Three things are bouncing around my brain after I drank coffee to knock out a headache, which worked.

I’m finishing the over 100 piece that seeks to provide a less-stressed introduction to this theory than the earlier “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  First, the theory is now called “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  The name changed when I hypothesized that estrogen manages the timing of maturation.

That, by the way, was a bizarre realization.  Bizarre for two reasons.  First, it came to me without my being aware that it had come to me.  I just found myself working with that premise, not having noted when it became part of my thoughts.  Second, for more than 11 years, I’ve been working with testosterone controlling the rate of maturation without it having ever crossed my mind that it would be interesting to know what managed the timing.  It just never struck me that it was relevant or knowable, even though I’d been discussing rates and timing of maturation for 11 years.  At the same time, for 11 years, I’d been wondering how specifically estrogen might fit into the theory that was coming together.  I sensed that the theory was out of balance.

Since 1998, I’d been wondering how estrogen was relevant at the same time that I was totally not paying attention to the relevance of timing to maturation, even though I talked of timing constantly in the context of timing being the other half of the time frame of maturation, integral to heterochronic evolution.  Then, late last winter, estrogen slipped in, and I didn’t even notice the integration.

Okay.  Pretty weird.

Finishing the new introduction, I’ve been refining different sections of the work.  Describing the contribution of the artist, it hit me that the definition of “artist” embraces two very different sensibilities with paradoxically opposite implications.

There is the Occam’s-razor worshipping, male, Neo-Darwinian, reductionist, materialist, programmer’s creativity that seeks an elegant solution with the fewest number of steps possible.  Integral to this view is a compulsive rhythm implying step-by-step behavior with little awareness of a larger picture.  This reflects a particularly patrifocal, hierarchical social paradigm with every level in the hierarchy obsessively protecting that which is observable and controllable in contiguous positions.  There are ways that this also reflects the male protohuman character that is far less interested, artistically, in relationship than in the obsessive performance of evocative rhythm.

In other words, features of the hypothetical low estrogen, obsessive male are evident in patrifocal society and its creative impulse.  Perhaps high estrogen, patrifocal, creative males have creative impulses similar to low estrogen matrifocal males.  Focus on detail characterizes both milieus.

The emerging artist’s impulse is one that features a high estrogen male, far from the kind of male I am hypothesizing was common while we were growing big brains.  We are now seeing the “feminine” male, the male that fits the newer of the two matrifocal paradigms, a male with an artistic sensibility that seeks productions that reflect a larger whole.  Relationship is closely observed.  Wider connections are respected.

In other words, the protoartist paradigm is not the same as the emerging artist paradigm, even though both operate in matrifocal context

“In a study of alcoholism, it was noted that alcoholism is a significant health concern for lesbians, with an incidence rate perhaps three times that of the general population.  The relationships among the development of alcoholism in women, the experience of stigmatization and the complex facets of lesbian identity and lesbian community are explored.  This exploration provides for a more comprehensive and critical analysis of alcoholism in lesbians.  As a phenomenon of women’s health, alcoholism is examined using the perspectives of developmental theory, symbolic interactionism and critical theory.  The author offers insights and implications for health care, research and theory building.”  (Hall, J. M., “Alcoholism in Lesbians:  Developmental, Symbolic Interactionist, and Critical Perspectives,” Health Care for Women International 11(1) (1990):89-107.)

“Yalom et al. (1973) studied 20 16-year-old boys of diabetic mothers, who had received estrogen or progesterone during pregnancy.  These boys showed less heterosexuality and less masculinity than 20 control boys.  Netley and Rovet (1982) showed that among 33 males with 47,XXY syndrome, 24% were nonrighthanded, compared to 10% of a control group. …  In the present study, as well as in Lindesay (1987), only homosexual men were studied.  In Rosenstein and Bigler (1987) and McCormick et al. (1990), both men and women were studied, and in the latter study, a significant increase in lefthandedness (or rather nonrighthandedness) was obtained for women.  This was assumed to be related to higher-than-normal levels of prenatal testosterone levels.  In their results, the increase in lefthandedness in homosexual women (which have lower occurrence than men in the general population) is much larger than that of homosexual men.  It is, therefore, fair to assume that the increase in testosterone, believed to cause both lefthandedness and homosexuality in women, will give a more pronounced effect in women than in men (p. 184).”  (Coates, T. J., Ekstrand, M., and Gotestam, K. O., “Handedness, Dyslexia and Twinning in Homosexual Men,” International Journal of Neuroscience 63(3-4) (1992):179-86.)

“Although numerous researchers have hypothesized a biological factor in the etiology of homosexuality, there is a lack of empirical evidence.  Previous investigations did not focus on behavioral functions of the brain.  Using neuropsychological testing, we found an increased incidence of left-hand preference (defined as non-consistent right-hand preference) in a group of 32 homosexual women.  A trend in the same direction was found in a group of 38 homosexual men.  These results suggest that homosexual orientation has a neurobiological component possibly related to hemispheric functional asymmetry.  The results are consistent with previous reports that (1) prenatal neuroendocrine events are a factor in the development of human sexual orientation and functional brain asymmetries, and (2) the mechanisms associated with homosexual orientation and related neuropsychological characteristics are different between the sexes, i.e., elevated levels of prenatal sex hormones in women and decreased levels in men.”  (Kingstone, E., McCormick, C. M., and Witelson, S. F., “Left-handedness in Homosexual Men and Women:  Neuroendocrine Implications,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 15(1) (1990):69-76.)

“Human homosexual males report more stressors (such as bereavement) during their mother’s pregnancy than controls (Dorner, Schenk, Schmiedel, and Ahrens 1983).”  (S. Baron-Cohen, S. Lutchmaya, and R. Kinickmeyer, Prenatal Testosterone in Mind:  Amniotic Fluid Studies (Massachusetts:  MIT Press, 2004), pp. 11-12.)

“Matched groups of homosexual men, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women (n = 38 per group) were tested on three measures of spatial ability and two measures of fluency that typically reveal sex differences.  For the three spatial tests and one of the fluency tests, the mean performance of homosexual men fell between those of the heterosexual men and women.  The pattern of cognitive skills of homosexual men was different from that of heterosexual men: homosexual men had lower spatial ability relative to fluency.  The cognitive pattern of homosexual men was not significantly different from that of heterosexual women.  In addition, the results suggest that homosexual men classified on the basis of hand preference may form two subgroups that differ in cognitive pattern.  These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that there is a neurobiological factor related to sexual differentiation in the etiology of homosexuality.”  (McCormick, C. M., and Witelson, S. F., “A Cognitive Profile of Homosexual Men Compared to Heterosexual Men and Women,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 16(6) (1991):459-73.)

“The raised incidences of strong left-handedness and of mixed-handedness in homosexual men, as in dyslexics, are mutually consistent under the normal distribution function, as expected by the right shift theory of handedness.  It is argued that atypical laterality in these groups is better described as a ‘reduction of right shift’ than as a ‘left shift.’”  (Annett, M., “Comments on Lindesay:  Laterality Shift in Homosexual Men,” Neuropsychologia 26(2) (1988):341-3.)

“A study of handedness, dyslexia, stuttering and twinning, was included in a study of sexual habits of homosexual men.  A questionnaire was mailed to homosexuals, and 394 forms suitable for data analysis were received.  The results showed an increased rate of lefthand writing (17.5% compared to 8-8.4%), and a clear left shift.  There were increased occurrence of both stuttering (7.1% compared to 1.6%) and reading difficulties (7.9% compared to 1-3%).  The incidence of twins was lower than the population (1.3%).  The results confirm earlier attempts to show a left shift in homosexuals, and support Geschwind’s hypotheses about etiological factors for both lefthandedness and homosexuality.”  (Coates et al., 179-86.)

“`

Phonetic dyslexics (Annett, 1990); stutterers (Corballis, 1981; Bryden, 1994); many Tourette’s sufferers (Shapiro et al., 1972); many gifted athletes, mathematicians, artists, musicians (Deutsch, 1978; Hassler, 1991b; Hassler & Gupta, 1993), and composers (Hassler, 1992); many schizophrenics (Crow et al., 1996); specific alcoholic types (London, 1985) and many obese women are individuals located at the left end of this societal balance that I’ve been describing.  In addition, there are many homosexuals and lesbians firmly positioned in matrifocal social structure displaying high testosterone women and low testosterone men.

Congregating these various excerpts in a single place, I’m hoping to make clear the pattern this particular group exhibits in the context of the thesis I’ve been describing.  There are groups in current society that exhibit neurological, endocrinological and handedness dispositions characteristic of matrifocal social structure and, hypothetically, our recent evolutionary forebears.  Gays and lesbians fit the paradigm.  Gays evidence maturational delay and females evidence acceleration.  In addition, females exhibit higher testosterone levels, males lower levels, and both are coming from high testosterone mothers.

I’d expect that male homosexuals, if they congregate features like those that we hypothesize were common when we were evolving in matrifocal social structures, would be often narcissistic, performance based, highly sexually motivated, often obsessive compulsive, musically inclined and excellent dancers.

I would estimate that lesbians would often feature female traits in our ancient matrifocal archetype.  They would have commanding dispositions, and they would be overweight (high testosterone/high estrogen), extremely discriminating and musically inclined.

I would also predict that gays and lesbians would often have relatives with autism and Asperger’s, with homosexuality not uncommon among the autistic and those with Asperger’s.  Gays and males with autism feature maturational delay; lesbians feature maturational acceleration.

The patterns here seem pretty clear.

Exploring human origins and social change paradigms is far more than the specialty of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists.  To understand our origins, it is necessary to understand human consciousness, human consciousness as it relates to prehuman consciousness, and whatever alternative consciousness is necessary to put the other two in context.  In other words, to understand ourselves and our society’s changes, let’s consider an alternative intervention.  Let’s try less dry explorations.  Let’s get wet.

What began as a creative exercise several years ago has evolved into an unconscious routine.  I used to make believe, or run an “as if” frame, that said that if society is changing according to a hidden yet overarching dynamic, the future could be intuited or predicted by patterns or trends observable in the present.  I’d place myself in a meditative space and listen.

