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?

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.

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 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.

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

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

Darwin and Freud were fascinated by reversion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new paradigm requires an integration with the past.

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 encouraged to occur in less than half a dozen. Wolves and foxes have been neotenized in a mere 20 years, acquiring dog-like characteristics.

Endocrinology is a new science even though we have been observing the effects of the gonadal hormones since the dawn of self awareness. That there might be an elegant correlation between specific hormones and the rate and timing of maturation has not been explored outside work done by biologists, followers of Matusa mostly, on amphibians and other nonmammal species. For over ten years, I’ve been exploring the repercussions of a theory of human evolution that considers that testosterone regulates the speed of maturation. This is a profoundly epigenetic theory, a theory that estimates that testosterone regulation occurs as a direct result of environmental factors that determine testosterone levels. Epigenetic theories are those theories that explore heredity/environment interactions that result in ontogenetic and eventually evolutionary change. It was unorthodox until recently to consider that genes are programmed to take into consideration environmental effects, and that the result of modifications will not only appear in the individual but in the individual’s descendants. So, we might see why it’s taken us a while to get to a place where testosterone could be even considered as a major force in evolution.

Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines the profound effect that social frames of reference have upon our ability to theorize. Thomas Kuhn alludes to the impact that shared social views have upon theorists’ frame of reference. Knight describes how hobbled we are in the West by a nonfeminist perspective. Kuhn suggests a sea change of societal perspectives would be necessary for the following to make sense.

Heterochronic theory’s changing rate and timing can be elegantly assigned to the effects of testosterone changing rates and estrogen controlling timing. Both hormones are associated with a host of related hormones, and there are circumstances where male and female hormones may transition to the other but, speaking generally, there are patterns that suggest that at a very real level, individual ontogeny, social evolution and human biological evolution are unfolding according to this very specific, two-variable dance.

Our commitment to Darwin’s theory of natural selection has made it difficult to note the effects of the environment upon evolution.

Our devotion to the idea that the behaviors of males in evolution are more important than the behaviors of females has made it almost impossible to observe that behind the scenes it has been the female controlling the timing of the process.

I wish we had a better word than “heterochronic” to describe the patterns. It would have been better if we had a name like “orchestral evolution.” Then it would make more sense when we assigned the position of conductor to a woman, she that decides the timing of the production.

There are several places where estrogen may be quietly stepping in and deciding exactly how things unfold by regulating the timing of those events. That may be occurring in no small way due to estrogen controlling the timing of testosterone’s effects.

• Fat levels at puberty, influencing estrogen levels, determine the timing of pubertal testosterone surges in both sexes. Individuals may experience delayed puberty if there is not enough fat on their bodies to propel the process.

• Estrogen levels in an infant and toddler may be influencing testosterone surges that determine cerebral synapse pruning. We don’t know what determines the timing of testosterone surges that result in the diminution of the right cerebral hemisphere. If it is a similar process to what determines the timing of testosterone surges in puberty, then estrogen levels may not only be controlling cerebral lateralization but may be heavily influencing language production, conditions such as autism and numerous other human features and conditions.

• Estrogen levels in a mother’s womb may be deciding (along with testosterone) which social structure the child will be inclined to ally with. I’ve described four social structures, two matrifocal and two patrifocal. Estrogen levels are a key determinant of social structure proclivity.

• Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young. Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but determines the likelihood of progeny survival by how much attention is directed toward the young. Consider that in female infanticide it is almost always the mother that kills the infant.

• Estrogen may offer the placating option when combat is being considered. Estrogen can control whether a battle occurs or not.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection or female choice may be but the suggestion of a vast network of relationships determined by estrogen levels. Darwin was familiar with the work of contemporaries, Neo-Lamarckians, who focused on the orthogenetic tendency of features to evolve in particular trajectories. We can see those patterns now as part of the larger pattern of Gould’s heterochronic theory paradigm. It is possible that Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his theory of sexual selection can be allied in a heterochronic theory of evolution that places testosterone as the prime mover of rates of maturation and estrogen as the queen of timing. Interestingly enough, Darwin’s third theory, pangenesis, revealed orthogenetic insights. Darwin even hypothesized “gemmules,” or particles, that would flow through the bloodstream, carrying information regarding the environment to the places in one’s body that controlled evolutionary change.

In other words, Darwin had all the puzzle pieces. But, he was exploring these ideas in a time when society embraced only the idea that might is right, environment be damned and women control little of what occurs.

To seriously consider that testosterone may control the rate of evolution, estrogen the timing, we might have to go back 150 years. The answer to our origins may be in the origins of evolutionary theory.

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 and neuropsychology; yet, because these three disciplines did not share a common language, it became my goal to show that they were indeed studying an identical process. Evolutionary biology’s heterochronic theory explored the long-term effects of changing maturation rates, while anthropological explorations of human social structure examined the repercussions that one or more generation’s mate choice has on society. Researchers in the field of neuropsychology largely neglected to acknowledge the evolutionary implications of their discoveries, which could elucidate the parallels between the environment’s influence on uterine hormone levels and the distribution of handedness across a society. It became clear to me that all three subdisciplines were describing the dynamic of sexual selection and how sexual selection’s influence on maturation rates impacts human evolution. There seemed limited opportunities for the practitioners of each discipline to feel moved by potential synergies with their academic neighbors. However, in order to further understand human evolution, there seems a need to speak the basic languages of these three subdisciplines.

This work seeks to transcend the academic language barrier by emphasizing common patterns and ideas shared by all three subdisciplines.

This introduction to the Theory of Waves begins with an overview of four hypothetical, yet fundamental, social structures (two matrifocal and two patrifocal) and outlines the hormonal constellation of the individuals who comprise those four basic prototypes. There exists an elegant dynamic that compels and maintains these four balances. This dynamic, as explained below, can be maintained or propelled at three different levels of two overlapping hormonal paradigms.

Below, I discuss the impact this dynamic has on understanding ethnic variation, disease and condition etiology. For example, I reframe female infanticide as a socially engineered form of sexual selection. The hormonal constellations that arise as a result of this selection process produce a low prevalence of female breast cancer in Asian societies.

Having investigated related theories, I offer several reasons why neuropsychological studies have produced such inconsistent results. This theory, the Theory of Waves, ends by making a number of predictions that concentrate on autism. These predictions provide an opportunity for members of the academic community to prove this story wrong. It has been by matching up anomalies across disciplines and by discovering melodies using the black keys on a piano that this theory has come together.

I believe that understanding neoteny (the prolongation of ancestor infant features into the adults of descendants) is integral to understanding the process of becoming human. Central to understanding neoteny is understanding early play behavior. Experiencing this theory as it has come together over the last ten years has felt like deep play, frequently crossing the line to the reverential. Let the following concepts play across your mind like music. Email me if this theory strikes a chord with your own experiences, or if it harmonizes with your own understanding.

…

In this model, or theory, which I’ve been calling the Theory of Waves, there are eight varieties of humans, four male and four female. These eight types of humans feature specific characteristics, or tendencies. Each type of human can be influenced by other types, and each is susceptible to specific features in the environment. Environmental influences can compel the progeny of these types of humans to transform into other types of humans. These environmental influences compel evolutionary currents, which can provoke a significant transformation within a single generation. More often, however, these transformations occur over the course of centuries or longer.

