“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.

“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 levels of testosterone that generally do not change markedly with social challenges.” (p. 85)

In 1998, I hypothesized that when there are great apes with larger testicles, suggesting males competing with other males in an environment characterized by female choice, with sperm production becoming more important than muscle mass, the testosterone levels would decrease even though the testicles were larger. Testes produce both sperm and testosterone. I calculated that an emphasis on one would diminish the other. Gorillas have small testicles and patrifocal male control of procreation. Bonobo have large testicles with a matrifocal, horizontal social structure.

The passages above suggest a relationship between testosterone production and social structure. Even testosterone fluctuations within an individual over time suggest that different procreation strategies are accompanied by different testosterone levels. If male testosterone levels are instrumental in the choices made at any time regarding degrees of cooperation or family orientation, and testosterone levels inform maturation rates, then there is a direct connection between social structure, maturational delay and acceleration.

For reasons I do not really understand, there seems to be little academic attention directed toward the possibility that testosterone manages rates of maturation. Testosterone is associated with handedness, and left-handedness is associated with low testosterone. Left-handedness is associated with maturational delay. Yet, testosterone is rarely visited as related to maturational acceleration and delay. Even further from the minds of theoreticians is the possible influence of estrogen on the timing of the rates of maturation. Grasping that seems to require an understanding of how maturation rates change under the influence of testosterone.

Human and nonhuman endocrine systems are moved by countless different variables in turn influenced by myriad environmental effects. Nevertheless, it seems central that social structure, which deeply influences evolution, is guided by a balance between testosterone and estrogen levels. These levels change according to the season, the environment and the circumstances of life. As these changes occur, maturation rates and timing transform and evolution happens.

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 processes.  Two pieces were left out of that not-useful story.

First, the free market interpretations of the theory of natural selection don’t view evolution from a larger scale.  Interconnection is ignored when focus is on survival strategies of constituent parts.  Marx’s Hegelian large-scale view provided leverage that transcended capitalist focus on individual achievements.  Whether evolution or societies are being studied, the scale of investigation can determine the solutions that emerge.

Second, interconnection is not only observed by an increase in scale, it is experienced by immersion in the process.  The experience of interconnection removes narration from the equation, introducing the experiencer to the feeling of an ever-present now, autistic primary process.  Compassion often results from the twin experience of interconnection viewed as a whole and interconnection felt from immersion.  When boundaries blur but sensitivity to scale remains, insight can result.  Compassion is a feature of integrated insight.

In a Hegelian fashion, I have proposed that we are in the middle of a social transformation that features a synthesis of two foundation principles.  I hypothesize that we evolved over the last, at least, two million years in a matrifocal, matrilineal/matrilocal context.  That swerved to patrifocal, patrilineal/patrilocal over the last 50,000, accelerating in the last 25,000 to start rocketing the last 6,000.  A slowdown began maybe 500 years ago.  A return to matrifocal commenced the last 300 with an acceleration occurring in the last 100.  In this latest generation, things are rocketing.  We could interpret current patterns as a synthesis of the two social structures, or as the reemergence of the matrifocal.  Both interpretations make sense.

Oscillations between social structures go with the territory of being an evolving social being.  Different social structures serve different animal societies in different ways.  Evolution charts social structure changes as the environment and social structure impact individuals.  Environmental influence is huge.  As regards humans, trends over time as humans ally themselves with social structure compel trajectories that simulate teleology.  It looks like a transcendental god is in play.  What is happening is biology.  Hierarchies rise and now fall in direct relation to biological imperatives.  Hierarchies rose for thousands of years under patriarchal frames of reference, high testosterone males and low testosterone females.  Now they fall.

Somehow, Hegelian narrative interpretations of experience and non-narrative primary process interpretations are both true at the same time.  Patrifocal transcendental and matrifocal immanent paradigms are both in play.  Evolution unfolds at several scales at the same time.  We both live in a return to matrifocal times and we are experiencing a synthesis of traditional patrifocal and ancient matrifocal.  Somehow, that which is aboriginal that is reemerging is also wholly new.

Understanding how things are different is somehow also the same as understanding how they are the same.

“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 for how the commons positively impacts our life are becoming ubiquitous vs. the expectation that hierarchy will always be.  Nevertheless, the shift suggests more than a little bit that we are also experiencing a synthesis, an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal points of view.  The synthesis is difficult to describe, to verbalize, particularly because most don’t understand we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in social structure.

