The discovery of evolution was one of the greatest turning points in the development of human thought. It changed man’s perspective on himself as profoundly as any other breakthrough in the development of science. First appearing in early Greek and Indian thought during the Axial Age, the idea resurfaced powerfully during the Enlightenment. Then Darwin’s seminal publication of his Origin of Species in 1859 more than anything else precipitated this revolution in thought.  

And yet a tremendous controversy, one long argument, has from the beginning accompanied Darwin’s achievement. This has produced the intractable and almost endless Darwin debate, which has become a central feature of modern culture itself. In part, this is the result of the renewed outbreak of the conflict of science and religion. The appearance of Darwin’s theory of evolution became a defining moment in the emergence of secularism, and resulted in the twentieth century opposition of fundamentalist religious groups whose challenges to Darwin have grown into a series of skirmishes in a cultural war.

But the debate was always much broader than the religion-science divide, or even the question of evolution itself. It was the theory of natural selection, hence of random evolution, that Darwin brought to his data that caused many even of those who embraced the factual discovery of evolution to challenge Darwin’s claims. And this has produced the many, often confused, discussions distinguishing the ‘fact’ and the ‘theory’ of evolution. The fact of evolution is really the discovery of ‘deep time’, the endless vistas of planetary eons stretching from the dawn of life. The crystallization of the fossil record in this progression of geological ages reached an evidentiary threshold that made the idea of development in time an inevitable conclusion. To project onto this almost stupendous temporal field a theory of how life evolved was an audacious step destined to oversimplifications.   

Beyond Natural Selection From the onset the real issue of the Darwin debate has always been the status of the theory of natural selection. Many of the first reviewers of Darwin's Origin accepted the evidence of evolution, but had difficulty with his claims for the mechanism behind it. The strength of the evolutionary hypothesis tends to mask the weakness of the claims for natural selection. It is simply not true that Darwin provided voluminous and convincing evidence for his theory of natural selection. Frequent reference under challenge to the evidence of bacterial samples, where Darwinian thinking seems confirmed, does not give us grounds for the universal generalization of natural selection. It is a confusing circumstance in so far as the visible aspect nature shows the struggle for existence, the teeming ecologies of competing lifeforms. Natural selection is the bottom line, the test of survival. But does it generate 'evolution'? Verifying that it does so, and does so in all cases without exception, is immensely difficult, perhaps impossible, leaving the claims of theory, and the ambitions of social ideologists, in limbo. Darwin observed these innumerable cases of natural selection, through Malthusian lenses, but none of these conclusively established a true theory of evolution. The theory of natural selection was also the linchpin for the claims of non-random evolution, and denials of directionality or progress in evolution.   

Evolution and Ethics There is nothing mysterious about the limitations of Darwinian explanation: value-free science must eliminate questions of the value domain. But is this legitimate for the question of evolution? Related to this is the attempt to produce purely causal explanations of ethical behavior and its evolution. The positivist methodology of scientific reductionism, by declaring the rigid separation of facts and values, leaves us to wonder if nature itself truly respects this division in all its processes, especially those of evolutionary emergence. Sometimes the naturalistic fallacy is cited here. But how do we know that evolution doesn't process values amidst facts, this in a naturalistic fashion? Darwin and his successors, making natural selection the fundamental axiom of explanation, have attempted considerable ad hoc extensions of great ingenuity to make selfishness the source of morality. This dramatic play of opposites has produced some exotic attempts to 'save the paradigm' in the theories of group and kin selection. These theories are essentially logical phantoms attempting to puzzle through the paradox of making selfishness the basis for its opposite. But none of this answers to the real issue, which is to explicate, and show evidence for, the emergence of an 'ethical' agent. 

Evolution of Consciousness The issue of ethics is really one of the freedom or potential freedom to act according to an 'ought', and it is almost by definition not going to be explained by the mechanization of valuation via natural selection. This issue gives us a hint that Darwinian style explanation is wrong in principle and wildly off the mark in practice. We must see if we can find any actual data that will give us a hint as to what the evolution of ethics might be like. We don’t have far to look. In general, a theory of ethical behavior must explicate the consciousness of an ethical agent, and produce a model of choice-based behavior. But theories of evolution cannot yet account for consciousness. To make ethical consciousness an epiphenomenon of natural selection, and to propose that it arises as an adaptation in the game of survival beggars the nature of the phenomenon itself. What’s more, this approach creates a de facto standard of ethics based on the evolutionary ‘value’ of pure selfishness.

Metaphysics of Evolution The need for a 'science of metaphysics' is the first step to a 'science of history and/or evolution'. But it is just this requirement that proves the stumbling block.  In the preface to his famous first critique Kant isolated the three great issues of the metaphysical tradition destined to get into trouble on the way to a 'science of metaphysics': that of divinity, followed by those of soul and free will. To these we should add the question of teleology, and note the way Kant considered teleology within the bounds of methodological naturalism, albeit ambiguously. The questions of divinity, soul, and free will demand proofs of existence, and Kant exposed the way that the road to these three proofs is beset with contradictions. They are metaphysical because they stand beyond the empirical.

Ideology and economy Questions of ideology stalk Darwinian theory but are concealed by the relative sophistication of Darwinists in evading the fallacies of Social Darwinism. Darwin's confusion in this area is often shunted off to Spencer. We should note that the confusion of biological and social evolution arises at the beginning of Darwinism, and the work of Spencer is a giveaway clue to the suspicious resemblance of classical liberal and biological theory. Most especially the influence of classical liberal economics on Darwin's thinking is, or should be, transparent, along with the frequent metaphors of economic self-organization applied to evolutionary processes.   

