|
INTRODUCTION
Inheritance of mtDNA is usually assumed to be from the maternal mitochondrial genome only. In recent years examples of paternal contributions to offspring mtDNA have become numerous.16 Paternal mtDNA leakage in sheep has unequivocally been shown.17, 18 Heteroplasmy was found in guanaco (Lama guanicoe),19 and direct evidence of paternal inheritance of mitochondria DNA was shown in sheep.20
Comparing human and chimp DNA in Almost Chimpanzee (2010), Jon Cohen describes awkward inconsistencies associated with proposed molecular clocks and constant mutation rates. On average the divergence time predicted of when the human and chimp lineages separated centers on 7.5 million years ago. (Other investigations, relying on different statistical procedures, place this divergence time closer to 4.7 million years. For over 4 decades this date has been under investigation without any firmly established interval. This in itself is an outstanding fact about the non-utility of molecular clocks.) Not all chromosomes have the same predicted divergence times. Mutation rates show considerable variation between different chromosomes, genes, even along different sites in DNA sequences on the same chromosome. Some human chromosomes are predicted to have much longer divergence times, while others seems much younger in their genetic distance from chimpanzees than 7.5 million years. The differences amount to as much as 6.3 - 11 million years. The mitochondrial DNA control region mutation rate vastly exceeds the protein-coding mitochondrial DNA. These rate disparities are a direct challenge to the Neutral Theory of molecular evolution, since they imply mutations that are neither random nor selectively neutral. Cohen resorts to the unlikely idea of subsequent hybridization between chimps and man to account for the apparent recent origin of some DNA during the course of evolutionary divergence.21
Armed with the formidable mathematics of the Neutral Theory of Evolution the Modern Synthesis confidently asserts that evolution is a stochastic process, perhaps analogous to radioactivity and quantum mechanical phenomena. Except that these phenomena from physics exist on a different scale of nature from biological evolution. It has barricaded itself around the “politically correct” interpretation of human evolution that modern humans evolved once in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago and subsequently populated the globe. The most ancient modern human skeletons are in fact from that area and time. Modern human skulls and bodies did evolve in Africa, based on the fossil record. In parallel, they also evolved in Europe and Asia. The theory of evolution has come down to the nucleotide substitution pattern in the noncoding regions of mtDNA extracted from three fossil sites from eastern and southern Africa dating between 100,000 to 195,000 years ago. The most ancient fossil hominins yet discovered having a modern skull and skeleton are from Omo Kibish, Ethiopia, dated at 195,000 years in age. Next in age are the fossils from Herto, Middle Awash in Ethiopia dating between 160,000 to 154,000 years ago. The third fossils that this debate is focused on were dated at 100,000 years ago in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth.3 None of these African specimens were yet associated with the most modern stone age culture or technology. The Aurignacian (in Europe) or the New Stone Age (its equivalent in Africa) had not arrived in these Ethiopian and South African fossil finds. Having a modern skull and skeleton does not necessarily mean concealed ovulation, secondary sexual characteristics, three generations living in unison, sexual duality, a sexual division of labor, or even permanent sexual pairing. All these must have been powerful orthogenic trends driving the evolution of modern human for at least 2 million years, whether finally achieved once in Africa or many times all over three continents. These truly modern human features could have theoretically evolved with the crude structural/cranial physiology of say H. erectus. The culture level of the hominins found at these three crucial African sites were Mousterian, on an equal level with the technological capability of Neanderthal Man who were their contemporaries in Europe at the time. 22 Mitochondrial Eve could turn out to have been not even a modern human, even if there is a mitochondrial clock in its DNA that ticks for some reason like a radioactive isotope decaying into lighter, more stable elements. Out of the 16,571 nucleotide base pairs in human mtDNA there are two regions with a combined total of 610 base pairs that do not code for genes. There are 2 Hypervariable Regions (control regions, or displacement loop D-regions) termed HV-1 and HV-2. Both HV-1 and HV-2 are important for genetic forensics, ancestry and maternal investigations. HV-1 has 342 base pairs between nucleotides 16,024 to 16, 365. HV-2 is 268 base pairs in length residing between codon numbers 73-340. HV-1 and HV-2 are the mitochondrial DNA codon positions where transcription of the coding regions begin. They are known to be much more variable in base pair composition than nuclear DNA or the coding regions of mtDNA. Exactly how these 2 Hypervariable Regions mutate, whether by a predictable clock-like pattern of base substitution linear in time, or by some hidden cause and effect resembling punctuated equilibrium, determines the outcome of the debate over mitochondrial Eve or the Multiregional Theory. The last battle of the evolution war is taking place on this ground, where Out of Africa predictions of the Neutral Theory (the mathematical form of the Modern Synthesis) have reached the attention of popular science and the news media. Evolution based on chance mutations that have no effect or nearly no effect, that take place according to some clock-like rhythm, that lack selective or survival value, where alleles diffuse through populations like the conduction of heat, in fact amounts to the study of population genetics in times of relatively stable species adaptation. The Neutral Theory of evolution and its molecular clocks of mutation amount to the study of evolution in periods when significant crises of competition do not exist, where species are not evolving, where genetic variability has not been summoned by crises in the struggle for existence. The Neutral Theory and its mitochondrial molecular clocks are calibrated to discover the absence of genetic variation and natural selection. The expanding list of important exceptions to the validity of mitochondrial DNA in determining the timing of evolutionary change, while very important, will not by