[Fis] Fwd: What is Art?

[Mark Johnson]

Yes! Thank you Joe!

On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 08:33, <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:

> Dear John,
>
> We have not talked to each other recently, but I follow your work with
> interest and wanted to applaud the last three lines of your 19.1 note: ... "the
> 'logic' of the Cosmos. Symbiogenesis is the mechanism by which life has
> acquired the logic of the Cosmos. In other words there is a continuum from
> the foundations of the Cosmos to life that is expressed in art."
>
> The image it evoked was that of my sculptor father, Michael Brenner,
> making a bust of me at age 10 in his studio in New York. He danced around
> his easel in a frenzy *(frénésie) *, chopping away at the emerging marble
> head, sweating and grunting. Art comes more easily to many, but I suggest
> that its becoming is always partly unconscious, an expression of the
> energetic foundations of existence.
>
> Cheers,
> Joe
>
> ------but ---- Message d'origine ----------
> De : JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu>
> À : fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Date : 17.01.2026 22:58 CET
> Sujet : [Fis] What is Art?
>
>
> Dear FIS, I am of the opinion that art is an expression of consciousness,
> raising the question Art as to what consciousness is? I fell down this
> 'rabbit hole' twenty years ago, having performed a series of experiments to
> understand how and why Parathyroid Hormone-related Protein (PTHrP) is
> necessary for the formation of alveoli in the lung (Rubin LP, Kovacs CS,
> De Paepe ME, Tsai SW, Torday JS, Kronenberg HM. Arrested pulmonary alveolar
> cytodifferentiation and defective surfactant synthesis in mice missing the
> gene for parathyroid hormone-related protein. Dev Dyn. 2004
> Jun;230(2):278-89)? The duplication of the PTHrP Receptor gene during the
> water-land transition amplified all of the vertebrate physiologic
> adaptations to land- lungs, kidneys, skeleton, skin- and since PTHrP is a
> stretch-sensitive gene, I tested the hypothesis that PTHrP mediated the
> vertebrate adaptation to the force of gravity. If cells are exposed to zero
> gravity they lose their differentiated phenotypes (i.e. they devolve), and
> when yeast are exposed to zero gravity they cannot conduct a calcium flux,
> meaning that they are unconscious. Moreover, human consciousness has been
> driven by bipedalism (Torday JS. A central theory of biology. Med
> Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), freeing our forelimbs for tool making,
> including language as a tool, and locomotion. Importantly, both language
> and locomotion are under control by the FoxP2 gene, so that positive
> selection pressure for FoxP2 would have coordinately stimulated language
> and locomotion, expressed through our hands and minds as art of all kinds-
> literature, painting, sculpture, music- in other words, art is a
> manifestation of our need to communicate with our environment and with
> other humans.
>
> Furthermore, all of the above is due to the evolution of homeostatic
> control of energy due to Symbiogenesis (Sagan, 1967), or the assimilation
> of factors in the environment that threaten homeostasis, including the
> elements in the Cosmos, the latter being an exaptation (Gould and Vrba,
> 1982) of Stellar Nucleosynthesis (Hoyle, 1946), or the serial chemical
> reaction of hydrogen and helium to form the stars, the elements being their
> byproducts in the exact order of their atomic masses as thec
> Your comments and criticisms are welcomed.
>
> Best, John
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
University of Manchester

Department of Science Education
University of Copenhagen

Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
University of Liverpool
Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Sy7jan0S4s1YFJpHuN4D-sV3gAfrxhhzBQF7S5MiBU45idZ4yPypxUsX1z9vO1PzMfnDub5JA9QC0iwpcgYHY1M$ 
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