Tin Horns, Flies & . . . Tadpoles
[Daemonic Dispatches] • “The notion of things dropping in upon this earth, from externality, is as unsettling and as unwelcome to Science as -- tin horns blowing in upon a musician's relatively symmetric composition -- flies alighting upon a painter's attempted harmony, and tracking colors one into another -- suffragist getting up and making a political speech at a prayer meeting.”
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
Ahh, it has been a fine Fortean week since the debut of Reality Sandwich! A massive fireball in Spain; the identification by the American Museum of Natural History of the “meteorite” that came through the roof of a New Jersey home as being -- well, not a meteorite!; and the announcement by astronomers that for the past eight months, they have been watching the explosion of a massive star, some 150 times the size of our sun. They have declared it to be the largest stellar explosion ever witnessed.
All of this happened last week, while I was out in Santa Barbara, California, to speak at a conference entitled “Synaesthesia in the Arts, Religion, and Cognitive Science,” sponsored by the Religious Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The supernova at that conference was Professor V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego. Dr. Ramachandran is one of the most visible neuroscientists proclaiming and popularizing the notion that there is an imminent revolution in the understanding of the human brain. His own recent work has focused on such mysterious neurological anomalies as phantom limbs, synaesthesia, and Capgras delusion, a condition in which family and friends are experienced as strangers. Dr. Ramachandran believes that such anomalous conditions can reveal the nature of the brain. Attention to anomalies is at the heart of the Fortean endeavor, and yet there is much in Dr. Ramachandran’s science that obscures rather than illuminates.
In the middle of his lecture on synaesthesia, Dr. Ramachandran interjected the subject of phantom limbs -- the sensation by amputees that their missing limb is still there, even to the point of feeling very vivid sensations of pain or pleasure. In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, Ramachandran hypothesizes that these sensations are caused by new connections -- “wiring” -- being formed within the brain.
Given the tragic increase in amputations due to injuries caused by the Iraq War, the issue of phantom pain has taken on a new immediacy, even leading to Pentagon fantasies of limb regeneration. Ramachandran and other contemporary researchers seem to have completely forgotten the work of Yale University neuroanatomist Harold Saxton Burr, which demonstrated conclusively in the 1930s that all living things are surrounded by weak electromagnetic fields that direct and organize tissue growth. “Fields of Life” (or “L-fields”), Burr called these. In amphibians the field fosters and guides both the growth and development of the larval animal, and limb regeneration after adulthood; in humans, the field manifests not as physical regeneration, but as the persistence of the feeling dimension of the absent physical organ.
I've got a jar full of tadpoles -- scooped out of the little vernal pool near my house -- sitting here as I write this. Though it is a delight to watch them now, it was even more remarkable to watch them before their birth, as each day the little black dots embedded in the mass of frog jelly miraculously metamorphosed into these wiggling, wriggling, jiggling little creatures lusting for LIFE. Harold Burr scooped up eggs and tadpoles just like these from a vernal pool in New Haven back in the 30s, and hatched from them a remarkably sound "electro-dynamic theory of life." How is it that in less than a century science could have forgotten his work?
Science is forever forgetting history. Dr. Ramachandran, for example, claims Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton as the pioneer student of synaesthesia, but Galton’s studies (on number-form) came almost 70 years after the first self-report of synaesthesia by German medical student (and albino!) G.T.L. Sachs. Charles Fort’s writings showed the way that science forgot -- or invented-- history to suit its own ideological purposes. The ideology of contemporary cognitive science, wed happily to models of the brain as a vast biocomputer, cannot abide Burr’s “fields of life” because they destabilize the reductionist focus on physical regions of the brain, and the supposed functional interaction between these regions. “Fields of Life” -- known to students of occultism as the etheric body, or to Eastern thought as chi-- are to Dr. Ramachandran and his peers tin horns, flies, pesky suffragists muddling their tidy maps of the human consciousness. They are themselves a sort of phantom to modern science, one needing to be recognized and studied, for the etheric is indeed the 'field of life,' not just the source for biological vitality, but the realm in which a whole host of daimonic phenomena manifest.
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- 5-22-07
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weak electromagnetic fields
Great piece, thanks!
Within conventional science, is there any support for the existence of these "weak electromagnetic fields"? And if not, why not? Is there something about the "energy body" that must remain unmeasurable by current science?
