One of the strongest tenets of proponents of Darwinian evolution is the denial of any form of evolutionary progress. But we can see clearly that the regime of theoretical natural selection has misled the analysis completely. Looking at the eonic sequence we can see that we would not have a difficult time putting the idea on a proper foundation.  We can also highlight the difficulties that arise from the idea. But it is obvious that within the scope of the eonic sequence, which may or may not tell us anything about earlier evolution, there is a clear expression of progress in history. At the bare minimum, we are able to see that there is a definite series of progression, and these are clearly timed by the eonic sequence. Darwinism blinds us to the fact that almost any form of evolution is going to show a progressive aspect, and this will be associated with any inherent depiction of development. The question of progress in biological evolution is, as we can now suspect, muddled by the overlay of different processes, and the difficulty of seeing processes closeup.

We can suggest what we suspect, but we can’t close the case with any ease. But the point is that a great of biological evolution is indeed relatively random or contingent. Here the suggestion of our eonic model is clear: any attempt to find directionality is going end up in speculations about teleology. We have completed our analysis of the eonic effect without such speculations because we had an evolutionary map allowing us to see directionality in the past, without extending this analysis to any teleological conclusion. Even our frequency hypothesis was left up in the air as our data falls out of range.  But in the case of biological evolution we are unable to close in on the specifics of ‘changes of direction’, if any, that might be present in the record we get from deep time. But all at once, confined to the short run of the eonic sequence, we clearly see the progressive aspect of a developmental sequence, mixed with the far larger intervals of the mideonic periods, where the evidence of progress is mixed with obvious cases of retrograde decline. This combination of short-term progression and mideonic sluggishness ought to warn us of the dangers of jumping to conclusion about evolutionary progress in the emergence of biological life.

We should be clear of the limits of our own approach to this question. Where does the idea of progress come from? It is another child of the eonic sequence, an eonic emergent! The literature of the idea of progress is very extensive, with suggestions about the birth of the idea in the Old Testament history, or else the thinking of Zarathustra, with statements that the Greeks had no idea of progress, or else statements that idea did indeed appear among the Greeks. Clearly the idea is gestating in the course of world history. But it is most ironically the appearance of the idea in the modern transition in the debate over the Ancients and the Moderns that it is born in its sturdy secular form. This debate arose as the achievements of modernity began to dispel the perennial sense of looking backward at the creative heights of antiquity. The sudden sense of surpassing this legacy gave birth to the idea of the progressive aspect of history, still without the clarity given by seeing its relationship to the eonic effect, where ‘eonic progression’ is not continuous but intermittent. The inability to account for this mideonic aspect of the potential of progress has continually thrown the idea into confusion. But we can see that at a bare minimum the eonic sequence sets a pace of overall progression, now for the first time visible in the larger picture of world history that archaeology has given us.

Notice how the fate of the idea of progress follows the contours of the modern transition. The idea is born, or reborn, in the core of the transition, turns into a philosophy of history, then suffers from ideological confusion in the wake of the transition, then suffers postmodern reversal in the sudden rejections of the idea. The match is exact, for the simple reason we can see that once the transition completes the nature of the future becomes an unknown once again. We cannot with total confidence say that the short term future and its longer range will coincide. Furthermore, as the modern system crystallizes the idea of progress turns from a revolutionary to an ideologically stabilizing idea. It can degenerate into propaganda, or become confused with the defense of an economic order.

It becomes obvious that while can clarify the evidence of progress in world history, we are nonetheless extracting an ‘eonic emergent’ to describe the whole system of history in a presumption of meta-knowledge. Thus the idea will retain its controversial dialectical character. But the point is clear in broad strokes: we can account for the evidence history shows, that of an immense progression from simple beginnings to a greater complexity in a fashion that is obviously evolution. Our model does more, because it distinguishes system action and the free action of the mideonic intervals. The driving motion of the eonic system must be matched by the resulting mideonic free action able to fulfill the potential established without retrogression, a task not always visible in the history we have!

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