“In spite of abundant evidence documenting intergroup conflict over the past 10,000 to 15,000 years, there is no evidence of warfare in the Pleistocene. Such absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it helps to explain why many of those who actually study hunter-gatherers are skeptical about projecting the bellicose behavior of post-Neolithic peoples back onto roaming kin-based bands of hunter-gatherers, and why anthropologists refer to the Pleistocene as the ‘period of Paleolithic warlessness.’” (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, pp. 19-20.)

For the last few years, I’ve reveled in the indulgence of reading several books at the same time, and often they were books seemingly unrelated. Sometimes synergies result. Exploring details regarding the endocrinology of relationship in primates in one book and the power of social structures that encourage alloparenting, resulting in cooperative evolution, in another book leaves me feeling like I’m reading about the same process from two different perspectives.

Central to understanding Hrdy’s work focusing on humans evolving in response to females raising children cooperatively, and the evidence that supports these conjectures, is the understanding that males, not females, are often moving to where they can procreate. Females are relatively stationary, with sisters and mothers working cooperatively to raise the children. This is in stark contrast to post-Neolithic developments that encouraged males to form alliances with other males that would result in land and resources staying within the control of a male and his male progeny. Females moved away from mothers and sisters to the location of their husband.

I’ve been exploring the endocrinological implications of matrifocal evolution for 12 years. When I started these explorations, Marija Gimbutas’ work was often derided. Gimbutas hypothesized that humans evolved in matrilineal societies. It seems Hrdy and her colleagues are finding support from colleagues as they make connections between matrilineality and our aboriginal forebears.

From my perspective, central to the realization that humans evolved in a matrifocal context is the understanding that natural selection was not the primary selective process that was in play. Though it is fairly easy to intuit that hormones adjust as social structure adjusts, it is when it can be understood that it is larger patterns of maturation rates and timing that are guiding both hormone levels and social structures, with hormone levels and social structures influencing maturation rates and timing, that we achieve insight into how evolution actually unfolds.

Reading Hrdy, I’m feeling stirred that humans evolving in matrifocal societies is a concept now receiving respect. If this shift in our origin story continues to gain followers, there will be impacts on other disciplines and popular culture.

In the previous piece, I noted the prerational and transrational distinction he makes that clearly demarcates the differences between aboriginal prepersonal points of view and more recent spiritual transpersonal experiences.  The two are often confused.  Wilber efficiently parses out the differences, using a system of seven stages of maturation that apply to both individuals and societies.

Wilber looks at some feminist inclinations to view ancient times as more evolved in human relations as another case of comparing seemingly positive aspects of earlier stages of societal evolution, or maturation, with later-stage negative features.  For example, human sacrifice was common in matrifocal agricultural society, a fact usually ignored by those seeking synthesis in the past.  Wilber suggests that some feminists pick and choose what they want to emphasize when comparing female-centered societies with contemporary patrifocal examples.

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

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

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

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

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

Most evolutionary psychology or sociobiological theorizing seems to assume or emphasize male impact.  Tanner, Hrdy and others have pioneered female influence.  I’ve written often about the heritage of our patrifocal society creating stories that emphasize a male’s influence.  I’m now encouraging myself to view animal evolution as heavily influenced by social structure, with female sexual selection perhaps understandable in a context of social structure that only sometimes makes it obvious that female choice or female sexual selection is in play.

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

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

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

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

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

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore, drummers apparently know by intuition the most potent brain-stimulating rhythms.  According to Neher, the predominant drumming rhythm used in a number of African dances as well as in Haitian voodoo dances is a fast 7 to 9 beats per second—and that happens to be about the same rhythm produced naturally by “brain waves” in the auditory cortex itself, groups of neurons charging and discharging in electrical unison.  It seems that properly synchronized drumbeats drive the brain, force it into heightened activity.  They work in phase with brain waves, amplifying them the way timed pushes impart more and more momentum to a swing, creating hallucinations and intense feelings of dissociation.”  (Pfeiffer, 1982.)

