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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“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, discerning, focused females being left-handed. Creativity seems not necessarily related.

So where am I going with this? Marian Annett discussed the balanced polymorphism that makes up a society in the context of the UK, where she is a practicing neuropsychologist. Those in the center are the right-handed, but not the extremely right-handed. These people, Annett believes, retain a language facility advantage yet avoid physical and mental maladies by not being at the right extreme. The extremely right-handed, she believes, retain several disadvantages with few natural talents. Those at the left end–the left-handed and extremely left-handed–experience a different variety of disadvantages. Yet, Annett noted an astonishing number of extremely talented people appearing at the extreme left end, out there where a number of unique physical and mental conditions plague those people. Those conditions include autism, dyslexia, stuttering, allergies, Asperger’s and perhaps obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and bi-polar personality disorder.

Side note. Annett discovered that dyslexia actually comes in two forms, a phonetic version mostly retained by lefties and a visual dyslexia that mostly affects extreme right-handers. It is possible that several conditions that are assigned one name actually have two separate etiologies composed of these two very different neurologies. For example, schizophrenia may come in both nonlateralized and highly cerebral-lateralized versions with additional narrow and wide corpus callosum variations. OCD may also come in these two very different variations.

With the current neurodiversity movement and the writing of Dr. Michael Fitzgerald, there is now a focus on a number of historical figures who offered world-changing paradigms and who seemed to feature traits of those with autism. Astonishingly creative imaginations with an ability to tease out interconnected wholes and brains with difficulty integrating the thoughts of other humans seem paradoxically closely related.

I think the answer to the question “How come imagination is associated with those leaning towards ancestral brain wiring, that is, less split brain and a better integrated right hemisphere?” has to do with two very different types of imagination engaged in by the two kinds of brains. The old, less split, more integrated, left-handed, autistic-leaning brain has a more direct access to holistic, interconnected, simultaneous, multilayered understanding, except with less grasp of the relationship between those connections and a self. On the other hand, the right-handed, split-brained person with a smaller corpus callosum, who is a narrative thinker, can far easier imagine what is not, and estimate, step by step, how exactly to manipulate time and space to arrive there.

Whereas the lefty with relative ease grasps what is, the righty can fairly effortlessly make up what is not.

Both exercise imagination. One has less self awareness in the context of a self’s relationship with others, but nevertheless he or she has a relative easier access to the existing, supporting, interconnected infrastructure, in no small part because of there being less distraction from a self. The other, with heightened sensitivity to self and self’s relationship with others, is acutely aware of differing perspectives, able to estimate much that does not exist, often failing to understand what is real.

Some male left-handers seem to travel in both worlds. This results in an almost separate class of individuals with abilities both to integrate and separate. Four of the last five presidents were perhaps these kinds of lefties. I believe part of what society is wrestling with today is some kind of synthesis or integration of the two paradigms leading to these kinds of individuals. We need both an ability to imagine what does not exist and the power to perceive and adjust to what does exist. These two usually separate forms of imagination merge, at the societal level, in the societal balanced polymorphism hypothesized by Annett.

I hypothesize these two imaginations are starting to merge in the neurologies of certain individuals, particularly in the matrifocal/patrifocal hybrid society that is developing. Another way of saying this is that the balanced polymorphism intuited by Annett is shifting leftward, exhibiting a different kind of center. A net result may be a wiser, more grounded, less ambitious, less competitive culture with an ability to integrate into its multiplace, multitime, creation-of-opposites imagination an understanding of how exactly we are interconnected with the world as it really is.

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 about isolation and accompaniment.

Exploring, weighing, interpreting and integrating biological, social, ontological and personal information is clearly metaphoric for simply embracing different elements of myself. How is it possible to understand anything that is not really about the self? Where does anything get stored if not in a drawer, an interpretation apparatus, which already exists?

Right now it’s feeling like everything is art. Whatever we do, it is an attempt to both reveal the self while at the same time change the definition of the self, providing more ways that self can be revealed. This is a very male view of the world. Males seem to struggle with the nature of barriers, females with the dynamic of relationship.

This is one of those mornings when I feel male and alone.

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 information through influences what we, as creators, are aware of.

An artist is drawn toward a particular medium because that medium complements what the artist has to say and how she or he wants to say it. It then becomes the case that the medium informs what the artist becomes aware of because a medium compels attention to only certain classes of detail. Producing video using exclusively imagery from the Creative Commons, exploring over 10,000 images and videos for each 5 minute piece, engenders a different awareness, suggests different insights than painting an illustration.

Perhaps someday there will be grammar school units on use of awareness when it becomes not only obvious that how we choose to exercise attention influences experience, but that particular kinds of attention are uniquely useful for particular goals. As we grow to understand how humans evolved split consciousness, school may become at least partly about teaching children how to direct the kind of consciousness appropriate for different paths or tasks.

