An article in the November 9 NY Times, “Refining the Twitter Explosion“, described changes that Twitter programmers are making to Twitter, changes that are taking steps toward a dramatic realignment of our society.

The article noted that in January 2009, daily traffic was 2.4 million transmissions, but it grew to 26 million tweets by October.  Then, the writer Noam Cohen noted the importance of geographic location to high quality information: “Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online.”

Twitter at present offers uncannily high quality information, if presented in 140 characters, in real time.  A major issue is access to information, which is stymied by Twitter’s present inability to control other variables.  That is changing.  The NY Times article suggests that Twitter is considering initiating a management tool that allows searchers for content to focus on both time (as long as the time is recent) and place.  The article describes the ability to then monitor individuals’ responses to, for example, the Ft. Hood horror, while it’s happening.

I’ve been writing about the growth of these communication tools for two years in the context of evolutionary theory and the tracking of lineage across time and space in a political action context.  My focus has been on exploring the birth and distribution of ideas in the way that individuals and species evolve in the context of the environment exerting constant influence.  This began with programmer Dave Larson and me.  We instituted social networking software that allowed the tracking of multiple degrees of separation in a fashion that permitted a tracing of speed, geographic span and number of participants in the context of political action.  That software is up and operating at PJEP.org.  I realized that the power of this model and its ability to track transmissions over time, over space, number of users and depth of degree of separation, offered a unique ability to monitor idea gestation, birth, growth and reproduction through communications technologies.  Dave suggested cell phone technology made more sense than use through a laptop.  Then, I realized that Twitter is already evolving in this direction.

With the news that Twitter is adding on a geographic element to its platform, it is clear that Twitter is exhibiting the kind of flexibility necessary to cooperate with the wisdom of the crowd.  What Twitter users are requesting is high quality information.  The kind of information becoming available with these tools is only beginning to be understood.  An individual is now less than a generation away from access to the evolution of ideas in real time, over time, with an ability to make comparisons over time of varying ideas.  At this point, Twitter does not offer much in the way of archived information that can be searched for patterns over time.  It is inevitable that the crowd will be seeking to understand information not only in the now, but over time.  When time, space, degrees of separation and the numbers of individuals associated with particular ideas are all searchable and then available through reports that offer unique, high quality, interpreted and interpretable information, an unfathomable new zeitgeist emerges.

For example, a poor child in India asks, on her cell phone, the following question:  How much faster would the local economy grow if 100,000 cell phones were made available to the poorest people at $1 a month, and how specifically could those phones be used to achieve that goal?  The child’s friends start coming up with ideas.  The technology would track the evolution of those ideas, including information about which individuals are coming up with the ideas most attended to and which individuals are most involved in the distribution of those ideas.  The application would track the speed, geographic span, degrees of separation and number of participants in the discussion.  Those results of the discussion evoking the most powerful response would be available to all interested in those results.

A transformation of society featuring the horizontalization of institutions, transparency, diversity and the use of microblogging to trace the evolution of ideas offers a profound shift in the way that individuals relate to their environment.  If the kind of access described here is accompanied by the ability of any individual to create a report that offers insight into the patterns now observable by the application, a major shift occurs, with the ability for any person with a cell phone to ask a question that can be answered.  Moreover, it is a question that was unanswerable in the past.  In other words, the kind of information that the environment can offer shifts to reveal depth of pattern or structure not even conceivable in human history.  Regarding ideas, idea origins, distribution, synthesis and reemergence–the stuff that our minds are made of–anyone with a cell phone can go exploring.

I recently attended a conference of local Chicago-area radical and liberal alternative-media specialists, about 75 people, who were seeking a better understanding of how to initiate social change by using new media tools.  More than one speaker got up to describe frustration with recent Right Wing successes at marshalling together large numbers of people to behave in specific ways at particular times and places.  Clearly, large chunks of the Left do not understand the milieu that we are entering.  The forces of change are not taking top-down orders from a single, well financed leader.  The evolutionary current is horizontal.  Individuals are seeking information, not orders.

