.... while post-1945 postmodernity seeks to preserve the human gene pool.
The elderly Congressmen of 1946 (who had been teenagers in the 1880s) who thought that there could only be one "atomic secret" and that America had it - that was quintessentially Modern.
Similarly the fact that middle aged voters today (who were teenagers in the 1980s) show a wide tolerance for racial, sexual, physical and cultural variety is quintessentially Postmodern.
Modernity thought it could easily find "the answer" for every possible question - one answer only (the correct and "normal" answer) ---- statically true for all times and all places and all circumstances.
A world without shades : black and white ; correct and incorrect answers with nothing in between , nothing correct here but not there , correct then but not now.
Answers like black warps threads, untouched by the grey weft threads of "maybe" and "sometimes" and "we can't know for sure" .
Postmodernity has restored the weft of variety to the reduced - warped - thought pool of modernity.
While Doctors Adorno and Dobzhansky at wartime Columbia University talked a bold postmodernist talk but did not act upon it, Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not talk postmodern talk.
He simply put postmodern talk into action.
He acted upon the insights he gained during his research into the wide diversity of survival strategies in avirulent (aka not "normal") commensal bacteria.
He then gave what was left of his life to preserving some of the similar diversity in the human gene pool (ie his SBE patients) that the NAS scientific elite thought was Life Unworthy of Wartime Penicillin.
His was the first postmodern action ...
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