A pattern I’ve noticed among professionals I know is the tendency to share the benefits of one’s expertise by actually imparting knowledge on how to engage in that professional’s profession.  A psychotherapist has at her or his disposal a host of interventions to bridge the client to the client’s desired state.  The intervention often chosen is the one where the client is invited to view and feel about himself or herself in a similar fashion to the way the therapist views and feels about the client.  The client is invited to experience the world psychodynamically.  The practitioner guides the client to share the practitioner’s model as a strategy to achieve the desired change.

I’ve noticed this in several contexts.  Outstanding teachers often are not only communicating information, they are sharing how the information is communicated.  There is sometimes a tendency to teach by making the student a teacher.

Outstanding political organizers are not just engaging in the step-by-step process of achieving goals, they are at the same time training and guiding the activists that they are working with to emulate the organizer’s behavior.

Excellence in communication may not just be about nurturing an environment that supports the exchange of information but may have no small amount to do with making it possible for the target audience, client or companion to fully enter the world of the information-imparter so that the receiver of information emerges with a brand new frame of reference, a new world view.

Think of it as a shaman not just performing rituals to compel change in the patient, but the shaman teaching his ritual interventions to all that he or she works with as part of the transformation that is sought.

The extreme of this paradigm might be going to the doctor to be diagnosed and being taught diagnosis, eating out for supper while watching the chef teach you how he or she prepares the food, meeting with the accountant to be taught bookkeeping, going to church to hear the minister preach by describing the steps necessary to become a minister.

Context is being shared in addition to information.  Often, professionals practicing in this way are able to offer a deeper level of communication.  There is an invitation to share the presuppositions of the practitioner.

There is a second piece to this, one I find particularly interesting.  There are a host of professionals that make their living traveling the country conducting workshops, preparing videos, writing books and running practitioner trainings.  The practitioners’ world view, their presuppositional context, is constantly reinforced by the fact that their professional success, self esteem and income are all tied to their achievements.  Those professionals whose job it is to model a specific paradigm such as success, high self esteem, spiritual achievement, calm or some specific positive outcome are themselves extremely reinforced by their position as model to maintain the target outcome.

The folks that they are teaching or guiding don’t have this leverage position.  Their relationship with their environment does not compel them in this ongoing fashion to model the target state.

Some practitioners engage in the extra step of seeking to teach the student to become a practitioner.  At the most basic level, one is being guided to experience changes in presuppositions, changes required to share the alternative world view.  A new matrix of assumptions are donned and explored for compatibility.  Then, wearing this new cloak of many colors, the students can be invited to practice, slipping into a position of authority, perhaps finding it easier to experience transformation because they become an example of the process.

Perhaps it is easier to become enlightened if you become a guru.

Cults are often accused of engaging in this process.  I’ve heard a “cult” defined as either a new religion or a religion unfamiliar to a particular culture.  The process of healing by requiring a shift in presuppositions is a classic religious strategy for change.  As noted here, it is common in other healing professions such as psychotherapy.

I’ve noticed that blogging, writing to a largely imaginary audience, offers some of the same effect I’m describing above.  My imagined skill at drawing together and communicating the various principles I find interesting is reinforced by my estimation that someone is benefiting from my insights.  I am at the center of a tiny cult, seeking students interested in embracing my world view.  This medium of blogging encourages my staying centered in a positive state as I model the benefits of being me.

Observing the effects of blogging, Facebook and Twitter on people I know and don’t know but just “follow,” I observe people feeling embraced by larger communities, putting them in hub positions where they are modeling their particular points of view.  At the same time that there is this profound amateurization of society with the deconstruction of a number of professions (for example, mainstream media), there is this balancing of amateur demeanor whereby amateurs are also models of behavior representing their own unique and particular world view.  There is this paradoxical professionalization of the nonprofessional as each person becomes the center of a larger community, modeling his or her own personal frame of reference.  Each becomes an acolyte to his or her personal message, responsible for imparting a particular point of view.

Professionals encourage clients to share the professional’s point of view.  Often, the particular way the professional engages in the profession becomes much of what is communicated.  The professionals’ self esteem or capabilities often become closely tied to their modeling successfully the sought-after target experience or behavior.  Authority to practice reinforces practitioner success.  With the proliferation of online communities placing many more individuals at the center of a matrix of like-minded people, the experience of authority is now offered to a greatly expanded number of online practitioners.  We feel part of a community, and it is not uncommon that we feel reinforced to model aspects of experience not easily accessible until now.

The dawning of the age of the amateur suggests an emerging ubiquitous sharing of authority.  With authority comes responsibility.  Perhaps we are each becoming responsible for the way we feel.

Well, the surgeons recommended cranial intervention.  Operating through arteries from the inside of the aneurysm risks damaging the tiny “peripheral” arteries that are inside the aneurysm.  They can see those arteries from the outside.  They can’t from the inside.  There is approximately a 10% chance of serious problems, mainly stroke.

This continues to be an astonishing adventure.  Dread and anxiety are, of course, part of the process.  What surprises me is the increased experience of being in the now as I pay far closer attention to the changing of the seasons, the spiritual in the everyday and my relationship with that part of myself with no personality, history or individual focus.  I am feeling humbled.

Ten years ago, when Marcia was having serious uterine pain, the doctors weren’t sure what it was, but they said cancer was a possibility.  There was about a two-week period of not knowing what was going on before the operation, which revealed that the symptoms were from endometriosis and were not life threatening.  During that two-week period, I felt far more dread than I have during my own life-threatening experience.  I was more upset than Marcia by what was happening.

Regarding the aneurysm, Marcia seems to be feeling my mortality more acutely, from an anxiety perspective, than I am.  But then, I’m seeking to leverage the experience into a reverence for my being alive.

It would be useful, so to speak, if I could frame my seeking to be present in a more human context.  I reflexively seek comfort and integration through a personal context that has mostly to do with my relationship with myself.  I’m thinking that paying more attention to Marcia, feeling and expressing affection, would allay some of her anxiety and balance my tendency to withdraw to find strength and solace.

It’s odd to so often see and hear distress regarding my health in the eyes and voice tones of the folks I love and not to be feeling that anxiety in myself.  My anxiety usually emerges when I’m by myself, often when I awaken in the morning.

So, I run my mantra as I fall asleep and when my eyes just open.  So far, I haven’t noticed meditating during dreams, which would be pretty cool.

I pay close attention to the changing season.

During work or life, I don’t generally write down ideas when something occurs to me to write about.  It’s so clear that my conscious self has so little influence on what I do that I just give in to what emerges.  I continue to be astonished at what comes out.

Just now, seeking to find one of those ideas that have been floating around in my mind for the last few days, I realize it is the shape of the idea that I am looking for.  I’m not trying to remember the words but the form.  If I can grasp its form, the words follow.

I’m one of these people that remember phone numbers by the way they look, feel and sound.  The keypad on the telephone has a shape when I punch the numbers.  I recall the pattern, the motion I make and the beeping melody.  The number sequence is the result of other sense interventions.

I go to the brain surgeon today.  He will tell Marcia and me which intervention he recommends for the cerebral aneurysm behind my left eye.  All interventions have risks, but supposedly fewer than 10% of the operations result in stroke.  I’m wondering how many of the operations result in strokes that people or the practitioners don’t notice.  I wonder how the subtleties of creative process might be affected.

Lives have shape more than they have sequence.  Even though we think of ourselves inside a story, living life with a beginning, middle and end, the muddle of emotions and memories and where our attention is directed suggest far more an experience characterized by arbitrary feelings than a sensible narrative.  Our compulsion to tell stories, view, read and listen to stories, organize our experience in a fashion that suggests a sensible narration, may be at least partially about the fact that life is really more like a giant floating hunk of silly putty.  Rub it against print, an established story, and the silly putty takes on a mirror reflection.  The mass can be pulled and shaped but is characterized by more a simultaneity than a sequence of impressions.  The hunk is.  We just seem to prefer to think of ourselves as becoming.

I think of myself as being molded by my unconscious.  To a large extent, I’m just along for the ride.  Though I see my place in the world as part of a larger story, I suspect the true shape of things has more to do with where there are no words.

“The existence of mammary ridges on the embryo concording with ancient synapsids suggests that those ancient animals also had nutrient-supplying ridges on their bodies for which there is no paleontological evidence.  On the human embryo, the mammary ridges gradually coalesce and finally resolve into discrete nipples on day 58.  This event concords almost exactly with the lowermost Triassic, where the fossils of Cynognathus are found.  Discrete mammary glands and a fused secondary palate in the embryo coincide with a fused secondary palate in the fossil record.”  (Swan, Lawrence W. (1990) The concordance of ontogeny with phylogeny.  Bioscience 40: 380)

Because male humans differentiate from the foundation female at six weeks after conception, might this reflect an ancient emergence of testosterone after estrogen?  Might the Pre-Cambrian explosion have had something to do with there being no testosterone to call an end to the party?

…

“No one, least of all Williams and Kafatos, expect the eventual story to be so simple.  But it does seem likely that normal development is controlled by gradually decreasing concentration of a hormone acting primarily at high levels of the regulatory system.  This is also an ideal mechanism for the simple and rapid production of heterochronic effects.  Any acceleration of adult characters by reduction in the titer of juvenile hormone, or extension of juvenile traits by maintenance of a high titer, represents heterochrony.  Since minor alterations in the concentration of a hormone can lead to substantial changes in morphology, heterochrony may play an important role in geographic variation (secretion of juvenile hormone is influenced by temperature and photoperiod, for example), polymorphism (including sex, caste, and phase) and speciation itself.”  (Gould, S. J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 295-6)

Why can’t it be simple?  Why not hormones acting at the level of the regulatory system influencing evolution quickly and profoundly?  Particularly if those hormone levels are easily influenced by the environment?

