“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.

I received an email from Elaine Morgan, popularizer of the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and the author of several books on human evolution, including The Descent of Woman.  Morgan recommended that I read the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.  She suggested I read Mother and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

“The paradigm shift away from thinking of our Pleistocene ancestors as reared by all-nurturing chimpanzee-like mothers, and toward thinking of them as apes with species-typical shared care, has been slow in coming.  Only in the past decade has cooperative breeding’s implications for attachment theory begun to be addressed, and its evolutionary implications taken into account.”  (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 113.)

Hrdy discusses the influence of the alloparent in detail, describing the profound uniqueness of the human species, where mothers share infant intimacy with other females (and occasionally males) from the first day on.  This is unheard of in other great ape species.  Many things are implied.  Hrdy concentrates on how natural selection reinforces a cooperation theory-of-mind paradigm that allows a larger number of progeny to survive in communities where child-rearing is a community event.  For Hrdy, coming from a natural selection theorizing background, natural selection alone explains how humans evolved an ability to identify with another person as compassion became a highly useful feature.

Two things jump out at me.  First, sexual selection seems to be of relatively little importance in Hrdy’s hypothesis.  Neoteny is not mentioned.  With a default assumption that natural selection is how things transform, there is no awareness that many of the features that Hrdy describes reveal neotenous trends.  Though she discusses the influence of matriarchy, this is not integrated into an understanding of how matriarchy encourages specific kinds of evolution, particularly those kinds of evolution leading to the features that Hrdy is paying the closest attention to.  Matrifocal social structure encourages cooperative societies.  Instead of exploring the conditions that support matrifocal social structure, Hrdy commits the usual sociobiological sin of assuming that only natural selection is in play.  (Geoffrey Miller’s work would be the exception.)

Placing a heavy emphasis on alloparent intervention keeping our species alive, Hrdy neglects to make the connection between neoteny and social structures that support alloparents.  In other words, Hrdy’s work supports matrifocal human evolution.

No doubt this is just the beginning of my exploration of Hrdy’s work in connection with my Orchestral Theory of Evolution.  Thank you, Elaine, for sending me in Hrdy’s direction.

Second, considering that autism features individuals exhibiting the characteristics of our evolutionary forebears, and noting that the environment and child-rearing practices of those forebears might be what current autistics are craving, I’ve hypothesized that diet, rhythm, dance, touch and performance may all be necessary to those with autism.  Reading Hrdy’s book, it strikes me that perhaps an autistic neurology requires constant multiple parents, several persons to form attachments with.  For a child to feel part of society, perhaps it is neurologically necessary that several central females be engaged from birth.  Hrdy notes that in primitive societies, though the babies may travel among several persons over the course of a day, the baby sleeps with the mother at night.  It is also possible that an autistic individual requires close contact with a central figure through the night.

As it becomes clearer how exactly we evolved, we may evolve a deeper understanding for how we can adjust the environment of particular humans having difficulty adjusting to current society.

I’ve described two neurological archetypes in my work on human evolution, autism and current social transformations. There is the male, maturationally delayed, and the female, accelerated, and both are matrifocal, often left-handed, leaning toward autism, inclined toward primary process and inclined toward being simultaneous thinkers. The other neurological archetype includes the familiar male who is maturationally accelerated and the female who is delayed (neotenous), and both are patrifocal, narrative-thinking, split-brained, normal right-handers. I’ve recently been playing with the idea that each displays a unique form of imagination, with primary process individuals exhibiting abilities to perceive and integrate larger patterns contrasted with split-brain thinkers that can easily imagine what does not exist while establishing the steps to get there.

What I’m considering at this particular moment is what might be occurring when a primary process thinker is introduced in childhood to split-brain thinking conventions, or the opposite, when a split-brain thinker is guided or propelled into how a primary process thinker thinks. For me, there is something similar to the life work of an artist, who is seeking to integrate seemingly incompatible polarities. It strikes me that by understanding the world by the way the world is perceived and processed, and offering ways that these two basic paradigms can relate, we might be encouraging a healthy integration.

