At the end of last November and the beginning of December, Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) volunteers worked hard to keep the 41 websites serving 50 states current with actions appearing across the country, which were protests of the Obama Afghanistan escalation. There were 99 events posted, by far the most comprehensive list available on the web.  Nevertheless, though attendance was often excellent at these events, it was usually older activists.

Though some activists posted the wider list to Facebook, Facebook events were mostly not linking to other Facebook actions in other locations.  Twitter, profoundly effective at encouraging worldwide attention on events in Iran, was strangely absent from the almost 100 events occurring across the U.S.

This obviously points to young people not being as motivated to fight the Obama escalation as their older activist associates.  If young people were not Twittering their friends to attend events, then it is likely young people were not consumed by the particular issue.  There is another thing suggested.  Not only were young people not feeling compelled to congregate, young people were possibly not feeling empowered to make their feelings known.  There is the possibility that former young supporters of Obama are responding to these developments by returning to a state of noninvolvement.

In other words, assuming that young people were often against the escalation and that young people were not demonstrating their objection, then we can predict a dramatic drop in young people showing up to vote in the next election.

In a blog posting of December 2, the second day of demonstrations, Paul Krugman discussed the increasing likelihood of a double-dip Great Recession.  Krugman described the repercussions of the Obama economic intervention resulting in a drift back into severe recession.  Though the piece did not discuss a combination of recession, war in Afghanistan and a resurgence in the number of Republicans elected congressmen and senators, the absence of youth in our streets suggests this scenario.

There now emerges the strong possibility that deep systemic change will only occur at state levels.  The federal government’s ability to initiate change is disappearing before our eyes.  The Senate will not approve executive support of international treaties.  Environmental legislation is deeply compromised.  The federal government behaves as if incapable of legislating additional large-scale job programs.  Congress will not inhibit presidential right-leaning initiatives.  The president cannot push left-leaning legislation through the Congress.

If the young do not exhibit their passion, the positive energy of our country’s government is destined to disappear.

The Afghanistan protests were a season ago.  The repercussions of these demonstrations will be with us for a while.

“Forest-dwelling apes efficiently conserve their water reserves, which they obtain primarily from fruit and vegetation, such that they need only rarely to visit predator-frequented watering holes.  By contrast, humans active in hot desert can lose up to 28 liters of water and up to 10% of bodily salt reserves per day (Morgan, 1982).  This incredible profligacy with water and salt suggests that early hominids must have enjoyed no shortage of either: they probably dwelled fairly close to fresh and salt water when not foraging.  Rivers and lakes would have provided not only drinking water, but also allowed body-washing and food-washing, offered fish, aquatic crustaceans, and shellfish for eating, and, because the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than that of air, quick swims would have allowed for efficient cooling-off after a long, hot day of foraging.  Note that these conditions would make the aquatic ape hypothesis (Hardy, 1960; Morgan, 1982) a bit more plausible…”  (Geoffrey F. Miller, “Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection:  The Mind as a Protean Courtship Device,” unpublished thesis (1994), p. 164.)

The aquatic ape hypothesis overlaps in two ways with the theorizing I’ve been conducting the last few years.  What I’m now calling The Orchestral Theory of Evolution and the aquatic ape hypothesis both have strong feminist components.  Elaine Morgan presented her thesis, one where male survival of the fittest was not the focus, as an alternative theory to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape.

Both Morgan’s hypothesis (Alister Hardy was the original creator of the theory) and my work feature an emphasis on neoteny.  The aquatic ape hypothesis states we lost our body hair to better spend our time in water, and that by evolving in a neotenous direction, access to hairlessness was encouraged.  An upright stature is also associated with neoteny, and estuary or river waders often acquire upright positions.  I’ve shown that lower testosterone levels can be associated with longer limbs.  Both low testosterone and long limbs are associated with maturational delay and neoteny.

Feminism and neoteny are closely tied to both our theories, and interestingly, Elaine Morgan and I are both nonscientists and artists who are thinking outside conventions in perhaps complementary fashions.  We are both in the origin myth business, working with similar material, constructing pasts that support an emerging zeitgeist.

“From Neolithic villages to organized state, from gardening to irrigation farming, from inconography to writing, from disorganized raids to institutionalized warfare, from custom to law, from matriarchal religious authority to patriarchal political power, from mystery to history; the transformation was so complete that the past itself was reinvented to create a new foundation for a radically altered present.  Now that we ourselves are moving into a radically altered present, it is small wonder that the patriarchal image of prehistory is disintegrating.  The movement into the future always involves the revisioning of the past.”  (William Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 208.)

One of the things Elaine Morgan was often criticized for was that though her conjectures explained a number of unique human features, there was no obvious way to prove the thesis.  Her subjects did not easily fossilize where they lived by shores.  Regarding human theories of evolution, we have such an astonishingly small amount of information to work with that it surprises me that proof would be the main criticism.  Barely grounded hypotheses are common among human evolution theorists.  I suspect she was more derided for her feminist positions.

We are in the process of creating a searchable database on the topics this blog has covered, check back soon.

We will soon be hosting posts by other authors, check  back for updates.

“In addition to extramarital sex, premarital promiscuity and trial marriage may also alter the paternity probability.  Indeed, at least one cross-cultural study suggests that in matrilineal-matrilocal societies sanctions against premarital sex, when they exist, are quite mild, whereas such sanctions are severe in patrilineal-patrilocal societies.  (Goethals 1971).  Although premarital sex is especially tolerated in matrilineal societies (e.g., Malinowski 1929), unwed mothers and illegitimacy leading to lower probabilities of paternity are not tolerated…In most matrilineal societies divorce is reported to be quite frequent, and can be initiated by either party without social stigma.”  (Kurland, J. A., “Paternity, Mother’s Brother, and Human Sociality,” in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior:  An Anthropological Perspective, N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds.) (North Scituate:  Duxbury Press, 1979), pp. 160-1.)

A fair amount gets written on changes in the nuclear family, increased divorce, marrying later, few kids, abortion, contraception, women becoming more fully employed outside the home, and now women often retaining jobs because they are often paid less, with their male colleagues getting let go.  Not so much gets written about how this influences general social frames of reference.  I hypothesize we are experiencing a dramatic shift from a patrifocal to a matrifocal foundation.  Intuitions for how the commons positively impacts our life are becoming ubiquitous vs. the expectation that hierarchy will always be.  Nevertheless, the shift suggests more than a little bit that we are also experiencing a synthesis, an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal points of view.  The synthesis is difficult to describe, to verbalize, particularly because most don’t understand we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in social structure.

This shift we are in the middle of gets described in lots of different ways.  Social structure is not just an anthropological principle, but a biological dynamic.  It is extremely rare that current changes in society are described as biological shifts.  Two reasons jump out that support the difficulty we have in seeing social changes as biological.  First, it’s been over 6,000 years since the Indo-Europeans rode horses out of Southern Russia and changed the world.  It’s rare that a Westerner views social structure as still integral to understanding current trends.  Riane Eisler is one of the few with deep understanding in this area.

Second, biological anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists and others that describe confluence between biology and anthropology view evolution from primitive society to modern society as a succession of stages followed by different peoples across the world while at the same time they assign a universality of neurology and consciousness to all peoples, denigrating interpretations of integral differences between “primitive” and modern.  The net result of suggesting that some cultures are more evolved than others, while at the same time stating we are all the same, obfuscates real differences among people.  Of particular importance are social structure differences and the possible real physical, neurological and hormonal variation that accompanies difference in social structure.

A net result is a deep difficulty in our ability to interpret our own position (physically, neurologically and hormonally) as informed by social structure.  We don’t seem to get that evolution is integrally tied to social structure, and that we as individuals and as a society are evolving.

