Every once in a while, when I receive a complimentary email regarding my theory, the emailer notes how complex it is.  It feels to me at this point like my job is making the theory easily understandable.  A problem is that as I seek to refine an explanation, new aspects get revealed and the theory deepens.  I can see how others interpret deepenings as additions in complexity.  I experience the deepenings as new subtleties revealed.  It’s not clear to me how to tell this story so that the meaning is clear.  I expect I’ll have to tell it in many ways and see what sticks.

Several of the concepts seem unfamiliar to Western ears.  Perhaps the most confounding is that to understand human evolution, a transformation characterized by a change in consciousness, it is useful that the theorist have at least a working definition of what exactly “consciousness” is.  I suggest that just stating that consciousness is a contingent or accidental result of a process, and it can be ignored as if not relevant to the transformation, is a little odd.  Also, there are the theorists that do say that consciousness is integral to how we evolved, but they often neglect to define it except as exhibiting self awareness.  Almost all theories exclude a larger consciousness, also excluding that understanding that the unconscious is integral to human evolution.  I presuppose that understanding consciousness is integral to understanding how humans evolved, and I posit a working definition grounded on Gregory Bateson’s interpretation of Freud’s primary process.  For some folks, I think, this makes my theory complicated.

I am now calling my theory “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  I had called it “Shift Theory” for 11 years, and last year I called it “The Theory of Waves.”  Perhaps the most unique and difficult feature of my theory is the understanding that maturation is integral to understanding evolution.  Evolution is a multiscale process occurring at many, if not all, scales of experience.  Exploring the dynamics of maturation, we at the same time grasp evolution.  I examine patterns in a discipline or evolutionary scale by watching, listening or feeling for patterns that reveal a carrying forward of younger stages into older stages over time, or the carrying backward of older stages into younger stages.  At the four scales we live in–biology, society, ontogeny and psychology/biography–I hypothesize that maturation is guided by changing levels of testosterone and estrogen as social structure and environmental influences affect those levels.  I enter a discipline seeking evidence that maturation dynamics are having an effect on outcomes.  If I see the effects, I reverse engineer the cause.  Then I make predictions.

This feels simple to me.  Nevertheless, it seems not simple to explain.  One of the reasons it is not simple to explain is that to deeply grasp the paradigm, it is useful to be able to at least conceptually give up personal identity and relieve oneself of the idea of narrative time.  To follow evolutionary or maturational patterns across barriers of scale, it helps if time and identity are flexible.  Again, familiarity with concepts of consciousness influence understanding of process and structure.  There is a way that this “Orchestral Theory of Evolution” seems to be informed by physics in that not only is time relative, but so is individuality or personal identity.

An agendaless consciousness is embraced as a feature of the system.  One of the reasons that consciousness is integrated into the theory is that when time becomes relative and identity is in play, there emerges a powerful experience of feeling part of something larger than the self.  In other words, when it becomes easy to understand the theory, when its premises are grasped, connections among disciplines become relatively easy to see.  An alternative experience of self emerges that suggests that consciousness is not a contingent accident of human evolution, or even that which propelled evolution, but is simply a feature of the system.

If what is required to understand a theory this “complex” is a shift in identity and understanding of time, I can see why this feels complicated to people.  It is my opinion that a theory is really only useful when it offers an alternative way of perceiving experience, providing answers where they were not obvious before.  But, more than being able to provide answers (for example, “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” purports to explain some forms of autism), a theory such as this, I hope, provides a foundation from which to interpret experience.

I am hoping that the user of “The Orchestral Theory” will not only be provided answers but will achieve the ability or leverage to create theories that offer useful explanations.

I went to my grammar school’s 42nd year reunion this last October, the first one my class has had.  It was at the Cubby Bear in Lincolnshire.

I’ve kept in touch with several friends from that period in my life, but when I walked into the party room I saw none of them.  There was a room of about 60 people.  None of them looked familiar.  Dozens of strangers I had supposedly spent a sizable chunk of my life with.

Before driving there, I resolved to keep conversations on the present, and to some degree, away from profession.  I wanted to stay away from hierarchy posturing and the successes we’ve had in life.  It worked.  It worked in no small part because that seemed to be the frame of reference adapted by most people in the room.  These were people humbled by life.  They were nearing retirement age, and there were few signs of people seeking struggle.

We talked about our kids, their finishing college and the professions they were choosing.  There was some talk about the difficulty of the economy.

Posted on the wall were pictures of each student at eighth grade graduation, and at one point I closely studied them.  I needed to have my mind refreshed regarding the people with whom I was talking.  The faces, and particularly the bodies of the people in the room, were totally unfamiliar to me.  I found while in conversation that physical mannerisms and unique verbal affectations were jogging my memory.  Memories were coming back in the form of what made individuals unique.  This was the most interesting discovery of the evening.  Faces had changed.  Bodies had changed.  Voices had changed.  Mannerisms were familiar.

Of the dozen boys I had hung out with most from kindergarten to eighth grade, one was there.  Three were dead.  The rest didn’t come in for the event.

I did not talk to girls in grammar school.  I sat in the back of classrooms, never asked questions and rushed through assignments so I could go back to drawing.  My friends were the boys that lived nearby.  So, at the reunion, there were few girls I could talk with and share memories.

I was aware of only three girls those nine years at Central School.  Martha did not come.  She still emerges in my dreams.  I was in love with Martha all those nine years.  I was terrified of talking with her.  I yearned for Martha, a longing that deeply informed my personality.

Betsy I was aware of but not in love with.  I walked up and introduced myself.  She couldn’t remember me.  I tried to jog her memory by describing my second grade birthday party.  She and Martha were the only girls invited.  John, my only friend from that period at the reunion, remembered the party in detail.  Betsy remembered Martha and John with enthusiasm.  She could not place me.  She seemed confused.  Betsy and I were in the same class of about 30 kids for nine years.  I’d discovered someone with a memory as bad as mine.

Myla, the first girl I had ever asked out on a date, walked up to me.  I didn’t know she’d be there.  Myla, anomalously, looked very much the same.  We began talking.  At that point, the live band cranked up.  To hear her, I had to place my left (good) ear in front of her mouth to hear her words.  I listened to her descriptions of her son while I was looking at our feet.

I felt delighted to be in conversation with her.  It was the highlight of the evening.

Myla is the World Bank official responsible for a sizable chunk of Europe.  In high school, I had asked her to go to a movie, If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium, and she had said yes.  We took the train from Glencoe to Highland Park.  I was 16 then and still hadn’t figured out how to talk to girls.  My former closest friend, Paul, had been in love with Myla for half of forever.  I talked about Paul.  She wasn’t sure who Paul was.  Paul was not at the reunion.  He recently died of Parkinson’s.

What is it about girls not noticing the shy guys?

Strangely, I had never been in love with Myla (Martha had that locked up), but I was not scared of her.  She was perhaps the only white girl I was not scared of.  I think I was not scared of the black girls because there was no societal expectation that intimacy was possible.  I remember at those weird dance classes where we’d practice ballroom steps I’d ask the black girls to dance, less worried that my advances would be interpreted as my wanting a relationship.  I was terrified girls would think I liked them.  (Things change.  My African-American stepson is now 37 with a daughter whose mother is white.)

The reunion was low-key, enjoyable and strange.  It was odd to see enthusiasm and innocence transformed into fatigue, mild delight and sadness.  The music grew so loud that conversation became impossible.  I left after a couple hours.  I took a wrong turn on the way home and ended up in Chicago.  Arriving home, Marcia asked me how it was.

It was good.

Maturity is not the same as progress.  To pass through a series of ontological stages evidencing the look, sound and behavior of the personal epochs that have been experienced is not progress.  It is life.

All mixed up in contemporary theorizing are three things:  the exact nature and difference between that which transforms over time that is changing as a result of random interconnections, that which is changing as a result of progress or improvement over time and that which is changing as part of a larger pattern of maturation.

Evolutionary biology tends to take the position that evolution follows Darwin’s wedges metaphor, with every feature of every being emerging as a direct or indirect result of what is necessary to survive to procreate.  Features acquired by individuals are random, unconnected to the environment or the parents’ experience, making random feature survival the central focus of evolution.  There is no such thing as progress.  There is no larger picture to inform what survives to procreate.

Society, religion and spirituality tend to focus on the idea that either we are on a pathway toward improvement or we are not.  Those saying not are often atheists, and often they find themselves sympathizing with the evolutionists.  Those allying themselves with the idea that things are getting better by design, whether deity-inspired or not, view society as an unfolding that will eventually end up somewhere that most would interpret as a good place.  With our science grounded in Wallace and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, there is often a not-so-subtle split between science and society perspectives.

The third path is an understanding of evolution or progress, which is not well understood.  Perhaps the primary reason there is confusion is that this third path suggests a “deistic” insight, though there is no deity.  The third path describes evolution as a dynamic that reveals a larger pattern, one characterized by interconnections over time and space, a dynamic that posits concepts of maturity as integral to understanding evolution.

Maturation is not about progress.  Maturation is a succession of stages over the course of time.  A baby is not more or less evolved, more or less good than an adult or any other stage of maturity.  No single stage of maturity is worse or better, more or less evolved than any other stage.  All stages are part of a single continuum.

The same holds true regarding evolution.  Species evolution reveals a vast, complex dance of maturation, with individuals maturing within lineages maturing within societies within species within larger systems.  Maturation at the biological level is influenced by an almost infinite number of environmental variables hypothetically managing the rates and timing of evolution through testosterone and estrogen.  Metamorphosis at the biological, societal, ontological and personal levels are all occurring according to the demands of the environment and social structure, far from random interpretations of change.

