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.

“On the other hand, his sense of aesthetic appreciation, based on the pleasure which man can receive from the construction and matching of musical patterns involving the interaction of rhythm, melody, and harmony and visual patterns resulting from the interaction of form and color, has also resulted from the freeing of his association areas from the more rigid relationship with the lower centers and with the more stereotyped, amorphous symbol patterns which constitute the inner reality of all other animals (Koestler 1964).  Aesthetic appreciation, therefore, is a foetalised form of the continuous search for congruity or matching between models of the environment, models which the animal constantly constructs in its brain by processing its perceptions and the stereotypes retained in its memory store.”  (Crombie, Donald L., “The Group System of Man and Paedomorphosis,” Current Anthropology 12(2) (1971):163.)

Going through my store of excerpts from several hundred papers and close to 300 books, I came across the passage above, having no memory of having recorded it.  This is what I’ve been playing with the last few weeks as regards a theory of music and aesthetics that emerge as a result of embryonic features appearing in the behavior and experience of adults.

This is not looking at art as a contingent or accidental property associated with intelligence that was naturally selected because intelligence exhibits facility with tools.  Art is instead approached as central to what humans sexually selected in each other as they sought mates exhibiting sensitivity to aesthetics.

In addition, the passage above suggests that art itself reflects an embryonic dynamic, a period in ontogeny when growth is characterized by an environment integrally involved with how an individual develops.

A question emerges.  I posit that neoteny is central to human evolution driven by sexual selection/social structure and environmental issues, with the creativity of infants appearing in the behavior of adults.  In addition, I consider, as the passage above suggests, that actual embryonic processes themselves are reflected in the aesthetic dynamics of our species.  Is there a relationship between neotenic physical features appearing in species over time and the creative exhibition of either males and/or females when displaying to achieve a mate?  In other words, do other species show alliances between neoteny and creativity?  How are neoteny and sexual selection closely allied outside humans?

In an earlier piece, I surmised that increases in estrogen in the female would also increase her tendency to focus with more discrimination on features in a potential mate while perhaps paying closer attention to her young.  If patterns in nature operate similarly to the way I describe how humans may have evolved, then might the exhibition of creativity in other species besides humans be also an exhibition of a tendency to prolong infant or embryo features into the adult of the species, where they would then provide males more behavioral flexibility when it comes to accommodating female predilection for the unique?

Does female choice result in not only sexual selection but a tendency toward male neoteny, resulting in the emergence of creativity when seeking mates?

It is rare when I think of human evolution dynamics in the context of other animals.  Doing so now, I find myself wondering if larger patterns are in play.

I’m finishing the over 100 piece that seeks to provide a less-stressed introduction to this theory than the earlier “Introduction to the Theory of Waves.”  First, the theory is now called “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  The name changed when I hypothesized that estrogen manages the timing of maturation.

That, by the way, was a bizarre realization.  Bizarre for two reasons.  First, it came to me without my being aware that it had come to me.  I just found myself working with that premise, not having noted when it became part of my thoughts.  Second, for more than 11 years, I’ve been working with testosterone controlling the rate of maturation without it having ever crossed my mind that it would be interesting to know what managed the timing.  It just never struck me that it was relevant or knowable, even though I’d been discussing rates and timing of maturation for 11 years.  At the same time, for 11 years, I’d been wondering how specifically estrogen might fit into the theory that was coming together.  I sensed that the theory was out of balance.

Since 1998, I’d been wondering how estrogen was relevant at the same time that I was totally not paying attention to the relevance of timing to maturation, even though I talked of timing constantly in the context of timing being the other half of the time frame of maturation, integral to heterochronic evolution.  Then, late last winter, estrogen slipped in, and I didn’t even notice the integration.

Okay.  Pretty weird.

Finishing the new introduction, I’ve been refining different sections of the work.  Describing the contribution of the artist, it hit me that the definition of “artist” embraces two very different sensibilities with paradoxically opposite implications.

