Western society’s reverence for art seems to have revolved around good stories. Individuals achieving entrance to the pantheon of great artists often had childhoods and adult lives characterized by extreme stress. In the West, this may be partly because the artist represents an individual struggling to integrate nearly impossible polarities: community sensibilities with the cult of individuality. An artist seeks to portray what unites us, walking a path seeking unities, while alone. The stories of an artist’s struggle are also a description of how each individual seeks both an allegiance to community and self. It can be argued that the great Western artist finds a way to integrate the two, at least in his or her work.

I’ve described two neurological archetypes in my work on human evolution, autism and current social transformations. There is the male, maturationally delayed, and the female, accelerated, and both are matrifocal, often left-handed, leaning toward autism, inclined toward primary process and inclined toward being simultaneous thinkers. The other neurological archetype includes the familiar male who is maturationally accelerated and the female who is delayed (neotenous), and both are patrifocal, narrative-thinking, split-brained, normal right-handers. I’ve recently been playing with the idea that each displays a unique form of imagination, with primary process individuals exhibiting abilities to perceive and integrate larger patterns contrasted with split-brain thinkers that can easily imagine what does not exist while establishing the steps to get there.

What I’m considering at this particular moment is what might be occurring when a primary process thinker is introduced in childhood to split-brain thinking conventions, or the opposite, when a split-brain thinker is guided or propelled into how a primary process thinker thinks. For me, there is something similar to the life work of an artist, who is seeking to integrate seemingly incompatible polarities. It strikes me that by understanding the world by the way the world is perceived and processed, and offering ways that these two basic paradigms can relate, we might be encouraging a healthy integration.

It may be often the case that those artists and theorists that achieve success in their chosen avocations or professions are those individuals that have accidentally or unconsciously found ways to perceive and interpret information considered from both a primary process and a split-brain perspective. I have hypothesized that our society evolved from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame and is now headed back to matrifocal, though in many ways what we are experiencing currently is integration. I’m hypothesizing that one way to approach how unique thinkers think is to consider that some individuals experience and exhibit an integration of both primary process and split-brain thinking processes.

It is my guess the integration is often not without stress. In just the way the artist in the West often acts as an example or symbol of the difficulty of synthesis between community and self, or the other ways of describing the existential polarities that we as humans wrestle with, those individuals that discover an ability to live in both primary process and split-brain worlds probably often experience the relationship as a struggle.

An example of two forms of imagination integration might be aboriginal children with natural primary process thinking inclinations that are raised in a Western home by split-brain parents, except that the parents are artists, and the home features an extended family with a mother’s sister and a mother’s mother living in the house. A net result might be an environment somewhat neurologically (and socially) familiar, with constant exposure to what may feel like a complementary opposite neurological condition. The children may become adults with a facility to intuit big picture, simultaneous, interconnected understanding with step-by-step abilities to achieve goals by imagining something that does not yet exist.

A perhaps more familiar example might be one that approximates the artist paradigm in Western culture. Consider a primary process thinker, a left-handed person, with left-handed parents. Borderline autistic, an Asperger’s candidate, this person is traumatized in early childhood and finds himself or herself withdrawing, except the world that he or she withdraws into features an enormous number of words. This person discovers that words are effective at creating a security zone isolating personal experience from a threatening environment. The person becomes an avid reader and uses his or her global imagination to fill the world up with the images his or her words create. Nevertheless, as a primary process thinker, community feels essential, resulting in a vivid imagination devoted to an imagined community, a community featuring many interconnections.

I hypothesize two neurological archetypes with few overt pathways toward integration of the two frames of reference. Some people, over the course of their life, experience various degrees of integration. Sometimes this occurs in an atmosphere characterized by love and affection. Sometimes this occurs in atmospheres featuring distress and misunderstanding. Both situations can result in individuals with enhanced abilities to serve society.

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A question from a visitor…

“If it’s the split brain, smaller corpus callosum and left hemisphere dominance that make us self-conscious and able to exercise imagination (pretending to be someone else, somewhere else, some other time), then how come imagination is associated with those leaning towards ancestral brain wiring, that is, less split brain and a better integrated right hemisphere?”

