“But effective clitoral stimulation, though intensely pleasurable, does not necessarily occur during sexual intercourse.  Female pleasure, far more than male pleasure, is a function of erotic learning and cultural expectations.  Among human societies the most advanced orgasmically are purported to be the women of Mangaia, a southern Cook Island in central Polynesia.  Mangaian females reach orgasm two or three times during intercourse.  Upon entering puberty at thirteen or fourteen years of age, Mangaian boys go through a series of initiation rites into adulthood.  Part of the initiation includes being instructed in methods of stimulating women to maximum sexual pleasure.  Indeed, Mangaian women are expected to attain orgasm during intercourse each time; if not, the Mangaian man who fails to please her loses his status in the island’s society.  Two weeks after a manhood initiation ritual involving penile mutilation, an experienced older woman begins to practice boys in the arts of conferring female sexual pleasure.  According to their ethnographer, D.S. Marshall, Mangaians probably know more about female anatomy than most European physicians.  The Mangaians, with no semblance of a Puritan heritage, do not consider female sexual pleasure an indulgence.  They consider it a necessity.  High cultural expectations for female orgasm have led to high rates of female orgasm.”  (Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (1991) Mystery Dance, On the Evolution of Human Sexuality: Summit Books, New York, p. 62)

Folks following this blog over time will notice my seeking not obvious connections to inform subtle understandings.  For example, I’ve been playing with the suggestion that since both Hopi and Trobriand Islanders display languages with less a sense of tense and are both matrifocal then maybe this is a pattern that can be explored to support my hypothesis that societies display an evolution that can be traced by following the transformation of several aspects or variables.

Variables we are tracking include:

Matrifocal tendencies or matrilineality
Language tense structures emphasizing the present (suggestions of enhanced primary process)
Brain structure
Anomalous dominance (both hemispheres the same size)
Large corpus callosum
Maturational delay and acceleration
Uterine hormonal levels
Migration patterns
Latitudinal extremes (and mountainous)
Menarche and pubertal onset
Homosexuality
Epicanthic fold
Classic neotenous features
Various disease and condition tendencies
Various personality disorder tendencies
Atopic disorders:  asthma, eczema, allergies
Lankiness
Handedness and ambidexterity
Female infanticide
Aboriginal and contemporary social trends in horizontal, diverse and transparent directions
Uninhibited sexuality

The quote that began this entry refers to a society in the Cook Islands, the Mangaia.  I would assume from their behavior that they are matrilineal, and a quick Google check confirms this to be the case.  I wonder if there are language conventions that carry across matrifocal societies that could be used to form conclusions on how societies have evolved?  It seems that sexual practices might be an indicator of social structure.

For many years, I’ve been watching the Teaching Company videos of lectures, coming up on a thousand videos of lectures I’ve watched while sweating in the morning.  Right now I’m watching linguistics courses.  Absolutely fascinating stuff.  The last four lectures were on pidgins and creoles with several references to Bickerton.  I’m enthralled by how languages evolve, by how creoles are formed and by possible correlations between language structure and social structure.

There are places that can form barriers to easy conclusions.  For example, a creole displays few of the complications of older languages and may even show little awareness of tense, but that does not reflect a potential allegiance to primary process manifesting in an ancient matrifocal context, but only reveals evidence of a language so early in its development it has not had time to embellish with the usual frills.

It feels satisfying to feel around for how trends through time can evidence themselves through the various features we are exploring.  Sexuality seems a reasonable variable to add to the list of illuminating features.  Perhaps it being so obvious is why I didn’t notice it before.  Or, maybe because I’m a prudish, white, middle-aged Western male.

For a while four years ago I was tracking the growth of the phrase “intelligent design” in Google to get an idea of how fast the concept, using those particular words, was attracting attention.

“intelligent design” 8/25/04 Google 174,000
“intelligent design” 9/28/04 Google 201,000
“intelligent design” 3/18/05 Google 671,000
“intelligent design” 7/4/05 Google 940,000

I recently revisited the phrase, discovering it had jumped to 6,400,000.

Clearly, it’s a concept that is acquiring a following or at least a lot of attention.

Though this blog spends a lot of time discussing human evolution theory and the repercussions of differences in theories, I spend little time focusing on the fundamentalist Christian battle to have Jewish origin myths integrated into science classes.  Stephen J. Gould’s work in this area was superb.  Richard Dawkins’ lectures on the subject make me cringe.  Ken Wilber has written a lot regarding the differences in world views between fundamentalist Christians and agnostic/atheist scientists.  In my opinion, it takes a spiritual relativist like Ken Wilber to make sense of the differences between Christian fundamentalists and natural selection evolutionary psychologist fundamentalists, both seeming to have difficulty embracing multiple paradigm perspectives.

It seems there are few pluralists in the battle between god and science.

While media concentrates on the battle between the creationists and believers in natural selection, another less visible battle is underway between the natural selection fundamentalists and theorists proposing that the theory of natural selection alone fails to explain the world we live in or how it evolved.

There is a deliberate confusing of the theory of natural selection with the fact that there is evolution.  The intentional blending of the two by the natural selection fundamentalist community, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, displays an arrogance disturbing to theorists specializing in the several complementing theories.  This contributes to the confusion in the media that constantly refers to the theory of natural selection and evolution interchangeably, and muddies the interchange between creationists and scientists by excluding all other theories of evolution from the discussion.

When Stephen J. Gould put back on the map the theory that neoteny was the process most responsible for recent (postdivergence from our chimpanzee cousins) human evolution, identifying heterochronic theory as possibly integral to the process of biological evolution, Gould was noting that there are alternative ways of viewing evolution.  Gould believed these alternatives were complementary to the theory of natural selection.  Yet, even Gould in his defense of evolution against the proponents of intelligent design hardly mentioned the powerful complementary principles of evolution which include heterochrony (which includes neoteny), sexual selection and Lamarckian selection in its modern guise, evolutionary developmental biology.

In other words, one of the reasons that intelligent design continues to make inroads into what seems conventionally acceptable is that evolutionary biologists display little humbleness for the vast variety of ways that evolution operates.  Instead they opt for arrogance, suggesting that the complexity, subtleness and beauty of our world are all derived by mistake, according to the principles of natural selection.  It is proclaimed that survival is the only criteria for success.

Both religious and science fundamentalists elevate themselves to such ridiculously high heights that it is impossible for them to explore the assumptions upon which they stand.  It’s time we demand our theorists come down to earth.  Leave the mountaintops to those embracing myth.

There are lots of unresolved riddles circulating around the various patterns that I sift through while looking for relationships that suggest how human evolution unfolds.  Actually, it’s more like sifting through patterns or relationships feeling for answers, waiting for a “thunk” experience when the tumblers all line up.  Often, I sense an answer is sitting waiting, and I wander in a particular direction; it sometimes takes me weeks to get there.  Sometimes the solution leaps upon me, and I had no idea it was hiding.  I’m only half aware I carried a riddle seeking answers.  The surprise can occur while writing.  I can start an essay and somewhere over the course of the piece a connection is made that was not there even one sentence before my fingers were typing out the insight.  At other times, an unraveling can occur while I’m involved in an unrelated, pleasant kinesthetic experience such as taking a bath or sitting on the toilet.

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, that is the closest thing I know of that explores how insight or the “ah ha” experience occurs.  I often find myself as fascinated by the process of pattern connection or synthesis as I am by that which is being understood.  I’m sure there are other books than Pearce’s exploring this area.  I’m just not familiar with them.

I am more than a little bit self conscious of my narcissistic enamoring of my experience and my frequent discussions about my creative process in this blog.  What can I say?  I fascinate myself.

On Monday, I meet with the neurosurgeon to discuss the latest imaging of my cerebral aneurysm.  It seems to be growing, but they are not sure, and they want to compare MRAs.  I’m adjusting myself to eventual brain surgery.  Awareness of the shortness of life and the presence of death is constant.

My response to the aneurysm has deepened my life in several ways.  I meditate more frequently during the day and evening, when I’m between things, not just in the early morning.  I pay far more attention to my surroundings, noting visual changes in the season in more detail.  I find myself paying more attention to the way it feels as I drift in and out of sleep, exploring the differences between being awake and asleep regarding changes in awareness.

I want to know what the nonlife or the death experience feels like as an awareness, and so I find myself exploring the differences between being awake and asleep as the equivalent of getting my feet wet in the ocean.

Exploring these levels of awareness feels like the “now” version of exploring human evolution.  I presuppose that biological evolution is the long version of individual ontogeny, an ontogeny that is explorable in the present by my accompanying myself as I drift in and out of wakefulness, descending to nonconscious states of awareness.  The aneurysm has been an opportunity to inform myself that I have limited time to revel in being human, a human that seeks to understand what we are in relation to our evolution and our world.

Ken Wilber’s work comes closest to the multileveled exploration that this blog engages in.  Whereas Wilber seems mostly about seeking useful interventions in consciousness, my work focuses on possible useful interventions regarding autism and conditions influenced by how specifically we evolved.  From my perspective, both of us are running riffs off of the nineteenth century believers in three-fold and four-fold parallelisms, a vision rather out of fashion in our reductionist milieu.

