The Religion, the Science, and the Atheism: Fasting

The Religion:

The Bible presents fasting as something that is good, profitable, and beneficial. The book of Acts records believers fasting before they made important decisions (Acts 13:2; 14:23). Fasting and prayer are often linked together (Luke 2:37; 5:33).  gotquestions.org

Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, and kindles the true light of chastity. Enter again into yourself.  St Augustine

Easter (www.photoloi.com)

O you who believe fasting is decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, that you may attain salvation. Specific days (are designated for fasting); if one is ill or traveling, an equal number of other days may be substituted. Those who can fast, but with great difficulty, may substitute feeding one poor person for each day of breaking the fast. If one volunteers (more righteous works), it is better. But fasting is the best for you, if you only knew. Quran 2:183-185

 

 

www.photoloi.com

In Buddhism, fasting is recognized as one of the methods for practising self-control. The Buddha advised monks not to take solid food after noon. Lay people who observe the eight Precepts on full moon days also abstain from taking any solid food after noon.  Critics sometimes regard these practices as religious fads. Budsas.org

For one who is fasting, the sense-objects disappear, Leaving the yearning behind. Bhagavad Gita 2:59

www.photoloi.com

The Science:

Fasting for regular periods could help protect the brain against degenerative illnesses, according to US scientists.

Researchers at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore said they had found evidence which shows that periods of stopping virtually all food intake for one or two days a week could protect the brain against some of the worst effects of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other ailments.

A vertical slice through the brain of a patient with Alzheimer's, left, compared with a normal brain, right. Photograph: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library

“It is likely to be better to go on intermittent bouts of fasting, in which you eat hardly anything at all, and then have periods when you eat as much as you want,” said Professor Mark Mattson, head of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences, and professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

He and his colleagues have also worked out a specific mechanism by which the growth of neurones in the brain could be affected by reduced energy intakes. Amounts of two cellular messaging chemicals are boosted when calorie intake is sharply reduced, said Mattson. These chemical messengers play an important role in boosting the growth of neurones in the brain, a process that would counteract the impact of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“The cells of the brain are put under mild stress that is analogous to the effects of exercise on muscle cells,” said Mattson. “The overall effect is beneficial.”

This model has been worked out using studies of fasting on humans and the resulting impact on their general health – even sufferers from asthma have shown benefits, said Mattson – and from experiments on the impact on the brains of animals affected by the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Mattson said that a person could optimise his or her brain function by subjecting themselves to bouts of “intermittent energy restriction”. In other words, they could cut their food intake to a bare minimum for two days a week, while indulging for the other five.  Robin McKie, Science Editor: guardian.co.uk

 ..and the Atheism:

Richard Dawkins: “It is clear that faith is a spent force in the UK, and it is time our policymakers woke up to that reality and stopped trying to impose beliefs that society itself has largely rejected.”

..oh boy, has it ever!

The Scientific American Dollar

I think I have to stop reading Scientific American!

Each month I’m lured in by heroic quantum advancements or dramatic new insights into the brain but more often than not, as with the February 2012 issue, I leave with a profound feeling of despair.  It’s a little like a Nicholas Cage movie.

There is an undeniable fascination surrounding all enquiries detailed within the magazine, and some heartening surprises, for example about the role of the placenta in brain formation – an idea so new there is not even a name for it yet.  On the other hand the admission that tracing the complicated feedback loops governing dust on the ecosystem is, so far, a losing battle, and that we have only tenuous ideas about saving the world’s supply of chocolate, and are still mystified about understanding diabetes and despair at ever getting rid of bedbugs or even how to fix the NIH’s apparently built-in bias against non-mainstream research, all point to the idea that nobody seems to have a clue what’s going on.

After reading about the reluctance of some doctors to admit that kicking the head repeatedly can cause brain damage, or that pointless (though highly profitable) medical interventions should be avoided not just for doctors in the know about their toxicity and appalling success rate but for us peasants in the street, and then have it all topped off with an infantile stab at religious genius using an argument as sharp as a ping pong ball, I start to ask: is there any hope?

NFL Brain Dollars

One of the most interesting of the many articles dealt with repeated concussions in NFL players creating symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease.  This disease up to now has no known cause, and no cure.

The mystery centres on the known fact that the NFL cases all do have a clearly understandable cause: repeated blows to the skull.  The confusion has become so great that someone made the puzzling suggestion that even Lou Gehrig may not, in fact, have had Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Needless to say, medical specialists are used to dismally slow progress and could reasonably expect a long drawn-out dispute unlikely to affect their status for the forseeable future.  So they are understandably up in arms as the rapid pace of progress  by keen-sighted individuals analysing the destroyed brains of deceased NFL stars, and the mounting pile of alarming evidence, is forcing things to a head faster than they or the NFL would like.

Image: www.elderkind.com

Unlike that of many brain conditions involving complex dances of neurotransmitters, the disastrous progress of the NFL cases is easy to understand.  The one hundred billion neurons encased behind several layers of protective devices are the main functioning agents within our brain.  They communicate with each other via axons, effectively cables extending in a myriad number of directions from every neuron towards possibly hundreds of others.  These cables have structural supports presumably to give them predictable curve parameters and torsional rigidity.

Whole-brain density map of TDP-43 distribution throughout central nervous system of ALS patients. Red, orange, and yellow depict areas of highest density of TDP-43 pathology. (esciencenews.com) The widespread distribution of TDP-43 suggests that it is used in many areas besides motor function, leading to questions about the nature of Lou Gehrig's disease.

These internal wires are formed by highly structured tubules, each held together by rows of tau molecules, which hold all the endlessly repeating spiral walls  in place, stopping the tubule itself from unravelling.  When the brain is given a good bashing, enough to cause concussion, dizziness or flashing lights, the internal tubules are stretched along with the neurons, and disintegrate in the process.  These tau molecules are let loose, and tangle up with each other like once-useful staples becoming a hazard after a document is shredded.  Thus, a high state of order is reduced to chaos, and the results are pretty bad for the neuron.

It’s all highly organised in its construction, but then it has to be: it’s hugely complicated.  Smashing it repeatedly with heavy objects was always going to be a bad idea.  Whoa, hey, not so fast buddy, say some scientists.  Where’s your proof, and control groups? 

It will not surprise any thinking person that the introduction of more protective helmets, especially in the junior leagues, only made things worse: players felt immune to damage, overriding even further the natural instinct to protect the head at all costs, and creating worse injuries than before.  I wondered why nobody thought to stop smashing the skull?  A quick look at decreasing NFL revenue sufficed to make this clearer.

Only a true SuperBowl fan will feel the adrenaline rush when he gets to know that an autographed, limited-edition Superbowl XL MVP Helmet is up for sale. It is autographed by 35 "legends of the game." A protective casing is included to keep the fidgety hands away. What a shame they didn't feel as protective towards the human brain itself

But returning to the freshly hammered brain we find, typical of self-inflicted problems, things get even worse.  Along with the neuron stretching chaos, TDP-43 proteins get jolted out of the nucleus (where they are thought to regulate gene function) and into the cytoplasm of the neuron, where they behave more like a spanner in the gearbox: the brain is now in serious trouble.

And thus we see how the priceless neurons  (carefully arranged, fed and maintained by the placenta while protected in the womb, delicately supported by the placenta during birth, protected by the cerebro-spinal fluid shock absorber, surrounded by a tough, sealed leather jacket, and again by layer after layer of protective membranes, housed inside a tough, intricately sealed skull, dome shaped for extra protection, fed by an automated, uninterruptable blood supply via fault-tolerant pressure sensitive devices, and finally covered with a matting of woolly hair for protection from heat, cold and bumps) ..are kicked to the kerb for our amusement.

The aggregate group into which both ALS and Lou Gehrig’s are included is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.   Lou Gehrig specialists, of course, object to their expertise being revealed as flawed, but some seem to be objecting for other reasons.

The pioneering work in studying and revealing the mechanisms behind ALS and possibly Lou Gehrig’s disease is being carried out by Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at Boston University.  It is heartening that individuals devote their energies to this kind of research.  But how dismaying to find that the NFL – bolstered either by paid-for or ignorant scientists (much the same way that cigarette companies had their own cancer-denial experts in their pockets as far back as 1950, a time at which overwhelming evidence already existed to link smoking with cancer) has denied that repeated blows to the skull can cause this kind of disorder.  “It’s all coincidence,” they say.

Some scientists still doubt or deny that former NFL players are suffering severe depression, memory loss, erratic or aggressive behaviour and early dementia because of repeated blows to the head.

..Scientific American, Feb 2012, [p 59]

We tested it to be sure

The real reason for this tepid “scientific doubt” is probably pressure from the NFL, which must have a large budget to cover such things.  The $8,000,000,000 revenue per year it still generates is evidence of the temptation to pay off a few dodgy scientists, and recent trends explain the desperate measures required to keep permanent decline as far away as possible:

Cancer Dollars

Other disappointing news includes a review of the prostate cancer tests which have caused tens of thousands of men to undergo painful and crippling procedures to avert cancer spread that very likely would never actually have happened.

The case is given of a “Mr H”, a client of Marc Garnick, the article’s writer, who refused advice for prostate surgery every year for sixteen years, because he took the time to read the research and concluded that his chances were terrible after the science had been applied, but pretty good if he just did nothing.

Without a trace of irony, Garnick relates how every year he advised this otherwise healthy man to endure rectal bleeding, impotence and incontinence as science waved its magic wand – and how every year this mentally sturdy individual refused.  He is still healthy, and his tumour remains confined to his prostate gland: as Garnick himself admits: he made a reasoned decision and avoided trading almost certain harms for uncertain benefits.

In the sharpest minds of all, why this strange blind spot covering damaging surgery?  Probably because private practices take a cut of the action.  In fact, in response to changes in payments by Medicare, one industry observer noted:

Health Affairs  just published an evaluation of the results of Medicare’s change in payment methods on the web.  The article was briefly mentioned in the New York Times June 26, 2010.  The researchers reviewed Medicare claims data for over 200,000 patients with the diagnosis of lung cancer.

The results are stunning.  In the context of these payment cuts, physicians prescribed chemotherapy to more patients (18.9% got treatment within a month of diagnosis, compared to 16.5% before the payment changes and dramatically increased the use of one medicine, docetaxel, where price decreased by just 8% and where a high price means that the 6% margin represented a larger profit for the oncologist.

..when physicians face a fee cut that will have a large impact on their income, they increase use.  On the other hand, when there is a fee decrease that impacts merely a small share of physician income, the affected services [still] have lower use.

So who makes amends for the needless surgeries and side effects of what were largely useless practices?  Where are the solid ethics promised in secular humanist manifestos, and the legal remedies for when it all goes wrong?  We were scientists, we meant well.  And we made lots of loot, too!  Aw, well that’s alright then!

Many private practice oncologists have made a substantial portion of their income from the “markup” on chemotherapy they administer in their offices.  The GAO calculated that oncologists were paid six times the acquisition cost for the chemotherapy agent Paclitaxel in 2004.

(managinghealthcarecosts.blogspot.com )

The bottom line is ignorance.  The public, as Garnick admits, never realised the flimsy nature of the evidence for screening or the damage done by these expensive treatments.  They soon found out, as it was lying in wait for them.

Other surgeons openly admit that medical staff often insist on “No Code” (one medic even had it tattooed on her chest) to prevent their resus via CPR, because they know that CPR, done correctly, splinters ribs and causes horrific problems for the patient to deal with when they finally come around.  Their feeling about chemo – a product freely handed out left and right to the public – is even worse.

I have known three people go through chemo and they all have one thing in common: they died very quickly and in misery.  Not a big test group, but big enough to convince me.  Be that as it may, Ken Murray, professor of family medicine at the University of Southern California last month published an essay in the online Zocalo Public Square arguing that most practising doctors would not put themselves through ‘life-saving’ interventions that are big on promises and small on success, because they involve great pain and distress.

No Code: Medical staff usually hope they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Fair enough, smart thinking.  But how odd doctors don’t tell this to their patients.  Instead, they encourage them to take the treatments.   On February 14th, Martin Scurr, a GP for the Daily Mail, wrote:

With pancreatic cancer, for example, which is often diagnosed late, the average length of time between diagnosis and death is usually less than six months.

If I had the disease, I would not attempt any of the treatments for it, such as chemotherapy, because it can be gruelling and misery-making, and the success rate is extremely low. I would rather have painkilling palliative care, which can do great things in helping to make you feel comfortable while you are dying.

I can think of only one doctor among all my medical acquaintances who has had cancer and fought it with medicine all the way to their death.

Medics’ scepticism about the worth of their own ‘lifesaving’ interventions has long been suspected. In one poll, around half of German specialists admitted that they would not undergo the operations they recommended to their patients.

Dr Eckart Fiedler, of the German health insurance company Barmer Ersatzkasse, said the 1996 survey showed that doctors felt many patients would be better off foregoing operations and instead taking their chances without the surgeon’s knife.

In similar fashion, a survey of nurses at a Massachusetts hospital found that nearly half of them would refuse treatment if they developed a serious illness at the age of 85 after having been in good health.

I smell money.

Other Gems

If anyone thinks that scientific research often just tells us the obvious, but in a much more expensive way, they need to think again!  A superb observation comes from SciAm’s probability column: “Pro basketball players are much more likely to try another shot after making one than after missing one.”  Wha – ?!  Get Olsen in here!  Olsen – hold the presses!

But the best all-round advice has to be from David Pogue, Emmy award winning CBS writer, dealing with the thorny problem of people predicting things that don’t come true and then looking stupid as a result.  The Future is For Fools contains this unmissable advice:

“So the first rule of making tech predictions is this: make predictions about things that will come to pass, not about things that won’t.” 

Let us be in no doubt as to how this man won an Emmy!  I predict he may or may not win another one!

