I’ve been noticing that Stumbleupon, the web service that directs participants to interesting sites, has been directing more and more visitors to this site, sometimes more than 100 a day.  For several years, Stumbleupon has been directing some days several hundred visitors to my original evolutionary theory site, serpentfd.org.  I’ve never been able to quite figure out what Stumbleupon is, and yesterday I drilled down a bit after finally joining the group, telling the application my interests and starting to follow where the site directed me to go.

I soon discovered that the reason my original evolution site, posted in 1998, gets so much Stumbleupon traffic is that it has been both a featured site in the evolution section and a site that receives five stars.  The review section of the site gathered almost 30 comments in almost six years; some of those who commented were confused, but many seemed impressed.  I was astonished that my site received respect.  I’m just so used to feeling invisible.

A recent email from an author whose work I deeply respect, his books having introduced me in the 1970s and 1980s to such concepts as sociobiology and matrifocal society, noted the near impossibility of…

Elia is in his last year of getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Loyola.  Tuesday evenings we often meet over supper and talk.  He shared with me last night his feeling that he’d like to specialize in mythology and what mythology suggests about a society and spirituality.  I could relate.  After evolutionary theory, I’ve probably read more mythology and spirituality texts than anything else.

It amazes me how little I remember of what I read.  I’ve conducted three book purges over the course of my life, getting rid of hundreds of volumes each time.  I’ve read hundreds of science fiction books, maybe 150 books on mythology, dozens of books on spirituality and dozens of books on psychology.  I’ve read many books I’ve barely understood.  I’m reading a book now on the endocrinology of relationship, another called The Ontogeny of Information, and in both cases most of the concepts are going over my head.  I’m approaching 1,000 lectures watched, put out by the Teaching Company, while exercising.  I remember almost nothing of maybe 100 lectures on philosophy.  Nevertheless, I expect my own ideas have been influenced by those hours.

I guess the point I’m making is that I vacuum up…

Every once in a while, when I receive a complimentary email regarding my theory, the emailer notes how complex it is.  It feels to me at this point like my job is making the theory easily understandable.  A problem is that as I seek to refine an explanation, new aspects get revealed and the theory deepens.  I can see how others interpret deepenings as additions in complexity.  I experience the deepenings as new subtleties revealed.  It’s not clear to me how to tell this story so that the meaning is clear.  I expect I’ll have to tell it in many ways and see what sticks.

Several of the concepts seem unfamiliar to Western ears.  Perhaps the most confounding is that to understand human evolution, a transformation characterized by a change in consciousness, it is useful that the theorist have at least a working definition of what exactly “consciousness” is.  I suggest that just stating that consciousness is a contingent or accidental result of a process, and it can be ignored as if not relevant to the transformation, is a little odd.  Also, there are the theorists that do say that consciousness is integral to how we evolved, but they often…

Maturity is not the same as progress.  To pass through a series of ontological stages evidencing the look, sound and behavior of the personal epochs that have been experienced is not progress.  It is life.

All mixed up in contemporary theorizing are three things:  the exact nature and difference between that which transforms over time that is changing as a result of random interconnections, that which is changing as a result of progress or improvement over time and that which is changing as part of a larger pattern of maturation.

Evolutionary biology tends to take the position that evolution follows Darwin’s wedges metaphor, with every feature of every being emerging as a direct or indirect result of what is necessary to survive to procreate.  Features acquired by individuals are random, unconnected to the environment or the parents’ experience, making random feature survival the central focus of evolution.  There is no such thing as progress.  There is no larger picture to inform what survives to procreate.

Society, religion and spirituality tend to focus on the idea that either we are on a pathway toward improvement or we are not.  Those saying not are often atheists, and often they find themselves sympathizing…

One of the paradoxes of contemporary anthropology is the hesitation to examine different societies as different stages on an evolutionary trajectory.  For those of you that visit this blog relatively regularly, you know that I can’t be conversant in as many disciplines as I purport to know something about.  I skim disciplines, looking for patterns that transcend disciplines.  This may be one of those places where current trends make what I am about to say make little sense.  Nevertheless, what familiarity I have with anthropology suggests that the default natural selection frame of reference is almost useless when discussing humans.

