We’ve established in earlier entries the following evolutionary paradigm:  Mother’s testosterone levels > progeny maturation rate > social structure proclivity > evolutionary trajectory.

Now, let’s consider a complementary addition.

Continuing yesterday’s discussion, let’s assume Scandinavian female Te, male tE where…..

T = high testosterone
t = low testosterone
E = high estrogen
e = low estrogen

If it is the case that in Scandinavia both sexes evolved the biological, neurological and societal features of neoteny over 5,000 years, then it would seem anomalous according to a foundation hypothesis of this blog and the Theory of Waves.  I am estimating that over the course of human evolution we tended toward matrifocal social structure (females TE, males te) or patrifocal social structure (females te, males TE).

We’ve discussed how Asian patrifocal cultures manifest neoteny in both sexes by encouraging female te and male TE by shifting all hormonal thresholds downward, allowing cooperation within a patrifocal context.  You’d also get a highly aesthetic society with male high E embedding refined discrimination, a matrifocal female attribute, with the male.

It seems possible that low female estrogen might be a powerful determinant of neoteny in females.  This might be the case biologically, though I know …

If Scandinavians are highly neotenous based upon mutual sexual selection (Miller, 2000), with both sexes choosing mates exhibiting those blue-eyed, blond-haired, pale skin markers of a person able to thrive off dairy and sunlight (Harris, 1989), then one would also expect to see larger brains (Tobias, 1970) and a cooperative, care-based society (Eisler, 2007).  Long arms and legs can also go with a low-testosterone neotenous constellation.

Asian societies, specifically Chinese peoples, also exhibit neoteny (Montagu, 1989), with perhaps both sexes choosing small-sized mates to manage limited nourishment sources.  Female estrogen levels are low (Diamond, 1986) and left-handedness is low (Dawson, 1974), with the males’ testes size almost half of a Scandinavian population adjusted for size (Diamond, 1986).  These are all patrifocal markers.

Chinese populations mature far faster and reach puberty sooner (Eveleth & Tanner, 1976) than Northwest Europe populations, an acceleration consonant with a patrifocal frame, yet they exhibit neotenous or maturational-delayed features such as relatively larger brains and flat-faced, diminutive features.

I am hypothesizing that Asian populations that require large-scale, multilevel cooperation encourage the societal cooperation bonuses that come with neoteny, while small size and fast maturation are demanded by intense agrarian population concentrations.  In this highly patrifocal context …

Last night was a weird night.  I was not exactly sleeping.  My mind was deep into the pattern-trolling mode.  A part of me feels a certainty that estrogen and testosterone/estrogen constellations in mate selection (see “Estrogen Conjecture Inspired by Asian Neotenous Patrifocal Society”) lead to a deepened understanding of human evolution and the particular physiological/neuropsychological/hormonal/psychological features of the human ethnic spectrum.

At these preinspiration sessions I find myself operating with several presuppositions.  The presuppositions suggest that this process is far more artistic than scientific.  It’s more than an “as if” frame where I make a hypothesis and then follow where the existing data lead.  I’m assuming several things.  One, I assume that I can know the answer.  Two, I assume my unconscious already has the answer.  Three, I assume my unconscious is connected to the larger consciousness.  Four, I assume the solutions are available to me in a form I am schooled to assimilate and not a form beyond my education, such as genetics or higher mathematics.

That is a lot of presuppositions.  What this boils down to is that, feeling blessed, I can allow myself to experience, identify and communicate the patterns just beyond the barriers of …

I woke up with the “ice weasels” this morning.

“Ice weasels” was a concept invented by comic artist Matt Groening to describe that experience of waking up when it’s still dark out and feeling dread.  I mention ice weasels among certain friends and they know exactly where I am.

I worked for Matt Groening and his wife, Deborah, for a couple years almost twenty years ago.  This was before The Simpsons appeared, back when Life in Hell was a panel comic available in the alternative press.  I was an aspiring comic panel artist selling the products of other comic artists as I also tried to make a living as a sales rep in the greeting card business.  One of my lines was Life In Hell greeting cards.  Though my comic panels and strips were acquiring a following–they appeared in almost 200 publications–I wasn’t close to making a living at it.  The sales firm ended up doing well and paid the bills.

I’m being visited by ice weasels.