Art, spirituality, sociality and science are four words for four different zones of consciousness direction. When we know the particulars of the different way that attention is directed in these four zones, children can be guided to learn by acquiring appropriate consciousness. If the medium is the message, we only need to learn the dance steps that juxtapose with each medium.

As an artist, one’s medium informs and guides the kinds of insight that the artist can experience. As a human, understanding medium is to understand how we understand.

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 time that I wrote to express what I had to say.

This last summer, listening to the computer-generated music compositions of my son, Elia, I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye my work regarding evolution in video format with Elia’s music deepening the communication of those written compositions. In August, when he and I drove down roadways that flanked the Mississippi, I began to interpret what I was seeing in ways that would impact what I was writing. Music, images and words were starting to interact.

That process deepens. Using the teleprompter, I lay down the narrative. I collect photos and videos off of Flickr’s Creative Commons section and occasionally Wikipedia Commons and other sources. I shoot some video myself. I consult Elia regarding music. I don’t tax the capabilities of Final Cut Express, utilizing just the basics for now, discovering what feels like a whole other hidden, creative capability inside me.

For several years, I produced comic strips and panels. Words and pictures told a narrative story. Producing video, I find a part of me prepared to produce work in a similar format. When creating comics, I wait for an image to appear as I talk to myself, encouraging creations, but when creating video, I search the work of other artists and amateurs. As a professional artist and amateur theorist I find myself deeply appreciating the Creative Commons. Both professional and amateur are treated with respect.

I am slipping down into a whole new world. I have disappeared down rabbit holes in the past. Marcia has shared with me her fear that I am about to disappear. I am enthralled. I foresee spending many hours searching for content on the Internet and shooting my own video in search of evocative examples of what my words are seeking to say. It’s only a matter of time before the words start to take their cues from the outside, not the inside, taking into consideration the images, sounds and music that I feel influenced by.

My words have always emerged from somewhere deep within me. What I’m sensing now is that my environment is about to start making words.

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 and evolutionary biology, I am woefully unqualified to provide much depth in the other disciplines I touch upon.  Intimidated by what I am doing, I prefer to avoid behaving like I know what I am talking about in a discipline outside where that discipline touches upon my basic thesis.  So, in Evolution, Autism and Social Change, I offer about ten pages where I review classic heterochronic theory, or the subdiscipline of evolutionary biology most integral to understanding what I am doing.  I’m worried those ten pages may lose three-quarters of my readers.

There are many philosophical implications to Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  That also gets saved for a larger work.  I estimated 17 sections of implications.  That was way too much for what is essentially an introduction.

The future implications of the theory also seemed too much information for a short work.  Those ten threads were left for the larger work.

One principle or concept has emerged since Evolution, Autism and Social Change went to the editor.  The central thesis of my theorizing condensed to the following sentence about nine months ago:  The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution. It feels lately like it has condensed even further.  The word maturity now summarizes the central thesis.  Whereas Darwin focused on conception and death with his theory of natural selection, which merged survival of the fittest with heritable traits, I find that the word “maturity” suggests all that which occurs between conception and demise that influences evolution.  I’m not sure how to integrate this understanding with the work now with the editor.

When I first wrote this stuff up in 1998 in the website serpentfd.org, estrogen’s connection with the dynamic was not at all clear or understood.  It was all about testosterone.  The model was expressed as a four-layered process unfolding in the push-and-pull way a serpent crawls.  Though I understood that the timing of maturation was integral, I had no idea what informed timing.  So I concentrated only on changes in rates of maturation.

With what I’m finishing now, I feel a whole is communicated, even though much has been left out.  Nevertheless, as someone who is not an academic–I am an artist by training–I am now left with the choice of how exactly the book is to be framed.  I am concluding that it is more genuine and reasonable to make this a book with an artistic rather than an academic slant.  Joining sections with illustrations seems right.  It makes it more accessible.  To pitch the work to fit academic conventions would probably be a waste of time.  Academics don’t offer attention to the work of nonacademics in their field.  It’s just off their radar.  Academics don’t even often offer attention to multidisciplinary theories that include their discipline.  They are used to regarding the work of those that have put in the time to get a degree in their particular discipline, those that have something to lose if they don’t perform.

Maybe 30 years ago a book came out with many diagram-like illustrations describing the spiritual transformation that was going to occur as a result of several planets aligning in a certain way.  The book was called Harmonic Convergence and was written by Jose Arguelles.  Even though I’m writing a book on evolution grounded in conventional science, there is really no format precursor to this book I’m finishing.  The closest thing that comes to mind is that weird astrology book.  Bummer.

