As a child, I was gifted at music and intellectually precocious. I was told that I could succeed at anything I wanted to do. The sky was the limit! I was going to grow up to Be Somebody! And when I say Be Somebody, I mean in a completely and utterly conventional sense. Doors were going to open. I was going to be welcomed into a prestigious position in which I would Do Important Things. In other words, I was going to be in the center of the known world.

On the other hand, I have always felt myself to be on the margins. I don’t mean on the socio-economic margins, although that has sometimes been the case. I mean on the karmic margins — which is to say, on the margins in nearly every situation I have ever entered. Even in my original family, in which I was The Child Destined to Do Great Things, in which people kvelled over me as though it were their life’s work, I was on the margins. I just didn’t fit. Even when I was standing next to them, I watched my family members over there, as though they were in the center of the room, relating to one another, and I was on the outside. For a long time, I was sure that I must have been adopted, because there was no one in the family who reminded me of myself at all.

I felt myself on the margins in high school, and I felt myself on the margins at work, and the feeling rarely left me, even when I was trying so hard to be in the center of it all. Especially when I was trying so hard to be in the center of it all. The only time I didn’t feel on the margins was when I happened to cross paths for awhile with other people on the margins. Then the world felt like home.

Recently, I’ve been finding myself in a state of Great Regret over some decisions I made in my early life. More specifically, it’s that self who was Destined to Do Great Things that is the source of this Great Regret. I’ve been kicking myself over my decision to leave Princeton after my sophomore year, and my decision to leave Berkeley without my PhD. I keep thinking to myself: How hard would it have been to stick it out at Princeton for two more years? I’d have a Princeton diploma! Think of the prestige! And I could have finished that PhD program, even though I didn’t want to become an academic. I’d have a PhD! More prestige! What the hell was I thinking? How could I have been so short-sighted?

All that comes from one version of myself. What’s kicking it all up right now is the other version of myself, the one who knows that I’m on the margins. Here I am, doing my work on autism and empathy on behalf of my dear and beloved autistic people, and wishing like hell that I had some kind of prestige to go with all my critical thought, because it would help the cause. Having spent a lot of time in academia, I’m painfully aware of the pecking order, and I’m keenly aware of where my master’s degree in English puts me.

Was I glad to have the experience of studying for my first master’s degree? Yes. Am I glad to have the experience of studying for my second master’s degree? Yes. But this time around, I am not doing it for the sake of “moving up” in the world, but for the sake of the work I want to bring to the world.

Of course, nothing would ever be enough to get me to a place of privilege in the world as presently constituted. Not as a disabled person. Not as an autistic person. Unless I help to work against hierarchies of power and privilege in the world, I will always be Other. Unless I help the world to move beyond a deficit-driven model of human beings, I will never be Enough — not if I have six PhDs and six fancy titles to go with them. For me, that’s the struggle of being disabled — not the condition itself, but the knowledge that in the eyes of the conventional world, I am less-than, whatever my intelligence and whatever my accomplishments.

In some way, I have always known all of these things, even before I ever imagined that the word “disabled” would adhere to me. I have always felt it. Perhaps it’s that I was never normal. I was always different. I was not different because of what I wore or what I said, though sometimes, those were the expressions of my difference. I could always change what I wore or what I said, although sometimes at great personal cost. But my difference went beyond that. I was different to my core, in a completely unchangeable way, in a society in which deviation from the norm is considered shameful and must be corrected at all costs. For all my passing, I’ve always known that something in the core of me was not acceptable in the eyes of the world, and that it would never change.

And now I know that it’s called being disabled.

All my life, I’ve been standing at the same crossroads, over and over. Do I chase that dream of being in the center? Or do I throw in my lot with other marginalized people? I’ve tried chasing the dream, over and over, and I always end up leaving it behind: I left Princeton, I left Berkeley, I left my high-paying job to homeschool my daughter. But I never acknowledge the other path, because the idea of stepping over to the path that leads to the margins has always felt too frightening to me. There is so much vulnerability there, so much potential for pain, and injustice, and derision, and disrespect, and mistreatment. I crave that acceptance, that conventional mark of approval, that illusion of safety that comes from wanting to Be Somebody, and I’ve resisted all my life the idea that to Be Somebody, in the way that the world understands it, may not be why I was put on this earth.

Lately, I’ve realized that I can’t keep circling around to the same crossroads, over and over. I have to choose the path that leads to the margins because, in truth, it has already chosen me, and it’s exhausting to continue to flee it. I have to throw in my lot with other marginalized people. I cannot continue to give power to the idea that one’s ability to be heard, and respected, and understood should depend upon a diploma, or the trappings of normalcy, or the acceptance of convention — not when most marginalized people will never have a diploma, will never pass for normal, will never live conventional lives, will never be granted prestige or the trappings of power, but will always have to fight just to be heard, just to eat, just to live in a safe place.

Many of us can pass well enough to have all those things, but as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, passing for normal with an invisible disability is a “seductive but psychically estranging access to privilege” that has serious personal and social implications:

“Some of my friends, for example, have measured their regard for me by saying, ‘But I don’t think of you as disabled.’ What they point to in such a compliment is the contradiction they find between their perception of me as a valuable, capable, lovable person and the cultural figure of the disabled person whom they take to be precisely my opposite: worthless, incapable, and unlovable… The trouble with such statements is that they leave intact, without challenge, the oppressive stereotypes that permit, among other things, the unexamined use of disability terms such as crippled, lame, dumb, idiot, moron as verbal gestures of derision.

…

[B]y disavowing disability identity, many of us learned to save ourselves from devaluation by a complicity that perpetuates oppressive notions about ostensibly real disabled people. Thus, together we help make the alternately menacing and pathetic cultural figures who rattle tin cups or rave on street corners ones we with impairments often flee from more surely than those who imagine themselves as nondisabled.” (22)

All my life, the man rattling the tin cup has been one of my people. I’ve known it. I’ve fled from that knowledge, and I’ve fled from that man, but I’ve known it. The suffering of others is a tear in the fabric of the universe, and I am part of that fabric, and I’ve known it for a long, long time. I’ve known it since the day I sat in the synagogue at the age of ten, and watched a film of real Nazis shooting real women and children at the edge of a ditch, and had a stark realization: Those women and children, standing on the margin of that pit, getting ready to feel the bullets tearing through their bodies, were not people to pity and to forget. I was one of them. I was on the edge of that ditch with them — terrified and grief-stricken, but one of them.

I have always known who my people are, and I’ve fled from them, afraid that if I threw in my lot with them, I’d have to give up this mad craving for acceptance, for approval, for the mythic safety of “normalcy,” for the dream of what people once led me to believe was my destiny. And that fear has cost me dearly — physically, mentally, ethically, and spiritually. I’m only beginning to understand just how dearly.

It’s an awful thing to be at war with oneself. It’s an awful thing to keep fleeing and arriving at the same place, over and over. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t do it anymore.

There is no shame in being on the margins. There is only shame in believing that I am too important to be there.

There is no shame in being told that I am broken, that I am lacking, that I will never be enough. There is only shame in believing it.

There is no shame in being ridiculed, or patronized, or dismissed. There is only shame in being the one who ridicules, or patronizes, or dismisses.

There is no shame in being misunderstood. There is only shame in refusing to understand.

There is no shame in being an ordinary person speaking truth to power. There is only shame in keeping silent and forgetting that ordinary people are the ones who heal this world.

No matter what happens to me in this life, I will always find my people. All I have to do is to reach out my hand.

Sources

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Feminist Formations 14, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 1-32. http://mtw160-150.ippl.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/nwsa_journal/v014/14.3garland-thomson.pdf.

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg blogs at Journeys with Autism, and presides at Autism and Empathy.

The Path That Chose Me appears here by permission.

The most recent installment in Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s published memoirs is Blazing My Trail.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/23/the-path-that-chose-me/feed/ 2 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/09/22/the-illusion-of-typicality/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/09/22/the-illusion-of-typicality/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 05:38:29 +0000 Gwen McKay http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=3398 The cypress trees of Louisiana’s bayous (to continue Shift Journal’s venerable landscape metaphor tradition) are very well adapted to their natural habitat.  They can get along just fine with most of their roots underwater; and they have a strong root system that can withstand powerful hurricanes despite their height and the swampy, sandy locations where they grow.  They are often planted as conservation trees along the Gulf Coast.