Marcia and I visited the brain doctor yesterday.  It’s been a little less than a month since the diagnosis that I have a brain aneurysm.  They discovered it when I was being brain-scanned …

Riane Eisler in her Real Wealth of Nations describes the Scandinavian countries as featuring many of the characteristics of a matristic, or partnership, society vs. the way a domination or patrifocal society operates.  She uses four categories to describe the differences among the paradigms, what I would describe as matrifocal and patrifocal social structures.

A partnership society has a structure that is equitable and horizontal vs. a dominator society that is rigidly hierarchical.  Relations in a partnership society are characterized by mutual respect with little fear, while in a domination system fear, abuse and violence are common.  In a partnership society, the genders are equal, with an emphasis on caring and caregiving, while in a domination society the male gender is ranked over females.  Last, the mythologies differ, with partnership society stories and beliefs emphasizing caring relationships, while domination-based societies idealize violence and control.  Eisler sees structure, relations, gender and beliefs as integral to understanding the differences between these two kinds of societies.

Eisler goes into some detail describing the ways that Scandinavian societies manifest features of a partnership society in a modern economy.  The social net is wide and firm, offering health care, employment security, education, child care, old …

I’d like to consider a counterintuitive conjecture, a hypothesis suggesting that the possible natural hormonal constellation for a matrifocal culture is a high-testosterone/high-estrogen female mating with a low-testosterone/low-estrogen male. The patrifocal complementary opposite would be low-testosterone/low-estrogen females pairing with high-testosterone/high-estrogen males.

It feels counterintuitive for several reasons. First, you’d expect in a matrifocal culture that the males be attentive to the children. As neotenous males, they would be attracted to children. Of course, you could have matrifocal cultures where the convention and the hormonal constellation of the males provide ongoing positive attention to children. But, if there is a natural matrifocal paradigm, I’m not so sure that males with relatively high estrogen necessarily fit. In my mind, I’ve always figured the males were attentive to children. I assumed this partially because in a society featuring females exhibiting female choice, I figured females would pick males that were attentive to the children. I figured that this quality fit in with neotenous males. I’m starting to wonder.

One indication of the counterintuitive perspective is that in matrifocal aboriginal societies, men often live in their own enclaves with relatively little contact with children. In avuncular societies characterized by men not often knowing who …

I’m posting some excerpts and abstracts that support or contest the conjectures from the last three posts hypothesizing that estrogen may influence our evolution.  I’m searching for studies that might explain, along with testosterone, specific ethnic physiological, psychological and neurological differences.  For those folks following this thread, jump on in.  Post in the comments section what you might have found that makes clearer (or less clear) what we are discussing.

Note we are looking for evidence of hormone levels in premenopausal women, those whose uterine environments influence the maturation rates of their children.

[citations removed]  “Schacter reported that women exposed in utero to the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol had a handedness distribution on the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) that was shifted away from strong right-handedness.  Nass et al. found that females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a disorder that results in increased androgen production during gestation, displayed a lesser degree of right-hand preference than unaffected sibling controls on the EHI.  However, males with CAH displayed a trend in the opposite direction.  More recently, Helleday et al. reported that females with CAH did not differ from controls in either degree of right-hand preference or in dichotic listening asymmetry.” (Moffat, S.D. & Hampson, …

To suggest I’m out on a limb here would be to understate the situation. This website and its three sister websites (see lower left) outline the details of an alternative theory of evolution based upon all three of Darwin’s theories of evolution integrated with an understanding of the relevance of recent discoveries in neuropsychology. This theory began when I hypothesized that we evolved within matrifocal societies driven by runaway sexual selection choosing cooperative, dancing males, following a neotenous trajectory. In my readings I had discovered that brains have been growing smaller for many thousands of years as we’ve turned patrifocal. I looked for evidence that there are males alive today, males that would be examples of an ancient matrifocal larger brain type with difficulty speaking, having been wired for gesture. I discovered that many autistic males have larger brains.

I immersed myself in the neuropsychological literature surrounding these issues. This was ten years ago. Geschwind and Galaburda’s Cerebral Lateralization opened the door. Reading Geschwind and several hundred additional books and papers, I discovered details revolving around that fact that at six weeks before birth, the mother’s testosterone level sets the testosterone levels of her children, establishing their maturation rate for …

A hazy dynamic is emerging in my mind.  This possibility has bounced around in my rear thoughts for several years along with the riddle of Asian patrifocal neoteny.  The dynamic is as follows.

