On The Origin of Life

00:00 Hello and welcome to Politics and Science. I’m your host John Barkasen. Today we’re dipping back into the archives when I had a show back at WGDR in the 1999 2000 time period and once again this is Dr. Raymond Pete and this is a more philosophical show talking about the origins of life, the work of Lamarck Darwin Vernadsky appear in the show so I hope you’ll enjoy it. For those who don’t know Dr. Raymond Pete has a PhD in biology and he has specialized in physiology and endocrinology and he has extensive knowledge about the history of science and philosophy. You can find out more about Dr. Raymond Pete and also read a lot of his articles. He has a newsletter that goes out six times a year. It’s fascinating and many of them are published on his website reypeat.com. It was a call-in show and the number may be given out in this 01:06 I’m not sure but it’s happened more than 10 years ago so you can’t call in. And I should also add that this is an abridged show. The original show was around an hour and a half long and I’m going to try to post the entire show at the website and the website is radio4all, radio numeral4all.net, radio4all.net and when you get there search for politics and science. So how should we start this way? We were thinking of talking about the origins of life. Okay I think it’s necessary at some point to think about the the philosophical things that have fed into controversies about the origin of life and national cultural differences. I’ve studied quite a bit of the Russian tradition starting with 02:12 Mendeley of the guy that invented the way of ordering the elements in the periodic table and he referred to himself as a cosmic realist and later about a generation younger than Mendeley of Vi Vernadsky was he called himself a biogeochemist and he was also thought of himself as a cosmic realist and what they meant by this was that you have to think always back think of the context of the problem that you’re dealing with and try to think of as many levels of the problem at the same time as you can and what year are we talking Mendeley of 03:16 for example completed his table in 1869 or in that in that period his his idea of the period periodicity of the elements in during the late 1800s Vernadsky was traveling around Europe talking to people got to know all the interesting people in Europe and every time he met someone he would incorporate their ideas and even literature fed into Vernadsky’s way of looking at the world and so that he thought of Tolstoy’s brain as as a geochemical event and Pavlov 04:18 was another person who sent Shinoff and Pavlov were they set out to try to explain consciousness human consciousness in realistic and physical terms so that they didn’t have to leave anything out of the system didn’t didn’t think of the material world without consciousness or a conscious world without material and so it was a tradition of looking at the hidden assumptions behind everything and from that perspective there are two one or two attitudes in in American and German science that I think have limited the way people think about the origin of life in a way past your I think he’s selected by American educators and 05:29 science people as a way to obscure thinking about the origin of life because his famous experiment in which he demonstrated that that life didn’t arise from decaying organic matter that his principle was that life comes from life people seized this who didn’t want to accept that life came from a non-living matter they they wanted to dispose of the idea of the origin of life in the world and say that life came only from life so there’s kind of a deliberate obscuring principle going on when when people try to place pastures thinking at the top and and that sounds like they don’t want to discuss it yeah and the same thing happened to Pavlov 06:35 they this man named Watson who I doubt even studied with Pavlov because he totally misrepresented what he claimed to have learned from Pavlov JP Watson was the founder of behaviorism in America and he denied the existence of consciousness and even my professors in in the university psychology department some of them were still denying consciousness or at least denying it to children they said that consciousness was only present in speech and uh this this picture of Pavlov has studying conditioned reflexes that it goes back to Watson’s misrepresentation of Pavlov and the the translation of Pavlov’s phrase even was 07:41 uh deliberately misleading um if you translate it back into Russian it says something like health resort reflection rather than what Pavlov actually said which was conditional reflex meaning that you reflect all the conditions around you in other words consciousness was the meaning of Pavlov’s term and consciousness was explicitly defined out of out of his system and the same sort of attempting to hide the problem has been going on in genetics and everything else that um genetics has attempted to evade the problem of where life came from in the first place simply by emphasizing that units are passed on which are identical to the units that preceded them 08:49 um and so when they’re forced to recognize change um very strange devices have developed and the idealization of randomness random change random mutation um for about oh 80 years or so um just totally took over biological genetic thinking that if we’re going to have to admit that that life changes and maybe even that life originated from non-life we’re going to have to say that it’s random because it we don’t really want to admit that it happens and um so the big controversy between uh the neo-darwinists and the lamarchaeans 09:49 um was this same thing the neo-lamarchaeans even rewrote darwin they took out the the um lamarchaean inclinations of darwin and um that’s why they call it neo-darwinism because darwin would be too lamarchaean for their preferences maybe for our listeners you should give a little bit of a brief synopsis of lamarchaean and darwinism yeah um lamarque um basically said that that life is purposeful and that the um intention to do something is part of of the process of physiological adaptation and that this attempt to adapt to an environment is is part of what is passed on to