I guess the suggested donation for this is $10. This benefit is to help repair the Burning Man Bop Camp bus.

Less than 4 days until the return of the Burning Bus!
 
The Burning Bus Benefit!
 
Come join us and celebrate! 3306 N Knox in Chicago 7pm to 3am.
 
The party will feature spoken word, video, DJ's and live music featuring:
 
Alkaloid
Carla Starla
DJ Johnny
Super Devious of Euulei
Ricky Ropesack
and
Kid Static
 
With a special appearance  by Chicago Rose and return of the Burning Bus!
 
and a planned appearance by members of 1000 Vertical Feet!
 
Gina's back and the Bus is only one state away!
 
Plus, remember the planning meeting:
We're meeting at Megan's place Tuesday:  1456 W. Augusta in Chicago (2blks N of Chicago Ave, 2blks E of Ashland) it's the garden apartment at 9pm.
 
We still need all kinds of help for Friday's event, so if you're available to help drop a line to
 
kevadair@aol.com or call 312-925-1626 or come out on Tuesday.
 
 
 

Teaching language to other primates.


>"If monkey brains have redundant capacity, why not human brains? 'Human
>language and intelligence could be brought up to a much higher level than
>we are at now,' he says. 'We are still in the middle of evolution. We can
>dream of the future.'"
>
>
>Aping Dr Dolittle
>
>A Japanese researcher reckons he will soon have monkeys communicating with
>humans. And, Laura Spinney finds, it could reveal how language evolved.
>
>Thursday November 25, 2004
>The Guardian
>
>In a laboratory in Saitama, central Japan, monkeys are behaving strangely.
>If someone sticks out a tongue, they do the same. If a person goes to
>unclip the latch on a box, the monkeys follow suit. If they need a rake to
>reach a piece of fruit, they ask for it with a special call. All of which
>is confounding experts, because none of it should be possible. Monkeys in
>the wild rarely ape, and as far as we know, they never, ever, ask for rakes.
>
>The Japanese macaques raised in Atsushi Iriki's lab are not particularly
>gifted. But intriguingly, he expects them soon to be communicating with
>him vocally, using simple linguistic rules. This isn't just an elegant Dr
>Dolittle curiosity: it holds the real possibility of understanding autism
>in humans and unlocking the vast unused power of the human brain.
>
>Iriki, head of the laboratory for symbolic cognitive development at the
>Riken Brain Science Institute, says his experiment will tap into neural
>systems monkeys always had, but have never been activated. He hopes to
>learn something about monkey thought, but more dramatically, about how
>language emerged in humans -and what happens when it breaks down in
>autistic children, for example.
>
>So what lies behind Iriki's attempt? As the ape brain evolved, it
>accumulated the components of a language. By the time the vocal tract
>could support speech, we were already human. But our brains, according to
>Iriki, were "language-ready" much earlier. In the monkey, this happened in
>a more fragmented form. The only reason it did not emerge was that the
>conditions were never right. "Maybe in the wild, vocal communication was
>not necessary for monkeys to survive, or was even harmful," says Iriki.
>"Those functions were not expressed or were even suppressed, even though
>their brains were furnished with the machinery."
>
>Iriki knew that monkeys would never be able to speak, lacking as they do
>the necessary vocal apparatus, but he became convinced he could perhaps
>exchange meaningful coos and grunts with them. To do so, he realised he
>would have to rear monkeys in an environment where to communicate in this
>way was not only safe, but in their interest. Could he encourage them to
>vocalise a primitive language? Would they use it to communicate not only
>with other monkeys, but even with him?
>
>The experiment has excited his peers and won Iriki the Golden Brain Award,
>presented annually for brain research by the Minerva Foundation in the US.
>"This is a guy who is on to a really exciting research programme," says
>neuroscientist Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California.
>Monkeys in the wild produce a limited range of calls - alarm calls to warn
>of approaching predators, for instance. But, says Arbib, "the general
>consensus would be that the set of calls is pretty much innate. Iriki now
>seems to show that the call system may be much more flexible than we thought".
>
>Iriki has a reputation for lateral thinking. Trained as a dental surgeon,
>he became interested in pain and by that route came to study the brain.
>Several years ago, he showed that a macaque trained to use a rake to grab
>a piece of fruit could operate just as skillfully whether it could see its
>own hand, or was prevented from seeing it and shown instead a video image
>of the hand, rake and fruit reward.
>
>Based on those findings, Iriki argued that monkeys had a concept of body
>image that matched a nine-year-old child. The findings seemed to
>demonstrate a level of abstract thinking that nobody had suspected in
>monkeys - though researchers had long argued for it in chimps, orang utans
>and gorillas. And they created a dilemma for Iriki.
>
>The problem was this: if monkeys have a relatively advanced view of
>themselves, how is it that they appear to be so oblivious to the behaviour
>of others, unable to follow the gaze of another monkey or imitate
>gestures, as even human toddlers can do? It mattered to Iriki because
>imitation and joint attention are considered key building blocks of the
>kind of shared understanding that makes communication possible. In the
>wild, monkeys rarely imitate. But two pieces of evidence suggested to
>Iriki that they could learn to - and they hinge on a recently discovered
>type of brain cell called a "mirror neuron".
>
>Animal behaviour experts have very occasionally observed both imitation
>and joint attention - which lets one follow another's gaze - between
>mother and infant macaques in the wild. And, though macaques seem to show
>no interest in others' actions, activity in their brains suggests they do.
>It harbours a type of neuron that fires not only when it performs an
>action, but also when it sees another monkey perform the same action.
>
>These mirror neurons were first identified by Giacomo Rizzolatti of the
>University of Parma, Italy, and colleagues in the early 1990s in an area
>of the macaque brain called the premotor cortex, and specifically in a
>sub-section called F5. Subsequently they have turned up in other areas.
>Luciano Fadiga at the University of Ferrara then found evidence that the
>human brain contained a mirror system of its own.
>
>When Rizzolatti's group investigated the human brain more closely, using
>functional magnetic resonance imaging, they showed that, among other
>places, mirror neurons show up in Broca's area, which in the human brain
>is responsible for speech production. F5 in monkeys is associated mainly
>with hand movements, but is the anatomical equivalent of Broca's area.
>
>There followed frenzied speculation about the role of mirror neurons.
>Rizzolatti and Arbib claimed that by providing the platform for imitation
>and shared understanding, they made language possible. Nevertheless, the
>question remained for Iriki: if humans and monkeys have mirror neurons,
>why are humans natural mimics while monkeys hardly ever imitate?
>
>"Maybe monkey brains are unaware of the mirror neurons' potential," he
>says. "When their brains realised the possible uses of this system,
>perhaps due to the expression of a gene trig gered by some accidental
>incident in the course of evolution, that could have been the beginning of
>the explosion of intelligent functions."
>
>Iriki suspects that a likely trigger for that realisation was human
>child-rearing practices. Using eye contact, mothers teach their babies to
>look in the same direction and to copy their actions. So in Iriki's lab,
>monkeys are reared as closely as possible to humans, with an intense
>relationship between the young monkey and its human carer.
>
>In a study published last year, his group showed that three in four
>monkeys brought up in this way learned joint attention, and once they had
>learned it, began to imitate a human's actions without having to be taught.
>
>Iriki is not the only scientist to experiment in this area. At Georgia
>State University, Atlanta, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has taught a
>human-reared pygmy chimp to become adept at communicating with symbols.
>But the difference is that Iriki's macaques choose their own calls to
>express what they want. When he trained two macaques to use a rake to
>retrieve a fruit reward, and then to call for either food or the tool, he
>found the monkeys produced different cooing noises depending on what they
>wanted. "I think this is the evolutionary precursor of naming," he says.
>
>Psychologist Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St Andrews says that
>what Iriki reports is new: monkeys are not known to produce acoustically
>distinct sounds associated with novel events or objects - certainly not
>with a man-made tool.
>
>Zuberbühler studies Campbell's and Diana monkeys in West Africa, whose
>calls are innate. "The acoustic structures of the different predator calls
>vary from one monkey species to the next, but those species are still able
>to understand each other," he says.
>
>By contrast, Iriki's monkeys' new calls do not yet have much communicative
>power. Each monkey has a different call for a given object, and the sounds
>are not the same. Iriki thinks it might be possible to teach naive monkeys
>to imitate the calls of others, and in so doing, help them learn what they
>mean. They might then use the calls themselves, to express the same idea.
>He can envisage, say, a macaque calling to another macaque for a tool,
>which is then dutifully handed over.
>
>"This is fascinating," says Fadiga, who thinks Iriki's work has the
>potential to reveal the origins of human language. But he also has doubts,
>not least that the monkeys will maintain any primitive language they
>develop. "The question is, do you think the monkeys need this language?
>Because if they do not need it, they will not teach others."
>
>Rizzolatti, meanwhile, is excited by the possibility that monkeys have
>mirror neurons but are unable to use them. "That has some interesting
>implications," he says. "For instance, perhaps autistic children have the
>mirror system but cannot use it. Or perhaps it is there, but not fully
>developed."
>
>One common symptom among autistic children is that they repeat words
>spoken to them without apparently understanding them - a phenomenon known
>as echolalia. At the same time, their language development is delayed,
>suggesting their mirror system may be malfunctioning. Rizzolatti
>speculates one could use tricks similar to Iriki's to improve the system's
>functioning in those kids.
>
>Iriki does not think it too far-fetched to suggest that humans could one
>day tune into his monkeys' enriched repertoire of sounds, using it to
>converse with them at a simple level. Then there will be a debate as to
>whether it deserves to be called language.
>
>"I think it's going to remain the case that language as we know it in
>humans is different from language that even the best brought-up ape is
>going to get to," says Arbib.
>
>But Iriki is already thinking laterally again. If monkey brains have
>redundant capacity, why not human brains? "Human language and intelligence
>could be brought up to a much higher level than we are at now," he says.
>
>"We are still in the middle of evolution. We can dream of the future."
>
>Further reading:
>
>www.brain.riken.go.jp/english/ Atsushi Iriki at the Laboratory for
>Symbolic Cognitive Development, Riken, Saitama, Japan
>
>Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language by Maxim Stamenov
>and Vittorio Gallese, 2002 paperback (John Benjamins, Amsterdam). ISBN
>1588112152

Brain-machine interface technology continues to develop. Note the reference
to "augmentation for military and commercial purposes."

>An implantable, brain-computer interface the size of an aspirin has
>been clinically tested on humans by American company Cyberkinetics.
>The 'BrainGate' device can provide paralysed or motor-impaired
>patients a mode of communication through the translation of thought
>into direct computer control. The technology driving this breakthrough
>in the Brain-Machine-Interface field has a myriad of potential
>applications, including the development of human augmentation for
>military and commercial purposes.

=== Some random fragments regarding the recent court ruling in favor of the UDV church

3rd Time's a Charm for Hallucinogenic Tea
By Scott SandlinJournal Staff Writer

    A federal court has ruled for the third time that the Santa
Fe-based
affiliate of a Brazilian religious sect should get back the
hallucinogenic
tea its practitioners take as a sacrament.

    The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled 8-5 for the
small religious group, O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal,
or
UDV, which has waged a 41/2-year legal battle for return of the tea. In
a
convoluted, lengthy and often esoteric discussion of legal issues, the
appeals court upheld the ruling two years ago by Senior U.S. District
Judge
James A. Parker.

    Parker ordered federal authorities to permit the group to import
the
tea and said they could not bar bona fide church members from using
the
hallucinogen according to their own strict internal guidelines.

    But he delayed the effective date of the order pending appeal- a
situation in effect until the appeals court's decision was handed down
late
Friday.

    The 10th Circuit sat en banc- meaning all 13 judges- to reconsider
a
2003 ruling by a three-judge panel."The court of appeals has once
again
affirmed the right of the UDV and its practitioners to practice their
religion. We hope they will be able to do that as quickly as possible,"
said
Nancy Hollander, who filed suit on behalf of Jeffrey Bronfman of
Tesuque,
the religion's North American leader, and other members of the group
in
2000."Now we have won in two courts and in three decisions," she said.
Hollander late Monday asked for emergency relief from Parker in light
of the
10th Circuit ruling. Noting UDV members "have been effectively
prohibited
from practicing their religion since May 1999," she said the court
should
require the government to issue a permit for the importation and
distribution of the tea.

    U.S. Attorney David Iglesias said he is consulting with attorneys
in
his office and with the regional solicitor to decide on the
government's
next step.

    The government could seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court, but
that
would require permission from the solicitor's office, Iglesias said.

    The U.S. Customs Service seized 30 gallons of the tea, known as
ayahuasca or simply hoasca, from Bronfman's home in 1999. Bronfman, who
was
first exposed to the religion during trips to Brazil for a nonprofit
board
on which he sat, began importing the tea for ceremonies for a growing
but
small North American membership. The tea is a blend of two Amazon
rain-forest plants and is legal in Brazil.

    Government lawyers have taken the position that hoasca is
regulated
by the Controlled Substances Act, from which the UDV is not exempt.
They
also have said international treaties governing narcotics will be
breached
by permitting its use.

    "This case is unique in many respects because it involves a clash
between two federal statutes, one based in the First Amendment to the
Constitution and protecting an individual's free exercise of religion
and
the other serving the important governmental and public interests of
protecting society against the importation and sale of illegal drugs,"
wrote
10th Circuit Judge Stephanie K. Seymour in one of the majority
opinions.

    Seymour said the government's claim of harm if it can't enforce an
international treaty on psychotropic drugs was undermined by
exemptions
permitted for plants traditionally used by certain small clearly
defined
groups. And she noted Congress reiterated the importance of the free
exercise of religion when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration
Act.

