Physics somehow, somewhere along the line, grew accustomed to behaving in a fully functional fashion while embedded in paradox. That light behaved like both a particle and wave contributed to this unusual space. Then, we discovered that while seeking to know something, using instruments that could provide the answer, we not only influence what we seek to know, making it impossible to know certain things, but the speed of the information of that which we can know becomes instantaneous, which is supposed to be impossible.

Physics has embraced ambiguity. Perhaps the supporting structure of mathematics offering opposite answers has made that possible. What would it take for evolutionary biology to acquire a relativistic perspective, bowing its head to the impossible, integrating with that which seems to deliberately contest reductionist interpretations?

Susan Oyama writes books that lambaste hard core genetic interpretations of evolution. She uncovers the many ways that biological theorists refuse to recognize the paradox that is integral to biology. What was called the nature/nurture debate for several decades has settled down to an understanding that the two are integrated. Nevertheless, practitioners of biology mostly seem incapable of fully realizing this. Most still reflexively offer deep allegiance to the genome as central to development, except when something happens where it is clear that the genome is not central to development. Instead of embracing a paradox, they display a continuing belief in the power of code to explain life, except when it doesn’t work.

A physicist does not default to light being a particle, except when a wave. A physicist accepts that light is both.

How best does a biologist seek solutions to a paradox when a biologist does not accept that a paradox is in play? Or, perhaps better than a solution would be the physicist’s disposition to accept noncomplementary paradigms as both true.

My work is deeply imbedded in the biological paradox that the environment influences the lives of parents in ways that the progeny’s physical and behavioral features are affected, so much affected that the acquired features become heritable. This is paradoxical. Evidence supports Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma that genes control evolutionary outcomes. Yet, there is also evidence that the environment heavily impacts development, with the result of those impacts being passed on to future generations.

Instead of accepting that light is both particle and wave, that the speed of information can exceed the speed of light, evolutionary biologists seem loath to consider that both genetics and Lamarckian principles are in play. It is still provocative to use Lamarck’s name when discussing these issues.

Why the deep reluctance to accept that we are confused?

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…

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…

“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’…

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

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

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

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

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

Ten years ago, I was exploring the possible origin of human culture in tribal societies driven by rhythmic dance and music. Tribal societies are on rare occasions characterized by paternal anonymity, or children who are unaware of the identity of their biological father. Observing that human brain size began to diminish about 25,000 years ago, I hypothesized that this reflected an emerging patrifocal emphasis on speech instead of gesture and a movement away from a selection for big-brained males. If this was the case, I suspected that there might be remnants of the old matrifocal paradigm that still exist within contemporary society. In the neurological literature, I sought humans with unusually large brains, difficulty with language, but who were also ambidextrous or left-handed. I came to find that autistic individuals commonly display these features; in addition, I discovered that individuals with autism are often obsessed with pattern replication and have perfect pitch (Brenton, Devries, Barton, Minnich & Sokol, 2008).

It appeared that hidden beneath the just-so story was a theory, which, if brought to light, could help make useful predictions and illuminate unrecognized relationships. From the beginning, the theory drew information from three different disciplines: anthropology, evolutionary biology…

These essays or blogs are an unconventional way to share evolutionary theory. This is not a peer-reviewed journal and I am not an academician. There are the less obvious reasons why this blog is unconventional. For example, I share some ideas before they are fully formed.

Many of the ideas expressed on this blog had their origins ten years ago. Click here to travel to a site that goes into those details. Those ideas have been fully cited (click here) though no peer-review process has presented them to a community that might absorb them. This blog offers me an opportunity to share those ideas in the context of contemporary events that might suggest their utility. The most obvious example is that the theory hypothesizes that autism has evolutionary origins and is a direct result of changes in our society’s transformation from patrifocal to matrifocal social structure. Almost thirty predictions come from the hypothesis. Click here for details.