There is the Occam’s-razor worshipping, male, Neo-Darwinian, reductionist, materialist, programmer’s creativity that seeks an elegant solution with the fewest number of steps possible.  Integral to this view is a compulsive rhythm implying step-by-step behavior with little awareness of a larger picture.  This reflects a particularly patrifocal, hierarchical social paradigm with every level in the hierarchy obsessively protecting that which is observable and controllable in contiguous positions.  There are ways that this also reflects the male protohuman character that is far less interested, artistically, in relationship than in the obsessive performance of evocative rhythm.

In other words, features of the hypothetical low estrogen, obsessive male are evident in patrifocal society and its creative impulse.  Perhaps high estrogen, patrifocal, creative males have creative impulses similar to low estrogen matrifocal males.  Focus on detail characterizes both milieus.

The emerging artist’s impulse is one that features a high estrogen male, far from the kind of male I am hypothesizing was common while we were growing big brains.  We are now seeing the “feminine” male, the male that fits the newer of the two matrifocal paradigms, a male with an artistic sensibility that seeks productions that reflect a larger whole.  Relationship is closely observed.  Wider connections are respected.

In other words, the protoartist paradigm is not the same as the emerging artist paradigm, even though both operate in matrifocal context

“In a study of alcoholism, it was noted that alcoholism is a significant health concern for lesbians, with an incidence rate perhaps three times that of the general population.  The relationships among the development of alcoholism in women, the experience of stigmatization and the complex facets of lesbian identity and lesbian community are explored.  This exploration provides for a more comprehensive and critical analysis of alcoholism in lesbians.  As a phenomenon of women’s health, alcoholism is examined using the perspectives of developmental theory, symbolic interactionism and critical theory.  The author offers insights and implications for health care, research and theory building.”  (Hall, J. M., “Alcoholism in Lesbians:  Developmental, Symbolic Interactionist, and Critical Perspectives,” Health Care for Women International 11(1) (1990):89-107.)

“Yalom et al. (1973) studied 20 16-year-old boys of diabetic mothers, who had received estrogen or progesterone during pregnancy.  These boys showed less heterosexuality and less masculinity than 20 control boys.  Netley and Rovet (1982) showed that among 33 males with 47,XXY syndrome, 24% were nonrighthanded, compared to 10% of a control group. …  In the present study, as well as in Lindesay (1987), only homosexual men were studied.  In Rosenstein and Bigler (1987) and McCormick et al. (1990), both men and women were studied, and in the latter study, a significant increase in lefthandedness (or rather nonrighthandedness) was obtained for women.  This was assumed to be related to higher-than-normal levels of prenatal testosterone levels.  In their results, the increase in lefthandedness in homosexual women (which have lower occurrence than men in the general population) is much larger than that of homosexual men.  It is, therefore, fair to assume that the increase in testosterone, believed to cause both lefthandedness and homosexuality in women, will give a more pronounced effect in women than in men (p. 184).”  (Coates, T. J., Ekstrand, M., and Gotestam, K. O., “Handedness, Dyslexia and Twinning in Homosexual Men,” International Journal of Neuroscience 63(3-4) (1992):179-86.)

“Although numerous researchers have hypothesized a biological factor in the etiology of homosexuality, there is a lack of empirical evidence.  Previous investigations did not focus on behavioral functions of the brain.  Using neuropsychological testing, we found an increased incidence of left-hand preference (defined as non-consistent right-hand preference) in a group of 32 homosexual women.  A trend in the same direction was found in a group of 38 homosexual men.  These results suggest that homosexual orientation has a neurobiological component possibly related to hemispheric functional asymmetry.  The results are consistent with previous reports that (1) prenatal neuroendocrine events are a factor in the development of human sexual orientation and functional brain asymmetries, and (2) the mechanisms associated with homosexual orientation and related neuropsychological characteristics are different between the sexes, i.e., elevated levels of prenatal sex hormones in women and decreased levels in men.”  (Kingstone, E., McCormick, C. M., and Witelson, S. F., “Left-handedness in Homosexual Men and Women:  Neuroendocrine Implications,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 15(1) (1990):69-76.)

