Conducting workshops at peace and justice conferences is becoming a warm weather routine.  Heading into a conference in Virginia this last spring, a series of events unfolded in a fashion different from what I had expected.

Good environmentalists that we are, Marcia and I share an old Echo.  The Echo has over 100,000 miles, so we rent cars to go any distance.  One of my greatest joys, a pleasure I inherited from my father, is to drive convertibles long distances to exalt in the long-haul high.  I picked up Budget’s default convertible, the Eclipse, and headed out.  It was a brand new car.  Marcia couldn’t join me, so I was on my own.

At the time, we were in the middle of a stressful, massive, 21-network, 800-organization PJEP upgrade (see pjep.org) that was experiencing upgrade hiccups.  My father’s wife, Marcie, was dying.  It was unclear how long she would stay with us.  It was not great timing to be taking a trip.  So it goes.

It was too cold to take the top down.  I tore across country, departing Evanston around 11:00 a.m. after the last of the handouts came out of our printer.  The drive took longer than I thought.  Evidently, I had miscalculated the miles.  Late that night, nearing Virginia, I heard a strange cracking noise, then a high pitch, then another cracking.  It seemed to be coming from the dashboard.

I arrived at midnight Eastern Time and climbed into bed.  I fell asleep.  At 12:30 a.m. Chicago time my phone rang.  Marcia told me my father had just called.  His wife, Marcie, had passed away.

Before falling asleep a second time, I resolved to briefly set up my booth, pile up the handouts and notify the conference organizers that I would not be able to conduct the workshop.  That next morning, that is what I did, lingering a while before climbing back into the Eclipse for the drive back home.  I asked the registration person how many they expected for the conference.  She told me 110 were registered.  I counted up the number of presenters and workshop leaders in the catalog.  There were 110.  There were as many as 11 workshops running concurrently.  Often 4 speaker and panel presentations with well known speakers were being conducted at the same time.  I overheard a conversation between frustrated presenters noting that they’d been booked to conduct two different workshops at two different places at the same time.  As conferences go, this one was looking like an occasion that would disappoint.  It seemed a conference with no direction.  Evidently, it had evolved to become a vehicle through which peace and justice leaders and authors could talk with one another.  There is preaching to the choir and then there is the choir singing to themselves.

I had funeral music on my mind.  I got back into the car, took the top down and headed home.  Services for Marcie would be the next day.

Trucks have difficulty climbing the mountains of West Virginia.  Long lines of cars crept along behind them as they geared slowly up the hills.  Hours later, I’d only made it as far as Charleston.  I tried going toward Kentucky.  This route worked far better until construction became the custom instead of the occasion.  After a few hours of construction, an accident backed up traffic for miles.  After maybe an hour of stop and go, I crawled up to an exit.  The map suggested I could cut through back country to Paris and over.  I headed north along one-lane roads.

It was horse country.  It looked like photographs of Europe with black wood fences, rock walls, old overhanging trees and astonishing attention to detail mile after mile.  Foals trotted on both sides of the road as the sun prepared to issue sunset colors.

…….

I remembered horse country in Connecticut in May, 1989, when I was driving with my friend Rick through back roads.  Topping a hill, I noted a horse leaping a fence, jumping onto the roadway to be struck by a car in the oncoming lane.  The mare was knocked down on its side, yet she quickly pushed herself up and continued sprinting directly in front of Rick and me as we approached the scene.  The horse was trailing streamers of flesh like kite tails.

A girl, perhaps 12 or 13, jumped the fence, yelling a name, and she ran across the road after the horse in front of our car.  The driver of the car in the collision, now stopped, opened his door, walked to the front of the car and inspected the damage.  All of this happened in perhaps 10 seconds.  As we passed the car, I observed the driver cursing and waving his fist above his head.

“Rick, did you see that?”

Rick replied, “Did I see the horse?  Of course, I saw the horse.  There are horses everywhere around here.”

“Did you see that car hit that horse?”

“What are you talking about?  I saw the horse.  Is that why that car was stopped?”

I wondered how Rick could not have noticed.

About five minutes later, we pulled into Rick’s driveway.  His wife sprung out the door, meeting me as I got out of the car and told me to call home right away.  Ok, I thought.  Someone died.  I called my wife.  My father’s mother, Myrla, had passed away.

How odd, I thought.  Myrla died right before my Dad and Marcie’s wedding.

……..

Arriving in Paris, Kentucky, I looked for the junction that would take me westward to Hwy 75.  I was confused.  Headed eastward for a ways, I realized I was going in the wrong direction.  Arriving back in town, I followed what I thought was the right road.  Again, after a few miles, I realized I was headed south.  I turned around.  Back in Paris a third time, I asked for directions.  Finally, headed west into a sunset, black fences on both sides of me, I was headed home.

It started raining.  Watching raindrop patterns, I noticed that the windshield was cracked.  There was a fissure through the glass coming up from beneath the dashboard, about a third of the way up the glass, and then arcing around toward the driver.  How could I have not noticed?  This crack must have been the source of the screeching, cracking noise from late the night before.

Before departing, I had calculated a 1300-mile journey over five days.  I ended up driving close to 1800 miles in two.  I felt like Odysseus returning from Troy, having had experiences I couldn’t quite put into words.  I felt confused.  At the open casket, I watched my father cry for the first time I could remember, perhaps for the first time in my life.  Driving from the graveside to the gathering of friends and relatives, I ended up driving in an incorrect direction.  Turning around, again I was off headed the wrong way.  This route was mere miles from where I grew up.  My directional sense seemed to have completely gone.  Whether it was Paris or home, I seemed not to be able to find my way.

Then, waking up the next morning, the grief.

It was when I first started growing my hair out in 1964, when I was twelve years old, that the arguments with my dad began.  They were mostly pretty mundane.  Occasionally, we chose an ancient issue and then, like moron lawyers from the planet X, proceeded to attempt to prove our positions.  My father was a girdle and bra manufacturer, an athlete, a Goldwater Republican who read westerns and science fiction.  I was a kid obsessed with comics.  I kind of wish I had some transcripts of those debates.

One argument was comprised of my expressing my certainty that the world had to change, was changing and that my father should change with it.  Dad expressed his confidence that if there was to be change, I would have to make it.  He emphasized that he wasn’t about to do anything differently.  There was a certain congruity to Dad’s communication.  As a closet obsessive compulsive, all his personal effects were arranged meticulously in patterned grids, rarely changing, with everything easily visible once you opened the drawers or stepped into his closet.  Arguing with a man with a mild case of OCD about the nature of change is a little bit like trying to make a cat into a vegetarian.  It can be done, but it doesn’t feel right.

I can’t say we agreed to disagree, but we both grew older and the context of each other’s sufferings became familiar.  Each divorcing a wife brought us much in common.  Right now, my father’s wife lies dying.  Our differences have grown trivial with time.

I remain a radical.  Yet my father’s position that he should not reasonably be expected to change is an argument that has acquired depth.  My slant is slightly different, yet informed by my love for my father and respect for the positions he holds dear.

There is the way things are right now.  Observing, respecting and honoring the way things are now allows me to see how things are changing.  There was a defect behind the assumption in the debates between my dad and me.  From my young eyes, it looked like there was a battle between stationary and change.  To my dad, things looked like they should stay the same.  We both assumed there was such a thing as not change.  There is no such thing as things not changing.

Change is everywhere.  Always.

As a radical, I do not experience complacency with things as they are.  I experience the ways things are as part of a process, an evolution that calls for my participation.  Like my father, we can choose to linger with what’s in the drawers and closets, paying closest attention to what seems the same.  Another option is to depart the house of hidden places and go outside and play.

The speed of change seems slow and deep.  I almost always misestimate when things will happen.  I’m usually off by at least a factor of 10.  Days end up weeks, weeks become years and years are really decades.

It is not unlike programming.  Programmers inevitably underestimate the time it takes to complete a project.  It’s difficult to fathom the webbing of interconnections developed when executing a design.  As a project progresses, it becomes necessary to bind not obviously connected, subtly interlinking features to create an effective, elegant, seamless whole.

I believed in 1970 that universal environmental awareness was inevitable and soon.  I defined soon as within the next 10 years.  Watching Reagan dismantle Carter environmental initiatives, I was not just appalled, I was confused.  The world seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.

Massive social change progresses in a fashion not unlike what is required to modify a highly complex piece of programming.  Every interconnection needs to be addressed.  It takes times.  Positive change takes time.

Naomi Klein outlines in detail in her book Shock Doctrine how the Right seeks change.  The Right compels transformation though destruction.  Severing connections in as many ways at as many levels as possible, Friedman’s gospel looks for situations where mass destruction can engender an environment where brand new programming can be applied.  Friedman, as a Social Darwinist, looks for opportunities where there are no environmental influences on corporate behavior, allowing corporations to “compete” with one another unrestrained, relieved of having to compete with the demands of labor, consumers, local communities or the environment.  Free markets, a facet of Social Darwinism, are markets free from competing with the portions of societies unable to influence legislation.

Friedman believed that it was the power of his ideas, theories which survived against their competitors, that made his conjectures true.  He refused to pay attention to the power of money to influence government within a larger context of a slow democratization of the planet outside the context of capitalism.  Friedman thought he saw the big picture when all he was seeing was the dollar bill.  It’s as if Friedman was a mathematician that refused to use the number 0 because it was invented by Arabs and then chose not to notice that his computations did not add up.

Radical change in the 60s meant change from the left.  The word has morphed to mean change from the right as it has become the Right Wing that is in favor of severing all connections to accomplish goals.  The radical Left has acquired some wisdom.  It is discovering that deep, systemic, positive change is about societal forces changing slowly and moving forward at one time.

Oddly, the progressive movement has acquired conservative credentials as it offers respect to changing slowly.  Slow change is the new radical.  Deep change is what it’s all about.