The deepest, most impact-filled presupposition that I live with is Descartes’ conclusion that because I am aware, I’ll accept that I exist.  Next in importance is this presupposition:  Because I experience feeling part of something larger than myself, I will accept the experience as valid, even though I began meditating almost 40 years ago with that experience as a goal.  In other words, I accept spiritual experience on a relative basis, based upon the fact that by seeking spiritual experience I assume that it exists.  As a student of Ericksonian hypnotherapy and as a follower of the work of the psychoanalyst/dolphin researcher/altered-state specialist John C. Lilly, I can relate to Lilly’s basic premise, “What I believe to be true is true or becomes true, within the limits to be found experientially or experimentally.”

Although there is a suggestion here that truth is relative, there is also a suggestion that our mind/self is so powerful a creative force that truth can be designed.

Listening for patterns, I sit in a deeply relativistic place, aware that my unconscious presuppositions deeply inform the patterns I can be aware of, and I am aware that my choice to believe that there is overarching pattern impacts what I perceive.

I theorize that there is primary process consciousness (the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness displayed by protohumans, small children, animals, the unconscious, dreams and the autistic), split consciousness (normal waking consciousness) and a third consciousness that features aspects of the other two.

So, when I engage in the exercise of seeking understanding, I use “as if.”  Placing myself in “as if,” also called “don’t know mind,” I encourage the emergence of patterns.  I get wet.  I’m playing with the notion that this kind of getting wet is becoming common.  I’m playing with the idea that grasping human origins and social change is best conducted outside an academic environment and inside the Internet, where the process of communication is showing signs of primary process, split consciousness and the unnamed transcendent third position all at once.

One of the current default beliefs among academics is that art was a contingent, accidental, emergent feature that resulted from the evolution of our unique large brains, language and self awareness.  Geoffrey Miller has suggested that perhaps we’ve got that direction reversed.  Miller writes that art drove our evolution.  I agree, and I would go a step further.  That which we experience as art is a direct reflection or manifestation of very early ontogenetic embryonic epigenetic process.  Art was encouraged to emerge in the adult of our species via neotenic runaway sexual selection, which emphasized song and dance.  Human adult consciousness in no small way reflects the actual creative process of life on earth.  Art is a direct reflection of that process.  We think like life creates.

Right now we are creating the Internet.

I’m thinking that the best way to understand ourselves is to share.  Giving our conjectures to the Internet, an automatic citation system embedding idea lineage into its very fabrication, we can relieve ourselves of the academic compulsion to father or mother every idea into a peer-reviewed journal, with every parent knowing exactly where every child is.  Yes, there is anonymity and loss of identity when words or works of art emerge and proliferate without it being obvious who might have been an “owner.”  This is the wet world of the Internet.  Boundaries are far less distinct.  Ownership is less important.  Control is not possible.

If we are going to understand human origins and societal evolution, we have to give up control.  The third consciousness that provides an understanding of the other two is one that presupposes that former boundaries can disappear.

For many, the question is:  How can we understand something if we don’t draw lines?

It’s OK to draw lines.  We just draw them with our temporary minds.  And, observe.

There is a tacit assumption or consideration that underlies much of what I write here.  Occasionally, I’m not subtle about this belief.  The idea is that art and science can be closely allied.  Perhaps they often are closely allied, except at present science seems rather obsessed with the idea that theory formation should be engaged in with the same obsession with detail as is necessary in the proof of theory.  That tends to keep artist/blogger/theorists writing for nonscientists.

Artists are just as obsessed as scientists, except their focus is usually on internal experience and the translation of that internal experience in a way that provides visitors something new.  Often, artists are exploring what it is like to be human, tasting and evaluating consciousness as the artists produce varying treats from the particular kitchen that is their medium.  Sometimes the artists attempt to put the concoction into words.  Some artists specialize in words.  For many artists, part of being an artist is having a unique experience without having to use words.

I am an artist, trained in watercolor and pen and ink, who now works in the medium of storytelling, collecting patterns from different science disciplines and showing how the different patterns can congregate to describe how humans came to be.  I am using my imagination to tell a story that describes how humans acquired imagination.  Like the scientist, I display obsession with detail, except I am relatively unconcerned by peer review.  As an artist, I find that convention is only useful insofar as the communication of my experience requires my overlapping with the experience of my audience.  For a scientist, allegiance to convention is integral to both being provided an opportunity to share ideas (getting an advanced degree) and presenting ideas that ally with at least some of the scientist’s colleagues’ thoughts.

As an artist producing evolutionary theory, I find myself over time producing no small number of products, at least as compared to the published work of scientists.  In the kitchen of my medium, I concoct many pies, cakes, roasts, casseroles, appetizers and sides.  I receive emails and comments alerting me to whether the flavors are satisfying to my visitors.  I get mixed reviews.  Nevertheless, from what I can tell with scientists’ productions, either they are spending less time in the kitchen, they are cooking but not sharing the results in peer-reviewed contexts or they are cooking but just producing far fewer, but more sophisticated (deeply researched and cited), products.

The point I am very slowly getting around to making is that as an artist I can explore consciousness as integral to my productions without having to strain myself.  An academic seems to need to make believe that understanding, experiencing or at least defining consciousness is not necessary to what a scientist produces.  A scientist is a member of a community of peers that believe that an advanced degree makes it possible for holders of that degree to have something to lose if they don’t behave in a trustworthy fashion.  Those folks that spend the time and money to get a Ph.D. receive an audience in part because everyone knows that if they screw up, they are out that time and money.  Not so the artists.  Artists are evaluated by what comes out of their kitchen.

A scientist has something to lose.  This is good insofar as society can trust a scientist’s evaluation or proof will hold up across conventional reality.  An artist has little to lose.  This is good insofar as an artist needs to cross boundaries, breaking culture barriers, to explore identity and consciousness, providing insight into where we come from and what it is like to be a human being.

So, we have two classes of humans, both engaging in obsession or deep ongoing focus of attention on some particular, one class committed to convention, the other to the boundaries of convention.  Scientists tend to stay away from understanding how consciousness may influence their particular focus (physicists and biologists, for example), while artists are seeking, at least to some degree, to understand consciousness.

It seems to me that there is potential for synergy, a science of consciousness or art of evolution.  Spiritual disciplines have mostly scoped out this area up to now, often accompanying their discoveries with mythologies obfuscating insights with maps confused with territories.  In the previous piece, I played with the presupposition or theory that humans evidence two forms of consciousness–primary process and split consciousness–and that unions or integrations of the two consciousnesses can offer beautiful (artist frame) or useful (scientist frame) results.

A place to begin might be to encourage scientists to behave more like artists by imagining that they have access to alternative, primary process states of consciousness that offer both beautiful and useful information.  We might also encourage artists to explore and communicate using evolutionary paradigms, allowing the extrapolation of their personal experiences to larger contexts.

Integration of primary process and split consciousness is not just a personal choice, but a societal imperative.  Experiencing our selves on multiple identity levels creates an opportunity to feel whole.  Observing what science and art have in common, what the scientist and artist share, is necessary if our society is to give up the mythologies of religion.

One of the deeply peculiar things about being human at this particular point in history is our tendency to ally ourselves with split consciousness or self awareness, deeply identifying with an identity at a single level.  We exhibit little desire to shift scales by assigning identity to levels beneath or beyond that of our body.

From a Hegelian point of view, we’ve emerged from a present tense consciousness characterized by no self awareness.  We used to be locked into a single time and single place, with no ability to intuit something’s opposite.  Before language, we lived in primary process.  This is the consciousness of animals, very small children, the unconscious, the severely autistic and hypnotic trance.

Acquiring split consciousness, we obsess on our peculiar station in existence, featuring existential isolation and an ability to view everything as separate.  We not only focus on our own self interest, but we do so in a step-by-step, focused, goal-oriented fashion that often fails to notice the direct, indirect or larger repercussions of our behavior.

That ability to obsess is integral to being human.  I’ve proposed that we sexually selected each other in the context of choosing the best dancers as copulation partners, growing bigger brains because a dance aesthetic requires a massive number of synapses.  In the process, those best at being obsessed made more babies.  A Fisherian runaway sexual selection encourages obsession, with one sex obsessed with display and the other sex obsessed with evaluating display.  Obsession became integral to who we were.

When our minds split and we emerged from primary process, we stayed obsessed.  Instead of obsessing over how exactly to leverage art into procreation opportunities, we instead obsess over how exactly to leverage anything we do, say or imagine into a procreation opportunity.  This obsession is often diverted into profession, hobby, recreation or even relaxation activities, with each of us engaged in behaviors that will draw us positive attention and respect.  At the foundation of these behaviors is our deep desire for physical union.  (See Geoffrey Miller’s Spent.)

So, we evolved in a manner that reinforced obsession, blossoming into self awareness, still obsessed.  The Hegelian synthesis to this primary process thesis, split consciousness antithesis, is an obsessed or deeply focused state of consciousness that provides an experience of primary process and split consciousness both at once.

One of the genuinely peculiar things about being a human is our connection to primary process that features symbol with associations displayed in places like dreams while at the same time we can line up a series of sounds that behave as signs associated with meanings that when displayed in a row over time collect more than one context so that together they compel imagination or an ability to be two or more places and times at once.

We maintain two very different awareness systems.  Primary process, the language of the unconscious, allows us to be in the present, with no multiplace perspective.  Split consciousness allows us perspective, multiple experiences, with little ability to be present.  Being human, we tend to obsess, regardless.

Back to Hegel.  Finding the synthesis requires some facility with both paradigms.  This is, of course, paradoxical insofar as one would think a person is either split or not split, not both at once.  There is a third way.  This involves being split while present to the split.

There are numerous paths that offer specific regimens that address this split.  What we’re doing here is a little different.  We’re defining the problem biologically as part of a hypothetical evolutionary dynamic.  We’re making believe religion or spirituality is biology, that consciousness is an evolutionary condition.

It was Gregory Bateson who described the human condition as an ability to focus on goals in a single-minded fashion, ignoring repercussions while achieving the goals.  What we are discussing here is blending together two separated consciousnesses, allowing the obsessed-with-goal portion of our nature to be embraced by the ancient, obsessed living-in-the-present portion of our nature, providing an ability to move through narrative time while sensitive to the relative nature of identity.

Achieving goals in the context of a larger whole.

Integral to this notion is not taking the split self so seriously.  What might be some techniques, rituals or games useful for learning to accompany our obsessed selves?

When I was a boy, I went for two years to a summer camp in Bemidji, Minnesota.  It was almost all Jewish boys, many from Chicago’s North Shore.  My second year, I was put back into the cabin with the kids from my first year.  I requested that I be put back with younger kids.  The kids from my first year had all reached puberty.  I wasn’t close.

