An article in Science News last October 31 called attention to a discovery:  ”These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study.”

“Juveniles and adults of these dinosaurs look very, very different from adults, and literally may resemble a different species,” said dinosaur expert Mark B. Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.  ”But some scientists are confusing morphological differences at different growth stages with characteristics that are taxonomically important.  The result is an inflated number of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.”

In the article, Goodwin’s associate, John “Jack” Horner, says, “Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth, which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”

Horner associates neoteny with sociality, suggesting that animals that congregate throughout their lives exhibit neotenous characteristics.  I wish I knew more about these areas.  My next question is:  Are there specific social structures associated with those animals that group in flocks and herds?

If it is true that in animals, when neoteny emerges as influential in the way ancient species appear, we can assume that these are social animals, then can we also assume particular social structures were in play?  If this is the case, and social structures are influenced by the environment, then this supports an ability to possibly examine not only species alive today, but ancient species like the ones that Goodwin and Horner describe, in a context of environment and social structure informing evolution.

Postulate 23:  The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

What I’m trying to get a feel for here is how universal, exactly, are the principles that I’m playing with.  I keep seeing signs, smelling flavors that call my attention to this alternative frame of reference.  The Goodwin-Horner study suggests that neotenous features suggest flock/herd inclinations.  Prolonging the features of infancy, dependency and close attention on the mother into the adult of species encourages social behaviors.  How clear is the pattern that species that congregate exhibit greater neoteny than those that don’t?  The implications of that suggestion are profound.  Frankly, outside my exploring this in connection to humans, it is not something I’ve ever considered, except in the context of social structure.

What exactly are the social structure predilections of congregating, herd and flock species?

“Forest-dwelling apes efficiently conserve their water reserves, which they obtain primarily from fruit and vegetation, such that they need only rarely to visit predator-frequented watering holes.  By contrast, humans active in hot desert can lose up to 28 liters of water and up to 10% of bodily salt reserves per day (Morgan, 1982).  This incredible profligacy with water and salt suggests that early hominids must have enjoyed no shortage of either: they probably dwelled fairly close to fresh and salt water when not foraging.  Rivers and lakes would have provided not only drinking water, but also allowed body-washing and food-washing, offered fish, aquatic crustaceans, and shellfish for eating, and, because the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than that of air, quick swims would have allowed for efficient cooling-off after a long, hot day of foraging.  Note that these conditions would make the aquatic ape hypothesis (Hardy, 1960; Morgan, 1982) a bit more plausible…”  (Geoffrey F. Miller, “Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection:  The Mind as a Protean Courtship Device,” unpublished thesis (1994), p. 164.)

The aquatic ape hypothesis overlaps in two ways with the theorizing I’ve been conducting the last few years.  What I’m now…

My wife introduced me to Ken Wilber’s work about three years after the Serpentfd.org website went up.  That was around 2003.  From there I read maybe six of his books (he’s written close to 20) and listened several times to the 10-CD interview he conducted.

In the previous piece, I noted the prerational and transrational distinction he makes that clearly demarcates the differences between aboriginal prepersonal points of view and more recent spiritual transpersonal experiences.  The two are often confused.  Wilber efficiently parses out the differences, using a system of seven stages of maturation that apply to both individuals and societies.

Wilber looks at some feminist inclinations to view ancient times as more evolved in human relations as another case of comparing seemingly positive aspects of earlier stages of societal evolution, or maturation, with later-stage negative features.  For example, human sacrifice was common in matrifocal agricultural society, a fact usually ignored by those seeking synthesis in the past.  Wilber suggests that some feminists pick and choose what they want to emphasize when comparing female-centered societies with contemporary patrifocal examples.

Paying close attention to similarities between evolution and maturation on both individual and social scales, Wilber, guided by the work of…

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.  I just typed “social structure” and “testosterone” into Google, wondering who might be discussing relationships among the environment, social structure, testosterone, estrogen and evolution.  I expected one of my postings to come up first, but preceding that there was a book I’d not heard of, Social Structure and Testosterone.  I just ordered it.  It seems to be carrying a sociobiological banner, but perhaps there are patterns the author is uncovering that will offer insight.

