polsci-000102-origin-of-life.vtt

WEBVTT

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 Hello and welcome to Politics and Science. I'm your host, John Barkhausen.

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 Today we're dipping back into the archives when I had a show back at WGDR in the 1999-2000 time period.

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 And once again, this is Dr. Raymond Peat, and this is a more philosophical show talking about the origins of life,

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 the work of Lamarck, Darwin, Vernadsky, up here in the show. So I hope you'll enjoy it.

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 For those who don't know, Dr. Raymond Peat has a PhD in biology, and he has specialized in physiology and endocrinology,

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 and he has extensive knowledge about the history of science and philosophy.

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 You can find out more about Dr. Raymond Peat and also read a lot of his articles.

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 He has a newsletter that goes out six times a year. It's fascinating.

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 And many of them are published on his website, raypeat.com, R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com.

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 It was a call-in show, and the number may be given out in this. I'm not sure.

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 But it's happened more than ten years ago, so you can't call in.

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 And I should also add that this is an abridged show. The original show was around an hour and a half long.

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 And I'm going to try to post the entire show at the website, and the website is Radio4All.net.

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 And when you get there, search for "politics and science."

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 So how should we start this, Ray? We were thinking of talking about the origins of life.

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 I think it's necessary at some point to think about the philosophical things that have fed into controversies about the origin of life and national cultural differences.

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 I've studied quite a bit of the Russian tradition, starting with Mendeley, the guy that invented the way of ordering the elements in the periodic table.

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 He referred to himself as a cosmic realist. Later, about a generation younger than Mendeley, V.I. Vernadsky called himself a biogeochemist.

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 He also thought of himself as a cosmic realist. What they meant by this was that you have to always think back, think of the context of the problem that you're dealing with,

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 and try to think of as many levels of the problem at the same time as you can.

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 What year are we talking?

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 He completed his table in 1869, or in that period, his idea of the periodicity of the elements.

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 During the late 1800s, Vernadsky was traveling around Europe, talking to people, and got to know all the interesting people in Europe.

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 Every time he met someone, he would incorporate their ideas, and even literature fed into Vernadsky's way of looking at the world.

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 He thought of Tolstoy's brain as a geochemical event. Sanchonoff and Pavlov set out to try to explain human consciousness in realistic and physical terms,

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 so that they didn't have to leave anything out of the system.

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 They didn't think of the material world without consciousness, or a conscious world without material.

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 It was a tradition of looking at the hidden assumptions behind everything.

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 From that perspective, there are one or two attitudes in American and German science that I think have limited the way people think about the origin of life.

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 In a way, Pasteur is selected by American educators and science people as a way to obscure thinking about the origin of life.

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 His famous experiment demonstrated that life didn't arise from decaying organic matter.

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 His principle was that life comes from life.

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 People seized this who didn't want to accept that life came from non-living matter.

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 They wanted to dispose of the idea of the origin of life in the world and say that life came only from life.

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 So there's kind of a deliberate obscuring principle going on when people try to place Pasteur's thinking at the top.

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 It sounds like they don't want to discuss it.

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 The same thing happened to Pavlov.

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 This man named Watson, who I doubt even studied with Pavlov because he totally misrepresented what he claimed to have learned from Pavlov.

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 J.B. Watson was the founder of behaviorism in America, and he denied the existence of consciousness.

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 Even my professors in the university psychology department, some of them were still denying consciousness, or at least denying it to children.

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 They said that consciousness was only present in speech.

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 This picture of Pavlov as studying conditioned reflexes goes back to Watson's misrepresentation of Pavlov.

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 The translation of Pavlov's phrase even was deliberately misleading.

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 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.

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 In other words, consciousness was the meaning of Pavlov's term, and consciousness was explicitly defined out of his system.

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 The same sort of attempting to hide the problem has been going on in genetics and everything else.

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 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.

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 When you are forced to recognize change, very strange devices have developed.

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 The idealization of randomness, random change, random mutation, for about 80 years or so, just totally took over biological genetic thinking.

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 If we are going to have to admit that life changes, and maybe even that life originated from non-life, we are going to have to say that it is random because we don't really want to admit that it happens.

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 The big controversy between the neo-Darwinists and the Lamarckians was this same thing.

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 The neo-Lamarckians even rewrote Darwin.

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 They took out the Lamarckian inclinations of Darwin, and that's why they call it neo-Darwinism, because Darwin would be too Lamarckian for their preferences.

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 Maybe for our listeners you should give a little bit of a brief synopsis of Lamarckian and Darwinism.

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 Lamarck basically said that life is purposeful and that the intention to do something is part of the process of physiological adaptation,

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 and that this attempt to adapt to an environment is part of what is passed on to the offspring.

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 Darwin accepted that there were many sources of variation, including the Lamarckian type of variation.

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 Darwin didn't say that variation was just by chance.

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 In fact, he enumerated a whole bunch of mechanisms that could cause variation.

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 But then after Mendel's silly work with peas, which people have pointed out wasn't even truthful, he fluttered his results to make it look more mathematically perfect.

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 After he was resurrected or invented, people reinvented Darwin to support their position that change and evolution are random.

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 One of the recent manifestations of this strange religion of random changes evading the thought of purpose in the universe,

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 there has been a craze about the idea of chaos, and there are really close parallels between the genetics of random change and this idea of chaos.

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 What they are doing is using purely numerical processes to argue that you can't predict the future.

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 The whole argument of these chaos people is based on numerical sequences and computer events.

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 Then they say, "Well, particles, atoms, and things in the real world are just like numbers."

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 That's what the genetics people did.

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 They said, "The particles we are dealing with are just like numbers, and individual particles don't know where they are going, so they can only change randomly."

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 What they are doing is reducing everything to the most meaningless unit, in one case totally abstract, immaterial numbers, and in the other case almost abstract and immaterial entities called genes.

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 Meanwhile, these other people were thinking about the actual physics, chemistry, history, geology, and cosmology that are operating in everyday life

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 that would tend to produce the various phenomena of organisms and organic chemicals and so on.

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 Oparin is one of the people that is well known in the theory of the origin of life.

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 He is talking about the types of physical processes that can create things equivalent to cells,

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 the idea of coacervation or clumping in complex colloid-like systems that find organization in a complex way that is stable,

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 and allowing complex structures to appear out of what seem to be simple, random solutions.

