THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION

A MATHEMATICAL UNIFICATION OF KNOWLDEGE

 

 

INTRODUCED AND EXPLAINED WITH THREE EASY TO READ STORIES  

 

THE T-PARTY, A BUNCH OF BULLFUCKERY

 

HIGH SCHOOL THE SECOND TIME AROUND

 

DEPT. CHAIR QUEENS AND OTHER “FUNNY” BOSSES

 

by petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com and family    © 08/29/2010

 

 

 

Everything done that takes great time and effort needs a good reason. While working this summer on the extensive mathematics in The Evolution of Information and the story of how it came to be developed in Littleton, NH, Ruth came across a sign in a store window informing the citizens of this usually quiet peaceful town of an upcoming Tea Party Rally on August 21. Hence our opening vignette about this NaziDisneyLand adaptation of America we all live in that gives some sense of why we have toiled for the last four decades to clarify it with inarguable, if tedious, mathematical logic.

  

THE T-PARTY, A BUNCH OF BULLFUCKERY

 

This is how the thirteen year old grandson summed it up in teen talk while the family attended the Littleton rally. It came fully equipped with a droop faced imitation of a founding father wandering around in the crowd dressed in authentic revolutionary garb, the only thing authentic about the rally. That became clear upon hearing the first invited speaker, a rural MD, repeatedly bemoan the fact that his annual income was limited to a paltry quarter of a million because of #@#$%^&* unconstitutional government interference. Less than merely amusing was his winding up his speech to this uniformly ugly audience with, “You better be buying guns and ammunition if we need them. Of course, we’d rather do it with elections, but just in case…” We, curious observers of this well rehearsed political theater, were genuinely shocked.  

Later a cued shout out from the audience directed to the hate spewing woman who was leading the rally against progressives, Obama, liberals, illegal immigrants, 60s radicals, Democrats, Muslims, leftists and every form of welfare recipient suggested with staged patriotic innocence and enthusiasm, “shouldn’t we all be saying the pledge of allegiance?!” When we were glared at by the crowd for not putting our hands on our hearts and joining in with this totally inappropriate patriotic validation of the hate talk, we quickly walked out of the rally, happy that we had come on foot so that none of these lunatic people could possibly track us down from a license plate number.

That’s not to say they would have tried, I would not go that far. But our feeling of relief in separating ourselves irrevocably from the non-stop hatred angrily spit out to this bunch of head nodding applauding baboons was a fair measure of how potentially dangerous this kind of stuff is as was made clear by the hate crime slashing of the Muslim cab driver in New York City we read about the week after.

The hours’ long speech by the diminutive, sun glassed, fiftyish, Sarah Palin clone at the speakers dais who read off all she said from typed pages in front of her was far too polished and grammatically perfect at every cleverly vicious phrase to be her own words. It had to be the product of a professional right wing political writer hired by moneyed interests who have the big bucks needed to pay for such perfect poison tipped Glenda Beck prose.

The interposition of “my country ‘tis of thee” and “inalienable rights given us by a higher power” invocations with the cursing of every group that threatens the continued dominance of the Wall Street, investment bank, fundamentalist cabal who run the country would have been hilarious if its effect were the “in one ear and out the other” treatment such contrived Ted Haggard Sunday School sermons to nine year olds deserves.  But the audience cheered at every pause.

True, it was clear from the self-caricaturing unfortunates participating in this mini-Nuremburg rally that this was an extreme fringe group or, as the fellow who runs the bicycle shop in Littleton referred to them, the strange folk in the area. Nonetheless the particularly loud cheer that flew up at the mention of buying guns and ammunition makes you take it very seriously.  

What struck us as delusional wishful thinking on the part of both the sadists whipping up the crowd and the unhappy baboons in the audience buying the scam could be a wish come true if the conservatives who gave birth to this Tea Party beast win big in November. This is not to say there is much laudable in the Democrats who also live in the pocket of the money mad emperors of America. But as much as a fool and a coward Obama has turned out to be in our eyes, he is not likely to allow this economically callous, near police state we now live in to ramp up to the next level of mass homelessness and political arrests that Republican pressure on him could make happen if the electorate, blind to the truth, votes the Republicans into the majority in the next congress.

We say that with great concern because present at the rally was a New Hampshire Republican candidate for the US Senate, Dennis Lamare, who refused to repudiate any of what was said. Not surprisingly Lamare did what all Republicans do when asked to state where they stand with respect to the T-Party brown shirts. He was evasive.

From: dennis@lamareforussenate.com
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2010 2:26 AM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Re: Littleton T-Party Rally

Mr. Calabria,

In all fairness, I do not remember you stating you were media related, only that you were from NY. I do not remember all that was said and ask that you provide me with what you are referring to before you assign anything to me. You and the young man did most of the talking and I had little opportunity to respond to your dialogue.

regards,
Dennis

 

This shows how untrustworthy the Republicans have become.

 

The problem with America is much bigger than that, though, as can be made clear only by countering the hurricane of nonstop doubletalk used by politicians and the media to control the thinking and behaviors of the little people the ruling class use as farm animals to maintain their billion dollar life style by explaining the game run on us in a firm mathematical treatise that we will introduce here with the easy to read story of how the math came to be developed,   

 

HIGH SCHOOL THE SECOND TIME AROUND

 

The first time around it wasn’t so great. It was their fault, the girls, so I thought. But what really destroys happiness is control while rebellion against control gives you a new life, a second time around.

 

Six weeks before I was set to start high school back in 1956 at BC High my family moved to a new location in Revere, Massachusetts. Because I was a new boy and we had just built a big ranch house on the lot the neighborhood kids had played on for time immemorial, I must have had some extra status because I connected that first night we moved in with the prettiest girl in the city, Lillian McGuirk, may she still be alive to see her name honored.

 

“Do you want to come up to my porch and help me plan my birthday party?” this girl who was one better than a 13 year old Brittney Spears asked me. Though I had previous experience making out with my quite darling cousin when I was 7-years-old and more recent than that at my spin the bottle eighth grade graduation party, I was still dumb and innocent enough to actually think Lillian wanted me or needed me to help her plan her birthday party.

 

There was no problem falling in love after two hours on her porch in the dark not planning her birthday party. I slept with my shirt scented in her light perfume smell tucked under my nose on my pillow that night, clutching it and almost as in love with it as I was with her. That Saturday I am in the back row at the movie house in Revere with Lillian and her friend, Elaine, kissing Lillian’s sweet mouth and feeling up her tight breasts wildly every minute of the black and white double feature. If ever anything explains instinct, this is it, for I had read no manual ahead of time.

 

Whether moralists would call it love or lust, it was big. I was a new person, a young man validated by real experience. But not for long for the very next day, a boy I met that same night in the new neighborhood, Victor L., last name omitted because he turned out typically dark, tells me that Lillian told him I was a pig and that she never wanted to see me again. The newly born young man now had a knife in his heart. For the next two years, the two dozen times I cross Lillian’s path, she never saying a word or looking in my direction, my knees literally wobbled and I died a death of falling off the Grand Canyon.

 

It was not funny. It was as painful as falling off the Grand Canyon would be. Rejection by a girl your emotions truly fall you in love with is like that. I become prone after that to falling in love with every pretty girl I saw while taking the MTA to and from my Jesuit run all boys high school on the other side of Boston every day. And was reflexively terrified down deep of their rejecting me because of Lillian, my love lost much, though better than never to have loved at age 13, bless you Lillian in decades long retrospect. I was the quintessential girl crazy kid, looking enough like a little Elvis Presley, so many people said, and so in love with women generally that I am sure my difficult to hide feelings of falling in love with a pretty face on sight of it sustained the egos of half the young bitches’ in the Boston area during the freshman and sophomore years of my life that I walked around with this constant lump in my throat from Lillian.

 

 

I am saved from the worse effects of this otherwise constant companion of mild depression and anxiety because I lacked both awareness of the world around me and the acuity to think about things from birth complements of an ambitious mother who wrapped her tentacles around me thoroughly so as to raise me under close if subtle control as the perfect professional success, all to the glory she needed to make up for her otherwise empty failed life, one typical of a middle class American mother of that generation (and the two before and the two after.)

 

I am an excellent student, but my intelligence is limited to what is stuffed in my head at school plus whatever my florid imagination can conjure up to distract myself from the Lillian blues including imaginings as to my future as Albert Einstein II and my ambient unstudied rationalization and remake of all my disappointments as successes. In short, for better or worse, I lacked a functioning mind. Thirteen years later when the lights upstairs finally click on to reality and start to think, I marvel, “Wow! Everybody should try this!”

 

This form of stupidity that produces a mildly What Me Worry personality and keeps one emotionally in the womb during these worst of one’s civilized years in early adolescence is a boon of sorts. It must be, for 90% of the students I went to high school with had faces more pained and dulled than mine, no doubt in part because Lillian type validation during these years of raging hormones of the type that kept me in full daydreaming mode every minute of sophomore year America History class is in short supply.

 

So if I was not in the top 4% of my high school class with those who had all the goodies wished for every minute, those who had starring roles on the football or basketball team and a Lillian actually at their side even if they were not feeling her up, the God I was stupid enough to believe in back then had kindly granted me but the punishment of purgatory, not the irreversible hell that is the common lot of most guys right from the beginning of their adult lives.

 

Being not in the bottom 90% in high school, no matter if brain damaged and constantly dissatisfied, did get me enough got me girls to feel up sporadically and one girl who accepted my falling in love with her enough to make me think she loved me back in approximately the same way. Annette was also, as Lillian had been, quintessentially cute if not quite so openly sexy. She was four feet eleven and 96 pounds and looked quite like a dark haired big eyed Tinker Bell. She turned a few years later to be the first girl student president of Boston College back in the pre-feminist days when an unusual success for a girl such as this had much to do with her being quintessential cute enough for the majority of the mostly male student voters to fall in love with her as I had easily done.

 

There was no active feeling up of Annette, a student in moral good standing at all girls Mt. St. Joseph Academy. Just to be allowed to make out with here once or twice a week was Heaven with whatever lustful action took place left to my elbow brushing craftily against her tight breasts with enough forethought in the strategy of making it seem accidental to have enabled the discovery of the law of relativity twice over, though dry humping oddly was permitted, the lack of use of hands somehow getting it past the overview of the nuns who taught Annette and her mother.

 

Perhaps all high school kids are very stupid by nature or just were back in the 50s, for Annette and I discussed marriage enough times at age 15-16 to make the possibility of it seem actually real. The night of her prom when she told me that she was seriously considering becoming a nun, I almost fell to the floor, actually hurt. Interestingly our marriage might have happened it not for the unintended intervention of a classmate of mine in high school and a lingerie model who comes into the picture much later.

 

Billy Nash, I can use his full name because he died many, many years ago, came to our science honors classroom the last semester my senior year. He was a Massachusetts All Star hockey player at St. John’s Prep, a live-in Catholic prep school his father, an abdominal surgeon from Marblehead, had no problem paying the tuition for. Billy had punched out three boys during a fight in his dormitory causing them significant facial injuries and was thrown out of St. John’s as a result. The father had the status to ship him over to our less elite but still well regarded Catholic high school in time for graduation, no questions asked.

 

We became close friends. One reason was that Billy’s father, Dr. Nash, thought the world of me as a “good boy” that would be a good influence on his rowdy son for I was president of the Math Club and the Science Club and Managing Editor of our award winning school magazine and had full scholarship offers to MIT and Rensselaer, the college I eventually choose. I was not physically aggressive in high school, though generally aggressive in wanting to win at whatever I tried. I had my limits to backing down, though, if insulted past some point, but my nature was to avoid a fist fight. Billy was a true bad boy in this area and it must have done him some good for his idea of what to do for amusement on a dull Tuesday evening was to go over to the Marblehead library and pick up some high school girl to casually fuck.

 

I might be missing something in the equation, but at least these two phenomena of superior combat ability and sexual success had an obvious connection in Billy’s case. On prom night I threw a party at my house. Billy’s girlfriend, whom he said he loved beyond imagination, was beyond cute. After all the other partygoers had departed from our downstairs play room in the wee hours, Billy had sex with this gorgeous brunette on the couch, presumably with my parents dead enough asleep upstairs not to notice.

 

Billy drank. I drank with Billy. Though I was a good influence on him and my mother always very maternally nice to him because his father was a millionaire MD while my dad worked the assembly line at Raytheon’s, Billy was what might be called a bad influence on me, thank God for your friends. I would buy the stuff using a forged Maine driver’s license Billy set up because with my Dad’s 50’s style fedora hat and a trench coat on, I looked older or gave the liquor store owner over in Chelsea less reason to not sell the stuff at liquor’s decent profit to an obvious underage kid. I was intimidated by Annette, at least as a boy in love with a pretty girl who wanted to keep her. Billy was not intimated by Annette or by girls generally or really by much of anything, all things being equal certainly the right way to feel.

 

If the parents of a girl who likes you like you too, there’s a good chance the click sticks. Annette’s mom and dad liked me. I was raised by my mother to be her charming puppet on a string in a way easy to transfer unconsciously to Annette’s equally fruity mother whom I equally entertained without effort. And Annette’s father, Charlie G. was a Massachusetts State Police guy, what they called then a Registry of Motor Vehicles officer, who was owned by his wife and her wishes as all husbands were back in the 50s.

 

So much was I slated to be part of the family that when my license was suspended for 30 days for running a red light and I couldn’t drive the night of the prom, Charlie let me have me the family car to use, safe because it was a plainclothes State Police car complete with souped up Ford engine and siren and red whirling light inside on the dashboard when you pressed the right button and a tiny police decal on the rear window to make it clear to other cops that this was indeed a police car.

 

I brought liquor to the prom held at the Norumbega Park Totem Pole Ballroom, far from home, and got completely lost. A local cop who checked us out parked on the side of the highway quickly recognized it as a plainclothes state trooper car and called in a second cop car to escort Annette and I, one cop car in front and the other in back, back home.

 

If more is needed to make it clear that I was “family”, liked by the parents and accepted by them for Annette, let me quickly add the short story of Charlie taking me to Cain’s Mayonnaise factory in Cambridge for a summer job. “No openings,” he is told at the door. Charlie is in full police dress for this with the high shiny state trooper boots on. “Give the kid a job or your trucks don’t roll.” I got the job. The next day, they fired some working class kid on the production line. I am not telling these stories to play up the power of the police, but if this straightforward relating of experience gives you that impression, so be it.

 

The above stories making it clear that I was more or less Annette’s designated nice boy husband to be, it shouldn’t strike as strange that as I was about to go off to college at Rensselaer in upstate New York, the parents were not disagreeable to arranging some sort of pre-marriage arrangement for us to keep the bond warm and viable. They family had a summer camp they stayed at but bought Annette an old car that summer so she could stay at the house in East Boston alone for two months while they were away at camp. “All alone, we’ll be!” Annette made clear, something to really look forward to for a teenage boy in love with a darling teenage princess especially as our dry humping had gotten serious and Annette had made clear that more was desirable by getting mad at me for not just grapping her tits: “I’m not supposed to give you permission!”

 

A week before Dream Comes True Fantasy D-Day, Billy Nash and I run over to pick up Annette on our rented motor scooters. He and I had started renting them as a small potatoes way of coolly imitating the Marlon Brando motorcycle thing of that day. After the three of us going out for pizza we head back to Annette’s house where Billy notices her dad’s liquor cabinet and calmly invites us to knocked off by the end of the evening a full bottle of State Police Officer Charles G.’s premium grade whiskey.

 

I was never close to Charlie personally. Police types and my types were at opposite ends of the spectrum. In fact I can’t ever remember saying a word to Charlie and I was the talkative type. Once I was invited up to the summer camp for the weekend when he had three or four fellow state troopers there too. They and I never exchanged a word. Charlie was intimidated by his quite loony post-hysterectomy wife and licked her ass when commanded as almost all married guys in the pussy whipped 50s did. Annette’s mother thought I was a great lollipop for her and Annette and that was what this queen of hearts of that household wanted and got. But the liquor theft went over the top because I never saw Annette again that summer. At the end of that week she went off to camp with her parents and left me all alone without explanation and a broken heart as pained as the one Lillian had broken in half before.

 

A smart kid would have put two and two together to understand that any love so swiftly broken by parental disapproval wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and portended of a less than honest marriage. But like I said, if I came close to any character in the movies it was the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, so I took it personally and my knees began to buckle at the thought of lost Annette, this bout of emotional devastation to last to the end of the summer.

 

It was not as abysmally terrible as the Lillian Heartbreak Hotel scene because college in New York with its 18 year old drinking age then and the student prince jock house fraternity I joined enabled me to live in a beer glass most nights of the week and dig up a date most weekends. And Annette did visit one weekend up at Rensselaer, the place I wound up accepting a full scholarship rather that at completely geek filled MIT because a high school buddy of mine was told by a buddy of his who went there (quite erroneously) that there was a whore house on every corner in Troy, New York, a major enticement for a young man whose love life was yet all in his fantasies.

 

The weekend with Annette was not a love filled fling. Then at Christmas time, she called me up to come over to her house. When I got there, she had a “friend” from Boston College there, too, you know so all us students, me, Annette and the other guy, could enjoy a Christmas hello together. Annette’s mother seemed hateful and gleeful that I was about to get what I somehow deserved. The kid she brought along, “just a friend” struck me, without the prejudice that might have come from his being a rival, as an asshole and that mitigated the pain of this more or less formal rejection. I never called her again. As in my having my limits as a pacifist if insults got too bad, so I also had my limits groveling for females. Yes, she did still have a bit of the knife in my heart for the next few months, but I never did call again.

 

If all this talking about girls seems to excessively crowd out all the other interesting things that can supposedly be part of your life, let me quote, Jackie M., also from Revere who also went to Rensselaer and who in response to our discussing whether Troy, NY, was a good place relative to our home town of Revere said: “Any place is a good place if you got a girl who likes you” followed up with “and no place is a good place if you don’t.”

 

Now maybe you think I should say a few bad words about Billy Nash for screwing me up with Annette. For one thing, Billy’s situation turned out too tragic too tragic to ever say a word about him even if by his proclivity for alcohol he did by accident do me wrong. Later that summer he and his beautiful girl who looked like the teenage Elizabeth Taylor have a monstrous argument and break up. He goes boogie over her loss and get’s blind drunk while piloting his father’s yacht, smashing it on the rocks that dot the coast of the Atlantic Ocean north of Boston.

 

The next year he goes to Hofstra University, buys a motorcycle and slams it into brick wall in the rain at 110 miles an hour and dies. The summer after that when I am home from school my mom tells me to go see Billy’s father who asked for me a number of times. Mostly she felt he could help me get into medical school. I don’t go because my social life distracts me from everything and in those days was basically selfish and had no feeling for the pain in the old man, who had always treated me nice.

 

But I will have no bad words for Billy Nash because he saved my life. Married to some well mannered girl obedient to a mother more Catholic than Mother Theresa and to a father a fucking state trooper? Be happy you don’t always get what you wish for. The Annette story picks up again a few years later and I’ll make you laugh when you hear the ending. Dearest Bill Nash, whatever your life was worth to you during your brief stay on the planet, thank you, thank you, thank you, for saving me from marrying Annette and her mother and father and her religion and the American culture she became a typical machine part of.

 

 

The fraternity I would join at Rensselaer had the name Theta Xi. Everything in life depends on the people you run into during your brief on the planet. That starts of course with the family you’re born into. In the highly ordered societies of today being born too high or too low comes with a price. The silver spoon in your mouth when you come out of the womb connects you irreversibly with the junk food of ease and power over those not born with one, which makes it impossible to shake the control that is also part of that game that makes the bulk of ruling class young men foppish as attendance at any real Harvard or Yale dance tells you, surprisingly, in a second.

 

And if you’re born too low, and my pity always goes out to these people, you feel too much of the whip of the Catcher in The Rye, whether as the landlord or the public school teacher in Just Another Brick In The Wall or the police on the lookout for wise ass, happy teenagers, to be able to run from the agents in The Matrix in time.       If your family is too typical, fate swallows you up and you are still born as a young adult other than for delusions of living happily in the eternity of your brainwashed imagination. If the spark the adolescent hormones nature gives you isn’t snuffed out immediately by parental murder aided by various organizational efforts to turn you into a compliant adult citizen, the bits and dots of the people you randomly connect with after high school do the job with finality. More than or as equally important as being smart or tough is being lucky.

 

I was very lucky in running into a bunch of young men at Rensselaer who were smart enough to be accepted as students at this moderately prestigious science and engineering school and tough enough, in the form of Billy Nash, to be honest in the way they interacted with others if aggressive and dominant in personality. The way they turned out later, like the usual cat shit that American life turns almost everybody into, might almost want me to say otherwise so as to not give the worst part of them any credit, but in their youth, the people I knew, could surpass or minimally equal anybody you might imagine. True men they were in their youth. And I, very luckily, got the best of what they were.

 

In high school, I was in the science “brain room”, all of us earmarked to be the future scientists and engineers of America. Most of my fellow students were, if not out and out geeks, as some patently were, soft like bland cold oatmeal is still soft and bland and tasteless. If the possibility of technical success and the joy of pleasing their mothers were eliminated from their lives, most of these would have been better off never having been born as showed on their faces even at that early age if faces were honestly assessed independent of the actor pretty boy models for such types in the movies and on TV.

 

While I may have suffered from female deprivation at the Can’t Get No Satisfaction level, can’t get No Female Action, these types students were at the level of no female interaction whatever other than with their moms. My mind recalls one full fleshed though not fat fellow, Joseph Turnbull, who I would have never noticed other than for his shock of bright red hair and the perfectly expensive if totally not cool clothes his mother dressed him up in every day for school as typical of the group.

 

Billy Nash’s appearance on the scene at the end of my high school incarceration was a welcome relief from this mix of unsalted crackers that the upper class uses in their adulthood to manage their affairs much as the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Babylon used the castrated eunuchs to manage theirs. The lot of these put up with the “In The Penal Colony” conditioning given us by my home room teacher, Mr. Sheehan, S. J., a five foot tall, almost entirely bald 29 year old fellow with milky white skin, who was so upset with the obvious glee exhibited by some of us who were dying to get out of this Catholic training pit and off to college fantasies, that he piled on the German science textbook homework five hours a night that springtime. Mr. Sheehan, though he wore the white colored black robe of a Jesuit, was not yet an ordained priest but rather what they called a “scholastic” in training to be a priest.

 

Without thinking much about what this jerk loser in a cleric’s cassock was doing, for as I said I had no more awareness or thought capacity in my head than Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow, I involuntarily started breaking pencils at my desk in mental illness fashion every time I heard this asshole bullying one of the yet healthy young men in the class, of which we were a few. Finally one day on the way out the door of the classroom, I whirled towards him, without premeditation, and grabbing him by his clerical garb lifted him off the ground and slammed his head into the blackboard.

 

I bring up Mr. Sheehan, who was then an about to be but not quite yet ordained Jesuit priest, not so much to denigrate religion and the overbearing sweeties that populate its ranks, but more because he is a thread in this story that will connect me back to my high school class mates so as to make the point of how important are the people you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to run into in life.

 

By my junior year in college, I had a steady girl friend who carried around a jar of Vaseline in her purse for the weekend pre-party screwing in the room I lived in smack in the middle of a hospital where I was an emergency lab technician. I got this very cute girlfriend, who did love me, at least to some extent because I was a member of Theta Xi fraternity. The first time I walked into this fraternity the beginning of my freshman year, it was plastered with beautiful, beautiful girls, Vogue models or so they looked. To make the point clearly, this was not what I saw in the other fraternities I rushed, some having some girls around, many having at best pictures of Playboy centerfolds hung on the walls as an indicator of fraternity house masculinity, but none with the real thing. Theta Xi was the movie.

 

These fraternity brothers actually had these girls as their girlfriends, many of whom were being regularly slept with in these days years before the so-called 60s sexual revolution. Life becomes easier for you when you are a member of such a group. When mixers were announced for girls schools in the area, three times the number of girls would sign up than could be accommodated, which were winnowed down by fraternity girl friends who would go around and check the girls out and select the ones with the cutest smiles and tits to come.

 

To make sense out of this, one does not credit grooming or style or academic achievement and career promise as attractants to the females but rather evolutionary factors as might be read up on in Nobel Prize winner, Konrad Lorentz’s masterwork, On Aggression, where it is made clear that the most aggressive males in just about every species gets the females. The physical superiority of this crew was inseparable from their social success. Our parties were always open to anybody on the outside who wanted to attend. This included the Troy weight lifting club, black street gangs from Albany and members of the National Champion (Third Division) Union College football team, all of these high testosterone groups looking for the honor of supremacy over a group with a reputation for being the baddest bunch of young men in upstate New York. Many bodies went flying out the door in the air and some through windows. To dismiss the testosterone levels that produce young men good at physical defense and young men successful with the opposite sex is to dismiss all of the above empirical observation and the science of evolution based zoology.

 

Whatever my charm in getting my steady girlfriend, Jeannie, the fact that she knew I was a Theta Xi was a factor.

 

Anyway to get back to Mr. Sheehan, S.J., in that junior year of near continuous partying and conjugal success, I got an invitation from him to attend his ordination in Springfield, MA. “You were my favorite student, Peter” the invitation was underscored. Insignificance will be described mathematically later to show that the mind automatically disregards what it considers to be insignificant. Never a bully or intentionally rude to anybody, when I unintentionally and automatically felt all of my former classmates who attended the ordination to be insignificant, their lives obviously having gone down a quite different path than mine at the mostly Catholic colleges they attended, rather than cause them pain by saying anything honest and, hence, rude to them, I just moseyed over to the motel bar with Sheehan’s older brother, there to laugh at swapped dirty jokes and get drunk for a couple of hours. At some point I was called back to the ordination reception to get now Fr. Sheehan’s first blessing of priest, which in Catholic dogma more or less guarantees you a place in Heaven when you die.

