Most Sundays, I make over 60 phone calls to Left/Progressive activists across the country. Mostly I leave messages on machines. The conversations I have are usually pretty short. I’m looking to find out what specifically local organizers are working on so that I can get those actions, events and projects posted to the statewide networking websites that my PJEP colleagues and I facilitate. Often activists express astonishment that there are people out there working hard primarily on helping other activists and organizers achieve their goals rather than focusing on a particular personal social change issue.

I think big-scale, long-term and larger patterns. Immersed in evolutionary theory and the evolution of humans and their unique form of split consciousness, focusing on current politics and social change, I find myself attracted to the bigger picture and longer-term goals or transformations. It’s partly personality, partly habit and partly what I’ve found interesting over time that attracts me to how interconnections form and larger systems function.

Making those Sunday phone calls, I’m struck again and again by how focused organizers are on what is happening in their immediate area and how little they feel attracted to making sure that what they are doing is available for exploration on a larger scale, a broader geographic region. Organizers, generally, don’t think big.

This is particularly obvious to me when I send an email to a large group of organizers that are the heads of chapters or affiliates of national organizations. I note that my communication is authorized or sponsored by their central office. A very small percentage of the organizers respond. Or, a central office emails the affiliates or chapters, urging them to contact PJEP to become part of a statewide network. Few respond. What local organizers are focused on is what they are doing at the moment. Thinking outside the moment to consider how that individual and the local organization will benefit from connections to numerous other organizations is a relatively uncommon occurrence.

In other words, most members of the Left/Progressive movement that I am in contact with, and I’m in personal contact with over 700 organizers in 30 states, don’t think big in the context of interconnections with organizations across their state and in other states around the country. Not thinking big is the same as not thinking in an interconnected, horizontal, transparent fashion. I believe this is because most of the organizers I work with are old (over 55). Organizers often also have low expectations regarding the benefits of working with other organizations or letting other organizations know what they are doing. This sense of isolation seems characteristic of Left organizers of all ages.

I haven’t hit upon a solution, a way of successfully encouraging activists to think big, take risks and see a larger picture across larger periods of time. The American Left/Progressive movement is rife with disappointed, frustrated organizers that keep their focus close to home. This is another reason why I believe the coming changes will be enacted largely through young folks and those with communications technology expertise in Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For the young, big picture is effortless and ubiquitous. All they need is an expanded sense of time. Then, everything they’d like to see won’t just seem possible; it will feel achievable in an immanent future.

We’ve been mulling over the relationship between the American Left and the new communications technologies. Integrally involved with this process is our role as co-facilitators of PJEP and its network of 41 statewide or multistate websites, where we are constantly seeking ways to empower small local organizations. The network sites provide them access to easy ways of communicating with allied organizations while building their effectiveness and contact lists through online petitions, eletters, boycotts and fundraisers. For example, right now we’re posting demonstrations surrounding the 7th anniversary of the US led invasion of Iraq. Actions are occurring across the country, appearing in the 40 networks, to a central position on the home page of pjep.org that lists over 120 actions around the country. The question we keep asking ourselves is: What other vehicles are there, that not only share information, but also offer opportunities for organizing?

There are, of course, the various national Left organizations that endorsed the protests that occurred the day after Obama announced he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan such as the United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Peace Action, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly,…

I started journaling when I was about 16. Over the decades, that evolved to my just recording dreams. My handwriting was (and is) terrible, so trying to figure out what I was saying at any time was so much work that I mostly only just recorded my thoughts and feelings, rarely revisiting them.

Nevertheless, on those occasions when I tried to glean some feelings from the past, I was struck by how few metaphors I used to explain a thought or feeling. Mostly, I just described my experience by writing down my feelings. Not only did this make it very difficult to read, but it seemed to provide the raw emotions that were expressed in a way that made them more difficult to absorb. Without metaphor, access seemed difficult.

