I’m learning new software, Final Cut Express (FCE).  Back in 1996, I taught myself Photoshop.  My world changed.  Over time, I departed the world of the printed page and disappeared inside of Photoshop.  Forty years of drawing and painting gave way to a creative process that involved both my hands and the manipulation of a mouse and keyboard.

My dreams grew to reflect the amount of time I spent at a computer keyboard adjusting the products of my imagination by typing instead of drawing or painting.  I sometimes still inked by hand.  Yet, coloration grew to become totally digital.  While sleeping, I began to adjust dreams using keyboard commands and Photoshop features.  It became routine to stop a dream and undo a section, withdrawing to an earlier stage before the unfolding of a chain of events that was not desirable.  I found myself frequently simply choosing to undo accidents in dreams, adjusting life with keyboard commands.

Final Cut Express, video production software, shows signs of another such evolution.  Playing with iMovie for about four months, I quickly bucked up against its limitations, even with the relatively simple piece I was producing (The Conservative Left).  Learning FCE is far more complicated and sophisticated.  It will take time, but it will be worth it.  It feels not unlike I’m producing dreams.  I expect my dreams will change, eventually integrating how I use FCE to create and adjust what my mind creates at night.

Perhaps the deepest difference between producing video and creating static Photoshop productions is the visceral difference between creating in narrative format productions composed of the work of many other creators and creating in static format content from only a personal repertoire.  What began in the 1980s with Hip Hop artists stealing copyrights from corporate-supported artists has exploded with Creative Commons licenses to borrow from millions of contributors sharing their creations with anyone for free.  A net result is a profound change in creative process.  Art has become a community endeavor instead of homage to the cult of individuality.  Majoring in art in the 1970s was all about the individual creating unique content to push the boundaries of a particular medium.  The Internet and the compulsion to share are destroying the modern allegiance to the idea that art is about an aesthetic survival of the fittest.

Video production–at home, on a computer, relying upon the works of millions of other contributors, working in a narrative format that tells a story over time, relying upon music, words and images–provides a profound opportunity to evolve consciousness in a direction that allows an obliteration of boundaries.  That is what art is about, the exploration of conventional boundaries and then their violation in order to better understand what all a human is.  This new medium, in combination with the contributions of others, who provide video, sound, words and photography, creates opportunities to integrate the community into the self, allowing an elegant, passionate dissolution of individuality.

I really like video.  I had no idea that this would be the case.

Running some more riffs off of yesterday’s conjectures regarding the particular hypothetical dynamics that I’ve been exploring in human evolution, are there species that tend to cluster (1) sexual selection with females picking males for particular qualities (dance, song, plumage, etc.) and (2) females assigning relatively large amounts of attention to the young?  If so, males can be chosen for their neotenous features, features females would be attracted to in their young, which might result in relatively larger brains, more cooperative behavior, more tendencies to play, more creativity.

This could veer off in two directions.  If the female is picking males for those features that demand higher testosterone levels (bright red plumage), the male will not likely be displaying neotenous tendencies and would not likely be helping in the raising of the kids (though this would depend on seasonal variations in hormone levels).  Yet, if the female is picking males that are challenged to behave with some creativity, or at least species-related novel behavior, to get the females’ attention, the male may end up evolving in ways that suggest how the human species has evolved.

I’m thinking that those predators that hunt in cooperative packs might as a trend display…

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

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

“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’…

Three things are bouncing around my brain after I drank coffee to knock out a headache, which worked.

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

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

There is a tacit assumption or consideration that underlies much of what I write here.  Occasionally, I’m not subtle about this belief.  The idea is that art and science can be closely allied.  Perhaps they often are closely allied, except at present science seems rather obsessed with the idea that theory formation should be engaged in with the same obsession with detail as is necessary in the proof of theory.  That tends to keep artist/blogger/theorists writing for nonscientists.

Artists are just as obsessed as scientists, except their focus is usually on internal experience and the translation of that internal experience in a way that provides visitors something new.  Often, artists are exploring what it is like to be human, tasting and evaluating consciousness as the artists produce varying treats from the particular kitchen that is their medium.  Sometimes the artists attempt to put the concoction into words.  Some artists specialize in words.  For many artists, part of being an artist is having a unique experience without having to use words.