This website describes a particular view of how human beings evolved.  I propose that art encouraged a particular ontological dynamic that compelled the growth of big brains because big brains more efficiently produce art.  We’re talking a sort of feedback loop, or what R. A. Fisher described as runaway sexual selection, whereby extravagant dancers chosen for their ability to evoke feelings of wonder resulting in copulation were (mostly) males that exhibited bigger brains and childlike features of cooperation and dependency, traits associated with neoteny.  Females kept picking big-brained, childlike dancers.  The women exhibiting the best  ability to form these evaluations, commanding and judgmental protohuman women, were making sure that they were the ones that got these men’s babies, and these women formed the other side of this feedback loop.  Big-brained dance performers got picked.  Big-brained dance evaluators did the picking.  Big brains evolved.

There are studies that conclude that the musically obsessed, composers and listeners with ability to note fine detail have bigger brains.  In addition, low testosterone males and high testosterone females seem to be the most talented composers.

“Creative musical behavior, musical intelligence, and spatial ability were investigated in relation to salivary testosterone (T).  In a cross-sectional study with 117 adults and in an 8-yr longitudinal study with 120 adolescents, composers, instrumentalists, and nonmusicians of both sexes were compared by analyses of variance.  Results indicate that an optimal T range may exist for the expression of creative musical behavior.  This range may be at the bottom of normal male T range and at the top of normal female T range.  In addition, musicians were found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians, both in an 8-yr-period of adolescent development and in adulthood.”  (Hassler, M., “Creative Musical Behavior and Sex Hormones:  Musical Talent and Spatial Ability in the Two Sexes,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 17(1) (1992):55.)

“Musical composers, instrumentalists, and painters were compared with nonmusicians from a student and from a nonstudent population on testosterone levels in saliva.  This steroid served as a marker for physiological androgyny.  The ANOVA showed a significant group by sex interaction.  Male composers attained significantly lower mean testosterone values than male instrumentalists and male nonmusicians; female composers had significantly higher mean testosterone values than female instrumentalists and female nonmusicians.  Painters of both sexes did not differ significantly from controls.  Spatial ability was assessed in the five groups.  Significant differences on spatial test performance were not reflected in differences on salivary testosterone.  Our results showed that musical composers of both sexes were physiologically highly androgynous.  Creative musical behavior was associated with testosterone levels that minimized sex differences.”  (Hassler, M., “Testosterone and Artistic Talents,” Int J Neurosci 56(1-4) (1991):25.)

Not only is testosterone related to musical inclination, so is handedness.  The left-handed often are more musically inclined.

“It seems possible that an optimal testosterone range exists for the expression of creative musical behavior and that exceeding this optimal range in the course of puberty may contribute to a stop of musical production in boys.  Such optimal testosterone levels may be lower than male average in adult men and higher than female average in adult women (Hassler, 1991; Hassler & Nieschlag, 1989). …  Handedness proved to be an important variable with respect to musical talent in boys.  Male left-handers attained significantly higher mean test scores than male right-handers on Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence (Hassler & Birbaumer, 1988) at each stage of the study.”  (Hassler, M., and Nieschlag, E., “Salivary Testosterone and Creative Musical Behavior in Adolescent Males and Females,” Developmental Neuropsychology 7 (1991):504.)

According to the thesis promoted on this website, it is the random-handed (left-handed), the high testosterone females, the low testosterone males (matrifocal social structure) and the big-brained dancers that are the folks engaged in the runaway sexual selection feedback loop just described.  The neurological literature is filled with examples that support this thesis.

Nevertheless, it is a story.  A story is art.  Art often has spiritual connections.  The question is:  Is this a story that offers opportunities to transform?