Similar to Watson and Crick’s double helix, a larger body is created from an assembly of component parts. In this case, societies are made up of eight types of human beings, each of whom represents one of the eight potential combinations derived from the hormonal extremes. The hormonal extremes form a structure that serves as a template for a majority of the individuals within a society. The majority of individuals within a society will exhibit some basic features associated with these hormonal extremes, yet they will exhibit these extremes to less of a degree than the eight prototype humans.

Imagine that the eight basic artist colors (purple, red, blue, yellow, orange, green, black and white) are all being blended in specific ways to paint the character of a society. Or, consider that instead of the two planets Mars and Venus, which represent the classic male/female dichotomy, there are eight planets—four female and four male—which together comprise a pantheon of eight gods and goddesses.

Female Constellations
High testosterone, high estrogen (F TE)
High testosterone, low estrogen (F Te)
Low testosterone, high estrogen (F tE)
Low testosterone, low estrogen (F te)

Male Constellations
High testosterone, high estrogen (M TE)
High testosterone, low estrogen (M Te)
Low testosterone, high estrogen (M tE)
Low testosterone, low estrogen (M te)

As in the double helix, there are natural complementary pairings. In this framework, opposite sexes are not only drawn to each other based on sexual attraction, but they are also drawn to each other based on the attraction to their complementary opposite hormonal counterparts.

Female te/Male TE
Female tE/Male Te
Female Te/Male tE
Female TE/Male te

The complementary counterparts naturally ally themselves into patrifocal and matrifocal social structures. There exist two variations within each.

F te/M TE Conventional Patrifocal
F tE/M Te Warrior Patrifocal
F Te/M tE Contemporary Matrifocal
F TE/M te Classic Matrifocal

Conventional Patrifocal: Domineering, caring and discriminating men who choose cooperative women.

Warrior Patrifocal: Domineering men who choose cooperative, caring and discriminating women.

Contemporary Matrifocal: Commanding women who choose creative, cooperative, caring and discriminating men.

Classic Matrifocal: Commanding, caring and discriminating women who choose creative and cooperative men.

These fundamental paradigms are flexile and have an ability to transform from one societal prototype into another over time. The human hormone thresholds can vary over time and can control the speed and direction of evolution. The thresholds can be influenced at three locations within two interlocking cycles, or feedback loops, as described below.

Mother’s testosterone level > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > mother’s testosterone level.

Mother’s estrogen level > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > mother’s estrogen level.

The environment can intervene at any of the three levels of these two loops by influencing both maturation rates and timing (via testosterone) or by influencing the intensity of mate selection criteria (via estrogen).

Level 1: A mother’s uterine hormonal levels are impacted by environmental influences, which in turn affect the child’s maturation and development. The hormonal levels of the mother influence the overall disposition of the social structure by predisposing certain tendencies of the progeny.
Level 2: The environment, through a variety of specific hormone-influencing prompts, impacts a person in society, thereby shifting social structure proclivities.
Level 3: Shifts in social structure influence mate selection criteria, which alter evolutionary trajectories.

Changes may occur at the level of the womb, individual ontogeny and/or at the level of society. The relationship among these three environmentally susceptible locations creates an interactive system, which directs evolutionary trajectory.

…

Central to this model are the environmental impact points, which compel the transformation of a society and our species. In a woman’s womb, testosterone levels decide her children’s testosterone levels (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987) and their maturation rates and social structure proclivity. Females (F) with high testosterone (T) give birth to high-testosterone (T) females and low-testosterone (t) males. F T = F T or M t. The reverse is true for low-testosterone females. Low-testosterone females give birth to low-testosterone females and high-testosterone males. F t = F t or M T. This is how societal prototypes are created and maintained and how the complementary opposite foundation of this thesis emerges.

This may be feeling rather dense. Bear with me. I will define some terms.

“Neoteny” refers to the prolonging of infant features over many generations so that eventually they appear in the adults of the descendants. For example, chimpanzee-like progenitor features, such as having a large head relative to body size, small chin, large eyes, upward stature, curiosity and affection, are all characteristics that over time manifest in the physiology and psychology of adults. Acceleration reverses the evolutionary trajectory, whereby processes featured by ancestor adults condense or withdraw over time and appear earlier in development in the characteristics of children as well as in the infants of future descendants.

Heterochronic dynamics (Gould, 1977) of evolution (i.e., neoteny and acceleration) are embedded in social structure and lead to the very specific mating of neotenous males with accelerated females in matrifocal social structures and accelerated males marrying neotenous females in patrifocal social structures. There is a direct connection between womb conditions, maturation rate directions (neoteny and acceleration) and social structure.

The net result is that not only are males and females mating with their hormonal complementary opposites, but also that societies are evolving with males and females trending evolutionarily in opposite directions by continuing selection for opposite proclivities in opposite sexes. It is conceivable that in human beings there exists a dynamic that demands eventual flipping of social structures, perhaps over periods as long as hundreds of thousands of years or as short as 6,000 years (Gimbutas, 1991). This provides an opportunity for the sexes to realign. It is also possible that this “flipping” is constantly occurring within different lineages in a society, which are taking turns performing the role of the hormonal outliers, or eight prototype humans.

Whereas the influence of a mother’s testosterone levels on her progeny has been established (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), this model hypothesizes that the mother’s estrogen levels influence her children via an identical dynamic, which encourages and reinforces the sexually selected focus on partner choice and discrimination, as well as caring and care giving. In this case, the estrogen levels within a woman’s womb determine her children’s estrogen levels, their tendencies toward evaluation of nuance and their compulsion to care. A female (F) with high estrogen (E) gives birth to high-estrogen females and low-estrogen (e) males. F E = F E or M e. The reverse is true for low-estrogen females. F e = F e or M E. This is how estrogen-related societal prototypes are created and maintained. This dynamic also contributes to the complementary opposite foundation of this thesis.

Whether a male or female has high or low estrogen levels does not contribute to maturation rates. This makes it possible to have high or low-estrogen males and females in any social structure. Maturation rates inform heterochronic tendencies and social structure proclivities. Nevertheless, estrogen confers discrimination, an attention to detail that can exaggerate the proclivity of a social structure. In addition, estrogen focuses on the features of a child, attracting those with high estrogen toward individuals who exhibit childlike features. Assign high estrogen to a female with high testosterone and you achieve Classic Matrifocal social structure with commanding females prone to choosing cooperative males with neotenous, or child-like, characteristics. Assign high estrogen to a male and you get either a Scandinavian Contemporary Matrifocal paradigm (Eisler, 2007) with both sexes exhibiting neoteny in a matrifocal context, or you get an Asian Conventional Patrifocal paradigm with males who are focused on mating with females displaying highly neotenous features. When pairing high estrogen with high testosterone, you get an exaggerated intensity of sexual selection, not unlike Fisher’s runaway sexual selection (Fisher, 1930), which results in a powerful focus on neoteny. F TE = Matrifocal selection for neotenous males. M TE = Patrifocal selection for neotenous females.

