What follows is an excerpt from Gould’s work.  (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Cambridge: Belknap Press pp. 356-58).

“To support the argument that we evolved by retaining juvenile features of our ancestors, Bolk provided lists of similarities between adult humans and juvenile apes: “Our essential somatic properties, i.e.  Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz. they are fetal conditions that have become permanent.  What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man” (1926a, p. 468).  In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:

1.  Our “flat faced” orthognathy (a phenomenon of complex cause related both to facial reduction and to the retention of juvenile flexure, reflected, for example, in the failure of the sphenoethmoidal angle to open out during ontogeny).
2.  Reduction or lack of body hair.
3.  Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair (Bolk argues that black peoples are born with relatively light skin, while ancestral primates are as dark at birth as ever).
4.  The form of the external ear.
5.  The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eye fold.
6.  The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates).
7.  High relative brain weight.
8.  Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age.
9.  The labia majora of women.
10.  The structure of the hand and foot.
11.  The form of the pelvis.
12.  The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women.
13.  Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures.
To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montagu (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958), and Keith (1949).  The following items follow Montagu’s order (pp. 326-327) with some deletions and additions:
14.  Absence of brow ridges.
15.  Absence of cranial crests.
16.  Thinness of skull bones.
17.  Position of orbits under cranial cavity.
18.  Brachycephaly.
19.  Small teeth.
20.  Late eruption of teeth.
21.  No rotation of the big toe.
22.  Prolonged period of infantile dependency.
23.  Prolonged period of growth.
24.  Long life span.
25.  Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).

These lists from Bolk and Montagu display the extreme variation in type and importance of the basic data presented by leading supporters of human neoteny.”

………

Stephen J. Gould reintroduced the power of neoteny as an explanatory principle early in his career.  Neoteny is one of the processes of heterochrony, where changes in the rates and/or timing of maturation influence the evolution of species.  Tom Robbins best communicates neoteny’s meaning from a literary perspective when he focuses on the behavioral repercussions of manifesting certain features of infants into the behaviors of adults.  Specifically, Robbins describes wild-eyed creativity, boundary busting, wonder, sensuality, curiosity and a compulsion to be close to creative sources.

Gould explores neoteny from biological and ontological perspectives.  Robbins gives it a personal approach.  It is not uncommon to explore society ontologically, comparing the unfolding of societal stages with the stages of human development.  I am not aware of any explorations of society using neoteny as a frame of reference.  I believe a reason is that the young, the disenfranchised, the poor, aboriginals and the Left would be invested with positive attributes having to do with progress contrary to an established paradigm that emphasizes that progress comes from the efforts of the powerful, the corporations, the government, the experienced and technological innovations discovered during war.

The ubiquity of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as THE theory of evolution has obfuscated evidence that suggests that natural selection is but the foundation theory, not the cathedral-like manifestation of how evolutionary theory actually unfolds.  Fundamentalists continue to inflict damage on this society’s ability to understand the nuances of evolutionary process by attacking the foundation.  Social conservatives provide scientific fundamentalists, theorists that believe exclusively in natural selection, platforms to defend natural selection by focusing only on that specific evolutionary theory.  Media stoke the battle.  Polemists like Richard Dawkins get a platform.  All nuance, all theories complementary to natural selection are ignored.  The cathedral is left empty while the foundation is explored for cracks.  When Stephen J. Gould was alive and was lead defender of his discipline against creationist offenses, even he was so lowered by the debate that this master of nuance was left defending natural selection, ignoring the rest of evolution’s processes.  Neoteny was never mentioned in these media exchanges.

Chris Knight, in his Blood Relations, notes how deeply science is affected by politics and societal beliefs.  Gould wrote extensively on the same subject.  Knight is an anthropologist.  Gould was an evolutionary biologist.  Less discussed is the frequency that medicine is affected by the constraints of our societal presuppositions.  For example, autism, an evolutionary condition, is rarely discussed in an evolutionary context.  They say all politics is local.  Indeed, politics reaches down to our very genes.