“Alberch et al. (1979) showed that between ancestor and descendant, development can either be reduced (resulting in paedomorphosis) or increased (resulting in what they termed peramorphosis). Each could be produced by three processes, involving: developmental rate change, change in onset time of development, or change in its offset time. In the case of paedomorphosis, reduced rate is neoteny; delayed onset time is postdisplacement; and earlier offset is progenesis. For the opposing case of peramorphosis, increased rate of acceleration; earlier onset predisplacement; and delayed offset hypermorphoses. These six processes could therefore describe all heterochronic processes. (McKinney, M.L. & McNamara, K.J (1990) Heterochrony: The Evolution of Ontogeny: Plenum Press, New York p. 11)”

It astonishes me that while the behavioral and social sciences have looked to physics as a model for how to engender robust accessibility as a science, a central theme that carries though the sciences has its origins in biology, along with a metric for measuring its effects. I refer to heterochrony with an emphasis on neoteny. I would suggest for a metric the social science or physical science equivalents of the following biological variables:

“Neotenous Physical Traits in Humans. Cranial flexure, head situated over top of spine, forward position of foramen magnum, forward position of occipital condyles, lack of heavy brow ridges, orbits under cranial cavity, flatness of face (orthognathy), contact between sphenoid and ethmoid bones in anterior cranial cavity, retarded closure of cranial sutures, large size of brain, round-headedness (fetal head index 72-82), small jaws, small face, large braincase, small teeth, late eruption of teeth, prominent nose, absence of cranial crests, thinness of skull bones, gracile skeleton, thin nails, nonrotation of big toe, relative hairlessness of body, lack of pigment in some groups, curvature of pelvic axis, lack of pronounced physical differences, anterior position of vagina, downward direction of vagina, persistence of labia majora, persistence of hymen, persistence of penile prepuce.” (Montagu, Ashley (1989) Growing Young N.Y.: McGraw Hill p. 23)

This work has suggested that heterochronic processes, what I would call the principle of waves, manifest across several scales, including biology, society, ontogeny and personal biography. I’d go a step further. It’s time physics be humbled a bit by being influenced by theory with a biological origin. Of course, physics has been deeply influenced by the assumption that there is such a thing as evolution, even though it has monkeyed with time, observing that time’s flow can be forward or backward. Consider the principle of waves applied to a discipline where a thing can be both a particle and a wave. This looks like major fun to me.

The principle of waves is based upon observing the effects of varying the rates and timing of maturation on progeny by noting the influence of the environment on the parents. Unlike natural selection where the traits of progeny are randomly generated, with the principle of waves the environment has an enormous amount to do with the features that are selected. Once selected, natural selection can then engage in its effects.

What would be the cosmological concomitant? How are universes born? How do they achieve their features? How do universes mature? What influences their maturing? Can a universe speed up or slow down? How do universes reproduce?

If we were to suddenly inhabit our bodies with no memories of parents, friends or family, what features of our existence could we rely upon to hypothesize the fact that we are social beings with long ancestral lineages, with an evolution driven by changing rates and timing of maturation?

Plopped down a mere 12 billion years into our universe’s unfolding, what clues do we have to what preceded us and what will likely follow?

I would start with what evidently influences the speed of our universe’s maturing. Has that speed changed? I would then ask what possible information or effects might enter our universe from outside our universe. Where are the universe’s boundaries, so to speak, that might allow influences from other dimensions? Light, for example, influences human evolution. What would be a universe equivalent of light?

Assuming that the universe has a parent or parents, and that new universes will be born, where do we look to discover what influences the universe we are in that the progeny universes would reveal as the results of that influence?

Because time is evidently malleable, I suspect that when searching for clues about how a universe matures, we should be observing changes in the behavior of time. Because speed and time are closely related, perhaps speed of expansion or fluctuations in that speed offer insight into universe maturation rates or timing.

Perhaps someone who knows something about cosmology and physics can consider some of these questions. As an artist that specializes in exploring the connections between ideas, I’ve discovered a limit in my personal universe of experiences.

What follows is an excerpt from Gould’s work. (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Belknap Press pp. 356-58).

“To support the argument that we evolved by retaining juvenile features of our ancestors, Bolk provided lists of similarities between adult humans and juvenile apes: “Our essential somatic properties, i.e. Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz. they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man” (1926a, p. 468). In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:

1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy (a phenomenon of complex cause related both to facial reduction and to the retention of juvenile flexure, reflected, for example, in the failure of the sphenoethmoidal angle to open out during ontogeny).
2. Reduction or lack of body hair.
3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair (Bolk argues that black peoples are born with relatively light skin, while ancestral primates are as dark at birth as ever).
4. The form of the external ear.
5. The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eye fold.
6. The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates).
7. High relative brain weight.
8. Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age.
9. The labia majora of women.
10. The structure of the hand and foot.
11. The form of the pelvis.
12. The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women.
13. Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures.
To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montagu (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958), and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montagu’s order (pp. 326-327) with some deletions and additions:
14. Absence of brow ridges.
15. Absence of cranial crests.
16. Thinness of skull bones.
17. Position of orbits under cranial cavity.
18. Brachycephaly.
19. Small teeth.
20. Late eruption of teeth.
21. No rotation of the big toe.
22. Prolonged period of infantile dependency.
23. Prolonged period of growth.
24. Long life span.
25. Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).

These lists from Bolk and Montagu display the extreme variation in type and importance of the basic data presented by leading supporters of human neoteny.”

………

Stephen J. Gould reintroduced the power of neoteny as an explanatory principle early in his career. Neoteny is one of the processes of heterochrony, where changes in the rates and/or timing of maturation influence the evolution of species. Tom Robbins best communicates neoteny’s meaning from a literary perspective when he focuses on the behavioral repercussions of manifesting certain features of infants into the behaviors of adults. Specifically, Robbins describes wild-eyed creativity, boundary busting, wonder, sensuality, curiosity and a compulsion to be close to creative sources.

Gould explores neoteny from biological and ontological perspectives. Robbins gives it a personal approach. It is not uncommon to explore society ontologically, comparing the unfolding of societal stages with the stages of human development. I am not aware of any explorations of society using neoteny as a frame of reference. I believe a reason is that the young, the disenfranchised, the poor, aboriginals and the Left would be invested with positive attributes having to do with progress contrary to an established paradigm that emphasizes that progress comes from the efforts of the powerful, the corporations, the government, the experienced and technological innovations discovered during war.

The ubiquity of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as THE theory of evolution has obfuscated evidence that suggests that natural selection is but the foundation theory, not the cathedral-like manifestation of how evolutionary theory actually unfolds. Fundamentalists continue to inflict damage on this society’s ability to understand the nuances of evolutionary process by attacking the foundation. Social conservatives provide scientific fundamentalists, theorists that believe exclusively in natural selection, platforms to defend natural selection by focusing only on that specific evolutionary theory. Media stoke the battle. Polemists like Richard Dawkins get a platform. All nuance, all theories complementary to natural selection are ignored. The cathedral is left empty while the foundation is explored for cracks. When Stephen J. Gould was alive and was lead defender of his discipline against creationist offenses, even he was so lowered by the debate that this master of nuance was left defending natural selection, ignoring the rest of evolution’s processes. Neoteny was never mentioned in these media exchanges.

Chris Knight, in his Blood Relations, notes how deeply science is affected by politics and societal beliefs. Gould wrote extensively on the same subject. Knight is an anthropologist. Gould was an evolutionary biologist. Less discussed is the frequency that medicine is affected by the constraints of our societal presuppositions. For example, autism, an evolutionary condition, is rarely discussed in an evolutionary context. They say all politics is local. Indeed, politics reaches down to our very genes.

This work seeks to demonstrate connections. The relationship between evolutionary biology and politics is multileveled with no discernable floor. Regardless, while looking down and exploring the causative relationship between biology and politics, we can still move the other direction, upward, observing the interdependence of theory. Let the media direct attention to the foundation. I’m headed to the cathedral bell tower where the music is being made.

When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the dining room door and then start lolling back and forth (north and south), and it careened more or less westward across the house. The history of the nearly 100-year old structure, since torn down, was represented in the pathway of the marble.

Tracing the path of societal ideas is compromised by an interpretation protocol that traces only the productions, not the origins, of the mind. We don’t think of biology or genetics as informing a discussion of the evolution of ideas. Exploring the connection between physical and mental when seeking an understanding of culture is not an intuitive choice. It has a lot to do with our not consciously knowing how we evolve biologically and societally. We are left watching the marble, guessing at what might have influenced its path.

No single variable influences our evolution more powerfully than changes in the rate and timing of maturation. Neoteny, or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants by the slowing down of maturation, is the single most influential factor in our divergence from chimpanzee-like progenitors. Variations in a mother’s testosterone levels while her child is in the womb adjust maturation rates, modifying the personality, physical features, strengths and interests of her child. For example, high testosterone levels in combination with other factors can lead to autism. An extremely powerful determinant of testosterone levels is the degree and duration of exposure to light.

Daily testosterone levels are influenced by diurnal light variations. In Africa and the Middle East, equatorial light patterns throughout the year are relatively constant and do not impact daily testosterone levels to variations of more than 30%. Those variations stay within a constant yearly range.

Africans made slaves and carried to America were forced to labor in the American South, a South subject to very different light cycles than their society of origin. With early 20th century migration to Northern cities, additional latitudinal differences came into play. Light varied seasonally and testosterone levels fluctuated wildly relative to the latitude of origin.

The Jewish Diaspora drew Semitic peoples away from regions near the middle of the earth to Europe, where light varies more radically, seasonally, the farther North one goes.

