A disorganized book by a highly-censored medical iconoclast. Despite its sloppiness, it will still send you down a lot of good rabbit holes. I don't recommend a labored, close reading of this book: just use it as an introduction to Ray Peat's dissident health and physiology ideas.
In certain ways, we can think of Ray Peat, along with Robert Mendelsohn and Ivan Illich, as direct ancestors of the courageous COVID-era medical dissidents: doctors like Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Pierre Kory, Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan, Paul Marik, Meryl Nass and Peter Gotszche, among others, who bravely spoke out against foolish lockdowns, hospital protocols, government mandates and the use of risky (but of course highly profitable) therapeutics like Remdesvir--and were censored, suspended or fired for it.[1]
As a general rule: in any knowledge domain you should always know who the dissident thinkers are. They are usually the ones who were right all along.[2]
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Back to the book, which, candidly, is all over the place. The author has a lot of insight to share, but he lurches from subject to subject--and from simple language to technical--without warning. He'll switch from a highly technical discussions of hormones to an equally technical discussion of the epistemology of science, and then without warning shift to environmental topics, and then again without warning to education. It's like listening to a brilliant guy with ADHD: it isn't bad, it's just... odd.
This means as a reader, you have to move most of the distance towards the author's mind to really get at the meat of this book. It's worth it. Sure, you'll have instances where the author will offer some whacked-out thought, but then he will follow it up with an incredibly perceptive comment on, say, agency problems in medicine, or intriguing thoughts on light therapy or various dietary and sleep adjustments that help your body recover from damage. Again, the book is all over the place, but in places extremely useful.
I'll add that Generative Energy is an interesting work of consilience, showing surprising parallels in biology, geology, physics--and even poetry and literature. In his youth, this author was profoundly inspired by the poetry of William Blake which, rather unusually, came to inform his scientific world view. He is a striking cross-domain thinker.
I'll make a few comments on specific parts of the book that merit more focus. The meat of the author's thinking on health starts in Chapter 5, where he criticizes reductionism and other forms of naive empiricism in medicine. Chapter 7 contains the author's central thinking about various "energy states" of an organism, and what types of states lend themselves to adaptation, restoration or degradation. Chapter 10 contains his thinking on the clinical value of light and light therapy. Chapter 17 challenges many of the conventional theories about aging and stress. And Chapter 18 stands out with a striking discussion of truth-seeking during an era of great corruption in the sciences. This chapter draws from an extraordinarily wide range of thinkers: from Julien Offray de La Mettrie, to William Blake, to Karl Marx, to Jean-Paul Sartre, to the Austrian poet/writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal among many, many others, all in a bare twelve pages.
The book will also expose a curious reader to important maverick thinkers from history, many of whom have been rejected, ignored or conveniently forgotten by the modern scientific consensus. See for example the Soviet biogeochemist V.I. Vernadsky, the Soviet climatologist M.I. Budyko, the visionary chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, the philosopher-biologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the ahead-of-his-time Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi. The author takes the disparate works of these controversial thinkers and puts them together in unusual, creative--and once again, at times odd--ways.
Finally, certain of the author's ideas about the pharmaceutical industry will be seen as obvious by cynical observers today. But back in 1994 it was still somewhat radical to go so far as to say that the pharma industry, far from wanting to cure us, wants us sick and on lifetime meds. Once again, it's the dissident thinkers who were right all along.
Medical Dissident Reading List Starter Pack:
H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health
Footnotes:
[1] For a prime example see the deeply disturbing campaign by the Maine medical board to destroy Dr. Meryl Nass, one of the world's most highly-regarded epidemiologists, described vividly in Chapter 3 of Robert Malone's book Lies My Government Told Me. See also Chapter 4 in Malone's book for an equally disturbing story about Dr. Paul Marik, a well-regarded hospitalist, whose career was destroyed via a Kafkaesque sham peer review process after he spoke his conscience against high-mortality COVID hospital protocols. Both of these doctors were later vindicated.
[2] And as a second general rule, it's vital to know how (and why) a given's field's dissidents are targeted and silenced, as it helps you understand the various mechanisms that field uses to control dissent.
[Readers, what follows are my notes and quotes from the text, which I use to help me process and better remember what I read. Feel free to either skip or skim.]
Notes:
Introduction:
1 "In this book I offer some practical methods for solving health problems by increasing biological energy. The methods can be applied by people to themselves, or by physicians to their patients... my effort here is to offer something like a 'technology of life,' which unites theory and practice... Self organizing systems decay only if they have assimilated inertia, and--with a little support of the right kind--the centers of degeneration can become centers of regeneration."
1-2 "Besides having the practical value of bringing coherence into our understanding of some things that have been merely 'therapeutic approaches,' I hope [this book] will also help to shift the theoretical focus in the study of self-ordering processes away from the informational-statistical, and toward the energetic; to interpret structure, phase and state in terms of energy and history, before considering their abstract, informational properties." [Medicine certainly would do very well to reduce its dependence on gaussian/"studies show" paradigms. "Studies show science" never was science in the first place, studies are easily p-hacked and manipulated, the study journals themselves are corrupted too as they will suppress "undesirable" findings, etc. Thus the author is totally right: we'd be much better off if we got away from abstract informational and statistical aspects of medicine.]
Part One: Aspects of Wholeness:
3 "There is an inertia that makes it easy to over-value present knowledge. If we have enough energy (and enough time), we overcome the inertia. The desire for wholeness can lead us toward a more appropriate kind of science, and also toward a more perfect world."
Chapter 1: Aspects of Wholeness
4ff On the idea of holism; on accepting (rather than denying) the unpredicted when it occurs; on having a non-dogmatic attitude to the world; on the fact that complex systems can have complex inputs and causes. Discussion here of "a reluctance to distinguish our present knowledge from possible knowledge." On reductionism; oblique reference here of J.S.S. Haldane's quote about physics "swallowing up" biology: ["If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed up, that one will be biology." The quote suggests physical laws would ultimately encompass biological processes, and this is a type of reductionism.] On how reductionism misses [ignores or omits] things like consciousness, perception, pleasure, intention; on hysteresis [lagging phenomena in physics], all of which have to do with levels of complexity and organization.
5 "...we hear so much about 'entropy,' 'randomness,' and 'symmetry' that we forget most of the formative processes in the material world." [He's referring to biological processes here.]
5 Human (and ecological) health obviously should have the benefits of holistic science, but the actual situation is that biology and medicine have become very product-oriented, and holistic considerations are increasingly left to a variety of 'fringe' occupations... In the following pages I will show how some of the most important achievements of ordinary science can be retrieved from the distortions of the medical promoters, and made available for holistic use, that is, for appropriate use."
6 Interesting discussion here about an ideological/dogmatic battle occurring even in scientific discoveries about genes, where the idea of reverse transcription once discovered was flatly rejected by the consensus, which believed that "information flows only from DNA to RNA, and only from RNA to protein" thus genes controlled expression and no information or influence could happen the other way. [I guess the Copernican revolution never actually ended... the dogmatism in modern "science" is as endemic as ever.]
7 On energy and the brain: "The literature of dissent (I wrote my master's thesis on William Blake) always reveals an abundance, or excess, of energy. I came to see literary 'periods' or styles (classical, realist, Romantic, surrealist, etc.) as reflections of a society's energy and structure. As I followed this line of thinking about the function of language in society, and in the life of the individual, I saw that Blake's descriptions of his own use of images and symbols made sense in relation to brain physiology. Even attitudes toward mathematical concepts, theories of ideal languages, and 'language philosophy' related strongly to the person's attitude toward authority, energy, the body, and the nature of consciousness." [Interesting, if not-fully fleshed, out thoughts here. Note also the footnote here (text is found the end of the chapter on page 25): "I circulated a questionnaire in 1957 among college students of various nationalities and classes. My conclusions suggested that the contemporary white male Western abstract personality was dysadaptive, in the sense that many vital abilities or capacities were undeveloped or suppressed." This was in 1957, during "second-turning America." I shudder to think that Ray Peat would think about modern screen-dominated life and what it is doing our personalities today...]
7ff Comments here on how progesterone and other hormones increase brain size and intelligence in rats; comments on mechanisms of aging and the amount of dogma the author found in neuroscience.
9ff Comments here on oxidative metabolism: "I was familiar with Otto Warburg's famous idea that cancer is caused by a 'respiratory defect,' and I knew that aged tissue has a diminished respiratory capacity." The context discussed here is senescent infertility, that the consensus idea that "aged ova" were the cause of age-based infertility is just dogma; discussion of various factors that contribute to what the author calls "a high rate of oxygen consumption": vitamin E deficiency; too much estrogen or too little progesterone, etc. "It appeared, therefore, that many of the features of aging resembled an estrogen excess, rather than estrogen deficiency."
11 "Although my work confirmed the other research that had been done in Soderwall's lab in the preceding 25 years, the idea that estrogen's influence appears to increase with aging, and even to contribute to the process of aging, was contrary to the doctrine that has been promoted by the pharmaceutical industry. Nevertheless, as I read more, I saw that there was really no evidence contrary to what I had seen in my own work. What existed was a web of interpretation which existed to sell estrogen treatments."
11 "The idea of many factors acting in the same direction, and tending to have a cumulative effect, seemed to me to have a general biological significance. It seemed to be part of the answer to the question of what it is which is lost, or accumulated, during aging, which accounts for the decreased ability to adapt to the changing environment... The main features of aging can be produced directly by administering excessive amounts of cortisol. These features include atrophy of skin, arteries, muscle, bone, immune system, and parts of the brain, loss of pigment (melanin), deposition of fat in certain areas, and slowed conduction velocity of nerves. The physiology of aging (especially reproductive aging) overlaps the physiology of stress."
12 "To understand the effects of aging on the risk of human disease and death. we need information specifically about people who have reached a certain age. There are several organizations and individuals in the U.S. that have cleverly used 're-standardized' statistics to convince the public that cancer is being defeated, industrial pollution is harmless, sickness is caused by the victim's own irresponsible choices, and that our longevity has increased by several years in the last few decades. ... The life expectancy for older people in the U.S. has barely increased a year in recent decades. 2,000 years ago, the life-expectancy for older people seems to have been several years longer than it is now."
