It is not uncommon that I am with a friend who is in distress and he or she is describing an experience that he or she has had or is having that is not related to the distress but which occurs during the time of distress.  The experience is informed by the individual’s emotional and mental state, resulting in what appears to me to be an experience very different from what it would have been without the distress.

Underlying, or presupposing, any experience is the mental/emotional place we are in when it occurs.  What I mean is that experience is informed by context.  An individual’s ability to be aware of his or her personal context while being exposed to life’s experiences can have a lot to do with how empowered a person feels by his or her life.  There are layers and layers of underlying context or presupposition.  These have been called personal stories or scripts.  It can be argued that the deeper our awareness of this context, the more empowered, the more secure we feel.

This kind of context, these presuppositions, is integral to understanding evolutionary theory.  Gould alludes to these issues in various works, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Mismeasure of Man.  William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber and many others have explored these issues.  What has me thinking now is how presupposition informs theorizing about evolution when theorists reverse the flow and make content inform a theory about process while demanding it’s the other way around.

There is the fact that, for me, consciousness and split consciousness and the nature and character of consciousness and split consciousness are integrally tied to my theory of evolution both at the levels of how split consciousness evolves and at the presuppositional level of how the theory comes together and can be understood.  In other words, you can’t really discuss evolution, particularly human evolution, without also discussing epistemology, or how it is that we understand something.  To write a theory of evolution is to also write an origin myth, a myth that describes both how our bodies and our minds emerged.  Without making epistemological presuppositions explicit, you end up with a Dawkins/Dennett paradox, where the theory creator insists that people believe that their beliefs as regards a creator be true without it being made clear that the belief is a presupposition that supports the theory, not the other way around.

A reductionist sees the world in pieces.  An interconnectionist sees connections.  It’s not about which is right.  It’s about what benefits accompany the two perspectives.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to often do two things suggestive of my friends who, while in distress, describe an experience that they have had or are having, unaware that the distress that they carried into the experience impacted their perception of the experience.  Evolutionary psychologists often insist that they are right because an evolutionary psychological explanation can explain what they are studying and it is both a simple explanation and an explanation used for many other related things.  This being the case, they then state that more complex or less related explanations should be rejected.  Evolutionary psychologists are using a presupposition to state they are right (according to the presupposition) instead of simply sharing the benefits of the conclusions implied by the presupposition.  They refuse to admit that what they are seeing is directly related to what they presuppose.

They presuppose a satisfactory explanation is simple.  Simple answers must be right.  This reminds me of friends in distress.  Experience is deeply informed by presupposition.

Second, it’s not only that evolutionary psychologists often insist that they have an exclusive solution that makes other answers less necessary, evolutionary psychologists such as Dawkins and Dennett state a belief is true without bowing to the fact that a belief is a belief, usually based on hidden context.  We can act as if something is true.  We can live our life as if something is true.  But to make believe that we can reach below the level of presupposition and haul up information that in itself is true is to violate the whole idea of science.

There can be no truth.  There can only be experience, which is relative.

I am an interconnectionist.  I presuppose connection.  A result is that I often feel part of something larger than myself.  This informs the theories I create and the life I live.  Nevertheless, I don’t purport to experience the truth.  My experience is based upon both hidden and nonhidden context.  Life is a mystery.

To be humble can be useful when seeking understanding.

The introduction to the theory discussed on this site is “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  It’s been viewed over a thousand times.  I’ve received feedback from perhaps 30 academics.  Most find it too condensed a presentation of unfamiliar material to convince them that it represents something useful.  So, I’m playing with the idea of another introduction, one that is less dense and more playful.  Only, it’s evolved from an introduction to a book.  It’s almost 100 pages.

Those folks reading this entry who have been more or less following along on this blog journey, please tell me in the comments below which parts of this thesis you’ve found most interesting.  What I’m thinking at this point is that a new introduction would begin with the last big piece that fell into place, the discovery that estrogen may be what manages the timing of maturation.  That seemed to communicate fairly well when I wrote people this piece.

Consider this as a sequence of themes or subjects in an introduction:

The trick is to find a way to take a step-by-step narrative path through an experience that implies a global gestalt understanding of a whole.  I find myself, for example, trying to explain the connection between biological and social heterochrony by bringing in sexual selection when that has not yet been explained.  Or, I find myself avoiding describing how sexual selection or environmental influences impact social change in adults before explaining how the same dynamic works inside the womb.  In my mind and body, all these various features of evolution connect; they are the same process manifesting in different scales and different disciplines.  Taking the experience of evolution out of my body/mind and putting it into a narration of words that tells a story is remarkably difficult.  I’ve been wrestling with this for almost a year.

Writing a blog, sharing sections of the thesis over time, has felt fun and easy.

If there are folks reading this that feel to some degree that what they’ve been reading this last year and a half makes sense, tell me in your comments how this makes sense.  Perhaps your particular narrative pathway will help me walk mine.

One of the astonishing things about being a human is that the great majority of us open our mouth to start a sentence with almost no awareness of a process that will culminate in a relatively articulately communicated thought or experience.  Talk about unconscious.  We have no clue how we do this, yet we associate it with our conscious experience.

Being part of the process that produces the words that appear on this blog is no less mystifying.  The fact that so much of the content emerges as my fingers type the words, while I subvocalize content having to do with the nature of evolution and transformation, is beyond me.  The stuff feels interesting.  I start to feel connections.  My fingers type.

So, opportunities emerge that suggest how two or more of these various strands connect to one another.  A connection feels interesting.  I type.  Yet, there come moments when I’m feeling stumped.  I intuit a connection or connections but they feel so deep, subtle or variable that describing them feels more like making a map than like traveling a territory.  All words are maps.  Using words, I’m playing with associations.  Nevertheless, there are times when I’m happy if I can just impart the flavor.  Real bites of experience feel tentative and far away.

Collecting together in book form the many strands and themes that have wound across this blog for more than a year and a half, I am presented with what feels like a deeply arbitrary sorting of associations into categories meant to offer a clear pathway to visitors interested in what I have to say.  Whereas inventing sentences seems to require not an iota of attention to make some sense, creating a doorway to an alternative way of viewing biological and social evolution requires making believe the world is really organized in the categories I’ve made up in order to make the imbedded concepts easier to grasp.

It’s a little like a toboggan ride down a mountainside filled with trees.  There are lots and lots of ways to get to the bottom of the hill.  Writing a book, I leave a specific path marking the particular way that I took to get down the incline.  Each reader follows my words down that specific path.  I imagine that that arbitrary path, invented to enhance the prospect of reaching bottom in one piece, ends up with traffic only because I went down it first.

How do I write the book and impart the concepts in ways that feel natural to the readers so that they can go tobogganing on their own?  How can I make the concepts feel so familiar that the speakers of the patterns, the makers of words can invent their concepts, identify their own patterns, unconsciously express connections that they’ve made?

At least as important as the theory is the ability to make this stuff up.  I guess I’ll know that I’ve succeeded if folks absorb the content and then invent new content, saying better and more elegantly what I’ve been trying to say.

From my sophomore to junior year in high school I went from selling fruitcake for my Boy Scout troop to selling buttons and bumper stickers for my anti-war group.  I grew up in a merchant family and looked at the world as an opportunity to sell things.  I didn’t exactly have the personality for it.  I was shy, but I was moderately obsessed with numbers and so made a numbers game out of whatever I was trying to encourage people to purchase.

That money bought stuff never seemed particularly relevant.

So my contribution to the Left in the 1960s and 1970s was mostly handling the accounting for the various things that were exchanged.  Forty years later, at protest planning meetings, I mostly handle display and transfer of information because web development is my profession.  Watching and listening to organizers in meetings, I notice that same deadpan earnestness I remember from my youth, but relations today are plagued by decades of hurt feelings and activists taking personally the former strategic decisions of their peers.  I am constantly astonished by how often present behaviors are informed by past disappointments or frustrations.  Experiencing forgiveness is not a common experience in the Leftist avocation.  Training oneself to be vigilant of abuse skews one’s world view toward being nonaccepting.

And there is perhaps the deepest irony of the Left.  Focused on needed change, the Left has a difficult time perceiving change when it occurs.

Nevertheless, these days it is not the Left that is receiving media attention.

I wonder what the organizing meetings of the Right look like.  Is it men in suits in hotel meeting rooms, suburban homes or offices?  Is there a budget for food being brought in?  Do attendees all go out and drink or go to a restaurant after meetings?  Are these all people that have worked together before and share tactics and strategies?  Are these almost all men with political connections?

