A couple entries ago, I proposed a predictable display of variation of the physical features in the children of a family over time as a mother’s testosterone level slowly rose with age. This prediction is in accord with a founding premise of this work, that our evolutionary past manifests in the present in more or less the degrees that a boy’s maturation rate is delayed and a girl’s maturation rate is accelerated, with timing also being important. The higher the mother’s testosterone levels, the more likely this manifestation will be the case.
I would additionally suggest that because social structure has political correlates, it would be likely that in a politically conservative family, if liberals would emerge, it would be with the youngest sons and daughters. In addition, the youngest kids would most likely evidence the features of matrifocal social structure. One statistic I would expect to see is higher incidence of divorce or serial monogamy with youngest children. I would even suggest that because social structure is correlated with testicle size in primates, youngest sons should show incrementally larger testes than oldest sons.
Observing that the Left more often exhibits the features of a matrifocal social structure, I would additionally predict that as a mother has more children over time–a mother tending toward higher testosterone levels already growing higher as she grows older–that the emergence of conditions characterized by maturational delay, such as left-handedness, autism, Asperger’s and stuttering, will occur more often in liberal families than in conservative families, particularly among the youngest children. However, findings would be skewed by the fact that a child born with severe autism might be the first and last child those parents choose to have.
Because testosterone levels in the mother control maturation rates in her children, with her testosterone levels growing higher with time, and because maturation rates control evolutionary trajectories, following the tenets of heterochrony, or the orchestral theory of evolution, and because social structure as evidenced by sexual selection propels societies in specific evolutionary directions by young adults choosing particular maturation-rate tendencies in their partners, then we should be able to see in families with several children a reflection of our recent evolution.
Sorry about that. Trying to condense the evolutionary relationship between ontogeny, society and biology in a single sentence is a bit like pantomiming the history of WW II.
When everything is connected, it can be difficult using language–a medium that provides only the option of communicating in narrative threads–to describe processes that deeply influence us on multiple levels. Politics is directly related to evolution. I expect everything is directly related to everything. Sometimes it takes no small number of words to show how two not obviously connected things are connected. Perhaps a dancer, an artist who communicates in three dimensions, is best qualified to explain how things really work.
…
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 10/28/09 in Evolution, featured | No Comments | Read More