Of course, like so much slick patter, it’s actually not even true: the future is not for fools.  On the evidence of the entire magazine we can also say the future is not for intellectuals; the future is for genius.  Genius predicts it by observing and acting on its own powerful sentiment: while “Mr H” relied on his sturdy natural instincts to preserve his quality of life against the protests of Big Pharma, it was genius – present in Logie Baird who believed in TV, Charles Babbage in computers, James Lund in citrus fruits as a cure for scurvy, Edison in electric light, or the Wright brothers in powered commercial flight – which predicted the future by creating it. 

All faced stiff criticism from the prevailing intellectuals.  Turning to the subject of mystical experience, it was no different in Jesus’ day: the intellectuals had secured an understanding of their little puddle of wisdom, were happy splashing about in it and making a good living thank you very much, and they were damn well not about to give it up and let someone else play in it.  Which is why relying on people like that to make the future is such an awful idea.

The Skeptic Tank

Which leads me to the last section, concerning spiritual genius.  Jesus’ words and high moral example transformed the backbone of western spiritual thinking; it was devout families who gave birth to the first wave of scientists, reformers and advanced thinkers to a man, working for the wellbeing of mankind; how strange then to read one of the magazine’s last articles, Michael Shermer’s Skeptic.

The skeptic  is a useful fellow.  When a restaurant charges you £60 for a piece of overcooked steak, when you’re told by the local council that something will be done soon, or that your call will be answered shortly, this is the fellow to have around, though admittedly this kind of scepticism can be generated by us laymen from experience.  Perhaps a few years waiting is enough to tell us that the council isn’t really going to do anything, or one look at energy profits shows the electricity board isn’t really going to bring prices down, or a little history assures us that the 160th UN resolution against Israel isn’t going to make any more of a difference to the world’s most criminal nation (judging only by UN resolutions against them) than the previous 159, and that the new president of the US is going to be as happy to push very expensive (and fiendishly clever) weapons onto problems crying out for peaceful solutions as the last one.  So far, so skeptical.  I like it.

Nukemap shows the effect if the Tsar Bomba was dropped on any city you choose. Up to St Albans you can forget about life afterwards, but people in the outer radius would be skinned alive with their eyeballs melted and ears welded shut, and might live to tell the tale. And what a tale to tell

But Shermer is also no fool.  He isn’t about to waste his energy on these modern problems which might invite a furious backlash from some of his own kind – involved as they might well be in devising Hellish nuclear ovens to cook entire cities alive, skinning men, women and children in the process – or in pushing deadly and useless chemo onto disposable peasants, or in denying that continually smashing the skull can harm the NFL – ah, I mean, the priceless human brain.

Not for him the potential embarrassment of a moving target.  Far better to spray noxious clumps of effluent at a static one.. perhaps something annoyingly immune to the ravages of time: let’s see, a Fabergé egg.. the Sistine ceiling.. hmm – little tricky with the curves and angles – or – wait, I know!  A spiritual genius!  Oops, hang on – is this one dead?  ..you sure?!  Ha ha!  Ok, let ‘er rip, boys!

So in this tragic piece he unloads a blast of his skeptic tank at the idea of Jesus being the son of God, citing it as classic self-deception, a condition he knows well.  In nimbly dodging the self-deceptions littering his own kind, his opening gambit refers not to the Bible, or the work of scholars painstakingly researching the original Aramaic, but to Lloyd Webber’s musical, Jesus Christ Superstar.

I like Lloyd Webber as much as anyone – in fact a good friend of mine played the Phantom in the London show for some time, and other friends sang in the Cats booth.  I have a true anecdote involving the grid over the orchestra pit and a woman unfortunately caught short in a very bad way.  On that night, Shermer’s skeptic tank would have come in very handy indeed.

If a skeptic's marriage fails, he knows who to sue for false advice

All well and good, but there a credibility gap begins to yawn open when citing catchy lyrics as a religious argument.  One might as well burst into a cheery song from Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to those sleepless souls living under the Heathrow flightpath, to better impress them with the need for an extra two runways.

The late Christopher Hitchens cited convincing proof that Jesus actually existed by explaining why the telling of his early movements had to be shifted slightly into a cleaner geographical route.  Hitchens did this, understandably, to set up a genuine target for his criticisms, but never insinuated that Jesus’ words were all made up.  From his words alone there is no doubt that Jesus was a genius; whoever wrote the Lord’s prayer or the Sermon on the Mount was an exceptional man, a conclusion which time has honoured.  But until the age of 30, he was seen as a carpenter’s son, so much so that those who knew him were “much offended” that he later began to preach.

It took a brave man to try and dislodge centuries of religious thinking: his anger, hunger, thirst, tiredness and even impatience show him to be a normal human being physically, but one whose brain was gifted with immense genius, traceable to an event taking place around his 30th year.  This fits well with what we know now, that the brain and nervous system mature usually in the early 30′s, with the margin of a few years this way and that.  Buddha was said to have reached illumination around the same age, and Mohammad began receiving revelations in his late 30′s.

Detail of Michelangelo's Pieta

The idea of Jesus being the “son of God” arose from his feeling that a vast natural intelligence, detection of which is mankind’s next major evolutionary step, was of a benign and infinitely wise character best described as a father to humanity.  This created a link between God and all mankind, marking a change in perception which would soon take place among the wider mass of mankind.

The same sentiment has been forcefully expressed in a hundred different ways by writers and thinkers who also had a taste of this same experience – some only momentary, some mystified by it – the details of which, and evidence of its uniform biological nature, would need another entire post to detail.  Dr Richard Maurice Bucke, the Canadian doctor whose classic work, Cosmic Consciousness, has never been out of print for the past one hundred years, had a momentary flash of the experience which permanently changed his view of the world.  Other witnesses to the reality of this experience were William Blake, Robert Browning, Edward Carpenter, Francis Bacon, Walt Whitman, Dante, Mohammad, Nuddha, St Paul, John Yepes, Jacob Behmen, and Honoré doe Balzac, and in the last century we also have the late Gopi Krishna.

Lesser or imperfect cases included Wordsworth, Thoreau, Pushkin, Tennyson, Pascal, Socrates, Spinoza, Gardiner, Ramakrishna, Jefferies, Lloyd, Traubel, Tyner and Swedenborg.  The evidence of mystical experience is so overwhelming, and so bolstered by modern research on the brain and nervous system that had Shermer only poked his nose a few yards into the local library, he would have come across writings dealing with it by names he would have known since his schooldays.  Of all this mystical experience, Jesus’ seems to be the strongest and most complete, and the most productive, of which there is recorded evidence.  It only seemed to desert him while on the cross, a time when his nervous system would have been under huge strain to maintain life in his body.  The constant nature of his experience until then is supported by his bewildered question:

“Eli, Eli, lambach sabathani?” or “My God, my God, why hast thou deserted me?”

Ok, perhaps this is specialist stuff and we know from the NIH that science deals exclusively with the mainstream.  Fair enough.  But even allowing for such a massive hole in his knowledge about a subject he chose to pillory while puffing his feathers and touting his latest book, Shermer would have been much better off quoting the Lord’s Prayer – a remarkable spiritual document surviving more than two thousand tumultuous years – which begins with the intentionally humbling, and uniting:

“Our Father..”

His impending rejoinder would probably be that with all the translations, how could anyone be sure what Jesus was really supposed to have said?  If that were the case, Shermer’s grounds for criticising anything to do with Jesus would be thrown out of any court for lack of proof one way or the other.  But as to mistranslations distorting Jesus’ meaning, let’s let Shermer himself be the judge:

Aramaic Bible in Plain English (©2010)
I have said, “You are gods; you are all children of The Highest!”

GOD’S WORD® Translation(©1995)
I said, “You are gods. You are all sons of the Most High.

New International Version(©1984)
“I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’

New Living Translation(©2007)
I say, ‘You are gods; you are all children of the Most High.’

English Standard Version(©2001)
I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;”

New American Standard Bible(©1995)
I said, “You are gods, And all of you are sons of the Most High.”

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

King James 2000 Bible (©2003)
I have said, You are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

American King James Version
I have said, You are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

American Standard Version
I said, Ye are gods, And all of you sons of the Most High.

Douay-Rheims Bible
I have said: You are gods and all of you the sons of the most High.

English Revised Version
I said, Ye are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.

Webster’s Bible Translation
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High.

World English Bible
I said, “You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High.”

Young’s Literal Translation
I have said, ‘Gods ye are, And sons of the Most High — all of you..’

John 10:34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’?

You get the picture.  But so could Mr Shermer have done, since clearly Jesus – considered no more than an ordinary workman until his experience of cosmic consciousness around the age of 30, and under no illusions about his origins (as he had at least seven brothers and sisters, and lived a perfectly normal life for three decades among them) considered himself on the same level as all human beings, and this is why Our Father is stated first in his prayer, and one reason Christianity represented such a reformation of spiritual thought.

Whether we talk about maths, physics, chemistry, genetics, farming, astronomy, electronics, manufacturing, mining, teaching, warfare, politics, racing, plumbing, dining, art, music, literature, language, medicine, printing, geography, meteorology, athletics, architecture, dancing, psychology or even shoes and fashion – each field has had its toilers, thinkers and geniuses, along with their critics, and were accepted or rejected by the human mind over time.  Spirituality, a beloved concept of so many people – including, it has to be said, the most creative lights society has ever known – had its evolutions and its own geniuses, and Jesus was without doubt one of them.

This simple idea of God as loving father was expressed through the evolving brain of genius, and ushered in a reformation of the concept of divinity into a benign source of love and wisdom – one which was not the property of a few, something various religious authorities have tried to claim.  The Lord’s Prayer is still used today in times of crisis, to bolster the spirit in discouraging circumstances.  When an innocent person, kidnapped, tortured and incarcerated in one of America’s black prisons recites to themselves a chapter of The Believing Brain to keep their spirits up and convince themselves that such prisons only exist in the minds of crazed conspirators, then Shermer should enter the discussion of spiritual texts with pride.

Until then, he could make a handsome career pointing out the self-deceit of the psychopaths alive today and badly in need of a morally sound, fearless global voice to shame them and shout them down.  To waste such a pulpit by turning it to vandalism seems like getting up on stage in front of 250,000 open minds and instead of inspiring them with action and courage, preening oneself in a mirror, or blowing raspberries.   This evasion is what I find so reprehensible about skeptics who snigger at what they have no ability to understand, like a mischievous schoolboy with a peashooter at the ballet, but fail to utter a murmur of protest at the creation of obscene nuclear weapons or the starvation of a billion kindred spirits on our own planet.

Shermer’s other arguments are not worth repeating in detail: when you’ve seen one poorly drawn circle, you’ve pretty well seen them all.  But they hinge on the idea that since phoney morality is easily exposed in small social groups, it must therefore have transformed itself into genuine morality.  It’s hard to know where to start criticising this.  Firstly, morality has been shown to arise from mirror neurons, and these have been proven in the lab as being active in rats and monkeys, and by observation in other life forms.  Dolphins, for example, have been known to rescue lost swimmers, to guide them to the shore or protect them from sharks, and even to detect the differences present in pregnant women, according them more gentler treatment.  Clearly sensitivity is part of altruism, and insensitivity part of its opposite.

All of which shows that altruism relies on natural mechanisms which must – like all other bodily systems -  rely on biological principles, and which were undoubtedly present in early man.  Studies of oxytocin, a supremely beneficial molecule produced in floods by generosity and gratitude, point to even more complex natural mechanisms relying solely on altruism, which are enshrined in all mankind’s ancient scriptures.  As I pointed out in Of Phrenologists, Planets, Big Pharma, and Phoneys, it may have even been the suppression of cholesterol by Pfizer’s much-touted Torcetrapib – an experiment in which a number of patients were killed – which caused system failure because along with one form of cholestoerol, a binding protein on which oxytocin relies was also wiped out.

Hurry up, Mr Shermer! SciAm wants to go to press this afternoon!

So his inexplicable confounding of fake morality – a product of a brain wired for crooked, manipulative greed – with the biological parent to genuine altrusim beggars belief.  This might be the single most important factor in human society, outweighing intelligence by a long way.  So to blithely say that one state magically turns into its complete opposite for no other reason than being an expediency to succeed in cheating is like claiming a complete blockhead morphs into an Einstein without any need for their brain to follow any genetically law-bound, biological progression, if they will simply pretend to be a genius, perhaps by mussing up their hair, affecting a german accent and writing illegibly in all directions with chalk.

The last time I felt this offended was on reading a Scientific American Mind supplement in which the writer suggested mental illness must assist the genius – presumably in the same way that broken legs are a boon to skiers, and shredded tendons the single best way forward for Olympic weightlifters.

Shermer observes that truth requires considerably less energy than lying.  This is not treated as particularly noteworthy, and only mentioned to support his idea that conning people is damn tough.   And he should know.  In fact it shows the brain is geared towards truth.  Why?  He doesn’t tell us.   Shouldn’t it actually be easier to tell a lie than to tell the truth, and run the risk of self-incrimination, rejection and other inescapable penalties?  And yet without this quality, all the edifices of knowledge and research, of education, discussion and philosophy, and of religion and science, of law and order, and even of justice, along with the predictability and all reliance on humanity, would crumble into dust.  But I notice they haven’t.

The very institutions which Shermer lumps in with charlatans and frauds – blatantly obvious hucksters like Sai Baba and Solomae Sanandae – have survived for thousands of years.  He may as well confuse the Teletubbies with the Beatles, seeing as the counts of both groups seem to number four members.  How exactly is such long-term survival possible, when brains are naturally configured, as Shermer himself admits, towards truth?

In his critique of prophetic dreams, Shermer's opening salvo relied on impeccable lyrics

In fact, traces of spirituality exist from as long go as two hundred thousand years and can easily be extrapolated the same distance again before that; they are cited not as delinquent aberrations but evidence of cultural sophistication by no less than James Watson in his study of the investigation into Neandertal DNA.  The fact that a separate species apparently independently formulated its own spiritual rites further bolsters the case for spirituality’s presence in the normal brain, and further discredits Shermer’s rantings.