Early last autumn, watching video of the September 12 D.C. demonstrations, I found myself trying to parse out differences between these two political extremes.  Whereas large national demonstrations of the Left haphazardly emerge from coalitions with no single person influencing the outcome, on the right, figures like Dick Armey or Glenn Beck almost single-handedly propel events into national prominence.  They have money and/or media control, providing enhanced one-to-many communications.  On the right, name recognition goes a long way.

At demonstrations of the Left, participants often move in people clumps as they congregate with a particular organization that they identify with.  Costume is common.  Of course, long hair and hippie affects are ubiquitous.  Other dress conventions such as anarchist attire and union tee shirts can be found.  Music is often integral to the contribution, often in the form of drums.  Education institutions are widely represented with students and professors.  Youth dress, which includes backpacks, music, head attire, jeans, beards and no bras, all signal a Left event.  Unlike organizing for a protest, where organization representatives seem often dour, at the events themselves there is often a sense of jubilation.  Participants seem to be celebrating their participation.

At the September 12 event, the tea bag protests and the town hall gatherings of the Right displayed a different aesthetic.  Attire seemed mostly to signal that the individual was a person that was not a member of a specific group.  Whereas on the left there is an almost aboriginal compulsion to signal tribal association, on the right the display of conventional clothing itself is a proclamation that the participant is an “American.”

Whereas a default frame of reference on the left is peace, on the right there is a respect or reverence for physical, even violent, intervention.  Guns are often heralded as a symbol of independence.  Wars are looked at as essential and reasonable ways of relating to societies that retain competing beliefs or agendas.  On the left, there is a deep sensitivity toward oligarchic and fascist behaviors in government.  On the right, there is this hyperawareness of socialism and fascism, as if the two are closely related.

On the right, placard-bearers often display the words they have seen or heard on TV and AM radio, tied to viewpoints that originated in a specific place within mainstream media.  On the left, signs bear slogans that represent opinions shared at the level of individual conversations.  Rarely are the words on signs from a living individual, let alone a media figure.

I attended an anti-war protest in September of 2005, in D.C., that brought in more than 300,000 people.  That’s my estimate, not the estimate of the organizers, which was far higher.  There was no media coverage.  None, with the exception of a mention on CNN.  Estimates for this year’s September 12 protest were 50,000 to 70,000 people, and that protest got strong coverage on all networks.

At a Left protest it is relatively difficult to distinguish the truly strange, those individuals bearing beliefs suggesting paranoia or a personality disorder.  The crazies dress in ways that look like everybody else, with the rare exception of those distressed individuals that dress really strange.  At a Right protest, those with truly strange perspectives, those that use FOX and AM radio as their exclusive sources of information, seem to be everywhere.  Those with deeply unconventional perspectives are the norm.  It seems to me that on the right there are many people without personality disorders that bear extreme beliefs because their sources of information are very specific and often wrong.  This seems partly a function of education.  I get the impression that a far larger percentage of the Left has a university or college education.

Most video of the September 12 tea bag and town hall events focuses on the most extreme cases of opinion.  If video portraying the Left did the same, I believe we’d look less strangely extreme, but it would not be a complimentary perspective.  Those with the most rage often emerge on these videos promoted by the other side.  The Left embraces compassion.  The Right extols forgiveness.  You’d never know this from the information that gets exchanged.

Not unlike when I was young, nowadays numbers are still often how I interpret my experience.  At demonstrations, even big ones, I count the protesters.  I pay close attention to how the events are promoted and conducted.  I find the logistics more interesting than the words.

Following the Right Wing protests and comparing them to Left events, I am struck by the differences.  Clearly, there is jubilation on both sides.  Protesters seem to display exultation with their expressions of dismay.  Yet, on the left, there is the idea that an ideal world exists.  On the right, there seems no such sensibility.  On the left, there is the desire that each and every person feel supported.

On the right, it seems that an ideal world is one where that individual protester gets what he or she wants.

Idea has structure based upon how those that create or share societal ideas relate to and are driven by the dynamics of testosterone and estrogen.  This societal structure dynamic, this testosterone-and-estrogen frame of reference, operates in an identical fashion as biological social structure.  For moderns, it’s been particularly difficult to parse out this commonality between biology and society because we’ve been so unaware of the relativity of social structure, because patrifocal social structure has been so ubiquitous in our lives.  Nevertheless, social structure informs culture and biology at the most basic level, the level at which progeny variation is decided.

The idea that idea has structure and that it is informed by sexual hormones is not new.  The pantheon of gods and goddesses in various religions display representations of ideas as specific male or female figures.  What I am considering now is that the idea that there are no new ideas may have its foundation in an understanding that all idea is a reflection of biological social structure and an endocrinological allegiance with one of the ways that the two sexes relate.

We humans indulge in the belief that society is profoundly different from biology.  Because we are able to spend time in what seems like an alternative world made up of ideas, ideas capable of being or not being “true,” we assign ourselves a position that is separate from biology, as if humans were something more than the physical.  This nonuseful belief, nonuseful because it encourages a separation from the environment that is integral to our survival, nonuseful because it engenders an experience of feeling alone, could use a redefining of what exactly being human is.

Humans are split conscious.  If you think that this presupposes that nonhumans are conscious, that is the case.  Because we are split conscious, we have two selves.  Two selves provide us an ability to be two places at once, two times at once, and to imagine something’s opposite.  Imagination is just an ability to maintain two or more positions at the same time.  An idea is simply the result of our ability to be split.

There is the language of animals and there is language as used by humans.  Human language strings together symbols that trail associations (we can only think in symbols because we are split) and stacks those symbols up in a fashion that allows us to become very clear, or relatively clear, about things that do or don’t exist, where we are, or somewhere where we are not.  Though this seems complex, all it really is, is music.  Split-brain music.  With words, things that represent something that is not a word, we build these beautiful structures that may or may not exist.  We can do this because we are two consciousnesses at the same time.

An idea is a doorway.  Yet, it may not be nearly as abstract as we may think.  When we realize that we ourselves are only unique insofar as we maintain two selves instead of one, we can understand that we are neither as special nor as alone as we may have suspected.  Still, ideas can be useful.  There are things we can do that animals cannot.  One of those things is to realize that we are not just closely connected to animals.  We are no different from animals.  We just have the ability to be someplace, and sometime, we are not.

Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges can be built between beings with difficulty entering others’ worlds.

Mark Stairwalt, my colleague producing Shift Journal, reminded me of the power of mirrored experience…

“My wife and I have a family friend who once worked as an untrained volunteer with autistic kids, and she astounded the professional staff by achieving a communications breakthrough with one particularly hard-to-reach child.  When I asked how she had done it, she told me she had simply mirrored the body language, breathing pattern, facial expression, etc., of the child in question.  Empathy expressed via mimicry > instant breakthrough.”

This is the principle of biofeedback, mirroring or establishing rapport taught by the practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming, much of it derived from the work of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist.  It has been discovered that very effective therapists and hypnotherapists engage in mirroring to establish contact with a client’s unconscious.  The same principle applies when communicating with a person with autism.  Reflecting an autistic person’s experience by mirroring his or her biological rhythms, breathing, heartbeat and movements gives the autistic person purchase on the reflector’s experience.  They see you, in no small part, because you, at that moment, are reflecting them.

Engaging in the performance of rhythmic activities, activities that perhaps, as in the Jacqui Russell programs, offer information on how emotions work, also engages the experience of feeling mirrored that is integral to establishing rapport.  A group of people performing the same movements at the same time, dancing, are mirroring one another’s experience.

The autistic have trouble establishing rapport.  The foundation feature of establishing rapport is mirroring another person’s experience.  It is important that the mirrorer genuinely have the feelings that he or she is mirroring, or at least have access to those feelings.  Two people having the same feelings while at least one of the two people is mirroring the other’s experience is what makes a sharing authentic.

The performance of two or more people of a rhythm-based experience such as dance places that group into the same physical experience, one that reproduces and generates the dynamics of rapport.

Performance, rhythm, dance and mirroring are perhaps a combination that can leverage an autistic person into an experience that includes another person.  Principles of how an unconscious is accessed are combined with an understanding that how we may have evolved may be directly related to the performance of dance and rhythm.  If autism is an evolutionary condition featuring characteristics of our species’ ontogeny from a few thousand generations ago, then perhaps an intervention that features both a reproduction of an autistic indigenous environment, dance and rhythm, with a proven doorway to the unconscious, mirroring, can be the opportunity for an autistic person to behave in new and different ways.

