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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider that those female children with low estrogen levels as they cross over into their teens may find themselves experiencing delayed puberty.  This may manifest delayed testosterone surges pruning cerebral synapses, resulting in more cerebral synapses and larger brains.  What exactly might be the relationship between low estrogen, low enough to delay puberty (particularly with girls), and increased encephalization?

With girls, estrogen levels that are too low will delay the first estrous cycle or stop it if already underway.  Introducing a high-fat diet to a girl nearing puberty can add on fat that sparks the transition to adulthood.

With girls, high fat encourages puberty.  It would seem that Western high-fat diets might be responsible for the drop in puberty by four years over the last 100 years.

A question arises.  Is the same dynamic engaged for boys?  Do thin boys introduced to high-fat diets also experience a push into puberty?

This dynamic suggests a number of questions.

To what degree have high and low-fat diets influenced human evolution?  If low fat delays puberty and results in more brain growth, might this be because more synapses are useful for finding more fat?

When there is more fat in diets and puberty…

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

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

I’ve talked about the effect of sunlight on the pineal gland changing testosterone levels of immigrants from equatorial regions. Equatorial people with established, normal, daily 30% fluctuations in testosterone move to northern climates and experience fluctuations that last for months, thus compelling radical changes in a mother’s uterine testosterone levels. Unusually high or low mother’s uterine testosterone levels can cause unusually high or low testosterone levels in her children, translating into exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration (depending on the season of conception) that can contribute to autism.

In previous pieces, I’ve noted these effects on Jewish and American Black populations, with a skewing of populations toward the extremes of maturational delay and acceleration evidenced by a number of diseases and disorders characterized by these hormonal extremes. I would predict that both these populations would evidence higher percentages of autism and left-handedness, perhaps higher in places like Milwaukee and Minnesota than Houston and Miami. In just the way the Somalis in Minneapolis and St. Paul are exhibiting higher rates of autism, I would suggest that this Somali population would exhibit higher rates of left-handedness.

Another population influenced by these processes are the Latino immigrants from South and Central America. Studies could…

Two biological processes impact the American Black population, resulting in increased learning disabilities, specific medical maladies and challenges not familiar to most other ethnicities and most whites of European origins. In addition to the challenges of these biological circumstances, as a result of these processes, the American Black population is also blessed with gifts that provide recognition and respect, and now the presidency.

There are three primary genetic pools in Africa. One genetic source is believed to have resulted in literally all other humans that have distributed themselves about the world since the diaspora of 50,000–80,000 years ago. The other two are far smaller, located in central and east/central Africa. All three are relatively ancient compared to the many other ethnicities across the planet.

Darwin observed, while breeding pigeons, that when two widely divergent threads or strains mate or blend, having had no genetic contact for a prolonged period of time, the progeny often reveals traits of the last common ancestor. For example, Chinese pigeons were bred in isolation from European pigeons for more than 2,000 years. When cross-bred, they revealed features of the Roc pigeon, ancestor to both derivations.

Breeders would sometimes observe a surge of archaic features that…

I’m starting to muddle through the implications of the four-pole hypothesis of four prototype pairings, with eight prototype human beings, four in each sex. (Proceed to the essays “Estrogen Ascendant” and “Estrogen Play” for more background on the concepts addressed in this essay.)

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…

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

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

Ten days ago we waded into what little information we have on estrogen to estimate if we know enough to inform an understanding on the influence of estrogen on human evolution and current societal formations. Eight days ago we came up with the following matrix of relationships…

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…

The work of scientists is not often poetry. But they do reveal patterns that are profound.

“A corollary of our hypothesis is that hormonal effects on the brains of offspring may vary with the time of conception. The activity of the pineal gland changes seasonally with alterations in day length. As a general rule, during the dark winter months the pineal becomes active and suppresses both ovaries and testes, whereas in the summer it is inactive and sex hormone levels are higher. For this reason many animals bear young in the spring, an advantageous situation since temperature and food supplies are more suitable for survival. An example of such seasonal modulation of hormonal effects on the brain is observed in the HVc nucleus of the singing bird (Nottebohm 1981). This description of pineal physiology is, however, somewhat oversimplified. An animal’s sensitivity to light may vary through the year. Gonadal hormones may thus become activated in the spring, but as a result of loss of sensitivity to light over the summer hormone levels may diminish as fall approaches. Despite these facts, day length is a powerful influence. Thus, steers increase their weight more rapidly in the winter when artificial light is…

The time we live in, the society that we are a member of and our personal lives and experiences deeply determine the productions of the artist, the theorist or even the athlete. When, where and who we are inform what we can create.

There are very few studies on the influence of the environment on estrogen. There are no studies on the influence of the environment on male hormone levels tracing how those changes might manifest in the features of progeny. Wakening from our patrifocal slumber, we will discover many things we did not consider paying attention to. We do not have studies in those two areas that trace the influence of environmental variables and sexual selection proclivities on human evolution. Theorists are left to focus on what we do know about the influence of environmental variables on the testosterone levels of mothers.

