“Not surprisingly, males of pair-bonding bird species have been shown to undergo an endocrinological shift to lower testosterone levels in parallel with the behavioral shift from territorial defense and mate attraction to parental behavior. Manipulations that evoke territorial responses in nesting males, such as playing the song of an invading male, both undermine parental behavior and lead to an increase in testosterone….Recently evidence has even begun to accumulate suggesting that lower testosterone levels may be typical of human males in stable mating relationships and perhaps even lower levels in men who are fathers of infant children.” (p. 70)

“…This led to the ‘challenge hypothesis,’ which states: high plasma levels of testosterone occur during periods of social instability in the breeding season (resulting from male-male competition for territories and mates) but are at a lower breeding baseline in stable social conditions thus allowing paternal care to be expressed.” (p. 83)

“Furthermore, there is growing evidence that patterns of testosterone in tropical species that may have long breeding seasons are very different from northern species (Goymann et al., 2004). Tropical species with long breeding seasons tend to have extremely low levels of testosterone that generally do not change markedly with social challenges.” (p. 85)

In 1998, I hypothesized that when there are great apes with larger testicles, suggesting males competing with other males in an environment characterized by female choice, with sperm production becoming more important than muscle mass, the testosterone levels would decrease even though the testicles were larger. Testes produce both sperm and testosterone. I calculated that an emphasis on one would diminish the other. Gorillas have small testicles and patrifocal male control of procreation. Bonobo have large testicles with a matrifocal, horizontal social structure.

The passages above suggest a relationship between testosterone production and social structure. Even testosterone fluctuations within an individual over time suggest that different procreation strategies are accompanied by different testosterone levels. If male testosterone levels are instrumental in the choices made at any time regarding degrees of cooperation or family orientation, and testosterone levels inform maturation rates, then there is a direct connection between social structure, maturational delay and acceleration.

For reasons I do not really understand, there seems to be little academic attention directed toward the possibility that testosterone manages rates of maturation. Testosterone is associated with handedness, and left-handedness is associated with low testosterone. Left-handedness is associated with maturational delay. Yet, testosterone is rarely visited as related to maturational acceleration and delay. Even further from the minds of theoreticians is the possible influence of estrogen on the timing of the rates of maturation. Grasping that seems to require an understanding of how maturation rates change under the influence of testosterone.

Human and nonhuman endocrine systems are moved by countless different variables in turn influenced by myriad environmental effects. Nevertheless, it seems central that social structure, which deeply influences evolution, is guided by a balance between testosterone and estrogen levels. These levels change according to the season, the environment and the circumstances of life. As these changes occur, maturation rates and timing transform and evolution happens.

“As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates. Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.”

The discovery begs a number of questions. Evidently there is not a clear time line regarding how many years in the past these Boskops lived, though a visit to Wikipedia says it was 10,000 – 30,000 years ago. Wikipedia also says the skull sizes have been exaggerated. Evidently there are a number of different opinions on how big the skulls actually were.

To assign the Boskops the name of “hominid” seems exaggerated if, indeed, they are from the last 100,000 years. They are evidently a variation of Homo sapiens.

What interests me most is not the exact brain size but the idea that an increased brain size is associated with neotenous features. The next question would be: What do digs surrounding these skeletons suggest about the culture that accompanied their brain size? Is there evidence of an exaggerated aesthetic?

I hypothesize that dance was central to humans evolving big brains fast. What would distinguish this particular branch of human evolution to suggest that a larger brain might be more closely connected to dance, music, body painting, fashion or song? Scanning web articles, I have found that writers on the Boskop are focused almost exclusively on brain size.

If Boskop skull size is significantly larger, an issue that is argued about (which seems strange, either they are a certain size or they are not), then is there evidence suggesting how long it took to grow these large skulls? If the surge in size was very brief, then it seems to be significant information.

Discover is a reputable publication. The Boskop finds are associated with no small number of disparaging articles. It’s not clear what exactly is happening here.

Physics has embraced ambiguity. Perhaps the supporting structure of mathematics offering opposite answers has made that possible. What would it take for evolutionary biology to acquire a relativistic perspective, bowing its head to the impossible, integrating with that which seems to deliberately contest reductionist interpretations?