The particular way that testosterone and estrogen align with individuals within a society compels both social structure and particular physical features of individuals. These two hormones, which influence heterochronic trajectories, also influence personality features, disease and condition proclivities, societal characteristics and even such societal mysteries as female infanticide.

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Another way to view this is by noting that at the extremes, a society displays the highest and lowest hormonal thresholds. These thresholds exist in those with bodies and minds most impacted by the battle between somatic function and behaviors, which are both required for survival. Those at the hormonal extremes are at the front lines of what a body can easily survive. When the environment changes, the extremes are put under more intense distress as the societal balanced polymorphism (the established balance of social structures within a society) is pushed in a specific direction. The majority of society, which exists in the center of this spectrum and which also has a heterozygote advantage (Annett, 2002), are compelled to drift left or right, matrifocal or patrifocal, over the course of several generations. Those at the margins are under the most intense duress.

Even in a society characterized by one of the four foundation social structures, one or more of the other social structures are integrally involved. Assimilated within a society are representative individuals, couples and subcultures, who act as social structure opposites to the established paradigm. In this way, these couples and subcultures also contribute to the balanced polymorphism. Though we in the West have been living in patrifocal social structures, matrifocal elements are integrated within the larger society and occupy the “left” end of the spectrum. American society displays a combination of all four social structures. Together, all four of these form a balance that is changing, particularly now.

There are a number of repercussions, or implications, of this basic model, and details are explored below. The etiologies for a number of physical and mental diseases and conditions are suggested by understanding the eight human prototypes as hormonal outliers that exist on a continuum within social structures and are held in balance so that they create a heterozygote advantage. Those whose hormonal constellations exist at the center are not burdened by hormonal extremes. The engine behind human evolution can be examined in detail so that one may offer a number of predictions. This work will concentrate on conditions characterized by maturational delay and acceleration, and it will focus particularly on autism. The reader will be able to infer by this example how the principles in this Theory of Waves can be applied to a number of diseases and conditions.

Neuroscientists will recognize at the core of this thesis a variation of the Geschwind and Galaburda (1987) hypothesis that connects hormones, handedness, lateralization and debilitations. Evolutionary developmental biologists familiar with nineteenth century principles of heterochrony (the study of the effects of changing maturation and development rates and timing) will find heterochronic processes (Gould, 1977) manifesting in neuropsychological studies of the endocrine system (specifically, testosterone and estrogen). These evolutionary biologists will also recognize how sexual hormones influence maturation rates and timing (Hall, Person & Muller, 2004). Anthropologists will be able to observe the impact of social structure—and the forms of sexual selection that drive social structure (such as female sexual selection and female infanticide)—on how societies transform and our species evolves. Studies of human social structures are integrally tied to both the evolutionary biological principle of heterochrony and neuropsychological processes driven by testosterone and estrogen.

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For example, I’m hypothesizing that in highly patrifocal hierarchical Asian societies, originally organized in ways that demanded large-scale cooperation in order to manage irrigation works spanning for hundreds of miles, males need to be high in testosterone relative to females, while simultaneously being low testosterone relative to other males. This would be necessary in order to better facilitate cooperation within a highly combative hierarchical and patrifocal society requiring male/male collaboration. In this hypothesis, I shift down both estrogen and testosterone levels to accommodate lower testosterone levels for males in a patrifocal society with cooperative undertones. A relatively high-estrogen Asian male is suggested by the highly aesthetic and visually discriminating Asian culture. Relatively low female estrogen level is implied by ubiquitous female infanticide. To fit this model, Asian females would have to exhibit the lowest recorded female estrogen levels. This would mean the normally low Conventional Patrifocal female estrogen would have to be shifted lower in order to accommodate Asian male patrifocal cooperation. And, indeed, studies support anomalously low female Asian estrogen levels (Diamond, 1986).

Female infanticide may be integrated into an understanding of patrifocal social structure—particularly the Conventional Patrifocal social structure of hierarchical Asian social structures, which exhibit long-term stability. When the number of females in the procreation pool is reduced, far fewer males are able to have children. A heavy emphasis is placed on the ideal male, the non-ideal males procreating far less. The result is a continuing selection of highly patrifocal traits in the male population. Because of this, left spectrum and older genotype features that accompany matrifocal social structure do not easily emerge. This would include left-handedness, an attraction to innovation and spontaneous creativity. Instead, status, hierarchy and tradition would be highly valued, as is the case with traditional Asian culture. Female infanticide is a powerful sexual selection tool providing long-term stability to Conventional Patrifocal societies. Very low incidence of autism would also be expected, as I will explain shortly.

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With individuals congregating around the eight hormonal paradigms, we’d expect that many diseases, disorders and conditions would be assigned to those located at the extremes, or outlying positions of the balanced polymorphism. For example, Asian females with very low estrogen should have low rates of breast cancer, while matrifocal societies with high estrogen should exhibit high rates of breast cancer. One would expect the same pattern with prostate cancer. We’d expect to see relatively few cases of prostate cancer in Asian patrifocal societies but high rates of prostate cancer in patrifocal societies that exhibit little cooperation. In Contemporary Matrifocal Scandinavia, one would expect very low rates of prostate cancer, yet relatively high rates of male breast cancer. Social structures compel hormonal tendencies, suggesting disease and condition etiology.

For conditions like autism, Asperger’s, stuttering and phonetic dyslexia, we’d expect to see the four matrifocal categories trending toward these conditions, with a possible emphasis on M te and F TE if Classic Matrifocal is how we primarily evolved (see below). Autism, Asperger’s, stuttering and phonetic dyslexia are often accompanied by male maturational delay, which is a marker of matrifocal societies. Matrifocal societies feature low-testosterone males and high-testosterone females.

There is the possibility that certain mental conditions will trend toward these same hormonal extremes. I would estimate that borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, based upon their association with families exhibiting left-handers and maturational delay, will fit the same matrifocal profiles, again with a likely Classic Matrifocal emphasis.

Diseases and conditions may have multiple etiologies depending on the particular symptoms they are associated with. For example, Marian Annett and colleagues noted two types of dyslexia. She observed phonetic dyslexia trending toward the extreme left end of the balanced polymorphism and visual dyslexia trending toward the extreme right (Annett, Eglinton & Smythe, 1996).

Schizophrenia may display two radically different etiologies, which would appear in both patrifocal and matrifocal cultures. These two different etiologies would be based upon the hypothesis that hemispheric differentiation and corpus callosum size vary according to two extremes (Coger & Serafetinides, 1990). One etiology is reinforced by facility with language (Crow, 1995; Crow, Done & Sacker, 1996) and is accompanied by a surge in patrifocal social structures, while the other displays a familial and social structure identical to the familial and social structure of autism, characterized by matrifocal origins.

