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.

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

I’m thinking that those predators that hunt in cooperative packs might as a trend display larger brains, exhibit relative creativity in display when seeking mates, be more playful as adults and be more or less well disposed toward caring for the kids.  Chimpanzees hunt in several male units, as do dogs.  Both are tolerant of little ones, at least not usually engaging in infanticide.

I know too little about these things to have ready information that sorts into this idea.  I expect that’s why I write almost exclusively about humans.  Humans I can observe.

Regarding primates, Knight wrote, “The variations and permutations are numerous, but the basic result is that females arrange themselves across the landscape in characteristic patterns – grouped or isolated, fast-moving or slow, in trees or on the ground – and the males in pursuing their sexual goals adopt strategies which take account of the situation which the females have defined.”  (Chris Knight, Blood Relations (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1991), p. 133.)

With female behavior often informing social structure founded on how both sexes hunt or forage in the context of the location and availability of what is required for sustenance, and the resulting social structure often delegating the hormonal constellations of a particular species, there seems to be a not so subtle relationship described as follows:  Environment > nourishment procurement strategies > social structure > male/female relative hormonal constellations > evolutionary trajectories (changes in hormones adjust ontogeny, changing the species over time).  This looks to me like a paradigm description of how evolution can occur, a variation of what I’ve been playing with as relates to humans.

Postulate 23: The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution.   I’ve not been considering much the hypothesis outside of humans, but it seems, at least among some species, that this paradigm may be in play.

There is this sense that the environment informs social structure that can then invest the female with powers to compel evolution in interesting directions based upon her ability to encourage neoteny or acceleration.  My head is spinning.  It’s feeling like a whole new area is opening up with clear influence trajectories or interlocking cause and effect relationships suggesting how evolution unfolds.

Social structure and the environmental effects upon social structure feel central to how species change cascades across an ecosystem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

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

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

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

Okay.  Pretty weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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 patterns can congregate to describe how humans came to be.  I am using my imagination to tell a story that describes how humans acquired imagination.  Like the scientist, I display obsession with detail, except I am relatively unconcerned by peer review.  As an artist, I find that convention is only useful insofar as the communication of my experience requires my overlapping with the experience of my audience.  For a scientist, allegiance to convention is integral to both being provided an opportunity to share ideas (getting an advanced degree) and presenting ideas that ally with at least some of the scientist’s colleagues’ thoughts.

As an artist producing evolutionary theory, I find myself over time producing no small number of products, at least as compared to the published work of scientists.  In the kitchen of my medium, I concoct many pies, cakes, roasts, casseroles, appetizers and sides.  I receive emails and comments alerting me to whether the flavors are satisfying to my visitors.  I get mixed reviews.  Nevertheless, from what I can tell with scientists’ productions, either they are spending less time in the kitchen, they are cooking but not sharing the results in peer-reviewed contexts or they are cooking but just producing far fewer, but more sophisticated (deeply researched and cited), products.

The point I am very slowly getting around to making is that as an artist I can explore consciousness as integral to my productions without having to strain myself.  An academic seems to need to make believe that understanding, experiencing or at least defining consciousness is not necessary to what a scientist produces.  A scientist is a member of a community of peers that believe that an advanced degree makes it possible for holders of that degree to have something to lose if they don’t behave in a trustworthy fashion.  Those folks that spend the time and money to get a Ph.D. receive an audience in part because everyone knows that if they screw up, they are out that time and money.  Not so the artists.  Artists are evaluated by what comes out of their kitchen.

A scientist has something to lose.  This is good insofar as society can trust a scientist’s evaluation or proof will hold up across conventional reality.  An artist has little to lose.  This is good insofar as an artist needs to cross boundaries, breaking culture barriers, to explore identity and consciousness, providing insight into where we come from and what it is like to be a human being.

So, we have two classes of humans, both engaging in obsession or deep ongoing focus of attention on some particular, one class committed to convention, the other to the boundaries of convention.  Scientists tend to stay away from understanding how consciousness may influence their particular focus (physicists and biologists, for example), while artists are seeking, at least to some degree, to understand consciousness.

It seems to me that there is potential for synergy, a science of consciousness or art of evolution.  Spiritual disciplines have mostly scoped out this area up to now, often accompanying their discoveries with mythologies obfuscating insights with maps confused with territories.  In the previous piece, I played with the presupposition or theory that humans evidence two forms of consciousness–primary process and split consciousness–and that unions or integrations of the two consciousnesses can offer beautiful (artist frame) or useful (scientist frame) results.

