Outline of a new theory of multidimensionality and complexity of human evolution

By Fazal Rahman, Ph.D.                         November 8, 2022

I had written an in-depth paper, “Biosocial and epigenetic relativity of human nature: Relative to political economy, technology, and culture”, with the following link, in September 2015, which has vast implications for evolution in general and for human evolution in particular.  In this article some of these implications are discussed and explicated.  The 2015 paper is essential for understanding of this article, as I will not repeat most of its relevant contents and review of literature here.  Focus of my theoretical research in that paper has been on the biosocial, epigenetic, mass psychological, and cultural processes and effects of the political economy of advanced capitalism and imperialism in the Advanced Capitalist-Imperialist Technological Societies (ACITS).  Here I am addressing their evolutionary dimension.  I also plan to include the contents of this paper in the 2015 article, which will make it more comprehensible within that context.

Biosocial and epigenetic relativity of human nature: Relative to political economy, technology, and culture. Updated July 7, 2023

By Fazal Rahman, Ph.D.

Written 1982.     Posted on September 7, 2015

It is a long article with many additions

Epigenetics and epigenetic evolution stand in relation to conventional genetics and Darwinian evolution, as Einsteinian physics stands in relation to Newtonian physics. Fazal Rahman

“It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity.”
Frantz Fanon

The Wretched of the Earth, (Fanon, 1963, p. 315).

“We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”
R. D. Laing

The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise (R.D. Laing, 1967)

Abstract

This and an earlier paper (Rahman 1980) have ventured into the terra incognita and focused on the effects of social environment on the epigenetic and biosocial regulation of human nature.  Undoubtedly, there are also the effects of natural and physical environment on such regulation, which are also important to investigate.  Various research studies with other forms of life, cited in the Review of Literature in these papers, reveal how changes in the internal and external physical environmental factors cause corresponding epigenetic and gene regulatory changes in various organisms.

A dialectical theory is developed in these papers on the dialectical and relative nature and regulation of human nature, in relation to and in interactions with the politico-economic, mass psychological, and cultural systems and processes of the social environment.  The main focus is on the totally un-researched and unknown areas and effects of such regulation on the epigenetic and gene regulatory dimensions. Some recent research findings which clearly demonstrate that domestication forces and pressures and directional selection (analogous to changes in the politico-economic and cultural forces and pressures in humans) bring about tangible and heritable gene regulatory changes in some animals are reviewed and correlated with the hypotheses and discoveries of our theoretical research. It is concluded that the imperialist capitalism-science and technology-culture complex, especially in its extremist forms and advanced stages, like those of the US, gives rise to extreme imbalances in the differential socio-genetic regulation of human nature.

Destruction of the ecology of nature is dialectically related to the destruction of the ecology of human nature, both being the historical products of the co-evolution of capitalism and technology.