“Edward Westermarck in his early classic A Short History of Marriage (1968: 126-155) discussed consent as a condition for marriage. Females, he noted, most often were married off at the will of some male–father, family elders, uncle. It is to be noted that the male partner in such marriages, also, had little personal choice. However, Westermarck pointed out that females in the simplest hunting and gathering societies could–and did–refuse the assigned mate. Sometimes she could do this directly and in other societies by subtle, indirect action. She lost much of this freedom in technologically more advanced societies. Some of the strongest arguments against male dominant choice of females as sex partners can be found in the statistical, cross-cultural work of George Murdock (1949: 20-21). Out of 241 societies where his criteria could be applied, 163 involved some consideration: bride-price, bride service, or exchange of women. In other words, families made the decisions rather than the individuals involved. Regarding divorce, Murdock (1969: 175-76) found, somewhat surprisingly, that in thirty of forty societies there were no substantial differences in the rights of men and women to terminate a marriage. Only 15 percent actually had the stereotyped view where men controlled the action. If divorce involved equal female choice, isn’t it likely that she would have had much to say about the original marriage? Further analysis of mating practices in primitive society raises more questions as to male choice selecting for specific traits. Murdock’s worldwide sample of 250 societies (1949:263) showed that only three had a generalized sex taboo. Most of the others allowed premarital sex, extra-marital sex, wife-lending, etc., all of which could be involved in pregnancy with someone other than the social father.” (Smith, James M. (1976) Sexual selection in recent human populations. California Anthropologist 6 (1): pp. 20)

In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was much talk among the people I hung out with about the dramatic change in the youth of American society as we shifted toward more aboriginal or matrilineal values. From our perspective, it felt brand new, like we were inventing it. In some ways, we were. Still, there was a lineage that our beliefs and behaviors were emerging from that we were at least somewhat aware of. I’m referring to the easy coupling of the sexes, letting go of sexual possessive tendencies and jealousy, sharing of possessions, frequent use of mind-altering substances, choosing relational professions such as social work, reverence for nature, attraction to art and eating healthful food.

I look back now at this 60s surge in matrifocal tendencies and note that it seemed to quickly disappear with the ending of the draft. Indeed, our whole culture seems to have surged several times into hierarchical greed fests in the 1980s, 90s and again in the 00s. Less observed has been those 60s tendencies continuing to transform the culture, currents moving into the mainstream now.

Our consumer economy driven by females choosing products for herself and her family has been central to the transitional three generations bridging our hierarchical, male-dominated, patrifocal past to the horizontal, matrifocal partnership society we are embracing. Females are choosing once again, with males cooperating with the new gestalt. How we choose our mate is the single most important, culture-informing decision we can make. Literally everything else in society is impacted by that decision. As the power to choose is returned to the female, we are witnessing the neotenization of society as aboriginal, matrifocal values emerge in contemporary times.

With the consumer economy coming to a halt, our compulsion to exercise choice will settle down to matrifocal society’s natural, horizontal point of view. To neotenize society is to make society horizontal. From electing another left-handed president (lefties are usually neurologically matrifocal), sexualizing media, creating universal health care to experiencing the ascendancy of the web/cell culture we are transforming ourselves almost as fast as the last transformation when men on horses with a male sun god hacked the heads off agricultural matrilinealists.

In the 1960s, astonished by the gifts provided by altered states and the Pill, we saw connections and observed the repercussions that come with female control of procreation. If the female could have any man she wanted whenever she wanted and she could choose her own profession, society was going to change. And so it has.

Clearly, the U.S. couldn’t continue to consume 25% of the world’s resources, behaving like it was OK to control third-world economies across the planet. Greenhouse warming and environmental demands eventually had to be integrated into global cost/benefit analyses. At some point, a large enough percentage of Americans were going to identify with being earthlings rather than identify with being compliant, American White might-is-right underlings.

The 1960s spread like wildfire through youth culture as we felt connected by fear/anger regarding the war, the benefits of the Pill, altered states that the rest of society did not share and rock & roll. We were only dimly aware of the sexual-selection societal foundation that our feelings of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self were built upon. It is clear now. The age of the fathers is coming to an end.

If opinion is the social equivalent of creating a theory or model and information is what you use to form an opinion, a theory or a model, then the mainstream media has pretty much given up on providing information.  It provides opinion.  Where do we go to gather the information to form an opinion or our own personal theories of how the world works?

To the web.

Before the election, listening to the NPR show Talk of the Nation, a radio hour was devoted to the character of the candidates.  Listeners were told to go to the candidate websites if they wanted to know their position on the issues.

It strikes me that the decades-old trend to dumb down the news to keep viewers always entertained is being accelerated by an Internet that provides an additional excuse to the mainstream media to not spend time sharing information.

The mainstream media is shifting to behaving like they assume that the web is where information lives.

There are repercussions.  Eventually, services similar to Google News will offer a selection of video excerpts from stories emerging across the country and around the world.  The selection services will pitch information from a variety of perspectives, far Left to far Right.  The Left services will provide stories on Palestinians and histories of areas of the world in potential conflict.  The Right services will describe the ways the world is frightening, conditions which we as individuals are powerless to change.

The Left services will show the ways that we are in danger that necessitate we help each other, that require government intervention to make the change.  The Left services will suggest how challenges are interconnected, have histories and can be resolved.

The Right services will describe ways that we are in danger.  They will define “we” as those of us with something to protect within the confines of the United States borders.  The Right services will describe how we can lose our freedoms and our standards of living.  The Right services will emphasize that we have something that we can potentially lose, that there are people that want what we have and that we need the government to protect us.

Web users will be able to select assortments from a number of different positions on the Left to Right spectrum.  Perhaps the same services will provide a variety of different perspectives.

Perhaps users will flip back and forth between left and right, reveling in the relativity of information.

Information is rarely just information.  Information is embedded in a webbing of associations and contexts providing connection to opinions, viewpoints and gestalts.  Information is presented in a context of presuppositions and assumptions that inform the user of the importance of the information in a hierarchy of what comes first in the narrative of presentation.

In other words, as viewers turn into users, becoming refugees from mainstream media, they will be introduced to information packaged inside contexts providing variety to the realities they choose.

If we’re lucky, we’ll become relativists.  Gathering our information off the web, maybe we’ll learn to consider the source.

The time we live in, the society that we are a member of and our personal lives and experiences deeply determine the productions of the artist, the theorist or even the athlete. When, where and who we are inform what we can create.

There are very few studies on the influence of the environment on estrogen. There are no studies on the influence of the environment on male hormone levels tracing how those changes might manifest in the features of progeny. Wakening from our patrifocal slumber, we will discover many things we did not consider paying attention to. We do not have studies in those two areas that trace the influence of environmental variables and sexual selection proclivities on human evolution. Theorists are left to focus on what we do know about the influence of environmental variables on the testosterone levels of mothers.

What haunts me is a deep-felt certainty that changing levels of estrogen, modified via sexual selection and environmental influences, have influenced, and continue to influence, our evolution. Clearly, individuals exhibiting a low level of testosterone allow for a more influential role for estrogen in their lives. I suspect there is more to it than that. For example, a male with low testosterone levels but high estrogen will behave differently from a male with low testosterone and low estrogen. What are the physiological and neurological manifestations of these two types? How do they behave differently? How do cultures leaning in one direction or the other differ?

It is a premise of this work that testosterone-driven changes in maturation rates (neoteny) prolonging the features of our infant progenitors into the adults of their descendants have resulted in radical physiological, neurological, behavioral and experiential change. There are hundreds of papers tracing the effects of various variables on testosterone levels. There are papers describing the influence of mother’s testosterone levels on the maturation rates of her children. Biologists are familiar with the influence of testosterone on males’ display and hierarchical standing.

But what about estrogen?

If testosterone compels one to compete and estrogen to connect, might unusually high or low levels of estrogen have something to do with autism? For example, might low estrogen encourage dissociation by making it difficult to connect or high estrogen encourage dissociation by enhancing the process of making connections in the mind? I have no idea.

If higher levels of estrogen inhibit height, what are the maturation-rate effects of estrogen, if any? Do higher or lower levels of estrogen encourage or inhibit maturation rates evidenced by testosterone levels? Estrogen levels can determine when a girl reaches puberty. Too little and puberty can be delayed, resulting in increased height and possible continued brain growth. Could relatively little estrogen in the females of our ancestors have resulted in delayed puberty and larger brain growth over time? Pubertal testosterone surges curtail brain growth. Does estrogen have a similar effect?

With more information, perhaps evolutionary theorizing can achieve more depth.

As a Left organizer, it’s not about making things happen but about appraising conditions in order to be in the right place in the right time, with the right tools, with the right allies, with robust contact lists, a powerful message and a unique presentation. Listening to the changing of the times, one becomes a specialist in currents and waves.

Sitting on the beach, with an eye always on the ocean, you see a wave, run out into the water, position yourself and let it carry you toward your goal. Rarely are waves so big that you can see them from far away. Usually, you need to linger at least waist deep in the surf.

We are in a unique situation, what with the slow-motion toppling of our hierarchical society, to be observing a tidal wave of change approach the beach. The usual activist interventions don’t apply. To catch this wave requires an understanding of the change in societal currents, the shift from patrifocal to matrifocal paradigms and the profound effect that communication technologies are having upon this changing seascape.

It’s as if the moon had not risen for 6,000 years and only now has appeared above the clouds. Currents have shifted, currents making it far easier to catch a wave. Whereas until recently the actions of the Left have had only limited effect on the well organized and highly monetized Right, shifts in currents are providing opportunities for the Left to start riding the big one and to make its vision known.

For the Left to be able to articulate a vision for society that society can embrace, in contrast to the vision articulated by the Right, the Left needs to speak the language of youth. Youth talk tech. For youth, it’s not even tech, it’s just their lives. Text-messaging is life. IMing is life. Social networking and twitter is life. These youth tools are collapsing a 6,000-year-old scaffolding erected to keep power in the hands of the few. A tidal wave of change approaches, characterized by surges in transparency, diversity and horizontal communication carried forward on a current of moon-propelled matrifocal social structure. Our very biology is changing as the macho male and docile female are overwhelmed by the changing seascape that is our time.

Right now, the correct tools are tech tools integrated with messages to take specific actions. The Obama campaign integrated new tech with community organizing to create the hybrid that will be an organizing paradigm for years to come. What will change will be that the organizing impetus will emerge from regular users, using the technologies to accomplish specific goals. Remove the charismatic leader from the equation and you have countless waves of change competing, creating unique actions, forming brief ad hoc social networking alliances, achieving very specific goals.