Let me start off by saying I’ve wondered about this in connection with two very different kinds of male left-handers that I come in contact with. Then there is the third group of left-handed males, who are autistic. One group is filled with social, talkative, articulate, focused, smart, imaginative males. The second group tends to be easily annoyed, gruff, focused, somewhat obsessed, smart and imaginative. Imagination seems to be closely associated with left-handedness in males. I don’t know why there are two kinds of nonautistic males (if my observations are at all useful). Perhaps one is high in estrogen and the other low, with both low in testosterone.

With females, it’s a bit different. Offering attention to left-handed females over the last ten years, I have noticed a very strong clustering of the classic matrifocal archetype, with many brilliant, commanding,…

There are mornings when it seems like I have nothing to say. Perhaps those kinds of mornings are more common than I am aware of, and I am typing anyway, not realizing I have nothing to say. That I so often find myself describing my experiences, after having lived for so many years feeling like I was struggling to get something out, is different. At this point I feel like there is not much that I do not share.

Well, that’s not totally correct. Often I feel frustrated, alone, not understood. I mostly don’t go into that. It just seems nonproductive. Usually, when I start writing, those feelings evaporate. Clearly, writing has evolved to become an important part of my process of integrating feeling integrated with my community and myself. Interestingly, the process of integration often begins with my feeling isolated.

Evidently, it is central to my creative process to be in touch with that part of me that is alone while connecting to that which is connected. It feels somewhat paradoxical that accompanying myself while frustrated, alone and not understood is integral to my feeling connected, accompanied and part of something larger than myself.

Seeking integration, achieving integration, is…

The medium informs and guides the kinds of insight that the artist can experience. Directly related are the contexts that the artist creates within. If a writer writes alone in a closed-door room at hours when everyone else is asleep, there is a good chance that the experience of being alone will influence what is created. Compare a writer that types with both hands, both hemispheres contributing to what is produced, to a painter using only one hand and the possible influence that has upon what is painted.

As a comic artist working with the medium of newsprint, I produced work with no one else around. Many pieces would be viewed by more than one hundred thousand, yet I was receiving almost no feedback because the viewer was usually far away. Musicians produce work accompanied by an audience, usually a group of a hundred or less. The musicians are receiving feedback as an integrated part of the process of creating.

McLuhan made clear that the medium is the message. That insight operates on several scales. It is not only the case that the channels we receive information through influence the content of the communication, the medium we choose to send…

I started journaling when I was about 16. Over the decades, that evolved to my just recording dreams. My handwriting was (and is) terrible, so trying to figure out what I was saying at any time was so much work that I mostly only just recorded my thoughts and feelings, rarely revisiting them.

Nevertheless, on those occasions when I tried to glean some feelings from the past, I was struck by how few metaphors I used to explain a thought or feeling. Mostly, I just described my experience by writing down my feelings. Not only did this make it very difficult to read, but it seemed to provide the raw emotions that were expressed in a way that made them more difficult to absorb. Without metaphor, access seemed difficult.

Through the years, I’ve encouraged myself to use metaphor and graspable images to enhance my ability to communicate what I want to say. At first, it felt very forced, so deliberate were the efforts to make what I had to say understandable. Over the last ten years, it has become easier. Starting this blog two years ago pushed me further in the direction of writing to be understood at the same…

I’m just finishing this ~140-page work, Evolution, Autism and Social Change, which summarizes most of the principles I’m playing with.  It skips all the political commentary that is scattered throughout this blog.  The work also does not spend numerous pages exploring the presuppositions behind the principles of, and the presuppositional differences between, a maturational theory of evolution and the Neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest frames focusing on mutation and adaptation.  Explaining differences between evolution theories ended up requiring a need to explain integral differences between paradigms by detailing how theory is created.  This felt like too much for a 100-page piece.  I’ll save it for the larger work if I ever write it.

