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note, 8th July 2009. Charlotte has a non-linear theory of time, within
which her evolutionary theory is embedded. It speaks of 10
simultaneous time-dimensions: 6 of these are "stable" dimensions and 4
are "intermediate". These also give rise to innumerable emergent time
dimensions - within which the evolutionary process is unfolding. (30
years after Charlotte´s death, Mike is still the best authority in respect
of her theories as they have been very poorly disseminated and studied.
Read on, for Mike´s bogus interview which attempts to summarise her
theory for a new audience - but so far does not include much of an
account of her "non-linear time".)

MIKE - (mike's introduction serves to situate this as a theory of evolution.)

Charlotte. I want you to imagine that the year is 2009, which is exactly 18 years
since your “Selected Writings” were due to be published by Wildwood House.
Imagine, if you will, that the publication fell through in 1982, the year after you
died, and that your ideas and writings have been almost entirely neglected in the
intervening time.

The question I want to put to you is: how can we offer these ideas, now, in 2009,
in a way that will be accessible to a new public, and a new generation?

Before you respond to this, I want to briefly summarise what I think is so powerful
about your way of thinking about evolution. Because it is certainly true that, in
spite of the 18 years that have passed since we last spoke together, your ideas
are in many ways far ahead of the best and the latest in evolutionary thinking. So
I want to start out by telling our audience – as clearly as I can – what is so good
about your approach.

It comes down to the fact that you are giving us a theory of the evolutionary
process which can be used in two quite contrasting ways. In the first place, we
have what some people have called "the view from Mars". This is how I would
describe the view that all so-called objective scientists think they are able to
achieve. It describes a system of events, of entities, and relationships, as if we -
the observers - had no real stake in the thing we are describing. Perhaps the
scientist claims to have a disinterested desire for understanding - simply to
understand how things work - but at the same time things are understood as if
they have nothing whatever to do with us. So your theory can work this way - as
a disinterested account from outside the arena.

But then, in the second place, your theory takes into account what the process of
life, and evolution, must be like, or must feel like, from the vantage point of the
organism. That also means, that your theory is able to address itself to our own
perspective - as creatures labouring within the pattern of an evolutionary process.
so here we discover ourselves to be simultaneously the agents, and the sufferers,
of the evolution of humankind.
To say this another way, you make it clear that evolution is about us - and not
merely about those other animals - the ones we think we can see, when we
have separated ourselves from them by putting on the uniform of the scientist.

CHARLOTTE - (Here she begins to define the concept of "evolution")

Yes that is exactly right. Whatever we have to say about the evolutionary
process, it also has to make sense about ourselves - because we ourselves are an
integral part of that evolutionary process.

(Now we can start with diagrams: one showing quite crudely, an individual "life-
cycle". Then we move on to the depiction of a series of life cycles: indicating the
preservation of the species through time, through the succession of generations.)

Think of it this way: the organism (which also means: "we, ourselves") is always
already in the middle of a stable, cyclical process known colloquially as “a life-
cycle”. Being within this cycle entails a complete set of what we might call
behavioural imperatives – the many behavioural conditions that must be met, if
the life-cycle is to be completed effectively. If you fail to do these things, then
you are eliminated from the arena of life, and from the arena of evolution, in the
blink of an eye.

And then, thinking in terms of this life-cycle, we have to recognize two disjunct
sets of behaviours - both sets equally necessary: self-preservatory behaviour
(which maintains the ongoing existence of the individual organism) and species
preservatory behaviour (which enables the reproduction – and therefore the
stability of the life of the species across the generations).

MIKE - And I think what is unique to your way of thinking, is the recognition that it
is this whole complex set of behaviours - both the self-preservatory and the
species preservatory patterns - which is the entity that has to evolve. And this
simple move also makes it clear what an extraordinary thing it is: to evolve a new
pattern of life out of an existing pattern of life. Those who think of evolution as
being some sort of mechanistic drift, and selection as being an impersonal force
of sorting out the "fit" from the "unfit" won't even notice that there is any
contradiction. But as soon as we think about this from the organism's point of
view - as the demand to fulfill precisely our own species' given pattern of life, but
also to contribute to the design of a significantly different pattern of life, we start
to see how extraordinary the fact of evolution really is.

points up an extraordinary tension at the heart of evolution, which other conceptions don't really
succeed in bringing out:- A species is something that is defined by its ability to prevail as exactly
this pattern of life - but it also has to evolve into another, different pattern! These are very close
to being contradictory demands, in the moment of action.