As outlined on numerous occasions within this blog, testosterone levels are hypothesized to compel human neoteny and acceleration-driven biological and social evolution, on occasion compelling extreme maturational delay such as autism, simulating what appears to be teleological intervention (evolutionary overarching patterns that have been hypothesized to represent the presence of an interventionist deity).  At six weeks before birth, mother’s testosterone levels establish her child’s lifelong maturational trajectory and which social structure will feel like home when that child is grown.  High testosterone mothers birth high testosterone daughters and low testosterone males who fit into a matrifocal paradigm.  Low testosterone mothers create low testosterone girls and high testosterone boys feeling at home amongst patrifocal folks.

Consider that estrogen levels also compel progeny trajectories based on the mother’s estrogen levels at a certain point in her child’s embryonic career.  Let’s hypothesize that low female estrogen levels result in small body size and an inclination toward patrifocal social structure where female infanticide is common.  High female estrogen would incline the …

At this particular moment, I am feeling attracted to another riddle.  Anomalies can serve to disprove a theory or open doors leading to solutions that draw the theory deeper.  Over the course of these entries, I’ve made a number of predictions.  The predictions that don’t hold true when experiments are conducted will suggest intuitions that have gone awry, threads of theory that need adjusting or hidden insights waiting for integration.

The riddle is as follows.  Nordic culture displays lanky females and males displaying a variety of neotenous features that include blond hair, blue eyes and astonishingly egalitarian societies.  Both sexes display these neotenous features.

In Asian societies, females and males exhibit a completely different assortment of highly neotenous features but are short, black haired and dark eyed.  Societies are not egalitarian but highly patrifocal.

If we assume that features exhibited reflect cultural visual predilections, visually based sexual selection criteria or tendencies, we have an easy answer to the riddle, but that answer feels unsatisfactory to me.  Let’s follow the pathway of pattern to see where pattern leads.

“As I explained earlier, the northern dairying people lived in a mist-shrouded environment and had to bundle up against the cold most of …

Marian Annett (Annett & Manning, 1990; Annett & Kilshaw, 1984) has hypothesized a balanced polymorphism in dyslexia that neatly fits with my theory of biological and societal evolution I am calling a Theory of Waves, formerly Shift Theory.  The Theory of Waves predicts a specific structure of health and disease in humans.  Nineteenth Century heterochronic theory’s descriptions of the operation of relative rate and timing changes of development and maturation are directly transposable to Annett’s (1985) right-shift theory.  It fact, superimposing Gould’s (1977) clock model of heterochronic evolution directly over Annett’s (1985) right-shift graph reveals the relationship among human evolution, the etiology of cerebral asymmetry and neurological disorders such as autism.

Right-shift theory (Annett, 1985) states that there is a gene (+) that predisposes most people for language facility.  Annett noted that there is a difference in the distribution of handedness between human and animal populations characterized by a right-shift in human beings.  This right-shift makes clear that not all humans are equally well disposed to language use.  People with a (- -) genotype (18-19 % of the population) evidence no predilection to specific handedness or cerebral asymmetry and so achieve a left- or right-handedness close to random.  People with …

Female choice and societal innovation are so closely tied as to be indistinguishable.

In Asian cultures characterized by patrifocal frames of reference, with female infanticide, and now female foeticide, ancient hierarchies, deep allegiance to status and a reverence for the warrior, you find little innovation because males are selected for their ability to command and dominate. Creativity is highly valued in the context of supporting an established, conventional, ritualized aesthetic.

Across Asia into India and the Middle East, females exhibit little choice in mate selection. Families, often the father, still decide which males are suitable for their daughters. These societies are often militaristic, caste-based, hierarchical and highly stratified, featuring domineering males. Women’s rights are few and neglected.

Perhaps the first society featuring an integration of matrifocal and patrifocal forces was ancient Greece. Indo-Europeans were not normally disposed to providing the matrifocal peoples that they conquered much influence in the societies that followed. Ancient Greece was an exception to a degree. Females could not vote but could sometimes wield authority, particularly in their choice of a mate. When females are provided the ability to choose, several things happen. Females choose mates that they estimate will enhance their lives, a male that …

Integral to an understanding of how humans are evolving is recognizing the many variables that influence social structure. Sexual selective forces inform social structure, and environmental effects influence hormonal levels that influence social structure. Demanding that natural selection is the cause of our evolution is a little like watching the railway tracks to guess what kind of locomotive will be passing by. Of course, any social structure-related evolutionary development has to pass the test of progeny surviving to procreate. That railroad they have to travel. What exactly passes down those tracks has far more to do with selective forces related to society and the environment than mere survival. The train is not the tracks.