One of the cabin counselors, the cabin I requested I be removed from, was a middle-aged cartoonist named Pogo.  All the other counselors were college students.  Needing a summer job was not a surprise for someone seeking to make a living as a cartoonist.  I was fascinated by his craft but didn’t understand his humor.  He specialized in dirty jokes on cocktail napkins.  Still, I was in awe of his ability to create a spontaneous likeness.

My first year, I had been placed in Wild Thing’s cabin.  Each counselor had a nickname.  Wild Thing was a 19-year-old.  All the 19- and 20-year-old counselors felt to me to be some other species.  I had no older siblings and so had nothing to compare them to.  Music, alcohol and sex were on all their minds.  This was about when the Beatles hit.

An evening shortly after camp had started, Wild Thing off somewhere, I walked into the main room with the half dozen bunk beds.  Five campers were lined up, facing the doorway, masturbating.  They were having a contest to see who could fling their semen the farthest.  I had never masturbated, considered masturbating or was even clear on what masturbation was.

I was seven or eight, receiving the birds and bees talk from my mother, when she explained how sperm coming out of the penis impregnated the woman’s egg and made a human.  I asked her how the sperm knew to come out of the penis instead of pee.  Mom said she didn’t know.

I was exposed to lots of new things in summer camp.

Periodically a truck would wind its way through the campground, dragging a generator spewing a cloud of bug bomb through the cabins and the woods.  The camp was filled with asthmatics with lots of allergies.  Some would flee.  I would hack my lungs out for a while after the truck passed by, astonished that the stuff wasn’t poisonous.  It left a white dust and dead insects everywhere.

I remember occasionally whipping out my handkerchiefs, I always carried two, and flinging them playfully at boys that were annoying me.  My nose ran nonstop all summer, a combination of pine tree, bug bomb and mold.  My handkerchiefs looked like they were baked in biscuits and gravy, an intimidating sight to friend and foe.

I remember stepping outside the mess hall one evening.  A circle of campers were holding hands and dancing in classic Jewish fashion around one particularly allergic, shy and fat kid.  They were singing the traditional Jewish dance song, except they were singing the words, “Oozie amoeba, Oozie amoeba…..”

In the mail, I received care packages from my grandmothers that included smoked oysters, salami and rye bread.  My cabin mates were astonished at the amounts and frequency of my grandmother missives.

I could draw and I could swim.  I remember wood-burning a Northern landscape into the paddle of one of the counselors.  I swam a mile, across the lake and back.

Peter Dubin and I went out on the lake in a kayak.  I couldn’t get the hang of paddling.  I accidentally smacked him up the side of the head with one of the blade ends.  Then, I did it again.  Then, again.  Peter was crying and screaming at me.  I couldn’t figure out how to paddle without whacking him.  I was just used to a regular paddle.

What I spent a lot of time doing those two summers was going on canoe trips around Minnesota and in Canada.  I didn’t particularly like summer camp.  Peter was my only friend, so getting out of camp on these journeys felt like a satisfactory alternative.  Paddling, portaging, cooking, setting up tent.  That was the routine.  I was small for my age so I always seemed to hurt, but that was OK.  Paddling around Canada, we sometimes saw no other person for more than a day.  Chipmunks were tame.  We saw moose, deer, etc.  I don’t remember viewing extraordinary beauty.  I think it was mostly about getting from day to day someplace where I wouldn’t be constantly exposed to behavior I found intimidating or didn’t understand.

I remember once, in a particularly remote, woody area, having seen no one for almost two days, I walked out of the camp into dense forest to find a place to take a crap.  I dug my hole.  Pants down, I was squatting, and a girl appeared, saw me and continued walking by me, making believe I wasn’t there.  Then, her family walked by, a dad and brother.  The dad said hi.

In another ridiculously remote place, we managed to get all our gear and canoes out of the water during a storm in the late afternoon.  We piled our stuff on what looked like abandoned railway tracks.  Then, we heard the train.  Scurrying to get everything off the tracks, we completed doing so just before the train came around the corner.

Some evenings I would get up with asthma or have to pee.  The sky was filled with more stars than is even imaginable today.

Though I don’t remember the beauty much, for many years afterward I drew scenes of the wild.  Over and over again I doodled woods and rivers.  Never was there a person in the pictures.

Strip religion of mythology and the discussion revolves around consciousness, awareness and identity.  Darwin was sensitive to his theory being received in a context that it would be used to support or deny the existence of god.  Darwin himself struggled with how exactly he understood god. After150 years, discussions of evolution often still focus on the battle between the theory of natural selection and Judeo-Christian myths.

The particular kind of consciousness that a normal human experiences and displays is what I’ve been calling split consciousness.  This understanding is premised on primary process consciousness–the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness of infants, animals, dream, the unconscious and the autistic–being what we evolved from and still retain while sleeping, while small or while in hypnotic trance.

I’ve hypothesized that the transition from primary process consciousness to split consciousness was compelled by runaway sexual selection focused on dance, which eventually resulted in a unique brain structure exhibiting two hemispheres of unequal size and a smaller corpus callosum.  This process was perhaps encouraged by a bridging of language from gesture to speech, enhancing an ability to represent a thing with a sound instead of a sign and motion.  Nevertheless, at this point we identify with a condition described as self aware.  Strangely, maybe because of all the stories that accompany religion, we haven’t paid all that much attention to the differences between primary process and split consciousness, at least in the context of evolution.  What I mean is that we are directly connected to all that preceded us in the way we experience the world.  We can choose to notice.

Evolutionary biology is described as a science, but as regards human evolution, it is far more than just science; it is also art.  It is art in that how we experience consciousness informs how we understand evolution.  The differences between prehuman consciousness and human consciousness are integral to how we understand evolution.

Most humans indulge exclusively in experiencing the world as a split consciousness being, evaluating the world based upon the dissociative constructs developed by an ability to be two places at once, two times at once, and to intuit something’s opposite.  A net result is we spend relatively little time allied with primary process or with that synthesis of the two forms of consciousness that has had a kazillion names, but which we’ll call epiphany.

In the context of understanding evolution, indulging in the experience of split consciousness, one of three choices of consciousness that we are aware of, we make it very difficult to understand what exactly happened when we humans evolved.  Perhaps most obvious is that as humans, we intuit that every separate individual animal, insect and plant exhibits individual consciousness with individual motivation and individual agendas.  We intuit that because that is how we humans experience the world.  I suspect that if we encouraged in ourselves and one another an ability to identify with both primary process and epiphany states (epiphany states being states that exhibit both primary process and split consciousness), we’d be far less likely to conclude that all life reflects this peculiarly human split perspective.

One might hypothesize that an individual’s genome is but part of the skeleton of a structure, each person’s genome but a single bone in a massive skeleton that covers the world with a trillion-bone being.  All that nongenome flesh, blood, weather, rocks and water are playing the bones of the skeleton like some mad timpanist beating into existence a music that has little to do with individuality and everything to do with alternative consciousness.

The more I study evolution, the more I feel like I’m exploring consciousness.  Alternative consciousness feels necessary to understand evolution.  I guess that’s why as an artist I feel qualified to theorize.  Shifting identity is where an artist feels at home.

A professor recently wrote me that she introduced the ideas described in my blog to her class on Neanderthals and Human Evolutionary Theory.  Her email asked or suggested several questions or expressed her class’s confusion in the following areas:

Are you proposing that testosterone levels are driving evolution of mammals in general or primates specifically?

The evidence that testosterone is driving evolution mostly comes from anomalies emerging in neuropsychology around progeny maturation changes that result from environmental influences upon a pregnant mother and other studies in the neuropsychological literature.

An interesting primate study was as follows…

“In a 5-year longitudinal study, we examined the effect of disrupting the neonatal activity of the pituitary–testicular axis on the sexual development of male rhesus monkeys.  Animals in a social group under natural lighting conditions were treated with a GnRH antagonist (antide), antide and androgen, or both vehicles, from birth until 4 months of age.  In antide-treated neonates, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection throughout the neonatal period.  Antide + androgen-treated neonates had subnormal serum LH, but above normal testosterone concentrations during the treatment period.  From 6 to 36 months of age, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection.  Ten of 12 control animals reached puberty during the breeding season of their 4th year, compared with five of 10 antide- and three of eight antide + androgen-treated animals.  Although matriline rank was balanced across treatment groups at birth, a disruption within the social group during year 2 resulted in a marginally lower social ranking of the two treated groups compared with the controls.  More high (78%) than low (22%) ranking animals reached puberty during year 4.  During the breeding season of that year, serum LH, testosterone and testicular volume were positively correlated with social rank.  Thus the lower social rank of treated animals may have contributed to the subnormal numbers of these animals reaching puberty during year 4.  However, of those animals achieving puberty during year 4, the pattern of peripubertal changes in serum testosterone and testicular volume differed between control and antide-treated animals.  The results appear to suggest that the disruption of normal activity of the neonatal pituitary–testicular axis retarded sexual development, but that social rank is a key regulatory factor in setting the timing of sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys.  The effect of neonatal treatment with antide and low social rank on sexual development could not be reversed by neo-natal exposure to greater than normal concentrations of androgen.”  Abstract from Sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys: importance of neonatal testosterone exposure and social rank by Mann, Akinbami, Gould, Paul and Wallen.

It seems that mammals in general may be so affected, but I have not explored this.

How specifically is testosterone expression selected for?

I see this as largely a social structure question.  Any number of fluctuating environmental situations can encourage differing social structures.  For example, if a primate society experiences dispersed food sources gathered by females often foraging out of sight of males, then male control of female procreation may be less effective than a promiscuous social structure evidencing lower male testosterone levels and less hierarchical posturing.  See “What is Neoteny?”

How do changes in the timing of testosterone influence the evolution of mammalian life history?

This is not a question that I have researched, but only asked.  I don’t know.

How has Darwin’s theory of natural selection, inherently based upon interactions with the environment and organisms, biased a current ability to note the effects of the environment upon evolution?

The version of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in widest use today is the Neo-Darwinian interpretation of Darwin’s work, with Dawkins as the most vocal representative.  Fern Elsdon-Baker, in The Selfish Genius, describes the rather odd situation that we are in with Darwin’s pluralistic perspective not being the general understanding of how evolution works; instead, it is Wallace’s rather orthodox interpretation (though Wallace believed deity intervened to make our brain).  What this largely boils down to is:  How random, exactly, is the variation that emerges in progeny?