A place to begin might be to encourage scientists to behave more like artists by imagining that they have access to alternative, primary process states of consciousness that offer both beautiful and useful information.  We might also encourage artists to explore and communicate using evolutionary paradigms, allowing the extrapolation of their personal experiences to larger contexts.

Integration of primary process and split consciousness is not just a personal choice, but a societal imperative.  Experiencing our selves on multiple identity levels creates an opportunity to feel whole.  Observing what science and art have in common, what the scientist and artist share, is necessary if our society is to give up the mythologies of religion.

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 like a winter overcoat in a blizzard of reductionist premises and feel if spring might seem to be coming a little closer.  If my hypotheses offer little usefulness in your experience, return it to the idea manufacturer.

Although this work draws upon the research and experiments conducted by scientists for centuries, there is a radical departure from trends initiated and supported over this long period of time.  This is a paradigm that unites contemporary theorizing with features carried forward from aboriginal frames of reference.  Just as neoteny in biology carries forward ancestor infant features to adult descendants, this work carries forward ancient aboriginal processes to inform contemporary pattern recognition.  Another way to say it is that this is a work of both my unconscious and conscious minds, associating the unconscious with primary process, primary process being central to the daytime consciousness of our aboriginal forebears.  In other words, this is a work of play.

As will be explored in detail in several sections of this work in the upcoming compilation, understanding consciousness is integral to understanding human and biological evolution.  Presupposing that everything is connected is to regard one’s relationship with consciousness as fundamental to a theory of evolution.  In other words, philosophy, or how we relate to spirituality, has been considered integral to an understanding of how we come to evolutionary theory conclusions.  This is what Darwin feared, that evolution and one’s opinion of spirituality be closely tied.  I would suggest that it is more useful to step into such an evolutionary theory discussion and make it clear how theorizing is informed by one’s relationship with connection or not connection, seemingly deistic or material perspectives.  I’m hoping that we can then discuss what is useful, not what’s true.

The atheism-advocating Neo-Darwinians are right that evolution theory is directly tied to a deity or nondeity frame of reference.  This theory of evolution is grounded in an alternative, still nonmythology-based, point of view.  I would suggest that maintaining a relativistic frame is essential while navigating between these two paradigms.  The atheists proclaim that truth is relevant.  I think not.  I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not as regards evolutionary theory.  What I find interesting is whether behaving as if there is that which connects everything offers theorizing advantages.

The potential advantages are twofold.  First, are the results of this theory useful?  I concentrate on the origins of autism and related conditions and a variety of diseases and conditions that may be explained by this work’s perspective.  For example, does this theory usefully explain autism and provide avenues to enhance the autistics’ experience?  Does this theory provide parents choices before and during pregnancy, making it possible for the condition to emerge in less burdening forms?

Second, is the theorizing process itself enhanced by behaving as if everything is connected?  Unlike Huxley’s revelation regarding the simplicity of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the principles and processes outlined in this orchestral theory of evolution are characterized by a complex, subtle yet elegant, interconnected whole that I would consider impossible to create without a presupposition that everything is connected.  What we presuppose influences the world we perceive.  This work represents a shift both in theory and how a theory is constructed as it shifts back to nonmaterialistic perspectives while shifting forward to nonmythological interconnection.  I’m interested in the deistic without the deity.

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 as important information that the particular thing I feel attracted to deserves my attention.  My wonderings through the themes and patterns in this blog are the wonderings of a person following a body’s desire to share what feels good.  I describe this as a sharing because the experience can best be described as a form of dance suggesting union, in this case a union between my conscious and unconscious self.  The process of writing, experiencing connections and exploring pattern is a process characterized by my enthusiastically following along behind a playful unconscious while at the same time translating that process itself into the structure and content of this work.

Dance, playful movement to music, is a central metaphor.  So are water and the power of the movement of water to inform an understanding of evolution.  I also explore dance, not just as a metaphor, but as an influential variable in human evolution.

Evolution is happening in the present.  It is an ongoing process influencing the moment we are in through specific channels.  My work discusses those channels in detail.  Evolution is a multiscale process manifesting in a species, a society, an individual’s ontogeny, or growth, and the peculiar and particular experience of each unique person.  That is a four-scale biological, societal, ontogenetical and personal experience.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an allegiance to the idea of threefold or fourfold parallelisms.  Many theorists from Freud to Piaget paid close attention to how there seemed to be intimate relations between patterns at different scales.  Freud believed developmental stages reflected societal stage transformations.  Piaget intuited that a child’s changes in consciousness reflected our species’ changes in consciousness.  This work often returns to the idea that evolution is a multiscale process.