 

This might have been appealing to me as I hadn’t much of chance of getting there in any other way except for the fact that I had walked away from the church and its silliness two years earlier after skipping Sunday Mass for a Sunday morning swimming date and after losing any feeling that I might go instantly to hell were I to die before confessing this mortal sin, I had a revelation that there was no God. But I was not the sort to insult now Fr. Sheehan by avoiding his effort to bless my soul for all eternity, I trotted away from the bar to be last in the line for the blessing. By the time I got to him, he was smiling and laughing softly and waving his hand for me to remain off my knees while saying, “You don’t need my blessing.”

 

Whatever I thought of religion, I always respected Sheehan for being honest, perhaps the only honest cleric on the planet minister, in telling me that a priest’s blessing means shot on a stick. Fr. Sheehan passed away a few years back of cancer. I spoke with him from Mexico where we were living in exile during the Bush years’ reign of terror. He sounded like your typical jerk phony overbearing priest again, which made me regret I ever had a kind thought about the asshole. I obviously just bring out the best in people.

 

Other than running into Billy Nash at a critical time and then the Theta Xi fraternity, the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was being prematurely flunked out of school that same spring semester of my junior year. When you feel good, it shows on your face. Most college professors are personal losers and tend to resent a happy stud student. If they have wives, and most do because women have to marry somebody, they come from the majority segment of the female population who know they are better off marrying an asshole with status than one without.

 

The three professors who conspired to flunk me out by giving me irreversible F grades six weeks before final exams, unheard of in the history of academics then and since, had faces and personalities three levels below the Three Stooges. But this changed my life in an unexpected way for immediately available were good paying summer scheduled jobs with the Grand Union supermarket warehouse in Waterford usually reserved for college students during summer vacation but that needed to be filled in last spring when I was flunked out. This had me live in New York for the summer rather than returning to the Boston area as I usually did.

 

Whatever may be said of drinking, it sometimes produces events that wouldn’t happen if you weren’t drinking, variation you might say, and as in biological evolution where variation is the key to evolutionary advance, the variation from the norm that drinking personal development that wouldn’t otherwise happen. I roomed that summer with a fraternity brother architect major who had to do summer school time to finish his degree. I was younger and going up socially while John Torello was approaching the end of the protective crib of college matriculation and, as happens with college graduates generally, going down.

 

Torello didn’t talk much about the professor in architecture department who was holding up his graduation to bust his chops because people don’t like to add to the humiliation of being under somebody’s bastard thumb by making the humiliation public. Impressive about John in earlier times was his girl friend, Shelly from Cohoes, not a college girl, a steady he sheltered from the usual drunken parties at Theta Xi. She was beautiful, actress level beautiful, the kind admired by anybody who laid eyes on her. But not an actress for actresses are always acting and most probably with no exception are shallow mama’s girls when scratched beneath the surface, trained by mama and by circumstances to pout and smile at the right times for effect, none of it real, as anybody who has played around with these types in the afterhours quickly comes to find out. Shelly was both beautiful and real and Torello had my admiration for connecting with her in my younger days.

 

But in this summer of 1963, she was not with him anymore and, you know, losing the girl really changes who a guy is. So John drank a lot that summer. That is what we did one Saturday afternoon in south Troy back in the days when it was mainly an Italian-American neighborhood. At noon we stepped into a family owned bar where you ordered pasta and waited to have it specially cooked. Much beer and many taverns 15 hours later, we were back in the apartment with a case of beer drinking and munching on the Swanson’s canned chicken I stole regularly from the warehouse until 8 AM, this noon to next morning binging causing a moderately massive hangover, one that seemed curable only by going for an early morning swim at Crooked Lake.

 

We vow on the drive out to avoid the Crooked Lake Motel Bar and Restaurant and having another drink. But though having bathing suits in hand, we never make it past the walk way to the front door of the bar we had sworn to ignore. A quick right turn finds it open at 8:30AM and not long after, she walked in the door, Judy Sullivan, lingerie model, just off a plane coming in from Boston where she had just had a catheter inserted into her ovarian tube to start an illegal abortion, so I find out later. She is ordering scotch with a milk chaser because she has ulcers at age 23 and she is downing them fast sitting on the bar stool right next to me.

 

She is above my class, that I sense immediately, but my drinking and her drinking and her situation I will theorize get us talking and as I love beautiful woman especially when they are responding to my chitchat with a smile, the conversation flows along like the drinks poured at the bar. The Vito Mamone jazz trio starts playing at 12 Noon. I like music and told her I wanted to get closer to hear it. She said she could care less and stayed seated at the bar as I got up to move closer to the music. At this critical moment, as Dr. Phil might say, she got up and came over, too.

 

She was very pretty, cute, beautiful, sexy, way over my head, way out of my class. College kid meets the supermodel. She was noticeably many points ahead of the Vogue magazine imitating college girls I had been so impressed by. Later, after we were connected, Judy complained angrily about the head of the modeling agency in Albany she worked out of when he told her, “You may be the most beautiful model in Albany, but there are many models in New York City who would put you to shame.” This made her furious. She was that type.

 

Every guy has that one big love of his life. She was mine. You hate to talk about the personal details. I’ve got a beer can in my hand trying to get the right words out because what happened between us is important to talk about. Well, sexually it was…. Well it was enough to get me fucking six times a day. You might think sex and love aren’t linked that powerfully. But they are. Of course you love what gives you pleasure. And she was a lot of pleasure. At our best one evening we fucked eleven times in 12 hours. Admittedly we were trying for a record of sorts after orgasm # 8.  But nonetheless, the point was that she was both irresistible and complaint. Though I’d also have to say that she was the stimulating sort, she prompted sexual attention, and in a very aggressive way.

 

Yep, to be honest, I’d have to say that the bulk of our sex was making up after a fight. We fought every day and we fucked every day. In fact that’s all we did, fight and fuck. I was kneeling on the floor fucking her while she was sitting on the living room couch with her legs spread watching a soap opera while we fucked something we often did when it was announced on the TV that John Kennedy had just been shot. I cried. She didn’t. She said he was an asshole. She was a whole lot smarter than me. Very down to earth as they say.

 

Usually after three or four days of fucking when we were all fucked out, the fighting could only be resolved by separation. I’d go off for a day or two with my fraternity brothers and then she’d call down to the tavern we hung out at and I’d go back to the apartment and we’d start fucking furiously again.

 

She put a different perspective on life. She was not sexually uptight. At least not with me. She told me the first night I fucked her, which was a good month after I met that she didn’t come, didn’t have orgasms, and that I shouldn’t be disappointed. Well she was so beautiful and I had been lasting after her so bad for that first month that I fucked her three times in succession, being only 20-years-old at that time. She didn’t come the first or second time. But she did pop the third time. And, you know, that does the trick. Good fucking is 100 times better than the best pizza and it just keeps people together from the pure pleasure of it. Even after we broke up after two years, we kept on fucking regularly for two more years because the fucking really was irresistible.

 

You wouldn’t think there could be much variation in fucking, but there was. The college girl who always carried the jar of Vaseline around in her purse. After two months with Judy that Summer of ’63, I went down to visit and sleep with her in Brooklyn. The difference was immediate. That also makes the point that my sexual prowess was much attributed to Judy for fucking Jeannie eleven times in 12 hours was unthinkable for she didn’t have that level of beauty and sexuality. Rather Jeannie was a middle class girl trained by mom and culture to have standard sexual morality in thought and was really geared, whether intentionally of by the culture, to looking for a husband. Basically she made up her mind to pull her pants down when she thought I cared enough about her to, as they say nowadays, make a commitment.

 

Jeannie I was sure to marry in a standard middle class marriage. But Judy killed that, thank God. All choice is relative, as we will show mathematically later, and very dependent on what you have to choose from. Why the hell do you think all marriages fail these days? The men have all been castrated by this capitalist police state tyranny we are forced to live under. Police state? When I was a kid, in grammar school, in high school, in the media, it was pointed out incessantly that the Stalinist Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa were obvious police states because they had the highest per capita lock up rates of any nation on earth or in human history. Now America by far has this dubious distinction, but we change the game by a hush-hush airbrushing of the publicizing and interpretation of the statistics.

 

Don’t you know, from a New England Journal of Medicine statistically valid study, that the testosterone titer of American males has fallen 15% in the last 25 years? And who is so stupid as to not see the rape of individuals and families carried out by the tyrants of capitalism who hoard the money while they thrown the “small people” out onto the streets of homelessness. That’s where the pain comes from. No money to survive, to feed the kids and give them a roof over their heads. And if you want to get that money you so very much need, you have to lick your boss’s ass until he smiles.

 

And poof goes the testosterone down the drain of humiliation. It is a simple zoological evolutionary reality. The females don’t fuck except for the males who are strong enough to dominate them in courtship play ritual. The weak ones, they feel, the assholes, can’t even put to me firmly enough that I recognize their value and take pleasure in it. Whence the rampant use of Viagra for the millions of punkish wristed American male losers out there. For every 1 guy with diabetes and such as a medical cause of “erectile dysfunction” there are nine whose tongue licks his boss’s ass to survive.

 

The relationship blew up after two years. She slept with my best friend. She denied it. He was the most honest person I ever met. He didn’t lie. She told him to get lost after that. She said it never happened. But I was shattered by it. And I said goodbye. It wasn’t a true good bye, though. For the next two years we saw each other often, for weekends. I am guessing it was the sex we did so well that got us back together. But in time, that fell apart, too. She lost her beautiful looks, actually became uptight about sex. Then one day after a phone call in October, 1967, it ended. I never saw her again after that.

 

My beer drinking shifted into shots and beer, hurry, hurry, get it down to soothe the pain. I drove the ’61 Austin Healy I had bought with poker winnings faster and faster, almost suicidally and the drinking got so bad I started shitting blood and falling down while walking up the stairs to my apartment and sleeping on the floor because the bed felt too wobbly and nauseating to sleep on.

 

I was a graduate student at the time and I remember proctoring a biology exam for undergraduates, my presence at the exam to a great extent to make sure the 150 kids tasking the test wouldn’t cheat. I felt so ill after passing out the tests, though, that I quickly left and retired to a stall in the men’s room where I puked and shit my guts out for the full hour of the exam to return only in the last few minutes to pick up their tests, whether they cheated or not quite beyond my concern.

 

Through this time, the two years on the down elevator with Judy, my success with women went steadily in the down direction. Around the time of my last phone call to her, I had been refused a date with a buck toothed engineering major and refused sex scornfully with a townie slut who had slept casually five per night with every member of the fraternity.

 

My dreams of Judy during this 2 year down period were the same every night. I approach the door to her apartment but am too afraid to knock on it, then turn away sadly and walk away. This recurrent dream and recurrent drinking and recurrent failures with getting dates and driving faster and faster while drunk to relive the pain point, in retrospective analysis, to something bad happening, like hemorrhaging to death from all the blood I was shitting and vomiting killing me or my getting into a fatal automobile accident.

 

Then in the middle of November of 1967, the phone rang. It was a friend of a girl I had dated briefly the previous spring. She told me that Debbie Rabinowitz, then an architect student at RPI who had left school to earn money working for Pratt Whitney in Hartford to go to a better school, had returned to RPI this weekend to attend an architect exhibit, but that the real reason she had come up from Connecticut was to see me. Did I want to see her?

 

Debbie was right out of the movie. She looked like a female version of Woody Allen, very small and cute in a kind of diminutive intellectual Jewish girl who wears glasses and talks too much kind of way, kind of like a cute mouse. I met her under odd circumstances. The guys I hung with were generally tough boys. After most of my fraternity brothers in or near my class graduated and I went on to graduate school at Rensselaer, I wound up palling with a poker player buddy who was bad enough to slap the roughest Canadian hockey player on the RPI team in the face and have him back down, Lou Andre, and the NCAA national middle weight wrestling champion, Kenny Klaus. I pinned Kenny once while he was drunk and he paid be back for this humiliation by later slapping me in the face. Kenny had a side job as a bouncer at a downtown bar and could walk around a full city block on his hands. Louis, who in younger days had this gorgeous brunette from Skidmore as a girlfriend but lost her, used to say that Kenny wasn’t afraid of women because he had been a fundamentalist religious asshole in his younger days and had just gotten on the womanizing scene at a late age, of 22.

 

Anyway Klaus wasn’t afraid of the woman in any way and after a night of drinking that included our hopping to an afterhours black bar where we three college students were the only whites surrounded by three dozen blacks at 4 in the morning whom Kenny challenged, all of them, to a fist fight, we three went to the RPI girls’ dormitory where Klaus asked two tables of coeds eating breakfast, including the girl who had called me on the phone, if any of them wanted to play basketball. Debbie was one of a handful who said yes.

 

After a discombobulated pick-up game, I took Debbie to the tavern I usually hung out at, one generally patronized by a working class crowd employed at the Arrow Shirt factory across the street, RPI hockey players, mostly Canadians recruited by RPI for that purpose, and Theta Xi fraternity brothers. To say that Debbie Rabinowitz was thrilled may be an exaggeration for she was of an emerging class of people in the 60s, the hippie types, who disdained all aspects of the standard culture. But in fact she was quite thrilled, because this was a moderately bad kind of place and young girls are just thrilled at some level to be sitting on a bar stool in such a place at 12 Noon on a school day sipping beer.

 

One thing led to another as it does in the stories one likes to tell and I soon had Debbie’s pants down in my apartment. This was not as difficult as it was with most college girls I had taken out because Debbie being in the vanguard of the new woman just pulled them down without any hassling at all, more like we were having a light brunch together than having sex, which in my experience with a hundred or so girls before this always entailed some kind of ritual resistance.

 

She was, from an experienced fellow’s perspective, a bad lay. By that I mean not very enjoyably lustful. She talked during the fuck much as two people might chit chat during a light brunch, saying among other things, “You aren’t going to tell anybody about this, are you?” All of this distraction might have had the effect of me and my penis losing interest during the act, except for the voluminous experience fucking my lingerie model girlfriend six times a day again and again that made it such, I believe, that I could have fucked Ann Coulter at maximum resistance and still taken the affair to organism.

 

That Debbie had pulled this crap on others, intentionally or not, for who can ever know a woman’s mind when she prefer it not be known, was evidenced by the most horrible scar on her right leg from when a football player she was having sex with threw her through a plate glass window. If this sounds to appropriate for a ready-made sermon, I swear it to be the truth.

 

Anyway, I did not ask Debbie out again for the best sense of what a woman is ascertained by your organ, and mine, though it had survived, the kill or be killed payoff with Debbie, had no great desire for a rematch. So I did not ask her out again.

 

Nonetheless after a hellacious summer descending into abject failure-hood, I was overjoyed that whatever I had done in the springtime to hold my own and get and give reasonably good sex under challenging circumstances had brought Debbie Rabinowitz back to me. I stilled lacked a brain to analyze what was going on or to plot and scheme to any good ending for myself, but rather just followed habit and brought her back down to the Colonial Tavern on River Street in Troy to sip a friendly beer or two and make old acquaintances.

 

After maybe a half dozen or so draft beers were served us, Debbie pulled out two pills, two tablets, from her purse. “Is that LSD?” I asked. I asked that question for two reasons. The first was that Debbie was known to affiliate with, indeed to be a prime, if not the prime, member of the counter culture people at Rensselaer, which because they were more arty than the engineer and science contingent in the school, was centered about the Architecture Department. I also asked that question because between the last time I saw Debbie and this time, I had gone to a talk by Timothy Leary at Rensselaer preaching the wonders of LSD. I was impressed by him when I heard him talk, not with what he said, for my conditioning was such that nothing anybody said contrary to the Time Magazine take on it, which was that LSD was abominable, could possibly be true, but how he said it.

 

He sounded like the most honest man I had ever heard. So much so that when I walked away from the auditorium that day once his talk was over, the only way I could make any sense out of what I had heard was that this man had tried everything in life to succeed at and failed at everything so that the only thing left was this idea of drugs, which Time Magazine had assured me among other information sources had to be horrible. Indeed, I never gave a thought to trying LSD after hearing him talk.

 

“No,” said Debbie, “They’re Coricidan cold tablets.” And then after a ten second pause, “But I can get you some LSD you want it.”

 

“Will I try to jump out a window to kill myself if I take it?” I asked in a cool, laughing tone? “Will I beat up my mother?”

 

“No, no!” she reassured me, half right as it would turn out. So she got some. And we took it.

 

It was not what she expected. “Usually when people take LSD, they huddle together and are loving,” she said a number of times in a number of different ways once the LSD took hold. But for me, the only thing I noticed was my mind working. This first LSD trip was just questions popping into mind and answers made available. We drove the Austin Healy from New York to Massachusetts over the mountains of Route 2 and back that night and what I got mostly was the coming alive of my brain.

 

It is hard to speak for everybody in such circumstances. It is possible that I had this tremendously healing experience of a brain dead mind because I was so fucked up to begin with, unable to focus on the world I was physically immersed in and unable to think about it other than in words I read in a book, but whatever the broader ramifications of taking this drug, it was a TRIP.

 

She asked if I would drive her back to Hartford. Though I did have much feelings of love for her during the trip, I totally loved her for turning me on to LSD and would have done anything in appreciation. When we got to Hartford she introduced me to a friend of hers, some kid who wanted me to try Heroin. Partly because I sized him up as a punky weeny beeny type, I politely said no, but also because I had heard enough about Heroin not to want risk experimentation with it.

 

And even with the LSD I experimented with for the next 30 months I was very careful, cartful to take it no more than once a month. But the results were astonishing. I stopped drinking as a result of the next acid trip, never to go near as much as a bottle of beer for the next 25 years. And on an LSD experience shortly after, I stopped smoking cigarettes instantly after a ten year, two pack a day habit.

 

I knew a good number of people who took LSD during that time, for this was the late sixties, and they did not have the same results that I did. So I am not saying this to become the reincarnation of LSD drug guru Tim Leary. But I will say that it opened my eyes to the reality of life in a way I am sure never could have happened without it because the conditioning stuck in your brain from your mother, the priest in the pulpit, the crap in the media constantly fed you and so on takes hold like cement and is very hard to see past without something special to get you to see things with a new set of eyes. And for me it was LSD. I remember Leary as an old man, persecuted and made weary, in a video of him made by Paul Krassner, not long before he died. I am very grateful for the fact that he existed.

 

But you can’t get by on drugs. They affect your emotions and your mood and your thinking. But the reality that affects those very same things is what matters in the end. Every LSD trip I took, one a month for two and a half years made me see a different piece of the puzzle until the last trip I took put it all together and I stopped taking it.

 

 

The second time I took the LSD by myself. While listening to the Beatles White Album, in some way I convinced myself that I didn’t need to drink anymore and from that moment on, I didn’t, not for 25 years. And then on impulse I called a one armed girl at Russell Sage College, good looking except for the missing arm, whom for some reason I had always liked, and took her out, for the first time, to a Rensselaer hockey game.

 

At the game I met a Theta Xi fraternity alumni and his wife, people I had known for many years and considered as good friends. I thought Patsy Parry’s greeting, if not phony, without real emotion and walked away without any departing phrase. Once up in the stands, the one armed girl coed, unable to make sense out of my incessant smiles at seemingly nothing, kept asking, “What’s going on?”

 

What I remember mostly was the flash of color on the hockey players uniforms as they moved up and down passing the puck back and forth on the ice and the crowd roaring when RPI scored a goal, which struck me as odd since there seemed to be no good reason why any of them should particularly care if somebody pushed a little black disc into a netted goal, at least no reason to make such a great roar.

 

I took the one armed girl home after the game was over and never called her again, not that she cared, not that I cared.

 

Whatever it was that was making me feel better, I was, indeed, feeling better and getting my confidence back. I had often attended Russell Sage mixers at the Henrik Hudson Hotel downtown on Friday afternoons. A very cute girl tended bar regularly there. With my mojo on low after breaking up with Judy, I had no courage to make conversation or ask her out when I went there with my buddies. But this time, I did and I asked her out for the next day and she seemed quite pleased to accept.

 

We took LSD together on the first “date.” Unlike Debbie Rabinowitz, I was quite inclined to have sex with Kathy Conklin, and we did. I don’t remember much about it other than her cute tits and the LSD exaggerated wrinkles on the black olives we bought to eat. Kathy suggested that we “do as the Polynesians do” and slap each other around, the Polynesian reference being some sort of natural origin rationalizing of S&M sex. I had no feeling for it, happy to have quick access to her with normal sex. While the lingerie model and I often quarreled and it sometimes got physical out of spontaneous anger leading to sex in our making up after the fight, sitting on the bed and hitting Kathy Conklin for no good reason held no appeal for me and less so the idea of her hitting me.

 

A third memory of the trip was of Kathy going on and on about how much she despised a long time boyfriend she had just broken up with who, unbeknownst to me before I asked her out, was a fellow graduate student named Van Thompson. Though she never stated it explicitly, I connected up Kathy’s penchant for S&M sex as deriving from the routine she must have had with Van and ever after that thought of him as some sort of deep down pervert though he always struck me on the surface as one of the more mild-mannered people I had run into.

 

Forty years later, while needing a dentist for the family and lacking dental insurance and the billion dollar bank account the uninsured need to pay for dental care these days, I looked Van up, now Dr. Thompson, dentist, and Chairman of the Dept. of Biomaterials and Biomimetics at NYU Dental School. He quickly made it clear that Kathy was no teller of truth and he no S&M freak.  

 

From: Van P Thompson <van.thompson@nyu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 8:11 AM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Re: Leaving

Peter:

Where in Vermont? Let me know to see about a dental referral there as Bridgeport has not proved easy. No UMD or NYU alumni that I know located there. My best contact in Darien is typical with the office closed on Wednesday. She was to call today.

You closed suggesting a few days, but seems there was more urgency than I realized. Pain meds for the surgery have me quite sleepy and getting through your latest math has not been easy.

Strange about Kathy C. Short of pot and booze we never did more and certainly nothing sadomasochistic. She must have picked that up later.

Van

Chair, Biomaterials and Biomimetics
NYU College of Dentistry
345 E. 24th St
New York, NY 10010

Whatever the truth telling proficiency of Kathy and Van in this particular regard, as we shall see, the two deserved each other with Van readily noted to be a major representative of a fairly common type in modern American academia, the department boss as closet faggot, as made clear in the vignette that follows the first phase of the math of The Evolution of Information, which describes my meeting up again with Dr. Van in his office at NYU Dental School over on 1^st Avenue and 24^th Street in New York City 40 years later.      

 

DEPT. CHAIR QUEENS AND OTHER “FUNNY” BOSSES

 

But that gets way ahead of the story. Getting back to the LSD trip with his quite domineering mistress, Kathy, as things turned out, I quickly thought her unusual in some regard in her not having the usual reaction to LSD of visual amazement about her surroundings. There was no “Wow, look at that!” excitement on her part, no exuberant spontaneity in her responses as I and most people I took acid with had. She seemed quite composed through it all, something I saw in only one other person I took LSD with.

 

As I said I have no memory of the details of fucking her other than that it must have been reasonably good because a few days later Kathy called to ask me to drive her home at the start of Christmas vacation to Wappinger’s Falls, NY, down the Hudson River from Troy, to meet her parents. In retrospect I might theorize that I was marriageable material as a PhD candidate and otherwise suitable particularly considering the LSD having ended my Heartbreak Hotel mood from breaking up with Judy.

 

We couldn’t fuck in Kathy’s house with her parents there and all, so we screwed outside when we had the chance over the few days. It must not have been very cold that December, though I remember fucking standing up, possibly because of the weather, something she particularly seemed to like, possibly because she thought it was a cool thing to do.

 

Kathy’s father struck me as a smiling agreeable asshole, kind of like a health nut, gray brush cut Vermont type, as friendly as he could be with the young people, smiling a lot for no good reason. Her younger 14 year old brother whose bedroom I took over for those few days was strikingly odd.  I had no sense of what a queer was back then, but Kathy said that this very quiet and rather softish kid just into adolescence around all the time with older guys at some local bull ranch that she said were the queer cowboys in town.

 

Kathy’s mother made some sense out of the rest of the family. She had become a real estate agent a few years prior and was quite in love with herself and bragging on and on about her selling this and that costly house in town for huge commissions making lots of money. Because being against this sort of stark materialism was the typical attitude for somebody into LSD back then and certainly my disposition, my response to the mother was less than overwhelmed as she bugled out her dollars and cents triumphs, indeed, rather mildly amused on the edge of discourtesy, it was clear she was not as pleased with me as she might have otherwise been.

 

Kathy’s mom was clearly dominant to the two wishy-washy guy members of the household and, though, there were no outward marker of it, she had to also be dominant to Kathy in a significant way. Kathy, it should also be noted, had been a cheerleader at Wappinger’s Falls High School. I bring this up to suggest the perhaps unfair generalization that cheerleader types tend to be the highly controlled underlings of their ambitious mothers destined to be the wife of some guy later in life only through the higher level control of her mother, whose position is in effect the master (or mistress) of both of them. That speculation from limited personal data and possibly facile observation at a distance is at least in confluence with my sense of having been so quickly invited into the Conklin household for inspection as husband material by the mother.

 

Before I left Wappinger’s Falls for Revere for Christmas with my own family, I made a date with Kathy for New Years Eve back at School in Troy. That night she looked quite lovely with her standard, high grade, cheerleader looks and I must say did nothing but make me look good in front of my friends. Perfectly agreeable and charming up until a half hour before the New Year’s midnight, at that moment, our relationship unraveled at the speed of light when she announced to me that she would be unable to stay for the New Years kiss because she had to immediately dash off to the Albany Airport thence to take a plane to New York City to meet with an “older man” who wanted to marry her, a diamond merchant in New York City who was an Auschwitz survivor! And off she went in a taxi lickety-split saying goodbye to me more or less forever ten minutes later.

 

The normal tug of pain felt under such failed circumstances was mitigated by the strange mode of the rejection, though more than likely in retrospect Kathy might have just gone back to her college dormitory that night after hitting me over the head with a suitable baseball bat at the request, command or suggestion of her Queen of Hearts mother who was still pissed that I had not paid proper homage to her grand successes in the real estate business. One might also hypothecate without bring the mother into it that after a girl pulls her shorts down as quickly and agreeably as Kathy had, her leave taking had to be of equivalent intensity to restore her emotional balance. At least it was a millionaire diamond merchant I had lost out to, so I faintly remember telling myself once or twice that night. And a miracle escapee from Auschwitz no less!