itself defeat the Modern Synthesis with the necessary finality. Only a better theory of evolution can do that, and no more important test is how to interpret the diverse genetic, archeological, linguistic, and cultural facts about human evolution. Sensing the possible weakness of the Modern Synthesis, the authors of The Climate Connection (2010) Rene Hetherington and Robert G.B. Reid refer to Emergence Theory as a new way to understand evolutionary change that is saltatory. They write: “if human emergence operated through unpredictable periods of static equilibrium punctuated by rapid change, and not through continuous evolution, it is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the molecular clock. A regular tick is the essence of a clock that keeps time. To average irregular ticks for the sake of estimating evolutionary points or origin may be wasting time.3 Even if mitochondria are in origin bacterial symbionts in the eukaryotic cell, the fact that the 13 genes they encode are all in the respiratory chain means that mitochondria are in a decisive position in the line of authority concerning states of metabolic competition. They encode the most basic of all aerobic metabolic enzymes of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, and ATP synthesis. The mitochondrial genome consists of a single circular chromosome just like bacterial genomes. Its 16, 571 base pairs in man are not annotated with introns in the way that nuclear chromosomes are dominated by noncoding genes; its transcription is clockwise; besides its 13 genes of the respiratory chain it encodes 22 transfer RNAs. 17 (As an aside, regarding the origin of mitochondria as a bacterial symbiont. The bacteria Paracoccus denitrificans is sometimes called a free living mitochondrion because its genes are so similar to those of an actual mitochondrion. Mutations can be engineered into this organism that mimic the metabolic changes found in human cardioencephalomyopathy, a fatal metabolic disorder.) It would be surprising if the mitochondria's separate genome from the nuclear genome didn’t have some still unknown but essential role in communicating to the cell and the nucleus information about nutritional stress and the current status of competition. Any modified transcriptional output of mtDNA in quantity or rate would be a canary in the coal mine of aerobic metabolism in crisis, an early warning system of competition in times of nutritional stress. The absence of ATP, or problems in the operation of the TCA cycle or of oxidative phosphorylation, would be extremely essential indications of immanent starvation, of competition, of a state of great alarm. It must be of particular significance beyond their origin as prokaryotic symbionts in the eukaryotic cell that mitochondria have their own genome, that they inherited maternally, and that 100s to 1000s of copies of the mitochondrial genome exist in every cell. The coding regions of mtDNA are known to be virtually intractable and intolerant to mutations, with fatal genetic diseases as consequences. Hyper variability of the mitochondrial DNA control region (HVCR) as the place where transcription begins cannot be altogether without selective or mutational significance, as the Neutral Theory supposes. Mutations in the hyper variable control region are variations in the only part of the genome where mutations are even conceivable, considering the vital conservatism of aerobic energy metabolism. These mutations of the HVCR, which are known to exist across diverse animal and plant phyla, must be subtler warning signs to the cells, not random meaningless noise. The mitochondrial genome is as inflexible to cells as the earliest stages of ontogeny are to metazoan species. Even seemingly trivial mutations in the main energy dynamo of the cell, leaving no transcriptional trace, cannot be without great importance in the biochemical vocabulary and syntax of variation and competition. Mutations in HVCR of human mitochondrial DNA are supposed to be selectively indifferent, of no use or harm in their clock-like rate of appearance through evolutionary time. This is the usual assumption tracing backwards in time to when mutations in this region may have occurred. Yet even their rare appearance has been called into question beginning with the discovery of heteroplasmy in the mtDNA of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II. Heteroplasmy is the presence of more than one mtDNA type among the 100s of normally identical copies of mitochondrial DNA, especially mutant types inherited from the mother alongside the normal DNA. The Tsar had inherited two types of mitochondrial DNA from his mother. Molecular biologist Mitchell Holland, Director of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab in Rockville, MD reports that heteroplasmy occurs in at least 10% and probably 20% of humans. The mtDNA mutation rate can be as much as 20-fold faster than previously estimated. Forensic scientists and evolutionary biologists were stunned to find 1 mutation every 40 generations instead of 1 mutation every 600 generations.18 Indifference to natural selection is assumed for the haplotype defining mutations in the regulatory region of mitochondrial DNA. Exceptions to the supposed neutrality of mtDNA control region mutations are therefore extremely serious for the single origin theory of human evolution. For example, in a 2009 investigation Sarit Suissa et al. studied the transcriptional efficiency in vitro of 2500 complete human mtDNAs representing all major human populations worldwide. Compared to other defining haplotypes of human populations the “J” mitochondrial haplotype mutations in the regulatory region showed significant functional non-neutrality. Within the mtDNA control region they showed that some single nucleotide base changes in the “J” defining variants significantly increased the transcriptional efficiency and elevated the mtDNA copy numbers in cells.19 Almost nothing else in the 3.5 billion-year fossil record of life on earth has been as 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 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 Neanderthal-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 H. 