“The entire scheme represents a hierarchically organized system of increasing size, differentiation, and complexity, in which each component affects, and is affected by, all the other components, not only at its own level but at lower and higher levels as well.  Thus, the arrows in Figure12-2 not only go upward from the gene, eventually reaching all the way to the external environment through the activities of the organism, but the arrows of influence return from the external environment through various levels of the organism back to the genes.  While the feedforward or feedupward nature of the genes has always been appreciated from the time of Weismann and Mendel on, the feedbackward or feeddownward influences have usually been thought to stop at the level of the cell membrane.  The newer conception is one of a totally interrelated, fully coactional system in which the activity of the genes themselves can be affected through the cytoplasm of the cell by events originating at any other level in the system, including the external environment.”  (G. Gilbert, Individual Development and Evolution (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 145.)

The article appearing in the 11/8/09 BBC News, “Early Life Stress ‘Changes’ Genes“, sent to me by reader Jon Gluckman, calls attention to evident changes in the genetic structure of mice genes as a result of stress just after birth.  The article wasn’t very specific except to note that changes were observed to occur at the molecular level by researcher Christopher Murgatroyd.  Watson and Crick’s Central Dogma has been adjusted to a less certain position of authority by a number of studies over the last 20 years.  Their discovery of the double helix was astonishing and beautiful, but not as easily understood as was first believed.  It’s looking like DNA is not the code of life, but the score.

When a current composer creates a symphony, he writes or types the notes to appear in a visual format to be provided to the various musicians by the conductor.  The composer does not “code” a symphony; he creates a score that then provides an idea of what the composer had in mind.  Musicians then marshal their assignment into existence by leveraging their skill with the instrument, paying attention to their own feelings, listening to their colleagues, watching the conductor and responding to the audience all at once.  There are at least these five variables impacting each individual performance.  Multiply that by the number of performers in a symphony and we begin to understand the subtlety, complexity and sophistication of DNA.  It’s as much about the environment as it is about the score.  That is the nature of art.

I hypothesize that music is not only a better metaphor than machinery or code for communicating how the genes and the environment relate, but music itself approaches the actual structure of the womb or egg environment engendered to produce an individual.  Art is a peculiarly human undertaking.  Its origins are explored far less often than language or culture, it being assumed that art is a contingent result of language or culture.  Even though art as it manifests in female sexual selection proliferates across the planet in the form of (usually) males displaying features that females like, art is not often explored as that which compelled humans to evolve.

The reason I state that art (in this case, music) was not only instrumental in how humans evolved but is a direct reflection of how evolution operates is because neoteny, the prolongation of ancient ancestor embryo features into the adults of descendants, not only made contemporary adult humans more like our chimpanzee-like embryo progenitors (as in large head, big brain, small jaws, hairless skin, head back on shoulders) but made humans behave like an embryo behaves.  Human adults make art and revel in environmental information to inform inspiration to create.  This is exactly what I hypothesize embryos do.  Embryos take their DNA score and proceed to proliferate growth based upon instructions from the environment.  Just as an audience informs production, the environment guides growth or ontogeny.  Art is not only integral to what it is to be human but is perhaps the most integral feature of what it is to be human.  In addition, art may be also how humans, and life, grow.

In other words, art may not only be the best way to represent those subtle and unique experiences that make life make sense, art may be the best way to understand how life actually unfolds.  Science, seeking to make an experience reproducible by making the number of variables so few that the outcome can be controlled, may be doing the opposite of what life actually engages in if life is to be understood.  Audience and performer, gene score and environment may be central to understanding not only evolution but ontogeny, individual experience and social relations.  Maybe it’s time science allies itself with art and makes itself part of an ensemble.

DNA’s Central Dogma, a great name, created with sensitivity to religious lines that science, with awareness, seeks to cross, needs a new name.  I would suggest Immanent Nature.  DNA’s Immanent Nature instead of Central Dogma suggests porous boundaries with continued awareness of the spiritual connotations.

If what makes humans human is that we directly reflect the processes engaged during earliest ontogeny, and our reflection of those processes compels us to create, then perhaps the unique self awareness also evidenced by humans is a feature of earliest ontogeny.

Immanence may be a feature of the system.

“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.

Are you proposing that testosterone levels are driving evolution of mammals in general or primates specifically?