It’s time the Left started using Obama’s youth tools. In terms of process, the Left has become conservative. The Obama Democrats, by using powerful democratizing youth tools, has become the Left.

In a way similar to how Gorbachev was the transition to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Obama will be the transitional leader making possible the arrival of the new wave, the wave of highly integrated citizen involvement, organized anarchy, horizontal society, a global community of peers.

The Left has got its feet wet. It’s time to swim.

Charles Darwin, referencing Morgan’s writings, suggested the possibility that humans were descended from tribal cultures characterized by matrifocal social structures that were driven by female sexual selection. After suggesting the possibility, he rejected it as being incongruent with his experience of contemporary and primitive society, which featured a focus on male hierarchical dominance patterns with a complementary pattern of female compliance. Darwin was a Victorian. It is possible that if Darwin had instead embraced what he rejected, then the history of evolutionary theory would have been at least slightly changed. Regardless, after being proposed by Darwin, female sexual selection was almost ignored for 100 years. And it is only with the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) that sexual selection theory in the context of human evolution gets its articulate advocate.

If humans evolved through matrifocal societies, driven by female sexual selection, what would have been the origin and nature of that dynamic?

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind. A moment later Freud joined him. The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray. For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream. Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?” (Goodall, Jane (1990) Through a Window. Houghlin Mifflin: Boston, pp. 241-242.)

Less overt but perhaps more evocative of our evolution is the behavior of the bonobo. Slighter than the chimpanzee, they have far fewer male demonstrations in these matrifocal societies with alpha males often the sons of the head female. Food is often exchanged for sex, and sex is frequent. Very frequent. Bonobo societies are horizontal societies sexually and in social structure. Males are not competing for dominance as intensely as in chimpanzee societies, though they still perform for sex.

Jane Goodall also describes the influence of a thunderstorm upon a male chimpanzee, propelling him into sexual display. Testosterone has powerful components of both aggression and sexuality that compel males to exhibit and then procreate. Jane Goodall observed that these behaviors appear in concert with natural phenomena such as thunderstorms and waterfalls. Now imagine rhythm as the central bridge between the sounds of nature and the sounds around which demonstrations would be engaged, sex procured and societies formed.

If we assume that the selection of neotenous features in our ancestor species often occurred in the context of matrifocal societies–small bands where fathers did not know their sons and women controlled procreation opportunities–societies driven by rituals of dance and sound, then how did this evolutionary trajectory get started?

When did rhythm and sex become allied?

Consider that it all started by the ocean.

Imagine roving bands of hominids coming occasionally to the ocean side. The sound of crashing breakers fills the males with the reverence and desire characteristic of the chimpanzees that Goodall observed. A good time was had by all.

It happens again. The band journeys to the ocean, the males get worked up, infants are created.

The rhythm of the ocean becomes associated with the sound of sex. Then, away from the ocean, a male gets the idea to stamp his feat to the rhythm of the ocean. The other males join him. By stamping in unison, the males arouse the band. The males with the best sense of rhythm, those that can most powerfully evoke feelings of fear/reverence, get to mate.

Ritual is born.

In just the way that human evolution has twisted and turned with varying emphases on patrifocal vs. matrifocal social structure, the transformations of societies can be observed as they mirror how humans choose their mates.

Though humans have been propelled in a neotenous direction over the last several million years, we could surmise that this trajectory has not been a seamless surge in one direction.  Just as we observe the contemporary sudden surge in maturational delay among our males and maturational acceleration with females, ancient precursors to our current species no doubt produced progeny that skewed off from the maturation rate convention.  Different bands exhibited different maturation rate proclivities based upon environmental influences, band interbreeding and sexual selection aesthetics.  The dramatic variations in the fossil record of even relatively contemporary finds testify to the breadth of variation among our ancestors.

We did not arrive here via the evolution express but via a very fast vehicle that made numerous stops and that took many routes along the way.

A highly refined aesthetic developed during millions of years of runaway sexual selection characterized by performers (dancers and singers) being chosen by discriminating mates.  Having arrived at language, our ancestors got off the evolution express, departed Africa and boarded the societal accelerator.  Evolution continued–our bodies and minds continued to be molded–but now in the context of a symbol-making ability mated to an ancient aesthetic compulsion.  These massive brain-based sensibilities became assigned to any and everything around them as speech sexualized the environment, propelling humans to evaluate everything they came in contact with as if they displayed the features of a potential mate.

And so society began with a deep appreciation for detail.  By the Neolithic, craft was life.

Just as matrifocal and patrifocal social structures form the foundation for the relational structures of many species in biology and form the matrix from which we as a species have evolved, this same hormonal dance characterizes how our societies have evolved, providing an impersonation of a teleological trajectory.  When the shift from matrifocal to patrifocal occurred that led to males being chosen for their commanding qualities and females for cooperative, neotenous features, a shift also occurred in how societies translated the new hormonal constellation.  With the rise in male testosterone, hierarchy took hold.  The ancient female-centric cultures were horizontal, transparent and egalitarian.  The new male-centered cultures grew increasingly stratified, with resources controlled by fewer and fewer men.

At no time does the influence of the matrifocals completely disappear.  Though the societies grow hierarchically taller with time, the artists and others with matrifocal tendencies make grounding contributions that keep the patrifocal edifices from toppling.  Until now.

The towers are tumbling as the matrifocals return in force.  Maturational-delayed males and maturational-accelerated females are the new convention.  Or, the old convention, depending on how far back you go.  Whereas we’ve been experiencing the acceleration of society for several thousand years with maturational-accelerated males informing the speed and direction of our societal evolution, now we are experiencing the neotenization of society as transparency, diversity and horizontal communication surge into our everyday.

A collapsing hierarchical society is a society becoming horizontal.  We’ve been here before.  As we return to the horizontal, we carry with us thousands of years of art, experience and knowledge of the repercussions of our actions.  It’s time to be horizontal for a while.  It’s time to integrate with our environment, appreciate our surroundings.  Maybe in ten thousand years we’ll be ready to start social climbing once again.

Three evenings I played with Elia on the floor of his bedroom.  He had recently turned five.  The marriage to his mother had slipped into the abyss a while back.  What was left was for me to leave.  Somehow I had to explain it to my son.  I was unable to tell his mother until I was gone.

Three evenings we played on his bedroom floor.  With “guys,” I acted out the two homes he would be having in the future.  I acted out with toys his Daddy moving to another nearby apartment.  My son seemed confused.  Devastation had been stalking me day and night.  Those three nights, I could see that darkness creeping into Elia’s eyes.

The morning after the third evening, I took Elia to kindergarten.  Climbing out of the car, I opened the back door and leaned in to unbuckle him from the seat.  I explained that I wouldn’t be home when he got home from school, but I would see him frequently.  As I said it, I saw in his eyes that his life had changed.  I could see that my lifelong distress was appearing in the psyche of my son.  My worst fears were being realized.  That which was most beautiful in my life was appearing broken.  I could feel that I was breaking Elia’s heart.

I carried him into his classroom.  I explained to his teacher, a friend of his mother, what was happening and to attend to him closely.  I hugged Elia.  I drove back to the apartment and told his mother I was leaving.

Until I was almost thirty, I could not even imagine having a son or daughter.  To voluntarily bring into the world a precious being and then abuse him with what followed seemed cruel and unloving.  My life felt characterized by unfathomable shame and terror.  No way did I want to expose a child to such pain.

But I loved this woman.  So I took a risk.

When Elia was born, I loved him, nurtured him and guarded him with a vigilance that was both neurotic and heroic.  I provided his mother all the support to protect him that was possible for a husband to provide.  I struggled to keep our arguments from his ears.  His personality featured joy, curiosity, courage and sensitivity.  He behaved like he was happy and secure.

And then I left.

My 24-year old son has the soul of an artist.  As a young adult, he too has unfathomable feelings.  But he seems less stalked than either of his parents.  He is tender with both his mom and dad.  Elia has an open heart.

My son has become my teacher and my guide.

Elia and I occasionally jump into rented convertibles and go traveling to warmer climes where I make sand castles while surrounded by the sound of the ocean.

Elia is my 24-year old son.  This August we drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  I missed my turn in Indiana and we ended up taking the long way around through central Ohio, but that was OK.  The conversation was excellent moving through the wee Ohio hours, driving ‘til 3 a.m.  These cruises feel like the last of the days where I can afford the gas for the long haul.  Burning that much fossil fuel for pleasure also feels like a tenuous trade.

We were going to drive down to the Keys, but Elia suggested somewhere closer.  Good choice.  When we arrived in Myrtle Beach, we discovered that a tropical storm was headed toward Cuba and South Florida.

This trip continues a tradition I established in August of 1991 when I rented a Mustang and drove 3,000 miles in six days working out the emotion of a devastating divorce.  I was on a sand castle tour creating towers on beaches from Pensacola to St.  Pete and then back up through St. Augustine and South Carolina.  On this trip, I was alone, though thinking often of my son.

I traveled with the radio off.  In media silence, with the top down, I drove afternoons and nights and listened to passing crickets and cicadas, the whistling of the windows and the sounds of waves.

Arriving in a place where I can make castles, I start by digging to water, building the foundation mountains, and then a sample tower or two.  The towers attract helpers.  If I’m lucky, after a couple hours a dozen children will be working on a project.

On the August ‘91 trip after castle-constructing in Myrtle Beach I headed toward North Carolina and found I could not get a room, anywhere.  All motels were filled.  I asked a person behind the desk what was happening.  He looked at me like I was crazy.  “The hurricane,” he said.  The coast was being evacuated.

I got back into my car and turned on the radio.  I discovered two things.  A hurricane had been tailing me on my journey up the East Coast.  I’d been making sand castles just ahead of real bad weather that was right behind me, weather that was just then catching up.  The second thing I discovered was that the Soviet Union was breaking apart.

I drove through driving rainstorms westward away from the coast.  While driving, I listened to the fall of Gorbachev and the transformation of a nation and the world.  After a couple hundred miles of driving, the motels opened up.  I found a place to stay, slept fitfully and then headed to Niagara Falls.  There the roar consoled me to my bones.

Arriving back at Myrtle Beach this August, Elia and I checked into a dilapidated, ancient, ocean-front hotel and got a fourth-floor room on the ocean.  The sink didn’t work and there were roaches, but the view was spectacular and the sound profound.  Nonstop wave noise played day and night.  We slept those three nights with the sliding doors open.  Sleeping was a rhythmic mediation.

