Articles from RayPeat.com

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Table of ContentsAcademic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals, & science............................................4 Adaptive substance, creative regeneration: Mainstream science, repression, and creativity....16 Aging, estrogen, and progesterone.............................................................................................32 Aging Eyes, Infant Eyes, and Excitable Tissues.........................................................................46 Altitude and Mortality................................................................................................................62 The problem of Alzheimer's disease as a clue to immortality - Part 1........................................76 The problem of Alzheimer's disease as a clue to immortality - Part 2.......................................90 Aspirin, brain, and cancer.........................................................................................................110 Autonomic systems...................................................................................................................123 Bleeding, clotting, cancer..........................................................................................................148 Blocking Tissue Destruction.....................................................................................................160 Breast Cancer.............................................................................................................................176 BSE - mad cow - scrapie, etc.: Stimulated amyloid degeneration and the toxic fats...............188 Caffeine: A vitamin-like nutrient, or adaptogen......................................................................204 Calcium and Disease: Hypertension, organ calcification, & shock, vs. respiratory energy.....215 Coconut Oil................................................................................................................................241 Diabetes, scleroderma, oils and hormones..............................................................................250 Eclampsia in the Real Organism: A Paradigm of General Distress.........................................263 Epilepsy and Progesterone........................................................................................................271 Estriol, DES, DDT, etc..............................................................................................................282 Estrogen and brain aging in men and women: Depression, energy, stress.............................291 Estrogen and Osteoporosis.......................................................................................................305 Estrogen, memory and heredity: Imprinting and the stress response.....................................311 Estrogen, progesterone, and cancer: Conflicts of interest in regulation and product promotion ...................................................................................................................................................324 Fats and degeneration..............................................................................................................349 Food-junk and some mystery ailments: Fatigue, Alzheimer's, Colitis, Immunodeficiency....364 Gelatin, stress, longevity...........................................................................................................379 Glycemia, starch, and sugar in context.....................................................................................391 The Great Fish Oil Experiment.................................................................................................413 How do you know? Students, patients, and discovery.............................................................425 Immunodeficiency, dioxins, stress, and the hormones............................................................436 Intelligence and metabolism....................................................................................................448 Intuitive knowledge and its development.................................................................................461 Iron's Dangers...........................................................................................................................470 Lactate vs. CO2 in wounds, sickness, and aging; the other approach to cancer......................479 Leakiness, aging, and cancer.....................................................................................................491 Membranes, plasma membranes, and surfaces.......................................................................498 Menopause and its causes.........................................................................................................507 Milk in context: allergies, ecology, and some myths................................................................512 Multiple sclerosis, protein, fats, and progesterone..................................................................522 Natural Estrogens.....................................................................................................................538 Oils in Context...........................................................................................................................553 Osteoporosis, harmful calcification, and nerve/muscle malfunctions....................................568

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Preventing and treating cancer with progesterone..................................................................579 The Progesterone Deceptions...................................................................................................598 Progesterone, not estrogen, is the coronary protection factor of women................................603 Progesterone Pregnenolone & DHEA - Three Youth-Associated Hormones...........................614 Progesterone Summaries..........................................................................................................619 RU486, Cancer, Estrogen, and Progesterone...........................................................................634 Salt, energy, metabolic rate, and longevity..............................................................................648 Serotonin, depression, and aggression: The problem of brain energy....................................660 Stem cells, cell culture, and culture: Issues in regeneration....................................................674 Suitable Fats, Unsuitable Fats: Issues in Nutrition.................................................................689 Thyroid: Therapies, Confusion, and Fraud..............................................................................700 Tissue-bound estrogen in aging...............................................................................................708 The transparency of life: Cataracts as a model of age-related disease.....................................723 Thyroid, insomnia, and the insanities: Commonalities in disease..........................................736 Tryptophan, serotonin, and aging............................................................................................754 TSH, temperature, pulse rate, and other indicators in hypothyroidism..................................770 Unsaturated fatty acids: Nutritionally essential, or toxic?.......................................................782 Unsaturated Vegetable Oils: Toxic...........................................................................................794 Vegetables, etc.Who Defines Food?......................................................................................804 Vitamin E: Estrogen antagonist, energy promoter, and anti-inflammatory............................812 Water: swelling, tension, pain, fatigue, aging..........................................................................826 William Blake as biological visionary: Can art instruct science?.............................................842

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Academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals, & scienceA few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of flexibly adaptive ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions. (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004). In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear. For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of mental maps, and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left. He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me. I thought this style of thinking might have something to do with the growing technological preference for digital, rather than analog, devices. The complexity and continuity of the real world is made to seem more precise and concrete by turning it into rules and numbers. Around the same time, I found that some people dream in vivid images, while others describe dreams as listening to someone tell a story. Several years later, a graduate student of language philosophy from MIT told me that I was just confused if I believed that I had mental images that I could use in thinking. His attitude was that language, in its forms and in the ways it could convey meaning, was governed by rules. He was part of an effort to define consciousness in terms of rules that could be manipulated formally. This was just a new variation on the doctrine of an ideal language that has concerned many philosophers since Leibniz, but now its main use is to convince people that cultural conventions and authority are rooted in the nature of our minds, rather than in particular things that people experience and the ways in which they are treated. George Orwell, whose novels showed some of the ways language is used to control people, believed that language should be like a clear window between minds, but knew that it was habitually used to distort, mislead, 4

and control. Scientific and medical practices often follow the authority of culture and indoctrination, instead of intelligently confronting the meaning of the evidence, the way chimpanzees are able to do. Not so many years ago, people believed that traits were determined by genes, and that the development of an organism was the result of--was caused by--the sequential expression of genes in the nucleus of the fertilized egg. When B.F. Skinner in the 1970s said a gestating baby isn't influenced by what happens to its mother, he was expressing a deeply rooted bio-medical dogma. Physicians insisted that a baby couldn't be harmed by its mother's malnutrition, as long as she lived to give birth. People could be quite vicious when their dogma was challenged, but their actions were systematically vicious when they weren't challenged. An ovum doesn't just grow from an oocyte according to instructions in its genes, it is constructed, with surrounding nurse cells adding substances to its cytoplasm. Analogously, the fertilized egg doesn't just grow into a human being, it is constructed, by interactions with the mother's physiology. At birth, the environment continues to influence the ways in which cells develop and interact with each other. Even during adulthood, the ways in which our cells--in the brain, immune system, and other organs--develop and interact are shaped by the environment. When Skinner was writing, many biologists still believed that each synapse of a nerve was directed by a gene, and couldn't be influenced by experience. Our brain grows into our culture, and the culture lives in our nervous system. If a person grows up without hearing people speak, he will have grown a special kind of brain, making it difficult to learn to speak. (Genie, wolf boy, Kaspar Hauser, for example.) When we ask a question and find an answer, we are changed. Thinking with learning is a developmental process. But many people learn at an early age not to question. This changes the nature of subsequent learning and brain development. In the 1960s, many textbooks were published that claimed to use scientific language theory to improve the instruction of English, from grade school level to college level. They didn't work, and at the time they were being published they appeared fraudulent to people who didn't subscribe to the incipient cults of Generative Grammar and Artificial Intelligence that later developed into Cognitive Science. At the time that Artificial Intelligence was coming to the attention of investors and academicians, Neodarwinism had already cleansed the university biology departments of its opponents who advocated more holistic views, and the idea of a brain that was hard-wired according to genetic instructions had entered both neurology and psychology. The field concept was disappearing from developmental biology, as Gestalt psychology was disappearing from the universities and journals. 5