Most evolutionary psychology or sociobiological theorizing seems to assume or emphasize male impact.  Tanner, Hrdy and others have pioneered female influence.  I’ve written often about the heritage of our patrifocal society creating stories that emphasize a male’s influence.  I’m now encouraging myself to view animal evolution as heavily influenced by social structure, with female sexual selection perhaps understandable in a context of social structure that only sometimes makes it obvious that female choice or female sexual selection is in play.

It is possible that my estimation that estrogen is managing the timing of testosterone, heavily influencing directions in evolution, is integral to understanding the relationship among the…

Running some more riffs off of yesterday’s conjectures regarding the particular hypothetical dynamics that I’ve been exploring in human evolution, are there species that tend to cluster (1) sexual selection with females picking males for particular qualities (dance, song, plumage, etc.) and (2) females assigning relatively large amounts of attention to the young?  If so, males can be chosen for their neotenous features, features females would be attracted to in their young, which might result in relatively larger brains, more cooperative behavior, more tendencies to play, more creativity.

This could veer off in two directions.  If the female is picking males for those features that demand higher testosterone levels (bright red plumage), the male will not likely be displaying neotenous tendencies and would not likely be helping in the raising of the kids (though this would depend on seasonal variations in hormone levels).  Yet, if the female is picking males that are challenged to behave with some creativity, or at least species-related novel behavior, to get the females’ attention, the male may end up evolving in ways that suggest how the human species has evolved.

I’m thinking that those predators that hunt in cooperative packs might as a trend display…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Maslow hierarchy of needs, or the Ken Wilber seven levels of experience, or the Gebser/Habermas scales of development all end up suggesting a succession of evolution theories that reflect a succession of personal/social developmental milieus.  Evolution theories are origin myths, stories that tease out patterns from experience that reflect how the interpreter experiences the world.

At first, there was no evolution theory.  The world just was.  The world was created at a point in an ancestor’s memory or an ancestor’s revelation and the world as it is now is pretty much how it used to be.

Then, in the West, evolution as a concept became widely embraced, even though there were few accepted explanations.  Darwin’s work emerged among an educated population, which to a large degree believed in the possibility of evolution; it just had no powerful theory.  Darwin provided a place where many could agree.  Only, where people agreed was where the theory successfully juxtaposed with their experience.  Darwin’s contemporaries ignored Darwin’s other two theories, sexual selection and pangenesis.  Natural selection made sense.  It was about survival, not females or the environment.

As we mature as a society, the story changes.

Since Darwin…

I was a professional artist, making portions of my living painting, cartooning, designing and illustrating over the years.  I am now a professional web developer, making my living managing a firm that creates and maintains websites, markets websites and designs unique applications for online communication.  I am also an amateur evolutionary biological theorist, perhaps the world’s only expert on the application of nineteenth-century heterochronist principles of maturational delay and acceleration to human evolution and social change.  In my study, I integrate recent neuropsychological brain-structure discoveries and the influences of testosterone and estrogen on the brain and physiology, along with how social structure and the environment impact these adjustments.

I know.  This sounds complicated and arcane.  It’s not.  It takes less time to become familiar with these concepts than it takes to learn to drive a car.  What it boils down to is the exact principles behind the way that we as individuals mature, species change and societies transform.  This is deeply intuitive.  It’s just that until recently we didn’t have the information that could tie it all together.  In addition, our obsession with natural selection obfuscated patterns more complicated than “survival of the fittest.”

A problem is that although I…

To understand trends in current societal transformations requires an evaluation protocol that takes into consideration where we’ve come from, where we’re going and where we are.  This is particularly challenging when society origin myths, belief structures or paradigms are examples of some of the very content that is transforming.  Seeking understanding from a position with similarities to where we are headed should offer unique insights because the new understanding, at least temporarily, integrates all three frames.  Time will tell.

