Hi, woke moralists! In today’s episode, we take a look at Jordan Peterson through the lens of Jungian archetypes – just as he would want – and explore some of his other ideas about climate change, gender, marriage, hierarchies, and lobsters. Don’t check the timecode!

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Executive Producer - Katy Stoll (@KatyStoll). Written by David Christopher Bell (@MovieHooligan) and Cody Johnston (@drmistercody). Directed by Will Gordh (@will_gordh). Edited by Gregg Meller (@greggmeller). Graphics by F. Clint DeNisco. Head Writer - David Christopher Bell. Producer - Jonathan Harris. Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales (@mijo_marco). Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker (@quincyrashard).

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Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 8:53 - Jordan Peterson Is Not A Climate Expert 19:24 - Jordan Peterson Demands That You Respect His Bigotry 26:28 - Who, What, Why, and How is Jordan Peterson? 34:56 - The Persona 1:28:44 - The Shadow 2:00:47 - The Anima And Animus 2:34:13 - The Self

Source list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ciPKIdTqGdHsxsj-7vjlcnyq4JDYlLBM-UyH3LBi3No/edit

jordanpeterson #jordanpetersonandjoerogan #jordanpetersonquotes #somemorenews

You are a member of a very peculiar species. Of all our quirks, the human religious impulse may be our most distinctive one. We build skyscrapers? Big deal, bowerbirds construct ornate decorative nests and they have brains the size of almonds.

You are a member of a very peculiar species. Of all our quirks, the human religious impulse may be our most distinctive one. We build skyscrapers? Big deal, bowerbirds construct ornate decorative nests and they have brains the size of almonds.

Honeycreepers, small birds inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands, have a rich assortment of beak shapes. Some species have long, thin beaks suited to plucking insects from leaves. Others possess thick beaks good for cracking open tough seeds.

Biomimicry design, explained with 99% Invisible. Check them out here: https://99percentinvisible.org/

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Japan’s Shinkansen doesn’t look like your typical train. With its long and pointed nose, it can reach top speeds up to 150–200 miles per hour.

It didn’t always look like this. Earlier models were rounder and louder, often suffering from the phenomenon of "tunnel boom," where deafening compressed air would rush out of a tunnel after a train rushed in. But a moment of inspiration from engineer and birdwatcher Eiji Nakatsu led the system to be redesigned based on the aerodynamics of three species of birds.

Nakatsu’s case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. She's a co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit encouraging creators to discover how big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often already been solved through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.

This is one of a series of videos we're launching in partnership with 99% Invisible, an awesome podcast about design. 99% Invisible is a member of http://Radiotopia.fm

Additional imagery from the Biodiversity Heritage Library: https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/

Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app.

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shown on 5/16/17 at 12pm PST a resident dj mix for the friendly folks at the Chillout Mixer.

https://www.chilloutmixer.org https://www.dubtrack.fm/join/chillout-mixer

(00:00): E66S 卵 - sounds of summer (02:11) Anglesh - WhatsLeft (04:29) slr - memoryfoam (05:19) René Schier - Wings (08:25) OZARK - Wing_walker (09:38) Erameld - stew [ x Ｋａｇａｍｉ 鏡 ] (10:37) ডহর - soFly [artist titled unknown in mix, but couldn't get the font right - artist is https://soundcloud.com/y2dscapes (y2d)] (12:05) wisdom - con (14:08) Hanzo - wannabedown (17:32) Hazy Year - the predator (18:46) Korporal K - Shards. (20:29) sarcsm. - day after day. (21:48) fushou - ohblivious. (22:54) Knowz - I live for da funk (24:27) supapao - C A N ' T F A L L I N L O V E (25:29) (01:43 am) - birds (27:07) Pantalaim0n - J^stynka (28:25) shkkad - hurdle (29:47) Wizard of Loneliness - Understanding (31:18) delt - x Fawg (32:38) ottr - endless (33:37) Heliflopper - lenny (34:19) suburbansanity - caress me (oh)

Video clips from my old datamoshing videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNm-ptb-Vtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr1kmrQFa5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvAQN_16C_I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B378U-K0opg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEuv-3bhClY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZyU1bPAwHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q9iKnjoHQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8dhWiZUuKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-KkgSXniig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDILu4GWGMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5yLQBJ3ZeA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlZSOHZGDe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8LSJ9zuiDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BecjWp06dsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO0G-xlEIuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93gNy6DN950 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YooaShzvdQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZd_MjOT_co https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SSceAfFdGY

I hate being in the ocean. Shallow beaches, I can handle, but the deep sea terrifies me more than spiders, snakes and birds who can talk put together. So a game where you do nothing but drown in open water is not my Game Of The Year candidate. But Sortie En Mer isn't supposed to be fun.

