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.

“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.

“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.

“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 genes without doing away with the individual organism itself.  It is ironic to me that biologists who begin by being enthralled by the forms and workings of plants and animals sometimes end up analyzing them out of existence.”  (Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information:  Developmental Systems and Information, 2d ed., rev. and exp., with a Foreword by Richard C. Lewontin (Durham, N.C.:  Duke University Press, 2000), p. 177.)

Reading Susan Oyama’s books on the battle among current genetic paradigms offers an experience not unlike observing wars among Western origin myths.  It feels less about which model is more useful and more about which views of the world feel intuitive to the theorists.  Intuitions often have social structure sources, informed by hormonal predilections.  That feels in play regarding genetic theory.  I find myself siding with Oyama, when I can understand her, but her tone suggests someone involved in a venture that is not fun.  She seems disgusted with the astonishing number of colleague-published accounts based upon hidden assumptions rather than upon observed conditions.

She cites dozens of academics I’m not familiar with, describing interpretations of genetic/environmental relationships in ways I find unfathomable, yet her point is clear.  Most male academics think that every living being in the world operates according to a set of instructions, less so by the relationships they form or the environment that they live in.

At this point, I feel comfortable interpreting the genetic algorithm outside the venue of individuals, as noted in the passage above.  Consider looking at any individual’s genes as shared resources of the larger system.  This view is accompanied by not looking at the individual as the level and context through which evolution operates.  This creates an opportunity to observe evolution outside our human obsession with noting parts, not wholes.

Natural selection as it emerged from the evolution theory synthesis in the mid-twentieth century often does not satisfactorily explain what we observe.  I believe one reason is that we are obsessed with interpreting the world from the scale of the individual, which happens to be the scale in which we as split-consciousness beings (self-aware beings) seem to spend most of our time.

Another reason is that implications of the new discipline, evolutionary developmental biology, are only beginning to be understood as regards the effects of social structure and the environment on maturation rates.

Both issues relate to autism.  The autistic often do NOT view the world from split-conscious awareness, but from a primary-process, presplit-consciousness orientation.  There is a world out there that exists outside materialistic, reductionist, cause-and-effect-relationship frames of reference.  A question is:  How do we integrate autistic and neurotypical paradigms?

If autism is a condition that can be partially explained by understanding how humans, species, ecosystems and systems in general mature, then perhaps we should be paying less attention to natural selection as a theory that offers solutions and more attention to alternative theories that concentrate specifically on maturation.

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 to take into consideration how exactly maturation rates and timing are influenced by social structure and the environment, the causes of autism and the causes of a number of other conditions and diseases are possibly made clear.

Autism does not have just one cause.  Perhaps there are several different etiologies and autism will acquire several different names when the different causes are uncovered.  The particular evolutionary dynamic I describe in this work describes exactly how one kind of autism emerges, under what circumstances and in which kinds of families.  I focus on three specific causes of autism that are directly connected to an underlying evolutionary matrix, a collection of processes that influence physical and mental health in a number of areas.  Though I concentrate on autism, this work represents a new theory of medical etiology, removing natural selection from its present station as all that doctors know.  In its place, I offer a number of tools that have the potential to make medical diagnosis an evolutionary intervention.  Consider that if we understand that how we treat our bodies and what we are exposed to compel the evolutionary trajectory of progeny, with repercussions for both ourselves and our children, then understanding health becomes the same as how we choose to evolve.

There are three main variables that impact autism.  This blog discusses contemporary changes in social structure, environmental influences and the blending of two parents with no recent common forebears.

Social structure is huge.  Contemporary theorists have been blind to the effects of an emerging matrifocal society.  They are so focused on what seems the default convention, patrifocal social structure.  The mind blindness described by Baron-Cohen that offers a window to understanding autism serves as a societal metaphor when it comes to understanding that patrifocal social structure is but one of two primary social structure paradigms.  Blind to the emergence of the power of women in contemporary society, we don’t notice the repercussions of that change.  The delay of maturation in males is one such repercussion.  I describe specifically how this happens.

There are at least eight variables that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen, often changing those levels differently, if not in opposite fashions, in men and women.  Changing uterine testosterone levels impacts maturation rates, delaying or accelerating the lifelong maturation rates of progeny.  Adjusting estrogen levels has the potential to impact the timing of maturation processes, resulting in dramatically different neurological structure.  This work explores how changes in environmental variables influence autism, Asperger’s and other conditions.

