Since the era of the World Wars in the early 20th century, it has become increasingly evident that science, as practiced, has become adulterated by politics. This is so much the case that the study of the causes of this adulteration has become a particular focus in the sociology of science, which studies science as is performed by living humans with their own goals and motivations, and in elite theory more generally, which explores the behaviors and strategies of the politically impactful, as well as in the history of the philosophy of science, which explores the march of scientific progress as it actually occurred, including its missteps, even when unintentionally so. While politics certainly influenced scientific progress even before the World Wars era, it was during this time that the postmodern paradigm, characterized by a certain kind of pessimism and an apparent appreciation of the absurd and the ironic, was introduced into European and American culture, establishing political corruption as the norm within science. Postmodernity was introduced largely by way of the Frankfurt School, which had taken some influence itself from Chinese Maoism and its Cultural Revolution. The adulteration of scientific practice might reasonably be said to be an extension of the culture wars, largely a conflict between advocates of Enlightenment and pre- or post-Enlightenment cultural values, which results from the impact of the Frankfurt School theorists, among others.
As a part of the shift into the postmodern paradigm, we have increasingly become informed of the various “heroes” that we are to acknowledge as the forerunners of scientific consensus, which I refer to as the gods of science. Among these are the illustrious Albert Einstein, of course, who suggested to the world that its very foundations were completely relative.
Cosmic relativity is, of course, a challenge to absolutism of any scale, and so strikes an early blow at the foundations of modernism, the idea of universal truths. But Einstein would not have the last word. Heisenberg would suggest to the world that relativity was not the worst of it, but that everything was established upon uncertainty. This set forth the postmodern paradigm within science, shaking the confidence of common sense observation and deductive reasoning or rationalism, which had previously provided a sense of certainty or concreteness to its wielders.
While Einstein and Heisenberg are important names in this discussion, their work is established upon an even more foundational idea to the postmodern mind. This idea is the concept of entropy, of things falling apart and degrading, and particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which privileges entropy as the dominant tendency of change in the Universe.
Behind the project of postmodernism was a particular cultural milieu from out of which postmodernism was drawn, the fin de siècle, an elite cultural milieu in France. A look at the history of the philosophy of entropy reveals that thedevelopment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics correlated greatly with the cultural and artistic expressions promoted within the fin de siècle, namely the art movement of Decadence, which promoted the aesthetic of a corrupted world of debauchery, depravity, and dissolution and an ethic of artificiality and self-indulgence. This correlated also with the sociological history affecting France, and so the general mood of the French elite at the time, from which the fin de siècle was drawn, which had experienced a decline due to various oppositional political elements in their society. In short, the fin de siècle was a cultural milieu scientifically inspired by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and embracing Decadence as a result. While it was a Counter-Enlightenment subculture led by the old aristocracy, it was set apart from more conservative aristocrats by its embrace of modern insights into science, not desiring to go back to pre-modernity exactly, but to bring pre-modern systems of control into modernity, so as to allow for post-modernity, as characterized by a priestly-like control of science.
At the helm of the fin de siècle was a particular sort of elite characterized by an interest in esotericism and political secrecy, the synarchists. The synarchists, following in the philosophy of Alexander Saint-Yves and his follower Papus, believed in secret government that would be administered without direct use of force by way of a culturally-united power of elite academics, financiers, industrialists, military men, mystics, and etc. This united effort has been responsible for the greatest of cultural and economic distortions the world has seen, as it may be characterized as “old money with new ideas,” also having the means to cause external forcing in the acceptance of those ideas by way of cultural manipulation. Though they do not have the means for direct control, these elite ruling class interests set the terms and conditions by which members of society gain and lose success. This is done by their focusing together, as a milieu, on the means of finance, accreditation, and the spotlight more generally, as well as by the insertion of linguistic or philological sophisms that distort the culturally relevant understandings of Nature. Because cultural warfare is their strategy, this means, especially, that positions of high cultural influence are kept from those who might rock the boat, including not only celebrities and media personnel, but also honest scientists, who find it increasingly difficult to make their voices heard and to pay their bills while puppet-men are increasingly subsidized and promoted.
