“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.

“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.

Becoming aware that this essay would not be published until March (after sending it to an editor), I considered what the view of these events would be from a season in the future.  Then, I became aware of myself conducting a dissociation to achieve an alternative perspective.  This was followed by my being aware of my being aware of my conducting a dissociation.

There is a difference between debilitating dissociation that leads to an experience of feeling removed or separated from an integration with the environment and the kind of dissociation that offers an ability to achieve both an experience of integration accompanied by a grasping of the relationship of the constituent parts at several levels.  Dissociation can be characterized by division or integration.

The line between these two kinds of dissociation can be pretty thin.  I spend time in both places.  The people I am close to in my life note that I’m engaged in debilitating dissociation usually before I am aware that that is what is happening.  They then call my attention to it, providing me a reminder to associate and engage.

The United States also features both debilitating and integrative dissociations.  This country has offered an astonishing ability to engender alternative perspectives propelling the world into new creative directions.  This does not always occur in an awareness vacuum where competing parts jostle for achievement with no oversight, but in a larger context where it is understood that the community is renewed by an independence of its parts, while those parts that contribute to the community are most revered.  Dissociation featuring integration does occur.

At the same time, the United States exhibits a shocking disregard for understanding the implications of violently intervening in the affairs of other countries.  Instead of defining U.S. national security in the context of a larger global whole, U.S. foreign policy often revolves around what works best for corporations and the access of those corporations to resources that benefit American investors.

Protesting the Obama escalation in Afghanistan, citizens call attention to government behavior that is resulting in a less integrated, less socially aware, less communally involved population.  Intervention is required.  So we protest.

Dissociation can be characterized by division or integration.  The choice to escalate in Afghanistan has compelled, in me, an association.  A deep sadness often establishes itself in my body.  When a choice by some invests sadness or anger in others, it’s often a sign that integration will only happen after grief is faced.

The escalation in Afghanistan is founded on dissociation, leading inevitably to grief.

At the end of last November and the beginning of December, Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) volunteers worked hard to keep the 41 websites serving 50 states current with actions appearing across the country, which were protests of the Obama Afghanistan escalation. There were 99 events posted, by far the most comprehensive list available on the web.  Nevertheless, though attendance was often excellent at these events, it was usually older activists.

Though some activists posted the wider list to Facebook, Facebook events were mostly not linking to other Facebook actions in other locations.  Twitter, profoundly effective at encouraging worldwide attention on events in Iran, was strangely absent from the almost 100 events occurring across the U.S.

This obviously points to young people not being as motivated to fight the Obama escalation as their older activist associates.  If young people were not Twittering their friends to attend events, then it is likely young people were not consumed by the particular issue.  There is another thing suggested.  Not only were young people not feeling compelled to congregate, young people were possibly not feeling empowered to make their feelings known.  There is the possibility that former young supporters of Obama are responding to these developments by returning to a state of noninvolvement.

In other words, assuming that young people were often against the escalation and that young people were not demonstrating their objection, then we can predict a dramatic drop in young people showing up to vote in the next election.

In a blog posting of December 2, the second day of demonstrations, Paul Krugman discussed the increasing likelihood of a double-dip Great Recession.  Krugman described the repercussions of the Obama economic intervention resulting in a drift back into severe recession.  Though the piece did not discuss a combination of recession, war in Afghanistan and a resurgence in the number of Republicans elected congressmen and senators, the absence of youth in our streets suggests this scenario.

There now emerges the strong possibility that deep systemic change will only occur at state levels.  The federal government’s ability to initiate change is disappearing before our eyes.  The Senate will not approve executive support of international treaties.  Environmental legislation is deeply compromised.  The federal government behaves as if incapable of legislating additional large-scale job programs.  Congress will not inhibit presidential right-leaning initiatives.  The president cannot push left-leaning legislation through the Congress.

If the young do not exhibit their passion, the positive energy of our country’s government is destined to disappear.

The Afghanistan protests were a season ago.  The repercussions of these demonstrations will be with us for a while.

“Forest-dwelling apes efficiently conserve their water reserves, which they obtain primarily from fruit and vegetation, such that they need only rarely to visit predator-frequented watering holes.  By contrast, humans active in hot desert can lose up to 28 liters of water and up to 10% of bodily salt reserves per day (Morgan, 1982).  This incredible profligacy with water and salt suggests that early hominids must have enjoyed no shortage of either: they probably dwelled fairly close to fresh and salt water when not foraging.  Rivers and lakes would have provided not only drinking water, but also allowed body-washing and food-washing, offered fish, aquatic crustaceans, and shellfish for eating, and, because the thermal conductivity of water is much higher than that of air, quick swims would have allowed for efficient cooling-off after a long, hot day of foraging.  Note that these conditions would make the aquatic ape hypothesis (Hardy, 1960; Morgan, 1982) a bit more plausible…”  (Geoffrey F. Miller, “Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection:  The Mind as a Protean Courtship Device,” unpublished thesis (1994), p. 164.)