This work seeks to demonstrate connections.  The relationship between evolutionary biology and politics is multileveled with no discernable floor.  Regardless, while looking down and exploring the causative relationship between biology and politics, we can still move the other direction, upward, observing the interdependence of theory.  Let the media direct attention to the foundation.  I’m headed to the cathedral bell tower where the music is being made.

When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the dining room door and then start lolling back and forth (north and south), and it careened more or less westward across the house. The history of the nearly 100-year old structure, since torn down, was represented in the pathway of the marble.

Tracing the path of societal ideas is compromised by an interpretation protocol that traces only the productions, not the origins, of the mind. We don’t think of biology or genetics as informing a discussion of the evolution of ideas. Exploring the connection between physical and mental when seeking an understanding of culture is not an intuitive choice. It has a lot to do with our not consciously knowing how we evolve biologically and societally. We are left watching the marble, guessing at what might have influenced its path.

No single variable influences our evolution more powerfully than changes in the rate and timing of maturation. Neoteny, or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants by the slowing down of maturation, is the single most influential factor in our divergence from chimpanzee-like progenitors. Variations in a mother’s testosterone levels while her child is in the womb adjust maturation rates, modifying the personality, physical features, strengths and interests of her child. For example, high testosterone levels in combination with other factors can lead to autism. An extremely powerful determinant of testosterone levels is the degree and duration of exposure to light.

Daily testosterone levels are influenced by diurnal light variations. In Africa and the Middle East, equatorial light patterns throughout the year are relatively constant and do not impact daily testosterone levels to variations of more than 30%. Those variations stay within a constant yearly range.

Africans made slaves and carried to America were forced to labor in the American South, a South subject to very different light cycles than their society of origin. With early 20th century migration to Northern cities, additional latitudinal differences came into play. Light varied seasonally and testosterone levels fluctuated wildly relative to the latitude of origin.

The Jewish Diaspora drew Semitic peoples away from regions near the middle of the earth to Europe, where light varies more radically, seasonally, the farther North one goes.

The pineal gland interprets summer as daytime and winter as nighttime, based upon a multimillion-year equatorial calibration in Africa. Africans in America, as well as Semitics in Europe and now in America, find themselves exposed to radically different light levels from their societies of origin. The result is fundamental change in maturation rates in both the directions of neoteny and acceleration because mothers’ testosterone levels are moving either up or down, depending on the season. Also influenced by the season would be when the mother’s parents were born, because they would be subject to the same light impact. Over generations, if relations are born in the same season, you can get multigenerational exaggerations of the pineal-influencing testosterone effects.

In African and Jewish cultures, you get far wider variations of personality, physical features, strengths and interests than you would get in a culture not impacted in this way. I hypothesize you’d also get more cases of conditions characterized by maturational delay (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering, OCD) and maturational acceleration (aggression disorders). Jews have had a huge influence on American culture in the arts and sciences. Blacks have had a huge influence on American culture in the arts and athletics. I would suggest this influence is directly related to both cultures having origins in or near Africa, near the equator, and having moved or been forced to move away. I predict that comparisons of African Americans and equatorial Africans living in their society of origin, and American Jews compared with multigenerational Israeli Jews, will exhibit notable differences in exhibition of conditions characterized by maturational delay.

Recently it was discovered that Somalis relocating to Minnesota are having children with autism a far higher percentage of the time than is normal.  The change in light is an explanation.  This being the case, the birthdays of these children exhibiting autism should be congregating in certain times of the year.  (For other variables that cause autism, click here, here and here.)

Tracing a moving marble through the hallways of our minds is not as easy as noting the effect of a single variable. Still, the history of culture involves a lot more than the tracing of ideas. It also requires following the bouncing ball as it travels from continent to continent, guiding us to note the influence of light. How we evolve socially and biologically is integrally tied to the ideas we have, our creative proclivities and our inhibiting conditions. Noting light’s influence on this process, we might say that no small amount of who and what we are comes from above.