Writing these blogs often led to insights. Since starting these entries last April 1, a number of ideas have occurred to me that bridge off of the original theses. Some of these ideas…

Researcher Henry Jerison noted in 1973 that there was a consistent and evocative pattern in the brain-size relationship between predator and prey. The predator in any predator/prey partnership always had a bigger brain. Jerison concluded that the demands of catching another animal were far more exacting than eating foliage and avoiding being caught. Hunting required far more brains than running away.

The origin of thought is not about how big a brain humans might have needed to be successful hunters. What humans needed big brains for, as Geoffrey Miller has outlined, was to achieve sex opportunities. The same process that drove predator brain-size increases, in the case of humans, drove them to behave in ways that resulted in larger brains. What drove humans was the dance and the sounds that humans would make to accompany the dance, with the most evocative performers being picked more frequently as sexual partners.

A predator’s brain need be no bigger than what is required to catch prey. There is no biological incentive to add any more brain power than is absolutely necessary to survive. Humans, as far as we know, are the first species to revel in culture, thought, language and all its implications.…

I’ve sometimes wondered what a theory of human personality and psychotherapeutic intervention would look like if contemporary psychodynamic theory was based on a theory of human evolution that embraced sexual selection, Lamarckian principles and the influence of social structure on societal transformation. Freud was a recapitulationist. Freud believed in a threefold relationship between childhood developmental states, human evolutionary stages and a contemporary societal hierarchy of cultures. Freud hypothesized that a child recapitulates or re-enacts our recent evolution. For example, he estimated that there might have been an actual prehistorical event where a son killed a father that correlated with the oedipal stage in early ontogeny. Freud’s perspective was Victorian and male-centric.

Humans may have evolved according to a dynamic where females picked males for their ability to evoke an experience of feeling part of something larger than the self, part of a matrifocal, dance-driven tribal culture where a craving for this aesthetic drove the exponential increase in our brain size. Females picking neotenic or cooperative males choose maturational delayed males whose brains grow bigger over generations as infant features (such as fast growing brains) prolong into the characteristics of adults. Female brains capable of interpreting the nuanced exhibitions of males…

For over 120 years, theorists have been aware of heterochronic principles in evolution. Stephen J. Gould has almost single-handedly kept the flame alive. Gould is dead. Evolutionists specializing in this area are relatively rare. As the bonfire of Neo-Darwinism continues to die down, perhaps we’ll see renewed attention offered to these alternative views. Evolutionary developmental biology is opening doors in this direction.

Humans have evolved as a result of neoteny. Neoteny is one of several heterochronic processes. Neoteny is that process by which the features of infants appear over time in the adults of descendants. Physical, behavioral and neurological features “prolong” over generations, manifesting later and later in ontogeny until specific characteristics of embryos, babies and toddlers emerge as full-blown adult characteristics.

Books discussing neoteny in detail, such as Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny, concentrate on the physical features that transform when impacted by neoteny. Wesley Montague explored some of the emotional repercussions of bridging the child to the adult. Specifically, Montague noted the profound effect of carrying creativity and curiosity into the adult of our species, with the resulting societal repercussions.

Two additional features of the very young have been somehow absent from discussions of the influence of neoteny on…

In ancient cultures across the world, there are myths describing a time when women controlled society with a magic more powerful than men’s. These stories go on to describe that there is a loss of the women’s power. Yet the stories also express that there still remains an awesome strength tied to female menstruation; the monthly moon blood is to be feared and respected.

Not unlike the experience of traveling to little-visited, far-flung corners of the earth and finding surprisingly similar myths describing origins of local culture; we find ourselves filled with a similar wonder upon traveling to little-visited academic sub-disciplines. Just as two far-apart aboriginal cultures might have no contact with each other, the heterochronic practitioners of evolutionary biology have little traffic with the neuropsychological theorists who may be located less than a hundred yards away in another building on the same campus. Strangely, we find these different scientists discussing identical processes in different terminologies with almost no published awareness that they have much in common.

