 the starting condition. Leibniz wanted to see the causality as a global holistic way

00:21:31.020 --> 00:21:37.540
 of existence. And I think you've pointed out before, and

00:21:37.540 --> 00:21:47.500
 you can say this over if you like, but the East or the Eastern Orthodox branch of knowledge,

00:21:47.500 --> 00:21:55.300
 the Russians basically went off primarily with the Aristotelian viewpoint and the West

00:21:55.300 --> 00:22:04.420
 somehow adopted the Platonic viewpoint. So we're all, I mean, I think that accounts for

00:22:04.420 --> 00:22:11.300
 our love of modeling instead of gathering empirical evidence. We're currently in a big

00:22:11.300 --> 00:22:18.220
 festival of creating mathematical models and imposing that on reality and trying to make

00:22:18.220 --> 00:22:32.900
 it fit. The teleological approach is fully compatible

00:22:32.900 --> 00:22:48.460
 with the evidence-based, historical, fact-centered approach. It just looks at generality and

00:22:48.460 --> 00:23:00.620
 laws in a different way that doesn't insist that they are outside of time and absolute

00:23:00.620 --> 00:23:13.860
 and that things can only obey them in a simple and abstract way. So it's open to complexity

00:23:13.860 --> 00:23:20.100
 in a way that the essentialist, Platonist approach isn't.

00:23:20.100 --> 00:23:31.180
 And bringing that history back to the history of evolution or the evolution of evolution,

00:23:31.180 --> 00:23:34.940
 how has the evolutionary thought developed over the years? Maybe you could give us a

00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:50.180
 summary of East versus West or if it's not... In Darwin's time, the racist approach tried

00:23:50.180 --> 00:23:59.300
 to explain everything in terms of your existing present biology, which was explained in terms

00:23:59.300 --> 00:24:16.060
 of your genetic nature. It said that how you came to be with this nature was a purely random

00:24:16.060 --> 00:24:29.140
 affair and that the only way to change the situation generally is to select out the inferior,

00:24:29.140 --> 00:24:37.020
 not to improve them, because things essentially aren't open to change and improvement. So

00:24:37.020 --> 00:24:48.860
 what you measure is what was destined from the start and can never be changed. So it's

00:24:48.860 --> 00:25:03.300
 seeing the future in terms of defining past or worse. You can delete the inferior species,

00:25:03.300 --> 00:25:13.900
 but you can't improve them. So it necessarily leads to either intentional or incidental

00:25:13.900 --> 00:25:23.820
 genocide in which inferior plants, inferior people, inferior animals will go out of existence

00:25:23.820 --> 00:25:39.420
 simply because improvement isn't possible. So that amounts to saying that the future

00:25:39.420 --> 00:25:50.460
 can be cleaned up by eliminating the random inferiority of all of the species except those

00:25:50.460 --> 00:26:05.340
 in England and Europe, but it rejects the idea of improving the world.

00:26:05.340 --> 00:26:10.100
 In that ideology you just expressed there of basically getting rid of inferior people

00:26:10.100 --> 00:26:19.260
 and things, was that expressed before Malthus came along?

00:26:19.260 --> 00:26:32.260
 I think it developed as they realized that the moneyed class had better health, everything

00:26:32.260 --> 00:26:48.940
 better. The ideology was intended to keep down the demands of the working classes. So

00:26:48.940 --> 00:27:00.580
 Malthus really just codified an ideology and Darwin, being a member of the upper class,

00:27:00.580 --> 00:27:14.820
 found that compatible with his way of thinking. I see Vernadsky's use of the Le Chatelier

00:27:14.820 --> 00:27:26.780
 principle that if a system is in equilibrium and you disturb the system, it adjusts itself

00:27:26.780 --> 00:27:42.060
 to come to a new equilibrium. Vernadsky saw the cosmos as an energy system and life as

00:27:42.060 --> 00:27:51.820
 part of the system that is adjusting the equilibrium as the system is energized from the outside.

00:27:51.820 --> 00:28:04.060
 So he saw evolution as having a direction, but in a way it was teleological because he

00:28:04.060 --> 00:28:16.780
 showed that it would maximize the movement of atoms, the intensity of metabolism in organisms,

00:28:16.780 --> 00:28:26.540
 and the maximization of size, especially of the nervous system and the brain. So the flow

00:28:26.540 --> 00:28:36.460
 of energy was giving shape to his system. Every part of the system was part of the equilibrium

00:28:36.460 --> 00:28:43.500
 which opened the change, but the change was directional in the sense of improving the

00:28:43.500 --> 00:28:49.100
 equilibrium and function of the whole system. And that's what you mean by teleological,

00:28:49.100 --> 00:28:59.140
 that's purposefulness? Yes, you think about equilibrium and the end

00:28:59.140 --> 00:29:05.020
 condition as well as the starting condition. You have to think in terms of a whole system

00:29:05.020 --> 00:29:14.540
 and the interactions through time so that everything has a history and all of the parts

00:29:14.540 --> 00:29:23.160
 and levels interact with each other so that there's no part of the system that isn't interacting.

00:29:23.160 --> 00:29:32.540
 So there's no place for one of these essential platonic forms, which Mendel, for example,

00:29:32.540 --> 00:29:45.500
 intended to identify as trait genes so that you could have the fixed species. He let the

00:29:45.500 --> 00:29:54.340
 traits vary by rearrangement, but the traits and the genes were really essential, timeless,

00:29:54.340 --> 00:30:09.540
 forever fixed forms. It's really a very pure religious imposition on key traits in Mendel's

00:30:09.540 --> 00:30:16.820
 case. It just seems like the pot calling the kettle

00:30:16.820 --> 00:30:23.340
 black there because you've got him insisting on these ideal forms, which sounds religious,

00:30:23.340 --> 00:30:29.460
 but he's calling the people who believe in teleological or purposeful adaptation, he's

00:30:29.460 --> 00:30:42.380
 calling them vitalists or superstitious people. Yes, and the people who own the schools, universities,

00:30:42.380 --> 00:30:52.420
 publishing houses are in a better position to denounce others as frauds and pseudoscientists

00:30:52.420 --> 00:31:06.820
 and so on. But actually, there's a tremendous amount of fake science hiding among the genetics

00:31:06.820 --> 00:31:24.060
 culture. Eugenics was part of the biological gene culture in the United States. The Journal

00:31:24.060 --> 00:31:33.980
 of Eugenics, after Hitler lost the war and was discredited, they changed their name to

00:31:33.980 --> 00:31:44.020
 the Journal of Human Genetics, but the people didn't change their ideas. They still worshipped

00:31:44.020 --> 00:31:50.460
 the doctrines of Conrad Lorenz, who devised Hitler's genocide rationale.

00:31:50.460 --> 00:31:59.620
 Yeah, that's right. We've talked about that before. He was lauded in this country as a

00:31:59.620 --> 00:32:05.020
 friendly scientist. He was on the cover of Life magazine when I was a kid.

00:32:05.020 --> 00:32:15.580
 Yeah, and after he got the Nobel Prize, my professors, every one of them, including the

00:32:15.580 --> 00:32:31.340
 immigrants, the Jewish, Hungarian, Austrian immigrants who had escaped Europe around 1939

00:32:31.340 --> 00:32:40.620
 and 1940, they were praising Conrad Lorenz and the very ideas that were published to

00:32:40.620 --> 00:32:46.580
 justify the extermination. Yeah, I looked that up after we talked last

00:32:46.580 --> 00:32:56.820
 time. He was apparently very influential in convincing the German public that the Jews

00:32:56.820 --> 00:33:05.820
 had to be removed like a cancer from Europe. Yeah, and his book that was published, I think

00:33:05.820 --> 00:33:13.660
 it was around 1970, he used exactly the same sentences except he used a slight euphemism

00:33:13.660 --> 00:33:23.340
 instead of exterminated. I think he used some milder term, but even though that was in his

00:33:23.340 --> 00:33:33.660
 newest book, these professors somehow made a disconnect and saw it as their very own

00:33:33.660 --> 00:33:42.900
 personal philosophy of the world. It's a good example of how dangerous science

00:33:42.900 --> 00:33:50.500
 or influential scientists gone bad can be. They have a powerful podium that they speak

00:33:50.500 --> 00:33:56.900
 from behind and they can be very influential in a terrible way.

