 
The True Origin of Species  
The Great Loom of Life

by  
John Kuti

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published on Smashwords by:  
John Kuti

The True Origin of Species: The Great Loom of Life  
Copyright 2012 by John Kuti

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Contents

Why and How Life Comes to Exist

Darwin Was Wrong  
All Life Is Bilateral  
More Darwinian Errors  
Irreducible Complexity  
Darwin's Big Error of Omission  
The Fractal Nature of Life  
The Bilateral Reality of Life  
The Bilateral Subjective Architecture of Life  
The Loom of Life

The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The First Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Action / reaction Communicative Responses  
The Second Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Communal Integration  
The Third Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Symbiosis  
The Fourth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Spontaneous / Instinctive Response  
The Fifth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Nurturance / competitiveness  
The Sixth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Conscious / unconscious Pleasure / fear  
The Seventh Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Conscious / unconscious Emotion  
The Eighth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Reciprocal Giving / getting  
The Ninth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Inductive / deductive Reasoning

The Evolution of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
The Purpose and Meaning of Life

Chapter 1: The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation

Competitive Fitness and Cooperative Fitness  
Subjective Response and the Nash Equilibrium  
Adaptive Today—Maladaptive Tomorrow  
The Story of Life  
The Subjective Foundation of Life  
Plants, Animals and Subjective Experience  
How Evolution Really Works  
Epigenetics: How Your Ancestors Changed Your Genes  
Jumping Genes  
Symbiogenesis  
Virogenesis  
The Rate of Evolutionary Change  
The Shifting Course of Evolution  
Too Much Junk  
The War Over Natural Selection: Dawkins V Gould  
More Problems with Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection  
Evolutionary Change and Sexual Selection  
The Bell Curve of Individual Variation Individual Preference, Variability and Sexual Selection  
Approach Distance  
Genomic Plasticity The New Chords of Life  
The True Origin of Species Form Follows Subjective Function  
Speciation and the Balance Within Shared interest / self-interest  
Speciation Triggers Punctuated Nash Equilibriums  
Speciation  
Old Assumptions, New Conclusions

Chapter 2: The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The Subjective Structure of Life The Genetics of Behaviour  
The Economics of Behaviour  
The Economic Tao of Life  
Concerning Cooperation  
Evolution and Subjective Response  
Life's Perfect Metaphor Songs in the Keys of Life  
The Genome and Subjective Response  
The Bilateral Subjective Response of 'Me / Us'  
The Bilateral Subjective Response of 'Us / Them'

The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The First Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Action / reaction Communicative Response  
The Second Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Communal Affiliation  
The Third Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Symbiosis  
The Fourth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Spontaneous / Instinctive Responses  
The Fifth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Nurturance / Competitiveness  
The Sixth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Conscious Pleasure and Fear  
The Seventh Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Conscious Emotion  
The Eighth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity Reciprocity

Chapter 3 Human Evolution

Early Relatives and the Path to Modern Humanity A Short List of Our Ancestors  
From Prey Animal to Hunter  
Neotony and Human Complexity  
The Origin of Modern Human Behaviour  
Becoming Human  
The Androgynous Human Brain  
Sexual Identity / Gender Identification  
Sex and Love Among the Hominim  
The Nuclear Family  
Love and the Human Unconscious

Modern Humans: Inductive / deductive Reasoning The Ninth Rung in the Ladder of Subjective Complexity  
The Bilateral Human Brain  
The Evolutionary Origin of Language  
Human Language  
Language and Self-awareness The True Sixth Sense  
Our Big Brains  
The Origin and Nature of Inductive / deductive Reasoning  
Rationality and Personal Identity  
Human Reciprocity and Morality  
Deferred Gratification  
Language and Perception  
Reciprocity, Attraction, Desire, and Love  
Monogamy and Adultery  
Bilateral Psychological Paired Traits and Human Personality  
Hunter / Gatherer Clans Male Practical Competency - Female Social Mastery  
Personal / cultural Narrative  
The Origin of Religion and Divine Narrative  
Religion and Reciprocity  
The Metaphorical Mind of Modern Man Reading, Writing, Numbers, Private Property and Money  
Human Civilization  
Money and Its Narratives  
Civilization and the Human Psyche: Civilization and Gender  
Since the Enlightenment The Modern Psyche  
Self-esteem and Civilization  
Unanswerable Questions
Why and How Life Comes to Exist:

Almost every modern scientist believes that Darwin's theory of natural selection is correct. Although there are countless exceptions to the way natural selection is said to work, there has been no credible scientific alternative offered to it in the last 150 years.

It is undeniable that natural selection exists. How it works and if it is the mechanism for the creation of new species is something else again. To challenge the accepted explanation for how natural selection works requires a new and better theory to first identify and demonstrate how all the work on evolutionary theory could have preserved fundamental errors for a century and a half and then propose a better explanation for the countless observations that have been made on evolutionary change.

This book will propose an alternate theory for evolutionary adaptation and the origin of species. The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation answers most of the exceptions to Darwinian theory and offers a more comprehensive explanation for the way evolution works. It will propose that genetic adaptation is a process in which competitive and cooperative advantage are two inseparable and indivisible aspects of life that serve the bilateral shared interest / self -interest of all living creatures in every ecosystem. Shared interest / self-interest exists in the way space and time exist as the bilateral, inseparable, indivisible reality of space / time, the one inseparable from and co-dependent on the other.

Cooperative and competitive advantage exists because of the dynamic balance within shared interest / self-interest expressed in life through the subjective responses of cooperative and competitive behaviour, and it is the balance within competitive and cooperative behaviour within and among species that defines every ecosystem on the planet. Cooperative and competitive behaviour weaves together the warp and weft of shared interest / self interest in what is the great loom of life that produces the infinite tapestry of living ecosystems.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation will show how evolution is primarily controlled by changes in the subjective response and behaviour of living creatures and will identify nine distinct quantum leaps in subjective response that are the rungs in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity that are the foundation of life's infinite variation in form. The theory proposes to identify the underlying subjective structure in the ladder of life's ascending complexity that has until now been hidden in plain sight.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation will also propose that new species are created by the awareness of external reality and the attendant plasticity of the DNA molecule network in living creatures responding to times of great stress or opportunity within the ecosystem of individual creatures. We propose that the network of DNA molecules that create every protein through which any life form responds to external environmental cues and internal metabolic needs, as well as past conditioning and learning, has within that network the ability to genetically reorganize itself to create fundamental new irreducibly complex forms and even new species. We will show that, like the brain, the network of DNA molecules in a living creature has a demonstrated plasticity to reorganize itself when its organism is fundamentally compromised or stressed. Like the brain, the network of DNA molecules in living creatures has within its own plasticity the ability to create irreducibly complex new processes, structures, organs that respond to new ecological opportunity or extreme stress often atavistically reaching back even millions of years to resurrect earlier genetic forms.

For the first time in evolutionary theory, we will propose an explanation for the undeniable rapidity and multiplicity in the appearance of new species that Darwin's theory of natural selection through slow, progressive adaptive change has been unable to explain. Natural selection will be shown to have a limited role in genetic adaptation and virtually no role at all in the origin of species. The giant, silent elephant in the room of evolutionary theory is the fact that there is literally no evidence for slow adaptive change creating even one new species. There is considerable evidence that some other rapid form of genetic reorganization is responsible for new genetic forms and functions.

We will propose that the DNA molecule itself is responsible for the unconscious / conscious responses of living creatures, working together much like the neurons in the brain respond to unconscious / conscious perceptions to create a representation of reality through which an individual creature can interact with its environment and most importantly with other living creatures. We will propose that the network of DNA molecules that creates all life processes has the same kind of representational awareness of external reality as the brain as it creates the proteins that allow the unconscious / conscious behaviour and physiological response of every individual creature. It is the awareness arising from this network of DNA molecules that resides in every living cell of an individual creature that creates the unconscious / conscious representation of reality that allows subjective behaviour and instinctive response. This means that it is the network of DNA molecules within the cells of living creatures that is the 'intelligent designer' that is responsible for the creation of irreducibly complex new structures and living forms and every new species that has ever come into this world.

The idea of genomic awareness and plasticity is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of science. It is far more revolutionary than the idea that a network of neurons in the brain is responsible for creating representations of reality from sensory information, or the very recent new idea that the brain is able to reorganize its own form and function because of its own plasticity. It is also far more revolutionary than the idea that a series of ones and zeros can make a visual representation of reality in super high-definition or create a computer that can beat two Jeopardy champions in the associative retrieval of conceptual information. These recent revolutionary ideas were almost universally rejected in science until they were shown to be demonstrably true.

We will give examples of how genetic awareness of external reality has been demonstrated in a number of different species. We will give examples of how genomic awareness is able to perceive external reality and create a fundamental reorganization of its genes through its own innate plasticity. This genomic awareness of external reality and most especially the subjective responses of individual life forms to the balance within shared interest / self-interest within their ecosystem is the mechanism for the genetic reorganization that produces new species at times of extreme stress or opportunity.

Darwin Was Wrong

Darwin's most fundamental error about how natural selection works was in stating that it was based on hereditary competitive advantage. There is no living system, no ecosystem, no society in which pure competitive advantage is the natural reality. Every living system, every ecosystem, every society dynamically balances the shared interest and self-interest of all living creatures within it. Darwin was only partly right about how natural selection creates variation within species, and completely wrong about how new species are created. And this fundamental error about competitive advantage has had enormous negative consequences to the understanding of nature and even human society since it was first proposed.

Darwinian competitive advantage has been used to justify the most monstrous social ideas and programs as well as pure unadulterated selfishness and greed. Fascism and capitalism have ironically each embraced Darwin. Social and economic theories have also used the idea of Darwinian competitive advantage as the scientific basis for the worst and least sustainable view of living systems. From eugenics to Wall Street greed, Darwin's explanation of natural selection has been used to explain life in a way that is just demonstrably wrong, and The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation will attempt to explain why that is so and offer a better alternative that is in fact true to the nature of all living systems.

Shared interest / self-interest as the true bilateral economic foundation of life describes the world and living systems as the balance within the cooperating and competing interests of individuals and groups, and it is the bilateral reality of subjective response that reflects the true interrelationships and interconnections of all members of any ecosystem or social group; the one interdependent with the many, the many dependent on the predictable response of every one. Simply put, it means that getting and giving, competition and cooperation, strength and weakness, shared interest and self-interest get their very meaning from each other and are in fact bilateral in their very nature because life from the very beginning is based on bilateral subjective response.

This truer perspective on the natural world and the economic reality of life is also the only foundation upon which human society can endure because it has been the foundation of life since the first living creatures appeared on the earth balancing co-operative and competitive subjective responses.

The stark truth may be that human civilization will not survive if it continues to believe the half-truth of Darwin's version of natural selection. This book will try to make that clear.

Darwin's theory of natural selection says that evolution favors any genetically determined trait, whether behavioural, structural, physiological, or psychological that leads to greater numbers of offspring who pass those traits to the next generation. Darwin's theory also says that such adaptive fitness evolving through natural selection is based on laissez-faire competition of individuals within and among species, in Hobbes famous characterization, 'a battle of all against all'. This economic model for pure self interest in the competitive division of limited resources is universally accepted among scientists as the explanation of how natural selection and all evolutionary change work.

The fundamental problem with Darwin's theory is that it ignores the fact that all creatures live in ecosystems in which there is both competitive and cooperative behaviour that fundamentally affects the survival of creatures within that ecosystem. Seeing evolution simply as a matter of the heritable competitive advantage of individuals in any particular species ignores how any evolutionary change to one particular species affects all the others and vice versa. Creatures live in a dynamic equilibrium in which the balance within shared interest / self-interest expressed through co-operative and competitive behaviour is fundamental to survival. Since the beginning of life, all creatures evolve in ecosystems in which they balance traits that serve their autonomous self-interest and traits that serve their communal shared interest within and even among species. The balance within autonomy and community, competitiveness and cooperation in the expression of self-interest / shared interest defines the bilateral subjective nature of life. It is true of bacteria. It is true of human beings. It is the fundamental truth behind the evolution of life.

Darwin himself recognized that cooperative behaviour is a fundamental part of nature offering creatures recognizable survival advantages. What he and every other evolutionist since has failed to recognize is that shared interest expressed through cooperative behaviour also offers a fundamental adaptive advantage through which creatures in any ecosystem exist and evolve. Self-interest is not shared interest, but the two are inextricably linked in every ecosystem and in every evolutionary adaptation as the bilateral expression of the nature of life itself. Life is simply the warp and weft of shared interest / self-interest, the many intertwined threads of living species creating the dynamic fabric of life that has grown in complexity and intricacy of design over the last four billion years.

All Life Is Bilateral

A Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation sounds complicated, a lot more so than Darwin's theory of natural selection that says evolution is the result of small heritable changes over time that give creatures a competitive reproductive advantage.

It is slightly more complicated, but not difficult to understand. In evolutionary terms, bilateral simply means that there are two complementarily different sides working together to make one integrated whole organism. There is a gene in vertebrate animals called the hox gene that creates the adaptations in form that allow complex creatures to have a left and right side, a top and a bottom, a front and back and these bilateral features in form are in fact inseparable, the one meaningless without the other. The right and left limbs, the right and left brain, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils are examples of the bilateral form of many aspects of complex creatures that work together to create a unified, integrated representation of particular perceptual aspects of reality.

Bilateral subjective adaptation is the idea that the subjective responses of all living creatures also have two sides that are inextricably linked in the same way. For every action there is a reaction in nature because that is why and how creatures communicate, and all communication between living creatures requires a bilateral subjective response. Approach means nothing unless there are subjective responses for avoidance. Prey responses mean nothing unless there are predators that prey animals can detect; predatory responses mean nothing unless there are prey behaviours predators can perceive. Every ecosystem is created through the bilateral subjective action / reaction responses of the creatures within it. Bilateral subjective complexity is the idea that this interconnected reality through which creatures detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other creatures has created a ladder of subjective complexity on which all living creatures adapt and evolve. Approach / avoidance, conscious / unconscious instincts, pleasure / fear emotions, even traits for subjective response such as risk-taking / caution, and even the most complicated human personality traits such as optimism / pessimism, extroversion / introversion and even abstract ideas like good / evil exist as inextricably linked bilateral subjective realities like the independently functioning right and left side of the brain communicate to create one single perception of experience.

The most fundamental aspects of bilateral subjective adaptation is that it is based not on heritable competitive advantage that serves the self-interest of individual creatures but rather the balance within shared interest / self-interest between and among creatures expressed as traits for co-operative and competitive behaviour that defines the true bilateral nature of life. It is the feedback mechanism of bilateral subjective response that is the process through which cooperative and competitive traits become integrated within the dynamic equilibrium of every ecosystem.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation proposes that it is the inextricable, dynamic balance within traits that give creatures co-operative advantages and traits that give creatures competitive advantages that define evolutionary success. It is the dynamic balance within cooperative shared interest and competitive self-interest that creates the foundation of evolutionary change and complexity. Darwin was wrong in seeing life as a rigid zero sum pie in which more resources for one individual or species must come from the resources of other individuals and species. He ignored the economic fact that the success or failure of one species can be fundamentally important to the success or failure of many others. Life and evolution is far more about growing the pie of resources through cooperation than the way it is divided through competition. Life and evolution is a lot more complex than the simple advantage of heritable traits over time that is Darwin's definition of natural selection.

Traits for self-interest are predominantly expressed through changes in form. Traits for shared interest are predominantly expressed through changes in subjective response. We will show that there are nine distinct rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity upon which all adaptations in form ultimately rest. Simply put, traits for shared interest and cooperative behaviour are dominant over traits for self-interest that control changes in the form creatures take as they adapt to ecological change. Every creature from bacteria to human beings must establish and maintain a balance within shared interest / self-interest to find a place within a living ecosystem, unlike standard Darwinian theory that has no accepted definition for something as fundamental as adaptation.

In this book evolutionary adaptation is defined as the process through which creatures within and among species in any ecosystem balance and maintain shared interest / self-interest through cooperative and competitive traits that offers an improved margin of reproductive success to one or many species within that ecosystem.

In the conclusion to his book, The Master and his Emissary, on the bilateral nature of the human brain, Dr. Iain McGilchrist put it most succinctly, "I believe our brains not only dictate the shape of the experience we have of the world, but are likely themselves to reflect, in their structure and functioning, the nature of the universe in which they have come about."

The bilateral nature of the universe may yet be established; the bilateral nature of life is what we propose to show.

More Darwinian Errors

Darwin's theory of natural selection also contains a number of fundamental errors as well as many inadequate definitions of basic terms, some of which exist because it has not recognized adaptations expressed through changes in subjective response.

As we have said, Darwin's first error was that natural selection is based solely upon the competition between individuals and species for the division of limited resources in any ecosystem. His idea of natural selection is based on the Malthusian theory of population growth that says that populations will increase until resources necessary for reproduction are exhausted.

There are countless examples of how species control population growth that have nothing to do with available resources. These include changes in fertility, alterations in the proportion of males to females as well as the sexual orientation of males. Loons, a species that has been on the earth for 60 million years, will stop breeding on lakes that have too much human activity, even though those lakes are established territories with all the resources necessary for raising offspring. Such a subjective response to stress and human intrusion often overrides fertility in many species, regardless of available resources. The only experiment that ever directly tested Malthusian population theory allowed an expanding population of mice all the necessary resources in food and space that they needed. The population grew exponentially for two years but then, for no discernible reason, collapsed completely until not a single mouse was left alive. With unlimited food supplies and expanding space to preserve population density, some subjective trigger altered the behaviour of these mice so that they lost all interest in food and sex, dooming the entire population. The only scientific test of the theory that is the foundation of Darwinian natural selection completely failed to prove its hypothesis. Although there are examples of creatures introduced onto islands eating themselves into extinction, these examples do not recognize that space is a resource as necessary and important as food to some creatures. Further studies may show that some creatures actually do reproduce as long as there are available resources, yet it is likely that social animals for whom subjective response is so complex and necessary are likely to need more than just safety and resources to achieve continuing reproductive success.

The other obvious challenge to Malthus' idea that the population of a species will expand as long as there are available resources is in the life span of creatures in zoos. Most species in zoos live only a third to one half as long as the same creatures in the wild, this despite excellent diet, veterinary care and a complete lack of predators. Clearly the survival challenges of life in the wild are more than made up by some particular advantage having nothing to do with resources, health or danger. Clearly there is some necessary subjective response that comes from life in the wild that is crucial to the life span and the attendant reproductive success of many species.

Life is about more than the division of resources and the competitive advantage one individual has over another that offers it some better chance at reproductive success. The division of resources in any ecosystem is clearly a lot more complicated than the Darwinian battle of all against all.

A better model for the division of limited resources among creatures in any ecosystem was put forward by the economist John Nash in his Nobel Prize winning description for the division of limited resources called the Nash equilibrium. A Nash equilibrium is the balance between self-interest and shared interest expressed through competitive and cooperative behaviour by which individuals identify and accept a particular share of limited resources. In a Nash equilibrium, self-interest and shared interest are inextricably linked through subjective behaviour which controls the way creatures respond to each other. Life exists in a dynamic balance between traits that express shared-interest / self-interest in all living creatures and the ecosystems in which they live. And each Nash equilibrium depends on the ability of species to be consciously and or unconsciously aware of each other and to respond to other individuals of their own kind, as well as to other species that affect their lifecycle. This subjective awareness combined with the ability to communicate with others defines the nature of subjective response and makes it central to behavioural and even physical adaptation. Without subjective awareness and the ability to communicate with others, cooperation is impossible. Without subjective awareness and the ability to communicate with others, competition is also impossible. Competition between individuals is in fact impossible without the foundation of cooperative behaviour that is absolutely necessary for life itself to exist. And both cooperation and competition depend entirely upon the nature of the subjective responses of every individual in every species.

We define subjective response as the ability of creatures to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living creatures in order to establish and maintain a balance within shared-interest / self-interest expressed through competitive and cooperative behaviour. It is this ability to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to others that allow both competitive and cooperative advantage to exist in evolution. It is this ability of creatures for subjective response that is the foundation of life because the economic reality of life: its cost and benefit, its risk and reward, the basic purpose of supply and demand cannot exist without it.

Darwin's theory ignores the question of why natural selection, even in bacteria, the most primitive and basic of life forms on the planet, would have selected for the many proteins which they use to communicate with other bacteria and for which they have countless receptors on their cell walls, if life is all about mindless competitive advantage. These proteins and receptors are in fact the basis of all cellular communication, complexity and subjective response in all living creatures great and small. Why would individual creatures mindlessly competing against one another to serve their own individual self-interest need to have evolved such complex means of communication? How would the communication necessary for cooperative traits expressing shared interest ever evolve? The only logical answer is that communication is necessary to maintain the balance within self-interest / shared interest expressed through traits for competitive and cooperative behaviour.

Darwin was also wrong in believing that natural selection created adaptive changes in species by favoring and preserving traits that offered the possibility of greater reproductive success, and eliminating those traits that were maladaptive to reproductive success. If standard Darwinian theory is correct, there are far too many maladaptive traits that limit reproductive success such as homosexuality, asexuality, maternal infanticide, depression, fatal genetic disease in immature offspring, and even human suicide. Such traits should have been eliminated through natural selection because they are so completely maladaptive to reproductive success.

We propose that rather than preserving adaptive traits and eliminating maladaptive ones, evolutionary adaptation is the process by which a bell curve of heritable traits is maintained in order to give creatures the widest range of individual variation through adaptive options. It is simply because environments can change rapidly and radically that it makes much better economic sense for natural selection to preserve the widest range of options for adaptive success rather than favoring and eliminating positive and negative traits for a particular ecosystem at a particular time. An adaptive trait in one period of time may be maladaptive in another and vice versa, and the most recent body of experimental evidence clearly indicates that natural selection often favors opposite traits in different years.

Within individual families, evolution clearly selects traits for particular adaptive fitness, but in breeding populations, the best option is to preserve the broadest bell curve of heritable traits that give adaptive fitness its widest range of options for the species.

Darwinian theory is also wrong in believing that evolution is a slow process solely based on random genetic mutations that offer individuals some reproductively adaptive advantage. The standard unit for evolutionary change called the darwin is in fact a change of one percent in one million years. But recent experiments have shown that evolution in some species can be extremely rapid, sometimes 60,000 darwins per year, which means that there must be some mechanism for genetic change that is much more rapid than random genetic mutation allows. We will show how form follows function, and the primary function of life is to allow creatures to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living creatures in order to establish and maintain a balance within the shared interest / self-interest of creatures in any ecosystem. The nature of subjective response is to serve as the foundation of most adaptations in form. If this is true, it is the genes that code for subjective experience in living creatures that predominantly control the form that creatures will take as they adapt to particular ecosystems, and this process can be very rapid or slow depending on how creatures are able to perceive the nature of their ecosystem, its prevalent stress and opportunity. Virtually all of the recent evolutionary research has confirmed that evolutionary change often happens with stunning speed and rapidity.

Another fundamental error in Darwinian theory is the belief that the behaviour of individuals can have no genetic influence on offspring. The new science of epigenetics has shown that in some species both diet in mothers and their nurturing behaviour with their offspring can actually turn genes on and off, and these genetic changes may persist for generations. There are also many experiments that show how genetic expression of particular proteins is influenced by environmental conditions. In some creatures, females transform themselves into males because of the sudden loss of the dominant male. Saltwater Stickleback fish have the ability to completely transform their bodies in one generation when moved to a freshwater environment. Epigenetic research and many new experiments in evolutionary genetics are proving that the genome has an incredible plasticity and responsiveness based on as yet undiscovered processes.

It has recently been discovered that there is more to genetic processes than the standard model in which DNA produces RNA which then create the proteins out of which all living things are formed. DNA also produces micro-RNA that create no proteins and yet are instrumental in the timing and quantity in which proteins are combined to form living tissue. The process through which changes in micro-RNA change the recipe of life is as yet little understood.

Jumping genes or transposons are bits of DNA that move freely about the genome and they either travel to a new spot or paste copies of themselves into random stretches of DNA, often with extremely negative consequences. "University of Michigan geneticist Fred Gage and his colleagues found that a transposon called LINE-1 readily moves around in the brains of mice, suggesting that the same gene may do likewise in humans. Their reshuffling seems to take place starting before birth and continuing throughout life in places like the short-term memory center. According to Gage, not only do humans have a much higher proportion of transposons in their genomes than other animals but the LINE-1 seems predisposed to alter genes for brain function... "If transposons do spawn variety in mental architecture, that can help explain the differences in identical twins," says Gage. "Even though they are clones, they have their own personalities."

This is clear evidence of the incredible plasticity of the DNA molecule and strongly suggests that there must be a communication network among DNA molecules that allows for rapid reconfiguration. The creation of a new species may be dependent on particular individuals within particular existing species that are capable of fundamental genetic reorganization at times a great stress. Humans and chimpanzees are a good example. Chimpanzees have 47 chromosomes. Two of those chromosomes joined together to create the 46 chromosomes in the human genome, a genome with a plasticity that created as many as 20 different proto-human species while chimpanzees evolved into only one new form, the bonobo. Clearly genomes of some closely related species have widely different expressions of genetic plasticity. This may also be true of individuals within species from which new founder genes may create new species.

Other experiments have also shown that there are yet undiscovered genetic processes that allow rapid transformation in form completely outside the range of natural selection that may in fact be responsible for the fundamental genetic changes that create new species. We propose that these processes are based on the genomes ability to perceive external reality and then use its own plasticity to reorganize itself in fundamental new ways to respond to external stress or opportunity.

In September of 2012, 30 papers in the journals Nature and Genome Research and Genome Biology established that the 80% of the genome that was once thought to be junk DNA was active and needed, and included a vast system of switches that control which genes are used in cells and when they are used.

These discoveries are considered a revolutionary new view of the genome that will change the way science understands genetics. The discovery of these countless new switches gives the idea of genetic awareness and plasticity a means for creating irreducibly complex new adaptations and new species because it establishes that the genome is an interconnected network of switches that creates the homeostatic infrastructure expressed within living organisms.

Darwin's most obvious error is actually found in the title of his most famous book, Origin of Species. In the last 150 years in which the genomes of some creatures like fruit flies have been altered in every possible way, not one new species has ever been created. The fossil history of life over the last 6 million years is contained in many different undisturbed sedimentary layers of rock, yet there is no evidence of any new species being formed through slow progressive change. In most of the fossil record, creatures appear and disappear in an evolutionary blink of the eye, and even those creatures that are seen as transitional species arrive suddenly in the fossil record after long periods of genetic stability. Stephen Jay Gould called this process punctuated equilibrium, yet there is no genetic explanation for such rapid change contained in such clear evidence found in the fossil record.

We will propose an alternative theory for how new creatures come into existence because of genomic awareness and plasticity responding to changes to the Nash equilibrium of ecosystems that trigger extreme reorganization of the genome in particularly adaptive species. These quantum leaps of extreme genetic changes come from outside the bell curve of heritable traits that define the extremes of variation in individual species, often atavistically reaching back to earlier genetic potentialities in other earlier species. Human beings have many more traits in common with Orang-utans than Chimpanzees who are genetically far closer to us, even though they appeared on the planet as a species millions of years before the common ancestor of chimps and humans. In his book The Red Ape, Jeffrey H Schwartz identifies 23 traits we share with Orang-tans and only 6 with Chimpanzees. Human nature may be closer to Orang-utans than Chimps because those were the traits genomic plasticity found most useful to proto-humans.

Darwin himself was on the brink of understanding the power of the genome to reach back to earlier forms and solutions. Stephen Jay Gould in his article Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes discusses atavism, the ability of the genome to produce variations in individuals that have been lost in a species for millions of years. One example he gives is Julius Caesar's horse, a horse that was born with five toes instead of the hoof that's been a part of equine anatomy for the last several million years. Gould quotes Darwin on the subject of atavism and how it exemplifies the incredible complexity and potentialities in the genome whose existence he intuited, but which would remain undiscovered for the next hundred years.

"The fertilized germ of one of the higher animals... is perhaps the most wonderful object in nature... On the doctrine of reversion (atavism)... the germ becomes a far more marvelous object, for, besides the visible changes which it undergoes, we must believe that it is crowded with invisible characters... separated by hundreds or even thousands of generations from the present time: and these characters, like those written on paper with invisible ink, lie ready to be evolved whenever the organization is disturbed by certain known or unknown condition." We believe this disturbance in the organization of the genome is in direct response to major disturbances to the Nash equilibrium of the environment to which a creature belongs. We believe this was Darwin's glimpse of genetic awareness and plasticity.

The evolutionary potential and plasticity of the genome is just beginning to be understood, and is proving to be infinitely more complex than simple natural selection based on competitive adaptive fitness. And that genetic complexity and plasticity must be built on the foundation of subjective responses of creatures because life depends primarily on the balance within the shared interest / self interest of creatures in every ecosystem.

Irreducible Complexity

Perhaps the biggest challenge to the Darwinian model of natural selection is at the level of cellular and microbiological processes. Although microbiological research has established the detailed functions of many life processes such as blood clotting and immune system response, there is virtually nothing in the literature that even begins to offer an explanation for how such exceedingly complex life processes could have evolved in slow adaptive steps. At the cellular level, life processes are irreducibly complex in that the timing, order and structures of the proteins that achieve a particular physiological end are all absolutely dependent on one another for that life process to function at all. Like a common spring mousetrap, all the parts have to fit together and work in exactly the right order for it to work at all.

Michael J. Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box makes an overwhelmingly persuasive case for the fact that all life processes are irreducibly complex. He points out that a bicycle can never evolve into a motorcycle by the slow and progressive improvement of the individual bicycle parts because there are no possible transitional steps between gears and pedals and an internal combustion engine. The irreducibly complex engine must fit into the bicycle frame and entirely replace the pedals and gears or neither the bicycle nor the new form of the motorcycle would work at all. There simply is no way for any one of the parts of a bicycle to slowly evolve into a gas engine that could power a motorcycle.

Like other life processes, even the various parts within a cell are irreducibly complex. There is no way for them to have evolved by slow, progressive adaptive change. They either work or they don't. They either exist or they don't. The way protein waste is disposed of by the lysosome is an irreducibly complex, multi-stepped intricate process, just like blood clotting and immune system response

Behe gives an excellent description of the structure of cilia and flagella, tiny structures some single celled creatures and bacteria use to propel themselves. He then goes on to describe the deeper problem. "As biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity with dozens or even hundreds of precisely tailored parts. It is very likely that many of the parts we have not considered here are required for any cilium to function in a cell. As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummet..... Darwinian theory has given no explanation for the cilium or flagellum. The overwhelming complexity of the swimming systems push us to think that it may never give an explanation. As the number of systems that are resistant to gradualist explanations mount, the need for a new kind of explanation grows more apparent."

As Darwin himself said, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown."

On the larger scale, within 10 million years, whales evolved from a land mammal that looked much like a wolf. As the whale evolved, the pelvis of the land animal changed so that a tail that moved back and forth became a tail that moved up and down. There is simply no possible way for such a complete pelvic reorganization to occur through slow step-by-step adaptation. A functioning tail either goes back and forth or up-and-down. Only a complete and instantaneous change from one irreducibly complex pelvic form to another irreducibly complex pelvic form would allow such a transformation.

The irreducibly complex ear in mammals has been identified as having its genetic origin in the lower jawbone of a reptile. Stephen Jay Gould proposed that this is possible because a jawbone may also be sensitive to sound, and so, through natural selection, slowly be transformed into a mammalian ear. It strains credibility to imagine a jaw and an ear existing coincidentally until the jaw function was lost and the ear finally began to work, especially when you consider that mammals have lower jaws. Both are irreducibly complex systems and they either work or they don't.

Virtually all life processes are just as irreducibly complex and there is simply no denying that in the course of evolution these countless irreducibly complex life processes within and among differentiated cells did come to exist. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe makes the case that only some form of intelligent design could possibly create such irreducibly complex life processes. He does not shy away from the religious implications of such an idea, although he admits that there may be some unknown process or even an extra-terrestrial agent responsible for such intelligent design.

The problem with seeing a divine origin in the intelligent design of living systems is that every new life process would require another and another and another divine intervention for their creation because they are all so irreducibly complex. It is difficult to reconcile life as the product of a god constantly tinkering with the genome of every species to create every basic change in the complexity of life. Behe offers another speculation that all the information necessary for every irreducibly complex biological system may have been present from the very beginning. Finally he says that in some cases, science must accept the fact that it can't know and may never be able to know the origin of exceedingly complex life processes.

We propose that there is an aware and responsive designer without innate intelligence that exists entirely within nature, much like the individual neurons in the brain that have no innate consciousness create a feedback loop of interconnected cells that does have conscious awareness. It is unconscious neurons that create a conscious representation of an outside reality. This structurally aware designer of all irreducibly complex forms in life is the genome itself which orchestrates the genes which create all the proteins and controls all the timing of metabolic processes that are responsible for every structure that are integrated within living creatures. If one thinks of the genome as having an innate structural awareness of all the integrated irreducibly complex parts of the living creature it creates and maintains, one can see that it might have the potential to create new irreducibly complex designs because of that structural awareness and potential for creating ever-increasing patterns of complexity. All that is required for the intelligent design of a new irreducibly complex biological process is the plasticity to change the expression of genes in a way that exhibits order and coherence that might arise from some basic rules within the genome itself. If the genome can be thought of as an irrepressible tinkering inventor making new irreducibly complex systems for which it may have no present use, but may one day use for a completely new life process, the story of evolution just may make rational sense. The genes that create the collagen rivets that all complex creatures use to connect cells together first appeared in single celled creatures called choanoflagellates that never connect cells. Other genes have been shown to exist in creatures that do not express them. This egg before the chicken scenario that creates apparently useless irreducibly complex parts may be the way the tinkering genome works and may go a long way to explaining why 95 percent of the genome called junk DNA has no apparent use. Later, we will discuss the revolutionary new idea that retroviruses still existing in the junk DNA of complex creatures may in fact record the process of evolutionary genetic reorganization responsible for major changes in evolutionary complexity.

Furthermore, there is in fact a new branch of science called chaos theory that says that out of simple rules, incredible variations in complexity can and do spontaneously arise everywhere in nature in everything from molecular interactions to the irreducibly complex interactions that create living systems. Rivers and blood vessels look the same because of this inherent property of matter for spontaneous self-organization into ever more complex patterns from very simple basic rules within natural structures. Chaos theory has established that these infinitely complex patterns are created using simple rules and feedback loops in nature that creates ever-increasing patterns of complexity in form. The feedback loops of communication in life are the subjective responses with which a creature responds to the ecosystem in which it exists and it is this fundamental feedback loop of subjective response that is the key determinant in how a particular adaptation fits into the ecosystems in which creatures live.

In the '70s Robert May, studying how animal populations change over time, discovered a simple mathematical formula, Xn +1= RXn(1-Xn) that showed that small changes in reproductive rates could have huge consequences in population numbers, up or down, with those wildly variant numbers appearing for no apparent reason. This butterfly effect where infinitely small changes can have enormous consequential effects in population numbers may be a crucial part of the basic nature of reproductive success that has nothing to do with natural selection.

The simple structural rules of the genomic network within cells connected to the feedback loop of bilateral subjective responses in the infinitely complex balance within every ecosystem is the most spectacular expression of the self-organizing nature of the universe in which order and chaos, simplicity and complexity are the foundational bilateral reality of existence. The feedback loop in which some traits are expressed and others are suppressed depends on communication, and communication and response between cells is our definition of subjective response. Just as the cellular communication between neurons in the bilateral brain expresses and suppresses particular responses to perceptions of external reality, the genomic network expresses and suppresses particular genetic responses to the perception of external reality in creating the balance within shared interest / self-interest of individual and groups of cells. It is genomic awareness that arises from the communication among cells and creatures in creating and maintaining the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem that determines which genes, which traits are expressed or not. Simply put, genetic adaptation is about the relationship between the genome and the ecosystem in which it expresses its own self-generating complexity.

If Robert May's formula is correct and population numbers are predominantly determined by small changes in external conditions, the Darwinian basis for natural selection based on adaptive fitness resulting in reproductive advantage collapses completely.

Just as the brain has the awareness of external reality and can reform itself through its own plasticity to respond with new structures to new stimulation, so too the genome that allows the brain to do all that must have its own structural awareness and plasticity to respond to the experience of the creature it creates. The way the brain uses neurotransmitters to maintain homeostasis and respond through the senses to the creatures external awareness of other living things, the genomes within the organs of the body that communicate through the endocrine system must also maintain homeostasis and respond through the senses to the creatures external awareness of other living things. The brain with its integrated modular organization, may be modeled on the way the endocrine system and organs work. The genomic network functions much like the brain with feedback loops that allow a creature to respond in milliseconds to external reality.

The genomic network of a body must function much like an engineer designing toy transformers. A toy transformer truck can become an airplane with just a few manipulations. The genomic network can create different forms and functions by altering the order of just a few genetic base pairs. The only difference is that the genome is creating spectacular variations in complexity from the simple rules of its own structural nature. The difference between the cerebellum of a chimpanzee and a human being is only 18 letters out of billions, and so it is breathtaking to consider what the genome can do with just a few alterations- irreducibly complex order arising from chaos, elegant simplicity giving birth to infinite complexity.

Because living creatures are the result of unimaginably complex integrated life processes, the genome within each cell of living creature must be part of a feedback loop with all the genomes in all the other cells in that living organism that create the proteins that preserve and maintain life function. It is this mindless structural awareness and interconnection with the ecosystem that gives the genome its unimaginably complex power in creating and altering life in stunningly new and rapid ways.

What is truly remarkable is how little the genome has to alter in its own behaviour to affect fundamental changes in form and function. The genome alone seems to have the power to create a two-stroke engine for a motorcycle from the instructions for the pedals of a bicycle with just a few changes in the manufacturing instructions. It can be argued that the genome alone has the innate structural ability to create the emergent design that is necessary for the evolution of species and all the irreducibly complex life processes that they use.

Darwin's admiration of the yet undiscovered genome and its ability to reach back hundreds and even thousands of generations to earlier forms was the first true recognition of genomic awareness and plasticity. With this realization, he was actually on the verge of understanding the true origin of species, if not the underlying self-generating order and complexity in the very nature of matter that forms the DNA molecule.

Darwin's Big Error of Omission

Perhaps Darwin's greatest error was one of omission in not understanding the power of subjective response to control reproductive and therefore evolutionary success. If the Nash equilibrium with its dependence on subjective awareness is the process that controls the economic success of all life forms and ecosystems, then subjective response must be the foundation upon which adaptive success primarily exists. Bilateral subjective response is the feedback loop connecting every creature and its environment. This final great error of omission in Darwinian theory also originates in the bias preserved in Western science and all current evolutionary theory which sees life in mechanistic terms, as if it was made up of reducible parts, parts made up of parts made up of molecules that create reproducible organic modules. Natural selection is seen as the mechanism for the progressive evolution of all the parts that make up a living organism, forgetting that a living organism isn't reducible to its genes or parts, but evolves as an irreducibly complex whole sentient being in an incredibly complex, dynamic, integrated ecosystem.

The reason no one has come up with an evolutionary theory that even includes subjective response is because it is necessary to see life, every living cell and organism as a whole that can never be reduced to its parts, the way an ecosystem can never really be reduced to its parts because it is defined by the actions and reactions of countless living things both cooperating and competing within and among species. Any life form or complex living being is really just an enclosed ecosystem competing and cooperating to create a greater sentient whole, and science has just begun to explore the idea that a whole living being is infinitely more than the sum of its parts. Life is a fabric made of countless interlocking threads created by genes that still persists from the time when life first began. And like all fabric, the pattern it expresses is based on simple rules inherent in the very structure of the loom upon which it is formed. The difference is that the fabric of life creates increasing patterns of order and complexity from those rules.

A living cell, organism or creature is an experiential entity dependent on its subjective response to other creatures and its parts only have meaning in terms of the entity's ability to turn experience with other creatures into behaviour. And the function of every part of every cell in every organism is to identify the experiences upon which it acts and reacts. Changes in subjective response must precede the changes in form a creature makes because that's what life is about. Changes within the genes that create subjective response must demand changes in form that are a response to experience, and so evolution is really the bilateral co-evolution of subjective experience and the genes that create the forms that respond to those experiences. Understanding the way the brain creates retrievable memory is meaningless unless it is understood that memory evolved to create subjective experiences of conscious feelings of pleasure and fear tied to a mental representation reality. The same is true of the proteins and receptors that allow a bacterium to detect, communicate and respond to other living things because life is about bilateral individual / shared experience. That is why life and evolution is primarily about balancing the relationships between living things rather than adaptation to environmental opportunity or pressure. A paramecium, porpoise, or person is an irreducibly complex sentient being, and it is that whole sentience that has evolved over time, not the parts from which it is made. The story of life is in fact primarily the story of the evolution of sentience or subjective response and how it connects living things. The story of life is primarily built on the subjective responses that create the feedback loops between a creature and its environment that allows it to find the balance within shared interest / self-interest that is the foundational bilateral rule of evolutionary success.

This book will propose that this missing part to evolutionary theory which we call bilateral subjective adaptation is even more fundamental to the way evolution works than physical adaptation. We will show how bilateral subjective response and its nine quantum leaps are the most powerful force in life. We will propose that traits for bilateral subjective response control inherited behaviour, and with such behaviour, the predominant evolutionary success and failure of every living creature that have ever lived.

The Fractal Nature of Life

There is a fractal formula E=M3 / 4 for the gain in energy efficiency of creatures as they grow in size. An elephant that is 200,000 times bigger than a mouse uses only 10,000 times more calories. This scaling efficiency for energy use is absolutely universal in all creatures from bacteria to blue whales. Again it is clear that there is within the genome itself a structural formula for life processes, and size in particular, that is simple and often universal and has nothing to do with natural selection.

Fascinatingly, G.B. West, James Brown, and Brian Enquist in a groundbreaking paper, A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology have shown that trees seem to be able to regulate their size and dispersion in a forest using fractal ratios that connect the differences in size and spacing of branches on an individual tree with exactly the same fractal ratio that determines the size and spacing of trees in the forest.

In their experiments, they cut down a random tree and measured the size and spacing of every branch on the tree, and found that their measurements corresponded directly to the size and spacing of trees in the forest surrounding the felled tree. By what means such spacing could be effected among trees of many species having different needs for light and growth, competing relentlessly, reproducing themselves through a random distribution of seeds in many varying types of soil is hard to explain without at least considering that the plants are communicating with each other to balance their shared interest / self-interest in their ecosystem. Where is natural selection in this?

Benoit Mandelbrot in his revolutionary, foundational book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, explains how the complexity of nature is found in simple formulae that repeat themselves over and over and over creating infinite variation and absolute similarity no matter how and where one looks. The self-similarity of fractal geometry is absolutely reflected in the self-similarity of nature. Blood vessels and nerves are not similar because natural selection found the same answer, but because a simple fractal order is contained in the genome for such living processes. It is not natural selection finding the same answers to particular ecological problems, but rather the foundational structural geometry of the DNA molecule expressing itself no matter what scale or what time frame one looks. The fractal branching of the blood vessels in a kidney is elegant and orderly like the fractal branching of an elm tree. The fractal branching of the blood vessels of a kidney cancer are disordered, with the branches much like that of a tumbleweed. This is a clear indication of the breakdown in the genetic geometry within the DNA molecule necessary for the orderly maintenance of life systems, with cancer cells exhibiting the inability of blood vessels cells to communicate with each other to create such order.

Fractal geometry is created by endless repetitions of the same formula on the same data that give rise to self-similarity, and what better descriptions of evolution might there be? Cells take the same information and repeat it endlessly through DNA replication. The fractal geometric shapes of the antenna in cell phones that allows it to respond to countless different wavelengths, is reflected in the fractal geometric shapes screaming out from all complex living forms. The 3 billion years that the DNA molecule was expressing itself through trillions upon trillions upon trillions of repetitions of the self-similarity of the DNA molecule in bacteria and single celled creatures is the reason that all complex life forms exhibit that same self-similarity. One might even define life as a particular Mandelbrot set of the DNA molecule that was established in the earliest bacterial life.

We will propose that life has an order based on the fractal geometry that originates in the genome, and the way that order is expressed is through the subjective responses and communication of cells and living creatures.

The Bilateral Reality of Life

Life has been based on bilateral subjective responses since the first bacteria appeared on earth. This bilateral process is the fundamental property of nature that unites the subjective responses that serve to create and maintain the balance within shared interest / self-interest in every creature that has ever lived. Bilateral action / reaction responses are the fundamental expression of subjective response even in creatures as simple as bacteria. Within and among species, within and among individual cells, subjective responses to other living things create actions that then induce reactions in other cellular or multi-cellular individuals which may then produce a cascade of action / reaction responses in other cells. These complex cellular reactions may in turn induce their own reactions in individuals or in groups of individuals within an ecosystem. This is the feedback loop necessary for the perfection of complex systems. Watch the movement of a school of fish or starlings in flight and one can appreciate how individuals in groups of thousands or even millions can express such unconscious cellular responses through their behaviour and awareness of others.

Shared interest / self-interest as bilateral subjective responses began with the beginning of life with creatures finding a balance within action responses that expressed objective, task specific, competitive functional behaviours tied to self-interest and reaction responses that expressed subjective, integrated, communicative cooperative behaviours tied to shared interest. All future evolutionary change would be an extension of the bilateral relationship within the basic shared interest / self-interest present in bacteria that would one day take the form of the bilateral brain of human beings having the most complex expressions of bilateral shared interest / self-interest in the bilateral right brain / left brain creation of human consciousness.

Iain McGilchrist in his seminal, spectacular book, The Master and His Emissary offers a tour de force in understanding how the shifting balance within the bilateral human brain has literally created the Western world.

Although he only speaks of vertebrates, he traces the bilateral human brain to the bilateral subjective response of me / us that we will trace back to the origins of life.

Iain McGilchrist... "On the one hand, there is the context, the world of 'me'-just me and my needs as an individual competing with another individuals, my ability to peck that seed, pursue that rabbit, or grab that fruit. I need to use, or to manipulate, the world for my ends, and for that I need narrow-focus attention. On the other hand I need to see myself in the broader context of the world at large, and in relation to others, whether they be friend or foe: and I need to take account of myself as a member of my social group, to see potential allies and beyond that to see potential mates and potential enemies. Here I may feel myself to be part of something much bigger than myself, and even existing in and through that ' something' that is bigger than myself-the flight or flock with which I scavenge, breed and roam, the pack with which I hunt, the mate and offspring that I also feed, and ultimately everything that goes on in my purview. This requires less of a wilfully directed, narrowly focused attention, and more of an open, receptive, widely diffused alertness to whatever exists, with allegiances outside of the self."

"The most fundamental observation that one can make about the observable universe... is that there are at all levels forces that tend to coherence and unification, and forces that tend to incoherence and separation. The tension between them seems to be an inalienable condition of existence; regardless of the level at which one contemplates it. The hemispheres of the human brain, I believe, are an expression of this necessary tension. And the two hemispheres also adopt different strategies about their differences: the right hemisphere towards cohesion of their two dispositions, the left hemisphere towards competition between them."

"It may well be that we, and the great apes before us, are not the originators of the asymmetry in hemisphere function—not even the originators of the nature of that asymmetry—but inheritors of something much older than ourselves which we have utilized and developed in peculiarly human ways to peculiarly human ends. It is not just human beings that have found that there are needs, drives, tendencies, which, while equally fundamental, are also fundamentally incompatible, an essential divisive drive to acquisition, power and manipulation, based on competition, which sets individual against individual, in the service of unitary survival: and an essential cohesive drive towards cooperation, synergy and mutual benefit, based on collaboration, in the service of the survival of the group."

These quotations from The Master and his Emissary offer as good a definition of bilateral shared interest / self-interest and the bilateral subjective response of 'me / us' as one might wish.

McGilchrist sums up... "In general terms, then, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be the awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends: and it is involved in bonding in social animals."

It is clear that the right and left sides of the human brain form the warp and weft in the fabric of human reality using the threads of shared interest / self-interest, memory and experience that exist in their separate / inseparable neurological domains.

Leslie Rogers, at the University of New England in Australia has demonstrated strong left and right biases in the brains of many so-called simpler creatures. Honeybees learn better when using their right antenna. Male chameleons show more aggression, reflected as changes in body color, when they look at another chameleon with the left eye. A toad is more likely to jump away when a predator is introduced to its left visual field (right brain / fear). The same toad prefers to flick its tongue to the right side when lashing out at a cricket (left brain / nourishment).

Chicks prefer to use their left eye to search for food and right eye to watch for predators overhead. When chicks are raised in the dark, they do not develop normal brain asymmetry. In trying to eat and watch for hawks overhead, such non-lateralized chicks become confused and vulnerable to attack. Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient trait, according to Professor Rogers. He believes that this must confer some sort of survival advantage on organisms.

Dogs also exhibit the same kind of bilateral brain function in the way they wag their tails. When they feel positive about something or someone their tails wag more to the right side than the left. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. Because a dog's tail is on the centerline of its body, this is a clear indication of the effect of bilateral brain function.

Chimpanzee brains are asymmetrical in the same way as a human brain says William D. Hopkins, researcher at Yerkes National Primate Research Center. When chimps are excited they tend to scratch themselves on the left side of their bodies, reflecting strong negative emotions. And left-handed chimps are more fearful of novel stimuli than right-handers. Their dominant right brains make them more cautious.

The bilateral nature of all subjective responses may best understood by thinking of the bilateral nature of the human brain.

The left and right sides of the brain exist as semi-independent functioning units that process perception in completely separate and different ways. Humans in fact have two completely distinct brains that evolved separately for different purposes and yet seamlessly integrate perception into a coherent representation of reality. These two separate sides of the brain then communicate with each other to create an integrated seamless whole representation of reality we call consciousness. Many experiments have shown this to be true. Human beings really have two distinct and different brains doing completely separate things that then work together for the shared purpose of perceiving, communicating and responding to an external world. The human brain can then best be represented as the bilateral left brain / right brain, creating two indivisible sides of the same coin, the warp and weft of memory and experience creating the representation of reality we call human consciousness. The same bilateral properties of reality are evident in space / time and mass / energy that were once thought to be distinct and different but are now known to be inextricably linked.

The bilateral reality of subjective response has existed since life began. Nature / nurture, cooperation / competitiveness, subjective / objective perception, conscious / unconscious response, male / female traits, reciprocal giving / receiving, personal / social acceptance, personal / social rejection, deductive / inductive reasoning and intimacy / sexuality in human love exist as dynamic inextricably linked subjective bilateral realities, just as all subjective responses exist in the Nash equilibriums that define the economic reality of life.

Even personality traits in humans are bilateral realities. Introversion / extraversion, shyness / self-confidence, risk-taking / caution, optimism / pessimism are almost invariably described as existing on a continuum, with extreme expressions of such pared traits at one end or the other. It is far more appropriate to see those personality traits as bilateral realities with individuals having genetic predispositions for both traits in varying degrees. Rather than seeing traits on a line between two opposite poles, it is more appropriate to see such paired subjective traits as two sides of the same coin, the fundamental nature of reality the Romans represented with the two-faced god Janus. Even good / evil are bilateral realities that are inextricably linked so that one depends on the other for its very meaning and existence. So too, introversion / extraversion, shyness / self-confidence, optimism / pessimism are also inextricably linked and each depends on the other for its very meaning and existence.

Shared interest / self-interest is the primary expression of the bilateral economic reality of life that has evolved into many different types of subjective response over the last 4 billion years. Shared interest and self-interest are economic terms that are the two sides of the same coin of shared interest / self-interest which express the bilateral reality of life because survival is an economic process that depends on the division of resources among cooperating and competing individuals and species in any ecosystem. Traits for cooperation and competition are in fact the first expression of the economic reality of shared interest / self-interest of dynamic ecosystems and the original expression of the bilateral subjective reality of life and evolution.

Another way to look at the bilateral subjective reality of life is to see shared interest and self-interest as two separate rails that create the track on which shared interest / self-interest must run, two parallel, separate sides of life that forms the bilateral foundation and architecture for every subjective adaptation that has ever been or will ever be.

All evolutionary adaptations can be seen as bilateral action / reaction formations of behaviour that express subjective responses that serve the bilateral nature of shared interest / self-interest of creatures in any ecosystem. Beginning with the first subjective approach / avoidance responses of bacteria, bilateral action / reaction formations are the source of all behaviour, and bilateral cooperative / competitive behaviour defines the evolutionary success or failure of all creatures, allies and competitors alike.

Even the DNA molecule itself can be seen as a model of this bilateral reality of life, with two spiral, inextricably interconnected proteins chains that divide and recombine to create the distinct nature of every individual and species, two inextricable and yet separate sides to the form in the nature of life. Even the proteins in the DNA molecule appear to have bilateral form; Adenine always pairs with Thymine and Guanine always pairs with Cytosine forming what are called complementary base pairs fitting together rather like the symbols of yin and yang fit together.

The yin / yang symbol of the Taoist religion is in fact the first and best philosophical expression of the bilateral reality of nature and life itself. Stretching the idea of bilateralism to its limit, even photons seem to exist in a bilateral reality as wave and particle and that is clearly observable in non-locality experiments that show that a particle split in two is instantly aware of any change of state in its partner, communicating that change of state at faster than the speed of light. Even subatomic particles it appears are inextricably entangled regardless of their apparent distinct separation and distance. The depth of the bilateral reality of nature is only beginning to be understood in what may be called the Tao of life.

The Bilateral Subjective Architecture of Life

A theory based on the genetic force of bilateral subjective adaptation also makes it possible to describe the evolution of subjective experience in a way current evolutionary theory has never even attempted to do. In the story of life, there are a number of crucial genetic adaptations that allowed increasing complexity in subjective experience just as there were a number of crucial genetic adaptations that allowed increasing complexity in living forms. The genes that allowed single celled creatures to join together with collagen and differentiate in form made the first communal and complex life forms possible. Millions of years later, the hox genes that allowed creatures to have bilateral form with a top and bottom, a front and a back, a right and left side also were foundational in giving life infinitely greater evolutionary possibilities. The genes that create a central processing unit called a brain contained in a separate segment of the body called a head was the next fundamentally important adaptation necessary for increased complexity in animals and that crucial step began with the genetic instructions that created the color around the mouth opening and anus of a sea squirt. The genes that would code for brains are present in these earliest complex life forms on earth clearly showing the power of the genome to create the most complex structure from something as simple as a colour.

Just as these genetic innovations were the foundation for the increasing complexity of form in life, there are a number of genetic innovations for subjective response that gave life increasing complexity and purpose and were the driving force behind those changes in form.

To be able to say subjective response gives purpose to life, it is necessary to define what that means. As we said, the purpose of life is to establish and maintain a balance within shared interest / self-interest among living creatures in any ecosystem through cooperative and competitive behaviour. Natural selection and sexual selection have been seen as the primary mechanisms by which that purpose is affected. And because form follows function, the form that creatures take must serve the function of establishing and re-establishing that balance in a constantly shifting environment. This is at least partially true among individual species where variation is the foundation of adaptation, but it is demonstrably not true for the creation of species where only genomic awareness and plasticity could create new irreducibly complex living forms and functions.

The Loom of Life

Irreducibly complex life processes characterize all living things. From bacteria to humans, creatures respire, metabolize food, eliminate waste, have locomotion, regulate internal processes, respond to environmental sensations and perceptions, perceive, communicate and respond to other living things.

When creatures became communal and then complex organisms of connected and differentiated cells, these life processes became even more complex. What creatures composed of differentiated cells have in common with simple bacteria is the integration of these 'organic' functions into a coherent, self-sustaining, homeostatic new organism. Within these complex life forms, 'me / us' became the relationship between organs composed of differentiated cells: brain, liver, kidney, skin, etc. In human beings, for example, there are 100 different kinds of cells doing perhaps 500 different functions, working seamlessly to create an integrated, homeostatic organism.

These irreducibly complex functions must appear fully formed or they do not work, and so natural selection cannot be responsible for any such change or evolutionary novelty in these functions.

What genomic awareness and plasticity does is create these new genetic potentialities in the genome before they are expressed in life, the genetic potential egg literally preceding the living egg-laying platypus, this egg-laying potentiality atavistically re-expressed by the genome from earlier reptilian ancestors.

Responding to its awareness of the ecosystem in which it lives, the genome creates new forms to respond to what it perceives.

The organic forms creatures have generally exist to serve the self-interest they have in health, survival and reproduction. The subjective responses of creatures, the way they communicate and respond to other living creatures, generally serves the shared interest creatures have with members of their own and different species in their ecosystem. The balance within shared interest / self-interest is the loom on which creatures live and evolve.

Like brain plasticity, genomic plasticity allows different areas of their structure to assume new functions when necessary. The visual cortex, because of brain plasticity is relegated to the auditory and tactile senses of a creature if it is born blind. Trapped in dark caves, creatures with eyes lose the sense of sight where it has no use, and those areas of the brain are taken over by other senses. The eyes may actually change in form to become vestigial remnants of what they had been, although the genes to create such eyes remain intact.

Because eyes are irreducibly complex organic structures, these changes in neural plasticity must happen rapidly and completely if they are to be of use to any individual creature, something clearly impossible through natural selection.

The genome it seems has a number of different experimental potentialities that it can generate to create new options for different or altered life processes. Like the ones that are changed, the new organic forms are irreducibly complex because they must instantly, and seamlessly integrate with all the other life processes that maintain the homeostatic balance of life. Genomic plasticity, like the brains, allows it to create new integrated forms to respond to its awareness of the external reality of its ecosystem.

The quantum leaps in evolutionary complexity are tied directly to the nine quantum leaps in bilateral subjective complexity we identify. It is only when creatures have new ways to communicate with each other that the genome has a deeper relationship with its ecosystem allowing it to create new options from its new awareness of external reality. Only then can evolution made the leaps in organic form and behaviour that can be characterized as new species. It is on the nine rungs in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity that genomic awareness and plasticity can adapt and create the forms, functions and even the ecosystems that form the Nash equilibrium in the loom of life.

Here is a graphic portrayal of the loom of life.
The Loom of Life

The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation proposes that there are a number of quantum leaps in subjective response that form nine rungs in the ladder of bilateral evolutionary subjective complexity upon which all creatures have and must live and evolve. Each new rung created a new order of subjective experience to express the balance within shared interest / self-interest of creatures occupying ecosystems of increasing complexity created by those living creatures themselves. The first three rungs contain all living creatures without a brain. The next five rungs contain all complex life forms having a brain but without rational conscious. The final rung is singularly occupied by human beings capable of the subjective response of abstract self-awareness through language in the bilateral subjective response of deductive / inductive reasoning.

The First Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Action / reaction Communicative Responses

Action / reaction communicative responses allow organisms to detect, communicate, and respond to each other, to identify friend and foe in order to establish a balance within shared interest / self-interest through co-operative and competitive behaviour. These were the initial bilateral subjective responses of life's simplest creatures; bacteria, archea, single celled animals and algae, creatures exhibiting life's most basic bilateral subjective responses.

Original life forms first developed the ability to respond to environmental cues through sensations that identified different levels of temperature, light, pressure, and chemical concentrations. The ability to move toward and away from preferential environmental conditions was the first expression of approach / avoidance sensation. These were automatic responses to environmental cues but not subjective responses.

When early creatures developed the ability to detect, communicate and respond to other living creatures, approach / avoidance sensation evolved into the first true bilateral subjective responses, the feedback loop necessary for all evolutionary change. This ability to detect, communicate and respond to other living creatures would be the foundation of all bilateral subjective responses in every creature that would ever live. The first expression of this ability for approach / avoidance as a subjective response would be the innate action / reaction attraction response to others with whom a creature had a shared interest and the action / reaction avoidance response expressed in bilateral fight / flight responses to the awareness of predators.

Approach responses would be expressed through protein signaling messages to and from individual creatures serving as an attractant to those creatures with which an individual had a shared interest. The other creature would then reply through its own protein messages or by direct behavioural response. The proteins signals that control approach responses in genetic transfer behaviour or mating, up to and including sexual attraction continues in creatures as simple as bacteria and as complicated as human beings.

One of the earliest expressions of avoidance responses to predators is the fight / flight response expressed through the innate subjective response of flight distance, the innate ability of creatures to unconsciously determine when one or the other was most appropriate in a particular circumstance. The bilateral expression of fight / flight response exists in all animals depending on the distinct balance of prey / hunter traits in that species.

Beginning with these earliest subjective responses in life's simplest creatures, genetic evolution would develop differentiated traits to serve prey and hunting animals by establishing a distinctly different balance within their particular approach / avoidance responses. A different balance of prey / hunter traits, attraction / reaction, fight / flight responses exists in all living creatures and forms the subjective architecture of life within every ecosystem and every creature within it.

Most animals, even bacteria and algae, have both prey and hunter traits. Bilateral prey / hunter traits, approach action / reaction and fight / flight responses create the first innate subjective responses by which creatures identify themselves and others in the bilateral relationship of 'me / us'. The innate bilateral subjective relationship of 'me / us' is quickly followed by the bilateral connection of one group identifying, communicating and responding to other groups through the innate bilateral subjective response of 'us / them'.

The Second Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Communal Integration

The second rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is the communal integration of cells in the same organism expressed through differentiated forms and behaviours. The bilateral innate subjective response of communal integration of same / dissimilar forms and behaviours allows communal creatures to form cooperative groups of many kinds of differentiated cells in order to achieve greater adaptation and flexibility for feeding, locomotion, protection and even reproduction through sex. Cooperation, communication and differentiation between cells in these creatures allowed the first quantum leap in bilateral subjective response that would be the basis of all further evolutionary complexity. With communal integration of groups of differentiated cells, bilateral subjective response was expressed through bilateral and multilateral expressions of form. With communal life forms, the innate bilateral subjective response of 'me / us' would concern groups of individual cells with an integrated shared identity responding to other groups of individual cells with an integrated shared identity. With communal identity, life's complexity and evolutionary potential would become exponentially greater allowing almost an infinite diversity in multilateral ecosystems and life forms. The simple rules that create and connect differentiated cells in communal creatures are the foundation for the exponential evolutionary complexity observable in all living things.

The Third Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Symbiosis

The third rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is symbiosis, the bilateral subjective response that allows organisms of different species to communicate and cooperate in ways that offer greater adaptive benefit to both creatures. Symbiosis created eukaryotic cells, the larger more complex single celled organisms that had their genetic material in a central nucleus. Symbiosis is the first expression of bilateral shared interest / self-interest between different species. Through symbiosis, the bilateral subjective response of 'me / us', was the relationship between two distinctly different species establishing a life form in which two individuals cannot survive without each other. These new single celled symbiotic life forms are the origin of all complex living creatures and establish the model of co-operative / competitive nature that exists in all ecosystems. The earliest symbiotic relationships may actually have been between retroviruses and early bacteria, this first interspecies relationship actually existing within the genome itself. The first true ecosystems actually existed inside single cells and those original ecosystems are the ones upon which all evolutionary complexity and every complex ecosystem is based.

Mitochondria, chloroplasts, organelles and other parts of the living cell all have their own distinctive and separate DNA and their own reproductive process. These creatures preserve forever the symbiotic relationships between different types of ancient bacteria and may in fact have arisen from the relationship between retroviruses and bacteria. In symbiotic life forms, the simple innate structural patterns within DNA molecules of different species create far greater evolutionary complexity in feedback loops between them that create the expanding resources of shared interest / self-interest that created ever-increasing ecosystems in which species evolve. The first animals exhibiting these complex differentiated cellular forms were cnidarians, sea creatures with mouths, digestive sacks, muscles and rudimentary nerves. Some cnidarians remain a polyp for their entire life, while others pass through the medusa body form. The more familiar polyp cnidarians include corals, hydras, and sea anemones.

The Fourth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Spontaneous / Instinctive Response

The fourth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is conscious / unconscious perception expressed through spontaneous / instinctive response. Conscious / unconscious, spontaneous / instinctive subjective responses depend on creatures having a central processing unit called a brain in which sensory perceptions create neurological representations of external reality. All such complex creatures have spontaneous / instinctive responses in detecting and communicating with other living creatures. With conscious / unconscious responses centralized in the brain, protein detection becomes sensory perception integrating that input as an enduring, coherent representation of the external world.

Conscious spontaneous responses allow creatures to react to different situations in different ways giving them increasingly greater options for survival. Unconscious instinctive responses are genetically hardwired and allow creatures to respond to other creatures and circumstances in predetermined particular ways that offer them a better chance for survival though cooperative or competitive behaviours. Puffing up to look bigger and intimidate a predator is a common hardwired response in animals. Evolutionary adaptation has hardwired particular instinctive behaviours for danger in virtually all complex creatures from ants to humans. Genomic structural awareness and plasticity has also hardwired instinctive shared interest through co-operative behaviour in countless species. The fungus farms of ants, the directional dances of bees, are just two of the countless examples of this.

Hardwired instinctive responses allow scrub jays to hide and remember up to 3000 different seed caches for future use and even use deception when other jays are watching them. Cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish can instinctively communicate emotional states to others with light patterns and colors moving on their skin, these patterns and colors hardwired to express particular moods and meaning to friends and enemies. The balance within conscious / unconscious response through spontaneous / instinctive behaviour determines the nature of all creatures capable of sensory perception processed in a brain. With bilateral conscious / unconscious response expressed through spontaneous / instinctive behaviour, complex animals exponentially extend the range of behavioural variation and options, ecological complexity and evolutionary potential.

The Fifth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Nurturance / competitiveness

The fifth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is nurturance / competitiveness expressed through sexual selection. The expression of sexual selection as conscious / unconscious subjective mating responses appears in creatures having two distinct genders. With this instinctive bilateral subjective response expressed through nurturant / competitive behaviour, shared interest / self-interest becomes an instinctive procreative response in living creatures. Because sexual selection is so crucial to genetic variation and genomic plasticity, it can be considered a special case of conscious / unconscious subjective response expressed through nurturant / competitive behaviour. Sexual selection also creates and extends individual subjective preference and paired behavioural traits in which the two genders may have distinctly different but complementary reactions to the same positive and negative experience expressed through nurturant / competitive behaviour. Promiscuity / coyness is an example of how the two genders may respond differently through nurturant / competitive behaviour, males usually but not always more promiscuous and competitive, females usually but not always more coy and nurturant. Bilateral nurturance / competitiveness exists in different balances and proportions within individuals and within different species as the bilateral expression of the subjective response that allows sexually reproducing species to vastly increase the speed and variability of genetic change.

The Sixth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Conscious / unconscious Pleasure / fear

The sixth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is conscious / unconscious feeling of pleasure / fear tied to past / present sensory representations of reality. Pleasure and fear are mental representations of positive and negative concrete experience through which creatures consciously / unconsciously learn about their environment allowing them to use spontaneous / instinctive adaptive reactions to different circumstances and environmental cues. With feelings of pleasure, creatures feel the desire to repeat positive experience that they consciously / unconsciously remember. With feelings of fear creatures feel the disincentive to repeat negative experiences that they consciously / unconsciously remember. With conscious / unconscious feelings of pleasure and fear stored in retrievable memory, conscious / unconscious learning becomes possible, and with such learning instinctive nurturance allows for prolonged maturation that allows creatures far greater and more effective options in responding to experience. Conscious / unconscious feelings of pleasure / fear tied to concrete experience create distinct areas and expressions of learned subjective response that allow creatures to become aware of each other's behaviour and extend the range of shared interest / self-interest among creatures in any ecosystem. For the first time nurturance / competitiveness would also have a consciously learned as well as an unconsciously instinctive component. For the first time the bilateral expression of subjective response within nature / nurture would come to exist on the planet as developmental learning, making it as important, and then even more important than innate genetic predispositions for behaviour. Feelings of pleasure / fear expressed as aggression, distaste, anxiousness, fear, and sensory pleasure tied to concrete experience would become the foundation of emotions in social animals.

The Seventh Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Conscious / unconscious Emotion

The seventh rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is conscious / unconscious emotion experienced in personal / social behaviour tied to individual / group acceptance / rejection. In social animals emotions of individual acceptance / rejection are tied to retrievable memories arising from the responses of individuals within a social group. Adapted from conscious / unconscious feelings tied to concrete, but not social experience, the predispositions for the emotions of anger, disgust, social fear, and happiness would evolve in social animals in both prey and hunter species forming the social architecture of herd and pack behaviour.

Emotions are conscious / unconscious remembered mental representations of positive and negative personal / social experiences with other living creatures. Personal / social acceptance / rejection is the bilateral subjective foundation for the creation of all social group dynamics and the foundation of complex personality traits and innate emotional response. In modern humans, these complex individual personality traits tied to personal acceptance / rejection are also expressed bilaterally in personality traits such as introversion / extraversion, anxiousness / self-confidence, doubt / trust, pessimism / optimism, indifference / empathy, guilt / shamelessness. These bilateral paired subjective traits and many others exist in their basic form in different measures and proportion in every individual in higher social primates and are inextricably linked as bilateral subjective responses.

Through natural selection and genomic awareness and plasticity, traits evolved in social animals that would maximize the likelihood of personal acceptance by the group, just as traits evolved that allowed creatures to deal with the fear of personal rejection. These traits were reinforced by conscious pleasure and fear tied to personal acceptance and rejection. In social animals these traits are called emotions.

The Eighth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Reciprocal Giving / getting

The eighth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is reciprocity expressed through the innate predisposition for giving / getting that is the foundation of group dynamics in social animals. Reciprocity is the first innate abstract subjective response in social animals that allowed for the personal judgment of individual behaviour and personality stored in retrievable memory. With reciprocity, social animals are innately capable of the conscious / unconscious awareness of the balance that exists within shared-interest / self interest in social interactions. Reciprocal giving / getting is the bilateral expression of reciprocity in both positive and negative measures rewarding positive sharing and cooperation and punishing inequitable withholding and selfishness. Reciprocity expressed through bilateral giving / getting as the expression of the innate ability to assess and evaluate social responses is the foundation for all complex social dynamics in primates, and expressed with greater and greater complexity in higher apes and hominids, even and most especially in modern humans. In hominids, nurturance / competitiveness in sexual selection would be tied to reciprocity expressed as bilateral giving / getting to form the new bilateral subjective response of intimacy / sexuality that create the lifelong bonds of mated love in the nuclear family unit.

The Ninth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Inductive / deductive Reasoning

In human beings alone, the ninth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is deductive / inductive reasoning. Inductive / deductive reasoning allows the inclusion / exclusion of information and the creation of abstract categories of understanding taken from direct observation of concrete and social experience. Basic deductive ability and self-awareness is observable in elephants, higher apes, porpoises, cephalopods, African grey parrots and even in Caledonia crows. The heritable predisposition for language acquisition that allows abstract representations of reality using words and grammar is the root of modern human abstract self-awareness that gives it vastly greater complexity and expression than basic problem solving and tool creation. Abstract concepts of personal and social identity created through cultural socialization using language, music and gesture allow humans to form and understand social relationships and imbue them with powerful new emotions tied to personal responsibility, clan loyalty, family bonds, monogamous bonding, personal love, and mythic storytelling and ultimately religion.

Music and dance are the first cultural expressions of empathetic emotions. These are predominantly right brain traits that allow the formation of social bonds and relationships. Deductive reasoning, as a specialized left brain skill in modern humans, allows for the abstract classification and categorization of experience using language and cultural traditions that allow humans to preserve technological and cultural innovation and environmental knowledge through oral traditions. Deductive reasoning would bring humans to the Stone Age with profound new abilities to understand and express the bilateral relationship within conscious / unconscious rationality. With abstract self-awareness would come a new understanding of conscious / unconscious emotions that would be a fundamental part of the architecture of the bilateral human brain. With inductive / deductive reasoning and language, experience would become abstracted as information. With inductive / deductive reasoning, the bilateral complexity of subjective response would make modern humans the most subjectively complex creatures on the planet.

Humans have clearly used deductive reasoning for the past 150,000 years, and likely much longer. With the evolution of modern humans 70,000 years ago having the new ability for rapid speech, deductive reasoning became exponentially more complex. But it is only since written language that modern humans have been capable of the expression of metaphorical, creative thought that expressed the human predisposition and capacity for inductive reasoning. Before that, inductive reasoning had no complex language ability with which to understand the global, empathetic reality of the right brain. Only when abstract categories of experience could be represented in the abstract form of writing was it possible to see and understand experience separate from reality, to have ideas about abstract relationships rather than perceptions of concrete information created through deductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning expressed through written language allows human beings to connect seemingly unconnected categories of experience and perception as abstract representations of experience. This is the foundation of metaphorical thought and creativity in modern civilization. It allows the ability to connect deduced categories of information in new creative ways. Without written language as the storehouse of deduced knowledge represented as abstract symbols in themselves, such purely abstract relationships are impossible to create. Ideas as independent hypothetical conjectures separate from nature and concrete experience are only possible when knowledge could be written in words that were themselves symbols. When speech became writing, abstract ideas of property, justice, marriage, destiny, technology, god and nature became possible for the first time. With inductive reasoning connecting abstract conceptual ideas about categories and classification of concrete reality created through deductive reasoning, human creativity could explode exponentially into many great complex literate civilizations that would establish new abstract bilateral relationships that defined cultural narratives. With inductive / deductive reasoning, concrete bilateral subjective response of 'me / us' becomes the abstract bilateral subjective response of 'I / we'. With inductive / deductive reasoning, the abstract bilateral subjective response of 'I / we' becomes the abstract connection within the bilateral self-awareness of 'we / they'.

With deductive / inductive reasoning and metaphorical thought in written language, information formed through deductive reasoning would be capable of being connected as abstract categories of related and unrelated abstract ideas. And that has made all the difference between Stone Age people and us.

The Evolution of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

Upon the rungs of the ladder of increasing bilateral subjective complexity would grow the branching shrubs of every order, phylum, family, species and variety of life that would ever exist, and every creature that evolves on each new rung retains the earlier forms of subjective response. Each rung created a new order and balance of shared interest / self-interest through cooperative / competitive behaviour, and human beings, virtually alone on the last rung, contain all the forms of subjective response that began in the simplest bacterium. Every distinct rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity was crucial in expanding evolutionary diversity through evolutionary adaptation. The self-organizing nature of matter creating infinite complexity from the structural properties of the DNA molecule created the billions and billions of species that have existed on the earth. The nine rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity are the simple foundational expressions upon which all variation and evolutionary diversity are built. From chaos comes order. From simplicity comes infinite complexity. It is the feedback loop of bilateral subjective response within and among cells, within and among individuals and within and among species that create the ecosystems that allows evolution to create ever-increasing complexity and infinite variations in form.

Without approach / avoidance responses as the first rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity, the first and simplest creatures would have had no means or reason to communicate and respond to each other. Subjective response would have had no meaning, and evolution would not exist. Without communication between creatures of the same and different species, self-interest / shared interest would not be the foundation for the economic reality of living ecosystems.

Without the ability of communal groups of cells to differentiate and communicate in order to create complex sensory organs and responses for feeding, locomotion, defense and reproduction, life would have remained microscopic. It was on this second rung of bilateral subjective complexity that evolutionary possibility became exponentially greater. Without communal subjective response and the extension of 'me / us' between differentiated cells making complex organisms capable of communicating with other complex organisms, this new form of self-interest / shared interest complex ecosystems would have never been possible.

Without symbiosis as the third rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity through which creatures of different species co-evolve for their mutual shared interest, cooperation between species would have limited evolutionary diversity and the potential for complex organisms would not exist. Every cell in every complex creature having a central nucleus, mitochondria, and other organelles continue to exist in such primary symbiotic relationships that are the foundation of life. Every complex living creature can in fact be described as nothing more than symbiotic bacterial life forms balancing self-interest / shared interest living as differentiated single celled organisms in complex living creatures.

Without conscious / unconscious heritable instincts centralized in a brain, subjective complexity would not have allowed creatures to develop complexity much beyond that of worms, snails, mollusks, fungi and plants. On this fourth rung of subjective complexity, evolving sensory organs would tie creatures to their ecosystems in more precise and effective ways through increasingly complex mental representations of reality.

Without conscious / unconscious nurturance / competitiveness expressed through individual preference / genetic predisposition of instinctual behavioural responses defining gender difference, sexual selection, upon which most complex evolutionary variation depend, could not exist. This fifth rung of bilateral subjective complexity allowed the perception and communication of conscious personal preference to enter into the process of evolutionary adaptation for the very first time. These conscious subjective responses of approach / avoidance of one individual for another in sexual selection would soon create the foundation of conscious emotions of acceptance and rejection in social animals.

Without conscious / unconscious pleasure / fear, no complex conscious / unconscious learning is possible. The sixth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is the conscious / unconscious responses of pleasure / fear tied to retrievable memories of concrete experience. Complex learning depends on consciousness, and without the ability to reinforce positive and negative learning through pleasure and fear, heritable subjective complexity would have never evolved into the complex nurturant behaviour that allows vulnerable offspring time and protection to develop complex brains with complex sensory organs. Without conscious / unconscious learning tied to retrievable memories of pleasure / fear, nurturance / competitiveness would not exist in creatures. Consciousness serving as the foundation of the five final rungs in subjective complexity allowed the enormous expansion of evolutionary complexity from fish to birds, from reptiles to mammals.

Conscious / unconscious emotions exist only in social animals and are based on the retrievable memories of personal acceptance and the retrievable memories of personal rejection. As the seventh rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity, it is in social animals that complex personality traits evolve to satisfy conscious personal preferences in individuals. It is the preference for these individual personality traits that create the emotions tied to personal acceptance and rejection that form the foundation of group dynamics and social cohesion. It is these emotions tied to personality traits that affect the reproductive success of individuals and even the groups to which they belong.

Reciprocal giving / getting as the eighth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity only exists in some social animals and allows the innate assessment of behaviour that goes well beyond the personality and behavioural preference observable in sexual selection. This allows creatures to assess and judge personal relationships in complex new ways. It allows for the creation of friendships and personal alliances, conscious kin preference and status hierarchy as well as preferential food sharing and nurturant responsibility. Reciprocity expressed as bilateral giving / getting is the way shared interest / self-interest becomes a conscious / unconscious part of individual and social behaviour. It is the foundation of complex personality traits that engender the pleasure of personal acceptance and mitigate the fear of personal rejection.

Inductive / deductive reasoning as the ninth rung in the ladder of subjective complexity belongs almost exclusively to modern humans. It is the part of human socialization that is possible because of the innate human ability for language acquisition. These two types of conscious reasoning allow humans to balance nurture / nature in a way no other creature can, preserving conscious learning through cultural socialization. With inductive / deductive reasoning, human beings can generalize experience and reform it into novel patterns though metaphorical thoughts and abstract ideas that allows social and technological creativity and development. With modern human beings using spoken / written language expressing inductive / deductive reasoning, Stone Age culture finally becomes what we call civilization. With inductive / deductive reasoning, the innate subjective responses of 'Me / Us' become the bilateral abstract concepts of 'I / We';

'Us / Them' become the bilateral abstract concepts of 'We / They'.

The Purpose and Meaning of Life

Darwinian theory can be summed up in the statement that natural selection favors those heritable adaptations that give creatures a little better reproductive advantage over time. The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation says that what works better must first 'feel' better, must first elicit adaptive bilateral subjective responses to changes in the Nash equilibrium of a creature's ecosystem. Evolution primarily favors those subjective responses that consciously / unconsciously result in bilateral behavioural responses that create an improved balance within shared interest / self-interest in any ecosystem.

Evolutionary theory and adaptation through natural selection has always focused on individual creatures and completely ignored the ecosystems in which they live because the relationship between and among individuals and species is so difficult to disentangle, measure and observe. Yet it is the ecosystem that determines the nature and success of any particular adaptation, and so this omission is a fundamental flaw in current theory. Understanding that an ecosystem is predominantly defined by the relationships between and among its members, it can be said that evolution is like a free trade agreement between nations, balancing the self-interest / shared interest of all parties. Unlike a trade agreement between nations, the ongoing adaptive set of rules of behaviour that defines an ecosystem is written in the genetic code of each individual and each species, coded in those genetic rules for subjective experiences that balance self-interest / shared interest among individuals and species. The ecosystem creates the feedback loop that evolution requires in order to prune the infinite expressions of complexity expressed by the fecundity of genomic awareness and plasticity.