The relationship of theorists with their god is perhaps too subtle and complicated for clear patterns to emerge.  I experience biology and biology’s manifestation as society, as spirituality, and I wonder that this reaction is not a common experience for a theorist.

I recognize that an early fear of death and a life characterized by frequent experiences of anxiety drove me to explore a place where I could feel embraced by interconnection and could become intimate with grace.  Clearly, my theorizing designs an intricate metaphor for the world I choose to live in rather than the world I was intimate with when young.  I suspect much theory for the creator represents a personal integration, a metaphor for what they seek to achieve in life.  Perhaps theory for others is a vindication for an embraced world view.  How theory reflects these nuances of personal journey and personality is fascinating to me.

Marian Annette, the British researcher who has done ground-breaking research on the relationship of handedness to disorders characterized by maturational delay, wrote me that my work seemed a “Just So” story or interesting conjecture with no evidence or proof.  Indeed, except I would suggest that theorists are always only writing stories.  Some of the stories are more useful than others.

That being said, a person’s relationship with her or his god has a lot to say about a person’s relationship with herself or himself and her or his unconscious.  How much of what we project upon our deity has to do with the nature of how we relate to our unconscious?  How do theorists’ relationship with their unconscious and their deity inform the power of the theories they create to model a reality characterized by, from my perspective, profound interconnection?

The late Stephen J. Gould was an agnostic.  Jane Goodall is a spiritual Christian.  These are the contemporary theorists/scientists I most respect.  I find it astonishing that Gould, a genius pluralist and deep appreciator of almost anything he’d investigate, did not experience the presence of spirit.  This suggests to me that the idea of spirit might be a useless concept.  If an agnostic can live so rich a life and discover principles of life so deep as to reveal integral underlying processes to our existence, then maybe we can do without the idea of god.  As long as one looks, sounds and behaves like someone embraced by spirit, why don’t we just drop the concept and just concentrate on experience and behavior?

I experience god.  Gould experiences a glorious, profound interconnection.  I don’t perceive a difference.

Darwin was also an agnostic.  It seems that Darwin was not very forthcoming on the details of his spiritual journey, so many people have written about what they thought occurred.  He was wracked by chronic illness, lost a child and was terrified of being vilified or misunderstood.  Darwin evidently did not die a happy man.  Yet Darwin opened doors to understandings we’ve hardly begun to integrate.  From his writings, you cannot but perceive his deep appreciation, perhaps gratitude, for the world around him he so keenly grasped.

And so I wonder about those scientific productions invested with a beauty and symmetry words cannot describe.  I wonder about the creators of those productions and the relationship between them and their science, what I would call their art, and their own life.

“The multi-male species show less sexual dimorphism and specialization, and capacities for group-living and organization are obviously being selected for rather than mere strength or endurance or display.  High-ranking female groups, for example, will often not tolerate males who are too aggressive and competitive, and these leave the group and become solitaries.” (Fox, R (1983) Sexual selection, female choice and human kinship. Cambridge Anthropology 8, 3, page 8.)

Differences between the American Left and Right and how the Left and Right organize likey reflect social structure and sexual selection proclivities.  The only contact I have with the Right is reading Right Wing blogs, so my observations are one sided.  Still, a couple of interesting things I’ve observed.

In the Chicago area, there was an activist that dressed for all events and meetings with an oversized Uncle Sam hat and American flag as cape.  Over time, “Fred” had alienated a number of his peers, largely through expressions of inappropriate belligerence.  Over six feet tall without the hat, with hat he towered above all other people at an event.  His red, white and blue display could be easily picked out in a demonstration of thousands.  Fred sat in the first row of all events, almost without exception.

From a biological perspective, Fred was locked into a frame of reference typified by display and single male society.  Uncooperative on almost all levels, Fred used space to exhibit.  It was not uncommon to observe Fred preening, chest out and shoulders back, strutting back and forth in front of a large group.  Fred had no allies.

Perhaps I demean myself and Fred by objectifying another activist to make my point, but this point seems interesting enough to me to take the risk.