Susan Oyama writes books that lambaste hard core genetic interpretations of evolution. She uncovers the many ways that biological theorists refuse to recognize the paradox that is integral to biology. What was called the nature/nurture debate for several decades has settled down to an understanding that the two are integrated. Nevertheless, practitioners of biology mostly seem incapable of fully realizing this. Most still reflexively offer deep allegiance to the genome as central to development, except when something happens where it is clear that the genome is not central to development. Instead of embracing a paradox, they display a continuing belief in the power of code to explain life, except when it doesn’t work.

A physicist does not default to light being a particle, except when a wave. A physicist accepts that light is both.

How best does a biologist seek solutions to a paradox when a biologist does not accept that a paradox is in play? Or, perhaps better than a solution would be the physicist’s disposition to accept noncomplementary paradigms as both true.

My work is deeply imbedded in the biological paradox that the environment influences the lives of parents in ways that the progeny’s physical and behavioral features are affected, so much affected that the acquired features become heritable. This is paradoxical. Evidence supports Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma that genes control evolutionary outcomes. Yet, there is also evidence that the environment heavily impacts development, with the result of those impacts being passed on to future generations.

Instead of accepting that light is both particle and wave, that the speed of information can exceed the speed of light, evolutionary biologists seem loath to consider that both genetics and Lamarckian principles are in play. It is still provocative to use Lamarck’s name when discussing these issues.

Why the deep reluctance to accept that we are confused?

“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 calling The Orchestral Theory of Evolution and the aquatic ape hypothesis both have strong feminist components.  Elaine Morgan presented her thesis, one where male survival of the fittest was not the focus, as an alternative theory to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape.

Both Morgan’s hypothesis (Alister Hardy was the original creator of the theory) and my work feature an emphasis on neoteny.  The aquatic ape hypothesis states we lost our body hair to better spend our time in water, and that by evolving in a neotenous direction, access to hairlessness was encouraged.  An upright stature is also associated with neoteny, and estuary or river waders often acquire upright positions.  I’ve shown that lower testosterone levels can be associated with longer limbs.  Both low testosterone and long limbs are associated with maturational delay and neoteny.

Feminism and neoteny are closely tied to both our theories, and interestingly, Elaine Morgan and I are both nonscientists and artists who are thinking outside conventions in perhaps complementary fashions.  We are both in the origin myth business, working with similar material, constructing pasts that support an emerging zeitgeist.

“From Neolithic villages to organized state, from gardening to irrigation farming, from inconography to writing, from disorganized raids to institutionalized warfare, from custom to law, from matriarchal religious authority to patriarchal political power, from mystery to history; the transformation was so complete that the past itself was reinvented to create a new foundation for a radically altered present.  Now that we ourselves are moving into a radically altered present, it is small wonder that the patriarchal image of prehistory is disintegrating.  The movement into the future always involves the revisioning of the past.”  (William Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 208.)

One of the things Elaine Morgan was often criticized for was that though her conjectures explained a number of unique human features, there was no obvious way to prove the thesis.  Her subjects did not easily fossilize where they lived by shores.  Regarding human theories of evolution, we have such an astonishingly small amount of information to work with that it surprises me that proof would be the main criticism.  Barely grounded hypotheses are common among human evolution theorists.  I suspect she was more derided for her feminist positions.

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 Habermas, Gebser, Adi Da, and others, feels to me to still be operating from a natural selection frame of reference.  Wilber’s trajectory is linear and pyramidal, male and hierarchical in many ways.  Though concepts of maturation are deeply integrated into his point of view, it seems to me that his point of view is informed mostly by a male orientation suggesting survival-of-the-fittest understandings.

What I think Wilber is at least partially missing is cyclical-based evolutionary changes over time.  In evolution by maturation, heterochronic theory, or what I’m now calling The Orchestral Theory, there are surges of maturational delay and acceleration, the prolonging of embryonic features into adulthood and the accordioning of adult features into embryos, which accompany evolution, often with a periodic, cyclic return of features and behaviors, modified as they reappear.

