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. 

One of the key thresholds is the invention of writing in the period of the early Sumerians, the point from which we can for the first time assemble a record that is more or less continuous at the level of centuries, or less. This circumstance has created a unique dataset, the historical record itself, the only such record that we have at all. And there, lo and behold, we have the evidence for the existence of non-random evolution. As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us a sense of the descent of man revisited and thereby freed from our current preconceptions about how this occurred. 

 The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery.  There is something almost foolhardy in the projection of selectionist scenarios onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of adaptation. And yet such claims are as extraordinary in their implications as they are weak in their evidentiary basis. One of the principal strands of evidence is that of a Great Explosion in the period around 50, 000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. Competing with this are the various datings of anatomically modern man around 150,000 B.C. There is also the question of where all of this began, its principal theatre of action, and the various hypotheses of the ‘Out of Africa’ variety. In fact, the absence of sufficient data should give us pause, and it is certainly true that we have no solid grounds at all for the facile assumption of Darwinists. We will soon see that drawing conclusions about this period is very difficult, which will lead us to ask if we can really trust the Darwinian account.

Looking at the descent of humans forces the issue on questions of random evolution. The very existence, however incomplete, of the so-called Great Explosion shows us directly the very clustering of rapid advance against the backdrop of slower development that challenges the basis of the gradualist assumptions of Darwinians. It is almost impossible to conclude anything one way or the other without close examination of the actual episodes of evolution, which raises the question of what we mean by observing evolution at all. A considerable confusion exists over the meaning of random evolution. Almost by definition the claims of evolution in the Darwinian sense are those of random evolution. And yet such statements are now confronted with the various statements by some authors that natural selection is itself non-random. But the meaning of the term has changed here, in the sense that environmental adaptation is in some fashion non-random. But this is misleading. The antithesis of random evolution must be the claim for some sort of long-range factor that operates over and above the causal chaining of relatively random incidents. And that is precisely what Darwinists are most adamant in rejecting.

This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution’, as opposed to microevolution. Is not Darwin’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a complete transformation in our assumptions about evolutionary epistemology. Most of all it requires resolving the crisis of correct observation.  We are operating in the dark in all cases prior to the rise of history where the beginnings of closely tracked evidence are to be found with the invention of writing. As we shall see that immediately suggests something different from what we had expected.

Considerations of 'Big History' have always failed, but the data of world history has finally reached critical mass and we discover unexpectedly that there is an overall logic to the whole. We have to stress this point, since it is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic. The trick to this system is the way that it operates on parts, regions, in short bursts, to further the whole. The quest for universal laws of history won't work. We find instead a nimble 'evolutionary driver' that operates in an intermittent timed sequence.    

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!

As we move toward the examination of world history we confront the task of rapidly assimilating an immense amount of data and it becomes problematical as to how we are to accomplish this. Since we have raised the issue of the Axial Age it must be said that this notion is already in a state of deviation from its 'initial conditions' as set down by Karl Jaspers. We must attempt to construct a means to map out the events we are describing by some kind of systematic method. Since we are liable to spawn false interpretations constructed by contemporary assumptions about all the cultures, philosophies and religions of this, and other eras, we must first restrict ourselves to some kind of neutral periodization. Remarkably, we don't need to produce the 'final' interpretation of Heraclitus, Isaiah, or Buddha, to make our point. 

The study of world history languishes as an object of public or educational study. This is a symptom of the reign of propagandas. But in fact, on one level, in the age of Internet search engines, the task is simpler than we might think, to start. Start with simple periodization outlines of world history since the Neolithic, with a rough sequential sense of the major civilizations, especially as the 'fog clears' to some degree after ca. -3000.

Zoom targets: Data on demand The logistics of historical study is immensely difficult, and we need to process the whole of world history all at once. Standard narrative accounts would require thousands of pages, and still be insufficient. Each narrative account would suffer ideological selection problems. At what level of expansion have we achieved a fair account? One solution to this problem is to create a simple outline as series of starting points for further expansions, zoom targets. Our discovery of historical pattern will partially solve this problem. We discover that our dynamics is invariant to many accounts, and that simple 'generic' history will be enough to make our point.

Secular history, biblical criticism Our account can be defined as secular, in a broad sense, a term we must define as we go along. A partial exception to our procedure arises with the narrative history given in the Old Testament. There is no simple definition of what we mean by 'generic history' here, and we must be extremely critical of the mythology given in these classic texts, and study the findings of Biblical archaeology. However, even here, simple periodization will tell us what we need to know. 

