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.

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 that children are being raised in matrifocal aboriginal society may be guiding those with predilections toward autism toward a more societal-connected version of themselves.

The connecting paradigm is primary process, a concept developed by Freud and embraced by Gregory Bateson.  It outlines thinking in one tense (the present), one time (now) with no negatives.  Dreams take place in primary process, as does early childhood, as do, hypothetically, animals, for instance, chimps.

What struck me while reading Whorf discussing the Hopi and Malinowsky discussing the Trobriand Islanders was that both peoples had a language that suggested intimacy with primary process with little attention to detail outside the here and now.  This fit my paradigm of matrifocal society preceding contemporary consciousness, matrifocal society being present when we bridged from gesture to speech.  What this suggests for me is that the particular way that children in these matrifocal societies are being raised may harbor specific techniques that modern families could use to bridge the autistic child into social reality.

I would focus on diet (the classic “paleolithic diet” with no gluten or casein), constant rhythm, almost constant dance, maybe more UV light and perhaps more touch.  What might be the common child-rearing practices among matrifocal cultures with primary process-like language structures heavily emphasizing the here and now?  For those women with high-testosterone uterine environments, maybe these techniques could be an opportunity to raise their children in an environment natural to their neurologies.

I’ve been playing with these concepts in the columns for a couple months.  They are leading to other interesting conjectures regarding females and estrogen in estrogen’s biological, prehuman manifestations.  Animal endocrine systems are way beyond me.  Still, it feels to me like autism is the bridge concept to understanding who we are as humans, and finally understanding ourselves and our place in the biological universe.

Thank you for the nice things you said, and the criticism.  The criticism I deeply value when detailed enough that I can adjust.  Don’t feel afraid to blast me.

Thank you, Amber.

Andrew

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 and neuropsychology; yet, because these three disciplines did not share a common language, it became my goal to show that they were indeed studying an identical process. Evolutionary biology’s heterochronic theory explored the long-term effects of changing maturation rates, while anthropological explorations of human social structure examined the repercussions that one or more generation’s mate choice has on society. Researchers in the field of neuropsychology largely neglected to acknowledge the evolutionary implications of their discoveries, which could elucidate the parallels between the environment’s influence on uterine hormone levels and the distribution of handedness across a society. It became clear to me that all three subdisciplines were describing the dynamic of sexual selection and how sexual selection’s influence on maturation rates impacts human evolution. There seemed limited opportunities for the practitioners of each discipline to feel moved by potential synergies with their academic neighbors. However, in order to further understand human evolution, there seems a need to speak the basic languages of these three subdisciplines.

This work seeks to transcend the academic language barrier by emphasizing common patterns and ideas shared by all three subdisciplines.

This introduction to the Theory of Waves begins with an overview of four hypothetical, yet fundamental, social structures (two matrifocal and two patrifocal) and outlines the hormonal constellation of the individuals who comprise those four basic prototypes. There exists an elegant dynamic that compels and maintains these four balances. This dynamic, as explained below, can be maintained or propelled at three different levels of two overlapping hormonal paradigms.

Below, I discuss the impact this dynamic has on understanding ethnic variation, disease and condition etiology. For example, I reframe female infanticide as a socially engineered form of sexual selection. The hormonal constellations that arise as a result of this selection process produce a low prevalence of female breast cancer in Asian societies.

Having investigated related theories, I offer several reasons why neuropsychological studies have produced such inconsistent results. This theory, the Theory of Waves, ends by making a number of predictions that concentrate on autism. These predictions provide an opportunity for members of the academic community to prove this story wrong. It has been by matching up anomalies across disciplines and by discovering melodies using the black keys on a piano that this theory has come together.

I believe that understanding neoteny (the prolongation of ancestor infant features into the adults of descendants) is integral to understanding the process of becoming human. Central to understanding neoteny is understanding early play behavior. Experiencing this theory as it has come together over the last ten years has felt like deep play, frequently crossing the line to the reverential. Let the following concepts play across your mind like music. Email me if this theory strikes a chord with your own experiences, or if it harmonizes with your own understanding.

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In this model, or theory, which I’ve been calling the Theory of Waves, there are eight varieties of humans, four male and four female. These eight types of humans feature specific characteristics, or tendencies. Each type of human can be influenced by other types, and each is susceptible to specific features in the environment. Environmental influences can compel the progeny of these types of humans to transform into other types of humans. These environmental influences compel evolutionary currents, which can provoke a significant transformation within a single generation. More often, however, these transformations occur over the course of centuries or longer.

Similar to Watson and Crick’s double helix, a larger body is created from an assembly of component parts. In this case, societies are made up of eight types of human beings, each of whom represents one of the eight potential combinations derived from the hormonal extremes. The hormonal extremes form a structure that serves as a template for a majority of the individuals within a society. The majority of individuals within a society will exhibit some basic features associated with these hormonal extremes, yet they will exhibit these extremes to less of a degree than the eight prototype humans.

Imagine that the eight basic artist colors (purple, red, blue, yellow, orange, green, black and white) are all being blended in specific ways to paint the character of a society. Or, consider that instead of the two planets Mars and Venus, which represent the classic male/female dichotomy, there are eight planets—four female and four male—which together comprise a pantheon of eight gods and goddesses.

Female Constellations
High testosterone, high estrogen (F TE)
High testosterone, low estrogen (F Te)
Low testosterone, high estrogen (F tE)
Low testosterone, low estrogen (F te)

Male Constellations
High testosterone, high estrogen (M TE)
High testosterone, low estrogen (M Te)
Low testosterone, high estrogen (M tE)
Low testosterone, low estrogen (M te)

As in the double helix, there are natural complementary pairings. In this framework, opposite sexes are not only drawn to each other based on sexual attraction, but they are also drawn to each other based on the attraction to their complementary opposite hormonal counterparts.

Female te/Male TE
Female tE/Male Te
Female Te/Male tE
Female TE/Male te

The complementary counterparts naturally ally themselves into patrifocal and matrifocal social structures. There exist two variations within each.

F te/M TE Conventional Patrifocal
F tE/M Te Warrior Patrifocal
F Te/M tE Contemporary Matrifocal
F TE/M te Classic Matrifocal

Conventional Patrifocal: Domineering, caring and discriminating men who choose cooperative women.

Warrior Patrifocal: Domineering men who choose cooperative, caring and discriminating women.

Contemporary Matrifocal: Commanding women who choose creative, cooperative, caring and discriminating men.

Classic Matrifocal: Commanding, caring and discriminating women who choose creative and cooperative men.

These fundamental paradigms are flexile and have an ability to transform from one societal prototype into another over time. The human hormone thresholds can vary over time and can control the speed and direction of evolution. The thresholds can be influenced at three locations within two interlocking cycles, or feedback loops, as described below.

Mother’s testosterone level > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > mother’s testosterone level.

Mother’s estrogen level > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > mother’s estrogen level.

The environment can intervene at any of the three levels of these two loops by influencing both maturation rates and timing (via testosterone) or by influencing the intensity of mate selection criteria (via estrogen).

Level 1: A mother’s uterine hormonal levels are impacted by environmental influences, which in turn affect the child’s maturation and development. The hormonal levels of the mother influence the overall disposition of the social structure by predisposing certain tendencies of the progeny.
Level 2: The environment, through a variety of specific hormone-influencing prompts, impacts a person in society, thereby shifting social structure proclivities.
Level 3: Shifts in social structure influence mate selection criteria, which alter evolutionary trajectories.

Changes may occur at the level of the womb, individual ontogeny and/or at the level of society. The relationship among these three environmentally susceptible locations creates an interactive system, which directs evolutionary trajectory.

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Central to this model are the environmental impact points, which compel the transformation of a society and our species. In a woman’s womb, testosterone levels decide her children’s testosterone levels (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987) and their maturation rates and social structure proclivity. Females (F) with high testosterone (T) give birth to high-testosterone (T) females and low-testosterone (t) males. F T = F T or M t. The reverse is true for low-testosterone females. Low-testosterone females give birth to low-testosterone females and high-testosterone males. F t = F t or M T. This is how societal prototypes are created and maintained and how the complementary opposite foundation of this thesis emerges.

This may be feeling rather dense. Bear with me. I will define some terms.