the offspring and darwin accepted that there were many sources 10:58 of variation including the lamarchaean type of of variation um darwin didn’t say that variation was just by chance in fact he enumerated the whole bunch of mechanisms that could cause variation but then after the um Mendel’s silly work with peas which people have pointed out wasn’t even truthful he uh fudged his results to make it look more mathematically perfect is that right after he was resurrected or invented um people reinvented darwin to uh support their positions that that change and evolution are random and one of the recent manifestations of this strange religion of random changes um evading the thought of of purpose in the universe um 12:05 there’s been a a craze about the idea of chaos and there are really close parallels between the genetics of random change and this idea of chaos um what they’re doing is using purely numerical processes to um argue that you can’t predict the future um the whole argument of of these chaos people is based on numerical sequences and computer events and then they say well particles atoms and things in the real world are just like numbers and that’s what the genetics people did they said um the particles we’re dealing with are just like numbers and individual 13:10 particles don’t know where they’re going and so they can only change randomly and what they’re doing is reducing everything to the most meaningless unit in one case totally abstract immaterial numbers in the other case almost abstract and immaterial entities called genes um and meanwhile these other people were um thinking about the actual physics and chemistry and history and and geology and cosmology and that are operating in everyday life and that that would tend to produce the various phenomena of of um organisms and organic chemicals and so on 14:12 opyrin is one of the people um that is well known in the theory of the origin of life in the 20s and 30s and 40s he was um talking about the the types of of physical processes that can create things equivalent to cells and the idea of co-asservation or clumping in in complex uh colloid like systems um that find um organization in a complex way that is stable um allowing complex structures to appear out of what seem to be simple random solutions um the appearance of order um probably these people talking about co-asservation were um 15:21 were the first to um introduce the idea of self-organization and uh self-structuring um in which entropy actually decreases um just according to ordinary physical processes once you add a few complexifying ingredients to a solution of of um say starch or oil or protein molecules um order starts appearing and the um the strange ideas about entropy only increasing you have to see that whole history of of denying that entropy can decrease in the universe you have to see that as part of this philosophy of idealizing randomness and chaos and the 16:24 unpredictability of things um Bernadsky was was working along um his synthesizing route um and in the I think 1922 or 26 he was lecturing on his um picture of the place of consciousness in in the cosmos and um showing that the according to well-recognized principles consciousness basically is generated by physical forces and uh he used the ideas of the biosphere and the noisphere and um Teyard to Chardin happened to be uh in in Paris I think it was where 17:28 Bernadsky was lecturing and he um popularized the idea of the noisphere but actually it was it was this uh cosmic realist philosophy of the biogeochemist that really generated the the central idea of of what the noisphere is in relation to the the biosphere and uh material world so Chardin he used the word noisphere but he didn’t really come up with the final meaning of it um yeah he um he turned it into a fairly revolutionary religious idea um and it it has been very stimulating to a lot of people but but he he left out the physical principles that explain it really he left it in a in a very abstract form um one of um the outcomes of operans 18:40 at work and the people worked on co-asservation um the American Sidney Fox was kind of the fruition of of some of these particular experiments with um how physical conditions affect the appearance of order out of disorder um I should mention that one of the people that Bernadsky um knew in Paris was um of Henri Le Chatelier and the famous in chemistry everyone hears about Le Chatelier’s principle of of um the restoration of the disturbed equilibrium anything you do to disturb an equilibrium causes the system to adjust in a way that restores 19:45 equilibrium um and he invented that concept Le Chatelier did yeah he first phrased it in very complex ways and over the years he he got it simpler and simpler and now they state it in very simple but sort of misleading ways in chemistry textbooks but it’s it’s a principle that really can be applied anywhere to um um organic physiology um brain processes social processes and so on um it’s simply an inescapable way of seeing things once once you apply it in a few cases if you have a system and you disturb it by by um adding energy to it or pressure or changing the conditions in any way the system adjusts and restores a new equilibrium 20:56 and um Bernadsky thinking cosmologically seeing the earth as as something in the universe um realized that heat is coming out of the inside of the earth and that um the sun is constantly adding energy to the system and if you’re constantly pushing on the system both from volcanic energy and solar energy you don’t have a closed system and in other words energy is driving the system disturbing the equilibrium in very powerful ways and the system is being driven and directed and steered by this constant um pressure of energy flowing into it and Bernadsky 22:00 said that um that the system will adjust in ways that restore equilibrium and he showed why um organisms would um adjust their complexity to use the energy that’s available and that this would make bigger and smarter more intensely metabolizing organisms um to uh basically equilibrate the energy that’s being added to the system and um I’ve I’ve never heard that Sidney Fox was a student of Bernadskis but um he in effect was because he used