…

“According to this theory [right-shift], the benefits of left hemisphere specialization for speech are induced by a gene (rs+) which impairs right hemisphere function at some sensitive period of cerebral growth.  Those carrying one copy of the gene (rs+ -) heterozygotes, about 49% of the population) enjoy the advantages of lateralization of speech to the left hemisphere, with minimal risk to the right hemisphere, while those having two copies (rs+ +) homozygotes, about 32% of the population) risk significant loss of right hemisphere power.  Those with no copy of the gene (rs – - homozygotes) are at no risk of hemisphere impairment (right or left), but risk developmental delays of speech and associated language skills due to the inherent difficulty of programming a large brain to serve speech…” (Annett, M. and Manning, M. (1990) Arithmetic and laterality.  Neuropsychologia 28 (1): pp. 61-62)

The work of Annett and her colleagues makes clear that there may be a direct connection between Right Shift theory and the cause of autism.  There exists a population with a tendency to display no particular handedness.  That population produces more maturationally delayed people.  Much of the autistic population comes from that group of the maturationally delayed.

…

“Schacter reported that women exposed in utero to the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol had a handedness distribution on the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) that was shifted away from strong right-handedness.  Nass et al. found that females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a disorder that results in increased androgen production during gestation, displayed a lesser degree of right-hand preference than unaffected sibling controls on the EHI.  However, males with CAH displayed a trend in the opposite direction.  More recently, Helleday et al. reported that females with CAH did not differ from controls in either degree of right-hand preference or in dichotic listening asymmetry.”  (Moffat, S. D. and Hampson, E. (1996) Salivary testosterone levels in left- and right-handed adults.  Neuropsychologia 34 (3): pp. 225)

If sexual hormone levels affect handedness, and if handedness is associated with degrees of cerebral lateralization, with degrees of cerebral lateralization suggesting variations in human evolution with increased lateralization over time, then are hormone levels influencing evolution?

…

“The finding from these three tests of behavioral laterality suggest that as one side of the brain assumes control of the behavior in these tasks, a smaller CC [corpus callosum] favours increased control by the specialized hemisphere, whereas the larger CC distributes this role more equitably between the two sides.  The magnitude of the resulting asymmetry, with better performance for the tasks lateralized to different hemispheres as expected, did not correlate significantly with the CC area.  However, the amount of dual task interference was strongly inversely correlated with the CC area in both within-hemisphere (right hand) and between-hemispheres (left hand) conditions.  Left hand slowing was significantly higher than in previously reported results, reflecting the increased demands and complexity of the task we used.  As the CC area became smaller, the left hand (right hemisphere) performance was more interfered with by the verbal (left hemisphere) activity.  This between-hemispheres relationship might reflect activation of systems distributed through the whole cerebrum rather than activation of a single hemisphere with increased task demands.”  (Yazgan, M. Y., Wexler, B. E., Kinsbourne, M., Peterson, F., Leckman, J. F. (1995) Functional significance of individual variations in callosal area.  Neuropsychologia 33:  775-6)

It seems to me that the corpus callosum is hugely important as regards speech production.  A smaller CC may be encouraging speech.  Does CC size reflect different degrees of self awareness?  How does CC size interface with degrees of cerebral lateralization?  For example, in what ways is a person with two cerebral hemispheres the same size with a large CC different from a person that is highly lateralized (right-handed with a far smaller right hemisphere) with a small CC?

…

“It is satisfying to consider embryos and adults as merely different parts of the slope of a curve subject to natural selection.  If biologists cannot agree to Haeckel’s concept, ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ there may be room for a less ringing slogan, ‘ontogeny concords with phylogeny.’” (Swan, Lawrence W. (1990) The concordance of ontogeny with phylogeny.  Bioscience 40: 384)

How about we just return to seriously considering that ontogeny and evolution are related?  If we note sexual hormones influencing ontogeny, what is so difficult in believing sexual hormones might influence biological evolution?  For humans, social structure seems an obvious place to start.

…

“This broad category [developmental learning disorders] principally includes developmental dyslexia, stuttering, delayed speech, childhood autism, and hyperactivity (CL, p. 83), and Giles de la Tourette syndrome should probably also be included (CL, p. 83).  These conditions are linked by having an excess of males, a ‘rather similar pattern of inheritance’ (CL, p. 84), and increased personal and familial left-handedness (CL, p. 84; Bishop, 1983; Boucher, 1977; Colby & Parkinson, 1977; Parac & Coren, 1981).”  (McManus, I. C. and Bryden, M. P. (1991) Geschwind’s theory of cerebral lateralization:  developing a formal, causal model.  Psychological Bulletin 110 (2): 242)

Those conditions that exhibit an excess of males might suggest testosterone (and/or an absence of estrogen) as integral to causation.  Add an evolutionary theory that suggests sexual hormones as integral to understanding transformation and we might be getting somewhere.

…

“Tan (1990a, b, c, 1991a, b, c) has investigated the relation between serum testosterone levels and hand performance extensively.  In a 1990 (1990c) study, he reported that serum testosterone levels correlated with right-hand skill on a modified version of the Annett pegboard: right-handed men showed a positive correlation between serum testosterone level and right-hand skill, while right-handed women showed a negative correlation.  This would suggest that high testosterone levels are associated with increased right-hand skill in men, but with decreased right-hand skill in women.  In a further study, Tan (1990b) found that right-hand superiority on the Tapley and Bryden (1985) dot-filling task increased with increasing serum testosterone level in males, but was unaffected by testosterone in women.  Next, Tan (1991a) showed that high testosterone levels in right-handed women were associated with poorer peg-moving performance and less improvement with practice, generally replicating his 1990 (1990a) study.  Subsequently, Tan (1991b) found the reverse pattern in male subjects.  These findings generally show that increased serum testosterone is associated with increased right-handed performance in men, but not in women.  However, Tan (1991c) has also reported that testosterone levels are significantly higher in both women with AD than in those with standard dominance, when the AD group includes left-handers, weak right-handers, and right-handers with a history of familial sinistrality.  This latter finding is in general agreement with Tan’s (1990a) report that degree of hand preference is negatively correlated with testosterone level in right-handed women and in right-handed men without a history of familial sinistrality.  However, Tan’s studies of hand skill (1990b,c, 1991a,b) suggest that increased levels of testosterone are associated with stronger right-handedness, at least in men.  Given the relatively small sample sizes employed in these studies (usually about 45 men and 20 women), the large number of potential confounding factors (eye dominance, footedness, and intellectual ability, to name a few), and the apparent inconsistencies in the effects on preference and on skill, it is unclear how best to interpret these data.”  (Bryden M. P., McManus, I. C., Bulman-Fleming, M. B. (1994) Evaluating the Empirical Support for the Geschwind-Behan-Balaburda Model of Cerebral Lateralization.  Brain and Cognition 26: pp. 151)

How about we interpret the data from an evolutionary perspective with complementary opposites as the norm?

…

“However, Moffat and Hampson (1993) have found that salivary testosterone levels are significantly lower in left-handers than in right-handers.  While circulating testosterone levels in adults may not correlate well with fetal exposure to testosterone, these data provide suggestive evidence against the Geschwind hypothesis — one would expect higher, rather than lower, levels of testosterone in left-handers.”  (Bryden, M. P., McManus, I. C., Bulman-Fleming, M. B. (1994) Evaluating the Empirical Support for the Geschwind-Behan-Balaburda Model of Cerebral Lateralization.  Brain and Cognition 26: pp. 151)

I would expect male lefties to be low testosterone, female lefties to be high testosterone (relative to females).  Discussing these issues without regard to sex makes no sense.

…

“Bryden mentions only studies in his review of research directly linking T and cognitive abilities, namely, a study by Hassler (1991) reporting decreased levels of salivary T in male musical composers and increased levels of T in female musical composers, and a study by Christiansen and Knussman (1987) showing that, in college-age men, T levels correlated positively with spatial relations and negatively with performance on verbal-sequential tasks.  The latter study is unusual in that there have been several studies showing better spatial performance in higher-androgen young women and lower-androgen young men, compared to their same sex counterparts (Gouchie & Kimura, 1991; Moffat & Hampson, in preparation; Shute et al., 1983).  One interpretation of these findings is that, across sexes, there may be a nonmonotonic relationship between T (or its metabolites, which have not been measured directly in any of these studies) and spatial performance, with optimal performance occurring in the middle range of T values, closer to the lower end of the normal range of T for young adult males.” (Hampson, E. and Moffat, S. D. (1994) Is testosterone related to spatial cognition and hand preference in humans?  Brain and Cognition 26: 257)

Another interpretation of these findings might be to explore handedness and sexual hormone levels from an evolutionary perspective with high-testosterone females and low-testosterone males as the musical composing forebears of current society.

Marcia and I live in an old row house 12 blocks from Chicago.  The maple in our tiny backyard is massive, making it impossible to grow vegetables and fruits.  With the abundance of shade, Marcia attends to plants and flowers.  I miss growing pumpkins, strawberries and sunflowers.

We have six birdhouses, some with families.  The tiny sparrows emerged in late spring.  Looking out the back door one June morning, I saw a baby sparrow on a branch, a tiny bunny in the grass and two new squirrels beneath the bird feeder.  We keep the four bird feeders filled.  This draws lots of life besides the sparrows and finches.

Elia saw three raccoons on our steps at 3:00 a.m.  Two were tiny.  Possums wander through.  One May morning we were alerted to something unusual in the backyard when several squirrel alarms went off, a sort of clicking, squawking noise.  There was a coyote standing amongst the birdhouses.

The last place we lived, near Damen and Roscoe in Chicago, I dug up the backyard and turned it into a garden and tortoise run.  Five box turtles wandered amongst the strawberries, tomatoes and cucumbers through spring and summer.  I’d rarely see them, though I’d see their signature bites taken out of strawberries or ripe vegetables.  The backyard had a wildflower section that drew moths, butterflies, grasshoppers and large, exotic insects.  High fences kept our yard cat free.  Momma squirrels brought their babies to hang out.

