What It Is To Be a Human -- Part I

A living organism is a complex and fragile mechanism that requires continual maintenance and repair.  Maintenance and repair of an organism depend on supplies of both material and energy. Some microorganisms obtain energy and structural materials from inorganic compounds in their environment. But the great majority of living organisms, both plant and animal, depend directly or indirectly on solar radiation for the energy to build and maintain their physical structure. 

Humans obtain the material and energy for growth, cellular maintenance and physical action by consuming other organisms: either plants that derive energy directly from the sun, or animals that derive energy by consuming either plants or other animals. 

Because all living creatures are mortal, perpetuation depends on reproduction. Hence, the basic human preoccupations: food and sex. Attention to all else, it might seem, is maladaptive.

But was the childless Sir Isaac Newton maladapted, was Saint Francis, or Jesus? Not necessarily. they each had a huge impact on the civilization in which they lived, and hence upon the survival and expansion of the gene pool to which their own genes belonged.

Covid, Now Just Another Common Cold Virus

The common cold is, well, common. According the American Lung Association, adults in the US have two to four cold per year, children, six to eight.  

There are several hundred distinct viruses that can cause a cold, including Rhinoviruses, Adenoviruses,  Respiratory Cyncytial viruses, parainfluenza viruses, plus Coronaviruses, the latter responsible for perhaps a quarter of all colds. 

Sars-CoV-2, or Covid-19, is a novel Corona virus that is evolving rapidly into increasingly mild forms, which is to say forms better adapted to its human host and thus less likely to kill. In time, quite soon therefore, we can expect Covid-19 to be recognized as simply another common cold virus, to which almost everyone will have some natural immunity due to frequent exposure. 

At that point, vaccination will be entirely pointless, since natural immunity, boosted by frequent reinfection, will provide superior immunity to that induced by the so-called Covid vaccines -- without the risk of vaccine-induced heart damage or death.

Natural immunity is superior to that induced by the mRNA and related new-technology vaccines because it primes the immune system for a rapid response to future infection. This it does by storing fragments of the viral genome in memory T and B cells, which enables early recognition and response to subsequent exposure to the virus. Such virus-induced immune system adaptation is long-lived and probably life-long. 

In contrast, the nucleic acid-based vaccines merely induce antibodies to the Corona virus spike protein. These antibodies are short-lived. Moreover, they are specific to a particular form of the spike protein. If the virus undergoes substantial mutation in the spike protein, as has occurred in the Omicron variant, the vaccine-induced antibodies lose effectiveness. Moreover, the antibodies are themselves short-lived: hence the loss of vaccine effectiveness over just a few months. 

Covid will keep on killing frail elderly people and a small number of particularly susceptible younger people, just as, in smaller numbers, the common cold does now. In the short-term, the addition of SARS-CoV-2 to the common cold menagerie, will raise common cold mortality. Within a few years, however, it will have further evolved and will likely be no more deadly than the Corona viruses that already account for a large proportion of the most severe colds.

RELATED:

Cardinal Warns Elites Ushering In "Total Control Surveillance State" Through COVID

UK: Massive Conservative Party Backbench Revolt Against "Nazi-style" Covid Passes

Former UK Vaccine Taskforce Chief: “The vaccines were not designed to end transmission” Which makes nonsense of Vaccine Passes. 

The Lancet Scolds Those Claiming "Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated"

That's kind of weak. President Brandon, Joker Johnson and our very own Justin, Black-Face, Trudeau have all been relentlessly demonizing the unvaccinated on the basis of total lies. The British data, for example, clearly shows that in those over the age of 29, the rate of Covid infection has been twice as high in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated. Any national leader unaware of this fact (see Table 2 in linked document) is an idiot. But even Justin Trudeau is not, technically, an idiot. Therefore, these people are all fucking liars.

Dr. Peter McCullough Joins Joe Rogan – Says Medical Elites “Purposely Suppressed Treatments” in Order to Force Mass Vaccinations

... Day after day, the evidence just keeps mounting that some sort of Nuremberg-style accountability must be had here.

If the claims by Dr. McCullough and others are true, and they seem to be providing the evidence and credentials to back their claims, then this pandemic will end up going down as one of the worst atrocities in human history.

FUN FACT: 

Omicron already behind 200,000 'cases a DAY' blares the Daily Mail's top headline, the cases a DAY, for no obvious reason being in quotes. As for the DAY, all caps, I guess that's for the reading impaired, so they don't mistakenly assume its per WEEK or MONTH or FOREVER.