As a writer often describing insights around the process of biological, social, individual (ontological) and personal evolution, and then the personal process that results in having those insights, I realize that there is the implied mental backflip that understanding the process that results in insight is directly related to the evolutionary process that so interests me.

How might the actual process of achieving insight be related to evolution?  I suspect that it comes down to it not being reasonable to try to differentiate god from sex.  I’m not even sure why I believe that is even relevant at this particular moment.  It just feels right.

“I have found the midsagittal area of the corpus callosum to be larger in mixed and left handers, referred to as non-consistent-right-handers (nonCRH), than among CRH subjects (Witelson, 1985).  Hand preference is a rough index of the pattern of brain organization.  Left handers (by various definitions) have a higher prevalence of atypical right-hemisphere representation of speech and language functions than do right handers and, in general, show a greater degree of bihemispheric representation of verbal and spatial skills (for review, see Bryden, 1988).”  (Witelson, S. F. (1991) Neural sexual mosaicism:  Sexual differentiation of the human temporo-parietal region for functional asymmetry.  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16: 139)

There seems to me to be tantalizing answers to riddles in human evolution in the various papers discussing corpus callosum structure in different kinds of human beings.  There are papers that support the conclusion that larger corpus callosums, or corpus callosums with larger sections, appear in left-handed people, women, those with two cerebral hemispheres that are the same size, musicians, the autistic and those that stutter.

“Theoretical speculation in humans (S. F Witelson,  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16 (1991) 131-153) and empirical findings in animals (R. H. Fitch, P. E. Cowell, L. M. Schrott, V. H. Denenberg, Int. J. Dev. Neurosci. 9 (1991) 35-38) suggest that testosterone (T) may play a significant role in the development of the corpus callosum (CC).  However, there are currently no empirical studies directly relating T concentrations to callosal morphology in humans.  The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between free T concentrations as determined by radioimmunoassay, and the mid-sagittal area of the corpus callosum, as determined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).  Subjects were 68 young adult (20-35 years), neurologically normal, right-handed males.  All subjects underwent MRI and provided two samples of saliva for radioimmunoassay of T and cortisol.  Anatomical regions of interest included total brain volume, left and right hemisphere volume and regional areas of the CC.  CC regions were defined using two different measurement techniques, each dividing the CC into six sub-sections.  Anatomical measurements were performed blind with respect to the hormone levels of subjects.  A significant positive correlation between T concentration and cross-sectional area of the posterior body of the CC was found.  This finding was consistent across the two measurement techniques and was not attributable to individual differences in total brain volume.  All correlations between cortisol and CC sub-regions were non-significant.  The results of this study are consistent with the notion that T, at an earlier stage in development, may play a significant role in modulating cortical/callosal architecture in humans.”  (Moffat, S. D, Hampson, E., Wickett, J. C., Vernon, P. A., Lee, D. H. (1997) Testosterone is correlated with regional morphology of the human corpus callosum.  Brain Res 767 (2):297)

I would be curious to know whether there is a difference in corpus callosum size between modern humans and matrifocal aboriginals, if musicians and artists have larger corpus callosums and if there is a general trend in growing corpus callosum size that would correlate with matrifocal trends in contemporary society.

“The size of the midsagittal area of the human corpus callosum obtained from postmortem measurement varied with tested hand preference.  The corpus callosum, the main fiber tract connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, was larger by about 0.75 square centimeters, or 11 percent, in left-handed and ambidextrous people than in those with consistent right-hand preference.  The difference was present in both the anterior and posterior halves, but not in the region of the splenium itself.  This callosal morphology, which varied with hand preference, may also be related to individual differences in the pattern of hemispheric functional specialization.  The greater bihemispheric representation of cognitive functions in left- and mixed-handers may be associated with greater anatomical connection between the hemispheres.  The naturally occurring regressive events in neurogenesis, such as neuronal cell death and axonal elimination, may be factors in the individual differences in brain morphology and in functional lateralization.  Specifically, right-handers may be those with more extensive early elimination of neural components.”  (Witelson, S.F. (1985) The brain connection:  the corpus callosum is larger in left-handers.  Science 229: p. 665)

I have a vague memory of a paper that suggested that after sampling several groups of children immersed in music, researchers found that those children playing and composing the most exhibited thicker corpus callosums.  It was implied that this brain structure could grow thicker through lives lived in specific ways.  I’m not sure I remember that right; it seems such a radical conclusion.  This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin notes studies concluding that musicians have larger corpus callosums (Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum#cite_note-Levitin-5).

“Mixed-handers showed significantly larger callosal areas for all measures except for posterior fifth…” (Witelson, S. F. (1985)  The brain connection:  the corpus callosum is larger in left-handers.  Science 229: p. 666)

Regarding autism, I’ve hypothesized that the autistic brain is an ancient brain primed for aesthetic manipulation/appreciation with a larger brain size and larger hemispheric bridge having evolved as a sexually selected device for wowing potential mates.  This is closely related to the Geoffrey Miller thesis, see The Mating Mind.  Lately I’ve been playing with the idea that in addition to a mother’s testosterone levels informing the maturation rates of her children, her estrogen levels in combination with her children’s estrogen levels may be informing the timing of testosterone surges that prune right hemispheric growth in infants and small children.  Not unlike how fat levels in a preteen girl can influence the timing of pubertal onset, perhaps similar factors are affecting the timing of infant cerebral lateralization.  I ask myself what might be influencing the size of corpus callosum development.  Assuming it is a combination of degrees of cerebral lateralization (with left and right hemispheres differing in size) and corpus callosum size that together are influenced by changes in maturation rates and timing, then what exactly are the levers of change that are responsible for their moderated forms?  How might the rate and timing of testosterone and estrogen be involved?

I have a related question.  Let’s assume an autistic brain is a healthy brain, a brain anachronistically located in modern times with perhaps inappropriate environmental conditions making it difficult to operate as it naturally would.  Would modulating the environment to nudge the autistic brain to acquire the features of the modern asymmetrical modern brain with a smaller corpus callosum be an appropriate intervention, if it worked?  This might be, for example, an intervention that lowers a mother’s testosterone levels while increasing the male infant’s estrogen levels, hypothetically accelerating his maturation rate while encouraging the beginning of synapse pruning.

Personally, this idea gives me the creeps.  We need to find out what the autistic brain demands and provide the appropriate environment.

Still, is the size of the corpus callosum influenced by estrogen levels?  Is the timing of its growth triggered by body fat or estrogen?

Does music or rhythm influence corpus callosum size, and if so, might music and rhythm prove integral to the autistic brain?

It does not seem like a good idea to invest in that which you wish to see fail.  Such mixed feelings are not useful when it comes to money.

The American Left is filled with incongruities and the occasional hypocrisy that comprise any large movement or social group.  Made up of dozens of subgroups, the American Left can’t be said to hold too many positions that are universal among its followers.  One of those controversial positions, a position not often discussed, is the relationship between that section of the Left seeking profound systemic economic transformation and the Left that has a 401(k), IRA or other investments.  Often, a single person may seek both deep economic evolution and profits from investments.

One-half of such a person roots for the destruction of the Dow; the other half desperately seeks the stock market’s return to health.

I have more than a few friends that seek a sustainable, environmentally sound world economy that cares for the starving and makes health care available to all.  With the United States absorbing 25% of the world’s nonrenewable resources, deep systemic transformation needs to be characterized by an end of business as we know it.  Clearly, this has to happen quickly, within a generation, to protect our planet.  This portion of the Left experiences exultation that our consumer economy is suffering.  This sizable percentage of the Left feels that an opportunity for transformation has emerged.

Yet, many of these Leftists are in their 50s and 60s, and their life savings are disappearing as the months limp by.

This spring, I stood outside at a demonstration when a troubled colleague, a radical by any definition, turned to me and asked if I had investments and how they were faring.  We radicals don’t voice the feeling that we are engaging in hypocrisy by demanding change while investing in the system we seek to see transformed.  Still, I perceive chagrin.  To both have assets to protect while demanding that the system be vulnerable to deep systemic evolution that will destroy the established status quo is not an easy balance to maintain.

One of the biggest problems of the Left at this time is that without a Hegelian Marxism there is little shared idea of what the ideal future offers.  It is easy to pick out the horrors we seek redressed, the injustices that can be offered peace and respect.  It is far more difficult to understand where exactly we would like to be in a generation or two as regards how a world economy would look and behave.  We are familiar with a consumer goosed to own more than the planet can reasonably provide.  We have invested in an economy founded on those principles.  Maybe if the Left disinvested in the economy we wish to see vanish, it would be easier to envision the world we work to make.

It does not seem like a good idea to invest in an economy you wish to fail.  For the Left, it is time to get clear on the world we seek to be.

In the February 27, 2009, issue of Science on page 1164 begins an article on Chinese government attempts to adjust the male/female birth ratio.  At this time, there are 120 boys born for every 100 girls.  Female foeticide has replaced female infanticide as the technique best designed to dispose of unwanted females.  Still, many baby girls are not taken to the doctor when they grow ill.  There are still quasilegal ways to dispose of children.