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 anywhere 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 Australopithecines, 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 a review paper published in China in 2006 Xinzhi Wu summarized the results of his years of study of multiregional evolution. He supports the 1984 theory of Wolpoff and others as the best account of the regional continuity of fossil characteristics in China. Regional continuity of human evolution in China, with hybridization, is consistent with the unique persistence in China of the Acheulean tool making technique, long after Africa and Europe had moved on to new methodology. Recent out-of-Africa scenario is not consistent with “the mid-sagittal keeling, the mandibular torus, the pinched nasal saddle, and the congenital agenesis of the third molar (that) are present in recent East Asian skulls in different frequencies but absent in recent African skulls. “It is important to recognize that each locus in the human genome can capture only a fraction of the human history, and different loci can have rather different genealogies. Thus, some conclusions from different loci are necessarily conflicting. In respect of the origin of modern humans in China, the total replacement conclusion based on some genes of Y-chromosome thus needs to be more carefully considered.”19a In 1993 David Frayer et al. argued that the multiregional 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 Wiedenreich 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. 19 Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky thought there was a linear progression in time from Australopithecus to erectus to sapien. They recognized the great variability of all members of this series, which is to be expected for a species in the throes of punctuated evolution. 20 One of the weakest assertions of the African Eve model is the requirement that the racial distinctions that exist now had to come into existence after the intellectual capabilities of man evolved. The evolution of culture would have rendered organic evolution obsolete. It is a real weakness in the African Eve theory that the modern races must have evolved following the exodus of modern humans from African 100,000 years ago. Professor Wolpoff and the multiregionalists assert the beginnings of such differences to be 2 million years old, as ancient as Homo erectus. African Eve advocates attribute the great genetic variability of modern humans in Africa today as being due to 100,000 years of evolution. The diversity of many genetic markers has been determined to be highest in Africa, including mtDNA. Africa has the greatest number of language families of any continent. It is also the home of several different body types: pigmoid, West African, and East African. While the African Eve specialists interpret all this as evidence for a single origin, the multiregionalists interpret Africa as its own theater of simultaneous human evolution, parallel to and contiguous with the European and Asian theaters of human evolution. Africa had its own multiple and unique trajectories by which the human condition was reached, as unique as what took place in Europe and Asia. The great variability within the fossil ancestors of modern man amounted to an assortment of initial conditions, leading to a family of related but distinct evolutionary trajectories. Man was never a single clonal entity throughout any region where fossils have been unearthed. No sudden, rare mutation caused modern humans to appear once by some miracle. Looking backwards or forwards, were never defined by one set of uniform, definite traits. We did not evolve once from one set of starting materials. We evolved multiple times in rough but not perfect unison across 3 continents of the whole Old World. The starting materials were not uniform; our various ancestors varied considerably even within continents. What we apprehend today as various races is due originally to the considerable diversity in form of our succession of ancestors. Since 10,000 years ago all people were hunter-gatherers, the subsequent differential development of certain regions has been fundamentally driven by sex, as recorded or not recorded in the original sin stories and by the creative acts of dual sexuality goddesses. The absence of such stories in the myths of most traditional cultures and in most of the Far East is the telling account of their comparative stability of consanguinity, culture and psychology. Culturally the Khoisan of southern Africa are two ethnic groups, the foraging San, and the pastoral Khoi. The Khoisan include the !Kung San of southern Africa who are famous for their unique click languages. They have short frames but are not pygmies, have copper brown skin, and have epicanthic eye folds resembling Asian features that are quite distinct from the majority of Africans. The Hottentot apron is a genetically determined elongation of the labia minora, hanging about 4 inches outside the vulva. It would seem to allow women to exert greater control over the possibility of sexual intercourse. The naked human body with concealed genital opening, concealed by pubic hair and other structures, is evidence for organic evolution leading up to the Homo sapien condition. The Hottentot apron and the steatopygous body are local forms of secondary sex characteristics that exist everywhere to one degree of elaboration or another.The multiregionalist viewpoint is that is that the various human body types, skin colors, hair textures, skull shapes, dentation patterns, etc., existed before the evolution of modern man’s full intellectual capabilities. After humanity began its primary reliance on a cultural voyage of adaptation, the premises of organic evolution, such as selective conditions necessary for local racial differentiation, would have become secondary, a second-rate power. The modern human condition was reached by a fistful of slightly different parallel trajectories, starting with racial categories that are relics of the deep past. Linguists who have joined the discussion about African Eve are divided about the possibility of a single recent common origin for all languages, including all 12 major language families primarily proposed by the famous linguist Joseph Greenberg. A single origin for all languages fits well with the supposed archaeological and genetic evidence for the origin of all humans from a small group that left Africa. With 4 of its own language families Africa has the greatest number of language families of any continent. Matching these families of unique languages, Luigi Cavalli-Svorza has shown by studying the genetic variability in African populations of 21 different genes that there are systematic genetic differences corresponding to the Khosian, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic language families in Africa. The diversity of many genetic markers is highest in Africa, except for Y chromosome diversity, which in Africa has the lowest diversity compared to Europe and Asia. There is much evidence to show that genetic diversity in America is lower than on other