At this particular moment, I am feeling attracted to another riddle.  Anomalies can serve to disprove a theory or open doors leading to solutions that draw the theory deeper.  Over the course of these entries, I’ve made a number of predictions.  The predictions that don’t hold true when experiments are conducted will suggest intuitions that have gone awry, threads of theory that need adjusting or hidden insights waiting for integration.

The riddle is as follows.  Nordic culture displays lanky females and males displaying a variety of neotenous features that include blond hair, blue eyes and astonishingly egalitarian societies.  Both sexes display these neotenous features.

In Asian societies, females and males exhibit a completely different assortment of highly neotenous features but are short, black haired and dark eyed.  Societies are not egalitarian but highly patrifocal.

If we assume that features exhibited reflect cultural visual predilections, visually based sexual selection criteria or tendencies, we have an easy answer to the riddle, but that answer feels unsatisfactory to me.  Let’s follow the pathway of pattern to see where pattern leads.

“As I explained earlier, the northern dairying people lived in a mist-shrouded environment and had to bundle up against the cold most of the year.  They were without access to vitamin D in fish and sea mammals, and lacked green leafy vegetables as an alternative source of calcium.  Under these conditions, individuals who were genetically capable of digesting large quantities of unfermented milk were better able to maintain normal bone growth and avoid crippling bone diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia, and therefore enjoyed higher rates of reproductive success than individuals who obtained their calcium through fermented milk, yogurt, or cheese.  Within 4,000 or 5,000 years, the gene that controls for lactose production in adulthood spread to over 90 percent of the individuals in northern European dairying populations.” (Harris, Marvin (1989) Our Kind.  Harper Perennial:  New York p. 167)

The late anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested that the extreme Northern climate with little light compelled a necessity for adults to derive vitamin D from sunlight by lightening skin and vitamin A from dairy by prolonging the lactate processing abilities of infants into adults by prolonging a basket of infant features into Scandinavian adults.  If this hypothesis has legs, this might explain why a number of neotenous features, including increased height, appeared in both sexes.

This could also explain why Scandinavian societies display such high degrees of what Raine Eisler calls Partnership Society characteristics.  Both sexes have been selected to display the cooperative tendencies characteristic of neoteny.

Whereas Scandinavians may have selected each other to encourage healthy progeny with access to vitamins, Asian priorities may have revolved around a need for a highly hierarchical society that encouraged cooperation on large scales to achieve societal goals.

Like Scandinavian cultures, Asian cultures reveal neoteny in both sexes, though a different selection of features, outlined in detail by Gould and Montagu, such as light skin, relatively large brain, flat face and eye fold.  Unlike Scandinavia, Asian geological/environmental constraints–massive, irrigation-driven agricultural operations with high population densities–demanded cooperation from large numbers of people working closely together within the context of a highly stratified society.  These are patrifocal, top-down, male-dominated cultures with females experiencing few rights.

I would hypothesize that males still reveal high testosterone relative to females, encouraging patrifocal social structure, but low testosterone relative to males in other societies.  This hypothesis would suggest that Asian females would have the lowest thresholds of testosterone among females in the world, lower than Scandinavian females, who also display neotenous characteristics.

In other words, to create a highly stratified society to be able to manage the resources to survive, natives had to be both highly cooperative and deeply committed to hierarchy, status and top-down control.  This commitment resulted in the traditional patrifocal spread of high testosterone males and low testosterone females, but both thresholds were fluctuating within far lower levels than societies without the high demand for cooperation.  That’s the hypothesis.

Perhaps the fact that these agrarian populations are so dense at least partially explains their smaller size.  Natural selective processes would reinforce the propagation of families that can consume relatively small amounts of food and nutrients.  Ten families on 10 10-acre lots all producing the same maximum amount of nourishment would find the families with smaller members more often nourished.

Was this unique set of constraints about short, neotenous, black-haired, dark-eyed citizens?

It’s possible estrogen plays a powerful role in these somatic deliberations.  What are the physical effects of low estrogen in females?  We might surmise that in patrifocal societies that display female infanticide, estrogen, which displays a compulsive attraction of humans to care for other humans, would be relatively low.  If Asian cultures display lower than the average estrogen levels in females, then might that have something to do with the specific basket of neotenous features displayed by individuals in these cultures?  This hypothesis would predict that low estrogen in females would result in small body size.  We might surmise males might have low estrogen or high estrogen depending on which serves best to create cohesion within society.  I would guess that Asian males exhibit relatively high estrogen compared to Asian females.  I would guess this way based upon the ubiquity of spiritual paths emphasizing community and compassion.

Conversely, we might predict that cultures featuring tall males and females would reveal matrifocal dynamics featuring low testosterone males and relatively low testosterone females, relative to high testosterone matrifocal females.

Does both low estrogen and low testosterone encourage a particular body type?  What body type does low estrogen encourage?

Often these essays return to seeking an understanding of the role of estrogen in evolution.  Again, what we don’t know about women may hide the answer to what we seek to understand about ourselves.

Marian Annett (Annett & Manning, 1990; Annett & Kilshaw, 1984) has hypothesized a balanced polymorphism in dyslexia that neatly fits with my theory of biological and societal evolution I am calling a Theory of Waves, formerly Shift Theory.  The Theory of Waves predicts a specific structure of health and disease in humans.  Nineteenth Century heterochronic theory’s descriptions of the operation of relative rate and timing changes of development and maturation are directly transposable to Annett’s (1985) right-shift theory.  It fact, superimposing Gould’s (1977) clock model of heterochronic evolution directly over Annett’s (1985) right-shift graph reveals the relationship among human evolution, the etiology of cerebral asymmetry and neurological disorders such as autism.

Right-shift theory (Annett, 1985) states that there is a gene (+) that predisposes most people for language facility.  Annett noted that there is a difference in the distribution of handedness between human and animal populations characterized by a right-shift in human beings.  This right-shift makes clear that not all humans are equally well disposed to language use.  People with a (- -) genotype (18-19 % of the population) evidence no predilection to specific handedness or cerebral asymmetry and so achieve a left- or right-handedness close to random.  People with (+ +) (32%), or a strong predilection to right handedness and asymmetrical lateralization, are highly disposed to language usage, but at the expense of right-hemispheric strengths.  Annett believes the mixture of both genetic propensities, (- +) offers the advantages evidenced by 49% of the population belonging in this category.  She characterizes these advantages as a balanced polymorphism (Annett 1984, 1990) when applied to overall strength in language facility.  It is important to understand that changes from population to population are gradual, not clearly demarcated, and that movements across this arc or spectrum from (- -) to (+ +) are incremental.

Heterochronic principles describe the effects of relative rates of development and maturation on species evolution.  I believe these concepts can be used to describe specific developmental trajectories in individuals vulnerable to neurological conditions.  Geschwind and Galaburda’s (1987) observations form the foundation for the patterns I have discerned.  They noted the connections between handedness; immune and autoimmune disorders and conditions associated with maturational delay.  The following patterns have been particularly noteworthy.

1) High testosterone (T) females (the older genotype) are at the (- -) end of the developmental spectrum and are developmentally accelerated compared to the low T females (+ +) at the developmentally delayed end of the spectrum.  Females at the right end are markedly more neotenous than left end females.  At the left end, relative to the females at the right end, the females are more left-handed and ambidextrous, featuring maturational acceleration.

2) Low T males (the older genotype) are at the (- -) end of the developmental spectrum and are maturational delayed compared to the high T males at the (+ +) other end.  Males, perhaps, exhibit more variation than females (Darwin, 1871) in the arc from (- -) to (+ +).  At the left end, relative to the males at the right end, the males have bigger brains (Annett, 1991), more symmetrical cerebral hemispheres, larger corpus callosums (Witelson, 1991a, 1991b, 1989, 1985), lower T (Tan, 1990), slower metabolic rates (Badcock, 1991), a less acute sense of the passing of time, increased left-handedness and ambidextrousness and increased speed (Annett, 1984), agility and coordination.  Males at the left end are markedly more neotenous (Coren, 1991) than males at the right end.

3) Females with high T give birth to females with high T and males with low T.  Males with low T tend to sire progeny characterized by females with high T and males with low T.  Older females, females with higher T, have more left-handed progeny, not because of increased birth trauma, but because females program the developmental rate of their progeny based on the sex of their progeny and the mother’s T level (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987).  Low T females and high T males create low T females and high T males.

4) The eight environmental variables influencing T; light (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), diet (Schmidt , 1997), body fat (Ross, 1986; Glass, 1977), alcohol and drugs (Castilla-Garcia, 1987; Ahluwalia, 1992), tobacco (estrogen levels) (MacMahon, 1982; Barrett-Connor, 1987), touch, physical activity (MacConnie, 1986; Morville, 1979) and stress (James, 1986) often do not affect the two sexes the same way.  For example, increased body fat raises female T and lowers male T (Pasquali, 1991).

5) These eight specific environmental variables impact the distance and direction progeny can slide along the (- -) to (+ +) developmental arc.  Moving left and right across the arc moves people backwards and forward in genetic time.  Impact points include the somatic environment of the parents at zygote creation and the uterine environment.  Along with sexual selection, uterine environment (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987) has the greatest influence on evolution in humans.  Particularly vulnerable to neurological disease are those children whose parents are genetically already at either the left (- -) or right (+ +) ends who are exposed to these environmental variables.  It is by the increasing or decreasing of the parents’ testosterone (and possibly estrogen) levels that these variables further impact the developmental maturation rates of these vulnerable genotypes.  For example, the raising and lowering of the mother’s T levels directly influences the developmental rates of the children during gestation (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987).

6) Left spectrum individuals retain the older genotype, evidencing skill clusters highly valued before the advent of the (+) gene for a decrease in corpus callosum size and a reduction in portions of the right cerebral hemisphere, which increased cerebral asymmetry.  The highly selected (sexual selection being the primary selection force) character of the (+) gene proffers a heightened sense of passing of time (Marshack, 1972), increased split consciousness (Thompson, 1981), with a resulting ability to use language linearly, to plan (Annett, 1985).  The (+) does not increase language facility directly; it creates an increased time dissociation evolving symbol to sign through a disassociation of the cerebral hemispheres.