The last year we were in Chicago, 13 years ago, one of the box turtles escaped.  A year later, after we’d moved to Evanston, we received a phone call.  A neighbor across the street had found our turtle in his front yard.  Harms Woody had made it about 30 yards in 12 months.  I can remember when I was a kid that one of my box turtles made it several blocks before he was found and returned.

In our backyard now are four turtles.  Yoshi has been with us almost 20 years.  They live all year in a tortoise pen buried in our garden.  They dig down in the fall to sleep from October to mid-April.  While they’re frolicking in spring and summer, we dump in fruits and vegetables left over from meals and give them worms from the leaf pile.  One of the bird feeders dangles above their weathered, four-story, ramped plywood home, causing several crops of millet and sunflower seeds to sprout and grow.

Maybe half my life I’ve had turtles.  They often enter my dreams.  There were times that we just let them wander around the house.  Sometimes I’ve had to give them shots to keep them healthy.  Once in a while one would lay an egg.  On several occasions we’ve picked up tortoises from children tired of the responsibility.  Several dead ones are buried in my backyards over 50 years.

Animals and growing things keep me grounded.  It being so easy for me to indulge in the abstract, I really miss having a place that I can garden.

So I encourage the turtles to eat and watch the baby critters grow.

Evolutionary theory has been encouraged to grow in the direction of what society believes about itself.  When we in the West were committed to the mythology of the Judeo-Christian ethic, we concluded that life emerged as a direct result of transcendent intervention in a prescribed time period.  Darwin was heavily influenced by contemporary forces that included the belief that humans could observe patterns, draw conclusions and make predictions without the influence of a universal god.  Drawing upon Linnaeus, Paley, Malthus, Smith and Lyell, Darwin created a theory of evolution that seemed to integrate both a reverence for the subject and respect for enlightenment and intellectual independence.  In choosing among Darwin’s three theories, society embraced the theory of natural selection, which directly reflected a material, stratified, industrializing West.

A new paradigm is emerging.  Instead of “survival of the fittest,” we see a drifting in the direction of “transcendence of the interconnected.”  Cooperative communities are becoming recognized as integral to understanding how individuals and collections of individuals evolve.  For many evolutionary theorists, the environment is now a variable that influences the kind of progeny that are produced.  We need not be products of random variation any longer.

Still unexplored as a variable in evolution is a feature of existence considered inappropriate for study.  As we assimilate the power of the concepts of interdependence and environmental influence on biological transformation, that aspect of experience will likely emerge as a variable to be treated with respect.  Right now that aspect of experience is associated with mythology and religion.  The variable with potential to deepen our understanding of how biology, societies and individuals transform is awareness.

Modern science mostly has concluded that because awareness is not measurable, it should be ignored.  Though perceptible by an individual, consciousness is usually assigned to that basket of features of human beings that arose due to contingent circumstance.  Consciousness, along with other human characteristics, was useful, so it appeared.

Consider the possible benefits of a theory of evolution that integrates awareness or consciousness as a characteristic of existence that has structure and features and changes over time.

I have found it useful, when theorizing, to presuppose that consciousness has always existed.  This is not about storytelling and assigning mythological motifs.  The issue is whether the presupposition is useful.  Does it provide any leverage to form explanations that offer an ability to predict the future or make connections between formerly unrelated concepts?  In other words, does presupposing universal awareness usefully deepen our understanding of our world or ourselves?

Regarding evolution, I believe that assuming that awareness or consciousness exists as a ground or foundation beneath biological evolution offers theorizing benefits.

Assuming that consciousness is embedded in biology, I look for subtlety, complexity, elegance and uniqueness as features of the overriding system.  Consciousness is characterized, from a human perspective, by a conversation between creativity and appreciation, yang and yin, proliferation and nuance, rate and timing.  By presupposing that consciousness exists, we look for interconnection, intuiting relationship, assuming a tendency to balance.  Instead of looking for hierarchy, we look for nested hierarchy (each level embracing the one below) with hierarchy violating interconnections.  If there are barriers to be broken, we search for evidence of breaches.  Anomalies are not just suggestions of broken models but are themselves evidence of a thriving system.  Integral to understanding how things work is how they play.  Novelty is a desired outcome.

Unlike our traditional, transcendent god with a desire to intervene, this is an immanent force with a compulsion to play.  This may be a force totally without certain features of human awareness characterized by split consciousness, which we might describe as the ability to be two places at once, two times at once, with an imagination capable of intuiting an opposite.  Prehuman biological awareness may feature what Freud called primary process:  one time, one place, no negatives.  This may not be creative consciousness as humans understand creative consciousness but something far simpler, yet unfathomably more powerful.

How does this apply to evolution?

What if the consciousness featured by our great ape cousins and early hominids is a form of consciousness equivalent to an individual’s manifestation of the overall general awareness, similar to sleep?  Then, brains split.  The two cerebral hemispheres grew to communicate poorly with each other, with one hemisphere having developed something wholly unique, an ability to assign gestural communication to speech.  With the split, a separation characterized by one cerebral hemisphere growing smaller than the other and the brain bridge corpus callosum accepting less traffic, each human became two humans.  This provided an ability to exercise personal imagination, featuring a knack to be two places at once, two times at once and an ability to imagine something and its opposite.  At night, when dreaming, we return to primary consciousness, great ape consciousness, when we can only be in a single place or time, unable to imagine another place or time without actually being there, along with an inability to imagine something not being.

This is a story.  The question is:  Can useful stories or theories be derived from a shift in presuppositions?  By making believe that awareness is not important when theorizing about biological and human evolution, we constrain our results to include only those conclusions that do not support consciousness as an unimportant variable.  Perhaps we should consider the alternative.  The benefits might include our being able to detect patterns in experience not obvious if we believe certain patterns can’t exist.

With the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology as a theorizing framework that offers interdependence and environment as variables important to understanding evolution, we have a bridge concept that clears the way to embracing the idea that interconnection and environment are features of a model that include additional concepts such as consciousness and play.

Perhaps with time, embracing play, we will become like children.  Maybe it is by playing that we can only truly understand.

A common argument emerged among evolutionary theorists starting 150 years ago.  Passionate words were exchanged that focused on whether variation was random or not.  If variation was random, then Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the primary player as species evolved.  If variation was not random, then the environment or other variables were deciding what features of an individual natural selection influenced, features possibly preselected for an environment.

If natural selection was choosing among a preselected group of candidates, those forces that determined the candidates being selected could be construed as being more important than natural selection.

The argument for a preselected group of candidate features faded in the 1930s as Darwin’s theory of natural selection became the default frame of reference for a society seeing the world through the effects of capitalism and maintaining a belief on the social level that without government intervention, it was all about the strongest surviving.  With the resurgence of Social Darwinism and free markets beginning in the late 1970s, the wise men of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Neo-Darwinists, shared with us the certain knowledge that variation is random and natural selection is the foundation of all evolution.

Times are changing.

Thomas Kuhn, Stephen J. Gould and many others have discussed in detail the influence that society has upon the stories or theories that a theorist can invent.  It’s not just a matter of what ideas can come to mind, but that times can determine if an idea can even draw enough tenured professors to make up a thesis committee.  As our time radically transforms what we believe to be true, how we believe we came to be will be affected.  As our present evolves, our past changes.  As we as a society experience transformed identity, our origin myths will radically transform.

In the West, we have transitioned from mythological origin myths to an origin myth based upon what we understand as science.  We are at the beginning of another origin myth transformation, one that integrates the influence of the environment upon variation in natural selection.  This new origin myth, this modified theory of evolution, is evidencing itself in the work of evolutionary developmental biologists who hypothesize that genes, during ontogeny, are selected in part for their ability to integrate information from the environment to offer individuals opportunities to adjust to the world that they are entering.  The modifications these individuals make are inheritable.  This is single-generation, environment-influenced evolutionary change.  This is not individual survival of the fittest but community-encouraged growth of the most flexible.

There are far more ways that it could be said that Darwin’s social environment influenced his theorizing than his theorizing influenced his social environment.  Then again, separating the two might be an arbitrary act.  Darwin’s theory of evolution has become our origin myth.  The information is shared as fact.  Even among scientists, theorists often fail to differentiate between Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution.  The media do not parse out differences, and they are encouraged to confuse the two by the proponents of the theory of natural selection.  A net result, for example, is that without thinking the American Left embraces Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  These Leftists are unaware that there are other theories of evolution complementary to the theory of natural selection, but they are theories that don’t encourage Social Darwinism, social stratification and the protection of the elites.

These are theories that see the individual in the context of a larger whole, deeply influenced by the environment.

Discussing evolution, we are exploring the origin myths of our society.  The two cannot easily be separated.  As we explore and integrate theories of evolution that consider how we are all connected, social change that encourages reverence for the commons will seem as natural as natural can seem.

It seems too elegant to be true, but I’ve become enamored of the possibility.

Heterochronic theory, the study of the effects of rate and timing on maturation and development, takes the work of several late nineteenth century and early twentieth century theorists and packages that work into a sort of seamless whole. Stephen J. Gould in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny went far, codifying the various theorists’ predilections so that they made an overriding sense. I say “sort of” seamless whole because the actual endocrinological underpinnings of the dynamics were never explored.

Neoteny is the best known of the six heterochronic processes. Neoteny is the process whereby features of infants, embryos or the very young are, over the course of generations, prolonged to emerge in the adults of descendants. Acceleration is the opposite, whereby features of adult ancestors appear in the infants of descendants. For example, let’s say great great grandfather had a baritone voice, emerging at puberty. His son’s deeper voice may emerge just before puberty and his great grandson might have an unusually hoarse voice as a child. That would be an acceleration of a feature. These things normally take hundreds and thousands of generations, though they can be encouraged to occur in less than half a dozen. Wolves and foxes have been neotenized in a mere 20 years, acquiring dog-like characteristics.