I am an artist, trained in watercolor and pen and ink, who now works in the medium of storytelling, collecting patterns from different science disciplines and showing how the different…

Thomas Kuhn describes those unique situations when a science discipline experiences a shift.  Shifts occur in different ways.  One way that a shift happens is when a new presupposition introduces new information that offers an almost completely alternative frame of reference and new world view.  Everything seems to look different with the new presupposition.  The established presupposition, by not embracing the new presuppositions, can continue in a kind of alternative universe.  The question becomes:  Which presuppositional matrix is more useful for which particular outcomes?  Asking which paradigm is true is not a useful question.

Darwin expressed deep distress and consternation that his theory of natural selection was instrumental in the discussion of whether god existed.  Indeed, his fears were reasonable, and we might say that society has shifted as a result of its acceptance of the theory.  This work operates with a different thesis.  It is an integration of all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of theorists that immediately followed.  This orchestral theory of evolution is an alternative frame of reference and a new world view.  Nevertheless, it has roots going back thousands of years, with connections to the work of many contemporary theorists.  Try on this work…

Several themes run through this blog.  Several related melodies play off each other as I explore how they are connected and the way that the melodies seem to transform when approached from different directions.  Perhaps this work’s most influential theme is the power of play to inform understanding.  I am not an academic.  I have no affiliations with an established institution or connections with groups that compel me to defend specific beliefs or conjectures.  I feel like a grown-up surrounded by toys, ideas that represent patterns in our experience, and I’m reveling in the process of letting myself be led to what feels like unique ways for the ideas or patterns to interact.

Like a child, I presuppose that what I am exploring, I can understand.  Engaging, I intuit and experience connection, and I estimate that my participation will be rewarded with my having learned something I didn’t know before.  Many themes carry through this work, but perhaps the core idea is that everything is connected and that those connections can be understood, or at least intuited, by a nonacademic.

I maintain a deep reverence for what might be called “fun.”  When I feel attracted to something, I take that…

Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges…

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream.  Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?”  (Jane Goodall Through a Window (Boston:  Houghlin…

I have been playing with the idea that genetics guides ontogeny, that how our genes inform an individual’s unfolding has far more to do with how music is made than with how a computer is programmed.  Once again, I’m finding these ideas emerging in my dreams.

Two nights ago, while dreaming, I was seeking to understand the mathematics of words, searching for the equations in language, wondering how music connects them both.  In the dream, the answer felt to be related to evolution.  The answer emerged.  The answer is the price of homemade baked goods at the farmer’s market. (I don’t know what that means.}

Scientists are stumped by how few genes there are in the human gnome.  Some less somatically sophisticated species display a far larger library of genes.  Having a complete gnome is not leading to deep insight as regards our disabilities, diseases, talents or evolution.  Over and over again, difficult-to-understand genetic riddles are ascribed to not-yet-understood, multiple gene effects.

Consider this.  By understanding music, we can understand how genetics works.  This is because the human connection to music is a direct reflection and result of the ontogenetic processes created by our genetic algorithm.

Genes engender a growing…

This August, I drove with my wife and son from Chicago to St. Louis to visit our first grandchild on his first birthday.  Nils is the son of Marcia’s daughter, Katie, and her husband, Dave.  It’s a five-hour drive.  We left at a little after 6:30 a.m.

I’m a big fan of the long-distance drive.  I went to college in Florida and frequently drove straight through from Chicago.  The experience was often accompanied by an altered state characterized by elation and a making of connections.  When my son, Elia, went to college in Asheville, North Carolina, I adored the ten round trips each year bringing him down or picking him up.  I often made the 10.5 hour trip with one stop.

On this St. Louis trip, I was concentrated on the collection of patterns or shapes for the video Elia and I were about to start.  In the video, I will narrate an explanation of neotenous human evolution while connecting that to social evolution and evolution in larger scales.  Accompanying the narration will be Elia’s music and photographs, and videos and images from other sources.  Before the trip to St. Louis, I collected from free-content CDs maybe 100 images, sorted…

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

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

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

I can’t exactly remember when the chills first started.  When I was in summer camp when five or six, I remember concentrating on placing my right hand over my left side to be able to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  I then felt chills, vibrations up my back, because I was feeling part of something I did not understand but I knew was good, something larger than myself.

