Politics and the Environment: Cause of Autism #3
A child exhibits characteristics from both parents. The parents’ features in their children can complement each other in ways that reinforce and even encourage specific maturational trajectories. For example, pairing two musician parents not only increases the chance of a musically inclined child, but also increases the chance that the child will be maturational delayed. Maturational delay is a hallmark of creativity, encouraging a child with an infatuation for pattern and form. Keep boosting the maturational delay and a line gets crossed where infatuation with pattern eclipses a facility to communicate internal experience. How the environment affects the parents can determine how this line gets crossed.
“Disorders” characterized by maturational delay, such as autism and Asperger’s, are encouraged by the choices we make when we fall in love, in addition to what we expose ourselves to as we live our lives. The previous two entries outline the influence of mate selection on the origin of autism in our children. Working in cooperation with sexual selection are environmental influences that compel how children’s social and mental lives unfold.
Since the death of Darwin, little thought has been given to how the environment might influence human evolution in a single lifetime. Politics has informed what we consider to be true as Russian theorists emphasizing Lamarckian evolutionary theories (effects of the environment on single generation change) have been ignored in the West. Marx and Engels were proponents of a matrifocal origin of society, polarizing the West to emphasize a patrifocal hypothesis and ignore the power of sexual selection on societal change. Environmental and mate-selection origins of autism have been obfuscated by a science influenced by politics. Reductionist natural selection focusing on random selection supports a social Darwinist/neo-conservative perspective. A belief that society should reflect a natural world where only the strongest and cleverest should thrive supports a society where resources remain in the hands of very few.
In other words, we are not encouraged to notice how what we are exposed to and how we live our lives affect our children. This perspective is heresy, according to the fundamentalist sociobiologist and Neo-Darwinist. Those scientists would say that Lamarckianism is dead. There is no way that evolution influenced by the environment in a single generation could cause autism. Evolution occurs mostly from mutation and results of random variation! The environment cannot cause autism because evolution does not respond to the environment in one lifetime.
We are discovering that not only are our genes taking into a account a parent’s environment when deciding how to assign features to our kids, our genes are designed to take into consideration information from the environment when deciding how to modify themselves.
There is very little about a human that is random.
There are (at least) eight environmental variables influencing changes in our evolution by modifying testosterone levels. This modification is most obvious in the mother, where the child’s maturational speed is determined by the mother’s blood testosterone levels several weeks before birth. (Click here) There are almost no studies tracking the influence on estrogen in these matters, but it is possible estrogen influences the timing of maturation. No surprise there. There are almost no studies tracing changes in the father’s hormone levels in a single lifetime as it relates to features in the children.
Exposure to light, changes in diet, percentage of body fat, alcohol and drugs, tobacco, amounts of touch, physical activity and stress all vary testosterone and estrogen levels in humans. They do not necessarily do so in the same way. For example, increased body fat raises female testosterone levels but lowers it for males.
Increasing the testosterone levels in the mother compels an increase in maturational delay in her sons and in increase in maturational acceleration in her daughters when, at several weeks before birth, lifelong maturational trajectories are set based on mother’s testosterone levels. Estrogen levels may be influencing synapse pruning influencing brain growth of infants.
Do we in our heart of hearts, in our unconscious minds, know the profound effects that we have upon our unborn children as we live our lives? Are we aware of the path we walk and what happens when we cross that line that influences our kids? Are we purposefully going about the business of creating a society populated by the male maturationally delayed: autistics, borderline autistics, Aspergers, artists, abstract thinkers, gifted ambidextrous athletes, dancers, musicians, gays and males inclined to competitively perform as opposed to dominate and subjugate?
By what we eat, breathe and imbibe and who we choose to mate with, are we unconsciously creating a world that is considering peace?
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Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here.
Andrew Lehman on 10/7/09 in Evolution, featured | No Comments | Read More