Endocrinology is a new science even though we have been observing the effects of the gonadal hormones since the dawn of self awareness. That there might be an elegant correlation between specific hormones and the rate and timing of maturation has not been explored outside work done by biologists, followers of Matusa mostly, on amphibians and other nonmammal species. For over ten years, I’ve been exploring the repercussions of a theory of human evolution that considers that testosterone regulates the speed of maturation. This is a profoundly epigenetic theory, a theory that estimates that testosterone regulation occurs as a direct result of environmental factors that determine testosterone levels. Epigenetic theories are those theories that explore heredity/environment interactions that result in ontogenetic and eventually evolutionary change. It was unorthodox until recently to consider that genes are programmed to take into consideration environmental effects, and that the result of modifications will not only appear in the individual but in the individual’s descendants. So, we might see why it’s taken us a while to get to a place where testosterone could be even considered as a major force in evolution.

Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines the profound effect that social frames of reference have upon our ability to theorize. Thomas Kuhn alludes to the impact that shared social views have upon theorists’ frame of reference. Knight describes how hobbled we are in the West by a nonfeminist perspective. Kuhn suggests a sea change of societal perspectives would be necessary for the following to make sense.

Heterochronic theory’s changing rate and timing can be elegantly assigned to the effects of testosterone changing rates and estrogen controlling timing. Both hormones are associated with a host of related hormones, and there are circumstances where male and female hormones may transition to the other but, speaking generally, there are patterns that suggest that at a very real level, individual ontogeny, social evolution and human biological evolution are unfolding according to this very specific, two-variable dance.

Our commitment to Darwin’s theory of natural selection has made it difficult to note the effects of the environment upon evolution.

Our devotion to the idea that the behaviors of males in evolution are more important than the behaviors of females has made it almost impossible to observe that behind the scenes it has been the female controlling the timing of the process.

I wish we had a better word than “heterochronic” to describe the patterns. It would have been better if we had a name like “orchestral evolution.” Then it would make more sense when we assigned the position of conductor to a woman, she that decides the timing of the production.

There are several places where estrogen may be quietly stepping in and deciding exactly how things unfold by regulating the timing of those events. That may be occurring in no small way due to estrogen controlling the timing of testosterone’s effects.

• Fat levels at puberty, influencing estrogen levels, determine the timing of pubertal testosterone surges in both sexes. Individuals may experience delayed puberty if there is not enough fat on their bodies to propel the process.

• Estrogen levels in an infant and toddler may be influencing testosterone surges that determine cerebral synapse pruning. We don’t know what determines the timing of testosterone surges that result in the diminution of the right cerebral hemisphere. If it is a similar process to what determines the timing of testosterone surges in puberty, then estrogen levels may not only be controlling cerebral lateralization but may be heavily influencing language production, conditions such as autism and numerous other human features and conditions.

• Estrogen levels in a mother’s womb may be deciding (along with testosterone) which social structure the child will be inclined to ally with. I’ve described four social structures, two matrifocal and two patrifocal. Estrogen levels are a key determinant of social structure proclivity.

• Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young. Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but determines the likelihood of progeny survival by how much attention is directed toward the young. Consider that in female infanticide it is almost always the mother that kills the infant.

• Estrogen may offer the placating option when combat is being considered. Estrogen can control whether a battle occurs or not.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection or female choice may be but the suggestion of a vast network of relationships determined by estrogen levels. Darwin was familiar with the work of contemporaries, Neo-Lamarckians, who focused on the orthogenetic tendency of features to evolve in particular trajectories. We can see those patterns now as part of the larger pattern of Gould’s heterochronic theory paradigm. It is possible that Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his theory of sexual selection can be allied in a heterochronic theory of evolution that places testosterone as the prime mover of rates of maturation and estrogen as the queen of timing. Interestingly enough, Darwin’s third theory, pangenesis, revealed orthogenetic insights. Darwin even hypothesized “gemmules,” or particles, that would flow through the bloodstream, carrying information regarding the environment to the places in one’s body that controlled evolutionary change.

In other words, Darwin had all the puzzle pieces. But, he was exploring these ideas in a time when society embraced only the idea that might is right, environment be damned and women control little of what occurs.

To seriously consider that testosterone may control the rate of evolution, estrogen the timing, we might have to go back 150 years. The answer to our origins may be in the origins of evolutionary theory.

There are spiritual paths for which an economy of language, myth and metaphor are highly valued.  Often a heavy emphasis is placed on practice and community.  A result is lives lived with attention or awareness, respect and often compassion.

I have this compulsion to take patterns evident in one discipline or community and then seeing if it carries forward to another, not so contiguous area.  Right now I’m wondering if you can have the equivalent of a wordless science, an academic discipline with an almost Zen-like attention to that which is best expressed without language.

This sounds like mathematics.  Perhaps it is.

Science and spirituality are feeling closely tied these days.  I have been tracing back human split consciousness to the primary process, nonsplit consciousness of the ancient aboriginal, then going back further to our hominid forebears, continuing back to great ape consciousness and finally beyond our great ape roots.

In the hospital yesterday I was paradoxically returned to an aboriginal sphere.  Groin arteries were healing, and my penis was observed by several nurses, doctors and practitioners while they were examining the wounds.  Of course, it didn’t matter.  My body had become the property of the community.  Tubes exited arteries and veins.  Vitals were constantly monitored.  Who I was had to do with the state of my body.  Amongst the array of high tech machinery I’d somehow become a person characterized primarily by my physical form.

Identities can shift.  Particularly when we die.  What would it take to shift how it is that we view science?  It seems to me this requires a science of awareness.

I’m particularly enamored of pattern.  Describing these patterns–I’m talking evolutionary patterns–I’ve been stuck with words.  Often I wonder how I would draw them.  Because I am a trained artist and illustrator, you’d think this would not be such a leap, but I withdraw to the convention of words.  Pictures seem so unlikely to be taken seriously.

Science papers are filled with computer generated images, charts and graphs.  They are not used to suggest but to provide exact details.  How do we describe patterns in awareness in a nonmythological context without language?

We need a science of awareness characterized by practice without a compulsion to preach, with an ability to elucidate biological and physical science patterns that transcend disciplines.

Simple, subtle, complex, transcendental.

Like mathematics without the math.

The carotid artery balloon angioplasty procedure occurred yesterday.  To get more detailed information on the cerebral aneurysm I have behind my left eyeball, they shut off my left carotid artery for 45 minutes while observing the repercussions.  What was required was snaking two long wires from my groin to my head.  One shut off that blood flow; the other snaked around through my brain to watch that effect from the aneurysm perspective.  The procedure required my being fully awake.

I think they call it a procedure, not a surgery, because there is no attempted intervention.

I was awake the whole time in order to answer questions so that the doctors could make sure the procedure was not causing a stroke.  There were two anesthesiologists.  Their job was to keep me aware enough to answer those questions.  I was told about halfway through the procedure that I would not remember any of it.

Right now it is the following morning.  I remember all of it, clearly.  I’m waiting to be told I can go home from the hospital.

From the time they began until they finished was almost three hours.

At the very beginning, literally while I was being wheeled into the surgery room, I was handed a form to sign by the doctor while being told that there was a 1-3% chance of stroke from the procedure, a small chance of severe stroke.  This was never outlined during the discussions preceding the intervention when great detail was provided regarding possible negative repercussions.  I decided to be angry later.

I’m angry now.

It was not horrible, though it was deeply disconcerting.  They anesthetized the two places they entered my arterial system, so that portion of the experience was OK.  I felt no other places where the snaking mechanisms were doing their thing, moving up my body through my aorta and through my neck and brain.  Three things struck me with impact.

First, for a sizable portion of the procedure, I was freezing.  I shivered violently through almost a third of the event.  The doctors, nurses and technical people reassured me this was normal and covered me.  The covers had little effect.

I have had four panic attacks in my life, the last about 15 years ago.  Each one featured very rapid heartbeat, sweating and dizziness.  The panic attacks were instrumental in my making life changes to address what was leading to the distress.  Yesterday during the intervention, fully awake and aware, I was experiencing the rapid heartbeat but not the dizziness nor sweats.  My pulse was pounding in my neck where the three remaining arteries were channeling blood to my brain.  Meditating throughout the experience, I was struck by my seeming inability to lower my heartbeat.  (Having meditated since 1971, voluntarily lowering my heartbeat is fairly easy.)  Finally, I noted that in the conversation around me there was discussion around my deliberately elevated heartbeat.  I asked when that could be lowered.  The person near me answered soon, and then he signaled to the anesthesiologist to increase the dosage.

After the balloon was deflated, my heart rate went down.

Third, as they began, I was told by one of the half dozen people working over me that this person was going to insert a catheter into my penis.  I strongly objected, saying I had purposefully not had a drink in the last 12 hours.  He insisted.  He inserted.  Never having had this experience, not expecting it during the intervention, I was shocked.

I discovered I was no longer in control of when I peed.  When I peed, it was accompanied by intense pain.  There was bleeding.

This discomfort went on till 10:00 p.m., when the catheter was removed, 10.5 hours later.  By that time I was having back spasms because I was unable to move my back for those 10.5 hours so that the arteries could heal.  I also had a headache and nausea.  By 11:00 it was only headache and nausea.  Several hours later, this morning, I feel fine.

There was one profoundly redeeming aspect of this whole adventure.  The staff, doctors and nurses were professional, attentive and often compassionate.  I felt accompanied throughout much of the experience.  Literally every person I came in contact with felt human, genuine and present.

I feel angry and betrayed regarding several aspects of this adventure.  I’m only beginning to sort this out as I wait for the resident to release me.  It’s hard to trust surgeons with my brain when my dick is feeling so abused.

Hegel and Lyell and others made philosophical and physical science contributions that led to the idea that such a thing as progress could exist.  With Darwin, progress was not a variable; contingency was king.  Species evolved according to the dictates of what was required to procreate.  Marx believed society was evolving toward a specific end in a particular way.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed the particular end was profoundly positive.  Others have run with variations on that theme.  At this time we have Social Darwinists, what we now call free market proponents, suggesting that economic survival of the fittest and societal progress are both true.  The wealthy have to be allowed to do what they want to make it possible for society to advance.  This is the entrepreneurial imperative.