Through the years, I’ve encouraged myself to use metaphor and graspable images to enhance my ability to communicate what I want to say. At first, it felt very forced, so deliberate were the efforts to make what I had to say understandable. Over the last ten years, it has become easier. Starting this blog two years ago pushed me further in the direction of writing to be understood at the same…

Joichi Ito recently emailed me asking if I would contribute to a comment thread regarding neoteny. The following is what I said…

Understanding neoteny as integral to human evolution and current social change is to reference evolutionary theories common in the nineteenth century (i.e., Mivart, Hyatt, Cope) that were let go when natural selection was raised to be our theory of choice. Ideas evidencing sensitivity to interconnection were abandoned in a theorizing environment that focused on theories offering the greatest number of questions being answered by the simplest hypothesis.

A reductionist milieu tends to pay less attention to solutions that suggest a connection between individuals or species across a scale or between scales. Over the last ten years, there has emerged a new evolution theory discipline called evolutionary developmental biology. In many ways, evo devo harkens back to the nineteenth-century theories that focused on the power of interconnection to both understand and predict how evolution will unfold. Central to evo devo and to the nineteenth-century theories was understanding the power of how individuals mature, and how maturity trajectories change over time when species are influenced by evolution. Central to understanding these kinds of changes, changes in maturity, is understanding how…

In ways not unlike my compulsion to find integration in the theorizing I engage in, I search for ways to integrate the differing aspects of my life.  Still, removing boundaries when seeking to theorize an interconnected theory of evolution is not the same as blending life pathways.

Three usually separate aspects of my life nevertheless take up portions of almost every day.  I run a small web development firm with six staff members that designs, maintains and markets websites.  We have over 400 clients, mostly small businesses.  Portions of every day are devoted to what’s involved in co-directing a 1,500-member organization, concerned with peace, justice and environment national communications and an action-initiation network.  Early mornings and weekends, I theorize and seek to explain my theory of evolution.

Though my design and technical staff assist me with building the national network and theory sites, there is relatively little traffic among these three areas as regards the people I’m in contact with, my colleagues and allies.  Most folks I am in contact with about my theorizing have no contact with my design or activist connections.  The people in each of the three areas tend to stay in that area.

Not so when…

The Hegelian interpretation of history, picked up by Marx, was a view of history as story with particular trajectories.  Teleology, the idea that we walk a path created by a transcendental god, was abandoned.  It was hypothesized that the path we walk is one informed by our own behaviors and understandings.

What I’ve been playing with the last year and a half is the idea that biology and history are connected by social structure, and that teleology exists but is biologically informed.

The Hegelian view of history was predicated on pattern and predictable changes in pattern over time.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection was founded on an opposite view of the effects of time, stating that change occurred only when heritable, randomly generated features compelled a proliferation of traits that served to promote the goals of individuals to survive to procreate.  Evolution displays no thesis and antithesis unless they are represented by every mating pair.

Perhaps ironically, the theory of natural selection does not operate in a narrative frame.  I say ironically because the foundation thesis has been interpreted to support Social Darwinism and free markets, which promote that story, or narrative, that controlling elites are the result of natural…

I’m learning new software, Final Cut Express (FCE).  Back in 1996, I taught myself Photoshop.  My world changed.  Over time, I departed the world of the printed page and disappeared inside of Photoshop.  Forty years of drawing and painting gave way to a creative process that involved both my hands and the manipulation of a mouse and keyboard.

My dreams grew to reflect the amount of time I spent at a computer keyboard adjusting the products of my imagination by typing instead of drawing or painting.  I sometimes still inked by hand.  Yet, coloration grew to become totally digital.  While sleeping, I began to adjust dreams using keyboard commands and Photoshop features.  It became routine to stop a dream and undo a section, withdrawing to an earlier stage before the unfolding of a chain of events that was not desirable.  I found myself frequently simply choosing to undo accidents in dreams, adjusting life with keyboard commands.