In an effort to display equanimity, theorists have mostly purged from theorizing the early discipline prejudices that Western civilization was more “evolved” than non-Western or aboriginal societies.  Two things got stripped during the purging process, and they have inhibited contemporary theorizing.

First, the word “evolve” has come to mean progress, or trend in a positive direction.  This was not Darwin’s definition, nor is it the definition usually used by current evolutionary biologists.  A result has been that there is an enormous epistemological muddle as regards what exactly evolution is.  Because a judgment accompanies the definition of “evolution” that suggests that…

I’m a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist by profession, in addition to running a web development firm.  This is in no small part due to the fact that SEO requires little technical expertise.  I’m one of those people that never did figure out a VCR, has trouble with cell phones and is easily stymied by unfamiliar technology.  My running a successful web development firm is based on my having a superb staff and a solid business model based upon serving very small businesses.

In 2002, I figured out Google’s algorithm, long before the competition, pretty much by chance.  I was immersed in creating web directories.  My firm’s website achieved position #1 for “web site design” and maintained that position for over a year.  I was getting top ten spots for items such as “lingerie,” “mortgage” and “airplane tickets.”  By achieving such high positions, the firm was bringing in many clients.  At the time, I had a two-person firm, minuscule compared to my competition.  On November 15, 2004, Google made a dramatic adjustment in its algorithm, penalizing what it had been formerly encouraging.  My expertise dramatically diminished.  To reproduce what I had accomplished would take resources a two-person firm did not…

“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…

By presupposing that consciousness or our relationship with consciousness is integral to the kind of evolutionary theory we can create, this work seeks to make part of the equation of our theorizing the actual way that we theorize.  Many Neo-Darwinists make direct correlations between their interpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and a materialist, atheistic world view, making it clear that a theory featuring randomness supports a world view with no mythology.  I also make connections between theory and a world view with no mythology, except my understanding of the world is informed by presupposing interconnection.

This interconnection that I presuppose can be described as consciousness or awareness.  I assign consciousness to everything that exhibits life.  I consider it possible that consciousness is a feature of all that exists and does not exist.  I sometimes explore if presupposing this to be the case offers any insight regarding the assigning of biological principles to a cosmic scale.  Significant to this work is the hypothesis that human beings are split conscious beings, and that this split consciousness can be explored in detail.

By assuming that life exhibits consciousness, embracing consciousness as integral to understanding life and evolution, and distinguishing human consciousness…

Thomas Kuhn describes those unique situations when a science discipline experiences a shift.  Shifts occur in different ways.  One way that a shift happens is when a new presupposition introduces new information that offers an almost completely alternative frame of reference and new world view.  Everything seems to look different with the new presupposition.  The established presupposition, by not embracing the new presuppositions, can continue in a kind of alternative universe.  The question becomes:  Which presuppositional matrix is more useful for which particular outcomes?  Asking which paradigm is true is not a useful question.

Darwin expressed deep distress and consternation that his theory of natural selection was instrumental in the discussion of whether god existed.  Indeed, his fears were reasonable, and we might say that society has shifted as a result of its acceptance of the theory.  This work operates with a different thesis.  It is an integration of all three of Darwin’s theories and the work of theorists that immediately followed.  This orchestral theory of evolution is an alternative frame of reference and a new world view.  Nevertheless, it has roots going back thousands of years, with connections to the work of many contemporary theorists.  Try on this work…

This work began almost 15 years ago when I disappeared down a rabbit hole where I was studying the origins of dragon and serpent mythologies in matrifocal cultures that came before the Indo-Europeans.  It was an art and writing project that involved my creating a book of dragons, treating the various dragons and dragon-like mythological beings as species within a genus, exploring them biologically and socially.  I became intimate with the religions, mythologies and social structures of ancient aboriginal societies and early civilizations at the root of dragon myths.  I found myself living and breathing ancient air, viewing, listening to, and feeling the world in a different way.