    In a separate, concurring opinion, Judge Michael W. McConnell
noted
that the district court's order worked as a compromise, permitting the
government some control over importation, storage and use of hoasca
while
permitting the UDV to continue its religious activity."This case ...
raises
the question of why an accommodation analogous to that extended to the
Native American Church cannot be provided to other religious believers
with
similar needs," he wrote.The Native American Church is allowed to use
peyote
as a sacrament.

================

This is a message from the Hinosdasemana Group. The mailing list of the

official Santo Daime website.

 

My dear supporters, friends and family;
       Last night at 6:20 pm the 10th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals

(for the Districts of Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming,
and
Kansas) published its en-banc opinion affirming the Lower Court's
Decision allowing us to distribute our Sacred Tea; and practice our
religion in the United States through the final resolution of our
case.
        This is a profoundly significant judgment and one we are most
grateful for.
       Among the 13 Appeal's Court Judges who reviewed the evidence
presented in our case, an 8-5 Majority ruled in our favor. 
        The District Court's order requires the DEA register our
church
as a legal Importer and Distributor of our sacrament, before we begin
holding our ceremonies. Up until now they have not done this pending
the
outcome of their Appeal.
         Although it is still possible that the Solicitor General and
the
Justice Department may now ask the United States Supreme Court to
rehear
their case, that is last recourse they have left. We are hopeful now
that three different Court's have all reviewed the evidence and
testimony (and all have reached the same conclusion in our favor) that

the Supreme Court will allow this Preliminary Ruling to stand.
         Our Lawyer's will be contacting the DEA's lawyers next
week to
see if they are going to comply with the Court's order now, or not.
In
the event they resist we could be back in District Court as early as
next week asking for sanctions and a new order that does not make our
Religious Liberty dependent on their co-operation. In the event they
accept the order of the Federal Courts and begin to comply, we may well

be able to resume our religious practices, gratefully in time for
Thanksgiving.
       I will faithfully continue to keep you posted as further details

emerge.
       With my genuine affection and appreciation for all of your
essential support and prayers;

=======================
The message below is forwarded from  an email correspondent who got this
"second hand from someone who talked to the UDV lawyer":
======================================

Yesterday (I think, or maybe today), a ruling came down about the Uniao
do Vegetal (UDV) case against the government regarding access to
ayahuasca tea (which contains DMT and harmaline).

Recall that in the late 1990's, the UDV filed suit against the gov't
for the right to import the tea and to be free from interference from
the DEA for practice of their religion.

After filing suit, the UDV sought a preliminary injunction to be able
to have access to the tea while the court case was playing out.  They
were granted the injunction.

The gov't then sought to challenge the injunction, by bringing the case
to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.  However, the gov't lost
in a 2-1 decision.

However, it apparently takes only one judge to request that the entire
Court (of 13) be called to hear the case.  This full panel hearing
happened and, yesterday, the decision was rendered:  8-5 in favor of the
UDV.

This means that the UDV have the right to import the tea.  But, more
importantly, it may well mean that the original court case is rendered
moot, because if they can import the tea now, on the basis that the
gov't failed to show the tea is dangerous, then they may not need to go
through with the trial on the same issue.

Note that this is dissimilar from the Native American Church issues of
use of peyote, where one has to have some Native American blood to
participate.  From what my informant says, the 10th Court decision is
based on the gov't not being able to interfere with the practice of
religion, and since the UDV did not have any "native blood" issues, this
means that anyone in the US can find a UDV church and take the
sacrament.  (Or, if you're imaginative, start their own church with
their own unique sacrament).

Stay tuned.  Next stop may still be the Supreme Court in this
interesting legal case.

For more background info, see:

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca_law16.shtml

Redmoon Theatre

October edition of the Mind States e-mailing newsletter:

1) MIND STATES VI: "Technology & Transcendence" • May 27-29, 20005 • San Francisco, CA

2) COSM HALLOWEEN EVENT: "Deities & Demons Masquerade" • Octoberr 29, 2004 • New York City, NY

3) SYNERGENESIS: Visionary Art and Culture • November 6 • Sa San Francisco, CA

4) VISIONARY ART WORKSHOP • November 12-19, 2004 • Boulder, r, CO

5) NEW MAPS BULLETIN: "Rites of Passage: Kids and Psychedelics"

6) *THANATOS TO EROS* NOW ON-LINE: Myron Stolaroff's biography.


See more details below.

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•


1) MIND STATES VI • May 27-29, 2005

The 2005 Mind States conference has been moved to more spacious and beautiful venue: The Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. The theme for this event is "Technology & Transcendence," and topics covered may include:

robotics
artificial-life
life extension
virtual reality
harm reduction
skeptical thinking
brain fingerprinting
intelligence increase
artificial intelligence
future pharmaceuticals
electronic trance-dance
cloning & consciousness
video game environments
visionary plants and drugs
EEG-mapping of altered states
visionary and science-based art
transcranial magnetic stimulation
50-year-reflection on Wasson's mushroom discovery
and more.

In order to help generate production funds, we are currently offering (until December 31) "ultra early bird" tickets for $195. This represents a $105 savings from the "at the door" price for tickets. Help us out by getting your tickets early, and save money at the same time! Visit http://www.mindstates.org to purchase tickets on-line with a credit card, or send check or money order made out to "Mind States" to: Mind States, POB 19820, Sacramento, CA 95819. And remember, our last two conferences have sold-out in advance: another good reason to buy your tickets early.

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•

2) COSM HALLOWEEN EVENT: "Deities & Demons Masquerade" • Friday,, October 29, 2004 • 540 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, NYC, New York, (212) 564-4253.

Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (COSM) now has a public home! Celebrate these new digs at the "Deities & Demons Masquerade" party on Friday, October 29 from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am. A night of costumes, music, and magic. Come dressed as your true self, archetype, or any thing that you can imagine.

9:00 pm: doors open
9:30 pm: lecture by Alex Grey titled "Deities & Demons: Fear & Ecstasy in the Masks of God"
10:15 pm: Ancient Spirits' Dance of the Dead with cellist Rubin Kudheli and violinist Jesse Mills; masks by Lauren Raine; dancers: Ayelen Liberona, Marisa Scirocco, Serene Zloof, Lynzee Dava, and Jonette Ford

MUSIC LINEUP:

Main Dance Floor
11:00 pm: KOZ (Agent Flux, CCC, Merkaba)
1:00 am: Matyas (Reality Engine, N’Light’N, Merkaba)
3:00 am: Allen (Gaian Mind - Philadelphia)
6:00 am: Closing Ceremony

COSM Chill Out
11:00 pm: Bluetech LIVE (Aleph Zero, Native:State, Waveform)
12:30 am: Pedro (Reality Engine, N’Light’N, Merkaba - Brasil)
2:30 am: J-dubs (Atmospherics by Enlightened Productions)
Audio-visual installation by Reality Engine

Video artists: Guillaume Clave, Jordan Walker, Matyas Kelemen, Kathi Von Koerber. Etheric projections by Pythagoras Pentad.

Plus a chai-shop and smart bar. Tickets are $20.00 (advance purchase only: space is limited and the event will sell-out). For ticket purchase and more information, visit http://www.cosm.org/index.html

The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors also recently published the first issue ($6.00) of their *COSM Journal of Visionary Culture*. Edited by Alex and Allyson Grey, this issue contains contributions from Matthew Fox, Paul Laffoley, Gabrielle Roth, Kenji Williams, Jayson Fann, Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D., Arlequin, Zena Gret, Liz Rymland, Marie-Elizabeth Mundheim, Alex Stark, Oliver Vernon, Eli Morgan, and Marisa Scirocco. Check the web site listed above for more information.

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•

3) SYNERGENESIS: Visionary Art and Culture • Saturday, November 6, 22004 • San Francisco, California

SYNERGENESIS is an "Experience of Transpersonal Visionary Art and Culture at the Cusp of Human Coevolution." Held from Saturday, November 6 at 12:00 noon until Sunday, November 7 at 4:00 am, at CELLspace, 2050 Bryant Street, San Francisco.

Your presence is requested for an entire day of full power interactivation. This event will serve as a catalyst for the (r)evolutionary creators of our time to converge and collaborate on manifesting the reality that our art invokes, creating a portal through which our collective vision is crystallized and potentiated. Our gallery will feature visionary art by: Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Mark Henson, Alex Grey, Paul Laffoley, Carey Thompson, Luke Brown, Vibrata Chromodoris, David Heskin, Xavi, Mariela de la Paz, Emily Butterfly, Michael Brown, J. Garcia, Kris D, Roman Villagrana, Nikki Anderson, Rob Newell, and others.

There will be live informational drops from: Mark Comings, Lloydine Arguelles (tentative), Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Spotworks, and Crystal & Spore--including the opportunity to participate in the infamous "Shamans and Allies."

• Opening Reception with Artist's Panel mediated by Erik Davis
• J.M. Nasim and Naasko on aural ambiance
• Community Market: signed prints, stickers, clothing and more
• Late Night Ecstatic Celebration and Integration of the Day with: bbluetech (BC), Shakatura (MFP), and Danny (moontribe)
• Floral Sculpture as Dance-Anthony Ward
• A Ritual Procession of the Archetypes
• Visionary Prayerformance

Come adorned as your highest s'elf!

Check http://www.synergenesis.org for schedule, presenter info, and registration/tickets. This is an ExploreSpirit Production, in association with Carey Thompson and Eve Bradford.

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•

4) VISIONARY ART WORKSHOP • November 12-19, 2004 • Boulder, r, Colorado

Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann present a visionary art workshops in Boulder, Colorado, on November 12-19, 2004. More detailed information is available at http://www.martinahoffmann.com/workshops.html

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•

5) NEW MAPS BULLETIN: "Rites of Passage: Kids and Psychedelics"

Another "theme" issue of the *MAPS Bulletin* has been produced by editors Jon Hanna and Sylvia Thyssen. This one tackles the controversial topic of the use of psychedelics by young people. See http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v14n2-html/

•Â •Â •Â •Â •
•

6) THANATOS TO EROS ON-LINE

Myron Stolaroff's amazing autobiography, presenting his inner exploration with psychedelics over the course of 35 years. From the Foreword by Alexander and Ann Shulgin:

"The story of *Thanatos to Eros* takes us through two marriages, over the course of the author's growth from a successful engineer to an independent business man, and eventually, we see his first steps and subsequent strides as a researcher and explorer of human consciousness. We move with him through the often intense and difficult changes that take place as he learns to use his chosen tools, the psychedelic drugs, beginning with LSD in 1956, and progressing to other powerful visionary plants and drugs over the subsequent years. He is trying to, in the words of Carl Jung, 'make the unconscious conscious,' as the way to attain realization of his ultimate self. We discover, along with him, that this is a hard goal to attain, and that it must be sought with complete inner integrity and fearless self-examination."

*Thanatos to Eros* is posted at http://www.maps.org/t2e/index.html

To: consciousness cafe
Subject: [CCC] Fwd: Spin Fire in Florence, Italy...

>From the art and culture department:

--- Fire Bella wrote:

>
> Hey guys...
>
> I just thought I would send out an opportunity for
> those of you looking to learn different tools for
> fire, or even further your poi training. These are
> fantastic people to learn from, all so passionate
> and full of life about what they do. If you can
> afford it, its quite the opportunity to see another
> part of the world and to incorporate fire into your
> travels.
>
> Take a look at it and let me know if you have any
> questions. I will be going out to the Tuscany region
> in the near future and would love to see all of you
> along side me. We all have room to learn.
>
> Salud!
>
>
>
> Casey Van de Merkt
> Assistant Program Director
> The Fire Academy of Florence
> Prato, Italy
> firebelleding@yahoo.com

Contact: Donia Love



3204.446183 (Italy)



Donia@poidpois.com
MEDIA ALERT
For Immediate Release

Great Photo Opp!


Italy + Fire = Fantastic and Unique Travel Adventure


Donia Love of Seattle, Washington and Fabrizio Fedi of
Prato, Italy have combined their talent and experience
to provide a truly unique adventure for travelers
bored by the same old tour bus routine.



Stay at an arts association, explore the best parts of
Tuscany, learn fire manipulation and immerse yourself
in the culture!



The Fire Academy of Florence provides comprehensive
training in fire manipulation as performance/circus
art. The Academy offers ongoing intensive courses in
various fire-related art forms such as Fire Blowing,
Fire Eating, Fire Chain swinging, Fire Staff spinning,
Fire Sculpture and more.



Now offering a new kind of learning/travel experience
The Fire Academy combines a week-long series of
classes, with hours of exploration of different parts
of Tuscany. You’ll see special places not generally
traveled by the regular tourist plus traditional
favorites like the “Uffizi” in Florence as well as a
myriad of local seasonal festivals and events.



Stay in our home (the Association), enjoy our cooking,
check out our favorite places and learn from
professionals how to handle the dangerous beauty of
fire. Immerse yourself in our culture!



For more information visit www.poidpois.com and click
on the link “Full Fire and Florence Immersion”



###



The Fire Academy of Florence #9702; Via Santa Chiara
38/1 59100 Prato Italy #9702; 0574.604947
info@poidpois.com











>From the outside, the Fire Academy of Florence at
Prato isn’t enormous or imposing. But it houses one of
the most unique travel experiences in the world; a
combination of old-world European hostelry,
exploration of the surrounding Tuscan region from
local view, and the art of fire, more commonly
recognized under various circus tents as fire dancing,
eating and blowing; fire dancing more commonly known
as fire spinning or poi.



In 2002, Donia Love and her husband Bobby traveled to
Italy, with the general idea of traveling to places on
a whim. Equipped with a backpack apiece and a few fire
dancing accoutrements stashed securely in the bottom
of Love’s pack, they began their “typical” tourism
routine in Rome. After a few days of running through
the “typical” museums and galleries, the couple
decided to seek out performance art in the Italian
community ­ specifically, fire dancers.