The most pertinent questions in evolutionary theory are not about what or how it happens, but why. Evolutionary theory in its current form denies any purpose or direction in life's natural unfolding. We propose to answer the question of why evolution happens and demonstrate both its purpose and direction, and show how human beings, consciously / unconsciously find meaning in life in the same purpose and direction as all other living creatures. Life is the relationship between and among individuals and groups of individuals. It is relationships that give meaning to behaviour and life.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation says there is more to evolution than basic reproductive success. If life can be said to have a purpose, that purpose begins with heritable traits for bilateral subjective response that serve to express, maintain and balance self-interest / shared interest among living creature through cooperative and competitive behaviour. And with that starting point, it seems more than arguably apparent that life evolved its complexity and multiplicity of form to serve the evolving complexity of such bilateral subjective responses. Because changes in subjective response invariably precede adaptation in form, it is the ability to detect / perceive, communicate and coordinate individual responses to others that defines life and every successful adaptation in it, whether the creature is as simple as a bacterium or as complicated as a human being.

The reason Darwinian theorists have denied that there is any purpose in life is because they have been unable to identify any purpose for the mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation beyond simple reproductive advantage. That is like mistaking the square and level necessary to build a house with the purpose behind building a house. Even though houses, like living creatures, are created in a multiplicity of forms, the tools used to make them are basically the same, as is the shared purpose of creating a sustainable environment as shelter from environmental conditions and dangers. Whether the walls enclose a single cell or the multiplicity of cells in a blue whale, the purpose of life and every adaptation within it is to allow creatures to communicate and respond to other living creatures in order to find a place within its ecosystem.

In our final chapter we will see how humans create meaning in life through the abstract understanding of the balance within shared interest / self-interest among human beings, and how that has recently come to include the other living creatures that share our ecosystem of the earth. Philosophically and evolutionarily, it is the problem of the one and the many: how to balance the self-interested needs and desires of individuals with the shared interest expressed in the needs and desires of the group to which the individual must belong? Human beings are finally coming to understand that the meaning of life includes more than other human beings, and creating, maintaining and balancing shared interest / self-interest is the purpose we share with all living things in the ecosystem of the earth, which we dominate so profoundly.

Because form follows function, using this simple architecture of bilateral subjective adaptation, it is possible to explain the fundamental changes that have produced the multiplicity of life on earth. It is also possible to show how and why cooperative shared interest evolved into complex nurturance, why self-interested competition evolved into hierarchical competitiveness and why these adaptations came to be expressed through sexual selection upon which most of life's variation in sexually reproducing species depends.

Because form follows function, using this simple architecture of bilateral subjective adaptation, it is possible to trace evolutionary adaptation from simple approach / avoidance responses present in common bacteria to the infinite complexity of the human psyche and see how the basic architecture of bilateral subjective response is part of all living things, no matter how simple or complex.

Because form follows function, using this simple architecture of bilateral subjective adaptation, it is possible to explain the evolutionary origin and purpose of complex and apparently maladaptive behaviours like asexuality, homosexuality and suicide, as well as the complex positive adaptive behaviours like reciprocity, empathy and altruism that lead to the complexity of intimacy and love in humans. It will even be possible to explain details in the life cycle of primates such as the average human male having a penis three times bigger than a gorilla as well as having an abiding fascination with female breasts. It will also be possible to understand the evolutionary adaptations that made human beings capable of an almost infinite range and depth of pleasurable personal experience, as well as an almost infinite range and depth of personal fear. It will also be possible to understand the evolutionary adaptations that created language, human culture, technology by describing their roots in the subjective nature of primates, especially our closest cousins orang-utans, chimpanzees and bonobos. It will also be possible to see the evolutionary origin of the most complex creation we know in the universe, the individual human psyche. All these things remain unexplained in current Darwinian theory.
Chapter 1  
The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation

Modern science doesn't like things that can't be measured. It also doesn't like things that are a complicated mix of things that can't be separated. And science really hates uncertainty, the inability to predict what will happen in any observed situation so that cause and effect can never be defined.

There are two areas of existence where science has to live with those three problems, the world of quantum mechanics that describes the sub-atomic world, and Darwin's theory of evolution. Yet both theories draw firm scientific conclusions from observations that can be difficult or impossible to measure, are impossible to isolate and are filled with uncertainty. Both quantum mechanics and Darwin's theory of evolution are completely accepted because there is no better way to explain the world of the atom or the origin of the infinite diversity of life on earth.

Just as the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics is ruled by a principal of uncertainty, so too is the realm of living things. More than exhibiting a complete uncertainty in evolutionary direction and adaptation, evolutionary theory is completely uncertain about even basic definitions for what constitutes a species, an evolutionary adaptation, an evolutionary niche, what constitutes nature and nurture, a subjective response, a feeling, an emotion, and even consciousness itself. There are profound disagreements and continuing debate about all the basic definitions in evolutionary theory. Such uncertainty in defining the basic terms of evolutionary thought strongly suggest that there are some basic flaws in the understanding of natural selection as proposed by the accepted Darwinian model.

The reason both theories are almost universally accepted by science is that increasingly more observations have been explained using those theories since they were first put forward. Simply put, it is believed that they have passed the test of time. And more importantly, it seems, there is no credible scientific alternative to either.

This book will propose a new theory for how evolution works that challenges the basic presumptions in Darwin's theory of natural selection. Not only will this new theory explain all the same observations about how life has changed over time in a more comprehensive way, but it will also explain many of the unanswered questions about Darwin's theory of natural selection that seem to be exceptions, contradictions and anomalies to the way natural selection is said to work such as the astonishingly different rates of evolutionary change in different species. It will also offer precise definitions where none have existed before.

The test of any new theory is how much it explains of what can be observed, and if it explains those observations in a more effective and comprehensive way. It must especially address those outstanding exceptions and contradictions present in the current theory.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation proposes to do that by using something that science has rejected, and continues to reject in evolutionary theory, namely subjective response. Talk about immeasurable, interconnected and uncertain! Using subjective response to explain evolutionary change would seem to make evolutionary theory exponentially more complicated, not simpler. But, we will show that just the opposite is true.

In the last 40 years, there have been many experiments trying to objectively measure physical changes in isolated populations of creatures trying to concretely determine rates of evolutionary change. And startlingly, those experiments seem to suggest that there are some major errors in standard Darwinian theory. But, as is the bias of all modern science, all those experiments on evolutionary change predominantly measured physical changes in experimentally studied populations. And though changes in subjective behaviour were observed in these experiments, they were impossible to measure, and so were not considered as relevant or usable results.

Darwin was one of the few evolutionary theorists who suspected that there is a big problem in ignoring how subjective experience affects reproductive success. He even wrote a book on emotion called, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, trying to understand its place in natural selection. And clearly, a theory for adaptation in living creatures should explain the origin and purpose of subjective response because the behaviour of all living creatures predominantly depends on their subjective responses to others, as well as to environmental opportunity and challenge. What creatures do depends entirely on what they sense of their environments, especially other creatures, and ignoring such a fundamental aspect of life seems problematical at best.

Yet, since Darwin, evolutionary theory has pretty much dismissed the relevance of subjective response in evolution. The irony is that the latest refinement to Darwinian evolutionary theory uses a word that is entirely subjective in its own name. Selfish Gene Theory was first proposed in a book by Richard Dawkins published in 1976. But, in his book, Dawkins doesn't use the word selfish to imply the least bit of self-awareness in genes. His 'selfish' genes are completely unaware of their connection to life, and genetic advantage is totally a matter of chance mutations in genes being preserved through natural selection. Genes are simply the purest form of self-interest in life, and life is only and exclusively about self-interest. He even proposes that living organisms are relevant to life only in that they are the organic structures that genes have created for their own propagation. For Dawkins, life is nothing more than a complicated self-replicating organic crystal whose subjective experiences are relevant to reproductive success or failure only in the way they preserve or eliminate particular genes. Take one step up from genes and one can make just as persuasive an argument that complex life forms are simply organic pods created by bacteria for their own lifecycle advantages.

Selfish Gene Theory actually tests for how subjective behaviour such as altruism could exists in humans with computer programs using simple mathematical equations and game theory. In such models, there are no subjective responses, but only simple mutations in algorithms whose effect can then be observed and then interpreted as analogs to subjective response such as altruism. For Dawkins genes are just molecules like benzine or plastic. What they do when they interact is create flesh and blood machines of their own design. Subjective experience, how creatures detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living creatures, it seems has only tangential importance to its reproductive success, potential, or life.

Yet, if life is a game of survival, subjective response is really its point, because the game of life depends predominantly on the awareness of individual players to the actions and reactions of other members in any particular ecosystem. Life is complicated because the success or failure of its competing and cooperating players depends to a significant degree on how well they respond to each other, and that is possible to predict only as a probability because subjective responses in complex organisms are different in all individuals, in every different context and situation, in every ecosystem. It is this very subjective complexity that drives evolution, and it is this very complexity that has made evolutionists ignore subjective response.

Yet Darwin's theory of natural selection says that evolution favors any genetically determined trait, whether behavioural, structural, physiological, or psychological that leads to more offspring who pass those traits to the next generation. Individuals and groups have no awareness of whether their genes are good or bad. Natural selection simply favors those genes that offer an individual a little better chance for reproductive survival. And full out competition between individuals is Darwin's mechanism that determines winners and losers in the genetic game of life. The fundamental problem with this view is that life depends far more on cooperative behaviour in dividing limited resources than it does on the competition of individuals for those same limited resources.

Competitive Fitness and Cooperative Fitness

Richard Dawkins... "Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward the common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish."

It turns out that Richard Dawkins is simply wrong. He is stubbornly, wilfully blind to the cooperative aspects of nature because Darwinian theory depends on competitive advantage for its very existence. Just the most cursory glance at any ecosystem and one cannot help but see that cooperation and shared interest is as fundamental a part of nature as self-interested competitive advantage. It is true of bacteria and virtually all other creatures, including human beings. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. Evolutionists have had to make themselves wilfully and purposefully blind to the cooperative nature of life because it contradicts the fundamental idea of competitive advantage being the basis for evolutionary success. Experiments have demonstrated that babies as young as four months have an innate moral and cultural sense of right and wrong, and there exists in human babies an innate bias is towards generosity and altruism.

Darwin's theory runs into its biggest unexplained problem with this reliance on competitive fitness as the basis for natural selection. If life is pure genetic competition, 'a war of all against all', why is there's so much cooperation in life? Individuals of the same species, from bacteria to humans, cooperate in astonishingly complex ways. One particular species of bacteria has such an incredible communication system that every individual in a population knows the very second there are enough bacteria of its species present to coordinate an instantaneously response by lighting up like a gigantic living phosphorescent bulb made of billions of infinitesimal points of light. This process called quorum sensing shared by many species of bacteria indicates that even such a simple life form can not only communicate with others of its own kind, but also respond instantaneously in unison in a way no individual of the species ever does. The process of random mutation that could lead to such a group response through natural selection is difficult to imagine among individuals who are mindlessly competing to the death against one another.

Why cooperation exists so universally in a world of pure competition is a troubling question. No complicated life form from a slime mould to a sponge, from a whale to a human being could exist if different kinds of cells were not able to detect, communicate, and coordinate their responses in order to cooperate with each other for a shared purpose.

Single celled animals began to gather together to live as communal cooperating units soon after they appeared on the planet. The oldest known large fossils are in fact from communal bacteria called stromatolites still found living in a few places on the earth. Massive colonies of these communal bacteria actually created the original oxygen atmosphere of the earth upon which most of life depends. So it can actually be said that virtually all of life depends on the first extremely successful cooperative organisms on the planet, and its success must entirely depend on that ability for subjective cooperative response. Living descendants of these earliest fossils actually still exist in a lake in British Columbia.

Soon after single celled animals came to exist more than a billion years ago, cooperation was a pervasive part of life. Cooperation persists within all simple life forms. Sponges, for example, are single celled animals that glue themselves together with collagen protein, the same material every other animal uses to join cells in complex life forms. And if that collagen in a sponge is experimentally broken down to make an undifferentiated soup of cells, the single celled members of that sponge will regroup in exactly the architecture it had before. Sponges not only know how to grow together, but they also unconsciously know how to get back together. There is also a creature called a pyrozome that is made up of single-celled individuals who connect with each other in a particular shape to propel themselves through the ocean as a communal organism. One species of pyrozome that looks like a giant windsock is made of so many billions of individual single celled creatures, that it has a form big enough to allow a human being to swim into the open end, turn around and swim back out.

Cooperation has also existed between separate and distinct species in a process called symbiosis from early in the story of life on earth. Through symbiosis, two species cooperate on such a deep level that neither can exist without the other. A lichen is made up of an individual fungus and an individual algae that can no longer live separate lives. Coral, made up of individual algae and individual polyps living as one cooperative life form, create all the gigantic reefs on the earth.

Stephen J Gould... "The Portuguese man-of-war looks like a jellyfish but is in fact a symbiotic relationship of polyps and medusa with the polyps having so many differentiated forms that they are called, "persons". Its float is a medusa person, and each tentacle a number of different polyp persons. More complex siphonophores have parts that are so differentiated and specialized, so subordinate to the entire colony, that they function more as organs of a body than as persons of a colony. "

It is now well accepted in science that all living things that have their DNA in the nucleus of their cells originally arose from separate early bacteria that learned to symbiotically live together as one organism. That means every complex plant and animal on the planet is made of cells that are symbiotic life forms. Even the mitochondria and chloroplasts that supply the energy in these living cells have DNA that is completely distinct from the DNA in the rest of the cell. Ninety percent of the cells in every human being are actually bacteria and other life forms comprising 500 to 1000 different species. And without that symbiosis, no human being would live for more than a few days. The average density of bacteria on human skin is one million per square centimetre, which means that the 1.8 square meters of skin on the average human is home to 15.8 trillion bacteria. Kill all those bacteria and you will die. And what is absolutely crucial to the survival of all symbiotic life forms, including bacteria and humans, is that they are able to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to each other at the most basic cellular level. It therefore seems absolutely undeniable that cooperation and communication are fundamental aspects of life on earth, and even more important to evolutionary survival than the blind competition of genes.

So, if there is to be an improved theory for how evolution works, it had better be able to explain cooperation in a better way than just labeling it as another kind of competitive advantage that favored particular genes. It really does strain logic to say that cooperation is just another more advanced kind of competition when it is so pervasive within and among species that life could not exist without it.

The subjective response of creatures, the ability to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living things is what makes both cooperation and competition possible. And a theory that explains the function of subjective response rather than ignoring it seems to have a greater likelihood of representing the way life and evolution works than one that doesn't.

If subjective response is to be understood as an integral part of evolution, a new Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation must also be able to show how it evolved from the simple approach / avoidance responses of bacteria to the infinite complexity of the human psyche.

Unless an evolutionary theory can explain the origin and evolution of subjective response, it really ignores the very responses that make life unique. The way it is possible to trace all eyes and heads in living creatures back to the foundational genes that originally created them hundreds of millions of years ago, it must also be possible to trace subjective feelings back to the origin of life itself. A new Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation therefore has to transform the theory of natural selection in a way that makes it possible to see how the evolution of subjective response in living creatures was a key part evolutionary adaptation," the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas described so beautifully.

Subjective Response and the Nash Equilibrium

To explain how cooperation and subjective experience are a fundamental part of evolution, an alternative evolutionary theory has to address the same problem Darwin faced in how creatures divide the limited resources in any ecosystem. Darwinian competitive fitness is founded on the economic reality that there is only so much to go around in any particular environment, and if natural resources are limited, individual creatures must compete for their share of a zero sum pie. In a zero sum pie, when everyone takes their share of it, there is nothing left. And because it is believed that living creatures multiply as long as there are available resources, every ecosystem is seen as a zero sum pie.

Laissez-faire competition, a battle of all against all, is one way to divide a zero sum pie, and that is the economic model Darwin chose for his theory of natural selection.

But there is another economic theory for dividing a zero sum pie that has both cooperation and competition in its model. It not only balances cooperation and competition in dividing limited resources, it also depends on the subjective response of individuals who are both competing and cooperating with each other. That economic theory is called The Nash Equilibrium. Russell Crowe in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, played the economist John Nash who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his theory.

In the movie, John Nash explains his theory to friends in a bar using a thought experiment. In his experiment three male friends see three attractive women, but one of the women is strikingly more beautiful than her two friends and she elicits the strongest interest in all three friends. His answer is for the male friends to ignore the beautiful woman, and focus their attention on her friends. This is actually a poor representation of the Nash equilibrium, because it ignores the most attractive genetic possibility.

A better description of a true Nash equilibrium would propose a number of alternative scenarios for the men to consider. In the first scenario, the three men approach the three women and compete exclusively for the most beautiful woman. And the best result possible in this scenario is that one of the three men is successful in winning her attention, while the other two fail completely and go home alone. The worst result is that the beautiful woman is offended that the three men were so rude to ignore her friends in their competition for her interest that all three men go home alone.

The best scenario is for the three men to find a way to cooperate beforehand in deciding which of the three women each will pursue. Deciding to cooperate in how they approach their opportunity offers all three a better chance of success, even though one may possibly benefit more than the others by gaining the interest of the most beautiful woman, if pure attractiveness is the only standard of benefit. And if each man ultimately has children with the woman he agreed to pursue, it is the best strategy for his reproductive success, much better than having two or three losers and only one possible genetic winner.

A Nash Equilibrium is the balance within shared interest / self-interest expressed through cooperative and competitive behaviour used as a conscious and / or unconscious subjective strategy in sharing limited resources. In a Nash equilibrium, subjective responses are key to any success. And this is in fact the way life works in any living organism, and in any living ecosystem. Cells compete and cooperate in any living organism for the limited resources available. Individuals both compete and cooperate in any living ecosystem for their share of a zero sum pie. No complex life form or ecosystem could exist without the balance within cooperation / competition in their responses. As we have said, the purpose in life is to balance the shared interest / self-interest of creatures in a living ecosystem, and this is precisely the definition of a Nash equilibrium.

The greatest challenge in adopting the Nash equilibrium as the basis for the division of scarce resources is that it depends upon the conscious / unconscious subjective awareness of the competing players as to how they will cooperate in dividing the zero sum pie in any ecosystem. It means that creatures must be aware of the balance between their own share, and the share taken by others. It has been assumed that animals as small as bacteria and single celled creatures like amoeba are incapable of the communication and coordination necessary for such cooperative responses. It has been assumed that such creatures are incapable of the subjective responses necessary for an awareness of the other players involved in the division of limited resources. But it turns out that just isn't so. Even single celled amoeba can, through some unknown process, communicate their relative distance to each other so that they can distribute themselves equidistantly in order to divide the available resources in their environment in the most efficient way. When resources become exhausted, those independent individuals then rapidly congregate in communal groups that offers individuals a better method of survival through cooperation. This behaviour clearly depends on the subjective awareness of every individual amoeba, using the genetic rules that define its response to the detection, communication and response of other amoeba. The difference between the subjective awareness of an amoeba to others of its kind and creatures capable of conscious decisions is that amoebae detect, communicate and respond to others through hardwired genetic responses that control its behaviour. Even though evolution has determined these rules of behaviour in amoeba, they are clearly able to perceive the resources available to themselves and others with which they must compete or cooperate. How the behaviour of amoeba demonstrates the competitive nature of the purely selfish genes of individuals is impossible to see.

If subjective responses are the genetic rules of behaviour that define the way individuals of different species respond to others, then those rules must include the balance within cooperative / competitive behaviour in responding to environmental opportunity and stress. The subjective perception of others must also include the relationship of individuals to others of their own kind as well as to individuals of other species. And part of that awareness must be the relationship the creature has with others as to the share of resources to which it has access.

Rather than mindless competition for available resources, nature seems to be entirely about detecting / perceiving, communicating and responding to the balance within shared interest / self-interest in dividing limited resources. Evolution is not about the unending escalating war between predator and prey, between one individual and another, but rather about creating and maintaining the balance through which creatures consciously / unconsciously create a particular equilibrium of prey / hunter traits in every ecosystem.

Competing individuals obeying rules that maintain cooperation in sharing limited resources is the definition of a Nash equilibrium, and the process by which every organism and the cells within every complex organism exists. Most proteins in living creatures are in fact created by the cooperation of many separate genes making the genome itself the best example of shared interest in life. Life simply could not exist without the cooperation of separate and distinct genes balancing their own self-interest with the shared interest of every other cell in a living organism.

But Selfish Gene Theory says there is no such thing as cooperation. Cooperation is just another way for selfish genes to propagate themselves. And though it strains logic to call cooperation just another form of competition, the theory of the Nash equilibrium shows that the two may be inextricably linked. The way space and time were once thought to be completely distinct aspects of existence but turned out to be two sides of the same coin of 'space / time', cooperation and competition in a Nash equilibrium can be seen as two sides of the same coin of subjective reality that controls life itself. Just as existence is impossible without the bilateral reality of space / time, living existence is impossible without the bilateral reality of cooperation / competition that forms the balance within interest / self-interest. One of the most fundamental errors in Darwinian theory may be the rigid distinction between cooperation and competition in establishing what is in fact adaptive fitness. Both actually exist as the bilateral subjective reality reflecting the balance within shared interest / self-interest.

Adaptive Today—Maladaptive Tomorrow

If it is defensibly true that the only adaptations in life that survive over time are those that preserve selfish genes, then those behaviours that are maladaptive which arise from particular genes must eventually be eliminated from the gene pool of life, just as behaviours that benefit particular genes are preserved.

There are many behaviours that are obviously maladaptive to the reproductive success of particular genes in any individual. Homosexuality, asexuality, pedophilia, maternal infanticide and depression also exist in nonhuman creatures and are clearly maladaptive subjective responses that have significant reproductive disadvantage. Yet along with conscious suicide that seems to be unique in humans, these maladaptive traits persist in all human societies. Altruism, empathy, and compassion for genetically unrelated strangers are also an important part of every human society and have been observed in some other animal species, and yet they are behaviours that offer no heritable genetic advantage to an individual or an individual's genes. There are contorted explanations in Darwinian theory for how unselfish traits evolved in humans, but a simpler and more persuasive explanation is simply the economic and therefore reproductive advantage that comes from cooperative behaviour. Competition gives individual creatures certain advantages, but so does cooperation. The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation says they are inextricably linked in evolutionary success.

A better theory of evolutionary change must offer a better explanation than Selfish Gene Theory for why genetically maladaptive and apparently useless behaviour persists so strongly in so many creatures and all human societies. A theory based on the power of subjective adaptation in which cooperation and competition exist in an inextricable balance more appropriately describes evolutionary fitness and offers a simpler, more comprehensive explanation for these apparently maladaptive or useless traits.

The Story of Life

Here is the short story of life on earth.

If all life processes are bilateral in nature, the first steps in creating self-replicating living creatures most likely began with amino acids joining together to respond to environmental conditions that were most favorable to their chemical reactions. Conjoined amino acids moving toward or away from light, heat, pressure or concentration of other chemicals may have been the first action / reaction responses of these pre-organic chemicals. Because of their natural tendency, one amino acid pulling toward one of those conditions and the other amino acid pulling in the opposite direction would allow a bilateral response that put the conjoined protein in its most optimal place of shared interest / self-interest. Two such conjoined reactive amino acids, one responding to light or heat joining to another conjoined pair responding to chemical concentrations might establish the form that would become the DNA molecule where two base pairs of amino acids form the double helix that creates all life. When these processes found a way to make their own environment within a chemical bubble of proteins, the basic structure of a proto-virus or proto-bacteria might have been created. It turns out that the cell wall in all living creatures is made of chemicals very much like detergent bubbles that form a segregated environment through which chemicals may pass in two directions.

Life processes are all about establishing a balance between action and reaction, and solving the Goldilox dilemma of how much is too much, too little or just right. Within particular irreducibly complex cellular functions like blood clotting, too much clotting and the whole bloodstream becomes solid, too little and the wounded creature bleeds to death. Virtually all life processes and ecosystems are about establishing a balance within competing forces and it is arguable that it must have been the foundation of living functions from the very beginning.

With the recent discovery of the ancient Mimivirus, a virus actually bigger than some bacteria, with more genes than some bacteria, as well as genes coding for nucleotide and amino acid synthesis which even some small obligate intracellular bacteria lack, it seems apparent that there is a fuzzy border between living and non-living creatures. Although Mimivirus is not dependent on the host cell genome for coding the metabolic pathways for these products, it does lack genes for ribosomal proteins, making Mimivirus dependent on a host cell for protein synthesis and energy metabolism. The Mimivirus genome is a linear, double-stranded molecule of DNA with 1,181,404 base pairs in length. This makes it the largest viral genome in scientific knowledge, outstripping the next-largest virus genome of the Cafeteria roenbergensis virus by about 450,000 base pairs. In addition, it is larger than at least 30 cellular clades. In addition to the large size of the genome, Mimivirus possesses an estimated 979 protein-coding genes far exceeding the minimum 4 genes required for viruses to exist. Analysis of its genome revealed the presence of genes not seen in any other viruses, including aminoacyl tRNA synthetases and other genes previously thought only to be encoded by cellular organisms. Like other large DNA viruses, Mimivirus contains several genes for sugar, lipid and amino acid metabolism, as well as some metabolic genes not found in any other virus. Roughly 90% of the genome was of coding capacity, with the other 10% being "junk DNA". A reasonable conclusion is that viruses and bacteria arose together and were somehow interdependent, forming the first symbiotic relationship in which genetic material must have been shared.

Four billion years ago life must have begun with such self-replicating proto-bacteria and viruses with the innate property of their regularly expanding detergent bubbles to divide in two at a particular size. The earliest true bacteria must have very quickly evolved the ability to detect, communicate and respond to other bacteria because they appeared so quickly after the formation of oceans on earth. These bacteria then evolved into species that lived in communal groups capable of coordinated responses among many individuals of the same species. The life cycle process of these early life forms quickly and completely transformed the ecological environment of the earth eventually creating the oxygen that larger single cell creatures would use for their life processes.

If one considers that life has existed on earth as single celled bacterial organisms for nearly a quarter of the time the universe itself has existed, one can appreciate the fact that life appears on earth very early in its existence, and that it had a stunningly long period of time to work out the basic structural form of the DNA molecule in simple viruses and anaerobic bacteria.

About one billion years ago, larger independent single celled creatures having their DNA in a central nucleus evolved from symbiotic bacteria that learned to live together as one organism. Some of these new single celled creatures then came to live in communal groups that then evolved into complex creatures with many kinds with differentiated cells performing various life functions. The first of these complex life forms were sponges.

Since single celled creatures gathered in communal groups hundreds of millions of years ago, they have refined this ability to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to each other through genomic structural awareness and plasticity. Since then they have evolved differentiated expressions of themselves that allowed more complex coordinated responses among individuals for new complex behaviours for feeding, self-defense, reproduction and movement.

Single celled creatures living in communal groups have often evolved the ability to respond to the environment and to other living creatures as if they were one organism, and we will describe how single celled creatures living in communal groups became so differentiated in form and expression, and so completely dependent on each other that they literally lost any real distinction between communal groups of individual creatures and separate complex organisms.

Form always follows function and through genomic awareness and plasticity these communal animals evolved the forms that best served the need to subjectively relate to other creatures that influenced their reproductive opportunity and success.

The next big step in evolution occurred when communal single celled animals made of differentiated cells evolved into complex life forms of infinite variety. Beginning with cnardarians, (jellyfish, polyps and coral), the Cambrian explosion happened about 600 million years ago when the ancestors of all the different kinds of living creatures we know first appeared on earth in what may have been as little as 10 million years. Here again, only genomic awareness and plasticity would allow such exponentially rapid life forms to differentiate and diversify into countless new species and forms in the evolutionary blink of an eye. According to Stephen J Gould, evolution is apparently stunningly slower now than when complex life came to the planet. Not only did all plants, fungi, vertebrate and invertebrate animals appear at this time, but other different kinds of creatures also appeared at this time that have since gone extinct. Only extreme genomic structural awareness and plasticity could possibly allow for such a geometric evolutionary explosion in such a short period of time. In what is now referred to as the snowball earth theory, it has been proposed that the entire surface of the planet was covered with ice at the time of the Cambrian explosion, creating such extreme stress on the single celled creatures in the oceans, that only extreme reorganizations of genetic material through genomic awareness and plasticity would allow life to persist.

After the Cambrian explosion, these many new complex organisms with brains and neural networks had new senses like sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. These creatures then quickly evolved into more complex organisms with even more sensitive sensory organs in which the subjective experience of sensory perception became centralized in the limbic system of the reptilian brain that created representations of reality in a feedback loop between the body and the brain. This newly evolved kind of subjective awareness allowed these new complex creatures to use these many new refined senses to perceive, communicate and respond to others through even more complex coordinated behaviour. When creatures developed senses that were processed in the brain as representations of external reality, detection of others became what we call perception. Animals without brains detect others. Animals with sensory organs that process that information in a brain have perception.

Hardwired genetic approach / avoidance responses in creatures without brains evolved into unconscious instinctual responses in creatures that centralized subjective experience as part of the brain. In simple creatures that are only able to detect others using protein receptors, subjective experience is hardwired in each cell. In complex creatures that centralize subjective response in a brain, automatic hardwired responses to sensory perception are called instincts. Unconscious instincts are the next step in the evolution of subjective response after ones that only use proteins and their receptors to detect, communicate and respond to others. It is this centralization of unconscious instinct as part of a brain using a perceptual neural network of physical senses that offered animals their greatest new evolutionary potential. Plants did this in limited ways while animals using increasingly refined neural networks in a brain evolved greater and greater degrees of subjective complexity and evolutionary diversity. It is only among animals that evolution has created new ways to balance shared interest / self-interest in emerging ecosystems based on novel forms of subjective response.

A bacterium, algae or frog reacting with a fight or flight response to the awareness of a predator uses unconscious avoidance reactions hardwired in its genetic behaviour, the only difference being that the frog's instinct resides in its brain, and is in response to the sight, smell or sound of the predator. Increasing complexity in the subjective responses to allies and predators depended on developing increasingly complex sensory organs and neural networks that could then respond to other creatures with even more complex behaviours in even more complex ecosystems. The more complex the senses tied to subjective reaction became, the more complex creatures became. The more a creature could sense about its ecosystem and the behaviour of others, the greater the number of options genomic awareness and plasticity could use as positive adaptations using positive approach or negative fight or flight responses. These instinctual responses are evident even in newly hatched chicks that crouch or flee from the shadow of a hawk but not a goose, the instinctual fear for the particular shape hardwired in their genetic memory. Twenty-five percent of human infants scream in terror at the movement of a snake and, like all other primates, this instinctual fear is hardwired in the unconscious through millions of years of evolution.

When instinctive subjective experience became part of a creature's brain, evolutionary complexity and possibility was exponentially enhanced and even today it is estimated that in modern humans, awareness is still more than 95 percent unconscious.

Approach / avoidance and instinctual responses are genetically hardwired in the unconscious nature of creatures and one or both persist in virtually all living animals no matter how simple or complex. Basic approach / avoidance responses using proteins and cell receptors even persist in humans. Protein pheromones and their receptors allow moths to find a mate over great distances. In one species of moth, one single female can send out enough protein attractants to gain the interest of one trillion males. And it's been shown that pheromones do the same in humans, without the human having any conscious realization of how they are even being attracted to a particular individual. And in some as yet undiscovered process, most likely using proteins and their receptors in the nose or mouth, humans are also most attracted to individuals who have immune systems that are most dissimilar to their own, the adaptive advantage clearly being that any offspring would be offered the broadest range of immune response.

The Subjective Foundation of Life

A new Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation based on the evolution of subjective response must necessarily begin with an applicable definition of subjective response itself. The definition we have proposed is as novel as the theory itself, and crucial to its understanding and effectiveness in explaining evolutionary adaptation.

Subjective responses are defined as the ability of creatures to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living creatures in ways that create and maintain the balance within self-interest / shared interest of individuals and species in any ecosystem. This ability for subjective reaction is based on unconscious / conscious responses that are stored in the genetic makeup of all creatures, and exist in creatures as simple as bacteria and as complicated as human beings. As we have seen, simple single celled animals called amoeba detect, communicate and respond to each other in order to space themselves equidistantly in a given environment to maximize each individual's access to available resources. They do so using unconscious detection and communication processes through which they respond to others of their own kind. Unconsciously acting in their own self-interest when resources run low, individual amoeba change their independent nature and equidistant spacing and stream toward central individuals to gather in communal groups where acting through shared interest allows each individual a better chance of survival. They do this unconsciously because of genetic hardwired instructions for detection, communication and response to others of their own kind. And what else can you call such abilities, such responses, such actions and reactions except subjective responses, even if such abilities are genetically hardwired and unconscious? Subjective responses are different from physiological reactions to heat and cold, light and dark, and non-organic chemicals in the environment because subjective responses require communication and reactions to other living things.

Sensation is the response creatures have to their physical surroundings while subjective responses are defined by the ability to communicate and respond to other living creatures.

In bacteria and single celled animals, subjective experience is the unconscious response to others using protein receptors on the living cell wall, and the detection of those proteins allows communication and response to other living creatures. When a particular species of bacteria produces an antibiotic toxin in response to its detection of protein receptors indicating the presence of a predatory bacteria, this fight response is genetically programmed just as a rattlesnake has a genetically programmed strike response to the sensory perception of a warm object that has come into its range of threat, even if that object is a balloon filled with warm water. Both are simply responding as their genetic makeup has hardwired them to do. The bacteria used protein receptors while the rattlesnake used infrared sensors to detect a threat and respond as it has evolved the ability to do. In creatures without sensory organs like bacteria, subjective awareness begins with simple detection that elicits a particular response. In creatures with sensory organs and brains like snakes, subjective awareness is also based on sensory perception that also elicits a particular response.

The difficulty we have in appreciating that even bacteria are capable of subjective response is our unconscious human bias that makes it difficult to see how creatures without a brain could have subjective responses when we see subjective experiences as part of sensory perceptions tied to brain function. The attack response in the bacteria or the rattlesnake is different only in the way it is processed. Both are hardwired unconscious reactions to other living things, but in the rattlesnake it is easier for a human to relate to a response based on the sensation of heat, but not one based on proteins.

The best way for humans to relate to approach / avoidance responses is through the most powerful sense that humans have that still uses the same mechanism of proteins connecting to protein receptors on the cell wall. That sense is the sense of smell. Like most mammals, human beings have evolved many receptors for particular proteins that create different smells, and it has been shown that smells elicit the most powerful memories of any of the five senses. Some smells experienced by humans are so bad they are physically nauseating. Some smells are so good they are thrilling. These responses are entirely automatic, and to a great degree, independent of socialization.

The difference between the sense of smell in humans and the approach / avoidance responses of bacteria is that in humans the sense of smell is also consciously processed in the cerebral cortex. And it is interesting to note that the cerebral cortex itself evolved from the olfactory lobe of the brain millions of years ago, so it is not unreasonable to assume that the sense of smell is the pathway from approach / avoidance responses to instinctual responses in a complex brain with other complex sensory organs. There is new evidence that it is actually the vibrational quantum state of particular proteins that elicits the perception of different smells demonstrating that the brain may act as a quantum computer in that most ancient of senses.

Approach / avoidance responses are completely tied to the most basic kinds of subjective experience, but these experiences allow even the simplest creatures an enormous range of evolutionary possibilities. It is clear that smells are subjective experiences in humans because they elicit conscious responses, but that doesn't mean they don't exist as unconscious subjective experience in humans as well as in other animals with only rudimentary cortical abilities to respond to smell. Many experiments have shown that particular smells unconsciously change human behaviour in particular situations.

The difference between physiological responses to environmental conditions and subjective experience is that subjective response is all about the interaction individual creatures have with other living things. And without this subjective ability among living creatures, the communication and response upon which all life depends is impossible. Without this ability to detect / perceive, communicate and coordinate respond to others, life has no direction or purpose.

Plants, Animals and Subjective Experience

One of the most important questions in evolutionary theory is why plants and fungi are so different from animals. Plants and fungi have evolved an enormous number of species and varieties just like animals, but the one stunning difference is in the subjective responses and capabilities of each. Simply put, plants, since they first appeared in the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago, still detect, communicate and respond to other living things using protein receptors on their cell walls and have never gone on to create other sensory organs. Although plants have evolved countless different forms, they really haven't changed very much in subjective complexity and the way they communicate with and respond to each other.

Among complex plants there are annuals and perennials, soft stemmed and hard stemmed species. Some species have roots that don't even need soil. But the basic design is pretty much the same for a Shamrock, orchid or a Sequoia; roots, stems and leaves. Why haven't plants that have the ability to detect light and vibration never developed eyes or ears as animals have done in such a multiplicity of ways since they first appeared on the planet? Why have plants stayed relatively so simple while animals grew more complex with hundreds of different kinds of cells doing hundreds of different kinds of tasks, to solve countless new complex problems that affected reproductive success?

Because plants have rigid cell walls, attaining greater size and complexity meant they had to give up the option for independent movement. Complexity meant having to put down roots. And giving up the flight response to avoid predators that came as varied in form as single celled fungi and enormous voracious dinosaurs apparently meant plants could only fight predation using disguise or fight responses such as toxic secretions or unpleasant smells. If a predator could get past such defenses, the plant was apparently at its mercy. The most effective strategy plants use for survival is based on neither flight or fight responses but on growth and regeneration. Plants simply had no need for complex sensory organs and subjective responses to respond to predators because their method of communication using proteins and their receptors was quite adequate for survival and reproductive success.

Recent research has shown that plants do have complex abilities to communicate with other plants and other species of animals. Plants can create smells to attract a particular pollinator or create specialized food for particular predators that then mark that predator with a smell that attracts its own enemy.

The best example is wild tobacco that sends out proteins to attract its prime pollinator, the hawk moth. In a symbiotic relationship, the hawk moth then lays its eggs on the plant, which its larvae then consume. In what is perhaps one of the most stunning examples of genomic awareness and plasticity, the wild tobacco plant completely changes its form in less than eight days if too many hawk moth caterpillars are threatening its life. Instead of flowering at night to attract the nocturnal moth, it starts sending a completely different attractant smell to attract a completely different pollinator, the hummingbird. Instead of flowering at night, the wild tobacco plant now flowers in the day and completely alters the form and structure of its flowers including its scent and nectar to accommodate the hummingbird instead of the hawk moth. Clearly, this has nothing to do with natural selection because it is the same individual plant genetically altering its own form and function in a little more than a week.

Additionally, Ian Baldwin and his colleague Danny Kessler of the Max Planck Institute have also shown that the wild tobacco plant is capable of recognizing what kind of herbivore is attacking it by the saliva being used to chew it leaves. They have also shown that the plant produces irresistible growths called tricombs that, when eaten, mark caterpillars with a body odor irresistible to predators of that caterpillar. They've also demonstrated that plants have some form of self-awareness, knowing when and if they have been pollinated.

Ian Baldwin put it succinctly, "More genes are involved in environmental perception in plants than in some animals. They need a sophisticated system of perception and response because they have no idea what they will face once the seed has germinated."

Plants clearly are gnomically aware of their own experience, and the wild tobacco plant clearly shows the genomic plasticity to alter itself in fundamental ways.

Growth and regeneration strategies also help solve the problem of predators as well as the vulnerability of a rooted organism to natural forces such as wind, waves, currents, darkness, fire, heat, cold and drought. Cut a plant back to its roots and it will most often regenerate if it is a perennial plant. Freeze, burn, parch or flood perennial plants and they invariably have a way to come back. Annuals, on the other hand, use sheer numbers of seeds and long dormancy periods to make sure they survive. Some seeds have sprouted after thousands of years. Plants simply did not have to develop the number or complexity in species that animals did because they solved the problems of survival far more effectively than animals. Plants could find a balance within shared interest / self-interest in any ecosystem in a much simpler and effective way. Animals needed better and better sensory organs and neural networks building more complex subjective responses in order to react to the subjectively complex evolutionary changes in other animals. Catastrophic extinction events that wiped out most animals often left plants barely affected. Islands in the Pacific that were wiped clean of life in nuclear tests were lushly covered with plants within a decade. It invariably took much longer for animal species to establish complex ecosystems in those toxic places. Animals are far more complex simply because they depend on each other so much more to establish a sustainable balance within shared interest / self-interest.

The subjective responses of plants, their ability to detect, communicate and respond to other living things is in some ways as robust as in animals that only use proteins and their receptors as their means of communication. Plants warn each other of predatory insects and signal attacks by diseases to other plants. They signal pollinating insects and animals with color, mimicry and smells, as well as through the production of nectar and other rewards.

Researchers at McMaster University found that plants are fiercely competitive when forced to share space in a pot with strangers of the same species, but limit root competition when sharing a pot with their own siblings. "The ability to recognize and favor particular individuals is common in animals, but this is the first time it has been shown in plants." said Susan Dudley, Associate Professor of Biology at McMaster University. "When plants share their pots, they get competitive and start growing more roots which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbors get them. It appears that they only do this when sharing a plot with unrelated plants; when they share a plot with family, they don't increase their root growth. Because differences between groups of strangers and groups of siblings only occurred when they shared a pot, the root interactions may provide a form of kin recognition." The study shows that even plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as kin favoritism towards relatives. It has being experimentally demonstrated that Redwood trees actually feed their nearby saplings through some underground process yet to be identified.

The way amoeba can communicate with each other and separate themselves equidistantly so as to have the best division of shared resources in a particular environment, trees may also have the ability to communicate with each other to effect the optimal spacing requirements in that ecosystem. Similar experiments on other types of trees, plants and ecosystems will establish whether this ability is more universal. It is more than likely that plants have the ability to balance individual and shared interests just as animals do by the use of subjective responses expressing competitive and cooperative behaviour.

Doctor Tanya Latty at the University of Sydney has discovered that slime moulds, the most ancient of communal plants, can make complex comparisons between two food options based on the quality of the food and the risks involved in entering a particular eating environment. When given choices of food quality in various exposures to light, the slime moulds were able to weigh both the risks and the benefits. Here again, simple communal organisms are capable of complex subjective responses and behaviour because of their ability to communicate with one another. This too is evidence of some kind of environmental awareness and subjective decision-making in the genomic ability to assess and respond to environmental conditions.

Unlike complex plants, complex animals quickly evolved complex neural structures after their first appearance in the Cambrian explosion. Subjective response of plants to other living things is tied entirely to growth rather than behaviour, and that must have been what limited their evolutionary course for all time. In animals, the subjective responses that would evolve into complex behaviour would be tied to evolving neural networks and perceptions culminating in the central processing unit called the brain. This occurred because animals are about more than growth, reproduction and survival, but about more complex forms of self-interest / shared interest expressed through competition and cooperation. Animals are about individual / social bilateral subjective experience as well as growth, reproduction and survival. Because animals have a stronger subjective sense of their individual nature and its relation to shared interest / self-interest, they were capable of evolving from subjective responses using only protein receptors up the next seven rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity. Only in animals would bilateral subjective experience allow the creation of individual variation based on personality. The difference between plants and animals is that animals are capable of subjective variation as well as physical growth and variation.

The subjective experience of plants are entirely concerned with growth and survival, and arguably they do that in some ways even better than animals considering their ability to genetically adapt and proliferate and live for centuries or even millennia. But unlike plants, the subjective experience of animals is about individual experience and survival, and individual experience of other living things simply has so much greater evolutionary potential and necessity than simple physical growth and regeneration.

As interesting and diverse and successful as plants are in life, the limitation in their mode of subjective experience has limited their behavioural complexity as much as their general lack of mobility in responding to opportunity and threat.

Animals depend entirely on plants for their survival, but it is animals that have come to rule the earth through the evolutionary potential of their subjective complexity for individual behaviour.

More than one million species of plants and animals have received Latin names. More than 80 percent of these apply to animals: of the animals, nearly 75 percent are insects; of the insects, about 60 percent are beetles.

Clearly, insects and especially beetles are capable of reproducing in the greatest numbers with the greatest genetic diversity, and yet their subjective nature has never gone beyond approach / avoidance behaviour and instinctive neural responses. Just as the basic subjective nature of plants is limited by the lack of neural development, so too insects may be limited by their genetic nature. Insects may have never developed conscious feelings of pleasure and fear because a brain of sufficient size and complexity is impossible in creatures that breathe through their skin. Insects simply can't supply the oxygen necessary for a brain large enough for conscious responses.

The reason subjective responses became most complex in vertebrates and invertebrates may simply have to do with the ability to create huge and complex neural structures and brains with metabolic processes to support them. Only invertebrates and vertebrates have a genetic structure and plasticity to grow in size and complexity in both their bodies and their brains.

The path to the subjective complexity that ended up in the creation of the human psyche is probably only possible among vertebrates. Probably only warm-blooded vertebrates could evolve brains capable of subjective experiences that allowed ever increasing complex unconscious / conscious behavioural options. This subjective complexity soon became more important to survival than size or power or any adaptation in form.

How Evolution Really Works

If shared interest and cooperation and the subjective responses upon which it depends are in fact fundamental aspects of the nature of evolutionary change, it must necessitate a very different model for how evolution works than one based on simple competitive advantage through a slow process of natural selection.

Having described the importance of subjective response and the balance between shared interest / self-interest in establishing the foundation for evolutionary change, it is time to look at the nuts and bolts of evolutionary change that creates new species.

Darwin was wrong about almost everything except that natural selection can help change species into many different varieties, partly through competitive reproductive advantage. He believed that this is a slow process played out over countless generations. Yet there is little evidence that shows that evolution is a slow process of infinitesimal adaptive improvements, and there is stunningly little evidence that it ever creates new species. An unbiased look at the evidence shows that competitive advantage is at best only part of the story and evolutionary change that creates new species is invariably more rapid than Darwinian theory allows.

A new Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation must offer a plausible explanation for how evolution really works if it is to challenge the existing belief that current Dawinian theory is fundamentally correct. It must propose mechanisms that better reflects the irrefutable evidence showing that species can remain virtually unchanged over enormous periods of time or change with stunning rapidity. It must propose a mechanism far more responsive than slow adaptive competitive reproductive advantage to show how species are created.

Although virtually every scientist who discusses evolutionary change recites the mantra of natural selection, almost all the research in the last decades have established that there are dynamic internal and external forces that change the genome of creatures in profound ways that have nothing to do with random mutation or competitive advantage. The fruit fly genome has been experimentally altered in countless ways to study the genes and chromosomes responsible for particular traits, and yet in all those experiments there has never been a new species of fruit fly created. Either the fruit fly is incapable of becoming a new species, or human tinkering with fruit fly genes is crude compared to the integrated complexity of genomic plasticity.

It is important to first consider some of the research that has established some of the different ways genomes change that has nothing to do with random mutation.

Epigenetics  
How Your Ancestors Changed Your Genes.

There are only a few ways that Darwinian theory says genetic change happens. The most important is sexual reproduction where two individuals combine their genes to create a distinctly new individual, although this has never been shown to create anything but variations within a particular species. There are also copying errors when cells divide that occasionally changes genes. There are also mutations in the genome caused by chemicals, radiation or just random changes in DNA. And until recently, with the new science of epigenetics, it was axiomatic in evolutionary theory that genetic change only happens within the DNA molecule itself, never from outside influences.

The new science of epigenetics has profoundly changed all that. Contrary to Darwinian theory, epigenetic experiments have shown that genetic change can come from outside the living organism. Epigenetic studies have shown the effects of variables outside the genome in producing profound changes in genetic heritability and how these epigenetically altered heritable traits can determine reproductive success in individual creatures and their offspring. Simply put, the genome of creatures is susceptible to changes that originate outside the cell including diet and social behaviour. This is extremely important, because it has been shown for the first time that diet, environmental conditions and subjective responses of individuals to other individuals can directly affect the course of evolutionary adaptation by turning on and turning off genes crucial to survival.

Because of epigenetics, your grandparent's diet or how they treated your father or mother may actually be reflected in your own genetic makeup, and you may pass those hardwired genetic traits to your children. How you eat and behave may also change your unborn children's genes, and theirs and theirs.

Epigenetic experiments have shown how diet and behaviour in the body of an individual can send chemicals through the cell wall and into the cell nucleus to the DNA molecule in eggs or sperm where these chemicals can turn genes on and off. In one experiment, skinny brown mice fed a particular food supplement had offspring that were fat and yellow. When the DNA of these fat yellow mice was examined, it was shown that the particular diet had turned on genes that controlled for both the different weight and color of that strain of mice. Other experiments with rats showed that mothers who licked their babies turned on the genes that helped control anxiety when the babies grew up. Mothers who were not so attentive had offspring that grew up to be anxious adults who had measurably shorter life spans. And the fascinating thing was that in these rats, this maladaptive trait persisted three generations, effectively limiting the number of offspring from bad mothers in a species capable of explosive reproduction.

Michael Skinner at Washington State University injected a fungicide used on grapes into pregnant rats. Males born to females exposed to the toxin produced sperm that swam slowly and died early, a serious limitation on reproductive success. The offspring of those males had the same problem, and so did their grandsons and the great grandsons even though they were never exposed to the fungicide. And startlingly, this heritable problem persisted without changing a single gene sequence. Undeniably, there is more to heritable genetic change than current Darwinian theory allows.

Skinner believes that epigenetics is the culprit. What changed was not the proteins the genes coded but whether genes created those proteins or not. The toxins permanently altered the way rat DNA was expressed, perhaps by altering the chemical tags that some genes carry. Skinner says that his study provides the first direct evidence that the environment can alter gene expression for generations.

It has even been shown that the genome in identical twins can change significantly over the course of life because of what must be epigenetic factors; the older identical twins get, the more their genomes differ.

And if diet and behaviour can create heritable changes that can last generations, the influence on succeeding generations would be considerable and rapid compared to the slow changes that Darwinian theory assumes from random genetic mutation.

Jumping Genes

The view of the genome as a rigidly inflexible code responsible for the structure of every living creature just isn't true. Genes constantly replicate themselves and move location for no apparent purpose, and only one to two percent of the human genome actually codes for the proteins that create individual human beings. Not only do genes repeat themselves for no apparent purpose, but they also insert themselves into different chromosomes for no apparent purpose. The genes that work together to create living beings also exist on different chromosomes, and somehow coordinate and communicate to do their particular tasks in ways that no one even begins to understand. There are also so-called jumping genes that seem to move around to no apparent purpose.

Stephen Stanley, "An important factor here may be that chromosomal changes play a role in the initiation of a major evolutionary step. There is much evidence that chromosomal rearrangements occur in association with speciation events. This we can see quite simply from the fact that many closely related species are characterized by distinctive chromosomal features. Chromosomal mutations or rearrangements may come about by accident during the cell division's that produce sex cells; here chromosomes divide, and in dividing they may be permanently fragmented, or segments of them may be reversed or displaced. The genes on the chromosomes may not be altered in this process, but the way that they function may be affected. It has been suggested that the mode of operation of the regulatory genes relates to its position relative to the genes that it controls. If this is true, then it is easy to see how chromosomal rearrangements may have profound evolutionary effects. Imagine, for example, the regulatory genes from the chromosomal neighborhood of one or more of these structural genes moving in the vicinity of others. This movement may have profound effects. It may cause changes in the sequence of development of an animal or plant, or it may change the rate at which different organs grow."

"This striking piece of information suggests that many of these distinctive larger groups can be traced back to single ancestral species that form by way of small, inbreeding populations. We do not know for sure, however, that the first species with a new chromosomal pattern possessed most of the adaptive features that now distinguish the genus or family in which the chromosomal pattern is displayed. It is clear that many new adaptive features do not emerge at the precise time the speciation occurs. In truth, we cannot pinpoint a time of speciation because there's no way of determining just when the burgeoning population could no longer breed with its parent species."

Here again is a description of genomic awareness and plasticity that completely contradicts the idea of slow change and adaptive fitness. If a species is a group of individuals who recognize themselves as a part of the breeding population, then small inbreeding populations may naturally exist within larger ones simply through personal preference as a part of sexual selection.

The genetic mechanism for effecting massive change may be exceedingly small when the disruption to the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem is extremely large. Of the billions of letters in their genomes, there are just two letter differences in the genes that create the cortex of a chicken and a chimpanzee. There are 18 letter differences in the genes that create the cortex of a chimpanzee and a human being. Considering the huge size and functional difference between the cortex of a chicken and a chimpanzee, it's clear that those two letters make a massive difference in each brain. And considering that chimpanzees and humans have so much in common when it comes to brain function, those 18 letter differences must arguably be doing something that makes humans incredibly more complex. In a genome of 30 billion letters, an 18 letter difference is exceedingly small, yet capable of creating changes that are astonishingly large.

Just as the neural connections in a child are pruned back significantly after five years and then again in early adolescence, chromosomes are also pruned back over the course of evolutionary time. How to explain that a worm may have 100,000 genes while human beings have only 25,000, other than reorganizational pruning of the genome that allows it to do so much more with what appears to be so much less.

Genetic responsiveness and plasticity it seems can also be stunningly and inexplicably fast.

Dr. Marla Sokoloski at the University of Toronto has shown that the expression of a particular protein from the forager gene in one ant species can be altered within one minute because of particular environmental cues. When an unmanageably large worm was presented to the small forager ants responsible for bringing food to the colony, the much larger soldier ants were recruited to help by changing their behaviour from protection to foraging, cutting the large worm into small pieces that their smaller sisters could then manage. It was shown that the environmental cue had actually changed the genetic expression of the protein in the brain of the soldier ants to the proteins responsible for foraging behaviour, making them behave like their smaller forager sisters. The rapid change in gene expression from such an environmental cue shows the incredible awareness and plasticity of the genome to subjective experience.

A Purdue University study revealed that plants can correct defective genes inherited from their parents by reverting to an ancestral gene sequence. Dr. Robert Pruitt and Susan Lolle discovered that members of the mustard family called Arabidopis carrying a mutant gene that caused plants to have fused flower heads had 10 percent of the succeeding generations exhibiting normal flowers even though both parents carried only mutant genes. This would be like all humans who have blue eyes because of the combination of two recessive genes suddenly producing ten percent of brown eyed babies without the genes to create them. The mustard plants in the Purdue study had somehow retrieved ancestral code that allowed them to repair or ignore mutant genes, almost like a computer operating system can be reset to an earlier time. As Dr. Pruitt said, "There's another way that genetic information can be inherited we've been blissfully unaware of for the last hundred years or so,"... To me that just boggles the mind. Then you really start to wonder what else is out there." What is out there is genomic awareness and plasticity.

In another experiment, fruit flies that had had the genes responsible for the creation of eyes deleted from their genome went on to produce a number of descendent individuals with fully formed, fully functioning eyes in succeeding generations. Somehow the genomes of some individuals were able to re-create a prior genetic configuration that should have been impossible, showing clearly that genomic plasticity is very powerful, and completely underappreciated. What other possible mechanism could explain the creation of irreducibly complex eyes in creatures without the genes to create them?

Interestingly, a group of international researchers have completed the first highly detailed map of a single chimpanzee chromosome and matched it with its human counterpart. Among the proportions that lined up, only 1.4 percent of the chemical letters were different, consistent with expectations. However, the researchers found 68,000 small discrepancies where DNA had either been added or lost on the respective chromosomes. And when they analyzed the sequences of 231 genes, they predicted that 83 percent of them would produce proteins that differed in some way. The same genes, it seems are capable of doing stunningly different things.

Genomic awareness and plasticity has the power to create massive change from the smallest of genetic differences created by processes that have nothing to do with natural selection.

Probably the best example of the power of genetic plasticity that strikes closest home is in the difference between the genome of chimpanzees and humans. Of the 25,000 genes in our respective genomes, perhaps only 350 are different, and of those 350, perhaps 50 are responsible for the observable differences between us and them.

We are obviously so completely different from our nearest cousins, and yet we are genetically almost the same. What is different is the result of the ninth rung in the ladder of subjective complexity, deductive / inductive reasoning and the exponential growth in the emotional complexity of the bilateral human brain.

Symbiogenesis

In talking about the causes of evolutionary change, it is important to mention the theory of symbiogenesis put forward by Lynn Margulis in her book, Acquiring Genomes (A New Theory for the Origin of Species).

She makes the bold case that complex creatures acquiring complete genetic sequences from bacteria is the mechanism for the genetic reorganization necessary for the creation of new species. She points out correctly that no observed genetic mutation in nature or the laboratory has ever produced one new species. She maintains that bacteria, placing their genetic material into the reproductive cells of complex creatures rather than natural selection is the outside force through which speciation happens. She believes that there is a symbiotic force in nature that allows creatures to integrate genomes to form new organisms. She also maintains that bacteria continue to integrate their genomes into cells of complex creatures and this is the process that explains the origin of species. Cancer researchers have given some support to her theory. "As they look beyond the genome, cancer researchers are also awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom. "We are massively outnumbered," said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial. In Orlando, he and other researchers described how genes in this microbiome — "exchanging messages with genes inside human cells — may be involved with cancers of the colon, stomach, esophagus and other organs...As the various cells are colluding, they may also be trading information with cells in another realm — the micro-organisms in the mouth, skin, respiratory system, urogenital tract, stomach and digestive system. Each microbe has its own set of genes, which can interact with those in the human body by exchanging molecular signals."

"The signaling these microbes do is dramatically complex," Dr. Nicholson said in an interview at Imperial College. "They send metabolic signals to each other — and they are sending chemicals out constantly that are stimulating our biological processes.

"It's astonishing, really. There they are, sitting around and doing stuff, and most of it we don't really know or understand."

Margulis' theory is a plausible explanation for genetic change in bacteria, and single celled creatures, and even in some multi-cellular animals where exact copies of the genome of bacteria have been found in the DNA of higher organisms. She also makes a compelling case for how the first cells that formed a nucleus holding DNA were created by the union of independent bacteria living symbiotically together until they became one creature. But the interesting thing is that in her radical new theory for natural selection, in her entire book based on symbiosis, it is possible to count on one's fingers the number of times she even mentions subjective response in creatures. She may be absolutely right about how single celled creatures came to be, but she completely ignores the subjective responses that must have made two independent creatures detect, communicate and respond cooperatively to each other as two separate creatures living together for mutual benefit. Her theory also does not address the overwhelming evidence that the highest proportion of new species appear at times of catastrophic extinction or opportunity. How random alterations of genomes caused by bacteria can cause periods of mass speciation offers no better an explanation than the slow work of natural selection. Neither fits the bill. Yet here again is a means through which genetic alteration may happen independent of natural selection, and here again is a theory that completely ignores the subjective responses that are central to symbiotic relationships in creatures.

Virogenesis

Viruses have also been shown to insert themselves in the genome of higher organisms. Retroviruses actually form a symbiotic relationship within the genome of higher creatures, using the genetic equipment of particular species to reproduce themselves without killing the cell in which they reside. Gene therapy actually depends on viruses to insert genetic material into particular cells. It has also been shown that placental birth may depend on viruses changing the genetic nature of the embryo so that it may attach to the placental wall. When these viruses were experimentally eliminated in sheep, no pregnancies were observed. Going back to the earliest forms of life, viruses and bacteria may have created the structural form of the DNA molecule through some symbiotic relationship. What is clear in virtually all the recent discoveries about the genome is that they are incredibly plastic, they are capable of complex interaction with other living creatures and their genomes, and they must have some form of awareness and ability to detect, communicate and respond to other genomes and other living creatures.

The Rate of Evolutionary Change

The first, and most remarkable evidence of rapid evolutionary change is seen in the fossil record 600 million years ago in what is called the Cambrian explosion. After three billion years of nothing but single celled creatures on earth, the ancestors of every type of complex organism appeared in the fossil record within 50-100 million years. There is some evidence that that time frame may have been as little as 10 million years. The ancestors of all complex creatures: invertebrates, vertebrates, insects, fungi and plants plus other kinds of creatures that have gone extinct were separated into the main branches of the tree of life with a speed and diversity that has defied explanation. In 50-100 million years, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of completely new life forms appeared on earth, far in excess of what natural selection should allow if it was based on slow adaptive, reproductive success.

In his book, The New Evolutionary Timetable, Stephen M. Stanley, defends punctuated equilibrium, the new theory for the creation of species that says species stay unchanged for very long periods of time, and then suddenly become new species in a relatively short period of time. He points out glaring contradictions to the idea of gradual evolutionary change. "What has unfolded with the many discoveries of the past two or three decades is a picture of rapid, but not instantaneous, diversification of life during the Precambrian and early Cambrian, an interval in the order of 100 million years. Though perhaps divisible into pulses when scrutinized in detail, this general event constituted the most spectacular adaptive radiation of all-time." If evolutionary change is gradual, how could one distinct period produce virtually the entire foundation for complex life in so short time? Stanley goes on, "The rapid adaptive radiation that is apparent today confronts gradualism with a seemingly insoluble problem. We now know that for many groups of marine invertebrates an average species lasts for five or 10 million years without evolving enough to be given a new name. How then are we to explain the origin of advanced groups like arthropods and mollusks from primitive ancestors in a few tens of millions of years? Our only reasonable recourse is to abandon gradualism in favor of punctuational evolution."

Since the Cambrian explosion, some creatures have gone through half a dozen ice ages and enormous variation in carbon dioxide and oxygen levels and stayed virtually the same while others have gone through many rapid speciation events. The coelacanth is a deep sea fish that has changed very little over the last 65 million years while primates have gone from a creature the size of a shrew to become many thousands of species including the many hominim species that are the related ancestors of modern human beings.

Stanley points out that "When mammals inherited the earth, the result was spectacular. Their greater adaptive radiation was recent enough that the fossil evidence for it is impressive. Within perhaps 12 million years, most of the living orders of mammals were in existence, all having descended from simple, diminutive animals that might be thought of as resembling small rodents, though not all possessed front teeth specialized for gnawing. Among the nearly 20 new orders were the ones that contain large carnivorous animals, including modern lions, wolves and bears; the one that compromises horses and rhinos; and the one that includes deer, pigs, antelopes, and sheep. Most of the orders evolved in less than 12 million years. Perhaps the most spectacular origins were of the bats, which took to the air, and the whales, which invaded the sea... Given a simple little rodent-like animals as the starting point, what does it mean to form a bat in less than 10 million years, or a whale in little more time?"

In an article on climate change in Walrus Magazine march 2007, Alanna Mitchell identifies research that has shown that 55 million years ago the earth got very hot because of a rapid rise in carbon dioxide levels. Ten million years after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, we propose that this extreme alteration in the Nash equilibrium of the planet provided the fundamental ecological stress that set off the geometric cascade in mammal speciation through genomic awareness and plasticity.

Still we are left to explain rapid evolutionary change over both extremely short and moderate periods of time while reconciling such change with evolutionary stability over extremely long periods of time? How can evolution be both fast and slow regardless of the period of time in which it is observed?

A founding principle in Darwinian theory is that evolution is very slow because genetic mutations that offer adaptive advantage are very rare. It has been clearly shown that only 1 in 1000 genetic mutations are advantageous, with all the rest either useless or maladaptive. This means that adaptive advantage must be a very slow process indeed with one step forward for every thousand steps either backward or to the side. Yet that is not what many recent experiments have shown. In many cases, evolutionary change is stunningly rapid, with transformative change sometimes happening within one generation.

Darwin himself said that the greatest threat to his theory of natural selection would be the absence of slow changes in the form of living creatures observable in the fossil record. And yet with only a very few exceptions, slow changes in the form of new species are almost entirely absent from the fossil record.

There are places on earth where there is a constant sedimentary record of life over the last 6 million years, and in those sedimentary records, in countless species, evolutionary change almost always happens in very short periods of time, following long periods of stable heritable forms. Steven Jay Gould first put forward a revolutionary idea to explain this in what he called punctuated equilibrium, and yet even though the evidence overwhelmingly supports his idea, it is still controversial because there is no known mechanism for rapid genetic change in very short periods of time.

Darwinian theory has been so tied to the idea of slow change, that the unit of evolutionary change, appropriately called the darwin, is a 1 percent change in one million years. By this measure, in 10 million years, the difference between the common ancestor of living mammals and a bat and a whale should be only 10 percent. Clearly, this is wrong.

In his book The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner describes one of the most famous ongoing experiments to measure evolutionary change. Over the last 40 years Peter and Rosemary Grant captured, measured and tagged almost every offspring of the 13 species of Darwin finches on a number of the Galapagos Islands. In some particular years of either great abundance or deprivation, the percentage change in the bodies of some of the finches was astounding. In one year of extreme drought the change in Darwin finches was 25,000 darwins. After an extraordinary flood in another year the change was 6000 darwins.

It has been assumed that the common ancestor of the 13 species of Darwin Finches came to the Galapagos millions of years ago, but there are almost as many distinct species of Hawaiian finches and the original pair is known for been brought to the Islands in the 1860s. Here again is more evidence for rapid speciation that would require some type of genomic awareness and plasticity.

In his exceptional book, The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner presents the problem of the contradictory observations about the speed of evolutionary change.

"The evolutionist, Philip Gingerich compiled more than 500 cases of evolutionary change, from short and fast experiments in artificial selection (events that took months or at most a year and a half) to evolutionary experiments in the fossil record (events that took millions of years). He discovered a simple pattern, a pattern that is just the opposite of what the earlier evolutionists-from Darwin to Haldane would have expected. The closer you look at life, the more rapid and intense the rate of evolutionary change. The farther back in time you stand, the less you see. In a single year, you can find rates of change as high as 60,000 darwins. But in the fossil record the average is only a tenth of a darwin."

Over short periods, evolutionary change seems to be very fast, but over long periods of time it seems to be very slow. That is like saying a car that often goes 0 to 60 in 5 seconds never goes further than the end of the street in a year. Why and how should evolution be capable of such rapid speed if it was bound to the same proximity? As Stephen Stanley has pointed out, there are even more conflicting observations in the fossil records about the rate of evolutionary change that indicates it often occurs with startling speed over what are evolutionarily short periods of time.

In the last 4 million years, human beings have evolved from a bipedal creature similar to an orang-utan, (Ardipithicus Ramedis). Humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor approximately 5 million years ago, and yet chimpanzees have evolved only one new form, the pigmy chimpanzee or bonobo. The bonobo appeared around 4 million years ago and has also evolved no new forms. Yet in the last 4 million years, there have been perhaps 20 or more different hominim species; from our three foot ancient cousin Lucy, to huge and powerful Neanderthals; to Homo floresiensis, the three foot tall hobbit human that lived in Indonesia only 13,000 years ago. The difference between the forms of our earliest ancestors and modern humans is clearly much more than three percent, the slow rate of change predicted by Darwin and Haldane. And clearly there's something in the human genome that allows massive transformative capabilities in form that doesn't exist in orang-utans, chimpanzees or bonobos. And clearly this has nothing to do with ecological change because the chimpanzee and human habitat in Africa has undergone many different transformations in the last 4 million years.

When it comes to rapid change in form, a recent example shows how massive changes in form can depend on only a single gene. David Kingsley at Stanford University found the variation in a single gene makes all the difference in transforming the ocean-going stickleback fish into a completely different freshwater creature. These ocean fish are covered in 35 bony plates that protect them from predators, but when those ocean- going stickleback fish were moved to freshwater, those bony plates were lost in one generation, demonstrating just how rapid evolution can be. His studies showed that a change in a single gene created fundamental rapid transformation in form using some process other than natural selection. And as with epigenetic change, clearly there are evolutionary processes that depend on something other than slow genetic mutations and natural selection. Clearly the genome of the ocean stickleback knows when it is in fresh water and alters its form to suit with a complete reorganization of its bony plates requiring the change in expression of many different proteins.

Evolution can be extremely slow, or it can be extremely fast in seemingly any time period depending on the species being studied. It can be slow in particular years, and fast in particular years. It can be extremely rapid over brief periods in the fossil record, or extremely slow over great lengths of time. Many creatures have stayed seemingly unchanged for millions of years, while others have changed with stunning evolutionary speed, even as the earth went through many ice ages, and catastrophic extinctions. And most rapid evolutionary changes in species observable in the fossil record are exponentially greater than would be possible through the slow natural selection of favorable traits attributable to random genetic mutation.

A number of theories have been put forward to explain this, although only punctuated equilibrium has even begun to address the mechanism through which genetic change could be extremely rapid or slow at different times in different species.

It is evident that times of great opportunity or stress can precipitate rapid evolutionary changes in some species, when species seem to pop into existence in the evolutionary blink of an eye. It is also during those periods that countless other species go extinct while some remain completely unchanged. Clearly, the mechanism for creating new species is complicated, and much more complicated than the simple Darwinian model of natural selection allows.

The Shifting Course of Evolution

The Grant's research on Galapagos finches, along with other studies of many others on different species, strongly indicates that evolution is like a lowland stream that constantly twists back and forth in its course, rapidly changing direction, cutting back on itself in opposite directions countless times before it reaches the sea. If the water in the stream can be thought of as the gene pool of a particular species, the genetic changes that will happen in predictable environmental conditions will tend to balance to a norm, creating a bell curve for the expression of particular traits. Where evolutionary change acts on genetic adaptations in individuals through family lines, it acts on populations of those family lines by preserving the widest range of traits possible in the group.

Evolution can be seen as the melting glacial gene pool of life that creates and sustains the 5 great remaining phyla, the great distinct rivers of life, and the water from the melting glacial gene pool of life continues to flow in every creature. The five great rivers that carry the genetic origins of life divide into the tributaries that scientists call orders. These tributaries then divide into lowland streams carrying the gene pools of individual species. It is only in lowland streams that natural selection creates variation in species. It is only from the gene pool of individual species, that new ones arrive. The metaphor of the lowland stream and its repeated cutbacks in the course and direction of evolutionary change is a model for how evolution can both be very rapid and yet also show little change over extremely long periods of time. Rapidly cutting back and forth to adapt to environmental conditions allows a species to respond with startling speed to short ecological variations and yet stay within the bell curve of physical and behavioural traits expressed in a population over time. This allows enough change to produce different varieties in a species but no distinctly new species.

In environments with a relatively stable Nash equilibrium through which the division of resources is predictably divided among species, genetic change may be rapid for particular traits as creatures respond to brief but significant changes in environmental conditions. In such relatively stable environments creatures also stubbornly resist changes that are so profound that they create new species. The genome is clearly capable of rapid change in form to respond to environmental conditions as well as preserving a stable bell curve of traits that define a breeding population.

Instead of simply favoring or eliminating traits that enhance reproductive success, evolutionary adaptation and sexual selection seem to preserve a bell curve for every particular trait that may be expressed in a particular species. Evolution seems to be all about options, options, options, and those options serve the primary function of allowing creatures to adapt to environmental opportunity and pressure using new adaptive ways to perceive, communicate and respond to other creatures and to the Nash equilibrium of the ecosystem in which those creatures exist. Because the purpose of life is to maintain the balance of the shared interest / self-interest of the creatures in any ecosystem, the function of genetic change would be to serve that purpose with the best adaptive forms for that environment.

Too Much Junk

It has been demonstrated that in human beings, less than 2 percent of the genome is devoted to creating proteins out of which all physical form and function flow. What the other 98 percent of the genome is doing is still a mystery, but it is doubtful that so much of the code of life is useless junk DNA, as it has been called. With so much genetic potential in that mysterious part of the genome, it seems more than likely that it contains yet undiscovered processes that affect the course of life and evolutionary adaptation. New research is making that clear.

It has been recently shown that this junk part of the genome creates very tiny RNA molecules that regulate the expression of genes. Genes create RNA molecules that then create the proteins out of which life is made. This is demonstrably true. But there is much more to the story because of the discovery of Micro RNA. Micro RNA doesn't create proteins, but determines how much, how many and when those proteins are created. The DNA and RNA it turns out produce the ingredients to make the living soup that becomes a creature, but micro RNA determines the timing and proportions of those ingredients in the recipe of life. In a process similar to epigenetics, the processes that influence the expression of micro RNA are yet to be discovered.

It also seems likely that heritable genes that control subjective experience may one day be shown to have profound influence over the form that creatures use to adapt to new environmental situations.

Sir Karl Popper the famous evolutionary biologist also maintained that subjective responses were significant factors in natural selection. "I distinguish external or environmental selection pressure from internal selection pressure. Internal selection pressure comes from the organism itself and, I conjecture, ultimately from its preference (or "aims") but these may of course change in response to external change. I assume there are different classes of genes: those which mainly control the anatomy, which I call a-genes; those which control behaviour, which I will call b-genes. The b-genes may be similarly subdivided into p-genes (controlling preferences or "aims") and s-genes (controlling skills)." What Popper is saying is that individual creatures have subjective incentives that are part of their genetic makeup, and part of their individual behaviour. It is hard to deny that if internal subjective responses are heritable, then reproductive advantage through natural selection must depend on them as well. Popper has given what may be the first outline of the loom of life in which genes that are responsible for the expression of form are interrelated with genes responsible for the expression of subjective response.

The War Over Natural Selection  
Dawkins V Gould

Since Darwin first published his theory of natural selection more than 150 years ago there have been tens of thousands of books written about evolution.

With some notable exceptions that are mostly ignored, evolutionists have now pretty much been divided in two camps. The first camp are those that see natural selection and changes to the genome as the primary process of slow evolutionary change, with Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene Theory as the ultimate expression of this approach. The rationale of the other camp, best articulated by Stephen Jay Gould, is more holistic and open, seeing evolution as a complex process reflecting the interaction between the innate limitations in the structure of living things, their historical place in changing ecosystems, as well as developmental lifecycle processes by which creatures are reproduced. Natural selection is constrained by the interaction of all these different forces. Dawkins sees evolution as ever expanding variation created by the natural selection of successful genes. Gould sees genes as less important, believing that chance and the changing fluctuation of gene lineages record success and failure, but is not the cause of success and failure. Selection is relatively less powerful for Gould than Dawkins. In his book, Dawkins vs Gould, Kim Sterelny describes the difference between Dawkins and Gould as centering on the difference in how they picture the spread of complexity. Gould thinks of complexity as having a lower bound but no upper bound, and these features of complexity are fixed by biochemistry, not by the course of evolutionary history. Dawkins believes there are a number of 'watershed events' which make new forms possible. Sex, the invention of multi-celled life and the invention of a modular mode of development and construction of bodies are some of these watershed events.

Both completely ignore subjective response as a force in evolutionary adaptation. Both see the form creatures take as the dominant measure and expression of evolutionary change.

Another major problem occurs when both camps come to the evolution of human beings, they either fall silent or focus on very narrow self-serving aspects of human nature to defend their particular views. For those who hold to evolution as being strictly tied to genes evolving through natural selection, only altruism seems to offer a serious challenge because the idea of an individual acting in a way that offers their particular genes no benefit makes no sense, and is an existential threat to their theory. The theory of kin selection is used to explain why individuals might sacrifice their own reproductive success in order to benefit a greater number of their close relatives, offering their genes greater reproductive opportunity than their own personal survival. They never explain nurturant behaviour between species that has no effect on the survival of particular genes. They never explain the persistence of completely maladaptive traits like asexuality across many distinct species.

Stephen Jay Gould and others have offered a powerful challenge to Dawkins' view, pointing out the many contradictions and exceptions to the Dawkins' camp's assumptions and predictions about evolutionary change, as well as to the basic rationale of kin selection. In this book we have also focused on the limitations of Selfish Gene Theory because it is so widely accepted and because it is completely at odds with the central thesis we propose in which cooperative advantage is as much a fundamental part of evolutionary change as competitive advantage. Unlike Dawkins, we propose that cooperation is not a special case of adaptive fitness, but inextricably bound to the nature of life and its subjective structure in the balance within shared interest / self-interest.

Like the Gould camp that is open to other complex influences on evolutionary success beyond natural selection, The Theory of Subjective Adaptation recognizes structural, historical and developmental influences on evolutionary success and adaptation.

Where we differ from this holistic or eco-centric approach is in our view of the force behind evolutionary change. The Theory of Subjective Adaptation sees subjective response tied to genomic awareness and plasticity as the foundation of all evolutionary change. Virtually all other theorists pay little attention to subjective response because it is seen as an irrelevant epiphenomenon to adaptive success. Our theory proposes that there is a purpose and direction in life, the purpose being to balance the shared interest / self-interest of creatures in any ecosystem, and the evolutionary direction in life is clearly apparent in the increasing complexity of subjective response.

All current Darwinian theorists see life as a tree, with species continually branching through the process of natural selection. For these theorists, random changes of positive fitness accommodate creatures to random changes in environmental pressure and opportunity and so life has no direction or purpose. Complexity simply represents particular adaptations that particular creatures evolved for their reproductive fitness. By this rationale, beetles, of which there are 60,000 species, are evolutionarily more successful than other complex creature because there are far more species with far greater numbers of individuals. If evolutionary success is simply a matter of numbers or species, bacteria and algae that form the major portion of the biomass of the earth are evolutionarily the most successful creatures on the planet. The idea that success is entirely a matter of numbers makes the study of evolutionary complexity of no real importance. By that logic, quorum sensing in bacteria is evolutionarily far more significant than human consciousness and culture.

Opposed to Dawkins and Gould, others have addressed the problem of the evolution of human behaviour in the new fields of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology proposing that culture and genetic predispositions for behaviour are coevolving aspects of human nature. There are predispositions for behaviour that offer individuals reproductive advantage that are favoured by genetic adaptation and natural selection, which traits culture then acts to promote or suppress. Cultures are also more or less successful by how effectively they select or suppress genetic predispositions for behavioural traits. Traits are more or less successful by how effectively they are adopted by the cultures in which they exist.

Studies of individual differences in personality routinely offer breakdowns on the nature / nurture question, asserting, for instance, the sociability is 37 percent determined by heredity. Unfortunately, the idea that purely environmental or genetic components can be isolated that "every behaviour can be factored into a percentage attributed to each, is just as wrong as determinism and in reality merely an adjunct to it," as Gould puts it. Both the Dawkins and Gould camps deny that there is a war between nature and nurture in their model, and yet fight rabidly to draw stark distinctions and significance between the two. They simply do not recognize or seriously address the bilateral reality of nature / nurture and its foundation in subjective response.

The Theory of Subjective Adaptation accepts socio-biology and evolutionary psychology as part of the story, just as it accepts that the nature / nurture aspects of the Dawkins and Gould approaches have a strong basis in fact. There are genetic predispositions for behavioural traits in humans, but they are only expressed when acted on by nurturant socialization of the human brain. What our theory also proposes to show is how sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are based on the ascent of subjective response in living creatures. Human consciousness is simply the final rung on the ladder of evolving subjective complexity.

The Theory of Subjective Adaptation proposes that the tree of life has direction and purpose, and that direction and purpose is seen in the ladder of evolving subjective experience. There are nine steps in the ladder of subjective complexity, beginning with approach / avoidance responses of bacteria and ending in the abstract self-awareness of deductive / inductive reasoning that creates the psychological complexity in the human psyche. These nine steps in the ladder of subjective complexity are the 'watershed events' or quantum leaps in subjective experience that have created evolutionary complexity and diversity.

For Dawkins and Gould, humans are a special case because we have culture and socialization, which removes us from the chain of natural selection. For Gould, human behaviour is simply an artifact of a brain that has enormous neural complexity; the human psyche and human nature, love and religion and other human behaviours without any meaningful genetic foundation. For Dawkins, human nature is the interplay of genes and memes, the cultural information humans pass from one generation to the next. Life, culture and evolution is only passing information. It ignores the fact that information is meaningless without a subjective response.

The Theory of Subjective Adaptation shows how evolutionary change arose on the nine steps of subjective complexity until it created the human psyche from adaptations for social behaviour in social animals. We accept there is a genetic foundation to all social behaviour. We also accept that without socialization and culture those genetic predispositions are never realized in behaviour. We propose that when evolution is seen as the shifting balance within shared interest / self-interest, between cooperative / competitive behaviour, it is possible to see the purpose and direction in life that would lead to the evolution of the complex human psyche.

Dawkins and Gould would both say that the existence of the human psyche is purely a matter of evolutionary chance, and could have just as easily been snuffed from the course of life as any other extinct species. They believe that the evolution of human consciousness is just another remarkable adaptation. We propose that consciousness and self-consciousness must eventually arrive in nature on this earth because evolution has and must come to favor those creatures that evolve greater subjective complexity. There is a force in nature that drives the evolution of subjective complexity, and that force is the shifting balance within the shared interest / self-interest of creatures in any ecosystem.