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Translation: the Romans who made it to old age lived longer (and likely better) than we do.
14 Comments on estrogen treatment: "Hans Selye pointed out that estrogen treatment mimics the first, 'shock' phase of the stress reaction. An excess of estrogen (or any stressor) causes the pituitary to secrete prolactin and ACTH, and both of these hormones act on the ovaries to stop progesterone production, and contribute in many other ways to the process of atrophy. ACTH, of course, stimulates the secretion of cortisol."
14 Comments here on neoteny: "If we can generalize from animal studies, delaying puberty could increase brain size and longevity, improve intelligence, decrease violence, and even make people physically more attractive (the 'cute puppy' appearance is largely a matter of brain size in relation to the size of the face and body). I think this will be the next step in human evolution." [Huh. We are certainly seeing neoteny idealized in our culture, that's for darn sure.]
15 Comments on drivers of aging: "The physiological age of the parts of an organism depends in some way on the developmental stage of the whole organism. This contradicts the reductionists' idea that cells or tissues have an 'intrinsic' lifespan which will cause them to deteriorate after a certain limited number of divisions. When pieces of breast tissue or skin were repeatedly transplanted from old animals to young animals of the same (syngeneic) strain, they were still in good condition after ten 'life-times,' and their survival was apparently limited only by the necessity of trimming them each time they were transferred. to make sure that no host tissue was transplanted with them... This kind of evidence (and the simple observation that the cells in skin and intestine undergo thousands of divisions in an individual's life-time) strongly favors the idea that a systemic energy problem is involved in aging."
15ff Some striking ideas here from Soviet scientists largely unknown in the West: on Vladimir Vernadsky [Soviet geochemist, 1863-1945] and his view that the earth's biosphere was increasing its "metabolic rate" in a way analogous to the development of photosynthesis. Also on Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko [Soviet climatologist 1920-2001] suggesting that "the origin of higher types of animal is closely associated with the availability of larger amounts of energy in the environment, and with the appearance of new structures which made possible a higher energy level of activity and more complex interactions with the environment." [Note also the footnote here]: "Budyko's idea that energy drives the biosphere is unfamiliar to our Anglo-American culture, which has tried to think of everything, even the weather (and especially evolution) in terms of mechanics, inertia, statistics, and hydrodynamics. There is a resistance to the idea of directional, dynamic self-governing systems."
16ff Comments on the benefits of saturated fats and the drawbacks of unsaturated fats: "The seed oil industry has created a national phobia about the consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol, but there is no basis for the idea that those foods should be avoided... The body's highest concentration of cholesterol exists in the brain. The level of cholesterol in the blood strongly influences the production of the protective hormones, such as progesterone. The brain contains by far the body's highest concentration of these hormones." [I guess this makes Ray Peat the original "seed oil denier!"]
17-18 Comments here on the value of visible light: "Another energy-promoting factor is visible light... Although ultraviolet light interacts with unsaturated fats in the skin to accelerate aging (E.R. Pinckney, Medical Counterpoint, Feb, 1973) and to produce cancer, ordinary visible light has several beneficial effects in animals. One effect is the 'regeneration' of the enzyme SOD (superoxide dismutase), by causing its copper atom to be re-attached to the protein. Light also increases the activity of normal respiratory enzymes, and tends to normalize (or maximize) the production of hormones, including progesterone and thyroid."
18 "Animal migration to reproduce in regions with longer days is a way to benefit from this energy-promoting action of light... I would expect an increase in the temperature of the earth, and increased use of artificial light (or migration) to lead to a prolongation of youth and the development of better brains." [Odd.]
20 Comments on dangers of seed oils, of heavy metals contaminating our food supply, including lead due to leaded gasoline [I'd be curious if this mean-reverted along with the rollout of unleaded gas]: "Food additives are often contaminated with heavy metals from the sulfuric acid used in their manufacture.
20 "Many people are aware of the famous experiments in which food restriction increased the longevity of animals, as if eating were toxic. But removing toxic heavy metals from the food, without restricting the amount of food eaten, has had the same life-extending effect in experimental animals."
20-1 Comments on copper deficiency and iron surplus in our bodies as we age: "During aging, the body's load of iron increases, especially if there is a deficiency of copper, and the body's content of copper decreases with age"; also: copper helps keep iron levels "safe" in the body: "Ceruloplasmin, a major copper-containing protein, helps to keep iron in its safe oxidized form. Copper is involved in the production of melanin (itself an antioxidant) and elastin. The loss of melanin, elastin, and respiratory capacity, which is so characteristic of senescence, is also produced by excessive exposure to cortisol."
21-2 "In animals, copper supplementation can restore natural color to white hair, and in one experiment, it increased longevity. At present, there isn't enough knowledge about the safety of different ways of administering supplemental copper. It can be toxic, and it oxidizes other nutrients. Besides choosing foods high in copper and low in iron and other heavy metals, other dietary choices which support thyroid function will tend to promote the retention of copper. Other dietary practices can minimize our production of cortisol (e.g., combining fruits and proteins, since protein foods lower blood sugar and stimulate the secretion of cortisol)."
22 Comments on self-ordering processes, contrasting them with the "billiard ball conception of mechanistic causality" where matter is ordered "from outside": the author calls this latter idea from Descartes, "supplemented by an utterly separate world of mind and spirit. Descartes' spirit has continued to live in many geneticists, who see 'selection' as an ordering principle imposed upon a stupid sort of material substance, which can vary only randomly, by chance."
21 "This genetic doctrine has a strong influence on medical thinking. Hundreds of diseases have been classified as 'genetic diseases,' and the idea is extended by showing an increased susceptibility among certain genetic tissue types even to germ-caused diseases and toxic sicknesses. Diabetes, allergies, arthritis, goiter, and myopia are often said to be 'caused by genes,' despite clear evidence for the involvement of the environment in producing them."
23 Interesting throwaway sentence here with what may offer several worthwhile references to look into: "Many well known physical scientists have had relatively holistic attitudes (e.g., J.C. Bose, Michael Polanyi, B.V. Deryagin, Frederick Soddy, V.I. Vernadsky). A rich view of physics has much to offer to biology." [Note also the footnote here]: "Paul Forman, in an article in Studies in the History of Science, gives some valuable historical information on the social factors involved in Germany of the 1920's, when physics' departure from the world of real objects became so conspicuous."
23-4 The author then goes over examples of self-ordering processes like crystallization as well as Alexander Rothen's work on showing a long-range ordering process of "biologically specific absorption at relatively great distances." Also "When cell components are rearranged, they return to their normal position in relation to other components, revealing a great capacity for self-assembly or self-ordering." [Note of course that Douglas Hofstadter talks intriguingly about self-ordering, self-replicating and self-referential systems in Godel, Escher Bach.]
24 "The medical tradition of naturopathy recognizes a great capacity of the body for self-regulation and self-healing. I think these attitudes can be usefully expanded now, in the light of new knowledge about energy and structure."
24 "On the short time scale in which we think about the health of an individual, and on the transgenerational scale relating to having healthier, more intelligent children, and on the evolutionary time scale, I think we can see a tendency, not just to preserve homeostasis, but to move upward in energy and greater generality of structure and function. To provide more energy and scope for using it stimulates our ability to use energy meaningfully."
24 Implications: "Vicious circles of physiology often stabilize an organism on a low energy level, which may involve disease or rapid aging... In therapy and in everyday living we can try to protect and promote our energy-producing and energy-using systems by seeking the stimulation, the conditions of light and temperature, and the foods that are appropriate for our evolutionary level."
Chapter 2: Another View of Evolution
27ff "When complex organic compounds were found in petroleum, some people argued that this was evidence that the petroleum was the residue of dead organisms, that had seeped into porous geological formations. Another view is that petroleum was directly created by the earth, and that life is a parallel creation." [If you think about it, is it really believable that crude oil is just "leftover dinosaurs"? Wouldn't it be more plausible that it's something generated through some geological ("abiogenic") process?]
28 "Mendeleev and others proposed that molten metals deep in the earth might interact with the carbon present in minerals to create petroleum. Recently, Gustaf Arrhenius at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography has been studying the ability of iron carbonates to produce organic compounds. I think the gap of 100 years between this work and the ideas of Mendeleev and his contemporaries is the result of a dominant habit of thought which sees the world as an inhospitable place, in which life is a great improbability that came into existence only with great difficulty. The famous Crick, for example, suggested that life had to originate elsewhere, and arrived on earth as a truly alien space-traveler. The thought that life forms might just sort of gush up out of the earth in volcanic regions makes it all seem too easy; where might it lead if people started believing that life could originate without a struggle for existence?" [The first three sentences in this quote is an interesting example of how Peat thinks: A fact (Medeleev's idea), another fact (Arrhenius' idea), and then a really wild but fascinating leap that philosophically unifies these two seemingly unrelated facts by virtue of the temporal gap between them.]
30ff Contrasting the idea of a "noosphere" (a global unified superconsciousness, this amalgamates ideas from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Edouard Le Roy, and V.I. Vernadsky) versus the "Gaia hypothesis" (viewing the earth as an organism-like self-regulating system). The former view sees the Earth in a process of development, the latter is more reductive, demanding limits to development and growth under the assumption that we have long passed the earth's carrying capacity. [It's interesting to consider these two frameworks, and then also look at "fossil" fuels through this lens too...]
30 "During the Second World War, Vernadsky wrote: 'I look at everything from the point of view of the noosphere and I think that in the wind and storm, in the horror and ordeal, a wonderful new future is being spontaneously born.'"
Chapter 3: Vernadsky's Holistic Science
32 On how during the perestroika era, people started taking a new look at V.I. Vernadsky's ideas: "...he saw that the intensity of biological reproduction and metabolism and the degree of biological organization have orderly and lawful interrelations, and that human culture and consciousness participate in these natural relationships and processes."
