I’m still trying to grasp the concept that testosterone and estrogen and their associated hormones are together managing ontological, social and biological evolution by adjusting to changes in the environment by moderating the rate and timing of ontogeny.

We always knew that sex governed our lives.  There is now the possibility that we can understand how exactly this is done.

In both sexes, entering puberty is characterized by a surge in testosterone that, among other things, halts most synaptic growth.  If fat levels are not high enough, puberty is delayed.  Certain levels of estrogen are required for testosterone surges to occur.

Over ten years ago I hypothesized that a mother’s uterine testosterone levels would influence the likelihood of her child exhibiting autism.  I estimated that the rate of maturation would be determined by the amount of testosterone.  A mother with high testosterone would feature maturationally delayed sons and maturationally accelerated daughters, both vulnerable to autism.

This last season I’ve been applying the pattern of how estrogen controls the timing of testosterone surges at puberty to early childhood when testosterone surges prune the right hemispheres of most normal right-handed individuals.  Might estrogen levels in these infants, toddlers and children be determining the timing of these testosterone surges?  What if estrogen levels were so low in boys that testosterone surges did not occur?  The result would be an unpruned right hemisphere, a larger brain with two cerebral lobes that are the same size.  This is a common feature of autism.

If a mother has both high testosterone and high estrogen, what I estimate to be an archetype of one of two forms of matrifocal social structure, then, according to the principles that I’ve been playing with, she would birth a low-testosterone, low-estrogen son; high-testosterone, high-estrogen daughter.

The implication is that we might predict that autism would be relatively common in cases where the rate of maturation and the timing of maturation combine to engender brains, mostly male brains, which are maturing slowly with little variation is hemispheric size.

Regarding female infants and children with high estrogen encouraging pruning still drifting in an autistic direction, click here.  That is a little more complicated.

Right now, I’m wondering if breast milk vs. infant formula might be an influence on this process.  If a mother’s body is able to modify her embryo’s maturation rate and timing based upon the various environmental influences that impact testosterone and estrogen levels, then does a mother’s milk also adjust to environmental influences in ways that her child’s ontogenetic timing is modified?

Does what a new mother eats, for instance, a high-fat diet, influence her breast milk to increase the estrogen levels in her sons and daughters?  Could a high-fat diet increase the chance of an autistic child?

High-fat diets increase testosterone and estrogen levels.

How much influence does what we eat have upon our children?

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

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

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

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

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

As a Left organizer, it’s not about making things happen but about appraising conditions in order to be in the right place in the right time, with the right tools, with the right allies, with robust contact lists, a powerful message and a unique presentation. Listening to the changing of the times, one becomes a specialist in currents and waves.

Sitting on the beach, with an eye always on the ocean, you see a wave, run out into the water, position yourself and let it carry you toward your goal. Rarely are waves so big that you can see them from far away. Usually, you need to linger at least waist deep in the surf.

We are in a unique situation, what with the slow-motion toppling of our hierarchical society, to be observing a tidal wave of change approach the beach. The usual activist interventions don’t apply. To catch this wave requires an understanding of the change in societal currents, the shift from patrifocal to matrifocal paradigms and the profound effect that communication technologies are having upon this changing seascape.

It’s as if the moon had not risen for 6,000 years and only now has appeared above the clouds. Currents…

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

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

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

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

Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen have noted a pattern. The mother’s testosterone levels influence the likelihood of a child having autism. The higher the mother’s testosterone level, the more possible the child will be autistic. The work of the late Norman Geschwin in the early 1980s paved the way for this understanding. Still, the context in which the mother’s testosterone level makes sense is still not pursued by researchers seeking to understand the origins of autism. Neither Baron-Cohen nor Geschwin have backgrounds in evolutionary biology, which might have provided them an introduction to arcane nineteenth century alternative theories of evolution. We all suffer the effects of a century of obsession with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

One of the patterns that a commitment to natural selection masks is that evolution can happen extremely quickly, in a single lifetime. Darwin was aware of single-generational change and struggled for an explanatory principle. He called his theory pangenesis. According to pangenesis, the body manufactures gemmules that can carry information informing the body of environmental change, which the body responds to, modifying progeny in response.

We call them hormones.