Over time the chills or vibrations would come and go.  The feeling always accompanied the experience that I’d been moved.  From what I can tell, this is universal.

In 1980 and 1981, I went through a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) trainers program to become a practitioner of NLP.  I was fascinated by the communications model.  Fifty-eight psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychologists, one businessman and I went through the training.  The focus was on addressing and achieving patients’ psychological goals.  There was a secondary emphasis concentrating on communicating directly with another person’s unconscious.

The work of Milton H. Erickson was integral to NLP insights.  Erickson was a hypnotherapist who developed a number of new techniques, wrote books describing those techniques and taught many therapists how to use hypnotherapy to advance patient goals.  Erickson died in…

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

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

Still unexplored as a variable…

I have barked up a lot of trees as I have been trotting blindfolded through the forest of possibilities that have had me so captivated the last twelve years.  I seem to have a natural inclination to shut myself off to conventional interpretations.  Instead of using my eyes, I’m feeling, smelling and listening to what’s around me until I get a taste of what it is I seek.

Finding powerful ways of explaining what I’ve found becomes as important as what I’ve discovered in these forests.  Sometimes the metaphor itself feels as significant as the process the metaphor seeks to represent.

Alford Korzybski famously noted, “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”  From my Zen evolutionary perspective, the territory is constantly in flux, representing an infinite number of constantly shifting relationships.  My art seeks to be part of a process that creates theories that can usefully represent these constantly changing relationships, and then I want to devise metaphors to make the theories feel accessible.

The proofs part is a challenge.

So, while I develop a repertoire of metaphors, proofs elude me.

I use…

In Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children were collected in schools where they could be taught together in one location.  They had developed individually various sign conventions, and a language spontaneously emerged where they were gathered in one place.  The oldest children learned this language slowest.  The youngest developed lightning fast sign fluency in this brand new nonverbal creole lingo.

One of the things that makes humans unique is this ability to play with time.  Language, by prying apart the present into a future and past, offers an ability to imagine being in two places at once.  Language lets you realize that the person you are communicating with is a different person, with the rather astonishing insight that the world is not just here and now.

There was a time when we were animals, experiencing the world through an infinitely lingering present, unclear on the boundaries between self and others, where dream was not only night but the every day.

Animals may not have developed humor exactly, but they have fun.  Animals don’t generate and participate in symbolic language, but they play.  Animals that have fun and play are mostly young animals.  Consider that human humor and language, two things…

I have an old compulsion.  It’s not clear when it emerged.  This constant urge is characterized by my seeking ways to make two or more things not obviously connected, connected, in as few steps as possible.

In high school, I wrote papers that sought to integrate subjects or themes at best only tangentially related.  In chemistry, I wrote a piece on motorcycle engine engineering.  In English, I penned a short play using characters from three books I was supposed to be writing a book report on.  I sought to push the boundaries of what intuitively seemed related.  My teachers criticized me for a seeming inability to follow directions and write a paper on a single subject.

I remember creating a drawing in art class with a middle-class man’s head on a T-Rex body, and I titled it “Alfred K. Prufrock.”  That drawing summarized what I was seeking, a way to integrate opposites so the world made sense.

I longed for a world that revealed integration.  Seeking relief from anguish and self-recrimination, I often dissociated to a degree that allowed a matching of opposites in my imagination that refused to ally themselves in my emotions.

I felt torn.  I sought unification.…

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 often keep a post-it note pad with me when I’m out and about. During meetings, I often doodle. Mostly I draw faces, experimenting with expression and line quality. I store those images that feel unique. A little stack of faces are collecting at the right side of my desk.

I took a couple years off of college between my junior and senior years. The reason I chose to leave college for a time was because I adored it. I didn’t want my education to end. I felt that at the point that I graduated I would need to start drifting toward a career. I did not look forward to never having my summers off again. I did not look forward to a life focused on something other than learning.

