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 after bumping my head in an unrelated event.  I’d not looked forward to this visit to the doctor.  I was worried that the prognosis would change between a month ago and yesterday, and it did.

A month ago the surgeons estimated I had a 50/50 chance of reaching a normal death.  I’m 55.  I took that to mean a 50/50 chance until I reached the mid-80s, when the men in my family usually pass.  A month ago I asked if that was the case and received a nod.  In any given year they gave me a 5% chance the aneurysm could rupture.  I was also told that if the aneurysm burst it would be 1/3 fatal, 1/3 stroke, 1/3 chance of complete recovery.  The last important number was that the surgeons estimated a 20% chance of stroke if they intervened.  Intervention would be by going in through the side of my head.

Yesterday morning the numbers changed.

Marcia and I were sitting in the little doctor examination room in the office building across the street from Evanston hospital.  We had a window overlooking the “L”.  There were surprisingly few medical accessories beside the standard patient table.  I’m supposing mostly people just sit with the doctor and look over test results.  I didn’t even have to take my clothes off.  In fact, now that I think of it, the aneurysm doctor has never touched me except to shake my hand.

I have been told I have a 50/50 chance of reaching actuarial old age, 72, I think.  Evidently there was a misunderstanding.  Not so good.  The surgeon has slightly modified the chances of rupture in any given year at 5%-10%.  Last, there is an intervention alternative, relatively new, involving 3-4 operations going in though a vessel in my groin and operating from inside the aneurysm instead of coming in through the side of my head.

Instead of clipping and crimping vessels, they would redirect flows and pressures with tiny tubes.

I have an unusual quasi-fusiform aneurysm on my left side, behind my eye, in a difficult junction with several smaller arteries branching off from the T intersection area that they are seeking to address.

The chance of stroke each time they tunnel in is 2%-3%.  Dying on the table is rare, 1 in 200.  The frequency rate of the kind of aneurysm I have is about 1 in 200.  Recovery from the operations is extremely quick.  I’m out of the hospital each time in about 2 or 3 days.

There are other options that involve going in through the side of my head with long recovery times and a 20% chance of stoke.  They seem less appealing.  Still, they are familiar interventions to the surgeons.  The intervention the surgeon is recommending sounds pretty unique to the particular aneurysm they are facing.

It could be worse.  I’m sometimes terrified.  Mostly I’m trying to accompany myself and stay comforted.  Marcia is worried.  Before yesterday I was going to put off an intervention.  Now, I’m mentally preparing myself for the operations.  In a couple weeks, I’ll meet with the tiny tube specialist.  Then I’ll get a second opinion.

In the meantime, every time I get a headache on the left side of my head, relatively rare but disconcerting, those weasels start icing up my bed.  I now meditate frequently while sleeping, getting better at falling asleep and waking up with my mantra humming.  It helps enormously to be with myself during this difficult time.  Strangely, I more often wake up feeling accompanied than at any time that I can remember in my life.

I don’t mean waking up feeling accompanied by ice weasels, which can be the case.  Waking up with Marcia beside me, I often wake up feeling accompanied by love.

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 age care, etc.  Caregivers are respected.  Corporations are encouraged to support and nurture.  The environment is revered.  A thesis of this neoteny.org blog is that we are a species featuring neoteny living at a time when society is transforming following a neotenous trajectory.  I would suggest that the direction we are going as a world culture can be seen in the laws and policies of Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Their physical features also seem to be a clue.

In previous entries, I’ve suggested we might be in the middle of a synthesis or integration between the two traditional, biologically informed social structures.  Observing the surge in conditions featuring maturational delay in males, maturational acceleration in females, I’ve wondered how these representatives of the older genotype will juxtapose with a highly hierarchical, Indo-European, dominator status quo.  Consider that Scandinavia may hold an answer.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested that the blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandinavians may have come by those neotenous features in a quest for vitamin D and A.  They were prolonging the lactate-processing features of infants into adults, providing them an ability to derive more benefits from dairy in combination with lightening the skin to let in the benefits of sunlight, all of which hypothetically made healthier those able to make those adjustments over generations.  Perhaps other neotenous characteristics accompanied an ability to absorb vitamins in a northern climate, such as the features Scandinavian societies exhibit today.  In other words, their society manifests their biology.  Society recapitulates ontogeny.

What is particularly unique about these features of Scandinavians is that both males and females are featuring physical characteristics of neoteny.  Why certain features are exhibited and not others, I don’t understand.  For example, both sexes feature height.  Yet, there is not the flatter-faced neotenous aspect of Asian cultures.  It may just be that the allometry of height does not compel the classic flat face and smaller jaw associated with neoteny.  Still, both Scandinavian sexes seem to be exhibiting the gracile features we associate with the maturational delayed.

I’m not suggesting that in a thousand years the world’s populations will be filled with lanky, blond-haired, blue-eyed minions.  I am suggesting that we have an example of a society that has successfully neotenized, with its population exhibiting neotenous features in both sexes.  Evidently in Scandinavia the biological transformation took place very quickly.  Marvin Harris suggests in less than five thousand years.  What does this say about our prospects for creating egalitarian societies in the near future?  Do we consider encouraging the exhibition of physical neoteny in our societies to have a more peaceful world? Of course not.

Yet, perhaps this is happening already.  A society’s idealization of a perfect mate suggests the features selected for in a society.  A society’s idealization of a perfect mate suggests where a society is headed.  What do media tell us to look for in a spouse?  In the West, what does our idealized mate often look like?

Blond-haired, blue-eyed and tall.

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 their children are, their closest known descendants are their nieces and nephews. In patrifocal societies revolving around nuclear families, males usually live with the females and the children. Perhaps patrifocal males evidence higher estrogen than matrifocal males. It would be interesting to know.

More than ten years ago, I watched my aunt’s 5- or 6-year old son relate to his infant cousin. Something was awry. I observed the anxiety the interaction created in the other relatives around the room. My cousin was evidencing what Baron-Cohen noted as a deficit in a theory of mind. He behaved like his cousin was emoting apparatus, not a person. He would poke her and then watch/listen to the response.

My cousin’s mother, my mother’s sister, was over 40 when he was born. My aunt is left-handed, overweight and has odd communicative affect. The left-handedness and obesity suggested to me that she probably was high in testosterone. I suggested to my family that my nephew had Asperger’s. He was evaluated. The diagnosis came back saying he had learning disabilities, not Asperger’s. I suggested he be reappraised. The second diagnosis agreed with my estimation.

It was not just my cousin’s behavior but the mother’s behavior and her characteristics that suggested the diagnosis. The evaluators never even took the mother into consideration when they tested.

I’m wondering now if my cousin’s and my aunt’s estrogen levels might be contributing to their odd communicative tendencies. My cousin seemed strangely detached. My aunt, though her affect is also unusual in that she seems to have difficulty mirroring or reflecting another person’s experience, is extremely attentive and easily amused. I felt very attracted to her when I was little.