7) Dyslexia is not the only condition that has confounded studies by masking its roots at both the left and right ends of the developmental spectrum (Annett et al., 1996).  I suggest that schizophrenia, Tourette’s, diabetes and several other diseases and conditions may be split according to the same principles.  By using peg tests (Annett, 1985); comparisons of brain size, planum temporale (Annett, 1992) and corpus callosum (Witelson, 1985); T levels; metabolic rates; developmental stage markers; and family histories, we can sort out the (- -) from the (+ +) from the pathological cases.  Pathologically, developmental delayed and accelerated individuals can now be identified and treated separately from the genetic/environmental cases.  The postnatal influences of the eight environmental variables mentioned above can then be assessed, because in addition to influencing a child’s developmental rates before birth, these same variables can exacerbate and alleviate existent conditions and diseases by their ability to raise and lower T.  Raised testosterone can have profoundly negative effects on the immune and autoimmune systems (Wingfield et al., 1997).  By assessing where a person naturally belongs on the left-right scale, a person’s natural T level can be calculated.  Once a person’s natural T level is known, the same eight variables can be used to change T, bringing that person in line with his or her natural immune and autoimmune threshold.  It is vital to note that the influence of these eight variables masks the natural T levels existent in each individual, throwing off studies and confusing the patterns.

8) The timing of the onset of puberty, the heterochronic principle of progenesis (Gould, 1977), has powerful correlations with neurological and cognitive variation.  Diet, percentage of body fat and physical activity are primary variables responsible for pubertal timing.  There are studies (Saugstad, 1989) that suggest that specific forms of schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are directly related to the timing of the onset of puberty.  The relationship between pubertal timing and an individual’s location on the developmental arc may reveal in greater detail the etiology of specific diseases.  Depression may be directly related to the worldwide curtailment of the final stage of cognitive development, abstract thinking, caused by an earlier onset of puberty.  There has been a drop in the age of puberty by three to four years over the last 100 years in urban cultures worldwide (Eveleth & Tanner, 1976) caused primarily by changes in diet.  These dietary changes signal our bodies that increased fat, carbohydrate, and protein resources are available for an increase in birth rate, accomplished by lowering the age of procreation; a naturally selected response.

9) Tracking the distribution of neurological conditions at the left end along the (- -) to (+ +) spectrum is tracking the sequence of our genetic heritage and cultural history.  At the far left end is autism, representing anatomically modern humans maybe 100 M years ago when we had bigger brains (Wiercinski, 1979; Lainhart, 1997), ambidextrousness (Soper, 1986) and no dominant hemisphere.  I hypothesize that the absence of constant touch as infants (Witelson, 1991a), and the absence of constant auditory rhythm and music pattern in a genotype as old as autism that requires constant touch and rhythm for full functioning, is responsible for many autistic syndrome complications over and above expected developmental delays.  Phonetic dyslexics (Annett, 1990); stutterers (Corballis, 1981; Bryden, 1994); many Tourette’s sufferers (Shapiro et al., 1972); many homosexuals and lesbians (McCormick et  al., 1990); many gifted athletes, mathematicians, artists, musicians (Deutsch, 1978; Hassler, 1991b; Hasler & Gupta, 1993), and composers (Hassler, 1992); many schizophrenics (Crow et al., 1996); specific alcoholic types (London, 1985) and many obese women are left-spectrum, old genotype individuals who can be located along specific places on the left end of the (- -) to (+ +) arc.  Several other conditions congregate at the right end of the left-right arc.  I believe that the human species moves through time inside a (- -) to (+ +) developmental arc, its character determined by the effects of sexual selection and the uterine environment on the rate and timing of development and maturation, creating the balanced polymorphism revealed by this Theory of Waves.

The process of evolution, the rules of species transformation, evolves.  The rules change.  Different rules apply to different species.  The rules become more intricate and subtle with an increase in complexity in hormonal systems.  Ancient species are still evolving exclusively according to random variation unlike more recently evolved complex species with longer ontogenetic histories.  Each species needs to be examined for its signature methods of transcending the random variation barrier.  Each human individual can be explored for his or her signature response to environmental messages mediated through a genetic history revealing a map of the responses of our past.

Investigate citations by proceeding to sexualselection.org.  There citation hotlinks will direct you to the cited quote from that author.

Female choice and societal innovation are so closely tied as to be indistinguishable.

In Asian cultures characterized by patrifocal frames of reference, with female infanticide, and now female foeticide, ancient hierarchies, deep allegiance to status and a reverence for the warrior, you find little innovation because males are selected for their ability to command and dominate. Creativity is highly valued in the context of supporting an established, conventional, ritualized aesthetic.

Across Asia into India and the Middle East, females exhibit little choice in mate selection. Families, often the father, still decide which males are suitable for their daughters. These societies are often militaristic, caste-based, hierarchical and highly stratified, featuring domineering males. Women’s rights are few and neglected.

Perhaps the first society featuring an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal forces was ancient Greece. Indo-Europeans were not normally disposed to providing the matrifocal peoples that they conquered much influence in the societies that followed. Ancient Greece was an exception to a degree. Females could not vote but could sometimes wield authority, particularly in their choice of a mate. When females are provided the ability to choose, several things happen. Females choose mates that they estimate will enhance their lives, a male that exhibits some flexibility. Males are forced to compete for the female’s attention. Creative and cooperative males become valued.

Societies providing for female choice are societies that also value male creativity, innovation, flexibility. Female choice and innovation go together. Societies that view women as the property of males shut down the engine of innovation as males featuring an ability to dominate are the males that the society highly values.

Observe the emergence of innovation in a society and you will find women that have been provided choice. They say necessity is the mother of invention. Not so. Mothers are the mother of invention. It is the female that determines the character of a society.

Put power in the hands of a man and you get stagnation. Empower a woman and you encourage the empowering of all.

Integral to an understanding of how humans are evolving is recognizing the many variables that influence social structure. Sexual selective forces inform social structure, and environmental effects influence hormonal levels that influence social structure. Demanding that natural selection is the cause of our evolution is a little like watching the railway tracks to guess what kind of locomotive will be passing by. Of course, any social structure-related evolutionary development has to pass the test of progeny surviving to procreate. That railroad they have to travel. What exactly passes down those tracks has far more to do with selective forces related to society and the environment than mere survival. The train is not the tracks.

My favorite game when I was small was Chutes and Ladders. I think I was as powerfully moved by the game board imagery as I was by the dynamic of the game. The player could observe at any time during the game the potential pathways that the game could take. Playing the game was to act out the manifest ups and downs characteristic of this chunk of life.

This theory of evolution offers two evolutionary trajectories and two social structures, each social structure enhancing or compelling a specific evolutionary direction. Like Chutes and Ladders, human procreative bodies (bands, tribes, societies) work their way across the game board, wiggling one way and then the other as they pass through time.

Matrifocal bands or tribes exhibit commanding, often domineering, females mating with cooperative males seeking to please. This is the bonobo paradigm. These are highly sexualized societies with progeny not knowing who the father is. Descent is matrilineal. Describing human matrifocal evolution, a number of additional features can be hypothesized, including male exhibition, runaway sexual selection, dance, song, rhythm and the dynamics of neoteny growing brains.

Patrifocal bands or tribes feature cooperative, often docile, females mating with commanding, hierarchically-inclined, status-seeking males. A dominant male or males often control access to fertile females. Often, the father can be fairly easily discerned.

As in Chutes and Ladders, a band can sometimes be matrifocal, at other times patrifocal, climbing or sliding its way across the game board. These transitions don’t usually occur quickly, but they can.

A band or society can oscillate between social structures impacted by surrounding societies, environmental impacts, intramale competition, access to resources, female infanticide and cultural innovations.

The result of these various impacts drives evolution. In a matrifocal society, cooperative males, neotenous, low-testosterone males, are highly valued along with commanding, high-testosterone females. Two trajectories are established, yanking in opposite directions. In humans, this specific dynamic was encouraged by runaway sexual selection resulting in exponential brain growth as that embryo and infant feature–rampant brain growth–prolonged itself into later and later ontogenetic stages.

Patrifocal societies select for neoteny in cooperative, low-testosterone females, and neoteny’s opposite, acceleration, in commanding, high-testosterone males. Here you still get a demand for neoteny, but there is no runaway sexual selection driven by female choice. Neoteny in females does not drag both sexes and society into larger brains because males are choosing females and their criteria are unambitious.

On one hand, the chutes, for example, you get quickly advancing neurological, physiological and hormonal change following a bigger brain trajectory that is horizontal and matrifocal. The ladders reveal hierarchical, male-dominant patrifocal society, more stationary societies, societies that tend to exhibit an evolutionary status quo.

If females aren’t choosing, the dynamic tends to be about marshalling resources, achieving status, manifesting control. These features can drive evolution. But it’s less about creativity, the hallmark of matrifocal culture, and more about domination.

Patrifocal-society intramale competition can create extreme physiological features, sexual dimorphism and a larger male relative to female size. A changing environment may compel a society to exhibit specific male-dominance patrifocal traits if those traits are suitable for the new milieu. In humans, if intramale competition becomes fierce, female infanticide becomes highly valued so that males without keen competitiveness find no mates.

If a warrior people begin impacting a gentle folk, the gentle matrifocals might feel compelled to kill its female infants to quickly reduce the number of males procreating, males that could produce cooperative, rather than commanding, adults, which could end the tribe. In less than a handful of generations a society might reverse direction to climbing ladders rather than taking slides.

The reverse can occur. A large and established matrifocal culture might compel a smaller patrifocal society to relax. If patrifocal females can exhibit choice, male domination will quickly wane. Patrifocal females, provided models, might choose a male that would enhance their life, not dominate it. These males are often innovators, not dominators. We can trace the emergence of matrifocal cultures over the course of history by noting surges of innovation within a society. Where there is innovation, there is female choice.

America, the nation of immigrants, exhibits exponential innovation in large part due to the complete breakdown of sexual selection criteria. There is no perfect mate. The patrifocal dominance model has become increasingly eroded as females choose mates according to their own criteria based on their experience and observations of the many ways other women choose mates.

In a human band, tribe, society, or mega society like the U. S., all cooperate with the demands of hormonal-driven social structure, sliding and climbing their way across the generations. Whereas the advocates of natural selection would prefer that our path be clearly defined by a railway-like, straight and narrow, long-term direction, I would suggest adjusting the metaphor. Even today there are still left on the railways seesaw-like rail cars, two-person units, which allow one person to pump down on one side as the other side leverages up. While one man stands, the other crouches, as they up and down each other clicky clack down the tracks. Indeed, natural selection is the foundation that we move upon. But getting from one place to another involves far more than if we survive to procreate.