The pineal gland interprets summer as daytime and winter as nighttime, based upon a multimillion-year equatorial calibration in Africa. Africans in America, as well as Semitics in Europe and now in America, find themselves exposed to radically different light levels from their societies of origin. The result is fundamental change in maturation rates in both the directions of neoteny and acceleration because mothers’ testosterone levels are moving either up or down, depending on the season. Also influenced by the season would be when the mother’s parents were born, because they would be subject to the same light impact. Over generations, if relations are born in the same season, you can get multigenerational exaggerations of the pineal-influencing testosterone effects.

In African and Jewish cultures, you get far wider variations of personality, physical features, strengths and interests than you would get in a culture not impacted in this way. I hypothesize you’d also get more cases of conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering, OCD) and maturational acceleration (aggression disorders). Jews have had a huge influence on American culture in the arts and sciences. Blacks have had a huge influence on American culture in the arts and athletics. I would suggest this influence is directly related to both cultures having origins in or near Africa, near the equator, and having moved or been forced to move away. I predict that comparisons of African Americans and equatorial Africans living in their society of origin, and American Jews compared with multigenerational Israeli Jews, will exhibit notable differences in exhibition of conditions characterized by maturational delay.

Recently it was discovered that Somalis relocating to Minnesota are having children with autism a far higher percentage of the time than is normal. The change in light is an explanation. This being the case, the birthdays of these children exhibiting autism should be congregating in certain times of the year. (For other variables that cause autism, click here, here and here.)

Tracing a moving marble through the hallways of our minds is not as easy as noting the effect of a single variable. Still, the history of culture involves a lot more than the tracing of ideas. It also requires following the bouncing ball as it travels from continent to continent, guiding us to note the influence of light. How we evolve socially and biologically is integrally tied to the ideas we have, our creative proclivities and our inhibiting conditions. Noting light’s influence on this process, we might say that no small amount of who and what we are comes from above.

The relationship of theorists with their god is perhaps too subtle and complicated for clear patterns to emerge. I experience biology and biology’s manifestation as society, as spirituality, and I wonder that this reaction is not a common experience for a theorist.

I recognize that an early fear of death and a life characterized by frequent experiences of anxiety drove me to explore a place where I could feel embraced by interconnection and could become intimate with grace. Clearly, my theorizing designs an intricate metaphor for the world I choose to live in rather than the world I was intimate with when young. I suspect much theory for the creator represents a personal integration, a metaphor for what they seek to achieve in life. Perhaps theory for others is a vindication for an embraced world view. How theory reflects these nuances of personal journey and personality is fascinating to me.

Marian Annett, the British researcher who has done ground-breaking research on the relationship of handedness to disorders characterized by maturational delay, wrote me that my work seemed a “Just So” story or interesting conjecture with no evidence or proof. Indeed, except I would suggest that theorists are always only writing stories. Some of the stories are more useful than others.

That being said, a person’s relationship with her or his god has a lot to say about a person’s relationship with herself or himself and her or his unconscious. How much of what we project upon our deity has to do with the nature of how we relate to our unconscious? How do theorists’ relationship with their unconscious and their deity inform the power of the theories they create to model a reality characterized by, from my perspective, profound interconnection?

The late Stephen J. Gould was an agnostic. Jane Goodall is a spiritual Christian. These are the contemporary theorists/scientists I most respect. I find it astonishing that Gould, a genius pluralist and deep appreciator of almost anything he’d investigate, did not experience the presence of spirit. This suggests to me that the idea of spirit might be a useless concept. If an agnostic can live so rich a life and discover principles of life so deep as to reveal integral underlying processes to our existence, then maybe we can do without the idea of god. As long as one looks, sounds and behaves like someone embraced by spirit, why don’t we just drop the concept and just concentrate on experience and behavior?

I experience god. Gould experiences a glorious, profound interconnection. I don’t perceive a difference.

Darwin was also an agnostic. It seems that Darwin was not very forthcoming on the details of his spiritual journey, so many people have written about what they thought occurred. He was wracked by chronic illness, lost a child and was terrified of being vilified or misunderstood. Darwin evidently did not die a happy man. Yet Darwin opened doors to understandings we’ve hardly begun to integrate. From his writings, you cannot but perceive his deep appreciation, perhaps gratitude, for the world around him he so keenly grasped.

And so I wonder about those scientific productions invested with a beauty and symmetry words cannot describe. I wonder about the creators of those productions and the relationship between them and their science, what I would call their art, and their own life.

“The multi-male species show less sexual dimorphism and specialization, and capacities for group-living and organization are obviously being selected for rather than mere strength or endurance or display.  High-ranking female groups, for example, will often not tolerate males who are too aggressive and competitive, and these leave the group and become solitaries.” (Fox, R (1983) Sexual selection, female choice and human kinship. Cambridge Anthropology 8, 3, page 8.)

Differences between the American Left and Right and how the Left and Right organize likey reflect social structure and sexual selection proclivities.  The only contact I have with the Right is reading Right Wing blogs, so my observations are one sided.  Still, a couple of interesting things I’ve observed.

In the Chicago area, there was an activist that dressed for all events and meetings with an oversized Uncle Sam hat and American flag as cape.  Over time, “Fred” had alienated a number of his peers, largely through expressions of inappropriate belligerence.  Over six feet tall without the hat, with hat he towered above all other people at an event.  His red, white and blue display could be easily picked out in a demonstration of thousands.  Fred sat in the first row of all events, almost without exception.

From a biological perspective, Fred was locked into a frame of reference typified by display and single male society.  Uncooperative on almost all levels, Fred used space to exhibit.  It was not uncommon to observe Fred preening, chest out and shoulders back, strutting back and forth in front of a large group.  Fred had no allies.

Perhaps I demean myself and Fred by objectifying another activist to make my point, but this point seems interesting enough to me to take the risk.

When Fred was permanently expelled from the group that he most frequently visited, it was the women that took the lead.  When confronted with his inappropriate behaviors by a woman standing before him outlining the reasons for his expulsion, Fred was uncharacteristically speechless.  After the vote, he left without a word.

In earlier blogs, I’ve shared my hypothesis that human sexual selection deeply informs huge swaths of contemporary culture.  It’s as if humans are incapable of turning off their proclivity to evaluate based on nuanced differences of the way things look, sound, feel, taste and smell.  Brains made bigger to both display and evaluate display slowly went extreme via runaway sexual selection, and now we evaluate everything in the way we only formerly evaluated our mates.  Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind is a superb work describing this dynamic in detail.  Consumer culture is an extension of human sexual selection, explaining in no small part the extraordinary variety of sex and violence broadcasted through every medium.

Consider that consumer culture might be an empowering experience for brains craving targets to appraise.  Unlimited consumer alternatives address an ongoing desire to evaluate or demonstrate to procreate.

Fred is an extreme example of a person behaving in ways to suggest a deep-seated investment in viewing the world from a sexual point of view.  We all are 24/7 devoted to the planet primate.  The rest of us in that room when Fred was rejected from the group were acting out our chosen roles as sexual beings.  On the left, we tend to be more subtle as we go about exercising our compulsion to evaluate our experience from a brain made big to gain a mate.  As they say, all there is, is love.

Biologically, there is no difference between sex and love.  If you’re like me, and everywhere you look you see biology, the next step is love, and then spirituality becomes just another name for the experience.

Sitting down to write this morning, I engage in my usual routine.  I compose these entries about 100 postings in the future, providing time to have them reviewed by an editor.  Before posting the day’s blog, I read it over and make final changes, it being almost three months since I was intimate with that piece.  Then I read over the pieces to post later in the week, written a season ago.  Then I read over and edit the blog essays produced in the last two days.  Finally, I prepare to write.

Rereading and editing work from 100 days ago and from the last couple days presents me with enough time to experience an evolution of the work over time, suggesting additional facets or perspectives, an opportunity to swim through a number of complementing ideas, and it presents me with exposure to new ways of expressing the foundation themes that flow through the larger work.  Often, more than one principle asks to be played with, and so I’m left searching for ways to express commonalities between melodies with no obvious ways to play with both at once.  Not unlike taking both a nine-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl to a Cubs game.  The challenge is to be with both of them at the same time, providing both a positive experience.

I sometimes find myself writing about the process of writing.  I’m observing the creative process.  This piece would be an example of writing about writing about the creative process, one additional step removed.  Dissociation is another theme that carries through these contributions, almost 150 pieces done to date.  Both a strength and weakness, dissociation allows perspective yet isolates from connection.  Dissociation is paradoxical in that it provides for self awareness yet forms the foundation for alienation.

There have been times in my life when I wielded insight like a shield, using sudden understanding either as an excuse to withdraw from the world or as a barrier between another person and me while I felt incapable of communicating what I understood.  Intimacy and friendship is 99% nonverbal.  Insight can be 100% nonverbal.  Making insight a communication that encourages intimacy is nearly impossible unless you make it art.

Sometimes a metaphor emerges that goes a long way toward making a point that would not sharpen.

Consider Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the concrete foundation for a one-story house.  We do not usually choose to live on concrete slabs.  I’ve only seen this at times of disaster or in third world countries where mere survival is a consuming issue.  Driving past New Orleans in October 2007, I observed fields of foundations where houses used to be.  A foundation was designed to be a beginning.

Upon this foundation, natural selection, are placed supporting internal walls.  Imagine that with a bird’s eye view, looking down, you see an X dividing the square foundation into four rooms.  Two longs walls run from corner to corner, creating this X.  This building is not supported by external walls, but by internal room dividers.  One wall is sexual selection.  The other wall is Lamarckian selection or how individuals influenced by their lives and their environment manifest those experiences in their children.  Now clothe the structure with walls and a roof.  That would be culture.

There are four sides to this building:  science, art, spirituality and popular culture.  Each side has its windows.  The side we’re calling spirituality has a door.

Walking inside, we note that each room has two doors providing access to each of the two contiguous areas.  In the center, where the four rooms and two long, internal walls meet, is a spiral stairway.  The stairway leads up.