The evidence that testosterone is driving evolution mostly comes from anomalies emerging in neuropsychology around progeny maturation changes that result from environmental influences upon a pregnant mother and other studies in the neuropsychological literature.

An interesting primate study was as follows…

“In a 5-year longitudinal study, we examined the effect of disrupting the neonatal activity of the pituitary–testicular axis on the sexual development of male rhesus monkeys.  Animals in a social group under natural lighting conditions were treated with a GnRH antagonist (antide), antide and androgen, or both vehicles, from birth until 4 months of age.  In antide-treated neonates, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection throughout the neonatal period.  Antide + androgen-treated neonates had subnormal serum LH, but above normal testosterone concentrations during the treatment period.  From 6 to 36 months of age, serum LH and testosterone were near or below the limits of detection.  Ten of 12 control animals reached puberty during the breeding season of their 4th year, compared with five of 10 antide- and three of eight antide + androgen-treated animals.  Although matriline rank was balanced across treatment groups at birth, a disruption within the social group during year 2 resulted in a marginally lower social ranking of the two treated groups compared with the controls.  More high (78%) than low (22%) ranking animals reached puberty during year 4.  During the breeding season of that year, serum LH, testosterone and testicular volume were positively correlated with social rank.  Thus the lower social rank of treated animals may have contributed to the subnormal numbers of these animals reaching puberty during year 4.  However, of those animals achieving puberty during year 4, the pattern of peripubertal changes in serum testosterone and testicular volume differed between control and antide-treated animals.  The results appear to suggest that the disruption of normal activity of the neonatal pituitary–testicular axis retarded sexual development, but that social rank is a key regulatory factor in setting the timing of sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys.  The effect of neonatal treatment with antide and low social rank on sexual development could not be reversed by neo-natal exposure to greater than normal concentrations of androgen.”  Abstract from Sexual maturation in male rhesus monkeys: importance of neonatal testosterone exposure and social rank by Mann, Akinbami, Gould, Paul and Wallen.

It seems that mammals in general may be so affected, but I have not explored this.

How specifically is testosterone expression selected for?

I see this as largely a social structure question.  Any number of fluctuating environmental situations can encourage differing social structures.  For example, if a primate society experiences dispersed food sources gathered by females often foraging out of sight of males, then male control of female procreation may be less effective than a promiscuous social structure evidencing lower male testosterone levels and less hierarchical posturing.  See “What is Neoteny?”

How do changes in the timing of testosterone influence the evolution of mammalian life history?

This is not a question that I have researched, but only asked.  I don’t know.

How has Darwin’s theory of natural selection, inherently based upon interactions with the environment and organisms, biased a current ability to note the effects of the environment upon evolution?

The version of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in widest use today is the Neo-Darwinian interpretation of Darwin’s work, with Dawkins as the most vocal representative.  Fern Elsdon-Baker, in The Selfish Genius, describes the rather odd situation that we are in with Darwin’s pluralistic perspective not being the general understanding of how evolution works; instead, it is Wallace’s rather orthodox interpretation (though Wallace believed deity intervened to make our brain).  What this largely boils down to is:  How random, exactly, is the variation that emerges in progeny?

Neo-Darwinism makes clear that Lamarckian principles are dead and that evolutionary developmental biological ideas (that the environment can compel changes in ontogeny) are a special case.  The current theorizing environment does not support the idea that the environment can affect evolution by influencing the parents in their lives to produce progeny with features that reflect the parents’ experience.  Darwin discussed this issue at length, providing numerous examples in his The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.  This two-volume work was basically a list of anomalies that did not fit his theory of natural selection.

Whereas the environment is noted as important because it decides which features encourage an individual to live long enough to procreate, in most current theory the environment is not noted as important in its ability to influence the kinds of individuals that are created by the parents’ experience.  My emphasis is that the environment influences the rate and timing of maturation, adjusting ontogeny, encouraging the emergence of a host of features.

