User:Jimbauer 01

Hard science fiction, fantasy, and surreal author James H. Bauer, who publishes under the pen names W.C. Leadbeater, Phineas Altenzauber, and Sophie Rosencruetz as well as under his own name was one of evolutionary biologist and philosopher of science William C. Wimsatt's students, who has extended Wimsatt's work on philosophy of consciousness (the cognitive-adaptive identity hypothesis) into a generalized pantheism akin to Haeckel's monistic religion (cf. Robert J. Richards' Romantic Evolution) and also explained polyandry by relating it to inclusive fitness: altruism is merely selfishness on a group scale, a higher level of organization. (Cf. both E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology and Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial) -- all nature is like a set of Chinese boxes, a hierarchy (the foundation of Wimsatt's holism) and, as Simon put it, "In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist can be a pragmatic holist". [need reference.] Thus a holistic effect, altruism, is merely a reduction to selfishness at the level of the group.

Now consider that, in mating with numerous males, a female is exerting a selection process: by choosing adaptive traits she is ensuring that they will be inherited. This is akin to inclusive fitness. [need reference]. Inclusive fitness is the tendency of shared genes to cause group selection effects, in this case, shared selection. It is a weak force: if polygyny is super-domance, monogamy is dominance and polyandry is comparable to a recessive gene -- perhaps it is a more true example of what Dawkins would call a meme [need reference] than a cultural or psychological entity.

An idea comparable to the meme is the "logos". An allusion to the Gospel of John, a work of Barbelo gnosis that somehow wound up in the New Testament [Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, need page number], "In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was God and the Logos was with God". The term is Greek for "word". A logos can be thought of as a meme at the verbal level of organization. As memes -- which Wimsatt believes spread like the colonization of islands and not viruses -- are "gene analogs" [Dawkins, need reference], these newly-postulated entitites are "word-analogs". The genetic code is the example par excellence, as it is a linguistic organism. However, memes and genes do not reduce to each other, as entities cannot be analogies of themselves. In this respect, the logos is a holistic reinterpetation of the meme.

And selection in polyandry is logoistic, or even at levels of linguistic organization beyond the logos due to its upper-level nature.

Mr. Bauer has also put forth a theory that brain organization requires random-number generators, the same way all computational systems do, and that psychedelic drugs simply trigger these systems. The natural tendency of evolution is toward the binary, as witness the evolution of technology (the CD player, the DVD, the Blu-ray) which is comparable to the evolution of the genetic code. The evolution of the human brain frequently exceeds binary processing and continues on to ternary, quaternary, pentary, which is due to teleology [Aristotle, Metaphysics, need reference], but the overall tendency of evolution is to achieve complexity only through the repeated building up and tearing down of systems, so that in this case the tendency of complex random number generators -- the imagination -- always has a tendency to collapse into dualism. This is perhaps a better explanation of lateralization in the bran than funtional localizational claims made for speech centers and "art centers" -- this claim is supported in part by Jill Bolte-Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight, in which she recounts her recovery of speech following a left-hemisphere stroke that damaged Broca's area. Ms. Bolte-Taylor explains this as being due to "auxilary speech centers" in the right hemisphere, which is consistent with Wimsatt's philosophy that the brain, like any irreparable system, is built with numerous failsafes and backups. It should be noted that after her stroke Ms. Bolte-Taylor's guitar playing improved.

Mr. Bauer studied fantasy with Michael Murrin, the Gothic (and creative writing) with William Veeder, and had Frank Cushman as a Thesis reader, who compared his poetic descriptions of an alchemical universe to Yates' poetry. Since graduating from the University of Chicago and moving away from Muhammad Ali's mansion, where he was the Champ's next door neighbor for three months and had the privilege to meet Emmanuel Farrakhan on his way to the A&P, Mr. Bauer fell on hard times due to mental illness but has recently recovered due to a combination of advanced neuraleptics and medical marijuana. He is currently eking out a living as a self-employed artist, having been instructed by Vera Klement, but is using the marijuana to control glaucoma, which is a dominant gene that has blinded other members of his family.