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 The first to introduce the idea of self-organization and self-structuring,

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 which is a process in which entropy decreases according to ordinary physical processes.

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 Once you add a few complexifying ingredients to a solution of starch, oil, or protein molecules,

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 order starts appearing.

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 The strange idea is about entropy only increasing.

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 You have to see that whole history of denying that entropy can decrease in the universe.

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 You have to see that as part of this philosophy of idealizing randomness and chaos and the unpredictability of things.

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 Oparin was working along his synthesizing route.

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 He was working on his picture of the place of consciousness in the cosmos,

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 showing that according to well-recognized principles, consciousness is basically generated by physical forces.

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 He used the ideas of the biosphere and the noosphere.

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 Teilhard de Chardin happened to be in Paris, I think it was, where Bernadski was lecturing.

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 He popularized the idea of the noosphere, but actually it was this cosmic realist philosophy of the biogeochemist

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 that really generated the central idea of what the noosphere is in relation to the biosphere and material world.

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 So Chardin, he used the word noosphere, but he didn't really come up with the final meaning of it?

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 He turned it into a fairly revolutionary religious idea.

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 It has been very stimulating to a lot of people, but he left out the physical principles that explain it, really.

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 He left it in a very abstract form.

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 One of the outcomes of Oparin's work and the people who worked on Coasservation,

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 the American Sidney Fox, was kind of the fruition of some of these particular experiments

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 with how physical conditions affect the appearance of order out of disorder.

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 I should mention that one of the people that Bernadski knew in Paris was Henri Le Chatelier.

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 In chemistry, everyone hears about Le Chatelier's principle of the restoration of the disturbed equilibrium.

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 Anything you do to disturb an equilibrium causes the system to adjust in a way that restores equilibrium.

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 He invented that concept?

00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:53.000
 Le Chatelier did, yes.

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 He first phrased it in very complex ways, and over the years he got it simpler and simpler.

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 Now they state it in very simple but sort of misleading ways in chemistry textbooks.

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 It's a principle that really can be applied anywhere to organic physiology, brain processes, social processes, and so on.

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 It's simply an inescapable way of seeing things once you apply it in a few cases.

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 If you have a system and you disturb it by adding energy to it or pressure or changing the conditions in any way,

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 the system adjusts and restores a new equilibrium.

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 Bernadski, thinking cosmologically, seeing the earth as something in the universe,

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 realized that heat is coming out of the inside of the earth and that the sun is constantly adding energy to the system.

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 If you're constantly pushing on the system, both from volcanic energy and solar energy, you don't have a closed system.

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 In other words, energy is driving the system, disturbing the equilibrium in very powerful ways.

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 The system is being driven and directed and steered by this constant pressure of energy flowing into it.

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 Bernadski said that the system will adjust in ways that restore equilibrium.

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 He showed why organisms would adjust their complexity to use the energy that's available

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 and that this would make bigger and smarter, more intensely metabolizing organisms

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 to basically equilibrate the energy that's being added to the system.

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 I've never heard that Sidney Fox was a student of Bernadski's, but he in effect was because he used Bernadski's principles

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 and was able to perceive what happened.

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 Everyone at this time, about 40 years ago, everyone then and most of them still are,

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 talking about life originating in a tepid pond or a warm ocean or an atmosphere sparked by lightning and various things,

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 atmospheric sparks causing organic molecules to fall into an ocean in which they accumulate and then by random events, etc.

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 Sidney Fox intended to rethink the question of how proteins come into existence when the equilibrium,

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 if you have a protein floating in water, is to degrade to various products such as the individual amino acids that it came from

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 or other small molecules.

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 So the equilibrium is obviously not favorable for the occurrence of large molecules if they're floating in water.

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 He put dry amino acids or almost dry amino acids deficient in water, put them on hot lava in a model of volcanic energy being added to organic molecules

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 and then added a little water and showed that the heat in the absence of water creates protein-like long polymerized molecules.

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 So the equilibrium is absolutely the opposite in the deficiency of water than in an excess of water.

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 One of my professors, Sidney Bernhard, revolutionized cell physiology, but no one seems to have noticed.

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 He demonstrated that the glycolytic enzymes are at a higher concentration in cells than the substrate sugars that they work on.

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 Everyone had been diluting these enzymes in water and then describing the rules of interaction with substrate

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 when there was an excess of substrate and water and a deficiency of enzymes,

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 but he showed that actually there are more enzymes per cubic unit than sugar molecules.

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 And the concentration totally changes the equilibrium situation.

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 And Sidney Fox demonstrated not only does the relatively dry heat create order and protein-like molecules out of free amino acids,

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 but when he added water, the proteins spontaneously formed tiny bacteria-like particles,

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 almost all the same size, about the size of a bacterium, and a very orderly appearance of cell-like structures.

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 And then over, I guess, about 20 years, the end of students demonstrated that these protein-like molecules have enzyme-like properties,

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 catalyzed reactions.

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 The amino acids polymerize in a nonrandom fashion.

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 It depends on what's present in the growing molecule and in its environment.

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 The growing molecule, in effect, selects certain amino acids to be the next one to add,

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 so it isn't growing in a random fashion.

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 And once it has grown, then it has this same selective pressure over other reactions,

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 and there's enzyme-like catalytic action in these artificially made spontaneous protein-like molecules.

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 And so he added the precursors of genetic material and showed that these would be catalyzed into chains.

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 And so you have the reverse situation in which genes come last after you've already created nice, neat little cells that can metabolize,

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 and they can even reproduce themselves without the genes in them.

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 He basically originated life.

00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:38.000
 Yeah, yeah. And you put the proteinoid microspheres, he called them, in a solution with amino acids,

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 and the proteins keep going in the growth process because they've concentrated a relatively water-free environment in which they do grow.

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 And so they assimilate nutrients from the water environment, grow, and then when they reach a size at which they are no longer stable,

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 they bud or divide and produce new cells, as long as there's food available, I guess.

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 And he did this in the '60s, and it was mentioned in my Leninger's biochemistry textbook, 1968 edition, I think it was,

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 and now the new so-called Leninger biochemistry book with the same title deleted that most interesting stuff

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 that Leninger had included as an important biochemical principle.

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 Because it doesn't fit their concept?

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 Yeah, apparently.

00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:48.000
 Yeah. Well, I would think that would be, what Sidney Fox did would be headline news.