Superb programs exist now, such as Jacqui Russell’s work in Chicago schools.  Let’s use the principles above to expand those programs.  To guide the autistic to have more facile access to their imaginations, it is necessary that we use ours.

I just noted a paper, Multiple ancient origins of neoteny in Lycidae (Coleoptera): consequences for ecology and macroevolution, that observes instances of neoteny compelling jumps in evolution.  One of the riddles of the career of Stephen J. Gould was how he seemed to rarely discuss how his deep insights focusing on neoteny explained his theory of punctuated equilibrium.  Gould did not believe in gradual evolution.  Yet, he seemed to only occasionally discuss the specifics of his saltationist conjectures, particularly when it came to heterochronic theory, or the study of the rate and timing of maturation and development, the source of neoteny.

The work just noted, Multiple ancient origins…, doesn’t just not note the influence of neoteny on humans, but it goes back many millions of years to discuss its subject.  My work has focused almost exclusively on neoteny in humans and makes the following statement….

If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

Contemporary research on neoteny and heterochronic theory, for some reason, seems hesitant to explore the endocrinological foundations for the changes in the rate and timing of maturation and development.  I am a comic artist trained to view the world through a succession of stills accompanied by words.  Perhaps this is how I’ve come to be so intimately involved with a theory best understood by a succession of images, not through mathematics or words.  Right now, Beck Kramer, one of my colleagues here at Andrew Lehman Design, is putting together a sophisticated Flash presentation of how neoteny looks and behaves when used to describe human evolution.  I’ve defined neoteny maybe 30 times in the nearly 600 pieces I’ve written for this blog.  Still, I get the feeling that the use of words to describe the process does little to provide an intuition for what exactly is happening.  Friends that have known me for decades, friends that have listened to several of my forays into evolutionary theory over the last ten years, often ask me to redefine “neoteny” before approaching the subject once again.

Consider that natural processes not easily described in mathematics or words, but by a succession of pictures or by animation, may become accessible with the emergence of new communications technologies that encourage video presentations.  There may be many theory features, such as neoteny, that are best described by a succession of pictures or an animation.  Journals fall flat as vehicles for sharing insights in these areas.

This may be another example of the media being integral to comprehension.  Whereas mathematics became integral to our understanding physics, animation may be what is necessary to assimilate and embrace new principles in biology.  I can imagine that for a future generation, being familiar with animation software will be necessary to model biological processes just as an ability now to work similar software is essential to being able to grasp molecular biology.

Might there be a connection among those experiencing the world through a succession of images tied to sounds, rather than through a focus on feelings or words, and the talents and tendencies of our youth and what those with Asperger’s and autism often describe, the visual, as their primary mode of experience?  Is it possible that a predilection to comprehend the world through pictures and sound is an emerging, or reemerging, paradigm, a way of experiencing the world that offers some paradigmatic leverage when it comes to understanding biological processes exhibiting predictable and structured changes in form over time?

Stephen J. Gould seems to me to have backed off of seminal insights as regards biological transformation.  This may have been because colleagues just didn’t seem to get it.  They were unable to see patterns in transformations over time.  Academics couldn’t grasp the larger picture in a reductionist milieu, times that feature mathematics or words when communicating scientific principles.  The times are changing.  Perhaps with changes in the ways we perceive the world, the world can be understood in different ways.

Clive Thompson’s September Wired article, “The New Literacy,” had me thinking several things.

The article describes an academic’s conclusion that there is a writing renaissance going on with astonishing increases in writing by students as they use communications technologies.  It has been believed by many that texting and social media are deprecating communication.  Professor Andrea Lunsford concluded the opposite.  New technologies are encouraging the young to share experiences by writing.

Several things come to mind.

First, texting is acquiring a number of unique conventions that are beginning to approach a different language.  I don’t speak text.  This is a function of my peer group, my age and the fact that I’m at my computer three-fourths of my waking hours.  Perhaps text is approaching another language as its conventions proliferate.  If that is the case, then maybe this is a good thing as regards the inculcation of flexibility of mind.  As youth text, they encourage an ability to experience the world through an alternative perspective.

Second, the day will come when voice translators advance to offer an effortless ability to take our spoken words and transform them into written text.  Gifted youth will find they can profoundly proliferate their productions by speaking instead of typing.  The Thompson article describes the emergence of performance as integral to text communications, with participating individuals able to broadcast to their unique collection of followers.  Thompson, with insight, observes the importance of performance to the new technologies.  Participants often speak with an attention to detail not obvious in communications up to now.  Consider the power of these technologies to enhance performance by letting people speak, instead of type, their minds.

What struck me most forcibly while I was reading Thompson’s article is the presence of yet another aboriginal feature emerging in modern youth, and the possible connection of this feature with autism.  In other pieces, I have described the relationship between neoteny emerging in contemporary society and the increases in autism.  Just as in biology, where ancestor infant features prolong to emerge in descendant adults, so it is in society, where ancestral societal-stage traits featured by aboriginal matrifocal societies emerge in contemporary times.  The dramatic horizontalization of society, with accompanying transparency, diversity, creativity and sharing, is evidence of this aboriginalization of culture.  I would add one more thing.  Performance during dance, song and mating rituals in aboriginal society are becoming embedded in our new technologies.  As each Twitterer and social-media user becomes more invested in communicating to a group, we are integrating ancient intuitions into the contemporary times, which offer an ubiquitous experience of performance, not unlike the way we communicated as our species bridged from a band society into culture.

In my work, I hypothesize that performance, the performance of dance and song, was integral to our evolution as a species.  I have also hypothesized that the autistic are embedded in this earlier artistic mode, compelled to experience the world through dance, rhythm and sound but few words.  In the previous piece, I suggested that perhaps performance could be a bridge experience that provides the autistic ways to cultivate split consciousness or a theory of mind.  It strikes me now that as performance emerges as a common communication form among youth in contemporary society, we are perhaps glimpsing the ways humans communicated back in the dawn of language.

In other words, I believe there is a connection between communications technologies enhancing performance consciousness characterized by the broadcast of information to large groups and the increases in autism, perhaps featuring a consciousness evolved to perform, less so to communicate.

This is the seminal issue.  If humans evolved by growing big brains and facile bodies, dancing up a storm to mate with discriminating members of the opposite sex (see Theory Summary), then perhaps performance consciousness is integral to who we were and what we are becoming.  If that is the case, providing the autistic performance contexts may be necessary to provide them an ability to gain some purchase to connect with other humans.

Lunsford’s discovery that our youth are writing far more than anytime in the past combined with Thompson’s insight that performance is integral to the process offers a bridge to understanding how autism is understood.  Once again, our youth seem to have the answers.  Observing how the young experience the world, we have a chance to understand how our world came to be.

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

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

I found Bill’s page within the janegoodall.org site while searching Google for evidence that chimpanzee or bonobo babies or children respond to music with movement or proto dance.  Although I’ve hypothesized in several places on this blog that dance emerged after the chimpanzee/human lineage split, probably during homo erectus as brains grew at lightning speed, yesterday’s entry has me thinking that if music/dance is a postbirth manifestation of womb ontogenetic epigenetic processes, then perhaps there is evidence of a response to music in chimpanzee and bonobo youth.  With bonobo exhibiting more neoteny than chimpanzees, bonobo babies and children would more likely exhibit an attraction to what we could interpret as proto music.

Evidently experiments have been conducted on human embryos in the womb to determine if brain waves suggested an integration of surrounding music and sound.  It seemed that was the case.  Click here.  Do bonobo exhibit the same predilection?  What other animals might reveal these trends?  What might be common among different animals that do show a tendency to be sensitive to rhythm?

I am fascinated by the relationship the autistic have with music and rhythm.  There is evidence that when language is tied to melody, it is easier for many with autism to absorb the words.  The autistic have been observed to retain perfect pitch in higher percentages than the nonautistic.  Several of those with autism that I have known personally felt a close affinity to music and dance.  One autistic boy I worked with almost never spoke, yet occasionally he would break out into dance.  In a subtle and interesting way, performance may be tied to the autistic experience.  There are rhythmic features to chimpanzee displays, particularly with the aggressive repetition of loud noise.  Perhaps the obsessive repetition associated with physical and aural exclamations in autism can be viewed as a combination of, or transition between, display and performance.  Autistic communication often feels to me to be a performance of information featuring a repetition of remembered or rehearsed songs, jokes and snatches of conversation.

I am reminded of Baron-Cohen’s exploration of Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimpanzee explorations regarding theory of mind.  If a chimpanzee demonstration can remind us so closely of a human performance, then perhaps certain autistic behaviors can be seen as a bridge between the two.