Donia Love began her journey as a performer in high
school, where she received professional instruction in
dance and theatre at a specialized school for the
arts. At the age of 19 she started working as a street
performer blowing fire at various festivals in the
Midwest. After several years of performing and
learning other fire arts skills, Love founded the Fire
Academy, and started her own fire performance troupe,
Ignis Devoco. With performances at the annual Burning
Man Arts festival in Nevada, and Lollapalooza tour
stops, to international festivals and events,
including the acclaimed Sundance Film Festival in Park
City, Utah, the Fire Academy’s performances ranged
over dozens of locations and events. And after a well
received exhibition of her work in Mannheim, Germany,
Love knew fire performance existed in Europe ­ it was
just a question of if she could find it in Italy. So
she went to a small Internet cafe to look up fellow
fire spinners on a fire spinning information board,
www.homeofpoi.com.



Five Italians were listed in all of Italy on the
board, and within hours of posting on the board, the
Loves were invited to visit Fabrizio Fedi in Prato,
and tour and stay at the performing arts center he
founded. During the first part of their visit, Donia
was asked to give a small performance for Fabrizio and
his friends, and that night, a partnership was formed.



Fabrizio, for his part, came to the art of poi through
a vacation to Thailand in the summer of 1999, and
became entranced by the sight of the locals on a beach
flinging small meteors of fire on chains around their
head. He began learning from the locals on the beach,
and found himself spending his entire vacation
practicing the basic moves.



Upon returning to Prato, Fabrizio founded the Poid
Pois Association as a place to teach others the art of
fire spinning. After leaving his job, Fabrizio
discovered an old textile mill and set about with
personal loans to convert it into a school for fire
performance and other arts. Though small, the school
grew, and now offers classes in tai-chi, yoga, belly
dancing, reiki, capoiera, tantra, and faldenkrais ­
martial arts and dance designed both for mind and
body. A year after its inception, the Association
formed a performance group, and began performing at
parties and festivals throughout Europe.



Once the pair found their mutual partner in fire, the
concept of a Fire Academy of Florence began building.
Love returned several times to Italy until the concept
of the Fire Academy took root. In her second trip to
Prato, Love and Fabrizio created a new name for the
European performance group whose participation in the
inaugural three-day fire immersion class significantly
changed the style of their shows. Lumen Invoco (invoke
the light of life) now stages elaborate fire
spectaculars throughout Italy and Europe. From her
experiences with the local culture and various special
moments and places she had access to as an insider
came the idea of The Fire Academy of Florence ­ a
place where participants from all over the world could
come, live in the Association for a week, be fed
homemade Italian cuisine, explore the natural beauty
of the Italian countryside and seek the deep roots of
Italian culture­ while learning the art of fire.



The Association and the Fire Academy are now offering
tourists and students worldwide the opportunity to
perform and learn in historic northern Italy, with
luxurious accommodations only twenty minutes’
train-ride to Florence. The uniqueness of the Italian
culture, combined with the Academy’s training
schedule, local insight, and travel accommodations put
a new perspective on the idea of the traditional
vacation package. With Internet access and plenty of
restaurants, clubs and unique sights in the local
area, the Association’s package of one week’s worth of
instruction, exploration and accommodations are an
incredible deal for a unique vacation.



For more information regarding booking, contact Donia
Love at donia@poidpois.com or Fabrizio Fedi at
339-546-6444 (remember to dial the country and local
prefix first) or check out the website
www.poidpois.com and click on the “Full Fire and
Florence Immersion” link.

// posted by ustaath @ 11/27/2004 01:30:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Nature triumphs:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html

The great irony: the use of the herbicide Roundup is
killing off the Columbian peasants' legal crops such
as bananas. Now peasants who wanted nothing to do with
coca growing are forced to grow the new
glyphosate-resistant coca, because it is the only
plant that can now grow when spraying is underway!!
The U.S. military is forcing Columbia to a 100%
prohibited psychoactives based economy.
Congratulations to those brilliant navigators of our
collective fate . . . who came up with this scheme.

save the muffin lady

http://www.1974inc.com/

> If you haven't heard about her arrest, you should pick
> up a chicago reader this week (November 5, 2004).
> Shirley Pena was famous for her pot-laced "space
> cakes" that she sold from a blanket for $5 apiece. Now
> she is facing some rather challenging times from local
> law enforcement. It is an interesting story.

>Is God in Our Genes?
>Time, 4.10.25
>
>Jeffrey Kluger, Jeff Chu/ London; Broward Liston/ Orlando; Maggie
>Sieger/ Chicago; Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
> It's not hard to see the divinity behind the water temples that dot
> the rice
>terraces of Bali. It's there in the white-clad high priest presiding in the
>temple at the summit of a dormant volcano. It's there in the 23 priests
>serving
>along with him, selected for their jobs when they were still children by a
>bevy
>of virgin priestesses. It's there in the rituals the priests perform to
>protect
>the island's water, which in turn is needed to nurture the island's rice.
>
> If the divine is easy to spot, what's harder to make out is the
> banal. But
>it's there too--in the meetings the priests convene to schedule their planting
>dates and combat the problem of crop pests; in the plans they draw up to
>maintain aqueducts and police conduits; in the irrigation proposals they
>consider and approve, the dam proposals they reject or amend. "The
>religion has
>a temple at every node in the irrigation system," says David Sloan Wilson,
>professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton,
>N.Y. "The priests make decisions and enforce the code of both religion and
>irrigation."
>
> Ask true believers of any faith to describe the most important thing that
>drives their devotion, and they'll tell you it's not a thing at all but a
>sense--a feeling of a higher power far beyond us. Western religions can get a
>bit more doctrinaire: God has handed us laws and lore, and it's for us to
>learn
>and practice what they teach. For a hell-raising species like ours,
>however--with too much intelligence for our own good and too little discipline
>to know what to do with it--there have always been other, more utilitarian
>reasons to get religion. Chief among them is survival. Across the eons, the
>structure that religion provides our lives helps preserve both mind and body.
>But that, in turn, has raised a provocative question, one that's increasingly
>debated in the worlds of science and religion: Which came first, God or
>the need
>for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above,
>or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather
>into the communities essential to keeping the species going?
>
> Just as a hurricane spins off tornadoes, this debate creates its own
>whirlwind of questions: If some people are more spiritual than others, is it
>nature or nurture that has made them so? If science has nothing to do with
>spirituality and it all flows from God, why do some people hear the divine
>word
>easily while others remain spiritually tone-deaf? Do such ivied-hall debates
>about environment, heredity and anthropology have any place at all in more
>exalted conversations about the nature of God?
>
> Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus,
> there is
>a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It's hard
>enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and
>cheating pay such rich dividends. It's harder still when there's no moral cop
>walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to
>have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best
>and, not
>incidentally, give us a sense that there's someone awake in the cosmic house
>when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we're
>here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine.
>And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods--and millenniums of holy wars
>prove that we do--the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely
>outweigh
>the bloodshed.
>
> Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a
> crucial
>trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation.
>Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to
>their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The
>evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.
>
> Nowhere has that idea received a more intriguing going-over than in the
>recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
>(Doubleday; 256 pages), by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene
>structure at the National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human
>spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the
>genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the
>neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of
>spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer's work, may be due to
>little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals
>governed by
>our DNA. "I'm a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we
>feel
>is the result of activity in the brain," Hamer says. "I think we follow the
>basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running
>around in a bag."
>
> Even for the casually religious, such seeming reductionism can
> rankle. The
>very meaning of faith, after all, is to hold fast to something without all the
>tidy cause and effect that science finds so necessary. Try parsing things the
>way geneticists do, and you risk parsing them into dust. "God is not something
>that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously," says Neil Gillman, a
>professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
>City. "[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological
>convictions." John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at
>England's Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: "You can't cut [faith] down to the
>lowest
>common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist
>thinking."
>
> Is Hamer really guilty of such simplification? Could claims for a
> so-called
>God gene be merely the thin end of a secular wedge, one that risks prying
>spirituality away from God altogether? Or, assuming the gene exists at all,
>could it somehow be embraced by both science and religion, in the same way
>some
>evolutionists and creationists--at least the less radicalized ones--accept the
>idea of a divinely created universe in which evolving life is simply part
>of the
>larger plan? Hamer, for one, hopes so. "My findings are agnostic on the
>existence of God," he says. "If there's a God, there's a God. Just knowing
>what
>brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the
>fact."
>
> Whatever the merits of Hamer's work, he is clearly the heir of a
>millenniums-long search for the wellsprings of spirituality. People have been
>wrestling with the roots of faith since faith itself was first codified into
>Scripture. "[God has] set eternity in the hearts of men," says the Book of
>Ecclesiastes, "yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to
>end."
>
> To theologians in the 3rd century B.C., when Ecclesiastes is thought
> to have
>been written, that passage spoke to the idea that while all of us are divinely
>inspired to look for God, none of us are remotely capable of fully
>comprehending
>what we are seeking. Scientists in the 21st century may not disagree, provided
>that "hearts of men" is replaced with "genes of men." The key for those
>researchers is finding those genes.
>
> Hamer began looking in 1998, when he was conducting a survey on
> smoking and
>addiction for the National Cancer Institute. As part of his study, he
>recruited
>more than 1,000 men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question
>personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).
>Among the
>traits the TCI measures is one known as self-transcendence, which consists of
>three other traits: self-forgetfulness, or the ability to get entirely lost in
>an experience; transpersonal identification, or a feeling of connectedness
>to a
>larger universe; and mysticism, or an openness to things not literally
>provable.
>Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring
>what it
>feels like to be spiritual. "This allows us to have the kind of experience
>described as religious ecstasy," says Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at
>Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the designer of the
>self-transcendence portion of the TCI.
>
> Hamer decided to use the data he gathered in the smoking survey to
> conduct a
>little spirituality study on the side. First he ranked the participants along
>Cloninger's self-transcendence scale, placing them on a continuum from
>least to
>most spiritually inclined. Then he went poking around in their genes to see if
>he could find the DNA responsible for the differences. Spelunking in the human
>genome is not easy, what with 35,000 genes consisting of 3.2 billion chemical
>bases. To narrow the field, Hamer confined his work to nine specific genes
>known
>to play major roles in the production of monoamines--brain chemicals,
>including
>serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, that regulate such fundamental
>functions
>as mood and motor control. It's monoamines that are carefully manipulated by
>Prozac and other antidepressants. It's also monoamines that are not so
>carefully
>scrambled by ecstasy, LSD, peyote and other mind-altering drugs--some of which
>have long been used in religious rituals.
>
> Studying the nine candidate genes in DNA samples provided by his subjects,
>Hamer quickly hit the genetic jackpot. A variation in a gene known as
>VMAT2--for
>vesicular monoamine transporter--seemed to be directly related to how the
>volunteers scored on the self-transcendence test. Those with the nucleic acid
>cytosine in one particular spot on the gene ranked high. Those with the
>nucleic
>acid adenine in the same spot ranked lower. "A single change in a single
>base in
>the middle of the gene seemed directly related to the ability to feel
>self-transcendence," Hamer says. Merely having that feeling did not mean those
>people would take the next step and translate their transcendence into a
>belief
>in--or even a quest for--God. But they seemed likelier to do so than those who
>never got the feeling at all.
>
> Hamer is careful to point out that the gene he found is by no means
> the only
>one that affects spirituality. Even minor human traits can be governed by the
>interplay of many genes; something as complex as belief in God could involve
>hundreds or even thousands. "If someone comes to you and says, 'We've
>found the
>gene for X,'" says John Burn, medical director of the Institute of Human
>Genetics at the University of Newcastle in England, "you can stop them before
>they get to the end of the sentence."
>
> Hamer also stresses that while he may have located a genetic root for
>spirituality, that is not the same as a genetic root for
>religion. Spirituality
>is a feeling or a state of mind; religion is the way that state gets codified
>into law. Our genes don't get directly involved in writing legislation. As
>Hamer
>puts it, perhaps understating a bit the emotional connection many have to
>their
>religions, "Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional."
>
> At least one faith, according to one of its best-known scholars,
> formalizes
>the idea of gene-based spirituality and even puts a pretty spin on it.
>Buddhists, says Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia
>University, have long entertained the idea that we inherit a spirituality gene
>from the person we were in a previous life. Smaller than an ordinary gene, it
>combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents, and
>together they shape our physical and spiritual profile. Says Thurman: "The
>spiritual gene helps establish a general trust in the universe, a sense of
>openness and generosity." Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer's possible
>discovery "amusing and fun."
>
> The Buddhist theory has never been put to the scientific test, but other
>investigations into the biological roots of belief in God were being conducted
>long before Hamer's efforts--often with intriguing results. In 1979,
>investigators at the University of Minnesota began their now famous twins
>study,
>tracking down 53 pairs of identical twins and 31 pairs of fraternal twins that
>had been separated at birth and raised apart. The scientists were looking for
>traits the members of each pair had in common, guessing that the
>characteristics
>shared more frequently by identical twins than by fraternal twins would be
>genetically based, since identical twins carry matching DNA, and those traits
>for which there was no disparity between the identicals and fraternals
>would be
>more environmentally influenced.
>
> As it turned out, the identical twins had plenty of remarkable things in
>common. In some cases, both suffered from migraine headaches, both had a
>fear of
>heights, both were nail biters. Some shared little eccentricities, like
>flushing
>the toilet both before and after using it. When quizzed on their religious
>values and spiritual feelings, the identical twins showed a similar
>overlap. In
>general, they were about twice as likely as fraternal twins to believe as
>much--or as little--about spirituality as their sibling did. Significantly,
>these numbers did not hold up when the twins were questioned about how
>faithfully they practiced any organized religion. Clearly, it seemed, the
>degree
>to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of
>environment and culture. Whether we're drawn to God in the first place is
>hardwired into our genes. "It completely contradicted my expectations," says
>University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard, one of the researchers
>involved in the work. Similar results were later found in larger twin
>studies in
>Virginia and Australia.
>
> Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking
>not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality
>plays
>out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of
>Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to
>watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood
>flow,
>he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers
>experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg
>found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The
>frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is
>where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing
>is the
>fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important
>region--the parietal lobe at the back of the brain--goes dim. It's this lobe
>that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the
>boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one
>with the
>universe. Combine that with what's going on in the other two lobes, and
>you can
>put together a profound religious experience.
>
> Even to some within the religious community, this does not come as
> news. "In
>India in Buddha's time, there were philosophers who said there was no
>soul; the
>mind was just chemistry," says Thurman. "The Buddha disagreed with their
>extreme
>materialism but also rejected the 'absolute soul' theologians." Michael
>Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in
>Sudbury, Ont., puts the chemistry argument more bluntly. "God," he says,
>"is an
>artifact of the brain."
>
> Even if such spiritual deconstructionism is true, some scientists--to say
>nothing of most theologians--think it takes you only so far, particularly when
>it comes to trying to determine the very existence of God. Simply
>understanding
>the optics and wiring of the eyes, after all, doesn't mean there's no inherent
>magnificence in the Rembrandts they allow us to see. If human beings were
>indeed
>divinely assembled, why wouldn't our list of parts include a genetic chip that
>would enable us to contemplate our maker?
>
> "Of course, concepts of God reside in the brain. They certainly don't
> reside
>in the toe," says Lindon Eaves, director of the Virginia Institute for
>Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in
>Richmond. "The question is, To what is this wiring responsive? Why is it
>there?"
>
> Says Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie
> University in
>Sydney, Australia: "I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking
>that if
>you explain something, you explain it away. I don't see that at all with
>religious experience."
>
> Those religious believers who are comfortable with the idea that God genes
>are the work of God should have little trouble making the next leap: that not
>only are the genes there but they are central to our survival, one of the
>hinges
>upon which the very evolution of the human species turned. It's an
>argument that
>'s not terribly hard to make.
>
> For one thing, God is a concept that appears in human cultures all
> over the
>globe, regardless of how geographically isolated they are. When tribes
>living in
>remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living
>shoulder
>to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the
>genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally
>strong indication that there are very good reasons it's there.
>
> One of those reasons might be that, as the sole species--as far as we
>know--capable of contemplating its own death, we needed something larger than
>ourselves to make that knowledge tolerable. "Anticipation of our own demise is
>the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe," says Persinger. "In
>many
>ways, [a God experience is] a brilliant adaptation. It's a built-in pacifier."
>
> But the most important survival role religion may serve is as the
> mortar that
>holds a group together. Worshipping God doesn't have to be a collective thing;
>it can be done in isolation, disconnected from any organized religion. The
>overwhelming majority of people, however, congregate to pray, observing
>the same
>rituals and heeding the same creeds. Once that congregation is in place, it's
>only a small step to using the common system of beliefs and practices as the
>basis for all the secular laws that keep the group functioning.
>
> One of the best examples of religion as social organizer, according to
>Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to
>prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was
>recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps
>one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity,
>was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius
>to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the
>city
>'s deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might be.
>
> Calvin's catechism included the familiar Ten Commandments--which, with
> their
>injunctions against theft, murder, adultery and lying, are themselves
>effective
>social organizers. Added to that were admonitions to pay taxes, perform civic
>duties, behave in a civil manner and submit to the authority of magistrates.
>"You must understand religions very thoroughly in relation to their
>environments," says Wilson. "And one problem for Calvin was to make his city
>function."
>
> The heirs to Calvinism today--Presbyterians, many Baptists and
> believers in
>the Reformed tradition in general--see the roots of their faith as
>something far
>more divine than merely good civic management. But even some theologians
>seem to
>think that a deep belief in the laws of God can coexist with the survival
>demands of an evolving society. "Calvin had a reverence for the Scriptures,
>which then became institutionalized," says James Kay, professor of practical
>theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary. "The Bible is concerned about
>justice for the poor, equity and fairness, and all of those things were
>seen to
>in Calvin's Geneva."
>
> Other struggling cultures have similarly translated godly law into earthly
>order and in doing so helped ensure their survival. The earliest Christians
>established a rough institutional structure that allowed them to transmit
>their
>ideas within a generation of Christ's death, and as a result succeeded in
>living
>through the Roman persecution; the Jews of the Diaspora moved as a cultural
>whole through the nations of Europe, finding niches wherever they could but
>maintaining their identity and kinship by observing the same rites. "All
>religions become a bit secular," says Wilson. "In order to survive, you
>have to
>organize yourselves into a culture."
>
> The downside to all this is that often religious groups gather not into
>congregations but into camps--and sometimes they're armed camps. In a
>culture of
>Crusades, Holocausts and jihads, where in the world is the survival
>advantage of
>religious wars or terrorism? One facile explanation has always been herd
>culling--an adaptive way of keeping populations down so that resources aren't
>depleted. But there's little evolutionary upside to wiping out an entire
>population of breeding-age males, as countries trying to recover from wars
>repeatedly learn. Why then do we so often let the sweetness of religion curdle
>into combat?
>
> The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't
>necessarily always use it wisely. Fire can either light your village or burn
>down the one next door, depending on your inclination. "Religions
>represent an
>attempt to harness innate spirituality for organizational purposes--not always
>good," says Macquarie University's Davies. And while spiritual
>contemplation is
>intuitive, says Washington University's Cloninger, religion is dogmatic; dogma
>in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing.
>
> Still, for every place in the world that's suffering from religious
> strife,
>there are many more where spirituality is doing its uplifting and civilizing
>work. A God who would equip us with the genes and the smarts to cooperate in
>such a clever way is a God who ought to be appealing even to religious
>purists.
>Nonetheless, sticking points do remain that prevent genetic theory from going
>down smoothly. One that's particularly troublesome is the question of why
>Hamer
>'s God gene--or any of the others that may eventually be discovered--is
>distributed so unevenly among us. Why are some of us spiritual virtuosos,
>while
>others can't play a note? Isn't it one of the central tenets of religion that
>grace is available to everybody? At least a few scientists shrug at the
>question. "Some get religion, and some don't," says Virginia Commonwealth
>University's Eaves.
>
> But this seeming inequity may be an important part of the spiritual
> journey.
>It would be easy for God simply to program us for reverence; it's more
>meaningful when the door is opened but you've got to walk through on your
>own--however hard those steps may be for some. "I have never had a Big Bang
>conversion experience," says the Jewish Theological Seminary's Gillman. "My
>sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one
>builds a faith."
>
> Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our
>spiritual tool kit as the genes we're born with. A poor genetic legacy but
>lucky
>spiritual circumstances might mean more than good genes and bad experiences.
>"Fortune includes the possibility of divine grace as well as environmental
>influences," says Cloninger.
>
> No matter how the two factors balance out, scientists may eventually find
>that trying to identify the definitive cluster of genes that serves as our
>spiritual circuit board is simply impossible--like trying to draw a genetic
>schematic of love. Still, they're likely to keep trying. "I am personally
>convinced that there is a scheme of things," says Davies of Macquarie
>University, "that the universe is not just any ragbag of laws." In the end,
>genes may prove to be a part of that scheme--but clearly one of very many.
>--With reporting by Jeff Chu/ London, Broward Liston/ Orlando, Maggie Sieger/
>Chicago and Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
>
> "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
>--ALBERT EINSTEIN
>
> "With all your science, can you tell me how it is that light comes
> into the
>soul?" --HENRY DAVID THOREAU
>
> "Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its
> readiness to
>fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses." --SIGMUND FREUD
>
> "All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods."
>--WILLIAM JAMES