CHARLOTTE - That is exactly right. There is a requirement to preserve the

pattern, and there is also a requirement to violate the pattern. But in order to
understand how this happens, we need to have two additional concepts in place
(Now we can start with a diagram that shows stable and emergent process -
somehow or other) : the stable process behavioural patterns - which are the
self-preservatory and the species-preservatory patterns I have already
mentioned. (And these are the processes that have to happen, and keep on
happening, in order for the species to prevail through epochs of biological time.)
And over against these, there are the emergent process behavioural patterns -
that derive from the stable-process behaviours but are actually deviations from
the established pattern.

MIKE - And how are these "emergent processes" distinct from the mutations that
are at the heart of Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory?

CHARLOTTE - In the first place, "mutations" is exactly what they are! There is
nothing at all wrong with this word! It is rather, that the neo-Darwinists
commandeered this word, and misused it to insinuate certain beliefs about
evolution that are nothing to do with Darwin's original concept, and which - to my
way of thinking - are frankly mistaken.
(Perhaps another diagram, contrasting the "outside" inciting influence to change -
and something depicting an impulse to change from within)

The Neo-Darwinists claim that their so-called "mutations" are merely random
changes in some sort of inert, physical matter. The DNA in the cell nucleus, in
other words. Whereas we need to insist that we are talking first and foremost
about mutations in the behavioural pattern. (We may assume that these are
paralleled, or followed-up, by changes in the molecular domain - but we should
avoid the fallacy of assuming in advance that the "mutation" is a change in an
essentially inert molecule, and only secondarily a change in behaviour. That
assumption is not necessary, in Darwin's theory - it is merely a part of the Neo-
Darwinist dogma.)

Another part of the Neo-Darwinist's dogma is what I have already mentioned:

their insistence that their so-called mutations must be random - or else "caused
by" some impact from outside the living system, for instance by radio-active
decay, cosmic rays, or whatever outside force they decide to postulate. My
theory is quite different: it is an exploration of forces generated within the
species' own pattern of behaviour, which create an inner necessity within the
organism itself, to undergo evolutionary changes. This is completely compatible
with Darwin's original formulation, but it is systematically at odds with the
fundamentalist Neo-Darwinism of the twentieth century.

MIKE - So in other words, you are not in any way denying or challenging the
validity of Darwin's own concepts?

CHARLOTTE - I am pointing to aspects of evolution that Charles Darwin did not

consider in his original formulations, largely because he did not address the
question "what is it like to be an evolving species, from the point of view of the
organisms themselves?"

MIKE - You talk about "an inner necessity within the organism, to undergo
evolutionary changes", and you also used the phrase" "to violate the stable-
process pattern". Are you talking about sexual deviation? I am recalling the
slogan you yourself coined (a slogan which gay liberation people were wearing as
a badge right through the seventies and eighties) "Sexual Deviation is the
Mainspring of Evolution!" (Show a badge on the screen, perhaps worn by an
outrageously punky lesbian feminist) Is this what your evolutionary theory is
really about?

CHARLOTTE - In one sense, yes: "sexual deviation" is exactly what my theory is

about. Every evolutionary change is, in a way, a form of sexual deviation. That
is: it is a deviation in the pattern of reproductory behaviour. But the reproductory
behaviour is not confined to what is colloquially called "sex". It entails the
complete cycle of reproductory behaviour, which occurs as a whole series of
distinct domains of behaviour.
(So here an illustration of the 7 stages... male and female as separate trajectories
that come together in courting behaviour?)
MIKE - And this is an area where sociological and biological research over the
past 20 years has begun to catch up with your own thinking. You distinguish 7
different stages in the reproductory cycle - all of which are essential to the
completion of the process, and each having its own pattern of relational logic - its
own "laws" in other words. I see this same principle in the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, who describes different "fields of interest" each having its own
irreducible fundamental laws. I think this is the same as the patterns you
describe: of parental behaviour, adolescent behaviour, courting behaviour, pre-
copulatory behaviour and so on - which you named under the general term
"relatively autonomous behavioural sub-hierarchy". So that is where the term
"sexual deviation" may be a little misleading - since the behavioural mutations
you describe will spill over into all of these 7 relatively autonomous domains - and
not all of these have directly to do with "sex" as the lay person would normally
understand this word.