Bernadskis principles and was able to perceive what happened um everyone at this time about 40 23:05 years ago um everyone van and most of them still are talking about life originating in our oh um like a a tepid pond or a warm ocean or or an atmosphere sparked by lightning and and uh various things um atmospheric uh sparks causing organic molecules to fall into um an ocean in which they accumulate and then by random events etc and uh Sidney Fox happened or or intended to uh rethink the question of how proteins come into existence when the equilibrium if you have a protein floating in water is to degrade to um various um products 24:12 such as the individual amino acids that it came from or other uh small molecules and so the equilibrium is obviously not favorable for the occurrence of large molecules if they’re floating in water and he put dry amino acids or almost dry amino acids and deficient in water put them on hot uh lava in a model of of volcanic energy being added to organic molecules and then added to little water and showed that the heat in the absence of water creates protein like long polymerized molecules so the equilibrium is absolutely the opposite in the deficiency of water then in the an excess of water and um one of my professors uh Sidney Bernhard 25:21 revolutionized self physiology but no one seems to have noticed um he he demonstrated that the glycolytic enzymes are at a higher concentration in cells than the substrate sugars that they work on and everyone had been deluding these enzymes in water and then describing the rules of interaction with substrate when there was an excess of substrate and water and the deficiency of enzymes but he showed that actually there are more enzymes per cubic unit than than sugar molecules and the concentration totally changes the equilibrium situation and Sidney Fox demonstrated not only does the relatively dry heat um create order and protein like molecules out of free amino acids but 26:27 when he added water the proteins spontaneously formed tiny bacteria like particles um almost all the same size about the size of a bacterium and um a very orderly appearance of cell like structures and then over over um I guess about 20 years he and his students demonstrated that these protein like molecules have enzyme like properties um catalyzed reactions the the amino acids polymerize um in a non-random fashion it depends on what’s present um in the in the growing molecule and in its environment the growing molecule in effect selects certain amino acids to be the next one to add so it isn’t growing 27:35 in a random fashion and once it has grown then it has this same selective pressure over um other reactions and there’s enzyme like catalytic action in these artificially made spontaneous protein like molecules and so he added the precursors of genetic material and showed that these would be catalyzed into chains and so the uh you have the reverse situation in which genes come last after you’ve already created nice neat little cells that can metabolize and they can even reproduce themselves really without the genes in them he basically originated life yeah yeah and the um you put the proteinoid microspheres he called them in a solution with 28:37 amino acids and there the proteins keep going in the growth process because they’ve concentrated um the relatively water-free environment in which they do grow and so they assimilate nutrients from the water environment grow and then when they reach the size of which they’re no longer stable they bud or divide and produce new cells as long as there’s food available I guess and this he did this in the 60s and it was mentioned in my uh Lenincher’s biochemistry textbook 1968 edition I think it was and now the the new so-called Lenincher biochemistry book with the same title deleted that most interesting stuff that Lenincher had included as an important biochemical principle because it doesn’t fit their concept yeah apparently yeah well I would think 29:44 that would be uh what Sidney Fox did would be headline news yeah it it was for me yeah I didn’t quite understand uh your professor Sidney Brunhardt um he showed that the the concentration of glycolytic enzymes was higher in cells than that the amount of sugar would warrant or no um then the absolute amount of sugar um like there there would be um um more than one enzyme per molecule of sugar where and and a very deficient relative amount of water so that the enzymes can bind a molecule of sugar as it appears and then directly hand the product over to another enzyme it isn’t a random uh the molecules are so close together 30:45 that the reactants can um go from one enzyme directly to the other without going back in the watery solution and that drastically alters the equilibrium and if you think of Le Chatelier the uh the concentration uh governs the equilibrium and the system adjusts accordingly so he showed that there was an order to yeah the glycolysis was essentially an ordered process where all of the test tube biochemists dissolving cells um I before Brunhardt had been working on that I had gone around to all of the chemistry professors trying to um just feel out ways for 31:45 studying those processes um without dissolving the cells and uh basically their reaction was just to laugh and and get rid of me because they said you don’t have biochemistry if you don’t squash and dilute cells so it seems to me this whole um divide between the two philosophies is it’s like the reductionist versus the um I don’t know what you call them you have a word for it I’m sure the whole list or the somebody who looks at the whole yeah organism rather than just dividing it into a mechanistic little parts yeah and also seems like science is afraid of sounding religious or something um yeah um did you happen to read my generic of energy book 32:45 yeah I read some of this stuff on Bernatsky yeah um Fred Hoyle I quote both Blake and Fred Hoyle right at the top of one of the chapters and Fred Hoyle says that the cosmos would be it would be hard to avoid thinking of the cosmos as essentially a biological thing except that people can’t stand the thought that the universe itself is purposeful and alive and I really I wonder why I mean it almost seems