If obsessive repetition, rhythm or music are often integral to the autistic experience, and on occasion seem to behave as bridges that provide access to words and what words represent, then would an early and deep immersion in rhythm perhaps provide the autistic with an environment through which they could establish firm connections?

Clearly, if this experiment were conducted on the very young, it would more likely have a positive effect than when they are older.  I don’t estimate there would be negative repercussions.  If we surmise that autistic attraction to repetition, rhythm and performance suggests a need for an environment that reflects those features, perhaps a rhythm-and-performance-infused environment of the type experienced by humans just before or during the transition to culture and split consciousness will encourage a making of connections.

There was a time, perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, when we did not trade in symbols.  We were still steeped in primary consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives) but were likely dancing up a storm.  Waterfalls and thunderstorms no doubt moved us, but there is a good chance we often moved each other, performing movement to rhythm and sound.

The autistic may be a mere 4,000 generations from us, a couple neurological anomalies away.  Perhaps all that is needed to bridge this distance is an ability for moderns to evolve a feeling for wordless, rhythmic performance, a feeling for living in the autistic now.

I have been playing with the idea that genetics guides ontogeny, that how our genes inform an individual’s unfolding has far more to do with how music is made than with how a computer is programmed.  Once again, I’m finding these ideas emerging in my dreams.

Two nights ago, while dreaming, I was seeking to understand the mathematics of words, searching for the equations in language, wondering how music connects them both.  In the dream, the answer felt to be related to evolution.  The answer emerged.  The answer is the price of homemade baked goods at the farmer’s market. (I don’t know what that means.}

Scientists are stumped by how few genes there are in the human gnome.  Some less somatically sophisticated species display a far larger library of genes.  Having a complete gnome is not leading to deep insight as regards our disabilities, diseases, talents or evolution.  Over and over again, difficult-to-understand genetic riddles are ascribed to not-yet-understood, multiple gene effects.

Consider this.  By understanding music, we can understand how genetics works.  This is because the human connection to music is a direct reflection and result of the ontogenetic processes created by our genetic algorithm.

Genes engender a growing being with cells that pay astonishingly close attention to the behavior of contiguous cells and the environments beyond the growing body.  Growth is all about receiving and displaying information, not following a template.  As each cell splits and acquires a series of tasks to perform based upon location and other information, it is passing on a musical score to be adjusted depending on how the other instrumentalists participate.

This is perhaps a case when a metaphor and that which the metaphor represents begin to merge.

Genes are a score or script outlining a specific symphony or performance, yet each gene also retains a score or script that includes an almost infinite number of ways for each instrumentalist to adjust to changes in the performance of the other players.

The human gnome is a score with instructions on how to vary that score and under what circumstances.

This music is most obvious in the womb when environmental information is heavily influencing ontogenetic outcomes.  This is perhaps the case with every species on the planet.  Humans, members of a species profoundly impacted by neoteny, have experienced over the course of tens of thousands of generations the emergence of this ontogenetic womb music in postbirth life.  Not only have ancient forebear embryo features, such as hairlessness and huge head-to-body ratios, prolonged to appear in great great great… grandchildren, but ancient embryo characteristics have manifested in contemporary adults.

In other words, the remarkable flexibility of cells in embryos to embrace change and adjust growth has emerged in aspects of human personality that include an obsession with music, which reflects exactly how it is that genes compel cells to participate in the creative process.  When compared to genetic process, music displays an isomorphic, or almost identical, dynamic.  Both display an unfolding across time of information influenced by the environment.

Music rhythms reflect human heartbeats, human breathing and the breadth and limits of human footwork.  We all go into a trance with music, often experiencing shifts in identity characterized by identification with groups larger than our selves.  For some, music bridges to spiritual experience, featuring shifts in identity beyond the group.  To ally oneself with music is to experience one’s boundaries becoming less firm.  The experience of multiple-person musical give-and-take allows us to feel as a cell might when instructed by the gnome to dance a person into existence.

Consciousness, or identity, is not nearly as stable as we often think.  Every night we slide into alternatives.  Music encourages shifts in identity.  This is not by chance.  Who we are as beings integrated into a larger society and ecology has a lot to do with our abilities to change.  This is a direct result of our living lives informed by the dynamics of the womb.  To understand genetics, we have only to pay attention to how we dance.

We live in a society that believes that it is pragmatic to presuppose that consciousness is contingent upon evolutionary conditions that led to its emergence.  Self awareness occurred by chance.  Academics, of course, embrace the claim that consciousness is unique.  But because it is not measurable and seems connected to humans only, it has been concluded in many sciences that it can be usefully ignored.  The autistic provide an ability to notice.

Over the course of human self examination there have been relatively few that have differentiated between the two most obvious kinds of consciousness that exist.  There is aware and self aware.  There is conscious and self conscious.  There is being present and there is the awareness that you are present.  This is a significant distinction because it can be suggested that the first kind of consciousness, presence, is not just a feature of human consciousness but a feature of that which is alive.  To be present to the fact that you are present seems peculiarly human.  We can call this split consciousness.  This is unique insofar as this ability for a single consciousness to experience a split evidently creates facility with being two places at once, being in two times at once, and having the power to imagine something’s opposite.  To be split creates what we call imagination.

So, we use our imagination to explore this world we live in.  While doing so, we often choose to ignore the ubiquitousness of that which is merely “present.”  Even if split consciousness emerged randomly as a result of contingent circumstance, how is it that the ground from which that split emerged so often goes unexamined?

If feels to me that we live in a social milieu featuring three immediately accessible levels of consciousness.  We are so steeped in these three conditions that we are only vaguely aware that we swim in all three waters at once.  This is somewhat like Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego, but they are separate only insofar as there are words we use to describe experience.  They are all the same.

There is the unconscious, also called primary consciousness.  There is split consciousness, or our being two at once.  There is social consciousness, featuring the wisdom of the crowd, the zeitgeist of our “times.”

Nested hierarchies are a feature of the way that structure builds as differing scales reveal structure at different levels.  Atoms make up molecules that make up cells that make organs.  Nested hierarchies are also how consciousness embeds.  The unconscious makes up the split conscious which makes up the social conscious.  There is an identity ladder that we can purchase at the consciousness hardware store.  You don’t buy just one stair at a time.

My point is that consciousness can be studied.  It exhibits characteristics.  An unconscious behaves differently from a split consciousness, and a split consciousness behaves differently from a social consciousness.

Piaget observed the growth of children closely.  Piaget, a follower of Freud and, like Freud, a believer in fourfold parallelisms, believed in close connections among species evolution, individual ontogeny and societal transformation.  Piaget was particularly interested in consciousness changes as children matured.  Children begin in a state of primary process or one time, one place, no opposites.  There is no split consciousness.  They are only present.  With time, children acquire features of split consciousness, one by one, as their brains reproduce the last several hundred thousand years of our evolution, ontogeny reenacting phylogeny.  All this time each individual is integrating community communications so that individual consciousness and then split consciousness are not just influenced by the larger community, but the individual is part of the larger community consciousness.

Simon Baron-Cohen bridged the work of primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh to humans having difficulty walking the ontogenetic ladder.  Savage-Rumbaugh hypothesized that chimpanzees exhibit an ability to intuit the motivations of other chimpanzees and humans, though there are limits.  Baron-Cohen suggested that the autistic are mind blind, unable to understand that there is an other.  Autism is a condition featuring anomalies in consciousness.  Individuals are experiencing minds that don’t split.  They are locked in primary process.  They seem to be following the evolution of our ancestors to a certain point, up to the time when imagination emerged.

Ontogenetically paused, the autistic are also in species limbo, living in a society with far fewer features.  An autistic person lives in the fourfold parallelism in a different location from the one lived in by those with split brains.  He or she climbs a narrower ladder.

Piaget studied children.  Baron-Cohen studies the autistic.  Let’s consider exploring autism as a condition that can make far clearer the features of consciousness as we study in detail those that wrestle in every moment with those things that the split conscious has a difficult time even noticing.

The autistic are our deep-sea divers, our journeyers into the dark.  We need to rediscover how to think like the autistic think.  Then maybe we can understand who and what we are.

In the United States, there have been three powerful democratization surges in the last 100 years.  Each featured an experience by participants of feeling part of something larger than themselves.  It continues to astonish me how the one we are experiencing now is almost invisible to folks I know.

