The Great American Novel: The Last Hurrah

Definitions

The Great American Novel (GAN) need not be a literary novel. It must be of what is (was) America. The GAN, which is Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, must be about politics, if it is about “America”, and about elections, and preferably about reelections. It need not be instances of the human or inhuman condition à la Malraux or Bõlano or Grossman, or as an author “engagé” concerned with, for example, about the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and how the distance between the rich and the poor never will be closed. In addition, the GAN need not be a catalog, Dos Passos, or a humankind depicted as technological tissue, Pynchon, or summed by a passion mutated from Nature until it is too intense.

Once we had more than hope, it was an opportunity though very rarely achieved for traversing the distance between poor to rich. To contain such insanity is only, if devastation is to be avoided, via politics – democratic participatory democracy. As always, the person in the street, the one on the barstool, the hick in hay or those with faces aglow from computer use, are the hope for change. But most recently on the massive historical scale, the Marxists, if honest with themselves, found that the commoners do wish to remain common-like, as the few Iowans who prize mediocrity. It is safe and assured.

Buell in his book about the GAN shows how sectionalism was not a characteristic of a great American novel. But as America became more like vanilla, he entertains notions of transnationalism to such an extent that the GAN could be written in the Congo, at Mbandaka. Wherever it is written, Buell asks if it should be about the “American way of life”. Academic projects in creative writing courses gave to the supposed GAN the taint of the “serious” like from Barth, DeLillo, Pynchon, and Wallace. Some ambitiously attempted construction of monumental human socialism to be negated by using technology without science. The smashing together of many cultural domains during the 60s-70s according to the rules of cinema led to bewildered unaccepted and unanticipated ignorance founded on relating them by means of attempts at reducing the tension between helplessness and prodigious knowledge through welcomed apocalypses that, unfortunately, needed coded competencies to restrain the constantly receding End of It All…and so on.

This is a long way from De Forest’s 1868 essay that called for how to pick a GAN. He was already beaten to the punch by the publisher of Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1867 book who proclaimed it the great American novel. De Forest presumably gave it a more formal consideration, and it could spark a quest for the GAN. But P. T. Barnum preempted both by ridiculing publishers concerned with having on hand the “Great American novel”. De Forest was not a huckster. He wanted a book that could display ordinary American values in manners and emotions. He wanted an entire geographical range for the book’s contents.

Those contents were not to be a geographical entity – the United States – but about an America, a political entity first and foremost about the socialism of political freedom, or so others have realized. They came later after America ended in the years 1963-1975. Before them, when the GAN was more of a concern – 1860s to 1920s -  they wanted it to be of many pages and be a summation, implied or direct, of America. Of course such a summation would have to be a work of literature. Never mind that literature is making the commonplace enlightening, they wanted its theme not to be based on the everyday and ordinary. Accelerating away from such a reality where we are known all too well by people not of our choosing, they got smothered by pompous almost lyrical reflection, dictates of a pseudoism flowing hot and fierce along the causeway of objectivity in service to their subjective reality as agreed upon by a like-minded group that was being protective of their self-realized symbolic status… and so on.

All of this could be packed into a supernovel or perhaps a series of meganovels and there end it. Truly? If someone could write it or them and their intention be made known, wouldn’t others attempt to stop it? If brought to completion what else would there be to write? Read? What could a publisher do for an encore? Might as well launch the nukes.

Before involuntary radiation-soaked baths are the last of life’s events, should we then endorse lesser efforts made to secure the identity of the United States? Henry James in 1880 called it, lesser or greater, the “GAN”. In his time “USA” and “America” were the same or at least connected. There is no America now. There is not enough order and decency. The GAN must have a Christian element, at least a nod to it – to faith, belief, and denying power as the last resort as Dostoevsky concluded. This Christianity contributed to order and not to a Hobbesian draconian cage but for disciplined, hard-working, and simple, moral humankind, though fallible. They sometimes knew truth and beauty with tolerance and humor. Certainly they mourned brutality and vulgarity. Life was precious, most of the time, and when it wasn’t, births were encouraged to possibly curtail irrationality and give strength to those facing the ordeal of harsh reality. There was morality, and it wasn’t a convoluted personal morality. United they were, even loosely, in punishment for misconduct and in avoiding the most obvious and anti-social evils.

Evils there were but the Americans were sustained by an experiment in representative democracy. American religion and American morals upheld their liberty even as mental superiority was resented and equality and being the same became confused. A whiteout from a blizzard of legal empowerment threatened loss of sight of what opinion embedded in the masses was subverting – the flip side of the consciousness of Puritanism (partly Calvinistic and partly Augustinian) – self-reliance, diversity, less “equality”, more freedom in an energetic progressivism that included less individuals and more of a family life.

Which is to say, this is obscene to those who wrote literary tombstones for the Lincoln republic. As consumers, tech-directed, we want what Polybius advocated in a different way – no erosion of polity while Aristotle thought that clearly moneymaking, not money, like acid eats into the social order and disfigures the face of society. It makes monsters of the common people in that they are devoid of common sense. They can’t then be trusted. Aristotle also put down that reasoning leads to happiness. Politics itself was not philosophy, sociology, or history. It was best, according to Aristotle, to not have too much leisure and this would help to avoid tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy. In each case they, whomever, govern or rule in their own interest. This is furthered by a lack of common morals, giving up our distinction from beasts, and ignoring we are only able to choose among evils.

In any event, we came to think we were more animal than human. Effective amoral violence became the only way, then, to political success. Make the animals into consumers and workers and name them always in personal terms and never can they be citizens. Use the Therapeutic Approach to keep them disengaged from polities. They are as they are because of society. Be careful out there; it may not be quite yet a jungle, but it isn’t a sensible civilization. In the jungle Rousseau found the missing link, the orangutan. So how did the orangutan’s relatives come to live in Paris? Probably they got divided into rich orangutans and poor orangutans along the way. They became two societies, the rich one vs. the poor one.

In America, there had been trust in the commoner. The commoner wasn’t rich or poor. There was equality of opportunity. It was a belief. We no longer believe. American writers asserted a fundamental moralism within the bounds of the United States. They knew we had fought for a distinct political way of life synonymous with the American way of life. There was present a chance the commoners could prevent the subversion by the rich but the commoners fell into the poor, and they offered no hope. No poor became rich. After all, there became only two ways of being -  rich or poor, a few vs. the masses. The dreadful boredom of the poor’s works and days could become intolerable so they were allowed diversions. One of these diversions, regarded as an essential American political novel and a GAN, is All the Kings’ Men.

All the King’s Men

All the King’s Men is about a demagogue on his way to dictatorship. Though the novel has been called “the essential political novel”, it is not primarily about politics. The politics described in the book use the characters like Willie Stark (better named as Talos thought the author, Robert Penn Warren, the pitiless and brutal character in the Faire Queen). Jack is to realize the meaninglessness of the quasi-religious Big Twitch to significantly account for undated activity. Neither can pragmatism nor idealism consistently clarify the mix of good and evil and so morality is a lost cause. It is all only what happens, one thing after another in a hard-boiled noir that Warren controls in a Machiavellian manner with a manipulating subjective blow-by-blow agenda. This is the really “real” without a continuum. Fractions only add up to more fractions. Endeavors are not completed. Perhaps some sophisticated mathematics with what little expository force that could be mustered might produce acceptance of the arbitrary in all human affairs. Pascal’s Wager, for example, has no place in such affairs. The Wager is nothing more than an exercise in probability.