Last August, my 24-year-old son went to the bank to renew his one-year CD, money his grandfather had given him on his 21st birthday.  It wasn’t a huge amount of money.  Still, several thousand dollars.  When Elia sat down with the bank officer to discuss the details, the sales pitch began.

It was the opinion of the officer, the strong opinion of the officer, that Elia invest in the stock market, allowing the officer to make recommendations on which Chase vehicles to buy.  The officer felt certain that Chase could wisely invest his money in stocks that would certainly, quickly increase in value.

Elia experienced and expressed confusion.  He wanted to purchase another CD.  The officer suggested not.

They say a stopped clock is right twice every 24 hours.  You don’t have to be right to be right.  Eventually, every opinion is supported by circumstances that reflect the conditions that make that opinion make sense.  I grew more than queasy in the 1980s when the disengagement of financial regulations picked up momentum with the Reagan Administration.  Then began the appointment of industry representatives to the very agencies that were designed to regulate their activities.  Transparency was legislated out of market management.  In 1999, banks were allowed to hawk investments.  Finally, the nascent derivatives market exploded when it was discovered that the adults had abandoned the premises and free markets were really free.  Risk had been legislated out of finance.

Or so it seemed.

Somehow the vanishing of the risk of capitalists being confronted with engaging in inappropriate behavior was correlated with the disappearance of risk when making money.  It’s as if the parents of two-year-olds went on vacation, with both the parents and toddlers certain that the little ones were more secure without parents around.

The stopped clock being right twice every 24 hours is a metaphor that has often, during this twenty-year stretch, come to my mind.  Over twenty years, I felt this crisis ever present.  I came to believe that eventually, my predictions would be true because just about everything becomes true at some point.  Reality seemed separated from logic.  The economy seemed balanced on a fiction.  Year after year after year the fiction exhibited so much strength that I considered myself the stopped clock, waiting for the real hour to fit my stalled and broken point of view.

I figure if something can be true evolutionarily, it probably is true somewhere or some when.  Evolution, characterized by an almost infinite creativity, leaves little out when inventing interesting solutions.  The same could be said of humans.  If it’s possible, somewhere, at some time, someone is playing with that thing to see what happens.  We’ve now spent a couple decades exploring a myth called free markets, formerly called Social Darwinism.  The free market proponents argue that allowing elites to serve themselves results in deep and long lasting benefits to society.

Well, they’re wrong.

I wasn’t the stopped clock being right on rare occasions.  I was a digital clock blinking because the power had gone off.  No one noticed that the electricity had ceased.  No one was paying attention to the fact that there was no power.  All three branches of government abandoned us decades ago.  Only now are we noting that the clock has been blinking midnight.

When a young person in our culture, a new adult, goes to the bank to save his money and is told by the bank to let the bank invest that money in the stock market…..  Well, it’s time for change.  Let’s see what 12:01 a.m. and a new day brings.

I often write of four facets tracing evolution’s pathways:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Philosopher Ken Wilber offers a similar map with his Integral Theory and four quadrants.  Hundred-year-old theories of recapitulation offer rich details on multiple-scale evolution processes.  For example, Stephen J. Gould in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny describes Freud’s fourfold parallelism:  Western child, adult aboriginals, Western primitive ancestor and the contemporary adult neurotic.  Freud was a passionate supporter of recapitulation, evolution following several discipline pathways.

What was missing in these hundred-year-old parallelistic models was a dynamic.  These theories described what theorists observed with no specific estimation of the operational details.  Darwin offered a theory, pangenesis, which he thought could fill in gaps.  It was conjecture.  Excellent conjecture, as it turned out.  Darwin suggested that sexual organs produced something that was influencing changes in physiology based upon environmental influences.

The piece that Darwin, and the recapitulationists such as Freud, was missing was the profound role social structure plays upon biological and human evolution.  Perhaps if they had known that human maturation rates are set by the mother’s uterine testosterone levels before birth they would have been able to intuit the role of testosterone in evolution.  A mother with high levels of testosterone creates males with low testosterone and females with high testosterone.  A mother with low levels of testosterone creates males with high testosterone and females with low testosterone.  These two pairings are the prototypes of matrifocal and patrifocal social structure.  These two social structures selectively reinforce, through sexual selection, specific evolutionary trajectories.  Matrifocal societies exhibit female choice.  In matrifocal societies, commanding females mate with neotenous, cooperative males.  In patrifocal societies, neotenous or cooperative females are awarded to competitive, often combative, males based on how high a status the male or the male’s family has achieved.

In neoteny, infant features are prolonged in ontogeny to appear in the features of descendant adults.  In acceleration, ancestor adult features are condensed to later appear in the infant features of descendants.  Social structure manifests both dynamics at the same time, with males and females simultaneously and literally evolving in different directions.

Is it any wonder that communication between the sexes is so challenging?

And, trajectories change over time.  A band or society can oscillate between social structures impacted by surrounding societies, environmental impacts, intramale competition, access to resources, female infanticide and cultural innovations.

Societies can evidence the two social-structure polarities simultaneously with individuals attracted to their complementary opposites while all mixed up.  Imagine all four examples engaged in a massive square dance.  At the end of the dance, the cooperative women match up with the commanding men while the commanding women pair with cooperative men.

In these types of societies, the U. S., for example, one would expect to see large-scale cultural innovation.  Not incidentally, ancient Greece was a rare, successful hybrid between the indigenous matrifocal societies (represented by the many goddess cults) and the Indo-European new arrivals.

In the West, we’ve been deeply influenced by the 6,500-year-old Indo-European incursions into indigenous matrifocal cultures.  It has been difficult for us to notice that other half of evolution’s social-structure dynamic, societies founded on female choice.  Darwin’s and Freud’s prejudices reflected a 6,500-year-old tradition, biases that obfuscated the actual operational processes behind biological, social, ontogenetic and personal transformation.

Though it seems to me that the implications of the thesis set forth in this blog have ramifications in several disciplines, consider that of the several hundred books and papers I’ve read that have contributed to the synthesis, almost nothing has been written about estrogen in these contexts.  If Darwin and Freud did not know anything about testosterone, consider that we still know almost nothing about estrogen.  I suspect that estrogen, as the other half of the hormonal dyad, offers a lot as we learn about how biology and societies evolve.

In these blogs, I write about evolutionary theory, autism etiology theory, political activism and social change.  I discuss the web, business, the economy, politics, political organizing specifics, organizer conference structure, media, cosmology, society, psychology, social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, heterochrony, hormonal-driven evolutionary dynamics, transparency, diversity, hierarchy, hypnosis, spiritual experience, personal experiences, play, art, language, myth, story, the nature of joy and sources of love.

Friends have told me I cover a lot of subjects.  I often get the feeling I’m writing about the same thing over and over again.  I write about evolution.

I arrived at writing about evolution by tracing backwards the origin of dragon myths and then serpent myths.  Visit humanevolution.net for more detail on what occurred.  Over the course of a year and a half, I immersed myself in dragon and serpent mythology.  I went deeply, head over heels, down the rabbit hole of attraction.  What booted me off that abyss was the book Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.

The book outlines a possible feminine foundation for human culture and explores implications of the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas.  Exploring and recording details of several hundred myths, reading over 90 books on dragon and serpent mythology, I finally arrived at the first snake carvings and Christopher Marshack’s thesis of early humans tracking moon cycles on horn and bones.

The point that stories began emerging from the imaginations of our ancestors feels like the place where I seek to be.  In meditation, I find myself often straddling the place where my unconscious generates images and voices, conscious of my unconscious.  The part of me that feels abandoned when I was small–a part that cannot yet tell or understand stories–feels to me to be the me that I accompany.  For me, evolution is personal.  Seeking an understanding of how humans evolved is the same as seeking inside myself for how I came to be.

I seek to grasp what it means for consciousness to split.  I explore consciousness.  I embrace the split.

I don’t yet understand the relationship between story/metaphor and our evolution.  I intuit that this is the core of who we are.  Lingering around the ancient rituals of dance and song, I seek those moments when time fractured and imagination reared.  I can feel these moments in my body.  Slowly my body allows the words to describe what the body knows.

We are each wrestling with our evolution as we form words and act out the stories that guide our lives.  I feel joy seeking origins.  There is love stored in an understanding of how we came to be.

Pattern recognition and exhibition form the essence from which we humans have evolved. Sexual selection usually involves a female choosing subtle variations on a pattern theme such as song, movement/dance or visual display. It can occur that males dramatically escalate the details while females exponentially increase their deliberative tendencies. You can get what Fischer called Runaway Sexual Selection.

What probably began the runaway loop were females selecting for superb dancers and sound makers with males responding over time with astonishing feats of endurance and acumen. Females become far more appreciative of the nuances the males could exhibit because females were being selected over time for acute judgmental abilities. Those females with subtle evaluative capacities mated with the most adroit male performers.

Somewhere along the line, females began selecting for males with talents for escalating pattern exhibition unrelated to any particular or specific stimuli trajectory.

Females selected for creativity.

There is no fiction in biology. Natural systems evolve within firm boundaries such as climate, food sources, natural disasters and competing peers. Now humans began operation in an alternative, complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, having crossed a line where what exists, exists, but not in the biological world.

With imagination humans could perform feats of pattern recognition and exhibition in more than one time and more than one place at the same time. Females were selecting for imagination. Females were selecting not just the creativity to generate novel variations on a theme but for an ability to generate new themes.

There is runaway sexual selection and there is careening-crazily-everywhere-at-once sexual selection. Well, not actually everywhere. Just two places. Sexual selection split the human brain.

Not long before the diaspora from Africa, the human brain shifted from random-handed gesture-users thinking almost always in the here and now to right-handed speech-users with a slightly smaller right hemisphere and a smaller corpus callosum hemispheric bridge. The new brain could be two places at once by decreasing communication between the hemispheres and assigning speech mostly to just the left side. With the emergence of a facility manipulating place and time, sexual selection focused on the productions of imagination. What we call “consciousness” was born. What emerged was actually split consciousness. “Consciousness” had always been present. The striving of consciousness to engage in pattern recognition and exhibition for millions of years, sexual selection, led to split consciousness and the eruption of imagination.

