I guess I do.
Man, I'm sorry.
I'm trying to figure this out.
I wanted to do it a little different, but I guess I really actually still have to do... I could do the desk quick, right?
That also works.
Does that work?
Can I do that?
No.
See, that doesn't work.
I also have to do this.
Good morning, everybody.
Good morning from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It is 1010 in the morning.
It's actually 1012.
I apologize if you expected music today we are having our first biology 101 class so I don't think we need a big intro or anything like that.
I just wanted to give everybody a chance to respond to the
to the email or whatever, the notification, if you are lucky enough to get them.
My plan is to kind of wing it.
This is a course that cannot be developed by myself in a room, deciding what to put where and what goes.
I mean, at certain moment, it just has to be done and a real quality
let's say freshman level biology course with a new tact on biology is going to take a few iterations to sharpen.
And so after a really long time of thinking that I could get it perfect before doing it, I've decided that this is the deadline.
Today was the day, the 3rd of September.
This is the first, I guess, kind of pseudo full week of school for my family.
One of my kids may transition very soon into being a homeschooled kid, and the other one is having an interesting adjustment to his first year in high school.
And of course, the younger one is still just having a really good time seeing those kids every day.
So I do have free time every day now during the week that I think I'm more than obligated to fill with reasonable work.
And so that reasonable work that I think in the long run is going to pay off the most is going to be trying to go back to my strengths, which is, I think, as a biology coach, as somebody who can help people to think more usefully and more critically about their own biology, the biology around them, and how
that fits into health and well-being and all this other stuff.
Now, I don't consider myself a guru or a master of any of this stuff.
I just think that because I have been thinking about these things for as long as I have, both as a naive child and a naive teenager and a naive young adult and a naive Akata magician wannabe,
Throughout my life, this journey has been a journey of humility and realizing how little I know and understand.
And that is something you have to almost shed in a way in order to become part of this academy that people want tenure in.
And so as a recovering Academician, I think I have a really unique take and as a lifelong
enthusiast of sharing my enthusiasm for biology in the form of teaching, I guess, I've decided that this is probably the best way forward for me.
And although I continue to be regularly affected by social media and the people that I have met in social media during the pandemic and the kind of
sort of coordinated lying that I've become aware of on the internet.
I don't think that that message really has much more value in the sense of we've really, you know, we've said it, I've said it, it's documented.
I have it all in my notebooks.
I have all the screenshots and everything.
And so if we ever want to write a book or we ever want to put it together or we ever want to put out a database of that history, we can do it.
And so now I think what's more important is to realize that we need a ladder out
And so I don't really know how to begin other than to just begin.
So I'm gonna attempt to just begin here.
So I have a few ideas.
See, there we go already.
I'm goofing around.
I have a few ideas about what I want to talk about and a few things that I want to cover as an introduction.
And typically speaking, in a Biology 101 class, the introduction is just going to be something to get everybody started, to put everybody on the same page, and to lay out what people call themes.
Themes of understanding, this kind of thing.
And I want to change some of these.
Sorry for the reflection there.
I guess I chose the wrong ink.
The idea of themes versus patterns, I think we're going to come back to this a lot, because a lot of the inspiration for this is going to be this book back here, which is Buckminster Fuller's To the Children of Earth book.
Very simple book, not a lot of words in it.
So, you know, if you can find a digital copy of this one, you're not going to probably find a
paper copy of it because it's a pretty rare book and it's pretty valuable because a lot of the, I mean, it's just a very rare book.
But you can find a PDF of it and we will discuss parts of it.
Buckminster Fuller has been one of the more recent influences in my life as far as biology goes, reading his words and reading his books, especially synergistics, synergetics, which is, I always say it wrong.
That book, I'm about a third of the way through.
I'm not saying that I've completed it and mastered it.
It's really easy.
It's an extraordinary book, but it shows you how really masterful, high-level thinkers are pretty much excluded from this debate, simply because, again, very high-level thinkers are often very aware of how inadequate
the models of our biology are, the models of our natural world are, and the way that those very inadequate models can be sort of used malevolently against us.
And I don't necessarily, I'm not saying that Buckminster Fuller is some kind of crusader, I'm just saying that he's a guy whose words have had a lot of influence on me in very recent years, like the last four years, as I've become aware
of how much of my perceived understanding of biology was
was really founded on these inverted principles of what I now come to understand as reverence.
So let's just try to get through this with some degree, you know, within an hour or so.
So the first thing I have on the list is trees versus genomes.
And the reason why I have that on there is because one of the things that I want to open the course with is some texts, which normally we would start with a biology textbook, right?
But I think
The most important thing to do if you're going to teach a real biology 101 class from the ground up, and if I was going to teach it to my kids, for example, 12 and 14-year-old boys, I would start with a text like this, Man and His Future, a book written in 1963 by a collection of authors
that include Julian Huxley and Joshua Lederberg and Hilary Kaprowski, not necessarily because this is a particularly wonderful work of literature from the time, but because I think one of the most important themes, sorry, I don't want to use themes, one of the most important patterns to understand
is that the ideas that we continue to focus on in the last decades in biology were laid down before we had any reasonable expectation for what we would find on the other side of these ideas.