I hypothesize that female infanticide and foeticide are patrifocal societal tools used to maintain a patrifocal frame.  Males that don’t fit the male patrifocal ideal don’t achieve a wife and don’t pass on ideal genes.  Maintaining a high male/female birth ratio goes a long way toward encouraging long-term patrifocal societal stability.

“Bao and Li are one of four couples in their 600-person village to have espoused uxorilocal marriage, or living with the wife’s family.  Couples in some regions have opted for this lifestyle throughout Chinese history, but the practice is typically stigmatized.  By rewarding daring couples with land and public praise, Care for Girls aims to remove the stigma.  Bao says it worked:  “People don’t discriminate against you now.”  (Science, p. 1164)

The article goes on to describe attempts to adjust male/female ratios by intervening in the intransigent patrifocal social structure.

“The demographers realized that reversing the trend would require a major cultural shift.  Undermining the patrilineal order, they suspected, might do the trick.  With Marcus Feldman, Zhu and Li surveyed two counties in China where historically loose clan structure had led to a high percentage of men living with their wives’ families.  Both uxorilocal counties had a normal sex ratio at birth and low female child mortality.  Moreover, matrilineality seemed to provide the same benefits as patrilineality: ‘We found that daughters provided economic and emotional support to their parents equal to that of sons,’ Li says.” (Science, p. 1165)

Researchers in China have discovered that social structure is directly related to male/female birth ratios.  What other features may these unique, less patrilineal provinces reveal?  Perhaps there are additional advantages to relieving oneself of allegiance to a society heavily dependent on the concept that males are more valuable than females.  I suspect that there are positive economic repercussions.

The Chinese culture is unique in more ways than can be counted.  Whereas in the West until this last century matrifocal tendencies were demonized along with the serpent, a major symbol of the old goddess religions, in Asia the serpent was assimilated and deified.  In the East, matrifocal values were never totally repressed.  Asian spiritual paths revere the power of the female while seeking balance between the two hormonal archetypes.

The distance that the Chinese culture has to go to begin to respect the rights of women and arrive at a balance that provides bonuses to all may not be as far off as many think.  Though there are many societal habits to be adjusted, there is a spiritual infrastructure that allows for the emergence of the unique.  China is seeking profound industrial and commercial innovation and a primary position in the world’s economies.  By focusing on birth ratios as the symptom of a restraining frame of reference, the peoples of China may have a high quality source of information on how close they are coming to acquiring a useful reference for the new global economy.

Patrifocal societies may be both useful and beautiful in a world that requires and rewards stable societies that can survive over long periods of time.  Now that our global cultures are integrating, innovation is king.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then China’s new matrilineality may be the mother of innovation.

There was a fascinating study I read several years ago that sampled the genes of children and their parents across working, middle and upper classes in the UK, looking for variations in the degree those women had made cuckolds of their husbands.  In other words, what percentage of families had children from fathers other than the father the children thought was theirs?

Across all UK classes, ~20 percent of children were living in families with fathers that were not their own.

On a show called Radio Lab, available by blog cast, there was a story that described a boy’s genotype being compared to his mother’s with the discovery that the boy’s mother was not really his mother.  After confirming that there had been no hospital mix-up (the boy was directly related to his dad), it was discovered that the mother was actually a two-person hybrid, a chimera.  In the womb, two embryos had somehow merged.  The boy was a direct descendant of some parts of the mother’s body, but not other parts.  The boy was not descended from the parts that had been the mother’s uterine sister.

A feature of rare aboriginal societies is that there are children that don’t know who their father is.  Lineage is through the mother.  Often, the mother’s brothers act as fathers to a sister’s kids.  It has been hypothesized by some evolutionary anthropologists that humans evolved out of this social constellation.  There are signs that modern society is drifting back in this direction.  The 20-percent figure noted in the UK study suggests that many of us are already there, or never left.

With the emergence of cheap paternity tests, the days of phantom fathers are over, if people care.  Serial monogamy is on the rise.  Contemporary society is starting to look like a mash-up of social structure archetypes, with females choosing their children’s father, which may not be the same person as their mate of the moment, with aunts and uncles playing varying degrees of importance in children’s lives.

It seems to me that in the United States, the more money that a family has, the more likely the children will move away.  College provides professions.  Professions move the professional to where the jobs are.  With no college, the children often stay relatively close to home.  Families disperse with added assets.  This is my conjecture.

How this affects avuncular behavior which might encourage women to have children with no father input is not clear to me.  But, it would seem that the poorer the family, and the more uncles that are nearby, the more possible it would be that the children would not share genes with the male that is living with the mother.  Then again, in a wealthier family, an uncle would have more assets to disperse to sisters wherever he might be living in the country.

This all seems a stretch as regards evolutionary conjecture.  Still, it’s fun to assemble and reassemble the Tinkertoy hubs and nodes of our social structure to see how things fit in different ways.

I have been told by others, particularly by author David Brin with some annoyance, that my bias toward the matrifocal frame weighs down what I am trying to communicate.  At those moments you feel most perturbed by how I’ve said something, do tell me so my turns of phrase don’t turn stomachs.  I’d rather communicate than indoctrinate.

I write about 90 days before posts appear.  In a couple weeks [a couple months ago], posts start to emerge that begin with the observation of a possible erroneous connection, that both Hopi and Trobriand Islanders have languages with not much more than the present tense and both are matrifocal.  Two cases a pattern does not make.  That the Hopi are mostly present tense is contested.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language informs culture with language structure guiding culture values) is considered disproved by many, but I’m thinking there might be a connection between language, ancient matrifocal society, primary process and autism.

A premise in that long piece, “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” is that matrifocal societies will evidence diseases and conditions associated with autism in modern society.  I’m starting to think that premise may be wrong.  The particular way that children are being raised in matrifocal aboriginal society may be guiding those with predilections toward autism toward a more societal-connected version of themselves.

The connecting paradigm is primary process, a concept developed by Freud and embraced by Gregory Bateson.  It outlines thinking in one tense (the present), one time (now) with no negatives.  Dreams take place in primary process, as does early childhood, as do, hypothetically, animals, for instance, chimps.

What struck me while reading Whorf discussing the Hopi and Malinowsky discussing the Trobriand Islanders was that both peoples had a language that suggested intimacy with primary process with little attention to detail outside the here and now.  This fit my paradigm of matrifocal society preceding contemporary consciousness, matrifocal society being present when we bridged from gesture to speech.  What this suggests for me is that the particular way that children in these matrifocal societies are being raised may harbor specific techniques that modern families could use to bridge the autistic child into social reality.

I would focus on diet (the classic “paleolithic diet” with no gluten or casein), constant rhythm, almost constant dance, maybe more UV light and perhaps more touch.  What might be the common child-rearing practices among matrifocal cultures with primary process-like language structures heavily emphasizing the here and now?  For those women with high-testosterone uterine environments, maybe these techniques could be an opportunity to raise their children in an environment natural to their neurologies.

I’ve been playing with these concepts in the columns for a couple months.  They are leading to other interesting conjectures regarding females and estrogen in estrogen’s biological, prehuman manifestations.  Animal endocrine systems are way beyond me.  Still, it feels to me like autism is the bridge concept to understanding who we are as humans, and finally understanding ourselves and our place in the biological universe.

Thank you for the nice things you said, and the criticism.  The criticism I deeply value when detailed enough that I can adjust.  Don’t feel afraid to blast me.

Thank you, Amber.

Andrew

At some point, our society is going to understand that a system that enhances the creation and maintenance of a wealthy elite is not good for the social system or the planet.  It’s looking like this revelation will be coming to America.  I’m suspecting this will not be until a massive number of formerly middle-class people sit staring at others with protected wealth.

This revelation carries potential for harm.  The realization that congregating wealth in the hands of the few necessarily creates inequalities will likely result not in a step-by-step, goal-oriented plan to destratify society but instead a blame-infused toppling of structure, potentially denying many access to resources.

Our corporate-controlled media are realizing that blaming rich people sells.  There is hesitancy to blame the system.  Perhaps this reflects an intuition built from observing the collapse of aristocracies when the system, not individuals, was blamed.  Instead, elements of the media are choosing to assign blame to individuals–the bad apple paradigm–so as to maintain the cadence of the consumer/producer parade.

The musicians will stop playing the march music.  The media pundits and anchors will change their tune.  I’d like them to play dance music.  The parade will come to a halt.  Blame will be recognized as unproductive.  Society will continue, except without a single-minded focus on accumulation.  Dancing may not as efficiently get a person from one location to another as a march.  But, you get to be where you are.

It’s not about the acts of individuals.  Humans everywhere would have behaved as the American wealthy have behaved if they had inherited those wealthy person’s birth positions.  This is a systemic issue encouraged by media working for those profiting from the system.  It’s not about individuals behaving badly.

Regulation, transparency and accountability are necessary to change this march into a dance.  Blame is not useful.  Turn off the TV.  Make some music.

In Seattle seeing family in March, I noticed American Indian and Asian populations, both with epicanthic folds.  The epicanthis fold is considered a neotenous feature because all humans exhibit this in the womb.  Many are born with the feature and lose it as they grow older.