Imagination is the sexualization of experience by creating time.

So, we’re maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years after the split, having had some time to explore the repercussions of using an imagination to navigate a biological world with real bodies. One of the challenges is that our love of stories, products of the imagination, stories exhibiting our ability to be in more than one time or more than one place at the same time, lead us to confuse the conclusions of our stories with the way the world works. Biology corrects our widest wanderings but still we get into trouble. For example, the financial world meltdown.

We are storytellers. That is our nature. We sexually selected ourselves to display astonishing abilities to makes things up. When those that control financial assets tell stories that enormous amounts of money can easily be made with little risk and involve no products or services but only the estimations of relative value over time, that is a story. When the story meets biology–biology tells us that everything changes and everything is interconnected–the story will suffer.

So, now we have a new story. The new story says we need regulations, just like nature regulates itself. In this new integrated global economy, integrated like our natural global ecology, we need constraints, natural constraints, like nature uses.

The first law of the new economy? Trade what’s real.

There are many paradoxes to the financial meltdown we’ve been experiencing.  From some perspectives, there are no paradoxes, just greedy or timid people following the direction provided by their peers.  I prefer to view what we are seeing as an inevitable result of Social Darwinism, now called free markets, which is a manifestation of the ancient Indo-European principle of might makes right.

Capitalistic Democracy allows the elites with resources to control elections, defund education and manage media.  We’ve designed a system that allows those forces with access to resources to manage wealth in a fashion that keeps those with less access to assets in a position where they are less likely to exert controls.  Folks in control work their levers of power to maintain control.  Elections, education and media management are the three intersections between the powerless and their access to the information that creates change.

Those in control feel entitled to stay in control.  They live by a philosophy that supports that position.  We call that “free market” philosophy at this time.  It was called Social Darwinism when last we went through this purge in the 30s.  Before that it had many names.  Riane Eisler calls it the dominance model.  Might makes right is the name that feels right to me.

Those in control subscribe to a belief that their being in control is a result of natural biological principles that declare that the most efficient system is one where those that are in control achieve that status naturally.  A while back it was God that offered the Kingdom to the King.  More recently it was asserted that Darwin made the same declaration, but this time nature conferred the gift to the kings of commerce.  God or science, it doesn’t matter, the story still ends with an elite.

A large difference between the two mythologies engineering an upper class is that the more recent scientific version states that a struggle resulted in the achievement of the higher status.  Most kings inherited wealth and power.  It is usually ignored that most contemporary elites inherited their wealth.  This newer story states that risks were taken by those brave and clever souls to achieve their elevated station.  This is the story of the entrepreneur.

It is this story, that risks were taken and battles were fought and won, that sets up the paradox of the fall.  At the end of these cycles, such as the time we are in, it is declared that massive amounts of money can be made and no risks are required.

It begins with a mythology based upon the brave taking risks, the mighty making right by brute force and will and it all ends with those same men, or their progeny, making easy choices, making billions, with no estimation that they could fail.

Somehow the philosophy of the elites embraces both the battle and the risk-free, exponentially escalating gift.  Perhaps there is no paradox.  Maybe it’s as simple as an understanding that once you achieve the pinnacle of power, you deserve a cornucopian access to resources undreamed of by those without a useful education, a vote that counts, access to media that reflect the world rather than the world the corporations prefer we know.

It’s not only those without resources that the mythology of the elites confuse.  They confuse themselves.  Free markets, Social Darwinism, might makes right–it doesn’t matter what you call it–the result is a mythology that does not embrace how the world really operates.  What results are these wild oscillations that reveal gaps in understandings of how society and biology unfold.

Whether explored as an example of paradox or just as a nonuseful mythology, the recent gyrations in economics can be usefully explored as manifestations of thinking characterized by little understanding of interconnection.  Might makes right is a mythology.  It’s time for alternatives stories, more useful stories, to be told.

The metaphor of a cancer spreading has often been used to describe the unwinding of credit and the destruction of assets across the world.  Cancer is not the right metaphor.  I would suggest we’re in the midst of a wildfire conflagration.

Two things prepared the world for the unfolding we observe.

There has been a confusion of metaphor with assets.  Integrating a beautiful story with no boundaries into our commodities, options, derivatives, stocks, options, precious metals and currencies created a beautiful fiction of wealth.  Stories, financial vehicles, were designed to suggest little or no risk.  We chose to believe them.  Three of the last four administrations were placing at the head of agencies the very industries that those agencies were designed to regulate.  All four administrations purged accountability and transparency from these bureaus, allowing industries to write their own regulations.  When the beautiful stories of life without risk were peddled up and down the avenues of power, there were no grown-ups left to suggest that life does not work that way.  The risk of government interference was removed from the experience of the American corporation.  The adults were gone.

It’s been Lord of the Flies in Washington, but no one noticed because the bodies were appearing in Iraq.

In just the way we build a bonfire that can signal direction for many miles, sometimes we have to create conditions for a story so powerful that we regulate our experience for many years to come.  Evidently the cycle of tales surrounding the 1930s depression lost their power.  The story we are telling now will perhaps last longer than 80 years.  The scale of the tale we are observing suggests that Homer will soon have competition.

We have created the conditions to compose a story describing the incredible power of a story to destroy.

In the Homeric epics, the entire Greek world contributed in the attack against Troy and experienced the repercussions.  We are one world now.  Over the last few decades, societies have been becoming horizontal across the planet, toppling sideways faster than gravity will let them fall.  The web is integrating individuals.  Media integrate entertainment.  Corporations have integrated finance.  Tinder has been gathering across the forest floors of the world, now catching fire.

There is no fiction in biology.  Natural systems evolve, unfold and integrate within the confines of forest fires, meteorites and floods.  Humans, operating within a complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, can effortlessly and with delight cross a line where what exists is only in the mind.  We have to create our own conflagrations that remind us where boundaries lie.  Now that we are an integrated species, now that the world is one, we need stories that make clear that we are not alone.

As my mother used to say, “You’re too old to engage in this behavior.”  Stories that encourage selfishness, independence, freedom, liberty and ownership are stories that encourage a fictional understanding of what humans are.  These stories are not contextualized.  We are interconnected.  Those stories only make sense when integrated into a whole.

We are blessed to observe the end of an age and the beginning of human adulthood.  The stories that will come of this time of transition will last perhaps until the end of our species.  These are the stories that describe the effect of telling stories.  These are the stories where we discover what it is to be human.

Through the last four American administrations, the American financial system has been designed to be nontransparent to encourage the growth of unique investment vehicles. Lessons learned and legislated in the 1930s were unlearned and rewritten in an atmosphere hailing “free markets” as if that was something different from Social Darwinism. Increased stratification was the result. Evidently the embrace of supply side economics in the 1980s wasn’t alone enough to tell us we’d crossed a line suggesting that the merger of mythology and economics was not a good idea.

Kings of old were able to afford the best in entertainment, which included frequent visits from the most talented storytellers. Today we have to merely turn on the TV to experience finely crafted tales. One thing has changed. The powerful today hire wordsmiths to design tapestries of tales that support their controlling the looms of power, which they call free markets, when the markets are only free on TV.

Free markets are free of government oversight, free of transparency, free of union intervention, free of accountability, free of the social costs of equal pay for women and day care, free of safety constraints, free of the costs of environmental destruction and often free of the costs of robust health care and protected pensions. Loss of health care and pensions are often the case when a corporation goes bottom up.

Untie a species from its environment, reduce the number of interconnections a biological unit has with its surrounding community and inevitable destruction will result. Free is a myth. We are all connected. To believe in free is the same as to worship being alone.

Right now the rest of the world is muddling through how it is going to deal with the crashing American concept of freedom. American financial vehicles have been designed to flourish unconnected to the real needs. Soon, real needs will be in all the headlines. Rage at “free markets” will be all the rage. The American stock markets, redesigned in the 1990s not to crash, will instead watch American assets slowly disappear. Having designed our financial instruments to enhance risk and our markets to protect risk, this awful combination will leave us in the end with little left to risk.

The Victorian Age interpretation of Darwin’s theories led to the concept of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was “scientific” support for the entrepreneurial excesses of the Industrial Revolution. One aspect of one part of how evolution operates was embraced as an example for us all. The fittest surviving was hailed as an economic model.

Little has changed. The fittest can be the cleverest. Our hailers of “free markets” have been most clever in their manipulation of words to make them free of society’s demands.

Evolution is not about the fittest surviving. Economic health is not about disengagement from the society that supplies support. Our economic model has been built upon the ancient Indo-European patrifocal dominance model of might makes right. Holding onto a portfolio of worthless assets, we must realize it’s time to face the fact that change has arrived.

Might is not right.

It’s time to evolve our government to serve.

This work has proposed three primary causes of autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. All three causes impact fluctuating testosterone levels inside a mother, which determine her children’s maturation speeds and their, and societies’, social-structure proclivities. The three causes are matrifocal sexual selection trajectories (mate-selection proclivities), different ethnicities mating, thereby propelling shifts back to a common progenitor and a host of environmental influences that modify mother-father testosterone levels. Explore these etiologies in detail by clicking here, here and here.

I hypothesize that these are primary causes of autism. There are also the reasons that these hypothesized causes have been so difficult to uncover and address. I would suggest that politics, patriarchy and academic division are the main barriers to understanding autism’s origins.

Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines a theory of evolution that revolves around female choice. He begins that work with an exploration of how it is that his particular perspective is not easily embraced. Knight proposes that the polarization of the West from the works of Marx and Engels obfuscated the works of theorists with matriarchal underpinnings. Theories of evolution with females at the center were ignored. Knight targets politics as a source of contemporary theorizing malaise.

Clearly, politics, patriarchy and academics are all entwined. Knight notes how few women were/are tenured theorists in human evolution studies and the fact we still largely inhabit an Indo-European patrifocal frame of reference.

Though the West is changing quickly in a matrifocal direction, we are still novices when it comes to understanding a woman’s point of view. Riane Eisler has written much concerning the transition we are experiencing. Eisler examines our origins in matrilineal Old Europe and the direction we are headed in a partnership society. Understanding autism, a condition characterized by its matristic bonds, is profoundly complicated by theorists raised to recognize only a patristic frame of reference. There is much that they have to unlearn. Most academics are not aware of the new paradigm or of its relationship to them personally or professionally. Max Planck said that major paradigm shifts often don’t evidence themselves in academia until the tenured professors retire or die.