Sometimes they are grown as landscape trees in other parts of the country, and you can find them in many garden catalogs.  If you wanted to grow a cypress tree in Midwestern clay soil, for instance, you might improve the planting site by mixing peat moss and sand into the soil, and you might water your cypress tree more often than some of your other landscape plants.  Assuming that you had a reasonably good understanding of its needs, a cypress tree would probably grow quite well and would be a handsome addition to your yard.

Dr. Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., an educator who recently wrote a book on neurodiversity, made a similar ecological analogy in his well-known article Special Education and the Concept of Neurodiversity, in which he compared children with special needs to rare flowers with particular environmental needs.  Others have elaborated upon this comparison by suggesting that unlike these rare flowers, most children are like dandelions, able to grow almost anywhere.

It’s not really accurate, however, to say that dandelions grow almost anywhere.  While those of us who find dandelions cropping up in our yards every spring might be forgiven for making that assumption, there are in fact wide swaths of Planet Earth that are not at all welcoming to dandelions—such as jungles, rainforests, deserts, frozen tundra, and swamps.

Indeed, in landscapes untouched by civilization, dandelions would rarely be found even in temperate parts of the world because they usually would be crowded out and overshadowed by larger vegetation.  But the dandelion is an opportunistic weed that has made itself very much at home in landscapes altered by humans.  It thrives in lawns, vacant lots, grassy areas along highways, and other such areas that would not exist in the absence of human activity.  As such, it gives the impression of being a typical and highly adaptable form of plant life, simply because we often find it in our environment.

Evolution, by its very nature, works against the existence of species that can flourish anywhere.  The farther a plant or animal ranges beyond its original habitat, the more vulnerable it becomes to catastrophic events such as disease or climate change.  The hardiest species often are those that have precisely adapted to a specific environmental niche over millions of years.  When it seems as if we can find a particular plant, animal, or neurological configuration anywhere we look, that’s probably not because it is ideally adapted to a wide variety of settings but because our society has made significant changes to the natural environment.

I wouldn’t describe this as not seeing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes; rather, what’s being seen are the dandelions in the clearing where the trees were cut down.

“It doesn’t seem like my school anymore,” she said.

She pondered her situation a while longer and then said, “But college doesn’t seem like my school, either.  It feels like being away at camp.”

I remembered what it was like to go away to school at her age, that strange sense of dislocation one couldn’t quite put a name to.  And I found myself thinking that the experience of growing up and moving on describes so well how our society feels in these early days of the new millennium.  Our world is growing up, learning new technologies, broadening its horizons, leaving behind the insular little villages and the familiar prejudices of its past.  That’s a scary thing to do.

Not only do we have to deal with rapid changes in our physical and social environments, which are unsettling enough in themselves; we’re also faced with the question of how our society will adjust to accommodate a much broader range of neurological differences than many people are used to seeing.  Whether or not the autistic population is increasing—which, as Mark Stairwalt accurately stated in his Friday post, will likely take several generations to determine—we can at least say that its existence is becoming more widely recognized.  It’s a matter of evolution, either way, regardless of whether the human brain is actually changing or whether we are going through a social evolutionary process of learning to acknowledge more diversity.

I have every confidence that my daughter will settle in at college and that she’ll do just fine there.  Likewise, I fully expect that our world will be able to make the transition to a more mature understanding of human differences and that at some point the existence of autistic people will be seen as just another familiar part of the social landscape.

Imagine, just as an exercise, that beyond the one percent of the population diagnosable with autism, there is another four percent whose cognitive style is describable under the less rigorous category of the Broad Autism Phenotype, or BAP

Now imagine this progression extending not only into the future, but also in the opposite direction, spread over evolutionary time, over millions of years and thousands of generations.  Out of autism we may have come, and into autism we may be returning. This is the vision, in part and in my own words, of the man who launched this website a year ago now, Andrew Lehman.

April of this year saw two watershed events in Andrew’s life.  One was the publication of his book, Evolution, Autism, and Social Change, which pulled together the ideas he had been working out for years at Neoteny and elsewhere into an elegantly coherent whole.  The other event was an urgent, pre-emptive operation to head off the threat of a brain aneurysm which had been a closely surveilled, mostly quiet companion for some time.  While the surgery was successful, it has left Andrew with higher priorities and more pressing challenges than participating in online discussion.

The five entries with which Andrew launched Shift are gathered here; parts of these posts and others here made their way in some form into his book.  While I was invited to be the only other ground floor contributor besides Andrew, I’d like to recognize that his intention for Shift was that it be a commons for contributors, a place where many and conflicting viewpoints could be sorted through by readers.  For all that Andrew has a longtime and diverse following at Neoteny, we were both outsiders to the online autism community; I at least had little idea what a thoroughly polarized battlefield it was, or what we must have looked like wandering out onto this scarred, cratered landscape, earnestly soliciting contributors.

By March of this year, I had taken stock of what I felt was and was not already being done well in online autism discussion, and posted a handful of entries outlining where I believed Shift Journal could fill in the gaps.  Andrew responded by suggesting that I insert my name as Editor and Publisher; I took his suggestion (unnecessarily hi-falutin’ as this title still seems), thus concluding an eight-month dance I refer to as the Velvet Shanghai—eight months, apparently, being how long it took Andrew to see me convince myself that this site was as much my child as his, and that I actually had time to both manage and contribute to it.

While time constraints continue to be an issue, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Andrew Lehman for placing this project in my hands.  Some years ago, somewhere on one of his blogs, he noted that seeing possibilities (such as this one, I presume) and laying the conditions for them to come into being was something for which he seemed to have a talent.  It is a privilege to have been included in such a process.  Thank you, Andrew.

Readers who browse the site by category headings know that some of these categories describe areas which contain few entries, while others are overflowing.  Though it might seem more practical in the short term to modify them, for now these category headings are markers of unfulfilled potential, of attention yet to be paid.

It is not a small thing to absorb or even to entertain the implications of the idea that we live in cyclical time, that out of autism we may have come, and into autism we may be returning.  In the entry which to my mind serves as a keynote for this site, Andrew wrote that “Autism … rights represent the third wave of genetic justice,” following as it does on the movements for civil rights, and for women’s and gay’s rights.  Much of the discussion here recently has centered on this struggle; one of my observations in March was that Shift Journal could serve as a center of gravity for the reflective task of self-definition that underlies such movements.

So this is where a good deal of energy and interested contributors are coming from today; tomorrow or the decade or later after, here or elsewhere, we may see similar energy focused in other areas.  Shift Journal is a big-picture endeavor; we are surveying a large territory, it’s a project not to be wrapped up or even comprehended in the space of a single year.  In this sense Shift is not even so much about the content already available here as the entries yet to come.  Watch this space—or better yet, send along a submission to help shape it.

Back to this notion of returning to autism, I want to direct attention to the ouroboros, the tail-swallowing snake up there in Shift’s masthead.  I’ve never discussed the figure-eight aspect with Andrew; that may or may not simply be artistic license, but the ouroboros itself refers to (among other things) cyclical time.  In the West, we tend to view time as something irrevocable, marching on, in a single unwavering direction.  Rightly or wrongly, we interpret even the tenets of evolutionary theory to imply only progress, so that no one—not even the most staunchly regressive conservative—wishes to go backwards in evolutionary terms.

The concept of evolutionary time entertained here is, again, cyclical rather than linear.  A return to autism—while prevalent biases and preconceptions may say otherwise—is no more a regression or backwards turn than is the return of clock hands to the same positions every twelve hours.  If your sensibilities insist on a vision of progress, imagine a spiral, circling into and plumbing the depths of mysteries.  Given our limited lifespans in the face of evolutionary time, all this remains metaphor in any case.  Even Andrew’s offering of a new evolutionary theory will likely need generations in order for its measure to be taken in scientific terms.

In the meantime, that theory—and this website along with it—provides a framework in which the legitimacy of autistic experience is a given.  We can now set about seeing what we might build on that framework, while also learning to recognize the staggering extent, historically and in everyday life, of what has already been created out of autistic experience.  There’s plenty more as well, as I’ve said, to tuck into—and there’s always an open call for contributors—but even if we don’t get to it all again this year, those tasks alone should be enough to keep us busy.