In the attic, beneath the roof, still within the confines of culture, we achieve a dissociated point of view.  Looking down, we observe how the various pieces all connect and support one another.  Looking up to the roof, we see a skylight that illuminates and warms the four rooms by providing a place for the sun to shine down the stairway.

There is little argument that evolution happens.  There is little argument that natural selection forms the foundation for how all living plants and creatures procreate.  But, a lot more happens besides survival.  There is transcendence.  Observing how the house is built allows us to understand how both survival and transcendence are integral to how and where we live.

Sitting down to write this morning, I engage in my usual routine.  I seek to understand how we are all connected.

A few entries ago, I proposed a predictable display of variation of the physical features in the children of a family over time as a mother’s testosterone level slowly rose with age. This prediction is in accord with a founding premise of this work, that our evolutionary past manifests in the present in more or less the degrees that a boy’s maturation rate is delayed and a girl’s maturation rate is accelerated. The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely this manifestation will be the case.

I would additionally suggest that because social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals would emerge, it would be with the youngest sons and daughters. In addition, the youngest kids would most likely evidence the features of matrifocal social structure. One statistic I would expect to see is higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children. I would even suggest that because social structure is correlated with testicle size in primates, youngest sons should show incrementally larger testes than oldest sons.

Observing that the Left more often exhibits the features of a matrifocal social structure, I would additionally predict that as a mother has more children over time–a mother tending toward higher testosterone levels already growing higher as she grows older–that the emergence of conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as left-handedness, autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will occur more often in liberal families than in conservative families, particularly among the youngest children. However, findings would be skewed by the fact that a child born with severe autism might be the first and last child those parents choose to have.

Because testosterone levels in the mother control maturation rates in her children, with her testosterone levels growing higher with time, and because maturation rates control evolutionary trajectories, following the tenets of heterochrony, or the principle of waves, and because social structure as evidenced by sexual selection propels societies in specific evolutionary directions by young adults choosing particular maturation-rate tendencies in their partners, then we should be able to see in families with several children a reflection of our recent evolution.

Sorry about that. Trying to condense the evolutionary relationship between ontogeny, society and biology in a single sentence is a bit like pantomiming the history of WW II.

When everything is connected, it can be difficult using language–a medium that provides only the option of communicating in narrative threads–to describe processes that deeply influence us on multiple levels. Politics is directly related to evolution. I expect everything is directly related to everything. Sometimes it takes no small number of words to show how two not obviously connected things are connected. Perhaps a dancer, an artist who communicates in three dimensions, is best qualified to explain how things really work.

Black culture in the United States maintains many of the features of matrifocal social structure.  Speaking in generalities, the African-American woman is comfortable wielding authority, is often the head of family and frequently engages in serial monogamy.  It would be interesting to explore studies that examine the social structures of the communities of origin of American blacks.  Understanding the influence of the slave experience upon African indigenous societal orientations could offer deeper understandings of what the American black wrestles with when creating family.

George Lakoff discusses differences between the Left and Right Wings of the American political community.  One way to parse out contrasts, complementary to Lakoff, is by noting the tendencies toward patriarchy present in the American Right vs. a matriarchy orientation on the Left.  The young man marrying Bush’s daughter asked Bush for his daughter’s hand.  I imagine this custom is far more common among conservatives than liberals.  On the left, personal choice and woman’s choice occur at many levels.  The American black community fits well within the progressive movement because they share a social structure perspective.

A lot has been written about the dynamic leading up to and supporting white racist attitudes toward blacks in the United States.  One more thing to consider is deeply contrasting social structure frames of reference.  In a homogeneous culture, there is variation from the conventional social structure orientation, variation often manifesting in the political polarities.  Not surprisingly, people usually pick mates from a pool of people that share their politics.  In the United States, where large minorities have so little in common with the ruling white majority, differing social structure further polarizes the two communities.

Among the list of features that blacks display and that racist whites assign to the category of “other”:  most blacks subscribe to very different ideas of an ideal mate, how to pick a mate, raise a child and how the individual fits into the community.  Social structure orientation is perhaps the biggest difference between American blacks and the American Right, a foundation for white prejudice rarely discussed and little understood.

In other words, if blacks looked and sounded the same way as whites and there were no disparity in income, there would still be relatively little traffic between the American Right Wing and African Americans.  Social structure, how we pick our sexual partners and engage in family, is perhaps the single most powerful feature informing the nature of our communities and the place of the individual within society.

“…in the chimpanzee, several males mate frequently with the oestroud females, so that each male has to deposit enough sperm to compete with the presence of sperm from other males. For the chimpanzee, therefore, we hypothesize that selection will favor the male that can deposit the largest number of sperm; thus the volume of spermatogenic tissue and hence the testis size is far greater in the chimpanzee than in the gorilla or orangutan. If this is correct, it implies that primates in which more than one male mates with each oestrous female should have larger testes relative to their body weight than those with single-male breeding systems. We have tested this prediction across a wide range of primates, and the results support the hypothesis. The relative size of testes may, therefore, provide a valuable clue to the breeding system of a primate species.” (Harcourt AH, Harvey PH, Larson SG, Short RV (1981) Testis weight, body weight and breeding system in primates. Nature 293: p. 55)

It is the anomalies that hold hidden treasures. It is the things that don’t fit in that suggest where doorways to new understandings are located. As we study human evolution and develop a theory that explains anomalies, with the hope of being useful, we find that an issue has emerged that suggests a productive new direction because it doesn’t fit in. This issue has to do with neoteny in contemporary social structure.

Asian cultures and physiologies are different from African cultures and physiologies in very specific ways that put them on opposite ends of a societal manifestation of neotenous characteristics. This difference is predictable because the two societies often exhibit opposite social structures. We are talking in generalities here.

Still, there is the conundrum. Asians exhibit far more neotenous features than Africans while Asian societies are far more patrifocal.

Whereas in a matrifocal society, neoteny focuses on the male in a way that results in an emphasis on cooperative males operating within a horizontal social structure, in a patrifocal society it is the females that are chosen for their neotenous characteristics, tending to be more docile, while the males combat one another for position in a stratified society.

Asian culture is classically patrifocal. These societies are highly stratified, and women are repressed with high incidence of female infanticide. Males battle for position with a heavy emphasis on status.

African culture is a mix. There is evidence to suggest that until relatively recently, many African tribal cultures were matrifocal in orientation. One physiological manifestation is the relatively large size of African male testicles relative to Asian males. This size difference suggests relatively recent, intense male competition for females in a matrifocal social structure. Relatively small, Asian male testicle size fits with a culture that is highly focused on male control of female procreation–less sperm required.

We are not discussing testicle size in connection to how much testosterone is produced or how aggressive a male is in that society, but how testicle size relates to sperm production. The more power or choice a woman has in society and the freer she is to choose her mates, the more sperm the male requires to insure that he is able to compete. In societies where the father is not known, copious amounts of sperm are required. Charm is far more important in a matrifocal society than in a patrifocal society. In a patrifocal society, it is more necessary to vanquish an opponent physically, control procreation through male head of family and use societal mores to compel a woman to mate with a single man.

In many African societies, males were, and to some degree still are, chosen for their ability to succeed in a matrifocal culture. Predictably, they have relatively large testicles. The females do not exhibit particularly neotenous characteristics. In an Asian society, females are chosen for their docility and cooperative tendencies, males for their facility and commanding authority. Females exhibit highly neotenous physical features.

This description all makes perfect sense. But why does the Asian society as a whole exhibit highly neotenous features relative to African societies?

“Mongoloid women accordingly tend to be more paedomorphic [neotenic] than women of other groups. Not only do women of Mongoloid origin present more prominent and rounded foreheads, but the bones of the whole skull, and, indeed, the whole skeleton, are more delicately made. Mongoloids generally tend to be shorter, and have larger heads, including larger brains — 150 cc by volume greater, on the average, than Caucasoids. The face is flatter, the jaws and palate smaller, the nose smaller and flatter at the root (the miscalled “bridge”), and the slight fold of skin over the median part of the eye (the epicanthic fold) is preserved. The body is less hirsute, and there are fetal traits….The differential action of neoteny has produced some peculiar effects. For example, among the highly neotenized Japanese the males’ upper and lower jaws have been reduced in size while the teeth have not. The result has created a disharmony in many males in the form of extreme crowding and malocclusion of the teeth.” (Montagu, Ashley (1989) Growing Young N.Y.: McGraw Hill p. 40)

Societies at the social structure extremes select for neotenous females or neotenous males. Evidently, selecting for neotenous females results in highly neotenous features overall, with both sexes being influenced. Yet, over the course of human evolution in the last few million years, until recently (last 10,000-25,000 years) we have been selecting for neotenous males, with our whole species drifting in a neotenous direction without nearly as much visual neoteny being evident as in Asian culture.

If anybody has ideas, please tell me what they are.

Perhaps a solution has to do with the difference of choosing behaviors only vs. behaviors and appearance. Our species has evolved by choosing males that exhibit neotenous behavior and females comfortable with wielding authority. Asian cultures highly value female cooperative, neotenous behavior, males that are comfortable commanding authority and a number of female physical characteristics such as large eyes, light skin color and petite build. Is it possible that a culture-wide fixation on female neotenous appearance rather than culture-wide attention to those that are highly skilled in dance (see earlier posts) has so influenced Asian societies that both men and women exhibit highly neotenous characteristics?

Last thought. In Asian societies with stable hierarchies built around the long-term maintenance of irrigation works, males that will cooperate with hierarchical conventions perhaps are males displaying neotenous characteristics after all. Battling for position, they compliantly honor the station they achieve. In an anomalous fashion, both Asian sexes exhibit neoteny in a context of a highly patriarchal culture.