In the 1930s, working people were provided a voice and power to affect their lives in positive ways.  The commons emerged as a political power as people were able to realize that the process of focusing on shared resources provided a new way of viewing influence.  Democratization was viewed as a feature of the commons.

In the 1960s, democratization acquired an almost spiritual dimension as peace and new interpersonal-communication protocols became integral to understanding how the commons operated.  Integration and feminization transformed the idea of how working together worked.  I felt part of something larger than myself.

Over the last 20 years, there has been growing a third wave of commitment to the commons.  Far more subtle than the other two waves, its influence has been exponentially more powerful.  Perhaps it makes no sense to separate them; they are all part of the same process.  The process features a horizontalization of society as power shifts downward with the realization that what we have in common is more useful and significant than what we can accomplish as independents.

What began with working classes 80 years ago reemerged in the middle class in the 1960s.  This time it began in academia, quickly propagated through the programmer community and then caught fire with youth across the planet.  What emerged was the understanding that when there is no ownership, free empowers, and that what you give away makes everyone more powerful.

The commons is emerging as a potent force in social interactions as sharing becomes a default frame for our youth.  What started as a way to exchange music cheaply has exploded into new forms of creativity characterized by joint authorship and a proliferation of information to such a profound degree that a new awareness is emerging.  This new awareness demands high-quality, fast and free information as a right.  This new awareness demands access to technology that enhances creativity and sharing.  This new awareness presupposes that power congregated in the hands of a few is inappropriate because it segregates information and resources from the “users.”

We are not consumers anymore.  This third wave of democracy is abandoning the consumer economy and embracing an economy of aesthetics.  This is an aesthetic based on sharing.

Though there has been an obvious embrace of the new technologies to achieve political goals, beginning with Joe Trippi’s work in the Dean campaign, there has been little awareness among organizers I know of the sea change in the way that money is being viewed.  Owning is giving way to sharing.  The repercussions are difficult to grasp.  If we focus on the victims of the old system, it looks like little has changed.  If we realize that the control paradigm is changing, we can begin to intuit how to empower those victims.

Focus on the youth.  Watch and listen to how they achieve their goals.  Consider what it is they want.

The commons has returned.  Though what is happening now may not be as obvious as what occurred in the 30s and 60s, this time it is not fading away.

I’d been studying Asperger’s and autism in connection to human evolution for maybe ten years before it dawned on me, after reading Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, that Asperger’s was a feature of my childhood.  As I was growing up, people seemed opaque to me.  I was in speech therapy almost all those years.  I had a strange sense of humor.  I was astonishingly gullible.  My closest friend was a boy that I later realized had Asperger’s.  He was also a math genius and a musician.  I was a collector and an artist.

Over time, it grew clearer to me what other people were thinking and feeling, particularly regarding how they were relating to me.  My obsessions grew integrated with my goals.  I became far less split or self conflicted.

The split that I experienced had perhaps less to do with my Asperger’s tendencies than with a childhood characterized by extreme stress.  But, I’m not sure.

People with autism aren’t generally understood to display classic personality splits featuring conflicts with self, self deprecation or a deep feeling of personal responsibility for what is wrong.  That split would suggest a developed theory of mind, with a mind in conflict, assigning responsibility for difficulties to a self that feels separate.  Nevertheless, there are degrees of split depending on where one sits on the autism-Asperger’s spectrum.  I’ve observed those with Asperger’s feeling deeply divided, assigning to self responsibility for a life characterized by distress.

It was often, if not usually, the case that children with Asperger’s were isolated from most social groups and often were targeted with teasing.  I was teased when others discovered that I would believe most anything I was told.  This occasionally would make me a center of attention when a joke could be constructed around my believing whatever had been imagined.  I often felt humiliated, furious and alone.  I would assign blame to myself for my feeling of isolation.  I expect that this is a common experience for those with Asperger’s.

One way I would adjust was to recoil from those that the class shunned, boys with Asperger’s.  I felt like I could blend in with the “normal” side, and mostly I did.  Yet, I often maintained a feeling I’d be “discovered.”

I was terrified of being singled out for torment.  At the same time, I felt powerfully attracted to people on an individual basis or while playing sports.  I spent no small amount of my childhood collecting boys to play baseball and football.  I proactively sought out playmates.  Yet, I only liked groups when we were playing games.  Mostly, I engaged in various collecting hobbies with another boy.  I introduced many friends to new hobbies such as collecting stamps, coins, rocks, miscellaneous stuff and comics.  I was obsessed with comics.  This was the 1950s and 1960s.

The idea I’m trying to tease out right now is that autism theory suggests that neurodiverse individuals maintain an experience characterized by the “other” as often absent or inscrutable.  Yet, as children, experience is often characterized by uniquely high degrees of stress in social situations because those with autism and Asperger’s are often singled out as different and worthy of receiving negative attention.  This tends to engender self reflection as possible sources for the distress, and malaise is explored and evaluated.  I’ve observed in myself and folks with Asperger’s a tendency to assign to the self blame for being “different” and blame of self for the experience of ongoing distress.  In other words, in some ways Asperger’s individuals have a heightened theory of mind as they experience a deeply personal divide.  They may not be able to easily intuit what is happening in others, but they often engage in a struggle characterized by two sides, and they take both sides in the conflict.

I say such an individual is able to take both sides in the conflict because the person evidently participates in both the placating and blaming polarity in the struggle, identifying with both sides, taking turns.

This begs a question.  Perhaps theory of mind is not an ability to experience both sides of a polarity but an ability to have that experience, to some degree, simultaneously.  Do neurotypicals have an ability to experience simultaneous identification with another while being with self, while the neurodiverse, even while in relationship with self, are only able to identify with one at one time?

Clearly, the neurotypicals are often just as split within themselves as any person with Asperger’s.  A question is:  Do neurotypicals have some brain-structure advantage when it comes to identifying simultaneously with both aspects of the split?

I am suggesting that theory of mind is not just an estimation of what goes on within another person.  It is also an ability to identify with what is going on within the self.

At the end of this last August, Marcia and I attended a Jan Schakowsky town meeting at Niles High School.  There were almost 2,000 present.  Most of those folks were in the auditorium where the event was held, and many were outside holding signs and banners.  The focus was the proposed health care legislation.

Marcia meets with Schakowsky fairly often as the leader of the North Shore Coalition for Peace, Justice and the Environment.  A couple years ago, Jan was at our home for a meeting regarding Iraq, Iran and Israel where one of our group brought up Blackwater establishing itself in Illinois.  At that time, Jan was not familiar with Blackwater’s presence in the state.  Not long after that, Jan emerged to become an important congressional opponent of military contractors, Blackwater in particular.

Schakowsky is a strong supporter of Israel.  My fellow activists and organizers strongly oppose Schakowsky’s support of Israel’s conservative governments, and they also oppose West Bank settlers, Gaza atrocities and the way Israeli government policies treat Palestinians.  Our contact with Schakowsky is characterized by agreement with some of her positions and opposition to her support of Israel.

The meeting in the auditorium in August was attended mostly by liberals friendly to her perspective.  There were some who were to the left of her positions, but surprisingly few.  The hundred or so local Leftists I know by face were not in attendance, with the exception of three or four.  Perhaps 20 percent of the audience was conservative, Right Wing or Libertarian.

Having watched video clips of town hall bedlam over the previous month, I was expecting chaos.  Across the country, out-of-district obstructionists had been strategically creating a din of protest to drown out the words of legislation supporters.  Nonsense such as bringing guns to these events had become common.  Schakowsky had widely promoted the gathering.  Liberal and Left groups had been pounding drums to drive their supporters to the event.

When we arrived, two hours early, maybe 200 people were in line.  In a matter of minutes, the line doubled.  Many people were carrying signs.  Most of the signs supported Jan and a public option.  Many emphasized universal health care or a single-payer plan.  Signs comparing Obama to Hitler were present.

They opened the doors early.  We found seats.

The event started pretty much on time.  Jan made a short introduction speech which was not drowned out by noise, though there were some loud, negative exclamations.  It seemed the out-of-district obstructionists were not present.  She went right to questions.

A pattern emerged.  A question was asked.  Jan answered the question in a fashion that supported a public option, and conservative members in the audience made lots of noise.  Certain individuals made particularly loud yells or screams.  Then Jan would call upon one of those brash, noisy individuals, asking the person to ask a question, but not before the two or three previously picked questioners got a chance to ask their questions.  (She picked questioners in clusters.)  That person would then be quiet until it was his or her chance to ask a question before almost a thousand people.  The person would ask the question.  Jan would respectfully answer.  Then the loud conservative would behave far more civilly the rest of the event.

