“Comparing the rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans gives support to the idea that male-male physical competition over females within the social group is vastly less important in humans.  Wrangham and his associates compared the rates of lethal violence between chimpanzees and human subsistence societies and found them similar….In sharp contrast, chimpanzees had rates of within-group nonlethal physical aggression between two or three orders of magnitude higher than humans.  Although preliminary data, these results indicate a major reduction in male-male violence within human groups and supports Boehm’s hypothesis on the evolution of human egalitarianism…”  (Lancaster and Kaplan, “The Endocrinology of the Human Adaptive Complex,” in Endocrinology of Social Relationships, eds. Ellison and Gray, p. 113.)

I received an email from Elaine Morgan, popularizer of the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and the author of several books on human evolution, including The Descent of Woman.  Morgan recommended that I read the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.  She suggested I read Mother and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

“The paradigm shift away from thinking of our Pleistocene ancestors as reared by all-nurturing chimpanzee-like mothers, and toward thinking of them as apes with species-typical shared care, has been slow in coming.  Only in the past decade has cooperative breeding’s implications for attachment theory begun to be addressed, and its evolutionary implications taken into account.”  (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 113.)

Hrdy discusses the influence of the alloparent in detail, describing the profound uniqueness of the human species, where mothers share infant intimacy with other females (and occasionally males) from the first day on.  This is unheard of in other great ape species.  Many things are implied.  Hrdy concentrates on how natural selection reinforces a cooperation theory-of-mind paradigm that allows a larger number of progeny to survive in communities where child-rearing is a community event.  For Hrdy, coming from a natural selection theorizing background, natural selection alone explains how humans evolved an ability to identify with another person as compassion became a highly useful feature.

Two things jump out at me.  First, sexual selection seems to be of relatively little importance in Hrdy’s hypothesis.  Neoteny is not mentioned.  With a default assumption that natural selection is how things transform, there is no awareness that many of the features that Hrdy describes reveal neotenous trends.  Though she discusses the influence of matriarchy, this is not integrated into an understanding of how matriarchy encourages specific kinds of evolution, particularly those kinds of evolution leading to the features that Hrdy is paying the closest attention to.  Matrifocal social structure encourages cooperative societies.  Instead of exploring the conditions that support matrifocal social structure, Hrdy commits the usual sociobiological sin of assuming that only natural selection is in play.  (Geoffrey Miller’s work would be the exception.)

Placing a heavy emphasis on alloparent intervention keeping our species alive, Hrdy neglects to make the connection between neoteny and social structures that support alloparents.  In other words, Hrdy’s work supports matrifocal human evolution.

No doubt this is just the beginning of my exploration of Hrdy’s work in connection with my Orchestral Theory of Evolution.  Thank you, Elaine, for sending me in Hrdy’s direction.

Second, considering that autism features individuals exhibiting the characteristics of our evolutionary forebears, and noting that the environment and child-rearing practices of those forebears might be what current autistics are craving, I’ve hypothesized that diet, rhythm, dance, touch and performance may all be necessary to those with autism.  Reading Hrdy’s book, it strikes me that perhaps an autistic neurology requires constant multiple parents, several persons to form attachments with.  For a child to feel part of society, perhaps it is neurologically necessary that several central females be engaged from birth.  Hrdy notes that in primitive societies, though the babies may travel among several persons over the course of a day, the baby sleeps with the mother at night.  It is also possible that an autistic individual requires close contact with a central figure through the night.

As it becomes clearer how exactly we evolved, we may evolve a deeper understanding for how we can adjust the environment of particular humans having difficulty adjusting to current society.

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,…

“The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism; and this has been generally achieved by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain.”  (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God:  Primitive Mythology (New York:  Penguin Books, 1959), p. 240.)

I know nothing about, yet am fascinated by, the differences in child-rearing practices of matrifocal aboriginal societies and modern parents.  Some matrifocal aboriginal societies are hunters, some herders, some agriculturally based.  Campbell notes agricultural communities with a focus on raising children with a social emphasis.  Hrdy describes how in matrilineal/matrilocal hunter gatherer societies children are taught to exhibit theory of mind.  I’m wondering what the nuances are between those societies and herder and later societies, and the differences between emphasis on social mind vs. individualism in matrifocal and patrifocal contexts.