Good conditions for making sand castles had disappeared in 17 years.  The sand was now too coarse to sculpt towers.  I found a rainwater run off channel and played in the river that cut though the sand.  I built a partial dam and watched the water run riffs off my constructions.  Diverted, the water would cut into the beach in different places downstream, depending on where I piled sand upstream.  Downstream about 20 feet a couple of young, yellow-haired brothers picked up the melody I was playing and built a second dam and observed the effects of their construction.  The water tinkled and chattered in different pitches and intonation patterns as the channel responded to where we placed the sand.

Playing with water in sand, building sand castles, is art.  My inner musician emerges as I respond to conditions and conditions respond to me.  I experience dialog with the medium, in this case a little section of the world.  I feel in rapport.  The creation becomes integrated into a community as children help and beach strollers express appreciation.

I can’t play an instrument but I can participate in the music of the beach.

At some point, we’re going to start monkeying with our own evolution.  I mean consciously.  Clearly we’ve been playing with our evolution, unconsciously, from the start.

One premise of this work is that we in the West have created an arbitrary division between our unconscious and conscious mind, no doubt born from the evil/good split we’ve carried for a few thousand years that is part of the whole human/gods split.

I suspect this is a direct result of most of us having the modern split brain, two hemispheres with language functions tending to congregate in the left hemisphere, with the other hemisphere slightly diminished in size accompanied by the reduced corpus callosum inhibiting hemispheric communication.

With the return of the old, nonsplit brain and the re-emergence of matrifocal social structure, surges in autism and males featuring maturational delay and females featuring maturational acceleration, there is also a return of nondifferentiated consciousness points of view.  It would be useful if the differentiated consciousness characteristic of modern humans and nondifferentiated consciousness featured by the matrifocals appearing in our midst could achieve a synthesis and provide some perspective on nondifferentiated consciousness.

To achieve nondifferentiated consciousness and not be aware that you know that you have achieved nondifferentiated consciousness may be a form of enlightenment, but it is not particularly useful.

In this context, “useful” is difficult to define.  Presupposing there is no division between unconscious and conscious, one would have to have some inkling of what designs the unconscious has.  Which brings us back to evolution.

On occasion, I play with the idea that evolution is profoundly deliberate on all scales–biological, societal, ontological, personal–with the idea of play most informing how things change over time.  If at least some of the ideas I’ve been playing with in this work are more or less useful, and I estimate that the ideas came from my undifferentiated unconscious/conscious, and I hypothesize that my undifferentiated unconscious/conscious is directly connected/related to the undifferentiated unconscious/conscious characteristic of the whole, then I would conclude that our conscious minds can join in on the adjustment of our evolution.

I’m not exactly sure how useful that would be.  I’m not real trusting of conscious minds to make informed decisions on how to evolve.  But if I’m to be true to the premise of this piece, any conscious choice is also an unconscious choice.

How would we deliberately, consciously play with our own evolution?

Be aware of what we are unconsciously doing now.

I’ve been reading Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos, where our universe is estimated to have been born from another universe’s black hole.  Smolin hypothesizes that the laws of our universe may have been naturally selected over time as universes gave birth to new universes with slight variations.  Those universes with laws providing for ease of black hole creation were the universes that proliferated.  Smolin advocates applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to understanding universe reproduction and galaxy ecologies.

The scale of these events is unfathomable.  A thought that comes to mind is the strangeness of physicists’ assumptions that the unfolding of these events is not characterized by life or consciousness.  Whereas life and consciousness fill the lives of those of us who inhabit a planet, consciousness does not operate at either the scale of the molecular processes that make up our bodies or at the scale of the galaxies and universes that transform the star stuff that provides the molecules that we’re made of.

Whereas the mystic differentiates between life and nonlife while he or she notes that consciousness invests both the living and the not, I’m starting to wonder how we can so blithely differentiate between life and nonlife with the principles of evolution possibly unfolding on scales of the universe.

Smolin explores exclusively Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  Oddly, Smolin quotes from Darwin’s Lamarckian work, The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication for the beginning of a chapter in The Life of the Cosmos emphasizing non-Lamarckian selective processes.  The quote by Darwin states that if a hypothesis is useful, it deserves respect.  Darwin makes this statement in the context of his theory that provides for the environment informing nonrandom features in progeny.

Smolin’s stated assumption is that universe procreation is characterized by the random selection of features for universes born of black holes.  We don’t know enough about the huge suns with 30,000-year life spans that become black holes, creating new universes to suggest the dynamics of random vs. nonrandom origins of new features.  But we might surmise that the principles that drive the four-scale nature of this work–biology, society, ontogeny, personal experience–might be evident in the ways that universes reproduce.  We can look for the prolongation of features of early universes into later stages of descendant variations, and the withdrawing of later stages of universes to early stages, earlier in the ontogeny of descendent universes.  How we would look for qualities of maturation in universes is beyond me. It may have something to do with the sudden emerging acceleration of our universe, etiology unknown.

Two things come to mind.  We humans are chauvinists of scale and chauvinists of time.

We behave like life and consciousness are characteristic of where we sit and where we sit only on the scales from strings and subatomic particles to universes and universe lineages.

We estimate that time has beginnings and ends because beginnings and ends characterize what we observe at the scale we are in.  Perhaps we are prejudiced by biology.  We are clearly prejudiced to believe that life occurs only at the scale we are in.

It partly comes down to this:  What information does a star turning black hole use to inform how it will vary from the universe that gave it birth so it will more likely seamlessly integrate into the environment into which it’s being born, and produce more universes?

What is the character of the environment that a universe is within?

This work observes the effects of sexual selection and social structure on testosterone levels influencing changes in maturation rates propelling neoteny in human evolution and then follows that same trail while watching societies transform.  By matching observed matrifocal trends (neotenous males, accelerated females) with the imminent necessity of global societal conversion to sustainable living practices, one can make the following predictions about the future.

Universal health care for all humans will demand right-eating practices.  The community won’t want to pay for individual dietary indulgences that result in costs to the community.  There will be a dramatic drop in animals consumed to make sure there is enough food for all.  The resulting low-fat, relatively low-protein diet will result in puberty returning to 16-17 years old, dramatic increases in brain size and higher synapse numbers and reverence for aesthetics as central to life.  (Early puberty testosterone surges halt brain growth, curtailing synapse production.)

Mother’s testosterone levels will be evaluated two months before birth.  If elevated, embryo ipods will be carried by pregnant mothers providing rhythms and melodies running in sync with variations with the child’s and mother’s heartbeat.  Music will continue to be delivered after birth.  It will be discovered that artificial interventions to change a mother’s testosterone levels to adjust the maturation of a potentially autistic child will have unpredictable negative effects.  Children will be taught to dance when they learn to walk.

Social networking will evolve quickly to become an extremely powerful political intervention tool used by very high percentages of young people, all having registered to vote.  The influence of political parties will break down as politics becomes issue/date based as temporary ad hoc coalitions build around social networking imperatives driven through very specific legislation.  Politicians put in power by networking blocks will vote less predictably as they seek to maintain their constantly changing coalitions, adjusting votes depending on their highly networked constituencies.  The influence of corporations will plummet.  Politicians will become faceless as their constituencies become all powerful.

Corporate media will be replaced by citizen media mediated by numerous rating intermediaries.  On the Internet, citizens will be able to choose between a vast number of services offering their particular selection of local and world news and stories created by local teams.  Taxes will supply governments with funds that are redistributed according to how long net users linger on a location on the web.  If a news story in Tibet produced by a local videographer achieves notoriety and is watched across the planet, that videographer is paid according to how long each viewer watched his piece.  High quality news will be produced as talented purveyors are rewarded for their work.

Evolution cultists will emerge seeking to transform culture and society in specific directions through deliberate hormone manipulation and targeted mate choice.

Spirituality and art will converge, characterized by spiritual visions informing aesthetic directions with an emergence of countless unique societal subcultures.

Music will become ubiquitous.  Many educated people will never learn how to read.  There will be a return to auditory art forms mediated by computers and the web that won’t require keyboard use, instead taking auditory input or lip reading by camera.  As more and more children are observed to be geniuses at creation and communication without the ability to read or write, reading and writing will fade.  Third world peoples and ethnic minorities previously hampered by societies emphasizing the visual over the auditory or kinesthetic will become globally revered for their contributions to the new aesthetic society.

The aesthetic economy propelled by transparency, collapsing hierarchy and resource accessibility will make possible global sustainability.  Observing these effects of neoteny, we can predict how the future will unfold.

Writing these daily entries, I discover something new almost as often as I record something I’ve earlier discovered. It’s time to collect some of the hypotheses or predictions of this work.

1) Relative testosterone levels in males and females inform matrifocal vs. patrifocal societal structure. High T females choose low T males for their cooperative abilities, creating more egalitarian, matrifocal cultures. High T males choose low T females for their ability to be the complement to male authority, forming patrifocal cultures.

2) Autistic males, from families of left-handers, will have lower testosterone than the norm, and autistic females will have higher testosterone. In any study of autism, those with familial male maturation delay tendencies, families of left-handers, need to be evaluated separately from those possibly traumatized by an environmental effect.

3) Larger penis and testicle size will be associated with autistic, ambidextrous males and the familial left-handed.

4) Autistic males will exhibit more neotenous characteristics while autistic females should show less neoteny than contemporary populations.

5) If larger testicles and increased sperm production are associated with low-testosterone, promiscuous social-structure males, the two variables will be related in that higher-testosterone males will have smaller testicles or lower sperm production.

6) Left-handed males and autistics will produce more sperm.

7) A high percentage of artistic, narcissistic males and females with borderline personality disorder, particularly those from families with left-handers, will have more frequent incidence of autism in their family.

8) Narcissistic males will frequently mate with borderline personality females. The males will have lower testosterone, the females higher testosterone than the average.

9) The children of parents of widely different ethnicities, separated by tens of thousands of years of no interbreeding, should reveal characteristics of their last common progenitor and increased incidence of autism.

10) Among contemporary cultures, patrifocal societies will exhibit increased sexual dimorphism compared to matrifocal cultures.

11) Over the last six thousand years, female brain size will decrease at a smaller rate than male brain size, or even increase over the same period because the female is being selected for an exhibition of neotenous characteristics.

12) 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 patrifocal social structure has taken hold?

13) 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. An older mother should more frequently have children with maturational delay, including autism.

