“The most common form of social organization for group-living monkeys is the multigenerational matrilineal group (Silk, 1987). In this type of system, males, and females have very different life histories. Females stay in the natal group and their mothers and female kin for life, while males leave at adolescence and transfer to neighboring groups for breeding.” (Lynn Fairbanks, “Influences on Aggression in Group-Living Monkeys,” in Endocrinology of Social Relationships, eds. Ellison and Gray, pp. 160-161.)

“In spite of abundant evidence documenting intergroup conflict over the past 10,000 to 15,000 years, there is no evidence of warfare in the Pleistocene. Such absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it helps to explain why many of those who actually study hunter-gatherers are skeptical about projecting the bellicose behavior of post-Neolithic peoples back onto roaming kin-based bands of hunter-gatherers, and why anthropologists refer to the Pleistocene as the ‘period of Paleolithic warlessness.’” (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, pp. 19-20.)

For the last few years, I’ve reveled in the indulgence of reading several books at the same time, and often they were books seemingly unrelated. Sometimes synergies result. Exploring details regarding the endocrinology of relationship in primates in one book and the power of social structures that encourage alloparenting, resulting in cooperative evolution, in another book leaves me feeling like I’m reading about the same process from two different perspectives.

Central to understanding Hrdy’s work focusing on humans evolving in response to females raising children cooperatively, and the evidence that supports these conjectures, is the understanding that males, not females, are often moving to where they can procreate. Females are relatively stationary, with sisters and mothers working cooperatively to raise the children. This is in stark contrast to post-Neolithic developments that encouraged males to form alliances with other males that would result in land and resources staying within the control of a male and his male progeny. Females moved away from mothers and sisters to the location of their husband.

I’ve been exploring the endocrinological implications of matrifocal evolution for 12 years. When I started these explorations, Marija Gimbutas’ work was often derided. Gimbutas hypothesized that humans evolved in matrilineal societies. It seems Hrdy and her colleagues are finding support from colleagues as they make connections between matrilineality and our aboriginal forebears.

From my perspective, central to the realization that humans evolved in a matrifocal context is the understanding that natural selection was not the primary selective process that was in play. Though it is fairly easy to intuit that hormones adjust as social structure adjusts, it is when it can be understood that it is larger patterns of maturation rates and timing that are guiding both hormone levels and social structures, with hormone levels and social structures influencing maturation rates and timing, that we achieve insight into how evolution actually unfolds.

Reading Hrdy, I’m feeling stirred that humans evolving in matrifocal societies is a concept now receiving respect. If this shift in our origin story continues to gain followers, there will be impacts on other disciplines and popular culture.

Some passages from Endocrinology of Social Relationships, edited by Ellison and Gray.

“Not surprisingly, males of pair-bonding bird species have been shown to undergo an endocrinological shift to lower testosterone levels in parallel with the behavioral shift from territorial defense and mate attraction to parental behavior. Manipulations that evoke territorial responses in nesting males, such as playing the song of an invading male, both undermine parental behavior and lead to an increase in testosterone….Recently evidence has even begun to accumulate suggesting that lower testosterone levels may be typical of human males in stable mating relationships and perhaps even lower levels in men who are fathers of infant children.” (p. 70)

“…This led to the ‘challenge hypothesis,’ which states: high plasma levels of testosterone occur during periods of social instability in the breeding season (resulting from male-male competition for territories and mates) but are at a lower breeding baseline in stable social conditions thus allowing paternal care to be expressed.” (p. 83)

“Furthermore, there is growing evidence that patterns of testosterone in tropical species that may have long breeding seasons are very different from northern species (Goymann et al., 2004). Tropical species with long breeding seasons tend to have extremely low…

The Hegelian interpretation of history, picked up by Marx, was a view of history as story with particular trajectories.  Teleology, the idea that we walk a path created by a transcendental god, was abandoned.  It was hypothesized that the path we walk is one informed by our own behaviors and understandings.

What I’ve been playing with the last year and a half is the idea that biology and history are connected by social structure, and that teleology exists but is biologically informed.