“Human homosexual males report more stressors (such as bereavement) during their mother’s pregnancy than controls (Dorner, Schenk, Schmiedel, and Ahrens 1983).”  (S. Baron-Cohen, S. Lutchmaya, and R. Kinickmeyer, Prenatal Testosterone in Mind:  Amniotic Fluid Studies (Massachusetts:  MIT Press, 2004), pp. 11-12.)

“Matched groups of homosexual men, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women (n = 38 per group) were tested on three measures of spatial ability and two measures of fluency that typically reveal sex differences.  For the three spatial tests and one of the fluency tests, the mean performance of homosexual men fell between those of the heterosexual men and women.  The pattern of cognitive skills of homosexual men was different from that of heterosexual men: homosexual men had lower spatial ability relative to fluency.  The cognitive pattern of homosexual men was not significantly different from that of heterosexual women.  In addition, the results suggest that homosexual men classified on the basis of hand preference may form two subgroups that differ in cognitive pattern.  These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that there is a neurobiological factor related to sexual differentiation in the etiology of homosexuality.”  (McCormick, C. M., and Witelson, S. F., “A Cognitive Profile of Homosexual Men Compared to Heterosexual Men and Women,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 16(6) (1991):459-73.)

“The raised incidences of strong left-handedness and of mixed-handedness in homosexual men, as in dyslexics, are mutually consistent under the normal distribution function, as expected by the right shift theory of handedness.  It is argued that atypical laterality in these groups is better described as a ‘reduction of right shift’ than as a ‘left shift.’”  (Annett, M., “Comments on Lindesay:  Laterality Shift in Homosexual Men,” Neuropsychologia 26(2) (1988):341-3.)

“A study of handedness, dyslexia, stuttering and twinning, was included in a study of sexual habits of homosexual men.  A questionnaire was mailed to homosexuals, and 394 forms suitable for data analysis were received.  The results showed an increased rate of lefthand writing (17.5% compared to 8-8.4%), and a clear left shift.  There were increased occurrence of both stuttering (7.1% compared to 1.6%) and reading difficulties (7.9% compared to 1-3%).  The incidence of twins was lower than the population (1.3%).  The results confirm earlier attempts to show a left shift in homosexuals, and support Geschwind’s hypotheses about etiological factors for both lefthandedness and homosexuality.”  (Coates et al., 179-86.)

“`

Phonetic dyslexics (Annett, 1990); stutterers (Corballis, 1981; Bryden, 1994); many Tourette’s sufferers (Shapiro et al., 1972); many gifted athletes, mathematicians, artists, musicians (Deutsch, 1978; Hassler, 1991b; Hassler & Gupta, 1993), and composers (Hassler, 1992); many schizophrenics (Crow et al., 1996); specific alcoholic types (London, 1985) and many obese women are individuals located at the left end of this societal balance that I’ve been describing.  In addition, there are many homosexuals and lesbians firmly positioned in matrifocal social structure displaying high testosterone women and low testosterone men.

Congregating these various excerpts in a single place, I’m hoping to make clear the pattern this particular group exhibits in the context of the thesis I’ve been describing.  There are groups in current society that exhibit neurological, endocrinological and handedness dispositions characteristic of matrifocal social structure and, hypothetically, our recent evolutionary forebears.  Gays and lesbians fit the paradigm.  Gays evidence maturational delay and females evidence acceleration.  In addition, females exhibit higher testosterone levels, males lower levels, and both are coming from high testosterone mothers.

I’d expect that male homosexuals, if they congregate features like those that we hypothesize were common when we were evolving in matrifocal social structures, would be often narcissistic, performance based, highly sexually motivated, often obsessive compulsive, musically inclined and excellent dancers.