[On January 10th a resolution to this riddle was posted here, with continuing pieces discussing these issues located here.]

Evolution manifests in at least four scales or levels:  biological, societal, ontological and personal.  A central theme of these entries is that there are powerful connections between the different scales that evolution uses to unfold.  One connection is that the different scales share the same processes, one of them being neoteny, which is part of heterochrony, or the principle of waves.

This work explores various conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, with a focus on what I’ve called left spectrum.  I believe that the theory or theories of evolution we consider inform our understanding of several medical conditions.  In other words, understanding exactly how we got to where we are can be very useful when addressing medical and psychological anomalies.

Another theme that carries through these entries is that science and spirituality are closely tied, particularly when exploring issues revolving around the unconscious and consciousness.  This work follows those connections to where they manifest in evolutionary theory, particularly where they link to discussions of art, play and creativity.

The study of neoteny in humans is also the study of creativity.  Studying how evolution is informed by creativity links to a number of areas, including story and myth, language, metaphor, art and childhood.

My professional training was as an artist/illustrator.  My profession is managing a web development firm specializing in two different areas.  We serve commercial firms, almost 400 clients, making it possible for small businesses to gain new customers with simple, small websites.  At the same time, we build highly sophisticated social change network-building web applications specializing in empowering local peace, justice and environmental organizations and the members of those organizations.  This work shows how evolutionary principles inform our understanding of how business relates to society.  In addition, these blogs show how an understanding of evolution offers guidance on the building of online tools to encourage social change.

Another connection among the different scales that evolution uses to unfold is that we can notice that the specifics of the evolutionary theory we believe in influences how society is managed, and vice versa.  Specifically, by allying ourselves exclusively with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we encourage the manifestation of Social Darwinism in its present iteration as free market philosophy.  With corporations controlling our access to ideas, it is more difficult to observe the many places that natural selection fails to offer satisfaction as an explanatory principle, particularly when interconnection and cooperation emerge in ways that could explain the world we’re in.

To me, this stuff all feels so closely connected as to be all the same thing, viewed from a number of different directions with lots of different names.  Expressing the experience that everything is connected can involve communicating a spiritual perspective while manifesting an understanding of evolution.  I explore the biological, societal, ontological and personal, showing interconnections.  At the same time, my vocation, interests, family, friends, political activism and spiritual point of view become interconnected as I experience (sometimes more, sometimes less) a personal integration.

It’s all connected.  We’re all connected.  Indeed, evolution can be fun.

“Humans and chimps are almost identical in structural gens, yet differ markedly in form and behavior. This paradox can be resolved by invoking a small genetic difference with profound effects—alterations in the regulatory system that slow down the general rate of development in humans. Heterochronic changes are regulatory changes; they require only an alteration in the timing of features already present.” (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Belknap Press. p. 9)

Monkeying with our regulatory system evidently helped make us what we are. By engaging in neoteny, or the prolonging of infant states into the adults of descendants, we have evolved ourselves large brains, small jaws, a proclivity to wonder, a compulsion to play and an inclination to be dependent. Altering regulatory systems can have profound positive effects if creativity is your goal.

With the economy quivering on a brink, there has been no small amount of talk about the effects of the last generation’s adjustments in the regulatory system of the American economy. Much discussed is how much freedom large corporations are allowed and if transparency and accountability are necessary if large corporations prefer they not have to be so constrained. Social Darwinism has a new name. Free markets have allowed those with the most power and the greatest wealth the opportunity to write the laws and manage the agencies that were designed to monitor and regulate how America conducts its business.

Regulatory legislation over the last thirty years provided the older, established, more powerful corporations within American industry the advantages that they requested to make them more “competitive.” With fewer constraints, less government oversight, fewer inhibitions to growth, less accountability to labor, consumers or the environment, corporations found it easier to make money. Free markets meant an opportunity to be less impacted by those factors in their environment that informed their growth and their existence. Evolutionarily, corporations lobbied for and received a less free market, one with far fewer interconnections with contiguous areas in their environment. As in Social Darwinism, business wanted and received special treatment, legislation targeted to inhibit the effects of competing influences, such as labor, environment, safety, consumer rights and taxes, so that there would be an infrastructure that the corporations could freely use.

Opaque to the interconnected, interdependent nature of evolution, “free markets” behave as if entitled to freely destroy the ties that bind them to a healthy society if it results in their short-term gain.

Inevitably, disconnected from their environment, they wither.

Regulation is not only central to our biological evolution; regulation deeply informs how our society evolves. Deregulation is another name for regulating from the top down. It’s time to regulate from the bottom up. Adjusting regulation to unfold features existing at the bottom to appear at the top is what is called neoteny. This way is how human beings evolved. This way is how society evolves.

Regulate to encourage growth at the level of the individual, the family and small business. Offer resources to the lowest level of authority, and creative surges will result. Free college education, free health care and free child care are deregulating in a direction that puts power in the hands of the formerly powerless, powerless because government regulation preferred to provide corporations no constraints and allow them to be separated from their environment.

Social Darwinism and free markets are not natural. They are philosophies that support disconnecting business from their environment to achieve short-term business gain.

Free services such as health care, education and child care all combine to encourage interconnection and interdependence by providing healthful forms of interaction. By encouraging the lowest level of societal authority, we invest in the area where we are most creative, our children, at the level where we can have real impact, the individual.

We evolved from a chimpanzee-like progenitor by encouraging the features of the youngest to manifest in adults by picking mating partners that were young at heart. We evolve as a society by manifesting the characteristics of the individual in our institutions, by encouraging businesses that respect individuals. Re-regulating business to care for the individual is our evolutionary imperative. We do so by regulating business to have a heart.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve seen images in the bathroom floor. While sitting on the toilet, I have noticed that the cracks, blemishes and patterns resolve themselves into mostly faces. Sometimes I see faces with bodies. Often I see cartoon-like faces, and sometimes realistic pictures emerge. It happens that the same images pop out over time like friends saying hello, occasionally over periods of years.

While looking out the window, I see these faces in leaves and trees. The wind invests the characters with life, sometimes with moving jaws as if they’re talking. Usually, I’m thinking of something else when I notice that I’m observing a character that my mind has constructed out of the foliage. It’s rare I just decide to find the faces. I’m usually seeing them, and then I abandon the thoughts I have so that I can offer them my attention.

When I was a child, the dark green-speckled bedroom wallpaper would resolve itself into snakes and other creatures that I’d feel scared of when the pictures began to form. I remember whole walls vibrating with chattering animation, soundless yet alive. Mesmerizing, terrifying.

I discovered, maybe twenty years ago, that I can suggest to my unconscious a particular animal, and then that animal will appear in the leaves or in the floor. I can request a squirrel and my unconscious will quickly piece together the random information offered by the foliage or the floor and create the squirrel.

My relationship with my unconscious, over the years, has acquired a character of its own. It’s as if my unconscious is an amalgam of the dog I grew up with, a boy, an elfin bringer of gifts, a wise mother and an inscrutable grim reaper. Mostly, my unconscious seems to want to please me. It sincerely hopes I am able to understand the clues provided me so I can accept a wonder-filled life. My unconscious seems astonishingly young, yet patient and wise.

On occasion, I ask my unconscious questions, and it will respond in the affirmative with a spine chill. Spine chills, those vibrations of the backbone, are communication of affirmation. If my unconscious approves, I receive a chill. Nonapproval or no opinion, I receive no chill. If stumped by something I’m researching, I can ask for guidance in the form of yes or no questions. If I’ve put myself in a receptive state, I receive answers to my inquiries.

In other words, I am not the creator of the words I write or the patterns I observe. I’m just a guy lucky enough to be aware that I’m adored by this creative force. I usually think it’s me, not my unconscious, doing the writing and having the insights. I know better.

If my conscious self is simply an artifact of unconsciousness, as I suspect, then evolution is quite possibly deeply informed by deliberate, unconscious intent. Differentiating science from consciousness seems profoundly arbitrary. Why separate what we can see from what we can’t?

We observe the creationist compulsion to evangelize an ancient, Middle Eastern mythology.  Ironically, fundamentalist Christians hawk the origin myths of Jews, who as a people hold science almost sacred.  Popular culture and the news promote creationism or intelligent design as a classic contrast to established, scientific paradigms of evolution.  What a truly bizarre time we live in.  We don’t examine natural selection, one of several theories of evolution that emerged in the 19th century, in the context of alternative theories of evolution that would serve to deepen our understandings of the circumstances of our evolution.  Instead, popular culture and the news compare this single theory of evolution with a mythology mostly rejected by the people that felt compelled to write it down.

Freud subscribed to evolutionary theory when exploring correlations between childhood development, the evolution of our species and a possible societal manifestation of the process when he observed the societal transformation arc from aboriginal to contemporary culture.  Einstein explored evolution over cosmic time as he and others parsed out how the universe originated and then evolved.  Jewish intellectuals have found it easy to embrace a world characterized by evolution and transformation.  Jewish culture experiences reverence for the abstract and is perhaps obsessed with how experience is evaluated or judged, with an emphasis on justice.  I would suggest that it is this ancient Jewish compulsion to evaluate in a context that places the self in a coveted position that prevents us from understanding evolution.

The Left reflexively withdraws from suggestions that one culture is more evolved than another culture and rejects societal priority because to do so suggests special status for the most modern societies.  Yet, the Left manifests a confusion that runs rampant through a dozen academic disciplines while embracing a deeply held chauvinism carried though the centuries by the Jews.

I would suggest the Left is correct.  Contemporary, modern culture is no “better” than aboriginal culture.  But modern culture does manifest a more subtle and complex stage of evolution.  The reason this manifestation often feels dissonant to Left sensitivities is because of certain misconceptions we retain about what evolution really is, a misconception retained by almost all of evolution’s supporters.