33 Interesting quote here on what Vernadsky thought of Tolstoy, as it illustrates aspects of the substrate of Vernadsky's thinking: "For example, he wrote 'I think that the teaching of Tolstoy is much deeper than I first thought. This depth consists in his view that the basis of life is the search for truth, and that the real task is to tell this truth without any retreats,' and he described Tolstoy as an accumulator of the energy of human consciousness." Also comments on Vernadsky's 1922 book The Biosphere, and that scientists in the USA at the time rejected or ignored his work on biogeochemistry.
34 "Although many of Vemadsky's concrete discoveries have been independently rediscovered in the United States, his name seldom appears in American books on geology or ecology. I think this is because of his basic belief that nature is not ruled by accident. 'Earth's structure is a harmonious integration of parts that must be studied as an indivisible mechanism... Creatures on earth are the fruit of a long and complicated mechanism in which it is known that fixed laws apply and chance does not exist.'" Comments here on how scientists in Germany and the USA instead idealized randomness in place of a physical worldview involving lawfulness, order, and directional transformations: "...the idea of a principle of "stability" which leads spontaneously to increased complexity and order in a system, is a little too alien to be received easily in our culture." The US scientific mentality is "to attribute the appearance of order to 'chaotic' processes, and to argue from the 'logic of chaos' that the future is absolutely unforeseeable, and that the world is chaotic rather than lawful."
35 "[Vernadsky's] first biogeochemical law, that the migration of atoms tends toward a maximum, is obvious to anyone who thinks about it, and it is an obvious parallel to Le Chatelier's principle of equilibrium. Once that principle is accepted, and if life is seen as part of nature, then Vemadsky's second law, that evolution will produce species which maximize the migration of chemical elements, follows naturally. But this requires thinking about the biosphere as a system which is driven by energy from the sun, and this context isn't habitual for evolutionists."
35 "Vernadsky said that his second biogeochemical principle 'shows, in a manner as precise as the corresponding principles in mechanics and physical chemistry, the direction in which the processes of evolution must proceed, namely, in the direction of increasing consciousness and thought, and of forms having greater and greater influence on their surroundings."
Chapter 4: The Centrality of Anticipation
36 "Energy flows through all systems, and the flow of energy leaves a residue of structure."
36ff "I see the interaction between the flow of energy (e.g., between a sugar and oxygen) and the structure as one in which the flow is retarded by the structure, and used by the structure, in maintaining and complexifying itself. (Another way of looking at this is that if energy can do something, it does something; and what it does is to build structure. The life structure is a kind of energy charge, but the important thing is the spontaneous nature of the interactions, in the presence of an energy supply.)"
37ff On the work of [German physiologist and doctor] Otto Warburg [who studied cell respiration among other things] and [Hungarian biochemist] Albert Szent-Gyorgyi [who isolated vitamin C in the 1930s]
37-8 In the 1930s, it was pointed out that all of the changes produced in rats by a diet lacking the 'essential fatty acids' were the same as the changes occurring in hyperthyroidism. Parallel to the balance (or antagonism) between opposing hormones, there seems to be some sort of balance and opposition between different sorts of food energy."
38 "When the availability of food changes according to a daily cycle of light and dark, there is an adjustment of the metabolism involving many hormones, and an adjustment of nervous function, to protect against stress (Figure 1 [see photo below]). Learning is involved, in the sense that a cyclic repetition is anticipated even by 'simple' organisms. In humans and other mammals, there is the 'dawn phenomenon,' in which blood sugar rises to daytime levels before sunrise."
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39 "When food is abundant during pregnancy, and when the environment is not stressful, the brain of the fetus grows at a faster rate than in cases in which the pregnancy is affected by malnutrition or stress. Since the brain is a metabolically expensive organ, and since a larger brain tends to correspond to a higher metabolic rate of the entire organism, it appears that the developing fetus is anticipating a lifetime of relative abundance of food when it is well nourished in the uterus, and when it is exposed to less cortisol and more progesterone."
39ff Comments here on cephalization [dominance of the head] in evolution as well as juvenilization in plants [where mature plants revert to displaying juvenile characteristics], as well as neoteny/pedomorphism in animals, where the juvenile stage "is preserved for longer and longer periods in the descendants, eventually becoming the normal adult type." "Embryologists have observed that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,' that is, that early in development, mammals go through stages that resemble fish and reptiles. But I have always been intrigued by the fact that the same trend which can be seen going back from the adult to the infant--i.e., increasing of the brain-to-body ratio--can be seen to continue from the infant back to the embryo, at about the second month or seventh week of development. That is, the first few weeks of ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny, but then ontogeny also anticipates a phylogeny that hasn't been yet. ... The extremely favorable energy relationships which exist in the early embryo (which is very small in relation to its supply of energy) appear to support a certain structural relationship, which sketches out the structural-functional possibilities for the future, when our environmental energy resources might be richer."
40 Notes here on M.I. Budyko's idea of "aromorphosis": "the sudden appearance of a new biological form, when energetic conditions are suitable." Also note this quote: V. L Vernadsky and Ilya Prigogine each worked out some important parts of the theory describing the emergence of order out of disorder. F. D. Peat outlines Prigogine's ideas in Synchronicity."
41 On [Henri Louis] Le Chatelier's principle, "that a system adjusts in ways which restore a disturbed equilibrium." ... "Every part of the flow can be seen as a disequilibrium, and the complexification of the structure tends to absorb the disturbing energy. Referring specifically to the heart muscle, Szent-Gyorgyi said 'function builds structure.' Generalized principles of stability will illuminate the life processes in which stimulation produces growth and adaptation. Much of the needed knowledge already exists in a fragmented way." [A good secondary point here is to think about how to apply "fragmented knowledge" and build a mosaic of insights and concepts across disciplines or by analogy.]
41 "A proposed law of aromorphosis: that the retardation of the flow of energy in living systems tends toward a maximum; in animals, this would imply a trend toward larger-brained, longer-lived, and probably warmer animals, having a higher energy charge."
Chapter 5: The Life of Nature
42 Note the striking lead quote to this chapter from astronomer Fred Hoyle: "If this were an entirely scientific matter, there is little doubt from the evidence that the case for a fundamentally biological universe would be regarded as substantially proven. The reason why the scientific community passionately resists this conclusion is that biological systems are teleological, which is to say purposive. And if we admit the universe to be inhabited by a vast number of purposive components then the thought cannot be far away that perhaps the Universe itself might be purposive .... " [Note that Jacques Monod was fully repulsed by the idea that the universe might be purposive: his work Chance and Necessity practically drips with condescension about this idea. It's also interesting to see the fact that many of physics' most brilliant minds, the more they wrapped their minds around the absolute beauty of the universe, rejected a fully materialist perspective and moved right back to Christianity.]
42-3 "To read either poetry or 'scientific' writing, it is useful to know what was going on in the writer's life. For example, if you know that Albert Einstein's family's business was ruined by the German electric-machine monopoly, his attitude toward the German-dominated physics establishment and its ideas will be seen in that context... Einstein explicitly recognized this situation when he said that a person's life can't be separated from the person's hypothesis." [Fascinating: of course we all idealize science as "objective" when the people who do it assuredly are not.]
43 "The dean of the Yale school of medicine said it wasn't proper for me to think that his school's research conclusions on the safety of Premarin could be influenced by a gift of a large amount of money from Ayerst (the makers of that ultra-lucrative product) but he refused to tell me how much money was involved. Big money from every major industry has corrupted our scientific culture, and it is important that we consider the scientific alternatives." [Note that Premarin is still a widely-prescribed hormone replacement therapy drug for women, and further note that this was written in 1994.. the corruption in pharma is far deeper and viler today than ever. Also note here that Ayerst was part of Wyeth Pharma, which was acquired by Pfizer in 2009.]
43 [Again some wild thinking by analogy here, translating ideas across a wide chasm from one domain to another] "The links between Premarin and the Theory of a Dead Universe are not obvious, unless you think about them. Our product-oriented medical culture is strengthening the idea of the pathogen-destroying magic bullet, because magic bullets can be profitably sold and administered. The idea that the patient is a self-healing, self-organizing kind of being is unpopular with the medical business, because they have no investment in the providing of healthful environments: Clean air, clean water, clean food, safe work, good housing."
44 Hilarious and yet sad quote here about what today we would call "disease-mongering": A doctor sees three people in a family with muscle twitches, and a Latin-named Twitchy Muscle Syndrome with dominant Mendelian inheritance enters the scientific literature. In thousands of such publications, the possibility of nutritional deficiencies and exposure to toxins isn't investigated, because there is such eagerness to recognize a new genetic defect."
44 [Long, good quote here]: There is a mystique in our scientific culture called Reductionism. It reduces the explanation for something to a description of its parts, and the ways the parts interact. A relatively small number of 'elements' and 'laws' are used to explain a great range of specific phenomena. My favorite formulation of the reductionist attitude is that of the famous Mr. Crick: What else is there but atoms?
The reason I call Reductionism a mystique is that its proponents feel it is so clear and obvious that they don't have to bother with philosophical complexity. They, in that sense, are the Fundamentalists of the 20th century. Although they emphasize the importance of analysis, formal reasoning, mathematics, and quantification, they are not interested in examining the philosophical basis of their methods, except occasionally to say something like 'the scientific method has been proven scientifically.' Sanity itself requires that we not confuse our wishes, assumptions, methods, and ideas with the world that we are trying to understand. If our method determines our conclusions we are closer to theology than to science, and that is how many 'scientists' prefer it."
45 "It is in the nature of formal reasoning that we can deduce specific details from something more general, but that we can't formally deduce something more general from specific things. This is where reductionism uses its method to impose a conclusion about the nature of the world... The nature of formal logic, proceeding from the parts, requires that the whole be explainable in terms of its parts. If the trick that explains the whole can be found in the nature of the parts, there is no problem, but problems arise when the reductionist claims that we already have the kind of knowledge of the parts that can adequately explain the whole."