It is only possible to deny the evolving subjective complexity of life by denying that there is a ladder from unconscious approach / avoidance and instinctual responses, to the conscious feelings of pleasure and fear, to conscious emotions in social animals. If human beings had never evolved, it is hard to accept that in the millions of years to come some species of social ape or monkey with an innate sense of abstract reciprocal value would not have eventually evolved the emotional complexity for self-conscious identity and the inductive / deductive reasoning that has made human beings what we are. The emotional complexity that is the foundation of all art, philosophy, psychology and religion does represent the culmination of the most complex balance within shared interest / self-interest expressed in life through human culture, and as long as there is a dynamic force maintaining that balance, consciousness must eventually arise. The thing that makes human beings different is that we represent the culmination of subjective complexity with the greatest breadth and depth of subjective response of any creature that has ever lived. Evolution clearly favors increasingly complex senses for perceiving ecological conditions, and it is in the subjective responses of increasingly complex bilateral subjective responses that creatures gained adaptive advantage. Bilateral intelligence and its final expression in the deductive / inductive reasoning that exists in humans was inevitable because it has such adaptive advantage, accommodating in the creature that has actually transcended natural selection. Human intelligence expressed through inductive / deductive reasoning is unique to humans, but, if it hadn't been our species, it would have eventually been some other.

Only humans have an abstract sense of self, the ability to understand personal identity as having meaning as well as purpose. Only human beings have an abstract sense of community, the ability to consciously understand that human life has meaning beyond the individual. Only humans can consciously appreciate the economic reality, meaning and evolutionary power of shared interest / self-interest. Abstract self-awareness, the ability to perceive process, to understand, to know that one knows, and how one knows is unique to human consciousness. It is the bilateral nature of deductive / inductive reasoning that makes human consciousness what it is.

In human beings, subjective experience takes one final step from the subjective feeling of 'me / us' to the abstract feeling of 'I / we' and that has made all the difference.

More Problems with Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection

The problem with Darwin's theory of natural selection isn't that it doesn't work in a limited way. The problem is in understanding how and why it works and just what is being selected and how limited it is in creating variation within species. Unfortunately, in the last hundred and fifty years, science has accepted assumptions and speculations about natural selection based on selective evidence and stunningly little data. Until the last 30 years, evolution was the only science that was almost completely theoretical and anecdotal, its problems with measurement, repeatability, and complexity mostly swept aside. And the more complex creatures and ecosystems are, the greater the problems apparent in Darwinian theory. The Darwinian theory of evolution is the only scientific theory almost entirely based on anecdotal observation and speculative assumptions. There are also just far too many exceptions to how natural selection is supposed to work.

Stephen Jay Gould in his essay Worm for a Century defines the problem. "How do we use the anatomy, physiology, behaviour, variation and geographic distribution of modern organisms, and the fossil remains in our geological record, to infer the pathways of history?" His answer lies in admitting we have a simplistic, stereotyped view of science based on regularity, repetition, and the ability to predict the future. Organisms he says, in the essay Quick Lives and Quirky Changes, "are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable, as they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because the myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to the present role." There is simply no knowing why creatures adapt, when they adapt, or how they will adapt in what ecosystem. So evolutionary science has no way to explain the past or predict the future, which calls into question the rationale that defines it as science.

The increased complexity in creatures makes it more and more difficult to understand natural selection and how adaptive advantage works because it is impossible to clearly identify any particular adaptive advantage. In a Scientific American article titled, Adaptation, Richard C. Lewontin described how difficult it is to draw any reasonable conclusion about a particular adaptive change in a particular creature.

The first difficulty he describes is the way evolution is seen as the process of adaptation of organisms to particular environmental niches. He makes it clear that 'niches" are completely arbitrary in their description, and there are many completely unoccupied niches that are completely ignored by creatures. There are no grass-eating snakes. There are no leaf-eating birds. There is only one plant-eating spider. Pandas have evolved a special thumb to strip bamboo and yet have never evolved a digestive system to process it in a more effective way. The panda's digestive system is in fact still almost identical to when it was a carnivore, and yet it restricts itself entirely to a nutritionally poor vegetable diet. What's up with such natural selection? And the best example for an unexplainable, unoccupied niche are New World monkeys that have lived in Central and South America for 35 million years, and yet never came down from the trees to occupy the land. There is no adaptive explanation for either the arbitrariness in the description of ecological niches, or the fact that some remain completely unoccupied.

The second problem he identifies is that the idea of environmental niches leaves out the role creatures have in creating particular niches. "Trees remake soil in which they grow by dropping leaves and putting down roots. Grazing animals change the species' composition of herbs on which they feed by cropping, by dropping manure, and physically disturbing the ground. There is a constant interplay of the organism and the environment, so that although natural selection may be adapting the organism to a particular set of environmental circumstances, the evolution of the organism itself changes those circumstances." He also points out, "If ecological niches can be specified only by the organisms that occupy them, evolution cannot be described as the process of adaptation because all organisms are already adapted." An ecosystem may be described as a completely arbitrary indiscriminate mix of resources that are constantly changing over time, making the very concept of an ecological niche problematical at best.

The next problem he identifies is the difficulty of constructing a plausible argument about how any evolutionary change functions as an adaptive device.

"The division of an organism into parts, each of which is regarded as a specific adaptation, requires two sets of a priori decisions. First one must decide on the appropriate way to divide the organism and then one must describe what problem that part solves. This amounts to creating descriptions of the organism and of the environment and then relating the description by functional statements: one can either start with the problem and try to infer which aspect of the organism is the solution or start with the organism and then describe adaptive functions to each part." Does a leg get longer to increase a creature's speed in order to outrun predators, get to the front of a herd, fight with a rival, or does it get longer to reach higher vegetation? Was the higher vegetation always there and the creature adapting to reach it, or was the vegetation a new part of the ecosystem? Some, all or none of such speculations may be true.

With extinct species, Lewontin says that the problem of understanding a particular adaptation is basically insoluble.

"With extinct species the problem of judging the adaptive status of traits is made more difficult because both the trait and its function must be reconstructed. In principle there is no way to be sure whether the dorsal plates of Stegosaurus were body temperature regulating devices, a defense mechanism, a sexual recognition sign or all these things."

Lewontin also points to the phenomenon of pleiotropy, whereby changes to one gene can have many different effects on the physiology and development of an organism. Not only does this genetic complexity make it impossible to identify a particular positively adaptive change, but makes it difficult to isolate those changes that may just simply be carried along.

There is also a problem in defining natural selection as the process by which adaptive fitness is defined by those traits preserved over time.

Species that have maintained a particular form over extended periods of time should logically be more adapted than those species changing more rapidly because the very fact that they had not changed says that they were adaptively fit. Yet there is no correlation between species that have gone extinct after long periods of stability and those undergoing rapid change. Extinction seems often to be simply a matter of chance rather than anything to do with natural selection. The simple statistic that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct is a rather persuasive argument that the survival of species is almost entirely a matter of chance, not natural selection.

It seems that the only thing that can be safely said about natural selection is that it exists to some unknown degree. Creatures change in response to environmental opportunity and stress. Why and how they do goes deeper than the simple fact of natural selection.

As John Tyler Bonner in his book The Evolution of Culture in Animals points out, "I must remind the reader that we're almost always guessing at what the adaptive advantage is and usually have no clue as to whether or not our guesses are correct. All we can say is there is a reasonable possibility." Unfortunately it's hard to make good science from reasonable possibilities, although his honesty about the limitations in describing natural selection is both admirable and rare.

In his book, The Battle for Human Nature, Barry Schwartz writes:

"Pair bonding is fitness-maximizing where it occurs; promiscuity is fitness- maximizing where it occurs. Multiple spawnings are fitness-maximizing, as are single spawnings. Brute selfishness maximizes fitness, but so does self-sacrifice... There is no possible finding, no pattern of animal behaviour in nature that can embarrass sociobiology.... Any activity at all can be shown to be maximizing fitness if the constraints are drawn carefully enough.... Theories with this much flexibility can explain everything; as a result, they explain nothing."

There is no definition of adaptive fitness in current Darwinian theory that is not extremely broad, imprecise and fundamentally self-contradictory. Our definition is very precise, defining adaptive fitness as the bell curve of traits within individuals and species that creates and maintains the balance within shared interests / self-interest, as it exists in the Nash equilibrium present in a particular ecosystem.

Because it is the most comprehensive long-term study of evolutionary change and natural selection, the Grant's work with the six species of Galapagos ground finches is most instructive in identifying the real problems with natural selection. It also substantially supports our definition of adaptive fitness.

These populations consistently compete for the same food, mix indiscriminately, have little aggression toward each other, occasionally hybridize, and those hybrids may be more fit at times than their specialist parents.

All the fundamentals necessary for natural selection isolating differences in species seems to be missing, and yet evolutionary change is clearly demonstrable over time in each population.

So why does natural selection exist in such conditions, and why is it so fast, between 6000 and 25,000 darwins, in some years?

The key may be in the observation of how sexual selection tied to genomic awareness and plasticity amplifies the traits that are perceived to be more favorable in particular years. Subjective preference in females may be key to isolating and accentuating the variations that become identifiable and distinct aspects of a particular population. Amplifying traits that may in fact be completely opposite in different years, (one year it's good to be bigger, another year to be smaller) supercharges the prevalence of such traits through sexual selection. And specialization for particular beak size and function are clearly adaptive at particular times of extreme environmental stress. Only genomic awareness and plasticity could respond with changes in form that is as rapid as was recorded in the Galapagos finches. Rapid evolutionary change is created by genomic awareness and plasticity, just as the bell curve of traits that define each species progresses slowly but inexorably within that bell curve.

The only obvious direction that evolutionists have identified in natural selection is that most creatures get bigger over time, although there are innumerable examples of just the opposite. The other thing about evolutionary change that is undeniable is that ecosystems get bigger and more complex over time, even adapting to catastrophic climatic change and mass extinctions with rapid reorganization and the expression of new species.

If genomic awareness and plasticity responds to the ecological awareness of individuals, it is most powerfully expressed in sexual selection through which individual females decide what expression of the bell curve of traits is best at particular times. There is no way to separate the effect of personal preference in females as to what constitutes the most attractive traits in males from those preferences that are innate. And so it is the range of personal preference in females that may be key to preserving the widest range of genetic options and the broadest bell curve in the expression of individual variation.

Some traits, some variations may also be entirely arbitrary, and nothing more than a fashion trend begun by particular females the way short or long skirts in women may come to dominate a particular population in humans. Just as short and long skirts may have been originally adaptive to particular climates and environments, they most often reflect nothing more than a particular fashion at a particular time and place. The same is probably true of countless physical or behavioural traits. Why does a rhinoceros in Africa have two horns, but only one in Asia? They have identical functions, and yet completely different forms, most probably because of the subjective preference of some long dead females. Why does one species of bird prefer courting dances to plumage color? Why does another prefer a song to a tail? Traits selected by sexual selection may have far more to do with arbitrary preference than signals of fitness.

So why does natural selection work where it shouldn't; why is it astonishingly faster than makes genetic sense; and so crucially dependent on sexual selection? The answer to these problems again lies in the power of subjective adaptation. Once again 'feeling' precedes being, changes in subjective response the precursor to changes in form.

The Theory of Subjective Adaptation offers a simple explanation for how evolutionary adaptation works by ignoring the infinite complexity of the details of particular adaptations and focusing on its primary purpose.

Adaptive responses exist to maintain as broad a set of individual variation as possible in species while maintaining a stable set of heritable traits that individuals use to identify themselves as members of a breeding population of a species.

Evolutionary Change and Sexual Selection

Sexual selection is the conscious / unconscious preference of individuals within species for particular traits in form and behaviour expressing nurturance / competitiveness, the fifth rung in the bilateral subjective complexity.

In sexual selection, expression of particular traits will depend on the conscious / unconscious subjective response exhibited in mating preference. Sexual selection favors particular traits at one time and rejects the same trait at another, the genetic expression of adaptive traits cutting back and forth again and again in different breeding seasons and circumstances. Evolutionary adaptation seems to do the same thing, favoring opposite traits at different times, in different conditions. And it's clear that the gene pool of individual species maintained through genomic awareness, natural and sexual selection preserves a wide range of possibilities that seem to have nothing to do with any small adaptive advantage present in a particular population or ecosystem. Genomic awareness, natural selection and sexual selection all seem to preserves a bell curve of traits that are either useless or maladaptive, traits that should have been eliminated from the gene pool according to standard Darwinian theory. Extreme low intelligence in humans is a good example. Clearly, very low intelligence in humans does not favor reproductive or adaptive success, while high intelligence in humans does. If natural selection and sexual selection favor those traits that enhance reproductive success, modern human beings should have become smarter and smarter over time, and very low intelligence should have been weeded from the gene pool. But that is not what is observed. Two people with extremely high intelligence invariably give birth to children who are closer to the intelligence norm in humans. Two people who are of very low intelligence can give birth to a genius like Albert Camus. Natural selection seems at times to favor completely opposite traits, regardless of whether they offer the potential for reproductive or adaptive success, preserving their robust expression in the genetic potential of every living species.

Like intelligence in humans, beauty or physical attractiveness also exists on a bell curve of expression which are preserved regardless of its relation to adaptive or reproductive success. Natural selection should and has favored beauty because of its influence and predictive value for health, yet there are and will always be extremely ugly and beautiful people. But instead of favoring beauty and eliminating ugliness in humans, most people lie in the bulge of the bell curve, somewhere in between. Genomic awareness, natural and sexual selection are clearly there to maintain a stable mean as well as adapt to ecological change.

Nothing can be more important to reproductive success than sexual desire, and yet even sexual desire also exists on a bell curve of expression, with asexuality at one end and hyper-sexuality at the other, with most members of a particular population clustered in the middle in terms of even that crucial behavioural response. If Selfish Gene Theory is to be believed, then asexuality as the most maladaptive of behavioural traits should have been weeded from the gene pool of creatures long ago. Yet two to four percent of humans feel no need for sexual contact. Lack of sexual desire is also common in other species and a constant problem in breeding populations in zoos and in domestic animals. Clearly, evolution even preserves certain traits that are genetic suicide for individuals.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation explains these persistent traits as the appropriate unconscious subjective response of individuals to their awareness of their ecological conditions. The stress factors that are blamed for the lack of sexual interest among individuals in captive populations of zoo animals are entirely subjective in nature in the animals, and arguably the appropriate response of individuals to environments with little potential for population growth. Here again, even sexual response is controlled by the unconscious subjective awareness of individuals, preserving traits in the gene pool that may best respond to environmental conditions.

In zoos and populations of domestic animals, it is also commonly observed that personal preference and not just captive stress determines reproductive behaviour. There are many examples of creatures fully capable of mating that choose not to do so because of personal preference. In one case, when KoKo, a female gorilla that had been taught American Sign Language and was refusing to mate with the available male in her group was shown pictures of available males in other zoos, she indicated her preference by signing the words to the effect that a particular picture showed 'one fine gorilla'. And when her choice was brought to her, the first e-harmony match in a nonhuman species immediately began a sexual relationship.

Using subjective response to limit population growth is a much more effective way for any species to respond to environmental opportunity and stress than through an all-out reproductive competition of individuals which leads to mass starvation.

Homosexuality is also another effective way to limit gender imbalance in populations. Removing two mature males from a breeding population where males are too numerous is a much better way for a group to adapt than through the inevitable conflict of too many males competing for too few females. Evolution would have favored groups in which homosexuality was an option. One study has shown that a human boy has a seven percent increased chance of being gay with every additional brother in his family. Somehow, because of her unconscious / conscious awareness of the gender balance in her family, a human mother can influence the sexual orientation of her sons, a trait that evolution would have favored in preserving the reproductive balance of the group to which she belongs. Many species including sea turtles are also able to control gender proportion in their offspring depending on environmental conditions. "The bonellia, a sea worm, chooses its sex depending on what happens to the rest of the worms. During its early development, if it finds itself in a group with a lot of male bonellia, it becomes a female, and vice versa. The difference is marked, since the male remains a microscopic blip while the female develops into a mature worm one inch long. To insure that he is Johnny on the spot when needed, the male bonellia makes his home in the genital tract of the female. The silverside, a small fish of the Atlantic, decides what sex to be based on the temperature of water at the time, as alligators do with nest temperature.

Suicide is an equally effective way for humans to limit the consequences of extreme expressions of the heritable subjective trait of sadness. Sadness, like all heritable traits, exists on a bell curve of expression in humans. Some people express little sadness in even extremely tragic personal situations while others become clinically depressed for little apparent reason. In most people, sadness exists in a broad middle range of expression, with extreme sadness and emotional ennui confined to periods of extreme emotional challenge and loss. Just as there is no real evolutionary consequence for groups that have a small number of people who are either asexual or experience minimal sadness, there is a profound social and therefore evolutionary consequence to the extreme expression of sadness called clinical depression. Clinical depression in an individual can debilitate a family and even a larger social group, and so suicide is an effective way to limit the effect of the most extreme forms of depression apparent on the bell curve of sadness. Societies in which suicide remained an option would be more successful over time. In Japan, suicide was once used for many centuries as a cultural tool called Hari Kiri to cull individuals who had broken cultural standards, thereby helping to eliminate such behaviour from the gene pool of the group. Again, suicide is an optional trait for both individuals and social groups.

Evolutionary adaptation preserves a bell curve for every particular subjective response, just as it does for the broadest range of behavioural and physical traits in a species. Not only is there no such thing as a selfish gene, genomic awareness, natural selection and sexual selection seem to be dedicated to preserving even extreme options not eliminating or favoring them. Options! Options! Options! Evolution is all about options.

Evolution can in fact be said to depend on the broadest range of physical, structural, psychological, and behavioural traits preserved in every species in order to balance the expression of self-interest / shared-interest with other creatures in their ecosystem. And it is the range of genetic options preserved through the subjective response of both individuals and their groups that determines a significant portion of evolutionary success.

The Bell Curve of Individual Variation  
Individual Preference, Variability and Sexual Selection

One of the fascinating things the Grant's research on Darwin finches shows is that evolutionary stress and evolutionary opportunity can make exactly the same trait either a definite advantage or definite disadvantage in reproductive success through the process of sexual selection. Subjectively responding to environmental conditions, females sometimes chose mates that had bigger bodies and bigger beaks that could crack bigger seeds. But in other years and in different environmental conditions, females chose smaller mates that wouldn't have to eat so much to survive trying times. It was the subjective preference of females that powerfully amplified the rapid change in adaptive heritable traits created through natural selection and the genomic awareness and plasticity necessary for such rapid change.

Yet even this example of how subjective sexual preference can have a powerful impact on evolutionary change was not without its exceptions. For one particular trait, the color of male plumage, it was shown that at particular times females of one particular species almost exclusively chose males who had rapidly turned black, raising the question of why all males didn't turn black as fast as they could. Some males turned black in their first year while others lingered for years in plumage of an obviously unattractive brown, despite the powerful pressure of sexual selection to change. In those years, black was obviously a good thing in terms of both adaptive response and sexual selection. Then why would so many males stay brown if it was of such an obvious disadvantage in terms of survival and reproductive success? That finches can turn black in one year also refutes the idea of natural selection and supports the proposition of genomic awareness and plasticity as the mechanism for evolutionary adaptation.

The Grants suggested that the amount of variation in the finches' plumage indicated that there were hidden costs to wearing black plumage and hidden benefits to wearing brown. And this is the consistent explanation for unexplained, inconvenient and contradictory results in Darwinian theory. Obvious disadvantages must have hidden advantages. Obvious advantages must have hidden disadvantages. And while such conditions do exist for some diseases such as Tay Sachs disease and malaria, to explain every problematical observation in terms of completely blind speculative assumptions is less than scientifically rigorous, and should be seen as a serious problem in any theory.

How and why particular subjective responses of females to environmental conditions could influence the expression of heritable traits through sexual selection was unexplained in the Grant's research. How females knew when to choose and amplify particular traits expressed through genomic awareness and plasticity, while some males completely resisted that powerful force in sexual selection is left as an unexplained mystery.

Yet here is concrete evidence that subjective response operating through sexual selection, genomic awareness and plasticity rather than adaptive changes occurring through natural selection had the greatest influence on the reproductive success of individuals. Since Darwin, it has been clearly understood that sexual selection, the subjective individual response to individual variation, is one of the primary forces in evolutionary change. It will be seen that the unconscious awareness of individuals through genomic awareness to the state of the Nash equilibrium apparent in particular environmental conditions also determines the choices individuals make through sexual selection. This subjective awareness of the state of the Nash equilibrium in ecological conditions will be seen as the tipping point that shifts the balance existing within the genetic equilibrium present in the genomes of individual creatures.

The genomic awareness of creatures of the Nash equilibrium in any ecosystem is far more crucial to survival than resources. "In an experiment at the National Institute of Mental Health, a scientist released four pairs of mice into mouse heaven: a room containing all the nesting material, food, and drink the mice would ever need. Absent were any natural predators or pressures of daily life; all the fortunate mice had to do was enjoy themselves. They immediately devoted themselves solely to sex and eating. 560 days later there were 2200 mice in the room, the peak population of this little love nest. Four years later, all the mice were dead. They had lost the will to live. Their sex lives had disappeared, along with normal behaviour patterns in the wild that delineate the sexes. The declining days of the rodent hedonists were spent grooming their bodies, eating, and sleeping. Their social instincts had declined along with everything else, although the amount of food and drink they consumed was constant." In an environment created completely to foster the self-interest of every individual, the group died out because they had lost touch with all other creatures with whom they would have a shared interest in a common ecosystem. Aside from disproving Malthusian population theory, the experiment shows that every creature exists in a Nash equilibrium. Destroy that and you may destroy the creature, or trigger the genomic awareness and plasticity to create a new species suited to a different Nash equilibrium with other living creatures.

Sexual selection usually tries to preserve the distinct traits for genetic identity in breeding populations over long periods of time through personal preferences for the most common expression of physical and behavioural traits. Simply put, sexual selection and genomic awareness usually tries to preserve genetic norms. But under exceptional circumstances, personal choice in mating partners is controlled by a recessive subjective preference for traits that lie deeper in the gene pool, so that mating preference broadens rather than isolates traits that define breeding populations. Just as genomes of species exist in equilibriums of different sensitivity, so too does sexual selection respond in varying degrees to a range of physical and behavioural traits selected through individual preference for individual variation.

Individual preference can in fact be seen to exist on a bell curve of potential choices in behavioural and physical traits that are the limits of variation in a species. Sometimes a female Darwin's finch likes males with big black bodies with big beaks, but at different times prefers smaller bodies with smaller beaks and brown plumage. The preference has nothing to do with natural selection. The reason brown and black plumage both persist in Darwin finches is because they are the adaptive extremes of color that offer particular benefits at particular times and so are preserved in the Bell curve of variation. Sexual selection, just like natural selection, just like genomic awareness and plasticity is as much about preserving options as it is about making choices in adaptive fitness.

A better definition for a species proposed by the Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation defines a species as those heritable traits that individuals use to identify themselves as part of a breeding population.

Approach Distance

The innate subjective predisposition for flight distance is very ancient, expressed in the avoidance response of flight in bacteria and single celled creatures through the detection of proteins indicating the presence of particular predators.

We propose that there is also an innate subjective predisposition that is the opposite of flight distance. Approach distance is the innate subjective response through which subjective behaviour is altered when another creature is selectively allowed to pass through that innate spatial flight distance. Just as the genetic expression of flight distance can genetically alter creatures both behaviourally, physically and physiologically, approach distance can do the same, creating responses that are affiliative rather than defensive and expressed through cooperative expressions of shared interest. Two creatures no matter how small or large can best express traits for cooperative shared interest when they are in close proximity. Bacteria do this through phage behaviour as well as through quorum sensing in which every individual becomes part of a greater integrated whole. These expressions of cooperative shared interest allow algae to work together to hunt larger prey than any individual could manage.

Approach distance may be the fundamental innate genetic predisposition that allows and creates the subjective responses of 'me / us' present to some degree in all living creatures. We propose that it is also the mechanism, the expression of 'me / us' that allows communal integration of unicellular creatures to create complex life forms such as stromatolites in bacteria, sponges, volvox and other communal single celled creatures. The innate genetic predisposition for approach distance may account for symbiotic relationships beginning with the symbiotic relationship of bacteria that formed the first unicellular prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells out of which all complex living creatures are created. It can be argued that approach distance expressing cooperative shared interest is a fundamental part of every living ecosystem as a fundamental expression of shared interest / self-interest. Ultimately, every social animal depends on such innate responses to others of their own as well as to other species. From scent marking to handshakes, from hand and vocal gestures to facial expressions expressing many emotions, creatures create an infinite range of behaviours indicating to others their predisposition for shared interest in some particular way. Antenna rubbing, sniffing, nuzzling, hugging, licking, grooming; there are innumerable ways creatures allow others through their approach distance. In humans, a 20 second hug releases a flood of oxytocin, the attachment hormone that helps create the nuclear family unit and every close friendship. Chimpanzees and bonobos do the same hugging behaviour and those affiliative responses alleviate stress and help create the social alliances and personal relationships upon which complex social groups depend.

Behavioural changes due to approach distance between creatures clearly have an important influence on a creature's survival and reproductive success. Approach distance is therefore arguably one of the key aspects of genomic awareness and natural selection and would therefore be a part of the basic genetic structure of life influencing both form and behaviour in profound ways. It may be that evolution is fundamentally dependent on a simple innate predisposition for approach distance that allows the creation of complex ecosystems of shared interest / self-interest in the innate predisposition for the subjective response of 'me / us'.

Approach and flight distance may in fact exist in bilateral form as approach / flight distance with approach distance expressed through subjective responses of 'me / us' and flight distance expressed through subjective responses of 'us / them', one expressing the cooperative nature of shared interest, the other expressing the competitive nature of self-interest.

It is now well understood that subjective responses can change the physiological nature of individuals of many different species. Just like prolonged stress, simple emotions like joy and depression can alter human metabolism, health, and even the immune system itself. The same effect has also been observed in other mammals and primates. Experiments have shown that enrichment or deprivation affecting the subjective life of developing individuals can alter their genome through epigenetic change, as well as influencing their reproductive success.

Alister Hardy, the theoretical biologist, described a theory for how behavioural adaptation precedes physical adaptation.

"If a population of animals should change their habits (no doubt often on account of changes in their surroundings such as food supply, breeding sites, etc.., but also sometimes due to their exploratory curiosity discovering new ways of life, such as new sources of food or new methods of exploitation) then sooner or later variations in the gene complex will turn up in the population to produce small alterations in the animal's structure which will make them more efficient in relation to their new behavioural pattern; these more efficient individuals will tend to survive rather than the less efficient, and so the composition of the population will gradually change. This evolutionary change is one caused initially by a change in behaviour."

Again, behaviour is based on subjective responses, the genetic predispositions for perception, communication and behavioural response in particular creatures. Hardy shows how feelings often precede being, the physical adaptations apparent in life and the fossil record.

Genomic Plasticity  
The New Chords of Life

Geneticists have shown that the ear of a mammal has evolved from the lower jaw bone of a reptile, but have had difficulty explaining how the intermediary forms could serve such completely different purposes during that transition. Simply put, it is hard to see how natural selection could have slowly turned a jaw into an ear. It is hard to chew with something that is not yet quite an ear. It is impossible to hear with a bone that is still a jaw. Stephen Jay Gould in the his essay, An Earful of Jaw, puts forward the case for how such genetic reorganization could create an ear from a jaw through natural selection, because the same form can serve two functions, one of which would be lost, and the other which would become the new form. Jawbones in reptiles could sense sound waves long before they became ears in mammals. But he also makes clear that there must be some yet unidentified genetic process through which genomes reorganize themselves to create new structures and senses involving the relationship between the countless interdependent genes that create any new structure. He also makes it clear that these alterations happen in species in quantum leaps, through which stable forms suddenly experience rapid and fundamental change. One of the few evolutionists to actually recognize that organs are in fact irreducibly complex, it is no more than a passing thought. He fails to recognize or admit that the countless interdependent genes necessary to create new forms can't evolve in a short period of time as a result of natural selection.

A better answer is that mammals needed much better hearing than reptiles, and the best genetic resource was found in the genes that made the lower jawbone of these earlier creatures. Similarly, the tails of whales that move up and down in the water somehow evolved from a land ancestor whose tail moved back and forth like a wolf. The intermediate pelvic stages of such a transformation are functionally useless or reproductively impossible, but the genomes of mammal whales allowed such a fundamental and rapid change, reaching back to an earlier form, perhaps as far back as Ichthyostega, the first vertebrate to venture on land, pushing itself forward in an up-and-down forward motion like a caterpillar. The chromosomes of living creatures it seems have the engineering design flexibility of toy transformers, able to turn the same parts from a genetic truck to a genetic airplane with a few simple manipulations. And with chromosomes and DNA, the transformative engineering potential of life seems to be exceedingly broad in its potential variation.

Arguably, the trigger for selective and mass speciation that allows access to genetic chords far outside the genetic expression of traits stable in a particular species are extreme changes to the Nash equilibrium of ecosystems. And the subjective responses upon which every Nash equilibrium depends may be the common denominator behind the creation of new species. Such genetic flexibility rests on the fact that subjective experience is the common genetic architecture shared by all living things, every creature preserving the genes from earlier rungs on the ladder of subjective complexity. There is no other explanation for rapid speciation events in times of mass extinction.

The True Origin of Species  
Form Follows Subjective Function

Professor Alister Hardy in his book, The Living Stream, says that "I think we can say, from the many different lines of argument, that the internal, behavioural selection, due to the" psychic life" of the animal, whatever we may think about its nature, is now seen to be one of the most powerful creative elements in evolution."

We propose that changes in subjective experience precede changes in form.

We propose that changes in the traits for particular subjective response have been shown to fundamentally alter the form of living creatures, indicating that particular traits for subjective response may be the base chords in the song of life, the ones that control and influence changes in physical form.

Here is a clear example of how changes in subjective response might control evolutionary change in form and ultimately result in speciation.

Arctic Foxes born and reared in cages in Siberia in the 1950s were uncontrollably agitated and aggressive, making them very difficult to raise for their fur. Many animals, including foxes, have a certain flight-distance; the subjective response that automatically and unconsciously tells an animal when to run away from danger and when to fight. Because the foxes were caged and could not flee, they were constantly driven to fight for their freedom with uncontrollable aggression. Deprived of the option of flight, all they could do was respond with an automatic fight response.

In an experiment begun in 1959 by Dimitri Belaev, Arctic foxes were bred for diminishing flight distance. Not only did the animals become more docile and manageable, their entire bodies and behaviour changed. Muzzles grew shorter, as did canine incisor teeth, legs grew shorter and their fur became mottled and multi-coloured. The foxes also started barking and wagging their tails like dogs. But the most startling change was that the foxes became so tame they would follow humans around and even responded to a given name. In five generations, changing one subjective response, flight distance, created an animal that looked and behaved entirely differently, although genetically almost identical to other aggressive foxes, but fundamentally different in both physical appearance and subjective response. And it can be argued perhaps the beginning of a fundamentally different species. These foxes are so tame that they are now being sold as pets in Russia.

Genetic research has demonstrated that dogs evolved from one wolf species in Central Asia about 15,000 years ago in only 100 years and many now believe that like the Arctic foxes, changes in flight distance are responsible. Dogs have a genome capable of creating rapid changes in form and new variations over as little as five generations, just like the foxes. We suggest that this incredible genetic flexibility is a result of the emotional complexity of dogs as they co-evolved with humans. It is clear that dogs are capable of extreme changes in form using artificial selection, but dogs also exhibit an enormous variation in subjective response. Dogs guard, herd, hunt in many ways, and are capable of deep emotional connection to humans, even exhibiting the ability for language acquisition and reading the intention of humans. It is this genetic emotional range and flexibility that we propose is the source of the genetic flexibility in form and behaviour that dogs express. To select for subjective behaviour, is to select for changes in form, even though breeders have generally approached artificial selection backwards, accepting changes in subjective response that came with changes in form.

In evolution, the creation of a new species begins with changing the subjective nature of a particular common ancestor. The difference between human beings, chimpanzees and bonobos did not arise from environmental or predatory pressures, or walking on two legs, or learning to hunt and butcher big game, but from the changes in subjective experience that transformed the body and the mind of early hominids. Our evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos have been stable species over the last 4-5 million years since we separated from our common ancestor and are very different from the orang-utan-like creature that was our common ancestor. We propose that Hominim changed so often and so dramatically into so many new species because of changes in their subjective relationships, and we will see how that happened in the chapter on human evolution.

Through genomic awareness, the subjective awareness every creature has of its place and part in the Nash equilibrium it knows as its ecosystem may be the origin of fundamental changes in form in creating new species. The mechanism of how the genome is altered through changing subjective response will be uncovered when the genetic power of heritable subjective traits are tied to the expression of proteins that create physical change in form. This will undoubtedly explain why changing flight distance in artic foxes changes them in form and in other aspects of behaviour.

The other serious problem about describing the origin of species is actually defining what a species is. The most accepted current definition is that a species is a population of animals sharing a common ancestor that can breed and produce fertile offspring. Lions and tigers are clearly two distinct species that never breed in the wild or in captivity, yet artificial insemination can produce fertile offspring called tiglons. Dogs and wolves, jackals and dogs, or cows and bison can all produce fertile offspring but rarely do when given the opportunity, and yet are all clearly different species. Genetic testing has shown there are 5 species of Orca and two of Orang-utans, each species a separate breeding population sharing a common ancestor. The same is true of many other species we have assumed to be one and turn out to be many. These breeding populations can interbreed, yet they haven't since dividing from a common ancestor. Again this is significant evidence supporting the idea that species are populations of individuals that recognize themselves as distinct.

As Darwin said himself, "After describing a set of forms as distinct species, tearing up my manuscript, and making them one species, tearing that up and making them separate, and making them one again (which has happened to me), I have gnashed my teeth, cursed species, and asked what sin I had committed to be so punished."

On the Serengeti Plain in Africa are countless zebra, and among this huge population of the same zebra species are five distinct populations that almost never breed with each other. They could do so and produce fertile offspring, and so are considered one species. But they either don't or rarely do it. This produces a genetic isolation through the shared individual preference members use to identify themselves as part of their particular breeding population. And it is in fact such subjective isolation that is the necessary beginning for a new species. The six species of Darwin finches that live on the ground in the Galapagos are a mixed population that eats the same seeds and share the same territory, yet each clearly sees itself as a distinct breeding population that only interbreed under rare occasions. They can breed, sometimes do, but generally won't.

It is abundantly clear that defining species by the ability to produce fertile offspring or having a common ancestor are very problematical approaches. Among taxonomists there are splitters and lumpers who approach their discipline by seeing greater and greater numbers of species or fewer and fewer numbers of species from exactly the same observations. What a species is seems to be entirely in the eye of the beholder. And in science, such imprecision and uncertainty is again problematical at best.

There is other evidence that suggests that at times the genetic isolation that is said to be necessary to produce and preserve individual species fundamentally breaks down. Sometimes members of individual breeding populations choose to mate with members of other distinct breeding populations in a process called hybridization. In studying the 13 species of finches in the Galapagos Islands, the Grants observed interbreeding between some of the different species whose fertile offspring then bred with one another. Where genetic isolation creates and preserves distinct traits in new species, hybridization washes them out by rejoining distinctly different gene pools. And so it is apparent that sexual selection through isolation and hybridization can work in two opposing ways.

This problem of hybridization has been mostly dismissed because it was presumed that hybridization would make individuals less fit and they would quickly die out because they would lose any special advantage from the special traits its parents had evolved to inhabit its particular ecological niche. But the Grants have found that hybrid finches were actually more successful not less successful at particular times of ecological opportunity or stress. In nature, sometimes in terms of heritable traits, is seems to be much better to be a genetic generalist than a specialist, to broaden a gene pool rather than isolate it.

The Dire Wolf and the Gray Wolf are good example of this. Dire Wolves were huge, fast, and extremely powerful, able to bring down large prey, making it the most reproductively successful carnivore in North America for 200,000 years. The Gray Wolf which was contemporary with its more powerful relative, was much less successful, smaller, weaker, slower, and restricted to much smaller prey so that its population was a fraction of its larger cousin. Yet when environmental stress challenged both, it was the generalist Gray Wolf that survived as a species. What makes a creature successful at one time may cause its extinction at another.

We propose that the genomes of particular species exist in differing states of equilibrium, differing states of a particular Nash equilibrium to be more specific. At times of great ecological opportunity or stress and a massive disruption to the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem, individual species are able to respond depending on the nature of the Nash equilibrium that exists within their genomes, and their ability to genetically respond to changes in subjective experience brought on by massive environmental changes. Genomic awareness and natural selection preserves a broad range of expression, a bell curve for every important heritable trait, but some genomes that have a more sensitive equilibrium are able to shift their balance with the speed necessary for massive adaptive change. Creatures whose genomes are much less flexible in creating new species using genetic alteration from beyond the bell curve of individual variance within that species simply cannot adapt with the rapidity necessary for survival in times of extreme stress and rapidly die out. Evolution is far more about genomic selection than natural selection. The more adaptable, aware and plastic the genomes of individual creatures, the more likely they are to evolve into new species. The best examples of such genetic flexibility may be dogs and humans that change with a stunning rapidity that doesn't exist in wolves, jackals and other higher primates. Artificial selection proves the genomic flexibility of dogs. In the last 2 million years, hominids have proven to be the most genetically flexible of all higher primates creating what is likely to have been twenty or more species.

What the fossil record says about times of mass extinction is that these periods precede times when new species appear with stunning rapidity. It is also at periods of mass extinction that huge new opportunities exist for those creatures that were able to survive. This open-ended opportunity allows the most flexible genomes to evolve new forms to fill the countless empty environmental niches created by mass extinction. In the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, 95 percent of all species were eliminated. And yet even with six other mass extinctions intervening since the Permian extinction, there are literally millions of species living on the earth today. Once again, with massive disruption of the Nash equilibrium of ecosystems, genetic plasticity and potentialities seem inexplicably robust and boundless.

The clear conclusion is that evolution preserves a bell curve of genetic extremes for heritable traits in the genomes of all creatures, but those creatures that survive extreme environmental pressure are those who can rapidly access expressions of extreme variability from outside the standard bell curve of traits usually expressed in their genomes.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation proposes that new species are created out of the most extreme variants possible in the genome of species, often atavistically reaching outside of the stable range of expression of heritable traits back to earlier forms, like the ancestor of the whale with the mammalian tail that moved back and forth on land reached back into the genome of its past to create a tail appropriate to the unlimited opportunity it found in returning to the sea.

Speciation and the Balance within Shared interest / self-interest

Natural selection has never been shown to create a single new species, but only extreme varieties of the same species. But something clearly does. If every known species alive on earth today were to be given a one-page description in a textbook, it would create a 10,000 volume set of books with 1000 pages in each volume To realize that 99.9 percent of all species have gone extinct, gives some small perspective on the genetic potential for creating new species. Billions if not trillions of species have existed since life came to the planet.

How this works, how the genome reorganizes itself by reaching outside the bell curve of standard variation through genomic awareness and plasticity is yet to be understood, but rapid transformational change is clearly written in the genetic potential of many species. Like countless other species, the appearance and disappearance of at least twenty different hominid species prior to modern humans were all sudden evolutionarily events compressed into the last 4 million years. According to Darwinian theory, natural selection cannot work at such rates, but as the creatures with the most complex keyboard of subjective response, hominim would have perhaps had the ability to play new chords, weave new complexity and create new species at a rate most other higher ape species could not approach. We propose that what made rapid human evolution possible was the genetic flexibility for subjective response that allowed rapid alteration in the genome of our human ancestors. That hidden flexibility clearly separates us from our nearest primate relatives, and that hidden flexibility most likely depends on genes that controlled newer and more complex expressions of subjective response and emotion. Human evolution may be the result of having the most complex and intimate approach distance of any higher primate.

Current theory explains the creation of species through two mechanisms. The first mechanism says that natural selection produces individuals in small populations that have a heritable genetic trait so beneficial to the creature's reproductive success that its offspring inevitably replace all other inferior members of the species. These superior genes in special individuals are called founder genes. And, using rates of change in DNA to determine genetic ancestry, modern human beings prove to be descended from one female individual, a genetic Eve who lived approximately 100,000 years ago and one single Adam who lived approximately 70,000 years ago who must have been one of that genetic Eve's descendants.

If founder genes exist, and there is considerable evidence that they do, then it is clear that in times of great stress or environmental opportunity, genetic variation is able to come up with extreme founder gene options that are completely transformational in creating new species. Founder genes clearly reach far outside the standard bell curve of expression of traits in any particular species, while still being included as a member of a breeding population.

A second mechanism of speciation that is currently proposed says that small breeding populations, when physically separated from their larger groups, slowly change through a process called genetic drift in which genomes alter through natural selection. As this genetic drift continues, members of the smaller group are eventually incapable of breeding with the larger population.

This physical separation of small populations does happen on islands, and in extremely difficult geographical terrain like mountains, but such physical barriers are just too uncommon to explain the trillions of species that have existed on the planet. A much better explanation for speciation stresses the psychological isolation that is so obvious among even existing populations of creatures, for example the five distinct breeding populations of zebra that live together on the Serengeti plain and yet rarely breed with each other.

The theory of punctuated equilibrium depends on rapid genetic drift as the origin of species in which the inbreeding of isolated populations fixes adaptive traits that are much more beneficial than any existing in the originating larger population. In this model, inbreeding strengthens rather than weakens adaptive success.

Steven M Stanley. "The important point for the punctuational stream is that there are discontinuities of form and behaviour between many related species and between many related populations and that these discontinuities in form arise by the rapid divergence of small populations." He goes on to say, "There is chromosomal and other evidence that many hale and hearty species have descended from the offspring of a single female, and this implies an early history of inbreeding." It is also clear evidence for the existence of founder genes.

As in zebras, some speciation clearly begins with the isolation of breeding populations through subjective preference, and is probably far more common than speciation that happens when creatures are trapped or isolated in some physical way. But these incidents of speciation must account for only a small percentage of the species that come to exist, because genomic awareness, natural and sexual selection tries very hard to preserve the bell curve of variation within species, a bell curve that allows natural selection enough latitude to respond to predictable extremes in ecosystems. What natural selection most often creates within species are distinct varieties, like the many varieties of ducks, finches and sparrows that have come to exist over time. One must remember that natural selection and sexual selection may favor traits that pass from individuals to their family line, but natural selection and sexual selection also preserve a bell curve of traits for an entire breeding population, no matter how small, strongly resisting any variation outside that bell curve.

There is simply no evidence that natural selection or sexual selection is the mechanism behind the origin of species.

Speciation Triggers  
Punctuated Nash Equilibriums

Founder genes and genetic drift through physical and psychological isolation may be responsible for the initial separation that ultimately results in the creation of many new species and varieties, but neither explains why there are extremely short periods in which countless species rapidly appear in the fossil record. It may even be possible that individual species have some kind of genetic function that limit the number of generations it will have, the way telomeres limit the number of times a cell can divide. When these generational telomeres expire, perhaps the genome reorganizes itself to create new options through genomic awareness and plasticity.

Massive alterations of the Nash equilibrium of the earth's ecosystem and the extreme stress on living creatures in those periods may also explain the rapid appearance of countless new species. And it is clear that the rapid appearance of new species found in the fossil record usually does follow periods of mass extinction. It is only at times of extreme stress and opportunity that the most flexible genomes of some individual creatures would reach into other octaves on the keyboard of life, and produce new viable evolutionary options that can be called different species.

The destruction of the Nash equilibrium in huge parts of the earth's ecosystem may be the primary trigger responsible for the origin of most new species because individuals with the most flexible genomes would be the most likely to survive and reproduce after such catastrophic events. If individual creatures can subjectively respond to an extreme need to change when the change is absolutely necessary, and there is some process to effect those changes in the genomes of their offspring, then rapid, transformational change has some workable mechanism. And that ability to reach into other octaves of the genetic keyboard may rest with the way genes that control subjective response may alter physical and behavioural expression of traits in creatures. Creatures exhibiting more traits for shared interest may simply be more genetically responsive to changes in the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem than creatures exhibiting more dominant traits for self-interest. This may be the reason shared interest is in fact a universal fact of life.

With each quantum leap in evolutionary potential following the creation of each new rung in the ladder of subjective complexity speciation events also occurred with astonishing speed and in exponential numbers. With the creation of new ways for creatures to perceive, communicate and respond to each other, ecosystems would become far more complex because these quantum leaps in bilateral subjective response would geometrically expand the way creatures might respond to each other and to environmental conditions.

With symbiosis and the creation of the eukaryotic cell tied to communal behaviour and cellular differentiation, the Cambrian explosion produced the foundation of all complex life on earth. When creatures went from being unicellular to being complex creatures made of communal, symbiotic life forms, the potential expression of life forms was set. Using the rich new oxygen environment created by communal bacteria, these creatures had a whole new environmental resource in which to expand and multiply creating new sensory and behavioural opportunities in which changes in behaviour and form offering creatures new opportunity and ecological success. When communal organisms became distinct creatures balancing the shared interest / self-interest of differentiated cells, their evolutionary options became almost limitless.

With every new rung in the ladder of subjective complexity, ecosystems became more complex and shared interest / self-interest had greater and greater degrees of possible expression. Complexity in animals would increase with each new rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective response as creatures evolved new ways to perceive, communicate and respond to each other as they created increasingly complex ecosystems.

Environmental niches are not discovered, but rather created by the changing, dynamic balance within shared interest / self-interest in the Nash equilibrium of every ecosystem. Environmental niches are far more about the perceived relationship between and among creatures that about changes in environmental conditions.

The more subjectively complex creatures became, the more the bias within shared interest / self-interest would shift towards more cooperative behaviour and complexity because ecosystems would encompass more and more species having to divide limited resources in an ever more expanding and complex Nash equilibrium. Depending on massive changes to the Nash equilibrium of environments as the result of mass extinctions, speciation events became more difficult and rare simply because of the genetic stability of creatures in complex environments. Simply put, it takes a geological catastrophe to change the course of the lowland stream that contains the bell curve of traits in species in that ecosystem, and as we have said, even the Cambrian explosion may have been the result of snowball earth causing the mass extinction of single celled creatures.

The reason that speciation events were so rapid and geometrically numerous when animals first assumed differentiated complexity in their cellular makeup must have had to do with the fact that genes were simpler, more distinct and isolated in their purpose before and during the Cambrian explosion. Simple mud worms have up to 100,000 genes while human beings have around 25,000. Simple creatures have nuclear DNA a few meters long containing those many genes while human beings have, in every cell, DNA many miles long. A fruit fly has four chromosomes; a human being has 46. Clearly, as creatures evolved, genes became far more complex, with every gene and its position responsible for increasingly complex timing, form and function in maintaining life processes. With 25,000 genes creating 100 different kinds of cells doing 500 different kinds of tasks, it is clear that human genetic complexity depends on the integration and cooperation of genes. In complex creatures, genes take the form of chromosomes, in the same way that unicellular organisms may become communal creatures creating complex, coordinated, integrated, differentiated expressions and purpose.

Simple creatures with 100,000 or more genes are like the musical composition of a flute with 100,000 stops. The musical melody created must necessarily be simple because the notes are played by much simpler genetic structures capable of playing only a few notes at a time. Now consider a piano with only 88 keys played by two hands and two feet operating 3 pedals. With far fewer keys being played with two hands of five fingers, cords can be created that give the music incredible complexity and depth compared to what can be created on a flute, even if it has far more stops and many, many more octaves. Like two independent hands working independently and yet coordinated to a common purpose, piano music allows a range of complex musical expression that is almost limitless even though there are far fewer keys to play. Shared interest / self-interest is like, so that even as fewer speciation events became possible, the more complex bilateral subjective responses would become.

The more complex genomes become, the more difficult it is for speciation events to occur because of the integrated nature of genes within chromosomes with many genes having to work together to effect changes in form. The way some communal organisms must live as integrated creatures and cannot regenerate from single cells, chromosomes appear to do the same thing, most often making it impossible to distinguish single genes as responsible for particular biological events. Cancer, and many other diseases are a good example of how it is the interaction of many genes rather than single, particular genes that are responsible for heritable predispositions for a particular disease.

The genetically simpler creatures are, and the closer they are to the appearance of each new rung in the ladder of subjective complexity, the more rapid and exponential speciation events appear to be. This explains why so many creatures first appeared in so short time in Cambrian explosion when life had only the first two rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity.

The Industrial Revolution is a good example of how this works.

When machines were much simpler and the sophistication needed to build them was more basic, a steam engine could be adapted for anything from an automobile to a boat or locomotive. Most towns had enough capital resources and technical ability to create a new car or boat, or even perhaps a locomotive. But as machines became more complex and sophisticated, most towns had neither the capital nor technical resources to create mass-market factories making increasingly complex machines. When machines became so sophisticated and complex that they could only be created by other complex machines, the business of creating a new car, or boat or locomotive was a rare and risky event and undertaken only with the identification of clear competitive advantage or some enormous new open markets. Only with the arrival of absolutely original new adaptations such as computer technology and the Internet could the old paradigm for making cars and boats and locomotives be fundamentally changed. Computers are a new technological step in the ladder of cultural complexity fundamentally changing the way things are created and opening up possibilities that were impossible under the old simpler paradigm. The way computers and then the Internet fundamentally altered technical possibilities and social interaction allowing exponentially unprecedented innovation and change, complex chromosomes allowed the creation of increasingly complex creatures, but far fewer than when life was genetically simpler. Agriculture, property, literacy, numeracy, money, roadways, international trade, commercial banking, the printing press, electricity each fundamentally altered civilization allowing deeper and deeper cultural expressions of shared interest. The nine rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity did the same for evolution.

It is crucial to understand that every rung in the ladder of cultural complexity created by technological innovation is a new way for people to balance shared interest / self-interest. International banking and money arbitrage is perhaps the best example of the crucial nature of shared interest / self-interest. In 2008, when many individual investment bankers acted only in their own self-interest to create the mortgage frauds of the American housing bubble, they almost destroyed their own institutions and the entire economy of the earth and potentially their own jobs. No ecosystem can survive in which members act entirely in their own personal competitive self-interest because in destroys the Nash equilibrium that sustains every living system.

Just as technical innovation is the origin of more technical innovation, evolution made foundational quantum leaps in subjective complexity that allowed life to become more and more complex in form and behaviour, expanding and creating ecosystems where these more complex creatures could adapt and evolve, creating new transformative expressions of shared interest / self-interest.

The way complex civilizations shrank the number and expression of new human cultures and even made countless languages disappear, complex animals containing more and more rungs in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity, created the world's complex ecosystem and shrank evolutionary potential creating a far more rigid bell curve of traits in the most subjectively complex creatures. As life became more subjectively complex, the fewer speciation events would occur and this is exactly what the fossil record shows. Even bacteria have established a more rigid bell curve of traits than would have existed in the two billion years they were the only life form on the planet. Evolution, responding to the shifting balance within bilateral subjective adaptation created nine rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity upon which all creatures then evolved. Genetic complexity preserves the bell curve of traits that define particular species, and only the catastrophic alteration of an ecosystem can trigger rapid speciation events, allowing creatures to genetically, atavistically reach outside the bell curve of traits. The rise of mammals was not possible without the catastrophic extinction of dinosaurs.

If traits for subjective responses control the form that creatures can take, it would explain why those mammals with high nurturant behaviour, slow development and conscious learning are capable of such exponential and rapid speciation events. Those mammals with the most complex conscious feelings and emotions would be capable of the greatest numbers and rapidity in speciation events because the foundational genes of bilateral subjective response upon which evolutionary change happens are most robust in them. Simply put, those mammals that contain the first eight rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity had the greatest genetic flexibility because they have access to all eight different, integrated genetic potentialities. Of all living creatures, mammals exhibit the widest range and potential for shared interest and cooperative behaviour and it is those mammals that seem to evolve most rapidly. Herd and pack animals are both examples of this.

Creatures exhibiting traits that bias them for self-interest over shared interest would change most slowly because they exist on the lower rungs of the ladder of subjective complexity. Even solitary top predators, like sharks, may remain unchanged for millions of years. Plants are also the least likely to change because they exhibit fewer traits for shared interest, living more independent lives and relying on symbiotic relationships with pollinating insects for their genetic survival. This may explain why animal species outnumber plant species 4 to 1.

Speciation

There are only a limited number of ways to radically change the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem, to change the way the existing zero sum pie of shared interests / self-interest in an ecosystem is divided among species. The first is to dramatically increase the amount of resources that can be divided among the group. The second is to dramatically decrease the needs of some individuals in the group for an unchanged set of resources. The third is to get rid of many members of the group or add many new members who want a share of the pie.

There are two more ways to extremely alter the Nash equilibrium of an ecosystem; one is the discovery of new environments, the way whales discovered oceans, the other is the addition of absolutely novel resources that can support completely new physiological possibilities. Mass speciation seems to depend on such extreme shifts in the Nash equilibrium of the planet, and that is what the fossil record seems to confirm.

The five possible changes to a Nash equilibrium and their effect on speciation are explained more fully below.

A Bigger Pie—

Greatly increased resources of the environmental pie that came about through warming climates have been shown to foster many new species by the creation of a much broader range of environmental opportunity, and this is borne out by the fossil record. The vast majority of species on earth still live in the tropical zones because of their habitability for so many different kinds of creatures. Tropical climates are where speciation has always been most rapid.

A Smaller Pie—

Geographical isolation of populations of creatures also creates new species that must adapt to fewer resources and opportunities. Island dwarfism is a good example of this where creatures, from snakes to humans to elephants suddenly became smaller when contained in an area unfit for large species. The smallest snake ever discovered, so small it can curl up on a nickel, was recently discovered on one of the Caribbean islands. Subjective awareness of the territorial constraint of an island seems to suddenly make many creatures smaller in size, and not through slow adaptations of natural selection. Perhaps the way the change in flight distance alters Artic foxes, changes in subjective feelings of territorial range may alter the size of isolated island populations of creatures.

Zoologist Adrian Lister has established that Red Deer were approximately 450 pounds for at least 100,000 years until the landmass that was to become the Isle of Jersey was cut off from the European mainland. Within 6000 years the Red Deer population shrank in size to approximately 75 pounds. Here again we have an example of evolutionary change clearly impossible by natural selection, and just as clearly an example of genomic awareness and plasticity. Once again the case for natural selection is contradicted by the fossil record, and supported by the Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation.

Island dwarfism seems to have even created a unique species of human being, a human relative that lived contemporaneously with modern humans. That last relative of humans to live on the planet was a Hobbit sized creature, Homo floresiensis, with adults the size of a human four year old. The last of these people lived only 13,000 years ago on the island of Flores in Indonesia. And the most interesting thing about these little people is that in physical structure they seem to be most like Austalopithecus aforensis, one of our earliest human cousins that died out 3 million years ago. So there is apparently no explainable evolutionary origin for these little people, no transitional phases, not even to our last close cousin, homo erectus, a creature with the brain capacity and stature of modern humans.

Homo floresiensis were human beings with brains smaller than chimpanzees that cooperatively hunted 800 pound pygmy elephants with weapons similar to those used by the big brained homo erectus cousins they may have never met. Having a little brain with big intelligence in a body much like our oldest human ancestor, Homo floresiensis may be an atavistic throwback that puts a giant monkey wrench in the idea of the decent of man through Darwinian natural selection. It also seriously threatens the idea that human consciousness is an emergent artifact of a large brain with far more neural connection. Again, a human species seems to have arisen without any apparent evolutionary explanation or any transitional stages, just like many, if not most other species.

More Competitors or Fewer Competitors:

Adding or eliminating members of an ecosystem has also been seen to have been instrumental in creating new species as members of the group had to learn to divide the existing pie in new ways. The addition or elimination of a top predator can do this in a small ecosystem. The many ice ages in the fossil record shows how fewer competitors can give surviving species many new opportunities. Again, subjective awareness of significant opportunity seems to allow the genomes of breeding populations to adapt with radical new designs rather than just new varieties that adapt to particular ecological niches. Only genomic awareness and plasticity would allow such rapid speciation events.

A New Pie—

Speciation has also been common when creatures found new territories devoid of competition, a great big new pie they didn't have to share. The creatures that became whales left the land because they could somehow subjectively respond to the open-ended potential for warm-blooded mammals in vast oceans in which mammals were new inhabitants. Left to exploit unlimited resources in their own way, whales rapidly became many different species as they explored and utilized different ecosystems in the ocean.

Clearly there is something in the genome of particular creatures that must respond to such new opportunity by becoming many different variations on a subjective theme. For whales, perceiving an unlimited ocean ecosystem must have pulled the genetic subjective trigger of rapid speciation. The potential for feeling new feelings and becoming new beings was somehow suddenly irresistible for the creatures that would become whales. The same genetic change must have happened in countless other creatures as they found new places to inhabit.

New Environments—New Ecosystems:

As we have said, the greatest mass speciation that ever happened on earth occurred within no more than 50-100 million years in what is called the Cambrian explosion. Six hundred million years ago the ancestors of all the different kinds of multi-celled creatures that would ever exist on earth were born in this short period. The ancestors of fungi, plants, insects, vertebrates and invertebrates all arrived in the fossil record in an evolutionary blink of the eye after millions of years of single celled animals in their countless forms. And in the Cambrian explosion, there was little apparent slow adaptive change from one species to another. Millions of species simply seemed to arrive fully formed in the fossil record. Creationist might claim divine intervention, but more likely it was caused by a tipping point in the higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere created by seas of blue-green algae that had been producing oxygen for millions of years. When it reached this particular tipping point, this significant rise in oxygen level made a whole new metabolic process possible for the first time for countless creatures capable of subjectively perceiving and responding to the new ecosystem. Because of the awareness of the unlimited opportunity in the new environment, countless creatures arose breathing oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide creating the ancestors of all complex animals. Even more plants could then inhale that new higher concentration of carbon dioxide and exhale even more oxygen creating a new balance in respiratory resources. And this fundamental new opportunity for respiration of a different kind was the origins of life as we know it today. This was a new resource so enormous that the planet is literally still living off the bonanza.

As levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide rose and fell, climate change supported many new and different balances of living plants and animals, and many a new Nash equilibrium. All the oil and coal on the planet could only have been created through an incredibly high concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and tropical temperatures that would allow plant life to explode into dense gigantic forms and concentrations. And it was during just this time that plants went through their greatest mass speciation. And all these plants breathing out oxygen raised the level to such a high concentration that animals could also suddenly grow to enormous size. This increased oxygen level even made it possible for insects that absorb oxygen through the surface of their bodies to become enormous. Some grasshoppers and dragonflies during this period were over a meter long. In today's atmospheric concentration of oxygen, such creatures could not pull enough oxygen from the atmosphere to survive.

It seems that changing the ecological pie can actually change the species that have a piece of it. If a new ecosystem is there, existing creatures will change to use it because they may have the genomic awareness of the new potential, and because they can respond through genomic plasticity. What William Carlos Williams said of the human body is also true of evolution, "If it is possible, it is inevitable." If it can happen, it will happen.

And it is the subjective opportunity that creatures feel in a new Nash equilibrium that precedes the extreme change in forms we call speciation. It is the subjective feeling and perception of new stress or opportunity that drive species to become new ones.

Old Assumptions, New Conclusions

So it is clear that Darwin made a lot of mistakes in his description of natural selection and evolution. It has only been possible to give the most basic outline of current Darwinian theory, because the primary purpose of this book is not to confront or debate those many different and often contradictory presumptions using the same detail as Darwin used in Origin of Species. The purpose of this book is to offer a completely new paradigm, a new way to see evolution as a process that has its own order and logic so others can examine it in detail. What seems clear is that there is another way to describe evolution and the origin of species based on the evolutionary power of genomic awareness and plasticity working through the nine rungs in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity and the Nash equilibrium that exists in all ecosystems, in all life forms and functions. Genomic awareness and plasticity working through the nine rungs that make up the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity balancing the shared interest / self-interest of creatures is an idea that must stand or fall on its own merit, on its own logic and evidence.

In the next chapter we will follow the evolution of bilateral subjective response as it proceeded through those nine steps from bacteria to our nearest primate cousins and us. We will see the bilateral subjective nature of evolutionary change hidden in plain sight that is the foundation of life itself. We will see how we share the same subjective architecture with all living things. We will look back down the nine rungs of bilateral subjective complexity, as it exists within every human being with the deductive / inductive reasoning power that makes us uniquely able to do that.
Chapter 2  
The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The Subjective Structure of Life  
The Genetics of Behaviour

In recent years a number of genes have been identified which express particular predispositions for individual subjective responses in human beings and other creatures. Shyness, gregariousness, and their global aspects introversion and extroversion, and pro-social behaviour like empathy are predispositions for subjective response that have clear genetic origins. Human faithfulness has also been linked to the number of copies of a particular gene that have been identified in the genome of particular individual men. Risk-taking also has clear genetic origins with that particular gene first identified in populations of fruit flies.

Homologies are the deep genetic similarities in different creatures. They are the genes we share, and to give an idea of how deep homologies go, humans share 80 percent of their genomes with sponges, the first communal life form. The genes that form our five fingers are the same genes that form the five bones in the flippers of fish and the wings of bats. The genes that form the eyes of a fruit fly are the genes that form yours and mine. There are countless other such homologies in form, but geneticists are now just beginning to describe the many homologies in subjective response between creatures.

Jonathan Weiner in his book Time, Love, Memory, describing the quest for the origins of behaviour quotes E.O. Wilson, "If everything else in biology is the product of evolution, then surely we have to constantly examine and re-examine the human mind and social behaviour as products of evolution."

Wiener goes on to describe early work in the genetics of behaviour. "Behaviour geneticists in England and in Boulder Colorado looked at what behaviour geneticists working with mice call "emotionality," or sometimes "reactivity." When a mouse is placed in an apparatus they call an "open field", a brightly lit white circular arena, a sort of spot lit stage, one mouse will spend most of its time exploring the stage, while another will spend most of its time keeping very still and defecating. The mice also behave in character when they find themselves in the dark arms of a Y maze. Their behaviour can be predicted from their lineage. The investigators crossed mice that explored the stage with mice that fled the stage, tested their grandchildren, and looked at the DNA of the most extreme mice at each end of the scale. Then they entered all the genetic data in the computer program called MAPMAKER and found at least three loci, on murine chromosomes 1, 12 and 15 that seem to be linked to a mouse's emotionality. As the New York Times observed about this finding: "Maybe it is appropriate that the first gene that scientists found linked to an ordinary human personality trait is a gene involved in the search for new things."

Maternal nurturance is also clearly genetic in origin. Attentive mothers have normal sets of genes while mothers who are indifferent to their offspring are missing a gene called fosB.

In another experimentally studied population of white mice, "one snuggles for hours with other mice in its cage, trimming their whiskers and letting them trim his. Another virtually identical mouse keeps to itself at the far side of the cage. Its bed in the cedar shavings is unmade and unfluffed, and its whiskers are untrimmed... The difference between the well-trimmed mouse and the unkempt mouse is that the second mouse has a problem in a gene called 'dishevelled'... Every human being also has a copy of the mouse gene 'dishevelled', the gene that is damaged in that unbarbered and unsocial mouse. Every fruit fly has a copy of 'disheveled' too."

Jonathan Weiner... "One maggot, when it crawls to a crumb of food always takes one or two bites and then moves on to the next. Another virtually identical fruit fly maggot arrives at a crumb, settles down, and eats every bit before moving on. The difference between the roving maggots and the sitting maggot is a single letter of genetic code in a fruit fly gene called 'foraging', a.k.a.dgk2."

"Looking for links between genes and behaviour is so straightforward with mice that Lee Silver of Princeton University lets his undergraduates do most of the work. Not long ago one of them designed an experiment in which she offered inbred strains of mice two spigots, one for water and one for alcohol (10 percent ethanol, about as strong as Chardonnay). An inbred mouse strain known as C 57 PL / 6 will drink three-quarters or more of its liquid from the alcohol spigot. The second inbred strains, DBAs / 2 will drink almost none- less than one hundredth of its liquid diet will come from the alcohol spigot. The DBAs / 2 mouse drinks so little alcohol that it is likely to take no more than a single small taste from the sipper tube and never go back... A senior of Silver's, Justine Jaggard crossed alcoholic mice with the teetotaler mice. Then she crossed the children with the teetotalers. Some of the grandchildren drank a great deal of alcohol. Some drank almost none... Jaggard found a locus on mouse chromosome 2 that seemed to predispose male mice to alcoholism, and a locus on chromosome 11 that seemed to predispose female mice to alcoholism... Students of Silver's are crossing aggressive and passive strains of mice; mice that are subject to seizures when they hear loud and high-pitched noises and mice that are immune to those same noises; mice that are monogamous and mice that are polygamous. With each of these traits Silver expects to begin finding complexes of interacting genes and dissecting those complexes while he looks for corresponding genes in human beings."

These examples from Jonathan Wiener's book offer some small indication of the current research on genetic predispositions for subject response and behaviour. Because of studies on identical and fraternal twins, it is now accepted that up to 50 percent of human happiness depends on an individual's genetic predisposition for that emotion. The more geneticists understand about the human genome, the clearer it becomes that the most basic and the most particular subjective responses are based on some varying genetic predisposition within individuals. Clearly many subjective responses have ancient genetic roots, but the most fascinating thing of all is the origins of the human psyche, the particular subjective responses that make us unique as a species. Understanding the course of human evolution over the last few million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, is to understand the evolution of a unique subjective complexity, an understanding that is just in its early stages.

And yet because human beings express the bilateral reality of nature / nurture that can never be separated, it is necessary and important to remember that any genetic predisposition in humans depends on socialization for its expression. Although heredity has been shown to have a significant role in alcoholism, a Swedish adoption study that identified this correspondence also found that environmental pressures actually accounted for more. One of the most widely held beliefs is that aggression is a part of human nature, a genetic predisposition from our predatory history. The Milgrum and Zimbardo studies that seemed to show that college students will quickly become heartless torturers if given control and authority over others is contradicted by studies that show that even when it is a matter of self-defense people will often refuse to take another's life. Alfie Kohn in his book, The Brighter Side of Human Nature, points to the S.L. A. Marshall study of infantry companies in the Central Pacific and European theatres in World War II finding that 75 percent of the men interviewed reported that they would not, or would not persist in firing against the enemy. They would face danger and risk their own lives but would not fight. Marshall notes the psychiatric study of combat fatigue that found, "fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause a battle fatigue in the individual." Other studies have shown that two-year-old children will respond aggressively when attacked by another infant. The bilateral reality of human aggression / passivity is clearly demonstrated in these seemingly contradictory studies. It is simply impossible to separate shared interest / self-interest when expressed in bilateral response to other human beings that allows both emotional, empathetic reactions and cold-blooded torture. Even the concept of aggression is difficult to define.

Alfie Kohn... "To use a single word like aggression to refer to killing a deer for food, taking part in a religious ritual involving cannibalism, smacking one's child, and shooting a security guard in the course of a robbery invites sloppiness of the highest order. Then to treat this word as a single concept that admits of a single explanation is to accept the invitation. As one group of scholars put it, it is false to assume that..."There is a single ("instinctive") motivational source for all the things that people customarily term aggressive.... Aggression is not a natural category of analysis; rather, it is a more or less useful construct that we impose upon nature... Aggression is not "located" in particular genes, hormones, or brain "centers"; rather, various kinds of aggressive behaviour are the developmental consequences in specific environments of multiple and diverse interactions within and between social animals or humans."

Kohn concludes that participants in wars are characterized less by aggressive energy in search of an outlet than by carefully socialized obedience. "The fact that fiercely warlike societies can become peaceful in a matter of the few centuries...also corroborates the importance of social and political rather than biological factors. Moreover, evidence is accumulating that war is a relatively recent event in human history: there appears to be little evidence of warfare among Pleistocene people, and even since that era has not been the rule. In a provocative synthesis of data from archaeology and other disciplines, Riane Eisler argues that the bloodiness we have come to see as the dominant feature of history in fact describes only the last 5000 years or so, less than one percent of the time our species has existed. War and other sorts of oppression, according to Eisler, constitute the historical exception, a detour from the main road of cultural development in which none of the landmarks have to do with destruction."

Kohn sums up the nature / nurture dilemma very clearly, "First, no genetic instruction can be meaningfully evaluated without knowing something about the environment in which an organism must function; what is adaptive in one setting may be maladaptive in another... second, the relation between even simple organisms and their environment is reciprocal: the individual both reacts to and actively transforms the world around it. The instincts of most mammals are invariably a product of experience, and this instinctive behaviour then shapes the environment, which in turn affects the organism."

Human nature is the most complex bilateral subjective reality in nature carrying the bilateral subjective responses of all nine quantum steps in subjective complexity. Even though nature / nurture is indivisible in every living creature capable of learning, scientists continue to battle for the primacy of one over the other even to the point of trying to separate the bilateral reality of abstract good / evil in describing human nature. The best definition for human nature may in fact be the bell curve of innate bilateral subjective traits expressed in socialized human behaviour.

The Economics of Behaviour

As Darwin understood so well, all life is economics. It is supply and demand, opportunity and its cost, marginal utility and the subjective nature of incentive. All living things share and compete to greater and lesser degrees depending on their nature and the ecosystem to which they belong. Every creature, every individual simply responds to different incentives in life, incentives that give life its very purpose. Without incentives there is no economic reality possible in life, and incentives are all subjectively felt whether the creature is a bacterium on a doorknob or the President of the United States in the Oval Office. The basic reality about all economic systems, and all of life is that every action / reaction starts and ends with subjective responses, and those subjective responses address the connection within the existing self-interest / shared interest of the members of every connected group. Evolution can in fact be defined as the process by which living creatures respond and adapt to the subjective awareness of new ecological incentives found in the dynamic balance within shared interest / self-interest.

Bilateral subjective conscious / unconscious awareness always precedes adaptation. Changes in bilateral subjective response invariably precede adaptations in form.

All economic decisions are fundamentally based on two subjective responses that identify shared interest / self-interest as it exists among the many different incentives creatures identify in all the ecosystems of life. These two aspects of economic decisions are totally interrelated and inseparable. Shared interest / self-interest can't be separated; they simply exist in a different balance, a Nash equilibrium in every individual, in every circumstance, in every ecosystem. Any living system that fails to balance shared interest / self-interest is doomed to collapse. Cancer is a good example of cells that act entirely in their own self-interest, ultimately destroying their host and themselves; so is the last financial meltdown in 2008 brought about by the systemic greed of many individuals and financial institutions acting with no regard for others. The epitaph for Western civilization may ultimately read, 'Here lies the West, a victim of its own unconstrained self- interest.'

Creatures are hardwired to feel the advantages that come from shared interest / self-interest because it is part of the nature of all living things. All living things are adapted to take care of themselves and respond in ways that serve the primary needs of survival. But creatures are also created with an awareness of others, and the reason creatures evolved that awareness was to reap the greater rewards possible from acting through cooperative shared interest. Because of its basic economic advantage, shared interest appears at the very beginning in the story of life in many kinds of bacteria. Later, single celled creatures like slime moulds formed cooperative concentrated mats so they could hunt much larger prey. There are countless examples to show that shared interest / self-interest is the economic foundation of life. Shared interest and cooperation exist among all living things simply because it pays.

Cooperation and competition are the two expressions of the economic nature of life; the two basic complementary expressions of behaviour that allow creatures to respond to the economic forces that control life within all ecosystems. Shared interest is expressed through cooperation. Self-interest is expressed through competition. Once there is life, once there are subjective responses in living things, all life is about living creatures dividing the expanding resources created by life itself.

The bias in western academic thought has always favored competition over cooperation because of the nature of our prevailing economic models. From Adam Smith, Hobbes and Darwin, social and economic models always focused on the competitive nature of life.

Alfie Kohn... "Interestingly, even those thinkers whose names we associate with a jaundiced view of human nature have given mixed signals. Even Adam Smith, descriptively and prescriptively a philosopher of self-interest who wrote the foundational book, The Wealth of Nations, began his other major book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as follows:

'How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it... that we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instance to prove it.'

Even 'war of all against all' Thomas Hobbes is not a strict psychological egoist since he does not insist that people are always and exclusively concerned with their own interests. And even Herbert Spencer, coiner of the term 'survival of the fittest', also insist that self-sacrifice is no less primordial than self-preservation, that real gratification can be had only by "unstinted benevolence... a benevolence that may foster, but not be motivated by, egoistic pleasure."

Although cooperation is an unmistakable aspect of life, it has always been relegated to the back burner, as an inferior exception to the rule that life is ultimately 'a war of all against all'. Cooperation as a central and equal part of natural selection was first put forward at the turn of the twentieth century in the book Mutual Aid by Petr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist and thinker. Its source among pre-revolutionary socialists made the idea even more suspect and uncomfortably communistic in the West and so has been quite effectively ignored. Kropotkin pointed out that, "There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense...Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle."

Stephen Jay Gould in his essay on Kropotkin agreed with his premise that cooperation is generally the rule in harsh environments, whereas competition was more the rule in lush environments such as the tropics where Darwin formulated his theory. He offered no support for or analysis of his agreement with Kropotkin.

Kropotkin's idea of evolutionary adaptation said that natural selection had two mechanisms to influence the course of life. The first mechanism depended on competition between individuals living in lush environments as the main process through which natural selection worked. The second mechanism depended on cooperation as creatures adapted to harsh environmental conditions, because cooperation in harsh environments is clearly in the self-interest of creatures. As Gould finally agreed, "Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more common results in the struggle for existence. Perhaps communion rather than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most circumstances." Although it is rarely emphasized, Western Darwinian theory only accepts cooperation as a special case of competitive advantage, rather than an equal aspect of evolutionary adaptation. Yet both theories focus on environmental resources rather than the subjective nature of creatures dividing those resources, once again effectively ignoring the very foundation for behavioural adaptation.

But portraying cooperation as competition's weak twin sister that is only marshaled to confront harsh environments is like saying the only allies in life are those formed to fight a greater enemy. With such a view, life is still seen as mainly a war of every individual against every individual, unless they can find a common purpose or enemy against whom cooperation may require a forced accommodation. It also completely ignores the subjective nature of cooperation and its deep roots in communal creatures and symbiotic relationships where shared interest is integral to life.

The problem is that an ecosystem is more than just its environmental conditions. An ecosystem is in fact mainly defined by the relationship of the living creatures that influence each other's lives. Cooperation to oppose a greater environmental enemy or problem ignores the incredible interrelationships that make up an ecosystem. It's been shown that the members of every ecosystem are often so interdependent that eliminating the smallest unicellular member or its most dominant predator can disrupt the balance so much that it falls apart, with catastrophic effects on many of its species.

Cooperation is more than an alliance between individual creatures. Cooperation is the recognition creatures have of their place among others, of the balance within their shared interest / self-interest. And cooperation, unlike blind competition depends on the ability of creatures to communicate and respond to each other in coordinated ways.

And that is clearly the dominant nature of subjective response and life itself.

At the beginning of life, its only forms were those that existed near volcanic ocean vents and in some rock, in bacteria or archea metabolizing chemicals like iron and sulphur. Since then, it is life that created life. Like an ever-expanding economy, the resources shared in every ecosystem are those produced by individuals and their species in ever expanding ecosystems, the largest ecosystem being the bilateral reality of the land / sea nature of the earth itself. The nature of shared interest / self-interest is to create new environments and ecosystem by ever increasing growth to what has never been a static zero sum pie.

The idea that individual genes or creatures act exclusively in their own self-interest without regard to the responses of other organisms in the ecosystems to which they belong denies the economic reality of life. Without subjective responses, without shared interest / self-interest, there is no life, no purpose in life, no way to establish any sustainable balance in life. In every creature that would ever live, evolution would be about responding to changes in the natural balance within shared interest / self-interest, through cooperative and competitive behaviour.

As Kim Sterelny in his book Dawkins vs. Gould points out, "The genes that built 3.5 billion-year-old cyanobacteria were not lone wolves. The relations between gene lineages had already become a balance between competition and cooperation. For no one gene can build a vehicle, not even one as relatively simple as a bacterium." Simply put, genes themselves must learn to cooperate and compete in building any organism. In A New York Times article, David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, sees the onset of humanity's cooperative, fair-and-square spirit as one of the major transitions in the history of life on earth, moments when individual organisms or selection units band together and stake their future fitness on each other.

"A major transition occurs when you have mechanisms for suppressing fitness differences and establishing equality within groups, so that it is no longer possible to succeed at the expense of your group," Dr. Wilson said. "It's a rare event, and it's hard to get started, but when it does you can quickly dominate the earth." Human evolution, he said, "clearly falls into this paradigm."

Our rise to global dominance began, paradoxically enough, when we set rigid dominance hierarchies aside. "In a typical primate group, the toughest individuals can have their way and dominate everybody else in the group," said Dr. Wilson. "Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust."

"Our ancestors had to learn to trust their neighbors, and the seeds of our mutuality can be seen in our simplest gestures, like the willingness to point out a hidden object to another, as even toddlers will do. Early humans also needed ways to control would-be bullies, and our exceptional pitching skills — which researchers speculate originally arose to help us ward off predators — probably helped. "We can throw much better than any other primate," Dr. Wilson said, "and once we could throw things at a distance, all of a sudden the alpha male is vulnerable to being dispatched with stones. Stoning might have been one of our first adaptations."

Wilson is wrong about why cooperation works, seeing it as a response to vulnerability in stronger individuals, rather than a recognition of a better social and practical outcome. He is also blind to the fact chimps depend far more on trust than mistrust in their reciprocal responses to one another, reconciliation far more important to chimp society than fear of retaliation.

It is not physical adaptation that decides a creature's reproductive success, but how it behaves. It is not the senses a creature uses to respond to environmental pressures and opportunities that makes it successful. Sensations are only streams of information created by the evolutionary hardware of life. The real measure of evolutionary potential and success is in the software of subjective response that creates behaviour. It's not the physical nature of an animal that determines its survival, but how it behaves when it communicates and responds to other living things.

The Economic Tao of Life

The best representation for the economic structure of life and the bilateral subjective reality of shared interest / self-interest itself is the eastern symbol of the Tao, a circle divided as equal, intertwined segments of black and white with a white spot contained in the black half, and a black spot contained in the white half. This is exactly the way shared interest / self-interest makes up the two halves of the economic reality of life. Cooperation and competition are the expressions of that living reality. At the center of the white cooperative aspect of life is a hard core of competition. At the center of the black competitive aspect of life is a hard core of cooperation. Neither exists without the other. Neither can be separated from the other. Taken as a whole, the Nash equilibrium that defines all living things is the Tao of life out of which the subjective responses of all living things evolved into different forms and functions. At its core, life is a subjective experience and nothing more, the very reason all economic incentives exist.

Concerning Cooperation

Darwinian evolution is seen as savage competition, the survival of the fittest, yet everywhere in nature are examples of cooperation and even altruism with animals apparently sacrificing their own good for the sake of others, even across species. Dr. Sigal Balshine at McMaster University in Canada studies species of African Cichlid fish that live together in communities in which "helper" fish assist breeding fish with childcare and habitat maintenance. Dr. Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University has demonstrated the power of group selection showing how groups of altruistic creatures can out-compete groups of selfish creatures. Dr. Troy Day at Queens University does mathematical modeling of altruism and believes that one of the most interesting areas is in understanding the role altruism has in the evolution of microbes and disease.

According to Dr. Marc Bekoff, "This "survival of the fittest" mentality, which pervades so much thinking and theorizing, is increasingly not supported by current research as being the prime mover in evolution. For a long time, cooperation has been ignored because of this ideological bias, but the recent deluge of research papers and other essays on cooperation indicate the tide is changing. In fact, the more we look for cooperation the more we discover its presence. Animals certainly compete, but cooperation is central to the evolution of social behaviour, and this alone makes it key for survival." And all animals, from bacteria to humans are to some degree social animals, in that they must communicate with and react to others of their own kind.

In his book, Cells and Societies, J. T. Bonner describes a Volvox, "Single celled creatures of about 2000 individuals that arrange themselves in a slightly lemon shaped sphere. Each cell is separated some distance from its neighbor by a matrix of jelly, with fine protoplasmic strands forming connections between each cell in a pattern of hexagons over the surface of the colony. The ball of cells is hollow and shows some differentiation; and the whole colony has a definite polarity, a head-and-tailness. The cells coordinate to move forward and back and spin in either direction. And there are certain vegetative cells that begin to swell to produce sex cells (eggs or sperm), or produce a daughter colony directly by asexual reproduction. Individuals in colonial groups like Volvox can and do communicate and coordinate responses in many intricate ways." Intricate communication and cooperation among single-celled creatures clearly begins very early in the story of life.

