“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, as Campbell suggests, that there is an evolution in emphasis on individualism accompanied by changes in child-rearing practices.  If we go back 2,000 to 4,000 generations, were parents using techniques that did more than just socialize the children and integrate them into the band or tribe?  Did they also individuate them enough to be independent social beings capable of theory of mind, or an ability to exercise compassion, and at the same time teach them to be more focused on the group than on the individual?

There is a paradox I’m trying to tease out here having to do with raising a child when we as a species were still largely lodged in primary process, the way an unconscious or dream self thinks, featuring one time, one place and difficulty imagining something’s opposite without focusing on the thing itself.  I’ve hypothesized that contemporary autistics are revealing forebear features, particularly brains not yet lateralized for speech.  I’m figuring that our evolutionary forebears, raising children naturally inclined toward primary process, were engaged in specific relational interventions that would propel them into a shared reality.

Animals across our planet successfully relate to each other while in primary process.  How exactly did we relate to each other during our primary process, prelateralized-brain evolution?  How did we prevent our children from careening off into autistic spaces featuring primary process but little ability to socialize?  How did we socialize our children before the development of postagricultural encouragement of individualism?

An answer to this question, I believe, offers guidance on how we can raise children with autistic tendencies, children of mothers with high testosterone, and possibly high estrogen.  This is the hypothetical prototypical matrifocal mother’s hormonal constellation.

I suspect this has something to do with band or tribal creation of constant access to shared tribal consciousness space featuring dance, song, performance and joint experience.  This may have something to do with Campbell’s observation of how agricultural societies raise their children to ally with shared priorities.

Modern times manifest an obsession with individuality.  Perhaps the increase in the numbers of those with autism is a direct response to a diminution in shared consciousness activities.

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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

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

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

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

I saw this piece appear in March:  Too Much Facebook could cause Autism in Children.  A doctor in the UK suggested that social networking applications were encouraging dissociation, making it more difficult for children to engage in relationship.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” said neurologist Susan Greenfield.

Social networking applications do seem to be changing consciousness, and it may be the case that the changes do exhibit some features of early childhood, but I would suggest that living in the moment, a moment characterized by massive amounts of incoming information offered in a fashion that makes integration of that information possible, is a good thing.

There have been other studies that concluded that there are correlations between watching TV and autistic behavior.  That may be the case.  Still, comparing social networking to watching TV is like suggesting a hike through nature collecting butterflies is equivalent to vacuuming the living room for dust mites.  I think professor Greenfield is confusing the two.

Getting up…

There is a not politically correct notion that the individuals that make up ancient aboriginal societies are different from contemporary humans.  It is usually assumed that they are different as in less evolved, less intelligent or less capable.  It depends on whom you talk to or what you’re reading.

The American philosopher Ken Wilber attempts to take this issue head on, repackaging the 100-year-old four-fold parallelism that equates human evolution, societal evolution, individual ontogeny and an individual’s psychology.  Wilber does not frame the differences between an individual in an aboriginal society vs. an individual in modern society in negative terms, but seeks to unpack the features of various stages of growth and show how these stages manifest on a number of different scales.  Growth, transformation, evolution, all these aspects of how life manifests over time, display pattern.  Those patterns can be described.  Ken Wilber seeks to describe how those patterns manifest in human society.

My personal focus is the influence of sexual selection on social structure mediated by changes in the rates of maturation.  The patterns I focus on are very specific.  Still, I focus on biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience, the four-fold parallelism.  Wilber is more general in…

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

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

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

Imagine that ten years from now autism and Asperger’s are still on the rise.  It is discovered that aboriginal matrifocal societies often exhibit what Gregory Bateson described as primary process.

“Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric.  These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free associations.” (Bateson G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  Balantine: New York, p. 139)

In other words, some ancient matrilineal societies may exhibit a less robust “theory of mind” than moderns.  Connections between matrifocal aboriginals and modern autistics are made.

The recapitulationists of the early twentieth century that emphasized three-fold and four-fold parallelisms make a new kind of sense.  In other words, there emerges a connection between the scales of human societal evolution and individual ontogeny insofar as aboriginal society child rearing practices inform how modern society can raise the children of its high testosterone women.  (I hypothesize that the women in early matrifocal societies are high testosterone and high estrogen.)

Imagine that ten years from now these connections are being made. …

Ten years ago, I was exploring the possible origin of human culture in tribal societies driven by rhythmic dance and music. Tribal societies are on rare occasions characterized by paternal anonymity, or children who are unaware of the identity of their biological father. Observing that human brain size began to diminish about 25,000 years ago, I hypothesized that this reflected an emerging patrifocal emphasis on speech instead of gesture and a movement away from a selection for big-brained males. If this was the case, I suspected that there might be remnants of the old matrifocal paradigm that still exist within contemporary society. In the neurological literature, I sought humans with unusually large brains, difficulty with language, but who were also ambidextrous or left-handed. I came to find that autistic individuals commonly display these features; in addition, I discovered that individuals with autism are often obsessed with pattern replication and have perfect pitch (Brenton, Devries, Barton, Minnich & Sokol, 2008).