Final Cut Express, video production software, shows signs of another such evolution.  Playing with iMovie for about four months, I quickly bucked up against its limitations, even with the relatively simple piece I was producing (The Conservative Left).  Learning FCE is far more complicated…

I’m just finishing this ~140-page work, Evolution, Autism and Social Change, which summarizes most of the principles I’m playing with.  It skips all the political commentary that is scattered throughout this blog.  The work also does not spend numerous pages exploring the presuppositions behind the principles of, and the presuppositional differences between, a maturational theory of evolution and the Neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest frames focusing on mutation and adaptation.  Explaining differences between evolution theories ended up requiring a need to explain integral differences between paradigms by detailing how theory is created.  This felt like too much for a 100-page piece.  I’ll save it for the larger work if I ever write it.

A larger work would also describe a short history, most influential theorists and currently accepted theories in the disciplines being explored.  Most of my writing falls within anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology.  Still, I discuss primatology, psychology, consciousness, medicine and endocrinology.  It is impossible in a short work to offer a several-discipline context.  It’s even unwieldy in a longer work, particularly one that seeks to communicate with a lay audience.  There is also the fact that though I am somewhat familiar with what I am talking about in anthropology, neuropsychology…

I’m considering mating image with text in the book-length piece I’m posting, Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  I thought I’d lost or given away the more than 100 comic art pieces I’d assigned color to back in 1999.  I just found them this morning, beneath a pile of papers, not 18 inches from the back of my head in a shelf behind me.

Some of the image/word combinations, what this culture calls comics, align themselves well with the themes and content of sections of Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  These comics were all from the early to mid-1990s, from before I disappeared in the late 1990s in studies of serpent mythology, ancient matrifocal societies and then evolutionary theory.  Some of the metaphors carry over.  I often use music, children and water images to evoke concepts, but many of the subtleties of the theory are not suggested by the comics.

I have no idea where accessible original digital files are, and they are now 11 years old.  Locked inside of jazz discs are most of the images, but jazz discs are just about inaccessible these days.  My discs are corrupted by a common defect that makes retrieval almost impossible.  I may…

As an artist who has worked with several media, I am familiar with feeling attracted to a particular medium, imagination engaged, and having to wait until I can exhibit some facility before I have an experience of creative closure.  It took almost a year of sowing before I was fairly facile at creating puppets.  Watercolor skills were long in coming.  I practiced with pencil and ink, literally for years, before I felt confident that what would come out was close to what I had to say.

I’m now slowly building writing skills.  My first book-length work posts shortly.  It was built from the short essays that comprise this blog.  At the same time, I’m learning video production, accompanying these short blog essays with Elia’s and Jordan’s music and Creative Commons contributions by artists and amateur photographers and videographers from around the world.

Engagement in theorizing on human origins and the dynamics of human and biological evolution is similar to, if not identical to, creating art.  Participating in art, I feel drawn toward a medium while experiencing that which wants to be expressed.  Medium and content feel closely allied.  The process or medium used to express the experience, and the experience…

In late November and early December, my colleagues and I were working at collecting information from the 1,500 organizations that comprise the Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP).  We work with organizers that are the contact person for their organization, mostly through email, occasionally by phone.  For me, it averages out to my talking to each person that I work with maybe once or twice a year.  There are several hundred people that I work with.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects…

Marcia and I have been working within the social change community since just before the second Iraq war started.  As a political activist, you can find that politics can become your life at several levels.  Because our kids are now all out of the house and mostly out of college, time formerly unavailable to be social is now often time spent with people we meet in the social change movement.  The kids were leaving the nest as we became involved in political protest, which has resulted in a proliferation of friends that also protest.

Many of the Left activists we know move in social circles comprised of other Left activists.  A result of the integration of political activism and friendship networks is an interesting nondifferentiation among actions taken in support of friends, actions taken to impress friends, actions taken because that is what your friends are doing and actions taken because we feel compelled to do so politically.  In other words, the line between friendship and politics becomes blurred.

Whereas I find many of my friends and political associates focused intensely on the larger politics of what they are involved in, my focus is often following through with what I…

It is December 4.  Preparing to write this entry, I considered describing the process of working with Lee Goodman to create the video describing the December 1 and December 2 Afghanistan escalation protests occurring across the country.  Those of us working as facilitators with PJEP kept 1,500 local organizations across the country in touch with the other small organizations across the country conducting protests.  We then requested video and photos of their events.  That stuff poured in.  On December 3, Lee and I cobbled the content into a five-minute video.