For ten years, I’ve been theorizing the effects of changing testosterone levels on human evolution and autism. The last few days, I’ve been considering possible repercussions of estrogen is this equation. It seems to me that high levels of mother’s uterine estrogen levels may also be influencing her progeny and the social structure toward which they are naturally inclined. Specifically, if matrifocal, high-testosterone females also evidencing high estrogen are creating (and mating with) low-testosterone males with low estrogen, then the low male estrogen may also be influencing autistic and Asperger’s males when they manifest dissociation from other human beings.

It may not be all about testosterone.

I recently began Riane Eisler’s book, Real Wealth of Nations. Reading this book has me suggesting to myself that I return to an evaluation of estrogen as integral to evolution, something which has bounced around the back of my thoughts for years. It was Riane Eisler’s Chalice and the Blade that started me down this theorizing path a dozen years ago (see humanevolution.net). It’s interesting to me that another of her books is taking this hypothesis in a fundamentally new direction.

If this new thesis has predictive power and an ability to effect positive change, examining the presuppositions that made it difficult to discern should tell me interesting things about myself and my society.

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, E. (1996) Salivary testosterone levels in left-and right-handed adults.  Neuropsychologia 34 (3): pp. 225)

Responding to the above quote, might estrogen duplicate or amplify what we already know about testosterone?  Might estrogen levels influence rates of maturation manifesting in handedness appraisals?

“The differences in dizygotic twin frequency, and presumably ovulation rate, are in the same direction as the differences in testis size.  The frequencies of dizygotic twins are even higher (up to 49 per 1,000 births) among African blacks. …  Yoruba women, with the world’s highest frequency of dizygotic twins, have higher FSH and LH levels at the time of ovulation than do Japanese women, who have the lowest frequency of dizygotic twins.    This variation in female hormone levels may contribute to the distribution of the incidence of breast cancer, which is known to be related to oestrogen levels.  Even after all other risk factors for breast cancer have been taken into account, the incidence among Japanese women remains inexplicably low.  Perhaps this puzzle, the so-called ‘Japanese factor’ of (breast cancer, is related to the low double-ovulation frequencies and low hormone levels.”  Diamond, J. M. (1986) Variation in human testis size.  Nature (London) 320: 488-489)

This above study suggests that Japanese women have unusually low hormone levels, which would support our hypothesis.

“It is undisputed that in the fetal environment, testosterone can have profound effects on neonatal brain development.  In animal studies, when hormonal levels have been controlled experimentally, many developmental processes are affected by exposure to testosterone, and thus lead to anatomical differences between males and females (i.e., sexual dimorphism.).     Most of these are mediated by estrogen, from which testosterone is converted by normal enzymatic operations involving aromatase, a catalytic enzyme found within the brain and expressed quite early in development (McEwen, Lieberburg, Chaptal, & Krey, 1977).  Ironically, the role of the female hormone estrogen in this process occurs to a significant extent only in males and not females, since the estrogen secreted by the developing ovaries never reaches the brain.  High levels of alpha fetoprotein in the neonatal serum bind these estrogens and prevent their access to the central nervous system.  By contrast, estrogen has an effect on brain development in males, since conversion of testosterone to estrogen takes place within the developing brain itself.”  (Small S.L., Hoffman G.E. (1994) Neuroanatomical lateralization of language: sexual dimorphism and the ethology of neural computation.  Brain and Cognition 26: 307-8)

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds interesting.

To suggest I’m out on a limb here would be to understate the situation.  This website and its three sister websites (see upper 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 life.

It became clear that at this seminal moment in existence, ontogeny, society and biology converge.  I matched up nineteenth-century theories of heterochrony or the studies of the rate and timing of maturation and development of individuals and their effects upon evolution with a 21st century understanding of the effects of hormones upon ontogeny.  Integral to making this connection between 19th and 21st centuries is noting the central position of sexual selection and social structure mediating the effects that hormones have upon evolution.

Evolutionary biology (heterochronic theory + all three of Darwin’s theories), anthropology (with an emphasis on social structure) and neuropsychology (brain and hormone studies) are all integral to an understanding of evolution.

It’s next to impossible to prove an evolutionary theory.  Yet, this theory advances itself as a fairly seamless whole (there are anomalies) with some predictive power.  This theory provides a number of opportunities to conduct experiments (click here).  Setting up studies to retrieve clean data is a challenge.  Environment is very difficult to control.  Nevertheless, ten years ago I predicted that equatorial populations transplanted to Northern climes will evidence far higher percentages of autism.  With the recent news about Minnesotan Somalis, that seems to be the case.  This theory of evolution hypothesizes that autism manifests maturational delay in males and maturational acceleration in females that directly reflect a high testosterone uterine environment that is an example of ancient matrifocal societies.  This theory of evolution, what I’ve been calling the Theory of Waves, describes the causes of genetic-based autism and predicts the conditions that will result in extreme maturational delay for males, extreme maturational acceleration for females.

I say that I’m out on a limb because this is not orthodoxy.  It’s not even unorthodox in the sense that this is a theory that has not even been established as beyond the pale.  Though available on the web for over 10 years, posted first on 11/7/98, one paper outlining this theory has appeared in a New Zealand psychohistory academic newsletter, but no papers have mentioned this theory, no academic websites have discussed details.  There is no evidence that there has been a single conversation between academics concerning this theory.

My training is as an artist and illustrator.  I am a web developer by profession, a specialist in search engine optimization.  My four sites detailing this theory have received, no exaggeration, over one million visits in 10 years.

So, there is interest.  Yet, clearly there is hesitation to investigate.

Out on a limb in the sense that I’m plucking fruits from branches others are not yet exploring, I’d like to wiggle a little further out on this evolutionary tree that has kept me nourished with so many interesting ideas.

In the last two entries, I’ve outlined the anomaly of Asian patrifocal societies revealing neoteny in both males and females.  Please click over to Estrogen Riddle and Estrogen Conundrum and review.  If testosterone is integral to evolution in all the ways outlined in earlier entries, then what might the influence of estrogen be if by some chance estrogen influences evolution in ways similar to the ways that the testosterone dynamic unfolds?  Might estrogen explain the anomaly of Asian patrifocal neoteny?  If so, what other answers to mysteries might emerge?

Established so far, high testosterone males mate with low testosterone females in patrifocal societies while low testosterone males pair off with high testosterone females in matrifocal societies.  This is our foundation for sexually selected social structures informing evolution, moderated by changes in mother’s uterine testosterone levels influenced by the environment.

Consider that humans also evolve according to the edicts of estrogen, with a mother’s uterine estrogen levels influenced by the environment, with high-estrogen mothers birthing high-estrogen daughters and low-estrogen sons, and low-estrogen mothers having low-estrogen daughters and high-estrogen sons.

There is absolutely no reason this should be true.  Going out on a limb is relatively easy if there is little at stake.  I’m not an academic with a following or allies to alienate.  As an artist, I feel rewarded if an idea shows promise, even if it does not pan out.