And I think that's why we need to go back to the history of these biological ideas to understand why we are so trapped within them.
And that might now sound too disconnected, but let me go back to the list that I have here, trees and genomes.
It used to be that it was quite smart to make the statement that wise men plant trees under whose shade they will never shelter.
meaning that wise men plant trees for the kids.
They plant trees because they're planning ahead.
They know what's going to happen when that tree is mature.
They have a plan.
That's why they put the tree there.
And that idea of planting trees, of, you know, looking at the world as something that you're only a part of for a little while, and then you pass on to the next generation is a sort of,
humbling philosophy.
And it puts man and his contributions to the world more like that of a gardener, where if you take the gardener away from the garden, the garden goes wild, right?
And the weeds win.
And so it puts this onus on the generations of humans to take care of the earth, to take care of their future.
And these people in this book have taken that philosophy and turned it into the genomes that we send to the next generation are something that we need to worry about rather than the trees we plant or the soil that we inherit or we bequeath to our children or the environment that we give to them or the history that we give to them.
or the culture that we give to them.
Now we're talking about particularly genomes.
Now, I would like to read to you the text in the beginning of this and then maybe a couple pieces from the first chapter as a way of, you know, supplementing our beginning understanding to this.
So, at the beginning of this book, it says, Man and His Future.
This book should make people think biological research is an affirmant
creating and promising methods of interference with natural processes which could transform or destroy nearly every aspect of human life that we value.
Intelligent individuals of every race, color, and creed must consider the present and imminent possibilities for mankind.
Man must be prepared to defend those principles which he believes good, and more importantly, to use the present immense opportunities, creative opportunities, for a happier and healthier world.
These words sound on their face as being fairly innocuous, but they are actually incredibly racist.
They are incredibly eugenic.
And they, they,
are a very fun-facing version of a philosophy that there are only certain people that are intelligent enough to see this.
There are only certain people who are intelligent enough to understand the responsibility that is codified in these words.
And the rest of the people are just useless eaters.
The rest of the people will never be able to understand the responsibility that the universe has given mankind in its ability to understand itself and therefore direct its evolution.
This myth, mythology,
put forth by people like Joshua Lederberg, Hilary Kaprowski, this Julian Huxley guy, and lots more like them.
This is not the only book, but it's a wonderful version of this philosophy, and it has a lot of different people involved with it, which I think is better than, say, reading a book that's written by only one of these people, which is there's, let me just, there is another book, which I think is really important.
I should have brought it over here.
Probably had it on my stack already.
um there's a couple actually you know you can look at I mean we can go go on and on about what books should be at the beginning of of one of these discussions but what we need to understand is that it's been more than a couple decades then that people have been already speaking in the way of
of Ray Kurzweiler where they make predictions about the fact that well we already have automobiles so soon we're going to have automobiles where the wheels turn upside down and we just fly off into space and when we get to 88 miles an hour we'll be able to travel through time.
And these people very particularly have been telling stories about these kinds of coming decisions and coming sort of societal level choices that we're going to have to make as we are confronted with the inevitable that, you know, we're going to end up with the controls.
And so the question only is, what are we going to do with those controls?
And those mythologies, I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen, are also at the heart of every biological 101 introductory class at every university in America and probably around the Western world.
Because over the last 20 years, this group of men and women that are behind these ideas have slowly
transformed our understanding of ourselves from a reverence to a kind of indifference or even worse.
And so I think it is really important to understand that a philosophy has been essentially inverted.
The philosophy of, you know, wise men plant trees under whose shade they will never shelter or whatever the exact quote was.
versus the idea that man very soon, if not already, has within his responsibility space the ability to control evolution.
The only question is, are we going to do it or not?
The only question is, are we going to put our big boy pants on and take the wheel and direct the evolution of mankind and maybe the entire biosphere that we see ourselves involved in?
It's all ours for the taking.
Instead of thinking about planting trees, we should think about changing them and reorganizing them and sort of usurping them for our own uses.
And this, I believe, is a philosophical change that you can see if you go way back in time and you look at books like this, which are books from the 1800s that are from, you know, schools in the Netherlands where you're doing animal and plant sciences.
And you look at how they are thinking about these things.
They are not thinking about these things as having anything more than similarities in their patterns.
Yes.
A lot of these higher organisms, these higher pattern integrities have cells.
But in the 1800s, in the early 1900s, we were never so arrogant as to think that that was sufficient to say that if we understand the cells in one animal, we understand most of what everything else does.
And that, of course, has been part of the oversimplification and the way that biology has been done, so to speak.
And that has changed, because if you look at these old books and read these old books, you will not feel this same lack of reverence.
Instead, it will always seem like, wow, it's overwhelming.
You turn over another leaf, and there's another animal there that you never expected.