How does your theory contrast with Darwin’s presentation of sexual selection and differential selective pressures between males and females in The Descent of Man?

In 1998 I was reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Campbell’s The Masks of God and Geschwind and Galaburda’s Cerebral Lateralization at the same time.  The four books kind of blended in my mind.  I was looking for support for the thesis that we evolved within matrifocal societies featuring males with neurological structures similar to the contemporary autistic.  I hypothesized that these matrifocal societies were evolving big brains and cooperation by females.  In mate selection, females were mostly picking males for being evocative dancers.

After coming up with the idea that human evolution was compelled by dance, following an R. A. Fisher sexual selection feedback loop thesis, I came across Geoffrey Miller’s 1994 work presenting a more detailed exposition of that thesis, except Miller said it was art in general that compelled human evolution.  Miller’s 2000 The Mating Mind is the published account of his ideas.

I see no difference between Darwin’s The Descent of Man thesis and my work, except I’m hypothetically providing far more detail on how exactly the dynamic of sexual selection is engaged.  Darwin did not yet have endocrinology, neuropsychology or even anthropology.  To me, the work of Gould, Campbell, and Geschwind feels like the manifestation in other disciplines of Darwin’s sexual selection thesis.  Sexual selection, without an understanding of how social structure informs the direction evolution takes, only provides part of the picture of species transformation.  Sexual selection and insight into how neoteny and acceleration compel specific evolutionary trajectories create an opportunity to view the kind of physical, neurological and behavioral transformations that accompany the particular features that the female is choosing.  We can use human sexual selection to understand the neurological repercussions of particular social structures, thus creating an opportunity to view not just our species but particular neurological variations within our species as related to social structure and sexual selection.

I think I’m just answering this question in a way that makes more questions.  I can send you a more detailed explanation of this thesis if you like, though it’s kind of long.

What is the empirical support for testosterone managing rate and estrogen the timing of maturation, influencing evolution?

This was her last question, the most difficult.  This lies at the foundation of most of what I write about.  I answered in six pages, citing a number of different studies, but there was no study that even asked these questions.  My conclusions are based upon what I infer.

Back in 1998, when a lot of this was coming together, I read a paper cited by Geschwind and Galaburda in Cerebral Lateralization that noted that a mother’s testosterone levels at six weeks before birth determined her child’s maturation rates.  I’ve been looking for the paper for almost a year, having noted that I found the paper in Cerebral Lateralization, but I failed to note the specific paper.  I recently reread Cerebral Lateralization to find the reference, but I couldn’t find it.  Nithya and Rosanna, who have helped me on this project, haven’t found reference to such a paper.  Did I dream it?

My interpretation of the power of neoteny to impact culture holds to the view that the prolongation of infant features into the adult of our species can be observed to be influencing society as aboriginal aspects emerge in contemporary times.  I describe the horizontalization of society, with female frames of reference and bonobo-like qualities.  Horizontalization is fanning out from its source among young people, the Internet.  In other words, many features of the very young, including playfulness, curiosity, affection and sociality, are becoming primary features of current society, particularly when examined from the view of the new communications technologies.

One could also view contemporary trends to withhold information, engage in secrecy, offer reverence to the leader, engage in systemic selfish behavior and associate only with those who are like you as traits exhibited by children, traits which many adults also exhibit.  That being the case, the neoteny premise of a horizontal society being one featuring the traits of young children could be viewed as a theory picking and choosing which child traits are to be emphasized.

Freud first proposed that developmental stages exposed to trauma result in the exhibition of features of the traumatized developmental stage in the adult of our species.  This is not a neotenic prolongation of infant features into the adult, but a lifting and placing of features of a child stage, a stage accompanied by a disturbing experience with accompanying repressed grief/rage/fear emotions, into the adult.  Instead of bridging childhood strengths such as creativity, affection and curiosity into adulthood, trauma shuts off childhood virtues, leaving instead an adult seeking a childhood featuring creativity, affection and curiosity.