Bonner also describes how different, smaller colonies of other single celled creatures can be regenerated from isolated cells, but "Volvox were incapable of regeneration from single cells, showing that as colonies increased in complexity during the course of evolution, the cells became increasingly interdependent, increasingly rigid in their functions. The direction in evolution appears to have been toward greater unity and integration of the colony, so that finally Volvox almost loses its colonial character and more closely approaches the qualities of an individual organism." Cooperation it seems is hardwired into genetic memory while life is still microscopic.

Most people who have had a science course in high school have seen amoeba under the microscope. They are completely separate and independent of one another, seeming to completely ignore one another's presence. Bonner describes how this independent behaviour can change, "this solitary existence changes very suddenly once the food supply is fairly exhausted and the density of the amoeba population is high. Then certain amoebae become attractive while others stream toward them so that soon the randomly speckled field of amoebae begins to look like feathery crystals formed in a series of rosettes in which the streams of aggregating amoebae are all pouring into the centers. When the process is completed, in two to four hours, all the amoebae will be collected in cell masses of different sizes; and these masses.... have many communal and integrated properties." It is also been shown that individual amoeba separate themselves equidistantly through some unknown sensory process in order to maximize the available resources for each individual, clearly exhibiting a bias for cooperative rather than competitive behaviour.

These and many other individual single celled creatures are capable of incredibly complex cooperative connections and behaviours and it is hard to see why more evidence is needed to identify the essential cooperative / competitive architecture of life.

In her book, Evolution Extended, Connie Barlow quotes Peter A Corning from his work, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution, "Social cooperation does not occur in a vacuum; it takes place against the background of direct or indirect competition. Competition may even be the major stimulus for cooperation.... In human societies such relationships are called markets, exchanges, cooperatives, corporations, contracts and so on." Corning goes on to say, "There is no inherent conflict between natural selection and cooperation, or between egoism and cooperation. Nor does cooperation necessarily require the kinds of motivations and behaviours that many social theorists equate with the term. There's not even an absolute dichotomy between competition and cooperation. Many social interactions involve cooperation in one area or with one group and competition in another. Darwin himself observed that cooperation for the purpose of engaging in competition has been a significant factor in socio-cultural evolution. The bottom line, though, is that in nature cooperation is a means to an end, and the end is synergy."

What Corning means by synergy may perhaps be more appropriately expressed as the bilateral subjective reality within the Nash equilibrium in which living things exist.

Barlow sums up Corning's argument very well. "Cooperative synergy and competitive strife are thus the yin and yang, the anima and animus, of biological evolution. It is perhaps human nature that drives us to enthrone one or the other as primary. Like hoops within hoops, what appears as competition at one level may be driven by and result in cooperation at the next level up or down, and vice versa."

James Rilling has used functional MRI on humans to show that the brain's pleasure centres are strongly activated when people cooperate with one another. This important research shows the strong neural basis for human cooperation: that it feels good to cooperate, that being nice and having social interactions is rewarding. Also, researchers have identified an area in human brains called the caudate nucleus. Activity in the caudate nucleus is greatest when generosity is repaid with generosity. There's every reason to believe that the brains of other animals share this trust centre with us.

Alfie Kohn... "Biochemical and physiological mechanisms are the servants of social adaptation, not the other way around," Robert Cairns has written. "Furthermore, the same genetic—biological stuff can be organized differently in the course of development to bring about drastically different patterns of social adaptation." The possibility of change, in other words, is built into biology itself.

Evolution and Subjective Response

Jean Batiste Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that life is motivated by "a force that attends incessantly to complicate organization." This force operates through the creative response of organisms to "felt needs." The reason this idea has been dismissed is that there was no known mechanism by which the feelings of an individual can affect the genetic structure responsible for heritable traits. The new science of epigenetics has changed all that, showing how subjective experiences, environmental change and even diet can turn genes on and off and these changes can persist for generations. If nurturant licking by a mother rat can epigenetically change the genes that control stress hormones when her offspring become adults strongly influencing their reproductive lifespan and success, what is to say that environmental pressure or opportunity can't do the same thing? What is to say that there is no epigenetic response to extreme environmental pressures or opportunity that can even alter the genome and chromosomal alignment in some fundamental way allowing extreme genetic reorganization that may lead to new species? The plasticity of the genome is just now beginning to be understood, and there is no current understanding of the mechanisms and limits of that plasticity. How the genes that code for subjective response control genes that express structural and behavioural form and expression is also unknown territory, but we believe will one day be proven to be the controlling force behind evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould in his essay, Triumph of a Naturalist, summarized some of the new discoveries about the genome. "In short, a set of new themes: mobility, rearrangement, regulation, and interaction has transformed our view of genomes from stable and linear arrays, altered piece by piece and shielded from any interactions with their products, to fluid systems with potential for rapid reorganization and extensive feedback from their own products and other sources of RNA. The implications for embryology and evolution are profound, and largely unexplored."

In social animals, emotions also control reproductive success, as the individual genetic predispositions that determine personality directly influence the traits that will be passed to succeeding generations. Dr. Robert Sokolosky in his thirty-year study of baboons said it took him fifteen years to realize that it was not hierarchical rank that was primarily responsible for the health and reproductive success of individuals, but personality. It is also undeniable that the personality traits that evolution preserves to foster social cohesion also have a profound influence on which animals will breed. When personal and social acceptance and rejection became keys to reproductive success, the feelings of individuals expressed through their personality traits became fundamental aspects of evolutionary survival.

Finally, the argument against Lamarckism is that it is directed variation, and there is no method through which feelings can alter genes. As Stephen Jay Gould in his essay Shades of Lamarck describes it, " If hairy coats are better, animals perceive the need, grow them, and pass the potential to offspring."

Even putting aside the possible epigenetic force of subjective feelings, natural selection should allow an adaptive advantage to an individual who feels cold more intensely and grows a thicker coat. There are physiological processes by which animals respond to environmental conditions, and those animals with the most advantageous response would be the ones favored by natural selection. It is also true that if genomic awareness and plasticity exists, then the awareness creatures have of their environmental conditions has a mechanism to change genes that are passed to the next generation. This is true of adaptations in form but it is even more crucial for adaptations in subjective response. In a six-year study of 736 middle-aged Swedish men, emotional attachment to a single person didn't appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease the way having multiple friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as a lack of social support. A ten-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 less percent likely to die during the study period than those with few friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained significant weight, and the closer the friends lived, the greater the weight gain. The same influence on weight gain did not appear among co-workers as among friends showing the profound unconscious effect of social affiliation on health and survival.

Clearly, subjective feelings influence physiological responses that determine an individual's survival. Clearly social groups exert powerful selective pressures on individuals and their reproductive success.

Life's Perfect Metaphor  
Songs in the Keys of Life

Understanding evolution ultimately means understanding chromosomes and the DNA molecule within them in all their intertwined complexity. Understanding life means understanding how genes turn on and off, and how they are orchestrated in chromosomes to create and maintain individuals and species.

There is another effective metaphor that offers an almost direct parallel to what is known of how chromosomes and the genes within them work.

If you think of genes as keys on a piano keyboard, then archea and bacteria, the earliest and most basic forms of life, have a limited number of genetic keys and octaves on which variations can be played. The smallest genome known to exist has 300 genes. Chromosomes in creatures vary in number from 1 to nearly 100, containing 300 to a 100,000 genes.

Genes in all creatures are sometimes played singly, and sometimes in chords where particular keys are chosen to be expressed together. And chords are made from individual notes played in many different possible patterns, order and frequency. Many human predispositions for behaviour have been shown to be linked to particular genes, for example, the likelihood that a human male will be faithful to his mate is strongly influenced by the number of copies of a particular gene; one copy and the man will most likely stay faithful, two copies of the gene and the man is likely to cheat; three copies and it is very likely the man will be repeatedly unfaithful. It is clear from this that the expression of just one gene clearly influences the predisposition for one particular behaviour. Although there is no genetic predestination for behaviour, there are undeniable differences in predisposition for particular behaviours in different creatures and individuals of different species.

What genes do depends far more on their repetition, timing and sequence than the fact that they simply exist in the genome of a particular individual.

In bacteria, the speed of mutation can be extremely rapid because of the limited number of notes and octaves at play. The flexibility of bacterial genes to find a place within the genome of different reproducing individuals including higher organisms may also make them powerful agents of evolutionary change. Heritable traits exist in species of bacteria that define their behaviour and structure just as they do in all living things, although the change in expression of those heritable traits created through mutation is very high in bacteria because the keyboard of life is still quite small and flexible. The DNA in these creatures is expressed much like jazz music, improvised variations on a particular simple theme, with genetic material within bacteria passing between individuals like hangers on a coat rack in a very busy restaurant. It is this bacterial sex that is the true origin of the original variations in life upon which evolution primarily depends.

When single celled creatures evolved on the planet in cells that used oxygen and had their DNA contained in chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell, life was presented with a whole new set of octaves on which the variations of life could be played. These single celled creatures, like communal bacterial stromatolites before them, learned to join together in complex cooperative structures like sponges and pyrozomes, and this was made possible because of genes that produced collagen, the material that all complex living creatures use to connect their cells. The collagen gene remains middle C in all the complex life forms that have ever existed and without its expression life would still be very simple. And it is extremely important to understand that the gene for collagen first came to exist within single celled animals that would never use it, the genetic adaptation for collagen preceding the expression of life forms that could not exist without it.

Evolution constantly creates new octaves and new possibilities within them because genes are made of four simple amino acids that can find a place in the DNA molecule. Because genes are made of four simple chemicals expressed in different order, timing and repetition, they too are like chords in music capable of infinite extension and variation.

To understand the possibility of expression in different chords and notes of a particular octave, it is helpful to realize that the C chord on a piano is made of three particular notes pressed by three different fingers. The F chord and G chord are also three fingers on three different notes. It is possible to play those three notes in each chord in different order, and in varying numbers of repetition and with different timing in countless ways. Almost every blues song, and most rock-and-roll songs are in fact harmonically based on just those three chords with three notes in each, and there are tens of thousands of different blues and rock-and-roll songs.

No one knows how many fingers rest on how many notes in the chords that make up the harmonic structure of living creatures, yet clearly the example of the limitless possible variations in popular songs using just three notes in three chords gives some idea of what is possible on a keyboard with up to 100,000 keys. Genes for irreducibly complex life processes are created in creatures that do not use them. The genome, like a jazz musician only expresses those new riffs in the context of a new piece of work.

We have amoeba-like ancestors who have clusters of genes that worked on building cell walls and those gene clusters still work together one billion years later on different tasks in different organisms. These modules of genes tend to keep working together over the course of millions of years. They get rewired along the way responding to new signals that act to build new traits. There is a network of genes that build the scaffolding to support the synapses in neurons, and there are 13 of these scaffold-building genes in single celled relatives of animals known as choanoflagellates, creatures that have no neurons. Many other such deep homologies or genetic roots have been found connecting genetic structures in humans to yeast, jellyfish and plants, which makes it clear that the potential for complexity clearly existed in some of the simplest creatures that are our common ancestors.

About 600 million years ago, in the Cambrian explosion, the ancestors of all complex living creatures appeared on the planet. The keyboard of life expanded by thousands and thousands of keys in many octaves, making possible the expression of an infinite variety of new chords and new species. The one chord central to all these new complex life forms is the hox gene, the gene that creates body segments with a top and bottom, a right and left side, a front and back. Without the hox gene there would be no appendages, no possible digestive tract, no reproductive systems, and no complex organisms. Hox genes created the bilateral form of all complex living things. Worms, mollusks, polyps, jellyfish and sea squirts dominated the planet in infinite variations on the original theme made possible by the octaves surrounding the hox gene. It is also important to realize that the hox gene has been discovered in bacteria that will never have bilateral form, again strongly suggesting that the keyboard of life expands before there are creatures to play them; the genetic egg it seems invariably preceding the evolutionary chicken.

These new octaves around the hox gene were made up of thousands of new keys that allowed many new cords to express those thousands of new genes. The genome of some worms have 100,000 genes; the genome of humans about a quarter of that. So it is apparent that as life became more complex, it needed to use fewer and fewer notes to express even greater variation, but notes used in chords of increasing complexity. More fingers came to rest on more keys, and those chords gave new harmonic structure to life's variations.

As life came to play out its possibilities, another gene became central to the octaves on which invertebrates and vertebrates and insects would come to exist. The genes responsible for the pigment around the mouth and anus of the sea squirt are the gene that evolved to create all heads in living things, in every form, every shape, in every creature with a brain encased in its upper segment. The same foundational gene creates a head in a fruit fly, a dinosaur and a human. In one little gene for color all the variations for heads in animals with brains would begin.

Within the octaves of new creatures that had bilateral form and brains, new genes and chords also created five unique senses to connect those creatures to their environments and to other creatures in complex new ways. First touch, then smell, then sight, then hearing appeared as creatures became more subjectively responsive through more complex neural structures. The light receptor cells that first appeared on some worms became part of the genetic chords needed for eyes, while other chords expressed the physical structure for these concentrated light receptors. It has recently been shown that the genes that produce light receptor cells as well as the genes that produce the structure of eyes are the same in fruit flies and humans. They are more than likely the same in all creatures with complex eyes even though eyes evolved separately in a number of different kinds of creatures.

It has also been shown through experiment that knocking out the genes that create eyes in a mouse and replacing them with the genes that create eyes in a frog does not make frog eyes on a mouse, but the appropriate eyes expressed in a mouse's genome. The composition of the genome that defines a particular species is clearly both robust and resilient. It is the gene within the context of a particular genome that creates its appropriate expression. The Nash equilibrium expressed through cooperation among genes is clearly apparent here, so is genomic awareness and plasticity.

Again we refer to the experiment where the genes responsible for the creation of eyes were deleted from a population of fruit flies. Many succeeding generations were completely eyeless, until a few individuals appeared with fully formed, fully functioning eyes. Again it seems that some form of communication and cooperation among genes acts to preserve the equilibrium of the genome itself, and this atavistic ability of the genome to create throwbacks to earlier genetic forms is likely the mechanism for most speciation.

It seems that no matter how we try to mess with Mother Nature, she doesn't allow anyone to fundamentally mess with her compositions.

Yet the genetic octaves in chromosomes and the individual notes of the genes that make up the DNA molecule have incredible rigidity as well as the capability of countless variations on the particular theme that makes up the genome of every individual. Notations that produce every particular species are firmly transcribed in the genome of every individual, but many chord progressions and individual notes that create and sustain individual variation are unique. Every individual genome is a composition that allows variations within a bell curve of expression for its physical, structural, behavioural and psychological traits. And that is what evolution preserves. That is what allows evolution to be so inflexible in some ways and yet so completely adaptable in others. Evolution preserves extreme variation at both ends of the genetic octaves for every living trait as the most effective way to respond to enormous environmental opportunity or stress.

The genome of a human being has approximately 25,000 genes. Genetically we are a little more than one percent different to chimpanzees and bonobos, our nearest genetic relatives. And of those 250 genes that represent our one percent difference, perhaps 50 account for the most obvious fundamental differences between our species. We also have 46 chromosomes not 47 as they do, with two chromosomes in humans reversing and joining together to become one. That change to the human keyboard must also have had some profound effect on the differences between us, changing the genetic chords and their possible progression.

So clearly, changing a few chords and a few notes can have astounding effects in the composition of life. And just as clearly, not much separates related species in the bifurcating low land streams of evolution.

The Genome and Subjective Response

But if life is a song, who is the player?

And where can we find subjective response in the octaves of life?

Sexual reproduction, epigenetic change, genetic mutation and simple errors in transcription do account for much of the infinite variations on the unique theme that defines each individual in every species. But just as important to evolutionary change is the foundational nature of subjective response and its foundation in genomic awareness and plasticity.

We propose that, just as the composition of every piece of music exists to be played, every heritable trait defined by the genome of individuals is tied to subjective responses, the heritable rules that a creature uses to respond to life itself.

We propose that it is the conscious movement of the left and right hands of cooperation and competition that determines the harmony and melody on the keyboard of life. And just as any piece of music on a piano depends on the relationship and interconnection between the right and left hand, right and left brain, so too, every living creature's existence depends on the relationship and interconnection between shared interest / self-interest and its expression through the bilateral subjective reality of cooperation / competition.

The Theory of Subjective Adaptation says that evolution depends on the changes in the subjective responses of creatures that enable them to perceive new incentives in life, which then create new structures, senses and behaviours to respond to those opportunities and costs. It is changes to the genetic rules for subjective response that create reactions to other living things that control the expression of genes that offer creatures adapted variation.

Just as the hox gene creates bilateral form in creatures allowing complex life forms to exist, the genes that create subjective experiences expressed as unconscious approach / avoidance and spontaneous / instinctive responses are the foundation of all complexity through evolutionary adaptation.

The genes that create subjective response expressed as conscious pleasure and fear are like the genes that create neural pathways and brains that allow the evolution of complex sensory perceptions and new adaptations that exponentially increase a creature's ability to take advantage of new perceived incentives in life.

The genes that create the subjective response expressed as the pleasure associated with personal acceptance and the fear associated with personal rejection are like the genes that create the neo-cortex of the brain that allow creatures to make alternative choices among new perceived social incentives in life, exponentially increasing the complexity of individual perception and behaviour and the neural complexity on which they depend.

We believe we can demonstrate that the genes that code for these fundamental subjective experiences are in fact the foundation upon which all evolutionary adaptation is built.

The Bilateral Subjective Response of 'Me / Us'

Lewis Thomas, in his book, the Medusa and the Snail discusses the concept of self in nature. "We tend to think of ourselves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there really is nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone. Spudich and Koshland have recently reported that motile micro-organisms of the same species are like solitary eccentrics in their swimming behaviour. When they are searching for food, some tumble in one direction for precisely so many seconds before quitting, while others tumble differently and for different, but characteristic, periods of time. If you watch them closely, tethered by their flagellae to the surface of an antibody-coated slide, you can tell them from each other by the way they twirl, as accurately as though they had different names".

"Beans carry self-labels, and are marked by these as distinctly as a mouse by his special smell. The labels are glycoproteins, the lectins that may have something to do with negotiating the intimate and essential attachment between the bean and the nitrogen fixing bacteria which live as part of the plant's flesh, embedded in root nodules. The lectin from one line of legume has a special affinity for the surfaces of the particular bacteria which colonize that line, but not for bacteria from other types of bean. The system seems designed for the maintenance of exclusive partnerships... Coral polyps are biologically self-conscious. If you place polyps of the same genetic line together, touching each other, they will fuse and become a single polyp, but if the lines are different, one will reject the other.

Fish can tell each other apart as individuals, by the smell of self. In mice, their olfactory discrimination is governed by the same H2 locus which contains the genes for immunological self-marking. Mice can apparently smell an individual's immune system profile, and it has been demonstrated that humans to the same thing when choosing a mate."

It has even been shown that wasps can remember the faces of other individual wasps for at least a week, a significant portion of their life cycle.

The sense of self that comes from coded rules for individual behaviour to other living creatures is apparently common to most living things.

All life forms share the same structure for subjective response based on genetic predispositions for the expression of shared interest / self-interest. Independent self-interested behaviour and group cooperation expressed in all living animals from bacteria to humans is based on the foundational response that all creatures experience as the bilateral subjective response of 'me / us'. Every animal from bacteria to humans unconsciously knows and responds to the bilateral subjective response of 'me / us'. The individual differences and group norms that define species arise from the feelings of 'me / us' embedded within individuals through genetic memory. In every creature with a self-interested feeling of 'me', there is a corresponding expression of shared interest in the subjective feeling of 'us'. Neither subjective response can exist without the other.

Understanding what "me" actually means is extremely important if it is to be understood as a universally shared attribute of life. The feeling of 'me' is defined as the cumulative and coordinated rules for unconscious / conscious subjective response expressing a creature's self-interest that create particular, concrete reactions to other living creatures. When a bacterium approaches another of its own kind, or flees from or fights with a predator, it is responding automatically to sensory stimuli that identify aspects of the living world outside itself. It is not the ability to sense outside stimuli that gives a creature its sense of 'me', it is the ability to approach others or to respond with a flight / fight response to danger that gives it a subjective identity. A human being in a vegetative coma can respond to sensations of light and cold, and maintain the regulatory balance within the body, but unless that human being can act in an approach / avoidance response to others, there can be no subjective identity, no sense of 'me', even as it operates at the level of a bacterium. A person in a vegetative coma has at least temporarily lost the sense of subjective self-interest that is necessary for the self-awareness required for self-preservation. Subjective response in creatures is simply the internal mechanism by which creatures react to other living creatures allowing them to identify and respond to the balance within shared interest / self-interest.

The other subjective response that all creatures share identifies other members of the same species. Even in bacteria, these responses to other members of the same species are incredibly intricate and complex. When individual bacteria respond to each other in a coordinated reaction, these shared subjective responses gives rise to the feeling of 'us'. The feeling of "me" identifies the self-interest of creatures. The feeling of 'us' identifies the shared interest of creatures.

The integrated bilateral response of 'me / us' is also the origin of communication between all living things, beginning with bacteria and ending with human language. Every cell in every living creature still communicates the way bacteria learned to do it billions of years ago, with receptors on cell walls for particular proteins produced to communicate with others of their own kind. Every cell in every body still communicates in the same way as they coordinate with each other in the countless processes that sustain life. Bacteria, the simplest creatures in life created the potential for cooperative complexity that maximize life's evolutionary possibility.

Neil Shubin in his book Your Inner Fish describes the work of Nicole King in her study of single celled organisms called choanoflagellates. It turns out that the DNA of these single-celled creatures is remarkably similar to bacteria. Her work has actually broken down the genetic distinction between single-celled microbes and animals with bodies. "Most of the genes that are active in choanoflagellates are also active in animals. In fact many of those genes are part of the machinery that builds bodies."...

"Functions of cell adhesion and cell communication, even parts of the molecules that form the matrix between cells in the molecular cascades that ferry a signal from outside the cell to the inside-are all present in choanoflagellattes. Various kinds of molecular rivets that hold cells together are also present in choanoflagellates, although they are doing slightly different jobs." Once again, genomes create options and possibilities within creatures that will never use them.

Within and without all living things, the coordination and communication necessary for the creation of complex organisms is passed from bacteria to single-celled creatures to complex communal beings very early in evolutionary history. And coordination and communication are the signature aspects of subjective experience, and of the feeling of 'me / us'.

If life is purely about competition, why would coordination and communication with other members of the same species appear so early and as such an important aspect of life? And surely, communication does more than imply the importance of subjective response being shared with others; it says that subjective experience is a key aspect of life. Without the feelings of 'me / us' in living creatures, genomic awareness and plasticity wouldn't be the foundation for physical or behavioural adaptation because subjective responses would have neither context nor purpose. Based on and beginning with the paired bilateral subjective response of 'me / us', physical senses, objective behaviour, and subjective reaction were indivisibly and inextricably linked in all living things. There is no 'me' without and 'us', and that is true of every species that has ever lived. New research on mirror neurons shows that even human self-awareness depends almost entirely on the interconnected, indivisible feelings of 'me / us'.

For 150 years, evolutionary theory has completely missed the foundation and purpose of life itself.

The Bilateral Subjective Response of 'Us / Them'

Not only were the earliest forms of life communicating and cooperating because of the economic motivations of bilateral shared interest / self-interest, life forms soon learned to identify friend and foe, ally and predator. Soon after life began, shared interest / self-interest had to be expressed through a second bilateral subjective response that is part of all living things. With friend and foe in every ecosystem, bacteria developed feelings of 'us / them'. Every animal from bacteria to humans knows the feeling of 'us / them' and very soon after the appearance of life; creatures evolved receptors on their cell walls to identify those proteins that identify friend and foe.

With the bilateral subjective response of 'us / them', creatures developed even more complex approach / avoidance responses, as well as structural and behavioural means for fight or flight. With awareness come actions. With actions come reactions, and the entire cascade of life that has transformed the earth. Shared interest / self-interest, cooperation and competition are forever linked in living things, beginning with the simplest organisms.

In one experiment we have previously described, single celled algae were grown in a rich environment so they could replicate without restriction. When a predator bacteria was introduced among them, in less than 2000 generations, in less than 2000 hours, the reproducing algae learned to respond to the predator by joining to each other in forms too big for the predator bacteria to attack. These forms were created in numbers from 8 to 124 individuals, but soon stabilized as groups of 8, the smallest number capable of both resisting the predator and maximizing metabolic efficiency. And the interesting thing is that after all predator bacteria were removed from the environment, the algae continued to reproduce in the form made of 8 individuals, preserving in the genetic memory of each individual bacteria the subjective experience of the predatory bacteria that was once part of their ecosystem. Feelings of 'us / them' had actually become a part of the genetic memory in this particular population of algae changing its heritable form.

Some bacteria are not only capable of flight responses using a number of means including tails of intricate complexity, but they are also capable of fight responses, including the ability to make antibiotics to kill other predatory bacteria. Bacteria are also capable of communicating and coordinating a common shared response to maximize their own self-interest through the group reaction called quorum sensing. Adaptive response to maximize shared interest / self-interest is robust in even the simplest forms of life, and clearly a crucial part of reproductive success.

Can there be a more effective expression of self-interest than the 'feeling' of 'me' that every individual in every life form experiences? Can there be a more effective expression of shared interest than the subjective feeling of 'us'? And there is no better way to express feelings of 'us / them', than through cooperation and competition expressed as coordination and communication.

With the subjective feelings of shared interest / self-interest, the awareness necessary for the evolution of all living things is laid down in the subjective architecture that is the plan of life.

From 4 billion years ago when life began, to 1.2 billion years ago when single celled creatures appeared breathing oxygen and having chromosomes contained in the nucleus of their cells, early life forms were sustained by the simple subjective responses all creatures share with them. Because of the bilateral subjective experience of, 'me / us', as well as ' us / them' identifying countless new individual incentives, creatures were so economically successful that they produced trillions of individuals and countless species, some of which produced the rich concentration of oxygen that new life forms would use for the rest of evolutionary time.
The Nine Rungs in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity

The First Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Action / reaction Communicative Response

The first rung of the ladder subjective response is the bilateral action / reaction communicative responses that allowed bacteria and archea, the earliest forms of life, the ability to detect, communicate, and respond to each other, to identify friend and foe in the ecosystems they would rule for 3 billion years.

Beginning with bacteria and archea, heritable rules of self-interest expressed through approach / avoidance responses tied to sensation allowed creatures to maximize and repeat positive experience, and mitigate and minimize negative experience by responding to heat and cold, light and dark, salinity and various positive and negative concentrations of chemicals, as well as the presence or absence of food. These primary bilateral action / reaction responses began as sensation. These heritable bilateral action / reaction abilities defined species through their sensations to environmental cues and resulted in the multiplicity of bacterial adaptations including and most especially locomotion that allowed these early creatures bilateral approach / avoidance responses. Sensation is all about pure self-interest, and depends on no other living creature. Bilateral action / reaction responses to environmental cues were the first identifiable behaviours in life.

Heritable genetic rules for pure self-interest expressed through bilateral action / reaction, approach / avoidance responses to environmental conditions then evolved into true subjective responses when creatures developed the ability to detect, communicate and respond to other living creatures of their own and different species. These first true subjective responses depended on the ability of these creatures to create proteins in their cell walls to signal others as well as to detect proteins produced in the cell walls of other living creatures. This ability for detection, communication and response expressed the shared interest / self-interest between and among individuals and their species, and such bilateral subjective responses allowed creatures to cooperate for mutual aid and protection. These bilateral subjective responses also allowed individual creatures to respond in their own self-interest by the ability to detect proteins created by predatory species and communicate with each other for mutual protection. With predation, the balance within bilateral self-interest / shared interest became a matter of individual and group survival with species responding to affiliative benefits and danger using both individual and group responses. With shared interest and cooperative advantage inextricably tied to self-interest and competitive advantage, the bilateral subjective shared interest / self-interest paradigm of life was set for all time.

Archea and bacteria communicate and approach one another for their mutual advantage. Archea and bacteria respond to predators with the fight / flight response that persists in most higher animals, and these responses are controlled by the subjective rules of behaviour for particular perceptions of threat. Confronted with a predator, a bacterium may sense the direction from which it comes by the location of the protein receptors on the surface of the cell that first signal the threat. The genetic rules of response to that threat will determine what the bacterium does, whether it engages its motor flagellum to move away, or perhaps put out an antibacterial chemical to kill the approaching predator. What the bacterium does is controlled entirely by the subjective rules for behavioural response evolution has coded in its genes. Genetic rules of subjective response to predatory threats have been a fundamental part of evolutionary change since subjective responses came to exist very early in the story of life.

The rules of bilateral subjective response coded in the genes of creatures allow them to respond to others through the expression of cooperative shared interest among individuals. Cooperative behaviour is a fundamental expression of shared interest in all living creatures. The cellular communication necessary for complex life forms to exist persists in all living things whether they exist as individual single celled life forms or complex beings with many kinds of differentiated cells. These genetically coded heritable traits for cooperative / competitive behaviour allow coordinated responses that exponentially increase the reproductive success and complexity of individual species. Bacteria can also create group responses through a process called quorum sensing that allow dramatic new reactions to particular perceptions through behaviours such as instantaneous phosphorescence or the creation of a protective slime covering. In bacteria, this first rule for shared interest is simple, 'If you do this, I will too.' And in quorum sensing, this rule expands to become, 'Under certain conditions, we all do this together.' From quorum sensing, communal bacterial life forms such as stromatolites took shared interest / self-interest one step further to create a communal life form from which came half the oxygen on earth, oxygen that was the foundation of a fundamental new ecosystem that offered a huge increase in the resources available for the expression of evolutionary possibility.

Here is an example of how flexible genomes are in early life forms. Ciliates are single celled organisms covered with tiny hair-like structures they use for a variety of activities including swimming and feeding. Their lineage is more than a billion years old. Uniquely, they have repeatedly evolved small variations on the normal way of reading genes. They also have some 30,000 genes, which is 5000 more than a human being. Olivia Judson in her New York Times article describes ciliate reproduction. "Ciliate sex is peculiar in several ways. For one thing, reproduction and sex do not happen together. When a ciliate reproduces, it does so asexually, typically by splitting in half and growing a complete new individual from each piece. So: where there was one individual, there are now two. In and of itself, asexual reproduction is not especially strange — many organisms, from aphids to sea anemones, do it at least from time to time. The weird stuff happens when ciliates get sexual. In ciliate sex, two individuals arrive, and two individuals leave: no eggs are fertilized, no offspring are produced. But by the time the two individuals go their separate ways, a massive change will have come over both of them: they will both have acquired a new genetic identity. Here's what happens. Each ciliate has something called a micronucleus; this contains two complete versions of its genome. During sex, the micronucleus divides in such a way that each individual keeps one version of its genome for itself; it then gives an exact copy of this version to its partner. Afterwards, each individual fuses the two genomes (the one it kept and the one it got) to make a new micronucleus. This has three odd consequences. The first is that, by the end of sex, the two individuals have become genetically identical. It's as if you and your mate began coitus as yourselves and finished as identical twins. The second odd consequence is that, partway through its life, a ciliate can radically alter its genetic make-up; genetically speaking, the transformation is so extreme that it's as if you changed into one of your children. Talk about being reborn. Which brings me to the third odd consequence: after sex, the organism undergoes a profound remodeling. Ciliates have evolved a curious system by which the micronucleus is reserved for sex: the DNA there is not involved in the day-to-day running of the cell. Instead, the job of running the cell is done by something known as the macronucleus. (After sex, the old macronucleus is destroyed, and a new one is built.)The macronucleus is made from the micronucleus, but it is not at all the same in content. In extreme cases — such as that of Oxytricha trifallax — less than 5 percent of the DNA in the micronucleus is used by the macronucleus. The rest is cut out and thrown away. Many ciliates have more than two sexes (or "mating types") and some — Stylonychia mytilus, for example — have as many as 100. This doesn't mean that 100 individuals have to gather for sex to take place. Rather, it means that you can mate with anyone not of the same mating type as yourself. In principle, it gives you more choice: with more mating types, more individuals are eligible mates." Clearly, genetic complexity may have nothing to do with the cellular complexity of large creatures. A single celled creature with more genes than a human being and having as many as 100 different sexes is far more complex in its reproductive repertoire than any complex creature. The one thing that is apparent is that single celled creatures already exhibit the foundations upon which all evolutionary potential exists. It is the bilateral subjective action / reaction responses of single celled creatures detecting, communicating and responding to each other for many ways and many purposes, the most important of which is genetic recombination upon which evolution depends, that is the model for all evolutionary adaptation.

The Second Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Communal Affiliation

The second rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is the communal affiliation that allowed creatures to form integrated cooperative groups, often with differentiated cells obeying new subjective rules of response to each other and to sensory experience. Communal affiliation is part of the bilateral nature of every living ecosystem in which creatures find and maintain a balance within shared interest / self-interest. Communal affiliation is the simplest expression of a Nash equilibrium in which the best economic choice is for creatures to act / react in their own interest And the interest of their relevant group.

This ability for the integration of separate individual organisms to create a shared identity allowed greater adaptation and flexibility for feeding, locomotion, protection and even reproduction through sex. Adaptations of molecular rivets in single celled creatures produced the protein collagen that ties the cells of all complex living creatures together. These collagen ties were first use in single celled communal creatures, although there genetic ancestry is in single celled creatures without communal form.

Single celled creatures like sponges, pyrozomes and volvox, and countless others have coded rules of behaviour that allow them to gather in colonial groups, and those rules of behaviour define the creature's form and lifecycle. These genetically programmed rules allow single celled individuals to coordinate themselves in many different ways allowing them to move, feed, protect themselves and reproduce in ways that the separate individuals in the colonial groups could never manage on their own. It is in these colonial single celled animals that differentiated cells having differing forms and activities arose, these differentiated cells coordinated by inter-cellular protein communication. These primary action / reaction, approach / avoidance bilateral subjective responses of single bacteria were adapted to become action / reaction responses between the cells of these communal creatures. It is in fact in such asexually reproducing single celled communal creatures that sperm and eggs and sexual reproduction between two distinct individuals was first created. In single celled colonial animals, the rule for shared interest among cells is simple; 'If you do that, I'll do this.'

'If you do that, I'll do this' and 'If you do that, I will too', are the first heritable rules of cooperative behaviour that existed in communal bacteria and in bacterial quorum sensing. When individual cells of the same communal organism came to exist in differentiated forms with distinct and separate tasks, bilateral shared interest / self-interest within and among the cells of complex organisms would be the foundation of infinite complexity in life. Coordinated action / reaction to physiological / subjective response is hardwired in the very nature of life's simplest and most complex creatures. When differentiated cells could detect, communicate and respond to proteins that created and maintain the balance within the self-contained ecosystem of communal life forms, evolutionary change through genomic awareness and plasticity would allow for the creation of creatures of exponentially greater physiological and subjective complexity. From differentiated cells in communal life forms would come the infinite multiplicity of complex life forms we know as life. From communal Volvox with a handful of differentiated cells to human beings with hundreds of different kinds of cells, evolution has expanded the repertoire of shared interest / self-interest in the bilateral integration within the physiological and subjective nature of living things.

Complex life forms preserve inter-cellular communication and coordination in cells that are no longer similar in form or behaviour, although their DNA is identical. Muscle cells, nerve cells, skin cells, and reproductive cells and the many other different kinds of cells all obey particular rules of behaviour through which they maintain their self-interest and coordinate and communicate with other cells for their mutual shared interest. Heart, muscle and nerve cells communicate and respond as one; 'If you do this, then I will too'. Responding to other differentiated cells using the rule; 'If you do that, I'll do this' communal creatures created the heritable rules for subjective response that makes complex life possible through the dozens of differentiated cell types that communicate and work seamlessly together. 'If you do this, I will too.' and 'If you do that, I'll do this,' define the rules that create the basic physiological / subjective response in all complex creatures. With cell differentiation, the changing equilibrium of shared interest / self-interest would make possible infinitely greater evolutionary adaptations in life. This equilibrium, this Nash equilibrium, is created and maintained by the genetic rules of response from which all behaviour arise.

In higher animals, subjective rules of response for the coordination between individuals in groups allowed fish species to move together in schools and birds to move together in flocks, offering even greater adaptive advantage for feeding, self-defence or reproduction. These coded rules of subjective response when extended to the movement of individuals, allowed the creation of dynamic, ever-changing patterns between individuals of complex species rather than just single cells that depended on the coordinated reactions of every member of the group hardwired in the genetic instincts of these complex creatures. Herring can signal each other to fall into schooling formation, to be aware of approaching predators, and to change direction by using chirps to signal these things to each other. Just one individual refusing to follow the rules of motion in a school or flock creates instant chaos, as every creature's behaviour depends on the predictable reaction and response to those innate instinctual rules of response. Murmuration, the behaviour in flocks of birds that allows thousands of individuals to move in coordinated waves of motion can be directed at one individual predator. Individuals unconsciously following rules of behaviour can turn masses of individuals into one responsive organism with a directed purpose.

When genetically coded rules of subjective response were extended to conscious social responses these behavioural rules of motion evolved into e-motions giving creatures in social groups the ability to translate the basic subjective rule of 'If you do this, I will too.' into the positive, 'I'll scratch your back, if you scratch mine', expression of reciprocity. The basic subjective rule of 'If you do this, I will do that.' became the negative, 'eye for an eye' expression of reciprocity in social creatures.

The Third Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Symbiosis

The next rung in the ladder of subjective complexity was the evolution of symbiosis that allowed different species to integrate and cooperate in ways that offered greater adaptive benefit to both creatures. Where shared interest / self-interest was the economic reality of communal bacteria of the same species, with symbiosis two distinctly different creatures with different genomes found a new balance within shared interest / self-interest to create a new life form having a bilateral identity in which each individual creature accepted a total integrated dependency on another living creature in a way that was of mutual benefit to both. Symbiosis, as the complete bilateral integration of individuals of two different species, created the model for bilateral shared interest / self-interest between and among different species that is the hallmark of every ecosystem that has ever been since that time.

Cooperation / competition between the cells of these new creatures allowed the quantum leap that would be the basis of all further evolutionary complexity. When single celled creatures learned to live together and communicate in order to create integrated responses that expressed the integrated nature of a single life form, evolutionary potential was geometrically increased. The most important of these symbiotic life forms is in fact the eukaryotic cell that was created when individual bacteria learned to live together as one symbiotic unit of life. These single celled organisms are much bigger and far more complex than bacteria, and these large single celled organisms existed for one billion years before complex living creatures evolved in the Cambrian explosion of life 600 million years ago. These large single celled organisms have organelles, mitochondria and chloroplasts with DNA that is completely distinct from the DNA of the larger cell in which they reside as symbiotic, indispensable life forms. This cooperation between different species of bacteria created the first living cells in which chromosomes and DNA would reside as a double helix in a separate cell nucleus. It is these eukaryotic cells that make up all the complex life forms that have and would ever live.

Evan Eisenberg, in his book The Ecology of Eden describes the wide-ranging power of symbiosis:

"Again and again in the course of geologic time, symbiosis has allowed the partners to colonize or conquer new environments. Giant tubeworms used sulfur- metabolizing bacteria as their passport to the bubbling sulfur hot springs of the deep sea floor. Deep-sea cold sweeps were colonized by muscles playing host to bacteria powered by natural gas. Corals and giant clams were able to colonize the nutrient poor but sun- rich waters of the seashore by offering homes to single celled algae and taking sun-made sugars as rent. Each of these arrangements is millions of years old but is still in force." He goes on to point out that "The hind gut of a modern termite is a zoo, many of whose denizens have amazing symbiosis among themselves. For instance, a lozenge shaped microbe called, Mixotricha paradoxa, is propelled through the fluids of the gut by half a million spirochetes that cling to its side, beating in synchrony like galley slaves. They are paid with nutrients secreted by the host ship"

"Vascular plants first colonized the dry land some 450 million years ago. Examination of the first land plants in the fossil record suggests that they were inside out lichens—in other words, a symbiosis of fungus and alga in which the alga was the dominant partner. The fungus contributed a fledgling root system, so the alga could draw water and minerals from dry land. The alga contributed the ability to draw energy from sunlight. The third great requirement for life on land – a waxy cuticle, so that the plant would not quickly lose water to the dry air - seems to have been the product of chemical teamwork between the two partners."

It is now widely accepted that the two kinds of organelle in living cells were once free-living bacteria that became established within the confines of other bacteria. Chloroplasts that produce energy in plants have also been shown to have once been free-living cyanobacteria that took up residence in plant cells allowing the crucial ability for photosynthesis.

The first step in the creation of the symbiotic life form called the eukaryotic cell may have originated in the way bacteria exchange genetic material. Dr. Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for discovering that bacteria have sex, the elementary process through which they temporarily join together to exchange genetic material. What better example of the inherent nature of shared interest / self-interest in life can there be than two individuals of the simplest life form detecting each other, communicating and then responding with a temporary cellular union that allowed the transfer and sharing of their genetic material? Evolutionary adaptation would clearly favor bacteria that could increase their genetic variability in such a novel way, and sex remains the foundation of the widest variability in creatures that use it to reproduce.

It is intuitively appealing to imagine that the first single celled creatures with a central nucleus were formed when one bacteria enveloped another during sex, and rather than being consumed, the internal bacteria learned to live inside its host, creating a new symbiotic life form. The main problem to overcome would have been what happened when the interior bacteria needed to reproduce itself by division. This lifecycle need for multiplication by the internal bacteria would have quickly killed its host. This made it necessary for this new symbiotic life form to create a new method by which the genetic material of both could be preserved in one reproducing organism. The answer to the problem may have been for the symbiotic bacteria to assemble the genetic material of both into a double helix rather than the simple circle in which bacteria usually maintain their genetic material. A genetic double helix that could unwind and copy itself would have allowed both bacteria the ability to preserve their genes in a new and dynamic form with infinitely greater genetic potential.

When the earliest microscopic life forms of different species found a way to symbiotically create their own tiny ecosystem in the eukaryotic cell, this new balance within shared interest / self-interest was arguably the most important step in subjective complexity because that first symbiotic life form is the one upon which all further evolutionary change ultimately rests.

Again, from the earliest foundation of life, adaptation depends on subjective responses that determine every creature's survival. Just as individual single celled organisms adapted to cooperate with each other in different ways, countless separate complex species have also symbiotically co-adapted for their mutual benefit; algae and fungus, aphids and ants, bees and orchids, birds and flowers, dogs and humans, to name just a tiny few examples.

And in perhaps the most remarkable example of symbiosis, Lewis Thomas in his book, the Medusa and the Snail, describes one particular species of Medusa jellyfish living with a common sea slug. In the life cycle, the full-grown jellyfish traps the small larval snail within its body, but soon the undigested snail begins to eat the jellyfish until all that's left of the Medusa is a tiny living remnant attached to the snail near its mouth where it continues to live in symbiotic balance for the remainder of its life.

As Thomas points out, 'The self-marking of invertebrate animals in the sea, who must have perfected the business long before evolution got around to us, was set up in order to permit creatures of one kind to locate others, not for predation but to set up symbiotic households. The anemones who live on the shells of crabs are precisely finicky; so are the crabs. Only a single species of anemone will find its way to only a single species of crab. These sense each other exquisitely, and live together as though made for each other."

The biologist Peter A. Corning may have put it best. "Ecological communities are not simply gladiatorial fields dominated by deadly competition; they are networks of complex interactions, of interdependent self-interest that require mutual adjustment and accommodation with respect to both the other cohabitants in the dynamics of the local ecosystem. The necessity for competition is only half of a duality, the other half of which includes many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation." This is another excellent definition for the Nash equilibrium in life.

The current idea that evolution is about countless, innumerable battles between individuals, a battle of all verses all, struggling for the survival of every individual's genes is simply wrong. The biological evidence is overwhelmingly just the opposite.

The Origin of Sex

For millions of years, evolutionary adaptation favored countless new single celled creatures with a central nucleus. New communal creatures evolved having differentiated cells that allowed them to become far more complex in form and behaviour. Creatures like moulds, lichen, sponges and pyrozomes evolved ever greater expressions of shared interest / self-interest as they became more differentiated in structure and behaviour because they were living together in larger and larger populations. The shared interest / self-interest of these new communal creatures became increasingly complex, but individual variation was still limited by the fact that these cells only reproduced by making cloned copies of themselves. At this time, genetic variation depended almost entirely on the arbitrary interchange of genetic material in the genome, and so in these early creatures, evolutionary possibilities were limited, even though their rate of mutability was very high. Simply put, single celled communal creatures are capable of rapid improvisational change through mutation but they have too few octaves of genes to go much beyond simple variations on a theme. The exchange of genetic material between bacteria, or bacterial sex was mostly constrained by the size of the organism itself, and the small number of genes necessary for its life cycle. Single celled creatures were capable of much more stable individual variations using a far larger genome, but because they too reproduced by cloning themselves, they had limited possibilities for change.

Evolution favors creatures that have greater potential for individual genetic variation, and it was in these early communal single celled creatures that sexual reproduction first appeared. Sexual reproduction occurs when half the genetic material of one individual is joined to half the genetic material of another individual to create a new original genome through the union of a sperm and an egg. Single celled creatures evolved the ability to divide the DNA helix to clone themselves as new individuals through the process of cell division called mitosis. Communal creatures evolved the ability to differentiate reproductive cells that would fuse to create a new individual through sexual reproduction.

Consider Volvox. These 2000 single celled genetically identical communal individuals create sperm and egg cells, and this clearly shows that sexual reproduction, the ability to split and recombine the genome in two separate parts, exists in very simple life forms. Individuals incapable of sexual reproduction somehow managed to create differentiated sex cells to create new individuals after they learned to bond together in communal groups. The base chords of sexual reproduction through genetic recombination were first played on the genes of individual creatures that reproduced asexually, just as creatures with bilateral form, a right and left side, a front and back, a top and bottom were first played on the genes of single celled creatures that would never have them. The base note of chromosomal recombination through sexual reproduction would be the new middle C in most of the evolutionary octaves of life to follow.

With genetic material from one set of communal individuals passing and joining with the genetic material from another set of communal individuals, sexual reproduction was born. Sperm and eggs were set free to randomly fertilize and create new individuals that were no longer simple clones, but new creatures with unique genomes having dominant and recessive traits carried from both parents. Volvox are a good example of how only a few thousand individuals living as a cooperative communal unit can have the ability to produce sperm and eggs, as well as preserving the asexual reproduction which is the reproductive mode of most single celled creatures.

Splitting and recombining two distinctly separate genomes created sexual reproduction in new living creatures, and because evolutionary adaptation always depends on individual variation for maximizing adaptive change, creatures combining two separate genomes exponentially increased their evolutionary speed and variable possibilities. Sex was and still is the best way to create the broadest bell curve for the expression of traits that define complex living creatures. Sex creates the broadest bell curve of traits in living creatures and it is from the bell curve of potential variation in every species that the greatest range of adaptive success is assured.

The one big problem with connecting two separate genomes from different individuals was that it required much greater precision in reconnecting genes because genes for particular traits in two individuals had to match up precisely in the newly fertilized egg. Since DNA was first concentrated in the nucleus of cells, its length and complexity has grown to express many new traits that gave different creatures cooperative / competitive advantages. With sex, the genetic keyboard grew larger and larger and its chords so complex that it's recombination in sexual reproduction allowed for far fewer errors. Bacteria swap genetic material almost randomly because they are such simple creatures. The more complex creatures become, the more restrictive the way genetic material could effectively join without error. Joining genetic material from only two genders most effectively limited the numbers of transcription errors that would be maladaptive while maximizing the expression of individual variation.

In The Logic of Life (1970) Francois Jacob wrote: "a bacterium represents the translation of a nucleic sequence about a millimeter long and about 20,000 signs. Man is determined by another nucleic sequence; about two meters long, and containing several billion signs." It is obvious that even a tiny percentile of error in a bacteria would have far fewer consequences than the same percentile of error in a human being. The more irreducibly complex creatures become, the more tiny errors affect their life processes.

In these new communal creatures that used sexual reproduction, feelings of 'me / us' and

'us / them' came to have complex new meanings as differentiated individual cells learned to cooperate with other differentiated cells to create new senses and new physical adaptations to new environmental and ecological conditions. These new cooperative organisms learned to respond as one sentient being. For the first time, individuals living in communal groups evolved ways to communicate and respond to other individuals living in communal groups. And for the first time, the experience of 'me' existed as an integrated shared experience of a complex differentiated group of cells. And for the first time, the experience of 'us' involved integrated groups of cells communicating with other integrated groups of cells responding as one living organism. For the first time the feelings of 'me / us' was attached to groups of cells rather than individual ones. This great quantum leap in the evolution of subjective experience would allow countless new species to evolve with a multiplicity of new forms and behaviours.

The Fourth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Spontaneous / Instinctive Responses

The next rung of the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is the spontaneous / instinctive responses experienced as representations of external reality in the brain.

All complex creatures that evolved new sensory organs required complex new nervous systems to process all that new information as subjective experience. And as senses became more complex, so did the neural networks that supported them and used them, finally resulting in their centralization in a brain of increasing size and complexity.

When animals developed differentiated nerve cells to process sensory experience, subjective response was tied to these new biological structures where subjective behaviour could be genetically coded and passed from one generation to the next. Every creature with a brain has unconscious instinctive responses coded in its genetic memory through evolutionary change and adaptation. Every creature with a brain also has conscious spontaneous responses to the sensory perception of experience created as a representation of reality in the brain. Spontaneous / instinctive responses create the bilateral nature of animal brains.

Evolutionary change in sexually reproducing animal species would soon allow the creation of even more complex new sensory organs to connect these new creatures to their environments through increasingly complex integrated representations of reality. Touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing all developed very early in complex, independent, sexually reproducing creatures evolving in a multiplicity of forms suited to each particular creature. Worms first evolved concentrated light receptor cells that would be the foundation of sight in all creatures, cells that would come to exist in structures for sight called eyes.

Just as sight evolved from a few light receptor cells into complex organs called eyes, so too the sense of smell has evolved to give creatures far more complex responses to environmental and ecological perceptions. The cerebral cortex of mammals actually evolved from the olfactory lobe of reptiles.

Neil Shubin... "The number of odor genes has increased over time, from relatively few in primitive creatures such as jawless fish, to the enormous number seen in mammals".... If you compare the odor genes of a mammal with the handful of odor genes in a jawless fish, the "extra" genes in mammals are all variations on a theme: they look like copies, albeit modified ones, of the genes in jawless fish. This means that our large number of odor genes arose in many rounds of duplication of the smaller number of genes present in primitive species."

Sensory organs evolved from different variations played on the expanding keyboard of instinctive subjective responses in the genome.

Until conscious feelings came along, subjective experience was automatic, with creatures sensing positive and negative things in their environment and instinctively doing things in response. Instinctive response is dominant in creatures with brains, although these creatures are also capable of spontaneous reactions in different circumstances. Even in planarian worms that have the most primitive form of brain known to science, there is some ability for alternative choice and response. A planarian worm is capable of some variability of responses and simple learning in that the same stimuli will not necessarily always produce the same reaction. Instinctive or spontaneous, it is the ability to respond to things outside one's own body, most especially to other living creatures that offers creatures the possibility of countless new forms. The way every creature responds to the outside world and the other creatures within it depends on the bilateral subjective responses it has inherited to place it within its ecosystem.

In the Evolution of Culture in Animals, John Tyler Bonner describes how behavioural responses exist as single or double reactions. In single reaction responses, a particular action automatically creates a particular reaction like a moth is irresistibly attracted to light. In double reaction responses there is a choice in behaviour, like the fight or flight responses observed in most animals. These single or double choice reactions are genetically hardwired responses and were exclusively that until creatures learned to pass information to others of their own kind through their expressed behaviour, communicating what they had learned as part of its shared interests with others. Single reaction responses are invariably sensations to concrete experience and sensation; double reactions are subjective responses to other living things.

The complexity of genetic memory and instinct in the simplest brains is truly remarkable. Consider how monarch butterflies find their way from Mexico to Canada over four or five reproductive cycles, finding their way back to the place their great great great great grandmothers laid her eggs. And the great great grandchildren of those butterflies who made it to Canada find their way back to a few hundred acres in Mexico using genetic memories accumulated and passed generation to generation on a trip north they had never experienced.

In another exemplary experiment, an earthworm was conditioned to avoid a particular chemical. When the earthworm was cut in half, both the half with the brain and the half without had the same aversive response to the chemical. Some cells, it seems can not only share experience, but remember them as well, and those automatic instinctive memories, when they are passed as inherited traits, are the ones that define the instinctual behaviour of living creatures. In another experiment, butterfly caterpillars were conditioned to avoid nail polish remover and when they emerged as butterflies, they had the same aversion, unlike butterflies from caterpillars that were not conditioned to the response.

Unconscious instinctive responses processed in a brain would allow far greater evolutionary success because creatures who could process experience through refined sensory organs that were adapted to particular environmental conditions had far more options than creatures who could only detect, communicate and respond to other living creatures using proteins and their receptors on the cell wall. Unconscious subjective responses processed in a neural package called a brain simply allowed the subjective complexity necessary for perceiving the balance within shared interest / self-interest among increasingly complex creatures exhibiting increasingly complex behaviours.

Unconscious instinctive responses to particular experience are coded in the brains of every species that have them, but are also particular and different within individuals of those species. Imprinting, the genetic instinct that many birds have to bond with the creatures they first experience after hatching has variable strength in different individuals. The instinct is so broad that ducklings and goslings may easily imprint on particular humans, if the human is the only option for imprinting. The nurturing instinct is powerful in many mammals, so powerful that this genetic instinct may even cross species, so that lactating rats may adopt not only orphan baby rats, but other babies like bunnies and even bantam chicks. Current evolutionary theory dismisses this behaviour as a simple mistake, whereby a mother doesn't recognize her own offspring. Still, a mother rat mistaking a baby bird for its own kind stretches credibility pretty far. A simpler explanation proposed by The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation, is that many creatures are born with genes that are expressed through nurturing offspring, and this instinct forms an irresistible drive that needs expression, even when a creature is only left with the most inappropriate object of that drive. In the adoption experiment in mother rats, the chicks did not take kindly to the mother rat trying to drag them into her nest. But it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they had been imprinted on her when they hatched. Most likely, the chicks and rats would have made a congenial family sharing similar diets.

The behaviours that dogs use to hunt are also all hardwired instincts, although the actual strategies for particular prey must be learned.

Human beings, like all primates have an instinctive fear of snakes and heights.

Unconscious instincts exist in all creatures with complex brains. The more complex creatures became, the greater the complexity of their hardwired subjective instincts and their attendant behaviours, and those unconscious instincts would be the foundation for all complex learning when creatures would come to the next quantum leap in subjective experience with conscious feelings tied to retrievable memory. Until conscious feelings arose in animals, unconscious subjective instincts would form the foundation for the behavioural response of every complex creature with a brain that would ever live.

The Fifth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Nurturance / Competitiveness

The next rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is instinctive nurturance / competitiveness expressed through sexual selection. With the expression of bilateral nurturance / competitiveness as distinct traits in complex sexually reproducing species, gender differences and differentiation was born. Sexual selection is a special case of bilateral spontaneous / instinctive response in which personal preference / genetic predisposition determine reproductive behaviour and success.

Perhaps the greatest quantum leap in evolutionary complexity was this creation of the bilateral subjective responses of nurturance / competitiveness in individual species that allowed far more complex expressions of shared interest / self-interest with a far bigger bell curve of form and behaviour. Nurturance is the personal attachment of parents to offspring. Nurturant behaviour must in fact be one of the most important hardwired instincts because it is fundamental to survival in creatures with relatively small numbers of offspring. This powerful new expression of 'me / us' created behavioural ties with which sexual selection could create infinite variation in behaviour and form. Sexual selection may in fact be defined as the instinctive subjective response for nurturance / competitiveness as it is expressed within particular species.

Competitiveness in sexual selection is the personal expression of competition between individuals for an individual mate, and such competitiveness evolving through sexual selection creates infinite variation in behaviour and form in sexually reproducing species. As animals and ecosystems became more complex, most reproductive decisions in life would become a choice between nurturant and competitive behaviour established through sexual selection. Nurturant behaviour is in fact primal to the evolution of complex subjective responses and began as spontaneous / instinctive responses in early creatures. Mark Bekoff... "Australian leeches have been shown to be devoted parents. They carry their newborn and nurture their young for up to six weeks after hatching. They also protect their offspring from predators and carry them to new areas where they'll be safe."

In social animals, finding the balance within nurturance / competitiveness would be the foundation for social dynamics, culture, and complex personality traits. And more and more, the nature of social animals would evolve to maximize traits for nurturance in individuals because the survival of the group and every competing individual within it would primarily depend on cooperative, nurturant behaviour. The more socially complex creatures are, the more important nurturance is to their development and survival. Nature / nurture are inextricably connected because behavioural nurturance / competitiveness is inextricably connected in sexual selection.

Sexual Selection and Subjective Preference

Sexual selection is based on the instinctive and individual preference of sexually reproducing creatures in choosing particular mates, and since Darwin it has been a fundamental part of evolutionary theory. Yet strangely absent from most evolutionary theories is the origin of sexual selection. Is it a different form of natural selection, or is it distinct and unique? How can natural selection favor one trait, while sexual selection favors an opposite one as many studies have shown?

If cooperation and competition are fundamental aspects of life, it is only logical that as creatures became more complex, unconscious cooperative processes would rise to the level of distinct nurturant behaviour characterizing a fundamental aspect of the lifecycle of sexually reproducing species. Similarly unconscious competitive behaviour would rise to the level of distinct individual competitiveness. Because reproduction is the most basic drive, it is around sexuality and reproduction that individually distinct nurturance and competitiveness would arise as a process called sexual selection.

As sexual selection created increasing complexity in the subjective behaviour of animals, shared-interest became even more complex, but so did self-interest. And within two separate genders this complexity was powerfully expressed through the new subjective responses of bilateral nurturance / competitiveness as expressed through those gender differences. Simply put, these new creatures with new sensory complexity had genes that controlled the balance between complex traits for nurturance and competitiveness in each gender. In this balance, males are usually, but not exclusively, more competitive and females are usually, but not exclusively, more nurturant in their reproductive and social behaviour. Through lifecycle nurturance / competitiveness, shared interest / self-interest has existed in different measures and proportion in species and individuals through gender orientation. With behavioural differences for nurturance / competitiveness coded in the genetic makeup of individual species, gender identification evolved out of sexual orientation. From that point on, behavioural rather than physical differences between the genders would form the most important part of the subjective architecture upon which sexual selection would work. And because of personal preference for behaviour in sexual selection, individual personality would become increasingly more important to survival than physical traits.

In his book, When Elephants Weep, (The Emotional Lives of Animals), Jeffrey M. Masson describes how some larger species of parrot fall in love at first sight in an experience described as 'the thunderbolt'. He describes a male umbrella cockatoo that was caged with a young beautiful female bird that was finally removed because he completely ignored her. Some months later he was given an old female as a companion, a bird who had plucked out her own feathers in an anxious response to captivity, and the two paired immediately, rearing a series of baby cockatoos. There are many stories of captive animals that refused to breed until they are introduced to a particular individual that satisfied their individual preference. Animals even form friendships with creatures of other species. Masson describes a hand-reared leopard that was raised with a dog and loved to play with her, but tried to kill other dogs, even dogs that closely resembled her friend. There are many stories of interspecies friendships; hippos and tortoises, elephants and dogs, even a hamster and a boa constrictor. How to explain interspecies friendships between what are even apparent natural enemies than as a subjective personal nurturing attachment between two particular individuals?

Current evolutionary theory absolutely accepts the idea that females are primarily the choosers and males the ones who compete to be chosen because a female invests so much more physical energy and resources than a male in attaining reproductive success. The consensus is that females are coy and sexually more particular and males more competitive and promiscuous in most sexually reproducing species because females are just so much more precious in respect to the reproductive potential of a species, and the best genetic strategy for males is to have as many different partners as possible. One male can fertilize many females, whereas females are limited by their own gestational constraints.

Although it is true that a male may fertilize many females, the fact remains that most species reproduce so that males and females exist in equal numbers, making hierarchical competitiveness inevitably linked to reproductive success. If one male is able to monopolize many females, the other males must suffer severe reproductive limitation. This model is true of most herd animals, and accounts for males growing progressively bigger and more equipped for fighting, or at least the display of physical fitness. Yet countless species never proceed to this evolutionary escalation of size and dominance in males. Most complex species avoid this escalating evolutionary battle of size and power so the males stay nearly the same size as the females, and share far more of the nurturant tasks. In higher primates, especially our closest cousins, sexual promiscuity is the rule not the exception, and the hierarchical battle between males has more to do with status than access to females. Humans are only mildly polygamous because few males ever have access to more than one female because a male has to invest such effort to provide for all his children, and it was only with the advent of modern civilization that males could feed more offspring than one woman could produce. Even in humans, having many wives has far more to do with social status in a male hierarchy than with sexuality or reproduction.

With the discovery of the fossils of Ardipithecus Ramedis, an ancestor of humans more than 4.2 million years old, a number of conclusions about human origins can be drawn. The males of these early human ancestors had very short incisors teeth. Longer teeth are used for display and fighting in males that compete for females, indicating that the males of our earliest ancestors were cooperative rather than competitive in behaviour. Males and females were also the same size indicating that they were probably monogamous and formed a lifelong family unit to raise offspring to maturity. This clearly indicates that the early foundation of human nature was more cooperative and nurturant than competitive and aggressive. The skeletons of both sexes in these early human ancestors were also long and delicate, indicating that they may have had a female dominant society, like gracile bonobos.

The problem with the current accepted theory is that sexual competitiveness is not exclusive to males but exists in females of countless species, and evolutionary theory must address the contradiction whereby females are less selective and nurturant and more competitive than males in those species. If genetic investment is a key aspect of sexual adaptation, then competitiveness overriding nurturance in females must be explained. Every theory must account for its exceptions, and there are so many exceptions to the idea that genetic investment explains genders differences, that Darwinian theory must account for these many exceptions. Competitive advantage through natural selection is clearly only part of the story. Why should the red phalarope, a species of shorebird, have females competing for the attention of a coy male? Why should titi monkey males do every part of nurturing their offspring except for nursing? Why should one species of monkey in South America have two males polyandrously bonded to a single female who invariably gives birth to twins, which are then divided between the two males who will then be responsible for all aspects of the nurturance of their assigned infant, an infant which either of the males only has a 50 percent chance of having fathered? Marmosets in the wild are also generally raised by fathers, like countless other species. Male seahorses actually incubate eggs that a female places within his incubating pouch. When baby seahorses are ready to be born, the male actually expels them by muscular contractions common in female childbirth. It is impossible to explain this contradiction in the idea of genetic investment using the standard theory of genetic cost in different genders.

Explaining 70 or even 90 percent of observed cases is simply not sufficient to affirm the theoretical foundation of any theory. The reason that most females nurture and most males compete to be chosen in sexually reproducing species may be nothing more than the fact that as nurturance became more complex in animals that used placental development, babies came out of females after having undergone gestational development in the female's body. The fact is that females are usually far more hormonally attached to the living extensions of their own body than males, and that is even true of human beings. And yet there are so many species in which males nurture while females compete and ignore offspring that even this hormonal gender bias is far from absolute.

Nurturance / competitiveness exist in different measures and proportions in different species and among individuals in those species, and evolution simply maintain different bell curves in the expression of nurturance / competitiveness by reinforcing a broad range of those traits through sexual selection.

In sexual selection, competitiveness can be very powerful or very weak in species and within individuals. Nurturance can be intense or even absent in species and within individuals of those species. Sometimes males are the competitive ones; sometimes it's the females. Sometimes females are the nurturant ones; sometimes it's the males.

In the 2012 movie, Chimpanzee, when a leopard killed the mother of an infant, it was the dominant male in the troop that adopted the infant. He was such a devoted father that he even ignored some of his most basic behavioural responsibilities as leader. This is an exceptional case among chimpanzees, but it shows how nurturance / competitiveness exist in different proportions in different individuals regardless of sex.

Nurturance has a wide range of expression in different genders; in some species like the Anaconda, females give birth to offspring that they completely abandon, while in a particular species of fish, males husband tiny fry, overcoming the natural swallow reflex to offer them safety within their mouths, giving them a much better chance of survival. One particular species of frog nurtures its eggs and tadpoles to maturity in its throat pouch.

Competitiveness also has a wide range of expression in the different genders; in the hamadrayas baboon in Africa. John Tyler Bonner describes them... "The group contains a dominant male with an absolutely unspeakable disposition. The top male actively herds his females together. If one strays, he will rush at her with ferocity. She then submits by rushing toward him, and if the first submission is not quick or sufficiently enthusiastic, he may slap her or bite her on the neck. He is of course equally fierce with males from other groups or the accessory males within his own."

Jeffrey M Masson makes the point that "in hamadrayas baboons such dominance can actually be counterproductive, citing the study in which Shirley Strum found that whether or not females like a male is more significant to his reproductive success than his dominance. She also found that the same is true in olive baboons. She found the more high-ranking and aggressive a dominant male was, the less likely females were to mate with him. Such males also lost out when special foods were found, apparently because they had fewer friends to share with them. When tomcats fight over a female in heat, the female is no more likely to mate with the winner than with the loser, a fact that seems to have eluded most observers." Masson says that "attempts to fit theories of dominance to the way animals really live seems to require such terms as respect, authority, tolerance, deference to age, and leadership; terms that begin to mix emotional concepts with those of dominant status. " Robert Sokolosky in his thirty-year study of wild baboons says it is personality, not dominance that offers greater reproductive success.

In contrast to aggressive dominance in baboons are South and Central American howler monkeys, the gentlest and most democratic of social animals. John Tyler Bonner... "The dominance hierarchy is so weak that it is not clear that there is one or more than one dominant male in a band. All the individuals are remarkably tolerant of one another, and perhaps the main function of any kind of dominance might be in leadership in the direction of the movement of the troop. There seems to be very little concern among the males or females about ownership of the opposite sex during periods of estrus. The mating is quite indiscriminate, and they all seem willing to wait their turn patiently."

In primates, even hierarchical social dominance can be weak or strong, centered in either males or females. The one noticeable difference between males and females in terms of social dominance in primates is that males tend to be more aggressive, and females more empathetic, reflecting not so much the genetic investment of either sex, but the life cycle bias of gender for more competitiveness in males and more nurturance in females.

Although it is the exception to the norm, nurturance is the dominant trait in males of many species: from seahorses to phalaropes, and even in some primates, just as competitiveness is the dominant reproductive behaviour in a significant number of females of different species. In some species, like Emu, the South American ostrich, males incubate eggs left by a number of females, who literally play the field, leaving the males to hatch and nurture their offspring. In another South American bird, the Rea, groups of females gather near a nesting male, mate with him and deposit their different eggs, leaving him to hatch and raise them on his own, while the group of females goes off looking for another male with a nest. Love him and leave him with the babies is just another of the possibilities on the bell curve of nurturant behaviour in both males and females. As is true of many species of fish, birds and reptiles, some mammal species also have extremely effective nurturant traits in either males or females and sometimes both.

It is easier to explain the many different physical and behavioural expressions of nurturance / competitiveness as particular expression of a foundational set of genes for that bilateral subjective response, than to postulate the creation of such an infinite set of behaviours through random mutations offering some small genetic advantage ending up as the particular behaviour exhibited in sexual selection. J Masson... " How else to explain that a mother wolf spider is just as kind to strange baby wolf spiders as to her own. How else to explain the flexibility in which creatures adopt unrelated infants of their own species and sometimes of other species? Researchers in Africa kidnapped infant and juvenile hamadrayas baboons and released them near unrelated troops. Invariably these young monkeys were promptly adopted by young adult male baboons, who cared for them tenderly." These are the very male baboons J.T.Bonner described as having unspeakable dispositions. Masson goes on... "Experimenters who gave mother rats the opportunity to adopt as many as 58 babies went on to offer mother rats odder babies. The rats readily adopted baby mice and baby rabbits. They also retrieved young kittens and tried to keep experimenters from taking them out of the nest again.... Curious to know how far this would go, experimenters procured two bantam chicks, and the rats "eagerly and repeatedly" tried to tuck these into their nest."

Although nurturance is clearly one of the most powerful drives in many complex animals it is also sometimes absent in particular individuals of species noted for strong nurturant behaviour.

It would seem axiomatic that poor nurturant traits in mothers with extremely dependent offspring should have been eliminated by natural selection. Yet poor mothering traits in individuals exist in many such species. Why would natural selection preserve such an obvious maladaptive behaviour if raising offspring to maturity is key to genetic success? The simple answer is that even for a key behaviour such as maternal nurturance, evolutionary adaptation preserves a bell curve of traits as an effective way to respond to environmental stress or opportunity. In species like mice or rats, poor mothering traits may simply be an effective way to limit explosive population growth in times of plenty.

The basic reality in every ecosystem is that its balance is constantly shifting, so that preserving a wide range of options, especially in such basic responses as nurturance and competitiveness is clearly a better strategy than making ultimate choices between adaptive options.

Individual variation may reflect genetic fitness in sexual selection, but it may also speak to the individual responses of the choosers. How individual preference may create a shared genetic trait in a breeding population may be due to the influence of a particular chooser or choosers. Individual preference may even be the case of an early adopter influencing other choosers to emulate their choice. Experiments have shown that male mice carrying the scent of other females are seen as more attractive to new females, showing how popular preference rather than particular traits can influence reproductive success. The pleasure of individual preference experienced by individual females rather than genetic fitness is simply a better explanation for why a male bowerbird creates nests showing extreme ranges of design, color and shape. But the subjective pleasure a female bowerbird takes in seeing a mate try to impress her is arguably analogous to the pleasure most females experience in all courtship behaviour. Even in bowerbirds, it seems the thought rather than the gift is what really matters. The interesting thing is that after producing a spectacular nest to win a mate, female bowerbirds then go on to lay their eggs in a small utilitarian nest created nearby. Arbitrary preference may be a part of sexual selection yet to be studied.

Incredibly complex, difficult and prolonged courting rituals may be nothing more than the inherited unconscious pleasure females take in being courted in particular ways that have little to do with the genetic fitness of suitors. The enormous tail of the Peacock may have begun with nothing more than the individual preference of a peahen for large tails. How else to explain the male trade-off in significantly greater vulnerability to predators from carrying such a burden? If the peacock's elaborate tail is not attributable to the simple subjective preference of peahens, it is difficult to explain why natural selection would have ignored many alternatives that could have been used to establish genetic fitness in particular male peafowl.

The more complicated nurturance / competitiveness becomes, the wider the range of traits, both physical and behavioural in such creatures. As variation becomes increasingly diverse and complicated, sexual selection becomes tied to personal preference in expanding degrees. When physical and behavioural traits are so integrated and complicated that there is no way to isolate adaptive fitness from individual preference, some of the things that determine reproductive success become arbitrary. Building a complicated nest indicates adaptive fitness in some birds, while the ability do battle for territory indicates adaptive fitness in others. In some species it's plumage and others it's in mating dance. Some species like presents. Other species like a song. Why one and not the other? The matter may, to a greater or lesser degree, simply be the influence of the personal preference of particularly successful individuals with genes spread through the gene pool.

It is clear that the range of expression for nurturance / competitiveness remains extremely broad among species, and among individuals within species.

It is also clear that gender difference established through the sexual selection of nurturant and competitive traits allows the greatest variation in genetic expression of physical, structural, behavioural, and psychological traits that come to exist in species.

Almost all psychological traits that define the subjective behaviour of many complex animals can be traced back to the nurturance / competitiveness that define individual difference in different species. And with nurturance / competitiveness, the increased complexity of individual behaviour and individual preference is also completely inevitable.

Nurturance / competitiveness as fundamental subjective drives, existing as a distinct rung on the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity is also a much simpler explanation for the complexity of choices made in the sexual selection of mates than simple adaptive fitness. As dominant and recessive traits carried in sexually reproducing species, these two bilateral drives explain not only the origin of individuality through the broadening of individual variation but also the exceptions to the stereotypical behaviour of each gender. Different species simply have created different heritable expressions of nurturance / competitiveness the way different creatures have created different heritable expressions for limbs, eyes, heads and bodies from the same foundational genes. Just as the genes that produce the heads of creatures in a multiplicity of sizes and forms can be traced back to a foundational set of genes that created the pigment around the mouth opening of sea squirts, so too can all psychological traits in sexually reproducing species be traced back to the genes that produce the foundational subjective experiences of bilateral nurturance / competitiveness in sexually reproducing species.

Preserving variation, maintaining a stable bell curve of traits, natural selection and sexual selection, genetic awareness and plasticity each alter and preserve many distinct options through gender difference and variation.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation accounts for these gender differences by simple variation in the genes that code for nurturance / competitiveness. Evolutionary adaptation simply expresses these foundational genes in different species for many different reasons having to do with the Nash equilibrium in which the species evolved. One species of bird, fish, reptile or primate may express one balance of nurturance / competitiveness where females choose and males compete, while another closely related species may express a completely different balance in which males choose and females compete. The battle of the sexes is really the war that has created the most complex of evolutionary potentialities.

The Bilateral Subjective Response of 'Me / Mine'  
The Origin of Nurture

With sexual selection, creatures would develop even more sophisticated expressions of shared interest / self-interest as they chose and competed for mates and evolved new ways to nurture offspring in ways that gave them better reproductive advantage.

With sexual selection, shared interest / self-interest once expressed only in the Nash equilibrium of cooperation and competition within and among species evolved into the new bilateral subjective response of 'me / mine' expressed through nurturance / competitiveness that created family bonds, which would be the foundation of all nurturant learning. With sexual selection for nurturance / competitiveness within two genders, the unconscious feeling of 'mine' became a fundamental part of subjective experience and the behavioural adaptations that maximized reproductive success. My territory, my resources, my mate, my offspring became the new central issues of reproductive success in all complex creatures that had two genders.

And just as creatures developed new subjective responses and behavioural adaptation to express the feeling of 'me / mine' through nurturance, they also developed new adaptations for competition expressed through direct competitiveness between individuals. This direct and personal competitiveness also served to identify feelings of 'me / mine' in terms of territory, resources, mating opportunity and offspring.

With sexual selection, the heritable rules that defined 'me / mine' controlled much of the reproductive behaviour and physical adaptations of sexually reproducing species. Songs, behavioural dances and gestures, territorial defense, ornament, mating gifts and many distinct physical traits all became part of nurturance / competitiveness that define the bell curve of traits in which sexual selection operates in each species. It can be said that in higher animals, balancing traits for nurturant and competitive behaviour is the foundation for most individual actions and reactions in life.

Responding to the shifting balance within nurturance / competitiveness would be the foundation of all evolutionary change in sexually reproducing species brought about through both natural and sexual selection, as well as genomic awareness and plasticity.

Once sex and sexual selection in two genders became a key part of adaptive change, nurturance / competitiveness allowed the creation of more complex lifecycles in creatures through behaviours expressing more complex forms of cooperation and competition. The more complex creatures became the more complex the nurturant and competitive behaviour in their lifecycles could become. In early sexual reproduction, simple creatures produced mass quantities of sperm and eggs relying on the sheer weight of numbers to achieve random fertilization. Such creatures never knew or concerned themselves with their offspring, and this strategy continues to work effectively for creatures that reproduce in great numbers in ecosystems that can support mass populations. Cuttlefish and salmon, insects and plants and many kinds of fish continue to use this strategy, often dying after one reproductive cycle. In a transitional approach, the Giant Pacific octopus lays 57,000 eggs in a cave and guards them for six months until they hatch, losing half her body weight and dying when her offspring are born. Nurturance ends with the birth of many thousand offspring, from which only two survivors are necessary to maintain the population.

But among small creatures that cannot sustain the production of huge numbers of eggs, protecting a smaller number of offspring became the most effective strategy for reproductive success. The male of one species of fish actually holds its offspring in its mouth, effectively protecting them from predators. The female of one recently extinct species of frog would swallow its eggs and incubate eggs and tadpoles in her stomach until she would literally cough up her new brood of baby frogs.

As species became more complex, the number of offspring in a breeding cycle continued to fall until some egg laying creatures like fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects and dinosaurs became extremely protective of a small brood of offspring for extended periods of time.

With such creatures, nurturance eventually became an extended period of both physical protection and behavioural learning for offspring.

With placental birth, sharks, snakes, mammals and marsupials reduced the number of offspring even further, and with even more vulnerable offspring developing at even slower rates, behavioural learning became an even more complex and important part of nurturance in many species. The longer the connection between mother and offspring, the more important nurturance became, especially those behaviours that allowed creatures to learn alternative reactions to environmental and social experience. Once creatures had to learn to hunt, explore environments and deal with other creatures in order to identify their positive and negative aspects, the heritable genetic rules that coded for particular responses became predispositions upon which nurturance would build particular rules of behaviour through subjective response that included learning. For the first time, conscious learning allowed creatures to alter the rules of response to sensory stimulation creating greater individual variation in behaviour and a more complex cortex in the brain. Using the reinforcing mechanisms of conscious / unconscious pleasure and fear, learning and nurturance would become even more important than genetic instincts and the hardwired nature of individual species. Conscious / unconscious pleasure and fear would become the next great quantum leap in the evolution of subjective experience, and would be the foundation for further variations in behaviour and complexity in evolution.

Kin Selection

Selfish Gene Theory says that nurturant behaviour is entirely a matter of the competitive self-interest of genes. The most accepted explanation for nurturant and altruistic behaviour is in the work of W. D. Hamilton and Robert L Trivers. Basically, they both assert that altruistic behaviour is a method creatures evolved to preserve as many of their own genes as possible by favoring their own offspring. The premise is that the closer creatures are in genetic makeup, the more they will act with nurturant self-interest in a process called kin selection. Hamilton says that is why the greatest degree of cooperation between individual cells can be found in the complex bodies of individuals where all cells are genetically identical. He says that parents favor their children over their sibling's offspring because nephews and nieces have only a quarter of the genes parents share with their own children. Hamilton developed his thesis in his study of bees, ants and wasps (hymnoptera). Because of their genetic makeup, a female of these social animals has more genes in common with her sisters than she has with her own daughters. Hamilton shows that females would do the most to perpetuate their genes by staying with their own mother and helping care for the new eggs that contain her sisters than go out on her own and have her own offspring. He proposes that this is why bees, ants and wasps evolve social systems in with sterile females care for their full siblings.

Robert L. Trivers work seems to confirm this bias of genetic propinquity. If females cannot distinguish between male and female eggs there should be an equal number of male and female offspring. In cases where workers can distinguish the sex of larvae there should be a preponderance of females who share three times the number of genes as they do with males. Analysis of the data on ants that can distinguish between male and female eggs shows females exist in a 3 to 1 proportion to males, while they exist in equal proportions where eggs cannot be identified by sex. Because it is the female workers who feed the eggs, the disproportion must be because of kin selection, where workers favor sisters over brothers who are genetically less alike.

Hamilton and Trivers' work has been widely accepted, with kin selection added as a particular adaptation of natural selection like sexual selection.

Unfortunately there are many possible reasons that sterile hymnoptera may be acting in the way they do that has nothing to do with favoring their own genes. The fact that sterile bees exist to serve a colony in an altruistic way may simply be a selected variation of the nurturant genes in such species. Economically, it is sometimes in the best interest of the colony to exist in a cooperative society where the division of labor removes sexual reproduction from some of the members. The fact that there are many bees who live solitary lives and care nothing about their genetic sisters says the bell curve of nurturant traits is very broad in hymnoptera, and does not necessarily depend on kin selection. The sisters of solitary bees are genetically as close as sisters in communal bees, so why should they be indifferent to the genetic future of their sisters?

The reason communal workers may favor sisters over brothers in a 3 to 1 proportion may be due to the fact that in such insects, nurturant behaviour is most dominant in females. If you're going to nurture tens of thousands of eggs and larvae, it may simply be better to have it done by females who have the genetic predisposition for nurturance in that particular species. Evolutionary adaptation would have favored hives that have far more females who do the nurturant work that is the primary enterprise of the hive. Genetic awareness and plasticity would also respond to the complex challenge of huge numbers of social individuals by creating a female to male ratio that maximizes nurturant traits.