At the same time, this work explores a model that proposes that our species evolved along a five-step continuum, a progression that can be explained by how we’ve been impacted by sexual selection.  I believe that sexual selection was instrumental in our evolving our unique form of consciousness.

In addition to playfully exploring evolution, this work explores the influence of play on evolution.  Neoteny and the processes allied with neoteny wind all through this blog.  Neoteny is the process that carries or prolongs embryo or infant features forward through generations so that ancient ancestor early ontogenetic traits appear in the adults of descendants.  Some have surmised that the hairlessness of progenitor human embryos made current human adults mostly hairless as that ancient embryo feature was carried through to contemporary adults.  Neoteny is also closely associated with a hypothetical compulsion to play as this ancient forebear infant feature emerged in the adults of the present day.

There is no difference between biology and society.  Until now this has been difficult to discern.  Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have attempted to show how Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be leveraged to explain social transformation.  I suggest that a more powerful and useful social model emerges when biological evolution is explored using all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of Darwin’s contemporaries, the Neo-Lamarckians.  This theory is not as simple as a “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” melody of a current reductionist hypothesis but instead seeks to offer the depth, symmetry and elegant complexity evident in a work by Bach.

Evolutionary selective processes evolve.  The very dynamics of evolution change, as if the physical laws of the universe adjusted over time.  By exploring the nature and sequence of the transformation of the evolutionary processes themselves, we offer ourselves additional leverage when it comes to searching for and finding hidden selective processes, a little like seeking to fill in the blanks on the periodic table.

This work represents a feminine theory of evolution insofar as what is not dominated by male frames of reference is often looked at as feminine by comparison.  I would suggest that this theory of evolution offers a balanced male/female perspective, even though the female often feels to be in control.

I presuppose connection, which encourages a tendency to notice patterns that suggest interconnection.  This is an often overlooked founding presupposition that reveals an almost totally different world, a world that the reductionist presupposes does not exist.  It is useful that people with different presuppositions notice that they do not share the ability to trade information, information only valid when examined in the context of a shared presupposition.  The question is:  Do the fruits of a theory grounded on wholly different presuppositions offer benefits?  Is the theory useful?  Trying to decide if something is true or not is a nonuseful discussion.

It is not fun trying to decide who is right.  I prefer exploring what is beautiful or useful.

Last, consciousness and identity are reframed as split consciousness or self awareness.  This work presupposes that consciousness predated humans.  Humans emerged from primary process, the unconscious, with our twin awareness, featuring a consciousness that was split.  By presupposing that consciousness is part of the system and that everything is connected, a number of patterns are revealed that are less obvious without those presuppositions.  The question is:  Are these patterns useful?  Clearly the presupposition is controversial.  I make a number of predictions that allow members of this community to determine if these conjectures are useful.  I focus on autism in particular.

This work focuses on autism as a social condition featuring anomalous consciousness.  I describe how specifically autism emerges and ways to cushion the confounding effects.  And I describe how by understanding autism, we understand ourselves.  In addition, I propose that by understanding the processes that lead to autism, we understand the etiologies of a number of related and seemingly unrelated diseases and conditions, etiologies currently unknown.

Changing our theory of evolution makes it possible to have a different understanding of ourselves and the physical and mental difficulties that accompany us.

This is a work of conjectures.  In the past, I have called this interlocking network of conjectures “The Theory of Waves” and, before that, “Shift Theory.”  I now refer to my theory as “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.”  When I write, or theorize, I seek to share beauty or observe patterns in ways that may be useful.  Beauty and usefulness are my focus.  Whether something is true or not just doesn’t make sense to me.  Patterns are just too vast, interconnected and overwhelming to conclude that my interpretations of those patterns are anything but stories.

I follow what attracts me.  Playing with evolution, I have fun.

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 can be built between beings with difficulty entering others’ worlds.

Mark Stairwalt, my colleague producing Shift Journal, reminded me of the power of mirrored experience…

“My wife and I have a family friend who once worked as an untrained volunteer with autistic kids, and she astounded the professional staff by achieving a communications breakthrough with one particularly hard-to-reach child.  When I asked how she had done it, she told me she had simply mirrored the body language, breathing pattern, facial expression, etc., of the child in question.  Empathy expressed via mimicry > instant breakthrough.”

This is the principle of biofeedback, mirroring or establishing rapport taught by the practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming, much of it derived from the work of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist.  It has been discovered that very effective therapists and hypnotherapists engage in mirroring to establish contact with a client’s unconscious.  The same principle applies when communicating with a person with autism.  Reflecting an autistic person’s experience by mirroring his or her biological rhythms, breathing, heartbeat and movements gives the autistic person purchase on the reflector’s experience.  They see you, in no small part, because you, at that moment, are reflecting them.