But if adults in Britain have two to four colds a year as is generally believed, that would be around 130,000 cases a day, year round. But since colds are mainly experienced in the late autumn through early spring, that would equate to around 250,000 cases a day at the present time of year. So actually the number of Covid cases a DAY (bolded and in caps for the benefit of the reading impaired) is not really anything to be greatly astonished at.

BUT DON'T RELAX YET

DAILY MAIL: Omicron and Delta may strike people at the same time and COMBINE. Just in case you're beginning to relax, even inclined to forget the mask while in bed with your life partner, remember we could be about to see a Jack-the-Ripper Covid variant emerge as a result of viral cohabitation. And if that doesn't worry you, they'll have a new angle next week, since there's $billions still to be made from the jab. 

Did Public Policy Increase Covid Infectivity and Virulence

Mutant variations and the danger of lockdowns

By Jemma Morris:

Have non-pharmaceutical interventions, including lockdowns and social distancing, enabled more dangerous virus variants to thrive?

At the beginning of 2020 we embarked upon a nationwide epidemiological experiment in an attempt to reduce the mortality burden of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. The premise of the experiment, though never formally defined, was to trial the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions with respect to the infection rate and subsequent death toll of an airborne respiratory virus.

The hypothesis was treated as a foregone conclusion and presented with little doubt. A significant reduction in person-to-person interactions within a population will lead to a decreased infection rate and reduce the number of deaths associated with the virus. The scientific community were so confident in this hypothesis that they did not present it as a hypothesis at all. The experiment was not defined as an experiment. The resulting data was subsequently ignored.

No matter how certain we are of the outcome, good science is about asking questions

It’s easy to see why. Given our most basic understanding of how viruses spread from one person to another, any measures that suppress the transmission of viruses should inevitably lead to a reduction in associated mortality. But given that we have never actually investigated this correlation in a real-world setting, perhaps assumptions based on our “most basic understanding” are not sufficient. No matter how certain we are of the outcome, good science is about asking questions. If the answers contradict your assumptions then those answers should bring about a shift in your understanding.

One year into the great experiment, we have a wealth of global data to inform our conclusions. This data largely contradicts the confident hypothesis with which we embarked upon this journey and has therefore been ignored. Scientists and politicians have clutched at straws, manipulated data or simply ignored the evidence in an attempt to safeguard the integrity of the original idea.

Read more

Related: 

Spacing COVID-19 vaccine doses has epidemiological benefits, but longer-term outcomes depend on immunity robustness

Epidemiological and evolutionary considerations of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dosing regimes

Covid and the 'Great Reset' — the Animal Farm version

The Nature of Physical Reality, Part I: Time

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
...
William Shakespeare

The moving finger writes,

and, having writ, moves on.

Nor all thy piety nor wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line. 

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

...
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by

Edward Marlborough FitzGerald

Time is not an illusion: it is a record of change in an evolving system, whether that be the unfolding of the universe, the progression of the seasons, or the vibration of the crystal at the heart of a quartz clock.

Before the creation of the universe there was no time. But after the Big Bang, stuff happened: first a fireball of quarks and photons exploding; then particles from the expanding plasma condensing; these, upon further cooling, cohering as atoms, mostly hydrogen plus a little helium; the clouds of gas collapsing under their own gravitation; the atoms fusing to heavier elements and heating the first stars to incandescence; the stars forming into gravity-bound spiral galaxies; the galaxies separating from one another in an ever expanding universe; the stars, their fuel of light elements exhausted, imploding violently to create the heaviest elements and spewing the remnants into space; stellar ashes aggregating into meteors and planets, some to be captured in orbit around new stars, our sun included; the process of universal evolution continuing, so far as can be told, without end. Thus the universe is the ultimate clock, its multifarious transformations marking the hours in the life of the world.

As the universe unfolds, so also do its components. Galaxies and stars evolve, as do planets, the latter both geologically and climatically. Planets may also acquire life, the evolution of which may result in the emergence of intelligent creatures able to fashion clocks and calendars providing measures of date and time more convenient for the regulation of life than natural processes, astronomical or geological.

The notion of events as the measure of time, seems odd to those conditioned by a scientific culture to view time as the measure of events. The notion of time outside of the world of events and having a reality of its own is reinforced by the subjective notion of time: our sense of the ongoing present, and receding past. But the subjective notion of time results from the workings of the mind, which constitute a process in evolution. The conscious mind, flowing continuously from idea to idea, as influenced both by internal processes and sensory input, serves as its own clock.

