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 life-forms. 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. 

Darwin and Malthus Darwin's extrapolations from Malthus and the selective breeding of animals foisted a misleading mental image of what we mean by 'evolution' on a subject whose complexity transcends the simplistic narrative of populations in demographic crisis.

As to claims that natural selection is responsible for real evolution, say, that of man, one has but to count the number of skeletons of hominids over time in the past several million years to see the extreme thinness of the record. These skeletal remains tell us very little indeed about the process of development as it actually occurred. It is merely an extravagant projection to say that natural selection produced language as an adaptation and then maintain this dogmatically. And history shows any number of Malthusian episodes, yet none of these have produced any clear indications of real evolution. Man, as man, survives these disasters without evolving at all.

Although we are critical of natural selection, we are in the same plight as Darwinists, and cannot close the case against it. However, beyond the often sterile and repetitious debate on this question, we can point to the historical record and attempt to show how natural selection is suddenly seen to be implausible indeed. Thus we might adopt a slightly different perspective on the question by examining the limits of natural selection as a form of historical explanation. The process of natural selection in human populations and, beyond that, of cultures and civilizations does not confirm Darwinian thinking. The survivors, the strong, are too often the problem, not the solution. History shows us the tendency of random processes to deviate in their own direction, and the need for a mainline of development to ensure an outcome. We suspect that Darwinian monism is collating two separate processes. The result is confusion over the meaning of historical development and the sudden transformation of a theory into an historicist ideology in the variants of Social Darwinism.

The generation of complex organs was a problem for Darwin as he himself noted, and now we know that he was wrong on major points, for we can see that mechanisms of development are at work. The new science of evo-devo, clearly foreseen by the embryologists a generation before Darwin, shows that the question of 'natural teleology', with the emphasis on ‘natural’, is at the core of the details of life processes, what then of the larger question of macroevolution itself?

Developmental genetics The discovery of the genetics of development has amply confirmed the reluctance of critics to accept the claims for natural selection. We see that complex organs emerge from the combinations of a systematic genetic toolkit, not via random natural selection. The question remains as to the source of that toolkit. Darwinians have retreated to the claim that random mutation in developmental genes is the core process, a significant change in the claims made.

We are left with a question, at what range or interval does evolution occur? The very nature of the question challenges the assumption of some kind of continuous slow evolution. How do we know that some kind of 'intermittent rapid evolution' doesn't take place in the vast and undocumented intervals of deep time? The answer is we don't, and the one crucial case, the emergence of man, shows unmistakable evidence of a sudden transition, the threshold period ca. -50000 of the appearance of modern man. The alternatives may not be mutually exclusive. We could hardly conclude anything given the evidence, but the case for natural selection is by no means established. Here Lamarck's instincts were better than Darwin's, keeping in mind that we are not referring to his theoy of adaptation, but to his intuitive division of the problem into double levels. 

Lamarck The history of biology has virtually written out the figure of Lamarck, but he is in many ways the real founder of evolutionary theory. Furthermore, his formulation, despite its less polished scientific character, proposed a far more realistic version of the idea of evolution, with two levels of action. These were reduced by Darwin to a single monistic explanation that suffers inherent contradictions. Unfortunately Lamarck's other theory of adaptation tended to discredit his contributions. Finally, the radical associations of the idea of evolution in the period of revolution marginalized his contribution. 
Two level evolution Many of the problems of evolutionary theory disappear if we posit two levels of action, natural selection or other processes and a direction setter operating over long- range intervals. This is often depicted as ‘micro’ and macro’-evolution, although these terms suffer prior definitions we may not use (e.g. macroevolution as speciation). The simplest version of this would be an intermittent macro process operating in short bursts on continuous random evolution. Since directionality suggests teleology (although the two are different) and is taboo in current science, biologists disallow this second possibility, which is very difficult to observe, but the result is riddled with difficulties. We will soon discover this two-level braiding of different processes in history itself.
Human evolution Darwinists are confronted with ambiguous evidence, the repeated differentiations of hominids in their descent from the great apes. How do we know that Darwinian evolution accounts for this? We don’t. In fact the data fits the rubric of two-level evolution just as well, and we see the repeated ‘selection’ of strains against the backdrop of static lineages left behind by a unique advancing branch.  We should face the fact that the so-called Great Explosion fits this interpretation very well. 
Macro/micro We must create our own distinctions of macro and micro. As we examine the eonic effect, one approach is to consider the eonic effect itself (cf. the evidence of the Axial Age) as the ‘macro’ component, and the ethical or qualitative aspect of individual action the ‘micro’. This makes ‘micro-evolution’ in our historical sense the degree of self-consciousness in action. That’s very different from the instant Social Darwinism of the ‘historical agent who overhears Darwinists talking’ and puts a false valuation on competitive, value-sheared behavior attempting to imitate natural selection.

