Enraptured by Platonic delusions,the Modernity Project imagined Life to be basically stabilizable and hence oriented to the K-selected and the Very Large.
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
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