It’s not about a random universe and random evolution.  It’s not about progress and the march toward the betterment of all.  It is about shifting scales and seeing how we as individuals, maturing as who we are, while we are who we are, is the exact same process engaged in by society, biology, and possibly, the universe.

Maturation is a pattern that repeats across all scales of existence, featuring the carrying forward of creation toward cessation (neoteny) and the carrying backward of cessation toward creation (acceleration).  I’m thinking that this is a natural dynamic, and it’s just how stuff works, a principle or law of existence.  Characteristics of embryos, youth, infants, creation, everything associated with beginnings slowly make their way forward through successive stages of whatever scale we happen to be examining until traits associated with beginnings approach the end.  At the same time, features of adults, old timers, the mature, and the end of systems make their way backward through successive stages of whatever scale we choose to explore until characteristics of endings advance upon the start.

Tracing these patterns over time is the study of many of our science disciplines.  Nevertheless, our science practitioners are bereft of a larger picture.  They are without an intuition that maturation is a feature of the larger system, revealing smaller patterns that a discipline explores.  These are patterns having nothing to do with progress but which nevertheless exhibit predictable outcomes.

What is missing in our explorations is the insight that there is no such thing as narrative time.  Humans have a unique ability to exercise imagination.  We confuse an ability to be two places at once and a seeming ability to examine time with the assumption that time is examinable.  Time can be experienced, not examined.  What we are missing is that each of us individually is actually every time we have ever been.  There is no progress or improving.  There is the moment.  The societal, religious and spiritual paths that suggest that progress is underway are mixing up location on the path with the path as a whole.  The path as a whole is about maturation.  There is no worse or better place to be on that path.

Maturity is not the same as progress.  To pass through a series of ontological stages evidencing the look, sound and behavior of the epochs we have experienced is not just a result of natural selection.  It is life.

One of the paradoxes of contemporary anthropology is the hesitation to examine different societies as different stages on an evolutionary trajectory.  For those of you that visit this blog relatively regularly, you know that I can’t be conversant in as many disciplines as I purport to know something about.  I skim disciplines, looking for patterns that transcend disciplines.  This may be one of those places where current trends make what I am about to say make little sense.  Nevertheless, what familiarity I have with anthropology suggests that the default natural selection frame of reference is almost useless when discussing humans.

In an effort to display equanimity, theorists have mostly purged from theorizing the early discipline prejudices that Western civilization was more “evolved” than non-Western or aboriginal societies.  Two things got stripped during the purging process, and they have inhibited contemporary theorizing.

First, the word “evolve” has come to mean progress, or trend in a positive direction.  This was not Darwin’s definition, nor is it the definition usually used by current evolutionary biologists.  A result has been that there is an enormous epistemological muddle as regards what exactly evolution is.  Because a judgment accompanies the definition of “evolution” that suggests that anything more evolved is an improvement, evolution is often neglected as a powerful principle in anthropology.  To suggest that one type of society evolves into another is to suggest that the second society is “better” than its predecessor.

I’m suggesting that it would be useful to reintegrate evolution into anthropology, but by using principles just emerging.  Evolutionary developmental biological concepts of evolution as deeply informed by and informing early ontogeny or womb dynamics (in combination with an understanding of how endocrinology integrates with social structure) may go a long way toward explaining how societies change.

The second thing purged from anthropological theorizing that characterized early contributions to the field is the idea that different disciplines are connected and that different scales of experience are allied.  This is perhaps another reason why evolution theory has not intuitively guided anthropological theorizing.  One hundred years ago there existed what has been called threefold and fourfold parallelisms connecting theorists in the disciplines serving biology, society, embryology/ontogeny and psychology.  Academics borrowed concepts from one another, experiencing a connection among disciplines as they observed evolutionary principles playing across a vast array of patterns.

A combination of several factors dampened that atmosphere.  Reductionism focused on variables that could easily be controlled.  There was less support for induction-based, big-picture connections.  The continued purge of patrifocal mythology from deistic or religious interpretations of experience encouraged an atheism that tended to see the world in pieces rather than in wholes.  With the purging of Western religion from Western theorizing, there seemed to be a vast, flat plane of religious practices occurring in thousand of societies, none seemingly more “evolved” than another, though trends were noted that seemed to suggest natural progressions of religious beliefs.

My work focuses on an understanding of anthropology as driven by the same dynamic that drives evolutionary biology.  By revisiting evolution as it influences humans, guided by an alternative “synthesis” that integrates embryology, social structure, neuropsychology and endocrinology into the synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, it is my opinion that anthropology can again be usefully explored from an evolutionary perspective.

Evolution is often reflexively considered inappropriate when approaching anthropology.  The synthesis I’ve been playing with struggles against the definition of “evolution” that means progress and suggests evolution can be examined using a parallelism paradigm.

We have a tradition of creating barriers to understanding.  It would be useful if we just assumed everything evolves.

I’m a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist by profession, in addition to running a web development firm.  This is in no small part due to the fact that SEO requires little technical expertise.  I’m one of those people that never did figure out a VCR, has trouble with cell phones and is easily stymied by unfamiliar technology.  My running a successful web development firm is based on my having a superb staff and a solid business model based upon serving very small businesses.

In 2002, I figured out Google’s algorithm, long before the competition, pretty much by chance.  I was immersed in creating web directories.  My firm’s website achieved position #1 for “web site design” and maintained that position for over a year.  I was getting top ten spots for items such as “lingerie,” “mortgage” and “airplane tickets.”  By achieving such high positions, the firm was bringing in many clients.  At the time, I had a two-person firm, minuscule compared to my competition.  On November 15, 2004, Google made a dramatic adjustment in its algorithm, penalizing what it had been formerly encouraging.  My expertise dramatically diminished.  To reproduce what I had accomplished would take resources a two-person firm did not have.

At the height of my ability to quickly achieve high rankings for client sites, I conducted a Google search for a paragraph of text on the home page of my firm’s web design site to see how many other design firms had decided to steal wholesale my text so that their site could hypothetically achieve high Google positions.  Over 200 design firms had taken my home page text with no adjustments.

They were not aware that the text was of relatively no importance.  It was all about the websites linking to the page that they were stealing the text from.  This is common knowledge now, but it wasn’t in 2002.

This comes to mind because in this website, neoteny.org, there are concepts, ideas, principles, theories and paradigms that I would like to have stolen or permanently borrowed.  Having had the experience of having my productions hauled away willy-nilly, I’m wondering what the best way is to reproduce that experience as regards my thoughts and theories.  Posting a Creative Commons license allowing visitors to use posted text in whatever way they choose may have some effect.  What is at issue here is the best way to distribute unique content, information more commonly disseminated in an academic context than in an amateur’s horizontal, web-based world.

I have felt deeply gratified by the many people that have posted comments and emailed me from off this blog.  Receiving those responses has been a deeply rewarding experience.  How best do I encourage this?

In my life, I have chosen not to join an academic discipline and get a Ph.D.  Nevertheless, I seek ways to share what I feel passion for.  What does not appear on journal pages has difficulty being taken seriously.  Academic attention will not come.  But, I do seek opportunities to engage in discussion regarding what I find fulfilling to explore, and I seek alliances that encourage the possibility that those portions of my work that may offer usefulness have an opportunity to prove that this is so.

I’m a web marketing expert, so my theory websites get respectable traffic, several hundred unique visitors a day.  Over one million unique visitors in 11 years have visited my sites.  Still, I’m looking for more interaction, more discussion, more opportunity to share experiences.

In academia, one struggles to achieve a position that makes sharing possible.  In business, one struggles to keep from being ripped off.  In this new horizontal paradigm, one struggles to be relieved of what’s been created.

Relieve me.

That I might have featured Asperger’s when I was young never crossed my mind until this year.  I’d been studying autism for 12 years.  Working for 12 years with the thesis that testosterone informed the rate of maturation, it never struck me that estrogen might manage the timing until last winter when I discovered I’d been causally considering it for a couple of weeks.  My creative process is an artistic process that often features a conscious mind just along for the ride.  There are similarities between those of us living lives deeply informed by the creative process and those that this society calls autistic.

Understanding autism is at the heart of this orchestral theory of evolution.  If this theory does explain how autism emerges and offers interventions that can improve the lives of those that feel inhibited by the condition, then there is the chance that several dozen conditions and diseases may be addressed by using the principles outlined in this work.  My premise is that autism is a condition that features male maturational delay and, in females, acceleration.  Social structure, neurological anomalies and endocrinological differences are all integral to autism and Asperger’s etiology.   By adjusting our theory of evolution to take into consideration how exactly maturation rates and timing are influenced by social structure and the environment, the causes of autism and the causes of a number of other conditions and diseases are possibly made clear.

Autism does not have just one cause.  Perhaps there are several different etiologies and autism will acquire several different names when the different causes are uncovered.  The particular evolutionary dynamic I describe in this work describes exactly how one kind of autism emerges, under what circumstances and in which kinds of families.  I focus on three specific causes of autism that are directly connected to an underlying evolutionary matrix, a collection of processes that influence physical and mental health in a number of areas.  Though I concentrate on autism, this work represents a new theory of medical etiology, removing natural selection from its present station as all that doctors know.  In its place, I offer a number of tools that have the potential to make medical diagnosis an evolutionary intervention.  Consider that if we understand that how we treat our bodies and what we are exposed to compel the evolutionary trajectory of progeny, with repercussions for both ourselves and our children, then understanding health becomes the same as how we choose to evolve.