Psychologically, the result of shaking scientific confidence has been for practicing scientists to lay aside their own common sense and rational discernment in favor of not rocking the boat, of going along with the externally-forced scientific consensus. Postmodern society had become increasingly focused on the favoring of recent publications over classics, and on so-called “peer review” processes and so-called “expertise.” These new authoritarian procedures, a sort of canonization process for scientific knowledge, among others, imperfectly ensured that only those who did not rock the boat could be heard.
Still, entropy as the dominant tendency of things would come to be challenged by Luigi Fantappie, an overlooked Italian mathematician, who showed that Einstein’s equations could be reversed according to the laws of mathematics, such that both a positive and negative solution can be derived from the equation. As Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini, following in Fantappie’s footsteps, have by now exhaustively relayed, this means that entropy itself has a corollary tendency that functions in the opposite direction. This is called syntropy. Di Corpo and Vannini have demonstrated quite well that syntropy might imply a Big Bounce cosmology wherein the Universe cycles, oscillates, or pulses between entropy and syntropy in one’s dominant frame of reference or arrow of time.
The cosmological-existential dilemma posed by an unchecked Second Law of Thermodynamics, total relativity, and true uncertainty are now in the process of being challenged by Ulisse, Antonella, and their readership on the cosmological level. This has great potential to break the postmodern paradigm of idiosyncrasy that has somehow mixed ultra-subjectivism with scientism, and to establish grounds for remodernism, striking a fair balance between objectivity and subjectivity. It seems an appropriate time to start revisiting some of the other gods of science.
As suggested, science had been infiltrated by elite interests long before actual distortions to science had become normalized by the fin de siècle. One of the gods of science to arise before the development of the fin de siècle, for instance, but nonetheless influenced by entropy, was Charles Darwin. Although Charles was anticipated by many others before him in his vision of evolution, such as Robert Chambers and Herbert Spencer, and even by his uncle, Erasmus, it is Charles’s name which has become culturally synonymous with the evolutionary project. This is not only unfortunate, but is clearly a disproportional recognition of one scientist’s achievements over many others’. And where disproportionality exists, social science and history tell us clearly that it is due to external forcing, which creates distortions working in the favor of the beneficiary of the disproportion. In this case, it is Charles Darwin. In others, it has been people like Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell. As with these others, the distortions do not appear as damage done to science itself so much as to individual scientists, whose influence was overshadowed. Like Chambers and Spencer, Darwin presented a view largely compatible with teleology despite the model being divergent. This distinguishes this effort of elite influence from those that were made through individuals such as Albert Einstein, who not only took fame from individuals such as Ernst Mach and others, but who decidedly threw out common sense and intuition in the process of tweaking and occulting the model of relativity he derived from them. This adulteration of science appears to be postmodern in character, allowing us to separate the (proto-postmodern) Modernist efforts— to steal the achievements of the modernists— from the efforts of actual postmodernism. That is, Modernists such as Charles Darwin were interested in taking the spotlight from modernists such as Robert Chambers and Herbert Spencer (who later switched sides and became a Modernist), whereas postmodernists wanted to go an extra step and distort, occult, or derail the projects of the modernists or, at best, mystify and obscurantize actual contributions to science made by themselves. If we are to believe fin de siècle philosophers such as Madame Blavatsky or Manly P. Hall, there may exist a group of “Unknown Philosophers” taken in by the synarchy and kept secret as the cream of the crop.
The above being the case, and though a genuine scientific perspective, the concept of evolution had a problem from the beginning. That problem is divergence, and it could have been a major factor in the pessimism and deviance of the fin de siècle, and like it was inspired by a mechanistic conception based largely in entropy. Evolution means “unfolding,” which implies entropy as it is the taking apart rather than putting together of a neatly-arranged object. This is the same meaning as the world development, which then could not have been substituted for it. Instead, as I will argue, simple volution minus the “e” would seem to suffice, meaning “a turn around the center.” I say this because, as it turns out, convergence, not divergence, is the rule in evolution. Perhaps, if this had been considered centuries before, the whole postmodern paradigm would not have been inspired from out of the entropianism that ensued.