The Hegelian view of history was predicated on pattern and predictable changes in pattern over time.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection was founded on an opposite view of the effects of time, stating that change occurred only when heritable, randomly generated features compelled a proliferation of traits that served to promote the goals of individuals to survive to procreate.  Evolution displays no thesis and antithesis unless they are represented by every mating pair.

Perhaps ironically, the theory of natural selection does not operate in a narrative frame.  I say ironically because the foundation thesis has been interpreted to support Social Darwinism and free markets, which promote that story, or narrative, that controlling elites are the result of natural…

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

A fair amount gets written on changes in the nuclear family, increased divorce, marrying later, few kids, abortion, contraception, women becoming more fully employed outside the home, and now women often retaining jobs because they are often paid less, with their male colleagues getting let go.  Not so much gets written about how this influences general social frames of reference.  I hypothesize we are experiencing a dramatic shift from a patrifocal to a matrifocal foundation.  Intuitions…

An aspect of neoteny just struck me that has never crossed my mind before.  It perhaps suggests a basic principle in evolution.  I’m not sure.

Two days ago, I posted a piece exploring a paradox of recapitulation that focuses on an odd possibility.  When a species is in an accelerated phase and withdraws adult features backward over generations to eventually appear in the infants of descendants, adults may exhibit features of ancient forebears.  If the species lineage had in the past gone through a similar cycle, then that genetic inheritance would have been available, emerging when a similar hormonal disposition became engaged.

Haeckel may have been focused on that very dynamic as he obsessed on recapitulation as a source of new behavioral and physical characteristics.  What strikes me now is that though recapitulation (acceleration) is not considered at this time as a relevant description of evolutionary process, it does seem to be half of a process that results in a seemingly natural biological dynamic that not only withdraws species backward through ontogeny to conception but at the same time carries forward or prolongs features of this planet’s earliest species forward into adults.

There are two waves or currents moving through…

In the 1960s, there was the “Generation Gap.”  Youth were perceived by themselves, their parents and society at large as feeling alienated from their parents and society.  Several new forces had emerged that were embraced by youth, forces that felt foreign to older folks.  Nonmonogamous premarriage behavior was reveled in.  Promiscuity was respected.  The Pill and an emerging woman’s movement made this possible.  Drugs were embraced as techniques to acquire insight about the self.  Music grew to become an opportunity to realize and reveal far more about the self than a desire for a mate.  The draft was vilified.  Both “small is beautiful” and a new holism emerged that embraced both immediate community and global community as necessary to a balanced whole.

Still, most of the population was not above a good story.  Reagan was elected on the premise that lower taxes meant more government services.  Reagan proclaimed that empowering the wealthy would result in increasing the resources of those with no money.  The Generation Gap seemed to decrease as Americans almost universally focused on the more and more difficult task of maintaining an established lifestyle as resources congregated with fewer and fewer people.

In the 1960s, there was a…

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been explored in the context of what authors, ideas, and social forces suggested and guided Darwin to come up with the specific principles of his theory.  At the other end of the influence equation, many books have been written focusing on how that theory influenced other writers, contemporary society and the generations that followed.

Darwin’s other two theories have been offered little of this kind of attention.  His theory of sexual selection, having become influential over the last 40 years, has not compelled the kind of cottage industry of influence divination characteristic of Darwin’s first theory.  Perhaps it is because the female plays such an important role.  Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, the theory where he outlines how the effects of the environment may influence evolution in a single generation, has been ignored.

Society and evolutionary theory are evolving.  A new social milieu is emerging.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been examined for how it was influenced and for what it has influenced.  Consider what evolutionary theory may next emerge in this new barrierless, horizontal, transparent and diverse world.

Hierarchy is becoming less effective at controlling resources.  The “might is right” age-old leverage paradigm…

There is a phenomenon in linguistics where language complexity is directly related to how isolated a particular language is from its neighbors.  A new language is difficult to learn for adults.  When several languages rub up against each other, and adults find themselves speaking curtailed versions of one another’s lingos, languages impacted most by these mash-ups simplify, lose endings, abbreviate and drop challenging sounds.  When adults have to learn a language, the language suffers.