There are three main variables that impact autism.  This blog discusses contemporary changes in social structure, environmental influences and the blending of two parents with no recent common forebears.

Social structure is huge.  Contemporary theorists have been blind to the effects of an emerging matrifocal society.  They are so focused on what seems the default convention, patrifocal social structure.  The mind blindness described by Baron-Cohen that offers a window to understanding autism serves as a societal metaphor when it comes to understanding that patrifocal social structure is but one of two primary social structure paradigms.  Blind to the emergence of the power of women in contemporary society, we don’t notice the repercussions of that change.  The delay of maturation in males is one such repercussion.  I describe specifically how this happens.

There are at least eight variables that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen, often changing those levels differently, if not in opposite fashions, in men and women.  Changing uterine testosterone levels impacts maturation rates, delaying or accelerating the lifelong maturation rates of progeny.  Adjusting estrogen levels has the potential to impact the timing of maturation processes, resulting in dramatically different neurological structure.  This work explores how changes in environmental variables influence autism, Asperger’s and other conditions.

Darwin noted that mated variants of the roc pigeon, bred separately in China and Europe over 2,000 years, created chicks that revealed features of their 2,000-year-old roc pigeon progenitor.  Modern breeders combine variants that are not closely related in order to create “hybrid vigor,” bringing forward some of the strength of ancestors.  If humans acquired facility with spoken language at about the same time we departed Africa, then mating ethnic persuasions that have had almost no contact over many thousands of years may produce children revealing features of their last common ancestor.  This may result in gifted progeny like Barack Obama.  It may also lead to children with difficulty speaking or who are unable to achieve split consciousness without the kind of guidance and stimuli that their ancestors received.

I am proposing that autism is a social condition that is impacted by the environment.  By understanding autism, not only can we grasp how humans evolved, but we can form a deeper understanding around what it is to be human.  If an understanding of consciousness is integral to understanding evolution, and if this orchestral theory of evolution satisfactorily defines the variables that have impact, then autism is a good place to begin as we seek a way to make this theory useful.

I expect that if this new theory I am presenting here is embraced by enough interested individuals, it will evolve to something different as the criteria that a theory be useful propels practitioners in new directions.  It is important that a theory be fun.  If it’s fun, then we have our unconscious invested and aboard.  With the unconscious as guide, the theory will change.  Consciousness is all about creation.

A foundation of this work is the power of sexual selection and social structure to inform biological and social evolution.  Integrating sexual selection and social structure with heterochronic theory, neuropsychology and endocrinology makes it possible for these components to comprise a synthesis I’m calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  One way to explain how these seemingly different disciplines integrate is to explore them in enough detail, one at a time, so that depicting how different languages are describing the same process makes sense intuitively.

In the case of sexual selection, I have the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) to detail what I am thinking.  Miller doesn’t believe neoteny influences human evolution in an important way.  Miller is an evolutionary psychologist.  He believes that the simpler explanation is likely more useful.  Nevertheless, Miller adroitly describes human evolution impacted by sexual selection.  My variation of Miller’s thesis is as follows:

1) Natural selection
2) Sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) Human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) Art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) Awareness of the selection, or creative, process

I believe that a familiarity with social structure is integral to understanding the power of sexual selection to propel these transitions.  Implied is a hierarchy, or meta-evolution, of evolutionary processes, beginning with natural selection.  Sexual selection follows natural selection.  Where it gets particularly interesting is when human sexual selection begins a focus on novelty or aesthetics, probably in the form of rhythm and dance.  What we call culture, step 4, represents a sexualization of experience, with a focus on novelty itself becoming assigned to experience.  Symbol itself, language, emerges from sexual selection rhythm-and-dance grounded rituals to become what we call culture, but it probably is in no small way almost all about procreation.  Step 5 emerges when we split consciousness beings begin to integrate our two separated selves, becoming aware of the relationship between consciousness, sexuality and the creative process.

This five-step process is a slimmed-down explanation of the evolution of evolutionary process, concentrating on sexual selection in particular.  I believe this to be a useful abbreviation because it offers a cogent doorway into the integration that this work seeks to share.  Over the course of this blog I step in and out of the central thesis of this work from several doorways, hoping the reader will acquire a feeling for the music that guides this work, like one who is learning dance steps.  Though I have described this thesis as subtle and complex, like a work of Bach, it is mostly a case of the theory just feeling unfamiliar.  Bach, complex, nevertheless can feel familiar.  Experiencing human evolution as a five-step dance is one way we can move to evolution’s music.

“Before Agassiz, recapitulation had been defined as a correspondence between two series: embryonic stages and adults of living species.  Agassiz introduced a third series: the geologic record of fossils.  An embryo repeats both a graded series of living, lower forms and the history of its type as recorded by fossils.  There is a “threefold parallelism” of embryonic growth, structural gradation, and geologic succession.  ‘It may therefore be considered as a general fact, very likely to be more fully illustrated as investigations cover a wider ground, that the phases of development of all living animals correspond to the order to succession of their extinct representatives in past geological times.  As far as this goes, the oldest representatives of every class may then be considered as embryonic types of their respective orders of familiar among the living.’”  (1857, 1962 ed., p. 114)  (Stephen J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge:  Belknap Press, 1977), pp. 65-66.)

Stephen J. Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny lies at the heart of many of the interconnecting concepts of this thesis.  Ontogeny and Phylogeny made sense of many of the disciplines I’d been studying for many years, showing how evolutionary theory informs many levels of experience.  Central to Gould’s thesis was the work of the Neo-Lamarckian heterochronists that explored how evolution manifested at several scales represented by several emerging science disciplines and those theorists’ influence on discipline founders such as Freud and Piaget.  Recapitulation was integral to an understanding of how many academics viewed the world.

Recapitulation, or more specifically, Haeckel’s thesis that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, has been set aside as a theory that if not totally disproven, is a theory that is not useful when exploring how species evolve.  Haeckel behaved as though obsessed with what he called acceleration, or ancestor adult features emerging in descendant young.  Theorists a hundred years ago often focused on a particular heterochronic dynamic as the prime mover and shaker of species transformation.  Many of these theorists carried a presupposition that evolution occurs at several contiguous levels or scales, informed by one of these particular heterochronic processes, often recapitulation.  This blog’s orchestral theory of evolution instead posits a balance of process, featuring both neoteny and acceleration, a process that manifests at the biological, social, ontogenetic and personal scales of experience, informed by testosterone and estrogen, driven by social structure and the environment.

The proponents of Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection, a theory of natural selection that rejected sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, also rejected Haeckel’s Lamarckian-grounded work that focused on a close relationship between ontogeny and species evolution.  It is Wallace’s world view we embrace today.  Darwin was a pluralist.  Wallace was a reductionist (with the exception that he believed that deity intervened to create the brain).  The current Neo-Darwinian era has focused on how answers provided by other theories could be instead explained by the theory of natural selection.  If natural selection could explain it, the others answers were ignored.

Rather than continuing to ignore theories that seem redundant to a more elegant solution, I am returning to a world view characterized by an attraction to observing what may at first seem like unrelated processes in different scales and disciplines.  Over the last 150 years, we have divided the scales of experience into different academic disciplines and subdisciplines, dramatically increasing the difficulty of intuiting similarities, particularly when different languages and nomenclatures have emerged.  Part of the process of forming the theory that this work represents has been to dive into several different disciplines to draw out isomorphisms or similar patterns that reveal hidden, common structure and process.

There are benefits.  Again, presupposition can be a powerful tool when swimming in unfamiliar waters.  An ontological discovery can illuminate a species’ evolutionary process, and vice versa.  A species’ evolutionary dynamic can offer a social transformation insight.  A personal revelation in one’s own life may reveal an ontological connection.  This work explores the usefulness of viewing species evolution, social transformation, growth maturation and development, and personal experience as deeply informing one another’s experience.

Parallelisms run rife through culture.  Still, science has difficulty growing in directions that society and politics don’t suggest.  For example, without the recent (over the last 200 years) idea of progress it would be difficult to hypothesize patterns of transformation over time.  The reverse is true.  In the West, we are so narrative/sequence time-based that it is difficult to evaluate processes that occur at several levels in a single moment.  Hence our blanking out as a society to the understanding that biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience are all integrally tied in the moment we occupy, a moment profoundly affected by the environment.

Biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience are not just closely tied; they are the same thing viewed with adjustments in time and scale.  Reductionists have become obsessed with how things are divided.  By offering our attention to how seemingly different scales of experience reflect one another’s process and influence one another’s behaviors, we can begin to understand relationships intuited by theorists a century ago.

By presupposing that consciousness or our relationship with consciousness is integral to the kind of evolutionary theory we can create, this work seeks to make part of the equation of our theorizing the actual way that we theorize.  Many Neo-Darwinists make direct correlations between their interpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and a materialist, atheistic world view, making it clear that a theory featuring randomness supports a world view with no mythology.  I also make connections between theory and a world view with no mythology, except my understanding of the world is informed by presupposing interconnection.

This interconnection that I presuppose can be described as consciousness or awareness.  I assign consciousness to everything that exhibits life.  I consider it possible that consciousness is a feature of all that exists and does not exist.  I sometimes explore if presupposing this to be the case offers any insight regarding the assigning of biological principles to a cosmic scale.  Significant to this work is the hypothesis that human beings are split conscious beings, and that this split consciousness can be explored in detail.