“Neoteny” refers to the prolonging of infant features over many generations so that eventually they appear in the adults of the descendants. For example, chimpanzee-like progenitor features, such as having a large head relative to body size, small chin, large eyes, upward stature, curiosity and affection, are all characteristics that over time manifest in the physiology and psychology of adults. Acceleration reverses the evolutionary trajectory, whereby processes featured by ancestor adults condense or withdraw over time and appear earlier in development in the characteristics of children as well as in the infants of future descendants.

Heterochronic dynamics (Gould, 1977) of evolution (i.e., neoteny and acceleration) are embedded in social structure and lead to the very specific mating of neotenous males with accelerated females in matrifocal social structures and accelerated males marrying neotenous females in patrifocal social structures. There is a direct connection between womb conditions, maturation rate directions (neoteny and acceleration) and social structure.

The net result is that not only are males and females mating with their hormonal complementary opposites, but also that societies are evolving with males and females trending evolutionarily in opposite directions by continuing selection for opposite proclivities in opposite sexes. It is conceivable that in human beings there exists a dynamic that demands eventual flipping of social structures, perhaps over periods as long as hundreds of thousands of years or as short as 6,000 years (Gimbutas, 1991). This provides an opportunity for the sexes to realign. It is also possible that this “flipping” is constantly occurring within different lineages in a society, which are taking turns performing the role of the hormonal outliers, or eight prototype humans.

Whereas the influence of a mother’s testosterone levels on her progeny has been established (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), this model hypothesizes that the mother’s estrogen levels influence her children via an identical dynamic, which encourages and reinforces the sexually selected focus on partner choice and discrimination, as well as caring and care giving. In this case, the estrogen levels within a woman’s womb determine her children’s estrogen levels, their tendencies toward evaluation of nuance and their compulsion to care. A female (F) with high estrogen (E) gives birth to high-estrogen females and low-estrogen (e) males. F E = F E or M e. The reverse is true for low-estrogen females. F e = F e or M E. This is how estrogen-related societal prototypes are created and maintained. This dynamic also contributes to the complementary opposite foundation of this thesis.

Whether a male or female has high or low estrogen levels does not contribute to maturation rates. This makes it possible to have high or low-estrogen males and females in any social structure. Maturation rates inform heterochronic tendencies and social structure proclivities. Nevertheless, estrogen confers discrimination, an attention to detail that can exaggerate the proclivity of a social structure. In addition, estrogen focuses on the features of a child, attracting those with high estrogen toward individuals who exhibit childlike features. Assign high estrogen to a female with high testosterone and you achieve Classic Matrifocal social structure with commanding females prone to choosing cooperative males with neotenous, or child-like, characteristics. Assign high estrogen to a male and you get either a Scandinavian Contemporary Matrifocal paradigm (Eisler, 2007) with both sexes exhibiting neoteny in a matrifocal context, or you get an Asian Conventional Patrifocal paradigm with males who are focused on mating with females displaying highly neotenous features. When pairing high estrogen with high testosterone, you get an exaggerated intensity of sexual selection, not unlike Fisher’s runaway sexual selection (Fisher, 1930), which results in a powerful focus on neoteny. F TE = Matrifocal selection for neotenous males. M TE = Patrifocal selection for neotenous females.

The particular way that testosterone and estrogen align with individuals within a society compels both social structure and particular physical features of individuals. These two hormones, which influence heterochronic trajectories, also influence personality features, disease and condition proclivities, societal characteristics and even such societal mysteries as female infanticide.

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Another way to view this is by noting that at the extremes, a society displays the highest and lowest hormonal thresholds. These thresholds exist in those with bodies and minds most impacted by the battle between somatic function and behaviors, which are both required for survival. Those at the hormonal extremes are at the front lines of what a body can easily survive. When the environment changes, the extremes are put under more intense distress as the societal balanced polymorphism (the established balance of social structures within a society) is pushed in a specific direction. The majority of society, which exists in the center of this spectrum and which also has a heterozygote advantage (Annett, 2002), are compelled to drift left or right, matrifocal or patrifocal, over the course of several generations. Those at the margins are under the most intense duress.

Even in a society characterized by one of the four foundation social structures, one or more of the other social structures are integrally involved. Assimilated within a society are representative individuals, couples and subcultures, who act as social structure opposites to the established paradigm. In this way, these couples and subcultures also contribute to the balanced polymorphism. Though we in the West have been living in patrifocal social structures, matrifocal elements are integrated within the larger society and occupy the “left” end of the spectrum. American society displays a combination of all four social structures. Together, all four of these form a balance that is changing, particularly now.

There are a number of repercussions, or implications, of this basic model, and details are explored below. The etiologies for a number of physical and mental diseases and conditions are suggested by understanding the eight human prototypes as hormonal outliers that exist on a continuum within social structures and are held in balance so that they create a heterozygote advantage. Those whose hormonal constellations exist at the center are not burdened by hormonal extremes. The engine behind human evolution can be examined in detail so that one may offer a number of predictions. This work will concentrate on conditions characterized by maturational delay and acceleration, and it will focus particularly on autism. The reader will be able to infer by this example how the principles in this Theory of Waves can be applied to a number of diseases and conditions.

Neuroscientists will recognize at the core of this thesis a variation of the Geschwind and Galaburda (1987) hypothesis that connects hormones, handedness, lateralization and debilitations. Evolutionary developmental biologists familiar with nineteenth century principles of heterochrony (the study of the effects of changing maturation and development rates and timing) will find heterochronic processes (Gould, 1977) manifesting in neuropsychological studies of the endocrine system (specifically, testosterone and estrogen). These evolutionary biologists will also recognize how sexual hormones influence maturation rates and timing (Hall, Person & Muller, 2004). Anthropologists will be able to observe the impact of social structure—and the forms of sexual selection that drive social structure (such as female sexual selection and female infanticide)—on how societies transform and our species evolves. Studies of human social structures are integrally tied to both the evolutionary biological principle of heterochrony and neuropsychological processes driven by testosterone and estrogen.

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For example, I’m hypothesizing that in highly patrifocal hierarchical Asian societies, originally organized in ways that demanded large-scale cooperation in order to manage irrigation works spanning for hundreds of miles, males need to be high in testosterone relative to females, while simultaneously being low testosterone relative to other males. This would be necessary in order to better facilitate cooperation within a highly combative hierarchical and patrifocal society requiring male/male collaboration. In this hypothesis, I shift down both estrogen and testosterone levels to accommodate lower testosterone levels for males in a patrifocal society with cooperative undertones. A relatively high-estrogen Asian male is suggested by the highly aesthetic and visually discriminating Asian culture. Relatively low female estrogen level is implied by ubiquitous female infanticide. To fit this model, Asian females would have to exhibit the lowest recorded female estrogen levels. This would mean the normally low Conventional Patrifocal female estrogen would have to be shifted lower in order to accommodate Asian male patrifocal cooperation. And, indeed, studies support anomalously low female Asian estrogen levels (Diamond, 1986).

Female infanticide may be integrated into an understanding of patrifocal social structure—particularly the Conventional Patrifocal social structure of hierarchical Asian social structures, which exhibit long-term stability. When the number of females in the procreation pool is reduced, far fewer males are able to have children. A heavy emphasis is placed on the ideal male, the non-ideal males procreating far less. The result is a continuing selection of highly patrifocal traits in the male population. Because of this, left spectrum and older genotype features that accompany matrifocal social structure do not easily emerge. This would include left-handedness, an attraction to innovation and spontaneous creativity. Instead, status, hierarchy and tradition would be highly valued, as is the case with traditional Asian culture. Female infanticide is a powerful sexual selection tool providing long-term stability to Conventional Patrifocal societies. Very low incidence of autism would also be expected, as I will explain shortly.

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With individuals congregating around the eight hormonal paradigms, we’d expect that many diseases, disorders and conditions would be assigned to those located at the extremes, or outlying positions of the balanced polymorphism. For example, Asian females with very low estrogen should have low rates of breast cancer, while matrifocal societies with high estrogen should exhibit high rates of breast cancer. One would expect the same pattern with prostate cancer. We’d expect to see relatively few cases of prostate cancer in Asian patrifocal societies but high rates of prostate cancer in patrifocal societies that exhibit little cooperation. In Contemporary Matrifocal Scandinavia, one would expect very low rates of prostate cancer, yet relatively high rates of male breast cancer. Social structures compel hormonal tendencies, suggesting disease and condition etiology.

