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  • From: Bob Howard <rmhoward@omninet.net.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Out of Control
  • Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 06:16:18 +0800

I'm not sure where this thread started from but I've been following the discussion with some interest and I went and skim read through the book which is on-line. My impressions are that the book rehashes material previously published by a number of recent authors. (e.g James Gleick's Chaos)

The problem with the paradigm expressed in this book - namely the equating of information science with ecological theory is that it operates in a transcendent but artificial reality.

Some recent posts quoting Bill Mollinson's critique of the modernist loss of remembrance points the way out. BUt to understand the full import of Bill's statement one has to (IMHO) have an understanding of the political history of organic chemistry.

Of all the sciences, organic chemistry has escaped the purview of serious political critiques - this is not to say that it has been free of criticism. But it's underlying assumptions have not been understood or challenged. All science is ultimately an _expression_ of a dominant political and economic ideology and the ideas expressed by science are constrained by this reality. There is no such thing as an objective reality. Only enlightened beings could be said to have a grasp on reality - mere mortals like you or me are constrained by our personal political and economic histories.

Organic chemistry textbooks invariably begin with a statement regarding the overthrow of vitalism usually quoting Wohler's synthesis of urea in 1843 as the death knell of the 'vitalist heresy'. Vitalism was the alchemical belief that living things contained some vital force that distinguished them from non-living things. Vitalist did not believe that rocks were alive. The force of vitalist heresy was such that it remained a dominant argument throughout the 19th Century, Louis Pasteur was famous for his denunciations of the heresy. The standard chemical argument was that - we could create from non-living things all the elements of life therefore there was no vital force.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores totally the chemical language of life. A baby's vocalisation includes all possible sounds of all possible languages, but a baby is not said to be able to speak until it learns to discriminate amongst those sounds and particularise the sounds of it's mother's tongue.

Similarly, organic chemistry (and here organic means carbon based) involves the creation of all possible carbon based molecules. However, life does not comprise all possible carbon based chemicals but a particular subset of these chemicals. Life is a chemical language. Most obviously that language is chiral - that is - it contains molecules that are only left or right handed (in a 3 -D sense). Chemists have yet to demonstrate how to create from non-chiral precursors chiral products. In this sense the vitalist heresy has yet to be overthrown.

At a  more subtle and at the same time catastrophic level life does not produce molecules containing chlorine or fluorine multiply bonded to carbon atoms. The use of chlorine(and fluorine)  in synthetic chemistry is as a result of another aspect of the industrial revolution. Chlorine is a by-product of the electrolytic production of caustic soda. Caustic soda was used to bleach fabric and hence to by-pass a major bottleneck in the industrialisation of spinning. Fabric was bleached in the sun for hours at a time prior to the application of dyes.

Chlorine pollution reulsted in the first environmental pollution laws in Britain around 1850 as a result of it's devastating effect on the countryside.

Chlorine enables chemists to carry out reactions that are not possible in water (because of its greater electronegativity) as a result a whole range of molecules were created that could not be created by life.

The resulting gobbledegook of what is today about 60,000 synthetic molecules produced by industrial chemistry has clearly resulted not just in pollution but also in a loss of language and pattern.

I would contend that the Islamic fundamentalist response to modernism and it's products is a logical consequence of this chaos. (I'm not saying that Islamic fundamentalism is aware of this or that it is itself logical).

A similar linguistic travesty is being foisted upon us by the industrialization of genetics. The failure to see the linguistic distinction between plant breeding and the insertion of unrelated genes into organisms condemns us to the same sorts of consequences as those of organic chemistry.

Much is made these days of artificial intelligence and artificial life. However, the science of artificial life in particular clearly demonstrates as much our ignorance about the nature of life as it does our knowledge.

I hope this little essay provides some food for thought.

Regards

Bob Howard



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