Biographical Statement

My doctoral dissertation (1955) demonstrated to me that schizophrenics lack an essential ingredient that all of the rest of us have in abundance: The ability symbolically to conceptualize events in a meaningful way. That predisposition in us is so powerful that it invades our visual percepts. I published the theory first as "Note on the Theory of Symbolic Transformations" (1966). The theory stated:

Postulate I. If no physiological stimulation is present, our experiences will equal our symbolized meaningful representations (PS = 0, E = SMR).
Postulate II. If no symbolized meaningful representations are present, our experiences will equal our physiological stimulation (SMR = 0, E = PS) (p. 750).

Lacking such powerful symbolizing capacities as we have the schizophrenic is unable to organize life around sets of conceptions that the rest of us are just naturally able to do. That insight was further expanded when the concept of Appurtenance was added to the theory in the 1980s. For Appurtenance means what pertains or matters to the person, so the sense of values that had been lacking in the two postulate theory was now a feature of the book Three Axioms for a Theory of Conduct (1984).

The theory now stated:

I. If two or more physiologic stimuli are present our experiencings will follow the rule given by Koffka's principle of appurtenance.

II. If no physiological stimulation is present, our experiencings will equal our symbolic meaningful representations of things. (PS = 0, E = SMR.)

III. If no symbolic meaningful representations are present, our experiencings will equal the sensory-tonic state. (SMR = 0, E = S-TS.) (p. 51.)

In this presentation our "free," or comparatively free "symbolic meaningful representations" are now constrained both by how things pertained to one another, i.e., "appurtenance," and also by "sensory-tonic reciprocities." The "symbolic meaningful representations" can be considered to be relatively timeless in their operation whether present or absent, as is the case for the other two axioms as well. The two postulate theory simply did not at all account for the complexities of those new data that had been building up between 1966 and the late 1970s.

I also became aware in time that that my original general formulation did not do proper justice to the neurological sensory and motor reciprocities that arise from the sensory and motor sites around the central sulcis of the brain. The neurologically based sensory presences at the front of the parietal lobes, and the motor actions that arise from stimulation at the back of the frontal lobes--that exist around the central sulcis of the brain--cover all of our actions and sensory experiences. Though the visual cortex provides for our visual abilities, it does not account for the exact qualities that are found in our visual percepts. It is at the central sulcis that the motor portion of events at the rear of the frontal lobes, and the sensory portion of our intake of events at the front of the parietal lobes that define the actual neurological, physiological, and experiential events that do occur in our perceptual qualities or in our actions.  Thus how things Appertain to one another in visual perception became one major constraint upon the free operation of Symbolizing. And then Sensory-Tonic Reciprocities based upon the effects of tonicity on our sensory, but also on our motor responses to perceptual inputs, rounded out that complexity.  Through these three Axioms I was able to account for 20 empirical findings in the experimental literature.

In time I found that one of those 20 predictions was incorrect, because I had derived it from an Axiom that was not appropriate for that finding. The ambiguity in one aspect of the "sensory-tonic" formulation which caused that mistake was one of the reasons for devising a new third Axiom that encompassed the functions it had encompassed, but with a new and more accurate formulation,.

"The theory of phenomenal psychology" now states (Carini, 2005):

I. If two or more external stimuli are present (ES > l), the qualia of the percepts (QPs) will be determined by the Axiom of Appurtenance. (ES > 1, QPs = A)

II. If no external stimulation is present (ES = 0), the quality of the percept (QP) will equal the person's Symbolic Meaningful Conceptualization for the thing. (ES = 0, QP = SMC)

III. If no Symbolic Meaningful Conceptualization (SMC = 0) is present, the quality of the percept (QP) will equal the person's level of Cortical Tonic Expressivity. (SMC = 0, QP = CTE). (Pp. 268-69).

And though I completed the theory in 1991 it is not until now that "The theory of phenomenal psychology" has been published.

During all of the time that I had been working on the theory of perception I had retained a keen interest in the theory of evolution, for I had become aware through Heinz Werner’s influence that Darwin’s formulation of the theory had problems. Werner had written in his Comparative Psychology of Mental Development about evolution (1940):

Indeed, it does appear that the development of biological forms is expressed in an increasing differentiation of parts and an increasing subordination or hierarchization (p. 41).