continents.21, 23 In The Human Career (2010) Richard G. Klein provides a thorough recent review of the state of fossil and other evidence with respect to human evolution. He accepts the African Eve theory but is very candid about contrary evidence. He is least confident about the Asian fossil record, including Australia, and Polynesia. “Hominin fossils and artifacts together suggest that eastern Asian populations after 1 million years ago followed a different evolutionary trajectory than their African, west Asian, and European contemporaries. Arguably, east Asian fossils imply two different trajectories: one in southeastern Asia, where classic H. erectus morphology persisted from 1 million years ago until perhaps 50,000 years ago, and a second in China where people by 200,000 years ago combined massive uninterrupted browridges, keeled, flat, receding frontal bones, low vault heights, and other features of classic H. erectus with larger more rounded braincases, less massive faces, and other advanced features that mark H. sapiens.” The Chinese skulls recall H. heidelbergensis and parallel evolution is favored “because the Chinese archeological record so far reveals no evidence for population intrusion” (by Afro-European H. heidelbergensis). Continuing his discussion of the uniqueness of East Asian human evolution Klein writes: “Ancient east Asians never manufactured typical Acheulean hand axes, even if it sometimes produced tools that appear equally sophisticated. Artifact assemblages remained similar between Africa and Europe after 500,000 years ago, while so far as we know, the Far East continued on its own distinctive course.” Even the most strident advocates of Mitochondrial Eve admit an Asian multiregional exception.22
Ceremonial Neanderthal interments with items 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 in France 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 possess somewhat the nature of 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 Paleolithic cave drawings are almost never as completely and realistically rendered as the animal images. These were hardy, robust people; psychologically without narcissism or egoism; of a mindset the same across two continents (Europe and Africa). One of the interesting features of some of the cave art in Paleolithic Europe is the great difficulty in actually reaching the interior spaces where the painted cave walls are famously hidden. In a significant number of these caves it is almost as though a significant intention is for the initiate to render a pantomime of a difficult journey with a sort of spiritual awakening finally experienced on the other side. In the absence of written language the whole experience, including the difficult journey to enter the realm of the actual cave paintings, might to be a semaphore, a symbolic reenactment of an epic. If these caves were secret places of male rites and initiation ceremonies, then the animals and hunting scenes depicted might be idealized visions of the highest pitch of skill and attainment, of the mature competence of what the men in those families and clans, using all of their effort and imagination, could in the best of cases grow up to possess (including knowledge of the animals and hunting skills). Those fully modern humans of the cave art epoch made what are undoubtedly underground cathedrals, temples, or mosques. They could have been deeply spiritual and sophisticated enough to create a stage show repeated generation after generation for thousands of years of what would eventually become our written epic literature, scripture, rites, and liturgy.Their bible was composed in 3-dimensions. 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 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. Sequencing of the entire human genome has only added more weight to this. Intra-ethnic genomic variability can be greater than inter-ethnic. 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,20 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 resuscitation, and a modern sensibility. Wu Xinshi has argued that Chinese people were derived from a succession of oriental types, versions in time of what are called 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 conceived by this gathering or regionally specific evidence, no matter how impossible random mutations make the numerical impossibility of regional fossils of man seem. Joseph Campbell, in his books and during his popular public television interviews during the 1990s with host Bill Moyers, also felt that mythological, anthropological, and fossil evidence all point to the Multiregional Theory and converging evolutionary trajectories, simultaneous solutions to the same problem of encountered competition, the achievement of modern humanity multiple times, the unity of which is proven by the fact that world mythology has very few repeated themes. Europeans, according 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 a 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 interpreters of the Modern Synthesis, 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.The molecular genetics of human skin pigmentation has proceeded far enough to add some weight from a new direction to the picture of human evolution proceeding at the same time on three continents (with hybridization at regional boundaries). Human skin, eye, and hair pigmentation is a complex process controlled by many genes. The best studied gene controlling pigmentation is the melanocortin 1 receptor gene (MC1R). Variants of the MC1R gene that are associated with red hair is due to switching between eumelanin and pheomelanin production in melanocytes. The MC1R gene shows an interesting pattern of polymorphism worldwide. There is “a surprising lack of diversity (of the MC1R gene) in sub-Saharan Africa; in particular, nonsynonymous nucleotide variants (mutations having an effect on protein synthesis) were absent in all the African samples analyzed. Similarly, the frequency of amino acid variants in other dark-skinned populations, such as Papuans and South Asians, was very low. This lack of diversity in dark-skinned populations can be explained as a result of a strong functional constraint on MC1R.” In Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia the MC1R gene is highly polymorphic. “In fact, the levels of nucleotide diversity observed in the MC1R gene in these populations are higher than the values observed in other autosomal genes. More than 30 alleles have been reported in European populations, with more than 20 nonsynonymous variants. Importantly, at least nine nonsynonymous variants are present at frequencies of 1% or higher in European