Many times there is sweat in the hot South of All the King’s Men. But there is never any stink. After rereading and reading, the novel wasn’t as interesting as on the first read. Burden was a burden. Sensationalism in a tight circle of people got to be annoying. Warren gives the impression of having the plain truth bolstered by melodrama. It is asked if Stark winked at Jack. Who cares? More important, was Warren winking at us? He can’t leave it alone. In the book “it” gets put out in a wise, if not profound and arty manner. One is reminded of Freud’s banana or cigar – that a banana or cigar is sometimes an inclusive banana or cigar.

Warren has trouble with the identities of his characters. He makes an uncertainty about them. But, he must “place” the characters; he does not want to do it if it unduly clarifies their identities. It’s what Warren, not a reader, wants. Not what a reader would want unless dominated by Warren. As if one can only appreciate the book if subservient to Warren, not “under a spell”. This is naked force, brutal. Warren thinks people and ideas can’t be realized enough, but they can for a time, then gone, the memory fades. A bright vivid, recent memory restores what was, for a time. Warren can’t accept the present because it is just not now, barely just, quite close in time, gone, always a memory and so identity cannot be ID’d, not truly. So? What is it? Nothing else but reality. Warren didn’t have to write like he did, but since he chose to do so, he should have found meaning without jargon, accents, sensationalism, and melodrama and twisting facts of the plot for the sake of obscurity, which is the truth, such as he found it. A wavering uncertain dim state without stages of process is the result.

It gets boring how Jack knows so much but remains ignorant. He would have stayed in Long Beach. He was enough of a Californian already. Warren gives him an uncertainty then denies placing the character if enough uncertainty about him could arise, so he wouldn’t be unduly clarified. Warren affirms contradictions in clarity, but denies them too and reaffirms them marginally altered. There can be an exasperation with this wordplay. He opens slots about who are the characters and what they do and fills them with this and that and, like enough monkeys with typewriters, you get significance. But why stop? If the monkeys were to continue, they would get back to obscurity. Warren’s obscurity came from the novel’s start as a play, his preoccupation with verse, and then a need to use the jargon, accents, and melodrama twisted by facts into obscurity, which is the “truth”, forget the facts.

The Last Hurrah

In contrast, in The Last Hurrah appearances are not deceiving. The truth is made of facts, except as Frank Skeffington related about political writers who have an occupational distrust of facts when writing about him. Skeffington, a crook, was the mayor of a city never named. His political base was mostly Irish Catholics. For them politics was a part of life. Politics was dramatic and, at times, comedic. It was accepted without doubt that it was entertaining. His supporters played roles, some assigned, and gave the best performance they could as parents, offspring, voters, and office holders. For them, family came first. They knew only what could be attained and that was an attempt at preservation of dignity with responsibilities set for the common good. Common sense was not yet the individualist’s banalities. Willful misinterpretation of facts was not in their ken. For them there was not a focus on clear-cut grand themes of human existence. The mysteries were Biblical, aided and abetted by the Church. Many of them were witty, decorous, caving sociability, and found a place even if they were forced into displaying a capacity for lacking the definitive.

They were sociable at a wake, for example at the wake of Knocko Minihan (those names never to be emulated again). A wake was a social event. Most in attendance were poor, worked hard (at a time when the expression didn’t apply to one and all), not often given a chance to be sociable, not much diversion. Otherwise, it was a dreary life. A grand custom was a wake. They were to be entertained. They deserved to be since they were unique and entertainly so – the most entertaining group in Europe transplanted to America. They had suddenly made the city three times its former size. Those already present belatedly realized that the savages, the Irish, had arrived. They came in uninvited. How they got in was not pretty.

Now it was the Italians on their way in. Going away were these Irish. Gone as a cohesive political force. A fading Eden, such as it was, Post-America was not far away. There were Italian songs at the 9^th Ward Democratic Club’s Spring Dance. Portraits in the hall were of Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt, and Skeffington. Open bar, formidable buffet, costly orchestra, and a chance for business.  A part of the business was Camaratta from the waterfront, soon to be deposed. There was no open hostility toward him, it would be ultimately pointless to have done so. Pointless then and at other times. Pointless in regard to Camaratta or anyone else. Here there were none of the gang of anthropoids in the State House and none from the western part of the state who were absolutely depraved, worse than the famous South.

Milder appearing depravity was not so far away. A prominent Republican attorney general had refused $10,000 to defend a notorious criminal. This was taken as a noble gesture, and he earned the nickname of “Honorable”. Much later it was discovered that he had refused the $10,000 because he had wanted $20,000. He was cremated. One person said it was like he was burned with the Sunday papers. He could have been put in an ashtray. Other Republicans painted the political landscape in complementary colors. Such as the Governor who was a well-born turd, a complete reactionary, he had a mind from the 19th century and it wasn’t an apt one. Progressivism for him was doing away with the use of the cat-of-nine-tails on a regular basis in the penal system. Going any further would have been too dangerous. The governor’s allies would help the poor, if down on their luck when they couldn’t be used by as allies. Then and only then did the poor have rights. In effect the Republicans didn’t want public baths for the poor, let them stink, and at a good distance from their betters. The poor can take a bath at the start and at the end and use talcum powder in between. The Republicans had a vested interest in the talcum powder industry.

Mostly likely Skeffington had no holdings in the talcum powder industry. But however his politics could be analyzed, there was no ignoring his recognition of the poor or those not so poor. He realized the ease with which people could be bought. Enormous wealth engenders yet more wealth to those who already have it. They have no answer to the fundamental question – how much is enough? For those at zero, they can be bought, have they any choice? But those at greater than zero, even if only a little can say, with Nancy, just say NO. In that NO, or from it, resides morality, the only way, unsure as it is, to stop the rich from taking us all for a ride and winning our lives. But one impertinence – what is meant by “zero”?

All Skeffington needed to hold them off, keep the rich at bay, was a plurality. The size of the plurality hardly mattered; a plurality is, as Skeffington said, like the color of your raincoat in a typhoon, what difference does it make? To obtain a plurality now and before, Skeffington in his campaigns entered differing cells of the city. These places were not just about race, money, religion, and sex. Broad categories of voters had within them these cells. All cells were in common in that what they said they wanted was apart from what they would settle for. Skeffington promised them the first, and he knew he had to deliver on the second.

All these cells were known to Skeffington building by building though to others they could be parts of villages on the steppes of Asia. He was, of course, among the Irish, but also he was immersed in Italians, Greeks, Syrians, and Chinese. Among these groups, Skeffington visited a slum building owned by one of the Opposition, who wanted to keep it as it had been. This was preserving his inheritance, so no paint or plumbing or electricity improvements were allowed. The only thing that changed was a steady increase in rent. This was obviously a combination of sentiment and good economy.

Among some of his voters, Skeffington knew he must reiterate that all Ireland must be free and that Trieste belonged to Italy. He could not possibly affect any changes in regard to these issues, but they wanted to hear it. Also, some wanted another statute of Columbus. Skeffington noted there were enough pigeons already pooping on enough statues. But the Sons of Italy wanted a statue of someone else, some lunatics wanted one of FDR, and Monsignor Tancredi wanted one of Monsignor Tancredi. Skeffington wanted to avoid making enemies he would have forever so he did the cynical, outrageous, reprehensible, and sensible thing and picked Mother Cabrini.