It is the belief that where we are in time right now is better than the time that came before.  We moderns are chauvinists of time.

Consider how evolution can operate without things getting better over time, but becoming more complex and subtle.  Consider evolution that manifests a succession of present states, all equal, all embraced.

Remove time as a prejudice and experience evolution from a Zen perspective, rather than from the ancient Judaic chosen position of the self.  Christians didn’t just embrace patriarchal myths of origin; they stole the concept of the chosen few.  It was established that the time we’re in is better than the times before.

It has been recorded that Spencer’s coining of the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe natural selection annoyed Darwin because the phrase diverted people’s attention from the depth and complexity of Darwin’s theory.  Little discussion has focused on the way that the word “evolution” has been deprecated by the idea that advancing time improves the character of what transforms.

In other words, we are deeply prejudiced by our inexperience with the relativity of time.  Indeed, evolution exists.  It exists in the context of a never ending present, with no judgments, no beginnings and no ends.

Observing the behaviors of children when as many as a dozen may be working with me on sand castles, I see that their ages, gender and disposition all influence how they participate in the project.  For example, some are inclined to concentrate on infrastructure, spending their time digging holes.  Others focus on the building of towers.  There are the artists and there are the engineers.

There are boys fascinated by the havoc caused when the ocean is allowed to enter the project through a channel.  They watch closely as walls erode and towers fall.  Often they have a narrative, spoken out loud, that involves a civilization, with all pitching in to prevent imminent catastrophe.

Some children surround themselves by the century they’re in.  Their hands are bulldozers, moving earth to make room for the hand-like cranes.  Other kids observe towers erected in the Middle Ages, and their hands and fingers are carriages moving up and down the slopes.  To some, usually girls, the sand castles are the homes for fairies.  The scale is normal; the inhabitants are small.

A dedication to dark places seems to be characteristic of certain kids.  They dig deep into foundations beneath the towers to create places for imaginary people to live.  Fascinated by tunnels, they look for opportunities to create connections beneath the earth, places where more than one doorway will lead to the center.

A few are spellbound by craft.  They want to know how the towers are made and practice hand positions to achieve the various fashions so that sand will reproduce a fairy gothic spire.  Often their hands are so small that they can’t haul as much dripping sand as they would like to haul so that they can reproduce what is in their imagination.  I’ve watched children concentrating for hours on perfecting their technique.

There are the natural leaders, usually girls, exercising a variety of techniques to berate and cajole peers into cooperating with a larger agenda.  Girls tend to exhibit more variety and patience in the ways that they guide the behavior of their contemporaries.  Bossy boys, tired of being ignored, resign from positions of authority and become independent contractors.

Some children are enchanted by the juxtaposition of found objects on the beach and their integration into the structure taking shape.  Leaves become awnings, sticks doorways and smooth glass shards become windows.

The visionaries are looking at the project and seeing what it will be like hours (centuries in sand castle time) in the future.  These kids usually engage in digging channels and heaping up the sand to create mountains that future castles will sit upon.  These kids often don’t talk for long periods of time as they concentrate on getting the present to line up with the picture in their head.

For some kids, it’s about the commotion, the conversations and the society of children growing up around the project.  These kids learn everybody’s name, and their sister and brother’s names, and where they come from, how long they’re there.  They want to know what everybody had for lunch.

Often the little ones don’t know what to do as they observe the other children playing.  Some are not talking yet.  They run back and forth between the ocean and the channels with buckets filled with water, raising water tables and causing walls to cave in.  Boy toddlers, the bane of castle builders everywhere, look for opportunities to destroy.  If they don’t have an older sister involved in the enterprise, they leave a trail of children wailing in frustration and dismay.

I enjoy the attention we receive from people walking along the shoreline.  We do good work, and I can accept their commendations.  As satisfying as it is to play, to build and to feel appreciated by the vacationers examining our inventions, I experience joy by being surrounded by children making something truly unique, a spontaneous, creative community of peers.

Between classes while I was going to college in St.  Petersburg, Florida, I drove over to the beach to make sand castles.  Surrounded by spires, a boy and his mom walking up the shoreline paused to look at what I was constructing.

“Look, Mom! That man’s making a sand castle!”

No one had ever called me a man before.  I was nineteen.  I was confused.  I was a man.  It was a boy that made this fact known.  It was while making sand castles that the truth arrived.

And so I define my life by how good I am at play.

The heterochronists of the 19th century that discovered and explored principles of biological evolution that included neoteny did not survive the ideological purge that occurred after Darwin’s theory of natural selection was accepted.  It’s as if spring arrived but only blossomed in the yards of people that had white houses, and then disappeared with an immediate return of winter.  Heterochrony includes the concept that evolution unfolds in a fashion that allows the features of embryos or infants to manifest later in ontogeny over time, while the lessons learned by adults are drawn from a vast, interconnected environment of interlocking influences manifested progressively earlier in the ontogeny of descendants.  In other words, progress moves in two directions.

The compulsion to create new moves forward in time.  New experiences move backwards.  Neoteny moves from the single cell outward and forward.  The reverse is informed by an environment suggesting what should be new or different, moving inward, backward in time.

Each individual experiences and manifests these overlapping tides, conversations between the individual and the all.

Creation moves from two directions.

When first explored by Darwin’s contemporaries, neoteny and its twin were believed to be biological processes only.  In theorist circles, there was little question that these dynamics existed.  The controversy was over whether they significantly contributed to the emergence of nonrandom features when progeny were being produced.  Was natural selection one dynamic amongst a host of influences, or was natural selection pretty much it?  Scientists concluded not only that less is more, but that one beats many.  Natural selection smothered the other theoretical babies in the crib.  The evolutionary spring returned to winter.

Whereas neoteny was discovered as a biological principle with ontological expressions, this work argues that neoteny manifests a societal dynamic in contemporary events, particularly social change and the web.

When I begin a sand castle, I pay close attention to tides and waves.  Noting where high tide last left its mark, I start digging a bit beyond that point.  Once spires spring up around the holes where the wet sand comes from, I violate the high tide line by building a channel to where the waves are active.

Building castles, constructing theories, it’s all about playing with waves.

The medium is the message.  It is perhaps most true when examining websites and the Internet.  As important as a message or an issue is, the way that it is communicated can have as much if not more impact than the words themselves.

With the web being all about transparency, diversity and horizontal communication, it has still not become obvious to a majority of the Left that it is a perfect vehicle for lifting Left priorities and carrying them into the mainstream.  The medium is the message.

This is a Zen revolution where words are not what makes the change.  It’s a content-free transformation allowing a massive flattening without rhetoric or a knocking down of walls.

When the medium is the message, what does it mean when the power of the medium is in the words it does not say?

We know what TV and radio sound like.  What is the sound of one web crackling?

Building coalitions on the left, there are those things that we can agree to argue about and those things that we are not exactly agreeing to argue about that we argue about anyway.  As fatiguing as it is to argue about the former, it is the latter that is more likely to cause damage.

Building and participating in coalitions and networks is where I seem to spend a lot of my organizing time, either in meetings or conference calls.  There are long discussions on the use of language when protests are being planned, conferences designed and flyers created.  These wordsmith sessions are attempts to reach the greatest number of people using words that mirror their experience while introducing to them ideas and dynamics that they may not share or be familiar with.  “Palestine, South America,” the words “imperialist” or “anti-imperialist,” “New Orleans” and other hot spots are weighed as words as the urgency of what the words represent are compared to the urgency of the primary communication of the piece being worked on.  The further focus strays from the event or issue that a coalition has been formed around, the more likely there are arguments over language as coalition partners express dismay with emerging concepts.

It is rare that I contribute to these discussions.  The decision about where to draw these lines seems based on personal experience.  My personal experience of respecting people’s personal experience often results in my having few opinions on matters of words.  When discussions turn to process, I become engaged.

In the discussions of process, words are often used but not defined.  Sometimes this method is intentional so that an argument is avoided.  If the coalition partners are familiar to each other, it is often not a problem.  For example, if in coalition discussions you have a blend of top-down and bottom-up organizations and you know each other well, you don’t have to labor each other with differing opinions of democratic process.  You’ve had the discussion before.

Where it gets complicated is when coalition members have different ideas of democratic process and those different ideas are not clear and agreed upon.  These difficulties are exaggerated if all communication is by conference call and if participants are relative strangers.  The difficulties become even more complex when different participants have different opinions on the importance of clarity of process.  To many folks, it’s just not interesting.  To others, it’s not important.  To a third group, they see that clarity in this area might undermine the ways they most efficiently achieve their goals.

This third group tends to be less transparent, less diverse and more hierarchical in their orientation.  I’ve noted that individuals in these groups tend to define “transparency, diversity and horizontal communication” in a coalition context, in ways that include their less transparent, less diverse and less horizontal ways in making decisions, without sharing that this incongruity is the case.  It’s an incongruity that often works to help them achieve their goals, particularly if they are in positions of control.  But their method often seeds distrust among their coalition partners.  For example, if it is decided by the group that information provided to the chair will be reviewed by the chair and brought to the group for a vote, and then the chair does not bring the information to the group for a vote, there has been a violation of process, more so if the chair suggests that there has not been a violation of process when information is withheld.

It is not the case that the more top-down, less transparent groups necessarily engage in this kind of incongruent communication.  When the details of transparency, diversity and horizontal communication are defined by coalition partners, misunderstandings are less likely to occur.  There is often annoyance expressed at differing definitions of process, but if there are no allegations of hidden agendas assigned to coalition partners, then cooperation can proceed.

From the bottom up, I’ve observed abuse of process when individuals behave uncivilly with words and tone corralling ideological opponents into channels they would not have taken.  Abusive language is abuse of process.  Activists frequently confront each other if they disagree on issues, but rarely do they express dismay, at the time that it is occurring, when inappropriate words or tone are used.  Inappropriate behavior, not confronted, will seed distrust within a coalition.