populations. Four of these mutations have a strong association with the red hair/fair skin phenotype, while three show only a weak association. It is important to mention that individuals harboring these functional variants burn easily and have poor tanning capacity, and numerous studies have indicated that these variants increase the risk of melanoma and nonmelanoma skin cancers. The variation of the gene MC1R in Asian populations has not been studied as extensively as in European populations, but the available data indicate high levels of polymorphism in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Asian populations are characterized by high frequencies of two nonsynonymous variants which are also present at much lower frequencies in European populations. The study of the genes underlying human pigmentation diversity brings to the forefront the mosaic nature of human genetic variation: our genome is composed of a myriad of segments with different patterns of variation and evolutionary histories.26
Another gene of importance in determining eye, skin, and hair coloration is the SLC24A5 gene. It was discovered first in zebra fish where it determined the golden color of the fish embryos. This gene and its proteins have been conserved in vertebrates, playing a role in melanosome morphogenesis and pigmentation. The ‘‘golden’’ gene (SLC24A5) has been the target of selection during the evolutionary process that resulted in the lightening of the skin of European and closely related populations. In melanosomes the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) named rs1426654, the ancestral allele, encoding alanine, is the most frequent allele in African, and East Asian populations. A derived allele, encoding threonine, is nearly fixed (98.7–100%) in European populations. “ In addition to this atypical pattern of differentiation, in the European sample (but not the West African or East Asian samples), there is a dramatic reduction of heterozygosity encompassing a 150 kb region that includes SLC24A5, indicating that there has been a recent selective sweep in the ancestral European population.” In African Americans and African Caribbeans individuals with one or two threonine alleles had lighter skin than homozygotes for the ancestral alanine alleles. “It was estimated that SLC24A5 explains 25–38% of the differences in skin melanin index between populations of European and African ancestry.” The distribution of the SLC24A5 polymorphism has important evolutionary implications. The presence of the ancestral alanine allele at very high frequencies and the lack of a selective signature in East Asian populations in the SLC24A5 gene strongly suggest that the decrease in melanin content took place, at least in part, by different mechanisms in Europe and East Asia.” The ancestral alanine allele is present at very high frequencies in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Melanesia. In contrast, the derived threonine allele is fixed in European populations (frequency 100%) and is also present at high frequencies in geographically proximate populations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (frequency 62-100%). 27
Polymorphisms in two genes other pigmentation genes, ASIP and OCA2, may play a shared role in shaping light and dark pigmentation across the globe while genes SLC24A5, MATP, and TYR have a predominant role in the evolution of light skin in Europeans but not in East Asians. “These findings support a case for the recent convergent evolution of a lighter pigmentation phenotype in Europeans and East Asians. Darkly pigmented populations in West Africa and Island Melanesia may share some ancestral pigmentation alleles, but the lighter pigmentation observed in European and East Asian populations is due to independent genetic mutations in at least three loci. Our data strongly support independent genetic origins for the light skin phenotype in Europeans and East Asians arising after the divergence of modern European and East Asian populations.”28 In 1962 the venerated scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky published a book called Mankind Evolving (Bantam Books, NY). Working with available fossils, in it he anticipated the terms and outcome of the debate about human evolution occurring almost 50-years later. “Mankind as it now exists is, then, is a product of several lines of parallel development,” he wrote. Continuing, he adds “species arise not as single individuals but as diverging populations, breeding communities, and races which do not reside at a geometric point but occupy more or less extensive territories….races are incipient species, not in the sense that every race is bound to become a separate and distinct species … races are genetically open, and species genetically closed systems.” Looking Beyond the Modern Synthesis Apart from human evolution, what cannot be undone anymore are the stubborn, most 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. 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 phenotypic or genotypic 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. Although the amount of somaclonal variation and its qualitative distinctness varies between subcultures derived from the same starting plant material the noted exponential increase in the rate of appearance of such variants during the standard subculture process admits a brake mutation explanation if the subculture method repeats itself at or very close to the point of nutrient exhaustion. In other words, somaclonal variation is another instance of stationary phase mutation. The difference in the amount of variation between cells from the same initial plant explant must be due to the timing of the subculture operation with respect to the approach of the stationary phase of nutrient exhaustion.24 The mode of variation, like modes of selection, has had its own evolutionary story. From nucleotide base substitution to aneuploidy to transposable elements; from altered gene regulation to the sexual production of new ideas there is obviously no single method of hereditary change. The endocrine regulation of variation by the HPA axis would be indirect, I think. 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. This does not have to be a direct transformation of DNA by steroid hormones, for which there is no evidence. The catabolic state of emergency mobilization characterized by high levels of adrenal corticosteroids in times of acute stress, would indirectly activate variation by suppressing the anabolic processes of development. 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 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. (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. 