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.

My dreams grew to reflect the amount of time I spent at a computer keyboard adjusting the products of my imagination by typing instead of drawing or painting.  I sometimes still inked by hand.  Yet, coloration grew to become totally digital.  While sleeping, I began to adjust dreams using keyboard commands and Photoshop features.  It became routine to stop a dream and undo a section, withdrawing to an earlier stage before the unfolding of a chain of events that was not desirable.  I found myself frequently simply choosing to undo accidents in dreams, adjusting life with keyboard commands.

Final Cut Express, video production software, shows signs of another such evolution.  Playing with iMovie for about four months, I quickly bucked up against its limitations, even with the relatively simple piece I was producing (The Conservative Left).  Learning FCE is far more complicated and sophisticated.  It will take time, but it will be worth it.  It feels not unlike I’m producing dreams.  I expect my dreams will change, eventually integrating how I use FCE to create and adjust what my mind creates at night.

Perhaps the deepest difference between producing video and creating static Photoshop productions is the visceral difference between creating in narrative format productions composed of the work of many other creators and creating in static format content from only a personal repertoire.  What began in the 1980s with Hip Hop artists stealing copyrights from corporate-supported artists has exploded with Creative Commons licenses to borrow from millions of contributors sharing their creations with anyone for free.  A net result is a profound change in creative process.  Art has become a community endeavor instead of homage to the cult of individuality.  Majoring in art in the 1970s was all about the individual creating unique content to push the boundaries of a particular medium.  The Internet and the compulsion to share are destroying the modern allegiance to the idea that art is about an aesthetic survival of the fittest.

Video production–at home, on a computer, relying upon the works of millions of other contributors, working in a narrative format that tells a story over time, relying upon music, words and images–provides a profound opportunity to evolve consciousness in a direction that allows an obliteration of boundaries.  That is what art is about, the exploration of conventional boundaries and then their violation in order to better understand what all a human is.  This new medium, in combination with the contributions of others, who provide video, sound, words and photography, creates opportunities to integrate the community into the self, allowing an elegant, passionate dissolution of individuality.

I really like video.  I had no idea that this would be the case.

A larger work would also describe a short history, most influential theorists and currently accepted theories in the disciplines being explored.  Most of my writing falls within anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology.  Still, I discuss primatology, psychology, consciousness, medicine and endocrinology.  It is impossible in a short work to offer a several-discipline context.  It’s even unwieldy in a longer work, particularly one that seeks to communicate with a lay audience.  There is also the fact that though I am somewhat familiar with what I am talking about in anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology, I am woefully unqualified to provide much depth in the other disciplines I touch upon.  Intimidated by what I am doing, I prefer to avoid behaving like I know what I am talking about in a discipline outside where that discipline touches upon my basic thesis.  So, in Evolution, Autism and Social Change, I offer about ten pages where I review classic heterochronic theory, or the subdiscipline of evolutionary biology most integral to understanding what I am doing.  I’m worried those ten pages may lose three-quarters of my readers.

There are many philosophical implications to Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  That also gets saved for a larger work.  I estimated 17 sections of implications.  That was way too much for what is essentially an introduction.

The future implications of the theory also seemed too much information for a short work.  Those ten threads were left for the larger work.

One principle or concept has emerged since Evolution, Autism and Social Change went to the editor.  The central thesis of my theorizing condensed to the following sentence about nine months ago:  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. It feels lately like it has condensed even further.  The word maturity now summarizes the central thesis.  Whereas Darwin focused on conception and death with his theory of natural selection, which merged survival of the fittest with heritable traits, I find that the word “maturity” suggests all that which occurs between conception and demise that influences evolution.  I’m not sure how to integrate this understanding with the work now with the editor.

When I first wrote this stuff up in 1998 in the website serpentfd.org, estrogen’s connection with the dynamic was not at all clear or understood.  It was all about testosterone.  The model was expressed as a four-layered process unfolding in the push-and-pull way a serpent crawls.  Though I understood that the timing of maturation was integral, I had no idea what informed timing.  So I concentrated only on changes in rates of maturation.

With what I’m finishing now, I feel a whole is communicated, even though much has been left out.  Nevertheless, as someone who is not an academic–I am an artist by training–I am now left with the choice of how exactly the book is to be framed.  I am concluding that it is more genuine and reasonable to make this a book with an artistic rather than an academic slant.  Joining sections with illustrations seems right.  It makes it more accessible.  To pitch the work to fit academic conventions would probably be a waste of time.  Academics don’t offer attention to the work of nonacademics in their field.  It’s just off their radar.  Academics don’t even often offer attention to multidisciplinary theories that include their discipline.  They are used to regarding the work of those that have put in the time to get a degree in their particular discipline, those that have something to lose if they don’t perform.

Maybe 30 years ago a book came out with many diagram-like illustrations describing the spiritual transformation that was going to occur as a result of several planets aligning in a certain way.  The book was called Harmonic Convergence and was written by Jose Arguelles.  Even though I’m writing a book on evolution grounded in conventional science, there is really no format precursor to this book I’m finishing.  The closest thing that comes to mind is that weird astrology book.  Bummer.