I received an email from Elaine Morgan, popularizer of the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and the author of several books on human evolution, including The Descent of Woman.  Morgan recommended that I read the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.  She suggested I read, Mother and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

“The paradigm shift away from thinking of our Pleistocene ancestors as reared by all-nurturing chimpanzee-like mothers, and toward thinking of them as apes with species-typical shared care, has been slow in coming.  Only in the past decade has cooperative breeding’s implications for attachment theory begun to be addressed, and its evolutionary implications taken into account.”  (Hrdy, Mothers and Others, p. 113.)

Hrdy discusses the influence of the alloparent in detail, describing the profound uniqueness of the human species, where mothers share infant intimacy with other females (and occasionally males) from the first day on.  This is unheard of in other great ape species.  Many things are implied.  Hrdy concentrates on how natural selection reinforces a cooperation theory-of-mind paradigm that allows a larger number of progeny to survive in communities where child-rearing is a community event.  For Hrdy, coming from a natural selection theorizing background, natural selection alone explains how humans evolved an ability to identify with another person as compassion became a highly useful feature.

Two things jump out at me.  First, sexual selection seems to be of relatively little importance in Hrdy’s hypothesis.  Neoteny is not mentioned.  With a default assumption that natural selection is how things transform, there is no awareness that many of the features that Hrdy describes reveal neotenous trends.  Though she discusses the influence of matriarchy, this is not integrated into an understanding of how matriarchy encourages specific kinds of evolution, particularly those kinds of evolution leading to the features that Hrdy is paying the closest attention to.  Matrifocal social structure encourages cooperative societies.  Instead of exploring the conditions that support matrifocal social structure, Hrdy commits the usual sociobiological sin of assuming that only natural selection is in play.  (Geoffrey Miller’s work would be the exception.)

Placing a heavy emphasis on alloparent intervention keeping our species alive, Hrdy neglects to make the connection between neoteny and social structures that support alloparents.  In other words, Hrdy’s work supports matrifocal human evolution.

No doubt this is just the beginning of my exploration of Hrdy’s work in connection with my Orchestral Theory of Evolution.  Thank you, Elaine, for sending me in Hrdy’s direction.

Second, considering that autism features individuals exhibiting the characteristics of our evolutionary forebears, and noting that the environment and child-rearing practices of those forebears might be what current autistics are craving, I’ve hypothesized that diet, rhythm, dance, touch and performance may all be necessary to those with autism.  Reading Hrdy’s book, it strikes me that perhaps an autistic neurology requires constant multiple parents, several persons to form attachments with.  For a child to feel part of society, perhaps it is neurologically necessary that several central females be engaged from birth.  Hrdy notes that in primitive societies, though the babies may travel among several persons over the course of a day, the baby sleeps with the mother at night.  It is also possible that an autistic individual requires close contact with a central figure through the night.

As it becomes clearer how exactly we evolved, we may evolve a deeper understanding for how we can adjust the environment of particular humans having difficulty adjusting to current society.

Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here.

That I might have featured Asperger’s when I was young never crossed my mind until this year.  I’d been studying autism for 12 years.  Working for 12 years with the thesis that testosterone informed the rate of maturation, it never struck me that estrogen might manage the timing until last winter when I discovered I’d been causally considering it for a couple of weeks.  My creative process is an artistic process that often features a conscious mind just along for the ride.  There are similarities between those of us living lives deeply informed by the creative process and those that this society calls autistic.

Understanding autism is at the heart of my orchestral theory of evolution.  If this theory does explain how autism emerges and offers interventions that can improve the lives of those that feel inhibited by the condition, then there is the chance that several dozen conditions and diseases may be addressed by using the principles outlined in my work.  My premise is that autism is a condition that features male maturational delay and, in females, acceleration.  Social structure, neurological anomalies and endocrinological differences are all integral to autism and Asperger’s etiology.   By adjusting our theory of evolution to take into consideration how exactly maturation rates and timing are influenced by social structure and the environment, the causes of autism and the causes of a number of other conditions and diseases are possibly made clear.

Autism does not have just one cause.  Perhaps there are several different etiologies and autism will acquire several different names when the different causes are uncovered.  The particular evolutionary dynamic I write about describes exactly how one kind of autism emerges, under what circumstances and in which kinds of families.  I focus on three specific causes of autism that are directly connected to an underlying evolutionary matrix, a collection of processes that influence physical and mental health in a number of areas.  Though I concentrate on autism, this work represents a new theory of medical etiology, removing natural selection from its present station as all that doctors know.  In its place, I offer a number of tools that have the potential to make medical diagnosis an evolutionary intervention.  Consider that if we understand that how we treat our bodies and what we are exposed to compel the evolutionary trajectory of progeny, with repercussions for both ourselves and our children, then understanding health becomes the same as how we choose to evolve.

There are three main variables that impact autism.  The blog neoteny.org discusses contemporary changes in social structure, environmental influences and the blending of two parents with no recent common forebears.

Social structure is huge.  Contemporary theorists have been blind to the effects of an emerging matrifocal society.  They are so focused on what seems the default convention, patrifocal social structure.  The mind blindness described by Baron-Cohen that offers a window to understanding autism serves as a societal metaphor when it comes to understanding that patrifocal social structure is but one of two primary social structure paradigms.  Blind to the emergence of the power of women in contemporary society, we don’t notice the repercussions of that change.  The delay of maturation in males is one such repercussion.  I describe specifically how this happens.

There are at least eight variables that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen, often changing those levels differently, if not in opposite fashions, in men and women.  Changing uterine testosterone levels impacts maturation rates, delaying or accelerating the lifelong maturation rates of progeny.  Adjusting estrogen levels has the potential to impact the timing of maturation processes, resulting in dramatically different neurological structure.  Neoteny.org explores how changes in environmental variables influence autism, Asperger’s and other conditions.

Darwin noted that mated variants of the roc pigeon, bred separately in China and Europe over 2,000 years, created chicks that revealed features of their 2,000-year-old roc pigeon progenitor.  Modern breeders combine variants that are not closely related in order to create “hybrid vigor,” bringing forward some of the strength of ancestors.  If humans acquired facility with spoken language at about the same time we departed Africa, then mating ethnic persuasions that have had almost no contact over many thousands of years may produce children revealing features of their last common ancestor.  This may result in gifted progeny like Barack Obama.  It may also lead to children with difficulty speaking or who are unable to achieve split consciousness without the kind of guidance and stimuli that their ancestors received.

I am proposing that autism is a social condition that is impacted by the environment.  By understanding autism, not only can we grasp how humans evolved, but we can form a deeper understanding around what it is to be human.  If an understanding of consciousness is integral to understanding evolution, and if this orchestral theory of evolution satisfactorily defines the variables that have impact, then autism is a good place to begin as we seek a way to make this theory useful.

I expect that if this new theory I am presenting here is embraced by enough interested individuals, it will evolve to something different as the criteria that a theory be useful propels practitioners in new directions.  It is important that a theory be fun.  If it’s fun, then we have our unconscious invested and aboard.  With the unconscious as guide, the theory will change.  Consciousness is all about creation.

…

Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/03/22/autism-and-evolution/feed/ 2 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/18/autism-diet-and-sexual-hormones/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/18/autism-diet-and-sexual-hormones/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:28:55 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1363

I’m still trying to grasp the concept that testosterone and estrogen and their associated hormones are together managing ontological, social and biological evolution by adjusting to changes in the environment by moderating the rate and timing of ontogeny.

We always knew that sex governed our lives.  There is now the possibility that we can understand how exactly this is done.

In both sexes, entering puberty is characterized by a surge in testosterone that, among other things, halts most synaptic growth.  According to some studies, if  fat levels are not high enough, puberty is delayed.  Certain levels of estrogen are required for testosterone surges to occur. There are other studies that suggest that higher fat levels delay male puberty, accelerate female puberty.

Over ten years ago I hypothesized that a mother’s uterine testosterone levels would influence the likelihood of her child exhibiting autism.  I estimated that the rate of maturation would be determined by the amount of testosterone.  A mother with high testosterone would feature maturationally delayed sons and maturationally accelerated daughters, both vulnerable to autism.