Some hymnoptera have pheromones that they use to alter behaviour and genetic expression. JT Bonner.. "If, for instance, a Queen termite produces an inhibitory pheromone that prevents female nymphs promoting into what is called a secondary reproductive, that pheromone is passed through the colony by mutual licking and food exchange. As M Luscher (1961) has shown, the inhibition pheromone somehow affects the balance of internal hormones within the developing worker so that sexual maturity is prevented."

Clearly there are many ways to change the sex ratio in hymnoptera that has nothing to do with kin selection, a fact which seems to call its very existence it into serious question.

Another possible explanation for the sterility in worker bees is that it may be an expression of neotony, the process by which the behavioural development of individuals is retarded, keeping the individual's behaviour at an early stage of development. It is in fact the case that worker bees who are younger stay and work in the hive for an extended period of time before they become foragers outside the hive. The fact they are sterile may have nothing to do with kin selection, but simply be an expression of retarded sexual development. There are also Cichlid fish where all the males remain in a prepubescent phase in the presence of one dominant adult male. Exhibiting no color, having no testes, and behaving like females, these many males indefinitely defer their genetic potentiality until the dominant male dies or is removed. In a particular experiment to study this, Dr. Russell D Fernald at Stanford University removed the dominant male during the night. In the morning when the other males noticed the dominant male's absence, one and only one male underwent puberty, transforming himself completely, changing his form, behaviour and reproductive system. From a colorless male with undeveloped fins and reproductive tract, this new dominant male became a brightly colored territorial creature, exhibiting all the behaviours and physiology of a breeding male, and did this complete transformation within five minutes. Only genetic awareness and plasticity could allow such a transformation within five minutes. And where are the selfish genes of all those males who would likely never reproduce? How is it that natural selection would allow so many males in the same territory competing for food, if access to a breeding female was so unlikely?

Proposed evidence for kin selection is also said to be found in human beings. Many studies have shown that parents favor their own offspring over the offspring of their siblings. It has even been shown that humans favor boys over girls among their own children. The reason proposed is kin selection whereby parents are biased because of the genetic closeness to their children and their self-interest in preserving their own genes. The bias for boys over girls is said to be the result of boys having far greater genetic potential for reproduction than girls, because girls can only bear so many children, and boys can foster many more. The idea that boys take far more risks and are half as likely to reach maturity is not considered as a reason for the increased instinctive nurturant concern parents feel for their boys. The idea that gender bias has been a part of human culture for only the last 10,000 years is also ignored. Boys may have been more valued in human society simply because we have needed to replace the huge number of boys lost in aggressive conflict. Boys may also have been favored in hunter / gatherer societies because males provided the majority of calories through hunting.

Also completely ignored are the hormonal bonds that create the nuclear family unit. Oxytocin and progesterone bond parents to offspring in mammals. The bonding is necessary because of the slow development of offspring in mammals. Selfish Gene theorists would say the only reason for oxytocin and progesterone to have evolved is because genes found them useful in their self-preservation. As always, such logic is circular. It is the chicken and egg problem that can never be resolved. Survivors are the ones who have survived. It is just as reasonable to say that genes depend entirely for their survival on the subjective behaviour of the individuals they create.

There are countless exceptions to what is predicted by a theory of kin selection.

In his 1978 article The Evolution of Behaviour, John Maynard Smith cites the observations of olive baboons in the Gombe National Reserve in Tanzania. "Of 41 inter-troop transfers observed over six year, 39 involved males, and all the males that reached maturity during that time left their natal troop.... As a result of the transfers, the females in an olive baboon troop will be closely related but the adult breeding males will in general not be related. In chimpanzee troops, where the males form the permanent basis of the troop and the females transfer, the situation is reversed. According to Hamilton's thesis, strong cooperation can be expected among female baboons and male chimpanzees but not among male baboons or among female chimpanzees."

Just the opposite is true. Decades of research since 1978 shows that close genetic affiliations are not the basis of cooperative or altruistic behaviour in baboons or chimpanzees. Females are invariably more cooperative, empathetic and altruistic than males regardless of their genetic similarity. Franz de Waal the pre-eminent authority on chimpanzee behaviour tells the story of how young females in a captive troop would go and fill their mouths with water from a distant tap for a very old arthritic female, and pass the water from their mouths to hers, saving her the long painful journey. Other females would also help lift the old female into a favorite spot in a tree out of simple care and consideration. There is no genetic advantage for unrelated female chimpanzees to help another female beyond her fertile years. There are countless examples of animals giving their lives for unrelated individuals. There are many examples of dogs and humans, with only the most distant genetic relationship, who have perished trying to save the other. Which selfish gene would be responsible for this?

Among bonobos, the entire social structure is based on cooperative, empathetic behaviour in a female dominant society where females leave the troop at maturity. Male chimpanzees, who on the other hand should be most cooperative, are in fact the most hierarchically competitive and aggressive of any higher primate.

Rather than using genetic similarity as the basis for altruistic cooperative behaviour, it is much simpler to recognize that the bilateral subjective response of "me / us" operates in all species and is most powerfully expressed in social animals. In species in which workers have given up sexual reproduction, individuals may simply be expressing the asexual behaviour present before maturity, at a time when an individual's closest affiliations are with other immature asexual siblings. The fact that they are genetically related may simply be an expression of the subjective feeling of 'me / us' in these particular social animals. An interesting experiment would be to transfer eggs from one bee colony to another and see if the worker bees treated their genetic sisters any differently than the unrelated transfers.

Perhaps the greatest existential challenge to the very idea of kin selection is also found in ants. When colonies of Argentinian ants meet, they simply merge into a larger super colony with workers raising unrelated offspring just as their own. Opting for the greater reproductive success offered by cooperative behaviour rather than conflict between colonies has made Argentinian ants the most successful ant population on earth. An even greater existential challenge to the idea of kin selection comes from fire ants. One colony of fire ants will raid another for eggs and raise the resulting larva as if they were their own. Not only do fire ants raise unrelated individuals, the members of the invaded colony, including the queen proceed to join the other colony, indiscriminately raising unrelated offspring as well. Even the queens of other invaded colonies will join the invaders until the entire colony ultimately chooses one queen from among the many in the merged super colony. The one chosen queen may or may not be queen of the original colony. The reproductive success of these super colonies of Argentinian and Fire ants shows that genetic awareness and plasticity often favors traits for shared interest that clearly have no genetic bias for any particular population or genetic profile.

Years of observation have shown that in primates, reciprocity between particular individuals is the basis for differences in pro-social behaviour, and these behaviours seem to be entirely a matter of individual preference. Primates like or dislike each other for their behaviour rather than their genetic closeness. Where lifetime kin affiliation does exist as in the mother / son bond in bonobos, it may simply be due to a persistent increase in the hormonal bond between mother and offspring present in mammals, the same neotenous hormonal bond that creates the nuclear family unit in humans. If kin selection works, why are so many males in social groups indifferent to their offspring? How to explain that a disproportionate amount of violence between human beings is against close relatives? Alfie Kohn... " Marshall Sahlins has shown that no system of human kinship relations is organized in accord with the genetic coefficients of relationship as known to socio-biologists." If genes are so selfish, why is indiscriminate sexual access to females so accepted by dominant males in many species? What possible genetic advantage could a dominant male have in allowing access to females to other males? Why would promiscuous sexuality even exist if selfish genes exist? And perhaps the nail in the coffin of kin selection can be summed up in two words, maternal infanticide. Such genetic suicide should have been weeded from the gene pool of behaviour long ago, and yet it persists in many species. It is difficult to accept a theory where the exceptions clearly outnumber the supporting examples.

There are also many examples of individuals of one species helping another without any possible reciprocal benefit, genetic or otherwise. A human being giving his life in attempting to save a wild animal makes no genetic sense but it has happened many times. A porpoise helping a drowning dog to shore or a captive bonobo helping a starling to fly after it was injured cannot be explained as reciprocal altruism where there might be some long-term genetic benefit to the helper.

Alfie Kohn in his excellent book The Brighter Side of Human Nature does an excellent analysis of the ideologically rigid attachment to the idea of selfish determinism in life that absolutely rejects altruism as anything real. The most accepted explanation for altruism put forward by Robert Trivers says that there is a selfish reason behind every act, even when it looks unselfish because people expect some benefit from something as risky as trying to save a drowning man.

Alfie Kohn... "Reciprocal altruism, the other major biological contribution to the topic, turns out to be no more promising as an explanation of our prosocial behaviour".... "Robert Trivers' determination to find a legalistic account of such behaviour is embarrassingly obvious: "where this an isolated case, it is clear that the rescuers should not bother to save a drowning man." he says. "There must be some self-maximizing advantage to rescuing or no one would do it;" This is the premise, not the conclusion of his discussion.

"Back in the real world, it is common to help strangers even though there is virtually no chance that they will someday return the favor. (In fact, as Sahlins points out, we even help people who may well be construed as genetic competitors.)" All Trivers can offer in response is the speculation that "selection may favor a multiparty altruistic system in which altruistic acts are dispensed freely among more than two individuals." In other words, the existence of precisely what would appear to refute a theory limited to self- maximizing, reciprocal helping behaviour is made to seem like a confirmation of it."

That millions of people actually believe the injunction to love thine enemy and act on it, is as clear a refutation of an ideology of self-interest as one can find. It is difficult to see that compassion, the foundation of almost all religions, is just some kind of self-serving social investment.

The willful blindness and strained explanations for altruism that are a part of selfish gene theory condemns it as anything but rigorous science.

Four quotations from Kohn's book exemplify how selfishness has been seen as a fundamental aspect of nature.

"Richard Dawkins tells us that anyone who still talks about altruism simply has not faced facts: "A human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true."

"Evolutionary biology is quite clear that' What's in it for me?' is an ancient refrain for all life, and there is no reason to exclude Homo sapiens," writes David Barash.

"And from Michael Ghislan... "Given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering-his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch and altruist and watch the hypocrite bleed."

"Richard Alexander has expanded this view into a book. Generosity and altruism are for him nothing more than "complex forms of reproductive selfishness," moral systems are self-serving arrangements of indirect reciprocity, and conscience is "the still small voice that tells us how far we can go without incurring intolerable risks. It tells us not to avoid cheating but how we can cheat socially without being caught."

This is not a description of human society that is even barely tenable or recognizable, and has been demonstrably untrue for at least 4 million years of human evolution, excepting perhaps the last 5000 in which the balance within self-interest / shared interest has been profoundly skewed toward self-interest in a way that actually does reflect something of that jaundiced view of human nature. Surely culture and urbanization and the unjust objectification of human beings through an unavoidable class system may have something to do with that change.

Kohn quotes Jerome Kagan with the first and simplest refutation of such a position.

"The idea that humans always act in the service of self-interest has created serious mischief. So many citizens have come to accept the truth of that assumption about human nature that the average person now treats it as a natural law. And because they believe they should not violate a natural law, they try to obey it...What worries me is that the presumptive validity of the law of self-interest is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Kohn does an excellent job of demolishing the primacy of self-interest as representing the foundation of nature and does it with honest perspective taking, fairness, intellectual clarity and rigor. But, as he himself points out, it is necessary to go further.

Abandoning the very concept of selfishness and altruism because they are so completely absolute and rigid in their definitions may in fact be a better way to draw a distinction between egocentric and prosocial behaviour. It is difficult to see selfishness / altruism as an expression of bilateral subjective response. It is much easier to see shared interest / self-interest expressed through cooperative / competitive behaviour as a bilateral reality in which each depends on the other for their very meaning and existence.

The Sixth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Conscious Pleasure and Fear

Conscious pleasure and fear is the next great quantum leap in subjective complexity arising from instinctive responses that are the unconscious genetic rules for subjective response. Pleasure and fear is the foundation of consciousness because there has to be a positive and negative reinforcing mechanism for conscious learning tied to concrete experience. Pleasure and fear as conscious experiences may have arisen because sensory experience tied to spontaneous / instinctive responses was simply not capable of dealing with complex new ecosystems containing many more complex creatures. Conscious retrievable memory would be the key adaptation necessary to deal with such complex subjective experiences, and conscious retrievable memory depends upon the ability to make mental representations of reality in the brain. Repeating positive experiences and avoiding negative experiences would depend on a creature's ability to tie retrievable memory to conscious feelings about those experiences. Instinctive approach responses would become conscious pleasure; instinctive flight or fight response would become conscious fear when creatures could learn and remember experiences. The reason for consciousness is clearly the advantage it gives creatures in making better assessments of contextual situations, giving them optional choices in behaviour and the ability to learn and remember better strategies. Consciousness is simply a much better adaptive response for survival than hardwired spontaneous / instinctive responses. Where instinct is about unconscious heritable options, consciousness is about remembering experiences and choices and most especially remembering the pleasure or fear associated with such experiences and choices. When evolutionary success is tied to conscious choices, options are geometrically increased because there is such a qualitative improvement in subjective response and the ability to balance even more complex issues of shared interest / self-interest.

Conscious pleasure and fear would be tied to concrete experience as creatures learned to remember and assess positive and negative, pleasurable and fearful memories better and longer, especially the behaviour of different individuals among the species sharing the creature's ecosystem.

The work Michel Cabanac has done at Laval University identifies the appearance of conscious pleasure to more than 350 million years ago with ammonites, the extinct ancestors of modern squid. He has shown how the developing complexity of subjective feelings of pleasure matches the increasing brain complexity of creatures, using the neurotransmitter dopamine which is responsible for the pleasurable feelings that reinforce behaviour.

All animals that experience conscious pleasure use neurotransmitters in the brain to create increasingly addictive responses to experiences that elicit pleasure. The greater the pleasure and the creature's predisposition to it; the greater the addictive response will be. Conscious creatures can be said to be pleasure junkies with varying degrees of addiction to various pleasurable experiences.

The key to these many addictions to pleasurable experience is the ability of individual creatures to remember and re-experience the pleasure as well as the experience itself. In conscious animals, conscious pleasure tied to concrete experience is even more powerful than the benefit derived from repeating the particular behaviour that elicits it.

The famous experiment with rats that could electrically stimulate the pleasure centers in their own brain by pressing a lever showed how they would become so addicted to the pleasure effect, that they would even ignore food and drink.

But since the beginning of life, positive subjective experience is always balanced with negative subjective experience. Conscious feelings of fear tied to concrete negative experience allowed creatures to avoid dangerous experience related to environmental situations like dangerous terrain as well as avoiding dangerous situations with other living creatures. Consciousness also allowed them optional responses when addressing the same fear in different contexts. Many creatures developed intense negative subjective responses to extremely painful events, whether physical or social. Post-traumatic stress disorder in conscious animals is simply the debilitating effect arising from the overwhelming, persistent retrievable memory of extreme fear, and such post-traumatic stress is common in many species.

In another of the many hideous experiments created to understand fear, dogs were repeatedly shocked and allowed no means of escape, until they just lay still and whined. When the partition that imprisoned these dogs was removed, they made no effort to get away when shocked. Even when called or offered food, the dogs made no move to escape. Eventually the dogs had to be dragged back and forth, sometimes 200 times, before they discovered that they could escape the electric shocks. The power of fear to create helplessness and depression can be so great that it overwhelms even the instinct for survival. Many animals capable of conscious fear have often been overwhelmed by the emotional overload of fear, and its weak sister stress.

Because fear is so tied to survival, and pleasure to positive experience with far fewer immediate survival benefits, fear has been demonstrated to be 10 times more powerful than pleasure in the way it affects behaviour.

Conscious fear arose from instinctive unconscious fight or flight responses produced in one of the oldest parts of the brain called the amygdala. Jeffrey M. Masson quotes a number of studies on the neurological basis of fear, "A small electrical impulse to a cat's amygdala (part of the brain's limbic system) produces alertness, a larger one produces the expressions and actions of terror. A rat whose amygdala has been removed loses the fear of cats and will walk right up to one. Researchers at New York University trained rats to expect an electric shock when they heard a tone, and discovered to their surprise that the nerve impulses in the rats taught to fear the tone went straight from the ear to the amygdala, instead of via the usual route through the auditory cortex.

Geneticists say that in just 10 generations of breeding, two strains of rats can be produced from a parental stock, one fearful, one calm."

So clearly, the genetic predisposition for fear can be isolated through artificial selection as a heritable trait. The origins of fear lie deep in the unconscious responses of the reptilian brain, but are only tied to consciousness in the cortex of animals capable of conscious pleasure and fear, of experiencing them as representations of reality in the brain.

In animals capable of conscious fear, unconscious fight or flight responses are integrated in the hypothalamus with concrete retrievable memories of experience. From there these experiences are then routed to the prefrontal cortex where they rise into consciousness. But many conscious fears in higher primates are based on no apparent instinctive precursor.

Many animals also have irrational fears, fears tied to arbitrary, non-threatening experiences.

J. Masson... "Koko, a gorilla, was born in a zoo and raised by humans in a sheltered, loving environment. Yet she has fears—of alligators, for instance, though she has never seen a real one. For years she acted afraid of toy alligators unless their lower jaws were missing. She also appeared to be afraid of iguanas, specifically a pet iguana she saw often. Although the iguana (described as "comatose") never made threatening moves toward her, Koko would run into her own room when the iguana was brought out." Jeffrey M. Masson goes on to describe a particular chimpanzee that was afraid of tarpaulin, and another, while unimpressed by tarpaulin, was reported to fear dust mops. Another chimpanzee in the same group was unmoved by dust mops but found the dividers from ice cubes trays so alarming that researchers kept ice cube dividers in drawers and cupboards so that, when the chimp became unruly, they could punish her by taking out the dividers and exhibiting it. At least in our nearest cousin, fear as phobia has already extended the range of fearful response to objects and situations that had no apparent relation to survival or real threat.

From Unconscious to Conscious Responses

If consciousness is the most powerful subjective adaptation using neural networks in the brain, how did it evolve?

In animals, approach / avoidance responses evolved into instincts that were unconsciously processed in the brains of living creatures. These unconscious instincts depended on integrating complex sensory experience, and coding appropriate behaviour into the genetic makeup of creatures. Evolutionary adaptation determined all such unconscious heritable instincts for subjective response in different creatures.

Instincts evolved into true conscious feelings in creatures with brains when those unconscious instinctual responses came to elicit conscious feelings of pleasure and fear. This ability to consciously feel pleasure and fear evolved with the ability to create representations of reality from retrievable memory as a separate function of the brain.

A caterpillar can be conditioned to avoid a particular chemical by giving it a shock when the chemical is present. Even the butterfly that grows out of this caterpillar will retain this conditioned aversion to the chemical. This unconscious conditioned learning is clearly an adaptive ability allowing the caterpillar and butterfly to avoid something that has become negatively conditioned as part of unconscious memory. Being able to detect and respond to chemicals associated with bad experience is an important part of learning, but even more important is the ability to learn from conscious retrievable memories of concrete experience.

Before creatures were able to make conscious representations of reality from retrievable memory, all subjective experiences were genetically hardwired as either approach / avoidance or instinctual responses.

Newly evolved creatures that could remember and learn about other creature's behaviour as well as contextual environmental risks and opportunities had a tremendous advantage in terms of reproductive success and evolutionary adaptation. Initially these retrievable memories would have been of short duration, but the longer a creature could store retrievable memory of past experience, the greater the chance of its survival and subsequent reproductive success. The more complex creatures became and the more senses they used to form retrievable memories, the more complex the brain would have to become to integrate such complex learning based on such complex memories. When retrievable memories were of such complexity and duration they could only be experienced as mental representations of reality, subjective experiences became conscious feelings reinforced using neurotransmitters in the brain. When memory became tied to positive and negative feelings of pleasure and fear, adaptation would become as much about nurturance and subjective learning as the genetic nature of creatures. With consciousness, nature and nurture would become inextricably intertwined as bilateral nature / nurture, and most likely had its first expression in the nurturance / competitiveness traits that created gender differences through sexual selection.

Feelings of pleasure and fear experienced as concrete representations of reality in the brain may have first appeared in ammonites (an extinct species of the squid family). Michel Cabanac at Laval University in his ground breaking work on the emergence of pleasure and its connection to consciousness in living creatures identifies some of the physiological differences that appear in creatures making conscious representations of reality in their brain. Snakes and reptiles experience pleasure and have the same physiological response as humans when they experience a conscious feeling, such as a rise in heart rate and body temperature. He has shown how animals like birds and reptiles experience play as an important pleasurable learning experience, and how this behaviour is not observed in amphibians. Cabanac identifies play as an important evolutionary stage in the development of conscious feelings of pleasure. He also gives examples of how some fish "display criteria for play as well as social strategies, social learning and tradition, cooperative hunting that resembles those of primates including foraging skills, tool use, cognitive maps, memory, and predatory behaviour, and the manipulation of the environment." If this is so, conscious feelings tied to retrievable memory and learning appear very early in the evolution of complex life forms. He also makes clear that these new abilities coexisted with the production of dopamine in the brain as part of increased brain complexity, and dopamine is the prime pleasure drug in the brains of conscious creatures.

Craig Kennedy at the University of Vanderbilt trained male mice to learn complex tasks rewarded only by the chance to fight other males. He showed that the pleasure drug dopamine was released in the nucleus cumbens in anticipation of the reward of battle. When dopamine inhibitors were given to the mice, they stopped working to gain access to aggressive confrontation with other males. In another experiment with young human males, Kennedy demonstrated that dopamine production in the nucleus cumbens was elicited by watching videotapes of both hockey fights and scantily clad women, showing the connection to pleasure in both sex and aggression in human males. His experiments demonstrate that in both mice and humans, aggression is elicited and maintained as pleasurable experiences in the brain, at least in males.

When experiences were stored as conscious memory, feelings about those experiences became conscious memories as well. The unconscious fight / flight response became conscious fear. The unconscious approach response became conscious pleasure. And both conscious experiences were reinforced using neurotransmitters in the brain that tied the repetition of behaviour to the intensity and duration of pleasure and fear associated with particular memories. Positive conscious response using neurotransmitters like dopamine for reinforcement would tie the repetition of behaviour to different levels and degrees of pleasure in any particular experience. The same process would also be used for tying an aversion to the repetition of negative experience to displeasure and fear. For the first time, learned experience had its own conscious reward / punishment, approach / avoidance mechanism that motivated creatures to repeat positive experience and avoid repeating negative experience.

Michel Cabanac's work is so crucial because evolutionary potential is so much greater in creatures capable of conscious rather than instinctive reactions. The origin of complex behaviour goes back to the ability of creatures to have conscious memories of pleasurable and fearful experience. The conscious memory of pleasure is as important as the pleasure itself in reinforcing positive behaviour. So, if the human brain and consciousness can be said to be the most complex creation we know in the universe, that complexity began with the creatures that could feel conscious pleasure and fear.

In higher animals capable of conscious feelings of pleasure and fear and even more complex emotions tied to social behaviour, automatic unconscious responses continue to exist as complex instinctual behaviours. Such genetic rules of subjective response to others can be seen clearly in dogs that have been bred to emphasize particular instinctive responses. Herding dogs have been bred to emphasize the natural instinctual stalking behaviour in hunting, while behaviourally eliminating the kill response that is natural in canines. Retrieving dogs are bred to emphasize the instinctual fetch response observable in almost all puppies, while behaviourally eliminating the feeding response canines have with fresh killed prey. These stalking and fetching behaviours are unconscious and automatic, but herding and retrieving dogs must be taught through either the pleasure of positive reward or the fear of aversive punishment carried out by the trainer to eliminate the next step in their instinctual hunting behaviour. When dogs that have been bred for the strongest genetic predisposition to herd or fetch are taught to herd sheep or retrieve game, nature meets nurture as the dog is rewarded with praise or treats that form retrievable memories of pleasure. This operant conditioning depends on the ability of a dog to remember past training and associate it with a pleasurable reward.

In a similar way a kitten stalking an invisible mouse is operating on instinct, but learns to hunt through conscious emulation of its mother. When a cat teaches its kitten to hunt by bringing home live prey, the unconscious instinct in the kitten will become conscious learning stored as retrievable memory, the reward for the kitten being the meal that it makes of the particular prey when it is killed.

When instinct becomes nurturant learning, it depends entirely on the reinforcing neurotransmitters that create pleasure and fear in animals capable of remembering experience and applying that learning to new conditions.

Consciousness itself may be defined as the representation of reality that exists as an emergent artifact of sensory awareness in creatures that have the ability to store and process retrievable memories as pleasurable or fearful learned experience. As we have said, consciousness may necessarily have arisen to create representations of reality in the brain when retrievable memories became so complex in number, of longer and longer duration, tied to so many senses of so many different behaviours and experiences of events and other living creatures that only a simpler mental representation of reality could integrate remembered experience. Consciousness can be seen as the resonant connection between retrievable memory and current experience. Consciousness is a way of being in time, the way awareness is a way of being in space. Awareness / consciousness is the bilateral subjective expression of life in space / time. Both are mental projections of experience. As Chris Frith at University College, London, has written, "Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality."

It has been demonstrated that of the many millions of bits per second of information that flow into the visual cortex of the brain in human beings, only 40 bits per second of that information is used to create the representation of reality we call sight. Recent experiments have created functional sight in blind people using only 60 electrodes from a camera attached to the optic nerve. This demonstrates that even with such limited sensory input, the brain can make useful sensory representations of reality. How much information it takes to imagine any object, experience something in a dream or remember a particular experience is still unknown, but if it is comparable to the physical senses, the brain processes and stores incredible amounts of information and needs only a small sample to make a representation of reality that is nearly indistinguishable from what is perceived as the real thing.

Conscious feelings are tied to memories of concrete experience and learning and begin in the unconscious just like the subjective responses that remain in the unconscious part of the brain where instinct and approach / avoidance are coded as automatic reactions. The unconscious fight response to the detection / perception of threat by bacteria or rattlesnakes evolved into conscious aggression in creatures capable of conscious feelings. The startle response that is unconscious and automatic in creatures like amphibians evolved into a conscious surprise response to unexpected experience in creatures like reptiles and mammals capable of conscious feelings. Unconscious approach responses to positive experience evolved into conscious pleasure, while particular distaste responses to unpleasant food or toxic chemicals evolved into disgust. The unconscious frustration a creature feels at some particular loss of food or opportunity evolved into conscious disappointment. Before the true social emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, happiness and sadness, creatures were first able to experience conscious feelings of fear, aggressiveness, startle response, distaste, pleasure and disappointment tied only to concrete experience. All these new conscious feelings that elicited the reward of pleasure and the aversive response of fear are reinforced by addictive neurotransmitters tied to concrete experience. This allows creatures conscious learned alternative responses in different situations and contexts at different times. Such feeling experienced in a separate mental space in the brain is the foundation of consciousness in all living creatures.

Recent experiments have shown that the neural reactions in the brain that create physical actions happen before they are consciously perceived. Humans apparently can decide what to do before they are aware of the decision to do it. In one experiment, subjects were asked to press a button and do it the instant they made the decision. Brain imaging showed that individuals engaged the motor neurons to press the button up to 10 seconds before the individuals reported that they were conscious of making the decision. Perception it seems is experienced unconsciously before its conscious representation in the brain. A good example of this is the universal automatic facial responses in humans to the emotions of fear, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness and happiness. Even newborn infants and blind children make the typical human face for fear, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness and happiness, indicating that it is a hardwired response rather than culturally learned. These universal automatic instinctual responses to emotion proceed from the limbic system to the cortex of the brain where they are interpreted and experienced through cultural conditioned and socialized individual long-term retrievable memory.

The recognition of emotions depends primarily on rapid unconscious analysis of human behaviour. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, gives numerous examples of how human beings can make incredibly complex assessments of human personality and behaviour in seconds using no conscious rational thought. Dr. Aaron Sell at the University of California, Santa Barbara has shown that people can determine the relative physical strength of individuals from a simple photograph of different male faces, showing that human faces can indicate a great deal about the physical capabilities of an individual. Women can tell men who have a history of cheating from their photographs. As we have said, consciousness itself may be seen as an emergent artifact of retrievable memory where the brain has to stitch together a plausible representation of reality because retrievable memories have become so numerous, so complex, using so many different sensory organs that only a simpler mental representation of reality is of any use. The fascinating thing is that these representations of reality based on such small samples of information can be so incredibly accurate and consistent among many individuals.

In creatures that experience conscious pleasure and fear, brains are hardwired to create coherent meaning from experience. As David Brooks points out in his book, The Social Animal, "John Bargh of Yale argues that just as Galileo removed the earth from its privileged position at the center of the universe,' so this intellectual revolution removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of human behaviour. This is especially true of emotions, Brooks quotes Joseph Le Doux, "The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts about emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake."

Even moral judgments are rapid intuitive evaluations. "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have found that evaluated feelings, even on complicated issues like euthanasia, can be detected within 200- 250 milliseconds after a statement is read. You don't have to think about disgust, or shame, or embarrassment, or whether you should blush or not. It just happens."

The ability of creatures to make mental narrative representations of experience from sensory awareness and stored memories differentiates conscious and unconscious perception. Dreams are a good example of how the brain can even do this without any sensory stimulation at all. Electrical brain stimulation has also been shown to produce perceptual representations of reality with no external sensory input at all, with smells, tastes and tactile feelings experienced as being indistinguishable from the real thing. Phantom limbs of amputees are also representations of reality in the brain that are often indistinguishable from the real thing.

Michel Cabanac, studying the transition from approach / avoidance responses to conscious feelings of pleasure identifies play as a transitional phase where instinctual responses become conscious representations of reality in certain creatures.

It is difficult to imagine play as anything but instinctual responses experienced as conscious mental events. A puppy stalking or chasing a sibling as if it were prey rehearses instinctual behaviour creating retrievable memories of action and reaction that will one day be focused on hunting real prey. Many mammals often play at chasing imaginary prey or rivals. Play is the conscious precursor of many different behaviours using different reactions demanding complex learning stored as retrievable memory. Play, it appears, is the developmental transition between unconscious instinctual response and conscious learning.

At the University of Lethbridge, Dr. Sergio Pellis has demonstrated that young rats allowed free play have much richer neural connections than rats raised with adults who greatly limit such play, and these richer neural connections were found in the prefrontal cortex where social learning and memory is processed. His team has also demonstrated that rats completely deprived of play are social incompetents as adults, reaffirming that play is also vitally important in translating subjective experience into social behaviour.

David Brooks... "Rats who are separated from their mothers for 24 hours lose twice as many brain cells in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices than rats who are not separated. Rats raised in interesting environments have 25 percent more synapses than those raised in ordinary cages."

Clearly the developmental processes of play and nurturance that transforms instinct into conscious behaviour is as crucial to social interactions as it is to hunting techniques.

Retrievable memory demands a much more complicated brain than one using only instinctive genetic memory and conditioned responses. Conscious feelings of pleasure and fear require a whole new system where they can be processed. The limbic system of the reptilian brain where unconscious approach / avoidance responses and instincts are centred needed a new structure in the brain where feelings could arise and be consciously integrated with retrievable memory. The need to integrate the countless retrievable memories necessary for learning and create a secondary representation of reality required a neo-cortex where these memories could be processed into action and reaction. Remove the amygdala from a mouse that has learned to fear cats and it will walk fearlessly to its death. Pleasure and fear require both unconscious predispositions and conscious learned responses stored in retrievable memory.

As retrievable memories of pleasure and fear became longer and more complex, it was necessary to integrate those memories as a representation of learned experience. Consider a computer mouse. For human beings a computer mouse has meaning only as an integrated conscious representation of retrievable memory. The words elicit associations from retrievable memory for shape, color, taste, smell and touch only in those people who have experienced their existence and use. Just the words computer mouse may also elicit retrievable memories of personal experiences of pleasure in learning its use with new programs or even retrievable memories of fear experienced because of an inadvertent computer crash. Every individual who knows what a computer mouse is has different retrievable memories and associations for every context in which it may have been used. And a person growing up in a culture where computer mice do not exist would have no idea what it was, because they lack retrievable memories of them. Show a computer mouse to a Bushman who has never seen one, and he would have no associations with which to represent its relation to reality.

Just one object like a computer mouse requires an incredibly complex ability to associate memories in different ways, and such retrievable memories can elicit responses that are physiological and psychological expressed in the bilateral reality of physiological / psychological conscious / unconscious responses. Imagine the taste of lemon, and your mouth may pucker at the thought. Pass the smell of new cut hay, and it can transport a person who grew up on a farm back to distant remembered experiences. Integrating memories of pleasure and fear allows learning to take place, and remains the primary function of consciousness in all creatures that make mental representations of reality.

Feelings and Consciousness

Conscious feelings are subjective responses to concrete experience created from retrievable memories of learned experience reinforced by neurotransmitters in the brain. A pleasurable experience can in fact even elicit a negative feeling if conditioned with an unpleasant reaction because of conscious learning. It has been shown that creatures capable of conscious feelings will avoid pleasant tasting food if it is associated with subsequent nausea.

Conscious feelings involve only those retrievable memories of concrete objects and experiences with other creatures whether pleasant, unpleasant or fearful.

Consider an apple. The response of different creatures to a simple object like an apple will depend on the creature's genetic makeup. A worm, a bird or human will respond to such an inanimate object depending on whether they perceive the apple as food. But human beings are also capable of countless other reactions to an object as simple as an apple. Animals that can make conscious representations of an apple in the brain are capable of having feelings about that apple, of remembering the pleasure in its taste or the joy of finding a tree full of ripe apples. Those animals capable of experiencing pleasure, displeasure and fear as separate experiences in a mental space in the brain will experience such conscious feelings, and the nature of those feelings will depend on the subjective nature of the animal involved. Elephants, dogs, deer and monkeys will eat an apple, but its taste and preference will depend on the reinforcing neurotransmitters in the brain creating a memorable experience of pleasure.

In all conscious animals, pleasurable or fearful feelings as conscious representations of reality are tied exclusively to concrete experience that depends on retrievable memory and socialized learning. The reason human beings have so many more reactions to an apple than a chimpanzee might have are the retrievable memories of complex socialized learning a human being can experience tied to an object as simple as an apple. Animals have concrete feelings about apples like humans do, but humans can also have complex emotions about apples. No chimpanzee would ever be able to emotionally connect Mom and apple pie, imagine making apple liqueur in a revolutionary way, or get excited about creating a business to market such a new drink. Humans are capable of having countless true emotional reactions to an apple because humans can imagine a concrete object in many complex social contexts. Feelings become emotions in social animals when they become part of complex personal / cultural relationships.

Anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, and fear are usually identified as the primary emotional responses and are in fact unique to social creatures capable of conscious feelings of pleasure and fear. In creatures capable of conscious feelings, all these six basic emotions evolved from concrete feelings of pleasure and fear tied to concrete experiences accessible through retrievable memory. Personal anger evolved from concrete aggressiveness. Disgust evolved from concrete distaste. Personal happiness evolved from concrete pleasure experienced as joy. Personal sadness most likely evolved from concrete separation anxiety from the mother or social group. Surprise evolved from the concrete startle response. The conscious emotional fear involved in rejection most likely evolved from the concrete fear that arose from the unconscious fight / flight response to personal danger of injury or death.

Birds, reptiles, mammals and primates exhibit concrete conscious feelings of pleasure and fear that are the precursors to social emotions. A day old chick fleeing the shadow of a hawk is not experiencing conscious fear, but simply a genetically hardwired avoidance reaction, but anyone who has watched chicks scatter at a shadow can see the genetic avoidance response that is the origin of conscious fear. A chicken that has learned to remember and fear a particular dog or person is exhibiting such a consciously learned feeling of fear. Most of the animals in the Galapagos Islands were completely unafraid of humans when people first arrived because they had no retrievable memories of predators. There was no inherited predisposition for flight distance in those particular animals because it had no use in an ecosystem where there were no predators.

Conscious feelings of pleasure and fear tied to concrete learned experience would be the foundation for the complexity of conscious emotions that would evolve in social animals and culminate in the infinite emotional complexity of the human psyche.

There is compelling data stemming from behavioural and neurobiological studies showing that fish are conscious, intelligent, sentient beings that express conscious preferences, which makes it clear that sentience arising from retrievable memory of conscious experience arose very early in evolutionary history.

Dr. Michel Cabanac has discovered that reptiles such as iguanas maximize sensory pleasure. They experience what is called "emotional fever" (a rise in body temperature") and tachycardia, (an increased heart rate), physiological responses that are associated with pleasure in other vertebrates, including humans. Cabanac suggests that reptiles experience basic emotional states and that the ability to have an emotional life emerged between the time of amphibians and early reptiles. He believes that the first mental event to emerge as consciousness was the ability of an individual to experience the sensation of pleasure or displeasure.

Complex feelings and individual personality goes deep into the evolutionary roots of animals. Mark Bekoff... "All mammals share neuroanatomical and neurochemical pathways that are important for feeling. Whales have spindle cells in the same area of the brain as humans, and these cells are linked to social organization, empathy, intuition about the feelings of others, as well as rapid, gut reactions. Whales actually have more of these cells than humans."

There are differences in how animals feel and express those feelings and there are also differences between individuals of the same species. Research by Sam Gosling has shown that, as with humans, each individual has his or her own "personality." Animals capable of conscious pleasure and fear can be bold, shy, playful, aggressive, sociable, curious, emotionally stable, or agreeable; they can be extroverted, introverted, dominant or submissive.

Individuality, the differences in subjective response among creatures of the same species is common in vertebrates and invertebrates, insects and even single celled organisms. Through evolutionary adaptation, variation in expressions of subjective response were accentuated and made more complex. Awkwardness and dexterity; risk-taking and caution; competency at song making, sexual posturing and dance is key to reproductive success because of individual preference in mating pairs in various species. Even nurturant behaviour such as gift giving became a key part of individual preference in mating in creatures as simple as insects. In the most extreme case, some male spiders actually make a food offering of their own bodies to gain reproductive access to a female. Not very good for preserving the male's selfish genes and the chance to mate again.

Very early in evolutionary history personal preference for particular expressions of individuality in subjective response was the foundation for much of evolutionary variation and complexity. Very early in evolutionary history, it was the individual assessment of what other creatures were feeling about each other that determined the reproductive success of countless creatures.

To understand the evolution of individuality it is necessary to understand the early origin of sexual attraction. Dr. Helen Fisher in her book, Why We Love, says, "All these data lead me to believe that animals, big and little are biologically driven to prefer, pursue, and possess specific mating partners; there is a chemistry to animal attraction. And this chemistry must be the precursor to human love."

Scientists studying manta rays in Mexico found that only certain individual humans would be allowed close contact, particular rays letting particular divers touch them and even ride on their backs. Experiments showed that the particular preference was entirely a matter of the individual manta ray being able to look into the diver's eyes. When the eyes were hidden with dark film on the diver's masks, no divers were allowed close contact. This discrimination in feelings of trust by manta rays clearly demonstrated their subjective preference and discrimination among humans that undoubtedly signified a clear preferential choice for some part of human personality reflected only in the eyes. What feelings the giant fish were experiencing when they look into a particular human's eyes is entirely a matter of speculation.

Dr. Marc Bekoff in his book The Emotional Lives of Animals gives many examples of animals forming close emotional bonds with members of their own species, and with members of different species. He gives many examples of emotions in animals that may be different than human emotions, but only in degree.

"Many animals play and experience joy, as both immature and mature individuals. Hens love to play, and some are moody, emotional and form close friendships. Cows also play games with one another and form strong lifelong friendships. They also sulk, hold grudges and act vain."

Neuroscientist Steve Siviy has shown that dopamine (and perhaps serotonin and norepinephrine) is important in the regulation of play, and that large regions of the brain are active during play. Rats show an increase in dopamine activity simply anticipating the opportunity to play.

Neural circuits for laughter can be found in very ancient regions of the brain. As neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp notes, "Research on roughhousing play in mammals, both sapient and otherwise, clearly indicates that the sources of play and laughter in the brain are both instinctual and subcortical." Human babies, even one's born blind and deaf, laugh at two months of age, clearly indicating its deep subcortical origin. The neurochemical dopamine is also implicated in both human and rat laughter.

Animals are also capable of grief and sadness and there are many documented examples of animals that exhibit powerful changes in behaviour and physiology on the loss of a member of the social group. This has been noted in wolves, primates, elephants, llamas, and countless others, where individuals or entire groups will completely loose interest in feeding, sex, play or social interaction on the death of a particular individual. Some individuals become so depressed at the death of a mate or offspring that they languish and die. Some species actually have wakes where the whole group will say goodbye to a dead individual with intimate gestures and keening cries.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania report that baboons rely on friendships to help them cope in stressful situations. When a lion killed a baboon named Sierra, her mother, Sylvia, looked to friends for support. Researcher Ann Engh described Sylvia's reaction as depression. "Without Sierra, Sylvia really had nobody else,... so great was her need for social bonding that Sylvia began grooming with a female of much lower status, behaviour that would otherwise be beneath her... like humans, baboons seem to rely on friendly relationships to help them cope in stressful situations. "

Animals are also capable of jealousy, rage, resentment, self-pity, trust, deceit, friendship, loyalty, empathy, and compassion.

In mammals, the hormonal bond between a mother and offspring generally lasts until maturity. And it was within maternal relationships that socialized nurturant behaviour first arose with personal acceptance and rejection acting as the carrot and stick necessary for complex learning in offspring.

In social animals, this hormonal bond between individuals would be extended to allow the protection of vulnerable offspring by the entire group, and increased the complexity of learning necessary for cooperative reciprocal behaviour.

In bonobo groups the bond between mother and son lasts a lifetime, and the social status of the son depends entirely on that of his mother. This lifelong bond would be adapted in early humans to become the lifelong bond between a man and woman. Human males also form lifelong bonds to their offspring as exhibited in bonobo females.

In human beings, sexual and emotional reciprocity would become the basis for lifelong monogamous bonding. And in human beings, reciprocal sexuality / intimacy would become the foundation of the new and unique emotion called love. In humans, love would become the first emotion expressed through the hormonal bonding that creates the nuclear family unit. Recent experiments have actually shown that unconditional love exists in seven separate regions of the brain, and is not tied to sexuality or any concrete feeling of pleasure. This would seem to also support the idea of unconscious nurturant bonding.

Evolution always builds new adaptations on earlier successful precursors of those adaptations. Compassion is impossible without the earlier adaptation of empathy. Clan or ethnic solidarity is impossible without the earlier adaptation of 'us / them' expressed in social inter-group dynamics. Human love in the nuclear family unit is impossible to understand without understanding its origins in emotional attachments among chimpanzees and bonobos, because human love, like all human emotions, has its origin in creatures that are very much like us.

To understand what it is to be human it is necessary to understand the earlier adaptations that we have preserved from among our closest relatives and see how they have been altered in creating abstract self-consciousness and the subjective emotions that arise from them. The difference between human feelings tied to concrete experience and other animals is that they have a rational component. Humans can make choices about their feelings about concrete experiences, and how they will respond to them. But the foundation for those choices in behaviour begins in our nearest relatives.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest genetic relatives among higher apes. Orang-utans and gorillas are genetically more distant, and yet human beings seem to preserve many traits from each of our closest relatives. When we examined the behaviour of our nearest relatives, we will see that humans seem to represent the broadest bandwidth of primate behaviour, integrating many different traits from all our closest cousins into a psyche of much greater complexity and flexibility. To understand what it is to be human, we must first look at the different subjective responses we have integrated into a new type of subjective consciousness.

Many studies examining the similarity and differences between apes and humans have been done over the last 30 years identifying startling similarities in both behaviour and social complexity.

Studies of chimpanzees in the wild have shown them to be capable of creating specialized tools and imitative learning. The personality of dominant individuals has been shown to create cultural differences in chimpanzee and baboon troops that profoundly affect the health and survival of every individual in the troop. Chimpanzees have been shown to cooperatively hunt smaller animals and share protein from such kills, such sharing creating a powerful bonding experience between males, as well as creating mating preferences in individual females. Chimpanzees have also been shown to commit murder, stalking and killing isolated males of nearby troops. Such killing has been shown to expand the territorial range of troops that killed most often which allowed it greater reproductive success and survival. Killing is a part of chimpanzee behaviour, and in one rare example a particular individual female even killed babies in the group so she could engage in cannibalistic behaviour. This behaviour ostracized her and the daughter with whom she shared such kills. Observations in the wild showed that a gang of male chimpanzees driven from one particular troop systematically murdered almost all the members of their own troop in what clearly must have been acts of homicidal revenge.

Within the chimpanzee troop, violence is rare and usually ritualistic with more than 95 percent of interactions positive and affiliative. Hierarchical dominance among males is responsible for complex alliances and rivalries that can in many ways be seen as analogous to human political behaviour. Favours are granted, bribes offered, support granted or withheld depending on personal friendship or tactical benefit to leadership rivals and their supporters. Female support is courted with babies being kissed and played with by males seeking the social support and loyalty of their mothers for future hierarchical disputes and contention.

At the center of all social relationships in chimpanzee troops is the innate sense of reciprocity through which personal relationships are bound through rewards for positive favors or behaviours or through penalties for negative ones. Just as in human society, the support of friends and the enmity of rivals and enemies form the foundation of most social interaction. If an individual chimpanzee finds a large quantity of food and does not call the others to it, the dominant male may beat that individual for such selfish behaviour.

Chimpanzees have also been shown to have strong emotional bonds, sometimes expressed through friendships and loyalty that may cause an individual to endure extreme rejection and suffering when a friend loses rank among the other members of the troop. A deposed and beaten dominant male may sometimes retain the friendship of his best friend, even though it costs the friend his own place in the male hierarchy.

Chimpanzees are also capable of complex emotions like affection, empathy, loyalty, jealousy, gratitude, self-pity, rage and resentfulness. Observations of captive populations have shown chimps capable of deceit and selfishness as well as guilt, moodiness, strong emotional preference for particular individuals, and long memories of positive and negative experiences with other individuals.

Although chimpanzees are the most aggressive of primates, chimpanzee social relationships have been observed to be 96.4 percent affiliative rather than confrontational and aggressive, and as we have previously pointed out, the social relationships in all higher apes are strongly affiliative.

Studies have also shown that chimpanzees, bonobos and even orang-utans, when taught to use American Sign Language, are capable of language abilities similar to that of a human child of two. One young bonobo even learned to use sign language from observing his mother's training.

The orang-utan, a primate that appeared many millions of years before the common ancestor of chimpanzee and humans, is also capable of complex communication equal to that of two to three year-old child when taught to use American Sign Language.

Even language, the most sophisticated means of communication and emotional bonding has its earliest expression in our nearest cousins who never use language in the wild.

The Seventh Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Conscious Emotion

The Pleasure of Personal Acceptance  
The Fear of Personal Rejection

Mammals have existed for more than 200 million years; primates for less than half that. Mammals were very successful until the rise of the dinosaur when they were nearly driven to extinction. At the time of the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the biggest surviving mammal was the size of a cat, and the biggest primate the size of a mouse. Since then, mammals and primates have come to rule the world, with blue whales becoming the largest creatures to ever live on earth. Mammals have also become the most numerous of complex land creatures as different as rodents, herd animals, apes and humans. Once dinosaurs were gone, mammals came to dominate virtually every land ecosystem with many species that exist in the billions. Even if human beings had never evolved, other mammal species would still rule the land, as they did until modern human beings came along.

Protective nurturance exists in leeches, fish and some species of reptile, and can be traced back in the fossil record where dinosaur mothers are observed to have died with their offspring gathered around them. What gave mammals their great advantage was that nurturance went beyond simply feeding and protecting offspring, going much further into complex environmental and social learning. This required a bigger brain, better senses, conscious feeling, greater adaptability, and far greater variation in individual personality. In mammals, the heritable rules of subjective behaviour became behavioural predispositions upon which nurturant learning acted in complex ways and in different measures and proportions within individuals. In mammals, nature / nurture became indivisible aspects of social response and reproductive success. In social mammals, these rules created complex individual personality and the complex neocortex of the brain.

Mammals have slow developing offspring that need protection for long periods of time, and the reason they develop so slowly is because conscious behavioural responses to environmental opportunity and pressure requires complex learning. The hormonal bond between mother and offspring made this possible.

Franz de Waal... "During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who responded to their offspring's needs out reproduced those that were cold and distant. Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted and defended their young, we should not be surprised by gender differences in human empathy. It is the mother / offspring bond that is the foundation of all complex social behaviour."

Mammals have to learn to use and refine the genetic behavioural predispositions that define their very nature by observational experience and trial and error practice. In mammals, nurture is as important as nature, and each is effectively useless without the other. Offspring in mammals have to be shown how to hunt, and the best places to do it. They have to learn how to react to predators in different circumstances and situations. They have to learn the skills and behaviours that allow them to find a place in a social hierarchy. They have to learn the best subjective responses to those of their own kind and to the other species that are part of their ecosystem. This is the reason all young mammals play. Their survival depends on having a safe way to practice the innate skills and behaviours upon which they will depend for survival. This is the reason mothers reward and discipline appropriate and inappropriate behaviour in order to reinforce the learning necessary in life. And because the hardwired bond between mother and offspring is the most powerful positive subjective experience in life, reward and discipline would have to do with the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection, the reward and punishment paradigm mothers use with their offspring. In mammals, the most intense pleasure and fear would come from the reaction of a mother to the behaviour of her offspring. It's true of horses, porpoises and people. The reinforcing pleasure of personal acceptance and the disciplinary effect of personal rejection by a mother with her offspring is the origin of all complex personality traits and behaviour because these conscious emotions are based on new rules for subjective response by which individuals try to maximize the pleasure of personal acceptance and minimize and mitigate the fear of personal rejection.

The ancient genetic predisposition for cooperation expressing the bilateral subjective reality of 'me / us' also allowed mammals to form large communal groups to maximize security for vulnerable offspring. And with such herding behaviour, acceptance and rejection also became the foundation for social group behaviour that went far beyond the nurturance / competitiveness involved in sexual selection. In social mammals with slow developing offspring, the nurturant response of the group became as important to reproductive success as any other physical or behavioural traits possessed by individuals, including mothers. No matter how excellent the mothering traits of an individual, few mammal species are able to survive as independent creatures. Bears and a few large felines rear their offspring on their own, but most depend on the support and protection of a group. Even top predators like wolves and lions need the pack or the pride to insure the survival of offspring. Just like top predators, herds of mammals from wildebeest, elephants, musk oxen and bison also depend on the social cohesiveness of the group. The large brain in these animals grew so much more subjectively complex because the heritable behavioural traits they depended on for survival had as much to do with nurturant teaching and learning as part of a group as it did with reproductive behaviour.

Only in the last decades has the social complexity of herd and pack mammals come to be appreciated by science. Elephants have even been observed touching the bones of a former member of the herd with what appears to be tenderness never displayed for the bones of strangers. Mark Bekoff describes one herd of elephants that was once entirely comfortable with humans that was hunted almost to extinction in the early decades of the 20th century. The only way the herd survived was by learning to forage only at night, and attack humans on sight. This behaviour was passed through social learning from generation to generation, so that their descendants still exhibit the same behaviour, even though these elephants have not been hunted for decades. This kind of social learning takes a big brain, and some mammals have had such large brains for millions of years.

In herding and pack mammals, subjective responses and emotional sophistication allowed the complex bonding and nurturant teaching that is the foundation for the emotional complexity that would arise in primates, apes and humans. In social mammals, feelings become emotions, and emotional variation finally becomes complex individual personality made up of complex psychological traits.

Unlike the hormonal bond between mother and offspring, the pleasure of personal acceptance in a group was reinforced as a retrievable memory of a particular emotion tied to a particular social experience. In the same way personal rejection was reinforced as a retrievable memory of fear tied to particular social experiences. With these new conscious pleasures of acceptance and fears of rejection, complex emotions and psychological states were born as dopamine reinforced aspects of subjective response.

Fifty-five million years ago, the neocortex of the brain developed from the olfactory bulb in the earliest primate, allowing conscious rational choices about how to respond to unconscious instinctive responses arising from the limbic system. For the first time, a living creature could make a rational choice from a number of considered options in responding to the unconscious rules for subjective response hardwired in the brain. And these rational, considered options were not so much expressions of freewill as free won't, the ability to censor hardwired unconscious responses. Experiments with humans have shown, that much of what we call freewill is still actually free won't, the ability to censor automatic unconscious subjective responses. In the bilateral brain, the major function is for each side to repress signals from the other in order to create independent ways of seeing the world that are then integrated into a unified perception.

In higher primates, emotions still arise unconsciously in the so-called reptilian brain, but they are made conscious in the neocortex where they are rationally processed and interpreted through socialized learning, memory and cultural inhibition.

The evolution of the neocortex and the prefrontal cortex in humans allowed increasing complexity in the spontaneous responses to environmental opportunity and stress. In humans, both feelings and emotions have a rational component. This rational intelligence in creatures gave them exponentially greater options in maximizing positive experience and mitigating negative ones. This would have resulted in a far greater likelihood of reproductive success and survival in such creatures.

As primates developed keener senses and greater abilities to store retrievable memories attached to conscious feelings of pleasure and fear, learning and brain complexity grew. This allowed the evolution of more complex creatures capable of more complex learned behaviour, capable of greater stored retrievable memory tied to conscious feelings of pleasure and fear. The limbic system that allow creatures instinctive subjective responses co-evolved with the cerebral cortex creating ever more complex neural structures to process subjective experience. As the cortex grew, so did the limbic system that would create its emotional and psychological states.

The ability to choose among rationally considered options also made individuality much more important in the behaviour of our human ancestors when they appeared because it allowed a far greater range of options through which an individual could gain acceptance by the social group. The ability to intelligently choose among options also offered individuals in early human social groups the ability to respond to the fear of personal rejection through complex personality traits that would minimize its psychological impact. Personal rejection by the group remains the greatest risk to survival that social animals, especially social primates, experience, and that is why the greatest fear and punishment in social primates is being ostracized from the group. Even in human beings, the most devastating form of psychological torture is prolonged solitary confinement.

When social acceptance and rejection became tied to individual personality in social primates, psychological traits became more and more important parts of behaviour because these individual predispositions for personal behaviour determined a great deal of the reproductive success and survival of individuals. Because personal acceptance and personal rejection became matters of life-and-death for individuals, personality traits would evolve to maximize one and cope with the other. With personal acceptance and rejection, nurturance would come to include complex hierarchical competitiveness and empathetic social learning, expressed through behaviours that would define group dynamics, social relationships and create the neo-cortex in primates where rational consciousness resides.

What makes primates different from other mammals in terms of hierarchy and empathy is a matter of degree rather than kind. But what makes social primates different is the degree of choice individuals have in how they experience and respond to social emotions based on the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection.

All conscious animals have feelings, but social animals have emotions that have to do with individual responses to personal / social acceptance / rejection.

Mark Bekoff... "In social species like wolves, where a pack needs to run like a well-oiled engine, we usually see more nuanced emotions as individuals need to know not only what others are doing or planning to do, but also what they are feeling. Compared to highly social wolves, less social coyotes and dogs have less varied facial expressions to communicate their emotional states. Wolf tails are also more expressive and they use more tail positions than dogs or coyotes to express their emotions."

"In social primates, positive affiliation is an overwhelming aspect of their lives. Primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber report that for diurnal prosimians such as lemurs, New World monkeys, and great apes, the vast majority of social interactions are affiliative rather than aggressive or defensive. Grooming and bouts of play predominate in the affiliative category. For the prosimians, an average of 93.2 percent of social interactions are affiliative, and the number for the New World monkeys and the Old World monkeys are 86.1 and 84.8 percent, respectively. Unpublished data for gorillas show that 95.7 percent of their social interactions are affiliative."

In all social creatures that have subjective expressions of nurturance / competitiveness that experience emotions arising from the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection, exclusion and loss can also have a dominant influence on survival. In animals capable of such conscious emotional pleasure and fear, individuality, psychological complexity and personality traits would become crucial parts of nurturant / competitive behaviour creating complex family relationships that had to find a place in complex social group dynamics.

In animals capable of conscious emotional pleasure and fear, the feeling of 'me / mine' would become conscious emotions tied to particular individuals. The pleasurable emotions of conscious attachment tied to personal acceptance would be accompanied by the fearful emotions tied to the loss of a particular individual. Individual rejection in mating competition has profound psychological and physiological effects on some individuals, and the death of offspring often does as well. Some individual primates when they suffer continual rejection or when they lose one of their offspring have been seen to become so depressed that they actually die. The pleasure of personal acceptance in social animals would become the foundation of short and long-term friendships and exists in many species such as chickens, cows and elephants. Elephants actually have best friends that they keep for life.

There are also demonstrable physiological and psychological benefits to social success beginning with sexual selection. The pleasure of nurturant / competitive success in sexual selection can affect the actual physiology of creatures.

In one experiment with barn swallows, it was shown that the darkest orange chest patch resulted in the greatest reproductive success. When reproductively unsuccessful males had their chest patch artificially darkened, they became reproductively more successful, and when they were tested, it was shown that their testosterone levels and general health were markedly improved. The upside of competitive success in mating seems to have profound effects on both health and behaviour. In most creatures, including barn swallows, personal success and social acceptance contributes significantly to an individual's survival and reproductive success.

The downside responses of individuals to competitive / nurturant rejection and failure also inevitably became psychological and physiological realities in sexually reproducing species. Coping with reproductive rejection or the death of a mate or offspring required deeper and more complex psychological traits in individuals, and these coping mechanisms soon became heritable aspects of individual personality. In creatures with complex personalities, where there is an upside to acceptance that is favored by evolutionary adaptation, there is a downside responses preserved as well, traits for positive acceptance balance by traits to mitigate loss and rejection. What may appear to be maladaptive traits, like anxiousness or depression may simply offer a useful way to balance the inextricable and inevitable extremes of emotional experience that flow from personal / social acceptance and rejection.

When personal / social acceptance and rejection became part of the conscious subjective responses reinforced by sexual selection, the psychological foundation for complex social behaviour in humans was set.

When Feelings Become Emotions

Early in the story of life, algae evolved the ability to gather in large numbers and act cooperatively to hunt larger prey, and such coordinated hunting ability is part of the genetic rules of behaviour for countless species. Early creatures also gathered in large groups to help protect themselves from predators. With many vertebrates, such pack and herd behaviour became an effective and common evolutionary adaptation for predators and their prey. These new groups soon evolved heritable genetic rules of social behaviour that allowed individuals to integrate themselves into groups using unconscious social rules that created group dynamics. This conflict of individual behaviour and variation with group behavioural norms formed the tension between autonomous self-interest and communal shared interest that would lead to complex emotions in social animals. When conscious feelings of pleasure and fear extended from concrete experience tied to survival into social behaviour and relationships, true emotions were born. With emotions tied to social relationships, and feelings tied to concrete experience, the bilateral subjective / objective nature of social animals formed the parallel bilateral tracks of conscious subjective response.

Conscious animals have feelings so they can create mental projections of concrete reality from retrievable memory. Social animals have emotions so they can create mental representations of social relationships from retrievable memory. In social animals, this psychological reality exists in a mental space where emotions are given personal meaning and preference tied to assessments of social behaviour rather than to feelings of pleasure and fear tied to objective experience. For humans, a great dinner is about the concrete, objective pleasurable feelings of the food, as well as the subjective emotional pleasure of the company. Feelings are subjective pleasure / fear reactions to objective experiences. Emotions are subjective pleasure / fear reactions to social experiences involving personal acceptance and rejection.

Simply put, feelings become emotions when creatures begin to care about what they are feeling about others, and what others are feeling about them. The pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection is the foundation of all social dynamics in gregarious animals. Emotional pleasure is based on the personal acceptance of individuals and emotional fear is based on anxieties about personal rejection. Traits that maximize one or help mitigate the other create the psychological representations of reality that arise as particular emotions.

In social animals, where survival predominantly depends on personal acceptance and rejection by others in the group, conscious feelings became complex emotions because these crucial social reactions are constantly in use and tied to social rather than concrete reality. The emotions involved in social relationships are infinitely more difficult to control or anticipate and completely inescapable for individuals in a connected group. Social animals are continuously bombarded by ever-changing social pressures of all kinds from every individual in their group, and so the fight / flight response is always keyed for action because social hierarchies are always being tested and reinforced. In social animals, from elephants to wolves to chimpanzees and humans, individuals also find allies and rivals, friends and foes that give social relationships and group dynamics its incredible power and unavoidable consequence. The emotions of social animals simply demand a much more complex brain to deal with the infinitely more complex pleasures of personal acceptance and the infinitely more complex fear of personal rejection.

Social contexts literally transform people because of the power of acceptance and rejection. In David Brooks' book, The Social Animal, he quotes Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler who have found a person's friends have more influence on whether he or she will be obese than a person's spouse. "If your friends are obese, you're more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you're more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely."

"At restaurants, people eat more depending on how many people they are dining with. People eating alone eat the least. People eating with one other person eat 35 percent more than they do at home. People dining in a party of four eat 75 percent more, and people dining with seven or more eat 96 percent more.

This social aspect of pleasure and fear is created as a conscious projection of reality in the brain from unconscious predispositions for emotional response much like concrete pleasure and fear is created from learned memory of concrete experience. The evolution of subjective response created unconscious predispositions for novelty seeking, gregariousness, shyness, trust, generosity, faithfulness, depression and the many other genetically hardwired predispositions for emotions in primates. These emotional predispositions evolved in primates in the prefrontal cortex where social relationships are consciously perceived and acted upon. Upon these hereditary predispositions for conscious social behaviour rest all psychological behaviour, personal bonding, empathy and ultimately the innate interpersonal reciprocity that is the basis of group dynamics in primates. When feelings of pleasure and fear became psychological representations of reality based on the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection subjective reality became the constant interaction of unconscious and conscious emotional responses. Because subjective experience is the constant interaction of unconscious predispositions and conscious emotional responses, higher primates became the most psychologically complex creatures to ever live because personal relationships were keys to survival.

The human brain is the most emotionally complex organ in any animal. All human emotions are created by the action of 19 different peptides that arise from the limbic system and communicate automatically and unconsciously with every cell in the body. A shouted curse from a passing car automatically engages the fight / flight responses in the person to whom it is directed. Within milliseconds, adrenaline pumps through the body and instantaneously raises heart rate and blood pressure. The field of vision shrinks, as well as the sense of hearing. The conscious mind then decides how to respond depending on the individual's predisposition for anger and how they were socialized to behave. But regardless of whether the decision is to avoid confrontation or take one on, the body will be ready for either by communicating with all the cells in the body using peptides that lock into receptors on cell walls. Just from a shouted curse, the two sides of the brain create an instant feedback loop that then engages the body in a fight or flight response. If the emotional response to particular types of experience is habitual, the cells in the body will create more receptors for those peptides when the cell divides. Again, this is clear evidence of genomic awareness and plasticity altering both the brain and the body in response to external experience.

Emotions are built on genetically programmed subjective predispositions that allow conscious responses to social pleasure and fear that have evolved to become a part of the limbic system of mammals. And when these unconsciously created emotions become severed from conscious control, psychological distress, and even neurotic and pathological behaviour may arise.

Socialized learning allows an individual to create a conscious representation of social reality through which unconscious predispositions for emotional response can be consciously interpreted, and integrated. These unconscious predispositions for emotional response required a more complex limbic system, a bigger and more complex amygdala and hypothalamus where such emotions might arise. Socialized learning required an even more complex part of the rational neo-cortex, the prefrontal cortex, where conscious retrievable memories of social experience are integrated and represented as social reality and personal emotional relationships. It is in the prefrontal cortex that socialization and memory are integrated into emotional intelligence.

Perhaps the best example of this is the way humans can fall in love. When humans fall in love at first sight they integrate complex unconscious perceptions of personality into an instantaneous, overwhelming emotional 'blink' response that can last a lifetime.

David Brooks in The Social Animal quotes research into human attraction...."David Bass surveyed over 10,000 people in 37 different societies and found that standards of female beauty are pretty much the same around the globe. Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, short distances between the mouth and the chin and between the nose and the chin, and a waist to hip ratio of about 0.7. A study of paintings going back thousands of years found most of the women depicted had this ratio."

"Women are sexually attracted to men with larger pupils. Women everywhere prefer man who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are."

Courting behaviours are also unconscious. David Brooks... "Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are the unconscious language that we used to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state."

But human beings are also capable of consciously falling in love, step-by-step, because of positive memories of shared experience and emotion. Love at first sight is instinctive and unconscious, while step-by-step love is experiential, the attachment formed by the memory of positive shared experience tied to predispositions for particular emotional response elicited by a particular individual.

David Brooks... "David Buss' survey suggests that kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women. Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can attest."

Love is the deepest and most powerful expression of personal acceptance and as such it is an overwhelming drive in most people. This is true of family, friends and most especially bonded couples.

Emotion and Addiction

Conscious feelings and emotions are reinforced in the pleasure centres of the brain. Both feelings and emotions create conscious learned responses through the use of the neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, powerful drugs that create pleasurable responses in the brain similar to drugs like cocaine. And like cocaine, these pleasurable responses are addictive to varying degrees in different individuals, depending on an individual's brain chemistry. With conscious feelings and emotions, these addictive responses are integrated with retrievable memories of particular experiences. Using addictive neurotransmitters, feelings and emotions created in the brain get creatures to repeat particular behaviours for which they have genetically hardwired predispositions.

These particular predispositions for subjective behaviour within individuals of different species form the foundation upon which emotional responses in social animals rest. Heritable predisposition for emotional response varies between individuals from obsessive behaviour to complete indifference to the same stimulus. Most social animals are capable of both obsessive-compulsive behaviour and total indifference to social stimuli. Hoarding and severe autism are examples of this range in humans. Music, chocolate, sex, risk-taking, caution, introversion, extraversion, shyness and gregariousness and other concrete and social responses are all reinforced by neurotransmitters, and an individual's response to those experiences and traits will depend on the heritable sensitivity of the individual to the dopamine produced in the brain in response to those experiences. Personality can be described as the integrated mix of predispositions for particular psychological traits with the cultural socialization that allow an individual to respond to experiences with addictive pleasurable or fearful responses.

Happiness for example is a hardwired emotional predisposition in many mammals most apparent in dogs, higher apes and humans, and every individual human is hardwired for a different level of innate happiness. Experiments have shown that in humans this predisposition accounts for up to 50 percent of an individual's ability to feel happiness, although existing in different measures in every individual. The other 50 percent of an individual's measure of happiness is determined by environmental conditions and social relationships and cultural conditioning. Happiness in humans it seems may be the emotional expression of the balance within nature / nurture as it relates to that predisposition.

It has also been demonstrated that there is also a heritable predisposition for sadness in individuals, with such depressive tendencies often seen among family members. Like happiness, the degree of sadness or depression an individual experiences will also be strongly influenced by the emotional context in which that person lives. Like the many other emotional predispositions, happiness and sadness have deep roots in conscious social animals depending on both genetic predispositions and social circumstance.

Mammals like horses, wolves and many social primates exhibit symptoms of depression when they are isolated from their group, and this behaviour may have evolved to signal emotional distress to other members of the group, in an attempt to facilitate re-admittance. Like the distress cry of infants that elicit protective responses in adult primates, sadness and depression may be cries of emotional distress from one adult to another. These distress signals may in fact be the origin of emotional predispositions for sympathy, empathy, and even compassion. This ability to consciously perceive emotional distress in others is also likely to be the foundation for the evolution of mirror neurons in primates that allow individuals to experience what others are doing and feeling as if the experience was happening directly to them. These mirror neurons may in fact be the neurological foundation of all complex reciprocal emotions in social relationships in higher primates and humans.

The combination of an individual's predisposition for happiness and sadness and the social environment in which the individual lives will have a powerful effect on the stress level of that individual, and that stress level often determines an individual's health and even reproductive success.

In higher primates, dogs and humans, it has been demonstrated using brain scan imagery that prolonged stress can affect the brain to such a degree that feelings of happiness are experienced at a much-reduced level. In social animals, nature / nurture is so integrated that they are in fact inextricably connected. In social animals, the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection are more important to an individual's survival and reproductive success than any other type of conscious learning or behaviour. That is why stress related to personal acceptance and rejection can affect the health and reproductive success of individuals in profound ways, from compromised immune systems to arteriosclerosis, from depression to increased risks of eating disorders, neuroses, sexual dysfunction and even cancer. Dr. Robert Sokolosky in his thirty-year study of wild baboons has demonstrated the profoundly negative physiological effects of stress. Studies of British civil servants have also shown how hierarchical pressure and personal acceptance and rejection influence the stress levels and health of individuals with the levels of stress in individuals directly corresponding to their place in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

The remarkable thing in Dr. Robert Sokolosky's study of baboons was the fact that hierarchical dominance relationships affecting stress levels and health can change when the most aggressive members are removed from the group. This happened in his study group after many years when the dominant aggressive males all died after they ate tainted meat they didn't share with others in the group. The new dominant Alpha male had a gentler predisposition and this changed the social dynamics of the group so that there were fewer social confrontations, and much more cooperative affiliative behaviour among all the members of the group. And the remarkable thing was how this new culture changed the health and stress level of every member of the group both physically and psychologically. And even more remarkably, when new more aggressive males joined the group, in a short time, the gentler culture of the group changed the behaviour of the new members. It is clear that at least in primates, the bilateral mind / body connection affects both the physical nature and social nurturance experienced by every individual in the entire social group. And clearly this would have profound survival advantages for every member of the group, and of the group itself. When conscious emotional and practical intelligence meet, self-interest / shared interest becomes a conscious part of evolutionary potential and that emotional consciousness is the next step in the evolution of subjective experience.

The Eighth Rung in the Ladder of Bilateral Subjective Complexity  
Reciprocity

Empathy

Reciprocal response depends on a creature's innate ability to respond to the individual actions and reactions of others. Empathy is the innate ability to feel pleasure from observing positive experiences in another or to feel distress at the observed suffering of another. Reciprocity must begin with feelings of empathy because it requires the ability of one individual to feel the emotional responses experienced by another and form an abstract assessment of appropriate behaviour that recognizes the needs and feelings of different individuals.

Frans de Waal... "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than 100 million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might need or want. The full capacity seems put together like a Russian doll. At its core is an automated process shared with a multitude of species, surrounded by outer layers that fine-tune its aim and reach. Not all species possess all layers: only a few take another's perspective, something we are masters at. But even the most sophisticated layers of the doll normally remain firmly tied to its primal core." The Russian doll metaphor is in fact an elegant representation of the nine rungs in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity with each new type of bilateral subjective response enclosing the one previous.

Experiments have shown that even mice show signs of empathetic response. In one cruel experiment, researchers injected mice with acetic acid causing them to writhe in excruciating pain. Other mice watching them suffer, exhibited clear signs of empathetic response.

Mark Bekoff "Jeffrey Mogil at McGill University showed that mice exhibit empathetic responses to others by staying close when they found one of their members in pain. An analysis of the data found differences in the sensitivity to pain experienced in the suffering mice, suggesting there is some form of social communication that affects the response to pain. "It is possible that mice have a rather more active social life than we have been giving them credit for." Mogil said. "While chimps have exhibited such behaviour, such things have never been demonstrated in anything lower than a non-human primate." Mogil points out that research has already shown social factors play a huge role in how well patients with pain do. German research has shown people do better or worse depending on how their spouses treat them.

Other mammals, canines, horses, elephants and even pigs all exhibit powerful empathetic responses to the suffering of others, sometimes even creatures that are not of their own species. Dogs have been observed licking an injured cat or protecting a lost duckling. Empathy may in fact be a common subjective predisposition in most mammals, but in social primates empathy becomes the social glue that connects individuals to and within their groups. In some social animals, empathy rises to the level of personal connection and perspective taking that is the foundation for self-awareness.

Frans de Waal... "In the past decade there has been considerable research on VEN cells, long spindle like neurons that reach further and deeper into the brain making them ideal to connect distant layers. These cells are found in a part of the brain critical for perspective taking, empathy, embarrassment, humor, and future-orientation. Damage in this area results in a special kind of dementia in which these particular traits are lost. Most importantly, these damaged patients also lack self-awareness. These cells, which may be responsible for self-awareness, have appeared independently in only two other branches of the mammalian tree, cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and elephants, giving further credence not only to the emotional depth of these creatures, but also to the conjecture that subjective complexity is so vital to evolutionary success that it is as inevitable as large complex bodies."

Arguably, empathy, the ability of one individual to perceive and respond to the emotional state of another individual is the most important emotion to evolve in social primates because it is the foundation of complex social relationships. In primates, empathy takes theory of mind to a new level through which complex emotions are shared in much the same way behavioural action connects individuals. In chimpanzees, when grooming behaviour becomes an emotional bonding and reconciliation mechanism instead of just mutual parasite control; when risk-taking and effective participation in a hunt is rewarded with social respect; when the most important aspect of leadership is impartiality in breaking up arguments; and when friendship, trust and loyalty between individuals results in a higher place in the group hierarchy, emotional connection based on empathy becomes a fundamentally important part of all psychological and social behaviour, as well as reproductive success. When shared doing results in shared feeling, social psychology is born. When the competitive tension of self-interest between individuals and their group is balanced with the emotional, empathetic shared interest of two or more individuals, shared interest has a profound psychological as well as a practical expression. With friendship based on shared empathetic psychological responses to behaviour and personality traits, the first non-familial personal expression of emotional shared interest is born.

The recent discovery of mirror neurons gives the neurological basis for shared intention, imitation, conscious teaching and reciprocity. Mirror neurons allow primates to grasp the mind of others not through conceptual abstract reasoning or practiced imitation but through direct simulation of neurons in the brain that allow individuals to experience the actions and reactions of others as if it was happening to them. Mirror neurons allow individuals of some species of primates to literally feel what others are feeling, to literally experience what is happening in another's mind. VS Ramachandran calls this discovery of mirror neurons equivalently important to neurological science as was the discovery of DNA to genetic research.

When mirror neurons became robust in higher primates, it allowed them to experience empathy and intimate personal relationships with others as an unconscious sense of personal union, a feeling of 'us'ness out of which lifelong emotional bonds would arise. In humans it is the robust development of these mirror neurons that must be the foundation for the abstract feeling of reciprocity and justice, and ultimately the emotion of love.

In baboons, friendship between individual lower ranking males and females is common. The female offers her male friend surreptitious sex, and the male offers the female and her offspring long-term protection she cannot expect from the Alpha male.

Frans de Waal finds it inconceivable that perspective taking and self-awareness evolved in a single jump in a few species without any stepping-stones in other animals. His book The Age of Empathy describes capuchin monkeys who would feed a pregnant female afraid to descend to the ground, or wild bonnet monkeys helping younger monkeys climb difficult terrain. Most amazing is the story of Ahla, a baboon employed by a goat farmer. "The baboon knew every mother-lamb relationship in the flock. When mothers and kids were kept in separate barns, Ahla would come into action as soon as the kids started bleating. She would go pick each lamb up and carry it under her arm to the barn. There she would shove the kids underneath the right female for nursing, never making a mistake." This obviously required knowledge of goat relationships, but perhaps even more, an understanding of why baby goats bleat, and how to solve the problem. Ahla's behaviour may be the simple trained expression of nurturance, like innate fetching behaviour becomes trained retrieving behaviour in dogs.

In higher primates, personal friendship goes beyond the individual connections apparent in other species like elephants and wolves to reciprocal food sharing, grooming and care of infants, to emotional support and even altruistic support for sick, infirmed, and aged non-related individuals. With the evolution of mirror neurons that allow an individual to experience the actions and emotions of another as if it was their own experience, social primates experienced a new type of shared interest unlike any that had ever existed before. In such primates, shared interest / self-interest becomes an inextricably linked conscious bilateral subjective reality.

Out of empathy, the shared emotional connection between two non-related individuals of the same species would evolve true altruism, the extension of empathetic responses to individuals of other species.

Richard Conner and Kenneth Norris believe dolphins have generalized altruistic tendencies, "Altruistic acts are dispensed readily and not necessarily to animals that can or will reciprocate. They need not necessarily even be confined to the species of the altruistic individual." Stories of dolphins assisting other species are common; including the case of an old dog about to drown that was pushed to shore by a dolphin.

This goes beyond the accepted idea of altruistic reciprocity whereby creatures of the same species may receive some genetic or social benefit from giving without a personal expectation of an immediate positive benefit for themselves. True altruism, offering an empathetic response to an individual of another species, is a trait that has no reproductive or evolutionary benefit and is impossible to explain except as the extension of nurturant behaviour because of generalized empathetic feelings.

Frans de Waal tells the story of a bonobo named Kuni who picked up a starling that had knocked itself unconscious in its cage. When the starling was unable to fly when lifted up on the hand of the bonobo, Kuni climbed into the highest tree in the cage where it stretched the starling's wings open between the fingertips of its two hands before launching it into flight. This action required that the bonobo be able to understand and care, not only that an individual of another species is injured, but also to understand the best way to assist that individual, and no action would be possible unless there was an ability to feel the motivation of an empathetic response. The motivation for such truly altruistic behaviour can only be the extension of empathetic nurturance to an individual of another species.

Reciprocal response runs deep in mammalian behaviour. Reciprocity has recently been observed in the behaviour of Norwegian rats where individuals who received help from other rats then proceeded to be more helpful when the opportunity arose. Based on the need for personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection, reciprocity is the social currency that allows the formation of personal relationships that create the social bonds and group dynamics in higher social mammals. 'I'll scratch your back, if you scratch mine', is the positive side of reciprocity, and goes back to the subjective response in bacteria and single celled animals expressed as, 'If you do this, I will too'

One experiment de Waal conducted taught monkeys to exchange a pebble for a piece of cucumber, and when one monkey was given a favoured grape in sight of all the others, the entire experiment immediately collapsed in screams of outrage. Eighty percent of the monkeys immediately refused to trade pebbles for cucumber if one individual was getting grapes. Showing the monkeys that the trainers had grapes to give made no difference until one individual was favored over the others. It is interesting to note that 20 percent of the monkeys kept on with the trading experiment, clearly overriding their outrage for what was still in their best interest in trading pebbles for cucumber slices. Such rational override of innate emotional response would be the foundation for perspective taking, and perhaps even deferred gratification in humans. Considering the intensity of the emotional response to a frustrated sense of reciprocity, it is clear this rational override had to be considerably robust.

Rage is one of only two responses possible from an individual's frustrated sense of reciprocity. The other is self-pity, as is evident in this experiment where eighty percent of monkeys would rather have nothing than have one individual treated preferentially. This also shows that both rage and self-pity can exist at the same time in response to a frustrated sense of reciprocity. What seems undeniable is that these monkeys had an internal sense of what makes an appropriate exchange, a sense of justice, if you will. And this internal measure of appropriate behaviour requires an innate abstract sense of fairness. This sense of fairness is clearly more than learned and is the first expression of abstract subjective response in nature. Social rage and self-pity, as the two responses to a frustrated sense of reciprocity, are in fact the beginning of new emotions coded in the limbic system of the brain that would allow an individual to cope with the fear of personal rejection experience because of frustrated reciprocal response. When reciprocal social responses came to be assessed and rewarded with trust and affection or punished with aggressive revenge or ostracism, primates had a way to concretely express abstract personal judgments of the balance within shared interest / self-interest in every relationship.

In higher primates and humans, this balance within shared interest / self-interest would create the most complex social relationships in living creatures. In higher primates, rage and self-pity arising from frustrated reciprocal responses would account for a great deal of the negative dynamics of individual relationships in social groups. This is especially true in humans, the most socially complex creature on the planet.

Reciprocity  
Bilateral giving / getting

Reciprocity is the innate ability of social animals to assess, judge and respond to the behaviour of other members of the social group in order to create and maintain affiliative personal bonds and alliances. This innate ability to judge appropriate behaviour is similar to the innate preferential assessment of particular behaviours found in sexual selection. The way an individual chooses a mate because of skills exhibited through gift giving or nest making, reciprocal alliances and friendships are based on reciprocal reactions expressed through mutual grooming, food sharing, mutual defense and support, as well as shared care giving with infants. Like the innate unconscious subjective response of nurturance / competitiveness itself, and likely arising from it, reciprocity of giving / getting behaviour was a way to create advantageous personal expressions of shared interest. Because of this, innate reciprocity is the subjective foundation for all group dynamics and bonding. Reciprocity is the innate subjective response that also allows individuals to extend shared interest to other unrelated individuals thereby markedly increasing the adaptive advantage available through cooperative behaviour. When shared interest / self-interest becomes personal through reciprocal giving / receiving, personality becomes the most crucial aspect in social relationships. Reciprocity is the basis for friendship and personal alliances that are still crucial to reproductive success, even in modern humans.