Despite the magazine itself showing there are plenty of directions for the skeptic to investigate in their own world of medical profiteering or NFL paid-for scientists, or, looking out the window, with big business, psychopathic presidents and other maniacs, Shermer focuses on mystical experience, something he knows full well he is hopelessly unqualified to write about. His article illustrates only one single thing about truth – the inability to distinguish it from fraud, or to tell a lunatic from a saint, easily passes for wisdom even in a reputable researcher’s magazine.  Perhaps it is not surprising, with one’s head firmly in a steaming, well-insulated skeptic tank.   And yes, he does have some dismal new book to push.

In the once-respected Scientific American, I find this the most depressing fact of all.

Hmm.. what on Earth is that smell?

Evolution – Past and Future

It’s often said that a developing foetus passes through all the stages of evolution from a single celled organism to the current human model, and at one point apparently even displaying a tail.

The time required for cell division is 20 hours for the first two days, and in subsequent divisions, curiously extends to 31 hours (M. Herbert & colleagues, Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, 1995: 103, pg 209-214) perhaps because of the extra processing required to generate  specialisation instructions. 

Researchers found that after certain number of cycles the number of cells never correlated to the number expected, presumably because not all cells duplicate during all division cycles, or some duplicate at a much slower speed, or perhaps need to wait until other cells have divided before receiving the instruction to divide further.  From what I could gather, it was unclear if the variation in duplication time was a result of the laboratory conditions or not.

Finally, there is wide variation in the number of cells of embryos of equivalent chronological ages and stages of development; our results demonstrate that this was due in part to a significant difference (P = 0.02) in the replication rate of embryos from different subjects.

It should also be remembered that up to three of the fastest growing embryos from each cohort had been selected for embryo transfer. These points illustrate the difficulties encountered in the study of human embryogenesis. Much larger studies are needed to overcome such difficulties if significant results are to be produced.

But if the duplication speed remains at about 30 hours, no cell in the finished product, the newborn baby, could be older than 224 cell divisions, more or less, which indicates a fantastic direction of branching and timing, all of which must be encoded somehow within a single, original cell.  Interestingly there are also about 210 different kinds of cell in the human body, so if we allow for a little error either way in both these measurements we could arrive at a very similar figure for each.

If a newborn baby has five trillion cells, then by purely doubling cells every 30 hours at maximum speed this number could be achieved in 42 divisions, or about 7.5 weeks.  Even if we reduce the percent of cells constantly dividing to a more reasonable 50% (instead of 100%) at each level, it still works out at about 72 stages of duplication, or less than 13 weeks.

Clearly, then, the overwhelming majority of nine months is not spent in comparatively routine, automated duplication but in more complicated knoweldge-based processes, such as monitoring and error checking, perhaps testing various organs and priming them for activity with the required enzymes and proteins before handing off development to the next stage.  This implies a specific store of rules and knowledge far greater than that currently possessed by all of mankind’s specialists combined, is maintained somewhere and referred to continually to detail the assembly of each specialised part and measure its function against set targets.  Otherwise, the odds are against a single pregnancy ending up with anything remotely resembling a living, fully functioning human being.

But this is a very important point suggesting that the creation of a baby is not due to duplication mechanisms – amazing as they are – but to intelligence of some sort, to an information and reference system somewhere.  After all, it is mechanically possible to build a human being within only two or three months, and evolution in an exposed habitat would surely favour the quickest possible pregnancy: a dog’s gestation is around 9 weeks – about four times quicker than ours -  while a dolphin’s is around 52 weeks, a third longer.

Nelson twins: 672 billion perfect duplications

Aside from all the supporting equipment – nucleus, proteins, ribosomes, etc, each cell division requires the copying of more than 3 billion DNA pairs, so that an accurate and continual reproduction of this database takes place at around 280 base pairs every one-hundredth of a second, or the more impressive sounding 28,000 every second.

If we take into account the coiling time required for the new DNA and all the processes involved with the separation of the actual cell into two (where, in at least 210 stages, the new one must vary significantly from the original, since there are at least 210 different kinds of cells) the DNA duplication time is going to be very much faster than this since it is only one stage in the process.  Nevertheless, some cells present in the newborn infant may have been the result of this staggering rate of base pair copying -280 per second- carried out continuously for a period of more than 24 million seconds.

The total number of DNA base pairs duplicated to achieve the construction of the last few cells would, by that time, be 672 billion: as such, the foetal development does indeed seem a fair analogy to evolution, bu especially so in its overlooked aspects of synchronised timing and complexity.  Even twins raised completely separately emerge in much the same condition, showing that internal preferences remain very smiliar, even those presumed to be a random affair.

Identical twins Andrea Freire and Marielisa Romo, separated at birth, found out about each other during a chance meeting in the southern Ecuadorean town of Milagros 15 years later. Their biological parents accuse two doctors of taking one of the twins after delivery (flatrock.org.nz)

The finished product, as can be observed in twins, proves the fidelity to the original design.  But that quality after all seems the most prominent feature of all biological life and suggests that it arises not from mechanical duplications which are generally understood but from complex laws and sources of data which are not yet known.  There can be no suggestion that the process tends to take random turns at any point: if this were so, identical twins could never be identical, and nor could a species remain constant for hundreds of millions of years – an observed fact.  Where functional changes are observed over time, this can only be a result of a very consistent process, fully accounted for somewhere within a database governing duplication and cell specialisation directives.

The whole idea of random mutations hinges on the persistent and rapid appearance of significant errors, but within each of us we have a completed experiment in which given the same starting point, the end result must be identical. After all, nobody is saying that identical twins have a completely different process of birth than anyone else: they simply share the same starting point.

Curiously, if foetal development does show evolution from a single cell to a human being, it also shows the entire process can take place, given the right starting point, within a nine month period. The process then does not seem to rely on vast stretches of time as much as it does on the need for specific information contained within that starting point.

Early painting by Tom Thomson, near the start of his painting career: The Canoe (1912)

Be that as it may, if the genius represents the future state of man’s thought in any given direction, he also displays future evolution, from the starting point of the present.  In other words, since genius represents a mental development, by observing the genius in his lifetime, we can see what changes are likely to take place in mankind as a whole, over considerably longer periods of time.  If we find a consistency in the mental development of the genius, it points to the existence of even more subtle laws involved in “mental biology” which have not even been suspected so far, let alone looked for.

Small sketch (1916, towards the end of his career) which over that winter became The Jack Pine, completed in 1917: probably Canada's most famous painting. Thomson used only three or four colours while sketching; the orange brown around the branches is actually the underlying wood surface (also visible around the upper right edges) which he incorporated into the final image

I want to focus on the artistic genius, as there are indeed some trends common to practically all of them.  The process I am interested in is one in which the initial urge to duplicate reality as seen by human eyes and to present this image to others (representing a kind of scientific process liable to minor stylistic touches) is eventually completely supplanted by the urge to present a vision created by the inner eye – an image not as true to facts as to impressions made by them directly on the personality.  These later images are made with all the force of accrued talent but are more importantly evidence of an emotional maturity and insights gained into the nature of life’s impact upon the mind.

Because this harvest arises from commitment and self-belief, it never occurs within the mind of the cautious amateur who, while perfecting his skill, never reaches the emotional depth or the adventurous conclusions of the committed artist.  He remains at the foot of the mountain and speculates on the nature of the peak, whereas the real atrist jouneys to the top and presents his new vision directly from the summit.  It seems one either invests the entire brain in the effort, or not at all.

The Jack Pine on a shopfront in Unionville (Toronto) shows the respect accorded by a nation not to an image of a tree, but to the concept for which the image stands: namely the ability of an independent mind to subdue even a vast and wild environment by imposing itself upon it

There are two remarkable aspects about this process, despite being one which could easily be mistaken for self-indulgence: one is that it happens at all, when a logical conclusion to a search for representation should be an ever-greater fidelity to reality seen with common eyes, and the other, is that these new ideas are much more appealing to the mass of mankind, and fully account for the genius’ eventual fame.  So much so that their earlier efforts become completely eclipsed and seldom referred to.  It is as if genius – while beginning with a solid grounding in scientific reality and technique – is not as concerned with the realm of facts as it is with a transcendent vision which communicates itself to a similar sense, necessarily less developed but still seeking expansion, within the viewer.

Number 8, 1949 (detail) ; Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas. Neuberger Museum, State University of New York (Jackson Pollock)

Self indulgence could never be a sufficient explanation since as the artist progresses he can only gain in skill and experience, and as his fame grows, he is obliged to communicate with an ever wider audience, and exposure to much greater criticism from those who are now only aware of him through his more transcendent works.   Such a deep appeal cannot be a result of accurate depiction of reality and later enlarged by greater stylisation, since the latter completely contradicts the aims of the former, and the former in any case only ever attracts a very modest audience compared to the latter.  Why should this be the case?

Concentration is the most important element, which indicates artistic skill is linked to amplification of structures in the brain.  Jackson Pollock, for example, took his inspiration from Indian trance states involved in sand paintings when he began his abstract works: he emulated not just their direct interaction with elements of the painting but the intense concentration.  He was susceptible to alcohol abuse, and later in his career despite having vast experience and motor-skill know-how, as well as confidence and inside knowledge about what appealed the most,  was unable to generate the same levels of concentration, and found the resulting decline of his popularity hard to cope with.

Gauguin’s progress from stockbroker and sunday painter to the creator of Polynesian myth is well known.  Here is one of his early works, from the 1870s, showing small variations in colour still subservient to the concept of expressing the same reality as seen by others:

And below, a much later work, The Moon and The Earth, from a time in the 1890s in which he was by now representing aspects of emotion using colour – an unheard of development up to that point – and elements of mysticism as represented though portrayals of Polynesian life.  His book, Noah Noah, deals not with painting technique but ideas of the soul and mysticism, further showing the journey he had travelled mentally since abandoning his stockbroker life.

Gauguin was, by all accounts, a highly flawed personality, creating and nurturing conflicts, with an overweening ego, and prone to make up stories left and right either to support the marketing of his artistic vision or justify his abandonment of his family, including his endlessly supportive wife and doting daughter.  Had he remained a stockbroker, even his own descendants would now be hard put to recall a single detail of his life; instead, purely through his artistic talent and mystical interpretation of human life, he remains a household name.  Like the legendary white lotus which blooms to absolute purity even in stagnant water, his genius co-existed with the dusty arena he created, and most represents the saving grace of the creative forces in this world which sometimes touch the personality.

A recent exhibition of his work, Maker of Myth at the Tate was a massive success.  On my second visit I decided to be first in line, which called for a very early start, but which enabled me to see Manao Tupapao up close, and all to myself for a full thirty seconds, helping me greatly in a portrait I was attempting at the time: it was well worth it.

How do we explain that the addition of some coloured pastes onto a grubby sackcloth canvas by a certain personality can creates a work of art which draws excited crowds a century after his death?

van Gogh, The Ox-Cart (1884)

Even the work of Vermeer, a highly realistic painter, contains a subtle element of emotional colouring which his peers were unable to generate, and which I tried to give an example of in The Buddhist Amygdala.

Van Gogh in the space of ten years learned the fundamentals of drawing and perspective, with the aim to highlight the plight of the peasant, but ended up communicating the twists and turns of his own psyche, projected upon the landscape: the human mind was once again writ large, so that the impression of a single mind dwarfed whatever vast landscape came under its relentless gaze, hinting at the possibility of encompassing even the whole universe.

It seems to me this growing certainty, this triumphant conquest of the physical world is the lesson of the genius, and by extension, perhaps of evolution itself.  It would surely have to be this way from the start: materialism is a dead end simply because material itself, at a certain point, loses its nature and yields its being to a mysterious energy.  The energy behind the mind must be linked to this deeper well; if not, a state would be reached where matter would lose everything it had presented as real up to that point, and life lose its meaning.  Instead, we find artists becoming more excited as they progress: clearly in the realm of the mind, assuming certain aspects of biological health, no end is in sight.

Van Gogh, Reaper (1889)

Picasso’s Rocks and Quarries, carried out at the age of 16, shows his eagerness to break reality up into separate parts; I stood in front of this picture for half an hour in Barcelona and still the wonder grew.  In fact I moved on very reluctantly.  What looks simple in this small photo (no larger reproductions seem to have ever been made) is actually comprised of layers – a ground colour on which stabs of light, in which the brush tracks are visible, have been made to carry the movement of light over the  form of the land.  It is visible as both painting and reality: it is worth the trip alone just to experience this alchemy.  But get to the museum early!

Castle of San Servando, Toledo; Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 1906

This idea to break solid elements into its component parts, along with the technical ability to express it, was dormant cubism; other artists of the time, for example Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (above) certainly compared to or excelled Picasso in their observation of light and form.  But Picasso’s much larger fame came not through his technique alone, but his radical re-interpretation of reality.

Picasso: Quarries (1896)

A certain depth of thinking is mandatory in a painter if he is not to be replaced by a camera, and it is this increased depth throughout his career that leads not to an ever more microscopic examination of facts, but to concepts created by his own mind,  showing him to be no self-indulgent fool – as Picasso said, a painter is acutely aware of society’s state, and is even more attuned to it than is the average person.

This final quote, by Sorolla, demonstrates firstly the acute perception typical of the adventurous genius; secondly, the unavoidable conclusion that it is the mind which attains supremacy over mundane matter – a feature even observable within the foetus’ development in the womb; and lastly, related to yet another quality of mind, Sorolla’s certainty that creation calls for all the innovation and boldness genius can muster, to leave the accepted wisdom behind him:

“If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his ‘Las Meninas,’ at the Prado in Madrid. Now, I have studied this picture with a lens, and what do I find? Why, that Velazquez got that marvelous atmospheric background by one broad sweep of his flowing brush, charged with thin color so thin that you can feel the very texture of the canvas through it.”

“Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects on this same principle, but instantaneously. The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand. At such moments I am unconscious of materials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes between my perception and the object or idea perceived.”

“No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard.”