We begin with a single conjecture.  Let’s make believe that Asian women have low estrogen to support the societal compulsion to engage in female infanticide.  With high estrogen, deep, immediate bonds with infants would form a barrier when seeking to make this societal sacrifice.  In addition, let’s assume Asian males have relatively high estrogen.  We’ll assume this both because it fits the testosterone paradigm of complementary opposites and because we have the perhaps related evidence that Asian spiritual practices revolve around aesthetics, community and compassion.

That would set up the following sixteen tentative testosterone (T) and estrogen (E) matrix of relationships.

Patri          Female low T, low e          Male high T, high e         Asian
Patri           Female low T, low e         Male high T, low e
Hybrid       Female low T, low e          Male low T, high e         Scandinavian?
Hybrid       Female low T, low e          Male low T, low e           Scandinavian?

Patri           Female low T, high e         Male high T, high e
Patri           Female low T, high e         Male high T, low e
Hybrid        Female low T, high e         Male low T, high e         Scandinavian?
Hybrid        Female low T, high e         Male low T, low e           Scandinavian?

Hybrid        Female high T, low e         Male high T, high e
Hybrid        Female high T, low e         Male high T, low e
Matri           Female high T, low e         Male low T, high e
Matri           Female high T, low e         Male low T, low e

Hybrid         Female high T, high e       Male high T, high e
Hybrid         Female high T, high e       Male high T, low e
Matri            Female high T, high e       Male low T, high e
Matri            Female high T, high e       Male low T, low e           African/ Polynesian

Though societies will cluster in more than one of the sixteen categories I am suggesting, societies will emphasize one or two.  I find myself forming gross generalizations about a society by trying to fit that culture into one category.  Assigning cultures to these categories can be an interesting game providing an opportunity to notice where one’s personal prejudices still linger.  Yet, if it can be determined if there are direct physiological/neurological/psychological correlations with these sixteen options, and that evolutionary trajectories can be established (following the example of how testosterone drives neoteny and acceleration drives human evolution), then estrogen can join testosterone as integral to understanding human evolution.

This is a very big “as if” frame or interlocking series of conjectures.  A quick exploration of PubMed and Google reveals some interesting supporting and not exactly supporting results of studies.  What we would be looking for, if you’re interested in barking up this tree with me, is evidence of physiological, neurological and psychological patterns congregating around these sixteen categories.

There are studies supporting weight gain for people with elevated estrogen, for example.  Yet, we also know that weight gain raises testosterone levels in women.  So, we might estimate that elevated estrogen allies with elevated testosterone in women, which would be expected because both support a matrifocal context.  (High estrogen women would be inhibited from engaging in female infanticide, a hallmark of patrifocal cultures.  High testosterone women are the foundation of matrifocal society.)

So, what societies evidence particularly high or low estrogen levels?  How do high or low estrogen levels manifest physiologically?  With answers to these questions, maybe patterns of how societies are influenced by estrogen will emerge.

And, if we’re lucky, more anomalies will appear.

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 female toward matrifocal social structure where it would not be considered that infanticide could serve society goals.

If by chance a person’s estrogen-influenced characteristics, including that person’s estrogen levels, are established by the mother’s levels of estrogen at some point late in embryonic ontogeny, then children born premature, premature before that day that embryonic estrogen has been established, will probably exhibit features mildly to radically diverging from other siblings.

I’ve not investigated the testosterone-influenced maturation rates of individuals surviving premature births occurring before the sixth week (when testosterone levels and maturation rates are set) before a normal 38-39 week gestation.  Anecdotal evidence suggests there are effects, for example, females exhibiting high testosterone personalities.  Establishing high and low estrogen physiological/psychological features and comparing that to various premature birth estrogen-related physiological/psychological features might reveal a biological/social evolution-informing estrogen dynamic.

The million-dollar question is whether high estrogen mothers birth high estrogen daughters, low estrogen sons while low estrogen mothers birth low estrogen daughters and high estrogen sons.

This would, of course, mirror and complement the testosterone paradigm.

What evidence would support this premise?  What are the implications?  What riddles are hanging out there that this second dynamic just might resolve?

What led me to this set of conjectures is the riddle of highly patrifocal Asian cultures exhibiting neoteny contrasted with Scandinavian societies exhibiting a different assortment of neotenous characteristics while living cooperative, care-based matrifocal lives.  (See Estrogen Riddle, previous entry)

While untying this knot, I’m assuming that we were created artfully and playfully.  In addition, let’s explore this hypothesis for its potential to be real.  Any academicians or amateurs like me out there that know of papers that support, disrupt or point to an alternative hypothesis?

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 the year.  They were without access to vitamin D in fish and sea mammals, and lacked green leafy vegetables as an alternative source of calcium.  Under these conditions, individuals who were genetically capable of digesting large quantities of unfermented milk were better able to maintain normal bone growth and avoid crippling bone diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia, and therefore enjoyed higher rates of reproductive success than individuals who obtained their calcium through fermented milk, yogurt, or cheese.  Within 4,000 or 5,000 years, the gene that controls for lactose production in adulthood spread to over 90 percent of the individuals in northern European dairying populations.” (Harris, Marvin (1989) Our Kind.  Harper Perennial:  New York p. 167)

The late anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested that the extreme Northern climate with little light compelled a necessity for adults to derive vitamin D from sunlight by lightening skin and vitamin A from dairy by prolonging the lactate processing abilities of infants into adults by prolonging a basket of infant features into Scandinavian adults.  If this hypothesis has legs, this might explain why a number of neotenous features, including increased height, appeared in both sexes.

This could also explain why Scandinavian societies display such high degrees of what Raine Eisler calls Partnership Society characteristics.  Both sexes have been selected to display the cooperative tendencies characteristic of neoteny.

Whereas Scandinavians may have selected each other to encourage healthy progeny with access to vitamins, Asian priorities may have revolved around a need for a highly hierarchical society that encouraged cooperation on large scales to achieve societal goals.

Like Scandinavian cultures, Asian cultures reveal neoteny in both sexes, though a different selection of features, outlined in detail by Gould and Montagu, such as light skin, relatively large brain, flat face and eye fold.  Unlike Scandinavia, Asian geological/environmental constraints–massive, irrigation-driven agricultural operations with high population densities–demanded cooperation from large numbers of people working closely together within the context of a highly stratified society.  These are patrifocal, top-down, male-dominated cultures with females experiencing few rights.

I would hypothesize that males still reveal high testosterone relative to females, encouraging patrifocal social structure, but low testosterone relative to males in other societies.  This hypothesis would suggest that Asian females would have the lowest thresholds of testosterone among females in the world, lower than Scandinavian females, who also display neotenous characteristics.

In other words, to create a highly stratified society to be able to manage the resources to survive, natives had to be both highly cooperative and deeply committed to hierarchy, status and top-down control.  This commitment resulted in the traditional patrifocal spread of high testosterone males and low testosterone females, but both thresholds were fluctuating within far lower levels than societies without the high demand for cooperation.  That’s the hypothesis.