And so that kind of wonder
potential is gone now and that's on purpose because again what I'm suggesting is that what you have in a biology 101 textbook is actually philosophy organized by guys like this and based on ideas from guys like these guys who all talk about how very soon if not right now mankind will have the ability to
to direct his evolution or our evolution.
And so the question is, who's going to do it?
Are Americans and the Americans going to have the guts to do it?
Or are we going to wait until communist China does it?
It's probably a ongoing discussion that happens in lanyard secret meetings.
And that is from the same idea set here.
that we are on the verge, as Ray Kurzweiler says, of getting rid of disease and having immortality and being able to upload our brains to a computer or whatever else they say, is not any dissimilar to, at this time, having been talking about how, in the very near future, we're going to have flying cars.
By now, we should have had flying cars, but we don't have them.
By now, we should have cured all diseases.
By now, there should have been a geneticist in every hospital curing childhood diseases with retroviruses if you would have believed these guys back then.
And so this philosophy is still present inside of every biological textbook.
And that's kind of the big giant problem that I'm trying to confront by starting this course.
And so that's why there isn't gonna be a real clear momentum in the beginning.
because we really need to establish how different it is what we're attempting to do here and how we still have to look at what we've observed and look at the observations that have been made over the last 200 years and reinterpret them, reassemble them.
Because otherwise we're in danger of, you know, again, just having this chaos and confusion
spread over the next 3, 4, 5, 10 years to the point where everything that we have built and have achieved will be lost.
I mean, I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but I think it's very important.
And so that's probably where themes versus patterns comes in, because in a typical biological textbook, they're going to talk about themes
One of the themes they talk about, for example, in a biological textbook is the properties that emerge as you talk about different levels of organization.
And it depends on which way we talk about it here.
So we're here on themes and patterns now.
And, and the idea would be then in biological textbooks, they might do something like, um, biosphere, which would be the whole earth.
Um, what do they do then they do like, I guess they say ecosystem next.
They might say inside of the ecosystem, our communities and then, uh, communities are made up of what, um, um, um, um, I think populations.
And then populations are what?
Individuals.
Do they say individuals?
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
We just say, of course, organisms.
And so these are different levels of organization, and you can ask biological questions in this
In this thematic, you can ask biological questions about the biosphere, about the ecosystem, or about communities, populations, organisms.
These are different levels of organization, and at these different levels, different aspects of biology emerge.
And so you might suggest for example that in populations is where selection occurs in their mythologies, so that animals that are that are, you know, fat and slow they get eaten and animals that are very strong and fast they have a lot of babies and so then the population moves.
towards strong and fast instead of fat and slow.
That happens at this level, it doesn't necessarily happen at this level.
That's the kind of thing that typically gets established in a biology 101 class.
So then after organisms, then we have organs.
And then we have tissues, I think, and then cells.
And so the idea, of course, is to start everybody off at understanding cells and thinking about cells.
I'm going to see if I can move this camera over here.
And so the idea is to start everybody here at cells.
And again, as I started out a while ago already saying, the trick that a lot of Biology 101 students fall into and the professors
trap them in wittingly or unwittingly is the idea that cells is a way of generalizing across animals.
And so you might very easily as a biology 101 student say that, well, there's lungs in a fox and there's lungs in a human.
And so lung cells in a human and lung cells in a fox must be almost, I mean, they're identical, right?
and they serve the same purpose, but the chances of them being organized identically at the cellular level is reasonably high.
The idea of them being organized the same identically at the molecular level is much lower.
And that's where this generalization becomes dangerous, especially from the perspective of a academy that wittingly or unwittingly is not going to emphasize this shortcoming.
And I think, I just want to read this.
I had this one little book open here because I wanted to read this.
This is actually from a Biology 101 textbook.
And it's funny that they say it because they should repeat this on every page of the book, but of course they don't.
But it's nice that the author of this chapter says it here.
But zooming in through the levels of the biological hierarchy at ever finer resolution illustrates an approach called reductionism.
Maybe I can put this under the camera so you can see what I'm reading.
because this is really the foundation of both what everybody believes works and then also what everybody gets confused about.
So, zooming in through the levels of biological hierarchy at every final resolution illustrates an approach called reductionism.
This method is so named because it reduces complex systems to simpler components that are more manageable to study.
Reductionism is a powerful strategy in biology.
It's a powerful strategy for codifying how to write a grant.
It's a powerful strategy for doing a null hypothesis-based experiment on p-values.
It is a powerful strategy for creating the illusion of progress and creating the illusion of revealed knowledge, but it's not.
And this is how science is broken.
And that's really where we are starting with this course, is at the point where the methodology by which these various hierarchical resolutions are probed is incorrect.
So, for example, by studying the molecular structure of DNA that has been extracted from cells, James Watson and Francis Crick inferred the chemical basis of biological inheritance.
Reductionism has propelled many major discoveries and it provides a necessarily incomplete, uh-oh, but it provides a necessarily incomplete view of life on Earth.
It's not an incomplete view, it is an uncertain view.