As regards understanding, convention is useful.  The following is a proposal for a new shared evaluation protocol.

What we understand “teleology” to mean is central to how we interpret current events, societal change, politics, geopolitical dynamics, the control of resources and the ability of the disenfranchised to feel free of want.  “Teleology” can be defined as the belief that there are overriding, perhaps spiritual, forces at work, compelling society to evolve or transform in particular directions featuring progress, improvement and an enhancement of individual positive experience.  There are atheist humanists that nonetheless display teleological tendencies insofar as they experience a confidence that our species has been acting and will continue to act, more or less, in our own best interest, compelling…

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore,

…

“The entire scheme represents a hierarchically organized system of increasing size, differentiation, and complexity, in which each component affects, and is affected by, all the other components, not only at its own level but at lower and higher levels as well.  Thus, the arrows in Figure12-2 not only go upward from the gene, eventually reaching all the way to the external environment through the activities of the organism, but the arrows of influence return from the external environment through various levels of the organism back to the genes.  While the feedforward or feedupward nature of the genes has always been appreciated from the time of Weismann and Mendel on, the feedbackward or feeddownward influences have usually been thought to stop at the level of the cell membrane.  The newer conception is one of a totally interrelated, fully coactional system in which the activity of the genes themselves can be affected through the cytoplasm of the cell by events originating at any other level in the system, including the external environment.”  (G. Gilbert, Individual Development and Evolution (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 145.)

The article appearing in the 11/8/09 BBC News, “Early Life Stress ‘Changes’…

“He [Darwin] was prevented from harvesting all the fruits of his fertile imagination because he did not follow through with the logic of his own argument – to discover how female choice influenced the origin of the hominids; that is, to show how sexual selection was important at the very onset of human evolution.  Because of an unfortunate blind spot engendered by his own cultural background, Darwin was unable to explicate the necessary interrelationships and carry his own work on to its more logical conclusion.”  (Nancy M. Tanner, On Becoming Human (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 167.)

Charles Darwin suggested the possibility that humans were descended from tribal cultures characterized by matrifocal social structures that were driven by female sexual selection.  He referenced Morgan’s writings.  After suggesting the possibility, he rejected it as being incongruent with his experience of contemporary and primitive society, featuring a focus on male hierarchical dominance patterns with a complementary pattern of female compliance.  If Darwin had instead embraced what he rejected, it is unlikely that the history of evolutionary theory would have been changed.  Female sexual selection was almost ignored for 100 years.  It is with the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) that sexual…

There is a tacit assumption or consideration that underlies much of what I write here.  Occasionally, I’m not subtle about this belief.  The idea is that art and science can be closely allied.  Perhaps they often are closely allied, except at present science seems rather obsessed with the idea that theory formation should be engaged in with the same obsession with detail as is necessary in the proof of theory.  That tends to keep artist/blogger/theorists writing for nonscientists.

Artists are just as obsessed as scientists, except their focus is usually on internal experience and the translation of that internal experience in a way that provides visitors something new.  Often, artists are exploring what it is like to be human, tasting and evaluating consciousness as the artists produce varying treats from the particular kitchen that is their medium.  Sometimes the artists attempt to put the concoction into words.  Some artists specialize in words.  For many artists, part of being an artist is having a unique experience without having to use words.

I am an artist, trained in watercolor and pen and ink, who now works in the medium of storytelling, collecting patterns from different science disciplines and showing how the different…

One of the deeply peculiar things about being human at this particular point in history is our tendency to ally ourselves with split consciousness or self awareness, deeply identifying with an identity at a single level.  We exhibit little desire to shift scales by assigning identity to levels beneath or beyond that of our body.

From a Hegelian point of view, we’ve emerged from a present tense consciousness characterized by no self awareness.  We used to be locked into a single time and single place, with no ability to intuit something’s opposite.  Before language, we lived in primary process.  This is the consciousness of animals, very small children, the unconscious, the severely autistic and hypnotic trance.