In the West, we have been seeking to integrate these two seemingly incompatible beliefs:  evolution has no goal and society is evolving toward something specific that is good.  It would not be the first time that humans believed two opposite things to be true if it seemed there was a benefit in doing so.

What if both things could be true?  What if understanding how both contingency and progress could both be true had to do with understanding the evolution of compassion?

It has to do with understanding that biology and society are the same and that compassion is at least partially a result of changes in maturation rates and timing.

The heterochronists of the late eighteenth and early twentieth century were evolutionary biologists that explored changes in the rate and timing of maturation and development.  Stephen J. Gould tracked those theorists that focused on neoteny, or features of infants and embryos that over time appeared in the adults of descendants.  Gould, Montagu and others hypothesized humans evolved to a societal and then cultural species in no small part due to the selection of neotenous features in our species.  No theorists emphasized sexual selection as the selective process largely responsible for the neotenic trend.  There are indications that this is the case.

If humans were selecting humans because they looked and behaved like very young children, then perhaps those humans doing the selecting were being in turn selected themselves because they were attracted to the very young.  At one end, there were those that were selected because they looked and behaved like children.  At the other end, there were those selected because they were attracted to those that looked and behaved like children.

This might be called a feedback loop.  The evolutionary theorist R. A. Fisher called it runaway sexual selection.  Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind goes into detail regarding how these runaway effects occur.  Might it be possible that with the emergence of culture, this dynamic could inspire a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin positive Omega Point trajectory?  This would be where many of us are fully engaged in feeling attracted, not unlike the exercise of compassion, while the rest of us are consumed with exhibiting the playfulness and creativity of children?  What might result when what we experience is an integration of the two?

Random chance and deliberate intention can appear to be the same, depending on the scale of the observation.  We may be in the middle of a nonrandom pattern of compassion evolution created in a seemingly random way.

Let’s take this one step further.

Consider that biology cannot be random because creation is an exercise of deliberate intent.

With each creation, with each appearance of an individual in an egg or womb, we have an emergence of awareness.  Awareness is nonrandom if we use a playful definition.  Consider that awareness is the exercise of deliberate intent.

With neoteny, features characteristic of earliest ontogeny wiggle their way forward into older and older stages of descendants.  What is being carried forward into an adult human is an ontogenetic experience that features proximity to creation.  Our obsession with features of the young, and those attracted to features of the young, is engendering that which is the youngest, which is creation, in our adults.

By recognizing, embracing and integrating our conception we experience compassion and identification with all that is.

As individuals inside society inside biology, we arrive home through identification with creation to something we might call reality.

Reality being everything is aware.

“We do have data from Japan that are highly suggestive.  Here, for many centuries, fair skins have been under parental control and, other things being equal, parents seek attractive brides for their sons.  As elsewhere, members of the upper classes tend to be the luckiest.  This might be expected to lead to selection as the generations have gone by.  Research which I conducted a few years ago (Hulse 1967) indicated that this has taken place, for upper-class high school students have the fairest skins and those of the lower class the darkest, while middle-class students are intermediate in pigmentation.  Furthermore, data from Greece (Friedl 1962) indicate that girls who are considered good-looking marry earlier than, and need not be supplied with as large a dowry as, their less-attractive sisters.  Throughout southern Europe, the upper classes contain a disproportionate number of blondes and near-blondes.  Sexual preferences, though they may be based on social snobbery rather than aesthetic interest, are capable of shifting allele frequencies in human population.”  (Hulse, F. S. (1978) Group selection and sexual selection in human evolution.  In Evolutionary Models and Studies in Human Diversity (Hague) Meier, R., Otten, C. M., Abdel-Hameed, F. (eds.), Moulton Publisher, Paris, p. 33.)

Consider that racism has biological roots with close connections to the evolution of compassion.

Neoteny is a biological process characterized by the emergence of infant, even embryonic, ancestor features in the adults of descendants.  For example, consider that many dogs today look a lot like wolf puppies, some adult dogs looking almost like wolf embryos with hair.  Just as humans can breed dogs by capitalizing on their maturational flexibility, humans have evolved over the last several million years in a neotenic direction with the infant features of our chimpanzee-like ancestors emerging in the adults of the present day.

What is adjusted is the rate and timing of maturation.  The reason chimpanzees and bonobos retain a mere 1.5 % difference in their genetics from humans, less than some variations within a single species, is because what has mostly changed is only the rate and timing of maturation.

In just the way that humans breed dogs to encourage specific characteristics, it has been discovered that wolves and foxes in fewer than 20 years can be dramatically transformed in look and disposition.  The offspring is tame and has the physical features of the very young.  Humans are talented at transforming other species.  Humans are also gifted at evolving themselves.

Stephen J. Gould in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny has outlined in detail over 30 features of adult contemporary human beings that are a direct reflection of our infant ancestors.  This includes upright stature, large brain and head relative to body, small jaw and teeth, curiosity, playfulness and social behavior.  There is also variation within human populations with some peoples exhibiting additional neotenous features that include blue eyes, blond hair, light skin and diminutive features.  Body builds can go in two directions.  Both childlike, diminutive bodies and slim, lanky bodies are features of a neotenous build.

Many humans are attracted to mates that feature these childlike characteristics.  Being attracted in such a way, we encourage the continued evolution of our species in this neotenous direction.  With the recent (last 6,000 years) emergence of stratified society and relatively permanent elites, we have a group of people engaging in almost compulsive human breeding not unlike the way we breed dogs.  Except, they themselves are the subject of their attention.

The elites, whether in the East or West, have for centuries been choosing mates exhibiting neotenous characteristics.  Fair skin has been an obvious, highly desired feature.  In the West, blue eyes and blond hair have been highly valued.  A net result has been the accumulation of light-skinned peoples at the top of the social pyramid with a corresponding deprecation of dark-skinned peoples far below.

Accompanying this evolution in physical appearance has been an evolution in our idea of ideal behavior.

R. A. Fisher hypothesized that when sexual selection compels focus on particular features, what is being selected is not only the features in question but also those individuals with a compulsion to pick those features.  Fisher described it as a runaway feedback loop.  Not just peacocks get picked, but peahens obsessed with males with big, pretty feathers.

Compassionate behavior is often considered the zenith of ideal human behavior.  The focus on compassion as an ideal may have no small part to do with human beings selected to select neotenous features.  When a person is attracted to neotenous features, that person is attracted to the features of children.  In other words, what may be developed over time is a big heart.

Racism and compassion may be connected.  The trick would be to universalize the tendency to be attracted so that the visual cues would cease to have more influence than behavior.

In other words, better we exercise our attraction to another person than our compulsion to judge.

Considering that racism might have biological roots with a close connection to the evolution of compassion, we might start paying close attention to juxtapositions of love and hate.

As society transforms, nations integrate and hierarchy becomes less efficient than barrierless transparency, our idea of how evolution operates will evolve.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection will feel strangely lacking as an explanatory paradigm.  Complementing theories will take center stage.  The process has begun with the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology.  It includes an understanding that genetics and the environment work together to impact how individuals develop.  It also has an understanding that genes are programmed to interpret and integrate environmental cues when guiding growth.

We will become savvy to the understanding that how humans treat humans within society determines how we believe that evolution operates.  Capitalism enhanced by horizontal communications technology will encourage evolutionary biological pluralism.

Still, there is something awry, something missing.  There is little talk of single theories that integrate biology and society within a single evolutionary paradigm.  How would you even begin to do so?

In these strange times that we live in, the political Left, those heralds of societal horizontal innovation, has Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the default metaphor for how humans treat humans as its most basic metaphor.  Only the far Left, the anarchists, have some intuition for evolutionary alternatives when they quote the work of the anarchist prince, Peter Kropotkin.  Kropotkin was a very early proponent of cooperation in biological systems as a prime influence on evolution.  He was 17 when On the Origin of Species was published.  He grew up to become a respected theorist and activist, a precursor to the emerging synthesis that sees society and biology as the same–both driven by cooperation and interdependence.

Integrating biology and society is more than the theory of natural selection that describes how those that survive to procreate pass on features that then mold a species.  Integrating biology and society is more than a theory of cooperation that describes how the best cooperators engender communities that make it safe to proliferate.  Both interpretations are generalizations, providing limited ability to identify the dynamics, the specifics, the prose and poetry of the process.

In addition to understanding how society influences our interpretation of biology, we require enough insight on how we actually evolved to be able to form a hypothesis on how biology and society are the same.  How do we see past our societal blinders to be able to view and then grasp useful biological evolutionary principles?

Society is made up of individuals.  We maintain self identities and identities associated with larger and larger groups.  A place to begin understanding biology is by paying close attention to a place characterized by an attention to identity.  In other words, as conscious, aware entities, it is useful if we become familiar with ourselves outside our history, our memories or our associations.

Who and what are we as individuals in society?  If you strip society from the individual, what is left?

Transcending everything we associate ourselves with, there is that which is aware.  Awareness is the integral foundation of both biology and society.  Awareness of awareness provides the leverage to experience things as they are, not as they are interpreted to be.

Less interpretation, more process.  Less content, more pattern.

In addition to a recognition that society influences interpretation of biology, there is the understanding that the two are the same.  To uncover the particulars of that insight, it is useful if we dissociate from our identification with society, associating with society’s most basic building block, awareness.

Embracing what it truly means to be human makes it possible for us to understand how we came to be.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been explored in the context of what authors, ideas, and social forces suggested and guided Darwin to come up with the specific principles of his theory.  At the other end of the influence equation, many books have been written focusing on how that theory influenced other writers, contemporary society and the generations that followed.

Darwin’s other two theories have been offered little of this kind of attention.  His theory of sexual selection, having become influential over the last 40 years, has not compelled the kind of cottage industry of influence divination characteristic of Darwin’s first theory.  Perhaps it is because the female plays such an important role.  Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, the theory where he outlines how the effects of the environment may influence evolution in a single generation, has been ignored.