In the humanities and social sciences, a fad appeared in the 1960s, in which a theory of grammar advocated by Noam Chomsky of MIT was said to explain human thinking and behavior, and specialists in anthropology, psychology, literature, rhetoric, sociology, and other academic fields, claimed that it informed their work in an essential way. The rapid spread of a doctrine for which there was essentially no evidence suggests that it was filling a need for many people in our culture. This doctrine was filling some of the gaps left by the failure of genetic determinism that was starting to be recognized. It gave new support to the doctrine of inborn capacities and limitations, in which formulaic indoctrination can be justified by the brain's natural structure. Chomsky was committed to an idealistic, rationalist doctrine of innate ideas, and to argue for that doctrine, which held that there are transcendent forms (or deep structures) that control mind, he disposed of the opposing empiricist approach to mind by claiming that children simply learn language so rapidly that it would be impossible to explain on the basis of learning from experience. Separating vocabulary from grammar, he acknowledged that each language is different, and can be learned as easily by the children of immigrants of different ethnicity as by children whose ancestors spoke it, but that all humans have a genetically encoded universal grammar, a language organ. It is this inborn grammar that allows children to learn what he said would be inconceivable to learn so quickly from experience. The abstract, computational nature of the inborn functions of the language organ would make a nice program for a translating machine, and the absence of such a useful program, after more than 50 years of trying to devise one, argues against the possibility of such a thing. Since Plato's time, some people have believed that, behind the changing irregularities of real languages, there is a timeless, context-free language. In the late 1950s, when I was studying language and the ideal languages of the philosophers, I realized that George Santayana was right when he pointed out that each time an artificial language is used by real people in real situations, it is altered by the experience that accrues to each component, from the context in which it is used. If real language were the model for mathematics, then the values of numbers would change a little with every calculation. Adults are usually slower than children at learning a new language, but they can make the process much quicker by memorizing paradigms. With those models, they can begin speaking intelligible sentences when they know only a few words. These basics of grammar are often outlined in just a few pages, but listing irregularities and exceptions can become very detailed and complex. The grammar that children use isn't as subtle as the grammar some adults use, and college freshmen are seldom masters of the grammar of their native language. There have been various studies that have investigated the number of 6

words understood by children at different ages. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute website says that By age 4 a person probably knows 5,600 words By age 5 a person probably knows 9,600 words By age 6 a person probably knows 14,700 words By age 7 a person probably knows 21,200 words By age 8 a person probably knows 26,300 words By age 9 a person probably knows 29,300 words By age 10 a person probably knows 34,300 words By age 20 a college sophomore probably knows 120,000 words A dictionary with 14,000 words is a substantial book. The grammar used by a 6 year old person isn't very complex, because at that age a person isn't likely to know all of the subtleties of their language. There is no reason to assume that a mind that can learn thousands of words and concepts in a year can't learn the grammatical patterns of a language--a much smaller number of patterns and relationships--in a few years. Idioms and clichs are clusters of words that are frequently used together in the same pattern to express a stereotyped meaning. There are thousands of them in English, and some of them have existed for centuries, while others are regional and generational. It is possible to speak or write almost completely in clichs, and they are such an important part of language that their acquisition along with the basic vocabulary deserves more attention than linguists have given it. A mind that can learn so many clichs can certainly learn the relatively few stereotypical rules of phrasing that make up the grammar of a language. In fact, a grammar in some ways resembles a complex clich. Recognition of patterns, first of things that are present, then of meaningful sequences, is what we call awareness or consciousness. There is biological evidence, from the level of single cells through many types of organism, both plant and animal, that pattern recognition is a basic biological function. An organism that isn't oriented in space and time isn't an adapted, adapting, organism. Environments change, and the organization of life necessarily has some flexibility. A traveling bird or dog can see a pattern once, and later, going in the opposite direction, can recognize and find specific places and objects. An ant or bee can see a pattern once, and communicate it to others. If dogs and birds lived in colonies or cities, as bees and ants do, and carried food home from remote locations, they might have a need to communicate their knowledge. The fact that birds and dogs use their vocal organs and brains to communicate in ways that people have seldom cared to study doesn't imply that their brains differ radically from human 7

brains in lacking a language organ. People whose ideology says that animals use instinct rather than intelligence, and that they lack the language instinct, refuse to perceive animals that are demonstrating their ability to generalize or to understand language. Organisms have genes, so a person could say that pattern recognition is genetically determined, but it would be a foolish and empty thing to say. (Nevertheless, people do say it.) The people who believe that there are genes for grammar believe that these mind-controlling genes give us the ability to generalize, and therefore say that animals aren't able to generalize, though their instinctive behaviors might sometimes seem to involve generalization. In language, patterns are represented symbolically by patterned sounds, and some of those symbolically represented patterns are made up of other patterns. Different languages have different ways of representing different kinds of patterns. Things are recognizable when they are far or near, moving or still, bright or dark, or upside down, because the recognition of a pattern is an integration involving both spatial and temporal components. The recognition of an object involves both generalization and concreteness. Things that are very complex are likely to take longer to recognize, but the nature of any pattern is that it is a complex of parts and properties. A name for a thing is a name for a pattern, a set of relationships. The method of naming or identifying a relationship can make use of any way of patterning sound that can be recognized as making distinctions. Concepts and grammar aren't separable things, semantics and syntax are just aspects of a particular language's way of handling meaning. As a child interacts with more and more things, and learns things about them, the patterns of familiar things are compared to the patterns of new things, and differences and similarities are noticed and used to understand relationships. The comparison of patterns is a process of making analogies, or metaphors. Similarities perceived become generalizations, and distinctions allow things to be grouped into categories. When things are explored analogically, the exploration may first identify objects, and then explore the factors that make up the larger pattern that was first identified, in a kind of analysis, but this analysis is a sort of expansion inward, in which the discovered complexity has the extra meaning of the larger context in which it is found. When something new is noticed, it excites the brain, and causes attention to be focused, in the orienting reflex. The various senses participate in examining the thing, in a physiological way of asking a question. Perception of new patterns and the formation of generalizations expands 8

the ways in which questions are asked. When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions. A few patterns, formulated in language, are substituted for the processes of exploration through metaphorical thinking. In the first stages of learning, the process is expansive and metaphorical. If a question is closed by an answer in the form of a rule that must be followed, subsequent learning can only be analytical and deductive. Learning of this sort is always a system of closed compartments, though one system might occasionally be exchanged for another, in a conversion experience. The exploratory analogical mind is able to form broad generalizations and to make deductions from those, but the validity of the generalization is always in a process of being tested. Both the deduction and the generalization are constantly open to revision in accordance with the available evidence. If there were infallible authorities who set down general rules, language and knowledge could be idealized and made mathematically precise. In their absence, intelligence is necessary, but the authorities who would be infallible devise ways to confine and control intelligence, so that, with the mastery of a language, the growth of intelligence usually stops. In the 1940s and '50s, W.J.J. Gordon organized a group called Synectics, to investigate the creative process, and to devise ways to teach people to solve problems effectively. It involved several methods for helping people to think analogically and metaphorically, and to avoid stereotyped interpretations. It was a way of teaching people to recover the style of thinking of young children, or of chimps, or other intelligent animals. When the acquisition of language is burdened by the acceptance of clichs, producing the conventionalism mentioned by Horner and Whiten, with the substitution of deductive reasoning for metaphoricalanalogical thinking, the natural pleasures of mental exploration and creation are lost, and a new kind of personality and character has come into existence. Bob Altemeyer spent his career studying the authoritarian personality, and has identified its defining traits as conventionalism, submission to authority, and aggression, as sanctioned by the authorities. His last book, The Authoritarians (2006) is available on the internet. Altemeyer found that people who scored high on his scale of authoritarianism tended to have faulty reasoning, with compartmentalized thinking, making it possible to hold contradictory 9