As noted in previous pieces (see http://www.neoteny.org/?p=375), people with Down syndrome display the fold.  People with Down syndrome exhibit a host of neotenous features.

What strikes me is the possibility that epicanthis folds might offer a signal for social structure anomalies.  This seems a stretch because Asian societies are largely patrifocal, negating the feature’s correlation with matrifocal societies.  Still, it would be interesting to know the variety of cultures around the world that display this feature.

I’ve discussed the two different kinds of neotenous societies, the Scandinavian and Asian paradigms.  The two kinds of societies display two different clusters of neotenous characteristics.  Scandinavians show blond hair, blue eyes, light skin, lanky builds and egalitarian societies.  Asians display light skin, childlike, fragile features, short height and the epicanthic folds.

One society matrifocal at its foundation, the other society patrifocal.

The tentative resolution of this conflict was discussed in the series of posts noted here.  It is still not clear to me why some neotenous features congregated around one paradigm vs. the other.  For example, why do Asians display the epicanthis fold, and Scandinavians not?

Observing American Indians in Seattle with the folds, it strikes me that there is the possibility that the little light that might have driven Scandinavian neoteny might be encouraging Northern American continent Indians to retain the folds.  Then again, Arctic Circle Indians are closely related to Asians, clearly more closely related than American Indians living farther South that don’t display the fold.  So, maybe there is no suggestion that climates with little light encourage the feature.

Wikipedia notes several areas around the world outside Asia and the Pacific exhibiting folds.  I guess I’d like to know how high a proportion of these cultures might be matrifocal.  What would this even mean?

Marcia noticed it before I did.  In deep thought, seeking answers to difficult problems, I tap out intricate percussive patterns by clicking my fingernails or by tapping my fingers, often to subtle swaying of my body.  I think thoughts by making music, percussive music, tying together the different mental threads.  I seek assimilation of the feelings in my body, the sounds that those feelings make and the words in my mind representing ideas mating to create unique progeny solutions.

My son, Elia, noticed that he and I both unconsciously, constantly, tap out on the steering wheel percussive riffs that seem to reflect unconscious mental activity.  Marcia has noticed how often he and I engage in evidently unconscious rhythm patterning.  She’ll observe us both quietly standing and tapping fingers to a hidden dance, occasionally both of us listening to the same invisible tempo, unaware that we’re both moving to an identical flow.

There was a point in my life when I practiced sensory acuity.  I was training to become a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  I remember sitting in the back of a bus headed down Broadway in winter Chicago.  I placed myself in a trance while observing the shoulders of maybe 40 bus commuters, letting my peripheral vision receive and sort the information coming in.  After a couple minutes I was able to simultaneously see almost 40 people from behind, breathing, as I was observing slight rhythmic elevations in each person’s shoulders.  Music emerged, the silent symphony of the body rhythm of an orchestra of humans.  The scene was complex and beautiful; I felt elevated by the journey.

I’m not surprised that it’s Marcia that usually notices I’m clicking my nails.  She’s amused.  I’m deep in thought.  Inevitably, when she asks me what I’m thinking, I’m sorting through information seeking integrations.  For me, rhythm is necessary to make something new.

I have an old compulsion.  It’s not clear when it emerged.  This constant urge is characterized by my seeking ways to make two or more things not obviously connected, connected, in as few steps as possible.

In high school, I wrote papers that sought to integrate subjects or themes at best only tangentially related.  In chemistry, I wrote a piece on motorcycle engine engineering.  In English, I penned a short play using characters from three books I was supposed to be writing a book report on.  I sought to push the boundaries of what intuitively seemed related.  My teachers criticized me for a seeming inability to follow directions and write a paper on a single subject.

I remember creating a drawing in art class with a middle-class man’s head on a T-Rex body, and I titled it “Alfred K. Prufrock.”  That drawing summarized what I was seeking, a way to integrate opposites so the world made sense.

I longed for a world that revealed integration.  Seeking relief from anguish and self-recrimination, I often dissociated to a degree that allowed a matching of opposites in my imagination that refused to ally themselves in my emotions.

I felt torn.  I sought unification.

When my son was born and started toddling, I loved to sit on the floor with him and mix up the various toys, guys, kitchen implements and miscellaneous.  Packing materials such as Styrofoam blocks (used to ship large appliances) were added to the mix.  Elia and I would develop vague Star Wars-like universes with his favorite heroes, in this case Hammerhead (a Star Wars guy villain), flying across galaxies in makeshift Styrofoam spaceships.  We would orchestrate toys, garbage and stuff around the house into a play world that integrated bits of real.

This feature of play and art, integration of opposites or not obviously connected elements, now seems to be a primary feature of how I work.  Whereas when I was younger this was driven by an emotional longing for a safe place, there is an addition to this compulsion paradigm that has to do with a series of revelations that seeks to bring the lowest higher up, nourishing the grass roots, prolonging infant features into adulthood, assimilating societal fringe elements into the center, reconciling the powerless with the powerful, integrating that which is our creative source with society stuck in the habits of the status quo.

My life has been characterized by constant shifts between focuses or modalities.  I’m beginning to wonder if these frequent changes in what I pay attention to contribute to my abilities to integrate.  Over the course of a day, I spend very concentrated time theorizing, theorizing on theorizing, running a web development firm, helping grow a national nonprofit organization, consulting with nonprofits, brainstorming with a media organization, guiding businesses and engaging in numerous personal communications.  All in a typical, single day.

In other words, my compulsion to integrate has led to a life that unconsciously exposes me to an enormous amount of information and differing consciousness states requiring orchestration.

And so in this piece I began by noting an obsession, a deep desire to integrate opposites.  This need is in turn connected to taking a particular class of that which is hidden–infant features, creativity, features of the social fringe–and prolonging, integrating or manifesting that which is hidden into the society at large.  Then I noted that how I engage in this process has something to do with how I live my life, constantly changing focus while somehow allying all those elements over the course of the day.

What interests me has a lot to do with understanding how things work and how I work.  What is it in me and how I live my life that results in the ideas I have, and what makes those ideas useful?  As I seek to integrate opposites and understand the integrations, I also seek to understand what it is about me that seeks the integrations and how it is that I engage in the process.

Seeking integration, I keep widening my sphere of examination.  My life often ends up in that sphere, being part of what I observe.  That being the case, there seems to be a part of me that transcends my life.  I become the observer.  Recognition of that piece is central to the integration I deeply seek.  True integration requires a shift in identification.

It happens that the thing we seek may be so close by, so a part of ourselves, that we cannot see it.  Still, there are other ways to perceive the world.

Among the aboriginal Australians, there are myths of serpent spirits that can vary from a few inches to the length of the Milky Way.  In the latter case, the serpent has grown so large that its relevance may seem to wane, and we forget that we form a part of it and we forget it’s even there.  To be aware of something, it helps if you have to have enough distance from it to identify its boundaries, if boundaries exist.  Still, achieving distance is not the only way of gaining perspective.

Verbal, symbolic language use and exponential brain-size increases are two qualities closely associated with the idiosyncrasy of being human.  Noting how we are different from other species, we see there is controversy when it comes to agreeing on the processes by which these unique characteristics evolved.  It is difficult getting distance when exploring issues of consciousness.  If you are exploring the nature of thought itself, it becomes seemingly impossible to discern the Milky Way-sized serpent from the self; you can’t get a feel for your own boundaries.

Art and science blend when we are studying the origins of humans.  Perhaps the degree that consciousness is split can be measured, but it seems that consciousness itself is not measurable.  We often seem to fool ourselves that by making believe that since consciousness cannot be measured, we can ignore it, and by doing so somehow achieve perspective.  Ignoring consciousness is like ignoring the aboriginal serpent deity that spans the sky in the form of the Milky Way.  We have to make believe that we’re not a member of that group of stars.

Art provides an experience of wholeness, understanding and connection to a larger self.  Science seeks usefulness amongst the patterns.  I often don’t differentiate between the two.  That would make me a poor scientist by most definitions, in addition to the fact that I’m not a member of the peer-review community.  Nevertheless, consciousness fascinates me.  Blurring the edges between art, science and spirituality helps me get a feel for my subject by giving up the idea of my achieving perspective.  At best, I can tell a useful story.  Again, usefulness being my focus, I become unclear on the differences between art and science.

It happens that the thing we seek may be so close by, so a part of ourselves, that we cannot see it.  This is not a problem if you can feel and you can hear.

I think I was in seventh grade when I remember thinking to myself that it seemed that my immediate circle of friends and I were unusually entertained by jokes having to do with crap, poop, farting and the various bathroom evacuation processes.  Paul, my best friend, and I seemed particularly amused by crap jokes.  Paul recently died of Parkinson’s.  It was maybe five years ago that I realized that Paul had Asperger’s.

I did not have Asperger’s, though I was definitely maturational delayed.  Still, a number of my friends were very smart, very strange and immature for their age.  It wasn’t until after SAT and other exams were taken that I discovered that several in my group of friends were not just smart, but scary smart.  Several tested highest in New Trier High School, one of the highest testing schools in the country.  There was more than one candidate for Asperger’s among the folks I knew.