For conditions like autism, Asperger’s, stuttering and phonetic dyslexia, we’d expect to see the four matrifocal categories trending toward these conditions, with a possible emphasis on M te and F TE if Classic Matrifocal is how we primarily evolved (see below). Autism, Asperger’s, stuttering and phonetic dyslexia are often accompanied by male maturational delay, which is a marker of matrifocal societies. Matrifocal societies feature low-testosterone males and high-testosterone females.

There is the possibility that certain mental conditions will trend toward these same hormonal extremes. I would estimate that borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, based upon their association with families exhibiting left-handers and maturational delay, will fit the same matrifocal profiles, again with a likely Classic Matrifocal emphasis.

Diseases and conditions may have multiple etiologies depending on the particular symptoms they are associated with. For example, Marian Annett and colleagues noted two types of dyslexia. She observed phonetic dyslexia trending toward the extreme left end of the balanced polymorphism and visual dyslexia trending toward the extreme right (Annett, Eglinton & Smythe, 1996).

Schizophrenia may display two radically different etiologies, which would appear in both patrifocal and matrifocal cultures. These two different etiologies would be based upon the hypothesis that hemispheric differentiation and corpus callosum size vary according to two extremes (Coger & Serafetinides, 1990). One etiology is reinforced by facility with language (Crow, 1995; Crow, Done & Sacker, 1996) and is accompanied by a surge in patrifocal social structures, while the other displays a familial and social structure identical to the familial and social structure of autism, characterized by matrifocal origins.

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I am hypothesizing a five-step evolutionary continuum that begins with natural selection but then moves to sexual selection. In this continuum, animals focus on particular patterns when they choose a mate. Step three begins with crossing a bridge over to human sexual selection, where adept practitioners of novel pattern creation are selected as procreation partners by mates with sensitivity to these nuances (Miller, 2000). The fourth step is taken when novelty itself becomes desirable outside the partner selection process, and society is thus compelled to embrace in its productions countless nuances of the new. In the fifth stage, awareness of the creation process itself becomes a target experience.

1) natural selection
2) sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) art and culture (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) awareness of the selection or creative process

Integrated into the sequence established above is the longer-term dynamic of humans, who evolved from random-handed non-speech users (Annett, 2002) with two equally large cerebral hemispheres and a wide corpus callosum (Witelson, 1991).

I hypothesize that step 3 of this sequence is compelled by long-term male maturational delay and reinforced by sexual selection in a matrifocal context, where child-like features attract more focus (Gould, 1977). Classic Matrifocal was likely our social structure at this stage (Knight, 1991). Stage 4 suggests a shift toward patrifocal social structure as well as a decrease in brain size (Wiercinski, 1979), culminating in the Warrior Patrifocal. This sequence suggests that Classic Matrifocal and Warrior Matrifocal preceded Contemporary Matrifocal as well as Conventional Patrifocal, with the possible emergence of Contemporary and Conventional in the last 5,000 years.

Deep societal change can occur quickly when there is a change in hormonal constellations. Sudden shifts can occur from matrifocal to patrifocal, or patrifocal to matrifocal. For example, if a matrifocal society is highly stressed over time by patrifocal incursions, the ideal male mate may shift from one displaying cooperative tendencies to a male who is quick to fight. Formerly highly valued aesthetic-oriented males may then find themselves outside the pool of highly valued potential mates. In mere generations, physiological, hormonal and neuropsychological transformations can occur.

Migrating populations exposed to changes in sunlight (Geschwind and Galburda, 1987) show radical fluctuations in social structure, which impacts evolution over time. Sunlight impacts the pineal gland, which directly influences the testosterone levels within the individuals of a population (Geschwind and Galburda, 1987). A variety of specific diseases and conditions acquired by the eight prototype hormonal outliers will emerge among these migrating peoples, including autism. In addition, changing diet can exaggerate hormonal changes.

A radical change in diet, such as an increase in high quality fats and nutrients, could raise a female’s estrogen and testosterone levels and lower a male’s testosterone levels (Ahluwalia, Jackson, Jones, Williams, Mamidanna & Rajguru, 1981). These changes in hormonal levels would compel a shift in social structure toward the direction of female choice. Females would then seek mates that were cooperators rather than warriors. Sudden dietary changes that drastically reduce access to high fat foods could compel a hormonal shift toward a patrifocal social structure. These hormonal shifts would be further accentuated if combative situations emerged. This is the variation of the Kuzawa (2007) thesis, which proposes that uterine environments can influence adult physiology. My Theory of Waves thesis suggests that the parent’s hormonal shifts can adjust a progeny’s hormonal constellations and shift a society’s hormonal spectrum in a particular direction, depending on environmental pressures. Such hormonal shifts thus result in modifications of social structure.

Eight environmental variables influence testosterone, including light (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), diet (Schmidt, Wijga, Von Zur Muhlen, Brabant & Wagner, 1997), body fat (Ross, Bernstein, Judd, Hanisch, Pike & Henderson, 1986; Glass, Swerdloff, Bray, Dahms & Atkinson, 1977), alcohol and drugs (Castilla-Garcia, Santolaria-Fernandez, Gonzalez-Reimers, Bastita-Lopez, Gonzalez-Garcia, Jorge-Hernandez & Hernandez-Nieto, 1987; Ahluwalia, Clark, Westney, Smith, James, & Rajguru, 1992), tobacco (MacMahon, Trichopoulos, Cole & Brown, 1982; Barrett-Connor & Khaw, 1987), touch, physical activity (MacConnie, Barkan, Lampman, Schork, & Beitins, 1986; Morville, Pesquies, Guezennec, Serrurier & Guignard, 1979) and stress (James, 1986). Estrogen has been far less studied, but diet has been repeatedly shown to dramatically influence estrogen levels (Ahluwalia, et al., 1981).

We can view evolution as both a dynamic and static process that is driven by social structure, environmental influences, maturation rate modifications and hormonal changes. The evolutionary developmental biological view, or the heterochronic perspective, offers a dynamic frame. Annett’s (2002) modern UK society is characterized by a balanced polymorphism, which exhibits an evenly balanced static spectrum view of left and right-handed individuals. On the far left side of this spectrum exist the extreme left-handed, as well as the random-handed, and on the far right side of this spectrum exist the extreme right-handed. Most people in a society exist somewhere in the middle. This spectrum of individuals is aligned along a gradated curve and offers a static snapshot of our society in the process of transition. The older anomalously dominant (both cerebral hemispheres close to the same size) matrifocal prototype is stationed at the left side and balances those with cerebral asymmetry designed for speech facility, the patrifocal prototype, on the right. Annett’s Right Shift Theory (Annett, 1985) argues that cerebral asymmetry with language proclivity offers a heterozygote advantage that allows the moderate right-handed to occupy the center of society. This Theory of Waves integrates social structure, maturation rates and a long-term evolutionary arc into Annett’s static snapshot in time.

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Four major barriers prevent the easy appraisal of the natural hormonal levels that characterize the eight human prototypes.

Assays that fail to measure the variations of handedness with the degree of sensitivity established by Annett’s peg tests obstruct new insight and obscure potentially valuable observation. Annett’s work concluded that humans evolved as a random-handed species, which transitioned to right-handed when brains became lateralized for speech. Her peg tests measure degrees of right and random-handedness and are integral for establishing a locus related to social structure, disease/condition proclivity and maturation rate propensity. It is essential that different studies, particularly studies across cultures, compare apples to apples and use Annett’s protocols when measuring handedness.

It would be useful if Annett’s techniques were required to measure handedness around the world, quickly. Dietary changes within patrifocal societies may be skewing results dramatically. Aboriginal societies with a matrifocal foundation have almost completely disappeared. There are very few tools available to measure variations in societal balanced polymorphisms. Annett’s peg tests seem to measure the effects of testosterone and some indirect effects of estrogen fairly well.

The eight environmental variables noted above profoundly impact the hormone levels of males and females in a variety of contexts. To effectively measure the natural hormonal thresholds in ontogeny at any point, one must have an understanding of how that person’s hormonal levels are being influenced and altered by external variables. Adult hormone levels are dramatically impacted by a variety of factors. Existing studies show wild variation in results because these studies ignore influential variables. One study that measured testosterone levels neglected to take into consideration the time of day that levels were tested. In addition, the effects of stress cannot be underestimated. For example, measuring the testosterone levels of an autistic child in an institutional setting does little to provide an idea of that child’s base hormonal threshold, particularly if that child is on a standard institutional diet. Diet has been shown to have an effect on the symptoms of autism (Hjiej, Doyen, Couprie, Kaye & Contejean, 2008).

