Archive Post "Betraying Hippocrates" Apr 2007

Archive Post "Betraying Hippocrates" Apr 2007

Betraying Hippocrates. The Medical Political Complex....(Repost from April 2007)

Aug 28, '08 7:44 PM for everyone

Entry for 18 April 2007 Yahoo 360

 

Who Needs Dr Mengele?

Medical Abuses in the Name of Science

Preface: I am currently working nights and so am less able to post new material at the moment, although there is plenty to blog about.... not least today's news in the UK that 3 men have been arrested for threatening to kill Gordon Brown.

This must be one of the greatest acts of futility ever conceived (or perhaps fabricated by MI5 and the corporate media?)...why anyone would want to kill a man who is so busy committing political suicide is completely beyond me?

A scandal of horrendous proportions is presently unfolding in the British media. The BBC television programme 'Newsnight' last night revealed the way in which UK scientists ignored warnings of contaminated blood products in 1970s and 80s. The result was that 4.500 British haemophilia patients were exposed to lethal viruses in blood products during that period. Around two thousand have since died of either Hepatitis C or HIV/AIDS.

What is particularly disturbing about this story is the claim that doctors 'volunteered' their patients for AIDS trials in the UK without their knowledge or consent, in collaboration with American AIDS researchers.

The defense is that doctors did not know that the clotting agent Factor 8 they prescribed for patients was obtained from the prison population in the United States who donated blood for small payments. This Factor 8 was not heat treated and was subsequently responsible for infecting the UK haemophiliacs with hepatitis and HIV/AIDS.

One of those people affected, Robert Mackie was featured on the Newsnight programme

Mr Mackie discovered by accident that his doctor, Professor Christopher Ludlam of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was doing a lot more than looking after patients.

In a medical newsletter in 1990, Professor Ludlam described a unique group of patients in Scotland that had formed the basis of several years of important research he had published on Aids.

When Mr Mackie saw this, he examined his records.

He has discovered that although he was infected in 1984, he was not told until 1987.

And strangely, the words "Aids study" were clearly written in his medical notes before he was infected.

Mr Mackie is convinced he was part of scientific attempts to understand the virus behind Aids, but he was not told.
He has discovered that in April 1983 - before he was infected - Aids specialists at one of the US's top medical institutions wrote in the Lancet about how valuable it would be to locate a group of haemophilia patients in a country not yet affected by Aids.

The implication here is that British people suffering from haemophilia were deliberately exposed by doctors 'looking after' them to the AIDS virus, because they fitted the research profile of the medical researchers in the US.

For years this outrage has been covered up by successive British governments who would not allow a public enquiry and papers relating to the 'study' have allegedly been shredded.

Unfortunately for those who were involved not all copies of the papers relating to the study were destroyed and details have now been released to the BBC.

It may seem unbelievable that UK citizens have been used as human guinea pigs by foreign scientists apparently with the agreement of their own doctors, the connivance of the British government and elements within the scientific community in this country.

This so-called study released the HIV/AIDS virus within a group of people in Britain who were not otherwise at risk.

For further details please see BBC link below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6562909.stm

The arrogance and egotism of medics who believe themselves entitled to treat people in this way is absolutely staggering. It enormously damages the credibility of a profession which traditionally has enjoyed respect and not a little deference amongst the general population of the UK.

It is my view that too much deference has been shown to these doctors which has protected them from proper public scrutiny in Britain for much too long.

But how surprised should we be that this infected Factor 8 was released whether for research or economic reasons to wreak havoc on the lives of already sick people?

Medical experimentation and eugenics has a long and ignoble history all around the world. In Nazi Germany Dr Mengele and his colleagues advanced medical knowledge by undertaking experimental procedures on concentration camp victims by the thousands. Experiments done by Mengele and his team involved

• Genetics
• Infectious Diseases
• Freezing / Hypothermia
• Interrogation and Torture
• Killing / Genocide
• High Altitude
• Pharmacological
• Sterilization
• Surgery
• Traumatic Injuries
•  

Further information on link below. http://www.remember.org/educate/medexp.html

Not all medical experiments are as overtly sadistic as the operations performed by the Nazi doctors, but some come pretty close.

America for example has a very long history of medical experimentation on unwilling subjects going back at least to the mid nineteenth century.
Between 1845 - 1849 J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynaecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia.