CHARLOTTE - But you are running ahead of the argument here. We had reached
the point of distinguishing the stable process behaviour patterns from the
emergent process behaviour patterns. And the next step is to understand how
and why the deviation into emergent process arises in the first place. We have
mentioned the species-preservatory behaviour, which from the individual point of
view is reproductory behaviour. We need to underline that for our species, as for
every plant and animal species beyond a certain very minimal complexity, this
reproductory behaviour is based on the division of labour of the male and the
female. So the issue here is not sexuality in its relation to the sexual act; it is
something broader, which we should use a different term for - perhaps we should
call it: "the gendered life". It is not restricted to the obviously sexual behaviour of
a couple in the bedroom, or under the kitchen table or wherever they choose to
do it.

So anyway, the reproduction of the life-cycle requires an intimate co-operation

between two individuals of the same species, who are in important ways quite
contrasting in their behavioural patterns, and yet each half of this pattern, the
male half and the female half, has to dovetail together with the other half in an
highly complex and intricate co-operation.

And it is very interesting that the Neo-Darwinists, for all their noisy insistence on
the so-called "survival of the fittest" do not seriously wonder about the
evolutionary function that this sexual dimorphism plays, in the life of the species.
Why would a species evolve such a complicated set of demands - firstly to
differentiate the male from the female, and consequently creating this need for
the precise co-ordination of the male and the female contribution. It is a complex
set of behaviours which from many points of view puts the completion of the life-
cycle into serious jeopardy - since a failure of co-ordination leads directly to the
extinction of that germ-line. The obvious question is: why does the vast majority
of multicellular species put itself to all that trouble? And why do the Neo-
Darwinists take so little interest in this question?

{but I have a problem with this, as I think evolutionary drift would tend to
reinforce and progressively amplify the difference between the "wandering DNA
vehicle" = male = sperm and the "stationary DNA and cytoplasm vehicle" =
female = ovum.... so I am not sure conventional evolutionists have such a big
problem to explain. However this still leaves the question of why sex is such a
"big deal" and such a preoccupation for human beings.... Maybe I should just not
highlight this question of sexual dimorphism in this way}
MIKE - Now, I would like to separate out three separate strands here. In the first
place, we understand that reproduction through the conjoining of individuals, and
the pooling of germ plasm obviously does give a species advantage, in that any
improvements in the genetic heritage can be spread through the population,
rather than staying in one single clone line. Secondly, you point out that
conjoining of un-like individuals, in other words the differentiation into male and
female, seems to create a whole extra complex problem for the preservation of
the species - because each gender has the task of locating, recognizing, and
joining with a creature which simultaneously has the characteristics of "my own"
species - but also the characteristics of "the opposite" sex. You are claiming this
is an enormous liability, and can only have been incorporated into the life pattern
of so many species because it carries some distinct survival advantage that a
coherent theory of evolution and selection needs to be able to explain.

CHARLOTTE - That is right...

MIKE - ...and let me just point out the third of my strands. In the human species
it is very obvious that we have a whole array of deviation and violation of the
basic behavioural male and female patterns, in a significant percentage of the
human population. I am thinking of all homosexual behaviour, as well as the huge
variety of sexual deviations - and even relatively normal heterosexual couplings -
that do not lead to the creation of human offspring. And so we need to explain
how a species can be so consistently faulty in its performance of the fundamental
reproductory patterns, ane yet is able to prevail and even to be (as of our current
time of observation) one of the most successful species on the planet.

