“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…

I’ve been playing with the idea that the genome is not a blueprint or a computer algorithm or a structured plan designed to take into consideration information provided by the environment.  I’ve been toying with the possibility that the genome is closer to a musical script, sheet music, designed to only make sense when integrated with the scripts or compositions of other beings of the same and other species.

First, perhaps a genome makes no sense as an isolated single gnome.  I am suggesting that a genome is but a puzzle piece among puzzle pieces, each piece appearing in a different being.  Seeking answers from within a single genome is like trying to understand a symphonic composition by reading the sheet music of the timpani.

Second, if the genome is like sheet music, then perhaps the musician is something science has been ignoring.  I’m thinking that it’s not that our genome is supplying content for the artist to then display, but that the genome is creating context whereby content and artistry can both emerge.  This is difficult to even consider without the first point successfully absorbed.

The genome is like a nationwide train-track system, with each city a different individual,…

After several hundred pages of describing biological anomalies that didn’t fit his theory of natural selection, on page 350 of his second volume of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Darwin said the following, “Under this point of view I venture to advance the hypothesis of Pangenesis, which implies that every separate part of the whole organization reproduces itself.  So that ovules, spermatozoa, and pollen-grains, – the fertilized egg or seed, as well as buds, – include and consist of a multitude of germs thrown off from each separate part or unit.  In the First Part I will enumerate as briefly as I can the groups of facts which seem to demand connection; but certain subjects, not hitherto discussed, must be treated at disproportionate length.  In the Second Part the hypothesis will be given; and after considering how far the necessary assumptions are in themselves improbable, we shall see whether it serves to bring under a single point of view the various facts.”

Darwin is wrestling with observations that don’t fit an established paradigm, the one that he and Wallace introduced in 1858 called natural selection.  He is hypothesizing movement across a body and between generations of something…

Exploring some of the original sources of the ideas I play with in this blog, I’m revisiting Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.  In this two-volume presentation of Darwin’s Lamarckian hypothesis, published in 1868, after his 1859 On the Origin of Species, Darwin does not associate himself with Lamarck.  Lamarck is rarely mentioned.  Then, as now, evolutionary theories focusing on use and disuse of organs and environmental effects were controversial.  Some sample excerpts….

“…selection does nothing without variability, and this depends in some manner on the action of the surrounding circumstances on the organism.”  V1, p. 7

Describing the transformation of several English dog breeds when raised in India, Darwin states, “It would appear that climate to a certain extent directly modifies the forms of dogs.  We have lately seen that several of our English breeds cannot live in India, and it is positively asserted that when bred there for a few generations they degenerate not only in their mental faculties, but in form….This remarkable tendency to rapid deterioration in European dogs subjected to the climate of India and Africa, may be largely accounted for by reversion to a primordial condition which many animals exhibit, as we…

It is not uncommon that I am with a friend who is in distress and he or she is describing an experience that he or she has had or is having that is not related to the distress but which occurs during the time of distress.  The experience is informed by the individual’s emotional and mental state, resulting in what appears to me to be an experience very different from what it would have been without the distress.

Underlying, or presupposing, any experience is the mental/emotional place we are in when it occurs.  What I mean is that experience is informed by context.  An individual’s ability to be aware of his or her personal context while being exposed to life’s experiences can have a lot to do with how empowered a person feels by his or her life.  There are layers and layers of underlying context or presupposition.  These have been called personal stories or scripts.  It can be argued that the deeper our awareness of this context, the more empowered, the more secure we feel.

This kind of context, these presuppositions, is integral to understanding evolutionary theory.  Gould alludes to these issues in various works, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny…

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.  Speed as a concept is also integral to biology.  I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemispheres impacts consciousness, behavior and personality.  And, whereas the basic unit of speed in physics is the kilometer or mile, in biology that unit is a generation.  Though maybe not.

Bernard Crespi has written a paper, Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain, which focuses on several neurological features as influential in the etiology of particular diseases and conditions.  Corpus callosum size (the corpus callosum is the primary brain bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres) and anomalous dominance (differing cerebral hemisphere sizes) are two of those features, aspects of cerebral lateralization.  I would consider that corpus callosum size not only influences the ease and speed of information transfer, but that corpus callosum size influences the experience of self awareness or split consciousness.

