Here is new material on this site, for the first time in 12 years! It is a concise rendering of the entire theoretical structure of the human ethology of Charlotte Bach, in a series of cartoons. There has never been anything like this, before or since. Click on these links, if you click on nothing else on this site.

• Cartoon intro to Charlotte Bach, parts 1 & 2
• Cartoon intro to Charlotte Bach, parts 3,4 & 5

Here is an outline of the theory of emergent evolution, which was originated by Charlotte Bach. This theory is based upon two key facets of the human biological frame: androgyny (the presence of both male and female characteristics in every individual) and neoteny (the fact that our species begins reproductory behaviour before full maturity has been reached). Though well-known, these facets have been inadequately highlighted in academic biology - though they have profound implications for the evolutionary process. Bach claimed that these factors denote an immature species - or a species that is actively in the throes of evolution - and together give rise to a kind of primordial unrest at the heart of the instinctual life of the male and female. This, she believed, amounted to an effective motor for evolutionary variation.

These arguments are in harmony with the broad position of Holistic Darwinism (see the book of this name, by Peter A. Corning) and with the Darwinian-inspired philosophy of Charles Peirce and John Dewey. They also point to the severe poverty of Neo-Darwinism which treats the interaction of individuals and of species as being statistically random and mechanistic - thereby reducing the evolutionary process to the interplay of essentially non-biological factors..

I am Michael Roth, the author of all the material on this site. While training as a medical doctor, I was also an alumnus at the famed AntiUniversity of London (1968-1969), and became involved with the alternative psychiatry movement in that era and later.

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I worked and studied with the existential psycho-analyst R.D.Laing, and was a founder-member of the Arbours Association (London), which provides alternative care for persons diagnosed with severe mental illness.

My research path has taken me into spheres of philosophy, social politics, linguistics and anthropology - whilst I have continued to seek out a genuine way of relating to other human beings in the troubled milieux of psychiatry, communal living, and twentieth and twenty-first century social and cultural instability.

I have been consistently inter-disciplinary in all of my reading and exploration, and the personal and philosophical insights to which this has given rise are almost always outside the prevailing classifications - or accepted lists of subjects.

The following authors are they whose work I have been most deeply occupied with, at different times in my life. This has often entailed exploring what the actual world feels like, within the patterns and definitions of life offered by these people. I have also written extensively, and often critically, about many of them.

• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Martin Buber
• Lao Ze
• St Matthew
• St Mark
• St Luke
• St John
• Rudolf Bultmann
• Paul Ricoeur
• Richard Rorty
• Robert Pirsig
• Donald Davidson
• Jacques Derrida
• Benedetto Croce
• Charles Peirce
• John Dewey
• A.N.Whitehead
• J.H.Randall
• Justus Buchler
• Martha Nussbaum

• Stafford Beer
• Humberto Maturana
• Francisco Varela
• Charlotte Bach
• Konrad Lorenz
• Bill Mollinson
• Moshe Feldenkrais

• Mary Douglas
• Gregory Bateson
• Milton Ericson
• R.D.Laing
• David Cooper
• Clifford Geertz
• Victor Turner

• Jane Austen
• George Eliot
• Dorothy Richardson
• Virginia Woolf
• Iris Murdoch
• Joanne Greenberg

• Eugene Gendlin
• Arnold Mindell
• M. Scott Peck

I am the foremost exponent of Charlotte M. Bach's ground-breaking theories of emergent evolution, described in my A Bolt From the Bleeding Sky (Dielectric Publications, London, 1984). I continue to work as a psychiatrist and as a researcher into holistic methods of facilitating social change. This used to include facilitation and training sponsored by the organization, Community Building in Britain which developed and disseminated the work of the holistic psychiatrist M. Scott Peck through the 90s and noughties.

I am also involved in an exploratory research group seeking to fuse poetic, practical and fantastical modes of action to create significant cultural/political interventions in the here and now.