Whether we live in a matrifocal society, a patrifocal society, or an integration of the two is huge.  Right now we are in transition.  Media do not describe the battle as one between social structures, or, from a Wilberian perspective, as a battle between societal maturation scales.  My explanatory paradigm offers a cyclic perspective, featuring the push and pull of neoteny and acceleration over generations.  The Wilberian/Habermas/Gebser paradigm looks at change from a linear, pyramidal position that nevertheless integrates many of the insights of the cyclic dynamic.  Both interpretations work.  One is more matrifocal or immanent in its perspective.  The other is more patrifocal or transcendent in its point of view.  Go far enough into either one and you come out the other side, inside the other.

Matrifocal/patrifocal, immanent/transcendent.  There exists an integration of the two.  That integration is where we as a society are headed.  We get closer with every spiral round in our evolution.

My wife introduced me to Ken Wilber’s work about three years after the Serpentfd.org website went up.  That was around 2003.  From there I read maybe six of his books (he’s written close to 20) and listened several times to the 10-CD interview he conducted.

In the previous piece, I noted the prerational and transrational distinction he makes that clearly demarcates the differences between aboriginal prepersonal points of view and more recent spiritual transpersonal experiences.  The two are often confused.  Wilber efficiently parses out the differences, using a system of seven stages of maturation that apply to both individuals and societies.

Wilber looks at some feminist inclinations to view ancient times as more evolved in human relations as another case of comparing seemingly positive aspects of earlier stages of societal evolution, or maturation, with later-stage negative features.  For example, human sacrifice was common in matrifocal agricultural society, a fact usually ignored by those seeking synthesis in the past.  Wilber suggests that some feminists pick and choose what they want to emphasize when comparing female-centered societies with contemporary patrifocal examples.

Paying close attention to similarities between evolution and maturation on both individual and social scales, Wilber, guided by the work of Habermas, Gebser, Adi Da, and others, feels to me to still be operating from a natural selection frame of reference.  Wilber’s trajectory is linear and pyramidal, male and hierarchical in many ways.  Though concepts of maturation are deeply integrated into his point of view, it seems to me that his point of view is informed mostly by a male orientation suggesting survival-of-the-fittest understandings.

What I think Wilber is at least partially missing is cyclical-based evolutionary changes over time.  In evolution by maturation, heterochronic theory, or what I’m now calling The Orchestral Theory, there are surges of maturational delay and acceleration, the prolonging of embryonic features into adulthood and the accordioning of adult features into embryos, which accompany evolution, often with a periodic, cyclic return of features and behaviors, modified as they reappear.

Clearly, both cyclic and linear patterns are in play.  Wilber’s concentration on the linear or hierarchical is probably mostly a function of the times we live in.  Then again, I’ve never noted Wilber ever quoting Gould or the heterochronists.  As a philosopher working with evolutionary principles, he does not often depart from natural selection orthodoxy on those rare occasions that it comes up.  Once, when on a forum discussing Dawkins’ positions on evolutionary theory, Wilber jumped in to make it clear he did not agree with much of what Dawkins says.  Wilber has opinions about biological evolution theory.  They just tend to congregate around natural selection, though not Neo-Darwinism.  It is perhaps odd that Wilber heavily focuses on maturational interpretations of societal change and personal transformation, while he at the same time ignores existing maturational interpretations of biological evolution put forth by the heterochronist Neo-Lamarckians of the nineteenth century.

Wilber, when he focuses on the confusions that accumulate around prerational and transrational, prepersonal and transpersonal, or ancient matrifocal as a current not belonging in the present, seems to overlook the power of cycles to explain much of what does not emerge in linear overviews.  Wilber describes the symbol of the serpent with her tail in her mouth, the oroborus, as not only an archaic representation of spiritual experience, but as a symbol that represents the prepersonal, or prerational, frame of reference.  I believe that Wilber misses the agency of cycles in both the prerational and transrational.  This can result in an interpretation of symbols that picks up some, but not all, of the connotations.  The serpent, as a powerful representation of prerational consciousness, also serves as a symbol of cycles that transcends the prerational, transrational split.

With Wilber, each stage transcends and includes previous stages, so nothing is actually lost or replaced as each transformation or maturation occurs.  Nevertheless, I believe it useful in a linear, nested hierarchy model to accompany these descriptions with the complementary opposite model of cycles, how things transform by maturing both backward and forward in time, often at the same time.  Wilber’s work is remarkable, astonishing and a joy to read.  Still, it could use a female’s touch.

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.  I just typed “social structure” and “testosterone” into Google, wondering who might be discussing relationships among the environment, social structure, testosterone, estrogen and evolution.  I expected one of my postings to come up first, but preceding that there was a book I’d not heard of, Social Structure and Testosterone.  I just ordered it.  It seems to be carrying a sociobiological banner, but perhaps there are patterns the author is uncovering that will offer insight.

Most evolutionary psychology or sociobiological theorizing seems to assume or emphasize male impact.  Tanner, Hrdy and others have pioneered female influence.  I’ve written often about the heritage of our patrifocal society creating stories that emphasize a male’s influence.  I’m now encouraging myself to view animal evolution as heavily influenced by social structure, with female sexual selection perhaps understandable in a context of social structure that only sometimes makes it obvious that female choice or female sexual selection is in play.

It is possible that my estimation that estrogen is managing the timing of testosterone, heavily influencing directions in evolution, is integral to understanding the relationship among the environment, social structure and hormonal change that then adjusts evolutionary trajectories.  It’s feeling like Hrdy and others, in their work, have just about wrapped their minds around how much power females really have, but the piece that connects this all together is how ontogeny is influenced by social structure and the environmental effect on hormone levels, and the relevance of the direct connection between ontogeny and phylogeny.  It keeps coming back to evolution being about maturation, not just survival.

“My archeological research does not confirm the hypothetical existence of the primordial parents and their division into the Great Father and Great Mother figures or the further division of the Great Mother figure into a Good and a Terrible Mother.  There is no trace of a father figure in any of the Paleolithic periods.  The life-creating power seems to have been of the Great Goddess alone.  A complete division into a ‘good’ and a ‘terrible’ Mother never occurred: the Life Giver and the Death Wielder are one deity.”  (Marija Gimbutas, The Languages of the Goddess (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1989), p. 316.)

It seems that what is necessary to develop a deep intuition for what I’m describing is a familiarity with pre-Indo-European immanent experiences of deity.  Ken Wilber describes the common mistake of confusing prerational and transrational interpretations (see http://www.praetrans.com/en/ptf.html).  He also calls this prepersonal and transpersonal.  “Prerational” connotes magical, childlike, “infantile states of narcissism, oceanic adualism, indissociation, and even primitive autism.”  (Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Volume 1:  The Spirit of Evolution  (Boston:  Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1995).)

“Transrational,” from a Wilberian perspective, embraces, nests inside and builds off of preceding maturational/evolutionary states, including rational perspectives.  What seems useful to me is an understanding of how humans interpreted their connection to the world back before patrifocal perspectives took hold.  Gimbutas was an expert in this area.

Feeling both the prepatrifocal, matrifocal immanent interpretation of experience (with the female as grounding matrix) and the patrifocal transcendent interpretation of experience (with male dissociation able to parse out cause and effect), there is suggested a third path, an integration of the two, where it becomes possible to observe the impact of the female in animal/human evolution as we again embrace relationship, in the context of change over time.

Running some more riffs off of yesterday’s conjectures regarding the particular hypothetical dynamics that I’ve been exploring in human evolution, are there species that tend to cluster (1) sexual selection with females picking males for particular qualities (dance, song, plumage, etc.) and (2) females assigning relatively large amounts of attention to the young?  If so, males can be chosen for their neotenous features, features females would be attracted to in their young, which might result in relatively larger brains, more cooperative behavior, more tendencies to play, more creativity.