This alternative path features a world view that presupposes connection.  Studying ancient matrifocal society, I was introduced to an experience characterized by an immanent presence rather than a separated, transcendental god.  Interconnection is presupposed.  The individual is part of a larger process.

These themes are, of course, reemerging in contemporary times through a number of avenues, including Eastern practices, drugs, group art/aesthetics such as dance and chanting, and aboriginal spiritual paths.  I was exploring the origin of dragon myths, discovering the cultural heritage of societies that had their myths and familiars demonized…

Explorations of societies displaying matriarchal, or matrifocal, tendencies often struggle with a definition that will adjust to very different examples of the paradigm.  Often, a woman’s exercise of authority within a culture can be profound but not obvious, as if there were an agreement that men look like they are in control.  There are different areas where authority manifests such as home, work, market, social situations.  Female authority may vary depending on the context.  Shared authority can look very different in different societies.

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…

“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.…

I was born in 1952 in an affluent northern suburb of Chicago.  Glencoe was perhaps a third Jewish.  I was raised mostly nondenominationally, but my grandparents embraced their ethnicity.  Still, they identified more with being wealthy Americans than with being Jewish.

My mother was manic depressive and was institutionalized on and off from about the time I was ten on.  My father’s mother was mentally ill.  Familiarity with mental illness up close purged my body and mind of identification with the benefits of affluence.  I withdrew from the conventions of success.

I was a walking, talking incongruity-detection device.  Hypocrisy jumped out at me when I saw or heard it.  My childhood calibrated my intuitions to make me hypervigilant to mixed messages.  I knew “crazy” up close.  I perceived the crazy in communications I observed.  In my experience, crazy was almost everywhere.  What wasn’t incongruent, I hardly noticed.  The dark side of the world felt familiar.

I became intimately aware of how my thinking process inhibited my goals.  I felt deeply split regarding much of what I desired.  I acquired a psychodynamic world view made up of trends and tendencies and what inhibits their achievement.

Growing up in craziness, I felt…

It struck me this evening that there are no Leftist specialists on the Internet and the Internet’s influence on Left politics.  There are journalists that write stories about the Internet and politics.  There are Left and left-of-center blogs that discuss the influence of the Internet on politics.  There are books, such as Viral Spiral and Here Comes Everybody, that are partly devoted to Internet activism and how the Left is impacted by the web, but I’m having trouble finding examples of those concentrating pretty much exclusively on Left politics and the net.

There is Richard Stallman’s late 20th-century crusade to carve out a commons on the web.  His influence has been astonishing.  In the Left community that I am part of, I am in contact with hundreds of activists.  His name has never been mentioned.

The word “hacker” has evolved over the last 20 years.  It rarely appears in Leftists’ conversations.  Nevertheless, its emerging meaning has more to do with an egalitarian revolution than with one that violates private cyber space.  The folks I am in contact with are little aware of the young programmers’ community fighting for free code and shared universal software.  There are few bringing the young,…

There are about a dozen of us volunteers working with nearly 1500 local peace, justice and environmental organizations in 50 states. The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP), located at pjep.org, places in the hands of local activists, at no cost, the kinds of tools that larger organizations have access to. This includes such features as online fundraising, eletters, online petitions and boycott tools. In addition, we make available almost 1000 resource documents congregating in 44 issue clusters, offer inter-organizational communications tools, and connect activists with like minded grassroots organizers in other states.

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any…

It is not uncommon that I am with a friend who is in distress and he or she is describing an experience that he or she has had or is having that is not related to the distress but which occurs during the time of distress.  The experience is informed by the individual’s emotional and mental state, resulting in what appears to me to be an experience very different from what it would have been without the distress.