We live in a post-Mendelian age. When a cloned sheep emerges from the mother…

I use an image to explain the relationship between different activists’ intervention philosophies. The image is the teeter-totter. On both the left and right, political activists engage tactics that are part of strategies for change. They seek to move the center, the status quo, the conventions of society located in the present, in the direction of the past or the future. The Right seeks that we withdraw to behaviors society threatens to abandon. The Left works to seek to achieve changes that have not yet been engaged.

At present, with the Right in America having so successfully brought things backward eighty years or more, what with the dramatic increase of stratification and corporate control, it seems like the Left is seeking to go backward to the 1970s when there was some obvious forward movement. Right backward. Left forward. However far back the Right succeeds in pushing back conventions, the Left keeps seeking to place its weight on the teeter-totter in a way that changes the center of gravity, forcing the center to move in the Left’s direction, forward in time.

This competition is a might confusing because our societal convention has time marching from left to right as we read…

When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the dining room door and then start lolling back and forth (north and south), and it careened more or less westward across the house. The history of the nearly 100-year old structure, since torn down, was represented in the pathway of the marble.

Tracing the path of societal ideas is compromised by an interpretation protocol that traces only the productions, not the origins, of the mind. We don’t think of biology or genetics as informing a discussion of the evolution of ideas. Exploring the connection between physical and mental when seeking an understanding of culture is not an intuitive choice. It has a lot to do with our not consciously knowing how we evolve biologically and societally. We are left watching the marble, guessing at what might have influenced its path.

No single variable influences our evolution more powerfully than changes in the rate and timing of maturation. Neoteny, or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants by the…

“Humans and chimps are almost identical in structural gens, yet differ markedly in form and behavior. This paradox can be resolved by invoking a small genetic difference with profound effects—alterations in the regulatory system that slow down the general rate of development in humans. Heterochronic changes are regulatory changes; they require only an alteration in the timing of features already present.” (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Belknap Press. p. 9)

Monkeying with our regulatory system evidently helped make us what we are. By engaging in neoteny, or the prolonging of infant states into the adults of descendants, we have evolved ourselves large brains, small jaws, a proclivity to wonder, a compulsion to play and an inclination to be dependent. Altering regulatory systems can have profound positive effects if creativity is your goal.

With the economy quivering on a brink, there has been no small amount of talk about the effects of the last generation’s adjustments in the regulatory system of the American economy. Much discussed is how much freedom large corporations are allowed and if transparency and accountability are necessary if large corporations prefer they not have to be so constrained. Social Darwinism has a new name. Free…

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

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

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

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

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

When I was exploring the possibility of a human genetic precursor that was random-handed with a larger brain encouraged by a song-and-dance-based matrifocal culture, I hypothesized that if representatives of our ancestors were around today, they would have larger brains and difficulty with language.

The premise is that the exponential growth in brain size through the history of Homo erectus and before was driven by the selection for mates talented in dance. An established biological pattern is that predators have larger brains than their prey. More demanding physicality (it’s more difficult to be a predator than to run away) creates a requirement for increased neurological support. Dance may have been a sexually selected physical demand with no upward threshold in satisfactory results. Rampant brain growth may have been the result of males competing for the attention of females in matrifocal societies where males that exhibited neotenous characteristics (creative, playful, cooperative) were the most likely males to procreate.

The best dancers had bigger brains. The best way to select for bigger brains over time was to choose males exhibiting neotenous characteristics. Neotenous males are cooperative males supporting a matrifocal social structure.

When I was first monkeying around with these ideas, noting…

In the past, I noticed that I often struggled that I struggled. Achieving the ability to observe that I was having difficulty having difficulty, I was eventually able to just observe that I was having difficulty. Eventually, I acquired an ability to just observe.

In other words, I was often angry I was sad, sad I was angry, angry I was angry, sad I was sad, frightened I was frightened, frightened I was angry, occasionally angry I was frightened, sad I was frightened and sad I was angry.

I don’t remember being frightened I was sad. I was familiar with eight of the nine dissociative derivations. It might be some kind of record. I suspect not. At some point, I just started noticing that a sizable portion of my experience was my experience of my experience. I realized that I was operating on three experiential levels at the same time: observer, experience 2, experience 1. And, I realized that I was realizing it.

Being in the present had always been sort of a group adventure. The present for me was characterized by several layers of experience. It was when I began to notice this view of the present and exercised…