Ep. 793 SOS Special | Everybody Needs A Bit Of Scienza

This episode is brought to you by the Italy International Academy, the toughest Italian wine program. One thousand candidates have produced two hundred and sixty two Italian wine ambassadors to date. Next courses in Hong Kong Russia, New York, and verona. Thank you, make the cut. Apply now at viniti international dot com. Welcome to our special SOS, everybody needs a bit of Shanza installment. This is a shout out to all the wine geeks out there. We need some feedback on the professor's new book, the English version of jumbo shrimp guide to the origins evolution future of the grapevine. The Italian wine podcast is part of the mama jumbo shrimp brand, and mama jumbo shrimp is all about breaking down difficult concepts into small bite sized pieces. The issue here is that the new book is while a bit difficult to chew at this point. So we want to invite wine lovers out there to give us their input and advice to make the final product more reader friendly. So have at it wine lovers. Don't be shy. Send your comments to info at italian wine podcast dot com. Now on to the show. Hello, everybody. My name's Stevie Kim. This is Italian wine podcast, and of course, this is a special Let's say, Puntata, special series for everybody needs a bit of, without actually, professor, shenza. Instead, we have Richard. Hoth. Hoth. A pale imitation. Yes. Although you you are starting to sound like him. So the whole point was I don't know if you missed our last episode, but we are introducing this new book, Professor, Shansa has written in his usual How would how would we say it in the usual, very geeky, fine, genitist way, and we are trying to translate his Expert, I think, is what you are looking for. Okay. Yes. Expertise in that area, but he sometimes cannot let's say, make it relatable to just normal people like us. So Richard has been doing a great job. He's translated the book, and now we are reaching out to the community for any suggestions, comments that you may have so that we can make this book a little bit better and more readable in a way. So today, you will finally be reading an excerpt. What do you have for us? Yeah. But today, I'm just going to read the first section of the of the book of the translation, which is the the introduction Okay. Take it away, Richard. Okay. For our ancestors, understanding the natural world and harnessing its truth was limited by the force of nature's vast and impassive permanence. Now in modern times, nature once again falls under our gaze, the subject of human interference. Historically, the study of nature has tended to be either religious in scope, nature seen as an expression of divinity or rational in which natural phenomena are explained by reason. Our understanding of nature goes back to the ancient Greeks who based their cosmologies on the distinction between Pfizer and logos reason. It finally came to fruition with the scientific and philosophical naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand in ancient Greek and Latin culture, the grapevine was represented in the form of the Saturn Ampalos, on the other, the wild vine. In considering the origins of wine, it is necessary to take a philosophical approach allowing us to question the standard ontology and classification of the wine with the aim of deconstructing the classic dichotomy between Asian and American vines, viewing the traditional methods of description and identification alongside newer cultural and molecular systems of evaluation. While nature is singular, there are many cultures. We must go back to the principles of naturalism, a cultural movement that began with Galileo and Newton and which start discartees continued. It was an unprecedented phase in the development of scientific thought even though the underlying vision that accompanied it led to an excessive simplification of the classification of beings and things. This eventually led to a crisis in the distinction between nature and culture between wild and cultivated vines between Agar field and Silva forest, which in reality should not be so clearly separated. In biological science, progress is the result not so much of individual discoveries but of the constant development of new concepts and the acceptance of new theories in short, science needs to constantly change its mind to evolve. Okay. So that was about four minutes. And what part of the book What's that coming from? That is from the introduction. So the the opening passages of the book before he really gets into the the substance of the science and history of the Grapevine. But as you heard from that passage, plenty of references to to ancient mythology, and, hints about what's to come in the sense of naturalism and biological science. Okay. So, Richard, let's let's have another read. Have you got another bit? Yeah. Okay. So this this is chapter two which is called the classification of species and fake science. The eighteenth century was a groundbreaking period for our understanding of the field of natural sciences, Bifon, in relation to animals, and the Nios for plants established some of the fundamental categories for classifying the diversity of living organisms known at the time and created a nomenclature capable of identifying and categorizing all animal and plant species. The history of taxonomy, the science of biological classification is an extraordinary journey into the diversity of life. It's a journey full of discoveries and twists, which fed the nineteenth century's understanding of the human race. It also spawned some of the era's most abhorrent ideologies. The notion of superior and inferior races emerged in this period with the publication of an essay on the inequality of human races. This study created a topology based on largely subjective criteria such as