The aquatic ape hypothesis overlaps in two ways with the theorizing I’ve been conducting the last few years.  What I’m now calling The Orchestral Theory of Evolution and the aquatic ape hypothesis both have strong feminist components.  Elaine Morgan presented her thesis, one where male survival of the fittest was not the focus, as an alternative theory to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape.

Both Morgan’s hypothesis (Alister Hardy was the original creator of the theory) and my work feature an emphasis on neoteny.  The aquatic ape hypothesis states we lost our body hair to better spend our time in water, and that by evolving in a neotenous direction, access to hairlessness was encouraged.  An upright stature is also associated with neoteny, and estuary or river waders often acquire upright positions.  I’ve shown that lower testosterone levels can be associated with longer limbs.  Both low testosterone and long limbs are associated with maturational delay and neoteny.

Feminism and neoteny are closely tied to both our theories, and interestingly, Elaine Morgan and I are both nonscientists and artists who are thinking outside conventions in perhaps complementary fashions.  We are both in the origin myth business, working with similar material, constructing pasts that support an emerging zeitgeist.

“From Neolithic villages to organized state, from gardening to irrigation farming, from inconography to writing, from disorganized raids to institutionalized warfare, from custom to law, from matriarchal religious authority to patriarchal political power, from mystery to history; the transformation was so complete that the past itself was reinvented to create a new foundation for a radically altered present.  Now that we ourselves are moving into a radically altered present, it is small wonder that the patriarchal image of prehistory is disintegrating.  The movement into the future always involves the revisioning of the past.”  (William Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 208.)

One of the things Elaine Morgan was often criticized for was that though her conjectures explained a number of unique human features, there was no obvious way to prove the thesis.  Her subjects did not easily fossilize where they lived by shores.  Regarding human theories of evolution, we have such an astonishingly small amount of information to work with that it surprises me that proof would be the main criticism.  Barely grounded hypotheses are common among human evolution theorists.  I suspect she was more derided for her feminist positions.

“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.

As regards understanding, convention is useful.  The following is a proposal for a new shared evaluation protocol.

What we understand “teleology” to mean is central to how we interpret current events, societal change, politics, geopolitical dynamics, the control of resources and the ability of the disenfranchised to feel free of want.  “Teleology” can be defined as the belief that there are overriding, perhaps spiritual, forces at work, compelling society to evolve or transform in particular directions featuring progress, improvement and an enhancement of individual positive experience.  There are atheist humanists that nonetheless display teleological tendencies insofar as they experience a confidence that our species has been acting and will continue to act, more or less, in our own best interest, compelling an ongoing positive direction.  Teleology is not widely discussed because it is associated with religious tendencies, and our academics, for the most part, operate from a materialist milieu.

What if there is structure to the particular way that societies change, a dynamic that offers insight on how transformation that reveals an overriding process is engaged?  What if teleology–social transformation–operated according to a biological imperative?

A theory of biological evolution that also explains human social transformation would be a powerful addition to the tools available that explain how our world works.  The nineteenth-century heterochronists (Mivart, Cope, Hyatt, Haeckel) and the twentieth-century theorists working with the concept of a fourfold parallelism (Freud, Piaget, Gebser, Habermas, Gould and Wilber) are operating with the same principles, only the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologists are not having their species transformation work interpreted by these twentieth-century psychologists, biologists and philosophers as connected to a social world.

Heterochrony includes a study of how the rate and timing changes that occur during early ontogeny or growth influence not only the structure, look and behaviors of an individual but how those changes impact that individual’s descendants.  For example, an environmental effect such as a change in a mother’s diet can transform the features of not only her children but her children’s children, changes that could compel the emergence of childlike features in the adults of distant progeny.  This is a kind of maturational delay called “neoteny,” or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants.  Heterochrony is a study of evolution that focuses on changes in features based upon influences exerted by the environment or social structure.

Fourfold parallelisms are four different scales of experience–biological evolution, social evolution, individual ontological or maturational transformation, and individual experience–that are believed to exhibit the same process, evolution, at four different levels.  Discipline founders or innovators, until recently, grew new ways of looking at the world by borrowing from contiguous disciplines, hypothesizing that different discipline dynamics operated according to identical processes at their core.