Just as there is an evolution of society, beginning with hunter/gatherers moving toward agriculture around 10,000 B.C., followed by the emergence of towns and cities, I’m estimating,…

“To adopt Dawkins’ gene’s-eye view for a moment, we can see that it would make sense for a gene to take advantage of any developmental opportunity, without caring whether the influence originated inside its organism’s skin or outside it.  Viewing this widely ramified network of interactions in terms of extended phenotypes rather than of developmental systems, however, has several disadvantages.  First, if a gene’s phenotype may be part of another organism’s body, then any organism’s genotype would seem to be distributed as well.  Just what genes were part of that genotype, furthermore, would change with time, since different genes would ‘manipulate’ this particular body at different times.  Second, even if one retains a more mundane view of genotype roughly as that complement of genes enclosed within the skin, the organism in Dawkins’ account is not only something of an epiphenomenon to genetic wheelings and dealings (as it already seems in many sociobiological accounts), but a mosaic epiphenomenon to boot, created to run by its own genes and by the genes of multiple others.  The concept of the developmental system, on the other hand, incorporates the insight that a given phenotype is a product of quite a bit besides its own

…

That I might have featured Asperger’s when I was young never crossed my mind until this year.  I’d been studying autism for 12 years.  Working for 12 years with the thesis that testosterone informed the rate of maturation, it never struck me that estrogen might manage the timing until last winter when I discovered I’d been causally considering it for a couple of weeks.  My creative process is an artistic process that often features a conscious mind just along for the ride.  There are similarities between those of us living lives deeply informed by the creative process and those that this society calls autistic.

Understanding autism is at the heart of this orchestral theory of evolution.  If this theory does explain how autism emerges and offers interventions that can improve the lives of those that feel inhibited by the condition, then there is the chance that several dozen conditions and diseases may be addressed by using the principles outlined in this work.  My premise is that autism is a condition that features male maturational delay and, in females, acceleration.  Social structure, neurological anomalies and endocrinological differences are all integral to autism and Asperger’s etiology.   By adjusting our theory of evolution…

Explorations of societies displaying matriarchal, or matrifocal, tendencies often struggle with a definition that will adjust to very different examples of the paradigm.  Often, a woman’s exercise of authority within a culture can be profound but not obvious, as if there were an agreement that men look like they are in control.  There are different areas where authority manifests such as home, work, market, social situations.  Female authority may vary depending on the context.  Shared authority can look very different in different societies.

What I am calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” is a feminine theory of evolution insofar as both sexes share the ability to inform change and both foundation hormones have profound impact.  “Feminine” suggests sharing and cooperation.  In the context of evolutionary theory, a feminine paradigm is a cooperative paradigm with both a male and female command of process.

Nevertheless, from our Western perspective, provide a woman any control in a hierarchical context where men have traditionally called the shots, and the female anomaly often receives negative attention.  Evolutionary theory traditionally focuses on the male.  Some exceptions with a focus on the female have emerged over the last 40 years, mostly from female theorists, but so long…

Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges…

I just noted a paper, Multiple ancient origins of neoteny in Lycidae (Coleoptera): consequences for ecology and macroevolution, that observes instances of neoteny compelling jumps in evolution.  One of the riddles of the career of Stephen J. Gould was how he seemed to rarely discuss how his deep insights focusing on neoteny explained his theory of punctuated equilibrium.  Gould did not believe in gradual evolution.  Yet, he seemed to only occasionally discuss the specifics of his saltationist conjectures, particularly when it came to heterochronic theory, or the study of the rate and timing of maturation and development, the source of neoteny.

The work just noted, Multiple ancient origins…, doesn’t just not note the influence of neoteny on humans, but it goes back many millions of years to discuss its subject.  My work has focused almost exclusively on neoteny in humans and makes the following statement….

If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

Contemporary research on neoteny and heterochronic theory,…

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…

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream.  Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?”  (Jane Goodall Through a Window (Boston:  Houghlin…

We live in a society that believes that it is pragmatic to presuppose that consciousness is contingent upon evolutionary conditions that led to its emergence.  Self awareness occurred by chance.  Academics, of course, embrace the claim that consciousness is unique.  But because it is not measurable and seems connected to humans only, it has been concluded in many sciences that it can be usefully ignored.  The autistic provide an ability to notice.

Over the course of human self examination there have been relatively few that have differentiated between the two most obvious kinds of consciousness that exist.  There is aware and self aware.  There is conscious and self conscious.  There is being present and there is the awareness that you are present.  This is a significant distinction because it can be suggested that the first kind of consciousness, presence, is not just a feature of human consciousness but a feature of that which is alive.  To be present to the fact that you are present seems peculiarly human.  We can call this split consciousness.  This is unique insofar as this ability for a single consciousness to experience a split evidently creates facility with being two places at once, being in…

I’d been studying Asperger’s and autism in connection to human evolution for maybe ten years before it dawned on me, after reading Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, that Asperger’s was a feature of my childhood.  As I was growing up, people seemed opaque to me.  I was in speech therapy almost all those years.  I had a strange sense of humor.  I was astonishingly gullible.  My closest friend was a boy that I later realized had Asperger’s.  He was also a math genius and a musician.  I was a collector and an artist.