It appeared that hidden beneath the just-so story was a theory, which, if brought to light, could help make useful predictions and illuminate unrecognized relationships. From the beginning, the theory drew information from three different disciplines: anthropology, evolutionary biology…

Geschwind and Galaburda in their 1987 Cerebral Lateralization noted a number of patterns across studies that seemed to support a relationship between lateralization, handedness and a number of diseases and conditions. Follow-up studies often led to results that were ambiguous. Still, the work of Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have come to conclusions that have suggested connections that Geschwind and Galaburda alluded to. Specifically, mother’s testosterone levels inform conditions characterized by male maturational delay. Marian Annett continues to pioneer an understanding of a paradigm characterized by random-handedness balanced by conventional handedness that she calls Right Shift Theory.

In other essays on this website (i.e., Evolutionary Theory, Neuropsychology and Autism), I have described the integral connection between heterochronic theory and the neuropsychological patterns observed by Geschwind and Galaburda, developed by Annett and Baron-Cohen. Heterochronic theory describes how species evolve when influenced by changes in the rate of timing of maturation and development. Neoteny is one of six heterochronic patterns, the prolongation or lifting of infant or embryonic features from ancient ancestors into the features of adult descendants, resulting in the slowing down of maturation, with features of early ontogeny appearing later in ontogeny over generations. One does not…

This work has proposed three primary causes of autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. All three causes impact fluctuating testosterone levels inside a mother, which determine her children’s maturation speeds and their, and societies’, social-structure proclivities. The three causes are matrifocal sexual selection trajectories (mate-selection proclivities), different ethnicities mating, thereby propelling shifts back to a common progenitor and a host of environmental influences that modify mother-father testosterone levels. Explore these etiologies in detail by clicking here, here and here.

I hypothesize that these are primary causes of autism. There are also the reasons that these hypothesized causes have been so difficult to uncover and address. I would suggest that politics, patriarchy and academic division are the main barriers to understanding autism’s origins.

Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines a theory of evolution that revolves around female choice. He begins that work with an exploration of how it is that his particular perspective is not easily embraced. Knight proposes that the polarization of the West from the works of Marx and Engels obfuscated the works of theorists with matriarchal underpinnings. Theories of evolution with females…

These essays or blogs are an unconventional way to share evolutionary theory. This is not a peer-reviewed journal and I am not an academician. There are the less obvious reasons why this blog is unconventional. For example, I share some ideas before they are fully formed.

Many of the ideas expressed on this blog had their origins ten years ago. Click here to travel to a site that goes into those details. Those ideas have been fully cited (click here) though no peer-review process has presented them to a community that might absorb them. This blog offers me an opportunity to share those ideas in the context of contemporary events that might suggest their utility. The most obvious example is that the theory hypothesizes that autism has evolutionary origins and is a direct result of changes in our society’s transformation from patrifocal to matrifocal social structure. Almost thirty predictions come from the hypothesis. Click here for details.

Writing these blogs often led to insights. Since starting these entries last April 1, a number of ideas have occurred to me that bridge off of the original theses. Some of these ideas…

When I was a cartoonist, a comic artist seeking to come up with a new piece every day, I used a variety of techniques to generate useful ideas. One technique I often used was that in my mind’s eye I’d create a column of words representing or associated with something specific and sit that column next to another column of words representing or associated with another concept. Then I would run the columns up and down like a slide rule. I was looking for complementing concepts or associations with patterns that mirrored each other. Goofy incongruities would emerge. Showing how things seemingly unrelated had connections, with the connections seeming arbitrary, led to humor.

Gary Larson, who created The Far Side, was a master of this technique. For example, placing a clown in one column with various associations, such as using a cream pie as a weapon, compared to a criminal in the other column creates a panel with a clown in an alley with a cream pie about to mug a citizen. The caption “When clowns go bad” completed the bridge. This kind of humor is all about connections.

How, you might ask, would this technique have anything to do…

On the autism rights and neurodiversity blogs in July, fury erupted around the radio show host Michael Savage’s comments that autistic kids were brats.

Savage said that autism was a “fraud, a racket.” He went on to say, “I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.”

The rage of autism advocates communicated quickly. Home Depot, Aflac, Sears, Budweiser, Direct Buy, Cisco and Radio Shack withdrew sponsorship before the end of the month. Radio stations dropped the show.

As an activist and organizer, I feel like what I observed was a social change miracle. Society likes to keep its anomalies and minorities invisible. Savage’s words have revealed the power of a group that will not hide.

