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

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

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

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

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

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

“In addition to extramarital sex, premarital promiscuity and trial marriage may also alter the paternity probability.  Indeed, at least one cross-cultural study suggests that in matrilineal-matrilocal societies sanctions against premarital sex, when they exist, are quite mild, whereas such sanctions are severe in patrilineal-patrilocal societies.  (Goethals 1971).  Although premarital sex is especially tolerated in matrilineal societies (e.g., Malinowski 1929), unwed mothers and illegitimacy leading to lower probabilities of paternity are not tolerated…In most matrilineal societies divorce is reported to be quite frequent, and can be initiated by either party without social stigma.”  (Kurland, J. A., “Paternity, Mother’s Brother, and Human Sociality,” in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior:  An Anthropological Perspective, N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds.) (North Scituate:  Duxbury Press, 1979), pp. 160-1.)

A fair amount gets written on changes in the nuclear family, increased divorce, marrying later, few kids, abortion, contraception, women becoming more fully employed outside the home, and now women often retaining jobs because they are often paid less, with their male colleagues getting let go.  Not so much gets written about how this influences general social frames of reference.  I hypothesize we are experiencing a dramatic shift from a patrifocal to a matrifocal foundation.  Intuitions for how the commons positively impacts our life are becoming ubiquitous vs. the expectation that hierarchy will always be.  Nevertheless, the shift suggests more than a little bit that we are also experiencing a synthesis, an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal points of view.  The synthesis is difficult to describe, to verbalize, particularly because most don’t understand we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in social structure.

This shift we are in the middle of gets described in lots of different ways.  Social structure is not just an anthropological principle, but a biological dynamic.  It is extremely rare that current changes in society are described as biological shifts.  Two reasons jump out that support the difficulty we have in seeing social changes as biological.  First, it’s been over 6,000 years since the Indo-Europeans rode horses out of Southern Russia and changed the world.  It’s rare that a Westerner views social structure as still integral to understanding current trends.  Riane Eisler is one of the few with deep understanding in this area.

Second, biological anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists and others that describe confluence between biology and anthropology view evolution from primitive society to modern society as a succession of stages followed by different peoples across the world while at the same time they assign a universality of neurology and consciousness to all peoples, denigrating interpretations of integral differences between “primitive” and modern.  The net result of suggesting that some cultures are more evolved than others, while at the same time stating we are all the same, obfuscates real differences among people.  Of particular importance are social structure differences and the possible real physical, neurological and hormonal variation that accompanies difference in social structure.

A net result is a deep difficulty in our ability to interpret our own position (physically, neurologically and hormonally) as informed by social structure.  We don’t seem to get that evolution is integrally tied to social structure, and that we as individuals and as a society are evolving.

Whether we live in a matrifocal society, a patrifocal society, or an integration of the two is huge.  Right now we are in transition.  Media do not describe the battle as one between social structures, or, from a Wilberian perspective, as a battle between societal maturation scales.  My explanatory paradigm offers a cyclic perspective, featuring the push and pull of neoteny and acceleration over generations.  The Wilberian/Habermas/Gebser paradigm looks at change from a linear, pyramidal position that nevertheless integrates many of the insights of the cyclic dynamic.  Both interpretations work.  One is more matrifocal or immanent in its perspective.  The other is more patrifocal or transcendent in its point of view.  Go far enough into either one and you come out the other side, inside the other.

Matrifocal/patrifocal, immanent/transcendent.  There exists an integration of the two.  That integration is where we as a society are headed.  We get closer with every spiral round in our evolution.

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.

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

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

An interesting primate study was as follows…

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

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

How specifically is testosterone expression selected for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding autism is at the heart of this orchestral theory of evolution.  If this theory does explain how autism emerges and offers interventions that can improve the lives of those that feel inhibited by the condition, then there is the chance that several dozen conditions and diseases may be addressed by using the principles outlined in this work.  My premise is that autism is a condition that features male maturational delay and, in females, acceleration.  Social structure, neurological anomalies and endocrinological differences are all integral to autism and Asperger’s etiology.   By adjusting our theory of evolution to take into consideration how exactly maturation rates and timing are influenced by social structure and the environment, the causes of autism and the causes of a number of other conditions and diseases are possibly made clear.

