PREFACE

 Where the material in this book came from is a very long story. It spans at least two generations and took more than half a century to finally compose. Briefly though, Robert B. Hamilton was my father. He passed away in 1973, leaving behind hundreds of pages of handwritten notes describing his vision that genetic variation and natural selection both had to be consequences of Darwinian/Malthusian competition. And so this work proposes a fundamental theorem of evolution, which is that genetic variation and Darwinian selection are simultaneous and have the same cause: the struggle for existence, competition. Chapter 1 has the main elements of this general theory.

•    Variation and rapid evolution arise in the setting of continuing competition.

It all began with his own troubled family where generational strife reached a high pitch in his youth during the 1920's-1930's. What he experienced is mild compared to what is common in many places now.  In those places where the family is now most broken there is the best evidence of his theory. The most extreme examples are of young people who fail to come to proper maturity, or overcome egoistic self-preoccupation very late. What happened to Robert B. Hamilton in the personal evolution of his own sexuality and personality as a consequence of generational strife, is covered in Chapter 2,  entitled "Variation in the First Person.”

  •   The inner stress, the chemico-physiological expression of the antagonism between reproduction as a reflection of metabolism and reproduction in crisis as the agency of death, is of the nature of a cause for altering the genetic constitution.

  •    The crisis that causes, underlies evolutionary change must be a crisis in the field of reproduction.

 •   In any case it is the hardships of one generation which produce the contradictions in the next whose resolution is the flowering of ideal developments.

 •   The process of gestation is the instrumentality by which the events external to the parent can exert themselves upon the development of the young. In the end the formative role of the parent generation is the very causality of evolution itself.

Without actually entering this new evolutionary realm, Sigmund Freud, Electra and King Oedipus made their way right up to its front door. Chapter 3, called Oedipus and Electra, is a discussion about a deep connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and competition between the generations as the driving force of evolution. I well remember those idyllic days of my youth that I thought would never end when I would laugh as my father used to joke with other adults about Freud’s anal fixations, hidden phallic symbols, penis envy theory and the rest. Listening in silence for countless hours from early grade school through high school to him converse with adults and myself about everything under the sun was my most important primary education about many things. Before he began writing about evolution in 1953 at age-39, I do not know how many years he may have been thinking over the proposition that darwinian competition might cause genetic variation as well as natural selection. I forgot to ask. We did talk around this subject once, when he offered the interesting insight that what gave hime the confidence or impetus to write about evolution was something he once thought of and composed concerning, of all things, economics. Although what this was he would not say and no notes of this nature ever passed before my eyes.

Bold-faced type and the bullet point symbol • set apart for the reader all verbatim quotes from my father's posthumous notes. Original copies of his notes are deposited in the U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, with copyright dates 1989 and 1994.

While corroborating my father’s theory, induced mutations in bacteria and multiregional human evolution, which are the main subjects of Chapter 1, actually had nothing at all to do with the origin of these theories. This work had in fact an autobiographical origin. Self-analysis from an evolutionary perspective, preceding by decades rigorous experimental verification only recently achieved, is what happened. It may be possible to categorize his diary-like writing as a personal confrontation with what evolutionists would call hypermorphosis, a form of heterochrony characterized by extended or delayed maturity. I believe his theories are a glimpse of the future of both biotechnology and sexual morality, rolled into an impossibly unlikely personal narrative.

I have combined my father's ideas with published experimental results which have outstanding implications for the future of the theory of evolution. By the way, my doctorate (1987) is in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering from Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.

For some paleontologists the human fossil record is a story about  modern humans evolving in several places at once from nearly identical local or regional ancestors. This is the Multiregional Theory of human evolution. Milford Wolpoff, Alan Thorne,1 Rachel Caspari, and Wu Xinzhi, are a few of its leading modern advocates. It had to be wrestled away from the iron grip of a demonic past. It is not the dominant theory of human evolution. The African Eve theory is more consistent with conventional genetics and the random mutation mode of variation. This is currently the more popular account of the origin of man. As if the ancient African fossil named Lucy (also called Mitochondrial Eve or African Eve) bequeathed to all people her own personal mitochondrial genes. This scenario sounds like it was plagiarized from the bible, not wrestled from anything. The simultaneous evolution of man in different places, even though the various races are in genetic contact throughout, requires rates of mutation and bursts of evolution far beyond what classical genetics would allow if strictly random mutations are the rule in nature. Variation on a big scale makes it possible that all modern people could be direct descendants of local varieties of Neanderthal types. The parallel evolution  of H. erectus is conceivable and could account for the discovery in 2004 of a so-called fossil hobbit Homo floriensis in a cave on a remote Indonesian island.2 These hominids used fire, hunted large animals, lived in caves, had skeletons like their larger, more familiar cousins known to have once inhabited many places in the Old World. These little people actually survived well into modern times (until 12,000 years ago by one estimate), just as the local legends of indigenous people had always maintained. But multiregional does not mean polyphletic. We are not going backwards in time here. 

If throughout Europe, Africa and Asia H. erectus had slowly become a succession of creatures increasingly resembling modern H. sapiens, why then on a remote  South Pacific island are there these dwarf H. erectus-like fossils and not survivors into modern times of Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Java Man or some other ancestor more recent than a species that all agree left Africa between 1.9 to 1.8 million years ago? Was the competition on this island relatively mild until approximately the most recent times, unlike what the situation of competition was elsewhere? Did the ices ages elude this island for the most part? And who says that characteristics of extinct relatives of man do not now exist in the form of the repeatedly cited 50 to 70 % of individuals who do not perfectly reflect the archetypal patterns or supposedly constant forms depicted in medical textbook diagrams of human skeleton, muscle, cardiovascular system, nervous system, etc.?

The theory of evolution has come a very long way from from a stubborn  indoctrination with the immutability of species, to Lamark's ideas about a direct connection between heredity and the environment, to random mutations, all the way to expressions of 20th century political objectives which made species much too plastic. A case can even be made that random mutations amount to a different way to describe or believe in the immutability of species, and many have made that observation. The implications have been around for a long time that non-secular ideas can creep into evolutionary theory if mutations are random. Now, at the beginning of a new millennium, with secret political and unmentionable religious agendas finally stripped away, the data itself about the variation of species is finally left to stand on its own merit. From this  shall rise a new account of the mechanism of the mutability of species. Even if encrusted prejudices and archaic opinions tend to still dominate the discussions, the data in journals and books speaks for itself and is as radically new as the new theory to which it will certainly give rise, as it is in the process of doing right now. The theory of evolution never needed to reconcile incompatible titans the like of relativity and quantum mechanics. Religion and evolution, the topic of Chapter 5, turn out to be the same thing.

The relentless work of molecular biologists, the leaders of this new view of evolution where selection and variation are seen as a single entity, will soon expand the field of interpreted evolutionary experience far beyond the world of microorganisms. Multiregional human evolution similarly strikes a formidable blow to the Mendel/Morgan school of thought. The domain of evolutionary experience will soon be acknowledged to be also in the right here and now. As the student sitting now in a classroom who prefers sex to learning, in the theory of homosexuality, in the form of a general theoretical account of times of incompatibility of the sexes, as the ultimate determiner of what we call sexual morality, in the unique adaptation of man through new ideas conceived (in the manner of a virgin birth, a universal theme in mythology) - all these will become provinces of this new theory of evolution. Morality and immorality, right and wrong, good and evil, altruism and the selfish principle, adaptation and its antithesis, are deterministic functions. For their stated position that everybody should be allowed to do anything as a constitutional right, the Libertarians fail to see the group or species as the basic atom of evolution.  A moral society cannot be willed, but social policy can engineer the like of Oedipus and Electra out of the culture of nations. As revealed by the characteristics of its citizens, every society has always been a theater of experimental evolution.

A twist of fate or change of destiny worthy of any irony in Greek drama or ancient parable places evolutionary theory in perfect harmony with most of what is in theology. The creation stories such as Genesis, which have been seen as conflicting with the theory of evolution for so long, are but chapters of a greater work about evolving humanity. The theory of evolution does not oppose religion. They are the same thing. As recorded in the biographies of their founders, religion and evolution have a unity of parallel elegance whose consequences are just beginning to be realized. Famous human variants are discussed in Chapter 5.

Religious doctrines have always had an essential advantage in linking morality with a benevolent creator. The linking of evolutionary thought with moral principles has only just begun. Only the bible and other religious texts have ever undertaken moral questions with any real vigor. However anachronistic in our times all this seems now it was in fact a very great insight. It is as though in some minds now evolution threatens religious texts, including the offering of a possible objective basis of morality itself. The remarkable thing is, this new theory evolution is not simply a mechanism for engineering evolution. It is linked to the deepest moral questions in the manner of a religion. It turns out that the mutability of species, while ruining the literal but not the transcendental basis of all religions on the one hand, on the other hand erects a new scaffolding to rebuild the same moral principles of all religions. The God fearing folks don't have to be worried about the theory of evolution. A secular outlook needs to unite evolution and morality as a single discussion. 

     Competitive variation must be a far deeper thing than any other instinct or function. It must be rooted in something as basic as the dual role of nucleotides in both heredity and energy (oxidative) metabolism.  It is necessary to suppose that in the earliest organization of living material there was a competitive kinetic and thermodynamic relation between oxidative potential and the genome for the same nucleotides. Many have realized that the redox reactions of life (using ATP, ADP, and related compounds for electron transfer) and the heredity of life (using DNA, RNA) have in common phosphorylated ribose nucleotides yet the significance of this outstanding fact has never been properly reconciled with evolutionary principles. A metabolic crisis of competition would  become a hereditary crisis and this must have been the basic setting for mutational changes by the substitution of new nucleotides for the previously needed types. This is all very speculative, of course. It explains the significance of the dual role of phosphorylated nucleotides in DNA and RNA as well as in many compounds used as redox agents in cellular metabolism, such as NAD, FAD, NADH, acetyl-coenzyme A, and many others. It also rationalizes the origin of competitive variation and gives in the complementarity of DNA/ATP in heredity and metabolism a definition of what it really means to be be a living organism on the planet Earth. A world with RNA instead of DNA as the chemical basis of heredity, as scientists suspect came earlier, does not violate the duality of function possessed by phosphorylated nucleotides. In fact the interposition of several types of RNA between DNA and protein transcription can be seen as a subcellular evolutionary stage of control of both proliferation and the permanence of variation. In speculating about why a majority of the eucaryotic genome consists of non-coding DNA (introns) in The Symbolic Species Terrance W. Deacon (WW. Norton, NY, 1997) writes that “It seems that by forcing the gene transcription and replication processes to sort through reams of superflous genetic information, the the ticking of the developmental clock is slowed, along with metabolism and cell-division rates.”

     In times of starvation for nucleotides either oxidative potential or heredity will be deprived of what is necessary. Competition for nucleotides must have very early developed into a complementary relation between the stability of the heredity and the success of metabolism. Altering the genome through the enforced utilization of unfamiliar nucleotides in order to acquire a new adaptation so that energy for life can be available again would be the key event defining life. In higher, somewhat disguised cultural forms far removed from simple metabolic starvation this inverse duality still controls evolution and variation. These amazing electron-rich oxidizing agents (phosphorylated nucleotides) preside over the domains of energy and heredity as the real secret of the living state. Redox potential (or the chemical potential) altering the fidelity of DNA replication is just the soma/germ plasm question again projected far back in time. Heredity and metabolism stand in perpetual opposition to each other, a relation disclosed in the unitary, competing biochemistry of ATP and DNA. In Earth’s early reducing environment dominated by an atmosphere of methane abiotic nucleotide synthesis would have been thermodynamically feasible compared to what is possible in the present oxidative atmosphere.

 Without suggesting a specific mechanism by which starvation and mutation could be chemically bonded the French mathematician René Thom in his famous 1972 work Structural Stability and Morphogenesis offered this opinion: “It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the metabolism has an effect, probably very weak, which in the long run can dominate the statistic of mutations, and the long-term effects explain the variational principle of minimum complexity and the increasing adaptation of biological processes...”

      A definite mechanism for translating the lack of adaptation of species into the search for suitable variation is not less fundamental than the translation of the genetic code into proteins. In the absence of any direct evidence of a hard-wired link between competition and heredity there is still a suggestion of what the chemical mechanism for this might entail. The phosphorylated nucleotides cyclic-AMP and adenyl cyclase are already established as key chemical messengers translating a host of environmental signals into appropriate genomic responses. And epigenetics is back, as one scientist has put it.  Non-geneticically encoded acquired epigenetic traits can be inherited through the germ line. This seems to be a transitional phase between softwired inheritance and full-blown genetic modification acquired and selected in conditions of what is often called stress. Chapters 1 and 4 have more about epigenetics and its main evolutionary implications.

•   In a general way, one can see that the fact that there is mortality, that the old are required to depart, means to make way for the young, the new. It is a systematic way to admit the new, to allow the new to flourish. So that, one must conclude, the possibility, the inevitability of newness has to exist in the succession of generations. So then the heredity is not given by God, but changes. The seed is now one thing, now another

•  The genetic constitution of the parent generation is past changing. The accommodation must be done by the second generation.

•     The process of natural selection has been modified by its own action, so that the process of natural selection in all of its ramifications produces the means to limit the operation of natural selection by limiting the competition which causes it, and by producing modification and restriction of fertility, and other agencies of selection than natural, to accomplish the adaptations.

 •   Organic evolution evolution is in fact a series of efforts to of protoplasm to overcome competition, both inter- and intra-specific.

 •   The reason for the fluctuation of populations is that the proliferative and the creative principles are in constant struggle.

•   The proliferative principle contains its own antithesis: competition.

It is this basic inner struggle which is the cause of evolution.