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Fields upon Fields
Yes, conventional science -- or at least one wing of it, and more prominently in Russia, Germany and a few other European countries than in the US-- has built on Burr’s work and also the contemporaneous work of Russian embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch, who in 1923 discovered an "ultraweak" photon emission --which he called "mitogenetic rays"-- from living tissues in the ultraviolet-range of the spectrum. (It is a testament to the different scientific climate of the 1920s that the researcher following up on Gurwitsch’s work came one vote away from getting a Nobel prize!) There is a massive, recently compiled (2006) bibliography of “biophotonics” (a term coined by Marburg University’s Fritz-Albert Popp in the 1970s) on the International Institute of Biophysics site:
http://www.lifescientists.de/publication/bibliography1-1.htm
But I think one can do no better than to read Burr’s original papers, which are written in very approachable, phenomenological language. In a 1936 article in the Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine, Burr set out his research agenda regarding the electromagnetics of living systems quite clearly:
1. Do living organisms possess steady state (i.e., direct current) voltage levels?
2. Can these voltage levels be assessed in a manner that is free from the usual ambiguities of electrical measurement such as random variations in the electrical resistance and flow in the specimen being measured?
3. Are voltage level fluctuations random or are they related in such a way as to produce definable electrodynamic fields?
4. If such fields are present, are they merely by-products of biochemical processes, or do they exert an influence on those biochemical processes and on the patterns of organization found in living entities?
[H.S. Burr, C.T. Lane, and L.F. Nims. A Vacuum Tube Microvoltmeter for the Measurement of Bioelectric Phenomena. Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine, 1936, Vol.10: 65 – 76]
For a fantastic summary of Burr’s work, see:
http://www.energymed.org/hbank/handouts/harold_burr_biofields.htm
Your second question, Daniel, about the dimension of the subtle body that is unknown to contemporary science, is the really important one. Contemporary natural science omits from consideration any evolutionary perspective on the subtle body, and this is just what the great religious traditions -- from the Hindu gitas to the Egyptian Book of the Dead to esoteric Christianity-- provide. The subtle body, the life body, is a ‘gift of the gods’ to humanity, and is the microcosmic bearer of the sort of macrocosmic shifts in consciousness which your own work so provocatively explores.
The Victorian Lens and Modernity Glasses
The Victorian Lens of Darwinian Observation and Dr. Ramachandran's Modernity Glasses
By Mr. Manifesto
Science has no wisdom, only logic. This logic is based on reason and reasoning is a culturally based form of thinking. Let's use Darwin, the king of Natural Selection and scientific logic, whom all scientists love to exalt.
The question we must ask is why would Darwin consider his observations which informed his theory of “Natural Selection” to be the constant state of nature? Why was he so certain of his logic and reason? Isn't it just as plausible that he was observing a single observable point in a constantly fluctuating cyclical ecosystem? More recent evolutionary theories suggest that population growth rates are cyclical responses to low or high population densities. These responses, rather than readjust once equilibrium is met, continue past the equilibrium point until they are reversed through Natural Selection.1 This would suggest indeed that "competition" and "struggle" are not innate characteristics of nature, but features characteristic of a certain point in a population cycle within a given ecosystem.
It is clear in The Origin of Species2 that Darwin understands the interdependency of species within an ecosystem. He sees interdependency primarily as a resource based relationship (a materialist perspective typical of modern science that rose to popularity during the Victorian age in which Darwin lived).3 His view of population growth as a static geometrical rate was the framework for his theory. He writes: "Every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers: that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals."4 The influence of Malthus upon this theory is strong. But unlike Malthus, "Darwin saw struggle not as an obstacle to progress and growth or a symptom of doom (as Malthus had), but rather as a force for immense evolutionary and creative change."5
Despite the evolutionary and creative aspects of his theories, he could not disengage the idea of violence and destruction as innate characteristics of nature.
Darwin's holistic observations were pivotal for the development of the ecological perspective. However, his theories were very much a product of the times in which he lived. Darwin could not remove his natural observations from the lens of the Victorian Age. Certainly he was doing groundbreaking work in a field that was just developing, but it was his social and cultural influences that created the assumption of "struggle" and peppered his writing with such violently colorful language. As a consequence, Darwin bolstered the ethos of Industrial Capitalism as well.
Indeed, with contemporaries such as Friedrich Engels writing descriptions of absolutely horrific conditions for the lower classes of Manchester, and historical precedents of the Industrial Revolution such as the Peterloo Massacre, it is not surprising that Darwin drew upon not only the writings of Malthus, but his own understanding of social relationships in Industrial England.