14) Obese mothers (overweight women exhibit increased testosterone levels), particularly those that are older, should show high incidence of autism in their children.

15) The teeth of males from older mothers should be smaller than the teeth of males of first-born, young mothers. It should be reversed for females.

16) If the low testosterone (T) males and high T females are late born, and high T males and low T females are the oldest children in a family or the first born, then first-borns will mate with first-borns and late-borns will mate with late-borns a higher percentage of the time than would normally occur.

17) In a large family, the male’s teeth will erupt later and later, the females earlier and earlier.

17) Hypothesizing that 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. One would also expect a higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children.

18) Conditions that display maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will appear in males with longer limbs and smaller teeth than in others in their family of origin.

19) Equatorial peoples transplanted to northern climates will display higher percentages of maturational-delayed male children, and maturational-accelerated females, including autistics, with the births congregating in certain seasons.

20) If mother’s allergies influence testosterone levels, for example, hay fever causing testosterone increases, then allergies might be a factor in the cause of autism in her children. Birthdays of these autistics should cluster in certain months.

21) Female infanticide is patrifocal culture’s method for keeping only high T males in the procreation pool. In societies engaging in female infanticide, there are far fewer females than males to mate. The males considered least desirable as husbands by the fathers of the females to be married go mateless. Female infanticide is the co-option of female selection by patrifocal society to maintain a patrifocal society over time.

22) Puberty or progenesis in humans when dropped to a younger age by several years has neurological and cognitive repercussions. In addition to an increase in depression and bi-polar disorder, there is a general curtailment of the final stages of cognitive development.

23) Eating healthy (the caveman diet) brings puberty later and provides a longer time for the brain to grow. Putting autistic children on such a late-puberty-enhancing diet may enhance their ability to connect.

24) Periods of innovation will be preceded by periods of romance, by changes in the selection criteria by which females pick their mates or by a widening of the selection criteria for the ideal male. Shifts to increases in the variety of acceptable features in the procreation population will result in increases in cultural and technical variation. For example, if female infanticide is a tool used for patrifocal cultural stability, decreases in female infanticide over time within a culture will correlate with increases in societal and economic variation.

25) If rhythm and dance were the media driving human evolution through rituals of sexual selection, then the sound and feeling of nonstop rhythm may be necessary to encourage the development of an autistic child. Rhythmic environmental triggers may be essential to the healthy growth of maturational-delayed children. Comparing congenitally deaf left and right handers may reveal an unusually high number of autistics in the left handed group.

26) If neoteny is a powerful force influencing the transformation of society, then we might predict societal increases in transparency, diversity and horizontal communication as features of aboriginals and the very young are prolonged into the character of contemporary times.

27) Teleological interpretations of cultural evolution are often the observations of the dynamics of neoteny. By prolonging the features of the smallest bands into the largest societies–transparency, horizontal communication, equality–society is invested with specific features and a predictable direction.

The American Neo-Lamarckians of the nineteenth century, Hyatt and Cope, explored the evolutionary repercussions of prolonging and accelerating maturation rates of individuals over time as they manifested in changes in descendants.  Stephen J. Gould follows the attempts by theorists to understand these processes in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  New features would be acquired, added to an ontological endpoint to the adult of a species, and slowly move backward to earlier ontological stages through descendants.  At the same time, existing features evident early in ontogeny would prolong their way forward to appear later in ontogeny in descendants.  A feature could appear as an adult, move its way backward to an embryonic stage, and then move forward again, having metamorphosed along the way.  There is this inhalation/exhalation aspect of evolution not examined closely for almost 100 years.

In humans, social structure mediates this dynamic.  In a matrifocal social structure, cooperative males and commanding females are highly valued.  Males are maturational prolonged as cooperative neotenous features are selected.  Females are maturational accelerated as commanding attributes are chosen.  Features move up and down the ontogenetic ladder, manifesting earlier and later in descendants.

In a patrifocal trajectory, the reverse is in play.  Commanding non-neotenous males are valued and choose cooperative neotenous females as their mates.  Features still move up and down the ontogenetic pathway, manifesting earlier and later in descendants, except the currents are moving in opposite directions from their matrifocal counterparts.

Evolution is not seamless in one direction.  There are movements within a single population back and forth in the direction of the two social structures, depending on environmental influences, societal styles and band intermarriages.  The process can be exaggerated further with the appearance of culture.

Gesture evolved to speech, which evolved to writing to the printing press to the web.  On one hand, highly patrifocal, male, aggressive, hierarchical tendencies were riding in on horseback and subjugating societies, stratifying them, placing males in control.  On the other hand, the ground was being laid for eventual seamless communication that would break down barriers, horizontalize hierarchy and allow far more people to be engaged.  Just as social structure mediated human evolution before language and culture, after the emergence of symbol systems, social structure continued to drive evolution, except at extraordinary speeds.

Both patrifocal and matrifocal social structures are essential to the variety of features exhibited and the speed of evolution achieved over the course of pre-language biological evolution and societal evolution.  They are the right and left hand, the inhalation and exhalation of our unfolding.

Hyatt, Cope and their contemporaries did not see the societal applications of the processes they observed.  Over a hundred years later, relationships between social transformation and maturational adjustments that drive evolution mediated by social structure go totally unremarked.  This relationship is not complicated, just unfamiliar.  A large reason it is unfamiliar is that matrifocal social structure is considered relatively anomalous and noninfluential in our evolution.

The late nineteenth century had several theorists estimating that matrilineal societies may have had more than a little to do with how humans evolved.  With the ascendancy of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Social Darwinism as a societal belief, the matrilinealists were rejected.  Now might be a good time to re-examine the power of the womb.

Researcher Henry Jerison noted in 1973 that there was a consistent and evocative pattern in the brain-size relationship between predator and prey. The predator in any predator/prey partnership always had a bigger brain. Jerison concluded that the demands of catching another animal were far more exacting than eating foliage and avoiding being caught. Hunting required far more brains than running away.

The origin of thought is not about how big a brain humans might have needed to be successful hunters. What humans needed big brains for, as Geoffrey Miller has outlined, was to achieve sex opportunities. The same process that drove predator brain-size increases, in the case of humans, drove them to behave in ways that resulted in larger brains. What drove humans was the dance and the sounds that humans would make to accompany the dance, with the most evocative performers being picked more frequently as sexual partners.

A predator’s brain need be no bigger than what is required to catch prey. There is no biological incentive to add any more brain power than is absolutely necessary to survive. Humans, as far as we know, are the first species to revel in culture, thought, language and all its implications. Culture requires brains, and brains of that immense degree were never necessary in any other animal. The human act that demanded immense brain power was the act of art. This requirement is because in art there are no limits. Competition to exhibit artistic prowess in the form of dance drove the practitioners to behave in more and more beautiful and complex patterns, with the most successful dancers being chosen for sex. The genes of the best dancers got passed on. The better dancers had bigger brains, just as predators had bigger brains, because it takes bigger brains to behave in more physically or orally complex ways. Whereby a predator needs a brain only slightly bigger than its prey, an archaic human needs a bigger brain to perform better than his or her peers, a constantly escalating standard. The result was runaway sexual selection. The race was on.

It has been hypothesized that early humans were selected for an ability to travel long distances, running, to chase down wounded prey. Spuhler in 1979 outlined specific hormonal innovations that support this conjecture. I believe these glandular innovations are explained by dance as the driving force behind these changes. The theories devised since 1979 that hypothesize running as the driving force behind our evolution neglect dance as a theory that retains far more explanatory power. Again, with dance there are no limits. Massive brain growth is not explained by chasing down a predator. If that were the case, wolves would be our cultural superiors and we their pets.

Sexual selection based on an aesthetic increased the speed of evolution exponentially because the demonstrator of the art was practicing an intangible with no demonstrable ceiling in the exercising of the skill, a skill requiring increased brain mass. This sexual selection, specifically, is what never had occurred before in evolution. Peacock feathers evidence a runaway aesthetic, but no increased brain power was required. The verbal facility and plumage of parrots suggest that they may have experienced a similar selective dynamic, and indeed parrots, like humans, have two unusually large cerebral hemispheres with different-sized lobes. But parrots don’t exhibit complex dance. Humans sing and dance.

Still, we need to address an additional variable that explains why this type of selection occurred with humans and not another species earlier in time. Humans are not the first animal to dance or sing to achieve sex. Why didn’t this exponential brain growth occur in another animal over the course of the last billion or so years? Because the specific way that the human brain grew so large so quickly was by slowing down maturation rates, prolonging the time it took to reach adulthood. Adults with bigger brains achieved this result by spending more time in the childhood states where brain growth was most intense. When the best dancers and singers were picked for procreation, the ones picked were the humans most maturational delayed. It is a feature of only certain groups of species that they can easily increase or decrease their rates of maturation. Wolves and foxes, for example, exhibit a high degree of manipulation in this regard, and the large variation in dog appearances is directly related to this ability. Humans sexually selected to perform dance and song were coincidentally selected to mature slower. Slower maturers grow bigger brains because they spend more time at those early childhood states where brains are growing. The late, great Stephen J. Gould discussed this dynamic in detail over his 30-year career and used the word “neoteny,” earlier popularized by Bolk, to summarize its effects.

“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) eyefold.
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 Montague (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958) and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montague’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).

Neoteny offers other bonuses besides an easy way to achieve rapid brain growth. These related or contingent features offer an astonishing variety of characteristics that contribute to our behavioral, physical and neurological make-up. These include upright posture, little body hair, small jaw relative to our progenitors, smaller teeth, longer life span and propensity to play and exhibit creativity and sexuality as an adult. The ability of our species to change maturational speeds in combination with art/sex as an accelerator in that process results in the unique species that we are today. But it is in revealing the biological process behind the change in maturation rates–what specifically physiologically causes maturation rates to change in humans–that truly whips away the curtain in this Wizard of Oz story of our unfolding. The biological engine (contrasted with art/sex as the social engine) behind maturational delay and acceleration is changing levels of testosterone.

Testosterone regulates maturation speed. It occurs on both a general and a specific scale. The story deepens.

General maturation speed is established at six weeks before birth and is based on the level of testosterone in the mother’s blood. Higher or lower levels influence males and females in the opposite direction. A mother with high testosterone will set her son’s maturation timer on slow, her daughter’s on fast. A mother with low testosterone levels will birth a son with fast maturation rates and a daughter moving at a slow pace. Environmental factors can have extremely powerful effects on mothers’ testosterone levels, radically amending maturation speeds. Autism and other disorders characterized by maturational delay or acceleration can and do result.