Over time, it grew clearer to me what other people were thinking and feeling, particularly regarding how they were relating to me.  My obsessions grew integrated with my goals.  I became far less split or self conflicted.

The split that I experienced had perhaps less to do with my Asperger’s tendencies than with a childhood characterized by extreme stress.  But, I’m not sure.

People with autism aren’t generally understood to display classic personality splits featuring conflicts with self, self deprecation or a deep feeling of personal responsibility for what is wrong.  That split would suggest a developed theory of mind, with a mind in conflict, assigning responsibility…

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.  Speed as a concept is also integral to biology.  I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemispheres impacts consciousness, behavior and personality.  And, whereas the basic unit of speed in physics is the kilometer or mile, in biology that unit is a generation.  Though maybe not.

Bernard Crespi has written a paper, Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain, which focuses on several neurological features as influential in the etiology of particular diseases and conditions.  Corpus callosum size (the corpus callosum is the primary brain bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres) and anomalous dominance (differing cerebral hemisphere sizes) are two of those features, aspects of cerebral lateralization.  I would consider that corpus callosum size not only influences the ease and speed of information transfer, but that corpus callosum size influences the experience of self awareness or split consciousness.

There are correlations between degrees of cerebral lateralization, how much the two cerebral hemispheres vary, and conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering).  Degrees of handedness are influenced by this variable.  Other diseases and conditions are associated with right cerebral hemispheres not…

Physicists maintain a reverence for process that transcends deity, the metaphors that deity is associated with and the battles that sometimes result from deep commitment to metaphor.  Physics is a relatively nonmetaphoric undertaking.  Reverence for process connects physicists across the world.  There is evidence that this state of reverence, this respect for the awe-inspiring mathematics of the universe, often results in the practitioners of physics having an experience of everything being connected.  Transcendence without mythology.

In the biological sciences, most practitioners are still enamored of the implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), studies revolving around epigenesis and the work of heterochronic theorists such as Matsuda have not been integrated into a general understanding similar to that engaged in by the practitioners of physics.  In biology, interconnections are viewed as contingent upon random circumstance leading to complexity.  In physics, interconnection is often viewed as evidence of an integrated whole.

In biology, a central focus is natural selection’s insistence that the variation of progeny produced by a coupling is random, unrelated to environmental effects.  Alternative theories (evo-devo, epigenesis and Matsuda) suggest that there may be little that is random in the proliferation of life upon earth.  Physicists…

I’m working with Nithya and Elia on two separate but related projects.  Nithya is exploring the possibility that there is a correlation between breast cancer and matrifocal society.  It looks like she’ll be concentrating on Dravidian communities in India.  I hypothesize that many matrifocal societies are characterized by high-testosterone, high-estrogen woman, and I am estimating that certain diseases and conditions will be more common among that hormonal constellation, including breast cancer.

About a week into conducting research, Nithya noted that an unusually large number of matrifocal societies are island communities.  She suggested Founder Effect, or an ability for unique features to proliferate in the absence of competition.  I told her to explore whether mountainous communities possibly show a similar propensity.  The Basques would be an example.  Both islands and mountains have shown unique language structures.  I’m wondering if islands and mountains might harbor ancient social structures, relatively unmolested because of unique geography.  It would not be farfetched to consider that matrifocal social structures mainly inhabit terrains that are difficult to attack.  This would support a hypothesis that matrifocal social structures are precursors to patrifocal social structure.

We also talked of creoles.  Nithya noted many matrifocal island societies in the Caribbean. …

I’m still trying to grasp the concept that testosterone and estrogen and their associated hormones are together managing ontological, social and biological evolution by adjusting to changes in the environment by moderating the rate and timing of ontogeny.

We always knew that sex governed our lives.  There is now the possibility that we can understand how exactly this is done.

In both sexes, entering puberty is characterized by a surge in testosterone that, among other things, halts most synaptic growth.  If fat levels are not high enough, puberty is delayed.  Certain levels of estrogen are required for testosterone surges to occur.

Over ten years ago I hypothesized that a mother’s uterine testosterone levels would influence the likelihood of her child exhibiting autism.  I estimated that the rate of maturation would be determined by the amount of testosterone.  A mother with high testosterone would feature maturationally delayed sons and maturationally accelerated daughters, both vulnerable to autism.