This formidable challenge to the textbook orthodoxy of evolutionary theory (the Mendel/Morgan school) has been reinforced by the discovery of selection-induced mutations in bacteria. Molecular biologists have proven in impressive and elegant detail that mutation numbers can exceed all prior expectations by orders of magnitude and that  genetic variation and natural selection were taking place simultaneously in stationary-phase laboratory cultures. In the 1980’s James Shapiro at the University of Chicago and John Cairns at Harvard University used the tools of molecular biology to verify this experimental result using the lac operon of E. coli as a model system.3 

There have always been claims of genetic change caused by the environment. It had never been proven so definitively before Shapiro and Cairns. Induced mutation studies of other microorganisms in their stationary phase of cultivation have subsequently deepened the pool of such controversial data and have intensified their implications. These are the two main bodies of data we have assembled in defense of the proposition that natural selection and variation are simultaneous. There is also a generous fund of allied, less well-known information pointing in this direction compiled in  Chapter 1.

The modern synthesis (random mutations and natural selection) cannot account for the widespread evolutionary phenomenon known as convergence, nor can it explain the reason for sex. Simon Conway Morris has compiled many examples of convergent evolution in his work Life’s Solution.4  Identical instinctive behavior, biochemistry,  and physiology have evolved independently extremely often in evolution, on different continents, in different orders, even between the plant and animal kingdoms there are some similar pigments in photoreception.  Millions of years before humans the humble attine ant discovered social organization based on fungal agriculture. Multiple fertilization was discovered at least twice, by Gnetales and flowering plants.  Saber-toothed mammals and marsupials evolved on different continents. Morris is also a philosopher about the wider implications of convergence and the inevitability of the direction evolution took with man as its culminating achievement as the consciousness of the cosmos. 

As a style of reasoning about competitive variation and not necessarily as anything proven a few examples can illustrate the potential of this theory:

1.  Amphibians must have appeared in this account of evolution when a contraction of the oceans brought the fishes into a state of inner competition. The availability of land plentiful with edible ferns, pteridophytes, bryophytes, club mosses and other such early vegetation would not have brought forth terrestrial tetrapods.  Lowered sea level would be one such suitable crisis of competition leading to the evolution of amphibians from fish.

2.  The “abominable mystery” of the angiosperms, all at once the dominant flora during the final stages of the Cretaceous breakup of the super continents Laurasia and Gondwandaland, was the backdrop for what botanists agree seems to be a mysterious polyphletic worldwide origin of the flowering plant kingdom. Competition from reduced available land at the same time new coastline was becoming available must have been the competitive impetus for flowering plant evolution. Genomic analysis and centuries of patient taxonomy concur that this group stands in sharp contrast to the apparent monophyletic genesis of their gymnosperm ancestors (pines, cycads, gnetales, and ginkgo). As contemporaneous solutions to new late Cretaceous niches on many newly isolated continents, the various dicot and monocot families must have originated independently from similar local gymnosperm ancestors. It is also interesting that at the family level only has this group remained historically stable taxonomically. Is this the reason so many angiosperm species of different families occupy such closely similar niches?

Plants cannot be mere statistical permutations of a handful of homeotic genes, such as ABC genes for flowers, and KNOX genes for leaves. (Homeotic genes regulate gene cascades that in turn make various body parts and tissues). When the mosaic of independent traits is altered the reproductive organization of plants is required to be simultaneously altered as fertility is made to match any new adaptation. Thus in botanical keys the flowers of herbs are different from those of trees and shrubs within a family.

With a few exceptions (such as absence of herbaceous species in a few of the most archaic dicot families) the species and genera of most angiosperm families have nearly identical growth habits and pollination mechanisms, occupy similar niches and habitats, have converged on the same adaptive solutions. The woody habit was first, herbs were secondary and derived. There are no herbaceous species in the archaic families Magnoliales, Annonales, Winterales, Trochodendrales,  are rare among Laurales. Angiosperm evolution was no bush. It  resembles more an ensemble of meandering, crisscrossing rivulets. At times in laminar flow, at others, very turbulent. The so-called Laurasian and Gondwandaland Complexes of flowering plants are no optical illusion. The most primitive angiosperms families (nyphaeids and some Magnolipsidia) and the most archaic monocots (liliopsids, or water lilies) are adapted primarily to wet habitat.  So much new shoreline must have also altered the chemistry of oceans. At the same time as the origin of the angiosperms diatoms became the primary producers of ocean biomasss. 5-9

Although subsequently rejected by many systematists, in 1959 George Gaylord Simpson pronounced mammals to be polyphyletic. On top of rapid bursts of evolutionary change and the absence of missing links between major phyla, in direct confrontation with random and rare mutational gradualism this paleontologist was carrying his consummate knowledge of the fossil record of evolution to its ultimate conclusion. The facts of paleontology collided with the theory of variation. To Simpson the fossil evidence showed not one but many separate origins for mammals. He also referred to the virtual inevitability of evolution of mammalian-type features from the reptilian-grade. The defining feature of fossil mammals, especially teeth, cranial and postcranial anatomy, including jaw articulation and ear morphology suggested multiple mammalian origins beginning with therapsid reptiles of the Upper Paleolithic and Lower Mesozoic.10

A similar suggestion in 1958 that the Arthropoda were actually a polyphyletic structural grade derived from Annelida met with greater subsequent acceptance.11

3.   The end of the Permian epoch witnessed the greatest mass extinction of all time, when 96% of all species are believed to have become extinct. Laurasia and Siberia-Kazakhstania had collided, and with the movement of China farther to the northwest the assemblage of the supercontinent Pangea was complete. By the Permian's end the world ocean Panthalassa was in place.  Loss of coastal, intertidal, and continental shelf, along with climate change must have played a key role in this  worldwide epoch of ecological upheaval and area-related competition.

4.   Much has been written about the Pleistocene extinctions of large herbivores and carnivores worldwide. Some leading authorities would have early humans responsible for mass extermination of species by overhunting. I prefer the notion that inadequate vegetation growth from the ice ages must have extinguished the herbivores first in the ecological crises mankind walked out of.

5.     • And where there is difficulty of separating organisms into species we are witnessing forms which are indeed in the process of forming a new species, which will disappear when the new species is established in its adaptation and ecology.

Is this why there are so many beetles (400, 000 species, 1/5 of all life by some estimates)?

No amount of data is ever going to change the impertinent distressing fact that this book had an autobiographical origin. It is fundamentally a tract about man, mostly about one man.  Not much could be less likely. Every chapter has excerpts from Robert B. Hamilton’s journals. His biography is the subject of Chapter 2. This style of writing is what the reader will encounter throughout. In these densely compacted paragraphs there is a new theory of evolution and a body of facts seldom seen as having anything to do with the theory of evolution. This is human sexuality and its atavistic variation. His theories arose from his own sexually specific self-analysis, from how he was a young teenager to what he eventually became as a man. The two were very different indeed. The path of his life intersected with gays and lesbians, sexually promiscuous men and women, and with people conservative that way. One could say that a science of sexuality morality was another of his outstanding efforts.

I have collated what numerous scientists have discovered and surmised about a new direction for evolutionary theory and have allied their work with my father’s autobiographical narrative to produce the most unlikely and audacious of tracts. From it the ability of man to engineer evolution becomes even more probable than the most optimistic of genetic engineers could guess because the way of Mother Nature can now be duplicated. The heretofore invisible foundation of human sexual morality is also uncovered. In times of competition between the generations during the nurture the sexuality is modified to control fertility, or is classical if the competition is only weak or moderately intense. Sexuality after all, like mortality, exists to control population levels. The bible says not to judge. We exclude from the international family of man no person, regardless of sexual orientation or any thing else. The welcome arms of an identical genetic constitution embraces all people on this Earth. Would an individual with 6 digits on their hand instead of 5 be considered less human?  Latently each person has a capacity for an infinite set of reconfigurations of gene expressions, none of which would make them less a part of our species. Our evolutionary history is vast and deep, our genomes contain buried treasures rarely glimpsed.

The genome of man tosses up many types of rare mutants, often based on ancient facets of our evolutionary history. There is a whole catalogue of these, including albinism, dwarfism, gigantism, piebaldism, extra or missing digits, sexual hermaphroditicism, stunted stillborn embryos, a vast number of metabolic disorders, etc. This list is long (something like 200 genetic diseases is one recent count) and, as we are beyond the reach of organic evolution now, they cannot to amount to much for the real adaptation of human populations.

The transition from a mammalian and primate-like mating constitution based on sexual selection to the mating constitution of man, being so radical and so recent, stands at the head of this considerable list of morally indifferent atavistic reversions. Examination of this is what gave rise to this book, and what this book is substantially about. Every person passes though this ancient transitional stage. According to the conditions of the nurture it happens often enough that this ancient relic is not superseded, or is overcome with great difficulty. 

•   The evolution of mankind as a species then, and of each individual in its life, has involved a struggle to overcome this element of the primitive mammal. The periodic rut had to be overcome as a condition for the development of the secondary sex features - at any rate in the process of the development of these features, and each individual must again repeat the process of overcoming this primitive element of rut.

There is present in the above paragraph a form of a death and resurrection motif. I have often wondered if whether it is actually this possible personal transformation that is the real hidden dimension, the actual real meaning, of what theologians have for so long placed in the realm of faith alone. Chapter 5 has more about this as a possible lineament for a new interpretation of scripture and mythology as facets of the theory of evolution.

However innocent the individual is to any compromise of its own heredity, no matter that genetic constitution cannot foresee the consequences what it is doing when ontogeny is arrested or altered, this special form of heterochrony, so common in modern times, is not morally indifferent or innocent in its consequences. As evolutionary principles are at work here, this book is also about the moral implications of this variation of the sexual constitution of human beings, all traced back to what one man experienced in the very late and difficult overcoming of remnants of his historically and nearly universally censored youthful indescretionary lifestyle. In a way that foreshadowed the personal side of this story Freud wrote that the Pleasure Principle gives way, when it can, to the Reality Principle. When it cannot, when the classical heredity cannot be achieved and the variation cannot be successful, egoism, hedonism in its  spectrum of types is what remains. Freud did not see any connection between psychoanalysis and evolution. What he referred to as a perverse polymorphous sexuality is actually a mechanism for forming variation and controlling fertility. When overcome this is the conversion of his Pleasure Principle into the Reality Principle. When not, when the maturation is permanently complicated by the intensity and duration of competition, the conflict between the classical heredity is in a great war with the imposed variation. The human psyche is tormented, sexuality can frequently become uncontrollable. Society calls this hedonism. It can be gay or straight, violent or not, compulsively onomastic, or a pornographic obsession, or promiscuity, etc. Freud attributed perverse polymorphous sexuality to childhood sexual fixations. 

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

•   Once given the existence of a substance which reproduces itself and has the feature of metabolism, and which therefore finds itself in competition with every other manifestation of the same features, then the entire process of evolution necessarily follows. It is not necessary to speak about any purpose to life or instinct of reproduction. Either the qualities of successful metabolism and reproduction will prevail or there will be extinction. And the very elements which determine the continuation are these two.

•    That all of the development takes place during the time of the nurture is on its face alone ground for suspecting that a very powerful and pervasive relation exists between parent and young in the formation of the development.

•  We are ready to believe that the unusual experience of the parents is communicated to the offspring so as to cause variation, in some not necessarily external aspect.

•   The agency for the production of appropriate variation is as much a feature of protoplasm as is its metabolism or its reproduction or its genetic conservatism.

•    It is worth taking a second look a what appears to be a fact at least at the present time: it appears that it is not the direct economic question which produces an active development of consciousness, but questions more closely related to reproduction, or the frustration of reproduction.

•   I believe on general grounds that it is not merely hardship, economic struggle which gives rise to the familiar flourishing of consciousness.

•    It is seemingly, in human evolution, the overcoming of obstacles to fertility that produces the adaptive changes. Not metabolic, but reproductive obstacles.

•    It is not consciousness as such, but change of consciousness, which is the method of human evolution.

•    The free expression of an instinct leaves no mark upon the "consciousness." It is the thwarting of an instinct, the placing of obstacles in the way of its expression, which causes the appearance of consciousness, which may be described as the agency for the circumventing of the obstacles. The more complex and difficult the obstacles, the more elaborate and effective the instrument developed for their overcoming.

•     The successful assimilation of the contemporary division of labor (of a role in it) precludes innovation.

Our contention is that the failure to accommodate to some role in the contemporary division of labor is the product of the reproductive distortions noted above.

•  The premature orientation towards reproduction is the specific agency of the interruption of development which is the basis of variation.

 •   The process of gestation is the instrumentality by which the events external to the parent can exert themselves upon the development of the young. In the end the formative role of the parent generation is the very causality of evolution itself.

 •   The separate individuals of a species do not all occupy the same setting. There is a range of conditions occupied by the species; and in some places organisms are comfortable, in another surfeited, in still another suffering from the beginnings of competition, and finally some, dwelling on a precarious periphery, for whom competition is radically severe. The last is producing variation in abundance, which however does not become selected and characteristic unless this condition proves to be typical. In the first setting the standard character is achieved without being strongly marked, a placid, comfortable but not vigorous population results. The surfeited could not survive in the setting of the first group, and exhibit a tendency not even to develop the character of the species and abandon the achievements won through lengthy struggle by the species. The third group have the full character, and also outstanding hardihood resulting from struggle, as befits the characteristic body of the species, which has fully earned its right to place its mark upon the new generation. The last group, barely surviving, responds with a shrunken social fertility, but an explosion of new qualities, which are ancient resources of the species, appearing in a new context. It is full of variation in which everything old is being reexplored within the matrix of the later established character. Its individuals are not very healthy, viewed from the standpoint of sexuality, comfort, sense of accommodation, sense of success, certainty of direction, sense of appropriateness to conditions, but it is characterized by a wide range of vitality, from a manifestly self-lethal proclivity, to a furiously intense, frenetic vitality or at least energy, which in the end represents the instrumentality of the transformation of the species, if the alien conditions encountered here prove to be finally the prevailing conditions whose persistence constitutes the new life setting for the whole species.

•     In a time of crisis the antagonism between reproduction as the agency of life, and as the agency of starvation is the  mainspring of evolutionary change.

•    And this must be so (reproductive crisis as  the central evolutionary question) on general grounds, for metabolic crises in the end are a reflection of the too rapid expansion of the protoplasm.