like science is reacting against religion in that sense because yeah because I as far as a lot of people are drawn to religion and and that’s because it does give a purpose to life yeah that was where T. R. Deschardin made a big contribution to uh French and American civilization by uh being both a scientist and 33:50 a religion uh thinker he his north here got people thinking about the uh the meaning of consciousness in the material world and how that relates to spiritual growth and uh uh unfortunately some of the ecologically minded people have um replaced even um the noosphere of Teilhard but even worse they’ve they’ve completely reversed the noosphere of Bernatsky with the idea the Gaia or Gaia hypothesis right um which um it basically it’s like the idea of homeostasis versus creation and um the Gaia hypothesis um it says that the the earth is um 34:59 um it’s sort of like a a conscious being except it’s not going anywhere it’s it’s trying to maintain itself and uh the one of the implications of the um randomness thinking is that random events have wiped out many species in the past and that that just has to be accepted species might take four billion years to evolve but um it’s okay if they’re wiped out by industry or whatever because that’s a normal uh event in history but when you look at it from the Bernatsky point of view um the earth and the sun are driving evolution as a system in which the uh 35:59 microorganisms uh soil organisms uh vegetation and animals and culture are all being driven forward as a system if you delete parts of the system the whole four billion years might go to waste right where the the people inclined towards the Gaia hypothesis and the random evolution tend to uh say whatever happens is okay so I always thought the Gaia hypothesis was more of the the earth is a is a being as an organism but I felt like the people the proponents of that idea were not accepting of uh man’s you know basically hurting the organism on which we live are part of well they say that the organism is a self-repairing system and that you just and you don’t want to 37:02 kill it but that it will repair itself and restore what was but they don’t see it as as a growing and evolving purposeful organism right and being driven in a specific direction by specific energy with a specific purpose yeah right I see and um the principles that Bernatsky developed were really extensions of Le Chatelier’s principle but he showed that uh oh the migration of atoms and the the use of energy of the um intensity of metabolism all of these he made as subdivisions of Le Chatelier’s principle but it it basically 38:02 showed why large-brained warm-blooded animals had to evolve as the world system evolved at sort of another level but but really parallel um and probably for similar um cosmic realist philosophical positions an astronomer Nikolai Kozirev did his doctoral dissertation around 1950 on the energy of stars and he like like these other people that who um pointed out that order tends to appear anytime you have a system which is receiving energy from the outside um in just the more abstract concept that Kozirev said what if we 39:15 assume that the universe is not necessarily running down and that the within a system entropy does tend only to increase but there’s no such system that we know of so why should we say that that is that is the ruling effect of of entropy what if we assume that the universe is um not just running down that it wasn’t created at one moment like like someone winding up a clock only to run down and he said time seems to us to move in one direction but these people who were working out why the universe seems seems to be running down 40:15 incorporated the assumption that time is not real and that that um time abstractly on the physical level is reversible because you’re said what if we assume that time physically is is a real um asymmetric factor in all systems then the mere passage of time distinguishes um one state of a system from another state in a real physical way and he said what if we apply this using standard Einsteinian arguments what if we apply this to the energy of stars and say that the passage of time 41:17 it introduces something every moment of time that passes something is being added to the system rather than time being as much downhill as uphill and just by that simple assumption that what if time is real um he he showed that that assumption leads to increasing energy being produced through time by a mass in proportion to how big the mass is and so he said okay now we can um suppose that time itself is the source of stellar energy what if we scale that down um to Jupiter for example and uh he back in the early 1950s before people were measuring the energy and temperature of the 42:21 planets he um he had predicted that that Jupiter and Neptune would be emitting more heat than they received and that each planet would have internal heat in proportion to its mass and scaling it down to the size of the moon he said that the internal energy of the moon is likely to produce an occasional volcanic eruption or emission of very hot gases and so he trained his our spectrometer through a telescope on the dark phases of the moon and recorded various um hot emissions and um other people had recorded these but he he found them according to the prediction of how much heat should be generated inside the mass simply by his reasoning but 43:26 because of the passage of time and so his physics I think should be uh taken into account in thinking about volcanic energy huh it’s very interesting I’d like to go back to that but we there’s a collar on the one yeah yeah you have a question or comment yeah it’s more in the nature of a question I guess um I’m curious about the idea of consciousness itself and its relationship to the brain and its relationship to matter outside the brain um as I understand it the scientific paradigm about consciousness is that it’s a sort of epiphenomena of the geochemical processes in the brain uh and that it’s more or less self-referential in other 44:29 words what I think or feel doesn’t uh intercede with anything outside myself or anyone outside myself but it’s entirely self-referential um there seem to be a lot of problems with