00:33:56.900 --> 00:34:05.700
 Ray, I was thinking maybe you could walk us through from which your conception of the

00:34:05.700 --> 00:34:13.500
 history of evolution is from the origin of life, maybe as you see it, but also as other

00:34:13.500 --> 00:34:23.220
 people have proposed, and bring us up to Darwin and Lamarck, if that's something you're able

00:34:23.220 --> 00:34:35.260
 or interested in doing. I'm inclined to see Sidney Fox's approach

00:34:35.260 --> 00:34:55.420
 as being at least a good image or analog of how the process works. He worked in Linus

00:34:55.420 --> 00:35:06.060
 Pauling's lab and was a professor in regular biology departments supported, I think, by

00:35:06.060 --> 00:35:18.140
 NASA and other government funding. But his conclusions, his results were very clear,

00:35:18.140 --> 00:35:29.820
 just didn't resonate with the genetics of biological schools. His crucial series of

00:35:29.820 --> 00:35:42.220
 experiments showed that the Urey-Miller bubbling primitive atmosphere supposedly with methane

00:35:42.220 --> 00:35:50.580
 and ammonia and sparking up getting amino acids, he did variations on that, cooking

00:35:50.580 --> 00:35:59.780
 ammonia and carbon dioxide in various ways in the presence of hot rocks. He found that

00:35:59.780 --> 00:36:16.060
 protein-like things spontaneously polymerized and the arrangement was nonrandom. If he had

00:36:16.060 --> 00:36:24.780
 eight or ten amino acids cooking together, the proteins that spontaneously formed on

00:36:24.780 --> 00:36:36.340
 the surface of the hot rocks had a nonrandom arrangement as if the amino acids were interacting

00:36:36.340 --> 00:36:44.740
 in such a way that they chose their position according to stability in some sense, rather

00:36:44.740 --> 00:36:56.580
 than just randomly falling together. In a certain arrangement, the heat with a very

00:36:56.580 --> 00:37:01.100
 small amount of water letting them dry out and then adding a small amount of water to

00:37:01.100 --> 00:37:12.300
 this hot spontaneously formed protein, they spontaneously formed little bacteria-like

00:37:12.300 --> 00:37:24.220
 spheres of very uniform in size. The bulk of the protein would take on this bacteria-like

00:37:24.220 --> 00:37:35.980
 shape spontaneously. When new amino acids were added, these shapes could divide like

00:37:35.980 --> 00:37:44.260
 cells or bud off parts that would then grow up to the bacteria-sized particle about a

00:37:44.260 --> 00:37:58.780
 micron in diameter, I think it was, so they could eat and reproduce. To a mixture of these

00:37:58.780 --> 00:38:12.660
 amino acid proteins and spheres, he found that adding the bases of the nucleic acids,

00:38:12.660 --> 00:38:22.220
 these two would polymerize inside the little bacteria-like particles and would form nucleic

00:38:22.220 --> 00:38:34.900
 acid chain polymers, again, which were nonrandomly arranged apparently by the nature of the bases

00:38:34.900 --> 00:38:45.780
 themselves and their context, the nature of the nonrandom protein structures around them.

00:38:45.780 --> 00:38:57.780
 So the ordering process doesn't require any kind of input up to this stage. Neither a

00:38:57.780 --> 00:39:12.580
 divine watchmaker specifying that they should have this sequence and shape, nor the infinitely

00:39:12.580 --> 00:39:28.340
 long spans of time that the crude Darwinian viewpoint suggested in which a random change

00:39:28.340 --> 00:39:42.260
 would be selected by the outside environment and become nonrandom through a series of adaptive

00:39:42.260 --> 00:39:51.420
 selections. Yeah, that's amazing. So he just did that by adding amino acids to hot volcanic

00:39:51.420 --> 00:40:00.340
 rock which presumably had some chemical attributes to it that made that stuff happen. He simplified

00:40:00.340 --> 00:40:08.140
 the procedure so that high school students could create life in an hour lab session.

00:40:08.140 --> 00:40:21.580
 That's a good science project. Wow. Make you feel like God.

00:40:21.580 --> 00:40:32.740
 That is a sort of a primitive single cell arrangement with nucleic acid possible precursors

00:40:32.740 --> 00:40:45.180
 to genetic material, but it seems like a very plausible way to see the first bacteria coming

00:40:45.180 --> 00:40:57.940
 into existence. The underwater vents in the ocean, there's a volcano spewing constantly

00:40:57.940 --> 00:41:11.340
 material into the deep ocean water. These are full of very weird types of organisms.

00:41:11.340 --> 00:41:22.020
 Looking at that as an analogy to Sidney Fox's experiments, it suggests that you might get

00:41:22.020 --> 00:41:31.220
 with a bigger lab setup, you might get something much closer to presently existing organisms

00:41:31.220 --> 00:41:42.900
 just in a matter of minutes or hours. When you have extreme pressure, for example, and

00:41:42.900 --> 00:41:48.180
 high temperature. Yeah, those underwater volcanic worms are

00:41:48.180 --> 00:41:57.420
 unbelievable. They're way down, very low in the ocean, so lots of pressure and intense

00:41:57.420 --> 00:42:06.380
 heat coming out too. Is that correct? Yeah. I think usually there's a lot of sulfur

00:42:06.380 --> 00:42:17.900
 and carbon dioxide, but each volcanic vent has its chemical particularity.

00:42:17.900 --> 00:42:24.100
 So is that theory of life developing, gaining more acceptance? Because I would think it's

00:42:24.100 --> 00:42:39.260
 very difficult to go on with any other kind of theory in that case, looking at that evidence.

00:42:39.260 --> 00:42:48.020
 I mentioned it to my professors in my qualifying exam. None of them had heard about it, even

00:42:48.020 --> 00:42:58.940
 though it was in Leninger's biochemistry textbook. They hadn't heard about it. I looked at the

00:42:58.940 --> 00:43:06.900
 edition that came out in Leninger's name after he died and Fox's work had been removed. So

00:43:06.900 --> 00:43:20.620
 I think there was a move away from it after Fox died. But I don't think anything has come

00:43:20.620 --> 00:43:27.860
 near to replacing it. You wrote in Generative Energy under the chapter

00:43:27.860 --> 00:43:34.460
 called Another View of Evolution, you wrote, "The thought that lifeforms might just sort

00:43:34.460 --> 00:43:42.380
 of gush up out of the earth in volcanic regions makes it all seem too easy. Where might it

00:43:42.380 --> 00:43:47.660
 lead if people started believing that life could originate without a struggle for existence?"

00:43:47.660 --> 00:44:01.220
 And what do you think they're afraid of, Ray? I'm sure it's that the Malthusian and Darwinian

00:44:01.220 --> 00:44:13.220
 hatred of the lower classes, the feeling that if they were given a chance, they would displace

00:44:13.220 --> 00:44:20.220
 the ruling class. So it really comes down to politics.