Brain-boosting "cosmetic neurology" on the horizon
Full story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2002083773_brain06.html

By Laura Beil
The Dallas Morning News
November 6, 2004

DALLAS — In the future, reality shows may have names such as "Extreme Makeover: Brain Edition" or "Sharp Eye for the Dumb Guy."

 At the beginning of each episode, viewers could learn about one hapless soul's lifelong struggles with algebra and another's desire to stop being a worrywart. By the end of the hour, the transformed contestants would be winning chess matches and prancing carefree through fields of daisies. Don't check the TV listings yet, but the idea is not all fantasy.

 Some neurologists recently have wondered whether their field is the next frontier in elective medicine. The specialty now tries to protect ailing brains from conditions such as Parkinson's disease or migraine headaches. But doctors' efforts one day may extend to normal brains.

 "This is coming, and we need to know it's coming," said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee of the University of Pennsylvania.

 There's even a name for the field: cosmetic neurology.

Other improvements

 As he envisions it, cosmetic neurology one day could mean not only sharpening intelligence, but also elevating other dictates of the brain — reflexes, attention, mood and memory. Studying for the SAT? Take this drug to retain more of those pesky facts. About to report for duty at the fire station? These pills will improve your reflexes. Here's the 800 number. Ask your doctor.

 These are not only theoretical musings. Last month in the journal Neurology, Chatterjee noted that some current drugs already may have many of these effects. In one study, for example, emergency-room patients given a memory-altering drug appeared to be spared some symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Another small study of pilots in flight simulators suggested that those taking medications for Alzheimer's disease performed better, particularly under emergency conditions.

 Chatterjee reserves opinion but says the idea speaks to the basic purpose of medical practice.

 "I'm not arguing that this is a bad thing, and I'm not arguing it's a good thing." Before doctors are caught by surprise, he said, they need to be prepared. "What I'm hoping to do with this is get people talking."

 They are. Since the journal's publication, he has fielded steady e-mails. Some neurologists say they already have had patients asking about such medications for the mind.

Medical gatekeepers

 Not all of Chatterjee's colleagues, though, agree that cosmetic neurology is inevitable, even if mind-improving drugs become safe and available. "There are certainly pressures that are going to push us that way," said Dr. Richard Dees of the University of Rochester. Doctors have the power, however, to shape the future of their profession regardless.

 Writing in the journal, Dees argues "as neurologists and as citizens, we can collectively control our own destinies, if we choose and if we have the will to act."

 Another of his colleagues has a different take. Dr. Stephen Hauser of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that "advances in neuroscience carry with them the likelihood, intended or otherwise, of medical applications that go well beyond the traditional goals to prevent, diagnose and treat disease."

 Few specialties know this as well as plastic surgeons. Before there was "Nip/Tuck" and Michael Jackson's nose, plastic surgeons were rebuilding war-mangled bodies. As safety improved and public demand for cosmetic surgery grew, so did the number of cosmetic surgeons.

 "You've always had a dilemma and a schism," said Dr. Robert Goldwyn, who has edited the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the field's premier journal, for more than two decades. In fact, some plastic surgeons now wonder whether their profession — under financial and public pressures — leans too far toward cosmetic surgery. And he has words of caution for colleagues who concentrate on the brain: "The minute technology comes along, it will be used," he said. "If doctors won't do it, other people will do it."

 There are other instances of doctor-provided enhancements beyond plastic surgery, said Thomas Murray, president of The Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y.-based bioethics research institute. Synthetic growth hormone was developed to help children with severe hormone deficiencies. But some parents have asked doctors to give it because their children simply are at the low end of the normal-height bell curve. In response, endocrinologists have tried to develop strict guidelines for its use.

 "The thing about surgical enhancement is we think we can more or less understand the risks," Murray said. "With drugs it gets more complicated."

Looking ahead

 Mental enhancement with drugs is not itself unethical, he said — a cup of coffee, after all, heightens alertness beyond a natural state. Few people object to caffeine, however, because it is considered safe, is inexpensive and is available to almost everyone.

 But other drugs might not be so clear. "There are major safety concerns," Murray said. For example, a person's personality is a blend of all traits, yet no one knows whether a drug that distorts one mental function would diminish another.

 In his editorial, Chatterjee also raised questions about whether cosmetic neurology might lead to coercion in certain professions. If a drug improved the emergency reaction of pilots, would they then be forced to take it? Would you pay more for a flight knowing the pilots took the drug?

 These and other questions are those that neurologists should be asking themselves now, Murray said, before advances take them by surprise. The growth-hormone story, he said, demonstrates that physicians can set standards, regardless of where public momentum pushes them.

Contribute $33 to Erowid and your donation will be tripled! Qualifying $33 donations will trigger a matching $67 donation making a total of $100 in support for Erowid.