I would estimate that lesbians would often feature female traits in our ancient matrifocal archetype.  They would have commanding dispositions, and they would be overweight (high testosterone/high estrogen), extremely discriminating and musically inclined.

I would also predict that gays and lesbians would often have relatives with autism and Asperger’s, with homosexuality not uncommon among the autistic and those with Asperger’s.  Gays and males with autism feature maturational delay; lesbians feature maturational acceleration.

The patterns here seem pretty clear.

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

Nevertheless, from our Western perspective, provide a woman any control in a hierarchical context where men have traditionally called the shots, and the female anomaly often receives negative attention.  Evolutionary theory traditionally focuses on the male.  Some exceptions with a focus on the female have emerged over the last 40 years, mostly from female theorists, but so long as our primary paradigm is Darwin’s theory of natural selection supporting survival of traits emerging in a random context, the female cooperative-and-sharing paradigm is framed in a male, competitive milieu.

Part of what is wholly new in what I am presenting is a balanced female/male perspective.  I place a heavy emphasis on the impact of those environmental and social structure influences that adjust levels of estrogen and testosterone, changing the rate and timing of an individual’s experience, ontogeny, societal change and species evolution.  Whereas the changing of rates, influenced by changing levels of testosterone, generates archetypal transformations, the changing of timing, managed by adjusting levels of estrogen, controls testosterone-informed rates of change.

In other words, this is a theory of evolution that suggests that the feminine governs the masculine rather than the other way around.

Whether timing governs rate or rate governs timing is really a nonuseful distinction.  They both influence each other, with biological and social systems offering feedback between the two that makes it difficult if not impossible to assign a beginning to any point within the system.  Still, it feels fun to congregate power in the hands of the cooperative polarity.

This feminine theory of evolution seeks to show how the neoteny/acceleration paradigm informs change at four scales (biology, society, ontogeny, biography), parsing out how changes in the timing of processes influence the rate of change.  For example, too little body fat and not enough estrogen at puberty will prolong puberty, with a number of repercussions.  This work hypothesizes that varying levels of estrogen in infants inform testosterone surges, which influence left hemispheric synapse pruning, thus impacting cerebral lateralization and degrees of split consciousness or self awareness, encouraging conditions featuring exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration, such as autism.  In other words, estrogen may manage the extreme maleness that Baron-Cohen suggests the autistic have too much of.

This work outlines the influence of estrogen on social structure.  Understanding social structure is integral to understanding both biological evolution and social evolution.

I also explore the relationship between estrogen and the dynamics of sexual selection, which is closely related to social structure.  Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young.  Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but may determine the likelihood of progeny survival by influencing how much attention is directed toward those progeny.

Is there a direct relationship between robust female sexual selection, with a compulsion to judge male features, and a deep desire to care for the young?  If estrogen levels inform one, are tendencies toward the other enhanced?

In a “feminine” theory of evolution, these are the kinds of questions I am asking.  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. Following these rate-and-timing pathways sends this work in several related directions.  One of the most interesting paths is the one where we need a woman to serve as guide.

Central to the dynamic that winds its way throughout this work, and what I am now calling the Orchestral Theory of Evolution, is the idea that biological evolution and social evolution are the same.  The present paradigm behaves like there has been so profound an effect upon society and consciousness by self awareness and language that culture now seems separated from biology.  This work seeks to integrate biology and culture.  This integration is made possible by an understanding of how evolution proliferates variation outside of natural selection.  This is an old idea, one that emerged in the nineteenth century.  Stephen J. Gould, in his 1977 Ontogeny and Phylogeny, sought to codify this idea.  He focused on the principle of heterochrony, a word coined by Ernst Haeckel.  Heterochrony is a process that describes the dynamic of progeny variation, a process that is not random.

The natural selection paradigm hypothesizes that the progeny produced by a parent or parents exhibit features that are random, uninfluenced by the parents’ life or the environment, and that the specific characteristics of an individual that will enhance its ability to survive to procreate will be traits that will be featured by descendants.