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 Yeah, it was for me.

00:29:54.000 --> 00:30:00.000
 I didn't quite understand your professor, Sidney Greenheart.

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:07.000
 He showed that the concentration of glycolytic enzymes was higher in cells than the amount of sugar would want?

00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:19.000
 No, than the absolute amount of sugar, like there would be more than one enzyme per molecule of sugar

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 and a very deficient relative amount of water so that the enzymes can bind a molecule of sugar as it appears

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 and then directly hand the product over to another enzyme.

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 It isn't a random, the molecules are so close together that the reactants can go from one enzyme directly to the other

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 without going back into watery solution and that drastically alters the equilibrium.

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 And if you think of Le Chatelier, the concentration governs the equilibrium and the system adjusts accordingly.

00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:18.000
 So he showed that there was an order to it?

00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:31.000
 Yeah, the glycolysis was essentially an ordered process where all of the test tube biochemists dissolving cells.

00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:41.000
 Before Bernhard had been working on that, I had gone around to all of the chemistry professors

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 and to feel out ways for studying those processes without dissolving the cells.

00:31:53.000 --> 00:32:08.000
 Basically their reaction was just to laugh and get rid of me because they said you don't have biochemistry if you don't squash and dilute cells.

00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:21.000
 It seems to me this whole divide between the two philosophies is it's like the reductionist versus the,

00:32:21.000 --> 00:32:28.000
 I don't know what you call them, you have a word for it, I'm sure, the holist or the somebody who looks at the whole organism

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 rather than just dividing it into a mechanistic little parts.

00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:35.000
 Yeah.

00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:40.000
 It also seems like science is afraid of sounding religious or something.

00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:42.000
 Yeah.

00:32:42.000 --> 00:32:46.000
 Did you happen to read my Generative Energy book?

00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:48.000
 Yeah, I read some of the stuff on Vernadsky.

00:32:48.000 --> 00:32:49.000
 Yeah.

00:32:49.000 --> 00:32:56.000
 Fred Hoyle, I quote both Blake and Fred Hoyle at the top of one of the chapters.

00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:10.000
 Fred Hoyle says that the cosmos would be, it would be hard to avoid thinking of the cosmos as essentially a biological thing

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 except that people can't stand the thought that the universe itself is purposeful and alive.

00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:26.000
 And I really wonder why, I mean it almost seems like science is reacting against religion in that sense because--

00:33:26.000 --> 00:33:27.000
 Yeah.

00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:34.000
 --as far as a lot of people are drawn to religion and that's because it does give a purpose to life.

00:33:34.000 --> 00:33:45.000
 Yeah, that was where Teilhard de Chardin made a big contribution to French and American civilization

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 by being both a scientist and a religion thinker.

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 His noosphere got people thinking about the meaning of consciousness in the material world

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 and how that relates to spiritual growth.

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 And unfortunately some of the ecologically minded people have replaced even the noosphere of Teilhard

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 but even worse they've completely reversed the noosphere of Vernadsky

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 with the idea, the Gaia or Gaia hypothesis.

00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:41.000
 Right.

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 Which basically it's like the idea of homeostasis versus creation.

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 And the Gaia hypothesis says that the earth is, it's sort of like a conscious being

00:35:03.000 --> 00:35:08.000
 except it's not going anywhere, it's trying to maintain itself.

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 And one of the implications of the randomness thinking is that random events have wiped out many species in the past

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 and that that just has to be accepted.

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 Species might take four billion years to evolve but it's okay if they're wiped out by industry or whatever

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 because that's a normal event in history.

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 But when you look at it from the Vernadsky point of view, the earth and the sun are driving evolution as a system

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 in which the microorganisms, soil organisms, vegetation and animals and culture are all being driven forward as a system.

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 If you delete parts of the system, the whole four billion years might go to waste.

00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:21.000
 Right.

00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:35.000
 Where the people inclined towards the Gaia hypothesis and the random evolution tend to say whatever happens is okay.

00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:42.000
 So I always thought the Gaia hypothesis was more of the earth is a being, is an organism

00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:49.000
 but I felt like the people, the proponents of that idea were not accepting of man's,

00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:53.000
 basically hurting the organism on which we live and are a part of.

00:36:53.000 --> 00:37:03.000
 Well, they say that the organism is a self-repairing system and that you just, you don't want to kill it

00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:15.000
 but that it will repair itself and restore what was but they don't see it as a growing and evolving purposeful organism

00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:20.000
 and being driven in a specific direction by specific energy.

00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:22.000
 With a specific purpose.

00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:23.000
 Yeah.

00:37:23.000 --> 00:37:26.000
 I see.

00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:37.000
 And the principles that Vernadsky developed were really extensions of Le Chatelier's principle

00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:52.000
 but he showed that the migration of atoms and the use of energy, the intensity of metabolism,

00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:59.000
 all of these he made as subdivisions of Le Chatelier's principle

00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:17.000
 but it basically showed why large brain, warm-blooded animals had to evolve as the world system evolved.

00:38:17.000 --> 00:38:32.000
 Sort of another level but really parallel and probably for similar cosmic realist philosophical positions,

00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:45.000
 an astronomer, Nikolai Kozyrev, did his doctoral dissertation around 1950 on the energy of stars

00:38:45.000 --> 00:39:00.000
 and he, like these other people who pointed out that order tends to appear anytime you have a system

00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:07.000
 which is receiving energy from the outside.

00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:21.000
 In just the more abstract concept, Kozyrev said what if we assume that the universe is not necessarily running down

00:39:21.000 --> 00:39:32.000
 and that within a system, entropy does tend only to increase

00:39:32.000 --> 00:39:43.000
 but there's no such system that we know of so why should we say that that is the ruling effect of entropy.

00:39:43.000 --> 00:39:51.000
 What if we assume that the universe is not just running down,

00:39:51.000 --> 00:40:00.000
 that it wasn't created at one moment like someone winding up a clock only to run down.

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:07.000
 He said time seems to us to move in one direction

00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:16.000
 but these people who were working out why the universe seems to be running down

00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:22.000
 incorporated the assumption that time is not real

00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:32.000
 that time abstractly on the physical level is reversible.