The metabolic crisis, the crisis of competition, is in fact a reproductive crisis expressing too much fertility for the adaptations.

•   The conception most often offered as the sole alternative to the genetic account of the origin of variation is that there is a molding of the species by nature so to speak in its image, a molding which causes the species to change adaptively and to transmit this change to the next generation, which continues the adaptive tendency, until a new form appears as the result of a lengthy accumulation of such directed changes. This idea involves the conception of the inheritance of acquired characteristics or Lamarckism, which has often been refuted.

•   But in fact the process is rather more complicated than this. The species cannot "adapt" strictly speaking: the fund of its possible transformations is precisely the series of genetic forms which it assumes in the course of its development in its recapitulation of the history of the development of its predecessors; and no degree of mal-adaptation can do more than draw upon these inherited resources by an emphasis or rearrangement of certain of them.

•   The only lack of adaptation which becomes an experience of species instead of just an experience of individuals is the condition which produces an excess of numbers over the food supply.

Fatality due to accidents and parasites is part of the adaptation of the species.

•     It cannot be doubted that there is a fundamental connection, the very one that we seek to connect sex with evolution, between intraspecific competition and the conversion of sexual expression from developmental determination into some other form.

•     What is the close relationship between frustrated development, between the thwarting of the development of the young, and their heightened genital activity?

•    The liaison function is the role of the modified female.

•    The behavior of each female is connected thus with the behavior of every other: the accessibility of some females dooms others to sterility; and if for this reason alone the opening of the womb is a act which reverberates throughout the species.

•   There is a remarkable inversion in both sexes with the achievement of maturity: in the female the development of the generalized negative sexual tendency as the actual condition for maternity in the family setting. And for the male: there must develop the definite recognition of the nurture function before the real reproductive relation can be established with a female.

•    The nature of the distortion is to convert the daughter into a male and a consort, and the son into a consort.

And these are possible because the genetic constitution contains these potentialities as the instruments for the social reproductive organization.

They have the effect of reducing intraspecific competition by causing sterility, partial or complete.

•    Considering the immediately foregoing ideas on fixations, it is worth considering whether, in the male, the form of sterility does not the character of of an incapacity to enter into this selection of the female, but to respond, as in the earlier condition, generally to all or nearly all females.

•     Obesity and leanness represent the double error - late and premature weaning?

Not the ingestion but the capacity to utilize starches, caused by the correct pace of the weaning?

•   On originality, creativeness. In the end a realization of what has to be an intrinsic potential of life itself, to make the radical accommodation to the radically alien setting. It does not appear when it is not needed. It appears under conditions of great adversity, not of the individual, but of the species. It has minor echoes for individuals. Its product is rich and profoundly novel only when it does respond to the adversity of great parts of the species. Evidently the requirements of one individual, in the small locality, and the response to this, only by a considerable accident could constitute a fundamental new direction for the species, which requires a common accommodation, an expression common to a great many of its individuals. And the individual success can only be an expression of success in the prevailing setting. Originality is a species phenomena, the result of a widespread need and impulse shared by very many.

•    On the question of the nature of consciousness: we distinguish two elements or principles. Every organism makes a characteristic selection of the ambient materiality according to its physiology, its metabolic arrangements. This selection, this continuously present field of sensation or awareness, this characteristic selection of stimuli to which the organism is constantly responding, is often erroneously described as 'consciousness" in human beings. But all organisms down to the most primitive are related to reality in just this way, and if this is to be called "consciousness," then another term must be invented to describe what is different about the human relation to reality — for there is something different, in degree if not substance.

What is different is the capacity to alter the selection from reality of another being, to acquire a new field of stimuli, a new selection, and to cause others to acquire it also.

•   The origin of consciousness (the development of the so-called “voluntary” muscle) is evidently connected with the development of the capacity to refrain from the stimulus-response mechanism characteristic of all protoplasm.

What is essential is not the faculty of response, for that is well established, nor yet the conditioned response, for that too is a universal function: but the abstention from response is the “voluntary” aspect.

•     The temporal separation of response from stimulus is the biological innovation which distinguishes the realm of the conscious from that of the non conscious.

The so-called voluntary expressions amount to a postponement of response, and consciousness is the accumulated effort to overcome what has been interposed between the stimulus and response. 

In particular it is obstacle of the barrier to incest which is the foundation of all thought and imparts the remarkable qualities to the human mating relation which distinguish it from all others.

I can recall from the early 1970s  how my father appraised his own ideas about evolution. “They are some good clues,” he said.

 Preface References 

1.  Thorne AG, and Wolpoff MH. The multiregional evolution of humans. Sci Amer., Apr;266(4):76-9, 82-3, 1992

2.  P. Brown et. al, A New Small-bodied Hominid From the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, Nature 431, 1055 - 1061 (28 October 2004).

 

3. Shapiro, J.A. 2002. Genome Organization and Reorganization in Evolution:Formatting for Computation and Function. In From Epigenesis to Epigenetics: The Genome in Context, L.Van Speybroack, G. Van de Vijver, and D. de Waele (eds.), Ann. NY Acad Sci 981, 111-134..

4.  Morris, Simon, C., Life’s Solution, Cambridge University Press, 2003.  

5.  Valentine, J.W.,  On the Origin of Phyla,  Univ. of Chicago, 2004.

6.  Takhtajan, A., Evolutionary Trends in Flowering Plants, Columbia Univ. Press, 1991.

7.  Takhtajan, A.,  The Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants, Columbia University Press, NY, 1997.

8.  Cronquist, A., The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants, 2nd Edition, NY, 1988.

9.  Gundesen, A., Families of Monocotyledons, Chronica Botanica Co., Waltham, Mass, (1950).

10.  Simpson, G.G., Mezozoic Mammals and the Polyphyletic Origin of Mammals, Evolution 13: 405-414, 1958.

11.  Tiegs, O.W., and S.M. Martin, The Evolution of The Arthopoda, Biol. Revs. 33:255-337, 1958.

INTRODUCTION

“Art for life’s sake”

             Anon.

These have to be trying times for the theory of evolution, as inner voices grow louder and bolder about an innate capacity for organisms to genetically vary. Several groups of disparate but formidable facts now brazenly assault the currently accepted theory of evolution.

 One of these, the multiregional evolution of man, requires large-scale variation to account for fully modern humans evolving simultaneously in several places at once in the Old World. Random mutation cannot accommodate this theory.  Our own view of ourselves as a species is at stake in this debate about evolutionary theory, since the two main theories of human evolution are bifurcated along a fault line created by the decisive break with its past the Mulitiregional Theory of evolution is making in the anthropological news now. The African Eve model of human evolution, while supposedly more politically correct than the multiregional theory, accepts random mutations and classical genetics as its mechanism for human variation. Either variation is random and rare or else it is caused and abundant. The Mulitiregional Theory proposes that an extinct early human group (Homo Erectus) left the cradle of mankind in Africa about 1.8 million years ago, but then migrated and evolved in all parts of the Old World. They slowly evolved in different places into the modern races of men around 100,000 years ago.  Over this time all races of men have always been in genetic contact with each other. This theory is not less politically correct than any other theory.  It also explains why modern humans are all so closely related genetically. What it really threatens is the random mutation theory of evolution. This logic of widespread variation also makes possible a direct line of descent from early australopithecine hominids in Africa to H. erectus to Neanderthal-types to modern people, the later stages in many places at once.

In his interpretation of polymorphic alleles coding for modern human traits,  Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) suggests the possibility that the succession of various H. erectus, H. habilis, and H. neanderthal species could have actually been our direct ancestors. Such archaic forms as Heidelberg Man in Germany, Rhodesia Man in Zambia, and Dali Man in China persisted along side modern humans until 100,000 years ago as “shadow pilgrims,” he wrote. The fossil age record for not quite modern Homo sapiens has been extended to the depths of the second-to-last ice age of the Pleistocene 160,000 years ago to Herto humans in the Afar depression of Ethiopia, a record previously held by 100,000 year-old Middle Eastern fossils not quite yet fully modern. (In connection with the more general question of the origin of genetic variation Dawkins coined the phrase “The Evolution of Evolvability.”)1

Based on direct evidence of alleles in the gene pool today that appear to be Neandertal-derived, Milford Wolpoff wrote that “Neandertals may have been a true human race.” Examples of such alleles include the FOXP2 locus, microcephalin D haplotypes, and the MAPT locus.2

Discontinuities or pulses in hominid evolution in Africa have been correlated to cooling periods and contractions of rain forests. Bipeds had appeared on the African  savanna by 5 million years ago. By 2.5 million years ago autralopithicines had given way to Homo habilis. Between 1.7 million and 900,000 years ago Homo erectus population levels were reinforced. These interpretations are  controversial, as gradual hominid evolution in East Africa has also been reported.

For the African Eve paleontologists, all modern races are descendants of a group of modern humans who evolved once in Africa about 100,000 years ago and then displaced all of the other hominids in the Old World. The probability of man (or anything) evolving with random mutations is still not encouraging, just more plausible in this view than a scenario of an international arena of simultaneous human evolution. Controversial statistical assumptions about a clock-like rate of putatively random mutations of mitochondrial DNA is the foundation of African Eve. A clock-like rate of random mutations contradicts the theory of punctuated evolutionary equilibrium and George Gaylord Simpson’s vetted conclusion that sudden evolution is the dominant message of paleontology for all evolutionary phyla. Simpson stressed the massiveness of evolution as well as its exceptional velocity. All of the most massive radiations of animal phyla happened within 10 million year spans, including the Vendian-Cambrian explosion, the radiations of arthropods and mollusks in the sea, arthropods on land, tetrapods on dry land, and the radiations of mammals and birds. 3 

In 2003 Alan Templeton published a paper on the mutational patterns around the world of 13 human haplotypes. Based on the molecular clock hypothesis of mutational rates, he found 3 distinct migrations of humans ancestors out of Africa.  The first at 1.7 million years ago that everyone seems to agree with, a second between 0.42 - 0.48 Mya, and another migration between 0.08 - 0.15 Mya. His statistical analysis included molecular genetic data on mDNA, Y chromosome DNA, 2 X-linked DNA regions, and 6 autosomal DNA segments. Templeton is convinced that no African migration to Europe or Asia was a replacement event but rather they were all cases of inbreeding, that there was a “gene-flow trellis” between African and Eurasian populations. There were also in his view migrations with interbreeding from Asia to Africa, southern Europe to northern Europe, southern Asia to northern Asia, southern Asia to the Pacific, and southern Asia to the Americas.4

Especially important to the replacement model of human evolution is molecular data based on mitochondrial DNA.  There are impressive studies of mDNA that are always cited in defense of Mitochondrial Eve, the putative African mother of all modern humans.  These studies nearly always agree with each other about the age of modern humans, that no fossil humans such as Neanderthal Man could have been our ancestors, and that a fortuitous event placed modern humans on this planet once as a small population.

Yet the mitochondrial DNA of the Mungo Man fossil from Lake Mungo in Australia 40,000 years in age does not have living descendants among the aborigines, even though  his bones were interred with the same style of red ochre ceremonial marking still practiced today. Mutations in mDNA do not for this fossil reflect either ancestry or the elapsed time of evolutionary divergence.

Any analogy between genetic mutations and the random pulse of radioactive nuclear decay creates important conflicts between paleontology and proposed molecular DNA mutational clocks. Human evolution is not the only place where the assumption of a constant rate of random mutations has seriously clashed with fossil evidence. According to the fossil record the divergence of orders of birds occurred explosively 65 million year ago at the beginning of the Tertiary epoch. A lockstep period of ordinal evolutionary diversification of mammals, teleost fishes, and most vertebrates was taking place at the same time. Yet a constant mutation rate consistent with a molecular clock  places the ordinal divergence of birds at 100 million years ago. Transitional shorebirds possibly related to loons and cormorants are avian orders known from the K-T boundary 65 million years ago. From fossil records, they are the bottleneck and wellsprings of all other modern bird orders.5

In the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees of fish evolution the molecular clock in now regarded as unfounded. Molecular sequence data and morphology conflict when the mutation rate is assumed constant.5a

Almost nothing else in the 3.5 billion-year fossil record of life on earth has been so merciful as the record of missing links in rapid bursts of evolutionary change in the human fossil record. This record is so exceptional that a succession of intermediate missing links, between individuals even inhabiting the same cave at the same time, is sometimes interpreted as just its opposite. In the Skhul and Tabun caves in Israel as in the Abrigo do Lagar Velho rock-shelter from Portugal fossils with both Neanderthal and modern features capture multiregional evolution in real-time action. The thing that so disturbed Darwin about the absence of missing fossil links between evolving species, which was eventually explained by the rapid pulse of evolution, in the case of our species is instead a kind and generous exceptional record of intermediate links between the origin of man in Africa and the appearance of moderns humans throughout the Old World virtually simultaneously.

The multiregional hypothesis of the evolution of man, competing with the African Eve theory in anthropological literature as an explanation for the origin of man, is  touched in a positive way by this simultaneity theory of variation and selection. Modern humans could have evolved simultaneously from local Neaderthal-types in more than one place. This account of the origin of man makes doubtful any random rate of mutation of mitochondria DNA.

There are outstanding cultural facts that only the Multiregional Theory has been able to explain. For example, how if not by genealogy did Neanderthals and archaic H. sapiens (in Africa and elsewhere) both come to use the same distinctive Mousterian style of stone tools?   In China, Xinzhi Wu and others have identified a continuity of human evolutionary fossils from erectus to modern orientals. Acheulean hand axes, taken as the universal signature of H. erectus technology, have not been found in NE Asia. Peking Man and Java Man were making regionally unique tools and, unlike the situation any where else, they made extensive practical and ritual use of fire 300,000 years ago. (Modern humans used the later Aurignacian style for tools of ivory, bone and flint.)