46ff The author gives a good example here of a trap of "naive reductionism" as well as an example of how science (even physics!) censors and suppresses discoveries that don't fit the current narrative/world view: Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian physicist, in 1915 presented a formula for gas absorption through multiple layers of gas molecules; this was rejected by German scientists who were basing their rejection on their more "modern" [but reductive] view that the electrical nature of matter better explained physics and chemistry, thus there was no way what Polanyi posited could happen. Polanyi's view was seen as "wrong" but it ultimately turned out to be much closer to the truth, as in 1930 Irving Langmuir came up with a very similar theory for multilayer gas absorption. "If the world's best physicists and chemists used a reductionist approach to block the development of an important branch of physics, it is clear how the approach can obstruct the development of ideas in more complex fields, such as biology and cosmology."
47 "A higher level of organization of substance (as in Polanyj's experiment) can, if insightfully described, provide new knowledge about the nature of the 'parts' making up the lower level. This might be called 'reducing up.'"
47 "Once we accept that knowledge is tentative, and that we are probably going to improve our knowledge in important ways when we learn more about the world, we are less likely to reject new information that conflicts with our present ideas. The attitude of expectancy will allow us to apply insights gained at one level of generality to other levels. No particular kind of knowledge will have such authority that it will automatically exclude certain possibilities in another field of knowledge." [I love the author's idealism. Also I like the idea of building a mental habit of always reminding myself that "knowledge is tentative" to help me avoid rejecting new information that conflicts with my present ideas too.]
47 "Polanyi's adsorption measurements or the known structures of organisms or biological systems could be seen as an opportunity to ask 'what processes could create structures of this sort, or are there rules of stability which can clearly define the conditions under which such a can exist?'" [Taking the underlying idea up a level to see what it might tell you. Kind of a scientific version of what Douglas Hofstadter would call "jumping out of the system."]
47ff Comments here on rules of stability vs. rules of structure-making: the former's rules are simpler and have greater generality than the latter's; also examples given here from chemistry where reductionist views (requiring the parts explain the whole) caused the field to reject Sidney Fox's experiments in biochemistry, "cooking" amino acids into a protein by omitting water and finding non-random structures that chemistry "said" would have to be random.
49 On discovering "rules of stability" that could be more holistically explanatory across domains: "The 'requirements for existence,' seen in this way, form a direct link between practical matters, such as health and human potentiality, and seemingly remote matters, such as cosmology."
49-50 [Again, a very good money quote here]: "The insistence that formal deductive reasoning should form the link between our present physical ideas, and our description of biology, is what forces the reductionists to assert that our existence is the result of random mutations plus natural selection. My preference for the use of imagination to extend physical ideas, rather than logical deduction to 'apply' those ideas, comes simply from my feeling that we don't yet know everything, and that in searching for new knowledge we should avoid routes that lead us to believe nothing is there even before we have looked."
50-51 Comments here on some potential principles and processes that might be behind a system of "rules of stability": systems in which energy is added or given off, where there is no equilibrium; asymmetry as a general aspect of interaction; also hysteresis, or "system memory" over time, which gives rise to long range order ("This simple idea is often neglected. It is implicit in hysteresis."); oscillating reactions; resonance; "all stability is metastability" [I wish the author explained what he means by metastability, he just leaves it hanging].
Chapter 6: The Ex-Rainforests of the Pacific Northwest
52 Interesting opening discussion here of a timber harvester looking at an ancient forest and seeing money, and foolishly saying that old forests could and should be replaced with "kindergarten forests" as old forests are static and "make no contribution toward absorbing the carbon dioxide produced by industry." The author retorts parenthetically here that "...replacing a big forest by a little forest adds carbon dioxide to the environment. I don't consider the 'greenhouse effect' to be a problem, but I mention it as an example of how even their own arguments weigh against their intentions."
53 Thoughts on rainforests/old growth forests: "their energy is primarily biological, and that their effects contribute massively to the stability of the biosphere." "...the great age of the forest reveals the stability of its integration with the world's weather system. Note also the footnote here: "Rainforests illustrate the first and second principles of biogeochemistry: that biogenic migration of chemical elements tends to the maximum, and that the development of stable lifeforms serves this tendency."
53 Comments on transpiration: "The secretion of droplets at the ends of leaf-veins under certain conditions shows that osmosis and evaporation are not adequate to explain the movement of water; the attitude of our science establishment to this fundamental problem offers great opportunities for sociological investigation."
54-55 Odd shift of topic here to loggers, ivory dealers and fishermen saying "I have to make a living" even as their root income source is overfished, overlogged or overhunted; "This pathological sort of perception resembles the type of autism in which the victim devours part of his own body, unless restrained."
55-56 Comments on the transitory nature of "timber wealth" as there are many other sources of material for fabric, homebuilding, etc., that are better and cheaper; "For example, I lived in a two-storey adobe house built around 1450, which had survived several major earthquakes without damage. It had 12 ft. ceilings, and didn't need air conditioning even in hot weather. When the drainage is good, these mud buildings are not damaged even by torrential rains. My father built an adobe house in the 1930's which is still in good condition."
56-57 Thinking of trees as a geologically significant form of water storage; [fascinating!] Quotes from A.V. Lapo in his book Traces of Bygone Biospheres talking about "the water cycle on land is determined almost exclusively by the transpiration of the plants."
58 "2500 years ago, Theophrastus recorded cases in which a region's climate was permanently altered by deforestation and swamp draining, with the result that rich agricultural productivity was lost forever. The difference between the small scale of the ancient Greek ecological damage and the present scale of deforestation suggests the scale of the damage which is being done to modem agriculture."
57-8 Interesting quote here: "In the 1920's, an economist, S.G. Strumilin, showed that money spent on education gave a 27-fold return; more recently, J.K. Galbraith said that the return is about 100 times the investment. and is greater than the return on investments in railroads, dams, or factories." [I think one can safely argue today that these return on investment guesstimates are fallacious on some level as the education system in the United States creates a type of "excellent sheep" designed for a ludic environment, and not well-designed for the kind of uncertainties that reality actually presents us with.]
58-60 The rest of this chapter appears to devolve into pablum: "There is no foreseeable limit to the qualitative development of the economy. If we can shift from an extractive-degradative economy to one which develops by investing in education, science. culture. and human well-being, we will have a future in which to discover whether the biosphere-noosphere has any limits to its developmental potential."
Part Two: Energy Problems
61 "In this section, I discuss some of the practical consequences and applications of the idea that we should focus on the role of energy in biological adaptation. Energy, in an important sense, is prior to information, especially in the context of biology."
Chapter 7: A Unifying Principle
62 "For many cells, the threshold for excitation (and response) is governed by the energy charge of the cell. This is clearest in the case of brain cells: seizures can be produced by either hypoxia or hypoglycemia, and in the low energy state of hypothyroidism, deep normal sleep is seldom possible. Muscle cells. secretory cells, and immune cells behave similarly. I believe we are at the beginning of a therapeutic revolution based on this, and other closely related principles."
62-3 Note the chart below: "The regions labeled with A, B, C, and D can be thought of, for the sake of illustration, as the following functional states of the organism:
A -- Adventure
B -- A baby sleeping
C -- Cautious conserving of energy
D -- Stressed to death
B -- A baby sleeping
C -- Cautious conserving of energy
D -- Stressed to death
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63 The ideal therapy is one which restores the cellular energy thoroughly, so the organism regains its full capacity to adapt, and seeks appropriate stimulation. Good nutrition and sleep are sufficient therapy for a healthy young organism. For old or sick organisms, artificial sleep and special nutrition can be useful.
63 "The idea of the 'therapeutic vector' means that any treatment should combine preservation of energy with restoration of energy production."
63-4 Shock, which is a state of suppressed energy production, can be used to illustrate this approach. Several times in the last 50 years great advances were made in understanding the nature of shock, but they tend to be ignored or forgotten. I think this is because our medical culture has lacked a unifying principle which would integrate physiology and biochemistry into a functional whole.
64 [Interesting to see comments here on Hans Selye and his groundbreaking work on the stress-adtaptation cycle here.] "Early in Hans Selye's study of the steroids, he noticed that estrogen treatment causes the same changes which occur in the shock phase of the stress reaction. Many years later I noticed that oxygen deprivation causes the same biochemical changes that occur with an estrogen excess, and with old age, and I proposed that estrogen acts by interfering with the use of oxygen. In the mid-1940s a group of researchers, believing that energy depletion was the basic cause of shock, demonstrated that intravenous injection of the 'energy molecule' ATP caused animals to recover which otherwise would have died from shock."
65-6 Note the graphic here of a vascular system in various energy states: "In the blood vessels at the left side of Figure 2, the arterioles are in the high energy resting state, while the veins are in the middle. active zone. On the right, the arterioles are receiving 'depleted' blood, lacking oxygen or sugar for example, and so are now in the middle energy, active state. Passing through the capillaries, most of the blood's remaining oxygen and nutrients are extracted by the tissue cells, leaving only minimal energy supplies for the veins, which are therefore in the lowest energy state, 'protective inhibition,' in which there is no muscle tone."
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66 "Besides helping to explain the shock state itself, this relationship of vascular tone to cellular energy helps to explain the circulatory distress which is associated with fatigue, old age, hypothyroidism, and estrogen excess."
66 [Interesting!] Bacterial endotoxin causes some of the same effects as adrenaline. When stress reduces circulation to the bowel, causing injury to the barrier function of the intestinal cells, endotoxin can enter the blood, contributing to a shock state, with further impairment of circulation. In old age and in 'winter sickness,' something like a chronic borderline state of shock can develop. Intravenous glucose has been used successfully to bring patients out of septic shock. The tonic effects of intravenous local anesthetics are, I think, largely the result of their ability to open the arterioles."
66 "Magnesium and vitamin A also have some ability to normalize blood vessel tone, and can help to maintain the barrier function of the bowel."
66-7 Whether a tissue is hyperactive or underactive, it is possible that a systemic energy deficit is responsible. Symptomatic relief is rational if it is consistent with restoration of energy. Glucose is often thought of as the most direct source of energy, but other substances are apparently used even more easily. 'Ketones' (for example, alpha-keto- or hydroxy-butyrate) are used more easily, at least in some circumstances. Short and medium chain fatty acids are used more easily than glucose, and it is apparently this fact which accounts for their presence in milk. Their effects on cells--induction of hormone receptors and other specialized cell functions. suppression of stress-induced enzymes, stimulation of energy production in fat cells, inhibition of cancer cell division and viral expression, etc.--are what we would expect of an ideal energy source. Unfortunately, commercial milk animals are fed large amounts of grain, the oils of which act in opposition to the short and medium chain fats. Some tropical fruits and coconut oil provide some of these efficient and protective energy sources. As little as one or two teaspoonfuls of coconut oil per day appears to have a strong protective effect against obesity and cancer."