A larger work would also describe a short history, most influential theorists and currently accepted theories in the disciplines being explored.  Most of my writing falls within anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology.  Still, I discuss primatology, psychology, consciousness, medicine and endocrinology.  It is impossible in a short work to offer a several-discipline context.  It’s even unwieldy in a longer work, particularly one that seeks to communicate with a lay audience.  There is also the fact that though I am somewhat familiar with what I am talking about in anthropology, neuropsychology…

As an artist who has worked with several media, I am familiar with feeling attracted to a particular medium, imagination engaged, and having to wait until I can exhibit some facility before I have an experience of creative closure.  It took almost a year of sowing before I was fairly facile at creating puppets.  Watercolor skills were long in coming.  I practiced with pencil and ink, literally for years, before I felt confident that what would come out was close to what I had to say.

I’m now slowly building writing skills.  My first book-length work posts shortly.  It was built from the short essays that comprise this blog.  At the same time, I’m learning video production, accompanying these short blog essays with Elia’s and Jordan’s music and Creative Commons contributions by artists and amateur photographers and videographers from around the world.

Engagement in theorizing on human origins and the dynamics of human and biological evolution is similar to, if not identical to, creating art.  Participating in art, I feel drawn toward a medium while experiencing that which wants to be expressed.  Medium and content feel closely allied.  The process or medium used to express the experience, and the experience…

“On the other hand, his sense of aesthetic appreciation, based on the pleasure which man can receive from the construction and matching of musical patterns involving the interaction of rhythm, melody, and harmony and visual patterns resulting from the interaction of form and color, has also resulted from the freeing of his association areas from the more rigid relationship with the lower centers and with the more stereotyped, amorphous symbol patterns which constitute the inner reality of all other animals (Koestler 1964).  Aesthetic appreciation, therefore, is a foetalised form of the continuous search for congruity or matching between models of the environment, models which the animal constantly constructs in its brain by processing its perceptions and the stereotypes retained in its memory store.”  (Crombie, Donald L., “The Group System of Man and Paedomorphosis,” Current Anthropology 12(2) (1971):163.)

Going through my store of excerpts from several hundred papers and close to 300 books, I came across the passage above, having no memory of having recorded it.  This is what I’ve been playing with the last few weeks as regards a theory of music and aesthetics that emerge as a result of embryonic features appearing in the behavior and experience of adults.…

Occasionally I write a letter to a writer whose work I respect and/or adore and share what I have been working on.  Four years ago, I wrote Tom Robbins, my favorite novelist, a long letter describing my life in a style I don’t use here.  I was being light.  I was trying to get a handle on a series of events, events I haven’t yet described in this blog.  The letter to Robbins was not only my way of communicating appreciation for his work but was also an attempt to put into words something I’d never tried to put into words before.

Tom’s response, “Your fascinating letter of 16 December caught up with me yesterday in this distant outpost, and I have to say it (your epistle) was more interesting and compelling than any novel I’ve read in the past few years.  Banks of thanks for “blabbing” about your life (and quite a life it’s been) in such a richly rewarding manner….”  He went on to ask about one of the studies I cited regarding a percentage of the population exhibiting left-handedness with features a lot like the characters in his books.

As I have noted perhaps far too often…

I was a professional artist, making portions of my living painting, cartooning, designing and illustrating over the years.  I am now a professional web developer, making my living managing a firm that creates and maintains websites, markets websites and designs unique applications for online communication.  I am also an amateur evolutionary biological theorist, perhaps the world’s only expert on the application of nineteenth-century heterochronist principles of maturational delay and acceleration to human evolution and social change.  In my study, I integrate recent neuropsychological brain-structure discoveries and the influences of testosterone and estrogen on the brain and physiology, along with how social structure and the environment impact these adjustments.

I know.  This sounds complicated and arcane.  It’s not.  It takes less time to become familiar with these concepts than it takes to learn to drive a car.  What it boils down to is the exact principles behind the way that we as individuals mature, species change and societies transform.  This is deeply intuitive.  It’s just that until recently we didn’t have the information that could tie it all together.  In addition, our obsession with natural selection obfuscated patterns more complicated than “survival of the fittest.”