Perhaps the fact that these agrarian populations are so dense at least partially explains their smaller size.  Natural selective processes would reinforce the propagation of families that can consume relatively small amounts of food and nutrients.  Ten families on 10 10-acre lots all producing the same maximum amount of nourishment would find the families with smaller members more often nourished.

Was this unique set of constraints about short, neotenous, black-haired, dark-eyed citizens?

It’s possible estrogen plays a powerful role in these somatic deliberations.  What are the physical effects of low estrogen in females?  We might surmise that in patrifocal societies that display female infanticide, estrogen, which displays a compulsive attraction of humans to care for other humans, would be relatively low.  If Asian cultures display lower than the average estrogen levels in females, then might that have something to do with the specific basket of neotenous features displayed by individuals in these cultures?  This hypothesis would predict that low estrogen in females would result in small body size.  We might surmise males might have low estrogen or high estrogen depending on which serves best to create cohesion within society.  I would guess that Asian males exhibit relatively high estrogen compared to Asian females.  I would guess this way based upon the ubiquity of spiritual paths emphasizing community and compassion.

Conversely, we might predict that cultures featuring tall males and females would reveal matrifocal dynamics featuring low testosterone males and relatively low testosterone females, relative to high testosterone matrifocal females.

Does both low estrogen and low testosterone encourage a particular body type?  What body type does low estrogen encourage?

Often these essays return to seeking an understanding of the role of estrogen in evolution.  Again, what we don’t know about women may hide the answer to what we seek to understand about ourselves.

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 (+ +) (32%), or a strong predilection to right handedness and asymmetrical lateralization, are highly disposed to language usage, but at the expense of right-hemispheric strengths.  Annett believes the mixture of both genetic propensities, (- +) offers the advantages evidenced by 49% of the population belonging in this category.  She characterizes these advantages as a balanced polymorphism (Annett 1984, 1990) when applied to overall strength in language facility.  It is important to understand that changes from population to population are gradual, not clearly demarcated, and that movements across this arc or spectrum from (- -) to (+ +) are incremental.

Heterochronic principles describe the effects of relative rates of development and maturation on species evolution.  I believe these concepts can be used to describe specific developmental trajectories in individuals vulnerable to neurological conditions.  Geschwind and Galaburda’s (1987) observations form the foundation for the patterns I have discerned.  They noted the connections between handedness; immune and autoimmune disorders and conditions associated with maturational delay.  The following patterns have been particularly noteworthy.

1) High testosterone (T) females (the older genotype) are at the (- -) end of the developmental spectrum and are developmentally accelerated compared to the low T females (+ +) at the developmentally delayed end of the spectrum.  Females at the right end are markedly more neotenous than left end females.  At the left end, relative to the females at the right end, the females are more left-handed and ambidextrous, featuring maturational acceleration.

2) Low T males (the older genotype) are at the (- -) end of the developmental spectrum and are maturational delayed compared to the high T males at the (+ +) other end.  Males, perhaps, exhibit more variation than females (Darwin, 1871) in the arc from (- -) to (+ +).  At the left end, relative to the males at the right end, the males have bigger brains (Annett, 1991), more symmetrical cerebral hemispheres, larger corpus callosums (Witelson, 1991a, 1991b, 1989, 1985), lower T (Tan, 1990), slower metabolic rates (Badcock, 1991), a less acute sense of the passing of time, increased left-handedness and ambidextrousness and increased speed (Annett, 1984), agility and coordination.  Males at the left end are markedly more neotenous (Coren, 1991) than males at the right end.

3) Females with high T give birth to females with high T and males with low T.  Males with low T tend to sire progeny characterized by females with high T and males with low T.  Older females, females with higher T, have more left-handed progeny, not because of increased birth trauma, but because females program the developmental rate of their progeny based on the sex of their progeny and the mother’s T level (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987).  Low T females and high T males create low T females and high T males.

4) The eight environmental variables influencing T; light (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987), diet (Schmidt , 1997), body fat (Ross, 1986; Glass, 1977), alcohol and drugs (Castilla-Garcia, 1987; Ahluwalia, 1992), tobacco (estrogen levels) (MacMahon, 1982; Barrett-Connor, 1987), touch, physical activity (MacConnie, 1986; Morville, 1979) and stress (James, 1986) often do not affect the two sexes the same way.  For example, increased body fat raises female T and lowers male T (Pasquali, 1991).

5) These eight specific environmental variables impact the distance and direction progeny can slide along the (- -) to (+ +) developmental arc.  Moving left and right across the arc moves people backwards and forward in genetic time.  Impact points include the somatic environment of the parents at zygote creation and the uterine environment.  Along with sexual selection, uterine environment (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987) has the greatest influence on evolution in humans.  Particularly vulnerable to neurological disease are those children whose parents are genetically already at either the left (- -) or right (+ +) ends who are exposed to these environmental variables.  It is by the increasing or decreasing of the parents’ testosterone (and possibly estrogen) levels that these variables further impact the developmental maturation rates of these vulnerable genotypes.  For example, the raising and lowering of the mother’s T levels directly influences the developmental rates of the children during gestation (Geschwind & Galaburda, 1987).

6) Left spectrum individuals retain the older genotype, evidencing skill clusters highly valued before the advent of the (+) gene for a decrease in corpus callosum size and a reduction in portions of the right cerebral hemisphere, which increased cerebral asymmetry.  The highly selected (sexual selection being the primary selection force) character of the (+) gene proffers a heightened sense of passing of time (Marshack, 1972), increased split consciousness (Thompson, 1981), with a resulting ability to use language linearly, to plan (Annett, 1985).  The (+) does not increase language facility directly; it creates an increased time dissociation evolving symbol to sign through a disassociation of the cerebral hemispheres.

7) Dyslexia is not the only condition that has confounded studies by masking its roots at both the left and right ends of the developmental spectrum (Annett et al., 1996).  I suggest that schizophrenia, Tourette’s, diabetes and several other diseases and conditions may be split according to the same principles.  By using peg tests (Annett, 1985); comparisons of brain size, planum temporale (Annett, 1992) and corpus callosum (Witelson, 1985); T levels; metabolic rates; developmental stage markers; and family histories, we can sort out the (- -) from the (+ +) from the pathological cases.  Pathologically, developmental delayed and accelerated individuals can now be identified and treated separately from the genetic/environmental cases.  The postnatal influences of the eight environmental variables mentioned above can then be assessed, because in addition to influencing a child’s developmental rates before birth, these same variables can exacerbate and alleviate existent conditions and diseases by their ability to raise and lower T.  Raised testosterone can have profoundly negative effects on the immune and autoimmune systems (Wingfield et al., 1997).  By assessing where a person naturally belongs on the left-right scale, a person’s natural T level can be calculated.  Once a person’s natural T level is known, the same eight variables can be used to change T, bringing that person in line with his or her natural immune and autoimmune threshold.  It is vital to note that the influence of these eight variables masks the natural T levels existent in each individual, throwing off studies and confusing the patterns.