In fact this is one of the big questions which your theory gives such an hugely
satisfactory answer to: why are there Gays at all? Why hasn't evolution and
natural selection eliminated homo-sexual behaviour millions of generations ago?

(flash the cover of Charlotte and Don's pamphlet on to the screen)

CHARLOTTE - And this brings us back to the point I was just coming around to.
That the human species has two basic flaws in relation to its stable process
reproductory behaviour. In the first place, there is the double sexual orientation -
found most obviously in homosexual and transexual orientations, but also present
to a lesser degree of insistence, perhaps, in every human being under the sun.

MIKE - That is the phenomenon of "androgyny" - the presence of male and

female psychic characteristics in every member of the species, which was brought
into the main-stream in the last century by the psychologist C.G.Jung...

CHARLOTTE - And the other flaw is the failure to develop a mature set of
parental behaviours, which is a phenomenon widely recognized by biologists, and
even associated in some species with a major leap forward, in an evolutionary
sense. This is the phenomenon of "neoteny" which means that the plants or
animals enter their reproductory behaviour before they have become mature
adults.

MIKE - So in a sense, they are lacking the biological template that is required for
parental behaviour - so that this phase of the life-cycle has to proceed to a great
extent by bluff and improvisation.

CHARLOTTE - Well, not exactly - in the nature of the reproductory cycle, it is

essential that the parental phase be one of the more stable. This means that for
most individuals it is the most resistant to what you are calling "bluff and
improvisation". This sounds like a contradiction, because I have just said we are
lacking the detailed template for the provision of parental behaviour. In fact it is
a contradiction in the actual human behaviour - there is enormous resistance to
change in these parental behaviour patterns, even though the anthropologist can
show us a very wide range in different behaviour patterns as we start to explore
the practices of all the different cultures in the world...

But all of these things become clearer when we start to consider <em>from
what</em>, or <em>from where</em> - within the stable process life-cycle - we
might be most powerfully propelled into into emergent process behaviour. Let us
focus in on these 7 stages of the life-cycle - and see where the androgynous
aspect might become most challenging, or most difficult for the individuals
concerned - and where they will experience the most serious thwarting in their
efforts to complete the cycle.
(We need a diagram, animated so that we can "home in on" the pre-copulatory
behaviour zone)
CHARLOTTE - At this point, we have two organisms that are highly aroused and
aware of one another. Within the stable-process aspect of the life-cycle they are
compelled to enter into copulatory behaviour in the mode of a full hetero-sexual
emotional, endocrinological and physical union that results in a stable pair bond
and the commencement of a pregnancy.

But since both of the parties are confused about their sexual identity, and neither
is, strictly speaking, ready for parenthood, this is also the zone of maximum
potential confusion. Neither party knows whether they have found their true love,
or is about to be seduced by a monster who will leave them in a state of damage,
or else destroy them. Or maybe it is their own self, who is the destructive
monster....

So this is the zone of maximum confusion - which means it is the place where
deviant behaviours are most insistently called for. Any pathway is acceptable, to
the extent that it offers a sense of identity and a way forward for the parties
concerned. But you have to remember that in the pattern of the individual life,
this "point of no way forward" sends waves of interference cascading backwards
through the other phases of the life-cycle. Many individuals need to take
"avoiding action" long before they reach this point of mutual sexual arousal.
Some have elaborate strategies for ensuring they never reach such a point, ever
in their lives.
(The diagram can show this "cascading" effect)

<THIS IS WHERE I'D GOT TO ON 2ND FEBRUARY>

MIKE - But I can't help noticing that this account is very far from capturing that
quality we spoke of at the beginning: the sense of what it is like to be at the sharp
end of this dilemma. So this is what I would like to try to capture here, now, in
words, if we are able to do this. The sense of being this vulnerable, naked, lost
creature - thrust into the middle of a life where I am supposed to know who and
what I am, and feeling at home with "the others" of my kind. I should be able to
fully inhabit my role: as a father, a lover, a brother, sister, son or daughter - in the
fullness of rich and intricate relationship, and knowing what I have to do. Yet
instead there is the bewilderment of not-knowing what I am supposed to know.
Simultaneously a feeling of attraction and belonging - mingled with dislocation,
confusion and lostness. And according to your theory, this pervasive sense of
dread, and mistake, is coming from something like an excess of identity: being
both male and female within a life-cycle which implicitly demands that I be one or
the other. It is as if I have been catapaulted into adult life, for which I am under-
equipped, and can only manage by pretending I can do it, which means by
copying other people who are in reality just as hollow, lost and confused as I am
myself - but seeming not to be.