Not fitting into that class of super smart folks, I’d grown up focused on comic books, reading hardly anything else until sixth grade.  My father was a talented athlete.  My focus was baseball.  I was terrible at baseball.  Nevertheless, I had a passion for playing the game and spent sizable amounts of time until high school corralling friends together to get up teams.

In the 1990s, I spent five years as a comic panel and strip creator, producing over 1,000 comics.  My sense of humor was sometimes subtle and sophisticated, occasionally coarse and dumb.  It’s almost as if an audience of different me’s sit inside my body chuckling at different comic inputs.  I astonish myself at the evident number of different developmental stages that occupy the same space, representing different times of my life.  I am enamored of subtle, beautiful stand-up comic creations by such artists as Dave Lippman, while at the same time a good shit joke can feel satisfying.  I observe many grown-ups with this ability to appreciate full comic spectrum.

It seems to me that one of the secrets of growing up is never leaving anything behind.  I used to believe that the goal of maturity was to abandon all the unproductive anguish that seemed to tie my feet to helplessness while flailing away to grasp a seemingly unattainable embrace.  It took me a while to realize that growing up was about accompanying first where I am, and then where I’ve been (which paradoxically is also where I am).  Finally, accompanied, I have a feel for where I am (are) going.

I remember clearly the immaturity that characterized my childhood, with stages that kept prolonging their way past appropriate points of display.  I picked friends that also seemed loath to grow up.  Yet, somehow, somewhere along the line, I seemed to have caught up with myself.  That feeling of lingering out of time has faded away.  Again, paradoxically, that which partially characterizes my sense of wholeness is my embracing the various stages of delay.

Nevertheless, sometimes I long to use a coarse shit metaphor because it so satisfies my sense of elfin impropriety.  I’ll save it until my grandson reaches three.

OK.  Several possible estrogen-related connections have emerged in the last few days.

First, if estrogen is a trigger in teenaged girls for entering puberty, thus beginning the testosterone surges that freeze brain growth, and it is also true for males (a stretch) that estrogen levels trigger pubertal timing, might this also apply to male and female infant/toddler testosterone-surge synapse pruning that results in asymmetric cerebral lateralization?  If so, might infant/toddler estrogen levels be instrumental in causing autism, low estrogen resulting in delayed growth?

Second, noting the seeming connection between estrogen’s focus on the young and the exhibition of maternal behavior along with estrogen’s focus on very specific features in a mate (thus driving the emergence of unique male species traits), is it true that species that engage in female sexual selection are also species where the mother exhibits maternal behavior?  An implication is that K vs. r strategies might compel female choice and changes in the exhibition of male behaviors.

Third, might it be the case that estrogen, predating testosterone, is somehow responsible for early proliferation of life on earth insofar as estrogen is associated with creation, discrimination and focus on the young?

In the old religions, there is a view of life characterized by the triple symbol of virgin, mother and crone.  There are goddesses that are both creator and destroyer.  If we approach estrogen as contributing to the three hypothetical frames noted above, the female acquires a depth and power that is mythical in scope.

Estrogen nurtures the young.  Estrogen focuses on particular features in mates and then encourages the proliferation of those features over generations.  Whereas it seems like testosterone is deeply involved in the creative process, perhaps testosterone’s lack of discrimination places in the hands of the female the direction that evolution travels.

Whereas testosterone assigns the power, energy or speed with which evolution unfolds, estrogen governs creativity and direction.

The first two of the three premises noted above are testable hypotheses.  If it is discovered that species that engage in female choice also display maternal behavior, I’m not sure how useful that information is, except that it supports the dynamic I’m proposing regarding human social evolution.  It doesn’t prove anything.  If, indeed, estrogen is a trigger for pubertal timing in males and females, then estrogen may be the trigger for early childhood testosterone surges, which are integral to the timing of maturation changes.

If males that are naturally maturational delayed experience a further delay in the timing of testosterone surges, then Asperger’s or autism might result.

It just struck me that whereas low estrogen in girls approaching puberty delays pubertal onset, in males it might be reversed.  High estrogen in males might delay pubertal onset.

And there is the fact that I am an amateur.  I’m associating fat levels with estrogen levels.  The two may not be as closely related as I am assuming.

There are a lot of situations where male or female estrogen or testosterone levels go in opposite directions with the same environmental effects.  What if baby males need low estrogen to time testosterone surges and baby females need high estrogen to time those surges?

High-fat diets would result in males with increased likelihood of autism.

“Well, we could get stoned before we decorate the tree.”

My wife, Marcia, had just spoken words the rest of us had not expected to hear.

The kids, 18 and 17 (boy and girl), had, before this comment, been communicating a respectful dismay with slack shoulders, shallow breaths and averted eyes.  They, of course, would rather be doing anything (with friends) than trim the tree.  I’d already concluded that silent, passionless cooperation was the most that my wife and I could hope for.  But Marcia’s words had ignited sudden, deep inhalations and bouncy demeanors in the two teens.

“OK,” I said, and I smiled.

With a giddy, awed reverence the kids indicated that purchasing and decorating the tree would be a special day for them.  Then they noted how horribly expensive marijuana was now compared to when Marcia and I were familiar with the prices.  I handed them a 20.

It’d been over 20 years since I had last smoked pot.  I’d been drunk twice in that same period–the last time at Easter supper three years ago.  This occurred because a massive toothache, untouched by medication, had condemned all my attention to my mouth and there were no dentists on Sunday to flee to.  It was before supper and we were playing board games.  There was wine being shared between my wife and a friend, so I decided to test its medicinal reputation.  The children stared, stunned, as I poured myself a glass.  (Alcohol makes me sick, so they’d always seen me abstain.)  Then another, and a third and on.  The pain abated!  I noted more and more laughter (not mine).  Playing a charade-type game I never quite could understand, I was marginally intelligible–unable to line up three thoughts in a row.  The kids thought the circus had come to town.  They had not been aware that I could be entertaining.  This went on for hours.  Our teens were reveling in a family event.

After the obligatory late night hours at the porcelain altar, I awoke the next morning with the pain still gone.  Trading pain for the heaves seemed a remarkably good deal.  The evening, though, was a blur.  And for three years now, I’ve heard stories of How Fun Dad Had Been on Easter.

And now the children would get to watch me stoned for a Christmas event!

At the center of my social self is an almost bottomless abyss of insecurity.  Over the 35 years of my adult life, I’ve managed and attended to this mixture of fear and self-effacement until I’ve achieved my present state of higher consciousness–Thoreau’s quiet desperation.  I stopped getting stoned because I grew weary of standing and swaying over the abyss as I listened to the rage and self loathing characteristic of my internal dialog.  I couldn’t stand to get stoned because I couldn’t bear to hear what went on inside my head.

So, though I might be a happy drunk (before I get sick), I was a frightened pothead.  I estimated that getting stoned that day during Christmas decorating, at 50 (just 50, actually–one week after my birthday), might be an opportunity to note how far I’ve come in 20 years.  Had I been successful at covering up my inner torment–to have the twisted nature of my insides revealed by the drug–or had I learned enough about myself that some serenity might be revealed?  The teens were looking forward to being entertained.  I was not so confident.  One thing seemed destined to occur.  The ornaments would get on the tree, and the family would be doing it together–reverently–from a heathen point of view.

It was a large joint.  Bigger than I remember joints being.  My daughter lit it and passed it to me.  She sat by the fireplace, I on the couch, my son on the piano bench and my wife across from me in the rocking chair.  I inhaled deeply.  Too deeply.  Way too deeply.  I coughed for two or three minutes.  The children were most amused.

After two more inhalations of the herb and a hit off my asthma inhaler (my lungs were stunned and required a familiar drug to get them working smoothly without constant attention), I let the wave of the altered state pull me down beneath the surface of the everyday.  What lay there was exactly what I had abandoned with dismay two decades earlier.

I was faced with an immediate decision.  Do I vocalize the whole of my internal experience or just a censored version suitable for family viewing?  This was a Christmas Family Event.  One does not trim the tree while listening to Leonard Cohen with Schindler’s List playing on the TV.  I decided to compromise.  I would simply note the negative aspects of my experience while discussing the other, less revealing parts of what was occurring to me.

The girls seemed incredibly normal to me.  As social and sensitive to what was happening to others as always.  My son was monosyllabic, fascinated by his internal states and delighted to share them.  He and I compared notes.  He and I tend to be percussion obsessed, constantly tapping out rhythms.  We found we were both sensitive to the percussions of the bloodstream as the heartbeat pulsed against the body parts.

As the evening progressed and I examined the details of the Edvard Munch landscape of my internal self, I once again was presented with a battle waged many times.  Do I take to heart the things that I am saying to myself and the anguish/rage that I feel because they are being said, or do I let myself say them (letting them be), being aware of their sources and their effects?  I did some of each.  While doing so, a sort of triumvirate appeared.  I experienced myself in three distinct places.  Place 1:  I was terrified and judgmental, evidenced by a difficulty in trusting all forms of internal or external communication without heavy censoring.  This was standing by the abyss.  Place 2:  I was aware of what was occurring, able to impartially observe and even sympathize and had no opinion.  I was simply present.  Place 3:  At the edges of my experience was a staggeringly vast, unknowable realm of my biological and social self.  Interacting with my family, I found that the mechanics of word formation and creation was totally unconscious.  So was my ability to interpret communication.  So was the nonverbal mirroring of others’ communications.  So was my heartbeat, my body operations, my imagination, etc.  The vast majority of my experience was operating outside my conscious awareness.  I felt humbled by how little of me my identity actually occupied.