Trying to find a publisher for what I’ve done seems a prescription to feel rejected.  Though some well-known authors, scientists and theorists have said kind and/or respectful things to me in emails, or just asked questions (Simon Baron-Cohen, William Irwin Thompson, Elaine Morgan, Riane Eisler, Tom Robbins), none has gone so far as to offer firm support for what is clearly an unproven theory, though they have usually had encouraging things to say.  I don’t think a publisher interprets encouragement as support.  I will self-publish.

I have several friends that have written books and found publishers.  Just because a publishing company puts a work into print does not mean it promotes the work.

So, I’ll publish this myself, if I bring it to print.  I’ll begin by posting this as a free pdf download. April 1st is my target date.  It will be difficult to categorize.  I’ll mull over ways to promote it.  How many books are out there purporting to explain autism from an evolutionary perspective using a new feminine theory of evolution, with illustrations?

Some of the image/word combinations, what this culture calls comics, align themselves well with the themes and content of sections of Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  These comics were all from the early to mid-1990s, from before I disappeared in the late 1990s in studies of serpent mythology, ancient matrifocal societies and then evolutionary theory.  Some of the metaphors carry over.  I often use music, children and water images to evoke concepts, but many of the subtleties of the theory are not suggested by the comics.

I have no idea where accessible original digital files are, and they are now 11 years old.  Locked inside of jazz discs are most of the images, but jazz discs are just about inaccessible these days.  My discs are corrupted by a common defect that makes retrieval almost impossible.  I may have to recolor and redraw many of these pieces if I go in this direction.

I sold many of these images to an early Internet greeting card firm.  I think it went out of business in the year 2000.  The firm had rights to the images for five years.  Almost all the images were originally comics I’d published in various magazines, newsprint monthlies and quarterlies through the 90s.  Whereas in 1990 my work was mostly funny, or trying to be funny, by 1995 it was mostly social commentary or provocative art.  Early in the 1990s, a piece might have appeared in 25 publications.  By 1995, two or three publishers might have picked a comic up.  In 1996, I stopped doing the comics and started an illustrated book on dragons that evolved into the theorizing that I’m now considering appropriate for these comics to accompany.

So, this is going to take some mental wrestling, combining media, deciding what to use and considering propelling myself back into the visual arts.  I need to ponder the need to create some new comic work to accompany the chapters or sections in Evolution, Autism and Social Change that don’t have work from 15 years ago that complement what is being said.

It’s not clear to me at this point where this is going.

I’m now slowly building writing skills.  My first book-length work posts shortly.  It was built from the short essays that comprise this blog.  At the same time, I’m learning video production, accompanying these short blog essays with Elia’s and Jordan’s music and Creative Commons contributions by artists and amateur photographers and videographers from around the world.

Engagement in theorizing on human origins and the dynamics of human and biological evolution is similar to, if not identical to, creating art.  Participating in art, I feel drawn toward a medium while experiencing that which wants to be expressed.  Medium and content feel closely allied.  The process or medium used to express the experience, and the experience itself, feel closely related.

By merging a medium with my own experience, art emerges that is based upon making sense.  Theorizing how evolution operates, like art, I at first feel drawn to particular ideas, books, disciplines and authors, intuiting that here an answer lies.  I feel that once I have accumulated and stored the content I am looking for, patterns will emerge that will offer an experience of integration.  Congregations of ideas, books, disciplines and authors feel to me like an artistic media.  My attraction to a knowledge cluster is predicated on my intuiting a hidden integration that when matched with my experience will offer epiphany.

Right now, I am feeling aware of a congregation of information in an area I don’t know well.  I don’t know if I’ll find myself flinging my attention in that direction.  This information area has to do with the relationship among nonhuman animal populations, social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, acceleration, endocrinology and ontogeny.  My studies have revolved almost exclusively around humans.  I’m sensing a deep and evocative story accompanying an understanding of how these principles work outside humans.

What I’ve been drifting toward is evolutionary theory based upon principles of maturity.  This is a complement to evolution based upon conception and death.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as an exposition on the survival of the fit, describes both the impact of demise on the survival of specific traits, and the power of a belief in heritability, how a being is conceived to inform a future life.  Between death and conception, or conception and death, is ontogeny, or maturation.  Integral to understanding evolution is how maturation influences and is influenced.  Exploring social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, acceleration, endocrinology, pubertal timing, environmental influences and ontogeny, we can begin to get an idea of how evolution operates outside of death and conception.  The artist in me intuits that an evolutionary epiphany accompanies an understanding of evolution’s other half, the part which happens while beings are alive.  It’s not just about when they are conceived and die.

An artist presupposes that integration is inevitable once a medium is respectfully explored.  A theorist can enter discipline explorations with similar sensitivities.  Presupposing connection is easy for an artist.  No violation of orthodoxy is implied.  Presupposing connection for a theorist can be heresy.  In a reductionist milieu, to behave as if something is true (connection between not obviously connected parts) that has not been proven true is often considered deeply inappropriate.

As an artist, I often feel compelled to find connections among two or more things which are not obviously related.  It is an obsession.  It is an obsession that periodically offers an experience of integration.  As a theorist, I feel compelled to discover and reveal connections among things not obviously related.  For me, epiphany results.

