Another significant element of Zimmer's file is that he was able to escape prosecution as a war criminal partly through exploiting his wartime intelligence contacts and dealings with OSS officials, who spoke up for him after the war. In that sense his history mirrors the experience of some other Nazi officials.

Wolff was a much bigger fish. In a climate where world public opinion was shocked by photos of corpses and survivors from concentration and extermination camps, there was no way for Himmler's former chief of staff--one of the highest ranking SS officers to survive--to escape early imprisonment. Wolff was moved from one internment camp to another and regularly interrogated. He almost was named as one of the major defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, but he lucked out.

It seemed to him that Dulles had failed to carry out a promise or a moral obligation to help him. In early 1946 Wolff was diagnosed as paranoid and was confined in a mental institution: he thought he was pursued by Jewish demons. After considerable American hesitation about prosecuting him because of his participation in Operation Sunrise, the British proposed to try him together with Field Marshal Kesselring. But they changed their plans and instead held a little-publicized trial in Hamburg in 1949, in which Wolff's partners in Operation Sunrise wrote affidavits or testified on his behalf. He was acquitted.

After the Eichmann trial West German prosecutors turned up evidence that Wolff had helped to speed deportations of Jews to Treblinka. Although Allen Dulles's former assistant Gaevernitz came to the National Archives to try to find evidence that would help Wolff, he was convicted in 1962 and sentenced to twenty years, of which he served ten.8 OSS officials long before had turned up evidence in German records that Wolff was responsible for reprisal killings in Italy-evidence which had never been used against him.9 Wolff survived his prison term to become a prosperous West German businessman in the 1970s.

tears posted:

I am reading: Imperialism in the Neocolonial Phase - P J James, Massline Publications, 2011

It is hoped that this study by P J James as per the decision by the Central Committee of CPI (ML) shall help the Marxist-Leninist forces an all those who take positions against the imperialist system and aspire for a socialist future to scientificically approach the present international and national situation when the imperialist system especially US imperialism is dominating the whole world through neocolonial methods. Such a scientific understanding will create conditions for chalking out the Programme and Path of Revolution in each country according to the concrete conditions there, always upholding the principals of proletarian internationalism
- K N Ramachandran

http://www.cpiml.in/cms/books/item/24-introduction-to-the-book-imperialism-in-the-neo-colonial-phase-kn-ramachandran

very. good. shit.

If anyone was looking for a 2011 school text book of the financial history of imperialism which also condemns khruchevite revisionism in the strongest terms, then don't worry I found it, it's this book

now reading Eduardo Mondlane's "The Struggle For Mozambique."

really love reading, really seeing noticeable gains in my posting ability from all the books i'm reading

Edited by tears (Feb. 24, 2017 20:26:20)

tears posted:

now reading Eduardo Mondlane's "The Struggle For Mozambique."

perfect book. why?, you ask. because it was 200 pages long, the perfect length for a book. If you ever write a book make sure its 200 pages, thank you

roseweird posted:

zzone stem ppl if you are good at keeping up your history and pol reading while studying pls give tips or exhortations for maintaining intellectual discipline bc im being shamefully sloppy and lazy and not reading outside of class

my tips are ... welp I don't have any tips it's heckin' hard. I've finished 1 non-math book this year.

roseweird posted:

if i understood him and remember right, in state & rev lenin saw technical specialists as kind of apolitical, and said they could be made to serve communists in the same way they are made to serve capitalists. i also read that mao told his children to study the natural sciences in order to serve the people, which is understandable advice from a guy who suffered a lot of embarrassment due to not knowing much about stuff like metallurgy and botany

botany very important science, incourage many people to study it, people will be amazed and wierded out by your ability to name every plant you see, and also your insistence in naming every plant you see. ignore naysayers - like the "job market" - who claim botany not a good thing to study, furthermore *

There are also several paradoxes, which were not easy to solve in the framework of the classical approach.



The paradox of speed

Only a very small piece of genome could be produced as an optimal one. This means that at the given time of the evolution of life on the Earth, the number of generations and the number of organisms born give the maximum estimation of the different genotypes ever built and checked for their survival. This number is seemingly lower than 4^50, which means that no longer than one 50-bases DNA-sequence could have been checked (by natural selection) for all its possible combinations of primary structure.6

This is a fascinating point. A 50-base DNA-sequence is ridiculously short, but we know enough about the history of life to be statistically certain that any organism more complicated is necessarily VERY far away from the 'optimal' version of its DNA as judged by natural selection alone. The paradox, in other words, is that evolution has only been able to (thoroughly) test a very limited number of the possible organisms, yet it has produced a tremendous variety and abundace of successful ones. The neo-darwinist view (where natural selection is the 'main' mechanism) suggests that, statistically, it should have taken a much longer time for life to reach the level it is at now, and yet here we are. So Post-Darwinism is an attempt to resolve this.