Appearing less outrageous and entailing much more than a statue was a televised evening with candidate McCluskey, Skeffington’s opponent in the race for mayor. A statue as one representation of one dead person to be seen by a handful of people didn’t begin to compare with the thousands that saw a key feature in our transformation from a political democracy into a social one – McCluskey’s TV spot. It was done at his home with wife, kids, IRISH setter (rented), milk and cookies, bookcases, divan, spinet, and large painting of Pope Pius XII in evidence. This was turning ostensibly private matters into public ones and did not involve a genial sin but one as cause for the end of acceptance of independence and association by those viewing, as voters, as a mass to be manipulated on ever greater stages as TV assumed ever greater importance. Their fare was intended for uncorrupted ordinary (where are they today?) people whose morals were to be ruined by TV’s programs and ads and “news” about sensations, fad, fallacies, fashion, gossip, personalities, and a feeble education being only what TV showed them.

McCluskey’s TV show was in the vanguard charged with destroying America. Never had certain outcomes guaranteed the best, the right or correct occupants of political office. TV made any such concerns irrelevant. Of more concern was did it sell, would they buy, what entertained and what did not? On such a scale, McCluskey was rather low on the totem pole. The religious tinge to his presentation would soon enough be dispensed with. One might as well rent the wife, kids, and order a platter of food and, okay, buy the candidate too or “rent” the candidate. Such goings on weren’t far off.

Obedience of the masses was gained by promising more pie though it always tasted like crap, always. More rights were to be upheld. Keep them focused on the individual uber all and deny avoidance of the most obvious evils. Tell them politics is dirty and about power and overt obedience will not be enough, since there was the possibility of heresy. Public opinion rules and it is made by those in power. Checks and balances cannot rein in public opinion pushed by the guardians of social communications. There are the means they determine to get the ends they determine. The future is nowhere, the past is dead, and of the present they are in control. They control of what freedom consists. It is in their realm that they have made. Any pains or ills in that realm are treated as boredom. Once there, in that state, the mass are never out of it. Meaning is lost and pseudo-meaning is put in its place, placebos are issued, social placebos for political needs.

So we become headed to a future (nowhere) less safe, more brutal, less rational, more hurried and harassed, less of sense and sensibility, with less honor or duty or decency; therefore, boredom prevails and, they counter with entertainment composed of torture, horror, sexual oddities, cruelty of any kind, suffering, murder, less disciple, no tradition and cohesion, and obviously lesser families. More families were prosperous in 1952-1956 as The Last Hurrah was being written and published. “Reet!”, as Fats Citronella says more than once during his reception of the keys to the city from Skeffington (who notes the keys and recipients had become of lesser quality), was based on that prosperity within one spending group. The youth as themselves were a consumer class and not of a family. There was a pent up suppression of incomes in the Depression and then WWII. The rush for economic betterment had only old social referents, not suitable or well-presented and integrated with the new youth. Constant self-assertion was to bully society into not placing any guides at large, no distant antecedents, and only incestuous standards to ensure the increase in the vulgarity of popular culture.

Vulgarity and dignity could not coexist. The family could have had some dignity in its repertoire when it had preserved limits and responsibilities in relation to the common good. Outside it, individuals drooled on an unawareness of the seriousness of history and how a just society could be maintained. Abundant slobber or a well-measured way of life – drool and drivel or deny the realm’s contrivances in order to render oneself composed. Being then, in their realm, in their control, an English-English dictionary is needed to figure out ones’ place, how to fit in. The realm lacks short condolences, soft compliments, quiet recognition, mild regret, and muted grief. The obverse is perfunctory, if accomplished, and done according to a script. As done in a TV program or if they have been done many times, then they are realized or otherwise to know how to do any of them is lost.

Within The Last Hurrah, Skeffington’s adversaries found some of this public utterances, which could include the Bible or Shakespeare as sources and apt as sources go, to be in an alliance with an awesome and hardly attainable ideal like chastity or telling the truth. O’Connor wrote The Last Hurrah with Skeffington central to it. Of course, it was not only Skeffington’s life that passed away. Skeffington gave no plea to Caufield; it was not an explanation in referring to an end even though something anew would transpire, but it would be a lesser truth, more lies. O’Connor wasn’t “political”, he needed to wrap the political matters he presented, such as they were, tightly around the Irish-Americans of Boston and their inseparable Catholicism. Without that wrapping, his story would have been diffuse. In addition, the story would have been too close to the future. Otherwise it could not have been as clearly written, calmly done, not overly profound (or any other attempt at a synonym for literary output) yet he depicted much that was lost. O’Connor was at the end of a very large group of writers who knew America was fundamentally moralistic. Whatever O’Connor thought of this disaster, he did not write much about it. If greatness must be what is said, how vastly inferior is what isn’t said? If greatness always lies in what is written in full, what can be found of worth in knowing that few words in number can add up to an incalculable effect?

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Kettlewell's Folly

Two of Two

Mostly Humankind

The particulars of the observable scientific environment were in Darwin’s realm Newtonian organisms at the limit of the optical microscope. The post-Darwin realm was formed by the molecules Kimura knew of at the limit of the electron microscope. First, simple arithmetic sufficed, and then it did not. Darwin’s account of “evolution” was too simple. He and his supporters viewed life as very diverse but they succumbed to the idea that an explanation of major groupings of life could be approached all too easily. It has become evident the diversity of life calls for a diversity of explanation to account for its “evolution”. A major sense of being incomplete was filled in, they thought, by genetics. A forced pairing of NS and genetics was made to account for Darwinian “evolution”. But the addition of the explanatory power of genetics in the service of NS got away from them. Darwin’s views were at the macro level and a scaling up of genetics at the micro level to the macro level assumed an unimportant loss of truth in the telling in regard to “evolution”. Maybe one-fourteenth of the truth was lost and in the new ballgame, a science reduced by one-fourteenth, still left thirteen-fourteenths. Wasn’t that enough?

The previous Haldane’s Dilemma, a result of placing more mathematical rigor into biology, especially evolutionary biology, had a requirement of too much time needed for genes to change, that is, for species to change. At the micro level of molecular genetics, there were too many genomic variations. No Darwinian “fitness” could match them. There is a drift and flow to derive what comes to be “used”. If it is not Haldane’s Dilemma, it is Kimura’s neutralism – a still greater dilemma.

The peppered moth story was instigated by the advent of human intervention – the Industrial Revolution’s pollution. This was not Nature at work and so, in a larger sense, no “natural” selection could result. As Darwin proposed his notions concerning Nature, their applicability had lapsed by only a matter of decades. Only rewilding projects could reestablish the “natural” component to an environment, though still the push that sets up the project is human. What has been called a “romantic” factor in rewilding has been used to support a weak, incomplete science. The emotional appeal “to let Nature take its course” behind fences and to let more ancient ecosystems to reestablish themselves means the end of the present day ecosystem. Destroying the present to let the past come again robs “evolution” of meaning.

There are no brightly colored hues of life just for the hell of it. But there is a linkage of biological structure. This linkage isn’t accounted for by evolutionary biology, if by Darwin’s resultants or anyone else’s notions. Certainly not by NS, now, maybe never, though perhaps more possible in Darwin’s time. Peppered moths, if selected, would not have been about species but a form of a species. Birds, if involved, would have been natural enough but soot and smoke are not. What is “natural” and of the “wild” was not present. They are of the past. “Evolution” (Darwin) studies Nature through examining the past. It was a theory of historical differences; it was about what was and can never be again. The additions we make to global warming invalidate all selection in the Darwinian sense – it throws an artificial blanket equating to a lack of “natural” processes on a worldwide scale.