A small, isolated island nation may experience the opposite effect.  When only children are required to learn the language, the language, in both sounds and grammar, tends to proliferate novelties.  Children, without the inhibiting convention of adult habits, get creative.  Those adult conventions that are extremely challenging to outsider adults are things that children learn effortlessly.

The most complex languages in the world tend to be those of isolated aboriginals or a people not impacted by their neighbors for many centuries.  When you leave a language to be learned by only children, there is a multiplication of the unique.

What would it be like if that period of time characterized by the linking of countless associations with specific sounds, and the joyous experience that accompanies the…

If I’m not mistaken, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh came up with her “Theory of Mind” to explore differences in great ape behavior and other species that seemed not capable of estimating that another individual retained separate consciousness.  Simon Baron-Cohen applied this principle to autism, calling it “mindblindness,” to offer an explanatory paradigm that parsed out differences between the autistic and the nonautistic mind.

Last week, I was exploring some unique language structures of two matrifocal societies, the Hopi and the Trobriand Islanders.  The languages display a unique attitude toward tenses, reminding me of Gregory Bateson’s interpretations of Freud’s description of primary process.  It seems that aspects of dream consciousness and primary process thinking are characteristic of these two languages.  This included only one time or tense (you can’t imagine another time without being there), one place (you can’t imagine another place without being there) and no negatives (you can’t image what something is not without imagining the something).

Stephen J. Gould would sometimes write of three-fold and four-fold parallelisms.  He was alluding to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century hypotheses that there are equivalencies between different scales of experience:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Regarding Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s “Theory of…

Yesterday, I met my younger sister Terry and her family in the Walker Brothers in Highland Park.  Our dad was treating us.  It was 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday.  I am the oldest of three kids, the only one still close to home.  We were eating breakfast a few blocks from one of the houses Terry and I grew up in.

Talking with my niece Renee, she told me about her choosing the economics of institutions as her undergraduate major, and her likely specialization as Ph.D.  It combines history, political science and economics and offers a wealth of interesting areas to explore.  Renee was excited.

I asked if there were evolutionary aspects to the discipline, if a paradigm of a succession of institutions in different societies over time was examined.  Renee was not aware that this was the case.  From her introduction to the study, it looked like the economics of institutions concentrated on snapshots of a place and time.

Riane Eisler’s The Real Wealth of Nations explores society’s institutions from a matristic point of view.  It’s not exactly an evolutionary model, but Eisler reveals the recent emergence of “partnership” society horizontal and egalitarian economic and government institutions.  From what…

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…

Female choice and societal innovation are so closely tied as to be indistinguishable.

In Asian cultures characterized by patrifocal frames of reference, with female infanticide, and now female foeticide, ancient hierarchies, deep allegiance to status and a reverence for the warrior, you find little innovation because males are selected for their ability to command and dominate. Creativity is highly valued in the context of supporting an established, conventional, ritualized aesthetic.

Across Asia into India and the Middle East, females exhibit little choice in mate selection. Families, often the father, still decide which males are suitable for their daughters. These societies are often militaristic, caste-based, hierarchical and highly stratified, featuring domineering males. Women’s rights are few and neglected.

Perhaps the first society featuring an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal forces was ancient Greece. Indo-Europeans were not normally disposed to providing the matrifocal peoples that they conquered much influence in the societies that followed. Ancient Greece was an exception to a degree. Females could not vote but could sometimes wield authority, particularly in their choice of a mate. When females are provided the ability to choose, several things happen. Females choose mates that they estimate will enhance their lives, a male that…

Integral to an understanding of how humans are evolving is recognizing the many variables that influence social structure. Sexual selective forces inform social structure, and environmental effects influence hormonal levels that influence social structure. Demanding that natural selection is the cause of our evolution is a little like watching the railway tracks to guess what kind of locomotive will be passing by. Of course, any social structure-related evolutionary development has to pass the test of progeny surviving to procreate. That railroad they have to travel. What exactly passes down those tracks has far more to do with selective forces related to society and the environment than mere survival. The train is not the tracks.