By assuming that life exhibits consciousness, embracing consciousness as integral to understanding life and evolution, and distinguishing human consciousness as a unique form of consciousness that displays as a twin or two, I break down and describe that which is unique about human evolution.  We are split consciousness beings (after we have grown past infancy, and while we’re awake) that have abandoned primary process (one time, one place, no opposites) to revel in language and imagination.  We live in a world of stacked associations, barely able to experience waking life outside the context of our ability to manufacture experience.  This is a function of our being able to be two places at once, two times at once, and being able to imagine something’s opposite.  This is because we maintain two consciousnesses.  This is directly related to how we evolved and the particular ways our brains were influenced by that evolution.

I offer a hypothesis describing how this came about and the useful implications of this premise.  It is a hypothesis that bridges biology and society and offers interventions for a number of conditions and diseases.  I am both suggesting that what we describe as unique human self awareness is understandable and not so special while at the same time celebrating this particular way that we are unique.  Consciousness is ubiquitous.  Split consciousness is unique.  Nevertheless, for most of us, it feels like it is the other way around.

Thomas Kuhn describes those unique situations when a science discipline experiences a shift.  Shifts occur in different ways.  One way that a shift happens is when a new presupposition introduces new information that offers an almost completely alternative frame of reference and new world view.  Everything seems to look different with the new presupposition.  The established presupposition, by not embracing the new presuppositions, can continue in a kind of alternative universe.  The question becomes:  Which presuppositional matrix is more useful for which particular outcomes?  Asking which paradigm is true is not a useful question.

Darwin expressed deep distress and consternation that his theory of natural selection was instrumental in the discussion of whether god existed.  Indeed, his fears were reasonable, and we might say that society has shifted as a result of its acceptance of the theory.  This work operates with a different thesis.  It is an integration of all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of theorists that immediately followed.  This orchestral theory of evolution is an alternative frame of reference and a new world view.  Nevertheless, it has roots going back thousands of years, with connections to the work of many contemporary theorists.  Try on this work like a winter overcoat in a blizzard of reductionist premises and feel if spring might seem to be coming a little closer.  If my hypotheses offer little usefulness in your experience, return it to the idea manufacturer.

Although this work draws upon the research and experiments conducted by scientists for centuries, there is a radical departure from trends initiated and supported over this long period of time.  This is a paradigm that unites contemporary theorizing with features carried forward from aboriginal frames of reference.  Just as neoteny in biology carries forward ancestor infant features to adult descendants, this work carries forward ancient aboriginal processes to inform contemporary pattern recognition.  Another way to say it is that this is a work of both my unconscious and conscious minds, associating the unconscious with primary process, primary process being central to the daytime consciousness of our aboriginal forebears.  In other words, this is a work of play.

As will be explored in detail in several sections of this work in the upcoming compilation, understanding consciousness is integral to understanding human and biological evolution.  Presupposing that everything is connected is to regard one’s relationship with consciousness as fundamental to a theory of evolution.  In other words, philosophy, or how we relate to spirituality, has been considered integral to an understanding of how we come to evolutionary theory conclusions.  This is what Darwin feared, that evolution and one’s opinion of spirituality be closely tied.  I would suggest that it is more useful to step into such an evolutionary theory discussion and make it clear how theorizing is informed by one’s relationship with connection or not connection, seemingly deistic or material perspectives.  I’m hoping that we can then discuss what is useful, not what’s true.

The atheism-advocating Neo-Darwinians are right that evolution theory is directly tied to a deity or nondeity frame of reference.  This theory of evolution is grounded in an alternative, still nonmythology-based, point of view.  I would suggest that maintaining a relativistic frame is essential while navigating between these two paradigms.  The atheists proclaim that truth is relevant.  I think not.  I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not as regards evolutionary theory.  What I find interesting is whether behaving as if there is that which connects everything offers theorizing advantages.

The potential advantages are twofold.  First, are the results of this theory useful?  I concentrate on the origins of autism and related conditions and a variety of diseases and conditions that may be explained by this work’s perspective.  For example, does this theory usefully explain autism and provide avenues to enhance the autistics’ experience?  Does this theory provide parents choices before and during pregnancy, making it possible for the condition to emerge in less burdening forms?

Second, is the theorizing process itself enhanced by behaving as if everything is connected?  Unlike Huxley’s revelation regarding the simplicity of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the principles and processes outlined in this orchestral theory of evolution are characterized by a complex, subtle yet elegant, interconnected whole that I would consider impossible to create without a presupposition that everything is connected.  What we presuppose influences the world we perceive.  This work represents a shift both in theory and how a theory is constructed as it shifts back to nonmaterialistic perspectives while shifting forward to nonmythological interconnection.  I’m interested in the deistic without the deity.

This work began almost 15 years ago when I disappeared down a rabbit hole where I was studying the origins of dragon and serpent mythologies in matrifocal cultures that came before the Indo-Europeans.  It was an art and writing project that involved my creating a book of dragons, treating the various dragons and dragon-like mythological beings as species within a genus, exploring them biologically and socially.  I became intimate with the religions, mythologies and social structures of ancient aboriginal societies and early civilizations at the root of dragon myths.  I found myself living and breathing ancient air, viewing, listening to, and feeling the world in a different way.

This alternative path features a world view that presupposes connection.  Studying ancient matrifocal society, I was introduced to an experience characterized by an immanent presence rather than a separated, transcendental god.  Interconnection is presupposed.  The individual is part of a larger process.

These themes are, of course, reemerging in contemporary times through a number of avenues, including Eastern practices, drugs, group art/aesthetics such as dance and chanting, and aboriginal spiritual paths.  I was exploring the origin of dragon myths, discovering the cultural heritage of societies that had their myths and familiars demonized by conquering patrifocal societies.  I found myself exploring origins of culture from a very non-Western frame of reference.  Studying the origins of dragon mythology led me to a study of the earliest origin of myth.  Serpents were some of the first carved images that emerged, which led to an exploration of what exactly happened when culture exploded just before, during or after the African diaspora.  Studying serpent mythology led directly to a study of consciousness and the origin of culture.

I was immersed in a different presuppositional matrix from that which characterizes most contemporary theorizing.  Presupposing that everything is connected, assuming that human evolution featured our thriving in a matrifocal context until the emergence of proto Indo-Europeans, herding societies and the larger agriculture-based communities, I found myself asking questions that I wasn’t sure had been asked before.

The question which broke things open was:  If brains had been growing smaller for the last 25,000 years and if we had been transitioning from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame, then might there be remnants of those ancient matrifocal aboriginals featuring a larger brain and difficulty with language?  The answer was that many autistics have larger brains, their right hemisphere never having diminished in size, and they often have a neurological difficulty with speaking.

I had presupposed that humans had evolved while living in matrifocal societies.  I had also presupposed that seemingly noncontiguous disciplines might be directly connected, particularly the sciences studying mythology, consciousness, evolution, neuropsychology, anthropology and social transformation.  Perhaps most importantly, I presupposed that integrating the immanent goddess of the ancient aboriginals, featuring an experience of all things being connected, with the narrative, often split, consciousness of the patrifocal societies that followed offered a useful synthesis when seeking to understand how humans evolved and how to describe this evolution.

Those that are good with children can often think/feel like children.  To be good at theorizing human origins, I am suggesting that it is useful to experience those early evolutionary states.  This work seeks to offer useful interventions in a number of different areas.  I am hypothesizing that it is useful to presuppose connection and matrifocal origins when seeking to understand how we came to be.

Explorations of societies displaying matriarchal, or matrifocal, tendencies often struggle with a definition that will adjust to very different examples of the paradigm.  Often, a woman’s exercise of authority within a culture can be profound but not obvious, as if there were an agreement that men look like they are in control.  There are different areas where authority manifests such as home, work, market, social situations.  Female authority may vary depending on the context.  Shared authority can look very different in different societies.

What I am calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” is a feminine theory of evolution insofar as both sexes share the ability to inform change and both foundation hormones have profound impact.  “Feminine” suggests sharing and cooperation.  In the context of evolutionary theory, a feminine paradigm is a cooperative paradigm with both a male and female command of process.

Nevertheless, from our Western perspective, provide a woman any control in a hierarchical context where men have traditionally called the shots, and the female anomaly often receives negative attention.  Evolutionary theory traditionally focuses on the male.  Some exceptions with a focus on the female have emerged over the last 40 years, mostly from female theorists, but so long as our primary paradigm is Darwin’s theory of natural selection supporting survival of traits emerging in a random context, the female cooperative-and-sharing paradigm is framed in a male, competitive milieu.

Part of what is wholly new in what I am presenting is a balanced female/male perspective.  I place a heavy emphasis on the impact of those environmental and social structure influences that adjust levels of estrogen and testosterone, changing the rate and timing of an individual’s experience, ontogeny, societal change and species evolution.  Whereas the changing of rates, influenced by changing levels of testosterone, generates archetypal transformations, the changing of timing, managed by adjusting levels of estrogen, controls testosterone-informed rates of change.

In other words, this is a theory of evolution that suggests that the feminine governs the masculine rather than the other way around.

Whether timing governs rate or rate governs timing is really a nonuseful distinction.  They both influence each other, with biological and social systems offering feedback between the two that makes it difficult if not impossible to assign a beginning to any point within the system.  Still, it feels fun to congregate power in the hands of the cooperative polarity.