Chapter 8: Steroids
68 Background comments on steroids as a general concept: The steroid hormones are involved in all aspects of animal physiology, and overlap with control functions of the nervous system, peptide hormones, metabolites, prostaglandins, cyclic nucleotides, etc. Sometimes people speak of 'steroids' when they mean glucocorticoids such as cortisol or a synthetic like dexamethasone, or, among athletes, when they mean anabolic steroids or synthetic androgens; and so it is common to associate "steroids" with harmful side effects. All foods contain steroids and sterols (a major type, containing an alcohol group and a side-chain) some of which are beneficial and some of which are toxic or allergenic."
68 "In animals, cholesterol is the basic sterol molecule, which is massively converted into other substances, including the steroid hormones. Thyroid hormone and vitamin A are required for this conversion."
68-9 [Interesting comment here]: "Depending on the tissue, pregnenolone will be converted by enzymes in the cytoplasm into either progesterone or DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone). The fact that progesterone (and probably pregnenolone) stimulates its own synthesis means that taking it does not suppress the body's ability to synthesize it, as happens with cortisol. Sometimes, one dose or a few doses can restore the body's ability to produce enough of its own. Progesterone also allows the thyroid gland to secrete its hormones, especially when the thyroid function has been inhibited by estrogen. Since the thyroid hormone is needed to produce progesterone, a supplement of either tends to normalize both thyroid and progesterone production."
69-70 "During pregnancy, very large amounts of progesterone are made. It protects and stabilizes practically all functions of both the mother and the fetus... Part of progesterone's protective effect is a result of its quieting effect on cells. For example, it tends to prevent seizure activity in brain cells. During childbirth, its normal function is to act as an anesthetic. When the level of estrogen is too high, progesterone can't achieve this effect."
70-1 [Comments on pregnenolone and dosing]: "Pregnenolone, taken orally, does nothing noticeable to a healthy animal or person, but if the stress-related hormones are elevated, they return to normal when pregnenolone is taken... A tenth of a gram is a reasonable first dose, though some people seem to need as much as 1 gram per day."
Chapter 9: Thyroid
72f "Measuring the amount of thyroid hormone in the blood isn't a good way to evaluate adequacy of thyroid function, since the response of tissues to the hormone can be suppressed (for example, by unsaturated fats)." On traditional ways of estimating thyroid function: pulse, temperature, carotenemia, bowel function and quality of hair and skin, also the achilles tendon reflex test: "If energy production is efficient, relaxation is faster than the passive return motion of the foot, so the foot swings freely back to its original position, and over-shoots slightly, causing a slight swinging action. In hypothyroidism, the foot returns as if controlled by a pneumatic door-closer, and settles slowly and precisely into its relaxed position, sometimes with a hesitating, intermittent motion. This slow replenishment of energy, and slow relaxation, can cause muscles to cramp easily. The aching leg muscles of children at the end of an active day are often a sign of hypothyroidism, and sometimes the gastrocnemius muscle becomes very swollen and hypertrophied in hypothyroid children. The same process, of slow energy regeneration, can cause rhythm disturbance in the heart, and often causes insomnia and restless sleep.
74 "If a hypothyroid person has a very slow pulse, and feels lethargic, it seems that there is little adrenaline; in this case, a feeding of carbohydrate is likely to increase both the pulse rate and the temperature, as the liver is permitted to form the active T3 hormone. Women often have above-average thyroxin, with symptoms of hypothyroidism. This is apparently because it isn't being converted to the active form (T3). Before using a Cytomel (T3) supplement, it might be possible to solve the problem with diet alone. A piece of fruit or a glass of juice or milk between meals, and adequate animal protein (or potato protein) in the diet is sometimes enough to allow the liver to produce the hormone."
75 "Besides fasting, or chronic protein deficiency, the common causes of hypothyroidism are excessive stress or 'aerobic' (i.e., anaerobic) exercise, and diets containing beans, lentils, nuts, unsaturated fats (including carotene), and undercooked broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, or mustard greens. Many health conscious people become hypothyroid with a synergistic program of undercooked vegetables, legumes instead of animal proteins, oils instead of butter, carotene instead of vitamin A, and breathless exercise instead of a stimulating life."
Chapter 10: The Stress of Darkness
76 "Cortisol begins to rise as soon as there is darkness, regardless of sleep or waking. Artificial light, and its absence, clearly can determine the time at which cortisol begins to rise. Falling glucose is the signal for cortisol to rise. Dreams are closely associated with the chemical-physiological mobilization in response to low blood glucose."
76 "Sleep minimizes the increase of cortisol. The inhibitory, sleep inducing brain chemicals, GABA and the sleep peptide, have a quieting, anti-stress effect even during waking stress. Sleep (and the inhibitory chemicals) reduce energy expenditures, conserving glucose... Beginning at sunset, darkness progressively damages mitochondria structurally and functionally. Mitochondrial damage, and the functional impairment of organs such as the heart muscle, reach a peak at dawn. During the day (in organisms which survive the night), mitochondrial structure is restored, and organ function improves, with the peak being reached at sunset. In winter, there is cumulative damage to mitochondria, because of too few daylight hours to complete the rebuilding of mitochondria. During the summer (in organisms that live long enough) the cumulative damage is mostly repaired."
77 "In the dark of polar winter, ordinary artificial light provides some protection during the 16 hours when it is used, but during the dark hours when lights are off, healthy young people show the darkness-related signs that normally occur in older people, such as an accelerated pulse. Although direct sunlight damages skin, people generally are healthier in proportion to their exposure to sunlight... Small organisms are able to set their biorhythms by a very weak light. Only bright lights can alter human rhythms. For example, the cycle of body temperature can be changed, or the rhythmic secretion of melatonin can be suppressed by lights stronger than 2500 lux."
78 "Besides darkness. hypoxia and overload stress (which is relative hypoxia, in a sense) are the main things which damage mitochondria. Inhibitory analogs of GABA appear to be protective in all types of stress. The anesthetic steroids, such as progesterone, pregnenolone (and possibly DHEA), also protect against injury by stress, and probably work by some of the same energy-sparing mechanisms."
78 [Interesting comments here about living at altitude]: "Both living at a high elevation and having high thyroid function increase the quantity of mitochondria in cells, and this increase appears to be fairly permanent. Pretreatment with thyroid hormone or with a time at high altitude increases the ability to resist stress."
79 "Avoiding excessive intake of unsaturated fatty acids and iron will decrease the damage caused by unavoidable stress (including darkness)." [More seed oil denialism here!]
79 [More interesting dietary comments here]: "Milk and various fruits contain close analogs of GABA, some of which specifically block formation of the catabolic stress enzymes."
79 [Salt before bed!] "To the extent that nocturnal stress resembles shock, taking some extra salt at bed-time is logical. It lowers adrenaline, and tends to increase blood volume. In hypoxic stress, tissue retains water, and increasing the sodium content of the blood opposes that tendency. It is often a remedy for insomnia."
79 [Also note the comments here on "penetrating red light" and its therapeutic benefits]: "Penetrating red light is possibly the fundamental anti-stress factor for all organisms. The chronic deficiency of such light is, I think, the best explanation for the deterioration which occurs with aging. ... The activation of energy-dependent repair processes is clearly involved, but the exact physical and chemical mechanisms still haven't been determined."
80 [More on ideas for light therapy during winter time]: "During the winter when there isn't enough sunlight, it is helpful to use several hundred watts of incandescent lights. If bulbs with internal reflectors are used, 500 or 600 watts can be bright enough to have a protective biological effect."
Chapter 11: Pregnenolone
82 [Discussion here of an accident by which the author found out the clinical value of pregnenolone]: "Since then I have taken some almost every day." He even shows two side-by-side passport photos to show before and after taking 50-100mg/day. His facial skin tightened up, he looked less haggard, he resolved his "winter sickness." [Note however the further comments below on p85.]
83 "Pregnenolone is known to be produced (in the mitochondria) from cholesterol. This is the first stage in the production of all of the steroid hormones. If pregnenolone synthesis is insufficient, supplementary pregnenolone would help to maintain an optimum level of the various other steroids. Aging, stress, depression, hypothyroidism, and exposure to toxins are conditions in which synthesis of pregnenolone might be inadequate."
84 "In 1944 factory workers were given daily doses of pregnenolone and, on alternate weeks, a placebo. During the pregnenolone weeks. their piece-work output was significantly higher. Healthy young people who are not under stress do not feel anything from taking even a very large dose (e.g., one gram), and no changes have been detected in blood glucose, proteins, amino acids, or salts."
84 "Papa and Kligman (1965) showed that adding pregnenolone or progesterone topically to skin would restore youthful properties to aged skin. I think DHEA gives similar results, and (like progesterone) is more easily absorbed than pregnenolone. Both progesterone and pregnenolone seem to improve the efficiency of blood circulation. I have seen grey-skinned depressed people turn pink and start smiling shortly after taking pregnenolone." The author even cites here a hard-to-believe case where he helped cure a woman with Grave's disease using pregnenolone.
85 "After using pregnenolone for several years, I noticed that the slack skin and other signs of aging were coming back. That spring I increased my dose of pregnenolone, and did other things to promote my own pregnenolone synthesis, such as using larger amounts of coconut oil and getting a little more exposure to incandescent light. The effects of the supplements are more noticeable in the summer, since that is when the body's repair processes are greatest. Avoiding the destructive effects of northern winters (without migrating to the south) would seem to require artificial lights as bright as summer daylight."
Chapter 12: Restoring Hair Color
86 [Parts of this chapter strain credulity.] "When I lived in Montana, I knew many people whose hair became grey in their late 20s; I wondered whether it was caused by low thyroid, by an odd mineral balance. by frequent chilling of the skin and scalp, or maybe just by their lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. In Mexico. people in warm, humid tropical areas seldom lost their pigment."