Nicolas Cage is one of the most versatile actors of all time.Nicolas Cage moves fruit to mouth with imperceptible motion.Nicolas Cage doesn’t usually like to admit his feelings.Nicolas Cage’s face hand painted on a denim jacket.Nicolas Cage was attractive in the 1980s.Nicolas Cage meant to steal the Declaration of Independence, But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage can do anything you can do better.Nicolas Cage surfs with the emotions of others.Nicolas Cage has a way with words.YESTERDAY, I REPLACED ALL OF OUR FAMILY PHOTOS WITH NICOLAS CAGE’S FACE, AND MY PARENTS STILL HAVEN’T NOTICED.Keep Calm And Imagine Nicolas Cage Saying : “Mumbo Jumbo.”Nicolas Cage leaps out, cackling and howling at the moon.Nicolas Cage texts with no spaces.Nicolas Cage sings “Love Shack” by the B-52’s.Nicolas Cage’s Face on Every Character in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’.Nicolas Cage is looking at himself in a mirror right now.Nicolas Cage owns a 9-foot-tall pyramid in New Orleans and plans to be buried in it. But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage stars as Nicolas Cage in: Nicolas Cage.Nicolas Cage smells like new born baby birds.Find out how Nicolas Cage handles his relationships and test what you and Nicolas Cage have going in love, marriage, friendship, partnership, dating and more.Sometimes at parties, two or more people ask Nicolas Cage questions at the same time.Nicolas Cage meets Shia Labeouf at the Oscars when competing in the same category. Shia Labeouf teaches Nicolas Cage how to ‘feel’.Nicolas Cage gets more than he bargained for during the new moon.Nicolas Cage sponsored by Crocs on Internet Explorer.Nicolas Cage isn’t affected by water, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since he isn’t a normal cat.Nicolas Cage Performs John Cage’s Silent Masterpiece, “4:33”.Nicolas Cage became the first person to ever check his email without a computer, But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage is switching on the Christmas lights in Bath.“Some religious extremists speculate Nicolas Cage’s head is a hollow vessel that angels will occupy on Judgment Day.”Please don’t masturbate, Nicolas cage.Nicolas cage thinks YOU are a terrible actor.Nicolas Cage’s condition is caused by two magnetic poles.Nicolas Cage is on a plane full of convicts.Nicolas Cage developed his own acting method, and it’s called Nouveau Shamanic.Nicolas Cage rode a centaur through a local Woolworths demanding ‘all the midget gems’.Nicolas Cage is inspired by his pet cobra.Nicolas Cage Pisses Fire.Nicolas Cage is the pinnacle of all human achievement.Nicolas Cage was temporary President of Angola for six months in 1997.Nicolas Cage is at home, reading a new script and drinking coffee, when he, after a short period of time and a couple of sudden happenings, finds himself in Equestria, whereupon he is arrested. But instead he stole her heart.Tonight: Nicolas Cage WILL be here.When I die, throw pictures of Nicolas Cage into my grave.

The 5th Mercy Podcast for Liverpool Biennial, 2012 is a work written, performed and edited by the wondrous poet Holly Pester and myself (Daniel Rourke)

Featuring Original Work by: George Major : http://www.georgemajor.com Claire Potter : http://clairelouisepotter.blogspot.co.uk

Featuring Audio Samples From: Bo Didley, I’m a Man The Yardbirds, I’m a man Jacques Dutronc, La Fille Du Père Noël Davie Bowie, The Jean Genie The Winstons, Amen, Brother Danger Mouse, Interlude Die Hard Original Soundtrack (inc. Let it Snow, by Dean Martin) Featuring Textual Samples From: Roger Ebert, Die Hard, July 15, 1988 : http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19880715/REVIEWS/807150301/1023 Scientific American, Shakespeare to Blame for Introduction of European Starlings to U.S. : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=call-of-the-reviled Wired Magazine, Cue the Scream : http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/st_scream BBC 1Xtra, The Story of the ‘Amen Break’ with Crissy Criss : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011cjqd New York Times, 1877, American Acclimatization Society : http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50912F73B5B137B93C7A8178AD95F438784F9