(Stone Age tools are classified as follows: Homo Australopicthecines, H. habilis and early H. erectus made Oldowan tools. Between 700,000 to 300,00 years ago H. erectus made Acheulean hand axes; from 350,000 to 50,000 years ago H. erectus moved on to the Levallois technique. Neanderthals before 50,000 years ago used Mousterian-style stone tools. After this, ivory, bone and flint tools were made in the Aurignacian style. A major exception is the regional use of non-Acheulean tools in NE Asia by  local H.erectus populations. See the references by Xinzhi Wu, such as Fossil Humankind and Other Anthropoid Primates of China, International Journal of Primatology, V25 no 5, Oct. 2004.)

In 1993 David Frayer et. al. argued that the  model was consistent with local characteristics of archaic and modern humans which have been stable for hundreds of thousands of years. Fossils a million years old found in Java, whose ancestors are believed to have migrated to Australia 60,000 years ago, have the same prominent brow ridge as living Australian aborigines. These authors also point out that many contemporary Chinese have the same distinctive shovel-shaped incisors as local Asian Homo erectus and more recent human fossils. In the 1930’s Franz Wiedenreich called special attention to the similarities between fossils of Peking Man and modern Asians. The “Weidenreich Theory of Human Evolution” was a forerunner of multiregionalism, already with both propositions in place that human races evolved independently in the Old World from H. erectus to H. sapien sapiens and that there must also have been constant gene flow between the various human populations throughout history. 6

Ceremonial Neanderthal burial interments furnished with artifacts suitable for an afterlife may be speaking about a human cultural continuum vastly longer than even the age of paleolithic cave art of H. sapiens. 

No less an authority than the Abbe Breuil has offered as the oldest identifiable image of any God the paleolithic cave figure named the Sorcerer of Trois Freres. This heavily bearded spooky-looking human male with feline and reindeer aspects, prominently drawn genitals, possibly dancing, is overlooking the huge image gallery in the cave Les Trois Freres in France. If the Sorcerer is a God, it is part animal, so these people must have believed themselves to partake of the nature of the animals.  The earliest religious iconography of man that these paleolithic cave artists created does not contradict the interpretation that these people could have actually held in their minds some version of evolution. In his book 400 Centuries of Cave Art (1952) the Abbe Breuil has even suggested that these artists recorded in the same cave the oldest known references to what in later times became mythology proper. Embedded on the cave walls within chaotic animal scenes of great drama are three mysterious part-human action figures. “Necessarily hypothetical, they no doubt depict mythical heroes like Orpheus, Creation scenes or directions for the animal kingdom,” he wrote.

With the notable exception of the Sorcerer (who is not entirely of our race anyhow) the human figures found among paleolitic cave drawings are almost never as completely and realistically rendered as the animals images. These were are hardy, robust people; psychologically without narcissism, egoism; of a mindset the same across two whole continents (Europe and Africa).

Not only are the fossils of modern Homo sapiens on different continents about the same age, there are no meaningful differences between any extant races of man. Plenty of people throughout history have claimed this discovery, that one race or another was better for some reason. All such studies have been shattered by serious scholars. Short of actually knowing people of different races, the next best proof of the equality of the races of man in the opinion of modern science is actually the whole literature on human evolution and anthropology. If you have had the experience of knowing different peoples, as I have had growing up in the big city, then you know that no differences exist between different races, nationalities, religions, or cultures. The differing quality of the maternal relation in any place and moment is behind behind what can give the false appearance of such difference.

Intelligence, sense of humor, sexuality, facial expressions - all the things one can measure or notice are not different between any peoples. In all the voluminous literature on race and human evolution that I came across while researching this book all indications point to the same results: there is no firm definition, first of all, of what a race is, and second, it is impossible to measure any difference even if you impose some standards of what any race is. Besides, the variability within races is greater than the variability between them. Such studies lose their point at the outset.

Just how mankind arose, whether by the Out-of-Africa model (also called the Mitochondrial Eve Theory) or by multiregional mechanism, and the exact meaning of the multitudes of human fossils, is fragmentary and hard to sort out. I think some sort of simultaneous evolution in different places is possible. The modern races could themselves be indecipherable mixtures of the deep past. Authorities on both sides of this ongoing debate about human evolution include Milford Wolpoff, Rachel Caspari, Wu Xinzhi, Chris Stringer, Ian Tattersal, 7 Erik Trinkaus, L.L. Cavalli-Storza,, and the Leakeys, among others.

Wu Xinshi in China has authored or coauthored many papers on human evolution. He has helped to rescue the multiregional hypothesis from its earliest roots by Wiedenrich and others, some of whom thought to prove that the various races were separate species. They could not show this. The field needed recusitation, and a modern sensibility. Wu Xinshi has argued that the Chinese people were derived from an succession of oriental types, versions in time of what are called erectus- and Neanderthal-types in Europe. Peking man and Java man are considered regional ancestors of modern Asians. In Africa similar contemporaries, structurally and culturally, are well known, including Heidelberg man. Wu Xinshi also maintains that other people added to these dynamics unfolding over many millennia. All races have been in genetic contact from the beginning of what Joseph Campbell called in his work Primitive Mythology a “zone of hominization" extending across a broad part of the globe where what happens to the lac operon had already happened to human beings.  

In Africa, Europe and Asia human beings were evolving simultaneously circa 1.8 million years ago from local varieties of H. erectus which appeared first in Africa. The discovery of regional fossils of the same age leading up to modern humans in all those places have been the basic fact Wolpoff, Caspari, and the other multiregionalists call upon. The Multiregional Theory was boldly conceived by this gathering or regionally specific evidence, no matter how impossible random mutations make the numerical impossibility of regional fossils of man seem. Campbell also felt that mythological, anthropological, and fossil evidence all point to the Multiregional Theory - one reason world mythology has very few repeated themes.

Europeans, according the the Multiregional Theory, are direct descendants of local Neanderthals with the high brow ridges and supposed fondness for cannibalism, who then evolved as a group during competitive crises in the Pleistocene into modern humans in Europe. Asia and Africa had local Neanderthal-type populations and similar evolutionary experience. In the Middle East there is even a suggestion that Neanderthals and modern humans once might have lived together in the same caves. At least their skeletons date from the same time. In many places fossils of the recent ancestors of several races around the world are known or suspected. 

For politically correct classical geneticists, for whom modern humans evolved once in Africa, then migrated out of Africa and later acquired minor differences like skin color as they populated the globe, simultaneous evolution is impossible because so many simultaneous mutations are wildly unlikely. They must reject the Neanderthals as our ancestors. All hominid species before them are also dead ends.

 What cannot be undone anymore the dramatic implications raised over and over again by the simultaneous genetic variation and Darwinian selection of lac operon genes of the common enteric bacteria E. coli.  Selection-induced mutations of the lac operon and rapid development of antibiotic resistance by various pathogenic microorganisms amount to a formidable mass of compelling data about decidedly nonrandom genetic variation. These molecular biologists know they discovered something big, and have proved it with impeccable rigor.

Convergent evolution and the theory of sex are third and forth assemblages of facts about which the modern synthesis can say nothing. The simultaneous evolution of finch beak lengths and chiclid fish behavior in different places over evolutionary brief periods are just two examples of convergent evolution. 

All sorts of smaller facts fit neatly into this large picture of simultaneous variation and selection. Somaclonal variation in plant cell cultures is inexplicable by random mutations. Somaclonal variation in plants is also a red flag about the fidelity of cloning in general that people working with animal cells never seem to use as a cautionary message. Cloned plants from cell cultures show little in the way of phenotype or genotype fidelity. Many new varieties of plants are routinely obtained in this way from cell cultures. Why this receives so little theoretical attention has also been unfair. Is botany less glamorous than research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies? Several generations of experience with variation in cloned plants should have an early warning signal about clonal fidelity in animals, even if no wholesale genome transfers are ordinarily used. In the 1990’s it was finally determined that parts of the genome are actually rearranged during somaclonal variation. Plants cells in tissue culture conditions sometimes elicit the activity of moveable parts of the genome - transposable elements. Chapter 1 has more information about this.

The mode of variation, like modes of selection, has had its own evolutionary story. From nucleotide base substitution to transposable elements to regulatory genes, from the endocrine regulation of variation to the sexual production of new ideas there is obviously no single method of hereditary change. Evidence in favor of the endocrine regulation of variation, perhaps through steroids that interact in as yet an unknown way with the DNA,  is one prediction of this theory. Whatever regulates the rate of reproduction, and beyond question in higher animals the pituitary-adrenal-gonadal axis does this, also is required by the theory presented here to be the governor of variation. 

The indications are in fact numerous that many bold new ideas are on the threshold of activation by a new theory of evolution. Unlike what has happened in the physical sciences in the past century or so, biology is undergoing a fully heuristic, old fashioned revolution the mind can actually get a grip on. Unlike the situation in physics and chemistry, biology can calculate little but now understand much; it does not calculate much with an understanding of nearly nothing.

To anticipate the flavor of what are to follow are typical types of statements whose subject is actually autobiographical. My father’s notes began in 1953 and ended in 1973.

•   Metabolism and plasticity are the only genetic constants.

•   The agency for the production of appropriate variation is as much a feature of protoplasm as is its metabolism or its reproduction or its genetic conservatism.

•    It is worth taking a second look a what appears to be a fact at least at the present time: it appears that it is not the direct economic question which produces an active development of consciousness, but questions more closely related to reproduction, or the frustration of reproduction.

•   I believe on general grounds that it is not merely hardship, economic struggle which gives rise to the familiar flourishing of consciousness.

•    It is seemingly, in human evolution, the overcoming of obstacles to fertility that produces the adaptive changes. Not metabolic, but reproductive obstacles. (reproductive obstacles are developmental obstacles to maturity.)

The central idea of new theory of evolution we are working towards is that variation and selection are dual simultaneous products of insufficient resources for the species as a whole. Malthus'' observation that reproduction is geometric while nutritional resources grow arithmetically was the founding point of evolutionary thought. Darwin explained natural selection in this way. We want to say that genetic variation is another result.  Living things must “know” this. Their instinctive use of it is the story of evolution.

When caterpillar metamorphosis begets a butterfly the process (however seemingly miraculous and almost dreamlike) begins with the death and disintegration of many of its existing cells and tissues. All of a sudden previously dormant cascades of genes are activated. New body segments, legs, halters, wings, eyes and the various other body parts form. These gene batteries and associated cis-regulatory modules turn out to be highly conserved genes determining invertebrate and vertebrate embryology, physiology, and ontogeny. Many researchers believe that butterflies and people (arthropods and vertebrates) differ mainly by a tetraplodization event of the invertebrate genome not later than around 450 million years ago in the Ordovician Period.  For some it is still traumatic enough to deal with having arboreal apes as ancestors.

Something analogous to a complete metamorphosis is just now being reluctantly forced upon the theory of evolution, great parts of whose most trusted edifices are in the process of disintegration. New concepts, new theories, based on accumulating new facts about variation are recreating, rebuilding the theory from the ground up. New ways of understanding sex, mortality, variation, competition, speciation and the evolution of selection are being built around the foundation stone of natural selection set in place by Darwin and Wallace.

Subsuming Freudian analysis, its contents will come to include a primary new structure - the variation of man, especially the modified sexuality of people and the ensuing struggle to enable effective sexual activity. The theory of evolution is in the grip of something from which there can be no escape. A decisive reckoning of great drama is about to happen to this venerable science. The global broken family shall know it must heal itself and how. The age of the goddess some say is returning to make this possible. The long-oppressed 50 % of our species, coming in all shapes ages, colors, sizes, classes, religions will be its natural vanguard.

 D. H. Lawrence said that the emancipation of women is not only coming now but has actually been sneaking up upon civilization since at least the Enlightenment. This bloodless revolution portends peace between the sexes, powered because of what will be new between the ears. The liberated will be the children. The vanquished will be what the bible calls sinners. But I do not believe in God, Satan, Heaven or Hell. Along with many others, I share the view that heaven and hell and all the gods are states realizable within you in this life. Modern scholarship finds the Upanishads of India in possession of this realization by 900 BC. Three-thousand years later there are still those willing to pile up corpses over lethal interpretations of such things. Which is not to deny or underestimate the reality behind words of the novelist Umberto Eco who wrote in The Name of the Rose, “because on Earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are.”

Specifically in pure science what is about to disintegrate in a contest with the new ideas are old ideas about selfish genes, Hardy-Wienberg equilibrium, random mutations, the mystery that sex has always been, the unlikely constancy of DNA base substitution for use as molecular or evolutionary clocks, and the puzzles of mortality and the succession of generations. Populations are never at genetic equilibrium during times of competition, and mating is never random even when the qualities of a species remain static. Sexual reproduction controls the rate of population increase. In man it also is active in the formation of variation. We will not take seriously intelligent design or divine intervention. And certainly this metamorphosis of theory will brook no return to anything resembling Lamarckism, or to whatever Lysenkoism was.

The cause of natural selection must be the same as the cause of genetic variation.

So many other things about the theory of evolution fall into place seamlessly if this is true. There is first of all a growing body of experimental data about microorganisms supporting this radical extension of Darwinism. Even the literature on evolution in popular books and scientific journals is now full of premonitory insights that something quite new about the theory of evolution is about to happen. Random mutations are taking deadly hits in many places along its front for philosophical as well as scientific reasons. Selection, for example, is now considered by many to be a group phenomena. It will turn out to be the case that both variation and selection are species events.

Sexual reproduction, mortality, mutations of regulatory genes, psychology and psychosis, timeless themes of mythology, Oedipus and Electra, theological personalities, the Holy Trinity, death and resurrection, the relationship between the generations, sex and variation, have all been aligned in this book as an admittedly extraordinarily unlikely group of unified defenders of this hypothesis that variation and evolution have competition as their proximate, singular cause. 

Many of these disciplines have never had any professional dialogue with each other.  To array them as one intellectual force is what I have intended with this book, as if an autobiography about evolution wasn’t utterly audacious enough in its own right. 

Robert B. Hamilton posited group variation, genetic change on a vast scale and of bountiful variety, all of which also has premonitory roots in the notion of punctuated equilibrium and in the hypothesis that the species is the unit of selection. In works such as Stephen J. Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory new ideas about evolution and about species selection have been gaining ground as a foundation for the theory of evolution for some time. This direction is richer by far than anything the world has seen. It is not a big step, we contend, from species selection to group variation, and from here to an identical cause for both. These three items imply each other.