beliefs, and to be dogmatic, hypocritical, and hostile. Since he is looking at a spectrum, focusing on differences, I think he is likely to have underestimated the degree to which these traits exist in the mainstream, and in groups such as scientists, that have a professional commitment to clear reasoning and objectivity. With careful training, and in a culture that doesn't value creative metaphorical thinking, authoritarianism might be a preferred trait. Konrad Lorenz (who with Niko Tinbergen got the Nobel Prize in 1973) believed that specific innate structures explained animal communication, and that natural selection had created those structures. Chomsky, who said that our genes create an innate Language Acquisition Device, distanced himself slightly from Lorenz's view by saying that it wasn't certain that natural selection was responsible for it. However, despite slightly different names for the hypothetical innate devices, their views were extremely similar. Both Lorenz and Chomsky, and their doctrine of innate rule-based consciousness, have been popular and influential among university professors. When Lorenz wrote a book on degeneration, which was little more than a revised version of the articles he had written for the Nazi party's Office for Race Policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, advocating the extermination of racial mongrels such as jews and gypsies, most biologists in the US praised it. Lorenz identified National Socialism with evolution as an agent of racial purification. His lifelong beliefs and activities--the loyalty to a strong leader, advocating the killing of the weak--identified Lorenz as an extreme authoritarian. When a famous professor went on a lecture tour popularizing and affirming the scientific truth and importance of those publications, and asserting that all human actions and knowledge, language, work, art, and belief, are specified and determined by genes, he and his audience (which, at the University of Oregon, included members of the National Academy of Sciences and Jewish professors who had been refugees from Nazism, who listened approvingly) were outraged when a student mentioned the Nazi origin and intention of the original publications. They said you can't say that a man's work has anything to do with his life and political beliefs, but in fact the lecturer had just finished saying that everything a person does is integral to that person's deepest nature, just as Lorenz said that a goose with a pot belly and odd beak, or a person with non-nordic physical features and behavior and cultural preferences-should be eliminated for the improvement of the species. Not a single professor in the audience questioned the science that had justified Hitler's racial policies, and some of them showed great hostility toward the critic. In the 1960s, a professor compared graduate students' scores on the Miller Analogies Test, which is a widely used test of analogical thinking

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ability, to their academic grades. She found that the students who scored close to the average on the test had the highest grades and the greatest academic success, and those who deviated the most from the average on that test, in either direction, had the worst academic grades. If the ability to think analogically is inversely associated with authoritarianism, then her results would indicate that graduate schools select for authoritarianism. (If not, then they simply select for mediocrity.) Although Bob Altemeyer's scale mainly identified right-wing, conservative authoritarians, he indicated that there could be left-wing authoritarians, too. Noam Chomsky is identified with left-wing political views, but his views of genetic determinism and a nativist view of language learning, and his anti-empiricist identification of himself as a philosophical Rationalist, have a great correspondence to the authoritarian character. The nativist rule-based nature of Cognitive Science is just the modern form of an authoritarian tradition that has been influential since Plato's time. The first thing a person is likely to notice when looking at Chomsky's work in linguistics is that he offers no evidence to support his extreme assertions. In fact, the main role evidence plays in his basic scheme is negative, that is, his doctrine of Poverty of the Stimulus asserts that children aren't exposed to enough examples of language for them to be able to learn grammar--therefore, grammar must be inborn. I think Chomsky discovered long ago that the people around him were sufficiently authoritarian to accept assertions without evidence if they were presented in a form that looked complexly technical. Several people have published their correspondence with him, showing him to be authoritarian and arrogant, even rude and insulting, if the person questioned his handling of evidence, or the lack of evidence. For example, people have argued with him about the JFK assassination, US policy in the Vietnam war, the HIV-AIDS issue, and the 9/11 investigation. In each case, he accepts the official position of the government, and insults those who question, for example, the adequacy of the Warren Commission report, or who believe that the pharmaceutical industry would manipulate the evidence regarding AIDS, or who doubt the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission investigation. He says that investigation of such issues is diverting people from serious issues, as if those aren't serious issues. And even if it's true that the government was involved in the 9/11 terrorism, who cares? I mean, it doesn't have any significance. I mean it's a little bit like the huge amount of energy that's put out on trying to figure out who killed John F. Kennedy. I mean, who knows, and who caresplenty of people get killed all the time. Why does it matter that one of them happens to be John F. Kennedy?" "If there was some reason to believe that there was a high level

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conspiracy" in the JFK assassination, "it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is just overwhelming." "And after that it's just a matter of, uh, if it's a jealous husband or the mafia or someone else, what difference does it make?" "It's just taking energy away from serious issues onto ones that don't matter. And I think the same is true here," regarding the events of 9/11. These reactions seem especially significant, considering his reputation as America's leading dissenter. The speed with which Chomskyism spread through universities in the US in the 1960s convinced me that I was right in viewing the instruction of the humanities and social sciences as indoctrination, rather than objective treatment of knowledge. The reception of the authoritarian ideas of Lorenz and his apologists in biology departments offered me a new perspective on the motivations involved in the uniformity of the orthodox views of biology and medicine. In being introduced into a profession, any lingering tendency toward analogical-metaphoric thinking is suppressed. I have known perceptive, imaginative people who, after a year or two in medical school, had become rigid rule-followers. One of the perennial questions people have asked when they learn of the suppression of a therapy, is if the doctors are doing it to defend the profitable old methods, how can they refuse to use the better method even for themselves and their own family? The answer seems to be that their minds have been radically affected by their vocational training. For many years, cancer and inflammation have been known to be closely associated, even to be aspects of a single process. This was obvious to analog minded people, but seemed utterly improbable to the essentialist mentality, because of the indoctrination that inflammation is a good thing, that couldn't coexist with a bad thing like cancer. The philosophy of language might seem remote from politics and practical problems, but Kings and advertisers have understood that words and ideas are powerfully influential in maintaining relationships of power. Theories of mind and language that justify arbitrary power, power that can't justify itself in terms of evidence, are more dangerous than merely mistaken scientific theories, because any theory that bases its arguments on evidence is capable of being disproved. In the middle ages, the Divine Right of Kings was derived from certain kinds of theological reasoning. It has been replaced by newer ideologies, based on deductions from beliefs about the nature of mind and matter, words and genes, Computational Grammar, or numbers and quantized energy, but behind the ideology is the reality of the authoritarian personality. I think if we understand more about the nature of language and its acquisition we will have a clearer picture of what is happening in our 12

cultures, especially in the culture of science.REFERENCES New Yorker, April 16, 2007, The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? by John Colapinto. Dan Everett believes that Pirah undermines Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar. Language & Communication Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2003, Pages 1-43. Remarks on the origins of morphophonemics in American structuralist linguistics, E. F. K. Koerner. Chomsky has led the public to believe that he originated things which he borrowed from earlier linguists. Science. 2008 Feb 1;319(5863):569; author reply 569. Comparing social skills of children and apes. De Waal FB, Boesch C, Horner V, Whiten A. Letter Curr Biol. 2007 Jun 19;17(12):1038-43. Epub 2007 Jun 7. Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups. Whiten A, Spiteri A, Horner V, Bonnie KE, Lambeth SP, Schapiro SJ, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution and Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. A.whiten@st-andrews.ac.uk Field reports provide increasing evidence for local behavioral traditions among fish, birds, and mammals. These findings are significant for evolutionary biology because social learning affords faster adaptation than genetic change and has generated new (cultural) forms of evolution. Orangutan and chimpanzee field studies suggest that like humans, these apes are distinctive among animals in each exhibiting over 30 local traditions. However, direct evidence is lacking in apes and, with the exception of vocal dialects, in animals generally for the intergroup transmission that would allow innovations to spread widely and become evolutionarily significant phenomena. Here, we provide robust experimental evidence that alternative foraging techniques seeded in different groups of chimpanzees spread differentially not only within groups but serially across two further groups with substantial fidelity. Combining these results with those from recent social-diffusion studies in two larger groups offers the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman species can sustain unique local cultures, each constituted by multiple traditions. The convergence of these results with those from the wild implies a richness in chimpanzees' capacity for culture, a richness that parsimony suggests was shared with our common ancestor. J Comp Psychol. 2007 Feb;121(1):12-21. Learning from others' mistakes? limits on understanding a trap-tube task by young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK. Vhorner@rmy.emory.edu A trap-tube task was used to determine whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens) who observed a model's errors and successes could master the task in fewer trials than those who saw only successes. Two- to 7-year-old chimpanzees and 3- to 4-year-old children did not benefit from observing errors and found the task difficult. Two of the 6 chimpanzees developed a successful anticipatory strategy but showed no evidence of representing the core causal relations involved in trapping. Three- to 4-year-old children showed a similar limitation and tended to copy the actions of the demonstrator, irrespective of their causal relevance. Five- to 6-year-old children were able to master the task but did not appear to be influenced by social learning or benefit from observing errors. Proc Biol Sci. 2007 Feb 7;274(1608):367-72. Spread of arbitrary conventions among chimpanzees: a controlled experiment. Bonnie KE, Horner V, Whiten A, de Waal FB. Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Atlanta, GA 30329, USA. Kebonni@emory.edu Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have a rich cultural repertoire--traditions common in some communities are not present in others. The majority of reports describe functional, material traditions, such as tool use. Arbitrary conventions have received far less attention. In the same way that observations of material culture in wild apes led to experiments to confirm social transmission and identify underlying learning mechanisms, experiments investigating how arbitrary habits or conventions arise and spread within a group are also required. The few relevant experimental studies reported thus far have relied on cross-species (i.e. human-ape) interaction offering limited ecological validity, and no study has successfully generated a tradition not involving tool use in an established group. We seeded one of two rewarded alternative endpoints to a complex sequence of behaviour in each of two chimpanzee groups. Each sequence spread in the group in which it was seeded, with many individuals unambiguously adopting the sequence demonstrated by a group member. In one group, the