This last season I’ve been applying the pattern of how estrogen controls the timing of testosterone surges at puberty to early childhood when testosterone surges prune the right hemispheres of most normal right-handed individuals.  Might estrogen levels in these infants, toddlers and children be determining the timing of these testosterone surges?  What if estrogen levels were so low in boys that testosterone surges did not occur?  The result would be an unpruned right hemisphere, a larger brain with two cerebral lobes that are the same size.  This is a common feature of autism.

If a mother has both high testosterone and high estrogen, what I estimate to be an archetype of one of two forms of matrifocal social structure, then, according to the principles that I’ve been playing with, she would birth a low-testosterone, low-estrogen son; high-testosterone, high-estrogen daughter.

The implication is that we might predict that autism would be relatively common in cases where the rate of maturation and the timing of maturation combine to engender brains, mostly male brains, which are maturing slowly with little variation is hemispheric size.

Regarding female infants and children with high estrogen encouraging pruning still drifting in an autistic direction, click here.  That is a little more complicated.

Right now, I’m wondering if breast milk vs. infant formula might be an influence on this process.  If a mother’s body is able to modify her embryo’s maturation rate and timing based upon the various environmental influences that impact testosterone and estrogen levels, then does a mother’s milk also adjust to environmental influences in ways that her child’s ontogenetic timing is modified?

Does what a new mother eats, for instance, a high-fat diet, influence her breast milk to increase the estrogen levels in her sons and daughters?  Could a high-fat diet increase the chance of an autistic child?

I’ve heard that soy products, soy milk for example, can result in developmental delay in small children. A recent study suggested that wealthier families had higher percentages of autism. Soy milk is relatively expensive. Is there a connection?

High-fat diets increase testosterone and estrogen levels.

How much influence does what we eat have upon our children?

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/18/autism-diet-and-sexual-hormones/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/15/what-darwin-never-knew/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/15/what-darwin-never-knew/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:59:06 +0000 Clay http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1350 Here’s a link to an excellent PBS Nova show I saw the other night.  It’s nearly 2 hours long, 1 hr 51 min, but I hope those who are interested will find time today or over the long weekend to watch it.  It’s really fascinating, especially if one keeps in mind that autism is a genetic variation, a mutation, and no, I’m not talking about any “Aspie Supremacy” here.  No one should be under the delusion that aspies are in any way “superior”, or that someday everyone will be autistic or Aspies.  That simply isn’t possible, no more than that everyone will become blonde, or blue-eyed, or left-handed.

The variation is more like if you put a few drops of blue food dye into a completely still backyard swimming pool.  For awhile, you’d be able to see it, mostly hanging together but slowly becoming diffused with the surrounding water.  Eventually, it would seem to disappear, but in fact, it would have a slight effect on the entire pool.  It could be that in a hundred (or a thousand) generations, no one will appear to be autistic, or “aspie”, but the entire population would be different in some way than how they are now.

I have no pretensions of being “scientific”, and no credentials whatsoever, but I have an intense interest in the subject of evolution.  I devour the stuff. I will state that I believe that human evolution is still occurring, and maybe at an ever-increasing rate.  If anyone believes that the present state of mankind is the pinnacle of possible human intellect and achievement, I suggest they take another look around.  Some species don’t seem to have the capacity to evolve, as I understand that the lobster and some sharks have remained essentially the same for like, 100 million years.  It could be that they just didn’t have the motivation to evolve, as their environment has remained unchanged.

I saw another documentary show last night, on the History channel, “How The Earth Was Made”.  It showed how they took deep ocean drillings and determined that the Sahara Desert first developed 3 million years ago, because the wind-driven sand that blew into the Atlantic first appeared at that depth.  Then they showed how, because of the wobble of the Earth, there were 20 thousand year cycles of wet and dry in Northern Africa.  They found fresh-water shells and whale bones, remnants of ancient human habitation in the desert, and determined that the end of the last wet period was only 5,500 years ago.  When the huge lakes and grasslands dried up, the inhabitants migrated to the east, where they found a generous river – and Egyptian Civilization was born!

Man is a highly adaptive creature, and our environment is constantly changing.  We even change it ourselves.  It could be that a major impetus for change is just around the corner.  I expect to see it.

If anyone wants to argue anything, please, at least watch the show in the link first.

Gotta give a link here to an excellent blog post, But you LOOK “normal!!”

What Darwin Never Knew first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

On page 575 of the May 1 issue of Science there is an article, “Africans’ Deep Genetic roots Reveal Their Evolutionary Story.” Examining the blood of 3,194 Africans from 113 populations, researchers looked for patterns in inheritance. “In many cases, the team found that ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences reflected real genetic differences…” For example, the three hunter gatherer click language cultures (Sandawe, Hadza and Khoisan) were all genetically connected.

They ran comparisons to 98 African Americans. “…71% of their DNA from ancestors who came from all over western Africa, 8% from other parts of Africa, and 13% from Europeans.”

A premise of my work is that there are several causes of autism that are related to changes in a mother’s sexual hormone levels as this relates to changes in testosterone and estrogen levels over the course of our recent (3,000 generations) evolution. We’ve transformed from a matrifocal, matrilineal/matrilocal aboriginal hunter gatherer, high-testosterone/high-estrogen female, low-testosterone/low-estrogen male to the reverse, a high-testosterone/high-estrogen male, low-testosterone/low-estrogen female. Various environmental and social effects propel our children backward hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generations. When sent too far back, their world becomes again one characterized by primary process (one time, one place, no negatives) that in modern times manifests as autism because there are no longer the ancient aboriginal social conventions that serve to bind individuals together within a group. This might be constant rhythm, constant touch, low-fat diets, nonstop dance, gestural language and several alloparents providing an enhanced ability to intuit theory of mind.

In Darwin’s 1859 On The Origin of Species, he described the result of mating two lineages of pigeons separated by 2,000 years of separate breeding. In Europe and China the birds were bred for different traits, and the two populations showed few of the features they displayed when last aligned. When the birds were mated by Darwin’s contemporaries, Darwin observed a proliferation of features in the hybrids that looked like the 2,000-year-old progenitor, the roc pigeon. There had been a slip backward of hundreds of generations to an ancestor last held in common by the parents.

Breeders of horses, dogs and other domestic species find that with careful interbreeding of disparate lineages, hybrid vigor can be encouraged by the carrying forward of useful characteristics of common ancestors into the present day.

Consider the following. Humans mating with other humans separated by two thousand generations or more since last connected are encouraging the emergence of features in their children that were extremely useful back when spoken language was brand new, or perhaps still mostly gesture. I would estimate that the children of these marriages would be left-handed a far higher percentage of the time, right-handedness hypothetically emerging with spoken language and hemispheric differentiation.

Some individuals would have difficulty adjusting to contemporary child rearing practices, tending to withdraw and to be lost in primary process. Hybrids may not easily integrate into a domestic context. Other individuals offer an astonishing array of useful features that seem to seamlessly align themselves with us moderns. There are those that are a combination of the two.

We are more than our genetics. What our parents provided is but part of the package. Also there is what we learned while in the womb, epigenetic understandings. Then there are the decisions we made while growing older. Genetics, environment and personal decisions combine to make us what we are and what we become. Nevertheless, how our parents’ contributions combine have a powerful effect upon what comes after.

Barack Obama is a hybrid child, a left-hander, a charmer and a deft performer. How much of Obama’s skill set comes from characteristics vital to our ancient forebears? In a matrifocal society, these are features that are deeply respected and particularly useful in procreation. Why are some children provided a set of skills that fit perfectly for our times while others have so much difficulty adjusting?

I don’t know. But it does seem reasonable to me that we explore the conditions that might feel most familiar to those emerging among us now and revealing features characteristic of long ago. A place to begin looking is where our matrifocal, aboriginal peoples are still alive today. Some of those people are still speaking in click languages, on the continent where we were born.