I don’t think so.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection is partly right.  Yes, an evolutionary guillotine exists that prevents the passing on of self-destructive tendencies and enhances the ability to procreate of those with useful gifts.  But, natural selection is only the basic premise, the foundation that other selective processes are built upon.

A foundation may make possible, but not suggest, the cathedral-like beauty and complexity of evolutionary processes that we visit to experience understanding.

Heterochronic theory, or my version of heterochronic theory, which I sometimes refer to as “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution,” pays particularly close attention to how the variation of traits featured by an individual emerges.  The process is the same in biology and society.  This is because in both biology and society testosterone and estrogen compel specific evolutionary trajectories.  I hypothesize that testosterone controls the rate of change.  Estrogen manages the timing.  Each hormone features a host of characteristics that additionally influence biology and society, characteristics that compel individuals and societies to exhibit specific features and behaviors.

Society has structure based upon how those that create or share societal ideas relate to and are driven by the dynamics of testosterone and estrogen.  This societal structure dynamic, this testosterone-and-estrogen frame of reference, operates in an identical fashion as biological social structure.  For moderns, it’s been particularly difficult to parse out this commonality between biology and society because we’ve been so unaware of the relativity of social structure, because patrifocal social structure has been so ubiquitous in our lives.  Nevertheless, social structure informs culture and biology at the most basic level, the level at which progeny variation is decided.
I come back to this many times over the course of this website.  I describe the specific endocrinological dynamics, the connection of those dynamics to social structure and brain structure, their relationship with that which makes humans unique (split consciousness) and how all that relates to how specifically species and societies evolve.

The following sentence sums it up.

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.

It’s not only about survival, but about maturation.

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 on hold.  I started a website design firm in 1999.  From the start, I focused on achieving high rankings for my clients’ websites and my theory site.  I discovered I had a talent for the kind of obsessive, focused puzzle-solving that search engine optimization entailed.  Search engine ranking is now a sizable portion of my living.  My four theory sites have received over a million unique visitors.

Last fall, I was diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm.  I’d been writing every day since the previous January 1, with daily postings slowly turning back toward evolutionary theory after a hiatus of several years.  Over the course of the spring and summer, I kept finding societal applications of heterochronic theory with implications that felt profound.  Biology and society began to merge as I observed identical processes impacting both disciplines in predictable ways.  Changing maturation rates and timing (the foundation of heterochronic theory) had both biological and societal implications.

Discovery of the aneurysm seemed to concentrate my attentions.  The existence of the aneurysm is not life threatening, unless it ruptures.  Still, the chance of a rupture in a given year is 2.5 percent to 10 percent, depending on the surgeon being interviewed.  Life feels more precious.

The original thesis that came together in 1997 and 1998 offered a host of insights and one major anomaly.  The anomaly was that Asian patrifocal social structures produce neotenous features.  I rejected the “random” answer that different ethnicities produce different features based on unpredictable tendencies to focus on particular sexually selected traits.  In the back of my mind for almost ten years was the feeling that an answer to this riddle would lead to useful new directions.

In addition, I was aware that my theory focused almost exclusively on testosterone as a driving force in human evolution, with testosterone controlling rates of maturation.  It seemed to me that estrogen probably had an integral part to play, but it had not become obvious what that part was.  For ten years, that thought about estrogen bounced around in the back of my mind.

Then, last fall, shortly after the discovery of the aneurysm, I began to play with the possibility that estrogen worked in close cooperation with testosterone in a complementary opposite fashion.  This possibility could both explain the paradox of Asian neoteny and provide a balanced explanation of how maturation rates are adjusted by estrogen in the womb and in society.

That felt major.  The piece, “Introduction to the Theory of Waves,” described the dynamic.  What I had called “Shift Theory” in 1998 I now called “The Theory of Waves” to accommodate the integration of estrogen into the equation.