Over the next few days, my mind often returned to that evening, looking to gain some insight as to how much I’ve changed over the last few years.  My conclusions are mixed.  Fear still heavily informs my everyday activities.  Yet acceptance is far more characteristic of life at 50.  It’s almost as if the terrified younger me is very much still present.  Yet an older me stands by him, unflappable and trusting.

There is one thing that I’ve concluded without effort.  This thing I know for sure.

Trees don’t get decorated by four stoned people paying close attention to what it’s like to be stoned.  Our tree stood bare until two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, when I put the ornaments on while my wife baked pies for the next day’s feast.  But something must have gone right.  My wife and I are considering making stoned tree trimming a tradition.

I’ve never had a hard time being playful, exactly.  I’m not exactly sure.  I don’t create much time for the opportunity to play.  I work a lot.  And, I guess, I take myself too seriously.

For example, there are things I’m ashamed to admit to myself about myself.  That it mattered that I turned 50 six years ago was such a thing.  The last week before the event–the event was a party my wife convinced me to accept–was filled with a succession of occasions for anxiety.

Like the line of mourners that file by the bereaved family, an orchestral spectrum of neurotic, middle-aged, Jewish male symptoms gathered and nurtured over a 30-year adult life–one by one–paid respects as the days counted down to the zero hour.  Three hours before midnight, a anxiety attack cheerfully assailed me.  I was convinced I was having appendicitis while simultaneously aware of the high predictability of my having this anxiety attack–the finale to a Mahler symphony of a week’s worth of abdominal percussion and a host of other somatic idiosyncratic experiences.  To list the instrumentation of this work would sound to my ears like dinner with grandma when I was a boy.  I’ll spare you the score.

Several years before this, early in my second (present) marriage, my wife was going to visit her sister, the first time we were apart for any length of time.  A slowly cascading series of symptoms accumulated through the preceding week.  Then, the night before her departure, there was a panic attack (my life’s fourth and the first in many years), and upon its retreat there was a realization.  I was having separation anxiety.

“I must really love her!” I thought.

“I love her but I’m incredibly neurotic,” I thought next.

On the day of my 50th birthday, I concluded that I was experiencing separation anxiety from my life.  I’ve been obsessed with death since before I was 10.  I felt 65 at 16 while fascinated by Freud and the French existentialists.  But what was bothering me at 50 was not exactly death, but my associations with ambition and defeat.  It was feeling like I hadn’t been able to leverage my allotted time on earth to succeed in the heroic undertakings fueled by my vivid imagination.

I made a resolution.  This is another thing that I’m ashamed to admit to myself about myself–that I occasionally feel forced to set a personal goal that could be characterized by such a conventional term.  This time the resolution created a paradox or double bind.  I made a resolution to give up ambition and defeat:  a goal to stop making goals.

Just as a dancer learns to dance by having faked the real thing, I hoped I could achieve contentment by making believe.  I felt that it would not be through my efforts that I’d succeed.  I figured that maybe I could succeed by playing.

My wife, at the time, owned a toy store.  (Some people marry for money.  I married for play money.)

So, the week of my 50th birthday, I stopped by and filled up my overcoat pockets with, perhaps, a dozen small toys; play dough, Silly Putty, teeny-tiny clothes pins, itty-bitty animals, a miniature crystal ball, Hindu god finger puppets, little monster women, pick up sticks, cap balls, etc.

I was 50.  I figured it was time to play.  Or, at least, play at playing.  By faking it, I figured I could end up having fun.

Six years later, I find it’s working.  Pockets still filled with toys, I find that life is lighter.  I often feel loved.  I feel lucky.  Growing younger as I grow older is not so bad.

It has been estimated that as human beings culturally evolved over the last 50,000 years or so, radical changes occurred very early in that process.  The river of culture’s evolution began deep and wide.  Many of these changes have been hypothesized to have occurred in relation to language.  It is difficult to discuss cultural evolution without discussing language and its effects.  Here I want to focus on one specific current or manifestation of these changes, community size.

Six years ago I reached 50 years old, the first of my friends from high school and earlier to reach that milestone.  I then noticed in my character the tenacious hold of a specific feature, a characteristic familiar to me my whole adult life, but a feature that then seemed anachronistic or out of place.  I am referring to a deep craving for recognition–the seeking of achievement followed by accolades.  I’d always been driven by my imagining the rewards of affirmation following success.  As the years unfurled, this craving looked more and more like the exhibition of a wound, as opposed to just being part of the baggage of being male or a male member of this culture.  Nevertheless, it is a wound that sometimes requires attention.  It can be mentally distracting, this craving to succeed and have success noted and affirmed.

This drive would not be considered deleterious or even self destructive except that I sometimes interpret success to be recognition by my community, and there are times I feel my community to be the world.  You see, I don’t identify with being an American as much as I feel I am a member of this world.  I seek a communication that I’ve done something good, that I’ve served the world.  Obviously, this is not a particularly well-formed goal.  If my self esteem is connected to succeeding at this goal, which it indeed has been, then I clearly have a problem.  Getting the world to like me is pretty tough.  But I am not alone.

I’ve noticed since I hit 50 that many of the males that I’ve been closest to, men’s whose inner thoughts I hear on a regular basis, are experiencing similar feelings and drives.  When I was younger, perhaps 30 years ago, my own ambitions seemed far more inflated than my friends’.  Not so at this stage of my life.  More and more frequently I’ve noted that what my friends seek to accomplish is nothing less than a vast fame for that specific task that they are so focused on.  These goals vary from achieving political office, artistic accomplishment and business success to writing fame.  Predictably enough, very few of the women I know seem tormented by the same drives.  And, though my male friends are intensely aware of the gap between what they seek to accomplish and the position that they now hold, they are only vaguely self aware of the situation.  A repressed existential disappointment pervades our efforts.  Craving recognition, we deny it.

It is no mistake that a sense of existential dissociation has rooted itself in our Western psyches in the last 150 years.  No doubt there are many sources for this malaise.  One specific cause is that we carry within our 50,000-or-more-year-old genetics a facility for being an integral member of a community–a community of perhaps 90, 120, even 150 individuals–but no more.  From wandering extended family to relatively stationary band, our evolution as hunter-gatherers occurred within a small community of intimates.  Within that community, attaining status as one making vital contributions to the community’s survival was expected and attainable.  When members did what was necessary for the community to survive, the community continued.  And each of us on the planet now comes from an unbroken chain of individuals who so well performed their job that they left children.  In other words, I believe we males are genetically programmed to crave respect for a job well done and status for achievement, and that this craving for hundred of thousands of years could be fulfilled.  For those thousands of years every individual that we were aware of could reflect back to us that respect, for there were so few individuals in our world.

That world has changed.  Our genetics have not.

I have no doubt that the scale of my desire for recognition has been exaggerated by idiosyncrasies of my life history, but the basic thesis holds.  Observe the cult of celebrity that seems to drive popular culture in the West.  This universal focus on the famous few serves to tie together members of our culture and now humanity at large.  We still carry with us that smallish community of less than 150 with whom we are intimate on an ongoing basis, but these few folks are never touched or talked to, only viewed and listened to.  Everyone we know is intimate with the favored few.  In fact, the varying subcultures within American society can be most easily identified by which of the famous few that the subculture most reveres.

There is an answer to this conundrum, the question of how does a contemporary male (or female with the same drives) compelled to work to receive recognition from his community succeed at this goal if he identifies with a community of thousands or millions of people.  The answer lies with the origin of our species–the origin of language–and the evolution of culture and its eventual transition from the archaic hunter-gatherer bands into tribes with magic, civilizations with myth, to the rational and the present day.  We who desire recognition imagine, with language, the circumstances that would engender the feeling of acceptance that we so deeply crave.  It is the language we use within our mind that drives the imagination processes that solidify the concepts that we subscribe to and work for.  Why not just go directly to the feeling of acceptance, bypassing the use of language, imagination and conceptual construct?

Before language there was silence, or rather nature’s music–with no words.  Before language there was still communication and appreciation, just no verbalization.

There is also a place beyond language.

Beyond language is the place where the issue of success at achieving recognition vs. failure becomes a nonissue.  The reason that the drive, the compulsion to attain, becomes irrelevant is because by establishing the self in the place beyond language, we expose ourselves to unconditional acceptance.  Just beyond words lives awareness.  Yet not just awareness, but the kind of awareness we crave when we seek affirmation.  It is an awareness that makes the drive for recognition reveal its true face–the drive for acceptance–and that drive re-experiences its home in the place beyond language, cradled by unconditional acceptance.