My favorite game when I was small was Chutes and Ladders. I think I was as powerfully moved by the game board imagery as I was by the dynamic of the game. The player could observe at any time during the game the potential pathways that the game could take. Playing the game was to act out the manifest ups and downs characteristic of this chunk of life.

This theory of evolution offers two evolutionary trajectories and two social structures, each social structure enhancing or compelling …

Last August, my 24-year-old son went to the bank to renew his one-year CD, money his grandfather had given him on his 21st birthday.  It wasn’t a huge amount of money.  Still, several thousand dollars.  When Elia sat down with the bank officer to discuss the details, the sales pitch began.

It was the opinion of the officer, the strong opinion of the officer, that Elia invest in the stock market, allowing the officer to make recommendations on which Chase vehicles to buy.  The officer felt certain that Chase could wisely invest his money in stocks that would certainly, quickly increase in value.

Elia experienced and expressed confusion.  He wanted to purchase another CD.  The officer suggested not.

They say a stopped clock is right twice every 24 hours.  You don’t have to be right to be right.  Eventually, every opinion is supported by circumstances that reflect the conditions that make that opinion make sense.  I grew more than queasy in the 1980s when the disengagement of financial regulations picked up momentum with the Reagan Administration.  Then began the appointment of industry representatives to the very agencies that were designed to regulate their activities.  Transparency was legislated out of market …

I often write of four facets tracing evolution’s pathways:  biology, society, ontogeny and personal experience.  Philosopher Ken Wilber offers a similar map with his Integral Theory and four quadrants.  Hundred-year-old theories of recapitulation offer rich details on multiple-scale evolution processes.  For example, Stephen J. Gould in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny describes Freud’s fourfold parallelism:  Western child, adult aboriginals, Western primitive ancestor and the contemporary adult neurotic.  Freud was a passionate supporter of recapitulation, evolution following several discipline pathways.

What was missing in these hundred-year-old parallelistic models was a dynamic.  These theories described what theorists observed with no specific estimation of the operational details.  Darwin offered a theory, pangenesis, which he thought could fill in gaps.  It was conjecture.  Excellent conjecture, as it turned out.  Darwin suggested that sexual organs produced something that was influencing changes in physiology based upon environmental influences.

The piece that Darwin, and the recapitulationists such as Freud, was missing was the profound role social structure plays upon biological and human evolution.  Perhaps if they had known that human maturation rates are set by the mother’s uterine testosterone levels before birth they would have been able to intuit the role of testosterone in evolution.  A mother with …

In these blogs, I write about evolutionary theory, autism etiology theory, political activism and social change.  I discuss the web, business, the economy, politics, political organizing specifics, organizer conference structure, media, cosmology, society, psychology, social structure, sexual selection, neoteny, heterochrony, hormonal-driven evolutionary dynamics, transparency, diversity, hierarchy, hypnosis, spiritual experience, personal experiences, play, art, language, myth, story, the nature of joy and sources of love.

Friends have told me I cover a lot of subjects.  I often get the feeling I’m writing about the same thing over and over again.  I write about evolution.

I arrived at writing about evolution by tracing backwards the origin of dragon myths and then serpent myths.  Visit humanevolution.net for more detail on what occurred.  Over the course of a year and a half, I immersed myself in dragon and serpent mythology.  I went deeply, head over heels, down the rabbit hole of attraction.  What booted me off that abyss was the book Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.

The book outlines a possible feminine foundation for human culture and explores implications of the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas.  Exploring and recording details of several hundred myths, reading over 90 books on dragon and serpent …

Pattern recognition and exhibition form the essence from which we humans have evolved. Sexual selection usually involves a female choosing subtle variations on a pattern theme such as song, movement/dance or visual display. It can occur that males dramatically escalate the details while females exponentially increase their deliberative tendencies. You can get what Fischer called Runaway Sexual Selection.