Because again, here, with a specific semantic strategy, you can make it seem like reductionism and experiments done in a reductionist context are making progress.
But they are not making progress.
They are making assumptions and then allowing people to feel as though those assumptions can be the basis of further assumptions.
And if that
strategy is not used in with incredible, with incredible critique, and the model upon which those experiments is not immediately dismissed when not validated, then you have the potential for for extreme danger.
I want to try and do a put this back under here.
I want to
I want to do a kind of thought experiment here to think about this.
One of the reasons why they think that DNA encodes everything is that when they move the DNA from one place to another, then everything goes with the DNA.
I want you to think about this analogy that is, of course, not very good, but it's better than nothing.
If I had a book and I put it in people's houses,
And then a certain percentage of the people that live in those houses changed their behavior after I put the book in the house.
Let's say that all the people in the house changed their behavior because I put the book in the house.
What about the book would you understand as a result of moving the book from one house to another and seeing that the behavior changed in a similar way from one house to the next?
What would that be?
What would you know about the book?
What would you know about how the book worked?
Would you know that the book was a romance?
Or would you think it was a nonfiction book?
What if everybody in the house that got the book started eating grilled cheese?
Would you know what the book said?
Would you know how the book convinced everybody in those houses to start eating grilled cheese?
And so the idea that we understand how the pattern integrity works, because we can move these molecules from one place to another, and then the pattern integrity seems to remain intact, is as silly as thinking that if we take a book and we move it from one house to another, the pattern of those people behaves similarly, that we understand what the book says.
It could be a romance novel about a couple that falls in love based on grilled cheese and then the effect of the novel affects everybody that reads it in the house to think grilled cheese is something they have to eat in order to meet the love of their life.
It could also be a book about the nutritional value of grilled cheese and a very convincing one.
And so it could also just be a book of photographs that makes grilled cheese look so tasty that the photographer is so talented that no matter what, when you see these pictures, you can't help but want grilled cheese for a few weeks.
And so we must understand from the very beginning of the course that the enticing thing
that all of these people have put in all of the biological idea trains, all of the mentor trains, all of the trainerships.
Everybody like me has been led to believe that it's just a matter of years and just a matter of keeping to the grind before all the details are known.
And Biology 101 is always designed to get you to believe that we're almost there.
By generalizing and reducing an irreducible complexity to a few layers.
And those layers are considered themes.
If you understand those themes, then you understand how cells work everywhere.
You understand how tissues work everywhere, how organs work.
That makes sense, so I get it.
But you really don't.
What you are seeing is the infinite complexity being kind of loosely organized around different layers of complexity.
And as has been described here, it provides a necessarily incomplete view of life on Earth.
Not a
Useful rubric to understand it all really easily like here's a rubric.
I understand all the tools in the toolbox No The wrenches are down there and the ratchets are up here and anything in English system is here and the metric is over here.
No What this is is a palette with more and more colors and more and more flavors and more and more permutations that yes
Consistencies across these pattern integrities can help us understand them, yes.
But inevitably each one of these is gonna be a phenomenon in and of themselves.
And that pattern and themes or patterns across patterns are still only going to be that.
And our model must always verify on that.
And our models are very easy to verify if we use a reductionist model.
That's the whole reason why that progress is false, that feels false, because when you eliminate all the other variables, and I've done this analogy before as well, the idea when you eliminate all the other variables and you just look at one thing and think that you're describing something is often what we're doing in biology.
At any one of these levels that we're purporting to understand, we're ignoring all the other levels.
And so if I wanna become an expert in the phenomenon of automobile biology, and I'm really focused on the exhaust and the composition of the exhaust that comes out of that back tube, and I have already demonstrated after a long career of science, that there is a correlation between the contents of that vapor that comes out and the gases that come out of the back of that thing, and how fast the car is moving, how long the car has been on, and what they recently put in it.
And so I am an expert in the biology of automobiles because I can tell you that there is a very strict correlation between the heavy metal content of the gases coming out of that back tube and the speed of the car.
And also the temperature often correlates highly.
And the hotter it is, the faster the car is moving.
And so I've found so many patterns in automobile biology that I got a Nobel Prize for my work on the correlation between exhaust content and temperature and the speed of automobiles.
And my students have gone on to show that there are correlations between the heavy metal content of the exhaust and the number of people and the number of wheels.
And if you have more wheels, then oh my gosh, the likelihood of the smoke coming out being more heavy metals and more pollutants is very high.
And so there's another phenomenon there where wheels might be related to the amount of heavy metals that are released by these biological organisms we call
automobiles.
And in fact, the more wheels they have, the bigger they are.
Now I know this is a bit hyperbole, but understand that this is basically how biology is done from the context of a reductionist biologist.
You reduce the number of variables so that you can understand neurons as being basically SK channel dependent.
Yeah, they fire action potentials.
and the action potential of a neuron is governed by the movement of sodium and potassium very quickly across the membrane and movement of one causes the voltage fluctuation in one direction and the quick movement of the other causes the voltage reset.
