I have been playing with the idea that genetics guides ontogeny, that how our genes inform an individual’s unfolding has far more to do with how music is made than with how a computer is programmed.  Once again, I’m finding these ideas emerging in my dreams.

Two nights ago, while dreaming, I was seeking to understand the mathematics of words, searching for the equations in language, wondering how music connects them both.  In the dream, the answer felt to be related to evolution.  The answer emerged.  The answer is the price of homemade baked goods at the farmer’s market. (I don’t know what that means.}

Scientists are stumped by how few genes there are in the human gnome.  Some less somatically sophisticated species display a far larger library of genes.  Having a complete gnome is not leading to deep insight as regards our disabilities, diseases, talents or evolution.  Over and over again, difficult-to-understand genetic riddles are ascribed to not-yet-understood, multiple gene effects.

Consider this.  By understanding music, we can understand how genetics works.  This is because the human connection to music is a direct reflection and result of the ontogenetic processes created by our genetic algorithm.

Genes engender a growing being with cells that pay astonishingly close attention to the behavior of contiguous cells and the environments beyond the growing body.  Growth is all about receiving and displaying information, not following a template.  As each cell splits and acquires a series of tasks to perform based upon location and other information, it is passing on a musical score to be adjusted depending on how the other instrumentalists participate.

This is perhaps a case when a metaphor and that which the metaphor represents begin to merge.

Genes are a score or script outlining a specific symphony or performance, yet each gene also retains a score or script that includes an almost infinite number of ways for each instrumentalist to adjust to changes in the performance of the other players.

The human gnome is a score with instructions on how to vary that score and under what circumstances.

This music is most obvious in the womb when environmental information is heavily influencing ontogenetic outcomes.  This is perhaps the case with every species on the planet.  Humans, members of a species profoundly impacted by neoteny, have experienced over the course of tens of thousands of generations the emergence of this ontogenetic womb music in postbirth life.  Not only have ancient forebear embryo features, such as hairlessness and huge head-to-body ratios, prolonged to appear in great great great… grandchildren, but ancient embryo characteristics have manifested in contemporary adults.

In other words, the remarkable flexibility of cells in embryos to embrace change and adjust growth has emerged in aspects of human personality that include an obsession with music, which reflects exactly how it is that genes compel cells to participate in the creative process.  When compared to genetic process, music displays an isomorphic, or almost identical, dynamic.  Both display an unfolding across time of information influenced by the environment.

Music rhythms reflect human heartbeats, human breathing and the breadth and limits of human footwork.  We all go into a trance with music, often experiencing shifts in identity characterized by identification with groups larger than our selves.  For some, music bridges to spiritual experience, featuring shifts in identity beyond the group.  To ally oneself with music is to experience one’s boundaries becoming less firm.  The experience of multiple-person musical give-and-take allows us to feel as a cell might when instructed by the gnome to dance a person into existence.

Consciousness, or identity, is not nearly as stable as we often think.  Every night we slide into alternatives.  Music encourages shifts in identity.  This is not by chance.  Who we are as beings integrated into a larger society and ecology has a lot to do with our abilities to change.  This is a direct result of our living lives informed by the dynamics of the womb.  To understand genetics, we have only to pay attention to how we dance.

I’ve been viewing this work as that of an artist that plays with ideas.  As an artist, I change or modify my perspective on a sweep of data until I acquire a position (have an experience) that suggests beauty, subtlety and complexity.  I then evaluate those ideas based on how potentially useful they are.

In other words, I am looking for useful stories.

I am coming to the conclusion that the world is so complex and so gorgeously constructed that any theory–that is what I specialize in, creating theories–can only be a temporary, partial explanation.  It feels obvious that the universe was created by god as artist.  It is while deeply engaged in the artistic process that the universe feels most understandable.

So, I look for patterns.  If I had been trained in music, I would be composing and playing tunes.  That not being the case, I compose and play the patterns evident in the world around me.  Theory formation is so like music because those patterns I draw out from my environment are so deeply influenced by my culture, the information available, my sense structure (sight, feeling, hearing, taste and smell) and my personal experiences.  The theories I come…

Pattern recognition and exhibition form the essence from which we humans have evolved. Sexual selection usually involves a female choosing subtle variations on a pattern theme such as song, movement/dance or visual display. It can occur that males dramatically escalate the details while females exponentially increase their deliberative tendencies. You can get what Fischer called Runaway Sexual Selection.