This shift we are in the middle of gets described in lots of different ways.  Social structure is not just an anthropological principle, but a biological dynamic.  It is extremely rare that current changes in society are described as biological shifts.  Two reasons jump out that support the difficulty we have in seeing social changes as biological.  First, it’s been over 6,000 years since the Indo-Europeans rode horses out of Southern Russia and changed the world.  It’s rare that a Westerner views social structure as still integral to understanding current trends.  Riane Eisler is one of the few with deep understanding in this area.

Second, biological anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists and others that describe confluence between biology and anthropology view evolution from primitive society to modern society as a succession of stages followed by different peoples across the world while at the same time they assign a universality of neurology and consciousness to all peoples, denigrating interpretations of integral differences between “primitive” and modern.  The net result of suggesting that some cultures are more evolved than others, while at the same time stating we are all the same, obfuscates real differences among people.  Of particular importance are social structure differences and the possible real physical, neurological and hormonal variation that accompanies difference in social structure.

A net result is a deep difficulty in our ability to interpret our own position (physically, neurologically and hormonally) as informed by social structure.  We don’t seem to get that evolution is integrally tied to social structure, and that we as individuals and as a society are evolving.

Whether we live in a matrifocal society, a patrifocal society, or an integration of the two is huge.  Right now we are in transition.  Media do not describe the battle as one between social structures, or, from a Wilberian perspective, as a battle between societal maturation scales.  My explanatory paradigm offers a cyclic perspective, featuring the push and pull of neoteny and acceleration over generations.  The Wilberian/Habermas/Gebser paradigm looks at change from a linear, pyramidal position that nevertheless integrates many of the insights of the cyclic dynamic.  Both interpretations work.  One is more matrifocal or immanent in its perspective.  The other is more patrifocal or transcendent in its point of view.  Go far enough into either one and you come out the other side, inside the other.

Matrifocal/patrifocal, immanent/transcendent.  There exists an integration of the two.  That integration is where we as a society are headed.  We get closer with every spiral round in our evolution.

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 time.  One takes contemporary species and slowly turns them into future embryos.  The other current takes former species still existing as past and current species embryos and carries them forward into contemporary adults, their second journey though ontogeny, in the opposite direction.  Except, I’m not sure when or where the journeys end.

I find myself nudged to think out of time.  To make sense of this process, I feel encouraged to take time out of the equation of evolution to view evolution as the behavior of a single being.

Perhaps, as in physics, time is a variable when exploring evolution that has to be integrated into theory.  Trying to understand which level that evolution operates at, gene vs. individual vs. species, etc., and arguing over the results, may occur because we have not taken time into consideration when exploring species transformations.

Consider all evolution of life on earth as the behavior of one single being.  Let’s adjust time in the approach we take and instead see only phases of one being.  There is no father and son, nor mother and daughter.  They are the same being at different stages of development.  The death of an individual is a pruning or clipping or sloughing off of a cell or skin.

In this single being, life on earth, there are two strong forces that feed each other content, growing information where information did not formerly exist.  One force slowly takes the features of the current aspect of the being and pushes in backward, downward, earlier and earlier in ontogeny to reproduce species lineages as a sequence in the maturational process.  Human forebears appear in our ontogeny with salamander-like, ancient precursors, manifesting as early embryonic phases.

At the same time, of course, neoteny prolongs embryonic features to appear later and later in ontogeny with a succession of individuals and species.

Deeply peculiar is that the embryonic stages being prolonged to appear later in ontogeny over time are aspects or features of earlier species now recapitulated to appear as embryos.  In other words, and it seems easier to make sense of this if viewed as a single being, evolution involves the emergence of novel features, the “digestion” of those features to appear early in ontogeny, and to have those same features reappear, transformed.

Several things are implied and I’m having trouble wrapping my head around them.

I’m imaging that, over time, there is a back and forth, back and forth of features (and behaviors) as embryonized ancient species rebound to head forward in ontogeny to at some point recapitulate to work their way back down again and then back up.

Second, ontogeny (growth, development and maturation) may be a process characterized by the use and reuse of information as neoteny and acceleration propel features back and forth along the ontogenetic (and species) pathway.  Looking at all life as a single being, I imagine an astonishing compulsion/struggle/play to find ways to capitalize on the information being absorbed.  Shoved forward and backward, past manifestations inform the present.

Third, that which is earliest in our ontogeny, the exponential growth that follows conception, both characterizes the earliest species on the planet and at the same time represents forces struggling to appear later in ontogeny through neoteny.  There is a very real way that the first life on earth that lived long enough to reproduce and create our lineage exists right now, in our body, as the beginning of this individual’s ontogeny.