'News Target' has published a paper outlining numerous known instances of medical experimentation in the USA between 1833-1965 at the link here:-

http://www.newstarget.com/019189.htmlhttp://www.newstarget.com/019189.html.

This year by year account shows ways in which American doctors have moved from slaves to prisoners and mental hospital patients over more than 150 years of medical abuse.

Examples include:-

(1906)

Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1919)

Between1919 - 1922, researchers perform testicular transplant experiments on inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, inserting the testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners (Greger).

(1939) 

In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous "Monster Experiment" on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, "in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career" (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

(1947)

Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that "certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract" (Goliszek).

(1963)

Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving "some cells," but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn't obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

In Britain throughout the nineteenth century the inmates of workhouses and asylums provided the raw materials in the form of their bodies and minds for doctors to practice upon, to develop techniques and treatments that when perfected could be sold to wealthy patients.

How long are we going to allow these doctors and researchers to get away with using the sick and the poor to experiment upon to further their careers and attract more research funding?

Why have ethics committees proved utterly impotent to prevent these abuses taking place?

What is required is greater democratic control over medicine and far more effective public scrutiny over doctors and physiologists.

After years of campaigning the British Haemophilia Society has forced this scandal into the public arena. At last it seems as if the pressure for a public enquiry into the AIDS study carried out in that community twenty to thirty years ago is irresistible.

Despite all their efforts to conceal the truth, the government and medical establishment is going to have to confront their role in introducing the AIDS virus into the UK back then. They will also have to answer for the way that medical practitioners have seemingly exposed innocent victims to debilitating illness and premature death because they could. They were that powerful!

This terrible chapter in British medical history is not going to go away, there will be a public enquiry and we shall see what effect that has on public perceptions of the Departmant of Health, the medical profession and the special relationship between the US and the UK scientific communities.

This is not the first time that populations have been deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS it happened in France to people with haemophilia in 1994 and again there was a case in Iran in 1999.

This is NOT acceptable, there must be prosecutions brought for what is reported to have taken place when culpability is established at the forthcoming enquiry.

There can be no more cover ups, no more abuses and justice must prevail for those infected and their families. It would appear that in Britain's medico-political estabishment heads are going to roll and not before time.

 England & Englishness - The Stateless State of the Nation

The political scene across the British archipelago has not been as complex nor fractious as it is now since universal suffrage giving (almost) all adults (over 21 years old) the vote irrespective of sex, income or property ownership finally became law in 1928. 

One problem we have here is an identity issue, who are we? 

This question is less problematic for our Celtic neighbours, the national identities of the Scots, or Welsh is better defined than that of the English.

In Northern Ireland at the opposite end of the spectrum rigid national and cultural identities have at times in its history threatened to tear the place apart. 

We all have multiple nationalities we are citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK), we are also British and also separately English, (Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish). 

Then there is the mythology that imagines Great Britain is some ancient land whose history reaches back into the mists of time, the land of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all that, this is largely a construct of Hollywood and Britain's own popular culture and fiction throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Great Britain loosely came into being with the arrival of James Stuart as king of Scotland and England in 1603 and whose court was in London.

The concept and actuality of Great Britain wasn't completely formalised until the Acts of Union cemented Scottish accession to rule from London in 1707.

The United Kingdom itself didn't come about until 1801 when the island of Ireland was absorbed into the union which is where it remained until 1922.

Some argue that plain old Britain without the Great refers only to England and Wales. The union of these countries can be said to have taken place when a Welsh dynasty the Tudors descended from Prince Rhys ap Tewdwr, that ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including the Lordship of Ireland, later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1485 until 1603. 

During that Tudor period, the Principality of Wales came to an end as a legally defined territory and was formally annexed to England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542.

Today England is by far the most populous of the countries that comprise the British Isles with about 84% of the population of the United Kingdom living here. The name England comes from the Anglo-Saxon Engla-Land or land of the Angles, the Germanic peoples who started to populate southern Britain in the 5th century AD.

It is I think an interesting fact in the face of officially sanctioned xenophobia giving  rise over the last few years to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) an extreme right-wing coalition of conservative Eurosceptics, neo-fascists and readers of tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, who would I think be deeply shocked and offended to discover the simple fact that England was actually originally created by immigrants.

Not only was England established by immigrants, but its language is a mongrel tongue comprising of loanwords borrowed from many different donor languages and constructed on a framework of archaic Germanic roots.