A problem is that although I…

“The fact that value judgments influence my proposals does not mean that I am making the mistake of which I have accused the positivists–that of trying to kill metaphysics by calling it names.  I do not even go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science.  For it cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas which have obstructed the advance of science there have been others — such as speculative atomism — which have aided it.  And looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical.’”  (Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York:  Basic Books, 1959), p. 39.)

Popper goes on to say that no matter how you come up with an idea, if it is not proved, it is not science.  In addition, falsifiability is central to the truth.  Thomas Kuhn focuses more on the process whereby science accepts a thesis and the repercussions of believing…

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore,

…

“The entire scheme represents a hierarchically organized system of increasing size, differentiation, and complexity, in which each component affects, and is affected by, all the other components, not only at its own level but at lower and higher levels as well.  Thus, the arrows in Figure12-2 not only go upward from the gene, eventually reaching all the way to the external environment through the activities of the organism, but the arrows of influence return from the external environment through various levels of the organism back to the genes.  While the feedforward or feedupward nature of the genes has always been appreciated from the time of Weismann and Mendel on, the feedbackward or feeddownward influences have usually been thought to stop at the level of the cell membrane.  The newer conception is one of a totally interrelated, fully coactional system in which the activity of the genes themselves can be affected through the cytoplasm of the cell by events originating at any other level in the system, including the external environment.”  (G. Gilbert, Individual Development and Evolution (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 145.)

The article appearing in the 11/8/09 BBC News, “Early Life Stress ‘Changes’…

Last night was another one of those nights where I dreamt evolutionary theory all night long.  It was the same thing over and over.  My dreams were outlining a sequence of processes involving estrogen and testosterone influencing behavior and physical features in progeny.  Estrogen and testosterone were impacting children when those hormone levels changed in parents, influencing the parents’ daily life in numerous ways.

In the dreams, I wasn’t observing the situations as much as I was writing descriptions of the process, pathways of influence.  Occasionally I’d see something from an auto window while the car was moving, as if what I was seeing was an example of what I was seeking to describe.  Getting the text right and the sequences correct seemed the main focus of the dreams.  The main communication seemed to be that humans are heavily impacted by events in their lives.  The environment informs our experience, changing not only ourselves but our children.

This operated at three scales.  I awoke unclear what those scales were, though while dreaming I had understood.

A big issue in the dream was that these things were easily explainable.  A main focus was on communicating the principles in a way that…

Three things are bouncing around my brain after I drank coffee to knock out a headache, which worked.

I’m finishing the over 100 piece that seeks to provide a less-stressed introduction to this theory than the earlier “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  First, the theory is now called “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  The name changed when I hypothesized that estrogen manages the timing of maturation.

That, by the way, was a bizarre realization.  Bizarre for two reasons.  First, it came to me without my being aware that it had come to me.  I just found myself working with that premise, not having noted when it became part of my thoughts.  Second, for more than 11 years, I’ve been working with testosterone controlling the rate of maturation without it having ever crossed my mind that it would be interesting to know what managed the timing.  It just never struck me that it was relevant or knowable, even though I’d been discussing rates and timing of maturation for 11 years.  At the same time, for 11 years, I’d been wondering how specifically estrogen might fit into the theory that was coming together.  I sensed that the theory was out of…

Exploring human origins and social change paradigms is far more than the specialty of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists.  To understand our origins, it is necessary to understand human consciousness, human consciousness as it relates to prehuman consciousness, and whatever alternative consciousness is necessary to put the other two in context.  In other words, to understand ourselves and our society’s changes, let’s consider an alternative intervention.  Let’s try less dry explorations.  Let’s get wet.

What began as a creative exercise several years ago has evolved into an unconscious routine.  I used to make believe, or run an “as if” frame, that said that if society is changing according to a hidden yet overarching dynamic, the future could be intuited or predicted by patterns or trends observable in the present.  I’d place myself in a meditative space and listen.