 

It was one of the briefer Heartbreak Hotels I had to live in over the years, about a two week stay, in part because I was very much into the wonder of this new and amazing chemical instrument of exploring the world around me and who I was.

 

One thing that LSD achieved was that it took the pressure out of my having to have a date every Friday and Saturday night. As much as I complain about my experiences with woman, not being able to hang on to this or that woman I truly fell in love with, I was seldom without a date for the weekend. Two uncle figures in my life, one our black cook at the fraternity and the other the Irish bartender at the tavern I hung out at, said independently that they never saw anybody with as many girls as I had. But in truth that was a lot of work. Having a date was required, more or less, socially. As though if you didn’t have a date or couldn’t get one, there was something less of you if not wrong with you.

 

Mind you I am not complaining about having the dates. Taking into account that liquor was common component of a date, I had a lot of sexual experiences for, at least back when I was young, girls who drank were more prone to slip their pants off or have them slipped off. A certain percent of them you just statistically wound up fucking and, if nothing else, this does give satisfaction and a bit of wisdom about such matters. While all sex is good from the perspective that you like pizza, whether with three toppings, plain or cold, some sex is quite like cold, day old pizza.

 

Fuck Dr. Phil about whom the rumors of his being as queer as he looks are probably correct, the plain truth is, if the sex really clicks, you more or less fall in love, boy and girl. That’s why couples in America don’t fall in love anymore. Just look at people‘s faces, real people, not the asshole actors on TV. Who the hell is attractive anymore? Maybe some of the women in some way because especially younger women are just generally attractive, but most guys nowadays, even on TV where you think they choose the best guys, are just funny looking if not plain queer looking. In this era of NaziDisneyLand obedience to rules and authority and its low testosterone titer, none of the guys have any vigor, on their faces and surely in parallel not in bed. And sex from a less than cool guy turns a woman off, which I will explain better from an evolutionary perspective once I get to that part of the story. Anyway, I felt I didn’t have to have a date every goddamn weekend after I started taking LSD, and it felt damn good to have that pressure off.

 

 

My mind worked better at school stuff, too. I began to find aspects of biophysical theory interesting and to understand it well. I was lucky, or so I thought at the time, to run into a biophysicist named Aaron Posner who was working on hard tissue, bone and teeth, who gave a talk on his work at my school. I managed to get invited to work at his laboratory at the Hospital for Special Surgery (for orthopedics) in Manhattan the following summer. He was big, maybe the # 2 man in the country in hard tissue research. His laboratory staff included eight or nine professionals, all with PhDs and a few with MD and DDS degrees. My job that summer was basically a lab technician helping out this research associate, John Termine, try to determine how mature bone and teeth arise from the juvenile form.

 

To explain, bone and teeth are made of calcium and phosphate molecules. To begin with these molecules are dissolved in the blood. They precipitate as solid material when the body says we need you molecules to make bone or teeth. When they first precipitate out of the blood as solid phase material, the first product is non-crystalline, not very hard or durable, but in time it changes to a crystalline form that that is as hard as rock, what you find in tooth enamel.

 

How does this happen? That was the question they wanted to answer, them and a dozen or so other good sized labs around the country. To find out how was a tedious operation that required me to take a few tablespoons of calcium phosphate solid suspended in water and freeze the water by dropping the stuff into liquid nitrogen and then freeze dry to remove the water, now ice, like they do in making instant coffee. This took lots and lots of hours. Then once the sample was freeze dried you run it through an x-ray diffraction instrument, somewhat like but still very different than a medical x-ray machine, that would tell you how much of the material was in the crystalline form that mature bone and teeth take.

 

It took about seventeen hours to do one sample, not just a lot of work, but tedious and boring. When I say boring, I don’t mean from a theoretical perspective because the problem of bone growth itself was very interesting. But the part I played in solving the problem could have been done by an entry level worker at Burger King and was very boring and very tedious.

 

Then one boring day while looking at this white chemical stuff swirling around in a beaker an idea came to me. Having looked at the white stuff so much that I became familiar with it like the proverbial back of my hand, I could see that the whiteness looked just a bit thicker over time. So an idea flashed into my quick if lazy poker playing mind that maybe you could measure the amount of thickness as it changed in time and maybe that would give you some information on what was going on in the reaction without someone having to go through a seventeen hour stretch to get a single sample. So into the boss’s office little graduate student me goes and tells him my idea.

 

“No, just keep working with Dr. Termine on what he’s doing,” is the reply that comes from the head of the laboratory.

 

“Can I try it myself on my own time, at night?” I say because I am genuinely curious about what you would see if you measured this thickening of the whiteness with a laboratory instrument.

 

“Whatever you do on your own time is your own business,” is Posner’s answer and he hands me a set of keys to the laboratory so I can get in at night.

 

I set up the experiment in a spectrophotometer. And on the first run, POW!!! I remember my reaction to what I saw as being like the first time I laid eyes on Ruth, my wife of the last 37 years, POW!!!

 

Of immediate importance to the work being done in Posner’s lab was that it shortened the time to get a data point from seventeen hours to less than an hour. It also gave important information that could not be gotten from Posner’s x-ray diffraction experiment, data that would enable me to explain the first, critical step in how mature bone and teeth formed. Posner immediately switched over all of his experiments to the way I had done them that night. He tells me I will be a co-author on the scientific papers written on the experiments because, most obviously, they were using this method of finding the crystallization times I had just figured out.

 

I am feeling good about things! That summer passes over to the Spring of 1969 when I am scheduled to take my PhD exams. This is exam is the big one for doctoral students. It you pass, you are Dr. Calabria for the rest of your life. If you fail, you go to work for Burger King full time one way or the other. I am supremely confident I will pass if for no other reason than that my research work, which is what being a PhD research scientist is all about, has solved with it a couple of moderately huge problems in my field and is all my own. Yet I have some misgivings because I am told by a fellow graduate student who has already been through it not to get angry no matter what. Angry about what, I wonder?

 

I did not get angry, but the asshole professors who ran the exam did. Nothing in my life prepared me for a bunch of low testosterone grown men acting like bullies on a playground, skipping past the fact that my research work was at the highest professional level. No doubt my recently grown beard and my hair getting longer and possibly a rumor that I was in counter-culture mode help bring it on, this quite possible because back then, to wear long hair and be against “the establishment” angered people, especially those in positions of power who demanded respect for their status, more than people today might understand and more than is openly advertized.

 

Three on the committee openly raged in anger as though I had just committed the crime of murdering an infant when I could not answer stupid impossible questions, knowledge of which had nothing to do with my ability or potential as a professional scientist, this while dismissing my research, which I knew by comparison was head and shoulders above what the other graduate students were doing. I remembered what I had been told, though, and did not get angry back.

 

When it was finished, all five committee members shook my hand and congratulated me. I was pissed with the treatment but happy I had passed. When my thesis advisor, Dr. Katz, asked me what I thought, I told him it the whole thing was a totally unnecessary humiliation, being toyed with like that for no good reason. “Well you passed,” he said, “that’s what matters.” And I felt there to be some truth in that.

 

The plot thickens. Dr. Posner had driven up from New York City to my school in Troy, NY, for my exam and it had been planned by his invitation that after I took the exam I would drive back with him to his house in upscale Tarrytown to have dinner with him and his family both to celebrate my passing the exam and his wife’s wedding anniversary. I was doubly happy to do this because by this time I was dating a girl in New York City, possible marriage material, and I had told Priscilla I would be joining her later to celebrate and stay overnight with her that night.

 

I complained to Posner about the treatment on the ride down but he shrugged it off completely as beside the point and countered by telling me the story of Mike and Ike that ends with the punch line of Mike telling Ike, “But what have you done for me lately?” This not very funny joke about power prerogatives and Posner’s going on and on about how much his dead mother would have thrilled to see his career successes makes me intuitively understand that he is a first class asshole and half wishing that I could skip his wedding anniversary and proceed firstly to NYC to see said girlfriend.

 

But his wife and good looking sixteen-year-old daughter with full sized, very firm Jewish tits make the hours there go by fast and fun. So much were the three of us engaged in non-stop conversation that Aaron is pretty much ignored. This may have been not good, but I am too young at heart at the time to understand the protocol in treating a dude with great power and little real confidence in himself. At one point Aaron interposes himself in our witty conversation by holding up a balalaika he got in Moscow during an international crystallographic meeting. We, all three, turn to look at him in a spontaneous collective condemnation of his boorishness.

 

Soon it is time to go because girlfriend Priscilla is waiting for me to take her out to a $100 restaurant in New York to celebrate maybe something that will impact our maybe marriage. The next morning I call Posner from Priscilla’s apartment. He said to do so we could talk about the paper that was being written based on my experiment that my name would be on. His tone of voice over the phone alarms me. It seems to have come out of nowhere much as had the harsh attitudes of my doctoral committee the day before.

 

When I get to his office at the Hospital for Special Surgery over on York and 71^st Street, I don’t recognize the man. He tells me rock hard and curtly that he is taking my name off the paper because any work done in his laboratory belongs to him anyway. It was eventually published without any mention of Peter V. Calabria as

 

Termine, J.D., Peckauskas, R.A. Posner, A.S.: Calcium phosphate formation in vitro. II. Effects of environment amorphous-crystalline transformation. Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics. 140, p. 318 (1970)

 

A quick perusal of this paper that measures crystallization time spectrophotometrically shows a sharp break with all of the Posner papers that come before it that measure it using x-ray diffraction. Indeed all subsequent Posner papers that entail crystallization time use this spectrophotometric method because it is much faster than the diffraction method that provides the same data. Without my work, started entirely on my own at night on my own time and against Posner’s negative judgment of its merit, there is no spectrophotometric crystallization time and there is no paper. Nowhere in the paper is the method credited to me.

 

Posner also tells me that morning in his office that has just talked on the phone to Dr. Johnson, the Chairman of the Biology Dept. up at Rensselaer. This fellow, an obvious mean asshole in leading the angry lynch mob at the exam has ultimate control over my graduation and Posner tells me I must talk to him right away. The meeting with Posner lasts less than four minutes. It feels very ominous, so ominous that I refuse to think about how ominously things could turn out or in what way they could be ominous.

 

In order to avoid finding out the answer to these ominous questions, once back upstate at Rensselaer I avoid Dr. Johnson for three weeks. Finally by chance I run into the Pontius Pilate of my thesis committee, Dr. Joseph Landau, who tells me with a faux worried look on his face that I must talk to Dr. Johnson immediately. He adds, “What did you do to Dr. Posner that he hates you so much?”

 

I was in no mood to try to answer that question back then, but have speculated on it frequently over the years. Did his wife like me too much? Did his daughter like me too much? Did I offend him or show too much cool by leaving his house to see a sleep over girlfriend rather than sleep over at his house as was awkwardly suggested just before I was ready to leave? Or had this shit smelling game been prepared ahead of time by this slimy, game playing, pseudo-scientist, idea stealing, businessman type academic in order to handcuff me to his laboratory and usurp my work for another few years? A half year later when he and I were most at odds he surprisingly offered me a position through his lackey, John Termine, and many years later I learned that he had one of the worst reputations among East Coast scientists for being a plagiarizer of his underlings’ ideas, so this last theory of why he “hated me” was not impossible.

 

But whatever the cause, the effect of his making war on me was made perfectly clear when Dr. Johnson starts talking to me in his fake low octave tone of voice, “Ahem, Peter, you know, the PhD is one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on a person in life…..and for that reason we in the Biology Department want to reconsider how we evaluate the doctoral exam. We feel that we are too hasty in passing judgment on the candidate immediately after the exam and are starting a policy now to make the pass/fail decision only after a few days of thorough consideration.”

 

And, he further explains, can you guess, that this policy will start with me, retroactively. Really? I ask myself, is this possible? Can they really do that to you? Yes, they can. Those with this level of power and control can do just about anything they want to you. That is the lesson, I think what Franz Kafka tried to make clear in his all to realistic surrealistic short story, The Penal Colony.

 

Johnson reassures me, of course, that I did not fail the exam. That’s because being failed in an exam just after being told by everybody that I passed would be patently illegal and vicious. Rather I am told that the exam just doesn’t count, is going to be thrown out like it never even happened. That’s nice. But, of course, since it effectively never happened, I will have to take it over again.

 

The thought immediately arises as to whom should I complain: to the President of the University, to the Supreme Court, to God? I quickly realize none of the above. Or anybody else.

 

So, what should I do? What did I do? I did what just about everybody in this position, which everybody more or less is eventually, does. And that is kid myself that if I put up with the shit and I eventually pass the exam, then everything will come out OK in the end and all the bad parts will be forgotten.

 

But whatever this hope or rationalization, the bad parts turn out to be the most unpleasant time in my life, on a level with my various Heartbreak Hotels, but in some ways more destructive yet of my sense of myself and of my pride in myself. I want to take the exam over again as soon as possible, but, no, I am told, I must wait four or five months. Presumably this will give time for their poison to sink in.

 

I will skip a description of the interim hell as nobody likes a weeper and this was a time of great restraint of the urge to weep because I felt like something in me was dying or dead just about every moment of the hell. Finally the day of the retake of the exam comes at the end of July, 1969. Only three out of the five committee members bother to show. Posner sends a letter from New York highly recommending my pass. Isn’t that sweet? I am asked one or two stupidly simple questions and I am passed. The exam lasts twenty minutes. All that shit was strictly to tell me who the boss was.

 

It was a relief that I had passed, of course. But I had did not want to remain anywhere near Posner in New York City or Johnson at Rensselaer. As it turned out one of the good guys on the good guy, bad guy academic cop team, Dr. Katz, was taking a sabbatical at the University of Miami that year. Getting smart in life fast, I suggested to him that I was very close to figuring out the exact molecular mechanism for bone and tooth growth and wouldn’t he like to have a piece of that pie tagged onto his list of publications and academic glory? Without my asking, but with my fingers crossed hoping he would take the bait, he said, “Hey, you want to come to the University of Miami with me?”

 

Just get me the fuck out of here!

 

Katz has two family cars. He wants me to drive one of them, his new Mercury, to Miami. I put an ad in the newspaper for a ride share to help me drive down and a girl my age answers the ad. She is strikingly bland and generally below my level of female companionship, but still not unattractive at the moment if for no other reason than that she is slim. I’ll skip the brutal details of my making an ass out of myself. Even with the physical necessity of stopping off at a motel on this 1500 mile trip sleeping on one of the two twin beds in the room and with over 3000 experiences of this sort under my belt, I couldn’t pull off even a kiss.

 

True it might have also been the case that I should have recognized the situation and the girl for what they were, inherently unsuitable for my designs, but I was too much of an asshole to either know not to take a swing at the ball or to be able to hit it once I swung. I was Posner’s asshole. No, all you generation x and y kids reading this, when you submit to tyranny in the short run with hope of long term gain, the punishment for your stupidity and cowardice doesn’t go away after they stop the front line beating. If you suck the guy’s dick or lick the guy’s (or woman boss’s) dirty ass, if that metaphor is less disgusting, your emotional punishment for being so stupid as to think the effect will be transient is to join the ranks of the living dead, usually for the rest of your days on earth, any chance of real happiness down the drain.

 

Whatever my punishments in this regard though, being moderately intelligent if ravaged, I still had one or two of my six cylinders working to understand the game that had been done on me. What got me out of this hell was an overpowering drive to persist in my research and solve the critical problem of bone and tooth growth. Larry Katz, a Jew academic, no anti-Semitism intended, had conjoined, as often happens often with such, with another Jew academic down at U. of M. and I quickly found out there was no place for me, an easy going blind to power reality Sicilian gentile, in that laboratory. So I started knocking on doors at the university and at the Howard Hughes Research Institute sitting next door to ask various scientists to let me use their laboratory facilities to finish my research work. Thankfully, I met a few good guys who opened their doors, though interestingly all of them non-Americans.

 

But before I tell what happened next in Miami, I have to explain the calcium phosphate research in a more detailed way. This is not because of what it says about bone and tooth growth, which few who are reading this could particularly cares about. Nor is its function to analyze my personal growth, which does not need such technical detail to make sense out of in this story. Neither of these motives would be sufficient to lay out the graphs and equations that follow.

 

Rather we are doing it because this calcium phosphate science will later be shown to be an evolutionary dynamic, which will show evolution to be a totally general process that underpins everything that happens in nature, which will provide the basis of an analytical argument as to how control and abuse is endemic in society, how that makes people unhappy and how revolting against that control makes you smile again. This is important for everybody to understand, not only because everybody prefers to be happy when you come right down to it, but because unhappy people are very prone to being aggressive and hurting others to slough off their feelings of unhappiness on vulnerable others. That mechanism of redirected aggression, so we call it, is the basis not only of the mass murders that entertain us every day with greater and greater frequency in the news, but also of war as a collective redirected aggression phenomenon, and in this day and age, eventually of the nuclear war that will soon put mankind suicidally-homicidally out of its 24/7 misery terminally.

 

That’s why I am going to expose the reader to hard core technical argument next, excusing all who dislike such for whatever reason to skim past it until you get back to the magazine style writing.

 

The non-crystalline calcium phosphate that appears first in juvenile bone and teeth has a technical name, amorphous calcium phosphate, or ACP, and the crystalline calcium phosphate that it transforms into is called hydroxyapatite or HA. The question is: How does ACP transform into the HA crystals that mature bone and teeth are made out of? Before I arrived on the scene, Posner’s group had explained the growth of HA from ACP after the first HA crystals appear. The following two graphs explain how and originally appeared in the paper,

 

Eanes, E. D. and Posner, A.S.:  Kinetics and Mechanism of the Conversion of Non-crystalline Calcium Phosphate to Crystalline Hydroxyapatite; Transactions of   the New York Academy of Sciences, 28, p. 233, 1965

 

 

Figure 1. Concentration of HA vs. time in reaction system under static conditions. Concentration is expressed as percent crystallinity.

 

What this graph shows is the growth of HA crystals in an artificial test tube system over time after the first HA crystals have appeared. A logarithmic measure of this HA growth is given below.

 

 

Figure 2. Logarithm of the percent crystallinity vs. time for same data in Figure 1.

 

From simple observation of the straight line seen in the above plot, the authors took the functional relationship between the C concentration or amount of HA and t time to be

 

(3)                                                                                                            

 

In the above k is an unspecified constant. From this a differential equation for the HA growth is obtained.

 

(4)                                                                                                                 

 

This equation describes HA growth once the first HA crystals appear, a little after t=4 hours in Figure 2. It indicates that the dC/dt rate of formation of HA at any time after the first HA crystals appear is proportional to the C concentration of HA that exist at that time. Growth in which the rate of formation of a substance is proportional to the amount of substance already formed is called autocatalytic. Such growth of new HA from existing HA derives from the existing HA acting as a seeds or templates for the new HA crystals to grow from. Not shown in the graphs is that as the HA crystals grow from the ACP, the ACP diminishes in amount as the HA that grows form it increases in amount.

 

The first thing I saw when I joined Posner’s group was that Eqs3&4 he thought were implied by the data of Figures 1&2 are patently incorrect for Eqs3&4 specify a never ending exponential increase in HA concentration, C, over time, which the data in Figures 1&2 clearly does not show. I was coming from Rensselaer, a highly regarded engineering school, and it was easy for me to spot this mistake that was missed by them.

 

What the ascending sigmoid or S-shaped curve of Figure 1 does fit, rather, is a dynamic in population biology called logistic growth. The logistic function, (see Wikipedia), sometimes called the Verhulst equation after the Belgian mathematician, Pierre-Francois Verhulst, who first introduced it, has the same sigmoid shape as HA growth in Eq1 and were that logistic function applied to HA formation, it would correctly express the HA growth incorrectly expressed as Eq4 rather as

 

(5)                                                                                            

 

In the above K represents the total amount of calcium phosphate solid material as the sum of ACP and HA, which is taken to be more or less constant over time, with C representing the amount of HA at any time and (K−C) the amount of ACP at any time. This understands the rate of growth, dC/dt, to be proportional to both the C amount of HA present as seeds for the crystallization and the (K−C) amount of ACP needed as a reservoir of calcium phosphate for the HA crystals to form from.

 

I will not present the physico-chemical details of this analysis here for they are not necessary at the moment. They were, though, written up many years later in 2006 and sent to Dennis Sullivan, a noted mathematician, (see Wikipedia), who won the National Medal of Science, 2004, to review and comment on. I received this validation of the important points stated above in an email from him as follows.

 

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:50

 

 

While I very much appreciated Dr. Sullivan taking the time to review my analysis and his kind subtle comparison of my innovative work to Einstein’s innovations in relativity, it should be understood that however bright the Dennis is, he accepted the Medal of Science placed around his neck by President George Bush, the Butcher of Baghdad, without criticism of Bush’s lying murderous Middle East policies. That scientific conclusions preempted by political consideration are worth nothing, I totally agree with, of course, that as a perfectly good reason not to mix the two. But scientists dwelling in their ivory tower that are blind to political considerations, which seriously affect us all, are worthy of disrespect in that regard, for my radicalism did not derive just from my “indulging in my own deeply felt philosophy”, but was an angry attitude shared about the worst aspects of America by many Americans who saw through and were disgusted by Bush’s lies and the mass murder they brought about in that totally unnecessary war.

 

The primary point to be gleaned from Dr. Sullivan’s note, though, with apologies to him for my being untoward again, is that my correction of Posner’s error in characterizing the HA growth via Eq4 rather than Eq5 was quite valid. It is also very important in a broader context in showing the HA transformation to be most fundamentally an evolutionary process of differential birth and death rates, here with chemical rather than biological species, differential precipitation and dissolution rates, as then allows, in conjunction with parallel examples, for evolution to be correctly seen as a completely universal dynamic that applies to all processes as The Evolution of Information when the central parameters of the processes are specified in terms of a new mathematical function for information that we develop later in this work.

 

My laboratory research sought to answer the question as to how the very first HA crystals were formed, the critical event in the formation of bone and teeth in humans and all vertebrate animals. Here is how it happens. Amorphous calcium phosphate, (ACP) exists as spherical globules of solid phase material suspended in a liquid aqueous solution. Almost all of the other laboratories working on the problem had speculated that the first HA crystals likely formed from some biologically active process, but it became clear to me from my nighttime research that the HA much more likely formed from ACP on the surface of the ACP spherical globules in an entirely passive physico-chemical way that had no biological guidance.

 

While in Miami after two months effort I performed a critical experiment that proved this hypothesis to be correct. I will never forget the exhilaration that ran through me the moment the spectrophotometric data proved me correct. Given that I had beat out two dozen professional scientists from around the country in figuring out the problem, it boosted my ego way up and way back from its fall from submitting to Posner. I explained this mechanism for the initiation of the formation of mature bone and teeth at an International Association of Dental Research (IADR) meeting in New York the spring of 1970 as was written up in the Abstracts of the meeting.

 

Calabria, P. V., Katz, J. L.:  The kinetics and mechanism of heterogeneous hydroxyapatite nucleation; IADR Abstracts; No. 448 (1970)

 

J. Lawrence Katz was my thesis advisor at the time. He knew next to nothing about my research, his name put on the paper essentially as my nominal sponsor at this professional meeting as I was his graduate student. It is helpful to point out that parallel to this was the authorship of the Eanes and Posner 1965 paper cited above, which included Posner’s name on it because he was the laboratory boss, Dave Eanes making it quite clear to me when I spoke to him at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, in 1982 that the all the research work and the ideas in the paper about ACP and its transformation to HA were his.

 

AS to the correctness of my idea, two years later in 1972 a research group from the University of Prague who heard my talk at the IADR meeting saw through the Scanning Electron Microscope, (SEM), exactly what I had deduced from my mathematical analysis and experiment and in their publication of it credited me as the discoverer of nucleation mechanism by citing the above IADR Abstract.

 

Brecevic, L. J., Furedi-Milhofer, H.:  Precipitation of calcium phosphates from electrolyte solutions; Calcified Tissue Research, 10, p. 82 (1972)

 

This understanding very much clarifies the general sense of evolution that pervades all processes in the universe, as we shall see. My having been its discoverer and that reviving my pride in myself also tells you how I got out of the hole that submitting to Posner after his stealing my research and causing to have me failed in my PhD exams retroactively put me in.

 

After that critical experiment in Miami that made me sure I was right long before the Brecevic work corroborated it with the SEM, the pushups I did daily to keep in shape as young men generally did back then became accompanied by my thinking about Posner’s ugly faggot face and wanting to punch it in. Anger at that level was a new thing for me, but I had no problem justifying it and quite welcomed it given the nature of what Posner had done, which could not be excused by any of the usual excuses and culturally approved of rationalizations that are foisted on other young men at this age, but that are not so blatantly unfair treatment. In that way I was lucky. My attitude and superiority goaded them to act in a way that was clearly unfair and lucky also to dig my way out of the emotional whole they put me in, this is what made me a revolutionary for the rest of my life, the raw joy of fighting back.

 

And it was extremely joyous. Shortly after proving my thesis, I decided to return to New York. That was much prompted by the social group that association with Larry Katz had put me in, for he and his colleagues were just variations of the out and out bastards on the committee, so much like the ghouls seen through in the John Carpenter film, They Live, (see YouTube), that I just wanted to get away from them once I had in hand what I needed scientifically.

 

This prompted me to call Priscilla on the phone and tell her I’d be coming back to New York City as soon as I had a few more things to finish up in my work. But an odd thing happened the very next day after calling Priscilla as sometimes happens when you are feeling particularly good. There was a redheaded girl, a most beautiful Scottish girl, who worked as a waitress at the restaurant across from the motel I lived at on the Miami Beach strip. She was so strikingly beautiful that particularly given my fall from grace from the Posner raping, I had no thought of asking her out. How beautiful she was is made clear by the fact of her being paid $50 to have her picture taken in a bathing suit while on Miami Beach by some Japanese tourist guys.