00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:45.000
 Kozyrev said what if we assume that time physically is a real asymmetric factor in all systems

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:58.000
 then the mere passage of time distinguishes one state of a system from another state in a real physical way

00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:07.000
 and he said what if we apply this using standard Einsteinian arguments

00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:20.000
 what if we apply this to the energy of stars and say that the passage of time introduces something

00:41:20.000 --> 00:41:25.000
 every moment of time that passes something is being added to the system

00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:33.000
 rather than time being as much downhill as uphill

00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:40.000
 and just by that simple assumption that what if time is real

00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:50.000
 he showed that that assumption leads to increasing energy being produced through time

00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:55.000
 by a mass in proportion to how big the mass is

00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:04.000
 and so he said okay now we can suppose that time itself is the source of stellar energy

00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:11.000
 what if we scale that down to Jupiter for example

00:42:11.000 --> 00:42:22.000
 and he back in the early 1950s before people were measuring the energy and temperature of the planets

00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:31.000
 he had predicted that Jupiter and Neptune would be emitting more heat than they receive

00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:37.000
 and that each planet would have internal heat in proportion to its mass

00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:41.000
 and scaling it down to the size of the moon

00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:51.000
 he said that the internal energy of the moon is likely to produce an occasional volcanic eruption

00:42:51.000 --> 00:42:55.000
 or emission of very hot gases

00:42:55.000 --> 00:43:04.000
 and so he trained his spectrometer through a telescope on the dark phases of the moon

00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:09.000
 and recorded various hot emissions

00:43:09.000 --> 00:43:18.000
 and other people had recorded these but he found them according to the prediction

00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:23.000
 of how much heat should be generated inside the mass

00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:29.000
 simply by his reasoning because of the passage of time

00:43:29.000 --> 00:43:39.000
 and so his physics I think should be taken into account in thinking about volcanic energy

00:43:39.000 --> 00:43:42.000
 huh, that's very interesting

00:43:42.000 --> 00:43:44.000
 I'd like to go back to that but we

00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:46.000
 is the call on the line?

00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:47.000
 yeah

00:43:47.000 --> 00:43:49.000
 do you have a question or comment?

00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:52.000
 yeah it's more in the nature of a question I guess

00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:59.000
 I'm curious about the idea of consciousness itself

00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:03.000
 and its relationship to the brain

00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:10.000
 and its relationship to matter outside the brain

00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:18.000
 as I understand it the scientific paradigm about consciousness is that

00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:25.000
 it's a sort of epiphenomena of physicochemical processes in the brain

00:44:25.000 --> 00:44:29.000
 and that it's more or less self referential

00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:39.000
 in other words what I think or feel doesn't interface with anything outside myself

00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:41.000
 or anyone outside myself

00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:44.000
 but it's entirely self referential

00:44:44.000 --> 00:44:51.000
 there seem to be a lot of problems with this idea if I've understood it correctly

00:44:51.000 --> 00:44:58.000
 the first thing which is my understanding is somewhat limited about this

00:44:58.000 --> 00:45:01.000
 I may be making a fool out of myself

00:45:01.000 --> 00:45:07.000
 but that no one's been able to locate memory in the brain

00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:14.000
 the person who did the initial research that showed a relationship between different areas of the brain

00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:24.000
 and the existence of specific memories of either olfactory or auditory or whatever

00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:33.000
 operated on epileptic patients who remained conscious during brain surgery

00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:40.000
 yet he came to espouse the idea of interactionism

00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:49.000
 that mind and brain are two different but interactive structures or forces

00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:58.000
 that thoughts or rather memories weren't stored in the brain per se

00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:03.000
 but existed in some type of field

00:46:03.000 --> 00:46:13.000
 my personal history is part of where my ideas on this have come from

00:46:13.000 --> 00:46:21.000
 before I discovered that thyroid was very important in my metabolism

00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:25.000
 I was a hyper metabolic individual

00:46:25.000 --> 00:46:32.000
 and I had probably I would burn 10,000 calories in a day

00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:38.000
 and I had an electrical field around my body

00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:46.000
 that would affect physical things like millivolt meters

00:46:46.000 --> 00:46:50.000
 about two feet away from my body

00:46:50.000 --> 00:46:55.000
 so I for years was very conscious of this

00:46:55.000 --> 00:46:59.000
 sometimes really annoying electrical field

00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:02.000
 I couldn't operate the apparatus

00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:07.000
 I had to have my lab partner do it because it would go off scale when I got near it

00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:12.000
 and all of this stopped when I took the right amount of thyroid

00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:19.000
 my metabolism became more normal and regulated

00:47:19.000 --> 00:47:25.000
 but I saw that oxidative metabolism generated this

00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:32.000
 potentially very immense and disturbing field around cells and the whole body

00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:46.000
 and this has inclined me more than people who haven't had those actual personal experiences

00:47:46.000 --> 00:47:49.000
 with bioelectric fields

00:47:49.000 --> 00:47:57.000
 it has inclined me to see the importance of bioelectric fields in development and physiology

00:47:57.000 --> 00:48:05.000
 and I still use this kind of field thinking

00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:10.000
 for example there's a field concept of cancer

00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:18.000
 which traditionally the definition of the field has been left open

00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:28.000
 but a lot of research shows that it is an electromagnetic field or a bioelectric field

00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:38.000
 at least in part that creates the precancerous and cancerous conditions in a tissue

00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:41.000
 that governs the development of an embryo and so on

00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:48.000
 yes and that idea has been taken up by people like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake

00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:54.000
 who came up with a theory which he calls formative causation

00:48:54.000 --> 00:49:04.000
 that if I understand it correctly that information can be shared among members of a specific species

00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:16.000
 from Vernadsky's perspective I think the supplementary context for that is that

00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:28.000
 things are ready to be discovered and that when you change components in the system

00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:34.000
 many things are contributing not just the individual's consciousness

00:49:34.000 --> 00:49:42.000
 but the preconditions are tending to make that certain behavior probable

00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:54.000
 so that Vernadsky would emphasize multi-causal factors rather than just conscious factors

00:49:54.000 --> 00:50:00.000
 and I also wondered you seem to have been scooting around something

00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:03.000
 which is sort of a scientific taboo

00:50:03.000 --> 00:50:12.000
 and I wondered what you thought of the evidence for the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics

00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:23.000
 definitely they are a fact and Darwin knew it, Lamarck

00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:28.000
 I'm familiar with Dr. Kamler, the Viennese biologist

00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:30.000
 which is a fascinating story

00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:38.000
 his work was real and a lot of people have met similar fates