This feminine theory of evolution seeks to show how the neoteny/acceleration paradigm informs change at four scales (biology, society, ontogeny, biography), parsing out how changes in the timing of processes influence the rate of change.  For example, too little body fat and not enough estrogen at puberty will prolong puberty, with a number of repercussions.  This work hypothesizes that varying levels of estrogen in infants inform testosterone surges, which influence left hemispheric synapse pruning, thus impacting cerebral lateralization and degrees of split consciousness or self awareness, encouraging conditions featuring exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration, such as autism.  In other words, estrogen may manage the extreme maleness that Baron-Cohen suggests the autistic have too much of.

This work outlines the influence of estrogen on social structure.  Understanding social structure is integral to understanding both biological evolution and social evolution.

I also explore the relationship between estrogen and the dynamics of sexual selection, which is closely related to social structure.  Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young.  Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but may determine the likelihood of progeny survival by influencing how much attention is directed toward those progeny.

Is there a direct relationship between robust female sexual selection, with a compulsion to judge male features, and a deep desire to care for the young?  If estrogen levels inform one, are tendencies toward the other enhanced?

In a “feminine” theory of evolution, these are the kinds of questions I am asking.  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. Following these rate-and-timing pathways sends this work in several related directions.  One of the most interesting paths is the one where we need a woman to serve as guide.

When in 1858 Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Wallace describing Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection, Darwin was exploring three different theories of evolution.  Conducting experiments in three different areas, he was also looking for evidence of how the three different dynamics were related.  Wallace’s letter aborted Darwin’s attempts to find a synthesis.  He then struggled to reduce his work on natural selection to a volume small enough to be accessible.  On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

Darwin’s 1868 The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication explored Lamarckian principles of evolution.  In this two-volume work, environmental influences and the use and disuse of organs were addressed in the context of his theory of pangenesis, which described hypothetical, influential gemmules passing through the bloodstream.  As it happened, both his 1868 Variations and his 1874 The Descent of Man, which discussed sexual selection, were almost totally ignored, while Darwin’s theory of natural selection received massive attention.

Natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection were all embraced by Darwin’s work.  Then, shortly after Darwin’s death, there emerged the work of the Neo-Lamarckians, Mivart, Cope and Hyatt, who were exploring principles of maturational acceleration and delay.

This work in many ways is picking up where Darwin left off in 1858.  Darwin was impacted by society’s complete attention to his theory of natural selection starting in 1859.  Darwin hypothesized several selective processes contributing to evolution.  Additional processes emerged after his passing with the discovery that maturation rates and timing influence evolution.  This work seeks to integrate these various selective processes and show how they interrelate and how they have evolved.

I hypothesize that there is an evolution of evolutionary processes, a meta-evolution with a lineage that can be traced.  Clearly, all life is influenced by natural selection.  Yet, there emerged avenues for progeny to exhibit non random variation, which offered advantages in a competitive environment.  There is evidence that suggests that sexual selection emerged with the appearance of estrogen.  We can estimate how that influence began.  The influence of maturational dynamics on evolution likely proliferated with specific mate-pairing conventions.

In other words, evolution evolves.  It is possible that Darwin was headed toward this understanding when Wallace sent him that confounding letter.  This blog explores possible paths that this evolution of evolution has taken, also discussing the emergence of technological evolution, the newest selective process to consider.

I have found that definitions of neoteny that I provide to friends often don’t easily stick in their mind.  To ask someone to think of an automobile accelerating is easy.  It is not too difficult to ask people to make a picture in their mind’s eye of an accelerating automobile changing its model year to acquire future features while speeding up, decelerating to change shape to look like an older model.  But it is more difficult to ask them in their mind’s eye to perform this animation while considering a long succession of automobile models, each succeeding vehicle behaving a little different from the one before, different in a fashion where its ability to change model year with speed is enhanced or compromised with time.  Minds’ eyes sometimes can use a little training.

Neoteny, one of six heterochronic dynamics described by Gould (1977), is the biological process that prolongs ancestor embryo, infant and childhood features and displays them in the physical bodies and behaviors of descendant adults.  The classic examples are our ancient chimpanzee-like forebear infant features of small jaw, small teeth, big head, relatively large brain, upright stature, vertical skull positioning, playful disposition, curiosity, social dependency and displays of affection all prolonging to stay engaged later and later in childhood over the course of successive generations until these features appear not only in the young, but in adults.

Gould lists over 30 contemporary human features formed from ancient forebear infants.

Imagine that your great grandmother loved and played harmonica until she was six.  Your grandmother enjoyed playing until she was ten.  Your dad played until he hit puberty, then quit.  Then you, grown up, play harmonica a little bit each day.  You might say harmonica playing displayed a neotenic trajectory over the course of four generations.  It has been estimated that neoteny has influenced human evolution over the course of maybe 100,000 generations.

Acceleration is the opposite of neoteny.  With acceleration, ancestor adult features withdraw, instead of prolonging, to appear in the childhoods of descendants.  If mammoths were originally warm-weather elephant-like creatures, and they needed more hair and aggression to survive difficult winters, then they may have taken elephant adult-like tendencies to have more hair and aggression and placed those tendencies in younger members of the species, until eventually over the course of generations both adults and children displayed more hair along with crusty dispositions.

Though with humans the drift in a neotenous direction occurred over the course of many generations, studies have been conducted on foxes that show radical changes in look and disposition in a mere 20 years.

“Belyaev, who was in charge of a huge fox-fur farm in Novosibirsk, wanted to develop a strain of foxes that would more readily tolerate contact with people.  Of a study population of 465 foxes, he selected the 10 percent who were most calm and curious toward people and displayed the least fear or aggression.  He bred among this group and continued selecting for succeeding generations.  After only twenty generations he had ‘naturally tame animals that…would search for their keepers, climb on them… sit on the windowsill waiting for someone to approach, roll over to get their tummies rubbed, and let people carry them around and give them their shots.’ They would wag their tails that turned up at the end, like dogs.  They barked like dogs, as foxes almost never do in the wild.  These surprisingly speedy and diverse changes were produced by inducing neoteny, so that the foxes reached sexual maturity while continuing to behave like immature animals…Belyaev’s tame foxes came into heat twice a year, instead of once, just as dogs can breed twice a year and wolves only once.”  (Katharine M. Rogers, First Friend:  A History of Dogs and Humans (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 20.)

In addition, after 20 years these foxes started licking the hands and faces of familiar people, their annual molting in some cases stopped, ears drooped like dogs and piebald coat coloration emerged. (click here)

A number of authors have described how differences in dog breeds can be ascribed to the degree that a breed has been influenced by neoteny or the prolongation of ancestor wolf cub features to appear in the adult of dog descendants.  Selecting specific tame behaviors featured by the very young resulted in physiological transformations that included animal size, skull shape, coat variation, dog age and more promiscuous mating strategies.

In Mexico, there is a salamander-like creature called an axolotl.  It has external gills and spends its whole life in the water.  Change the axolotl environment, remove the water, and the axolotl, over a generation, will adjust to become indistinguishable from the North American salamander.  The North American salamander lives on land and uses lungs.

The larval or embryonic stage of the salamander is the axolotl.  This creature can evolve or adjust maturation to offer descendants a choice of a larval version (living in the water) or an adult version (living on the land).  Both forms reproduce.  The axolotl features neotenous characteristics of the salamander.  Or, you might say that the salamander exhibits acceleration regarding axolotl features.  The absence or presence of water determines which form this axolotl/salamander takes, an environmental effect.

This blog explores the power of neoteny and acceleration to explain evolution and transformation at a biological, social, ontogenetical and personal scale.  What I am calling an orchestral theory of evolution has to do with the adjustments of maturation rate and timing.  Although at these four scales the process is driven by the influences of social structure and the environment upon testosterone and estrogen, which impact rate and timing, I am also suggesting that adjustments in the rate and timing of systems over time, at other scales, may follow the same process.

This work also considers that though testosterone and estrogen do not inform rate and timing at the molecular biological or cosmic scales, the evolution of systems at these scales may be impacted by an identical or similar dynamic.

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.

Central to the dynamic that winds its way throughout this work, and what I am now calling the Orchestral Theory of Evolution, is the idea that biological evolution and social evolution are the same.  The present paradigm behaves like there has been so profound an effect upon society and consciousness by self awareness and language that culture now seems separated from biology.  This work seeks to integrate biology and culture.  This integration is made possible by an understanding of how evolution proliferates variation outside of natural selection.  This is an old idea, one that emerged in the nineteenth century.  Stephen J. Gould, in his 1977 Ontogeny and Phylogeny, sought to codify this idea.  He focused on the principle of heterochrony, a word coined by Ernst Haeckel.  Heterochrony is a process that describes the dynamic of progeny variation, a process that is not random.

The natural selection paradigm hypothesizes that the progeny produced by a parent or parents exhibit features that are random, uninfluenced by the parents’ life or the environment, and that the specific characteristics of an individual that will enhance its ability to survive to procreate will be traits that will be featured by descendants.

I don’t think so.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection is partly right.  Yes, an evolutionary guillotine exists that prevents the passing on of self-destructive tendencies and enhances the ability to procreate of those with useful gifts.  But, natural selection is only the basic premise, the foundation that other selective processes are built upon.

A foundation may make possible, but not suggest, the cathedral-like beauty and complexity of evolutionary processes that we visit to experience understanding.

Heterochronic theory, or my version of heterochronic theory, which I sometimes refer to as “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution,” pays particularly close attention to how the variation of traits featured by an individual emerges.  The process is the same in biology and society.  This is because in both biology and society testosterone and estrogen compel specific evolutionary trajectories.  I hypothesize that testosterone controls the rate of change.  Estrogen manages the timing.  Each hormone features a host of characteristics that additionally influence biology and society, characteristics that compel individuals and societies to exhibit specific features and behaviors.