Becoming aware that this essay would not be published until March (after sending it to an editor), I considered what the view of these events would be from a season in the future.  Then, I became aware of myself conducting a dissociation to achieve an alternative perspective.  This was followed by my being aware of my being aware of my conducting a dissociation.

There is a difference between debilitating dissociation that leads to an experience of feeling removed or separated from an integration with the environment and the kind of dissociation that offers an ability to achieve both an experience of integration accompanied by a grasping of the relationship of…

An article in Science News last October 31 called attention to a discovery:  ”These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study.”

“Juveniles and adults of these dinosaurs look very, very different from adults, and literally may resemble a different species,” said dinosaur expert Mark B. Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.  ”But some scientists are confusing morphological differences at different growth stages with characteristics that are taxonomically important.  The result is an inflated number of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.”

In the article, Goodwin’s associate, John “Jack” Horner, says, “Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth, which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”

Horner associates neoteny with sociality, suggesting that animals that congregate throughout their lives exhibit neotenous characteristics.  I wish I knew more about these areas.  My next question is:  Are there specific social structures associated with those animals that group in flocks and herds?

If it is true…

At the end of last November and the beginning of December, Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) volunteers worked hard to keep the 41 websites serving 50 states current with actions appearing across the country, which were protests of the Obama Afghanistan escalation. There were 99 events posted, by far the most comprehensive list available on the web.  Nevertheless, though attendance was often excellent at these events, it was usually older activists.

Though some activists posted the wider list to Facebook, Facebook events were mostly not linking to other Facebook actions in other locations.  Twitter, profoundly effective at encouraging worldwide attention on events in Iran, was strangely absent from the almost 100 events occurring across the U.S.

This obviously points to young people not being as motivated to fight the Obama escalation as their older activist associates.  If young people were not Twittering their friends to attend events, then it is likely young people were not consumed by the particular issue.  There is another thing suggested.  Not only were young people not feeling compelled to congregate, young people were possibly not feeling empowered to make their feelings known.  There is the possibility that former young…

“Forest-dwelling apes efficiently conserve their water reserves, which they obtain primarily from fruit and vegetation, such that they need only rarely to visit predator-frequented watering holes.  By contrast, humans active in hot desert can lose up to 28 liters of water and up to 10% of bodily salt reserves per day (Morgan, 1982).  This incredible profligacy with water and salt suggests that early hominids must have enjoyed no shortage of either: they probably dwelled fairly close to fresh and salt water when not foraging.  Rivers and lakes would have provided not only drinking water, but also allowed body-washing and food-washing, offered fish, aquatic crustaceans, and shellfish for eating, and, because the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than that of air, quick swims would have allowed for efficient cooling-off after a long, hot day of foraging.  Note that these conditions would make the aquatic ape hypothesis (Hardy, 1960; Morgan, 1982) a bit more plausible…”  (Geoffrey F. Miller, “Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection:  The Mind as a Protean Courtship Device,” unpublished thesis (1994), p. 164.)

The aquatic ape hypothesis overlaps in two ways with the theorizing I’ve been conducting the last few years.  What I’m now…

“In addition to extramarital sex, premarital promiscuity and trial marriage may also alter the paternity probability.  Indeed, at least one cross-cultural study suggests that in matrilineal-matrilocal societies sanctions against premarital sex, when they exist, are quite mild, whereas such sanctions are severe in patrilineal-patrilocal societies.  (Goethals 1971).  Although premarital sex is especially tolerated in matrilineal societies (e.g., Malinowski 1929), unwed mothers and illegitimacy leading to lower probabilities of paternity are not tolerated…In most matrilineal societies divorce is reported to be quite frequent, and can be initiated by either party without social stigma.”  (Kurland, J. A., “Paternity, Mother’s Brother, and Human Sociality,” in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior:  An Anthropological Perspective, N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds.) (North Scituate:  Duxbury Press, 1979), pp. 160-1.)