When Fred was permanently expelled from the group that he most frequently visited, it was the women that took the lead.  When confronted with his inappropriate behaviors by a woman standing before him outlining the reasons for his expulsion, Fred was uncharacteristically speechless.  After the vote, he left without a word.

In earlier blogs, I’ve shared my hypothesis that human sexual selection deeply informs huge swaths of contemporary culture.  It’s as if humans are incapable of turning off their proclivity to evaluate based on nuanced differences of the way things look, sound, feel, taste and smell.  Brains made bigger to both display and evaluate display slowly went extreme via runaway sexual selection, and now we evaluate everything in the way we only formerly evaluated our mates.  Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind is a superb work describing this dynamic in detail.  Consumer culture is an extension of human sexual selection, explaining in no small part the extraordinary variety of sex and violence broadcasted through every medium.

Consider that consumer culture might be an empowering experience for brains craving targets to appraise.  Unlimited consumer alternatives address an ongoing desire to evaluate or demonstrate to procreate.

Fred is an extreme example of a person behaving in ways to suggest a deep-seated investment in viewing the world from a sexual point of view.  We all are 24/7 devoted to the planet primate.  The rest of us in that room when Fred was rejected from the group were acting out our chosen roles as sexual beings.  On the left, we tend to be more subtle as we go about exercising our compulsion to evaluate our experience from a brain made big to gain a mate.  As they say, all there is, is love.

Biologically, there is no difference between sex and love.  If you’re like me, and everywhere you look you see biology, the next step is love, and then spirituality becomes just another name for the experience.

Sitting down to write this morning, I engage in my usual routine.  I compose these entries about 100 postings in the future, providing time to have them reviewed by an editor.  Before posting the day’s blog, I read it over and make final changes, it being almost three months since I was intimate with that piece.  Then I read over the pieces to post later in the week, written a season ago.  Then I read over and edit the blog essays produced in the last two days.  Finally, I prepare to write.

Rereading and editing work from 100 days ago and from the last couple days presents me with enough time to experience an evolution of the work over time, suggesting additional facets or perspectives, an opportunity to swim through a number of complementing ideas, and it presents me with exposure to new ways of expressing the foundation themes that flow through the larger work.  Often, more than one principle asks to be played with, and so I’m left searching for ways to express commonalities between melodies with no obvious ways to play with both at once.  Not unlike taking both a nine-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl to a Cubs game.  The challenge is to be with both of them at the same time, providing both a positive experience.

I sometimes find myself writing about the process of writing.  I’m observing the creative process.  This piece would be an example of writing about writing about the creative process, one additional step removed.  Dissociation is another theme that carries through these contributions, almost 150 pieces done to date.  Both a strength and weakness, dissociation allows perspective yet isolates from connection.  Dissociation is paradoxical in that it provides for self awareness yet forms the foundation for alienation.

There have been times in my life when I wielded insight like a shield, using sudden understanding either as an excuse to withdraw from the world or as a barrier between another person and me while I felt incapable of communicating what I understood.  Intimacy and friendship is 99% nonverbal.  Insight can be 100% nonverbal.  Making insight a communication that encourages intimacy is nearly impossible unless you make it art.

Sometimes a metaphor emerges that goes a long way toward making a point that would not sharpen.

Consider Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the concrete foundation for a one-story house.  We do not usually choose to live on concrete slabs.  I’ve only seen this at times of disaster or in third world countries where mere survival is a consuming issue.  Driving past New Orleans in October 2007, I observed fields of foundations where houses used to be.  A foundation was designed to be a beginning.

Upon this foundation, natural selection, are placed supporting internal walls.  Imagine that with a bird’s eye view, looking down, you see an X dividing the square foundation into four rooms.  Two longs walls run from corner to corner, creating this X.  This building is not supported by external walls, but by internal room dividers.  One wall is sexual selection.  The other wall is Lamarckian selection or how individuals influenced by their lives and their environment manifest those experiences in their children.  Now clothe the structure with walls and a roof.  That would be culture.