Acquiring split consciousness, we obsess on our peculiar station in existence, featuring existential isolation and an ability to view everything as separate.  We not only focus on our own self interest, but we do so in a step-by-step, focused, goal-oriented fashion that often fails to notice the direct, indirect or larger repercussions of our behavior.

That ability to obsess is integral to being human.  I’ve proposed that we sexually selected each other in the context of choosing the best dancers as copulation partners, growing…

A professor recently wrote me that she introduced the ideas described in my blog to her class on Neanderthals and Human Evolutionary Theory.  Her email asked or suggested several questions or expressed her class’s confusion in the following areas:

Are you proposing that testosterone levels are driving evolution of mammals in general or primates specifically?

The evidence that testosterone is driving evolution mostly comes from anomalies emerging in neuropsychology around progeny maturation changes that result from environmental influences upon a pregnant mother and other studies in the neuropsychological literature.

An interesting primate study was as follows…

“In a 5-year longitudinal study, we examined the effect of disrupting the neonatal activity of the pituitary–testicular axis on the sexual development of male rhesus monkeys.  Animals in a social group under natural lighting conditions were treated with a GnRH antagonist (antide), antide and androgen, or both vehicles, from birth until 4 months of age.  In antide-treated neonates, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection throughout the neonatal period.  Antide + androgen-treated neonates had subnormal serum LH, but above normal testosterone concentrations during the treatment period.  From 6 to 36 months of age, serum LH and testosterone were

…

I received an email from Jon Gluckman, who follows this blog, suggesting that there is another interpretation of human developmental stages and political milieu, one that suggests that Right Wing orientations and perhaps fascism have their origin in the maturationally delayed.

My interpretation of the power of neoteny to impact culture holds to the view that the prolongation of infant features into the adult of our species can be observed to be influencing society as aboriginal aspects emerge in contemporary times.  I describe the horizontalization of society, with female frames of reference and bonobo-like qualities.  Horizontalization is fanning out from its source among young people, the Internet.  In other words, many features of the very young, including playfulness, curiosity, affection and sociality, are becoming primary features of current society, particularly when examined from the view of the new communications technologies.

One could also view contemporary trends to withhold information, engage in secrecy, offer reverence to the leader, engage in systemic selfish behavior and associate only with those who are like you as traits exhibited by children, traits which many adults also exhibit.  That being the case, the neoteny premise of a horizontal society being one featuring the traits of young…

I’m in the process of refining a nearly 100-page introduction to what I’m now calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” or maybe “Neoteny, Evolution and Autism”. I haven’t decided yet.  The 13-page introduction to “The Theory of Waves,” posted last February, has been made less condensed and more accessible, with societal applications included.  The name has been changed with the integration of estrogen as the hypothesized agent controlling the timing of maturation.  I see estrogen as the conductor of the symphony of evolution.

Whereas most not-particularly-grounded amateur theorists with big ideas usually find themselves thinking of Einstein, I wonder about Darwin.  A couple things come to mind right now.

I often write about the nature of the Internet and its future.  It’s not just my profession, but it feels to me to be a particularly evocative part of the contemporary manifestations of neoteny-driven social structure transformations.  A half dozen blogs pick up my pieces regarding the Internet, some with respectable circulations, such as Counterpunch, The Public Record, BuzzFlash and The People’s Voice.  In the world I see forming, the amateur is gaining influence insofar as a person with few or no credentials now has an ability to acquire a relatively…

It has now become clear that neo-Lamarckism has always been a reasonable theory, and it has stood the test of time for more than a century.  Once some misunderstandings and inhibitions are removed, the theory can be regarded as a more complete theory (than neo-Darwinism) in that it analyses the evolutionary process in terms of both the proximate and ultimate mechanisms, and in that it is especially suited for analyzing the origin of macroevolutionary change.  Through the analysis of the proximate process we come to know the cause of variation and the presumed initial stage of evolution of the structures upon which natural selection has worked.  In traditional neo-Darwinism natural selection is considered to be involved throughout the whole evolutionary process (of structures), which is indeed untrue, as Mivart (1871) already knew.  In practice obvious cases of over-extension of the theory of natural selection, which actually results from neglect of the proximate process, have often been criticized in terms of their falsifiability.  Yet the critics have never offered a solution for this dilemma.  Indeed, evolutionary biology has been in a state of constipation caused by the neo-Darwinian constraint that inhibits exploration of the proximate process of evolution.  It should now