England is a construct of incomers after the Romans departed Britannia, they were mostly economic migrants and settlers coveting the fertile lands of the south and east of the British mainland, some of whom had first arrived as mercenaries and auxiliaries of the now gone Romans and they just stayed and settled down here.

However, the ethnic makeup was already a mix of Romano British, Brythonic and various other ethnicities some of whom first arrived with the Romans between 55 BC until 450AD when they finally left British shores to address the crisis at home. The Celtic nations to the west and north including Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Irish and to the southwest the Bretons also had a presence in what was to become England. 

In the southeast the Belgae from what is now northern France and Belgium had a significant foothold in Kent. Waves of subsequent immigration has enriched the cultural canvas upon which the idea of England has been painted and added complex patterns to the tapestry of English life, and all that from well before the word go as well!

Add into the pot the Danes and we see a truly diverse population in the territory that became England even before its actual existence as a distinct national entity.  The Anglo-Saxons had seven minor kingdoms (the Heptarchy) that with the exception of Wessex, were all devastated and eventually overrun by Viking incursions and by the establishment of Danelaw during the period sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages roughly between the years of 500 and 850AD.

The Scandinavian languages of the Danelaw areas and the Viking invaders brought about the first lexical enrichment of the proto-English language's Anglo-Frisian base, so English is not only a hotch-potch of other languages mostly from the Indo-European family but, during the 7th and 8th centuries it comprised of at least four distinct dialects, which were the founding pillars of the language we are using here to communicate now.

    Northumbrian in Northumbria, north of the Humber

    Mercian in the Kingdom of Mercia

    West Saxon in the Kingdom of Wessex

    Kentish in Kent

From these small linguistic acorns great linguistic oaks really did grow. English currently has about 300 million native speakers worldwide and is the official or co-official language of 45 different countries. Around another 300 million people are using English as a second language and somewhere in the region of 100 million people who use English as a foreign language in the world today.

England's 19 Days of Freedom

England was founded when The English lands were again unified in the 10th century in a reconquest completed by King Athelstan in 927. Although the Norse threat did not go away and was not roundly defeated by the Saxons until the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066. It is one of English history's supreme ironies that very soon after the final defeat of the Viking armies, followed the defeat of the recently victorious Anglo-Saxon army and King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, from whence began the Norman Conquest, just 19 days after the decisive defeat of the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge.

Since those times England and the English have been under the control of a succession of non-English dynasties, the Normans, the Frankish House of Anjou (the Angevins), the Anglo-French Plantagenet dynasty, the Welsh House of Tudor, the Scottish Stuart dynasty, the Dutch House of Orange, the German Hanoverians including the thoroughly German pedigree of the current incumbent of the British throne, HRH Queen Elizabeth II.

There is then a reading of history that says England is a country that was invented by immigrants and ruled by foreigners for the best part of the last thousand years.

Nothing much has changed. In 2014 England has no parliament, no government, and no independent existence of its own. The former Kingdom of England existed from 927 until 1707, so for  a period of 780 years, whereas the United Kingdom has been in existence for about 307 years but is now faltering under the multifaceted pressure of globalisation, regionalism, economic decline and political devolution on the Celtic fringes which has left England completely high and dry.

English nationalism is not as I have attempted to briefly sketch here - a simple matter.

It isn't simple now and it has never been simply a question of racial or ethnic integrity, in that sense the situation in England is much more akin to America than such ethnically homogenous countries as say Japan, or both of the Korea's  at the other extreme.

As DNA studies alone have clearly shown, all notions of race and ethnicity are social constructs but obviously incredibly significant ones, particularly in England at the present time for a whole combination of reasons.

England has had to reinvent itself in the wake of political devolution in the UK since 1999 which has given rise to a Scottish Parliament (which had previously gone into voluntary liquidation in 1707) a Welsh Assembly and a National Assembly for Northern Ireland.

The UK parliament in London comprises of elected representatives from all parts of United Kingdom that are making laws for England over which we the citizens of this country have no control, while the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs have no accountability to anyone for the decisions they make about England alone because they do not apply to their own electorates at home and have no effect upon their popularity with the voters that elect them to Westminster.

The British unwritten constitution resembles something from Alice in Wonderland fully replete with grandiose theatricals, but with no real substance and set against the now imminent prospect of Scottish Independence (or at the very least devolution-max) it is increasingly meaningless and has sadly descended further into the realms of the absurd.