It may be often the case that those artists and theorists that achieve success in their chosen avocations or professions are those individuals that have accidentally or unconsciously found ways to perceive and interpret information considered from both a primary process and a split-brain perspective. I have hypothesized that our society evolved from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame and is now headed back to matrifocal, though in many ways what we are experiencing currently is integration. I’m hypothesizing that one way to approach how unique thinkers think is to consider that some individuals experience and exhibit an integration of both primary process and split-brain thinking processes.

It is my guess the integration is often not without stress. In just the way the artist in the West often acts as an example or symbol of the difficulty of synthesis between community and self, or the other ways of describing the existential polarities that we as humans wrestle with, those individuals that discover an ability to live in both primary process and split-brain worlds probably often experience the relationship as a struggle.

An example of two forms of imagination integration might be aboriginal children with natural primary process thinking inclinations that are raised in a Western home by split-brain parents, except that the parents are artists, and the home features an extended family with a mother’s sister and a mother’s mother living in the house. A net result might be an environment somewhat neurologically (and socially) familiar, with constant exposure to what may feel like a complementary opposite neurological condition. The children may become adults with a facility to intuit big picture, simultaneous, interconnected understanding with step-by-step abilities to achieve goals by imagining something that does not yet exist.

A perhaps more familiar example might be one that approximates the artist paradigm in Western culture. Consider a primary process thinker, a left-handed person, with left-handed parents. Borderline autistic, an Asperger’s candidate, this person is traumatized in early childhood and finds himself or herself withdrawing, except the world that he or she withdraws into features an enormous number of words. This person discovers that words are effective at creating a security zone isolating personal experience from a threatening environment. The person becomes an avid reader and uses his or her global imagination to fill the world up with the images his or her words create. Nevertheless, as a primary process thinker, community feels essential, resulting in a vivid imagination devoted to an imagined community, a community featuring many interconnections.

I hypothesize two neurological archetypes with few overt pathways toward integration of the two frames of reference. Some people, over the course of their life, experience various degrees of integration. Sometimes this occurs in an atmosphere characterized by love and affection. Sometimes this occurs in atmospheres featuring distress and misunderstanding. Both situations can result in individuals with enhanced abilities to serve society.

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“Not surprisingly, males of pair-bonding bird species have been shown to undergo an endocrinological shift to lower testosterone levels in parallel with the behavioral shift from territorial defense and mate attraction to parental behavior. Manipulations that evoke territorial responses in nesting males, such as playing the song of an invading male, both undermine parental behavior and lead to an increase in testosterone….Recently evidence has even begun to accumulate suggesting that lower testosterone levels may be typical of human males in stable mating relationships and perhaps even lower levels in men who are fathers of infant children.” (p. 70)

“…This led to the ‘challenge hypothesis,’ which states: high plasma levels of testosterone occur during periods of social instability in the breeding season (resulting from male-male competition for territories and mates) but are at a lower breeding baseline in stable social conditions thus allowing paternal care to be expressed.” (p. 83)

“Furthermore, there is growing evidence that patterns of testosterone in tropical species that may have long breeding seasons are very different from northern species (Goymann et al., 2004). Tropical species with long breeding seasons tend to have extremely low levels of testosterone that generally do not change markedly with social challenges.” (p. 85)

In 1998, I hypothesized that when there are great apes with larger testicles, suggesting males competing with other males in an environment characterized by female choice, with sperm production becoming more important than muscle mass, the testosterone levels would decrease even though the testicles were larger. Testes produce both sperm and testosterone. I calculated that an emphasis on one would diminish the other. Gorillas have small testicles and patrifocal male control of procreation. Bonobo have large testicles with a matrifocal, horizontal social structure.

The passages above suggest a relationship between testosterone production and social structure. Even testosterone fluctuations within an individual over time suggest that different procreation strategies are accompanied by different testosterone levels. If male testosterone levels are instrumental in the choices made at any time regarding degrees of cooperation or family orientation, and testosterone levels inform maturation rates, then there is a direct connection between social structure, maturational delay and acceleration.