This could veer off in two directions.  If the female is picking males for those features that demand higher testosterone levels (bright red plumage), the male will not likely be displaying neotenous tendencies and would not likely be helping in the raising of the kids (though this would depend on seasonal variations in hormone levels).  Yet, if the female is picking males that are challenged to behave with some creativity, or at least species-related novel behavior, to get the females’ attention, the male may end up evolving in ways that suggest how the human species has evolved.

I’m thinking that those predators that hunt in cooperative packs might as a trend display larger brains, exhibit relative creativity in display when seeking mates, be more playful as adults and be more or less well disposed toward caring for the kids.  Chimpanzees hunt in several male units, as do dogs.  Both are tolerant of little ones, at least not usually engaging in infanticide.

I know too little about these things to have ready information that sorts into this idea.  I expect that’s why I write almost exclusively about humans.  Humans I can observe.

Regarding primates, Knight wrote, “The variations and permutations are numerous, but the basic result is that females arrange themselves across the landscape in characteristic patterns – grouped or isolated, fast-moving or slow, in trees or on the ground – and the males in pursuing their sexual goals adopt strategies which take account of the situation which the females have defined.”  (Chris Knight, Blood Relations (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1991), p. 133.)

With female behavior often informing social structure founded on how both sexes hunt or forage in the context of the location and availability of what is required for sustenance, and the resulting social structure often delegating the hormonal constellations of a particular species, there seems to be a not so subtle relationship described as follows:  Environment > nourishment procurement strategies > social structure > male/female relative hormonal constellations > evolutionary trajectories (changes in hormones adjust ontogeny, changing the species over time).  This looks to me like a paradigm description of how evolution can occur, a variation of what I’ve been playing with as relates to humans.

Postulate 23: The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.   I’ve not been considering much the hypothesis outside of humans, but it seems, at least among some species, that this paradigm may be in play.

There is this sense that the environment informs social structure that can then invest the female with powers to compel evolution in interesting directions based upon her ability to encourage neoteny or acceleration.  My head is spinning.  It’s feeling like a whole new area is opening up with clear influence trajectories or interlocking cause and effect relationships suggesting how evolution unfolds.

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.

“On the other hand, his sense of aesthetic appreciation, based on the pleasure which man can receive from the construction and matching of musical patterns involving the interaction of rhythm, melody, and harmony and visual patterns resulting from the interaction of form and color, has also resulted from the freeing of his association areas from the more rigid relationship with the lower centers and with the more stereotyped, amorphous symbol patterns which constitute the inner reality of all other animals (Koestler 1964).  Aesthetic appreciation, therefore, is a foetalised form of the continuous search for congruity or matching between models of the environment, models which the animal constantly constructs in its brain by processing its perceptions and the stereotypes retained in its memory store.”  (Crombie, Donald L., “The Group System of Man and Paedomorphosis,” Current Anthropology 12(2) (1971):163.)

Going through my store of excerpts from several hundred papers and close to 300 books, I came across the passage above, having no memory of having recorded it.  This is what I’ve been playing with the last few weeks as regards a theory of music and aesthetics that emerge as a result of embryonic features appearing in the behavior and experience of adults.

This is not looking at art as a contingent or accidental property associated with intelligence that was naturally selected because intelligence exhibits facility with tools.  Art is instead approached as central to what humans sexually selected in each other as they sought mates exhibiting sensitivity to aesthetics.

In addition, the passage above suggests that art itself reflects an embryonic dynamic, a period in ontogeny when growth is characterized by an environment integrally involved with how an individual develops.

A question emerges.  I posit that neoteny is central to human evolution driven by sexual selection/social structure and environmental issues, with the creativity of infants appearing in the behavior of adults.  In addition, I consider, as the passage above suggests, that actual embryonic processes themselves are reflected in the aesthetic dynamics of our species.  Is there a relationship between neotenic physical features appearing in species over time and the creative exhibition of either males and/or females when displaying to achieve a mate?  In other words, do other species show alliances between neoteny and creativity?  How are neoteny and sexual selection closely allied outside humans?

In an earlier piece, I surmised that increases in estrogen in the female would also increase her tendency to focus with more discrimination on features in a potential mate while perhaps paying closer attention to her young.  If patterns in nature operate similarly to the way I describe how humans may have evolved, then might the exhibition of creativity in other species besides humans be also an exhibition of a tendency to prolong infant or embryo features into the adult of the species, where they would then provide males more behavioral flexibility when it comes to accommodating female predilection for the unique?

Does female choice result in not only sexual selection but a tendency toward male neoteny, resulting in the emergence of creativity when seeking mates?

It is rare when I think of human evolution dynamics in the context of other animals.  Doing so now, I find myself wondering if larger patterns are in play.

“The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.”  (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God:  Primitive Mythology (New York:  Penguin Books, 1959), p. 240.)

I know nothing about, yet am fascinated by, the differences in child-rearing practices of matrifocal aboriginal societies and modern parents.  Some matrifocal aboriginal societies are hunters, some herders, some agriculturally based.  Campbell notes agricultural communities with a focus on raising children with a social emphasis.  Hrdy describes how in matrilineal/matrilocal hunter gatherer societies children are taught to exhibit theory of mind.  I’m wondering what the nuances are between those societies and herder and later societies, and the differences between emphasis on social mind vs. individualism in matrifocal and patrifocal contexts.

Just as there is an evolution of society, beginning with hunter/gatherers moving toward agriculture around 10,000 B.C., followed by the emergence of towns and cities, I’m estimating, as Campbell suggests, that there is an evolution in emphasis on individualism accompanied by changes in child-rearing practices.  If we go back 2,000 to 4,000 generations, were parents using techniques that did more than just socialize the children and integrate them into the band or tribe?  Did they also individuate them enough to be independent social beings capable of theory of mind, or an ability to exercise compassion, and at the same time teach them to be more focused on the group than on the individual?

There is a paradox I’m trying to tease out here having to do with raising a child when we as a species were still largely lodged in primary process, the way an unconscious or dream self thinks, featuring one time, one place and difficulty imagining something’s opposite without focusing on the thing itself.  I’ve hypothesized that contemporary autistics are revealing forebear features, particularly brains not yet lateralized for speech.  I’m figuring that our evolutionary forebears, raising children naturally inclined toward primary process, were engaged in specific relational interventions that would propel them into a shared reality.

Animals across our planet successfully relate to each other while in primary process.  How exactly did we relate to each other during our primary process, prelateralized-brain evolution?  How did we prevent our children from careening off into autistic spaces featuring primary process but little ability to socialize?  How did we socialize our children before the development of postagricultural encouragement of individualism?

An answer to this question, I believe, offers guidance on how we can raise children with autistic tendencies, children of mothers with high testosterone, and possibly high estrogen.  This is the hypothetical prototypical matrifocal mother’s hormonal constellation.

I suspect this has something to do with band or tribal creation of constant access to shared tribal consciousness space featuring dance, song, performance and joint experience.  This may have something to do with Campbell’s observation of how agricultural societies raise their children to ally with shared priorities.

Modern times manifest an obsession with individuality.  Perhaps the increase in the numbers of those with autism is a direct response to a diminution in shared consciousness activities.

Occasionally I write a letter to a writer whose work I respect and/or adore and share what I have been working on.  Four years ago, I wrote Tom Robbins, my favorite novelist, a long letter describing my life in a style I don’t use here.  I was being light.  I was trying to get a handle on a series of events, events I haven’t yet described in this blog.  The letter to Robbins was not only my way of communicating appreciation for his work but was also an attempt to put into words something I’d never tried to put into words before.