00:44:20.220 --> 00:44:32.940
 Yes, and the very present attitude of the American ruling class is that they have the

00:44:32.940 --> 00:44:46.420
 right to kill anyone in the world they choose to. No legal process required, just choosing

00:44:46.420 --> 00:44:51.340
 names on the list is all that's necessary. That's right. Now even American citizens can

00:44:51.340 --> 00:45:03.580
 be taken out. Yes, it has different justifications. It was

00:45:03.580 --> 00:45:16.860
 a little more complex in Darwin's time, the various justifications for why Africans could

00:45:16.860 --> 00:45:30.380
 be exterminated. But the general attitude towards the working class has, from 1800 right

00:45:30.380 --> 00:45:45.340
 down to more or less the present time, the working class is seen as a threat. The word

00:45:45.340 --> 00:45:54.660
 class in politics, the only time I saw an American presidential candidate use the word

00:45:54.660 --> 00:46:13.740
 social class, that was the end of television paying attention to his candidacy. I forget

00:46:13.740 --> 00:46:22.180
 the candidate's name, but class isn't something that you can mention politically except to

00:46:22.180 --> 00:46:35.140
 denounce the union advocacy as a class warfare. You can denounce class warfare, but you can't

00:46:35.140 --> 00:46:47.740
 denounce class privilege. They have embedded in their thought process

00:46:47.740 --> 00:46:56.820
 is these Malthusian sort of ideas that the people are dispensable, I think, which is

00:46:56.820 --> 00:47:01.700
 an odd thing. We live in a democratic country and yet that's occurred in places like San

00:47:01.700 --> 00:47:09.660
 Francisco. Yeah, not only dispensable, but better off

00:47:09.660 --> 00:47:20.860
 without them. A lot of people are arguing that birth control, especially for the poor

00:47:20.860 --> 00:47:28.340
 in other countries, but they don't like to say it very loud, but birth control is a way

00:47:28.340 --> 00:47:35.100
 of eliminating the undesirables.

00:47:35.100 --> 00:47:41.740
 So stepping out of the political realm for a second, if we go back to those molecules

00:47:41.740 --> 00:47:50.820
 forming from the amino acids and then forming larger organizations of molecules, how do

00:47:50.820 --> 00:47:59.900
 you see life developing into actual organisms that have organelles within them and going

00:47:59.900 --> 00:48:09.060
 on from there to where we are now? The Sidney Fox particles could interact with

00:48:09.060 --> 00:48:19.180
 each other. If you have a whole planet full of such things, the interactions every time

00:48:19.180 --> 00:48:33.020
 you get something that is a little more stable, this will spread horizontally. It isn't necessarily

00:48:33.020 --> 00:48:43.540
 a matter of descendants, but it will spread its influence by contact with its contemporaries.

00:48:43.540 --> 00:48:52.340
 So things can spread much faster than the idea of inheritance and the selection of the

00:48:52.340 --> 00:49:00.100
 fittest and so on. The bacteria are now known to be able to spread

00:49:00.100 --> 00:49:11.740
 their resistance to antibiotics horizontally so that they don't have to evolve as descendants

00:49:11.740 --> 00:49:19.460
 of the immune individual, but that one can give it to all of his neighbors. So you get

00:49:19.460 --> 00:49:30.540
 an explosive change in populations. If you have a planet that's full of these simple

00:49:30.540 --> 00:49:39.140
 things, the tendency is for them to accumulate more and more of the stabilizing, activating

00:49:39.140 --> 00:49:53.900
 structures. I see it as an example of Vernadsky's "apply the right pressure and temperature

00:49:53.900 --> 00:50:03.100
 conditions and so on" and the system spontaneously moves in that direction as being driven by

00:50:03.100 --> 00:50:12.820
 the environmental conditions. I think it's a very quick process to come

00:50:12.820 --> 00:50:26.380
 to the single cell that's extremely well endowed with the so-called genetic material, the nucleic

00:50:26.380 --> 00:50:40.220
 acids. Just by following the Vernadsky principle, we'll tend to complexify so that instead of

00:50:40.220 --> 00:50:54.100
 simple bacteria, you get very well endowed things like amoebas, very complex single-celled

00:50:54.100 --> 00:51:05.460
 organisms. I think it was James Shapiro who talked about the bacterial self-engineering

00:51:05.460 --> 00:51:20.100
 of their genetic material. I think he was maybe the first one that proposed that the

00:51:20.100 --> 00:51:30.860
 movement from a protozoan-type organism to a multicellular organism could also be almost

00:51:30.860 --> 00:51:46.300
 spontaneous in which this over-endowed single cell finds a situation in which colonizing,

00:51:46.300 --> 00:52:00.180
 co-dominating with its neighbors, leads it to a new level of metabolism and stability.

00:52:00.180 --> 00:52:11.740
 I think the Vernadsky principle applies not only the move from the protein to the fox

00:52:11.740 --> 00:52:20.420
 particle and the fox particle to the full bacterium and the bacterium to the amoeba,

00:52:20.420 --> 00:52:26.180
 but also from the amoeba to the multicelled organism.

00:52:26.180 --> 00:52:32.820
 Wow. Vernadsky was a Russian geophysicist? Is that what his official title was?

00:52:32.820 --> 00:52:47.780
 Yeah. He had a theory of how soil was formed and that led him to a new view of cosmology

00:52:47.780 --> 00:52:57.260
 and of organisms and so on. He didn't draw any lines and so in trying to understand the

00:52:57.260 --> 00:53:04.260
 soil, he had to understand the history of the organisms that made it and the history

00:53:04.260 --> 00:53:12.940
 of the cosmos and the energy supplies that supported those organisms interacting and

00:53:12.940 --> 00:53:16.340
 making their environment.

00:53:16.340 --> 00:53:28.260
 Just that the organisms make their environment in a sense and then they choose the way they

00:53:28.260 --> 00:53:36.340
 will be in the environment so they make themselves as well as the environment. But it's the whole

00:53:36.340 --> 00:53:43.780
 system that is making the whole thing possible.

00:53:43.780 --> 00:53:51.420
 I really like that idea. We just had a question come in about what you were saying earlier.

00:53:51.420 --> 00:53:57.780
 This is from Duncan and the question goes like this. It's by email. People can email

00:53:57.780 --> 00:54:06.820
 politicsandscience@madriver.com if they want to send an email in.

00:54:06.820 --> 00:54:13.060
 Duncan says, "Is it possible to fix the class warfare problem? If so, then how? Are there

00:54:13.060 --> 00:54:18.220
 any ways to do it non-violently? What are the best materials to study for propaganda

00:54:18.220 --> 00:54:29.900
 and revolution? Will the class warfare problem always exist considering inherent human nature?"

00:54:29.900 --> 00:54:43.020
 I think it's a metaphysical problem essentially in which I think it was about 1870 or 1875

00:54:43.020 --> 00:54:52.820
 when William Morris said, "Where will this culture end? With a counting house on top

00:54:52.820 --> 00:55:10.020
 of a cinder pile?" That was very close to the way the climate change seems to be leading

00:55:10.020 --> 00:55:22.140
 us, ashes and money.

