Woman, Neoteny, Art, and Evolution
By Andrew Lehman
Humans, as far as we know, are the first species to revel in culture, thought, language and all its implications. Culture requires brains, and brains of that immense degree were never necessary in any other animal. The human act that demanded immense brain power was the act of art. This requirement is because in art there are no limits.
The rituals of community sound-making, dance and sex are profound spiritual experiences characterized by a loss of individual awareness into a larger communal identity. The dance/sex loop nurtures the experience of our human progenitor individual away from purely self-motivated action to community-oriented action by offering an experience, a spiritual experience, of identity with something larger than the self.
Competition to exhibit artistic prowess in the form of dance drove the practitioners to behave in more and more beautiful and complex patterns, with the most successful dancers being chosen for sex. The genes of the best dancers got passed on. The better dancers had bigger brains, just as predators had bigger brains, because it takes bigger brains to behave in more physically or orally complex ways. Whereby a predator needs a brain only slightly bigger than its prey, an archaic human needs a bigger brain to perform better than his or her peers, a constantly escalating standard. The result was runaway sexual selection. The race was on.
Sexual selection based on an aesthetic increased the speed of evolution exponentially because the demonstrator of the art was practicing an intangible with no demonstrable ceiling in the exercising of the skill, a skill requiring increased brain mass. This sexual selection, specifically, is what never had occurred before in evolution. Peacock feathers evidence a runaway aesthetic, but no increased brain power was required. The verbal facility and plumage of parrots suggest that they may have experienced a similar selective dynamic, and indeed parrots, like humans, have two unusually large cerebral hemispheres with different-sized lobes. But parrots don’t exhibit complex dance. Humans sing and dance.
When the best dancers and singers were picked for procreation, the ones picked were the humans most maturational delayed. Humans sexually selected to perform dance and song were coincidentally selected to mature slower.
Neoteny and Evolution
Slower maturers grow bigger brains because they spend more time at those early childhood states where brains are growing. With neoteny, infant features prolong into adulthood. Embryo features prolong into infanthood. With time, embryo features prolonged into infanthood themselves prolong into adulthood. With the decrease in maturation rates and the continued revealing of more and more infant and child features into the adult phase of a species, there is an increase in both play and sexuality.
‘Our essential somatic properties, i.e. Those which distinguish the human body form from that of other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man.’ (Bolk 1926a, p. 468).
In his most extensive work, Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:
1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy
2. Reduction or lack of body hair.
3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair
4. The form of the external ear.
5. The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eyefold.
6. The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates).
7. High relative brain weight.
8. Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age.
9. The labia majora of women.
10. The structure of the hand and foot.
11. The form of the pelvis.
12. The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women.
13. Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures.
To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montague (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958) and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montague’s order (pp. 326-327) with some deletions and additions:
14. Absence of brow ridges.
15. Absence of cranial crests.
16. Thinness of skull bones.
17. Position of orbits under cranial cavity.
18. Brachycephaly.
19. Small teeth.
20. Late eruption of teeth.
21. No rotation of the big toe.
22. Prolonged period of infantile dependency.
23. Prolonged period of growth.
24. Long life span.
25. Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).
The ability of our species to change maturational speeds in combination with art/sex as an accelerator in that process results in the unique species that we are today. But it is in revealing the biological process behind the change in maturation rates–what specifically physiologically causes maturation rates to change in humans–that truly whips away the curtain in this Wizard of Oz story of our unfolding. The biological engine (contrasted with art/sex as the social engine) behind maturational delay and acceleration is changing levels of testosterone.
The Role of Testosterone
Testosterone regulates maturation speed. It occurs on both a general and a specific scale. The story deepens.