Darwin noted that mated variants of the roc pigeon, bred separately in China and Europe over 2,000 years, created chicks that revealed features of their 2,000-year-old roc pigeon progenitor.  Modern breeders combine variants that are not closely related in order to create “hybrid vigor,” bringing forward some of the strength of ancestors.  If humans acquired facility with spoken language at about the same time we departed Africa, then mating ethnic persuasions that have had almost no contact over many thousands of years may produce children revealing features of their last common ancestor.  This may result in gifted progeny like Barack Obama.  It may also lead to children with difficulty speaking or who are unable to achieve split consciousness without the kind of guidance and stimuli that their ancestors received.

I am proposing that autism is a social condition that is impacted by the environment.  By understanding autism, not only can we grasp how humans evolved, but we can form a deeper understanding around what it is to be human.  If an understanding of consciousness is integral to understanding evolution, and if this orchestral theory of evolution satisfactorily defines the variables that have impact, then autism is a good place to begin as we seek a way to make this theory useful.

I expect that if this new theory I am presenting here is embraced by enough interested individuals, it will evolve to something different as the criteria that a theory be useful propels practitioners in new directions.  It is important that a theory be fun.  If it’s fun, then we have our unconscious invested and aboard.  With the unconscious as guide, the theory will change.  Consciousness is all about creation.

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 as our primary paradigm is Darwin’s theory of natural selection supporting survival of traits emerging in a random context, the female cooperative-and-sharing paradigm is framed in a male, competitive milieu.

Part of what is wholly new in what I am presenting is a balanced female/male perspective.  I place a heavy emphasis on the impact of those environmental and social structure influences that adjust levels of estrogen and testosterone, changing the rate and timing of an individual’s experience, ontogeny, societal change and species evolution.  Whereas the changing of rates, influenced by changing levels of testosterone, generates archetypal transformations, the changing of timing, managed by adjusting levels of estrogen, controls testosterone-informed rates of change.

In other words, this is a theory of evolution that suggests that the feminine governs the masculine rather than the other way around.

Whether timing governs rate or rate governs timing is really a nonuseful distinction.  They both influence each other, with biological and social systems offering feedback between the two that makes it difficult if not impossible to assign a beginning to any point within the system.  Still, it feels fun to congregate power in the hands of the cooperative polarity.

This feminine theory of evolution seeks to show how the neoteny/acceleration paradigm informs change at four scales (biology, society, ontogeny, biography), parsing out how changes in the timing of processes influence the rate of change.  For example, too little body fat and not enough estrogen at puberty will prolong puberty, with a number of repercussions.  This work hypothesizes that varying levels of estrogen in infants inform testosterone surges, which influence left hemispheric synapse pruning, thus impacting cerebral lateralization and degrees of split consciousness or self awareness, encouraging conditions featuring exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration, such as autism.  In other words, estrogen may manage the extreme maleness that Baron-Cohen suggests the autistic have too much of.

This work outlines the influence of estrogen on social structure.  Understanding social structure is integral to understanding both biological evolution and social evolution.

I also explore the relationship between estrogen and the dynamics of sexual selection, which is closely related to social structure.  Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young.  Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but may determine the likelihood of progeny survival by influencing how much attention is directed toward those progeny.

Is there a direct relationship between robust female sexual selection, with a compulsion to judge male features, and a deep desire to care for the young?  If estrogen levels inform one, are tendencies toward the other enhanced?

In a “feminine” theory of evolution, these are the kinds of questions I am asking.  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. Following these rate-and-timing pathways sends this work in several related directions.  One of the most interesting paths is the one where we need a woman to serve as guide.

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 can be built between beings with difficulty entering others’ worlds.

Mark Stairwalt, my colleague producing Shift Journal, reminded me of the power of mirrored experience…

“My wife and I have a family friend who once worked as an untrained volunteer with autistic kids, and she astounded the professional staff by achieving a communications breakthrough with one particularly hard-to-reach child.  When I asked how she had done it, she told me she had simply mirrored the body language, breathing pattern, facial expression, etc., of the child in question.  Empathy expressed via mimicry > instant breakthrough.”

This is the principle of biofeedback, mirroring or establishing rapport taught by the practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming, much of it derived from the work of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist.  It has been discovered that very effective therapists and hypnotherapists engage in mirroring to establish contact with a client’s unconscious.  The same principle applies when communicating with a person with autism.  Reflecting an autistic person’s experience by mirroring his or her biological rhythms, breathing, heartbeat and movements gives the autistic person purchase on the reflector’s experience.  They see you, in no small part, because you, at that moment, are reflecting them.

Engaging in the performance of rhythmic activities, activities that perhaps, as in the Jacqui Russell programs, offer information on how emotions work, also engages the experience of feeling mirrored that is integral to establishing rapport.  A group of people performing the same movements at the same time, dancing, are mirroring one another’s experience.