Of Phrenologists, Planets, Big Pharma, and Phoneys

Evidence of serious head injury

Sometimes I wonder if there is any hope for the scientific mind.  This evening I read in National Geographic the following article on military head injuries:

Since 2000 some 220,000 US troops have suffered traumatic brain injuries, often from exposure to explosions.  To fathom – and treat – such wounds, blast data are key.  So last year the US military and private sector partners developed and deployed devices that assess explosion severity.  In field testing, soldiers wear the watch-size dosimeter on their chests, shoulders and heads.  The gauges measure pressure and acceleration, letting medics press a button and evaluate risk in color-coded traffic light style: red for serious, yellow for moderate, green for insignificant.

I do have one question: why is such an advanced nation happy to completely wreck nigh on a quarter of a million of its young, energetic brains in a war zone?  These injuries mean long-term damage and ruined lives.

Staff Sgt. James Ownbey, a Marine who served in Iraq as an explosive ordnance disposal technician in 2007 now suffers from a traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and numerous physical ailments (Washington Post)

So never mind designing clever ways to measure the damage – for God’s sake, what about getting them the hell out of harm’s way, by STOPPING THE WAR?!

Seeing stars after an argument

A year ago I was at the coffee bar at the office, arguing about the possibility of other life in the universe.  My opponent was a scientist; he was a very likeable and intelligent chap whose company was developing a probe able to give blood diagnostic readings direct from the patient’s arm.  And his stories were always worth listening to: like the time when as a toxicologist he diagnosed a number of people taken seriously ill in a single neighborhood.  He deduced that someone had attached a pump to their own tap and injected petrol at high pressure into the neighborhood’s water system.

I assured him the universe must be teeming with life.  He scoffed that the chances of life evolving were so perilously close to zero that there would be no way for it to evolve so completely elsewhere: we were therefore alone.  The usual group had gathered and rather sided with him, as I found myself unable to mount a coherent defence apart from insisting there were far too may stars.

I had been unable to persuade anyone because I failed to bring to life an amount that was mentally unmanageable on its own.  The number of stars was just too big.  This failure was annoying, especially knowing the number of stars was so vast – somewhere between 7 times 10 to the power 21, and the power 23.  But if I couldn’t imagine such a number, how could I expect to make it clear to anyone else?

The next morning I noticed the shower was probably less than a metre square, but it still looked fairly substantial.  This gave me an idea: imagining a star as a 1mm grain of sand, a flat square metre of it would be a million grains, or 1 followed by six zeros.  A cubic metre would be 1 followed by 9 zeros – a billion grains – and a strip a kilometre long would be 10 to the power 12, and a square kilometre (one metre thick) would be 1 followed by 15 zeros – which still left at least 6 zeros and possibly 8.

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away

I knew the surface of the Earth was about 500 million square kilometres, or 5 followed by 8 zeros.  That day’s coffee break couldn’t come soon enough.  When it did, I casually asked my colleague if stars were sand, how much sand would he have?  “Oh, Iain, not this again,” he protested, but shrugged “- a bucketful.  No, no, probably a bathful.”

“Do you realise, that if stars were sand – 1mm per grain, let’s say, you would have enough sand to cover the whole parking lot, to a depth of one metre!”  He looked shocked at this.  “That’s a lot of sand – but how do you know the exact measurement of the parking lot?”

“Well, you’ll soon see.  Because you’d have enough sand left over after the parking lot, to cover all of England, to the same depth!”  The wheels were turning behind his eyes.  “And after that, you would have enough to cover the entire planet – oceans, icecaps, continents, the whole lot – and possibly the moon as well, a metre deep in sand.  Look around and imagine it.  Do you really think, with all those stars, that one ordinary, run of the mill star in the corner somewhere is the only one able to produce life?  It’s like believing God could only have one son, and then give up from exhaustion.  The universe must be teeming with life!”

He laughed and shook his head: “it’s inevitable really, isn’t it?”   And this conclusion must be intuitively obvious, since the job of a sun is to produce life.  If you want scientific proof of that, conduct an experiment of your own: look out the window.  But science wouldn’t know common sense if it ran them over with a steamroller.   So I was heartened to read this week that NASA say:

“Our galaxy is loaded with planets”

Nasa’s Kepler space telescope has found 60 planets and 11 new solar systems – all from a fist-sized patch of sky.

It’s the latest find from a two-year space scan, and brings the total to 60 confirmed planets. The new haul triples the number of multi-planet solar systems found by Kepler.

Planetary systems discovered in only one very small, randomly selected area of sky

Doug Hudgins, a Kepler scientist at Nasa says, ‘In just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets. Our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.’

‘The approach used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows the overall reliability is quite high,’ said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper on Kepler-33.

These discoveries are published in four different papers in the Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity." Shelley Memorial, University College, Oxford.

When Less is Moore

Wired magazine have an excellent article this week by Jonah Lehrer about science reaching its limit in drugs research, due to its reliance on reductionist thinking which is not only now failing to work, but proving lethal.  I’d like to print it in full, but Nate Lanxon at their PR department says I can only print an excerpt of 200 words, as long as I include a link to their article.  That seems fair enough, so I’ll have to write my own instead, but here’s the link anyway as it’s well worth reading:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/02/features/trials-and-errors

The gist of it is that the intellect seems to be reaching the end of its tether in some complex areas, provding diminishing returns much like Moore’s law of computing in reverse.   Lehrer cites as an example the development of smart drugs to interfere with the molecular processes of the body, specifically Pfizer’s 2006 drug in development, torcetrapib.  The molecule is shown below:

Torcetrapib

Torcetrapib was designed to manipulate the cholesterol production system in the body: Pfizer already has a medication called lipitor, which works by plugging up a very important enzyme usually kept busy making choleserol in the liver, so the level of low density lipoprotein (LDL) is lowered.  LDL is supposed to be the dangerous cholesterol – like the cowboy with the black hat.

This is quite a good cartoon, actually - a style much like Mad magazine's Jack Davis

Now, the body is a complex place.  As it happens, high density cholesterol, HDL, is supposedly the cholesterol wearing the white hat – as it takes the LDL back to the liver where it is broken down.  Torcetrapib was designed to gum up a protein which converts HDL to LDL, thus causing a lot of white hats and no black ones.  Pfizer expected the drug to redefine cardiovascular treatment.

Well, it certainly would have done that: in phase II trials it triggered chest pains and heart failure – killing 60 percent more people than their original medical condition would have done.  But in their optimism, Pfizer had already invested more than half a billion in tests and in gearing up production lines.  It all had to be scrapped.  Now compare that molecule with this one:

Note the location of Proline - an amino acid which provides a backbone to a molecule, locking the two segments at about a 75 degree angle from each other. I learned that from the internet!

This highly engineered molecule is called oxytocin – comprised of 9 amino acids (the codes given in blue), and much more complex than torcetrapib.   And therefore tens of millions more ways it could go wrong.   Each one is made in a very small factory – a single neuron – among a group of such neurons within the supra-optical nucleus.  This area has come in for a lot of research because its neurons produce a significant number of very important neurotransmitters, but as there are only a few thousand of them, it is a very manageable area for study.

In fact oxytocin is manufactured (I say manufactured because all are identical molecules and made by separate neurons) in response to emotions of gratitude and generosity.  The lack of it seems to be a factor in autism (a single injection of oxytocin can relieve some autistic symptoms for two weeks) and the presence of it seems to be an important part of bonding: animals which generate it are known to bond well, sometimes for life, and animals with less of it are known to lose interest after a while and seek another mate.  So much, so clear.

The neurons which make oxytocin, and the very similar vasopressin, also make other hormones, but those two are the only neurotransmitters known to act at a distance.  They enter the blood and the brain, and as one researcher claimed, “they seem to have a beneficial effect on every major system in the body.”  To operate, oxtytocin requires a certain receptor – a receptor which itself requires cholesterol.  I’m wondering if the cholesterol it requires is LDL.  If so, this single fact could have saved Pfizer getting on to three quarters of a billion dollars.

My point is that this molecule which is so effective to the brain and every major organ system within the body is produced by a natural factory within the brain – a tiny neuron.  It’s more complex and has more impact on us than anything we could come up with even with hundreds of millions in research.   And it’s generated automatically in a unique way: in response to unselfish emotions which themselves feel good, leading you to feel you are doing the “right thing”.  Well, you clearly are.  How difficult is it to theorise that the body itself might be able to come up with powerful drugs already peer-reviewed and needed for robust health, provided we are living a fairly good life, and listening to our inner voice?  Is it worth living if we rely on a crateload of pills every day instead of getting on with our lives?

The problem is widespread now.  As Wired’s article points out, hormone replacement therapy was supposed to reduce heart attacks in post-menopausal women, but did the opposite.  Oestrogen was supposed to prevent Alzheimers, but that didn’t work.  Vitamin C was supposed to prevent bone loss in cases of MS, but it didn’t.  Vitamin E was supposed to reduce cardiovascular disease – again, nope.

AstraZenca and GlaxoSmithKline are scaling back research into the brain – because it’s too complicated.  One look at the electro-chemical diagram of the retina will astonish any engineer.  In fact you could spend a lifetime on it and stil not grasp it in its entirety.  And there you have a problem: how are you going to mess with a system that interlinks with a thousand other systems – not one of which you can completely understand?  I’ve actually written software that turned out to be too complicated to maintain properly.

Once I came up with a six-dimensional array to handle a holiday pricing system for Budget Travel, the largest tour operator in Ireland.  They revealed at the last minute a series of discounts which they’d inserted into their brochure to drum up extra business.  Well, the first two dimensions were the number of hotel rooms and the details, with dates of stay and durations.  The third was the number of people in each room.  The fourth was the breakdown of passengers into adults, children and infants.  The fifth was the meal plan per person, and the sixth was the discount structure so that each person could have a whole set of pricing per night, with free nights, reductions and so on.  It wasn’t the comlexity so much as the fact that it was all in an array which only existed in the memory of the computer – it was laid to disk in a separate series of steps but it was the collection of dimensions that had to be managed mentally all at one time.

A year later I tried to add a seventh dimension, to incorporate currency variations, and I eventually gave up – it was too complicated.  What I had done under pressure working overnight could not be duplicated later – not by me, anyway.  I converted the whole thing into a series of tables which worked slower but was easier to diagnose.  Things can get complicated because they have had too much intelligence put into them and the amazing thing is sometimes that they work at all.  In the old days, Norton had a product that could fix the first Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets if they corrupted.  But now, the things that can go wrong have hundreds of implications to other internal pointers and formulas – like reassembling a sandcastle.  So if your magnificent Excel spreadsheet goes belly up the only question is, did you make a backup?

Words fail me when I see articles on meditation studies praising the benefit of various neurotransmitters and their great effect on the peace of mind of an individual – which  sombrely conclude that analysing these processes could well lead to new drugs in the war on mental illness.  Look!  Never mind spending years of research and billions of dollars on factories churning out dodgy molecules, while the original problems all multiply and compound themselves – for God’s sake, man, the factories are already assembled, tooled up and ready to go, inside each and every brain – what about trying meditation?!

And now 175 words from the original Wired article, leading tortuously back to Moore’s law:

While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them.

These troubling trends play out most vividly in the drug industry. Although modern pharmaceuticals are supposed to represent the practical pay-off of basic research, the R&D to discover a promising new compound now costs about 100 times more (inflation-adjusted) than it did in 1950.

It also takes nearly three times as long. Industry forecasts suggest that once failures are taken into account, the average cost per approved molecule will top $3.8 billion (£2.46 million) by 2015. What’s worse, even these “successful” compounds don’t seem to be worth the investment. We are witnessing Moore’s law in reverse.

Although we’ve mapped every known part of the chemical pathway, the causes that matter are still nowhere to be found. If this is progress, it’s a peculiar kind.

A wolf in cheap clothing

In 2003 I received – as a result of my website which dealt at some length with genuine Kundalini experiences – a mysterious letter from one Solomae Sananda of PO Box 882, Somerset, California 95684, who had written a book called Kundalini and the Evolution of Consciousness, which she enclosed, along with an intriguing pamphlet.  The pamphlet offered to train me via a mail order course to become an ordained minister for $250; they would even send me a parking permit with my certificate.  I could pay up front, or pay half now and half when I took the final test.

But more intriguing by far was the claim that Cheryl Stoycoff – her real name – claimed to be an ascended master, and was now disseminating wisdom for the enlightenment of mankind.  I read the book, which was as close to nonsense as I have ever seen.  Her spiritual experience sounded so humdrum and banal that one could compare it to throwing out the trash.  “Once again, I checked out of my body for a while.”  It was as if she had read about genuine spiritual experience and decided that she, too, could be an ascended master, and make a quick buck.  There was nothing in the book whatsoever other than a colossal insult to the idea of spirituality, and the charging of $50 per head to listen at her feet added a nauseating context to what might otherwise could been mistaken for simple ignorance.

I wrote back that it was exactly this kind of rubbish that gave spirituality a bad press.   It’s small wonder that the militant atheists have so much ammunition when these frauds and phoneys are touting their wares.  People giving themselves exotic Indian names and answering every question with a riddle is still in fashion simply because no proper long-term scientific research has ever been carried out on the biology of spiritual experience.

Anyway, last weekend I thought I’d see what had happened to her in the intervening nine years.  It did not surprise me that her website, www.livingspiritfoundation.org was now a spam site pushing badly translated automated Chinese phrases about marketing scams, and that Cheryl has turned her back on universal enlightenment to push a rather averagely received book on raw vegatables for kids.

Oh well, no harm done, I thought.  But much worse was the following news I found in the Tulsa World of 25th July 2005:

By Nicole Marshall

A family is waging a court battle with a church that they say is a religious cult over the estate of a woman who was found dead on an Arkansas River bank in April.

Linda Mauer belonged to the Living Spirit Foundation and moved with it from California to Oklahoma in 2003. The church, under the direction of its spiritual leader, Solomae Sananda, formerly Cheryl Stoycoff, is based in Inola, its Web site shows.