There are correlations between degrees of cerebral lateralization, how much the two cerebral hemispheres vary, and conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering).  Degrees of handedness are influenced by this variable.  Other diseases and conditions are associated with right cerebral hemispheres not…

Where you draw the line between individual and species or individual and society has a lot to do with our ability to understand ourselves and evolution.  This line is not an arbitrary line but characterizes what we perceive as the primary unit.  As humans, we maintain individual self awareness and so view the world as composed of those units that create the foundation of the structure of our world.

Dawkins and his colleagues have played with the gene as the foundation unit and have come up with some interesting conjectures.  Though I disagree with many Neo-Darwinians that behave compelled to believe that the level of the gene is the only important level of selection, I agree that there is usefulness in taking a gene perspective.  What interests me now is not just the Neo-Darwinist perspective, or even the Gould position that evolution occurs in numerous levels, including gene, individual, species, groups and larger systems.  The idea that is playing with me at this time is that using units to explore evolution strips the process of the dynamic hidden at its core.

I’m feeling that just as in physics, in biology, by assuming that there are patterns that play across the…

It interests me how Einstein perceived the relationship between speed and time by identifying with the kind of Doppler effect that he imagined to occur when a light beam left a train station, compelling two different rates of time.  He then capitalized on this exercise of imagination by conceptualizing it as equations, music of the spheres.

I’ve been playing with a concept that I’m feeling integrates a lot of the various patterns I’ve been observing and exploring over the last 12 years.  It is as follows… If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.

This is a description of the influence of time on biology.  Maturation is usually understood to be associated with the stage-like development of an individual.  Maturation in an individual is also an unfolding of the maturational record of all preceding individuals in the lineage of life on earth.  I’m not just describing Haeckel’s recapitulation, but the back and forth play of waves of both neoteny and acceleration, waves paradoxically…

An aspect of neoteny just struck me that has never crossed my mind before.  It perhaps suggests a basic principle in evolution.  I’m not sure.

Two days ago, I posted a piece exploring a paradox of recapitulation that focuses on an odd possibility.  When a species is in an accelerated phase and withdraws adult features backward over generations to eventually appear in the infants of descendants, adults may exhibit features of ancient forebears.  If the species lineage had in the past gone through a similar cycle, then that genetic inheritance would have been available, emerging when a similar hormonal disposition became engaged.

Haeckel may have been focused on that very dynamic as he obsessed on recapitulation as a source of new behavioral and physical characteristics.  What strikes me now is that though recapitulation (acceleration) is not considered at this time as a relevant description of evolutionary process, it does seem to be half of a process that results in a seemingly natural biological dynamic that not only withdraws species backward through ontogeny to conception but at the same time carries forward or prolongs features of this planet’s earliest species forward into adults.

There are two waves or currents moving through…

Rate and timing may be the foundation concepts that tie together the many scales of experience.  Assigning testosterone to rate and estrogen to timing may serve to explain how evolution and societal transformation unfold.  The nineteenth and early twentieth century attention to four-fold parallelisms–biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience–may all be testosterone and estrogen informed via the engine of heterochronic theory.

I came to these studies originally by offering attention to the possibility that human evolution was driven by women’s choices.  With the recent revelation that estrogen may control the timing of maturation rates, it becomes possible that biological evolution in general may be built upon a foundation of testosterone controlling rate and estrogen managing timing.

I’d prefer to call this orchestral evolution rather than heterochronic theory, noting the power of estrogen, in the position of conductor, to control the timing of the unfolding of the production.

A question that has crossed my mind is:  If rate and timing are the foundation principles, and testosterone and estrogen are the particular ways these principles have manifested at the scales of evolution closest to the levels at which we identify, then what might be the levers of influence at other scales of…

There is an idea I’ve been wrestling with for several years that I don’t think is going to get resolved by putting it into words, but I still want to describe the conundrum.