So testosterone can regulate speed through the mother setting the general speed of maturation. Testosterone can also regulate speed on a micro level, within a lifetime, by being increased or decreased within an individual. On obvious example is the eunuch. If testicles are removed before puberty, that individual will live several years longer than a normal male, in fact, as long as a female, because testosterone levels are dramatically reduced. In the West, this practice was used into the 20th century in order to create a permanent, ringing singing voice; in the East, it was used to provide a guard for the emperor’s females. The eunuch’s biological processes have been slowed down. Stress will increase testosterone levels and shorten life. Exercise will decrease testosterone levels and prolong life. As our testosterone levels change, so will the speed of our metabolism, which is connected to how slow or how fast we mature.

In humans, as we evolved from the primate progenitor over millions of years up and through homo erectus, sexual selection eventually utilized our ability to adjust maturation rates to increase brain size by slowing down our rates of maturation (by adjusting testosterone levels) in order to become better dancers and sound-makers to achieve more sex. It is a combination of these two processes–tightly focused sexual selection revolving around an aesthetic (also called runaway sexual selection) and neoteny (the ability of a species to unfold over time, prolonging its infant states into adulthood by slowing down maturation rates)–that propels humans through its unique trajectory.

The slow acceleration of the art/sex sexual selection feedback loop can be observed to become a high pitched fever and the center of society when the fossil record reveals males and females coming closer and closer in size. The specific change in dynamics toward the art/sex society was a shift away from the formerly necessary bonus of a relative larger male size and strength for the early hominid males to aggressively compete with one another. How do we know that this was the case? Fossil remains, though suggestive at best, reveal a high degree of sexual dimorphism between the emerging hominid male and female for at least 2 million or so years after diverging from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Australopithecus afarensis were highly dimorphic, with males almost twice the size of females. Homo erectus did not evidence this extreme difference. The similarity in size is due to the growth in the size of the female. Among living primate societies, increased sexual dimorphism is exhibited when there is violent intramale competition or frequent harsh contact with forces in the environment. These societies are usually patrifocal. It is unlikely that males and females would be mutually choosing each other as mates according to a physical aesthetic of dance and sound in a patrifocal society. A highly dimorphic social structure implies males physically threatening each other for procreation rights. The art/sex competition would only be a powerful dynamic in a promiscuous social structure where males cooperate to compete via the aesthetic as opposed to physical strength. Strength alone does not require brains. Survival of the fittest did not make us who we are.

And it is likely that the degree of focus in the matrifocal vs. patrifocal directions varied from band to band, region to region. The less hierarchical, dominant competition between males, the less necessary that males be large and strong and thus the less sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. And a single band or evolutionary pool may have evolved back and forth between the two poles over time. Eventually a line was crossed, probably more than once. Evidence that this crossing occurred is when the fossils show that males and females became far less sexually dimorphic–more similar in size. Matrifocal society had taken hold.

There are a number of repercussions and implications–not just in body size. When the first proto human bands transitioned into matrifocal tribes, we can assume that the environment was relatively benign or unthreatening because there was less need for the advantages conferred by sexual dimorphism. The life of the aesthetic could be concentrated on with less distraction. Bonobo chimpanzees exhibit societal relationships similar to what we’re discussing. The bonobo often pass band leadership through a dominant female’s son. Strong females are deferred to. Sex is a constant form of recreation and communication. There is little violent competition among males. Both males and females initiate sex. At the other great ape extreme are gorillas, where a single male dominates the band through the control of sex through a harem of females. Other males have sex opportunities, but at the leader’s discretion. In between these two extremes is the chimpanzee. Males compete for procreation opportunities by working their way up to alpha position, but all males can have sex with any willing female in estrus. Alpha males and their allies just get more access and at the times females are ovulating. Only males initiate sex. With chimpanzees and gorillas, food sharing is not associated with sexual behavior, whereas it is with bonobo. Predators have little effect on social structure in these three cases. Yet gorillas are highly sexually dimorphic because the most physically imposing males can more easily control sexual opportunities–intramale competition. Among bonobo where frequency of sex and amount of sperm produced determines paternity percentages, the males and females are closer in size. And, not incidentally, bonobo have a far larger penis and testicles than the gorillas, because their social structure demands these attributes. Bonobos exhibit maturational delay compared to both other chimps and gorillas and have larger relative brain size. Bonobos exhibit sexual swellings for 75% of their cycles as opposed to chimpanzee females showing these changes 50% of the time. It has been suggested that bonobo adult sexual behavior is not unlike the chimpanzee adolescent, an example of maturational delay, just as the bonobo skull is similar to the chimpanzee adolescent skull. Social structure determines relative size of the males and females to each other, relative size of male sexual organs and relative brain size. In the evolving human, with social structure having veered in the direction of a bonobo-like matrifocal highly sexed society, brain size (and likely penis and testicle size, though the fossil record is mum on this subject) was increasing at stunning rates with an extreme slowdown of maturation.

With the decrease in maturation rates and the continued revealing of more and more infant and child features into the adult phase of a species, there is an increase in both play and sexuality. Play and sex are closely related, with both evidencing themselves more frequently in the adult. In the course of just 20 years, experiments with foxes selected solely for signs of exhibiting tame behavior associated with maturational delay showed the females going into heat far more of the time. There is increased incidence of domesticity and playfulness when the same selective principle is applied to wolves as they morph into the dog. Again, note in the bonobo, compared to its close relatives the gorilla and chimpanzee, that evolution in a neotenous direction has resulted in dramatically increased sexuality. The female bonobo spends substantially more time in estrus than the female chimpanzee or gorilla.

There is another point concerning this social structure that best evidences the art/sex neoteny/brain size increase in hominid evolutionary trajectory. Male cooperative behavior relative to male competitive behavior is a feature of bonobo vs. gorilla social structures–matrifocal vs. patrifocal societies. A species that becomes more neotenous is inclined to become more cooperative. At the same time that art/sex is growing bigger brains and neoteny is reinforced, a host of other features (noted by Gould, Bolk and Montague) that contribute to individual and societal characteristics are also becoming evident. The ability of males to avoid the energy expended to control breeding opportunities by force and instead rely on neoteny to grow bigger brains to dance their way to the bedroom results in males with lower testosterone levels–males relatively comfortable around children. In a society where paternity is totally unknown and all descent is through the mother, low testosterone males are more likely to engender an environment where the infants and children are in less danger from male conflicts and infanticide, where males will kill infants not evidently their own. In addition, this is a society where males are more likely to hunt cooperatively because the high-testosterone, hierarchical posturing for position is far less evident. Many things are implied by this thesis, not the least of which is the reinforcement of cooperative behavior by the males of the species, creating further opportunities for the gathering of food, particularly foods high in fat needed to feed the evolutionarily expanding brain.

Evolutionary developmental biology is slowly embracing concepts introduced in the nineteenth century, including the possibility that features exhibited by individuals are not randomly selected but emerge in direct response to environmental influences.  The three points of impact are sperm production, egg creation and the uterine environment.  Most obvious is the influence of the environment on the fetus.  For example, clones are emerging from wombs looking and acting differently from their parent.  The effects of the uterine environment are only beginning to be understood.

Physicists investigating how the universe evolved are hypothesizing black holes as the birthplace for new universes.  If there are correlates between the ways biology and a universe evolve, then there needs to be a location in this process that a gestating universe can be influenced so it can exhibit new features.  The gestating universe would also need a dynamic that could mediate environmental influences, making it possible for the impact of those influences to manifest.  If a dying sun becoming a black hole transforms into a universe, at what point in that sequence are environmental influences absorbed and how are these influences transcribed?

Is it possible that a sun’s environment while still shining influences the sun in some way that the information is carried forward through to its rebirth as a universe?  Could it be that what forms the sun influences the universe that follows?

Physicists are still using natural selection as their sole paradigm for biological transformation and applying that to the ways that universes evolve.  Natural selection is the dinner table holding a feast of selective processes available to explain how biology and society evolve.  Eating the table does not sustain, though it may make it possible to eat.  In other words, natural selection does not explain how evolution unfolds.  Natural selection only states the obvious, that features that don’t live long enough to procreate lose an opportunity to continue to exist.

Consider that in human evolution the dynamic called neoteny is drawing or prolonging the features of our progenitors’ infants into the adults of the present day.  Infant features of a chimp-like ancestor, such as high forehead, upright stature, small jaw, big brain relative to skull size, curiosity, playfulness, etc., are evidencing themselves in contemporary adults.  Slowly, embryonic features appear later and later in the ontogeny of descendants.  Babies today look like ancestor embryos.  Could a human millions of years from now look like the sexless salamander embryo of the first trimester?

Evidently there is some super slow compulsive drive to manifest our origins in our ends.  It just may be that the innate creativity that accompanies earlier and earlier stages of ontogeny is compelling enough on its own to drive this process as adults are provided more and more an experience of the creation process, and crave more.  If what is occurring to human beings is seminal to biological evolution, perhaps this process can be observed to occur in the way that a universe evolves.

Neoteny is not the only evolutionary process.  Heterochronic theory proposes six derivations in the ways that species can mature and/or develop over time.  Sexual selection in concert with social structure influences these various trajectories.  Looking for patterns in astrophysics that mimic or suggest these biological dynamics might lead to a conclusion that life and nonlife might be only differences of scale.

A child’s lifelong maturation rates are set several weeks before birth by the mother’s testosterone levels. A mother with high testosterone gives birth to low testosterone males and high testosterone females. A low testosterone female raises high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Numerous factors influence a mother’s testosterone levels, including age, stress, exercise, smoking, alcohol, drugs, touch, diet and light. Radical elevations in a mother’s testosterone level can lead to extreme maturational delay and autism.

This scheme is part of a larger picture of how humans evolve. Changing maturation rates over generations send societies in one of two directions: matrifocal or patrifocal social structures. Low testosterone males mating with high testosterone females form the foundation of matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males pairing with low testosterone females make up patrifocal social structure. When mothers today exhibit matrifocal features, high testosterone, while exposed to environmental influences that elevate their testosterone further, male children with delay tendencies may shift into extreme delay.