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I am hypothesizing a five-step evolutionary continuum that begins with natural selection but then moves to sexual selection. In this continuum, animals focus on particular patterns when they choose a mate. Step three begins with crossing a bridge over to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances (Miller, 2000). The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is thus compelled to embrace in its productions countless nuances of the new. In the fifth stage, awareness of the creation process itself becomes a target experience.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art and culture (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Integrated into the sequence established above is the longer-term dynamic of humans, who evolved from random-handed non-speech users (Annett, 2002) with two equally large cerebral hemispheres and a wide corpus callosum (Witelson, 1991).

I hypothesize that step 3 of this sequence is compelled by long-term male maturational delay and reinforced by sexual selection in a matrifocal context, where child-like features attract more focus (Gould, 1977). Classic Matrifocal was likely our social structure at this stage (Knight, 1991). Stage 4 suggests a shift toward patrifocal social structure as well as a decrease in brain size (Wiercinski, 1979), culminating in the Warrior Patrifocal. This sequence suggests that Classic Matrifocal and Warrior Matrifocal preceded Contemporary Matrifocal as well as Conventional Patrifocal, with the possible emergence of Contemporary and Conventional in the last 5,000 years.

Deep societal change can occur quickly when there is a change in hormonal constellations. Sudden shifts can occur from matrifocal to patrifocal, or patrifocal to matrifocal. For example, if a matrifocal society is highly stressed over time by patrifocal incursions, the ideal male mate may shift from one displaying cooperative tendencies to a male who is quick to fight. Formerly highly valued aesthetic-oriented males may then find themselves outside the pool of highly valued potential mates. In mere generations, physiological, hormonal and neuropsychological transformations can occur.

Migrating populations exposed to changes in sunlight (Geschwind and Galburda, 1987) show radical fluctuations in social structure, which impacts evolution over time. Sunlight impacts the pineal gland, which directly influences the testosterone levels within the individuals of a population (Geschwind and Galburda, 1987). A variety of specific diseases and conditions acquired by the eight prototype hormonal outliers will emerge among these migrating peoples, including autism. In addition, changing diet can exaggerate hormonal changes.

A radical change in diet, such as an increase in high quality fats and nutrients, could raise a female’s estrogen and testosterone levels and lower a male’s testosterone levels (Ahluwalia, Jackson, Jones, Williams, Mamidanna & Rajguru, 1981). These changes in hormonal levels would compel a shift in social structure toward the direction of female choice. Females would then seek mates that were cooperators rather than warriors. Sudden dietary changes that drastically reduce access to high fat foods could compel a hormonal shift toward a patrifocal social structure. These hormonal shifts would be further accentuated if combative situations emerged. This is the variation of the Kuzawa (2007) thesis, which proposes that uterine environments can influence adult physiology. My Theory of Waves thesis suggests that the parent’s hormonal shifts can adjust a progeny’s hormonal constellations and shift a society’s hormonal spectrum in a particular direction, depending on environmental pressures. Such hormonal shifts thus result in modifications of social structure.

Eight environmental variables influence testosterone, including light (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), diet (Schmidt, Wijga, Von Zur Muhlen, Brabant & Wagner, 1997), body fat (Ross, Bernstein, Judd, Hanisch, Pike & Henderson, 1986; Glass, Swerdloff, Bray, Dahms & Atkinson, 1977), alcohol and drugs (Castilla-Garcia, Santolaria-Fernandez, Gonzalez-Reimers, Bastita-Lopez, Gonzalez-Garcia, Jorge-Hernandez & Hernandez-Nieto, 1987; Ahluwalia, Clark, Westney, Smith, James, & Rajguru, 1992), tobacco (MacMahon, Trichopoulos, Cole & Brown, 1982; Barrett-Connor & Khaw, 1987), touch, physical activity (MacConnie, Barkan, Lampman, Schork, & Beitins, 1986; Morville, Pesquies, Guezennec, Serrurier & Guignard, 1979) and stress (James, 1986). Estrogen has been far less studied, but diet has been repeatedly shown to dramatically influence estrogen levels (Ahluwalia, et al., 1981).

We can view evolution as both a dynamic and static process that is driven by social structure, environmental influences, maturation rate modifications and hormonal changes. The evolutionary developmental biological view, or the heterochronic perspective, offers a dynamic frame. Annett’s (2002) modern UK society is characterized by a balanced polymorphism, which exhibits an evenly balanced static spectrum view of left and right-handed individuals. On the far left side of this spectrum exist the extreme left-handed, as well as the random-handed, and on the far right side of this spectrum exist the extreme right-handed. Most people in a society exist somewhere in the middle. This spectrum of individuals is aligned along a gradated curve and offers a static snapshot of our society in the process of transition. The older anomalously dominant (both cerebral hemispheres close to the same size) matrifocal prototype is stationed at the left side and balances those with cerebral asymmetry designed for speech facility, the patrifocal prototype, on the right. Annett’s Right Shift Theory (Annett, 1985) argues that cerebral asymmetry with language proclivity offers a heterozygote advantage that allows the moderate right-handed to occupy the center of society. This Theory of Waves integrates social structure, maturation rates and a long-term evolutionary arc into Annett’s static snapshot in time.

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Four major barriers prevent the easy appraisal of the natural hormonal levels that characterize the eight human prototypes.

Assays that fail to measure the variations of handedness with the degree of sensitivity established by Annett’s peg tests obstruct new insight and obscure potentially valuable observation. Annett’s work concluded that humans evolved as a random-handed species, which transitioned to right-handed when brains became lateralized for speech. Her peg tests measure degrees of right and random-handedness and are integral for establishing a locus related to social structure, disease/condition proclivity and maturation rate propensity. It is essential that different studies, particularly studies across cultures, compare apples to apples and use Annett’s protocols when measuring handedness.

It would be useful if Annett’s techniques were required to measure handedness around the world, quickly. Dietary changes within patrifocal societies may be skewing results dramatically. Aboriginal societies with a matrifocal foundation have almost completely disappeared. There are very few tools available to measure variations in societal balanced polymorphisms. Annett’s peg tests seem to measure the effects of testosterone and some indirect effects of estrogen fairly well.

The eight environmental variables noted above profoundly impact the hormone levels of males and females in a variety of contexts. To effectively measure the natural hormonal thresholds in ontogeny at any point, one must have an understanding of how that person’s hormonal levels are being influenced and altered by external variables. Adult hormone levels are dramatically impacted by a variety of factors. Existing studies show wild variation in results because these studies ignore influential variables. One study that measured testosterone levels neglected to take into consideration the time of day that levels were tested. In addition, the effects of stress cannot be underestimated. For example, measuring the testosterone levels of an autistic child in an institutional setting does little to provide an idea of that child’s base hormonal threshold, particularly if that child is on a standard institutional diet. Diet has been shown to have an effect on the symptoms of autism (Hjiej, Doyen, Couprie, Kaye & Contejean, 2008).

Some diseases and conditions appear at both ends of the left/right spectrum and occupy multiple poles of both matrifocal and patrifocal social structure. Annett approached dyslexia etiologies from a new perspective and established a protocol, which discovered that handedness congregated at both the extreme left and right ends of the spectrum. Diseases and conditions with more than one etiology often confound studies and frustrate attempts to discover patterns in social structure, handedness, hormonal constellations and ethnicity. It may seem that a disease such as schizophrenia, or a condition such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, does not always associate with a specific social structure or prototype predilection when more than one etiology is potentially in play.