Last spring, a series of additional revelations regarding estrogen emerged.  The whole theory began to lean in the direction of an estrogen dynamic when it occurred to me that there was a relationship between my stepdaughter’s difficulty with entering puberty (her diabetes wouldn’t let her put on fat) and estrogen as a possible force that controlled the timing of maturation.  This implied that heterochronic theory, already deeply integrated into the thesis, might offer further illumination by interpreting testosterone as controlling the rate of maturation while estrogen controlled the timing.

A one-sentence explanation of evolution.

An immediate implication was that autism was impacted by the mother’s testosterone and estrogen level.  In addition, the child’s hormone levels would impact maturation rates once out of the womb, particularly as regards estrogen levels.  Synapse pruning results in a reduced left hemisphere in most normal right-handed people.  This may be managed by estrogen levels, just as fat levels in adolescents determine the timing of the testosterone surges that occur at puberty.  Autistic brains are often characterized by having had no pruning of synapses as young children.

I wrote Simon Baron-Cohen.  On 6/25/09 he replied that I ask a bunch of great questions but that he doesn’t think researchers have the answers yet.  Baron-Cohen said he’d discuss my conjectures with his colleagues.  Dr.  Baron-Cohen had responded positively to an emailed introduction to my work last autumn, providing me permission to quote his positive response.

In the meantime, having been in the middle of the slow accumulation of a number of ideas that have suddenly snapped together into an integrated whole, I continue to wonder how something so beautiful might not be profoundly useful.  And, if not so useful, are there portions of the theory that might be useful?

A major hurdle is that heterochronic theory is not applied to human diseases and disorders.  It is a rather arcane, evolutionary biological backwater.  Getting theorists to pay attention to the rate and timing of maturation as regards evolution, ontogeny, epigenesis and endocrinology is a challenge.

A second problem is that autism is not looked at as an evolutionary condition.  With Darwin’s theory of natural selection still the default frame of reference, it’s very difficult for people to note the potential usefulness of alternative, complementing evolution theories.  Looking at autism as a heterochronic condition is a foreign concept to literally every academic or theorist I have proposed this idea to.

One last thing.  Sensitivity to the preciousness of life seems to encourage a lifting of veils.  If some of these conjectures turn out to be useful, if the central thesis offers physics-like leverage to open doors to additional useful theories in the future, then perhaps specific forms of spirituality might be useful when it comes to science.  If, instead of rejecting mythology as a prerequisite to engaging in science, what if we instead embraced an eastern inclination to live in the present, with no mythology?  Awareness of our own mortality may be integral to understanding that which transcends individual identity.  Feeling our not existing may offer insight into that part of us that transcends individual self.

Sensitivity to mortality may offer leverage when exploring the structure of interconnection.  Experiencing self and Self may allow us to experience evolution over time, and in the now.

We always knew that sex governed our lives.  There is now the possibility that we can understand how exactly this is done.

In both sexes, entering puberty is characterized by a surge in testosterone that, among other things, halts most synaptic growth.  If fat levels are not high enough, puberty is delayed.  Certain levels of estrogen are required for testosterone surges to occur.

Over ten years ago I hypothesized that a mother’s uterine testosterone levels would influence the likelihood of her child exhibiting autism.  I estimated that the rate of maturation would be determined by the amount of testosterone.  A mother with high testosterone would feature maturationally delayed sons and maturationally accelerated daughters, both vulnerable to autism.

This last season I’ve been applying the pattern of how estrogen controls the timing of testosterone surges at puberty to early childhood when testosterone surges prune the right hemispheres of most normal right-handed individuals.  Might estrogen levels in these infants, toddlers and children be determining the timing of these testosterone surges?  What if estrogen levels were so low in boys that testosterone surges did not occur?  The result would be an unpruned right hemisphere, a larger brain with two cerebral lobes that are the same size.  This is a common feature of autism.