There are four sides to this building:  science, art, spirituality and popular culture.  Each side has its windows.  The side we’re calling spirituality has a door.

Walking inside, we note that each room has two doors providing access to each of the two contiguous areas.  In the center, where the four rooms and two long, internal walls meet, is a spiral stairway.  The stairway leads up.

In the attic, beneath the roof, still within the confines of culture, we achieve a dissociated point of view.  Looking down, we observe how the various pieces all connect and support one another.  Looking up to the roof, we see a skylight that illuminates and warms the four rooms by providing a place for the sun to shine down the stairway.

There is little argument that evolution happens.  There is little argument that natural selection forms the foundation for how all living plants and creatures procreate.  But, a lot more happens besides survival.  There is transcendence.  Observing how the house is built allows us to understand how both survival and transcendence are integral to how and where we live.

Sitting down to write this morning, I engage in my usual routine.  I seek to understand how we are all connected.

A few entries ago, I proposed a predictable display of variation of the physical features in the children of a family over time as a mother’s testosterone level slowly rose with age.  This prediction is in accord with a founding premise of this work, that our evolutionary past manifests in the present in more or less the degrees that a boy’s maturation rate is delayed and a girl’s maturation rate is accelerated.  The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely this manifestation will be the case.

I would additionally suggest that because social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals would emerge, it would be with the youngest sons and daughters.  In addition, the youngest kids would most likely evidence the features of matrifocal social structure.  One statistic I would expect to see is higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children.  I would even suggest that because social structure is correlated with testicle size in primates, youngest sons should show incrementally larger testes than oldest sons.

Observing that the Left more often exhibits the features of a matrifocal social structure, I would additionally predict that as a mother has more children over time–a mother tending toward higher testosterone levels already growing higher as she grows older–that the emergence of conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as left-handedness, autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will occur more often in liberal families than in conservative families, particularly among the youngest children.  However, findings would be skewed by the fact that a child born with severe autism might be the first and last child those parents choose to have.

Because testosterone levels in the mother control maturation rates in her children, with her testosterone levels growing higher with time, and because maturation rates control evolutionary trajectories, following the tenets of heterochrony, or the principle of waves, and because social structure as evidenced by sexual selection propels societies in specific evolutionary directions by young adults choosing particular maturation-rate tendencies in their partners, then we should be able to see in families with several children a reflection of our recent evolution.

Sorry about that.  Trying to condense the evolutionary relationship between ontogeny, society and biology in a single sentence is a bit like pantomiming the history of WW II.

When everything is connected, it can be difficult using language–a medium that provides only the option of communicating in narrative threads–to describe processes that deeply influence us on multiple levels.  Politics is directly related to evolution.  I expect everything is directly related to everything.  Sometimes it takes no small number of words to show how two not obviously connected things are connected.  Perhaps a dancer, an artist who communicates in three dimensions, is best qualified to explain how things really work.

Black culture in the United States maintains many of the features of matrifocal social structure.  Speaking in generalities, the African-American woman is comfortable wielding authority, is often the head of family and frequently engages in serial monogamy.  It would be interesting to explore studies that examine the social structures of the communities of origin of American blacks.  Understanding the influence of the slave experience upon African indigenous societal orientations could offer deeper understandings of what the American black wrestles with when creating family.

George Lakoff discusses differences between the Left and Right Wings of the American political community.  One way to parse out contrasts, complementary to Lakoff, is by noting the tendencies toward patriarchy present in the American Right vs. a matriarchy orientation on the Left.  The young man marrying Bush’s daughter asked Bush for his daughter’s hand.  I imagine this custom is far more common among conservatives than liberals.  On the left, personal choice and woman’s choice occur at many levels.  The American black community fits well within the progressive movement because they share a social structure perspective.

A lot has been written about the dynamic leading up to and supporting white racist attitudes toward blacks in the United States.  One more thing to consider is deeply contrasting social structure frames of reference.  In a homogeneous culture, there is variation from the conventional social structure orientation, variation often manifesting in the political polarities.  Not surprisingly, people usually pick mates from a pool of people that share their politics.  In the United States, where large minorities have so little in common with the ruling white majority, differing social structure further polarizes the two communities.