00:55:22.140 --> 00:55:31.540
 I think it's basically a metaphysical thing that if you see the mechanical commitment

00:55:31.540 --> 00:55:43.180
 to the past leading its way into the future, you end up with that cinder pile. To avoid

00:55:43.180 --> 00:55:52.860
 that you have to change your metaphysics to the Leibnizian or Aristotelian view in which

00:55:52.860 --> 00:56:06.860
 the final cause has to be taken into account. Leibniz and Teilhard de Chardin attended a

00:56:06.860 --> 00:56:19.580
 Bernadsky lecture on the noosphere. Chardin was an archaeologist, anthropologist, priest

00:56:19.580 --> 00:56:32.300
 and he saw this end point as a God consciousness. That was how Leibniz expressed it, that the

00:56:32.300 --> 00:56:47.380
 end condition was moving towards in some way a fuller expression of Godness. However you

00:56:47.380 --> 00:56:59.380
 express the end conditions, Bernadsky didn't have that sort of an end in mind. He described

00:56:59.380 --> 00:57:14.780
 it as a universe of consciousness, the noosphere, in which knowledge and awareness became the

00:57:14.780 --> 00:57:23.020
 governing principle. However you see the end condition, I think you have to start thinking

00:57:23.020 --> 00:57:32.980
 in terms of final causes and get back to Aristotle at least. Once you take that into account

00:57:32.980 --> 00:57:41.660
 that maybe it isn't so good to reduce the planet to ashes and money, then maybe you

00:57:41.660 --> 00:57:50.900
 can work on solutions. Part of the solution is to stop thinking about class superiority

00:57:50.900 --> 00:58:01.100
 and racial superiority and so on. When you say the end conditions, does that

00:58:01.100 --> 00:58:06.900
 mean you have to imagine how you'd like the world to be and then intend to make it that

00:58:06.900 --> 00:58:15.100
 way? Yes. The final cause was the purpose, where

00:58:15.100 --> 00:58:29.740
 you mean to go. By denouncing teleological thinking at any level, they said that the

00:58:29.740 --> 00:58:38.060
 bottom line is that you want to make your money and you don't care what it costs the

00:58:38.060 --> 00:58:50.220
 other person or the environment. The strict one-directional idea of causality, you work

00:58:50.220 --> 00:59:03.580
 on what's local and profitable and disregard the outcome because according to that metaphysics,

00:59:03.580 --> 00:59:14.460
 the outcome is always a matter of degradation, the elimination of what was unsuccessful.

00:59:14.460 --> 00:59:27.300
 You're listening to WMRW LP Warren. We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat. He has a PhD

00:59:27.300 --> 00:59:35.220
 in biology and specializes in physiology. We're talking around the subject of evolution

00:59:35.220 --> 00:59:56.020
 and how you think about that is important. On that line of thinking, anthropology is

00:59:56.020 --> 01:00:06.860
 an area that is very closely connected to evolutionary thinking. Despite the fact that

01:00:06.860 --> 01:00:17.140
 the academic anthropology in the U.S. has been very strongly guided by the CIA recruiting

01:00:17.140 --> 01:00:27.900
 anthropologists as agents to learn how to control the inferior masses of the world,

01:00:27.900 --> 01:00:37.500
 despite that pretty much takeover by the government, there are these evolutionary lines of thinking

01:00:37.500 --> 01:00:51.660
 in anthropology that are very promising. The Margaret Mead approach that cultures don't

01:00:51.660 --> 01:01:00.820
 have to be static, that the people make the culture and so they can change the culture.

01:01:00.820 --> 01:01:14.540
 Professor Franz Boas at Columbia thought of himself as a Darwinist

01:01:14.540 --> 01:01:28.820
 and evolution-oriented thinker, but when he actually studied the facts, he was showing

01:01:28.820 --> 01:01:37.500
 that the environment rather than the genes govern even the person's biology, not only

01:01:37.500 --> 01:01:48.620
 their language and thoughts and culture and ordinary everyday behavior, but even the shape

01:01:48.620 --> 01:01:59.780
 of their organism. He measured the heads of Europeans who had moved either to New York

01:01:59.780 --> 01:02:12.140
 or Puerto Rico and found that the first generation offspring of these immigrants had heads shaped

01:02:12.140 --> 01:02:19.060
 more like New Yorkers or Puerto Ricans than like the European parents.

01:02:19.060 --> 01:02:36.660
 Even though he thought of himself as a Darwinist, it showed the powerful importance of the material

01:02:36.660 --> 01:02:45.940
 and the social culture that people move into, shaping even the organism, the body.

01:02:45.940 --> 01:02:50.140
 Here's another question, I'll just take this as it comes, it's also from Duncan.

01:02:50.140 --> 01:03:01.700
 Is empathy evolutionarily advantageous?

01:03:01.700 --> 01:03:20.100
 I see empathy as the universal principle of substance, the absolute opposite of the essentialist

01:03:20.100 --> 01:03:34.940
 view of reality. If you break the world up into like Mitzian monads, the essentialist

01:03:34.940 --> 01:03:47.580
 says that the monads are closed. The existence of empathy implies that each unit of existence

01:03:47.580 --> 01:03:59.940
 is open and interacting with its environment. So I see empathy as expressible in physical

01:03:59.940 --> 01:04:17.020
 terms such as resonance. In the case of empathizing with a person or animal, you tune your nervous

01:04:17.020 --> 01:04:25.900
 system so that it in effect is resonating with the conditions of the other's nervous

01:04:25.900 --> 01:04:33.580
 system. But I see it as something that is explaining

01:04:33.580 --> 01:04:44.340
 why the amino acids take on a nonrandom arrangement in Fox's molecules, why certain structures

01:04:44.340 --> 01:04:58.060
 are stable that happen to look like small bacteria. Resonance is a stabilizer on the

01:04:58.060 --> 01:05:09.100
 atomic level, the chemical cellular level and so on, as well as the organismic level

01:05:09.100 --> 01:05:16.980
 resonance of the nervous systems. I like that a lot, culturally too in the form

01:05:16.980 --> 01:05:34.300
 of music and ideas that resonate. Luca Turin, there are some lectures by him.

01:05:34.300 --> 01:05:48.140
 He's a perfume expert, but his theory of psychoactive drugs or of hormones and so on,

01:05:48.140 --> 01:05:58.300
 as well as odor molecules, is based on the idea that it's an electronic resonance between

01:05:58.300 --> 01:06:06.060
 the molecule and the cell that accounts for the specificity. He gives many examples in

01:06:06.060 --> 01:06:18.660
 which molecules that resonate have the same smell or the same biological effect despite

01:06:18.660 --> 01:06:25.580
 having a different shape, or that molecules with the same shape that are different vibratory

01:06:25.580 --> 01:06:35.140
 frequency don't have the same biological effect.

01:06:35.140 --> 01:06:44.380
 Where did you run into him, Ray? Reading about perfume, I guess. The Science

01:06:44.380 --> 01:06:51.980
 News around 1951 had an article about the person who originated that theory, or actually

01:06:51.980 --> 01:06:59.820
 a follower of the person who originated the theory. It started in the 1930s, but I saw

01:06:59.820 --> 01:07:11.460
 this article in Science News in the early 50s. Luca Turin is updating those lines of

01:07:11.460 --> 01:07:17.380
 thinking. I had a basic question about evolution. Basically,

01:07:17.380 --> 01:07:22.580
 we're made out of the material the world's made out of, our bodies and everything on

01:07:22.580 --> 01:07:29.180
 the earth. Are we basically just an evolution of the actual material that we're made out

01:07:29.180 --> 01:07:41.860
 of, the elements of the earth? Or is it just a building of complexity of those materials?

01:07:41.860 --> 01:08:02.100
 I think the resonant properties are the properties that matter to us. We can substitute sometimes

01:08:02.100 --> 01:08:24.220
 molecules that aren't exactly the same in form or substance, but that have the same

01:08:24.220 --> 01:08:32.340
 remarkable range of biologically valuable functions, even though it's something that

01:08:32.340 --> 01:08:43.540
 we're never involved with, that it has an electronic property that fits in and stabilizes

01:08:43.540 --> 01:08:49.220
 or enriches our system. Okay, at this point, we had a Skype fallout.