this idea if I’ve understood it correctly um the first thing which is my understanding is somewhat limited about this so I may be making a fool out of myself but that no one’s been able to locate memory in the brain the person who did the initial research that showed a relationship between different areas of the brain and uh the existence of specific memories of either uh all factory or auditory or whatever uh operated on epileptic patients who remain conscious during 45:31 the brain surgery yet he came to uh espouse the idea of interactionism that mind and brain are two different but interactive structures or forces that uh thoughts or rather memories weren’t stored in the brain per se but existed in some type of field yeah uh when my personal history is part of of where my ideas on this have come from um before I discovered that thyroid was very important in my metabolism I was a hyper metabolic individual and I had um oh probably I would burn 10 000 calories in a day and I had an electrical field 46:36 around my body that that would affect physical things like millivolt meters about two feet away from my body and so I for years was very conscious of this um sometimes really annoying electrical field I couldn’t operate the apparatus I had to have my lab partner do it because it would go off scale when I got near it and all of this stopped when I took uh the right amount of thyroid my metabolism became more uh normal and regulated but I saw that oxidative metabolism generated this potentially very immense and disturbing field around cells and and the whole body and um this has um inclined me more than than people who haven’t had those actual 47:44 personal experiences with bioelectric fields it has inclined me to see the importance of bioelectric fields in development and physiology and uh I still use these this kind of field thinking for example there’s um a field concept of cancer which um traditionally the definition of the field has been left open but um a lot of research shows that it is an electromagnetic field or a bioelectric field at least in part that creates the pre-cancerous and cancerous conditions in a tissue or that governs the development of an embryo and so on yes and that idea has been taken up by people like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake who came up with a theory uh which he calls formative 48:52 causation that if I understand it correctly that uh information can be shared among members of a specific species I’m from from Vernadsky’s perspective and I think of the um of supplementary context for that is that um things are ready to be discovered and that um when you change components in the the system um many things are contributing not just the individual’s consciousness but the preconditions are tending to make that certain behavior probable so that Vernadsky would emphasize multi causal um factors rather than just conscious factors 49:55 and I also wondered you seem to be have been scooting around something which is sort of a scientific taboo and I wondered what you thought of um the evidence for the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics um definitely they they are a fact and um Darwin knew it Mark um how are you with Dr. Kamler the genius biologist yeah his work fascinating story his work was real and um a lot of people have met similar faiths people slandered Lamarck and took him down because of the implications of of his really empirical physiological approach to life um people couldn’t 50:55 stand that in 1820 or 30 and so they had to disassemble his reputation same thing happened to Kamler and everyone who who violates the taboos um Carl Lindegren wrote a book Cold War in Biology that it’s the best American book on the subject that I know Seeky Lindegren what I’ve been seeing at least on the level of the popular media in the way the idea of genetics is presented is a kind of genetic determinism in which the public at large is being led to believe that that that a gene is sort of a individual almost like an organism itself you know the selfish gene and all that sort of thing which then is responsible for a specific quality your characteristic appearing and as far as I know no one’s ever proved the genes do anything 52:01 except organize the synthesis of proteins yeah um I have um because I guess I’ve been interested in the subject for more than 50 years and so I’ve noticed the things going on and tried to find out where they came from um the in some of my newsletters I’ll be talking about um related issues but the motivation for a lot of these ideas around 1910 to 1920 were to stop immigration of eastern europeans and southern europeans to the united states right so they created IQ tests and showed that russians and jews and the various people that 53:03 they didn’t um want to immigrate so 85 percent of them were people minded naturally they gave the tests in english these tests were very explicitly designed for racist exclusionary purposes and many of these people have persisted in the universities the bell curve for example right a real idiot at harvard was one of the last hangers on and and these people had great success in getting published in science the um leading american science magazine um um when when I sent a tiny letter criticizing one of these um genetic determination of intelligence 54:06 I think it was an eight or ten page article I sent about a two sentence letter they sent me pages of anonymous referees one of them the only evidence that was cited for not publishing my little letter critical of the conclusions I just said the conclusions have nothing whatsoever to do with the text of the article these pages of of anonymous referees rejecting my comment the only data cited was from hitler’s um racial hygiene institute that got the interest of been studying what was going on there and I saw that by studying that period I saw that conrad lorenz was the architect of the racial hygiene that he created the rationale who based on american 55:08 iq uh racism he created the rationale for exterminating inferior people conrad lorenz was a not seeing his I think it was his last book he repeated exactly the arguments of his 1942 and and the founding papers of um genocide he repeated the exact