Tom’s response, “Your fascinating letter of 16 December caught up with me yesterday in this distant outpost, and I have to say it (your epistle) was more interesting and compelling than any novel I’ve read in the past few years.  Banks of thanks for “blabbing” about your life (and quite a life it’s been) in such a richly rewarding manner….”  He went on to ask about one of the studies I cited regarding a percentage of the population exhibiting left-handedness with features a lot like the characters in his books.

As I have noted perhaps far too often in these entries, I’m more than a little insecure about my ability to successfully communicate my evolution ideas and experiences in my life.  With time, I feel more facile with words and confident that what I experience I can share.  With the diminution of the feeling of isolation, the accompanying self-aggrandizement also fades, which is good.  Wrestling with putting into words five major lifelong dream themes and the hidden events those themes often represented is part of what I wrote Robbins about.  I recently put the whole thing into words, about 30 pages, but I neglected to accompany the writing with the lighter touch I used in writing the Robbins letter.  Getting the whole thing out of me felt more like excavating a mouthful of molar roots, a wrenching epiphanic release, not an attempt at providing a way for another person to share the experience.

Writing is not just getting the words out, but getting the words out in a way that allows another person to get in.  When writing about evolutionary theory, this means coming back again and again to the same material from different directions, seeking metaphors and narrative trails that allow easy ways to access the ideas.  This blog often comes back to the same themes as I seek effective ways to communicate the central issues.  Understanding maturation as integral to evolution involves understanding how different disciplines are actually studying maturation by a number of different names.

When it comes to describing what’s happened in my life, the challenge is yanking down those elevated experiences to make the wordless into words, while at the same time detraumatizing the horrendous to a degree that a visitor would be able to embrace it.  That involves my being able to embrace it.  That involves my writing from a position of compassion.  Compassion for self and the others that were involved.

I suspect these two different goals, making theory understandable and making my life accessible, are more than a little bit related.  The theory emerged in 1997, almost exactly five years after the dreams had begun to emerge that resulted in personal revelations about a year later.  Both were integrally tied to the relationships I was having with women at the time.  Love and loss of love, for me, has everything to do with whether the world makes sense or not.  The evolution theory emerged from a context where love, at last, felt integrated and understood.  I would not be exploring the origins of what it is to be human, a metaphor for an exploration of my self, without Marcia in my life.

The Tom Robbins letter that I just rediscovered gives me confidence that I can make my life into words that can move a person.  I’ll try again to turn the dental distress into something like a black, white and grey wedding dress.  There are ways to marry horror and love so that understanding and compassion result.

“To adopt Dawkins’ gene’s-eye view for a moment, we can see that it would make sense for a gene to take advantage of any developmental opportunity, without caring whether the influence originated inside its organism’s skin or outside it.  Viewing this widely ramified network of interactions in terms of extended phenotypes rather than of developmental systems, however, has several disadvantages.  First, if a gene’s phenotype may be part of another organism’s body, then any organism’s genotype would seem to be distributed as well.  Just what genes were part of that genotype, furthermore, would change with time, since different genes would ‘manipulate’ this particular body at different times.  Second, even if one retains a more mundane view of genotype roughly as that complement of genes enclosed within the skin, the organism in Dawkins’ account is not only something of an epiphenomenon to genetic wheelings and dealings (as it already seems in many sociobiological accounts), but a mosaic epiphenomenon to boot, created to run by its own genes and by the genes of multiple others.  The concept of the developmental system, on the other hand, incorporates the insight that a given phenotype is a product of quite a bit besides its own genes without doing away with the individual organism itself.  It is ironic to me that biologists who begin by being enthralled by the forms and workings of plants and animals sometimes end up analyzing them out of existence.”  (Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information:  Developmental Systems and Information, 2d ed., rev. and exp., with a Foreword by Richard C. Lewontin (Durham, N.C.:  Duke University Press, 2000), p. 177.)

Reading Susan Oyama’s books on the battle among current genetic paradigms offers an experience not unlike observing wars among Western origin myths.  It feels less about which model is more useful and more about which views of the world feel intuitive to the theorists.  Intuitions often have social structure sources, informed by hormonal predilections.  That feels in play regarding genetic theory.  I find myself siding with Oyama, when I can understand her, but her tone suggests someone involved in a venture that is not fun.  She seems disgusted with the astonishing number of colleague-published accounts based upon hidden assumptions rather than upon observed conditions.

She cites dozens of academics I’m not familiar with, describing interpretations of genetic/environmental relationships in ways I find unfathomable, yet her point is clear.  Most male academics think that every living being in the world operates according to a set of instructions, less so by the relationships they form or the environment that they live in.

At this point, I feel comfortable interpreting the genetic algorithm outside the venue of individuals, as noted in the passage above.  Consider looking at any individual’s genes as shared resources of the larger system.  This view is accompanied by not looking at the individual as the level and context through which evolution operates.  This creates an opportunity to observe evolution outside our human obsession with noting parts, not wholes.

Natural selection as it emerged from the evolution theory synthesis in the mid-twentieth century often does not satisfactorily explain what we observe.  I believe one reason is that we are obsessed with interpreting the world from the scale of the individual, which happens to be the scale in which we as split-consciousness beings (self-aware beings) seem to spend most of our time.

Another reason is that implications of the new discipline, evolutionary developmental biology, are only beginning to be understood as regards the effects of social structure and the environment on maturation rates.

Both issues relate to autism.  The autistic often do NOT view the world from split-conscious awareness, but from a primary-process, presplit-consciousness orientation.  There is a world out there that exists outside materialistic, reductionist, cause-and-effect-relationship frames of reference.  A question is:  How do we integrate autistic and neurotypical paradigms?

If autism is a condition that can be partially explained by understanding how humans, species, ecosystems and systems in general mature, then perhaps we should be paying less attention to natural selection as a theory that offers solutions and more attention to alternative theories that concentrate specifically on maturation.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Maslow hierarchy of needs, or the Ken Wilber seven levels of experience, or the Gebser/Habermas scales of development all end up suggesting a succession of evolution theories that reflect a succession of personal/social developmental milieus.  Evolution theories are origin myths, stories that tease out patterns from experience that reflect how the interpreter experiences the world.

At first, there was no evolution theory.  The world just was.  The world was created at a point in an ancestor’s memory or an ancestor’s revelation and the world as it is now is pretty much how it used to be.

Then, in the West, evolution as a concept became widely embraced, even though there were few accepted explanations.  Darwin’s work emerged among an educated population, which to a large degree believed in the possibility of evolution; it just had no powerful theory.  Darwin provided a place where many could agree.  Only, where people agreed was where the theory successfully juxtaposed with their experience.  Darwin’s contemporaries ignored Darwin’s other two theories, sexual selection and pangenesis.  Natural selection made sense.  It was about survival, not females or the environment.

As we mature as a society, the story changes.

Since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 150 years have passed.  Our origin myth is evolving along with the story’s description of evolutionary process.  Gradually, survival has come to be an unsatisfactory explanation of how everything in the world works.  New stories are emerging to nest within and then build upon old stories.

Just as the psychologists, philosophers and societal observers note maturation is an integral concept when they observe those things that humans are involved in, evolutionary theorists can interpret patterns in experience as revealing successions of stages.  Believers in natural selection apply their principles to molecular and cosmic scales to explain how things change over time.  Principles of maturation offer the same robust capability of translating how forces go through metamorphosis at small and large scales over time.

It’s all story.  Recognizing these theories as stories offers an ability to grasp the next one as it emerges.  First, there was no evolution.  Then there was evolution.  Then there was evolution through natural selection.  Now, consider evolution via maturation.  Next, evolution….

If evolution theory evolves, what is the experience that these stories all describe?