Lastly, the season in which an individual is born affects the maturational delay and acceleration of that individual. Season of birth can thus help polarize a society’s social structure to either end of the spectrum. The effects of pineal-influenced testosterone levels may not merely be influencing those who live in migrating populations but also those who live in relative climatic extremes. When individuals within a society congregate at the hormonal extremes, vacating the balanced polymorphistic middle where those with the heterozygote advantage reside, it becomes nearly impossible to form conclusions about a society normally based on a seamless arc, or balance. In other words, climate and migration patterns influence the variables we’ve been noting.

These four conditions that inhibit high quality information regarding hormone levels—inconsistent handedness studies, untracked environmental variables, multiple pole disease/condition etiologies and season of birth effects—are primary reasons that the Geschwind/Galaburda hypothesis drew mixed support.

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Norman Geschwind and his colleagues suggested that a number of diseases and conditions tend to align with specific handedness and cerebral lateralization tendencies. Geschwind believed that the random-handed (often left-handers) and the anomalously dominant, both of whom exhibit cerebral hemispheres near the same size, were evolutionary derivations. I agree with Annett (2002) that the random-handed and anomalously dominant are our evolutionary forebears, but I’ve added that these ancestral genotypes are matrifocal in origin.

Approaching Geschwind and Galaburda’s (1987) thesis with a heterochronic/social structure perspective gives one the ability to hypothesize the etiologies of a host of diseases and conditions as well as suggest a relationship between handedness, hormonal associations, social structure, lateralization, ethnicity and environmental variables.

These are some of the diseases and conditions noted in the literature (mostly from Geschwind and Galaburda, 1987) that offer correlations with some of the variables addressed in this model: alcoholism, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, asthma, ataxia telangiectasia, atopic syndrome, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, benign intracranial hypertension, bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, breast cancer, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), cluster headaches, celiac disease, conduct disorder, congenital heart disease, dementia, depression, diabetes, Down’s syndrome, dyslexia, dystrophia myotonica, endometriosis, epilepsy, gastrointestinal issues, harelip, heart disease, Huntington’s disease, immune disorders, hyperkinetic syndrome, Kartagener syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome, Klippel-Feil syndrome, lupus erythematosus, migraine headaches, mital valve prolapse, narcissistic personality disorder, obesity, obsessive compulsive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, osteoporosis, ovarian cysts, Parkinson’s disease, phobias, pilonidal sinus, polycystic ovary syndrome, prostate cancer, schizophrenia, scoliosis, spina bifida, stuttering, temporal lobe epilepsy, thyroid disorders, torticollis, Tourette’s syndrome, Turner syndrome and twinning. Cross reference these variables with handedness, social structure, maturation rates, ethnicity, family of origin, cerebral dominance and hormonal levels. All of these conditions offer opportunities to observe the relationships of these conditions and diseases to the eight human prototypes.

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The predictions below focus specifically on issues of relative maturation rates with an emphasis on autism and related conditions.

1) Autistic males, from families of left-handers, will have lower testosterone than the norm, and autistic females will have higher testosterone. The mothers will have high testosterone (Baron-Cohen, Lutchmaya & Knickmeyer, 2004) and quite possibly high estrogen. If we evolved primarily from high F TE, M te, then autistic males will have low estrogen, and autistic females will have high estrogen. (In any study of autism, those with familial male maturation delay tendencies, or families of left-handers, need to be evaluated separately from those possibly traumatized by an environmental effect.)

2) Larger penis and testicle size will be associated with autistic, ambidextrous males and the familial left-handed. Left-handed males and autistics will produce more sperm. (This is based on the large testicle matrifocal bonobo sexual egalitarian paradigm vs. the small testicles patrifocal gorilla harem paradigm.) If larger testicles and increased sperm production are associated with low-testosterone, promiscuous social-structure males, then the two variables will be related in the sense that higher-testosterone males will have smaller testicles or lower sperm production.

3) Autistic males will exhibit more neotenous characteristics, while autistic females should show less neoteny than their contemporaries.

4) The children of parents of widely different ethnicities, separated by tens of thousands of years from common ancestry, will reveal characteristics of their last common progenitor and increased incidence of autism and left-handedness. (Maturational delay progenitor feature emergences will be far more common in matrifocal social structure families.)

5) Neoteny has dental correlations, with smaller teeth being characteristic of the neotenous smaller jaw. Learning that teeth have grown smaller over millions of years, researchers will find that they have actually grown larger in males over the last few tens of thousands of years as patrifocal social structure has taken hold. Ontologically, the teeth of males from older mothers should be smaller than the teeth of males of first-born, young mothers. The reverse should be true for females. In a large family, the male’s teeth will erupt later and later, the female’s earlier and earlier.

6) Because a mother’s testosterone level rises with her age and because she has children across the whole arc of her reproductive years, we might observe a display of personality and physiological features in her children that would roughly reproduce human evolution over a span of eons. An older mother should more frequently have male children with maturational delay, female children with accelerated maturation and increased prevalence of autism in both sexes. Autistic children born to young mothers will more likely come with less frequency from families of left-handers, trauma being a likely cause.

7) Obese mothers (overweight women exhibit increased testosterone and estrogen levels), particularly those who are older, should show high incidence of autism in their children, particularly in migrating populations moving from equatorial regions to northern climates. Equatorial peoples transplanted to northern climates will display higher percentages of maturational-delayed male children, and maturational-accelerated females, including autistics, with the births congregating in certain seasons.

8) If the low-testosterone males and high-testosterone females are late born, and high-testosterone males and low-testosterone females are the oldest children in a family or the first born, then first-borns will mate with first-borns and late-borns will mate with late-borns a higher percentage of the time than would occur by chance.

9) Hypothesizing that social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals were to emerge, it would be among the youngest sons and daughters. One would also expect a higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children (reflecting matrifocal values).

10) Conditions that display maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will appear more often in males with longer limbs and smaller teeth than in others in their family of origin. This would suggest that the youngest males would also be the tallest. (Longer limbs and smaller teeth are neotenous features.)

11) Eating healthfully (the caveman diet) brings puberty later and provides a longer time for the brain to grow. Putting autistic children on such a late-puberty-enhancing diet may enhance their ability to connect. When puberty or progenesis in humans is dropped to a younger age by several years, it has neurological and cognitive repercussions. In addition to a possible increase in depression and bi-polar disorder, there is the potential for a general curtailment of the final stages of cognitive development.

12) Societal periods of innovation will be preceded by periods of romance, revealing changes in the selection criteria by which females pick their mates or by a widening of the selection criteria for the ideal male. Shifts toward increases in the variety of acceptable features in the procreation population will result in increases in cultural and technical variation. For example, if female infanticide is a tool used for patrifocal cultural stability, decreases in female infanticide over time within a culture will correlate with increases in societal and economic variation. These changes will result in matrifocal societal surges, increases in left-handedness and increases in autism.