Some diseases and conditions appear at both ends of the left/right spectrum and occupy multiple poles of both matrifocal and patrifocal social structure. Annett approached dyslexia etiologies from a new perspective and established a protocol, which discovered that handedness congregated at both the extreme left and right ends of the spectrum. Diseases and conditions with more than one etiology often confound studies and frustrate attempts to discover patterns in social structure, handedness, hormonal constellations and ethnicity. It may seem that a disease such as schizophrenia, or a condition such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, does not always associate with a specific social structure or prototype predilection when more than one etiology is potentially in play.

Lastly, the season in which an individual is born affects the maturational delay and acceleration of that individual. Season of birth can thus help polarize a society’s social structure to either end of the spectrum. The effects of pineal-influenced testosterone levels may not merely be influencing those who live in migrating populations but also those who live in relative climatic extremes. When individuals within a society congregate at the hormonal extremes, vacating the balanced polymorphistic middle where those with the heterozygote advantage reside, it becomes nearly impossible to form conclusions about a society normally based on a seamless arc, or balance. In other words, climate and migration patterns influence the variables we’ve been noting.

These four conditions that inhibit high quality information regarding hormone levels—inconsistent handedness studies, untracked environmental variables, multiple pole disease/condition etiologies and season of birth effects—are primary reasons that the Geschwind/Galaburda hypothesis drew mixed support.

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Norman Geschwind and his colleagues suggested that a number of diseases and conditions tend to align with specific handedness and cerebral lateralization tendencies. Geschwind believed that the random-handed (often left-handers) and the anomalously dominant, both of whom exhibit cerebral hemispheres near the same size, were evolutionary derivations. I agree with Annett (2002) that the random-handed and anomalously dominant are our evolutionary forebears, but I’ve added that these ancestral genotypes are matrifocal in origin.

Approaching Geschwind and Galaburda’s (1987) thesis with a heterochronic/social structure perspective gives one the ability to hypothesize the etiologies of a host of diseases and conditions as well as suggest a relationship between handedness, hormonal associations, social structure, lateralization, ethnicity and environmental variables.

These are some of the diseases and conditions noted in the literature (mostly from Geschwind and Galaburda, 1987) that offer correlations with some of the variables addressed in this model: alcoholism, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, asthma, ataxia telangiectasia, atopic syndrome, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, benign intracranial hypertension, bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, breast cancer, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), cluster headaches, celiac disease, conduct disorder, congenital heart disease, dementia, depression, diabetes, Down’s syndrome, dyslexia, dystrophia myotonica, endometriosis, epilepsy, gastrointestinal issues, harelip, heart disease, Huntington’s disease, immune disorders, hyperkinetic syndrome, Kartagener syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome, Klippel-Feil syndrome, lupus erythematosus, migraine headaches, mital valve prolapse, narcissistic personality disorder, obesity, obsessive compulsive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, osteoporosis, ovarian cysts, Parkinson’s disease, phobias, pilonidal sinus, polycystic ovary syndrome, prostate cancer, schizophrenia, scoliosis, spina bifida, stuttering, temporal lobe epilepsy, thyroid disorders, torticollis, Tourette’s syndrome, Turner syndrome and twinning. Cross reference these variables with handedness, social structure, maturation rates, ethnicity, family of origin, cerebral dominance and hormonal levels. All of these conditions offer opportunities to observe the relationships of these conditions and diseases to the eight human prototypes.

…

The predictions below focus specifically on issues of relative maturation rates with an emphasis on autism and related conditions.

1) Autistic males, from families of left-handers, will have lower testosterone than the norm, and autistic females will have higher testosterone. The mothers will have high testosterone (Baron-Cohen, Lutchmaya & Knickmeyer, 2004) and quite possibly high estrogen. If we evolved primarily from high F TE, M te, then autistic males will have low estrogen, and autistic females will have high estrogen. (In any study of autism, those with familial male maturation delay tendencies, or families of left-handers, need to be evaluated separately from those possibly traumatized by an environmental effect.)

2) Larger penis and testicle size will be associated with autistic, ambidextrous males and the familial left-handed. Left-handed males and autistics will produce more sperm. (This is based on the large testicle matrifocal bonobo sexual egalitarian paradigm vs. the small testicles patrifocal gorilla harem paradigm.) If larger testicles and increased sperm production are associated with low-testosterone, promiscuous social-structure males, then the two variables will be related in the sense that higher-testosterone males will have smaller testicles or lower sperm production.

3) Autistic males will exhibit more neotenous characteristics, while autistic females should show less neoteny than their contemporaries.

4) The children of parents of widely different ethnicities, separated by tens of thousands of years from common ancestry, will reveal characteristics of their last common progenitor and increased incidence of autism and left-handedness. (Maturational delay progenitor feature emergences will be far more common in matrifocal social structure families.)

5) Neoteny has dental correlations, with smaller teeth being characteristic of the neotenous smaller jaw. Learning that teeth have grown smaller over millions of years, researchers will find that they have actually grown larger in males over the last few tens of thousands of years as patrifocal social structure has taken hold. Ontologically, the teeth of males from older mothers should be smaller than the teeth of males of first-born, young mothers. The reverse should be true for females. In a large family, the male’s teeth will erupt later and later, the female’s earlier and earlier.

6) Because a mother’s testosterone level rises with her age and because she has children across the whole arc of her reproductive years, we might observe a display of personality and physiological features in her children that would roughly reproduce human evolution over a span of eons. An older mother should more frequently have male children with maturational delay, female children with accelerated maturation and increased prevalence of autism in both sexes. Autistic children born to young mothers will more likely come with less frequency from families of left-handers, trauma being a likely cause.

7) Obese mothers (overweight women exhibit increased testosterone and estrogen levels), particularly those who are older, should show high incidence of autism in their children, particularly in migrating populations moving from equatorial regions to northern climates. Equatorial peoples transplanted to northern climates will display higher percentages of maturational-delayed male children, and maturational-accelerated females, including autistics, with the births congregating in certain seasons.

8) If the low-testosterone males and high-testosterone females are late born, and high-testosterone males and low-testosterone females are the oldest children in a family or the first born, then first-borns will mate with first-borns and late-borns will mate with late-borns a higher percentage of the time than would occur by chance.

9) Hypothesizing that social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals were to emerge, it would be among the youngest sons and daughters. One would also expect a higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children (reflecting matrifocal values).

10) Conditions that display maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will appear more often in males with longer limbs and smaller teeth than in others in their family of origin. This would suggest that the youngest males would also be the tallest. (Longer limbs and smaller teeth are neotenous features.)

11) Eating healthfully (the caveman diet) brings puberty later and provides a longer time for the brain to grow. Putting autistic children on such a late-puberty-enhancing diet may enhance their ability to connect. When puberty or progenesis in humans is dropped to a younger age by several years, it has neurological and cognitive repercussions. In addition to a possible increase in depression and bi-polar disorder, there is the potential for a general curtailment of the final stages of cognitive development.

12) Societal periods of innovation will be preceded by periods of romance, revealing changes in the selection criteria by which females pick their mates or by a widening of the selection criteria for the ideal male. Shifts toward increases in the variety of acceptable features in the procreation population will result in increases in cultural and technical variation. For example, if female infanticide is a tool used for patrifocal cultural stability, decreases in female infanticide over time within a culture will correlate with increases in societal and economic variation. These changes will result in matrifocal societal surges, increases in left-handedness and increases in autism.

13) If rhythm and dance were the aesthetics driving human evolution through rituals of sexual selection, then the sound and feeling of nonstop rhythm may be necessary to encourage the development of an autistic child. Rhythmic environmental triggers may be essential to the healthy growth of maturational-delayed children. By implication, comparing congenitally deaf left and right-handers may reveal an unusually high number of autistics in the left-handed group.