Deep into this great transition from a capitalist, hierarchical, patrifocal society to the horizontal, aesthetic-based, partnership society, events occur that provide a window into the future. Neurodiversity is almost invisible at present. It is becoming a central focus of society very quickly. This last July was a coming out party.

Autism and Asperger’s rights represent the third wave of genetic justice. Civil rights, the first…

In 1971 in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I was attending my first year of college, I observed a lecture by a visiting academic. I went to a small liberal arts college, Florida Presbyterian, later to become Eckerd College. The lecture was in the chapel, the only venue large enough to hold several hundred students. Evidently, this outside lecturer was well known. He was a biologist.

The talk was about the growth and crash of biological and social systems. With charts he described an inevitable increase in the cost of petroleum until the price would make it unavailable for regular use. He showed a pattern across several systems of a line slowly inclining until, with surges, an almost vertical line results. Then the system crashes.

Lately, I’ve been the signs of acceleration. There is no end to places where this pattern can be observed. Noting how these various signs of acceleration connect suggest ways we might be able to more easily weather the crash.

I first noticed the acceleration in the gift trade where I was a sales rep for 19 years. When I started in 1980, unicorns were big, but fading. The trend had lasted several years. In Rockford, Illinois,…

It has been observed that a human baby displays many of the characteristics of an embryo in the womb. The infant is unable to slumber longer in the dark or he or she would not be able to depart. Their head would become bigger than the doorway. So, aspects of womb life are prolonged into infanthood. This process is neoteny in action. Earlier stages of ontogeny are prolonged into later stages over time.

We might consider where this process is headed.

The acceleration that we are in the midst of has most of us astonished by how fast things are changing. Little noticed is how we as a species are changing physically, dispositionally, integrally. Autism, an evolutionary condition, is blossoming across contemporary society. Social structure is radically adjusting to place woman in positions of authority, allowing them to choose their own mate, abort and compete with men. In just 100 years, we are taller, our brains are bigger (after a 25,000-year period of size decrease) and we as a species are becoming more gracile, fragile and vulnerable.

Infant features prolong into adulthood. Embryo features prolong into infanthood. With time, embryo features prolonged into infanthood themselves prolong into adulthood.

Features of…

There is a principle in hypnosis that suggests that a patient’s ability to achieve a targeted change is enhanced when the patient is unaware of the details of the intervention.

The hypnotherapist is not trying to hide anything from the unconscious. It is through the therapist’s forming a pact with the unconsciousness that the change is engaged. The hypnotherapist is hiding what is happening from the client’s conscious mind.

The targeted change is further encouraged if the patient does not notice that a change has taken place.

American conservatism is chock-full of blind spots. With media reflecting and promoting the agenda of corporations, which form an important pillar of the conservative tribunal (corporations, neo-cons, social conservatives), media do not focus on the problems that many in society would like to change. The Left notices. Society, in a sense, has hauled itself to the hypnotherapist. The therapist has put society into a trance. Media, or what society is aware of, are asleep and deeply focused elsewhere.

Massive changes are underway, changes that are connected, and it is important that we not notice these changes.

Twenty-five countries in Western and Eastern Europe are closely uniting into an integrated whole providing health care,…

What follows is an excerpt from Gould’s work. (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge: Belknap Press pp. 356-58).

“To support the argument that we evolved by retaining juvenile features of our ancestors, Bolk provided lists of similarities between adult humans and juvenile apes: “Our essential somatic properties, i.e. Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz. they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man” (1926a, p. 468). In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:

1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy (a phenomenon of complex cause related both to facial reduction and to the retention of juvenile flexure, reflected, for example, in the failure of the sphenoethmoidal angle to open out during ontogeny).
2. Reduction or lack of body hair.
3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair (Bolk argues that black peoples are born with relatively light skin, while ancestral primates are as dark at birth as ever).
4. The form of the external ear.

There is a tribe of males more than a little infatuated with themselves and their own ideas. We’re often described as narcissists. Upon discovering I fit into this group, I was appalled, and predictably I obsessed that I was too obsessed with my own behavior.

I now look at myself as a recovering narcissist. I observe how frequently I engage in being a legend in my own mind. Sometimes I’m amused. Sometimes I’m not.

My wife is tolerant but not particularly amused. Interestingly, I come across few women narcissists.

Narcissism often gets relegated to an example of an early developmental stage that gets carried into adulthood as a result of trauma or a peculiar environment that caused a freezing of psychological resources in the past. This effect is not unlike following a recipe while making a cake. If at an early stage something goes awry, you may end up with a less than delightful outcome. Accidentally add salt instead of sugar early in the process and the results will be unique but not particularly edible.

I’m playing with the idea that there is healthy narcissism characterized by the person feeling accompanied while they feel they are the center of the…