Clearly, both cyclic and linear patterns are in play.  Wilber’s concentration on the linear or hierarchical is probably mostly a function of the times we live in.  Then again, I’ve never noted Wilber ever quoting Gould or the heterochronists.  As a philosopher working with evolutionary principles, he does not often depart from natural selection orthodoxy on those rare occasions that it comes up.  Once, when on a forum discussing Dawkins’ positions on evolutionary theory, Wilber jumped in to make it clear he did not agree with much of what Dawkins says.  Wilber has opinions about biological evolution theory.  They just tend to congregate around natural selection, though not Neo-Darwinism.  It is perhaps odd that Wilber heavily focuses on maturational interpretations of societal change and personal transformation, while he at the same time ignores existing maturational interpretations of biological evolution put forth by the heterochronist Neo-Lamarckians of the nineteenth century.

Wilber, when he focuses on the confusions that accumulate around prerational and transrational, prepersonal and transpersonal, or ancient matrifocal as a current not belonging in the present, seems to overlook the power of cycles to explain much of what does not emerge in linear overviews.  Wilber describes the symbol of the serpent with her tail in her mouth, the oroborus, as not only an archaic representation of spiritual experience, but as a symbol that represents the prepersonal, or prerational, frame of reference.  I believe that Wilber misses the agency of cycles in both the prerational and transrational.  This can result in an interpretation of symbols that picks up some, but not all, of the connotations.  The serpent, as a powerful representation of prerational consciousness, also serves as a symbol of cycles that transcends the prerational, transrational split.

With Wilber, each stage transcends and includes previous stages, so nothing is actually lost or replaced as each transformation or maturation occurs.  Nevertheless, I believe it useful in a linear, nested hierarchy model to accompany these descriptions with the complementary opposite model of cycles, how things transform by maturing both backward and forward in time, often at the same time.  Wilber’s work is remarkable, astonishing and a joy to read.  Still, it could use a female’s touch.

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 environment, social structure and hormonal change that then adjusts evolutionary trajectories.  It’s feeling like Hrdy and others, in their work, have just about wrapped their minds around how much power females really have, but the piece that connects this all together is how ontogeny is influenced by social structure and the environmental effect on hormone levels, and the relevance of the direct connection between ontogeny and phylogeny.  It keeps coming back to evolution being about maturation, not just survival.

“My archeological research does not confirm the hypothetical existence of the primordial parents and their division into the Great Father and Great Mother figures or the further division of the Great Mother figure into a Good and a Terrible Mother.  There is no trace of a father figure in any of the Paleolithic periods.  The life-creating power seems to have been of the Great Goddess alone.  A complete division into a ‘good’ and a ‘terrible’ Mother never occurred: the Life Giver and the Death Wielder are one deity.”  (Marija Gimbutas, The Languages of the Goddess (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1989), p. 316.)

It seems that what is necessary to develop a deep intuition for what I’m describing is a familiarity with pre-Indo-European immanent experiences of deity.  Ken Wilber describes the common mistake of confusing prerational and transrational interpretations (see http://www.praetrans.com/en/ptf.html).  He also calls this prepersonal and transpersonal.  “Prerational” connotes magical, childlike, “infantile states of narcissism, oceanic adualism, indissociation, and even primitive autism.”  (Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Volume 1:  The Spirit of Evolution  (Boston:  Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1995).)

“Transrational,” from a Wilberian perspective, embraces, nests inside and builds off of preceding maturational/evolutionary states, including rational perspectives.  What seems useful to me is an understanding of how humans interpreted their connection to the world back before patrifocal perspectives took hold.  Gimbutas was an expert in this area.

Feeling both the prepatrifocal, matrifocal immanent interpretation of experience (with the female as grounding matrix) and the patrifocal transcendent interpretation of experience (with male dissociation able to parse out cause and effect), there is suggested a third path, an integration of the two, where it becomes possible to observe the impact of the female in animal/human evolution as we again embrace relationship, in the context of change over time.

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 larger brains, exhibit relative creativity in display when seeking mates, be more playful as adults and be more or less well disposed toward caring for the kids.  Chimpanzees hunt in several male units, as do dogs.  Both are tolerant of little ones, at least not usually engaging in infanticide.

I know too little about these things to have ready information that sorts into this idea.  I expect that’s why I write almost exclusively about humans.  Humans I can observe.

Regarding primates, Knight wrote, “The variations and permutations are numerous, but the basic result is that females arrange themselves across the landscape in characteristic patterns – grouped or isolated, fast-moving or slow, in trees or on the ground – and the males in pursuing their sexual goals adopt strategies which take account of the situation which the females have defined.”  (Chris Knight, Blood Relations (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1991), p. 133.)