arguments except he replaced um exterminate with some slightly mild translation but he uh never repented from this idea of eliminating genetic inferiority and well I think the ideology has survived apparently but it’s been shorn of certain terms one for instance never heard the word eugenics anymore yeah I went to a lecture in the 70s all the professors from my biology department were there nodding happily as gunter stance who was a Jewish refugee from hitler as gunter stance 56:16 presented conrad lorenz’s arguments for genocide as the ultimate in uh understanding the brain genetically and all of my professors were there happily agreeing that this was wonderful stuff and when my friend and I pointed out some of the logical irrationalities such as as he was saying that a person’s life and work are a genetically determined unit suddenly they said are you saying that the fact that he was a Nazi had anything to do with the validity of these ideas and the whole point of the lecture was that every cultural feature is genetically determined well one of them everything sort of interesting sidelight on this is that in the uh indian tradition there were the so-called laws of 57:19 manu which were basically uh governed uh the questions of occupation heredity and the creation of a caste system uh based on certain ideas about that and my understanding was originally the caste system was not hereditary but it was rather simply the recognition that certain people had certain uh proclivities or uh natural abilities or interests or capacities and that that they could be best sorted out according to those you know in various occupational groups and so forth but that it was possible to move from one to the other and then gradually it became modified into a hereditary system in which you know if your father was you know a letter worker or something you would be one or if he was a farmer you would be one and and there was no mobility and no possibility of uh of of actually assimilating anything new so to speak 58:28 you know i think i think one of the driving forces of the caste system was the uh 3,500 years ago the nordics um the indo europeans invaded and enslaved the dark native people and i think that was the racial caste difference became the the power that stayed in force and tended to uh uh rigidify the the occupational system so do you think do you think this this whole uh caste system and the emphasis on genetics as being the uh you know the set and stone basis for your status in life um yeah i think that’s the people just justifying survival of the fittest um no the the whole idea of survival of the fittest is um um basically saying that whoever is in power is the 59:35 fittest right and whoever is able to say it with most force is the fittest and if you object and they can kill you they’re the fittest right and uh it it basically is tending to create well a ruling class of inferiors if they keep their status only on the basis of um you know saying things like if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich like me pretty soon the the ruling class becomes degenerate yeah what do you think of the misappropriation i mean it seems like the modern the official ideology you might call it of the ruling classes in this country is compounded of misinterpretations of garland and adam smith basically uh and that uh you know i personally 01:00:38 don’t find the neo-dirwinian period of evolution intellectually convincing at all myself but whenever i bring this up it’s roughly people look at me as if i suggested to the earth is flat because it constitutes so to speak the very pillar of their thought about how the world is organized and operates yeah if you point out if you start pointing out any of the thousand hidden assumptions or thousand facts that they are trying to cover up um you get to about two or three of them and then they remove you in some way from the discussion right and um you know and interestingly adam smith’s ideas intersect with darlinism very much i think and and they’re always misrepresented in economics textbooks um for instance we all know that adam smith believes that self-interest 01:01:44 was uh the appropriate form of being so to speak and acting and that if everyone pursued their own self-interest to the maximal degree that would result in the maximal degree of happiness for all but what they leave out is that um smith believed also in benevolence as a counterpoint to self-interest to naked self-interest and that he he you could say his idea of benevolence was a kind of social capital you might say um and and you know his comment for instance on business men is quote they neither are nor ought to be the rulers of mankind unquote and yet yes his ideas are promoted one half of his ideas are promoted the other half is ignored similarly darwin you know 01:02:47 it isn’t just neo darwin darwinism and the um adam smith disorders but it’s basically everything in our intellectual history um i’ve had a habit of reading textbooks in in many different fields over the years and they really 99 plus percent of them are um ideological distortions are rewriting of history leaving out everything interesting or threatening to the um established system um every field of knowledge has been distorted art our literature um every third part of culture that you can think of has its uh threatening aspects and in education it happens that the 01:03:50 potential um meaningfulness that some of these ideas give to life are very exciting to students and so education has been very powerfully trimmed down to become nothing but um as far as as the system can manage it to um be nothing but an indoctrination in these distortions adam smith darwin um have love every one that’s treated if they were good they have to be distorted if they were too good they have to be left out entirely right for instance uh i remember my biology textbook talked a little bit about darwin and wallis and contrasted their basically coincident discovery of so-called natural selection but a radical difference between darwin 01:04:52 and wallis is that that wallis simply could not accept the idea of an entirely mechanical evolutionary process driven by you know making by randomness or chance yeah darwin didn’t