In Peterloo, the landed interests of the elite class mobilized the militia against a mass gathering of anti-industrial artisans under the pretext of preserving order.6 During the ordeal the military "lost all command of temper: numbers were trampled under the feet of men and horses; many, both men and women, were cut down by sabers."7 Such class conflicts were typical of the Industrial Revolution and certainly inspired Malthus. His response to such violent struggles over resources gave him little hope for the future of society, and thus he was certain that the masses must be allowed to suffer and die if humanity was to survive. For Malthus, it was a natural "check" to population growth.8
Such a cold disregard for the well being of his fellow man was, in part, where Darwin diverged from Malthus. Darwin was most certainly aware of the struggles described by Engels and Malthus. However, "Darwin saw struggle not as an obstacle to progress and growth or a symptom of doom (as Malthus had), but rather as a force for immense evolutionary and creative change."9 Natural Selection was a demonstration of Darwin's optimism and faith in reason. Struggle was a conflict in which adversaries were “enemies”10 and the victor was logically the superior and therefore was awarded the right to exist. Natural Selection embodied the scientific idea of a continual progression of improvement, one improvement building upon the previous.
During his expedition to Tierra del Fuego, Darwin saw the natives of the island to be so "savage" that he felt they were hardly human at all.11 To the Victorian ethos, the conflict between civilization and savagery was Natural Selection in the process. A theory that so clearly bolstered the ideology of the Industrial Revolution garnered Darwin acceptance into the Royal Society. It is ironic that the same theory should be the foundation for the contemporary ecological perspective.
That Darwin's theory of Natural Selection (within the framework of "The Struggle for Existence") should bolster Industrialists and Ecologists alike demonstrates the influence that English social, political, and cultural values shaped his observations. His idea of competition was purely a cultural value while his observations of interdependency were strong in their objectivity despite being fixed in a palate of hostile metaphors. Industrialists exalted the aspects of Darwin's theory that reinforced their cultural values. Unfortunately, this was the aspect of Darwin's theory that was the least scientific by contemporary standards.
It seems to me that Dr. Ramachandran has his own cultural lens through which he can only see the world in the context of modernity. An idea such as “Energy Fields” as so long been associated with the esoteric or eastern culture that it cannot even enter into the realm of serious consideration for a modernist such as himself. When one adopts the logic and reason of the scientific paradigm, the knowledge of the past is immediately categorized as antiquated. It is merely a basis for which to create new ideas and expand the scope of human knowledge. Sound familiar? Sounds like the capitalist principle of economic growth to me.
Our modes of reasoning are so culturally embedded that we cannot easily escape them. To do so requires the really hard questions. It requires truly engaging Fortean phenomenon and recognizing that the exceptions to rules render rules obsolete. It is no longer a rule, only a generality. Sure, generally many of us perceive reality in similar ways. We cannot walk through walls, we cannot bi-locate, or use psychic communication. We debunk any evidence of these phenomenon using by measuring them with our own standards of reality, never for a moment considering that to truly understand them we might first have to abandon the very notion of what reality is. Reality is fluid and until some scientist “tears” open the fabric of space time, proving that indeed this is true in the manner and tradition of his mysoginistic colonizing forebearors, we will suffer at the hands of leaders who learn nothing from history and only desire to propagate their own oppressive vision of the world.
Shame on Dr. Ramachandran, he lacks the very objectivity he claims as his faith. I bet he is proud of himself for carrying on the tradition of such weak minded Victorians such as Darwin.
1 Witting, Lars. "Evolutionary Dynamics of Exploited Populations Selected by Density Dependent Competitive Interactions." Ecological Modeling 157.1 (2002) 51-68.
2 Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . Ed. John W. Burrow. New York: Penguin Books, 1982 (originally pub. 1859).
3 Darwin, 127.
4 Darwin, 119.
5 Gale, Barry G.. "Darwin and the Concept of a Struggle for Existence: A Study in the Extrascientific Origins of Scientific Ideas." Isis 63.3 (1972): 341.
6 Colby, Charles W., ed. "The Peterloo Massacre, 1819." Selections from the Sources of English History, B.C. 55 - A.D. 1832. London: Longmans, Green, 1920: 298-300. Modern History Source Book Fordham University. 24 Sep. 2006 <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1819peterloo.html>.
7 Ibid.
8 Gale, 336-341.
9 Gale, 341.
10 Darwin, 121.
11 Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p170-171.
Lenses & Glasses & Footnoted Sass!
Thanks, Mr. Manifesto, for lassooing Darwin and Malthus to the ground, and tying their feet in footnotes!
Footnote Sass
Yes, I would not normally feel compelled to write in such a manner, but when dealing with these science types it seems that an idea is not valid unless it is someone elses. Weird huh?
Where then would ideas originate? God?
see below
Hello
Hello
Nice article and a very
Nice article and a very constructive read. The wonders of regeneration, if only us humans could do something like that. What a different world we would be living in.
Nigel ZouchElectrical Contractor
Helping to install solar panels for your home houston based.
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