The way sexual selection binds two individuals for procreation; reciprocal giving / getting binds particular individuals for mutual benefit within social groups. Without reciprocity there is no mechanism for individuals to establish and maintain alliances and friendships that depend on respect and trust.

Reciprocity is also the social glue that establishes and maintains a common set of behavioural expectations for the entire group. These innate reciprocal responsibilities are monitored and enforced by every member of the group. "If I scratch your back, you had jolly well better scratch mine." Reciprocity also operates to regulate negative behaviour, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Reciprocal responses are the carrots and sticks that, to a large degree, control behavioural response in social animals.

A sense of fairness is both cerebral and visceral, cortical and limbic. In the journal PLoS Biology, Katarina Gospic of the Karolinska Institute's Osher Center in Stockholm and her colleagues analyzed brain scans of 35 subjects as they played the famed Ultimatum game in which participants bargain over how to divide up a fixed sum of money. Immediately upon hearing an opponent propose a split of 80 percent for me, 20 percent for you, scanned subjects showed a burst of activity in the amygdala, the ancient seat of outrage and aggression, followed by the arousal of higher cortical domains associated with introspection, conflict resolution and upholding rules; and 40 percent of the time they angrily rejected the deal as unfair. That first swift limbic kick proved key. When given a mild anti-anxiety drug that suppressed the amygdala response, subjects still said they viewed an 80-20 split as unjust, but their willingness to reject it outright dropped in half. "This indicates that the act of treating people fairly and implementing justice in society has evolutionary roots," Dr. Gospic said. "It increases our survival."

Because reciprocity is the foundation for all social dynamics, respect and trust are keys to maintaining the balance within the individual shared interest / self- interest of each member of the social group. That is why deceit and unconstrained selfishness are so toxic and corrosive to social cohesion and so costly in terms of personal acceptance for individuals. Trust / deceit as the innate bilateral subjective response that allows both positive and negative expressions of reciprocity in higher primates is the foundation of social relationships and is crucial to social stability. Without trust, deceit has no meaning. Without deceit, trust has no meaning. In modern humans, it is even more crucial and complex because of the ability human beings have to rationalize and create self-serving narratives in which deceit and unconstrained selfishness are presented as something else. Modern humans require complex cultural rules for ethical behaviour, moral obligations and legal responsibilities because it is so hard to define and enforce feelings of reciprocal fairness and justice because our numbers are so large and nonreciprocal responses are so common.

Food Sharing and Reciprocity

Among primates only orang-utans, chimpanzees, bonobos, capuchin monkeys and human beings share food as a part of personal / social relationships. They do this most with related individuals and close friends, but it is a fundamental part of the innate reciprocal responses that creates the social cohesiveness of shared interest among these higher primates group. Observation of wild and captive primates show the extent to which sharing is an ingrained social trait. A chimpanzee that discovers a large quantity of food and does not call the others in the troupe may be beaten for such selfish behaviour. And in chimpanzees, the possession of food even takes priority over social status so that the most dominant male must plead for a share from even the lowest ranking member of the group. Chimpanzee males hunt cooperatively for small monkeys.

Frans de Waal... "One hunter usually captures the prey, and not everyone necessarily gets a piece. The male's chance of getting a share appears to depend on his role in the hunt, which hints at reciprocity. Even the most dominant male, if he failed to partake in the hunt, may beg in vain." Here is a clear example of how social groups must have learned to respect the autonomy needs of individuals and balance them with traits for pro-social behaviour. In evolutionary terms, those social groups survived who had the best balance between self-interested autonomy of individuals and the interdependence of shared interest of the entire group.

De Waal goes on to point out that a large part of an Alpha male chimpanzee's authority actually flows from the degree to which he will share food. This food sharing in dominant males may often go so far as having the male share everything in his possession. Among orang-utans who live much more solitary lives in the wild, food sharing is not an issue, but often observed among captive groups. Capuchin monkeys are the only small primates to share food, and the one thing they have in common with higher primates is their intelligence. The proportion between brain and body size in these tiny monkeys is in fact almost the same as in higher primates. Just as in higher primates, their social intelligence depends on the emotional complexity their social group demands, and a brain big enough to process complex social relationships.

Food sharing in higher primates, as the division of the most important of scarce resources, is one of the most profound expressions of shared interest and social cohesion cementing personal relationships. Most common with relatives and friends, it nevertheless extends to non-related individuals and even rivals, clearly showing how social animals often choose shared interest over self-interest in the division of food. Once again, life is anything but a battle of all against all. Frans de Waal describes such an event. "Chimpanzees regularly break up fights over food without taking any themselves. I once saw an adolescent female interrupt the quarrel between two youngsters over a leafy branch. He took the branch away from them, broke it in two, and handed one part to each...( A chimpanzee Solomon). There's even one observation of a bonobo worried about getting too much. While being tested in the cognitive laboratory, a female received plenty of milk and raisins but felt the eyes of her friends on her, who were watching from a distance. After a while, she refused all rewards. Looking at the experimenter, she kept gesturing to the others until they too got some of the goodies. Only then did she finish hers."

Food sharing is most likely the origin of reciprocal behaviour, the innate understanding that an individual who shares food with others will later have the opportunity to share food resources in the possession of others. Frans de Waal describes a study "that recorded nearly 5000 interactions over "browse food" in the Yerkes chimpanzees. Half of these resulted in a transfer of food from one individual to another.... Food transfers in the colony were analyzed in all possible directions among adults. As predicted by the reciprocity hypothesis, the number of transfers in each direction was related to the number in the opposite direction; that is, if A shared a lot with B, B generally shared a lot with A. The reciprocity hypothesis was further supported by the finding that grooming affected subsequent sharing: A's chance of getting food from B improved if A had groomed B earlier that day."

"Individuals with the mental capacity to keep track of given and received favors can apply this capacity to almost any situation. Collaborative hunting and the sharing of meat, or grooming and the sharing of food, are only two possibilities. Female chimpanzees, for example, may follow reciprocity rules when protecting or babysitting each other's offspring, and sex is an obvious bargaining chip between males and females. This alternative is particularly used by bonobos; females of this species are known to receive food from males immediately following, or even in the midst of intercourse. Once a quid pro quo mindset has taken hold, the "currency" of exchange becomes secondary. Reciprocity begins to permeate all aspects of social life."

Food sharing as a crucial social behaviour exists in almost all human societies. In most human societies, reciprocal hospitality and food sharing is mandatory, and in some societies a family on the brink of starvation is still obliged to share what little they have, even with a stranger. Human courting rituals from coffee dates, to romantic dinners, to marriage feasts all use food sharing as an expression of emotional bonding between individuals and families. Even with the most important limited resources of food, all societies learn the balance within shared interest / self-interest, and this psychological predisposition clearly is as much inherited as it is learned.

Overriding self-interested behaviour is so important in higher primates that pleasure centers in the brain are activated when individuals share with others.

De Waal... "The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we are in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that matters, evolution should never have got into the empathy business." The empathy business is common social currency in all primates, simply because complex reciprocal social relationships could not exist without it."

"The way our bodies, including voice, mood, posture, and so on are influenced by surrounding bodies is one of the mysteries of human existence, but one that provides the glue that holds entire societies together. It's also one of the most underestimated phenomena, especially in disciplines that view humans as rational decision makers. Instead of each individual independently weighing the pros and cons of his / her own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind."

Conflict and Reconciliation

The fundamental question every social primate and group must resolve is how to deal with the aggression inherent in self-interested competitiveness for resources and mates, and balance it with the survival advantages that are the result of shared interested cooperative behaviour upon which social cohesion depends.

As with human beings, most primate behaviour revolves around issues of sex, scarce resources and power. De Waal points out that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, resolve these issues in opposite ways. Chimpanzees use power to resolve issues of sex. Bonobos use sex to resolve issues of power. Human beings with androgynous brains can and do use either or both strategies.

In his books, Chimpanzee Politics and Good Natured, his conclusion is that Chimpanzee societies depend almost entirely on reciprocal relationships of such complexity that it rivals Machiavellian political theory.

"Because autonomy and interdependency are both crucial to social cohesion in higher primate groups, a great deal of energy is expended by the group in making sure that individual autonomy is respected, but consistently constrained by social pressures that reinforce rules for social cohesion."

"Every chimpanzee understands that every member of his or her group is influenced by the relationship between individuals, and so it is common for a dominant female to intercede in a quarrel between two males by bringing them together and getting them to make eye contact, from where they can go on to more positive interactions. Male chimps groom each other far more after a serious battle than a minor altercation."

He states that it has also been demonstrated that the tenure of an alpha male in a chimpanzee group depends most on his impartiality in breaking up quarrels among members of the troop. This ability to deal impartially in quarrels between allies and rivals is understood by other members of the group, and key to the alpha male's support in hierarchical battles to come

This ability for impartiality must depend on an innate ability for abstract understanding of personal relationships, but must also be based on an innate abstract sense of reciprocity and fairness. This abstract innate feeling of fairness in higher primates would become the foundation for principles of justice in human beings.

Frans de Waal in his book, Good Natured, lists the traits in other primates upon which human morality would be built.

Sympathy Related Traits, attachment, succorance, emotional contagion, learned adjustment to and special treatment of the disabled and injured, the ability to trade places mentally with others: cognitive empathy.

Norm Related Characteristics  
Prescriptive social rules  
Internalization of rules and anticipation of punishment

Reciprocity  
A concept of giving, trading, and revenge

Moralistic aggression against violators of reciprocity rules

Getting Along  
Peacemaking and avoidance of conflict  
Community concern and maintenance of good relationship  
Accommodation of conflicting interests through negotiation.

All these social traits in our higher primate cousins allows for the release and control of aggressive tension in all aspects of personal relationships, addressing the problems of conflict over resources, sex and status.

And it is clear that none of these traits can be separated from innate reciprocal judgment of behaviour: 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.' 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' Fair is fair is an abstract feeling, even if the feeling varies with every individual and social group.

Frans de Waal also found three ways to eliminate pro-social behaviour in capuchin monkeys having to cooperate to get food. "The first is to pair with a stranger: they are in a much more selfish mood with partners that they've never met before. This fits the idea of the group as the cradle of cooperation. The second even more effective way to reduce pro-sociality is to put the other out of sight by sliding a solid panel between both monkeys. Even if the monkey making the choice knows the one on the other side of the wall, and has seen the other through a small peephole, it still refuses to be pro-social. It acts as if the other isn't there and turns completely selfish. The third way to eliminate acts of kindness is perhaps the most intriguing since it relates to inequity. If their partner gets a superior reward, our monkey becomes reluctant to pick the pro-social option. They are perfectly willing to share, but only if their partner is visible and gets what they get themselves. As soon as their partner is better off, competition kicks in and interferes with generosity. As with expressions of sympathy, conflict resolution by peaceful means would never have come into existence were not for strong attachments based on mutual dependency and cooperation."

"Extreme expressions of self-interested behaviour by individuals in social groups expressed through aggression are invariably constrained because such behaviour has consequences for the perpetrators, as others tend to remember who is responsible for antisocial acts. Cooperative relationships depend on trust that the other parties will act in a particular way under particular circumstances; troublemakers have difficulty gaining such trust."

"The relational model views aggressive behaviour as resulting from conflicts of interest between individuals who share a history (and the future). It assumes an equilibrium between tendencies that pull individuals apart and those that bring them together. It focuses on individuals drawn together by attachment in a sense of belonging to the same group. Whenever open conflict shakes this emotional foundation, it causes discomfort not unlike that associated with physical separation. Because conflicts may occur despite a conflux of interest between the same parties, aggression is usually not a onetime event but part of a series of encounters, from positive and negative, through which the relationship cycles."

Reconciliation

Reconciliation is common among primates and de Waal sees this as crucial to social cohesion. "Golden monkeys do it with mutual handholding, chimpanzees with a kiss on the mouth, bonobos with sex, and tonkeana macaques with clasping and lips smacking. Social groups simply need a mechanism through which conflict is put in the past because the social order cannot survive ongoing resentments and distrust. Reconciliation is widespread in the primate order and especially apparent after conflicts."

This complex social skill is learned by infants while learning to reconcile after discipline and rejection by mothers. This ability is then extended to peers with whom individual conflicts first arise, usually in the context of rough-and-tumble play.

In one experiment, stump-tailed macaques that are easygoing, tolerant characters were placed with rhesus monkeys that have strictly enforced aggressive hierarchies. Frans de Waal describes the experiment. "Reconciliation occurs three times more often after fights among stump-tails than rhesus monkeys.... Because the stump-tails were slightly larger and more powerful, it took some time before they were challenged, and where a dominant rhesus would have answered the challenge, the stump-tails simply ignored it. Our most significant finding was that, having lived with stump tails, the rhesus reconciled more easily. Initially, they made up after fights as seldom as is typical of their species; but gradually they approached the high rate of their tutors, until they reconciled exactly as often as the stump tails. Even after the stump-tails had been removed and the rhesus were left to interact among themselves, they maintained their newly acquired pacifism. Like chemists altering the properties of a solution, we had infused a group of monkeys of one species with the "social culture" of another." The power of nature / nurture is clearly evident in this fascinating experiment.

Although conflict and reconciliation are typical among primate groups there is one species, the muriquis monkey that is almost entirely peaceful. De Waal cites the work of Karen Strier on these monkeys who, in 1200 hours of observation, recorded only nine aggressive chases. Males did not compete for females who were sexually receptive, but patiently waited their turn. Males would spend much time together, often embracing in clusters of two or more individuals while uttering a sound called the chuckle.

Strier's explanation for a virtual lack of aggression in these monkeys is a combination of separate foraging, egalitarian relations between the sexes, and the huge testicles of the males. The last factor suggesting that it was in the production of sperm that males found a competitive advantage rather than through direct aggressive competitiveness.

Here again evolution finds a way to balance genetic self-interest with social cohesion forming a stable Nash equilibrium in a way that even eliminates direct competitive conflict for sex, resources and status. What is not addressed is the fact that higher sperm count in large testicles may give individuals reproductive advantage, but so too would a display of aggressive dominance. That dominance never arises, even with a clear reproductive advantage simply shows how traits for shared interest can dominate traits for selfish advantage.

Community concern, the direct opposite of competitive conflict, takes as its starting point each organism's vested interest in a social environment optimal for survival and reproduction.

Frans de Waal lists the drawbacks of competition:

Harm to specific partnerships. To win a fight may be to lose a friend.

Bodily harm to others. Wounded individuals make the group more vulnerable to attack, and damages the breeding population.

Harm to group unity. Social cohesion simply serves every member of the group. His conclusion is that "the higher a species' level of social awareness, the more completely its members realize how events around them ricochet through the community until they land at their own doorstep. This understanding allows them to become actively involved in shaping community characteristics. It starts with interest in relationships close to them (as between their kin and an attacker), then extends to more distant relationships that impact their lives (strained relations between rival dominants), and culminates in collective support for actions that enhance group harmony (arbitration by a central individual, who will perform the so-called control role)."

Conflict and reconciliation, self-interest and community concern dealing with sex, resources and power is resolved in different primate species in different ways, but ultimately reflects the need to find a balanced equilibrium through subjective responses that accommodates increasing social complexity. Once again it is traits for subjective response that are the foundation for reproductive success and adaptation.

The Negative Side of Reciprocity

'An eye for an eye' is the negative side of reciprocity and goes back to the subjective response in bacteria and single celled animals expressed as, 'If you do this, I will do that.' The long memory of many individual mammals for their abusers is well documented. Marc Bekoff cites one example in Saudi Arabia where a particular automobile that regularly passed a baboon group accidentally killed one of the baboons. The troop waited for three days for that particular car, showering it with stones and tearing out the windshield. Observations of chimpanzees and bonobos in the wild and in captive populations have shown the Machiavellian complexity of reciprocal alliances, friendships and favors that control the social dynamics of our simian cousins. Reciprocity has also been observed to be the basis of the emotional complexity present in the personal relationships of every individual in such groups

As we have said, there are only two instinctive emotional responses to a frustrated sense of reciprocal fairness; rage and self-pity. A frustrated sense of reciprocal fairness is responsible for much of the social aggression and personal depression observed in higher primates, including humans. In humans these responses can be so extreme that they may provoke homicidal rage or suicidal self-pity in some individuals. Homicidal behaviour that begins as road rage, and homicidal rampages where particular individuals slaughter complete strangers invariably trace back to a frustrated sense of reciprocity. A frustrated sense of reciprocity is the origin of most anger in marriage, parenting and sibling rivalry. In human children, the first and most persistent cry of emotional pain is in the words, "But that's not fair."

Just as a frustrated sense of reciprocal fairness can externalize as aggressive behaviour, it can also be expressed through self-destructive behaviour exhibited in anorexia, self-mutilation and the emotional response of humans to every sad song ever written. In higher primates socially destructive behaviour can often be traced back to a frustrated sense of reciprocity expressed as self-pity.

The ability to judge and measure the appropriateness of behaviour and put it into a contextual framework is the beginning of abstract reasoning, and its precursor in the innate assessment of reciprocal response appears in animals long before humans.

In human beings, rational, abstract, considered responses to innate emotions tied to reciprocity would be the origin of every religion, legal system, and constitutional government that would ever bind groups in a common union. Reciprocal abstract feelings of group solidarity and oneness would also be the emotional origin of every clique, clan, tribe, nationality, group loyalty and all the biases upon which they depend. In human beings, the innate feeling of ' me / us' that originated in bacteria would evolve into the new innate abstract emotions tied to bilateral subjective response of 'I / we', the shared feeling of humanity we have come to recognize as part of human nature. In human beings the innate feeling of 'us / them' that originated in bacteria would become the basis for social class distinction, racism, and chauvinistic nationalism that also seem to be an unavoidable part of human nature. Racism, sexism, ageism, chauvinism and all the ugly expressions of, 'us / them' would be based on the inevitable exclusion of those for whom reciprocal feelings could be ignored. With the ability to make abstract rational distinctions about feelings of reciprocity, to decide to whom it would and wouldn't extend, human beings would lay the foundation for the best expressions of human nature expressed through compassion, generosity, shared purpose and communal solidarity and the worst expressions of human nature expressed through war, slavery, rape, prostitution, as well as every other type of human exploitation.

In the next chapter we will see how human nature arose from the subjective traits we share with our closest cousins orang-utans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, to those unique expressions of human nature that allowed the creation of abstract thought, abstract meaning, inductive / deductive reasoning, the understanding of the psychological, legal, spiritual and philosophical relationships inherent within the expression of shared interest / self-interest that defines human nature. We will see how human beings came to understand their own nature by creating abstract verbal and symbolic representations of reality that could be shared through art, religion and culture. We will see how human beings came to be the only creatures that could step outside their own experience to create an abstract understanding of that experience.
Chapter 3  
Human Evolution

Early Relatives and the Path to Modern Humanity  
A Short List of Our Ancestors

4.4 million B.C.E...

Ardipithicus Ramidus lived in woodlands and was adapted for both tree climbing and walking on two legs; it had a predominantly vegetarian diet and lived in monogamous bonded family units within larger groups comprised of other nuclear families; brain size like a modern chimpanzee; bodies three to four feet tall and approximately 50 pounds in males and females, both having a slim build like that in modern bonobos.

3.5 million B.C. E...

Australopithicus Afarensis, lived in grassland savannas; not much different than

Ardepithecus but with a slightly bigger brain. Also walked upright. These protohumans were also rapidly losing their body hair.

Two million B.C.E...

Australopithicus Africanus... larger brain, 450 cc, and more humanlike face and teeth evolved for eating meat.

Australopithicus robustus twice the weight of other early humans, much bigger skull with teeth made for grinding tough fruits and vegetables, brain 530 cc

Australopithicus boisei... like A. robustus but even bigger and stockier, brain also 530 cc

Australopithicus sediba... 1.95 to 1.7 B.C.E.

The best fossil of a Sediba female was over four feet tall and weighed approximately 75 pounds. While the species has long arms, similar to apes, it has short, powerful hands, unlike the longer fingers of chimpanzees. Its long legs and more developed pelvis indicate it was able to walk upright, yet still likely spent some of its life in trees. The size of the cranium indicated this species had a brain as small as some of the oldest "ape-men," yet their faces more closely resembled something similar to Homo erectus, a more direct human ancestor.

Homo Habilis...

The handy man, our first recognized human ancestor had very dexterous fingers necessary for making tools. They were the same height as other protohumans, about the same weight with a slim body and a brain of 700 CC. They were able to create shelter; drive game as big as elephants into swamps and butcher them with handmade tools. Importantly, brain casts indicate that they had evolved the area of the brain associated with language.

Homo Turkana called 1470

Like habilis but with a bigger brain, living in much larger groups in order to hunt larger game.

1.5 million B.C.E. Homo erectus

The earliest fossils show Homo erectus was 5 1 / 2 feet tall and weighed 120 pounds. They had a human like body slightly shorter and stockier than modern humans with a brain of 850 cc. They made much more sophisticated tools for chopping, pounding and crushing from lava, quartzite and churt; and delicate tools for boring, scraping and carving made of quartz and bone. By 500,000 B.C.E. the brain capacity of Homo erectus was between 850 and 1300 cc, well within the range of modern humans and was six feet tall. Homo erectus had spread to Europe and Hungary to the steps of Russia and East to Burma, China and Indonesia and had tamed fire for cooking, warmth and self-defense and even used fire for driving large game into swamps where they could be killed. They lived in caves and made shelters, lived in much larger groups hunting and butchering dozens of elephants, horses, red deer and oxen at a time. They were undoubtedly capable of language of some sort and had evolved the cultural and emotional sophistication to live in larger groups. Their Stone Age society would not have been radically different from modern humans that have been discovered living much the same way.

400,000 to 35,000 B.C.E. Neanderthals

Neanderthals were heavy, stocky creatures much stronger than Homo erectus and modern humans with which they were contemporary, probably the final expression of the robust, stocky version on our family tree. Their brain size evolved to be even larger than our own. They had the same Stone Age culture as their contemporary homonids although their diet was almost entirely meat. They did stone carving and created bone flutes, creating the first examples of true art in the anthropological record. They must have been capable of complex language, perhaps even as an innate ability of their offspring. They even buried the dead with ceremonial ritual indicating some type of religious sensibility.

400,000- 200,000 B.C.E Denisovans

Denisovans, a newly discovered species of human, also seem to have spread from

Africa to Indonesia, if genetic testing inferences are to be believed.

The Outliers

There may be 20 or more different species of proto-hominid and hominid creatures before Homo sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago. The most intriguing are the dwarf versions found in Central Europe and on the island of Flores in Indonesia. These throwbacks look much like our earliest ancestors, Austalopithecus afarensis, but hunted and lived like Homo erectus, even though they had brains the size of our early proto-hominid ancestors. The last of these Hobbit humans lived only 13,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. How such a throwback could exist 2 million years after the proto-human creature they closely resemble went extinct challenges every assumption about human evolution, especially that a large brain is required to live and make tools like Homo erectus, our closest human ancestor with which we were contemporary for 150,000 years.

200,000 to 70,000 B.C.E. Homo sapiens

Homo sapiens. Skeleton remains are almost exactly like modern humans although slightly smaller, with a slightly more primitive skull and facial form.

They exhibited very little apparent cultural difference from Neanderthal and Homo erectus, except for the first use of bone points on spears and arrows and the earliest decorative objects.

70,000 B.C.E. to present Homo sapiens, sapiens

Homo sapiens sapiens... modern humans like all the people living today. Genetics show that we have evolved from a single genetic male and female. The genetic Eve most probably lived approximately 100,000 years ago in South Africa. Her closest descendants, the iKung San bushmen still live near there. The single male from whom we have all descended lived 70,000 years ago near Kenya and Tanzania. His closest descendants, the Hadzabe, still live in Tanzania, with a culture much like Stone Age Homo sapiens, sapiens. It is clear that these ancient peoples have a highly sophisticated language, clearly indicating its ancient origin. Both the San and Hadzabe tribes still use clicks as part of their spoken language. They use 100 different sounds to form words where we use only 30. Quentin D Atkinson at U of Aukland has put forward the theory that language evolved over the last hundred thousand years from this area. It is also clear that only these most recent modern humans created sophisticated art and innovative technologies, although these innovations did not lead them out of Stone Age existence.

Wikipedia describes these people. "The Hadzabe have one of the simplest social structures known. They are organized into bands, called 'camps' of typically 20–30 people, though groups of over a hundred may form during berry season. There is no tribal or other governing hierarchy, and conflict may be resolved by one of the parties voluntarily moving to another camp. The Hadzabe move camp for a number of reasons. Conflict is resolved primarily by leaving camp; camps frequently split for this reason. Camps are abandoned when someone falls ill and dies, as illness is associated with the place they fell ill. There is also seasonal migration between dry-season refuges, better hunting grounds where water is more abundant, and areas with large numbers of tubers or berry trees when they are in season. If a man kills a particularly large animal such as a giraffe far from home, a camp will temporarily relocate to the kill site. (Smaller animals are brought back to the camp.) Shelters can be built in a few hours, and most of the possessions owned by an individual can be carried on their backs. The Hadzabe, like many predominantly hunter-gatherer societies, are predominantly monogamous, though there is no social enforcement of monogamy. While men and woman value traits such as hard work when evaluating mates, they also value physical attractiveness. In fact, many of their preferences for attractiveness, such as symmetry, averageness and sexually dimorphic voice pitch are similar to preferences found in Western countries." This was likely the cultural pattern for humans for the last 150,000 years. Human culture did not change from this ancient model until 10,000 years ago when agriculture, metal smelting, numeracy, property rights and phonetic written alphabets allowed the creation of modern civilization.

From Prey Animal to Hunter

Human beings are the only creatures that have ever evolved from being communal prey animals to become the top pack predator in every ecosystem on earth.

Subjective responses in prey animals are very different to that of predators and this difference in subjective response goes back to bacteria and algae that existed as both the hunters and the hunted in countless unicellular species. There is some evidence that the antibiotics some bacteria produce to defend themselves from predators of their own kind were initially used for communication between individuals of the same species indicating that cooperative communication for approach behaviour preceded the fight or flight response of avoidance behaviour in response to predation. Here again is an example of genomic awareness and plasticity creating an irreducibly complex physiological response from a completely unrelated process.

The subjective responses adaptively useful to hunters and the hunted give rise to two distinctly different patterns of behaviour. Hunters have to be risk takers, better at sensing environmental circumstance, opportunity and behavioural cues exhibited by their prey. Hunters must be capable of spontaneous actions and reactions and be capable of innovative responses to behavioural and situational change. If hunting is done in a group as even some bacteria and algae do, they must be able to detect, communicate and coordinate responses among each other in responding to the behavioural reactions of particular prey. The evolutionary success of hunters depends on the ability to select traits that reinforce self-interest and competition because those traits are the ones necessary for an individual of one species to pursue and kill another. Hunting species are action-driven, left-brain dominant, and evolutionary adaptation would have favored traits for that kind of response in such animals. Hunter traits largely depend on focused attention and dominant left brain skills.

Prey animals are conversely reaction-driven and evolutionary adaptation would have favored traits for that kind of fight or flight, right brain response in such animals. Evolutionary adaptation would have favored traits that thwart a range of predators, the best of which is group defense and coordination. That is why prey animals evolve very different subjective responses in their ability to detect, communicate and respond to hunters and to each other. Their evolutionary success depends on the ability to evolve traits that maximize shared interest, because the hunted have a far greater dependence on group cohesion and response as the best defense against predators.

Prey animals also form cohesive units that depend on traits for cooperative behaviour as well as traits that maximize defensive vigilance, anxiety and coordinated response. Prey animals depend on contextual awareness and right brain social skills.

In any ecosystem, predators and prey animals evolve a natural balance in a Nash equilibrium that finds the balance within shared interest / self-interest for both groups expressed through bilateral prey / hunter traits. Because so many animals are both hunters and hunted, prey / hunter traits are the expression of one of the basic bilateral subjective responses in life, no matter how big or small, how simple or complex. Prey animals and their predators come to an evolutionary balance in every ecosystem, and that balance generally prevails for long periods of time, the dominant adaptive traits for self-interest in predators balanced by the dominant adaptive traits for shared interest in prey animals.

Only top predators ever enjoy an independent advantage completely favoring their own self-interest over all other creatures in their ecosystem, but that is typically only for a short time, until the ecosystem changes in such a way that they cannot respond with sufficient adaptive speed. A good example of this is the Dire Wolf, the top predator in North America for 200,000 years that went extinct when large herd animals disappeared. The top predator's role was left to the smaller more adaptive Gray Wolf that was able to feed on creatures as small as insects and mice.

One million and a half years ago, early humans went from being defensive, anxious, vulnerable, four foot tall prey animals that had to be vigilant for countless large predators to become creatures capable of hunting huge animals like mastodon, horses, and elephants and even to top predators like Sabre Toothed Tigers. There are fossil records of dozens of huge animals being driven into swamps, killed and butchered with stone tools by these early human beings. From vulnerable prey animals, humans had become the top predator because of their having evolved the subjective traits of the most cunning of hunters. Human vulnerability to predators did not disappear and exists to this day, but it was vastly diminished by the new ability of humans to coordinate and cooperate both defensively and offensively using fire and weapons to hunt and kill even the fiercest predators in their environment.

The only known hominid species to migrate through the world were Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, and finally Homo sapiens sapiens who colonized the world in the last 50,000 years. These species would break the territorial imperatives of other higher primates who were prey animals that needed to consolidate and understand a particular territory to survive. In the last 1.5 million years, these big game hunter hominids would be the adaptive explorers with the genetic predisposition to keep moving, to keep taking risks and seek novel environments and opportunities.

With defensive and offensive vigilance in individuals and their coordinated groups, with caution and risk-taking in both individuals and their coordinated groups, with novelty seeking and a fear of change in both individuals and their coordinated groups, human beings developed a range of psychological paired traits that gave them tremendous advantage over all other creatures and tremendous new subjective complexity.

This radical new expression of shared interest / self-interest through high expressions of bilateral prey / hunter traits created a new type of creature. Just as the bilateral nature of the androgynous brain and shared dominance created the monogamous nuclear family unit and human love as a powerful evolutionary adaptive subjective response, this revolutionary new bilateral expression of traits allowed these late hominids the ability to prosper and multiply as they had never done before.

With vastly increased numbers of surviving offspring as a result of greater fertility, security and protein resources came increased cultural contact, trade, new types of communal connection between groups for sharing food that was now available in huge quantities. It is in the bilateral expression of high prey / hunter traits that human beings found a basis for many new expressions of culture.

The subjective traits that arose in humans from having been prey animals for millions of years persist to this day, but with the new subjective traits of hunters being added to the subjective profile of these prey / hunter proto-human beings, our behaviour has an adaptability and range of response unlike any creature that has ever lived. In modern human beings prey / hunter traits are still expressed to a high degree in complex ways that are the foundation of human character and personality.

The San Bushmen have survived to this day living much as big game hunting hominids lived 1.5 million years ago. They still hunt huge game and gather separate groups together to share a large kill like a giraffe, often with great cultural fanfare and even ritual religious practice.

Balancing the traits of prey animals and hunting animals, human beings can dominate any local ecosystems. It is this bilateral combination of subjective traits in these hominid species that was also the source of the human predisposition for constant migration. In these hominid species, the bilateral trait in prey animals to follow migrating resources was amplified by traits for novelty seeking and risk-taking. Traits from hunting animals creating the constant urge in humans to continually move into new territories. It was this bilateral balance within the subjective traits of prey and hunting animals that led proto-humans of a number of species to leave Africa and settle the entire world.

It is interesting to note that the cautious, conservative, resource driven traits of prey animals are still most strongly expressed in women, while traits for risk-taking, novelty seeking and opportunity seeking are still most evident in men. The bilateral expression of gender traits in the androgynous hominid brain was wedded to the bilateral expression of prey / hunter traits to an extent that does not appear in any other species. Many studies have shown that women, to this day, tend to express traits common to prey animals more dominantly than males, while men generally express higher expressions of those traits common in hunting animals. One study seeking to identify gender differences as expressed through territory exploration simply asked college seniors how many buildings they had entered on campus in which they did not have classes. Most males but few females reported having entered buildings in which they did not have classes. Apparently it is the novelty-seeking hunter traits expressed in human males that are primarily responsible for human migration since we combined prey and hunter traits in bilateral subjective responses.

Neotony and Human Complexity

Neotony is the process through which some creatures preserve early developmental traits into adulthood. The longer creatures preserve such developmental traits, the longer they will have to stay with adults, usually the maternal caregiver and members of the extended social group. This is true of a number of species like Caledonia crows, porpoises, whales and many primates. It is also true of all domestic animals; dogs, cattle, horses, goats, sheep and even chickens who preserve the curiosity of early development as it exists before the onset of adult fear and flight distance. It may be this extended period of learning because of neotony that gives these creatures the bilateral brain complexity to create and use tools as well as the early types of communication through language. The fact that we humans take 20 years to develop into adults that preserve a lifelong predisposition for learning gives us the most profound adaptive advantage of any creature on earth. It is the bilateral complexity of the human brain that makes us different from all other creatures and most of that complexity has to do with emotions and personal relationships.

The most important difference between human beings and all other primates and animals is intelligence and emotional complexity and both depend to a great degree on slow maturation, neotony and the complexity of the bilateral brain expressed through nature / nurture. Unlike all other animals, most of human brain development happens after birth. Human beings stay younger longer than any other living creature. Human brain development is physiological and developmental but is also highly dependent on socialization that creates personal maps of emotional connections and meaning through which humans perceive personal identity. Human intelligence simply could not exist without the socialized emotional learning that comes from parents and caregivers. Children who have been denied social contact and emotional interaction through isolation are severely compromised for life when it comes to intelligence, emotional response and social behaviour.

What makes us human are the emotional maps that human babies are pre-programmed to make of the world, unconsciously doing statistical analysis of facial expression and emotional responses in order to understand personal acceptance and personal rejection as the basis for personal identity and meaning. The foundations of human intelligence are the emotional maps that create our complex social lives, with nuclear families connected for a lifetime within larger social groups.

It is ironic that this ability to make emotional maps and achieve exponentially greater intelligence than other higher primates depends to a great degree on neotony, the process through which creatures persist in form or behaviour in some early stage of development. With so much subtle and difficult social complexity to learn in drawing emotional maps of the social world, human babies stay young and helpless, forcing caregivers to interact with them for decades, and even longer in nuclear family units. Humans learn for a lifetime, human brains grow and change for a lifetime, simply because we are forever young.

Alison Gopnik in her book, The Philosophical Baby, points this out. "We are the only creatures who are in fact forever young. The modern adult human skull looks very much like the skull of a chimpanzee infant, and this adult preservation of form occurring at an early developmental stage called neotony is not only true of many aspects of human form, but also true of human emotional traits. The fact that human beings stay bonded for a lifetime may simply be an expression of neotony through which offspring stay emotionally bonded to parents even when they are physically mature with families of their own. Ironically, the evolution of human rational and emotional complexity may entirely depend on preserving a form of lifelong emotional immaturity and dependency."

But this change that keeps us forever young took millions of years to evolve. Human brain development was modest until half a million years ago when Neanderthals and Homo erectus brains began to evolve until they finally became the same size as our own about 500,000 years ago. And even among these two closest ancestors to modern humans, childhood development was much faster than in us; an 8-year-old individual Neanderthal or Homo erectus child was developmentally the size of a modern human 14-year-old boy. The faster creatures mature, the less new learning is possible or necessary. The longer it takes to grow up, the more important social learning is to survival, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that only in modern humans is intelligence capable of something greater than the basic emotional maps of social meaning that would have been crucial to survival in our early ancestors. Only modern humans are capable of the inductive / deductive reasoning that allows human beings to understand the world, to have a sense of past, present and future, to teach as well as learn, to know that we know, to see the forest as well as the trees. Only modern humans know that they know, and all evidence of this difference only begins to appear in the last 70,000 years when human originality and creativity, problem solving and culture through inductive / deductive reasoning appeared on the planet. It is likely that the current advanced state of human neotony did not appear until Cro-magnon man 70,000 years ago when humans must have acquired innate predispositions for language using rapid speech, numerical skill and inductive / deductive reasoning. Only in the most recent humans is rationality capable of complex abstract expression and understanding.

Although there was a burst in technical innovation like arrows, and slings, Stone Age life stayed much the same after the appearance of inductive / deductive reasoning 70,000 years ago, but with what must have been much better survival rates. What must have been new in human evolution was a profound new emotional and social adaptability, the ability to change to fit entirely new social contexts, contexts that apparently engendered little significant technological or cultural change yet required advanced inductive / deductive ability.

Alison Gopnik "The rare evolutionary advantage of human beings is their ability to escape from the constraints of evolution. We can learn about our environment, we can imagine different environments, and we can turn those imagined environments into reality and as an intensely social species, other people are the most important part of our environment. So we are particularly likely to learn about people and to use that knowledge to change the way other people behave, and the way we behave ourselves. The result is that human beings, as a central part of their evolutionary endowment, and as the deepest part of their human nature, are engaged in a constant cycle of change. We change our surroundings and our surroundings change us. We alter other people's behaviour; their behaviour alters ours." What Alison Gopnik says may be true of personal relationships, but she is absolutely wrong in terms of cultural evolution and the environment, at least until the last 40,000 years, because, until then, virtually all our human ancestors lived the same way for 2 million years. Human society was as culturally and technologically rigid as that of any other higher primate and characterized by very limited innovation and change. What she may be talking about is emotional and social adaptability, the ability human beings have to fit into any social group and context. Alison Gopnik... "Even the youngest babies already seem to understand some basic facts about emotion and action. But as they grow older they gradually develop an understanding of desire, perception, and belief, personality traits, moods and prejudices, all the way up to the detailed and social psychology we can appreciate in Lady Muranski or Proust." The emotional maps that babies create to understand and respond to the social world upon which they depend for survival must be very ancient indeed.

The Origin of Modern Human Behaviour

Our human ancestors lived in much the same way for the last two million year period of human evolution, until the arrival of agricultural societies 10,000 years ago. Human societies have been discovered and studied living in the same Stone Age patterns as our recent and even our early ancestors once lived. Some tribes of modern humans that were discovered in the last 100 years had not even developed the technology to create fire, but had to depend on preserving fire created by lightning, something early humans began doing more than 3 million years ago.

The only apparent technological innovations in the last three million years were the ability to create fire and cook with it, (3 million BCE) the ability to make better hunting and butchering tools,(1.5 million B.C.E.), the ability to hunt large game using cooperative hunting strategies, (1.5 million B.C.E), the ability to create shelter, (180,000 BCE) the ability to make clothing,(70,000B.C.E), the ability to use inductive / deductive reasoning to create medicines to care for the weak.(50,000 B.C.E.). Finally, modern humans were capable of art arising from trance like experience in shaman practices. (35,000 B.C.E.)

The human brain doubled in size in the last half million years to accommodate new behavioural and emotional skills that clearly had little to do with technology and information preserved through culture. The only reasonable conclusion is that in the last half million years of hominid evolution, social and personal interactions became so much more complex that they required a brain of much larger size and complexity, the most significant anatomic change in our human ancestors in the last six millions of years. It was only in the last half million years that the human body and brain went from one moderately larger than a chimpanzee's to the size it is today, with a brain big enough to accomplish all the necessary stone age survival skills. Humans became bigger and smarter, not to be better hunters and gathers, but because they were becoming far more emotionally complex and that complexity must have had to do with new challenges having to do with social relationships in larger groups. People had to become much smarter to deal with life in larger and larger social groups where the shared interest / self-interest of individual families clashed with the shared interest / self-interest of their clan.

Homo erectus grew from 5.2 to 6 feet tall with a brain that doubled in size in only the last half million years. Neanderthals appeared on the planet 400,000 years ago and similarly grew to have a brain and body even bigger than our own. Evolution would have favored size and intelligence as these, our most recent human ancestors, hunted larger and larger game, It is clear from the fossil record that Homo erectus and Neanderthals depended more and more on killing larger and larger prey as they evolved into a creature with a brain and body similar to modern humans. Homo erectus and Neanderthals were great hunters, killing, butchering, and sharing the carcasses of enormous mastodon hundreds of thousands of years ago. Neanderthals apparently ate almost nothing but meat. This protein diet was necessary for a larger body and brain and this complex and dangerous form of cooperative hunting required more complex social organization in the form of clans of perhaps up to a hundred individuals. These interconnected human groups must have been large and very cooperative if they could dismember and use the perishable meat from dozens of elephants killed in a single hunt.

Because males did the hunting, evolution would have favored stronger, larger, faster, braver individual males, so that the size difference between modern men and women did not evolve through the aggressive competition between men for mates, but because of the advantage that size gave to big game hunters.

Helen Fisher in her book, the Sex Contract, says "What other things might females have looked for in their lovers? Smart males who were good hunters and dependable providers were in demand. Those that could get along with other males and had self-confidence, alert, amiable, popular personalities were probably sought after. Large, strong males must been in demand, too, because today men are on the average 20 percent larger than women—a sexual dimorphism apparent in humans around the world."

"Though more ink and paper have been expended on this single male-female dimorphism than any other, male size and strength could in part have resulted because females like males with these attributes. The larger proto-hominids probably wandered farther afield, and found more animals in their wanderings. This made them better food providers which attracted women. Perhaps they were better fighters and protectors too. In any case, if females preferred large, strong males their genes would proliferate producing the larger human male we see everywhere today."

Sexual selection is likely far more important than natural selection or even genomic awareness and plasticity in this. Cooperative hunting strategies exist in many species, so that it is also unlikely that the human brain had to double in size to be successful in this regard. It must have been social complexity rather than environmental pressure that changed the human brain.

This sexual dimorphism must date to the time proto-humans became big game hunters approximately 1.5 million years ago, and that is what the fossil record shows.

To hunt creatures the size of mastodon would have taken many men working together, and those individuals, families and clans with more sophisticated traits for shared interest and cooperation would undoubtedly have been more successful. To raise children to maturity would have taken greater and greater emotional and social commitments from parents, families and clans as the developmental stages of childhood got longer and longer. As we have said, in Neanderthals and Homo erectus, an eight-year-old child was developmentally equal in size and maturity to a modern human 14-year-old. Only the slower developmental growth that would appear in modern humans offered a considerably greater potential for neural complexity and brain size, and the complex emotional skills acquired through socialization. Only increasing subjective complexity in the family and clan would account for the modern human brain ultimately needing 20 years of learning to become fully developed.

Neurological studies have shown conclusively that there is a massive reorganization of neural connections between puberty and the time an individual is full-grown, and it is in that period that human beings become fully modern humans. But, to understand that new neural complexity, it is important to go back to the foundations of subjective complexity upon which all human behaviour rests, beginning with our earliest ancestors.

Becoming Human

The recent discovery of the 4.4 million year old fossil specimens of nearly two dozen skeletons of one of our human ancestors called Ardipithicus ramidus (Ardi) has completely transformed many of the long held beliefs about human evolution. Because other early human ancestors had skulls, brains and physical features similar to chimpanzees, it was assumed that their social behaviour would be much the same as in a chimpanzee troupe. Ardi has destroyed all those assumptions. Ardi walked erect like other early humans and did so on the ground but also in tree branches like orang-utans, so human erect posture had nothing to do with finding a new habitat in grassland savannas.

Males and females of this 4.4 million-year-old creature were almost the same size and had small canine teeth, clearly indicating that males didn't compete with each other for females using aggressive dominance to attain a place in a male hierarchy. This slim early human ancestor may in fact have been behaviourally more like bonobos, and like them most likely controlled by a female cooperative hierarchy. The male dominant aggressive hierarchically model of chimpanzee behaviour that is a part of almost all evolutionary assumptions about humans seems to be an anomaly to the gentle and cooperative nature of most of our many other ancestors that lived in the last 4.4 million years. The fact that we share far more traits with orang-utans than chimps may be because our common ancestor may have been much more like orang-utans, living both in trees and on land. According to Jeffrey Schwartz in his book, the Red Ape, we share 28 physical traits with them and only six with chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest genetic relatives. Because of genetic awareness and plasticity, our earliest human ancestors may in fact have been atavistic throwbacks to the physical and behaviour of traits in much more ancient orang-utans.

It is in the human line that shared interest and cooperative behaviour allowed the more important subjective adaptations that led to deductive and inductive reasoning. And so it may be most ironic that we share so many traits with the least social of higher apes.

Since Ardi, it seems undeniable that human nature is based on shared interest and cooperation far more than self-interest and direct aggressive competition between individuals, especially males, even for the most important scarce resource of all, access to mating opportunity. Until modern humans came along, there is almost no evidence for interpersonal aggression among our ancestors, and is in general still an anomaly in modern hunter / gatherer societies. And it makes sense that slow, vulnerable four-foot tall creatures would have to rely predominantly on each other and use mental strategies and complex emotional resources to survive.

The fact that our human ancestors never grew past the size of seven-year-old modern human children until Homo erectus evolved on the planet 1.5 million years ago indicates that evolutionary adaptation in our early human ancestors would have favored small individuals because of their limited ability to provide enough caloric intake for larger bodies and brains. The diet would have most likely been vegetables with scavenged meat and small game providing rare but essential protein. Food would have been shared, with family members only moderately favored over other members of the group. Cooperative behaviour and support would have been the only advantage these small, slow, vulnerable creatures would have had in an environment filled with large, swift predators. And because males and females were the same size, males clearly did not compete with each other for females through physical aggression and dominance.

Sexual selection would have increasingly favored character and personality in the choice of a mate, with pair bonding a reciprocal response between individuals. Even in early humans, both males and females would have competed for each other's attention to achieve a lifelong bonded connection, and both would have had a reciprocal choice in the selection of a mate, so that for the first time in the evolution of sexual selection, early human males and females would both compete and choose in establishing a pair bond. In early humans, reciprocal attraction and desire would be the foundation for sexual selection with two individuals feeling a permanent monogamous bond to one another because of individual personality traits and behaviours. Individuals exhibiting favored cultural traits and norms would have also been key to reproductive success connecting the nuclear family unit to its clan group.

Interpersonal aggression would have been rare among all our human ancestors because social cohesion would have been indispensable to survival, so that only the most cooperative individuals would have survived. Many archaic peoples use different strategies to deal with interpersonal aggression because social cohesion is literally a matter of life-and-death. Traits that enhance cooperative shared interest would have trumped traits for competitive self-interest, and most surviving archaic societies continue to display this bias for cooperative shared interest within the social group. The Zuni in the southern United States go so far as to actively discourage any expression of pride or boasting in successful hunters because they recognize that such pride might provoke conflict between individuals that is harmful to the interest of the entire group. In all our human ancestors, evolutionary adaptation would have favored traits for reciprocity, generosity, emotional reconciliation, food sharing, compassion, and even altruism. The traits that we use to define the best in human nature began with our early ancestors having to fundamentally depend on traits that expressed shared interest and cooperative behaviour.

So how to account for human aggression in its many and astonishingly brutal forms in modern humans?

It is clear that modern human males are aggressive and hierarchically competitive in order to gain status and access to females. Like chimpanzees, human males are driven to compete for higher social status using both violence and cunning that is Machiavellian in its complexity. Unlike our ancestors, aggressive competitiveness and hierarchical dominance in humans seems now to be a fundamental aspect of masculine behaviour. To this day, like chimpanzees, human males often fight for women, territory and respect, and this competition accounts for virtually all of interpersonal human aggression. As we appeared as a new species 70,000 years ago, modern human males, like chimpanzees, have apparently reached back to the earlier hierarchical dominance behaviour observable in other higher primates like gorillas and baboons. How much of that has to do with civilized socialization has to be considered. In the last 10,000 years, some fundamental change in human society and individual social development must have allowed powerful personal and cultural aggression to become widespread. How much is dependent on some genetic change must be questioned because of the short period of time in which human aggression spread across the planet in advanced civilizations. The connection between aggressive behaviour and cultural norms must be considered, and there is considerable research to indicate that modern humans given unlimited power over others often become brutal and oppressive in their behaviour. When reciprocal feeling and trust are broken, humans can be even more brutal than chimpanzees and that is why interpersonal connection and empathy depends so much on the constraints of positive socialization. From the beginning, culture is more important to humans than any physical or technological ability. Right-brain emotions that connect individuals to group feelings and shared interest would dominate over left-brain expressions of focused attention and self-interest, because they were more important. We will soon explain how the bilateral human brain depended so much more on right-brain than left-brain traits to create and maintain complex social relationships and cultural norms.

The Androgynous Human Brain

From our earliest human ancestors onward, sexual selection was a process through which male and female individuals formed a pair bond because of physical and personality traits that expressed both competitiveness and nurturance. Unlike all other pair bonding species, only in humans are male and female traits homogeneously blended.

What is different about human males from bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons is the profound empathetic nurturance that males feel for their own children, as well as other non-related individuals in their social group. Unlike chimpanzees and other higher primates, most human males also have and express nurturant traits as deep and profound as that in human females.

Like chimpanzees, bonobos and other higher primates, human females also express profound empathetic nurturance for their own children and other non-related young and adult individuals, but unlike other female primates, human females can also be far more aggressive and hierarchically competitive for status within their social group. Female hierarchies exist in other higher apes, but they are not achieved through aggressive display and competitiveness. There are countless examples of women who are as aggressively competitive as any man. Human females clearly have and express traits for competitiveness and social dominance as deep and profound as those for nurturance.

The unavoidable conclusion is that one of the earliest and most profound differences in human beings that distinguish them from all other creatures is that human males and females combine strong predispositions for traits that express both nurturance and competitiveness within the same brain. Simply put, human beings have an androgynous brain in which the proportion between traits for nurturance and competitiveness exist in a different measure and balance in every individual independent of gender or even sexual orientation. Some men have high levels of both nurturance and competitiveness. So do some women. Some men and some women are only high in one aspect or the other. Most people fall within a bell curve of gender traits, somewhere in the middle on the human scale of nurturant and competitive traits, and this has been clearly demonstrated by the Behm sex inventory, a test that has been done on hundreds of thousands of individuals to test for gender traits. In most societies tested, men and women share 60 to 70 percent of the same traits, clearly indicating the androgynous nature of modern human beings. The man's man, and the woman's woman it seems are the exception rather than the rule in terms of stereotypical gender traits.

For virtually all our evolutionary history, we and our ancestors have not only shared parental duties through a monogamous union, but have also shared social dominance through the integration of masculine and feminine traits in the same brain. Until the last 10,000 years, human societies have, by and large, exhibited egalitarian shared dominance in both the nuclear family unit and even in larger clan groups. In human beings, self-interest / shared interest expressed through gender traits is integrated within the same brain regardless of gender or even sexual orientation. In human beings, bilateral cooperativeness / competitiveness is completely integrated in both individuals and in their social groups, and this clearly began very early in human evolution.

How and why the androgynous brain evolved in these early humans is a fundamentally important question. As early humans became more dependent on group cohesion and cooperative shared interest, nurturant behaviour would have been extended from mothers, mates and even the rest of the social group to become the most important cultural norm. Nurturant traits would be far more important to human survival than hierarchical competitiveness because cooperative behaviour is a far more effective survival strategy among weak prey animals. When nurturant traits became expressed in lifelong bonds between genders and even non-related individuals and families, this nurturant support would have allowed humans to have more children and reproduce at a far greater rate than any other primate, the primary reproductive advantage humans have over other higher apes. Instead of the two to five years between offspring common in our primate cousins, humans would eventually be able to have a child every year. This and the extended nurturant support from the family and its group would give these early humans an incredible survival advantage, and high birth rate continues to be the one thing that lets humans persist in the harshest subsistence environments. One of the reasons humans may have had to stand up on two legs was to carry infants who are too close in age and too great in number to cling to the mother. High birth rates must also have necessitated women forming stable camps while men went to hunt.

Helen Fisher on monogamy... "Furthermore, on a species level it was a dramatically favorable innovation: it quadrupled the number of children a female could bear. Close births enabled the population to increase sevenfold in one generation, and with males helping to rear the young, these infants survived."

Emotional preference for particular individuals that includes sexual contact is common in higher primates. It is females who choose their friends with benefits, and such mating choices and sexual access observable in primate females continues to be made by modern human women. As monogamy evolved in early humans, evolutionary and cultural adaptation would have favored those individuals increasingly tied to one mate because of the increased resources necessary to support multiple offspring. Higher fertility rates would have required greater care and resources, and these can only been provided by the emotional commitment of one particular male to his mate and their offspring. This would have made a lifelong monogamous bond crucial to the survival of offspring.

Evolutionary and cultural selection would have favored those individuals who made emotional bonds with one mate and this hormonal, oxytocin bond would come to be reinforced by the dopamine bond and attachment arising from increasingly powerful pleasure responses to physical/emotional intimacy and sex.

Carrying infants and bringing resources back to a common campsite required proto-humans to walk on two legs, but it is also clearly possible that human beings may in fact walk on two legs because of the bonding advantage that came with increased pleasure from physical intimacy and sex. The male penis grew in size and width because it offered greater stimulation and pleasure to female humans. Helen Fisher... "The width of the male penis provides extreme sexual pleasure to the female. It distends the outer third of the vaginal canal during intercourse creating pleasurable tension. And because it is there, the intense contractions of orgasm are easily felt. Furthermore during inward thrusts the increased width pulls on the muscles and other tissues of the external female genitalia. This motion stretches the clitoral hood downward creating gentle friction on the clitoris itself. It seems that the largeness of this male anatomical part has no practical function other than sex, and undoubtedly it evolved in size long ago because women liked men with large penises."

In early humans, face-to-face intercourse, only occasionally observable among chimpanzees and bonobos, would become more and more pleasurable among those individual females whose hip girdle shifted forward. Evolutionary adaptation would have favored those mates that gave and received the most amount of pleasure through sexual intercourse because of the bonding effect of dopamine reinforced sexual pleasure. This pelvic shift forward would have eventually resulted in the ability to walk continuously and comfortably on two legs. Ardipithicus Ramidis was walking on two legs 4.4 million years ago, and this was in a forest environment where walking on two legs would have had limited benefit because food would have mostly been found in trees. It is therefore arguable that sexual pleasure may have been the primary reason for the structural change that allowed proto-humans to walk on two legs. The pleasure of sex, not the ability to run or to see over tall Savannah grass is arguably the most likely reason that evolutionary adaptation favored the novel erect posture of early humans.

The dopamine reinforced bond of pleasure resulting from sexual contact is still crucial in the monogamous bonding responses of both men and women, although men seem to have a higher initial sex drive than the drive for emotional attachment. Daily sexual intercourse and availability experienced with one partner created the double barreled oxytocin and dopamine bond necessary for long-term commitment in both men and women, and evolutionary and cultural adaptation would have favored those individuals in whom the increasing pleasure of sexual contact became a crucial part of sexual selection and lifelong attachment.

Helen Fisher proposes that sexual pleasure may also have been the reason that humans lost their hair. Bare skin allows the direct stimulation of nerve endings and a significant increase in pleasurable response. "With the evolution of hairlessness, the soft delicate areas of the neck, underarms, abdomen and legs became exposed. Just a slight touch with one's fingertips could now arouse one's partner to intercourse. Furthermore, these areas could be seen during frontal copulation. When a female blushed, her partner knew she was responding to his touch or speech. When a female's nipples hardened, her partner was informed she was getting sexually excited. And the sexual flush that occurs during orgasm was obvious to both. The loss of visible body hair enabled partners to signal their desire, to express their excitement, to arouse each other with touch and sight- a tremendous service when sex had become so important to survival."

In these early humans, the reciprocal pleasure of sexuality became completely integrated with the nurturant attachment of two individuals experiencing a physical and emotional intimacy that extended to their children. And this long-term shared bond would also have favored those children who developed most slowly, the ones whose neural development would increasingly happen after birth. Evolutionary adaptation would have favored increasing helplessness in offspring that would demand greater and greater nurturant commitment from two parents, from siblings and even the extended social group. Being helpless and forever young made the neural complexity of humans possible. Human neotony could only have happened with the arrival of the intense emotional bonds of love in the nuclear family unit.

Integrating the previously distinct expressions of gender differences of nurturance / competitiveness in the same brain demanded a cortex of far greater complexity because such an integrated personality would demand far greater emotional depth and sophistication. Shared dominance and an androgynous brain would also demand much greater rational control of instinctive behaviour which would result in the developmental expansion of the prefrontal cortex, the center of rational impulse control and social behaviour. It is this rational control of instinctive behaviour that is one of the primary differences between humans and higher primates like bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas.

But integrating male and female subjective responses in the same brain would also create significant problems. Two individuals with different predispositions for nurturance / competitiveness would have the potential for ongoing conflict if they had to share dominance in an egalitarian way for a lifetime, especially in issues of child-rearing and social responsibility. Giving both parents in a family equal power and authority would be a source of ongoing conflict and disagreement demanding greater and greater emotional sophistication and restraint and a far greater dependence on emotional reconciliation after a conflict. The resolution of these conflicts would have demanded increasing rational complexity and conscious control of unconscious emotional responses. Simply put, an androgynous brain would have demanded new neural complexity to integrate male and female traits in the way they were expressed through shared social dominance of two parents in the nuclear family unit living in a clan of other nuclear family units.

There is no married couple on the planet today that cannot attest to the demands and complexity of integrating gender role differences and similarities in dealing with the personal and social responsibilities that are part of family relationships. It turns out that human males and females are not so much from Mars and Venus, but more like bilingual, bicultural Canadians with distinct French and English cultures completely integrated in the same personality.

It is clear that shared social dominance and the creation of the androgynous brain in the prefrontal cortex developed over the 4.4 million years of human evolution since Ardi, and there is very little evidence that disputes the idea that our human ancestors were profoundly cooperative and peaceful creatures. The pervasive aggressive brutality of modern humans over the last 10,000 years is apparently a cultural anomaly and clearly not an evolutionary change, but rather one arising from fundamental cultural transformations. This extreme predispositions for violence that has appeared so recently in human history is unlike the traits for violence in chimpanzees that have evolved over the last 5 million years of their evolution, and ours is most likely the result of the new subjective response of abstract self-awareness that allows human beings to make conscious decisions about when, how and if natural feelings of empathy will be extended to others beyond the family and clan group. Modern culture has clearly allowed human beings the ability to objectify other human beings and override feelings of empathy for others.

The origin of the human psyche must depend on a genetic complexity for subjective response unlike that of any other living creature because human beings are the most psychologically complex creatures that have ever existed and that psychological complexity has its foundation in the androgynous nature of human consciousness. Simply put, mixing male and female traits for behaviour in the same individual must have been the primary reason for the developing neural complexity in the prefrontal cortex responsible for social awareness and regulation in human beings

Sexual Identity / Gender Identification

Because sexuality expressed through sexual selection is the primary foundation of reproductive success, gender identification and response is a fundamental part of evolutionary change.

Sexual identity and behaviour as subjective responses are relatively simple and clear within individuals of most species. In most species in which sexual selection exists, either males or females exhibit dominant traits for competitiveness or nurturance, and these behaviours appear to be instinctive and rigidly tied to one gender or the other within particular species. Males or females compete and then the opposite sex chooses a mate from that competition.

With an androgynous brain, human sexuality and gender became much more complicated, with different individuals expressing masculine or feminine traits in various degrees and proportions. Straight men and women can dominantly express masculine or feminine behavioural traits and interests in competitiveness as well as nurturance. Gays and lesbians can too. Sexual identity is a matter of nature: gender identification is a matter of its cultural expression tied to those genetic predispositions. Gender identity / identification is the bilateral integrated expression of the androgynous human brain expressing nurturance / competitiveness in human sexual selection.

Completely under-appreciated is the genetic origin of anomalies in the connection between sexual orientation and behaviour that goes deep in evolutionary sexual selection. Jonathan Weiner in Time, Love, Memory states, "Alfred Sturtevant discovered the first sexual determination mutant in fruit flies in a gene he called 'transformer'. When a female fly inherits two copies of transformer, her chromosomes remain female, and she still grows big like a female, but otherwise she looks and acts like a male, with the male's black belly and the male's gift of song. Mutations like transformer have since been discovered in every imaginable kind of organism, including human beings."

The best example in human beings of what may be transformer genes at work are the fa'afafine in Samoa. Such individuals look like males and have all the genetic parts and developmental stages of masculinity. What is different is that these individuals prefer to identify with behaviour traditionally associated with women such as child-rearing, cooking, feminine dress, grooming and nurturance responsibilities. And what is most interesting is that these individuals prefer to have sex with heterosexual males rather than men who are gay. They in fact do not identify themselves as homosexuals, finding sex with men who prefer other men to be completely unappealing. Like fruit flies with the transformer gene that exhibit cross-gendered behaviour, fa'afafine may be female psyches literally trapped in the body of a male. Simon Barron-Cohen in his book, The Essential Difference, makes it very clear that research has demonstrated that a masculine or feminine psyche can exist in either gender, another powerful argument for the existence of the androgynous brain in human beings. Only humans express the bilateral nature of sexual orientation / gender identity

Clearly gender roles have powerful genetic origins, but human beings with androgynous brains and shared gender dominance integrating traits for nurturance and competitiveness in the same psyche are not transformer anomalies like fa'afafine. Because it has been clearly demonstrated that the vast majority of men and women share an overwhelming majority of masculine and feminine traits, the androgynous brain of human beings must express a common genetic predisposition unique to humans.

In human beings, behavioural complexity must begin with genetic complexity.

Jonathan Weiner... "Inside the growing embryo, a gene interacts with the genes around it, and in the adult animal each complex of genes interacts with many others and with the surrounding world in ways so complicated that we're only just beginning to explore them, even in a fly."

One of the most profound aspects of behavioural complexity in humans is the way the human psyche deals with sexuality, gender identification and sexual orientation, these complexities began with the profound evolutionary innovation of the human androgynous brain and the early creation of the lifelong nuclear family unit.

Sex and Love Among the Hominim

The most important evolutionary change in any species is the way individuals choose mates through sexual selection because such choices largely determine reproductive success. In early humans, an androgynous brain and shared social dominance in the nuclear family unit fundamentally altered and blurred the distinction between male and female subjective responses. The particular balance within shared interest / self-interest as expressed through individual personality traits and behaviour would determine an individual's sexual desirability and reproductive success. An individual's perception of and preference for the balance between male and female traits would allow that determination. The way individuals were perceived and respected by the social group would also become important considerations affecting an individual's mating potential and the likelihood of their having a better choice from among the healthiest and the most practically and socially competent members of the social group.

Without the complex cultural norms and pressures that may have only evolved in the last 35,000 years, mating choices would have been strongly based on personal preference, and those preferences would have been for individuals with traits that elicited the emotional pleasure of both personal and social acceptance as well as traits that allowed individuals and families to deal with personal and social rejection. Divorce exists in all archaic societies although it is very much discouraged by the clan. The family and group know the harsh consequences of divorce on children and so the love that binds two people in a monogamous nuclear family has always been seen as crucially important in life. The San Bushmen are entirely peaceful people except when it comes to love, jealousy, divorce and adultery. Evolutionary adaptation has favoured those individuals and social groups in which love and marriage had the greatest emotional resonance and importance, even at the cost of homicidal aggression.

When mating preferences became a matter of unconscious / conscious personal preference in individuals, sexuality was given a whole new power and meaning. Because humans, like bonobos, are constantly available for sexual response not depending on the hormonal stimulation of menstrual signals and accessibility in females, sexuality would become a key bonding mechanism in preserving a lifelong emotional connection between two mated individuals. In humans, like bonobos, sex is a vital hormonal bonding mechanism. Unlike bonobos, sex in humans is primarily a bonding mechanism between two mated individuals rather than one that preserves social relationships and group cohesion. The lifelong bond between mates in even our earliest ancestors would require a new set of emotions that can be characterized and must have been expressed as true intimacy. For even our earliest ancestors, this highest form of personal acceptance felt and expressed through physical and emotional intimacy would be the basis of human love.

The emotional ties that bind the human nuclear family unit are unlike any in nature because of their complexity, duration and intensity and most importantly because they depend on reciprocal emotional responses between individuals. The emotional ties that bind the nuclear family unit are so strong that they form the indisputable foundation for human survival to this very day. Because of the duration and intensity of these emotional ties, there should be little doubt that these new emotions, even in our earliest ancestors, should be called love. If one considers the emotional attachment between some animals of the same species, or the emotional intensity of the reciprocal emotional attachment between a human and a pet dog, it is easy to imagine how intense the emotional bond of love must have been even in our earliest human ancestors. Without language, dogs and humans can communicate and read each other's intentions to form a lifelong bond, so it is reasonable to assume that early humans, without complex language but sharing the ability to communicate and read each other's intentions through behaviour and gesture could form emotional bonds of incredible intensity and duration. The bonds of love in human evolution must be very ancient and perhaps only its means of expression has evolved over time because of the evolution of complex personality traits upon which personal emotional attachment is based.

Aliso Gopnik... "All the processes of change, imagination, and learning ultimately depend on love. Human caregivers love their babies in a particularly intense and significant way. That love is one of the engines of human change. Parental love isn't just a primitive and primordial instinct, continuous with the nurturing behaviour of other animals (though certainly there are such continuities). Instead, our extended life as parents also plays a deep role in the emergence of the most sophisticated and characteristically human capacities. Our protracted immaturity is possible only because we can rely on the love of the people who care for us. "

The trust, loyalty, and the reciprocal pleasure of personal affiliation and acceptance between friends common in other higher apes rises to an intense new level in the emotional bonds that last a lifetime among the members of a human family.

The Nuclear Family

Even in archaic hunter / gatherer societies today, low life expectancy means that few individuals ever get to see their own grandchildren grow up. For 4 million years, the life expectancy of gentle, predominantly vegetarian hominids barely four feet tall must have been very short indeed. With high infant birth mortality and vulnerability to many predators and diseases, it is more than likely that very few human parents ever saw their children grow much past physical maturity. Only because human fertility became so much greater than in other higher primates with a new child possible every year would such vulnerable creatures be able to survive. All other higher primates generally have four to seven years between babies. Yet even in 19th and 20th-century industrial societies, high levels of child mortality was a brutal reality, really ending only with the advent of modern 20th century medicine. Even with increased human fertility, increased physical size and intelligence, human populations would have been extremely vulnerable. In early humans, close social bonds between relatives and non-relatives among the 20 to 100 individuals that made up typical social groups would have been essential for reproductive survival and success. It would be the one essential survival advantage human beings had.

Not only did our early human ancestors need two parents monogamously committed to each other to supply the resources necessary for multiple children to reach maturity, it would have taken the support of other individuals in the group as well. Menopause may have been a selected trait because those few surviving elder women would have provided crucial assistance to young families as they often do to this day. Evolutionary adaptation would also have favored those individuals and groups in whom clan unity, empathetic nurturance and reciprocal sharing became dominant traits. To this day, in much of the world, it literally takes a village to raise a child. The ikung San bushmen of South Africa which have been genetically identified as the oldest human population living on the planet, are exemplary in how child rearing and protection is a shared responsibility of not only the other adults, but siblings and other non- related adolescents.

The most important social trait that would allow human beings to survive abject vulnerability was the strength of the nuclear family unit and the clan to which it belonged, and the most crucial trait in creating the nuclear family unit would be the love that would hold a man and a woman in a common union for what would likely be a very brief lifetime.

In such a small social group made up of a few families in which neither females nor males would be forced to migrate to find mates within other social groups as is the rule in all other higher primates, family ties would be essential. Clan loyalty and cohesion would also be crucial to survival, even while creating an inevitable conflict between family loyalties and feelings, and the cultural norms of the wider social group. One can just imagine the emotional complexity of personal relationships among 10 to 30 families trying to balance the self-interest of each family unit with the shared interest of the clan to which they belonged. Self-interest / shared interest would necessarily reach far greater practical and emotional complexity because of the lifelong bonds that form the nuclear family unit as well as the lifelong bond of families to their social clan.

Food sharing would have become more complex, every family in the social group having to balance the self-interest of the family unit with the shared interest of the clan upon which it also depended. Leadership issues and decisions would have to be resolved within each family, as well as among the other families in the clan as well. Shared dominance and cooperation would be a part of all human social decisions. For the first time in evolutionary history, decision-making would become a matter of shared consensus rather than one imposed by a single dominant alpha authority.

Helen Fisher... "Slowly a predisposition to share, cooperate, to divide one's labors, and to work together became fixed in our genetic heritage. From these natural propensities other emotional predispositions would emerge. Love, friendship, trust allegiance, understanding, sympathy, and compassion evolved to hold people together."

Because of its personal / social complexity, sexuality and mating choices would also have become far more complicated in human groups than in other higher primates.

Where individuals stay connected for a lifetime because of personal / social preference, the choice in a mate would be one of reciprocal physical and emotional bonding. The ability to supply resources, and express traits for personal / social responsibility, trust and respect would have been and continue to be the key considerations for a woman choosing a mate. Physical attractiveness indicating reproductive health, sexual faithfulness and nurturance traits would have been and continues to be the key considerations for a man in choosing a mate. These basic considerations persist in all human societies.

Along with these complex personality traits of personal / social responsibility, respect, faithfulness and nurturance would come the negative emotions of jealousy, envy, lust, avarice and duplicity. Although these traits are observable in other higher apes, they would become incredibly more problematical, pervasive and subtle as issues of self-interest / shared interest became increasingly more important and complex within the monogamous family its extended clan.

Because extended families have lifelong emotional bonds that kept them together, genetic inbreeding would have been a common feature of human evolution. Among such a small number of families in widely dispersed home territories, genetic variation would have expressed itself in many positive and negative extremes. And when it so happened that individuals did mate with members of other clans, the hybrid vigour released would have also given these particular human beings powerful evolutionary novelty and potential. This combination of inbreeding and hybrid vigour may have been instrumental in the rapid and multiple speciation events in the hominid family tree over the last 4 million years. Add to this the fact that 70,000 years ago modern humans were reduced to a population of a few thousand and it is clear that genetic variation in modern human beings is now very narrow.

Humans are hardwired to respond to physical and behavioural difference in selecting a mate because it was the crucial subjective response in determining the survival of offspring. Modern human beings are still strongly influenced in their selection of mates by the unconscious perception of the degree of difference in immunological response as it exists between two individuals, and this unconscious ability would have been crucial in small isolated populations of humans because it would have given children the best defense against diseases. This ability is more than likely the result of humans being able to unconsciously smell or taste sexual pheromones that indicate the immunological profile of an individual, and thus their particular genetic attractiveness. Adult humans have even been shown to have the ability to smell fear and joy on another human. When asked to tell if a sweatshirt was worn by someone who had just watched a movie that was a comedy or horror film, people could tell the difference from the smell, with women much better at discriminating the difference than men. Human females can also tell a man's physical strength from a photograph of his face. From a photograph, a woman can also tell whether a man's is likely to be faithful or cheat on his mate.

Studies have shown that there is also an apparent predisposition to select mates with the greatest difference in psychological traits. This would have provided children with parents having the broadest set of behavioural and emotional resources that would have been crucial for survival. Personality tests in many human societies have shown that people choose mates with common values, but clearly opposite personality traits.

Because personal and social relationships are so emotionally complex and crucial to survival, human beings are hardwired for deep emotional sophistication that depends on the ability to perceive complex personality traits from the subtlest cues. The ability of infants to read the emotional facial signals of adults is an enormous part of the brain development that happens in children after birth. Most of human brain development actually happens after birth and this developing neural complexity acquired through socialization must account for a great deal of the specialized human ability for a broad range of complex subjective responses. Emotional nurturance and socialization is crucial in early development, but human babies are capable of complex emotional development because they are hardwired for these incredibly complex social perceptions and responses, from language acquisition and empathetic response to abstract moral judgment. All babies depend on personal interaction to create the neural patterns of human subjective response that are the expressions of traits hardwired as predispositions in the modern human brain.

Alison Gopnik describes how, "Within months after birth, human babies demonstrate that they can create mental maps of cause and effect, and test assumptions about human behaviour like tiny scientists doing improvisational conjectures on action and reactions. They can imagine things that don't exist and understand the concepts of numerical addition and subtraction. Before they are a year old, human babies demonstrate that they know right from wrong, and the difference between moral and cultural rules of behaviour; between things that are inherently wrong and things that are wrong because they are part of a recognized social convention."

"A human baby is the most complex social sponge on the planet, wiring its brain for particular personality traits that allow it to develop complex interpersonal relationships, different relationships with different people in different contexts, instinctively learning to understand and express trust, reciprocity, empathy and even altruism"

All this is done in order to develop those traits that foster the pleasure of personal acceptance and mitigate the fear of personal rejection, the foundation of all human emotions, especially love. Human babies are apparently capable of creating narratives to define life experience before they even have the language ability to communicate those narratives to others.

Gopnik goes on to say that, "ultimately, the most important thing for a human baby is to develop an understanding and ability to give and get love."

"Human babies are anything but the blank slate that psychologists used to believe them to be. A human baby is a sponge with specialized neural and psychological pockets created by natural selection to absorb emotional interactions reinforced by the pleasure of personal acceptance, as well as emotional interactions that ameliorate fears of personal rejection. In a human baby, just the sound of its mother's voice can produce as much oxytocin as occurs in the intimacy of an embrace. Babies can actually tell their mothers voice within the womb." These abilities may have begun very early in the course of human evolution because of the emotional bonds necessary to create the nuclear family and its clan.

Love and the Human Unconscious

Before human beings had the ability to speak, the neocortex of the brain that was responsible for monitoring experience and making conscious choices had a great deal more to do in the realm of emotions than in the practical ones of physical survival. With the creation of the androgynous human brain, the bilaterally paired traits of physical / emotional intimacy became the positive poles of personal attraction that would have been contrasted with the negative pole in the fear of personal rejection. Love would have created powerful positive feelings of intimacy and acceptance but these powerful feelings of love would have come with the inevitable fear of rejection expressed through jealousy, fears of abandonment, aversion to criticism, as well as a profound fear tied to the death of a loved one, the ultimate physical and emotional abandonment. The paired traits of physical / emotional intimacy as well as the fear of rejection / abandonment would have surfaced as a natural consequence of love in the nuclear family. These enormously complex feelings of pleasure and fear would have needed a way to be processed in the unconscious part of the brain. Without the language that is necessary for abstract thought, these fears would have been automatic and unconscious, expressed most likely as it is today, in dreams and psychological symptoms of insecurity or anxiety. Since Freud and Jung, love, sex and death have been identified as the prime focus of unconscious feelings. Mythic stories also identify love, sex and death as the primal anxieties in life. Because these feelings of emotional pleasure and fear that arose from ongoing feelings of love are so old, the human unconscious no doubt survives to serve the same purpose it had before human beings developed language and the ability for abstract thought with which humans have the ability to recognize, understand and accept such deep personal feelings.

The unconscious must be the very ancient process that allowed human beings to process emotions they had no way to understand or articulate beyond physical gestures and facial expressions that still convey the basic emotional range of human feelings.

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and his Emissary talks about the unconscious part of the mind.

"Julian Jaynes in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, points out that very little brain activity is in fact conscious (current estimates are certainly less than five percent, and probably less than one percent), and that we take decisions, solve problems, make judgments, discriminate, reason, and so on, without any need for conscious involvement."

"The organic function of thought is carried on for the most part unconsciously. Should the product finally entered consciousness also, or should consciousness momentarily accompany the process of logical thought, this light only penetrates to the shallows, and the actual fundamental processes are carried on in the darkness of the unconscious. The specifically purposeful operations are chiefly and in any case at the beginning, wholly instinctive and unconscious, even if they later press forward into the luminous circle of consciousness."

Originating in the amygdala, unconscious emotions would persist in modern humans, rising to the level of consciousness only when the rational prefrontal cortex evolved to the point where it was conscious of complex social responses and the emotional constraints necessary for an individual's integration into a complex family and social environment. It was only when left brain language gave us an inescapable, internal verbal monologue that human consciousness had a way to express the new form of bilateral subjective response through inductive / deductive reasoning.
Modern Humans

Inductive / deductive Reasoning  
The Ninth Rung in the Ladder of Subjective Complexity

The Bilateral Human Brain

The complexity of the human mind and psyche can be tied directly to the robust bilateral complexity of the human brain. Bilaterality is a fundamental part of nature, as we have made abundantly clear, but only in the human brain is bilateral subjective complexity so advanced as to create abstract self-awareness through inductive / deductive reasoning. Only modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, know that they know what, why and even how they know. It is the feedback loop between the right-brain and left-brain that creates abstract self-awareness, depending on complex language to represent concrete reality as abstract ideas that are created by the feedback loop that defines inductive / deductive reasoning.

Dr. Iain McGilchrist in his comprehensive and important book on the bilateral human brain, The Master and his Emissary, describes the process through which the modern human brain creates the human mind. There is no book that so well explains the bilateral nature of the human mind as well as making clear its deep evolutionary roots. Fair use and practicality makes it impossible to quote even a fraction of the supportive research and ideas in his book that apply to our thesis, and there is no book that gives a more comprehensive view of how the human mind works.

McGilchrist gives many examples of how subjective response is bilateral in form and expression and a fundamental aspect of nature. His own thesis that modern civilization has come to express left side dominance in the brain to a degree that is distorting the very nature of humanity is done from a neurological and philosophical point of view. Our thesis, which entirely concurs, is done from an evolutionary and cultural framework. In our view, our two theses are two sides of the same coin and so it is important to describe his understanding of the bilateral nature of the human brain / mind to offer a better understanding of the one we are making.

McGilchrist... "If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on the mode of language and abstraction yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known—and to this world it exists in a relationship of care."

The left brain creates a world of objective self-interest. The right brain creates the subjective world of shared interest. The human mind creates the bilateral subjective reality that expresses shared interest / self-interest. Only in the human mind does the loom of life become the loom of self-conscious reality created through inductive / deductive reasoning and the bilateral nature of the human mind.

Dr. McGilchrist describes the two sides of the brain as creating separate realities which they integrate through a feedback loop of information, the right side of the brain creating a holistic, contextual framework that fits new information into a greater context that is predominantly social and dealing with shared interests while the left side of the brain creates an abstract, verbal, reductive focused-attention that breaks experience into component parts. The right side of the brain creates all the different kinds of attention that create conscious awareness in the human mind but one. The left side of the brain is responsible for that one single aspect of awareness, the conscious focused-attention and verbal skill through which human beings create abstract ideas. It is the bilateral nature of the right-brain / left-brain expression of inductive / deductive reasoning that gives human consciousness its range and power.

In pointing out the essential differences in human consciousness McGilchrist identifies 'imagination, creativity, the capacity for religious awe, music, and dance, poetry, art, love of nature, a moral sense, a sense of humor and the ability to change one's mind as uniquely human and usually involving the right frontal lobe.'

"Where the left hemisphere's relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp and therefore to use it, the right hemisphere' appears to be one of reaching out—just that. Without purpose. In fact, one of the main differences between the ways of being of the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere always has ' an end in view', a purpose or use, and is more of the instrument of our conscious will then the right hemisphere.

"Ultimately there is clear evidence that when it comes to recognizing emotion, whatever it may be, whether it is expressed in language or through facial expression, it is the right hemisphere on which we principally rely."

"It seems to me a possibility that those emotions which are related to bonding and empathy, whether we call them' positive' or' negative', are preferentially treated by the right hemisphere, as one would expect: such stimuli capture right hemisphere attention. By the same token those to do with competition, rivalry and individual self-belief, positive or negative, would be preferentially treated by the left hemisphere."

"However, at least one study has found a clean divide between the hemispheres, the left coding for the nonliving, and the right for the living, regardless of the task. Another study concluded that there are different brain networks subserving the identification of living and nonliving entities. Food, however, and musical instruments, presumably because of the way in which they take part in the life of the body, sort with the living rather than the nonliving."

Simply put, the right brain is primarily responsible for emotional relationships and perceptions expressing shared interest while the left brain is primarily responsible for objective decision-making expressing self-interest. It is the right brain that integrates these two separate ways of viewing human reality into the bilateral subjective response of inductive / deductive reasoning. And because human beings are so dependent on socialized learning and shared nurturance, it is the right brain upon which our evolutionary survival has primarily depended, at least until the last 10,000 years.

