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. 

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.

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 standard narrative of the Darwin debate writes the opposition to Darwin in terms of the conflict of spiritual versus material explanation. Those terms confuse the discussion. The reality is more complex. Scientists defend methodological naturalism as the basis for research. We need not quarrel with this save to suggest that this rubric is not fully defined in advance. And the question of nature is not so simple. Between Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant the standard scientific definitions of naturalism tend to contract into a post-philosophical physicalism that presumes to be post-metaphysical. But this has never successfully resolved the issues of human consciousness or man’s social history. The alternative is not to posit some spiritual antithesis to the natural domain but to account for the totality of what constitutes man.

The issue is compounded by the attempts to define secularism. 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. This was also in part an institutional question in the context of the English Anglican church, and many of the early students of biology were ordained in the establishment ministry of the Church. This situation made dissenting or secular views a risky endeavor. The triumph of Darwin’s theory signaled more than a scientific breakthrough, it also crested on the tide of the professionalization of science and the formation of a new establishment not bound by the clerical tradition. Indeed, Darwin’s great champion, T. H. Huxley, is clearly seen as one of the first generation of this new cadre of scientists, and his efforts were decisive in the changing of the guard. A considerable irony is that Huxley was open to the criticisms of Darwin’s theory and even prodded Darwin on the inadequacies of his claims for natural selection, this on the eve of publication. But this period was already showing the severe contraction of the Enlightenment debate over the place of science in the context of metaphysics.  

The chronic intractability of the Darwin debate springs finally from the concealed metaphysical character of Darwin's theory as the claims for natural selection became the master key to unlock the enigmas of divinity, soul, and free will. Like overshoot and undershoot the metaphysical dialectic on these questions is never satisfied by simple negations. The result is that the exact definition of even so basic a category as that of an organism is left unresolved by Darwin, who produced the imaginary solutions based on adaptationism to all these questions characteristic of positivistic reductionism. It is not surprising that this 'instant metaphysics in reverse' produces an oversimplification of human nature and never resolves the origin of consciousness. His work was a triumph of public acclaim, in the tide of a bestseller. The failure to properly document his claims indicates a series of misunderstandings about what a theory of evolution should be. We have never really observed evolution at close range, a very difficult thing to do, and the need for a sounder empirical starting point is preempted by the scale of deep time, and the relative emptiness of the fossil record. One irony is that while the discovery of deep time immensely broadened the scope of our knowledge of the universe, it is history itself that can give us the clue to the riddle of human evolution. And yet, the question of science applied to history has no simple solution. What is a science of history? It is interesting that we should presume to have a science of evolution, given the difficulties that attend the development of a science of history. Why should the one be considered a fait accompli, while the other is considered a hope for the future?

 The nineteenth century produced an immense proliferation of the methods of scientific reductionism in the biological and social sciences, as the onset of positivism led the way to a monolithic consolidation of scientific viewpoints. A symbolic influence is seen in the figure of Comte, and his somewhat idiosyncratic Positivism, which influenced Darwin at the early stage of his career. One of the problems here is that Comte’s work exhibited its own metaphysical tendency, and the historicist philosophy of history in which the Age of Positivism was to succeed those of theology and metaphysics induced a sense of an irreversible progression of thought, with the methodology of science in the starring role. As we have noted already the secularism has its own metaphysical threshold, and Darwinism, for one, never truly exited the metaphysical age.

It is significant that the formulation of Darwinism and the so-called Age of Positivism followed directly in the wake of the collapse of the great era of German philosophy. The end of the reign of Hegelianism, which began with Kant, was very sudden and the history of the 1840’s shows us the drama of Feuerbach and Marx challenging the legacy of idealism and championing the need for sciences of society. This period produced a clear delineation of the human and natural sciences, with a challenge to the reductionist implications of the expanding scientific revolution. A kind of amnesia has overtaken science in the stubborn regression, fueled by spectacular, but misleading, technological wonders, to reductionist obsessions dressed up in scientific methodological jargon. It is nonetheless true that Darwinism thrived on this sense of the epochal transition of modernity attempting to establish the foundations of a new age of secularism. This is not an unreasonable view, once its tacit assumptions are brought out. The problem is Darwin's selectionist metaphysics, which cannot sustain the task of defining secularism. A strong case can be made for the 'new age of science', but this is not something fixed or defined by a passing phase of evolutionary theory. 