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 surprising metamorphosis into something beautiful 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 in its momentum, 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 must bring 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, the promised land, the parting of the Red Sea, and all the gods are psychological states realizable within you. Modern scholarship finds the Upanishads (the philosophical portion of the Rig-Veda 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-Weinberg 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 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 itself an autobiography about evolution is utterly audacious enough. 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 Stephen J. Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory new ideas about evolution and about how species selection has been gaining ground as a foundation for the theory of evolution is emphasized. 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 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 for geologic time scales, it is still possible (however shocking ) to speak of Hansel and Gretel and Archaeopteryx in the same sentence, as far as each archetype having the same cause. In one case the psychologically damaged post-epigenetic variant results, literary relatives of characters from literature such as the notorious and tormented King Oedipus and countless Dickensian childhoods suffered. (Psychiatry is the study of post genetic/epigenetic strife variation.) In the other case some type of genetic 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 that 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 people 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 a 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 as 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. 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, 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 do not see 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 evolution and what makes up the superego. 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 remote in time they might seem in certain instances no human beings have ever lacked some form of religion, whether pagan, animistic, or monotheistic. 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. In the young, bad manners and immaturity are specific indications of personality development mangled by parental competition. They are nothing if not expressions of egoism. Premature sexual activity, at the expense of education, is one of its normal concomitants. It is frequent in our culture, and not hard to spot. Egoism, and this has many sides and flavors, has an evolutionary basis, as the converse of or the not yet realized achievement of classical human maturity. As is known to school children, belief in the theory of evolution implies that humanity had to have once had ape-like ancestors.14 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. 15-17 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 ancient 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 breathe 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 genes and combine these ancient gene products and properties (including behavior) with modern genetic qualities. Its mechanism will be to reach into the 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 easily 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, 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 hermaphroditism. All people have both sexes within, genes and hormones, anima and animus. For some the residual sex is just more prominent. Let’s be no less frank that promiscuous males and females exhibit a more recent atavism: 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 latter is barely recorded in the beginning of written history, which has 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 the 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 of Tsarist Russia, Ivan 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 difficulty 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. 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. It is also true that not all sexual behaviors have 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 social inhibition, 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 affects 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 double fertilization of angiosperms (of the embryo and endosperm), as well as the complexity of flowers can be 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 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 consequences of intergenerational competition. 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 in the environmentally induced mutations of the lac operon of E. coli bacteria. This correspondence between mutations in these bacteria and their interpretation by molecular biologists from the 1980s on together with the established fact of heterochrony was the information I needed to publish his ideas. Chapter 1 is primarily the transplantation of the theory of evolution about him 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 on Wick Ave. 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 Francis Crick and James 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. Social revolution, new economic systems, more industrialization, more technology, more wealth, less wealth, were all for him beside the point. 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 phenomenon 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 into the period of nurture following the preceding genetic and epigenetic opportunities to modify the final character of the human animal. It will not then be a surprise that serious psychological disorders attend the failure to mature into the typical heredity. Transposable elements, HPA hormones and the family romance are distinct stages in the evolution of the modality of variation. Art and Entropy “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 might be expected to have atonality in its 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 physics, live comfortably 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 phenomenon 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. Let’s pretend men and women are the same thing, should seek the same things, act the same way. Let’s give up, there is no future, let nihilism win the day. Let’s 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.”20 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.21 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.” 