This change in technology is reflected in a dramatically changing society.  The Left is often unaware of the relationship between a technology that offers high quality information instantaneously and a population that feels empowered to achieve goals.  The more features that Twitter acquires and the deeper an individual can dig to discover underlying patterns, the freer a society becomes.  A result of that freedom will be a complete redefinition or reevaluation of what freedom and individuality really are.  If every individual has access to the same high quality information, then individuality becomes less characterized by how each of us is different than by how each of us uniquely manifests what is the same.  Society informed by stratification gives way to an aesthetic society concerned with an appreciation of nuance, not denial.

The direction that Twitter is headed is good.  The crowd wisdom informing Twitter’s adjustments is a deep wisdom.  It is a wisdom that presupposes we are all connected.  Little is hidden.  And, each is entitled to understand.

Thomas S.  Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes the way that science textbooks are written that results in the destruction of student abilities to understand how science evolves.  Textbooks are written from the perspective of the current paradigm.  The history of a discipline is told as if all discoveries unfolded along a path leading to contemporary insights.  Left out of textbooks are the unique world views retained by the succession of paradigms.  Past unresolved, nonintegrated anomalies get discarded as the story of the current paradigm is told.  Anomalies are the doorways to revolutions.  With old, unintegrated anomalies ignored, science students are inducted into a society with secrets.  Disciplines become amnesiac.  Individuals within a discipline don’t know what they don’t know.

A very peculiar thing is happening to time and space.  We are experiencing an elimination of time and space in societal relations.  As individuals, we are experiencing a shift in identity.

Several hundred years ago, we had no watches.  In Western society, a vague sense of linear time accompanied those with access to resources.  They could tell the time.  For the rest, church bells bonged out the hour.

Fifty years ago, we all had analog watches that…

There is a process that we engage in that is characterized by our observing changes in information over time, noting trends and estimating where we will be in the future.  Our lives are filled with charts that provide an image of where we may end up at some particular point.  Usually what is implied is something scary.  Gore’s pictorial representations of greenhouse gases are an example.

I engage in a similar process, focusing on patterns that reflect both personal experience and my social environment.  What interests me are evolution, transformation, consciousness and interconnection.  The news might suggest some specific thing is bound to get worse because there is an evident pattern to support the conclusion, and then it focuses on that thing because it drives viewers to return.  I also have a criterion for what I focus on.  My criterion is that what I follow has to be interesting.

So, reality has little to do with what the media choose to share.  Reality has little to do with what I choose to focus on and write about.  Still, whether a song describes reality isn’t as important as whether the song succinctly expresses feelings and a point of view.  That is…

“The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press.  Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.”  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 207, 1964.

Marshall McLuhan studied the effects of speed and time on social change.  One of his seminal insights was that media mold how we perceive the world, not only by the content that is distributed, but by how specifically media enhance our ability to access information.

It has become evident that the media are about politics.  How we communicate influences the distribution of power and authority.  More powerful than any political manifesto is the way that the words might be conveyed.

There are three foundation, democratizing power centers.  Education controls the ability for an individual to synthesize information.  Voting integrity empowers an individual to act upon the information.  Media enhance access to information.  With fundamental transformations in media, education and voting integrity get a boost.

What we are observing now is an exponential increase in the speed and quality of information distribution.  Everything is changing as a result of this transformation.

Theorists Shirky, Rheingold and others describe the result of barriers coming down with…

In physics there is the phenomenon where the closer a traveler comes to the speed of light, the more separate one’s “time” becomes from the traveler’s place of origin.  Einstein imagined time while riding a beam of light as if it were a train and concluded that time is relative.

In the physics of biology and social change, identity is a variable that, like time, can change.  What is necessary to be able to trace transformations in identity is a model of biological and social evolution that embraces consciousness or awareness as a default feature of the system.  This is quite different from our present predilection to presuppose that the underlying system does not exhibit consciousness or awareness.  Note the works of contemporary, respected evolutionary psychologists Dawkins, Dennett and Miller.  There is an assumption built upon an allegiance to natural selection being the only necessary process to drive evolution.  That assumption is that because god is not necessary for evolution, god does not need to exist.  All three are atheists.

Identity is changing.  And, like the rider on a light beam, we have a difficult task to evaluate the relativistic nature of our experience without access to an alternative landscape. …

Just after the Iran election, Twitter emerged as news.  It seemed not only to be able to share information about what was happening in Iran with folks following events around the world, but Twitter was also encouraging the ability of protesters to congregate spontaneously and keep each other informed of developments in real time.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication…

Mysticism is largely about shifting identity. There are techniques–strategies and tactics–that encourage opportunities to identify at levels alternative to what occurs within one person’s body or one’s imagination. When the opportunities appear, an individual can choose to identify with something different from himself or herself.