This pattern was repeated several times.

On the more liberal end, there were guys behaving like grade-schoolers, screaming at conservatives to shut up.  Mostly the hour and a half went by with little chaos.  It was quite different from what I had seen appear on the video clips of TV reports.

The principle in play was the one of offering a voice to your opponent.  During the Bush Administration, this was not only discouraged, but actively repressed.  For those of us representing the American Left, it has been particularly frustrating that those representing a Left position, such as universal health care, have been discouraged from speaking by the Obama Administration.  Not unexpectedly, some of the loudest applause at the Schakowsky event went toward those expressing support for a single-payer plan.

No one expects anything like consensus around this issue.  Nevertheless, talented officials like Schakowsky do seem to be able to create an environment where radically different opinions can be exchanged.  I experienced both excitement and anxiety sitting in a room with 1,300 people, people passionate about their position.  I yearn for universal health care.  I was dumbfounded by last summer’s events burying a single-payer plan or even a single-payer compromise such as the public option.

Perhaps with continuing events like the August town halls where all sides could listen, universal health care will some day arrive.

I grew up in a household with literally no religion.  My father was agnostic, my mom sort of Jewish.  She’s since been Unitarian and Catholic.  Almost 20 years ago I was dating a woman who had been raised Catholic, who was converting to Judaism, while my mother was converting from Judaism to Catholicism.  How Jewish was I raised?  Just now I had to go to Google to figure out how to spell “Judaism.”  I had the “a” and “i” reversed.

Nevertheless, I was raised according to one of the most basic tenets of Western society, that the unconscious maintains an agenda separate from that of the conscious mind, one that often conflicts with conscious goals and aspirations.  I was raised a Freudian.  High percentages of my father’s income went toward my parents’ and their children’s psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  We did not go to temple.  We went to therapists.

I am almost 57.  In high school, I was in therapy with a Rogerian for 2.5 years.  In Florida, I was the client of an eclectic psychoanalyst for six years.  He studied with many of the New Age luminaries at Esalon in California.  Chicago has connected me with another eclectic practitioner for almost 24 years.  That makes 32 years of my life that I’ve been in psychotherapy.  I’ve already passed in and out of those years where everything in the world seemed to unfold according to psychodynamic processes.  Nevertheless, I have been deeply affected by having spent so many years seeking a satisfying and productive relationship with my unconscious.

In a sense, the religion I was raised with has not changed.  I still revere the unconscious as central to experiencing access to hidden resources.  Some things have changed.  My relationship with my unconscious has evolved.

When I was younger, I was encouraged to think of the unconscious as that which maintains the barrier between me and those things which would seem to enhance my life.  I was acutely aware of a split between what I craved and my ability to achieve that desire.  I was critical of myself, particularly that part of myself that seemed compelled to withhold from me what I wanted.

That split has flipped.  Over the years, a slow realization has spread across the hours of my days.  That realization is that my unconscious withholds nothing from me.  My unconscious accompanies me every moment of my life.  My unconscious is me.  That which makes it difficult to achieve my goals has nothing to do with my unconscious.

It is my conscious mind that confuses and distracts me.  How I choose to direct my consciousness is what affects my life.

In other words, there is now an emphasis on being present and trusting the outcomes of my words and behaviors.  Feeling accompanied, I suspect less what I cannot intuit.  I can choose to trust.  The challenge becomes being in my body, in the present, experiencing the unique moment I might be part of.

Barriers feel not to be anything related to my “unconscious,” but something related to my consciously choosing to not offer attention to what is happening.  I often choose to concentrate on some other time, on some other place or on imagination.  My conscious mind has become the location of that which creates barriers between me and what I seek to achieve.

Enhancing the paradox is my changing definition of the unconscious.  Its boundaries have become less familiar.  As my heart slowly heals and I can trust people in my life and I can trust my experience, the separateness of things feels less relevant than how things are connected.  It has become difficult to characterize my unconscious as a feature of my own separate body and identity.  My unconscious feels to be part of something larger than my self.

Raised in a nonreligious home, encouraged to feel that the unconscious is in control, committing 32 years of my life to psychotherapy, I’ve somehow come back around to something that some might associate with religion.  This doesn’t feel to me to be about god.  It’s an experience, not a mythology or a world view.  My experience suggests to me that we are all connected.  But it’s not religion.  It’s just the experience that I feel accompanied by that which is me, yet it is far greater than what I am consciously aware of.

I feel humbled.

Identifying with that which we call the unconscious, embracing that unknown, offers a strange benefit.  It becomes less clear what we really are, while discovering what really is.

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.  Speed as a concept is also integral to biology.  I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemispheres impacts consciousness, behavior and personality.  And, whereas the basic unit of speed in physics is the kilometer or mile, in biology that unit is a generation.  Though maybe not.

Bernard Crespi has written a paper, Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain, which focuses on several neurological features as influential in the etiology of particular diseases and conditions.  Corpus callosum size (the corpus callosum is the primary brain bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres) and anomalous dominance (differing cerebral hemisphere sizes) are two of those features, aspects of cerebral lateralization.  I would consider that corpus callosum size not only influences the ease and speed of information transfer, but that corpus callosum size influences the experience of self awareness or split consciousness.

There are correlations between degrees of cerebral lateralization, how much the two cerebral hemispheres vary, and conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering).  Degrees of handedness are influenced by this variable.  Other diseases and conditions are associated with right cerebral hemispheres not pruned by early childhood testosterone surges, leaving a larger overall brain with two hemispheres the same size.  Ally these features with changes in corpus callosum sizes (and corpus callosums can vary in size in several ways depending on which of several zones are varying), and I would suggest you have a template for estimating degrees of self awareness (split consciousness), behavior, specific diseases, various conditions and personality structure.

My point in this piece is that in the context of two cerebral hemispheres with varying sizes, corpus callosum sizes are influential in the speed of information transfer, and information transfer between the cerebral hemispheres is integral to our experience of self awareness.  The more inhibited information transfer, the more self aware we become.  I mean self aware in the context of split consciousness or a person struggling with himself or herself.  There is a spectrum featuring at one side a non-self-aware, primary-process person with an experience characterized by not being able to be two places at once, two times at once, nor being able to imagine something’s opposite.  This is animal consciousness, the kind of consciousness we experience while dreaming.  This is the consciousness of small children.  This is the consciousness of the autistic.

At the other side of the spectrum are those humans with an experience characterized by a split.  These individuals are two people.  The unconscious feels like a different person.  The world often seems very black and white.  Imagination is often exercised as different times and places, and things’ opposites are juggled and compared, and conclusions are drawn.

The split, modern consciousness is encouraged by a small corpus callosum size with an inhibition of hemispheric communication, along with a right cerebral hemisphere reduced in size.  Light moves at 186,000 miles per second.  The speed of information transfer between cerebral hemispheres varies depending on the structure of the bridge.  The smaller the bridge, the more inclined that individual is to experience himself or herself as split, self aware, surrounded by a community of ideas.  That is my hypothesis.

Whereas the speed with which information passes between the hemispheres influences the emergence of a separate self, there is a second level of information transfer that deeply influences physiology, personality and behavior.  This is the passing of information between generations.  That this seems slow may be a result of our focusing on an individual as the primary unit in evolution.  Assuming that evolution unfolds as part of a process characterized by environmental influences on those that are genetically predisposed to modify ontogeny in response to those environmental influences, then we might consider that examining evolution from any specific level of experience, including the individual, makes little sense.

In just the way that information passes back and forth between the cerebral hemispheres, informing the whole person, a person whose experience may be characterized by a split, information passes back and forth between individuals within the larger community, influencing individual ontogeny, compelling different physical features and behaviors.

In other words, though it looks like the unit of change in evolution is a generation, that generation adjustment may come as a result of an almost infinite number of pieces of information transferring throughout the larger community, a community not unlike a massive brain with countless hemispheres.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.  The speed of nature information transfer might be measurable, but we don’t know even a fraction of all those variables that influence ontogeny.  One question to consider is this:  If in a human a split brain can lead to the emergence of self awareness, even if that awareness is characterized by no small amount of anguish, confusion and isolation, then might this multiple-brain, massive-information transfer characterized by nature suggest self awareness?  And, consider that humans are part of that production.

Where you draw the line between individual and species or individual and society has a lot to do with our ability to understand ourselves and evolution.  This line is not an arbitrary line but characterizes what we perceive as the primary unit.  As humans, we maintain individual self awareness and so view the world as composed of those units that create the foundation of the structure of our world.