01:08:49.220 --> 01:08:53.460
 The distortion got so bad, Ray couldn't hear me, and I had to call him back. So it goes

01:08:53.460 --> 01:09:00.460
 away pretty quickly. But at any rate, I apologize for yet another audio problem.

01:09:00.460 --> 01:09:04.020
 Hello? Can you hear me now?

01:09:04.020 --> 01:09:09.940
 Oh, it's better, but still pretty scrunchy. Still scrunchy. Gosh, I don't know what's

01:09:09.940 --> 01:09:13.740
 going on. But I can understand you now.

01:09:13.740 --> 01:09:18.100
 Okay. You said something about methylene blue was

01:09:18.100 --> 01:09:20.500
 the last. That's correct. And I've heard you say that

01:09:20.500 --> 01:09:27.500
 it's a supplement you can take that will actually improve your cellular energy function.

01:09:27.500 --> 01:09:39.020
 Yeah, yeah. Even though it's a weird molecule, it happens to electronically fit in, even

01:09:39.020 --> 01:09:46.180
 though there's no structural analog that's exactly like it.

01:09:46.180 --> 01:09:52.540
 And do you think using materials like that, finding them out of the environment and using

01:09:52.540 --> 01:09:58.860
 them because we find some benefit from them, is that part of our evolutionary and probably

01:09:58.860 --> 01:10:06.180
 all life's evolutionary process? Yeah, I think so. I think things analogous

01:10:06.180 --> 01:10:16.460
 to that have happened at different stages, that something that is available and increases

01:10:16.460 --> 01:10:27.740
 our efficiency, give us sort of a stepping stone to do something else.

01:10:27.740 --> 01:10:31.860
 I know there was a book, I think it was called Food of the Gods. I could have that wrong,

01:10:31.860 --> 01:10:40.820
 but it was postulating that our consciousness did a radical shift and improvement sometime

01:10:40.820 --> 01:10:47.760
 in ancient history when we discovered psilocybin mushrooms that went along with the cow plops

01:10:47.760 --> 01:10:53.100
 that came out of following cow herds around the world or Africa. And I was wondering what

01:10:53.100 --> 01:10:58.220
 you thought about the evolution of consciousness.

01:10:58.220 --> 01:11:10.780
 I think things such as the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, the amount of particular

01:11:10.780 --> 01:11:22.620
 nutrients in the diet, the balance of amino acids and such very widely available things

01:11:22.620 --> 01:11:35.860
 are the main powers of increasing consciousness. But consciousness I see as simply one side

01:11:35.860 --> 01:11:48.800
 of the metabolic interactive process so that anything that increases our quality of metabolism

01:11:48.800 --> 01:12:03.260
 is increasing our ability to resonate with more complex and extensive systems. Things

01:12:03.260 --> 01:12:16.280
 like the mushrooms act as a lubricant that the organism might have a certain amount of

01:12:16.280 --> 01:12:26.620
 energy available and with just a little lubricant it might find that it can slide up to a new

01:12:26.620 --> 01:12:30.540
 metabolic level.

01:12:30.540 --> 01:12:39.820
 Sort of a lubricant that will help you have epiphanies about the life around you.

01:12:39.820 --> 01:12:54.860
 Yeah, and new ways of interacting. For example, I think there's a tendency of the offspring

01:12:54.860 --> 01:13:04.700
 of the ruling class to not have the appetite for the crazy things that their parents and

01:13:04.700 --> 01:13:09.420
 grandparents were committed to.

01:13:09.420 --> 01:13:12.340
 I see, so they've had a change of consciousness.

01:13:12.340 --> 01:13:23.660
 Yeah, I think there are bits of that happening over the last 40-50 years.

01:13:23.660 --> 01:13:29.220
 One of the things that you've written about a lot is Pavlov and Anokin, the Russian behavioral

01:13:29.220 --> 01:13:36.180
 scientists is that what you call them? And one of the things that you put down which

01:13:36.180 --> 01:13:44.540
 I thought was interesting was Pavlov's writing about that life has a biological urge for

01:13:44.540 --> 01:13:51.780
 freedom and I was wondering if you believe that and if that's a powerful evolutionary

01:13:51.780 --> 01:13:53.780
 force.

01:13:53.780 --> 01:14:11.340
 Yeah, I think it fits in to the idea of the noosphere. Pavlov's reflex of freedom was

01:14:11.340 --> 01:14:28.940
 also the exploratory reflex or the what is it reflex, always wanting to find out more.

01:14:28.940 --> 01:14:40.020
 When the culture or planet evolves beyond the urge to accumulate and gain power and

01:14:40.020 --> 01:14:56.460
 so on to the conscious noosphere level, then that reflex I think will be fully activated

01:14:56.460 --> 01:15:06.820
 and everything will become a question and an opportunity for discovery. So that instead

01:15:06.820 --> 01:15:32.180
 of being an end point, it becomes an opportunity for creation of new levels of being.

01:15:32.180 --> 01:15:37.780
 You also wrote that health can be seen as the coordination of the levels of evolution

01:15:37.780 --> 01:15:44.380
 and I know you do a lot of writing about health because that's a good window I think you've

01:15:44.380 --> 01:15:50.580
 said to connect with people and I thought that was very interesting. Maybe you could

01:15:50.580 --> 01:15:57.380
 talk about the levels of evolution and what those are and why coordinating those equals

01:15:57.380 --> 01:15:58.380
 good health.

01:15:58.380 --> 01:16:16.620
 I don't remember what I had in mind. Maybe something like Maslow's steps of development,

01:16:16.620 --> 01:16:34.100
 security, the need for enough food, the need for social interactions and mental stimulation

01:16:34.100 --> 01:16:47.700
 and finally Maslow's self-actualization. It might be analogous to the freedom reflex,

01:16:47.700 --> 01:16:56.220
 the opportunity to live for creative action.

01:16:56.220 --> 01:16:58.020
 Who was Maslow, Ray?

01:16:58.020 --> 01:17:13.180
 Abraham Maslow, the Brandeis psychologist, along with Carl Rogers. He was the great step

01:17:13.180 --> 01:17:22.660
 forward in psychology beyond Freudianism and behaviorism to humanistic psychology.

01:17:22.660 --> 01:17:28.420
 Bringing us back to empathy.

01:17:28.420 --> 01:17:41.260
 Carl Rogers was actually a sophisticated thinker with a phenomenological approach to science

01:17:41.260 --> 01:17:54.700
 and his understanding of therapy was that it's the interactive attempt of the therapist

01:17:54.700 --> 01:18:04.220
 to listen to and understand the client which is therapeutic. It's the resident in itself

01:18:04.220 --> 01:18:06.020
 which is therapeutic.

01:18:06.020 --> 01:18:16.660
 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, we've got a question taking you back to the methylene

01:18:16.660 --> 01:18:21.700
 blue. It came in by email. It's from Duncan again. Considering higher energy levels, have

01:18:21.700 --> 01:18:28.500
 you tried methylene blue and if so, how does it feel versus progesterone or caffeine? Were

01:18:28.500 --> 01:18:34.020
 there any higher energy thinking abilities evident?

01:18:34.020 --> 01:18:44.300
 I've only been using it transdermally. That's my approach to understanding new chemicals

01:18:44.300 --> 01:19:00.180
 is to find what the smallest amount does and then work up in stages. So far, I see it as

01:19:00.180 --> 01:19:07.140
 just a good anti-inflammatory.

01:19:07.140 --> 01:19:15.420
 We'll wait for a further report as that progresses. Were you going to say something else, Ray?