And actually there's this slower current governed by calcium that decides how long this refractory period is and decides whether a neuron can fire one or two or three before it needs to recover.
And so if you're a reductionist biologist, you just say that SK channels are responsible for this.
And I study SK channels because SK channels decide whether neurons can fire one action potential or four very, very fast.
And since signaling in the brain is dependent on action potentials and their frequency, citation, citation, citation, that I study SK channels.
And so all academic biologists
approach biology from a reductionist standpoint.
The less I know about those other variables, the better.
Because it would be terrible to find out that although SK channels, when they're blocked, change the frequency of firing, that's also true for six other channels.
And so the argument that you make is only realistic if you ignore the fact that there are many other channels, when removed, have a very similar effect on neuronal function.
Just like I was describing before, if you just focused on the exhaust of automobiles and trying to make ever more precise measurements on the contents and temperature, you could tell stories related to all kinds of things about how automobiles work with ever never really making any useful progress.
And the only reason why people don't do that with automobiles is because automobiles are not irreducibly complex.
But biology is.
And so if biology is irreducibly complex, then we actually are fooling ourselves when we use and overuse and overuse the reductionist strategy.
On a non-irreducible complexity like an automobile, that strategy will eliminate itself.
Those mistakes will reveal themselves as correlations are added and experiments are done, then the ridiculousness of continuing to focus on the correlation between velocity and content of exhaust would become obvious.
But when applying this irreducible complexity, I mean, sorry, this reductionist strategy to an irreducible complexity, one can essentially engage in an infinite inquiry.
And I would argue that from the perspective of science, these people know that and knew that this would be the way to get us to slowly stumble
into allowing a few smart men to attempt to grab the toolbox and organize the way that our evolution goes, to start to direct the way that our evolution goes, because in their imagination, it's just a matter of time.
And so I think we gotta raise our kids, our high school kids, we gotta send high school kids off to their, you know,
their adult age already understanding this fundamental inversion.
That a reductionist strategy, when applied ad infinitum to an irreducible complexity, will actually get us nowhere.
It's like dividing the same piece of thing into a million, million, million, million, million.
You can't keep doing that.
But that's how science works.
When we are applying these questions incorrectly without validation, sticking to these models, we have a very big problem.
And yet that's how grants are written.
That's how successful tenure is achieved, is learning how to take this reductionist strategy, find your own combination of reduced variables, and then learn how to tell stories about how you are creating knowledge by probing this little tiny space of possibility.
And all that work is actually diluting the irreducible complexity in a very malevolent way.
Even if it's unwittingly, which it was, it's done by everyone in academia unwittingly.
Because again, your salary is depending on you learning how to do it.
Learning how to apply this reductionist strategy to identify a, a
a path of inquiry.
And it's not a path of inquiry in the way that a naturalist would go.
And that's what I'm trying to impart here, what I want people to see as they approach biology.
You have to see that all of these abstracts of all of these papers are all written in this idea where reductionism is a good idea.
It's not only a good idea, it is necessity.
And that is a philosophy that completely ignores that fundamental incongruity that I'm trying to get out in words that I don't know if I'm doing it at all here or not.
But I'm really trying to, that's why I think I just have to improvise this and figure out how to say it.
And then when I figure it out and it comes out right, then we'll repeat it.
But you can't use this kind of reductionist strategy and correlation and null hypothesis testing on an irreducible complexity and make progress.
You can use it on a non-irreducible complexity like an automobile that is a solvable problem.
You can use it on a watch.
because this is a solvable mechanism.
It's something that you could understand.
Even someone like a tribesman could see, wow, this is amazing.
This is beautiful.
But if the watch was ticking, right?
If the watch was ticking and moving,
And you clicked it like this, and you clicked it like that, and you gave it back to the dude.
He might not know what's happening here.
He might not know what's going on, but he can see how the device works.
It's not an irreducible complexity because if you then took that tribesman... I'm not going to be able to open that with my fingernails.
Don't look.
I shouldn't be using this tool.
If you open this watch and you showed him this, now again, he might be very impressed with the craftsmanship, but the illusion of what's going on would be much less magical.
Now, it still might be very hard for him to understand how someone came up with this idea, but this is no longer the production of magic.
It's something that even the imagination of a tribesman would be able to see is a very elaborate creation.
And then if you showed him that the hands don't move, if that wheel in there isn't ticking and that this hand moves in rhythm with that wheel in there that's ticking, any child would be able to connect those.
But when it comes to an irreducible complexity and when it comes to starting with this kind of assumption where we can work at this level and generalize across this level with very rudimentary measurements.
That's where this becomes undermined.
That's where our whole reverence for this irreducible complexity becomes undermined.
Because instead of saying regularly that this is a necessarily incomplete view so that we can scratch the surface of something, otherwise we couldn't even, it would be a drop in the pond.
Instead, very, very cleverly for the last few decades, we have been teaching our children and those children being me and you,
that we're very close to understanding everything.