The content or process of growth after conception (at this moment, thinking out of time, I’m having difficulty separating content from process) IS the very content/process of existence in our ancient forebears.  Time disappears as we realize the past has been integrated into the present in the form of a body that manifests all that has preceded.

Consider this.  We are a highly neotenized species engaged in a neoteny surge featuring a social democratization of creativity with similarities to conception.  Stages of growth immediately following conception are at the same time stages of our planet’s ontogeny.  The planet’s early species are being used to propel individual ontogeny.  As we prolong infant features into adults, exploding creativity into society, horizontilizing culture, we are investing the present with that which invested earliest life with life.

Ontogeny is not just a concept that describes the growth of individuals.  Ontogeny is evolution of life on our planet.  That single life has exhibited many stages, with transformations occurring at many levels, not the least of which is the pulling backward and forward, backward and forward of that which is novel or unique.

Time, when integrated into physics, offered a handle on relations across great distances.  Integrating time into an understanding of biology, treating evolution as the behavior of a single being, may provide biologists an ability to understand a single life.

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 gap between generations as young people struggled to find a way of living life that would result in a healthy world.  Most middle-aged and older adults viewed themselves as members of a nation.  What is emerging now is a generation abyss where young people have found a way to feel that they are members of a world.  Adults in their 50s and 60s, who were youth in the 1960s, are struggling to find that feeling.

There are ways that the psychic spread between youth and established adults is more distant now than the distance between youth and grown-ups in the 1960s.  In the 1960s, when the draft ended and young people began creating families, most returned to a monogamous, middle-class, relatively drugless, possession-based existence.  What we are observing now is young folks embracing wholly new ways of relating to one another and the world.  They are using communications tools and protocols that feel deeply unfamiliar to those that embraced change in the 1960s.

Some things are the same.  Important things.  Promiscuity, drugs and music that reveals information about the self have become so ubiquitous that they have become associated with being young.  Sex, drugs and beats have become integrated into modern culture.  There is no gap here.

Where the abyss lies is in our concept of community.  Conversation with old hippies from the 60s reveals that most feel deeply disappointed regarding a healing in the world.  Whereas in the 60s and early 70s it felt to youth like profound transformation was imminent, these same people, who are now becoming grandparents, don’t see the change.

The abyss is in the embracing of the process.  Young people, no matter what their political persuasion, are becoming deeply integrated into the new communications technologies.  It is not uncommon for a single person to form alliances, shared communications, with hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals.  In the 1960s, we imagined connection to those in our immediate area while at the same time we wanted to take into consideration the necessities of the world.  Youth today are doing exactly that.  The abyss between generations is characterized by older folks being frightened of cell phone and online technologies that offer massive numbers of horizontal, many-to-many connections with folks near and far away.

The transition away from traditional frames of reference that burst out in the 1960s has continued unabated.  Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll never faded.  The former Soviet Union and Communist China have become our economic allies.  The dream of an interconnected, integrated world is becoming a reality.  It is our youth that are experiencing this truth.  It may only be with the passing of the 60s generation that a united world will be perceived to be at hand.

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 based on wealth, inheritance, gender, skin color and resource control is giving way to a commons-based perspective.  If Malthus, Smith, Lyell and the emergence of the industrialization of the west influenced Darwin to see biology as mostly a struggle between individuals over time, then how might the world we see emerging impact evolutionary theory?

Expect to see the emergence of radical new ways of interpreting evolution that reflect the horizontalization of society.  As those new interpretations take hold, expect society to be reinterpreted in the context of patterns that the new radical theories of evolution emphasize.

It has begun with the increasing respect offered evolutionary developmental biology.  Epigenetic perspectives offer vast, panoramic visions characterized by a listening to how genetics and the environment converse.  This new paradigm widens the biological sphere of interconnection.  It’s not all about the individual or the gene any longer.  This new biology of interconnection will reflect a society characterized by interconnection, encouraging a new biology/society interpretation.

Biology evolves.  Societies transform.  How we interpret biological evolution and societal transformation changes over time.  We use a single interpretation paradigm to apply to both biology and society.  We are in the middle of a biology/society evolution/transformation paradigm shift.

When our understanding of one changes, so changes the other.

Through a deeper understanding of our social selves, a more powerful, more useful evolutionary theory evolves.

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 learning to produce those sounds, was to prolong into the adult of our species?  Imagine this ability of children to learn language effortlessly drifting forward into older ages.