Autism does not have just one cause.  Perhaps there are several different etiologies and autism will acquire several different names when the different causes are uncovered.  The particular evolutionary dynamic I describe in this work describes exactly how one kind of autism emerges, under what circumstances and in which kinds of families.  I focus on three specific causes of autism that are directly connected to an underlying evolutionary matrix, a collection of processes that influence physical and mental health in a number of areas.  Though I concentrate on autism, this work represents a new theory of medical etiology, removing natural selection from its present station as all that doctors know.  In its place, I offer a number of tools that have the potential to make medical diagnosis an evolutionary intervention.  Consider that if we understand that how we treat our bodies and what we are exposed to compel the evolutionary trajectory of progeny, with repercussions for both ourselves and our children, then understanding health becomes the same as how we choose to evolve.

There are three main variables that impact autism.  This blog discusses contemporary changes in social structure, environmental influences and the blending of two parents with no recent common forebears.

Social structure is huge.  Contemporary theorists have been blind to the effects of an emerging matrifocal society.  They are so focused on what seems the default convention, patrifocal social structure.  The mind blindness described by Baron-Cohen that offers a window to understanding autism serves as a societal metaphor when it comes to understanding that patrifocal social structure is but one of two primary social structure paradigms.  Blind to the emergence of the power of women in contemporary society, we don’t notice the repercussions of that change.  The delay of maturation in males is one such repercussion.  I describe specifically how this happens.

There are at least eight variables that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen, often changing those levels differently, if not in opposite fashions, in men and women.  Changing uterine testosterone levels impacts maturation rates, delaying or accelerating the lifelong maturation rates of progeny.  Adjusting estrogen levels has the potential to impact the timing of maturation processes, resulting in dramatically different neurological structure.  This work explores how changes in environmental variables influence autism, Asperger’s and other conditions.

Darwin noted that mated variants of the roc pigeon, bred separately in China and Europe over 2,000 years, created chicks that revealed features of their 2,000-year-old roc pigeon progenitor.  Modern breeders combine variants that are not closely related in order to create “hybrid vigor,” bringing forward some of the strength of ancestors.  If humans acquired facility with spoken language at about the same time we departed Africa, then mating ethnic persuasions that have had almost no contact over many thousands of years may produce children revealing features of their last common ancestor.  This may result in gifted progeny like Barack Obama.  It may also lead to children with difficulty speaking or who are unable to achieve split consciousness without the kind of guidance and stimuli that their ancestors received.

I am proposing that autism is a social condition that is impacted by the environment.  By understanding autism, not only can we grasp how humans evolved, but we can form a deeper understanding around what it is to be human.  If an understanding of consciousness is integral to understanding evolution, and if this orchestral theory of evolution satisfactorily defines the variables that have impact, then autism is a good place to begin as we seek a way to make this theory useful.

I expect that if this new theory I am presenting here is embraced by enough interested individuals, it will evolve to something different as the criteria that a theory be useful propels practitioners in new directions.  It is important that a theory be fun.  If it’s fun, then we have our unconscious invested and aboard.  With the unconscious as guide, the theory will change.  Consciousness is all about creation.

In the case of sexual selection, I have the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) to detail what I am thinking.  Miller doesn’t believe neoteny influences human evolution in an important way.  Miller is an evolutionary psychologist.  He believes that the simpler explanation is likely more useful.  Nevertheless, Miller adroitly describes human evolution impacted by sexual selection.  My variation of Miller’s thesis is as follows:

1) Natural selection
2) Sexual selection (selecting for pattern when seeking a mate)
3) Human sexual selection (selection for novel pattern when seeking a mate)
4) Art (selecting for novel pattern outside of mate selection)
5) Awareness of the selection, or creative, process

I believe that a familiarity with social structure is integral to understanding the power of sexual selection to propel these transitions.  Implied is a hierarchy, or meta-evolution, of evolutionary processes, beginning with natural selection.  Sexual selection follows natural selection.  Where it gets particularly interesting is when human sexual selection begins a focus on novelty or aesthetics, probably in the form of rhythm and dance.  What we call culture, step 4, represents a sexualization of experience, with a focus on novelty itself becoming assigned to experience.  Symbol itself, language, emerges from sexual selection rhythm-and-dance grounded rituals to become what we call culture, but it probably is in no small way almost all about procreation.  Step 5 emerges when we split consciousness beings begin to integrate our two separated selves, becoming aware of the relationship between consciousness, sexuality and the creative process.