Conducting research for this thesis, I continue to be astonished by how little traffic there is among academic disciplines. Noting identical principles appearing in different academic departments with totally different nomenclatures has been deeply disappointing. I have a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in art. The research I conducted in college was mostly in art history. It was only after falling down the rabbit hole of this project that I discovered that the barriers among academic disciplines were so high as to deeply impede pattern synthesis. Specifically, from my perspective, the answer to autism’s etiology is in nineteenth-century biological evolution theories blended with nineteenth-century anthropological social structure insights while exploring late twentieth-century neuropsychological insights from Geschwind and Annett. Clearly, our deep reverence for natural selection as the primary or sole theory of evolution, particularly when it comes to humans, has fractured our ability to conduct reasonable explorations of conditions with evolutionary origins.

Exaggerating the three areas just explored is our contemporary society’s willingness to adhere to Social Darwinism or “free markets” as perhaps the foundation theme of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush years. Corporations decide the information we receive based on their interpretation of what we seek in the context of how they can make money. We’ve lived in a nightmare exaggeration of top-down, paternalistic, patristic values where the commons all but disappeared until the emergence of the web.

Though autism may have (at least) three causes, the barriers to understanding those causes are often foremost in my mind.

Our uniqueness as a species may have more to do with our choice not to decide upon a specific mating strategy than those many other things that we believe are peculiarly human.

We observe the manifestation of heterochrony in society, neoteny and its reverse, through the two social structures that seem to manifest these two evolutionary trajectories. Neotenous, cooperative males and commanding, accelerating females reveal themselves in matrifocal or matristic social structures. A social structure with commanding, accelerated males and cooperative females inclines toward patriarchy or a patrifocal orientation.

Matrifocal and patrifocal social structures come with either commanding, high-testosterone males mating with cooperative, low-testosterone females or cooperative, low-testosterone males pairing with commanding, high-testosterone females.

Over time, in a matrifocal context, with males focused on artistic exhibition as opposed to hierarchical display, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of the cooperative males and commanding females, revealing a constellation of features characteristic of matrilineal, matristic or partnership societies. Society evolves in particular fashions with the female choosing her mate.

In a patrifocal context, with males striving for hierarchical ascendancy, offering enhanced procreation opportunities, with females cooperating with the winners, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of commanding males and cooperative females manifesting in a society with specific features that mirror the hormonal constellation and social structure proclivities of its individuals.

Stephen J. Gould describes the several-million-year neotenous trajectory that the human race has been running. There are physical, neurological, psychological and hormonal repercussions to following a matrifocal or patrifocal path. I’m suggesting that matrifocal bands selected for neotenous males for perhaps three million years, with likely occasional forays into patriarchy. Sometime before the diaspora from Africa, maybe 50,000–100,000 years ago, brains split, language surfaced and culture emerged.

Few societies are exclusively matrifocal or patrifocal but instead exhibit aspects of both. Most societies can be fairly easily situated within one or the other frame by examining how mates are chosen, how sexual selection unfolds. How much choice does a woman have when she chooses or is assigned her mate? Is the ideal male loved or feared?

Social structures and their participating individuals exhibit evolutionary trajectories over time. Societies and cultures mirror these trajectories, revealing their own evolutions, operating according to the same dynamics. Societies, like ancient bands weaving between matrifocal and patrifocal loci, fluctuate between highly hierarchical, male-domination models and societies revolving around a commons with a horizontal frame. In the West, we’ve observed a surge of Indo-European patriarchy lasting almost 6,000 years with infrequent influxes of matriarchy and occasional hybrids birthing unique cultures like the ancient Greeks.

What has resulted, over time, looks like a specific trend. Of course. We are still observing the influence of social structure upon evolution. Anthropic or teleological arguments suggesting that an interventionist god is responsible for the clear and universal patterns we observe seem unnecessary. It comes down to hormones and what attracts us to our partners. It’s about love.

I would suggest that this evolutionary argument undermines a theological interpretation of societal or cultural evolution. Heterochrony, neoteny and acceleration describe species and societal evolution. Biological principles directly apply to social transformation. There are just over 200 species of primates. We’re the ones that can’t decide how best to mate.

The work of scientists is not often poetry. But they do reveal patterns that are profound.

“A corollary of our hypothesis is that hormonal effects on the brains of offspring may vary with the time of conception. The activity of the pineal gland changes seasonally with alterations in day length. As a general rule, during the dark winter months the pineal becomes active and suppresses both ovaries and testes, whereas in the summer it is inactive and sex hormone levels are higher. For this reason many animals bear young in the spring, an advantageous situation since temperature and food supplies are more suitable for survival. An example of such seasonal modulation of hormonal effects on the brain is observed in the HVc nucleus of the singing bird (Nottebohm 1981). This description of pineal physiology is, however, somewhat oversimplified. An animal’s sensitivity to light may vary through the year. Gonadal hormones may thus become activated in the spring, but as a result of loss of sensitivity to light over the summer hormone levels may diminish as fall approaches. Despite these facts, day length is a powerful influence. Thus, steers increase their weight more rapidly in the winter when artificial light is supplied to lengthen the day. This light-enhanced growth of muscle mass does not take place if the bull is castrated, suggesting that the effect of light is mediated through a rise in testosterone effect (Tucker and Ringer 1982)…..If pineal effects on sex hormone levels are important, then the birth months of lefthanders, and of those with learning disorders, might not be uniform throughout the year, since fetuses conceived at different seasons might be subjected to very different hormonal environments. These effects should differ in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and at the equator, although other factors, such as variations in the ethnic composition of populations, would also have to be considered. Data are still very sparse. Badian (1983) found that in males born in each of the six months beginning in September, the rate of nonrighthandedness was higher than that found in any of the other six months, but no clear trend was observed for female births.” (Geschwind & Galaburda 1987: 116-7, Cerebral Lateralization)

Noting the observations of Geschwind and Galaburda in 1987, I am struck by how many of their insights apply to the possible origins of autism. Consider the emergence of autism among Somali Minnesotans. (Click here to note the autism-inducing implications of equatorial populations migrating to extreme Northern climates, taking into consideration Geschwin and Galaburda’s hypothesis.)

Many of the studies inspired by their work did not take into consideration the difference between familial left-handers and those who became left-handed as a result of trauma. Results of those studies were usually inconclusive. I sometimes wonder how often it is that cerebral palsy and autism have identical etiologies, only different parts of the brain were traumatized. Researchers conducting studies involving left-handedness who do not remove those individuals that have been traumatized study two different etiologies, muddying results.

It seems to me that administering Marian Annett’s dexterity/speed peg tests would efficiently separate those untraumatized genetic lefties from those that had experienced early, hostile environments. (Natural lefties often evidence facility with both hands.)

“The earliest civilizations of the world–in China, Tibet, Egypt, the Near East, and Europe–were, in all probability, matristic” Goddess civilizations. “Since agriculture was developed by women, the Neolithic period created optimum conditions for the survival of matrilineal, endogamous systems inherited from Paleolithic times. During the early agricultural period women reached the apex of their influence in farming, arts and crafts, and social functions. The metrical with collectivist principles continued. There is no evidence in all Old Europe of a patriarchal chieftainate of the Indo-European type. There are no male royal tombs and no residences in magarons on hill forts. The burial rites and settlement patterns reflect a matrilineal structure, whereas the distribution of wealth in graves speaks for an economic egalitarianism.” (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. P. 432)

There are two major currents contemporary theorists are not noticing, forces influencing the direction that society evolves and its individuals adjust to. Handedness is not arbitrary. Those that are random-handed (commonly called left-handed) are the old matristic or matrifocal neurological types common perhaps 100,000 years ago, and they were still exerting influence in terms of social structure as recently as early recorded history. Second, when Geschwin and Galaburda note the influence of features of the environment, such as light, on handedness, they are observing one of the ways that an individual’s neurology and resulting social structure is modified. Sexual selection proclivities also have enormous influence on these maturational trajectories, revealing left-handers as matrifocal in origin. Visit here and here for more on sexual selection and conditions featuring maturational delay.

Understanding social structure and the relationships between matrifocal and patrifocal frames as they drive human evolution provides insight on the origin of conditions characterized by maturational delay. Understanding the neuropsychological origins of these conditions and the many related psychological and oncological disorders offers awareness of how the nature of societal transformation integrates into the neuropsychological, psychological and physiological profile of the individual.

Much comes down to how and whom we pick as partners. And then, how we live our life. Perhaps the poets should be writing about evolution. Perhaps they are.

Early last summer, before the conventions, Sarah Palin caused a stir among the parents of children with Down Syndrome.  My Leftist buddy Martin has a kid with Downs.  Martin was moved by this Alaskan elected official’s seeking attention for the disability that his life revolved around.  Martin seriously considered voting for McCain/Palin when Palin was picked as VP.  Until he heard her speak.

I’ve not studied Down Syndrome.  Still, in my explorations of autism, Down Syndrome kept emerging, but I did not swerve to explore its possible connection to the theory I was detailing.  Several things do jump out.  Those details suggest an evolutionary etiology for Down Syndrome.  If supported, advocates like Sarah Palin that lambast evolutionary theory would be left advocating for advances within a discipline that she religiously combats.

Papers heavily support the thesis that Down Syndrome, in males and females, reveals extreme neoteny or maturational delay.  Unlike in autism, where I posit males exhibit maturational delay and females maturational acceleration, all of those with Down Syndrome show extreme neoteny.

“Down syndrome individuals generally have retarded growth and maturational processes with retention of fetal development (“unfinished”) characteristics involving brain, face, and the 5th fingers.  According to Waardenburg (1932) it was Blok in 1922, who first proposed a fetalization theory of Down Syndrome.  From a palaeontological perspective all of these growth disturbances and developmental dysmaturities can be subsumed under the heading of neoteny.  The concept of neoteny was coined by Kollmann in 1885 and refers to the retention of juvenile characters in the adult state, or to extention of fetal characteristics into childhood.” (Opitz, John M. & Gilbert-Barness, Enid F.  (1990) Reflections on the Pathogenesis of Down Syndrome.  American Journal of Medical Genetics 7: p. 44)

Most humans have 46 chromosomes.  Chimpanzees have 48.  A person with Down Syndrome has 47.  The obvious question is whether those with Down Syndrome are transitional and when in our evolutionary past did the transition occur?