…

I am hypothesizing that evolution is driven by this hormonal ebbing and flowing, or waxing and waning. Mother’s testosterone levels > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory. Mother’s estrogen levels > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory. These two currents are inextricably intertwined, yet they follow established patterns, not unlike the double helix. Changes in hormone levels, influenced by the environment, impact ontogeny while we are in the womb, when we are children and after we’ve become grown-ups.

I call this the Theory of Waves to suggest the surge of features that travel ontogenetically back and forth from conception to adulthood and adulthood to conception over generations, with the direction of features often opposite between the sexes. Darwin proposed three different theories of evolution. This model in some ways integrates his three models (natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, or pangenesis) and seeks to show patterns common to evolutionary biology (heterochronic theory), anthropology (social structure) and neuropsychology (sexual hormone endocrinology and Annett’s balanced polymorphism), all three of which describe ways that human beings may have evolved and may still be evolving.

Clearly, an adjustment (Matsuda, 1987) of Watson and Crick’s (1953) Central Dogma is occurring in several places in this thesis. Let me urge the reader to approach this work playfully while still rummaging for something useful in these conjectures. Most of all, perhaps, this thesis is suggesting that neoteny is central to being human. I believe that by playing with evolution we may discover who we are.

References:

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Annett, M., Eglinton, E. & Smythe, P. (1996). Types of dyslexia and the shift to dextrality. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines, 37(2), 167-80.

Annett, M. (2002). Handedness and brain asymmetry. New York: Taylor & Francis Inc.

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Baron-Cohen, S., Lutchmaya, S. & Knickmeyer, R. (2004). Prenatal testosterone in mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Barrett-Connor, E. & Khaw, K. T. (1987) Cigarette smoking and increased endogenous estrogen levels in men. American Journal of Epidemiology, 126(2), 187-92.

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…

The introduction to this piece was modified on 3/8/09

For more details regarding this theory, visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=28

For more details regarding this theory and autism, visit http://www.neoteny.org/?cat=29

F te/M TE Conventional Patrifocal
F tE/M Te Warrior Patrifocal
F Te/M tE Contemporary Matrifocal
F TE/M te Classic Matrifocal

F te/M TE means low-testosterone & estrogen female, high-testosterone & estrogen male. Domineering, caring, discriminating men choosing cooperative women.

F tE/M Te means low-testosterone, high-estrogen female, high-testosterone, low-estrogen male. Domineering men choosing cooperative, caring, discriminating women.

F Te/M tE means high-testosterone, low-estrogen female, low-testosterone, high-estrogen male. Commanding women choosing creative, cooperative, caring, discriminating men.

F TE/M te means high-testosterone & estrogen female, low-testosterone & estrogen male. Commanding, caring, discriminating women choosing creative, cooperative, aloof men.

We have noted that Marian Annett observed a balanced polymorphism of gradations between random-handed and strong right-handed individuals within a society. We might conclude that just as there is a hypothesized random-handed prototype human and a strong right-handed prototype human, with some people fitting those exact prototypes, most folks in our four-pole hypothesis will appear along the mixed characteristics curve in between the extremes. We might also conclude that Annett’s charts are plotting our a four-pole hypothesis with her handedness evaluations parsing out the matrifocal/patrifocal split, but Annett is unable to break out our hypothetical estrogen influence in the process, with estrogen not evidencing itself in maturation-rate influenced features.

Nevertheless, we now have two complementing dynamics acting as the engine behind social change and evolution, pushing and pulling individuals closer and farther away from these four-poles over a period of generations.

Mother’s testosterone levels > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory.

Mother’s estrogen levels > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory.

I hypothesize two feedback loops. Mother’s testosterone level > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > mother’s testosterone level. Mother’s estrogen level > progeny ability to exercise aesthetic discrimination and caring behavior > social structure proclivity > Mother’s estrogen level. The environment can intervene at all three levels of both loops by either influencing maturation rates and timing (via testosterone) or by influencing the intensity of mate selection criteria (via estrogen), thus modifying the trajectory of social and human evolution.

How would the influence of estrogen be evaluated if indeed Annett’s tests are successfully discovering the degree that testosterone influences maturation rates, evidencing itself in extremes of anomalous dominance vs. strong right-handedness?

Consider the emerging consensus that the mother’s testosterone level has influence on the likelihood of autism in her children. It is the estimation of this site’s thesis that matrifocal social structure’s high-testosterone mothers are the evolutionary force behind the increase in autism. High-testosterone mothers create low-testosterone males, high-testosterone females. We are hypothesizing that this, in combination with other testosterone-influencing variables, often leads to autism. Consider that there are two kinds of high-testosterone mothers: high estrogen and low estrogen. This would be our Classic Matrifocal (high E) and Contemporary Matrifocal (low e) prototypes. Are there four types of autism groups based upon a mother with these two different high-testosterone hormonal constellations?

Male tE
Male te
Female Te
Female TE

How would we evaluate the groups? Stress increases testosterone levels, making the direct measuring of testosterone a difficult way to form a conclusion. Autistic children often live in highly stressed environments, to say nothing of the existential dissonance they no doubt experience because they are often unable to integrate with society. Are there different enough infant hormone thresholds of these four hormone prototypes that very early evaluations would form a clue?

If genetic, not trauma-based, autism has these four etiological foundations, then how do we best evaluate if this is the case?

And, if we evolved primarily via one of the two matrifocal social structures, F TE/M te (Classic Matrifocal), then autistic children should primarily exhibit Female TE and Male te.

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 just mature slower. Features of the infant manifest in the adult. Acceleration is the reverse of neoteny, with the features of adult ancestors appearing in the infant or embryonic features of descendants.

Darwin discovered sexual selection. He did not intuit the close connection between sexual selection and social structure in human evolution though he observed a relationship between the two. It seems that Victorian prejudices prevented him from seriously considering that human evolution was heavily influenced by female sexual selection or matristic, female-centered societies. Ironically, Wallace shared few of Darwin’s prejudices that women and aboriginals were lower than white Western academics, yet Wallace rejected sexual selection. If Wallace had embraced the theory, perhaps he’d have had the insights that several of his contemporaries experienced, that female sexual selection may have been integral to human evolution. Wallace chose instead to believe that divine intervention was responsible for language, society and culture.

Among those Western intellectuals that considered that the human female may have been central to how we evolved were Marx and Engels. Anthropologist Chris Knight, in his Blood Relations, observes how this has resulted in the fracturing of Western theorizing of human evolution.

For 150 years these three disciplines, neuropsychology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, have evolved in separate directions, occasionally exchanging idea memes but mostly conducting their work in separate journals describing seemingly unrelated theories with different descriptive nomenclatures.

I’ve suggested that by observing the influence of social structure on the heterochronic patterns of neoteny and acceleration, various neurological, physiological, psychological and hormonal patterns emerge in descendants over time. Anthropology, evolutionary biology and neuropsychology are three names for whether the patterns are observed in a society at a particular time, in society over time or in an individual within that society. These three disciplines are parsing out the scale and timing of experience. Engineering has one language to describe the almost 100-year evolution of the auto, general auto design and the products of specific auto manufacturers. It would be useful if we had a single language for human beings.

A potentially useful language is the language that lovers speak, the evocations of testosterone and estrogen. A mother’s testosterone levels at six weeks before birth decide the testosterone levels and maturation rates of her children. A high-testosterone mother births high-testosterone daughters and low-testosterone sons. A low-testosterone mother gives birth to low-testosterone daughters and high-testosterone sons. The environment influences those testosterone levels, adjusting the testosterone levels in her children. If the mother mates with a male from a genetic line long separated from hers (i.e., an American Indian mating with a Jew), the progeny may display hormonal constellations or maturational trajectories that are ancient. If a very high-testosterone woman is attracted to a very low-testosterone man, the children’s maturation may be vulnerable to environmental influences exaggerating the mother’s testosterone levels even further.

The mother’s womb is the place where the scale and timing of experience converge. A society’s social structure is informed by the testosterone levels and maturation speed that her children emerge with. High-testosterone (T) females mating with low-testosterone (t) males form matrifocal, matristic or partnership societies. Low t females pairing with high T males create patrifocal, patristic or male domination societies.

Social structure changes over time. Evolution reflects those changes. These changes manifest in specific features of individuals within those societies, including dispositions for particular diseases, conditions and disorders informed by their particular hormonal tendencies driven by social structure.