Werner’s formulation gradually made it clear to me that evolution on the basis of chance, as Stephen Jay Gould held, could not fit with this increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration of experiences. The circular quality of the "survival of the fittest" had also begun to cause difficulties for me, because I could sense the circularity of that formulation. It was if Darwin were writing ‘it is a survival of the surviving,’ for his term "fittest" in the context of his "theory" only meant "surviving."

I turned my attention to finding out more about DNA in the late 90s and found an article entitled "Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans" in Cell in 1997. Reading this article I became fascinated, because they really were talking about our origin, not our survival. Their point was that the 28 sequence difference in the mtDNA "control region" and the mere average of 8 among all of humanity meant that we were not descended from the Neandertalers. We were a new group that had originated about 150,000 years ago in Africa. They had measured the 150,000 year birth date on the basis of the fact that every ten thousand years there arises a mutation in the "control region" of the mtDNA. The range of these mutations in our "control regions" among all of humanity are from zero to 14—that is from whence the 150,000 year origin arose. Since this mutation is on a ten thousand year schedule I could not see how it could be based upon chance. But a competent Ph.D. research biochemist told that it was made up of many small chance events so that it was still chance based. But that what they use as a clock to tell time is based upon chance, I thought, and still think, is absurd.

I sent an article in 2003 to Nature entitled "The Ten Millenial Beat Origin of Homo Sapiens" which was rejected after 4 months by the Editor without his sending it out to any referees. The postcard came with the warning not to try to re-submit it. Of course, that only made me more interested, and I asked myself both why was he not interested, and what else would be involved to make us into the human beings that we are? An answer to the first question is that I think that the current evolutionists are afraid to consider revising the neo-Darwinian-Mendelean theory that has been serving them as the "evolutionary synthesis" since the middle of the twentieth century. I believe that that is why the Editor of Nature refused to discuss or have anything to do with my article. I say it is time for a new theory. I think that they don’t want to have to reconsider what they already have.

nd, of course, the answer to what else has to be involved in our evolution is language. We have language and language is not simply another form of communication. I published “On the origins of language” in Contemporary Anthropology in 1970 (Carini, pp. 165-166). There I showed that language would arise among children and their mothers as soon as their babbling became symbolic at about eighteen months. But now I have put that together with the fact that to comprehend the meanings of words then Broca’s area in the left hemisphere of the brain has to be functioning. Furthermore, the articulation of the sounds of words requires a functioning Wernicke’s area also in the left hemisphere of all human brains. The brain of Homo sapiens, I suggest, is specialized for speech through the development of increasing asymmetry in our brains compared to other organisms which allow for these new functions to arise that were not present in any of the earlier hominids. Without this specializing of the brain and the development of these language areas along with the symbolization of our perceptual experiences human beings never would have arisen as human beings. But that view is blocked by the prior assumption that language is only a form of communication and arose in the service of communication. Communication, of course, is a very primitive function—even bees communicate. But language is a special function requiring those specialized areas in the left hemisphere of the human brain. There is no evidence that Neandertalers had such areas in their brains, but they communicated, of course.

So now I have a two, actually a three pronged theory of the origins of Homo sapiens: "The Ten Millennial Beat and Brain Asymmetry Theory as the Origin of Homo Sapiens" is the title of the theory. The third prong of the theory is that some form of environmental catastrophe also has to happen for any kind of evolution to occur (Eldredge, 2000; 200l, p. 86). Since I wrote that I have written two books and several articles based upon the theory.

References
Carini, L. (1966). Note on the theory of symbolic transformations.
Perceptual and Motor Skills. 22, p. 750.
Carini, 1970). On the Origins of Language," Current Anthropology, 11,
pp. 165-166.
Carini, L. (1984). Three Axioms for a Theory of Conduct: Philosophy, and The Humanistic Science of Psychology. Lanham, MD. The University Press of America.
Carini, L. (2005). "The Theory of Phenomenal Psychology." In J.
Valsiner (Ed.), Heinz Werner and Developmental Science. (Pp. 261-283). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Eldredge, N. (2000; 2001). The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Krings, M. , Stone, M., Schmitz, R. W., Krainitzki, H., Stoneking, M. , and Paabo, S. (1997). Neandertal DNA sequences and the Origin of modern humans.
Cell, 90, pp. 19-30.
Werner, H. (1948). Comparative Psychology of Mental Development.
Chicago: Follett.