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number of audio clips, including (amongst others) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night. Projected onto a double-sided, cinema-sized screen, these images – but not the audio clips – are the basis of Steve McQueen’s solo show ‘Once Upon a Time’. The images range from photographs of children being born to family portraits, the monumental (Jupiter) to the miniature (a leaf), and the poetic (a sunset with birds) to the mechanical (a calibration circle). There are ordnance photographs of the Sinai Peninsula and an intimate portrait of a nursing mother. Ethnographic portraits, perhaps inevitably, feature too and, despite the generally auspicious and upbeat tone of the Golden Record, there are also premonitions of more immediate concerns:

"The Rise of the Tweet takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good & bad senses"

It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering. Wasn’t the whole thing about us featherless bipeds that we could give connected intelligible sounds a cumulative sense?

The signed-up user is apt to have more mixed feelings. At its best, Twitter delights and instructs. Somebody, often somebody you wouldn’t expect, condenses the World-Spirit into a great joke, epigram, or aperçu. What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. 

Yesterday afternoon, Matthew Fuller gave a brief but fascinating overview of artworks that make a direct address to the perceptual world of non-human animal species. As you will see quite a few amazing works have been done in this field. Art for animals is art with animals intended as its key users or audience. Art for animals is not therefore art that uses animals as a substrate or a carrier, nor as an object of contemplation or use.

You can find online the text related to his presentation which was titled Pattern Recognition - Art for Animals so i'm just going to run through the examples he gave during the conference.

First one is Berthold Lubetkin's early modernist architecture for aquatic birds: the Penguin Pool at the London Zoo.

Hans Waanders's series of Perches are simple branches placed by the water in the hope to attract the attention of a kingfisher and modify its habitat in an obtrusive way. Sorry i couldn't find any illustration for this one.

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine's ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time's grander web. Unable to grasp a people’s history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them.

Archaeology derives from the Greek word arche, which literally means the moment of arising. Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a Thing, which although indemonstrable and intangible in Itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that Thing. In a sense, archaeology is as much about the present instant, as it is about the fragmentary past. We work on what remains through the artefacts that make it into our museums, our senses and even our language. But to re-energise those artefacts, to bring them back to life, the tools we have access to do much of the speaking.

Like the unseen civilisations of H.G.Wells’ museum, these Things in Themselves lurk beyond the veil of our perceptions. It is the world in and of Itself; the Thing as it exists distinct from perceptions, from emotions, sensations, from all phenomenon, that sets the conditions of the world available to those senses. Perceiving the world, sweeping dust away from the objects around us, is a constant act of archaeology.

Kant called this veiled reality the noumenon, a label he interchanged with The-Thing-Itself (Ding an Sich). That which truly underlies what one may only infer through the senses. For Kant, and many philosophers that followed, The Thing Itself is impossible to grasp directly. The senses we use to search the world also wrap that world in a cloudy haze of perceptions, misconceptions and untrustworthy phenomena.

In another science fiction classic, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem considered the problem of The Thing Itself as one of communication. His Master’s Voice (HMV), written at the height of The Cold War, tells the story of a team of scientists and their attempts to decipher an ancient, alien message transmitted on the neutrino static streaming from a distant star. The protagonist of this tale, one Peter Hogarth, recounts the failed attempts at translation with a knowing, deeply considered cynicism. To Peter, and to Stanislaw Lem himself, true contact with an alien intelligence is an absolute impossibility:

“In the course of my work... I began to suspect that the ‘letter from the stars’ was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the coloured blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is ‘on his mind’, so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

In HMV and Lem’s better known novel, Solaris, the conviction that an absolute true reality exists under the dust of perception leads humanity down ever more winding labyrinths of its own psyche. For Stanislaw Lem the human mind exists in a perpetual state of archaeology, turning away from Itself in search of truth, but time and again finding Itself confronted as the very Thing that underlies the reality it is trying to decipher.

