History and Evolution

The historical emerges from the unknown, the primeval scenes of evolution, and the emergence of the hominid creature with a runaway brain from the Paleolithic, the ‘primordial minus infinity’ from which man arrives to commence the arts of agriculture, and the creation of civilization. This tale must be one of relative beginnings and pass on from the still clouded threshold moment when modern man passed, or by-passed, the Neanderthal in an explosion of cultural and artistic creativity. But as we look back at the lost world of man’s cultural existence in the later Paleolithic, we must wonder if the historical, then still so far in the future, was not prefigured in that passage. We have seen the wisp of evidence for a Great Explosion. Does the explosion of creativity that suddenly appears with the beginning of earliest man show any relation to what we see later? Is the historical the evolutionary? That is, how is the historical related to its greater source, the descent of Man? This is one of the most difficult questions, for it evokes at once the search for historical causality, the mechanisms of evolution, both genetic and cultural, in the context of physical laws and in the headwind of all ‘arguments by design’, teleological philosophies, and the nature of purpose in relation to both organism and its environment.

The discovery of the eonic effect as a concealed process of macroevolution operating in world history has forced us to examine the meaning of the term ‘evolution’. We adopt our own usage of the term but with an open-ended suggestion of an overlap with earlier phases of the descent of man. Perhaps the details of the account are lost forever. Yet the eonic effect warns us that high-speed changes may have occurred, and these are no longer visible. We need a model that can adapt to relative beginnings. Otherwise we may suffer the plight of Darwinism, whose source myth based on insufficient evidence is being applied to the study of history, where we do have evidence, an absurd situation.

The point is that our data suggests the way we can do without the account of absolute beginnings that vitiates theory with a false consistency. This sense of the relative beginning of history is essential because we must take man as we find him. Our argument throws severe doubt on current accounts of the descent of man, because we see that many of the cultural aspects of man ascribed to adaptation are the result of a different form of evolution altogether, one visible in history. In the final analysis, we cannot indulge in the speculations of Darwinists. We weren’t there. But what we can say is that world history is not evolving in this fashion. It is a preposterous situation where speculation about what we can’t observe is applied to what we can see, after we have put blinders on. We can do without the account of absolute beginnings because the result will be a model that is an empirical map, a theory of the evidence, not a full theory of evolution. We cannot produce the latter until we resolve the facts. An intermittent model allows a component chain of relative phases of evolution.

Further, we suspect that those who apply this theory to history have an agenda. They may wish to induce competition, survival of the fittest, with an excuse for this. Witness the subtitle of Darwin’s Origin. This was the age, for example, of the extermination of the American Indian. If you wish someone’s land, a theory like Darwin’s is a useful excuse to flout morality. Thus we must examine the motives of theory, for theories are emergent processes in real evolutionary time. Their status as ‘objective’ is open to question. A close look at the eonic effect can be used as a test of ‘competition’, historically. This might be too harsh, Darwinists merely confused, but this is what they themselves have declared. It is convenient to have ‘scientific’ grounds to relieve conscience, justify conflict. We can however extend our view of history to see that meaningful development follows a different course. The onset of civilization after the Neolithic, taken as one relative beginning, shows its own dynamic. And this is not a struggle for dominance of ‘favored races’. We don’t have to inject the red herring of some speculative theory about unobserved eras into this history. World history is moving toward an integrated community of man, not some divisive struggle between winners and losers in the game of survival.

Wallace pointed unwittingly to the basic flaw in Darwinism, man has a complex potential, difficult to realize, how could this be the result of adaptation? Man is confronted with the demand to understand himself, his latent potential, and consciousness. In simplest terms, we need the evolution of an agent, not of an ethical robot with altruistic genes. It is hard to see how adaptation could account for the man behind the man. Without this there is no definition even of what organism it is that has evolved at all. Whatever the case, Darwinism offers us no such account. Committed to absolute beginnings, a full and total account, it must plug the gaps with a universal generalization, a claim on a law of evolution. Natural selection is perfect for that. It is devastating to consider that Darwinism has missed the main issue altogether. It seems an insoluble puzzle. Where did Darwin go wrong?

A first problem is the nature of the observer himself. Since the time-scale of evolution surpasses the lifespan of a human observer, the question arises as to what is meant by the concept ‘observing evolution’. Historians can never deceive themselves that guesswork can be applied to gaps in history. The facts, and all the facts are needed. We have produced our hurricane argument, and must remember that the temporal and spatial scope of evolutionary process is tremendous, and that we never see and cannot easily visualize evolution, and are prone to misconceptions. If we apply the term ‘evolution’ to world history we see at once the difficulty of correct observation with respect to five thousand years of civilization, let alone theoretical generalization. And even there we detect an evolutionary macro process entangled at the highest level of culture. Thus warns us that you must close in on the facts at close range, and that is still beyond our ability. We must have eyes to see.