This five-step process is a slimmed-down explanation of the evolution of evolutionary process, concentrating on sexual selection in particular.  I believe this to be a useful abbreviation because it offers a cogent doorway into the integration that this work seeks to share.  Over the course of this blog I step in and out of the central thesis of this work from several doorways, hoping the reader will acquire a feeling for the music that guides this work, like one who is learning dance steps.  Though I have described this thesis as subtle and complex, like a work of Bach, it is mostly a case of the theory just feeling unfamiliar.  Bach, complex, nevertheless can feel familiar.  Experiencing human evolution as a five-step dance is one way we can move to evolution’s music.

“Before Agassiz, recapitulation had been defined as a correspondence between two series: embryonic stages and adults of living species.  Agassiz introduced a third series: the geologic record of fossils.  An embryo repeats both a graded series of living, lower forms and the history of its type as recorded by fossils.  There is a “threefold parallelism” of embryonic growth, structural gradation, and geologic succession.  ‘It may therefore be considered as a general fact, very likely to be more fully illustrated as investigations cover a wider ground, that the phases of development of all living animals correspond to the order to succession of their extinct representatives in past geological times.  As far as this goes, the oldest representatives of every class may then be considered as embryonic types of their respective orders of familiar among the living.’”  (1857, 1962 ed., p. 114)  (Stephen J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge:  Belknap Press, 1977), pp. 65-66.)

Stephen J. Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny lies at the heart of many of the interconnecting concepts of this thesis.  Ontogeny and Phylogeny made sense of many of the disciplines I’d been studying for many years, showing how evolutionary theory informs many levels of experience.  Central to Gould’s thesis was the work of the Neo-Lamarckian heterochronists that explored how evolution manifested at several scales represented by several emerging science disciplines and those theorists’ influence on discipline founders such as Freud and Piaget.  Recapitulation was integral to an understanding of how many academics viewed the world.

Recapitulation, or more specifically, Haeckel’s thesis that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, has been set aside as a theory that if not totally disproven, is a theory that is not useful when exploring how species evolve.  Haeckel behaved as though obsessed with what he called acceleration, or ancestor adult features emerging in descendant young.  Theorists a hundred years ago often focused on a particular heterochronic dynamic as the prime mover and shaker of species transformation.  Many of these theorists carried a presupposition that evolution occurs at several contiguous levels or scales, informed by one of these particular heterochronic processes, often recapitulation.  This blog’s orchestral theory of evolution instead posits a balance of process, featuring both neoteny and acceleration, a process that manifests at the biological, social, ontogenetic and personal scales of experience, informed by testosterone and estrogen, driven by social structure and the environment.

The proponents of Wallace’s version of the theory of natural selection, a theory of natural selection that rejected sexual selection and Lamarckian selection, also rejected Haeckel’s Lamarckian-grounded work that focused on a close relationship between ontogeny and species evolution.  It is Wallace’s world view we embrace today.  Darwin was a pluralist.  Wallace was a reductionist (with the exception that he believed that deity intervened to create the brain).  The current Neo-Darwinian era has focused on how answers provided by other theories could be instead explained by the theory of natural selection.  If natural selection could explain it, the others answers were ignored.

Rather than continuing to ignore theories that seem redundant to a more elegant solution, I am returning to a world view characterized by an attraction to observing what may at first seem like unrelated processes in different scales and disciplines.  Over the last 150 years, we have divided the scales of experience into different academic disciplines and subdisciplines, dramatically increasing the difficulty of intuiting similarities, particularly when different languages and nomenclatures have emerged.  Part of the process of forming the theory that this work represents has been to dive into several different disciplines to draw out isomorphisms or similar patterns that reveal hidden, common structure and process.

