Lucas Kiely

It's time to go home when the ferris wheel breaks.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@DanielJHannan @CapelLofft Tories had 3 female prime ministers and potentially will have a 4th if the centre right parties stop stepping in each others' way. Quite impressive really

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

I think the main issue is that we see this organic material (single cellular organism) be the linchpin of an evolutionary journey that gets us to mankind, which just isn't a plausible reckoning. I always found the debates of Dawkins vs Gould interesting, but ultimately, someone must have lit the blue touch paper to start it all off. Humanity i think is the evolution of biological mutation and natural selection processes, I've never been a buyer of the bacteria to human journey though, although until its time to meet my maker, I'll not dismiss it either.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@JeffClarkUS Timelines of neurodevelopment processes and glucose metabolism changes from conception to adulthood
1Steiner P: Brain Fuel Utilization in the Developing Brain. Ann Nutr Metab2019; 75 (suppl1):8-18.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

Jeff, respectfully, the "mathematically impossible" line is Hoyle's tornado-in-a-junkyard. It only works if you model evolution as random one-shot assembly. It isn't.

Concrete worked example: human brain mass tripled from Australopithecus to modern Homo. The mechanism is well documented. Wrangham's cooking hypothesis. Fire gelatinises starch, denatures protein, kills pathogens → net energy per meal rises sharply. Fingerprints all over us: smaller teeth, weaker jaws, shorter gut vs chimps, AMY1 (salivary amylase) gene copies expanded 2 → 6-20 in humans.

The infant piece is the kicker: human babies run on ketone bodies, with KB uptake 4-5x faster than adults (Steiner, Ann Nutr Metab 2019). Cooked food + MCFA-rich breast milk fuel the brain through the weaning window. Shorter weaning + bigger brains, simultaneously.

That's what an evolutionary explanation looks like in detail. Specific mechanism, genomic evidence, comparative anatomy, biochemistry. All converging. One can hold religious belief and accept this (Francis Collins ran the Human Genome Project as an evangelical Christian), but the specific objections in your post don't land.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

The comparison is not that Augustine and American liberal academia did the same thing morally, but that they performed the same cultural operation structurally. Augustine received pagan antiquity through the double logic of spolia Aegyptiorum and excision: what could be subordinated to Christian truth was kept; what could not was rejected. American liberalism performed the same operation on Foucault. It retained suspicion, power/knowledge and the critique of institutions, but excised Foucault’s austerity, tragedy and anti-bureaucratic severity. It then reattached his vocabulary to a new moral centre: empathy. The result is not Foucault restored, but Foucault baptised into victimhood, harm and bureaucratic penance.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@brivael What Augustine did to antiquity, American academia did to Foucault: it kept what could be remade and excised what could not. Augustine baptised the pagan hero into martyrdom, sainthood and Christian virtue. American liberalism repurposed Foucault into identity, harm, privilege and institutional morality. In both cases, the source survives only after conversion.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

Marinovic gets the ratios right; the structural argument behind them runs deeper than canon-preservation.

The Western tradition has always renewed itself through paired acts of spoliatio and excision, the spolia Aegyptiorum, Augustine's image at De Doctrina Christiana II.40.60 for the gold and silver vessels the Israelites carried out of Egypt and reused in the tabernacle.

Pagan inheritance, on this principle, is gold to be reclaimed and remelted for Christian use; what resists remelting must be excluded. Augustine performs both moves in the same work. In De Civitate Dei he absorbs the Erythraean Sibyl as a witness to Christ (XVIII.23) and refuses the word heros (X.21), the verdict in X.21 placed at the structural hinge of a twenty-two-book project, after ten books of sustained engagement with the inheritance he is pruning. The Sibyl is a conduit whose source can be reframed from Apollo to the God of the Platonists; the hero is a station whose cosmological position cannot. Both decisions are principled because Augustine had mastered what he was repurposing and what he was excising.

Two later moments show what happens when the operation breaks down.

After the Norman Conquest, the institutional carriers of Old English literary theology broke. The Anglo-Saxon synthesis: Christ as geong hæleð in The Dream of the Rood, and the apostles as hæleð in Andreas was not refuted but starved. By Layamon's Brut around 1200, hæleð could mean either "brave warrior" or "basest of men" depending on context; the heroic charge had thinned to a metrical convenience. The chivalric knight stepped into the empty space the hero had once occupied, but he could not carry the weight; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the literary record of that inadequacy.

Three centuries later, the Tudor humanists could re-coin hero in English (Douglas 1522, Marshall 1534, Eden 1555), a delayed spoliatio of the Greek word, now processed through a millennium of doctrinal pressure, only because they had been schooled in the Latin and Greek tradition the medieval English had lost. Recoinage worked because the iceberg of classical learning was still there to draw on. Eden could write "thofe goddes made of men, whom the antiquitie cauled Heroes" because the antiquity was still in him.

Marinovic's complaint reads more sharply through this lens. An 11:1 ratio of contemporary identity-work to canonical philosophy is neither spoliatio nor principled excision. No sustained engagement justifies what is being kept and what discarded; no humanist iceberg is being presumed in the students such that future recoinage might be possible. It is closer to a third pattern: rupture-as-attrition. The texts are not being argued against. They are being declined to be assigned.

The worry, then, is less which books appear on this term's syllabus than whether the students reading it will have the inheritance to perform the next recoinage when their generation needs to. Eden's gloss only worked because his readers shared his iceberg. The COLLEGE syllabus, on Marinovic's description, is not preparing students to write that word back-in.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@SohrabAhmari The target is real, but the genealogy is crude. Guédon saw it in 1977: Foucault reached Anglo-America “out of context.” Discipline and Punish gives power/knowledge; Madness and Civilization an archaeology of silence. HR-style moral bureaucracy is vulgarised Foucault.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@AstroMikeMerri @athenaeumbc @grok In my day, despite being EE offer, it was still referred to as an unconditional offer, despite having peppercorn conditions

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@AstroMikeMerri @athenaeumbc @grok Splitting hairs there. 3 A-Levels, get EE. Mine was the same

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

The Oxford entrance papers to get unconditional offers were abandoned in the mid-to-late 90s. The rationale was that they bestowed an unfair advantage on privately educated applicants who were able to prepare better for those exams. They were traditionally sat at the beginning of the final year at high school.

A good grade in those exams meant an offer for a place at Oxford was awarded on an unconditional basis. They really tested how much an applicant had read outside of their high school curriculum in the subjects they chose to present for examination.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

Worth noting that in the ancient tradition, Achilles spent his adolescence disguised as one of King Lycomedes’ daughters on Skyros, fathered a child while in disguise, and was discovered only when Odysseus left weapons as a trap. Statius’s Achilleid book 1 is the fullest treatment (90s AD), also in Apollodorus, Hyginus, Ovid Met. 13, and going back to the Cypria in the 7th c. BC.

Just some context for everyone screaming at the rooftops of the casting

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@morgan_defi @Galois_Capital It Dumas

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@BasedMikeLee @mrddmia @grok wasn’t this rhetoric and othering similar to the underpinnings of the Rwandan genocide?

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@HuwsPari @jfoster2019 @WillKingston @zatzi @UKLabour @Conservatives Bring their voice to the debate, have an opinion that isn’t driven by partisanship.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@HuwsPari @jfoster2019 @WillKingston @zatzi @UKLabour @Conservatives They represent legacy and independence. I don't think they should be allowed to vote, but they definitely have a place in the Lords.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@RealEmirHan

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@ATRightMovies Lot of votes for The Champ (1979). I saw this movie on a flight to the US in the very early 80s, and the whole plane was crying by the end.

This was when movies were projected on to a screen at the bulkhead, so everyone had to watch the same movie.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@ATRightMovies Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.

[Lucas Kiely @LAlexK]

@AjitPai @pmarca Amazing. I remember switching from Mosaic to Netscape 1.0. I also remember the export issues with SSL where overseas users could only have 64bit SSL encryption