What haunts me is a deep-felt certainty that changing levels of estrogen, modified via sexual selection and environmental influences, have influenced, and continue to influence, our evolution. Clearly, individuals exhibiting a low level of testosterone allow for a more influential role for estrogen in their lives. I suspect there is more to it than that. For example,…

A child’s lifelong maturation rates are set several weeks before birth by the mother’s testosterone levels. A mother with high testosterone gives birth to low testosterone males and high testosterone females. A low testosterone female raises high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Numerous factors influence a mother’s testosterone levels, including age, stress, exercise, smoking, alcohol, drugs, touch, diet and light. Radical elevations in a mother’s testosterone level can lead to extreme maturational delay and autism.

This scheme is part of a larger picture of how humans evolve. Changing maturation rates over generations send societies in one of two directions: matrifocal or patrifocal social structures. Low testosterone males mating with high testosterone females form the foundation of matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males pairing with low testosterone females make up patrifocal social structure. When mothers today exhibit matrifocal features, high testosterone, while exposed to environmental influences that elevate their testosterone further, male children with delay tendencies may shift into extreme delay.

This theory predicts that females with autism will not exhibit maturational delay, but maturational acceleration accompanied by elevated testosterone. When a mother’s testosterone level elevates, she not only influences the maturation rates of her children, she sends them on…

I’ve sometimes wondered what a theory of human personality and psychotherapeutic intervention would look like if contemporary psychodynamic theory was based on a theory of human evolution that embraced sexual selection, Lamarckian principles and the influence of social structure on societal transformation. Freud was a recapitulationist. Freud believed in a threefold relationship between childhood developmental states, human evolutionary stages and a contemporary societal hierarchy of cultures. Freud hypothesized that a child recapitulates or re-enacts our recent evolution. For example, he estimated that there might have been an actual prehistorical event where a son killed a father that correlated with the oedipal stage in early ontogeny. Freud’s perspective was Victorian and male-centric.

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…

Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen have noted a pattern. The mother’s testosterone levels influence the likelihood of a child having autism. The higher the mother’s testosterone level, the more possible the child will be autistic. The work of the late Norman Geschwin in the early 1980s paved the way for this understanding. Still, the context in which the mother’s testosterone level makes sense is still not pursued by researchers seeking to understand the origins of autism. Neither Baron-Cohen nor Geschwin have backgrounds in evolutionary biology, which might have provided them an introduction to arcane nineteenth century alternative theories of evolution. We all suffer the effects of a century of obsession with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

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…

In ancient cultures across the world, there are myths describing a time when women controlled society with a magic more powerful than men’s. These stories go on to describe that there is a loss of the women’s power. Yet the stories also express that there still remains an awesome strength tied to female menstruation; the monthly moon blood is to be feared and respected.

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…

When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the dining room door and then start lolling back and forth (north and south), and it careened more or less westward across the house. The history of the nearly 100-year old structure, since torn down, was represented in the pathway of the marble.

Tracing the path of societal ideas is compromised by an interpretation protocol that traces only the productions, not the origins, of the mind. We don’t think of biology or genetics as informing a discussion of the evolution of ideas. Exploring the connection between physical and mental when seeking an understanding of culture is not an intuitive choice. It has a lot to do with our not consciously knowing how we evolve biologically and societally. We are left watching the marble, guessing at what might have influenced its path.

No single variable influences our evolution more powerfully than changes in the rate and timing of maturation. Neoteny, or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants by the…

A few entries ago, I proposed a predictable display of variation of the physical features in the children of a family over time as a mother’s testosterone level slowly rose with age. This prediction is in accord with a founding premise of this work, that our evolutionary past manifests in the present in more or less the degrees that a boy’s maturation rate is delayed and a girl’s maturation rate is accelerated. The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely this manifestation will be the case.

I would additionally suggest that because social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals would emerge, it would be with the youngest sons and daughters. In addition, the youngest kids would most likely evidence the features of matrifocal social structure. One statistic I would expect to see is higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children. I would even suggest that because social structure is correlated with testicle size in primates, youngest sons should show incrementally larger testes than oldest sons.

Observing that the Left more often exhibits the features of a matrifocal social structure, I would additionally predict that as a…

It could be said that it all begins in the womb. It is even deeper and more subtle than that. Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen are coming to the conclusion that a mother’s testosterone levels are influencing the likelihood of autism. I came to this same conclusion ten years ago exploring the work of Norman Geschwin and Charles Darwin. Noting this effect while exploring the impact of sexual selection on social structure provides additional perspective. Observing the relationship between social structure and evolution, one begins to understand that what goes on in the womb can decide the direction we evolve.

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

The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely the male children will have maturational delay and the females maturational acceleration. The males’ testosterone levels will be relatively lower compared to boys born from mothers with low testosterone levels. The females’ testosterone levels will be relatively higher compared to girls born from mothers with low testosterone levels.