01:19:15.420 --> 01:19:24.340
 No, but quite a few people are having very powerful anti-depression effects from it with

01:19:24.340 --> 01:19:33.140
 just one milligram a day. I think it's probably going to be effective at doses analogous to

01:19:33.140 --> 01:19:43.260
 thyroid hormone, 20, 30, 40 micrograms per day I think might be the optimal dose of methylene

01:19:43.260 --> 01:19:44.260
 blue.

01:19:44.260 --> 01:19:54.780
 All right. Take something blue to get rid of your blues. It sounds like, like you said,

01:19:54.780 --> 01:20:01.140
 if it works, it's raising your energy levels and that's a common theme.

01:20:01.140 --> 01:20:09.860
 It's known that it can bypass mitochondrial defects and I think that's a big part of why

01:20:09.860 --> 01:20:14.700
 it can cure very serious depression at such a small dose.

01:20:14.700 --> 01:20:22.900
 Wow. That's impressive. I have some, well, I wanted to talk a little bit, we have some

01:20:22.900 --> 01:20:29.700
 time left and I wanted to talk about Russian science. I know you've always been interested

01:20:29.700 --> 01:20:36.300
 in that and I was curious about your experience personally going to Russia. I know you went

01:20:36.300 --> 01:20:42.380
 there one summer to talk to scientists and they were all out at their, what do they call

01:20:42.380 --> 01:20:43.380
 them, dachas?

01:20:43.380 --> 01:20:44.380
 Dachas, yeah.

01:20:44.380 --> 01:20:50.100
 Dachas. I was wondering if you speak Russian, have you learned Russian?

01:20:50.100 --> 01:20:52.700
 No, I learned to read it.

01:20:52.700 --> 01:20:53.700
 Oh, you did?

01:20:53.700 --> 01:21:00.380
 I hoped that I would get to practice it, but I would go up to someone on the street and

01:21:00.380 --> 01:21:05.980
 ask them directions or something in Russian and every one of them said, "I'm sorry, I

01:21:05.980 --> 01:21:15.100
 don't speak Russian." They were all from the other republics on vacation in Moscow.

01:21:15.100 --> 01:21:20.980
 I see. Nice try though. Did you meet any scientists when you went?

01:21:20.980 --> 01:21:32.980
 Yeah, I went to Lysenko's place where he was working and it happened that I was there on

01:21:32.980 --> 01:21:44.660
 the day he wasn't, but one of his assistants took me around. Yuri Holodov was the person

01:21:44.660 --> 01:21:54.900
 studying magnetobiology, he called it, as opposed to biomagnetism, the influence of

01:21:54.900 --> 01:22:08.740
 magnetic fields on the nervous system in particular. This person, I guess, called him up and we

01:22:08.740 --> 01:22:23.500
 went over on the bus and dropped in without warning. He took the time to talk to us, answer

01:22:23.500 --> 01:22:33.100
 our questions. His first question was, "What are you studying and where?" I said, "I plan

01:22:33.100 --> 01:22:41.140
 to enroll at the University of Oregon in nerve biology." He said, "Oh, are you going to work

01:22:41.140 --> 01:22:53.460
 with a professor who just that quarter had left the university?" He was up to the nerve

01:22:53.460 --> 01:23:04.820
 the present year at least, who was doing nerve research in the universities. He didn't know

01:23:04.820 --> 01:23:13.420
 in advance that I was from Oregon, but just instantly knew who the professors would be

01:23:13.420 --> 01:23:19.460
 at Oregon. Were you speaking Russian with him?

01:23:19.460 --> 01:23:32.460
 I forget. I think we might have been doing a mash of languages.

01:23:32.460 --> 01:23:39.540
 When you look into Russian literature, you're reading it in the original form, is that right?

01:23:39.540 --> 01:23:40.540
 Yeah.

01:23:40.540 --> 01:23:46.460
 Because it does seem like you have an awfully in-depth perception of what they're talking

01:23:46.460 --> 01:23:49.460
 about.

01:23:49.460 --> 01:24:00.940
 The translations are sometimes very obviously ideological. That's a great example of fraud

01:24:00.940 --> 01:24:12.700
 in American science, how they translated Soviet things. Israel did a lot of good translations

01:24:12.700 --> 01:24:17.420
 of Russian research.

01:24:17.420 --> 01:24:25.740
 That's good. Some of the scientific literature is available through Israeli publishers?

01:24:25.740 --> 01:24:26.740
 Yeah.

01:24:26.740 --> 01:24:37.940
 I see. Maybe since Trofim Lysenko ties in with the subject matter of evolution, maybe

01:24:37.940 --> 01:24:42.780
 you could outline for us what that was all about, and primarily the Russian stance on

01:24:42.780 --> 01:24:48.460
 evolution versus the Western stance.

01:24:48.460 --> 01:25:03.060
 Lysenko never was the czar of genetics. Even at the height of his power under Stalin, he

01:25:03.060 --> 01:25:15.740
 was always criticizing the university genetics people. He was basically like the state college

01:25:15.740 --> 01:25:26.260
 research stations, the crop improvement stations, where a lot of good science is done out in

01:25:26.260 --> 01:25:39.420
 the agricultural stations, not the universities. The universities stayed Western genetics oriented

01:25:39.420 --> 01:25:47.980
 right through Stalin, so we've been given a really false history of what Lysenko was

01:25:47.980 --> 01:25:52.580
 doing.

01:25:52.580 --> 01:26:06.820
 His research, I think it was Lewontin, an American Marxist biologist who examined the

01:26:06.820 --> 01:26:15.700
 actual grain production records in the years under Lysenko's influence. They were actually

01:26:15.700 --> 01:26:22.380
 increasing grain production steadily when they were applying the work he did at the

01:26:22.380 --> 01:26:30.780
 field research stations. The university genetics departments weren't producing anything of

01:26:30.780 --> 01:26:40.660
 value, but what they did was to take the seeds he developed out of these practical research

01:26:40.660 --> 01:26:50.460
 farm stations, take them to England, and give them to the anti-Soviet genetics people to

01:26:50.460 --> 01:27:02.820
 work with. The government learned that he was giving away the valuable seeds that Lysenko

01:27:02.820 --> 01:27:14.820
 had developed. That was where the prosecuting them for working with the enemy came in. It

01:27:14.820 --> 01:27:25.780
 was actually concrete events of giving stuff away without permission rather than any ideological

01:27:25.780 --> 01:27:29.940
 punishment.

01:27:29.940 --> 01:27:36.420
 Lysenko was always ridiculed in the West, wasn't he? His theories? Is that because he

01:27:36.420 --> 01:27:42.460
 was advocating the inheritability of acquired characteristics?

01:27:42.460 --> 01:27:57.340
 He emphasized the predominance of the cytoplasm and the nucleus was a reservoir of useful

01:27:57.340 --> 01:28:06.980
 stuff, but the changes and the adaptation was being done by the cell as a whole, but

01:28:06.980 --> 01:28:19.220
 especially being led by the cytoplasm. The adaptation of the organism involved changes

01:28:19.220 --> 01:28:29.500
 in the organization of the cytoplasm. People in the West were working on similar things

01:28:29.500 --> 01:28:37.020
 with cloning experiments, for example, where a nucleus would be removed or replaced by

01:28:37.020 --> 01:28:48.740
 a nucleus from a different species or even a different phylum. The cell would develop

01:28:48.740 --> 01:28:59.060
 if it was in an embryo. The embryo would develop according to the rules of the cytoplasm. The

01:28:59.060 --> 01:29:08.220
 genus or phylum that the cytoplasm came from would govern the shape of the organism, even

01:29:08.220 --> 01:29:13.740
 with a very remotely related nucleus.