Neo-Darwinism makes clear that Lamarckian principles are dead and that evolutionary developmental biological ideas (that the environment can compel changes in ontogeny) are a special case.  The current theorizing environment does not support the idea that the environment can affect evolution by influencing the parents in their lives to produce progeny with features that reflect the parents’ experience.  Darwin discussed this issue at length, providing numerous examples in his The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.  This two-volume work was basically a list of anomalies that did not fit his theory of natural selection.

Whereas the environment is noted as important because it decides which features encourage an individual to live long enough to procreate, in most current theory the environment is not noted as important in its ability to influence the kinds of individuals that are created by the parents’ experience.  My emphasis is that the environment influences the rate and timing of maturation, adjusting ontogeny, encouraging the emergence of a host of features.

How does your theory contrast with Darwin’s presentation of sexual selection and differential selective pressures between males and females in The Descent of Man?

In 1998 I was reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Campbell’s The Masks of God and Geschwind and Galaburda’s Cerebral Lateralization at the same time.  The four books kind of blended in my mind.  I was looking for support for the thesis that we evolved within matrifocal societies featuring males with neurological structures similar to the contemporary autistic.  I hypothesized that these matrifocal societies were evolving big brains and cooperation by females.  In mate selection, females were mostly picking males for being evocative dancers.

After coming up with the idea that human evolution was compelled by dance, following an R. A. Fisher sexual selection feedback loop thesis, I came across Geoffrey Miller’s 1994 work presenting a more detailed exposition of that thesis, except Miller said it was art in general that compelled human evolution.  Miller’s 2000 The Mating Mind is the published account of his ideas.

I see no difference between Darwin’s The Descent of Man thesis and my work, except I’m hypothetically providing far more detail on how exactly the dynamic of sexual selection is engaged.  Darwin did not yet have endocrinology, neuropsychology or even anthropology.  To me, the work of Gould, Campbell, and Geschwind feels like the manifestation in other disciplines of Darwin’s sexual selection thesis.  Sexual selection, without an understanding of how social structure informs the direction evolution takes, only provides part of the picture of species transformation.  Sexual selection and insight into how neoteny and acceleration compel specific evolutionary trajectories create an opportunity to view the kind of physical, neurological and behavioral transformations that accompany the particular features that the female is choosing.  We can use human sexual selection to understand the neurological repercussions of particular social structures, thus creating an opportunity to view not just our species but particular neurological variations within our species as related to social structure and sexual selection.

I think I’m just answering this question in a way that makes more questions.  I can send you a more detailed explanation of this thesis if you like, though it’s kind of long.

What is the empirical support for testosterone managing rate and estrogen the timing of maturation, influencing evolution?

This was her last question, the most difficult.  This lies at the foundation of most of what I write about.  I answered in six pages, citing a number of different studies, but there was no study that even asked these questions.  My conclusions are based upon what I infer.

Back in 1998, when a lot of this was coming together, I read a paper cited by Geschwind and Galaburda in Cerebral Lateralization that noted that a mother’s testosterone levels at six weeks before birth determined her child’s maturation rates.  I’ve been looking for the paper for almost a year, having noted that I found the paper in Cerebral Lateralization, but I failed to note the specific paper.  I recently reread Cerebral Lateralization to find the reference, but I couldn’t find it.  Nithya and Rosanna, who have helped me on this project, haven’t found reference to such a paper.  Did I dream it?

I received an email from Jon Gluckman, who follows this blog, suggesting that there is another interpretation of human developmental stages and political milieu, one that suggests that Right Wing orientations and perhaps fascism have their origin in the maturationally delayed.

My interpretation of the power of neoteny to impact culture holds to the view that the prolongation of infant features into the adult of our species can be observed to be influencing society as aboriginal aspects emerge in contemporary times.  I describe the horizontalization of society, with female frames of reference and bonobo-like qualities.  Horizontalization is fanning out from its source among young people, the Internet.  In other words, many features of the very young, including playfulness, curiosity, affection and sociality, are becoming primary features of current society, particularly when examined from the view of the new communications technologies.

One could also view contemporary trends to withhold information, engage in secrecy, offer reverence to the leader, engage in systemic selfish behavior and associate only with those who are like you as traits exhibited by children, traits which many adults also exhibit.  That being the case, the neoteny premise of a horizontal society being one featuring the traits of young children could be viewed as a theory picking and choosing which child traits are to be emphasized.

Freud first proposed that developmental stages exposed to trauma result in the exhibition of features of the traumatized developmental stage in the adult of our species.  This is not a neotenic prolongation of infant features into the adult, but a lifting and placing of features of a child stage, a stage accompanied by a disturbing experience with accompanying repressed grief/rage/fear emotions, into the adult.  Instead of bridging childhood strengths such as creativity, affection and curiosity into adulthood, trauma shuts off childhood virtues, leaving instead an adult seeking a childhood featuring creativity, affection and curiosity.

I remember studies conducted to determine the common experiences among adults that were passionate followers of the Nazi Party.  Nazi males were often severely beaten as children.  A Right Wing politic may exhibit adults acting like children, but I would suggest that the children they are acting like are deeply wounded.

A childhood featuring joy harvests a different selection of feelings and experiences than a childhood frequently presented with the awful.  Different adults result.  This insight may perhaps have preceded language.  It’s so integral to how we understand how the world works.  Understanding what exactly a human being is outside of trauma, inside a world that feels secure, contributes to an understanding of evolution as a process that is informed by maturation.

I consider myself a pragmatist.  I make decisions based upon the information I receive.  I change strategies for achieving goals based upon changing information.  Though I am a human featuring creativity, I often devote my ability to make things up to form what seems like useful models of how the world works.  A traumatized person, one featuring creativity, often is not pragmatic.  That person forms conclusions based upon information stored at the time the trauma occurred.  Current information is often ignored, or only information that matches the feelings or conclusions that accompanied the old experiences are paid attention to.  The traumatized person develops models of experience based upon personal ancient times.

Understanding the power of imagination and creativity to inform experience based upon what happened in the past is integral to understanding a model based upon maturation rates and timing to explain biological and social evolution.  Imagination is driven by emotion.  The conclusions we draw based upon experience impact the kind of child we manifest as adults.

To understand neoteny, it is important, perhaps essential, that we understand that we are, by nature, joy-filled creatures.  To understand evolution, it is useful that we feel young.

The rat returned to the backyard this October.  This time she made the tortoise house her home.  It was hibernation time for the box turtles and so they were doing their autumn disappearing act.  They were digging down into the dirt beneath their multilevel home, a wood structure inside an about 6′ X 4′ X 4′ pen.  Rat, in the meantime, was collecting dirt and making dirt mounds to seal off the open walls, making a nest, I figured.

The tortoise house is right below the bird feeder.  I was not feeling comfortable with the rat coming out in the daytime to eat birdseed with the squirrels.  It finally got to the point where my opening up the back door of our row house and stepping outside was not driving the rat back into the house.  Like the squirrels, Rat continued to eat the birdseed.

Our home and yard are 17 feet wide.  It was only a matter of time before the row house neighbors noticed we were housing and feeding rats.  Our yards are all contiguous.

So, I tried putting out mouse poison and stood and watched.  I had to watch because if a squirrel approached the poison, I had to shoo the squirrel away and remove it.  Rat approached the poison, sniffed it and tore off like a rocket in the other direction.  So much for poison.

A couple tortoises emerged briefly to get some sun on the last days before hibernation.  I grabbed them and placed them indoors in the bathtub.  I had a new plan.  On a relatively warm day, I would dig down into the turtle pen, remove the house, find the two other newly hibernating tortoises, bring them inside and clean the whole pen out, making it inhospitable for the rat.  This winter the tortoises would not hibernate.  I’d take them back out in the spring, after putting their house back, with the rat long gone.

On an October Sunday, I opened up the tortoise pen and started digging.  I was not thrilled by the idea of finding an annoyed rat or rat babies.  I made my movements in a fashion that would allow my jumping backward on short notice.

We’ve had tortoises for almost 20 years.  Yoshi and Filbert are at least that old.  Four, maybe five tortoises have died over that time.  One, a very young one from the pet store, might have escaped through the chain link cage.  Two died out of hibernation and we buried them.  Two never emerged in the spring.

Digging out the tortoise home to make the rat go away, I found the shells of Gertrude and Crag.  Both had chosen to dig down into the dirt at a relatively uninsulated location inside the pen that was outside their wood home.  This no doubt killed them.  Every autumn, I jam leaves into the first and second floor of their wood structure, generating extra insulation for their sleep.  Then I fill the whole 6′ X 4′ X 4′ pen with leaves to better insulate the whole pen and the house.  These tortoises are all from the Missouri/Arkansas area, which has warmer winters.  They dig down only about 8″.  We have to cover them up with more insulation because they are not indigenous Illinois tortoises with the genetic memory to dig below the deeper frost line.

It was very odd to see old friends in the form of shells only.  Bodies were long gone.  Crag’s shell was beginning to fragment.

After about a half hour of digging, I lifted the house out.  No rat or rat babies.  There was Harms Woody and Archimedes sleeping.  I washed them off in the kitchen sink and placed them with their buddies in the bathtub.

Everybody is awake in winter.  Odd for this bunch that likes to sleep.  We fetch crickets and worms from the pet store, two of their favorite foods, along with bananas and strawberries.  I’m thinking of buying some newcomers, some three-toed box turtles in complimentary pairs.  Half my life I’ve been accompanied by box turtles.  Though eggs get laid, never have I seen a baby.

The rat seems gone. I haven’t seen her for a couple months.  Raccoons live beneath the porch on the other side of us.  Possums visit.  Bunnies often bounce by.  Chipmunks hang out with the squirrels beneath the feeder.  Last spring a coyote wandered into the backyard.

I look forward to spring.  The tortoises, who love the sunlight, will like it, too.

One of the most challenging things about producing unique theory in an amateur context is the necessity of embracing the amateur milieu.  The academic and hobby environments are very different on several levels.  As an amateur, it is easy to believe that your audience is at least partly academics if what you are producing is the kind of product, unique evolutionary theory, for example, that an academic would produce.  That is a nonuseful perspective.

The academic and amateur environments operate on different premises and come with different appropriate behaviors.  I have relatives, friends and colleagues that are professors, so though I don’t speak from the experience of being an academic, this is not an unfamiliar world.