The earlier context of the idea of evolution in the generation before Darwin shows a broader spectrum of views gestating on the threshold of a science of biology. The focus on positivism makes us forget the immense era of philosophical flowering in the German Enlightenment, whose conclusion in the generation of Marx and Feuerbach foretells the downshifting character of the next generation of scientific methodologies. The moment of the birth of the idea of evolution produced a rich field of thinkers. Kant and the teleomechanists, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, the school of Hegelian Naturphilosophie, Schopenhauer, the embryologists, these and other figures are grappling with the implications of the new evolutionary perspective, and the question remains whether Darwin’s theory did not diminish this complex field of his predecessors. The dialectic of materialists and idealists, mediated between such figures as Kant and the renewed Spinozism of the Hegelians, produced a universe of thought more solid than the watered down collision of naturalism and spiritualism characteristic of the current Darwin debate. 

A philosophy of history such as Comte’s becomes a kind of historicism, to use the phrase of Karl Popper, as it seems to make a prediction about the future, and this sense pervades the ideological futurism of the Scientific Revolution. But we may be in for surprises, as that critic of historicism, Karl Popper, pointed out. And for good Kantian reasons, the age of 'metaphysics' might prove more enduring than reductionists might think. Man’s metaphysical limitations are themselves evolutionary, and it is merely an assumption that man is sufficiently evolved to grasp his own evolution. The irony is that man's propensity for metaphysics might endure as long as man, in his current phase of evolution, remains man. These metaphysical limits are an evolutionary aspect of human nature. The point here is that Darwinism has been taken as a defining shibboleth of modernism, its overthrow a postmodern battle against secularism. But the theoretical reserve potential of the idea of evolution far outstrips what should have been taken as the operational hypothesis in a dialectical research program, the hypothesis of natural selection. 

It is useful to dwell on the historicism of Comte, since a progression of age periods, as the classic cliche of many philosophies of history, will prove a starting point for our look at historical dynamics. The issue of an historicist progression of epochs might produce derision in most scientists, who then make tacit assumptions about just such a progression. Comte’s view of history itself constitutes an ‘evolutionary’ claim, as a philosophy of history, and the question arises if this progression of stages is simply another myth of historical inevitability, to use the phrase of Isaiah Berlin . The idea of a progression of epochs is itself an ancient one, and the emergence of modernity itself is often seen as a New Age of world evolution. But Comtean thinking has led to the assumption that the ‘positive’ stage of historical development will lead to the rote application of scientific assumptions in all fields, a premature conclusion that does not do justice to the complexities of history. In any case there is no inherent equation of 'modernism' with Darwinism, and we cannot easily expect any progression of epochs to lead to an Age of Postmetaphysics.    

Age periods and the Eonic Effect We will soon see the way in which our discovery of the 'eonic effect' naturally divides world history in a series of three age periods, with the rise of modernity being the transition to a third, and the Axial Age being the transition to the second. These periods should have no labels and have no inherent content. But the rise of the modern, while certainly keynoting the Scientific Revolution, achieves its distinction more from a spectrum of contradictions than from the triumph of an idea. But the significance of secularism remains to be understood. The scientific master idea of causality is matched by the various liberal consolidations of the idea of freedom. The keynote of an epoch might be better the richness of its dialectical spectrum than the triumph of a particular viewpoint, destined inexorably to its own negation.

In this context the triumph of the theory of natural selection became a driving force to legitimate an immense passage of culture across a threshold but in the process upheld a kind of naïvete about culture, history, and evolution itself. The mechanization of the principles of biology under the reductionist perspectives of positivistic science blinded its champions to the sudden contraction of thought created by their own advance. Just as science wished to take over a sudden narrowing of vision occurred, and the result has produced many false starts, bogus paradigms in social science, and the restive underground of puzzled dissenters watching the triumph of secularism turn into a nest of adders. Many early critics of Darwin 's work, dismissed in contempt in the rhetoric of Darwinians, even as they moved toward acceptance of evolution, saw immediately the many problems with the account of natural selection that Darwin provided. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century Darwin ’s theory was almost in eclipse and it wasn’t until the onset of the new genetic science in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel’s work that natural selection was able to make a comeback.

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