either though yeah right and wallis actually went to the extent of writing a book which i have never been able to locate uh in which he he tried to work on the idea that there was consciousness and will and even perhaps this is really going over the edge uh angelic intelligences as he calls them who are guiding the evolutionary unfoldment of people or humans um you know of course they wrote him off can’t have that yeah can’t have that um but what i i’m turning the discussion a little bit why is there there seems to be you know science developed as a reaction against what i guess you 01:05:58 could call religious provincialism or or a metaphysical speculation uh you know by giving people a concrete method by which they could prove or disprove certain phenomena and repeat them and you know like that but then it seems to have turned into an ideology i mean science is a method is one thing science is an ideology scientism is something else altogether well my view is that they got one little success but then they decided to give in to the forces which were also driving the um the backward um cultural forces which at one time were very closely identified with religion but these same forces took over and most scientists have accepted the fundamental 01:07:01 assumptions of the people who used those assumptions for what they called religious purposes right it’s a kind of surrogate religion for the materialism you might say yeah yeah how it works is by eliminating all of the troubling, complexifying other things and reducing everything to a few principles of random variation for example and chance and uh survival to so-called fetus well you know what’s interesting about that is that i mean i’m not a mathematician but my understanding is that uh that’s the neo-derwinian theory of evolution basically posits random mutation and natural selection as the driving factors in the creation and you know the the dominance of certain species and the death of others and but randomness is based on the idea of 01:08:05 infinite time in other words given enough time if you throw bricks at random they will organize themselves into a building or if you put a bunch of monkeys in a in a room with typewriters they will eventually write the sun also rises or war and peace or something that’s that’s where vernadsky shows that very quickly the species will arise to the limits of the resources available that evolution is driven in a relatively practically instantaneous way there is such a powerful guiding influence coming from this energy disturbing the old equilibrium that variation whatever the stimulus might be there might be some random events but the driving environmental force is so powerful that evolution is is 01:09:14 relatively fast and directional and one of the puzzling things is if you profit mutation that’s as a one of the principal driving forces most mutations are regressed and uh sheldrecht points out you might be able to get a uh say a a insect uh say a precursor of a fly that that couldn’t fly and it might somehow through genetic mutation produce one wing but what are the probabilities that it could produce two wings and then what are the probabilities that those two wings would be functional and actually allow it to fly etc etc in other words it seems like a series of of improbabilities linked together to explain how we get flies but if you look at it in the context of energy added to the system 01:10:17 and look for rules of stability um it many different physical principles that are well accepted um like hysteresis the system memory every system that is is um undergoing change has a certain memory of the changes that has gone through right um and long range order um um a surface project um a sort of field or ordering influence into for example the surrounding water or air or vacuum um and orders um its environment michael polanyi’s absorption isotherm was um came prematurely for western physics and so it was ignored but he showed that surfaces 01:11:22 project um their influence into the environment and uh one of my professors um posted um electron microscope pictures but as far as i know never published about them he showed that um you can lay a plastic membrane a sheet of plastic over a crystal um and in a vacuum evaporate a different chemical on top of the crystal and the first um accumulation of atoms appears um ordered it takes on the ordering characteristics of the crystal under the plastic layer showing that the crystal isn’t working just atom to atom that is projecting a field through space that orders the way atoms of 01:12:23 another substance fall and uh stick to the crystal to the membrane wow so in other words their paradoxically is some type of consciousness inherent in so-called matter and in life forms yeah the principle that that explains polanyi’s and um um several other people um um and devised a way of measuring this um optically the ordering influence that could be projected through membranes and uh devised um a lot of interesting techniques that no one is using Alexander Rothen um was um i think he died about 1980 um he was applying a lot of these long-range ordering principles that the mechanism seems to be partly that um the electrons on an 01:13:32 atom are resonating such that one atom will induce a field in whatever the next atom is which then induces a field um off into space and if these can be ordered rather than going simply away from the surface out in space if the surface reinforces this in the other dimension of horizontally then you can project for amazing distances this ordering field yes uh related thing is the discovery several years ago of that heart cells human heart cells which were put in recent in close proximity but not you know actually touching or whatnot appeared to influence the physiological processes in other cells even though they weren’t physically 01:14:32 touching or chemically awake in the 1930s the grovaches um were demonstrating this process but again they were ridiculed they would demonstrate that you could put a quartz window between cells and they could communicate through that quartz window which was very similar to what my professor demonstrated with a crystal influencing gas molecules through a plastic membrane in