For centuries an eagerness has been felt by some scientists to admit that variation might be a response to environmental stress such as malnutrition or climate change. We are saying something very specific about what type of environmental stress induces genetic variation, and that this is overpopulation, intraspecific competition, the condition in which all elements of the environment are deficient. The environment has uncountable parts, its own type of fractal geometry. Overpopulation, especially competition between the generations, sets in motion both the necessity and the production of variation for resulting new adaptations.

Whether the competition stops after a single generation or persists over geologic time scales, it is still possible (however shocking ) to speak of Hansel and Gretal and Archaeopteryx in the same sentence, as far as each archetype having the same cause. In one case the psychologically damaged variant results, literary relatives of characters from literature such as the notorious and tormented King Oedipus and countless Dickensian childhoods suffered. In the other case some type of trend in the evolution of winged flight happened. From this population of anguished youth are born all of the magnificent prophets of ages past, all of the heroes in world literature, all of the leaders of human culture. Those human variants who change culture and consciousness are today named geniuses. In other times they were shaman, prophets, saints, or heroes. The other side of this is also possible when the maturation process is too severely compromised by a wholly inadequate nurture, a side including criminals.

It would be a very wise thing, as scientists like James Shapiro continue to enunciate, not to underestimate the possibility of change from within driving the whole of evolution. The main hypothesis here is that evolution is the flowering of implacable internalized Malthusian requirements, To Shapiro, change from within predominately via transposable elements, will become the 21st century’s theory of evolution. Just this single conjecture that Malthusian competition causes both natural selection and genetic variation is my father’s theory. 

The experiments of Shapiro, John Cairns and many others have awakened the world of theoretical biology in an qualitatively new, even revolutionarily way with the concept of selection-induced mutations. What they did will not stay buried in academic journals forever. 

Shapiro places particular emphasis on transposable elements as an instrument that makes new gene combinations possible and mutations nonrandom. Any mechanism identified for nonrandom mutation is a tremendous achievement. The mode of variation, just like the evolution of selection,  must have more to it than transposition though, especially at the higher levels of life. But this work is what opened the floodgates.

Natural selection, as Darwin realized, has its essential cause from crises of overpopulation which Thomas Malthus viewed pessimistically as inevitable. Our point is that the theory of evolution can be an engineering discipline if competition alone induces genetic variation. It is also our contention that this competition, when manifested between the generations, can strangle the social and individual sexual morality and the mental health of whole regions. From a controversial theory with partial explanations and prescient hypotheses about the evolution of this or that species there will then arise the actual practical possibility of engineering the evolution of species in the interests of man. Mr. Hamilton’s theories reach from the insular world of theoretical biology into the daily affairs of man. They cut a remorseless, undismayed path across class boundaries, nations, cultures and time. Its invisible hand has always been at work between the generations for every past and future social and geologic epoch. His words will insult, debase, judge, arrogantly assert, declare right and wrong, inspire or outrage or bring one to despair, depending on the individual character of the reader. They have done to me all these things. 

If it was once shocking, as the history books tell us, when Copernicus determined and Galileo insisted that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, and if it was later on an insulting jolt to mankind's dignity to imagine as did Darwin and others that apes belong in our family photo album, then these will turn out to be slight insults compared to the even more shocking and humbling fact that human evolutionary variants caused by generational strife are all around us all the time. As family members, coworkers, neighbors, friends, possibly you and the next person you see. The heresy of this is that, far from being random, the variation of man surrounds us at all times. What we apprehend and label as immoral and immature are in fact individuals whose personality development has unduly overemphasized characters of the evolutionary past reappearing in a modern context.

 The genetic basis of atavistic aspects of embryology is rather well established now. Behavioral atavisms by comparison are not well established in their mechanism. Regulation of the behavioral sexuality of the mammalian rut requires different behavior than monogamous marriages of man or the external fertilization of fishes. In summarizing medical literature M. Deric Bownds in The Biology of Mind  (Fitzgerald Press, Bethesda MD, 1999) has written that after the genitalia, the brain is the most significant area of sex differentiation. For example, in the hypothalamus there are separate centers for male and female behavior. The medial pre optic area plays a vital role in male-typical behavior. The 3rd interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is 3X larger in males than females, is smaller in gay men, and depends for this on circulating testosterone levels just before and after birth. In women the corpus callosum and the anterior commissure, which serve to connect the left and right brain hemispheres, are much larger than in men. “Androgen receptors are found throughout the brain, and their stimulation by testosterone during development appears to play a large part in superimposing male features on the brain’s intrinsic female developmental program.” The brain and human sexual behavior have a plasticity with respect to sexual hormones.

Experimentally transplanted fetal chicken tissue can reissue dinosaur teeth their kind has not seen in 60 million years. Humans are occasionally born covered with hair. The number of people born with characteristics long ago lost by our kind is small even if their types are numerous. Full and partial hermaphrodites, dwarfs and giants, skin pigmentation irregularities, webbing between digits, even the choice over what some people find beautiful in the opposite sex all say something about quiescent genetic ghosts still patrolling the corridors of our genome. Some human stillborn teratological monsters were declared clam- or mollusk-like in their physiology by scientists such as Etienne Serres centuries ago. Evolutionary atavisms in man have been known and studied with wonderment for a very long time.8  In behavior as in physiology such things happen all the time.

The cleft palate birth disorder has been traced to modern genetic reenactments of the choana, a unique internal nostril. The choana was the first part of tetrapods to develop in the fish-tetrapod transition, evolving even before limbs. “A common defect in facial development refers back to an evolutionary event that occurred nearly 400 million years ago.” The specific genes involved are  known. This information came from a study of the most primitive known tetrapod,  Kenichthys campbelli,  a fish with nostrils in its row of teeth.9

Considering the long and winding path the evolution of man took, from single cell to fish,  amphibian, reptile, to mammal to ape, and then to a walking and talking ape, considering the oddness of some of our more exotic distant but upright walking and long deceased relatives, it would not be so surprising to find in modern man some occasions where these ancient long-lost antecedents once again show features of themselves under the pressure exerted by competition. The permanent reminders of the genetic ghosts of our humble history are the weaponry of organic adaptation.  It’s not like the DNA of our remote ancestors does not exist in all of our cells, including pseudogenes.

In the area of human sexuality ancient modes of reproductive behavior show themselves as atavisms in living human beings. Some are commonly known by the crude rubrics immature or immoral. But value judgments about gays, lesbians, promiscuous adults, adultery, etc. are not the point we seek to make. The point is that, like evolutionary change, sexual morality itself has a definite organic calculus.

 The genetics of sexuality is especially well known. The genetics of sex determination (especially the role of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome) has not changed substantially in base pair composition in 500 million years. The SRY gene is mammalian, a derivative of a particular and more general SOX gene paralogue of sex determination in lower animals.7-9  Genes for both sexes are present and are active to some degree in virtually all animals, certainly in all higher animals. The same genes at that, for human being, sea urchin, or sponge. As indelible features of the animal genome both sexes are always present. Morality has nothing to do with that. A gene for homosexuality is not needed, the slight over-expression of existing sex genes and sex hormone production by endocrine tissue is sufficient to cause expressions of sexuality different from the Biblical (or Koranic, Talmudic, Confucianist, etc.) ideal. Non-secular instructions about sex are surprisingly similar about what is condemned or allowed, what is deemed proper by this or that God or sage. The non-secular texts are referring to biological constructs, are not arbitrary at all. A glimmer of evolutionary principles are hidden underneath much theocratic dogma. There is biology and instinct in theology (and mythology). 

Religions function like gene operators and promoters in the inheritance of acceptable and appropriate social behavior, sexual and otherwise. Some people say we need and wait upon a messiah or a new mythology for such directions. The kingdom of evolution is spread upon the Earth only men have never seen it.   Events like the Sermon on the Mount speak to deep issues. It is a good thing if such topics should again occupy the world stage. This is one poignant place of intersection between the theory of evolution and theology, that morals and civics are altruistic behavior necessary for group survival and evolution,  and are what the superego is all about. If you do not believe in any god, or if you have any doubts, or if you are the most devout member of your congregation or synagogue or mosque - the search for an authoritative source of rights and sins must be sought in a time frame long before the career of the human animal.

No matter how seemingly backward in time some examples might seem, no human beings have ever lacked some form of religion, whether pagan, animistic, or monotheistic. Contrary to most interpretations belief in a single god is not more enlightened than the worship of any historical pantheon of deities, since in the familiar examples this single god has most often been the theological incarnation of a racial or cultural ego quest. Whatever form these beliefs have taken, no matter how seemingly backward, superstitious, or incomprehensible to modern minds, there is a very good reason why religion has always been the dominating factor in the lives and cultures of people. This is because of the way in humanity concepts have so completely superseded purely instinctive, non-conscious determinants of behavior. Even if they are only rule-based reformulations of ancient instincts or feral superstitious nonsensical allegories, by regulating behavior religions can in this way all seem very different but be essential in the same compelling sense. They can all be true at once because the kernel of their truth is the conceptual determinism of what had in evolutionary history been governed by endocrine and nervous reflexes. No people or culture can function for very long without some sort of guiding principles either suggested by the state or assumed by the nation spontaneously from within, without coercion. Viewed in this way separation of church and state, while certainly valid and necessary as societies struggled to free themselves from theocratic feudal social relations, is no great cultural principle. The first great step forward in this direction may be not be anything resembling atheism at all, just a more general and generous decidedly less provincial and parochial interpretation of the meaning of your own deepest religious beliefs and celebrations. As a species we have already come a long way since the days not all that long ago (compared to the vastly longer career of H. erectus) when the Sorcerer of Trois Freres was dancing in caves.

As is known to school children, belief in the theory of evolution implies that humanity had to have once had ape-like ancestors.10 It is less often emphasized but just as true if you believe in the theory of evolution that human beings also once have had to have had in their ancestry creatures far more bizarre than mere apes. Human ancestors also included for a very long time (and a long time ago) creatures for whom sexual selection - the periodic rut - was the primary method of reproduction. Mammals generally reproduce this way. For countless millions of years our mammalian relatives, as the reptiles and amphibians before them, reproduced through the process of sexual selection, where males contended with each other through violence or colorful displays or elaborate courtships in order to mate most often with as many females as possible.

 Intersexual, bisexual, hermaphroditic, even asexual ancestors are definitely also in our remote past. 11-13  Fish, for example, often have interchangeable sexuality. More about the genetics of sex are in Chapter 4. Some of the ways in which the sexuality of man is varied is a big part of Chapter 6. The reader could actually start this book there. I did it that way before this book was even an idea. 

According the online encyclopedia Wikepedia there are about 1,250,000 animal species known. Homosexual behavior has been reported in 1,500 species, with about 500 well documented cases, including marine birds, mammals, monkeys, great apes, dolphins and penguins. In American bison cases of full anal penetration are not uncommon. This also occurs in about  6-10% of rams, in bighorn sheep, giraffes, and the black swan. A clitoris is present in all mammal females.

Many human variants are individuals for whom ancients character traits of sexuality are especially prominent. As a group these are the individuals often called immoral. They are no less human, no less deserving of respect and civil rights, just as valid as people, just as deserving of the air we breath and water we drink. Products all, my father's theory says, of intergenerational competition. The human genome, like our evolutionary history, is morally neutral. Natural selection takes care of that end of it.  No one picks their parents or determines how they are raised. Varied sexual behavior as an adult is the indication of an emphasis of some aspect of the recapitulation as a young person. At the end of the day no society can exist or be morally healthy without a strong family. As a national and international priority the primacy of peace between the sexes and harmony between the generations is the condition for the continued survival and psychological prosperity of the human species, in all of its glorious variety.

To engineer evolution (in agriculture and animal husbandry) will be to reactivate evolutionarily dormant faculties and combine these ancient gene products and properties (including behavior) with modern genetic qualities. Its mechanism will be to reach into the DNA library of our genetic past to modify the future. Changing the timing of certain phases of development will become an important technique, as will repression of genes and newly altered regulatory pathways. To engineer evolution will be to find new genomic combinations that are useful to man and inducible through applied intraspecific competition. What is new is that Darwinian competition can be used to bring about such major evolutionary events. This is the second half of the Darwinian puzzle, the completion, finally after all these years, of the theory of evolution.

As is supposedly usual or cliché for truly seminal theories, this one came from the deepest part of left field, from the improbable post WW II period, by an amateur. It was not due to the investigation of the variation of any other species. He was motivated by self-analysis and I think he had fun doing it, no matter that he would describe the writing process to me as "bloody." His writing began about one year before I was born.

It was in the curious immediate aftermath of two titanic tragedies aimed at trying to change the nature of man - perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler - that the nature of culture, of human behavior, so to speak spontaneously transformed itself. To the chagrin and puzzlement of both left and right, during the post WW II period the relationship between the generations and the sexes have broken down in the West (and in the East to a lesser extent) to the point where evolutionary recollections, conceptual and organic, of our ancestors display the variation of man living in his broken family as the predominant feature of late 20th and early 21st century human culture.

In South Africa the same result that is a plague on the whole West has been documented. Since the beginning of gold-mining, diamond-mining and industrial activity in the 1880’s Laura Longmore estimates it took about 35-years for paternal irresponsibility, sex promiscuity, unwed mothers, crime waves, and lawless family dissolution to set in. Longmore wrote in her 1959 book The Dispossessed: A Study of the Sex Life of Bantu Women in Urban Areas Around Johannesburg (Jonathan Cape, London) that as a result of the breakdown of the traditional culture and the extended African family “the African people are in danger of moral collapse.” She saw that “humanity must start afresh to restore the social order.” In contrast to typical African tribal life “there seems to be nothing to make an urban youngster realize when to stop behaving like a wild beast.” She identified prostitution and hedonistic behaviors as indices of stresses and strains in home-life.  In the old days the main emphasis was on the fertility of a woman. “Today in the urban township this has shifted, and it is often her skill in copulation rather than her success in childbearing that tends to be emphasized.”