Transparency, diversity and horizontal communication are the foundations of democratic process.  Coalition-building is all about having these three things in common and agreeing to embrace these things as more important than the issues that define your constituency or the issue that brought together the coalition.  Allegiance to these process foundations engenders the trust that makes coalition-building fruitful.  Perhaps the most destructive tendency the Left exhibits is an expectation that good process will be violated.  The resulting distrust is ubiquitous.  It is sad and ironic that the Left, champions of good process as represented by transparency, diversity and horizontal communication, is often unable to unite in trust to accomplish those very goals.

A premise of this work is that transformation unfolds in two waves or impulses, which inform the direction that evolution takes.  This concept first emerged in the works of Darwin’s contemporaries, such as Ernst Haeckel, but was eventually abandoned as Mendel and Weisman’s work around 1900 converged to suggest that evolution could be nothing less than random.  This blog urges the re-examination of the principle of waves–heterochrony is its old name–in light of recent discoveries in evolutionary developmental biology and neuropsychology.

Theorists and philosophers such as Habermas, Gebser and Wilber have noted a succession of stages in the development of species, societies and the maturation/development of individuals.  The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould was sensitive to the potential insights that a multiscale–biological, societal, ontological, biological–perspective provides.  It is my experience that by observing the impact of waves upon this multiscale, four-leveled chess board perspective, a visitor to this model can detect patterns that inform an understanding of present day politics and social activism, features of the future and insight into how society is changing.

In other words, recent discoveries in biology and neuropsychology suggest that biology, ontogeny, society and the individual are all operating according to the same dynamic.  Exploring this dynamic in detail is more than useful.  As an artist, I experience it as beautiful.

One idea bouncing around my head, surfacing as waves, is that class structure in the U.S. and more stratified societies exhibits a process not unlike what has been expressed in the previous entry and other postings.  Whereas youth culture washes up while corporate culture washes down, occupied aboriginal or indigenous culture has a tide that moves one direction as occupier European culture goes the other way.  I’m considering that in an identical fashion, poverty and working class culture exhibit currents of change that course up through stratified layers while the wealthy, upper class culture’s currents flow metaphorically downhill.

Fashion and musical trajectories form with the poor and uninfluential, are embraced by society and finally get integrated into corporate product lines and are made the convention.  The upper class allegiance to the idea of an unencumbered individuality manifested by the power to purchase anything you want drifts down to the very poorest of society, encouraging them to believe that purse strings are the most important strings that bind us all.  The new drifts up.  Assimilated conventions drift down.

Nineteen years I was in the gift business.  I watched multiyear fad cycles become eighteen-month cycles, and then approach a year.  The cycles are growing shorter as the avenues of idea distribution become greased by online technologies and a mass media that crave stories that compel viewers to watch the ads.  While the young and the working class are creating, the controlled-by-the-old corporations are broadcasting their central insight that whatever it is, it’s OK if it makes money.

A principle we use to design social change web applications, building networks between activists across the country, is the principle of waves.  By investing the lowest level of political authority with the tools for social change, we enhance the ability for culture to evolve in a horizontal, transparent, diverse direction.  As this impetus moves upward, it transforms the very premise that society has been built upon for over 6,000 years, hierarchy.  The more power provided to the lowest levels, the more potential there is for profound, creative change as the system itself is transformed by using the principles that drive transformation.

Waves and scales.  Scales and waves.  Standing knee deep in the surf during a thunderstorm, it’s not clear whether we’re being pelted by the ocean or the sky.  Evolutionists like Haeckel, Darwin or Gould may seem dry at first exposure.  Noting their ties to contemporary society, we can feel the waves.

Things that we’ve all noted evolve over time are words that serve to communicate our enthusiasm or wonder. The most active period for word invention for words of this type seem to be the teenage years, when words like “swell, neat, cool, cul, bad, word, sweet” were invented, I think in that order.

Words pop up and quickly disappear, having served their purpose, such as “dynamite, totally, far out, awesome,” though “awesome” may be lingering for a while longer. I think I’m the only person I know that still uses “far out.”

Most of my adult life, the words “fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, amazing” have served to communicate generic wonder. Lately, noting what might be described as word fatigue for the previous set, there seems to be an increase in frequency of use for three additional words: “astonishing, remarkable, extraordinary.” I suspect those three words sort of meandered over from common British usage. The British make almost every word sound like it has more meaning.

It is no accident that words are often invented by teens and young adults, sexual beings without permanent mates. This age is when music drives our lives and souls and is able to explain the feelings and experiences conventional culture seems opaque to. Dancing, we invent new moves. Our musical tastes compel new tunes. It’s as if every moment we’re wrestling with the challenge of communicating both our uniqueness and our allegiance to what our immediate tribe most reveres.

Two currents inform this process of sitting on the edge of invention and assimilation. Mass media homogenize class and culture, massaging regional dialects and accents into softer, less idiosyncratic versions of their former selves. This election cycle has revealed that the mountains of Kentucky hold some of the most racially polarized whites in the country, Democrats unable to vote for a black man. Mass media homogenization has been so subtle and so powerful that this prejudice is the exception to the rule of relatively universal tolerance for a black man president, relative to where we were 50 years ago. Where goes language, so goes society. We’re all sounding the same and thinking the same thoughts.

The second current manifests in the several dozen musical subgenres serving several dozen groups of subcultural demographics. Fifty years ago, there was rock, pop, jazz, blues, classical, rhythm and blues, country, gospel, folk and a couple of others I’m forgetting. We’re watching a homogenizing society revel in subcultural idiosyncrasy. The fashion and accessories business has followed this path that music pioneers. Stand at Clark and Belmont in Chicago and watch several fashion/music demographics stride by in any given minute.

Two currents. Two waves.

In previous entries, I’ve noted biological, societal and ontogenetical evidence of evolution unfolding in complementing waves. Neoteny manifests creative impulses by drawing a compulsion to originate forward in time, to manifest in the physiology or behavior of descendants. For example, a chimpanzee infant, surmised to be similar to a human progenitor infant, often walks upright, has a large brain relative to body size, a small jaw relative to head size and a goofy or playful disposition. Those four features (there are over 30) are all now evident in the adult stage of human beings. Neoteny is the biological evolutionary process of prolonging rates of maturation, and adjusting the timing of maturation, so that ancestor infant features evidence themselves in contemporary adults. We might also say that the proliferation of subcultures in American society today reveals a neotenous societal impulse with invention running amok among our young. Novelty is appearing along with new words to describe the changes.

Astonishing subgenres emerge with remarkable new words being invented to describe extraordinary developments.

The other wave, homogenization, if following the pattern uncovered earlier in these entries, should be working its way backward from the older or more established forces in society. Indeed, this movement seems to be the case. Corporations, by controlling most of mass media, have established a template that the rest of us can ally with. It’s the idea that if we express our independence by the products we purchase, we become unique by what we own. The media that the message is expressed through (TV, radio and film) unite us all as we absorb this communication by the corporate elite. Yet, convention is not as conventional as it seems. This idea of a consumer economy is a relatively new idea. It’s an idea assimilated, disseminated and shared by almost all. It’s a new idea that has become a shared convention working its way down though society, subsuming all classes.

Even convention has its origins and is part of a process of change. It’s just hard to recognize because it moves down from the opposite direction of conception and birth. In other words, what the old folks, the folks who seem to be in control, the elites, are telling us is what they’ve learned or is new to them. It’s something they discovered. Still, these things can change.

Watch for a new convention to emerge from the proliferation of ideas emerging from the young. This convention will take time, maybe ten years. Considering the impact of the web and its unique growth, coming particularly from what the young are drawn to, watch for an imminent end of the consumer economy.

Consider what the new convention might be.

Wow. “Wow” is sort of the big bang of exclamations. It just sort of comes out, yet as a word “wow” seems to have been around forever. For me, it feels like the first word. ‘Wow” is neoteny in three letters.

Georges Cuvier was an early French biologist, a contemporary of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck, unfortunately, died before Cuvier and ended up vilified in a famous eulogy by his younger, very influential peer. That speech is attributed to having marginalized Lamarck’s influence on evolutionary theory. Cuvier didn’t believe in evolution. That was almost 200 years ago. Only now is Lamarck’s name emerging with respect in the discussions of biologists.

Lamarck hypothesized that the environment can influence evolution in a single generation, compelling the emergence of nonrandom characteristics and environment-influenced features. Darwin shared this view, devoting the last years of his life in search of an explanation for the process that Lamarck proposed. How despised was Lamarck? Darwin rarely mentioned in his writings Lamarck’s name or even the names of Darwin’s contemporaries that shared Lamarck’s positions. Darwin felt he could explore their ideas if he did not cite them.

Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection emerged as a paper in 1858. Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared a year later, and “survival of the fittest” was embraced with astonishing speed. It was a theory that complemented and enhanced the principles behind the industrial revolution. The natural world looked to mirror the world of men. Darwin was a hero.

Lamarck is the boogie man of biology circles. “This is what can happen to you if you don’t swim with contemporary theory, don’t make the right friends or if you think of things too soon,” suggests this story of the brilliant theorist ignored. Darwin was tormented by the possibility that his theory of natural selection would bring down scorn. He waited almost twenty years to publish. Then, Darwin was haunted by the possibility that his pluralistic inclinations embracing additional theories of evolution would not be understood. While distancing himself from contemporary Lamarckians, Darwin shared many of their beliefs. Even Darwin’s genius accompanied by the adulation of many of his peers was not enough to protect him from a sizeable portion of this work being rejected and ignored.