13) If rhythm and dance were the aesthetics driving human evolution through rituals of sexual selection, then the sound and feeling of nonstop rhythm may be necessary to encourage the development of an autistic child. Rhythmic environmental triggers may be essential to the healthy growth of maturational-delayed children. By implication, comparing congenitally deaf left and right-handers may reveal an unusually high number of autistics in the left-handed group.

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I am hypothesizing that evolution is driven by this hormonal ebbing and flowing, or waxing and waning. Mother’s testosterone levels > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory. Mother’s estrogen levels > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory. These two currents are inextricably intertwined, yet they follow established patterns, not unlike the double helix. Changes in hormone levels, influenced by the environment, impact ontogeny while we are in the womb, when we are children and after we’ve become grown-ups.

I call this the Theory of Waves to suggest the surge of features that travel ontogenetically back and forth from conception to adulthood and adulthood to conception over generations, with the direction of features often opposite between the sexes. Darwin proposed three different theories of evolution. This model in some ways integrates his three models (natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, or pangenesis) and seeks to show patterns common to evolutionary biology (heterochronic theory), anthropology (social structure) and neuropsychology (sexual hormone endocrinology and Annett’s balanced polymorphism), all three of which describe ways that human beings may have evolved and may still be evolving.

Clearly, an adjustment (Matsuda, 1987) of Watson and Crick’s (1953) Central Dogma is occurring in several places in this thesis. Let me urge the reader to approach this work playfully while still rummaging for something useful in these conjectures. Most of all, perhaps, this thesis is suggesting that neoteny is central to being human. I believe that by playing with evolution we may discover who we are.

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…

The introduction to this piece was modified on 3/8/09

For more details regarding this theory, visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=28

For more details regarding this theory and autism, visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=29

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 are appearing on this website without the benefit of time to let them steep or a withdrawal to explore the background literature that includes supporting and opposing positions.

So, in addition to sharing the original thesis, I’m experiencing new insights leading off into unexplored territory. At the same time, I’m often describing my personal experience while taking this journey.

Through the spring into the summer it became clearer how the dynamics of individual ontogeny inform the growth and transformation of societies. First, it became evident that the features of aboriginal societies, the “lower” classes and the street arts were manifesting themselves in society today in ways that were directly related to the dynamics of neoteny and the manifestation of ancestor-infant features in the adults of their descendants, or the humans of today. Society was recapitulating ontogeny.

Still, this is different from the Haeckelian (or even Hegelian) hypothesis of a hundred years ago. It wasn’t that a succession of societal stages reflected a succession of human stages or vice versa. One could observe a process by which specific features of earlier social ontogeny were manifesting later in contemporary times, driven by changes in social structure. With a shift to patrifocal social structure beginning maybe 50,000 to 25,000 years ago, gaining momentum 6,000 years ago, society moved toward hierarchical structures reflecting directly the new social structure, with its neurological/hormonal constellation of high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Now, with the shift back to an older matrifocal social structure and the neurological/hormonal constellation of low testosterone males and high testosterone females, that hierarchy is collapsing.

There was dynamism to social evolution unobserved by the inventors of recapitulation, a dynamism driven by the same process that drove human ontogenetic growth–relative levels of testosterone and social structure proclivity. Matrifocal features of aboriginal society emerging in the everyday were creating predictable results, including an increase of autism. Our brief supernova of consumer society is directly related to a resurgence of female choice. The exponential growth of the Internet is intimately connected with the return of matrifocal values of transparency, diversity and horizontal communication.

Understanding human evolution and how the individual informs that evolution, we understand the evolution of society.

With an understanding of how society transforms having become clearer to me over the last few months, I’ve shared the insights as they have emerged. These insights perhaps make far less sense to me now than they will in the future after I’ve had time to connect the insights to the work of other authors, find useful metaphors and relax into the concepts. Nevertheless, this blog has become an opportunity to share connections as they are made and to describe my experience as the connections form.

An insight that I shared about a month ago is continuing to percolate without benefit of reading to inform the understanding. I ordered two books yesterday to add to the stack of books I’m reading on other subjects. The books I ordered were on teleology.

Authors over the centuries, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the 20th century, have noted that the trajectory of society seems to reveal overarching patterns best explained by the presence of a creative intelligence. Teleological interpretations of history and society conflict with reductionist biological hypotheses that make clear that no intelligence is required. Needless to say, itemizing the arguments serving both sides can’t be done in this daily blog format. Wikipedia offers a good summary. My point is this. Heterochronic theory, which includes neoteny when applied to societal evolution, creates overarching patterns that look a whole lot like the intervention of a creative intelligence. Large-scale patterns with direction are in evidence, just as in human evolution neoteny has produced a clear physiological/neurological trajectory over several million years. What we are observing is not some evident but unfathomable overarching pattern best explained by the intervention of a deity. What we are observing is evidence of a noted and accepted biological process, heterochrony, operating on the scale of societal evolution.

Teleology follows the same pathways as ontogeny.

Early stages of society can prolong or reveal themselves in later societal states just as infant states of earlier species of our primate lineage manifest in the features of contemporary adults. The reverse is also true. Society is influenced by the ontogenetic equivalent of condensation or the addition of features to an adult stage, features slowly embraced by younger and younger stages over time, recapitulation. Integral to understanding this dynamic is noting the impact of testosterone on the formation of individuals, social structure and societies. How this process unfolds can be observed by following the influence of testosterone on these multiple scales. The evidence of this process on a societal level is what we have called teleology.

Writing this entry, I wrestle with the patterns and the scales, letting one scale inform understandings in the next. The music of our unfoldings is embedded at all levels. Where we don’t see the connections, we infer deity intervention. Not necessary. Deity is everywhere at once working through processes which are understandable.

We don’t need god to make the universe understandable.

Experiencing god can be useful to come to that understanding.

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. Culture requires brains, and brains of that immense degree were never necessary in any other animal. The human act that demanded immense brain power was the act of art. This requirement is because in art there are no limits. Competition to exhibit artistic prowess in the form of dance drove the practitioners to behave in more and more beautiful and complex patterns, with the most successful dancers being chosen for sex. The genes of the best dancers got passed on. The better dancers had bigger brains, just as predators had bigger brains, because it takes bigger brains to behave in more physically or orally complex ways. Whereby a predator needs a brain only slightly bigger than its prey, an archaic human needs a bigger brain to perform better than his or her peers, a constantly escalating standard. The result was runaway sexual selection. The race was on.

It has been hypothesized that early humans were selected for an ability to travel long distances, running, to chase down wounded prey. Spuhler in 1979 outlined specific hormonal innovations that support this conjecture. I believe these glandular innovations are explained by dance as the driving force behind these changes. The theories devised since 1979 that hypothesize running as the driving force behind our evolution neglect dance as a theory that retains far more explanatory power. Again, with dance there are no limits. Massive brain growth is not explained by chasing down a predator. If that were the case, wolves would be our cultural superiors and we their pets.