Alpheus Hyatt was a contemporary of Darwin. In Hyatt’s view, all species transformations could be explained by acceleration, with the apparent withdrawal or reversion into former stages, neoteny or paedomorphosis, being explained by a natural reemergence of early ontogenetic stages very late in an accelerated process, an exhibition that might be compared to senility in human development.

I’ve hypothesized that humans and many other species evolve over time by delaying and accelerating maturation (influenced by higher and lower levels of testosterone and estrogen).  Both the environment and sexual selection informed by social structure can influence these hormone levels.  Imagine a roller coaster or a snake’s wavering path revealing periods of time in a species’ transformation that evidence relatively high male testosterone, for example, and relatively low male testosterone.  Over time we might observe several peaks of high testosterone, reflected, we might hypothesize, by far more male-against-male control of procreation competition and shorter life spans with higher mortality.

Let’s hypothesize that humans have followed something like this meandering…

There are the interpretations of evolution that emphasize mutation.  Evolutionary developmental biologists are exploring ways life may be evolving that are unrelated to mutation, pathways influenced by the environment.  My work concentrates on how the rates and timing of maturation are influenced by hormones, with sexual selection or environmental changes transforming individuals and then species over time.

In the river analogy that preceded this piece, there is no explanation for how a species might leave the groove provided by the trajectories set up by maturational delay and acceleration.  This river chatters, making music as it flows downstream.  What might be the music of evolution?

A species could evolve over time, prolonging infant features into adult descendants, and then it could reverse that trend by withdrawing adult features into descendant infants.  Then repeat.  It would seem, like a teeter totter, that over great periods of time there would be no real movement, just variation between two polarities.

Indeed, in some cases this may be what occurs.  Nevertheless, unique variations keep emerging, species that have never been observed.

Some reasons for this come to mind.  What might these reasons sound like?

Species don’t just prolong infant features to adult descendants.  Aspects of…

I’ve been playing with the idea of the Mississippi as a metaphor for a species’ life when it comes to understanding neoteny and acceleration.  It’s not a perfect fit, but it is an interesting one.

Imagine the Mississippi as representing changes in a species over time.  At the source, Itasca in Minnesota, clear water emerges from beneath the earth in a pristine environment featuring wildlife and virgin forest.  At first a trickle, the stream picks up speed and breadth, finally leaving the protected environment of the park.

The river grows wider as it meanders south.  Houses and, later, towns appear beside it.  Soon, industry emerges, and before too long, boats carrying the product of industry share river space with tourists and local boaters.

At the other end of the river, New Orleans, the river is girdled by cities on both sides, massive commercial and industrial activity and almost a million people.  Cities like Baton Rouge offer single corporate sites square miles in size, using the Mississippi as an opportunity for profit.

Driving down and up the Mississippi with my son, I am sensitive to the ways he is different and the same as I, as I am similar yet vary…

I’ve been reading The Selfish Genius by Fern Elsdon-Baker.  The book feels like both a window into contemporary evolutionary biological theorist societal culture and a support of my feelings regarding Neo-Darwinism.  There are lots of fascinating historical tidbits.

One piece of the historical narrative I’ve found deeply interesting is the relationship between professionals and amateurs while the polarity between atheism and spirituality are in play.  In Darwin’s day, Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, led the movement to place supporters of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in important positions in universities.  At the same time, he was bullying his way into establishing a professional, merit-based science community as opposed to science controlled by moneyed elites with leisure time.  Connected to this transition was the emergence of professional scientists with an atheistic point of view.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, there were several theories of evolution combating to explain patterns observed in nature.  Wallace contacted Darwin in 1858 with Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection.  Darwin at that time had been working on three different dynamics of evolution.  Darwin had not discovered a way to integrate natural selection, sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, what Darwin called “pangenesis.”  He shelved…

There are several ways that children play.  They imitate adults, using costume or pantomime to reproduce a different time and place.  They engage in games that seek to achieve competition or cooperation goals.  Children will initiate or participate in an activity that engages the senses in a fashion that feels good and seems interesting, such as dancing, looking through a telescope and making music.  Children also like to play with scale.