8) The timing of the onset of puberty, the heterochronic principle of progenesis (Gould, 1977), has powerful correlations with neurological and cognitive variation.  Diet, percentage of body fat and physical activity are primary variables responsible for pubertal timing.  There are studies (Saugstad, 1989) that suggest that specific forms of schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are directly related to the timing of the onset of puberty.  The relationship between pubertal timing and an individual’s location on the developmental arc may reveal in greater detail the etiology of specific diseases.  Depression may be directly related to the worldwide curtailment of the final stage of cognitive development, abstract thinking, caused by an earlier onset of puberty.  There has been a drop in the age of puberty by three to four years over the last 100 years in urban cultures worldwide (Eveleth & Tanner, 1976) caused primarily by changes in diet.  These dietary changes signal our bodies that increased fat, carbohydrate, and protein resources are available for an increase in birth rate, accomplished by lowering the age of procreation; a naturally selected response.

9) Tracking the distribution of neurological conditions at the left end along the (- -) to (+ +) spectrum is tracking the sequence of our genetic heritage and cultural history.  At the far left end is autism, representing anatomically modern humans maybe 100 M years ago when we had bigger brains (Wiercinski, 1979; Lainhart, 1997), ambidextrousness (Soper, 1986) and no dominant hemisphere.  I hypothesize that the absence of constant touch as infants (Witelson, 1991a), and the absence of constant auditory rhythm and music pattern in a genotype as old as autism that requires constant touch and rhythm for full functioning, is responsible for many autistic syndrome complications over and above expected developmental delays.  Phonetic dyslexics (Annett, 1990); stutterers (Corballis, 1981; Bryden, 1994); many Tourette’s sufferers (Shapiro et al., 1972); many homosexuals and lesbians (McCormick et  al., 1990); many gifted athletes, mathematicians, artists, musicians (Deutsch, 1978; Hassler, 1991b; Hasler & Gupta, 1993), and composers (Hassler, 1992); many schizophrenics (Crow et al., 1996); specific alcoholic types (London, 1985) and many obese women are left-spectrum, old genotype individuals who can be located along specific places on the left end of the (- -) to (+ +) arc.  Several other conditions congregate at the right end of the left-right arc.  I believe that the human species moves through time inside a (- -) to (+ +) developmental arc, its character determined by the effects of sexual selection and the uterine environment on the rate and timing of development and maturation, creating the balanced polymorphism revealed by this Theory of Waves.

The process of evolution, the rules of species transformation, evolves.  The rules change.  Different rules apply to different species.  The rules become more intricate and subtle with an increase in complexity in hormonal systems.  Ancient species are still evolving exclusively according to random variation unlike more recently evolved complex species with longer ontogenetic histories.  Each species needs to be examined for its signature methods of transcending the random variation barrier.  Each human individual can be explored for his or her signature response to environmental messages mediated through a genetic history revealing a map of the responses of our past.

Investigate citations by proceeding to sexualselection.org.  There citation hotlinks will direct you to the cited quote from that author.

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 exhibits some flexibility.  Males are forced to compete for the female’s attention.  Creative and cooperative males become valued.

Societies providing for female choice are societies that also value male creativity, innovation, flexibility.  Female choice and innovation go together.  Societies that view women as the property of males shut down the engine of innovation as males featuring an ability to dominate are the males that the society highly values.

Observe the emergence of innovation in a society and you will find women that have been provided choice.  They say necessity is the mother of invention.  Not so.  Mothers are the mother of invention.  It is the female that determines the character of a society.

Put power in the hands of a man and you get stagnation.  Empower a woman and you encourage the empowering of all.

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 a specific evolutionary direction.  Like Chutes and Ladders, human procreative bodies (bands, tribes, societies) work their way across the game board, wiggling one way and then the other as they pass through time.

Matrifocal bands or tribes exhibit commanding, often domineering, females mating with cooperative males seeking to please.  This is the bonobo paradigm.  These are highly sexualized societies with progeny not knowing who the father is.  Descent is matrilineal.  Describing human matrifocal evolution, a number of additional features can be hypothesized, including male exhibition, runaway sexual selection, dance, song, rhythm and the dynamics of neoteny growing brains.

Patrifocal bands or tribes feature cooperative, often docile, females mating with commanding, hierarchically-inclined, status-seeking males.  A dominant male or males often control access to fertile females.  Often, the father can be fairly easily discerned.

As in Chutes and Ladders, a band can sometimes be matrifocal, at other times patrifocal, climbing or sliding its way across the game board.  These transitions don’t usually occur quickly, but they can.

A band or society can oscillate between social structures impacted by surrounding societies, environmental impacts, intramale competition, access to resources, female infanticide and cultural innovations.

The result of these various impacts drives evolution.  In a matrifocal society, cooperative males, neotenous, low-testosterone males, are highly valued along with commanding, high-testosterone females.  Two trajectories are established, yanking in opposite directions.  In humans, this specific dynamic was encouraged by runaway sexual selection resulting in exponential brain growth as that embryo and infant feature–rampant brain growth–prolonged itself into later and later ontogenetic stages.

Patrifocal societies select for neoteny in cooperative, low-testosterone females, and neoteny’s opposite, acceleration, in commanding, high-testosterone males.  Here you still get a demand for neoteny, but there is no runaway sexual selection driven by female choice.  Neoteny in females does not drag both sexes and society into larger brains because males are choosing females and their criteria are unambitious.

On one hand, the chutes, for example, you get quickly advancing neurological, physiological and hormonal change following a bigger brain trajectory that is horizontal and matrifocal.  The ladders reveal hierarchical, male-dominant patrifocal society, more stationary societies, societies that tend to exhibit an evolutionary status quo.

If females aren’t choosing, the dynamic tends to be about marshalling resources, achieving status, manifesting control.  These features can drive evolution.  But it’s less about creativity, the hallmark of matrifocal culture, and more about domination.

Patrifocal-society intramale competition can create extreme physiological features, sexual dimorphism and a larger male relative to female size.  A changing environment may compel a society to exhibit specific male-dominance patrifocal traits if those traits are suitable for the new milieu.  In humans, if intramale competition becomes fierce, female infanticide becomes highly valued so that males without keen competitiveness find no mates.

If a warrior people begin impacting a gentle folk, the gentle matrifocals might feel compelled to kill its female infants to quickly reduce the number of males procreating, males that could produce cooperative, rather than commanding, adults, which could end the tribe.  In less than a handful of generations a society might reverse direction to climbing ladders rather than taking slides.

The reverse can occur.  A large and established matrifocal culture might compel a smaller patrifocal society to relax.  If patrifocal females can exhibit choice, male domination will quickly wane.  Patrifocal females, provided models, might choose a male that would enhance their life, not dominate it.  These males are often innovators, not dominators.  We can trace the emergence of matrifocal cultures over the course of history by noting surges of innovation within a society.  Where there is innovation, there is female choice.