Neoteny is the prolongation of infant features into the adult of a species with ancestor embryo, infant and toddler features emerging over time in later ontological stages, eventually to emerge in the adults of descendants.  Our chimp-like progenitors had babies with big head-to-body ratios, large brain-to-head ratios, small chins, big foreheads, an ability to amble around upright, creativity, affection and a compulsion to connect.  In other words, our chimp-like forebears had infants that looked a lot like and behaved like contemporary adults.

Biology is not the only scale of experience that evolves.  Society is also influenced by the dynamic that compels biology to prolong the features of infants into the adults of descendants.  Society today reveals neotenous dynamics when new behaviors are invented or embraced by our youngest and carried with them as they age.  Texting, initiated by youth, is becoming ubiquitous across many age groups.  Social networking, at first only used by students, is now engaged in by half the nation.  In just the way that Rock ‘n’ Roll was played at first by mostly high schoolers, today Rock is the soundtrack of our lives.

Over the course of our recent history, many fads and trends emerged with low-income ethnic minorities and fanned out into mainstream culture.  With cell phone and social networking technologies becoming cheap enough for everyone to have, watch for unique and creative uses of these new technologies.  Societal neoteny evidences surges of creativity both from the young and from the disenfranchised.  Those closest to being aboriginal, those in poverty, the artists and the fringe–those furthest from the conventional center–are sources of the creative impulse, that which is newest that can prolong its way up the social tiers.

It is no mistake that there is a dramatic surge in those with autism and Asperger’s, mostly males that are maturational delayed.  We are observing the neotenization of society, the same as biological neoteny, with individuals taking longer to mature, with infant features emerging later and later, particularly the ability to speak.  Those with autism and Asperger’s are the white crest of the wave.  Massive numbers of males are taking longer to mature.

Keep in mind small, little-visited island nations with complicated languages, where children are the only ones to learn those languages.  Then, in world culture at large, consider the additional years that children are taking to absorb the world and develop their communication interface.  The neotenization factor is giving kids in the world at large a longer time to have that special ability to learn language.  It’s as if the astonishing lingual creativity obvious in an island culture is now manifesting in world culture at large, with our children embracing new technology and making new stuff up at a rate unfathomable even a generation ago.

And, in the way that formerly a culture could be isolated, the whole world is becoming integrated, allowing the incubation of creative novelties in the midst of the cacophony of societal interconnecting and combining.

We are members of this island nation with the children growing older while retaining the ability of the very young to create, integrate and understand.

As this child’s ability to make and manifest language creativity emerges in the adult of our species, observe a society that will explode with novelty.

Laughter will become the language of us all.

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 Mind,” Simon Baron-Cohen’s mindblindness, Hopi/Trobriand present tense orientation, and conventional Western dream consciousness, we possibly have an example of a pathway that evolution uses to travel across time and space.

Biology:  Great ape behavior
Society:  Hopi/Trobriand Islander language structure
Ontogeny:  The autistic
Personal Experience:  Dream

The reason that the autistic are assigned to the ontological level of this four-fold parallelism is because  those with autism often feature extreme maturational delay, by definition an ontological experience resulting in the prolongation of infant or young features or characteristics into later developmental ages.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber has explored in detail a hierarchy of individual and societal developmental stages, equivalencies that he believes inform each other.  The works of Jean Gebser and Jurgen Habermas were influential in guiding Wilber to his conclusions.  Wilber proposes that evolution naturally unfolds through seven stages on its way toward achieving a Pierre de Chardin-like Omega Point fruition.

In other places on this website, I have detailed why Omega Point teleological interpretations of evolution seem unnecessary if heterochronic (neoteny and acceleration) processes are presumed to unfold on societal scales.  Let me make an addition to that sense-based rather than religious interpretation of history.  Consider that the near future will be characterized by a return of dream time to society, the proliferation of matrifocal aboriginal primary process thinking and the integration of autistic associational present moment thinking with conventional consciousness.

I’ve been experiencing a powerful feeling that we’ve re-entered the mythological age.  In ways that an individual can have a dream that powerfully informs that person’s life, we have entered a period in our societal unfolding that will serve as both cautionary tale and heroic cycle for perhaps the time that remains to our species.  In the way that an unconscious informs an individual life, the collective unconscious is molding the zeitgeist.  I feel like we are living in a story, a mythic story, with the future chapters not impossible to intuit.