There is a higher incidence of autistic and Down Syndrome children being siblings than would be normally estimated.

A far higher number of Down children are left-handed than is the norm.  My evolutionary theory posits we were all random-handed a hundred thousand years ago or so.

Older mothers are more likely to have a Down child.  According to this blog’s thesis, the increased levels of testosterone in an older mother make her more likely to birth a son or daughter from an evolutionary past.

Several studies suggest that Down Syndrome reveals atavisms, or features characteristic of evolutionary progenitors.

Not supporting these ruminations is the fact that those with Down Syndrome are short in stature with unique physiological features.  We have no ancestors of comparable stature or features in our archeological lineage.  The physical handicaps are often profound.  It’s hard to imagine a society of primitives with Down Syndrome characteristics surviving to procreate.

“Thus, with respect to (1) the fixation of a common pattern of major variability easily recognized in every race of humankind, (2) the invariable alteration of numerous morphometric traits and the abolition of family resemblance, (3) change in growth and of maturational characteristics with enhanced neoteny, (4) change in fertility, (5) appearance of a different behavioral phenotype, (6) change in chromosome number, and (7) changes in gene frequency —at least with respect to genes on chromosome 21 (Goodman, 1965; Rundle, 1973; Rundle and Sudell, 1973), we can only conclude that the occurrence of Down syndrome is akin to the process of speciation (albeit a sudden, rather than a gradual speciation).  With respect to the relationship between speciation and chromosome abnormalities it is important to note that the types of chromosome rearrangements ‘that occur as polymorphosisms or as fixed permanent heterozygotes invariably involve meta- or submetacentric chromosomes.  Those that distinguish species and serve to isolate those species involve telocentric or acrocentric chromosomes, which are self sterilizing.’  (John, 1981).”  (Opitz, John M. & Gilbert-Barness, Enid F.  (1990) Reflections on the Pathogenesis of Down Syndrome.  American Journal of Medical Genetics 7: p. 45)

As an extreme example of neoteny, Down individuals are exaggerations of how our evolution might have occurred, without evidence of a dramatically expanded brain.  It seems like Down Syndrome is some sort of alternative reality exhibition of how we could have evolved had our brains not grown at as fast a rate as they eventually achieved.  The clues suggesting that Down Syndrome has an evolutionary etiology are powerful.  Unlike autism, there is not a relatively clear hypothesis or picture of how exactly this occurred.  Still, Sarah Palin, an aggressive, high-testosterone woman who gave birth to her Down child after 40, fits the thesis’s profile of the mother of an autistic child from the past.

It seems we have crossed a line in the United States where a lie, if powerfully performed, is treated as truth as a reward.  Politics has always been about storytelling.  Nimble and effortless exaggeration makes up our everyday communication, self concepts and political big pictures.  Something has changed that now makes it possible to lie outright and expect to be rewarded with a prize.

In a Greek restaurant with friends Lee & Nancy maybe 25 years ago, John Coleman, the weatherman, walked in to have supper.  Lee asked John, “Will it rain tomorrow?”  John responded, “Somewhere.”

I saw Coleman being interviewed on Fox last year.  He’s about 80.  He’s a leader in the movement that broadcasts that global warming is a myth.  When John Coleman was a weatherman in Chicago, we’d watch him because he was the most entertaining.  Rainstorms were a potential deluge.  Tornados stalked most storks.  The Big Snow was an ever present winter possibility.  Ironically, his talent was exaggerating disaster.  Real disaster he cannot, or will not, see.  Or, perhaps he does see but is choosing to lie.

Storytellers are entertaining.  Liars are dangerous.  It seems pretty clear that in America today, the distinction is viewed as only a matter of degree.

Ronald Reagan inspired a mating between Social Darwinism and social conservatism that has matured into a beast that believes that lying is a sound strategy if you survive to procreate.

If a business lies, stays respected enough to go forward unencumbered and achieves its quarterly goals, it will continue to lie.  Corporations run our media and so media pundits treat lies as strategies, evaluating them on how well they achieve their goals.

Social conservatives know what’s true by how they feel.  They feel embraced by a community with specific mythological beliefs.  They feel deeply right within their community.  To the social conservative, the community beliefs, of course, are right.  Community becomes the arbiter of truth.  Social conservatives allying themselves with Social Darwinians embrace the “truth” that lying is acceptable.  What emerges is a deeply committed mythologist that lies.

I would not call this deeply cynical.  I call this frightening.

Whereas along the left spectrum we have voters sensitive to an insight that truth is relative, along the right side voters behave as if truth is fiction.

Clearly, corporate control of media encourages a blurring of the lines.  How long will it take before the young with facile access to alternative news will spawn news consumers willing to not tolerate a lie?

My guess is that it will happen when we respect the truth.  The Enlightenment was not a fad.  It will likely take a Depression for the United States to recognize it’s been had.

Our row house, in addition to being the place that I conduct business, is where meetings occur for local peace, justice and environmental organizations.  Three days ago when I got home from the hospital, there was a meeting of one of the local groups.  Folks had heard about the aneurysm.  I answered questions.

Some folks are close friends.  Others I’ve known for years.  There are some people I’ve known for a long time but haven’t had a conversation with outside these group discussions.  While we were eating Marcia’s meatloaf, Charlene’s fresh garden tomatoes with basil and homemade soup, Dick approached me, noting that he’d heard about my adventures.  Dick is in his early to mid-80s.

“I heard about your, your….your…”

“Aneurysm.  It’s not serious.  No symptoms.  Scary, though.”

“Which hospital did you go to?”

“Evanston.”

Dick observed, “You know, the food over there isn’t that bad.  I was surprised at the variety of alternatives available on the menu.”

“Indeed, you live close enough to the hospital that you could consider walking over there for supper.”  Dick lives almost across the street.

Dick and I started talking.  We hadn’t really talked much before but for short exchanges on various political actions we were both involved in.  Dick described a heart condition and the intervention that included an apparatus living inside his chest.  I found myself engaged by his choice of conversation.  I’d never been one to identify closely with the physical repercussions of growing older.  My grandmother had been a hypochondriac.  I’d always mentally and emotionally withdrawn from old folks’ descriptions of their conditions.

Something had changed.

Over the course of the weekend, I had changed generations.  At 55, I was still a generation from my parents and their contemporaries.  With the weekend’s news, I’d shifted to that group of folks that could die at any time.  Dick perceived that I was vulnerable, vulnerable and able to identify with his condition.  Dick was right.  In two days, my horizons had widened to include the older folks I knew and the situation they faced daily.  I was in the midst of an identity shift.

It strikes me that old folks aren’t just isolated by the shutting down of their sensory systems, mobility constraints and difficulty expressing themselves.  There is a gap between an older person’s experience of vulnerability and most of the rest of the world’s feeling of being relatively unthreatened.  The elderly are isolated because they are exposed.

The trick for me now is to let myself feel vulnerable without feeling isolated.  Clearly, this is a day-to-day challenge.  Luckily, I have good friends and family to accompany me on the journey.

When I was 16, my parents sent me to a psychotherapist, Nina Blinstrub, to address the possible psychological dynamics behind my difficulty with speaking in circumstances outside of talking to family and friends.  Evidently, I was not just shy but hardly understandable.  Two years later, when I moved to Florida to go to college, I continued therapy with a gestalt therapist, Mike Gardner.  With Mike I attended a therapy group and individual sessions.  After three years, I stopped seeing Mike individually and continued the group for three more years until I moved back to Chicago in 1977.

In 1985, during a particularly troubled period in my marriage, I started therapy again, group therapy, with Jane Jacobs and Tom Goforth.  After a couple years, Tom split off and I continued group therapy with Jane.  Twenty-three years later, I’m still in group with Jane.  More than half my life I’ve been in group therapy.

When my first marriage ended in 1989, the group offered the safe place my soul desired.  When things were worst–bad enough to be the most distressing time of my adult life–I’d find myself imagining myself in group telling my confidants about what was occurring.  I had and have many friends, but the group was family.  A healthy family.

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated by psychological process, therapeutic intervention, spiritual experience and the relationship of the individual with his or her unconscious.  I had a manic depressive mother, borderline grandmother and a number of other relatives with unique derivations from the norm.  I craved my center, often feeling stalked by fear and rage.  Studying psychology and participating in psychotherapy became integral to my seeking to become whole.  Then I began meditating when I was 19.  The combination of meditation and group therapy, and later exercise and a healthy diet, became the foundation for the way I weather life.

When I received news of the aneurysm four days ago, I was prepared.  Still, it’s a one-day, one-moment-at-a-time thing as I experience my emotions swinging back and forth like the proverbial screen door in a windstorm.  Many of my feelings come as a result of observing family and friends receiving the news and expressing fear, dismay or concern.  It’s almost as if I experience more fear identifying with those I’m close to than I experience myself.  Maybe the fear I feel that I’m not aware of emerges around those I love.

Not that I do not feel fear much of the time.  I awoke feeling dread.  But the fear and dread feel manageable.  The fear and dread are accompanied by love.

Often, I imagine myself in group sharing what is happening that moment with Jane and the others I’ve become so close to.  Just the imagining I find consoling.  Along with the ability to travel to that place with those people in my imagination, I meditate.  I place my consciousness within my body.  I accompany me.  I experience me.  I do not generally run from the emotions, though they do stack up like airplanes circling an airport in bad weather.  I sometimes feel like there’s more emotion to be felt than there is time.

In about two weeks, I’ll sit down with the brain surgeons I met this weekend.  Then I’ll get a second opinion.  For now, it feels easy to choose no intervention.  I love my life and choose to live it as I am, aneurysm and all.  With time and more information, I may change my mind.

If it wasn’t enough that my frequent headaches were a painful distraction, now they are reminders of my mortality.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Right now, that’s not feeling like the case.

On Saturday night, I briefly passed out after eating Indian food, after one beer, while deeply fatigued.  I left the restaurant at the point I felt like I might pass out.  I sat down on a chair on the sidewalk.  I woke up lying on the sidewalk, having just hit my head.  I then threw up.  Marcia was inside the restaurant taking care of the bill and had not seen me topple or hurl.

Twenty-four years ago, deeply fatigued, I had a glass of wine, Indian food, then passed out and threw up.  This time, remembering the circumstance and sequence, I got myself outside so I would not throw up in the restaurant.  Last time, by the time an ambulance arrived, I felt recovered.  An EEG a couple weeks later suggested no cerebral issues.

