Furies In The Genome

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FURIES IN THE GENOME

ON THE SIMULTANEITY OF

VARIATION AND SELECTION

By Robert B. Hamilton and

Robert M. Hamilton, Ph.D.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction 1

Human Evolution

Entropy

1. Towards a New Theory of Evolution 43

Reproductive crisis as the central evolutionary question

Stationary phase mutations

Transposable elements

Somaclonal variation

Mathematics of variation

General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.) - Hans Selye

2. Variation in the First Person 85

Biography of R. B. Hamilton

The inheritance of IQ

Premature sexual activity and early libertine lifestyle

The Maternal Relation

Evolution in an Autobiography

3. Oedipus and Electra 133

The Furies

The Olympians were hypermasculine variants

Freud's theories reach into evolutionary theory.

Immature male sexuality

Immature female sexuality

East vs West in psychology

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual

Mutations in Man

Congenital mutations

Autism

The Metabolic Syndrome

4. Sex & Death 175

The Evolution of sex and death

The role of mortality

The role of sex

Small differences can be decisive in selection

Supranatural Selection

5. Famous Human Variants 215

Prophets, shaman, artists, scientists as successful human variants

Consciousness and innovation

Eve and Helen of Troy

Sex duality and mutual aid

6. Marriage 253

The biology of marriage

Speculation about the future

7. Education 311

Postnatal nurture

Learning is required because instinctive adaptations are too slow

The developmental stature of education

8. Epilogue 315

Future experiments,

Secular theory of values.

Index 337

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 my father’s own troubled family where generational strife reached a high pitch in his youth during the 1920's-1930's. His family experienced in a difficult way the transition from farming to the industrial age. The end of the family farm way of life was a major trend in the US at that time. 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 and infantile ids 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, 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.

With subjective idiosyncrasies Sigmund Freud’s theories about Electra and King Oedipus made their way right up to the front door of the theory of evolution. 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 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 me 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 him 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, proceeding 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.

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 as 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.

A new appreciation for and understanding of what endocrinologists call stress is necessary. Stress of the highest rank is that of competition from overpopulation within a species and between generations. This very special form of stress dispenses organic and psychological variation. Problems with IQ and immature personality are “only“ an extension into the stages of childhood of problems with organogenesis and tissue differentiation, which can and often do appear very early in gestation as the metabolic syndrome (sometimes called fetal programming) in times of generational stress. Low IQ is part of the disorder spectrum of the metabolic syndrome. Its ultimate logic is the denial of the full genetic inheritance in favor of a trial period of varied arrangements of the genetic constitution. It takes a tremendous effort to sufficiently restore successful adaptative power when the classical genetic character is diluted due to delays. This forms the hardiness of a people, or its apathy. This must be the origin of free will, determination, human effort. Also defeat, the withdrawal of effort, depression, the faces of supranatural selection.

There is scientific evidence that prenatal stress at critical stages of the sexual differentiation of the brain during the third trimester of pregnancy, and as experienced during secondary sexual differentiation during puberty, can cause the genetic sexuality of the zygote to be in conflict with the sexuality of gender identity and sexual orientation. What my father refers to as the emphasis of primitive aspects of the genetic constitution as the general method of evolution appears in the scientific literature to me to resemble more the cancellation or sabotage of established features. In new environments in times of great competitive crisis, some very few such mutations must bear the potential character of successful experiments, with slight advantages at times, even if the restriction of fertility is the only momentary advantage.

What a young person experiences as anxiety translates the consequences of childhood oedipal problems into the breakdown of perfected intellectual talents (including multiple intelligences) deployed for normal adaptation. The metabolic syndrome consists of all manner of genetically linked disturbances of the nervous system, energy metabolism, and cardiovascular system. Diabetes, insulin resistance, obesity, hypertension, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, arthritis, low birth weight, precocious idiopathic puberty, and other serious disorders are associated with maternal stress during pregnancy and the resulting “metabolic syndrome” and “fetal programming.”

It would not be surprising to find out that many common human diseases have corrosive generational strife and an objective lack of adaptation in social conditions as hidden social dynamics. What endocrinologists have been saying for a long time about disease is that the endocrine system is a major player in the evolutionary realms of variation and selection. The endocrine system places the individual within the species in the most powerful examples of its functional logic.

What he observed, all the things he wrote about under the heading of human variation, were composed with no knowledge of molecular biology, and very rough information about clinical endocrinology. In the 1950’s molecular biology, gene cloning, and the detailed study of DNA mutations in humans did not exist; anyway he had no access to scientific journals or other sources of essential scientific information. The internet was more than a generation away. Under the heading maternal stress during pregnancy and childhood, modern science has shown in animal experiments that in times of competition the endocrine hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) cancels or scrambles progress towards sexual maturity and can cause intersexual variants. Varied endocrinology deployed in times of such stress can give rise to the notion that evolution reaches into the evolutionary past for possible future adaptations, which must be what my father was seeing and writing about. One of the tasks was to match known endocrine responses to stress in humans and animals to known genetics. One possible result of the hypothalamic withdrawal of permission for sexual maturation (due to competition between the generations) could be the persistence into adulthood of mammalian sexuality. This must be the default position if the construction process of human secondary sexual characteristics is rendered incompletely by the HPA axis that withdraws essential gonadal steroids.

The brain circuits of male animals can be feminized across the placenta by maternal adrenal sex hormones during stressed pregnancies; female animals can likewise be masculinized in the adult behaviors by maternal adrenal activity at the right moment due to maternal stress at critical times. These experiments are described in Chapter 3. They have been known for a long time. They are politically incorrect to mention, such experiments can never be done to humans, and, as they reject selfish genes and imply group selection, they weigh too much for the Modern Synthesis.

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 imitated. The heretofore invisible foundation of human sexual morality is also uncovered. In times of competition between the generations 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. Evolution excludes from the international family of man no person, regardless of sexual orientation or anything else. The welcome arms of the human 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, some 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 hermaphroditism, stunted stillborn embryos, and a vast number of nervous, endocrine, developmental, and metabolic disorders, etc. Chapter 3 has a discussion of human mutations in relation to the theory that genetic variation takes place because of crises of reproduction.

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 a 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 through 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.

The theory of evolution has come a very long way 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 could potentially 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. That other tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of immortality, suggests a level of brilliance in the author(s) of Genesis seldom seen before or since. Back then did they already recognize what we have long since forgotten, that sexual reproduction overthrew immortality? Is there an echo from the bottom of the well? Sex and mortality is the main subjects of Chapter 4. Famous human variants, such as the prophets and saints who founded religions, 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. 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.

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 from 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 valid 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.

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.

• The achievement of successful features is the path to sexual expression, at all levels, in all species. This is the relation between sex and evolution.

• The modern role of sex, and the general impression one takes from its urgent character in all levels of evolutionary development, suggests that even metabolism is subordinate to it.

• 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 at 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 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 re-explored 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 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 an 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.

• 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 used to say.