00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:46.000
 people slandered Lamarck and took him down because of the implications

00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:54.000
 of his really empirical physiological approach to life

00:50:54.000 --> 00:50:58.000
 people couldn't stand that in 1820 or 1830

00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:03.000
 and so they had to disassemble his reputation

00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:10.000
 same thing happened to Kamler and everyone who violates the taboos

00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:16.000
 Carl Lindgren wrote a book called Cold War in Biology

00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:22.000
 it's the best American book on the subject that I know

00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:24.000
 C.P. Lindgren

00:51:24.000 --> 00:51:28.000
 what I've been seeing at least on the level of the popular media

00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:32.000
 and the way the idea of genetics is presented

00:51:32.000 --> 00:51:35.000
 is a kind of genetic determinism

00:51:35.000 --> 00:51:39.000
 which the public at large is being led to believe

00:51:39.000 --> 00:51:43.000
 that a gene is sort of an individual

00:51:43.000 --> 00:51:48.000
 almost like an organism itself

00:51:48.000 --> 00:51:51.000
 the self is a gene and all that sort of thing

00:51:51.000 --> 00:51:57.000
 which then is responsible for a specific quality or characteristic

00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:01.000
 and as far as I know no one has ever proved that genes do anything

00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:04.000
 except organize the synthesis of proteins

00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:13.000
 I have been interested in the subject for more than 50 years

00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:19.000
 and so I've noticed the things going on

00:52:19.000 --> 00:52:23.000
 and tried to find out where they came from

00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:32.000
 in some of my newsletters I'll be talking about related issues

00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:42.000
 but the motivation for a lot of these ideas around 1910 to 1920

00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:49.000
 were to stop immigration of Eastern Europeans

00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:53.000
 and Southern Europeans to the United States

00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:57.000
 so they created IQ tests

00:52:57.000 --> 00:53:04.000
 and showed that Russians and Jews and the various people

00:53:04.000 --> 00:53:07.000
 that they didn't want to immigrate

00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:11.000
 but 85% of them were feeble minded

00:53:11.000 --> 00:53:17.000
 naturally they gave the tests in English

00:53:17.000 --> 00:53:22.000
 but these tests were very explicitly designed

00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:26.000
 for racist exclusionary purposes

00:53:26.000 --> 00:53:32.000
 and many of these people have persisted in universities

00:53:32.000 --> 00:53:37.000
 the Belker for example a real idiot at Harvard

00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:41.000
 was one of the last hangers on

00:53:41.000 --> 00:53:48.000
 and these people had great success in getting published in Science

00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:54.000
 the leading American science magazine

00:53:54.000 --> 00:53:59.000
 when I sent a tiny letter criticizing

00:53:59.000 --> 00:54:06.000
 one of these genetic determination of intelligence

00:54:06.000 --> 00:54:09.000
 I think it was an 8 or 10 page article

00:54:09.000 --> 00:54:11.000
 I sent about a two sentence letter

00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:17.000
 they sent me pages of anonymous referees

00:54:17.000 --> 00:54:20.000
 one of them the only evidence that was cited

00:54:20.000 --> 00:54:25.000
 for not publishing my little letter critical of the conclusions

00:54:25.000 --> 00:54:31.000
 I just said the conclusions have nothing whatsoever to do with the text of the article

00:54:31.000 --> 00:54:40.000
 these pages of anonymous referees rejecting my comment

00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:49.000
 the only data cited was from Hitler's racial hygiene institute

00:54:49.000 --> 00:54:53.000
 and that got me interested in studying what was going on there

00:54:53.000 --> 00:54:56.000
 and I saw that by studying that period

00:54:56.000 --> 00:55:04.000
 I saw that Conrad Lorenz was the architect of the racial hygiene

00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:11.000
 that he created the rationale based on American IQ

00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:13.000
 and racism

00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:17.000
 he created the rationale for exterminating inferior people

00:55:17.000 --> 00:55:19.000
 Conrad Lorenz was a Nazi

00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:22.000
 and I think it was his last book

00:55:22.000 --> 00:55:28.000
 he repeated exactly the arguments of his 1942

00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:33.000
 and the founding papers of genocide

00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:39.000
 he repeated the exact arguments except he replaced exterminate

00:55:39.000 --> 00:55:42.000
 with some slightly milder translation

00:55:42.000 --> 00:55:49.000
 but he never repented from this idea of eliminating genetic inferiority

00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:53.000
 I think the ideology has survived apparently

00:55:53.000 --> 00:55:55.000
 but it's been shorn of certain terms

00:55:55.000 --> 00:55:58.000
 one for instance never hears the word eugenics anymore

00:55:58.000 --> 00:56:03.000
 I went to a lecture in the 70s

00:56:03.000 --> 00:56:08.000
 all the professors from my biology department were there

00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:15.000
 nodding happily as Gunter Stantz who was a Jewish refugee from Hitler

00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:21.000
 as Gunter Stantz presented Conrad Lorenz's argument for genocide

00:56:21.000 --> 00:56:28.000
 as the ultimate in understanding the brain genetically

00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:35.000
 and all of my professors were there happily agreeing that this was wonderful stuff

00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:44.000
 and when my friend and I pointed out some of the logical irrationalities

00:56:44.000 --> 00:56:54.000
 such as he was saying that a person's life and work are genetically determined units

00:56:54.000 --> 00:56:58.000
 suddenly they said are you saying that the fact that he was a Nazi

00:56:58.000 --> 00:57:02.000
 had anything to do with the validity of these ideas

00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:10.000
 and the whole point of the lecture was that every cultural feature is genetically determined

00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:17.000
 well one of the sort of interesting side light on this is that in the Indian tradition

00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:20.000
 there were these so called laws of Manu

00:57:20.000 --> 00:57:30.000
 which were basically governed the questions of occupation, heredity

00:57:30.000 --> 00:57:37.000
 and the creation of a caste system based on certain ideas about that

00:57:37.000 --> 00:57:42.000
 and my understanding was originally the caste system was not hereditary

00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:49.000
 but it was rather simply the recognition that certain people had certain proclivities

00:57:49.000 --> 00:57:53.000
 or natural abilities or interests or capacities

00:57:53.000 --> 00:58:01.000
 and that they could be best sorted out according to those in various occupational groups and so forth

00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:04.000
 but that it was possible to move from one to the other

00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:09.000
 and then gradually it became modified into a hereditary system

00:58:09.000 --> 00:58:15.000
 in which if your father was a leather worker or something you would be one

00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:17.000
 or if he was a farmer you would be one

00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:29.000
 and there was no mobility and no possibility of actually assimilating anything new so to speak

00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:37.000
 I think one of the driving forces of the caste system was the 3500 years ago

00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:46.000
 the Nordics, the Indo-Europeans invaded and enslaved the dark native people

00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:59.000
 and I think that was the racial caste difference became the power that stayed in force

00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:08.000
 and tended to rigidify the occupational system

00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:19.000
 So do you think this whole caste system and emphasis on genetics as being the set in stone basis for your status in life

00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:24.000
 Do you think that people are justifying survival of the fittest?