After joining the Living Spirit Foundation, which describes itself as a nondenominational, interfaith, nontraditional and Christ- based spiritual organization, Mauer began using the first name ‘Bethany.’

Two passersby found her body April 1 in a muddy area thick with brush north of the 21st Street Bridge.  A detective at the time noted some “suspicious circumstances” but no obvious signs of trauma to her body.

Sananda’s husband, Clyde Stoycoff, filed a petition for probate of a lost will in Tulsa County District Court in June, claiming that Mauer willed her estate to him, Sananda and the Living Spirit Foundation, court records show.

Stoycoff describes himself as an ordained minister, director of ministerial services and business manager for the foundation, its web site shows.

Even if the judge allows the copy [of the will]to be used, or if the original is found, the family maintains that the will is not binding for several reasons, including the suspicious circumstances of Mauer’s death.

Apparently Mauer met Stoycoff in a yoga class, and Stoycoff convinced her to join the LSF.  She became so committed to it that when her mother died – leaving her an undisclosed sum – choosing to leave California with the couple, headed to Oklahoma, instead of attending her mother’s funeral.

Stoycoff’s site is down.  but the Internet Archive provides pages going back to before Mauer’s death.  From the text on it, Stoycoff seemed obsessed with dark satanic forces, and this tallies with claims that Stoycoff nominated Mauer as a gatekeeper who “held the energy of the gates of hell at bay so that Christ could form the new Earth through His body.”  No pressure, then.

I also found a tech discussion site in which someone who had moderated Stoycoff’s blog admitted that at the time, all this pretentious twaddle of hellish spectres around every corner sounded appealing, but in the light of this news, he realised it was corrupted and sick stuff.

Talk about putting a brave spin on a rejected, abandoned mental patient found starved to death in a ditch.  Stoycoff’s husband wrote of the woman they expelled from their inner circle “..because of her isolation, when the time came and her mission was complete, she drove to a public place last Friday morning (April 1), laid down and, with the assistance of a bevy of angels, went home to be with her True Love in the peace she so richly deserves. In the midst of my selfish sorrow of my missing her, I am overjoyed at her current circumstance.” 

With a flourish – no doubt tinged with sadness – the Stoycoffs then produced a copy of an email assigning them complete control over the funeral arrangements, which Mauer had supposedly hoped would expedite the processing of her will.  How convenient.  But how strange then, to read the following:

Paula Sullivan, a Tulsa woman who befriended Mauer, said Mauer changed both physically and emotionally before she last saw her in the winter.

“In the dozens of walks and even more cups of tea shared, Linda only spoke of spiritual topics — Scriptures and the inquiry classes she was taking in the Catholic Church. The last time I had tea with her in her apartment, she told me Clyde Stoycoff said Solomae was ‘expanding exponentially through spiritual realms.’ “

Sullivan said Mauer was always very excited when she spoke about Sananda. But Mauer told Sullivan that she believed she had “denser energies” surrounding herself and that it wasn’t good for her to be physically near Sananda because of these dark energies, Sullivan said.

It seems the Stoycoffs got a bit tired of Mauer’s attentions and gave her the cold shoulder – a devastating blow for someone already on the fringe of sanity – but not so tired of her to turn down a chance at snagging her estate.  Stoycoff wrote to me exactly two years before all this happened.  She never responded to my furious reply.

All of this made me feel sick to think perhaps I could have prevented it by publicising her fraud with more vigour back in 2003.  But all I knew for sure at the time was that she had written a crappy and deceitful book and was running an “ordained minister” course with free parking permits.  It sounded like a stupid joke and impossible to take seriously;  I never imagined someone might lose their life because of her.   I could find no more about Cheryl Stoycoff from the internet, other than one of her sons has joined the Tulsa Air Squadron, and the other became a journalist.

Ascended Master's advice for scrapping junk cars, and "earning to the maximum when the desired opportunity is foremost." It probably reads better in the original auto-generated Chinese

I traced what looked like an affiliate website to an individual in Eastern Canada, who had claimed online that Sananda was her friend.  From the hosting details of her site I obtained her phone number, but came up empty handed: a very pleasant lady, she assured me she had never met Sananda and had only been impressed by her book.

Kundalini, in a nutshell, is the Sanskrit name for the coiled up force at the base of the spine responsible for evolution, for altered states of consciousness, and also, in a tainted, corrupted form, the horrors of mental illness.   Genuine knowledge of it is so sparse that cases of awakenings or partial awakenings can labour for years to find anyone with the least knowledge about it; some end up in institutions, or victims of despicable scam artists like the Stoycoffs.

There is one thing I can tell you for sure about Kundalini: it will one day be the most researched avenue in human biology.  If you want information about it, forget the yoga sessions at the corner gym, forget anyone dressing themselves in funny white clothes and making silly hand gestures, forget anyone adopting an esoteric Indian pseudonym and charging you twenty bucks a time to listen to their stupid riddles.  Especially avoid anyone who tells you they are an ascended master.

Instead, go to the Institute for Consciousness Research in Canada.  They have a website which I have linked to on the side of the page, near the top. As far as I know, they are the only credible avenue interested in divesting Kundalini of its mysterious origins, and placing it on a firm scientific footing.  Associated with the group are Gene Kieffer, a superb, energetic American writer who with John White brought Pandit Gopi Krishna to the attention of the western world and the Max Planck Institute.

And working tirelessly there are first class human beings such as Paul and Dale Pond, Michael Bradford, Vitold Kreutzer and Teri Degler.  Some of them have had kundalini experiences themselves – and all have developed their personalities to the point where they are part of the solution.  If you want to know anything about Kundalini, take it from me that these are the people to talk to.

www.icrcanada.org

Biological Strength of Spirit?

I read today that what can only be described as a group of geniuses in Illinois has been quietly making amazing discoveries about the molecular processes involved in DNA, including the fascinating field of epigenetics.

The DNA contains four different nucleic acid bases, called Adenosine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, or ACG and T.  C and G bond together, as do A and T, making the rungs of a long and beautifully coiled ladder of data.

This vast two-dimensional storage system only a few atoms wide (if an atom were a grain of sand, the smallest visible object would need to be at least 4 metres wide) is twisted, coiled and supercoiled repeatedly to such an extent that the collections it forms, the chromosones, become visible through a microscope.

Cytosine

The field of epigenetics deals with a newly discovered layer of meaning superimposed on the DNA itself.  Epigenetic processes seem to be influenced by the experiences and lifestyle of an individual, and leave markers which can survive for many generations – the effects are so long lasting in successive generations of laboratory animals that some researchers believe the markers laid down can’t be turned off.

Methylated cytosine

These processes don’t change the arrangement of the letters, but instead, they can change one of the base molecules – usually cytosine, sometimes adenosine – by swapping one of its hydrogen ions to a more complex methyl group.  It’s as if they swap a capital letter instead of the same letter in lower case.  The 4-character information remains the same, but the changed letter is read differently by the other equipment in the cell.  Therefore while the DNA remains intact, the proteins which it is supposed to make can be switched on or off.  Up until recently, it was thought that this was the main extent of changes caused by “methylation”.

DNA in the grip of methyltransferase (DNMT1)

Above you can see the little molecular machine grabbing the DNA, finding the right sequence and adding a methyl group to the cytosine.   Now, you may well ask, from where do those little machines come from, that is, where are their designs stored and how are they assembled?  How should I know?  I’m only a programmer!

This process is almost always carried out to cytosine bases lying in the sequence:

—CG—
—GC—

So as both DNA strands have a cytosine, both strands will be converted with a methyl group. When the DNA is replicated, each of the new DNA double helices will have one old strand, complete with methyl groups, and one new strand, which is not methylated.  But all the machinery has to do is find such a group, and apply the modification to the cystine on the other strand.  Impressive though, for a machine which can’t see and doesn’t seem to have any kind of a memory in which to store its instructions.  What makes it act the way it does?

How to measure the forces need to break apart strands of DNA (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu)

Well, who knows – or to be more precise: it’s a hotly debated topic at present.  But now to the real story: the catchily-named Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group did a rather clever thing.   By trying to break apart strands of DNA before and after methylation, they proved:

..a role of methylated DNA physical properties needs to be reconsidered as a direct epigenetic control factor. We found through novel and extremely extensive force measurements comparing non-methylated and various methylated DNAs that methylation affects the propensity for mechanical DNA strand separation to a significant degree.

This means that methylation doesn’t just accent the language of DNA, it makes the DNA itself stronger – tougher to break apart – which is important because your DNA, much like your wealth or your beautiful girlfriend, is subject to constant break-ins or attempts to rip it off altogether.

Yes, even on the molecular level there are crooks and predators on the make.  What a neighborhood!  Some attacking machinery from bacteria tries to splice in their own, alien, DNA into ours to mess up the activity of our cells.  So any process which makes the DNA stronger is a boost to our immune systems.

It took some pretty strong DNA to turn this Carrera marble into Moses. I think the horns were a misinterpretation of the Aramaic or Hebrew. But nobody wanted to tell Michelangelo that

It may well be that the resistance some people have to disease is a direct result of epigenetics.  Perhaps the susceptibility to addictions in materialist societies is a result from weakened genetics.  It is striking that in the last days of the Raj, virtually all the male children became alcoholics, something hardly seen before.

Perhaps the races which have had to cope with slavery and oppression by raising their spiritual values in non-violent protests have also increased the resilience of their DNA.  It is true that African Americans led the way in practically all sports, once freed from the chains of slavery.  Perhaps the well researched but otherwise inexplicable tendency of families with strong moral backgrounds to produce men of genius is because of beneficial changes to the DNA by virtue of, well, of virtues – if so, perhaps virtues and vices, far from being arbitrary and meaningless concepts, have biological reflections of their own.

Of course, making statues to preserve myths doesn't suit our advanced civilisation today. Cardiff, the capital of Wales is well known across the UK for its vibrant nightlife

Anyway, it is already known that positive attitudes can defeat the onset of infections or improve the recovery time from illnesses.  From this, and in the light of The TCBG’s work, it’s not much of a leap to suppose the epigenetic system to be closely tied to our emotional state, and an important part of the biology reflecting our strength of spirit.  And to all, a good night.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Next week!  How to make this amazing bit of machinery for uncoiling knots:

DNA Gyrase from E.Coli is an enzyme which helps untangle, un-knot and relax supercoils in its DNA. It does so by binding to a strand of DNA, cutting both strands and then, while keeping hold of both cut ends, passing another piece of double stranded DNA through the gap. It then reseals the double stranded break.

Essentially it allows portions of the large circular bacterial genome to pass through itself, to prevent knotting and entanglement. A number of antibiotics (e.g. Simocyclinone D8) target this enzyme, since it is essential to the organism’s survival. Humans also have a form of this enzyme but its construction is different and we are thus not affected by the antibiotics.

(http://beautifulproteins.blogspot.com/)

Judging the Fabric of Society: the Buddhist Amygdala

“The amygdala pervades the organisation of thought and behaviour at all levels.”

Ralph Adolphs, expert on emotion, memory and social cognition, California Institute of Technology

“By attuning the brain to all manner of threats and pleasures.. the amygdala helps to confer emotional significance on a wide range of experiences. The amygdala helps to give life meaning.”

(David Dobbs, Scientific American)

While trekking in Nepal in the 1970′s, Colorado businessman Adam Engle was so impressed by the warmth and compassion of the Buddhist lamas that, with the late Franciso J Varela, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, he later co-founded the Mind & Life Institute in Colorado, “to see if we can bridge the gap” between science and spirituality. (Scientific American Mind, Feb/Mar 2006, p40)

Dalai Lama - image from www.mindandlife.org

They have a blog with some very interesting posts, including this one about an 8 week meditation program which shows measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of the first study to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.

An expert in facial expressions and emotion, Paul Ekman, found that Buddhist lamas were able to correctly interpret facial expressions “much faster and more accurately” than thousands of other people he tested over the years, including lawyers, policemen and judges.  It thus became apparent that meditation strengthened the parts of the brain dealing with the recognition of emotion, and this has a huge implication for the fabric of our society.

How important is the innate ability to discern truth?  Last week a woman who had been a suspect in the murder of her six year old son has been cleared by new evidence – after twenty five years.   On closer inspection we see the evidence was there all along, but was  completely ignored by the legal experts:

Nicholas Loris, 6, was found strangled to death 150 yards from his Davidson County, N.C., home on Feb. 21, 1987.

The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department credited new technology with helping them to clear Elizabeth Watkins’ name and determine that her son’s cause of death was a dog attack.

“Not only has she been exonerated but the weight from the last 25 years has been lifted from her shoulders,” Watkins’ attorney, David Freedman, told ABCNews.com. “It means everything to her.”

Spending the past 25 years as a suspect cost Watkins a relationship with her older son, who went to live with his father after she became a suspect, as well as the burden of search warrants, DNA tests and always wondering what really happened to Nicholas.

In partnership with the FBI, investigators were able to use new technology to blow up photographs and determine that the claw and scratch marks on the boy’s body came from a number of medium-sized dogs. Nicholas died from strangulation after the dogs pulled his clothing tightly around his neck.

“Once investigators were able to see the wounds up close, they were able to see they were consistent with a dog attack,” Freedman said.

Bill Schatzman, Forsyth County Sheriff, announced at a press conference Thursday that Watkins had been exonerated and the case was officially closed. (ABC World news)

It’s a shame these emotional cripples were unable to recognise a bereaved mother’s emotions.  I can barely imagine the trauma of a mother losing the son she gave birth to, then being accused of his death, and as a result abandoned by her only other son, and then having to live under this shadow of grief and blame for a quarter of a century.  Leaving aside the imbeciles who failed to spot signs of what must have been a ferocious dog attack on a young boy, I cannot accept that any judge should be incapable of distinguishing grief from guilt.