This theory predicts that females with autism will not exhibit maturational delay, but maturational acceleration accompanied by elevated testosterone. When a mother’s testosterone level elevates, she not only influences the maturation rates of her children, she sends them on a journey into the past. Maturation rates unfold on two scales, on the scale of the individual unfolding in a lifetime–personal ontogeny–and on the scale of how our species has evolved over the last few thousand generations. We have recently (25,000 years ago to the last couple hundred years) evolved out of matrifocal social structure to patrifocal social structure. We reverse the process by reversing our maturation rates, reproducing that path we took to arrive in the present. Elevating mother’s testosterone, we instill ancient ontogenetic pathways, propelling our children back in time to when language was still new. For males, backwards is lowered testosterone and maturational delay. For females, backwards is raised testosterone and maturational acceleration.

Light influences testosterone levels via the pineal gland, which regulates testosterone production. Testosterone fluctuations of 30% a day can be observed as thresholds follow diurnal–day & night–cycles, influenced by the availability of sunlight. What happens when a people are shifted away from consistent, daily 30% fluctuations into northern climates where the light in winter is almost nonexistent, in summer almost always there?

Jews and Blacks both display anomalous distributions of testosterone in males. Both Black and Jewish males (studies were conducted with only males) showed either very high or very low testosterone levels. Both these cultures were transplanted from equatorial regions to climates with light-fluctuating seasons.

One would predict that both these ethnicities would exhibit a higher percentage of conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism.

Somalis immigrating to Minnesota are discovering radical rates of autism among their children. This theory predicts that these autistic children’s birthdays should cluster in certain times of the year. If mother’s light-influenced testosterone rates are particularly high at six weeks before birth, intervention to lower rates (for example, modifying light exposure) would be prudent.

There is also the possibility that the father’s testosterone levels influence the child’s rates of maturation. There are no studies to support this possibility other than studies concluding that older parents are more likely to give birth to autistic children. (Women experience high testosterone with age, males lower testosterone.) It could be estimated at what seasons a fathers testosterone rates are lowest at conception, and compare that to when mother’s testosterone is highest six weeks before birth and look for the impacts of overlap. It may be that both mother and father are having an effect.

There are also possibilities that autumn September through October allergy seasons are influencing testosterone levels impacting embryo’s maturation rates.

Light and testosterone are related. Many things in our environment influence testosterone levels. Understanding autism involves recognizing how testosterone is influenced and realizing how this influence connects to how we evolved.

One of the less becoming features of a big chunk of American society is a tendency to revere achievement over the path taken to that success.  Honor in action or behavior is often portrayed as quaint.  I’ve observed this attitude among many of my competitors.  I run a web design or web development firm.  There are many younger males in the web business that behave like Darwin’s theory of natural selection is a business model, not a theory of evolution.

On the other hand, perhaps the left hand, there is strong movement toward exploring and manifesting transparency in the processes and actions of organizations, corporations and personal relations.

In my opinion, these are not two arbitrary societal trends slugging it out.  Long lineages trail behind them.  It’s looking like the patrifocal-dominance model has become self-corrupting as it takes a step away from a Goldwater honorable path conservatism and catapults itself over the philosophical abyss claiming targeted ends justify any means.  In the U. S., we’ve achieved a kind of Zen conservatism where everything is relative; morals are useful when cementing constituencies and ethics are only relevant in relation to how you are perceived.  Whereas in Zen one shifts identity to the all, the American Right withdraws from anything as a guiding principle to acquire all.  Democrats often suffer from the same malaise.

It astonishes me how little that telling the truth is respected in the society of corporations, media, politics and bureaucracies.  This disregard seems in sharp contrast to the behavior of individuals where trust between friends seems strong as ever.  It’s not clear to me that this split is any different than in the past, but now there is respect for the tellers of lies by people in positions of power.

Truth and transparency are not the same things, but they are pretty close.  A central theme of this work, these blogs, is the impact of neoteny on human evolution and social transformation.  Infant features are observed to appear in the adult of descendants over hundreds of thousands of years.  Characteristics of the aboriginal, the ethnic minority, the young, the disposed, the underprivileged, the shaman and the artist are emerging in contemporary culture or moving from the fringes to the center.  The meek are inheriting the earth.

Infants and toddlers evidence several features appearing in the adults of human beings, features I am suggesting were characteristic of our earlier chimpanzee-like progenitors.  Playfulness, curiosity, creativity, trust, affection, dependency, vulnerability to environmental influences and transparency are a few of these features.  There is that point in an individual’s ontogeny when it becomes possible to lie.  Truth and transparency are features of the very young.

There is a truth about truth, a metatruth.  The more that we as individuals stay with what is real, the closer our ties to the environment.  The closer that we are to our environment, the deeper we feel loved.

We can fill our lives with stories.  Metaphors reveal truth.  Particularly those truths that don’t work well with words.  Yet, the more we fill our lives with misinterpretations, attempts at obfuscation and respect for lies, the less likely we will feel part of something larger than ourselves.

The more real we let our lives become, the closer we can come to those around us.

Make your life transparent and see through to the other side.

Dance (and song), brain size, testosterone levels, play, sexuality and cooperative behavior are so closely tied as to be undifferentiated when discussing human evolution.  All are closely allied and reinforcing each other, waxing and waning according to the same dynamic of maturation rates influencing social structure driving neoteny.

There is another aspect of the dance/sex evolutionary trajectory–an aspect opaque to an academic understanding of this multivariable process–the possible effects of consciousness itself on our evolution in relation to how consciousness evolved in humans.  This aspect is difficult to explore because the spiritual perspective is not useful in scientists’ world views.  Yet familiarity with an idea of spirit, using an “as if” frame, provides a possible way to understand how we evolved; it could shed light on another facet or perspective on this multidisciplinary, ongoing event.

How we came to be might make deeper sense if we posit the possibility of who we are as a manifestation of spirit or consciousness.

The desire to feel part of something larger than the self, like sex, has a huge impact on the behavior of human beings.  Humans move toward experiences of spiritual oneness because the experience confers such powerful feeling bonuses.  The same with sex.  Sex, like spiritual experience, is deeply satisfying and, of course, feels extremely good.  The dance/sex dynamic of human evolution cannot be easily differentiated from an urge toward spiritual experience, with the desire for sex and the experience of oneness both resulting from the dance/sex experience.  The rituals of community sound-making, dance and sex are profound spiritual experiences characterized by a loss of individual awareness into a larger communal identity.  The dance/sex loop nurtures the experience of our human progenitor individual away from purely self-motivated action to community-oriented action by offering an experience, a spiritual experience, of identity with something larger than the self.

Different writers have explored a social context that supports the dynamic that we are detailing here.  Chris Knight, a Marxian anthropologist, has discussed in detail an evolving aboriginal orientation that revolves around monthly rituals featuring dance, song and sex–rituals acting as the cement of social relationships–rituals created and maintained by a matrifocal, promiscuous social structure characterized by females ovulating in synchrony and providing sex in exchange for meat brought back by males.  Jane Goodall observed adult male chimpanzees participating in proto-rituals, demonstrating to other members of their band when confronted with the overwhelming power of a thunderstorm and at another time a waterfall.  Proto-ritual evolved to actual ritual propelled by experiences of feeling part of something larger than the self.  The arts of dance and sound-making were the media in this process.  Sex was the payoff.

It may seem like a large assumption that the human experience of feeling part of something larger than the self, intuiting the presence of spirit or larger consciousness, means that the larger consciousness does exist.  Just as we experience consciousness as a feature of our own existence, for many the experience of the larger consciousness is just as direct an experience.  To note the effects of this directly perceived reality on a theory of evolution might be useful.  Yet this experience of a larger consciousness is not a consensus reality.  To ground a theory on information that is limited in availability is neither prudent nor scientific.

It’s important not to take god too seriously.  It’s also useful not to take too seriously theories that don’t take consciousness seriously.

Other features, characteristics or accompanying myths associated with god are not being explored as necessary to this exposition.  It is simply that we as individuals are self-aware, that we are often aware of the larger consciousness that is greater than ourselves and that the relationship between the two might be useful to understanding how we evolved as a species.

If we hypothesize that a larger consciousness already existed before and during human evolution, and if we hypothesize that human beings evolved partly by a desire to experience this larger consciousness, then human individual identity or separateness from this larger consciousness had to be evolving at the same time.  We might estimate that the further from an experience of spirit that we evolutionarily wandered, the deeper our cravings to reunite.  There is this hidden dynamic potentially feeding the dynamo of our unfolding.  The bigger our brains, the more facile we became with the manipulation of mental space and time and the deeper our craving grew for less individual identity and a reuniting with the larger consciousness.

Here’s my point.

It is possible that a major factor in our evolving so quickly was the tension between independent mental life and interdependent, larger consciousness.  The quicker our brains grew, the more we were compelled to engage in the process that resulted in larger brains.  In a very real sense, we became addicted to experiencing separateness from the larger consciousness in order to have the deeply satisfying experience of reuniting with the larger consciousness.  This addiction process might be at the root of what it is to be human.  Hence, the craving for altered states and alcoholism is a distinguishing feature of our species.  The addictive qualities of the courtship process as it manifests in our attachment to romance is another facet of this dynamic.  The obsessive aspect of the artistic process as it searches for moments of integration shows this effect from another angle.  The deep craving of the neurotic for an opportunity to feel whole, the desire to feel happy–these feelings are at the foundation of what it is to be human.  It is possible that these feelings made us human.  These feelings might be at the center of how we evolved.

So there you have it.  Dance, sex, rapid brain growth, neotenous trajectory, cooperative behavior, spiritual accompaniment–dancing and sound-making in a communal content–human bodies, brains and minds all changing.

Spirit may or may not have played a part in our evolution.  Still, it is possible that our deep desire to feel part of something larger than ourselves as expressed through ancient dance-and-sex-driven matrifocal societies may have informed how humans came to be.

A child of the 60s, a younger brother in the baby boom family of several million, I was born in 1952. I became politically aware after the 1968 Democratic convention. I was driven more by the desire for social change than political revolution, though of course, the two were allied. Hippiedom seemed divided into political revolution, social transformation and drug use streams. One could easily ally with one of the three and not the others. Some allied with two or three of these social currents. The younger the hippie, the more likely only drugs were the center of the orientation. This effect seems related to the draft becoming less threatening over time.

A colleague organizer mentioned last night the experience many of us had in the 1960s that revolution was just about to happen. For Joe, it was the sense that the political process was about to change. My experience was that social structure was transforming. The feeling of imminence was encouraged by most of us political and social change advocates spending no small amount of time in altered states characterized by revelatory experiences in the now focused on the nature of now. Castaneda’s “crack between the worlds” was opening up for millions of young people. We just assumed that society would follow us in. We could feel it happening to us.

We were right. Only it would be our children and grandchildren that would lead the way. Revelation is like that. Revelation can be right on, experiencing the connections, articulating the insight and be off by decades in terms of timing.