As we adopt a more holistic approach to the study of world history we discover that a principle of coherence is at work, and this greatly simplifies its study. To look at the whole is in reality much simpler than to break the subject up into area studies. In fact this fragmentation is itself the strategy of cultural bias.  Instead of the obsessive accumulation of detail in one area, we need to balance our study to a series of isolated regions and move towards the whole in concert from separate moments of initial specialization. In fact, the discovery of the eonic effect will turn out to be the discovery of an efficient means for the study of world history, and it is useful to construct our own outline of history. It is not our business to construct a narrative of events, and we will try to deal wholesale with a whole series of accounts. In fact, we can discover the answer to the historical enigma by examining the standard Table of Contents for most world histories. But we can produce an outline on the spot, which can be expanded to any length. 

Current biology distinguishes anatomically and behaviorally 'modern' man (note the relativity of the term 'modern'), the first appearing ca. 200000 years ago, the second in the period after -100000, with the remarkable threshold, called the Great Explosion, around 50000 BCE, associated we are to suppose with various 'Out of Africa' scenarios. Is this a myth? At the very least in the dialectic of the rival proponents of fast and slow evolution, we seem forced to conclude that all the characteristics of a new species appeared rather fast indeed. But these periods are completely beyond the range of our emerging historical standard, the 'centuries level test', and we can only wait for further research to confirm or falsify this emerging but fuzzy picture of the suspiciously sudden appearance of homo sapiens. The obvious resemblance of the phenomenon of the Great Explosion to the eonic effect leaves an immediate question mark for Darwinian claims, or plaintive hopes, that some lucky mutation suddenly appears to accompany the seeming fait accompli of a hominid (modern indeed!) so accomplished in language, art, religion, and the elements of 'technical ingenuity' that will transform the nature of cultural evolution. 

And yet even so a relative static period ensues until, in the interstices of the various Ice Age rhythms, human cultural evolution begins to take off with the discovery of agriculture. Man emerges from the Paleolithic and sometime around -8000 we see the Neolithic underway. Our subject begins here, but, once again,  this earlier period still fails our 'centuries level' test. 

Now we come to the remarkable pattern of the eonic effect: three periods in a row of rapid transition, equally spaced, inside the slower current of world history, relatively static by comparison. The first occurs around 3000 BCE we have the invention of writing, and the sudden onset of two classic advanced civilizations, Dynastic Egypt and the world of Sumer. This period is conventionally described as the 'rise of civilization', although the slow transition, village, town, city, that defines the Neolithic is all too obviously an earlier stage of gestating 'civilization'. But a new threshold of human social complexity clearly comes into existence very rapidly at the end of the third millennium BCE.

The next rapid burst is the so-called Axial Age. Around a center of gravity ca. -600 we have the beginnings of our classical traditions, the world of the Greeks, the core Old Testament and its Prophets, the world of Buddha and Confucius. From this period springs the constellation of great traditions lay the foundations not only for 'western' civilization, but the civilizations of India, China. 

This period wanes rapidly and we enter period of the Occidental Roman Empire and its long decline, followed by what we call the Middle Ages. 

Then once again quite suddenly we see he remarkable rise of the modern world, a great take-off about 1500. In three centuries starting in the sixteenth century the world system is transformed and reaches a new level of civilization and cultural organization. 

The job is done, in a first round! We have thimble-sized world history at our fingertips, which we can expand to any length and depth, and in this 'whole'-istic fashion we have also unwittingly outlined the object of our study the eonic effect. Note that instead of 'starting at the beginning' and getting bogged down, we can 'restart' in three independent regions. This method can be elaborated, and it also allows us to 'begin' without an absolute beginning. The point here is that we can examine the surface of world history and there find our subject matter through simple periodization alone. And we have found something called the 'eonic effect' from nothing more than a Table of Contents. 

Let us note that if we were to embark on a search for historical structure we would be forced to reconsider what we already know. This point must, of course, consider that 'standard knowledge' has been transformed in the past two centuries by the discovery of lost civilizations, such as those of Sumer, and Dynastic Egypt. But the point is clear: we are dealing with the history in which we are immersed and must come to more than knowledge of facts, we must understand what we are seeing. With this in mind, what we discover must already be known. We wouldn't have far to look, and would find the structure already taken for granted, perhaps under a different set of concepts. In fact, almost all world histories fall into a natural division of periods reflected in their Table of Contents, good example being Robert MacNeil's The Rise of The West. 

The rise of civilization
The onset of the classical civilizations
The rise of modernity

Roughly speaking, this Table of Contents occurs over and over again in histories of civilization, and if we are to discover the principle of Big History it must be something we already half-know, but don't notice. But already we can see that this simple structure is a phenomenon that demands explanation. The rise of the modern world in the sixteenth century is very close to home, yet already a world historical given, and as we enter a kind of postmodern age we already look back at the early modern in some wonder at its seminal generation of our present world, in the throes of globalization. Thus, as we will see, everytime we use the term 'modernity' we are already making statements about Big History. 

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