 

That next day after the phone call, I said to the cook at the restaurant, who reminded me of my father in some ways, what a beautiful smile his waitress had. “Tell her, not me,” he counseled. That was at breakfast before she came to work. At lunch, I told her.

 

“I smiling at you because you’re always smiling at me,” which I suppose I always was, she said smilingly. The next parts were easy. Breaking the ice is the hard part, especially if you’ve had significant prior rejection, because rejection feels oh so fucking bad. But after we made contact, asking her out and the rest was easy, for I did have substantial experience and did, more or less, understand women.

 

She was a trip. The pattern was right of Konrad Lorentz’s description of animal courtship. At a bar on Miami Beach where she is friendly with the beach type hang out guys, I become aggressive towards them and aggressive towards her. I should point out none of this is an act. Guys who fake the game are out to make it with girls to impress their mommies and the most they get as time passes is their internalized feeling that their mommy’s like them. It’s only when you play it real that anything good can happen. After a few dates, our courtship squabbles came to head and angry, I told her to get out.

 

I had somewhere in between given her a book by the photographer, Edward Steichen, The Family of Man. It affected me in, perhaps, in showing people around the world at their best, what people could be.  It was a book of hope, or so it struck me that way. After I got angry and told her to go, she came back a few hours later and said she kept looking at the book and decided to come back. And then she pulled down her pants and we got to it. She was real. Real girls resist. It took me a month to fuck Judy, the lingerie model. It’s funny, though, how the real girls are few and far between, and unusual in where they are coming from, for rules and the demand to have an advantage makes phonies out of most people, and at surprisingly very ages.

 

I am tempted to tell the stories of both girls, but my sense of privacy prevents the spilling of the sordid details of the shipwrecked from the plague of normalcy lucky and/or exceptionally talented enough to survive. Soon I went back to New York and she said she’d be coming up in a week. For whatever dumb reason, I went right to Priscilla’s apartment in Manhattan the first day back. The fuck was odd. Generally fucking Priscilla was not that much fun. She was still young, mid-twenties or so like myself, but she’d had an affair with her boss, horror of typical horrors so exemplary of the general situation of all working women under the power of a boss. Power is power for a woman and she is made to respect and turn on to it, ask Lorenz. Not understood by most is that boss men get their (institutional) power by submitting to high up bosses as Posner tried to get me to do to him. And as such, not revolting against that higher boss control as you will see I did, they are a quite smelly hybrid of powerful asshole, dangerous to healthy young men of whom they are all jealous and to young at heart women who don’t understand what these unnatural anomalies of powerful assholes are.

 

Fucking Priscilla had me fucking a cunt that had been traumatized by a powerful asshole. I always prided myself in being able to get a girl to come and enjoy the sex, but Priscilla, even when I was successful, gave the feeling more of riding a bull than of fucking a girl. It is interesting, too, to note that Priscilla gave a blow job on the first date, which is indicative of a girl eager to please before pricing the goods and, hence, interested in marriage, the most dangerous and essentially loveless game of accommodation or making the best of life.

 

Anyway, Priscilla was not that stupid because she could sense that something was off interrupting me in mid-fuck to spit out, “What the hell is going on. Get out of here!” Miss Scotland, which is what I called the princess like Jan Krank, had saved my life as Judy had saved my life before, by saving me from the impending irremedial doomsday fate of standard marriage. Girls who make for standard wives, much of their emotions controlled by cultural and maternal conditioning rather than raw instinct, have standard mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, all or most of who submit to their bosses, tongue on dirty assholes when necessary, and to the general rules of do’s and don’t’s that make conjugal relationships more the occasion for stabilizing the wage slave workers each are in their workplace activity and of raising little wage slaves for the Wall Street fatherland America is underneath its airbrushed Star Spangles Banner wolf in sheep’s clothing disguise.

 

Judy not only got rid of Jeannie Deutsch, whom surely would have married without her intervention because men always prefer having a woman than not having a woman without regard to a point assigned evaluation of the woman. Judy was real, her father a vice president of Remington Rand corporation who had her suck his dick when she was a young teen and from whom, and the mother, she separated at age 16. Judy was the only person I ever saw who saw through my phony middle class mother on one family visit and let her know she saw through her. Sexual comparison of Judy to Jeannie was as of the plainest white bread to home baked pumpernickel.

 

And Judy saved me from Annette Gotgart, too. I was working at a discount department store on Revere Beach when Annette’s youngish aunt and uncle came into the store. “Peter!” Annette and I had often baby sat for their little kids back when, their apartment downstairs from Annette’s parents the scene of much dry humping. I like Joe. “Annette would love to see you!”

 

Though I was in the middle of hot heat with Judy at the time, after a quick call to Annette, I went over to her house for memory had placed her in my mind as the object of intense love she had been in my high school days. The lights in the living room of her parent’s place were so dim and Annette was standing at the far end of the room.

 

“Where’s your mom and dad, Annette?” I stupidly asked. They were obviously gone to give the girl and I, now quite old enough to be adults, alone time.

 

“Why are the lights so dim, Annette, and what are you doing way over there on the other side on the room?” She tells me that she attended Boston College on A Navy ROTC Scholarship and that in the last year, her first year the Navy, she caught emphysema and that it destroyed her looks and she had dimmed the lights and gone to the far side of the room so I wouldn’t see her. From what I saw Annette still looked pretty except that the sparkly joy that always lit up her eyes was gone, maybe from emphysema, what did I now, but more likely from a year of having to submit to a bunch of submissive asshole Navy officers who had too much institutional power of this once adorable girl child for a woman’s good looks are no more than the natural arrogance of reproductive potential preserved in primitive circumstances until she trades it in by encounter with a male willing to give his life to protect her, thus retaining her pride then in them rather than herself and her beauty in the bargain as women loved retain even if their virgin arrogance has been dissipated.

 

Anyway, whatever the truth in a dominant male’s take on it, I told Annette I had a girlfriend and walked out shortly after with little thought of Annette, then or afterwards, easy to do for Judy at that time conversed with me and I with her by talking on the phone or writing incessantly about the dirtiest of dirty delights of fucking her cunt and ass in every imaginable way. Otherwise I am susceptible to middle class Annette and all the baggage she takes with her and would have rested on me. Years later my older girl cousin, who lived three doors down from Annette tells me that she married some pussy boy graduate of Columbia law who never practiced law but taught immediately at Columbia after he graduated and whom Annette treated in a public way as a poodle dog on a leash.

 

In the same way, Miss Scotland saved me from Priscilla, whom I surely would have married shortly along with her mother and father and two brothers and everything in this horrible culture that sidesteps love in exchange with artificial arrangements directed to surviving a life of control and raising children to serve the Wall Street fatherland in the next generation.

 

Miss Scotland did the same thing for me with Priscilla, saved me from the standard inherently unfulfilling marriage, thank God and all the Gods that never existed because nothing is worse than never having a woman then the eventual separation from one trained as a reproductive puppet that is certain emotionally and physically in time and has little in it than never having loved at all other than what your neighbors and relatives think of you.

 

Miss Scotland empowered me to piss on the They Live ghouls in my work group on the way out, for the one thing about truly beautiful women are is that they are not impressed with people on the basis of social rank. And as she smiled her beautiful smile in their presence that said she was head and shoulders over all of them and this without being outwardly rude but effectively ignoring them, so did I share in that momentary triumph in my having her as my carnally obvious girl friend, a very pleasant leave taking filled with very natural and deserved retribution for these assholes for when I first got down from New York fresh from Posner’s drubbing, it was difficult to avoid falling at least partially into the hole they were doing their best to dig for me, these ever common seldom fired loyal workers whose obsequiousness to the boss, though subtle in its act for each other is obvious to a healthy young person.

 

Once Miss Scotland got to New York we got a hotel room at first and then an apartment over on W. 89^th Street. I did not mention but should record my experiential observation that she was difficult. I might have called her a beautiful bitch and then gone off on a discourse how all beautiful women are difficult or bitches, but using that label is taboo these days. Nonetheless it is worth recounting the ways that Miss Scotland was difficult. For one thing she had something called vaginismus, an involuntary spasm of the vaginal muscles which in shutting it quite tight made it very difficult to fuck, at least at first.

 

Whatever broad experience I may have had, this malady I encountered the night she came back after reading Steichen’s Family of Man and pulled her pants down, required both fortitude and patience to get past. The thing about beautiful women, though, is that they are inherently so attractive as to keep the testosterone flowing and pushing on, as they say.

 

Up in New York, parallel characteristics quickly appeared. She got off on digging her fingernails into my back enough to make blood run seriously, which I did not appreciate. In short as in most relationships particularly at the beginning and sometime all the way through, we remained for the first month, even though in constant contact, friendly enemies, sort of like mating tigers, but before, at least psychologically, the male tiger triumphs and the female tiger relaxes and prepares to reproduce, so to speak. But she was baby faced gorgeous and impossible not to be totally in love with.

 

But like I said, a bitch, excuse me.

 

I take her home at Christmas to meet the female and we have a not unusual fight on the bus ride from New York to Boston. After arriving at the Greyhound in Boston, we separate with harsh words and she trots off in the direction of Tremont Street while I go my way and take the subway to Revere sans the girlfriend my family is waiting to be introduced to. I am quite broken hearted until the phone rings and it is her calling from a bar, where I head quickly towards to calm things down and get her back to Revere with me. She is perfectly charming at this point and I make it a point without thinking about it to center the entirety of the Christmas Eve celebration around her.

 

It is well worth it for this presumably kept her happy, which paid off when the true guests of honor arrive, my mother’s boss and his fiancé. They are mid-thirties. He is the new owner of Jack’s Drum Shop, a musical instruments store in Boston that was in the pre-rock and roll days the biggest on the East Coast. He was Jack, the original owner’s son-in-law, but after Jack died, his daughter divorced this fellow whose name escapes me. But he kept the business, which was at this time was just beginning to fall apart because of his ineptitude. He was dressed in a suit in contrast to my jeans that were accompanied by my long hair and beard, which my mother thoroughly despised. She started off paying him and the well dressed sanctified slut whom it was obvious was about to marry him principally for his money considerable respect.

 

I couldn’t stand the guy, let alone the treatment designed to play up his normalcy and wonderfulness and my 60s degeneracy. But this was quickly solved by Miss Scotland paying them and my mother zero attention while rubbing against me cheek to cheek and groping for my dick under the Christmas table set with shrimp scampi and other once a year holiday treats. All of the blood I had suffered on my back for her amusement was worth it for that and her dragging me outside on the patio disrupting the Yuletide festivities in such an erotic way, both panting naturally and loudly by the time we passed out the back door, pretty much destroyed the composure of the asshole and slut fiancé and my mother for the rest of the night as to make this possibly the best Christmas of my life.

 

Later that Christmas Eve evening, shortly after the bride and groom to be had left, my sister, Diane, whose story I will tell soon enough, gave me two tabs of LSD in the shape of little yellow submarines, actually, and the key to her apartment in Brighton on Commonwealth Avenue for which we departed. I don’t remember what or if sex when we got there at about 1 AM, but early the next morning, we took the LSD and waiting the usual half hour or so for the effect to take hold. It did for me as I called her attention to the seeming extremely colorful Venetian blinds in the corner of the room that had no merit as wonderments other than the fact of their being in my line of sight while high on this hallucinogen.

 

But she was paying no attention to me as I spoke, totally absorbed with herself, one would guess in recall, as she sat on a windowsill with a look on her face that would have rivaled that of the young Queen Elizabeth on the day of her coronation. Whatever that distant look that completely walked past my existence in the room was, it prompted me to do something entirely spontaneous, which was to slap her hard across the face. At this she fell to the floor and started screaming. At the moment I was both totally chagrinned and ashamed for, not just for hitting her for no good reason, for I really felt I had none, but for doing it on LSD, which I knew after taking it 29 times before this, caused all emotions experienced to be greatly intensified.

 

My first thought was to shut her up for, though my sister was a student at the time, this was a generally middle class professional type apartment and it she kept screaming at that level, the entirety of the Boston Police Department would soon arrive to cart me off to Bridgewater for the rest of my life. Thankfully she stopped almost immediately when my hand touched her mouth. And so strangely, I thought at the moment, she looked into my eyes with the softest most beautiful eyes I had seen up to that time.

 

Only for a moment. Then we both got up and, I feeling so guilty, and apologized a thousand times. I really felt what I had done to be so horrible and unfair. In ten minutes, I made it clear that, of course, it would only make sense that she left me forever and moved out of our apartment the minute we got back to New York City and that we should leave Diane’s apartment immediately and be on our way. And off we went.

 

The rest of the story was particularly eventful, though, because we were just at the beginning of a trip on some very powerful LSD and usually one does not venture into the unknown when high on this chemical brain stimulator. By the hand of some clever God in need of amusement, it was snowing a bit that night even as we left Revere for my sister’s apartment and on this Christmas Day after it had stopped, the sun was shining blue in the sky and the world was truly a beautiful scene that morning when we stepped out the door.

 

My father’s Volkswagen was covered in snow enough to need digging out. When I got the shovel in my hand from the trunk in the front, though, Miss Scotland, insisted through the window that she would do it. OK. Perhaps it was some manifestation of a deep and previously unexpressed feminist attitude in her. I remember watching her through the car window struggling awkwardly with the snow and looking adorably cute doing it, when a young student walked past and offered to do it for her. He took the shovel and spent the next fifteen minutes shoveling us out while I watched from inside trying so hard to suppress the smile the occasion would have called for had you been watching the scene in a movie, but would never have unsuppressed for fear of hurting the kid’s feelings for he had gotten himself into this absurd trap by reacting to Miss Scotland’s adorable looks that morning particular sweet in that vulnerable way that could have only been produced by my having slapped her in the face atop of high octane LSD and once the shovel was in his hand not knowing how to change the scene without making a total fool out of his initially falling in love with her and taking the shovel.

 

She and I said nothing during the fifteen minutes. After he finished, we drove out onto Commonwealth Avenue and proceeded for no more than five minutes when a tire went flat. Fortunately a gas station was within sight and open this Christmas Day and I had no problem arranging for the tire to be repaired in a half hour’s time despite being high on acid. The kid fixing it directed me to a diner around the corner where we could grab a cup of coffee while waiting.

 

It was a archetypal workingman’s diner complete with a handful of factory types in it despite it being Christmas Day. Whether they could sense she was distressed or because she looked so beautiful, stares came, very pointedly. Mind you I am bedecked in log hair and a beard at this time and this was years before workingmen types began to take up the style. Their stares, whatever their intent, made her very nervous. And this caused me to feel and act very protectively, basically staring back with a feeling of murder in my soul if these assholes did not mind their own fucking business. When you have that actual urge to kill if necessary in your heart and on your face, people do pay attention, and left us alone.

 

On the ride back to New York City on the bus, a good number of middle age, dominant personality, proto-dykes, most likely married and also going to New York City and presumably from there tried to interact with her, repeatedly. It was clear she didn’t want it and I was very deft at keeping this different sort of bitches away from her. She packed her things quickly. I remember none of that but 40 years later can never forget putting her in the cab that was taking her to her friend’s house and away from forever. I felt entirely that I deserved this fate for hitting her that way unprovoked, so much so that I took it to be a crime that no amount of apology could forgive.

 

My heart was crushed. On a subway ride once, she looked around and seeing a sharply dressed New York City girl said, “These girls are so beautiful here,” to which I replied that she three times more beautiful than anybody in New York. How objective that judgment was, I don’t know, but the point is that I thought her that beautiful, which is an indication of how much I loved her and how painful losing her was. The holiday week was bad enough to have thoughts of throwing myself in the East River cross my mind briefly, that level of sad. The worst night was New Year’s Eve. I don’t remember my thoughts, but I do remember my feelings, death stop the pain.

 

Then at 2 AM, the door bell rang. Unwilling to speculate for a second, I ran downstairs to open it. It was her. “I think I love you,” she says in this adorable Scottish brogue.  This was remarkable, of course. And as remarkable for all of you who would rather not hear tales that contradict your rationalizations, sex with her that night and for the next three months, was also remarkably different.

 

“How did ye know that?” she sputtered when I put my finger up her ass. What she meant if it needs to be clarified is how did I know that really turned her on. Well, to be entirely honest, I knew it from Judy, the lingerie model, whom if I fucked her 2000 times, about 1500 with some form of pleasing her ass. This included fucking her in the ass a half dozen times, which quite drove her mad. Why not more times that way, then? Though I was very sexually aggressive with her, she was overall dominant in the relationship. How do I define that? I needed her so much to love me that I’d of amputated by leg without an anesthetic to make her happy.

 

In a way my sexual aggressive gave some balance. She could piss me off in the most insulting way when she is in her bitchiest moods, which she was half of her waking hours. She couldn’t cook anything. She burned oatmeal and she burned chicken. If it would be going too far to resort to the classic line that she couldn’t even boil water, it wouldn’t be very far. And it hurt her that she couldn’t cook.

 

Once she made spaghetti and meatballs, trying real hard to make it come out perfect because I was Italian. She worked a good part of the afternoon trying to get the meatballs right. I was primed to say “it was great!!” before I ever put a forkful in my mouth. But the meatballs were so garlicky that Francis the Talking Mule couldn’t have eaten them without complaining. I downed two, trying not to involuntarily spit out the second one, saying, “Just delicious,” but she became suspicious from the look on my face that something was wrong. It could also have been from her tasting them herself.

 

“You’re just saying that!” It was clear that we were getting close to the Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca (See YouTube) moment. “You’re just saying that!!” two decibels louder.

 

“OK, OK, they’re fucking terrible!” Her plate is thrown at me, this in the days before melmac plates, and the shards of glass fly off the kitchen wall behind me. Easily she could start scratching or punching next, unless I got the first one in and started strangling her, never enough to cause a mark, after which we’d make love for 36 hours. And good, too. Well you can’t do it more or less non-stop for 36 hours if it’s not the best.

 

Anyway, after I slapped Miss Scotland, really not a professional model but who looked just like one, which is why I always called her Miss Scotland, she was transformed from a vaginismus plagued page out of Kraft Ebbing to hot Pizza with Prosciutto and black olives. And she too had a hot ass. All of this came about because I had dominated Miss Scotland. This cannot be pure pathology, kids. Fags, at least the subordinate ones take it up the ass. Presumably they like it there. And it is the subordinate fairy type who likes it this way.

 

And you know that the word honeymoon has direct connotations of ass fucking. The Chinese do it this way during the honeymoon. And so did the Romans. It’s a dominance fuck, pure and simple. Dominant woman don’t like it, but the one’s you dominate do. Up to some point. It is the consequence of violent courtship, when the two, male and female, are fighting in whichever way to see which of you is the Supreme Court if differences can’t be settled in any other way. Once harmony sets in, the drive to doing it that way is lost for the most part, but it serves its purpose in the courtship stages. Right girls?

 

The only problem was that the days altered with Miss Scotland just as they had with Judy. On all the even days, we fucked like the proverbial rabbits in heat, but on the odd days, we fought like proverbial cats and dogs. Enough to drive you insane! Three months of this until finally I have a friend turn me on to cocaine. In truth coke is great sex stuff. That’s what people use it, dummies. Not crack coke, which is dangerous at all times, not snort coke. But coke has its downside, too. On the even days, when the sex light is ON, whew, that’s some fucking. That’s why everybody in Mexico who can afford it uses cocaine, federal police, school superintendents, even the parish priest.

 

But on the odd days, when the fight light in ON, the increase in aggression is not worth making any jokes over. She still goads the same way. I react too strongly. By the time the fight is over, I hate myself. She doesn’t have to complain. I can see I have put marks on her beautiful face. I hate myself. The guilt is like the hand of a monster, who won’t let go. My primitive credit-blame mechanism blames her for goading me into it. Get out, I say. I don’t need somebody I have to do that, too. Get out and don’t ever come back.

 

There are a couple of dozen things you never forget, words and pictures. This one is of her going down the stairs saying, “You really mean it,” in a complete little girl’s voice, the hurt showing through like the moon in the middle of the month. “Yes, get out. I don’t want to ever see you again!”

 

I never did. Did it hurt? Well full year later, when I thought I saw her in Amsterdam, Holland, my heart melted and then dropped into a canal when I saw it wasn’t her. But it was different this time. I really loved this one as much as I had Judy. So I felt or I thought, if I could fall in love once and lose it and then fall in love again and lose it, I could probably fall in love a third time, and a fourth and a fifth. Somehow I had conquered the Heartbreak Hotel syndrome for good.

 

Now I must add something very important to this, for just as man does not live on bread alone, so spirit does not live on sexual success alone. And this is the key to happiness for all of you reading this that have the sense to understand that I am not making this shit up and that, as one good week watching every program on the Animal Planet channel will tell you or reading Lorentz’s masterwork, On Aggression, if you are sufficiently high brow or technical, that aggression is a normal part of courtship and that the bigger, larger stronger gender, the male invariably wins, if there is to be any sex at all. Note that females are generally smaller than males so that in the days before primitive tribes could pay police to enforce the will of the group, the large cave man beat the smaller cave woman if sex was the issue and she was reluctant. Yep, rape, in the limit of resistance and in the limit of the overpowering.

 

Now let us ask if the woman likes to be raped and if there is anything to the locker room talk that women like to be raped and that it is not unusual for a women to have rape fantasies. Well, I don’t really know because I have never out and out raped a woman. But I will say that there is something that runs quite contrary to standard cultural thinking in women getting quite hot between their legs when they are overpowered in whatever way.

 

This is not illogical if you know anything about evolution and genetics. The aggression is a test. If the female, who is invariably physically smaller, cannot beat the male, little her, he has to nothing more than lion food. Of course, the animals don’t kick the crap pout of each other as human boys and girls do at their worst as I was part of at times. But the latter over the top beatings take place because of the totally screwed up conditioning put on sex in civilized humans particularly in Western Christian culture. I was not the fault of Miss Scotland’s vaginismus. It was not my fault that Judy had never had an orgasm before I came on board. Once I counted for Ruth 100 different girls I had sex with and another time 150. Whatever the number, one things is for sure, most woman, especially middle class women, are quite fucked up down between their legs.

 

Anyway, the LSD I took with Miss Scotland was the last I ever took because what the LSD did was make me aware of things and the central thing you need to know is that one or the other sex is dominant in the relationship, equality being not just a fable but a mathematical impossibility, and that while no one has the right to say a female should be subordinate to a male, certainly not given the chowder shit that’s available as males nowadays, the reason that the light and the heat doesn’t turn is that men are mollycoddles who couldn’t fairy dominate a woman no matter what they consciously tried because they’ve all submitted to the castration surgery done to get them into the system and have successful careers taking it in the rear from their bosses, metaphorically or literally, to please their mamas.

 

I’ll try to clarify that by telling next what happened between me and Posner when I got back from Miami. Katz, the guy I had gone to Miami with knew I had gotten the answer to the bone growth problem and that trickled up to New York to Posner. But this time I was smarter. I didn’t tell the jerk what the mechanism was. He knew I had it and I knew he wanted it, so without having to punch him in the face as I had fantasized frequently when doing my pushups, I hit him good by keeping the recipe tight in my pocket and subtly laughing at him while he tried to wheedle it out of me.

 

How good did this make me feel? After a number of interactions with Posner after I returned to New York, I thought Posner looked kind of bad and said to John Termine one day, “You know, Aaron looks twenty years older.” To which Termine replied, “That’s because of you.”

 

That’s how it made him feel. How did it make me feel? At one level no different than had I kicked his as in physically, and if you’ve ever been in a physical fight that matters and you win, you know how that feels. Or if you haven’t because you are a nice person who would never think of getting in a fistfight either from the way your mommy raised you or from an anger management class, think of winning in a sporting competition. Does that feel good? Sure, but you had nothing against your competitor at the start of the game. When you do, it’s that much better, and if the guy fucked with you big time once, as Posner did with me, it feels really, really good to beat his ass in, however you might accomplish the beating, in my case academically.

 

How good? I had a friend, Richard. He turned out so horrible that I would never mention his last name. But I ran with Richard when I was young as a card playing buddy and drug connection, for Richard even though he started out with a full scholarship to Yale, was a college drug connection. After my playing my trump card on Posner, odd things began to happen.

 

Now I remember. The very day I first put it to Posner, his lab was on 71^st Street and York Avenue, I am just coming out of the lab and as I turn the corner on York and am walking up the street, I see a girl coming towards me about a half a block away at first with the prettiest smile on her face and I think to myself, “What a beautiful smile that girl has,” only to see as we get closer that she is smiling very directly at me. Now you may see, so what, big deal. But you don’t know New York City in the late 60s and early 70s if you say that. There used to be an ad for some household cleanser back then, Ajax, I think. It used to be said of New York City that if the White Knight came out of a manhole cover atop his horse in New York, nobody would even glance at him. To have somebody make contact with you casually on York Avenue was, indeed, noteworthy and a telling data point of what shaking off control could do for the spirit and for you probability of social success.

 

On that particular day, I was on my way up to have lunch and a beer with Richard in a 1^st Avenue watering hole no far from the lab. The waitress, young and cute as they tended to be in New York, nearly sat herself on my lap while taking our order. This sort of thing happened repeatedly. And it was not just socio-sexual successes. Somehow the genie had granted me charisma. If I was on an elevator and turned my head to the left, everybody in the elevator turned their head to the left. This is to say I was noticed, and noticed favorably.

 

Past some point Richard asked one night when we stayed up all night snorting coke and bullshitting with his brother from University of Pennsylvania and his brother’s girlfriend, “What the fuck is going on?” He was referring to my newly developed personality that seemed to snap its fingers and get whatever it wanted. I honestly didn’t know how it came about.  I was living my life, not doing a psychological analysis of it, so why all of a sudden I had this magical charisma, I didn’t know. But a full night’s talk until dawn made it clear to me that I had done revolution, revolution on Posner, and that is what brought this great feeling on.

 

Part of what filled in the blanks was a few underground or alternative newspapers of that day that had pictures showing the suspects in the Chicago 7 trial. That was the one where after the Chicago Police brutalized a thousand young people for protesting the murderous Vietnam War (57,000 dead on our side for no good reason and 2 million on the Vietnamese peasant side for less good reason) and the politics that sustained it, they indicted the people who ran protest for treason. What might have been puzzling considering that these guys were locked up and were facing years more of lockup were the smiles on their faces.