It happens that while I am deep into composing text describing evolutionary theory, I’ll get an idea having to do with creating or adjusting online website programming designed to enhance communications among social change organizations.

There is the actual idea and there is my awareness of the context of the idea generation.  Then, there is my awareness of the context’s context.  One of the interesting repercussions of theorizing about the origins of consciousness is a frequent shift of position to being aware of how I am aware.

Back to the idea.  It struck me that our PJEP network of almost 1,500 organizations spread across 50 states has little ability to effortlessly proliferate a local action, petition, boycott, eletter or fundraiser campaign across state lines without someone having to cajole, encourage or harangue an ally or potential ally, who could then take that action or campaign and post it in a different state network.  Negotiation accompanies almost every attempt to forge an alliance if there is text involved.  Most organizations have few contacts outside their immediate town or region and so don’t even start the process.

The idea was to simply allow the banding together of different local organizations, or chapters of nationwide organizations, in organizational alliances that would authorize a member of an organization to post an action or campaign for all participating organizations, at one time, across all participating states.  Once an action or campaign were posted, the members of any local organization could adjust the language of the action or campaign to their local liking or choose to remove themselves from that particular project.

I’m seeking to enhance a seamless proliferation of social change interventions across the country, encouraging relationships, empowering individuals, providing an opportunity for an idea emerging anywhere to have access to the resources to make its fulfillment possible.

Studying how quickly evolution operates through the extraordinary ability of natural systems to respond to information by adjusting the structure of individuals and societies, I’m seeking to program into our social change online applications an ability for small local organizations to easily share information and impact allies, thus creating opportunities for large shifts quickly.

Pieces of this particular idea have bounced around my head and been discussed by Dave, Laurel, Marcia and I for over a year, but it has never felt particularly compelling.  Then, twice this week, Marcia and I were in discussion with national or international organizations working for peace that were having trouble integrating existing chapters.  In one case, a large national organization was disintegrating, for several reasons, and not the least of all was the ineffectiveness of their communications infrastructure, based mostly on one-to-many communications.

So, it’s feeling like it is time to integrate this new programming protocol.

I was a professional artist, making portions of my living painting, cartooning, designing and illustrating over the years.  I am now a professional web developer, making my living managing a firm that creates and maintains websites, markets websites and designs unique applications for online communication.  I am also an amateur evolutionary biological theorist, perhaps the world’s only expert on the application of nineteenth-century heterochronist principles of maturational delay and acceleration to human evolution and social change.  In my study, I integrate recent neuropsychological brain-structure discoveries and the influences of testosterone and estrogen on the brain and physiology, along with how social structure and the environment impact these adjustments.

I know.  This sounds complicated and arcane.  It’s not.  It takes less time to become familiar with these concepts than it takes to learn to drive a car.  What it boils down to is the exact principles behind the way that we as individuals mature, species change and societies transform.  This is deeply intuitive.  It’s just that until recently we didn’t have the information that could tie it all together.  In addition, our obsession with natural selection obfuscated patterns more complicated than “survival of the fittest.”

A problem is that although I can fairly easily write about the Internet and societal change and have that work picked up and appear in online venues, some with large circulations, and get carried by a Twitter surge of close to 100 thousand, I have difficulty distributing perspectives on biological evolution.  In those areas where I am a professional, it is perceived that I have something to lose if what I share ends up being erroneous.  My services depreciate in value if I am wrong.  Also, it is relatively easy to write about the Internet on the Internet.

It is not so easy to write about evolution in those places where theorists write about evolution.

In those areas where I am an amateur, my contributions are not noted by the professional community, because I did not go through the credentialing process whereby it can be assumed that I have something to lose if I am wrong.  Professionals lose much if they are wrong.  They perceive it in their best interest not to ally themselves with those with nothing to lose.  It would be like assigning my clients to high school students.  It is in my best interest as a web developer to hire folks that have received a college education in design.

So, what I’m toying with now is the following:  What are the most subtle and effective ways that I can write about the Internet and social change–areas where I can fairly easily get my ideas distributed–so that biological evolution also gets discussed?  At this time, on the four sites where my ideas appear (sexualselection.org, causeofautism.com, shiftjournal.com and this site), I get several hundred unique visitors a day (by conservative stats analytic tool estimations).  I’m trying to be crafty here and increase that exposure in such a fashion that it becomes clear to readers that the way that individuals, species and societies mature informs our understanding of an enormous amount of what occurs to us in our lives.

Survival sums up the way that most of us understand how biology evolves, individuals survive and societies transcend.  This is the old model.  The new model focuses on how populations, species, individuals and cultures mature.

Natural selection is the process by which randomly generated heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to generate progeny become more common in a population over successive generations.  This is the old model.  The old model does not get replaced.  It becomes the foundation for the new model.

The new model:  The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing.  Those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

The new model is all about maturation, not survival.  How does an amateur best write about a theory of maturation, with roots in evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, endocrinology, and anthropology, and sound like he’s got something to lose if he is wrong?

I’m not exactly sure if the issue is my surviving attempts to scale traditional barriers that surround professional expertise or my needing to mature to the point where I can be present to what I have to say rather than being concerned with those in my imagination that are not listening.

I just realized.  I think amateur is French for “not mature.”  This work is all about neoteny, or the bringing forth of infant features into adults, a sort of merging of the immature and mature.  That seems to be the theme of several of these essays as regards my personal attempts to introduce a new theory to a professional community.  There are ways that the product and the process are the same.

I need to let this insight mature.

To understand trends in current societal transformations requires an evaluation protocol that takes into consideration where we’ve come from, where we’re going and where we are.  This is particularly challenging when society origin myths, belief structures or paradigms are examples of some of the very content that is transforming.  Seeking understanding from a position with similarities to where we are headed should offer unique insights because the new understanding, at least temporarily, integrates all three frames.  Time will tell.

As regards understanding, convention is useful.  The following is a proposal for a new shared evaluation protocol.

What we understand “teleology” to mean is central to how we interpret current events, societal change, politics, geopolitical dynamics, the control of resources and the ability of the disenfranchised to feel free of want.  “Teleology” can be defined as the belief that there are overriding, perhaps spiritual, forces at work, compelling society to evolve or transform in particular directions featuring progress, improvement and an enhancement of individual positive experience.  There are atheist humanists that nonetheless display teleological tendencies insofar as they experience a confidence that our species has been acting and will continue to act, more or less, in our own best interest, compelling an ongoing positive direction.  Teleology is not widely discussed because it is associated with religious tendencies, and our academics, for the most part, operate from a materialist milieu.

What if there is structure to the particular way that societies change, a dynamic that offers insight on how transformation that reveals an overriding process is engaged?  What if teleology–social transformation–operated according to a biological imperative?

A theory of biological evolution that also explains human social transformation would be a powerful addition to the tools available that explain how our world works.  The nineteenth-century heterochronists (Mivart, Cope, Hyatt, Haeckel) and the twentieth-century theorists working with the concept of a fourfold parallelism (Freud, Piaget, Gebser, Habermas, Gould and Wilber) are operating with the same principles, only the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologists are not having their species transformation work interpreted by these twentieth-century psychologists, biologists and philosophers as connected to a social world.

Heterochrony includes a study of how the rate and timing changes that occur during early ontogeny or growth influence not only the structure, look and behaviors of an individual but how those changes impact that individual’s descendants.  For example, an environmental effect such as a change in a mother’s diet can transform the features of not only her children but her children’s children, changes that could compel the emergence of childlike features in the adults of distant progeny.  This is a kind of maturational delay called “neoteny,” or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants.  Heterochrony is a study of evolution that focuses on changes in features based upon influences exerted by the environment or social structure.