It makes sense to think in terms of the two levels Lamarck proposed, although he got into metaphysical difficulties immediately. Our approach will be slightly different. We are likely to summon up two such levels of evolution, quite possibly also taken as continuous and discontinuous, braided together. Inexorably, attempts to reintroduce two levels of evolution reappear in the various theories of punctuated equilibrium, mostly still entangled with selectionist preconceptions.

Two levels of evolution As proceed to examine the eonic effect we will discover the unexpected way in which history itself can be resolved as an (historical, non-genetic) ‘evolutionary’ process or processes operating on two levels. One level shows continuous action, the other an intermittent character that interrupts the general stream of events to redirect that stream. The phenomenon of the Axial Age is hardly explainable on any other basis.
The Axial Age This isn’t speculation. An unmistakable instance where two level explanations resolve the facts is the phenomenon of the Axial Age: we see two levels to cultural evolution, the stream of cultures, and the sudden interrupt phase of rapid innovation and redirection. This was a mere 2500+ years ago, right in our back yard. There is no genetic component to these events.  The level of selection is that of whole cultures in brief time-slices!

Note: Gaps arguments Proponents of discontinuous evolution tend to be their own worst enemies, and we will tend to avoid the terms ‘continuous/discontinuous’ except as facon de parler. The action of a feedback device is discontinuous, but not grounds for supernatural explanation. The foundation for all claims about evolution lies in the fossil record. But the question of the fossil record is not so simple. One of the most persistent criticisms of Darwin has always been that of the so-called gaps in this record. There can be no doubt that the record is incomplete, and that something suspicious lurks in the data Darwinists give for the theory of natural selection. Over and over we see the phenomenon of rapid emergence followed by relative stasis. The record of human evolution itself is ambiguous here. The fossil record isn't really homogenous, in the sense that random evolution should not show sudden changes in direction. Nonetheless considerable progress has been made here by paleontologists. And many of these supposed gaps have been filled, or, if not filled, given some inkling of a transitional something (e.g. dinosaurs with feathers, or the basilosaurus), so at least to a some degree the record is filling out, although this does not add one jot to the claims for natural selection. 

Here critics of Darwin have too often fallen into confusion themselves, because the whole idea of a 'gap' in the record suffers from misdefinition, if not incoherence. Fatal theological temptations induce hallucination here in many otherwise sincere minds aware of the problems of the fossil accounts. Although it is certainly true that the fossil record is very sparse, too sparse to maintain Darwinian certainties, it is not likely that one will find 'gaps' in the record. Some form of macromutation (i.e. a sudden change in developmental genes), for example, might well produce what looks like a gap. What is a gap? It is highly likely that there is a continuous sequence of organisms showing an unbroken lineage of bodily forms. That is not the same as saying that natural selection alone is at work. However, we have no conclusive grounds to extend this claim to the factor of consciousness, especially in the human case. A sudden change of consciousness, or its transformation as ‘self-consciousness’, can, as we see from the Axial Age, change the direction of history. But these critics have a point, and a refinement of the 'gaps' argument is easy to provide, hence the challenge to Darwin's theory remains in some form. Taken over all, without claiming gaps in the record, we should suspect that something is speeding up the process of evolution beyond the rate entailed by natural selection. 

Indeed, conventional Darwinians such as S. J. Gould upgraded this argument with the various claims for so-called 'punctuated equilibrium', which amounts to seeing that emergence is often very sudden, followed by a period of stasis where the rate of change is small, or nonexistent. Granting that such data is hard to interpret, the basic issue simply won't go away. These theories suffered from the inability to disassociate themselves from the fallacies of natural selection, as they attempted to have their cake and eat it too, by proposing various 'levels of selection'. But real evolution is altogether likely to be something different. And it might well 'punctuate', this being followed by some sort of 'equilibrium'. The issue is bound up in distinctions of microevolution and so-called macroevolution, or speciation. The existence of microevolutionary processes is not in doubt, but the elusive factor of macroevolution remains unclear. 