When the mother’s testosterone levels are high, she is propelling her children backwards in evolutionary time. Backwards in evolutionary time for humans is away from patrifocal social structure…

Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has a theory that the autistic male shows evidence of a brain that is too male for his own good, the autistic personality being male to the extreme, evidencing exaggerated male characteristics. For example, the autistic is not just a little dissociated and abstract, but very dissociated and abstract. Baron-Cohen suggests that exposure to high levels of testosterone in the mother’s womb in combination with an absence of testosterone surges that prune early childhood synapse production that create a right-handed (as opposed to random-handed) person combine to encourage the emergence of autism.

Still enamored of natural selection, medical theorists explore the etiologies, or origins, of conditions and disorders encumbered by a theory structure that supports a narrow, patrifocal point of view. Informed by the fertile, earlier work of Norman Geschwin, Baron-Cohen has noted some of the most important clues to understanding how humans evolved and autism develops, but he is unable to see the larger picture.

Autism is an evolutionary condition. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, Geschwin and Baron-Cohen’s clues are major interstate intersections on the roadmap of Homo sapien’s unfolding. When navigating across country, we look at the map and then use our eyes to read the…

A child exhibits characteristics from both parents. The parents’ features in their children can complement each other in ways that reinforce and even encourage specific maturational trajectories. For example, pairing two musician parents not only increases the chance of a musically inclined child, but also increases the chance that the child will be maturational delayed. Maturational delay is a hallmark of creativity, encouraging a child with an infatuation for pattern and form. Keep boosting the maturational delay and a line gets crossed where infatuation with pattern eclipses a facility to communicate internal experience. How the environment affects the parents can determine how this line gets crossed.

“Disorders” characterized by maturational delay, such as autism and Asperger’s, are encouraged by the choices we make when we fall in love, in addition to what we expose ourselves to as we live our lives. The previous two entries outline the influence of mate selection on the origin of autism in our children. Working in cooperation with sexual selection are environmental influences that compel how children’s social and mental lives unfold.

Since the death of Darwin, little thought has been given to how the environment might influence human evolution in a single lifetime. Politics…

There are many ways to kill a dragon. I counted several hundred strong-man dragon interventions in the almost one hundred books I read when I was snake-charmed by the subject. Courage, strength and cleverness were the qualities looked for in a dragon vanquisher. Many battles led to happy endings where the victor gained a wife.

Myths and legends are a little like spring garden catalogs, offering pictures of the ways a man can gain a mate along with instructions to society and its women on how to best encourage the man’s strong features. Our catalog of stories for the last few thousand years have offered guidance for the families of the women on how to pick strong, protective men for their grown-up little girls. When women began to pick their own husbands, they sought men with qualities that society respected, men with strength and streaks of independence, men who could be relied upon when dragons reared their heads.

Gilgamesh slew a dragon-like creature, a stand-in for the goddess, when records of these stories first emerged. Not just the Indo-Europeans, but Semitic, Asian and aboriginal peoples revel in these tales of acts of courage in gaining honor and a wife. Not…

I have friends with gaydar. Usually women, these friends can conclude a guy is gay after a brief conversation. I don’t think it’s the way they dress or the way they talk. It’s a childlike aspect they pick up on. When they are wrong, and the guy they thought was gay was not, that person had a Peter Pan quality about him.

When I was in college, I evidently jammed some guys’ gaydar. On occasion, I’d have to tell gay guys I was straight. I had girlfriends. It’s just that I was living out the life of my hero, Peter Pan. The Mary Martin version. If there was a major in childhood, I had the course load: children’s lit, art, children’s theatre, developmental psychology, clay, drawing, children’s clinical psychology, etc.

Many years later, when I fell in love for the first time I experienced a powerful connection between Wendy, as she was portrayed in the Mary Martin production of Peter Pan, and the woman I’d fallen in love with. It’s only now, more than 15 years later, that I fully realize why her wearing the Wendy-like white nightgown so filled me with reverence, fear and joy.

I’ve heard of the…

Anything that is understood or known consciously is understood or known unconsciously first. I can’t imagine how the reverse would be true. Knowledge has to come from somewhere, right?

I often know I know something before the answer emerges. Knowing that I know, I trust that the answer will emerge, and so it does. We don’t often consider how long an insight or understanding has already been grasped before the veil lifts. I suspect hidden knowledge can stay hidden a very long time.

Hormone levels in humans fluctuate in response to a number of environmental influences. One of the most powerful and subtle is light. Cradled in equatorial Africa, our ancestors were exposed to the diurnal cycle of day and night. Human sexual hormone levels ran 24-hour cycles, as they do today, peaking and troughing at specific times in the cycle, with evenings about 30% lower than mornings.

Six weeks before a child is born, a crucial environmental trigger tells the child at what speed he or she will mature during his or her lifetime. The trigger is the amount of testosterone in the mother’s blood. High and low levels lead to very different outcomes of maturation speed. Change in…