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>>From: "Alberto M. Giordano"
>>
>>November 15, 2004
>>Please Distribute Widely
>>
>>Dear Colleague,
>>
>>Weeks after some punishing setbacks for the government of Brazilian
>>President Lula da Silva, with his Worker's Party losing three of the
>>flagship cities in the world for Harm Reduction policies toward drug
>>users (São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba), the Lula administration
>>has finally decided to make the groundbreaking local policies go
>>national.
>>
>>According to a report in today's Folha de São Paulo (subscription only),
>>Lula's government of has reached a "consensus" to step forward into a
>>bold new era of drug policy: decriminalizing the drug user nationwide,
>>and opening 250 safe drug use centers across the country during the year
>>2005.
>>
>>Lula is expected to sign an executive decree on November 24, taking drug
>>enforcement responsibilities away from police agencies, and placing the
>>problems of drug use under the jurisdiction of the Health Ministry,
>>which will be charged with supporting the safe drug-use centers and make
>>Harm Reduction - a policy to reduce the harms associated with drug use -
>>the law of the land.
>>
>>Here is an excerpt from today's report from Brazil's largest daily
>>newspaper:
>>
>>"Policy proposal considers drug consumption as a public health problem,
>>and no longer one for the police"
>>
>>"The government wants to create centers for drug use"
>>
>>"By Luciana Constantino and Iuri Dantas - Folha de São Paulo, Brasília
>>Bureau"
>>
>>"After a series of internal disagreements about drug policy, the federal
>>government is preparing a realignment of national policy to define drug
>>consumption as a public health problem, and not one for the police as it
>>is today."
>>
>>"There will be a presidential order creating rules for treating drug
>>dependents, with emphasis on Harm Reduction..."
>>
>>To read more of the translation, and comment on this exciting new
>>development, head toward The Narcosphere:
>>
>>http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/11/15/94326/676
>>
>>The NarcoSphere
>>narcosphere.narconews.com
>>A Project of the Narco News Bulletin.
>>
>>---
>>
>>Brazil's Lula to Sign Drug Decriminalization Decree on Nov. 24
>>
>>By Al Giordano,
>>
>>Posted on Mon Nov 15th, 2004 at 09:43:26 AM EST
>>
>>According to a report in today's Folha de São Paulo
>>http://www.folha.uol.com.br/ (subscription only), the government of
>>Brazilian President Lula da Silva has reached a "consensus" to step
>>forward into a bold new era of drug policy: decriminalizing the drug
>>user, and opening 250 safe drug use centers across the country during
>>the year 2005.
>>
>>Lula is expected to sign an executive decree on November 24, taking drug
>>enforcement responsibilities away from police agencies, and placing the
>>problems of drug use under the jurisdiction of the Health Ministry,
>>which will be charged with supporting the safe drug-use centers and make
>>Harm Reduction - a policy to reduce the harms associated with drug use -
>>the law of the land.
>>
>>Here is an excerpt from today's report from Brazil's largest daily
>>newspaper:
>>
>>Policy proposal considers drug consumption as a public health problem,
>>and no longer one for the police
>>
>>The government wants to create centers for drug use
>>
>>By Luciana Constantino and Iuri Dantas
>>
>>Folha de São Paulo, Brasília Bureau
>>
>>After a series of internal disagreements about drug policy, the federal
>>government is preparing a realignment of national policy to define drug
>>consumption as a public health problem, and not one for the police as it
>>is today.
>>
>>There will be a presidential order creating rules for treating drug
>>dependents, with emphasis on Harm Reduction...
>>
>>(More of the translation appears after the jump.)
>>
>>The new focus will include a change in the name of the policy. It will
>>be changed from "National Anti-Drug Policy" to "National Policy on
>>Drugs."
>>
>>"Changing the name is a symbol, and there will be a change in
>>orientation. The country is maturing in order to put forward a more
>>pragmatic policy," said Pedro Gabriel Delgado, the government's mental
>>health coordinator.
>>
>>The president's public safety secretary, General Jorge Armando Felix,
>>has also endorsed the proposal. "Drug dependents are a public health
>>problem. They should be treated as people like those with any other
>>illness, particularly in the area of psychiatry, they need support and
>>treatment."
>>
>>Through this new lens, Lula will sign a presidential decree to regulate
>>harm reduction programs, making possible a wider network of treatment
>>for drug users and the creation of local centers for safe drug use.
>>Before opening their doors, these centers will need authorization from
>>the Health Ministry and will count with permanent support.
>>
>>Preferably, the centers will be monitored by universities and dedicated
>>to high risk users, such as those who use crack or inject cocaine.
>>
>>The decree will create the role of Harm Reduction agent, a health
>>professional who will be responsible for the direct contact with the
>>users. And he, for example, will provide sterilized syringes…
>>
>>Today, non-governmental organizations, with support from the health
>>department, are already involved in Harm Reduction programs, but within
>>the limits of legal prohibitions, thus there has been no regulation of
>>this kind of work…
>>
>>The goal for 2005 is the creation of 250 such local drug use centers
>>around the country.
>>
>>After much controversy and six public hearings in different states, the
>>government will finalize the new policy on November 24th… The emphasis
>>will be on demand and Harm Reduction.
>>
>>According to the national drug czar, General Paulo Robero Uchoa, the
>>government decided to put its efforts into combat against
>>narco-trafficking, leaving the drug user to medical attention. "A drug
>>is an inert thing. I don't combat penicillin… Now I combat trafficking.
>>Drugs have to be understood to be able to educate and prepare society
>>and the youth to not use drugs carelessly."
>>
>>Translated from: Folha de São Paulo, 15 de novembro de 2004.
>>
>>---
>>
>> From somewhere in a country called América,
>>
>>Al Giordano
>>Publisher
>>The Narco News Bulletin
>>http://www.narconews.com/
>>new email: narconews@gmail.com
>>
>>Narco News is supported by:
>>
>>The Fund for Authentic Journalism
>>P.O. Box 71051
>>Madison Heights, MI 48071 USA
>>http://www.authenticjournalism.org
>>
>>The Fund receives online donations at this web page:
>>
>>http://www.authenticjournalism.org
>>
>>Apply for your co-publisher's account, here:
>>
>>http://www.narconews.com/copublisher/application.php
>>
>>Subscribe for free alerts of new reports:
>>
>>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconews
>>
>>Suscríbete gratis para alertas de nuevos reportajes en español:
>>
>>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconewsandes
>>
>>Inscreva-se para alertas gratuitos de reportagens do último minuto em
>>português brasileiro:
>>
>>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconewsbrasil

// posted by ustaath @ 11/27/2004 12:46:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

From the Marijuana Policy Project (mpp.org)

 

======================================================================

Please distribute this memo widely to family and friends in Illinois.

======================================================================

TO:  Illinois residents*

FROM:  Steve Fox, director of government relations

DATE:   Monday, November 22, 2004

SUBJECT:  Thank Senator Durbin for introducing historic medical

marijuana bill in the U.S. Senate

======================================================================

Last week, I notified you in a national alert that U.S. Sen.

Richard Durbin (D-IL) had made history when he introduced the first

medical marijuana bill ever in the U.S. Senate.  Today, since you

are a constituent of Senator Durbin's, I am writing to encourage you

to send him an e-mail expressing your gratitude.

Please visit -- http://www.mpp.org/tydurbin -- and send your thank-you

message today.  It will take less than two minutes of your time.

Thank-you e-mails are just as important as earlier e-mails urging him

to support medical marijuana.  The overall constituent reaction to

Sen. Durbin's decision will play a large role in determining whether

he will support other similar legislation in the future.  You can be

sure that opponents of medical marijuana will be voicing their

displeasure.  We must drown out those complaints so that Sen. Durbin

understands that the public supports his decision.

Like the House version of the bill, the Senate Truth in Trials Act

would end the federal government's gag on medical marijuana defendants

in court. By providing an affirmative defense to federal marijuana

charges, this bill would not only ensure that defendants could

introduce evidence about the medical aspects of their marijuana-

related activities, but would also keep them from being sent to

federal prison if it is determined that they were acting in compliance

with state medical marijuana laws.

More importantly, this bill ends the shameful silence of the U.S.

Senate with respect to the Bush Administration's attacks on medical

marijuana patients and providers.

So please thank Sen. Durbin for having the courage to break the ice on

this subject in the U.S. Senate.

Visit -- http://www.mpp.org/tydurbin -- and send your message today.

Your Brain and Music

>http://sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0007D716-71A1-1179-AF8683414B7F0000

Your Brain and Marijuana

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0008F53F-80F7-119B-80F783414B7F0000

Scientific American editorial: restrictions on marijuana research are absurd

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=000A844E-8FBE-119B-8EA483414B7FFE9F

The long awaited LA Times article on ibogaine just appeared on their web page.

http://tinyurl.com/429ta

The Magical Mystery Tour

Drug and alcohol addicts are going abroad in search of the purported miracle treatment called ibogaine. But will the drug industry embrace a substance that causes a hallucinatory high?

By Vince Beiser
Special to The Times

November 28, 2004

The hallucinations are coming fast and vivid. Faces, shapes, colors rush toward him, melting and swirling into each other, sometimes coalescing into more concrete visions. He sees himself floating underwater. By turns, his four children drift by. Sometimes they blow bubbles and float happily up to the surface; sometimes they sink straight down, disappearing into darkness. Then there are three ships, coming in to dock at three tubes; he knows, somehow, that they are building a bomb, and if all three dock successfully it will explode. He tries to direct them away, but can't. The final ship enters the final tube. A titanic explosion collapses everything into darkness.

Then it all starts again.

While Craig's mind reels through this visual cacophony, his body lies quietly in a darkened room in a house near Tijuana, deep in the grip of a powerful psychedelic drug. His wife, his children and his upper-middle-class home in Salt Lake City are all far, far away.

Craig is not some crystal-collecting spiritual seeker on a Carlos Castañeda trip. He is a prosperous, respected restaurant owner, age 50. He is friendly with the mayor and active in mainstream charities. Other than family vacations to the Bahamas and Mazatlan, Mexico, this is the only time he has been outside of the United States.

Craig is here because he is desperate. He is addicted to painkillers­OxyContin, Lortab and other illegally obtained prescription opiates. His habit is costing him $1,500 a month, and he knows he must stop. Conventional detox programs have failed to help, so he has slipped over the border to try a treatment that is as much an urban myth as a scientifically proven medication­and is as illegal as heroin in the United States.

The treatment is a dose of a powerful hallucinogen called ibogaine. It is derived from the roots of a shrub called Tabernanthe iboga that grows in Africa. Local tribespeople have used it as a peyote-like sacrament for generations. Since the 1960s, it has circulated on the margins of Western drug culture, sustained by its reputation as a potent healer. A single daylong trip on ibogaine, lore has it, can help break an addiction to heroin, cocaine, alcohol or even cigarettes.

Other hallucinogens such as Ecstasy have purported to be helpful in treating addiction, but interest in ibogaine seems to be approaching critical mass. The increasing number of anecdotal success stories has attracted the attention of researchers. Although there is no rock-solid proof, scientific consensus is growing that this drug may indeed possess potent addiction-thwarting properties.

Regardless of what science says, faith is flourishing. A devoted community has grown up around ibogaine­a motley congregation of former junkies, envelope-pushing academics and drug-reform zealots helping to spread awareness and use of the drug. There reportedly are at least two underground activists in the U.S. who will provide it to seekers illegally. But taking ibogaine doesn't have to involve breaking laws, because it's legal in many countries. As a result, clinics are popping up from the Caribbean to Pakistan, offering ibogaine treatment for a few thousand dollars to well over $10,000.

The clinic near Tijuana is, relatively speaking, among the most reputable. It was opened in 2001 by Martin Polanco, a Mexican doctor who was impressed with how ibogaine­obtained at an underground U.S. clinic­had helped one of his relatives beat cocaine addiction. Polanco's facility, known as the Ibogaine Association, has administered more than 350 treatments and currently has 10 to 15 new patients a month, says program director Randy Hencken.

Hencken, a gangly 28-year-old with curly hair and little studs in each ear, was one of Polanco's first patients. He had dropped out of college at 21 to devote himself to cocaine and, eventually, heroin. Over the years, he tried everything from 12-step programs to methadone to get clean, but nothing worked. He discovered ibogaine on the Internet, made his way to Polanco's facility, and returned with his addiction broken. He has since embraced the cause with a convert's zeal, taking a job as the association's main organizer.

On the summer day Craig is to begin his ibogaine experience, Hencken is padding around a San Diego apartment that doubles as the association's U.S. office. The place fits naturally in the beachside slacker-student-surfer neighborhood. The front room is furnished with worn couches and a computer emblazoned with a Jane's Addiction sticker. A bike and surfboards hang on hooks in the kitchen.

Hencken, dressed in a black T-shirt and pants, hops into an unmarked van and drives to a dingy airport motel. Waiting in the parking lot is Craig, a trim, compact man wearing loafers, khakis and a Nike T-shirt.

"I've got to admit this is a little weird," says Craig, who flew in from Salt Lake the night before. "I feel like we're doing a drug deal." Which, in a sense, they are. Craig gets in the van and they roll south.

Craig is highly motivated to undertake this bizarre journey. He was an alcoholic for years, with the smashed cars and nights in jail to show for it. He quit drinking 16 years ago and has stayed sober. But a few years ago he was prescribed painkillers for a knee injury and discovered that he liked them. He began downing fistfuls of pills daily, scoring them from one of his employees. "At first it was recreational," he recalls. "But then you find yourself doing them just to get from point A to B and you know it's a problem."

Last year, he checked himself into a rehab center and went cold turkey. "It was horrible," he says. "You hurt from your bones in. I couldn't sleep. I cried like a baby. I'd take hot baths all day and eat ibuprofen like candy." He stayed clean for six weeks and then fell off the wagon.

"I can't stop myself. But I know I can't go down that road again like I did with alcohol," he says. "But when you're on opiates, it really hurts to stop." So when his dealer, who had been scouring the Internet for unconventional ways to kick drugs, told Craig about the Ibogaine Association, he decided he had little to lose.

"I just need to get this stuff out of my system," he says, "and I'm looking for an easier, softer way."

Ibogaine, as even its most ardent supporters say, is not a cure for drug dependence; however, it apparently can play a potent role as an addiction-interrupter. The drug has two powerful addiction-fighting effects. The first is biochemical: It seems to act on serotonin and opiate systems in the brain, physically nullifying a person's craving for drugs and smoothing their withdrawal symptoms. That's a huge boon for those addicted to heroin and other opiates, many of whom shrink from the physical pain of detox.

"It has been proved to alleviate the pain and physical discomfort of drug withdrawal with animals," says Dr. Stanley Glick, a neuropharmacologist at Albany Medical Center in New York who has researched the drug for years. "And there are lots of reports of it doing the same with humans. You hear the same story a few thousand times, you've got to believe there's something there."

After a few weeks, this craving-blocking effect generally fades. But by then, users have been able to detox relatively painlessly, and then have a month or more free of drug cravings in which to do whatever it takes to stay clean.

"One dose of ibogaine is not a magic bullet," says Dr. Deborah Mash, a neurology professor at the University of Miami who has done the most extensive research on ibogaine's effects on human beings. "But it can be a powerful first step on the road to recovery."