It's just a few gaps we have to fill in here, and then we'll understand everything.
And there's people working on every level here.
And of course, there's people working at the level below this, which is the level that these guys were all advocating for already for decades before this, that we have to understand and prioritize at the genetic level.
and understanding our biology at the genetic level should be where all of our resources are bent because, again, it's our future.
It's our destiny.
We're not going to leave our evolution up to Mother Nature forever, are we?
And I think that's also what Biology 101 has been now contorted over these few decades to represent.
That Mother Nature is not actually a very fair and just arbiter.
It can be very random and cruel.
And so it's just by luck and random chance that humans are here.
And if we don't pull our heads out, it could be that we could vanish like the dinosaurs.
So I think we're at a stage now where we can start to see the issue.
Because one of the themes then that's under here is this idea that genes and genetics, that we basically get it.
And that it's just a question of doing the work to sort out the details.
but essentially when we put a book and we move a book from one house to another, we understand why the people start eating grilled cheese.
And it's not true.
It's not true at all.
Yes, it does indicate that the material in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells, if this is biology 101, I guess we better do some of that too.
Eukaryotic.
I'm not a spelling man.
That's probably wrong.
Eukaryotic.
Oh, of course.
I think it's closer to that.
Eukaryotic cells are cells that have a nucleus and inside that nucleus is stuff like DNA, chromosomes, that kind of thing.
And then prokaryotic cells are cells that don't have nuclei, like fungi and that kind of thing.
Um, so the idea of course is, I know that analogy is not perfect, but again, recall what I just said.
If you have a book and you put it in somebody's house and everybody in the house reads it and then is inspired to eat grilled cheese for a couple of weeks, you don't have any idea what's in that book.
and you don't have any idea why it would do that.
And even if you take that book and put it in the next house and the same thing happens, the only thing you can say is that you can't say that that book is even a story about grilled cheese.
And so a lot of experiments have been done with regard to genes and genetics and moving genes and deleting genes and this kind of thing.
And so to a certain extent, our understanding of their role is true, but we have to see that this generalization doesn't mean that the way the DNA is decoded in closely related mammals is necessarily exactly the same as it's decoded for us.
because our enzymes could be different.
The rules could be subtly different.
And one of the assumptions that is made in reductionist biology is that these rules can be generalized across these different layers, that what we learn about the cells in mice could be assumed to be very similar to that found in animals.
And so this assumption, and I think this is,
nice because I'm getting where I wanted to go without knowing how I was going to get there.
This assumption can be seen in a reflection again, in particular with Man and His Future, because in this book, of course, one of the authors is Joshua Lederberg, Joshua Lederberg being one of the pioneers in terms of describing and understanding the biology of bacteriophages.
And so that's why I think it's very important to understand that Joshua Lederberg, being one of these thought leaders, had to have known.
I mean, he was a child prodigy.
He had to have known, had to have immediately thought after all of that Nobel prize winning work with his wife that showed that bacteriophages do what they do and how they do it and what they can are capable of.
He must, he must and his contemporaries must have realized that similar signaling mechanisms, packet genetic signaling mechanisms would be used by eukaryotic cells of our own.
He had to have thought of the possibility that if bacteria
bacteria have this mechanism of packet communication and packet genetic signaling, then there's a possibility that the correlative cells of a eukaryote would have a similar mechanism of communication.
There's no possible way that
that he couldn't have known that, and yet that fundamental assumption that that's not there, we don't see that, is part of the molecular biology that we are taught from the very beginning, from page 7 in a biological textbook that
genes are genes and genes do the same thing in every animal and cells are cells and they do basically the same thing in every animal and tissues are tissues.
And they're organized in the same way in every animal.
And so we can generalize across all of these things.
But before we knew any of these details, people were already aware of bacteriophages and knew for sure that they were there and and derived really detailed experimental proof.
And none of the no virus people from the COVID narrative would disagree that bacteriophages are there, which means that one of the layers here that everybody would be skipping then would be, you know, cells.
Yeah, okay, great.
But what about the bacteria and the bacteriophages?
as a background of biological material that's literally everywhere, actually everywhere, in the air, water, soil, our skin, on our mucus membranes.
Every surface is covered by bacteria and bacteriophages, which our DNA and RNA signal background.
It's impossible to underestimate how much of it there is.
And that our pattern integrity, who we are and who the animals and plants are exist on that and with that background.
And yet in the reductionist biology that we are taught in biology 101, those things aren't part of this, this scheme.
Those things are definitely left out of the bottom here because they want you to make the incredible leap.
from thinking that you understand how a family works because you can put a book in the house and then they start eating grilled cheese.
That you think that you understand how cells work because we find DNA in all these places.
That you think that you can generalize across how those codes manifest in one pattern integrity versus another.
They need us to accept this incredible level of reductionism across all these levels at once in order for us to fool ourselves into believing that we almost understand it.
And that's really where I think the first chapter of every biological textbook fails.
and fails maybe in an intentional sense because of, again, this philosophy of how we're gonna get to the end game.