General maturation speed is established at six weeks before birth and is based on the level of testosterone in the mother’s blood. Higher or lower levels influence males and females in the opposite direction. A mother with high testosterone will set her son’s maturation timer on slow, her daughter’s on fast. A mother with low testosterone levels will birth a son with fast maturation rates and a daughter moving at a slow pace. Environmental factors can have extremely powerful effects on mothers’ testosterone levels, radically amending maturation speeds. Autism and other disorders characterized by maturational delay or acceleration can and do result.
In humans, as we evolved from the primate progenitor over millions of years up and through homo erectus, sexual selection eventually utilized our ability to adjust maturation rates to increase brain size by slowing down our rates of maturation (by adjusting testosterone levels) in order to become better dancers and sound-makers to achieve more sex. It is a combination of these two processes–tightly focused sexual selection revolving around an aesthetic (also called runaway sexual selection) and neoteny (the ability of a species to unfold over time, prolonging its infant states into adulthood by slowing down maturation rates)–that propels humans through its unique trajectory.
A highly refined aesthetic developed during millions of years of runaway sexual selection characterized by performers (dancers and singers) being chosen by discriminating mates. Having arrived at language, our ancestors got off the evolution express, departed Africa and boarded the societal accelerator.
Evolution continued–our bodies and minds continued to be molded–but now in the context of a symbol-making ability mated to an ancient aesthetic compulsion. These massive brain-based sensibilities became assigned to any and everything around them as speech sexualized the environment, propelling humans to evaluate everything they came in contact with as if they displayed the features of a potential mate. And so society began with a deep appreciation for detail. By the Neolithic, craft was life.
The slow acceleration of the art/sex sexual selection feedback loop can be observed to become a high pitched fever and the center of society when the fossil record reveals males and females coming closer and closer in size. The specific change in dynamics toward the art/sex society was a shift away from the formerly necessary bonus of a relative larger male size and strength for the early hominid males to aggressively compete with one another.
How do we know that this was the case? Fossil remains, though suggestive at best, reveal a high degree of sexual dimorphism between the emerging hominid male and female for at least 2 million or so years after diverging from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Australopithecus afarensis were highly dimorphic, with males almost twice the size of females.
Homo erectus did not evidence this extreme difference. The similarity in size is due to the growth in the size of the female. Among living primate societies, increased sexual dimorphism is exhibited when there is violent intramale competition or frequent harsh contact with forces in the environment. These societies are usually patrifocal. It is unlikely that males and females would be mutually choosing each other as mates according to a physical aesthetic of dance and sound in a patrifocal society.
A highly dimorphic social structure implies males physically threatening each other for procreation rights. The art/sex competition would only be a powerful dynamic in a promiscuous social structure where males cooperate to compete via the aesthetic as opposed to physical strength. Strength alone does not require brains. Survival of the fittest did not make us who we are.
And it is likely that the degree of focus in the matrifocal vs. patrifocal directions varied from band to band, region to region. The less hierarchical, dominant competition between males, the less necessary that males be large and strong and thus the less sexual dimorphism in the fossil record. And a single band or evolutionary pool may have evolved back and forth between the two poles over time. Eventually a line was crossed, probably more than once. Evidence that this crossing occurred is when the fossils show that males and females became far less sexually dimorphic–more similar in size. Matrifocal society had taken hold.
Neoteny and Creativity
There is evidence to suggest we were highly matrifocal up to and past our leaving Africa. The diminution of brain size around 25,000 years ago suggests that a transition to a patrifocal orientation was underway. Patriarchy galloped out of Southern Russia 6,500 years ago and quickly converted old Europe, India and China. Right now, we are in the midst of a synthesis of matrifocal and patrifocal paradigms. From this position, we can observe surges of neoteny moving up through cultures as the neotenous characteristics of earlier stages of our societal ontogeny stream into and through contemporary society.
There are the physical features of our chimpanzee-like progenitors that have prolonged into the adult human of today, such as large brain, small jaw, big eyes, walking on hind legs, location of foramen magnum, etc., and there are the nonphysical features, such as propensity to play, creativity, alertness to that which is different, curiosity, etc. Note the most ancient cultures existing today, the young people in society, the poorest in society, the least empowered, the ethnic minorities, the political Left (representing the disempowered) and the artists.