The second effect is less tangible and more controversial. In many users, ibogaine induces hours of staggering hallucinations while the patient appears to be sleeping. Many ibogaine users say they gained profound insights from this experience, which helps them to understand why they became addicts.

Greg Douglass, a former guitarist with the Steve Miller Band, credits a session last year at the Ibogaine Association with helping him to kick methadone. Douglass had visions of himself as a terrified child, of his still-living father in a coffin, of fantastic animals tearing each other apart in a red sea. Over the next several weeks, he says, he gradually came to understand some of the messages encoded in the visions.

"I'd be tying my shoes and suddenly have a little epiphany­'Aha, that's what that meant.' " The visions, he says, "showed me the potential for myself as a human being."

Beth Giuliano, a sturdy 25-year-old from New York, had been in and out of rehab programs for years trying to kick heroin before she found her way to the Ibogaine Association in February. "I saw my mother holding an infant," she says, describing her hallucinations. "I realized that was me. I felt the pain of what it would be like to have a child who becomes a drug addict. I'd always felt guilty about my family, but I never really understood their pain until I did ibogaine.

"I woke up the next day seeing things a completely different way. I'd never felt so positive," she says. "I felt like the person I was when I was little or like a whole new me." She says she's done heroin twice since her treatment, but didn't enjoy it and has stayed clean for four months.

But there are plenty of people who discount the supposed wonder treatment. For some, the visions are harrowing and the treatment is a failure. "It's like acid times one million," writes an anonymous naysayer on one of the many web sites devoted to ibogaine. "I saw God alright­I talked to him. And I was so sure it was real. But it wasn't…. It was someone who [messed] with me and scared the [daylights] out of me." This person's account says that others who took the treatment at the same time saw themselves being crucified or raped. "It didn't work for me, and it didn't work for anyone else that I personally met who took it," the writer concludes.

Everyone agrees that ibogaine is no fun. It's often emotionally unsettling, mentally exhausting and physically stressful. Its side effects can include nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination and a potentially dangerous reduction in blood pressure and heart rate.

There have been several documented deaths in connection with the drug. But because the ibogaine was not taken in a clinical setting, the cause of death was never firmly established. Some fatalities may have been caused by preexisting heart conditions made lethal by ibogaine's effects. Mash is confident that there are more that have gone unreported. "There are some pretty unethical people" giving clandestine treatments, she says. "They just leave patients for dead in hotel rooms."

"That's why ibogaine needs to be legal and available in safe settings," Hencken says. "It needs to be in the hands of someone who can judge your health, your dosage and provide a safe environment."

The Ibogaine Association requires clients to submit a medical history as well as undergo testing before treatment can begin. A doctor administers the drug. Still, the procedure seems remarkably casual.

From San Diego, Craig is brought to the association's treatment facility, a rented house on a well-kept residential street near Tijuana. Only the dining room, which has been converted into a medication-equipped office, and the oxygen tanks under the stairs indicate that it is a medical establishment, of sorts.

The doctor treating Craig is Francisco Cañez, a calm, round-faced man who splits his time between the association and a hospital emergency room. Craig sits with his arms crossed, looking more than a tad nervous as Cañez reviews his file and calculates his ibogaine dosage. From a small jar, he shakes out three gelatin capsules filled with white powder and hands them to Craig.

Craig looks speculatively at the first pill, which he'll take to make sure he doesn't have an allergic reaction. "Well, I've put all kinds of things in my body," he says, shrugging. Half an hour later, having evinced no untoward initial responses, he swallows the other two pills.

Cañez then takes him into a bedroom, where sheets of Styrofoam cover the windows and a CD softly plays rainforest sounds, and attaches him to a heart monitor next to the bed. The monitor's graph flutters peacefully as the ibogaine gradually pulls Craig away. After a while, he just lies there silently, engulfed in a hallucinogenic hurricane.

After several hours, the visions gradually start to subside. Craig sits up, nauseated and dizzy. "That was a wild ride," he mutters. Though he hasn't had a painkiller in several days, he finds he doesn't crave one now. He lies down again and drops back into his head for another hour. Finally, he revives enough to be moved to another house where he will spend the next day recovering. He totters out to the van with small, jittery steps.

Ibogaine's addiction-fighting potential was discovered only recently, and accidentally. It was sold as a stimulant in France during the middle decades of the last century, and an American psychologist and a psychiatrist dabbled with it in the 1950s and '60s. So little was known about it that it could not even be considered a curiosity.

But in 1962, Howard Lotsof, a 19-year-old New York student with a heroin habit and an appetite for other pharmacological kicks, scored some powder that he was told would give him a 36-hour trip. Lotsof and some of his junkie pals experimented with it and, to their astonishment, found that it knocked out their heroin craving.

Mightily impressed, Lotsof tried to drum up street interest, and a little cash for himself in the process. It never caught on in a big way, but it did find a place in counterculture lore­and got banned by the federal government in 1970. It was memorably cited by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who speculated that "a bad ibogaine frenzy" was the likely explanation for Democrat Ed Muskie's oddly emotional behavior in the 1972 presidential campaign.

Ibogaine's legend grew as a constant trickle of adventurous addicts tried it. In the mid-'80s, Lotsof managed to patent ibogaine as an anti-addiction palliative, and set up a company to try to bring it to market. An early series of treatments in the Netherlands looked promising, although there were a couple of ibogaine-related deaths elsewhere in Europe.

Lotsof continued his crusade. In the early '90s, he and other activists persuaded a federal agency to cough up several million dollars for ibogaine research. He recruited Mash and the two began working together. (They have since parted ways.) By 1993, Mash had won FDA approval to begin testing ibogaine on human subjects. But then one of Lotsof's informal patients in the Netherlands died. In 1995, the National Institute on Drug Abuse decided not to proceed to clinical studies.

"Committee members were not all that impressed with its efficacy, but the safety issue stopped them in their tracks," says Frank Vocci, a federal researcher who has followed ibogaine's progress. "What you have are a lot of interesting, colorful anecdotes. But the plural of anecdotes is not scientific data."

A number of researchers around the country, however, have become sufficiently intrigued to continue experimenting with animals. Dozens of articles have appeared in scientific journals, most of them reporting promising results that buttress the anecdotal evidence.

Mash is doing her own part to advance the cause. In 1996 she helped to launch an ibogaine clinic on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. During the next five years, she gathered data on more than 300 patients who sought treatment there­the largest body of serious clinical research on ibogaine ever collected.

Mash presented her findings at a medical conference last fall in San Francisco. Granted, her sample wasn't representative of America's drug users: Most were white men between 20 and 40 years old, the sort of addicts who can afford to spend several weeks and several thousand dollars detoxing in the Caribbean. Still, she declared that her research proves that ibogaine can be administered safely and does help break addictions. "We saw people with big methadone habits lose their cravings after just a single dose of ibogaine," she says. "One month later, both cocaine and opiate addicts reported cravings were significantly lower. And at one year, drug use was significantly down among testees."

At this point, perhaps the major obstacle to Ibogaine's mainstream acceptance is its scrofulous image. This isn't a medicine developed by white-coated scientists; its anti-addictive properties were discovered by a junkie, and some of its promoters are folks who may be of more interest to the attorney general than the surgeon general.

One of ibogaine's most energetic boosters is Marc Emery, founder of a Vancouver, Canada, clinic. Emery is a verbose, middle-aged man with bushy hair and corporate-casual clothes. You'd never guess that he heads the British Columbia Marijuana Party and is, by his reckoning, one of the world's largest sellers of pot seeds. It is his personal mission to bring ibogaine to the masses, because the drug helped his adopted son kick methadone and heroin. Until this spring, Emery offered free treatment in the Iboga Therapy House, a clinic that consists of a plush one-bedroom apartment in a Vancouver high-rise. With his cash flow crimped by business and legal troubles (he just spent two months in a Saskatchewan jail for passing a joint at a gathering), he has stopped funding the clinic, putting its program on hold, but he remains supportive. "It was a very worthwhile investment," he says. "The improvements I saw in our patients were significant and astonishing."

Still, Emery's enthusiasm is unlikely to change the minds of skeptics such as Dr. Herbert Kleber, head of the substance abuse division at Columbia University's school of medicine. "I'm in favor of anything that works, but there needs to be proof that it does, and that it doesn't endanger patients," he says. "I've been in this field 35 years, and I've seen a lot of magic bullets. They often turn out to be worse than the disease."

Getting that kind of proof requires controlled experiments on human subjects, which is what Mash is working toward. She has isolated a molecule called noribogaine, which is produced in the body as it metabolizes ibogaine, and which she believes is the key agent that blocks drug cravings. She is trying to get FDA approval to start human testing. On a parallel track, Stanley Glick has synthesized a chemical cousin of ibogaine dubbed 18-MC, which he also hopes to market.

Both Mash and Glick think their ibogaine derivatives will give users the drug-blocking effect without the hallucinations­something both believe is necessary if the FDA is to approve their products.

But would eliminating ibogaine's psychedelic side diminish its effectiveness? No one knows. "For me, the ideal would be for people to take ibogaine in a controlled environment, and use the experience as part of their psychotherapy," Mash says. "Then slap a noribogaine patch on them."

Mash and Glick also face a more prosaic obstacle: money. Funding comprehensive clinical trials for a new drug is colossally expensive, and so far neither has found anyone willing to pony up the full cost. In October, a Los Angeles philanthropist pledged to give Mash $250,000 to restart research at the University of Miami, but that's only a tiny fraction of what will eventually be necessary if ibogaine is ever to be brought to market.

"The pharmaceutical industry has never wanted much to do with addiction medicine," Glick says. "It's not very profitable, and it's bad public relations."

Though there are millions of people addicted to various substances in the U.S., many of them don't want, or can't afford, treatment. Worse, from a bottom-line standpoint, an ibogaine-based treatment drug would be used only once­a feeble investment for companies accustomed to cash-cow refillable prescriptions.

Which leaves people like Craig knocking on doors of unregulated ibogaine clinics in a desperate search for something that will help defeat their addictions.

"All these clinics popping up all over the world­it's become almost a cult-like phenomenon," Glick says. "All the hype and politics around ibogaine just make my job harder. It means the scientific establishment and regulatory agencies take a dim view."

But the ranks of the believers keep growing. Six months after his ibogaine treatment, Craig says he's staying clean and feeling great. "That stuff worked just like it was supposed to," he says. "It was so much better than the detox I tried. I don't understand why it's not legal."

*

Editor's note:

In this article, the name of the patient seeking ibogaine treatment in Tijuana has been changed to protect his privacy. However, the Los Angeles Times Magazine has verified his identity and the circumstances described in the article.

Another sign that Darwinian group selectionism is gathering steam as a major social meme. This is the same idea developed in Howard Bloom's _Global Brain_ and Robert Wright's _Nonzero_. Be prepared for a new wave of corporate sloganeering as this idea sinks in with global business elites.

"Don Norman, author of "The Design of Everyday Things," left

Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo. He claims that his most

significant asset is the list of 10,000 names in his PalmPilot.

Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the common good, Norman

puts people in touch with other people for everyone's mutual benefit.

The more Norman gives of his time and his contacts, the more business

flows back to him. The formula is not tit for tat. Rather, it's

another rule that the paranoid can hardly fathom: "What goes around

comes around." By putting people in contact with one another, Norman

helps new businesses begin, the pie gets bigger for everyone, and

sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new law -- not of diminishing

returns or of increasing returns, but of exponential returns."

http://pf.fastcompany.com/magazine/29/paranoia.html

It was the kind of situation in which a dog might have understandably
wanted to eat another dog. The month was January, the year was 1999,
and the crown princes and princesses of the largest companies in the
world had gathered for a little skiing, a little socializing, a little
polite conversation, and a little dabbling in the latest, most
provocative ideas -- something they do every year at the World
Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.

But this year, it was snowing like mad -- too much for skiing, too
depressing for socializing, and almost too cold for politeness. Hell
in this Swiss mountain town was beginning to take on a whiter shade of
pale. The meeting rooms started getting colder. Then the portions at
dinner started getting smaller. All of a sudden, the lights went out
all over town -- and you could almost feel the question being asked by
the rich, the privileged, the powerful: What happens now? Any
hypercompetitive, only-the-strong-survive, entrepreneurially minded
capitalist could be excused for hoarding food, defending prime
territory, and knocking off competitors. Or would he?

In this setting of surplus-turned-to-scarcity, Helena Cronin, 57,
philosopher, social scientist, and codirector of the Centre for
Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of
Economics, delivered her scheduled lecture on the survival of the
fittest: "Look carefully at nature, and you will find that it doesn't
always seem short, brutish, and savage," she told the cold, hungry
moguls. "Animals are strikingly unselfish, giving warnings of
predators, sharing food, grooming one another, adopting orphans,
fighting without killing -- or injuring -- their adversaries. In some
ways, they behave more like moral paragons of Aesop than the
hard-bitten, self-seeking individualists that natural selection seems
to favor."

The environment was decidedly cold, but Cronin warmed to her theme.
"It turns out," she told the assembled kill-or-be-killed crowd, "that
you can actually prosper more by entering into relationships of
reciprocation, so that you're both getting more than either of you
would have gotten separately."

The lecture was not what anyone expected. But in those dark moments of
the soul, Cronin offered a way of coping with shared adversity, a new
school of competitive thinking based on the notion of an unselfish
gene. Her ideas are a more challenging line of thought and a more
accurate reflection of how the world works than the view popularized
by Intel's Andy Grove that "only the paranoid survive."

Cronin's version of Darwinism shows that altruism and generosity
create more rewards than their opposites do. She introduced the CEOs
to the flip side of paranoia: "pronoia" -- the idea that everyone is
not out to get you, but that they are out to love you, or at least to
appreciate you, if you reciprocate. According to the new Darwinism,
only the pronoid survive -- in fact, only the pronoid endure and
flourish.