Society and evolutionary theory are evolving.  A new social milieu is emerging.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been examined for how it was influenced and for what it has influenced.  Consider what evolutionary theory may next emerge in this new barrierless, horizontal, transparent and diverse world.

Hierarchy is becoming less effective at controlling resources.  The “might is right” age-old leverage paradigm based on wealth, inheritance, gender, skin color and resource control is giving way to a commons-based perspective.  If Malthus, Smith, Lyell and the emergence of the industrialization of the west influenced Darwin to see biology as mostly a struggle between individuals over time, then how might the world we see emerging impact evolutionary theory?

Expect to see the emergence of radical new ways of interpreting evolution that reflect the horizontalization of society.  As those new interpretations take hold, expect society to be reinterpreted in the context of patterns that the new radical theories of evolution emphasize.

It has begun with the increasing respect offered evolutionary developmental biology.  Epigenetic perspectives offer vast, panoramic visions characterized by a listening to how genetics and the environment converse.  This new paradigm widens the biological sphere of interconnection.  It’s not all about the individual or the gene any longer.  This new biology of interconnection will reflect a society characterized by interconnection, encouraging a new biology/society interpretation.

Biology evolves.  Societies transform.  How we interpret biological evolution and societal transformation changes over time.  We use a single interpretation paradigm to apply to both biology and society.  We are in the middle of a biology/society evolution/transformation paradigm shift.

When our understanding of one changes, so changes the other.

Through a deeper understanding of our social selves, a more powerful, more useful evolutionary theory evolves.

How evolution operates or unfolds has something to do with whether a person believes life has been engineered or designed.  An engineer seeks ways to make things work that will involve the least number of parts, the lowest cost and the greatest efficiency.  Efficiency is often defined as low maintenance and long life.

When an artist creates, the process is often characterized by a seeking to establish novel patterns using alternative or unique processes.  Efficiency is less important than what has not been done before.  There is a desire to break barriers and to apply principles established in one area to a new area unfamiliar with those principles.  The creative process is often characterized by suggesting connections where connections are not obvious.  There is often a deep desire to perceive and express universality.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins subscribes to Occam’s razor, proclaiming that the simplest solutions are those that will naturally emerge.  Systems will reduce themselves to the easiest ways to accomplish goals within the confines of their environment, and those are the ones that will most likely survive.  Wikipedia notes that Occam’s razor reflects a “hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.”  Less is more.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has described seeking solutions to puzzles in physics by looking for answers that are beautiful or elegant.  Einstein was known to suggest that a particular explanation was too beautiful to be wrong.  In physics, beauty and elegance are often seen as the same thing.  Though Occam’s razor seems in play, a solution seems to need to manifest a certain universal symmetry or connection to a larger environment, as if designed by a single sensibility.

It’s not just about less is more; it’s also about everything being connected.

Whereas Gell-Mann’s or Einstein’s physics suggests a search for elegance born of interlocking symmetries inside a universal frame, Dawkins and the Neo-Darwinians, the evolutionary psychologists, prefer to find answers revolving around the simplest explanations.  No interconnections necessary.

Because Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star delights and entertains with a single melodic thread does not mean Beethoven’s Ninth is unnecessarily redundant.

A physicist intuits that the universe was created and operates through interlinking laws that operate at the smallest and largest scales, across all phenomena.  Evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and philosophers like Daniel Dennett proclaim the achievement of universality in their explanations without intuition for how interlocking symmetries engage.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection promoted as the sole evolutionary process is a little like saying all that exists has mass, and leaving it at that.  Of course.  But natural selection is but the beginning of theorizing how life evolves.  Natural selection alone is not beautiful; it is only simple.  Neo-Darwinians confuse the universality of death either before or after procreation with elegance and subtlety.  It is an engineer’s interpretation of how things work.

Darwin was not an engineer.  He devised three separate theories of evolution.  Only the first immediately caught on.  He died unable to find a way to integrate the three.  Darwin knew it was not simple.

Evolutionary developmental biologists are integrating epigenetic solutions into an evolutionary biological equation that is revealing symmetries and universalities at least as elegant and interconnecting as the theories of Gell-Man and Einstein.  Formerly rejected nineteenth century explanations that explored the rates and timing of maturation and development, work by Mivart, Cope, Hyatt, Haeckel and others, are being addressed in new ways as the environment is noted as integral to ontogeny as genetic triggers assimilate surrounding context.

Universality is intuited by physicists as integral to any understanding.  This is what makes the outcomes “beautiful.”  Evolutionary biologists are struggling to emerge from a paradigm that equates universality with simplicity.  The discipline is only beginning to understand that life has been designed with the same intuition for interconnection as has physics.  There are patterns within patterns to be explored.

Once a month I attend a group of about 25 social media and web 2.0 aficionados specializing in the use of online tech tools for nonprofits.  At Net Tuesday some are programmers, many are staff members in nonprofit organizations, there is the occasional entrepreneur, a web application company employee and consultants.

I got on Twitter the beginning of this year, largely as a result of how often discussions turned to that application.  I finally started using it this May.

My connection to technology is, I believe, unique.  I am a technophobe by many definitions.  I experience anxiety when having to interpret and use hardware like a cell phone or a recording device, such as a VCR or DVD.  So, I don’t explore.  On my cell phones I’ve never learned to do anything but dial a number.  I don’t know how to text or retrieve a phone number.  Until the last couple years I just left my phone off unless I was making an outgoing call.  I can’t get the VCR working without my wife’s assistance.

Perhaps my greatest technological letdown was buying my first computer, a Mac, around 1992, in no small part to be able to log onto the Well, an early web community.  Two weeks I tried to get the modem to let me in.  The folks at the Well tried to help me over the phone.  I could not do it.  It would be years before I finally got online.

Yet, I run a web development company that, in addition to serving almost 400 clients, performs unique programming feats based upon innovations I think up.

So, I feel like an outsider in an industry that thrives on technological prowess.  Yet, as an artist and as someone with deep respect for software and some facility with design software, I get by.

Regarding Twitter, I don’t use it in connection with my cell phone.  I have the window open on my desktop where I view what’s being posted by folks I follow.  I post once a day.

Listening to the folks at the Net Tuesday group, it is clear that Twitter is making a significant difference in some people’s lives.  When Twitter is integrated with Facebook and a blog it seems to offer opportunities for ubiquitous communication, which seems a big plus for those whose personal and professional identities are becoming integrally tied to their ability to deeply interface with a group.  Twitter’s contribution does not seem to be the deep part of the deep interface but more an ongoing opportunity to be aware of the boundaries of the experience.

Of the maybe 60 friends I email when I post a piece on my blog that I like a lot, maybe 30 visit the link I provide.  On Twitter, only one of those 60 friends had started using it. Almost 90 people followed me on Twitter.  In May, literally no one followed a link that I would post.

I might conclude that Twitter is only as good as the number of real friends that accompany me on the device.  In the meantime, I use it to observe the passing of news (I follow several media outlets) and wry, pithy statements by humorists and cartoonists.

On weekends over the last two months, I’ve been writing down the story of a series of dreams I had that began 17 years ago and lasted almost a year.  The dreams were referring to events I’d forgotten that happened to me when I was very small.  It wasn’t until the last dreams in that series that it was revealed that there had been something hidden.

Making clear what the dreams unearthed has been requiring my describing the main characters of my childhood and events in my adult life leading up to the dreams.  The writing has involved my being honest with myself and candid about the behavior of close relatives.  I’ve also discovered that there are only so many synonyms for terror, the emotion that seems a theme throughout the piece.

Sixteen years ago, after the primary dream revelations, I sat down with friends and family to describe what had likely happened.  A particularly odd second set of revelations proceeded to emerge.  Somehow, over the course of my adult life, I’d picked as close friends people that had been sexually abused as children, friends that never shared with me those experiences.  Upon my telling them what happened to me, they told me their stories.

As a younger adult, I used to try to write but found the style that I wrote in clunky and not very communicative.  I would describe an experience and then say what emotions I was feeling.  It wasn’t exactly clinical, but there was little that was lyrical.  Mostly I was trying to find some way of putting into words something that approximated the truth.  There was little in the way of doorways for a visitor to enter.  I wasn’t creating an opportunity for the experience to be shared.  I had a very difficult time coming up with metaphors.

Working on this longer piece the last two months I find some of that clunkiness returning.  I go into a kind of narrative trance where I’m trying to get the words out, describing the emotions that I was having during a particular event.  It is difficult to write the words in a way where I feel like I’m providing purchase for a visitor to relatively easily stay on for the ride.

Which brings me to the realization that is accompanying the writing of my story of the dream revelations.

To tell the story I have to pick and choose the events that seem to make clearer how these things occurred.  Then I have to choose the words that best describe those events.  Putting all these words together, telling the story, I am becoming deeply aware of the relativity of truth.

I have a close friend who is a writer.  Not incidentally, he was severely physically abused when he was a child.  He believes that when he writes a story, he is telling the truth.  The closer he comes to describing what happened, the better he believes the story is.  I don’t share my friend’s view of writing.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as truth.

Writing down what happened to me is in no small part letting go of believing there is such a thing as what really happened.  Of course, there were and are events and repercussions.  Still, it seems to me that interpretation is 99% of experience.  That 1% that is not interpretation has an enormous amount to do with where you choose to direct your attention.

In any given moment, the experience I am having is being directed by what I am saying to myself, words to be interpreted by more words.  This narrative flow is relying upon a life of experiences that are again influenced by where I choose to direct my attention, and how I interpreted those events.  Additionally complicating my perception is the condition of my body and my hormone levels.  For example, if I miss a meal, I get very irritable.  My experiences during these sugar drops are colored by my deeply annoyed disposition.  I am a man.  I see the world very differently from the way a woman sees it.  Whereas I may interpret some experience competitively, a woman may see only narcissistic self indulgence.

Learning to write and writing is not about telling the truth.  Writing is about describing participation.  No small amount of what I write about describes my experience of the world as regards evolution.  I theorize or tell stories that seek to come close enough to the structure or patterns of experience that some usefulness will result.  As an artist, only those patterns that are beautiful arrest me.  So what is really happening is that I seek those places where beauty and usefulness converge.