How might two different scientific disciplines be discussing the same natural dynamic and not know it, like two aboriginal societies fearing menstrual blood half a world apart, unaware of another culture with the…

On one side towers the pill, the 60s symbol of goddess, placing sexuality in the control of women and providing females the power to decide when to make love and if they will be fertile.

On the other side sits AIDS, symbol of patrifocal, socially conservative Republicanism, demanding that sex stop now and that contraception and abortion be banned.

The pill vs. the virus, joy vs. fear, matri vs. patri is the battle of social structures, the oldest human civil war of all, where the female newborns are the disappeared.

Often, when a new lion king takes over an established pride with kittens not obviously his own, he kills them. It has been estimated that this action is a naturally selected tendency since cats evidencing this behavior are more likely to pass it on to male progeny that retain the trait. Humans are horrified observing this conduct. Yet, female infanticide is widely practiced today in cultures seeking to retain vanishing male dominance in societies where ancient hierarchies are threatened.

Societies retain ideals of the perfect mate. Those ideals can vary radically from culture to culture, even varying from country to country in the West. Perfect mate ideals vary to the…

There is a five-step continuum that begins with primordial competition and ends with what may make human beings unique.

Darwin struggled with three selective processes, seeking ways that they could make sense together. He is best known for natural selection. Darwin also discovered sexual selection. In addition, he wrote detailed accounts of how he estimated Lamarckian selective processes influence evolution. Unable to find a way to make the three different processes elegantly nest, Darwin is remembered mostly for his contribution to our contemporary paradigm that believes natural selection is the most important selective process.

I have suggested (see sexualselection.org) that the evolutionary processes themselves have unfolded in their own meta evolution. Natural selection evolved sexual selection and Lamarckian selection. Sexual selection then evolved language and society. I have proposed that society and human split-consciousness emerged as a direct repercussion of dance and art.

The five-step continuum begins with natural selection and then moves to sexual selection, with animals focusing on particular patterns when they choose a mate. Step three begins with a bridging over to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances. The fourth…

Tracking patterns as they emerge on several levels, across multiple disciplines, floats my boat. In this case, a boat filled with the reproducing parents of all the animals and plants that have existed. This boat would be a Noah’s ark filled with all the passengers of time.

Species evolution, societal transformation, individual ontogeny and personal lives unfold in waves. One current lifts that which is newest and most creative and carries that new item into the later lives of species and individuals. We call this wave neoteny. The other wave embraces what we’ve learned and draws the new experiences backward, informing descendants of the changes that have occurred. We might name it new experience, environmental influences or the effects of time.

We’re talking two kinds of new. There is the New Year’s baby. There is the passing year’s old man before the old year disappears at midnight. Infant and ancient trading the briefest of embraces. One brings the newness of creation, with no experience. The other offers vast new and unique experiences as it prepares to fade.

Manifesting as waves, these two kinds of new rock the dance of evolution, cultural change and individual growth. When storms come and the…

Radical shifts in environment produce a proliferation of new species. Darwin noted vast gaps in the fossil record. (Evangelicals jump on this observation as proof that theories of evolution are fatally flawed.) Gould & Eldredge provided a name and explanation for this phenomenon: punctuated equilibrium. Theorists now conclude evolution often unfolds in sprints and spurts. Another way to understand it is that evolution rolls in and out, in waves.

Survival-of-the-fittest theorists would have us believe that some of the randomly produced progeny created during cataclysmic times, progeny exhibiting random features that are appropriate for the new environment, would survive to procreation, creating progeny like themselves. This view is fading.

Individually, ontogenetically, we as individuals reproduce a cellular march of a half billion years, improvising unique and interesting endings with every lifetime.

Two strong tides inform how this history unfolds. In one direction, individual modifications are embraced and stored–ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny–as innovations are transformed into history, becoming part of the ontological unfolding of descendants.

In the other direction, we have neoteny. With humans as an example, biological currents draw features of fetuses into adulthood, characteristics of infants into grown-ups, the creativity of creation into minds that invent, create and are inspired.…