A strange question lurks in Darwinian theory: is there a difference between evolution and history, and if so on what date did the transition occur? Clearly there would not be a ‘date’ for this, but some sort of incremental transition. We can make the distinction formal by allowing history to emerge from evolution. The eonic effect foots the bill here. This means that history is really appearing in the Paleolithic, a not unreasonable usage, which we will take informally as a significant comment on our standard usage, noting also that history is sometimes also defined as starting with the invention of writing, the first period of the eonic effect (!). We can also speak of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, to qualify our use of the term ‘evolution’.

From evolution to history We can make the evidence of the type seen in the eonic effect explicit grounds for defining both the unity of and a distinction between evolution and history. We could call history the record of free activity rising in the wake of the passive evolution of volition. At what point has relative free action emerged for man to create culture as a free agent? This definition includes the possibility that this has not yet occurred.

The ‘eonic evolution’ of civilization We can call the evidence of our three turning points the ‘eonic’ or intermittent evolution of civilization, as some form of ‘macroevolution’ turning into history. Then we can keep rough track of the two levels of history we detect in the eonic effect. This will create a puzzle of two distinct forms of action, one inside the eonic pattern, one outside. We will say that system action shows ‘eonic determination’ while behavior outside of it is simply ‘free action’.

The Great Transition Armed with these distinctions we can call the passage from evolution to history The Great Transition, with a possible echo (or not) of The Great Explosion. However, we are immersed in this transition, and may or may not have reached the end of its clearly intermittent action, seen as a series of individual transitions.

This is a high-level perception in search of the definition of ‘eonic determination’ requiring careful judgment of what effects have this property, so our stance is always just prior to theory crystallization. That seems to hand victory to a critic, but as we will see we can still proceed. We could look at those properties that would belong any ‘eonic’ theory, or model, i.e. one that shows turning points, on-off sequences. This connection is a variant of our photo finish argument, and it has a significant twist, which is that many fail to find any science of history, while the science of evolution is taken as a given. We should be suspicious that our eonic data is precisely the type of sequence, complete with intermittent transitions, required to fill the discontinuity between history and evolution.

Notes: Laws of history and Popper on historicism Even as we respond to the challenge of Darwinism, we must confront the legacy of historical theory, as we embark on a path often labeled ‘historicism’. The perception of the eonic effect, in the evidence of what we will call the eonic evolution of civilization, seen in the strange hints of periodic motion in its emergence, must by its nature propose to reopen the issues, well-known to students of historiography, of macrohistorical structure and sequence, ‘laws of history’, in the debate that has attended the rise of modern historical research, beginning in the early nineteenth century.

This research has tended to skirt these very issues as intractably difficult, or undecidable, in the first priority of accurate historical fact-finding. Indeed, a healthy skepticism is generally brought by the specialist narrative historian to the legacy of Universal History as it emerges in the movement, for example, of German Idealism, and to attempts to find laws, forces, or regularities of the kind studied in the more fundamental branches of science. In the latter category must be placed the Darwinian theory of evolution, and in the middle, the Marxist theory of historical materialism, this a significant inversion of an idealist program. To these can be added the eclectic world of the macroeconomic model, seldom explicitly offered as a model of historical evolution, but very much so taken in practice in the various ‘economic interpretations of history’.

Related to this, one of the most interesting challenges to the attempt to find historical ‘laws’ is the work of Isaiah Berlin in his Historical Inevitability. The basic difficulty raised by this and other critiques is the factor of spontaneous human action, whether or not we ascribe to this as an element of will, in the difficulties of all theories of will. Thus, Karl Popper’s well-known critique of historicism is one perspective that cuts to the root of the problem of both historical and evolutionary theories:

I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history.

This term has a complex and confusing history but we will take Popper’s version to start. This important critique (directed at Marxist predictive ‘laws’) does not apply to our eonic effect, for the simple reason that our evidence is empirical, and gives us the answer, without telling us what the question was. We see pattern, rhythm, but these are not laws, and we make no predictions from the observation. But this was our problem, not nature’s. We can retreat from causal explanation to pure periodization, and correlated causal association.[i]

It would seem that the case against laws of history, laws of evolution strangely exempted, is so overwhelming that we should abandon their consideration. But the ironic result of seeing the eonic effect is precisely this, to find strong, conclusive, evidence of historical regularity that courts rather than preempts the issues of freedom. Our three turning points suddenly start to make sense, for they show us nothing but free activity, and yet this is demonstrably different in the crucial eonic intervals, witness the Axial Age. More, we see the idea of freedom born in this very context of historical determination, e.g. emergent democracy shows historical conditioning . This provokes the classic contradiction in the question, what causes freedom? We will explore in the next section the simple solution we see in action, which is to find some middle ground between ‘freedom and necessity’ in the factor of self-consciousness.

Thus, we can adapt our thinking to the eonic effect, by taking the contrast of consciousness and self-consciousness as surrogates for determinism and free will. And then freedom can be an evolutionary idea carried as a virtual potential realized at points of ‘relative freedom’ or self-consciousness. Indeed, note the paradox that arises here, which is that ‘freedom’ in history, and ‘the generation of freedom’ cease to be the same thing. We must realize our own potential, and activate that. Note that the emergence of philosophical ideas of freedom itself shows correlation to our non-random pattern. We can thus demonstrate the eonic effect without committing ourselves to a theory of freedom, which require a breakout from Q3.