The really bizarre thing is that this belief comes from a bona fide
Darwinist -- and wasn't Darwin the top dog in the high court of Canine
v. Canine? Wasn't he the pseudoeconomist of choice in the
greed-is-good 1980s, offering justification for the decade of
financial reengineering? Wasn't Darwin the pseudosociologist of choice
in the Reagan years, providing a fig leaf of intellectual cover for
social policies that asserted that poverty was a sign of an
individual's unwillingness to evolve to some higher economic ground?

But that was then, and this is now. As we enter a new millennium, a
new generation of Darwinists, with Helena Cronin at the lead, is
turning those 1980s beliefs upside down. Today, Cronin is saying,
"Yes, but ..." What if being the fittest means having the most
generosity of spirit? What if enhancing your chance of survival comes
from improving your capacity to be altruistic?

Cronin has spent the past 20 years carefully rereading the work of
Charles Darwin, showing that most of what we believe about his
theories is wrong. "Darwin himself said that the war of nature 'is not
incessant' and that 'the happy survive and multiply,'" Cronin says.
Read Darwin's own fieldwork: He recorded dozens of examples of animals
engaged in self-sacrifice. Why, Cronin asks, did Darwin note countless
instances of an animal giving up its time, its food, its mate -- even
its life -- to help others? Because, Cronin answers, that kind of
behavior is smart evolution: It results in greater rewards.

Dusting off the lies from Darwin's principles can be the best thing
believers in the power of ideas can do. What we presume to be the
theory of survival of the fittest is probably the oldest story we tell
ourselves about success. We grow up believing that it's a jungle out
there. We learn that to survive, we must become "natural-born
killers." So Cronin's radical rethinking of Darwinism goes against the
grain and yet proves to be essential, especially now. At a moment when
most accepted wisdom is up for grabs -- when Karl Marx is dead,
Sigmund Freud is finished, and a "new physics" is looking very old --
only Darwin promises insight into our work and our future. But we need
to know the real Darwin. And the real Darwin says that the paranoid
may survive, but only the pronoid succeed.
The Gift Economy

"Doing what's immediately good for oneself has been understood by
Darwinists for a long time," Cronin says. "But what hasn't been
understood until recently is that you can actually do better for
yourself by being cooperative and altruistic than you can by selfishly
refusing to cooperate with others. It's not that you do as well. You
actually do better -- and all of you do better than if you had gone
off on your own and refused to help others."

At the conference in Davos, Cronin illustrated her point about the
power of altruism with an example of the new Darwinism: "In Britain,
blood is given free of charge. Donors are proud to be known as good,
altruistic people. There is never a shortage, and the quality of blood
is very high because the healthiest people give blood. In America,
it's the opposite. People are frequently paid to give blood, and so
you've got two big problems: The quality of blood is bad, because drug
addicts and the poor have an incentive to donate, and there tend to be
many shortages of blood.

"Two years ago, there was talk in Britain about selling blood to make
money for the new blood-donor service. Immediately, there was an
uproar. People didn't want to give blood, even though that money was
to go back into the blood-donor service. People felt it was no longer
a gift relationship.

"The number of people giving blood dropped dramatically in the weeks
following that decision. The currency changed. Therefore, the emotions
changed. When someone gives you money, you don't feel the same
emotions that you feel when someone demonstrates a kindness. We are
too quick to interpret everything as marginal that does not fit our
economic model," says Cronin. But the elements of the story of the
British blood bank and the essential factors of altruism are starting
to show up everywhere in the new economy.

The paranoid are having a hard time with this new rule: The more you
give away, the more you have. Yet America Online is about to give away
computers. The Linux operating system is readily available and free.
Meanwhile, eFax.com offers free faxing services. Also, a recent
meeting between two potential Internet partners, Inktomi Corp. and
venture capitalist CMGI, began by each throwing down the gauntlet --
of openness: In seeking grounds for cooperation, the two sides would
compete only to see who would do a better job of telling all. "The
deal is that we agree to tell each other everything; otherwise, there
is no meeting," is how one participant described the understanding
that prefaced the session. "We acknowledge that we can't create
something new by ourselves. In the past, people would be secretive.
You'd have to get drunk to open up and tell the truth."

Generosity, not greed, is a strategic good. Don Norman, author of "The
Design of Everyday Things," left Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo.
He claims that his most significant asset is the list of 10,000 names
in his PalmPilot. Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the
common good, Norman puts people in touch with other people for
everyone's mutual benefit. The more Norman gives of his time and his
contacts, the more business flows back to him. The formula is not tit
for tat. Rather, it's another rule that the paranoid can hardly
fathom: "What goes around comes around." By putting people in contact
with one another, Norman helps new businesses begin, the pie gets
bigger for everyone, and sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new
law -- not of diminishing returns or of increasing returns, but of
exponential returns.

This is the gift economy, where money is meaningless and gifts are the
new currency. The more a business or an individual worker gives away,
the more that everyone has. This is a vision of a new economic model,
a new evolutionary order that poet Lewis Hyde has captured in his 1983
underground classic, "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of
Property," in which he points out that these two very different
marketplaces -- gift and greed -- exist side by side, and increasingly
they converge.

What is the gift economy? It's based on tribal notions that a gift is
meant as currency, not property. A gift must be circulated; it must be
passed around. The old phrase of shame -- "Indian giver" --
paradoxically exemplifies the story behind the gift economy. When
Indians gave white settlers a gift, they expected one in return.
Instead of keeping gifts in circulation, the settlers would put their
peace pipes, which they had received from the Indians as gifts, on
their mantles. The Indians believed that gifts were meant to be kept
in circulation, so when they didn't get something in return, they
asked for their gifts back. This shocked the settlers and their
traditional notions of property. The whites faulted the Indians for
their bad manners, but to the Indians, it was just good economics.

If today's businesses were more immersed in the gift economy and less
steeped in the transaction culture, would we see more goods and
services like Linux? Cronin says that the minute you introduce money,
you turn off the altruism gene. It doesn't disappear from people's
character, it disappears from the transaction. And often -- as with
the British blood bank -- it impoverishes the transaction.

Altruism fundamentally changes economic and competitive equations:
Observers say that the biggest threat to Microsoft is not the U.S.
Department of Justice but the growing freeware movement. Under the new
rules of freeware, Linux rewards its network of elite programmers not
with pay but with prestige; the richest developer is not the greediest
but the one with the best reputation. In 1976, Bill Gates accused the
freeware movement of shoddiness. He wanted to know, "Who can afford to
do professional work for nothing?" But today, although its overall
market share is small, Linux presents an interesting competitive
scenario: Say, for instance, that China adopts Linux as its
countrywide operating system. "Then," says one observer, "whoever owns
China, will own the software business. Even software pirates prefer
not to steal but to take what's free."

Such changes are fresh and are still taking shape. And they challenge
the conventional wisdom of competition. They also make most
high-testosterone businessmen very uncomfortable. Nicholas Humphrey is
a Darwinist at the London School of Economics. Wherever he looks in
the culture of business, Humphrey sees the discomfort and
disorientation that generosity can cause. "An IBM spokesman came to my
child's nursery school several years ago," Humphrey says. "He said,
'We are not giving money to this school out of altruism. Every penny
has an intent of enlightened self-interest.' Somewhere this man was
told, 'Don't admit that anything you do is motivated by anything other
than self-interest.' He felt that he had to apologize on behalf of IBM
for giving the school a gift."

Management guru Peter Drucker offered the bottom line on a company's
purpose in the old economy: to make a profit. Today, even profits have
become a less-compelling way to keep score than intangible values,
such as share of mind, strength of relationships, or loyalty of
employees. These days, having a compelling story can be just as
important as having a compelling product. The bottom line is not a
single number, but more an emotion, a mind-set, a credible promise.
The transaction economy is changing into a gift economy. And in the
process, we're learning to reinterpret Darwin's fundamental lessons.
Darwin in Love

Flash back to 1831: Charles Darwin, 22, is the troublesome son of a
father who predicts that his boy will amount to nothing more than "a
rat catcher." He leaves his father's bruising opinions and goes
looking for something to do with his life.

He travels to the Galápagos Islands -- and he can hardly believe what
he sees. It looks like paradise. The finches have no fear of humans.
They land on Darwin as if he were a tree. They catch themselves in his
hat. The man who will become one of the greatest scientists of the
millennium is so bewitched by his surroundings that he succumbs to a
form of poetry: He claims to know what the rocks and animals are
thinking. He pulls the tail of one burrowing creature. "At this, it
was greatly astonished and shuffled up to see what was the matter,"
Darwin wrote, "and then stared me in the face, as much to say, 'What
made you pull my tail?' " Enchanted by the scenes, he called the
islets "a center of creation."

Flash ahead to the last days of the 20th century and the early days of
the digital economy. The Internet is a new locus of creation: Teeming
life. Spiraling evolution. Exotic species. Enchanted islands. It's the
perfect place for the unselfish gene to undergo a massive thrust in
evolution: a step change, an evolutionary twist in which nature is
redirected and behavior changes.

For years, scientists have recorded step changes in evolution. Before
the Industrial Revolution, for example, the predominant color of moths
was a light peppered form recorded in 1848, in Manchester, England, a
center for the new manufacturing economy. As factories grew, a
population of darker moths soon increased in frequency. By 1950, a
mere 100 years later, dark moths made up more than 90% of the moth
population. In the world of science, that's a sudden and dramatic
evolutionary change. The Darwinian change agent: birds hunting by
sight. Darker moths were better disguised on tree trunks covered by
the soot of the new factories, and thus, they were not so easily eaten
by birds.

Then, something truly bizarre happened: House cats got darker, too.
Not because birds preyed on them, but because the darker color
protected them from the increased radiation that resulted from the
pollution. The Darwinian lesson has less to do with survival of the
fittest and more to do with how change happens in nature: Once
evolution enters a step change, most everything gets caught up in its
influence. Eventually, the future shows up everywhere.

To Cronin and her colleagues, a similar evolutionary shift is now
taking place with the altruism gene. Altruism, which literally means
"concern for the other," has been recessive for most of history. The
new economy makes it recessive no longer.
Natural-Born Cooperators

Altruism has been hardwired into us; it's right there in the genes.
When economies become larger, richer, and more interdependent,
conditions that favor the unselfish genes increase -- similar to the
conditions that increased the numbers of dark moths and dark cats in
smoggy England.

"We have a propensity for altruism, for wanting to give, for hating to
renege, for forgiving, for feeling indignant," says Cronin. "These are
part of our machinery for altruism. If we set up an environment to
evoke what is most altruistic from us, then it isn't at all difficult
to evoke altruism and increase it, because altruism grows on altruism,
and reneging grows on reneging. We don't have to change human nature
to change society. The environment evokes from a given human nature
more or less cooperative behavior."

We are born altruists in two areas. The first is by kin selection. "
We are finely tuned to offer altruism to others who share the same
genes," Cronin says. "A mother is self-sacrificial to her children."
The other source is reciprocal altruism -- tit for tat at its most
crude level. "If you're playing over a long period, it's worthwhile to
keep cooperation going," says Cronin.

Darwin himself hated conflict. When Alfred Russel Wallace, a young
naturalist, wrote Darwin a year before Origin of Species was to be
published and outlined word for word what was apparently Darwin's own
idea, Darwin wrote to a colleague asking whether he should publish his
own work: "I would rather burn my whole book than he or any other man
should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit." His colleague
insisted that he publish his book. But a year before he did, Darwin
published a joint paper with Wallace.

Altruism breeds altruism, and reciprocal acts breed reciprocal acts.
"If we feel that other people are only out for themselves, one is wary
of being altruistic. If we feel other people are not giving, we say,
'I'm not going to be a sucker,' " says Cronin. "The more people
understand that we are evolved altruists, and the more people feel
that no one is taking advantage of another, the more we will become
altruistic, and the more we won't take advantage of one another."
Living by the Laws of the Unselfish Gene

Darwin had a great gift: curiosity. He saw nothing as ordinary. Helena
Cronin has the same gift. The big mystery about Darwin is how this
wealthy country boy, far from brilliant as a youth, became a genius.
Helena Cronin has a similar mystery about her.

When she began studying Darwin, the field was not fashionable. In
fact, Cronin has a background much like Darwin's: She was left out of
the mainstream for years, thinking she would study English literature.
She studied philosophy, but with no great passion. "I have three
degrees in philosophy, but I never really enjoyed it," she says. "I
never quite decided what I wanted to do when I grew up, but in the
meantime, I was studying philosophy." Throughout her career, she was
driven by others' direction. "Basically, I got a PhD because my
adviser thought I should. This is a typical woman's story."

It's one of Cronin's less-than-politically-correct Darwinian theories:
In a Darwinian world, women don't have the competitive direction of
men. "The problem with Darwinism is that it is a male-advantaged
science," she says. "Darwinists explain males as peacocks, strutting
and displaying their advantages. The men were killing elk or giraffe
while the women were catching rabbits. What is it to be the rabbit
catcher? The colorless creatures. What is it to own that? There's a
theory of the peacock, but where is the theory of the peahen?"

In the spring of 1963, Cronin was reading the philosophies of Karl
Popper in a library much like the great reading room of the British
Museum. "I still remember how the light was streaming in on the page,"
Cronin says. What struck her was the explanatory power of science.
>From there, it was a small step to getting hooked on Darwin. She was
drawn to Darwin at a time when philosophers were saying that Darwin
was bad science, and survival of the fittest was a tautology. On the
other hand, Cronin says, "It was the foundation of all biology. It
needed reexploring. I thought I would take a new look at evolutionary
theory." She wrote a book, "The Ant and the Peacock," chosen by the
New York Times as one of its top books of 1992. The subject: the
innate altruism of animals.