The Evolutionary Origin of Language

The rudiments of language exist in some birds and monkeys when they use particular sounds to indicate the presence of particular predators. As prey animals, many primates and birds have developed the ability to make an abstract connection between a particular warning sound and the presence of particular predators, even learning to respond to each other's signals. This ability may be the first instance of the creation of abstract vocal symbols to represent particular perceptions of significant and distinct objects and the perception of behaviours in other living creatures. This socialized learning stored in retrievable memory is the first ability creatures had to classify and categorize experience and express it through abstract symbols used to communicate with others. This earliest language ability may be the foundation of deductive / inactive reasoning and the ability to classify and categorize information beginning with the appearance, intention and behaviour of particular predators.

In The Lopsided Ape, Michael C. Corballis describes an experiment that shows dolphins have the ability to vocally pass information from one individual to another, and this may be more advanced in some mammals than has been presumed. In one experiment with captive dolphins at the University of Hawaii, dolphins were taught to imitate each other, so that if one dolphin performs some complex action, a second dolphin would be classically conditioned to do the same, sparing the trainers the slow training of the first dolphin with the second. Observations suggest that the second dolphin can imitate the first even if blindfolded while the first carries out the action, suggesting that the information might have been conveyed "linguistically".

Predators also communicate with each other in coordinated hunting strategies. Body and tail position, gestures and sounds are used by predators to communicate with each other in responding to the behaviour and particular circumstances involved in the hunting of particular prey. There is evidence that wild dogs communicate with each other before they set out to hunt, deciding on the particular prey to be hunted, completely ignoring other species opportunistically encountered on the hunt. There is also clear evidence that Moray eels and Grouper fish use gestural signals to hunt cooperatively, the first evidence of such communication and cooperative hunting behaviour between species. Orca whales also use low-level sound communication while they are cooperatively tracking and hunting prey.

Two Border Collies, one in Austria and the other in the United States named Betsy and Chaser respectively have experimentally demonstrated the ability to acquire large vocabularies of human words connected to particular objects. Unlike chimpanzees who take a long time to learn to associate particular objects with a corresponding symbol, these dogs can do this with incredible speed. Betsy has a vocabulary of over 300 words tied to objects, and can even retrieve them when shown picture representations of those objects. Chaser has a vocabulary of over 1000 words and has demonstrated the ability to deductively identify a new object connected to a new word by the process of elimination. They can even connect picture symbols of objects as well as words with the objects they know. Border Collies, unlike most other dogs that can acquire 15 to 20 words, have the gene CTNND2 that has been identified as being crucial for cognitive development. This gene present in humans perhaps accounts for this spectacular difference in ability between other dogs and border collies.

Dogs are also the only creatures that can read human intention, and Border Collies, as the most intelligent herding breed, express that ability to the highest degree of any canine as anyone who has watched herding contests can attest. The hunting communication between shepherd and dog that has been modified into herding behaviour must have some correlation to their ability to acquire language using the basic inductive / deductive reasoning upon which hunting communication relies. The deductive / inactive reasoning necessary to understand prey behaviour must precede any cooperative hunting strategies because it is necessary to categorize and correlate information about a particular prey animal and store it in retrievable memory before a successful hunt can begin. Once a prey's behaviour has been deductively learned and understood, inductive hunting strategies may be employed in response to that category of information. The ability to create abstract gestures and sounds to indicate the relationship between action and reaction, between hunters and the hunted may be the foundation for inductive / deductive reasoning and the ability to understand the connections and correlations between abstract possibilities rather than concrete reality. It is the ability to make abstract analysis that connects past, present and future behaviour that allows creatures to hunt particular prey. It is this ability to learn and predict behaviour, to correlate the relationship between action and reaction that must be the foundation for inductive / deductive reasoning.

Some birds can demonstrate language abilities and basic inductive / deductive reasoning. Wild crows make up to 250 different distinct sounds in communicating with each other and have different vocalizations for communicating with the social group or within the family unit.

Wikipedia describes the abilities of Alex, the famous African great parrot, demonstrating the ability to use imitated human words to identify particular objects. He could not only do that but was also able to identify and select objects by color, shape and the material from which the object was made. His in-depth training clearly developed what must be a basic innate ability for basic inductive / deductive reasoning. Listing Alex's accomplishments in 1999, his trainer, Irene Pepperberg said he could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to six; that he could distinguish seven colors and five shapes, and understand the concepts of "bigger", "smaller", "same", and "different", and that he was learning "over" and "under". Alex passed increasingly more difficult tests measuring whether humans have achieved Piaget's 6 stage object permanence. Alex showed surprise and anger when confronted with a nonexistent object or one different from what he had been led to believe was hidden during the tests. Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. He could understand that a key was a key no matter what its size or color, and could figure out how one key was different from others. He was asked what color he was, and learned "grey" after being told the answer six times. Alex understood the turn-taking of communication and often the syntax used in language.

Preliminary research also seems to indicate that Alex could carry over the concept of four blue balls of wool on a tray to four notes from a piano. Pepperberg was also training him to recognize the Arab numeral "4" as "four". Alex also showed some comprehension of personal pronouns; he used different language when referring to himself or others, indicating a concept of "I" and "you".

In July 2005, Pepperberg reported that Alex understood the concept of zero. If asked the difference between two objects, he answered; but if there was no difference between the objects, he said "none", which meant that he understood the concept of nothing or zero. In July 2006, Pepperberg also discovered that Alex's perception of optical illusions was similar to human perception.

Darwin was absolutely correct in stating that all adaptations are created on simpler preceding ones, and the inductive / deductive reasoning ability in humans using oral and written language may have begun in the adaptations of prey and hunting animals to communicate both concrete and abstract information to one another.

Human Language

Human language may in fact be very ancient, first appearing millions of years ago. Brocca's region is the area of the brain where language is processed, and is so situated that it leaves an impression in the top of the skull. Some anthropologists believe this region first appeared in Homo habilis, one of our earliest human ancestors, more than 2 million years ago. It is clearly apparent in Homo erectus and Neanderthal skulls indicating that at least our closest extinct relatives had some form of language.

Recent neurological experiments have demonstrated that Brocca's region responds not only to spoken language, but also to visual attention focused on finger movements. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of years before complex rapid speech, our extinct relatives were probably using sign language to communicate. It is not hard to imagine that our earliest ancestors would also make sounds to make words to indicate the presence of particular predators just like other primates. And it is not difficult to imagine that silent hand gestures in particular circumstances of danger might have been more effective at indicating the appearance and behaviour of particular predators or prey. Soldiers still use this form of silent communication in confronting enemies in complex terrain and situations. Because of its adaptive advantage, the earliest communication through language must have used basic signs and gestures, slowly evolving into more complex communication and eventually the portrayal of experience using mime and the entire body to communicate emotions and experiences to others.

There are tribes that still use mime to do this, and anyone who has ever watched a silent movie knows how well human beings can communicate their experiences without words. Merlin Donald in his books, A Mind so Rare and The Origin of Consciousness makes a persuasive case for how language ability must have evolved from signs and gestures to mimetic portrayal of experience and finally on to spoken and then written words.

Preliterate societies still living in the Stone Age have been demonstrated to have remarkable vocabularies of from 10,000 to 30,000 words. Considering that the entire Bible only uses 12,000 words and most people in modern societies use approximately that number to function effectively, it is clear that total vocabulary is not directly tied to complex civilization and culture. Using signs to create 10,000 to 30,000 words would have necessitated the use of intricate finger gestures similar to those in American Sign Language used by the deaf. Evolutionary and cultural adaptation, favoring those with the most complex language skills, would have selected those individuals and groups with the greatest hand and finger dexterity. This dexterity, evolved for the key function of communication, would be adapted for all the fine motor skills that humans use to both make tools and use them effectively. Because tool technology and use remained so limited for most of the last 2 million years, it is likely that hand / eye coordination and dexterity was primarily an adaptation for language, and language was used primarily for creating emotional maps of meaning rather than for practical survival skills. C.W. Bowra says it is interesting and instructive to note that most words in archaic societies have to do with emotions rather than objects and actions. Words, it seems, were created and vocabularies expanded over the last two million years of Stone Age existence to express practical behaviour and emotional complexity.

Iain McGilchrist and others have made the case that language evolved from music. "It has a vital way of binding people together, helping them to be aware of shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actually drawing them together."

He also points out that this may be the reason poetry evolved before prose. "Prose was at first known as pesos logos, literally 'pedestrian', or 'walking logos' as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from the right hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left hemisphere language (the referential language of prose).

Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere where one would expect a means of communication with others, promoting social cohesion to arise."

Bowra also points out that what archaic languages do not seem to address are abstract ideas like hope and freedom. This may be because predominantly left brain abstract representations of experience are of little use in a world that is based on concrete reality. Even today, creating written forms of languages that were only spoken until recently require difficult conjunctions of existing words to create abstract words like hope and freedom. It was with the advent of inductive / deductive reasoning and the innate ability to create causal maps of meaning that modern humans needed far more words to categorize and classifying and describe experience and reality than just those that had to do with emotional and social reality. It was only with inductive / deductive reasoning that human beings needed the ability for rapid speech to match the massive increase in the lexicon of practical and emotional experience, and that ability for rapid speech only appeared in modern humans in the last 70,000 years. Humans that live in Stone Age societies do not apparently have a significant need, use or desire for abstract ideas, or even technological innovation and change, for that matter.

We, the most recent human beings, are different than all other primates because we have this innate ability to acquire language upon which inductive / deductive reasoning depends. But this inductive / deductive reasoning ability is still there primarily to serve emotional needs. Recent experiments have shown that babies learn language by doing a statistical analysis of the relationship between sound and behaviour in their observations of caregivers that allows them to perceive, communicate and respond to them as a way to create emotional bonds.

Alison Gopnik... "Experimentation and statistical analysis seem to be programmed into our brains even when we are tiny babies. Very young children unconsciously use these techniques to change their causal maps of the world."

She describes one experiment in which 10-month-old babies were exposed for three hours a day to caregivers who spoke only Mandarin Chinese. At the end of a month those babies could understand as much Mandarin as children raised from birth in homes that spoke nothing else. Another group of 10-month-old babies watched videos of the babies and the Mandarin speaking caregivers in the earlier experiment. These children, attentively watching television, learned absolutely no Mandarin skills, clearly indicating that the purpose of language is to establish emotional bonds with caregivers.

Language plays an especially potent role in learning about the mind of others, in fact, there are consistent and strong correlation between children's language abilities and such understanding.

There was a population of children in Nicaragua who were born deaf because of a particular genetic defect. Because these children lived in isolated communities, they had no language and were invariably considered to be retarded. When the government brought these children together in one residence, they quickly developed sign language without any outside training or encouragement. There is also the famous recorded case in Hawaii where children from many cultures speaking different languages were brought together in day-care facilities while their parents worked in fields. These children, without prompting, created an entirely original new language with its own syntax and vocabulary out of the many different languages in which they were raised. It is also apparent that this did not happen unless there was a group of 30 or more individual children in the group. Group size and its attendant complexity is again clearly shown to influence behaviour and developmental abilities, just as group size and complexity would influence human development and ability when humans groups became gatherings of many strangers in urban settings.

Clearly, the innate ability to acquire language can use either signs or sounds for its expression. It has been demonstrated that babies with deaf parents use signs instead of sounds in the practice babbling all babies do in learning language. Again, what seems to be crucial is the need to perceive, communicate and respond to others in a social group to establish emotional bonds and abstract causal maps of social meaning. What was most interesting is that the deaf children in Nicaragua who had invented their own sign language had a terrible time understanding how other people's minds worked. A second younger group of children who came to this group facility all learned the common sign language and had no such trouble understanding the minds of others. Because they were younger, the developmental stages of language acquisition tying language to emotional meaning was still open. Apparently the longer one goes without the language abilities to make emotional connections, the more difficult it is to even recognize those emotions in others. Like sight, there is an apparent developmental stage in the brain when language ability and emotional connections to others are formed as a child uses the mirror neurons in Brocca's region to understand another person's state of mind.

Apparently humans don't even need consonants or vowels for complex communication through language. According to Iain McGilchrist, "There are extant tribes in the Amazon basin such as the Piraha, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Brazil, whose language is effectively a kind of song, possessing such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum or whistle conversations."

That groups in South America have, in the 10,000 years since they arrived in the continent, re-created what must be some echo of the earliest kind of human language is breathtaking in its implication as to how fundamental emotional communication is in our evolutionary foundation.

The connection between some kind of language and emotional bonding is so profound that it must have appeared very early in human evolution because emotional connections must have been vitally important among even our earliest ancestors. Today emotional bonding and maps of social meaning remain a crucial part of human development through life. For modern humans, like our ancestors, the shared interest of personal / social acceptance and rejection gives language its true meaning, purpose and unlimited richness.

It is the innate ability for making causal and emotional maps that is the foundation of the innate ability for language acquisition that modern human beings use in creating a representation of the world. All of modern culture depends on the same ability. Words create an abstract representation of the world. Words are the fingers of the mind. The mind forms abstract individual sounds into iconic representations of the world. The words tree or house or hat has different meanings for every individual in every different culture on the earth. Words as abstract representations of the world of experience allow human beings to create and classify those experiences to make abstract representations of reality. 'I took my hat out of the tree and went in the house.' means the same thing as a purely abstract expression of reality to every person in every culture, even though it's concrete translation into mental images or even pictorial form would be radically different in every individual and every culture. Words also allow human beings to create stories that go beyond what and when things happened to an understanding of how and why things happen. It is the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning that is the foundation of the new human ability to perceive and to even create new realities. It is words and the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning that allows human beings to understand the abstract idea of past, present and future. It is deductive reasoning that allows human beings to understand relationships as well as experience them. It is deductive reasoning that is the prerequisite body of information necessary for the creative, inductive reasoning that would result in all technological innovation, in all art, science, religion and government. Without the innate need and deductive ability to make sense of the world, modern human culture would be not much different than late Homo erectus or Neanderthals. We would still all be living in caves, hunting big game with spears, cooking food over a fire with our families in our clans. Because of inductive / deductive reasoning and complex language expressed through rapid speech, human beings are capable of seeing and understanding the world in a whole new way and creating countless abstract options called ideas formed in the internal monologue that distinguishes human consciousness from all others. Because of inductive / deductive reasoning and complex language these new Cro-magnon Stone Age humans were very different than all the humans that came before them.

Language and Self-awareness  
The True Sixth Sense

There is a difference between concepts and ideas. Many animals form concepts about their experience, and some can even create categories for those experiences.

Pigeons can tell the difference between a Picasso and Matisse painting or Bach from Stravinsky. Carp can tell the blues from classical music. Dogs and seals even understand the connections between words, signs, actions or things.

Iain McGilchrist...."In fact, subjects who have suffered a stroke demonstrated even complex reasoning and mathematical calculations do not depend on language. Syntactic structure is distinct from logical structure: subjects that have lost their grasp of syntax following a left hemisphere stroke remain able to use sophisticated thought processes as complex as the structure of complex syntax, and then calculate and reason perfectly well. Patients with semantic dementia can perform calculations, sometimes exceptionally well." McGilchrist goes on to point out that archaic tribes with limited words for numbers are capable of complex mathematical ideas, like infinitely adding one to any number. People without words for particular colors can still recognize those colors.

"Thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them."

McGilchrist believes that language is connected to manual manipulation, essentially, a way to mentally mold the world to hand, and that the syntactic elements of language may derive from gesture. "One theory is that referential language may have evolved not from sounds at all, but actually direct from hand movements—not only that, but specifically from motions to do with grasping." This is supported by the close neurological connection between finger movement and the language area of the brain. He agrees with American neuroscientist Norman Geschwind that language didn't originate to communicate but as a means of mapping the world, but he goes further in his belief that it is in fact a means of manipulating the world.

Regardless of their original purpose, words are clearly not necessary for concept formations, but words are absolutely essential for ideas, ideas being the abstract connection between concepts. And ideas, even about things humans manipulated with fingers, remain largely unexpressed until modern humans had the ability for rapid speech. This is clearly evident in the fact that tool innovation was almost nonexistent until 70,000 years ago when humans developed the ability for rapid speech. If words were about manipulating the world, they clearly had little use in tool innovation until modern humans came along.

In the beginning was the word, and for humans words are the origin of true rational consciousness expressed through inductive / deductive reasoning used to create narrative representations of reality. Words are abstract representations of reality that are stored in the retrievable memory of the brain. Each word corresponds to a particular experience, and also a particular category of experience. There are particular trees, and there are categories of trees. When the mind creates a representation of reality from the retrievable memories of particular trees in particular categories it is much like the way the eyes create a representation of reality of a particular tree in a particular context using light waves to pass information from the retina to the brain. The difference between the representation of reality created by the eyes and the mind is the mind uses memories from all the senses to create those representations. Using words, syntax and verbal context, human beings make representations of reality that are entirely abstract. One can see a particular birch tree in the mind's eye, or imagine a category of deciduous trees like birches independent of any sensory input. Language is the abstract sixth sense, the one the human brain can use to integrate all the other senses, all concrete and emotional experiences into a rational narrative constantly flowing from the internal narrator that every individual requires to have an abstract sense of self-awareness. It is the internal narrator that creates the 'I / We' that forms abstract representations of personal identity and social reality. In modern humans, the internal narrative would be the process through which all human beings use inductive / deductive reasoning to create abstract representations of both concrete and emotional reality. The internal narrative of language that creates emotional representations of personal / social reality begins in infancy so that by the time a child is six years old, it has the ability to even imagine realities that might and might never exist. By six years old, children can tell stories that are completely unique and individual, restricted only by the child's language ability and exposure to cultural contexts in which all stories, expressed or internal give meaning to life. Children can create imaginary friends that satisfy particular psychological needs, just as adults read novels about imaginary characters that do the same thing. The bilateral subjective responses of personal / cultural narratives of personal identity and social reality using words and stories created the oral traditions that brought human beings to the Stone Age culture of archaic peoples. It is personal / cultural narratives of personal / social reality using written words that created the many literate civilizations that have transformed the world since then. Without words and language spoken then written, human identity can form no complex abstract personal or cultural reality. Without words and language, spoken then written, abstract self-awareness doesn't go much further than that demonstrated by chimpanzees, porpoises and elephants. Without an internal narrator using words and language, spoken then written, humans would be just big game hunting apes who love one another.

Perhaps the best example to show how words create representations of reality in the brain just like all the other senses is the case of Helen Keller, who became totally deaf and blind when she was eighteen months old and had only a few spoken words of language. Her parents raised her with love and tenderness, but she was a virtual wild child until she was 11 years old, and learned from her teacher Annie Sullivan that signed letters pressed into her hand could form words and sentences. This ability to form a representation of reality in the brain through signed letters and words pressed into her hand allowed her to get a college degree, write 40 books and become one of the most famous human beings of her time. And when she described the period of her life before she learned to make words, she called herself "the phantom", someone aware but with only a tenuous grasp of reality even though she still had the full use of the senses of smell, taste and touch. Without words, those three senses were simply not enough to create a personal sense of reality as vivid as that created by the eyes and ears as they form representations of reality from meaningless shapes, colors and sounds that a baby perceives at birth. Without eyes and ears to learn language, she was a phantom in an unintelligible world.

It is also important to note that Helen Keller, unlike those children in Nicaragua who were born deaf and blind, was capable of understanding the minds of others and had a profound sense of another human being's state of mind. Because the Nicaraguan children were treated as retarded and often shunned and isolated by others, they did not have the emotional bonding that Helen Keller had with her loving, attentive, emotionally expressive parents. Words and language have the ability to create representations of reality in the brain, but that reality only includes the minds of others if emotional connections are a part of child development.

Our Big Brains

The most distinctive features about human beings compared to our nearest cousins is the size of our brains, its emotional and rational complexity, and the fact that we remain emotionally connected to one another in family units for a lifetime. Developmentally, our brain complexity and its large size is due to the fact that modern humans have three-quarters of their brain development occur after birth. Modern human beings are the only creatures whose brains continue to grow, reshape and transform themselves for more than 20 years, and perhaps a lifetime if new studies on brain plasticity are recognized. The neural pruning and brain development of human beings depends on socialization, and so neural development and emotional complexities are completely interrelated and interconnected, nurture / nature intertwined as in no other animal. The simplest explanation for why the hominid brain tripled in size a million and a half years ago is the fact that human groups increased in size from less than 50 to 150 or more, and with that emotional complexity expanded geometrically. The fact that hominids also went from being a prey species to become the top predator on earth may also have required the integration of subjective responses of prey and hunting behaviour in a bilateral complexity unique to our human ancestors. This integration would have changed human subjective complexity in a way that only an androgynous brain and shared social dominance would have done previously.

Alison Gopnik suggests that this increase in brain size in mankind has to do with rational complexity in the prefrontal cortex. "The reasons that we evolved such massive brains remains obscure, but one reason may have been to help us at the choice points. Our brains allows each of us to bring a maximum amount of learning and experience to each and every choice point, all that our species has learned and all that we have learned in our lifetimes. A fly does this to some small degree, and we do it to a large degree, more than any other creatures on this planet."

In the one percent genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees, 50 percent are tied directly to brain development. Considering the fact that there are only two letter change differences in the genes that form the cortex of a chicken and a chimpanzee, but there are 18 letter change differences between the genes that form the cortex of a chimpanzee and a modern human, it is clear that an enormous part of human evolutionary change has been involved in subjective and emotional complexity. The subjective complexity that happened in humans did not happen in chimpanzees since we shared a common ancestor five million years ago. And considering that most of that rapid change in brain development happened in the last half million years, it is clear that there had been rapid evolutionary changes in the subjective complexity of the human brain in that period of time.

The Origin and Nature of Inductive / deductive Reasoning

Our nearest human ancestors, homo sapiens first appeared no more than 200,000 years ago. They were anatomically almost identical to us, Homo sapiens sapiens, except for one crucial difference. We have a larynx lower down in the throat that gives us the ability for rapid speech. This evolutionary adaptation happened seventy thousand years ago, in a small population of individuals from which all living human beings are descended. This unique anatomic developmental process persists in all human babies, and happens between two and four years of age. Although the brain of Homo sapiens had all the same areas for speech, clearly language ability underwent some fundamental change at this time in human evolution. It is not coincidental that until this happened, human culture and innovation was appreciably no different than later Homo erectus or Neanderthals. What happened 70,000 years ago must be the evolutionary adaptation that makes modern humans what we are, allowing complex spoken language, a sense of personal identity, and most importantly the ability to think in radically new and creative ways. This new ability to think in terms of cause and effect in order to consciously analyze experience appeared with rapid speech and was the ninth rung in the ladder of bilateral subjective complexity. It is the human capacity for inductive / deductive reasoning that makes us unique among all creatures.

Genetic testing of human populations around the world has shown that all living human beings are descended from one woman who lived in East Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. One of her descendants was a man who lived near Kenya or Tanzania approximately 70,000 years ago, and all living human beings are descended from that one man. There was a genetic Eve and a genetic Adam who lived approximately 30,000 years apart, and their descendants, the ikung San and Hadzebe are still found where those modern humans first appeared. Determining the genetic advantage that gave the descendants of these two human beings such an overwhelming survival advantage that they completely replaced or subsumed every other human lineage is crucial in understanding what and who we are?

We propose that it was the ability for innate language acquisition that allows modern humans to create maps of meaning and do unconscious statistical analysis of experience that allows modern humans the ability for bilateral inductive / deductive reasoning. This new inductive / deductive reasoning ability would require and be dependent on far more complex and extensive vocabularies using abstract syntactical structure and ideational skills. Modern children learn these skills from simple exposure to complex language as a part of developmental change and are first apparent with the larynx descending in the throat around two years of age.

This innate ability for language acquisition may have been a recessive trait in the descendants of the genetic Eve, allowing perhaps one in four of her descendants the expression of this recessive trait. In Adam's descendants this clearly is a dominant trait that allows all human babies the innate ability for language acquisition and inductive / deductive reasoning. Such a trait would have given the genetic Adam's offspring an inexorable advantage in virtually all aspects of life that determined reproductive success and survival. Inductive / deductive reasoning would allow increasingly complex new expressions of cooperative / competitive behaviour, as well as increasingly complex abilities to understand and manipulate the environment. To be able to communicate the understanding of cause and effect, to be able to teach as well as learn, to be able to create categories of knowledge and experience and pass it from one generation to another using rapid speech and expanded vocabularies would be the foundation of human culture and creativity through which human beings would come to control the world.  
Deductive reasoning upon which language acquisition is dependent is innate in modern human children. Inductive reasoning, the ability for creative thought and abstract representations of reality is also innate and appears at approximately six years of age when children are able to create stories and scenarios that no longer are tied to concrete experience. Imaginary friends and fantastical stories are based on such inductive ability to re-create and re-imagine ideas of reality that have been deductively learned through language. It is not coincidental that this ability appears most strongly with the acquisition of literacy, the abstract representation of language upon which the creation of ideas primarily rests. With language as a practical tool, and imagination as the creative tool, left brain / right brain feedback loops would allow modern humans to understand cause and effect, probability, and the benefit of deferred gratification, and to create new technologies for hunting, medicine and shelter and cultural expressions like music, myth and religious sensibility.

Bilateral inductive / deductive reasoning has two complementary aspects. Deductive reasoning is the mental ability humans have to create abstract categories of experience connecting cause and effect. This conscious connection of cause and effect would allow people to understand the medicinal properties of plants and create the first medicines. Deductive reasoning, the left-brain ability to focus attention on separate parts of experience would allow humans to understand the behaviour of other creatures and thereby significantly increase available resources. Deductive reasoning, connecting cause and effect in the observation of experience, would also allow the creation of many new tools for hunting, clothing and shelter. It is impossible to prove, but it is also likely that, coincidental with rapid speech, the internal monologue that characterizes human thought must have come into existence. To create categories of experience out of words attached to concrete observation of cause and effect would have required some mechanism by which categories could be formed, remembered and considered. The most likely tool for such an abstract ability for intellectual analysis would have been the internal monologue that characterizes modern human consciousness.

It was only then that human beings began inventing and perfecting new kinds of weapons that allowed them to hunt from a distance. Until then, modern humans hunted large game with rough, heavy spears and stone axes just like Homo erectus and Neanderthals. This new species of human invented spears and arrows with sharp points made of bone that could be fired from a distance. Through deductive reasoning these first modern humans found poisons to tip spears and arrows that made them far more effective hunting weapons. These people also invented jewelry and personal decoration indicating a more complex sense of abstract reality and meaning in social relationships.

Inductive reasoning is the bilateral correlative of deductive reasoning. It is the right-brain ability to understand the abstract connection between categories of experience created through deductive processes. Without the categorization of experience and observation created through deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning is impossible to use in an effective way to create new ideas. Inductive reasoning would remain largely unexpressed and underutilized until the creation of writing that allowed deductive categories of experience to be represented in an abstract form.

Until humans could read and write, the potential advantages of literate civilization were not only impossible to see, but fundamentally threatened personal and clan relationships. Literacy, it must be remembered, only happens when human populations gather in urban areas where human beings are for the most part complete strangers. Civilization, the most complex expression of inductive / deductive reasoning is entirely the result of literacy and urbanization, and though its social benefits have been clear, it has come at the price of warfare, slavery and every type of human degradation. Inductive / deductive reasoning expressed through literacy has given modern humans the ability to have ideas that are powerfully beneficial as well as powerfully destructive.

Because the ability for rapid speech was coincidental with the first appearance of rapid technological change it must indicate a new mental ability for rational understanding and complexity that had never existed before. Rapid speech must have represented a new capacity for thought that went beyond the emotional maps humans needed for social cohesion. This new capacity was the great quantum leap in intelligence in the human species allowing the ability to create abstract representations of reality that are the basis for all technology, science, art and religion. It was the increase in the left- brain capacity for breaking experience into its component parts that allowed the right brain to integrate them into new imaginative forms.

Between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, the drought that brought humans to the point of extinction finally broke and the climate in Africa changed for the better. The environmental stress at this time cannot be exaggerated because genetic evidence shows that the population of humans on the planet then was only a few thousand individuals living on the coastline of South Africa. By 50,000 B.C.E., the first population of these new humans had already migrated to Australia. In the next 20,000-year period, human populations recovered significantly and the migration of modern humans up the rift Valley of Africa into Central Asia and the Far East was well underway. It was these modern humans who were capable of rapid speech, and inductive / deductive reasoning that created the cultural and technological innovation that moved into Europe 35,000 years ago and displaced the last of the Neanderthals. It was these human beings who created the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. It was these human beings who populated and came to dominate the world. It was these peoples who were the first human beings truly like us in all ways.

With inductive / deductive reasoning, human beings could go much further in making sense of experience, allowing human beings to categorize and classify information and pass this information on to other human beings through cultural expressions that used language as its primary tool. The observed efficacy of plants as medicine would become crucial cultural information that gave particular groups profound survival advantages. Categorizing and classifying animal behaviour and environmental observation through deductive reasoning would also give those human groups a powerful new tool in achieving success as hunters and gatherers. Coming to understand the relationship between seasonal events and animal behaviour would depend on the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning. Coming to understand that there was a causal relationship behind most things would become the foundation of animist religion, ancestor worship and reciprocal exchanges of sacred objects that tie individuals within and among social groups in profound new ways. Deductive reasoning would allow humans to connect cause and effect in nature in both practical and mythic ways, creating the bonding power of spiritual sensibility as well as the problematic power of superstition. Only words allow humans to create very different abstract realities expressed through culture.

These new human beings had the ability to teach as well as learn, an innate skill that is clearly observable in babies even before they learn language. It is the innate ability for inductive / deductive reasoning that allowed the process of hypothesis, testing and conclusion that is the foundation of the scientific method through which both babies and adult humans understand cause and effect and make sense of the world. It is this inductive / deductive ability that is the foundation of science, engineering, medicine, and philosophy. It is inductive / deductive reasoning that makes rapid speech necessary and useful and allows modern humans the ability to actually understand and change their environment. It was only in these Cro-Magnon humans, us, that the subjective response to experience was based on the creation of causal maps of experience that exist only in the modern human brain. Until modern humans, all brain development clearly had to do with the ability and need to create more complex emotional maps of the world to fit into increasingly complex social relationships. Until these modern human babies became tiny scientists making statistical analysis of experience, complex expressions of inductive / deductive reasoning was impossible and language of no more use than communicating concrete and emotional experience as it related to day-to-day survival.

Inductive / deductive reasoning exists in bilateral form, the ability to make abstract categories of experience inseparable from the ability to connect those categories in novel ways. Inductive / deductive reasoning is the foundation of literate civilization and the source of the infinitely generative cultural ideas, innovation and diversity that has appeared in the last 10,000 years. Civilization has in fact overwhelmed the evolutionary purpose of human social relationships, which are the emotional maps of meaning that create human identity in the context of a nuclear family and its clan. Evolutionarily speaking, people are not evolutionarily meant to live among strangers, and the more isolated individuals are, the more problems they and their societies have in coping with that stress. One in four North Americans sought some intervention for their mental health in 2010, and personal isolation and its inevitable stress and ennui is likely the reason why. The balance within shared interest / self interest in North America has been so shifted toward self-interest that both the individual and society are in fact at an existential precipice. Such is the power of bad ideas that distort the balance within shared interest / self-interest upon which every living system is founded. This is Dr. Iain McGilchrist's thesis with which we agree entirely, and which we will address from a different point of view.

The many profound and useful ideas that have created civilization are important to us and have had world altering consequences. But this ability to make abstract categories to understand and alter nature would have had little use in a hunter / gatherer society bound in rigid cultural patterns. But this inductive / deductive ability would geometrically explode in cultural and technological innovation in every literate civilization once people became urbanized groups of largely unrelated strangers. The deductive part of intelligence was all that people could use or need until civilization separated people from nature and those categories of experience tied to day-to-day life. Except in interpersonal relationships, human creativity and inductive reasoning would be a largely unexpressed potentiality in human culture until literacy and the abstract representations of language through writing became a necessity in urban societies.

Michael Corballis... "At this point, it is worth noting that the variations in vocabulary between one language and another have little to do with the complexity of the language itself. The languages of the Australian aborigines... are intricately inflected and, in many respects, more complex than English. Claiborne remarks that "Navajo grammar is so complicated it is virtually impossible to master unless you learn it in your childhood."

Anthropologists have established the profound richness and efficacy of these Stone Age peoples, the sophistication of their medicines, the complexity of their rites and rituals, and the profound depth of their myths and stories. The complexity of language clearly has little to do with the complexities of culture and technology that are the source of the million or more words found in the English vocabulary.

A good example of the differences in the richness of languages is in Peter Farb's article in Horizon, Autumn 1968, in which he describes the difference between an English-speaking person reporting a break in a fence and a Navajo speaker doing the same. The English-speaking person would report 'the fence is broken in such a place.' "The Navajo speaker would have to choose words that would first indicate the fence belongs to a category of inanimate things. The verb he selects will indicate that the fence material was long and thin and thus presumably wire. He then must choose among several verb forms that tell whether the fence consisted of one strand, two or many strands of wire. Similarly, the act of breaking will be reported with much greater precision. The Navajo speaker must choose between two different words that tell us the fence was broken by a human act or by some nonhuman agency such as a windstorm; his choice of words will probably also indicate the way in which the fence was broken. And, finally, his verb will tell us whether or not the fence is presently moving (being whipped by the wind, perhaps, or carried downstream by a flood). Using the same number of words, the Navajo speaker has given a far more complex and useful description of the same event."

Elizabeth Thomas, in The Harmless People, points out that the San Bushmen have different words for countless places and things, that sometimes a particular place of only a few square meters will have its own name and there are countless such words for areas encompassing many square miles. Even a particular root that grows at a particular place at a particular time will have a word that every member of the clan will know. When survival depends on what you can communicate and remember about what you know of your world, words become the most useful survival tool ever invented.

It was only in modern literate humans that the left-brain language ability to break experience into distinct abstract parts would threaten the primacy of the right brain right in integrating experience into conscious reality. Until modern humans appeared on the planet 70,000 years ago, brain complexity involved only the limited expression and conscious constraint of complex emotions arising from unconscious emotions having to do with love, sex and death, the most intense subjective responses in human social relationships.

The innate ability to understand cause and effect that allowed humans to teach as well as learn is the foundation of everything that we call culture. Among archaic peoples, using the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning, culture became primarily about passing information and rituals between individuals, groups and most especially generations. Deductive reasoning, making sense of the world, understanding experience by testing for cause and effect and making statistical analysis of observations to draw verifiable conclusions allows modern human beings to create and categorized information in incredibly complex ways. Most of science still depends on the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning, the human ability to classify and categorize and draw conclusions from those observations. There are no modern human cultures that do not have sophisticated abilities to classify, categorize and draw conclusions from nature and experience. And the deductive aspect of inductive / deductive reasoning depends entirely on complex language and the ability for rapid speech to express complex observations and information.

Rationality and Personal Identity

Unlike intelligence which is the ability to store and use information with particular dexterity, rationality is about understanding how the relevance of information is dependent upon the context in which exists, and the context in which people operate is that of the emotions. Intelligence is about the ability to categorize knowledge; rationality is about making wise choices with what we know. Intelligence reflects the deductive abstract side of intelligence whereas rationality reflects the inductive concrete aspect of intelligence. And rationality depends on the use of words and the internal personal and cultural narratives that human beings have created in the last 35,000 years to express the abstract understanding of relationships. It is in the subjective responses of personal / social relationships that wise choices are most crucial to personal acceptance or rejection, and these emotional choices are more crucial to reproductive success in humans than choices about physical survival. The foundation of human intelligence and personality is the transformation of intelligent knowledge into functional rationality, and nowhere are there greater demands on rationality than in personal and social relationships. That is why the rational prefrontal cortex responsible for social judgment and inhibition is the neural center of human nature and inductive / deductive reasoning. Iain McGilchrist... "Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion, that is communicated by one individual ' inhabiting' the body, and therefore the emotional world, of another; a bodily skill, further, it is acquired by each of us through imitation, by the emotional identification and intuitive harmonization of the bodily states of the one who learns with the one from whom it is learned, a skill moreover that originates in the brain as an analogue of bodily movement, and involves the same processes, and even the same brain areas, as certain highly expressive gestures, as well as involving neurons (mirror neurons) that are activated equally when we carry out an action and when we see another carry it out (so that in the process we can almost literally be said to share one another's bodily experience and inhabit one another's bodies); a process finally, that anthropologists see is derived from music, in turn an extension of grooming, which binds us together as physically embodied beings through a form of extended body language that is emotionally compelling across a large number of individuals within the group."

But language is also the place where the bilateral human brain finds its greatest challenge and complexity.

McGilchrist again... "Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience- and it does so by a metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought."

"Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ' off-line' a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, all with a disembodied representation of the world abstracted, central, not particularized and time and place, generally applicable, clearly fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on the particular aspect of reality and how it can be modeled so that it can be grasped and controlled." But its losses are in the picture as a whole. Whatever lies in the realm of the implicit, or depends on flexibility, whatever can be brought into focus and fixed, ceases to exist as far as the speaking hemisphere is concerned."

And where would modern humans constantly confront important choice points of action than in the increasingly numerous and difficult emotional responses that exist in the relationship between individuals in lifelong bonded families, lifelong family units with loyalties different and sometimes superseding the behavioural norms of the group to which they belong? It is in the evolution of subjective complexity that human beings would require so much greater neural capacity, dexterity and the new subjective skill of rationality. And that neural capacity and dexterity begins at birth with the interaction of innate predispositions for subjective response with the causal and emotional learning and maps of meaning acquired through language in the social bonds of childhood.

In mammals, extended periods of early development are necessary for complex learning about environmental opportunity and risk, as well as learned knowledge about social interactions. Toolmaking in Caledonia crows, African gray parrots and chimpanzees may depend on extended periods of learning in early development and socialization. In human beings, the period of physical, emotional and social development lasts at least two decades, and in some cases much longer, and this extended period of emotional and social development is one of the key aspects of human nature that makes inductive / deductive rationality possible. Alison Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby describes the research that shows that such rationality does not exist in children under six years old. "Intelligence is clearly on display from the moment a child is born, but rationality is something that is acquired at a developmental stage in the prefrontal cortex responding to emotional socialization. This process of neural development and pruning tied to socialization is responsible for the many years it takes for human beings to grow up, and human beings are in fact the only creatures who continue changing through brain development and complex socialization for a lifetime."

Iain McGilchrist quotes Evan Thompson, "In the case of inter-subjectivity, much of the convergence centers on the realization that one's consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual in the world is founded on empathy- one's empathic cognition of others, and others' empathic cognition of oneself."

As in all other bilateral subjective responses, the sense of self and the sense of other are expressed in the warp and weft of the right brain / left brain creation of human consciousness.

Human Reciprocity and Morality

Reciprocity is the innate ability of particular primates to perceive, communicate and respond to abstract rules of behaviour within a social group, and it is the bilateral subjective response of reciprocal giving / getting that forms the basis of human relationships. Human beings go much further with other innate predispositions that allow them to develop abstract rules of response to their observations of personal / social behaviour and turn innate reciprocity of giving / getting into personal / socialized behaviour appropriate to a particular culture. The best place to identify these innate abilities is in babies. Alison Gopnik identifies many such abstract innate abilities such as a moral sense, experimental hypothesis, cognitive experimentation, and improvisational conjecture. The most important difference between other primates and humans can be identified in babies in their ability to teach themselves and others about their environment, both physical and social, through the abstract analysis of experience. Only human beings learn this way, going beyond trial and error and pure imitation to a statistical analysis of cause and effect.

Predispositions for emotions genetically hardwired in individuals are useless without retrievable memories of individual experience. Without learned socialization, human consciousness does not exist because retrievable memories of emotional experience do not exist. Wild children and children raised in extreme isolation give a clear demonstration of how the development of the human psyche depends on socialization and retrievable memory of emotional experience with other humans. Even though feelings, emotions and causal maps of meaning are hardwired genetic predispositions in humans, they have no possible expression without learned retrievable memories created through socialization. Just as an animal raised in complete darkness in its early development will never be able to see after it is brought into the light, human beings deprived of early nurturance and socialization will never fully develop the ability to create emotional maps of meaning as conscious representations of the social reality upon which human interaction depends.

Just the deprivation of free play may have profound negative psychological effects on children that may persist into adulthood. This relationship between free play and social maturity has been demonstrated in many different mammals. And there are of course many other emotional interactions that influence a child's social development and behaviour such as physical contact, exposure to language skills expressing emotional complexity, and most especially loving intimacy in caregivers.

Human babies have an innate abstract awareness of experience with innate predispositions for particular abstract self-awareness most especially tied to social cues and language acquisition. The way light is necessary for the brain to develop visual responses, social nurturance and cultural expressions of emotional behaviour are necessary for the brain to develop an abstract understanding of the self and others. Abstract self-awareness expressed through inductive / deductive reasoning is unique to modern humans and is the innate ability to make general rules about particular subjective experiences learned through emotional interaction and cultural socialization.

Sympathy and empathy are subjective responses to particular emotional situations. These are innate subjective predispositions expressed in different measures and proportions within particular individuals and must have existed throughout human evolution. Compassion is the generalized rule that unites such innate empathetic subjective responses through the rational processes of the brain called rational understanding. A human being doesn't have to learn empathy, but human beings are the only creatures capable of inductively / deductively learning abstract feelings of compassion. Experiments have shown that babies exhibit different degrees of empathetic response to the distress cries of other infants. And there's a distinct difference between such innate empathetic responses and learned compassion. Compassion and its appropriate expression have to be learned through cultural socialization. Every human culture forms general rules about the concern for the suffering of other creatures that arise from empathy, including and excluding those to whom compassion will and will not apply. We feel for the suffering of many living creatures, and are oblivious to the suffering of many more. We can learn to feel compassion where none existed before through the abstract understanding of suffering that was previously seen to be something else. Some scientists still deny that many animals suffer because they have particular ideas about the cognitive ability of particular creatures so that they see the writhing of a worm or snake when it is injured as nothing but muscular reflex. To others such responses are clear indications of pain. The compassion felt will depend on how such behaviour is viewed, and if you are a snake or worm.

Human beings even have the ability to exclude other human beings from the general rules of compassionate response to suffering, and this ability to exclude others from compassionate responses has existed for all recorded human history. All human exploitation, from child and sexual slavery to ethnic cleansing depends on the ability of humans to exclude particular human beings from feelings of compassion, effectively closing off the natural empathetic response that exists in almost all human beings. This is even true of doctors treating the injured who have to shut off natural empathy even when feeling the most compassion for a suffering human being.

Similar to the generalized rules for compassion we learn through socialization, human beings generalize the feeling of 'us / them' into emotions rising from nationalism, clan loyalty, ethnic solidarity and even team spirit. Human beings are socialized to form these abstract general rules that elicit powerful emotions that are then expressed through many forms of cultural behaviour. And all these subjective emotions depend on the ability of human beings to make abstract inductive / deductive representations of social reality and experience with strong, attendant emotional responses to those beliefs. When the emotional bonds humans feel among the members of their nuclear family become enculturated ideas about the way families must be and behave, what families mean, and the personal and social importance of families, those ideas depend entirely on abstract self-awareness formed through inductive / deductive reasoning and cultural socialization. In human beings, the concrete feeling of 'Me / Us' becomes the abstract subjective experience of 'I / We" and every complex human culture depends on that abstract sense of personal identity.

Every living creature has some sense of individual identity, the 'me' part of 'me / us', but only human beings are able to understand, consider and reformulate how that personal identity may fit into a social context, and even make rational judgments about that context. The abstract feeling of 'I / We' only exists in the context in which humans create and understand culture and human relationships. Just as there is no me without and us, there is no abstract feeling of personal identity without an abstract feeling of social identity. There is no I without a We. Abstract self-awareness expressed through inductive / deductive reasoning allows human beings to feel emotions about the way we are taught to understand what it means to be human. In human beings, culture, socialization and nurturance as abstract ideas have come to dominate social behaviour because of the emotions human beings have that arise from abstract concepts of personal and social identity.

Deferred Gratification

Inductive / deductive reasoning allows modern humans to create causal / emotional maps in the mind, to understand cause and effect, to perceive time as past, present and future. This ability to understand cause and effect and conceive of experience as having a past, present and future is unique to modern humans and is the basis for our ability to defer gratification, to put off present gratification for a better and more desirable result in the future. No higher primate or human ancestor was apparently capable of deferred gratification and planning, and it appears as a developmental stage in modern humans only at approximately four years of age. Before then, like chimpanzees, children cannot resist the desire for instant gratification. If you show a child of 3 two bowls, one containing five candies and the other containing only one, and tell that child that they can have the bowl with the five candies if they resist eating the single candy until the experimenter returns in a few minutes, the children invariably give in to their need for instant gratification and take the single candy even though they understand very clearly that they are giving up the opportunity to have more if they are able to wait. And the interesting thing is that in longitudinal studies of children participating in that experiment, those three-year-olds who were able to resist gratification the longest had higher incomes, higher status and greater academic achievement as adults. The ability to defer gratification is a key to success and even survival in many families, and must be one of the basic differences between modern humans and those that lived more than 70,000 years ago. To this day countless millions of human parents continue to deny themselves personal pleasure and gratification for the sake of the future success of their children. Religious acolytes can even deny themselves the most basic pleasures of life in the hope of achieving the gratification of the ultimate postponed bliss of heaven or enlightenment.

The ability to defer gratification is crucial to human success and achievement, and has clearly been a trait amplified by evolutionary and cultural selection over the course of recent human evolution. It must also depend on the ability to understand past, present and future and to create internal narratives with many different causal results.

It is clearly possible that this ability to defer gratification may actually have its earliest foundation in human evolution with a particular change in subjective response attached to sexuality. When humans have sex there is a powerful rush of addictive oxytocin that bonds two individuals emotionally. There is also the addictive dopamine reinforced pleasure arising from physical intimacy. This sexual / emotional addictive rush creates the highest expressed form of personal acceptance. Couple this with the constant availability and interest of both males and females in sex and there is a foundational mechanism for intense emotional attachment in humans. Humans are hardwired to constantly want sexual / emotional intimacy because of the way hormonal and neurotransmitter reinforced pleasure of love created the strongest bonds between two mates, the highest form of addictive behaviour known to humans.

Arguably, the first place that deferred gratification would have become part of human behaviour was in deferring orgasm to prolong the pleasure and intensity of sexual union. Just as it is today, reciprocal sexual desire and intimacy, wanting to give as well as receive both physical and emotional pleasure would make sexual coupling a dominantly important and expressive aspect of personal bonding and commitment. Making this pleasure last would have been a crucial advantage in forming the lifelong bond of love, the greatest possible pleasure arising from the deepest form of personal acceptance known in nature.

In all other primates, sex lasts seconds. Only in humans does it last for many minutes with complex expressions of emotional tenderness, sensory stimulation, multiple positions and the most intense orgasms known to nature, sometimes even occurring multiple times in one sexual act in particular individuals, usually women. Deferring orgasm is crucial in maintaining sexual intimacy and that sexual union. Evolution would have favored those couples whose deferred orgasms served to create the strongest emotional bonds over the greatest length of time. Multiple orgasms in women may in fact be indicative of their ability to repeatedly and more effectively defer momentary pleasure for a far more intense physiological reaction that may come later. This incredibly intense deferred gratification most likely began with the unconscious need to maintain the bond of intimacy experience in sexual union. Even the intensity of female orgasms may have been favored because women who had the most intense pleasurable responses would have been chosen by males who would want to share the same pleasurable intensity. Remember that in humans the pleasure of sexual intimacy is entirely reciprocal. And in a small social group where sexual contact would have been largely indiscriminate before marriage, everyone in the clan would know who had the most intense sexual responses and with whom. Evolution would even have favored those females who faked orgasms if they didn't have them naturally because a faked orgasm might be crucial in obtaining and maintaining a particular man's interest. Add to this a more robust set of mirror neurons that allow individuals to experience what another is feeling, and it's clear that the emotional power and intensity of making love would have been crucial for the long-term survival of a mated relationship, just as it is today.

Human males also have the largest penis of any primates, sometimes of a truly awesome size compared to other primates. A 500 pounds gorilla has a penis an inch and a half in length. Chimpanzees and bonobos also literally don't measure up when compared to humans. And though there is great debate about the evolutionary purpose behind such a prodigious organ whose only apparent purpose is to insert semen in a female, it is undeniable that penis size has a direct correlation with the pleasure felt by a woman and a man. Those few men born with extremely undersized penises have a big problem. The huge industry devoted to increasing penis size is undeniable proof of its ongoing importance both psychological and physiological to sexual confidence and its attendant pleasure in men. The importance of the ability to defer the gratification of an orgasm is also clearly evident in the problem that premature ejaculation in men poses to a couple. To this day, both men and women unconsciously know the importance of extended intimacy experienced in sexual union.

Deferring orgasm to prolong sexual pleasure and intimacy may in fact be the origin of the human ability to defer gratification in other realms, a subjective predisposition which would ultimately lead to the ability to plan for the future, to understand the past, to form complex cooperative hunting strategies, and perhaps one day allow humans to feel a sense of personal identity that can be consciously changed over time. Only human beings can understand what they are and defer particular present tense gratification for the sake of what and who they want to be.

If deferred gratification is a developmental stage in childhood, it may have been a developmental stage in human evolution attached to the sexual intimacy of making love. There is a scientific principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or the way an individual develops recapitulates the way its species evolved. The way children are unable to defer gratification until they are four may recapitulate the way our early ancestors had to evolve the ability to control present tense desires for a greater pleasure that would come later. Examining the developmental stages of early childhood may in fact offer the best insight into what our early ancestors might have been like.

Language and Perception

Before the creation of language, human beings had already developed a refined ability to read human faces for acceptance and rejection. Even human infants can very clearly do that. Tests have shown that our higher primate cousins are also capable of reading emotional response through facial expression in members of their own species, even from photographs. This is strong evidence that the ability to connect faces with emotions as a perceptual skill is very ancient. There is a study that shows how grown humans can not only perceive emotions in human faces, but can also determine behavioural and physical traits just from the look of a person face and the sound of a voice. From portrait photographs both men and women are able to tell those human beings who are most receptive to the idea of casual sex from those who expect emotional commitment. People are also capable of telling the physical strength of an individual from the sound of their voice regardless of the age, language or culture of the voice they are hearing. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink describes the same powerful ability for human beings to read personality and behavioural traits in human faces in the study showing that a ten second silent clip of a professor giving a lecture used as the basis for an evaluation of the teacher's skill is as equally predictive as a survey given to students who had spent an entire semester with the same professor. Love at first sight is no doubt just this hardwired ability for instant assessment of personality traits, and functions so well that 70 percent of people who married the individual they loved at first sight, continued to be married after 25 years. This is much higher than the standard rate of divorce that even includes those people in the sample. The neocortex it seems is hardwired for incredible feats of individual perception of emotion and personality.

The evolution of that profound adaptability must have had to do with some new ability for the expression of emotional and cultural complexity, the relationships between individuals within their families and social groups that required the development of complex new personality traits. This new ability for the expression of emotional and cultural complexity would require new forms of reciprocal response and new ways to respond to a new consciousness of personal and social relationships. And most crucial to the evolution of such new behaviours and abilities would be the recent evolution of a new form of communication unique to modern humans that would be expressed in the innate ability to acquire and create language. With innate language acquisition, there would be an inevitable evolution and escalation in the expression of behavioural and emotional traits in human beings. With language would come new emotions tied to the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection. With these new emotions would come new language abilities necessary for their expression. With complex language and rapid speech would come the internal voice we all hear and use to create the timeline of our memories and extend our personal identities from the past through the present and into the future.

The more humans were able to understand, the more they would have to say. The more they would have to say, the more they would need to understand the new complexities of what was being said. In modern humans, reality becomes an infinite number of narrative possibilities, unique to every culture and individual within that culture. It is with this infinite generative ability in language to create endless narratives that human psychological complexity is born and grows ever more complex through a lifetime.

Our most recent ancestors who could not use rapid speech may have been more like babies who do not experience internal consciousness as personal identity. Alison Gopnik describes personal identity "as a stream of thoughts, feelings, and plans that seem to run past the inner "eye" who is also the inner "I", the internal observer, autobiographer, and executive we call ourselves. Babies experience the past and the future, memory and desire, very differently than we do. They don't seem to have the same kind of inner observer, and they remember the past and plan for the future in very different ways. A single unified self is something we create, not something we are given." It is likely that that unified self is created using language expressed through the internal narrator of experience.

This inner speech and internal eye that creates a timeline of our past and imagines events in the future is very new and clearly what makes us fundamentally different from all our human ancestors. It is the ability to see ourselves as characters in the story of our lives that makes us capable of understanding different possibilities, different outcomes, greater pleasurable accomplishments, practical and social benefits arising from deferred gratification. It is because we can see ourselves and others from outside and inside, outside / inside, to imagine as well as to know that we know that gives us the ability to create human civilization in its infinite forms. Until we could create an internal abstract sense of personal identity we would have no use for a geometrically expanding vocabulary of abstract ideas. But once human beings could create an abstract sense of self-awareness using an internal narrator, that expanding vocabulary would rapidly create the myths, religions, laws and customs that form complex cultures and eventually literate civilizations.

Because humans also have such robust mirror neurons allowing them to personally feel another person's experience, human beings would also be able to share their own sense of self and personal identity by recounting the meaningful moments in the timeline of their lives. When retrievable memories were expressed as stories, these shared experiences would create powerful new bonds and far greater understanding between individuals. Out of this understanding of abstract identity and experience would come formalized expressions of morality and innate empathy expressed as abstract concepts of compassion.

Reciprocity, Attraction, Desire, and Love

Reciprocal giving / getting as the innate sense of abstract value that determines personal / social relationships in higher apes and humans is the foundation of complex personality traits through the expression of personal preference for particular behaviours in others. It uses the dopamine reinforced emotional pleasure of personal acceptance to establish friendships and alliances that are key to survival in social groups. Reciprocal giving / getting is also the foundation of human sexual selection whereby one individual expresses personal preferences for the particular form and behaviours of another. Reciprocal attraction between individuals leads to reciprocal desire for the expression of bilateral giving / getting through bilateral sexual / emotional intimacy. This process is probably ancient and described by Helen Fisher in her book, The Sexual Contract,

"Intense personal relationships began to become commonplace among proto- hominids. Often a male struck up with one female. Maybe one older male was courted by two females. Highly successful males may have provided meat and protection for three or more females. Extremely sexy, efficient females may have had more than one male providing them with meat. But most often, one male and one female bonded together.

With sharing would come responsibility between teammates—particularly for her young. This happened naturally. A male who was constantly around a female grew to know her young. Perhaps a child began the bonding process. Soon after birth, the infant may have started to recognize the male who constantly slept near mother. After the infant learned to walk he would rush to greet the familiar figure when he entered camp. In the morning he invited this male to play tag, tickle, or hurled a stick, and at night the infant curled up and slept near him..... Gradually a male who entered sexual and economic ties with a female began to feed and protect her young. The sex contract had been made."

Fisher points out that absolute monogamy and shared dominance is extremely rare, with gibbons and siamangs the only other example of higher primates in which male and females bond for life, with the offspring of the couple the equal responsibility of both mother and father. Apparently, the genetic traits for monogamy and shared dominance are in the evolutionary toolkit of primates millions of years before hominids needed them as the most important survival tool of all. The difference is in the depth and intensity of the hormonal bonds that began in our earliest ancestors.

Humans use two mutually reinforcing but separate pleasure systems to establish and preserve the emotional bond that happens between spouses.

Sexual responses release both dopamine and oxytocin in both men and women. Oxytocin is released after only 20 seconds of physical contact. Dopamine instantly reinforces the physical pleasure of sexual contact, creating an addictive pleasurable response in two individuals. Oxytocin in both men and women and progesterone in men are the emotional bonding hormones that create the reinforcing pleasurable feeling of emotional intimacy and the deepest form of personal acceptance we call love.

Mated love can be defined as the reciprocal hormonal bond of sexual / emotional intimacy between two individuals responding to cultural and innate predispositions for distinct physical and behavioural traits.

Dr. Louann Brizendine in her book, the Male Brain, describes the neurological process of two young patients, Ryan and Nicole, as they fell in love.

"When Nicole finally invited Ryan to spend the night, he felt like he had died and gone to heaven. After that, they made love every day, sometimes more than once, and he still couldn't get enough of her. Sex doesn't always lead to love, but for the male brain, it is a necessary part of getting there.

Ryan's brain on sex was producing chemicals that create a blissful euphoria, similar to being high on cocaine. He couldn't figure out why, when he was away from Nicole for more than four or five hours, he started getting a primitive biological craving. If we could travel along the Ryan's brain circuits on a miniature train as he was falling in love, we'd begin in an area deep in the center of the brain called the VTA, the ventral tegmental area. We'd see the cells in this area rapidly manufacturing dopamine...the brain's feel-good neurotransmitter for motivation and reward. As the train was being filled with dopamine at this VTA station, Ryan was starting to feel a pleasant buzz.

Filled with dopamine, the train would speed along his brain circuits to the next station the NAc, or nucleus accumbens, the area for anticipation of pleasure and reward. Because Ryan is male, we'd see the dopamine from the train being mixed with testosterone and vasopressin. If you're a female, it gets mixed with estrogen and oxytocin. Mixing dopamine with these other hormones is now making an addictive, high octane fuel, leaving Ryan exhilarated and head over heels in love. The more Ryan and Nicole made love the more addicted their bodies and brains became.

When the lovebirds were apart, there were constantly thinking about and texting each other. The love train with its addicting fuel makes it so you can't stop thinking, fantasizing, and talking about the person we're in love with. In one study, men and women said they spent up to 85 percent of their waking moments daydreaming about their lover. Ryan felt as if he were literally incorporating Nicole's essence into the fabric of his brain circuits. And he was. As the train sped into the final station, the caudate nucleus, or CN, the area for memorizing the look and identity of whatever is giving pleasure, we see the tiniest details about Nicole being indelibly chiseled into his permanent memory. She was now literally unforgettable. Once the love train had made these three stops at the VTA, the NAc, and the CN we'd see Ryan's lust and love circuits merge as they focused only on Nicole."

Yet, there are crucial and problematical differences in men and women in forming physical and emotional bonds. Men generally have an appreciably greater initial response to dopamine and physical bonding through sex than women, although the pleasure of sexuality in men depends to a great degree on reciprocal physical responses in a woman.

Women generally have a greater response to oxytocin because it is the hormone that bonds a mother and child in the most powerful personal connection in nature. Emotional monogamous bonding is based on that hormonal system in both men and women.

Because human males have an androgynous brain, they too experience the hormonal pleasure of intimate emotional oxytocin bonding with both their children and their spouses.

Dopamine, the pleasure drug of the brain, is released when a man or woman sees a physically attractive individual. In men, that initial attraction happens unconsciously in 1 / 5 of a second.

Physical attraction is both biological and behavioural as in all species in which sexual selection exists. Physical traits like symmetry, size and color that indicate an individual's health and reproductive potential define attractiveness in most species. Studies have shown that pheromones that indicate the neurological profile of an individual also unconsciously determine an individual's attractiveness. Primates, like other species, also have courting rituals and behaviours through which individuals determine if another is an acceptable mating partner. In humans, smiles and eye contact, postural changes and alterations of voice intonation all signal that one finds another attractive. If there is no reciprocal response to the signals, attraction is thwarted and both individuals have to deal with the emotional consequence of such rejection.

If the powerful mating force of attraction is established as being reciprocal, it invariably leads to desire. Desire is the drive to test the extent to which reciprocal attraction will go. From a brief onetime hookup to a lifelong mating bond, desire depends on two individuals testing and agreeing on how far the physical and emotional reciprocal sexual / emotional bond goes between them. A lack of reciprocal response generally kills desire, and many times even the physical attraction. Too intense or too fast a response may do the same thing. Desire is a dance in which two individuals balance reciprocal attraction and expectations in establishing a particular relationship.

Desire in humans depends upon being desired both physically and emotionally. The process of physical attraction leading to a test for reciprocal desire works the same way for a woman as it does for a man, although the physical cues are different, men generally focusing on face, bust and backside, women on chest, legs and backside.

Emotional attraction works differently than physical attraction because it depends on psychological traits that are expressed through personality and character. Resources, nurturant responsibility and respect are the key considerations a woman has in testing a man's emotional attractiveness. This is true across every culture because those are the behavioural and character traits that mean a woman can count on a man to provide for her children, and treat her and her children well. Emotional desire grows in a woman as a man expresses those character traits and focuses them exclusively on her. Evolution would have favoured those women who responded to those traits.

For a man, physical attractiveness, sexual faithfulness, respect, and nurturant responsibility are key to establishing an emotional bond with a woman. A woman's physical attractiveness is a key indication of fertility. A woman's faithfulness is also a key consideration for a man because he has to be confident he is raising his own children. Respect is also crucial, because competency for a man is a measure of his own personal value and identity; and in human society, status and respect for a man is directly tied to his competency as a responsible provider for his family and group. This has been true for at least the last half million years when men were hunting big game to feed large families and clans. Nurturant responsibility in a woman is also crucially important to a man because it will determine the personal / social survival of his children.

Because of the basic difference in what elicits personal attraction, men and women have different emotional priorities and needs, and a reciprocal emotional connection and bond is only achieved when both parties perceive that there is a clear intent to satisfy each other's priorities and needs.

Although emotional needs and priorities are different in men and women, the neural process of emotional bonding is much the same.

The biggest challenge in reciprocal desire is the Goldilocks dilemma. Too much or too little expression of either physical or emotional response generally dampens or kills desire. Physical and emotional bonding depends to a great degree on both individuals understanding when they are going too fast or too slow in the way they are expressing personal desire and commitment. Reciprocity by its very nature depends on a balance in both physical and emotional expressions of desire. Perceived reciprocity; giving as much as one is getting, getting as much as one is giving is when things are just right, and the way long-term emotional bonding is achieved.

The one big problematical difference is that most men have an initial bias for the dopamine reinforced system of physical and sexual intimacy. Women generally have an initial bias for the oxytocin reinforced system of emotional intimacy. This discontinuity in the intensity of reciprocal response is often problematical because men initially prioritize physical intimacy over emotional intimacy and women do the opposite. Larry McMurtry described it this way, "Men talk to women to sleep with them. Women sleep with men to talk with them." The problem of perceived nonreciprocal response may be the single greatest cause of attachment difficulties and divorce. Only humans fall out of love because only in humans can human physical and emotional desire be extinguished by a lack of perceived reciprocal response.

Men who are frustrated in finding reciprocal physical response may resort to masturbation, dominance fantasies, pornography, prostitution, and even rape, behaviours expressing the objectification of women inherent in such nonreciprocal behaviours. Masturbation fantasies and pornography is a developmental stage for boys learning about their own physical response to sexual attraction. Nonreciprocal attraction is often expressed through fantasies about celebrity sex symbols and unavailable girls, and is a developmental stage for boys learning to respond to the drive for physical bonding.

Women on the other hand who are frustrated in finding reciprocal emotional response, may resort to romantic movies and novels and vicarious identification with fictional characters. Nonreciprocal emotional attachment to teen idols and unavailable boys is often a developmental stage for women learning emotional bonding.

Reciprocal physical intimacy and reciprocal emotional intimacy existing as a bilateral subjective trait is still the foundation of human love. Sexual / emotional intimacy as intertwined paired traits would be the first unconscious drive subject to the innate abstract subjective response of reciprocity expressed through love and this innate psychological reciprocity would be the foundation of all emotional complexity in human beings.

Monogamy and Adultery

Without monogamy human evolution would not have been possible. We would live and look and behave much like bonobos or chimpanzees. Without monogamy, human neotony and slow brain development, human socialization would be impossible because of the time, resources and complex learning required to raise a child to maturity. It takes two people in a lifelong committed bond to raise children to maturity. After the creation of the androgynous human brain, monogamy would be the most important key to human survival and evolutionary potential.

The bond of love in a mated couple of humans is so strong that it actually creates shared physiological responses. Some men will go through the same hormonal changes as their wives as they both go through pregnancy. Some men actually produce increased levels of prolactin, the hormone responsible for the production of milk, and in some men this hormonal change can actually produce breast milk. It's hard to argue that this is not profound evidence for an androgynous brain in human beings. The profound effect of the emotional bond between husband and wife has been experimentally demonstrated; the severity of an argument between the bonded couple will actually influence the degree of immune system response to injury; the more intense the argument, the slower the healing in both individuals. In modern humans, studies have shown that emotional isolation is a far greater threat to an individual's health and mortality than cigarettes, obesity or lack of exercise. This clearly shows that human beings literally depend for their survival on emotional support and connections regardless of age, gender or cultural background. The emotional maps created in childhood are the most crucial survival tools that humans ever develop most likely arising very early human evolution with the creation of the nuclear family unit.

An individual male attached to an individual female for life requires a powerful new emotional complexity in shared social dominance and parenting skills. This complexity and skill required new and resilient nurturant abilities in both parents over the many years of childhood development. Because modern human males compete with each other for the status recognition gained from hunting prowess and providing for his family, monogamous bonding would also require a male to support and defend his female from all other males. Every male would perceived himself as the Alpha male in his family unit competing as well as cooperating with every other Alpha male in his own clan. Because humans have always had to be so socially cooperative to survive, it would have been relatively easy among largely non-aggressive human males to preserve the nuclear family unit except for the predilection of both sexes to engage in illicit sexual relationships.

Many studies have shown that lifelong bonded monogamous pairs in nearly all species invariably cheat. This is true of both sexes, and the reason for this is that evolution must have favored those individuals who would cheat on their mates.

Cheating behaviour has undeniable genetic advantages in that it broadens the genetic pool within the family as well as the particular genetic traits expressed in the offspring of the family unit. The downside of infidelity for humans is the risk that this betrayal of trust has on the monogamous reciprocal bonds between the couple, risking the very stability of the family unit. The other grave risk is that other males who violate the reciprocal respect and trust of a clan member by engaging in illicit sex would be subject to aggressive retaliation. The ikung San, among the gentlest and most peaceful of archaic peoples, have as high a murder rate as New York City because of conflict over marital infidelity. Nothing is more socially destructive to a family and the clan to which it belongs than adulterous behaviour, and this would be most problematical for families in small nomadic groups where social cohesion was so key to survival.

Among many archaic peoples, sexual relations among unmarried individuals is relatively common and encouraged. But almost universally, in human culture, marital infidelity is subject to severe social penalties, up to and including death for one or both cheating individuals.

Clearly monogamous bonding must be a powerfully adaptive subjective response as it seems to be common among all our human ancestors, but, because of the innate tendency for sexual unfaithfulness, monogamy came with equally powerful emotional problems that could create life-and-death conflicts that would affect individuals, families and even the clan to which they belonged.

Evolution favored both monogamy and cheating in human beings because both were crucial in raising children to maturity.

More than just spreading genes as widely as possible, infidelity offers a man a potential new mother for the children he loves if his wife dies unexpectedly in childbirth or as a result of disease or natural dangers, a brutally common fact of life for all our human ancestors. The survival advantage of having a backup spouse is also true for a woman, her need for a man to provide resources a matter of life-and-death for both her and her children. This practical cultural advantage would have been far more important than broadening the genetic traits within a family unit through a pregnancy that is the result of adulterous activity.

Orphans do not commonly do well in archaic societies because the family unit is the foundation of most social relationships. Orphans rarely do well even in this modern world. Losing one or both parents was the most devastating survival risk for a child until perhaps the last two decades, and that is true in only a few of the most prosperous countries on earth. Those men and women who had secret sexual and emotional affiliations would clearly have been evolutionarily favored if having two parents was crucial in raising offspring to maturity. This would have been even more important to our human ancestors, where having two parents was a matter of life-and-death.

Because human behaviour and complexity is based on the reciprocal feelings between individuals found in lifelong bonded love, society has an enormous bias against adultery. Because reciprocity depends on trust, it is the primary and most important abstract subjective response in human beings flowing out of reciprocal love. Without trust, no complex personal social relationships are possible. Every individual has to be able to understand and appreciate the rules of reciprocal response in any cultural setting and in every personal relationship if they are to be socially and reproductively successful.

Trust is crucial to the lifelong bond between two people, because it is impossible for a man to know that he is not raising another man's children without trusting in his spouse's sexual faithfulness. Trust is crucial to a woman because she has to have confidence that a man will not leave her and her children without the resources necessary to survive. To this day, virtually every human culture uses its greatest coercive power to discourage adultery in marriage because it is not only important to the preservation of the family unit, but to the preservation of the social group itself. Resentment and revenge among individuals and families over sexual infidelity continues to be one of the primary sources of aggression in human beings. Aside from war, adultery continues to be the motivation for the vast majority of murders in human society. When trust is broken, social conflict invariably ensues.

Human society is based on the reciprocal expectation of personal commitment and respect and nurturant responsibility between individuals, families and their social group. That reciprocal expectation in human behaviour began with lifelong pair bonds, and that is why marriage is sacrosanct in virtually every culture. The abstract ideas of reciprocal fairness and justice began in personal lifelong relationships based on love, the highest form of personal acceptance in nature.

Complex personality traits must have evolved to deal with this new emotional and social complexity arising from monogamous bonding in the nuclear family unit. The ability to perceive an individual's emotional intention and commitment would have been a crucial skill in choosing a mate.

Marc Bekoff cites a study across 59 cultures that identified the trait that women found most problematical in their spouses was the male tendency to be emotionally non-expressive. Males, on the other hand, found moodiness in their spouses the most problematical personality trait. He proposes that these emotional traits were effective strategies to test both love and commitment in a potential partner. A woman continually asking a man for emotional expressions of his feelings for her is telling him how important his feelings are to her.

For a man, withholding them is a good way to test a woman's emotional interest and commitment. In the same way a woman can test a man's love and commitment to her as well as his potential as a parent by testing his nurturing traits by displaying periodic emotional distress through her changing moods. Evolution would have favored both men and women who used these simple strategies to test the emotional bonds and commitment of potential partners.

The reciprocal love that forms and preserves the nuclear family unit demands perceptual and social skills unlike any other species because it rests on the androgynous human brain and shared social dominance in mated relationships. The love that forms and preserves the nuclear family unit also demands reciprocal complexity in which character skills are even more important than physical ones. The love that forms and preserves the nuclear family is the deepest and most powerful expression of personal acceptance in any social animal, and it also comes with the deepest and most powerful expressions of fear tied to personal rejection in any social animal.

Being human is a complicated thing, and those complications began with the unique psychological changes that allowed the creation of complex personality traits, social relationships and reciprocal emotional bonds to express the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection that are the basis of all emotions in social animals.

Bilateral Psychological Paired Traits and Human Personality

With an androgynous brain those traits that were once most dominant in males and those traits that were once most dominant in females would also become bilaterally paired, the aggressive traits for action and competitive competency meant to achieve personal acceptance being paired with the more reactive, defensive traits meant to mitigate personal rejection. Prey traits would be subjectively paired with hunter traits giving powerful new expressions to both. In modern humans, the human psyche would become the infinitely complex interrelationships of many bilateral subjective paired traits. In the psychologically complex human brain, risk-taking became bilaterally paired with caution; optimism became paired with pessimism; trust became paired with doubt, confidence paired with anxiousness along with many other personality predispositions that would come to define individual human personality. The human psyche is the most complex expression of the bilateral nature of subjective reality that exists in conscious animals because of the bilateral subjective complexity of the androgynous male / female, prey / hunter traits in the bilaterally complex human brain.

With the different measures and proportion of bilateral subjective paired psychological traits in every individual, personality differences based on these subjective predispositions would become another hardwired advantage that came with its own problematic conflict built into a lifelong bond between mates, family members and other members of relevant social groups.

As we have pointed out the last chapter, conscious emotions, as the seventh rung in the ladder of subjective complexity, are the subjective responses arising from the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection in social animals.

Human beings are unconsciously / consciously driven by the need to respond to these fundamental personal / social pleasures and fears. Human beings are in fact the only creatures who have an almost unlimited range of personal response to both conscious and unconscious personal / social pleasure and fear.

Some pleasures and fears are feelings rather than emotions because they are attached to concrete situations and particular objects. These intense and sometimes compulsive feelings account for phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviours in humans. Individual human beings can be afraid of anything from keys, feathers, colors, birds, food, doors, hair, shoes, leather, flowers, particular numbers and even invisible germs. Individual human beings can also find addictive pleasure in virtually all the same things as well as string, stamps, coins, and even things that usually elicit disgust such as blood, garbage, feces, corpses and even self-mutilation and pain. These feelings must also have some foundation in individual genetic predispositions for subjective response, and clearly the result of some particular neural response to concrete stimulation. Twins separated at birth meeting as adults often find that they have many identical tastes in many things from colors to toothpaste, as well as responding to pleasures and anxieties that clearly indicate how deep and how individualistically complex particular human subjective responses are concerning conscious feelings about concrete things and experiences in life.

But the human psyche is infinitely more complex than these basic feelings of pleasure and fear tied to concrete experiences, with chimpanzees also exhibiting similar preferences, anxieties, phobias and even obsessive-compulsive responses. Human beings have an almost infinite range of conscious feelings, but human subjective complexity is based on the almost unlimited range of personal responses to the emotional pleasure of personal acceptance, and the emotional fear of personal rejection.

Every human being is an infinitely complex mix of subjective responses to the genetic predispositions that express the personal preferences individuals have for particular subjective responses in others. It is also becoming very clear that predispositions for particular emotional responses can be inherited. University of Edinburgh scientists Gary Lewis and Timothy Bates looked at self-assessment of nearly 1000 pairs of twins in the United States to see how "pro-social" they were. Some of the twins were identical and the others were fraternal. According to Dr. Lewis, "Identical twins, which share 100 percent of their genes, are more similar than not identical twins, which share only 50 percent. You can infer genetic influences because of that biological fact."

"The twins were asked a scale of 1 to 10, how much compulsion they felt to pay more so that everyone, including the poor, could have access to medical care. Those who felt the greatest impulse for generosity were identical female twins." This suggests that genetic effects are influential with regards to pro-social behaviour."

These genetic predispositions are then subject to the cultural forces of socialization through which an individual's personal preferences are deemed to be acceptable or not. Only human beings are torn by the conflict between their personal predispositions for how and what parts of their personality they hope will engender the pleasure of personal acceptance in others and the socialized cultural norms that either approve or disapprove of those particular predispositions. Gregarious, risk-taking, confident individuals will find the pleasures of personal acceptance for those traits to be uncommon in a non-expressive, socially inhibited society such as traditional Japan. Shy, cautious, anxious individuals will find little personal acceptance on a football team or cheerleading squad in Texas. Only human beings can know and appreciate the terror of being oneself if they have particular personality traits that are markedly different from the cultural norm, because cultural norms are intrinsically hostile to individuals who express traits that seem to challenge those norms.

Because emotions evolved in social animals to maximize the pleasure of personal acceptance and mitigate the fear of personal rejection, the human psyche exhibits the unconscious traits for both subjective responses in every individual, although in different degrees and proportions. Risk-taking based on overcoming fear may offer an individual the approval of the group because it may offer the group potential protection from danger or the rewards that may follow from taking risks to access dangerous food resources. Caution, on the other hand, which is based on giving in to fear, may be seen as much less praiseworthy, and its extreme form of cowardice may be seen as a behaviour for which the entire group may reject an individual. Many human individuals seek the pleasure of exhibiting risk-taking behaviour for which they may be admired. Countless individuals risk their lives every day participating in extreme sports or challenges and are proud to share stories of their exploits. Heroes are invariably the greatest risk takers in life. But few human beings will think to boast of their own cautious nature, even though it is a fundamentally important adaptive response. In a similar way extraversion is generally a much approved trait in individuals because it expresses trust and confidence in the pleasure arising from the interaction with others, whereas introversion is often looked at with suspicion or even scorn where an individual may be seen to be cold, aloof, and disinterested in others. Most people are proud of their extraverted sociability, but few people will even consider claiming introversion as an admirable trait, even though it arguably must have evolved like all other traits that mitigate the fear of personal rejection as an effective social strategy allowing an individual to deal with the stress of personal rejection by finding pleasure in one's own company.

Trustfulness / suspicion, engagement / detachment, emotional accessibility / inaccessibility, enthusiasm / passivity, self-confidence / self-doubt, hopefulness / fatalism, optimism / pessimism, dominance / submissiveness, engagement / detachment, and many other bilateral human personality traits are often observable in our nearest primate relatives, but in human beings these traits have become so complex, so deep and subtly different in every human individual that it takes a gifted novelist an entire book to convey the representation of a living human character. There are action-oriented people, and reaction oriented people, just as there are explorer mice and fearful mice expressing a particular gene for "novelty-seeking". The behaviour of a novelty-seeking mouse has a very limited range of expression, whereas the behaviour of a novelty-seeking human can create an explorer, an inventor, a scientist, a philanderer or a junkie.

In human beings, all the genetic predispositions expressed as subjective behaviour are constantly scrutinized by the social group to which an individual belongs, making individuals feel powerful responsive emotions to the social reactions to their particular personality traits.

And what is truly fascinating about human beings is that every individual carries their many bilateral social paired traits in different measures and proportions, expressing them in different ways in different social contexts depending on their perception of how those traits will be accepted or rejected by the group. We are different with family, friends, co-workers and strangers. We are different when we're alone. Individual human identity is so complex that no human being can ever even begin to answer the most basic question of conscious self-awareness, 'Who am I'? This human complexity, the ability to become a different individual in different contexts begins in human infancy, with babies responding to the personalities of their caregivers in different ways.

To make things even more difficult in describing or understanding the human psyche is the fact that an individual can have low, medium or high expressions in both measures of any bilaterally paired trait. Risk-taking and caution are invariably seen as traits that exist on a continuum, cautious people are not considered risk takers and vice versa, and yet the greatest of risk takers, stuntmen in movies, are invariably meticulously cautious about every detail of their work. Extroversion and introversion also appear to be antithetical subjective responses existing on a continuum. It would seem unlikely that one can be an extrovert and an introvert at the same time. But many actors and even comedians whose work is entirely about social engagement and performance are also painfully shy and introverted when they are not working. For human beings, emotions and personality are all about context. Every human being creates many faces to present to the world, faces that express or hide particular personal traits because the individual needs to act in ways that garner personal acceptance or mitigate the fear of personal rejection. Personal identity, the 'I' we experience as an integrated self, is actually countless different contextual selves integrated seamlessly into one conscious identity. We are in fact all multiple personalities; many intertwined and integrated petals of a single flower that we present to the world.

The most aggressively dominant individual may even find emotional pleasure in abject submissiveness and even physical bondage. An extreme optimist may have extremely pessimistic responses about some of their own particular talents. An extreme risk taker can be terrified at even the thought of attempting to skate or dance in front of strangers. Even at the basic level of gender traits that express competitiveness and nurturance, men and women, gay and straight, can have low, medium or high expressions of competitiveness or nurturance or both. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barak and Michelle Obama are good examples of individuals high in traits for both competitiveness and nurturance.

And because human personality is so complex, with many individual personality traits having evolved to maximize the possibility of personal acceptance, and mitigate the fear of personal rejection, most human beings find each day to be a never-ending stress-related challenge to their self-esteem. And self-esteem it seems is also powerfully influenced by genetic predispositions. A meta-study by Roy Baumeister of 5000 different school programs designed to increase the self-esteem of students over five years found no discernible change in individual measures of self-esteem over that time.

The bilateral psychological paired traits of human personality based on the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection can and do exist in humans in infinitely varied measures and proportions, depending on both an individual's genetic predispositions and the cultural socialization under which their individual personality traits are either encouraged or suppressed. We human beings are different in every social context in which we find ourselves or which we try to create for our own satisfaction.

Character and personality reflecting particular bilateral psychological paired traits would also determine the status of individuals within families. The human psyche would evolve as evolutionary selection favored bilateral psychological character and personality traits that expressed and responded to personal emotions existing in a complex social environment. The evolution of the human psyche is the evolution of complex emotions integrating the self-interest of individuality with the shared interest of family and community, the self-interest of personal autonomy with the shared interest of human community. The bilateral human brain integrates nature / nurture, shared interest / self-interest, autonomy / community into the emotional maps of meaning modern humans need above all things. Modern human culture would arise when neural complexity produced literate individuals capable of perceiving individuality and community as abstract ideas capable of different expression and understanding. Modern human beings arose 70,000 years ago with those founder genes that gave people such abstract self-awareness.