What probably began the runaway loop were females selecting for superb dancers and sound makers with males responding over time with astonishing feats of endurance and acumen. Females become far more appreciative of the nuances the males could exhibit because females were being selected over time for acute judgmental abilities. Those females with subtle evaluative capacities mated with the most adroit male performers.

Somewhere along the line, females began selecting for males with talents for escalating pattern exhibition unrelated to any particular or specific stimuli trajectory.

Females selected for creativity.

There is no fiction in biology. Natural systems evolve within firm boundaries such as climate, food sources, natural disasters and competing peers. Now humans began operation in an alternative, complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, having crossed a line where what exists, exists, but not in the biological world.

With imagination …

There are many paradoxes to the financial meltdown we’ve been experiencing.  From some perspectives, there are no paradoxes, just greedy or timid people following the direction provided by their peers.  I prefer to view what we are seeing as an inevitable result of Social Darwinism, now called free markets, which is a manifestation of the ancient Indo-European principle of might makes right.

Capitalistic Democracy allows the elites with resources to control elections, defund education and manage media.  We’ve designed a system that allows those forces with access to resources to manage wealth in a fashion that keeps those with less access to assets in a position where they are less likely to exert controls.  Folks in control work their levers of power to maintain control.  Elections, education and media management are the three intersections between the powerless and their access to the information that creates change.

Those in control feel entitled to stay in control.  They live by a philosophy that supports that position.  We call that “free market” philosophy at this time.  It was called Social Darwinism when last we went through this purge in the 30s.  Before that it had many names.  Riane Eisler calls it the dominance …

The metaphor of a cancer spreading has often been used to describe the unwinding of credit and the destruction of assets across the world.  Cancer is not the right metaphor.  I would suggest we’re in the midst of a wildfire conflagration.

Two things prepared the world for the unfolding we observe.

There has been a confusion of metaphor with assets.  Integrating a beautiful story with no boundaries into our commodities, options, derivatives, stocks, options, precious metals and currencies created a beautiful fiction of wealth.  Stories, financial vehicles, were designed to suggest little or no risk.  We chose to believe them.  Three of the last four administrations were placing at the head of agencies the very industries that those agencies were designed to regulate.  All four administrations purged accountability and transparency from these bureaus, allowing industries to write their own regulations.  When the beautiful stories of life without risk were peddled up and down the avenues of power, there were no grown-ups left to suggest that life does not work that way.  The risk of government interference was removed from the experience of the American corporation.  The adults were gone.

It’s been Lord of the Flies in Washington, but no one …

Through the last four American administrations, the American financial system has been designed to be nontransparent to encourage the growth of unique investment vehicles. Lessons learned and legislated in the 1930s were unlearned and rewritten in an atmosphere hailing “free markets” as if that was something different from Social Darwinism. Increased stratification was the result. Evidently the embrace of supply side economics in the 1980s wasn’t alone enough to tell us we’d crossed a line suggesting that the merger of mythology and economics was not a good idea.

Kings of old were able to afford the best in entertainment, which included frequent visits from the most talented storytellers. Today we have to merely turn on the TV to experience finely crafted tales. One thing has changed. The powerful today hire wordsmiths to design tapestries of tales that support their controlling the looms of power, which they call free markets, when the markets are only free on TV.

Free markets are free of government oversight, free of transparency, free of union intervention, free of accountability, free of the social costs of equal pay for women and day care, free of safety constraints, free of the costs of environmental destruction and often …

This work has proposed three primary causes of autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. All three causes impact fluctuating testosterone levels inside a mother, which determine her children’s maturation speeds and their, and societies’, social-structure proclivities. The three causes are matrifocal sexual selection trajectories (mate-selection proclivities), different ethnicities mating, thereby propelling shifts back to a common progenitor and a host of environmental influences that modify mother-father testosterone levels. Explore these etiologies in detail by clicking here, here and here.

I hypothesize that these are primary causes of autism. There are also the reasons that these hypothesized causes have been so difficult to uncover and address. I would suggest that politics, patriarchy and academic division are the main barriers to understanding autism’s origins.

Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in his Blood Relations outlines a theory of evolution that revolves around female choice. He begins that work with an exploration of how it is that his particular perspective is not easily embraced. Knight proposes that the polarization of the West from the works of Marx and Engels obfuscated the works of theorists with matriarchal underpinnings. Theories of evolution with females at the center were ignored. Knight targets politics as a …

Our uniqueness as a species may have more to do with our choice not to decide upon a specific mating strategy than those many other things that we believe are peculiarly human.