Dawkins and his colleagues have played with the gene as the foundation unit and have come up with some interesting conjectures.  Though I disagree with many Neo-Darwinians that behave compelled to believe that the level of the gene is the only important level of selection, I agree that there is usefulness in taking a gene perspective.  What interests me now is not just the Neo-Darwinist perspective, or even the Gould position that evolution occurs in numerous levels, including gene, individual, species, groups and larger systems.  The idea that is playing with me at this time is that using units to explore evolution strips the process of the dynamic hidden at its core.

I’m feeling that just as in physics, in biology, by assuming that there are patterns that play across the whole matrix being explored, we can find overriding principles.  Natural selection is not a description of overriding pattern.  By stating that all variation is random, that the progeny that emerge have no connection to environmental influence, the theory of natural selection is not true.  Individual progeny exhibit features and behaviors based upon both parents’ experience and that individual’s experience in the womb.  This leaves natural selection noting that individuals that don’t procreate don’t have their features passed on.  This is not an overriding pattern in biology.  This is a statement of truth across all scales of experience.  What does not procreate, does not procreate.  This is truth.  But is it useful?

An overriding pattern is a principle, once embraced, that illuminates the operation of the whole.  In physics, we have observed an evolution of overriding principles as theorists have explored relationships in time.

Time is important.  So is the scale at which we are exploring experience.  We might conclude that because time and scale are so integral to physics, they may be necessary to understanding how biology evolves.

So, let’s explore biology by adjusting time and scale, and by scale I also mean where we choose to assign identity.  As humans committed to the notion that individuality is the unit of experience with which nature and society builds, as a species committed to the idea that there is a past, present and future, we might consider stepping outside the individual as a unit, and time as split, and see what results.

If physics benefited from a conjecture that time is relative and everything is connected, why not biology?

I would start with the notion that our genes are programmed to embrace information generated by the environment that then adjusts ontogeny, modifying features and behaviors.  These adjustments are inheritable.  There is pattern to the fashions that genetic/environment information is passed on, the most obvious being that developmental stages are liquid, sloshing forward and backward along ontogeny through generations, modifying maturation, changing features and behaviors.

Now take down the walls between individuals and consider that what we call the environment is but another aspect of a single system.  As information passes back and forth between individuals, influencing features and behaviors, there exists consciousness, a consciousness not characterized by our idea of time.  There is not past, present and future informing a decision-making process featuring a focus on an individual.  In this larger system, past, present and future exist simultaneously because the system is hypersensitive to the information passed back and forth between individuals, individuals with ontogenies that manifest the back and forth, forward and backward records of evolutionary trajectories of the past.

In other words, within each individual is the record of his or her evolution to that point.  Individuals relating and sharing information influence each other’s features and behaviors.  Each individual relies upon that information to make informed decisions on which direction to evolve.  We might even surmise that an individual’s genetics are a profoundly incomplete record of what is necessary to grow and reproduce in a healthy fashion.  The genetics of other individuals, individuals sharing useful information, may be integral to the genome of other, different individuals and species.  In other words, a community has a shared genome that informs the evolution of each individual, all together.

The concept of individuality disappears when we consider that we only evolve by taking into consideration the influence and genetics of individuals in both our and other species in our community.  The concept of time disappears when we note that species’ pasts are present in individual ontogenies that reveal, via maturation, the succession of features that comprised our forebears.

What benefits are there to adjusting identity and time to embrace the system as a whole?  Perhaps we’ll discover we’re not alone.

It interests me how Einstein perceived the relationship between speed and time by identifying with the kind of Doppler effect that he imagined to occur when a light beam left a train station, compelling two different rates of time.  He then capitalized on this exercise of imagination by conceptualizing it as equations, music of the spheres.

I’ve been playing with a concept that I’m feeling integrates a lot of the various patterns I’ve been observing and exploring over the last 12 years.  It is as follows… If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

This is a description of the influence of time on biology.  Maturation is usually understood to be associated with the stage-like development of an individual.  Maturation in an individual is also an unfolding of the maturational record of all preceding individuals in the lineage of life on earth.  I’m not just describing Haeckel’s recapitulation, but the back and forth play of waves of both neoteny and acceleration, waves paradoxically appearing in individual ontogeny.

In other words, we each as individuals also carry with us a record of life on earth.  And, if you take into consideration that the environment has everything to do with the rate and timing of evolution, each individual also carries within himself or herself records of the environment that formed individuals in his or her lineage.

What I’m slowly coming around to understand is that there is an physics-like revelation waiting, regarding biology, having to do with the nature of time as it integrates with evolution.  A physicist’s insights offered leverage in understanding how the universe unfolds.  By integrating the understanding that speed informed relationship, useful patterns emerged.  I’m thinking a similar process is engaged at the biological level.  The speed of maturation, its rate and timing, informs feature and behavior.

Again, maturation is not just occurring in an individual but, at the macroscale, is engaged in by every individual that ever lived upon the earth.

Whereas velocity in physics features speeds equal to or less than the speed of light, velocity in biology seems related to variation between parent and progeny, and the accumulation of those variations over the number of generations since the first variation emerged.  In physics, we cross space using the speed of light as a grounding variable.  In biology, we cross time using a generation as our basic unit.

When looking for patterns as we seek an answer to how the universe works, we look at the universe as one thing with patterns exhibited throughout that structure.  Perhaps it would be useful to look at earth’s biology as one thing with patterns exhibited throughout the structure.  One such pattern is that the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution are stored within the body of every individual, and each individual is integrated with an environment engaged in the same process as it unfolds in every individual.

I’m not thinking that a description of this process will be anything as crisp as an equation.  Biology is wet.  But there may be a simple song.

An aspect of neoteny just struck me that has never crossed my mind before.  It perhaps suggests a basic principle in evolution.  I’m not sure.

Two days ago, I posted a piece exploring a paradox of recapitulation that focuses on an odd possibility.  When a species is in an accelerated phase and withdraws adult features backward over generations to eventually appear in the infants of descendants, adults may exhibit features of ancient forebears.  If the species lineage had in the past gone through a similar cycle, then that genetic inheritance would have been available, emerging when a similar hormonal disposition became engaged.

Haeckel may have been focused on that very dynamic as he obsessed on recapitulation as a source of new behavioral and physical characteristics.  What strikes me now is that though recapitulation (acceleration) is not considered at this time as a relevant description of evolutionary process, it does seem to be half of a process that results in a seemingly natural biological dynamic that not only withdraws species backward through ontogeny to conception but at the same time carries forward or prolongs features of this planet’s earliest species forward into adults.

There are two waves or currents moving through time.  One takes contemporary species and slowly turns them into future embryos.  The other current takes former species still existing as past and current species embryos and carries them forward into contemporary adults, their second journey though ontogeny, in the opposite direction.  Except, I’m not sure when or where the journeys end.

I find myself nudged to think out of time.  To make sense of this process, I feel encouraged to take time out of the equation of evolution to view evolution as the behavior of a single being.

Perhaps, as in physics, time is a variable when exploring evolution that has to be integrated into theory.  Trying to understand which level that evolution operates at, gene vs. individual vs. species, etc., and arguing over the results, may occur because we have not taken time into consideration when exploring species transformations.

Consider all evolution of life on earth as the behavior of one single being.  Let’s adjust time in the approach we take and instead see only phases of one being.  There is no father and son, nor mother and daughter.  They are the same being at different stages of development.  The death of an individual is a pruning or clipping or sloughing off of a cell or skin.

In this single being, life on earth, there are two strong forces that feed each other content, growing information where information did not formerly exist.  One force slowly takes the features of the current aspect of the being and pushes in backward, downward, earlier and earlier in ontogeny to reproduce species lineages as a sequence in the maturational process.  Human forebears appear in our ontogeny with salamander-like, ancient precursors, manifesting as early embryonic phases.

At the same time, of course, neoteny prolongs embryonic features to appear later and later in ontogeny with a succession of individuals and species.

Deeply peculiar is that the embryonic stages being prolonged to appear later in ontogeny over time are aspects or features of earlier species now recapitulated to appear as embryos.  In other words, and it seems easier to make sense of this if viewed as a single being, evolution involves the emergence of novel features, the “digestion” of those features to appear early in ontogeny, and to have those same features reappear, transformed.

Several things are implied and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around them.

I’m imaging that, over time, there is a back and forth, back and forth of features (and behaviors) as embryonized ancient species rebound to head forward in ontogeny to at some point recapitulate to work their way back down again and then back up.