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alternative sequence was discovered by a low ranking female, but was not learned by others. Since the action-sequences lacked meaning before the experiment and had no logical connection with reward, chimpanzees must have extracted both the form and benefits of these sequences through observation of others. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Sep 12;103(37):13878-83. Faithful replication of foraging techniques along cultural transmission chains by chimpanzees and children. Horner V, Whiten A, Flynn E, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, United Kingdom. Observational studies of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have revealed population-specific differences in behavior, thought to represent cultural variation. Field studies have also reported behaviors indicative of cultural learning, such as close observation of adult skills by infants, and the use of similar foraging techniques within a population over many generations. Although experimental studies have shown that chimpanzees are able to learn complex behaviors by observation, it is unclear how closely these studies simulate the learning environment found in the wild. In the present study we have used a diffusion chain paradigm, whereby a behavior is passed from one individual to the next in a linear sequence in an attempt to simulate intergenerational transmission of a foraging skill. Using a powerful three-group, two-action methodology, we found that alternative methods used to obtain food from a foraging device ("lift door" versus "slide door") were accurately transmitted along two chains of six and five chimpanzees, respectively, such that the last chimpanzee in the chain used the same method as the original trained model. The fidelity of transmission within each chain is remarkable given that several individuals in the no-model control group were able to discover either method by individual exploration. A comparative study with human children revealed similar results. This study is the first to experimentally demonstrate the linear transmission of alternative foraging techniques by non-human primates. Our results show that chimpanzees have a capacity to sustain local traditions across multiple simulated generations. Nature. 2005 Sep 29;437(7059):737-40. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees. Whiten A, Horner V, de Waal FB. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JP, UK. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk Rich circumstantial evidence suggests that the extensive behavioural diversity recorded in wild great apes reflects a complexity of cultural variation unmatched by species other than our own. However, the capacity for cultural transmission assumed by this interpretation has remained difficult to test rigorously in the field, where the scope for controlled experimentation is limited. Here we show that experimentally introduced technologies will spread within different ape communities. Unobserved by group mates, we first trained a high-ranking female from each of two groups of captive chimpanzees to adopt one of two different tool-use techniques for obtaining food from the same 'Pan-pipe' apparatus, then reintroduced each female to her respective group. All but two of 32 chimpanzees mastered the new technique under the influence of their local expert, whereas none did so in a third population lacking an expert. Most chimpanzees adopted the method seeded in their group, and these traditions continued to diverge over time. A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture. Anim Cogn. 2005 Jul;8(3):164-81. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Horner V, Whiten A. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU, UK. Vkh1@st-andrews.ac.uk This study explored whether the tendency of chimpanzees and children to use emulation or imitation to solve a tool-using task was a response to the availability of causal information. Young wild-born chimpanzees from an African sanctuary and 3- to 4-year-old children observed a human demonstrator use a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box. The demonstration involved both causally relevant and irrelevant actions, and the box was presented in each of two conditions: opaque and clear. In the opaque condition, causal information about the effect of the tool inside the box was not available, and hence it was impossible to differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant parts of the demonstration. However, in the clear condition causal information was available, and subjects could potentially determine which actions were necessary. When chimpanzees were presented with the opaque box, they reproduced both the relevant and irrelevant actions, thus imitating the overall structure of the task. When the box was presented in the clear condition they instead ignored the irrelevant actions in favour of a more efficient, emulative technique. These results suggest that emulation is the favoured strategy of chimpanzees when sufficient causal information is available. However, if such information is not available, chimpanzees are prone to employ

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a more comprehensive copy of an observed action. In contrast to the chimpanzees, children employed imitation to solve the task in both conditions, at the expense of efficiency. We suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions, perhaps combined with a differential focus on the results, actions and goals of the demonstrator. Learn Behav. 2004 Feb;32(1):36-52. How do apes ape? Whiten A, Horner V, Litchfield CA, Marshall-Pescini S. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, Scottish Primate Research Group, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. A.whiten@st-and.ac.uk In the wake of telling critiques of the foundations on which earlier conclusions were based, the last 15 years have witnessed a renaissance in the study of social learning in apes. As a result, we are able to review 31 experimental studies from this period in which social learning in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans has been investigated. The principal question framed at the beginning of this era, Do apes ape? has been answered in the affirmative, at least in certain conditions. The more interesting question now is, thus, How do apes ape? Answering this question has engendered richer taxonomies of the range of social-learning processes at work and new methodologies to uncover them. Together, these studies suggest that apes ape by employing a portfolio of alternative social-learning processes in flexibly adaptive ways, in conjunction with nonsocial learning. We conclude by sketching the kind of decision tree that appears to underlie the deployment of these alternatives. http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/vocabula.html

Ray Peat Ph.D. 2009. All Rights Reserved. www.RayPeat.com

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Adaptive substance, creative regeneration: Mainstream science, repression, and creativity"I intend to show you how neo-Darwinism has been invalidated within science itself, as an explanation of how life on earth has evolved and is evolving. It is nevertheless still perpetrated by the academic establishment, if only because it serves so well to promote genetic engineering, a technology that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. Furthermore, neoDarwinism reinforces a worldview that undermines all moral values and prevents us from the necessary shift to holistic, ecological sciences that can truly regenerate the earth and revitalize the human spirit." Mae-Wan Ho http://www.isis.org.uk/paris.php =========================== More than 50 years have been wasted in one of the most important and fundamental branches of science and medicine, for reasons that are highly ideological and political. Rather than studying the regeneration of organs and tissues, and recognizing its obvious importance in healing as well as in understanding the nature of life, much of the last century was devoted to the defamation of the researchers who were making real process in the field. Despite many demonstrations that regeneration can occur in adult mammals, students were taught that it happens only in lower vertebrates. I think it's important to look closely at the ideology responsible for this great loss. Warburg and Szent-Gyorgyi, in thinking about cancer, emphasized that growth is the primordial function of all cells, and that the differentiated functions of complex organisms involve restraints of that primitive function, imposed by a system that has developed through time. Seen with this orientation, regeneration is the spontaneous result of the disappearance of restraint. The reproduction of a whole plant from a twig, or clone, was a process known for thousands of years. Any part of the plant contains the information needed for making a whole plant. More than thirty years ago, cells from a tumor were added to the cells of a normal embryo, and the animal that matured from the embryo-tumor mix was normal, and had traits of both lineages, showing that the tumor cells had retained the genetic information of a complete healthy organism, and just needed a different environment in which to realize their full potential. One of the currents of medical thinking, from classical times through Paracelsus to homeopathy and naturopathy, has been a confidence in the capacity of the organism to heal itself. But "modern" medicine has arrogated to itself the "healing power," with terrible results, mitigated 16