Perhaps the oldest peoples of the world can offer us insight into contemporary conditions and diseases that we are wrestling to understand.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/09/hybrid-vigor/feed/ 1 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/03/corpus-callosums-autism-aboriginals/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/03/corpus-callosums-autism-aboriginals/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:12:44 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1284

“I have found the midsagittal area of the corpus callosum to be larger in mixed and left handers, referred to as non-consistent-right-handers (nonCRH), than among CRH subjects (Witelson, 1985).  Hand preference is a rough index of the pattern of brain organization.  Left handers (by various definitions) have a higher prevalence of atypical right-hemisphere representation of speech and language functions than do right handers and, in general, show a greater degree of bihemispheric representation of verbal and spatial skills (for review, see Bryden, 1988).”  (Witelson, S. F. (1991) Neural sexual mosaicism:  Sexual differentiation of the human temporo-parietal region for functional asymmetry.  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16: 139)

There seems to me to be tantalizing answers to riddles in human evolution in the various papers discussing corpus callosum structure in different kinds of human beings.  There are papers that support the conclusion that larger corpus callosums, or corpus callosums with larger sections, appear in left-handed people, women, those with two cerebral hemispheres that are the same size, musicians, the autistic and those that stutter.

“Theoretical speculation in humans (S. F Witelson,  Psychoneuroendocrinology 16 (1991) 131-153) and empirical findings in animals (R. H. Fitch, P. E. Cowell, L. M. Schrott, V. H. Denenberg, Int. J. Dev. Neurosci. 9 (1991) 35-38) suggest that testosterone (T) may play a significant role in the development of the corpus callosum (CC).  However, there are currently no empirical studies directly relating T concentrations to callosal morphology in humans.  The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between free T concentrations as determined by radioimmunoassay, and the mid-sagittal area of the corpus callosum, as determined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).  Subjects were 68 young adult (20-35 years), neurologically normal, right-handed males.  All subjects underwent MRI and provided two samples of saliva for radioimmunoassay of T and cortisol.  Anatomical regions of interest included total brain volume, left and right hemisphere volume and regional areas of the CC.  CC regions were defined using two different measurement techniques, each dividing the CC into six sub-sections.  Anatomical measurements were performed blind with respect to the hormone levels of subjects.  A significant positive correlation between T concentration and cross-sectional area of the posterior body of the CC was found.  This finding was consistent across the two measurement techniques and was not attributable to individual differences in total brain volume.  All correlations between cortisol and CC sub-regions were non-significant.  The results of this study are consistent with the notion that T, at an earlier stage in development, may play a significant role in modulating cortical/callosal architecture in humans.”  (Moffat, S. D, Hampson, E., Wickett, J. C., Vernon, P. A., Lee, D. H. (1997) Testosterone is correlated with regional morphology of the human corpus callosum.  Brain Res 767 (2):297)

I would be curious to know whether there is a difference in corpus callosum size between modern humans and matrifocal aboriginals, if musicians and artists have larger corpus callosums and if there is a general trend in growing corpus callosum size that would correlate with matrifocal trends in contemporary society.

“The size of the midsagittal area of the human corpus callosum obtained from postmortem measurement varied with tested hand preference.  The corpus callosum, the main fiber tract connecting the two cerebral hemispheres, was larger by about 0.75 square centimeters, or 11 percent, in left-handed and ambidextrous people than in those with consistent right-hand preference.  The difference was present in both the anterior and posterior halves, but not in the region of the splenium itself.  This callosal morphology, which varied with hand preference, may also be related to individual differences in the pattern of hemispheric functional specialization.  The greater bihemispheric representation of cognitive functions in left- and mixed-handers may be associated with greater anatomical connection between the hemispheres.  The naturally occurring regressive events in neurogenesis, such as neuronal cell death and axonal elimination, may be factors in the individual differences in brain morphology and in functional lateralization.  Specifically, right-handers may be those with more extensive early elimination of neural components.”  (Witelson, S.F. (1985) The brain connection:  the corpus callosum is larger in left-handers.  Science 229: p. 665)

I have a vague memory of a paper that suggested that after sampling several groups of children immersed in music, researchers found that those children playing and composing the most exhibited thicker corpus callosums.  It was implied that this brain structure could grow thicker through lives lived in specific ways.  I’m not sure I remember that right; it seems such a radical conclusion.  This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin notes studies concluding that musicians have larger corpus callosums (Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum#cite_note-Levitin-5).

“Mixed-handers showed significantly larger callosal areas for all measures except for posterior fifth…” (Witelson, S. F. (1985)  The brain connection:  the corpus callosum is larger in left-handers.  Science 229: p. 666)

Regarding autism, I’ve hypothesized that the autistic brain is an ancient brain primed for aesthetic manipulation/appreciation with a larger brain size and larger hemispheric bridge having evolved as a sexually selected device for wowing potential mates.  This is closely related to the Geoffrey Miller thesis, see The Mating Mind.  Lately I’ve been playing with the idea that in addition to a mother’s testosterone levels informing the maturation rates of her children, her estrogen levels in combination with her children’s estrogen levels may be informing the timing of testosterone surges that prune right hemispheric growth in infants and small children.  Not unlike how fat levels in a preteen girl can influence the timing of pubertal onset, perhaps similar factors are affecting the timing of infant cerebral lateralization.  I ask myself what might be influencing the size of corpus callosum development.  Assuming it is a combination of degrees of cerebral lateralization (with left and right hemispheres differing in size) and corpus callosum size that together are influenced by changes in maturation rates and timing, then what exactly are the levers of change that are responsible for their moderated forms?  How might the rate and timing of testosterone and estrogen be involved?

I have a related question.  Let’s assume an autistic brain is a healthy brain, a brain anachronistically located in modern times with perhaps inappropriate environmental conditions making it difficult to operate as it naturally would.  Would modulating the environment to nudge the autistic brain to acquire the features of the modern asymmetrical modern brain with a smaller corpus callosum be an appropriate intervention, if it worked?  This might be, for example, an intervention that lowers a mother’s testosterone levels while increasing the male infant’s estrogen levels, hypothetically accelerating his maturation rate while encouraging the beginning of synapse pruning.

Personally, this idea gives me the creeps.  We need to find out what the autistic brain demands and provide the appropriate environment.

Still, is the size of the corpus callosum influenced by estrogen levels?  Is the timing of its growth triggered by body fat or estrogen?

Does music or rhythm influence corpus callosum size, and if so, might music and rhythm prove integral to the autistic brain?

One more thing.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in Mothers and Others has hypothesized the current hunter gatherer societies exhibit several features that together heavily encourage theory of mind. She also suggests that without several of these features, particularly a mother having several female allies that are close intimates of her children, humans would never have evolved. Consider that current autistics require the kind of attentions we received while we evolved, attentions still utilized in matrilineal/matrifocal hunter gather societies today.

Music and rhythm are integral and ubiquitous in these hunter gatherer societies.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/02/03/corpus-callosums-autism-aboriginals/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/01/27/becoming-human/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/01/27/becoming-human/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:24:57 +0000 Clay http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1238

The other day, on “Cat in a Dog’s World“, Sarah takes to task the originator of “The Neanderthal Theory”, Leif Ekblad.  His theory is the result of his desire to justify his ideas of Aspie Supremacy, and not based on any sort of fact.  I commented there, and made reference to a PBS show I had seen recently.  Please watch it, if you are at all interested in the subject of evolution, because it encompasses all that we know on the subject, and that’s quite a lot.  There are also links to Parts 1 and 2.
It’s really very informative, it tells about how half a million years ago, a creature called Homo Erectus began to leave Africa, slowly spreading across Asia as far as Indonesia, and also going up into Europe, becoming Homo Heidelbergensis.  This breed developed into Neanderthal man, while those who remained in Africa evolved into Homo Sapiens.  About 60 thousand years ago, some of these too began to leave Africa, and for quite a while, they co-habitated Europe along with Neanderthal man.  They had many advantages, and began to push Neanderthal into marginal areas.  The last evidence of Neanderthals was on the island of Gibraltar, and that only 28 thousand years ago.  They had existed for about 400 thousand years.

Our scientists have the Neanderthal genome all mapped out, and are certain that there was no cross-breeding between the two.  And now I’m going to do a little reckless speculation.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if they could reconstruct the Neanderthal DNA, put it in a human egg, and create a test tube Neanderthal baby?  (I’m not saying it would be ethical, but it sure would be interesting.)  We could find out all that we want to know about them.  At some point, it may be possible to do.