Engaging in the performance of rhythmic activities, activities that perhaps, as in the Jacqui Russell programs, offer information on how emotions work, also engages the experience of feeling mirrored that is integral to establishing rapport.  A group of people performing the same movements at the same time, dancing, are mirroring one another’s experience.

The autistic have trouble establishing rapport.  The foundation feature of establishing rapport is mirroring another person’s experience.  It is important that the mirrorer genuinely have the feelings that he or she is mirroring, or at least have access to those feelings.  Two people having the same feelings while at least one of the two people is mirroring the other’s experience is what makes a sharing authentic.

The performance of two or more people of a rhythm-based experience such as dance places that group into the same physical experience, one that reproduces and generates the dynamics of rapport.

Performance, rhythm, dance and mirroring are perhaps a combination that can leverage an autistic person into an experience that includes another person.  Principles of how an unconscious is accessed are combined with an understanding that how we may have evolved may be directly related to the performance of dance and rhythm.  If autism is an evolutionary condition featuring characteristics of our species’ ontogeny from a few thousand generations ago, then perhaps an intervention that features both a reproduction of an autistic indigenous environment, dance and rhythm, with a proven doorway to the unconscious, mirroring, can be the opportunity for an autistic person to behave in new and different ways.

Superb programs exist now, such as Jacqui Russell’s work in Chicago schools.  Let’s use the principles above to expand those programs.  To guide the autistic to have more facile access to their imaginations, it is necessary that we use ours.

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 Mifflin, 1990) pp. 241-242.)

I found Bill’s page within the janegoodall.org site while searching Google for evidence that chimpanzee or bonobo babies or children respond to music with movement or proto dance.  Although I’ve hypothesized in several places on this blog that dance emerged after the chimpanzee/human lineage split, probably during homo erectus as brains grew at lightning speed, yesterday’s entry has me thinking that if music/dance is a postbirth manifestation of womb ontogenetic epigenetic processes, then perhaps there is evidence of a response to music in chimpanzee and bonobo youth.  With bonobo exhibiting more neoteny than chimpanzees, bonobo babies and children would more likely exhibit an attraction to what we could interpret as proto music.

Evidently experiments have been conducted on human embryos in the womb to determine if brain waves suggested an integration of surrounding music and sound.  It seemed that was the case.  Click here.  Do bonobo exhibit the same predilection?  What other animals might reveal these trends?  What might be common among different animals that do show a tendency to be sensitive to rhythm?

I am fascinated by the relationship the autistic have with music and rhythm.  There is evidence that when language is tied to melody, it is easier for many with autism to absorb the words.  The autistic have been observed to retain perfect pitch in higher percentages than the nonautistic.  Several of those with autism that I have known personally felt a close affinity to music and dance.  One autistic boy I worked with almost never spoke, yet occasionally he would break out into dance.  In a subtle and interesting way, performance may be tied to the autistic experience.  There are rhythmic features to chimpanzee displays, particularly with the aggressive repetition of loud noise.  Perhaps the obsessive repetition associated with physical and aural exclamations in autism can be viewed as a combination of, or transition between, display and performance.  Autistic communication often feels to me to be a performance of information featuring a repetition of remembered or rehearsed songs, jokes and snatches of conversation.

I am reminded of Baron-Cohen’s exploration of Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimpanzee explorations regarding theory of mind.  If a chimpanzee demonstration can remind us so closely of a human performance, then perhaps certain autistic behaviors can be seen as a bridge between the two.

If obsessive repetition, rhythm or music are often integral to the autistic experience, and on occasion seem to behave as bridges that provide access to words and what words represent, then would an early and deep immersion in rhythm perhaps provide the autistic with an environment through which they could establish firm connections?

Clearly, if this experiment were conducted on the very young, it would more likely have a positive effect than when they are older.  I don’t estimate there would be negative repercussions.  If we surmise that autistic attraction to repetition, rhythm and performance suggests a need for an environment that reflects those features, perhaps a rhythm-and-performance-infused environment of the type experienced by humans just before or during the transition to culture and split consciousness will encourage a making of connections.

There was a time, perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, when we did not trade in symbols.  We were still steeped in primary consciousness (one time, one place, no negatives) but were likely dancing up a storm.  Waterfalls and thunderstorms no doubt moved us, but there is a good chance we often moved each other, performing movement to rhythm and sound.

The autistic may be a mere 4,000 generations from us, a couple neurological anomalies away.  Perhaps all that is needed to bridge this distance is an ability for moderns to evolve a feeling for wordless, rhythmic performance, a feeling for living in the autistic now.