00:59:24.000 --> 00:59:36.000
 No, the whole idea of survival of the fittest is basically saying that whoever is in power is the fittest

00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:43.000
 and whoever is able to say it with most force is the fittest

00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:48.000
 and if you object and they can kill you, they are the fittest

00:59:48.000 --> 00:59:57.000
 and it basically is tending to create a ruling class of inferiors

00:59:57.000 --> 01:00:08.000
 if they keep their status only on the basis of saying things like "if you are so smart why aren't you rich like me"

01:00:08.000 --> 01:00:13.000
 pretty soon the ruling class becomes degenerate

01:00:13.000 --> 01:00:22.000
 What do you think of the misappropriation, I mean it seems like the modern, the official ideology you might call it

01:00:22.000 --> 01:00:32.000
 of the ruling classes in this country is compounded of misinterpretations of Darwin and Adam Smith basically

01:00:32.000 --> 01:00:44.000
 and I personally don't find the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution intellectually convincing at all myself

01:00:44.000 --> 01:00:54.000
 but whenever I bring this up, people look at me as if I suggested to the earth is flat

01:00:54.000 --> 01:01:03.000
 because it constitutes so to speak the very pillar of their thought about how the world is organized and operates

01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:16.000
 If you start pointing out any of the thousand hidden assumptions or thousand facts that they are trying to cover up

01:01:16.000 --> 01:01:24.000
 you get to about two or three of them and then they remove you in some way from the discussion

01:01:24.000 --> 01:01:34.000
 Right, and interestingly Adam Smith's ideas interface with Darwinism very much I think

01:01:34.000 --> 01:01:39.000
 and they are always misrepresented in economics textbooks

01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:51.000
 For instance, we all know that Adam Smith believed that self-interest was the appropriate form of being so to speak and acting

01:01:51.000 --> 01:02:00.000
 and that if everyone pursued their own self-interest to the maximal degree that would result in the maximal degree of happiness for all

01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:13.000
 but what they leave out is that Smith believed also in benevolence as a counterpoint to self-interest, to naked self-interest

01:02:13.000 --> 01:02:21.000
 and that you could say his idea of benevolence was a kind of social capital you might say

01:02:21.000 --> 01:02:35.000
 and his comment for instance on businessmen is "they neither are nor ought to be the rulers of mankind"

01:02:35.000 --> 01:02:45.000
 and yet his ideas are promoted, one half of his ideas are promoted, the other half is ignored

01:02:45.000 --> 01:02:47.000
 similarly Darwin, you know

01:02:47.000 --> 01:03:00.000
 It isn't just neo-Darwinism and the Smith disorders but it's basically everything in our intellectual history

01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:07.000
 I've had a habit of reading textbooks in many different fields over the years

01:03:07.000 --> 01:03:21.000
 and really 99 plus percent of them are ideological distortions, rewriting of history

01:03:21.000 --> 01:03:28.000
 leaving out everything interesting or threatening to the established system

01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:33.000
 every field of knowledge has been distorted

01:03:33.000 --> 01:03:45.000
 art, literature, every part of culture you can think of has its threatening aspects

01:03:45.000 --> 01:04:00.000
 and in education it happens that the potential meaningfulness that some of these ideas give to life are very exciting to students

01:04:00.000 --> 01:04:14.000
 and so education has been very powerfully trimmed down to become nothing but as far as the system can manage it

01:04:14.000 --> 01:04:19.000
 to be nothing but an indoctrination in these distortions

01:04:19.000 --> 01:04:31.000
 because Adam Smith, Darwin, Pavlov, everyone that's treated, if they were good they have to be distorted

01:04:31.000 --> 01:04:35.000
 if they were too good they have to be left out entirely

01:04:35.000 --> 01:04:42.000
 Right, for instance I remember my biology textbook talked a little bit about Darwin and Wallace

01:04:42.000 --> 01:04:49.000
 and contrasted their basically coincident discovery of so-called natural selection

01:04:49.000 --> 01:05:06.000
 but a radical difference between Darwin and Wallace is that Wallace simply could not accept the idea of an entirely mechanical evolutionary process driven by randomness or chance

01:05:06.000 --> 01:05:08.000
 Darwin didn't either though

01:05:08.000 --> 01:05:15.000
 Yeah, right, and Wallace actually went to the extent of writing a book which I have never been able to locate

01:05:15.000 --> 01:05:25.000
 in which he tried to work on the idea that there was consciousness and will and even perhaps, this is really going over the edge

01:05:25.000 --> 01:05:38.000
 of angelic intelligences as he calls them who were guiding the evolutionary unfoldment of people or humans

01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:42.000
 You know, of course they wrote him off

01:05:42.000 --> 01:05:43.000
 Can't have that

01:05:43.000 --> 01:05:46.000
 Yeah, can't have that

01:05:46.000 --> 01:06:01.000
 But I'm turning the discussion a little bit back, why is there, there seems to be, you know science developed as a reaction against what I guess you could call religious provincialism

01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:15.000
 or metaphysical speculation, 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

01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:26.000
 But then it seems to have turned into an ideology, I mean science as a method is one thing, science as an ideology, scientism is something else altogether

01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:46.000
 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 backward cultural forces

01:06:46.000 --> 01:07:10.000
 which at one time were very closely identified with religion but these same forces took over and most scientists have accepted the fundamental assumptions of the people who used those assumptions for what they called religious purposes

01:07:10.000 --> 01:07:16.000
 Right, it's a kind of surrogate religion for the materialists you might say

01:07:16.000 --> 01:07:37.000
 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 survival of the so-called fittest