In any event, the advent of humankind could never be and wasn’t explained by Darwinianism or its offshoots. His Origin of Species was too too slow, and careful to not miss a detail, to have ever been the origin of humankind. Certainly humankind is not a part of Nature. For homo sapiens to humankind by what route? The dead-end routes of “evolution” are not much use for explication. Humankind’s sufficient intelligence isn’t much more than a phenotype. It isn’t seen but alters behavior (also not seen in the fossil record structurally speaking) and outcome and “fitness”. How, then, a transition to intelligence if it affected survival? No “sort of pregnant” reasoning to get to levels of intelligence, graduations of, and not a little intelligence vs a zero amount.

However, the condition(s) did obtain, they did/do not represent “progress” as evolutionists now insist. Once upon a time the evolutionists were quite certain that a teleological process was occurring. If no “progress”, what to call it – a trend? An accumulation of change? Once A, then B, B not dependent on A. Then A+B=C. C not dependent on A+B. There is linkage, but not a dependent one. “Evolution” (Darwin) is condemned to being a historical and an unimportant study. It totally ignored humankind. Darwin’s “Nature” in theory came before humankind.

If one wants “progress” of living things, then NS is the way to go. If not, randomness has been the alternative – random then random and after that, random. The first occurrence of randomness precludes certain further changes in some directions and so a second random event must work on a prior determination, and a third effective random event must work on what these random events solidified. You get change not in a preferred direction but in an established direction, not predetermined but determined by one; by one and one are two, then three and so on. It is additive but not entirely controlled. Four is more than three and after that no more can be said.

The human intelligence is critically dependent on the human brain. The size of the brain and size of the body containing the brain aren’t enough to adequately characterize intelligence. It is maintained that a dense packing of neurons plus resorting to cooked food brought about sufficient intelligence. Within that intelligence the actual causes of species-level changes of life could be very complex, hidden, and only given over to worthless discussion. For example, the lack of hubris regarding reductionism might see a push beyond molecular genetics into quantum genetics or leave off “genetics” entirely and make the transitions of all life coupled to quanta.

The search for “fitness” on the quantum level would seem to be futile. In any case, “fitness” does not apply to humankind. It is odd that humankind, the source of the propagation of ideas about “evolution” and all else, should have been turned by human reasoning into animals to apply “fitness” to ourselves. Or is humankind odd and its hallmarks of “only human”, “to err is human”, and “all too human” establish a special province of life for us?  In that province physicists reason about the never-having-lived and Darwin and others reasoned about the dead and the living, including those like us, and obviously we are of the living, but Darwin was absolutist (like Newton) and sought to have us “ape” the dead. He rid us of fixed species, but that was not enough ambition, and he overreached himself and made the dead and us like objects of physics – known and determinate. T. H. Huxley did not think Darwin had an experimental science. He said Darwin showed no proof of NS, but that it must occur. Then “fitness”. Many agreed with Waddington in 1966 that NS got tangled in a tautology. The survivors survive.

To survive is to also to age. The aging of a phenotype can have a connection with the stress of air pollution. Kettlewell was aware the forms he made use of could have differing ages. Telomeres may be causally related to aging. Telomere length shortens with each cell division. Telomeres act as a cell’s “memory” of exposure to air pollution. To compensate for telomeric DNA loss, telomere length is maintained by the enzyme named telomerase. In addition, if you die, I die, but then again we don’t all die. Humankind does not die. It doesn’t have a mortality rate at 90% nor births in the hundreds or more per source. Evolutionists have no role for intelligence nor recognition of its existence. We do have similar structure vis-à-vis apes or monkeys or chimps or whatever but we did not “descend” from them or “cousins”. We transcend death, apes do not. “Evolution” is a mathematical combination of life and death. Darwin read Malthus into Nature. “Evolution” should have had determinate relations concerning brain size and body size, and structures derived from them. Yet humankind has “evolutionary” structure but the interaction has an outcome transcending “evolution”. We shouldn’t be here and have been there. We are and we were. We gave up on God, got “evolution” and some fight viciously and desperately to keep “evolution”. It doesn’t work, something else acknowledging humankind as paramount vs the never-having-lived and the dead and other life can be sought for answers. Start from we aren’t part of Nature. For some a representative of the much admired intelligence came up with “evolution” and so, nevertheless, we aren’t as smart as we think we are. But now it isn’t 1859. The quantum world may bubble up into molecules and some of those molecules could be DNA or RNA or…

Another fundamental problem is to have regarded Darwin and Wallace as scientists. Very early on theory got divorced from empirical test. One needed confirmation from others. No bias in hypotheses, data, and conclusions was needed. Lurking underneath it all was the conviction that God was gone and good riddance. The central facts of biology were posited to be in human prehistory. That’s where the hypotheses were relegated to and multiplied if needed so that causal importance could be drawn out. Acceptance of Darwinism is more about “climate change”, how dreary, dark, and cold God “died” and how cheery, bright, and warming was the intellectual fashion that received a climate not hostile to intellectual acceptance of biology and its disciple, evolutionary biology.

Where, then, does the truth reside? In the specifics or the generalizations? Can one separate the two? Supposedly truth about data could lead to a false generalization. Good data doesn’t automatically mean good generalizations. A certain kind of thought must be along the rope leading from the specifics to a generalization. A concern for truth must be brought along. Should it go part of the way to the generalization? Half? One-third? Three-fourths? Perhaps one-fourteenth. Once upon a time, a court of law would have a recitation of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and a reference to a deity. In our day the partial truth is all the rage. In support of this laxity is our sloppy use of language – the words, especially the scientific ones that were once thought to be significant and precise in usage. Now the words, improperly punctuated in a fragment represent mostly a worthless piece of thought. Let your usage be your guide – not any standards, however low, are allowed. A try for high standards “obviously” lets “elitism” in and that cannot be sanctioned. Thus the language has a simple and obvious lack of truth, absolute and unequivocal and resolute beyond anything the Hebrews got from God via Moses.

Kettlewell's Folly

One of Two

Mostly Moths

A moth in England flies at night. During the day, it rests. Its life, at night, is devoted to reproduction. Lacking reproduction, it dies. Of course, participating in reproduction does not prevent death. The adult moth, after surviving a death rate of 90% across its earlier engagement in the stages of eggs, caterpillars, and pupae, either travels miles to a female or, if a female, travels a shorter distance and awaits the arrival of a male. She aids being found by giving off pheromones, odors, so the male can find her. The encounter between male and female is not brief. A successful encounter can lead to 2,000 eggs per en copula. If the moths have or have not done their duty at night, they have nothing to do during the daytime. They rest. That is assuming they survived their in-flight status. Bats, using their innate sonar, end the lives of some of the moths. The bats encounter males flying every night of their lives as they search for females. The females fly for one night. The adult moths start life at some time from May to August.

These generalities about a particular moth may apply to other moths. Different kinds of moths, or species of moth, are of a great number. There are about 160,000 species of moth. One species that has received much attention over the years was ranked 216^th in abundance out of 263 species of moth in Britain. The particular moth of interest, found in Britain but also in Armenia, China, Europe, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Koreas, Mongolia, Nepal, North America, Russia, and elsewhere is the commonly called peppered moth. Its scientific name is Biston betularia. In Britain, this moth has three “forms”, all of one species. The forms are usually characterized by their wing color. The typical peppered moth is called typica and has a white (“off white”) color with some dark spots that are like pepper or dark freckles. Meanwhile, there is a form called carbonaria that has the pepper spread out, as it were, so that the moth is dark, sometimes called “black”. Lastly there is a little discussed intermediate form called the insularia. It is the dark form of the peppered moth that received the most attention. The dark form is also called a melanic form.