Sexual selection based on an aesthetic increased the speed of evolution exponentially because the demonstrator of the art was practicing an intangible with no demonstrable ceiling in the exercising of the skill, a skill requiring increased brain mass. This sexual selection, specifically, is what never had occurred before in evolution. Peacock feathers evidence a runaway aesthetic, but no increased brain power was required. The verbal facility and plumage of parrots suggest that they may have experienced a similar selective dynamic, and indeed parrots, like humans, have two unusually large cerebral hemispheres with different-sized lobes. But parrots don’t exhibit complex dance. Humans sing and dance.

Still, we need to address an additional variable that explains why this type of selection occurred with humans and not another species earlier in time. Humans are not the first animal to dance or sing to achieve sex. Why didn’t this exponential brain growth occur in another animal over the course of the last billion or so years? Because the specific way that the human brain grew so large so quickly was by slowing down maturation rates, prolonging the time it took to reach adulthood. Adults with bigger brains achieved this result by spending more time in the childhood states where brain growth was most intense. When the best dancers and singers were picked for procreation, the ones picked were the humans most maturational delayed. It is a feature of only certain groups of species that they can easily increase or decrease their rates of maturation. Wolves and foxes, for example, exhibit a high degree of manipulation in this regard, and the large variation in dog appearances is directly related to this ability. Humans sexually selected to perform dance and song were coincidentally selected to mature slower. Slower maturers grow bigger brains because they spend more time at those early childhood states where brains are growing. The late, great Stephen J. Gould discussed this dynamic in detail over his 30-year career and used the word “neoteny,” earlier popularized by Bolk, to summarize its effects.

“To support the argument that we evolved by retaining juvenile features of our ancestors, Bolk provided lists of similarities between adult humans and juvenile apes: ‘Our essential somatic properties, i.e. Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man.’” (1926a, p. 468).

In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:

1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy (a phenomenon of complex cause related both to facial reduction and to the retention of juvenile flexure, reflected, for example, in the failure of the sphenoethmoidal angle to open out during ontogeny).
2. Reduction or lack of body hair.
3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair [Bolk argues that black peoples are born with relatively light skin, while ancestral primates are as dark at birth as ever].
4. The form of the external ear.
5. The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eyefold.
6. The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates).
7. High relative brain weight.
8. Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age.
9. The labia majora of women.
10. The structure of the hand and foot.
11. The form of the pelvis.
12. The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women.
13. Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures.

To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montague (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958) and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montague’s order (pp. 326-327) with some deletions and additions:

14. Absence of brow ridges.
15. Absence of cranial crests.
16. Thinness of skull bones.
17. Position of orbits under cranial cavity.
18. Brachycephaly.
19. Small teeth.
20. Late eruption of teeth.
21. No rotation of the big toe.
22. Prolonged period of infantile dependency.
23. Prolonged period of growth.
24. Long life span.
25. Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).

Neoteny offers other bonuses besides an easy way to achieve rapid brain growth. These related or contingent features offer an astonishing variety of characteristics that contribute to our behavioral, physical and neurological make-up. These include upright posture, little body hair, small jaw relative to our progenitors, smaller teeth, longer life span and propensity to play and exhibit creativity and sexuality as an adult. The ability of our species to change maturational speeds in combination with art/sex as an accelerator in that process results in the unique species that we are today. But it is in revealing the biological process behind the change in maturation rates–what specifically physiologically causes maturation rates to change in humans–that truly whips away the curtain in this Wizard of Oz story of our unfolding. The biological engine (contrasted with art/sex as the social engine) behind maturational delay and acceleration is changing levels of testosterone.

Testosterone regulates maturation speed. It occurs on both a general and a specific scale. The story deepens.

General maturation speed is established at six weeks before birth and is based on the level of testosterone in the mother’s blood. Higher or lower levels influence males and females in the opposite direction. A mother with high testosterone will set her son’s maturation timer on slow, her daughter’s on fast. A mother with low testosterone levels will birth a son with fast maturation rates and a daughter moving at a slow pace. Environmental factors can have extremely powerful effects on mothers’ testosterone levels, radically amending maturation speeds. Autism and other disorders characterized by maturational delay or acceleration can and do result.

So testosterone can regulate speed through the mother setting the general speed of maturation. Testosterone can also regulate speed on a micro level, within a lifetime, by being increased or decreased within an individual. On obvious example is the eunuch. If testicles are removed before puberty, that individual will live several years longer than a normal male, in fact, as long as a female, because testosterone levels are dramatically reduced. In the West, this practice was used into the 20th century in order to create a permanent, ringing singing voice; in the East, it was used to provide a guard for the emperor’s females. The eunuch’s biological processes have been slowed down. Stress will increase testosterone levels and shorten life. Exercise will decrease testosterone levels and prolong life. As our testosterone levels change, so will the speed of our metabolism, which is connected to how slow or how fast we mature.

In humans, as we evolved from the primate progenitor over millions of years up and through homo erectus, sexual selection eventually utilized our ability to adjust maturation rates to increase brain size by slowing down our rates of maturation (by adjusting testosterone levels) in order to become better dancers and sound-makers to achieve more sex. It is a combination of these two processes–tightly focused sexual selection revolving around an aesthetic (also called runaway sexual selection) and neoteny (the ability of a species to unfold over time, prolonging its infant states into adulthood by slowing down maturation rates)–that propels humans through its unique trajectory.

The slow acceleration of the art/sex sexual selection feedback loop can be observed to become a high pitched fever and the center of society when the fossil record reveals males and females coming closer and closer in size. The specific change in dynamics toward the art/sex society was a shift away from the formerly necessary bonus of a relative larger male size and strength for the early hominid males to aggressively compete with one another. How do we know that this was the case? Fossil remains, though suggestive at best, reveal a high degree of sexual dimorphism between the emerging hominid male and female for at least 2 million or so years after diverging from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Australopithecus afarensis were highly dimorphic, with males almost twice the size of females. Homo erectus did not evidence this extreme difference. The similarity in size is due to the growth in the size of the female. Among living primate societies, increased sexual dimorphism is exhibited when there is violent intramale competition or frequent harsh contact with forces in the environment. These societies are usually patrifocal. It is unlikely that males and females would be mutually choosing each other as mates according to a physical aesthetic of dance and sound in a patrifocal society. A highly dimorphic social structure implies males physically threatening each other for procreation rights. The art/sex competition would only be a powerful dynamic in a promiscuous social structure where males cooperate to compete via the aesthetic as opposed to physical strength. Strength alone does not require brains. Survival of the fittest did not make us who we are.

And it is likely that the degree of focus in the matrifocal vs. patrifocal directions varied from band to band, region to region. The less hierarchical, dominant competition between males, the less necessary that males be large and strong and thus the less sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. And a single band or evolutionary pool may have evolved back and forth between the two poles over time. Eventually a line was crossed, probably more than once. Evidence that this crossing occurred is when the fossils show that males and females became far less sexually dimorphic–more similar in size. Matrifocal society had taken hold.