The deepest, most impact-filled presupposition that I live with is Descartes’ conclusion that because I am aware, I’ll accept that I exist.  Next in importance is this presupposition:  Because I experience feeling part of something larger than myself, I will accept the experience as valid, even though I began meditating almost 40 years ago with that experience as a goal.  In other words,…

There is a tacit assumption or consideration that underlies much of what I write here.  Occasionally, I’m not subtle about this belief.  The idea is that art and science can be closely allied.  Perhaps they often are closely allied, except at present science seems rather obsessed with the idea that theory formation should be engaged in with the same obsession with detail as is necessary in the proof of theory.  That tends to keep artist/blogger/theorists writing for nonscientists.

Artists are just as obsessed as scientists, except their focus is usually on internal experience and the translation of that internal experience in a way that provides visitors something new.  Often, artists are exploring what it is like to be human, tasting and evaluating consciousness as the artists produce varying treats from the particular kitchen that is their medium.  Sometimes the artists attempt to put the concoction into words.  Some artists specialize in words.  For many artists, part of being an artist is having a unique experience without having to use words.

I am an artist, trained in watercolor and pen and ink, who now works in the medium of storytelling, collecting patterns from different science disciplines and showing how the different…

Strip religion of mythology and the discussion revolves around consciousness, awareness and identity.  Darwin was sensitive to his theory being received in a context that it would be used to support or deny the existence of god.  Darwin himself struggled with how exactly he understood god. After150 years, discussions of evolution often still focus on the battle between the theory of natural selection and Judeo-Christian myths.

The particular kind of consciousness that a normal human experiences and displays is what I’ve been calling split consciousness.  This understanding is premised on primary process consciousness–the one time, one place, no opposites consciousness of infants, animals, dream, the unconscious and the autistic–being what we evolved from and still retain while sleeping, while small or while in hypnotic trance.

I’ve hypothesized that the transition from primary process consciousness to split consciousness was compelled by runaway sexual selection focused on dance, which eventually resulted in a unique brain structure exhibiting two hemispheres of unequal size and a smaller corpus callosum.  This process was perhaps encouraged by a bridging of language from gesture to speech, enhancing an ability to represent a thing with a sound instead of a sign and motion.  Nevertheless, at this point we…

One of the most challenging things about producing unique theory in an amateur context is the necessity of embracing the amateur milieu.  The academic and hobby environments are very different on several levels.  As an amateur, it is easy to believe that your audience is at least partly academics if what you are producing is the kind of product, unique evolutionary theory, for example, that an academic would produce.  That is a nonuseful perspective.

The academic and amateur environments operate on different premises and come with different appropriate behaviors.  I have relatives, friends and colleagues that are professors, so though I don’t speak from the experience of being an academic, this is not an unfamiliar world.

In academia, though the concept of the commons is integral to the idea of a learning community, knowledge sources are closely associated with individual contributions.  Struggles for recognition or for being a knowledge source are integral to institutional and discipline respect.  There are very specific conventions for how knowledge is shared and contributions are made, beginning with getting a degree in the area where you are seeking support for your ideas.  Criticism and analysis of contributions are part of the system, so it is…

I have a friend whose dad was a famous guru and whose brother was a mathematics professor at a prestigious college.  My buddy chose a profession that surrounded him with art.  That’s how I met him.  I provided him illustrations.  Thirty years ago he made it to an endocrinologist to discover that he didn’t have schizophrenia as diagnosed.  He needed his hormones adjusted.  Pills taken, life settled down.  He was always going to be obsessive-compulsive, but the terror and paranoia went away.

Every autumn, my diabetic stepdaughter goes through endocrinological hell as her auto-immune system goes haywire.  Most years she spends some time in the hospital.  Doctors don’t know what to do other than to address the symptoms.  Gwyn is an artist of the palette, inventing new tastes and flavors and sharing them with those that visit her in her restaurant.