America, the nation of immigrants, exhibits exponential innovation in large part due to the complete breakdown of sexual selection criteria.  There is no perfect mate.  The patrifocal dominance model has become increasingly eroded as females choose mates according to their own criteria based on their experience and observations of the many ways other women choose mates.

In a human band, tribe, society, or mega society like the U. S., all cooperate with the demands of hormonal-driven social structure, sliding and climbing their way across the generations.  Whereas the advocates of natural selection would prefer that our path be clearly defined by a railway-like, straight and narrow, long-term direction, I would suggest adjusting the metaphor.  Even today there are still left on the railways seesaw-like rail cars, two-person units, which allow one person to pump down on one side as the other side leverages up.  While one man stands, the other crouches, as they up and down each other clicky clack down the tracks.  Indeed, natural selection is the foundation that we move upon.  But getting from one place to another involves far more than if we survive to procreate.

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 management.  In 1999, banks were allowed to hawk investments.  Finally, the nascent derivatives market exploded when it was discovered that the adults had abandoned the premises and free markets were really free.  Risk had been legislated out of finance.

Or so it seemed.

Somehow the vanishing of the risk of capitalists being confronted with engaging in inappropriate behavior was correlated with the disappearance of risk when making money.  It’s as if the parents of two-year-olds went on vacation, with both the parents and toddlers certain that the little ones were more secure without parents around.

The stopped clock being right twice every 24 hours is a metaphor that has often, during this twenty-year stretch, come to my mind.  Over twenty years, I felt this crisis ever present.  I came to believe that eventually, my predictions would be true because just about everything becomes true at some point.  Reality seemed separated from logic.  The economy seemed balanced on a fiction.  Year after year after year the fiction exhibited so much strength that I considered myself the stopped clock, waiting for the real hour to fit my stalled and broken point of view.

I figure if something can be true evolutionarily, it probably is true somewhere or some when.  Evolution, characterized by an almost infinite creativity, leaves little out when inventing interesting solutions.  The same could be said of humans.  If it’s possible, somewhere, at some time, someone is playing with that thing to see what happens.  We’ve now spent a couple decades exploring a myth called free markets, formerly called Social Darwinism.  The free market proponents argue that allowing elites to serve themselves results in deep and long lasting benefits to society.

Well, they’re wrong.

I wasn’t the stopped clock being right on rare occasions.  I was a digital clock blinking because the power had gone off.  No one noticed that the electricity had ceased.  No one was paying attention to the fact that there was no power.  All three branches of government abandoned us decades ago.  Only now are we noting that the clock has been blinking midnight.

When a young person in our culture, a new adult, goes to the bank to save his money and is told by the bank to let the bank invest that money in the stock market…..  Well, it’s time for change.  Let’s see what 12:01 a.m. and a new day brings.

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 high levels of testosterone creates males with low testosterone and females with high testosterone.  A mother with low levels of testosterone creates males with high testosterone and females with low testosterone.  These two pairings are the prototypes of matrifocal and patrifocal social structure.  These two social structures selectively reinforce, through sexual selection, specific evolutionary trajectories.  Matrifocal societies exhibit female choice.  In matrifocal societies, commanding females mate with neotenous, cooperative males.  In patrifocal societies, neotenous or cooperative females are awarded to competitive, often combative, males based on how high a status the male or the male’s family has achieved.

In neoteny, infant features are prolonged in ontogeny to appear in the features of descendant adults.  In acceleration, ancestor adult features are condensed to later appear in the infant features of descendants.  Social structure manifests both dynamics at the same time, with males and females simultaneously and literally evolving in different directions.

Is it any wonder that communication between the sexes is so challenging?

And, trajectories change over time.  A band or society can oscillate between social structures impacted by surrounding societies, environmental impacts, intramale competition, access to resources, female infanticide and cultural innovations.

Societies can evidence the two social-structure polarities simultaneously with individuals attracted to their complementary opposites while all mixed up.  Imagine all four examples engaged in a massive square dance.  At the end of the dance, the cooperative women match up with the commanding men while the commanding women pair with cooperative men.

In these types of societies, the U. S., for example, one would expect to see large-scale cultural innovation.  Not incidentally, ancient Greece was a rare, successful hybrid between the indigenous matrifocal societies (represented by the many goddess cults) and the Indo-European new arrivals.

In the West, we’ve been deeply influenced by the 6,500-year-old Indo-European incursions into indigenous matrifocal cultures.  It has been difficult for us to notice that other half of evolution’s social-structure dynamic, societies founded on female choice.  Darwin’s and Freud’s prejudices reflected a 6,500-year-old tradition, biases that obfuscated the actual operational processes behind biological, social, ontogenetic and personal transformation.

Though it seems to me that the implications of the thesis set forth in this blog have ramifications in several disciplines, consider that of the several hundred books and papers I’ve read that have contributed to the synthesis, almost nothing has been written about estrogen in these contexts.  If Darwin and Freud did not know anything about testosterone, consider that we still know almost nothing about estrogen.  I suspect that estrogen, as the other half of the hormonal dyad, offers a lot as we learn about how biology and societies evolve.

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 mythology, I finally arrived at the first snake carvings and Christopher Marshack’s thesis of early humans tracking moon cycles on horn and bones.

The point that stories began emerging from the imaginations of our ancestors feels like the place where I seek to be.  In meditation, I find myself often straddling the place where my unconscious generates images and voices, conscious of my unconscious.  The part of me that feels abandoned when I was small–a part that cannot yet tell or understand stories–feels to me to be the me that I accompany.  For me, evolution is personal.  Seeking an understanding of how humans evolved is the same as seeking inside myself for how I came to be.

I seek to grasp what it means for consciousness to split.  I explore consciousness.  I embrace the split.

I don’t yet understand the relationship between story/metaphor and our evolution.  I intuit that this is the core of who we are.  Lingering around the ancient rituals of dance and song, I seek those moments when time fractured and imagination reared.  I can feel these moments in my body.  Slowly my body allows the words to describe what the body knows.

We are each wrestling with our evolution as we form words and act out the stories that guide our lives.  I feel joy seeking origins.  There is love stored in an understanding of how we came to be.

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 humans could perform feats of pattern recognition and exhibition in more than one time and more than one place at the same time.  Females were selecting for imagination.  Females were selecting not just the creativity to generate novel variations on a theme but for an ability to generate new themes.

There is runaway sexual selection and there is careening-crazily-everywhere-at-once sexual selection.  Well, not actually everywhere.  Just two places.  Sexual selection split the human brain.

Not long before the diaspora from Africa, the human brain shifted from random-handed gesture-users thinking almost always in the here and now to right-handed speech-users with a slightly smaller right hemisphere and a smaller corpus callosum hemispheric bridge.  The new brain could be two places at once by decreasing communication between the hemispheres and assigning speech mostly to just the left side.  With the emergence of a facility manipulating place and time, sexual selection focused on the productions of imagination.  What we call “consciousness” was born.  What emerged was actually split consciousness.  “Consciousness” had always been present.  The striving of consciousness to engage in pattern recognition and exhibition for millions of years, sexual selection, led to split consciousness and the eruption of imagination.