Trying to find a publisher for what I’ve done seems a prescription to feel rejected.  Though some well-known authors, scientists and theorists have said kind and/or respectful things to me in emails, or just asked questions (Simon Baron-Cohen, William Irwin Thompson, Elaine Morgan, Riane Eisler, Tom Robbins), none has gone so far as to offer firm support for what is clearly an unproven theory, though they have usually had encouraging things to say.  I don’t think a publisher interprets encouragement as support.  I will self-publish.

I have several friends that have written books and found publishers.  Just because a publishing company puts a work into print does not mean it promotes the work.

So, I’ll publish this myself, if I bring it to print.  I’ll begin by posting this as a free pdf download. April 1st is my target date.  It will be difficult to categorize.  I’ll mull over ways to promote it.  How many books are out there purporting to explain autism from an evolutionary perspective using a new feminine theory of evolution, with illustrations?

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 itself, feel closely related.

By merging a medium with my own experience, art emerges that is based upon making sense.  Theorizing how evolution operates, like art, I at first feel drawn to particular ideas, books, disciplines and authors, intuiting that here an answer lies.  I feel that once I have accumulated and stored the content I am looking for, patterns will emerge that will offer an experience of integration.  Congregations of ideas, books, disciplines and authors feel to me like an artistic media.  My attraction to a knowledge cluster is predicated on my intuiting a hidden integration that when matched with my experience will offer epiphany.

Right now, I am feeling aware of a congregation of information in an area I don’t know well.  I don’t know if I’ll find myself flinging my attention in that direction.  This information area has to do with the relationship among nonhuman animal populations, social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, acceleration, endocrinology and ontogeny.  My studies have revolved almost exclusively around humans.  I’m sensing a deep and evocative story accompanying an understanding of how these principles work outside humans.

What I’ve been drifting toward is evolutionary theory based upon principles of maturity.  This is a complement to evolution based upon conception and death.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as an exposition on the survival of the fit, describes both the impact of demise on the survival of specific traits, and the power of a belief in heritability, how a being is conceived to inform a future life.  Between death and conception, or conception and death, is ontogeny, or maturation.  Integral to understanding evolution is how maturation influences and is influenced.  Exploring social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, acceleration, endocrinology, pubertal timing, environmental influences and ontogeny, we can begin to get an idea of how evolution operates outside of death and conception.  The artist in me intuits that an evolutionary epiphany accompanies an understanding of evolution’s other half, the part which happens while beings are alive.  It’s not just about when they are conceived and die.

An artist presupposes that integration is inevitable once a medium is respectfully explored.  A theorist can enter discipline explorations with similar sensitivities.  Presupposing connection is easy for an artist.  No violation of orthodoxy is implied.  Presupposing connection for a theorist can be heresy.  In a reductionist milieu, to behave as if something is true (connection between not obviously connected parts) that has not been proven true is often considered deeply inappropriate.

As an artist, I often feel compelled to find connections among two or more things which are not obviously related.  It is an obsession.  It is an obsession that periodically offers an experience of integration.  As a theorist, I feel compelled to discover and reveal connections among things not obviously related.  For me, epiphany results.

Presupposing connection offers an experience of integration.  It’s the same in science and in art.

“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.

This is not looking at art as a contingent or accidental property associated with intelligence that was naturally selected because intelligence exhibits facility with tools.  Art is instead approached as central to what humans sexually selected in each other as they sought mates exhibiting sensitivity to aesthetics.

In addition, the passage above suggests that art itself reflects an embryonic dynamic, a period in ontogeny when growth is characterized by an environment integrally involved with how an individual develops.

A question emerges.  I posit that neoteny is central to human evolution driven by sexual selection/social structure and environmental issues, with the creativity of infants appearing in the behavior of adults.  In addition, I consider, as the passage above suggests, that actual embryonic processes themselves are reflected in the aesthetic dynamics of our species.  Is there a relationship between neotenic physical features appearing in species over time and the creative exhibition of either males and/or females when displaying to achieve a mate?  In other words, do other species show alliances between neoteny and creativity?  How are neoteny and sexual selection closely allied outside humans?

In an earlier piece, I surmised that increases in estrogen in the female would also increase her tendency to focus with more discrimination on features in a potential mate while perhaps paying closer attention to her young.  If patterns in nature operate similarly to the way I describe how humans may have evolved, then might the exhibition of creativity in other species besides humans be also an exhibition of a tendency to prolong infant or embryo features into the adult of the species, where they would then provide males more behavioral flexibility when it comes to accommodating female predilection for the unique?

Does female choice result in not only sexual selection but a tendency toward male neoteny, resulting in the emergence of creativity when seeking mates?