That it is the stream of consciousness which provides our sense of the passage of time is evident from the fact that when unconscious, for example, between the time  — as instructed by the anesthetist — to begin counting, and reaching perhaps to the number two or three, until the time consciousness returns amid the seeming chaos of a dimly lit and crowded recovery room, there is no sense whatever of the lapse of time.

The common use of language, according to which clocks measure time, further reinforces the misconception that time has a reality independent of events. But, in fact, clocks do not measure time, of which there is no known means of sensing, but only the evolution of their own internal workings: the swinging of a pendulum; the unwinding of a spring; the vibrations of a crystal.

A mistaken belief about the reality of time may also arise from the notion that time forms part of the ultimate fabric of the universe. So far as we understand it, reality consists in a succession of events in a three dimensional space. Thus to identify a particular event it is necessary to specify a point along the three spatial dimensions. But because what happens at every point throughout the universe evolves, identification of a specific event requires that it be time stamped. Thus time is often referred to as the fourth dimension in a space–time continuum. But time has no more reality than the spatial dimensions, fore and aft, left and right, up and down, none of which have a reality in the absence of the events that they map.

The Block Universe: Image source. In the block universe, 

each of our moments are not forever"changing place with that which 

goes before," neither does the Moving finger of Omar Khayyam move, 

but both remain  forever fixed like the frames of a movie on a reel of 

celluloid. Only in perception, do our moments "in sequent toil all forwards 

do contend."

A curious consequence of the notion of time as the fourth dimension, is the idea that just as every event located in space at a particular point on the temporal axis, co-occurs, so every event located at a particular point in three-dimensional space must co-occur at every point on the temporal axis. Hence has arisen the concept of the "block universe," a world in which there is no future and no past, but where everything conceived to be past, present or future has always existed, and always will exist, in all its exquisite detail.

Perhaps this view is correct, but if so, it contradicts Ocham's razor, the principle that, among alternatives, the simplest theory is the one that should be preferred. And it does not merely contradict Ocham's razor, it makes an utter mockery of it, for what it asserts is that for everything that ever happened, that is, for every microscopic event, and every nanoscopic, or picoscopic event that has ever occurred, or will ever occur, there exists a complete copy of the entire universe, to which a time traveler could transport himself. Worse still, time travelers, by showing up in the past or the future, would necessitate countless more copies of the world: giving rise to an infinity of infinitely many worlds.

Something else the theory of the block universe implies is that the creator is a practical joker, for whereas the universe has every appearance, from the microwave background radiation to the fossil record, of being a system in continual transformation, everything in a block universe, from the big bang to the evolution of the big brain and onward to eternity, has always existed and always will exist in a world where absolutely nothing has happened or ever will.

The evidence for evolution, according to this view, whether cosmic or organic, is a matter of appearance created by the juxtaposition of events preserved eternally in aspic but seemingly related to one another as cause and effect in accordance with temporal scientific laws. Morally, this notion seems odious. It means that for all that a person may strive, he will achieve nothing, good or bad, that is not  already cut in stone.

Contrary to the view presented here, Isaac Newton held time to be

absolute, true, and mathematical ... in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly... 

Newton's great contemporary Gottfried Leibniz, on the contrary, held time to be, not the reason for, but a consequence of, the linkage of events in accordance with strict laws of cause and effect, a view also held by Einstein's mentor, Ernst Mach,* who wrote.

Time is an abstraction, at which we arrive by means of changes of things. 

Clockwork Time by Fractamonium

Taking the Newtonian view, Julian Barbour has argued that the structure of the universe is such that events are interconnected as if driven by gears in a gigantic clockwork mechanism.*

There is, however, a serious problem with the Newton–Barbour view of time, which is that time is not, as Newton believed, "absolute, true and mathematical," or uniformly flowing as would be required within Barbour's clockwork cosmology. Rather, time, as measured by the best clocks known, the oscillations of a photonic wave, or the vibrations of a quartz crystal, flows at different rates according to circumstance, as observation of clocks moving relative to one another or subject to a difference in gravitational field reveals.

Thus, although Einstein's Theory of Relativity is widely believed to prove the existence of a space-time continuum underlying physical reality, Einstein was not without doubts, remarking that:*

Perhaps, ... we must also give up, by principle, the space-time continuum. It is not unimaginable that human ingenuity will some day find methods which will make it possible to proceed along such a path."