Fourfold parallelisms are four different scales of experience–biological evolution, social evolution, individual ontological or maturational transformation, and individual experience–that are believed to exhibit the same process, evolution, at four different levels.  Discipline founders or innovators, until recently, grew new ways of looking at the world by borrowing from contiguous disciplines, hypothesizing that different discipline dynamics operated according to identical processes at their core.

What’s missing is the concept of social structure and environmental influence.  Biological evolution is compelled by social structure and environmental effects that convey very specific maturational delay and acceleration dynamics.  Those same dynamics display overriding patterns, making transparent how society evolves or transforms in particular directions in specific ways over time.  These social transformations directly reflect biological social structure maturational delay and acceleration dynamics.

What has never occurred, and what this piece is proposing, is that the particular way that heterochronists viewed biological evolution–social structure and environmental effects compelling change by adjusting the rates and timing of maturation–was never picked up by the fourfold parallelists so that they could consider that society reveals teleological tendencies that in actuality are biological imperatives.  The reason for this is that by the time the parallelists were theorizing (early twentieth century), the heterochronists (mostly Lamarckians) were receiving less attention.  One hundred years later the Lamarckians are back.  Their discipline is called evolutionary developmental biology.  These evo devo practitioners have not yet turned their attention to the heterochronists.  Even so, multiscale parallelisms are still only in vogue among philosophers and artists.

Society evolves according to changes in its rates and timing of maturation, influenced by adjustments in social structure and environmental effects.  Societies reveal maturation tendencies identical to how individuals are impacted.  Those tendencies are influenced by observable variables.  Overriding patterns can be observed.

Teleology has biological roots.

“The fact that value judgments influence my proposals does not mean that I am making the mistake of which I have accused the positivists–that of trying to kill metaphysics by calling it names.  I do not even go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science.  For it cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas which have obstructed the advance of science there have been others — such as speculative atomism — which have aided it.  And looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical.’”  (Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York:  Basic Books, 1959), p. 39.)

Popper goes on to say that no matter how you come up with an idea, if it is not proved, it is not science.  In addition, falsifiability is central to the truth.  Thomas Kuhn focuses more on the process whereby science accepts a thesis and the repercussions of believing that there is such thing as truth.  On occasion, biologists discuss the similarities between male primate procreation strategies and science community strategies and tactics for achieving idea acceptance.  There are ways that interpretations of what “truth” is and the specifics that seek to occupy that truth station behave like sperm that lust to occupy a position of respect in the womb of our academic institutions.

It astonishes me the amount of time that I spend concerned with definitions of “truth” or foundation premises that inhibit alternative understandings.  I feel like I spend a lot of time in basements with flashlights discovering that an extraordinary amount of information has more to do with dream, or the unconscious, than with waking.  I then realize that I myself am a figment of dreamlike imagination.

Then, with chills, I realize the imagination is not my own.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on the difference between art and science and my exact role while engaged in the theorizing process.  As an artist, I seek insight, often by relieving myself of conventions that act as barriers between the social and the transsocial self.  A scientist adheres closely to conventions in order to provide colleagues the information that conventional reality is what is being explored.  Scientists need to trust that the information shared and relied upon is information that will behave identically for everyone in the science community.  An artist is looking for alternative perspectives, ideally universal, often not describable with anything like language.  Whereas science relies upon language or mathematics, media for sharing of convention, art instead seeks any avenue that usefully or beautifully offers access to nonconventional, but real, points of view.

No doubt these distinctions keep coming to my mind because I am engaged in an artistic process as I am theorizing about evolution.  I struggle with how exactly I fit into a conventional theorizing community while offering reverence to nonconventional, artistic process.  The result of this acute awareness is my frequent examination of the differences between science and artistic processes at both the creative level and the logistical level, the how of how content gets created, and the how of how content gets accepted by the community.

This often feels fatiguing, in no small part because a foundation feature of my personality is the deep-seated belief that what I create is not acceptable.  Many of us carry around this unconscious belief that we are of little use to the community and have to work extra hard to make a difference.  In the back of my mind, at the bottom of my emotions, is a frightened, grieving being who believes he’s alone because of something that he is or did.  I know many people with these hidden feelings.  I feel like much of what I do while I write is accompanying this being.

Accompanied, I get creative.

Whereas a scientist makes sure his work is above reproach, an artist seeks to be accompanied.  Popper and Kuhn describe rules of engagement regarding conventional reality.  The artist simply seeks to engage.

Except the product of my engagement is theory, theory that seeks to be useful.  I keep finding myself bridging these two worlds.  I note few models of how exactly to build this kind of bridge.  Firmly recognizing that I engage in art seems integral to my experiencing comfort with what I do.

Except I’m not convinced comfort is useful in creating art.

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore, drummers apparently know by intuition the most potent brain-stimulating rhythms.  According to Neher, the predominant drumming rhythm used in a number of African dances as well as in Haitian voodoo dances is a fast 7 to 9 beats per second—and that happens to be about the same rhythm produced naturally by “brain waves” in the auditory cortex itself, groups of neurons charging and discharging in electrical unison.  It seems that properly synchronized drumbeats drive the brain, force it into heightened activity.  They work in phase with brain waves, amplifying them the way timed pushes impart more and more momentum to a swing, creating hallucinations and intense feelings of dissociation.”  (Pfeiffer, 1982.)

This website describes a particular view of how human beings evolved.  I propose that art encouraged a particular ontological dynamic that compelled the growth of big brains because big brains more efficiently produce art.  We’re talking a sort of feedback loop, or what R. A. Fisher described as runaway sexual selection, whereby extravagant dancers chosen for their ability to evoke feelings of wonder resulting in copulation were (mostly) males that exhibited bigger brains and childlike features of cooperation and dependency, traits associated with neoteny.  Females kept picking big-brained, childlike dancers.  The women exhibiting the best  ability to form these evaluations, commanding and judgmental protohuman women, were making sure that they were the ones that got these men’s babies, and these women formed the other side of this feedback loop.  Big-brained dance performers got picked.  Big-brained dance evaluators did the picking.  Big brains evolved.

There are studies that conclude that the musically obsessed, composers and listeners with ability to note fine detail have bigger brains.  In addition, low testosterone males and high testosterone females seem to be the most talented composers.

“Creative musical behavior, musical intelligence, and spatial ability were investigated in relation to salivary testosterone (T).  In a cross-sectional study with 117 adults and in an 8-yr longitudinal study with 120 adolescents, composers, instrumentalists, and nonmusicians of both sexes were compared by analyses of variance.  Results indicate that an optimal T range may exist for the expression of creative musical behavior.  This range may be at the bottom of normal male T range and at the top of normal female T range.  In addition, musicians were found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians, both in an 8-yr-period of adolescent development and in adulthood.”  (Hassler, M., “Creative Musical Behavior and Sex Hormones:  Musical Talent and Spatial Ability in the Two Sexes,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 17(1) (1992):55.)

“Musical composers, instrumentalists, and painters were compared with nonmusicians from a student and from a nonstudent population on testosterone levels in saliva.  This steroid served as a marker for physiological androgyny.  The ANOVA showed a significant group by sex interaction.  Male composers attained significantly lower mean testosterone values than male instrumentalists and male nonmusicians; female composers had significantly higher mean testosterone values than female instrumentalists and female nonmusicians.  Painters of both sexes did not differ significantly from controls.  Spatial ability was assessed in the five groups.  Significant differences on spatial test performance were not reflected in differences on salivary testosterone.  Our results showed that musical composers of both sexes were physiologically highly androgynous.  Creative musical behavior was associated with testosterone levels that minimized sex differences.”  (Hassler, M., “Testosterone and Artistic Talents,” Int J Neurosci 56(1-4) (1991):25.)

Not only is testosterone related to musical inclination, so is handedness.  The left-handed often are more musically inclined.