The paradox of the survival of new genotypes (the paradox of unique child)

In case of sexual reproduction, almost every individual has its own genotype which has never existed before. Nevertheless, a remarkable part of offspring is viable. This paradox may not be easy to solve from the point of view of strong neo-Darwinism, since, strictly speaking, the viability of a unique genotype is unpredictable. Also, if many of new genotypes are viable, it means that natural selection is, at least, not intensive. The offspring, which is genetically different from the parent, does not, evidently, contribute to the fitness of the parent's genotype.7

In other words, under strong neo-Darwinism (heavy focus on natural selection), we would expect a lot more offspring to fail, since they are almost certainly 'untested' blueprints for survival.

I agree with the claim that these paradoxes cannot be resolved within the framework of neo-darwinism. As an undergraduate, I learned basically the 'neo-darwinist' view, which is usually presented as capital T True. The paradoxes of this school are not usually addressed by the mainstream or your typical New Atheist I-love-science types.

The conclusion of the piece is also, I think, a fair assesment of the value of the Post-Darwinism view:

However, according to E. Mayr (1988:535) "Darwinism is not a simple theory that is either true or false but is rather a highly complex research program that is being continuously modified and improved", i.e., with which one may, or may not join. Similar is the conclusion of K. Popper: "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program"8. If so, then logical arguments may not be sufficient to decide, whether the post-Darwinism, as described above, belongs to this program or not9, which, in my opinion, is not actually important. Nevertheless, as we can conclude from the previous history of biology, there has always existed more than one great school of thought simultaneously, and I cannot see any reason why this situation should change.

It all sounds very dialectical and materialist to me. *thumbs up*

Edited by Belphegor (March 2, 2017 09:22:43)

blinkandwheeze posted:

can any of the STEM ppl here tell me whether the lines gestured toward in this article are compelling or not http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/postdarw.htm

general thoughts as i read:
- "real" STEM people wouldn't like any of this because it is too filled with what sounds like philosophy, and STEM people are incredibly tedious & just want a thing that says x = y

- it sounds like nomogenetics despite its outsider reputation is not actually that controversial in the modern context? environmental pressures and limitations on an organism cause pressure on its evolution and direct it in certain ways?

In modern terms, the genetic memory works as read-only, as the ROM.

it's been recently discovered that actually, DNA is not read only at all. we inherit immunity by incorporating pieces of pathogen DNA into our own so we and our descendants recognize it in the future. iirc this was only published properly literally a few weeks ago. there's also (for work I go to genetics conferences so i'm fairly up to date, though i'm not a geneticist myself) a lot of discussion recently that our understanding of the structure and variance of genomes is actually very limited in practice and needs major change. in general there seems to be much more going on than we previously realized with e.g. "junk" sections. besides that there are interactions among various DNA-like things that we don't really understand. even the basic structure of DNA itself is still being figured out: it turns out some bases (the A, C, G, T) can be methylated which changes some things subtly, but the scientific community currently has almost no idea what. also no modern sequencing techniques differentiate between the methylated and non-methylated versions of the bases, so it's a little like finding out that there are actually 4 new letters in the DNA alphabet. (it's more complicated than that, but whatever.) i expect if you asked most leading geneticists today if it's possible environmental pressures lead to specific, correlated DNA changes (rather than mutations) they would have to say yes it is possible, whereas ten years ago they'd have just kicked you out of their office for even imagining it.

(oh i see methylation is mentioned later on in here.)

In the existing models of Darwinian theory of evolution (synthetic theory of evolution), the organism is not considered to have a multi-level structure with independent activity and a possibility to use its genome in various ways.

This is definitely not true in the current state of human genetics, it's been pretty clear and accepted for a while that there are certain genetic-metabolic pathways that are not activated until certain conditions become true (environmental, psychological, chemical, whatever) and it could be that some of your genes are "read" for years and/or only become relevant in specific times or places or situations.

drwhat posted:

it's been recently discovered that actually, DNA is not read only at all. we inherit immunity by incorporating pieces of pathogen DNA into our own so we and our descendants recognize it in the future. iirc this was only published properly literally a few weeks ago

ooh! where?

Constantignoble posted:

ooh! where?

i am poking around and i might have misremembered, this might be an established thing for a few years? i will poke around a little more tomorrow. my boss shared it on our work chat sometime in the last month iirc but we don't pay for the fancy chat that keeps archives around

drwhat posted:

- "real" STEM people wouldn't like any of this because it is too filled with what sounds like philosophy, and STEM people are incredibly tedious & just want a thing that says x = y

oh sure i don't think the people here who know about this stuff are like that tho. at least i hope not.

drwhat posted:

- it sounds like nomogenetics despite its outsider reputation is not actually that controversial in the modern context? environmental pressures and limitations on an organism cause pressure on its evolution and direct it in certain ways?

this is mostly what i'm interested in, i find the idea of recuperating von baer and lev berg more compelling than the introduction of semiotics to the field or whatever. i just have no knowledge in this area so i can't evaluate whether this is worthwhile independently. do you know of any modern biologists who have discussed nomogenetics or are you just extrapolating this from the current state of the field?