The representatives of the dark form, or “darks”, became predominant in the middle of the 19^th century in England in the industrialized Midlands. The darks were presumed to be examples of what was later called “industrial melanism”. Factories were producing very abundant dark smoke and soot that carried or were composed of chemicals. The chemicals could be harmful to animals and plants. In 1848, R.L. Edleston found one of the darks. It was then regarded as rare. By 1864 Edleston was finding more darks than the typical peppered moths. It was darkness at noon in Manchester, England. Black soot and smoke were very thick. Mothers had a difficult time making out their children from across a narrow street. In short, the pollution was terrible.

Meanwhile, in rural areas of Britain the typical remained typical. In addition to Edleston, many other lepidopterists, overwhelmingly of amateur status, were finding more of the darks than the typica in polluted areas. Also meanwhile, it was thought melanism of the moths could be caused by the “impressions” of surroundings on moth eggs or moth caterpillars. If reared at temperatures different from normal or in higher than normal humidity, melanic adult moths were produced. But even without differing temperature or high humidity, the “darks” were predominating.

In 1896, J. W. Tutt was maintaining that the increase in the number of dark forms was due to natural selection (NS). Tutt’s use of the term “natural selection” made reference to a theory put forward by Charles Darwin. Darwin in 1859 published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This was not yet “evolution”. Darwin used “evolution” in another book of his in 1871. By 1872, he had put “evolution” into Origin of the Species. For Darwin, NS was the crux of “evolution”. It could produce species and end them. It acted quite slowly and could build up small, if not tiny, differences into structural change. Others were thinking and had thought species were not stable and definite. Darwin supported this notion. He marshalled data to help along the idea, but NS was the distinctive feature for Darwin. This lack of fixity for species was quite enough for some people. A kind of devotee of the Bible knew that Darwin and his sort were a menace to their Biblical truth. Moreover, “evolution” was not limited to past action, it was currently still at work. It operated through sex and death.

Post-Darwin support for Darwin had come from Tutt. But John W. Heslop Harrison did not agree with Tutt about melanism in moths. Around 1926 Harrison had reasoned chemicals in the polluted environment, such as in leaves that the moth caterpillars fed on contained “metallic salts”, and could alter the adult moths. Harrison did not use the peppered moth. The larvae of other moths that he did use were fed foliage covered with lead nitrate and manganese sulfate. Mutation occurred. There were dark forms of the moths. But others could not get his results. In other later activities he was found out as a fraud. His earlier scientific work became adversely back-colored by those fraudulent practices.

Harrison wasn’t the only one to doubt the efficacy of NS as exemplified by the peppered moth. Nevertheless, it was thought that the dark peppered moths offered a proof of the action of NS. It was simply too good to pass up. Consider: few darks before industrial soot and smoke, and the typicas rested during the day, it was said, on lighter-colored bark of the trunks that were coated with light-colored lichen. Then along came the pollution and tree trunks became dark, and the lichen died. The dark moths couldn’t be seen against the dark background. Meanwhile the poor lighter-colored moths were more easily found out. What was seeing the moths? What was finding them out? The assumption was that more typicals were killed more often than the darks were being killed. The agent of death? It must be birds. What else could it be? The deaths of the typicals was due to “predation” – this being a general term – but specifically because birds could more easily find the typicals against dark, industrially polluted, background tree trunks sans lichen.

Scientists at Oxford, great supporters of NS, thought the dark vs. lighter moths presented a neat opportunity to confirm NS as real and actually in operation even as they spoke about it. At Oxford was E. B. Ford, who recruited a non-scientist, Bernard Kettlewell, to undertake field experiments to bolster the notion of how important NS was to promoting evolution. Kettlewell entered the English countryside in 1953 on a mission to find out why the darks prevailed, with none of his field notes having ever been found. If he could know the why of such prevalence, some perceived he could rescue evolutionary biology as exemplied by NS, in short, “evolution”, from its lack of support in the field. “Evolution” was a theory, but where was the experimental data? The theory and the experiment(s) should intertwine. Otherwise, “evolution” was history – a part of an historical effort to place organisms in the context of Earth’s activities. Predating the 1950s were the faithful many who found large scale mutation and genetic random drift, among other devices, as being the only way or the almost only way “evolution” worked. But E.B. Ford felt Kettlewell had a good shot at scoring a big hit for NS. Perhaps it could be said Ford tutored or mentored Kettlewell about NS in relation to peppered moths. In any event, Kettlewell was brought by Ford into Ford’s Oxford School of Ecological Genetics. At best it could be said Ford wanted Kettlewell to investigate the appropriateness of referring to the occurrence of dark vs. typical peppered moths as being a result of “evolution” in action via NS.

Perhaps it could be said Ford got what he wanted in Kettlewell –difficult to tell since Ford destroyed all his papers. Kettlewell was a moonlighting lepidopterist past his youth, with a lackluster MA in zoology and a medical degree. He was well versed in field knowledge, but he was not a scientist. He knew a thousand things found only by trial and error. He could “hand-pair” moths – pushing them into copulation position. He had the fanatical enthusiasm of an amateur. He insisted you had to know the “private lives” of the insects under study. Kettlewell decided to find out if birds ate more darks (of Biston betularia) in unpolluted woods and if birds ate more typicals in polluted woods. He would use the “mark-release-recapture” procedure. Marked by a dot of paint, released, and perhaps (if not eaten by birds) captured. They were to be caught in light traps by being attracted to the traps. Both darks and typicals were to be released in the polluted area and both darks and typicals were to be released in the unpolluted area. More darks were expected to be recaptured in the polluted area and less so in the unpolluted area.

The summer of 1953 would be the season for the release of the moths. Kettlewell had to tend to thousands of moth larvae in 1952. He was at it all hours of day and night protecting the larvae and operating mercury vapor light traps at night to record the counts of darks and typicals in the area. All of this activity was on behalf of a species of moth that Kettlewell didn’t know very well. He assumed the mark-release-recapture procedure would recapture a worthwhile number of moths, be they dark or typical, in the light traps. It was not known if the Biston betularia, among moths having a reputation for not being weak in the power of their wings, might fly away entirely. Because Kettlewell was uncertain about some particulars regarding Biston betularia, he had been considering experiments with Gonodontis bidentata, also a species of moth having a dark form. 

(Ford could not abide by the idea of random drift – alteration of reproductive persistence not brought about by being “fit”, but by chance, by a chance change in genetic frequency. Ford wanted “evolution” to be progressive adaptation. There was then purposeful change for organisms. It must be so, no random drift in any aspect was acceptable, nor was any other means of evolutionary transformation.)