In academia, though the concept of the commons is integral to the idea of a learning community, knowledge sources are closely associated with individual contributions.  Struggles for recognition or for being a knowledge source are integral to institutional and discipline respect.  There are very specific conventions for how knowledge is shared and contributions are made, beginning with getting a degree in the area where you are seeking support for your ideas.  Criticism and analysis of contributions are part of the system, so it is required that positions be well defended.  Presentations are made in a context of attacking and defending ideas.  Over time, an academic builds a web of allies and supporters that is useful to achieving practitioner goals.

A result of the academic battle for recognition and respect is a hesitation to offer attention to those not participating in the slugfest.  It is hard enough achieving respect following the rules.  Forming alliances and offering recognition to folks operating outside the academic battleground are experienced as not useful to achieving goals.

My work makes it particularly difficult for academics to offer signs of their support.  It is interdisciplinary, grounded in anthropology, evolutionary biology, neuropsychology and, to some degree, endocrinology.  On several occasions I’ve received emails from academics interested in what I was working on where it crossed over into their area of expertise, but because they were unfamiliar with the concepts as they entered other disciplines, they could not estimate how reasonable my ideas were outside their own profession.  There is, of course, the fact that I have no degree in their area, I am not published in a peer-reviewed journal, I have no alliances with an academic institution and my work is not cited by papers published in peer-reviewed journals.

There is also an issue because I feel a defined understanding of consciousness is integral to understanding evolution.  I closely ally art, spirituality and science when I discuss evolutionary theory.  Many evolutionary theorists might say that’s fine, understanding your epistemological foundations can be useful when exploring something as fundamental as evolutionary theory, but these discussions are not the convention in contemporary journals.

What I continue to struggle with as I slowly integrate the many aspects of what I’m now calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” is that as an amateur, it is necessary that I embrace the amateur milieu.  As an amateur, it is essential I have fun, communicate I am having fun and make that joy of sharing central to my communication.

Almost without exception, academics that I observe don’t behave like they’re having fun, particularly when they are seeking to lobby for their ideas or interpretations.  They sometimes do seem to be having fun while teaching.  When teaching, they are not engaged in the struggle to achieve respect.  When they are lobbying for acceptance of an idea or opinion, they wear battle demeanor.  Struggling for recognition, they are focused, concentrated, making sure they are aware of the ramification of all their utterances, paying close attention to the words and behaviors of their foes and allies.

That is exactly the space I need to avoid, but it is one I keep feeling drawn to.  I am in no battle.  I have no foes or allies.  As an amateur, engaged in hobby, swimming in ideas with no boundaries, I have no academic conventions to uphold, no institutional routines to distract me.

Writing the larger overview of my theory, a part of me feels drawn toward establishing my credentials as a person whose ideas should be taken seriously.  That means several things.  One of them is at the beginning of the work it is good to be describing on overview of the discipline, noting accepted theories, while referencing important past and current researchers and theorists.  My work covers half a dozen disciplines.  Writing an overview of half a dozen disciplines as an introduction feels overwhelming.  It feels like work.  Perhaps more importantly, I’m not familiar with the history, all the current theories and important past and present individuals in those disciplines.  In addition, academics won’t be reading what I write, at least not in a fashion where they are considering citation, and nonacademics would likely be bored by an essentially very long introduction.

I think it also relevant that academics have something to lose if the information they are putting their reputation on the line to share is proven false, poorly supported or just highly conjectural.  This prevents professionals from wasting time and resources pursuing false leads.  The amateur has not spent years achieving credentials that it would be very costly to lose.  Not unlike male and female procreation agendas, an amateur, like a male with an almost infinite amount of sperm, is encouraged to take risks because losses have fewer repercussions. A professional, like a female that can only give birth to a limited number of children, will protect the ideas that he or she is identified with because each idea supported requires a personal commitment and some reputation risk.

Establishing credentials as a hobbyist, I make clear that I am an authority when I make sense, tell the truth and share my passion.  Authenticity accompanies a passionate, articulate sharing.

As an amateur, I am blessed by having no discipline barriers to corral my thoughts.  As an amateur, I am not enmeshed in a network of relationships that would tell me who would be disappointed by a thought I share.  My successes won’t translate into a colleague or friend feeling that he or she has failed.  My failures don’t burden a colleague with an ally that has let him or her down.

What I need to remember is that I am writing to share the joy I experience.  Though there are academics with the strength and character to write from a position of joy and to continue to battle for their ideas, as an amateur, I am relieved of battle.  I need only experience the joy of participation.

Continuing to write an integration of my ideas, I can remember this.  I am not a professional.  I am not writing for professionals.  I am writing for those that may share my joy.

I have a friend whose dad was a famous guru and whose brother was a mathematics professor at a prestigious college.  My buddy chose a profession that surrounded him with art.  That’s how I met him.  I provided him illustrations.  Thirty years ago he made it to an endocrinologist to discover that he didn’t have schizophrenia as diagnosed.  He needed his hormones adjusted.  Pills taken, life settled down.  He was always going to be obsessive-compulsive, but the terror and paranoia went away.

Every autumn, my diabetic stepdaughter goes through endocrinological hell as her auto-immune system goes haywire.  Most years she spends some time in the hospital.  Doctors don’t know what to do other than to address the symptoms.  Gwyn is an artist of the palette, inventing new tastes and flavors and sharing them with those that visit her in her restaurant.

Where I live in Chicago, one of the most common topics of conversation is the weather.  When we ask each other how we’re doing, we respond with the conventional answer, fine.  Yet, somehow, discussing the weather is also a way to discuss how we are doing, but it is done in such a way that we aren’t getting sidetracked by what the person is aware of in his or her internal landscapes.  We hear the voice tones, timbre, intonation patterns, stress, presence and level of preoccupation when we discuss the weather.  Not incidentally, when we discuss the weather, communicating our internal states through various nonverbals, we are also discussing the larger community of variables impacting our physical, emotional and consciousness states.

For people like my stepdaughter, the weather is a life and death experience.  Without medical intervention, the autumn would have killed her years ago.

For my friend, misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, medical intervention has made him far more able to withstand environmental variation.

I personally experience radical mood swings depending on the season.  Growing older, I find that the swings slowly become less extreme.  Nevertheless, autumn anxiety and melancholy feel inevitable.  Deep winter depression is a routine.  During thunderstorms, I often feel elevated by the presence of something larger than myself.  I know many others with emotions, world views and even consciousness impacted by season and the weather.

My evolving understanding of evolution seems to be informed by a sense that our human idea of individuality, the way a human associates split consciousness or the experience of existential separateness with any being with a body, has impacted our ability to view/observe/listen to the world.  In other words, the peculiar human ability to be self aware has ironically obfuscated our ability to perceive a highly integrated, interconnected environment featuring relationships, not individuals.  Self aware, we have difficulty perceiving the awareness features of our environment.

The weather impacts our endocrine system, influencing our moods and adjusting our states of consciousness.  Each of us is self aware, but strangely we spend little time noting fluctuations in awareness.  Our consciousness is impacted by the environment, and we pay little attention.

If science is occupied by individuals talented at focusing on the specific to prove larger patterns, then perhaps it will take artists to understand evolution.  Evolution is a process that features massive interconnection.  Artists often succeed in crafting a communication that provides the person experiencing the art the feeling that he or she is not alone.  I’m slowly coming to the realization that evolutionary theorizing is more art than science as it becomes clear that breaking down larger patterns into smaller pieces doesn’t communicate the larger patterns.  To describe evolution, you need art.

Each of us is impacted by the larger patterns.  We know in our bodies, our emotions and our minds what it is like to be part of a larger system.  Evolutionary theory that both supports and reveals this experience would be useful.  Evolutionary theory that integrates understandings on what exactly consciousness is and how evolution engenders consciousness–beginning with how our environment influences human consciousness–would not only be useful, but would be art.

I’m in the process of refining a nearly 100-page introduction to what I’m now calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” or maybe “Neoteny, Evolution and Autism”. I haven’t decided yet.  The 13-page introduction to “The Theory of Waves,” posted last February, has been made less condensed and more accessible, with societal applications included.  The name has been changed with the integration of estrogen as the hypothesized agent controlling the timing of maturation.  I see estrogen as the conductor of the symphony of evolution.

Whereas most not-particularly-grounded amateur theorists with big ideas usually find themselves thinking of Einstein, I wonder about Darwin.  A couple things come to mind right now.

I often write about the nature of the Internet and its future.  It’s not just my profession, but it feels to me to be a particularly evocative part of the contemporary manifestations of neoteny-driven social structure transformations.  A half dozen blogs pick up my pieces regarding the Internet, some with respectable circulations, such as Counterpunch, The Public Record, BuzzFlash and The People’s Voice.  In the world I see forming, the amateur is gaining influence insofar as a person with few or no credentials now has an ability to acquire a relatively large audience.  New communications technologies are integrating with our primate compulsions to socialize to form massive hub-and-spoke relationship structures built on a horizontal rather than a pyramid premise.  With a bachelor’s degree, emphasis in art, I get to discuss biological and social evolution with a bunch of folks.

Weird effects emerge.  About four months ago, a blog picked up a piece I had written on the Internet, social evolution and the future.  About 30 Twitterers that specialized in social media picked it up, many with over 5,000 followers.  Over the course of maybe 24 hours, close to 100,000 Twitterers were transmitted a link to my piece.  Twitter has a low read rate for transmissions, so fewer than 1,000 people of the 100,000 read the essay.  I received three emails asking questions.  This blog receives a comment or email for about every 300 views.

What I’m trying to get a feel for is how exactly are new ideas on evolution emerging and being distributed outside the conventional context of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal?  Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs seem integral to this new world.  Stumbleupon, Digg and other vehicles seem to be having an effect.  Right now I am observing mostly the distribution of various aesthetics, such as music, across the Internet landscape.  I am curious how unique theory, the realm of academia, might proliferate in a nonacademic context.

It’s relatively easy for me to write and distribute a piece about the Internet on the Internet.  It’s more a challenge when it comes to evolutionary theory.  The Internet and evolutionary theory are the same to me.  Communicating the experience of it being the same is a challenge.

Back to Darwin.  One of the strangely similar things between many theorists writing in the early to mid-1800s and bloggers keyboarding today is that they were/are both amateurs.  Those earlier amateurs were almost always wealthy and were accorded excellent educations.  Their elevated station, their higher position on the social hierarchy, made it possible to influence the status quo.  Amateurs today are instead sharing ideas in an environment where hierarchies are coming down, enhancing the ability for former outsiders to have access to communities of other former outsiders.  The status quo is becoming less controlled by those with wealth and the conventional credentials.