A Texas man declared innocent Tuesday after 30 years in prison had at least two chances to make parole and be set free - if only he would admit he was a sex offender. But Cornelius Dupree Jr refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn't commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

Carrillo, 37, served 20 years but was released from custody on Wednesday afternoon after a judge overturned his 1992 conviction for the drive-by shooting that left one man dead. Witnesses later recanted their testimony, and a dramatic reconstruction of the shooting raised doubts about whether it would have even been possible to identify Carrillo as the shooter.

James Harden, 36, was freed after serving nearly 20 years in the Menard Correctional Center for the 1991 rape and murder of 14-year old Cateresa Matthews, in Dixmoor, Illinois. One of five men, Harden was only 15 years old and suffering with severe learning disabilities and unable to read when he signed a confession that led to his lifetime behind bars.

After eight years on death row, Ryan Matthews was found innocent and freed in 2004.

There are so many cases to choose to show how little interest the legal system has in its clients that it’s hard to know where to start.  The problem seems to be a preconceived notion which infleucnes all subsequent interpretations, no matter the evidence which may refute the original, prejudiced conclusion.

Studies have shown that meditation has both short-term and long-term effects on various perceptual faculties: consider the Poggendorff illusion, in which the black line broken by the vertical shape seems to be continued by the blue line.   The error is caused by the brain translating the shift from left to right without taking into account the amount of vertical movement:

In 2000, Tloczynski et al. studied the perception of visual illusions by zen masters, novice meditators, and non-meditators. There were statistically significant effects found for the Poggendorff illusion (above). The zen masters experienced a statistically significant reduction in initial illusion (measured as error in millimeters) and a lower decrement in illusion for subsequent trials.

“A person who meditates consequently perceives objects more as directly experienced stimuli and less as concepts… With the removal or minimization of cognitive stimuli and generally increasing awareness, meditation can therefore influence both the quality (accuracy) and quantity (detection) of perception.”

In other words, the amygdala, properly trained in meditation, tends to recognise truth rather than reacting along preconceived lines even in emotionally neutral optical illusions, where sheer mechanical judgement is required.  So the skill has nothing to do with enhanced trust or naiivete.  It even increases one’s mechanical accuracy. Nowhere is perception of truth more in demand than in law enforcement and the judiciary.

It has long been known that the large number of coloured people convicted of crimes in America, especially in the South, is largely because of racial prejudice amongst those in the court system.  But even so,  it is hard to believe the sheer neglect of duty and disinterest than in the case of Ryan Matthews:

Ryan’s trial lawyers  had only met Ryan twice during their preparation. They never discussed the facts of his case with him, what he knew about the shooting, or asked him what he was doing that night. They didn’t know that he had a half-brother in a wheelchair who had been shot in the back.

They had never been to the scene of the crime or spoken to the eyewitnesses who couldn’t identify anyone at the time of the shooting but managed to identify Ryan years later, never stressed to the jury the significance of the fact that the DNA in the ski mask worn by the killer was not Ryan’s, never talked to the guy who’d been boasting in prison about killing a white guy in his store, never found out that the boastful guy was in prison for manslaughter, never found out that his DNA matched that inside the ski mask.

In short, they never believed they were representing an innocent boy, though his innocence would later be proven.

(Shauneen Lamb, Guardian)

This shocking disability is bad enough in an ordinary person but inexcusable in brains responsible for discerning truth, yet the legal system seems to thoroughly perpetuate it.  How many cases of innocence are revealed after decades, because of new forensic or DNA tests?   Our professionals concern themselves with legal formalities and lose track of their own senses, just as it has been found that using SatNavs disable the brain’s own spatial mapping abilities.  Could it be that using a crutch weakens one’s legs?  Can such things be?

We have shrugged off the responsibility to discern truth for ourselves and fobbed the job off to experts, and they, in turn, to their machinery.  It’s much easier to absolve ourselves of blame and point to a tedious legal precedent.   Behind this freakish display of stupidity can only be an under-functioning brain, perhaps overloaded by bookish learning but also, damaged by attraction to the financial rewards of the legal system itself.  It seems one can be seriously interested in truth, or in money, but not both.

What kind of mind gravitates to these positions of power to decide on the fate of mortal men?  Cherie Blair is a case in point – an extremely wealthy professional who seems to have given up ethics for the sake of money – a process also known as prostitution:

“The press pounced on an embarrassing episode when she was fined for fare dodging after jumping on a train to Luton, where she was due to sit as a magistrate.” (BBC)

“Most people have difficulty seeing themselves as others see them, but there is something almost psychopathic about Cherie Blair in this respect: she has reached absolute zero when it comes to self-irony or self-knowledge. She tells us that she’s “a good Catholic girl” while detailing her premarital as well as postmarital sex life. She retails offensive tittle-tattle about the queen and other members of the royal family, calling Princess Margaret “a stuck-up old slapper.”

“She goes on at length about her deprived childhood in Liverpool while insisting, “I have no problem with saying I am a socialist.” She then whimpers about the terrible difficulty of repaying a $6 million mortgage on the London house they acquired when Blair was still prime minister—and on top of which they’ve just bought a beautiful country house, formerly Sir John Gielgud’s, for nearly $8 million. (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Slate)

“Cherie Blair presented the cash-strapped Labour Party with a £7,700 bill for the services of her personal hair stylist during last year’s general election campaign. As Labour struggled with outgoings so large that it had to resort to secret loans from millionaires to stay afloat, Mrs Blair made the party pay £275 a day for a month to keep her hair in shape” (Times)

“On an official trip to Australia, she went shopping at a designer clothes showroom. In what might have been a scene from Supermarket Sweep, she left with 68 items worth £2,000 after being told to take “a few things” as gifts.” (Telegraph)

There is plenty of evidence that materialism damages mirror neurons, the basis of empathy, and it seems also to affect the performance of amygdala.  In fact the whole sensitiv eorgan of the brain seems to come under attack from wealth and privilege, which is why all religions have emphasised an indifference to wealth, and to loss of wealth, focusing instead on the development of the personality, that is, the brain.

The latest statistic show the number of giraffes in the world have nearly halved since 1988 from over 140,000 to less than 80,000. Hunters pay up to a whopping £10,000 for the the chance to slay them - preferring bulls because they are the biggest. The hunts typically last three-to-five days and see tourists using .458 Winchester Magnum rifles to kill the animals. With most hunters flying to Africa from their homes in Europe or America, the costs stretch into five figures (Daily Mail)

From Ekman’s professional evidence we see that meditation’s effect is to make the brain much more sensitive to truth.  In the case of materialism, we can infer that the separation of the personality from the needs and emotions of others results in an inability to detect the truth, and even a complete disinterest in it.   Therefore truth is inextricably linked to sensitivity, which is why sensitivity is so necessary among those who practice any kind of art, as the instrument they are sharpening and enhancing is their own brain.  Fleeting impressions pass equally across all minds, but detecting their significance relies on the sensitivity of the brain.  The qualities of meaning and of truth are not arbitrary as militant atheists would have us believe, and nor are they items of convenience for survival, but as absolute as light and dark are to the eye; the difference perhaps being that we can sharpen the brain to those contrasts, or dim it altogether.

Spiritual practices therefore are not an escape from the world, but a deeper investigation into its reality.  A greater ability to synthesise an otherwise confusing mass of details to form conclusions shows the brain’s potential to be not a greater storage of facts, as commercial education would have us believe, but the greater detection of truth and meaning which those facts represent.

Last weekend my daughter and I went to a small exhibition in Cambridge in which I think the most beautiful painting was a Vermeer called the Lacemaker.  It is known that Vermeer’s model in most of his pictures was his devoted wife Catherine (together they produced eleven children); their love seems as much a part of the portraits as the paint itself, judging by his sensitivity and the patience with which she modelled for him.  Vermeer came from a protestant background, and Catherine from a Catholic one, which seems to have been overcome by the fondness for him of her mother, and perhaps even his conversion to Catholicism.

Amygdala at work?

In contrast to the pretence and deception which people will go to any lengths to avoid, meaning, and its corollary, truth, is what they will go to any lengths to pay homage to – which explains the popular exhibition and the two hour lineup to get in.   In this tiny portrait, Catherine is completely absorbed by her craft, and become one with it; the tiny threads, one vibrating slightly under tension could as well be nerves, so fine are they and so central to the whole activity.  This extraordinarily sensitive picture could only have been rendered by an artist who understood this absorption only too well and with it, pay tribute both to their bond of affection, and to the creative act itself.

It is said that children bring to our mind the nature of their parents; the Vermeer’s children and their works may have long been lost to history but the colourful alchemy between mother and father has survived, carefully preserved for 350 years to pay tribute to the power of the sensitive brain.

The painting’s background is unusual for Vermeer, lacking finely-observed detail of walls, tiles and beaded glass windows.  Instead, perhaps in a burst of inspiration, he abandons realism altogether to leave the weave of canvas practically bare, the fabric sustaining Vermeer’s art in the same way cloth and thread underlie the lacemaker’s.

There are other paintings of the Dutch period which excel Vermeer’s in realism and grandeur, but the many layers of subtle contexts in this tiny work seem to show that people are not attracted by realism and pomp as much as they are by meaning, reflected from a brain sympathetic to their own.  What survives the centuries seems to be that which means most to the human heart: that which has meaning.

The Persistence of Spiritual Vision: the Symbols of Jack Kirby

1. Humanity’s heritage: Symbolic thought

I’m 71 years old.. I used to read the first science fiction books, and I began to learn about the Universe myself and take it seriously.  I know the names of the stars.  I know how near or far the heavenly bodies are from our own planet.

I know our own place in the Universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself.  I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the Universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome.  I found it in Thor.  I found it in Galactus.

Jack Kirby, 1988

There are very strong arguments which rely only on logic.  Christopher Hitchens’ claim that we help others not because of the dictates of a God – which might implicate us as incapable of reaching that conclusion on our own – but because we depend on others to make our Earthly experience as positive as possible, indicates that the intellect is capable of putting people before self interest.

In debate with Sam Harris, Hitchens was asked: on what do you base the value of your life, if there is no transcendent God to serve?  His answer was that he had spent his life trying to be free, and trying to help others be free.  There is no argument, whether rational or religious, which can discredit such a view.

Kirby's inspiration for the Hulk came from a news story of a mother who lifted tha back of a car to save her son trapped underneath. "I feel we all have this ability, to transcend our limitations, in times of crisis."

If one abides by the Biblical saying “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or  “whatsoever ye do unto the least of all thy brethren, that do ye also unto me”, they must see that a human life can be amply justified by service to others, and that such a life embodies a genuine spiritual impulse, no matter the nature of its justification, just as a harmful act such as a punch in the stomach, easily condemned on humanitarian and logical grounds, cannot be justified by using religious ones instead.

Paradoxically, even someone who does not believe in a spirit can create what can only be defined as a spiritual outlook.  Their anti-theism is their private business, and might be understandable if based on characterisations made in ancient religions.  Perhaps denial on those grounds supposes archaic concepts to be the very limit of the field, and if so, one could quite fairly criticise medicine, physics, astronomy, plumbing, marriage, business and table manners on the same basis.   But since ancient symbols must have been limited by the evolutionary capacity of their day, it would be more sensible to construct a platform of protest in the light of modern thought, taking into account recent discoveries in biology, neurochemistry and epigenetics, and their effect on genius and creativity.

To be a complete refutation and not be mistaken for ignorance, idle or mischievous speculation or a quick opportunity for self-puffery, it should also include their own experience with meditation, without which it must be impossible to form any kind of opinion about the subjective experience of concentrated thought acting on the brain.

Jack's lettering from Prize Comics, circa 1949

Each language is a specialised collection of symbols created so intangible thought can be communicated.  As we can imagine, early languages must have given way to more complex ones as the brain evolved.   Religious symbols fulfil much the same function, for an area of thought inexpressible in any other way.  The remarkable thing about languages is not that all are different, or that their forms change over time, but that they evolved independently, and arose not from any external pressure, but to express something internal to the evolving human brain.

It’s surprising to find we humans cannot form an accurate mental picture of greater than about a dozen objects.  So the racial brain working through genius has produced symbols – numbers – which are not objects themselves, but an agreed code enabling us to share these otherwise unmanageable ideas.  We are alone in conceiving such symbolic thought; some primates can be taught a certain amount of it but do not develop it independently, which makes clear the giant leap made by us at some point in the distant past.

Kirby and Simon were the first to bring the romance genre to comics, with Young Romance (1948)

Such symbols began about 8000 BC to represent sheep and other goods, followed around 3000 BC by a further, significant, abstraction: the quantity of these goods represented as symbols in their own right.  Such ideas represented leaps which we take for granted now, but which could only arise from individuals prone to thinking things over and coming up with inspiration: in fact the modern function of humans as teachers to primates might mirror this early, slow process of development between the forward thinking types and the ordinary, slow moving minds of their day.

A very early work from around 1941, in which wisdom is passed from generation to generation and death referred to as "the long sleep"

Spiritual symbols must have predated such elements of trade by a huge distance.  The animism of the Aborigines is supposed to date from 60,000 years ago, the Aurignacian cave paintings (presumed to have more than just decorative purpose, as they are found in inaccessible caves not used for habitation) about 32,000 years and I believe the temple of Gobekli Tepe is reliably dated to about 12,000 years ago.

The ennobling effect on the mind of elegant, overwhelming spiritual symbols was understood by Kirby, and used as a sign of an emotionally sophisticated society. The same conclusion was arrived at by James Watson in his book "DNA", when evaluating the significance of Neandertal funerary rites

We know that 200,000 year old burial sites in Africa show evidence of funerary rites; the Neandertal also developed these rites, and their race dates from 600,000–350,000 years ago, and we know such beliefs existed at least 300,000 years ago.  It would hardly make sense for early man to suddenly develop abstract ideas which changed only slightly over the next 300,000 years, especially when a much more evolved specimen took at least five thousand years to go from symbolic objects to symbolic quantities, so it seems reasonable to believe that religious beliefs and the language to articulate them could easily have emerged as long as half a million years ago.

Therefore if we agree that order in time correlates to order of fundamental importance, the spiritual symbols must have been of huge importance to society, followed only much, much later by a systemised set of symbols encoding objects and their quantity.