What’s missing is the concept of social structure and environmental influence.  Biological evolution is compelled by social structure and environmental effects that convey very specific maturational delay and acceleration dynamics.  Those same dynamics display overriding patterns, making transparent how society evolves or transforms in particular directions in specific ways over time.  These social transformations directly reflect biological social structure maturational delay and acceleration dynamics.

What has never occurred, and what this piece is proposing, is that the particular way that heterochronists viewed biological evolution–social structure and environmental effects compelling change by adjusting the rates and timing of maturation–was never picked up by the fourfold parallelists so that they could consider that society reveals teleological tendencies that in actuality are biological imperatives.  The reason for this is that by the time the parallelists were theorizing (early twentieth century), the heterochronists (mostly Lamarckians) were receiving less attention.  One hundred years later the Lamarckians are back.  Their discipline is called evolutionary developmental biology.  These evo devo practitioners have not yet turned their attention to the heterochronists.  Even so, multiscale parallelisms are still only in vogue among philosophers and artists.

Society evolves according to changes in its rates and timing of maturation, influenced by adjustments in social structure and environmental effects.  Societies reveal maturation tendencies identical to how individuals are impacted.  Those tendencies are influenced by observable variables.  Overriding patterns can be observed.

Teleology has biological roots.

“The fact that value judgments influence my proposals does not mean that I am making the mistake of which I have accused the positivists–that of trying to kill metaphysics by calling it names.  I do not even go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science.  For it cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas which have obstructed the advance of science there have been others — such as speculative atomism — which have aided it.  And looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical.’”  (Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York:  Basic Books, 1959), p. 39.)

Popper goes on to say that no matter how you come up with an idea, if it is not proved, it is not science.  In addition, falsifiability is central to the truth.  Thomas Kuhn focuses more on the process whereby science accepts a thesis and the repercussions of believing that there is such thing as truth.  On occasion, biologists discuss the similarities between male primate procreation strategies and science community strategies and tactics for achieving idea acceptance.  There are ways that interpretations of what “truth” is and the specifics that seek to occupy that truth station behave like sperm that lust to occupy a position of respect in the womb of our academic institutions.

It astonishes me the amount of time that I spend concerned with definitions of “truth” or foundation premises that inhibit alternative understandings.  I feel like I spend a lot of time in basements with flashlights discovering that an extraordinary amount of information has more to do with dream, or the unconscious, than with waking.  I then realize that I myself am a figment of dreamlike imagination.

Then, with chills, I realize the imagination is not my own.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on the difference between art and science and my exact role while engaged in the theorizing process.  As an artist, I seek insight, often by relieving myself of conventions that act as barriers between the social and the transsocial self.  A scientist adheres closely to conventions in order to provide colleagues the information that conventional reality is what is being explored.  Scientists need to trust that the information shared and relied upon is information that will behave identically for everyone in the science community.  An artist is looking for alternative perspectives, ideally universal, often not describable with anything like language.  Whereas science relies upon language or mathematics, media for sharing of convention, art instead seeks any avenue that usefully or beautifully offers access to nonconventional, but real, points of view.

No doubt these distinctions keep coming to my mind because I am engaged in an artistic process as I am theorizing about evolution.  I struggle with how exactly I fit into a conventional theorizing community while offering reverence to nonconventional, artistic process.  The result of this acute awareness is my frequent examination of the differences between science and artistic processes at both the creative level and the logistical level, the how of how content gets created, and the how of how content gets accepted by the community.

This often feels fatiguing, in no small part because a foundation feature of my personality is the deep-seated belief that what I create is not acceptable.  Many of us carry around this unconscious belief that we are of little use to the community and have to work extra hard to make a difference.  In the back of my mind, at the bottom of my emotions, is a frightened, grieving being who believes he’s alone because of something that he is or did.  I know many people with these hidden feelings.  I feel like much of what I do while I write is accompanying this being.

Accompanied, I get creative.

Whereas a scientist makes sure his work is above reproach, an artist seeks to be accompanied.  Popper and Kuhn describe rules of engagement regarding conventional reality.  The artist simply seeks to engage.

Except the product of my engagement is theory, theory that seeks to be useful.  I keep finding myself bridging these two worlds.  I note few models of how exactly to build this kind of bridge.  Firmly recognizing that I engage in art seems integral to my experiencing comfort with what I do.

Except I’m not convinced comfort is useful in creating art.

“The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance.  In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticisms.  But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace.  There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times.  If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-produce more resistant individuals.”  (J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1982), p. 213.)