To transcend phenomena, to clear away the dust, one must, according to Kant, think. Thus his Thing Itself, derives from the Greek for 'thought-of' (nooúmenon) and further implies the concept of the mind (nous). Kant’s Thing Itself is accessed through pure thought. A clear enough mind, devoid of the bodily shackles of pain, pleasure or emotion, might see without seeing, sweeping away the perceptual cobwebs by guile alone. What Plato referred to as the only immortal part of the human soul, reason, becomes through Kant the dominant principle by which The Thing Itself may be reached.

In the short space I have allotted myself here, I have not the time, or the guile, to fully analyse the Kantian noumenon. Needles to say, countless thinkers, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Hegel to Agamben, have grappled with the suppositions and presuppositions made to cohere and then crumble by Kant’s addiction to reason. What interests me about science fiction, and most readily about the works of Wells and Lem, is the attempt made to search for 'The Thing Itself' beyond the mind; beyond the human altogether.

Science fiction allows the creation of an imaginary set of conditions by which the human being may break their most burdonsome shackle: their own mind. Human timescales, bodies, forms of thinking and perception: each of these must be circumvented if one is ever able to grasp The Thing Itself. Kant’s principle of noumenon embodies a discourse on the limits of perception that has remained relevant to philosophy for millenia. The paradox of the archaeology – the arising – of an underlying reality is the defining principle of a thousand sci-fi tales.

For Stanislaw Lem our limitations become obvious once we are confronted with the existence of an intelligence which is not human. Lem’s novels seek to connect us with the absolute ‘other’: that most alien of Things, ourselves. Reality, for Lem at least, is composed in an indecipherable language. Humanity lives in an eternal stasis, unable to circum-navigate the new realities it constantly 'discovers' for itself. And in the end we find ourselves limited by the brains that think us, unable to distinguish the twinkle-twinkle from the little star:

“There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of – and the languages not made by man. In such language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural...

Now to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ‘acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself’. One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is 'other'. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.

Encounters like this, hashed together from memories that span my childhood and adult years, represent the closest many of us will come to meeting a Neanderthal. Encounters built upon out-dated science and the desire of museums to authenticate experiences which, in reality, are as far away from 'true' anthropology as those glass eyes are from windows on the soul. In a recent Archaeology.org article a question was put forward that made me think again about these encounters:

Should we Clone Neanderthals? : I could not help but probe the proposition further.

In my own lifetime our understanding of these absolute 'others' has gone through several revolutions. What once were lumbering apes, incapable of rational thought, speech or the rituals of religious reverence, have become our long lost evolutionary cousins. Research from various quarters has shown that not only were Neanderthals quite capable of vocal expression, but in all likelihood they lived a rich, symbolic life. They had bigger brains than we did, or do, and were probably burying their dead with appeal to an afterlife 50,000 years before our ancestors left Africa. They cared for their young, lived in well established social groups and apart from their prominent brow and less mobile, stocky build, resembled humans in most other aspects. More recent evidence seems to show that far from being a completely separate species, it is quite possible that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. This astounding revelation, if it were ever verified, would mean that many of us – if not every one of us – carry within our genetic make-up a living memory of Neanderthal heritage.

But Neanderthals are more than scientific curiosities. They are the embodiment of the 'other', a reflective surface via which the human race may peer upon themselves. Human myth is filled with lumbering creatures, not quite human but every bit an echo of our deepest fears, our vanities, our failings, our memories prone to fade in time. With Shakespeare's Caliban, the feral beast of Prospero's burden, and William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who myth says was reduced to animal madness, being only two in a long list of sub-human characters. Along with these mythic creatures the Neanderthal has achieved the status of a linguistic archetype, carrying the weight of our inhumanity when admitting our limitations is too much to bear. For a very long time after their discovery Neanderthals were named as the very embodiment of our ineptitudes. To be violent, or brutally instinctive was to be Neanderthal Neanderthals stood as a fiendish remnant of the days before language, fire or social grace, before the borders between man and nature had been breached by the gift of free-will – a gift bequeathed to us, and not to them.

This vague notion of a 'gift' came to me after reading the article about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals At first I read with a certain distance, the same reading I might have given to an article about cloning dodos, mammoths or dinosaurs. Soon though, it was clear that "bringing Neanderthals back from the dead" was a far more metaphysically slippy statement than similar ones about long extinct birds or mammals.

Although concise and engaging the article bounds between two wildly opposed positions when it comes to representing Neanderthals On the one hand the scientists interviewed seem to understand Neanderthals as entities worthy of 'human' rights and freedoms:

"We are not Frankenstein doctors who use human genes to create creatures just to see how they work." Noonan agrees, "If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have," he says, "and if your experiment fails...well. It's a lose-lose." Other scientists think there may be circumstances that could justify Neanderthal cloning.