This time a passerby using a cell phone had an ambulance there in maybe two minutes and then ran into the restaurant to retrieve my wife.  I was still weak, pale and sweating, though totally cogent when the ambulance arrived.  The EMTs convinced me to go to the hospital.  I agreed, if they didn’t turn on the siren.  The head EMT said OK.  We proceeded to the hospital, siren blaring.

Because I hit my head when I passed out, hospital doctors insisted I have a test to determine that my brain had not been damaged, which would involve my being admitted to the hospital.  I said no and that I would like to go home.  I felt totally recovered.  The doctor said that if I went home now my insurance would not cover the ambulance ride or ER admission costs because I was leaving without the approval of the doctor.  The doctor told Marcia and me that if I wanted insurance to cover costs up until that point, I would have the scan.  I complied.

The first test came back indicating no brain damage.  They concluded this while I was still in the ER.  They thought the passing out might be heart related, so I was wheeled to the cardiac ward.

Around 10:00 p.m., a doctor came to my room with the news that there was something on the brain scan that did not belong, a small anomaly.  She said it looked like a small aneurysm, not necessarily life-threatening.  I was not comforted by how uncomfortable she looked and sounded while sharing the news.  More tests would be required.  The second in a succession of five tests over a period of 40 hours was administered that night.

It was time to accompany myself, deliberately staying away from talking myself into fear and dread.  Marcia was loving and present.  I sent her home to sleep.  I shifted to full-scale meditative mode, placing my full consciousness within the confines of my body.  Hour after hour, I just stayed with me.  Hospital noises and interruptions prevented me from sleeping.  I meditated, breathed and stayed in a relative present.  Still, I was scared, yet feeling loved.

The next day, a neurosurgeon came in to provide me a summary.  I had a 12 mm aneurysm in a complicated location.  It looked like it had been around for a while and was not imminently threatening, though intervention might be prudent.  He said intervention would have no long-term serious effects.  Untreated, there was maybe a 5% chance in any given year that it could rupture.  The neurosurgeon said his boss, the head neurosurgeon, would be in to see me later in the afternoon.

The head neurosurgeon, the fourth doctor to provide an evaluation of the tests, made one correction.  The head neurosurgeon estimated that there was perhaps a 20% chance that intervention would result in stroke and long-term negative effects.

I woke up in my own bed this morning with a headache.  When I have headaches, which is pretty often, about once a week, I dissociate.  I dissociate by working or by writing, like I am now.

If I’m feeling scared, dissociation encourages anxiety.  To allay anxiety, I go into my body, inhabit my body, associate, comfort myself by being with myself.  The pickle I’m in at this moment is that a headache reminds me of the aneurysm, which I reflexively want to respond to by being in my body, but being in my body makes me more in touch with the headache pain.

The doctors assure me that my headaches are unconnected to the aneurysm.  I’ll only get one aneurysm headache and it will be the worst headache I’ve ever had.  My normal headaches are just a reminder.  A reminder of my mortality.

I’m going to take some more Advil and soak in the tub.  I need to be with me right now, though I’m not real experienced at being with me, in pain.

Passion for exploring underlying presuppositions is useful when offering attention to how things work.

My father is a Republican.  His affiliation is based upon what he determines is best for him, personally.  Issues are not important in the context of his allegiance.  He views himself as a person with something to protect.  He estimates that Democrats don’t really care about people that are well off and he wants to make sure that he stays well off.  An underlying presupposition of my father’s political leanings is that he makes his decisions based on what’s best for him.

This is not just a Republican assumption.  Many people that vote Democrat support the party they believe is best for them, personally.  A person with few resources will often estimate that Democrats will more likely make it possible for him or her to have access to resources.  The difference may often be incremental, but a real difference exists.  Whether it’s my father voting Republican or a person with few resources voting Democrat, an underlying presupposition is that both people are voting based on what is best for him or her at his or her economic level.

Republicans and Democrats can share underlying assumptions.  The Depression and WWII affected so many so deeply that personal identity expanded beyond personal issues.  There was a shift, and change occurred.  More recently, 9/11 compelled that same change in personal identity with a temporary abandoning of personal points of view as the population identified with a larger society.  The governing administration, noting the shift in underlying presuppositions away from personal interest to the larger group, put through legislation that was not in the interest of individuals with few resources.  Republicans and Democrats take advantage of these times of identity shift to create laws that could not normally be achieved.

In the American Left, I come across two very different groups of activists.

The first group is focused on achieving what is in the best interest of those with few resources, empowering the powerless.  Some in this first group concentrate on poor in the U. S.  Others seek redress for the powerless overseas.  Some go back and forth between both domestic and foreign fights for freedom.  Often these activists are not themselves without resources.  Their underlying presuppositions suggest an ability to identify beyond what is best for them personally.  For Americans, a shift in identity occurs when the society is deeply stressed.  People are scared.  Many activists don’t require this stress to see the world in a different way.  They already identify with a larger group than just themselves.

Members of the second group of activists offer their attention to the planet as a whole.  Sustainability, peace and justice issues are all entwined.  These folks are citizens of the world that happen to live in the U. S.  These folks display a shift in identity beyond national boundaries.  Underlying presuppositions of this group often include reverence for the whole.

Attention to underlying presuppositions offers an ability for understanding what we have in common.  People behave in ways having to do with whether they identify with themselves or circles larger than themselves.  Strong emotion can compel identify shift.  Politicians ride emotion waves to achieve narrow-identity personal goals.

Wider identity is possible without strong emotion.

As disappointed as I sometimes feel that my father continues to vote based on how much money he perceives himself to have, loving a man with such different intuitions does me good.

I noticed in my stats that someone found this site by typing “patrifocal” into Google.  This struck me as strange.  Getting high rankings for single word searches is notoriously difficult.  Then I noticed that the word “patrifocal” has less than 5,000 sites using that word, a tiny number.  “Matrifocal” revealed almost 40,000 sites with that word, still a miniscule number.

How does the academic world discuss issues of social structure and mate selection?  Evidently “matrifocal” and “patrifocal” are not frequently used terms.  It seems to me an important distinction sleeps beneath the notice of most academics studying social change.

Scanning the literature, there doesn’t seem to be a very deep intuition for the relationship between sexual selection and social structure outside discussion of lineality, as in matrilineal or patrilineal frames of reference.  Perhaps this is why fundamental changes in Western society characterized by a dramatic surge in the direction of female choice go mostly unremarked.  Lineality issues are not involved.  Folks mostly know who the father is.  Lineage is traced through the father’s last name regardless of matrifocal or patrifocal proclivities.  There was a brief time in the 60s where hyphenated last names were experimented with, providing matrilinealists the opportunity to be supported.  The default frame quickly reverted back to father’s last name.  (It would be interesting to do a study on whether folks carrying hyphenated last names reveal matrifocal tendencies, such as increased left-handedness, commanding women, cooperative men.)

Identifying matrifocal or partnership cultures by tracing lineage through the mother (father often unknown) is a convention that has lost its usefulness.  Deep changes in our society are occurring without the benefit of perspective as we shift toward matrifocal values with full knowledge of who the father is.  This is particularly true with the emergence of cheap genetic tests.  This is totally anomalous, with no comparable situation among almost 200 primates or human culture up until recently.

One way matrifocal societies distinguish themselves from patrifocal societies is that in matrifocal societies males exhibit, whereas in patrifocal societies males demonstrate.  I define “exhibit” as a more passive demonstration, providing females the choice of taking or leaving the aesthetic being proffered.  Among humans, an exhibitor is engaged in romance.  The male pays close attention to what the female is signaling as valued in the male’s behavior, and then the male adjusts the presentation to make clear that he has a cooperative nature.  Talent for mirroring or feedback is being selected along with skill at the aesthetic being exhibited.  In the context of the uber theme of this blog, the female is selecting a male with neotenous tendencies.  A result of this selective paradigm is a proliferation of unique cultures as females encourage creativity by guiding males into unique behaviors as the females seek males with facility for change.

In a patrifocal society, a male demonstrates.  Exaggeration is highly valued.  Escalation is revered.  The female is not engaged in a process where her choice informs the productions of society or a variety of talent nuances are encouraged.  Instead, the female is awarded or awards herself to the males who best demonstrate insensitivity to artfulness and a talent for doing some one thing better than all the rest, usually having to do with vanquishing an opponent.

Matrifocal selective processes create increasingly unique cultures as males exhibit a variety of productions to satisfy discriminating females.  In the past, this has been characterized by children not necessarily knowing who their father was.  Those days are over.  We need more signature concepts than just lineality to identify when we have shifted to a partnership society.  I use the words “matrifocal” and “patrifocal” as defaults.  As noted above, they are not exactly conventional words.  We don’t yet have a common language that provides an ability to trace emerging patterns in the context of biological and social evolution.

It seems that society is evolving while asleep.

I attended the Peace Island Conference (PIC) that took place in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention.  Marcia, Laurel and I, as co-directors of the Peace, Justice and Environment Project, attend several conferences over the course of the year.  We are usually tabling, sometimes conducting workshops, occasionally speaking.

The usual format is speakers and workshops.  Workshops are usually constituency-based with topics designed to appeal to the folks attending the event.  Often there are eight or more workshops running concurrently, resulting in several with 2 or 3 people attending.  It is not uncommon that workshops are created to encourage a particular group or interest to attend the event.  Far more workshops are created than is reasonable to beef up the attendance numbers at a conference.  For example, 40 workshops can mean at least 40 more conference attendees conducting workshops.

At the Peace Island Conference, there were no workshops.  Instead there were breakouts.

The unique way (in my experience) that the PIC was designed was that a speaker’s section with four speakers was followed by breakout sessions with each speaker assigned a room.  In the speaker’s session, one person was assigned about 45 minutes to talk, followed by three additional speakers talking for about fifteen minutes.  One theme was carried through all presenters, sustainability, for example, which then got carried into the breakouts.  The breakouts were very well attended.  As many as 300 people might attend the main assemblies; then, they were broken up into four groups.  As many as 100 people might attend a breakout.