beauty of farm, physical strength, and intelligence, criteria that would subsequently be used by the Nazis to distinguish between Jews and the aryans The English statistician Francis Galton inspired by the work of his cousin Charles Darwin invented the term Eugenics. He applied at a social level the belief that natural selection ensures the diversity of species and the survival of the most suitable individuals starting from the selection of the most desirable human qualities and the elimination of the least desirable. In the nineteen thirtieth, Eugene Fisher, a member of Hitler's magic circle obtained funds to conduct experiments on the children of mixed race. His ideas underpinned the concept of the pure alien race led to enforce sterilizations and the prohibition of racial interbreeding and culminated in the anti Semitic and racist laws of nineteen thirty five, which prohibited marriages between Jews and those of pure German blood. The pseudoscientific drift of social Darwinism and eugenics also included the policy of the elimination of less desirables who are identified in concentration camps through blood and tissue sampling and cranial measurements. Fisher invented a pseudo scientific scale to determine the racial origin of his detainees based on the color of their hair. The purest were those who had blonde hair. The most impure had black hair or shades of red. There are few supporters of such theories today, at least in the scientific community because human genetic studies have shown that the concept of race based on apparent biological differences is meaningless. In nineteen seventy six, Luigi sports challenged the meaning of race, replacing it with the term population or ethnic group. He argued that while the concept of race has a certain cultural significance, it has no biological basis. The main characteristics that allow us to assign an individual to a particular race are skin color hair and body shape, particularly the features of the face. However, the characteristics typical of a certain race are products of genetic adaptation to the environment in which most of the lifespan of that population has existed over tens of thousands of years. Among these environmental conditions, the most important is climate. Furthermore, races are by no means homogeneous. In fact, there is an enormous variation between individuals. In reality, races are populations. One hundred or one thousand times smaller than what we commonly term to be a race. These populations are made up of the descendants of individuals who lived hundreds and thousands of years ago with occasional genetic mutations accompanied by certain specific defects. A similar analysis to this can be formed on the genus fetus, the grapevine. Okay. Excellent. So that was a little bit of like a taste of what the this book new book is about of about racism in in wine, in wine grapes, in vine genetics, if you will. We're still looking for a title. If you if you folks have any ideas, please send them our way. Ping us and let us know. So that is all for today. Again, I'm with Richard Hof. Is that correct? If I say two hundred times, maybe I'll get that right. Okay. He is the translator and the editor for this new book that we are doing with Professor Artilio Shainza. And we have kind of come to an impasse and we were talking amongst us and saying, why don't we approach the community and see what they have to say? How how much of interest there is for this type of a book? And more importantly, the, I guess, the language, the style of the book, if it is comprehensible so that it can be embraced by the community. So please reach out to us, reach out to Richard. Richard, what is your email? Good question. It's Richard Hoffman at just to The work. To work. Okay. So anyways, we'll put it on the, on the bio, so that you can have that. Again, so this is all for today with Richard Hoff, the translator and editor for Professor Shenza's new book coming up soon, and we are looking for any comments or suggestions. Do you have any ask from our audience in general? Anything specific? No. I I don't think so. Just, I mean, general response to to what they've heard and, you know, whether whether it's something that is going to be of of interest to them. And if it's comprehensible. If it's comprehensible, yeah, that that's probably the the most important question. Do they do they understand? They can they do they get a sense or an idea of where this book is going? Right. So we're looking for help. There you go. We we've said it. We're very transparent about this. So I'm going to sign up. Richard will be reading some more excerpts from the book. It's Anteprima, if you will. So keep tuned and follow us and don't forget to subscribe to Italian wine podcast wherever you get your pods but also mama jumbo shrimp which is the new YouTube channel and as well as TikTok and Pinterest. So So follow us. This is a labor of love as I always say, and we appreciate all of your support. We went from twenty three thousand listens in two thousand seventeen to more than a million lost during January we had two hundred thousand just on SoundCloud. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Until next time. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcast spotify, email ifm, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time. Chichi. Hi, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. We are the only wine podcast that has been doing a daily show since the pandemic began. This is a labor of love and we are committed to bringing you free content every day. Of course, this takes time and effort not to mention the cost of equipment production and editing. We would be grateful for your donations, suggestions, requests, and ideas. For more information on how to get in touch, go to Italian wine podcast dot com.