 

 

They looked rather like how I felt, so it was easy to make the logical transfer that what I was doing was what they were doing, namely making revolution, even if mine was individual revolution against Posner. At that moment from my own quite intense personal experiences of having been abused by Posner I could feel the pain of the poor Vietnamese who were being slaughtered with napalm for absolutely no good defensive reason while we protected an inarguably corrupt regime in South Vietnam, all for the sake of winning some bloody football game over the ideological superiority of the tyranny of capitalism versus the tyranny of communism. And I quite intensely felt the pain of blacks in the United States on the context of the civil rights battles that went on in the 60s.

 

Revolution is simple. It’s a resistance to control and abuse. I had no sense of it when I first started to change. While LSD did open my eyes to what was around me, what I had direct contact with, even if I grew up with a mind that was not very aware, it was a also a mind that, within the context of its limited awareness, thought for itself. I was not easily swayed by others arguments, especially when they contradicted by own observations and experiences. Indeed I was so much divorced from the political realities of that era at first that if I could not produce reasonable excuses for my political detachment I would be truly ashamed of myself.

 

The Vietnam War never made any sense to me. As a lad born in 1943 in the middle of World War II whose father was an active participant in the Pacific Theater in the island hopping battles that led ultimately to Japan’s defeat, that fact enhanced by two bags of war souvenirs he brought home including Japanese flags with bullet holes in them and a fancy Jap long distance sniper rifle replete with bayonet, it was hard to not be pro-American. But the Vietnam War as reported in the daily newspapers wasn’t like WWII at all, no clear why it was fought other than to beat the communists and no clear how it was being won. The thought to be against it crept up very slowly and that primarily from fraternity brothers being drafted or effectively forced to join and coming back, one with 56 stitches in his face, another, a very close friend of mine, with his testicles blown off and another yet, not at all.

 

Civil rights was also an entirely distant happening for me. The night the assassination of Martin Luther King was broadcast on television, I had just returned with a group of friends from taking LSD at a party at Amherst College and my response when turning on the TV and hearing of his death was little different than if I was listening to a commercial for laundry detergent while high on LSD. I was raised in the Boston area where the blacks were so cordoned off in Roxbury and on Columbus Avenue when I was a kid that I barely remember ever seeing one. I had no prejudice in me because I was just not the hating type. But I had little active empathy because I had no direct sense of the problems that oppressed other people.

 

My three year coming of age trip that centered about power situations that affected me directly and my feelings rebelling against them changed all that in a dramatic way. I attended a speech at Rensselaer in 1969 by the black revolutionary, Eldridge Cleaver. Having an independent mind as I said, I was not led into ideological thinking by what I heard but very much could feel his pain and anger as a black man. And in May 1970, a week after the Kent State killings, I was part of the Cambodia protest in Washington, DC, though I felt the political speeches given by the protest leaders were hardly radical enough to fit the situation for my sense of politics went beyond the war and the civil rights issue to the very structure of society that allowed the powerful in all areas to completely control the destiny and potential happiness of people in all areas of life, my sense of it in academics being but an instance of authority unfairly and overwhelmingly imposing itself on the individual.

 

All of this time I refined my thesis research on bone growth in order to finish it and get my PhD and get the hell out of school. My direction spirit wise was simply put, UP. I had the spirit of youth, the spirit of freedom reinstalled in me, so to speak and it felt like high school the second time around and on my terms. That spring of 1970 I felt as though I would not want to change places with anybody in the world or anybody who had ever lived. Whatever I may not have had, I did have one thing. I had my freedom and empirically, that success made me happier than I could have imagined, without exaggeration, Heaven on earth for a young man.

 

But that was all too easy. Doing revolution in a capitalist society is like being a runaway slave against it. It is very much not allowed. You know your place or you pay the price. I blatantly advertized my not staying in line, not knowing my place, by this time my scraggly beard and very long unkempt hair and dress. Towards the end of May, 1970, up in Posner’s lab on a very dark day in my memory either because the light was off in his office on a very cloudy day or because of the mood, the slimy bastard pointed to lines printed on the first page of my PhD thesis where the approving signatures of the doctoral committee were to go. Then he specifically placed his finger on his line and said in a tone that didn’t have to be menacing because the message was clear enough, “You know, I still have to sign your thesis for you to get your PhD.”

 

I walked down to 6^th Avenue that and passing by a skyscraper that was just being finished 60 stories high, thought, “It’s so big and I’m so little.” And with that pithy encapsulation of my position, I understood power. And with that I knew I had to make a decision, get down on my knees to him again, for that was the content of his message, or give up my PhD. It took perhaps a minute and a half to make up my mind, really an easy decision to make. The pleasure of my being the free me had been so great and the displeasure of being this potentate’s lackey so great that I had no problem whatever of giving up the PhD, of dropping out of graduate school but with one credit left to go if that is what had to be done.

 

This enormous step of giving up what I had worked hard for, for so many years I had one last chance of avoiding. The very end of May I rented a car and drove up to Rensselaer in Troy to talk with the intent of talking to my other committee members about Posner. What I found when I got there is that I had essentially had the black spot put on me. Not just with the professors, but with other graduate students, everybody knew I was “gonna get it,” and nobody I had contact with seem to have any feeling about it other than glee that I was about to be put in my place, the facts about my thesis discovery not considered in the least.

 

I drove back to New York City that afternoon at high speed and the next morning took a taxi to JFK Airport and bought a ticket to Paris with the intent of going eventually to Africa after buying a motorcycle in France. When the girl at the ticket counter asked me if I wanted return trip ticket, I told her no, I wouldn’t be returning.   As to whether my heading towards that jungle continent was inspired by the Tarzan books or by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s biography, Day on Fire, I am not sure. All I know was that I wanted to get away from the USA so badly that the feeling of relief when the plane got off the ground was overwhelming, as though I had just escaped a fire breathing dragon about to destroy me.

 

 

The good feeling I had in leaving came not just from my rebelling against the system, as it was called back then, but from my upbringing, for much of what we are and much of what our fate is, happy or unhappy is plugged into us by our parents in the early years of our upbringing. In the 60s this was acknowledged and the basis of what was called then the generation gap. On one occasion upon coming home to Revere from Troy, NY, and the bus pulling into Boston just about at five o’clock when I knew my mother was getting off work at Jack’s Drum Shop where she worked as bookkeeper, I stopped by there so we could both go home to Revere. When I walked in to the shop she was talking to two other employees. I moved close to her to kiss her as was entirely natural for a son coming home from college on a vacation who had not seen his mother in a couple of months.

 

She pulled back from my attempt to kiss her in a way that came close to intentional public derision of me in front of her co-workers because of my beard and long hair. I was shocked. But that is not an attempt to excoriate my mother for this relatively superficial slight for the downside of the relationship went much deeper in representing how a child is raised in a controlled society by parents controlled in that society in which a good part of what they are controlled for is to raise children who are amenable to being controlled. In that sense rebellion against the control of society is only possible when one also rebels against the control of the parent. And that control can be devastating when tampered with because the control has been laid down, often is subtle but yet powerful ways, from the moment of one’s arrival on the planet from birth.

 

A son talking about his mother has in inherent distaste about it, so I will tell the story instead through my relationship with my younger sister, Diane. She had just started high school when I started college and just started college when I started graduate school. Her boyfriend during the worst summer of my life in 1967 when the final break-up with Judy, the lingerie model, was near at hand and when all just about all my friends had graduated and left the area leaving me very alone on both counts was a fellow named Phillip DiModica.

 

I should not take away points from sister, Diane, for having him as her fiancé because he was my buddy in younger days before he started dating her. Mostly I played cards with Phillip and shot pool with him. We never talked much because Phillip simply didn’t say very much, at least not of a philosophical nature. If this sounds like a trivial basis for friendship, playing poker until three in the morning when there was not much else to do, it had its pleasures for me when I in high school, especially because I usually won.

 

I took LSD with my sister first. If all this LSD stuff seems like the tale of somebody who should be principally labeled as a drug taker, it certainly didn’t operate like that at the time. Indeed most recently, in an article on msnbc.com entitled “Scientists Suggest Fresh Look at Psychedelic Drugs” 08/18/10, and a couple of others in the news I noticed earlier this year, it is made clear that LSD has potentially great healing powers. With me, that was certainly the case.

 

My sister was always a beat down sort, self-described as morbid. This was not strange given her treatment by our mother who was a complete control freak, who lacked loving parents herself and did everything possible to get that social approval she missed both from and through her kids, me, Diane and our younger brother, Bob. IN that regard she raised us both to respect and value her as the Queen of Hearts of the household and to be good citizens who would one day become, for me, a successful professional and for Diane, a successful, morally upstanding wife who married well, this the typical goal for women back in those pre-feminist days.

 

The summer of 1967 was spent traveling home to Revere, MA, most weekends to get very drunk on gin and tonic for the weekend with Phillip and my sister as I was otherwise alone and without friends in Troy, NY. By the time summer, 1968 had come around, I was well on my way to becoming the new person I describe above and took LSD with my sister one day home in our mother’s house.

 

Two dramatic things happened while we listened to the music of the Steve Miller Band over and over again. One of them is that I got heavy with my sister into the reasons why I smoked two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. The cause of the need to smoke that came to mind was girls. When I was around them, I chain smoked incessantly. Why? I was afraid of something about them. What was I afraid of? I was afraid of their rejection. Part of that had certainly to do with my mother. In the masterpiece movie, The Truman Show, Truman is selected from a set of kids rejected by their mothers at birth who are looking for the rewards offered for giving up their child for this social experiment.

 

The point I’m trying to make isn’t whether I was like Truman, but hat mothers do exist who basically reject their kids at birth and raise them basically for whatever rewards society offers to raise the kids in a way agreeable to society. To my mother, as, I think it is fair to say, for many American mothers, it’s what their kids can do for them and not what they can do for their kids, that matters. This is not frowned on by society, for such mothers (and fathers, too, though not mine, the saving grace in my life) who raise offspring obedient to the rules and successful in that regard are well thought of and rewarded in that vein, and very much so.

 

So our mom, as typical as all the other moms in our middle class neighborhood from any objective sense I had of that cesspool of middle class normalcy, was a mother who did not give out love unconditionally, but quite conditionally, like a benevolent prison warden or rehab shrink, when we danced the tuned she played to make us good puppets on her string.

 

Whatever the source of my fear of rejection by women, mother, my experiences or some characteristic of women from the way they are trained socio-sexually, it was real, so I was able to state up front during the acid trip. Almost immediately after my connecting up this fear of rejection with my compulsion to have a cigarette in my hand or in my mouth, I said to my sister, “But I’m not afraid of it anymore.”  And presto-chango, believe it or not, that realization in combination with my seeing my lungs depicted on the ceiling dark and clogged with tobacco tar, had me stop stopping cold, never to smoke another for the rest of my life. It wasn’t that quitting was easy, for after that I never had any urge to smoke.

 

Some credit would have to be given to my kid sister, I think, for it always helps to have someone supportive like that around, even if for no other reason than giving passive support. That was sort of a built in factor in having a kid sister from the 50s because that’s the way families were raised in my Sicilian immigrant neck of the woods. For better or for worse as to how it affected her, Diane was like a mini-wife and raised, if not to an inordinate degree, to give me respect at some level, to provide emotional support, this aspect of our relationship controlled by the traditional European-American culture of that time and most directly by my mother, who quite controlled most everything we children did and thought.

 

That she did with me was obvious in the five month interim between when Posner effectively failed me in my PhD exams the first time and passed me the second time. I said that I acceded to this game without resistance because I could find no way to resist. But that is not entirely true. At one point I took a trip to the New School of Social Research in New York City and spoke to the head of the Psychology Department about switching my PhD from Rensselaer in Biophysics to their school in Psychology. I remember being quite emotional when I talked to him, almost openly showing the desperation I felt in being under the powerful and abusive thumb of Posner and my thesis committee. He said quietly, “Why don’t you finish up your PhD in your science area first and then we can consider any next step you might want to take.”

 

I bring that up, though, only to provide a powerful realization I had when I thought about switching in order to get away from the Posner trap, and that was that the only reason I was going for my PhD at all was to please my mother, which was the primary reason I did all of the structurally important things in my life. The point again, excuse this extended digression needed to make it, was that my mother exerted near total control over us, her children, in all the important things.

 

I should also point out that this control was not inculcated in wholly benevolent ways. While my mother was not a corporal punishment addict as many mothers are, the beatings I got from her in fits of anger I have clear memories of along with my sense of submitting to her afterwards, for what else does a five year do after he is slapped in the face from an enraged adult. And she had other means to control that were just as despicable, if not worse.

 

The point is, excuse that repeated expression, that LSD, as it was getting me to rebel against unfair authority, also gave me the spirit to resist my mother’s control, and that in a significant way. For during this acid trip, I developed a considerable affection for my sister, for she was quite under my mother, at least as much as I was, if not more. However she was treated as a child to inculcate my mother’s great dominance over her, something I never saw directly, I clearly remember my mother slapping and punching my sister in the face if she came home late from a date. And it showed in my sister, generally.

 

She was the kind of person, who always doubted herself, as a girl that her ass was too big and her this was too that and so on, which made her very susceptible to what people thought of her, which is dangerous to confidence because generally if you don’t think a lot of yourself to begin with, nobody else is likely to think much either. But on that acid trip, I paid her a lot of attention. Well, it wasn’t a Dr. Phil thing.  I wasn’t trying to cure her of anything. I just liked her. As I said I stopped smoking cold turkey without pain that day with her as the mid-wife of ti all, even if not in an active way.

 

How could I not like her and think the world of her? And it took on her. By the end of the trip, she looked like a different person. Her walk changed. I remember that so clearly. And she looked beautiful. Her looks prior to that were pretty, on a good day, and plain, on a bad, but not beautiful. At the end of that trip, and it stuck, she looked beautiful. You might say I fell in love in her that day. It did me a lot of good. Not just in not smoking cigarettes anymore, but also in boosting my confidence with women after my breakup with Judy. You might say she was the first girl I was able to fall in love with again after Judy, really a resurrection.

 

And it did her a wonder of good, too, for her change was of the same magnitude in its own way as my stopping smoking cigarettes instantly after a two pack a day habit for ten years. My mother did not appreciate this in any way for she was a control freak who survived by drawing the blood from others. And so a rivalry quickly formed between me who was rebelling against our mother for my own sake, then further in competition with my mother for my sister’s affection. This is much as a man has with the mother of any girl he loves, really to become the primary person in her life in place of her mother. This is what makes standard marriage so difficult and the brunt of a thousand mother-in-law jokes. And why it was that the two most beautiful and sexual females I had were no friends of their mothers, estranged from their families to begin with, while the others I mentioned, Annette, Jeannie, Priscilla and even the brief, Kathy Conklin were clearly underlings and under control of their mothers to a degree that no man would or could ever become central in their lives like that.

 

After this great success for both me and my sister, Diane talked about the wonder of the LSD with Philip, her fiancé and he asked me to take it with him for the change in Diane was both obvious to him and a bit of trouble, for Phillip, as we shall see, was a control freak of his own sort, rather connecting with Diane in more or less the same way as my mother controlled her, which was to subtly disapprove of her in enough ways to make her susceptible to his approval, which she concomitantly developed a dependence on.

 

As I said earlier with respect to Kathy Conklin’s relatively controlled acid trip, most people open up on LSD. Phillip DiModica was entirely closed, so much so it made no sense to me, especially given that my trip with him was #20 and one develops a certain feel for tripping after that many of them, a feel that told me that something was seriously amiss in his behavior. There was. He was basically faking it, feeling something but not wanting to indicate it to me. He was generally that way.

 

Some humans are you-man. Others are not. It’s an interesting word if you break it down like that, in its homophonic connotations. That is to say, what makes us human is our sociality, the “you” in “you-man”. It takes some level of intuitive trust in people to be human. Some people trust very little or not at all. My mother-in-law of the past 37 years, the wife of my father-in-law, a fundamentalist minister, whom neither my wife, Ruth, or I have had anything to do with, said to Ruth when she was nearing her death and wanted, in her 93 year old near senility, to give her Ruth good advice, “Never say what you think!”

 

Conservatives generally mistrust, which is why they come off as less than humanistic, less than “you-man.” That’s because they are less than human, they trust nobody for the most part. Phillip was a natural in this area. His father, Frank, a mid-level executive for the old ATT, was a consummate mama’s boy who looked something like Frank Sinatra, but a half-point sweeter. He drank a six pack of beer every day after work and fell asleep in front of the TV set, like clockwork And his mother always looked like a perfectly coiffed fashion model, sexual but distant like her eyes never focused.

 

Shortly after I got Phillip talking on the LSD trip by shouting at him, “What the hell are you doing? Stop playing games with me!” we wound up at his house. The first things he started talking about in earnest and with some excitement were the colors of everything in the combination kitchen-living room we were in, all ochre, mustardy brown, musty colors, like you might see back 40 years ago, he said.

 

He pulled open the dish washing machine whose interior was a bright blue to make the point. “See, it’s the only bright color in this dreary place my mother decorates to look like when she was a child.” Then he pointed to the console TV on a stand it the room.

 

“Look at the goddamn thing!” It was completely covered with colored sequins. “She spent hours and days carefully pasting sequins all over the goddamn thing!” And he went on further to say that she spent all her days shopping at boutiques for little knickknacks that filled the shelves and all available places in the house. Phillip’s parents were divorced when he was one year old and he spent the next three years of his life cared for in the family of his uncle, who was the Revere Chief of Police, Gillis Collins.

 

By the time Phillip came back to his mother and father after they reunited, I speculate that for whatever reasons he did not trust anybody. Unlike me and my brother and sister, he did not call his mother and father mom and dad or anything like that, but by nicknames, Sally and Sam. He was rude to them incessantly and they accepted it, no doubt from the guilt they felt in abandoning him when he was a baby. He rather owned them.

 

The family always seemed different. A kid as I was doesn’t think strange because they still had the superficial trappings of what you’d consider a normal family. Phillip became a millionaire later in life, a chapter we’ll talk about later, if that is any evidence of normalcy. But, in any event, what he was reeling off to me on this acid trip made some sense out of why he and his family seemed different or strange.

 

As he continued to speak and unravel, he came near to having tears in his eyes and a pleading tone blanketed everything he was saying. And then he came to the punch line.

 

“I have sex with that bunch of car guys I hang around with.”

 

“You what?!!”

 

I just didn’t believe him the first moment I heard him say it. For one thing I had little idea of what he was talking about, queer sex not being a subject anybody I knew chit chatted about. And the very idea of it seemed absurd. Phillip was a big strong kid. I threw the shot put in high school, but Phillip, who played no organized sports, threw my 12 pound practice ball four feet further then my best distance with little effort the first time he tried. And he was generally aggressive, always wanting to win at things, though I recall a particular situation where he surprised me when, challenged in a fistfight, he backed down to a bully I immediately engaged with because of the taunts the kid was throwing our way by taking the balls off the pool table Phillip and I were playing on.

 

“Yes, it’s true,” he repeated about six times until I slowly nodded my head up and down and accepted what this guy I had known for eight years and who was engaged to my sister was telling me. It made great sense out of why Phillip was so closed mouth all the time. I didn’t despise him for what he was saying. Rather my sense was to help him, for he so completely broke down after revealing himself that he certainly seemed like he needed help and was asking for it. But, to be honest, I had no idea how to help him, other than to support him as a friend.

 

He dropped this bomb on my sister a couple of weeks later when the two of them were out to a high priced New Year’s Eve party, while they are dancing. She literally fell on the floor. She wanted to help him, too. Later they took acid together. He destroyed her. She said the room went black. I should have destroyed him and gotten him away from us when I had the chance, for I had great control over him after he revealed himself to me. Diane relapsed into being my mother’s chattel. I left her behind when I fled to Paris on the plane that day in late May, 1970. There wasn’t much else I could do. I was lucky to escape the fire breathing dragon myself.

 

Relevant postscript to the Phillip story. During the time when I thought I could straighten Phillip out and in talking to him got to know him, he casually let me in on the various contrivances he used to “beat” people. One of them he touted was to say something to a gullible person that had no meaning whatever and have that person tried to respond to that nonsense as though there was some sense in it as makes a fool out of him in not understanding your disguised hostility to begin with. He said he used that technique to make a total ass out of a philosophy professor and get an A out of him when he deserved a D. This talking gibberish loudly and repeatedly to naïve left wingers is so much the technique of today’s right wingers that you have to know they’re all a bunch of aggressive faggots underneath their pseudo-self-righteous skins.

 

 

Europe was a new life from the moment I walked through customs at the Paris Airport. I intend to buy a motorcycle in France and drive forthwith to Africa. However absurd the idea in retrospect, my overall mood was dominated by the thought of escape and Africa, the setting of many an escapist tale I had been exposed to in books and movies, seemed the right place. Paris was friendly enough, but I quickly found out that motorcycles came with a high excise tax and I was advised at a shop to go to Germany where I was allowed as an American tourist to buy a Honda duty free. So off I went on a train to Frankfort, Germany.

 

Deutschland was as unfriendly as France was friendly. My long hair and beard put me automatically into the “bad” category in generally conservative Germany, so much so that I couldn’t get a hotel room in Frankfort until I was directed to a cubbyhole hotel for Algerian workers. It would be a two week wait for the Honda, I found out, so I left Germany for Amsterdam for what had to be a better experience than the Third Reich treatment I was getting.

 

Amsterdam provided a cheap room where I could hide and think. As a renegade of sorts and very much looking the part, the contact I made with European women was flattering for I was aggressively flagged down by quite good looking girls a number of times, potential offerings I walked away from because my ego, if I am saying it right, was fragile. By that I don’t mean so much my confidence, for if I were lacking in some form of basic confidence in myself, I could never have made the great leap away from my PhD and America to begin with.

 

But my situation was so new that I didn’t know who this new me was. So I spent most of the two weeks in the room thinking about everything that had happened, trying to explain it all and the feelings I had to myself. My emotional response to everything was so primitive that the characterization of myself as a talking animal came readily to mind. I tried writing down my thoughts. I was no writer. By that I mean I had never tried writing down my ideas, and all I managed over two weeks time was two sides of a page, which concluded that the only person who could explain it all was a biologist, this thought springing from my sense that I, and everybody in the world were just talking animals. Interestingly I did not think for one moment that I was that professional biologist because of having abandoned the PhD, not just as a degree I left behind, but as anything that had to do with my life in any way anymore.

 

Finally a phone call to Germany told me that the Honda had come and in two days I was driving the bike on the Autobahn at 120 mph, an exhilarating experience, particular given that I had never been on a motorcycle before and barely understood how to operate the pedals and hand controls. My end stop on the highway that first day was Karlsruhe, a site of a US Army base. You might think as I was an American that this would have been a plus, but, no, here the hotelier became furiously angry upon seeing my long hair and beard and near threw me bodily out of his hotel.

 

In the end I had to go the Police Station and show them the $2000 I had in my pocket, whereupon they escorted me to some other hotel and told the desk clerk that I was OK. The shortest route to Africa was to continue down through Germany and over the Swiss Alps through northern Italy to the French Riviera along the coast into Spain and thence to the Gibraltar area where a ferry would take me and my shiny new motorcycle to Morocco. But I despised Germany so much by this point that exited quickly the next morning to the travel southward rather down the Eastern backbone of France.

 

Vive le difference! As I said, Paris was very friendly and the city of Strasbourg where I bought a tent so I wouldn’t have to depend on hotels anymore very, very friendly. I bought the camping supplies and some motorcycle accouterments at a motorcycle shop clerked by two quite beautiful girls deliciously dressed in black short shorts. Seeing anything like this in America would get one automatically to proceed with caution because of that underlying fear of rejection I spoke about earlier.

 

“Vous êtes un aventurier?” they asked in a bubbly tone, “Are you an adventurer?” I was taken by their friendliness, which after the half hour it took me to shop because I knew little French, seem to flow over into asking me if one or both could go off with me. I suppose I was an adventurer or close to it in just having given up a PhD to tell my boss to shove it and then head for Africa on a motorcycle. And I supposed it showed, for with extended analysis on the subject, it did take a lot of balls to do it. But mostly, as I found out the following weeks, the difference lay in the French girls themselves.

 

I had intended on spending a few days getting down to southern Spain and right across to North Africa, but it was summertime and it seemed that all of young France took their vacation in Spain where things were cheap. In the end, I met French girl after French girl running down the coast of Spain and stayed there for three months after which I could say without prejudice that a primary reason I felt rejected by American girls is because they are complete assholes, poison, game playing farts.

 

Joy is a summer of European women. The few American women I met who were on vacation in Europe stood out quite like ballooned sore thumbs, ugly in a shot by comparison to the average European woman, almost all of which could be described as pretty women. What a relief! Later I will explain this mathematically, that there are two membranes in society that keep the working classes downcast in the presence of their money mad capitalist masters. One is the police who knock you on your head and lock you in a cage if you dare punch your boss in the nose in any way, shape or form. And the other are the witches who are raised to castrate the spirit and vigor in a man by employing calculating power trips that deserve considerably more than an erotic spanking.

 

Whatever one’s opinion of the truth of these generalizations, they were entirely my experience in Europe. I should complete the picture my also saying that you could spot an American couple at 100 yards, a long enough distance to just barely make out the dominant whine of the female and the submissive peeping of the asshole American male she was with, husband, boyfriend or date.

 

I will spare the reader any bragging of the details as I slowly made my way down to the port city of Algeciras, Spain over the summer where the ferry crosses to Ceuta, Morocco other than to say that my adventurer’s adventures caused me to lose my urgency to escape to Africa. One or perhaps two other things got me to change my mind about going into the jungle. The perhaps thing was an encounter I had with a Dutch national in a Swiss campground, the day after I left Karlsruhe, Germany.