87 "A Japanese researcher found that each hair color is associated with a certain pattern of several trace minerals. When he removed all the trace minerals, every type of hair became white. When he added a characteristic pattern of trace minerals, associated with a particular hair color, to a sample of demineralized hair, the color which was produced corresponded to the minerals added, and not to what the original color of the hair had been. He concluded that people inherit a tendency to concentrate certain minerals in their hair."
87 "The familiar association of severe stress with sudden greying of the hair also would suggest that excessive cortisone destroys melanin."
88 "Someone suspected that copper accelerated aging by causing free radical reactions, and fed a chelator (gluconic acid) to animals, and extended their lives by 10 or 12%."
88 "Black sheep will produce white wool if they are fed an excess of molybdenum. This is supposedly caused by a displacement of copper. I think we probably accumulate too much of the wrong metals, such as iron, with aging and stress."
88-9 [Hard to believe yet striking story about hair color restoration here]: "I had some eyebrow hairs that were pure white; when one matured and fell out, another white one would replace it. They grow quickly, and have a short life cycle, so they are nice to experiment with. I went on a very low iron diet, eating mostly milk, with some eggs, cheese, and citrus fruit, but with very little meat for several weeks. I cooked eggs in a copper pan, to increase my copper intake and to avoid iron absorbed from an iron pan. I found a source of vitamin A without preservative, and began using large amounts of that, which I had not done for several years because of an allergy to the preservative. I increased my doses of DHEA and pregnenolone. Usually on alternate days, I would rub vitamin A and vitamin E (sometimes with DHEA), or a solution of copper acetate, into the skin around the white hairs. Within a few weeks, the bottom of one of the white hairs had begun to darken. Another hair came out a couple of weeks later, and was darkened along about half of its length. The third hair came out two or three weeks later, and was all black except for 3 millimeters at the tip, which had begun growing about the time the other two were changing color. It has been about two months since I stopped cooking regularly in copper (the taste gets very tiresome), and none of the hairs has reverted to white."
Chapter 13: Arthritis and Hormone Balancing
90 "It is fairly common for arthritis to appear shortly after an accident, a shock, or surgery, and Hans Selye's famous work with rats shows that when stress exhausts the adrenal glands (so they are unable to produce normal amounts of cortisone and related steroid hormones), arthritis and other 'degenerative' diseases are likely to develop." Anecdote about a healthy 71-year old man having arthritis develop in his hands after facial trauma, the doctor treated him for low thyroid and this resolved his arthritis.
90-1 "Selye's work with the diseases of stress, and the anti-stress hormones of the adrenal cortex, helped many scientists to think more clearly about the interaction of the organism with its environment, but it has led others to focus too narrowly on hormones of the adrenal cortex (such as cortisol and cortisone), and to forget the older knowledge about natural resistance."
91 "While one of Selye's earliest observations related gastrointestinal bleeding to stress, Meerson's work has revealed in a detailed way how the usually beneficial hormone of adaptation, cortisone, can cause so many other harmful effects when its action is too prolonged or too intense. Some of the harmful effects of the cortisone class of drugs (other than gastro-intestinal bleeding) are: Hypertension, osteoporosis, delayed healing, atrophy of the skin, convulsions, cataracts, glaucoma, protruding eyes, psychic derangements, menstrual irregularities, and loss of immunity allowing infections (or cancer) to spread."
92 "According to Meerson, heart attacks are provoked and aggravated by the cortisone produced during stress. (Meerson and his colleagues have demonstrated that the progress of a heart attack can be halted by a treatment including natural substances such as vitamin E and magnesium.)"
93ff On hormones produced during a healthy pregnancy and their benefits: progesterone as both anti-inflammatory and anesthetic; DHEA, which is being studied for its anti-aging, anti-cancer, and anti-obesity effects.
94 "...after about fifty years of medical use, no toxic side effects have been found for progesterone or pregnenolone."
95 "Besides many people whose arthritis improved with only thyroid supplementation, I have seen more than 30 people use one or more of these other natural hormones for various types of arthritis, usually with a topical application. Often the pain is relieved within a few minutes. I know of several other people who used progesterone topically for inflamed tendons, damaged cartilage, or other inflammations."
95 [Disturbing quote here that shows Peat was ahead of his time in understanding the central agency problems posed by the pharma industry]: "We often hear that 'there is no cure for arthritis, because the causes are not known.' If the cause is an imbalance in the normal hormones of adaptation and resistance, then eliminating the cause by restoring balance will produce a true cure. But if it is more profitable to sell powerful drugs than to sell the nutrients needed to form natural hormones (or to supplement those natural hormones) we can't expect the drug companies to spend any money investigating that sort of cure. And at present the arthritis market amounts to billions of dollars in drug sales each year. A drug company representative recently told me that a substance which cures arthritis isn't a desirable product; a good drug (from his company's point of view) is one that has to be used for the rest of the patient's life."
Chapter 14: The Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
97 [More structural agency-type problems in healthcare described here]: "When a physician chooses the most profitable diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to a health problem, it is likely to be considered fraudulent if the doctor is a chiropractor, but not if the doctor is a surgeon. If a naturopath tells you that bed rest is the best treatment for a ruptured spinal disc, surgeons will warn you about the dangers of quackery, but the research clearly shows that, for safety and efficacy, surgery is distinctly inferior to bed rest. There are many other situations in which doing nothing, or using a more conservative treatment, is clearly superior to the standard medical or surgical treatment, but the medical industry has learned how to control public opinion by manipulating the mass media."
99 "When a tendon in the wrist swells, it can cause numbness in the hand, by pressing on a nerve which passes through the carpal tunnel with some tendons. The tunnel is formed by a ligament that holds the tendons in place, and swelling of the ligament itself can contribute to compression of the nerve. Even the connective tissue that forms the nerve sheath itself can swell. Many people with undiagnosed hypothyroidism complain that they 'have poor circulation,' and that their hands and feet go to sleep easily. These are two separate (but related) problems that can be relieved through a nutritional and hormonal anti-stress program."
Chapter 15: The Premenstrual Syndrome
101ff "Although it has been only in the last 20 years that animal studies of the behavioral effects of the steroid hormones have become subtle enough to explain their role in emotions, depression, aggression, etc., the more physical dangers of excessive or unopposed estrogen were clearly recognized by the late 1930s and the early 1940s: It was, for example, known to cause cancer, infertility and miscarriages, excessive blood clotting, edema and a shock-like stress reaction. Other toxic effects of estrogen--seizures, birth defects, toxemia of pregnancy, increased intraocular pressure, atrophy or necrosis of various tissues, etc.--continued to be discovered, while the opposing steroid. progesterone, was found to offer protection against these, and still other, toxic effects."
102 More comments on progesterone: "...natural progesterone has a broad spectrum of intrinsic effects, and is easily metabolized into other active hormones as needed, that is, it is a basic precursor substance. It has been tested in isolation on practically every type of tissue, where it seems to have a stabilizing action: nerve, smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, epithelial cells, cells of the immune system, etc. It is anti-spasmodic. anti-inflammatory, antimitotic in certain tissues, and (at high concentration) anesthetic. Its use before and during pregnancy has been associated with a lower than normal incidence of birth defects."
103ff Comments on delivery mechanisms of progesterone, including warnings about injections because of the adjuvant benzyl alcohol, which "has significant toxicity to nerves, and can produce anaphylaxis. Benzyl alcohol, in contact with tissue, combines with water, causing progesterone to be deposited as crystals."
105 "My first suggestion for someone with PMS is to avoid thyroid suppression (diet; darkness and endurance exercise should be avoided), and to use my carrot salad recipe: Grated carrots, vinegar, coconut oil and salt are the essentials, garlic and olive oil are optional. Acetic acid and fatty acids released from the coconut oil act at different levels, and the carrot fiber is a timed-release system which also binds toxins and stimulates the bowel; the salt spares magnesium and tends to inhibit excessive prolactin release."
105 "Use of a balanced thyroid (Armour or Proloid) supplement can help to restore normal thyroid function by breaking the cycle of stress. If these methods aren't enough, progesterone or pregnenolone can be supplemented. Both of these help to normalize thyroid function, and both have the 'catatoxic' function of protecting against a wide range of toxins."
Chapter 16: Restoring Fertility
106 "Several years ago, a friend of mine had a healthy baby a few months after she had begun using small supplements of hormones, and several years after her early menopause. I wondered whether age or the absence of menstruation might be almost irrelevant to fertility, if the right balance and sequence of hormones could be achieved. A gynecologist I knew had been giving his wife progesterone since she was about 40, and at 60 she was youthful looking, and still menstruating. I have known of many women who still menstruated at 55, and--since diet and light and stimulation powerfully affect metabolism of hormones--it is easy to imagine that natural conditions could sometimes help to preserve fertility beyond that age." [Wild.]
107 Some striking case studies of late-age pregnancies described here of women in their 50s and 60s.
108 "Since it helps to have information from blood tests, physicians are often involved, and it is important that both the woman and her doctor be aware of what the other is trying to do." [Sound advice in any and all situations.]
109-110 "In animal experiments, an appropriate dose of estrogen terminates pregnancy at any stage. It is clear that lack of oxygen caused by estrogen dominance is a major factor in miscarriage at any stage. The six-day-old embryo suddenly becomes dependent on oxygen, just at the moment of readiness for implantation. Only a small excess of estrogen is needed to prevent implantation of the embryo, because progesterone is produced in relatively small amounts at that early stage, but even late in pregnancy a dose of estrogen sufficient to override the effects of progesterone can destroy the fetus."
110 "Women who used progesterone before getting pregnant had babies with a very low incidence of congenital defects (roughly 1/ 10 the 'normal' rate), and women who used sizable amounts of progesterone during pregnancy had outstandingly superior babies. The things which sustain fertility, in its simple sense, also are the things which optimize the life of the child."
