There is a tribe of males more than a little infatuated with themselves and their own ideas. We’re often described as narcissists. Upon discovering I fit into this group, I was appalled, and predictably I obsessed that I was too obsessed with my own behavior.

I now look at myself as a recovering narcissist. I observe how frequently I engage in being a legend in my own mind. Sometimes I’m amused. Sometimes I’m not.

My wife is tolerant but not particularly amused. Interestingly, I come across few women narcissists.

Narcissism often gets relegated to an example of an early developmental stage that gets carried into adulthood as a result of trauma or a peculiar environment that caused a freezing of psychological resources in the past. This effect is not unlike following a recipe while making a cake. If at an early stage something goes awry, you may end up with a less than delightful outcome. Accidentally add salt instead of sugar early in the process and the results will be unique but not particularly edible.

I’m playing with the idea that there is healthy narcissism characterized by the person feeling accompanied while they feel they are the center of the…

When I was exploring the possibility of a human genetic precursor that was random-handed with a larger brain encouraged by a song-and-dance-based matrifocal culture, I hypothesized that if representatives of our ancestors were around today, they would have larger brains and difficulty with language.

The premise is that the exponential growth in brain size through the history of Homo erectus and before was driven by the selection for mates talented in dance. An established biological pattern is that predators have larger brains than their prey. More demanding physicality (it’s more difficult to be a predator than to run away) creates a requirement for increased neurological support. Dance may have been a sexually selected physical demand with no upward threshold in satisfactory results. Rampant brain growth may have been the result of males competing for the attention of females in matrifocal societies where males that exhibited neotenous characteristics (creative, playful, cooperative) were the most likely males to procreate.

The best dancers had bigger brains. The best way to select for bigger brains over time was to choose males exhibiting neotenous characteristics. Neotenous males are cooperative males supporting a matrifocal social structure.

When I was first monkeying around with these ideas, noting…

Studies of left-handers have revealed a number of interesting things about left-handed people and the ambidextrous.  Hints of our evolutionary origins are suggested in these studies.

Left-handed people are more maturational delayed.

Right-handed people actually are less capable with their other hand as opposed to left-handed people, who are usually almost equally capable with either hand.  In other words, left-handers are usually more dextrous than right-handers.  Left-handers often have larger brains than right-handers, with less hemispheric differentiation.  In addition, their lobes are more nearly the same size.  The brain connections, for example the corpus callosum, are usually larger in left-handers.

Lefties grow slower, have bigger brains and often are more physically adept.

Left-handed people are usually reversed in their hemispheric organization.  Some have surmised that this reversal alone has provided them a competitive advantage by slightly confusing their associates and peers.  I would suggest that they do have several advantages, but these strengths are innate and are directly related to several factors.

Left-handers have not suffered as extreme a neurological pruning as those of us that are right-handed, when testosterone surges negatively impacted brain growth as a toddler.  In a sense, most of us have been biologically traumatized, and there…

Three out of four of our last presidents were left-handers. If Obama is elected, it will be four out of five.

Researcher Marian Annett hypothesizes that there is a gene for being right-handed and a gene for being nonhanded or random-handed. One could also say that most random-handed people have a gene for being right-handed. Studies vary, but most cultures show around 10% left-handers.

By Annett’s calculations, about 18.5% of modern populations retain this random-handedness proclivity, with about half of those displaying left-handedness and about half being right-handed. Various degrees of ambidexterity are mixed in.

Random-handedness is genetically inherited, usually revealing close relatives with that same feature. Various social and biological interventions can mask these relationships. My sister was left-handed, broke her arm in grammar school, and ended up writing with her right. Older folks were often instructed to write with their right hand regardless of their natural inclinations. This instruction was common in Catholic schools. Early brain damage or uterine trauma can compel a person to switch hemisphere and, for example, rely upon the left hemisphere for language instead of the right or both, making them left-handed. These folks are not genetically random-handed.

Among the many prejudices and divisive…

A child exhibits characteristics from both parents. The parents’ features in their children can complement each other in ways that reinforce and even encourage specific maturational trajectories. For example, pairing two musician parents not only increases the chance of a musically inclined child, but also increases the chance that the child will be maturational delayed. Maturational delay is a hallmark of creativity, encouraging a child with an infatuation for pattern and form. Keep boosting the maturational delay and a line gets crossed where infatuation with pattern eclipses a facility to communicate internal experience. How the environment affects the parents can determine how this line gets crossed.