It is rare when I think of human evolution dynamics in the context of other animals.  Doing so now, I find myself wondering if larger patterns are in play.

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 in these entries, I’m more than a little insecure about my ability to successfully communicate my evolution ideas and experiences in my life.  With time, I feel more facile with words and confident that what I experience I can share.  With the diminution of the feeling of isolation, the accompanying self-aggrandizement also fades, which is good.  Wrestling with putting into words five major lifelong dream themes and the hidden events those themes often represented is part of what I wrote Robbins about.  I recently put the whole thing into words, about 30 pages, but I neglected to accompany the writing with the lighter touch I used in writing the Robbins letter.  Getting the whole thing out of me felt more like excavating a mouthful of molar roots, a wrenching epiphanic release, not an attempt at providing a way for another person to share the experience.

Writing is not just getting the words out, but getting the words out in a way that allows another person to get in.  When writing about evolutionary theory, this means coming back again and again to the same material from different directions, seeking metaphors and narrative trails that allow easy ways to access the ideas.  This blog often comes back to the same themes as I seek effective ways to communicate the central issues.  Understanding maturation as integral to evolution involves understanding how different disciplines are actually studying maturation by a number of different names.

When it comes to describing what’s happened in my life, the challenge is yanking down those elevated experiences to make the wordless into words, while at the same time detraumatizing the horrendous to a degree that a visitor would be able to embrace it.  That involves my being able to embrace it.  That involves my writing from a position of compassion.  Compassion for self and the others that were involved.

I suspect these two different goals, making theory understandable and making my life accessible, are more than a little bit related.  The theory emerged in 1997, almost exactly five years after the dreams had begun to emerge that resulted in personal revelations about a year later.  Both were integrally tied to the relationships I was having with women at the time.  Love and loss of love, for me, has everything to do with whether the world makes sense or not.  The evolution theory emerged from a context where love, at last, felt integrated and understood.  I would not be exploring the origins of what it is to be human, a metaphor for an exploration of my self, without Marcia in my life.

The Tom Robbins letter that I just rediscovered gives me confidence that I can make my life into words that can move a person.  I’ll try again to turn the dental distress into something like a black, white and grey wedding dress.  There are ways to marry horror and love so that understanding and compassion result.

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 can fairly easily write about the Internet and societal change and have that work picked up and appear in online venues, some with large circulations, and get carried by a Twitter surge of close to 100 thousand, I have difficulty distributing perspectives on biological evolution.  In those areas where I am a professional, it is perceived that I have something to lose if what I share ends up being erroneous.  My services depreciate in value if I am wrong.  Also, it is relatively easy to write about the Internet on the Internet.

It is not so easy to write about evolution in those places where theorists write about evolution.

In those areas where I am an amateur, my contributions are not noted by the professional community, because I did not go through the credentialing process whereby it can be assumed that I have something to lose if I am wrong.  Professionals lose much if they are wrong.  They perceive it in their best interest not to ally themselves with those with nothing to lose.  It would be like assigning my clients to high school students.  It is in my best interest as a web developer to hire folks that have received a college education in design.

So, what I’m toying with now is the following:  What are the most subtle and effective ways that I can write about the Internet and social change–areas where I can fairly easily get my ideas distributed–so that biological evolution also gets discussed?  At this time, on the four sites where my ideas appear (sexualselection.org, causeofautism.com, shiftjournal.com and this site), I get several hundred unique visitors a day (by conservative stats analytic tool estimations).  I’m trying to be crafty here and increase that exposure in such a fashion that it becomes clear to readers that the way that individuals, species and societies mature informs our understanding of an enormous amount of what occurs to us in our lives.

Survival sums up the way that most of us understand how biology evolves, individuals survive and societies transcend.  This is the old model.  The new model focuses on how populations, species, individuals and cultures mature.

Natural selection is the process by which randomly generated heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to generate progeny become more common in a population over successive generations.  This is the old model.  The old model does not get replaced.  It becomes the foundation for the new model.

The new model:  The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing.  Those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

The new model is all about maturation, not survival.  How does an amateur best write about a theory of maturation, with roots in evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, endocrinology, and anthropology, and sound like he’s got something to lose if he is wrong?

I’m not exactly sure if the issue is my surviving attempts to scale traditional barriers that surround professional expertise or my needing to mature to the point where I can be present to what I have to say rather than being concerned with those in my imagination that are not listening.

I just realized.  I think amateur is French for “not mature.”  This work is all about neoteny, or the bringing forth of infant features into adults, a sort of merging of the immature and mature.  That seems to be the theme of several of these essays as regards my personal attempts to introduce a new theory to a professional community.  There are ways that the product and the process are the same.

I need to let this insight mature.