CHARLOTTE - Well, that is a fine description, and you have captured beautifully -
quite poetically - the felt sense of what it is to be on the cusp of our androgynous,
neotonous being. Yet you are also missing the point quite dramatically, in one
very important sense. By keeping your description anchored to this point of not
knowing - you veer away from the fact that for most of the time, we know
perfectly well who we think we are, and we are able to flow spontaneously with
the appropriate cultural rituals. You are forgetting how readily, and how
confidently, we are able to mimic other people. So as you said, we happily inhabit
the roles or personas - the personality, even, of the people around us. We are
fully clothed in patterns of behaviour, freely imbibed from everything we observe
in the children and the adults in the neighbourhood. So you have described
something different from this: namely, the moment of confusion, and loss of
identity, that leads us into another domain altogether. This crisis of identity, this
dislocation and anguish, is what I have described as the prelude to the shaman's
descent into the underworld.

MIKE - So yes, this opens up another huge topic that you have covered
extensively in your work: the role of the shaman or the witch-doctor...

CHARLOTTE - It is more general than this: they are shamans or witch-doctors in

traditional societies, but in modern times we have exactly the same thing: the
culture-heroes in every shape and form, and also the originators of major religions
including the ones which seem the most bizarre to the mainstream, for instance
Christian Science, Latter Day Saints and so forth. But also Gore Vidal, who writes
so brilliantly and satirically about these very characters - he too is one of them: a
larger-than-life cultural revolutionary, we might say... So, also, Jesus, the Buddha,
Abraham, Mohammed - but in the twentieth century Adolph Hitler, Winston
Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, and in a lesser way perhaps, the big stars of "stage
and screen", the football heroes, the artists, the "pop stars" and so forth...

So, whether we are talking about the traditional, or the modern versions, we can
say that the shaman, the witch-doctor, is the individual in which these crucial
issues come to a head: - the painful loss of identity that you have mentioned: the
sense of dislocation, the feeling of being a "self" that is entirely paradoxical. This
is a person who, just like everybody else, needs the human community for their
psychic and material survival, but who also feels the full force of the
oppressiveness, we might even say the impossibility of the relationship with other
humans. They are the ones who are forced into some kind of radical innovation -
some extraordinary creative spark - within themselves, just in order to survive.

MIKE - So this resolves what was earlier looking like a disagreement between us,
about the typical way of being human. In some ways the shaman is exactly like
everybody else, in this state of inner homelessness - and yet it comes to a kind of
fever-pitch in this minority, which is precisely what goads them into becoming
cultural innovators. Whereas the majority are able to get along, in relative
psychic comfort, muddling along with the cultural roles that they absorb or "take
on" from the people around them.

CHARLOTTE - Exactly so. Except that it is also true that most human beings find
themselves in such a state of internal crisis at some time or another in their lives.

MIKE - And let me point out that we are now right back at the central point about
your theory, the one we started out with: that it is dealing in parallel, with the
biological factors that are highly visible to the external observer - the sexual
deviation, the androgyny and the neoteny - and with the personal, cultural - we
might almost say "subjective" factors...

CHARLOTTE - This is a false dichotomy. We have a spectrum of positions,

ranging from the extreme obectiv-ist, who speaks entirely in terms of the so-
called outward "facts" and the extreme subjectiv-ist who is dealing with personal,
emotional or intuitive factors. But in reality, everything that happens, and
everything that is perceived, partakes of both the objective and subjective
elements. This is a complete spectrum... and yet the extremes: of "pure"
objectivity, and "pure" subjectivity do not actually exist...
(Maybe flash a diagram up... it could even be a quaternio, with "culturally
comfortable" at the bottom - (standing in for "stable process") and "culturally
dislocated" - (standing in for "emergent process")..... and "objectivist" on the
right-hand side and "subjectivist" on the left-hand side....)
MIKE - Yes, but my point is: the figure of the shaman, or witch-doctor, does not
figure at all, in other evolutionary theories. And yet he and she is quite central to
your theory. Can you say something about this?