My favorite game when I was small was Chutes and Ladders. I think I was as powerfully moved by the game board imagery as I was by the dynamic of the game. The player could observe at any time during the game the potential pathways that the game could take. Playing the game was to act out the manifest ups and downs characteristic of this chunk of life.

This theory of evolution offers two evolutionary trajectories and two social structures, each social structure enhancing or compelling…

R. A. Fisher hypothesized runaway sexual selection in 1930.

“The two characteristics affected by such a process, namely plumage development in the male, and sexual preference for such developments in female, must thus advance together, and so long as the process is unchecked by severe counter selection, will advance with ever-increasing speed. In the total absence of such checks, it is easy to see that the speed of development will be proportional to the development already attained, which will therefore increase with time exponentially, or in geometric progression. There is thus in any bionomic situation, in which sexual selection is capable of conferring a great reproductive advantage, the potentiality of a runaway process, which, however small the beginnings from which it arose, must, unless checked, produce great effects, and in the later stages with great rapidity.” (Fisher, R. A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford. Clarendon Press, pp. 136-7.)

David Brin in 1995 posited a relationship between runaway sexual selection and neoteny in humans, emphasizing two-say sexual selection. Geoffrey Miller in 1994 outlined runaway sexual selection in humans without an emphasis on maturational delay or neoteny. In other entries on these pages, you’ll find my hypothesis that runaway…

Teleological interpretations of societal transformation conflict with the reductionist zeitgeist that demands that consciousness not be considered as a variable when exploring biological or social evolution because consciousness cannot be measured. To suggest that history, as it bridges from the past into the future, follows a deliberate path is not a useful conjecture if we seek an understanding of structure and process rather than bowing to the intentions of an outside force.

If teleology has structure, is it still teleology?

Many nineteenth century theorists focused on a specific process as they sought to understand the dynamics of biological evolution and its connection to individual ontogeny. Ernst Haeckel was a champion of heterochronic theory or the study of changing rates and timing of maturation and/or development when species and individuals transform. Neoteny is one manifestation of one of these processes. In neoteny, the features of the young, even the embryonic, manifest later and later in the maturation of ancestors. For example, our chimp-like precursors retained features such as relatively big eyes, small chins, upright stature, curiosity and playfulness that evidenced later and later in the stages of descendants until today we human adults exhibit many of the characteristics of grown-up, chimp-like…

Watching TV and observing media, one notes that different ideals of beauty are exposed. From the orientation of social-structure representatives of the two primary paradigms, media offer a unique perspective of matrifocal and patrifocal beauty points of view.

Neoteny is physically represented in specific facial features. A matrifocal social structure encourages the selection of males exhibiting neotenous characteristics, which would include smaller jaw, bigger eyes and possibly a more lanky build. The male would be altogether more gracile than robust. Females would tend to be less neotenous than their patrifocal counterparts, with a more square jaw and stocky presence.

In a patrifocal social structure, macho men are choosing demure women for their neotenous tendencies. Western female beauty frames are engaged. The woman has smaller jaws, seemingly bigger eyes, a more petite frame and features of the young. Blonde hair and blue eyes are often characteristics of infants that fade with time. As a neotenous feature, blue-eyed blondes are classic patrifocal female beauty markers. But for hair and eye color, Asian females exhibit many of the features of a beautiful patriarchal woman. The classic handsome patrifocal man has a square jaw and robust build, which are non-neotenous characteristics.

Media expose us…

Imagine the evening news and the productions of our media as the dreams emerging from a troubled patient or the myths that linger around a culture in distress. I’ve considered that the tools of comparative religion might serve best to parse the meaning of these cultural constructions, but it feels like a societal perspective provides more play. Ad agencies make commercials, production companies create shows and political observers/editors design the news. Produced by these institutions of enterprise, the product feels like the fever dreams of corporations lying half asleep in a sweaty bed after overeating.