22 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 breathe 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, temporality, 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 counter positioning 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 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 one likely 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 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 marketers/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 economic 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 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. Which genes Can evolve A general accounting for the fact that the great majority of DNA does not code for proteins (the introns and intergenic sequences) has been given by Eric Davidson in The Regulatory Genome.23 The non-coding DNA provides “genomic space, space that allows given regions of the genome to be partitioned at given times and places into very large functional domains. Genomic space thus serves as a template for chromatin assembly, and a major component of nuclear three-dimensional structure.” Genomic space permits DNA to loop, bringing diverse regulatory elements into contact with each other and with the basal transcription apparatus. “Genomic looping is a major aspect of developmental gene regulation.” Whole clusters of related genes are tethered in this way, each with its own cis-regulatory apparatus. It is also raw material to become sequence-specific regulatory functionality, which is why, except for rare exceptions (larvacean urochordates, for example), all animal genomes have such huge amounts of sequence-independent DNA. Bilateral animals have as many as 100,000 to 300,000 cis-regulatory modules (transcription factor binding sites), compared to approximately 25,000 genes that code for proteins. In The Regulatory Genome Professor Eric Davidson considers most congenital mutations, diabetes for example, to be of regulatory genes, not of differentiation gene batteries, which is why they specify disaster. Stages of development exist, and each stage gives rise to the next, defined by a succession of cis-regulatory outputs to downstream differentiation gene batteries. Developmental complexity is the continuing generation of new regulatory states of the basal transcription apparatus. The stages are irreversible, rather than cyclical; a series of causally linked temporary genetic regulatory stages, each setting up the next specified developmental event. What we perceive as a developmental process is a succession of genomic regulatory states. There is, Davidson writes, “direct evidence of the process of reapplication of the same shared regulatory toolkit, a process that has occurred endlessly during bilaterian evolution. “Animal body plans, their structures and functions with which their morphology endows them, are the integrals over time and space of their successive developmental processes. Evolution is the time derivative genomic sequence change in the genomic regulatory network.” Classical microevolutionary Darwinism - continuous small incremental change of selective value - applies to differentiation gene batteries, at the terminal phases of development. There are batteries of differentiation genes, each with separate constituent cis-regulatory controlling elements, for muscles, eyes, hearts, etc. Changes in protein sequence, plus or minus new genes, or regulatory alterations in time, place or amplitude of individual genes amount to comparisons of different species within a genus, or genera within a family. The later portions of adult body formation are the most flexible. For example, the bristles on Drosophilid legs or control of bird forelimb bone length are both modifiable by slight mutations in Hox gene domains. Linnaean species and genera, as for what distinguish congeneric species and confamilial genera, are due to changes in terminal differentiation gene batteries, 10s to 100s of genes each, and their immediate upstream linkages. Also very easy at low taxonomic levels are changes in body part size - transcription factors controlling the cell cycle. Evolution at the level of class, order, or family, on the other hand, is due to changes in internal portions of genetic regulatory networks (GRNs). Microevolution and continuous gradual change fails at the level of internal domains of GRNs. Gene changes upstream can have large effects, are qualitatively very diverse. At the earliest phases of bilaterian embryology body plans cannot be changed, have not been altered for 520 million years. For example, the through gut with anterior mouth, posterior anus of the gastrula stage once formulated, is enormously resistant to change, has never again be redone.BIBLIOGRAPHY OF INTRODUCTION 1. 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.. 2. Morris, Simon, C., Life’s Solution, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 3. Hetherington, R., Reid, R.G.B., The Climate Connection, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2010. 4. Thorne, AG, and Wolpoff, MH, The multiregional evolution of humans. Sci. Amer., Apr., 266(4):76-9, 82-3, 1992 5. P. Brown et al, A New Small-bodied Hominid From the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, Nature 431, 1055 - 1061 (28 October 2004). 6. Dawkins, R., The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin Co, Boston, 2004. 7. Wolpoff, M., How Neanderthals Inform Human Variation, Amer. J. Phys. Anthro., 139: 91-102, 2009. 8. Lalueza-Fox, C.H., H. Rompler, C. Staubert, G. Catalano, D. Hughes, N. Rohland, et al., A Melanocortin 1 Receptor allele suggests varying pigmentation among Neaandertals, Science 318: 1453-1455, 2007. 9. Krause, J., Fu, Q., Good, J.M., Viola, B., Shunkov, M.V., Derevianko, A.P., and Svante Paabo, The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia, Nature 464 (7290):894-897, 2010. 10. David Reich et al., Genetic History of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Nature 468 (7327): 1053-1060, 2010. 11. Gerhart, J., Cells, Embryos and Evolution, Blackwell Science, Oxford, 1997. 12. Templeton, A.R., Out of Africa Again and Again, Nature 416: 45-51, 2002. 13. Feduccia, A., The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. 14. Subramanian, S., et al., Ancient Penguin DNA Raises Doubts about Accuracy of Genetic Dating, Trends in Genetics 25 (11): 482-486, 2009. 15. Janvier, P., Living Primitive Fishes and Fishes From Deep Time, in Primitive Fishes, McKenzie D.J., Farrell, A.P., and Brauner, C.J. (Eds.), 16. Tsaousis AD, Martin DP, Ladoukakis ED, Posada D, Zouros E. Widespread Recombination in published animal mtDNA sequences. Mol Biol Evol 2005; 22: 925–33.
