Some of the least complex toys are the most powerful.  In the 1950s, my parents seemed amused that Slinkys and Hula Hoops had captured my sisters’ and my attention.  These toys were so simple.  Nevertheless, they were compelling.  Some of the simplest metaphors or processes can suggest or reproduce seemingly complex relationships.

Seeking to understand human evolution by focusing on individual adaptability to circumstance offers some unique and useful perspectives.  Exploring human evolution by examining humans in society can in ways simplify the play of transformation.  Raising the scale, shifting to society from individual, can simplify our understanding of the process.

Marian Annett’s explorations of the brain changes that compelled a shift to speech revealed a “balanced polymorphism,” or seamless arch of human features from those humans with little speech facility to others cerebrally lateralized so intensely for speech that they are handicapped in communication.  Those in the middle, she suggested, had a heterozygote advantage by retaining some of the useful pre-speech strengths in combination with speech proclivities.  Speech facility demands that the right hemisphere be pruned of some of its potential growth and subtlety in combination with a brain bridge reduced in size.  Odd that a reduction in hemispheric…

No device exists that measures consciousness.  There is no consciousness Geiger counter that provides the opportunity to visit different places and measure their degree of connectivity.  There is no helmet you can strap onto chimpanzees and humans that will measure how aware an individual is of his or her particular situation.

Ken Wilber hypothesizes that meditation engaged in over 20 years provides a leap of two units (on a scale of approximately 7 units) from where you began on the climb to enlightenment.  Wilber suggests where we begin depends on life circumstances, personal history, social context, historical situation and personal choice.  A number of different behaviors or experiences suggest one’s location on the ladder.  For example, Wilber observed that fear dramatically diminishes the longer one engages in the consciousness climb.

Personally, I’m more interested in the nature of the differences among individuals subscribing to different social structures and the hormonal associations with those social structure proclivities.  Measuring how enlightened someone is feels unnecessarily hierarchical and sort of anti-Zen.  Noting the difference between humans 200,000 years ago–hypothetically random-handed humans with no shift in cerebral functioning enhancing speech–and humans today, who are exhibiting varying degrees of random-handedness, sounds interesting and possibly useful. …

Elia and I occasionally jump into rented convertibles and go traveling to warmer climes where I make sand castles while surrounded by the sound of the ocean.

Elia is my 24-year old son.  This August we drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  I missed my turn in Indiana and we ended up taking the long way around through central Ohio, but that was OK.  The conversation was excellent moving through the wee Ohio hours, driving ‘til 3 a.m.  These cruises feel like the last of the days where I can afford the gas for the long haul.  Burning that much fossil fuel for pleasure also feels like a tenuous trade.

We were going to drive down to the Keys, but Elia suggested somewhere closer.  Good choice.  When we arrived in Myrtle Beach, we discovered that a tropical storm was headed toward Cuba and South Florida.

This trip continues a tradition I established in August of 1991 when I rented a Mustang and drove 3,000 miles in six days working out the emotion of a devastating divorce.  I was on a sand castle tour creating towers on beaches from Pensacola to St.  Pete and then back up through St. Augustine and…

Researcher Henry Jerison noted in 1973 that there was a consistent and evocative pattern in the brain-size relationship between predator and prey. The predator in any predator/prey partnership always had a bigger brain. Jerison concluded that the demands of catching another animal were far more exacting than eating foliage and avoiding being caught. Hunting required far more brains than running away.

The origin of thought is not about how big a brain humans might have needed to be successful hunters. What humans needed big brains for, as Geoffrey Miller has outlined, was to achieve sex opportunities. The same process that drove predator brain-size increases, in the case of humans, drove them to behave in ways that resulted in larger brains. What drove humans was the dance and the sounds that humans would make to accompany the dance, with the most evocative performers being picked more frequently as sexual partners.