Before Kettlewell entered the woods to give the theoretical fray a resolution, Cain and Sheppard thought the shell patterns of snails, Cepaea nemoralis, showing many bands or colors, must mean something and such banding or colors could be related to the snail backgrounds on which they were seen by birds that ate the more conspicuous (in terms of banding and color) snails. So it was NS at work. No random drift here, they declared. Also, Drosophila and human blood groups showed selection at work. But was NS at work in all instances of “evolution”? Weren’t Ford and his allies searching for an instance to definitively show the power of NS? Concerning the snails: Lamotte said genetic drift and mutation and migration and NS were at play, though NS by predators was exceedingly small in effect. The supporters of NS wanted only NS involved. The snails had differences in colors and number of bands on their shells. If NS was to prevail, then one would expect a prevalence of some colors and bands but the various colors and bands now being displayed had been in existence since the Pleistocene. Prior to selectionism becoming dogma in the late 1940s, the snails were thought to be examples of nonadaptive variation. Lamotte stressed multiple causal factors were at work in biology.

Most definitely in the selectionist camp was Kettlewell who needed to show that he recaptured significantly (statistically) more darks in polluted areas and more typicas in unpolluted areas. In addition, there needed to be adequate experimental controls, and a demonstration that birds ate darks or the typicas as the case might be. Kettlewell had the female moths’ scents in profusion in his experimental wooded area to keep the male moths from going too far away from his traps. That the birds would eat moths, any moths at all, was in need of verification, odd that this was so after all those years, but then there had been many, many organisms for study and very, very few people interested in any of the organisms. Kettlewell had two birds released in the presence of posed peppered moths. Day 2 had shown the birds ate the moths more readily. Kettlewell thought he had created a bird feeder. On day 3 Kettlewell put in local moths and insects with the peppered moths. The more evident peppered moths were eaten. Kettlewell also worked out a scale to indicate how hidden a moth appeared, which involved pacing away from the moths and seeing when a moth was hidden or at least was not very conspicuous.

Kettlewell released his first batch of moths on June 25, 1953. He shook a moth from a box onto a place he had selected, which was one of 33 boughs or tree trunks. It being daytime, the moths were sluggish though they moved somewhat, though not far, to apparently get a good hiding place on a bough or tree trunk. He didn’t let a moth get established in a sunlit spot or it would have been “cooked”. After 5 days, Kettlewell was getting very poor recapture rates. Ford wrote Kettlewell on July 1 about the low recapture rates, calling them disappointing but noting the results would be worthwhile. Then Kettlewell’s recapture rates improved. Not only were the recapture rates as a whole as was wanted, but the numbers of darks vs typicals were improving. Some of the statistics that were worked out on his data ended in being very close, perhaps too close, to the theoretical expectation. It was known what the destination, in theory, should be and upon arrival there was mild surprise that they got where they had wanted to go. Could it have been there were windy days during the low recapture rates and less so for the higher recapture rates?  In her book, Of Moths and Men, Judith Hooper checked weather reports for those days of low and high recapture rates and found steady weather, little wind. Wind with or without, Kettlewell was doing it all alone. He set up the experiments, conducted the experiments, and gathered the data.  As it turned out, he could not do the unpolluted part of the experiments in the summer of 1954 because viruses had ravaged the moth pupae. He appealed to collectors to supply him with eggs.

(Meanwhile, P.B.M. Allan, an editor of Entomologist’s Record reviewed Ford’s Moths and especially its chapter on what Kettlewell had been doing in 1953. Allan doubted birds ate moths in large numbers nor that they did so from tree trunks too fast to record. Additionally, Allan mentioned that a lack of moths in the traps could mean that they weren’t eaten by birds; other explanations could account for their absence. Ford stated birds were engaged in selective elimination of moths on a large scale. This occurred with great frequency, so said Ford. Ford said Kettlewell saw moths destroyed in large numbers by robins and sparrows. Back when science was science these statements would have been called lies. In post-science they could be called exaggerations. Allan did note that Ford had “given a new orientation to our conceptions of the behavior of both the robin and the hedge-sparrow”.)

In Dorset for the unpolluted part of the experiment, Kettlewell got a reversal of the numbers for captured moths, that is, more typicals than darks. He cut out results from several days. Kettlewell knew results could be affected by differing life spans of the forms or one form might fly better than the other, or would be more attracted to a light trap or more affected by female scent. Nevertheless, for Kettlewell only birds as eaters of the moths could explain the recapture numbers. Most observers thought birds were not natural predators of peppered moths. Doubts persisted so Kettlewell got Niko Tinbergen to film birds devouring moths. (Kettlewell wanted to “cine” birds eating moths.) Kettlewell set out a dense group of moths on tree trunks. Birds ate the moths, favoring the darks. To the unaware, viewing the film was conclusive.

Too little was as conclusive as Kettlewell and others wanted it to be. This was according to Judith Hooper in her book, Moths and Men. I had been tagging along in this book for its “Moths” and less for its “Men”. However tempting was the novelistic approach to the “Men”, I wished to confine events to “facts” – those that could be described as scientific – to ultimately arrive at the truth the “Men” gave or did not give to their involvement with “Moths”. She has a rebuttal, more a refutation, of Kettlewell and Ford and others aided and abetted by Ted Sargent late in her book.  Some points are repeated, some new, for example, Kettlewell set out too many moths, and they were placed to facilitate obtaining recapture rates that would be statistically significant. Kettlewell had, in effect, created a bird feeder. The pinned specimens in the famous photographs were pinned, that is, dead. If the forms of the moth preferred differing backgrounds to rest on, why didn’t the forms do equally well in polluted or unpolluted areas in that you still had lots of dark places? If the background was so important then, since you would always have dark backgrounds, and then you would always have the dark forms, no pollution needed. All the concern was about seeing moths that we see; however, birds see in the UV. What other species of moth in polluted areas had the darks?   Kettlewell himself scored the degree of camouflage the moths enjoyed and he put out the moths and he did the counts. Somewhere or everywhere along the line he should have had assistants blinded to the task at hand. He stopped counts for a time. He changed the number of moths per tree at Dorset. He had differing densities of moths in Dorset and Birmingham, but recapture rates as he wanted in each area. Kettlewell had stuporous moths in unnatural resting places in unusual densities. It constituted unnatural predation, an artifact of the experiments. Kettlewell had both lab-bred moths and wild moths. In Dorset he had more of the lab-bred typicals and in Birmingham; he had more of the darks from the lab. Kettlewell knew bats probably got 90% of the flying moths, but he assumed the bats were not engaging in differential predation. In Britain, clean air laws were enacted in 1956. Pollution by sulfur dioxide and smoke declined; as did the number of darks. Clean air acts were in place in the USA in 1963. The number of darks declined. Rise and fall of darks in Michigan occurred without change in the lichens, or if the lichen disappeared, the darks came back before the lichens did. In West Virginia, the darks are few in areas that are heavily polluted. There are no darks in Japan, no matter what the conditions.

Who Murdered Alan Turing?

The official opinion is that Alan Turing killed himself by cyanide poisoning. Andrew Hodges, author of “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” supports this view. It is a foregone conclusion that Hodges would have it so. If Hodges’ book is a biography, it may be a “scientific” biography, which may excuse the failure to accomplish what biographies about those dead set out to do – tell the tale of who someone had been. Hodges’ is less preoccupied with the “who” than the “what” in regard to Turing. What he was, for Hodges’ purposes, was a homosexual for whom, at every significant turn in his life, there was suffering for him because he was a homosexual. The enemy that produced the suffering was Society. In truth, Society “killed” Alan Turing.

The death of Turing, for B. Jack Copeland, ends his “Turing, Pioneer of the Information Age.” It is about the Information Age and who Turing had been is not relevant. One cannot seriously take Copeland’s book as a biography. That Turing was a homosexual is mentioned by Copeland but Copeland is much more concerned with the “whats” that Turing had done. Yet Copeland’s book is not dismissive of the possibilities that exist to account for Turing’s death. He entertains three options to Hodges’ one and only.