What we are observing now is the beginning of a process of credential or barrier destruction.  Not surprisingly, it seems to be driven by the young, those with the least invested in traditional enclaves of influence and control.  Young people are creating and distributing their own aesthetics in the form of music, an area formerly controlled by corporations.  They are creating and distributing their own opinions on current events, an area formerly controlled by mainstream media.  Young people are populating one another’s world with image, video and written content; they are not satisfied with being consumers of corporate content anymore.

How exactly this will impact academia is not clear to me.  I find myself in an amateur’s position, in a small way like Darwin 170 years ago, except Darwin was at the top of a hierarchy where amateurs were respected, whereas I am watching hierarchies fall, and perhaps the last to fall will be academia.

Ironically, academia has been instrumental to the present seismic changes.  Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues have encouraged the destruction of the segregation of information with the Creative Commons movement, which encourages individuals to give up the traditional covetous attitude toward what they have created.  Where it was the working class that drove the 1930s changes, the middle class the 1960s, it seems to be a combination of youth and savvy academics that are propelling changes currently underway.  Nevertheless, not surprisingly, academia itself is proving difficult to introduce to a noncredentialed status quo.

Darwin felt loath to experience the ramifications of an introduction of his theory of natural selection to a society perhaps too willing to embrace it.  Only Wallace’s letter managed to push Darwin to publish.  Even then, Darwin put off for another 13 years publishing his theories regarding how specifically humans evolved.  Darwin was a man who was confident his ideas would be accorded both respect and controversy.

My theory of biological and social evolution emerges in an environment where again the amateur is respected, though strategies for being accorded respect are far less clear.  Darwin was a scientist who was wealthy, brilliant, creative and articulate.  I’m an artist with an active unconscious.  I ask myself if there is anything in Darwin’s amateur status that I could learn from as I seek an audience with my peers.

It has now become clear that neo-Lamarckism has always been a reasonable theory, and it has stood the test of time for more than a century.  Once some misunderstandings and inhibitions are removed, the theory can be regarded as a more complete theory (than neo-Darwinism) in that it analyses the evolutionary process in terms of both the proximate and ultimate mechanisms, and in that it is especially suited for analyzing the origin of macroevolutionary change.  Through the analysis of the proximate process we come to know the cause of variation and the presumed initial stage of evolution of the structures upon which natural selection has worked.  In traditional neo-Darwinism natural selection is considered to be involved throughout the whole evolutionary process (of structures), which is indeed untrue, as Mivart (1871) already knew.  In practice obvious cases of over-extension of the theory of natural selection, which actually results from neglect of the proximate process, have often been criticized in terms of their falsifiability.  Yet the critics have never offered a solution for this dilemma.  Indeed, evolutionary biology has been in a state of constipation caused by the neo-Darwinian constraint that inhibits exploration of the proximate process of evolution.  It should now be realized that such a worry will be over once we accept the neo-Lamarckian approach.

The application of the neo-Lamarckian analysis appears to resolve some outstanding problems and riddles in evolutionary biology.  For instance, the problem of “inheritance of acquired characters” is now understood as the result of accumulation of genocopies.  The age-old riddle of ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ can now be answered from the evolutionary viewpoint (Sect. 3B2).  ‘Adaptive response’ now must be restored as a fundamental evolutionary concept, though it has been neglected.  All phenomena of abnormal metamorphosis (halmatomorphosis, neoteny, caenogenesis) resulting in macroevolutionary structural changes are now attributed primarily to environmentally induced alteration in the response of the genotype (alteration in gene regulation) during the proximate process.  The study of the Baldwin effect as special cases of genetic assimilation must be encouraged.

It should be realized that all the above problems can be more clearly understood by inquiring into the hormonal mediation that becomes involved.  Indeed, the environmentally induced hormonal intervention controlling gene action was the mechanism that was unknown to the nineteenth century neo-Lamarckists, and the lack of knowledge of such a mechanism might have hindered the acceptance of neo-Lamarckism.  (Ryuichi Matsuda, Animal Evolution in Changing Environments, with Special Reference to Abnormal Metamorphosis (New York:  Wiley Press, 1987), p. 53.)

Ryuichi Matsuda has now passed, but he has colleagues that still pursue a classic Lamarckian interpretation of how evolution unfolds, a seemingly anomalous approach in a world where even evolutionary developmental biologists often hesitate to cite Lamarck.  Matsuda was a giant among Lamarckians, an anomaly in the late 20th century.  We in the year 2010 still live in an epistemological limbo where leaders of evolutionary biology are also leaders in the atheism movement, binding together insights on evolution and deity.  This is all so very strange.  Matsuda, the Lamarckians and creationists all get lumped together as people believing in the power of nonrandom variables to influence evolution.

There are a number of Asian spiritual paths that explore levels of consciousness or identity scales, some offering levels within levels as the individual shifts further and further away from identification with the body.  I sometimes find myself wondering how these kinds of sciences, accompanied by a host of details, might inform evolutionary studies, where it seems that an ability to identify interconnection on different scales might make possible a reevaluation of what an individual is.  This is in the context of the individual within a community, suggesting a possible redefining of consciousness, depending on which community or scale is being examined.

Theorists such as Dawkins intuit that deity is integral to understanding evolution.  Dawkins concludes that it is essential deity not exist.  What interests me is what kind of deities, in the form of consciousness studies, best model interpretations of evolution that are not Neo-Darwinian.

I am fascinated by myth as a modeling process seeking to find pattern to the world.  The Dawkins crowd targets myth believers as creating unnecessary information which, in addition, poorly models reality.  I think Dawkins misses the point of myth.  Myth-making is model-making.  There is a process that humans engage in that involves the aesthetic of embracing reality while transforming it into something unique.  This aesthetic seems closely related to an integral feature of consciousness, to embrace and transform, that the atheists experience as random.

Reading science text, I see myth deeply integrated into “facts.”  How content is connected has everything to do with how process is understood.  Based upon the power of natural selection, there is this make-believe that connection suggesting larger wholes is arbitrary.  Matsuda described nonarbitrary connections between environment and evolution.  Slowly this paradigm is becoming respected again.  Perhaps soon consciousness will be able to enter the equation.

I read pretty much nothing but fiction until I was 30.  I’ve read almost exclusively nonfiction since then.  Whereas when I was younger I’d enjoy reading to feel the impact of a complete story that I could immerse myself in, these days I jump from book to book, tracking the larger story of evolution, a story I feel surrounded by almost all the time.

With each book I read I feel I’m exploring this evolving world.  I’ve developed reading habits that encourage that experience.

I often refer to Freud in evolutionary theory.  Freud was a recapitulationist, paying close attention to how the different scales of evolution interrelated.  I spent much time studying Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnotic therapeutic intervention and the humanists, such as Fritz Pearls, Rogers, Maslow, Janov and their contemporaries.  From 1980 to about 1984, I studied and read everything published by the NLP School of psychology and communication, becoming a licensed practitioner in 1981.  My artistic sensibilities were deeply influenced by the sense-based model.  I learned to interpret and understand relationship dynamics by observing behaviors.  Interconnection became a reality rather than just an intuited possibility.  Studying NLP, exploring how modeling worked and how models were developed, I felt like I had entered the sense-based world.

Entering the sense-based world, I began to feel like the world could make sense.  That the world could be modeled felt fascinating to me.  Modeling felt to me like an artistic process.

My son was born in 1984.  I didn’t read much the next few years.  When I wasn’t working, I painted in watercolors, mostly metaphoric maps of states of mind, moving on to producing comic panels and strips for several years.  I placed the comics in almost 200 publications.  From there, I was consumed by puppet design, producing 60 commercial puppets, seeking to then make a living as a manufacturer of those puppets.  During the period I was designing puppets, I starting reading again after an almost 10-year hiatus.  I became consumed by reading about dragons and the origins of dragon mythology.  That led to my love affair with evolution.

For the last dozen years or so, I have read several books at once, usually around four or five, but sometimes as many as a dozen.  The books are almost always nonfiction, each from a different discipline, often including subjects I can barely understand.  I underline and mark the pages I might end up citing.  Mostly I’m reading for pattern.  I read while feeling around for insights from out of left field, connections both deep and unique.  Mixing up disciplines while I read encourages the experience.

I had an interesting experience a couple nights ago.  I’ve been reading a book of Basque legends.  I was listening/looking for unique serpent or matrifocal myths that might offer insight regarding that ancient ethnicity.  There are lots of variations on the youngest son or daughter of three sons or daughters and the monster/serpent/witch that creates opportunity for wealth, mate, progeny and happiness.  I went from the Basque book to a book on theory of mind of chimpanzees and human children.  That would be followed by a book on the endocrinology of relationship, followed by a book on the failure of genetic models to explain the ontogenetic reality of environmental influence.

Turning from the Basque book to the theory of mind book, my mind did not shift from reading fiction, Basque legends, to reading descriptions of studies, what we call facts.  I very much read by reading aloud in my imagination.  I continued to subvocalize while reading the chimpanzee descriptions, except the studies became stories and the paradigm being promoted by the author was instead an ancient myth.

The book on endocrinology was clearly just the best story we have at this time for a larger story we barely understand.  The last book on genetics was a story about a story that seemed to be failing to perform its job as a story, which was to make clearer how things are deeply connected.

The process of reading nonfiction concepts as merely clues in a story, like the repeating motifs in ancient legends or myths, creates an opportunity for the unconscious to build theories in ways similar to how we dream a dream.  Elements that belong together start to congregate, whether or not there is an obvious connection, creating situations where potentially useful relationships can be made.  Integral to this process is a sense of excitement, like the hero or heroine leaving home to discover something new.  Also integral is a willingness to be involved in magic.

Reading nonfiction as if it were fiction may be more than an exercise of imagination.  It feels close to truth.  Interpreting “reality” as fiction makes me feel like I’m approaching models of reality as a form of play.  Differences between mythology and science may be fewer than we think.  Patterns in mythology are covert.  Patterns in science are overt.  Nevertheless, they are both seeking to model experience.

Having been fascinated by Freud, the humanists and NLP, I find that psychology feels relative to me.  Consider the potential usefulness of relating to all science, and all experience, on a relative basis, and then play.

Google is nothing like a seamless citation system though it has lately improved its ability to find academic papers when certain searches are conducted.  I’m wondering what the effect upon academia would be of a search engine that intuitively displayed the sources of concepts cited in academic and nonacademic works.