only by their occasional reluctant acceptance of fragments of sane organismic thinking, such as recognizing the importance of nutrition, or of keeping sewage out of the drinking water. Research into methods to support the organism's natural restorative powers has been ridiculed and suppressed. We are immersed in the propaganda of modern medicine, and part of that propaganda involves the confabulation of a history of science that supports their practice and their ideology. The real history of science won't be found in science textbooks. "I intend to show you how neo-Darwinism has been invalidated within science itself, as an explanation of how life on earth has evolved and is evolving. It is nevertheless still perpetrated by the academic establishment, if only because it serves so well to promote genetic engineering, a technology that has the potential to destroy all life on earth. Furthermore, neo-Darwinism reinforces a worldview that undermines all moral values and prevents us from the necessary shift to holistic, ecological sciences that can truly regenerate the earth and revitalize the human spirit." Mae-Wan Ho http://www.isis.org.uk/paris.php Mainstream medical treatments are based on some fundamentally absurd scientific ideas. The advent of experimental animal cloning and the industrialization of genetic engineering have undercut the most important biological doctrines of the 20th century, but the processes of critical thinking haven't made headway against most of the traditional medical stereotypes. Cloning shows that all cells are potential "stem cells," but this fact co-exists with the Hayflick doctrine, that says, essentially, that no cell is a stem cell. The ideology of culturally significant "intellectuals"--scientists, professors, neurobiologists, linguists, philosophers, oncologists, geneticists--in the US is deeply influenced by the dualism and mechanistic materialism of Rene DesCartes. The denial that animals can think or understand language, the claim that babies or animals don't feel pain, or that heart cells and brain cells can't divide, or that somatic cells lack the genetic capacity to be cloned, or that they are intrinsically mortal, limited to a maximum of 50 cell divisions-these absurdities of 20th century biology and medicine all resulted from an abject commitment to the mechanistic doctrine of matter and life promoted or invented by DesCartes. I doubt that DesCartes really invented anything, because, by the evidence of his writing, he wasn't an intelligent man, but he placed himself politically in such a way that his arguments were acceptable to many influential people, and they continue to be acceptable to authoritarian and elitist factions even today. In the 16th and 17th century the cultures of England, Holland, and France 17

were increasingly dominated by business interests. People who had money to invest wanted to see the world as an orderly, predictable place, and they found that many of the ideas of the ancient Greeks were useful. Mathematics was needed to calculate interest rates, insurance premiums, and, for the military, the trajectories of missiles. In an orderly world, allowance for a little random variation helped to save the perfection of the general rule. In this environment, theological thinking began retrenching its doctrine, to make it more acceptable to the increasingly powerful commercial people. The clockwork universe of DesCartes' time, in which a perfect world that operated according to perfect natural laws had been divinely created, gradually became theologically acceptable during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century, the Deists were the most famous embodiment of the idea, and then in the 19th century their place was taken by the Catastrophists, who claimed that the fossils which seemed to show evolutionary change of species actually represented species that had been created along with those now existing, but that had been destroyed by catastrophes, such as Noah's flood. By the end of the 19th century, the president of an American university recognized that theological compromises could prevent his undergraduates from rejecting religion entirely, and forbade sermons against evolution. There were many biologists who insisted that evolution of new species was analogous to the development of an individual, and that both revealed an adaptive capacity of the living substance. In this view, the adaptive growth of an individual in a new environment revealed novel solutions to new problems, and showed an innate inventiveness and intelligence in the process of growth and adaptation. The appearance of new species was thought to represent the same sorts of adaptive processes. Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) was an evolutionist of this sort, but because of political and theological pressure, he kept relatively quiet about his beliefs. There was an underground culture, in which an evolutionary view of the world was accepted, but these views were seldom published, because of increasingly stringent censorship. Because of censorship, poetry, letters, and diaries, rather than academic and scholarly works, give us the true picture of 18th century and early 19th century scientific culture. The scientists who wanted their work to be acceptable to those in power found ways to work with the Cartesian mechanical view of the world, building on the Deists' compromise, which had succeeded in removing the supernatural from nature. As the fossil evidence of evolution became inescapable, around the time of Charles Darwin's work, those who wanted to bring evolution into the mainstream of culture found that the Catastrophism of the creationists could be adapted to their purposes, with only slight modification. 18

The doctrine of Thomas Malthus, who argued that war, famine, and disease were beneficial for those who survived, by decreasing the competition for limited resources, became a near equivalent to the catastrophic floods that the creationists had invoked to explain the geological record that contained evidence of many extinct animals. The doctrine of Malthus, like that of the Catastrophists, made loss, deletion, and destruction into a central device for explaining the history of the world. Both of the Darwins had accepted the idea that many biological changes were adaptive, rather than random, but the new practical compromise doctrine introduced the idea that changes were just "random variations." The essentially mechanical nature of the world was preserved, because "chance" occurrences could be dealt with, and didn't involve anything supernatural. The function of the environment wasn't to add anything to life (that would have been to assert that there were creative powers other than those of the Creator), but simply to eliminate the inferior individuals that appeared as the result of random changes. Gregor Mendel applied the principle of chance to explaining the inheritance of certain traits, and showed that "traits" were passed on unchanged, even when they weren't visible. His ideas were published and were acceptable to the scientific mainstream of his time. Traits were determined by "factors" that were passed on, unchanged, from parents, and biological variation was explained by varied mixing of factors which in themselves were unaffected by the organism or the environment. Genetic determinism was safely compatible with creationism. Shortly after Mendel's death, August Weismann began a campaign to put a stop to the claims of those who, like the Darwins and Lamarck, saw adaptive development of organisms as an essential part of the evolution of species. Weismann was essentially a propagandist, and his first fame was the result of "disproving" Lamarck by cutting the tails off more than 1500 mice, and observing that their offspring were born with tails. The reason the inheritance of acquired traits was impossible, he said, was that the "germ line" was perfectly isolated from the rest of the organism. The differentiated tissues of the body were produced by the selective loss of information from the nuclei of cells in the embryo. The cells of the germ line were immortal and contained all the information needed to produce an organism, but no other cell of the organism was complete. Complexity was produced by deletion, and this was the basis for arguing that, if even the development of an individual was nothing but a passive unfolding of inherited properties, much like unpacking a trunkful of clothes, then there could be no adaptively acquired traits, and certainly no inheritance of something which didn't exist. Changes in an individual were simply accidents, such as having a tail amputated, and so the whole 19

issue of the origin of complexity was safely left to a primordial creation. Weismann and his arguments were famous in Europe and the US, and formed the background for the ideas known as neo-Darwinism. His "isolation of the germ line" was the earliest version of the Central Dogma of molecular biology, namely, that information flows only from DNA to RNA to protein. His doctrine, of complexification through deletion, is the epitome of the greatest dogma of modern times, expressed in doctrines from Catastrophism through the second law of thermodynamics and the theory of the Big Bang, down to Hayflick's Doctrine of the mortality of somatic cells. All these are consequences of the Cartesian and Deistic separation of intelligence from matter. Regeneration is one of the most vivid examples of the intelligence of living substance. Given a natural tendency of cells to multiply, the interesting thing about regenerative healing is the question of why the new growth of tissue sometimes differentiates to fit appropriately into its surroundings, but sometimes fails to differentiate, becoming a tumor. With aging, the regenerative process declines, and the process of tissue rebuilding slows. Against a background of reduced regenerative ability, tissue growth sometimes produces tumors, rather than renewed healthy tissue. When tumors are grafted onto the amputated tail stump of a salamander, which has good regenerative ability, the tumor is transformed into a tail, by its envirornment, or morphogenic field. The "cancer problem" is essentially the problem of understanding the organizing forces of the organism. The aging problem is another aspect of the same problem. Traditionally, biologists had studied anatomy, physiology, embryology or development, and taxonomy or the classification of organisms. The growth of knowedge early in the 20th century was suddenly seeming to confirm the physiological, adaptive view of organisms that Lamarck had held. C.M. Child, Joseph Needham, Alexander Gurwitsch, and L.V. Polezhaev were demonstrating the primacy of a formative process in biology. Polezhaev and Vladimir Filatov were studying practical means of stimulating regeneration as a medical technique. Until the beginning of the second world war, the study of regeneration and the pattern-forming processes in embryology were the liveliest parts of biological research. Gestalt psychology was being developed at the same time, with a similar emphasis on patterns and wholes. But Weismannism and neo-Darwinism, largely embodied in the person of the geneticist T.H. Morgan, deliberately set out to kill that line of biological research. Gestalt psychology was similarly eliminated by the Behaviorists. One of Morgan's closest associates, his student and colleague A.H. Sturtevant, said that "Morgan's objectives, what he was trying to get at in 20