Imagination is the sexualization of experience by creating time.

So, we’re maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years after the split, having had some time to explore the repercussions of using an imagination to navigate a biological world with real bodies.  One of the challenges is that our love of stories, products of the imagination, stories exhibiting our ability to be in more than one time or more than one place at the same time, lead us to confuse the conclusions of our stories with the way the world works.  Biology corrects our widest wanderings but still we get into trouble.  For example, the financial world meltdown.

We are storytellers.  That is our nature.  We sexually selected ourselves to display astonishing abilities to makes things up.  When those that control financial assets tell stories that enormous amounts of money can easily be made with little risk and involve no products or services but only the estimations of relative value over time, that is a story.  When the story meets biology–biology tells us that everything changes and everything is interconnected–the story will suffer.

So, now we have a new story.  The new story says we need regulations, just like nature regulates itself.  In this new integrated global economy, integrated like our natural global ecology, we need constraints, natural constraints, like nature uses.

The first law of the new economy?  Trade what’s real.

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 model.  Might makes right is the name that feels right to me.

Those in control subscribe to a belief that their being in control is a result of natural biological principles that declare that the most efficient system is one where those that are in control achieve that status naturally.  A while back it was God that offered the Kingdom to the King.  More recently it was asserted that Darwin made the same declaration, but this time nature conferred the gift to the kings of commerce.  God or science, it doesn’t matter, the story still ends with an elite.

A large difference between the two mythologies engineering an upper class is that the more recent scientific version states that a struggle resulted in the achievement of the higher status.  Most kings inherited wealth and power.  It is usually ignored that most contemporary elites inherited their wealth.  This newer story states that risks were taken by those brave and clever souls to achieve their elevated station.  This is the story of the entrepreneur.

It is this story, that risks were taken and battles were fought and won, that sets up the paradox of the fall.  At the end of these cycles, such as the time we are in, it is declared that massive amounts of money can be made and no risks are required.

It begins with a mythology based upon the brave taking risks, the mighty making right by brute force and will and it all ends with those same men, or their progeny, making easy choices, making billions, with no estimation that they could fail.

Somehow the philosophy of the elites embraces both the battle and the risk-free, exponentially escalating gift.  Perhaps there is no paradox.  Maybe it’s as simple as an understanding that once you achieve the pinnacle of power, you deserve a cornucopian access to resources undreamed of by those without a useful education, a vote that counts, access to media that reflect the world rather than the world the corporations prefer we know.

It’s not only those without resources that the mythology of the elites confuse.  They confuse themselves.  Free markets, Social Darwinism, might makes right–it doesn’t matter what you call it–the result is a mythology that does not embrace how the world really operates.  What results are these wild oscillations that reveal gaps in understandings of how society and biology unfold.

Whether explored as an example of paradox or just as a nonuseful mythology, the recent gyrations in economics can be usefully explored as manifestations of thinking characterized by little understanding of interconnection.  Might makes right is a mythology.  It’s time for alternatives stories, more useful stories, to be told.

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 noticed because the bodies were appearing in Iraq.

In just the way we build a bonfire that can signal direction for many miles, sometimes we have to create conditions for a story so powerful that we regulate our experience for many years to come.  Evidently the cycle of tales surrounding the 1930s depression lost their power.  The story we are telling now will perhaps last longer than 80 years.  The scale of the tale we are observing suggests that Homer will soon have competition.

We have created the conditions to compose a story describing the incredible power of a story to destroy.

In the Homeric epics, the entire Greek world contributed in the attack against Troy and experienced the repercussions.  We are one world now.  Over the last few decades, societies have been becoming horizontal across the planet, toppling sideways faster than gravity will let them fall.  The web is integrating individuals.  Media integrate entertainment.  Corporations have integrated finance.  Tinder has been gathering across the forest floors of the world, now catching fire.

There is no fiction in biology.  Natural systems evolve, unfold and integrate within the confines of forest fires, meteorites and floods.  Humans, operating within a complementing universe of pattern exhibition and recognition, can effortlessly and with delight cross a line where what exists is only in the mind.  We have to create our own conflagrations that remind us where boundaries lie.  Now that we are an integrated species, now that the world is one, we need stories that make clear that we are not alone.

As my mother used to say, “You’re too old to engage in this behavior.”  Stories that encourage selfishness, independence, freedom, liberty and ownership are stories that encourage a fictional understanding of what humans are.  These stories are not contextualized.  We are interconnected.  Those stories only make sense when integrated into a whole.

We are blessed to observe the end of an age and the beginning of human adulthood.  The stories that will come of this time of transition will last perhaps until the end of our species.  These are the stories that describe the effect of telling stories.  These are the stories where we discover what it is to be human.

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 free of the costs of robust health care and protected pensions. Loss of health care and pensions are often the case when a corporation goes bottom up.

Untie a species from its environment, reduce the number of interconnections a biological unit has with its surrounding community and inevitable destruction will result. Free is a myth. We are all connected. To believe in free is the same as to worship being alone.

Right now the rest of the world is muddling through how it is going to deal with the crashing American concept of freedom. American financial vehicles have been designed to flourish unconnected to the real needs. Soon, real needs will be in all the headlines. Rage at “free markets” will be all the rage. The American stock markets, redesigned in the 1990s not to crash, will instead watch American assets slowly disappear. Having designed our financial instruments to enhance risk and our markets to protect risk, this awful combination will leave us in the end with little left to risk.

The Victorian Age interpretation of Darwin’s theories led to the concept of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was “scientific” support for the entrepreneurial excesses of the Industrial Revolution. One aspect of one part of how evolution operates was embraced as an example for us all. The fittest surviving was hailed as an economic model.

Little has changed. The fittest can be the cleverest. Our hailers of “free markets” have been most clever in their manipulation of words to make them free of society’s demands.

Evolution is not about the fittest surviving. Economic health is not about disengagement from the society that supplies support. Our economic model has been built upon the ancient Indo-European patrifocal dominance model of might makes right. Holding onto a portfolio of worthless assets, we must realize it’s time to face the fact that change has arrived.

Might is not right.

It’s time to evolve our government to serve.

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 source of contemporary theorizing malaise.

Clearly, politics, patriarchy and academics are all entwined.  Knight notes how few women were/are tenured theorists in human evolution studies and the fact we still largely inhabit an Indo-European patrifocal frame of reference.

Though the West is changing quickly in a matrifocal direction, we are still novices when it comes to understanding a woman’s point of view.  Riane Eisler has written much concerning the transition we are experiencing.  Eisler examines our origins in matrilineal Old Europe and the direction we are headed in a partnership society.  Understanding autism, a condition characterized by its matristic bonds, is profoundly complicated by theorists raised to recognize only a patristic frame of reference.  There is much that they have to unlearn.  Most academics are not aware of the new paradigm or of its relationship to them personally or professionally.  Max Planck said that major paradigm shifts often don’t evidence themselves in academia until the tenured professors retire or die.