A fair amount gets written on changes in the nuclear family, increased divorce, marrying later, few kids, abortion, contraception, women becoming more fully employed outside the home, and now women often retaining jobs because they are often paid less, with their male colleagues getting let go.  Not so much gets written about how this influences general social frames of reference.  I hypothesize we are experiencing a dramatic shift from a patrifocal to a matrifocal foundation.  Intuitions…

My wife introduced me to Ken Wilber’s work about three years after the Serpentfd.org website went up.  That was around 2003.  From there I read maybe six of his books (he’s written close to 20) and listened several times to the 10-CD interview he conducted.

In the previous piece, I noted the prerational and transrational distinction he makes that clearly demarcates the differences between aboriginal prepersonal points of view and more recent spiritual transpersonal experiences.  The two are often confused.  Wilber efficiently parses out the differences, using a system of seven stages of maturation that apply to both individuals and societies.

Wilber looks at some feminist inclinations to view ancient times as more evolved in human relations as another case of comparing seemingly positive aspects of earlier stages of societal evolution, or maturation, with later-stage negative features.  For example, human sacrifice was common in matrifocal agricultural society, a fact usually ignored by those seeking synthesis in the past.  Wilber suggests that some feminists pick and choose what they want to emphasize when comparing female-centered societies with contemporary patrifocal examples.

Paying close attention to similarities between evolution and maturation on both individual and social scales, Wilber, guided by the work of…

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.  I just typed “social structure” and “testosterone” into Google, wondering who might be discussing relationships among the environment, social structure, testosterone, estrogen and evolution.  I expected one of my postings to come up first, but preceding that there was a book I’d not heard of, Social Structure and Testosterone.  I just ordered it.  It seems to be carrying a sociobiological banner, but perhaps there are patterns the author is uncovering that will offer insight.

Most evolutionary psychology or sociobiological theorizing seems to assume or emphasize male impact.  Tanner, Hrdy and others have pioneered female influence.  I’ve written often about the heritage of our patrifocal society creating stories that emphasize a male’s influence.  I’m now encouraging myself to view animal evolution as heavily influenced by social structure, with female sexual selection perhaps understandable in a context of social structure that only sometimes makes it obvious that female choice or female sexual selection is in play.

It is possible that my estimation that estrogen is managing the timing of testosterone, heavily influencing directions in evolution, is integral to understanding the relationship among the…

Running some more riffs off of yesterday’s conjectures regarding the particular hypothetical dynamics that I’ve been exploring in human evolution, are there species that tend to cluster (1) sexual selection with females picking males for particular qualities (dance, song, plumage, etc.) and (2) females assigning relatively large amounts of attention to the young?  If so, males can be chosen for their neotenous features, features females would be attracted to in their young, which might result in relatively larger brains, more cooperative behavior, more tendencies to play, more creativity.

This could veer off in two directions.  If the female is picking males for those features that demand higher testosterone levels (bright red plumage), the male will not likely be displaying neotenous tendencies and would not likely be helping in the raising of the kids (though this would depend on seasonal variations in hormone levels).  Yet, if the female is picking males that are challenged to behave with some creativity, or at least species-related novel behavior, to get the females’ attention, the male may end up evolving in ways that suggest how the human species has evolved.

I’m thinking that those predators that hunt in cooperative packs might as a trend display…

“On the other hand, his sense of aesthetic appreciation, based on the pleasure which man can receive from the construction and matching of musical patterns involving the interaction of rhythm, melody, and harmony and visual patterns resulting from the interaction of form and color, has also resulted from the freeing of his association areas from the more rigid relationship with the lower centers and with the more stereotyped, amorphous symbol patterns which constitute the inner reality of all other animals (Koestler 1964).  Aesthetic appreciation, therefore, is a foetalised form of the continuous search for congruity or matching between models of the environment, models which the animal constantly constructs in its brain by processing its perceptions and the stereotypes retained in its memory store.”  (Crombie, Donald L., “The Group System of Man and Paedomorphosis,” Current Anthropology 12(2) (1971):163.)

