Keith,
Just a couple of questions about this otherwise fine presentation. In your reference to history: historically America was an environmental mixing pot before 1776. People of vastly different cultures mixed freely and parts of the colonies were wildly different. The slave culture of the South for example versus the free culture for people of color in the North. That all coalesced when the revolution happened and then the constitution. Americans discovered very quickly that the kind of market that Europe is now trying was a recipe for impotence without a strong central government. On the other hand, voting was and has continued down to the present as universal and supported by all. That seems to be changing as one party now drafts laws that the poor will be unable to fulfill in order to vote. Might this be an epigenetic return to a pre-American European culture? I say this in reference to your final sentence. [ This regression would be a four to seven generation regression. We could also make the same case for Yugoslavia and Russia's return to the Russian Orthodox Church.] After the constitution it took 70 years for the industrialists to disassemble the Founding Father's Secular Common and replace it with a Drone contract as they had in England before they came. We are still in the thrall of the Anglo mechanical materialism with a love for Aristocracy which you seem to be justifying with your scientific determinism. On a personal level, although it's been five hundred years since we were a coherent culture, I still have the fierce individualism, personal responsibility and commitment to learn everything I can through group analysis (called the Medicine Wheel amongst our people) as a part of my personality as it was my great, great grandfather's who guaranteed that I would exist by resisting the Americans trying to drag his pregnant wife and 9 children to Oklahoma in the dead of winter. His loyalty to his people was strong but his personal responsibility to his children and his children's clan was stronger and so he escaped the U.S. soldiers and took his family to Mississippi to hide amongst integrated Choctaws. Considering that I still carry his foundational beliefs [different from the dominant Anglo society] I would guess that our epigenes are reeeally strong don't you think? Or maybe it's something else. Or maybe both. In all fairness the hard epigenetic argument seems to be an extension of the "gifted" or "talented" argument of the Italian opera world that now says that you either have a singing voice or you don't and that it was a "gift of god" and not developed. This flies in the face of four hundred years of deliberate vocal pedagogy with hundreds of thousands of educational exercises for the development of Bel Canto. In contrast to that belief, in the 1990s I formed an opera company with people literally off the street and with no musical education other than my voice lessons, no audition according to talent, and I took whomever walked through the door. They were truly "gifts of God" because they were random. Within five years they were singing and competing against the other opera companies in New York on the Chamber Opera level and getting good reviews from the NYTimes and excellent reviews on CDs in music magazines across the country. Juilliard picks 6% of their auditionees from across the world and trains them for five years. We took people off the street and trained them for five years and our reviews were comparable. Our people's success rate in the business has also been comparable to the other training programs in the country which only pick "the talented." It's not how high you go but how far you came that tells whether something is true or not. We can also consider a second possibility that is grounded in the physiology of muscles and the routine of personal practice. All people have trigger points or "tight muscles" that give them pain and that they either work out over time or seek a somatics instructor, Alexander, Feldenkrais or a simple Masseur to reprogram the muscles that are firing out of sync with the intent of the person in the body. These points are founded around the idea of effort or "work" that has been interrupted, left unfinished and continues on in the unconscious of the person. Meanwhile the rest of the body goes about its daily extensions and contractions based in the chemical structure of the muscle built on proteins. A trigger point is literally a contradiction or a "boulder" in the flow of the work of the muscle. On a larger level, the body is sculpted by the images in the mind that relate to parental cultural identity in the child. So there are "trigger points" that relate to a person's image of who they believe themselves to be as an individual a family member and a member of a culture and nation. These "identity" contractions are not true to the potential of the body of the individual but are so to the psychology. The work on this was done extensively by Edward T. Hall at the end of the last century. It's called "Proximics" and involved thousands of hours of film work on gestures and what they call "sync-movements." My point is that the simple mechanism of "practice" just as in "practice" of a musical instrument or the body instrument of the human voice is sufficient to explain how these things happen. Things get stuck and are repeated and continue, in special cases over a lifetime. A child loves its parents