Among the list of features that blacks display and that racist whites assign to the category of “other”:  most blacks subscribe to very different ideas of an ideal mate, how to pick a mate, raise a child and how the individual fits into the community.  Social structure orientation is perhaps the biggest difference between American blacks and the American Right, a foundation for white prejudice rarely discussed and little understood.

In other words, if blacks looked and sounded the same way as whites and there were no disparity in income, there would still be relatively little traffic between the American Right Wing and African Americans.  Social structure, how we pick our sexual partners and engage in family, is perhaps the single most powerful feature informing the nature of our communities and the place of the individual within society.

“…in the chimpanzee, several males mate frequently with the oestroud females, so that each male has to deposit enough sperm to compete with the presence of sperm from other males.  For the chimpanzee, therefore, we hypothesize that selection will favor the male that can deposit the largest number of sperm; thus the volume of spermatogenic tissue and hence the testis size is far greater in the chimpanzee than in the gorilla or orangutan.  If this is correct, it implies that primates in which more than one male mates with each oestrous female should have larger testes relative to their body weight than those with single-male breeding systems.  We have tested this prediction across a wide range of primates, and the results support the hypothesis.  The relative size of testes may, therefore, provide a valuable clue to the breeding system of a primate species.” (Harcourt AH, Harvey PH, Larson SG, Short RV (1981) Testis weight, body weight and breeding system in primates. Nature 293: p. 55)

It is the anomalies that hold hidden treasures.  It is the things that don’t fit in that suggest where doorways to new understandings are located.  As we study human evolution and develop a theory that explains anomalies, with the hope of being useful, we find that an issue has emerged that suggests a productive new direction because it doesn’t fit in.  This issue has to do with neoteny in contemporary social structure.

Asian cultures and physiologies are different from African cultures and physiologies in very specific ways that put them on opposite ends of a societal manifestation of neotenous characteristics.  This difference is predictable because the two societies often exhibit opposite social structures.  We are talking in generalities here.

Still, there is the conundrum.  Asians exhibit far more neotenous features than Africans while Asian societies are far more patrifocal.

Whereas in a matrifocal society, neoteny focuses on the male in a way that results in an emphasis on cooperative males operating within a horizontal social structure, in a patrifocal society it is the females that are chosen for their neotenous characteristics, tending to be more docile, while the males combat one another for position in a stratified society.

Asian culture is classically patrifocal.  These societies are highly stratified, and women are repressed with high incidence of female infanticide.  Males battle for position with a heavy emphasis on status.

African culture is a mix.  There is evidence to suggest that until relatively recently, many African tribal cultures were matrifocal in orientation.  One physiological manifestation is the relatively large size of African male testicles relative to Asian males.  This size difference suggests relatively recent, intense male competition for females in a matrifocal social structure.  Relatively small, Asian male testicle size fits with a culture that is highly focused on male control of female procreation–less sperm required.

We are not discussing testicle size in connection to how much testosterone is produced or how aggressive a male is in that society, but how testicle size relates to sperm production.  The more power or choice a woman has in society and the freer she is to choose her mates, the more sperm the male requires to insure that he is able to compete.  In societies where the father is not known, copious amounts of sperm are required.  Charm is far more important in a matrifocal society than in a patrifocal society.  In a patrifocal society, it is more necessary to vanquish an opponent physically, control procreation through male head of family and use societal mores to compel a woman to mate with a single man.

In many African societies, males were, and to some degree still are, chosen for their ability to succeed in a matrifocal culture.  Predictably, they have relatively large testicles.  The females do not exhibit particularly neotenous characteristics.  In an Asian society, females are chosen for their docility and cooperative tendencies, males for their facility and commanding authority.  Females exhibit highly neotenous physical features.

This description all makes perfect sense.  But why does the Asian society as a whole exhibit highly neotenous features relative to African societies?