Shifting scale is often engaged in while exploring the other three forms of play:  mimicking, games and pattern exploration.  A child might imagine that he or she is in a spaceship while cruising through a room.  Flashing by light fixtures, the child imagines passing galaxies.  Marching soldier figures through forests of grass blades, the child might also see himself or herself as a giant above the battlefield.  A child might invent a game with specific scenarios that game pieces represent.  Playing dress up, a child might imagine that he or she is grown.

Much play presupposes an ability to be two places at one or two times at once.  Not all play.  Early play simply involves an exploration of the senses, the mechanics of the body and the mirroring…

“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 near or below the limits of detection.  Ten of 12 control animals reached puberty during the breeding season of their 4th year, compared with five of 10 antide- and three of eight antide + androgen-treated animals.  Although matriline rank was balanced across treatment groups at birth, a disruption within the social group during year 2 resulted in a marginally lower social ranking of the two treated groups compared with the controls.  More high (78%) than low (22%) ranking animals reached puberty during year 4.  During the breeding season of that year, serum LH, testosterone and testicular volume…

There seems to be at least two evolutionary processes that, at best, are tangentially referred to.  They are so simple as to often feel irrelevant.  I’m wondering how many more of these processes are floating around out there, unremarked.

One process is the back-and-forth dance between homogeneity and heterogeneity.  Over time barriers are built.  Life on the two sides of the barrier unfolds uniquely.  With time, the barrier comes down and there is a proliferation of the new as what was formerly separate builds unique hybrids.  Eventually, a new homogeneity sets in.  Then new barriers are built.

This paradigm is integral to explanations of natural selection.  Populations have to segregate to form varieties and species.  With each new species, the larger system transforms.  The dance of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels an almost infinite variety as it unfolds on many scales and at many locations over time.

The process of homogeneity and heterogeneity compels new forms upon separation and new forms upon combination.  Each new form compels the emergence of its complementary opposite, a process that operates, hypothetically, at all scales of existence.  Socially, the separation of nations encourages unique cultures.  Barriers come down and unique hybrids are encouraged.  Personally, the…

If changing the rates and timing of human maturation results in more or less self awareness or degrees of split consciousness when cerebral hemispheres and corpus callosums adjust to varying levels of testosterone and estrogen, then might there be a macro, universe version of this process?

Okay, this is WAY out there regarding an exploration of hypothetical biological processes and their possible application to universal processes.  Nevertheless, there is a website that explores the possible ramifications of evolutionary developmental biological theory as regards the ontogeny of our universe.  These folks posit that if you can apply the theory of natural selection to how the universe acquired its characteristics, then you can do the same thing with complementary theories of evolution that suggest that the environment can influence evolution in a single generation.

What I’m playing with here is the suggestion that each of us exhibits split consciousness, which is enhanced by having two cerebral hemispheres that are not the same size with a corpus callosum small enough that it inhibits communication between the two hemispheres.  I’m presupposing that consciousness already exists, consciousness evidenced by primary process, defined as awareness of only one time, one place and no…

There is this thesis that I’ve been playing with.  Like the experience physics theorists have described, it seems too beautiful to not be true.  Nevertheless, Stephen J. Gould has described the trap biologists sometimes get themselves into, the dogged pursuit of a beautiful thesis that turns out to be false.

The thesis I am now exploring has been developing since late 1997.  It has grown deeper with time.  Earlier immersion in works by William Irwin Thompson and Riane Eisler prepared me for what followed.  It started out as an exploration of how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection juxtaposed with Chris Knight’s explanation of matrifocal human evolution.  This insight was joined by Gould’s description of heterochronic processes, associated with Norman Geschwind’s studies of cerebral lateralization and Annett’s discoveries regarding handedness distributions.

Darwin, Knight, Gould, Geschwind and Annett each offered pieces that suggested an integrated whole.  Sexualselection.org describes the thesis, introduced in 1998.