So here are the fundamentals of English nationalism, a concept many right-thinking people shrink away from because of the risk that it might sound a bit fascistic. No such qualms automatically attach to Celtic nationalisms you will note, but when uttered by English nationalists suddenly the terms become suspect?... So, I think we have to be clear about a few things.

First is that English nationalism, if it is to represent the spirit of the nation cannot be anything other than multicultural. All of England's history demands that and it is indelibly inscribed upon the very bedrock of the people as reflected in the origins and the evolution of the English language. It is and must be a nationalism that recognises it co-exists with many other nationalisms and is not afraid to embrace ethnic and cultural diversity in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance. Its the English way.

Xenophobia is not only unpatriotic but profoundly ahistorical, as the 20th century demonstrated in England and indeed across all of Britain, fascism has been rightly regarded as a rather continental excess of sentimental irrationality.... or if not - just downright evil.

Here is a link to a 2012 pamphlet on English political self-determination called The Dog That Finally Barked; England as an Emerging Political Community a discussion paper published by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2012/02/dog-that-finally-barked_englishness_Jan2012_8542.pdf 

England was the First and is Now the Last Colony of the British Empire

The most pressing political issue in England today is the question of Home Rule. It is clear from the experience of the Scots that we will never get anywhere until England has its own parliament which in my view, must be located just about anywhere other than in London. England is very strongly regional, and its regions must be represented fairly in the English parliament which is impossible unless it establishes a seat far away from Westminster and all the trappings of the failed British state.

The English comprise of everyone who lives in England irrespective of cultural or ethnic background and whose interests are bound up with future of the country in Europe and in the world. Our closest political allies are the Scots, Welsh and Irish separatists, it is yet another irony that we are perhaps now more united in our desire to achieve local autonomy than we were as constituents of this outdated imperial throw-back that is the UK today.

The constitutional form of an independent England I would prefer is a republic with greatly devolved powers to the localities, but whatever form  a reinvented England takes, it will have its own interests within the wider European community and on a regional basis so that a direct link between let's say the English West Midlands and the Spanish region of Catalonia would be possible without any direct reference to, or involvement of either Spain or the United Kingdom.

A Europe of confederated regions, or to use EU-speak full blown subsidiarity and devolution of decision making to the most appropriate level, a Europe of the regions of which England will one day have a place. I suggest that this is the model for English nationalism, which is indistinguishable from English regionalism which gives us Geordies, Scousers, Brummies’ and a whole host of other local allegiances, identities and rivalries (especially in sport).

There is a new national agenda for England which has nothing directly to do with Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland nor anywhere else for that matter, whether an independent England would apply to join the British Commonwealth would be a matter for debate and discussion. Of course, it is quite possible that the secession of England from the Union would cause the implosion of the Commonwealth and the fizzling out of any last vestiges of a long-gone empire anyway.

The people of England cannot continue to have no meaningful political voice within Britain and Europe, there is a cultural revolution gaining impetus in this country that has been forced to stop ignoring its own history and culture and to seriously question who are the English and what is England all about?

First Blogged On 9 March 2014

Archive Post "Cosmic Ancestry" Oct 2008

Archive Post "Cosmic Ancestry" Oct 2008

Blog Entry    Cosmic Ancestry....is God a Virus?       

Oct 1, 2008 4:31 PM

In the context of the debate between evolutionary theory and intelligent design in the American education system and the impact of that debate here in the UK (and elsewhere) I want to raise some doubts here about the adequacy of both of those perspectives, in the light of developing theories about the origins of all existence.

Essentially the debate between the 'creationists' and the 'scientists' is about the origins of life on earth, but the thesis I want to briefly propose here is that those debates are parochial disputes that have resulted in an intellectual dead end.

At this time in the history of human society there is an enormous upheaval, a revolution is taking place politically, economically, sociologically and ideologically all the cards are all spinning in the air.

Alongside this temporal maelstrom there are seismic spiritual shifts taking place and impacting upon on all of the major world religions and belief systems.

From the rise of fundamentalism to the stalled experiment at CERN, there is a reaction to and a questioning of the nature of reality that has resulted in conflict between radical science and conservative religion at the end of the modernist epoch.

This dispute can be seen in all areas of cultural life and is played out in the uncertainty and loss of confidence in the global economy during this, the tertiary stage of capitalism and the collapse of those beliefs that have sustained it for the past 500 years.