For me, social change, political change and personal transformation were/are integrally connected. An underlying tie between the social, political and the personal was the fear and anxiety that were characteristic of a large part of my experience and the division of the world between two nuclear polarities. There were ways that I did not differentiate between my fear of nuclear annihilation and my fears of personal annihilation. I often felt threatened. I maintained a brutally critical internal dialog. I desperately sought solace and loathed that I was so insecure. I felt split. The world felt split.

In the summer of 1988, I was driving from Champaign Urbana across to Normal, Illinois. Every six weeks I drove a great circle, leaving Chicago and heading south in the morning, looping west through mid-state cities and then back up through southwest suburbs, visiting five Carson Pirie Scott locations in one day, conducting inventories of The Far Side greeting cards and the products of other companies I represented. I loved the driving. Not so much the inventories.

Cruising down the interstate early on a balmy August afternoon, I had a sky that was sprinkled with medium-sized, puffy clouds rolling above fields filled with cylindrical hay bales from the harvest. A local NPR affiliate was airing information regarding Gorbachev’s verbal overtures to the West. The anchor’s intonations revealed our government’s suspicions. I heard something deep between the lines. Like a lightning strike, the crack between the worlds opened up down the middle of the interstate.

Tears were rolling down my cheeks. We’d made it. There would be peace soon. The end of the Cold War was beginning. World peace would be occurring in my lifetime. These things felt true.

Then I noticed the rainbows in the clouds. The west-headed highway unfolded before me between north and south banks of rainbows cascading down the sides of clouds. Like waterfalls, the rainbow streams were following the contours of the cloud sides until they spilled off of the white billows into the sky. Rainbows tumbled across the firmament, heading downhill toward the river of the road.

I was aware I was having a spiritual revelation seeded by the perception of a political transformation. I was aware that I was having a visionary experience during the visionary experience. No stranger to how visionary experiences evidence themselves in different cultures, eras and contexts, I was fascinated by my having such an experience. And so I reveled in the vision, the insight that world peace would occur in my lifetime, while observing the experience with a second layer of revelation that the specifics of the revelation were not necessarily true. Truth was in the experience of feeling part of something larger than myself, not in the accompanying insights or words. All else was interpretation. I was particularly aware of Black Elk’s late 1800’s revelations of massive social transformation that seemed to have never occurred.

So, I was experiencing revelation accompanied by a vision, accompanied by a revelation that truth is relative.

Arriving in the Carson Pirie Scott parking lot a half hour later, I could see remnants of the rainbows lingering in the sky. I got out of my car and observed a woman approach her car. I struggled to ask her if she saw the rainbows. I did not ask.

I stored the experience, deciding to come to no conclusions. Later, I discovered that I was living my life “as if” there would be world peace in my lifetime. Whether I was right or not seemed less important than having had the experience of feeling loved.

We experience love in ways similar to the way we express it. We interpret the love that we experience from the other side of the crack in a fashion that fits the way we express love in this world. Everything is relative, including our experience of god.

In the 1960s, political and social change seemed imminent. Clearly, we misinterpreted our experience as the 1970s transformed into the 1980s and Reaganism seemed almost universally embraced. The 1960s was nothing less than a revelatory epoch with insights unprecedented in their universality and depth. The timing was off. Our interpretation mechanisms required some seasoning, some maturing.

As I’m observing changes cascading through society today, riding the rainbow rapids of transformation, it feels to me like we live in days of revelation. I can’t help but see and hear the revolution we felt imminent forty years ago. Except now I understand it as evolution.

The changes were happening all the time.

R. A. Fisher hypothesized runaway sexual selection in 1930.

“The two characteristics affected by such a process, namely plumage development in the male, and sexual preference for such developments in female, must thus advance together, and so long as the process is unchecked by severe counter selection, will advance with ever-increasing speed. In the total absence of such checks, it is easy to see that the speed of development will be proportional to the development already attained, which will therefore increase with time exponentially, or in geometric progression. There is thus in any bionomic situation, in which sexual selection is capable of conferring a great reproductive advantage, the potentiality of a runaway process, which, however small the beginnings from which it arose, must, unless checked, produce great effects, and in the later stages with great rapidity.” (Fisher, R. A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford. Clarendon Press, pp. 136-7.)

David Brin in 1995 posited a relationship between runaway sexual selection and neoteny in humans, emphasizing two-say sexual selection. Geoffrey Miller in 1994 outlined runaway sexual selection in humans without an emphasis on maturational delay or neoteny. In other entries on these pages, you’ll find my hypothesis that runaway sexual selection in humans is closely tied to social structure, with females picking the best male dancers in a matrifocal context, males who are cooperative and highly neotenous. Brains grow quickly to be able to achieve exponential increases in facility in dance while the females mirror the runaway process, as women require extra synapses to appreciate the nuances of the art. Unfolding over thousands of generations, this process slowed down as language bridged from gesture to speech, brains split and males became valued for their ability to line up words and achieve goals. Brains started growing smaller 25,000 years ago. The runaway ceased. Patrifocal societies emerged.

Runaway sexual selection serves well as an explanatory principle revealing the origins of humans. Tying runaway sexual selection to social structure suggests that these same principles may apply to how society transforms.

Runaway sexual selection is closely associated with females picking males as males compete to achieve procreation opportunities, females becoming encouraged by that process to become more discriminating as genes for both sides of the process get carried forward. Over the course of the 20th century, we’ve seen a dramatic return to matrifocal social structure in the West with woman’s suffrage, the adoption of the Pill, women’s rights, abortion legalized, more women in the work place, women in academics, having children later, child care, etc. The ideal man has changed. Macho is out.

Women are choosing men that potentially provide them a life characterized by her feeling loved, strong and secure. Men are being chosen for qualities not highly valued in the West until recently. In addition to being providers, the men need to be cooperative, attentive and good with kids.

Not unlike the last time around, runaway female sexual selection has been engaged. Only this time, it’s not females picking males because they’re good dancers, it’s females picking products that they are drawn to and males picking products that they feel females will be drawn to. The runaway consumer economy is a direct manifestation of a return to a matrifocal society, only the unique productions of culture have become the focus of our attentions.

Female and male consumers have become consumed by the dance of exercising choice amongst an avalanche of products provided by corporations specializing in creating, producing, advertising and dispensing whatever a consumer might delight in. Instead of dancing, we adorn. We drape our lives in products.

We discriminate without discrimination.

Corporations maniacally provide.

Upon first observation, it would seem that the runaway sexual selection feedback loop would be between consumers on one end and corporations on the other. Indeed, sensitivity to nuance on the consumer side encourages a proliferation of products on the other that further encourages focus on specifics. This is the overt manifestation of an extremely sudden resurgence of female choice in a matrifocal social structure, with males struggling to compete with each other to display to females that they, too, are sensitive to nuance.

And so it ends.

During this period, we’ve seen blended qualities of both patrifocal and matrifocal frames of reference. We’ve been living in a hybrid society. In patrifocal societies, males control female procreation, seek dominance over competitors, collect stuff to ensure survival and pass it down to sons. Controlling, collecting and staying on top are features exhibited by the established powers in our society, those fittest that have survived in a patrifocal frame of reference. It is they that have been urging that we can’t have enough stuff. Their time is ending.

With the return of the female paradigm, there will be an inevitable collapsing of hierarchy and an end to a consumer economy. It has already begun. If given the choice and time, females will choose beauty over stuff. The men that get chosen as partners will be the men than intuit a woman’s aesthetic and satisfy. We’re on the road to bigger brains, once again.

Among evolutionary biologists, there is an ongoing argument revolving around the specific location or levels among hierarchies of animals (gene, individual, group, species, multispecies community, etc.) where evolution most powerfully occurs. Richard Dawkins and the reductionist sociobiologists focus on the gene as the central station where selection has its greatest impact. Dawkins advocates suggest that no train leaves the station, no gene lives to procreate, that hasn’t first been provided clearance by an environment. Good genes can carry many passengers, many individuals that profit by owning them, and it is the genes that decide how individuals evolve.

Stephen J. Gould was Dawkins’ opposite. Instead of suggesting that evolution occurs at a single location, Gould argued that evolution was influenced by selection at multiple levels at the same time. Biologists often have a favorite scale of selective influence. Classically, evolution was believed to occur at the scale of the individual.

This argument is not an arcane argument. Recent discussions in evolutionary developmental biology focus on the influence of the environment on the individual before and after birth. A consensus is emerging that the environment does not just influence evolution by killing individuals that can’t compete, but that the environment helps install the useful features or characteristics that an individual will exhibit to survive. With the environment so influential at the beginning and end of life, it becomes less clear how the individual is defined. As the individual becomes defined by environmental influence, it becomes necessary to define the environment, which is a very multiscale, multilevel affair.

Dawkins would argue that a gene acquires a proclivity to take environmental cues into account. It’s still about the gene. From an evolutionary developmental biological perspective, the Dawkins view becomes nonuseful. There seems to be many scales integral to evolution. What predictive power is offered by just focusing on the one?

I observe a similar argument in play as political organizers and social change advocates seek the best way to achieve social transformation. Individuals often focus on a particular scale or level within society as the place most vulnerable to outside impact or deliberate intervention. This selection often has to do with the number of resources at an individual’s command.

The far Left or hard Left advocates agitating as low as is possible, signs in the streets. With the fewest resources, the far Left has least access to power. They can touch people one by one. Media attention is as close as they can get.

The Progressive or soft Left seeks strings that they can pull. Relationships are established with elected officials, often by working on their campaigns. They get to have conversations with those elected officials. They can threaten withdrawal of support.

Some advocates of deep and lasting social change choose to work for liberal, elected officials, and these advocates seek to influence legislation by influencing the legislator.

Many are lucky enough to exhibit talent with words. As free lancers, bloggers or employees of mainstream media, authors pen opinions and observations that can influence legislators and voters.

Perhaps most of the Left believes that what most influences elected officials is the money they receive. Those with the resources can make sizable campaign contributions, seeking to offset what corporations contribute. At the highest level of the intervention hierarchy are those with money that can marshal the support of others with money, and these allies can get the focused attention of an elected official.

I hear arguments supporting one level or another. As an organizer, I hear most often that it’s feet in the streets that make the biggest difference. This argument would be equivalent to a Dawkins argument in evolutionary biology. It’s odd to associate a reductionist position with the American Left, but when a Leftist suggests it’s only demonstrations that make a difference, that Leftist ignores the same thing that the reductionist ignores–the influence of the environment on all levels of a multilevel, evolving system.