“Mongoloid women accordingly tend to be more paedomorphic [neotenic] than women of other groups.  Not only do women of Mongoloid origin present more prominent and rounded foreheads, but the bones of the whole skull, and, indeed, the whole skeleton, are more delicately made.  Mongoloids generally tend to be shorter, and have larger heads, including larger brains — 150 cc by volume greater, on the average, than Caucasoids.  The face is flatter, the jaws and palate smaller, the nose smaller and flatter at the root (the miscalled “bridge”), and the slight fold of skin over the median part of the eye (the epicanthic fold) is preserved.  The body is less hirsute, and there are fetal traits….The differential action of neoteny has produced some peculiar effects.  For example, among the highly neotenized Japanese the males’ upper and lower jaws have been reduced in size while the teeth have not.  The result has created a disharmony in many males in the form of extreme crowding and malocclusion of the teeth.”  (Montagu, Ashley (1989)  Growing Young N.Y.: McGraw Hill p. 40)

Societies at the social structure extremes select for neotenous females or neotenous males.  Evidently, selecting for neotenous females results in highly neotenous features overall, with both sexes being influenced.  Yet, over the course of human evolution in the last few million years, until recently (last 10,000-25,000 years) we have been selecting for neotenous males, with our whole species drifting in a neotenous direction without nearly as much visual neoteny being evident as in Asian culture.

If anybody has ideas, please tell me what they are.

Perhaps a solution has to do with the difference of choosing behaviors only vs. behaviors and appearance.  Our species has evolved by choosing males that exhibit neotenous behavior and females comfortable with wielding authority.  Asian cultures highly value female cooperative, neotenous behavior, males that are comfortable commanding authority and a number of female physical characteristics such as large eyes, light skin color and petite build.  Is it possible that a culture-wide fixation on female neotenous appearance rather than culture-wide attention to those that are highly skilled in dance (see earlier posts) has so influenced Asian societies that both men and women exhibit highly neotenous characteristics?

Last thought.  In Asian societies with stable hierarchies built around the long-term maintenance of irrigation works, males that will cooperate with hierarchical conventions perhaps are males displaying neotenous characteristics after all.  Battling for position, they compliantly honor the station they achieve.  In an anomalous fashion, both Asian sexes exhibit neoteny in a context of a highly patriarchal culture.

Evolution manifests in at least four scales or levels:  biological, societal, ontological and personal.  A central theme of these entries is that there are powerful connections between the different scales that evolution uses to unfold.  One connection is that the different scales share the same processes, one of them being neoteny, which is part of heterochrony, or the principle of waves.

This work explores various conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, with a focus on what I’ve called left spectrum.  I believe that the theory or theories of evolution we consider inform our understanding of several medical conditions.  In other words, understanding exactly how we got to where we are can be very useful when addressing medical and psychological anomalies.

Another theme that carries through these entries is that science and spirituality are closely tied, particularly when exploring issues revolving around the unconscious and consciousness.  This work follows those connections to where they manifest in evolutionary theory, particularly where they link to discussions of art, play and creativity.

The study of neoteny in humans is also the study of creativity.  Studying how evolution is informed by creativity links to a number of areas, including story and myth, language, metaphor, art and childhood.

My professional training was as an artist/illustrator.  My profession is managing a web development firm specializing in two different areas.  We serve commercial firms, almost 400 clients, making it possible for small businesses to gain new customers with simple, small websites.  At the same time, we build highly sophisticated social change network-building web applications specializing in empowering local peace, justice and environmental organizations and the members of those organizations.  This work shows how evolutionary principles inform our understanding of how business relates to society.  In addition, these blogs show how an understanding of evolution offers guidance on the building of online tools to encourage social change.

Another connection among the different scales that evolution uses to unfold is that we can notice that the specifics of the evolutionary theory we believe in influences how society is managed, and vice versa.  Specifically, by allying ourselves exclusively with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we encourage the manifestation of Social Darwinism in its present iteration as free market philosophy.  With corporations controlling our access to ideas, it is more difficult to observe the many places that natural selection fails to offer satisfaction as an explanatory principle, particularly when interconnection and cooperation emerge in ways that could explain the world we’re in.