Where I live in Chicago, one of the most common topics of conversation is the weather.  When we ask each other how we’re doing, we respond with the conventional answer, fine.  Yet, somehow, discussing the weather is also a way to discuss how we are doing, but it is done in such a way that we aren’t getting sidetracked…

I read pretty much nothing but fiction until I was 30.  I’ve read almost exclusively nonfiction since then.  Whereas when I was younger I’d enjoy reading to feel the impact of a complete story that I could immerse myself in, these days I jump from book to book, tracking the larger story of evolution, a story I feel surrounded by almost all the time.

With each book I read I feel I’m exploring this evolving world.  I’ve developed reading habits that encourage that experience.

I often refer to Freud in evolutionary theory.  Freud was a recapitulationist, paying close attention to how the different scales of evolution interrelated.  I spent much time studying Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnotic therapeutic intervention and the humanists, such as Fritz Pearls, Rogers, Maslow, Janov and their contemporaries.  From 1980 to about 1984, I studied and read everything published by the NLP School of psychology and communication, becoming a licensed practitioner in 1981.  My artistic sensibilities were deeply influenced by the sense-based model.  I learned to interpret and understand relationship dynamics by observing behaviors.  Interconnection became a reality rather than just an intuited possibility.  Studying NLP, exploring how modeling worked and how models were developed, I felt…

The introduction to the theory discussed on this site is “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  It’s been viewed over a thousand times.  I’ve received feedback from perhaps 30 academics.  Most find it too condensed a presentation of unfamiliar material to convince them that it represents something useful.  So, I’m playing with the idea of another introduction, one that is less dense and more playful.  Only, it’s evolved from an introduction to a book.  It’s almost 100 pages.

Those folks reading this entry who have been more or less following along on this blog journey, please tell me in the comments below which parts of this thesis you’ve found most interesting.  What I’m thinking at this point is that a new introduction would begin with the last big piece that fell into place, the discovery that estrogen may be what manages the timing of maturation.  That seemed to communicate fairly well when I wrote people this piece.

Consider this as a sequence of themes or subjects in an introduction:

The trick is to find a way to take a step-by-step narrative path through an experience that implies a global gestalt understanding of a whole.  I find…

One of the astonishing things about being a human is that the great majority of us open our mouth to start a sentence with almost no awareness of a process that will culminate in a relatively articulately communicated thought or experience.  Talk about unconscious.  We have no clue how we do this, yet we associate it with our conscious experience.

Being part of the process that produces the words that appear on this blog is no less mystifying.  The fact that so much of the content emerges as my fingers type the words, while I subvocalize content having to do with the nature of evolution and transformation, is beyond me.  The stuff feels interesting.  I start to feel connections.  My fingers type.

So, opportunities emerge that suggest how two or more of these various strands connect to one another.  A connection feels interesting.  I type.  Yet, there come moments when I’m feeling stumped.  I intuit a connection or connections but they feel so deep, subtle or variable that describing them feels more like making a map than like traveling a territory.  All words are maps.  Using words, I’m playing with associations.  Nevertheless, there are times when I’m happy if I…

Clive Thompson’s September Wired article, “The New Literacy,” had me thinking several things.

The article describes an academic’s conclusion that there is a writing renaissance going on with astonishing increases in writing by students as they use communications technologies.  It has been believed by many that texting and social media are deprecating communication.  Professor Andrea Lunsford concluded the opposite.  New technologies are encouraging the young to share experiences by writing.

Several things come to mind.

First, texting is acquiring a number of unique conventions that are beginning to approach a different language.  I don’t speak text.  This is a function of my peer group, my age and the fact that I’m at my computer three-fourths of my waking hours.  Perhaps text is approaching another language as its conventions proliferate.  If that is the case, then maybe this is a good thing as regards the inculcation of flexibility of mind.  As youth text, they encourage an ability to experience the world through an alternative perspective.

Second, the day will come when voice translators advance to offer an effortless ability to take our spoken words and transform them into written text.  Gifted youth will find they can profoundly proliferate their productions by…

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…