"If we could really do it and we know we are doing it right, I'm actually for it," says Lahn. "Not to understate the problem of that person living in an environment where they might not fit in. So, if we could also create their habitat and create a bunch of them, that would be a different story."

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

On the other hand, much of the article is made up of insights into piecing together ancient – and therefore fragmented – DNA sequences, and the benefits a Neanderthal clone might be to human medicine:

“Neanderthal cells could be important for discovering treatments to diseases that are largely human-specific, such as HIV, polio, and smallpox, he says. If Neanderthals are sufficiently different from modern humans, they may have a genetic immunity to these diseases. There may also be differences in their biology that lead to new drugs or gene therapy treatments.”

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The article does a very good job of considering the moral implications of these outcomes, and on many levels I agree with them. But when it came to the metaphysical significance of cloning a Neanderthal the article, like so many other articles about science, stayed largely silent.

Before I come back to the notion of the 'gift' I mentioned before, I'd like to reconsider the article with a few simple questions:

1. What would it mean to give life to an extinct creature, let alone one whose mental capacities are as varied and dexterous as our own?

The likelihood is that early human groups had a part to play in the extinction of our closest cousins, as we still do in the demise of many other, less human, creatures. Our propensity to distinguish ourselves from the natural world that supports us is one intimately bound to our notions of identity, of cause and effect and – perhaps most fundamentally – of spiritual presence. Where the Neanderthal differs from other extinct species is at the status of 'other'. By being so similar in kind to us the Neanderthal cannot help but become a mirror for the human race. Of course it is impossible to know how early humans and Neanderthals reacted to each other all those centuries ago. But the outcome would suggest that humans did not run to help their evolutionary neighbours as their life slipped away. To us they must have seemed both alien and kin. Something to fear, not because of their absolute difference, but because deep down we knew how they viewed the world. And if it was anything like the way we did, we were better rid of them.

Further more, to bring Neanderthals into the world as scientific curiosities – which they would be by necessity – is to deny them the status of 'human' from the beginning. Not only would a Neanderthal grown in a test-tube be the embodiment of 'other', they would also be a walking, talking genetic tool-kit, replete with the needs of a person, but the status of a slave.

2. How much of what we decode and reconstruct is just DNA?

Genetics is an impressively successful science, giving us insights into the living, breathing world at a range of detail unknown to previous generations. But I don't think it is too cynical of me to throw caution upon its 'truth' value. Genetics is not a truth about the world. Instead, it is a highly paradigmatic model that scientists use to understand abstractions of reality far removed from the every day. Of course this gross generalisation is worthy of a long discussion in itself, and one better balanced by whole swathes of research designed to outline the weak points of the genetic paradigm, as well as advance our understanding of it. When the issue at hand is better medical care, or the development of advanced crops for the third world, we should keep these issues in mind, moving forwards cautiously as long as the benefits outweigh our reservations. When it comes to bringing to life an entire species, and one in whose original demise we probably played a part, a blind trust in scientific models is much more likely to lead us into a moral cul de sac we may never escape from. Although the article talks at length on the problems associated with cloning (such as birth defects and multiple infant deaths) it fails outright to consider what genetics, and thus 'cloning', actually represents.

Any creature that we did 'raise from the dead' would be as much a result of contemporary scientific models as it was of mother nature.

...and with both those questions in mind, a third:

3. What happens to our vision of ourselves once the deed has been done?

This final point, leaking naturally from the other two, is founded on what seem on the surface overtly metaphysical concerns. But I hasten to show that through applying the rhetoric of 'human rights' onto creatures that were born in a laboratory, nothing but confusion can arise.

It pays here to visit two theorists for whom the questions of the 'gift' and of the 'tool' are highly significant to their philosophies.

From the writings of Georges Bataille we learn that nothing humans make in utility may be given a status above a tool:

“The tool has no value in itself – like the subject, or the world, or the elements that are of the same nature as the subject or the world – but only in relation to an anticipated result. The time spent in making it directly establishes its utility, its subordination to the one who uses it with an end in view, and its subordination to this end; at the same time it establishes the clear distinction between the end and the means and it does so in the very terms that its appearance has defined. Unfortunately the end is thus given in terms of the means, in terms of utility. This is one of the most remarkable and most fateful aberrations of language. The purpose of a tool's use always has the same meaning as the tool's use: a utility is assigned to it in turn and so on...”