It was on the basis of this theory that the claims for a totality of scientific knowledge came to seem plausible. The theory of natural selection purported to resolve all the key metaphysical issues that block the way to a comprehensive scientific worldview. And yet here Darwin was open to challenge from the beginning, because of the failure to properly document the claims for his theory of natural selection. In some ways Darwin made it easy for his critics, because he attempted an overarching generalization that was simplistic and ideological rather than truly scientific. With hindsight, we can see that the true nature of a science of evolution is not easy to resolve. The problem lies in truly observing evolution. It is relatively easy to conclude that evolution has occurred.  But there are degrees of observation. It is very difficult to track an evolutionary sequence over time in order to get a sense of its real dynamics.

A glimpse of evolution The problem with the theory of Darwin lies in the verification of its claims for natural selection, and random evolution. Properly documented sequences of evolution are rare to non-existent. The only intensively observed historical/evolutionary sequence, one with data at the level of centuries or less, is that of world history since the invention of writing. This unique data set, five thousand years in length, is just barely long enough to put the idea of natural selection to a test. The result suggests something entirely different from the mechanism claimed by Darwin. History itself, seen rightly, will give us a glimpse of evolution in the form of high-speed bursts or organized evolutionary transformation.  The most notable aspect of this data is the so-called Axial Age phenomenon, an historically visible transformation far more complex than anything proposed by Darwinism. That this is not genetic evolution is no objection.

The relationship of history and evolution must remain a subtle one, but the fact remains that no final definition of what we mean by ‘evolution’ has proven satisfactory. The reductionist attempt to define ‘evolution’ in purely genetic terms does not solve the mystery.

The debate is biased by the attempts to define secularism using biological foundations. It can never succeed thus. Religious anti-modernism tends to be armed with a critique of the limits of scientism taken as a reaction to the Enlightenment. But the best critique of the Enlightenment lies in the Enlightenment itself, in its full scope. The rise of modernity is more than the Scientific Revolution. The emergence of modern freedom is an independent historical process emerging in parallel to the Scientific Revolution. There is an irony here in that the emergence of freedom is itself an evolutionary process, and its relation to the emergence of modernity shows the crux of this process very close to home. But this requires that we have the means to carefully distinguish what we mean by ‘evolution’ from free agency.

Secularism and freedom The prominence of fundamentalist religion in the Darwin debate makes us forget that the basis of modernity itself is more than the reductionist fundamentalism it has become in a positivistic age. The Protestant Reformation was itself the first stage of modernity. The very basis of the idea of freedom, at the core of all modern liberalisms, has a metaphysical character that would in principle be excluded by scientific explanation. These classic issues of the philosophy of history arose at dawn of modern biology but were filtered out in the tide of later Darwinian triumphs. The ambiguous 'transcendentalism' of the idea of freedom, as explored by a philosopher such as Kant, becomes a key foundation stone for secularism itself. 

Thus a disguised reverse metaphysics haunts Darwinism: it must derive the nexus of freedom issues from its selectionist assumptions. We need look no further for the difficulties of universal biology.

Related to this is the question of teleology, and/or evolutionary progress. Divorcing modern thought from the idea of progress, whatever its ideological liabilities, because of the presumed demonstration of random evolution by Darwin, has sown confusion in historiography and biology both. And now the current phase of the debate sees the so-called Intelligent Design movement at work attempting to revive the natural theology of William Paley. But the design argument, challenged by such figures as Kant and Hume, is as problematical as that for natural selection. The design argument is often a confused version of the issue of teleology. 

Natural teleology The methodological naturalism of modern science, and of Darwin's theory, began with the challenge to Aristotle at the beginning of modern physics. But the questions of biology are not easily resolved in this fashion. These issues were unwittingly exposed by the philosopher Kant whose proposals to examine natural teleology extend our definition of naturalism. This, however, requires a careful 'critique' of metaphysics, and there is no easy resolution of teleological questions. 

Paley's natural theology is the original context in which Darwin produced his theory, against which he reacted, claiming that he had superceded the claims for design in nature. And yet this tradition had already been powerfully challenged prior even to its nineteenth century reemergence. 

Historical research has greatly expanded our understanding of the data of world history, and in the process transformed our knowledge of the emergence of civilization. As we proceed we will need to avail ourselves of immense ranges of this enlarged chronicle, which creates a considerable logistics of study. Part of the problem with such a study lies in the influence of Darwinism itself, which enforces a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of what has been called ‘Big History’, and any attempt using the philosophy of history to generalize about history in the large. A further critique of any idea of Big History comes from the postmodern rejection of 'metanarratives'. In this field the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper with his critique of historicism makes clear. And yet as the labors of archaeological research come to fruition a broad overall picture emerges, beginning with the Neolithic, followed by the rise of civilization, the Classical period, and finally the rise of the modern world. 

The prejudice against Big History As the data of world history reaches critical mass the question of Big History arises spontaneously, limited only by our inability to produce theoretical tools to deal with such an entity, seen to be the all time classic case of a mixed causal/freedom system. 

Deconstructing flat history We can turn postmodern critiques of Big History against themselves by deconstructing the idea of flat, random history. Such histories are infested with fallacies of the Social Darwinist type, and reject teleology only to create unconscious teleologies of conflict.   

We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. There is an irony in our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here. The problem is that the historical record is relatively short compared with the immense vistas of the earlier stages of evolutionary emergence. But it is significant that in reviewing the history of the idea of evolution we have discovered an odd fact indeed: the evolution of the idea itself is closely bound up with the pattern of evolution itself that we are about to discover!  

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