Intermezzo:
Defining Evolution, Huxley's #2, Jamming Darwinism

World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
2nd. Edition
The Book
By  John Landon

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 3. Idea For A Universal History 
      3.1 A Short History of the World
             3.1.1 Stream and Sequence: A Frequency Hypothesis 
             3.1.2 Notes Toward an Eonic Model  
             3.1.3 A Certain Strangeness: Beyond Space and Time?
      3.2 Transition and Divide: A New Model of the Modern 
             3.2.1 The Discrete Freedom Sequence  
             3.2.2 The Old Testament as Eonic Data
             3.2.3 Religion, Transition and Oikoumene 
             3.2.4 The Economic Interpretation of History  
             3.2.5 Sequential Dependency and The Evolution of Theory   
      3.3 Kant’s Challenge  
            3.3.1 Kant’s Question  
            3.3.2 Intermezzo
Endnotes.  
      3.4 Critique of Historical Reason 
             3.4.1 Fisher’s Lament    
             3.4.2 A Science of History? The Third Antinomy             
             3.4.3 ‘Nature’s Secret Plan’ and Sociobiology 

 We have discovered Huxley’s evolution #2, and we are in a strange position of trying to disprove Darwin in practice, the effect Huxley noted. And we should begin to share Huxley’s sense of alarm, for we see that the self-interaction of selectionist theory, as a belief system, with history is producing wrong results. We end up needing to oppose the theory in practice (hopefully!), a built in falsification, a jamming process so to speak. The whole scenario is cockeyed. 

Problems arise with Darwin’s theory and we have seen some crucial ones, among a host of others:

1. Selectionist theory claims that agency or even ‘free will’ in some sense arises in an adaptive scenario. Yet we can see from the eonic data that there is a macro component to the question of freedom. In general, we must demand to see empirical data demonstrating the evolutionary process in action, on the scale of our hurricane argument.

2. Darwinists often speak of the ‘gene for religion’, and would have to claim that religion arises as an adaptive formation. Yet we can see in historical times the way in which religions arise. There is an explicit process of ‘distributed evolution’ that proceeds beyond local adaptation toward a global result.

3. Sociobiologists seem to claim that ‘human nature’ is a given from the selectionist evolution of the Paleolithic. But this is pure speculation, and we see in history something far more complex. We can barely define human nature at all, and can see that historical evolution might be changing that human nature as it goes along. 

There are endless other problems arising with this runaway usage of selectionist thinking. Adaptation is not the issue. It is time to be finished with Darwinian fantasies. Survival of the fittest, and competition, and economic action, are not the laws of macroevolution. All of the advances we see come from high performance intervals of seminal innovation. And these appear in a developmental sequence.

The Meaning of Evolution Our model appeared fast, and in essence is complete, leaving the reader wondering where the theory is. We have a problem. The sheer scale of the eonic effect is beyond known theories of the simple type. The issue of the ‘emergence of freedom’ demands a non-standard theory. We have produced the beginnings of a map instead. We ‘get the answer’, and then this turns into a theory of the evidence, not the theory explaining that evidence (e.g. like a theory showing something is a wave, not a theory explaining waves). Further, all theories are evolving inside our system, and show sequential dependency. We are shot out of a cannon with action scripts, as eonic productions. It is hard to avoid this problem since our evidence is rich in the high-level cultural software from which we derive our analysis. A good example is the ‘idea of freedom’ (or of Newtonian causality): it is strongly correlated with our pattern, and the direct ancestor of the eonic model itself. Finally, the condition of explanation in our approach is the realization that the mechanism is unseen by us. The resemblance to Kantian limits is remarkable.  

And yet our new approach succeeds in a most unexpected fashion. One problem is that we are so used to a different concept of evolution that it is hard to change our semantic and verbal habits. And yet we should persist in our usage, leaving open the option of a completely revised terminology. The reason is that Darwinists, after denying that their theory applies to history, cleverly or unconsciously apply it anyway, and in any case the work of sociobiologists now wishes to Darwinize history.

But we can already sense the disastrous consequences of Darwinian thinking It puts a premium on social conflict, competition, and misleads those who are confronted with the ethical potential in all situations.

Our usage of the term ‘evolution’ also requires caution in the sense that we are still proceeding heuristically, don’t wish to create a new dogma, have a huge (!) job to do to define the ‘eonic emergent maps’ of our transitions, and are confronted with ideological contradictions at the conclusion of our sequence. We must erect safeguards against ideology, Eurocentric issues, and teleological presumption. In fact, our model has already built in these safeguards. However, we have a potentially far superior approach to the use of the term ‘evolution’ for the descent of man, at least. No use saying evolution has to be genetic. We can see that is a very misleading view.

Thus the problem is the exact connection to man in the Paleolithic. In general, there are several possibilities. Our eonic sequence is continuous all the way back, and involves all stages of man’s evolution. Or else it is itself discontinuous and switches on at crucial stages in man’s evolution (how would it do that?). We can take the matter no further without more evidence. By showing that more data is required, we must at once caution Darwinists against the abuse of their theory based on theoretical hallucination, and the dangers of theoretical tragedy.

But one thing we can say is that the visible eonic effect gives us a snapshot of ‘evolution of some kind’ and that we see this in history. There is no other possibility, granted our way of defining the sliding scale (evolution to history). The process we see has its finger in too many pies for any other type of evolutionary explanation to work. We can only fit one elephant in a room this size.

We would do well to forget Darwin applied to history, given this broader perspective, since the issue of ethical action is retabled with great vigor and takes the immediate form of the question of qualitative action. Not the winner take all of survival of the fittest, but the high performance levels required to advance the system, is the key. We must take the gifts of nature and render them at the level of the highest motive, lest we degrade our chances in the spectacle of hallucinatory evolutions. We may not easily state the canon of this ethic, but it makes no difference to the fact that this is a system of generated potential, and it requires more than mechanized principles of predator/prey nonsense. The great irony is that the great religions were the fittest survivors, and our eonic system must leapfrog the Eurasian inertia to reseed political freedoms, and indeed a renewal of science, which did not survive the Darwinian thinning out of Axial antiquity.

We have an ingrained tendency to blame history for our own faults. We can see that the eonic sequence is operating on a minimum principle and is always benign, while the realizations in its wake rapidly turn into something else. If, for example, democracy is an eonic emergent, then anything less loses it status by comparison. As our emergent source areas proceed toward a new liberal civilization they also tend to imperialism in their exteriors, spoiling the outcome, one not benefited at all by wrong-headed theories of the Darwinists.

It never occurs to anyone that ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, as a depiction of nature, can be as anthropomorphic as anything from religion. Even a cursory glance at the eonic sequence shows an organized and benign process that is waiting on man to respond with something more than the usual carnivorous logic. It creates a potential for political freedom, for example, but man takes millennia to respond, and even then the realization is inadequate. Best to be forgetting Darwin at this point. It seems to be man that is ‘red in tooth and claw’, projecting his nature onto the universe.