17. Bromham L, Eyre-Walker A, Smith NH, Maynard Smith J. Mitochondrial Steve: paternal inheritance of mitochondria in humans. Trends Ecol Evol 2003; 18: 2–4.
18. Schwartz M, Vissing J. New patterns of inheritance in mitochondrial disease. Biochem Biophys ResCommun 2003; 310: 247–51.
19. Mate ML, Di Rocco F, Zambelli A, Vidal-Rioja L. Mitochondrial heteroplasmy in control region DNA of South American camelids. Small Rumin Res 2007; 71: 123–9.
20. Zhao X, Li N, Guo W, Hu X, et al. Further evidence for paternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA in the sheep (Ovis aries). Heredity, 2004; 93: 399–403. 21. Cohen, J., Almost Chimpanzee, Times Books, NY, 2010. 22. Scherer, Stewart, A Short Guide to the Human Genome, Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Press, NY, 2008. 23. P.L. Ivanov, M.J. Wadhams, R.K. Roby, M.M. Holland, V.W. Weedn, and T.I. Parsons, Mitochondrial DNA sequence heteroplasmy in the Grand Duke of Russia Georgij Romanov establishes the authenticity of the remains of Tsar Nicholas II. Nature Genetics, v12, no 4, pp. 417-420, April, 1996.24. Sarit Suissa et al., Ancient mtDNA Genetic Variants Modulate mtDNA Transcription and Replication, PLoS Genetics, 5 (5), May, 2009. 25. Xinzhi Wu, Evidence of Multiregional Human Evolution Hypothesis from China, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 2006, 26(5) 70,709DOI:ISSN: 1001, 7410CN:112708/P
26. Esteban J. Parra, Human Pigmentation Variation: Evolution, Genetic Basis, and Implications for Public Health, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 50:85–105 (2007)
27. Jennifer Y. Lin & David E. Fisher, Melanocyte biology and skin pigmentation, Nature |Vol 445|22 February 2007
28. Heather L. Norton, Rick A. Kittles, Esteban Parra, Paul McKeigue,Xianyun Mao, Keith Cheng, Victor A. Canfield, Daniel G. Bradley, Brian McEvoy, and Mark D. Shriver, Genetic evidence for the convergent evolution of light skin in Europeans and East Asians, 2006, Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology 7. S. Choudhuri, The Eukaryotic Genome, in Genomics, Supratim Choudhuri and David B. Carlson (Eds.), Informa Healthcare, Ny, 2009. 14. Leroi, Armand, M., Mutants, Viking, NY, 2003. 15. Zhu, Min, and Alberg, Per. E., Origin of the Internal Nostril of Tetrapods, Nature, V432, 4 Nov., 2004. 16. Olson, Steve, Mapping Human History, Mariner Book, NY, 2002. 17. The Genetics and Biology of Sex Determination - No. 244 Novartis Foundation Symposium, March 2002. 18. Hardy, Ian C.W, (Ed.) Sex Ratios, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. 19. Scherer, G., and Schmid, M. (Eds.) Genes and Mechanisms in Vertebrate Sex Determination, Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 2003. 20. Toulmin, S., Hepburn, R.W., Macintyre, A., Metaphysical Beliefs, SCM Press LTD, London, 1957. 21. Dafermos, C.M., Entropy For Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, in Entropy, Grevan A., Keller, G., and Warnecke G. (Eds.), Princeton Univ. Press, 2003. 22. Uffink, J., Irreversibility And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics, in Entropy, Grevan A., Keller, G., and Warnecke G. (Eds.), Princeton Univ. Press, 2003. 23. Davidson Eric, The Regulatory Genome (Academic Press, San Diego, 2006. a. Tomislav Domazet-Loso, and Diethard Tautz, A Phylogenetically based transcriptome age index mirrors ontogenetic divergence patterns, Nature 468:815-818 (09 Dec 2010). aa. Duarte, C., Mauricio, J., Pettitt, P.B., Souto, P., Trinkaus, E., van der Plicht, H., and Zilhao, J., The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 96: 7604-7609, June 22, 1999.
|