To me, this stuff all feels so closely connected as to be all the same thing, viewed from a number of different directions with lots of different names.  Expressing the experience that everything is connected can involve communicating a spiritual perspective while manifesting an understanding of evolution.  I explore the biological, societal, ontological and personal, showing interconnections.  At the same time, my vocation, interests, family, friends, political activism and spiritual point of view become interconnected as I experience (sometimes more, sometimes less) a personal integration.

It’s all connected.  We’re all connected.  Indeed, evolution can be fun.

“Humans and chimps are almost identical in structural gens, yet differ markedly in form and behavior.  This paradox can be resolved by invoking a small genetic difference with profound effects—alterations in the regulatory system that slow down the general rate of development in humans.  Heterochronic changes are regulatory changes; they require only an alteration in the timing of features already present.” (Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Cambridge: Belknap Press.  p. 9)

Monkeying with our regulatory system evidently helped make us what we are.  By engaging in neoteny, or the prolonging of infant states into the adults of descendants, we have evolved ourselves large brains, small jaws, a proclivity to wonder, a compulsion to play and an inclination to be dependent.  Altering regulatory systems can have profound positive effects if creativity is your goal.

With the economy quivering on a brink, there has been no small amount of talk about the effects of the last generation’s adjustments in the regulatory system of the American economy.  Much discussed is how much freedom large corporations are allowed and if transparency and accountability are necessary if large corporations prefer they not have to be so constrained.  Social Darwinism has a new name.  Free markets have allowed those with the most power and the greatest wealth the opportunity to write the laws and manage the agencies that were designed to monitor and regulate how America conducts its business.

Regulatory legislation over the last thirty years provided the older, established, more powerful corporations within American industry the advantages that they requested to make them more “competitive.”  With fewer constraints, less government oversight, fewer inhibitions to growth, less accountability to labor, consumers or the environment, corporations found it easier to make money.  Free markets meant an opportunity to be less impacted by those factors in their environment that informed their growth and their existence.  Evolutionarily, corporations lobbied for and received a less free market, one with far fewer interconnections with contiguous areas in their environment.  As in Social Darwinism, business wanted and received special treatment, legislation targeted to inhibit the effects of competing influences, such as labor, environment, safety, consumer rights and taxes, so that there would be an infrastructure that the corporations could freely use.

Opaque to the interconnected, interdependent nature of evolution, “free markets” behave as if entitled to freely destroy the ties that bind them to a healthy society if it results in their short-term gain.

Inevitably, disconnected from their environment, they wither.

Regulation is not only central to our biological evolution; regulation deeply informs how our society evolves.  Deregulation is another name for regulating from the top down.  It’s time to regulate from the bottom up.  Adjusting regulation to unfold features existing at the bottom to appear at the top is what is called neoteny.  This way is how human beings evolved.  This way is how society evolves.

Regulate to encourage growth at the level of the individual, the family and small business.  Offer resources to the lowest level of authority, and creative surges will result.  Free college education, free health care and free child care are deregulating in a direction that puts power in the hands of the formerly powerless, powerless because government regulation preferred to provide corporations no constraints and allow them to be separated from their environment.

Social Darwinism and free markets are not natural.  They are philosophies that support disconnecting business from their environment to achieve short-term business gain.

Free services such as health care, education and child care all combine to encourage interconnection and interdependence by providing healthful forms of interaction.  By encouraging the lowest level of societal authority, we invest in the area where we are most creative, our children, at the level where we can have real impact, the individual.

We evolved from a chimpanzee-like progenitor by encouraging the features of the youngest to manifest in adults by picking mating partners that were young at heart.  We evolve as a society by manifesting the characteristics of the individual in our institutions, by encouraging businesses that respect individuals.  Re-regulating business to care for the individual is our evolutionary imperative.  We do so by regulating business to have a heart.