In Max Weber's important work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) he suggests the origins of our current socio-economic and spiritual crisis in the west. 

Weber wrote that capitalism evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant ethic was a force behind an unplanned and uncoordinated mass action that led to the development of capitalism. 

This idea is also known as "the Weber thesis".

Ref:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

The 'Weber Thesis' sets out to demonstrate the connection between the dominant Anglo-Saxon spiritual ideology (Protestantism) and the revolutionary social and economic relationships (capitalism) that evolved out of it.

In a similar if much less ambitious vein, I want to suggest here that theoretical innovations in the contemporary sciences are beginning to reshape the zeitgeist of the Post-Capitalist Age and influence the shape of the future.

 

The Key to Complexity

Perhaps the greatest conundrum for evolutionary theory is the emergence of complexity.

How did life first emerge from the primordial soup and end up in the information age we inhabit today?

This has been an unanswered question that creationists have been able to pose and which natural selection Darwinists have struggled to answer in the absence of an organising principle like that of 'intelligent design'.

As Brig Klyce has recently noted in an article posted on the panspermia website

"Science can tolerate being unsure about some things. But science cannot entertain the notion that there are phenomena in the everyday natural world that require supernatural intervention. That requirement would emasculate science. Yet that requirement is precisely what creationists, by definition, want to establish. Darwinism responds to this challenge with scientific excommunication — "It's not science." This reaction often causes Darwinists to dismiss too hastily the valid scientific points creationists raise against aspects of Darwinism. In this way Darwinism behaves much like a religion with its own cherished, unquestionable beliefs. And so, for explaining evolution and the origin of life on Earth, a holy war is being waged."

Ref: http://www.panspermia.com/mechansm.htm

Over the past half century, since the discovery of DNA the biological explanation for diversity is that small errors occur when genomes are copied and passed down the generations. Small mutations accumulate into big evolutionary leaps over time and they are say the biologists, the reason for diversity in nature. The creationists have cast doubt upon the serendipity of such mutations and posit God as the guiding hand in the emergence of the diverse life forms that inhabit our universe today.

The 'invisible hand' of the market is an equivalent notion in classical liberal economics since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the bible of Enlightenment free market philosophy... now perhaps on it's last legs as global capitalism goes into a flat spin.

During the past decade or so, new theories about the agent of these mutations have emerged however that seem to dispense with both God and serendipity as the first cause of biological diversity. Those evolutionary shape shifting entities are in fact viruses.

Back in 1995 Don Chamberlain at the Woodrow Wilson School of Bioloigcal Science at Princeton University was asking questions like:-

What are viruses?.......Answer:- Viruses are submicroscopic, intracellular parasites.

 

Are viruses alive?

The debate continues around those questions. According to Aristotle, an object that has life if it "has a plan" for survival. All viruses contain either DNA or RNA. The molecules could constitute such a "plan." Thus, Aristotelian philosophy suggests that viruses do live.

Now when we invoke a 'plan' we seem to be moving toward intelligent design and seemingly away from Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest and a natural selection dependent upon random factors determining evolutionary fitness.

Viruses are especially instructive here because they evolve very rapidly between 20 and 30 times a day and therefore can tell us much about the relationship between the virus and the host cell.

Viruses of course have a very bad press and rightly so, viral infections have killed more human beings (not to mention other life forms) than all of the wars and famines throughout history put together. But are viruses simply killers or do they have more important functions in the evolution of life?

Research into the human genome is now changing our view of viruses and their role in evolution in radical ways. For a start they are the most numerous life forms on earth and they are everywhere as Garry Hamilton writing in New Scientist (August 2008 pp38-41) points out 'they are found in hot springs, deserts, polar lakes and in rocks 2000 meters below the ground'. Hamilton goes on to indicate that a millimetre of water from the Barents Sea turned out to contain 60,000 virus particles, in a similar sized sample from Lake Plussee in Germany...... the count was 254 million.

Prof. Luis P. Villarreal is a leading theorist in the role of viruses in the evolutionary process. He is Professor, Molecular Biology & Biochemistry, School of Biological Sciences, Director, Center for Virus Research, Director, Viral Vector Facility, and Director, Minority Science Program School of Biological Sciences, all at University of California, Irvine.

For about 100 years, the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a grey area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behaviour of their hosts profoundly. The categorization of viruses as nonliving during much of the modern era of biological science has had an unintended consequence: it has led most researchers to ignore viruses in the study of evolution, but not Villarreal and his collaborators whose work now proposes viruses as fundamental players in the history of life.