For Bantu tribal society the extended family was essentially an economic organization destroyed by the wage/monetary economy of urbanized/industrialized South Africa in a sudden drastic dislocation. With its passing the traditional moral system of duties and safeguards had disintegrated with disastrous consequences. 

There is no point using soothing expressions of reassuring calmness to describe gay and lesbian sexuality as a form of partial hermaphroditicism. All people have both sexes within, genes and hormones, anima and animus. For some the residual sex is just more prominent. Lets be no less frank that promiscuous males and females exhibit a more recent atavism reminiscent of and ultimately derived from the mammalian rut. The source of these mixtures of evolutionary times will be the most controversial of all - the parents induced it, parental competition with the youth. It was not my idea, it is just now mine by inheritance and default to write about.

At the center stage of world culture, on view in many classrooms, reflected in popular entertainment and other media in America, are active again now on a big scale ancient bisexual or intersexual behavior and physiology, together with an even more pronounced, as socially corrosive for children, retrogressive behavior associated with the rut of mammals. In the presence of intense competition between the generations the evolutionary variation of man is on exhibit now as definitely as the lac operon spontaneously mutates in the stationary phase. What still goes by the name sexual revolution was and is for us a sexual devolution, coming on the world stage together with the emancipation of women on a scale not scene for millennia. The later is barely recorded in the beginning of written history, which has been been a male dominated temporary interlude. 

Mr. Hamilton’s theory of evolution was an effort to account for the actual problems in his own personal life, especially concerning his overly attached mother, his early libertine lifestyle, and late psychological maturation. His problems were not that unusual or remarkable. Where there is lack of social adaptation for any individual, expressed concretely as being unemployed and unemployable, still unfledged long past the normal time range, with alcohol and substance abuse commonly, where there is immaturity like this there are attendant parallel sexual issues by no coincidence. The immaturity of the personality runs parallel to phylogentically archaic, still undifferentiated sexuality. It was in the reason he gave for the arrest of his own development that soon enough will change this whole planet. 

Forgotten people like Prince Peter Kropotkin, Michurin and Arthur Koestler might have aroused in his mind the first stirrings of the embers about evolutionary theory being way wrong. Freud and Louis Bolk seemed to have been big influences too. The gross errors wrought by Lysenko occurred within his lifetime. D. H Lawrence’s largely ignored opinions about sex always looked like to me like a starting point for what he wrote about the endlessly changing male and the more conservative female principle, not speaking about any people, but as an evolutionary idea. 

The book has a conceptual density and degree of difficultly unmatched by any other book familiar to me. In Chapters 2 and 5 I have a few guesses about this type of work and how it arises and why. His biography had a very familiar format about it. As a writer he didn’t spend time gathering subject matter by staring at his navel. We went out there and lived. He could see where no one else could what really was going on in this world. His ideas must have been simmering for a long time before he began to write them down.

His problems were not that seemingly rare or severe. That fact they were of a common general sort was key. They were not so severe that he could not outgrow them. He did outgrow them, as do many people overcome difficult childhoods. Not always: the external conditions interact with the personality successfully for the successful variants. This is the real basis for his ideas about natural selection in Chapter 4.  In my impression success is the rarer of the two outcomes of a highly evolved mode of selection based on the simultaneous success or failure of sexual and psychological maturity. His theory was not based on animal, plant, microorganism or fossil study. He studied people he knew, but especially himself. His theory of evolution was based upon analysis of himself and those around him. I suppose these unnamed people were mostly friends in his youth, including college friends. His theory of evolution had almost nothing to do with any other species, extinct or alive, or anything to do with political philosophy. He actually tried to apply some of the more contentious ideas in the history of evolutionary theory to his own personal problems and family circumstances.

 Caused by competition between the generations, in human sexuality echoes and hints and almost literal reversions to ancestral sexuality commonly exist,  like time travel to parts of a past genetic history, where ancient sexuality gets combined with the modern human secondary sex characteristics and mating constitution. When there is too great a return to sexual characteristics of the too distant past, such as that of our bisexual pre-amphibian or fish ancestors, or of the sexual selection of mammals, when this happens we label this as “immoral” or “immature.” Atavistic sexual phenomena are all around all the time. Friends, enemies, family, coworkers, strangers, all races, all religions, all creeds have this affliction, are them all, meaning these folks contain all types of this variation. We place value judgments, because in the absence of more than severe incipient competition there is a classical and healthy human sexually. But gay or straight, harlot or housewife, playboy or husband, mistress or misogynist,  all are results of a single inherited ancient genetic constitution. Variant or classical outcomes of the same recapitulation of human developmental/evolutionary pathways all. In some cases exaggerated at some past or primitive stage to a large degree. The value judgments are not in the biology. The value judgments are the psychological and sexual health in the objective collective judgment of society of the impact of variation upon the young, of the meek who always inherit this earth. Contrary to the ridiculous beliefs of libertarianism, all things are not equally good, all behavior is not always OK and nobody else's business. It is always social. The sex life of people anywhere resounds everywhere. Within a local community the results can be devastating when variation is extreme and immediate because the family is broken apart. Epigenetic in its mechanism or not, because it was so prominent in our evolutionary history the exaggeration in man of behavior associated with the rut  is a typical and primary symptom of what happens to people raised by broken families. Whole cities, entire generations, culture itself is ripped apart. Our genetic history as a species always contains this Sodom and Gomorra as a genetic potential, and not always just latently. When the gentle bonobo ape relaxed restrictions about mating outside the period of ovulation, and combined this with a promiscuous sexuality to enhance their social cohesion, did they not as our likely ancestors open the  way in the future for exactly what ails the West now?  The biochemistry and molecular genetics can wait to prove it. In the West it was named the Sexual Revolution. Sexual reversion is what it actually is; a true sexual revolution is waiting in the wings still, its stage is being now set, a new order of things in due time will show itself. The evolved instincts regarding sex will be its foundation.

The Galton Society was founded by Madison Grant in 1919. It was a virulent racist, pro nazi, group which favored eugenics and believed that genetics determined all things about races, classes, etc. Some consider it to be the first evolutionary psychology science. Gerrit Miller, Jr. was associated with the Galton Society. He made some remarkable assertions about human sexual instincts that were and still are largely ignored: “The main characteristics of the human sexual behavior, contrary to a widely prevalent belief, are not peculiar to man ... most of them are shared by man with several non-human primates that have been subjected to comparative psychological study. In this department man has invented nothing new. ... it seems reasonable to believe that a stage of simian horde life with its attendant sexual promiscuity lies somewhere in the ancestry of the human social systems which exist today ... We have little difficulty in in detecting beneath the surface of the cultural structure unmistakable traces of the framework of the promiscuous horde.”13A

Its also true that not all sexual behaviors have an an exact historical atavistic counterpart (like S&M). Internal struggles with different forces contending internally produce a range of pathologies not seen in any ancestor. Like pedophilia, even rape. Their origin as the immoral must basically come down to some type of early developmental fixation interacting with, struggling against modern sexuality. Immoral means behavior that effects the sexuality in such a way as to cripple the arrangements for child rearing. Internal contradictions, tensions, anguish, depression and other forms of mental illness including criminality attend such crises of incomplete or mixed maturation. A new science of psychology will be a corollary requirement, as the Oedipus Complex is viewed as being much more general than it is now, as a result of this new theory of evolution. Psychological problems attend and define conflicts between the classical heredity and the variation, including the Oedipal category of neuroses. Freud’s talking cure is probably a parental substitution relation, simply attention received which by itself eventually resolves the painful drama in the psyche.  The healer is a wise and kind substitute parent. 

The multiple fertilization of angiosperms, as well as the complexity of flowers can be seen as real obstacles to reproduction. Only certain specific pollinators will do, the whole fertilization process has a special seasonal timing, the flower itself must have all of its myriad parts in perfect order. There are gymnosperms in the pine family for whom the interval between pollination and fertilization lasts for as much as a year. Among plants generally, the sexual process is obviously a deliberate and self-imposed way to regulate, severely limit, ratchet down the number of offspring. Unlike their propensity for asexual propagation, the sexual reproduction of plants is complex and only conditionally successful. When growth conditions are favorable plants and algae exercise a nearly universal capacity for asexual propagation. When seasonal change or climate shifts set in, the reproductive mode typically shifts to the sexual route. The utilization of variation and the limitation of fertility are implemented together.

The replacement of gymnosperms by angiosperms as the dominant land plants in evolutionary history could be more associated with their superior, more refined control of fertility vested in the dual sexuality and complexity of their flowers than with any other traits. Is this also why mammals superseded the dinosaurs, because during times of severe crises they regulated their fertility more proficiently? The complicated sexuality of mammals and angiosperms made both groups superior to their predecessors in the control of fertility. Human beings took this one step farther, they figured out how to limit fertility while inventing new ideas.

Such as remarkable assertion as the simultaneity of variation and selection by competition modifies the theory of evolution in all ways. Speciation, convergent evolution, the evolution of symptoms of competition and modes of selection, the role of mortality and the story of sex are all implicated. A number of leading edge biologists are already anxious to concede that variation may not be random. We want to take it one step beyond that and  argue that it all has one cause.

It will be a tsunami shock wave for pop psychology (and for social policy) to find out that people are never not in the grip of the theory and forces of evolution, that society is never without numerous evolutionary variants. They show show up in extreme form as what are call the sexually immoral. The full range of psychological disorders, the varieties of expression of sexuality, indeed morality and immorality are the subtextual consequences of intergenerational competition, whose result is the production of variation.

It really did truly buckle my knees when I realized as a young teenager that my father was seeing in behaviorally anachronistic sexual behaviors (especially his own) the actual evolutionary variation of men and women. It still does sometimes, even after all these years, leave me without words to describe the way I feel about it. Even though this work speaks essentially of a single conjecture, it reaches with such audacity into heretofore untapped realms of sensibility that it has not been without genuine trepidation that I have worked to publish his ideas about sex and evolution.

To my great surprise much of what he wrote about decades before had its mirror image at the end of the 20th century in the environmentally induced mutations of the lac operon of E. coli bacteria. This correspondence between my father’s ideas and publications about mutations in these bacteria in the 1980s and 1990s, was the necessary corroberating information I needed to have the confidence to wrtite to President Bill Clinton and Senator Robert G. Torricelli about the theory of evolution. After having being been already ignored by 38 traditional publishing houses and several important scientists I was surprised indeed in the way they and the CIA responded.

 Chapter 1 is primarily the transplantation of the theory of evolution about himself applied to indisputable facts about selection induced mutations of microorganisms. A most unusual amalgam of fact and theory, just like this whole project, from start to finish. A theory compatible with facts as remote as possible from each other in time of origin and subject compatibility. Chapter 1 could not be a more improbable mismatch of theory and practice and of time and place. Yet in my view they are a valid marriage, as a theory ready-made for representing the explanation for experiments which to me at the time were not less than a providential gift of Western science to me personally.

My dad was born in Youngstown, Ohio, Jan 29, 1915. He completed 3.5 years of college at Ohio State University and Michigan State University, earning virtually straight A's while majoring in mathematics. He dropped out of college with one semester remaining to get married, never subsequently accumulating enough credits to earn a BA degree. This marriage did not last very long and produced no children. Mr. Hamilton's first wife Ruth was, I believe, the identity of his personal canonical dual aspect goddess-seductress. She was the inducer of his new ideas, the midwife of his creativity. This Circe archetype sent him to an apocryphal “Land of the Dead” in his personal life. He thought about all this before a long time before notes about began appearing. By 1953 he had been married to my mom for four years. They lived in Newark, NJ when he began to leave written notes about the theory of evolution in the context of the long delayed maturity and early libertine lifestyle he lived. His proposition of a transpositional relationship between sexuality and development may be traceable back to this incident of his dropping out of college to get married, for the end for all practical purposes to his formal education coincided with what must have been a relationship based solely on sexual attraction or seduction. I suspect that when he was very young something very similar to this also took place and interfered with his attention to his own very early formal education.

In March 1953, when his notes begin, Stalin died and Crick and Watson were just making public their discovery of the structure and significance of DNA.

His theory of evolution has little to do with that political moment in which it was incubated. His subject matter seems so far removed from the headline news then. I think now that the women’s rights movement in the USA is what really touched off his theories, not the World Wars or any Cold War political intrigue. The people he wrote about must have had much in common with himself. He suffered for his art, much of it self-inflicted, some not, but social Lamarckism is forever an impossibility, and rightfully so. In a different age his personal troubles would have been just as definite. In prison Dostoyevsky wrote about this in a slightly different way in his "Notes From the Underground,” where he formulated his theory that suffering is man's sole means of salvation.

The stubborn adherents to the classical selfish gene and random mutation paradigms will object in all ways to this book. They are wrong about the role of the individual in any species, they are incorrect that mutations are random, and the philosophical implications of selfish genes are not acceptable, are politically incorrect. The experimental work on bacteria and other species which must be happening all over the world now will finally be too much resistance to bear. Intellectual inertia in theoretical biology would have its center of mass right here.  Selfish genes are a dead end relic of the past.

For all, the cultural acceptance of babies having babies is a self-inflicted cultural pathology  as suicidal as anything else possible, on a par with the failure to see in education the only path leading to any future. It is self inflicted cultural death for babies to have babies, undertaken by innocent young girls with the utmost lack of concern or awareness of the future consequences of unwed, immature teens having babies. Whole cultures and lone individuals can be psychotic. Broken families make for broken students with teenagers having babies they cannot support, whose father will not support the family in an endless cycle. If the family isn’t fixed the whole society will end up on those popular television shows about dysfunctional families and relationships. Optimism is supposedly an American thing. Yet the only basis for any optimism long term is the rebirth of the family, albeit of a new type. This is the real material of sex education for young people, not condom distribution or morning-after pills.