Divergent evolution, or the entropy model of evolution, follows after the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus, who understood the procreation of species to establish a taxonomic tree that diverges from original ancestors, branching out from them to other sexually-reproductive partners that serve the same role as a root from which division occurs. But, with more insight, Linnaeus could have just as well established the tree in another order, beginning with the vast number of different individuals that compose the grandparents, great grandparents, and so on to the parents understood to be the original. It seems that Linnaeus was following in the religious insights of Abrahamism, which suggest that all of humanity has diverged from an original parentage of two created beings, Adam and Eve. But if you think about it, you have two biological parents, each of which had two of their own, each of which had two of their own, and so on. So, your ancestry doesn’t seem to be divergent, so much as convergent, from that angle, does it?
Today, the reigning model of evolution is called the Out of Africa model, and involves a number of “waves” of human migrations from out of Africa and into Eurasia, Australia, and North America, the assumption being that humans all share two common ancestors, unironically nicknamed “Adam and Eve” after the Abrahamic faith, from which the various races of the world have diverged. While it is important to acknowledge the divergent forces that establish the contexts for “volution” to occur within, it is probably more important, considering the prevailing influences, to consider the much less discussed convergent elements in evolution, some of which have posed some serious challenges to the Out of Africa model. For instance, Milford Wolpoff’s challenge to the Out of Africa model, the multiregional model, assumed a great deal of hybridization between humans, and echoed some of the arguments of earlier thinkers such as Franz Weisenreich or even Carleton Coon, who had argued that humans had evolved from out of what are now popularly categorized as separate species. Thinkers before them, such as Ephraim Squier, had argued for polygenism, that human races had completely separate origins from one another. Interestingly, before there was the Out of Africa model, there was the Out of America thinking of the Ameghino brothers and the more popular Out of Asia ideas. Polygenism might suggest that there is some truth to each of these concepts.
But how could separate species come to compose a common chronospecies together? What could be the mechanism behind such a thing? The answer to that can be generally summed up in the concept of convergent evolution, a literal contradiction of terms nonetheless generally referring to volutionary processes that are convergent rather than divergent or specifically to those processes by which similar or analogous morphologies of organs or even species come about without genetic exchange. For instance, flying squirrels and sugar gliders appear as if they are closely related, but apparently evolved independently from one another, while sharing “camera eyes” with octopi that had apparently evolved them completely independently as well, though perhaps utilizing the same genes in different pathways. In the more general sense, convergent evolution also includes the processes of hybridization, lateral gene-transference, and symbiogensis, which allow for great amounts of coalescence between species.
It is generally thought that humans evolved from out of a common ancestor that is much like a Chimpanzee, but this does not appear to be the case. It appears much more likely that humans had evolved from an ancestor coming more directly from out of the Cercopithecines, the likes of which have been found not only in the Old World, where they are prevalent, but which also provide candidates such as Protopithecus and Perupithecus for bridge-species connecting the development of New World Monkeys to Old World Monkeys. As the official story goes, some Old World Monkeys had accidentally rafted across the Atlantic Ocean on a mat of grass and landed in the New World where they evolved into New World Monkeys. The details of this story are quite controversial, as might be imagined, including the details regarding the differences between New and Old World Monkeys, which have to do with the forms of their noses. Convergent evolution presents the possibility of the New and Old World Monkeys having had a separate evolutionary history, having evolved from different creatures altogether. This is something that Carleton Coon even suggested might be the case. According to Coon, categories such as Homo erectus, for instance, should not be considered to be ancestral categories so much as stages of development or milemarkers that can be independently reached through different pathways. In Coon’s case, he believed that the human races arrived at the level of Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens at different times and by different means. If Coon and others like him might be right about this, one might reason even further that, if humans compose a polygenic but slowly converging and hybridizing chronospecies that evolve at different rates relative to one another, that Cercopithecines might, likewise, be composed of a polygenic but slowly converging chronogenus, the members of which evolve separately and at their own pace, but convergently toward the capacity for hybridization and, ultimately, unification.