Kirby also understood that an image of a God must have an overwhelming, inspiring impact on the mind. "I don't know if there's an ultimate, or where the ultimate lies. Possibly I'm not equipped to answer that question. But the question intrigues me. I feel it intrigues everybody. Like with everybody, it's a question of faith. That whatever the ultimate is, I have to have faith that it exists. And of course, the hero does, too; otherwise he would never lay his life on the line."

The vast gulf needed to be crossed to assimilate these concepts can be appreciated by the five thousand year gap which apparently exists between symbolic representation of objects and the much harder abstraction of their symbolic number.  Bonobo apes have been taught to communicate using symbols but the additional learning required to conceive of organised agriculture for the purposes of trade, the concept of payment values to purchase other goods, as well as the assessment of integrity of character of the trader, are vast, vast leaps into the future.

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html

Symbolic thought is, without doubt, one of humanity’s most precious and hard-earned evolutionary steps, and those who can manipulate symbols with agility are powerful influences on the rest of us.

Kirby's elegant characterisations from the 1950's hit, Boys' Ranch

In well-attended debates where atheistic opinions are based on logic alone, resting a defence of religion on a recollection of ancient events is of dubious worth, and also a little pointless, just as the value of medical science cannot be reckoned by referring to its murky origins or courageous proponents living centuries ago, but by benefits and facts which are to hand today.

If these audiences are polarised into two camps attracted by two completely different things, as if watching the brute force of Hulk Hogan compared to the golden voice of Shirley Bassey, then small wonder that nothing is ever resolved convincingly: each side walks away feeling much the same sympathies as before, and perhaps a little puzzled by the failure of two intelligent minds to somehow communicate the truth of something they both feel so passionately about.

Early Kirby work in partnership with Joe Simon. The fluid lines and dramatic shading were all self-taught under pressure, as were the anatomy and storytelling technique: Kirby's colleagues insist that he never once used an eraser. "Someone told me once that using an eraser just wasted time. I couldn't afford to waste time - I had to make a living." The gangsters and their molls came straight from his childhood

If one can justify humanitarianism by logic, one should also be able to justify spiritual beliefs by present day knowledge.  If not, there is no point in debating.  Convincingly resolving the question of God is perhaps for distant generations.  The biology which is somehow already in motion must be the thing which concerns us the most, along with what we can do to affect it, just as a driver speeding over a collapsed bridge thinks not about its architects or the technical drawings for his car, but where the brakes are!

Kirby borrows a chair from Patrick McGoohan's TV show The Prisoner, to characterise Victor von Doom

2. Misunderstanding the persistence of religious faith

“We all have a kind of feeling that I think we’ve had for thousands of years, that there are higher beings somewhere.  I think all our spiritual feelings stem from that.

The truth is that the Greeks had Hercules, even as the Norsemen had Thor, and through the ages we’ve had heroes similar to them, who’s no more than a superhero.  And today, we have our superheroes: we believe in them because we believe in ourselves.”

But before you wonder why this blog isn’t just called Science and Science.com, the idea behind this post is a much stronger proof of the persistence of spiritual beliefs.  Richard Dawkins once claimed in an interview that religion is perpetuated solely because children are indoctrinated by their parents, who then indoctrinate their own children, and so on.  This idea has become blithely repeated ever since as a criticism of religion, but it shows a complete failure to think, and thereby reversing the accusation altogether, as well as explaining why such minds find this argument entirely credible due to their own failure to think.

The tendency to listen to one’s parents was attributed by Dawkins to a natural selection in which those who did not listen – for example, rebels who disobeyed the urging to avoid snakes or the edges of cliffs – did not tend to survive.  According to Dawkins, it was not religion so much as the tendency to obey authourity figures which was the genetic foundation of religion’s persistence.  This idea supposes that rebels are generally so liable to catastrophe that they die before procreative age and therefore should have been eliminated over the course of tens of thousands of years, producing a docile race of sheep unable to think for themselves.

How does a thinking man propose a theory so completely at odds with observed fact that to refute it, one hardly knows where to start?  The urge to discredit religion seems so great that essentials like simple logic, observed evidence, and even common sense are all desperately jettisoned like hampers of food from a hot air balloon plummeting to the ground.

"I realised I had to find with something new..I couldn't depend on gangsters forever. And so for some reason I went to the Bible, and I came up with Galactus. And there I was, in front of this tremendous figure, who I knew very well, because I always felt him in my life, and I knew I certainly couldn't treat him the same way I would have treated any ordinary mortal character. And I remember in my first story I had to back away from him, in order to resolve that story... of course the Silver Surfer is the fallen angel: when Galactus relegated him to Earth, he stayed on Earth, and that was the beginning of his adventure."

It is only the mentally sturdy rebel able to conceive and energise inventions and advances, corrections to restrictive systems, and resultant changes in society’s direction; therefore, far from being the type found bitten by snakes at the foot of cliffs, he forms the quick-thinking engine of all historical progress.  And since every development is, for a time, a rebellion against the norm, its adoption by the mass mind requires a kind of intuitive faith in the rebel, further accenting the strength of his perceived character – as we can see from the development of symbolic thought.

Whatever symbols, concepts, forms and institutions which have arisen and survive today, are solely down to this class of men.  Without them, man would follow the same direction as the animal world, and our social forms would remain static for millions of years.  Instead, in evolutionary heartbeats, we see a constant drive for change accompanied by colossal jumps in understanding.  In fact it seems as if change is part of man’s mental makeup, and it is the biological urges – eating, sleeping, romance and procreation – which remain constant, and in some cases vary little from the animal world, perhaps as a reminder of our origins.  So while man remains in some way imprisoned by his biology, his mental abilities are his true heritage, and they are free to grow: no one can say where they would lead us as a race.

Metron of the New Gods reaches the end of the Universe, and finds those who tried to broach it came to a sticky end

Another fact so obvious that it should never need pointing out to a champion of evolution is that, apatr from the reforming rebel, it is the willfully disobedient youngsters who account for most – if not all - illegitimate births today, and probably all through history too. These individuals tend to have more partners because the sacrifices and discipline required by pair bonding is not for them, and they must therefore produce the largest number of genetically varied offspring in geographically separate areas, giving their traits by far the most chance to survive.  I know one such free spirit who has a child in England, one in Vancouver, one in Toronto, and one in Egypt; for all I know he may be working on a fifth.

If natural selection were a genuine shaping force – and it clearly isn’t – then common sense tells us the race would be comprised mainly of irresponsible, non pair-bonding individuals by now.

When I created the Silver Surfer and Galactus it came out of a Biblical feeling. I couldn’t get gangsters to compete with all these superheroes, so I had to look for more omnipotent characters.
I came up with what I thought was God in Galactus; a God-like character.

Still thinking about it in the Biblical sense, I began to think of a fallen angel, and the fallen angel was the Silver Surfer. In the story, Galactus confines him to the Earth, just like the fallen angel. So you can get characters from Biblical feelings.

Still another unavoidable fact is that teenagers all go through a stage of rebellion, questioning the dictates of parents, for the simple reason that they must develop the ability to reason for themselves; this mental development and eventual merging with the complexities of wider society is why the childhood of a human being is by far the longest in all the animal kingdom.  As soon as we call a mammal human, even a prototypical human, this period of rebellion is guaranteed.  Not all will go as far as getting a child by the age of 13, but they will question the parents to re-evaluate their ideas, as surely as a toddler entering the “terrible twos” will reflexively answer “no” to everything you suggest.

But why stop at examples of individual behaviour?  A recent experiment which flatly contradicts the idea that religion is propagated by the sheepish took place in Communist Russia – perhaps you heard of it?  The experiment involved hundreds of millions of individuals, in which three or perhaps even four generations were forbidden any exposure to religion by the sternest authority of the state, with ferocious penalties for those who disobeyed.  Without membership of the Communist Party, one could not even own an apartment in a crumbling block.  Dissent was dealt with by imprisonment or the reverse of natural selection ..by a natural Siberian exile.

If religious faith were a simple matter of obedience to parents, these beliefs should have been gladly jettisoned if only to avoid exclusion from society.  In the Soviet Union it would be impossible for any child born after about 1925 to have any idea of religion as an acceptable outlet; still less for one born in the fifties and sixties.  Not only did the country remain separate socially from others, the government’s influence was so all pervasive as to affect every nook and cranny of daily existence. This experiment was as complete and as ruthless in efficiency as it could ever be possible to orchestrate.

By reviving the Norse Gods, as imagined by Kirby, Marvel Comics introduced something new to popular culture. In fact, they were advised that youth would not buy it - yet it became one of their biggest sellers, especially on campus

But no sooner did the Soviet Union fall than the churches in Eastern Europe sprang back into life, lovingly restored to a state exceeding their former beauty. To give you a taste of the Russian mentality: when Stalingrad was surrounded in WWII, the citizens swore no German would set foot in their city.  The Nazi blockade meant starvation set in, alongside constant bombardment.  The city did not fall.

Residents eventually boiled wallpaper to make some thin kind of starch soup, and slept under dozens of layers of cloth and blankets to survive the subzero temperatures.  Death hovered around every doorway. A few gave way to cannibalism, betrayed by their rosy faces and good health.  But these were the exceptions.  The city survived under the harshest and most sadistic pressure.

An imposter posing as Ben realises he must sacrifice his life for another, to atone for a life of jealousy and hatred

These were not latte-sipping, ipad-tapping, cosy armchair scoffers and caviar conoussieurs.  These were a people possessed of an inflexible iron will and indifferent to suffering, to whom all else came second to their patriotic pride.  For this reason, WWII is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, a war in which at least 40 millions lost their lives.  When they see programs showing how Britain claims to have won the war, they literally fall silent with astonishment.  So either the religious minds which survived generations of war and repression in secret were the sternest and strongest of all, or, if you prefer, those minds which gravitated to religion only after the fall of the USSR must have been expressing the most hardy, perennial, and captivating sentiments of the soul.

Either way the phenomenon of spirituality, or the mental fabric which dresses it to give form to its ideas, by that I mean religion, has nothing to do with external pressure from family or society, nothing whatever to do with sheepish weakness, and nothing at all to do with escapism.  The urge remains intact because it is generated internally. You could no more remove it from the mass of mankind than you could eliminate the urge to procreate, using banners, leaflets and threats.   Such an idea only seems viable to those who are the spiritual equivalent of eunuchs, and by their own condemnation of a healthy instinct in others, they reveal the startling lack of it within their own selves.  Their childish diatribes against those of simple faith serve to further amplify the warning signs emerging from their own twisted and dissonant personality.

As a matter of fact the sole reason the Communist experiment failed – a reason greater even than the corruption which ate its way throughout the entire structure – was because the ordinary human being was denied a choice of thought.  This state of being is so repugnant to human nature – not surprisingly since, as I have easily shown here, freedom of thought is man’s only true heritage and marker of evolutionary progress – that the amassed resistance was enough to topple a regime so callous that an estimated forty million people were also sent to die in slave labour camps for their crime of free thought.  This staggering statistic is never taken into account by those seeking to criticise religion on the grounds of sheepish continuation because it makes their argument seem puerile and stupid, but there seem to be no other words to describe it.

Kirby's X-Men were based on an extension of the idea of evolution: genetic mutations developing superhuman powers

All these examples show that a propagation of religious faith solely by external pressure is a nonsense, and in any case something which experience of everyday people shows would be an impossibility.  Religious faith seems to be an internal concept limited only by the capacity of that particular mind to which people return, as readily as they do to that source of infinite warmth, the sun.  The variation in forms shows an evolutionary capacity of the mind and the widespread acceptance of each shows the large numbers which simultaneously achieved that particular level.

The widespread and simultaneous resistance to oppressive regimes today in middle east countries, among populations which meekly accepted such dictatorships without protest for ages before, shows the same tendency.  The evolution of mass consciousness is the evolution of the brain, and it is expressed in man’s symbols.  The gifted individuals able to create and manipulate appealing symbols are gifted with an insight into the mind of society at that level of evolution, and they serve an important evolutionary purpose.

3. Spirituality in symbols: the creative life of Jack Kirby

“I don’t know what spiritual beliefs are comprised of.  I only know that I have senses.  And I bring them all into play.  I don’t know what these senses are.. I cant define them.  All my senses are hidden from me.  but they move me…”

But examples of populations in countries we have never visited and can only dimly sense the character of might still be unconvincing.  So the subject of this post is a man who, more than any other single individual, contributed to the visual language of 20th century story telling by the force of his personality, the courage of his convictions, and by sheer genius.  This man is Jack Kirby, one of the true heroes of 20th century America.

It is telling that in the Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins speaks of his amazement as a child, on being told about the pending arrival of “our train”, at his interpreting this to mean the train actually belonged to his family.   Similarly, Christopher Hitchens’ mother once declared, “if there is going to be an upper class in thic country, Christopher is going to be in it.”  These benevolent conditions were fateful, as they propelled both individuals in to the forefront of academia and social influence from the very beginning.  It is no wonder that their ideas grew from a position of security.

The young Jack Kirby could never have had such delusions: whatever he would have in life, he had to fight everyone else for, from the very beginning.

Kirby gets to grips with microcircuits a decade or so before their use in electronics

At the turn of the 20th century, immigrants flooded into New York from Europe.  Those with family already in America might have followed routes out towards the farmlands of the mid-west or the west coast; those with nothing but the clothes on their backs stayed where they landed, in New York.  They had no other choice: and there were vast numbers of them.

Among the huddled masses yearning to be free who arrived probably around 1913 were an Austrian Jewish couple – Benjamin Kurtzberg and his wife.  Settling in the poorest, cheapest, and most densely crowded slum in all of America’s history, “the couple endured some of the most abject conditions that overpopulation and neglect had ever contrived anywhere.. with 1500-1800 people crammed into a single block” (Mark Alexander, The Wonder Years).  But Benjamin found work in a garment factory, and his family produced two children, the first of whom, Jacob, was born August 28, 1917, later attending elementary and Hebrew school in PS 20.

