The discovery of the eonic pattern has forced us to reexamine the meaning of evolution itself, for we suspect that its current purely genetic interpretation is misleading, and fails to account for a broader component that we can only call ‘macroevolution’. The term 'macroevolution' tends to refer to the process of speciation. But in the case of man we confront the ambiguity of that definition of man as man, the species Man. Perhaps that speciation is still incomplete, and history itself is an exhibit, evidence, in this process! It will turn on a question of 'evolution' becoming 'self-evolution', the passage from passive to active, as if it were an 'evolution of freedom'. It is time in any case to elaborate on our remarks about history and evolution. We have already produced the gist, and we should, at the risk of repetition, formalize our discussion. And this discussion began with a very simple question. If history and evolution are distinct, when did evolution stop and history begin? Clearly they could turn the one into the other in an instant. Thus it would seem that man 'evolved' toward 'history' but that something like history was coming into being while he was still evolving. And this still could be the case. So the two overlap. And this makes sense. Something that doesn't happen all at once has to happen in a transition, or a series of stages. On the one hand, the control of a passive process doesn't allow any freedom. But the total freedom to begin and continue is, at the beginning, an empty possibility. Chimpanzees are free to create civilization, but it won't happen. So between underdetermination and overdetermination we have some kind of overlapping evolution/history in which the balance is shifting toward freedom. One way to balance the under/overdetermination would be a series of 'transitions' of an intermittent character: strong direction, then a stop to see something actively emerge, then more direction, then stop again, and so on. But wait, that's what we see in the eonic sequence! A series of on-off transitions! Looks familiar.  

It is peculiar to bring the term 'evolution' so close to home in our own history. We tend to have romantic image of wild and primordial evolution, and like to think that we evolved into free men in a jungle somewhere, tearing raw flesh off of wild beasts, the fourth chimpanzee cooking steaks on a fire, and then after some lucky mutation we just walked away with full-blown Kantian moral to greater things from then on. But the eonic effect is a cautionary tale. Its action seems to be still coaching man at the point where he is producing his own art, so what are we to think? We underestimated what it means to be man, perhaps. And in history we detect something that is not supposed to be there, something truly stupendous, a system leapfrogging millennia, able to morph whole cultures comprehensively in short time-slices. Most of all we see a process of directional evolution that can operate globally in selected localized regions, as seen in the ingenious placement of the zones of transition. Thus as we examine the eonic effect we are confronted with something that demands to be called ‘evolution’, although it seems paradoxical to apply this to history.  But in fact Darwinists have no monopoly on the use of the term. We speak routinely of ‘cosmic evolution’, ‘economic evolution’, the evolution of technology or religion, even the evolution of science or, indeed, of evolution as an idea. The evolution of civilization as a concept poses no problem, save that unexpectedly we find it to be a genuine type of macroevolution in collision with Darwin's version. So let us ask, why the emphasis on Darwin's version? Scientific evidence? As we have seen the evidence of Darwin is not adequate and our different evidence indirectly suggests that he is in fact wrong about natural selection. So, as they say, 'we are free to go', and redefine the meaning of evolution by redefining our line of attack on its mechanism. The fact of evolution, however, is quite secure, and the overall research project of the biologists remains in place as a foundation for any use on our part of the term evolution. 

Thus, there can be no objection, as such, to still another use of the term for our data, especially if we qualify it, so that we don't get in the way of perfectly sound genetic usages of the word, even if those usages, as we suspect, are quite inadequate. Looking at our three successive transitions we can simply define this as the ‘eonic, or intermittent, evolution of civilization’, calling our intermittent sequence of transitions the ‘eonic sequence’, keeping in mind that this itself does not fully define the totality of the evolutionary components of world history, the economic evolution(s) of world history, for example, being something different, and an important component we will address separately. But then what is the status of everything happening in between our transitions? That’s the interesting part. We suggested the possibility of defining this as some kind of 'microevolution', based on issues of self-consciousness. Actually, our main point was simply to call this history, in contradistinction to the macroevolution of the eonic driver. As crude as it is, this approach works beautifully, as a descriptive, please note, not more, not yet as a theory of evolution.   

To conclude, the answer to the paradox of history and evolution is given to us empirically. We see a series of intermittent transitions. Clearly that’s the form taken by our evolution-history. We can simply define the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘history’ to conform to that definition. We can speak of the Great Transition, broken into a series of smaller transitions, from evolution to history. This means that there is an overlap of the two. It is like a cornucopia, with a precession of things proceeded from a source but with a different character.  The advantage of this approach is the relativity of the definition. We can say that early man in the Paleolithic was evolving, but that his history is beginning, and that the two are braided together. Furthermore, we have a natural interpretation of the distinction of macro and microevolution.  We can formalize this as follows:

From evolution to history We can make the evidence of the type seen in the eonic effect the:transition from evolution to history” explicit grounds for defining the overlap between evolution and history. We could call history the record of free activity rising in the wake of the passive evolution of volition. 

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. 

System action (or eonic determination)/free action The character of these definitions is that of a mixed 'causality/freedom' system, except that causality is no longer causality, and freedom may not be free will. So we will speak of mixed 'eonic determination/free action' system. Eonic determination would be whatever caused the Axial Age, or the other transitions, free action the relative degree of freedom, subject to fluctuations, exhibited in the transitions (more creative) or in the mideonic periods (hopefully still creative). 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 XE “Great Transition, The” , 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.  

 Our exploration of historical ‘macroevolution’ seems audacious, and yet there is a rightness to this approach, and furthermore it is non-dogmatically useful. And it can also give us a venue to reopen a long outstanding question, that of a science of history. And the question of such a science raises at once the issue of Big History, the many attempts to explicate some form of historical dynamics, in the search for laws of history. This has always been a controversial question, and even as the progress of science has advanced into the realm of culture and mind, the stubborn refusal of history to yield to the reductionist legacy of the hard sciences.  

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