Those who propose this issue of 'gaps' in the record, then, are onto something, but need to consider that the fossil record is always going to be continuous in some sense. This does not preempt the possibility, not of 'gaps', but of some other evolutionary process that creates a real discontinuity in some definable sense on top of that continuity. Think in terms of acceleration, as artificial as physics logic might be applied to evolution. Acceleration is not a 'gaps' argument, and its discontinuous action is not in contradiction with continuous motion. To propose discontinuity as antithetical to continuity is logical in the abstract, but in this case leads to the hopeless quagmire of miraculous interventions of one kind of another in the creationist vein. We cannot say in advance what that kind of process it would be that generates this sense of discontinuity, but its existence is something that we must suspect based on the evidence that we have. The discovery of complex genetic components such as the developmental genes suggests one way of resolving the seeming paradox. But that is not enough. Consider the Axial Age again.

Gap argument in history As we move to study world history in light of the eonic effect, we will discover how tricky the question of 'gaps' really is. Considering the sudden compression or close packing of innovations in the Axial Age, in a finite interval, we have something that shows, not a gap, but historical continuity at all points, yet also shows a sudden speed up of development, and on a level that has no connection that we know of to genetics. This could be defined as 'discontinuity' but hardly a gap. That should leave us wary of pronouncements about deep time. Only close observation at the level of centuries suffices to discover what is going on. It is better to bypass the confused language of discontinuity and gaps, and think in terms of transitions. 

Remarkably, the perfect example of the discontinuity factor, and its elusive basis, lies in the attempt to resolve the mystery of the descent of man. There the (not very adequate) evidence of the so-called Great Explosion stands out as a mockery of the basic Darwinian claims. Something very sudden occurred in the emergence of man, or so it seems from the evidence. We should be wary here of inadequate evidence, and simply note that we are under no evidentiary obligation to accept Darwinian claims at the current level of demonstration. However, this example typifies the confusion Darwin critics often succumb to, because the evidence of some sudden crossing of a threshold for species man is not the same as man's speciation as such, nor is it incompatible with earlier continuous processes that may also have been crucial. Once again the question of two levels suggests its relevance. But, in any event, the descent of man is beset with the issue of continuity/discontinuity dead center in its data set. So much for Darwinian certainties here. They are based on a monopoly of public communication to drown out critics, and little more. The evidence for this Great Explosion, as a sudden transition, poor as it is, is at least on a par with Darwinian presumptions in advance they have explained it all via the nearly metaphysical projection backwards of selectionist theory. So the evolution of man shows the prime difficulty latent in all theories of the Darwinian type, if they can be called theories at all. The point is that Darwinists merely assert they have solved the issue of man's descent, when they most definitely have not.  

We might consider again the example of acceleration, and beyond that the definition of science in the case of biology. On the one hand, biologists wish to make evolutionary theory compatible with physics, and yet to do so they must fail to do what physicists do: build a science around a type of 'force'. This question was very clear in the eighteenth century, but the result was the emergence of vitalism, which was not up to the job of explanation. It is this search for the missing process that Darwinists find unacceptable, because there are no candidates for this in the thinking of reductionist science. It is nonetheless worth considering the force analogue, and then matching that to, say, the Axial Age phenomenon. Clearly natural selection operates through history, but the Axial period shows there is a ‘something like a force’ that suddenly drives the historical process in a new direction.

There is something peculiar about this limitation in the Darwin scheme, in the sense that any science is going to have a 'force' argument, this force is going to show itself in terms of its own action, archetypically 'acceleration', and this action will seemingly be short acting. Such language is heuristic and must be set aside as at best metaphor once we have real data to examine, but the point is that Darwinists constantly remind us of the right way to do science, even as they propose a science with no substance to it. This example of the missing 'force' uses the language of physics, but the basic issue must remain. Of course, we have already criticized the physicalism that created reductionist thinking, and there is no reason why biological evolution should conform to a force argument. But there is likely to be an analogue to a force argument in the sense of some intangible ‘principle of sufficient reason’. That is, any phenomenon is going to have an explanation of some kind. This is the oddity of Darwinism. The surrogate substitute of natural selection for a true ‘explanation’ of what drives evolution leaves it with a strange void at its core. The point is that Darwinism is quite anomalous as a 'science' in the sense that this process that actually 'does evolution' is missing, and the strong suspicion is always there that natural selection, however real in the survival struggles of organisms, is simply the microevolution we see in the absence of 'real evolution'. Darwinists become adamant here, or change the subject, but the sword of Damocles has always stood over Darwin's claims for this reason. It is like confusing Newton's first and second laws. We begin to suspect that the regime of natural selection too often perpetuates continuity, and is really the opposite of 'evolution'!