general in his biological work was to produce mechanistic interpretations of biological phenomena. One of the things that irritated him most was any suggestion of purpose in biological interpretation. He always had some reservations about the idea of natural selection, because it seemed to him to open the door to interpretations of biological phenomena in terms of purpose. He could be talked into the conclusion that there was nothing that wasn't strictly mechanistic about this interpretation, but he never liked it. And you had to talk him into it again every few months." (Sturtevant, A. H., Genetics, Vol. 159, 1-5, September 2001, Copyright 2001, Reminiscences of T. H. Morgan.) Whatever his motives, Morgan was known to have prevented his students (including C.M. Child) from publishing work that supported a holistic view of the organism. After Morgan's death, there was an intense and widespread campaign to suppress any approach to biology other than the "new synthesis," neo-Darwinism, with its doctrine of mechanistic genetic determinism and its doctrine of random variation. A developmental biologist, J.M. Opitz (1985), commented that "in one of the most astounding developments in Western scientific history, the gradient-field, or epimorphic field concept, as embodied in normal ontogeny and as studied by experimental embryologists, seems to have simply vanished from the intellectual patrimony of Western biologists." Formative processes are necessarily multidimensional, and that makes calculation and analysis very complex. To a great extent, the geneticists were motivated to study bacterial genes, rather than vertebrate embryos, by the principle that motivated the drunk to look for his car keys under the street lamp, even though that wasn't where he lost them, because the light made it easier to look there. Bacteria are easy to study because they lack the complexity that makes it hard to study an embryo or an animal. The language used in genetics textbooks shows not only that bacteria are treated by geneticists as if they were one or two dimensional, but that the concepts developed for bacterial genetics have been extrapolated to use in describing complex organisms: "Genes interact to establish the body axis in Drosophila. Homeotic Genes control pattern formation along the anterior-posterior body axis." (Essentials of Genetics, M. Cummings and W. Klug, Prentice Hall, 2004.) One of the basic distinctions in embryology is in the way the cells divide after the egg is fertilized. Oysters and earthworms have spiral cleavage, sea urchins and people have radial cleavage. Several decades ago an experimenter was transferring a nucleus from an egg of an animal with radial cleavage, I think a sea urchin, into the enucleated egg of a snail, with spiral cleavage. The nucleus transplanted across such a great difference in phyla didn't sustain maturation of the animal, but it did permit development to proceed for several rounds of cell division, and the 21

pattern of cell division, or cleavage, and embryonic development always followed the pattern of the phylum to which the egg cytoplasm belonged, never the pattern of the phylum from which the nucleus was derived. The genes in the nucleus, obviously, weren't directing the basic pattern formation of the embryo. One-dimensional bacterial genetics can be used to "explain" multidimensional systems, but it can't be expected to make useful predictions. The idea of complexity, or of multidimensionality, has often been analyzed in terms of "fields," by analogy with a magnetic field, as some property, or properties, that extend beyond any individual part, giving some coherence to the parts. Lamarck was concerned with understanding ensembles of particles and cells, but in his time electricity and heat were the only principles that physics provided that helped to illuminate the nature of living organisms. At the end of the 19th century, though, the physicist J.C. Bose was noticing that all of the properties of life that had interested Lamarck and Buffon--irritability, sensation, contraction, memory, etc.--had their close analogs in non-living substances. Bose, who invented the radio detector that was the core of Marconi's apparatus, found that, in the presence of an electromagnetic field, particles of a substance, such as finely powdered metal filings, cohered into a unified whole. An otherwise invisible, undetectable "field" which in Lamarck's time might have been known as one of the "subtle fluids," was able to organize a myriad of inert particles into a unified whole. In the early 1920s, Bungenberg de Jong and A.I. Oparin showed how solutions of organic substances could spontaneously organize themselves into complex systems, with differentiated parts. A Russian embryologist, Alexander Gurwitsch, found that the parts of an organ or embryo could exert their stimulating or organizing influence on other cells even through a piece of glass, and by using different types of filter, he identified ultraweak ultraviolet rays as a medium of communication between cells. F.-A. Popp and others are currently studying the integrating functions of ultraweak light signals. Guenter Albrecht-Buehler (who has an interesting website called Cell Intelligence) is investigating the role of pulsed infrared signals in cell communication. Electrical fields produced by cells, tissues, and organisms have been shown to influence cellular metabolism and physiology, and to influence growth patterns. Closely associated with cellular electrical fields are fields or gradients of pH and osmolarity, and all of these fields are known to affect the activity of enzymes, and so to create environments or fields of particular chemical concentrations. A phenomenon that was well known in the 1930s, when developmental fields were still a familiar part of scientific discussion, was the "cancer field." Before a cancer developed in a particular area, the area showed progessive changes, away from normal function and structure, toward the 22

cancer physiology. In the embryonic state, damaged tissues regenerate quickly. The metabolism of an embryo or fetus is highly oxidative, converting glucose rapidly to carbon dioxide and water. Both carbon dioxide and water are important regulators of cellular metabolism and function, and the concentrations of both of them decrease systematically with maturity and aging. Both are involved with the most basic aspects of cellular sensitivity, responsiveness, and organization. To resume the scientific tradition that has "simply vanished," I think we have to recover our ability to think about organisms generally, leaving aside as many of the concepts of genetics as possible (such as "gene," "operon," "receptor"; "the gene" has never been more than an ideological artifact), because they so often falsify the most important issues. The organization of tissues and organs, and their functional properties, should be the focus of attention, as they were for Lamarck around 1800, and for Johanes Muller, who in 1840 saw cancer as a problem on the level of tissue, rather than cells. For Lamarck, sensitivity and movement were the essential properties of the living substance, and J. C. Bose showed reasons for believing that the characteristics of life were built on related properties of matter itself. Sensitivity, the ability to respond appropriately to the environment, is probably a missing factor in the development of a tumor. The ability to become quiescent, to quietly participate in the ensemble of cells, is an essential feature of the sensitivity and responsiveness of the cells of complex organisms. The factors that support organized appropriate functioning are the factors that help cells to inhibit the excitatory state. If the keys of an accordion or organ didn't spring back after the musician pressed them, the instrument would be unplayable. In extreme physiological states, such as epilepsy or malignant hyperthermia, nerves or muscles become incapable of relaxing. Insomnia and muscle cramps are milder degrees of a defective relaxation process. Excitoxicity and inflammation describe less generalized cases of a similar process, in which there is an imbalance between excitation and the restorative ability to stop the excitation. Prolonged excitation, resulting in excessive fatigue, can cause a cell to disintegrate, in the process of cell death called apoptosis, "falling away." In the experiments of Polezhaev and Filatov, the products of cell disintegration were found to stimulate the birth of new cells (possibly by blocking a signal that restrains cell division). This process has been found in every organ that has been examined appropriately. It amounts to a "streaming regeneration" of the organism, analogous to the progressive creation of Lamarck's view. G. Zajicek has demonstrated an orderly "streaming" renewal in several organs, and even the oocytes (which in the Weismannian dogma were formed at a very early stage during embryonic development, and were perfectly isolated from the cells of the mature 23

