Dawson vs Florey : Plentifier vs Plenticidalist : postmodernity vs modernity

Modernity hated ambiguity and mystery : there always had to be only one correct "clearcut" answer --- not a diversity or variety of maybes, sometimes and sort-ofs.

A clearcut binary division between the right answer or the wrong answer, the right method or the wrong method, the normal individual and family or the deviant individual and family.

Not unexpectedly then, Modernity also wanted a small, clean, clear, pure, gene pool.

And Modernity's eugenic-dominated Science was glad to help.

The 'Law of Everything' meets the pesticide for everything

Science was busy at work in those days (still is, you say ?) distilling down all our knowledge of the non-living world into a single sheeted exam answer to be kept locked away in Leslie Groves' safe in Washington DC: the Law of Everything.

'No Prob' to also distill all our existing living variety down into a small pure gene pool --- one small pool for humans and non-humans like.

Via pesticides like prussic acid, that liquid so much loved by Agatha Christie villains, California fruit growers and .... Himmler's killers at Auschwitz.

So Dr Howard Florey MD let his obsessive years of searching for penicillin's elusive chemical purity blind him to the WWII wounded dying untreated all around him.

I think one could have foresee his behavior - based solely on his lifelong love for the term "clearcut", his particular dislike for dealing with medical patients as people and his general dislike for all Jews, Italians and "Blacks" among others.

He was , therefore , the very model of a modern Modernist ,  - to the "above-the-fray" WWII Swedes anyway - as his 1945 Nobel Prize for penicillin perhaps indicates.

Plentifiers take on the Plenticidalists

But a (very) few people at the very Apogee of Modernity aka WWII dared to opposed this belief that when it came to gene pool sizes, for once "smaller was better".

A few biologists such as Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ  and Dr Martin Henry Dawson opposed such a massive and man-made reduction of the gene pool.

Taking their cue from one of the many Charles Darwins, they emphasized that rapid and endless Evolution was vital in an rapidly changing  and anything but static world.

This being so, the wider the pool of genes that natural selection had to work on, the better and faster Evolution worked.

They promoted a new variant of the old religious ( but not scientifically accurate) concept of plentitude ; call it ( I do !) neo-plenitude or the new plentitude.

So they were - to use a term made popular by Teilhard de Chardin - plentifiers.

Opposing them, Florey and the majority of educated humanity in the heyday of Modernity, I call (contrastingly) plenticidalists ( killers of plentitude.)

Why waste, says I , weeks and weeks of time and acres and acres of trees trying to contrast today's postmodernity with granddad's modernity ?

Borrow a page from modernity's love of simple-minded absolute binary divisions , ones like roundheads vs cavaliers , and say the divide comes down to their contrasting attitudes to plentitude in all non-living and living things and concepts.

Yesterday's plenticidalists vs today's plentifiers .....