We observe the manifestation of heterochrony in society, neoteny and its reverse, through the two social structures that seem to manifest these two evolutionary trajectories. Neotenous, cooperative males and commanding, accelerating females reveal themselves in matrifocal or matristic social structures. A social structure with commanding, accelerated males and cooperative females inclines toward patriarchy or a patrifocal orientation.

Matrifocal and patrifocal social structures come with either commanding, high-testosterone males mating with cooperative, low-testosterone females or cooperative, low-testosterone males pairing with commanding, high-testosterone females.

Over time, in a matrifocal context, with males focused on artistic exhibition as opposed to hierarchical display, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of the cooperative males and commanding females, revealing a constellation of features characteristic of matrilineal, matristic or partnership societies. Society evolves in particular fashions with the female choosing her mate.

In a patrifocal context, with males striving for hierarchical ascendancy, offering enhanced procreation opportunities, with females cooperating with the winners, society mirrors the hormonal constellation of commanding males and cooperative females manifesting in a …

The work of scientists is not often poetry. But they do reveal patterns that are profound.

“A corollary of our hypothesis is that hormonal effects on the brains of offspring may vary with the time of conception. The activity of the pineal gland changes seasonally with alterations in day length. As a general rule, during the dark winter months the pineal becomes active and suppresses both ovaries and testes, whereas in the summer it is inactive and sex hormone levels are higher. For this reason many animals bear young in the spring, an advantageous situation since temperature and food supplies are more suitable for survival. An example of such seasonal modulation of hormonal effects on the brain is observed in the HVc nucleus of the singing bird (Nottebohm 1981). This description of pineal physiology is, however, somewhat oversimplified. An animal’s sensitivity to light may vary through the year. Gonadal hormones may thus become activated in the spring, but as a result of loss of sensitivity to light over the summer hormone levels may diminish as fall approaches. Despite these facts, day length is a powerful influence. Thus, steers increase their weight more rapidly in the winter when artificial light is …

Early last summer, before the conventions, Sarah Palin caused a stir among the parents of children with Down Syndrome.  My Leftist buddy Martin has a kid with Downs.  Martin was moved by this Alaskan elected official’s seeking attention for the disability that his life revolved around.  Martin seriously considered voting for McCain/Palin when Palin was picked as VP.  Until he heard her speak.

I’ve not studied Down Syndrome.  Still, in my explorations of autism, Down Syndrome kept emerging, but I did not swerve to explore its possible connection to the theory I was detailing.  Several things do jump out.  Those details suggest an evolutionary etiology for Down Syndrome.  If supported, advocates like Sarah Palin that lambast evolutionary theory would be left advocating for advances within a discipline that she religiously combats.

Papers heavily support the thesis that Down Syndrome, in males and females, reveals extreme neoteny or maturational delay.  Unlike in autism, where I posit males exhibit maturational delay and females maturational acceleration, all of those with Down Syndrome show extreme neoteny.

“Down syndrome individuals generally have retarded growth and maturational processes with retention of fetal development (“unfinished”) characteristics involving brain, face, and the 5th fingers.  According to Waardenburg (1932) …

It seems we have crossed a line in the United States where a lie, if powerfully performed, is treated as truth as a reward.  Politics has always been about storytelling.  Nimble and effortless exaggeration makes up our everyday communication, self concepts and political big pictures.  Something has changed that now makes it possible to lie outright and expect to be rewarded with a prize.

In a Greek restaurant with friends Lee & Nancy maybe 25 years ago, John Coleman, the weatherman, walked in to have supper.  Lee asked John, “Will it rain tomorrow?”  John responded, “Somewhere.”

I saw Coleman being interviewed on Fox last year.  He’s about 80.  He’s a leader in the movement that broadcasts that global warming is a myth.  When John Coleman was a weatherman in Chicago, we’d watch him because he was the most entertaining.  Rainstorms were a potential deluge.  Tornados stalked most storks.  The Big Snow was an ever present winter possibility.  Ironically, his talent was exaggerating disaster.  Real disaster he cannot, or will not, see.  Or, perhaps he does see but is choosing to lie.

Storytellers are entertaining.  Liars are dangerous.  It seems pretty clear that in America today, the distinction is viewed as …