I remember studies conducted to determine the common experiences among adults that were passionate followers of the Nazi Party.  Nazi males were often severely beaten as children.  A Right Wing politic may exhibit adults acting like children, but I would suggest that the children they are acting like are deeply wounded.

A childhood featuring joy harvests a different selection of feelings and experiences than a childhood frequently presented with the awful.  Different adults result.  This insight may perhaps have preceded language.  It’s so integral to how we understand how the world works.  Understanding what exactly a human being is outside of trauma, inside a world that feels secure, contributes to an understanding of evolution as a process that is informed by maturation.

I consider myself a pragmatist.  I make decisions based upon the information I receive.  I change strategies for achieving goals based upon changing information.  Though I am a human featuring creativity, I often devote my ability to make things up to form what seems like useful models of how the world works.  A traumatized person, one featuring creativity, often is not pragmatic.  That person forms conclusions based upon information stored at the time the trauma occurred.  Current information is often ignored, or only information that matches the feelings or conclusions that accompanied the old experiences are paid attention to.  The traumatized person develops models of experience based upon personal ancient times.

Understanding the power of imagination and creativity to inform experience based upon what happened in the past is integral to understanding a model based upon maturation rates and timing to explain biological and social evolution.  Imagination is driven by emotion.  The conclusions we draw based upon experience impact the kind of child we manifest as adults.

To understand neoteny, it is important, perhaps essential, that we understand that we are, by nature, joy-filled creatures.  To understand evolution, it is useful that we feel young.

“Environmental factors can be an important source of nongenetic influences on laterality.  Since the effect of a gene is to play a role in some form of chemical reaction, it is not surprising that genetic determination is not absolute.  Every chemical reaction can be modified by alterations in pressure, temperature, pH, light, the presence of other substances, the availability of chemical precursors, and the rate at which products are removed.  With growing sophistication of molecular genetics, it has become increasingly clear that nongenetic effects can play a powerful role; methylation, for example, has been shown to suppress expression of many genes.  We will now consider some of the random effects that might modify lateralization.  One implication of our hypothesis is that even if the genetic endowment of any particular fetus were known precisely, it would not be possible to make predictions concerning the distribution in a population basis.  One of the reasons for this relative freedom from genetic determination is that if hormones do play a role in determining laterality, then the effects of testosterone or related substances on the developing brain will be modified by factors not under the control of the fetal genes.  Androgens are produced not only by fetal testes and the placenta but also by the maternal ovaries, adrenals, and nonglandular tissues.  The fetus can be influenced by the actions of many of the unshared maternal genes.  It is reasonable to expect that if a fertilized ovum were transplanted into the uterus of an unrelated female, the final pattern of the brain would be quite different, because the brain would develop in an environment of hormones and other substances that would certainly differ in many respects.  It might therefore be reasonable to take a different approach than usual to the genetics of many conditions.  One should perhaps consider, not the genes carried by the offspring alone, but rather the genes of that organism existing or active only for the nine months of pregnancy; in other words, one should consider the mother and the fetus as a unit.  This unit contains three groups of different genes: one paternal set present in the fetus, one maternal set present in the mother, and another maternal set present both in the mother and in the fetus.  The situation is even more complex when dizygotic twins are involved, since the maternal-fetal unit will contain another group of paternal genes.  The effects of substances produced by the mother will, however, be diminished by the capacity of the placenta to act as a barrier to some maternal hormones.  The fetus is protected to a great extent from maternal testosterone, which is converted to estradiol by placental aromatase.  Dihydrotestosterone, which is not aromatized and therefore crosses the placenta, is, however, usually present in the mother at much lower levels than testosterone.  The protection from maternal testosterone is not complete, since offspring do show signs of masculinization when mothers are exposed to this hormone.  In addition, progesterone administered to the mother may masculinize female fetuses.  It is clear that the placental barrier is far from complete.  Furthermore, it is likely that there are individual variations in the aromatizing capacity of the placenta.  It is conceivable that some maternal genes not shared by the offspring have greater effects on female fetuses.  Thus, the testosterone to which female fetuses are exposed comes predominantly from maternal tissues, whereas males produce it themselves in high quantities.  In the study of Nichols and Chen (1981) sex hormones given to mothers were associated with a higher rate of hyperactivity in female offspring than in males.”  (Geschwind and Galaburda 1987: 133-134, Cerebral Lateralization)