this case uh thin quartz window would transmit the influence and i think we’re probably circling around the phobia if you i don’t know what else to call it uh about how research is directed and how people understand uh these uh processes and linkages to happen because you know we don’t 01:15:34 have as far as i know a mechanism that can explain communication between cells or communication between organisms that are not linked in some kind of uh you know concrete material chemical electrical fashion that you can measure and show uh you know it’s it’s kind of a there’s a missing piece um usually the missing piece is just that the the researcher is too dull minded to to think of measuring what might be relevant they have in mind that only atom to atom forces um only mechanical processes are relevant and so they simply don’t measure other conditions such as the the phase of the moon or the outside the room conditions 01:16:34 right things that are actually physically affecting the uh the process that they’re measuring well a similar note i understand that they recently discovered the presence of magnetite in human brain tissue uh which is of course a form of iron i think some people have it in some zone according to the experiments yeah you can put some people out in the woods and i think it’s about 15 percent of them know always where north is and the rest of them have no clue well i’ve sort of rambled on and on but you could see i’m trying to link some of these ideas and get get your feeling about that there are two more aspects of this origin of life that i um wanted to mention before we finish um okay the submarine vent biologists are if you link them with vernebsky and sydney fox’s work um it is very suggestive um that 01:17:48 that the volcanic processes are creating organisms rather than your organisms simply have chosen to live in this incredibly hot environment um and the um one of mendeleev’s early perceptions was he happened to be melting dissolving iron in acid and he noticed the smell of crude petroleum this happened to be the year that petroleum was discovered for um started to be mined in pennsylvania and uh he sent samples of this oily material to various petroleum uh chemists i think was 59 or 60 and they identified it definitely as petroleum from a 01:18:53 certain region and uh it was simply the carbon molecules atoms that had been dissolved in the hot iron were catalyzed into what everyone agreed smelled exactly like natural petroleum and thomas gold is an american um basically a geologist um the he has argued that petroleum is being constantly created by a mechanism such as um mendeleev’s iron acid reaction since volcanoes have plenty of acid and the earth is rich in iron on this mendeleev reaction would essentially have to produce petroleum in the depths of the earth 01:19:58 and thomas gold has pointed out that you can find petroleum um miles down in in a granite where it absolutely shouldn’t be unless it’s being synthesized from the depths of the earth rather than being a fossil material but bacteria is definitely pleased well the the traditional idea is that petroleum is is um marine biological fossil residue right but uh the thomas gold mendeleev brunadski’s interpretation is that the earth is generating new petroleum and these processes if you think of sydney fox’s work um in which cells are generated by volcanic heat um you have um organic sources of energy uh fats and oils and carbon dioxide 01:21:04 being released and organisms that um are able to eat carbon dioxide as as a raw material these submarine vent bacteria live on carbon dioxide um you have um many factual um things that have to be considered in relation to the origin of life um it basically looks increasingly as if um not only petroleum but simple organisms are being generated volcanically and emitted into the depths of the earth that um that interfaces interestingly with uh the bion experiments of dr wilhelm reich in the 1930s where he claimed to have found an intermediate an intermediate type 01:22:04 of uh life form that was intermediate between matter and biological life forms called bion yeah sydney fox’s organisms any high school student can produce uh little cells that will eat and reproduce it just takes a few hours in the lab to to make organisms so the spontaneous generation idea is not completely bad altogether right not at all i think i think volcanoes are turning out life all the time wow it’s amazing okay well i didn’t want to monopolize everything you’ve done very well and i went for a long walk and you guys have taken care of yourselves okay well i’m gonna hang up now okay thanks for somebody else have an opportunity thank you very much for calling thank you yeah so did you get to say everything you needed to say yeah briefly i think i touched everything that has to be thought about in connection with the origin of life that 01:23:11 was extremely interesting um i might mention the work of lancelot law white wrote um books on sort of the philosophy of physics and biology uh he was i think an important thinker along those lines talking about the formative principle as as something that has been overlooked by by the conventional science community are his books available or oh they’re in good libraries they haven’t been in print for 40 years i guess okay his name is lancelot law white yeah w8 yte okay a white well that was uh really fascinating and i want to thank you for coming on again okay and all right well we’re gonna have to leave it there that was dr raymond pete circa 2001 on w gdr in plainfield vermont you are now listening to w mr w lp warren and you’re listening to the 01:24:15 show politics and science i’ve been your host john barkhausen and this will be posted on the website radio numeral for all dot net radio the number four and then al l dot net and when you get there search for politics and science uh raymond pete has a phd in biology and a specialized in physiology and endocrinology and he has a website ray pete dot com r a y p e a t dot com where you’ll find many many extremely interesting articles fully referenced that will keep you busy for months to come thanks for listening to politics and science and tune in again next week for another edition