I struggled to write a larger, cogent overview of the thesis but a combination of deep disappointment around failed attempts to start conversations with academics (many polite responses, little enthusiasm) and the need to make a living (my former business took a dive) propelled me to put my theorizing…

Physicists maintain a reverence for process that transcends deity, the metaphors that deity is associated with and the battles that sometimes result from deep commitment to metaphor.  Physics is a relatively nonmetaphoric undertaking.  Reverence for process connects physicists across the world.  There is evidence that this state of reverence, this respect for the awe-inspiring mathematics of the universe, often results in the practitioners of physics having an experience of everything being connected.  Transcendence without mythology.

In the biological sciences, most practitioners are still enamored of the implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), studies revolving around epigenesis and the work of heterochronic theorists such as Matsuda have not been integrated into a general understanding similar to that engaged in by the practitioners of physics.  In biology, interconnections are viewed as contingent upon random circumstance leading to complexity.  In physics, interconnection is often viewed as evidence of an integrated whole.

In biology, a central focus is natural selection’s insistence that the variation of progeny produced by a coupling is random, unrelated to environmental effects.  Alternative theories (evo-devo, epigenesis and Matsuda) suggest that there may be little that is random in the proliferation of life upon earth.  Physicists…

It may be possible that we are approaching a way of looking at social and biological evolution that provides us a synthesis perspective or integrated discipline.  Its name might be something like “Evolutionary Endocrinology.”  This new perspective might be characterized by an exploration of evolution in the present, not just over time.  This would integrate evolutionary developmental biology with social structure theory.  It might even provide a place for evolutionary psychologists by framing their contributions as the human dynamic evidenced by patrifocal social structure.  With the new paradigm we’d be encouraged to integrate the biological now with the arc of evolution over time.

Thomas Kuhn described and framed the evolution of science in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  He started off by presupposing that there was structure to the way that science transformed over time.  To presuppose that something is possible it is necessary to recognize that the something exists.  I presuppose that everything is connected and awareness or consciousness is a feature of the system.  A benefit of this presupposition is that I look for connections in places where a reductionist model suggests they are unnecessary.

The questions are:  What useful outcomes does a presupposition offer and can…

Evolutionary theory has been encouraged to grow in the direction of what society believes about itself.  When we in the West were committed to the mythology of the Judeo-Christian ethic, we concluded that life emerged as a direct result of transcendent intervention in a prescribed time period.  Darwin was heavily influenced by contemporary forces that included the belief that humans could observe patterns, draw conclusions and make predictions without the influence of a universal god.  Drawing upon Linnaeus, Paley, Malthus, Smith and Lyell, Darwin created a theory of evolution that seemed to integrate both a reverence for the subject and respect for enlightenment and intellectual independence.  In choosing among Darwin’s three theories, society embraced the theory of natural selection, which directly reflected a material, stratified, industrializing West.

A new paradigm is emerging.  Instead of “survival of the fittest,” we see a drifting in the direction of “transcendence of the interconnected.”  Cooperative communities are becoming recognized as integral to understanding how individuals and collections of individuals evolve.  For many evolutionary theorists, the environment is now a variable that influences the kind of progeny that are produced.  We need not be products of random variation any longer.

Still unexplored as a variable…

How evolution operates or unfolds has something to do with whether a person believes life has been engineered or designed.  An engineer seeks ways to make things work that will involve the least number of parts, the lowest cost and the greatest efficiency.  Efficiency is often defined as low maintenance and long life.

When an artist creates, the process is often characterized by a seeking to establish novel patterns using alternative or unique processes.  Efficiency is less important than what has not been done before.  There is a desire to break barriers and to apply principles established in one area to a new area unfamiliar with those principles.  The creative process is often characterized by suggesting connections where connections are not obvious.  There is often a deep desire to perceive and express universality.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins subscribes to Occam’s razor, proclaiming that the simplest solutions are those that will naturally emerge.  Systems will reduce themselves to the easiest ways to accomplish goals within the confines of their environment, and those are the ones that will most likely survive.  Wikipedia notes that Occam’s razor reflects a “hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.”  Less is…