People are engaging in such opportunities across society. Mysticism could not be further from their minds.

There was a time in our species’ past, perhaps not so very long ago, maybe as few as 3,000 generations ago, when our experience was not characterized by individuality. One of the several profound differences between then and now was that then we had a far less concise idea of the passing of time. This was true socially and biologically. Socially things just did not change much. There were no fads or fashions. Progress as a concept is barely 250 years old, let alone tens of thousands.

Biologically our brains were not sorting in a narrative, sequential path. When narrative reality emerged and spoken language acquired the ability to parse out past from present and present from future, we acquired individuality at the same evolutionary moment. With our ability to disassociate in time we were also able to imagine…

Maybe fifteen years ago, Natalie Cole recorded a vocal track on top of one of her father’s productions, resulting in a duet between a dead Nat King Cole and his daughter.  Drew Friedman, the cartoonist, inked a panel with a skeleton performing with Natalie, suggesting an incongruence in the production.  For some, the duet felt contrived.

A unique video emerged on the web several months ago.  In the video, street musicians from cities across Europe, Africa, South America and the U.S. perform where they live, in the street, with headphones on.  They contribute both to the tracks of the performance and to the video that was recording the series of integrated performances.  The song is Stand By Me.

As in the Susan Boyle video, several story lines come together to create a powerful presentation.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, there was a TV show called Tales of the Texas Rangers.  What I loved was the beginning.  A single lawman is walking down the street.  Over the course of the growing intro music, he is joined and followed by others until by the end there are maybe 30 earnest lawmen walking in a triangle…

In China, there is something like nine wholly different languages using the same writing system, unlike Europe where you have many similar languages using a similar language system.  A result is that in China, over a billion people can understand what people from other groups write but not what they say.

Over three billion people have cell phones.  Companies like Nokia are designing phones for the market of people that make about $4 a day.  There is not yet a universal language of communication, but there may soon be a universal communications interface that offers an ability to understand what any other person is saying.

I have a friend, a Florida Jewish commercial fisherman with a grouper vessel in the Gulf, who conducted a romance with a Mexican woman mostly by the Internet.  She spoke only Spanish.  Martin spoke only English.  They communicated by email, translating each other’s words using Internet translation software.  They are now married with a son.

Consider a world language, perhaps iconic and very basic, which allows all peoples to communicate.  It could be a language not unlike the Chinese characters universal to that culture.  It may not be necessary with translation software.  But if invented,…

There is a phenomenon in linguistics where language complexity is directly related to how isolated a particular language is from its neighbors.  A new language is difficult to learn for adults.  When several languages rub up against each other, and adults find themselves speaking curtailed versions of one another’s lingos, languages impacted most by these mash-ups simplify, lose endings, abbreviate and drop challenging sounds.  When adults have to learn a language, the language suffers.

A small, isolated island nation may experience the opposite effect.  When only children are required to learn the language, the language, in both sounds and grammar, tends to proliferate novelties.  Children, without the inhibiting convention of adult habits, get creative.  Those adult conventions that are extremely challenging to outsider adults are things that children learn effortlessly.

The most complex languages in the world tend to be those of isolated aboriginals or a people not impacted by their neighbors for many centuries.  When you leave a language to be learned by only children, there is a multiplication of the unique.

What would it be like if that period of time characterized by the linking of countless associations with specific sounds, and the joyous experience that accompanies the…

I saw this piece appear in March:  Too Much Facebook could cause Autism in Children.  A doctor in the UK suggested that social networking applications were encouraging dissociation, making it more difficult for children to engage in relationship.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” said neurologist Susan Greenfield.

Social networking applications do seem to be changing consciousness, and it may be the case that the changes do exhibit some features of early childhood, but I would suggest that living in the moment, a moment characterized by massive amounts of incoming information offered in a fashion that makes integration of that information possible, is a good thing.