The autistic have trouble establishing rapport.  The foundation feature of establishing rapport is mirroring another person’s experience.  It is important that the mirrorer genuinely have the feelings that he or she is mirroring, or at least have access to those feelings.  Two people having the same feelings while at least one of the two people is mirroring the other’s experience is what makes a sharing authentic.

The performance of two or more people of a rhythm-based experience such as dance places that group into the same physical experience, one that reproduces and generates the dynamics of rapport.

Performance, rhythm, dance and mirroring are perhaps a combination that can leverage an autistic person into an experience that includes another person.  Principles of how an unconscious is accessed are combined with an understanding that how we may have evolved may be directly related to the performance of dance and rhythm.  If autism is an evolutionary condition featuring characteristics of our species’ ontogeny from a few thousand generations ago, then perhaps an intervention that features both a reproduction of an autistic indigenous environment, dance and rhythm, with a proven doorway to the unconscious, mirroring, can be the opportunity for an autistic person to behave in new and different ways.

Superb programs exist now, such as Jacqui Russell’s work in Chicago schools.  Let’s use the principles above to expand those programs.  To guide the autistic to have more facile access to their imaginations, it is necessary that we use ours.

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, for some reason, seems hesitant to explore the endocrinological foundations for the changes in the rate and timing of maturation and development.  I am a comic artist trained to view the world through a succession of stills accompanied by words.  Perhaps this is how I’ve come to be so intimately involved with a theory best understood by a succession of images, not through mathematics or words.  Right now, Beck Kramer, one of my colleagues here at Andrew Lehman Design, is putting together a sophisticated Flash presentation of how neoteny looks and behaves when used to describe human evolution.  I’ve defined neoteny maybe 30 times in the nearly 600 pieces I’ve written for this blog.  Still, I get the feeling that the use of words to describe the process does little to provide an intuition for what exactly is happening.  Friends that have known me for decades, friends that have listened to several of my forays into evolutionary theory over the last ten years, often ask me to redefine “neoteny” before approaching the subject once again.

Consider that natural processes not easily described in mathematics or words, but by a succession of pictures or by animation, may become accessible with the emergence of new communications technologies that encourage video presentations.  There may be many theory features, such as neoteny, that are best described by a succession of pictures or an animation.  Journals fall flat as vehicles for sharing insights in these areas.

This may be another example of the media being integral to comprehension.  Whereas mathematics became integral to our understanding physics, animation may be what is necessary to assimilate and embrace new principles in biology.  I can imagine that for a future generation, being familiar with animation software will be necessary to model biological processes just as an ability now to work similar software is essential to being able to grasp molecular biology.

Might there be a connection among those experiencing the world through a succession of images tied to sounds, rather than through a focus on feelings or words, and the talents and tendencies of our youth and what those with Asperger’s and autism often describe, the visual, as their primary mode of experience?  Is it possible that a predilection to comprehend the world through pictures and sound is an emerging, or reemerging, paradigm, a way of experiencing the world that offers some paradigmatic leverage when it comes to understanding biological processes exhibiting predictable and structured changes in form over time?

Stephen J. Gould seems to me to have backed off of seminal insights as regards biological transformation.  This may have been because colleagues just didn’t seem to get it.  They were unable to see patterns in transformations over time.  Academics couldn’t grasp the larger picture in a reductionist milieu, times that feature mathematics or words when communicating scientific principles.  The times are changing.  Perhaps with changes in the ways we perceive the world, the world can be understood in different ways.

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 speaking instead of typing.  The Thompson article describes the emergence of performance as integral to text communications, with participating individuals able to broadcast to their unique collection of followers.  Thompson, with insight, observes the importance of performance to the new technologies.  Participants often speak with an attention to detail not obvious in communications up to now.  Consider the power of these technologies to enhance performance by letting people speak, instead of type, their minds.

What struck me most forcibly while I was reading Thompson’s article is the presence of yet another aboriginal feature emerging in modern youth, and the possible connection of this feature with autism.  In other pieces, I have described the relationship between neoteny emerging in contemporary society and the increases in autism.  Just as in biology, where ancestor infant features prolong to emerge in descendant adults, so it is in society, where ancestral societal-stage traits featured by aboriginal matrifocal societies emerge in contemporary times.  The dramatic horizontalization of society, with accompanying transparency, diversity, creativity and sharing, is evidence of this aboriginalization of culture.  I would add one more thing.  Performance during dance, song and mating rituals in aboriginal society are becoming embedded in our new technologies.  As each Twitterer and social-media user becomes more invested in communicating to a group, we are integrating ancient intuitions into the contemporary times, which offer an ubiquitous experience of performance, not unlike the way we communicated as our species bridged from a band society into culture.