And if it were possible to create such test tube babies, there’s another experiment that simply must take place.  I’d like to see the same experiment done with DNA taken from the skeleton of a 20 thousand year old Homo Sapiens.  What would that show?  Well, Homo Sapiens has been around for 200 thousand years, and for the first 190 thousand showed very little progress.  It was only in the last 10 thousand years that we developed any kind of civilization, and the bulk of that only in the last 3 or 4 thousand years.

What changed 10 thousand years ago?  The North American glaciers melted, releasing cold fresh waters into the Atlantic, changing the climate in Europe and the Near East, making agriculture possible.  The first remnants of civilization are in Jericho, where they say cultivation of wheat began.  Was it the change in diet, or the cultural change from hunter/gatherer to agriculture that made the difference?  The change in diet wouldn’t have been complete, I’m sure they still ate meat, as they couldn’t subsist on only wheat, but they ceased to be nomadic.  Still, I wonder, if they made a test tube baby from a 20 thousand year old skeleton, would they find any significant difference?

No, I’m not selling any theories, like “intelligent design” or even “divine intervention”, I’m just looking for a rational explanation of why Homo Sapiens went 190 thousand years without making much progress, and then suddenly progressed in leaps and bounds.  At what point in our evolution did we cease to be mere animals, and become “human”?  Was homo erectus human, or Neanderthal, or that early homo sapiens?  I don’t know, that’s why I’d like to see the results of that experiment.  Or maybe Nova will address it in a Part 4.

Comments are welcome, as always.

Becoming Human first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

A superb 25-year study in the UK by Marian Annett ending in the 1990s seemed to prove that in that part of the UK, left-handedness was not increasing over time. It’s been a difficult issue to parse out, what with left-handedness being repressed before WW II. When conventional wisdom declared that forcing children to switch hands would encourage stuttering, schools withdrew from demanding all children use the right hand. A result has been that though it looks like the number of left-handers has been increasing over the decades, it is obvious that institutions stopping the repression of left-handers has skewed the numbers.

A similar effect is seen in Asia. Society has strongly encouraged that the left hand not be used. The rates of left-handedness in many parts of Asia are 2% and lower. It’s difficult to determine the true handedness percentages.

The same effect comes into play with autism. Though it seems there have been dramatic rises in autism over the last twenty years, many believe we just have more refined evaluation protocols with more attention being placed upon those individuals exhibiting unconventional behaviors.

I make several predictions regarding handedness and autism, two issues that I believe go hand in hand.

It has been noted that there have been increases in autism in Silicone Valley. I would also look for higher percentages of left-handedness among that population. This population of highly skilled, abstract thinkers engaged in innovation suggests the presence of left-spectrum, low-testosterone male, high-testosterone female prototypes of matrifocal society. This would be an enclave of the future.

Among the Somali of Minnesota, where autism is increasing, I’d also estimate increased percentages of left-handers. Where light influences a mother’s testosterone levels though pineal gland misinterpretation of the seasons (the pineal gland still thinking light is following equatorial, daily 30% fluctuations, maintaining ongoing high or low thresholds for several months instead of several hours), more left-handed children will emerge. Also, more strongly right-handed children will be produced as the center of the balanced polymorphism (the seamless gradations from strong left-handers to strong right-handers) disappears. This will result in increased prostate cancer (high-testosterone males) in this population after the children become adults. Many additional maladies characterized by hormonal markers will also be higher in this population.

I have hypothesized that in Scandinavia, the population exhibits neotenous characteristics in both sexes as a result of prolonging ontogeny to allow adults to derive vitamins from dairy in combination with lightening the skin to absorb vitamin D. When both sexes exhibit neoteny, we are hypothesizing that the males have relatively high estrogen resulting in a determined male-aesthetic focus, where they choose females with features of the very young. We see in Scandinavia, unlike in neotenous, patrifocal Asia, a powerful matrifocal tendency exhibited by a society focused on partnership societal values. I predict higher percentages of left-handers in Scandinavia.

In matrifocal West Africa, one would expect to discover higher percentages of left-handers, and this is the case. One would also predict this to be the case in Polynesia based upon egalitarian social structures. There are indigenous American populations with egalitarian societies. Is there increased left-handedness in those populations or has there been too much sharing of genetics between contiguous matrilineal and patrilineal societies?

Consider that the direction that Scandinavia has gone is a trajectory being followed by other Western industrialized societies. Let me suggest that this is happening on several levels. The 1990s Swedish intervention to temporarily nationalize banks in exchange for equity is the action that the UK engaged in 2008, followed by the other EU nations, followed by the U.S. This reversed a U. S. direction taken two weeks before. Scandinavian nations exhibit an intuition for the healing power of the commons. These intuitions emerge from the biological imperatives of neotenous neurologies. The values of egalitarian, partnership society have their roots in high-testosterone women mating with low-testosterone, high-estrogen men.

Watch for increases in left-handedness in American, white, urban populations mirroring the pathway taken by the Scandinavians. Observe high-testosterone, low-estrogen women pairing off with low-testosterone, high-estrogen men. These would be slimmer peoples, like the Scandinavians, but not necessarily blond and blue eyed. These changes take more than a single generation.

Observe Jewish and Black Americans experiencing the same effects as the Somalis in Minnesota but not so extreme, revealing increased numbers of left-handedness as these two formerly nearly equatorial populations continue to experience hormonal polarization to the extremes of society’s balanced polymorphism. Again watch for the emergence of the Scandinavian hormonal prototype with slim couples, commanding women, cooperative men. Classic matrifocal pairings will also be in evidence, high-testosterone, high-estrogen women marrying low-testosterone, low-estrogen men. These women will often be lefties, but will be large, not tall.

Studies exploring these issues have not been consistent. With left-handedness only recently being relieved of sinister implications and autism evaluation procedures still not universal across the world, we’ve a ways to go before we’re comparing apples to apples. Still, these predictions are based on evolutionary biological principles manifesting in society today.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/21/an-increase-in-left-handers/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/14/neuropsychology-and-autism/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/14/neuropsychology-and-autism/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:43:17 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=918 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 the Orchestral Theory of Evolution.  This theory 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 such as autism.  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.

Eight) 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.  Dance may be central to an autistic.  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 Orchestral Theory of Evolution.

I am hypothesizing that autism has evolutionary origins made understandable by recent discoveries in neuropsychology.  Central to this understanding is the insight that humans evolved primarily do to sexual selection, not natural selection.  Click here for details.  Click here for citation sources.

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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.

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.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/07/ruminations/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/03/down-syndrome-riddle/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/03/down-syndrome-riddle/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:01:52 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=852

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 the heading of neoteny.  The concept of neoteny was coined by Kollmann in 1885 and refers to the retention of juvenile characters in the adult state, or to extention of fetal characteristics into childhood.” (Opitz, John M. & Gilbert-Barness, Enid F.  (1990) Reflections on the Pathogenesis of Down Syndrome.  American Journal of Medical Genetics 7: p. 44)

Most humans have 46 chromosomes.  Chimpanzees have 48.  A person with Down Syndrome has 47.  The obvious question is whether those with Down Syndrome are transitional and when in our evolutionary past did the transition occur?

There is a higher incidence of autistic and Down Syndrome children being siblings than would be normally estimated.

A far higher number of Down children are left-handed than is the norm.  My evolutionary theory posits we were all random-handed a hundred thousand years ago or so.

Older mothers are more likely to have a Down child.  According to this blog’s thesis, the increased levels of testosterone in an older mother make her more likely to birth a son or daughter from an evolutionary past.

Several studies suggest that Down Syndrome reveals atavisms, or features characteristic of evolutionary progenitors.

Not supporting these ruminations is the fact that those with Down Syndrome are short in stature with unique physiological features.  We have no ancestors of comparable stature or features in our archeological lineage.  The physical handicaps are often profound.  It’s hard to imagine a society of primitives with Down Syndrome characteristics surviving to procreate.