There have been other studies that concluded that there are correlations between watching TV and autistic behavior.  That may be the case.  Still, comparing social networking to watching TV is like suggesting a hike through nature collecting butterflies is equivalent to vacuuming the living room for dust mites.  I think professor Greenfield is confusing the two.

Getting up…

Rosanna and I are conducting an overview of matrifocal societies around the world, seeking correlations with the primary elements of the thesis.  I’m estimating that a matrifocal society will have females with higher testosterone and higher estrogen than a modern conventional society, males with lower testosterone and lower estrogen, more frequent anomalous cerebral dominance with both cerebral hemispheres more often the same size, a leftward shift of Annett’s handedness distributions (more left-handers), delayed puberty and tendencies to exhibit specific diseases and conditions characterized by the hormonal tendencies just mentioned.

There is the possibility that matrifocal societies will have language structures characterized by an emphasis on the present tense as in the Hopi and Trobriand Islanders.  This would suggest an affinity to primary process in waking consciousness:  one time, one place, no negatives.  An implication might be a different kind of sense of humor and a possible different kind of creative imagination.

Elia and I were talking last night about the relevance of myth.  Elia suggested that the structure of the mythology of matrifocal societies may reflect the unique neurological constellation we are proposing.  We considered that the myths might show a single story line, main character almost always present (no…

What evidence is there that aboriginal dream consciousness is re-emerging into modern global culture?  In what ways might our society be taking the ship of state below the surface to deep waters mostly familiar to the artist, the mystic and child?

As society becomes more horizontal, exhibiting neoteny, there will be a prolonging of features of the infant into the adult, the aboriginal into modern society, with those that are on the fringes, such as people in poverty, ethnic minorities, artists, musicians and the Left, moving toward the conventional center.

There are the perhaps obvious signs of societal transformation seen in the dramatic increases in transparency, vast horizontal communications through new technologies via our youth and an astonishing surge in diversity as people across the world meet and communicate online.  We are observing Scandinavian economic and social support models heavily influencing the American economic transformation.  Scandinavians, both sexes, exhibit neoteny.  I don’t note any enhancement of dream consciousness or the influence of dream on their everyday.  But I am observing something very similar.

If features of dream were to emerge into waking, not unlike the vision quests of American aboriginals or aboriginal Australians, how exactly would they manifest?

Alternative online…

If I’m not mistaken, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh came up with her “Theory of Mind” to explore differences in great ape behavior and other species that seemed not capable of estimating that another individual retained separate consciousness.  Simon Baron-Cohen applied this principle to autism, calling it “mindblindness,” to offer an explanatory paradigm that parsed out differences between the autistic and the nonautistic mind.

Last week, I was exploring some unique language structures of two matrifocal societies, the Hopi and the Trobriand Islanders.  The languages display a unique attitude toward tenses, reminding me of Gregory Bateson’s interpretations of Freud’s description of primary process.  It seems that aspects of dream consciousness and primary process thinking are characteristic of these two languages.  This included only one time or tense (you can’t imagine another time without being there), one place (you can’t imagine another place without being there) and no negatives (you can’t image what something is not without imagining the something).

Stephen J. Gould would sometimes write of three-fold and four-fold parallelisms.  He was alluding to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century hypotheses that there are equivalencies between different scales of experience:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Regarding Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s “Theory of…

Observing the government’s interventions to address the changes that the economy is experiencing, I often see the individual as a metaphor for society and think of an intervention in the context of how an individual could be assisted.

I frequently shift back and forth between the scales of biology, society and individual growth and transformation.  I observe how stories operate on the level of the individual, society and even our species.  The dynamics of evolution evidence themselves at these different planes.  This website often focuses on how understanding evolution at one scale informs the others.

Thinking of what our society requires to achieve health often has me thinking in terms of an individual human.  Reading what other people are observing about the crisis, I note that others are often doing the same thing, seeking to understand a society by achieving insight into a self, using individual as metaphor.

In other essays I’ve explained what is happening by describing the crash and the coming depression as part of a process of a major social structure transition from mostly patrifocal to mostly matrifocal.  Across generations people are transforming as parents birth children with different hormonal constellations and neurological propensities from what their…

Imagine that ten years from now autism and Asperger’s are still on the rise.  It is discovered that aboriginal matrifocal societies often exhibit what Gregory Bateson described as primary process.

“Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric.  These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free associations.” (Bateson G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  Balantine: New York, p. 139)

In other words, some ancient matrilineal societies may exhibit a less robust “theory of mind” than moderns.  Connections between matrifocal aboriginals and modern autistics are made.

The recapitulationists of the early twentieth century that emphasized three-fold and four-fold parallelisms make a new kind of sense.  In other words, there emerges a connection between the scales of human societal evolution and individual ontogeny insofar as aboriginal society child rearing practices inform how modern society can raise the children of its high testosterone women.  (I hypothesize that the women in early matrifocal societies are high testosterone and high estrogen.)

Imagine that ten years from now these connections are being made. …

I’ve often talked about the horizontalization of society in these essays as I’m describing the influence of neoteny and matrifocal culture on contemporary times.  I’ve presented my view that the exponential growth of the web is a direct result of these social impulses.  Consider that we are about to begin a profound transformation of our academic institutions that will result in a surge of unique ideas.

A big positive of our academic communities is that they provide a space for like minds to congregate and integrate ideas.  That space offers opportunities for peer review, from which useful consensus can emerge.  That space is about to exponentially expand.

There are two distinct kinds of information that is gathered, stored and distributed as part of the services that academic communities perform.  First, there are data.  It is essential that data be of high quality and trusted.  Ernst Haeckel compromised a whole school of evolutionary biology with liberties he took diagramming animal ontogeny.  Several successive U.S. administrations have modified inflation and economic growth metrics to enhance the picture they wished to see described.  Not good.  High quality data are vital to good science.

The second kind of information has to do with the…

Gregory Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind discussed a unique feature of the human species that he believed is responsible for our destructive behavior. Humans are able to visualize a future, splitting time, and then focus on the steps necessary to achieve a specific future. In addition, with humans, steps imagined and achieved on the way toward a future don’t have to be examined for their repercussions on other people or other aspects of the environment.

Competitors are encouraged to “stay focused.” Shutting out the world achieves goals. Bateson might suggest that this ability to shut out the world also destroys it.

This blog describes a hypothetical proto society characterized by dance-and-song-driven rituals and a population selecting neotenous features in our species over time. We lived in dreamtime. We communicated by gesture. Both cerebral hemispheres were the same size, the corpus callosum brain bridge was still wide, we did not split time and children did not know who their fathers were. We were random-handed, left and right-handed half the time.

There were changes, changes described in this work. The result was society stopped selecting exclusively for aesthetics and started selecting for those adept at spoken language, splitting…

Over the last few decades, there has been a seeming decrease in available time as both parents needed jobs, traffic took longer to negotiate and leisure became less about relaxing and enjoying and more about decompressing.  At the same time, enormous amounts of money have gone into entertainment vehicles paid for by advertising dollars that we feel compelled to watch with the leisure time we have.

We are coming to an end of an age where just money buys influence and buys time.  The shift is subtle, yet unmistakable.

Online social networking has become the avenue through which individuals seek friends, cement relationships, look for respect, express creativity, listen for trends, consider proposals and search for jobs.  Those excelling at the medium put in the hours.  The number of people that an individual affects grows wider with time.  In the world of social networking, time equals influence.  Facebook, My Space, Twitter and the others use up enormous amounts of time.

As the economy spirals downward and our identity shifts from a consumer to a steward frame of reference, what we observe in media will transform as advertiser dollars disappear.  Programming will grow to reflect the creations of a new tech,…

The Obama Administration is seeking to wrest the economy away from a depression while addressing several interconnected and growing crises.  Borrowing and taxing, we are creating jobs.  Redistributing assets, we are seeking health care for all, a reduction in greenhouse gases and an effective educational system.

And we’re seeking to do this in the midst of a profound transformation of society.

Old conventions are crumbling as our traditional vertical, hierarchical institutions are coming down.  The consumer economy and its evil twin, the free market, are greatly diminished.  The Obama Administration, as it seeks jobs and engages in crisis management, is not concentrating on what institutions might replace those that are disappearing.  At this point in the process, a little vision and a little money might go some way.