A predator’s brain need be no bigger than what is required to catch prey. There is no biological incentive to add any more brain power than is absolutely necessary to survive. Humans, as far as we know, are the first species to revel in culture, thought, language and all its implications.…

Lucid dreaming is the process of being aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming.  The study of lucid dreaming was popularized by Carlos Castaneda. Scientist Stephen LeBerge conducted research and published discoveries as he explored lucid dream in the laboratory.  Lucid dreaming might be described as secular mysticism.  Repeated exposure to an experience of being part of something larger than yourself while at the same time identifying with that which is larger than yourself creates a convincing reproduction of spiritual experience.

In the works by Carlos Castaneda, Carlos is encouraged by Don Juan to experiment with the boundaries of dream until he is able to manifest miracles of dream in the actions of the everyday.  Less proactive but nonetheless satisfying, lucid dream over time can help one discover that in the everyday, as in dream, a person can experience a pervasive feeling that the world is being created every moment, in the now.

In Castaneda, lucid dream is passed down as part of aboriginal spiritual practice.  It has been hypothesized that waking life as experienced by the radically autistic may have several features in common with how a conventional person dreams.  Psychosis suggests an experience of being unable…

I am not a scientist.  I was trained as an artist.  Unconnected to an institution, with no allies in academia, and a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in art, I am not in a position to conduct experiments and publish papers.  My art form of late seems to be to create hypotheses derived from information available in the professional literature (published papers) without conducting proofs of what I hypothesize.

I talk in these blogs as if my theories are established because that is how they feel.  As an artist, not an academic, I am not burning allies if I’m wrong.  I’m not breaking academic rules.  I am not jeopardizing my career.  Tenure is not an issue.  The respect of my peers is not an issue.  Making sure I can continue to publish is not an issue.

I am playing.

I am playing and creating while engaged in the study of the nature of play and creation as it relates to human evolution.  Making believe while engaged in a study of make-believe is deeply congruent.  My methods juxtapose comfortably with what I explore.

Working outside of academia, I can ignore both the barriers between disciplines and the theory conventions that decide…

Designing and building websites that seek to encourage social change is more than a little bit like designing playgrounds for children with slides, ladders, jungle gyms and swings.  A difference is that when I am designing web applications about social transformation, I pay close attention to the principles of change; I seed the software with features that play upon the nature of biological, social, ontological and personal evolution.

When I was maybe nine years old, I went with my youngest sister, Gale, to the playground at the corner of the block.  Gale was four years old and had pink glasses with bluebirds at the temple.  New playground features had been added to the park.  One of them was a hefty plastic animal with a sort of saddle, embedded in a large, powerful, grounded spring that allowed for slow rocking back and forth.  Gale said she wanted to show me something and had me straddle a hippopotamus while standing on my feet instead of sitting on the hippo.  She stood in front of me and then slowly drew the plastic hippo to the ground, yanking the wooden handle coming out of its head.  She managed to draw it all the way…

I like to play with my life.  This is not particularly obvious to some people that know me as they observe the enormous amount of time I spend indoors at my laptop conducting business, talking to clients on the phone, emailing activists around the country, talking to activists on the phone….  I spend a lot of time emailing, reading emails and talking and listening on the phone.

Play follows trails while allowing itself to be led.  Wondering into the forest of an interesting idea, I occasionally come to the end of a small dirt path and have to either backtrack or just stroll into the underbrush.  These daily essays feel like just such a stroll.  I can’t see my feet because of all the foliage, but I feel the ground is firm, so I keep on going.  After a bit, I realize there happens to be a footpath where I am walking.  It just wasn’t evident at first.

When I say I play with my life, I mean that I pay attention to what feels interesting, what I feel attracted to.  I explore what feels neat.  A neotenous aspect of my personality is that I reflexively like and trust people. …

As an activist with an evolutionary focus, there is a particular way I go about engaging in intervention.  Evolution is all about connection.  Experiencing unfolding at multiple levels (personally, societally, biologically), I don’t feel a compulsion to make something happen, to cause change, to struggle for an equality.  I am not wrestling with opponents.  What I feel is an attraction to contribute to those places where my efforts can have an effect.  I experience relationship in the places where I intervene.  Like engaging in art or writing, there is an experience that I’m part of a process larger than myself.  An idea, an action, a strategic arc with related tactics draws me in as if it were seeking my attention.  Just as there is that ongoing conversation between my conscious and unconscious mind, there is an identical conversation between my conscious/unconscious and my environment that murmurs to me, like an always present river, about what it would be fun to do.