No doubt Chomsky would reveal his influence in even more papers than he does now, Chomsky being the most oft-cited of living academics.  What I’m trying to get a feel for is how academia would change if the lineage of influence evident in the citations that accompany a paper were generated by an algorithm instead of the author.  What would emerge would be similar to what we observe now on the web, with a proliferation of very specific, nonrandom links connoting respect and influence.

I look at things evolutionarily.  I seek connections over time that suggest influence directions, and I seek to find out how interconnection propels the behavior of individuals.  An academic, when creating citations in a work and seeking respect among peers, is creating a lineage tree, or evolution history, by describing the precursors to his or her idea.

There is that delightful diagram of the relationship of many rock ‘n’ roll artists that appears in the movie School of Rock.  It is an evolutionary chart, like Darwin’s branching tree, that reveals the chain of influence leading to the present day.

What if a search engine could automatically generate such a diagram for an academic for the various concepts explored within a paper?

Several things are coming to my mind.  First, those potentially useful former models and current subdisciplines that get made invisible by new paradigms might find their way back into contemporary theorizing if such an algorithm kept noting how they are connected.

Second, because whom one cites is important in establishing and maintaining relationships to get ideas accepted, what if those citations were not solely within the author’s control?  Perhaps the authors could be more daring or creative in what they write.  Maybe writers would take more chances if they were not haunted by the need to behave respectfully.

Third, academics now have little incentive to cite theorists and researchers outside their discipline who are exploring similar or the same processes or patterns.  They do not normally cross boundaries into one another’s journals, conferences or department management issues.  If unique algorithms could be designed that specialize in bridge concepts among disciplines, the citation lineage could be observed to break down discipline barriers, opening ideas to the light of new discipline audiences.

Consider the act of writing a paper just to observe the lineage trees generated by the algorithm.  For those fascinated by unique patterns, concepts could be strewn together just to watch them propagate their origins.  I can see paradigm-busting concepts emerging from observing the particular ways that ideas are observed to be related, particularly if discipline lines are crossed and old paradigms are shown to be still relevant.

Google and the other search engines specialize in revealing the results of connection by displaying those words and phrases that receive the most attention from other websites relevant to the word or phrase.  There is a lineage tree, with no sense of time.  It’s a snapshot of an evolutionary process, with no past.  The resources now exist to trace not just connection, but evolution, providing the opportunity to understand how ideas are born, influenced and transform over time.

Evolution is a process that happens over time and in the present.  Perhaps an algorithm that enhances our ability to view connection over time will at the same time impact our understanding of evolution.  Soon our best metaphor for evolution will not be a computer program describing genetic heritage, but the Internet itself.  What it may take to arrive at that more useful metaphor is an ability for users to view connection, not just in the present, but over time.

Perhaps 150 academics have contacted me over the last 11 years after coming across one of my websites or this blog.  Some were directed to my work by my having contacted them.  Others happened across it on a search.  Others by referral.  Almost universally, they leave no comments online.  They email me directly with comments or questions.  I receive maybe one email for every three posts by nonacademics.  With academics, I receive maybe 200 emails for every one comment post.

I don’t think the issue is that they feel like they are performing or speaking to a group when commenting online where other visitors can observe a conversation.  What I believe is happening here is partly a hesitation to become associated with concepts they themselves have not signaled that they support.  Perhaps they are concerned about association with an individual that will tout the visitor’s support when it was not provided.

The horizontal, transparent, diverse world of the Internet does not exactly occupy the same behavioral space as academia.  Academics are carving out territories where their names are associated with various disciplines.  They are building walls around a place where their expertise has been established.  This is so they can at least partly possess the respect that accompanies association.  On the web, we mostly concentrate on taking down walls while seeking respect by sharing ideas to watch them spread beyond our awareness and control.  This difference between professional and amateur doesn’t seem that extreme.  Still, control does seem an issue.

The professional, the academic, when offered respect, achieves units of currency called citations.  The amateur, the blogger and net surfer are also offered respect in the form of citations represented by links and comments.  In this way, the academic and the blogger/user are much alike.

The academic mostly shares his or her work and receives little or no money, as does the Internet sharer of ideas.  Of course, the more often academics publish, the more likely they will achieve tenure, but once tenure is achieved, papers published still bring little money.

The academics base their seeking of community respect upon the words they compose, papers written with much attention to detail, citing allies whose work they respect or whose support they seek.

The net idea maker usually places far less attention on the words composed.  Citations are far more casual, often neglected altogether.

A major difference, of course, is that source material in academia is often difficult to retrieve.  Barriers among disciplines–different journals, different academic languages, different conferences–inhibit communication.  Until the last 150 years, academics were almost exclusively the wealthy and elites.  Then, to pursue an academic career and have access to peer-reviewed journals, proof of entry was required–a degree.  Once academics have achieved a degree, the coveted information frame of reference continues to be the most effective way to establish territory among elites.

There seems to be more similarities between academia and Internet relations than differences, though the differences are stark.  Still, wrestling with why so few academics leave comments on the over 600 posted pieces, I’d conclude that because words are the most important possession of a university professional, they are loath to share them publicly without the compensation of a potential citation from someone that shares their elevated or segregated station, or at least they want assurance that the other party won’t embarrass them among their peers.

Is there a hierarchy here that should be flattened, an elite that should be taxed?  The product of the current academic system is astonishing erudition.  Might useful results be achieved if some barriers were removed?  Clearly, the current system inhibits seamless sharing of high quality information.

Sharing is what the Internet is all about, behaving as an example and metaphor for the direction that society is taking.  Academia, with roots in nineteenth century elitism, has trouble with the concept of sharing.  Livings are made and reputations are established by embracing a covetous attitude toward knowledge.

Academics possess knowledge.  Net users share it.  When academics start leaving comments, I’ll know that some walls are finally coming down.

“Environmental factors can be an important source of nongenetic influences on laterality.  Since the effect of a gene is to play a role in some form of chemical reaction, it is not surprising that genetic determination is not absolute.  Every chemical reaction can be modified by alterations in pressure, temperature, pH, light, the presence of other substances, the availability of chemical precursors, and the rate at which products are removed.  With growing sophistication of molecular genetics, it has become increasingly clear that nongenetic effects can play a powerful role; methylation, for example, has been shown to suppress expression of many genes.  We will now consider some of the random effects that might modify lateralization.  One implication of our hypothesis is that even if the genetic endowment of any particular fetus were known precisely, it would not be possible to make predictions concerning the distribution in a population basis.  One of the reasons for this relative freedom from genetic determination is that if hormones do play a role in determining laterality, then the effects of testosterone or related substances on the developing brain will be modified by factors not under the control of the fetal genes.  Androgens are produced not only by fetal testes and the placenta but also by the maternal ovaries, adrenals, and nonglandular tissues.  The fetus can be influenced by the actions of many of the unshared maternal genes.  It is reasonable to expect that if a fertilized ovum were transplanted into the uterus of an unrelated female, the final pattern of the brain would be quite different, because the brain would develop in an environment of hormones and other substances that would certainly differ in many respects.  It might therefore be reasonable to take a different approach than usual to the genetics of many conditions.  One should perhaps consider, not the genes carried by the offspring alone, but rather the genes of that organism existing or active only for the nine months of pregnancy; in other words, one should consider the mother and the fetus as a unit.  This unit contains three groups of different genes: one paternal set present in the fetus, one maternal set present in the mother, and another maternal set present both in the mother and in the fetus.  The situation is even more complex when dizygotic twins are involved, since the maternal-fetal unit will contain another group of paternal genes.  The effects of substances produced by the mother will, however, be diminished by the capacity of the placenta to act as a barrier to some maternal hormones.  The fetus is protected to a great extent from maternal testosterone, which is converted to estradiol by placental aromatase.  Dihydrotestosterone, which is not aromatized and therefore crosses the placenta, is, however, usually present in the mother at much lower levels than testosterone.  The protection from maternal testosterone is not complete, since offspring do show signs of masculinization when mothers are exposed to this hormone.  In addition, progesterone administered to the mother may masculinize female fetuses.  It is clear that the placental barrier is far from complete.  Furthermore, it is likely that there are individual variations in the aromatizing capacity of the placenta.  It is conceivable that some maternal genes not shared by the offspring have greater effects on female fetuses.  Thus, the testosterone to which female fetuses are exposed comes predominantly from maternal tissues, whereas males produce it themselves in high quantities.  In the study of Nichols and Chen (1981) sex hormones given to mothers were associated with a higher rate of hyperactivity in female offspring than in males.”  (Geschwind and Galaburda 1987: 133-134, Cerebral Lateralization)

This long excerpt discusses Geschwind and Galaburda’s 1987 thoughts regarding the yet unnamed evolutionary biological discipline, evolutionary developmental biology.  Neuropsychologists are not often referred to in evolutionary biology.  When neuropsychologists are referencing evolution at all they are usually thinking in terms of natural selection.  Neuropsychologists and evolutionary biologists retain separate journal systems, separate languages, separate conferences.

T. J. Crow is a British theorist who has crossed lines in his explorations of schizophrenia and other mental conditions, bringing in discussions of neoteny to explain cerebral anomalies.  Marion Annett has suggested left-handedness reveals features of an evolutionary forebear.  Bernard Crespi, though focusing on genetics as the cause of schizophrenia and autism, seems to imply evolutionary underpinnings to the conditions.  Connecting the work of these three theorists to an evolutionary developmental interpretation of their work may be useful.  From what I can tell, these kinds of interpretations are rare events.

In the excerpt above, Geschwind and Galaburda are realizing that a person’s genetic heritage as regards something as central as cerebral lateralization has far less to do with an individual’s genes than with the environment that they are located in and possibly the genes of those they are in contact with.  In the model I am playing with, we cannot easily look at a representative of a species, any person, for example, as the source of information regarding the individual’s “genetic heritage.”  We each are part of a larger matrix of genetic information, with genomes located in other individuals, including individuals in other species, informing our personal ontogeny.

The following is the premise I am playing with.  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.

Connected to this premise is a reinterpretation of genetics to be not a “template,” an algorithm or a code, but more a musical score requiring both (1) the input of unique musicians that includes their life history and experience and their interpretation of the score and (2) the influence of the audience on the musicians.