01:07:37.000 --> 01:08:02.000
 Well you know what's interesting about that is that, I mean I'm not a mathematician but my understanding is that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution basically posits random mutation and natural selection as the driving factors in the creation and you know the dominance of certain species and the death of others

01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:26.000
 But randomness is based on the idea of 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 room with typewriters they will eventually write "the sun also rises" or "war and peace" or something

01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:44.000
 That's where Vernadsky shows that very quickly species will arise to the limits of the resources available, that evolution is driven in a relatively practically instantaneous way

01:08:44.000 --> 01:09:06.000
 There is such a powerful guiding influence coming from this energy disturbing the old equilibrium that the variation, whatever the stimulus might be, there might be some random event

01:09:06.000 --> 01:09:18.000
 But the driving environmental force is so powerful that evolution is relatively fast and directional

01:09:18.000 --> 01:09:43.000
 And one of the puzzling things is if you posit mutation as one of the principle driving forces, most mutations are regressive and Sheldrake points out you might be able to get a insect, say a precursor of a fly that couldn't fly

01:09:43.000 --> 01:09:59.000
 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. etc.

01:09:59.000 --> 01:10:10.000
 In other words it seems like a series of probabilities linked together to explain how we get flies

01:10:10.000 --> 01:10:33.000
 But if you look at it in the context of energy added to the system and look for rules of stability, many different physical principles that are well accepted like hysteresis, the system memory

01:10:33.000 --> 01:10:44.000
 Every system that is undergoing change has a certain memory of the changes it has gone through

01:10:44.000 --> 01:11:09.000
 And long range order, a surface projects a sort of field or ordering influence into for example the surrounding water or air or vacuum and orders its environment

01:11:09.000 --> 01:11:27.000
 Michael Polanyi's absorption isotherm came prematurely for western physics and so it was ignored but he showed that surfaces project their influence into the environment

01:11:27.000 --> 01:11:38.000
 One of my professors posted electron microscope pictures but as far as I know never published about them

01:11:38.000 --> 01:12:04.000
 He showed that you can lay a plastic membrane, a sheet of plastic over a crystal and in a vacuum evaporate a different chemical on top of the crystal and the first accumulation of atoms appears ordered

01:12:04.000 --> 01:12:29.000
 It takes on the ordering characteristics of the crystal under the plastic layer showing that the crystal isn't working just atom to atom but is projecting a field through space that orders the way atoms of another substance fall and stick to the membrane

01:12:29.000 --> 01:12:39.000
 So in other words there paradoxically is some type of consciousness inherent in so called matter and in life forms

01:12:39.000 --> 01:12:57.000
 The principle that explains Polanyi's and several other people, a man devised a way of measuring this optically

01:12:57.000 --> 01:13:10.000
 The ordering influence that could be projected through membranes and devised a lot of interesting techniques that no one is using

01:13:10.000 --> 01:13:25.000
 Alexander Rothen, I think he died about 1980, he was applying a lot of these long range ordering principles

01:13:25.000 --> 01:13:46.000
 The mechanism seems to be partly that the electrons on an atom are resonating such that one atom will induce a field in whatever the next atom is which then induces a field off into space

01:13:46.000 --> 01:14:08.000
 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 horizontally then you can project for amazing distances this ordering field

01:14:08.000 --> 01:14:25.000
 Yes, a related thing is the discovery several years ago that human heart cells which were put in close proximity but not actually touching or what not

01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:36.000
 appeared to influence the physiological processes in other cells even though they weren't physically touching or chemically linked

01:14:36.000 --> 01:14:45.000
 In the 1930s the Gervaches were demonstrating this process but again they were ridiculed

01:14:45.000 --> 01:14:55.000
 They would demonstrate that you could put a quartz window between cells and they could communicate through that quartz window

01:14:55.000 --> 01:15:05.000
 which was very similar to what my professor demonstrated with a crystal influencing gas molecules through a plastic membrane

01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:11.000
 In this case a thin quartz window would transmit the influence

01:15:11.000 --> 01:15:31.000
 I think we are probably circling around the phobia if you want to call it about how research is directed and how people understand these processes and linkages to happen

01:15:31.000 --> 01:15:54.000
 because we don't 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 concrete, material, chemical, electrical fashion that you can measure and show

01:15:54.000 --> 01:16:01.000
 There is a missing piece

01:16:01.000 --> 01:16:13.000
 Usually the missing piece is just that the researcher is too dull minded to think of measuring what might be relevant

01:16:13.000 --> 01:16:23.000
 They have in mind that only atom to atom forces, only mechanical processes are relevant

01:16:23.000 --> 01:16:34.000
 so they simply don't measure other conditions such as the phase of the moon or the outside the room conditions

01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:42.000
 Things that are actually physically affecting the process that they are measuring

01:16:42.000 --> 01:16:52.000
 On a similar note I understand that they recently discovered the presence of magnetite in human brain tissue which is of course a form of iron

01:16:52.000 --> 01:16:56.000
 I think some people have it in some zone according to the experiments

01:16:56.000 --> 01:17:09.000
 You can put some people out in the woods and I think about 15% of them know always where north is and the rest of them have no clue

01:17:09.000 --> 01:17:21.000
 I've sort of rambled on and on but you can see I'm trying to link some of these ideas and get your feeling about it

01:17:21.000 --> 01:17:29.000
 There are two more aspects of this origin of life that I wanted to mention before we finish

01:17:29.000 --> 01:17:40.000
 The submarine vent biologists, if you link them with Vernadsky and Sidney Fox's work

01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:53.000
 It is very suggestive that the volcanic processes are creating organisms

01:17:53.000 --> 01:17:59.000
 rather than organisms simply have chosen to live in this incredibly hot environment

01:17:59.000 --> 01:18:15.000
 One of Mendeleev's early perceptions was he happened to be melting, dissolving iron in acid

01:18:15.000 --> 01:18:23.000
 and he noticed the smell of crude petroleum

01:18:23.000 --> 01:18:32.000
 This happened to be the year that petroleum was discovered or started to be mined in Pennsylvania

01:18:32.000 --> 01:18:48.000
 He sent samples of this oily material to various petroleum chemists, I think it was '59 or '60

01:18:48.000 --> 01:18:55.000
 and they identified it definitely as petroleum from a certain region

01:18:55.000 --> 01:19:05.000
 It was simply the carbon molecules, atoms that had been dissolved in the hot iron