Underlying, or presupposing, any experience is the mental/emotional place we are in when it occurs.  What I mean is that experience is informed by context.  An individual’s ability to be aware of his or her personal context while being exposed to life’s experiences can have a lot to do with how empowered a person feels by his or her life.  There are layers and layers of underlying context or presupposition.  These have been called personal stories or scripts.  It can be argued that the deeper our awareness of this context, the more empowered, the more secure we feel.

This kind of context, these presuppositions, is integral to understanding evolutionary theory.  Gould alludes to these issues in various works, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny…

From my sophomore to junior year in high school I went from selling fruitcake for my Boy Scout troop to selling buttons and bumper stickers for my anti-war group.  I grew up in a merchant family and looked at the world as an opportunity to sell things.  I didn’t exactly have the personality for it.  I was shy, but I was moderately obsessed with numbers and so made a numbers game out of whatever I was trying to encourage people to purchase.

That money bought stuff never seemed particularly relevant.

So my contribution to the Left in the 1960s and 1970s was mostly handling the accounting for the various things that were exchanged.  Forty years later, at protest planning meetings, I mostly handle display and transfer of information because web development is my profession.  Watching and listening to organizers in meetings, I notice that same deadpan earnestness I remember from my youth, but relations today are plagued by decades of hurt feelings and activists taking personally the former strategic decisions of their peers.  I am constantly astonished by how often present behaviors are informed by past disappointments or frustrations.  Experiencing forgiveness is not a common experience in the Leftist avocation. …

I just noted a paper, Multiple ancient origins of neoteny in Lycidae (Coleoptera): consequences for ecology and macroevolution, that observes instances of neoteny compelling jumps in evolution.  One of the riddles of the career of Stephen J. Gould was how he seemed to rarely discuss how his deep insights focusing on neoteny explained his theory of punctuated equilibrium.  Gould did not believe in gradual evolution.  Yet, he seemed to only occasionally discuss the specifics of his saltationist conjectures, particularly when it came to heterochronic theory, or the study of the rate and timing of maturation and development, the source of neoteny.

The work just noted, Multiple ancient origins…, doesn’t just not note the influence of neoteny on humans, but it goes back many millions of years to discuss its subject.  My work has focused almost exclusively on neoteny in humans and makes the following statement….

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.

Contemporary research on neoteny and heterochronic theory,…

Clive Thompson’s September Wired article, “The New Literacy,” had me thinking several things.

The article describes an academic’s conclusion that there is a writing renaissance going on with astonishing increases in writing by students as they use communications technologies.  It has been believed by many that texting and social media are deprecating communication.  Professor Andrea Lunsford concluded the opposite.  New technologies are encouraging the young to share experiences by writing.

Several things come to mind.

First, texting is acquiring a number of unique conventions that are beginning to approach a different language.  I don’t speak text.  This is a function of my peer group, my age and the fact that I’m at my computer three-fourths of my waking hours.  Perhaps text is approaching another language as its conventions proliferate.  If that is the case, then maybe this is a good thing as regards the inculcation of flexibility of mind.  As youth text, they encourage an ability to experience the world through an alternative perspective.

Second, the day will come when voice translators advance to offer an effortless ability to take our spoken words and transform them into written text.  Gifted youth will find they can profoundly proliferate their productions by…

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events.

“All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream.  Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?”  (Jane Goodall Through a Window (Boston:  Houghlin…

We live in a society that believes that it is pragmatic to presuppose that consciousness is contingent upon evolutionary conditions that led to its emergence.  Self awareness occurred by chance.  Academics, of course, embrace the claim that consciousness is unique.  But because it is not measurable and seems connected to humans only, it has been concluded in many sciences that it can be usefully ignored.  The autistic provide an ability to notice.