 

Upon entry to it I noted a fellow wrapping a large plastic sheet around his and his wife or girlfriend’s campsite to give them privacy. It was my first time using a tent because growing up in suburban Boston I was strictly a city boy. I had never seen a cow, not in the flesh anyway and I had never slept in a tent, let alone put one up. He saw me from the distance struggling. I was about to drive spikes through parts of the tent that were distinctly not made to be perforated when he came over to offer help. I said I would not brag, but I should make clear that I was a formidable looking person by this time, my long hair and beard giving me an appearance like a tough looking Che Guevara. Surprisingly after an exchange of few words, for he spoke English as many Dutch do, he recognized me for what I was, a young man on the run from the ties and ropes of civilized control. I had a natural respect for him, also, partly because of his very pretty wife and partly because of the way he carried himself.

 

“I left it all behind when I was a young man, too,” he made clear. So, he understood what I was running from. He then explained that he owned a boat shop in Utrecht that employed five workers. He sold yachts.

 

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” I offered in solace because he sounded like he was complaining about something that he had failed to get.

 

“No,” he said, “Five men under you, five men over you, it’s all the same.” I got it. I got the message. You know the song, “I get by with a bit of help from my friends.” His information was a bit of help. He was saying that there is good reason to run, implying that what I was doing made plenty of sense.

 

“But you will go back,” he said. When I heard those words, I thought he was saying that he was unable to succeed in his escape, which brought him back to Utrecht and a situation that he had made clear did not satisfy him. Down in Algeciras the days before I was ready to take the ferry I recalled what he had said and interpreted it rather as saying that there was really no place to escape to.

 

The clincher was a dream that reinforced this sense of reality that I had the night before I was ready to go. I started dreaming, or perhaps better said, remembering my dreams, in 1970 while I was still back in America. Some seemed to explain things, to give real information in one way or another. The dream I had before I was about to ship off to Africa was very clear. I am wrestling with a fraternity brother, one who was on the Rensselaer wrestling team in real life, a good wrestler, when he begins to gain the upper hand and win. At which point I begin to raise my hands and smile and say, OK, that’s enough, you win. But in the dream he flashes a broad grin and keeps coming at me, you might say, with the clear intent of breaking me in half.

 

I did not have to be a biblical Joseph to interpret the dream. It said clearly you can’t run from your troubles. If you try, you lose.

 

Then what to do? I made up my mind immediately after understanding the dream to write my ideas down as a revolutionary, the main point of which was that unhappiness comes mostly from the control put on people in civilized societies and then the path to happiness was resisting that control, as I had done, which certainly increased my happiness many fold. My sense of revolution was deepened by my long stay in Spain, which at that time was run by the dictator, Francisco Franco. Rather than search into memory to recall my sense of things and adventures as I turned back in the other direction, I will include next an email I sent to my colleague and friend, Van Thompson, who was attending a dental meeting in Barcelona at the time of the email.

 

From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 7:26 AM
To: van.thompson@nyu.edu
Subject: Catching up w/ U in Spain,

 

Van: ...It is most interesting that you are Barcelona at this time. I am sure you were aware of the million people march there two days ago protesting Catalan inclusion in the nation of Spain, very unusual from our American point of view of what a nation is and should be. I can fill you in a touch about Spain to make some sense out of it for you.

 

My time in Spain back in 1970 was when Franco was still alive and Spain was a firm dictatorship. When I pulled up to the gates at the Franco-Spanish border in my motorcycle and long hair, I was almost not let in, the roll of $1000 American dollars stuck in my jean's pocket making the difference after an hour's heated arguing.

 

You have read Orwell, of course, and might understand that Orwell's acute political views, while of course having one foot in British bureaucratic socio-political construction, had the other in the Spanish civil war. Barcelona was a center of it. Whatever ideological prejudices may color one's interpretations, understand that Franco killed, hung by the neck, 200,000, mostly young, Spanish men, in the 12 months following the end of the Spanish civil war. An objective assessment that avoids ideological moralizing calls it mass murder, which is how the Catalan and Basque people feel about those things.

 

I was fortunate in that my direct experiences in Spain told me a clear story. I was not very long in Barcelona. I had bought a tent a few days before arriving there, the first one in my life as I was not a camping person, coming from Revere.  A tent to me was like the theory of relativity to an auto mechanic. Camped just outside of Barcelona and still finding out by trial and error what you bang into what to get a tent to stay up, I ran into a moderately fierce Mediterranean  storm, which blew my tent down in the middle of the night. Rescued by two campers from Sweden who shared their sturdy tent with me to spare me pneumonia from the pouring rain, I left Barcelona the next day.

 

Further south, Spain was Francisco Franco dominated Spain. I had a number of nose to nose run-ins with machine gun carrying Civil Guard dudes and some very weird experiences in the small towns in south central Spain I stayed in, a couple of them for two or three weeks.

 

In one where I had gotten to know the men in town enough to hang out at the bar-restaurant as "one of the guys" getting by with a mishmash of my shitty Spanish, their shitty English and a smattering of German I shared with one of the more world wise Spanish dudes.

 

One day I explored the outer perimeter of the town on the motorcycle and rambling down a poorly kept side road soon ran  into a collection of maybe a dozen bombed out homes. Weird. And weirder yet was to see two or three women in black widow's clothes flitting across the road from one house to another. Obviously this was some kind of remnant of the civil war. Back at the bar-restaurant at a table surrounded by six of my "buddies" I ask in my pigeon Spanish - what was that? All just stood up and walked away, not saying a word. That's how tight the fear of talking politics and reality were.

 

In the same vein and more vivid as a story yet was a side trip to a truly primitive Spanish village I ran down on an isolated dirt road in south central Spain. My Honda 450 was the biggest horse in this town where only one person owned a car, an aged tiny Citroen. The "pension" or family house hotel I stayed in got me two rooms (in order to discretely change the urinal when it was filled by my moving to another room with a fresh one in it) and three custom ordered meals a day for $2. This village had never seen an American let alone one with long hair and this bright shiny motorcycle.

 

I was coming into my own physically at that time and having had a few aggressive interactions with Spanish guys my age in the town that passed the test with flying colors, I was considered almost a young demi-God, somebody special, enough so to warrant me the attention of the whole town. For example, it was not strange to have 20 children peering through the window of the kitchen when I ate my meals. But mostly I was a source of pride for the woman whose quite huge house I was staying in.  Some sense of this may be gathered by where she insisted I park my motorcycle. My hostess would have never thought of leaving it outside. So on a whistle from her, a dozen kids picked the motorcycle up and carried it inside her living room.

 

I really wanted privacy to write for by this time I had turned away from going to North Africa on the strength of a dream and was trying to write up my revolutionary political ideas, most of which were based on the basic idea that pain in life derives mostly from abuse by authority as I had learned first hand from Posner stealing my material and bullying me and the only honorable resolution of that of giving up my PhD, which was not all that fun. So I preferred to stay in my room in this town and write my political ideas up.

 

An hour after supper the third night I was there my hostess called me down from my upstairs room. Waiting in her grand living room were no less than 80 people, all dressed to the nines, with a chair set up for me facing the lot of them, presumably to give some sort of a speech. My Spanish was limited mostly to asking for, "dos heuvos, por favor" for breakfast, and in this village, nobody knew a word of English. Still it was all smiles and super polite despite the near impossibility of my stumbling horrible pronunciations of the handful of Spanish words I knew.

 

After ten minutes of this, my hostess, possibly seeing that I was not a half bad linguist and keeping the crowd quite pleased with my efforts offered me a comb to comb my long hair as you might to somebody making a speech at an undertaker's convention who forgot to comb his hair before his talk. I am sure it was prompted especially by the fact that my hair was not just long but super unkempt, knotted and gnarled.

 

I indicated, no, that's OK. This prompted a quick question from my audience, particularly curious because as I am sure you have seen, the Spanish are neatly groomed people. Why is your hair long?

 

I hesitated for a moment and then said the word, "politico", to try to indicate that my motives for my not attending to my hair and for the rest of what I was doing was basically political. I will bet you your plane ticket home you cannot guess what happened next.

 

Everybody in the room, all 80 people, got up and near ran out the door. Early the next morning there was a knock at my upstairs room. Standing in the doorway were two Spanish soldiers, machine guns at the ready, and an officer type who demanded my passport in an intensely unfriendly way. I gave it. They checked it presumably and brought it back by the afternoon. I packed quickly to leave, fuck this place, my hostess whistling to what seemed like 100 school children vying with each other to carry my motorcycle back out to the street from her living room.

 

That really was most of Spain, if not so blatantly, friendly but intimidated people. At that point I made up my mind to head back to France, stopping off in Madrid to get a couple of repairs on the bike. But that all changed when I hit the city of Burgos heading north to France. This story really is crazy when I recall it. On the way up from Madrid on the highway there were soldiers on the side of the road holding machine guns and spaced every few hundred yards. Run the movie of it in your imagination, quite surreal when you see it for over a hundred miles. When I got to Burgos I find out why. Franco was coming down from his summer residence to Madrid.

 

I met a fellow in his 30s with a motor scooter at a gas station who started asking a thousand questions about the Honda as even the Spanish motorcycle cops did. This guy tells me Franco will be passing right in front of us very soon. And indeed, he did. Check this out. Three cars in front, convertibles carrying nasty angry faced looking dudes in uniform waving machine guns and shot guns and what not all about. Same in three convertibles to the rear of Franco's entourage, with Franco himself somewhere in between these in one of five limos all with their windows dark tinted so you wouldn't know which shell the pea was hidden under!

 

After he goes by my new friend who speaks some English and understands I am political invites me inside the bar that abuts the gas station. There I meet a dozen of his friends and when they find I am political, they treat me like, with so much brotherly affection and respect it almost makes me cry a bit when I think of it.

 

These guys fucking hate Franco. They are Basque and are not a drop scared to talk about politics openly.  Nicest people you would ever want to meet.  All the Basques were. I stayed in Basque country almost another month. Strong proud men, beautiful women, and beautiful healthy children, the fruit of a thousand years of resistance to tyranny and control, for it was explained to me that from their high mountainous perch, they resisted the conquering by the Romans and the Muslims that the rest of Spain did not.

 

The Basques are terrorists? Well, that's the point. It was easy for me to get the picture, because when I said fuck you to Posner and Johnson I went way up and was a happy young man, and one who had successes where he wanted to have them….

 

Peter

 

But it was impossible to write about revolution in Spain, not so much from apprehension of Franco’s Civil Guardia, but more so simply because I didn’t know Spanish worth a damn and having to concentrate on the language problem just to get by with people made it impossible for me to focus on writing about anything, so I decided to head back to Amsterdam where almost everybody speaks some English and you can get by with it.

 

 

Long hair was an impediment of sorts in Amsterdam, too. “No,” said the real estate agent as politely as she could, you can’t rent out here,” she meant in the sections where the good people are. That wasn’t so bad, though, because even though the apartment she directed me to was owned and run by a prostitute past her prime and full of Africans and Arabs, it was only $56 a month, and sitting atop a genuine canal that ran underneath my third story window. Just where a writer in a movie about a writer with little money was supposed to be!

 

I carried on at first with the same political rhetoric I had started in Spain, but quickly, within a week of getting there, I abandoned it for more scientific perspective on what I was trying to say, that unhappiness comes from control its abusiveness. I still had trouble writing my thoughts even when I changed to a science format, though.  It took a novel by the Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to clarify the problem and direct me to a solution. I always loved that guy’s books. They were written to describe Stalinist society, but the interactions between boss types and underlings that characterize the better part of all his works, to me, described America, and much better than anything that any American’s write.

 

That is not strange considering how American publishers are corporate big money enterprises no different that the corporate owned and run electronic media. Some radical ideas came out in the 60s, but that was only because the corporate Wall Street ruling class was caught unprepared for that kind of mass rebellion that caught them off guard. Since then they made the maze that much more impossible to run and blocked up all the exit holes with a near total effective censorship as has produced the gibble gabble, black is white ideas, you hear on TV and on the corporate sponsored Internet today.

 

Excuse the digression. Anyway, in one of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, he talks about the writer’s who are basically paid by the Soviet Union and under their control whose output is worthless because the writers are always looking over their shoulders at the Writer’s Union heads who’ll chop off their heads if they write anything contrary to the party line. It’s no different than today, except that out propaganda structure is considerably more clever in allowing some token and trivial rebuttal of the capitalist Christian line that somehow can actually pass off the lie that America is a representative democracy when all of its representatives are either millionaires or owned by millionaire’s and billionaire’s campaign contributions.

 

Anyway, what I got out of this clear description of Solzhenitsyn’s of the denial of any intellectual freedom was that in still nominally having the opportunity to return to Troy, New York to get my PhD, I automatically filtered everything I wrote through the five members of my thesis committee. Would that show them! Would this beat them! Would they approve of the way I said this or that? I knew I had to burn my bridges to get my mind free because hanging onto that way to crawl back into the system should I “fail” in my revolutionary endeavors made a fucking joke out of the whole thing. Whether the parallel was perfect or not, I could feel my thesis committee looking over my shoulder, so I sent them all the same letter.

 

Fuck you all, bunch of assholes.

 

No it didn’t say that, at least not in those words. I tried to make half of what I said sound moderately erudite. And the other half was taken up with a variety of fuck you’s. But the point was that the letters were quite insulting enough to have them individually and collectively erase my name forever from the list of eligible PhD candidates. At least I thought so, and poof went their ghosts from their perch over my shoulder.

 

There was one exception. While I was in Miami with Dr. Katz, I got to know his family. While now I might not have the best things to say about him or them, when I knew them they were just kids. I took a few guitar lessons when I was in Miami and then had my mother send down an electric base for their 13 year old, Talbot Katz, and introduced him to the same music shop where I was taking lessons. And the daughter, Andrea, maybe 15, was a cute kid, who turned on to me, so she acted, in a big way. So while I sent out the fuck you letters to all of them around Thanksgiving of that year, come near Christmas time, I sent the Katz family a telegram wishing them Happy Holidays.

 

The rule to follow was simple for me.  Don’t let others take advantage of you. Don’t take advantage of others. If you keep yourself guilt free and as pure as Jesus with innocents, you have no qualms about wanting to break the predators’ necks. But you have to be pure to the rule, no violating it for any reason. No exceptions. So I let Katz get by, fooled by the punk bastard as we will see later in the story. I hate him.

 

 

It didn’t really take a genius to see what to base your political views on scientifically. Political behavior is behavior, so you have to start from there. Nowadays evolutionary behavior is talked about often and with good reason, for like I said, we are just talking animals. I got the notion of an evolutionary basis of behavior mostly from three books I read in the late 60s. One I’ve brought up a number of times: On Aggression, by Konrad Lorentz, a true masterpiece that really tells you all you want to know about aggression especially how it connects up with reproductive behavior; African Genesis, by Robert Ardrey, a playwright and screen writer who translated and extended the anthropological science of the early 60s to understand man as a talking animal and a very aggressive one; and The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, a further and more thorough effort to understand man as a talking animal.

 

I particularly liked Morris because of a second book he wrote called, The Human Zoo, where he expressly talked about civilized man as a controlled species by parallels with lower animals locked in zoo cages. His last chapter in this book hit home directly by talking about how the work of graduate students was routinely stolen by laboratory bosses. He did not excuse it but rather understood it as an instance of the broader abusive control imposed on all people in society as a human zoo. He said too much in this book and was pretty much dropped from sight by the powers that be.

 

To these basic books that set my mind to thinking about behavior as a biological phenomenon, I added what I learned from formal coursework in genetics and evolution. When I started writing I seriously considered the anti-science no-nothing attitude of fundamentalists and conservatives that included back then the absurd creationist arguments against evolution and now the denial of greenhouse gas global warming that among other things is the obvious cause of the monstrous and devastating floods seen these days in Iowa and Tennessee and Pakistan.

 

This prompted me to explicate Darwinian natural selection in mathematical terms and to show that natural selection is a totally general process of differential birth and death rates that apply universally to all redistributive processes as includes the hydroxyapatite kinetics considered in Figures1&2 and Eqs3-5 and economic competitions developed readily from utility theory as will also be shown.

 

Rather than go through the evolution arguments in magazine language as went through my mind and writings during this one year period of work in Amsterdam, I am going to lay Darwinian selection out mathematically first and then go back to a magazine language discussion of it after Eq31 though I would still advise those readers who are not mathematics minded to yet skim lightly through the derivation that follows even if the meaning of the equations doesn’t immediately hit home.

 

The equations for natural selection that follow were developed by me and my family on our own only to find out that the classical population biologists of the turn of the 20^th Century had developed functions very much like it long before we did. Correspondence with professional biologists, Dr. Sean Rice of Texas Tech University, author of the primary graduate text used for the mathematics of evolution, Evolutionary Theory, and Dr. David Fitch of the Fitch Genetics Laboratory at NYU, make it clear that the equation we develop is theoretically firm and empirically verifiable.

 

Subject: Re: A Math Proof of Human Evolution?

From: Sean H Rice <sean.h.rice@ttu.edu>

Date: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 6:32 PM

To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

 

Dear Dr. Calabria,

 

Thank you for the letter….Your description of selection in terms of differential population growth is similar to that used by Fisher, Wright, and Haldane in the 1920s and 1930s [a good description is in "An introduction to population genetics theory" (1970) by Crow and Kimura].….. The text by Crow and Kimura mentioned above is a good place to start with this body of theory. I also focus on this in the first 5 chapters on my book on Evolutionary Theory.

 

Best wishes,

 

Sean Rice

Dept. of Biological Sciences

Texas Tech University

 

This second email is from Dave Fitch at NYU.

 

Subject: Re: Darwin and God Are Not Brothers

From: David Fitch <david.fitch@nyu.edu>

Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 7:14 PM

To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

 

Hi Peter,

 

Naturally, I don't need a mathematical proof of selection.  That has already been provided both analytically and numerically previously by many people, and it has also been demonstrated empirically by a lot of wet-lab work as well……

 

Good luck in Texas!

Dave

 

It should be pointed out before we begin that these scientists have their own narrow focus on the evolution function as suits their particular areas of research and interest. Our interpretation of it is rather very broad in its showing evolution in conjunction with the information we shall develop to underpin all processes in the universe as The Evolution of Information, a description of which is difficult to abstract ahead of time and requires the laying down of the basic mathematics of evolution and information first.

 

Biological evolution, the great gift of Charles Darwin to the world, consists of two parts. Organisms successful at replication produce a number of offspring, some different than others in their capacity to survive and reproduce. This is the principle of variation. Differences in the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and behavior producing neurology of organisms make for variation in the capacity of organisms to survive and reproduce. When populations of organisms compete for the same resources in an environment, the population whose individuals are more capable at surviving and reproducing persist from generation to generation while their competitors die out or become extinct. This is the principle of natural selection. Together variation and natural selection bring about biological evolution. We will derive an equation for the natural selection component of evolution, later to be embellished to include the variation component.

 

Darwin, who wrote his masterwork on evolution back in the mid-19^th century, understood competition to take place between populations as species. In agreement with modern theory as clarified by the noted evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, what follows takes competing populations as lineages, that is, as genetically related families that survive and reproduce from generation to generation. We begin with a consideration of the simplest kind of population growth, exponential growth, which occurs when the x number of individuals in a population have a rate of change, , directly proportional to x.

 

(6)                                                                                       

 

In the above equation g is a constant called the growth rate. It is equal to the difference between the birth rate, b, and the death rate, d, of a population.

 

(7)                                                                                     

 

(8)                                                                                     

 

The b birth and d death rates of populations are observable, not theoretical, parameters. In human populations birth and death rates can be obtained from the records of births and deaths in county offices. In animal populations birth and death rates are obtained by counting the number of births and number of deaths observed over time. Note also that exponential growth is a general mathematical construction that specifies growth for populations of anything that grow in direct proportional to existing population size. This includes the growth of money in a savings account where setting the d death rate to zero and the b birth rate to the interest rate in Eq8 specifies the growth of money in an account with daily compound interest, a process whose correctness nobody (sane) argues about, important to point out in this era of anti-science lunacy in America.

 

For biological population growth, the b, birth, and d, death, rates are best understood as averages of the realistic variable rates that occur taken for simplicity sake to be constant. It should also be noted that the form of Eq8 specifies newborn organisms to reproduce with the b birth rate immediately upon being born. With reference to human populations, this understands the b birth rate, then, to be of the “birth” or development of an adolescent human being physiologically able to reproduce. The solution to the differential equation of Eq6 is

 

(9)                                                                                

 

In the above x₀ is the number of individuals initially observed at some arbitrary t=0 starting time. The e symbol in the equation is a number, e ≈ 2.718. A population that starts off with x₀=2 organisms and has a growth rate of g = b births – d deaths = 2 per year will increase over time according to Eq9 as graphed below in Figure 10.

 

 

Figure 10. Exponential Growth

 

 

This exponential population grows without limit according to Eq9. But a real population has limited resources to grow on and rival populations in the common environment or niche they exist in together that compete with it for those resources. To specify the simplest case of n=2 populations that compete for resources in a common niche, we will first consider the two as totally separate populations growing independent of each other exponentially, their growth given by the general exponential growth expression of Eq9 specified with each population’s particular birth, death and growth rates.

(11)                                                                     

 

 

(12)                                                                     

 

(13)                                                                    

 

(14)                                                                     

 

The solutions to the differential equations of Eqs13&14 take the same form as Eq9.

 

(15)                                                                      

 

(16)                                                                      

 

The x₁₀ and x₂₀ terms are the initial sizes of the #1 and #2 populations respectively. The sizes of the two independently growing populations may be added together and considered collectively as

 

(17)                                                               

 

The growth of each population relative to this collective measure is

 

₍₁₄₎                                                           

 

(15)                                                             

 

Now let us take these n=2 independently growing populations and put them together in a common niche that has a carrying capacity or limit of combined x₁+x₂ population sizes of K. That is, the combined population sizes must be equal to or less than K.

 

(16)                                                                     

 

For two populations whose combined size is less than K, the populations will grow to K after which their sum of x₁+x₂ will remain constant at K, the situation of interest. 

 

(17)                                                                     

 

This boundary condition of the combined population sizes is of interest because it is where competition can be understood to start in earnest, sub-capacity populations understandable as having space and resources to grow in and with that obviates or significantly dilutes competition. Note at this the limit of growth of the K carrying capacity, the initial population sizes, x₁₀ and x₂₀, also sum to K.

 

(18)                                                                     

 

Eqs17&18 obtain Eq14 as

 

(19)                                                                   

 

Now dividing the numerator and denominator by obtains x₁ as

 

(20)                                                                  

 

Eqs17&18 similarly obtain Eq15 as

 

(21)                                                                  

 

And dividing its numerator and denominator by obtains x₂ as

 

 

(22)                                                               

 

 

A plot of Eqs20&22 for K=100, x₁₀=1, x₂₀=99, g₁=2 and g₂=1, hence with g₁>g₂, obtains the curve shown below with x₁ given in blue and x₂ in red.

 

 

Figure 23. Natural Selection of n=2 Competing Populations

 

 

The population with the higher growth rate in blue of g₁=2 flourishes in the niche while the population in red that has the smaller growth rate of g₂=1 dies out and goes extinct in the niche. It is helpful for understanding this process to express the time equations for x₁ and x₂ in Eqs20&22 as differential equations. To do that in the most efficient way we note that Eq38 has the form of the time equation of the familiar logistical equation of population biology, (see Wikipedia), which describes the growth of a single population with size, x, growth rate, g, initial population size, x₀, in a niche with carrying capacity, K as

 

(24)                                                                  

 

This plots as a sigmoid curve in the shape of the ascending (blue) sigmoid curve in Figure 23. The well known differential equation representation of the logistical equation is

 

(25)                                                                   

 

As the only significant difference between the Eq24 logistical time equation and the Eq20 competitive growth time equation is the replacement of the g growth rate and x population size in Eq24 with the growth rate difference (g₁−g₂) and x₁ population size  in Eq20, the differential equation form of Eq20 must take the same form as that for the logistical equation in Eq25, namely as

 

(26)                                         

 

We can simplify this further by defining a fitness of the i=1 population, F₁, as the difference in the growth rates of the 2 competing populations.

 

(27)                                                                       

 

This expresses Eq26 succinctly as

 

(28)                                                                       

 

To clarify the meaning of this differential equation we can expand F₁ = g₁ – g₂ in terms of its component birth and death rates via Eqs12&14 as

 

(29)                                                             

 

Similar considerations have us express the time equation for x₂ of Eq22 as the differential equation

 

(30)                                                                   

 

(31)                                                  

 

The above makes it clear that a positive fitness for the #1 population, F₁>0, as derives from a higher growth rate, g₁>g₂, causes this “fit” #1 population to be selected for and to flourish in the niche while the “unfit” #2 population that has negative fitness, F₂<0, as derives from its lower growth rate, g₂<g₁, is selected against and goes extinct in the niche. Eqs28&30 clarify Darwinian natural selection as selecting the fit population, the one whose individuals are superior in survival activities as results in a smaller death rate and/or are superior in reproductive activities as results in a larger birth rate or rate of development of sexually mature offspring. This mathematical expression for natural selection of Eqs28&30 is a perfect fit to Darwinian natural selection as expressed in non-mathematical language by that grandmaster evolutionist, Ernst Mayr of Harvard.

 

“.....it must be pointed out that two kinds of qualities are at a premium in selection. What Darwin called natural selection refers to any attribute that favors survival, such as better use of resources, a better adaptation to weather and climate, superior resistance to diseases, and a greater ability to escape enemies. However, an individual may make a higher genetic contribution to the next generation not by having superior survival attributes but merely by being more successful in reproduction.” (Mayr, Ernst, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and Modern Evolutionary Thought, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991, p.88).

 

For those for whom the mathematical derivation made little sense when you skimmed over it, bear with me and I’ll make sense of what it means now. Check out Eqs28&30 below. You can forget about everything else in the functions except the F₁ and F₂ terms.