It is worth mentioning that although there are indeed a great many genetic diseases of man it is not this type of variation that this book addresses. Here we talk exclusively about permutations, extensions, delays, exaggerations, postponements, fixations, and insurmountable obstacles to the physical and psychological ontogeny of man as each individual matures in its own life, passing briefly through embryonic forms of hermaphroditic, mammalian, and primate ancestors whose reproductive biology ordinarily remains latent because it is surpassed genetically, superseded quickly, in utero or postnatally. The fixation of genetically inherited modifications of development into the germ line cannot be absolutely instantaneous, cannot become permanent aspects of the genetic constitution unless repeated and reinforced often enough for a certain number of generations. We call this variation, to distinguish it from apparently uncaused DNA aberrations in genetic disorders, for which mutation seems a more proper nomenclature. Sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia, thalasaaemia and hundreds of other genetic defects exist and are important and they lend support to the random mutation theory. They seem not to agree at first sight to the theory in this book. This book makes no statement about all these except to say that they could possibly be Malthusian in origin too.

This next passage was written in winter of 1968. We lived in the South Ward of Newark at the time. The riots of 1967 had occurred that previous summer. My sisters and I saw some it. The National Guard, the tanks, the bullet holes in the store fronts on Bergen Street, and then the equally devastating racial polarization of the city, traces of which still have never been entirely eradicated. I was a sophomore at Weequahic High School at the time.  His emphysema was already quite severely noticeable in 1967.  He was teaching at Central High School in Newark, NJ at the time he composed the next essay. Instead of working on his book all of his free time was in my opinion wasted on all kinds of nonessential often angry discussions about local and national politics and other topics unrelated to his procrastination about his own book.  I believe that the actual subjects of this essay are the people who were our neighbors and his students in Newark.

 •   The separate individuals of a species do not all occupy the same setting. There is a range of conditions occupied by the species; and in some places organisms are comfortable, in another surfeited, in still another suffering from the beginnings of competition, and finally some, dwelling on a precarious periphery, for whom competition is radically severe. The last is producing variation in abundance, which however does not become selected and characteristic unless this condition proves to be typical. In the first setting the standard character is achieved without being strongly marked, a placid, comfortable but not vigorous population results. The surfeited could not survive in the setting of the first group, and exhibit a tendency not even to develop the character of the species and abandon the achievements won through lengthy struggle by the species. The third group have the full character, and also outstanding hardihood resulting from struggle, as befits the characteristic body of the species, which has fully earned its right to place its mark upon the new generation. The last group, barely surviving, responds with a shrunken social fertility, but an explosion of new qualities, which are ancient resources of the species, appearing in a new context. It is full of variation in which everything old is being reexplored within the matrix of the later established character. Its individuals are not very healthy, viewed from the standpoint of sexuality, comfort, sense of accommodation, sense of success, certainty of direction, sense of appropriateness to conditions, but it is characterized by a wide range of vitality, from a manifestly self-lethal proclivity, to a furiously intense, frenetic vitality or at least energy, which in the end represents the instrumentality of the transformation of the species, if the alien conditions encountered here prove to be finally the prevailing conditions whose persistence constitutes the new life setting for the whole species.

It is necessary to state in this introduction that there are far too many topics, too little time, and an actual physical impossibility for me to have professional quality expertise in the all the subjects we cross paths with here. I know there is also too much hubris, too much audacity and arrogance, even too many new ideas. I am well aware of all this and more.

He left for me a few dead end trails in his notes to follow, in other words wrong ideas, resulting in the waste sometimes of years. It would have been so much better to see him finish it; no matter what, I could never deliver to all of it proper justice. I think he would not have chosen to die anonymously. In that regard he was too shy and helpless.

For nearly a generation now molecular biologists have been hinting at his ideas. Whatever the detailed molecular mechanism may be in each case, the conjecture that variation and selection are two sides of a single event is consistent with other salient macroscopic facts. Mortality and sexual reproduction can be interpreted to function primarily to control competition within a species. Mortality eliminates the competition of the old generation. Sexual reproduction controls the reproductive rate and therefore the level competition. Sexual selection represents the substitution of competition within a species for competition between males only. Something fundamental to life definitely lies within this realm of competition control. Variation and selection are just two more parts of the adaptation process which is taking its commands from the situation regarding competition. Those theoreticians who merely call variability useful under conditions of environmental stress miss the whole point that Malthus all by himself must stand over all of it to account for variation and in order to make the theory of evolution whole and consistent. Darwin’s vision established only the first half of the theory of evolution.

No more debates now either, and this is also a very big leap of consciousness for those still skeptical about the like of apes and mammals as the ancestors of people, as well as fish and much lower forms than this in our family photo albums. Caused by competition between the generations, in human sexuality echoes and hints and almost literal reversions to ancestral sexuality commonly exist, exactly like time travel to parts of a past genetic history, where ancient sexuality gets combined with the modern human secondary sex characteristics and mating constitution. Often but not always these problems are solved by the individual. He or she grows up, as we say. When there is too great a return to sexual characteristics of the too distant past, such as that of our mammalian or even more ancient bisexual pre-amphibian ancestors, when this happens we label this as immoral or immature. Many fishes can change their sex according to environmental conditions such as water temperature and salinity; many invertebrates and protostome phyla are functionally hermaphroditic. Almost all plants at all evolutionary levels can have flowers or reproductive organs with both sexes present in the same individual. Examples of atavistic sexual phenomena are all around all the time. Friends, enemies, family, coworkers, strangers, all races, all religions, all creeds have this condition, are them all, meaning these folks contain all types of this variation.

Intelligent design of evolutionary change will become the profession of intelligent people, not an excuse to maintain ancient superstitions by those for whom the earth is still 6,000 years old. Its experimental verification would not be especially difficult, since this will mean only expanding the proof which continues to be disbelievingly amassed. Soon enough the data will become impossible to ignore. To what must be the consternation of conservatively entrenched academicians, and to the charlatan emissaries of the lord this is heresy, an abomination that will leave them aghast.

By artificially generating conditions of intraspecific competition the heredity of species can be molded in the interests of man without (or in conjunction with) the traditional vectors of genetic engineering.

Evidence from very different sources converge upon the proposition that genetic variation and natural selection must be simultaneous products of the struggle for existence caused by the Malthusian doctrine. This evidence includes numerous experiments concerning selection-induced mutations of the lac operon of bacteria, Mr. Hamilton's own inimitable evolutionary self-analysis, Freudian analysis, mythology, and the abundance right now caused by the broken family of polymorphous expressions of sexuality present in postmodern society.

Molecular biologists have a number of techniques available to add genes and DNA to the genomes of many species. Among the vectors used are phages, retroviruses, and plasmids. We are saying that there must in addition to these be a natural way to modify the genetic constitution, which is to imitate the method Mother Nature uses in the actual process of organic evolution.

Such as remarkable assertion as the simultaneity of variation and selection by competition modifies the theory of evolution in all ways. The nature of speculation, convergent evolution, the evolution of symptoms of competition and modes of selection, the role of mortality and the story of sex are all impacted in a big way. A number of leading edge biologists are already anxious to concede that variation may not be random. We want to take it one step beyond that. We say it all has one cause.

The next few entries are the style of his self-analysis. I am quite sure that originally the terms variation or variant as he means it refers to the difference he must have seen between his personality and that of his peers, first in Ohio where he born, then in Montana in his youth, and finally in NJ as an adult. It must refer to his shyness, to obstacles in his personality around girls his age. At some early age he evidently became sexually active but stopped maturing as well. The exact details are impossible to know anymore. I tried to inquire about it often with no luck.

•    There is no individual which is not a variant.

•   How profoundly marked it is with primitive features, and how little, is determined by the time, the depth and duration of the crisis in development - the crisis of competition.

•   The true representative of the species is always the old individual, but little marked by the competitive crisis but developing in the typical external struggles of the species.

•    The variants have higher, but not typical development.

•    The onset of competition between the generations, the setting of crisis, the hostile relation, causes a premature "going to seed," a premature interruption of development and an orientation of the organism towards reproduction itself, of varying degrees of permanence; so that the whole process of development is, as we know from painful personal experience, fraught with delays and hesitations, perhaps long past the classical time of preparation.

I have always been aware of the extreme unlikeliness of a new theory of evolution coming from a person with his insufficient formal educational background, so far away from persons who were then leaders in evolutionary theory. He compounded the confusion by not trying to publish anything.  

The late Robert Bentley Hamilton began in March 1953 to compose this book. Age 39 at the time, stably married and employed for a change, about to become a father for the first time, but most of all he very very curious about the events of his childhood, especially concerning the facts that he was too neglected as a child and that later his mother must have been far too inappropriately attached to him. Her husband had passed away, and, as the youngest child his mother looked to my father a source of emotional support. She actually moved with him, I learned later, to the colleges he attended to be closer to her son. I know that he was both embarrassed by this and resented it very much. At this time in 1953 he began analyzing himself in the third person about all this, leaving notes that were trying to figure out exactly what went haywire in his early life. I would say this would certainly involve prominently his own failure for a long time to find a stable occupation. This combined with a libertine sexual lifestyle antithetical for the offspring of a Victorian WASP family. I did not of course know him then, and I never met his mother or father. Something big did happen short of actual incest in the relation with his mother, exactly what the nuts and bolts are I do not know. From what I observed it was mostly late at night after everybody else went to sleep that he would write his ideas down. He only slept about four hours per night. In the next day or so I would run across his notes wherever he left them in our house. I would read and store them. In 1964 when I was ten I began to collect his handwritten notes on evolution, sexuality and on the special circumstances of his family life related to these issues. It was like a textbook with the pages all shuffled and no subtitles at all. I never knew what I was reading about. By the time he passed away in 1973 many 100's of pages of his notes came into my possession, along with what I saw as a great responsibility to deal with them effectively. A few days before he died I promised him that I would one day publish his ideas. Those nine years between age 10 and 19 have to be unlike anything any young person could have ever experienced.

Despite all of our conversations when I was an adolescent about his theories many years passed before I acquired a real understanding of what he was trying to say.  Like a pile of dinosaur bones, his notes did not come with directions.

There is far more to religion than skeptics commonly suppose, like deeply rooted, poorly understood biological and evolutionary facts that resonate instinctively and acutely, serving some vital role for this reason in people's minds, in the manner of supernormal sign stimuli. Religion is not a package of lies. Neither are they in their main importance literal historical facts. Religion is a corpus of supernormal sign stimuli speaking to an innate genetic constitution needing conceptual guidance if it is to become anything useful. All the gods and goddesses are within all of us, not out there somewhere.

Some years after his death I gave photocopies of all of his notes to Aunt Carolyn, his sister, and other relatives on my father’s side in the Phoenix, Arizona area. It took them some time to realize what I had given them. She and the rest of his family were aghast. A few years later she asked if she could return them. I said I did not care if she threw them away. I had guessed correctly that it would shock her eventually, when it had time to be digested. Except for a couple of friends I never told anybody what I was doing until my mother became very ill and I thought she should know. I would say from age 10 to about 35 I kept rereading everything he wrote until one summer I just typed it all up, all of his handwritten notes, and began giving out copies. Even then there was still much I did not get, and some things I had not yet rejected as being wrong.

My father worked in various occupations, none related in any way to his theories. The first I am aware of came from army records indicating a background in time studies in manufacturing prior to W.W.II. When I was very young he worked in the capacity of repairing heavy construction equipment, like Caterpillar tractors. Later he was high school teacher of automotive mechanics and mechanical drawing. The theory of evolution had been his and is now my own avocation. His last occupation was for a metal refining foundry where he taught science and math for various industrial trades.

As the subject of Chapter 2, the delay in his own achievement of responsible maturity (heterochrony) is attributed to what he labeled competition between the generations. What if all genetic variation, he must have asked himself, in the whole history of evolution was also due to competition within species, which competition between the generations would then be a symptom of?  This must have been his greatest essential insight, leading by induction to the principle of the necessary simultaneous duality between variation and natural selection. Darwin's theory of evolution is held intact, only expanded. His mom revealed to him, by seeking his affection and later his economic support, the clue to understanding organic evolution. She kept diary-like poems of her life, as he would later keep diary-like prose later. You cannot take Bessie Wick Hamilton or his first wife Ruth away from what made him. They made him. Together in the milieu of his day as a social phenomena they produced the critical experiences of his theories. Nothing popped out of his brain that was not interpreted experience (plus induction and deduction).

To put it another way, if competition is the outside impetus or condition producing inheritable variation, then competition between the generations would be a later evolved form of the evolution of competitive relations within a species, and Freudian analysis (the Oedipus and Electra Complexes, the topic of Chapter 3) an even more elaborate refinement of this. Freud's theories came right up to the brink of anticipating the manner by which the theory of evolution needed to be recast. It provided the means for extending Darwinism. It will not then be a surprise that serious psychological disorders attend the failure to mature into the typical heredity.

Transposable elements, hormones and the family romance are distinct stages in the evolution of the modality of variation. 

“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time” wrote the author of Das Kapital.  Endless oscillations between classical and romantic art have their evolutionary counterparts in the stability and variability of the heredity of species.

Selection-induced variation determines the individual and the social sexual morality, the social fertility, the developmental/psychological health of the young generation. It is the secret cause of the socialism of sexuality. As the lever determining the stability or variation of the young it establishes the mores and boundaries of what society finds acceptable with respect to sexuality.

The postmodern era is an extreme type of romantic episode. If modernism was, as I suspect, the reflection in art, science, literature and culture of the new predominance of the nuclear family in the West, then the postmodern era is the cultural reflection of the growing dominance of the  fractured family. The extended family gave way in the industrialized West to the nuclear family and to its cultural reflection as Modernism, which was in turn succeeded by approximately nothing at all in the way of a solid foundation for raising children. The postmodern artists express truly a tremendous human crisis. The biology of procreation has collided with economic production. In the midst of plenty the generations stand opposed as great competing armies.