Estrogen has been studied far less than testosterone. Not unlike observing a baseball game by watching only what occurs at first base and right field, understanding the impact of estrogen in this dynamic, intuiting the rules of the game but being only able to observe part of the game, is a challenge. Nevertheless, like Geschwind and Galaburda in 1987, I’d like to make some tentative hypotheses and see if some of the patterns that they observed twenty years ago make more sense from this new point of view. I’d like to see how many of the rules of baseball we can infer by watching a fraction of the game.

Let’s imagine that not only testosterone levels are set at a particular time in the woman’s womb. Let’s estimate that estrogen levels in the mother decide the estrogen levels in her children, operating with a similar dynamic. This is a big leap, but the implications in social structure (anthropology) and evolution (evolutionary biology) are perhaps useful.

Imagine that a mother with high estrogen (E) gives birth to a low (e) estrogen son and a high E daughter. A low e mother gives birth to a low e daughter and a high E son. Estrogen confers caring and caregiving, along with a tendency to make aesthetic evaluations or judgments, as in sexual selection. Estrogen compels caring and a biological aesthetic.

Consider that just as testosterone propels maturational trajectories, resulting in changes in evolution, societies and the features of individuals, changes in estrogen result in similar profound modifications in evolution, society and individual characteristics. These changes are more difficult to see when everyone’s eyes in a patrifocal society are on the ball clearing a fence in left field. Still, there are 18 players in the game. It’s not all about the batter and the pitcher.

Perhaps it was the catcher that told the pitcher to throw a fast ball.

It may not be obvious that estrogen is calling signals in biological and societal evolution, but the possibility might make many patterns clear.

Consider the following…..

F te/M TE Conventional Patrifocal
F tE/M Te Warrior Patrifocal
F Te/M tE Contemporary Matrifocal
F TE/M te Classic Matrifocal

F te/M TE means low-testosterone & estrogen females, high-testosterone & estrogen male.

F tE/M Te means low-testosterone, high-estrogen female, high-testosterone, low-estrogen male.

F Te/M tE means high-testosterone, low-estrogen female, low-testosterone, high-estrogen male.

F TE/M te means high-testosterone & estrogen female, low-testosterone & estrogen male.

These are the outliers. The work of Marian Annett and her Right Shift Theory suggest that perhaps most people are in middle zones, not exhibiting particularly high or low levels of either hormone. Still, we are hypothesizing that societies will tend to lean powerfully in a matrifocal or patrifocal direction, evidencing populations with tendencies to fall into one or two of the four quadrants. All societies will exhibit examples of all four quadrants. I am hypothesizing that one or two of the four will be emphasized.

Because the mother’s testosterone levels always propel the two sexes in opposite directions (maturational delayed vs. maturational accelerated), we are hypothesizing that mother’s estrogen levels fashion her children’s exhibition of estrogen in opposite directions.

Domineering, caring, discriminating men choose cooperative women (F te/M TE).

Domineering men choose cooperative, caring, discriminating women (F tE/M Te).

Commanding women choose creative, cooperative, caring, discriminating men (F Te/M tE).

Commanding, caring, discriminating women choose creative, cooperative, aloof men (F TE/M te).

Marian Annett’s hypothesis of a balanced polymorphism or a society evidencing a seamless gradation between two outlier or extreme populations seems a reasonable way to view the patterns we are hypothesizing here. We would hypothesize that different societies will evidence varying balanced polymorphisms depending on their social structure proclivities. Specific hormonal constellations will become reinforced by womb conditions.

Deep changes in a society can occur quickly when there is a change in hormonal constellations. There can be sudden shifts from matrifocal to patrifocal or patrifocal to matrifocal. For example, if a matrifocal society is highly stressed over time by patrifocal incursions, the ideal male mate may shift from one displaying cooperative tendencies to a male quick to fight. Formerly highly valued aesthetic-oriented males may find themselves outside the pool of highly valued potential partners. In mere generations, physiological, hormonal and neuropsychological transformations may occur.

Nomadic populations exposed to changes in light (light influencing the pineal gland, which moderates testosterone levels) may experience radical fluctuations in a society’s social structure, impacting evolution over time.

Radical changes in diet manifesting in large amounts of high quality fats and nutrients might raise a female’s estrogen and testosterone levels, compelling a shift in social structure in the direction of female choice, with females choosing cooperators over warriors.

Hypothesizing both estrogen and testosterone as players in the transformation of species, societies and individuals, we might be able to infer rules in the game of life too subtle when we choose to only notice the behaviors of males. Details describing the power of women go unremarked when viewed from the elevated position of disciplines that do not play ball with one another. Consider that when we are able to see the whole playing field and are able to view all players, we notice that half of them are females and that the catcher, with mask withdrawn, is a woman.

It takes at least two to play a game. It’s time we recognize that the females are always players.

(Thanks to Riane Eisler’s The Real Wealth of Nations for inspiring the conclusions that I came to in this piece.)

Patri Female low T, low e Male high T, high e Asian
Patri Female low T, low e Male high T, low e
Hybrid Female low T, low e Male low T, high e Scandinavian?
Hybrid Female low T, low e Male low T, low e Scandinavian?

Patri Female low T, high e Male high T, high e
Patri Female low T, high e Male high T, low e
Hybrid Female low T, high e Male low T, high e Scandinavian?
Hybrid Female low T, high e Male low T, low e Scandinavian?

Hybrid Female high T, low e Male high T, high e
Hybrid Female high T, low e Male high T, low e
Matri Female high T, low e Male low T, high e
Matri Female high T, low e Male low T, low e

Hybrid Female high T, high e Male high T, high e
Hybrid Female high T, high e Male high T, low e
Matri Female high T, high e Male low T, high e
Matri Female high T, high e Male low T, low e African/ Polynesian

Let’s amend that chart to reveal what we’ve concluded might be useful in our ruminations of the last few days. Let’s delete, to see what happens, all pairings that are not complementary in that a female/male matching can’t have both high T, high E, low t, or low e. That would set up the following four tentative testosterone and estrogen matrix of relationships, with the addition of the classic patrifocal hormonal constellation, thresholds shifted down, to create the Asian archetype.

Patri Female low t, low e Male high T, high E Asian (shift down)
Patri Female low t, low e Male high T, high E Classic Patrifocal
Patri Female low t, high E Male high T, low e Warrior Patrifocal
Matri Female high T, low e Male low t, high E Scandinavian
Matri Female high T, high E Male low t, low e Classic Matrifocal

I don’t know if this is any more realistic than the 16-node breakdown. It seems reasonable to tentatively hypothesize that estrogen/testosterone across-sex pairings have to be opposites. If the mother’s estrogen and testosterone levels are setting her progeny’s levels, with girls opposite from boys, this would suggest the four-node solution.

The Female tE, male Te pairing seems to patrifocal society what the Scandinavian societies are to matrifocal society, an intensification of the paradigm. This seems to be the classic dominator warrior with no aesthetic sense, no caregiving tendencies and not choosey in the features that he looks for in a mate. The female seems docile, cooperative, caring and caregiving, with an aesthetic orientation. Perhaps over the course of hominid evolution all four of these polarities engage.

What are some of the implications of this paradigm?

Jared Diamond and Marvin Harris have explored hypothetical environmental influences on human social evolution. Juxtaposing those variables with the four-pole matrix proposed here may suggest specific evolutionary trajectories. Ethnic physical features may be predictable, particularly when seen against this hormonal hypothesis. Geoffrey Miller’s work focuses on the power of sexual selection or aesthetic compulsion to create features in physiology and society. Aesthetic choice in combination with hormonal constellation proclivities may go a long way toward informing an understanding of societal evolution since the African Diaspora.

What seems most powerful in the implications of this hypothesis is an enhanced understanding of diseases, disorders and conditions characterized by hormonal markers or tendencies. Studies suggest Asian women get breast cancer far less often than Westerners because they have unusually low estrogen levels, consonant with our hypothesis of the Asian shift down in hormonal thresholds to accommodate a neotenized, patrifocal society. If elevated and diminished hormone levels are markers for specific kinds of social structures, then we would expect to see specific diseases correlate with specific societies. For example, we might expect to see Scandinavian males get breast cancer more often than would be expected.