Cuvier did not believe in evolution, but he shared the insights that he experienced behind his pioneering observations that there are relationships or patterns connecting the physical structures of species. He had the thoughts of a creationist but the heart of a biologist. He saw connections everywhere he looked. It was Lamarck that insinuated the element of time, a violation that Cuvier could not tolerate.

As a blogger, not a biologist–a web developer/activist, not an academician–I can wander freely about, displaying leaps of logic without fear of retribution or marginalization by my peers. I can experience an idea and share it on these pages in just the way an artist can be struck by a metaphor and put it to paper as an illustration or a cartoon. I was a comic panel and strip artist for several years.

So, let’s draw ideas!

As noted in the last entry, because a mother’s testosterone level rises with her age and because she has children across the whole arc of her reproductive years, then we might observe a display of personality and physiological features in her children that would roughly reproduce human evolution over a span of eons.

If matrifocal and patrifocal social structure reflect physically the hormonal manifestations characteristic of a matrifocal high-testosterone female, low-testosterone male in the first case; and a patrifocal low-testosterone female and high-testosterone male in the second case, then perhaps we can observe in the skeletal remains of our evolutionary precursors evidence of evolving social structure.

Are there, for example, dental correlations between the just mentioned physiologically contrasting social structures and/or familial family arcs? Neoteny has dental correlations, with smaller teeth being characteristic of the neotenous smaller jaw. Watching teeth grow smaller over millions of years, might researchers find that they have grown larger in males the last few tens of thousands of years as patrifocial social structure has taken hold? Are the teeth of males from older mothers smaller than the teeth of males of first-born, young mothers? Is it reversed for females?

In a large family, do the male’s teeth erupt later and later, females earlier and earlier?

Are there height correlations, particularly in the relative length of the legs and arms to the body, suggesting evidence of neoteny in our contemporaries or the fossil record? Leg length has emerged as a possible marker for neoteny when noting bonobo/chimpanzee comparisons. The maturational delayed often reach puberty later, providing a longer time for the legs to lengthen. Note that primary hypogonadism (abnormally low testosterone production) results in disproportionately long legs and arms. Does just low testosterone also prolong the limbs?

Do conditions that display maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, display longer limbs or smaller teeth? Perhaps there is a correlation noting the reverse. Maybe as we go back in time, we will find that teeth grow larger, with perhaps that less intuitive correlation emerging as a signature of increased maturational delay. What specifically are the correlations?

Cuvier was famous for maintaining an extraordinary work environment characterized by a host of working surfaces, each focusing on a different aspect of animal physiology. In my mind, these surfaces move about on wheels, often bumping into one another, mixing ideas and sharing patterns, compelling the emergence of understandings not obvious before.

Astonishingly right while remarkably wrong, Cuvier is an inspiration.

It could be said that it all begins in the womb. It is even deeper and more subtle than that. Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen are coming to the conclusion that a mother’s testosterone levels are influencing the likelihood of autism. I came to this same conclusion ten years ago exploring the work of Norman Geschwin and Charles Darwin. Noting this effect while exploring the impact of sexual selection on social structure provides additional perspective. Observing the relationship between social structure and evolution, one begins to understand that what goes on in the womb can decide the direction we evolve.

Mother’s testosterone levels > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory.

The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely the male children will have maturational delay and the females maturational acceleration. The males’ testosterone levels will be relatively lower compared to boys born from mothers with low testosterone levels. The females’ testosterone levels will be relatively higher compared to girls born from mothers with low testosterone levels.

When the mother’s testosterone levels are high, she is propelling her children backwards in evolutionary time. Backwards in evolutionary time for humans is away from patrifocal social structure and towards matrifocal social structure. Males experience more maturational delay, females more maturational acceleration. A mother with elevated testosterone levels (a woman comfortable in a matrifocal society) sends her children on a journey to the society of her societal and evolutionary precursors.

Eventually, we go back far enough in time to when males were first acquiring facility with spoken language. Go back even further in time and females are first acquiring facility with spoken language. Hence the higher number of males exhibiting autism, Asperger’s, stuttering and other conditions characterized by maturational delay. Males don’t have to go very far back in time, compared to females, to begin wrestling with the origin of speech.

With this premise, one could come to the following conclusions. The older the mother grows, and the higher her testosterone levels, the more likely her male children will experience maturational delay, her girls maturational acceleration, and the more common autism will be. The youngest son, conceived when the mother is oldest, should exhibit a number of personality features associated with a matrifocal social structure vs. a more hierarchical, commanding, aggressive oldest male in the family. One might also consider that the youngest sons would be more graceful than the robust older sons, if there are physiological concomitants to social structure traits. For example, the matrifocal bonobo are slimmer and lighter, with longer legs than their close cousins, the chimpanzee.

For the same reason, one could hypothesize that lankiness would be common among autistic males.

You can see where I’m heading. Since a mother’s testosterone levels rise with her age, if the hormone variation is relatively extreme and she has children across the whole spread of the years that she can conceive, then we might observe an arc of features in her children that would roughly reproduce human evolution over a span of tens of thousands of years.

A mother’s testosterone levels can be impacted by a host of other factors, such as smoking, physical exercise, stress, exposure to light, alcohol consumption, diet, touch, etc. For example, if a mother grows fatter over the years, the weight gain will increase her testosterone levels, sometimes radically.

So, though it may seem like it all begins in the womb, consider all those variables that influence hormone levels in the womb. Beginnings become blurred if a multitude of factors influence that beginning. The characteristics of our children may in some cases have as much to do with the mother’s environment as her ancestral inheritance.

The womb may be only the beginning….of the beginning.

Visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=7 for more on the cause of autism.

Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has a theory that the autistic male shows evidence of a brain that is too male for his own good, the autistic personality being male to the extreme, evidencing exaggerated male characteristics. For example, the autistic is not just a little dissociated and abstract, but very dissociated and abstract. Baron-Cohen suggests that exposure to high levels of testosterone in the mother’s womb in combination with an absence of testosterone surges that prune early childhood synapse production that create a right-handed (as opposed to random-handed) person combine to encourage the emergence of autism.

Still enamored of natural selection, medical theorists explore the etiologies, or origins, of conditions and disorders encumbered by a theory structure that supports a narrow, patrifocal point of view. Informed by the fertile, earlier work of Norman Geschwin, Baron-Cohen has noted some of the most important clues to understanding how humans evolved and autism develops, but he is unable to see the larger picture.

Autism is an evolutionary condition. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, Geschwin and Baron-Cohen’s clues are major interstate intersections on the roadmap of Homo sapien’s unfolding. When navigating across country, we look at the map and then use our eyes to read the signs around us, and then use the signs around us to read the map. We go back and forth between two representative systems while passing through the real world to find our way. To satisfactorily navigate the riddle of how autism emerges, it is necessary to explore both evolution and ontogeny, while paying attention to sexual selection and social structure in society, jumping back and forth, until we can figure out where we’re located in the life of a human being.

There are major intersections in our evolution, as there are major events in our own ontogeny or personal unfolding. A hundred years ago, this perspective was conventional. The Darwinian synthesis of the mid 20th century, accompanied by the cultural capitulation to Social Darwinist perspectives, narrowed orthodox theorizing to a thin band of back roads hypothesizing around an allegiance to the idea of random origins. Understandings informed by shifting scales, for example, comparing biology, society and ontogeny, were considered unproductive and became unfashionable.

Perhaps no single feature of a human being so informs both our evolution and our children’s lives more than the testosterone levels of the mother while the child is in the womb. Baron-Cohen understands this point but hasn’t assimilated the repercussions. This feature is one of the major physiological intersections informing the directions we evolve. High testosterone mothers birth low testosterone males and high testosterone females. Low testosterone females create high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Mother’s blood suggests and prescribes social structure, evolutionary trajectories and individual human skill/challenge constellations, simultaneously.

Very few myths are shared by aboriginal tribes on six continents. One central belief is that a woman’s blood possesses more power, more potency than all other magic. No single issue motivates social conservatives more than the compulsion to control a woman’s womb. In the roadmap of human experience, this issue is where the mythic and manifestly real intersect.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Perhaps 150,000 to 50,000 years ago, before the exodus from Africa, there occurred the shift to right-handed males from random-handed males. This shift is the conversion from random-handed, cooperative, neotenous males with two hemispheres the same size to the more aggressive, hierarchical, right-handed males with the left hemisphere slightly reduced in size. I would suggest this facility-with-language anomaly evidenced itself at puberty. As the feature of non-gestural, verbal articulate behavior was encouraged by women choosing men displaying the trait, they chose non-neotenous males, accelerating or manifesting adult features into the childhood of descendants rather than prolonging infant features into adulthood as had been done in matrifocal societies for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Consider that the testosterone surge we see in early childhood is a re-enactment of its emergence as a feature around puberty perhaps a hundred thousand years before, the process having appeared earlier in ontogeny with every passing generation. What we are observing in early childhood with synapse pruning in right-handers is the repercussion of the emergence of a trait, selection for that trait and the absorbing of that feature by the species.

In other words, the contemporary (soon-to-be right-handed) infant/toddler testosterone surge might be an echo of puberty from before our African ancestors hit the road.

It has been suggested that a split brain was necessary to talk because the tongue is in the center of the body. Gestural communication would rely upon noncompeting hemispheres controlling one side of the body at any time. When both brain hemispheres sought to control the tongue, stuttering was the inevitable result. (A high percentage of stutterers are left-handed.) By selecting males that did not stutter when talking, females were selecting men with single hemispheric control of speech.

Why females were already talking when the process of speech production began for men I’ll discuss in another entry.

What might reverse that process that compels the emergence of males having difficulty speaking? On this roadmap we are exploring, what might coerce traffic to move in the opposite direction? What might influence changes in the amount of testosterone in a mother’s blood?

Unfold your evolutionary roadmap. Let’s go for a ride.

(Visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=7 for more on the cause of autism.)