Describing events in my life or what I observe in society, I operate under the same guidelines.  I cull through my experiences, seeking particular angles on specific experiences that will result in both beauty and usefulness.  I seek to observe or experience transformation and share the experience with my readers.  This question seems nonuseful:  How close can I be to reality when the path I take to communicate experience carries such specific criteria for success?  Can there be anything like truth when all experience requires interpretation when communicated?

The easy answer is that truth is relative.  Nevertheless, shit happened and who we are today was influenced by specific events in the past.  For me, a foundation paradox is that words are not exactly a suitable medium for describing anything specific.  Each symbolic sound carries so many associations, yet language is necessary to be able to exercise that state or level of self awareness characterized by a separate self.

Perhaps truth can stop being relative when we don’t identify with a separate self.  But then, of course, truth becomes indescribable.

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis has been savaged by academics for decades.  After studying Hopi language structures, Benjamin Whorf suggested that language may deeply inform the kind of world that we can perceive.  He believed that language informs perception and world view.

In the United States, we wrestle with a deeply destructive cognitive paradigm characterized by an allegiance to a cult of individuality.  We seem to be in the midst of a reframing of this compulsion.  Whereas until recently we encouraged selfishness for selfishness’s sake, because society seemed to profit from this kind of creativity and greed, now there seems to be a growing reverence for those that seek achievement that serves the common good.  We still revere the individual.  The context is changing.

At the opposite end of this cognitive arc are those that may not be particularly aware of themselves as individuals with priorities separate from the community.  Individuals define themselves in a context of what the community demands or requires.  These people may seem to behave selfishly, but conceptually most of what they may be aware of is others’ needs.  The individual is only significant in regard to his or her contribution to the community.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber hypothesizes that in ancient and some modern aboriginal societies it can be observed that personality structures will trend toward early childhood developmental stages.  One way to interpret this is that there are adult personality disorders–borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder–that reveal early childhood developmental stages in the personalities of modern society adults.  If I understand Wilber correctly, he suggests that the aboriginal adults will commonly evidence these stages not as “disorder” derivations from the norm, but as natural exhibitions of childhood developmental stages as adults.

So, we have a kind of complementary opposite thing happening.  American contemporary adults, if not exhibiting a “disorder,” are extolling the glories of selfishness while actually exercising a high degree of sensitivity to social interaction.  On the other side you have in a hypothetical aboriginal society a relative absence of an encouragement of individuality while cognitively there is a strong compulsion to being self centered.

The opponents of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis would not view this hypothetical dichotomy as a possible place to search for transformational grammar (TG) equivalents.  There is a presupposition among those in the TG community that language structures have not recently evolved, but that language structure is present in a full blown module embedded in our genetics that manifests similarly across all societies.

What I’m interested in at this particular moment is the possible connection between identity, transformational grammar and social evolution.  Identity and consciousness are closely related.  Consciousness has been a difficult subject to explore in the west, because according to reductionist precepts there is no “larger consciousness,” no trans consciousness, or what in the East they call the larger Self.  Because consciousness cannot be measured, it is excluded from the equation.  You end up with evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins extolling atheism because, in the opinions of Neo-Darwinists, Darwin’s theory of natural selection makes a larger consciousness unnecessary.

This reductionist emphasis creates an environment where clues to evolution in identity and consciousness are not explored.  This is particularly true when exploring the structure of language, language being perhaps the most obvious direct reflection of degree of identity/consciousness shift.

An evolutionary study of mythology in this context might be fruitful.

As I understand it, the hypothesis of Benjamin Whorf that language informs reality is not considered proven by most linguists.  Perhaps linguists should define “reality” evolutionarily.  How does language reflect an individual’s experience of identity and consciousness?  The specifics of transformational grammar suggest several places where a researcher can begin.

“We have now surveyed a wide range of creole structures across a number of unrelated creole languages.  We have seen that even taking into account the, in some cases, several centuries of time that have elapsed since creolization, and the heavy pressures undergone by those creoles (a large majority) that are still in contact with their superstrates, these languages show similarities which go far beyond the possibility of coincidental resemblance, and which are not explicable in terms of conventional transmission processes such as diffusion or substratum influence (the ad hoc nature of the latter should be adequately demonstrated by the opportunism of those who attribute a structure to Yoruba when it appears in the Caribbean and to Chinese when it appears in Hawaii).  Moreover, we find that the more we strip creoles of their more recent developments, the more we factor out superficial and accidental features, the greater are the similarities that reveal themselves.  Indeed, it would seem reasonable to suppose that the only differences among creoles at creolization were those due to differences in the nature of the antecedent pidgin, in particular to the extent to which superstrate features had been absorbed by that pidgin and were therefore directly accessible to the first creole generation in the outputs of their pidgin-speaking parents.  Finally, the overall pattern of similarity which emerges from this chapter is entirely consonant with the process of building a language from the simplest constituents — in many cases, no more than S, N, and V, the minimal constituents necessary for a pidgin.”  (Bickerton, D. (1981) Roots of Language.  Karoma Publishers:  Ann Arbor.  P. 132)

It just struck me that there may be a biological basis to the evident fact that creoles across the world exhibit similar features.  If the societies that are being intermingled are from across the world, as is often the case, with people mating with no lineage in common for over a thousand generations, then the same dynamic in play that creates hybrid vigor may be bringing into contemporary times features of their last common forebear.

This would suggest that creole peoples would exhibit other features characteristic of their ancestors, not just ancient language structures.  If the merging peoples were separated by perhaps 2,000 generations, we might expect to observe an increase in conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism, stuttering, Asperger’s and left-handedness.  We might also see a talent for dance, gesture and performance.  (See “Introduction to the Theory of Waves” for details on this hypothesis.)  In some creoles, only the languages blend.  In others, there is a blending of ethnicities as peoples half a planet away meet and form families.  When genetics separated by many generations blend, according to Darwin, common ancestor characteristics emerge.

Might creole societies display features that we would associate with primary process (one time, one place, no negatives)?  In other words, might there be a cognitive withdrawal to an earlier societal evolutionary time?

There are other variables in play.  In the piece Aboriginal Primary Process and Contemporary Autism, I noted the possible effects of specific child rearing practices that could encourage children not to maturationally delay but to stay engaged.  Specific tribal child rearing conventions may have been necessary to create the shared identity characteristic of ancient tribal culture.  If those conventions were not used, it may have not been a question of the child acquiring individuality, but of the child withdrawing to a place of nonidentity, not unlike autism.

So, there are not two new themes I am exploring in this thread.  Creoles may evidence the biological principle observed by Darwin whereby divergent lineages when combined display features of the last common ancestor.  Regarding creoles, such a feature may be the language grammar and structure.

Second, the hypothetical aspects of primary process displayed by some aboriginal societies may be evidencing an alternative identity formation, one that requires specific child rearing practices to encourage participation by young minds.  I might suggest that particularly ancient aboriginal societies, matrifocal cultures, for example, might display earlier stages of biological/neurological/hormonal evolution.  If those particular child rearing practices are not engaged, then the repercussions might be withdrawal or a form of autism.  The new thing to consider is that some aboriginal societies may be exhibiting group identity, which is far from the cult of individuality that characterizes the contemporary United States.  I’ve never explored this, though I have a vague memory of studies exploring the differences in personal identity between aboriginal and modern individuals.

In the back of my mind is the question of whether contemporary autistic children are hard wired for the kind of group identity characteristic of the biological/neurological/hormonal constellation of ancient aboriginal societies and whether they need the specific child rearing practice necessary for that biological/neurological/hormonal type?

This piece started by positing that creole language structure peculiarities might signify evidence of a biological process.  This led to the conjecture that group identity characteristic of some aboriginal societies might be connected to primary process, which suggests connections to autism.  In some ways, it seems to come down to identity.

Autism has been described as a condition characterized by a lack of theory of mind.  Perhaps another way to view the condition is that children with autism are displaying difficulties acquiring identity.  Different societies offer different ways to display identity.  Maybe we need to examine whether modern society should explore alternative group identity options as it relates to children with a nonconventional neurology.

I typed “Chomsky ‘universal grammar’ matrilineal” into Google, looking to see how much attention has been given to the various tenets of Chomsky’s universal grammar as regards social structure. The results were 215, fewer if I subbed in “patrilineal.”  Using “Transformational Grammar,” the results were even fewer.

For the most part, theorists and academics are not exploring juxtapositions between social structure and language structure as they relate to Chomsky’s hierarchy trees and the various parts of language that might suggest some sort of evolution over time.

One issue is that in Chomsky’s foundation hypothesis, every human on the planet shares the same language template.  This may be true.  Then again, there may be derivations.  If we presuppose, as the anthropologist Chris Knight, the archeologist Marija Gimbutas, and sociologist Riane Eisler have, that humans evolved until recently within matrifocal social structures, then language structure may or may not reflect this matrifocal evolution, depending on whether the hypothesized template was completed before or after the transition to patrifocal social structure.

If matrifocal social structure language groups show clear trends in particular linguistic structures, then it might be possible to adjust Chomsky trees to reveal evolutionary developments over time.

The hypothetical emergence of humans into at first gestural language and then speech was no doubt accompanied by a transition from an experience characterized by at first primary process to a combination of primary process and standard split consciousness to finally modern day, split-consciousness, speech-using human beings.

Can this pathway be traced in specific ways that allow modern language users an ability to understand how they created grammar?

Children born of parents speaking pidgins where many speech conventions have been stripped develop creoles that reveal patterns that apply to almost all creoles across the planet.  It has been observed that these patterns hold a number of structural features identical to sign language.  Might there be observable differences between creoles invented by exclusively matrifocal societies vs. those invented by patrifocal societies?  Are there similarities between creoles and sign languages and the language structures of matrifocal societies that do not appear in patrifocal societies?