Hunter / Gatherer Clans  
Male Practical Competency - Female Social Mastery

One of the most powerful and important expressions of cultural rules in modern humans has to do with behavioural differences tied to gender. The first thing most people ask about a baby is its gender, and actually change behavioural responses to that individual baby because of its gender. Almost all cultures encourage and reinforce their own stereotypical gender roles attached to each sex. Studies have shown that these gender roles also express strong innate predispositions for behaviour tied to sexual orientation, although there are many clear exceptions to this. These predispositions for gender role identification have been shown to even exist in chimpanzees where immature males prefer action-oriented toys like trucks and balls while immature females prefer empathetic cuddle toys like dolls. Because humans have androgynous brains there is a broad bell curve of overlap in behaviour tied to sexual orientation and gender identification, and yet, straight or gay, male or female, individual human beings with different innate predispositions for stereotypical male and female behaviour will invariably clash with the cultural norms for how boys and girls, men and women should behave. Children begin enforcing gender role expectations as soon as they are able to express them.

In human sexuality, the clear self-interest of the individual is to express his or her own gender role preferences for behaviour as it feels most appropriate to their own personality. But because of the cultural bias in most human societies for particular stereotypically defined male and female gender role expressions, there is often an unavoidable conflict between an individual, his or her family and the extended social group and culture when it comes to expressing innate feelings tied to gender identity. The risk of personal rejection by either the family or the social group can be an extreme price to pay in expressing gender identity, as it feels most appropriate to an individual. To this day, countless human beings suffer and even die because of this conflict.

Unique to humans are the implications of those innate feelings tied to gender as it relates to the reproductive success of individuals. Although humans are hardwired for androgynous personalities and shared social dominance in mates, gender roles are primarily attached to gender identification, the behavioural traits that each gender stereotypically prefers to express as aspects of social identity. Men predominantly tie their gender identity to behaviours expressing their role as hunters and protectors while women predominantly express their gender identity through interpersonal empathetic nurturant behaviours. Since humans became hunter / gatherers, men prefer behaviours and activities tied to their crucial role as a hunter with its key expression being personal practical competency. Women have evolved preferences for behaviours and activities tied to their crucial role in establishing and maintaining social relationships through empathetic skills and social mastery. Men are usually biased towards practical competency and women towards social mastery and this seems to be true in every human culture. There is very little measurable difference between men and women in actual skills tied to practical competency and social mastery but there is a clear preference in men and women for those skills that would make each gender express traits for practical hunting behaviours or nurturing social behaviours.

In early humans, with new codified rules of social behaviour attached to food sharing, male status was no longer a matter of aggressive posturing, individual alliances and favors as exist in chimpanzee troupes, but rather a matter of pure practical competency, the ability of a man to hunt and provide for his family as well as the entire group. Evolutionary survival would have favored those men who had the practical competencies of hand / eye coordination, the ability to track and understand the habits and behaviour of different prey, the ability to tactically cooperate with other men in coordinating a successful hunt, and most importantly the ability to understand spatial movements and directional orientation to find their way in an unmarked environment. A man's competency is measured primarily in his left brain skills.

For the first time male competency was an intricate set of physical, behavioural, intellectual and emotional responses to practical problems. For the first time practical competency in males would connect rational problem solving, coordinated action and bravery with social status. For the first time, in modern human males, evolutionary adaptation would have favored the ability to defer gratification when tied to a particular goal, accepting the short-term risk and rigors involved in hunting large prey for the greater personal / social gratification inherent in providing for one's family and clan. For the first time practical competency and emotional courage would be the key to the status of every individual male in virtually every archaic and modern society, and this would determine a man's options in choosing a mate. To this day, one of the most stereotypical behaviours in men is a single-minded focus on a particular challenge or result. There are few archaic societies in which this is not the case. The male predisposition to value practical competency, physical prowess, hand / eye coordination, team cohesion and loyalty and physical courage persists in modern males and remains a crucial part of a man's attractiveness to a potential mate. Physically or vicariously participating in team sports is the modern alternative to the hunt for men with strong predispositions for the expression of practical competency, coordinated behaviour and physical courage. In sport men actually make competency something that is preserved and measured through record-keeping and statistical analysis. For a man, competency is even better if you can prove it through impersonal statistics. Competency is the measure of a man and the team to which he belongs. That way, at least in sport, a man and his team can even compete against other men who are long dead. Men continue to chase old records, and when they surpass them, their heroic status is assured among every fan that identifies with the individual or team.

Across virtually every culture, archaic and modern, it has also been demonstrated that women choose mates for the three R's; resources, responsibility and respect. The most important thing for a woman is a man's practical competency, demonstrated by his ability to provide resources for his family. Responsibility as a personality trait in a man is next in importance to a woman because it indicates his long-term nurturant reliability in providing those resources to her and her children. Reciprocal respect is also a key personality trait for woman when choosing a man because it is the prime indicator that a man will stay faithful and treat her and her children with nurturant attention. To this day, practical competency is crucial to a man's reputation, status, and wealth, and both men and women treat failing at practical skills or in providing resources harshly. There is no greater stain on a man's reputation than to be seen as a loser, or an incompetent, so much so that one egregious mistake may haunt a man for his entire life. Every baseball fan still associates Bill Buckner's name with the one play that cost his team the World Series. And perhaps the best example of the importance a man places in providing resources to his family is the questionnaire that asked men diagnosed with prostate cancer to list their greatest fears surrounding the diagnosis. The thing men feared the most was not death, not impotence or incontinence, but how it would affect their job.

Women, on the other hand, do not primarily measure each other's value or status in terms of practical competency. For women, until very recently, social status has invariably come with the ability to attract a man and keep him while achieving the social mastery that keeps a family together for a lifetime. This would have been true among our earliest ancestors, and often continues to be true today.

Across many cultures, archaic and modern, it has been demonstrated that men choose women for their attractiveness, sexual faithfulness and nurturant responsibility, and it is those traits women also value most in themselves and other women. Both men and women insult a woman by calling her a slut or a whore, even when it is anything but the truth.

Evolution has favored men who chose women for their attractiveness, because the symmetry expressed by a woman's physical beauty is clearly indicative of her heath and childbearing potential. Evolution would have also have favored men who could assess the potential faithfulness of their mates and who could also rigidly enforce the importance of that particular trait. In women who are always sexually available and responsive, the greatest genetic risk a man can take is having an unfaithful mate who might become pregnant with a child that wasn't his own for which he would then have to provide for a lifetime.

Finally, a woman's nurturant responsibility is a key part of her desirability to a man, because social mastery is expressed less as a predisposition in men because, for most of human of evolution, men spent much of their time on practical challenges and interests, their emotional sophistication focused primarily on the coordinated teamwork necessary for hunting. Until very recently, women have spent most of their time with their family members and others in their clan. This close contact and socialization would have developed predispositions for personality traits that were more sensitive to social relationships and empathetic response. The only exposure men would have to the problems inherent in social relationships would be when they came home and had to respond to problems of emotional complexity they most likely would have not observed directly. For this reason men would find the most socially masterful women to be the most attractive because they could supply social cohesion and wisdom to make up for his limitations in those areas. Even today, this is most often the case in marriage. Evolution has favored men who did learn to respond and understand emotional complexity, but their natural predisposition would have been for problems that had practical solutions. And to this day, men invariably seek practical solutions to emotional problems, problems that invariably resist practical solution. Because men have androgynous brains, they are capable of understanding empathetic and nurturant problems in social relationships, but because competency is key to their self-worth, men tend to defer to women who have a far greater mastery of social problems and relationships.

Women understand the importance of social mastery, and to this day spend much of their time discussing personality, behaviour, motivation, emotional responses and desires in themselves and others. With an androgynous brain, evolutionary adaptation has given women the ability to solve practical problems as well as men, but the predisposition women have for social mastery means that they generally prefer to involve themselves more with behaviours that give them a greater understanding of personal relationships. A simple look at a magazine stand gives a clear reflection of this bias for practical competency in men and social mastery in women.

Men and women have androgynous brains and statistically almost equal abilities with practical and social problems when directly tested, but each has their own preference as to which type of social behaviours they prefer to address and how they will address them. One of the things social science has pretty much ignored is the personal preference of each gender in expressing aspects of human behaviour. It is not measurable skills that are so much different in men and women as the predispositions to express them. One longitudinal study followed an equal number of men and women who were accepted into an engineering program. Both gender groups initially performed the same on tests for skills tied to engineering competency. Neither gender outperformed the other in their university careers, but the women took far more courses outside the engineering curriculum. When they graduated, virtually all the men became engineers while only half the women chose careers in engineering. It is not so much that men and women have different abilities for practical competency or social mastery but each gender seems to have a clear preference for one ability over the other. Prenatal development may also explain this preference for behaviour in the two genders because the flood of testosterone that turns a fetus into a boy prunes away about one-third of the area of the brain tied to emotional response. Neural connections for spatial orientation take up this area. In neural terms, males generally have to work harder at emotional tasks and women have to work harder at spatial ones.

The wonder of the androgynous brain is that males and females of any sexual orientation can generally do practical and emotional tasks with equal facility, if not preference.

Personal / cultural Narrative

Until 35,000 years ago there is little evidence of modern humans having personal or cultural narratives. Technological innovation, clothing and shelter were as basic as those of archaic peoples living today. With animist religion and humans living in much larger social groups, internal and cultural narratives became the foundation of modern culture. The abstract bilateral subjective response of 'I / We' became the conscious expression of human reality with individual and cultural narratives expressing a true consciousness of purpose and meaning in life. In the abstract awareness of the narratives of 'I / We', shared interest / self-interest became the conscious shifting foundation of human culture and ultimately, human civilization.

Personal / cultural internal narratives are necessary for the abstract understanding of the states of mind in others as they exist in the context of culture. Modern humans have the ability to appreciate the states of mind of others five levels deep. I know Mary knows that Tom knows that I think Mary thinks I should lose weight. This deep understanding of the mind of others depends on words and the internal narratives that connect human beings. Only modern humans are capable of such abstract conjectures about what others know and think. Only internal narratives allow this abstract form of consciousness. Without an internal narrator we would be incapable of the complex expression of rational, considered abstract thought. Without an internal narrator, humans just don't have abstract ideas. It is the internal narrator of our personal and cultural realities that makes us truly modern humans with the ability to use inductive / deductive rationality in an almost unlimited ways.

And yet all the children of the genetic Eve and Adam, all the billions of people on earth today, had only had a limited appreciation of the power of personal narrative, only a limited sense of personal individuality prior to the last 250 years and the Enlightenment. Until the Enlightenment, when some human beings first entertained the abstract idea that we may not be expressions of a greater divine narrative, there was very little consciousness of the potential and possibilities within personal meaning and narrative. Before the Enlightenment, civilization did not foster or encourage the ability to create unique and individual representations of reality, and actively repressed any awareness of a possible narrative that included the abstract idea of innate universal human rights and freedoms. It was John Locke who first put forth the abstract idea of personal identity. Until then, the self was almost completely subsumed by cultural narratives. Until the Enlightenment, the balance within personal narrative / cultural narrative was completely biased toward the cultural narratives of literate civilizations. Until the Enlightenment, personal stories were seen to have very little meaning in themselves. Since the beginning of complex civilizations 10,000 years ago, personal / cultural narratives were extremely biased toward the state and religious narratives that defined human society. Meaning still belonged to the narratives of gods and Kings. Personal identity was still an expression of divine order defined and culturally enforced in by the church and state. The balance within 'I / WE' was profoundly skewed toward cultural narratives of the collective 'WE' that were rigidly enforced by social pressure. The crucial ideas about human nature that defined every great religion were corrupted for the benefit of the power elites in modern civilization.

Since the Enlightenment, the balance within 'I / We' has radically shifted to the 'I' side of self-interest, so much so that today many individuals may feel no particular loyalty to any collective 'We', whether a corporation, a country, a particular religion or even one's own family. Since the Enlightenment, the bias towards self-interest expressed through personal narratives of self-fulfillment is challenging every culture and cultural institution that has existed since modern civilization was created 5000 years ago.

The Origin of Religion and Divine Narrative

A profound sense of awe and wonder at nature has been observed in chimpanzees reacting with captivated excitement at the power of a waterfall or an approaching storm, and some consider this type of response the possible origin of religious feelings. Early human beings must also have experienced such captivation and wonder at overwhelming natural experiences, and yet this sense of awe and wonder cannot be described as true religious feeling, a sense of a transcendent reality that creates and influences all existence.

Current human beings have the developmental ability to perceive positive and negative intention in others within a few months of birth. It has been speculated that this is the origin of animist religions, humans ascribing positive and negative intention to gods and spirits for the positive and negative experiences of life.

Until the last 35,000 years, there is virtually no evidence for any kind of religious feelings in modern human beings and so this ability for ascribing intention either did not exist until then or needed more sophisticated language and narrative ability before it could be felt and expressed. It seems unlikely that religion is actually based on some human capacity for ascribing supernatural intention to serendipitous or coincidental events because humans have had the ability to read intention for hundreds of thousands of years. Such a hypothesis about religion also makes the assumption that there is no transcendental reality, no supernatural origin of creation, no human ability to communicate and influences events by establishing a relationship with a transcendental realm. Either there is no transcendental realm and gods and spirits do not exist, or every human culture for the last 35,000 years has been wrong to believe that such things do in fact exist.

The most interesting question is why there is no evidence of religion until 35,000 years ago considering the human brain had attained its modern form more than 35,000 years earlier. Modern humans have lived in Australia for the last 50,000 years, living in a Stone Age culture. A Tasmanian subgroup never even invented the technology to create fire and existed there until 200 years ago when white men wiped them out, yet these ancient cultures had and have profound mythological spiritual narratives and practices connecting concrete reality to what they call the dreamtime.

Why modern humans expressed no spiritual sensibility until that time must have to do with some cultural practice that allowed this new spiritual perception to be perceived and expressed. This cultural practice may have been the discovery of hallucinogenic plants and ritualized behaviours that allowed people to experience what they perceived to be transcendent realities.

San Bushman spiritual practices may have been the foundation of religious behaviour in modern humans, and new research suggests that the origin of all modern language may be among these people as well.

"Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in human genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time."

It is entirely possible that these genetically ancient peoples in South Africa where the genetic Eve and the genetic Adam once lived may has supplied the founder genes that allowed all surviving modern humans inductive / deductive reasoning, complex language and even religion.

Religion and Reciprocity

Innate subjective responses of reciprocity are the foundation of all complex social behaviours in primates. In modern humans, innate reciprocity extends to abstract concepts of bilateral giving / getting that are the foundation for the creation and understanding of friendship, marriage, family and cultural dynamics. The subjective response of bilateral reciprocal giving / getting has undoubtedly been the foundation for human relationships for at least the last two million years, but likely much longer. The positive benefits of reciprocal relationships are many, but they also come with problematical expectations and stresses in every personal relationship. The experiment with rhesus monkeys that were trained to trade pebbles for pieces of cucumber and dissolved into rage and self-pity when the entire group could see that one of their members was given much preferred grapes is most instructive.

What makes human beings so complicated is that individual predispositions for what constitutes a cucumber or grape, what is the preferred response to what is being offered and expected in return, what is perceived as a sign of personal acceptance and rejection is different in every individual and every social relationship. Human reciprocity is very complex going far beyond food sharing, grooming, mutual defense and babysitting as is common in other higher apes. Every human has a different measure of what is an appropriated reciprocal response in every situation involving bilateral giving / getting. The rage and self-pity of perceived nonreciprocal response are common human reactions. It is also interesting that in the monkey experiment with the cucumbers and grapes, 20 percent of the monkeys continued to trade pebbles for grapes, rationally overriding the emotional reactions of rage and self-pity. This cognitive ability undoubtedly remains the foundation for human rationality and the ability to control innate unconscious subjective emotional responses.

When human beings became capable of spiritual sensibilities and religious practice, they too were based on the reciprocity humans perceive in their relationship with the transcendent reality of gods, ancestor and animist spirits. It is undeniable that human beings have found profound cultural benefits in such a spiritual sensibility. It is also undeniable that religion is a profound expression of the human need for meaning in life and that relatively recent need has meant addressing the questions all religions address; the origin of death, suffering and the injustice of disease, accident and privation.

There is some evidence for religious sensibility in Neanderthals who buried their dead with ceremony and created the first fertility fetishes, like the Wilendorf Venus, a distorted representation of a pregnant women that was probably used to venerate and communicate with a feminine deity responsible for the giving of life. The first representations of deities in humans were also feminine fertility figures.

The most intense emotional experience adult human beings ever experience occurs with the birth of a child. The flood of hormones attaching mother and child, and father and child is the greatest flood of emotionally addictive hormones in human experience. And because of the small pelvic girdle and the large head of modern human babies, for the last million years at least, the birth of a child has been the greatest existential threat to the life of a woman and her family. To this day, the risk of infection during childbirth puts millions of women at risk every year. Childbirth is literally the moment when life and death are often completely coincidental. And because human beings did not connect sex and childbirth until very recently in human civilization, the birth of a child was seen as a magical event, something flowing from the transcendent side of reality. That is perhaps why the first religious objects among modern humans were fertility fetishes used to communicate with and propitiate a female deity. These first Venus figures would distort the size of the breasts and abdomen of women so that they represented a woman in the final stages of pregnancy, the most profoundly important aspect of human life. It is entirely possible that modern humans copied this first form of worship from Neanderthals in whom it may have originated.

Because of the existential nature of childbirth, when both a child and mother could each live or die, when a family and clan could be seen to be blessed or punished by the great feminine deity out of whom life flowed, childbirth was and continues to be the moment when prayers are seen to be most needed and relevant. It is the existential nature of fertility and birth that must have made it the cornerstone of all religious experience.

Because human beings have loved one another for millions of years, every death would also have elicited the most profound emotional grief and loss. And yet there is no record of ancestor worship, or propitiation of the gods until the last 35,000 years. Until then the world was entirely secular; after that the world was entirely sacred. Before then there is no evidence that human beings had anything more than the most rudimentary sense of spirituality. And spirituality is the correct word because the first expression of religious feelings had to do with the burial of the dead and the survival of personal identity in spirit form.

The anthropological record shows that many of the first religions had to do with recognizing the spirits of the dead and keeping on their good side, because the spirits of ancestors were seen to have tremendous power over the health and wellbeing of individuals and groups.

The first religious behaviour in modern humans was to bury the dead with respect and ceremony, giving them tools and supplies for the afterlife, and even burying them with sacrificial companion animals or even spouses to serve them. The first great civilizations in the Middle East, India and China and South America followed this practice. The pyramids in Egypt and North America, and the great armies of terra-cotta figures buried with the first great emperor of China show the extent to which that sacred narrative of an afterlife persisted into organized religion as codified myths and burial practices. There is some evidence that earlier Neanderthals did this type the burial ritual, even scattering flowers in a grave, much like the gesture in many burials in many modern religions. This expression of tenderness in our close cousins may have had some true spiritual significance, but it is only in modern humans with inductive / deductive reasoning that religious sensibility would come to absolutely control culture. Only in modern humans with inductive / deductive reasoning would language create myths that defined reality as the relationship between spirits, gods and men that could be passed from one generation to the next, forming the cultural bond of religion that address the most fundamental existential questions in life.

The first burial rituals served two purposes. The first purpose would have been to create a narrative that would help individuals and groups cope with grief and loss. And to this day, all religions focus on an afterlife where the souls of individuals never die. The second purpose of burial rituals would be to maintain a relationship with those spirits in order to seek reciprocal benefits in confronting danger and maintaining health and prosperity in this world. Shamen were those particular individuals who had the ability to use trance-like states to go into the spirit world and bring back supernatural knowledge, powers and sacred objects and form practical connections between spirits, gods and men. And obtaining benefits or protection from the spirit world invariably required the reciprocal offering of some sacrificial object or gesture.

All religions are based on the innate feeling of reciprocity of bilateral giving / getting, the innate expectation that there are rewards for positive behaviour and consequences to negative behaviour. If one has received a benefit one is obligated to repay it, whether to another man or to the creative force behind existence. If one wishes a benefit from another human or the creative force behind existence, one must first make an offering, a sacrifice of great value. If one has suffered an existential threat to health or prosperity, one must make an offering to atone or propitiate the spirits for what must have been an error or insult that required punishment. To this day, sacrificial offerings of gratitude or atonement remain a fundamental part of religious behaviour in every religion. When reciprocal bilateral giving / getting was extended to a reciprocal relationship with the transcendent force behind life, human religions took their universal form.

Once human beings established a reciprocal relationship with the transcendental reality that gave life, it was a short step to the concept of animal and human souls that come from and go back to that transcendent reality. With the spiritual concept of souls in animals and humans, religion would get far more complex, with reciprocal and transcendent relationships between the living and the dead, between the supernatural forces sustaining life and taking life. With the spiritual concept of transcendent souls, true religion was born.

Every religion seeks to create narratives and practices that address the most fundamental existential realities of life; death, suffering and injustice. Religious narratives and practices are then created to understand and influence the creative power that is seen to control life and existential threats to it. How one lives and behaves toward others, and towards the creative force in life itself not only affects an individual's health and prosperity but also the reward and punishment that one might expect in the next life of the spirit.

Animist religions confront these existential narratives and practices directly through the guidance and influence of shaman who gain supernatural power through a direct, personal reciprocal relationship with the transcendent reality that is the origin of life, health, prosperity and death.

Animism, like all other religions, reward and punish individuals in an afterlife for the way they live in the reciprocal relationship of bilateral giving / getting with other men and with the gods and spirits. All religions also develop practices to influence the gods and spirits in the real world, seeking benefits or atoning for transgressions through ritual practiced and offerings. A great deal of human culture is in fact the creation of ritual practices and narratives that create the relationships between a transcendental reality of the spirit and the practical realities of the flesh, between one's soul and one's behaviour. Approved and proscribed behaviour defines how a religion sees the connection between life and the afterlife.

Because of the innate human feeling of reciprocity, religion has always been about reciprocal favors between spirits, gods and men; 'I'll scratch your back because you scratched mine.' 'I will scratch your back, lest you stop scratching mine.' The greater the fear of danger an individual or their social group felt, the greater the sacrifice that would have to be offered to propitiate the spirits or gods. The greater the good fortune experienced by an individual or social group, the greater the sacrifice that must be offered in gratitude, up to and including the still beating hearts of countless infants as was done in Aztec human sacrifices. Innate reciprocity demanded the appreciation of what one received whether it was protection from sickness, lack of game and bad weather or the benefits of health, accessible game and good weather. Human beings continue to pray and sacrifice for these benefits from the spirits of the dead and the gods they serve to this day.

When human beings formed complex civilization completely dependent on agriculture, the existential importance of fertility would be extended to crops, so much so that not only families, but clans and even civilizations came to believe and worship gods who controlled weather, insects, crop diseases and yields. To this day, human beings in virtually every religion make sacrificial offerings to the gods that they believe control the lives of cultivated plants. Humans have destroyed countless living creatures, including other human beings to propitiate those fierce and fickle gods of fertility.

It is crucial to understand the difference between the concept of reciprocity in archaic peoples in their religious feeling and the way we understand reciprocity. To us reciprocity is a simple transaction, one must offer a benefit if one is received; one must offer a benefit, if one is expected. In a world where everything was sacred, benefits went far deeper than simple transaction. Giving was a sacred act, as was receiving. Giving / getting was the bilateral expression of the relationship between gods and the souls of men. The greatest gifts were those sacred objects with which individuals identified their entire being, objects completely identified as extensions of their immortal souls. Giving a talisman or personal object to another was literally giving a part of one's soul to another along with the power that resided in the control of that object. To give someone a fetish object or even a lock of hair was giving part of your soul to another so that they literally had the power to inflict grievous harm on the owner by harming those sacred objects. If one offered another person the existential power to inflict harm, one would necessarily expect a reciprocal response from that person. Reciprocal exchanges were absolutely necessary between people and social groups because people literally exchanged parts of their souls that would then be held hostage by each party. These reciprocal exchanges of power over others created the first instance of mutually assured destruction among individuals and social groups who had participated in such mutual exchange. Reciprocal exchanges of sacred objects tied individuals and groups together in life and death bonds of trust and fear.

To understand the consciousness of all living human beings, it is necessary to understand the origin of religious feeling because it has defined human behaviour, human culture and even the definition of human nature for the last 35,000 years. Until the Enlightenment, religion has been and continues to be the overriding narrative that human beings cling to in the creation of civilization. Humanism, enlightened self-interest and atheism as abstract ideas offering an alternative narrative for existence is still in its infancy compared to the religious narratives that have ruled human behaviour and culture for the last 35,000 years.

The internal spiritual narrative that allows human beings to give meaning to life had its first great concrete expression in the archaeological record in the cave paintings in Spain and France that go back 35,000 years. It is now believed that these paintings were records of trance visions by shaman seeking to record spiritual experience in which they attempted to gain power that could be used for healing, protection or other benefits for individuals or the social group.

The ikung San people of Tanzania created almost identical paintings to those in Lascaux and Altamira in the Drackensburg mountains of South Africa until 200 years ago when they were driven into Tanzania. These, the genetically most ancient peoples on earth, were the ones whose ancestors migrated to Europe and the rest of the world. It was their ancestors whose shaman created such cave paintings to recording their spiritual experiences. It must be remembered that these were not expressions of artistic feeling, but rather sacred records of experiences with the souls of animal spirits by shaman capable of reaching across to the transcendent reality of spirits to bring back supernatural power to heal, influence the appearance of game, propitiate the spirits of animals or ancestors or even see the future.

These trance experiences persist to this day.

John Curtis Gowan in his book Trance, Art and Creativity describes the nature of transcendent experience among archaic peoples... "The core of the San people's religion is the healing dance, and the core of the dance is the trance of the healer. Trance states occur primarily in the domain of primitives; due in part to cultural mores and ritual, and also because the psychology of archaic man and children is marked by the fusion of religions, moods, emotions, instincts and somatic reactions. Rituals and trance induction in primitive societies are seen to enhance the developmental rather than regressive functions of the ego. Simply put, spiritual experiences are profound opportunities for personal growth."

"Animist religion, just as modern religion, is a crucial part of group solidarity and identification. Many primitive cultures around the world employ a form of trance which may be called 'group trance dance.' The ceremony or ritual involves a large number of persons in the tribal group, generally but not always, of an elite nature. The purpose of the trance dance is usually for active curing or healing, although paranormal identities are sometimes seen. It also seems evident that participants experience some intrinsic satisfaction by entering the associated altered state of consciousness; they may also receive extrinsic incentives and societal rewards as increased status. Aspects of group contagion appear to be involved; drumming and music often accompany the dance; and finally the spectacle is public and open."

"Another relevant aspect of the body consciousness of primitive man is its characteristic looseness of boundaries. The flexible self-image of the primitive allows him to remain, when he so chooses, undifferentiated from external reality. A typical example is the relationship of Australian aborigines to the "churinga" the piece of wood or stone which the subject hides away as a manifestation of 'one's own hidden body'... The self is here felt to be identical with the body and with the world of the ancestors. The primitive is freer than his more rational relations to experience oneness with the environment, and thus through extensive bodily manipulation, rather than mental journeys, is able to extend himself into an altered state of perception of that environment."

"A great deal of religious experience has to do with individual and group suggestibility. "Suggestion in primitive society can be implanted with enormous effect. The combination of complete belief in magic and in the powers of the witch doctor, a large element of fear, the cumulative effect of reciprocal suggestion always present among the crowd, the state of excitement and intense expectation-all operate to induce a state of extreme suggestibility."

"Among the Ashanti of West Africa trance is part of the healing ministry. In Bali, mass spirit possession takes place in mourning and divination services which include frenzy, dancing, and unconsciousness. Among the Crow Indians, trance is used for divination, for manhood ceremonies, as a relief for stress, and as part of the ceremonial Bear dance. Among the Laps, trance is used for clairvoyance; it is induced by rhythmic singing and dancing and beating of drums. Among the Bedouin of Syria trance may come about by spirit possession. The Shango of Trinidad become entranced by the beating of drums, and it can be passed from one to another by touch. In the Bantu in Kenya, married women are possessed by spirits who make demands for prohibited objects, and who must be exercised by ceremonies."

All these quotations from John Curtis Gowan's book, Trance Art and Creativity make it clear that the religious practice of archaic peoples persists to this day across many cultures and share clear similarities in practice and purpose. It is clear that animist religion served powerful individual and social purposes, giving human beings the first ability to interact with and control the forces of nature, both seen and unseen. It also allowed different clans to form powerful reciprocal alliances based on absolute existential trust. The connection between the self and others, between living and inanimate objects was the first expression of metaphorical thought in human beings, even though archaic peoples do not see the connection between unconnected objects as metaphor. For archaic peoples, spiritual reality is indivisible from concrete reality.

It is in religion that humans express the first cultural flowering of inductive reasoning and metaphorical thought, the perceived connection between unrelated things through myth, ritual and spiritual practice. When modern humans developed written language, this earliest form of inductive reasoning would be extended to all types of categorized information developed through deductive reasoning.

It is crucially important to remember that animist religions are the only ones in which there are individual and group practices that allow trance states in which it is possible for individuals to attain supernatural power and favors from spirits and gods. Modern literate civilizations elevated ritual cultural practices determined by a favored priestly caste over individual and group experiences involving a direct relationship with transcendental reality.

The best evidence for the power of transcendent experience in hunter / gatherers is found in Turkey at a site called Gobekli tepi where a 12,000-year-old Temple has been found and is being unearthed by Dr. Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute. This enormous site of 300 x 300 metres contains four huge stone rooms, each with two central monoliths 18 feet high representing some kind of faceless human form believed to be connected to some perceived transcendental reality. The excavations have also shown that the site was never used for habitation, and so must clearly have only been for shared worship.

The manpower and coordination necessary to create a temple much more sophisticated than Stonehenge 7000 years earlier is staggering in its implication. That hunter / gatherers could marshal such cooperative effort to create a site for shared religious experience is far more impressive than even the Gothic cathedrals because all this was done before agriculture, before tools, before mathematical measurement, before human beings had even invented the first pottery.

The Metaphorical Mind of Modern Man  
Reading, Writing, Numbers, Private Property and Money

Deductive reasoning is the ability to classify and categorize information by seeing connections and correlations between related things. Inductive reasoning is the ability to see connections and correlations between apparently unrelated categories of information. This is the most basic definition of a metaphor. A man does not run like a deer. A man does not have the strength of the lion, but this metaphorical connection between unrelated things is the foundation of all creative thought that result in emotional responses to shared narratives of personal and cultural experience. With metaphorical thought, human beings turned life into true narrative, breaking the bonds between revelation and reason, between divine truth and its representation. With inductive reasoning and creative thought expressed through literacy, metaphors allowed human beings to then create narratives that did not come directly from the gods, but from inductively, metaphorically brilliant men and women. When one spoke of running like a deer or having the strength of a lion, it no longer meant that one was literally possessed by those animal's spirits. Metaphor allowed the creation of a new sensibility expressed through narratives that were spoken or expressed through the other concrete representations of art. Metaphorical representations of complex emotional states and even transcendent reality were the first steps humans took in creating symbols that were separate from sacred visions. Art and stories using words and language were the first representations of reality outside the brain that could be passed as emotionally laden information from one individual to another, from one generation to another. When personal / cultural narratives became shared narratives using oral and written language, human culture had a way to include great masses of unrelated strangers in those shared emotionally laden narratives binding them the way shared cultural and religious experience and practice binds hunter / gatherer clans.

It is important to remember that art among early peoples was an expression of religious experience. It either recorded the trance experience of a shaman that was sacred and identical with the transcendental world of supernatural power. The earliest shared religious experiences may have used such icons of power to bind groups together in a deeply spiritual way, the way it still happens for many people in religious services. The cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira may have been experienced by groups in trance dance ceremonies, in flickering firelight, accompanied by rhythmic music. They are not unlike the emotional experiences of rock concerts today.

When sacred iconic representation of transcendent experience became art, human beings left behind the perfect identification of concrete and transcendent reality. Art is the conscious distorted representation of reality created by an individual seeking to elicit an emotional experience beyond what is possible in concrete reality. It comes from and is an expression of an individual's experience of a deeper reality that is defined by a culture's aesthetic forms and traditions. Since modern civilization created the metaphorical human mind, art has been the go-between of a purely secular and a spiritual reality. It is art that allows people to experience the bilateral subjective nature of the human mind, to integrate the one and the many, good and evil, gods and men as mythic expressions of the shared interest / self-interest inherent in human nature and culture. In the last century art has even come to be expressed in purely abstract, left brain terms that divorce human beings from human nature and culture, creating a new aesthetic of purely abstract form very much like the one created with mathematics.

Unlike words and language that are made of symbols related to real sensory experience, mathematics is the purest system of abstract inductive reasoning, connecting abstract symbols to other abstract symbols rather than to concrete reality. Like reciprocity and the innate predisposition for language, number sense is also an innate abstract ability in modern humans. Mathematics can be thought of as the seventh and perhaps even the greatest of the human senses creating representations of reality in the brain because those representations are purely abstract, ultimately requiring no concrete correlative. And without mathematics, and the inductive reasoning on which it depends, science and technology would have no more than rudimentary possibilities.

It has been clearly demonstrated by experiments that numeracy is also an innate human ability that appears in babies as early as four months of age. But this ability has no expression unless it is part of socialized learning through literacy. The ability with numbers is as innate as the ability for language in humans, but it has no expression until human culture creates the abstract symbols upon which they depend. Numbers are about a lot more than counting, and when numbers are represented as abstract written symbols, it opens up a geometrically infinite range of technical and conceptual possibilities. Only in modern verbal and mathematically literate humans does abstract inductive reasoning and metaphorical thought have a means of full expression. If the medium is the message, abstract symbols for letters and numbers carry within them the potential messages that allow for the creation of countless innovative narratives to describe experience and existence.

Abstract metaphorical thought is clearly an innate predisposition in modern humans and may be in fact a form of synesthesia, the ability to connect different senses; to see a certain smell, or hear a certain color. This unusual ability to create a metaphorical representation of reality exists to some conscious degree in 20 percent of the population. Daniel Tammet, a prodigiously gifted autistic savant has the ability to see numbers as shapes in a landscape that present themselves to his conscious mind with no conscious effort. He can do calculations at the speed of a computer using this innate ability to connect shapes and numbers, effortlessly and unconsciously multiplying two six digit numbers in an instant. The ability to connect different senses in different parts of the brain and experience that connection in an abstract language like mathematics is perhaps the purest example of metaphorical creative thought. It is interesting that Tammet can also connect symbolic words in different languages in retrievable memory with computer-like speed, learning to speak fluent Icelandic, an excruciating complex language, after only one week of lessons. Clearly his ability to connect linguistic and mathematical symbols to create abstract representations of reality is what every human being does from infancy, although much more slowly and with far greater effort.

Although most human beings have the ability for creative thought and metaphorical symbolism, it is the few most gifted humans whose prodigious inductive reasoning ability is the foundation of all the narrative and technological innovation in civilized history.

Human Civilization

It would seem that human civilization has little to do with evolution because human beings are fundamentally the same creatures before and after complex human civilizations came into being less than 10,000 years ago. Cultures have changed rapidly in that time, but people must be pretty much the same because evolution is thought to work too slowly for natural selection to have had any real consequence over that time. This may or may not be the case. Recent genetic evidence seems to say that human beings have been genetically changing with unprecedented rapidity in the last 400 years, even though human beings have actually taken control of most of the factors upon which natural selection is said to depend. Human beings have simply taken increasingly greater control over survival and reproductive success through technological and cultural change. The weak and the strong both survive to reproduce because of advances in culture and medicine. There is less, not more competitive genetic advantage due to natural selection, and so there should be no way for humans to be undergoing rapid genetic change. If one considers all the other different ways that genes turn on and off such as epigenetics and even the introduction of many new retroviruses that insert themselves into genomes, it may offer some explanation for this rapid genetic change. What is more likely is that genomic awareness and plasticity has responded to a massive reorganization of the Nash equilibrium of the entire planet in the last 400 years. Human beings have changed the world and their own cultures in massive ways. The ecosystem of the earth has responded with one of the greatest mass extinctions since the last ice age. Genomic awareness and plasticity may be reorganizing the entire ecosystem of the earth in response to human dominance and intervention.

It is undeniable that human beings evolved over the last 4 million years to live in small groups, to be emotionally complex, to need to love and to be loved by families and the social groups to which they have belonged. Human beings simply have not evolved to live as isolated families among the countless strangers that make up urban civilization. In the last 6000 years, the emotional balance within shared interest / self-interest that defined the family and clan has suffered extreme dislocation due to the creation of oppressive class structures by religious and secular authorities creating narratives for people who are seen as a part of an abstract hierarchy of human worth and value. Within urban cultures of countless strangers, the evolutionary foundation of human relationships dependent on the need to love and be loved has been under persistent and inexorable assault since people started living in towns and cities. Simply put, living a life among strangers has enormous consequences when it comes to the healthy expression of human nature and relationships. There are clear benefits to complex human civilizations, but those benefits have come at the cost of personal / social human needs and a massive dislocation in the balance within shared interest / self-interest that humans have evolved to express. We are now living in an extreme left brain world of emotional detachment and technological dominance that has placed fundamental stresses upon virtually all human beings.

Iain McGilchrist also makes the case that the dislocation in the balance between left brain traits and right brain traits has dire consequences for modern humans. He believes this change in the expression of human behaviour is responsible for the rapid increase in mental illness in Western society, even the creation of new mental diseases such as schizophrenia which was almost never reported before industrial civilization. The context in which modern people live and the way they see and process the world is now exceedingly left brain dominant, so that life is broken down into smaller and smaller parts with less and less seeming correlation. Life has become mechanistic, with people even seeing their relationships as an interrelated series of isolatable positive and negative issues. The DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that identifies psychological problems for professionals has expanded exponentially over the past decades with so many new problems that the majority of the population can be seen as having some identifiable mental health issue. How much this is a matter of better analysis and identification and how much of this reflects a rapid increase in such problems may also be bilateral in its nature. The more we look for mental health issues the more we will find. The more we find, the more our cultural contexts will reflect these new mental illnesses.

The Middle East is the cradle of human civilization. It is here the first writing, the first agriculture, the first animal domestication, the first numbers, the first money, the first towns and cities were created. In the primary step away from the hunter / gatherer model of human culture. It was here, 10,000 years ago, that the first nomadic tribes with grazing animals began to eke out a living the way their descendants do to this day. It was not long after that revolutionary change away from the hunter / gatherer model that civilization became defined by a revolutionary new ecosystem called urban life, almost completely separating man from nature. When nomadic clans of herdsmen came down from the hills with grains they could plant in fertile floodplains, human civilization became possible because those domesticated grains and those domestic animals could feed countless people living together in larger and larger communities.

In his book The Ecology of Eden Evan Eisenberg describes the transition to urban life... "The alliance of grass and man has conquered the world about as thoroughly as any previous alliance, and in record time. The genus Homo had struggled for 2 million years to reach a population of 5 million; once the marriage with annual grasses was solemnized, it took only 10,000 years to reach the present level ... Humans now control at least 25 percent of the primary productivity- that is, the green stuff- on the planet's land surface. Much of this consists of annual grasses."

Cities depend on farming, and it was farming that changed the interpersonal relationships upon which human survival depended for all its prehistoric existence.

Eisenberg... "As the view of our evolutionary past becomes clear, the domestication of plants and animals comes to look less like a strange and sudden denial of our animal nature-a lion eating straw-and more like an offshoot of that nature. Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that two things are natural to man: war and gardening. Clearly there are some things about farming and gardening that appeal to our deepest instincts:

The instincts to nurture, as in keeping pets

The instinct to control and manipulate, which is seen in many higher mammals.

The need to be secure in a predictable environment. The hunter / gatherer makes his environment predictable mainly by learning it, the farmer mainly by changing it."

With ecosystems stripped of wild game, ever-increasing numbers of human beings were actually forced to live in urban settings dependent on new domestic agriculture that offered those masses of people at the very least a subsistence vegetarian diet. Herding dogs allowed the creation of domesticated sheep and goat herds that could supply towns and cities with enough protein for the most affluent classes. Private farms fed towns and cities made of private dwellings as they do to this day. It was the idea of private property that became the foundation upon which all civilization would rest. With agriculture and property, for the first time in human history, the ownership of land was synonymous with survival and a revolutionary new abstract reality called wealth. Whether in rural or urban spaces, the more land a person and family owned, the greater the power and status of that individual and family. For the first time, power resided with those who had the means to acquire and defend the most land. For the first time power and authority meant something more than the respect arising from the competency to defend and provide for one's family and clan through day-to-day hunting and gathering in a direct relationship with nature. For the first time resources would not be equitably shared, but would divide human beings into classes and castes based on their landholdings, status and means of employment. Land was so important that early Greek democracy only extended the rights of citizenship to landowners, and it was a provision still seriously considered in the creation of the American Constitution.

The classes and castes of every civilization would be defined and created by educated, literate religious and secular elites who created the religious and social narratives that would define social structure, and to this day, those social narratives predominantly benefit those same elites.

The first great cities and civilizations arose at the conflux of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on a floodplain of mixed marshes and desert. Using revolutionary new irrigation methods, this first great agricultural society was capable of feeding tens of thousands of people. Agriculture capable of feeding tens of thousands of people demanded innovation and a new large class of landless workers because large acreages of land and crops needed tilling and water, and there were very few places where large acreages of crops would grow without massive human intervention. Technology to till the land and move water has been and continues to be the foundation of human civilization since the first great cities 8000 years ago.

Evan Eisenberg describes the origin of civilization at its birth at the conflux of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers... "The first signs of permanent settlement on the floodplain date to the sixth millennium B.C... 2000 years later- the length of an afternoon in prehistory- Mesopotamia was a paradise... The magnitude of this achievement can stun us even now if we stop to think about it. These people, the Sumerians and their predecessors in the region, the Ubaidians-gave us wheeled vehicles, the yokes and harnesses so that animals could pull them, animal drawn plows, sailboats, metalworking (casting, riveting, brazing, soldering, inlay, and engraving in copper and bronze), the potter's wheel, the arch, the vault, the dome, surveying, mapping, and a rough and ready mathematics. Above all they gave us the process in which you and I are now engaged, even if we no longer use wedge shaped marks on soft clay. On the debit side of the ledger (another Sumerian invention), we might place large professional armies, siege engines, war chariots, a rigid division of labor and status, imperialism, and bureaucracy."

Iain McGilchrist quotes the great French historian, Fernand Braudel, "Writing became established as a means of controlling the society... In Sumer, most of the archaic tablets are simple inventories and accounts, lists of food rations distributed, with a note of the recipients." McGilchrist goes on to say that numbers are essential for controlling crops, herds, and people.

With written language and abstract thought, innovation spawns innovation. Creative solutions using inductive / deductive reasoning in ever-changing new circumstances allowed even more innovative and creative solutions. Copper tools became iron tools which then became bronze. The Copper Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Ages of civilization were all in the service of agriculture, war and religion; all in the service of elites who could conquer and control land and people.

Civilization became defined by the narratives societies created to justify those three new aspects of culture, and it was all about wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few. The lowest classes of humans were forced into armies conquering new territories of people who would supply free labor as slaves. With the creation of city- states and the great empires that followed them, human civilization was created to serve the self-interest of the very few, with wealth trickling down through the classes to individuals who were just cogs in the wheels of state. The first city-states were the model for the ones we live in today.

Eisenber again... "In the story of the Tower of Babel can be seen the myriad lights and fractures of city life. Civilization brings people together—in the most literal sense—but also divide them. Indeed (and here the Bible gets it wrong), the city thrives on division: of labor, of classes, of ethnic groups. The cities of the ancient near East were nearly as cosmopolitan as Paris or New York. They were melting pots with the heat turned low. Merchants, mercenaries, nomads bringing their goats to market spoke a stew of tongues. The towers rose anyway—if not to heaven, but high enough for most purposes."

Even the first flower of democracy in Greece between 500-400 B.C.E. that replaced a line of brutal kings and tyrants was soon abandoned for the oligarchical rule of rich landowners. The laws that gave recognized citizens certain civil liberties were only enacted by the rich because they feared the poor would rise up and take what they owned. In Classical Greece, 10 percent of the population owned 90 percent of the wealth which is about the same as in 21st century North America, and trickle-down economics is still accepted as a legitimate economic theory, with the poor and the middle-class often defending the fundamental inequity so contrary to their own self-interest, and even the best interest of the state.

Then and now, divine authority was codified into laws interpreted by priests of many new religions imposed on illiterate masses whose labor was crucial to building cities, feeding cities and making war between cities. The literate priests served literate kings that raised illiterate armies to conquer more and more land. And until very recently literacy was limited to the elites who could not risk the possibility that the masses could develop analytical narratives of their own that might clash with the imposed dogma that served those elites. Until the Enlightenment in the West, the only religion and culture in Western history to champion universal literacy were the Jews for whom it was key to their cultural survival as they were invaded and conquered by successive empires with different secular and religious narratives. The only religion in the East to promote literacy was Confucian China that was the first civilization to see the advantage of identifying the most exceptional minds to serve the Emperor. That model remains in place, and is arguably the most effective because it is the one civilization that has survived since literacy began.

In virtually all other urban civilizations, divine and secular authorities were seen as the two intertwined aspects of social reality. The abstract idea of private property is the cornerstone of civilization because it made possible a dependent relationship between illiterate peoples who were virtual strangers to one another, held together only by the narratives handed down to them from literate sacred and secular authorities.

In every civilization, until the 20th-century, every aspect of life was justified by divine narratives that rationalized the exploitation of the many by the few. Hamurabi, the first great Middle Eastern conqueror was the first to claim to have spoken directly with God, and being given a divinely ordered code of human conduct.

Wikipedia... "The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code, dating to 1772 BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, that consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (lex talionis) as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man. Nearly one-half of the Code deals with matters of contract, establishing for example the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction, establishing the liability of a builder for a house that collapses, for example, or property that is damaged while left in the care of another. Approximately a third of the code addresses issues concerning household and family relationships such as inheritance, divorce, paternity and sexual behaviour. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on an official; this provision establishes that a judge who reaches an incorrect decision is to be fined and removed from the bench permanently. A handful of provisions address issues related to military service."

From this code onward, civilization became the story of human beings divided into distinct classes, those classes reinforced and preserved by what was said to be divine will and authority. Every empire from the Babylonian onward led by a succession of psychopathic monsters including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler believed in a personal divine inspiration that allowed them to objectify human beings on a scale that permitted the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Killing millions of innocent human beings has been a part of human civilization from its very beginnings, and terrorizing civilians an accepted tactic of war. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the recent ethnic cleansing in Laos, Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda are the modern continuation of this acceptable practice in modern civilized warfare. This left brain ability to objectify human beings expresses its need for absolute power, regardless of the cost to others. As history repeatedly teaches, absolute power corrupts absolutely simply because of its ability to objectify others and deny the expressions of shared interest that were fundamentally important for human survival until the last 10,000 years.

With distinct classes of strangers living in ever-increasingly dense urban populations, political tension was between the few rich decision makers and the powerless masses. Even the few brief periods in Greece and Rome in which the general population had some small political influence, the scales were always weighted in favor of the rich and powerful. It is important to remember that even these brief periods of limited human rights were soon snuffed out by tyrants for whom terror was the favorite form of political action. It is also important to remember that democratic suffrage was for a selected few. In the United Kingdom, home to the mother of all parliaments, until 1728, only three percent of the population could actually vote, and most Western countries excluded women from equal rights under the law until the 20th century. Suffrage, even in democracies, was mainly reserved for those men with property.

With property, it became possible to even own other human beings. With property, it became possible for a man to extend the abstract idea of property rights to all other human beings including his own women and children and to see them as chattel just like livestock. With the abstract idea of property, human civilization would make abstract rules of social behaviour created by literate elites dominant over any idea of shared individual human dignity and rights that were an innate part of the balance within shared interests / self-interest that define all hunter / gatherer cultures.

Civilizations, to a great degree, are defined by cultural narratives that bind groups of virtual strangers who are existential rivals divided into inequitable classes that serve the needs and ambitions of religious and secular elites. Those narratives define reality, and the most relevant parts of any narrative for every individual in any civilization concerns what one owns, and how one makes a living and how that serves the ruling elite. The foundation of true cultural narrative begins with the abstract ideas of property and class and a complete shift in the balance within shared interests / self-interest that defined human culture for 4 million years. It was the left-brain ability to break the natural world into detachable pieces that served the self-interest of elite social groups divided into distinct and different classes that has created every great literate civilization. The benefits largely accrued to the few; the costs were paid by the many whose lives were never secure from rape, torture or enslavement. Even the elites of small city-states were often victimized by the merciless acquisitive self-interest of neighboring states and empires. Armies became another class of poor and helpless people who were forced to suppress all the natural feelings of empathy and shared humanity that is the best expression of human nature.

With civilization came the geopolitical policies of terror, rape and slaughter on monumental scales. With civilization, and all its technical innovation, the nightmare of left-brain rationalization and detachment was let loose upon humanity. To this day civilized nations and ethnic groups from the most culturally advanced to those still settling ethnic scores from centuries past see other people as less than human and treat them as such.

Money and Its Narratives

After property, the most important abstract concept in human civilization is the idea of money, particular abstract tokens of value that can be used as a medium of exchange instead of trading real goods or services. With money it was no longer necessary to barter what one had for what one needed or wanted. With money, people could trade for an infinite range of goods and services and trading in those goods and services is the basis of all urban civilization. Money, as an abstract representation of value created measures of wealth completely independent of land and real goods. The power elites of church and state also had new ways to accumulate wealth through tithe and taxation with which they could raise armies and pay them to wage war on other people to usurp their wealth in land and treasure. With money, even human beings could be bought and sold like sheep or tools. To this day, power elites can still buy the services of strangers to even kill their own people.

Iain McGilchrist... "Money changes our relationships with one another in predictable ways. These also clearly reflect the transition from the values of the right hemisphere to those of the left. In Homer, artifacts of gold and silver may be aristocratic gifts, and are associated with deity and immortality but are not money: in fact, significantly unformed gold and silver, as such, had negative associations. Before the development of currency, there is an emphasis on reciprocity. Gifts are not precise, not calculated, not instantaneously enacted or automatically received, not required; the gifts are not themselves substitutable, but unique; and the emphasis is on the value of creating and maintaining a relationship, which is also unique. With trade, all this changes; the essence is competitive: the exchanges instantaneous, based on equivalence, and the emphasis not on a relationship, but utility or profit."

Once money was created as an abstract means of exchange, infinite cultural possibilities were opened allowing the creation of magnificent innovations in architecture, engineering, art and technology. For the first time, success for an individual or society rested on creative invention as much if not more than property. Build a better mousetrap, house or temple; create new kind of aqueduct to move water; create new roads and trading ships, create new technologies for commerce and war and an individual could rise in status and wealth through the patronage of established elites. It must be remembered that technology as basic as the wheel was not invented until 3300 BCE when there were many great civilizations in the middle east, India and China. For the first time in human history, individual brilliance, intelligence and innovation would be the way out of urban poverty and suffering.

This new innovative creativity of course depends entirely on individuals with the greatest power of inductive / deductive reasoning, those individuals capable of creating the most useful technologies and the most resonant narratives that would serve the needs of the established elites. Sacred myths would be replaced by great stories that would bind civilizations in common narratives, both religious and secular. The first written stories were all about the exploits of kings and gods meant to instill in the masses a sense of cultural solidarity and loyalty and make them serve the kings and priests in any way they were asked. The cultural narratives of civilizations establish the authority and primacy and the divine authority of the king to make war and keep people in their place. The Bagavad Gita, the Old Testament of the Bible, and the Koran all do that very effectively.

Civilization has been built on the inductive / deductive brilliance of the few in service to those who controlled their lives. It is the ability of a few brilliant men to create new narratives for existence that has raised us from the Stone Age to the stars. From Archemedes to Einstein, from Lao Tzu and Buddha to Socrates and Jesus, and countless others, civilization has been the exploitation of the inductively / deductively brilliant by the greedy few.

Genius is the ability to conceive of new narratives for existence whether they are scientific or social, secular or sacred and it is in the power of narrative that all civilizations find meaning, purpose, direction and power. Without written words and numbers and the inductive / deductive reasoning and metaphorical genius of the most brilliant human beings, civilization could never have been created.

Until the 17th-century when individuals could copyright stories and patent ideas, the most brilliant human beings would serve at the whim of established elites and often paid with their lives if they did not, or if they even dared question the established cultural narrative created by those elites. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of the secular and religious establishments and money allowed that concentration an infinite range of expression and power. The first banks were in fact created to serve those elites. It was only when individuals could benefit from their own innovative genius that the true power of inductive / deductive reasoning and creative brilliance would be liberated. Stifled by the control of wealth in the hands of the autocratic few, innovation would be stifled in its potential expression until the last 200 years, and that is why most of human innovation has happened in that time.

With the Enlightenment, and the very partial liberation of human beings from the narratives of church and state, science, medicine, technology and social understanding could finally be tested through the creation of the scientific method using hypothesis, practical testing and theoretical conclusion. Only when ordinary individuals had accumulated enough wealth to concentrate private capital in banks would individual business and innovation take hold of the world's economy.

The Enlightenment also gave birth to countless new social narratives. Since then, reason and rationality have been used to make theoretical models of human existence to create narratives of secular reality. Capitalism, communism, socialism, and countless other Utopian narratives all tried to make sense of human behaviour and create a social reality that might find the balance within shared interest / self-interest more appropriate to civilizations of countless millions bound together in an ecosystem that was finally seen to include the entire earth.

In the last 250 years, human beings in many cultures have also finally been free to use the same ability that babies use to make sense of the world when they do a statistical analysis of observation to make conclusions about reality in their social context. It is important to remember that the first scientific experiments in which hypothesis were tested and the results recorded for peer review and evaluation as to their statistical repeatability, happened in Germany in 1850. The idea that there is a balance within shared interest / self-interest that will determine the evolutionary success or failure of the human race is also a new but profoundly relevant narrative that is in fact existential for us and countless species on the planet.

Until the 19th-century, inductive / deductive reasoning and metaphorical thought was held captive by the authoritarian conservative power elites of church and state, and it is not coincidental that Darwin's theory of natural selection was not published until 1859. It was only 20 years after its conception that he dared publish it because of his fear of religious authority. It is also clearly apparent that the narratives of many entrenched religious elites that define human nature and existence still reject Darwin, believing that human beings and dinosaurs lived together 6000 years ago. The testable logic of science which is the same as the one that every baby uses to define human nature and existence still has not given way to the religious narratives of some powerful elites.

It is also clear that inductive / deductive reasoning and the scientific method is a two edged sword. Without finding a balance within shared interest / self-interest in human civilization, technology will only accelerate the destructive power of the left brain imbalance that has favored the self-interest of the few over the many for the last 6000 years.

Civilization and the Human Psyche  
Civilization and Gender

For 2 million years the androgynous brain of human beings was expressed through social dominance shared between a man and a woman in the nuclear family unit.

With the creation of civilization and agricultural societies that shared social dominance became completely unbalanced, with men creating narratives to objectify and dominate nature, even and most especially their own wives and children. In early agricultural societies, men and boys were more important because they have the upper body strength to plow the earth using tools pulled behind domesticated draft animals. The more boys a family had, the greater the agricultural productivity possible. Most cultures still carry this bias, even those that are overwhelmingly urban. And the first and greatest complication arising from the abstract idea of property was inheritance; how to divide land among offspring when the landowner died. To this day, family conflicts over inheritance divide many families.

Laws having to do with title to land define a society in fundamental ways. The Celts actually created 11 types of marriage in order to establish legal precedents and authority for dividing land between a surviving spouse and children. And making that complication even more contentious and perilous was the fact that there had to be some necessary cultural solution in leaving land to children so the property would not be divided into smaller and smaller unsustainable agricultural holdings. The more children one had, the more prosperous one could be; but dividing that land between many children, generation after generation would destroy the very wealth that built the family. This paradox of wealth directly connected to land holdings would divide families and generations making it nearly impossible to form an equitable balance within the shared interest / self-interest of the family unit. The abstract idea of property turns the children of every family against each other in what is often an existential conflict. The favoured son will prosper; his siblings, not so much. With the abstract idea of property, shared interest / self-interest in human civilization became increasingly biased toward self-interest, with the self-interest of individuals within and without the family unit increasingly dominant over the shared interest of the family and even the entire social group. This bias towards self-interest is true to this day and is happening with increasing rapidity and extensiveness through the world. Competitive capitalism, the quintessentially Darwinian battle of all against all, is rapidly and systematically destroying most of the concepts of shared interest that hold civilization together, even and especially the shared interest that all living creatures have in a sustainable world ecosystem. Taken to an extreme, individual liberty is as destructive to social cohesion as totalitarian collectivism. Any society or civilization that does not establish an effective balance within shared interest / self-interest must inevitably collapse because all ecosystems, including human civilization must find that equilibrium.

Patriarchy, the bias towards masculine traits in the family and cultural unit was also born with the abstract concepts of property. Culture selected those males with the natural predisposition for competitiveness, status, dominance and self-interest. Those men would create a boy's club where those traits were most prominent and approved. They would institutionalize those genetic biases in state and religious cultural narratives that would praise the traits that gave particular males the highest degree of dominance and status. The secular and sacred boy's clubs would conspire to create their own narratives in which men became living gods, in which priests justified in their own ambitions by serving the interests of the powerful at the expense of the weak, justified by the very voice of God that only they could hear.

Men with more empathetic, feminine traits were castigated as weak, inferior or homosexual. Homosexuality itself became an abomination, in public if not in private practice, because it threatened the narrative in which masculine traits were desirable and dominant. This bias continues to this day in almost all civilized human cultures.

Modern humans have returned to the social model of chimpanzees with males competing for status and dominance and females relegated to nurturant roles and responsibilities or sexual exploitation, or both. The abstract masculine biased concept of honor became the cultural justification of patriarchy for killing other men and even one's own women and children. To die with honor is a manly thing that usually entails denying honor and respect to others. It is something most women eschew rather than embrace even in cultures were patriarchy rules with absolute authority.

The threat of female traits is so severe in most urban civilizations, that many cultures segregate men and women from all social contact outside the family. Women are property. Women are not to be trusted. Men are not to be trusted with women. The greatest imbalance within shared interest / self-interest in patriarchal families since the rise of civilization is that between the genders. That imbalance has made human civilization the most brutal and ruthless expression of behaviour in any social animal. Until just the last few decades, rivers of blood from soldiers, but mostly women and children have washed the very concept of shared interest almost completely from the narratives of human society.

Eric Larrabee in his article in Horizon November 1959 discusses the book, The Power Elite, by C Wright Mills who could see the coming alienation of the white-collar middle class in America.

"Thus a new class is been created aware of social change and unable to influence it.. Mills'White-Collar Man with no old Golden age, no plan of life, no culture to lean on is pushed by forces beyond his control into movements he does not understand. He makes excellent material for the synthetic molding of his motives by mass media, and is especially vulnerable to their onslaught of manufactured loyalties and distractions. White-collar workers may vie with one another in emulating models of behaviour just beyond their reach, but satisfaction is short-lived; on-the-job, no status is secure, each hurdle has another one beyond it, and the symbols of each new step upward, having been savored in advance, lose their flavor when attained, and the results Mills calls 'Status Panic,' an inevitably frustrating struggle to find oneself in a "market of strangers," where evidences of prestige are fragile and fleeting, and all dreams are false."

The Tea Party and the Occupy movements are just two sides of this inescapable frustration of class warfare that is the dominant feature of Western civilization. The inescapable cultural narratives of the elite secular and religious authorities are meant to distract and pacify those they exploit, turning one class against the other, but never against the one with all the wealth and power. Since its inception, civilization has been the class warfare of the rich versus everyone else, and they have invariably been the overwhelming winners.

Even the idea of universal human rights and freedoms of a shared humanity is still new and tenuous and easily denied. It must be remembered that virtually every fascist and autocrat has come to power turning classes, tribes and sects against another. To quote W.B. Yeates:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.

By any reasonable measure, civilization still embraces a left brain heartless and brutal geopolitics. Political discourse is now based entirely on ideological certainty and absolute mistrust of any narrative that threatens one's own. And no social group can survive without some form of reciprocal trust that finds an equitable balance within shared interest / self-interest.

Societies built on mistrust depend to a greater and greater degree on coercive authority because human beings naturally seek a balance within shared interest / self-interest, between male and female traits, between cooperative and competitive behaviour, and ultimately within the many reciprocal relationships upon which all social groups depend. Power corrupts because it destroys the natural balance within shared interest / self-interest. Power corrupts absolutely when self-interest has total sway.

Since the Enlightenment  
The Modern Psyche  
The Individual, Civilization and the Clash of Narratives

The idea of universal individual rights and freedoms has only been a part of human civilization since the Enlightenment. The balance within shared interest / self-interest that exists in hunter / gather societies was so natural that it was an unconscious part of human culture. Every individual felt as much a part of and inseparable from the social group as any herd or pack animal. Until the Greek philosophers, no culture ever attempted to distinguish between the two. Just as the ancient Greek philosophers divided the soul into spirit, emotion and rationality, they were the first to identify the abstract idea of the one and the many. Reconciling individual self-interest and social shared interest has been a fundamental theme of Western philosophy since that time. With the Enlightenment, the distinction between the individual and society, between personal and cultural narratives became polarized ideas leading to fascism, laissez-faire capitalism and totalitarian communism. Since the Enlightenment, the individual and the state have existed in what can only be described as a state of war. Each has paradoxically both won its own territorial imperatives as they lost their touch with the right brain contextual realities of shared interest that define humanity. We live in a world where everyone is right about their own choices in life and no one is interested in how that connects to anyone else. All the lonely people; that's where they all come from.

Until the Enlightenment the abstract idea of an individual with a personal narrative and identity deserving equal respect and treatment was foreign to most patriarchal societies and civilizations that were organized to serve ruling literate male elites. Personal narratives went no further than the nuclear family unit and were largely irrelevant to the cultural narratives of those ruling elites that controlled people's lives. The tenuous balance within shared interest / self-interest in modern civilized societies have been imperfectly maintained by family units, but those family units are all that have kept civilization from being an authoritarian nightmare with absolutely no interest in the value of any particular individual.

McGilchrist... "The final ironic twist in the logic of this process of objectification is that it escapes our control, and we ourselves become its victims, simultaneously reduced to the being- available of mere objects and reduced to the being of a purely inner subjectivity that is no longer recognized as enjoying any truth, any reality."

Those cultures that tried to destroy the family unit were inevitably and quickly doomed. No matter how regressive and brutal an authoritarian regime might be, the nuclear family unit that is 4 million years old would not be swept aside. The cult religions, small and large, that attacked the nuclear family unit with narratives of individuals like David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith could only succeed in keeping members from rebelling through increasingly rigid supervision and physical and psychological coercion. The big established religions have always used the same kind of monitoring and coercion to enforce and preserve their own narratives, but they universally include the nuclear family as part of that narrative. They even try to broaden the narratives of family to one that is divine. All the dominant great religions see individuals as god's children meant to be controlled by the patriarchal authorities of the church and state.

But self-interest and individuality is a fundamental reality of nature. From bacteria to humans, no two individuals are subjectively alike. Even the same worm will not necessarily behave the same way in exactly the same circumstances. Subjective responses are exceedingly broad within species and even within individuals of species. But what may separate modern humans from all other living creatures is that individuality has achieved an almost infinitely broad range of expression. There is literally nothing on this earth some human being does not find completely fascinating. There is literally nothing on this earth that does not give some person incredible pleasure. There is literally nothing on this earth that some person does not fear. And for the first time in human history, millions of human beings have embraced the concept of individuality with inalienable rights and freedoms.

Until the last 250 years, individuals far outside of the bell curve of culturally approved thoughts and behaviours were seen to be possessed of devils, or simply insane. Many modern states and religions still use coercive psychological indoctrination on individuals who question established doctrine. Disagreement with religious or secular authority is often seen as a mental disease. Individuality and its expression is seen as selfishness, heresy or treason. Modern psychology and the scientific method have fundamentally challenged all such narratives, so that the individual can now be seen as a unique blend of genetic predispositions and cultural socialization with each individual deserving equal rights and respect. But until modern inductive / deductive rational thought came along to develop the social sciences, civilizations really had no interest in the personal narratives of individuals.

Yet individuals did exist as they have always done, and the more complex civilizations became, the more complex individual personality, interests and subjective responses would become. Universal literacy would extend the abstract idea of personal identity to countless millions of people who would be able to express their own personal narratives and ideas and share them with family, friends and strangers. Writers would create narratives and characters with which individuals would personally identify and see them as unique and inherently valuable regardless of the cultural narrative in which the person lived. Huckleberry Finn may have been the first fictional character to consciously make that choice, knowing that according to the cultural narrative he believed, in choosing to help a slave escape to freedom he was dooming his immortal soul.

With universal literacy, individuality would come to have meaning as profound as that of any cultural narrative in which the individual was raised.

The first abstract expression and measure of individual meaning and narrative would arise from a recognition of the innate feeling of self-esteem by which human beings measure their place and value in their social context. When individuals felt their personal value equal to that of the institutions to which they belong, the inherent conflict between self-interest of the individual and the shared interest of the social group would rise to the level of conscious and purposeful conflict. Individuals began to create narratives that confronted the narratives in which they were socialized, and the institutional power that created and enforced them. Cultural institutions began to need more complex indoctrination and coercive authority to keep individuals in line with the dominant cultural narrative.

McGilchrist... "For even rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination without rationality. The marriage of the two is, however, of such a peculiar kind, that they carry on a life-and-death struggle, and yet it is only together that they are able to accomplish their greatest feats, such as the higher forms of conceptualizing that we're accustomed to call reason."

It is only in modern times, the last two centuries that the life-and-death struggle between reason and imagination, detachment and feeling, individual and social values have come to exist as an existential challenge to civilization.

In describing the origins of the modern and postmodern worlds, McGilchrist explains the overriding extremism in the 20th century.

"Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationship based on little more than utility, greed and competition came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity. The state, the representative of the organizing, categorizing and subjugating forces of systematic conformity, was beginning to show itself to be an overweening presence even in democracies. And there were worrying signs that the combination of an adulation of power and material force with the desire, and the power (through technological advance) to subjugation, would lead to the abandonment of any form of democracy, and the rise of totalitarianism."

For the individual, the left-brain world of ironic detachment and technological objectification has also exacted a terrible price. McGilchrist goes on to say... "The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but, as advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom. Since the rise of capitalism in the 18th-century, when according to Patricia Spacks boredom as such began, ' an appetite for the new and different, for fresh experience and novel excitements' has lain at the heart of successful bourgeois society, with its need above all to be getting and spending money."

Self-esteem and Civilization

Self-esteem is the subjective process by which individuals assess their personal value in relation to the social group to which they belong. This assessment carries with it powerful emotional responses. It is observable in other social primates in the pecking order and hierarchical dominance through which status is determined. There are male dominant and female dominant social groups. and status within these groups reflects the behavioural biases inherent within each gender. Chimpanzees and baboons are male dominant, the larger males fighting with each other to determine a position in the social hierarchy so that, except for the Alpha and omega males, every individual knows to whom they must defer and those who must defer to them. In all social groups, social hierarchy establishes a balance in which conflict is minimized because everyone knows their place.

In modern human beings with androgynous brains, this gets far more complicated with males and females each expressing status needs and the social balance it engenders through shared dominance in the nuclear family. Practical competency and social mastery are the two ways that hominids and later humans established social status for the last 4 million years, and though there is a bias in males for practical competency and a bias in females for social mastery, both are crucial parts of determining an individual's social status in human societies. This was the case until modern civilization and patriarchy skewed that balance in favor of male dominance and practical competency as the socially preferred and sanctioned model for behaviour. Males left domestic social mastery mostly to women, suppressing masculine cultural narratives that involved empathy and cooperation among individuals or social groups. Patriarchal societies created cultural narratives that stressed self-interest and competition as a model for social interaction. A great deal of evolutionary theory is in fact supported by the behaviour of male dominant chimpanzees who are the most aggressive and hierarchical of the higher apes, completely ignoring the behaviour of bonobos whose societies are matriarchal and cooperative.

Modern science has been dominated by men until very recently, and its own patriarchal old boy's club has maintained the cultural bias of hierarchical competitiveness that has been a part of the cultural narrative of every civilization. Shared interest and cooperation were seen to be nothing more than a complicated form of self-interest rather than the fundamental aspect of life that it is. Darwinian theory is fundamentally patriarchal in its focus on self-interest and individual fitness.

In most modern patriarchal institutions, the same coercive penalties were also levied on anyone who defied the masculine narratives of self-interest. Until the Enlightenment, every modern civilization has institutionalized the chimpanzee and baboon male-dominant model of social status and control. In modern civilization, power belongs to the most aggressive males capable of forming Machiavellian alliances with an elite group of other favored males. Individual rights and freedoms and liberty itself was for the benefit of men. Women and children and other races were seen as second-class and there are many cultures where this is still the case.

Individual self-esteem in modern humans was seen to be so irrelevant to a society structured on a rigid model of social status that it was virtually invisible until modern psychology began to question why particular individuals had so much difficulty coping with stress, and other individuals could cope with stress that was profoundly more demanding.

What psychology has shown is that there are three different innate predispositions for self-esteem which reflect a consistent pattern of subjective responses and behaviours. These innate predispositions and their behavioural expressions are so strong that Roy Baumeister's meta-study of 500 different programs lasting at least five years in public schools in North America found that there was no measurable change in the measure of self-esteem of those children participating in the programs.

People with low, medium and high self-esteem behave very differently and measure their own self-worth in their own unique way. People with low self-esteem need constant reassurance and feel they have to earn status through particular accomplishments that never satisfy that innate self-doubt. People with medium self-esteem innately seek to find a balance between their own status and self-worth and that of others. For them, conformity and social rules establishes that balance. They defer to the narratives authorities provide for their social status. People with high self-esteem are the ones who feel they may not only question authority but actually challenge it, providing themselves and the social group with a new and possibly better narrative for balancing social status. These are the leaders and social innovators who provide the new narratives that have changed social groups and even entire civilizations.

Evolution has established a balance for innate self-esteem in human societies. Those societies who had a proportion of people with low self-esteem that had to constantly try to prove themselves took great benefit from those members who were never satisfied with the responses of others and constantly trying to accomplish greater things to gain approval. Those same societies would also greatly benefit from having the greatest proportion of individuals who wanted to follow social rules and accepted their place in the social hierarchy. Societies with a few gifted individuals who would challenge social rules and authorities would also be more successful because they would transform society in new and better ways.

Since the Enlightenment personal narratives began to be seen as equal in value to the cultural narratives of modern societies. Status is the social position as defined by the cultural narratives of human society, and when personal narratives conflict with social narratives, personal stress is the result. The stress on modern humans in complex civilizations is infinitely greater than in any other primate group or species because the social balance of status is created as purely abstract expressions of cultural narrative. A person of high status in Japanese society has a very different narrative from a person of high status in American society. Modern humans are also the only creatures with an abstract sense of personal identity flowing out of those literate cultural narratives. Since the Enlightenment, modern civilization is characterized by the conflict between personal and cultural narratives with individuals trying to find an abstract, theoretical, rational balance within shared interest / self-interest that has emotional relevance and satisfaction. The countless cult religions, philosophical and psychological systems that have arisen since Darwin is a result of this shifting balance between personal and cultural narratives.

Because emotions flow from the pleasure of personal acceptance and the fear of personal rejection, modern human beings in enlightened, civilized societies have the most difficult time, experiencing the greatest stress because so many of the expressions of those two primary emotional roots are based on the same personal and cultural narratives that create and socialize every individual in every civilized society. Every year, twenty-five percent of Americans seek some kind of help for mental problems flowing out of the stress inherent in modern civilization. The richest country on earth that has created most of the technical and cultural narratives for present-day modern civilization suffers from the greatest imbalance between shared interest / self-interest that defines the narrative of their culture.

Iain McGilchrist... "The development of mass technological culture, urbanization, mechanization and alienation from the natural world, coupled with the erosion of smaller social units and an unprecedented increase in mobility, have increased mental illness, at the same time that they have made 'the loner' or outsider the representative of the modernist era. His apprehension of life has become fragmentary, and the welter of disparate information and surrogate experiences, taken out of context, with which we're deluged intensifies the sense of fragmentation. Increasing virtuality and distance from other human lives tends to induce a feeling of an alien, perhaps hostile environment. Social isolation leads to exaggerated fear responses, violence and aggression, and violence and aggression often lead in turn to isolation."

American government is actually based on mistrust, dividing the government between three independent branches made to check and balance power. What that institutional distrust has done is place government at the service of the rich and powerful who have achieved the greatest success by serving their own self-interest at the expense of the shared interest they have with their fellow Americans, and even their own fellow employees.

Personal narratives of isolated self-interest have come to dominate American life, and the world at the expense of narratives of shared interest that are necessary to balance and create social stability. The cultural narratives that Americans have produced are meant to serve that imbalance. America has the highest disparity in income between the rich and poor, and that most basic imbalance within shared interest / self-interest has created a society with the greatest number of social problems in any way social problems can be measured, from physical and mental health, to standards of education and success, to the numbers of people incarcerated in prisons and many, many others.

McGilchrist sees the shift within the balance of right brain / left brain traits as a threat that is potentially existential to human civilization. He describes the left-brain bias of our civilization and its present and future course... "Knowledge that came through experience, and the practical acquisition of embodied skills, would become suspect, appearing either a threat or simply incomprehensible. It would be replaced by tokens or representations, formal systems to be evidenced by paper qualifications. The concepts of skill and judgment, once considered the summit of human achievement, but which come only slowly and silently with the business of living, would be discarded in favor of quantifiable unrepeatable processes... "

"In fact, more and more work would come to be overtaken by the meta-process of documenting or justifying what one was doing or supposed to be doing—at the expense of the real job in the living world. Technology would flourish, as an expression of the left hemisphere's desire to manipulate and control the world for its own pleasure, but it would be accompanied by a vast expansion of bureaucracy, systems of abstraction and control."

It seems that the ultimate challenge for civilization is finding the balance within shared interest / self-interest that effectively defined human society until the last 10,000 years. Until modern humans, uniquely gifted with the ability for inductive / deductive reasoning, can find a way to re-establish the emotional connections we have evolved to express, democracy, individuality, and the recognition of universal human rights are all at risk. This is not a world of selfish genes. It is a world of shared interest / self-interest and it, in all its bilateral subjective complexity, has been the foundation of life from its very beginning.

Because the fruits of human civilization have only appeared in the last 5000 years, it is clear that the one thing responsible for human survival over the last 4 million years has been the emotional depth and feeling between and among individuals within families and clans. Human beings have evolved to love and be loved, and it is on the unique depth of that subjective emotion that human nature and human survival is and has always been dependent. We have not evolved to live in a world of strangers. We have not evolved to be divided into factions and classes. We have not evolved to serve our selfish genes or the purely self-interested part of our human nature. We are here to love and be loved, and that remains and will always remain the measure of human nature that gives life meaning and purpose.

Unanswerable Questions

There are consequences to believing things are true. That is true in science. That is true in religion. Only human beings benefit from or suffer those consequences. Mind over matter, the placebo effect, prayer, divine intercession and miracles can all be documented with scientific rigor, although there is absolutely no explanation for how and why such things exist. It is absurd for any human being to say they understand God's intention because transcendent and human reality are so completely different but paradoxically so connected, like dead atoms make living things, like consciousness is only a representation of reality we believe is true. Saying that one person can speak for God is like saying any single cell in your body can understand your thoughts and intentions. It is as absurd for people to speak for God as it is for an individual cell to speak for you. It is also absurd to dismiss religion because of its metaphorical explanations of a process that must be clearly beyond human comprehension. When atheistic scientists dispassionately address those documented cases of miracles that are instantaneous, irreversible and scientifically and documented in Vatican files, their opinions about a transcendent reality might have more credibility.

For 35,000 years, across virtually every human culture, spiritual practices have seemed to access the power inherent in a transcendent reality. But until religious leaders humbly admit that they have no possible way to understand such a transcendental reality, their opinions about that reality have little credibility. Those who believe in religion must also address the fact that, since modern civilization began, religious narratives invariably have been created to serve a ruling elite and establish the means to control people and accept a hierarchical class system. Religions are just metaphorical representations of reality we often come to think are literally true. And it must always be remembered that both scientific and religious opinion reflects an imperfect, limited, and incomplete view of both existence and life itself from its very beginning to its ultimate end.

And it is important to remember that neither science nor religion can even answer the most fundamental question, 'When does life begin?' A spermatozoa and an egg are clearly alive. They detect, communicate and respond to each other, just like a bone or muscle or skin cell detect, communicates and responds to many other cells in the body. The sperm and egg cannot reproduce themselves until they join and so it can be argued that conception is the moment when life begins. This is why many religious people, including some scientists, believe it is murder to kill a fetus, even as soon as its first cellular division. Other religions and other scientists believed just the opposite, because a fertilized embryo is incapable of any life process beyond the cell division exhibited by any amoeba.

There is also no scientific or religious agreement on what constitutes death. Is a human in a persistent, brain dead vegetative state really dead? When someone dies instantly from electrocution, the last neuron in that person's brain won't stop firing until 36 hours later. Skin cells continue to grow for days after death. Is that person really dead or just irreversibly unconscious until the last cell stops dividing? Both scientists and religious people disagree about whether life exists when someone is in a persistent vegetative state, and yet both agree that a person is dead even when cells in a lifeless body are still alive and functioning.

All that can be said is that life is about the ability to detect / perceive, communicate and respond to other living things. Life may begin at the moment of conception as many contend, or a fetus may simply be an extension of a woman's body until it is capable of sustaining its own life process. Either opinion can and are supported by both science and religion. In science, and religion some very fundamental things are undeniably just a matter of opinion. In both science and religion, beliefs and opinions by their very nature are not subject to experimental analysis and review and neither science nor religion can ever ultimately answer some of the most basic questions about life. In science and religion, there are some completely unanswerable questions.

One thing that is undeniably true in both science and religion is that evolution exists, whether it is simply the result of a process of genetic change, or the result of the divine creation of life's potentialities that play out through evolutionary adaptation. Either or both may be true, but that is also completely a matter of opinion like the moment of life or death.

McGilchrist, one last time... "Virtually every great physicists of the last century—Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Bohm amongst many others have made the same point. A leap of faith is involved, for scientists as much as anyone. According to Max Planck, 'Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientists cannot dispense with' and he continued: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we're trying to solve."

In science, believing things are true is the result of experimental repeatable evidence, and rigorous peer review, and yet there are as many interpretations of scientific evidence as there are interpretations of religious scripture, and nowhere does the debate within science find more contradictory explanations than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

There is even no common agreement as to what constitutes a species, an adaptation or an ecological niche, the most basic terms in the theory. The only thing evolutionists agree on is that natural selection exists and is the result of heritable genetic advantage over time for individuals within species. Even though there are rabid disagreements about how evolution works, peer reviewed experiments are said to overwhelmingly verify that Darwin was fundamentally correct. As we have seen, that is demonstrably no longer a supportable thesis. Those peer-reviewed experiments using fundamental genomic alterations never resulted in the creation of a single new species.

The Theory of Bilateral Subjective Adaptation says that Darwin was fundamentally wrong and that the same peer reviewed observations and experiments can be used to overwhelmingly verify that conclusion. This book has proposed an alternative theory using the same observations and experimental evidence, creating new definitions for the basic terms in evolutionary theory that are more precise and consistent with observation and experiments. It proposes that a true theory of evolutionary adaptation sees evolution as more than the random mutations that give creatures a heritable competitive advantage, but as the genomic awareness and plasticity of creatures that recognize and respond to the dynamic balance within shared interest / self-interest in any ecosystem. Erich Heller may have said it best, "Many scientific theories have, for long periods of time, stood the test of experience, until they had to be discarded owing to man's decision, not merely to make other experiments, but to have different experiences."

Only a human being can experience nature and life as the dynamic balance within shared interest / self-interest as part of the Nash equilibrium of this most beautiful planet. Only a human being has the use of all nine rungs in the ladder of subjective complexity that not only lets us see and understand life in its infinite variability and complexity but truly have a different experience, one that gives life meaning, purpose and preciousness. These too are ultimately just matters of opinion. But those opinions, those beliefs, can alter the course of human life, and ultimately the evolution of every living creature on the planet which we, each and all, now hold in the palms of our hands.

fin