Hodges’ book is drenched in his account of the dreary, sad limitations of a life lived as a homosexual in Britain during Turing’s lifetime. Being a homosexual, as Hodges has it, was the limiting factor for Turing. Hodges forces much drama into the surroundings for what Turing did. There are references to Hitler vs. Turing on a grand stage along with Disney’s Snow White (and the poisoned apple), The Wicked Witch, the Wizard of Oz, Dodgson’s Alice, and Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

All of this fiction by Hodges is a high-level game to convey meaning to Hodges’ account of Turing. For Hodges, imitation was the name of the game. Turing and others were drawn into an imitation game involving codebreaking during WWII, though Copeland says Turing jumped in. But Hodges, before and after WWII, has Turing in an imitation game of play-along because of his status as a homosexual. Turing’s intelligence becomes thwarted by Society’s opinions about homosexuality to such an extent that Society’s anti-homosexual forces destroyed Turing. This destruction of Turing ended, of course, both his personal and social life.

Copeland rarely makes statements about Turing’s personal life. One such statement is about Turing and Joan Clarke – “Homosexual men not infrequently opted for an opposite-sex marriage, children, happy family life. The circumstances of life were coped with, a formula was found for rendering everything consistent. In the end, though, this was not the route Turing chose for himself.” Hodges would have found this to be a ghastly understatement of the non-fictional suffering he placed in Turing’s life. Though, true enough, many do seek formulas for life, but consistency, nowadays especially, is often lacking. The consistency then could be a factor through a setting within Society. Also, true enough, such a setting was denied Turing. 

Hodges has far more personal material relating to Turing than does Copeland. This material, such as Turing’s friendship with Morcom at public school, is restricted by the homosexuality vs. Society attitude. Turing as a person, apart from his homosexuality, is not allowed on stage, not at school, before or after. Hodges has a political agenda and Turing is on it. Copeland relates nothing about Morcom, nor is politics his forte. He does bring up the matter of Turing’s court martial during WWII. He had joined the Home Guard and learned to shoot but he had not signed a statement about being subject to discipline. He took the trouble to point this out to the authorities.

Per Hodges -  Turing personally was arrogant, sloppy, direct, and unapologetic. Turing was, in addition, too honest and decent (on his terms) - that old “he was too good for this world,” whereas Copeland has no morality for any of it for Turing.

Per Hodges – Turing’s science and mathematics got away from him. At Manchester, in his last years, he had little social life; it would have meant too much compromise. By 1954 he was totally isolated. WWII had not ended the warfare; it continued as the Cold War. Turing contributed well in WWII in an era of amateurs and Profs and mathematical specialization but by post-WWII it had become old news. So many copycat experts were in the field of R&D and security concerns that this allowed government forces to pick and choose personnel.

Copeland names and ranks the importance of contributions to coding and computers that Hodges leaves out or doesn’t emphasize: Tutte, Flowers, Huskey, Schmidt (who photographed the Engima), and a Pole, Rejewski (who worked out the wiring of the Engima). Turing benefited from “pinches” made by British forces involving Schiff 26, Krebs, two Nazi weather ships, and U-110. Surely Turing would have been more frustrated in his codebreaking had it not been for these aids.

Hodges goes beyond this situation to assert Turing was frustrated by not being taken seriously in mathematics and science. In addition, Hodges has it that Turing at public school came away from his experience there with a need to “do” something. Hodges does concede that Turing made life more difficult for himself. It was awkward enough, his being in it with shyness, hesitancy, a high-pitched voice and a sustained noise he made as he searched for a word. Turing developed a Spartan attitude toward the bric à brac of life.

Copeland also mentions a Spartan approach by Turing, but it was for the way he thought about what he did. Copeland notes Turing had success upon success. Turing experienced “crescendos” of achievement. Turing as a graduate student at Kings College, Cambridge, came up with what is now known as the universal Turing machine while dealing with an application to the Entscheidungs problem. During WWII, Turing was a key player, not the key player in the decryption effort regarding the German Enigma code machine. He broke the code of the Nazi Naval Enigma. Copeland has an excuse for drama when he maintains Turing broke that code during a winter night in 1939 and on the same night, Turing devised the Banburismus method. He first cracked Tunny. The Tunny algorithms later were incorporated into Colossus, the first large scale electronic computer. Turing could do practical tasks with ACE, 1945’s huge stored program electronic computer. A design of his became DEUCE, a commercial computer. The ACE was the basis for the world’s first PC. At Manchester Turing was doing pioneering work on AI using a Colossus. Turing had the first AI program – for chess. Finally, Turing pioneered Artificial Life. In many instances, Turing was introducing engineering into a fundamental aspect of mathematics. He wasn’t an engineer. 

The WWII efforts of Turing were mostly and firstly spent at Bletchey Park. Secondarily he was at Hanslope Park. Hodges has Turing transferring himself to Hanslope Park. Bletchley no longer offered him an excuse for originality. The WWII game had, like a boardgame, new pieces and places. Copeland has it that Jumbo Travis wanted Turing to pursue speech cryptography. Tunny was solved. So Turing set up an electronics laboratory of his own at Hanslope Park.  Hanslope Park represents a significant change in Turing’s life. He had moved away from direct involvement in the war effort. He was onto his own project, and his own projects would consume his remaining time. 

Hodges maintains there was an element of force being applied to Turing as the war effort shifted into colder conceptions of warfare post-WWII. Turing could not, in the security mania of the great struggle against Communism, do crypto any longer. He was a homosexual. Hodges also relates Turing may have suffered from no longer being a front-runner in computing, having started with mechanical processes becoming algorithmic in a machine; Turing’s later morphologic studies were only puttering about, a plodding exercise; and perhaps Turing had lost faith in his own ideas. Copeland hardly concurs in such a gloomy assessment of Turing’s later days. Copeland portrays Turing as clicking along quite well at the end. Hodges suddenly states Turing killed himself. Hodges then continues his book. 

As a homosexual he had transgressed against his class. At Manchester for the first time he mixed with ordinary people. It encompassed the allure of the vast unknown working class. He discovered this country of difference without being covert about it. In the early 1950s there were American concerns about a lost China, stolen secrets of the atomic bomb, the Rosenbergs’ execution, and the British homosexuals, Maclean and Burgess, going over to the other side. Turing needed to stay under the radar. But he made no or little social adaptation. If an accomodation by him was unavoidable then the most minimal arrangement was completed. He had blown his “cover” as a brilliant yet eccentric British academician. He avoided prison and took out the implant the court had ordered for this crime of being a homosexual. 

He was also said to have regarded the matters of court involving the implant and his probation to be a laugh. He was childlike. He was, if known to you, a fun person. He was lively, stimulating, even comic. He had a raucous crow-like laugh that pealed out boisterously. Yet what he was had become public. Who he was remained a secret.  Other secrets were in abundance. The Cold War warriors were greatly troubled to find all the secrets and keep them so. They expected him to, trivially speaking, park his bicycle correctly, but he went far beyond this nor doing even so much as that. He appeared to be engaging in “sex tourism” at least with a Norwegian. Surely the “Kjellan crisis” in connection with “a light kiss beneath a foreign flag,” put him over the top and onto a list, a list of no reprieve.