Conducting research for this thesis, I continue to be astonished by how little traffic there is among academic disciplines.  Noting identical principles appearing in different academic departments with totally different nomenclatures has been deeply disappointing.  I have a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in art.  The research I conducted in college was mostly in art history.  It was only after falling down the rabbit hole of this project that I discovered that the barriers among academic disciplines were so high as to deeply impede pattern synthesis.  Specifically, from my perspective, the answer to autism’s etiology is in nineteenth-century biological evolution theories blended with nineteenth-century anthropological social structure insights while exploring late twentieth-century neuropsychological insights from Geschwind and Annett.  Clearly, our deep reverence for natural selection as the primary or sole theory of evolution, particularly when it comes to humans, has fractured our ability to conduct reasonable explorations of conditions with evolutionary origins.

Exaggerating the three areas just explored is our contemporary society’s willingness to adhere to Social Darwinism or “free markets” as perhaps the foundation theme of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush years.  Corporations decide the information we receive based on their interpretation of what we seek in the context of how they can make money.  We’ve lived in a nightmare exaggeration of top-down, paternalistic, patristic values where the commons all but disappeared until the emergence of the web.

Though autism may have (at least) three causes, the barriers to understanding those causes are often foremost in my mind.

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 society with specific features that mirror the hormonal constellation and social structure proclivities of its individuals.

Stephen J. Gould describes the several-million-year neotenous trajectory that the human race has been running.  There are physical, neurological, psychological and hormonal repercussions to following a matrifocal or patrifocal path.  I’m suggesting that matrifocal bands selected for neotenous males for perhaps three million years, with likely occasional forays into patriarchy.  Sometime before the diaspora from Africa, maybe 50,000–100,000 years ago, brains split, language surfaced and culture emerged.

Few societies are exclusively matrifocal or patrifocal but instead exhibit aspects of both.  Most societies can be fairly easily situated within one or the other frame by examining how mates are chosen, how sexual selection unfolds.  How much choice does a woman have when she chooses or is assigned her mate?  Is the ideal male loved or feared?

Social structures and their participating individuals exhibit evolutionary trajectories over time.  Societies and cultures mirror these trajectories, revealing their own evolutions, operating according to the same dynamics.  Societies, like ancient bands weaving between matrifocal and patrifocal loci, fluctuate between highly hierarchical, male-domination models and societies revolving around a commons with a horizontal frame.  In the West, we’ve observed a surge of Indo-European patriarchy lasting almost 6,000 years with infrequent influxes of matriarchy and occasional hybrids birthing unique cultures like the ancient Greeks.

What has resulted, over time, looks like a specific trend.  Of course.  We are still observing the influence of social structure upon evolution.  Anthropic or teleological arguments suggesting that an interventionist god is responsible for the clear and universal patterns we observe seem unnecessary.  It comes down to hormones and what attracts us to our partners.  It’s about love.

I would suggest that this evolutionary argument undermines a theological interpretation of societal or cultural evolution.  Heterochrony, neoteny and acceleration describe species and societal evolution.  Biological principles directly apply to social transformation.  There are just over 200 species of primates.  We’re the ones that can’t decide how best to mate.

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 supplied to lengthen the day.  This light-enhanced growth of muscle mass does not take place if the bull is castrated, suggesting that the effect of light is mediated through a rise in testosterone effect (Tucker and Ringer 1982)…..If pineal effects on sex hormone levels are important, then the birth months of lefthanders, and of those with learning disorders, might not be uniform throughout the year, since fetuses conceived at different seasons might be subjected to very different hormonal environments.  These effects should differ in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and at the equator, although other factors, such as variations in the ethnic composition of populations, would also have to be considered.  Data are still very sparse.  Badian (1983) found that in males born in each of the six months beginning in September, the rate of nonrighthandedness was higher than that found in any of the other six months, but no clear trend was observed for female births.”  (Geschwind & Galaburda 1987: 116-7, Cerebral Lateralization)

Noting the observations of Geschwind and Galaburda in 1987, I am struck by how many of their insights apply to the possible origins of autism.  Consider the emergence of autism among Somali Minnesotans. (Click here to note the autism-inducing implications of equatorial populations migrating to extreme Northern climates, taking into consideration Geschwin and Galaburda’s hypothesis.)

Many of the studies inspired by their work did not take into consideration the difference between familial left-handers and those who became left-handed as a result of trauma.  Results of those studies were usually inconclusive.  I sometimes wonder how often it is that cerebral palsy and autism have identical etiologies, only different parts of the brain were traumatized.  Researchers conducting studies involving left-handedness who do not remove those individuals that have been traumatized study two different etiologies, muddying results.

It seems to me that administering Marian Annett’s dexterity/speed peg tests would efficiently separate those untraumatized genetic lefties from those that had experienced early, hostile environments.  (Natural lefties often evidence facility with both hands.)

“The earliest civilizations of the world–in China, Tibet, Egypt, the Near East, and Europe–were, in all probability, matristic”  Goddess civilizations.  “Since agriculture was developed by women, the Neolithic period created optimum conditions for the survival of matrilineal, endogamous systems inherited from Paleolithic times.  During the early agricultural period women reached the apex of their influence in farming, arts and crafts, and social functions.  The metrical with collectivist principles continued.      There is no evidence in all Old Europe of a patriarchal chieftainate of the Indo-European type.  There are no male royal tombs and no residences in magarons on hill forts.  The burial rites and settlement patterns reflect a matrilineal structure, whereas the distribution of wealth in graves speaks for an economic egalitarianism.” (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess.  Harper:  S. F.  P. 432)

There are two major currents contemporary theorists are not noticing, forces influencing the direction that society evolves and its individuals adjust to.  Handedness is not arbitrary.  Those that are random-handed (commonly called left-handed) are the old matristic or matrifocal neurological types common perhaps 100,000 years ago, and they were still exerting influence in terms of social structure as recently as early recorded history.  Second, when Geschwin and Galaburda note the influence of features of the environment, such as light, on handedness, they are observing one of the ways that an individual’s neurology and resulting social structure is modified.  Sexual selection proclivities also have enormous influence on these maturational trajectories, revealing left-handers as matrifocal in origin.  Visit here and here for more on sexual selection and conditions featuring maturational delay.

Understanding social structure and the relationships between matrifocal and patrifocal frames as they drive human evolution provides insight on the origin of conditions characterized by maturational delay.  Understanding the neuropsychological origins of these conditions and the many related psychological and oncological disorders offers awareness of how the nature of societal transformation integrates into the neuropsychological, psychological and physiological profile of the individual.

Much comes down to how and whom we pick as partners.  And then, how we live our life.  Perhaps the poets should be writing about evolution.  Perhaps they are.

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 was Blok in 1922, who first proposed a fetalization theory of Down Syndrome.  From a palaeontological perspective all of these growth disturbances and developmental dysmaturities can be subsumed under th