Is it possible to give in to the altruism gene in your career?
Darwin's own career is practically a study in submission to the
altruism gene. He never seemed to have any clear sense of ambition or
determination. His father, a wealthy, successful doctor, despaired for
his son's future. The younger Darwin, meanwhile, never ardently
pursued degrees or honors.

For her part, Cronin used her gender to her advantage -- that, "and
doing things in the decent, right way," she says. "If I were a man, I
would not have the luxury of being able to behave in noncompetitive
ways. Most men couldn't afford to do what I'm doing, because it
wouldn't affirm their careers, and it wouldn't show up well in a
competitive arena. I have the luxury of not needing to do that, partly
because I'm not driven the way they are. I've never had a career.
Things just happen to me." She has evolved, much as Darwin's own
discoveries had evolved. "I think of my career as a series of
contingencies. I see it as a fortuitous stumbling onto things that
were worthwhile, without seeking them out."

In 1995, Cronin enjoyed another fortuitous stumble, founding
"Darwin@LSE," an interdisciplinary program that has become the hottest
salon in England. It attracts writers like A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan,
scientists like Paul Davis, and others who gather to debate the truth
as Darwinists interpret it. Structurally, Darwin@LSE is a study in the
gift economy of altruism. "We were desperately underfunded," Cronin
says. "I wrote to the world's best scholars and asked them to appear
for free, not even offering to pay for expenses. Everyone I approached
found the money, rearranged their schedules, and appeared. People who
normally were paid thousands of dollars a lecture would say, 'I have
gone out of my way because it's a worthwhile cause, done with
commitment, integrity, and good feeling.'"

Cronin's approach shows the limits of competitive strategy for
building careers and institutions, along with the evolving
alternative: cooperative strategy. "If I had set out to start
Darwin@LSE, I don't know if it would have been such a success," she
says. "I set out to start a seminar with the best people and no money
at all. It turned out that the best people wanted to take part. How do
you plan something like that? Typically, you go out, get an
administrator, and raise money. But if I'd gone that route, I wonder
if people would have responded in the same way. Everything was done by
me, from securing hotel rooms to buying candles for dinner. Because of
that, I gathered lots of voluntary help, which I've still got. If I
had money to pay for everything, who would have volunteered?" It's the
story of the blood bank, applied to Cronin's own undertaking.

In fact, Cronin applies the same thinking to her own career choices:
what she thinks about and how she spends her time. "It would have been
better for my career if I had written another book," she says
candidly. "But it's been better for Darwin's theory for me to have
founded Darwin@LSE."
The Sobriety of the Gene

Management depends on changing people's behavior. In a Darwinian
worldview, however, people cannot change. "It is important to know
what is fundamental to us as evolved animals, so that we don't waste
our efforts trying to change what we cannot change," says Cronin.
"People can't be managed, but systems can be altered to take advantage
of the behavior that begins in our brains. When you know what you can
control versus what you cannot control, that allows you degrees of
freedom. You can't change human behavior, but you can change the
conditions in which you work and the policies that you create to
elicit a certain kind of human response."

It's a sobering thought, but whether you see it as imprisoning or as
liberating depends on your worldview. "My younger students get very
depressed studying Darwin," says Nigel Nicholson, a Darwinist at the
London Business School. "They think he robs them of their free will by
arguing that genes define behavior. But my older students love Darwin.
They are at the point in life where they see that control counts for
little, that there are larger forces determining who we are and how we
act."

How different would the world be if neo-Darwinism held sway? Here are
some of Cronin's insights about the intersection of human behavior,
business practices, and neo-Darwinism:

Forget romantic love. Darwinists believe that everything starts with
the force of the genes. Romantic love is just the desire of genes to
be passed down from one generation to the next. Females are attracted
to males who are able to secure family resources; males, meanwhile,
look for signs of female reproductive health -- which in humans is
best determined by a formula: waist size that is one-third of hip
size. The arts of all kinds -- poetry, music, theater -- are like the
peacock's tail: displays of virtuosity or of desirability that lead to
sex.

Psychology isn't sustaining. "Freudian theory makes no sense," Cronin
insists. "Why on Earth should you carry into your adulthood childhood
incidents that influence your behavior? There are no adaptive reasons
for this." On the other hand, there are very sound Darwinian
explanations that connect lessons learned in early childhood to
personal decisions made in adulthood. For example, a woman who was
brought up by a mother who had no male support might decide to have
children early in life, because she doesn't see herself as having a
long or comfortable reproductive future. But in Darwinism, such
behavior is adaptive, not neurotic.

Management goes bankrupt. You can't change behavior; it's hardwired.
You can only change structures or environments, which will make
recessive behavior more prominent.

Strategy is a badly flawed approach to problems. "The problem with
strategy," says Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics,
"is that you have to think first. In a fast-moving game, you want to
make the behavior seamless with the being, so that pause and thought
are not necessary."

The science of leadership looks false. Visions don't come from on
high. Change comes from the ground up, from genes and subtle shifts in
nature. But you can't alter these -- you can only respond, and respond
quickly.

And if new-economy businesspeople seek to adapt their behavior and
practices to the new Darwinism, what kinds of changes would then be
called for?

Understand how cooperation pays. The more cooperation there is, the
more it pays. Altruism, generosity, and loyalty are at the heart of
the famous prisoners' dilemma -- which is, itself, a test of which
version of Darwinism you choose to practice. It works like this: Put
two prisoners under an investigator's bright light. If each rats on
the other, both remain jailed. If neither rats, both stand a chance of
going free. "The more a tit-for-tat strategy is successful, the more
likely people will be able to reap the rewards of mutual cooperation,"
says Cronin. "Out of selfishness comes altruism."

Put renewed emphasis on policy. "The more we understand how altruism
evolves, the more we will be able to feed it into our policies,"
Cronin says. "And the more we will be able to understand things that
are either odd or downright paradoxical to the standard economic
models that make the world run very well. Simple things like
neighborliness or being trusting without paying guards to create a
sense of safety. The belief that financial rewards are what attracts
people is not only false, it destroys a lot of goodwill."

Show respect for marginal examples. "There have been some experiments
that don't fit the standard economists' models, and they are pushed
aside," Cronin says. "The more we seek to understand them, the more
they can be brought into the center, and the more we can run societies
based on them. And that will serve to induce more altruism in people.

"For example, a professor of economics in Zurich asked people whether
they would be prepared to have a nuclear-waste dump near their homes,
given that it was socially necessary. When it was thought to be a
public good and also safe, 50% said they would agree to have this dump
nearby. The professor then changed the conditions: People would be
paid money to have the dump near their homes. The percentage of people
who agreed then dropped to 25%. People agreed in the first scenario
because they felt the dump was for the public good. As soon as it
became a matter of money changing hands, having the dump nearby became
a different sort of act. People then believed, 'Well, maybe I'm not
getting enough for it.' With money, a whole new area of transaction
comes into play."

Don't romanticize competition. This may be Cronin's most compelling
argument -- and the hardest for traditional business players to
accept: Competition is not mortal or moral combat. In the animal
kingdom, it's simply an opportunity to show off. To make the point,
Cronin undertakes a little anthropological fieldwork.

In a prettified British pub -- one of those new pink-tablecloth joints
in Tony Blair's kinder, hipper Britain -- Cronin is talking about the
irrational, primal choices economic creatures consistently make. Her
voice is constantly drowned out. Upstairs, a party of shouting British
businessmen is celebrating some fresh triumph in the market-place.
They are mighty frisky, thumping tables, stamping on the floor,
yelling, laughing, toasting.

This, says Cronin, is how the successful typically compete: "They're
lekking. 'Lek' from the Swedish, meaning to sport or to mate," she
explains. "It means, to play. In the animal kingdom, once a year males
get together and lek. They strut around. During mating season, for
example, the grouse compete for certain areas. They have to go to
special clearings. The females come and look at them and choose a
mate. The definition of 'sad' is lekking that has no female viewers."

Understanding that most competition is a display feeds into the
argument for the ultimate triumph of altruism. Most people believe
that animals do only what they must to survive: eat, sleep, ward off
predators, and reproduce. But studying the peacock's tail, as Cronin
has done, reveals how animals favor looking good themselves. Cronin
invites a deeper consideration of the simple version of competition as
a battle for survival: When the race goes to the fastest, then how do
we explain peacocks' tails -- extravagant, over the top, grossly
inefficient adaptations?

"The peacock's tail is a wild extravaganza," says Cronin. "It's a
burden, unnecessarily bright and gaudy. The peacock could well be
better off without it, in a way that you couldn't say the cheetah
would be better off without its sprint or the wren without its
camouflage. How do we explain this wild extravaganza that takes a lot
of resources, doesn't produce anything, is heavy to tote around, and
marks the bird as a target for predators?"

Why has nature designed something so useless? As useless as being nice
to the other guy? As useless as sharing information? As useless as
committing your life to pursuing an idea whose outcome you can't
possibly know? Reputation, says Cronin, is a key element in
competition. "Once you understand that sexual selection is displaying
qualities like kindness or goodness, or is demonstrating that you can
afford to give things away, then you understand the close connection
between flamboyance and altruism. Altruism can be one of those evolved
peacock feathers in our minds."

Physicists don't believe that in 100 years there will still be
Einsteinian physicists. But in 100 years, biologists will still be
Darwinians. "Once you understand that we are evolved animals, then
everything has to be Darwinian," says Cronin. "That economics could
treat us as pure, rational 'choice entities' is sadly mistaken. We're
not; we're human beings." It's one of those rare instances in science
where the founder of an idea continues to affect everything we desire:
what we wish and what we don't wish. Darwin's radical finding is that
ours is a world of "man from monkeys." For neo-Darwinists, there's an
even more radical conclusion: It's also humans who make angels -- the
symbol of altruism.

Harriet Rubin (hrubin@aol.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor.
Her new book, "Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambition," will be
published this month by HarperCollins. Her Web site
(www.ivillage.com/thesoloist) also debuts this month. You can contact
Helena Cronin by email (cronin@lse.ac.uk).
Sidebar: How Altruistic Are You?

The characteristics of altruism are of greatest value in a
fast-changing environment, where people are frequently called on to
trust strangers, invest in new companies, or make deals with people
they have just met. To get a sense of your own evolutionary
trajectory, ask yourself the following questions:

How much do you value high risk?

Taking risks is a primary characteristic of altruists. For example,
altruists are apt to jump into a lake to save somebody they don't
know. Other ways that risk and altruism intersect include camaraderie
in battle -- that is, risking your life for someone who is not related
to you or for an idea in which you believe.

Are you concerned with your own view of your reputation?

How do you behave when there is no one around to judge? For example,
do you leave a tip in a town where you'll never be seen again? An
altruist would behave appropriately, so she could think of herself as
a person who does worthy and upright things.

How good are you at detecting when people are being kind for selfish
reasons and when they are being altruistic?

Noticing altruism in others is a trigger for reciprocity, and it
starts at the youngest ages: A very young baby can respond to a smile.
The skill in adulthood is discerning between a real smile and a fake
one.

Do you feel empathetic or sympathetic to others' situations?

There is a physical test for this: How much do you attempt to read
other people's minds to learn their concerns? Eye gaze is the defining
factor, says Helena Cronin. "You look toward someone else, and I
follow your eyes and look at someone else. A baby develops eye gaze
when he sees an adult stare away, and he follows that gaze. That baby
can put himself into someone else's life. It's part of our
psycho-logical machinery that natural selection has given us to be
able to be good reciprocators."

If you notice these altruistic tendencies in yourself, you may worry
that this type of behavior is dangerously unstrategic. Instead of
worrying about being too altruistic, pretend you are a gene, Cronin
suggests. Otherwise, economic behavior makes no sense. "Genes are the
strategists," she says. "It's no good for nature to build a perfect
bird if that bird won't sit on its nest and hatch its young. Behavior
is strategies adapted by genes as they pass down the generations --
including genes for altruism."

Altruism, says Cronin, is dangerous to the individual -- and good for
the species. We put ourselves in jeopardy to be altruistic, the same
way many animals will act as sentries for their tribes. To think of
ourselves as strategic, in Darwinian terms, is a mistake. Says Cronin:
"Essentially, humans have no strategy. It's an illusion to think of
ourselves as rational. We have animal brains in our bodies."
Sidebar: The Undiscovered Darwin

Business has made a mess out of Darwin's theories. For the most part,
business has built its understanding of competition and strategy on a
foundation of Darwinian misreadings. Here's the truth about some
commonly misunderstood Darwinian principles:

The struggle for existence.

One of the ways that Darwin used that expression was to refer to the
death of a plant that didn't get enough water. The struggle for
existence doesn't mean the lion biting into the lamb. Lots of
Victorian gentlemen perverted Darwinist theories to justify their own
predatory instincts.

The selfish gene.

Do you believe that natural selection is just about selfishness? Try
explaining it then: Think of yourself as a gene sitting in a body. You
give an alarm call. By so doing, you call attention to yourself, which
may alert the predator to your presence. At the same time, you will be
saving the kin group -- and saving copies of yourself -- in future
generations. Genes do self-sacrificial things regularly. Those that do
are often the best replicators -- that is, they are the ones that make
their way down through the generations.

Competition hurries progress.

This false notion suggests that you get better outcomes by eliminating
the weaker member of a group. That is supported by another Darwinian
misreading: Only the strong survive, and the outcome will be better if
you have people of first-rate strength. These assumptions have become
the foundation of growth, progress, and capitalism: stronger, better,
more. But they are not part of Darwinism. Darwin's insight was that
competition can lead to all sorts of new ecological niches. If
predators are devouring animals (like you) during the day, you might
become nocturnal. If predators are becoming stronger or larger, you
could become smaller, more mobile, or less visible.

Nice or nasty?

There is nothing vengeful or vindictive about Darwinian theory.
Invoking Darwin to justify cutthroat behaviors is wrong.