Integral to this interpretation is a complete overhaul of the reductionist or materialist perspective.  Geschwind and Galaburda see clues to a shift in this direction.  Evo Devo advocates can sometimes sense where we are headed.  Consider that Geschwind and Galaburda are noting that if something as central as cerebral lateralization, which I have described as integral to understanding human self awareness, or split consciousness, is heavily influenced by hormones, hormones heavily influenced by environmental factors, then the origin of human consciousness ontologically in each of us individually is directly related to what is happening in the world around us.

I have stated that environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.  The emergence of split consciousness was, of course, central to human evolution.  Geschwind and Galaburda are trying to sort out the influence of the hormones on individual cerebral ontogeny.  Their work can also be interpreted to be seeking to untie the knot of understanding of how humans evolved split consciousness originally.  We’re not talking just adjustments in genes, what Annett has described as right shift theory, or tendency to lateralize.  We are talking about the contribution of a whole environment to the origin of human split consciousness both tens of thousands of years ago and right now with the emergence of each new person.

I often read papers by specialists in disciplines and have few clues about what they are trying to communicate.  Works by an evolutionary biologist I seem to get most of.  If the work is by a geneticist or neurologist, I miss much.  I often feel like an outsider trying to grasp some particular subdiscipline’s insight, needing courses in the subdiscipline, a mentor and the kind of personality that is willing to study what I’ve been told to study because it is the convention to do so.  Reading neuropsychology and evolutionary developmental biology, I’m asking myself if these two subdisciplines can even understand each other.  I don’t think my brother-in-law, who is the chair of an economics/finance department, has the background to grasp concepts that my astronomy professor friend Craig would be familiar with, though they both use mathematics.  (I could be wrong.)  I’m starting to wonder if the holistic insights characterized by understanding common concepts among neuropsychology, evolutionary biology and social structure where it integrates with endocrinology are difficult to grasp in no small part because the different disciplines just don’t talk because they can’t.

When I read excerpts like the passage that began this piece, little evolution flags start excitedly waving.  What do academics do when they have those cross-disciplinary gestalt experiences?

I’ve been noticing that Stumbleupon, the web service that directs participants to interesting sites, has been directing more and more visitors to this site, sometimes more than 100 a day.  For several years, Stumbleupon has been directing some days several hundred visitors to my original evolutionary theory site, serpentfd.org.  I’ve never been able to quite figure out what Stumbleupon is, and yesterday I drilled down a bit after finally joining the group, telling the application my interests and starting to follow where the site directed me to go.

I soon discovered that the reason my original evolution site, posted in 1998, gets so much Stumbleupon traffic is that it has been both a featured site in the evolution section and a site that receives five stars.  The review section of the site gathered almost 30 comments in almost six years; some of those who commented were confused, but many seemed impressed.  I was astonished that my site received respect.  I’m just so used to feeling invisible.

A recent email from an author whose work I deeply respect, his books having introduced me in the 1970s and 1980s to such concepts as sociobiology and matrifocal society, noted the near impossibility of my being accorded respect or notoriety in academia.  He emphasized that if work does not appear in peer-reviewed journals, it is invisible.  Though he expressed enthusiasm and respect for what I am doing and recommended publishers to approach, he made it clear that if I expected anything but rejection, I’d be fooling myself.

My experience agrees with his advice that to believe or behave as if an amateur could significantly impact academia is a delusional proposition.  Nevertheless, there is a world outside academia, though unique theorizing on biological, human and social evolution occurs almost exclusively on journal pages.

This is a little like dreaming of becoming a commercial airline pilot and flying tens of thousands of people across the planet in the course of a single year.  Academics are able to carry ideas to thousands of colleagues in many countries, pilots of commercial airliners, so to speak.  Airline pilots are required to speak English to fly a plane.  It’s as if I can’t speak that language and so can only fly small, noncommercial aircraft.  I get to take friends and friends of friends to interesting places across the world.  My experience is not curtailed.  But my ability to share the experience is limited to those, like me, that fly planes for free.  This world of the amateur is rich in experience.  But it is a different world from the one traveled by the professionals.  I can go to as many places.  The folks I travel with share my passions.  But we are not pilots by vocation.  Our ability to help others move from place to place is limited.

I am in a somewhat unique position as an evolutionary theorist operating outside academia, often theorizing on the connection between social and biological evolution, while actually engaged in the profession of enhancing the ability of clients and colleagues to achieve communication goals in this new horizontal, barrier-destroying, diverse and transparent world.  I am not a professional evolutionary theorist.  I am a professional web developer, a social media application developer seeking ways for enhanced information access and digitally encouraged relationships to effortlessly transform the social landscape.  In a very strange and interesting way, my life is becoming about the ability of the potentially transformative ideas that I describe to compel transformation through the actual medium that the ideas seek to explain.

I am an evolutionary theorist who describes modern technological communications/social structure transformations as outcomes of very specific biological processes.  It seems congruent with my creative process, my nonacademic station and my reverence for the explosion of the commons that what I create be offered for free, with no copyright and no citation encumbrances creating barriers to the distribution of the ideas.  In other words, I am feeling an attraction to taking the nonidentity paradigm described by my theory, a process that I hypothesize is necessary to an ability to theorize, and giving myself up totally to the web.

If academia is about forming an identity around the respect accorded for work produced, the web is about allying with nonidentity as the individual forms idea alliances with other individuals.  Academia is about the individual.  The web is about the community.  My evolutionary theory is about the power of environment and community to inform evolution.

Two things have propelled my thought in this direction.  One is the respect accorded my work on Stumbleupon, compliments from strangers, nonacademics.  The other thing was respect offered me by an academic whose work I respect, respect that was accompanied by advice to not knock on an academic’s door.

I embrace that advice.  My life’s work is to share, not to educate.

I’ve been experiencing some frustration communicating difficult-to-explain concepts and experiences.

In just the way that a musician-songwriter writes and composes pieces that describe his or her experiences, the theorist seeks ways to make embraceable ideas that feel foreign at first exposure.  I heard Paul Simon describe his having left Bridge Over Troubled Water in a drawer for over half a year, unaware that the piece could be effective.  It finally crossed his mind that the lead voice didn’t have to be his own, but Garfunkel’s, and the composition clicked.

I’m trying to cross that bridge that achieves the goal of describing a holistic theory in a way that the audience experiences the theory as a whole.  I adore blog format, the over-time narrative, with its small chunk introduction of concepts.  It makes possible an experience of the audience accompanying me, the theorist, as ideas emerge and are expressed.  By accompanying me on this bread crumb journey, the visitor to these pages may sometimes experience the “Aha!” that the author feels.  This is wonderful.  This is one of the things that makes this medium special.

Nevertheless, it seems to often feel to the visitor that there are many ideas that are not necessarily related because it is not clear how they flow together.  Waters are choppy.

But, unless the visitor starts at the first entry, in April 2008, and spends hours reading entry by entry over 600 contributions, in succession, in relatively few sittings, the holistic nature of the theory will not likely emerge.  Even following that path, one may find that a synthesis experience seems difficult.  I am engaged in a curious process that is using a time-punctuated narrative medium to describe evolutionary insights grounded upon time-transcending, simultaneous, multiscale interconnections.  I am redefining evolution as a process characterized by the observation of maturation at many scales, which requires an ability to at least conceptually temporarily abandon narrative time.  Or, perhaps it is being able to identify with several narrative time scales at the same time (biology, society, ontogeny, personal identity) while aware of how they all converge in a non-narrative now.

So, I’m wrestling with ways to express the concepts in larger, gestalt-like presentations.  Creative Commons offers an ability for creators to share their art with no copyright encumbrances.  This creates an opportunity for the art to transform and grow.  What better way to share a work on evolution.  So, all words that I’ve composed on this blog are freely available for whatever use visitors would like to put them.  Find ways to make things make sense, cut and paste the concepts, adjust and delete, add on what feels right.  Integrate this stuff with what you’ve made yourself or discovered on other sites.  I’ll link to what you’ve created.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to rearrange the pieces of some of these over 600 entries into different, larger works that seek to communicate the nature of this whole.  I’m sampling sections of my work, inserting excerpts from sources I cite, creating works of art on evolution.  I’m learning to steal from myself.

Steal from me.  It feels good.  It feels like an excellent way to cross troubled waters.

Elia is in his last year of getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Loyola.  Tuesday evenings we often meet over supper and talk.  He shared with me last night his feeling that he’d like to specialize in mythology and what mythology suggests about a society and spirituality.  I could relate.  After evolutionary theory, I’ve probably read more mythology and spirituality texts than anything else.

It amazes me how little I remember of what I read.  I’ve conducted three book purges over the course of my life, getting rid of hundreds of volumes each time.  I’ve read hundreds of science fiction books, maybe 150 books on mythology, dozens of books on spirituality and dozens of books on psychology.  I’ve read many books I’ve barely understood.  I’m reading a book now on the endocrinology of relationship, another called The Ontogeny of Information, and in both cases most of the concepts are going over my head.  I’m approaching 1,000 lectures watched, put out by the Teaching Company, while exercising.  I remember almost nothing of maybe 100 lectures on philosophy.  Nevertheless, I expect my own ideas have been influenced by those hours.

I guess the point I’m making is that I vacuum up concepts and ideas, sometimes feeling integrations during the process, but usually the stuff just disappears unremarked.  Probably numbering in the hundreds are the ideas discussed in this website that previously emerged in other places I’ve watched, listened to or read, but I have no memory of the exposure.

And then there are all those times I think I’ve thought of something new, and I discover later it was proposed by another person I have had no contact with.

Elia is studying mythology.  I feel like I’m deeply involved in a process that is resulting in my creating my own mythology, one that I hypothesize might be useful.  Whereas Elia is exploring societies and the stories those societies create, I feel a sensitivity to mythology and the nature of consciousness and identity in my own experience as I feel an opportunity to be part of the creation of something that is practical.

Last night, Elia and I talked about the nature of presupposition and how theorizing has a lot to do with one’s assumptions regarding consciousness.  I suggested to Elia that all we know, as Descartes proposed, is that we exist.  All else is surmised.  Living life aware of how little we actually know offers astonishing leverage to appreciate the moment.

Appreciation is a powerful place to theorize from.

Perhaps that should be considered when examining the power of presupposition.  If people are experiencing appreciation or gratitude when engaged in the process of understanding evolution, their chosen discipline or their experience, the results of the exploration will be influenced by their feeling state.

If Elia has discovered his profession and is feeling guided by an appreciation for what he studies, perhaps he is following Joseph Campbell’s footsteps, following his bliss by listening to the stories that people tell.

As always, I feel lucky to be his dad.