Philip Sclater had suggested that the primates, and after him Ernst Haeckel suggested humans too, might be traced to a now-lost continent called Lemuria, named after what may have been some of its primary residents, the lemurs. This idea was used this to explain the evolutionary history that separated the disparate primates strewn across the Earth, which produced discontinuities in biogeography, such as lemur fossils in Madagascar but not in mainland Africa or Arabia, despite their also being present in India. Lemuria would have been a land bridge of sorts that connected India to Madagascar. Haeckel and others thought that some of the unique characteristics of humans might be traced to Lemuria. Nonetheless, this common place of origin, no matter how far back in time, might suggest that, like the eye of the octopus and that of the flying squirrel, common morphologies might be able to arise from disparate primates or their ancestors who nonetheless share a basic genetic inheritance.
But this brings us to the final god of science on the list for today, Alfred Wegener. As Einstein and Heisenberg are to cosmology, Alfred Wegener, the father of plate tectonics, is to geology. Wegener tells us that the Earth has continents that move along its surface and that, in the process, these form and reform continents such as Pangea. The problem is, Wegener has been used in the paradigm-making process. Much as with the others, anyone who does not fall into this paradigm will not pass peer review and cannot be cited as an up-to-date source by other interested parties. If one were to cite others before Wegener, for instance, such as Roberto Mantonvani, who anticipated Wegener’s idea of continental drift but taking place upon an expanding and contracting Earth, or John Joly, who believed the continents to be essentially granite floating on basalt that was subject to isostatic changes resulting in the expanding and contracting of the planet, have been certain not to pass peer-review.
Nonetheless, in recent decades, and thanks to a comic book artist without an academic position to be taken from him, the growing Earth hypothesis has been advanced and has inspired a number of lay geologists to look beyond Wegener’s box. According to Neal Adams, a follower of an earlier expanding Earth thinker, Samuel Warren Carey, the Earth is growing from a process known in physics as pair production, the opposite of particular annihilation. Whereas annihilation describes the destruction of particles and their release of energy into photons, pair production describes the genesis of matter from out of photons. Neal Adams believes that the Earth takes photons from the Sun in at its poles and utilizes that energy in the process of pair production at its core, as in a nuclear process. The problem is, of course, that this is ruled out by the paradigm of entropianism, because pair production is a syntropic process. It doesn’t fit the paradigm.
Neal Adams has used his growing Earth theory to explain a number of anomalies, among them the large size of the dinosaurs, which he believes would have had a much easier time on a smaller planet with less gravity to weigh them down. It seems that a growing Earth might also be able to explain such things as the sunken continents that are told of in myths or legends as well as in scientific hypotheses. If the planet also shrinks at times, this might explain periods of divergence met by periods of convergence, as continents would seem to come together before moving back apart. In such a case, Lemuria might just be another name for Antarctica and other lost continents such as Mu and Atlantis to the Americas. If this is the case, other land bridges such as Beringia, Doggerland, Sahul, and Sunda might also be unnecessary.
Ultimately, all of life is, materially-speaking, an expression of water and soil instilled with an animating power and, in this sense, we may all be considered the collective project of animated water and soil. Could it be, then, that we are not only connected to our fellow primates, but that our unity through water and soil means that any organism can traverse the evolutionary pathways to become human? That we are not only a Cercopithecine chronogensus, but that all of life might be considered a multiorganismal chronobeing, destined to reach the same finality, perhaps even dependent upon one another to get there? In such a case, we might want to treat one another with a little bit more consideration, behave more mutualistically or co-operatively, and identify ourselves not so much by the ancestors we diverged from, but by associations of our own choosing.