“It seems possible that an optimal testosterone range exists for the expression of creative musical behavior and that exceeding this optimal range in the course of puberty may contribute to a stop of musical production in boys.  Such optimal testosterone levels may be lower than male average in adult men and higher than female average in adult women (Hassler, 1991; Hassler & Nieschlag, 1989). …  Handedness proved to be an important variable with respect to musical talent in boys.  Male left-handers attained significantly higher mean test scores than male right-handers on Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence (Hassler & Birbaumer, 1988) at each stage of the study.”  (Hassler, M., and Nieschlag, E., “Salivary Testosterone and Creative Musical Behavior in Adolescent Males and Females,” Developmental Neuropsychology 7 (1991):504.)

According to the thesis promoted on this website, it is the random-handed (left-handed), the high testosterone females, the low testosterone males (matrifocal social structure) and the big-brained dancers that are the folks engaged in the runaway sexual selection feedback loop just described.  The neurological literature is filled with examples that support this thesis.

Nevertheless, it is a story.  A story is art.  Art often has spiritual connections.  The question is:  Is this a story that offers opportunities to transform?

“The entire scheme represents a hierarchically organized system of increasing size, differentiation, and complexity, in which each component affects, and is affected by, all the other components, not only at its own level but at lower and higher levels as well.  Thus, the arrows in Figure12-2 not only go upward from the gene, eventually reaching all the way to the external environment through the activities of the organism, but the arrows of influence return from the external environment through various levels of the organism back to the genes.  While the feedforward or feedupward nature of the genes has always been appreciated from the time of Weismann and Mendel on, the feedbackward or feeddownward influences have usually been thought to stop at the level of the cell membrane.  The newer conception is one of a totally interrelated, fully coactional system in which the activity of the genes themselves can be affected through the cytoplasm of the cell by events originating at any other level in the system, including the external environment.”  (G. Gilbert, Individual Development and Evolution (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 145.)

The article appearing in the 11/8/09 BBC News, “Early Life Stress ‘Changes’ Genes“, sent to me by reader Jon Gluckman, calls attention to evident changes in the genetic structure of mice genes as a result of stress just after birth.  The article wasn’t very specific except to note that changes were observed to occur at the molecular level by researcher Christopher Murgatroyd.  Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma has been adjusted to a less certain position of authority by a number of studies over the last 20 years.  Their discovery of the double helix was astonishing and beautiful, but not as easily understood as was first believed.  It’s looking like DNA is not the code of life, but the score.

When a current composer creates a symphony, he writes or types the notes to appear in a visual format to be provided to the various musicians by the conductor.  The composer does not “code” a symphony; he creates a score that then provides an idea of what the composer had in mind.  Musicians then marshal their assignment into existence by leveraging their skill with the instrument, paying attention to their own feelings, listening to their colleagues, watching the conductor and responding to the audience all at once.  There are at least these five variables impacting each individual performance.  Multiply that by the number of performers in a symphony and we begin to understand the subtlety, complexity and sophistication of DNA.  It’s as much about the environment as it is about the score.  That is the nature of art.

I hypothesize that music is not only a better metaphor than machinery or code for communicating how the genes and the environment relate, but music itself approaches the actual structure of the womb or egg environment engendered to produce an individual.  Art is a peculiarly human undertaking.  Its origins are explored far less often than language or culture, it being assumed that art is a contingent result of language or culture.  Even though art as it manifests in female sexual selection proliferates across the planet in the form of (usually) males displaying features that females like, art is not often explored as that which compelled humans to evolve.

The reason I state that art (in this case, music) was not only instrumental in how humans evolved but is a direct reflection of how evolution operates is because neoteny, the prolongation of ancient ancestor embryo features into the adults of descendants, not only made contemporary adult humans more like our chimpanzee-like embryo progenitors (as in large head, big brain, small jaws, hairless skin, head back on shoulders) but made humans behave like an embryo behaves.  Human adults make art and revel in environmental information to inform inspiration to create.  This is exactly what I hypothesize embryos do.  Embryos take their DNA score and proceed to proliferate growth based upon instructions from the environment.  Just as an audience informs production, the environment guides growth or ontogeny.  Art is not only integral to what it is to be human but is perhaps the most integral feature of what it is to be human.  In addition, art may be also how humans, and life, grow.

In other words, art may not only be the best way to represent those subtle and unique experiences that make life make sense, art may be the best way to understand how life actually unfolds.  Science, seeking to make an experience reproducible by making the number of variables so few that the outcome can be controlled, may be doing the opposite of what life actually engages in if life is to be understood.  Audience and performer, gene score and environment may be central to understanding not only evolution but ontogeny, individual experience and social relations.  Maybe it’s time science allies itself with art and makes itself part of an ensemble.

DNA’s Central Dogma, a great name, created with sensitivity to religious lines that science, with awareness, seeks to cross, needs a new name.  I would suggest Immanent Nature.  DNA’s Immanent Nature instead of Central Dogma suggests porous boundaries with continued awareness of the spiritual connotations.

If what makes humans human is that we directly reflect the processes engaged during earliest ontogeny, and our reflection of those processes compels us to create, then perhaps the unique self awareness also evidenced by humans is a feature of earliest ontogeny.

Immanence may be a feature of the system.

An article in the November 9 NY Times, “Refining the Twitter Explosion“, described changes that Twitter programmers are making to Twitter, changes that are taking steps toward a dramatic realignment of our society.

The article noted that in January 2009, daily traffic was 2.4 million transmissions, but it grew to 26 million tweets by October.  Then, the writer Noam Cohen noted the importance of geographic location to high quality information: “Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online.”

Twitter at present offers uncannily high quality information, if presented in 140 characters, in real time.  A major issue is access to information, which is stymied by Twitter’s present inability to control other variables.  That is changing.  The NY Times article suggests that Twitter is considering initiating a management tool that allows searchers for content to focus on both time (as long as the time is recent) and place.  The article describes the ability to then monitor individuals’ responses to, for example, the Ft. Hood horror, while it’s happening.

I’ve been writing about the growth of these communication tools for two years in the context of evolutionary theory and the tracking of lineage across time and space in a political action context.  My focus has been on exploring the birth and distribution of ideas in the way that individuals and species evolve in the context of the environment exerting constant influence.  This began with programmer Dave Larson and me.  We instituted social networking software that allowed the tracking of multiple degrees of separation in a fashion that permitted a tracing of speed, geographic span and number of participants in the context of political action.  That software is up and operating at PJEP.org.  I realized that the power of this model and its ability to track transmissions over time, over space, number of users and depth of degree of separation, offered a unique ability to monitor idea gestation, birth, growth and reproduction through communications technologies.  Dave suggested cell phone technology made more sense than use through a laptop.  Then, I realized that Twitter is already evolving in this direction.

With the news that Twitter is adding on a geographic element to its platform, it is clear that Twitter is exhibiting the kind of flexibility necessary to cooperate with the wisdom of the crowd.  What Twitter users are requesting is high quality information.  The kind of information becoming available with these tools is only beginning to be understood.  An individual is now less than a generation away from access to the evolution of ideas in real time, over time, with an ability to make comparisons over time of varying ideas.  At this point, Twitter does not offer much in the way of archived information that can be searched for patterns over time.  It is inevitable that the crowd will be seeking to understand information not only in the now, but over time.  When time, space, degrees of separation and the numbers of individuals associated with particular ideas are all searchable and then available through reports that offer unique, high quality, interpreted and interpretable information, an unfathomable new zeitgeist emerges.