In this way viruses have been elevated above the mere vectors for disease and death and promoted to a primary evolutionary role and are now seen as agents of change in a symbiotic relationship with their hosts.

If this line of enquiry is correct viruses are the missing link in the evolution of diversity of life on earth, but some theorists go further than that and suggest that viruses arrived here from outer space and are ubiquitous vectors of change that have resulted in such complex structures as the human brain. At this point we encounter an interface between cosmology and virology and the development of a new way of describing the relationship between human beings and the universe in which we live, a perspective called 'Cosmic Ancestry'.

Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. This theory has a very respectable scientific pedigree which begins in ancient Greece and it represents a separate evolutionary line to that of Darwinian theory.

"The first point, which deals with the origin of life on Earth, is known as panspermia — literally, "seeds everywhere." Its earliest recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who influenced Socrates.

However, Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation came to be preferred by science for more than two thousand years. Then on April 9, 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur announced his great experiment disproving spontaneous generation as it was then held to occur. In the 1870s, British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur and argued that life could come from space. And in the first decade of the 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth."

Brig Klyce http://www.panspermia.com/intro.htm

The case for Cosmic Ancestry is not yet proven, of course says Klyce. At this point the best reason to notice it is that sustained evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth are not satisfactorily accounted for by Darwinism. We will mention some of the flaws in the Darwinian account, but our primary purpose is to present Cosmic Ancestry as a viable, new scientific account of evolutionary progress and the origin of life on Earth.

Panspermia, the most controversial hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth is gaining support.

The theory that we are all descendants of an alien life form that 'seeded' our planet billions of years ago becomes stronger with time, also because we realize that much of what we considered 'scientifically impossible' can instead happen.

The notion of Cosmic Ancestry and role of viruses as the creative forces responsible for the leaps in the complexity of life itself is potentially ground-breaking and epoch shattering discovery.

In the above cited New Scientist article Garry Hamilton (2008:41) says:-

"All in all, biologists are confronting what may be the biggest advance in evolutionary thinking since the discovery of the gene. Our emerging knowledge of viruses challenges many tenets of evolution, not least that it is driven by competition between selfish genes.

Viruses provide a strong argument for the idea that evolution is also driven by fitness boosts gained through give and take."

This changing view of the origins and evolution of life based not upon competition, but on reciprocity between the virus and the host cell may not bring comfort to orthodox evolutionists, but it is potentially devastating to the creationists and their theory of supernatural intelligent design.

Just as former innovations in Christianity in the form of Protestantism according to Weber became the spirit of capitalism, so the universal holism of Cosmic Ancestry theories has the potential to reshape the spiritual underpinnings of a post capitalist age.

An age where competitive concepts of 'human nature' as endorsed by both Darwinism and capitalism are replaced by a symbiotic 'give and take' conception of life, in which the role of the 'creator' is replaced by the interaction between the virus and the host cell in a creative process has resulted in the fantastic diversity of existence.

If the creationist arguments seek to give God the credit for viral mutations like human beings, then God will have to take responsibility for the pathogens that have cut a swathe through human and non-human populations of his alleged creations from time immemorial.

This must change our conception of creation from being an essentially benign and sacred happenstance to a random chance dynamic with an absolute moral neutrality, neither 'good' nor 'bad'. It also changes our perception of the cosmos which now becomes a living entity swarming with actual and potential lifeforms, in which viruses are the active agents of creation across the entire universe.

As a matter of fact it seems to suggest a form of Gaia theory as explicated by English chemist and inventor James Lovelock during the 1960s and 70s.

The Gaia theory is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are coupled to form a complex interacting system. This coordinated system of living organisms according to Lovelock maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Commenting on Cosmic Ancestry theory Brig Klyce  points out:-

“This account of evolution and the origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm. The new theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the past. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed.”

 Epilogue

We are I think on the verge of a global cultural revolution, Cosmic Ancestry contradicts and confounds the Big Bang Theory and that is why it is essential that the experiment currently under way at CERN restarts as soon as the fault that halted it is rectified, hopefully early in the new year.

Whichever way it goes however, the virus theory of evolution continues to go from strength to strength and threatens to leave both creationists and Darwinists locked into an increasingly sterile debate that is hopelessly out of touch with the new realities of the 21st century.