This philosophy stems from way back when, from very few number of thinkers.
And I think what Mike Eden said the other day is really right.
I think a lot of these ideas have culminated in and have looked forward to culminating in the event that is the pandemic, the COVID pandemic.
this plan to make us accept our biology as basically solved and therefore not really ours, not really sacred anymore.
But at the point where we all need to realize that it's our responsibility as a member of society to go along with this plan to understand ourselves, this plan to finally break this code.
And they are going to admit that we can't do it in animals.
They are going to admit that if we do it in animals, it won't help us with ourselves.
They've already admitted it to themselves and to each other in private meetings.
And they already admit it in every biological textbook without actually saying it now that I know how to read them.
And I think that's the goal of, of what we're trying to do here.
We're trying to get to the stage where we can.
we can see the effect of these early ideas on every abstract, on every reductionist experiment, and then we can extract the useful observation from the experiment, or more importantly, dispel the illusion that these experiments have created.
And I think that's the way we should be reading papers.
We should be reading papers with the idea that
By the wanton application of reductionist thinking, we are being bombarded by primary literature, which essentially creates the illusion of knowledge creation.
And that illusion of knowledge creation requires that we accept this framework of understanding.
And this framework of understanding is dividing these things into separate parts where separate questions can be answered instead of emphasizing these as different layers that add complexity to the irreducible complexity that we are trying to appreciate.
Appreciate as beauty.
appreciate as creation, not trying to dissect, hijack, or own, dominate, or master.
And that's really how I think a real biology class would start.
I think that's how we do it, is we have two goals.
The first goal would be to
to understand life as a pattern integrity and the second would be to understand how science has been broken and so as I try to approach those two things in parallel, I want to emphasize this idea that
this division of understanding and this sort of imposition of these different levels of organization is how they get people to accept the reductionist philosophy.
Teach people how it's applied so that you can get to the stage where you say, I study SK channels in the brain because SK channels control how the brain works.
And the only way that they can get people to the stage where they can really apply this thinking and think they're making progress is to start with an introduction where they introduce the reductionist philosophy as a good thing, as a consequence of stuff being real complicated, but then never say it again.
And I think that's really what we're going to be repeating for this entire course, what Buckminster Fuller repeats for all of his books, and how we can get people to understand that the main question should be now, what do we know?
And what do we definitely not know that they are insisting that they know?
And I think then we'll be able to, you know, make progress with our kids.
and arm them with the knowledge that they have the right questions to ask and can see how this is being misapplied.
And so that's why I think in about an hour and a half or so, I'm gonna come back on and we're gonna audit the first of the many course installments of William Briggs, because one of the ideas that I have in parallel here is to incorporate some of the thinking of David Stove, who is an author and a person that I was made aware of by,
Emily Kaplan and Greg Glassman of the Broken Science Initiative.
And I think this is probably the best way
It's almost too simple.
Essentially, I have it on my list up here, but it's essentially models and analogies.
In the biology textbook, we're going to have a lot of analogies, analogies with computers, analogies with machines.
And these analogies are ways of reinforcing this reductionist thinking and making you feel comfortable in this reductionist thinking without ever challenging you to verify
the predictions that your reductionist model makes.
So let me say it another way.
If you go back down to the SK Channel thing and the guy who thinks that SK Channels control the brain,
It's very important that this person never really usefully question the assumptions that are made there.
As I said before, it would be terrible if there were 20 other channels that if you remove them from a mouse, the firing frequency of their neurons uniformly change because then the statement doesn't really make as much of an impact as it would if this was the only channel that had any role here.
And so the reductionist thing is often analogies versus models, because again, in an analogy, you already get to limit the potential possibilities.
If you use an analogy of a virus hijacking the machinery of your cells to make it do something that they don't already do, then that analogy doesn't play the role of a model.
that can be validated but instead provides the basis for a null hypothesis and therefore you never really test anything.
And so we need to understand that.
We need to understand how use of models and validation is the way science is done.
The use of reductionist analogies and null hypotheses is the way that this fake knowledge is created.
And I think more than anybody, David Stove has been able to explain how this semantic game is done.
And I think more than anybody else, I think William Briggs, Matt Briggs has really attempted and succeeded
in being able to bring people to understand what is oftentimes seems on its face very simple ideas that are almost duh but those same ideas are the basis for modern academic science these wait a minute that's that's your argument but you didn't prove anything if you really see it for what it is then the
the contradiction in what people write in their conclusions and discussion and abstracts versus what the limitations of their reductionist model is and then therefore what they're really not testing at all because their reductionist model is framed in only one layer of these things or maybe only takes into account two of these layers and the rest is gone.
The rest is permanently ignored so that we can say that SK channels control the brain.
And so that's why semantics are also very important.
And of course, we've experienced something like this, where the semantics of virology have been the subject of debate and ridicule and argument and the focus of potentially thousands of people for the last four or five years.
And they're basically semantic arguments when it comes down to it.