Society 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.
I come back to this many times over the course of this website.  I describe the specific endocrinological dynamics, the connection of those dynamics to social structure and brain structure, their relationship with that which makes humans unique (split consciousness) and how all that relates to how specifically species and societies evolve.

The following sentence sums it up.

The orchestral theory of evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

It’s not only about survival, but about maturation.

Several themes run through this blog.  Several related melodies play off each other as I explore how they are connected and the way that the melodies seem to transform when approached from different directions.  Perhaps this work’s most influential theme is the power of play to inform understanding.  I am not an academic.  I have no affiliations with an established institution or connections with groups that compel me to defend specific beliefs or conjectures.  I feel like a grown-up surrounded by toys, ideas that represent patterns in our experience, and I’m reveling in the process of letting myself be led to what feels like unique ways for the ideas or patterns to interact.

Like a child, I presuppose that what I am exploring, I can understand.  Engaging, I intuit and experience connection, and I estimate that my participation will be rewarded with my having learned something I didn’t know before.  Many themes carry through this work, but perhaps the core idea is that everything is connected and that those connections can be understood, or at least intuited, by a nonacademic.

I maintain a deep reverence for what might be called “fun.”  When I feel attracted to something, I take that as important information that the particular thing I feel attracted to deserves my attention.  My wonderings through the themes and patterns in this blog are the wonderings of a person following a body’s desire to share what feels good.  I describe this as a sharing because the experience can best be described as a form of dance suggesting union, in this case a union between my conscious and unconscious self.  The process of writing, experiencing connections and exploring pattern is a process characterized by my enthusiastically following along behind a playful unconscious while at the same time translating that process itself into the structure and content of this work.

Dance, playful movement to music, is a central metaphor.  So are water and the power of the movement of water to inform an understanding of evolution.  I also explore dance, not just as a metaphor, but as an influential variable in human evolution.

Evolution is happening in the present.  It is an ongoing process influencing the moment we are in through specific channels.  My work discusses those channels in detail.  Evolution is a multiscale process manifesting in a species, a society, an individual’s ontogeny, or growth, and the peculiar and particular experience of each unique person.  That is a four-scale biological, societal, ontogenetical and personal experience.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an allegiance to the idea of threefold or fourfold parallelisms.  Many theorists from Freud to Piaget paid close attention to how there seemed to be intimate relations between patterns at different scales.  Freud believed developmental stages reflected societal stage transformations.  Piaget intuited that a child’s changes in consciousness reflected our species’ changes in consciousness.  This work often returns to the idea that evolution is a multiscale process.

At the same time, this work explores a model that proposes that our species evolved along a five-step continuum, a progression that can be explained by how we’ve been impacted by sexual selection.  I believe that sexual selection was instrumental in our evolving our unique form of consciousness.

In addition to playfully exploring evolution, this work explores the influence of play on evolution.  Neoteny and the processes allied with neoteny wind all through this blog.  Neoteny is the process that carries or prolongs embryo or infant features forward through generations so that ancient ancestor early ontogenetic traits appear in the adults of descendants.  Some have surmised that the hairlessness of progenitor human embryos made current human adults mostly hairless as that ancient embryo feature was carried through to contemporary adults.  Neoteny is also closely associated with a hypothetical compulsion to play as this ancient forebear infant feature emerged in the adults of the present day.

There is no difference between biology and society.  Until now this has been difficult to discern.  Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have attempted to show how Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be leveraged to explain social transformation.  I suggest that a more powerful and useful social model emerges when biological evolution is explored using all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of Darwin’s contemporaries, the Neo-Lamarckians.  This theory is not as simple as a “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” melody of a current reductionist hypothesis but instead seeks to offer the depth, symmetry and elegant complexity evident in a work by Bach.

Evolutionary selective processes evolve.  The very dynamics of evolution change, as if the physical laws of the universe adjusted over time.  By exploring the nature and sequence of the transformation of the evolutionary processes themselves, we offer ourselves additional leverage when it comes to searching for and finding hidden selective processes, a little like seeking to fill in the blanks on the periodic table.

This work represents a feminine theory of evolution insofar as what is not dominated by male frames of reference is often looked at as feminine by comparison.  I would suggest that this theory of evolution offers a balanced male/female perspective, even though the female often feels to be in control.

I presuppose connection, which encourages a tendency to notice patterns that suggest interconnection.  This is an often overlooked founding presupposition that reveals an almost totally different world, a world that the reductionist presupposes does not exist.  It is useful that people with different presuppositions notice that they do not share the ability to trade information, information only valid when examined in the context of a shared presupposition.  The question is:  Do the fruits of a theory grounded on wholly different presuppositions offer benefits?  Is the theory useful?  Trying to decide if something is true or not is a nonuseful discussion.

It is not fun trying to decide who is right.  I prefer exploring what is beautiful or useful.

Last, consciousness and identity are reframed as split consciousness or self awareness.  This work presupposes that consciousness predated humans.  Humans emerged from primary process, the unconscious, with our twin awareness, featuring a consciousness that was split.  By presupposing that consciousness is part of the system and that everything is connected, a number of patterns are revealed that are less obvious without those presuppositions.  The question is:  Are these patterns useful?  Clearly the presupposition is controversial.  I make a number of predictions that allow members of this community to determine if these conjectures are useful.  I focus on autism in particular.

This work focuses on autism as a social condition featuring anomalous consciousness.  I describe how specifically autism emerges and ways to cushion the confounding effects.  And I describe how by understanding autism, we understand ourselves.  In addition, I propose that by understanding the processes that lead to autism, we understand the etiologies of a number of related and seemingly unrelated diseases and conditions, etiologies currently unknown.

Changing our theory of evolution makes it possible to have a different understanding of ourselves and the physical and mental difficulties that accompany us.

This is a work of conjectures.  In the past, I have called this interlocking network of conjectures “The Theory of Waves” and, before that, “Shift Theory.”  I now refer to my theory as “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  When I write, or theorize, I seek to share beauty or observe patterns in ways that may be useful.  Beauty and usefulness are my focus.  Whether something is true or not just doesn’t make sense to me.  Patterns are just too vast, interconnected and overwhelming to conclude that my interpretations of those patterns are anything but stories.

I follow what attracts me.  Playing with evolution, I have fun.

“Again, masculine characters generally lie dormant in male animals until they arrive at the proper age for procreation.  The curious case formerly given of a Hen which assumed the masculine characters, not of her own breed but of a remote progenitor, illustrates the close connection between latent sexual characters and ordinary reversion.”  (The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Charles Darwin, 1868, V2, p. 394)

Freud was inspired by his contemporary evolutionary biological theorists to take the emerging paradigm equating the fossil record displaying species transformation with embryology and cultural variation.  Biology, ontogeny and society were thought to be allied.  Western prejudices assumed aboriginals were less “evolved.”  They were looking at evolution as a process displaying “progress.”  Nevertheless, this threefold parallelism was embraced by many a hundred years ago.  Freud added a fourth layer by theorizing that individual human development could follow pathways, influenced by incidents over the course of a lifetime, that would align themselves with paths at the biological, social and ontological scales.  Central to Freud’s thesis was the power of adult reversion to early developmental stages to then have early childhood (and earlier human-society) features manifest in the lives of adults, informing their behavior and experience.

Darwin and Freud were fascinated by reversion.

Contemporary evolutionary and psychodynamic theorists tend not to concentrate on patterns that suggest a withdrawal to former times.  This is partly a result of a liberal prejudice that societies are all the same, revealing no evolutionary dynamic, and that evolution is only about the gene.  The government and insurance companies work together to compel psychotherapists to come up with very quick solutions, using drugs when possible, that can address problems without long-term interventions.  Interventions are often ignored that take time and require a stepping-back into past experiences while feeling securely accompanied so that past experiences can feel embraced and integrated.  The net result of an anthropology that often ignores fundamental difference based upon evolutionary principles, an evolutionary biology that focuses on incremental random processes and psychotherapeutic interventions limited to what insurance companies will tolerate is an ignoring of the relationship between ancient time and present transformation and the connection between seemingly different disciplines that actually share the same dynamic on different scales.

A result of our peculiar refusal to experience ourselves as part of a larger whole, passengers in narratives with informative pasts, is a difficulty observing conditions and diseases with obvious evolutionary implications.  This is complicated by our having embraced only one of Darwin’s theories, his theory of natural selection.  Darwin was working on three theories when Wallace, in 1858, compelled Darwin to prematurely publish.  I say prematurely because Darwin noted a number of anomalies that did not fit the theory of natural selection.  He broke out these various exceptions into two additional theories, sexual selection and pangenesis.  An integration of all three theories did not emerge.  Nevertheless, he described in detail hundreds of exceptions to natural selection, many directly related to reversion.

In just the way that Freud suggested that past or present trauma could compel the contemporary emergence of past features, earlier developmental stages in the adult phase of development, Darwin focused on what exactly could be causing the emergence of past species’ features in contemporary individuals.  In addition, it seemed to Darwin, if we understood the processes that led to the reemergence of ancient traits, we might gain insight into how new traits are developed.

As is often the case with gifted scientists, Darwin was obsessed with anomaly.  What didn’t fit suggested answers.  As his discipline evolved, it instead occurred that evolutionary anomaly was explained as a result of individual adaptation, compelling species trajectories solely justified by natural selection.