Observing a biological system and seeking to influence a social system are not equivalent interventions, even though in both systems a multileveled environment is in play. Most of us on the Left, seeking change in society, carry an underlying faith that society is evolving toward equality, quality of life and equitable distribution of resources. By most evaluations, no such social teleology has its equivalent in biology. Still, there are those that believe that biology has goals.

With the forces of change engaged at all levels, it is difficult to evaluate where intention lies.

When I was a cartoonist, a comic artist seeking to come up with a new piece every day, I used a variety of techniques to generate useful ideas. One technique I often used was that in my mind’s eye I’d create a column of words representing or associated with something specific and sit that column next to another column of words representing or associated with another concept. Then I would run the columns up and down like a slide rule. I was looking for complementing concepts or associations with patterns that mirrored each other. Goofy incongruities would emerge. Showing how things seemingly unrelated had connections, with the connections seeming arbitrary, led to humor.

Gary Larson, who created The Far Side, was a master of this technique. For example, placing a clown in one column with various associations, such as using a cream pie as a weapon, compared to a criminal in the other column creates a panel with a clown in an alley with a cream pie about to mug a citizen. The caption “When clowns go bad” completed the bridge. This kind of humor is all about connections.

How, you might ask, would this technique have anything to do with evolution?

Highly controversial in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the origin of features or characteristics that emerged in progeny that selection had acted upon. Darwin proposed in his Origin of Species that features exhibited in progeny were completely random. The environment culled out those individuals with features that did not live to procreate. Other theorists (and Darwin in later works) suggested that the variety of individuals that emerged–features pre-installed–were influenced by the environment so that the selection of features that were exhibited were more likely to be features that would survive into the next generation.

Sifting through the two columns of associations when seeking a comic bridge is a little like mating two individuals carrying with them a variety of features or characteristics. A good pairing will lead to a unique, robust being that settles easily into the world. Where do the columns of ideas come from, the selection of features in each association column that led to the unique production?

The Origin of Species would suggest the source is random. As humans, with an unconscious, that is not the case. For example, comic ideas emerge as a direct result of unconscious, deliberate intent. In a sense, the conscious mind behaves like the environment, culling out the less unique, less useful options. The unconscious mind provides the material to work with. In just such a way, nineteenth century theorists suggested, the environment was the source of features an individual would exhibit. And then the environment would cull out those individuals with features that didn’t fit.

Comparing a comic creation process that uses this technique to biological creation equates the human unconscious when creating a comic to the environment when designing an individual to survive. Pursuing this comparison further, one could define “nature” or the “environment” in terms or associations familiar to us by our knowledge of the unconscious, and vice versa. We could seek to understand our unconscious by how we understand how the environment influences the origin of features in an individual.

In other words, nature is to the individual as the unconscious is to the conscious mind.

This analogy becomes particularly interesting when we consider that humans, as individuals influenced by the environment before birth, are the equivalent of the conscious mind in nature. In other words, nature or the environment is to the individual as the human unconscious is to the human conscious. Consider that human consciousness was a feature selected by the environment.

There is evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Just as autism and other conditions characterized by maturational delay and less cerebral differentiation are emerging as a direct result of the environment raising a mother’s testosterone levels influencing maturation rates, there was a time when the environment installed features in the opposite direction. Autism in several ways exhibits a more global consciousness or fewer barriers between the unconscious and conscious mind. This is a direction we are headed. A while back, perhaps 25 thousand generations or so ago, the environment installed cerebral differentiation and maturational acceleration leading to split consciousness and the ability to make cartoons.

When I started writing this blog, I didn’t exactly know where I was going. With my unconscious leading the way, I follow along with my fingers typing out words. I experience the feeling that no small part of this adventure is following along as my unconscious seeks to make known its relationship with the environment, its origins and our connection to sources we have no words for.

I’ll end with a riddle my unconscious just created.

What’s the difference between nature and the unconscious? One creates life and in the other, life creates. The challenge is to learn to not know the difference.

There is a thought experiment I engage in on occasion. I imagine trying to suggest to two fundamentalists of two different religions, for example, a Christian and a Muslim, that what connects the two true believers has more weight than what divides them. In my thought experiment, I ask that each imagine two sets of parents, a Christian couple and a Muslim couple, and each couple has a child with no hearing and no sight. Each child is to be raised believing in his or her parents’ religion while only touch can be used to communicate the central tenets of their belief. I then ask how the two children, grown older, could differentiate the two beliefs. How would they know one religion from the other?

Remove the words from religion and truth remains.

I observe the American Left and Right for differences in behavior that would suggest deeper truths than the words that I hear them say.

“You have something to protect. We will help you protect what is important to you. In our community, we protect ourselves from outside threats.” This argument is what I hear the Right say. These words encourage people to experience what is valuable to them: family, money, self concepts. An underlying message is, “You shall be rewarded in proportion to what you have.” If the right had no words, there would be no action. Silently, in the dark, how would the Right communicate these principles? The Right needs to generate a time dissociation, either fear of the future or embrace of the past, for the communication to stick. With no sight or sound, future and past are difficult to grasp.

“If you have more than is necessary, we require that you share. If you have little, we will provide. In our community, we make sure all have good quality of life.” Words from the Left are easy to express while soundless in the dark. These words are understandable with only actions available to make the concepts clear. Relationship is engaged. There is taking and giving, sharing. Left concepts are easily manifested in behavior in the here and now.

When Indo-European warriors on horses galloped into India and Europe, the established matriarchal societies were destroyed. The ancient Left, for example, the tribal aboriginals of Western Europe, found that communities of sharing were inappropriate responses to roving communities intimate with threat. In a world where these communities collide, often it is the Right with the more congruent, more useful message.

In our world, it is not patriarchs riding in on horses. These days, it is the young, and they are networking through new technologies: the web, social networking and cell phones. The new Left are those intimate with the rituals of sharing, sharing technologies and communities characterized by celebrations in the present. They are not clinging to the past or protecting the present against the future.

The Left has returned. It is the Left with the more congruent communication, the more useful message. It is the Left whose message makes sense soundless in the dark.

Integrally entwined in a political movement are the specific ways the movement’s practitioners engage in process and issue execution or how things get done and what gets focused on. The degree of congruency between processes used and issues emphasized has everything to do with political success.

The contemporary Right has a process characterized by an allegiance to the belief that the ends justify the means. Though this belief would seem to suggest that the issues are so important that any action justifies the goal, the opposite is true. What is occurring is that an emphasis is being placed upon process over the goal. Right Wing process, as it is mediated through its most heralded practitioners Lee, Atwater and Rove, is about success by any means that work. Being on top is the core principle of the Right Wing. Right Wing ideology has less to do with its various issues. The Right Wing is about winning. And so, the Right has been deeply process-oriented, a process congruent with its behavior, though we’ve often believed that it was the specific issues that were central to Right Wing core values. The issues, supporting corporations, supporting male control of the female body, supporting wealth and health for the wealthy, little for the poor, are all about winning. A reason the Right has been so adept at controlling message and creating powerful stories is that the Right is all about a process that includes controlling message and creating stories. We’ve all been fooled into thinking that for the Right there were issues more important than winning.

The Left has not been about process. The way that the Left has behaved, its process has had little to do with the goals the Left has been seeking to achieve. Whereas the Right has been about winning, a process congruent with its goals of controlling resources by those on the winning side, the Left has been about sharing while engaged in a process with no obvious connection or congruence with that goal.

The Left seeks to share resources with those with less access to resources. The Right seeks to protect resources, making sure that those in control maintain control with an enhanced opportunity of achieving more. The Right has been playing a game with a goal to win. The Left has not been playing the game as much as it has often been sitting on the sidelines demanding that the rules change. This focus on sharing-related issues while engaged in a process incongruent with its goals has left the Left a loser.

The rules are changing. The Left is becoming engaged in process. The process and the process goal are both becoming about sharing. Congruence is moving toward the left.

People crave congruence.

It’s all about process. The Right Wing, doing anything to win, puts money and resources into one-to-many communications, mostly TV, to drive their message. The Left has discovered sharing. Specifically, the web, social networking and cell phone technologies are the processes congruent with the message of the Left, the message that we are in this all together. We are at the beginning of a convergence of process and issue characterized by congruence between process and what the process seeks to achieve.

The Left to date has tended to focus on a goal, the goal of sharing, as the most important thing. Ironically, this is the Right paradigm, the paradigm of winning, of achieving a goal. At an astonishing speed, society is changing, changing in the direction of a sharing process, changing without most of those identified as Left even being involved, because the traditional Left is focused on issues, not process. Most Leftists don’t even have a social networking page. Most Leftists don’t text message. Most Leftists are over 50.

The new Left is deeply involved in process, a process characterized by sharing, a process congruent with Left goals. The members of the new Left are mostly children. They are Obama supporters that use these new tools. They are young activists organizing through the web. The new Left are conservatives using the new technologies to spread horizontal, diverse and transparent principles through their ancient, one-to-many, winning-obsessed political structures.

McLuhan noted that the medium is message. It is also the case that the medium is the issue. By seeking a culture of sharing, we can follow a media path that shares. We are at present building the bridges that all will walk.

Bridges first. Walking after.

The process is the thing.

There is a paradox in the way that creativity is expressed in the West.  Many arts are undertaken alone.  For example, the painter, the sculptor, the author and even the musician often compose their work with no one else present.  Yet, the subject of their inquiries often revolves around the nature of relationship.  The relationships explored might be specifically the relationship between individual and god, individual with another individual, individual with society, society with god or even the nature of relationship itself.

I can be a little slow.  It’s only now I realize that working alone exploring aspects of not being alone, exploring relationship, is inherently incongruent.  Working alone, insights tip in the direction of sensitivity to when relationship goes awry.  The artist in the West often chooses a medium and context (working by himself or herself) that predetermines the insight outcome.

That insight would be that we are alone.

I am observing the converting of the young in our society from a culture touting independence with conventions that reinforce individuality and allegiance to feeling alone to a new web-based culture that encourages sharing, reverence for the commons, transparency and doing things in mass.  I anticipate that the experience of being alone and creating art that seeks understanding of the barriers between the individual and relationship is in for a transformation.  Watch for web-based, multi-person art forms, for example video productions, that will replace creators working by themselves.

When art is engaged in through a group, our society will be emerging into health.  Art was group-based (dance and song) until recently.  We’re headed toward group art once again.