There is a transformational grammar principle called pragmatics.  Some languages, particularly Chinese and Japanese languages, show a tendency to contextualize a communication by noting a second level or dissociative observation of whom a particular experience is happening to.  In addition to subject, verb and object, you get context.  Does this split reflect a particularly split-consciousness, patrifocal frame of reference?  Does the pragmatics principle ever appear in matrifocal societies or creoles?  These are the kinds of patterns that might reveal an evolution of language among modern language users.  In other pieces, I’ve alluded to the potential power of tense use to reveal proximity to primary process and a possible position on a biological/social evolution path.

Elia is joining me in seeking correlations between matrilineal societies’ tense structures.  Other language structures may also be in play.  Elia is particularly interested by the possibility that there may be different myth motifs and myth structures that can be categorized by social structure.  I wonder if Levi-Strauss conducted research in this area.  Chris Knight’s Blood Relations might provide some clues.

Chomsky’s transformational grammar was created as a structural blueprint for how humans are genetically predisposed to learn and create speech.  Consider that transformational grammar might also reveal stepping stones on a pathway toward how we learn and create speech.  Instead of presupposing that only the outcome of evolution is revealed, let’s examine these structures for correlations with social structure, assuming social structure reflects an evolutionary narrative.

Where we’ve been and how we got here may be hidden in how we speak.  The words we use may have to do with understanding our origins in addition to the underlying structure of those words.

I get into these spaces where I feel driven, pushed to perform, in a relatively relaxed kind of way.  I pace myself.  I exercise, meditate, eat pretty well and pay attention to my body to some degree to make sure I can continue to perform.  I push.

With time I’ve grown accustomed to my rhythms as I have to what my body won’t digest and so get good results from the time that I am awake each day.  There is fear that acts as motivator.  There is also a sense that I am a mere moment, inches away from union, from significant understanding.

For example, I go through stages where I won’t watch movies while I exercise.  I don’t want to waste time on entertainment when I could be learning, absorbing, getting clues to the way the world works.  I watch academic lectures on DVD instead.

I crave connection and so continually explore my world for evidence of connections I can’t see.

My tendency to be aware of the boundaries between life and death has been enhanced by my having become aware that I have a brain aneurysm and by the possible surgery for the brain aneurysm.  It feels like spring has twice the spring this year. The summer feels blessed.  Were there really twice as many dandelions or is it my imagination?

My tendency to take things very seriously, which includes finding humor in what I see, feels enhanced by acute awareness of life being temporary.

Several things.

I pay attention to what I’m thinking.  If I’m scaring myself regarding the aneurysm, I shift myself to what I see, moving to an appreciation frame of reference.  I additionally sometimes try to shift to a sense other than visual, to hearing and feeling, and vacuum in some appreciation through alternative sense channels.

I’m making believe that humans are the earth’s appreciation/gratitude species, created to take in what’s been created and experience the miracle of being.  I’m trying to do my job.  I’m telling myself that if I do my job well, dying will be less frightening.  I can retire knowing I did good.

When I was a little kid, I connected the ongoing terror in my life to the eventual end of my life, concluding that death was terrifying.  Ever since then I have been trying to make sense of life and death.  I believe that if I can make sense of life and death, I’ll feel less terrified.

So, life has been one long experiment where I am trying out different thoughts and beliefs, comparing them, experiencing what feels consoling or confidence-building, checking for incongruities, looking for the real behind the fear.

Something that’s crossed my mind a couple times lately is that there is no such thing as death.  There is no polarity of life and nonlife.  There is only identity shift.  Experience is characterized by a constant fluctuation of identity.  There are scales of identity like a hundred thousand melodies managing to intermingle in ways that new melodies are made, some manifesting unfathomable harmonies composed of an almost infinite number of different melodies and harmonies.  We can identify with a single melodic thread, a deeper harmony or the whole production.

What am I without my life, my experiences, expectations, ruminations?  I’m not exactly sure.  But I’m more than I was a moment ago.  By asking the question and considering the answer, I shift scales.

No doubt that is one of the things, if not the thing, I find so fascinating and nurturing about studying multiscale evolution.  I love exploring the similarities between the transformation dynamics operating at the biological, social, ontogenetic and personal scales.  I shift identity while I explore.  I feel less fear.  I dissociate.  I also associate or identify with consciousness at another level.

So much of my life is driven by my seeking a place where I can feel comfortable with death.  Understanding that there is no death may be the way I finally feel peace.

On page 575 of the May 1 issue of Science there is an article, “Africans’ Deep Genetic roots Reveal Their Evolutionary Story.” Examining the blood of 3,194 Africans from 113 populations, researchers looked for patterns in inheritance. “In many cases, the team found that ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences reflected real genetic differences…” For example, the three hunter gatherer click language cultures (Sandawe, Hadza and Khoisan) were all genetically connected.

They ran comparisons to 98 African Americans. “…71% of their DNA from ancestors who came from all over western Africa, 8% from other parts of Africa, and 13% from Europeans.”

A premise of my work is that there are several causes of autism that are related to changes in a mother’s sexual hormone levels as this relates to changes in testosterone and estrogen levels over the course of our recent (3,000 generations) evolution. We’ve transformed from a matrifocal, aboriginal, high-testosterone/high-estrogen female, low-testosterone/low-estrogen male to the reverse, a high-testosterone/high-estrogen male, low-testosterone/low-estrogen female. Various environmental and social effects propel our children backward hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generations. When sent too far back, their world becomes again one characterized by primary process (one time, one place, no negatives) that in modern times manifests as autism because there are no longer the ancient aboriginal social conventions that serve to bind individuals together within a group. This might be constant rhythm, constant touch, low-fat diets, nonstop dance, gestural language.

In Darwin’s 1859 On The Origin of Species, he described the result of mating two lineages of pigeons separated by 2,000 years of separate breeding. In Europe and China the birds were bred for different traits, and the two populations showed few of the features they displayed when last aligned. When the birds were mated by Darwin’s contemporaries, Darwin observed a proliferation of features in the hybrids that looked like the 2,000-year-old progenitor, the roc pigeon. There had been a slip backward of hundreds of generations to an ancestor last held in common by the parents.

Breeders of horses, dogs and other domestic species find that with careful interbreeding of disparate lineages, hybrid vigor can be encouraged by the carrying forward of useful characteristics of common ancestors into the present day.

Consider the following. Humans mating with other humans separated by two thousand generations or more since last connected are encouraging the emergence of features in their children that were extremely useful back when spoken language was brand new, or perhaps still mostly gesture. I would estimate that the children of these marriages would be left-handed a far higher percentage of the time, right-handedness hypothetically emerging with spoken language and hemispheric differentiation.

Some individuals would have difficulty adjusting to contemporary child rearing practices, tending to withdraw and to be lost in primary process. Hybrids may not easily integrate into a domestic context. Other individuals offer an astonishing array of useful features that seem to seamlessly align themselves with us moderns. There are those that are a combination of the two.

We are more than our genetics. What our parents provided is but part of the package. Also there is what we learned while in the womb, epigenetic understandings. Then there are the decisions we made while growing older. Genetics, environment and personal decisions combine to make us what we are and what we become. Nevertheless, how our parents’ contributions combine have a powerful effect upon what comes after.

Barack Obama is a hybrid child, a left-hander, a charmer and a deft performer. How much of Obama’s skill set comes from characteristics vital to our ancient forebears? In a matrifocal society, these are features that are deeply respected and particularly useful in procreation. Why are some children provided a set of skills that fit perfectly for our times while others have so much difficulty adjusting?

I don’t know. But it does seem reasonable to me that we explore the conditions that might feel most familiar to those emerging among us now and revealing features characteristic of long ago. A place to begin looking is where our matrifocal, aboriginal peoples are still alive today. Some of those people are still speaking in click languages, on the continent where we were born.

Perhaps the oldest peoples of the world can offer us insight into contemporary conditions and diseases that we are wrestling to understand.

I’ve been reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Having read Trippi, Rheingold, Shirky and others, I thought I’d go back to the source of many insights regarding media and social transformation.

McLuhan is a very odd experience. He often writes in an oracular style, allowing the reader several ways to interpret what he says. As a specialist in the process rather than in the content forms of human mass communication, he nonetheless relies upon a deep reservoir of literary references to offer texture to what he writes. The result is truly Delphic. It feels like much that is communicated can be taken in opposite ways. From my perspective, it feels like he misses much by committing so deeply to an ethnocentricity that places the works of modern culture above ancient societies along with a deep reverence for Progress.

He evidences a methodology and spirituality that revere process yet neglects to embrace all process as part of a larger whole. But, then again, maybe not.

McLuhan writes, “If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”

McLuhan’s description of a hierarchy of nested media with new media using former media to structure content (the printing press incorporates language, radio the printing press and TV radio) is in interesting ways like Ken Wilber’s descriptions of evolving society as a series of nested consciousnesses with specific attributes. The idea that deep, systemic change is characterized by nested assimilations appears in Hegel, Marx, Freud, Wilber, McLuhan and many others. I feel my contribution to the paradigm is that by applying the heterochronic principles developed by Mivart, Cope, Haeckel and the Neo-Lamarckians of the 19th and early 20th century to an understanding of social transformation, you end up with a specific structure that describes how these nesting hierarchies develop.

We’re drifting back to the four-fold parallelism or the belief that evolution unfolds on four scales: biology, society, ontogeny and individual human experience. Societal transformation is informed by biological evolution, often interpreted by personal experience or metaphors describing how human beings mature. McLuhan was not an anthropologist, developmental psychologist or evolutionary biologist. He was a literature professor. He refers to or quotes authors that draw inspiration from all four scales. For me, it makes for a frustrating read because McLuhan prefers to suggest rather than explain. I guess sometimes I like my art separated from science, the beautiful segregated from the useful, particularly if I’m seeking to understand how things work.

Nevertheless, McLuhan emphasizes that how we communicate influences what we can communicate and that there is an integral relationship between communication and spirituality. This insight forms a foundation for understanding the web, social media and the transformation we are presently engaged in.