I’ve spent much of my life unconsciously sensitizing myself to these river whisperings as I’ve sought ways to transcend conventional barriers.  If in college I could convince two professors to allow me to keep a journal as part of…

Sasha the cat lived with us five years.  Five years of allergy hell for me.  Five years of furry heaven for my wife.  Sasha seemed thimble-sized when she arrived.  She was billed as hypoallergenic.  Not so.  Even when she was teeny, she had me wheezing.

It was maybe a year before we realized that Sasha thought she was a squirrel.  The neighbors had dogs, so she wasn’t too inclined to go exploring much past our little cement back yard, where she might have met others of her kind.  So, watching out the windows, she saw squirrels.  Wandering about the back yard, she saw squirrels.  And, as noted in the previous entry, it was not infrequent that she happened upon squirrels inside the house.  Squirrels were everywhere.  And so on occasions, Sasha would be seen gamboling back and forth across horizontal branches in the front or back yard, as she’d watched the squirrels do.

We noticed that the squirrels were growing familiar with Sasha.  I’d interpreted Sasha’s hiding and then pouncing on the squirrels as evidence of predatory behavior.  Yet, the squirrels always got away.  Slowly, I realized she was playing.  The squirrels understood.  Eventually, Sasha would sit and watch the…

I’m a squirrel trainer.  I don’t do this work professionally, which is a good thing, because I’m not a very good squirrel trainer.  But because I have little competition, this fact seems not to have mattered.  I began this avocation fifteen years ago when I grew intimate with Amber and Chunky, two squirrels that thrived on my block in Chicago.  Amber grew tame with time and eventually ate peanuts out of my hand.  The kids thought this was pretty nifty.  I put more attention into it.  Amber and Chunky eventually came when I whistled.  When Amber had babies, she brought them to our yard and introduced us.  The kids and I took to keeping all the neighbor cats out of our yard to keep the baby squirrels safe.  It was fun to see Amber swinging through a tree.  I’d whistle from the 3rd floor and watch her swing her head around to where I’d be leaning out a window.  She would make her way toward us, where I’d throw her a peanut, and she’d catch it.

We had to move from that house, taking up residence in the middle unit of an ancient British-style, five-unit row house with no air…

When I was a kid, my mom worked part-time in the local toy store, Wienecke’s.  I would stop there on the way home from school.  In the early grades, I’d stop and look at dinosaurs, seeking new ones to add to my collection.  Wienecke’s had a chemistry supply department.  When I was in sixth grade, the toy store ladies wondered at what experiments I was conducting that required so much saltpeter, sulfur and carbon.  I had a bomb-making laboratory in my basement. Creative ways to make loud noises was all the craze among my friends.  I was a poor chemist.  An arms manufacturer or terrorist I would not be.

I dreamed of when I would be old enough to work at the toy store as the gopher fix-it boy whose job it was to put together tricycles and wagons, run up and down the stairs and price inventory.  Finally, I achieved 16 and was offered the job after passing the grilling by the store matron, Ruth.  It was 1968.

My mom had been placed in a mental institution for a third time for manic-depression.  My parents’ divorce began.  The playful part of my personality was subdued.  One of the two…

In psychotherapeutic dynamics, attention offered to the presenting problem goes a long way toward providing an opportunity for the problem to transform.  Clients or patients are guided into an experience of accompanying themselves rather than engaging in a battle.  A paradox is revealed.  It could be concluded that the “problem” was not the person’s unconscious, but their conscious.  Once the patients deliberately choose to not confront or battle the part of them that they feel victimized by, but just let themselves be aware of that part, change is engaged.  The clients learn they can exercise choice.  Then, the clients learn to play.