 

(28)                                                                       

 

(30)                                                                        

 

These are the fitness functions of two populations competing with each other in a niche they occupy together. The fitness values determine which population will survive from generation to generation and which one will die out or go extinct in the niche. The fitness functions have signs opposite to each other, F₁ = −F₂, so that when one of the populations has a positive fitness, the other has a negative fitness. The fit population, the one that has a positive fitness, wins in the competition and is naturally selected for and continues to exist while the unfit population, the one that has the negative fitness, loses and is naturally selected against and goes extinct in the niche.

 

The populations compete, on the one hand, for the resources in the niche that they need to survive and reproduce on. And on the other hand the populations may also compete with each other directly via territorial aggression that results in one population driving some or all of the other population out of the niche and may also result in rivals killing each other. The forms of the F₁ and F₂ fitness functions show how both forms of competition occur. The fitness function of the #1 population, F₁, is a simple function of its own birth and death rates, b₁ and d₁, and of those of the competing population, b₂ and d₂.

 

(29)                                                             

 

It is easy to see from the simple algebra in the above that when the #1 population has a combined greater birth rate and smaller death rate than its rival population, it has fitness, F₁, positively valued or greater than zero. That can come about by the members of the #1 population having more offspring than the #2 population, b₁>b₂, and/or their living longer, d₁<d₂. This d₁<d₂ relationship that makes for a positive F₁ fitness for the #1 population can also come about from its members killing off the #2 population as increases its d₂ death rate or from its members driving the #2 population in part or entirely from the niche, which mathematically kills off the #2 population in the niche.

 

And the same goes for the #2 population, which follows the same basic recipe via its fitness function, F₂, which is just the mirror image of F₁ as

 

(31)                                                              

 

And this is what we see in nature, organisms engaging in survival behaviors like finding food and staying warm and not too hot and avoiding being eaten; in reproductive behaviors like mating and for mammals, raising their offspring to sexual maturity as satisfies the mathematical peculiarities of these evolution equations; and in aggressive behaviors that may result in driving a rival off the common niche territory or killing it. There are many ramifications and nuances of the natural selection functions of Eqs28-31, particularly when they are applied to human behavior. For the moment, though, we just want to emphasize that selection for the population that persists and selection against the population that dies out comes about from the differential birth and death rates.

 

We also want to show next that the selection aspect of evolution is a completely general operation that occurs in all competitive selection processes in nature via differential birth and death rates. We have already suggested that this was the case for the transformation of ACP to HA back in Eqs3-5 and now we want to look at that process again to show it more in greater detail. We’ll do it as we sent it to Dennis Sullivan in a complete self-contained fashion as repeats some of the material we already went over in introducing it in Figures 1&2 and Eqs3-5.  Again those not technically based can skim through the following to its conclusions following Eq40. 

 

We are going to show that the phase change transformation of an amorphous calcium phosphate “population” of molecules, ACP, to a crystalline calcium phosphate population of molecules, hydroxyapatite, HA, is an evolutionary process. This phase change has been well studied and thoroughly quantified in the biophysics literature because it is an in vitro analog of the transformation of immature hard tissue, bone and teeth, to mature bone and teeth. The parallel to biological evolution as we considered in Eqs6-31 lies in the self-seeding, exponential nature of the molecular replication of the HA crystals.

 

The experiments centered about a precipitation of solid phase calcium phosphate from the mixing of calcium and phosphate solutions at high concentrations. The first precipitate obtained is the amorphous calcium phosphate, ACP, with formula, Ca₃(PO₄)₂(H₂0)_n, where n is a variable number of hydrating water molecules. This initial calcium phosphate precipitate is said to be amorphous because of its diffuse X-ray diffraction pattern, which is more like that of amorphous liquids than of crystalline solids.

 

The ACP molecules clump together in large spherical globules dispersed in a suspension of dilute calcium and phosphate ion mother liquor. This ACP transforms over time to a crystalline calcium phosphate called hydroxyapatite, HA, formula, Ca₁₀(PO₄)₆(OH)₂. The transformation of the ACP amorphous solid to the HA crystalline solid is represented below.

 

(32)                                                                  ACP → HA

 

The ACP and HA molecules may be understood to transform into one another in a way that is mathematically similar to individuals of one biological population transforming into those of another during Darwinian natural selection. By that we mean that the solid molecules of ACP and HA can be understood to be born by precipitation events and to die via dissolution events. The ACP and HA populations have birth rates better known as precipitation rate constant, that of HA to be represented as b₁ and that of its rival molecular population, ACP, as b₂. And both ACP and HA have death rates better known as dissolution rate constants, that of HA represented as d₁ and that of ACP as d₂.

 

The mechanism of the ACP → HA transformation was investigated over an extended period in kinetic studies done mostly in the laboratory of Aaron S. Posner, then Director of the Research Division of the New York Hospital for Special Surgery, Cornell Medical School, with findings relevant to our analysis published as:

 

Study I: (Eanes, E. D. and Posner, A.S.: Kinetics and Mechanism of the Conversion of Noncrystalline Calcium Phosphate & to Crystalline Hydroxyapatite) Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 28, p. 233, 1965);

 

Study II: (Boskey, A. L. and Posner, A. S.: Conversion of Amorphous Calcium Phosphate to Microcrystalline Hydroxyapatite, Journal of Physical Chemistry, 77, 2313, 1973);

 

Study III: (Boskey, A. L. and Posner, A. S.: Formation of Hydroxyapatite at Low Supersaturation, Journal of Physical Chemistry, 80, 40, 1976)

 

In Study I, X-ray diffraction methods were used to obtain kinetic data for the ACP → HA transformation. Plots from study I of the amount of HA formed in the reaction vessel vs. the time of reaction are shown below.

 

Figure 33. Concentration of HA vs. time in reaction system under condition of constant stirring. Concentration is expressed as percent crystallinity.

 

 

Figure 1. Concentration of HA vs. time in reaction system under static conditions. Concentration is expressed as percent crystallinity.

 

The sigmoid shape of HA growth in the linear plots of Figures 33&1 is clear and is also seen in another half dozen HA growth curves done in Study II.  Also given in Study I is a logarithmic plot of the HA growth data of Figure 1.

 

Figure 2. Logarithm of percent crystallinity vs. time for same data in Figure 1.

 

Study I derived a function for the ascending portion of the above plot, called the proliferation period of HA growth. From simple observation of the straight line seen in the plot, the authors took the functional relationship to be

 

(3)                                                                          

 

In the above C is the concentration of HA and k is an unspecified constant. From the above, Posner obtained the differential equation 

 

(4)                                                                             

 

This is the governing kinetic expression for HA growth in the proliferation period. This expression indicates that the dC/dt rate of formation of HA at any time is proportional to the C concentration of HA already present in the reaction vessel. Such a mechanism of growth in which the rate of formation of a substance is proportional to the amount already formed is called autocatalytic. This means that the growth of new HA derives from existing HA which acts as a seed or template for further HA growth. This mechanism for HA growth is operationally identical to biological population growth, whereby the rate of growth of new organisms, dx/dt, as seen in Eq6, dx/dt=gx, depends on the x number of existing organisms that act as seeds or templates for the production of offspring. 

 

This conclusion from Study I was important in its physiological implications that bone, which is essentially HA, matures by an autocatalytic process that is biologically passive rather than active. However their understanding of the ACP → HA transformation as represented by Eq3&4 is chemically naive and a bit misleading as to how the transformation takes place.

 

We show next the ACP→HA transformation they studied must take the form, rather, of the natural selection equations of Eqs28&30 and that the phase change process is just a kind of competitive process of molecular natural selection that is little different than what occurs for competing biological populations in the same niche.

 

(28)                                                                        

 

(30)                                                                       

 

The Posner understanding of the HA growth process as governed by Eq4 is an oversimplification because it takes into account only the proliferation period of HA growth, ignoring the final period of growth, the horizontal line part in the graph of Figure 2, which also needs to be considered to understand the true nature of the ACP→HA transformation. That their Eq4 does not describe the process accurately is clear when we consider a plot of C vs. t as solves Eq4, not specified in any of the Posner studies, which would be

 

(34)                                                                         

 

In the above, C_o is an initial concentration or amount of HA, the source of which shall be clarified later. For present purposes, note that a plot of x vs. t for the above function would be a simple exponential curve that increases without limit as for the exponential biological population growth depicted in Figure 10 rather than the sigmoid shape of the curve in the experimental data on the ACP → HA transformation in Figures 33&1.

 

Also the ascending straight line that would be produced by a logarithmic plot of the C and t variables in Eq34 would rise without limit rather than flattening out as the experimental data of Figure 4 shows at t=6.5 hours. Hence the time equation of the Posner kinetics of Eq34 does not describe the process properly, that expression distorting the actual mechanism of the growth of HA from ACP, which, as we shall next make clear, is better described by an analog of the natural selection equation of Eq28.  

 

The similarity of the sigmoid curve of the experimental HA growth curves of Figures 33&1 to the sigmoid curve of logistical growth of Eq24, which we said was the shape of the ascending (blue) sigmoid curve of competitive growth in Figure 23. This suggests that HA growth from ACP might be either a kind of logistical growth or a kind of competitive growth.

 

We decide between these two possibilities from the following argument. Chemical analysis in all three studies show the total amount or mass of solid phase calcium phosphate precipitate, whether as ACP or HA, to remain essentially constant during the ACP → HA transformation. Hence as the amount of solid phase HA increases over time as seen in Figures 33,1&2, the concentration of ACP must decrease concomitantly in what is essentially a zero sum game between the HA and ACP solid phases. Thus the ascending HA growth sigmoid curve in Figures 33&1 must be matched by a mirror image descending ACP sigmoid curve, one that would look very much like the descending (red) sigmoid curve in the competitive growth plot in Figure 23.

 

This similarity in Figures 33&1 (with the ACP sigmoid decrease penciled onto the graphs in your mind’s eye) to Figure 23 points to a competitive growth explanation for the ACP→ HA transformation because the ACP→HA kinetic data then graphically fits the biological natural selection curve. This suggests that HA growth fits the natural selection expression of Eq28.

 

(28)                                          

 

This has a time evolution of Eq20.  

 

(20)                                         

 

And it suggests that the ACP molecular population changes in time according to Eq30.  

 

(30)                                     

 

This has a time evolution of Eq22.  

 

(22)                                    

 

To test the correctness of these equations derived for biological population growth as suitable for representing the ACP → HA transformation, we must consider the ACP→HA chemical transformation from a population perspective. That is, we must consider the HA as a population of HA molecules and HA growth as an increase in the number of HA molecules over time. And we must consider the ACP decrease as that of a population of ACP molecules that decreases in number over time.

 

To understand the changes in HA over time from this population perspective, we must convert the C concentration of HA into some directly proportional number of HA molecules, which we shall designate as x₁. This conversion of variables from C concentration to x₁ number of HA molecules understands the 100% crystallinity of HA value in the experimental plots of Figures 33&1 as the maximum number of HA molecules, which exist at the end of the transformation reaction.

 

Taking for numerical simplicity the maximum concentration of HA at 100% HA crystallinity to be approximately 1/6 of a mole of HA and understanding there to be an Avogadro’s Number of 6.023x10²³ molecules in a mole, we take the maximum number of HA molecules at 100% HA crystallinity to be 10²³ HA molecules. In parallel to the K maximum number of population #1 organisms in biological competitive population growth, we will understand this 10²³ maximum number of HA molecules to be K in the above equations when they are taken to represent the ACP→ HA transformation as a competitive growth, K=10²³ molecules.

 

We will also take this K=10²³ value to be the maximum number of ACP molecules. To do that, given the divergent stoichiometry of HA and ACP as Ca₁₀(PO)₆(OH)₂ and Ca₃(PO₄)₂(H₂0)_n respectively, we must consider the ACP molecules three at time, that is, as a triplet ACP form with formula written as [Ca₃(PO₄)₂(H₂0)_n]₃. Note that this triplet ACP, [Ca₃(PO₄)₂(H₂0)_n]₃, has no reality other than to provide a stoichiometric equivalent form to HA as Ca₁₀(PO)₆(OH)₂. Note that this ACP form and HA have the same number of six PO₄^--- , phosphate ions, but that the ACP form is deficient by one Ca⁺⁺, calcium ion relative to HA.

 

Earlier we stated that the amount of solid phase calcium phosphate, ACP plus HA, remains appreciably constant in the transformation reaction over time. The above triplet representation of ACP allows us to understand the maximum number of these triplet ACP molecules as K=10²³ from the perspective of this triplet ACP and HA having the same number of PO^---, phosphate, ions in them if we can make the case that the Ca⁺⁺ ion deficit in ACP relative to HA is corrected, is made up, by an uptake of Ca⁺⁺ ions from the mother liquor as the ACP → HA transformation proceeds.

 

This is exactly what happens as shown in Study II, which shows that mother liquor Ca⁺⁺ ion concentration decreases progressively as ACP is transformed to HA as indicates a progressive uptake of Ca⁺⁺ ions into the solid phase during the transformation. This validates our stoichiometric simplification of ACP that allows K to represent the maximum number of (triplet) ACP molecules and the maximum number of HA molecules. And it also us to represent the sum of the number of (triplet) ACP molecules given as x₂ and of HA molecules represented as x₁ to be K at any time. Or in parallel to Eq17

 

(35)                                                                                          

 

This relationship between the number of (triplet) ACP and HA at any time also specifies x₁₀ + x₂₀ =K function of Eq17 as valid for the ACP→ HA transformation, which suggests that Eq20 is valid for it.

 

(20)                                                 

 

To test it, we next make a logarithmic plot for HA growth as it would be generated by Eq20. Using the parameters of K=10²³, x₀=1, (this x₀=1 representing a first HA molecule whose origins we shall make clear shortly) and g₁−g₂ =.8 (whose basis in terms of ACP and HA precipitation and dissolution rate constants we shall also make clear shortly), we obtain the logarithmic plot of x₁ vs. time, t, for Eq36 as shown below.

 

Figure 36. Theoretical Logarithmic Plot of HA Formation

 

 

The remarkable similarity of this logarithmic curve of HA growth hypothecated from the log plot of Eq20 to that of the experimental logarithmic curve of HA growth of Figure 2 indicates that HA growth may be explained by the differential equation form of Eq20, which is Eq28, And because Eq30 derives in a simple way from Eq28 for biological natural selection that it may correctly represent the time course of ACP decay in the ACP→HA transformation.

 

To understand the ACP → HA transformation as a selection process, we might try using Eqs28&30 for Darwinian selection with the fitness functions in the written out in terms their birth and death rates of Eqs29&31.

 

(37)                                    

 

 (38)                                   

 

To use these to understood to the ACP→HA transformation, we understand the birth and death rates as precipitation and dissolution rate constants, the b₁ and b₂ terms as the precipitation rate constants respectively of HA and ACP molecules and the d₁ and d₂ terms as their dissolution rate constants. The birth and death rates of real biological populations change in time, the functions we use in the equations being averages of them. This causes realistic competitive growth of biological populations to not be the smooth dynamic specified by the idealized Eqs20&22 and Figure 23.

 

On the other hand there is a tight fit of the ACP→HA kinetics to the natural selection curves because the precipitation and dissolution rate constants do not change in time. Further these molecular populations have a combined total population on the order of K=10²³, which is so large as to remove all stochastic irregularity from the dynamics of the system via the law of large numbers.

 

But even this interpretation of the birth and death rates as precipitation and dissolution rate constants, Eqs37&38 are not perfect representations of the calcium phosphate ACP→HA transformation. The functional dependence of the dx₁/dt rate of formation in Eq37 on the b₁x₁x₂/K term is entirely reasonable because it fits the self-seeding, autocatalytic, basically exponential, dynamic of HA crystal growth and crystal growth generally as a templated replication. This understands the dx₁/dt dependence on b₁x₁x₂/K to arise with x₁ as the number of template or seed crystals and the x₂ number of ACP molecules as the reservoir of solid state calcium phosphate needed to produce the HA crystals.  This functional relationship is most obvious when all the ACP needed to make HA is used up, x₂=0, which causes the HA growth reaction to cease, dx₁/dt=0, as seen in the laboratory data. The reasonableness of dx₁/dt measured HA growth as determined by b₁x₁x₂/K, by parallel to the templated replication in biological growth, also validates the dependence of dx₁/dt on the dissolution of HA molecules as represented by the −d₁x₁x₂/K term in Eq27.

 

The growth of ACP measured by dx₂/dt in Eq38 as proportional to b₂x₂x₁/K, however, presents a problem because it suggests that the rate of precipitation of ACP is proportional to the x₂ number of existing ACP molecules and that this precipitation of ACP is, thus, self-seeding or autocatalytic as is the growth of HA. But that is very much not the case, for there is no evidence that ACP is a templated replication, which is in confluence with the fact that ACP is not a crystalline solid but amorphous.

 

Rather the dx₂/dt precipitation rate of ACP is proportional to x₂^(2/3) as indicates that its precipitation is proportional to the surface area of the large ACP globules suspended in the mother liquor. The evidence for such a surface mediated ACP precipitation is obtained indirectly from an understanding of the rate of formation of the initial HA crystals in the ACP → HA transformation being proportional to the surface area of the ACP agglomerates as was shown in a thermodynamic analysis done by Peter Calabria.

 

Calabria, P. V., A Kinetic Study of the Heterogeneous Nucleation of Hydroxyapatite on Amorphous Calcium Phosphate Particles, PhD Thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 1980

 

Calabria, P. V. and Katz, J. L.: The Kinetics and Mechanism of Heterogeneous Hydroxyapatite Nucleation, International Association of Dental research Abstracts, Abstract # 448, 1970

 

Verifying visual proof of the formation of the first HA molecules on ACP surfaces was also obtained from scanning electron microscope micrographs in a study which cites Calabria as the first to propose mechanism.

 

Brecivic, Lj. and Furedi-Milhofer, H.: Precipitation of Calcium Phosphates from Electrolyte Solutions, Calcified Tissue Research, 10, 82, 1972

 

The molecular picture that we have, then, of the formation of the very first HA molecules is of a repeated precipitation of calcium phosphate on the surface of the large ACP agglomerates, most of which precipitations are of ACP, but some rare few of which have by chance solidify in the highly ordered configuration of HA crystals. This is how the first HA molecules are formed. Once the initial HA molecules are formed in this way, the remainder of the HA molecules form by the crystal self-seeding mechanism described above.

 

This understanding that the first HA molecules form at a rate in proportion to the ACP surface area implies that all calcium phosphate precipitation is mediated or catalyzed by the surfaces of the large ACP globules suspended as colloids in the mother liquor and, hence, that the dx₂/dt rate of ACP precipitation is proportion to the ACP globule surface area. This surface catalysis of solution phase ions to solid phase precipitates is in conformity with general physical chemical theory. As surface is proportional to mass raised to the 2/3 power and the mass of ACP is directly proportional to the x₂ number of ACP molecules, we understand the dx₂/dt rate of formation of ACP molecules to be proportional to x₂^(2/3).

 

We can also understand the dissolution of ACP particles back into solution as taking place at a rate in proportion to the surface area of the ACP globules because their ACP surfaces are the physical interface between solid phase ACP and the mother liquor solution phase into which the ACP dissolves. This has us understand the rate of dissolution of ACP molecules back into solution as also being proportional to x₂^(2/3), which requires that we alter the  −d₂x₁x₂/K term in Eq38 to −d₂x₁x₂^(2/3)/K. These reductions of x₂ to its 2/3 power alter the kinetic equations for the ACP→HA process from Eqs37&38 to 

 

(39)                                   

 

 (40)                                   

 

The difference between the molecular selection in Eqs39&40 versus Darwinian selection in Eq37&38 as regards the 2/3 power of the #2 population size in the former does not detract from the primary generalization we are making about all selective processes being controlled by differential birth and death rates. This is clear in the above comparative analysis of Darwinian selection in biological systems and molecular selection in chemical systems. Next we will extend that generalization to human systems using elementary probability and game theory to select a winner and loser in a competitive game.

 

 

Consider rolling two dice, one with red pips to specify the tens digit of a 2-digit number and the other with black pips to specify the units digit of the 2-digit number.  When, for example, the tens digit die lands on a 1 and the units digit die lands on a 4, the 2-digit number rolled is 14. In order to do that, we now reconsider the dice game in greater detail and with important nuances. The probability of guessing the tens digit is p_A and the probability of guessing the units digit, p_B. Because a die has n=6 equiprobable sides it can land on, these probabilities are

 

(41)                                                                                    

 

The composite probability of guessing the 2-digit number that could show up on the dice is the product of these probabilities.

 

(42)                                                                      

 

The probability of failing to guess the tens digit and the units digits is just the arithmetic converse of the probabilities in Eq41.

 

(43)                                                                           

 

The probability of failing to guess correctly is also referred to as the uncertainty in guessing. The uncertainty or probability of failing to guess the 2-digit number is just the arithmetic converse of the P probability of guessing it in Eq42.

 

(44)                                                               

 

Next consider a guessing game in which a cash payoff of V=$36 is paid for correctly guessing the 2-digit number. In this game the dice are rolled and seen by a roller with the guess made by a guesser after the roll. The guesser obviously cannot see the 2-digit number rolled or he or she would not be a guesser. The rolling of the dice and rewarding of the V=$36 payoff for a correct guess is repeated again and again. As there are 36 of 2-digit numbers to guess from, on average there is one correct guess in every 36 tries with the average payoff per guess or expectation in making a guess, E,

 

(45)                                                                  

 

Next consider a variation of this guessing game in which a colored flag is chosen at random from the n=4 set of flags, (■, ■, ■, ■), two times to form 16 2-flag semaphore signals.

 

(46)                                               (■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■, ■■)

 

Each of the n=4 colors in (■, ■, ■, ■) has an equal probability of being on the 1^st flag and on the 2^nd flag. So in parallel to Eq41 the probabilities of guessing the colors on each of the two flags are 

 

(47)                                                                                 

 

The composite probability of guessing the 2-flag semaphore in Line 46, in parallel to Eq42, is the product of the above probabilities.

 

(48)                                                                 

 

The uncertainty in guessing the color on the 1^st and 2^nd flags is in parallel to Eq43,

 

(49)                                                                   

 

The uncertainty in guessing the 2-flag semaphore is in parallel to Eq44

 

(50)                                                     

 

And consider a cash payoff of V=$36 for correctly guessing the 2-flag semaphore, which in being gotten on average one time in 16 tries has an expectation or average payoff in parallel to Eq45 of

 

(51)                                                   

 

Now let’s consider these two guessing games to be played by two players with the dice player paying off the semaphore player’s correct guesses and the semaphore player paying off the dice player’s correct guesses  at each turn. Assuming they make their guess at the same time, the dice player will pay an average of E₁=$2.25 to the semaphore player at every turn and the semaphore player, E₂=$1 to the dice player at every turn. (Note that we have subscripted the expectation in Eq51 as E₁ and in Eq45 as E₂ to distinguish them.) This makes for an average profit of E₁−E₂=$1.25 for the semaphore player at every turn and an average loss of E₂−E₁= −$1.25 for the dice player at every turn.

 

If we bankroll the semaphore game player with an initial x₁₀=$10 and the dice game player with an initial x₂₀=$90 and specify the money in the semaphore player’s bank at any time as x₁ and in the dice player’s bank at any time as x₂, hence, with the sum of money in the two players’ banks initially and at any time being x₁ + x₂ =K= $100, the time course of the x₁ and x₂ banks at any time will be on average  

 

(52)                                                             

 

(53)                                                              

 

Note that if the guesses are made at equal time intervals, the E₁=$2.25 per turn payoff for the semaphore player is a per time payoff that can be understood as the birth rate of semaphore player cash and the death rate of dice player cash and E₂=$1.00 as the birth rate of the dice player cash and death rate of the semaphore player cash. A graph of the x₁ and x₂ bankrolls over time, with semaphore player cash in blue and the dice player cash in red, is

 

 

Figure 54. Selection of the Winner and Loser in the Joint Guessing Game.

 

The blue line semaphore player wins the competition. Note the parallel of this selection of the winner as the one with the greatest expectation, E₁>E₂, to Darwinian natural selection that selects the population with the largest growth rate, g₁>g₂, as the winner in evolutionary competition.  

 

 

Figure 55. Natural Selection For and Against n=2 Competing Populations

 

The parallels between the two selections are seen more clearly yet when both are expressed both in terms of their representative differential equations, for evolutionary competition from Eqs28&30 with the fitness terms expanded as growth rates and birth and death rates from Eqs29&31 as

 

(56)                                     

 

(57)                                     

 

And for the game competition by differentiating both sides of Eqs52&53,

 

(58)                                      

 

(59)                                     

 

The Darwinian selection is clearly determined by differential birth and death rates and the game selection by differential expectation with the latter understood as a differential birth rate or a differential death rate, one or the other rather than both, because of the equivalence of the birth and death rates of cash in the game. But the main point made is that selection arises from differential birth and death rates in both Darwinian and game selection as it also does in the ACP→HA transformation that selects HA as the “winning” calcium phosphate solid over time.  

 

In all three processes a fixed number of K entities, organisms, molecules or dollars, have an initially distribution, x₁₀ + x₂₀ =K that changes over time eventually to x₁=K, x₂=0. Hence all three processes should be understood as redistributions that are brought about by differential birth and/or death rates.      

 

Every real process in nature is most fundamentally a redistribution brought about by differential birth and/or death rates. This is one of two principle precepts in The Evolution of Information, the evolution part of it given that redistribution via differential births and deaths is the Darwinian natural selection component of biological evolution. The other foundation precept in The Evolution of Information is what changes in every process is information described mathematically with a new function for that I did not figure out for another 30 years, so we will hold off on talking about it for now.    

 

So fundamental and universal is differential birth and/or death redistribution as the underpinning of all of nature’s real processes, that it is also the basis of realistic addition, which as an abstract concept is the cornerstone operation for all mathematics. When as 2+7=9, we add 2 units, ■■, to 7 units, ■■■■■■■, to get 9 units, ■■■■■■■, when this is a real addition process for material units, the 2 units, ■■, must come from some other place or source. For example it might come from a set of 5 units, ■■■■■, which in doing so would reduce that set via subtraction of the 2 units, ■■, to 3 units, ■■■, which is essentially a redistribution of 12 (constant) units originally distributed as 5+7=12, or (5, 7) or (■■■■■, ■■■■■■■) to 3+9=12 or (3, 9) or (■■■, ■■■■■■■■■).