For another example, I hypothesized that equatorial peoples moving to northern climates will exhibit season-of-birth variations in testosterone levels, resulting in higher rates of autism. Recent news stories supported that prediction by calling attention to Somalis in Minnesota exhibiting exaggerated rates of autism. That would be low-testosterone males, high-testosterone females. I would predict you’d also get a higher percentage of prostate cancer when the exaggerated higher testosterone males reach adulthood, higher rates caused by those same light-influencing, pineal gland-impacting testosterone levels in the uterine environment. (See Minnesota Somali Autism: Geography and Light for an explanation of how radical changes in light compel the extremes of both male and female maturational delay and acceleration, high and low testosterone for both sexes.)

Taking things one step further, if indeed estrogen levels are set for life while a person is in the womb, then those diseases with high or low estrogen level markers may be directly related to impacts of the environment on the mother’s estrogen levels and environmental impacts later in ontogeny. (Chris Kuzawa explores how changes in the fetal environment influence adult disease.) Environmental impacts in combination with the natural high or low estrogen levels of that particular social structure constellation might lead directly to an etiological understanding for numerous diseases.

There is another implication. This work now hypothesizes that human evolution was driven by the female TE, male te constellation. That is a change from the high-testosterone female, low-testosterone male archetype this work has been presenting until the last few days. We now surmise, with the addition of estrogen, that the evolving male was low estrogen. If low-estrogen males were the prototype male during much of our evolution, and we hypothesize autistic males to feature a genotype from this period, then low e would be a feature of the autistic male. This would suggest that the autistic’s mother has elevated E in addition to T, and the elevated E is contributing to autism in contemporary society.

Ten years ago, I wrestled with an impact of estrogen on this theory as a possibility. Testosterone alone seemed not robust enough to form a theory to explain the origin of many cancers, though studies I read suggested hormone patterns. Exploring both testosterone and estrogen in combination with this modified theory of human biological and social evolution, modified to take into consideration estrogen as integral to the thesis, opens up the model to explaining far more than conditions characterized by maturational delay or acceleration.

Humans may have evolved according to a dynamic where females picked males for their ability to evoke an experience of feeling part of something larger than the self, part of a matrifocal, dance-driven tribal culture where a craving for this aesthetic drove the exponential increase in our brain size. Females picking neotenic or cooperative males choose maturational delayed males whose brains grow bigger over generations as infant features (such as fast growing brains) prolong into the characteristics of adults. Female brains capable of interpreting the nuanced exhibitions of males on aesthetic overdrive also experience selection for big brains. This process was runaway sexual selection in a matrifocal social structure.

The not particularly complementary opposite is patrifocal social structure evolution, which was Freud’s and Darwin’s world. Combative males partner with cooperative females. It has been estimated that this trend may have started as early as our departure from Africa, picked up speed about 25,000 years ago when the fossil record shows brains starting to decrease in size, accelerating 6,500 years ago with the advent of the Indo-Europeans (and brains grew even smaller) and peaking over the last 300 years. In the 20th century, mate choice began shifting back to the female, with a woman choosing a mate according to her personal criteria for what she seeks in a mate.

Developmental models, derived from Freud, have mostly been stripped of their evolutionary origins. The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber integrates Freud’s developmental model with a more contemporary, recapitulationist frame, but a frame that still does not take into consideration the influence of social structure and sexual selection on human evolution. I am proposing that the examination of a runaway matrifocal sexual selection model for human evolution correlating with individual developmental stages reveals personality “disorders” representing stages in our recent (last ~100,000 years) evolution.

In other words, in the way that autism is an evolutionary condition, not a neurological disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorders, obsessive compulsion tendencies, etc., may have far less to do with mental diseases demanding intervention than they may represent evolutionary stages or conditions demanding context re-orientation.

I’m re-orienting psychodynamic theory to accommodate evolutionary theory. Understanding ourselves outside the context of our evolution is a little like conducting psychotherapy without exploring a person’s personal past. Our evolutionary origins are integral to understanding our personal journeys. As we walk a person back through childhood to re-engage the resources left behind, we must also be cognizant of the resources natural to their social structure inclinations. Bridging a client to health involves knowledge of what health looks like for that particular person. A domineering, commanding female may fit all the criteria for matrifocal matriarch. Interpreting her behavior as borderline personality disorder may make less sense than seeking a context where her behavior complements her experience. It might be easier for a narcissistic male to achieve a less self-centered, more compassionate perspective if his experience is contextualized by an understanding of his evolutionary origins and an understanding that, for him, the narcissism is natural, not a defect.

Note that personal trauma compelling the freezing of assets in developmental states also manifests features of the correlated evolutionary stages in the behavior of adults. The thawing of the assets may release attachment to those evolutionary stages. In other words, the manifestations of evolutionary conditions may be contingent upon contemporary influences. That being the case, psychotherapeutic intervention might result in a radical shift equivalent to a 50,000-year jump in evolution–psychotherapy as time machine.

We need diagnostics able to parse out when a person is experiencing mostly an evolutionary condition in a society uncomplimentary to his or her neurology vs. a person suffering from an inability to ontologically progress because of threats in childhood. There are those that suffer both.

The diagnostics might include a complete hormonal work-up. High testosterone females and low testosterone males comprise the matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males partnering with low testosterone females fit the patrifocal paradigm. There are profound brain differences between these two groups that are only now beginning to be understood. Physiologies differ.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparison of dream theme differences between the two social structures, personality “disorders” and conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism. That’s actually what got me started writing this essay. I want to know how people naturally adhere with one of the two social structures when they dream. How do the dreams differ? Dreams might be able to tell us where we are living in the larger arc of our evolution.

To understand Freud is to understand that he believed that understanding our evolution is integral to understanding personality and personality disorder intervention. Shifting from a patrifocal focus to a perspective that embraces both social structure orientations provides a deeper understanding of our origins. From this vantage point, we might discover that many human mental maladies may be less about defect, but about how to discover where we live in time.

In a highly patrifocal society, it is vital that the pool of potential wives be repressed. With few child-bearing females, only the males considered most ideal as husbands will be chosen by the fathers or families of the available woman. In a warrior society, or a very competitive, highly hierarchical society, the males that fail to perform will go mateless. Aggressive, competitive males will procreate and bring higher testosterone warriors into society.

The abortion battle is not over whether killing babies is moral. The abortion battle determines the social structure of society. If females can kill an unborn infant, then future mate selection also reverts to female choice. Females can choose to abort and they can choose their husband according to criteria that support her personal point of view.

Female infanticide is practiced widely in China and India. Targeted female abortion has become a problem with the new technologies. Until the last century there is evidence to suggest that Europeans widely practiced female infanticide. I know of no studies in the United States that track the percentages of males and females born to Right Wing and Left Wing families. With the availability of sex-determining technologies in the first trimester, there is a good chance that even today in the United States it could be observed that social conservative Republicans give birth to more males than members of the Green Party. Every generation that lacks Right Wing control over a woman’s ability to bear children is another generation in which the Right Wing observes the dissolution of male dominance of the society at large. The more females that can choose a mate, the more nonideal males (from a patrifocal male point of view) become fathers.

Among those fathers now easily finding mates are those maturational delayed, noncombative pattern manipulators and creative types. “Wimps”, “nerds” and sensitive males are marrying in greater numbers than in the past. They are giving birth to maturational delayed sons and maturational accelerated daughters, thus introducing to society greater numbers of the autistic (characterized by extreme male maturational delay) than have ever appeared before. Not only has an increase in abortions contributed to a plummeting in crime, abortion has resulted in an increase in autistics as women choose males that would have less problem with her having an abortion. These are nonpatrifocal, relatively female-centric males.

In just the way that Darwin observed humans breeding pigeons, pruning features not desired in an evolutionary thread, humans prune themselves by killing embryos and babies in order to guide society in the direction of matrifocal or patrifocal points of view. There may be few differences between Republicans and Democrats in foreign policy (or domestic policy, in many cases) but there are major differences when it comes to death. How life is trimmed, when the young are killed, has everything to do with how aggressive the future society will be. As long as Democrats struggle to preserve abortion, providing choice for woman whenever possible, the future will be far less aggressive than the past.

(Click here to review now female foeticide effects these issues.)

One of the patterns that a commitment to natural selection masks is that evolution can happen extremely quickly, in a single lifetime. Darwin was aware of single-generational change and struggled for an explanatory principle. He called his theory pangenesis. According to pangenesis, the body manufactures gemmules that can carry information informing the body of environmental change, which the body responds to, modifying progeny in response.