With that intuition, Einstein seems to have come down on the side of Leibniz and Shakespeare, seeing time as a record of the succession of events in an evolving universe. On that view, the universe exists only in the present, not in any past or future states, which means that time travel is impossible since there is no past or future world existent to which one might travel.

————
* Quoted by George Musser in "Spooky Action at a Distance." Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.

Related:
CanSpeccy: The Nature of Physical Reality, Part II: Space
CanSpeccy: More about time
Thibault Damour: Time and Relativity

First published November 26, 2015

Why Religion Matters in the Age of Science

Here’s why a wise Darwinian need find no conflict between religious faith and pursuit of scientific truth. Indeed, it is a statement of why a wise evolutionist can be, and perhaps always should be, an exponent of religious faith:

Without a religious dimension, a commitment to human freedom is likely to be attenuated, too weak to make sacrifices in its name. Europe’s political elites especially, but its citizens as well, believe in freedom and democracy of course, but they are reluctant to put the “good life” on hold and put lives on the line when freedom is in need of a champion — in the Balkans, the Sudan, Darfur or, in the Middle East. The good of human freedom, by European lights, must be weighed against the risk and cost of actually fighting for it. It is no longer transcendent, absolute. In such a world, governed by a narrow utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is rare, churches go unattended and over time the spiritual capital that brought forth all that we know as the West is at risk of being lost. Let me name five things that might turn the tables and perhaps, even begin to, if I was so bold to suggest, revive Europe. First, coming to grips with its unique place in world history and renewing the importance and source of those original ideals. Second, some comprehension that culture matters and Europe’s culture has been the most formative for Western-Christian civilization, what used to be termed, Christendom. Third, accepting the social, political, economic and especially military responsibility of a great continent, now more and more united. Fourth, realizing the too evident demographic realities and Islamization and stepping up to reverse them so as to avoid an eventual Eurabia. And finally, and most critically in my estimation as a Christian, sparking the second great Reformation, spiritually such that there is a wider recognition of transcendence and a moving of the spirit of God across the whole continent from the western most shores of Portugal, Ireland and Britain to the eastern most steppes of Russia. I pray every day for such transformation and reawakening. Ted Malloch: The New Dark Age of European Progressivism

This statement draws urgent attention to the role of religion in determining the fate of civilizations. What it asserts is that religious faith, where it exists, through its influence on the behavior of both individuals and organizations alters the prospects for survival of human groups, whether they be families, tribes, or nations.

Evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins who deride religion because it is based on propositions that are inconsistent with scientific truth make a mockery of their own claimed scientific expertise. There is no reason why a religious faith should be based on literal scientific truth any more than nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry should be based on literal scientific truth. In fact, religion, like  nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry, would have little appeal without an element of the supernatural. What matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is how faith, or for that matter nursery rhymes, fairy tales, or epic poetry, serves to shape individual and group behavior.

In abandoning Christianity, the West has abandoned belief in absolute values of right and wrong for the Humean proposition that "honesty is the best policy but the wise knave will take advantage of every exception." In fact, the condition of the post-Christian West, indeed the anti-Christian West, is even worse than that. Today, far from considering it knavish to be relentlessly self-serving, many consider it stupid to be otherwise. We know where that led the Soviet Union, but benighted rulers in the West unhesitatingly lead in the same direction.

That is not to say that all religions are equal. Some religious beliefs can no doubt be highly detrimental to human group survival, the Ebionite heresy, for example, which eschewed marriaged and child raising. There is little reason to doubt, however, that much of what has been best in Western civilization was the work of Christians and often inspired by religious ideals.

Misunderstanding Evolution, Or Evolutionary Theorists May Be Wrong, But Fred Reed Is Wronger

Fred Reed has a gift for a witty turn of phrase that has earned him a respected place among Internet essayists. Verbal facility and comprehension whereof one speaks are not, however, necessarily related as Fred has amply demonstrates in a recent contribution to the Unz Review entitled Darwin Unhinged:The Bugs in Evolution.

Let me count some of the ways in which Fred misunderstands the theory of organic evolution.

(1) Fred begins his attack on the theory of evolution by citing a dead Polish expert on typhus who held that scientists in any field inevitably develop a “thought collective.” In other words, Fred suggests, evolutionists are dopes incapable of thinking for themselves.