 

In the addition of 2+7=9 in pure mathematics, nobody is interested in where the 2 units come from, this simpler perspective understanding the addition to take place independent of redistribution. But such a simplification can only exist in one’s imagination and never in a real process. This is so because, in the simplest take on it, the matter in a system taken as a whole is constant as derives from the less simple take on the problem that the matter-energy in the entire universe is a constant as implied via Einstein’s deservedly famous expression of matter-energy equivalence, E=mc², where E now is the amount energy, m, the amount of matter, and c, the speed of light.      

 

Let’s give an example of the simple form. Consider picking apples off an apple tree during harvest time. The initial distribution for the average apple tree puts all the apples on the apple tree and none in the farmer’s packing boxes. At the end of the picking process, all of the apples on the tree are redistributed to the boxes. From his practical perspective, the farmer only considers as significant the addition of the apples originally on the tree to his boxes in a now saleable state, the fact and number of apples left or not left on the tree being immaterial and of no importance to him. But the process seen in complete realistic detail is clearly one of redistribution.

 

Moreover realistically the process is not only one of births of apples in boxes and deaths of apples in trees, but one whose dynamic is completely described properly by the birth and/or death rates of the apples in boxes and on trees because this and every process in nature takes place in time and must have a rate associated with birth (or becoming) and death (or ceasing to be) whether one considers those rates significant enough or not to specify. Without getting anywhere near the details of it, this is certainly also the case for every chemical (and nuclear) reaction as made clear in standard kinetic theory. There are no exceptions: every process, from the most complex in nature to the simplest realistic addition, is a redistribution determined by differential birth and/or death rates.

 

Referring to this generalization as evolution in The Evolution of Information title may be objected to on the grounds that the second component of biological evolution, the production of variation, is as important as the natural selection component of evolution and is not present in every process. Variation may be understood as present in the Darwinian natural selection in Figure 23 by considering the x₁₀=1 organism at t=0 to have arisen from a prior x₂=K=100 population as a variant individual of it brought about by some form of mutation. Similarly it is clear that the 1^st HA molecule formed is a variation derived from the ACP population via random molecular mutation. But there is no production of variation in the game competition and in other forms of differential birth and/or death rate redistributions.

 

We refer to the process as evolution nonetheless from the perspective that the zero variation redistributions are evolutions without variation. Of course, in the end this is just the splitting of semantic hairs. With those who choose to call the universal birth and/or death rate redistribution process something other than evolution, we have no argument, but prefer The Evolution of Information as title rather than The Redistribution of Information or The Selection of Information because almost all of the processes we consider significant enough to talk about at length include variation and are true evolutions.             

 

If the sense of redistribution is present in all processes in nature, one might ask why that sense of redistribution is not already salient in science. There are two reasons. A primary one has already been touched upon, namely that the redistribution dynamic in many processes is not significant to the particular problem trying to be solved as, for example, as discussed above when the addition aspect of a process is the only meaningful aspect as in the picking of the apples.   

 

A second impediment that tends to hide the universality of the redistribution dynamic derives from the fact that Western society, the font of modern science, is pretty much universally capitalist and as such dislikes the notion of redistribution in its economic theorizing, the distribution and redistribution of income and wealth being more Marxist concepts. The reason for this dislike of distributional concepts is simple and has to do with the subtle nature of fairness.

 

On the one hand fairness is readily associated with equality and balance in the distribution of resources in a cooperative group, as a wholesome or moral nation is considered to be. Certainly equal or even distribution is very much of a central factor for fairness in a family group whether what are distributed by the controlling adults are goods or services or attention or affection or whatever is desirable to have. 

 

Counterpoised to fairness as a balanced or even distribution of desirables is fairness in the competition that brings about success for individuals, judged to be fair when all parties have an equal or fair chance to succeed based on their talent and competence. The central question as to what determines whether a society is free and fair as opposed to being exploitive and tyrannical revolves subtly but largely around the fairness deriving both from fair distribution and fair competition. To a sensible, thinking person, both aspects would seem to be important.

 

One way for a society that unfairly distributes the fruit of everybody’s labor to hide the fact of its being exploitive and unfair is to jigger the criteria for fairness away from fair distribution and one way to do this is to not call attention to the concept at all by using the word and the concept as seldom as possible. This is a prime reason why the concept of distribution and redistribution is more or less taboo in capitalist societies even if saying that West based science avoids reference to distribution and redistribution is excessive.   

 

To make clear that any form of capitalist ideological suppression of the redistribution generalization is absurd, we next will show that the basic machinery of the guessing game that illustrated the redistribution process in the simplest way also derives the most elemental form possible of the Law of Supply and Demand, the foundation of free market, capitalist economics.           

 

Recall the P=1/16 probability of guessing the semaphore signal chosen at random from Line 46 and the p_B=1/4 probability of guessing the color of 2^nd semaphore flag from Eq47. If the guesser knew ahead of time what the color of 1^st semaphore flag was, he would increase the probability of guessing the semaphore signal from P=1/16 to p_B=1/4 as would increase the expectation or expected value of his guess from E=PV=$2.25 in Eq51 to

 

(60)                                                                   

 

The value of knowing the 1^st flag color before he guesses is just the increase in expectation that knowing it provides, this increase from E=$2.25 to E_A=$9, being

 

(61)                                                              

 

The W_A term is understood as the fair price that the guesser would pay for the information of the 1^st flag color. From a profit perspective the less he has to pay for the information the better, but W_A=$6.75 is taken to be the fair price of the information because if he gets E_A =$9 on average per guess and pays W_A= $6.75 for the facilitating information of the 1^st flag color, he nets the same payoff of E=$2.25 that he got when he didn’t know what the 1^st flag color was.

 

(62)                                                                    

 

This makes clear that what we mean by the W_A=$6.75 fair price of the information on the 1^st flag color is the break-even price. Now to obtain this W_A fair price for the 1^st flag information as deriving from the fundamental Law of Supply and Demand of standard economic theory, we need but algebraically manipulate Eq61 via Eqs49-51.    

 

(63)                              

 

The W_A= q_AE_A relationship tells us that the W_A fair price of the 1^st flag information is a function of the q_A uncertainty in guessing or obtaining that 1^st flag information and the E_A expected value of guessing the semaphore signal which that 1^st flag information facilitates. The q_A uncertainty in obtaining the 1^st flag information may be understood in a very basic way as a measure of the scarcity of the information or its lack of supply.  And the E_A expected value of guessing the semaphore signal, which that 1^st flag information provides may be understood in a very basic way as a measure of demand there would be for that 1^st flag information on the basis of its probable value.

 

The Law of Supply and Demand determines the price of something in two elementary ways, on the one hand as a decreasing function of the available supply of it and an increasing of the demand for it and, on the other, in a perfectly equivalent way as an increasing function of its scarcity, the inverse of supply, and the demand for it. With q_A uncertainty understood as a measure of the 1^st flag information’s scarcity and E_A as a measure of the demand there would be for it on the basis of its probable value, W_A=q_AE_A is an elemental form of The Law of Supply and Demand

 

It is an extremely important elemental form of the Law of Supply and Demand in its formulation in the most fundamental way in terms of simple probability functions the mind intuitively uses constantly and generally to measure confidence, uncertainty and the expected value of what it desires and is willing to pay a cash price for. It is also and again importantly a unique form of the Law of Supply and Demand in its specifying an exact price of a commodity in terms of the supply and demand measures and, as such, is a major correction of the inexact way the Law of Supply and Demand is presently given in standard microeconomic theory, which makes possible the development of a true mathematical science of economics. This should make it clear that the redistribution algorithm derived from this guessing game machinery should not be set aside because of any supposed contradictions to true free market economics because it directly derives the Supply and Demand foundation principle of free market economics. 

 

The W_A=q_AE_A relationship also generalizes the Law of Supply and Demand for all goal directed behavior in terms of the time you spend to get something as the price you pay for it. This should not strike the reader as odd given that one generally spends time to earn money with the relationship between time and money being quite direct in the dollars per hour wage that the majority of people around the world are paid in.   

 

We will show that the time spent to get something as the price paid for it explains human behavior in the most general and precise mathematical way as makes possible the development of a true mathematical science of behavior. We will do that by calculating the number of simple yes/no questions it takes to ascertain the color selected at random from (■, ■, ■, ■) for the 1^st semaphore flag.

 

These simple yes/no questions asked about the n=4 colors in (■, ■, ■, ■) are the following. Is the color selected ■, red? Is the color selected ■, green? Is the color selected ■, purple? Is the color selected ■, black? We will see next that asking L=n−1=3 of these n=4 questions determines the color selected by successive disqualification when, in the simplest case, all questions asked are answered “no”. That process disqualifies the 3 colors asked about and ascertains the color selected as the color not asked about. An example of that is when the three questions asked and answered “no” are the following. Is the color ■, red? Is the color ■, green? Is the color ■, purple? This determines the color selected to be ■, black by process of elimination or successive disqualification of the other colors.

 

In this simplest analysis, if we understand each of the L=n−1=3 questions to take one unit of time to be asked and answered, we see that we must spend L=n−1=3 units of time as the price to be paid to obtain the 1^st flag information. As we shall see later the obtaining of information in this example can be generalized to obtaining anything meaningful desired. Seeing the price paid to get something as the time spent in getting then explains all goal-directed human behavior because how we spend or allocate our time determines our behavioral selections and, hence, what we do.

 

The above analysis, though, specifies the number of questions needed to be asked and, hence, the time needed to be spent to obtain the 1^st flag information in a seemingly contrived way in insisting that all questions asked be answered “no.” As this can hardly be the general case given the non-zero probability of guessing the 1^st flag color from (■, ■, ■, ■) on any question asked, we must determine the number of questions for that general case.

 

The probability of guessing the color correctly on the 1^st question is

 

(64)                         

 

The 1 subscript in p₁=1/4 is used here to specify it as the probability of guessing the color on the 1^st question. If the color selected happened to be red, ■, for example, the probability of guessing it on the first question would be p₁=1/4. If the red color, ■, question, though, is answered “no”, that reduces the set of colors the selected color could be to the n=3 set, (■, ■, ■), which has the probability of guessing the color from it on the 2^nd question be p₂=1/3. But as that 2^nd question is asked only when the red color, ■, question is answered “no”, which is q₁=1−p₁=3/4 of the time, then the probability of getting the color on the second question is

 

(65)                        

 

Let us assume that the second question asked is of the green color, ■. This reduces the set of colors the selected color could be to the n=2 set, (■, ■), which has the probability of guessing the color from it on the 3^nd question be p₃=1/2. But as that 3^nd question is asked only when the red color, ■, and green color, ■, questions are answered “no”, which is q₁q₂ =(3/4)(2/3)=1/2 of the time, then the probability of getting the color on the third question is  

 

(66)                      

 

If the color guessed on the 3^rd question is also incorrect, then all L=n−1 questions asked and answered “no” determine the color to be the one not asked by successive disqualification or process of elimination as we first considered. Of interest is the number of questions needed to be asked on average, which is just the sum of the probability of guessing the color on a given number of questions times that number of questions. 

 

(67)                      

 

Hence when we translate number of questions needed to be asked on average to time, we see that on average we need to spend L/2=1.5 amount of time as the price needed to obtain the 1^st flag information. The above can be generalized to any similar guessing game, the number of questions translated to the amount of time needed to guess which side an n=6 sided die landed on when tossed being L/2=(n−1)/2=5/2.

 

It can also be further generalized to obtaining the amount of time needed to determine the information needed to perform any goal-directed behavior that has component subtasks that have component probabilities of success associated with them. This allows this analysis to explain human behavior in a totally clear and precise mathematical way. The many ramifications and nuances of this analysis explain everything one would want to know about human behavior and how the mind processes the information necessary to try to behave in an optimal way as regards attaining success in the evolutionary fitness dictates of survival, reproduction and combat.

 

To explain this fully requires that we understand the above probability functions in terms of their respective uncertainties, with those uncertainties underpinning a new mathematical function for information that took another 20 years to figure out and will be taken up in the appropriate place in this story. In the meantime, though, before proceeding with that personal story, we want to use the analysis we have developed above from elementary probability theory to spell out a few other conclusions available from this simple analysis that help explain how the human mind works and how its intuitive fundamental operations are inopportune for restraining the kinds of behaviors that lead to nuclear war and the possible extinction of the human species.  

 

We have appreciated the W_A=q_AE_A relationship as an elemental Law of Supply and Demand. We can extend that sense of it to appreciate how the human mind values behaviors in the sense of wanting to spend time on them or doing them. The greater the value of something for us as the E_A= p_BV expected value and the q_A uncertainty or difficulty there is getting that something, the more time we spend on it or, in emotional terms, want to do it. Even if there is great value in something, if there is no uncertainty in obtaining it, there is no sense of wanting to spend time doing it. 

 

Breathing air is a perfect example. While it has enormous value for without air we die, there is no uncertainty in obtaining air to breath for most people at most times. Hence there is no neural signal for us to spend time breathing. We just do it unconsciously so it is not a goal directed behavior for us. The W_A=q_AE_A term, whether as time spent or money spent is W_A=0 because the q_A uncertainty is q_A=0. With one’s head thrust forcefully under water, all that changes as the uncertainty of getting that most valuable commodity of air to breathe shoots up as does the W_A time spent, or attention paid, to getting air. Or correlatively, if one were drowning and could spend or pay money for the air rather than spending time or paying attention to getting air, there is no limit as to what one would pay.

 

This relationship is extraordinarily general and firm. If something has either no value, here as E_A=p_BV probable cash value, but in any measure of what is considered valuable, or if it has value if there is absolutely no uncertainty in getting it, we don’t spend time or money on it. That is the power of the W_A=q_AE_A to explain what we do and why we do it.

 

Of particular interest is using it to explain why people act competitively for rewards in terms of the joint guessing game analyzed earlier. Clearly the high probability of the semaphore player to get the V=$36 payoff more often than he must pay it out as specified by the E₁−E₂ average profit made at every guess and the unit uncertainty he has in getting any money if he does not spend the time playing make clear that he will spend that time playing, that he will play the competitive game rather than not play it.

 

The loss of value, the loss of his money at every turn for the dice player, on the other hand, suggests from raw common sense, for we have not analyzed the patent loss of value much at all, that the dice player would not play the joint guessing game if he had a choice. We then want to inquire under what conditions he might play. The answer again using the common sense of a moderately intelligent gambler is when the relative probability of winning is more equal or better yet in his favor.

 

Now let’s add another element to the problem and that is, if the dice player plays and loses, it cost him not just the E₂−E₁ loss specified, but also a further penalty for trying to win and taking up his opponent’s valuable time with his foolish effort. Rather what he can do is just give up the money he might lose without incurring a penalty for foolishly what the probabilities tell him is a game he has little to no chance of winning at.

 

This changes of course when the probabilities of winning get more and more even or equal for when they are nearly so, even if the disadvantaged player has a lesser chance of winning, the element of chance may work in his favor for any particular turn. Professional poker players who have a 45% chance of winning relative to their opponent’s 55% chance, for example, generally consider it to be a good situation, one they are happy to have their money in for. 

 

The decision as to play or not depends not only on the two above factors of relative probability and the additional penalty of playing and losing rather than just submitting to the opponent with the higher probability of winning becomes that much more problematic once one understands that such decisions are very often based not on some objective and sure probabilities that both players have access to, but on each player’s estimate or guess as to what his chances are.

 

This is usually not a problem when the relative probabilities of winning are very divergent. Indeed people who play for meaningful stakes when the probability is very much against them are understood to be crazy or irrational for the very notion of rational behavior means action whose probability of success is by guided past favorable ratios of success in similar circumstances projected as probability to the future challenge. 

 

But both players estimating their probabilities of success becomes a real problem under the above penalty condition when ascertainable objective probabilities appear to be close in value as suggest both players have a reasonable chance of winning if they play as very much deters submitting and losing without a fight. Keeping in mind at all times that only one combatant will actually win, the above tells us that many fights that could have been avoided and should have been avoided were not. And this, not only at the individual level, but also at the level of international aggression or war.

 

Look at how much simpler it would have been for Japan and Germany if they were smart enough to calculate the odds more carefully as would have told them they would lose. And that goes for every fight ever fought and every war every fought, the latter king sized errors being extremely costly in pain, life and unhappiness during and after the defeats.

 

And so it goes as the strife we see between nations at the beginning of this 2^nd decade of the 3^rd millennium and various nations, some seemingly crazy in defying the odds like upstarts North Korea and Iran with their threats, which one never knows may be tangible, and others not at a very great distance from nuclear war from their both possessing significant nuclear arsenals as cause the thought of a near equiprobable battle to appear in the minds of their leaders from time to time as with Pakistan and India, and others yet whose growing probability of winning and motives of restoring long suffering pride trampled on, like China, will be the biggest problem as the years pass and their increasing probability reaches greater parity with the decreasing probability of the United States to prevail from the stupidity of its decadent leadership.

 

And all of this is insanely compounded by the sense of the probability of great success enabled by a god who has magical powers to win miraculously against great odds. There are other important ramifications associated with the unhappiness of the social control of people significantly exacerbating the tone and level of violence in the world, domestic and international, but the above truncated analysis should make clear that nuclear annihilation is, indeed, a major problem that deserves great time and attention paid to it. We shall clarify this further once our story, now developed to the year, 1970, catches up with the mathematical machinery for the new information function we derived in the 1990s that are needed to explain the nuclear nuances with mathematical precision sufficient to muster the attention and collective action of the public without which there can be no resolution to the problem in time.          

 

STORY AND MATH TO BE CONTINUED WITH THE FOLLOWING TO BE SPLICED IN

 

The solution to the nuclear war problem, to paraphrase a recent popular movie, is to design a better social matrix, a world with no weapons at all in it. The general idea for it is laid out in a newspaper article we wrote back in May, 1986, when the nuclear laden Cold War was on in an obvious way. Printed in The Knickerbocker News, the old Albany, NY afternoon daily, the piece focuses on getting rid of all weapons both for the sake of freedom and to keep the planet from nuclear annihilation.

 

We make the case for mass disarmament including of all conventional weapons in a firm mathematical way after the reprint of the news article. But it should be obvious even without rocket science that the world has real problems from taking a hard look at the Gulf Oil Spill beyond BP’s public relations distortion of the catastrophe. This irreversible tragedy is a clear harbinger of a twin sister irreversible tragedy of nuclear war that will be no different in its unexpectedly arriving on our doorstep from the shortsighted self-interest of power brokers up at the top.  As with the oil spill it will be impossible to halt once triggered, whether by nuclear armed Israel trying to retrieve its captured soldier from the Muslims, nuclear armed North Korea jumping the restraining leash of the Chinese who underneath the perfunctory business smiles have little love for the USA or by a nuclear armed America knocked off as #1 by humiliating economic and military losses while run by the loony homicidal-suicidal right wingers happy to have God’s will take us all to Heaven in one fell swoop. Here’s one solution to the problem, the only one available however idealistic, given first in readable newspaper prose and then spelled out mathematically to make it inarguably clear that the only solution is to develop a world without weapons.

 

 

 

Nuclear war will begin unexpectedly like the oil spill and with its level of devastation, but will not be able to be plugged up after the fact. It will arise from the self-interested shortsightedness of the leaders of America as did the oil spill, the mortgage flimflam housing bubble burst, the deceitful pointless war in Iraq, the salmonella poisoned egg recall and the global warming caused floods that have devastated in unprecedented ways Iowa and Tennessee and China and Pakistan. We need new leadership of a different kind. Vote for my people caring, very intelligent wife, Ruth Calabria, for President in 2012.    

 

Date:        Friday, May 14, 2010 8:08 AM

From:       "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>

To:            jpaton4@bloomberg.net>,<aprakash1@bloomberg.net

Subject:  Oil Spill Realty versus Oil Spill PR

 

I realize that you folks are reporters not editorial writers so you may not be able to take advantage of what I am about to say, but I will give you the information anyway. I taught engineering thermodynamics years back at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute enough times to be an expert in the field. This university graduated and later had as its president, George M. Low, the fellow responsible at NASA for the moon landing. Chris Craft was the administrative and PR guy for NASA, not the nuts and bolts head of it. George Low was. Technical info coming from Rensselaer faculty should not be taken lightly.

 

Textbook thermodynamic theory makes clear in an inarguable way that thermo-mechanical dynamics at 2000 PSI is equivalent to thermo-mechanical dynamics on the sun's surface. This is not to say, as some mainstream journalists I have talked to confusedly and humorously misinterpret me as saying, that the temperature one mile below sea level is that of the sun's surface, but rather that chemo-mechanical reactions down in the depths are as anomalously weird as on the sun's surface, that is, quite unpredictable.

 

In short, there is no time to take the Gilbert Chemistry Set down to the briny depths and start doing experiments. The point to be made from this is not the obvious, that this is an irreparable disaster that will only be capped after five months of "leakage" that will effectively destroy the Atlantic marine ecosystem with attendant economic calamity. But that I am not an especially Nobel level genius and that at least two dozen thermodynamics-aware engineers now in the pay of the companies responsible for the spill know the same thing I do, namely, that a marine Armageddon is inevitable. We in the know, all of us, quite well know that there is NO FIX that will save the day.

 

Further it should be noted that the cost of these "heroic attempts" that are impossible in physical chemical reality, is but two or three days' BP oil profits. Which is to say, not so much in cynical but in realistic terms, that what is being "heroically attempted" is all comic opera public relations, no different in intent and purpose than the tripartite mutually contradicting denials of responsibility that came from the oil rig company executives at the congressional hearings just held.

 

There is a worse prediction that comes out of our mathematical analysis, but first things first. If you can digest this much, then I'll bother to take the time needed to spell out Part II of the man-made disaster story.

 

Sincerely,

Dr. Peter V. Calabria, PhD, retired.

 

 

Date:        Friday, May 14, 2010 8:38 AM

From:       "JIM POLSON, BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:" <jpolson@bloomberg.net>

To:            petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

Subject:  Re:fw: Oil Spill Realty versus Oil Spill PR

 

Thank you, Peter. So you're saying that it's impossible to either divert the leak sort of loosely, as they're trying to do the next day or so, and also impossible to "top kill" the well? You don't think they can plug it with the relief well either?

 

Hope to hear from you

Jim Polson

Bloomberg News

212 617 5293

609 462 2931 cell

 

 

Date:        Friday, May 14, 2010 8:38 AM

From:      "SUSAN WARREN, BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:" <susanwarren@bloomberg.net>

To:           petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

Subject:  Re: fw: Oil Spill Realty versus Oil Spill PR

 

Mr. Calabria. You make a convincing case. Would like to hear more. I'll have a reporter call you. Be gentle with our more feeble journalist brains and we'll strive to get it right. What do you think of latest 70,000 bd flow estimates

Susan

 

 

From:              Peter Calabria<petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>

To:                   JIM POLSON, BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:

Subject:           On The Second Well

Date:               5/14/2010 9:55:24

 

Jim,

 

Let me add as I see you did have a focus on that point that, of course, the second well has to alleviate the pressure. The primary problem is how much and the time it takes to drill it. It won't be, from all I have been able to ascertain, 2.5 months, but rather 4-5 months, and by that time, especially according to the upgraded flow rate on the wires this AM, you will see that Armageddon has already come and gone.

 

In my eclectic undergraduate days, I managed to tuck in a course on oceanography. Once the Coriolis Effect shifts the end of summer and stirs this mess through all the ocean currents, we'll have a new planet, and the economic catastrophe that accompanies it will seem, even to this secularist engineer-scientist, as though it came from a very angry deity. If you want more, tap one of your writers into the menu of recipients of this information that has some technical or mathematical background. Sometimes arguments based on mathematical functions can be hard to read without focus, but the conclusions reached with them are most convincing.

 

Peter

 

 

Date:        Friday, May 14, 2010 10:01 AM

From:       "JIM POLSON, BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:" <jpolson@bloomberg.net>

To:            petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

Subject:  Re:On The Second Well

 

Agreed. Wind, tide and current has favored them so far. They know it can't last.

 

 

From:              "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>

Sent:                Friday, May 14, 2010 10:32 AM

To:                   susanwarren@bloomberg.net

Subject:           Re: fw: Oil Spill Realty versus Oil Spill PR

 

Hi Susan,

 

…..As the low end 5000 bpd estimate is in the interest of BP, (this) raises doubts independent of the engineering aspects of the question. The government source of that number also gets tricky to question and requires amateur political theorizing that I will pass on.

 

What does have merit as criteria are the university sources that are quoting the higher flow rates and their arguments. The three I have come across this morning have solid reputations as scientists and the means of calculation makes sense to me. If I were practical in my thinking I would split the difference and say that the flow rate is considerably higher than the low 5000 bpd figure if not quite at Congressman Markey's sure sense of the upper 70,000 figure. That is a common sense way to judge it.

 

This signals a middle figure, still quite higher than 5000 bpd, a flow rate 8-10 times higher than 5000 bpd as indicates 3 Exxon Valdez oil spills minimally already with so many more to come that given the failure of short terms fixes I am absolutely sure of, quite boggles the mind. If you were smart, you might contact the people making the higher estimates directly…..

 

Peter

 

 

Date:              Friday, May 14, 2010 11:28 AM

From:             Joel Achenbach <achenbachj@washpost.com>

To:                  Peter Calabria <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>

Subject:        Re: Message via washingtonpost.com: Oil Spill

 

Peter, please forward me any info you have, am happy to read it and am eager to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks...best, joel

 

 

Date:              Monday, June 07, 2010 4:16 PM

From:             "Bazinet, Kenneth" <KBazinet@nydailynews.com>

To:                  petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

Subject:        Re: Oil Spills On Ken

 

Hi Peter,

 

Hope all is well. This disaster is monumental and sad. It doesn't surprise me that you were ahead of the curve.

 

All the best,

 

Ken