Part Three: Regenerating Knowledge
111 "Our organism has requirements that must be recognized, and one of these is the need to know, to have intellectual adequacy. Knowing takes energy, and our experience is influenced by our biological state. We can improve our developmental conditions, socially and materially, to bring our species up to a higher level of mental energy. In this section, I discuss some of the biological, social, and ideological aspects of the problem--the problems of how to overcome inertia and foster creative knowing."
Chapter 17: Youth, Energy, and Regeneration
112 "Being alive is good for you. But our culture is saturated with arguments to the contrary--that it is life which kills us, and self-denial which sustains us. It is always easier to blame the victim than to search for the real cause of a problem. In this chapter I will give some of the arguments in favor of life and more life, or rather, some of the evidence from which those arguments can be made."
112-3 [Ray Peat is not a fan of distance running.] "There are now many people who argue that a low metabolic rate, a low body temperature and slow heartbeat indicate that you should live a long time: 'your heart can beat only so many times.' Most of these people also advocate 'conditioning exercise,' and they point out that trained runners tend to have a slow heart rate. (Incidentally, running elevates adrenaline, which causes increased clumping of platelets and accelerated blood clotting. Hypothyroidism--whether pre-existing or induced by running--slows the heart, raises the production of adrenaline, and is strongly associated with heart disease, as well as with high cholesterol.)"
114 "Two clear differences have been found between old blood and young blood. The albumin in old blood is in a more oxidized state. (I think it was the famous gerontologist, Verzar, who first reported this.) Although, at least in aging humans, there is much less oxygen in the blood, something causes the albumin to be in a more oxidized state in older blood. The other distinct feature of older blood might also seem paradoxical at first: the red blood cells are younger. That is, in an old individual, the red blood cells are more fragile--possibly from being more quickly damaged from oxidation--and are replaced sooner, and so, on average, they are many weeks younger than the cells in a healthy young individual. Neither of these features is paradoxical. Poor oxygenation is a stress, and causes the waste of glucose and compensatory mobilization of fat from storage, and the relatively reducing environment in the cytoplasm causes the mobilization of iron from storage, in the toxic reduced (ferrous) form. Products of the peroxidative interaction of iron with unsaturated fats are evident in the blood (and other tissues) during stress, and especially so in older animals."
115-6 "(In reading the published research on dietary restriction and the effects of unsaturated or saturated fats, it is important to pay careful attention to the actual composition of the diet. The cancer rate, for example, usually reaches a maximum and levels off at a com oil content of less than 10% of calories, but this content is often called a 'low fat' diet. If a normal and low calorie diet both contain 6% com oil, which is clearly carcinogenic, the animals which eat less food will eat less corn oil, and will also tend to burn it more completely for energy, so there will be a major difference in the toxic effects of oil. Lard is often the same as soy oil in linoleic acid content, yet it is too often described as a 'saturated fat,' I read a publication on the effects of a 'low fat' diet, which contained 20% com oil; sometimes I feel there is a deliberate attempt to mislead when language is used so arbitrarily.)"
118 On "traditional" diets (rather than grain-based diets) being linked to longevity: "Low thyroid function, relative over-feeding, and the presence of unsaturated oils in the diet are known to accelerate sexual maturity. Early sexual maturity has been associated with premature aging and early death."
119 [Interesting comments here on coconut oil as well as organ and offal meats]: "In the tropical regions where puberty doesn't occur until about the age of 17, it seems that some of the heaviest birth weights occur, and high birth weight generally indicates good maternal nutrition. ...These tropical areas generally coincide with areas where coconuts are produced abundantly, and are used for food. Animals fed coconut oil are lean, have delayed sexual maturation, and have offspring with larger brains than animals fed similar amounts of unsaturated oils. Since coconuts and related fruits contain sterols, their use might have a direct hormonal action, in addition to the effects of the easily metabolized high energy short and medium-chain fats, which support an efficient and intense respiratory metabolism. The dietary hormones are probably responsible for the high metabolic rate of the Eskimos, too, except in that case glands, skin, and brains are regularly eaten. Tropical people generally consume all parts of their food animals, too (except for vegetarian cultures such as Hindus, which use only milk and butter from their cows), though the Eskimos are unique in having, traditionally, a pure meat diet."
121-2 In another discussion on neoteny, there is a non-sequitur mention here of Ashley Montagu's book The Natural Superiority of Women.
122 [Interesting] "Progesterone's effects are 'neotenous,' in the sense of prolonging youthful traits. Women have several 'neotenous' features relative to men, including a bigger ratio of brain to lean body mass, a smaller face-to-cranium ratio, differences in voice and body hair, less aggressiveness, and greater adaptability. (In spite of the people who teach assertiveness, I think high adaptability and low aggressiveness are characteristic human and primate traits, which are typical of infants, and are likely to represent our species' future.)"
123ff Related comments about trees and neoteny/paedomorphism: "Premature reproduction can be produced by stress, or to look at it from another angle, the conditions which prolong the growth state can be thought of as stress-free conditions... Jerry Barnes, a tree developer in Cottage Grove, Oregon, discovered several years ago that the intensity of the metabolic activity even in seeds can be used to accurately predict the future performance of the tree, cutting many years out of the process of tree improvement. The story of how his work was received at the state university is interesting; he did some quick lab tests on seed provided by the university, and they confirmed that he had correctly chosen the seeds which produced the best trees in their 13 year study, but they simply rejected his result as not conforming to accepted ideas. According to Jerry Barnes' theory, trees become able to move into less favorable niches by accumulating 'restraint genes,' which limit their growth, but prevent death by making them able to tolerate marginal conditions." [Even highly rigorous ideas frequently get rejected if they challenge orthodoxy...]
124 "Upward adaptiveness, which is typical of large-brained animals and of plants with a high metabolic rate, allows the organisms to find more expansive niches by living at a higher energy level. This process obviously places great importance on an environment which can provide abundant energy and the necessary nutritional substances."
125 "There is evidence that the cranial volume grows into old age, and also that the DNA content of the brain keeps increasing during adulthood. Presumably, this is only the result of an increase in connective tissue cells, but the certainty many people have that we can't grow new brain cells at any age is unfounded... The old doctrine, which claimed that '100,000 brain cells die every day,' is now recognized to have no basis in fact."
126 "Rather than a programmed or random continuous loss of cells, when atrophy of the brain occurs, it seems to be caused by specific conditions, such as stress with prolonged exposure to glucocorticoid hormones."
126 "The skeletal changes (shrinkage, curving of the back, moving forward of the lower jaw) which are so characteristic of old age in humans, also occur in other animals in aging and under the influence of the stress hormones."
126 "At a certain point, I think we will understand mitochondrial protection well enough to prevent and cure the basic pathologies of aging. The Mayans and Eskimos studied by [Dr. George W.] Crile produced 25% more biological energy at rest than people in the U.S. and Europe. They are culturally and nutritionally very different from each other, but they have enough in common to make them very different metabolically from the Euro-American culture. What they have in common is possibly something as simple as the absence of thyroid-inhibiting substances in their diet."
127-8 "Since the DNA repair process is energy dependent, greater biological energy prevents mutations. It used to be a common belief among biologists that the 'wear and tear' of being alive would cause mutations, as well as other cell damage. However, many lines of evidence show that stress and energy depletion are common causes of chromosome damage. Even free radical damage, which is popular as an explanation for aging, tends to become worse when energy is deficient (fasting or emotional stress. e.g.), and not as a result of living itself... most of the conventional theories of aging and degenerative diseases contain a strong tendency to blame life itself as being at fault for its suffering... The flow of energy through substance increases the order in that substance. More life and more energy can solve many of the basic problems of life."
Chapter 18: The Tradition of Truth
131-2 [Interesting long quote here that gives a window into the author's curious and idiosyncratic mind. Also in the comments throughout this chapter Peat scratches at a phenomenon that's difficult to describe, but gets at how everything is fake, gay and corrupt these days: researchers, propagandists and narrative pushers are bought and paid for and thus find not truth but the scientific "evidence" they are paid to find. We look to all the wrong people for our answers!]: "Several years ago I was thinking about the different levels of ability among famous painters of history, and I read about the family origins of some of them; the painters that I considered to have the best ability turned out to have come from poor families, in which skill in a craft was accepted as the way to earn a living. The bad--but famous--painters had 'noble' origins, in which there was no tradition of skilled work. Painters who were 'insiders,' familiar with the attitudes of the rich who paid for the pictures, knew what things would flatter, what things were fashionable, and what would contribute to prestige. The people from a lower class, however, had to be very skilled at painting if they were to succeed.
"I think this illustrates something general about truth. A person's vitality is drawn forward by meaningful work, that is, we grow to meet the demands of an important opportunity. Frans Hals' paintings could only have been done by an alert mind, and one which had been alert for a long time learning the skills of drawing and painting. That skill revealed a large amount of truth. On the other hand, from Rubens we don't learn much except that rich people ate well and dreamed of grandiosity.
"William Morris said, "It is workmen only and not pedants who can produce real and vigorous art." I think something similar should be said for science. While some people explore and solve important problems, others do not explore, and even reject solutions to problems when they are made available by the workers who produced them."
132 "One of my recurring objects of thought has been the slowness with which raw knowledge is assimilated. For example, I have been thinking about Broda Barnes's work on the prevention of heart disease with thyroid extract. He did solve much of 'the riddle of heart attacks,' but recent statements by the Heart Association show that the dominant forces in the health business haven't learned anything at all from his work, which he began 50 years ago. His work is clearly presented, not hard to understand, and it is scientifically so sound that no one challenges it, at least not on the scientific level. It is ignored, rejected by people who choose not to be bothered to read it. How many people have died from heart disease, since his work first became available? (And how many more from cancer, tuberculosis, and other diseases he showed occur mainly among hypothyroid people?)"
132 "I suggest that the resistance to Barnes's discoveries (and to nutritional therapies, etc.) has this explanation: that the health business is a Rubens equivalent. There may be a family tradition of practicing medicine, but the child experiences family status long before he can experience the work of healing or the learning of special skills. Rather than an apprenticeship, it more closely resembles inherited nobility. Consider the character of most of the people who choose the profession, their motives, the way they are instructed, the meaning of truth in their lives.