body) have recently been shown to be continually regenerated in adult ovaries. "Stem" cells turn out to be ubiquitous, and the failure of regeneration and restoration seems to be situational. In the 1950s a magazine article described the regeneration of a finger-tip when the wound was kept enclosed. Decades later, friends (one a child, the other a man in his forties) had accidental amputations of a finger-tip, down to the cuticle so that no visible nail remained. The boy's mother fitted his finger with the tube from a ballpoint pen, and the man used an aluminum cigar tube as his "bandage." Within a few weeks, their fingers had regenerated to their normal shape and length. I think the closed environment allows the healing tissues to be exposed to a high concentration of carbon dioxide, in equilibrium with the carbon dioxide in the capillaries, and to a humid atmosphere, regulated by the osmotic or vapor pressure of the living tissues. Under ordinary conditions, the creation of cells and the dissolution of cells should be exactly balanced. The coordination of these processes requires a high degree of coherence in the organism. Simple increase of water in the vicinity of a cell increases its tendency to multiply, as well as its excitability, and hypertonicity restrains cell division, and reduces excitability. Carbon dioxide, besides helping proteins to release water, appears to increase the ability of proteins and cells to respond to morphogenetic fields. Carbon dioxide is the most universal agent of relaxation, restoration, and preservation of the ability of cells to respond to signals. Progesterone is another very general agent of restorative inhibition. The study of regeneration and "stem cells" is helping to illuminate the general process of aging, and to provide very practical solutions for specific degenerative diseases, as well as providing a context for more appropriate treatment of traumatic tissue injury. In aging, the growth and regenerative processes are slowed. There is some evidence that even cell death is slower in old age, at least in some tissues. Since animals with the highest metabolic rate live the longest, the slowing rate of metabolism during aging probably accounts for those changes in the rate of cell renewal. The continually streaming regeneration of tissues is part of the adaptive process, and it is probably intensified by stress. The ability to sleep deeply decreases in old age, as a generalized inflammatory, excitatory state of stress develops. With progressive weakening of restorative cellular relaxation (inhibition), cells become more susceptible to disintegration. It's well established that bone loss occurs almost entirely during the night, and since the catabolic hormones generally affect soft tissues as well as bones, the atrophy of soft tissues ("sarcopenia") of aging is also probably a process that occurs mostly

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during the night. Mediators of inflammation are at their highest during the night (Cutolo and Masi, 2005). But during the period of growth, the length of bones seems to increase mostly during the night (Noonan, et al., 2004). My interpretation of this is that the stress of darkness accelerates biological processes, whether the process is mainly constructive or mainly destructive. The effect of light supports efficient oxidative energy production, which supports the protective inhibitory processes, by increasing ATP and CO2, and decreases the inflammatory mediators that intensify stress. If organized cellular luminescence is required for a proper balance, then the random luminescence produced by lipid peroxidation (which may be more intense at night--Diaz-Munoz, et al., 1985), might be an important factor in disrupting the balanced streaming of regeneration. Free radicals, whatever their source, absorb a broad spectrum of radiation, and would block luminous signals of all frequencies. Isoprene, produced mainly at night (Cailleux and Allain, 1989), is another ultraviolet absorber that might account for nocturnal regulatory disorders. The age pigment, lipofuscin, is known to contribute to degenerative diseases, but the nature of its toxicity has never been established. Its absorptive and fluorescent properties would be very likely to interfere with mitogenetic and morphogenetic radiation. Polyunsaturated fats are the main component of lipofuscin, and these fats in themselves can absorb ultraviolet light. When those fats are present in the skin, exposure to ultraviolet light accelerates the aging of the skin. Free fatty acids often increase during the night, under the influence of hormones such as adrenaline and growth hormone. A single night of poor sleep probably causes significant anatomical damage to the streaming cellular systems that will be repaired over the next few days if a high level of energy metabolism can be combined with a sufficient amount of deep sleep. The things that optimize energy and sleep form the background for supporting the restorative processes. Salt, glycine, carbon dioxide, progesterone, thyroid hormone and sugar all contribute to preserving the organism's energetic reserves by reducing inappropriate excitation. Lamarck's idea that organs developed or regressed according to their use or disuse was often attacked by followers of the Weismann-Morgan genetic dogma. In their view, the influence of the environment was limited to either preventing or permitting the realization of "the genetic potential." Once that predefined potential had been unfolded, the finite and mortal nature of the somatic cells didn't allow for any significant changes, except for depletion and death. One of the high points of Weismannian biology came with the publication of an article in Science, around 1970, that proposed to explain learning in terms of the lifelong loss of brain cells, beginning in humans around the age of 18 months, with a daily loss of 100,000 cells, which would record experience by 25

selective deletion, the way punching holes in cards had been used to enter data into computers. I was present to witness "world class biologists" taking that idea very seriously. As Sturtevant mentioned in the quotation above, T.H. Morgan couldn't accept any attribution of purposefulness to organisms. In his genetic dogma, changes were only random, and people who denied that were denounced as "teleological" (or metaphysical) thinkers. Changes occurred by deletion, not by meaningful addition. One of Pavlov's students, P.K. Anokhin, developed the concept of the Functional System in the 1930s, to explain the purposive behavior of animals. In the 1950s, Anokhin integrated the endocrinology of stress and adaptation into the concept, and F.Z. Meerson continued the work, concentrating on the metabolic and structural changes that protect the heart during stress. The simplest view of the conditional reflex involves the adaptation of an animal to an external signal, identifying it as the occasion for a particular action. Analyzing the Functional System starts with the need of the animal, for example for food, and examines the processes that are involved in satisfying that need, including nerve cells, a sense of hunger, knowledge of what things are edible, the muscles needed to get the food, and the digestive apparatus for assimilating it. When an understanding of stress physiology is combined with the idea of functional systems, the adaptive meaning of the use or disuse of certain organs is given a concrete basis. Cortisol mobilizes amino acids from muscles that are idle, and makes them available for the synthesis of proteins in the muscles, nerves, or glands that are activated in adapting to the stress. The London taxi drivers whose hippocampus grows as they learn the locations of the streets are very good examples of the processes described by Meerson, Anokhin, and Lamarck, in which the use of an organ in meeting a need contributes to the development of that organ. The balance between growth and regression is shifted during adaptive behavior. Exercise physiologists, without mentioning functional systems, have recently discovered some principles that extend the discoveries of Meerson and Anokhin. They found that "concentric" contraction, that is, causing the muscle to contract against resistance, improves the muscle's function, without injuring it. (Walking up a mountain causes concentric contractions to dominate in the leg muscles. Walking down the mountain injures the muscles, by stretching them, forcing them to elongate while bearing a load; they call that eccentric contraction.) Old people, who had extensively damaged mitochondrial DNA, were given a program of concentric exercise, and as their muscles adapted to the new activity, their mitochondrial DNA was found to have become normal. There are probably the equivalents of constructive "concentric" activity and destructively stressful "eccentric" activity in the brain. For example, "rote learning" is analogous to eccentric muscle contraction, and learning 26

by asking questions is "concentric." "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." Any activity that seems "programmed" probably stifles cellular energy and cellular intelligence. When activity is meaningful, and is seen to be meeting a felt need, the catabolic and anabolic systems support and strengthen the components of the functional system that has been activated. Everything we do has an influence on the streaming renewal of the adaptive living substance. There are many therapeutic techniques that could be improved by organized research, for example, investigating the interactions of increasing carbon dioxide, reducing atmospheric pressure, supplementing combinations of salt and other minerals, balancing amino acids and sugars, and varying light exposure and types of activity. The dramatic results that have occasionally been demonstrated (and then suppressed and forgotten) are just a hint of the possibilities. If we keep our thoughts on the living substance, the pervasive ideologies lose their oppressive power. REFERENCESChronobiol Int. 2004;21(6):937-47. Postprandial metabolic profiles following meals and snacks eaten during simulated night and day shift work. Al-Naimi S, Hampton SM, Richard P, Tzung C, Morgan LM. "We have previously shown that both simulated and real shift workers showed relatively impaired glucose and lipid tolerance if a single test meal was consumed between 00:00-02:00 h (night shift) compared with 12:00-14:00 h (day shift). The objective of the present study was to extend these observations to compare the cumulative metabolic effect of consecutive snacks/meals, as might normally be consumed throughout a period of night or day shift work." "There was a trend toward an effect of shift for plasma glucose, with higher plasma glucose at night (p = 0.08), and there was a time-shift interaction for plasma insulin levels (p < 0.01). NEFA levels were unaffected by shift." "These findings confirm our previous observations of raised postprandial TAG and glucose at night, and show that sequential meal ingestion has a more pronounced effect on subsequent lipid than carbohydrate tolerance." Anokhin P.K. System mechanisms of higher nervous activity. Moscow, Nauka, 1979. (In Russian).