This long excerpt discusses Geschwind and Galaburda’s 1987 thoughts regarding the yet unnamed evolutionary biological discipline, evolutionary developmental biology.  Neuropsychologists are not often referred to in evolutionary biology.  When neuropsychologists are referencing evolution at all they are usually thinking in terms of natural selection.  Neuropsychologists and evolutionary biologists retain separate journal systems, separate languages, separate conferences.

T. J. Crow is a British theorist who has crossed lines in his explorations of schizophrenia and other mental conditions, bringing in discussions of neoteny to explain cerebral anomalies.  Marion Annett has suggested left-handedness reveals features of an evolutionary forebear.  Bernard Crespi, though focusing on genetics as the cause of schizophrenia and autism, seems to imply evolutionary underpinnings to the conditions.  Connecting the work of these three theorists to an evolutionary developmental interpretation of their work may be useful.  From what I can tell, these kinds of interpretations are rare events.

In the excerpt above, Geschwind and Galaburda are realizing that a person’s genetic heritage as regards something as central as cerebral lateralization has far less to do with an individual’s genes than with the environment that they are located in and possibly the genes of those they are in contact with.  In the model I am playing with, we cannot easily look at a representative of a species, any person, for example, as the source of information regarding the individual’s “genetic heritage.”  We each are part of a larger matrix of genetic information, with genomes located in other individuals, including individuals in other species, informing our personal ontogeny.

The following is the premise I am playing with.  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.

Connected to this premise is a reinterpretation of genetics to be not a “template,” an algorithm or a code, but more a musical score requiring both (1) the input of unique musicians that includes their life history and experience and their interpretation of the score and (2) the influence of the audience on the musicians.

Integral to this interpretation is a complete overhaul of the reductionist or materialist perspective.  Geschwind and Galaburda see clues to a shift in this direction.  Evo Devo advocates can sometimes sense where we are headed.  Consider that Geschwind and Galaburda are noting that if something as central as cerebral lateralization, which I have described as integral to understanding human self awareness, or split consciousness, is heavily influenced by hormones, hormones heavily influenced by environmental factors, then the origin of human consciousness ontologically in each of us individually is directly related to what is happening in the world around us.

I have stated that environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.  The emergence of split consciousness was, of course, central to human evolution.  Geschwind and Galaburda are trying to sort out the influence of the hormones on individual cerebral ontogeny.  Their work can also be interpreted to be seeking to untie the knot of understanding of how humans evolved split consciousness originally.  We’re not talking just adjustments in genes, what Annett has described as right shift theory, or tendency to lateralize.  We are talking about the contribution of a whole environment to the origin of human split consciousness both tens of thousands of years ago and right now with the emergence of each new person.

I often read papers by specialists in disciplines and have few clues about what they are trying to communicate.  Works by an evolutionary biologist I seem to get most of.  If the work is by a geneticist or neurologist, I miss much.  I often feel like an outsider trying to grasp some particular subdiscipline’s insight, needing courses in the subdiscipline, a mentor and the kind of personality that is willing to study what I’ve been told to study because it is the convention to do so.  Reading neuropsychology and evolutionary developmental biology, I’m asking myself if these two subdisciplines can even understand each other.  I don’t think my brother-in-law, who is the chair of an economics/finance department, has the background to grasp concepts that my astronomy professor friend Craig would be familiar with, though they both use mathematics.  (I could be wrong.)  I’m starting to wonder if the holistic insights characterized by understanding common concepts among neuropsychology, evolutionary biology and social structure where it integrates with endocrinology are difficult to grasp in no small part because the different disciplines just don’t talk because they can’t.