01:19:05.000 --> 01:19:14.000
 were catalyzed into what everyone agreed smelled exactly like natural petroleum

01:19:14.000 --> 01:19:25.000
 Thomas Gold is an American, basically a geologist

01:19:25.000 --> 01:19:34.000
 He has argued that petroleum is being constantly created by a mechanism

01:19:34.000 --> 01:19:41.000
 such as Mendeleev's iron-acid reaction

01:19:41.000 --> 01:19:48.000
 Since volcanoes have plenty of acid and the earth is rich in iron

01:19:48.000 --> 01:19:58.000
 this Mendeleev reaction would essentially have to produce petroleum in the depths of the earth

01:19:58.000 --> 01:20:06.000
 Thomas Gold has pointed out that you can find petroleum miles down in granite

01:20:06.000 --> 01:20:13.000
 where it absolutely shouldn't be unless it's being synthesized from the depths of the earth

01:20:13.000 --> 01:20:17.000
 rather than being a fossil material

01:20:17.000 --> 01:20:19.000
 But bacteria?

01:20:19.000 --> 01:20:32.000
 The traditional idea is that petroleum is a marine biological fossil residue

01:20:32.000 --> 01:20:43.000
 but the Thomas Gold-Mendeleev-Bernadksy interpretation is that the earth is generating new petroleum

01:20:43.000 --> 01:20:48.000
 and these processes, if you think of Sidney Fox's work

01:20:48.000 --> 01:20:53.000
 in which cells are generated by volcanic heat

01:20:53.000 --> 01:21:05.000
 you have organic sources of energy, fats and oils and carbon dioxide being released

01:21:05.000 --> 01:21:15.000
 and organisms that are able to eat carbon dioxide as a raw material

01:21:15.000 --> 01:21:19.000
 These submarine-vent bacteria live on carbon dioxide

01:21:19.000 --> 01:21:31.000
 You have many factual things that have to be considered in relation to the origin of life

01:21:31.000 --> 01:21:43.000
 It basically looks increasingly as if not only petroleum but simple organisms are being generated volcanically

01:21:43.000 --> 01:21:47.000
 and emitted into the depths of the earth

01:21:47.000 --> 01:21:59.000
 That interfaces interestingly with the bion experiments of Dr. Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s

01:21:59.000 --> 01:22:06.000
 where he claimed to have found an intermediate type of life form

01:22:06.000 --> 01:22:10.000
 that was intermediate between matter and biological life forms

01:22:10.000 --> 01:22:12.000
 He called bionds

01:22:12.000 --> 01:22:22.000
 Sidney Fox's organisms, any high school student can produce little cells that will eat and reproduce

01:22:22.000 --> 01:22:28.000
 It just takes a few hours in the lab to make organisms

01:22:28.000 --> 01:22:34.000
 So the spontaneous generation idea is not completely bad altogether, right?

01:22:34.000 --> 01:22:39.000
 Not at all. I think volcanoes are churning out life all the time

01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:42.000
 Wow, that's amazing

01:22:42.000 --> 01:22:45.000
 Okay, well I didn't want to monopolize everything

01:22:45.000 --> 01:22:48.000
 You've done very well and I went for a long walk

01:22:48.000 --> 01:22:52.000
 You guys have taken care of yourselves

01:22:52.000 --> 01:22:54.000
 Okay, well I'm going to hang up now

01:22:54.000 --> 01:22:56.000
 Let somebody else have an opportunity

01:22:56.000 --> 01:22:58.000
 Thank you very much for calling

01:22:58.000 --> 01:23:00.000
 Thank you

01:23:00.000 --> 01:23:02.000
 So did you get to say everything you needed to say?

01:23:02.000 --> 01:23:11.000
 Yeah, briefly I think I touched everything that has to be thought about in connection with the origin of life

01:23:11.000 --> 01:23:14.000
 That was extremely interesting

01:23:14.000 --> 01:23:18.000
 I might mention the work of Lancelot Law White

01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:24.000
 who wrote books on sort of the philosophy of physics and biology

01:23:24.000 --> 01:23:29.000
 He was, I think, an important thinker along those lines

01:23:29.000 --> 01:23:38.000
 Talking about the formative principle as something that has been overlooked by the conventional science community

01:23:38.000 --> 01:23:40.000
 Are his books available?

01:23:40.000 --> 01:23:42.000
 Oh, they're in good libraries

01:23:42.000 --> 01:23:46.000
 They haven't been in print for 40 years, I guess

01:23:46.000 --> 01:23:49.000
 Okay, his name is Lancelot Law White?

01:23:49.000 --> 01:23:51.000
 Yeah, W-H-Y-T-E

01:23:51.000 --> 01:23:54.000
 Okay, a Y-T-E

01:23:54.000 --> 01:23:59.000
 Well, that was really fascinating and I want to thank you for coming on again

01:23:59.000 --> 01:24:01.000
 Okay

01:24:01.000 --> 01:24:03.000
 Alright, well we're going to have to leave it there

01:24:03.000 --> 01:24:11.000
 That was Dr. Raymond Peat circa 2001 on WGDR in Plainfield, Vermont

01:24:11.000 --> 01:24:14.000
 You are now listening to WMRW LP Warren

01:24:14.000 --> 01:24:17.000
 and you're listening to the show Politics and Science

01:24:17.000 --> 01:24:19.000
 I've been your host, John Barkhausen

01:24:19.000 --> 01:24:24.000
 and this will be posted on the website

01:24:24.000 --> 01:24:26.000
 radionumeralforeall.net

01:24:26.000 --> 01:24:30.000
 radio, the number 4, and then all.net

01:24:30.000 --> 01:24:34.000
 and when you get there, search for Politics and Science

01:24:34.000 --> 01:24:40.000
 Raymond Peat has a PhD in biology and has specialized in physiology and endocrinology

01:24:40.000 --> 01:24:43.000
 and he has a website, rayPeat.com

01:24:43.000 --> 01:24:46.000
 R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com

01:24:46.000 --> 01:24:51.000
 where you'll find many, many extremely interesting articles

01:24:51.000 --> 01:24:55.000
 fully referenced that will keep you busy for months to come

01:24:55.000 --> 01:24:57.000
 Thanks for listening to Politics and Science

01:24:57.000 --> 01:25:00.000
 and tune in again next week for another edition