If a mother has both high testosterone and high estrogen, what I estimate to be an archetype of one of two forms of matrifocal social structure, then, according to the principles that I’ve been playing with, she would birth a low-testosterone, low-estrogen son; high-testosterone, high-estrogen daughter.

The implication is that we might predict that autism would be relatively common in cases where the rate of maturation and the timing of maturation combine to engender brains, mostly male brains, which are maturing slowly with little variation is hemispheric size.

Regarding female infants and children with high estrogen encouraging pruning still drifting in an autistic direction, click here.  That is a little more complicated.

Right now, I’m wondering if breast milk vs. infant formula might be an influence on this process.  If a mother’s body is able to modify her embryo’s maturation rate and timing based upon the various environmental influences that impact testosterone and estrogen levels, then does a mother’s milk also adjust to environmental influences in ways that her child’s ontogenetic timing is modified?

Does what a new mother eats, for instance, a high-fat diet, influence her breast milk to increase the estrogen levels in her sons and daughters?  Could a high-fat diet increase the chance of an autistic child?

High-fat diets increase testosterone and estrogen levels.

How much influence does what we eat have upon our children?

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

Neoteny is the best known of the six heterochronic processes. Neoteny is the process whereby features of infants, embryos or the very young are, over the course of generations, prolonged to emerge in the adults of descendants. Acceleration is the opposite, whereby features of adult ancestors appear in the infants of descendants. For example, let’s say great great grandfather had a baritone voice, emerging at puberty. His son’s deeper voice may emerge just before puberty and his great grandson might have an unusually hoarse voice as a child. That would be an acceleration of a feature. These things normally take hundreds and thousands of generations, though they can be encouraged to occur in less than half a dozen. Wolves and foxes have been neotenized in a mere 20 years, acquiring dog-like characteristics.

Endocrinology is a new science even though we have been observing the effects of the gonadal hormones since the dawn of self awareness. That there might be an elegant correlation between specific hormones and the rate and timing of maturation has not been explored outside work done by biologists, followers of Matusa mostly, on amphibians and other nonmammal species. For over ten years, I’ve been exploring the repercussions of a theory of human evolution that considers that testosterone regulates the speed of maturation. This is a profoundly epigenetic theory, a theory that estimates that testosterone regulation occurs as a direct result of environmental factors that determine testosterone levels. Epigenetic theories are those theories that explore heredity/environment interactions that result in ontogenetic and eventually evolutionary change. It was unorthodox until recently to consider that genes are programmed to take into consideration environmental effects, and that the result of modifications will not only appear in the individual but in the individual’s descendants. So, we might see why it’s taken us a while to get to a place where testosterone could be even considered as a major force in evolution.

Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines the profound effect that social frames of reference have upon our ability to theorize. Thomas Kuhn alludes to the impact that shared social views have upon theorists’ frame of reference. Knight describes how hobbled we are in the West by a nonfeminist perspective. Kuhn suggests a sea change of societal perspectives would be necessary for the following to make sense.

Heterochronic theory’s changing rate and timing can be elegantly assigned to the effects of testosterone changing rates and estrogen controlling timing. Both hormones are associated with a host of related hormones, and there are circumstances where male and female hormones may transition to the other but, speaking generally, there are patterns that suggest that at a very real level, individual ontogeny, social evolution and human biological evolution are unfolding according to this very specific, two-variable dance.

Our commitment to Darwin’s theory of natural selection has made it difficult to note the effects of the environment upon evolution.

Our devotion to the idea that the behaviors of males in evolution are more important than the behaviors of females has made it almost impossible to observe that behind the scenes it has been the female controlling the timing of the process.

I wish we had a better word than “heterochronic” to describe the patterns. It would have been better if we had a name like “orchestral evolution.” Then it would make more sense when we assigned the position of conductor to a woman, she that decides the timing of the production.

There are several places where estrogen may be quietly stepping in and deciding exactly how things unfold by regulating the timing of those events. That may be occurring in no small way due to estrogen controlling the timing of testosterone’s effects.