CHARLOTTE - Yes, it is my central postulate: the one that drives the theory of
emergent evolution - the neoteny and the androgyny in other words - that has
profoundly objectivist and subjectivist implications, both at once. That is why we
can talk about "mutation" and "the shamanic journey" in one and the same
sentence. Since we are talking about a basically internal pressure, or internal
goad, towards evolutionary change, we would automatically expect this to have
its subjective manifestation, in other words: the dislocation, confusion and
lostness that you mentioned earlier. But also, we can see that each individual is
so to speak the product of the evolutionary process, but also the agent of this
same evolutionary process. And this relationship, both in the mode of myself
being produced - and in the mode of myself as agent - has objective
manifestations that are irreducible.

MIKE - So it seems very clear: that your theory is a theory of human culture
equally as much as it is a theory of human biology......

CHARLOTTE - Exactly so!

##
MIKE -

MIKE - B

CHARLOTTE - W

MIKE - B

CHARLOTTE - W
MIKE - B

CHARLOTTE - W

MIKE - B

CHARLOTTE - W

So yes, an analogy with slipping into a dream, or into the vividness of a movie,
where suddenly one is totally enveloped in the flow of the action, fully identified
with a character... feeling immersed in the action and the emotion. and then the
different ways of falling out of this: into anxiety, confusion or terror.

The cusp of the not-knowing. The readiness with which we slip into...

on to the scre
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This term "sexual deviation" is extremely misleading. In one way, it summarises

exactly what I mean when I am talking about evolutionary changes. That is
because every evolutionary change - every emergent process, in other words - is
a deviation from the stable processes of self-preservatory and species-
preservatory behaviour that we were talking about earlier. Now, in my theory,
every change has its point of origin in the species-preservatory, or reproductory
behaviour in ways we shall come on to, in just a moment.
ut

from conception, maturation of the embryo, the entire complex of maternal and
paternal nurturing behaviour, the answering behaviour in the infant, which
dovetails in with the parental behaviour, and then the adolescent period of
preparation for courting, the courting behaviour proper

In the second place, I have demonstrated that the mutations are not taking place
as purely random events - which was the dogma of the Neo-Darwinists.
these are the consequence of a change in behaviour, whether we are talking on
the level of molecular behaviour, or micro-physiology or macro-physiology

I've already mentioned

in contra-distinction to the emergent process behavioural patterns

But you and I have something that Darwin did not: which is a view of this
particular driving force of evolution, which has to do with a powerful unrest that is
intrinsic to the human behavioural instinctive repetoire. Central to this are two
key concepts that you have invented, and which – as I have already suggested –
the scientific community has not even begun to keep up with.

They are the concept of specific evolutionary processes, – You speak of

emergent process – and this is a term that has been used by various people over
the years, but not with the clarity and definition that you have given to the term.
Your “emergent processes” are basically an entire realm of deviant behaviour –
that in a crucial way violates the stable-process patterns (so “deviation” is
definitely the right word)

OUT-TAKES
Then we need to consider your concept of evolution. You used to represent yourself as being, in
significant ways, in opposition to Charles Darwin. I have to tell you, in the year 2009, that because
of bizarre and unwarranted publicity to some retrograde and fanatical Americans, opposition to
Charles Darwin is usually taken to mean the denial of the evolutionary process altogether, which
includes the denial of the fundamental biological kinship of ourselves with the rest of the animal
kingdom.

In the light of this unexpected modern foolishness – I need to stress for the contemporary
audience that you and I stand solidly with Charles Darwin, in asserting our kinship with all living
creatures, and our very close kinship with modern apes. We believe in the evolution of species –
as being something that is beyond reasonable doubt, in other words.