What probably began the runaway loop were females selecting for superb dancers and sound makers with males responding over time with astonishing feats of endurance and acumen. Females become far more appreciative of the nuances the males could exhibit because females were being selected over time for acute judgmental abilities. Those females with subtle evaluative capacities mated with the most adroit male performers.

Somewhere along the line, females began selecting for males with talents for escalating pattern exhibition unrelated to any particular or specific stimuli trajectory.

Females selected for creativity.

There is no fiction in biology. Natural systems evolve within firm boundaries such as climate, food sources, natural disasters and competing peers. Now humans began operation in an alternative, complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, having crossed a line where what exists, exists, but not in the biological world.

With imagination…

Charles Darwin, referencing Morgan’s writings, suggested the possibility that humans were descended from tribal cultures characterized by matrifocal social structures that were driven by female sexual selection. After suggesting the possibility, he rejected it as being incongruent with his experience of contemporary and primitive society, which featured a focus on male hierarchical dominance patterns with a complementary pattern of female compliance. Darwin was a Victorian. It is possible that if Darwin had instead embraced what he rejected, then the history of evolutionary theory would have been at least slightly changed. Regardless, after being proposed by Darwin, female sexual selection was almost ignored for 100 years. And it is only with the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) that sexual selection theory in the context of human evolution gets its articulate advocate.

If humans evolved through matrifocal societies, driven by female sexual selection, what would have been the origin and nature of that dynamic?

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind. A moment later Freud joined him. The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender…

In the same way that a dream reveals the private life and secrets of an individual, myths tell us secrets about society and our species. The secrets that myths reveal about our species are only beginning to be understood.

I am a practical mystic. I don’t consider something to be true unless I’ve experienced it personally, and even then I accept it on a relative basis. If it’s true for me, maybe it’s true for others. Maybe not.

A life characterized by terror and anxiety propelled me to search for comfort and integration. Studying Castaneda starting around 1971, I launched a nighttime career of lucid dreaming. Not particularly adept, I still established dream as a refuge and a resource that over decades has provided both solace and instruction about myself.

In the 1980s, I explored hypnotherapy after becoming a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, concentrating on the work of Milton Erickson. Through a combination of deep dream exploration and hypnosis studies, I acquired an ability to shift consciousness fairly easily. Unconscious material would rise to the surface with relatively few barriers. As an artist, this ability is useful. As a mystic, this ability feels nurturing.

Dream themes have started and developed,…

There is a five-step evolution continuum that begins with natural selection and then moves to the next step to where sexual selection, usually by the female, focuses on a specific pattern when they choose a mate. Step three transitions to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation (beginning with dance) are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances. The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is compelled to embrace in its productions the infinite nuances of new. In the fifth stage, awareness of evolution’s stages attended by an awareness of the awareness that accompanies evolution provides an identification with the five-stage creation continuum.

The fifth stage loops around to stage one, what we think of as competitive evolution, accompanied by awareness.

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 (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Story has structure. Lifted from the infinite associational matrix of experience, a story allows the…

We don’t just think in stories, but in layers of stories, stories nested up and down a continuum of stories from the personal, familial, societal and even to the biological.

I had several favorite stories when I was a child. Yurtle the Turtle convinced his colleague turtles to allow him to achieve a greater and greater height by standing on the backs of his shelled associates. Disaster at the end. But not before the reader got a bird’s eye view of Turtleland. It reminds me of Newton’s suggestion that his accomplishments were achievable only because he was able to stand on the shoulders of his predecessors. In science, there are still moments of “all fall down.”

Our stories stack, back to back, not unlike an almost infinite pile of turtles. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses a stacking-turtle metaphor to describe how evolutionary scales nest and stack. There is a mirroring between the nested stages of social evolution and the stories that accompany those stages. The impact of competing societal stages can be experienced by stories that are told.

Perhaps the most classic tale of clashing societies is how the now lost stories, rituals and traditions of the prepatriarchal goddess cultures…

Things that we’ve all noted evolve over time are words that serve to communicate our enthusiasm or wonder. The most active period for word invention for words of this type seem to be the teenage years, when words like “swell, neat, cool, cul, bad, word, sweet” were invented, I think in that order.