…

“Environmental factors can be an important source of nongenetic influences on laterality.  Since the effect of a gene is to play a role in some form of chemical reaction, it is not surprising that genetic determination is not absolute.  Every chemical reaction can be modified by alterations in pressure, temperature, pH, light, the presence of other substances, the availability of chemical precursors, and the rate at which products are removed.  With growing sophistication of molecular genetics, it has become increasingly clear that nongenetic effects can play a powerful role; methylation, for example, has been shown to suppress expression of many genes.  We will now consider some of the random effects that might modify lateralization.  One implication of our hypothesis is that even if the genetic endowment of any particular fetus were known precisely, it would not be possible to make predictions concerning the distribution in a population basis.  One of the reasons for this relative freedom from genetic determination is that if hormones do play a role in determining laterality, then the effects of testosterone or related substances on the developing brain will be modified by factors not under the control of the fetal genes.  Androgens are produced not only

…

Every once in a while, when I receive a complimentary email regarding my theory, the emailer notes how complex it is.  It feels to me at this point like my job is making the theory easily understandable.  A problem is that as I seek to refine an explanation, new aspects get revealed and the theory deepens.  I can see how others interpret deepenings as additions in complexity.  I experience the deepenings as new subtleties revealed.  It’s not clear to me how to tell this story so that the meaning is clear.  I expect I’ll have to tell it in many ways and see what sticks.

Several of the concepts seem unfamiliar to Western ears.  Perhaps the most confounding is that to understand human evolution, a transformation characterized by a change in consciousness, it is useful that the theorist have at least a working definition of what exactly “consciousness” is.  I suggest that just stating that consciousness is a contingent or accidental result of a process, and it can be ignored as if not relevant to the transformation, is a little odd.  Also, there are the theorists that do say that consciousness is integral to how we evolved, but they often…

Maturity is not the same as progress.  To pass through a series of ontological stages evidencing the look, sound and behavior of the personal epochs that have been experienced is not progress.  It is life.

All mixed up in contemporary theorizing are three things:  the exact nature and difference between that which transforms over time that is changing as a result of random interconnections, that which is changing as a result of progress or improvement over time and that which is changing as part of a larger pattern of maturation.

Evolutionary biology tends to take the position that evolution follows Darwin’s wedges metaphor, with every feature of every being emerging as a direct or indirect result of what is necessary to survive to procreate.  Features acquired by individuals are random, unconnected to the environment or the parents’ experience, making random feature survival the central focus of evolution.  There is no such thing as progress.  There is no larger picture to inform what survives to procreate.

Society, religion and spirituality tend to focus on the idea that either we are on a pathway toward improvement or we are not.  Those saying not are often atheists, and often they find themselves sympathizing…

One of the paradoxes of contemporary anthropology is the hesitation to examine different societies as different stages on an evolutionary trajectory.  For those of you that visit this blog relatively regularly, you know that I can’t be conversant in as many disciplines as I purport to know something about.  I skim disciplines, looking for patterns that transcend disciplines.  This may be one of those places where current trends make what I am about to say make little sense.  Nevertheless, what familiarity I have with anthropology suggests that the default natural selection frame of reference is almost useless when discussing humans.

In an effort to display equanimity, theorists have mostly purged from theorizing the early discipline prejudices that Western civilization was more “evolved” than non-Western or aboriginal societies.  Two things got stripped during the purging process, and they have inhibited contemporary theorizing.