• Fat levels at puberty, influencing estrogen levels, determine the timing of pubertal testosterone surges in both sexes. Individuals may experience delayed puberty if there is not enough fat on their bodies to propel the process.

• Estrogen levels in an infant and toddler may be influencing testosterone surges that determine cerebral synapse pruning. We don’t know what determines the timing of testosterone surges that result in the diminution of the right cerebral hemisphere. If it is a similar process to what determines the timing of testosterone surges in puberty, then estrogen levels may not only be controlling cerebral lateralization but may be heavily influencing language production, conditions such as autism and numerous other human features and conditions.

• Estrogen levels in a mother’s womb may be deciding (along with testosterone) which social structure the child will be inclined to ally with. I’ve described four social structures, two matrifocal and two patrifocal. Estrogen levels are a key determinant of social structure proclivity.

• Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young. Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but determines the likelihood of progeny survival by how much attention is directed toward the young. Consider that in female infanticide it is almost always the mother that kills the infant.

• Estrogen may offer the placating option when combat is being considered. Estrogen can control whether a battle occurs or not.

Darwin’s theory of sexual selection or female choice may be but the suggestion of a vast network of relationships determined by estrogen levels. Darwin was familiar with the work of contemporaries, Neo-Lamarckians, who focused on the orthogenetic tendency of features to evolve in particular trajectories. We can see those patterns now as part of the larger pattern of Gould’s heterochronic theory paradigm. It is possible that Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his theory of sexual selection can be allied in a heterochronic theory of evolution that places testosterone as the prime mover of rates of maturation and estrogen as the queen of timing. Interestingly enough, Darwin’s third theory, pangenesis, revealed orthogenetic insights. Darwin even hypothesized “gemmules,” or particles, that would flow through the bloodstream, carrying information regarding the environment to the places in one’s body that controlled evolutionary change.

In other words, Darwin had all the puzzle pieces. But, he was exploring these ideas in a time when society embraced only the idea that might is right, environment be damned and women control little of what occurs.

To seriously consider that testosterone may control the rate of evolution, estrogen the timing, we might have to go back 150 years. The answer to our origins may be in the origins of evolutionary theory.

My step-daughter Gwyn contracted juvenile diabetes when she was about 11.  She couldn’t keep fat on, and puberty was delayed.  Finally, she seemed to have achieved enough weight and her first menses arrived.  The whole family went out for supper in celebration.

All that time while she was trying to gain weight, she kept on growing taller.

I sometimes wonder if Gwyn’s effortless intelligence and astonishing facility with language is directly related to her delayed puberty and diabetes.  The brain continues to grow until puberty’s testosterone surges prune that growth.  Might a eunuch have a larger brain than a male with both testicles?  Would a male with one testicle have a larger brain than a male with two?

I had a childhood friend with a single testicle.  It descended only after he was born.  David had several Asperger’s features in his personality and a strangely large head.  He tested brilliant.  He came from a family of brilliant, passionate scholars.  He hated school.  He worked for the Post Office for a while.  I think he ended up in library science.

Relating this to that first pruning of cerebral hemispheres that occurs in early childhood, might we suppose that the fat levels of the mother with a child in the womb and the fat or estrogen levels of her infant and toddler influence the timing of those early testosterone surges, influencing brain size, determining relative sizes of the left and right hemisphere and the character of the corpus callosum brain bridge?

I’m thinking that it would have been nice if Baron-Cohen, while conducting those brilliant tests of thousands of placentas, had also sampled their estrogen levels.  (Baron-Cohen and colleagues discovered that testosterone levels were relatively high for many mothers that later had autistic children.)

Big heads, undescended testicles, Asperger’s personalities, juvenile diabetes, delayed puberty, fat and estrogen levels, testosterone, slim builds, cerebral hemisphere synapse pruning…..all these things seem related.  Listening for the music through the noise.