Global horizontalization is being driven in part by the rise of the Internet and cell phone technologies.  Conventions have emerged that allow the most visited sites to achieve the most visibility.  The most popular videos, blogs and presentations achieve success in part because there are web applications that allow those presentations that receive the most attention to be rewarded with an elevated status in the form of prime positioning.  At this time,…

In meditation, I sometimes have an experience of an underlying consciousness characterized by a twin identity:  creation and perception.  It’s sort of a pitcher-catcher relationship, like a basketball player that plays superb offense and defense.  It is also called yin and yang.  There is the cosmic artist and the cosmic appreciator.  Each moment is filled with a seemingly infinite intelligence and vast humor engaged in deep play.

I’ve wondered if this dichotomy is a vagary of human split consciousness with our physicality deeply informed by estrogen and testosterone.  Probably so.  Regardless, with the body I have and the instrument of perception that I was granted, that is how the music sounds.

As we have observed the evolution of the web and the dissolution of our consumer economy, it seems as if that music is growing louder.  There is an emergence of creativity and appreciation in purer, less hindered forms as the Internet encourages the pairing up of performers with audience.  Without the barriers of money, geographic distances or even language, new venues have emerged, such as Youtube, that allow a profound proliferation of creative content while training visitors to see and listen with new eyes and ears.

The line between…

Consider that the American and world economy are beginning to work their way into a depression.  This is not too farfetched considering that in the blogs and mainstream media, the 1930s are becoming a common theme.  It is becoming conventional wisdom that we’re headed for depression.  Just as dust bowl winds destroyed our farmlands, this hurricane of financial abuse is deconstructing the modern economy.  It is not unreasonable to expect that the federal government cannot manufacture jobs quickly enough to breathe life into a dying consumer economy gasping for breath.

It’s time for the American Left to start exercising some imagination.

Let’s assume that eighteen months from now it will have become clear that Federal interventions displayed only moderate success.  Big box and specialty chains will be closing doors.  Flea markets and street vendors will spring up like mushrooms around an old tree trunk as the abandoned old structures house numerous spontaneous eruptions of minicommerce.  Deep resentments will emerge, focusing on those perceived as wealthy.  Demands will be made that resources be redistributed that allow the disadvantaged to have access to health, education and a job.

The American Left has been split for years between those that concentrate on heinous…

“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)  (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Cambridge: Belknap Press, pp. 65-66)

When the sciences were forming in the nineteenth century and earthly twentieth century, strong personalities explored fertile new ground, and they planted virgin orchards to have followers harvest many of the fruits.  Society would draw boundaries regarding what was acceptable to pursue, and sciences would evolve in the…

If opinion is the social equivalent of creating a theory or model and information is what you use to form an opinion, a theory or a model, then the mainstream media has pretty much given up on providing information.  It provides opinion.  Where do we go to gather the information to form an opinion or our own personal theories of how the world works?

To the web.

Before the election, listening to the NPR show Talk of the Nation, a radio hour was devoted to the character of the candidates.  Listeners were told to go to the candidate websites if they wanted to know their position on the issues.

It strikes me that the decades-old trend to dumb down the news to keep viewers always entertained is being accelerated by an Internet that provides an additional excuse to the mainstream media to not spend time sharing information.

The mainstream media is shifting to behaving like they assume that the web is where information lives.

There are repercussions.  Eventually, services similar to Google News will offer a selection of video excerpts from stories emerging across the country and around the world.  The selection services will pitch information from a variety of…

This work observes the effects of sexual selection and social structure on testosterone levels influencing changes in maturation rates propelling neoteny in human evolution and then follows that same trail while watching societies transform.  By matching observed matrifocal trends (neotenous males, accelerated females) with the imminent necessity of global societal conversion to sustainable living practices, one can make the following predictions about the future.

Universal health care for all humans will demand right-eating practices.  The community won’t want to pay for individual dietary indulgences that result in costs to the community.  There will be a dramatic drop in animals consumed to make sure there is enough food for all.  The resulting low-fat, relatively low-protein diet will result in puberty returning to 16-17 years old, dramatic increases in brain size and higher synapse numbers and reverence for aesthetics as central to life.  (Early puberty testosterone surges halt brain growth, curtailing synapse production.)

Mother’s testosterone levels will be evaluated two months before birth.  If elevated, embryo ipods will be carried by pregnant mothers providing rhythms and melodies running in sync with variations with the child’s and mother’s heartbeat.  Music will continue to be delivered after birth.  It will be discovered that artificial…