01:29:13.740 --> 01:29:33.300
 The cloning experiments in which a nucleus, say from a skin cell, would be put into a

01:29:33.300 --> 01:29:40.180
 frog's egg. Frogs were the first things cloned because they have such big eggs and are easy

01:29:40.180 --> 01:29:53.220
 to do surgery on. In the 1960s, Western biologists were working on the changes happening in the

01:29:53.220 --> 01:30:03.980
 cytoplasm that would be inherited, like with a paramecium. If you take a bit of the surface

01:30:03.980 --> 01:30:12.980
 and turn it around so that the cilia beat in reverse, as that organism has descendants,

01:30:12.980 --> 01:30:25.980
 they all have the reversed cilia in that spot, showing that you do have very clear inheritance

01:30:25.980 --> 01:30:38.860
 of things that happen to the cytoplasm, which is all that was essential in Lee Sanko's thinking.

01:30:38.860 --> 01:30:49.140
 The idea of stress increasing variability simultaneous, or maybe five or ten years after

01:30:49.140 --> 01:30:56.980
 Lee Sanko was writing about it, Barbara McClintock was finding the same things in her work with

01:30:56.980 --> 01:31:07.220
 corn, that stress increased the variability and adaptability of the organism, changing

01:31:07.220 --> 01:31:14.460
 the chromosomes.

01:31:14.460 --> 01:31:24.700
 So how is it that they were so intent on making fun of Lee Sanko? Basically, they put him

01:31:24.700 --> 01:31:29.860
 in the same boat as Lamarck, who we've hardly talked about in this whole show, which was

01:31:29.860 --> 01:31:37.020
 going to be about Lamarck, but we said we'd be talking around him. We successfully avoided

01:31:37.020 --> 01:31:38.020
 him.

01:31:38.020 --> 01:31:47.820
 Barbara McClintock came so close to Lee Sanko and Lamarck in showing that stress changes

01:31:47.820 --> 01:32:01.900
 heredity. She was sort of hostilely ignored by the profession for forty years, I guess

01:32:01.900 --> 01:32:15.540
 it was. Then with genetic engineering, when people wanted to patent new genes, they realized

01:32:15.540 --> 01:32:24.140
 that it would be good to have some actual scientific precedent to make them sound nicer,

01:32:24.140 --> 01:32:35.660
 that they weren't just changing DNA to make a profitable product.

01:32:35.660 --> 01:32:45.900
 They resurrected from obscurity Barbara McClintock's work and gave her, I think, first the MacArthur

01:32:45.900 --> 01:33:12.140
 Prize and then the Nobel Prize, but forty years later, roughly, than her actual discoveries.

01:33:12.140 --> 01:33:26.740
 Another line of evidence related to Lee Sanko and McClintock and genes, you remember Darwin

01:33:26.740 --> 01:33:38.660
 proposed that since he knew that farmers could improve their animals and plants by selection,

01:33:38.660 --> 01:33:45.540
 he wanted to say something about acquired traits being passed on. He had the idea of

01:33:45.540 --> 01:33:56.620
 gemmules or pen genes, which were the idea that something that the organism acquired

01:33:56.620 --> 01:34:07.820
 through experience in a particular organ or all of the organs, that these were shed from

01:34:07.820 --> 01:34:16.100
 a particular part of the organism and reached the gonads to be taken up in the germline

01:34:16.100 --> 01:34:30.020
 as the evidence or the expression of the environmental modification that had happened to the organism.

01:34:30.020 --> 01:34:43.740
 That idea was too Lamarckian for anyone up until Lee Sanko's time, that something could

01:34:43.740 --> 01:34:53.700
 pass from the cytoplasm or the cell of the body and be taken up in the germline to be

01:34:53.700 --> 01:35:05.940
 passed on. That was where Darwin and Lee Sanko and Lamarck were all put down totally.

01:35:05.940 --> 01:35:17.100
 But in the last ten or twenty years, it really can be traced back to a North Korean, Bongun

01:35:17.100 --> 01:35:26.540
 Kim, who in the 60s published his work, which was repeated only, as far as I know, by two

01:35:26.540 --> 01:35:40.420
 Japanese. He showed that there were particles carrying nucleic acids through a lymphatic-like

01:35:40.420 --> 01:35:50.980
 conductive system that he thought accounted for how acupuncture could cause changes in

01:35:50.980 --> 01:36:00.500
 other parts of the organism. He thought these particles of nucleic acid were being transmitted

01:36:00.500 --> 01:36:11.940
 along the meridians of acupuncture, but he demonstrated microscopically these particles

01:36:11.940 --> 01:36:21.860
 and their chemical RNA content, for example. But only in the last ten or fifteen years,

01:36:21.860 --> 01:36:33.500
 people have bothered to look at the particles in the plasma or serum. Under an electron

01:36:33.500 --> 01:36:42.780
 microscope it looked just sort of like dust, undefined, very small particles, smaller than

01:36:42.780 --> 01:36:50.420
 bacteria, like a tenth of the diameter of even a small bacterium. These little particles,

01:36:50.420 --> 01:36:59.340
 just billions of them everywhere, you can find them in the blood, the lymph, saliva,

01:36:59.340 --> 01:37:10.780
 urine, every body fluid is full of these little particles. They are now known to in fact carry

01:37:10.780 --> 01:37:20.420
 RNA, proteins, fats, and even DNA. It has been demonstrated that the DNA carried in

01:37:20.420 --> 01:37:29.900
 these particles can be incorporated into the germ cells and transmitted. So basically Darwin's

01:37:29.900 --> 01:37:41.740
 gemmules now are called exosomes or microvesicles or ectosomes by different people.

01:37:41.740 --> 01:37:50.420
 So he may have been a classist and racist, but he was pretty far-seeing.

01:37:50.420 --> 01:38:00.380
 Yes, he was an intelligent observer and sometimes a very imaginative thinker.

01:38:00.380 --> 01:38:07.700
 And he did not rule out many of the mechanisms that Lamarck talked about for passing on acquired

01:38:07.700 --> 01:38:10.100
 characteristics, is that right?

01:38:10.100 --> 01:38:20.340
 Yes. In his "Descend of Man," I think it was, in one of the introductions to that he said,

01:38:20.340 --> 01:38:31.380
 "My opponents are saying that I'm all about the natural selection, but in fact here are

01:38:31.380 --> 01:38:40.380
 the points that I believe in." He listed several inheritance of acquired traits and sexual

01:38:40.380 --> 01:38:48.140
 selection and several points other than natural selection.

01:38:48.140 --> 01:39:00.580
 Samuel Butler in two or three books while Darwin was still alive was denouncing Darwin

01:39:00.580 --> 01:39:11.420
 for neglecting to acknowledge his debt to both Lamarck and his grandfather, Erasmus

01:39:11.420 --> 01:39:21.820
 Darwin. I think Samuel Butler was very accurate in saying that Darwin was just too cowardly

01:39:21.820 --> 01:39:26.580
 to be very public about his Lamarckism.

01:39:26.580 --> 01:39:33.780
 Yes, it's amazing it carried such a stigma and still does. I mean, people are still laughing

01:39:33.780 --> 01:39:39.380
 at Lamarck even though he seems to be in a large part correct about how things work.

01:39:39.380 --> 01:39:47.300
 I have a quick question. I hope that it's quick because we don't have much time. But

01:39:47.300 --> 01:39:53.700
 what was Blake, I know you're a great scholar of William Blake, who lived, I think was a

01:39:53.700 --> 01:40:00.580
 contemporary with Erasmus Darwin, and what was Blake's opinion on evolution?