and repeats those patterns even though they are pathological to the physical structural potential of the child. We can explain the small trigger mechanism in an I and H band with its chemical bonding but the mechanics are devoid of specific intent. That intent is provided by identity and the desire to bond with parents and group. On the other hand, Actors and especially "Singing Actors" go through internships to disassemble these patterns and that's why their faces seem so blankly beautiful at times. Up close camera work [as in movies and TV] work especially to erase all but the most general facial and bodily gestures. The extreme workouts that actors do at the gym every single day is not only to keep trim. In some cases it makes them look bony and ugly but they are doing something deeper. They are building their psycho-physical makeup into a blank slate without those individual tics, dare I say "epigenes". We have an example of this in the larynx in the system known as ""effort closure"" which is the closure of the larynx when the body is either doing lifting or under stress. It literally thickens and closes both the real and false vocal cords as a valve for lifting. Laryngeal bio-mechanics says that one must stay as far as possible away from ""effort closure"" in the production of beautiful singing. However there is a lot of "effort closure" in Rock and Roll and other commercial vocal mediums that get their power from electronics. But if you are physically the acoustical power then you have to stay away from "effort closure" unless there is an opposite pathology caused by a weakness in the vocal cords. Then we use a mild "effort closure" to build strength but with great restraint and a strict warning not to practice this too much. A kind of physical therapy for a pathology. Otherwise NO "effort closure". But anything can cause "effort closure" on a nervous system level. Not just lifting but psychological stress can thicken the cords as a preparation for a defensive effort. Singers will thicken and darken their sound as a psychological defense and feel like they are wonderful when in reality the sound is dull and impotent. The key is the nervous system and kinesthetic feeling. The psychology teams up with the mechanism of ""effort closure"" and a very subtle "trigger like" tension is found in a thickened vocal cord that destroys the acoustic and layers the sound with a complexity that is both physically destructive and musically impotent. Is it an epigene on a gene or a habit caused by personal identity and incorrect assumptions about what constitutes the foundations of beautiful and powerful singing? I don't agree with the Italians. I think they have five hundred years of environment and beautiful cities and art to train their children from birth and that they have no idea how that voice just seems to appear as if by magic. On the other hand America is English and tends to use up things, make them ugly and demean art. Americans don't just make beautiful sounds. They have to earn them. :>)) That may seem like I'm conflicted about what you are saying. It's not true. You did a very good job of explaining your position and thinking on these. It's clear, beautifully written and concise. On the other hand I believe that the situation is more layered than you are making it and that teaching is a lot more potent then the determinists believe. I believe that from my years of doing it and producing art from people who were declared untalented before they started. I suspect they will eventually find that epigenetics is like left handed people who as a group are more musically prone than right handed folks. But once practice is begun, that advantage quickly disappears. In fact the point of symmetry in perceptions and action are more important to musical development than an asymmetrical right or left handedness. The real answer is to rediscover the structure and potential of the individual apart from prejudicial factors. In the case of culture it is to understand the dynamics of culture and the domains of power within cultures that shape individual unconsciously. Muscles move by virtue of chemical tags. Some of those tags get left behind as [Trigger Points] "boulders" in the flow of things or as physical shapes in identity. They have little to do with potential or the ability to change and grow. Music is about change in the elements of sound exercised with the greatest delicacy within the context of a time or era. Resistance to change is bad Art and we all know that Art is an evolutionary biological necessity. We must be careful in science that we do not mistake the fact of something for the truth of why it is that way. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 6:14 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Sadly no, for the Arab Spring David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and other Western politicians are naive in the extreme if they imagine that countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, after their recent 'Arabian Springings', will acquire anything resembling what we call democracy in their lifetimes. Quite besides what history tells us about cultural inertia and the slow pace of significant political change -- generations rather than years or even decades -- we now have scientific evidence why this is so. This comes from the new sub-science of epigenetics. Although suspected by a handful of evolutionary biologists for two or three decades, the subject only sprang to life in recent years following the first draft of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003. This is telling us that by far the most of our genes doe not act as single stimulants for this or that physical trait, or propensity to this or that disease, but only have their effect when orchestrated in large numbers. This is achieved by other agents, epigenes, which arise from the regions of our 'junk' DNA that lie in between the gene areas themselves. This explains why large pharmaceutical corporations have already lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a fruitless search for single genes which cause various mid-life killer diseases such as heart diseases, diabetes, many cancers and mental senility. Yes, in each case the researchers found a few genes that seem to be specifically involved but they only contributed something like 5% or 10% to the likelihood of the disease actually developing. At least scores more, perhaps hundreds, of other genes were also involved. Furthermore, some potentially lethal genetic orchestrations also needed to be tripped off by specific features in the environment of the individual concerned -- such as diet or daily habits. A person can carry a lethal predisposition but is lucky (or sensible) enough to avoid the environment which has a high chance of sparking it off. Even more astonishing to post-2003 geneticists was the realization that new epigenetic orchestrations could not only arise in the lifetime of an individual, according to particular life-circumstances, but also that those orchestrations could be inherited by the next generation, and then the succeeding one, and so on. The reason for this is that the genes that take part in a particular orchestration actually acquire specific chemical tags and the complete set of such tags for any particular life-effect can be passed on just as certainly as genes themselves are passed on. For the purpose of this morning's piece (I'm endeavouring to make this as short as possible) two more points about epigenetics need to be mentioned. One is that, unlike genes themselves, the epigenetic tags are not quite as permanent as genes. If the same environmental conditions are not repeated in succeeding generations then the tags can gradually fall away from their genes. A particular epigenetic orchestration that has taken several generations to develop (and thus spread around in a population) can also degrade over further generations if the environment changes. Finally, that particular disposition will disappear altogether and the genes that were involved no longer carry those particular tags. Secondly, epigenetic orchestrations are not confined to predispositions to physical effects (such as a particular cancer) but also to psychological and behavioural effects. For example, a pair of identical twins (with identical genes and identical epigenetic tags at birth) might behave quite differently in adult life. One might become schizophrenic (this is believed to be epigenetic) and the other, living in a different environment, might not. One might become a cheerful optimistic person, the other gloomy and pessimistic. We can now translate these findings into considering cultures. Some cultures, after living in the same sort of environment for many generations will have inherited a fairly widespread predisposition to some particular diseases, while others, not noticeably different in other ways, will experience quite a low incidence to the same diseases. On the other hand, the latter are each highly likely to have an idiosyncratic collection of diseases to which they are particularly prone. Also, disparate cultures of long-standing will each have their own blend of psychological and behavioural predispositions. In both cases, however, even if a particular culture acquires a brand new environment overnight, then its physical and psychological predispositions would take generations to disappear and be replaced by new ones. The sub-science of epigenetics is still very new, but what has been discovered so far is fully compatible with what historians tell us. Thinking about politics and government, modern Russia, for example, is scarcely any different in many respects (domination by secret police, lack of sufficient property law) -- despite two immense make-overs -- than Tsarist Russia was a century ago even though Russians may know intellectually what they should be doing before they can approximate to the standard of living of, say, America. That's just one example of dozens that could be instanced. Thus, in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, although an educated youthful minority may know what is desirable by way of becoming Westernized -- which is what the vast majority of their populations want -- the older culture, dominated by Islamic imams, is already resisting and taking advantage of the opportunities offered them. In the West, it took most countries two or three hundred years of civil strife to bring about our voting procedures. The Islamic countries will be no different. We now have some scientific evidence to back up one's intuition that it's going to take more than one or two generations before the necessary psychological predispositions are in place and being inherited. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/10/
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