“Thus, with respect to (1) the fixation of a common pattern of major variability easily recognized in every race of humankind, (2) the invariable alteration of numerous morphometric traits and the abolition of family resemblance, (3) change in growth and of maturational characteristics with enhanced neoteny, (4) change in fertility, (5) appearance of a different behavioral phenotype, (6) change in chromosome number, and (7) changes in gene frequency —at least with respect to genes on chromosome 21 (Goodman, 1965; Rundle, 1973; Rundle and Sudell, 1973), we can only conclude that the occurrence of Down syndrome is akin to the process of speciation (albeit a sudden, rather than a gradual speciation).  With respect to the relationship between speciation and chromosome abnormalities it is important to note that the types of chromosome rearrangements ‘that occur as polymorphosisms or as fixed permanent heterozygotes invariably involve meta- or submetacentric chromosomes.  Those that distinguish species and serve to isolate those species involve telocentric or acrocentric chromosomes, which are self sterilizing.’  (John, 1981).”  (Opitz, John M. & Gilbert-Barness, Enid F.  (1990) Reflections on the Pathogenesis of Down Syndrome.  American Journal of Medical Genetics 7: p. 45)

As an extreme example of neoteny, Down individuals are exaggerations of how our evolution might have occurred, without evidence of a dramatically expanded brain.  It seems like Down Syndrome is some sort of alternative reality exhibition of how we could have evolved had our brains not grown at as fast a rate as they eventually achieved.  The clues suggesting that Down Syndrome has an evolutionary etiology are powerful.  Unlike autism, there is not a relatively clear hypothesis or picture of how exactly this occurred.  Still, Sarah Palin, an aggressive, high-testosterone woman who gave birth to her Down child after 40, fits the thesis’s profile of the mother of an autistic child from the past.

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/12/03/down-syndrome-riddle/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/11/30/predictions/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2009/11/30/predictions/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:03:30 +0000 Andrew Lehman http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=842

Writing these daily entries, I discover something new almost as often as I record something I’ve earlier discovered. A year ago this is what I collected connected to the hypotheses or predictions of this work.

1. Relative testosterone levels in males and females inform matrifocal vs. patrifocal societal structure. High T females choose low T males for their cooperative abilities, creating more egalitarian, matrifocal cultures. High T males choose low T females for their ability to be the complement to male authority, forming patrifocal cultures.

2. Autistic males, from families of left-handers, will have lower testosterone than the norm, and autistic females will have higher testosterone. In any study of autism, those with familial male maturation delay tendencies, families of left-handers, need to be evaluated separately from those possibly traumatized by an environmental effect.

3. Larger penis and testicle size will be associated with autistic, ambidextrous males and the familial left-handed.

4. Autistic males will exhibit more neotenous characteristics while autistic females should show less neoteny than contemporary populations.

5. If larger testicles and increased sperm production are associated with low-testosterone, promiscuous social-structure males, the two variables will be related in that higher-testosterone males will have smaller testicles or lower sperm production.

6. Left-handed males and autistics will produce more sperm.

7. A high percentage of artistic, narcissistic males and females with borderline personality disorder, particularly those from families with left-handers, will have more frequent incidence of autism in their family.

8. Narcissistic males will frequently mate with borderline personality females. The males will have lower testosterone, the females higher testosterone than the average.

9. The children of parents of widely different ethnicities, separated by tens of thousands of years of no interbreeding, should reveal characteristics of their last common progenitor and increased incidence of autism.

10. Among contemporary cultures, patrifocal societies will exhibit increased sexual dimorphism compared to matrifocal cultures.

11. Over the last six thousand years, female brain size will decrease at a smaller rate than male brain size, or even increase over the same period because the female is being selected for an exhibition of neotenous characteristics.

12. Neoteny has dental correlations, with smaller teeth being characteristic of the neotenous smaller jaw. Watching teeth grow smaller over millions of years, might researchers find that they have grown larger in males the last few tens of thousands of years as patrifocal social structure has taken hold?

13. Because a mother’s testosterone level rises with her age and because she has children across the whole arc of her reproductive years, then we might observe a display of personality and physiological features in her children that would roughly reproduce human evolution over a span of eons. An older mother should more frequently have children with maturational delay, including autism.

14. Obese mothers (overweight women exhibit increased testosterone levels), particularly those that are older, should show high incidence of autism in their children.

15. The teeth of males from older mothers should be smaller than the teeth of males of first-born, young mothers. It should be reversed for females.

16. If the low testosterone (T) males and high T females are late born, and high T males and low T females are the oldest children in a family or the first born, then first-borns will mate with first-borns and late-borns will mate with late-borns a higher percentage of the time than would normally occur.

17. In a large family, the male’s teeth will erupt later and later, the females earlier and earlier.

18. Hypothesizing that social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals would emerge, it would be with the youngest sons and daughters. One would also expect a higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children.

19. Conditions that display maturational delay, such as autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will appear in males with longer limbs and smaller teeth than in others in their family of origin.

20. Equatorial peoples transplanted to northern climates will display higher percentages of maturational-delayed male children, and maturational-accelerated females, including autistics, with the births congregating in certain seasons.

21. If mother’s allergies influence testosterone levels, for example, hay fever causing testosterone increases, then allergies might be a factor in the cause of autism in her children. Birthdays of these autistics should cluster in certain months.

22. Female infanticide is patrifocal culture’s method for keeping only high T males in the procreation pool. In societies engaging in female infanticide, there are far fewer females than males to mate. The males considered least desirable as husbands by the fathers of the females to be married go mateless. Female infanticide is the co-option of female selection by patrifocal society to maintain a patrifocal society over time.

23. Puberty or progenesis in humans when dropped to a younger age by several years has neurological and cognitive repercussions. In addition to an increase in depression and bi-polar disorder, there is a general curtailment of the final stages of cognitive development.

24. Eating healthy (the caveman diet) brings puberty later and provides a longer time for the brain to grow. Putting autistic children on such a late-puberty-enhancing diet may enhance their ability to connect.

25. Periods of innovation will be preceded by periods of romance, by changes in the selection criteria by which females pick their mates or by a widening of the selection criteria for the ideal male. Shifts to increases in the variety of acceptable features in the procreation population will result in increases in cultural and technical variation. For example, if female infanticide is a tool used for patrifocal cultural stability, decreases in female infanticide over time within a culture will correlate with increases in societal and economic variation.

26. If rhythm and dance were the media driving human evolution through rituals of sexual selection, then the sound and feeling of nonstop rhythm may be necessary to encourage the development of an autistic child. Rhythmic environmental triggers may be essential to the healthy growth of maturational-delayed children. Comparing congenitally deaf left and right handers may reveal an unusually high number of autistics in the left handed group.

27. If neoteny is a powerful force influencing the transformation of society, then we might predict societal increases in transparency, diversity and horizontal communication as features of aboriginals and the very young are prolonged into the character of contemporary times.

28. Teleological interpretations of cultural evolution are often the observations of the dynamics of neoteny. By prolonging the features of the smallest bands into the largest societies–transparency, horizontal communication, equality–society is invested with specific features and a predictable direction.

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This scheme is part of a larger picture of how humans evolve. Changing maturation rates over generations send societies in one of two directions: matrifocal or patrifocal social structures. Low testosterone males mating with high testosterone females form the foundation of matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males pairing with low testosterone females make up patrifocal social structure. When mothers today exhibit matrifocal features, high testosterone, while exposed to environmental influences that elevate their testosterone further, male children with delay tendencies may shift into extreme delay.

This theory predicts that females with autism will not exhibit maturational delay, but maturational acceleration accompanied by elevated testosterone. When a mother’s testosterone level elevates, she not only influences the maturation rates of her children, she sends them on a journey into the past. Maturation rates unfold on two scales, on the scale of the individual unfolding in a lifetime–personal ontogeny–and on the scale of how our species has evolved over the last few thousand generations. We have recently (25,000 years ago to the last couple hundred years) evolved out of matrifocal social structure to patrifocal social structure. We reverse the process by reversing our maturation rates, reproducing that path we took to arrive in the present. Elevating mother’s testosterone, we instill ancient ontogenetic pathways, propelling our children back in time to when language was still new. For males, backwards is lowered testosterone and maturational delay. For females, backwards is raised testosterone and maturational acceleration.

Light influences testosterone levels via the pineal gland, which regulates testosterone production. Testosterone fluctuations of 30% a day can be observed as thresholds follow diurnal–day & night–cycles, influenced by the availability of sunlight. What happens when a people are shifted away from consistent, daily 30% fluctuations into northern climates where the light in winter is almost nonexistent, in summer almost always there?