Instead of thinking in terms of gaps we can simply compare large time intervals. The course of purely random evolution requires by statistical calculation an immense vista of time for its action. The ratio of that interval length to that of the actual history of life produces an inference that evolution proceeds much more rapidly than Darwin's theory would allow. Thus we can infer that something is missing in standard accounts by simple probability arguments. In a now classic text, Evolution From Space, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe give one version of this objection.

Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle on the theory.  [Hoyle &  Wickrmasinghe, Evolution From Space (London: Dent, 1981), p. 148]

This passage has been the object of endless ‘refutations’ but we forget that genetic research has essentially confirmed it with the discovery of new developmental structures and processes, as the level of DNA, if not large-scale evolution. And it is hard to see how random mutations in complex developmental sequences is going to work as a Darwinized evo-devo. The issue is not gaps but the compression inferred by the time-periods in question. As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."  There is a corollary to this, "Evolution makes little sense in the light of natural selection." 

Note: Theories of Evidence The Darwin debate constantly scrambles the issues of the 'fact' of evolution and the 'theory'. There is a complication here, which is that we can distinguish a 'theory of the evidence' from a 'theory to explain that evidence', should that theory of the evidence graduate to stable data. Darwinism has yet to produce a proper theory of the evidence. This subtle difference constantly confuses all discussion. Most discussions of biological evolution should be focused on arriving at the facts, with detailed records of how evolution actually happened. But that is a very difficult thing to do, and the temptation is to project a simple generalization that will apply prior to determining the facts of the case. In economics, for example, a theory of evidence would be, as a theory, that economies show cyclical behavior. A second theory to explain the first, i.e. explaining cyclical behavior, is quite another task. Note that without a detailed record we would be likely to think in the abstract about economic systems. This example shows the dilemma of Darwinian theory. We have no detailed record of the way evolution actually happened, and tend to deal only in abstractions based on Malthusian or other misleading examples. This is clearly the trap into which Darwin and Wallace fell, because they were struck by the teeming behavior of jungle populations with its clear profusion of speciation processes. They thought the full evolution of forms was explained by its surface aspect, the competitive struggle in biogeographical regions.

This point is difficult to grasp without seeing an example. As move to explore the eonic effect we will naturally find the need to create a map of the evidence, with a possible theory about the nature of that evidence, e.g. a cyclical interpretation of cultural evolution. The task of explaining such a dynamic is quite different.  We should note that the Axial Age shows us a pattern of evidence. We can propose a theory of this evidence, i.e. that it is part of larger pattern of such evidence, without explaining the dynamics behind it. And we must act, willy-nilly, or react to this pattern, since it contains sources of our current action. A theory will itself alter, or limit, our action, which

The issue of verification haunts Darwinian theory. To state that complex structures arose via natural selection demands far more proof than what Darwinists have given us. The question is very simple: were there any witnesses to the facts claimed? No. Therefore, why such obsessive claims? And these claims stretch over immense vistas of time, sight unseen. Evolution could be, and probably is, something entirely more complex, and we would never know, unless we mapped out the scale and temporal intervals for the real thing, a tremendous job, one that is consistently followed in historiography. 

Evidence Density: Darwinian theory suffers from low evidence density, i.e. the balance of observations over long intervals and the fine-grain observations of short intervals possibly showing high-speed changes. Just how dangerous this can be is suggested by our phenomenon of the Axial Age.

The Axial Age as 'evolution': Later we will look at the data connected with the Axial Age. This is a prime example of high-speed cultural evolution in a matter of mere centuries. We must be able to observe a comprehensive global history over the period of several centuries, in detail. Suppose such data were needed for earlier stages of man's evolution. We would apply natural selection in a completely misleading way to such periods of man's early emergence. 

Look at history. Nothing less than a full account of all events at all times on the total surface of a planet is acceptable as an answer to 'what happened'. We may be able to manage something at a lesser standard, but the danger of jumping to conclusions is always there, and the comparison with Darwinism is obvious. What happened 'when human language evolved' falls into this category. 

This warns us of the foolhardy character of Darwin's oversimplification. Therefore, Darwin's claims are on hold, and that is that. If you gainsay this, you are violating the rules of science. In science, evidence rules. If we suspect better evidence, then the stock of Darwin's theory falls. We make no claim to refute Darwin, or to produce a better theory. Only that false claims of certainty here are dogmatic. That, with grim finality is that. 

Here's the problem. If we say that something evolved by natural selection, we are making statements about tens of millennia, sight unseen. Historians who do that are sent packing at once. Look at the amount of work it takes to document five thousand years of history. And yet Darwinists exempt themselves here. 

Top