01:40:00.580 --> 01:40:09.500
 He didn't use any such language, but he obviously had read Erasmus Darwin's "Zoolomia" and

01:40:09.500 --> 01:40:20.380
 Emanuel Swedenborg's "Physiology," things that ordinary embryology and anatomy didn't

01:40:20.380 --> 01:40:28.940
 recognize until the twentieth century. Blake, I'm sure, got them from knowing Swedenborg's

01:40:28.940 --> 01:40:45.220
 writings. Swedenborg lived in London in his old age, and Swedenborg had identified the

01:40:45.220 --> 01:40:56.220
 brain anatomy of the nervous system and its development. Seeing the nature of the developing

01:40:56.220 --> 01:41:09.540
 embryo combined with Erasmus Darwin's picture of all organisms developing from a single,

01:41:09.540 --> 01:41:21.980
 simple fiber, he said, or in one case he said everything from a seashell or a sea organism,

01:41:21.980 --> 01:41:38.620
 but a simple cell as the origin of all organisms was a current idea in London of the 1790s.

01:41:38.620 --> 01:41:48.820
 You can see those anatomical, flexible ideas in many places in Blake.

01:41:48.820 --> 01:41:58.540
 Here's a question from Prana Rupa. Would you be willing to speculate about future evolutionary

01:41:58.540 --> 01:42:04.100
 expressions both at the level of the biosphere as a whole and in relation to optimizing our

01:42:04.100 --> 01:42:19.460
 own potentialities? I think the environment, I think the increase

01:42:19.460 --> 01:42:29.900
 in carbon dioxide is going in the right direction. I think it increases adaptability, and so

01:42:29.900 --> 01:42:35.780
 I don't think we have to worry about carbon dioxide as contributing to extinction of species.

01:42:35.780 --> 01:42:45.420
 I think it increases everyone's flexibility and adaptability. I think the tendency of

01:42:45.420 --> 01:42:56.140
 this increasing carbon dioxide is to support the process of cephalization, so I think the

01:42:56.140 --> 01:43:14.780
 direction will be bigger brains, further development of a lot of the abilities, especially the

01:43:14.780 --> 01:43:28.220
 imaginative types of mental processes. A question from Todd Mudd. He says, "Are evolutionary

01:43:28.220 --> 01:43:34.740
 steps really spontaneous? Do they happen in a single generation or are the changes gradual?

01:43:34.740 --> 01:43:39.860
 Does an energy charge build up and then suddenly make a change? Would the next physical changes

01:43:39.860 --> 01:43:44.860
 in humans to bigger heads, higher metabolic rates or something else?"

01:43:44.860 --> 01:43:54.220
 Okay, there's a similar question there. Yeah, I think it's happening intermittently.

01:43:54.220 --> 01:44:05.780
 One woman will have a remarkably advantageous pregnancy and will be sort of the forerunner

01:44:05.780 --> 01:44:20.740
 of a trend. It can happen immediately in one lucky group of organisms and more widespread

01:44:20.740 --> 01:44:37.260
 in the whole population when the whole situation is more fortunate.

01:44:37.260 --> 01:44:40.540
 And here's another question. I'm not sure if I have it right, but would another evolutionary

01:44:40.540 --> 01:44:46.940
 step have something to do with being aware of sensory processes and would it have something

01:44:46.940 --> 01:44:52.420
 to do with thinking and images rather than words?

01:44:52.420 --> 01:45:02.100
 The essentialist metaphysics, I think, is literally holding back physiological functioning

01:45:02.100 --> 01:45:12.820
 and evolution. The organism is impaired when it gets stuck in these verbal formulas, which

01:45:12.820 --> 01:45:24.940
 are the nature of the essentialist metaphysics. The brain loses energy and works on a low-energy

01:45:24.940 --> 01:45:40.980
 symbolic set of interactions. In Anokin's terms, from a perspective analogous to Luca

01:45:40.980 --> 01:45:49.020
 Turin's, from this perspective there's a conductive quality to the fluids of the brain and the

01:45:49.020 --> 01:46:05.100
 cells which allows a holistic, more encompassing kind of functioning so that any concrete thought

01:46:05.100 --> 01:46:14.300
 or image brings with it an interpretive context so that you see the meaning in all of its

01:46:14.300 --> 01:46:25.420
 expanded qualities rather than a symbolic formulation with links to other symbolic formulations.

01:46:25.420 --> 01:46:37.700
 You see, it's like a simultaneous picture in three dimensions and moving. When the brain

01:46:37.700 --> 01:46:48.940
 is properly energized, Anokin and Luca Turin, as dimensions of how this is described, when

01:46:48.940 --> 01:46:57.820
 the brain is properly energized, it forms these image complexes which bring with them

01:46:57.820 --> 01:47:10.340
 the interpretive context so that the sense of meaning is always part of understanding

01:47:10.340 --> 01:47:14.780
 the particular image.

01:47:14.780 --> 01:47:25.900
 That's fascinating. Especially a moving image is such a powerful method of communication.

01:47:25.900 --> 01:47:31.020
 You mentioned a talk by somebody called No More Secrets. Is that possibly where we're

01:47:31.020 --> 01:47:34.900
 evolving to, to telepathy?

01:47:34.900 --> 01:47:47.220
 I think, yeah, he makes some good arguments, Michael Persinger. He experimented with stimulating

01:47:47.220 --> 01:47:55.980
 the brain in different ways and getting what he called the God consciousness. I think that

01:47:55.980 --> 01:48:04.100
 sense of overwhelming meaning, that's just a natural brain process when it's properly

01:48:04.100 --> 01:48:14.140
 energized. When you think of an atom, you can't think of an abstract atom out of time.

01:48:14.140 --> 01:48:21.580
 Every atom has its own history.

01:48:21.580 --> 01:48:30.220
 In that family tree, I can hardly keep track of my own. Well, Ray, I'm afraid we're out

01:48:30.220 --> 01:48:37.620
 of time. I hate to do it. That was almost two hours with Dr. Raymond Peat. Thank you

01:48:37.620 --> 01:48:44.940
 so much for offering us your time and knowledge today here on WMRW. If all goes well, we'll

01:48:44.940 --> 01:48:53.740
 talk to you again next week about physiological implications of acid-base molecular electric

01:48:53.740 --> 01:48:59.340
 charges and reduction oxidation and their relation to each other. That's a subject I've

01:48:59.340 --> 01:49:04.940
 always gotten very confused by, so I'm looking forward to maybe getting less confused.

01:49:04.940 --> 01:49:05.940
 Okay.

01:49:05.940 --> 01:49:08.940
 Okay. Thanks so much, Ray.

01:49:08.940 --> 01:49:11.940
 Okay. Thank you.

01:49:11.940 --> 01:49:13.260
 Okay. Goodbye.

01:49:14.260 --> 01:49:19.980
 And you are listening to WMRW LP Warren, and we're about to go to the news here. I want

01:49:19.980 --> 01:49:29.460
 to thank everybody who helped participate and make the show more interesting.

01:49:29.460 --> 01:49:37.500
 This is an archive edition of a Ray Peat interview done on the 4th of March, 2015. With Ray,

01:49:37.500 --> 01:49:45.460
 this subject ostensibly was about evolution. And if you'd like more information, you can

01:49:45.460 --> 01:49:53.740
 go to rayPeat.com where he has many, many articles there for you to read for free. I've

01:49:53.740 --> 01:50:00.260
 been John Barkhausen. I still am, I hope, and hopefully do a few more interviews with

01:50:00.260 --> 01:50:06.060
 Ray. So thanks for listening and thanks to everybody who made this possible. I apologize

01:50:06.060 --> 01:50:11.180
 for the fact that there's some distortion. Obviously, I had some technical challenges

01:50:11.180 --> 01:50:17.860
 during the show, which hopefully I'll conquer next time around. All right. Thanks a lot

01:50:17.860 --> 01:50:18.420
 for listening.