Biology Week Seven: Cell Biology and Cancer

How sophisticated is our understanding of cancer?

Sometimes I think our understanding of cancer in western medicine is so overly complicated its a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. Its compounded by the political and financial interests of pharmaceuticals and proponents of the American medical model.

How does a TCM approach to cancer differ?

TCM gives the individual far greater responsibility to make healthy choices and more tools to protect one's health. The approach to cancer is vastly different than the American medical approach. TCM empowers us to eat well, access the wealth of herbal medicine benefits, and to control our treatment of cancer or any other illness. It gives us options other that using toxic radiation to target malignant (yet ultimately naturally occurring) mutations in our cells.

Physics Week Seven: Chaos Theory

The idea that the seat of consciousness is outside of the skull, consisting of an electromagnetic field, was very interesting to me. I'm curious of the implications this has for understanding empathy and intimacy. How does the proximity of two individuals' heads (such as while kissing or cuddling) affect one another's EM fields? If you spend time with another person for long periods of time, is there any crossover between fields? Does this explain affective empathy? Partners having the same dream? Knowing what someone else is thinking?

Biology Week Six: The Nature of Life

How would you distinguish between living and non-living systems?

I guess I don't really think the difference between living and non-living systems is the most pertinent question. What is the reason for the question? Often we find dividing lines between the creatures worthy of rights and the creatures (sub-human) that do not deserve rights. I think a more pressing question is what is our responsibility to all-that-is and of course living systems deserve rights and our responsible behavior, but where does that leave aspects of the natural world that are not recognized as living? If we can't identify cognitive behavior amongst stones, does that mean we have no responsibility? Many people would say "heck no you don't have responsibility to rocks!!" But a) those rocks are connected to living systems so when we mine stones and minerals from the ground there is a devastating impact on the habitat and b) those rocks are part of a time scale much larger than us so who are we to decide their worth?

DNA doesn't determine race. Society does" Would you agree?

Yes, race is a construct determined by geography, culture, history (which can be stored in genetic memory), and politics.

Physics Week Six: Vibrations

Are all vibrations “good”?

Depends on who you ask. The vibrations of an earthquake seem like a bad thing to us, but Mama Earth is going to shed her tension whether it benefits us or not. For her its good, for us it is terrifying. I think her needs and timescale trump ours so does that mean her good trumps our pain?

Resonance in my world

This makes me think most about people I resonate with and what makes someone so easy to get a long with. I've had several experiences of being at parties or events, not particularly talking to anyone outside of the group that I was with, and then I turn to talk to a random person and find out they are from my home town/region. Is it just coincidence that I would find someone in the Bay (not too far from home) who went to my high school or grew up in a nearby town, or is there something about people from the Central Valley that just call to me?

Connections I can make between Energy and Qi

Music is one of the most powerful expressions for me, something that moves me, empowers me, brings me happiness. I think of how the vibrations of sound at a house show or concert fill up the crowd, getting under our skin, moving people to dance or fight or flirt. Its clearly not just our ears experiencing the sound. The article "Is Energy a Dirty Word?" proposes the idea that cerebro-spinal fluid may express itself throughout our fascia as a qi-circulating system. I think this articulates a lot of what is felt when a person gets caught up in listening to music. Its an energy that feeds the soul.

Biology Week Five: The Complexity of Life

In class we compared the idea of diverse humanoid species living at the same time to a variety of species of monkeys or birds, etc living in a jungle. While it makes sense that various hominids lived alongside each other, I couldn't quite picture it until we connected it to how we are already used to seeing animals coexist. Of course there were different species! Of course different species would have evolved to spend more or less time in the trees or teeth that ate from this or that source, therefore coexisting without being in direct competition with one another. And of course interspecies mating would lead to the next branch in the evolutionary line.

The answer given for the chicken or the egg question was so hilariously simple. Just as breeding across humanoid species led to the first modern day humans, breeding across bird species led to the first chicken to crawl out of a chicken egg. But that just opens up new questions. If the chicken didn't come first, who/what were mom and dad?!

Physics Week Five: Symmetry and Sacred Geometry

As I think about the concept of particle symmetry applied to "my (a)symmetrical world," I think of the drive to have someone complete us, whether it is a partner or best friend or a community of loved ones. We find people on similar "wavelengths" or whose qualities in someway complement our own. While a particle and anti-particle will combust if ever they meet, in relationships we may explore different operations of symmetry. Maybe we seek out friends/partners who are much like us (reflection) or maybe we seek out our opposites, a partner whose strengths and/or weaknesses complement our own, a balance like the yin yang (rotational symmetry). And lets face it, sometimes relationships are much like the particles, highly combustible.

It seems that the frequency of the Golden Ratio found in nature would demonstrate a connection of sacred geometry to quantum mechanics. For some reason many plants, animals, even galaxies organize themselves according to the spirals of the Fibonacci sequence. This beautiful continuity indicates to me some underlying organizational unity at the deepest level of the universe's structure.

Biology Week Four: The Pattern of Lfie

The damage done by the idea that animals are mindless, soul-less "stimulus-response machines" is terrible and far reaching. We hunt them to extinction for convenience or sport. We breed, cage, and slaughter them by the millions for industrial farming. We torture them into amusing us in circuses and fights. In the case of the first two examples, this leads to massive devastation of our environment.

The animal automaton/enlightened human duality hurts us in ways I see as a profound soul wound. It is a cornerstone of the Western drive to dominate nature. One result of that old belief that we are set above the earth and its inhabitants (who exist to serve us) is that we are conditioned to repress our most basic animal urges and taught to feel shame for what comes natural. And incidentally, as a result we also construct specious experiments to measure animal intelligence inadvertently designed so that the animal will fail, thus confirming our superiority.

It is encouraging to see examples of how researchers have started to recognize and address that bias. More and more studies have begun to show that animals routinely use tools, have languages with which they communicate, live in a variety of social structures including cooperative communities, have the ability to understand human body language. And maybe most importantly, have evolved specialized traits that surpass our own, the cuttlefish with the seeing skin being the most exciting (and creepy!) example from the reading.

Physics Week Four: Energy, Matter, and the Four Forces

I feel affected by e=mc2 (for the life of me my computer won't do superscript. We're just gonna have to deal with it) every time I engage in a form of exercise. I especially think of yoga. As I move through the flow, I feel my mass stretch into different poses and the energy that is raised inside me as I do so. I take deep breaths and hold the pose. Despite a minimal amount of movement, I feel all the energy that is reflected within my body matter. As I leave the yoga studio or get up from my backyard practice, I feel grateful for those moments of feeling light and energized within my body.

Gravity is the fundamental force of attraction. It keeps us where we ought to be. Gravity keeps our planet in the orbit around the sun necessary of life to exist and keeps us attracted to the earth that sustains us.