Features of these groups have been slowly, over thousands of years, been prolonging their way into societies controlled by ruling elites. This slow process over the last three hundred years has accelerated to the point that right now it’s become a convertible ambulance tearing through traffic, driven by ancient healers, carrying herbs and antibiotics in the trunk.
Aboriginals bring land-based spiritual integrity and an intuitive familiarity with the natural balance between independence and interdependence. Neoteny is characterized by close proximity to creative sources. Aboriginal cultures offer an understanding of this frame.
The young bring a form of deep curiosity and confidence that what they imagine can become true. The young are fearless. The young crave fun. Curiosity is a prime feature of neoteny, and imagination is most powerful when acculturation has not been fully engaged.
The poor and the most disempowered bring a dependency on the culture at large, and although at first glimpse this dependency seems like a deficit, from neoteny’s perspective, dependence provides a compulsion to be connected. This compulsion is mingled with intense creativity as the powerless generate art to express their relationship with the connection/disconnection polarity. As a result, they generate music, song, dance, fashion and unique athletic productions that speak for society as a whole.
Ethnic minorities often draw sustenance and inspiration from their former and present experience of poverty and a relatively close proximity to aboriginal or tribal institutions. These wellsprings of inspiration are characteristic of the sources of neoteny: creativity, sense-based spiritual revelation, deep respect for the physical and reverence for rhythm.
The political Left articulates the frustrations and the goals of neoteny’s children, helping to make it possible that the present-time orientation of the aboriginal, the young, the poor and the ethnic minorities be charted into a future that integrates their orientations, strengths and needs.
The artist or creator, along with the child, is neoteny’s mascot. To empower the creative is to bridge the essence of the child into society. Political empowerment is creative empowerment. Political repression is creative repression. To create is a political statement.
The nascent creativity characteristic of all these groups is now bursting into visibility, supercharged by the appearance of the web.
Matrifocal to Patrifocal and back
When the shift from matrifocal to patrifocal occurred that led to males being chosen for their commanding qualities and females for cooperative, neotenous features, a shift also occurred in how societies translated the new hormonal constellation. With the rise in male testosterone, hierarchy took hold. The ancient female-centric cultures were horizontal, transparent and egalitarian. The new male-centered cultures grew increasingly stratified, with resources controlled by fewer and fewer men.
At no time does the influence of the matrifocals completely disappear. Though the societies grow hierarchically taller with time, the artists and others with matrifocal tendencies make grounding contributions that keep the patrifocal edifices from toppling. Until now.
The acceleration that we are in the midst of has most of us astonished by how fast things are changing. Little noticed is how we as a species are changing physically, dispositionally, integrally. Autism, an evolutionary condition, is blossoming across contemporary society. Social structure is radically adjusting to place woman in positions of authority, allowing them to choose their own mate, abort and compete with men. In just 100 years, we are taller, our brains are bigger (after a 25,000-year period of size decrease) and we as a species are becoming more gracile, fragile and vulnerable.
The towers are tumbling as the matrifocals return in force. Maturational-delayed males and maturational-accelerated females are the new convention. Or, the old convention, depending on how far back you go. Whereas we’ve been experiencing the acceleration of society for several thousand years with maturational-accelerated males informing the speed and direction of our societal evolution, now we are experiencing the neotenization of society as transparency, diversity and horizontal communication surge into our everyday.
A collapsing hierarchical society is a society becoming horizontal. We’ve been here before. As we return to the horizontal, we carry with us thousands of years of art, experience and knowledge of the repercussions of our actions. It’s time to be horizontal for a while. It’s time to integrate with our environment, appreciate our surroundings. Maybe in ten thousand years we’ll be ready to start social climbing once again.