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

For Jean-Joseph Goux the act of 'giving' is always a statement of otherness:

“The impossibility of return reveals the truth of the gift in separating it from the return and, most of all, in showing it as an act carried out for others. This service toward others must be the only reason for the kind deed.... It is only as a superior level in the gradation of the regimes of giving that the gift without return can be thought. This mode of giving imitates the Gods. We have two extreme positions on the moral scale, “The one who brings kind deeds imitates the Gods; the one who claims a payments imitates the usurers.””

Jean-Joseph Goux, Seneca Against Derrida

To consider the cloning of Neanderthals as an act of utility (i.e. for the benefits their genome would be to human medicine) is to, by definition, subordinate them to their 'use-value' - denying them outright the status of human and the rights to which that status is associated. On the other hand, to consider the act of cloning as a true 'gift' to the Neanderthals is to push our own status as the 'givers' towards the divine. Either the cloned Neanderthals are tools for us to use as we wish or their life is their very own and one instantly removed from any right we claim to administer it.

Of course it is impossible to imagine the cloned Neanderthals' 'gift' as being one we would honour unto them without any claim of return. In the modern world such creatures, born in our laboratories, would at least be the legal property of the institution that bore them. At the very worst the cloned Neanderthal would grow up under the lights of a thousand television cameras, only to be cut open and dissected in front of the very same zooming lenses when it came of age.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, one that I believe science has no possibility of solving. Once our technologies are capable of bringing sentient life into existence, whether that be a Neanderthal or a cognitive computer, that very same technology becomes instantly incapable of representing the life it has created. Simply put, it is at this point that scientific rhetoric collapses as a field of enterprise, and only the patterns and considerations of philosophy and religion become relevant. As Bataille and Goux show, the only entity capable of truly giving – asking not for return, the only metaphysical concept capable of acting upon the world without utility is a divine being, neither of this world nor capable of being represented in it. Not for one moment does this philosophical enquiry suggest that such a being exists, what it does do is draw firmly into the sand a metaphysical line beyond which 'we' cannot cross. It is not that humans won't be technically able to bring such living entities into the world, it is more that, at the very moment we do so 'we' – as a concept – cease to be. In religious terminology the relationship we might have with such beings is similar to that between the shepherd and his flock. At the moment we bring Neanderthals into our world they become our most significant responsibility, exploding to infinity any notions we may have carried before about our own place in the cosmos.

I have no idea whether I would like to see Neanderthals walking the planet alongside us, or whether their memory should stay that way, long into our future. What I do know is that this philosophical parable is one that science, and the modern humanity it supports, would do well to become more aware of. So often it seems that our scientific rhetoric is incapable of providing us with solid enough foundations for the acts we commit in its name. Perhaps in a world of continued, man-made extinctions, of climate change and ever increasing human populations, perhaps in this world science needs a Neanderthal-cloning moment to awaken it to the implications of its continued existence.

“...philosophy seeks to establish, or rather restore, an other relationship to things, and therefore an other knowledge, a knowledge and a relationship that precisely science hides from us, of which it deprives us, because it allows us only to conclude and to infer without ever presenting, giving to us the thing in itself.”

Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands

It’s hard to exaggerate just how widely Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and the evolution of human kind traveled in the cultural milieu of his day, even in the age of stagecoaches and month-long journeys across the Atlantic. Artists of all shades reacted to his revolutionary theories, and this exhibit attempts to capture their range of responses in all sorts of mediums, including paintings, photographs, sketches, and sculptures. Sprinkled amidst 200 works of art are historical collections of natural wonders like beetles, fossils, gems, stuffed birds, and plated flowers. These items give visitors a distinctly visual sense of what artists—and Darwin himself—grappled with during the Victorian era, as academic science began to challenge the subjective nature of romantic art.

The exhibit categorizes Darwin’s artistic influence into tidy themes like the Darwinian “struggle for existence,” the ancient history of earth, the kinship with other animals, the origin of man, and the nature of

A collaborartion between Joshua Kaye (composer) and Holly Pester (poet and text artist)

Presidents Birds and Even

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone – Alex Garziglia

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan