Book
Review
Biological
Time
by
Bernie Taylor, Ea
Press,
2004 -- more at www.TheEaPress.com
--
available by
phone at 1-800-431-1579 or you can click to e-order
through Barnes & Noble...
Reviewed by John Townley
For
decades, mainstream
scientists have been dancing around the edge of astrology, mainly
because to be
tarred with the brush of “pseudoscience” has meant
risking
financial and
professional destruction, thanks to the enormous prejudice against the
subject
among their peers. Still, in a variety of areas – from
biology,
to archaeology,
to anthropology – researchers have been stumbling wholesale
into
correlations
between solar and lunar positions in all sorts of documented events and
behaviors. Whether it’s been lunar phases carved on pieces of
prehistoric bone
or fish populations ebbing and swelling with the moon, each alone has
been
suggestive of geocosmic connections, but no unifying physical link has
been
proposed.
Well,
wait no longer. In an intensely concentrated work,
Northwest Coast naturalist Bernie Taylor has gathered up an
astonishingly
diverse array of disparate research and out of it forged a unifying
theory of
the effect of solar and lunar light rhythms on every level of animal
and plant
behavior, from microbes to agrarian and hunting cultures. Nearly half
the
book’s 200 pages is comprised of notes, documentation, and
appendices, which
makes its carefully-formulated conclusions especially formidable.
Mr.
Taylor’s
background is in marine biology studies (the
world of the Northwest fisheries is a world unto itself), and his
original
observations of fish migrations and the historically precise (and
unexplained)
knowledge of local Amerindians as to the exact, varying day the fish
appear
each year led him to explore connections between solar and lunar light
cycles
across human history and in multiple scientific disciplines. The result
is his
proposal of a universal, physical connection between the sun, moon, and
all
biological timing.
It’s
simple enough to be both obvious and elegant. The
only way any form of life knows what time it is – and thus
whether to mate,
migrate, feed or avoid being fed on – is by the varying light
of
the sun and
moon. Through their daily, monthly, and yearly cycles these lights set
and
maintain the inner biological clocks that regulate the entire
ecosystem, from
microscopic growth right up to the human economy. Everything devolves
from
there, everything. That’s a philosophical premise which has
often
been made
down through history, but the gathering mass of life and life system
studies
over the last thirty years is finally sufficient to actually document
it, and
Mr. Taylor has done a laconic, yet thorough job of putting the proof to
the
pudding. His construction of the argument is a wonderful, convincing,
and
approachable read. In a nutshell, the cycles of day and night, summer
and
winter, and monthly light and dark nights entrain every organism, and
each set
of interacting organisms refine each other’s behavior as they
interact, with
the sun and moon always at the top, the calibrating mechanisms of the
countless
biological clocks working in tandem below.
The
sun and moon’s light rhythms have been determining the
timing of all life since the beginning, but when humans finally
developed
language and record-keeping, they not only noticed the obvious but set
about
putting it down so they could predict it all ahead of time and put food
on the
table. Once you knew when and where the food animals would turn up,
when the
seeds would germinate (or wouldn’t), and many of the other
timing
secrets of
the fundamental food chain, you had it all. Those inspired few who
became
really
good at it tracking it became the first shaman/priests, and then
later
the astronomer/astrologers -- and political leaders found good reason
both to
employ them and to keep their activities under wraps, and thus under
control.
This all began with the early cave men (literally, those who painted on
the
cave walls at Lascaux) and culminated with the great empires of Egypt,
Rome,
India, China, and MesoAmerica. All partook equally of varied levels of
understanding of the predictable (though often extremely complex)
light-driven
biological universe of which humankind was a part.
How
did we so lose touch with all this that we are only
now just coming around to it again? Mr. Taylor only
speculates,
suggesting that the rise of new religions had a hand in it, and the
likes of
Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo separated out astronomical happenings
from
their biological repercussions. He even suggests Aristotelian and
Ptolemaic
man-centered philosophies pointed us away from our understanding of
true
biological systems integration.
Here
we would beg to differ. The tipping point (a popular
phrase these days) may well have been the work of 17th-century
Dutch
scientist Christian Huygens, discoverer of physical entrainment and the
inventor of the pendulum clock, which took the measurement of time away
from
dependence on the celestial and straight into the hands of the
experimental
scientist. The advantages of this localized, godlike power were
immediate, and
the spiraling effects of working within artificially constructed and
contained
systems (the laboratory) became the birth of
“modern”
science and caused the temporary
eclipse of the older, larger view. Only now are we coming to realize
that both
go hand in hand.
For
those who study and practice astrology, this book is a
big step toward integration with the scientific community, for which we
all
should offer praise and thanks to Mr. Taylor. It’s been a
long
time in the making.
Is
there more to come? A lot, certainly enough for a
follow-up volume for a start. This book clearly suggests another step
in the
integration of the moon and sun with biological timing and that is
gravitational: the tides. Although light is a primary driver, in times
when it
is suppressed – as in major periods of volcanism or the
occasional asteroid
impact – internal clocks still reset and life goes on, albeit
with difficulty and change. Tidal
boundaries are
increasingly recognized as major drivers of evolution, and there is
all kinds
of ready evidence in studies waiting to be analyzed together to further
and
broaden the theories suggested here. We hope Mr. Taylor is
primed for
the task.
And
along the lines of systems entrainment and
mode-locking, there is a final consideration to include the rest of
ancient
astrology: the cycles of the planets. If the sun and moon are the major
movers
of the most elemental activities, surely there are fine-tuners that
subtly
affect the world’s goings on down to the level of information
itself. If the
other planets are strong enough to perturb the earth’s orbit
--
and
each other’s -- their effects surely step down
along the
entrainment chain
as
well. The Babylonians noticed it enough to buy grain futures based on
Mars
conjunctions, so why not us? It was Diogenes who commented that
everything
reduces to air (the element), which in astrological terms means
information. In
modern times, another naturalist/biologist, Paul Kammerer, was the
first to
re-notice that part of the equation. For the rest of us, it’s
the
next in line…
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