In my work, I hypothesize that performance, the performance of dance and song, was integral to our evolution as a species.  I have also hypothesized that the autistic are embedded in this earlier artistic mode, compelled to experience the world through dance, rhythm and sound but few words.  In the previous piece, I suggested that perhaps performance could be a bridge experience that provides the autistic ways to cultivate split consciousness or a theory of mind.  It strikes me now that as performance emerges as a common communication form among youth in contemporary society, we are perhaps glimpsing the ways humans communicated back in the dawn of language.

In other words, I believe there is a connection between communications technologies enhancing performance consciousness characterized by the broadcast of information to large groups and the increases in autism, perhaps featuring a consciousness evolved to perform, less so to communicate.

This is the seminal issue.  If humans evolved by growing big brains and facile bodies, dancing up a storm to mate with discriminating members of the opposite sex (see Theory Summary), then perhaps performance consciousness is integral to who we were and what we are becoming.  If that is the case, providing the autistic performance contexts may be necessary to provide them an ability to gain some purchase to connect with other humans.

Lunsford’s discovery that our youth are writing far more than anytime in the past combined with Thompson’s insight that performance is integral to the process offers a bridge to understanding how autism is understood.  Once again, our youth seem to have the answers.  Observing how the young experience the world, we have a chance to understand how our world came to be.

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 Mifflin, 1990) pp. 241-242.)

I found Bill’s page within the janegoodall.org site while searching Google for evidence that chimpanzee or bonobo babies or children respond to music with movement or proto dance.  Although I’ve hypothesized in several places on this blog that dance emerged after the chimpanzee/human lineage split, probably during homo erectus as brains grew at lightning speed, yesterday’s entry has me thinking that if music/dance is a postbirth manifestation of womb ontogenetic epigenetic processes, then perhaps there is evidence of a response to music in chimpanzee and bonobo youth.  With bonobo exhibiting more neoteny than chimpanzees, bonobo babies and children would more likely exhibit an attraction to what we could interpret as proto music.

Evidently experiments have been conducted on human embryos in the womb to determine if brain waves suggested an integration of surrounding music and sound.  It seemed that was the case.  Click here.  Do bonobo exhibit the same predilection?  What other animals might reveal these trends?  What might be common among different animals that do show a tendency to be sensitive to rhythm?

I am fascinated by the relationship the autistic have with music and rhythm.  There is evidence that when language is tied to melody, it is easier for many with autism to absorb the words.  The autistic have been observed to retain perfect pitch in higher percentages than the nonautistic.  Several of those with autism that I have known personally felt a close affinity to music and dance.  One autistic boy I worked with almost never spoke, yet occasionally he would break out into dance.  In a subtle and interesting way, performance may be tied to the autistic experience.  There are rhythmic features to chimpanzee displays, particularly with the aggressive repetition of loud noise.  Perhaps the obsessive repetition associated with physical and aural exclamations in autism can be viewed as a combination of, or transition between, display and performance.  Autistic communication often feels to me to be a performance of information featuring a repetition of remembered or rehearsed songs, jokes and snatches of conversation.

I am reminded of Baron-Cohen’s exploration of Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimpanzee explorations regarding theory of mind.  If a chimpanzee demonstration can remind us so closely of a human performance, then perhaps certain autistic behaviors can be seen as a bridge between the two.

If obsessive repetition, rhythm or music are often integral to the autistic experience, and on occasion seem to behave as bridges that provide access to words and what words represent, then would an early and deep immersion in rhythm perhaps provide the autistic with an environment through which they could establish firm connections?

Clearly, if this experiment were conducted on the very young, it would more likely have a positive effect than when they are older.  I don’t estimate there would be negative repercussions.  If we surmise that autistic attraction to repetition, rhythm and performance suggests a need for an environment that reflects those features, perhaps a rhythm-and-performance-infused environment of the type experienced by humans just before or during the transition to culture and split consciousness will encourage a making of connections.

There was a time, perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, when we did not trade in symbols.  We were still steeped in primary consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives) but were likely dancing up a storm.  Waterfalls and thunderstorms no doubt moved us, but there is a good chance we often moved each other, performing movement to rhythm and sound.

The autistic may be a mere 4,000 generations from us, a couple neurological anomalies away.  Perhaps all that is needed to bridge this distance is an ability for moderns to evolve a feeling for wordless, rhythmic performance, a feeling for living in the autistic now.