For reasons I do not really understand, there seems to be little academic attention directed toward the possibility that testosterone manages rates of maturation. Testosterone is associated with handedness, and left-handedness is associated with low testosterone. Left-handedness is associated with maturational delay. Yet, testosterone is rarely visited as related to maturational acceleration and delay. Even further from the minds of theoreticians is the possible influence of estrogen on the timing of the rates of maturation. Grasping that seems to require an understanding of how maturation rates change under the influence of testosterone.

Human and nonhuman endocrine systems are moved by countless different variables in turn influenced by myriad environmental effects. Nevertheless, it seems central that social structure, which deeply influences evolution, is guided by a balance between testosterone and estrogen levels. These levels change according to the season, the environment and the circumstances of life. As these changes occur, maturation rates and timing transform and evolution happens.

What I’ve been playing with the last year and a half is the idea that biology and history are connected by social structure, and that teleology exists but is biologically informed.

The Hegelian view of history was predicated on pattern and predictable changes in pattern over time.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection was founded on an opposite view of the effects of time, stating that change occurred only when heritable, randomly generated features compelled a proliferation of traits that served to promote the goals of individuals to survive to procreate.  Evolution displays no thesis and antithesis unless they are represented by every mating pair.

Perhaps ironically, the theory of natural selection does not operate in a narrative frame.  I say ironically because the foundation thesis has been interpreted to support Social Darwinism and free markets, which promote that story, or narrative, that controlling elites are the result of natural processes.  Two pieces were left out of that not-useful story.

First, the free market interpretations of the theory of natural selection don’t view evolution from a larger scale.  Interconnection is ignored when focus is on survival strategies of constituent parts.  Marx’s Hegelian large-scale view provided leverage that transcended capitalist focus on individual achievements.  Whether evolution or societies are being studied, the scale of investigation can determine the solutions that emerge.

Second, interconnection is not only observed by an increase in scale, it is experienced by immersion in the process.  The experience of interconnection removes narration from the equation, introducing the experiencer to the feeling of an ever-present now, autistic primary process.  Compassion often results from the twin experience of interconnection viewed as a whole and interconnection felt from immersion.  When boundaries blur but sensitivity to scale remains, insight can result.  Compassion is a feature of integrated insight.

In a Hegelian fashion, I have proposed that we are in the middle of a social transformation that features a synthesis of two foundation principles.  I hypothesize that we evolved over the last, at least, two million years in a matrifocal, matrilineal/matrilocal context.  That swerved to patrifocal, patrilineal/patrilocal over the last 50,000, accelerating in the last 25,000 to start rocketing the last 6,000.  A slowdown began maybe 500 years ago.  A return to matrifocal commenced the last 300 with an acceleration occurring in the last 100.  In this latest generation, things are rocketing.  We could interpret current patterns as a synthesis of the two social structures, or as the reemergence of the matrifocal.  Both interpretations make sense.

Oscillations between social structures go with the territory of being an evolving social being.  Different social structures serve different animal societies in different ways.  Evolution charts social structure changes as the environment and social structure impact individuals.  Environmental influence is huge.  As regards humans, trends over time as humans ally themselves with social structure compel trajectories that simulate teleology.  It looks like a transcendental god is in play.  What is happening is biology.  Hierarchies rise and now fall in direct relation to biological imperatives.  Hierarchies rose for thousands of years under patriarchal frames of reference, high testosterone males and low testosterone females.  Now they fall.

Somehow, Hegelian narrative interpretations of experience and non-narrative primary process interpretations are both true at the same time.  Patrifocal transcendental and matrifocal immanent paradigms are both in play.  Evolution unfolds at several scales at the same time.  We both live in a return to matrifocal times and we are experiencing a synthesis of traditional patrifocal and ancient matrifocal.  Somehow, that which is aboriginal that is reemerging is also wholly new.

Understanding how things are different is somehow also the same as understanding how they are the same.

“Juveniles and adults of these dinosaurs look very, very different from adults, and literally may resemble a different species,” said dinosaur expert Mark B. Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.  ”But some scientists are confusing morphological differences at different growth stages with characteristics that are taxonomically important.  The result is an inflated number of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.”