A good chunk of the two years I took off was spent as a waiter in a resort on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg. I was living by myself in a garage apartment. My landlord, whose house I lived behind, was a young author writing a movie script for a movie to be called Conan the Barbarian.

I was experiencing a lot of anguish, feeling…

Like most people I know, I had a somewhat odd childhood.  I started talking when I was three.  I remember spending a lot of time confused by adult communication.  Speech therapy accompanied my schooling until college.

I recall struggling to understand what made people laugh.  I could be amused, but I was often uncertain what it was that people were finding funny.

Sometime around sixth grade it’s as if my brain achieved traction and stuff started to make sense.  My closest friend was Paul Jean.  Paul died last year.  It was only recently I realized Paul had Asperger’s.

As a child, the peculiarity of Paul’s communication felt familiar and somehow consoling.  Paul was brilliant at mathematics and an effortless musician.  His affect was affable yet often strange.  I liked strange.  It was a communication style not unlike my mother’s.

I have friends and relatives with Asperger’s.  There are the obvious, unique aspects to their characters that are outlined by the diagnostic tools.  There is another facet of the Asperger’s personality which interests me as I think back to my early childhood when I exhibited some Asperger’s-like features.  Of course, all of us when moving through early stages of development displayed…

Attracted to making music during portions of my life, I’ve never given in to the desire to learn an instrument.  Instead, I’ve made music by learning a single key on an instrument and then played that instrument for a particular feeling, usually revolving around one song or two.  A flute makes a sad song, a harmonica offers encouragement, piano suggestions of wisdom, the recorder joy, kalimba sociality, drumming earnestness and sexuality, and the bouzouki loss.  Never having learned an instrument except for these brief visits, my fingers and lips are familiar with these evocations of feelings as if I lived in several foreign countries for short times, never having learned the language.

I approach theorizing in a similar manner.  I feel attracted to particular disciplines and the theories in those disciplines based upon the feelings that those theories awaken in me.  In the same way that I don’t learn an instrument, I don’t become any discipline’s adept, but I become somewhat proficient in those portions of the discipline that evoke powerful feelings, feelings of reverence.

I am guided by wonder.  My journeys across the fret boards/keys of instruments and the relationships evoked by theories in different disciplines are explorations characterized…

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…

I’m starting to get an idea for a book.  It began when I noticed how many of the metaphors I use are related to toys and play.  Noting that toys seem to often elegantly portray biological processes, I’m considering using a different toy to guide a different chapter.  The book would be called something like “The Play of Evolution.” Maybe, “Playing With Evolution.”  The subtitle might be “Beyond the Abyss of Reductionism,” with the Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt comic as the cover of the book.

The chapter breakdown would emphasize the several human evolution themes of this website:  biology, society, transition from biology to society, neuropsychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, autism, spirituality/language/unconscious, story and myth, society and teleology, society and political activism, medical implications of the theory, creative process and contemporary social shifts.  There is lots of overlap between sections.

My mother worked in a toy shop during Christmastime when was I was growing up.  I was employed there for a year when I was 16.  My wife Marcia owned and ran a toy store for 22 years.  That is where I met her.  Toys have perhaps fascinated me more as an adult than when…

The behaviors of individuals, the behaviors of societies and the observation of changes in those behaviors in different scales of time are divided up into different disciplines to be studied by different academicians in different journals and research communities.

There are scientists that don’t believe in “unitary” theories or perspectives because unitary theories seek to remove the barriers between scales and/or time frames.  I don’t think these academics experience the world through a seamless progression of information gradating from discipline to discipline.  They live on an archipelago of knowledge springing from an unexamined ocean.

Next door lives a teenager practicing guitar.  He practices his riffs repeatedly, seeking a familiarity that prompts him to move on.  I am practicing merging ideas from different disciplines, encouraging my fingers to find various pathways between concepts that have not had much opportunity to mate.  Next door, the boy is becoming deft and drawing melodies from his instrument.  I am seeking ways to easily jump between biological scales and time frames.

In between the academic archipelagos that seek to sort and store the information about our world, I am building Tinker Toy bridges, hubs and nods that suggest a connection between these islands of understanding. …