With female behavior often informing social structure founded on how both sexes hunt or forage in the context of the location and availability of what is required for sustenance, and the resulting social structure often delegating the hormonal constellations of a particular species, there seems to be a not so subtle relationship described as follows:  Environment > nourishment procurement strategies > social structure > male/female relative hormonal constellations > evolutionary trajectories (changes in hormones adjust ontogeny, changing the species over time).  This looks to me like a paradigm description of how evolution can occur, a variation of what I’ve been playing with as relates to humans.

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.   I’ve not been considering much the hypothesis outside of humans, but it seems, at least among some species, that this paradigm may be in play.

There is this sense that the environment informs social structure that can then invest the female with powers to compel evolution in interesting directions based upon her ability to encourage neoteny or acceleration.  My head is spinning.  It’s feeling like a whole new area is opening up with clear influence trajectories or interlocking cause and effect relationships suggesting how evolution unfolds.

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.

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 published On the Origin of Species, 150 years have passed.  Our origin myth is evolving along with the story’s description of evolutionary process.  Gradually, survival has come to be an unsatisfactory explanation of how everything in the world works.  New stories are emerging to nest within and then build upon old stories.

Just as the psychologists, philosophers and societal observers note maturation is an integral concept when they observe those things that humans are involved in, evolutionary theorists can interpret patterns in experience as revealing successions of stages.  Believers in natural selection apply their principles to molecular and cosmic scales to explain how things change over time.  Principles of maturation offer the same robust capability of translating how forces go through metamorphosis at small and large scales over time.

It’s all story.  Recognizing these theories as stories offers an ability to grasp the next one as it emerges.  First, there was no evolution.  Then there was evolution.  Then there was evolution through natural selection.  Now, consider evolution via maturation.  Next, evolution….

If evolution theory evolves, what is the experience that these stories all describe?

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 can fairly easily write about the Internet and societal change and have that work picked up and appear in online venues, some with large circulations, and get carried by a Twitter surge of close to 100 thousand, I have difficulty distributing perspectives on biological evolution.  In those areas where I am a professional, it is perceived that I have something to lose if what I share ends up being erroneous.  My services depreciate in value if I am wrong.  Also, it is relatively easy to write about the Internet on the Internet.

It is not so easy to write about evolution in those places where theorists write about evolution.

In those areas where I am an amateur, my contributions are not noted by the professional community, because I did not go through the credentialing process whereby it can be assumed that I have something to lose if I am wrong.  Professionals lose much if they are wrong.  They perceive it in their best interest not to ally themselves with those with nothing to lose.  It would be like assigning my clients to high school students.  It is in my best interest as a web developer to hire folks that have received a college education in design.

So, what I’m toying with now is the following:  What are the most subtle and effective ways that I can write about the Internet and social change–areas where I can fairly easily get my ideas distributed–so that biological evolution also gets discussed?  At this time, on the four sites where my ideas appear (sexualselection.org, causeofautism.com, shiftjournal.com and this site), I get several hundred unique visitors a day (by conservative stats analytic tool estimations).  I’m trying to be crafty here and increase that exposure in such a fashion that it becomes clear to readers that the way that individuals, species and societies mature informs our understanding of an enormous amount of what occurs to us in our lives.

Survival sums up the way that most of us understand how biology evolves, individuals survive and societies transcend.  This is the old model.  The new model focuses on how populations, species, individuals and cultures mature.

Natural selection is the process by which randomly generated heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to generate progeny become more common in a population over successive generations.  This is the old model.  The old model does not get replaced.  It becomes the foundation for the new model.

The new model:  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.  Those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

The new model is all about maturation, not survival.  How does an amateur best write about a theory of maturation, with roots in evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, endocrinology, and anthropology, and sound like he’s got something to lose if he is wrong?

I’m not exactly sure if the issue is my surviving attempts to scale traditional barriers that surround professional expertise or my needing to mature to the point where I can be present to what I have to say rather than being concerned with those in my imagination that are not listening.

I just realized.  I think amateur is French for “not mature.”  This work is all about neoteny, or the bringing forth of infant features into adults, a sort of merging of the immature and mature.  That seems to be the theme of several of these essays as regards my personal attempts to introduce a new theory to a professional community.  There are ways that the product and the process are the same.

I need to let this insight mature.