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Wednesday, March 17, 2004
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 Timothy Wilken, MD writes: All members of a synergic heterarchy are required to veto any plan where they or anyone else would lose. This is not an arbitrary veto. This is a veto to prevent loss. The heterarchy is seeking to win together. Plans causing loss need to modified to plans that insure winning. Therefore all vetoes are immediately followed by renegotiation to modify the plan of action so that loss can be eliminated. Synergic consensus is unanimous consensus. Unanimous consensus is protected by the judicious use of the synergic veto. Synergic relationship requires that when any party within a group is losing, the action causing the loss must stop. But again all vetoes are immediately followed by renegotiation to modify the plan of action so that loss can be eliminated, and action can continue. Thus synergic consensus is a two step process. 1) consensus--to find mutual agreement, and 2) consent--to find specific disagreements and eliminate those through modification and re-negotiation of proposed plans. This second step is initiated by use of the synergic veto. After I designed Ortegrity, which uses the process of synergic consensus and synergic veto, I learned about Sociocracy. It is from Sociocracy that I have borrowed the term consent for the second phase of synergic consensus. ... Any group of humans organized as an Ortegrity are using synocracy. If a nation of people chose to organize as an ortegrity they would have a synocracy. If all of humanity were organized as an Ortegrity, we would have world wide synocracy. ... Today, mind and brain scientists have made enormous progress in understanding how the human brain works. There has been many surprises in these recent advances. But the biggest shocker is that the brain doesn’t decide what to do. Decision making is not controlled centrally in the brain. The mind-brain appears to act as a coordination and consensus system for meeting all the needs of the cells, tissues, and organs of the body. The brain doesn’t decide to eat. The cells of the body decide to eat, the brain coordinates their activity and carries out the consensus will. Our human brain stores the gathered information from the body’s sensing of its environment, the brain presents opportunities for action reflective of both the sensing of environment and the needs and goals of the 40,000,000,000 cells it serves. The brain is not the leader of the body, it is the follower of the body. It is a system that matches needs of the body with its sensing of opportunities to meet these needs by action within the environment. The brain is a ‘synergic government’ that truly serves its constituents—the cells, tissues, and organs that make up the human body. The body is governed by a unanimous rule democracy that has survived millions of years. The apparent ‘I’ is not real. It is really a ‘we’. We humans have mistaken the self-organization of synergic consensus for the directed organization of an ego decider. If the human body can using unanimous rule democracy and synergic consensus can organize and coordinate the actions of 40,000,000,000 cells so totally that we identify the whole organism as a single individual, then we humans should be able to use these same mechanisms to organize our species and solve our human problems. (03/17/04)
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 Jonathan Schell writes: The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere--some far from Iraq or deep in the past--and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone. ... Just now, the peoples of the world have embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous, wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered planet. Seen in a certain light, the Administration's imperial bid, if successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d'état, in which the world's dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light, the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty; responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course, stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed. (03/17/04)
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 BBC Health -- A fault in the way cells signal to each other may be to blame for the development of a deadly form of skin cancer, researchers have found. A team from the Marie Curie Research Institute has found 90% of malignant melanoma cells produce abnormally high levels of a protein called BRN-2. The discovery could help differentiate between melanomas and less dangerous moles. The protein seems to play a crucial role in cell division. Malignant melanoma cells contained more than 20 times more of the protein than normal cells, the scientists found. Lead researcher Dr Colin Goding said: "We found that BRN-2 is really important for melanoma growth. "When we switch off BRN-2 in the lab, the cells grow much more slowly." ... Malignant melanoma kills an estimated 1,600 people in the UK each year. The number of cases has risen with the boom in foreign holidays to sunny destinations. Dr Tim Eisen, consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, said: "This is a very important discovery of three reasons. "First, it may help us tell the difference between moles that cannot cause further problems and melanomas that can. Second, it may help us to determine the risk of a further problem after somebody has had a melanoma removed. Third, this discovery is another important piece of information that shows us why melanomas behave the way they do and points to possible new ways of treating the disease." (03/17/04)
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 BBC Science -- A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. But many researchers believe the capacity for true symbolic thinking arose much later with the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens. The 8cm-long bone was unearthed at the Kozarnika cave in north-west Bulgaria. Another animal bone found at the site is incised with 27 marks along its edge. "These lines were not from butchering; in this place (on the animal) there is nothing to cut. It can't be anything else than symbolism," Dr Jean-Luc Guadelli, of the University of Bordeaux, France, told BBC News Online. When early humans butchered animal carcasses for meat, they left cut marks on the bones made by the stone tools they used to scrape away the flesh. But the French and Bulgarian researchers who have been excavating at Kozarnika claim the parallel cuts on the bones are too precise to be the result of hacking at the animal to strip away meat. "Now, what is the meaning of these symbols? It is impossible to know. But they put on this bone something they wanted to explain: 'I saw 16 animals in this place'. It could be something like language." Many researchers see the capacity for symbolism in humans as something that only became widespread after about 50,000 years ago in our own species. Therefore, evidence of this capacity in an earlier species of human is highly controversial. (03/17/04)
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 BBC Science -- Scientists believe they may have found a new way to reverse baldness and treat conditions like alopecia. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have identified stem cells or master cells in the hair follicles of mice. They found that these cells grow into hair follicles and produce hair when transplanted into skin. Writing in Nature Biotechnology, they said the discovery could lead to new treatments for humans. The researchers found certain genes were activated in the stem cells that were not activated in other hair follicle or skin cells. They are now planning further research to identify these genes in humans. They said developing drugs to affect these genes could lead to new ways of controlling hair growth. "By defining these molecular markers, we will be able to isolate human stem cells from hair follicles," Dr George Cotsarelis, one of those involved in the study, told Reuters. While the discovery could lead to new treatments for baldness and conditions like alopecia, the researchers believe it may also help burn victims. "One problem with a burn is that the wound is never covered with hair follicles," said Dr Cotsarelis. "These cells have that capability so if we can isolate them and seed them onto a wound we can constitute skin that is more normal than currently possible." (03/17/04)
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6:09:07 AM 
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© TrustMark
2004
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
3/31/2004; 6:04:07 AM.
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