Presupposing connection offers an experience of integration.  It’s the same in science and in art.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects created by small, local organizations.  PJEP does not initiate or articulate.  We empower and encourage.

Empowering and encouraging involves access to and distribution of high quality information.  The closer to consensus reality we are, the better we’re able to perform our job of mapping out the landscape to achieve goals.  PJEP, by simply being in contact with 1,500 organizations, able to retrieve from them information on what exactly they are doing, allows us to share that information, empowering activists with knowledge of their place in the larger whole.  For example, speakers at local events could state with confidence that over 100 cities around the country were protesting a government decision.  Groups are not acting in isolation.

Just before the protests, one of the places I searched for high quality information was Twitter.  Conducting a number of different searches, such as “Afghanistan protest” or “escalation protest” or just “#protest” or “#Afghanistan,” I was shocked to discover there was very little activity around the 100 emerging protests across the country.  One activist posted his frustration with finding any information regarding the protests on Twitter.  That got more retweets than any protest posting.

Concluding that the protests were not generating heated conversations among youth, it was easy to predict, early December 1, that attendance across the country would be low, with mostly the usual older folks.  Indeed, that was the case.  The largest of the 100 demonstrations was in Chicago, with about 450 in attendance.  The folks in Chicago all considered this a healthy turnout.  I received many emails from organizers in other states that were disappointed by the low attendance.

Chicago was the very first city in the country to post that an action would occur at 5:00 p.m. the evening after the announcement.  Organizers worked hard to create the event, led by Andy Thayer, whose leadership has become integral to almost all Chicago Left mass demonstrations.  Chicago also has almost every Left organization on a single organizational listserve.  This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to put a spontaneous project together.  Most cities don’t display as much cooperation among organizations as Chicago does.  Then again, most cities don’t have activists like Andy Thayer.  Andy doesn’t only take responsibility for doing what other activists don’t step up to do, but he executes those things with efficiency, professionalism and a creative flare.

How could other cities have encouraged larger numbers to attend their 100 demonstrations?  Chicago was a unique situation.  Though Twitter was not engaged, Andy relied upon Facebook extensively, even posting links to the other demonstrations around the country from his Facebook page.  A heavier reliance upon social media like Facebook by other city demonstrations might have had a positive effect.

Still, I don’t think the low numbers around the country were about what organizers could have done differently.  Activists that worked hard for Obama mostly did not show.  This included many faith-based, union and African-American activists.  Clearly, youth mostly were not engaged.  That leaves me wondering what youth in the United States would be inclined to twitter about as regards political change.  Furious Twitter activity around the Iran elections engaged a massive number of Americans.  The Afghanistan escalation jolted few.

What in America would compel a powerful Twitter response?

Many of the Left activists we know move in social circles comprised of other Left activists.  A result of the integration of political activism and friendship networks is an interesting nondifferentiation among actions taken in support of friends, actions taken to impress friends, actions taken because that is what your friends are doing and actions taken because we feel compelled to do so politically.  In other words, the line between friendship and politics becomes blurred.

Whereas I find many of my friends and political associates focused intensely on the larger politics of what they are involved in, my focus is often following through with what I committed to doing, engaging in an action or intervention I find interesting or just doing something because it is with people I know and like.  My work is not driven by emotion.  The politics that are most interesting to me are those that make clear how the Left operates, how the Left responds to events, how the Left seeks to achieve its goals and how working together can achieve those goals.  This is all in the context of relationships I’ve formed with activists across the country.

For me, friendships, relationships and my involvement with social and political change are pretty much the same thing.  It’s all art.  I am part of a process that involves my response to community requests in combination with what emerges from my imagination.

There is a deeper level that this dynamic operates within.  I carry with me a belief that each of us unconsciously plays a part in a larger societal and biological dynamic.  There is no difference between biology and society.  The decisions each of us makes individually is part of a decision we make socially and biologically.  Experiencing the personal, the social and the biological as one integrated whole, I find that the political feels far less “personal” than it evidently does to many of my friends.  What I mean is that I rarely feel personally affronted by the words and behaviors of men and women on the world stage.  I observe men and women making decisions, decisions that they perceive to be in their own best interest, but which nevertheless are decisions informed by a larger personal/social/biological context.  Each plays his or her part.  Rarely do the players show signs of awareness that the decisions they make are not only their own.

The frame of reference that I carry with me when I theorize about human and biological evolution accompanies me when I’m involved in political and social change.  It has at its foundation an artist’s point of view.  I am propelled to write, imagine and behave in particular ways related to what spontaneously emerges from a place within or beneath me that is definitely not my conscious mind.  I theorize and construct political change tools based upon these emerging inclinations.

What I am aware of is what attracts me.  Some things feel fun and I engage in them.  Some people feel attractive and I engage with them.  I let myself be led through love, friendship, work, theory and political activism, aware that I am following along behind where my personal/social/biological path leads me.

I am a political activist that usually feels no blame.  Aware that I am led, I understand we all are led.  Each plays his or her part.

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.

“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?

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.