This last season I’ve been applying the pattern of how estrogen controls the timing of testosterone surges at puberty to early childhood when testosterone surges prune the right hemispheres of most normal right-handed individuals.  Might estrogen levels in these infants, toddlers and children be determining…

“The existence of mammary ridges on the embryo concording with ancient synapsids suggests that those ancient animals also had nutrient-supplying ridges on their bodies for which there is no paleontological evidence.  On the human embryo, the mammary ridges gradually coalesce and finally resolve into discrete nipples on day 58.  This event concords almost exactly with the lowermost Triassic, where the fossils of Cynognathus are found.  Discrete mammary glands and a fused secondary palate in the embryo coincide with a fused secondary palate in the fossil record.”  (Swan, Lawrence W. (1990) The concordance of ontogeny with phylogeny.  Bioscience 40: 380)

Because male humans differentiate from the foundation female at six weeks after conception, might this reflect an ancient emergence of testosterone after estrogen?  Might the Pre-Cambrian explosion have had something to do with there being no testosterone to call an end to the party?

…

“No one, least of all Williams and Kafatos, expect the eventual story to be so simple.  But it does seem likely that normal development is controlled by gradually decreasing concentration of a hormone acting primarily at high levels of the regulatory system.  This is also an ideal mechanism for the simple and rapid production of heterochronic…

It seems too elegant to be true, but I’ve become enamored of the possibility.

Heterochronic theory, the study of the effects of rate and timing on maturation and development, takes the work of several late nineteenth century and early twentieth century theorists and packages that work into a sort of seamless whole. Stephen J. Gould in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny went far, codifying the various theorists’ predilections so that they made an overriding sense. I say “sort of” seamless whole because the actual endocrinological underpinnings of the dynamics were never explored.

Neoteny is the best known of the six heterochronic processes. Neoteny is the process whereby features of infants, embryos or the very young are, over the course of generations, prolonged to emerge in the adults of descendants. Acceleration is the opposite, whereby features of adult ancestors appear in the infants of descendants. For example, let’s say great great grandfather had a baritone voice, emerging at puberty. His son’s deeper voice may emerge just before puberty and his great grandson might have an unusually hoarse voice as a child. That would be an acceleration of a feature. These things normally take hundreds and thousands of generations, though they can be…

“We have now surveyed a wide range of creole structures across a number of unrelated creole languages.  We have seen that even taking into account the, in some cases, several centuries of time that have elapsed since creolization, and the heavy pressures undergone by those creoles (a large majority) that are still in contact with their superstrates, these languages show similarities which go far beyond the possibility of coincidental resemblance, and which are not explicable in terms of conventional transmission processes such as diffusion or substratum influence (the ad hoc nature of the latter should be adequately demonstrated by the opportunism of those who attribute a structure to Yoruba when it appears in the Caribbean and to Chinese when it appears in Hawaii).  Moreover, we find that the more we strip creoles of their more recent developments, the more we factor out superficial and accidental features, the greater are the similarities that reveal themselves.  Indeed, it would seem reasonable to suppose that the only differences among creoles at creolization were those due to differences in the nature of the antecedent pidgin, in particular to the extent to which superstrate features had been absorbed by that pidgin and were therefore directly…

On page 575 of the May 1 issue of Science there is an article, “Africans’ Deep Genetic roots Reveal Their Evolutionary Story.” Examining the blood of 3,194 Africans from 113 populations, researchers looked for patterns in inheritance. “In many cases, the team found that ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences reflected real genetic differences…” For example, the three hunter gatherer click language cultures (Sandawe, Hadza and Khoisan) were all genetically connected.

They ran comparisons to 98 African Americans. “…71% of their DNA from ancestors who came from all over western Africa, 8% from other parts of Africa, and 13% from Europeans.”

A premise of my work is that there are several causes of autism that are related to changes in a mother’s sexual hormone levels as this relates to changes in testosterone and estrogen levels over the course of our recent (3,000 generations) evolution. We’ve transformed from a matrifocal, aboriginal, high-testosterone/high-estrogen female, low-testosterone/low-estrogen male to the reverse, a high-testosterone/high-estrogen male, low-testosterone/low-estrogen female. Various environmental and social effects propel our children backward hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generations. When sent too far back, their world becomes again one characterized by primary process (one time, one place, no negatives) that in modern times manifests…

Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard a Terry Gross interview with a woman author.  I don’t recall her name or the books she wrote, but she described the experience of being a bipolar author and finding herself frequently saying things she wished she hadn’t.  The author noted that the condition in its manic stage is characterized by the sharing of inappropriate words and behaviors and a difficulty identifying conventional boundaries.