Second, ontogeny (growth, development and maturation) may be a process characterized by the use and reuse of information as neoteny and acceleration propel features back and forth along the ontogenetic (and species) pathway.  Looking at all life as a single being, I imagine an astonishing compulsion/struggle/play to find ways to capitalize on the information being absorbed.  Shoved forward and backward, past manifestations inform the present.

Third, that which is earliest in our ontogeny, the exponential growth that follows conception, both characterizes the earliest species on the planet and at the same time represents forces struggling to appear later in ontogeny through neoteny.  There is a very real way that the first life on earth that lived long enough to reproduce and create our lineage exists right now, in our body, as the beginning of this individual’s ontogeny.

The content or process of growth after conception (at this moment, thinking out of time, I’m having difficulty separating content from process) IS the very content/process of existence in our ancient forebears.  Time disappears as we realize the past has been integrated into the present in the form of a body that manifests all that has preceded.

Consider this.  We are a highly neotenized species engaged in a neoteny surge featuring a social democratization of creativity with similarities to conception.  Stages of growth immediately following conception are at the same time stages of our planet’s ontogeny.  The planet’s early species are being used to propel individual ontogeny.  As we prolong infant features into adults, exploding creativity into society, horizontilizing culture, we are investing the present with that which invested earliest life with life.

Ontogeny is not just a concept that describes the growth of individuals.  Ontogeny is evolution of life on our planet.  That single life has exhibited many stages, with transformations occurring at many levels, not the least of which is the pulling backward and forward, backward and forward of that which is novel or unique.

Time, when integrated into physics, offered a handle on relations across great distances.  Integrating time into an understanding of biology, treating evolution as the behavior of a single being, may provide biologists an ability to understand a single life.

Rate and timing may be the foundation concepts that tie together the many scales of experience.  Assigning testosterone to rate and estrogen to timing may serve to explain how evolution and societal transformation unfold.  The nineteenth and early twentieth century attention to four-fold parallelisms–biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience–may all be testosterone and estrogen informed via the engine of heterochronic theory.

I came to these studies originally by offering attention to the possibility that human evolution was driven by women’s choices.  With the recent revelation that estrogen may control the timing of maturation rates, it becomes possible that biological evolution in general may be built upon a foundation of testosterone controlling rate and estrogen managing timing.

I’d prefer to call this orchestral evolution rather than heterochronic theory, noting the power of estrogen, in the position of conductor, to control the timing of the unfolding of the production.

A question that has crossed my mind is:  If rate and timing are the foundation principles, and testosterone and estrogen are the particular ways these principles have manifested at the scales of evolution closest to the levels at which we identify, then what might be the levers of influence at other scales of existence?

For example, how does orchestral evolution operate at the cosmic and molecular levels?  What might manage the rate and timing at their scales?  If estrogen and testosterone have such huge influence on at least four scales, then we might surmise that the rate and timing dynamics at other scales may cover several scales at one time.  We might also hypothesize that there could be overlap or an integration of two different rate/timing dynamics at contiguous levels.

For example, let’s say that the velocity of the expanding universe is controlled by a particular variable.  Velocity evidently varies.  That would be our equivalent of testosterone.  Managing the timing of velocity variations would be our equivalent of estrogen.  We might expect, based upon what occurs at the biology/society/ontogeny/biography scale, that what is controlling the rate and timing of the expanding universe influences our universe at other scales.  Information providing pathways to answers might be evident in the way solar systems form or even in how our planet balances the biosphere.

Are there forces that seem to manage the rate and timing of molecular activity?  Because macro and micro seem to so often intersect, could the same rate and timing forces be operating at both the cosmic and atomic levels?  Is there a macro/micro, yang and yin, testosterone/estrogen concomitant?

Many of the spiritual symbols of existence dynamics–the cross, the Star of David, the yin and yang–have two pieces superimposed so that symmetry results.  If evolution can be condensed down to the relationship of the rate and timing of maturation, then perhaps the universe can be understood in a simple fashion.

There is an idea I’ve been wrestling with for several years that I don’t think is going to get resolved by putting it into words, but I still want to describe the conundrum.

Alpheus Hyatt was a contemporary of Darwin. In Hyatt’s view, all species transformations could be explained by acceleration, with the apparent withdrawal or reversion into former stages, neoteny or paedomorphosis, being explained by a natural reemergence of early ontogenetic stages very late in an accelerated process, an exhibition that might be compared to senility in human development.

I’ve hypothesized that humans and many other species evolve over time by delaying and accelerating maturation (influenced by higher and lower levels of testosterone and estrogen).  Both the environment and sexual selection informed by social structure can influence these hormone levels.  Imagine a roller coaster or a snake’s wavering path revealing periods of time in a species’ transformation that evidence relatively high male testosterone, for example, and relatively low male testosterone.  Over time we might observe several peaks of high testosterone, reflected, we might hypothesize, by far more male-against-male control of procreation competition and shorter life spans with higher mortality.

Let’s hypothesize that humans have followed something like this meandering serpentine evolution pathway with lineages revealing a history characterized by sometimes a more matrifocal, gracile, cooperative society vs.  periods featuring a patrifocal, robust, competitive community.  A span of a million years of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens evolution may have had several mild and more severe such roller coaster ups and downs.  Separate lineages would exhibit separate histories, histories that would genetically converge when geographically separated bands of hominids met and merged.

Now, consider that the dynamics of neoteny and acceleration compel a prolonging or withdrawing of features forward or backward, revealing a change in features in descendants over time.  If, over time, your lineage is transforming back and forth between gracile and robust versions, maturationally delaying and accelerating over time, then consider that when impacted by sexual selection or the environment, species are sliding backward and forward along an established maturational trajectory.  In other words, we don’t just mature ontogenetically, delaying or accelerating within a life span.  Our maturation follows a very specific species history, reproducing the roller coaster, serpentine path of evolution.

To a degree, ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, or, to be more exact, ontogeny reenacts our hormonal past.

The conundrum emerges during acceleration and has to do with Hyatt’s observation that perhaps there are features of neoteny that can emerge as a result of acceleration.  I’m not convinced that this is the case, though it is an interesting conjecture.  What has my attention is that if, for example, a male is exhibiting high testosterone and is pushing the envelope regarding his society’s hormonal constellation, does that male then begin exhibiting features of the last time his lineage explored a high testosterone peak?  When there is an established species/lineage maturational experience of high testosterone, do features of the last time it occurred now reappear in the lineage?  In other words, though moving forward in maturational time, withdrawing adult features back toward infancy, can features of ancestors emerge?

This feels like an important question, one that has plagued me for almost a dozen years.  What is suggested is that we as individuals within a species with a maturational pathway history might find ourselves with access to forebear features by both maturationally delaying and maturationally accelerating.

I have already hypothesized (sexualselection.org) that in current human patrifocal social structures, those of us with matrifocal predilections, cooperative males and commanding females, can find ourselves propelled backward by environmental effects, resulting in a return to ancient aboriginal hormonal constellations and neurological structures.  Further decreasing male testosterone or increasing female testosterone can result in a slide backward in time down the lineage roller coaster.  This is because I estimate males have become less neotenous over the last 50,000 years while females have become more neotenous as we have shifted from matrifocal to patrifocal social structures.  Paradoxically, evolving forward can also be to evolve backward.  Forward and backward become somewhat difficult to discern when evaluating evolution as a maturational condition that features movement along an established track.

What is at issue is that it is not clear to me that acceleration, when pushing the limits of what we can easily hormonally tolerate, doesn’t also propel individuals and species backward.  This seems like classic Haeckelian recapitulation.  Not only are adult features drawn backward in ontogeny over time, but features emerge that echo features of the past.

Although it feels like this is almost making sense, it still doesn’t quite click and come together.  By maturationally delaying, we bring new features into ontogeny, yet by accelerating or withdrawing features backward, we regress to manifest ancestor adult traits in contemporary youth.  Yet, the same thing can happen with neoteny.  Ancestor infant traits can appear in adult contemporaries and we slide backward, compelled by hormone changes, to a past that reveals neotenous characteristics.

It seems to me that Tourette’s syndrome may be explained to some degree by these conjectures.  Individuals experiencing acceleration may be presented with features exhibited by ancient forebears.  Whereas a male with decreasing testosterone may show autistic tendencies, a male with increasing testosterone may reveal Tourette’s tendencies, the difference between ancient gracile and ancient robust hormonal constellations.

The fog-filled roller coaster pathway that got us to where we are leaves many questions as to how this process works.  Perhaps with time this fog will lift.