A society with too many citizens fractured from within has atonality in music, the withdrawal of actual subjects in abstract art, the purposeful removal of meaning in literary criticism, accepts the withdrawal of cause and effect in Special Relativity, lives with observation itself determining experimental results in quantum theory.  Art is the measure of variation. Its social extent, the success or failure of the crisis of maturation on a mass scale, premonitions of the solution - however possibly disturbing or moving - what else can art be but an indication of the state of generational relations? The artistic production of an era is the canary in the mine shaft of its social fertility.

Postmodern culture takes its character in my opinion as the failure to resolve crises of sexual and psychological maturation as a general phenomena in the West. The high tides of postmodernism are disturbing, subjective, emotionally charged expressions of frustrated sexual development on the scale of a whole group. Its literature, art and music can be ugly.  Postmodernism is a disturbing era of human culture. Arising from the destruction of social mechanisms for nurture, it discourse is the anguish of an aggravated social illness, expressing the urgency in the West for a new type of family. 

Postmodern fascination with the like of Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other deconstructionist philosophers celebrates confusion. Along with Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man and others, serious scholars see this work as solipsism, subjective idealism, with nihilistic qualities that undermine ethical and intellectual norms of civilization. Deconstructionists propose the removal of meaning from texts. The subjective aspects of much modern art refers to inner feelings of artists. Objective realms of knowledge cannot be turned into valid subjective styles of artistic expression. This is period of poverty of a real philosophy of nature, where such a group of dilettantes obtain any standing at all. The ideological void they temporarily occupied in the seemingly godless world of fascism and genocide in the 20th century is about to filled with that which is real.

Let the pessimism of Toynbee, Spengler, Nietzsche, and their followers stay in cemeteries.  A philosophy of the future is what we need. The world must have a philosophy of optimism. It will not come from wealth or material goods. It will come from a new type of family. It will also come from a new understanding of morality. Let the popular culture celebrate sexual promiscuity, anguish and chaos. Let the women think themselves chic for the number of notches in their bed posts. Let everything bizarre triumph. Lets pretend men and women are the same thing, should seek the same things, act the same way. Lets give up, there is no future, let nihilism win the day. Lets all feel sorry for ourselves as the 21st century world outlook. The forces arrayed against the good of man are too powerful. As the consciousness of the universe, as the most unusual matter in the universe, we will not avail ourselves of the easy way out. 

At about the same time Darwin was publishing his ideas about evolution the steam engine  that empowered the Industrial Revolution was being studied and perfected. The maximum efficiency of any engine driven by the flow of heat from hot to cold is limited by an inevitable increase in the production entropy, a brilliant insight advanced by several important scientists. No exception has ever been found to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

Rudolf Clausius, who coined the term entropy in the 1850’s, Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck, Caratheodory and others immediately extended the concept of entropy production as a measure of the inevitable degradation of energy to every process and event in the universe. The law of entropy production became an apocalyptic nightmare of fatalism, nihilism. As F.W. Ostwald wrote “We must in all circumstances learn to accept the fact that at some indefinite but far-off time our civilization is doomed to go under ... and that, in the longest run, the sum of all human endeavor has no recognizable significance.”14

C. M. Dafermost, a co-author of a recent text on entropy finds a mysterious aspect about the state function entropy that is not directly observable yet pervades the whole of nature, regulating the flow of time, aging, even the demise of the universe.15  Some modern physicists regard the 2nd law as an absolute relic from a bygone age; many others consider it firmly established. Another physicist, Jos Uffink,  finds it “not easy to make sense of debates ... that the 2nd law characterizes all natural processes as Clausius first claimed.” On Plancks’ view that the 2nd law expresses the irreversibility of all natural processes he writes “ a convincing derivation of the bold claim, however, has never been made.” 16

The astronomer Fred Hoyle argued that “the 2nd law may not be universally applicable after all, that processes may be going on in the universe which are capable of making up for the universal unwinding and putting fresh power in the Spring, so that we can breath freely again.”10

To read the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a statement of the ultimate fate of the universe is to apply a law pertaining to heat flow and chemical reactions to levels of material being whose own internal laws of physics and nature do not include anything relevant to heat engines. The so-called universal laws of nature pertain to particular scales of size, form, type and material organization only. Even cause and effect, like left-right parity, so apparently universal, grow fuzzy at the level of quantum physics in favor of probabilities.

The 2nd law applies to living matter no more than Newton’s Laws or Maxwell’s Equations have any relevance to matter at this level of organization. Biological evolution, the counterpositioning of heredity and metabolism, is no more a heat engine than a bunch of particles or waves. That physical laws pertain to unique domains of materiality and seldom beyond, restores a sense of optimism to the whole universe and the human condition.

No one has ever quantified anything called biological entropy, besides the fact that the only equilibrium condition in evolution has nothing whatever to do with temperature or heat flow from hot to cold. Biological evolution is a constant adjustment of heredity and fertility to new resources, so that the the equilibrium of minimal entropy production in thermodynamics and chemical kinetics never plays any role in the production of variation or in natural selection. The living state transcends the limitations placed upon the behavior of heat and mere chemicals.

 “Do, act, be,” my father used to say sometimes. “And don’t worry about all this frustrated genius bullshit,” he said.  Men and women need to end their cold war. We need democracy between the sexes, and we need a new way to bring this peace in the interests of raising children properly again. The theory of evolution has all these things and more. 

By all means you should know what the theory of evolution is if you want to be a person in the new millennium. The theory of evolution is a New Reformation, for all men and women, all creeds and religions. Group variation, group selection, and altruism will be the only things left standing when the modern evolutionary synthesis disintegrates and 1000's of different religions cannot all be literally true at the same time.

China, by limiting each family to 1-2 children in the last generation or so, has wiped out a family system many 1,000s of years old. Westernization, not only of production methods and economic ways, but of its citizens’ values would be a likely if unintentional result of this social experiment. It would not be too much to guess that China will be soon plagued by an epidemic of rude, poorly raised children that infest too many public schools in America. These young ego monsters are tamable.

 Postmodernism is an “I” culture whose resolution is a “we” culture. I think we in the West could could learn much from the East about the meaning of this. Evolution has never been about the individual variant. 

 "I"  cultures are rife with intergenerational strife, played out as the consequence of a lack of achievement of self-leisures. It's not that the advertisers are creating consumerism. They are taking advantage of a certain self-centered, nurture-induced (or rather deprived), cultural tendency which has inverted the Copernican solar system so that the planets revolve now around every individual. The biggest difference between East and West is that that Eastern cultural philosophy is suitable for, reflects, an enduring cultural result of a stable family. It is from the broken families that the “I” culture of the occident stands apart is sharp contrast. The statistical superiority of any economic system does not translate into what artists and such do. The family does that. 

Much of the change in the nature of the family to make the divorce rate so high has to do with women not being the chattel property of men anymore. That long, long era is fast disappearing now. The mobility of labor also upset stable communities. Men are no longer the supreme masters. When heavy labor prevailed they ruled. Now it is over in America and many other places.  Metaphorically speaking, the female goddess is about to resume her rightful place on the throne in the family circle. Thousands of years ago she lost it. The new family culture will be hers. Feminism, at least ultra feminism, implies a hatred of men in my understanding of the word as it is used by professed ultra feminists resulting from a mental hatred of men instead of instinctual resistance to intercourse overcome by social considerations that never developed. To me ultra feminism is just another hate culture, led by women who complain that men see them only as sex objects, for whom an essential instinct has been not fully developed. Extreme feminism is a defect of the psyche, caused by the frustration of an instinct by maternal intervention (or more generally, the nurture). Most girls and women enjoy their status and privilege associated with womanhood, femininity, beauty, in the difference in their nature and ways from men's’ ways. Mother Earth (Magna Mater), or simply just the Mother Nature movement is a good word for the new culture we need. The new cultural epoch we as a family of human beings need is a new and democratic association between the sexes. We must acknowledge how different men and women are from each other, and find a way for peaceful coexistence.  Effective child rearing will then virtually take care of itself. Postmodernism takes most of its character from a breakdown in sexual relations, from sexual misunderstanding of each other, all compounded by the “me first” mentality. The whole society in the West is arrested in its own ontogeny. Postmodernism is its outstanding symptom, an epoch where there is taking place a vast search for something new in the mode of human adaptation. Not much different really from E. Coli in the stationary phase activating their transposable elements to adapt to new food types. A new theory of sex and a real theory of the meaning of the nurture process will go a long way towards ushering in a new epoch in human history, where the sexes finally begin to understand each other, and not own or rule each other, or at least learn not to flaunt it. 

For the reader I expect that the first author’s compositions will be especially challenging. He forces you into intense concentration, insisting upon the attention in the afterlife he needed while on this planet as a young person. In the end this is the metamessage of his sometimes brutal conceptual density. As for me, I hope I got it mostly right, although to be perfectly frank this is a more than I expect happened. No one should ever wish for his type of brilliance.  For me it was at times more a Pandora's Box than anything else to deal with his notes. So much trouble, only hope to work with.  So there may be other explanations than what I interpret as what he would have written about. People may not agree on much; still there is this one concept of variational and selective duality that stands by itself and by itself changes the entire world. We can work around the rest of it. Know this single fact and Chapter 6 and you’ve digested plenty.

Being that it took for me many years to decipher everything you see highlighted in bold, I like to think that no one will be able to skim this book. The conceptual density is great enough for more than one book for sure, if I ever had the expertise necessary in psychiatry, sociology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, etc. perhaps I would have done it that way. As it is this book contains perhaps one half of all of my father’s writing. The rest I either deemed to be in error or essentially a duplication. If he had been guilty of any plagiarism I would have run into it by now.

Chapter 6, what I have called Marriage, has statements more insightful than anything I have ever seen in matters of sex, romance and marriage. Many are beyond my ability to annotate, so I have left that pleasure/labor to the reader.  Also there is in Chapter 6 the evolutionary basis, not just the psychological basis of relationships that do not work, but behavior that is guaranteed to be unsuccessful in the romantic or reproductive world. This was the material that I was able to grasp first. I still find it the most fun to read. They are almost like a chapter of scientific poems, all of which I agree with, none of which were especially easy to see the meaning of for me. Actually, daunting is a better term for how I experienced reading them.

One of my strongest memories is of a day just a few days before he passed away, which  occurred December 28, 1973. I held his hand in his hospital bed and he communicated to me by pretending to speak. “Say the theories are yours!” He was connected via a tube inserted into his throat to a respirator and could not talk. I just laughed and shook my head no. He must have wanted to be reassured about this, with the end obviously near.

Notebook 1, 1953

This is his earliest surviving writing, composed starting in March, 1953. The first 5-10 pages from this notebook contain not much very noteworthy. Then all of a sudden statements like the following suddenly appear as if out of nowhere, and for the next 20-years it does not stop. This is  his earliest statement about evolution.

Reproduction is a derivative form of metabolism - metabolism in the setting of critical variations of milieu. It is metabolism in the only form which permits organic adaptation. In this sense it is the species which is the organism, and its organs (members) constantly accommodate to the changing setting of the species by this special metabolic activity which, through a succession of generations, permits the total adaptation of the organism to take place rapidly enough.

The succession of generations is the primary mechanism, but the variation of generations is the next requirement. The succession of generations implies conservatism in the hereditary material: the achievements of the adaptation must be preserved. The variety of reproductive methods constitutes the means for realizing the possibilities of change implied by the succession of generations.  The specialized methods of reproduction - gametic and sexual - are the instrument for overcoming the conservatism of the species, the means for permitting a rapid accommodation to a changing setting. Gametic reproduction permits a sharing of the critical experience of two hereditary lines, while complete sexual reproduction which necessarily implies male sexual selection, permits not only a sharing of two hereditary lines, but a union of the female gamete with a highly select male gamete, so that the process of accommodation is very much more rapid and flexible, though the female genetic elements in the selected male gamete preserves the essential conservatism of the general heredity.

Selection and the succession of generations are then a unitary process. Each requires the other, and together, in alliance with a means of variation, they are the mechanism of organic evolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF INTRODUCTION

1. Dawkins, R., The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin Co, Boston, 2004.

2.   Wolpoff, M., How Neandertals Inform Human Variation, Amer. J. Phys. Anthro., 139: 91-102, 2009.

3.  Gerhart, J., Cells, Embryos and Evolution, Blackwell Science, Oxford, 1997.

4.  Templeton, A.R., Out of Africa Again and Again, Nature 416: 45-51, 2002.

5.  Feduccia, A., The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996.

5a. Janvier, P., Living Primitive Fishes and Fishes From Deep Time, in Primitive Fishes, McKenzie D.J., Farrell, A.P., and Brauner, C.J. (Eds.), 

6.  Frayer, D., Wolpoff, M.H., Thorne, A.G., Smith, F.H., and Pope, G.G., Theories of Modern Human Origins:The Paleontological Test,  American Anthropologist  95:14-50, 1993.

7. Tattersal, Ian, and Schwartz, Jeffrey, Extinct Humans, A Peter N. Nevraumont Book, Cambridge, 2001.

8. Leroi, Armand, M., Mutants, Viking, NY, 2003.

9. Zhu, Min, and Alberg, Per. E., Origin of the Internal Nostril of Tetrapods, Nature, V432, 4 Nov., 2004.

10. Olson, Steve, Mapping Human History, Mariner Book, NY, 2002.

11.   The Genetics and Biology of Sex Determination - No. 244 Novartis Foundation Symposium, March 2002.

12. Hardy, Ian C.W, (Ed.) Sex Ratios, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.

13. Scherer, G., and Schmid, M. (Eds.) Genes and Mechanisms in Vertebrate Sex Determination, Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 2003.

13A.  Gillette, A., Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture Debate, Palgrave Macmillian, NY, 2007.

14. Toulmin, S., Hepburn, R.W., Macintyre, A., Metaphysical Beliefs, SCM Press LTD, London, 1957.

15.  Dafermos, C.M., Entropy For Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, in Entropy, Grevan A., Keller, G., and Warnecke G. (Eds.), Princeton Univ. Press, 2003. 

 16. Uffink, J., Irreversibility And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics, in Entropy, Grevan A., Keller, G., and Warnecke G. (Eds.), Princeton Univ. Press, 2003.