There are a number of repercussions and implications–not just in body size. When the first proto human bands transitioned into matrifocal tribes, we can assume that the environment was relatively benign or unthreatening because there was less need for the advantages conferred by sexual dimorphism. The life of the aesthetic could be concentrated on with less distraction. Bonobo chimpanzees exhibit societal relationships similar to what we’re discussing. The bonobo often pass band leadership through a dominant female’s son. Strong females are deferred to. Sex is a constant form of recreation and communication. There is little violent competition among males. Both males and females initiate sex. At the other great ape extreme are gorillas, where a single male dominates the band through the control of sex through a harem of females. Other males have sex opportunities, but at the leader’s discretion. In between these two extremes is the chimpanzee. Males compete for procreation opportunities by working their way up to alpha position, but all males can have sex with any willing female in estrus. Alpha males and their allies just get more access and at the times females are ovulating. Only males initiate sex. With chimpanzees and gorillas, food sharing is not associated with sexual behavior, whereas it is with bonobo. Predators have little effect on social structure in these three cases. Yet gorillas are highly sexually dimorphic because the most physically imposing males can more easily control sexual opportunities–intramale competition. Among bonobo where frequency of sex and amount of sperm produced determines paternity percentages, the males and females are closer in size. And, not incidentally, bonobo have a far larger penis and testicles than the gorillas, because their social structure demands these attributes. Bonobos exhibit maturational delay compared to both other chimps and gorillas and have larger relative brain size. Bonobos exhibit sexual swellings for 75% of their cycles as opposed to chimpanzee females showing these changes 50% of the time. It has been suggested that bonobo adult sexual behavior is not unlike the chimpanzee adolescent, an example of maturational delay, just as the bonobo skull is similar to the chimpanzee adolescent skull. Social structure determines relative size of the males and females to each other, relative size of male sexual organs and relative brain size. In the evolving human, with social structure having veered in the direction of a bonobo-like matrifocal highly sexed society, brain size (and likely penis and testicle size, though the fossil record is mum on this subject) was increasing at stunning rates with an extreme slowdown of maturation.

With the decrease in maturation rates and the continued revealing of more and more infant and child features into the adult phase of a species, there is an increase in both play and sexuality. Play and sex are closely related, with both evidencing themselves more frequently in the adult. In the course of just 20 years, experiments with foxes selected solely for signs of exhibiting tame behavior associated with maturational delay showed the females going into heat far more of the time. There is increased incidence of domesticity and playfulness when the same selective principle is applied to wolves as they morph into the dog. Again, note in the bonobo, compared to its close relatives the gorilla and chimpanzee, that evolution in a neotenous direction has resulted in dramatically increased sexuality. The female bonobo spends substantially more time in estrus than the female chimpanzee or gorilla.

There is another point concerning this social structure that best evidences the art/sex neoteny/brain size increase in hominid evolutionary trajectory. Male cooperative behavior relative to male competitive behavior is a feature of bonobo vs. gorilla social structures–matrifocal vs. patrifocal societies. A species that becomes more neotenous is inclined to become more cooperative. At the same time that art/sex is growing bigger brains and neoteny is reinforced, a host of other features (noted by Gould, Bolk and Montague) that contribute to individual and societal characteristics are also becoming evident. The ability of males to avoid the energy expended to control breeding opportunities by force and instead rely on neoteny to grow bigger brains to dance their way to the bedroom results in males with lower testosterone levels–males relatively comfortable around children. In a society where paternity is totally unknown and all descent is through the mother, low testosterone males are more likely to engender an environment where the infants and children are in less danger from male conflicts and infanticide, where males will kill infants not evidently their own. In addition, this is a society where males are more likely to hunt cooperatively because the high-testosterone, hierarchical posturing for position is far less evident. Many things are implied by this thesis, not the least of which is the reinforcement of cooperative behavior by the males of the species, creating further opportunities for the gathering of food, particularly foods high in fat needed to feed the evolutionarily expanding brain.

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 on aesthetic overdrive also experience selection for big brains. This process was runaway sexual selection in a matrifocal social structure.

The not particularly complementary opposite is patrifocal social structure evolution, which was Freud’s and Darwin’s world. Combative males partner with cooperative females. It has been estimated that this trend may have started as early as our departure from Africa, picked up speed about 25,000 years ago when the fossil record shows brains starting to decrease in size, accelerating 6,500 years ago with the advent of the Indo-Europeans (and brains grew even smaller) and peaking over the last 300 years. In the 20th century, mate choice began shifting back to the female, with a woman choosing a mate according to her personal criteria for what she seeks in a mate.

Developmental models, derived from Freud, have mostly been stripped of their evolutionary origins. The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber integrates Freud’s developmental model with a more contemporary, recapitulationist frame, but a frame that still does not take into consideration the influence of social structure and sexual selection on human evolution. I am proposing that the examination of a runaway matrifocal sexual selection model for human evolution correlating with individual developmental stages reveals personality “disorders” representing stages in our recent (last ~100,000 years) evolution.

In other words, in the way that autism is an evolutionary condition, not a neurological disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorders, obsessive compulsion tendencies, etc., may have far less to do with mental diseases demanding intervention than they may represent evolutionary stages or conditions demanding context re-orientation.

I’m re-orienting psychodynamic theory to accommodate evolutionary theory. Understanding ourselves outside the context of our evolution is a little like conducting psychotherapy without exploring a person’s personal past. Our evolutionary origins are integral to understanding our personal journeys. As we walk a person back through childhood to re-engage the resources left behind, we must also be cognizant of the resources natural to their social structure inclinations. Bridging a client to health involves knowledge of what health looks like for that particular person. A domineering, commanding female may fit all the criteria for matrifocal matriarch. Interpreting her behavior as borderline personality disorder may make less sense than seeking a context where her behavior complements her experience. It might be easier for a narcissistic male to achieve a less self-centered, more compassionate perspective if his experience is contextualized by an understanding of his evolutionary origins and an understanding that, for him, the narcissism is natural, not a defect.

Note that personal trauma compelling the freezing of assets in developmental states also manifests features of the correlated evolutionary stages in the behavior of adults. The thawing of the assets may release attachment to those evolutionary stages. In other words, the manifestations of evolutionary conditions may be contingent upon contemporary influences. That being the case, psychotherapeutic intervention might result in a radical shift equivalent to a 50,000-year jump in evolution–psychotherapy as time machine.

We need diagnostics able to parse out when a person is experiencing mostly an evolutionary condition in a society uncomplimentary to his or her neurology vs. a person suffering from an inability to ontologically progress because of threats in childhood. There are those that suffer both.

The diagnostics might include a complete hormonal work-up. High testosterone females and low testosterone males comprise the matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males partnering with low testosterone females fit the patrifocal paradigm. There are profound brain differences between these two groups that are only now beginning to be understood. Physiologies differ.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparison of dream theme differences between the two social structures, personality “disorders” and conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism. That’s actually what got me started writing this essay. I want to know how people naturally adhere with one of the two social structures when they dream. How do the dreams differ? Dreams might be able to tell us where we are living in the larger arc of our evolution.

To understand Freud is to understand that he believed that understanding our evolution is integral to understanding personality and personality disorder intervention. Shifting from a patrifocal focus to a perspective that embraces both social structure orientations provides a deeper understanding of our origins. From this vantage point, we might discover that many human mental maladies may be less about defect, but about how to discover where we live in time.