ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Researching another topic, I came across the line that reportedly one of der Führer’s favourite go-to sayings was that “politics is applied biology,” misattributed to nineteenth century biologist and educator Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, who did remark that the social sciences—a much broader retrospective of human affairs—are instances of applied biology.
It’s also another mark against him too that he espoused rather racists theories couched in the language of science but without scientific basis, captured in the title phrase (that may sound familiar) that an individual’s biological development is a summary and reflection of its evolution as a species—based on the imaginative though equally incorrect premise that human embryonic stage resemble a progression through more primitive forms of life—which I recall being taught in elementary school. Haeckel’s vast body of work and contributions to life sciences aside from these significant missteps define the way we view the natural world and his place in the scientific community (like his favoured non-Darwinian Jean Baptise Lamarck who privileged exercise and atrophy over natural selection) ought not be excised from history. Haeckel did a lot for scientific literacy, having introduced the public to the rich ecological diversity at scale all environments support and prefigured the ascending understanding of genetics by introducing concepts like the stem-cell and the missing link.  In his way, Haeckel also started the discussion ethics in biological research and experimentation and how humans might one day soon not only be able to understand but also to edit Nature. Despite the fact that Nazi propagandists selectively exploited some of his research and he reinforced the prejudiced views of race of the day, the political movement that Haeckel founded in 1905 centred around pantheism was disbanded in 1933 and disparaged—along with all other partisan groups—and Haeckel would be dismayed to see his teaching perverted had he lived to see it.  As a war correspondent late in life, coined the term “First World War” for the beginning Great War, a term that did not come into common use until its post-mortem six years later, worried that this European conflict would spread. Despite having the same ambiguity in both German and English, we did not need to wait until there wasn’t a First World War II for it to be clear whether people feared for an expanding global battlefield or whether the richer countries of the planet were fighting amongst themselves, as that classification scale was a Cold War invention.

othello

The social construct of race—a figment though its derivative racism is very much a reality—was coined with the debut performance of the stage play Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth on 29 October 1613 in which the character of an African king addresses the audience and remarking upon the amazement that beset the faces of all these white people.
At the time of the playwright’s career, the colour lines were already coming into sharper contrast but that sense of otherness had lied just as much between the English and the Irish or the Italian and the Sicilian and was without respect to racial identity. The language and concept of race grew out of tribalism (ancestry) as a way to justify colonialism, enslavement and secure international trade—but there was not always a time when such superficial and broad classifications of one’s complexion was accorded so much power. What do you think? Though as handmaidens of ideas that we’ve matured beyond, prejudice and bigotry no matter how unwelcome cannot be said to have outlasted their purpose—since one group will always want to claim dominance over another and needs divisive abstractions to these accomplish these ends—but perhaps by dint of the transformative and relatively very short histories of race politics we can again foster societies that don’t ascribe to such standards that foist affiliations on others by their outward appearance.

panopticon

For any of you humans brave or fool-hearty enough to tread into heretofore uncharted neural network territory, Waxy presents AI Spy, an absurdist version of the game meant to impart a sense of patience in children during prolonged travel and in waiting rooms where one is pitted against machine-learning in a sort of augmented reality setting, the computer asking the user to limn its surroundings in photos and selecting interesting artefacts to tease out. Part of an on-going series of weekly projects, playing requires some suspension of disbelief and asks humans to think like machines

masquerade

Over-sharing (indeed the utopian oblige of it all) and the way we’ve filled in the gaps of celebrity as a crisis of character and of history through nostalgia and an endless series of hails, salutes and remembrances has made a parallel world in our own image that’s apparently of more consequence than the real physical world—without even venturing into the myriad ways we’ve disrupted Nature with unnatural selection—where we’re held hostage to those who know (that is have to incontrovertible, time-stamped evidence) those things that we are not the most proud of and would never want to promote as part of our on-line and public persona.
Even if the forces that be are not malevolent spirits and have no intention of betraying one’s secrets, it’s still a regime of unease and blackmail that really mentally challenging to endure and as a result—whether we’d admit to this revolt and backlash or not since complacency and the status quo have been accorded higher sanctities—people seemed instead of dealing with this aggregated dossier without alibi to turn pre-emptively confessional and willing to excuse past indiscretions no matter what they were nor whom the peccadilloes belonged to, either out of unrelenting fear or mistaking empathy for whataboutery—the sophistry of appealing to one’s opponents’ apparent past hypocrisy as relevant to the present situation. Perhaps it’s a very American trait to ignore a very large problem like the concentration of data and having no control over how its interpreted and shared or stolen because it would be complex to solve and require a lot of sacrifice to deny there’s a problem at all and instead excuse the symptomatic being caught red-handed or being made to eat one’s words as some sort of shared consolation-prize that exculpates any bad behaviour.

brimful of asha

The neighbourhood bodegas (cognate with boutique, Spanish for wine-cellar and ultimately from the Greek ἀποτίθημι for to put away in the sense of a repository) or corner shops (or dépanneurs) are the anchors of communities, and a tech start-up that’s telling consumers to shut-up whilst they’re being disrupted is developing a rather unpopular business model that aims to replace these indispensable institutions with vending machines stocked with whatever honour-bar and tone-deaf line of merchandise vying for dubious product-placement. What do you think? Unicorn-chasing—much like ambulance-chasing, surely fuels the rank-hypocrisy of misguided confidence that assumes that complacence and convenience is paramount.