Over the course of human self examination there have been relatively few that have differentiated between the two most obvious kinds of consciousness that exist.  There is aware and self aware.  There is conscious and self conscious.  There is being present and there is the awareness that you are present.  This is a significant distinction because it can be suggested that the first kind of consciousness, presence, is not just a feature of human consciousness but a feature of that which is alive.  To be present to the fact that you are present seems peculiarly human.  We can call this split consciousness.  This is unique insofar as this ability for a single consciousness to experience a split evidently creates facility with being two places at once, being in…

In the United States, there have been three powerful democratization surges in the last 100 years.  Each featured an experience by participants of feeling part of something larger than themselves.  It continues to astonish me how the one we are experiencing now is almost invisible to folks I know.

In the 1930s, working people were provided a voice and power to affect their lives in positive ways.  The commons emerged as a political power as people were able to realize that the process of focusing on shared resources provided a new way of viewing influence.  Democratization was viewed as a feature of the commons.

In the 1960s, democratization acquired an almost spiritual dimension as peace and new interpersonal-communication protocols became integral to understanding how the commons operated.  Integration and feminization transformed the idea of how working together worked.  I felt part of something larger than myself.

Over the last 20 years, there has been growing a third wave of commitment to the commons.  Far more subtle than the other two waves, its influence has been exponentially more powerful.  Perhaps it makes no sense to separate them; they are all part of the same process.  The process features a horizontalization of…

At the end of this last August, Marcia and I attended a Jan Schakowsky town meeting at Niles High School.  There were almost 2,000 present.  Most of those folks were in the auditorium where the event was held, and many were outside holding signs and banners.  The focus was the proposed health care legislation.

Marcia meets with Schakowsky fairly often as the leader of the North Shore Coalition for Peace, Justice and the Environment.  A couple years ago, Jan was at our home for a meeting regarding Iraq, Iran and Israel where one of our group brought up Blackwater establishing itself in Illinois.  At that time, Jan was not familiar with Blackwater’s presence in the state.  Not long after that, Jan emerged to become an important congressional opponent of military contractors, Blackwater in particular.

Schakowsky is a strong supporter of Israel.  My fellow activists and organizers strongly oppose Schakowsky’s support of Israel’s conservative governments, and they also oppose West Bank settlers, Gaza atrocities and the way Israeli government policies treat Palestinians.  Our contact with Schakowsky is characterized by agreement with some of her positions and opposition to her support of Israel.

The meeting in the auditorium in August was attended…

An aspect of neoteny just struck me that has never crossed my mind before.  It perhaps suggests a basic principle in evolution.  I’m not sure.

Two days ago, I posted a piece exploring a paradox of recapitulation that focuses on an odd possibility.  When a species is in an accelerated phase and withdraws adult features backward over generations to eventually appear in the infants of descendants, adults may exhibit features of ancient forebears.  If the species lineage had in the past gone through a similar cycle, then that genetic inheritance would have been available, emerging when a similar hormonal disposition became engaged.

Haeckel may have been focused on that very dynamic as he obsessed on recapitulation as a source of new behavioral and physical characteristics.  What strikes me now is that though recapitulation (acceleration) is not considered at this time as a relevant description of evolutionary process, it does seem to be half of a process that results in a seemingly natural biological dynamic that not only withdraws species backward through ontogeny to conception but at the same time carries forward or prolongs features of this planet’s earliest species forward into adults.

There are two waves or currents moving through…

This last August, my son, Elia, and I drove down, then up, the Mississippi, taking photographs for our respective projects.  Elia feels attracted to decaying industry.  He gathers images of nature’s return inside factories and old structures.  I was taking shots of various abstract forms to be used in the neoteny video, the section describing how neoteny operates at different scales.  At night, Elia worked on the music for the video, using his Mac.  We were driving a rented car.  Elia wouldn’t reach 25 until the following month, so I was doing all the driving.

About half the time we took the slow roads that went through small towns, lingering around old river cities to take photos.  We stopped in Chartersburg, Memphis, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Hannibal, Missouri, in that order.  A theme that quickly emerged was that in most sizable Mississippi cities there is gambling.  Elia got that out of his system early on.  This was the first time in his life he’d been in a casino.

On the way back up, on a Sunday in the middle of August, it emerged that Obama had concluded that he didn’t think he had the votes to get a…