Having hierarchialized for several thousand years, informed by patrifocal social structures, we are now quickly horizontalizing, neotenizing, with society prolonging the features of youth and the aboriginal into society writ large.  Along with surges of creativity, narcissism, associative thinking and cooperation on massive scales with the advent of the web and global commerce, we are also seeing changes in neurology with the maturational-delayed emerging more and more often as the neurology of choice.  In addition to our society reflecting features of our youth, dream consciousness in the everyday is being prolonged into the adult of our species.  Primary process is appearing in waking life; aboriginal intuitions are manifesting in the way our teenagers think.

In other words, the past is becoming the present, dream is bleeding into waking, biology is emerging in society and the natal is manifesting in the adult.

The future is also the past.  The tenses are blending.

What we are becoming is also what we were and always have been

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 Renee was saying, her economics course was comparing Marxist and capitalist models.  Eisler compares her new matrifocal paradigm with both patristic communist and patristic capitalist orientations.

During the conversation with Renee, my mind began to bounce the concepts I’ve been playing with up against the economic models and the kinds of institutions that societies create.  It would be fascinating to explore the overlap between social structure, the nature of institutions that different social structures create and the ways that manifestations of individual heterochronic tendencies within a society manifest in that society’s institutions.

A thought that slammed me during the discussion was the possibility that early institutions in the United States, and the profound innovation that followed, were a direct result of youngest sons and youngest daughters immigrating to this country.  Primogeniture would have encouraged this.  The first-born males would have stayed with the family property.  The first-born females were often married to ally two families and enhance status.

Flipping over to Wikipedia, I am stunned to see noted in the second paragraph, “…This may have resulted in a large number of younger sons of the British aristocracy emigrating to the colonial Southern United States.”  There is likely a pattern here.  This pattern is likely to have unfolded not just in the diaspora to America but in immigration populations across the planet.  Youngest sons and daughters, maturational-delayed sons, maturational-accelerated daughters, those with tendencies toward matrifocal social structure, are the people that immigrate to new locations.  More likely to engage in female choice, separated from families that would choose their mates for them, the immigrants would tend to create societies built from institutions that would encourage equality.  Industry and the commercial environment would more likely feature innovation.

While coming to these conclusions, talking to Renee, my head began to pound in pain.  And then, a little later, waves of nausea.  It being 24 hours later that I’m writing this down, I’m feeling much better, but I am wondering if there is a connection between my somatic distress and the ideas discussed.  Physical distress or emotional elation seems to frequently accompany insight.  It occurs that ideas are preceded by headaches that lift when put to paper, or headaches emerge while ideas get written down and headaches linger after the ideas are expressed.  Making connections is a physical experience.

Regardless, the idea that immigrating human populations may often compel the youngest sons and daughters to leave their societies of origins to begin new societies suggests that more egalitarian, innovative institutions will be characteristic of new societies.  Match this up with pineal testosterone season-of-birth effects on populations moving from equatorial regions to Northern climates and possible dramatic changes in diet and a picture emerges of how human evolution is impacted by movements in populations.

A question to consider is whether birth order and age of mother issues relevant to human evolution and social structure tendencies are applicable to other species when it comes to the movement of populations to new locations.  Are there other species with predictable progeny variations in testosterone and/or estrogen levels based upon mother’s age?  What are the male and female birth order patterns when societies of unestablished individuals break off from central groups?  Are there patterns that suggest that individuals that have broken off from their society of origin are more behaviorally or physiologically flexible than their parents?  Does social structure trend from a patrifocal to a matrifocal direction in immigrating populations?  How would you measure degrees of social structure in nonhuman species?

Perhaps the many ancient fairy tales can provide us guidance.  Always it is the youngest son that returns with blessings after having walked the unconventional path.  His two older brothers fail to achieve what the stories’ youngest son hero inevitably manages to discover.  The youngest son receives help from elves, dwarves, fairies, all manner of mysterious guides and gift givers.

Youngest daughters are similarly blessed in these stories.  With the older sisters married off to the parents’ first choice in a mate, whom the younger daughter marries becomes less important, more open to the invention of chance.  Their lives are less predictable.  They come across fairy godmothers and other powerful mysteries.

In my family, the younger the child, the farther from home they live.  Indeed, that would be one way to test one aspect of this thesis.  I would predict that youngest children live farthest from their parent’s home.

Our ancient stories encourage our youngest children to take chances.  Society structures itself to send the youngest far away.  There may be profound repercussions in our institutions.  Innovation may be blossoming around the youngest where they settle.  Consider that the profound creative, innovative proclivities of the United States may have its origins in progeny of the oldest moms.