‘Laws’ and differential equations The problem can be seen by looking at the differential equation, the rubric for the idea of a ‘law of anything’. This sometimes enters historical theory under the discourse of ‘covering laws’. The problem is that a differential equation is a causal sequence from a set of initial conditions, and has a net information content that is unchanging from beginning to end. But in our case evolution is putative ‘self-organization’ in some form, and, whatever we call it, broken into intervals that allow a net increase in information content (we suspect, not proven, many of our ‘eonic effect’ look like permutations, relative transforms of something prior) at each stage. In effect, a differential equation determines a future, while our process of evolution ‘breaks free’ from the causal sequence at periodic intervals. And it spawns a new category, ‘geographical freedom’ in opposing types in the interiors and exteriors of its localized mainline.

A freedom paradox Consider as scratchpad heuristic thinking the contradiction (there are any number of variants), speaking very looosely: either man is free to self-evolve or else he is not so free and is ‘evolved’ by a larger process toward that freedom, at which point there should be a transition to a post-evolutionary era where ‘evolution’ is switched off and freedom takes effect. Note the dilemma. If he is too ‘evolved’ by that larger process, that self-evolution can never begin or exercise itself, yet if that ‘self-evolution’ is total he might never advance, remaining at the level of his starting point, and never reach freedom (which we didn’t define, the definition might itself be evolving). One resolution of the paradox might be to consider that some form of ‘evolution of one kind’ must initiate an evolutionary sequence toward freedom as un-interfered with ‘sort of freedom’, and yet operate intermittently in a series of on again off again bursts of ‘evolving’ between which self-evolution can occur. It is like the extra wheels on a child’s bike. The temporary constraint on ‘freedom to ride’ is necessary as a stage toward riding solo. We have just found a way to derive the eonic effect with its distinct alternation of degrees of freedom. Thus an evolution of freedom might well break down into a series of alternating intervals of degrees of freedom, induced or not induced. Such situations occur all the time in real life, e.g. the ‘third wheel’ on a child’s bike.

Relative beginnings, observing ‘evolution(s)’ There are any number of candidates for the use of the term ‘evolution’, e.g. ‘economic evolution’, or the ‘cultural evolution’ of particular cultures or civilizations. But the eonic effect shows a clear pattern of general global ‘distributed evolution’ in a master sequence proceeding from a focal source, operating in short transitions, and creating diffusion fields or oikoumenes. This transcends the individual civilization. Since we can see that laws of history/evolution are not possible, we could refine our thinking and speak of each stage of our eonic sequence as ‘eonic evolution 1’, eonic evolution 2’, etc…We can see that each stage seems to involve a novel macro response to the given ongoing stream, and we need to get down to cases with a ‘tracker’ or mapping sequence. Since we can see that reductionist accounts are misleading, and that novelties are appearing as ‘new complexity’ not known to be derivable from antecedents, we must take what we see from its relative starting point, as the incoming stream of prior culture enters into the visible master sequence. Thus we can try to close the gap with earlier stages of human evolution in a fashion opposite to that of biologists by proceeding from the recent past backwards. Observing evolution can be highly subjective if we see the past through the lens of our current evolutionary coordinates, since ‘evolution 1’ may be different from or in the process of being negated by ‘evolution 2’. Thus the emergence of the state is (arguably) a new freedom, freedom in the state, while the subsequent emergence of ‘democracy’ is a reaction to an earlier phase, as ‘freedom from the state’, etc…

We must suspect that the ‘cultural evolution’ we see in the immense field of tribalisms inherited from the Paleolithic is relatively static, yet undergoes kaleidoscopic transformations we tend to confuse with ‘evolution’, e.g. the commonality still visible in the splitting of Indo-European cultures. The tendency is toward differentiation, rather than the integration visible in the eonic effect. For example, we see as historical givens the multiple descendants of Indo-European, Semitic, Sinic, and other culture streams across Eurasia. But these separate cultural evolution(s) obviously need also to be taken into account, the whole point of our method. Indeed they often provide the content of what is transformed in the eonic mainline. This differentiation is confronted with the reversal toward integration in the stunning pattern visible in the Axial period, a tour de force where our ‘eonic evolution’ does time-slice interrupts on the parallel differentiated streams. And these start generating new ‘cultures’ as transcultural oikoumenes.

In any account of relative beginnings the differentiated components have to be taken as is, at the start, with or without reductionist derivation. Thus ‘consciousness’ and its potential is a given at the start of history, and cannot be eliminated on the grounds that we see no adaptationist scenario for that in deep time. A good example can be seen in the ‘evolutionary psychologies’, clearly of great antiquity, and clearly entering history in the world of the Indus, and we will discuss this evidence minimally in terms of the famous Shiva seal. Thus the burden is on us to discover the evidence of what man is first, and then backtrack toward the past. It’s no use saying that ‘human nature’ must conform to scenarios of the Paleolithic. We don’t know what those scenarios are, and only have more recent versions. There the discovery of ‘human nature’ is notably difficult.

[i] Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 3.