Kamandi was Kirby's vision of a post-apocalyptic Earth arising from man's inability to manage his technological powers. The animals, meantime, had developed larger brains and complex societies, while man had degenerated back to prehistoric mental levels

My father was Conservative. We were never Orthodox, but we were Conservative. I went to Hebrew school. It was above a livery stable, the Hebrew school.

Until the day I die I’ll never forget that wonderful table we used to sit at. Hebrew school was a rough place. An airplane flew over one day and I ran over to the window and everyone was pushing and shoving each other, and some guy really shoved me out of the way — I knocked him clean out.

I was about 12. Because I wasn’t bar mitzvahed yet. They had to pick him up. But I was so eager. That was such an innovation to hear the sound of the motor of an airplane flying overhead. I just had to get there in front. I was attracted by everything that seemed to be new and advanced.  I saw the Time Machine.

(Interviewed by Gary Groth)

Jacob showed early promise in art, sometimes angering the landlord by sketching over the corridor walls in their slum tenement.  Hardened by constant gang fights and anti-semitism in the densely packed quarter, his character mirrored the resilience of the spiritual beliefs growing inside of him, and forced him to rely on instinct to better himself.  Of the crowded, hostile slum, he said:

I hated the place because I… well, it was the atmosphere itself.  It was the way people behaved.  I knew that there was something better, and instinct told me that it was uptown, and I’d walk every day from my block to 42nd Street where the Daily News was, where I could be near the Journal, the Hearst newspapers.

I’d run errands for the reporters.  My boss was playing golf in the office, and he was shooting golf balls through an upturned telephone book, see?  That’s the kind of job I wanted!

By age 18 ni 1936 the entirely self-taught Kurtzberg was already working with the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate, drawing newspaper strips and editorial cartoons.

I was drawing editorial cartoons for the syndicate, and I drew a thing called “Your Health Comes First.” I was called in once for drawing an editorial cartoon when Chamberlain made that pact with Hitler.

By using different styles and aliases for each (such as Jack Curtiss, above) Kirby's output gave the impression of a large stable of artists

“Where does a young squirt like you,” he says, “get the nerve to do an editorial cartoon on Chamberlain and Hitler?” And I told him I know a gangster when I see one, see?  Hitler was gobbling up all of Europe.

Jacob Kurtzberg eventually changed his name to Jack Kirby not to disown his Conservative Jewish roots – but because he wanted to be an American.  This ambition took a huge amount of personal confidence – after all, he might still have been a failure, except now, one disowned by his family.

On each comic strip I put a different name: I was Jack Curtiss, Jack Cortez… I didn’t want to be in any particular environment, I wanted to be an all-around American.  I kept Kirby.  My mother gave me hell.  My father gave me hell.  My family disowned me.

This act shows Kirby was not the kind to give in to the dictates of others, even though the mother in those days was sacrosanct.  In one childhood incident Kirby was beaten unconscious by a rival gang, then carefully left at his parents’ door.  The other kids took the time to make his clothes presentable and straighten out his hair, only to reduce the shock to his mother.  Even against this all-powerful maternal influence, Kirby was ready to rebel if it meant he could closer approximate his vision of himself.

This beautifully rendered sequence revealed why Black Bolt, the leader of Kirby's genetically altered raced of "Inhumans" remained silent his whole life

How could such an individual maintain that most intangible belief in the spirit – without it arising internally and continually renewing itself?

Galactus was God, and I was looking for God. When I first came up with Galactus, I was very awed by him. I didn’t know what to do with the character.

Everybody talks about God, but what the heck does he look like? Well, he’s supposed to be awesome, and Galactus is awesome to me. I drew him large and awesome. No one ever knew the extent of his powers or anything, and I think symbolically that’s our relationship with God.

Distribution ad showing rapid saleability of Kirby's ideas in the early 1960's (Lee & Kirby: The Wonder Years, Mark Alexander). After Kirby left Marvel in 1970, the company failed to produce any further ideas of note

Using Kirby as an example, we can see that far from being a sign of meek obedience spiritual ideas are a source of strength and of inspiration, growing from an internal discussion, and feeling.  Though in the light of history there can be no religious or historical group under more pressure to abandon their beliefs altogether than Judaism, spirituality can never be judged by those who are indifferent to the very idea of the spirit.  Spirituality, like creativity and genius, hunger and thirst, instinct and reaction, is a property of each individual, and is dealt with afresh by each generation.

Ragnarok, the "Twilight of the Gods" (Götterdämmerung in German) was intended by Kirby to bring the series of Thor to an end, and to introduce a new language comprised of godly concepts more in keeping with scientific thinking

In fact, if we believe in evolution, this has to be the case.  The question remains, from where did all these spiritual ideas emerge?  Myths, certainly, arose from genius of ancient times – minds which were more advanced than the average.  But men such as Kirby were not men of compromise or shifting allegiance.  The Austrian Jewry who arrived penniless in America’s new world may have been refugees but they were also bold adventurers, bringing only one thing of value – their spiritual faith.  Simon Baron-Cohen in his Zero Degrees of Empathy calls the confidence given by a positive and loving family “the internal pot of gold” whose currency is equally life-saving in any adverse situation.

"The Silver Surfer is the way I feel when I read the Bible," Kirby admitted in a 1989 conference. Part of the surfer's appeal was his serenity in the face of opposition; ancient myth held that the soul of man was tied to the flesh by a silver cord, broken only in death

A similar claim can be made for an active spirituality, that the resilience it lends to the individual is a connection with natural intelligence.  Nowhere is this dynamic more present than in men of genius such as Kirby.  By their raw power, inspiration and appeal they become not the pernicious infection of lazy, unthinking intellectual capitulation, but the driving force behind mental expansion.

Bored of the repetetive nature of the plots, Kirby intended to herald the end of one series, and the beginning of a new one. On discovering this, the publishers forbade it and quickly rewrote the climax

Spiritual ideas are formless until combined with a given medium – whether music, art, literature, poetry or the spoken word – just as a fabric draped over an invisible object reveals its form.  This is the secret of all talent and genius, and perhaps of life itself: the intangible combining with a mysterious, undefined energy, impresses its complexity and beauty in a form bearing witness to the nature of that intangible spirit itself.

Spiritual ideals meet the lackadaisical drop-out mentality of the Hippes (1966)

Ordinary ideas, too, remain formless until they emerge in the communicative symbols of an alphabet – necessarily restricted and limited by this defining act – and rise to higher levels, by words, by grammar and syntax, and even rhythm and abstraction.

In a completely different alphabet, the mouse protein Cyp2el contains exactly 493 amino acids. True!

Compare the different ways a mere 493 characters can be used.  Firstly, this enchanting pre-nuptial sentiment expressed by a highly educated and proficient lawyer, representing a desire for a harmonious betrothal immune from base material concerns.  To all thinking people, this, my friends, must be the purest poetry:

The parties enter into this agreement to provide for the status, ownership and division of property including future property owned or acquired by either or both and wish to affix respective rights and liabilities that may result from this relationship.

The parties recognize the possibility of unhappy differences and accordingly desire that the distribution of any property that either or both may own will be governed by the terms of this Agreement

..and insofar as the statutory law permits intend that any statutes that may apply to them by virtue of legislation will not apply to them.

I could read that all day for inspiration.  But now, try to wade through this incomprehensible rant by an unhinged mind which neither knows nor cares for the wonderful precision of language:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

With which writer should you build a secure matrimonial ladder to the stars?  I am sure the conclusion is obvious!

This variety of emotion can never belong to lifeless marks on paper but only to the mind bent on manipulating them, to communicate its otherwise intangible thought.  The thought and the language must arrive together, as does the spider’s web and his ability to create and manipulate it.   This synchronicity is all around us in nature, so that every living form can also be seen in the surroundings it creates, always organised and designed in a specific and creative manner.  The mythical vampire who cannot be seen in a mirror reverses the intuitively understood fact that the normal mind reflects itself in every medium it touches.  This tendency is so automatic and immune to fakery, that its opposite is not a misleading impression, but no impression at all.

Kirby often recycled classic film ideas and wrapped his own plots around them: note changes in layout and character size, to make the design more dramatic and easier to read on the newsstand

Take formless patriotism, requiring a symbol designed by creative intelligence – from an individual who feels patriotism in themself.  Divinity likewise requires expression in a symbol of some kind – the variance in forms is to be expected: the consistency being in the tendencies they symbolise.  Emotions in the viewer are thus generated or stimulated by the more powerful original ones within the creator.

"I tried to make my characters relate to the human condition. The Hulk, I feel, is someone who is inside all of us... the ability to transcend our own limitations when the need arises. I made Captain America very patriotic... patriotism is a feeling that runs very deep. I feel that the deeper the appeal of a character, the larger the audience it will gather."

A persuasive sense of reality – not a scientific sense, but a symbolic one – arises in the mythical symbols of beings possessed of some definite aim creating energetic forms and thereby imbuing meaning within an otherwise formless and meaningless material.  The nature of the creating energy is encoded within the form itself.  Thus the concept of symbolism is both explained, and put to use.

This is certainly the active principle in the life of Jack Kirby: armed with nothing more than a pencil and paper he created his own symbolic language.  When we compare these to the first crude carvings made tens of thousands of years ago, we are seeing evolution, and its form and direction has always been dictated by men of genius.

After being forced to abandon his own idea for the purposes of sales, Kirby quit Marvel and went to rival DC, where he began by illustrating the death of his previous pantheon of Gods including Thor, who is seen at mid left

“You’re born with a soul–God wants you to do something with it, not give it away.  Nobody has the right to tell you what you should do with it.”

“What I try to say is that you’ve been given a life, and you have to live that life. I couldn’t live it for you.. and I can’t die for you either.. when it’s time for you to die, you’re the one that has to go, not me.“  (1989 discussion with a fan at conference).

“They were the first gods in comics, and so I began thinking along those lines. I began to ask: everybody else, other societies, all had their gods, but what were ours? What was the state of our society, and where were our mythic figures?  I’m a guy who lives with many questions.. because I was never able to resolve them.”

“I try to ask what’s out there, and I can’t resolve that.. I don’t know if anybody can. I sure would like to hear the answers.. to know the ultimate answer, and I find that search entertaining.  You know, if my life was to end tomorrow, I would be satisfied.. I’d have to say the questions have been teriffic.”

Kirby eventually developed his idea of New Gods who each had their own character, purpose, and tragedy. Izaya (perhaps a mutation of Israel) was forced to exchange his newborn son, to keep peace between planets.  His inheritance became The Source, a place where the wisdom of the old gods was expressed in revelations, which men were free to follow or discard, forming the principle of life.

Kirby's symbol for the nature of revelation.

He cheerfully worked at fever pitch and never missed a single deadline in more than forty years.  Always pushed for time and money, he once tried to cut back by using cheap pulp paper after which Mike Royer, his inker at the time, despaired of being able to keep up with him, as he had to actually iron the pages to stop them from curling during inking.  He rang Kirby in a panic.  “This new paper you’re using is terrible – it’s curling up as soon as I put ink on it,” he complained.  Kirby just laughed, “well, I didn’t have any problem drawing on it!”

While his imagination searched for the possibilities in our universe, his intellect tried to define man’s relation to it.  He reasoned that Earth was a tiny speck of matter in an infinitely large creation, and that forces far beyond our control would not concern themselves with our fate.  Despite this, he emphasised the mind of man as the key to all questions, perhaps even the question of immortality itself.

The gods in his work seemed to emerge from somewhere beyond his conscious thought, and the strangeness puzzled him at times; when asked about it at various conferences he would try to rationalise it as best as he could.  “I must have a hangup of some kind.  I’m prone to my own environment and express it in terms of gods.  Maybe I was oriented to some sort ofm ythology.  I speak in terms of mythology.  I’m communicating in my own way.”  This paradoxical state in which created ideas seem to have bypassed the intellect altogether has been experienced by many artists, including Neil Diamond, who sought to understand why his output would lean towards a mysticism not arrived at step by step but already fully formed in words and music.

A terrified pilot trying to evade capture behind enemy lines fails to realise he has already died, but finds relief at the warm and understanding nature of the next world, in this moving story story from 1970

Gopi Krishna’s poetry, the content of which often took him by surprise, would appear in his mind in rhyming couplets, he said, multiplying like snowflakes which grew bigger and bigger, written down as fast as was humanly possible, but many of which would necessarily be lost as the brain struggled to keep up.  The end result was a kind of revelation with messages he could never have arrived at consciously.  This same idea appears in religious literature throughout history, meaning that the creative mind shares attributes attributed to one ni touch with a higher form of intelligence.

The experiences of Ayrton Senna in which he felt an overwhelming and greater intelligence than his controlling his car at dangerous speeds, or the despair of Russian painter Isaak Levitan felt at his inability to completely capture on canvas the depth of mystical feelings within, and the puzzling appearance of creatively perfect ideas in dreams, such as the complete melody for Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” have all been well documented.  These observations indicate the creative brain is liable to influences beyond its normal capacity, giving birth to ideas which arrive already surrounded by mystery.

In one memorable Kirby story, Thor supervises the release of warlike Trolls captured in Asgard.  The goddess Sif protests they should all be slain for the evil they had planned.  He replies, “Thou hast no inkling how precious is all life, even such as theirs.”   Jack believed in life because he believed in himself, and people believed in his work because he, in turn, believed in them.  He once claimed that you could take any four-issue story from his comics and turn them into a film, as he had already worked out the best pace at which the arcs of plot and elements should be interwoven, and the angles which would make each scene the most interesting.

Although he hardly profited from them in his lifetime, and his family still maintains a legal battle to gain some share of their continuing turnover, his ideas have become a billion dollar film and entertainment industry, and his own life was a testament to the redeeming power of faith creativity: that a boy from the slums could raise himself to a world famous name through his talent alone.

Farewell, Jack Kirby!

God, by Jack Kirby. And Jack Kirby.. by God