Thirty-one exhibitors surrounded the room where lunch was dispensed and breakout sessions were offered.  This format was fantastic for exhibitors.  Too often, exhibitors are placed in a room separate from proceedings, creating a negative experience for all those tabling activists and organizers seeking integration with the activity of the conference.  In addition, the exhibitor section was shut down during the main assemblies.  Thus, exhibitors were able to attend events.  By contrast, while tabling at the Netroots or YearlyKos conference in Chicago, we were isolated far from the conference events, compelled to stay with the booth during those events.

An outstanding assortment of presenters gathered in St. Paul because the demonstrations allowed the organizers of the conference an ability to create a powerful lineup from visiting luminaries.  Yet, attendance could have been larger.  The conference was poorly promoted outside the Twin Cities, not alluded to from the stage events of the demonstrations and there were no handouts that I observed distributed to the thousands of demonstrators gathered on September 1.  In one breakout of 100 people, one person was from Wisconsin.  Almost everyone else was from Minneapolis or St. Paul.

Conference organizers offered themselves the opportunity to artfully arrange themes and presenters in ways that complements and contrasts were allowed to play off each other.  Designing a conference that focused on peace, justice and sustainability issues, they placed sustainability early in the program, establishing a cooperative, positive vision of the future as a foundation for the event.

Until attending this conference, I was not aware of how flexible conference format was in allowing design to manifest in experience.  Talking to the organizers, I found that what emerged was the result of numerous discussions, not so much what the organizers had observed at other conferences.  I wonder what other unique conference formats are being used that I am not yet aware of?

Way back before the election, I was a marshal for the protest march that occurred on September 1, the first day of the hurricane-impacted Republican National Convention.  I was assigned to follow the 45-minute long stretch of several thousand people with several other blue-shirted organizers.  From where we were, things were peaceful.  On TV that night, I watched video of pepper-spraying police, anarchist confrontations, unlawful arrests and varying degrees of chaos.  This conflict was all happening at other places in or near the march, which from the back end seemed characterized by calm.

In one mildly surreal moment during the march, I looked up to read the news ticker trailing across the side of a skyscraper.  In the blinking lights of the ticker I read that seven had been arrested in the march.

As an organizer, a lot of attention is devoted to designing events and preparing advisories that will draw cameras.  At the RNC, I observed more media in one place than I was aware was even possible.  Anybody that wanted to be interviewed could find one several times.  I read that there were 15,000 reporters, producers, camera people, lighting specialists and talking heads at the RNC.  That was more media people in St. Paul than there were protesters at the march, though maybe a tenth of them were in the streets covering the protest story.

In the streets, in the middle of the story being told, it becomes clear that experience is profoundly relative.  Beginning with a position to pitch, one can cut and snip experience and create a narrative that fits the perspective one seeks to propagate.  As an organizer with a viewpoint I wish to share, I work to create an event that suggests a powerful story that supports a specific interpretation of how the world works.  Watching a TV editorial on the local news the evening of the first day of the convention, I observed the commentator drawing conclusions based upon the behavior of a few activists, using information that was erroneous or outright lies.  Storytellers are not scientists.  We pick and choose the facts to fit our stories.  Not that scientists don’t often pick a study that will support desired facts.

At mass marches that I help organize or attend, I do head counts.  With high quality numbers I am able to assess the relative effectiveness of our organizing techniques over time and the mood of the activist community that we serve.  Organizers rarely do head counts.  Not knowing the real numbers, they can make an estimation that supports a story that is being told.

I’ve discovered the police numbers are also often inflated.  The police don’t do head counts.  I expect with inflated numbers it’s easier to get funding for these events.

Reality is relative in protest politics, even in the streets where pepper spray in the eyes feels pretty real.

Several things contribute to an evolutionary understanding of small business formation, health, difficulty and demise.  First, there is the examination of the business model and an earnest exploration of the likelihood that the business will find its niche.  It is also important to address how the business can best get the word out that it exists and will perform its services seamlessly so that buyers will return.  For me, there is the examination of the person I am working with, noting the person’s talents, strengths and challenges, and understanding who the person is as a social being in the larger picture of the contribution the individual is seeking to make to the business community at large.

In other words, how exactly is the person I am working with complementary to the pathway he or she is walking?  What makes the person attracted to the job?  What makes the person I am working with unique?

Discussions with prospective clients usually occur in my living room.  I work out of my home.  Talking websites, we sit surrounded by books on evolution and related disciplines.

Immersed in an evolutionary theory characterized by how social structure evidences itself in behavior, physiology and neurology, I notice in the people I come in contact with features that place them in a matrifocal or patrifocal context.  It’s not exactly a compulsion that I observe conversations between clients and myself from this unusual perspective.  The things people say, how they say it, how they behave, what they seek and how they look suggest to me their evolutionary proclivities.  I sometimes make predictions, based upon their behavior, that I will see evidence of certain other behaviors.  Sometimes my predictions hold true.  Often not.  I note the exceptions.  Anomalies often open doors to new understandings.

Sometimes it is a couple that seeks advice on putting up a website.  Having received training to become a therapist and having experienced over 30 years of group, individual and couples therapy in my own life, I’ve developed a process-psychodynamic view of human communication.  In a way still difficult to explain, watching the interactions of a couple in my living room offers both a process/choice-based interpretation of what I observe and an evolutionary perspective.

An astonishing number of people come to me for websites and do not really care if the website succeeds.  What I mean is that they are willing to take a chance of paying for a site but don’t want to pay to make sure the site receives visitors.  What do these folks have in common?  I look for patterns.

People with communication qualities suggestive of Asperger’s come to me seeking website consultation.  I watch and listen for the patterns in common among these different folks.

I offer the most attention to people that are left-handed or display qualities that I associate with left-handedness.  What do these folks have in common?

I talk with many artists, designers, architects, photographers and creative folks.  Left-handedness runs rife among the creative.  Often in conversation I am talking to a person who shows all the signs of a left-handed person, but the individual is right-handed.  Sometimes I can’t stop myself and I ask if they have a left-handed parent.  Almost always they do.

My laboratory is my living room where potential clients come to talk.  Like a psychotherapist doing intake, I gather information about what they seek for their website while I’m collecting nonverbal details on who they are and what they want.  People are astonishing.  Each person carries his or her whole life and the lives of his or her evolutionary precursors.  Interacting with these folks in my living room is like chatting with the fingernail of a giant, a fantastic being filled with possibilities and pasts.

Evolution is everywhere.  Evolution walks into my living room every day.

When I was young, in college and before, I collected work experiences.  I’ve been fired from two jobs in my life.  The rest I quit when I got bored.  Working to make money felt like an adventure.  At one point, I counted 40 different jobs that I had tried.  I was taking an artist’s path through my family’s business frame of reference.  With hard-working, merchant/business Jews on both sides of my family, with almost every male running his own businesses, I sought a path where I could work and yet enjoy it.  After graduating from college, this work-as-adventure frame continued as I proceeded to work my way through several professions.

1 Girdle and Bra factory vice president (I worked for my dad out of college for a year and a bit.)
2 Free Lance Illustrator and graphic design
3 Greeting Card Manufacturer (publishing my paintings as greeting cards)
4 Greeting Card Independent Representative (ran a firm working for more than 100 businesses over 19 years)
5 Cartoon Strip & Panel Artist (Off the Deep End & Lehman were in almost 200 fringe publications)
6 Comic Art Syndicator (represented 12 comic artists to the alternative press)
7 Comic Art Publisher (Free monthly distributed in Chicago and Ann Arbor)
8 Puppet Manufacturer (with wife & dad’s factory created 60-character puppet line sold nationwide)
9 Web Design Firm (with wife and 4 staff members, we manage almost 400 websites) see andrewlehman.com

Two of the businesses made enough to feed a family.  The repping firm allowed me to try several other professions (5, 6, 7 and 8 above) during those 19 years.  The web design firm allows me to spend almost half my time working to develop PJEP, a nationwide network of networks, a resource-packed, high-tech communication/cooperation commons for local peace, justice and environmental organizations.  The web design firm has some interesting characteristics that allow me some of the sense of adventure I experienced as a teenager trying all kinds of jobs.  I get to learn new professions, vicariously.

About 80 new firms join Andrew Lehman Design each year.  Sometimes we take over established sites.  Often, we have built new websites from scratch.  When we build a new site, I sit down with the owners (we work almost exclusively with small, local businesses) and learn what they do and how best to communicate their profession in the quasi-narrative format of the web.  I am good at this.  As an artist of ideas attracted to evolutionary processes, I enjoy focusing on this intersection between business and society.  I get to understand the nature of a specific business, and then I design website visitor access in a fashion where integration of that profession into society feels seamless.

My specialty within my firm is search engine optimization.  While exploring how best a business might share its central focus and achieve its website goals, I note how the website needs to be constructed to achieve high rankings in search engines.  By pure chance, I began tracking Google’s search algorithms shortly after they went into business.  Their name jumped out at me from a list of hundreds of unknown companies.  I ended up a Google expert early in my career.  This expertise has helped me to keep clients because high rankings for targeted phrases are perhaps the most important thing a website can achieve.

Over a 30-year stretch, I’ve had detailed discussions with perhaps 7,000 people on what exactly it is that they do.  In 1980, I started repping my own greeting card reproductions of watercolors, which led to my becoming a rep for other companies.  These days, I frequently sit down with people starting a new business or looking for a website for their established business.  In college and after college, I had some training to become a therapist.  This is different.  I’ve developed an intuition for the nature of small business, how to start one and what is required to communicate the essence of that firm.

I suspect this experience has contributed to the multiscale nature of the theories I explore inside this blog.  As one intimate with small business, I’ve observed up close the effects of environment on the health of individual firms and the power of individual imagination to propel an idea into a growing concern.  When I drive unfamiliar streets, often in the back of my mind I’m tabulating the kinds of businesses I’m seeing and sorting them into commercial patterns that I’m familiar with.  I feel embedded in the evolutionary process of business formation, birth, growth and demise as I perform my job, which is to make it easy for my clients to express what it is that they do and how they can serve, making themselves useful to the community.

I often wonder what it would have been like to have received an advanced degree in evolutionary biology or anthropology and spent my life conducting research and teaching classes.  I suspect that an academic environment, though infused with interesting ideas, may have served poorly as an incubator for the types of hypotheses I’ve formed.  Strangely, business has offered me a laboratory that academia cannot reproduce.  Observing business, and the individuals creating those businesses, I’ve received a schooling no university could ever offer.

Observing the birth, growth and death of thousands of businesses, I live and work within the embrace of evolution.