Life Sci. 1989;44(24):1877-80. Isoprene and sleep. Cailleux A, Allain P. Isoprene is one of the main constituents of endogenous origin in exhaled human breath. The concentration of isoprene seems to vary with states of sleep and wakefulness, increasing during sleep and decreasing sharply just after awakening. Thus, isoprene may be involved in in sleep upholding. Exp Neurol. 1978 May 15;60(1):41-55. Evidence of normal mitosis with complete cytokinesis in central nervous system neurons during sustained depolarization with ouabain. Cone CD Jr, Cone CM.

Nat New Biol. 1973 Nov 28;246(152):110-1. Stimulation of DNA synthesis in CNS neurones by sustained depolarisation. Stillwell EF, Cone CM, Cone CD Jr.

J Natl Cancer Inst. 1971 Mar;46(3):655-63. Intercellular transfer of toxic components after laser irradiation. May JF, Rounds DE, Cone CD.

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J Theor Biol. 1971 Jan;30(1):151-81. Unified theory on the basic mechanism of normal mitotic control and oncogenesis. Cone CD Jr.

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Acta Cytol. 1969 Oct;13(10):576-82. Autosynchrony and self-induced mitosis in sarcoma cell networks. Cone CD Jr.

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1980;339:115-31. Ionically mediated induction of mitogenesis in CNS neurons. Cone CD Jr.

Science. 1976 Apr 9;192(4235):155-8. Induction of mitosis in mature neurons in central nervous system by sustained depolarization. Cone CD Jr, Cone CM. DNA synthesis and mitosis have been induced in vitro in fully differentiated neurons from the central nervous system by depolarization with a variety of agents that produce a sustained rise in the intracellular sodium ion concentration and a decrease in the potassium ion concentration. Depolarization was followed in less than 1 hour by an increase in RNA synthesis and in 3 hours by initiation of DNA synthesis. Apparently normal nuclear mitosis ensued, but cytokinesis was not completed in most cells; this resulted in the formation of binucleate neurons. The daughter nuclei each contained the same amount of DNA as the diploid preinduction parental neurons; this implies that true mitogenic replication was induced.

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1974;238:420-35. The role of the surface electrical transmembrane potential in normal and malignant mitogenesis. Cone CD Jr. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1974;238:451-6. Panel discussion: The role of electrical potential at the cellular level in growth and development. Becker RO, Cone CD, Jaffe LF, Parsegian VA, Pohl HA, Weiss L. J Cell Physiol. 1973 Dec;82(3):373-86. Contact inhibition of division: involvement of the electrical transmembrane potential. Cone CD Jr, Tongier M Jr. J Theor Biol. 1971 Jan;30(1):183-94. Maintenance of mitotic homeostasis in somatic cell populations. Cone CD Jr. Oncology. 1970;24(6):438-70. Variation of the transmembrane potential level as a basic mechanism of mitosis control. Cone CD Jr. Trans N Y Acad Sci. 1969 Apr;31(4):404-27. Electroosmotic interactions accompanying mitosis initation in sarcoma cells in vitro. Cone CD Jr. Rheum Dis Clin North Am. 2005 Feb;31(1):115-29, ix-x. Circadian rhythms and arthritis. Cutolo M, Masi AT.

Neuroscience. 1985 Dec;16(4):859-63. Day-night cycle of lipid peroxidation in rat cerebral cortex and their relationship to the glutathione cycle and superoxide dismutase activity. Diaz-Munoz M, Hernandez-Munoz R, Suarez J, Chagoya de Sanchez V. Lipoperoxidation, glutathione cycle components and superoxide dismutase activity show a daynight rhythm in the cerebral cortex of the rat. The highest lipoperoxidative activity is observed during the night (20.00-04.00 h). The enhancement in lipoperoxidation occurs concurrently with a decrease in glutathione peroxidase activity, an increase in superoxide dismutase activity and an increase in the double bonds in the brain cortex lipid fraction. The changes described in this paper seem to be related to a succession of light and dark periods, or to fasting and feeding periods. We propose that those fluctuations could act as a physiological oscillator with an important role in modulating the membrane properties of the nerve cell.

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Brain Res. 1977 Mar 4;123(1):137-45. Daily variations of various parameters of serotonin metabolism in the rat brain.II. Circadian variations in serum and cerebral tryptophan levels: lack of correlation with 5-HT turnover. Hery F, Chouvet G, Kan JP, Pujol JF, Glowinski J. Rats submitted to regular 12 h cycles of light and darkness for three weeks were sacrificed at various times of the day. 5-HT, 5-HIAA and tryptophan levels were estimated in the fronto-parietal cerebral cortex. Tyrosine and free and total tryptophan levels in serum were estimated in parallel. Significant circadian variations in 5-HT and 5-HIAA levels were found in cerebral tissues. The peaks of 5-HIAA levels were dectected during the lignt and dark periods respectively, the maximal fluctuations being seen between 17.00 h and 21.00 h, two times separating the light off. Important significant circadian variations in free and total serum tryptophan levels were also observed. In both cases, the maximal levels were found during the middle of the dark phase after the peak of 5-HIAA levels. The circadian rhythm of tyrosine levels in serum was in opposite phase with that of tryptophan (free or total). The diurnal changes in tryptophan content in cerebral tissues seemed thus related to those found in serum. Taking in consideration results obtained in previous studies 16,17 carried out in similar experimental conditions, it was concluded that the parallel increase in serum free tryptophan and in tissues 5-HIAA levels seen during the night were not related to a stimulation of 5-HT turnover. Indeed 5-HT synthesis is minimal at this time16.

Kryukov V.I. An attention model based on the principle of dominanta // Proceedings in Nonlinear Science. Neurocomputers and Attention. I: Neurobiology, Synchronization, and Chaos. 1989. Ed. by A.Y. Holden and V.I. Kryukov, pp. 319-351. Endocrinol Exp. 1976 Jun;10(2):131-7. Diurnal variation in the effect of melatonin on plasma and muscle free fatty acid levels in the pigeon. John TM, George JC. Pigeons maintained on standard diet and held under 12 h daily photo-period in a controlled environmental room, were given intravenous injections of melatonin. A low dose (1.25 mg/kg body weight) of melatonin when given in the middle of the scotophase, produced a significant increase in plasma FFA when estimated at 20 min and 90 min post-injection, whereas no significant change was seen with injections given in the middle of the photophase. No significant change in muscle FFA level was obtained either during the photophase or the scotophase when estimated at 90 min postinjection.With a higher dose (5 mg/kg body weight) of melatonin given in the scotophase, on the other hand, a significant increase in both plasma as well as muscle FFA levels was obtained at 90 min post-injection but there was no effect on plasma FFA at 20 min or 90 min post-injection in the photophase and at 20 min in the scotophase. It is concluded that melatonin has a lipid mobilizing action in the pigeon when administered during the scotophase.

Exp Brain Res. 2001 Feb;136(3):313-20. Enhanced neurogenesis after transient global ischemia in the dentate gyrus of the rat. Kee NJ, Preston E, Wojtowicz JM. "Certain insults such as epileptic seizures and ischemia are known to enhance the rate of neuronal production. We analyzed this phenomenon using the temporary occlusion of the two carotid arteries combined with arterial hypotension as a method to induce ischemia in rats. We measured the rate of cell production and their state of differentiation with a mitotic indicator, bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), in combination with the immunohistochemical detection of neuronal markers. One week after the ischemic episode, the cell production in dentate gyrus was increased two- to threefold more than the basal level seen in control animals. Two weeks after ischemia, over 60% of these cells became young neurons as determined by colabeling with BrdU and a cytoplasmic protein (CRMP-4) involved in axonal guidance during development. Five weeks after the ischemia, over 60% of new neurons expressed calbindin, a calcium-binding protein normally expressed in mature granule neurons. In addition to more cells being generated, a greater proportion of all new cells remained in the differentiated but not fully mature state during the 2- to 5-week period after ischemia." "The results support the hypothesis that survival of dentate gyrus after ischemia is linked with enhanced neurogenesis. Additional physiological stimulation after ischemia may be exploited to stimulate maturation of new neurons and to offer new therapeutic strategies for promoting recovery of neuronal circuitry in the injured brain."

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