The same principle is in play on the spiritual path.  Practitioners are provided opportunities to choose to observe rather than engage.  Students are encouraged to be watchful.  If there is struggle, there is the choice to be aware of the struggle.  An emphasis is placed on the ability to choose and the choice to choose to be aware.

Awareness is integral to an understanding of psychological and spiritual models of transformation.  It is also a major factor in social change.

The activist compulsion to bring media to an event is about bringing awareness of an issue to individuals…

Evolution manifests in at least four scales or levels:  biological, societal, ontological and personal.  A central theme of these entries is that there are powerful connections between the different scales that evolution uses to unfold.  One connection is that the different scales share the same processes, one of them being neoteny, which is part of heterochrony, or the principle of waves.

This work explores various conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, with a focus on what I’ve called left spectrum.  I believe that the theory or theories of evolution we consider inform our understanding of several medical conditions.  In other words, understanding exactly how we got to where we are can be very useful when addressing medical and psychological anomalies.

Another theme that carries through these entries is that science and spirituality are closely tied, particularly when exploring issues revolving around the unconscious and consciousness.  This work follows those connections to where they manifest in evolutionary theory, particularly where they link to discussions of art, play and creativity.

The study of neoteny in humans is also the study of creativity.  Studying how evolution is informed by creativity links to a number of areas, including story…

Between classes while I was going to college in St.  Petersburg, Florida, I drove over to the beach to make sand castles.  Surrounded by spires, a boy and his mom walking up the shoreline paused to look at what I was constructing.

“Look, Mom! That man’s making a sand castle!”

No one had ever called me a man before.  I was nineteen.  I was confused.  I was a man.  It was a boy that made this fact known.  It was while making sand castles that the truth arrived.

And so I define my life by how good I am at play.

The heterochronists of the 19th century that discovered and explored principles of biological evolution that included neoteny did not survive the ideological purge that occurred after Darwin’s theory of natural selection was accepted.  It’s as if spring arrived but only blossomed in the yards of people that had white houses, and then disappeared with an immediate return of winter.  Heterochrony includes the concept that evolution unfolds in a fashion that allows the features of embryos or infants to manifest later in ontogeny over time, while the lessons learned by adults are drawn from a vast, interconnected environment of interlocking…

We’ve learned several things developing over 20 independent online network websites designed to enhance communication and cooperation between activists working within local organizations.  What became obvious right away was that technology alone, without humans integrally involved at almost every level, would be ignored.  On a playground, the slides and swings are great additions.  It’s the humans having fun.

This winter, 130 Evanston citizens gathered to discuss the city, its inhabitants, local institutions and businesses reducing carbon footprints to comply with the Kyoto Accord targets.  People broke up into ten committees to discuss and plan how these changes could be made.  I volunteered to be on the communications/PR committee.

I found myself asking myself the same question many times in different ways.  How could a website best assist people to communicate with one another, encourage one another and provide information to one another in ways that made the process fun?

It’s been coming back to this point.  There are 130 people showing interest in the project.  There are about 60,000 people in this town.  What is the best way to use established networks while nurturing new relationships that connect these 130 people with the 60,000 people?

I sent out a survey…

Developmentally, narcissism is pretty early stuff.  It emerges with differentiation from the mother.  Not terribly attractive as a quality in adults, narcissism is an essential step in each of our progressions.  Some of us tend to carry it with us longer than others.  Some societies have difficulty viewing the world in non-narcissistic ways.

Still, there is a positive relationship between selfishness and compassion, narcissism and global consciousness that was not really clear to me until now.

Societies exhibit or express human individual developmental stages.  Ontogeny and society are closely tied.  A number of theorists over the last century have explored this relationship, including Gebser, Habermas and Wilber.  William Irwin Thompson’s books introduced me to the concept in the 70s.  There is a tendency to observe individual progress (ontogeny) and societal progress through the lens of a succession of stages.  Wilber has expressed consternation with the surges of narcissism that characterize American society.  To some it seems that the presence of this early developmental stage inhibits a societal transformation to an experience of a far wider identity, seeing oneself as a citizen of the world and the engaging of compassion in the decision-making process of world affairs.