For example, a poor child in India asks, on her cell phone, the following question:  How much faster would the local economy grow if 100,000 cell phones were made available to the poorest people at $1 a month, and how specifically could those phones be used to achieve that goal?  The child’s friends start coming up with ideas.  The technology would track the evolution of those ideas, including information about which individuals are coming up with the ideas most attended to and which individuals are most involved in the distribution of those ideas.  The application would track the speed, geographic span, degrees of separation and number of participants in the discussion.  Those results of the discussion evoking the most powerful response would be available to all interested in those results.

A transformation of society featuring the horizontalization of institutions, transparency, diversity and the use of microblogging to trace the evolution of ideas offers a profound shift in the way that individuals relate to their environment.  If the kind of access described here is accompanied by the ability of any individual to create a report that offers insight into the patterns now observable by the application, a major shift occurs, with the ability for any person with a cell phone to ask a question that can be answered.  Moreover, it is a question that was unanswerable in the past.  In other words, the kind of information that the environment can offer shifts to reveal depth of pattern or structure not even conceivable in human history.  Regarding ideas, idea origins, distribution, synthesis and reemergence–the stuff that our minds are made of–anyone with a cell phone can go exploring.

I recently attended a conference of local Chicago-area radical and liberal alternative-media specialists, about 75 people, who were seeking a better understanding of how to initiate social change by using new media tools.  More than one speaker got up to describe frustration with recent Right Wing successes at marshalling together large numbers of people to behave in specific ways at particular times and places.  Clearly, large chunks of the Left do not understand the milieu that we are entering.  The forces of change are not taking top-down orders from a single, well financed leader.  The evolutionary current is horizontal.  Individuals are seeking information, not orders.

This change in technology is reflected in a dramatically changing society.  The Left is often unaware of the relationship between a technology that offers high quality information instantaneously and a population that feels empowered to achieve goals.  The more features that Twitter acquires and the deeper an individual can dig to discover underlying patterns, the freer a society becomes.  A result of that freedom will be a complete redefinition or reevaluation of what freedom and individuality really are.  If every individual has access to the same high quality information, then individuality becomes less characterized by how each of us is different than by how each of us uniquely manifests what is the same.  Society informed by stratification gives way to an aesthetic society concerned with an appreciation of nuance, not denial.

The direction that Twitter is headed is good.  The crowd wisdom informing Twitter’s adjustments is a deep wisdom.  It is a wisdom that presupposes we are all connected.  Little is hidden.  And, each is entitled to understand.

“He [Darwin] was prevented from harvesting all the fruits of his fertile imagination because he did not follow through with the logic of his own argument – to discover how female choice influenced the origin of the hominids; that is, to show how sexual selection was important at the very onset of human evolution.  Because of an unfortunate blind spot engendered by his own cultural background, Darwin was unable to explicate the necessary interrelationships and carry his own work on to its more logical conclusion.”  (Nancy M. Tanner, On Becoming Human (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 167.)

Charles Darwin suggested the possibility that humans were descended from tribal cultures characterized by matrifocal social structures that were driven by female sexual selection.  He referenced Morgan’s writings.  After suggesting the possibility, he rejected it as being incongruent with his experience of contemporary and primitive society, featuring a focus on male hierarchical dominance patterns with a complementary pattern of female compliance.  If Darwin had instead embraced what he rejected, it is unlikely that the history of evolutionary theory would have been changed.  Female sexual selection was almost ignored for 100 years.  It is with the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) that sexual selection theory integrated with evolutionary psychology achieves a robust acceptance.  Charles Darwin’s vision transcended not only his contemporaries, but his culture.

“Nevertheless, from the strength of the feeling of jealousy all through the animal kingdom, as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, more particularly of those which come nearest to man, I cannot believe that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in times past, shortly before man attained to his present rank in the zoological scale.”

“…We may indeed conclude from what we know of jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed as many of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable.”  (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London:  John Murray, 1871), pp. 611-612.)

Observing the battle occurring in America today, conservative elements are behaving like they are on the defensive.  This is for good reason.  Imagine what our times would look like to Charles Darwin.  Would he have come to the same conclusions regarding sexual selection and human evolution in an environment featuring women’s ability to inherit, women’s right to vote, women’s access to a wide range of professions, abortion, the Pill, divorce, women choosing to have children later in life, and families having little influence on women’s choice of a mate?  This year more female doctors graduated than male doctors.

The Left exhibits little awareness of the profound distance our society has come in six generations.  So much has changed that we live in a totally new theorizing environment.  Evolutionary developmental biology is partly based on a concept of evolution not yet understood or embraced by the status quo, evolution guided by the environmental influences on womb conditions.  What happens to the mother has a whole lot to do with how we evolve.  The American Right is still trumpeting Judeo-Christian mythology with a transcendent male in total control.  This male frame of reference in no small way influenced Darwin.  This frame of reference is on the wane.

Charles Darwin composed our culture’s origin myth.  Evolutionary evangelists like Richard Dawkins pound the pulpit, pursuing very specific interpretations of the gospel.  In just the way that the Bible’s text was influenced by the culture that it came from, Darwin’s life work was influenced by his position as a nineteenth-century, Western, wealthy, white male.

Evolutionary theory is our society’s origin myth.  Six generations have passed since its composition.  It would be useful to examine Darwin’s work in the context of its time.

Last night was another one of those nights where I dreamt evolutionary theory all night long.  It was the same thing over and over.  My dreams were outlining a sequence of processes involving estrogen and testosterone influencing behavior and physical features in progeny.  Estrogen and testosterone were impacting children when those hormone levels changed in parents, influencing the parents’ daily life in numerous ways.

In the dreams, I wasn’t observing the situations as much as I was writing descriptions of the process, pathways of influence.  Occasionally I’d see something from an auto window while the car was moving, as if what I was seeing was an example of what I was seeking to describe.  Getting the text right and the sequences correct seemed the main focus of the dreams.  The main communication seemed to be that humans are heavily impacted by events in their lives.  The environment informs our experience, changing not only ourselves but our children.

This operated at three scales.  I awoke unclear what those scales were, though while dreaming I had understood.

A big issue in the dream was that these things were easily explainable.  A main focus was on communicating the principles in a way that they were easy to understand.

Shortly after I awoke, it struck me that there are three things that I am seeking to communicate in my work.  1) There is the theory itself.  2) There is the power and usefulness of my engaging in the distribution of the theory through the Internet, not academic conventions, making my theory an advocate of the new horizontal, barrier-free milieu.  3) Last, there is my sharing of the process of the theory formation in blog, narrative format, providing a window into how exactly the theory comes together.  In other words, I don’t only seek to share insights or what the theory is that has been formed.  I also seek to offer a transparency that allows a communicating of theory-formation process, providing not just the results of the process, but access to how the process is engaged in.  A theory about human evolution and the origin of human split consciousness usefully offers access to the split consciousness hypothesized to exist.

This, of course, assumes that I am part of a process with a result that is beautiful and/or useful.  I’ve hypothesized many interconnected, hypothetically useful theories or models under the umbrella of this Orchestral Theory of Evolution, all in the context of my being an amateur.  I am a trained artist by profession.  That contextualizes these productions as a work of art.  This relieves me of competing with practitioners of science, which would leave me open to being evaluated by their rules.  Not that my work is much noticed by the practitioners of science.  Nevertheless, as an amateur, I fail the academic requirement that practitioners make no claims without being above reproach.  I frequently posit hypotheses, using intuition and information, and then I run “as if” frames, or I assume those hypotheses are true so that I can explore the implications.  Then, I explore the implications of the implications.  I do this without conducting experiments or running studies.  This is not particularly good science, though there are similarities to abstract physics.

As an artist, I can indulge.  As an artist, I can consider the content of my dreams to be very important.  I believe that there is nothing that I know that wasn’t unconscious first.

The main focus of the dream last night was that what I write should be simple and understandable.  I will continue to pursue that goal.