First, the word “evolve” has come to mean progress, or trend in a positive direction.  This was not Darwin’s definition, nor is it the definition usually used by current evolutionary biologists.  A result has been that there is an enormous epistemological muddle as regards what exactly evolution is.  Because a judgment accompanies the definition of “evolution” that suggests that…

A foundation of this work is the power of sexual selection and social structure to inform biological and social evolution.  Integrating sexual selection and social structure with heterochronic theory, neuropsychology and endocrinology makes it possible for these components to comprise a synthesis I’m calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  One way to explain how these seemingly different disciplines integrate is to explore them in enough detail, one at a time, so that depicting how different languages are describing the same process makes sense intuitively.

In the case of sexual selection, I have the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) to detail what I am thinking.  Miller doesn’t believe neoteny influences human evolution in an important way.  Miller is an evolutionary psychologist.  He believes that the simpler explanation is likely more useful.  Nevertheless, Miller adroitly describes human evolution impacted by sexual selection.  My variation of Miller’s thesis is as follows:

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 (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) Awareness of the selection, or creative, process

I believe that a familiarity…

“Before Agassiz, recapitulation had been defined as a correspondence between two series: embryonic stages and adults of living species.  Agassiz introduced a third series: the geologic record of fossils.  An embryo repeats both a graded series of living, lower forms and the history of its type as recorded by fossils.  There is a “threefold parallelism” of embryonic growth, structural gradation, and geologic succession.  ‘It may therefore be considered as a general fact, very likely to be more fully illustrated as investigations cover a wider ground, that the phases of development of all living animals correspond to the order to succession of their extinct representatives in past geological times.  As far as this goes, the oldest representatives of every class may then be considered as embryonic types of their respective orders of familiar among the living.’”  (1857, 1962 ed., p. 114)  (Stephen J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge:  Belknap Press, 1977), pp. 65-66.)

Stephen J. Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny lies at the heart of many of the interconnecting concepts of this thesis.  Ontogeny and Phylogeny made sense of many of the disciplines I’d been studying for many years, showing how evolutionary theory informs many levels of experience.  Central to Gould’s thesis…

When in 1858 Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Wallace describing Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection, Darwin was exploring three different theories of evolution.  Conducting experiments in three different areas, he was also looking for evidence of how the three different dynamics were related.  Wallace’s letter aborted Darwin’s attempts to find a synthesis.  He then struggled to reduce his work on natural selection to a volume small enough to be accessible.  On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

Darwin’s 1868 The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication explored Lamarckian principles of evolution.  In this two-volume work, environmental influences and the use and disuse of organs were addressed in the context of his theory of pangenesis, which described hypothetical, influential gemmules passing through the bloodstream.  As it happened, both his 1868 Variations and his 1874 The Descent of Man, which discussed sexual selection, were almost totally ignored, while Darwin’s theory of natural selection received massive attention.

Natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection were all embraced by Darwin’s work.  Then, shortly after Darwin’s death, there emerged the work of the Neo-Lamarckians, Mivart, Cope and Hyatt, who were exploring principles of maturational acceleration and delay.…

I have found that definitions of neoteny that I provide to friends often don’t easily stick in their mind.  To ask someone to think of an automobile accelerating is easy.  It is not too difficult to ask people to make a picture in their mind’s eye of an accelerating automobile changing its model year to acquire future features while speeding up, decelerating to change shape to look like an older model.  But it is more difficult to ask them in their mind’s eye to perform this animation while considering a long succession of automobile models, each succeeding vehicle behaving a little different from the one before, different in a fashion where its ability to change model year with speed is enhanced or compromised with time.  Minds’ eyes sometimes can use a little training.

Neoteny, one of six heterochronic dynamics described by Gould (1977), is the biological process that prolongs ancestor embryo, infant and childhood features and displays them in the physical bodies and behaviors of descendant adults.  The classic examples are our ancient chimpanzee-like forebear infant features of small jaw, small teeth, big head, relatively large brain, upright stature, vertical skull positioning, playful disposition, curiosity, social dependency and displays of…