In the article, Goodwin’s associate, John “Jack” Horner, says, “Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth, which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”

Horner associates neoteny with sociality, suggesting that animals that congregate throughout their lives exhibit neotenous characteristics.  I wish I knew more about these areas.  My next question is:  Are there specific social structures associated with those animals that group in flocks and herds?

If it is true that in animals, when neoteny emerges as influential in the way ancient species appear, we can assume that these are social animals, then can we also assume particular social structures were in play?  If this is the case, and social structures are influenced by the environment, then this supports an ability to possibly examine not only species alive today, but ancient species like the ones that Goodwin and Horner describe, in a context of environment and social structure informing evolution.

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.

What I’m trying to get a feel for here is how universal, exactly, are the principles that I’m playing with.  I keep seeing signs, smelling flavors that call my attention to this alternative frame of reference.  The Goodwin-Horner study suggests that neotenous features suggest flock/herd inclinations.  Prolonging the features of infancy, dependency and close attention on the mother into the adult of species encourages social behaviors.  How clear is the pattern that species that congregate exhibit greater neoteny than those that don’t?  The implications of that suggestion are profound.  Frankly, outside my exploring this in connection to humans, it is not something I’ve ever considered, except in the context of social structure.

What exactly are the social structure predilections of congregating, herd and flock species?

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“He [Darwin] was prevented from harvesting all the fruits of his fertile imagination because he did not follow through with the logic of his own argument – to discover how female choice influenced the origin of the hominids; that is, to show how sexual selection was important at the very onset of human evolution.  Because of an unfortunate blind spot engendered by his own cultural background, Darwin was unable to explicate the necessary interrelationships and carry his own work on to its more logical conclusion.”  (Nancy M. Tanner, On Becoming Human (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 167.)

Charles Darwin suggested the possibility that humans were descended from tribal cultures characterized by matrifocal social structures that were driven by female sexual selection.  He referenced Morgan’s writings.  After suggesting the possibility, he rejected it as being incongruent with his experience of contemporary and primitive society, featuring a focus on male hierarchical dominance patterns with a complementary pattern of female compliance.  If Darwin had instead embraced what he rejected, it is unlikely that the history of evolutionary theory would have been changed.  Female sexual selection was almost ignored for 100 years.  It is with the work of Geoffrey Miller (2000) that sexual selection theory integrated with evolutionary psychology achieves a robust acceptance.  Charles Darwin’s vision transcended not only his contemporaries, but his culture.

“Nevertheless, from the strength of the feeling of jealousy all through the animal kingdom, as well as from the analogy of the lower animals, more particularly of those which come nearest to man, I cannot believe that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in times past, shortly before man attained to his present rank in the zoological scale.”

“…We may indeed conclude from what we know of jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed as many of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable.”  (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London:  John Murray, 1871), pp. 611-612.)

Observing the battle occurring in America today, conservative elements are behaving like they are on the defensive.  This is for good reason.  Imagine what our times would look like to Charles Darwin.  Would he have come to the same conclusions regarding sexual selection and human evolution in an environment featuring women’s ability to inherit, women’s right to vote, women’s access to a wide range of professions, abortion, the Pill, divorce, women choosing to have children later in life, and families having little influence on women’s choice of a mate?  This year more female doctors graduated than male doctors.

The Left exhibits little awareness of the profound distance our society has come in six generations.  So much has changed that we live in a totally new theorizing environment.  Evolutionary developmental biology is partly based on a concept of evolution not yet understood or embraced by the status quo, evolution guided by the environmental influences on womb conditions.  What happens to the mother has a whole lot to do with how we evolve.  The American Right is still trumpeting Judeo-Christian mythology with a transcendent male in total control.  This male frame of reference in no small way influenced Darwin.  This frame of reference is on the wane.

Charles Darwin composed our culture’s origin myth.  Evolutionary evangelists like Richard Dawkins pound the pulpit, pursuing very specific interpretations of the gospel.  In just the way that the Bible’s text was influenced by the culture that it came from, Darwin’s life work was influenced by his position as a nineteenth-century, Western, wealthy, white male.

Evolutionary theory is our society’s origin myth.  Six generations have passed since its composition.  It would be useful to examine Darwin’s work in the context of its time.