132-3 "But a few individuals within the profession live their lives for a different purpose, or cluster of purposes. They don't choose their problems in the way most likely to draw the favor of the powerful. Rather, there seems to be a need to understand, to take actions which lead toward the truth. I suspect that an 'apprenticeship' has somehow been served in most of these cases. Seen from a distance, it may seem that such people know in advance where the truth is, so they can proceed in the right direction. Deep involvement in the problem, investment of some of your life in the work, reveals that the truth is everywhere, and is clarified and arranged through the technical actions of the worker. The production of (or 'discovery' of) truth is nothing mysterious, as most philosophers and some scientists would have us believe."
133 [Yet another extremely intriguing quote here]: "In the Spanish culture in which Picasso grew up, there was the category of 'genius,' and Picasso clothed himself with the attributes of genius; he fulfilled his father's expectations, believed that he was that, and found a culture willing to believe it. At that point, he could do no wrong; everything he did was the work of genius--'look at him, every scratch he makes with a pen is a stroke of genius.' Criticism becomes impossible. The mystique around medicine is very similar. The public isn't qualified to criticize, and members of the profession are reluctant to criticize, because the myth must be preserved."
133-4 "But some people do take truth seriously, and a few try to find the 'secrets' of people who have had it abundantly. Wilhelm Reich felt it had to do with a right relationship to the body and its energies; Einstein identified it with one's life. Robert Creegan, in The Magic of Truth, tries to clarify its nature, and to reveal where it is in our life. The physiologist Ukhtomskii was interested in the same problem, what it is that allows some people to directly see the important truth, while others are concerned only with self-assertion." [It's incredible the wide range of intellectual forebears this author turns to. Genuinely impressive.]
135 "In physics, we can compare the experimental attitude of Michael Faraday, the blacksmith's son, with the pompous errors of Lord Kelvin. In literature and the other arts, the richness of immediacy and realism in certain works distinguishes itself from the self-assertive fantasies and status obsessions of other works."
135ff "William Morris pointed out the similarity between the culture of the Romans and their subjects, and the culture of the workers and capitalists of his time, and he observed that these types expressed themselves in their art and science as different mental types. The productive people were described as constructive minds and 'eye' people, or as 'visionaries and practical people,' whose work would be characterized by sensuous realism. The ruling classes he described as having analytical minds, concerned with formulas, labels, abstractions and theories, or formalisms. Creegan and Ukhtomskii wrote about the two attitudes--full living vs. status concerns--and Morris observed that there are two cultures, sustaining those two attitudes, and showed the importance of recognizing their products all around us, so that we can learn to evaluate them, according to their origins and their purposes." [Once again, a cheat code to life is to reject status in all its forms. The Buddhists and the early Christians were right all along!]
136ff Comments on Philippe Aries and his book Centuries of Childhood, finding that childhood is a modern phenomenon, in the past children were thought of as little adults: "If children are isolated from any intelligent work that the parents may perform, the world that they learn is one of functionless entertainment. Any tradition passed down by their parents is one of attitude, rather than of ability. If the child is allowed to be present when the parents work, the child wants to participate, to help, and to the extent that the children can participate, they are apprentices, and they learn effectiveness, personal power.... If work is removed from the presence of children, how is the enabling truth which is in our culture to be distinguished from the useless aspects of the culture? If we lack a tradition of skilled work, then the point William Morris made becomes essential--we have to learn to reject the bad which is present in all the products of our culture--Iiterature, painting, science, and so on."
137 Fascinating contrast here between the science of de La Mettrie and Descartes: On de La Mettrie's notion of organization underlying his worldview of physiology, how his physiology of organization was "forgotten" by the scientific consensus; whereas Descartes' idea of mind-body duality was accepted, even though de La Mettrie was closer to the truth. On Descartes as a "theoretical type" in Morris's pejorative sense of the word, basically epistemically arrogant, wrong but not in doubt, etc. Peat writes: "If more scientists felt toward the world as La Mettrie and Ukhtomskii did, there would be not only a different 'science,' but a different world."
139-40 Insightful discussion of work and meaning: "The attitude toward the future is an important part of how we orient ourselves and what concrete things we do to prepare for the future. A mechanistic view argues that we can't intervene to change the future, that it must fundamentally resemble the past, and that if people just invest in things that promise to give them a good profit the future will be nice. Another view sees the future as being composed of choices which lead to new choices, with new possibilities emerging as choices are put into action. It's important that people start talking about the possible choices we have. If we accept that 'the choice' is between being unemployed and having a job, the job we get is not likely to be what we want to do with our lives. And 'status' isn't what I'm talking about. Giving maximum meaning to our lives should be one of the basic things that we demand of our work." Comments on what work is for, different attitudes toward work under different economic systems; how work shapes us and how we shape it; quoting Blake's poem "London" and the line "the mind-forg'd manacles I hear." "Repeatedly, Blake tried to define the mechanisms of oppression and limitation of the human personality. He observed that the State chartered corporations, licensed power, that it used false science, devious moralizing and religion, and illiteracy to create a culture of obedient drudgery. Commercial interests, he pointed out, distorted and degraded human life, art, and science." Also note Blake referring to his era's factories as "Satanic Mills."
142 Interesting comments here on Cuba and its people shifting from indolence and lethargy to purpose and energy after the revolution there [granted the revolution just led to another form of tyranny, as revolutions often do, but the transition process certainly can be one of optimism and great energy]. See also this quote from Peat: "J.P. Sartre described [Cuba] as sleep being driven from the island along with the imperialists. I think this 'sense of possibility' is an important subject to study."
142-3 Comments from the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal: "The necessary is always possible. History proceeds in just that way, that something hardly credible is treated by a few as if it could be immediately realized."
143 "Our present lives are usually divided between routine work and entertainment. The entertainment is supposed to enliven us, to help us recover from the deadening effects of routine work. Some people put great energy and concentration into their hobbies, because they find the activity intrinsically interesting. Such intrinsic value and interest is what should be demanded of our work. But for many people, free time is routinized too... This is where the whole person has been affected by a certain approach to work, and work is seen as something to avoid--the idle rich seem to have found the only satisfactory life."
143 "People like Blake, Higgins, and Marx have realized that there are different ways of being, that one is fragmented and diminished, and the other is whole, alive, and growing. When people feel that they are in possession of their own lives, then problems become opportunities. Each problem leads to new problems. The world draws us forward, and we are not defined by an 'occupation' or 'profession,' but by the work we have achieved, and the problems we have confronted." [This is quite a beautiful quote, and he's right: it involves a shift in world view.]
Chapter 19: The Expanding Earth
144ff On the [wackadoodle?] idea that the earth is expanding, that the author stumbled onto in an old library book: "Oddly, most steady state universe theories which balance lost matter with newly created matter, tend to imagine the newly created matter as appearing only in stars or in empty space. I think there is something safely abstract and 'academic' about theories which ignore the earth as a possible source of new stuff; any heat inside the earth apparently seems less threatening if it is merely the cooling embers of a cosmically remote fire."
145ff Again on Mendeleev's (as well as the astronomer Thomas Gold's) view on petroleum being formed deep in the earth by geological processes; on N. A. Kozyrev's theories of hot lunar emissions, as well as his theory that time's asymmetry itself as a source of stellar energy (Kozyrev "predicted that planets would also have a steady source of internal heat in proportion to their mass, and his prediction matched the known heat of the earth"); also thinkers like Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold seeing more linkage between cosmological events and geological events, rather than totally separating the two scientific domains.
146 "Rather than admit that certain facts are not explainable by any present conceptions, many so-called scientists will deny that such observations were made. Others will change the rules of reason, by subjectivizing science, resorting to operationalism, or to paradoxes such as wave-particle dualism. Instead of leading to a science-mysticism, the existence of strange and conflicting observations should stimulate people to examine their assumptions, and to think new thoughts, and to devise new experiments."
148ff On the expanding earth as metaphor: "But beyond the geological or cosmological issues, the expanding earth is a rich metaphor. The nature of star energy, and the origin of life can't be such remote or abstract issues if we begin to sense the earth swelling, under and around us... Another aspect of the problem of understanding has to do with our perception itself. Energized, intentional and personal, it is also responsive and public and endlessly flexible. It is part of the world, and the same motors that drive other processes must shape it. We might rephrase Le Chatelier's principle, in the way V. I. Vernadsky did, to say that systems use the energy that's available, and that our perceptions and social understandings are supported by energy flowing into the whole system. And again, there is no foreseeable limit to the intensity and richness of perception and understanding. The availability of appropriate energy--e.g., the right foods and the right fields and the right stimuli--would be the only limiting factor."
148ff On "dead matter" theorists vs "expanding earth" theorists: "Though the 'Dead Matter' theorists now dominate education, research, and medicine, and control so many other systems that the world is objectively in decline (toxins, radiation, deforestation, malnutrition, shrinking brains, extinction of species), techniques are now available to repair much of the damage and to start on an upward course... as Blake pointed out, there is a limit to contraction, but no limit to expansion." [Perhaps a similar mental lens here would be the Paul Erlich world view vs the Julian Simon world view.]
149 See also comments here on Blake's "Mundane Shell" a system of thought that is constrained, with fixed opinions and beliefs, a sort of intellectual sclerosis.
Vocab:
hysteresis: the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force
lipofuscin: a brownish-yellow, autofluorescent pigment composed of lipid-containing residues and oxidized proteins, often referred to as the "aging pigment" or cellular waste
To Read:
Vladimir Vernadsky: The Biosphere
Vladimir Vernadsky: Essays on Geochemistry and the Biosphere
Paul Forman: "Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918-1927" [paper, 1971]
***Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man
M.I. Budyko: History of the Biosphere
F. David Peat: Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind
Andrey Lapo: Traces of Bygone Biospheres
Percy E. Davidson: The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy
Broda O. Barnes: Solved: The Riddle of Heart Attacks
***Robert F. Creegan: The Magic of Truth
Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Woman Without a Shadow [see also his poetic works]
Ashley Montagu: The Natural Superiority of Women
Robert Creegan: The Magic of Truth
Philippe Aries: Centuries of Childhood
Poetry of William Blake