And so the place beyond language, beyond the words that drive us to succeed in the venue of our choice, is strangely also the place before language, before we began that swim down culture’s deep, wide river.  There are strong bonds between the hunter-gatherer and today’s politician, businessman or artist.  These ties are not just the raw male craving for achievement.  We are bound by language, at its beginning and at its end, in those places where full awareness is revealed at the source and mouth of culture’s evolution and our own lives.

My wife’s ex-brother-in-law believes that he is an alien from outer space.  I am told that he likes to discuss this at family events, making small talk seem even tinier.  Confusing the metaphor with the thing represented is not uncommon in our culture.  Perhaps this is what makes the crazy people so irritable–that it’s so obvious that the “sane” are also closet nuts, taking seriously the oddest things.  Still, it feels to me like passing a wreck on the interstate when I pass time with someone deeply into psychosis, where the metaphor and thing represented have merged.

My mother used to live with a woman who believed that she was Jesus Christ.  Both were living in a mental hospital at the time.  My mother met many fascinating people in the mental hospital.  When she was being a mother–between hospital stays–I think she was bored and intimidated by the sane people.  I suspect she only truly became comfortable with me when as a teen I became intimate with altered states.  Perhaps my mom felt most understood by those whose identities were most in flux, who felt at least slightly paranoid and suspicious of society and culture.

After three years of college–having had enough of drugs and unable to decide between clinical psych and art–I took two years off to make up my mind.  I adored college.  To consider that it be over terrified me.  I found a garage apartment near the ocean rented to me by a man writing a screenplay for a movie he wanted to call Conan the Barbarian.  I worked as a waiter for an oceanfront resort.  During the daytime, I dreamt.  I was practicing lucid dreaming–being aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming.  I lived to dream and the dreams were powerful and profound.  Eating little (I ate my first meal upon arriving at work in the late afternoon) and rarely seeing friends, I was living the life of the unguided closet mystic.  I was not flirting with being crazy, but I remember romanticizing mental illness.  I was occasionally having benign hallucinations while awake.  My nonlucid dreams became more vivid.  I awoke one night sleepwalking in an alley in my underwear, believing my apartment was an ice cream truck.

My mother came down to visit during this period.  In the room of the resort where we were staying, I angrily confronted her on how failed I felt her to be as my mother.  She broke down sobbing.  I felt frightened, angry and ashamed.  I hadn’t even got the chance to get real pissed.  All Mom wanted was my understanding and sympathy.  The resentment I nurtured and carried felt stale and impotent.  I felt like an alien.

I adore James Thurber.  He makes domestic bedlam seem intimate and quaint.  Mental illness is not coy or cute close up.  Yet my memories are sometimes draped with a certain warmth and trust that were not in evidence when the memories were made.  Terror still lives inside me in a dim 1950s dining room, but the room is also occupied by more mature versions of myself who are not frightened by the night.  These older selves hold the little ones’ hands.  They all wear the same red plaid shirt.  I saw them all one afternoon while dreaming.

The children of the man I know from outer space, I suspect, are feeling that cold, sick fear that grasps you when you are seeing a dear one float out into the abyss.  A child knows, with no doubt, that what is wrong is connected to the child.  There is Jesus in every kid–a compulsion to believe that a parent’s life would be healed but for a defect in the child’s soul.  This makes the child into God, because the child believes he or she has control.  Almost every little human chooses to feel personally responsible for the love they do not experience but intuit should be there.  To exercise control over the fear and grief where the love is not, they sacrifice elation for beration.  Blame becomes the frame of reference–blame of self or others.

It’s not crazy to believe that you are Jesus Christ.  It’s crazy to think you’re Special because you’re Jesus Christ.  The walking wounded are everywhere, staggering in that sleepy, secular haze of blame, irony and dissociation.  Waking up from the haze frequently happened to me when dreaming–dreaming that I was aware that I was dreaming–in dreams that had me feeling fully alive–dreams where I’d fly though space, breathe beneath the water, die and be born again.

Dreaming those dreams had been almost the only times in my life when I was not at least somewhat confused.  There was no question that my experience was not real.  I could feel unlimited consciousness creating what my senses perceived. I knew that reality was relative, and that it would not be there when I awoke–paradoxical because it seemed so much more real to my senses than “reality.”  The brother-in-law thinking that he is an alien and the woman confusing herself with Jesus had gone and got the two confused.  Instead of being aware that they were dreaming while asleep–they were unaware, while dreaming, while awake–confusing the map with the territory–mixing the metaphor with the thing represented.

They let go of conventional reality and juiced up the traditional relationship between metaphor and the thing represented.  They chose to forget what is story and what is not.  They, and we, can lose ourselves in the story.  We have the ability to forget it’s a story.  We can dream while awake, having forgotten that it’s a dream.

When we lose control, we can choose to let go.  We can let go of the moment-by-moment struggle that we sane folk engage in day by day.  We can stop living the metaphor.  Things can stop representing other things.  What is–just is.  Something that an alien–or Jesus–might understand.

If Darwin’s theory of natural selection is the yang of evolutionary theory, focusing on the repercussions of a testosterone point of view, the fight/fuck spectacle of how evolution unfolds, then what might be the yin side of species transformation?

Estrogen seems to perform many functions, but a two-word summary might be affection/evaluation.  What might an affection/evaluation evolutionary theory look like, and how might that integrate with the fight/fuck paradigm?

First, many species do not have mothers that raise their young, or they exhibit females that choose among several males when deciding whom to mate with.  The affection/evaluation paradigm is limited to a portion of the biological world.  I have no idea how large a portion that is, or where on the branching tree of our Post Pre-Cambrian explosion history the affection/evaluation paradigm tends to congregate.

Might we suggest that it is the job of estrogen to proliferate possibilities and the job of testosterone to cull out winners?  This would seem contrary to our fight/fuck affection/evaluation relationship.  It is estrogen during sexual selection that is appraising and picking those that get to pass on their genes.  Consider that estrogen is not conducting an evaluation to limit the number of options but is creating new avenues of genetic opportunity by focusing on criteria without survival utility.  In other words, even when estrogen is declaring winners, it is widening the field of opportunity.

Consider that the Pre-Cambrian explosion may have been connected to an absence of testosterone.

I just Googled, asking which came first, estrogen or testosterone, and estrogen came up a hypothetical winner (click here).

What if there was a time when estrogen was the only hormone in the world?  An almost insane proliferation of biological alternatives would be the norm.  You’d get something like the Pre-Cambrian explosion.

We mammals are all born females, and we spend the first six weeks of our existence as estrogen beings.  (Birds are born male.)

If conventional evolutionary theory suggests the fight/fuck testosterone world view, perhaps it’s time we consider alternative theories of evolution that balance that with an affection/evaluation feel for how the world works.  We may discover it’s not only about survival of the fittest but about creation of that which is beautiful and loved.

We are all females in the womb until week six.  Almost half of us then transform into the male.

Does estrogen precede testosterone in the global biological parade?  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny only to a degree.  Does that degree include a single degree of separation between estrogen and testosterone with estrogen leading to testosterone?

The theory of evolution trumpeted in this work, summarized in the piece “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” outlines an alternative to Darwin’s theory of natural selection when exploring how human beings evolved.  My theory places a heavy emphasis on sexual selection, with human sexual selection hypothesized to be closely connected to individual estrogen levels.  Consider that there is also an alternative way of viewing biological evolution based upon an understanding of estrogen’s integral contributions to biological transformation instead of a focus on the survival rates of various strategies for procreating.

This goes back to the mostly nineteenth century argument between evolutionary theorists regarding what exactly determines the variability of progeny between two parents.  The theory of natural selection stated variability was random.  Darwin later suggested not.  Theorists tended to take one side or the other.  The two camps divided into two views of how the universe unfolds.

One side, those enamored of Occam’s razor, believed that god thinks like an engineer, or, better yet, how god thinks, or if he even exists, is not relevant.  The most elegant solution to a problem, the solution with the fewest steps, is obviously also the correct answer to that problem.  The universe reflects this male frame of mind.

On the other side are those for whom an outcome is more about the journey than the destination.  Occam’s razor is for those who need a shave.  Consider that our world was created by an artist, not an engineer.  A female artist.  A female artist that doesn’t care how fast or efficiently a thing can be accomplished but instead focuses on how elegantly a thing can reflect the larger whole.

Yes, elegance is important.  Yet, elegance without an intuition for interconnection isn’t art, it’s engineering.

William Paley was an English religious philosopher popular in the 18th century who wrote reverently about biology and spirituality.  He inspired a young Darwin and many other biologists of that epoch.  In a sense, the estrogen perspective as seen from this well-to-do, white male point of view was the bathwater thrown out when the baby of evolution was embraced.  The baby has not been bathed since Paley, at least by academia.  We’ve been raising this wolf child of a natural selection theory without the benefit of a woman’s touch, without periodic bathing to keep it clean.

Biological evolutionary theory has grown feral from lack of the estrogen perspective.

For the last twelve years, I’ve been exploring only how humans may have evolved, placing an emphasis on the estrogen paradigm by emphasizing the influence of female sexual selection.  How might our understanding of biological evolution change if we explored species transformation as a function of the female?