Following Darwin’s death, there emerged a whole evolutionary biological discipline devoted to changes in species over time, changes seeming to follow specific trajectories, often by reversion.  These were the heterochronists.  Noted were tendencies for ancestor infant features to appear in adult descendants and the reverse, ancient adult features emerging in embryonic descendants.  Reversion was integral to this new paradigm.  Anomalies that Darwin was fascinated by were studied closely by these Neo-Lamarckian theorists.

Perhaps it’s time we moderns consider that there is much our precursor theorists might know.  Darwin’s focus on anomalies in the context of different discipline parallelisms, integrated with the discoveries of the heterochronists that suggested answers to many of Darwin’s reversion questions, in combination with recent endocrinological discoveries, together suggest solutions to contemporary riddles.

Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward.  Instead of continuing to ignore anomalies, it’s time we step back to old science paradigms while feeling securely accompanied with recent discoveries so that past insights can feel embraced and integrated.

A new paradigm requires an integration with the past.

I was born in 1952 in an affluent northern suburb of Chicago.  Glencoe was perhaps a third Jewish.  I was raised mostly nondenominationally, but my grandparents embraced their ethnicity.  Still, they identified more with being wealthy Americans than with being Jewish.

My mother was manic depressive and was institutionalized on and off from about the time I was ten on.  My father’s mother was mentally ill.  Familiarity with mental illness up close purged my body and mind of identification with the benefits of affluence.  I withdrew from the conventions of success.

I was a walking, talking incongruity-detection device.  Hypocrisy jumped out at me when I saw or heard it.  My childhood calibrated my intuitions to make me hypervigilant to mixed messages.  I knew “crazy” up close.  I perceived the crazy in communications I observed.  In my experience, crazy was almost everywhere.  What wasn’t incongruent, I hardly noticed.  The dark side of the world felt familiar.

I became intimately aware of how my thinking process inhibited my goals.  I felt deeply split regarding much of what I desired.  I acquired a psychodynamic world view made up of trends and tendencies and what inhibits their achievement.

Growing up in craziness, I felt the world was crazy.  I was seeking relief from crazy.  The world acquired a crazy/not crazy frame.

In my childhood, there were paradoxes.  One carried through to my adult life.  Among the many things I did not understand was the Nazi extermination of the Jews.  This became a test that I would slam ideas against if an idea suggested an answer in my life.  If something could not make sense of the Holocaust, then the something was only taken on a relative basis.  Everything in my life became integrated on a relative basis, not having passed the test of explaining the Holocaust.  In other words, from an early age, truth was relative.  It would be a while before I’d experience that truth being relative was an insight that would offer me the opportunity to bridge incongruities, integrate hypocrisies, unjumble mixed messages.  Embracing horror, I would discover an answer.

Embracing horror can transcend crazy.  Crazy/not crazy can feel part of a larger whole.  This is a relativist’s world view.  Observing the politics that has emerged inside our country, I would say the nation is dating crazy, considering marriage.

Right now, the elected Republicans are encouraging their social-conservative/government-hating/reactionary fringe to embrace lies in order to control the mainstream media to stop Democratic legislation that seeks to relieve individuals of want.  Observing politics since I was little, I’ve seen lies pitched as truth over and over again.  I’ve seen lies pitched as truth when both liar and listener were aware they were lies, but it did not matter because liar and listener shared common goals.  Democrats and Republicans have both engaged in this process.  I’ve observed lies embraced by people who were aware that they were lies, while those that did not share the common goals did not call them lies.  Because everyone knew they were lies, they were not named.

I grew up in crazy.  Amongst the folk I knew and was related to, explaining the Holocaust was never even considered.  Its reality transcended explanation.  In a crazy world, the Holocaust feels familiar.

We are living in a national political environment very similar to living in a home with crazy people.  Not only is unreality embraced as normal and familiar, it is encouraged as if crazy were the truth.

This is the kind of crazy that the Holocaust was born from.  When crazy becomes familiar, horror happens.

From the Holocaust, healing emerged.  Germany’s shame compelled a bridging of chasms never straddled in the past.  An almost immediate result of World War II was national health care in several countries.  Horror let go, but remembered, resulted in a rapid evolution in the direction of making certain that it did not happen again, and it was possible to improve the lives of people in many ways.

It’s feeling to me like the United States is flirting with the idea of making something horrible.  We all know that sometimes destruction is necessary to make the new.  It is not the only way to make something new.  Watching and listening to the encouragement of craziness, it’s feeling like horror is the choice we may choose to make.

I’ve been playing with the idea that the genome is not a blueprint or a computer algorithm or a structured plan designed to take into consideration information provided by the environment.  I’ve been toying with the possibility that the genome is closer to a musical script, sheet music, designed to only make sense when integrated with the scripts or compositions of other beings of the same and other species.

First, perhaps a genome makes no sense as an isolated single gnome.  I am suggesting that a genome is but a puzzle piece among puzzle pieces, each piece appearing in a different being.  Seeking answers from within a single genome is like trying to understand a symphonic composition by reading the sheet music of the timpani.

Second, if the genome is like sheet music, then perhaps the musician is something science has been ignoring.  I’m thinking that it’s not that our genome is supplying content for the artist to then display, but that the genome is creating context whereby content and artistry can both emerge.  This is difficult to even consider without the first point successfully absorbed.

The genome is like a nationwide train-track system, with each city a different individual, and the genome is capable of spontaneously compelling an overnight relaying of tracks to form new relationship constellations.  Yet, in addition to producing tracks, the genome also produces that which travels across the tracks, and the gnome constructs the created trains using the information received through the telephone wires that accompany all the railways.

The genome produces structure and content based upon its relationships with other genomes.  No being is produced in isolation.

I’ve also been playing with the idea that human beings, creatures perhaps more informed by neoteny than any other species on the planet, are immersed in language–the massive trade in both imaginary and representational content–in no small part due to embryonic epigenetic processes characterized by developmental adjustments to environmental information carrying forward to the adult of our species.  In other words, that which is most unique about being human, culture, massive interchange of unique information characterized by an internal process informed by massive amounts of external societal input, is isomorphic or uncannily similar to an individual while still inside the womb.  The human obsession with music, for example, is shorthand for culture and a reproduction or extension of womb dynamics into adult and species life.

The symphony that is implied by the genome, the genome seemingly only able to work in concert with other genomes to create the context whereby content and musician can perform, manifests in both womb dynamics and culture.  When exploring the genome from this perspective, we see that the ability of a species to exhibit culture is inevitable if womb dynamics are prolonged to appear in the adult of a species.  Perhaps eventually neoteny compels culture.

Now consider the nationwide genome-designed train-track system with trains and telephone wires stretching across the system.  Consider the patterns people use to describe their dissociated experience.  Each person carries with him or her an ability to be two places at once, to be in two times at once and to imagine something’s opposite.  This is how the brain works each day after the individual awakens every morning from primary process.  (Primary process is dreaming consciousness characterized by one time, one place, no opposites.)

Imagine that the way each person communicates reflects the switching systems and branching directions used across the country by the tracks.

I am playing with the idea that individual split consciousness, the opposite of primary process, and how it leads to culture or the production of shared representational or imaginary content, is a direct reflection of a genome dynamic that is characterized by a shared genome paradigm with a womb dynamic that manifests this paradigm.

I’ve been playing with the idea that the genome is not a blueprint.  I’m starting to think that it is only by playing that we can understand the genome.

After several hundred pages of describing biological anomalies that didn’t fit his theory of natural selection, on page 350 of his second volume of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Darwin said the following, “Under this point of view I venture to advance the hypothesis of Pangenesis, which implies that every separate part of the whole organization reproduces itself.  So that ovules, spermatozoa, and pollen-grains, – the fertilized egg or seed, as well as buds, – include and consist of a multitude of germs thrown off from each separate part or unit.  In the First Part I will enumerate as briefly as I can the groups of facts which seem to demand connection; but certain subjects, not hitherto discussed, must be treated at disproportionate length.  In the Second Part the hypothesis will be given; and after considering how far the necessary assumptions are in themselves improbable, we shall see whether it serves to bring under a single point of view the various facts.”

Darwin is wrestling with observations that don’t fit an established paradigm, the one that he and Wallace introduced in 1858 called natural selection.  He is hypothesizing movement across a body and between generations of something that offers information that can be integrated into an ontological unfolding resulting in physical and behavioral change.  “It is universally admitted that the cells or units of the body increase by self-division or proliferation, retaining the same nature, and that they ultimately become converted into the various tissues and substances of the body.  But besides this means of increase I assume that the units throw off minute granules which are dispersed throughout the whole system; that these, when supplied with proper nutriment, multiply by self-division, and are ultimately developed into units like those from which they were originally derived.  These granules may be called gemmules.  They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations and may then be developed.  Their development depends on their union with other partially developed or nascent cells which precede them in the regular course of growth.”  V2 pp. 369-370

What Darwin seemed to be feeling his way toward was endocrinology.  Imagine endocrinology without genetics.  Darwin hypothesized that gemmules display several features of gonadal hormones, however, hormones, when informing the next generation of useful information, don’t themselves store information in a dormant state.

Darwin was very focused on reversion.  He felt that the ability of forebear features to emerge in future generations was an important clue to how ontogeny and evolution operate.  “Reversion is not a rare event, depending on some unusual or favourable combination of circumstances, but occurs so regularly with crossed animals and plants, and so frequently with uncrossed breeds, that it is evidently an essential part of the principle of inheritance.”  V2 p. 368.

Indeed, how specifically a body stores a record of ancestor solutions to their ancient environments seems integral to the mechanics of evolution.  Darwin observed changes in environments compelling the reemergence of old solutions.  He hypothesized that the same “granules” that share the information regarding environmental effects store the information for future use.