So yeah, that's an attempt at an intro.
And so we might have to clean this up a little bit.
I'm going to watch it again, take some notes, and figure out how to distill it and organize it better.
And every day we're going to do this until we get it right.
So the next Biology 101 class will be on Thursday.
We're going to do Tuesday and Thursday for a while.
There will be other shows on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
On school days, but the biology 101 and the statistics will be Tuesday and Thursday So that I can you know do some do something in the way of course programming and so Thursday again, we'll have class at 1010 and Today, I think it's 1112 now.
So I don't see any reason why 1313 is
cannot be the usual time for the statistics class.
Now remember, I'm not a teacher.
I'm a biology coach.
And for this, we're auditing William Briggs's statistics course.
So I'm going into this as a student with you.
And so I don't know how far we'll get or what trouble I'll have.
But the nice thing is,
is Matt Briggs is a phone call away and I think I can already say this pretty safely, we're going to be able to have William on as often as we should need when we start to encounter problems or we start to think we're having a useful discussion about something we can invite
Matt in and I'm sure that he'll spend a half an hour with us and and talk about our questions and talk about What we think we're learning and I think that's how we're gonna make incredible progress Tuesdays and Thursdays as we move forward and then on Monday Wednesdays and Fridays We'll do journal clubs and and study halls and and maybe even some meddler medleys or some kind of fire hose type thing I'm not really sure my my main focus now is going to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays and
getting this out and then being present as often as possible Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
My sons and I have started a couple projects that will eventually be revealed here in the next couple weeks and I'm really excited about them so some of my focus will also be on that.
So again, we don't have notes from this one because the intro week
Let's say the intro four classes or so are going to still be kind of skeletonized like this, kind of hashed out as I go.
I might open Thursday again with just a list of things that I want to cover and then see how I cover them.
And then I think we'll have our momentum going and we'll have a framework of goals in mind.
And again, I need to review what I've just discussed now and see if I got what I wanted out of it.
And so Thursday will also be a little bit of a recap of this as well.
I don't know what you were expecting me coming back after a week or so.
I hope not too many people are disappointed.
I'm gonna try and move the ball forward in a more useful way to try and find a broader audience and try to provide something that more people feel is worth financially supporting because more than anything now I believe that
For my family.
This is this is the best way forward for me to become this or go back to coaching biology instead of Instead of chasing bad guys or revealing The bad guys which is also important work But most of which has been done at this stage So again, we have a couple months to go where some crazy stuff is gonna happen So, of course, I'm gonna be still paying attention to that and I'm still gonna be available on soapbox discussing it and I'll still be here and
discussing it.
But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we're going to be doing this kind of work and trying to organize a framework of a biology 101 course that I don't think has ever been taught and taught in a different way.
for a new way forward.
So that's my goal.
I don't know how well I'm going to be able to achieve it.
I'm just one guy.
But if you have feedback for me, please find my email or please go to gigaombiological.com and provide that feedback because this course will be better if people tell me what's wrong with it and tell me what I'm getting right and what I've made clear and what I haven't because that's what I need.
Otherwise it's just going to be me organizing something for me.
So hopefully I get some feedback.
Thanks very much.
Am I going to play music on the way out?
I guess not.
I think it's better if I don't.
Because this is a classroom.
People don't leave a classroom with...
music.
We just say goodbye.
So I guess I'll see you at 1313 where we will audit the first lesson of William Briggs's probability and statistics course.
And remember, that's loosely based on the probability theory by Jaynes.
And it's also got a lot to do with this book.
And I think this book is available via PDF form already for free.
I'm gonna find out where that is and then put that on The list of literature that we're working with and I'm also gonna put the PDF of this book up Which we have in a couple different places Thanks to a couple people like Mark Kulak and and Uwe Olsner and that kind of thing So the PDFs of some of the books that we're gonna be deriving the next four days from Will be up in the next couple days on on on
the soapbox and maybe also on the course webpage that I haven't put up yet because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to put up there, but I guess these will be part of it as well.
And so again, remember this is a work in progress.
I thought it was, I thought it's, it's much more useful to teach on the fly.
And so we'll just do this as a development and then, uh,
When we have this first semester or first, you know, let's say a couple months of the course done, then I think what we're going to end up doing is just repeating it, but repeating it better and maybe reducing the number.
And then that will be the first iteration of this.
And so hopefully we'll be able to have that done.
Hopefully we'll be able to have that done before the red pill in November.
I'm speaking at the Red Pill at the end of November in Oklahoma.
I think it's the 16th and 17th of November.
You can find that website on the internet, of course.
And so I'm looking forward to that.
And I want this biology course not only to be available, but also to be kind of complimentary to that presentation.
So I've got plans and they even include my sons, which I'm really excited about.
We've got to find other ways to make this work for my family.
And so I finally, after a long time, with the help of my kids, actually figured out a way to make it all synergistic.
So I'm all really excited.
I'm really happy to finally be back.
And thanks very much for joining me.
I'll see you again soon.