There are benefits.  Again, presupposition can be a powerful tool when swimming in unfamiliar waters.  An ontological discovery can illuminate a species’ evolutionary process, and vice versa.  A species’ evolutionary dynamic can offer a social transformation insight.  A personal revelation in one’s own life may reveal an ontological connection.  This work explores the usefulness of viewing species evolution, social transformation, growth maturation and development, and personal experience as deeply informing one another’s experience.

Parallelisms run rife through culture.  Still, science has difficulty growing in directions that society and politics don’t suggest.  For example, without the recent (over the last 200 years) idea of progress it would be difficult to hypothesize patterns of transformation over time.  The reverse is true.  In the West, we are so narrative/sequence time-based that it is difficult to evaluate processes that occur at several levels in a single moment.  Hence our blanking out as a society to the understanding that biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience are all integrally tied in the moment we occupy, a moment profoundly affected by the environment.

Biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience are not just closely tied; they are the same thing viewed with adjustments in time and scale.  Reductionists have become obsessed with how things are divided.  By offering our attention to how seemingly different scales of experience reflect one another’s process and influence one another’s behaviors, we can begin to understand relationships intuited by theorists a century ago.

What I am calling “The Orchestral Theory of Evolution” is a feminine theory of evolution insofar as both sexes share the ability to inform change and both foundation hormones have profound impact.  “Feminine” suggests sharing and cooperation.  In the context of evolutionary theory, a feminine paradigm is a cooperative paradigm with both a male and female command of process.

Nevertheless, from our Western perspective, provide a woman any control in a hierarchical context where men have traditionally called the shots, and the female anomaly often receives negative attention.  Evolutionary theory traditionally focuses on the male.  Some exceptions with a focus on the female have emerged over the last 40 years, mostly from female theorists, but so long as our primary paradigm is Darwin’s theory of natural selection supporting survival of traits emerging in a random context, the female cooperative-and-sharing paradigm is framed in a male, competitive milieu.

Part of what is wholly new in what I am presenting is a balanced female/male perspective.  I place a heavy emphasis on the impact of those environmental and social structure influences that adjust levels of estrogen and testosterone, changing the rate and timing of an individual’s experience, ontogeny, societal change and species evolution.  Whereas the changing of rates, influenced by changing levels of testosterone, generates archetypal transformations, the changing of timing, managed by adjusting levels of estrogen, controls testosterone-informed rates of change.

In other words, this is a theory of evolution that suggests that the feminine governs the masculine rather than the other way around.

Whether timing governs rate or rate governs timing is really a nonuseful distinction.  They both influence each other, with biological and social systems offering feedback between the two that makes it difficult if not impossible to assign a beginning to any point within the system.  Still, it feels fun to congregate power in the hands of the cooperative polarity.

This feminine theory of evolution seeks to show how the neoteny/acceleration paradigm informs change at four scales (biology, society, ontogeny, biography), parsing out how changes in the timing of processes influence the rate of change.  For example, too little body fat and not enough estrogen at puberty will prolong puberty, with a number of repercussions.  This work hypothesizes that varying levels of estrogen in infants inform testosterone surges, which influence left hemispheric synapse pruning, thus impacting cerebral lateralization and degrees of split consciousness or self awareness, encouraging conditions featuring exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration, such as autism.  In other words, estrogen may manage the extreme maleness that Baron-Cohen suggests the autistic have too much of.

This work outlines the influence of estrogen on social structure.  Understanding social structure is integral to understanding both biological evolution and social evolution.

I also explore the relationship between estrogen and the dynamics of sexual selection, which is closely related to social structure.  Estrogen levels may be determining both the intensity of mate selection criteria (higher levels compelling a more determined choice) and the degree of focus on the young.  Estrogen not only decides which male features get passed to the next generation but may determine the likelihood of progeny survival by influencing how much attention is directed toward those progeny.

Is there a direct relationship between robust female sexual selection, with a compulsion to judge male features, and a deep desire to care for the young?  If estrogen levels inform one, are tendencies toward the other enhanced?

In a “feminine” theory of evolution, these are the kinds of questions I am asking.  If heterochrony is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, then those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determine the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution. Following these rate-and-timing pathways sends this work in several related directions.  One of the most interesting paths is the one where we need a woman to serve as guide.