Jews and Blacks both display anomalous distributions of testosterone in males. Both Black and Jewish males (studies were conducted with only males) showed either very high or very low testosterone levels. Both these cultures were transplanted from equatorial regions to climates with light-fluctuating seasons.

One would predict that both these ethnicities would exhibit a higher percentage of conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as autism.

Somalis immigrating to Minnesota are discovering radical rates of autism among their children. This theory predicts that these autistic children’s birthdays should cluster in certain times of the year. If mother’s light-influenced testosterone rates are particularly high at six weeks before birth, intervention to lower rates (for example, modifying light exposure) would be prudent.

There is also the possibility that the father’s testosterone levels influence the child’s rates of maturation. There are no studies to support this possibility other than studies concluding that older parents are more likely to give birth to autistic children. (Women experience high testosterone with age, males lower testosterone.) It could be estimated at what seasons a fathers testosterone rates are lowest at conception, and compare that to when mother’s testosterone is highest six weeks before birth and look for the impacts of overlap. It may be that both mother and father are having an effect.

There are also possibilities that autumn September through October allergy seasons are influencing testosterone levels impacting embryo’s maturation rates.

Light and testosterone are related. Many things in our environment influence testosterone levels. Understanding autism involves recognizing how testosterone is influenced and realizing how this influence connects to how we evolved.

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Humans may have evolved according to a dynamic where females picked males for their ability to evoke an experience of feeling part of something larger than the self, part of a matrifocal, dance-driven tribal culture where a craving for this aesthetic drove the exponential increase in our brain size. Females picking neotenic or cooperative males choose maturational delayed males whose brains grow bigger over generations as infant features (such as fast growing brains) prolong into the characteristics of adults. Female brains capable of interpreting the nuanced exhibitions of males on aesthetic overdrive also experience selection for big brains. This process was runaway sexual selection in a matrifocal social structure.

The not particularly complementary opposite is patrifocal social structure evolution, which was Freud’s and Darwin’s world. Combative males partner with cooperative females. It has been estimated that this trend may have started as early as our departure from Africa, picked up speed about 25,000 years ago when the fossil record shows brains starting to decrease in size, accelerating 6,500 years ago with the advent of the Indo-Europeans (and brains grew even smaller) and peaking over the last 300 years. In the 20th century, mate choice began shifting back to the female, with a woman choosing a mate according to her personal criteria for what she seeks in a mate.

Developmental models, derived from Freud, have mostly been stripped of their evolutionary origins. The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber integrates Freud’s developmental model with a more contemporary, recapitulationist frame, but a frame that still does not take into consideration the influence of social structure and sexual selection on human evolution. I am proposing that the examination of a runaway matrifocal sexual selection model for human evolution correlating with individual developmental stages reveals personality “disorders” representing stages in our recent (last ~100,000 years) evolution.

In other words, in the way that autism is an evolutionary condition, not a neurological disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorders, obsessive compulsion tendencies, etc., may have far less to do with mental diseases demanding intervention than they may represent evolutionary stages or conditions demanding context re-orientation.

I’m re-orienting psychodynamic theory to accommodate evolutionary theory. Understanding ourselves outside the context of our evolution is a little like conducting psychotherapy without exploring a person’s personal past. Our evolutionary origins are integral to understanding our personal journeys. As we walk a person back through childhood to re-engage the resources left behind, we must also be cognizant of the resources natural to their social structure inclinations. Bridging a client to health involves knowledge of what health looks like for that particular person. A domineering, commanding female may fit all the criteria for matrifocal matriarch. Interpreting her behavior as borderline personality disorder may make less sense than seeking a context where her behavior complements her experience. It might be easier for a narcissistic male to achieve a less self-centered, more compassionate perspective if his experience is contextualized by an understanding of his evolutionary origins and an understanding that, for him, the narcissism is natural, not a defect.

Note that personal trauma compelling the freezing of assets in developmental states also manifests features of the correlated evolutionary stages in the behavior of adults. The thawing of the assets may release attachment to those evolutionary stages. In other words, the manifestations of evolutionary conditions may be contingent upon contemporary influences. That being the case, psychotherapeutic intervention might result in a radical shift equivalent to a 50,000-year jump in evolution–psychotherapy as time machine.

We need diagnostics able to parse out when a person is experiencing mostly an evolutionary condition in a society uncomplimentary to his or her neurology vs. a person suffering from an inability to ontologically progress because of threats in childhood. There are those that suffer both.

The diagnostics might include a complete hormonal work-up. High testosterone females and low testosterone males comprise the matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males partnering with low testosterone females fit the patrifocal paradigm. There are profound brain differences between these two groups that are only now beginning to be understood. Physiologies differ.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparison of dream theme differences between the two social structures, personality “disorders” and conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism. That’s actually what got me started writing this essay. I want to know how people naturally adhere with one of the two social structures when they dream. How do the dreams differ? Dreams might be able to tell us where we are living in the larger arc of our evolution.

To understand Freud is to understand that he believed that understanding our evolution is integral to understanding personality and personality disorder intervention. Shifting from a patrifocal focus to a perspective that embraces both social structure orientations provides a deeper understanding of our origins. From this vantage point, we might discover that many human mental maladies may be less about defect, but about how to discover where we live in time.

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One of the patterns that a commitment to natural selection masks is that evolution can happen extremely quickly, in a single lifetime. Darwin was aware of single-generational change and struggled for an explanatory principle. He called his theory pangenesis. According to pangenesis, the body manufactures gemmules that can carry information informing the body of environmental change, which the body responds to, modifying progeny in response.

We call them hormones.

We live in a post-Mendelian age. When a cloned sheep emerges from the mother with fur exhibiting different patterns from her other self, we might take notice. This effect is not what was predicted. With the complete genome mapped and realizing that things aren’t exactly as easy as Mendel suggested, we might consider alternative paradigms.

A mother with high testosterone produces males with low testosterone and females with high testosterone. The child’s maturation speed is determined six weeks before birth based on the mother’s testosterone level. Imagine that the fetus reaches that point, six weeks before birth, and the individual’s lifelong maturation rate is set. Now imagine that it is not only the speed that the individual will mature in his or her own life that is calculated, but his or her position in evolutionary time. What is determined by the mother’s testosterone level is the child’s position in the evolutionary arc of our species over the last several tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years.

This trend means, as Frederick Engels and several nineteenth century proto-anthropologists suggested, a return to matriarchal social structures: low testosterone males and high testosterone females.

Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Stages of our ontogeny inform and reproduce the final stages of our social structure evolution.

Autism manifests that recent stage in our unfolding where split-brain modern consciousness emerges and language use bridges over from gesture to speech. The females were often the leaders of these bands. They wielded authority and were first to be adept with words. Their brains made the transition first from two lobes of the same size with a wide corpus callosum to brains with a smaller right lobe with less robust cerebral connective tissues. Split brains made them better leaders. They could toy with time. Males continued to be selected for their cooperative, artistic, neotenic tendencies to be dependent upon and comply with the directions of the band.

With the story we are telling, we’d expect our male and female autistics, our travelers to the past, to evidence complementary opposite features.

I would predict that autistic males (those from families of left-handers, families evidencing maturational delay, not the autism born of trauma) will evidence neotenous characteristics such as smaller jaws, big heads and a post-puberty lanky build (unless provided diets that would hasten the onset of puberty). The literature already suggests that autistic males have larger brains with two lobes the same size. The males, of course, should have lower testosterone relative to the autistic female and relative to the standard, nonautistic right-handed male.

The autistic female is relatively rare compared to the autistic male, because you have to go further back in evolutionary time to find females having difficulty with words, with brains not yet split. I would predict that the autistic female would show little neoteny as compared to a nonautistic female. The autistic female should evidence a larger jaw, stockier build and a more domineering disposition when compared to her contemporary sisters. She should reveal higher testosterone levels relative to the standard, right-handed nonautistic female.

This model predicts complementary opposite characteristics of male and female autistics that mirror the matriarchal social structure that is their society of origin. When we understand that social evolution, biological evolution and ontological transformation are all about different time scales of the identical process, we can better interpret what we are observing in the now.

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

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

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

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

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

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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here.