The power of art to inform culture receives relatively little attention in current times.  Any anthropologist studying aboriginal society finds art central to how a culture operates.  In that context, always, art and spirituality are closely tied.  Perhaps art feels separate from society today because religion has been contextualized as important, but not essential, to how we understand society.  So, art often finds itself ignored.

“Furthermore, drummers apparently know by intuition the most potent brain-stimulating rhythms.  According to Neher, the predominant drumming rhythm used in a number of African dances as well as in Haitian voodoo dances is a fast 7 to 9 beats per second—and that happens to be about the same rhythm produced naturally by “brain waves” in the auditory cortex itself, groups of neurons charging and discharging in electrical unison.  It seems that properly synchronized drumbeats drive the brain, force it into heightened activity.  They work in phase with brain waves, amplifying them the way timed pushes impart more and more momentum to a swing, creating hallucinations and intense feelings of dissociation.”  (Pfeiffer, 1982.)

This website describes a particular view of how human beings evolved.  I propose that art encouraged a particular ontological dynamic that compelled the growth of big brains because big brains more efficiently produce art.  We’re talking a sort of feedback loop, or what R. A. Fisher described as runaway sexual selection, whereby extravagant dancers chosen for their ability to evoke feelings of wonder resulting in copulation were (mostly) males that exhibited bigger brains and childlike features of cooperation and dependency, traits associated with neoteny.  Females kept picking big-brained, childlike dancers.  The women exhibiting the best  ability to form these evaluations, commanding and judgmental protohuman women, were making sure that they were the ones that got these men’s babies, and these women formed the other side of this feedback loop.  Big-brained dance performers got picked.  Big-brained dance evaluators did the picking.  Big brains evolved.

There are studies that conclude that the musically obsessed, composers and listeners with ability to note fine detail have bigger brains.  In addition, low testosterone males and high testosterone females seem to be the most talented composers.

“Creative musical behavior, musical intelligence, and spatial ability were investigated in relation to salivary testosterone (T).  In a cross-sectional study with 117 adults and in an 8-yr longitudinal study with 120 adolescents, composers, instrumentalists, and nonmusicians of both sexes were compared by analyses of variance.  Results indicate that an optimal T range may exist for the expression of creative musical behavior.  This range may be at the bottom of normal male T range and at the top of normal female T range.  In addition, musicians were found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians, both in an 8-yr-period of adolescent development and in adulthood.”  (Hassler, M., “Creative Musical Behavior and Sex Hormones:  Musical Talent and Spatial Ability in the Two Sexes,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 17(1) (1992):55.)

“Musical composers, instrumentalists, and painters were compared with nonmusicians from a student and from a nonstudent population on testosterone levels in saliva.  This steroid served as a marker for physiological androgyny.  The ANOVA showed a significant group by sex interaction.  Male composers attained significantly lower mean testosterone values than male instrumentalists and male nonmusicians; female composers had significantly higher mean testosterone values than female instrumentalists and female nonmusicians.  Painters of both sexes did not differ significantly from controls.  Spatial ability was assessed in the five groups.  Significant differences on spatial test performance were not reflected in differences on salivary testosterone.  Our results showed that musical composers of both sexes were physiologically highly androgynous.  Creative musical behavior was associated with testosterone levels that minimized sex differences.”  (Hassler, M., “Testosterone and Artistic Talents,” Int J Neurosci 56(1-4) (1991):25.)

Not only is testosterone related to musical inclination, so is handedness.  The left-handed often are more musically inclined.

“It seems possible that an optimal testosterone range exists for the expression of creative musical behavior and that exceeding this optimal range in the course of puberty may contribute to a stop of musical production in boys.  Such optimal testosterone levels may be lower than male average in adult men and higher than female average in adult women (Hassler, 1991; Hassler & Nieschlag, 1989). …  Handedness proved to be an important variable with respect to musical talent in boys.  Male left-handers attained significantly higher mean test scores than male right-handers on Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence (Hassler & Birbaumer, 1988) at each stage of the study.”  (Hassler, M., and Nieschlag, E., “Salivary Testosterone and Creative Musical Behavior in Adolescent Males and Females,” Developmental Neuropsychology 7 (1991):504.)

According to the thesis promoted on this website, it is the random-handed (left-handed), the high testosterone females, the low testosterone males (matrifocal social structure) and the big-brained dancers that are the folks engaged in the runaway sexual selection feedback loop just described.  The neurological literature is filled with examples that support this thesis.

Nevertheless, it is a story.  A story is art.  Art often has spiritual connections.  The question is:  Is this a story that offers opportunities to transform?