The keepers of the list, I believe, decided that they had no choice other than to remove Turing from the list. Both Hodges and Copeland agree that Turing was found dead in bed, on his back, and neatly tucked in. He seemed in repose, a calm assumption of The End. Yet, Copeland notes cyanide poisoning is a thrash-about death. Copeland had stated how Turing could not stand the sight of blood and that Turing would become nauseous if conversation was about injury or well-described surgical procedures. Both Hodges and Copeland agree froth was about the mouth. The presumption is that it was a residue of cynanide consumption. Could it have been painted there? The famous apple. Not consumed, bites had been removed. It was known he favored an apple at bedtime. The apple was not tested. The coroner, J.A. K. Ferns, vastly incompetent or wise to the necessity of appearing to be incompetent, also mostly recorded the scent of bitter almonds, there with Turing and about the area of death. There was no connection attempted between his death and his hay fever. During the War, Turing had worn a far from comfortable gas mask as he bicycled three miles in hay fever time.

Most likely Eliza Clayton knew of none of this. She was Turing’s housekeeper who occasionally cooked for Turing. She arrived about 5 PM, Tuesday, June 8, 1954. She had been away for a few days over the Whitsun Holiday. Presumably many others normally in the vicinity of the scene of death had also been away. Turing had died sometime during the night of June 7, a Monday. A light was on in his bedroom. One may ask – he slept with the light on? He was in PJs, wristwatch on a bedside table. Half of an apple was there too on the bedside table. He was “laid out” in repose. There was a large quantity of cyanide bubbling in a pan in a room nearby. Turing dabbled in electrolysis and cyanide was part of the process. Neighbors and acquaintances thought Turing to be cheerful days before his death. Mrs. Webb said Turing had a party for her and her little boy. Did the boy polish shoes? (see below) Also, Turing left a note in his office concerning plans for the week after Whitsun. He was to meet with his research assistant. He had accepted an invitation to a Royal Society meeting. Turing had said he was meeting “luscious” men.

Though there was frothing at the mouth, there was no burning about the mouth – if cyanide had been drunk. Perhaps Turing inhaled the cyanide from the next room? It could have built up to lethal levels. So Turing got a bite from an apple, put on PJs, removed the watch, left the light on, tucked in, and succumbed? The famous scent of bitter almonds was “faint” – no quantitative measurements were attempted. This almond smell was associated with the water-like fluid in his windpipe and lungs. Perhaps benzaldehyde was present. It is made by the decomposition of the amygdalin found in almonds. It can also be broken down into glucose and hydrogen cyanide. Benzaldehyde is described as having a bitter or pleasant almond odor. Some maintain natural almond extract can contain enough cyanide to be lethal. In any case, according to Copeland, cyanide distribution is uniform throughout the organs and tissues. Yet Turing’s liver was normal, in it should have been a high level of cyanide.  

Such odd liver results were no doubt not known to Turing’s mother. She insisted it had been an accident. Suicide was a crime, she may have thought enough criminality had been attached to Turing. She favored the inhaled cyanide theory. Copeland reported that a psychotherapist, who had been addressing Turing’s problem(s), wrote to Mrs. Turing a year after the death to tell her that he had no doubt that it had been an accident. It, then, was to be made into an accident for a suicidal security risk of the first magnitude. He was living alone, not monitored, not controlled, and not controlling himself. The national press saw no significance in his death.

Arnold, Turing’s partner at the time of Turing’s arrest, according to Hodges, became a musician and married. Harry, the burglar of Turing’s home and an associate of Arnold, after being sent to Borstal, disappeared. Kjellen had disappeared. Mrs. Clayton must have gone to her reward in good order. Presumably Ferns shaped up or continued to bungle investigations. What became of the shoes? Turing’s shoes were found outside the door of his bedroom. Mrs. Clayton had discovered them there. Putting the shoes in such a location was done by the upper classes to have polish applied by someone in the morning. But Turing had not engaged in such a placement of shoes. Mrs. Clayton commented that the placing of the shoes was unusual. What of his suit and a tie? Were they in good order? Turing was cremated. Was someone operating under the mistaken assumption that Turing was to be buried? So then a casket viewing would be done, and he would have to look presentable. Ordinarily he did not look presentable. The same person or persons wanted him to make a good impression on those who discovered his death. Some odd assassin it could have been with an overpowering desire for order and propriety. 

Coda

The successful imitation of a human being must include mistakes. Always providing the correct answer, be it human or inhuman, is an error. This a machine, imitating us, must not do.

Turing wrote of machines of state. A state is easily seen spatially but the other outstanding characteristic of state is time. The machine would need a memory, not one provided, but its memory, and then, therefore, on to mind. Once the machine “had gotten” time, it could have mind. This mind, associated with the organic, must be sourced from itself or it “is” not existing. Our minds, and one supposes the machine mind, are nevertheless dependent on “what” we are. Thereafter comes “who” we are. The who for the machines would be what? No, not a what but a who. Beyond structure in space, what objects are there that can be the “who” of a machine mind?

For us, who we are is organically based. This is not to say we aren’t filled with dead matter. Nanomachines are in abundance. The important point about all this particulate death is that it masquerades as life – to hear scientists tell it, whereas most of us recognize and realize we are aware of death – not of the nanomachines but of ourselves. We are conscious of our life.

Our lives are characterized by our minds. We are free to do such a characterization. Can machines do so? They can if they have free will. Otherwise they build cars. But do we have free will? Does any intelligent and conscious reflective entity that can reproduce itself have free will? If it ends in itself, no real free will is demonstrated. As you live for yourself, by yourself, you have provisional, partial free will. It is almost synonymous with actual free will. Real free will must be proved to be the case. It is the case if you reproduce your colors, shape, and appearance of your physical self or if the hues of your mental possibilities are brought into play. If so, you have transcended the limitations of the lonely and not entirely free will. You have freed yourself by going beyond only who you are. It is free will, complete and lacking anything provisional about it.

This is in the realm of the mind. Gödel praised Turing and said Turing had shown (contrary to Turing’s own notions) that “the human mind will never be able to be replaced by a machine.” Turing’s machines were about numbers, based on numbers. There were tables of instruction to control the “behavior” of the machine, a computer. The start of such a machine was a set of numbers subject to “Gödel’s arithmetic.” There are rules of arithmetic not supported by the rules. What can be proved by the rules is less than the truth.

The truth is that the RNA, DNA, ribosomes, and ATP are dead yet we are alive. Life has electrical gradients or differences in ion concentration and energy is created. So can we be reduced to ions? We have ionic minds? We have drawn the lines between the dead and the undead. But aren’t these lines blurred? A viral infection is different from a bacterial infection. The bacterium is alive. Is the virus dead? Computers, nowadays, can become infected. Viruses also plague them. Are the lines between the computers and their viruses as blurred as in our case? The machines are already dead. We are filled with death and yet are alive. We say so. We have a less discrete existence than do the computers. They have their numbers, we contain no numbers. They can be rendered discrete. Who we are is a blur. We are blurred by “meaning” and “emotion” – both vital to tagging reality as we do. For Turing, his mathematical efforts were without emotion. He was described, fondly, as being “ruthless” in his thinking. A ruthless implication was that by evolutionary forces the rat or the pig could someday supplant us. Turing acknowledged the threat from the existence of the pig and the rat but placed the politics entailed in changes coming from thinking machines as a less oblique threat to our demise. 

The rat and the pig will beat out machines subject to discrete states. For machines, a blurred state is needed and the quantum world provides the blur. Quantum computing, if unclear and not distinct enough to us, could do the trick.