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.

“Again, masculine characters generally lie dormant in male animals until they arrive at the proper age for procreation.  The curious case formerly given of a Hen which assumed the masculine characters, not of her own breed but of a remote progenitor, illustrates the close connection between latent sexual characters and ordinary reversion.”  (The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Charles Darwin, 1868, V2, p. 394)

Freud was inspired by his contemporary evolutionary biological theorists to take the emerging paradigm equating the fossil record displaying species transformation with embryology and cultural variation.  Biology, ontogeny and society were thought to be allied.  Western prejudices assumed aboriginals were less “evolved.”  They were looking at evolution as a process displaying “progress.”  Nevertheless, this threefold parallelism was embraced by many a hundred years ago.  Freud added a fourth layer by theorizing that individual human development could follow pathways, influenced by incidents over the course of a lifetime, that would align themselves with paths at the biological, social and ontological scales.  Central to Freud’s thesis was the power of adult reversion to early developmental stages to then have early childhood (and earlier human-society) features manifest in the lives of adults, informing their behavior and experience.

Darwin and Freud were fascinated by reversion.

Contemporary evolutionary and psychodynamic theorists tend not to concentrate on patterns that suggest a withdrawal to former times.  This is partly a result of a liberal prejudice that societies are all the same, revealing no evolutionary dynamic, and that evolution is only about the gene.  The government and insurance companies work together to compel psychotherapists to come up with very quick solutions, using drugs when possible, that can address problems without long-term interventions.  Interventions are often ignored that take time and require a stepping-back into past experiences while feeling securely accompanied so that past experiences can feel embraced and integrated.  The net result of an anthropology that often ignores fundamental difference based upon evolutionary principles, an evolutionary biology that focuses on incremental random processes and psychotherapeutic interventions limited to what insurance companies will tolerate is an ignoring of the relationship between ancient time and present transformation and the connection between seemingly different disciplines that actually share the same dynamic on different scales.

A result of our peculiar refusal to experience ourselves as part of a larger whole, passengers in narratives with informative pasts, is a difficulty observing conditions and diseases with obvious evolutionary implications.  This is complicated by our having embraced only one of Darwin’s theories, his theory of natural selection.  Darwin was working on three theories when Wallace, in 1858, compelled Darwin to prematurely publish.  I say prematurely because Darwin noted a number of anomalies that did not fit the theory of natural selection.  He broke out these various exceptions into two additional theories, sexual selection and pangenesis.  An integration of all three theories did not emerge.  Nevertheless, he described in detail hundreds of exceptions to natural selection, many directly related to reversion.

In just the way that Freud suggested that past or present trauma could compel the contemporary emergence of past features, earlier developmental stages in the adult phase of development, Darwin focused on what exactly could be causing the emergence of past species’ features in contemporary individuals.  In addition, it seemed to Darwin, if we understood the processes that led to the reemergence of ancient traits, we might gain insight into how new traits are developed.

As is often the case with gifted scientists, Darwin was obsessed with anomaly.  What didn’t fit suggested answers.  As his discipline evolved, it instead occurred that evolutionary anomaly was explained as a result of individual adaptation, compelling species trajectories solely justified by natural selection.

Following Darwin’s death, there emerged a whole evolutionary biological discipline devoted to changes in species over time, changes seeming to follow specific trajectories, often by reversion.  These were the heterochronists.  Noted were tendencies for ancestor infant features to appear in adult descendants and the reverse, ancient adult features emerging in embryonic descendants.  Reversion was integral to this new paradigm.  Anomalies that Darwin was fascinated by were studied closely by these Neo-Lamarckian theorists.

Perhaps it’s time we moderns consider that there is much our precursor theorists might know.  Darwin’s focus on anomalies in the context of different discipline parallelisms, integrated with the discoveries of the heterochronists that suggested answers to many of Darwin’s reversion questions, in combination with recent endocrinological discoveries, together suggest solutions to contemporary riddles.

Sometimes you have to take a step back to go forward.  Instead of continuing to ignore anomalies, it’s time we step back to old science paradigms while feeling securely accompanied with recent discoveries so that past insights can feel embraced and integrated.

A new paradigm requires an integration with the past.