Words pop up and quickly disappear, having served their purpose, such as “dynamite, totally, far out, awesome,” though “awesome” may be lingering for a while longer. I think I’m the only person I know that still uses “far out.”

Most of my adult life, the words “fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, amazing” have served to communicate generic wonder. Lately, noting what might be described as word fatigue for the previous set, there seems to be an increase in frequency of use for three additional words: “astonishing, remarkable, extraordinary.” I suspect those three words sort of meandered over from common British usage. The British make almost every word sound like it has more meaning.

It is no accident that words are often invented by teens and young adults, sexual beings without permanent mates. This age is when music drives our lives and souls and is able to explain the feelings…

A pidgin is a kind of quasi-language composed of the pieces of more than one language crunched together when speakers of different languages are forced to communicate. Pidgins vary from place to place depending on the languages involved. For example, English in combination with local languages have created several different pidgins around the world.

In some communities, a pidgin gives birth to a creole. If children grow up listening to a previously unconnected smorgasbord of words and phrases, those children will provide those words and phrases grammar, syntax and the other civilized accoutrements of communication. In a single generation, a creole is born. Strangely, this creole is not as unique as you might imagine.

Creoles born of pidgins across the planet use an almost identical grammar, syntax and language structure. It seems that great minds think alike, in this case revealing a universality of thought. But the roots of language suggest a deeper hidden source for this way of thinking. There is only one language in the world with deep structural similarities to creoles born of pidgins.

That one language is sign language.

Sometimes when watching people talk, I become mesmerized by the movement of people’s hands. It’s obvious when…

We are so deeply steeped in story it’s hard to tell which layer of fiction we were last swimming in when it comes time to come up for breath. It’s like we’re deep sea divers that don’t keep track of how many fathoms we’ve descended. Come up too fast and we maybe get the bends.

When I was training to practice therapeutic interventions, one tool was the “As If” frame. I was encouraged to guide a client to access difficult-to-integrate personal resources that could be leveraged to achieve a specific change goal. The idea was to offer a client a novel story. Framed as a story, this alternative point of view was one the client could choose to resist less. Basically, we were making sales pitches, except the therapist was speaking both to the client’s conscious mind and an unconscious that had been engaged in a particular way of doing things for particular reasons. The “As If” frame allows someone that feels like they have limited choices to have additional ways of looking at the world.

Many things did not come easy to me during training. Creating stories was not a problem. Years of relying upon comic books as a…

We live in Evanston, twelve blocks from Chicago. Northwestern University is about six blocks north of us. Loyola is about two miles south. We are in the middle unit of a 5-unit, antique row house. Our backyard is cement, like a largish carport, surrounded by a maybe 3-foot band of dirt. An astonishingly large maple tree covers our backyard, making it almost impossible for grass or garden to grow.

Still, the animals find us.

We have possums, squirrels, birds, mice, a rat, chipmunks, crows and the occasional raccoon. Down the street we happened across a skinny fox chasing a local squirrel. Coyotes cruise up the canal banks or along the lagoon. Deer bop through on occasion. We harbor tortoises year-round in a large turtle pen sunk perhaps two feet into the dirt.

There are several bridges to an awareness of interconnectedness and evolution. A necessary feature of these unique bridges is that they abandon language. As language users, we habitually think in single-narrative threads, intuiting cause and effect as the way of the world when it’s the only path our words are capable of walking. We think narratively in a non-narrative world. We make the world a story. Our lives…

The origin myth of Western culture begins with the big bang and unfolds in varying narratives, depending on how the works of Darwin are interpreted. The story we know best is “survival of the fittest.”

How we experience our place in the world as social animals has an enormous amount to do with the origin myths we tell each other and ourselves. Sociobiology or evolutionary psychology–orthodox Darwinism extolling random variation as the central dogma of evolution–interprets species origins and evolution according to a strict or fundamentalist interpretation of only one part of Darwin’s life work. This story of life is the one told in our textbooks, on TV and in popular culture. It is often a story characterized by an experience of fear, life according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

It is no mistake that as conservative forces in American politics expanded their influence, controlling government, media and economics, their story line conformed to the prevailing origin myth that it is the strongest that survive. It’s called social Darwinism. It is the elite world view that it is the rich people’s skill at accumulating or retaining wealth that should be encouraged because it is that specific skill that is…