Pace and lead is the foundation of psychotherapy, salesmanship and communication theory. To establish rapport and provide guidance, it is necessary to mirror or reflect the target’s behavior and beliefs until the person trusts that they are understood. Once the person believes what the practitioner is saying, because the practitioner is saying what the target believes, that target can be guided to what the practitioner wishes the target to understand. The practitioner can be acting in the best interests of a patient when a psychotherapist practices pace and lead. The practitioner might not care what is in the best interests of a consumer if it’s…

For two years now, the first dandelions of spring popped up amongst the grasses of the Post Office here in Evanston. I noticed the yellow flowers during the ides of April while handing out pie-chart war budget leaflets to taxpayers sending last minute missives to the IRS. It is public property, our local commons, that harbors my favorite flower since there is little budget to pay employees to make sure the grass stays green.

Three miles away on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago is perhaps the greatest dandelion garden in the region. Along both grass embankments on that scenic stretch of roadway are public lands offering sanctuary to a blossom usually despised. The flowers go crazy. Earlier this decade, during an uncannily balmy January that followed a mild fall, yellow dandelions still lingered along the lake front highway. No single experience has so alerted me to the changing weather than the appearance of winter dandelions.

In a society that deeply respects the personal, the independent and the individual, it’s not surprising that this flower that thrives in the commons is so scorned. In addition, the dandelion is not a native but a visitor from overseas. Perhaps if its origins were…

One could make the argument that the French Revolution replaced one group of overlords with another, after a transitional phase filled with hope and violence. The American Revolution made it possible for the founding father slave owners to further free themselves but not their charges. Clearly, ideals take time to actualize. Revolutions are often hypocritical up close.

Paradigms shift slowly, with exceptions.

Stephen J. Gould and others have suggested that there are ways that nature can rapidly adjust to extreme circumstances. Gould and Eldredge’s Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium, which outlined their ideas in detail, were conjectures that helped explain gaps in the fossil records that confounded Darwin. Gould’s observations of processes described as heterochony, which include neoteny, track the influence of changing rates and timing of maturation on the unfolding of a species’ evolutionary trajectory over time. These rates and timing of maturation can be influenced by social structure.

Between two chimpanzee species, two social structures are represented. The laid back, sensualist, bonobo society revolves around the alpha female, with little conflict between the males in the band. Barriers to sex are few. The common chimpanzee social structure exhibits males struggling to achieve enough dominance to control procreation opportunities. Though…

The environment can have radical effects on the speed and timing of maturation at the societal scale.

Over the last 100 years, the timing of puberty has dropped 4 or more years. Human bodies, because of the dramatic increase in resources in the form of protein, carbs and fats, make it possible for humans to reproduce sooner to create more progeny to take advantage of the bounty. This is a naturally selected biological response. Baboons in Africa, feasting on human food refuse, experienced an almost immediate drop in pubertal timing in one generation.

Careening into the 21st Century, cultures addicted to unrestrained consumption are now facing an increasingly limited supply. Environmental issues such as global warming are forcing us to restrain carbon output, compelling a clamping down on consumptive lifestyles. Just as an increase in nurturing foods can force an earlier physical maturing, at the societal level a decrease in necessary supplies is also encouraging an earlier maturing.

But maybe not. Things may not be as them seem.

Human puberty arrived literally a year or more sooner with every generation in the 20th Century. Brain growth was curtailed a little bit each time. For each individual so affected, the final…

There is a deep, underlying connection between processes that guide the unfolding of biological evolution and social/cultural evolution. Stephen J. Gould has described in detail how neoteny, or the unfolding of infant features or characteristics into the adult of a species over the scale of evolutionary time, influences the evolution of a species. The same dynamic is now engaged as technology encourages the empowering of individuals by providing them access to information and access to other humans. The process is transcending barriers of knowledge, distance and national boundaries.

In evolutionary biology, humans displayed increased neotenous characteristics as maturation rates delayed the emergence of features later and later in an individual’s ontogeny. Similarly, new technology provides increased transparency, breaking down the barriers between human beings. The increase in transparency evidences itself in several ways.

There is less information hidden from participants at lower levels of hierarchy. The effect can flatten hierarchy because information control informs the decision-making process. When information is widely dispersed, the decision-making processes can be widely shared. New tech voting options can streamline consensus when information is widely held.

Transparency emerges when national boundaries and geographic barriers fall. Instantaneous global communication is creating a transparency surge.

Just as…