I grew up with a bipolar mother, yet I’d never made the connection between the manic phase of the condition and Asperger’s, where individuals often can’t easily intuit appropriate words and behavior.  The connection suggests several questions.

Is a bipolar person having this difficulty identifying social convention boundaries during the manic stage having this same difficulty in the depression stage?  During the depression stage, is the difficulty just not obvious because of the diminution in engagement?  Or, is there an endocrinological foundation to this difficulty, with swings in hormone levels mirroring these changes in behavior?

Many women experience radical swings in mood before, during and after menstruation.  If I remember right, progesterone levels can plummet, resulting in mood changes, and in some women, migraines.  My mother was bipolar, and…

I have barked up a lot of trees as I have been trotting blindfolded through the forest of possibilities that have had me so captivated the last twelve years.  I seem to have a natural inclination to shut myself off to conventional interpretations.  Instead of using my eyes, I’m feeling, smelling and listening to what’s around me until I get a taste of what it is I seek.

Finding powerful ways of explaining what I’ve found becomes as important as what I’ve discovered in these forests.  Sometimes the metaphor itself feels as significant as the process the metaphor seeks to represent.

Alford Korzybski famously noted, “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”  From my Zen evolutionary perspective, the territory is constantly in flux, representing an infinite number of constantly shifting relationships.  My art seeks to be part of a process that creates theories that can usefully represent these constantly changing relationships, and then I want to devise metaphors to make the theories feel accessible.

The proofs part is a challenge.

So, while I develop a repertoire of metaphors, proofs elude me.

I use…

“I have found the midsagittal area of the corpus callosum to be larger in mixed and left handers, referred to as non-consistent-right-handers (nonCRH), than among CRH subjects (Witelson, 1985).  Hand preference is a rough index of the pattern of brain organization.  Left handers (by various definitions) have a higher prevalence of atypical right-hemisphere representation of speech and language functions than do right handers and, in general, show a greater degree of bihemispheric representation of verbal and spatial skills (for review, see Bryden, 1988).”  (Witelson, S. F. (1991) Neural sexual mosaicism:  Sexual differentiation of the human temporo-parietal region for functional asymmetry.  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16: 139)

There seems to me to be tantalizing answers to riddles in human evolution in the various papers discussing corpus callosum structure in different kinds of human beings.  There are papers that support the conclusion that larger corpus callosums, or corpus callosums with larger sections, appear in left-handed people, women, those with two cerebral hemispheres that are the same size, musicians, the autistic and those that stutter.

“Theoretical speculation in humans (S. F Witelson,  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16 (1991) 131-153) and empirical findings in animals (R. H. Fitch, P. E. Cowell, L. M. Schrott, V. H. Denenberg, Int. J. Dev.…

I have been told by others, particularly by author David Brin with some annoyance, that my bias toward the matrifocal frame weighs down what I am trying to communicate.  At those moments you feel most perturbed by how I’ve said something, do tell me so my turns of phrase don’t turn stomachs.  I’d rather communicate than indoctrinate.

I write about 90 days before posts appear.  In a couple weeks [a couple months ago], posts start to emerge that begin with the observation of a possible erroneous connection, that both Hopi and Trobriand Islanders have languages with not much more than the present tense and both are matrifocal.  Two cases a pattern does not make.  That the Hopi are mostly present tense is contested.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language informs culture with language structure guiding culture values) is considered disproved by many, but I’m thinking there might be a connection between language, ancient matrifocal society, primary process and autism.

A premise in that long piece, “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” is that matrifocal societies will evidence diseases and conditions associated with autism in modern society.  I’m starting to think that premise may be wrong.  The particular way…

OK.  Several possible estrogen-related connections have emerged in the last few days.

First, if estrogen is a trigger in teenaged girls for entering puberty, thus beginning the testosterone surges that freeze brain growth, and it is also true for males (a stretch) that estrogen levels trigger pubertal timing, might this also apply to male and female infant/toddler testosterone-surge synapse pruning that results in asymmetric cerebral lateralization?  If so, might infant/toddler estrogen levels be instrumental in causing autism, low estrogen resulting in delayed growth?

Second, noting the seeming connection between estrogen’s focus on the young and the exhibition of maternal behavior along with estrogen’s focus on very specific features in a mate (thus driving the emergence of unique male species traits), is it true that species that engage in female sexual selection are also species where the mother exhibits maternal behavior?  An implication is that K vs. r strategies might compel female choice and changes in the exhibition of male behaviors.

Third, might it be the case that estrogen, predating testosterone, is somehow responsible for early proliferation of life on earth insofar as estrogen is associated with creation, discrimination and focus on the young?

In the old religions, there is a…