We call them hormones.

We live in a post-Mendelian age. When a cloned sheep emerges from the mother with fur exhibiting different patterns from her other self, we might take notice. This effect is not what was predicted. With the complete genome mapped and realizing that things aren’t exactly as easy as Mendel suggested, we might consider alternative paradigms.

A mother with high testosterone produces males with low testosterone and females with high testosterone. The child’s maturation speed is determined six weeks before birth based on the mother’s testosterone level. Imagine that the fetus reaches that point, six weeks before birth, and the individual’s lifelong maturation rate is set. Now imagine that it is not only the speed that the individual will mature in his or her own life that is calculated, but his or her position in evolutionary time. What is determined by the mother’s testosterone level is the child’s position in the evolutionary arc of our species over the last several tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years.

This trend means, as Frederick Engels and several nineteenth century proto-anthropologists suggested, a return to matriarchal social structures: low testosterone males and high testosterone females.

Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Stages of our ontogeny inform and reproduce the final stages of our social structure evolution.

Autism manifests that recent stage in our unfolding where split-brain modern consciousness emerges and language use bridges over from gesture to speech. The females were often the leaders of these bands. They wielded authority and were first to be adept with words. Their brains made the transition first from two lobes of the same size with a wide corpus callosum to brains with a smaller right lobe with less robust cerebral connective tissues. Split brains made them better leaders. They could toy with time. Males continued to be selected for their cooperative, artistic, neotenic tendencies to be dependent upon and comply with the directions of the band.

With the story we are telling, we’d expect our male and female autistics, our travelers to the past, to evidence complementary opposite features.

I would predict that autistic males (those from families of left-handers, families evidencing maturational delay, not the autism born of trauma) will evidence neotenous characteristics such as smaller jaws, big heads and a post-puberty lanky build (unless provided diets that would hasten the onset of puberty). The literature already suggests that autistic males have larger brains with two lobes the same size. The males, of course, should have lower testosterone relative to the autistic female and relative to the standard, nonautistic right-handed male.

The autistic female is relatively rare compared to the autistic male, because you have to go further back in evolutionary time to find females having difficulty with words, with brains not yet split. I would predict that the autistic female would show little neoteny as compared to a nonautistic female. The autistic female should evidence a larger jaw, stockier build and a more domineering disposition when compared to her contemporary sisters. She should reveal higher testosterone levels relative to the standard, right-handed nonautistic female.

This model predicts complementary opposite characteristics of male and female autistics that mirror the matriarchal social structure that is their society of origin. When we understand that social evolution, biological evolution and ontological transformation are all about different time scales of the identical process, we can better interpret what we are observing in the now.

Not unlike the experience of traveling to little-visited, far-flung corners of the earth and finding surprisingly similar myths describing origins of local culture; we find ourselves filled with a similar wonder upon traveling to little-visited academic sub-disciplines. Just as two far-apart aboriginal cultures might have no contact with each other, the heterochronic practitioners of evolutionary biology have little traffic with the neuropsychological theorists who may be located less than a hundred yards away in another building on the same campus. Strangely, we find these different scientists discussing identical processes in different terminologies with almost no published awareness that they have much in common.

How might two different scientific disciplines be discussing the same natural dynamic and not know it, like two aboriginal societies fearing menstrual blood half a world apart, unaware of another culture with the same belief?

The followers of heterochronic theory, tucked within the discipline of evolutionary biology, follow the influence of the relative rate and timing of development and maturation on species transformation. These theorists believe they have discovered a shortcut in the process by which Darwin’s selective processes, natural selection and sexual selection, cajole and curtail the way species transform and go through metamorphosis. The concept is elegant. Instead of waiting for chance mutations or unusual random variations, the selective processes act to retain specific useful features characterized by changes in maturation. A simple variation in, for example, the speed with which an individual can reach maturity, could mean that this faster-growing individual could defend himself or herself against a threat to which another, slower-developing individual might yield to. By passing on this ability to grow faster, this individual’s progeny would also have an increased chance to survive.

This example is one of several ways of manipulating the development and maturation process. Growing smaller is an advantage in many situations, as is growing slower. For example, spending more time at a specific maturational stage, the stage when brain size increase is the most rapid, might result in a far larger brain when that individual reaches adulthood; for example by having a more prolonged early infancy, some species might attain a larger brain size. All that changed may have been the rate of maturation at a specific age for a specific or extended period of time.

Stephen J. Gould suggests that the prolongation of the stages of infant growth into adulthood, since our divergence from chimpanzee-like ancestors five million years ago, would result in many features we identify as human. Human adults look like chimpanzee infants; in this case, a human’s ancestral infant stage prolongs its features into its descendant’s adulthood. An awareness of the rates and timing of maturation leads to an understanding of how humans evolved.

So how do rate and timing changes in hominid evolution relate to the studies of neuropsychologists?

Evolution is not just a record of the processes of the past leading to the present. Evolution is the process by which life unfolds in the here and now. The biggest block to understanding the connection between these two disciplines is the belief by many evolutionary theorists that the genes you pass on to your progeny cannot be revised once you have been conceived. The confusion has to do with the belief that our genes are randomly dealt according to a randomly created sperm impregnating an egg randomly created by the female’s parents. Overlooked is that long, long ago, embryos and animals were genetically programmed, naturally selected, to respond to changes in their environment, passing on these adaptations to their progeny in a form that their progeny could use to revise the rate and timing of their development and maturation to conform with what their parent’s bodies had learned.

Changes in diet influence the onset of puberty. The onset of puberty has been dropping for 100 years, with teens now starting their changes three to four years earlier. It has been suggested that increased high fat diets, non-meat fats, carbohydrates, hormone-infused meats or even plain protein trigger earlier puberty, which generates a change in the body’s environment that gets communicated to the next generation genetically when eggs and sperm are produced. Eggs and sperm are produced from the body’s hormonal constellation at the time of egg and sperm creation; for the woman, her eggs are created when she herself is an embryo; for the man, sperm creation is within days of ejaculation. The parent’s body knows hormonally that there has been an increase in specific elements of the diet. The message is passed on through genes that were naturally selected to be able to discriminate hormonal changes. It is an important message. It is a message that, over the course of several generations, can mean a huge difference in the number of descendants walking the globe. Early puberty means early procreation. A message that higher dietary reserves exist accelerates puberty, increasing the potential for more offspring to take advantage of the increased resources. Puberty has been dropping for 100 years as each generation has passed to the next the information that those resources still exist.

This is evolution in the here and now–individuals making it possible for their progeny to flourish in a changing environment. They are creating progeny prepared for the specific world they are entering. We pass on the information that directs our children into appropriate maturation rates based on how our hormonal systems fluctuate with the environment we live in. It is our hormonal systems that guide the creation of the egg, the sperm and the uterine environment that guide our children to a fertile adulthood.

Many neurological conditions and diseases are a direct result of hormonal messages guiding the rate and timing of development and maturation of individuals in circumstances that convention does not view as useful for survival. Extremely maturationally delayed individuals can evidence autism. Heterochronic theorists and neuropsychologists are both describing the effects of environments on the rate and timing of maturation. Both are describing the identical processes. Neuropsychologists see the effects of rate and timing changes on a time scale of the present–fast time. Evolutionary biologists have difficulty speeding up enough to see it. Without the perspective across time–slow time–characteristic of an evolutionary biological point of view, neuropsychologists behave unaware that a condition may have an evolutionary foundation. Observing autism, they don’t see its evolutionary origins. In both cases, because nonrandom changes can lead to single-generation changes, theorists trained to note only random changes do not see them.

Those ancient myths describing the power of women, the magic of menstruation, may be grounded in those same processes that make up the world of the evolutionary biologist and neuropsychologist. Aboriginal myths may be describing the power of the female womb to determine the specific nature of the child within. It has recently been discovered by a neuroscientist that a mother’s hormone levels while her child is in the womb dramatically influence that child’s maturation rates. Artificial and environmental interventions change an embryo’s maturation speed by changing the mother’s testosterone levels. The blood of a woman carries a heavy magic.

Ancient peoples across the planet have myths grounded in a magic we are only starting to understand. Scientists in different disciplines may be actually exploring the same aboriginal territory, unaware that they have colleagues mere feet away in the very same jungle.