When I read excerpts like the passage that began this piece, little evolution flags start excitedly waving.  What do academics do when they have those cross-disciplinary gestalt experiences?

All mixed up in contemporary theorizing are three things:  the exact nature and difference between that which transforms over time that is changing as a result of random interconnections, that which is changing as a result of progress or improvement over time and that which is changing as part of a larger pattern of maturation.

Evolutionary biology tends to take the position that evolution follows Darwin’s wedges metaphor, with every feature of every being emerging as a direct or indirect result of what is necessary to survive to procreate.  Features acquired by individuals are random, unconnected to the environment or the parents’ experience, making random feature survival the central focus of evolution.  There is no such thing as progress.  There is no larger picture to inform what survives to procreate.

Society, religion and spirituality tend to focus on the idea that either we are on a pathway toward improvement or we are not.  Those saying not are often atheists, and often they find themselves sympathizing with the evolutionists.  Those allying themselves with the idea that things are getting better by design, whether deity-inspired or not, view society as an unfolding that will eventually end up somewhere that most would interpret as a good place.  With our science grounded in Wallace and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, there is often a not-so-subtle split between science and society perspectives.

The third path is an understanding of evolution or progress, which is not well understood.  Perhaps the primary reason there is confusion is that this third path suggests a “deistic” insight, though there is no deity.  The third path describes evolution as a dynamic that reveals a larger pattern, one characterized by interconnections over time and space, a dynamic that posits concepts of maturity as integral to understanding evolution.

Maturation is not about progress.  Maturation is a succession of stages over the course of time.  A baby is not more or less evolved, more or less good than an adult or any other stage of maturity.  No single stage of maturity is worse or better, more or less evolved than any other stage.  All stages are part of a single continuum.

The same holds true regarding evolution.  Species evolution reveals a vast, complex dance of maturation, with individuals maturing within lineages maturing within societies within species within larger systems.  Maturation at the biological level is influenced by an almost infinite number of environmental variables hypothetically managing the rates and timing of evolution through testosterone and estrogen.  Metamorphosis at the biological, societal, ontological and personal levels are all occurring according to the demands of the environment and social structure, far from random interpretations of change.

It’s not about a random universe and random evolution.  It’s not about progress and the march toward the betterment of all.  It is about shifting scales and seeing how we as individuals, maturing as who we are, while we are who we are, is the exact same process engaged in by society, biology, and possibly, the universe.

Maturation is a pattern that repeats across all scales of existence, featuring the carrying forward of creation toward cessation (neoteny) and the carrying backward of cessation toward creation (acceleration).  I’m thinking that this is a natural dynamic, and it’s just how stuff works, a principle or law of existence.  Characteristics of embryos, youth, infants, creation, everything associated with beginnings slowly make their way forward through successive stages of whatever scale we happen to be examining until traits associated with beginnings approach the end.  At the same time, features of adults, old timers, the mature, and the end of systems make their way backward through successive stages of whatever scale we choose to explore until characteristics of endings advance upon the start.

Tracing these patterns over time is the study of many of our science disciplines.  Nevertheless, our science practitioners are bereft of a larger picture.  They are without an intuition that maturation is a feature of the larger system, revealing smaller patterns that a discipline explores.  These are patterns having nothing to do with progress but which nevertheless exhibit predictable outcomes.

What is missing in our explorations is the insight that there is no such thing as narrative time.  Humans have a unique ability to exercise imagination.  We confuse an ability to be two places at once and a seeming ability to examine time with the assumption that time is examinable.  Time can be experienced, not examined.  What we are missing is that each of us individually is actually every time we have ever been.  There is no progress or improving.  There is the moment.  The societal, religious and spiritual paths that suggest that progress is underway are mixing up location on the path with the path as a whole.  The path as a whole is about maturation.  There is no worse or better place to be on that path.

Maturity is not the same as progress.  To pass through a series of ontological stages evidencing the look, sound and behavior of the epochs we have experienced is not just a result of natural selection.  It is life.