Going through my store of excerpts from several hundred papers and close to 300 books, I came across the passage above, having no memory of having recorded it.  This is what I’ve been playing with the last few weeks as regards a theory of music and aesthetics that emerge as a result of embryonic features appearing in the behavior and experience of adults.…

“The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.”  (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God:  Primitive Mythology (New York:  Penguin Books, 1959), p. 240.)

I know nothing about, yet am fascinated by, the differences in child-rearing practices of matrifocal aboriginal societies and modern parents.  Some matrifocal aboriginal societies are hunters, some herders, some agriculturally based.  Campbell notes agricultural communities with a focus on raising children with a social emphasis.  Hrdy describes how in matrilineal/matrilocal hunter gatherer societies children are taught to exhibit theory of mind.  I’m wondering what the nuances are between those societies and herder and later societies, and the differences between emphasis on social mind vs. individualism in matrifocal and patrifocal contexts.

Just as there is an evolution of society, beginning with hunter/gatherers moving toward agriculture around 10,000 B.C., followed by the emergence of towns and cities, I’m estimating,…

Occasionally I write a letter to a writer whose work I respect and/or adore and share what I have been working on.  Four years ago, I wrote Tom Robbins, my favorite novelist, a long letter describing my life in a style I don’t use here.  I was being light.  I was trying to get a handle on a series of events, events I haven’t yet described in this blog.  The letter to Robbins was not only my way of communicating appreciation for his work but was also an attempt to put into words something I’d never tried to put into words before.

Tom’s response, “Your fascinating letter of 16 December caught up with me yesterday in this distant outpost, and I have to say it (your epistle) was more interesting and compelling than any novel I’ve read in the past few years.  Banks of thanks for “blabbing” about your life (and quite a life it’s been) in such a richly rewarding manner….”  He went on to ask about one of the studies I cited regarding a percentage of the population exhibiting left-handedness with features a lot like the characters in his books.

As I have noted perhaps far too often…

“To adopt Dawkins’ gene’s-eye view for a moment, we can see that it would make sense for a gene to take advantage of any developmental opportunity, without caring whether the influence originated inside its organism’s skin or outside it.  Viewing this widely ramified network of interactions in terms of extended phenotypes rather than of developmental systems, however, has several disadvantages.  First, if a gene’s phenotype may be part of another organism’s body, then any organism’s genotype would seem to be distributed as well.  Just what genes were part of that genotype, furthermore, would change with time, since different genes would ‘manipulate’ this particular body at different times.  Second, even if one retains a more mundane view of genotype roughly as that complement of genes enclosed within the skin, the organism in Dawkins’ account is not only something of an epiphenomenon to genetic wheelings and dealings (as it already seems in many sociobiological accounts), but a mosaic epiphenomenon to boot, created to run by its own genes and by the genes of multiple others.  The concept of the developmental system, on the other hand, incorporates the insight that a given phenotype is a product of quite a bit besides its own

…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Maslow hierarchy of needs, or the Ken Wilber seven levels of experience, or the Gebser/Habermas scales of development all end up suggesting a succession of evolution theories that reflect a succession of personal/social developmental milieus.  Evolution theories are origin myths, stories that tease out patterns from experience that reflect how the interpreter experiences the world.

At first, there was no evolution theory.  The world just was.  The world was created at a point in an ancestor’s memory or an ancestor’s revelation and the world as it is now is pretty much how it used to be.

Then, in the West, evolution as a concept became widely embraced, even though there were few accepted explanations.  Darwin’s work emerged among an educated population, which to a large degree believed in the possibility of evolution; it just had no powerful theory.  Darwin provided a place where many could agree.  Only, where people agreed was where the theory successfully juxtaposed with their experience.  Darwin’s contemporaries ignored Darwin’s other two theories, sexual selection and pangenesis.  Natural selection made sense.  It was about survival, not females or the environment.

As we mature as a society, the story changes.

Since Darwin…