Evolutionary developmental biologists are exploring how genes behaving like “triggers” can take information from the environment and adjust development to enhance the ability of the individual to survive.  Some of these switch systems are hundreds of millions of years old.  Ancient switches suggest Darwin’s focus on how reversion operates, but Darwin is not talking millions of years but usually just up to hundreds of generations, perhaps sometimes thousands.

How does a genetic theory of evolution need to be framed or interpreted to make possible the genes that a person is offered being able to hold in memory a sequence of ancestor events, not unlike the phenotypic sequence vaguely evidenced by our ontological progression?  In other words, ontogeny displays a general memory of ancestor phylogeny, or at least physical forms that suggest ancestor physical forms.  I’m not committing to ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, but perhaps our ontogeny reenacts ancestor ancient switching systems, somehow storing in some detail the sequence of responses to ancient environments.  If this is the case, then perhaps the genes are not producing features but are producing a biological production, a play or symphony, that offers both a history of lives lived with environments responded to, along with an ability to respond to the present environment.

It seems to come back to music.  Our genes are a musical score along with direction on how to build an orchestra.  Each individual hires musicians to play the score, based upon what musicians are available (as informed by the environment).  Each adjusts his or her playing to the other musicians hired.  The music unfolds.  Yet, somehow, that particular production, that life experience is recorded.  The genes don’t change based upon that lifetime, but as with Darwin’s gemmules, information is carried forward to the next generation that shares a history of productions.

Is it possible that the history is stored in the environment?  Might the score created by genes be but part of a larger score with vital information about the individual and the individual’s past stored in the scores around the individual?

This is different from Darwin’s gemmules.  That which carries the information is different from how the information is stored.  Nevertheless, as Darwin noted, “after considering how far the necessary assumptions are in themselves improbable, we shall see whether it serves to bring under a single point of view the various facts.”

Exploring some of the original sources of the ideas I play with in this blog, I’m revisiting Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.  In this two-volume presentation of Darwin’s Lamarckian hypothesis, published in 1868, after his 1859 On the Origin of Species, Darwin does not associate himself with Lamarck.  Lamarck is rarely mentioned.  Then, as now, evolutionary theories focusing on use and disuse of organs and environmental effects were controversial.  Some sample excerpts….

“…selection does nothing without variability, and this depends in some manner on the action of the surrounding circumstances on the organism.”  V1, p. 7

Describing the transformation of several English dog breeds when raised in India, Darwin states, “It would appear that climate to a certain extent directly modifies the forms of dogs.  We have lately seen that several of our English breeds cannot live in India, and it is positively asserted that when bred there for a few generations they degenerate not only in their mental faculties, but in form….This remarkable tendency to rapid deterioration in European dogs subjected to the climate of India and Africa, may be largely accounted for by reversion to a primordial condition which many animals exhibit, as we shall hereafter see, when their constitutions are in any way disturbed.”  V1 pp. 39-40

Regarding dogs, “We may, however, readily admit that abundant and rich food supplied during many generations would give an inherited tendency to increased size of body, and that from disuse, the limbs would become finer and shorter.”  V1 p. 76

Particularly relevant to the hypothesis promoted in this blog is Darwin’s assertion that both selective process, in this case human selection of specific pigeon features, and environmental effects combine to compel species change.  “Each slight change in the length or shortness of the beak, in the length of leg, &c., has no doubt been indirectly and remotely caused by some change in the conditions to which the bird has been subjected, but we must attribute the final result, as is manifest in those cases of which we have any historical record, to the continued selection and accumulation of many slight successive variations.”  V1 p. 225

Darwin was a pluralist.  He believed that several selective processes working together effect change.  He said this of chickens, “Thus from occasional appearance of abnormal characters, though at first only slight in degree; from the effects of use and disuse of parts; possibly from the direct effects of changed climate and food; from correlation of growth; from occasional reversions to old and long-lost characters; from the crossing of breeds, when more than one had been formed; but, above all, from unconscious selection carried on during many generations, there is no insuperable difficulty, to the best of my judgment, in believing that all [chicken] breeds have descended from some one parent source.”  V1 p. 245

“…the act of crossing often leads to the reappearance or reversion of long-lost characters; and in most cases it would be impossible to distinguish between the reappearance of ancient characters and the first appearance of absolutely new characters.  Practically, whether new or old, they would be new to the breed in which they appeared.”  V2 p. 252

Did Darwin ever consider that humans having difficulty speaking might be evidencing the reappearance of long-lost characters?

“The causes which induce variability act on the mature organism, on the embryo, and, probably, on the sexual elements before impregnation has been effected.”  V2 p. 259

Darwin was a radical evolutionary developmental biologist offering ideas not even in evidence today.

There were principles that Darwin embraced that were not included in the synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.  The importance of early development and embryo studies to an understanding of the power of the environment to inform structure and behavior has only recently begun an integration into established orthodoxy with the recognition of evo devo.  Darwin placed a heavy emphasis in his post-Origin works on the influence of the environment on variation.  As noted by Gould, this has been perhaps the longest, most controversial issue wrestled with by biologists for 150 years.  For Neo-Darwinians, it seems to have philosophical, even religious, ramifications.

It has been the case for over a century that evolutionary theorists pull excerpts from Darwin that support their particular point of view, ignoring what Darwin said that goes in other directions.  Darwin’s complete works reveal a vast collection of examples of evolution impacted by a variety of selective processes.  Contemporary theorists would do well to read all three of this great man’s great works.

It struck me this evening that there are no Leftist specialists on the Internet and the Internet’s influence on Left politics.  There are journalists that write stories about the Internet and politics.  There are Left and left-of-center blogs that discuss the influence of the Internet on politics.  There are books, such as Viral Spiral and Here Comes Everybody, that are partly devoted to Internet activism and how the Left is impacted by the web, but I’m having trouble finding examples of those concentrating pretty much exclusively on Left politics and the net.

There is Richard Stallman’s late 20th-century crusade to carve out a commons on the web.  His influence has been astonishing.  In the Left community that I am part of, I am in contact with hundreds of activists.  His name has never been mentioned.

The word “hacker” has evolved over the last 20 years.  It rarely appears in Leftists’ conversations.  Nevertheless, its emerging meaning has more to do with an egalitarian revolution than with one that violates private cyber space.  The folks I am in contact with are little aware of the young programmers’ community fighting for free code and shared universal software.  There are few bringing the young, creative, digital commons movement to the older Leftist radicals writing leaflets and blogs.

I end up part of many discussions that involve bringing in speakers to Chicago to raise funds and excite the Left/Progressive community.  Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are the names most often raised.  Cindy Sheehan and Seymour Hersh come up.  Never do the names of the champions of the electronic commons, the creative commons and Internet freedom come up in those conversations.  Names such as Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito…

We need bridges between the political Left and the Internet commons.  I’m not clear why there is such a gap, perhaps because it seems most of the Left is 55 and older.  Not unlike the 60s when there was a clearly identified generation gap, there is perhaps a wider one now featuring older Leftists unable to see the commons that is growing around them.  Most older Leftists don’t identify the rip, burn, share, create Internet culture as a natural ally.  To the older folks, change has to be political.  Cultural change is just not on their radar.

Right now, actions are proliferating across the country that protest Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan.  Yet, there is relatively very little activity on Twitter.  Little on Twitter is alluding to the depth of the demonstrations.  There are almost no links to those pages showing over 80 cities conducting protests.  Few Twitter posts call attention to local protests.  I predict that tonight’s December 2 protests will be mostly older activists.

We need translator advocates that can speak both lingos, ones who can talk both cultural change and political transformation.  We need blogs dedicated to explaining to the denser old folks what exactly is going on with the young.  The older postmodern-angst advocates need to be introduced to the young horizontalists that have little respect for what has gone before.

There is a generation gap.  We need some writers to bridge the chasm.

There are about a dozen of us volunteers working with nearly 1500 local peace, justice and environmental organizations in 50 states. The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP), located at pjep.org, places in the hands of local activists, at no cost, the kinds of tools that larger organizations have access to. This includes such features as online fundraising, eletters, online petitions and boycott tools. In addition, we make available almost 1000 resource documents congregating in 44 issue clusters, offer inter-organizational communications tools, and connect activists with like minded grassroots organizers in other states.

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any effort into trying keep up with the actions proliferating around the country.

With PJEP, keeping up has been relatively easy. Our 1500 participating organizations post actions to their state network websites themselves or send the actions to us to post for them. We have keep a running tally of Dec 1 and Dec 2 Afghanistan escalation protest actions. I email WCW and National Assembly my running totals. WCW then posts that tally on their national website. We’re also finding WCW events on their website that we didn’t know about. A.N.S.W.E.R. hasn’t responded to emails offering them information, except for a Washington state chapter that we work with.

As the list of local protests grows we send it out to local activists in the various states. This seems to be encouraging the creation of new events. As of 8 am (today, Dec 1) we are following almost 70 protests across the country.

We observe the momentum. We share the information. We see increases in momentum and action.

This has been an interesting experience. I’ve been monitoring the use of Facebook and Twitter as a communication device for the coming demonstrations, it has become clear that Facebook and Twitter offer no opportunity to monitor or experience an integration of related events across the country. By contrast, PJEP has had 50-state coverage since early July, 2009. This is the first time our breadth of operations has been able to magnify our members’ goals and actions into a clear contribution to a national movement. The networks are fulfilling one of the goals we set out to accomplish as we envisioned what PJEP could be.