The work of the 19th century orthogenesists, Mivart and Cope, concentrated on what they observed as evolutionary trajectories, contractions and elongations of physical features as they manifested or withdrew from the characteristics of descendants at various stages of ontogeny.  No explanation emerged for how this process was engaged, though the fact it occurred, for many biologists, was not in dispute.

In human beings, I’m hypothesizing (see “Introduction to the Theory or Waves“) that estrogen and testosterone together constitute the foundation for an engine of biological and social evolution.  Testosterone drives maturational acceleration and delay.  Estrogen compels a focus on delay or, absent estrogen, no focus on delay.  The ebb and flow of these two hormones behave in a fashion very like what the 19th century theory of orthogenesis describes.

Several things have just plowed into my mind.

Animals behaving like their young, exhibiting young behavior or placating behavior, defuse or tamp down on potentially damaging high testosterone behavior of a possible opponent.  Demure, behaving childlike attracts a certain kind of male.  The exhibition of childlike behaviors both disengages potential opponents from combat escalation and can attract a member of the opposite sex.

Certain levels of relatively high estrogen in a human teenager might possibly be required to engage the testosterone surges that compel puberty.  The same process might be involved in the synapse-pruning testosterone surges compelling asymmetric cerebral lateralization in early childhood.

My “Theory of Waves” states that higher estrogen levels, when accompanied by higher testosterone levels, compel people to select childlike features in their mates, contributing to a neotenous evolutionary trajectory.

And, consider that estrogen both compels an attention/attraction to the child and a focus and evaluation regarding particular features in a mate.  Higher estrogen results in more attention on the young.  Higher estrogen leads to qualified conclusions on satisfactory mate characteristics.

I’m sensing a connection here, a relationship between this mix of proven and hypothetical dynamics and the way that estrogen impacts evolution.  There is a hidden “whole” that can somehow be expressed.  How do these things all connect?

Is it simply that estrogen controls testosterone?

Estrogen controls testosterone.

Estrogen manages evolution’s direction.  Testosterone provides the power.

Estrogen diffuses tension.  Or, absent estrogen, the fight takes place.

Estrogen sits at the doorways of ontogenetic transformation, triggering puberty.

Estrogen shields progeny, focusing on their needs.

Estrogen decides which male features get passed to the next generation.

Whereas testosterone compels that things get done, estrogen determines what those things are.

Still, there is a piece missing.  It has to do with the difference between what childhood is and what a woman is.  Childhood is more closely connected to a woman than a man even though creative forces in society often seem to revolve around males.  Perhaps this is because a woman’s body is more like a child’s body, and that we are all females until the transformation into males begins in utero.  There is a connection, an insight waiting here.

There have been studies conducted that note the testosterone levels in males at different levels of a primate hierarchy.  Conclusions correlated hierarchical positions with testosterone levels.  Higher thresholds congregate at higher hierarchical positions, lower thresholds at lower positions.

I don’t know of studies conducted that match up testosterone levels with maturation speed, delayed maturation being associated with lower testosterone levels.  Bouncing around the web, I find that there are sites that suggest it.  For example, males denied testosterone mature more slowly and live several years longer.

What interests me at this moment are studies that would observe changes in estrogen being accompanied by changes in mate-selective intensity.  Perhaps this would be easier to observe in humans.  With certain fish, male tails were artificially elongated, with the females becoming attracted to those longer-tailed fish.  What if the amount of estrogen or estrogen-related hormones were modified to increase or decrease with the female?  Would she show more or less compulsion to exercise choice?  Would she become more discriminating with higher estrogen?

Estrogen seems associated with at least two powerful female features, attention to the young and attraction to nuance.  They seem related in that attention to the young often revolves around attention to detail.  Perhaps the attention to the aesthetic details characteristic of sexual selection has its origins in focus on the young.  That would suggest that those species with females most engaged in sexual selection would be species where the young are nurtured for at least some time, or their evolutionary forebears were engaged in that process.

I mentioned this to Paul, and Paul suggested some females spend no small amount of time picking just the right place to place their eggs.  Might that pickiness be related to estrogen?  When the males do the nest searching, are those males exhibiting higher estrogen levels?

Nevertheless, with females having higher levels of estrogen than males, and females often engaged in sexual selection and feeling attracted to the young, one would expect variations in those behaviors with variations in the levels of estrogen or estrogen-related hormones in their systems.

It’s always a little weird when I conduct a search in Google for a correlation that seems pretty obvious to me, for example “estrogen” and “sexual selection,” and find my sites coming up in the top of the searches.  Ten years ago, I posted serpentfd.org.  There I discussed in detail the connection between testosterone and autism.  Conducting searches, I found that my sites came up first with no discussion of the connection on other sites.  Now, it’s a conventional connection what with the astonishing work of Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues.

I have been considering that testosterone, estrogen and autism are all related. (Click here).  A premise in that conjecture is that as estrogen levels change, so do compulsions to sexually select, with humans selecting for neotenous or childlike features.  This seems pretty basic to me.  I need to explore what the literature is on the subject.

For about a year and a half, I’ve been mulling over an idea that involves tracking ideas as they move across the web.  I posted that idea here.  I’ve talked to programmers and various other folks.  Responses have ranged from deep enthusiasm to a shrug.

Basically, a web application with social networking interface would allow anyone to create or pass on a message or document, and one could note participation in a project in a way that the breadth (number of participants), depth (degrees of separation), speed (number of people added in particular time periods) and span (geographic spread) of the idea would be traceable across the web through the display of detailed relationship hierarchy or lineage trees displaying the branching of the idea through the web.  A reports function would allow an ability to run comparisons of ideas across the web.  The structure of idea emergence, distribution and evolution could be examined.

Portions of this programming are up and running (click here) in the PJEP.org website, where online boycotts, petitions, eletters and fundraisers are traced across the various participating users.

It just struck me that this idea might make sense in the context of a Twitter or Twitter-like application.  Programmer Dave Larson mentioned that designing the application to work on cell phones might make sense.  What about designing it for cell phones exclusively, except when examining relationship lineage, and running reports to provide an overview?

A cell phone user would send a message of 300 digits or less.  The receiver would choose to pass on that message, as is, with an addendum of 140 digits or less, broadcasted to his or her group as in Twitter.  The beginning message is stored in the original user’s social networking page, along with the potentially very long string of addendums.

The original message is tagged.

When a message is received, it notes how many degrees removed the receiver is from the original message along with the gross number participating, speed and number of zips.  For example: 9/455/1.91/65.  With that information, the receiver can see how powerful the message is.

Clicking on the message, the receiver can travel to the originator’s social networking page and view the complete lineage display along with the words each person has added to the message.

When a person receives a message with the originator’s words, that person can view the last three messages added by people participating in the chain before adding his or her own words and passing on the message.

At any point in the process, a receiver of a message can push the “evolve” button, adding a tag to the communication and rephrasing the original message, rebranding it, continuing the lineage tree.

On the website, tags and messages can be examined, compared and evaluated regarding the power of different tags and messages to compel activity across the system.  Individual people can be noted as particularly powerful originators of ideas or disseminators of other people’s ideas.

This feels interesting to me.  What do you think?

In China, there is something like nine wholly different languages using the same writing system, unlike Europe where you have many similar languages using a similar language system.  A result is that in China, over a billion people can understand what people from other groups write but not what they say.

Over three billion people have cell phones.  Companies like Nokia are designing phones for the market of people that make about $4 a day.  There is not yet a universal language of communication, but there may soon be a universal communications interface that offers an ability to understand what any other person is saying.

I have a friend, a Florida Jewish commercial fisherman with a grouper vessel in the Gulf, who conducted a romance with a Mexican woman mostly by the Internet.  She spoke only Spanish.  Martin spoke only English.  They communicated by email, translating each other’s words using Internet translation software.  They are now married with a son.

Consider a world language, perhaps iconic and very basic, which allows all peoples to communicate.  It could be a language not unlike the Chinese characters universal to that culture.  It may not be necessary with translation software.  But if invented, it might be something children would embrace, particularly those children participating in many-culture multiplayer virtual communities.

Clearly, it is becoming easier to communicate.

Consider that the anecdotal evidence that our young men are taking longer to grow up is not just the grumblings of older generations.  Neoteny, or the prolongation of younger stages of ontogeny or growth into older stages over time, is a central feature of contemporary society.  Play is not just for children anymore.  Our young adults are spending sizable amounts of time playing with new technologies, technologies that enhance the neotenous perspective; they are egalitarian, horizontal, diverse and transparent.

In other words, there is a juxtaposition of new technologies with a new humanity.  People are becoming both more communicative and more capable of communication as people biologically transform, bringing early childhood stages of language acquisition capabilities into older stages where new communications technologies are being embraced.

Consider also that as these facilities with language prolong from early childhood to young adults, the profound, pervasive and natural creativity, affection and attraction to connection that characterize our small children will be more and more evidencing itself in our older youth.  As adult individuals neotenize, so will our societies, reflecting in their structures and conventions our modified human beings.

It is said that to see the future you have only to look at our children.  Might it be the case that the actual features of our children may be the future of our adults?