Indeed, this seems to…

The revolution has been going on for some time now. It’s moving from the bottom up. As is usually the case, it begins with the young.

Neoteny is the process whereby the infant features of a species emerge in the adults of the descendants. For example, our chimpanzee-like infant progenitors had small jaws, big heads and big eyes, often walked upright and were extremely curious and playful. These features worked their way up in age with every descendant subspecies until, after several million years, they became features of human adults.

How “new” manages to appear later with time is a feature of the various scales of evolution or transformation: biology, society, ontogeny and biography. Very specific hormonal and neurological processes guide these transformations. Though the transformations of neoteny are all around us, perhaps because they are everywhere, they are difficult to see.

One of the most powerful characteristics of newborns and new beings steeped in the matrix of creativity and play is narcissism. This narcissism often masks the presence of the creative. This masking is particularly true when evident in adults, as we tend to pay less attention to the seeming selfishness of those lost in experiences of satisfactory self…

Writing these one-page, blog-format, daily entries, I find myself making a series of draping daisy chains.  Actually, when I was small, we used dandelions.  Perhaps a more exact metaphor would be the different colored construction paper chains we’d make for grammar school special occasions where we’d drape paper chains back and forth across the room.

With our little plastic scissors, we’d snip out a long rectangle from a sheet of heavy, colored paper.  Pasting Elmer’s on one side, we’d loop around the other end and hold the ends together until they stuck.  Then we’d slip the next chain inside the circle, paste one end, hold both sides firmly and continue the chain.

In each entry, I seek to take myself and the reader on a little journey.  Leaving home, I like to explore an idea, maybe note something new along the path, introduce the idea to another idea it may not have met and then carry the new relationship back home.

Having established a little circle, the next day I look for a starting place somewhere along the path of the previous day’s contribution.  Beginning the new circle within the older circle, I seek to carry myself and the reader…

Consider that a characteristic of awareness is that it is an integration of opposites.

Most humans are at least two distinct persons, or at least they feel or behave like that is true.  People argue with themselves, consider themselves their own worst enemy, are in internal conflict, have mixed feelings, feel torn, are of two minds, can’t make decisions, experience deep remorse, second guess themselves and often feel out of control of their own behavior.

Peace has been characterized by neither side winning, but both sides experiencing an embrace.  It takes two to be one, noting that when one arrives, the two don’t go away.

Observing/experiencing the dynamics of biological evolution, societal evolution, individual ontogeny and personal biography, I listen/feel for how awareness makes transitions.  As Darwin observed in his metaphor of many wedges, we are each always pushing against our boundaries, creating the opportunity for the environment to inform who we are and what we become.  This process of exploration, or play, occurs at all four evolutionary scales.  Awareness morphs depending on whether we are identified with many or the all, or a single, or as in the case of most people, a split twin.

This morphing of awareness…

It is not beyond consideration that the web is beginning to exhibit emergent characteristics that would suggest how intelligence evolves. Online, we can assume that consciousness exists. Hundreds of millions of consciousness derivations are behaving, invested in specific personal outcomes. Unexpected synergies are beginning to surface. Observing this online evolution, we might form tentative hypotheses on how earth’s biological infrastructure evolved.

Developing theories of biological evolution that presuppose that consciousness exists is not the same thing as presupposing that a mythological god intervened to both start the process of evolution and makes sure that the process unfolds to his or her satisfaction. Presupposing that consciousness exists, thinking outside the box of not considering god as a variable that you cannot isolate and weigh, you offer space for alternative conclusions. We tend to constrain our thinking by not taking into consideration the very thing that makes our thinking unique, consciousness, and the possibility that consciousness in not an emergent feature of evolution but the very instrumentation with which evolution plays, the ocean that the fish is unaware of.