“Disorders” characterized by maturational delay, such as autism and Asperger’s, are encouraged by the choices we make when we fall in love, in addition to what we expose ourselves to as we live our lives. The previous two entries outline the influence of mate selection on the origin of autism in our children. Working in cooperation with sexual selection are environmental influences that compel how children’s social and mental lives unfold.

Since the death of Darwin, little thought has been given to how the environment might influence human evolution in a single lifetime. Politics…

It crossed my mind yesterday that individuals with autism are not likely to be superstitious. This conclusion would also suggest that autistics are not magical thinkers. If this generalization has some truth, then this characteristic would not only make them unique in today’s society, but unique going back through multiple societal transformations past bands and tribes.

There are those folks that exhibit obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior as they seek to exert some degree of control over the world by performing personal rituals. OCD is not uncommon with people that are autistic. But OCD that features an obsession with pattern and a compulsion to participate in pattern replication is not the same as OCD linked to event control. The latter, which is more a robust expression of a superstitious frame of mind, suggests someone deeply fatigued by magical thinking. I am estimating that autistics are not magical thinkers. Autistics don’t easily intuit how they might change the world.

In the 1960s, I had two friends, brothers, who exhibited unique behavior. One had, at the time, undiagnosed Tourette’s syndrome, and he exhibited bizarre ritualistic behaviors, astonishing physical strength and a powerful intelligence. His brother retained unique thinking processes characterized by his seeing himself…

Evolutionary biological principles have powerful repercussions in the societies of humans.  These forces manifest during the ontological unfolding of individuals exposed to the forces of the environment on society, and the environment on individuals.  We as individuals evolve features–mental and physical–that emerge as a result of our contact with the environment.  Sometimes the features that get evolved are from the past.

Society moves through time, revealing a spread or arc of degrees of maturation.  Just as there are degrees of separation revealing connections not obvious without a Facebook, there are degrees of maturation deeply imbedded in our culture that display tens of thousands of years of our evolution in the generation that we’re in.

At the far left end of this rainbow of human variation are the maturationally delayed male and the maturationally accelerated female (low testosterone males and high testosterone females).  At the right side of the arc are the maturationally accelerated male and the maturationally delayed female (high testosterone males and low testosterone females).  Ancient, left-handed, ambidextrous, matriarchal, creative, physically dexterous people on the left; modern, right handed, focused-target narrative thinkers, strong but not ambidextrously agile people on the right.

Brains began splitting perhaps 2,000 generations ago with…

Autism is a social condition.

Rather, in the way that loud, rhythmic music is a symptom of puberty, the sudden rise in autism is a manifestation of extreme societal change. Both transitions are characterized by a radical hormonal shift.

The autistic person is a normal person time-traveling here from the distant past to the present where his or her gifts are only about to be understood.

Our genetic history is stored like a pocket roadmap of an almost endless roller coaster ride, tracking, among other things, the hormonal fluctuations of our ancestors. A patriarchal past stores a history of high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Further back in time, our genes tell us we lived matrifocal lives with high testosterone females and low testosterone males. Back further still, we were just learning to use language in dance-driven tribal bands where females were revered societal leaders. Unceasing music was the rhythm of their life.

Almost half of these male band members were left handed. Females were far more verbally articulate than men. The males were often relatively tall and lanky. Puberty arrived unusually late. Dancing was the center of their life.

A million or more years of sexual selection with…

Sit in a room with Left/Progressive activists and note that left handed people are often about 20-25% of the people present.  Lefthanders in the U.S. comprise about 12% of the population.  What’s with all the lefties on the Left?

Note that when defining conservative and liberal, those most conservative are most comfortable going furthest back in time.  Get rid of the New Deal, and you’re pretty damn conservative.  Get rid of women’s suffrage, and you’ve crossed some line.  (The media won’t print your editorials).  Bring back slavery, and you’re nuts.

Demand universal health care, and you’re progressive.  Demand unions and environmental rights for third-world workers, and you’re pretty radical.  Cry out to end world hunger and initiate universal health care for all humans everywhere, and you’re crazy.

As you become more conservative, you move further back in time.  As your progressive tendencies increase, you stretch more and more into the future.  The center of this teeter-totter, where we sit now, is the present.

In our culture, time proceeds from left to right.  We read from left to right.  We turn pages from left to right.  In our diagrams of time and evolution, progress proceeds from left to right.  So what’s…