In other words, instead of beginning your evolutionary theorizing by presupposing that god does not exist nor have influence on biological evolution, we…

I run a small web development firm. There are seven of us specializing in html design, website maintenance, PHP MySQL programming, email marketing, pay per click (Google Ad Words), tech support, server maintenance, email consultation and search engine optimization. Where possible, we try to spread the specialties around.

I’m the search engine optimization specialist. I have little tech facility but have skills in pattern manipulation and recognition. Engaged in search engine optimization (SEO), I weigh the specific variables the search engines use to decide how to rank a website and then design the site and provide links to the sites in ways that encourage search engines to give them higher rankings.

About seven years ago, I sort of fell into this portion of my profession as a result of creating high quality local retail directories for Chicago and local towns. I created the directories, loading them with links to local business websites to funnel traffic to my client websites. I’d give my clients free ads within the directories. The program worked well.

Over time, the directories themselves achieved higher and higher rankings in Google. They commonly ranked #1 in Chicago, making my clients happy, but they were also ranking in…

Somewhere there must be a hierarchy of humor set forth in a study that explores how what we find funny changes as we grow older.  The study would explore the humor of those who have delayed maturation–the autistic, for example–comparing it to what normal finds funny.  Uncovering jokes recorded over time, the study might look for patterns in what makes us laugh over the long haul during recorded history.  The study could research what aboriginals find funny and if there are patterns that cross continents in terms of tribal culture.

Let’s take funny seriously for a moment.

There are certain features of being human, though not always exclusive to our species, which deeply inform what exactly we might be.  I’m suspecting that humor and metaphor–often so closely related as to be indistinguishable–may reveal our origins and our evolution.

I think it has a lot to do with sensitivity to the anguish of being split.

Watching and listening to ontogeny, or growth of a child to adulthood, observing the autistic, studying evolution and examining my own consciousness, I would conclude that contemporary self-consciousness or split consciousness is pretty new.  Julian Jaynes suggests it emerged with recorded history.  Feiffer offers 50,000 years…

I’m a sand castle purist.  I use only my hands, drip/pancake style.  How I let the wet sand fall from my hand has everything to do with what takes form.  A hot sun, 85 or higher, is necessary to bake the sand quickly.  Having almost no wind is important to keep the tower detail intact.  Fine-grain shell sand is essential.  Rock sand will not do.

Engaged in the process of creating sandcastles, I’ve noticed a pattern in the emergence of new ideas.  New architectural forms rarely emerge in a day or three.  It takes all day devotion for almost a week before new kinds of towers start to spontaneously form.  When the novelty begins to flow, it’s not one interesting unique construction, but several.

Often, the surge of creativity follows an emotional low in the form of boredom/depression/disappointment.  I’ve noticed this effect in other times in my life.  The lows seem to release or hollow me out of present infatuations.  The space created allows the growth of something new.

There has been an observation among developmental biologists studying early human ontogeny on the repercussions of testosterone surges in embryos, infants and toddlers.  These surges “prune” brain growth.  It has been…

I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, for six years in the 70s.  It was there that I discovered that fine shell beach mixed with water contained the perfect properties for erecting four-foot towers of sand.  Sand castle construction is one of my passions.  I find it deeply satisfying at several levels.

In this blog, you’ll note my joy at shifting scales.  I travel biological evolution, societal transformation & political activism, ontogeny and personal change, observing the connections and correlations that emerge along the way.  This traveling is how I have fun.  Herman Hesse called something like this, the glass bead game.

I don’t imagine there has been a better period in history to watch the dynamic of change or transformation than this era that we’re living in.  Interesting times have ended.  Astonishing times are here.

Fascinated by evolution and transformation, I find myself in the web development profession.  Attracted to the crest of the wave of change, I am a social change/political activist.  I feel lucky to be living now when vast, raw patterns of creation are exposed and seemingly different disciplines or studies (biology, society, ontogeny, the self) are revealed to be playing the same melody in different scales.…