The Meaning of Evolution

The meaning of the term 'evolution' is problematical, and it can be difficult to assess 'evolution' in history, if we think Darwin's theory truly accounts for the descent of man. 

Part of the problem is that evolution is not yet properly defined scientifically and requires a cosmological foundation, a point clear from the confusions of thermodynamics and new ideas of self-organization, which highlight the plight of reductionism. The whole confusion is seen in one of the most famous Darwinian declarations, that of Dobzhansky:

Is evolution, a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more--it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts,...

Although this seems right, and is our approach here, in spite of criticisms, we can indulge in a pro forma challenge to make Darwinists leap from their socks to defend the true faith, for it is not as certain as we might think. Not only theologians, but innumerable nineteenth century theosophical critics (often  Buddhists in disguise), beyond the pale in most accounts, pointed out that 'involution' was a better concept than 'evolution', or, in some accounts, reciprocal 'evolution and involution'. These mystic theories never worked either and rapidly degenerate into New Age speculation, but in their original forms cannot be rejected out of hand if we see any kind of triggering process, gaps in the record, feedback, or evolutionary self-regulation, leading us to suspect a hierarchical process, partly unseen, and having nothing to do with supernaturalism. This is especially the case if Darwinists simply assume that temporal selection in early times can generate unlimited complexity in future times, as with the 'evolution of consciousness'. These proponents of 'involution' were attempting to bypass the silliness of claiming divine intervention with natural 'laws of involution'. It would seem that this doesn't work either, and that the category of evolution is the right one, but nothing is certain. Considering 'involution' can actually be a useful roundabout introduction to the value of 'reductionism', for it is clear that 'evolution' is a better approach in the long run, for it demands accounting, reduction, to basic fundamentals. But the danger is precisely what Darwinism shows, oversimplified reductionism.  In a fair argument, Darwinists would not have such an easy time getting away with statements of 'evolution' rather than 'involution' made about, say, the Cambrian explosion, a still obscure toss-up between these two, evolution and 'involution'. On this point at least, it would seem Darwin was right, 'involution' tends to lead nowhere save into speculation. Theories of 'involution' are dime-a-dozen, paper money, while theories of 'evolution' attempt the gold standard of 'reduction', whether successfully or not. But it depends on the arbitrary choice of words, the crucial thing is what we mean by the term 'evolution'. Most crucial of all, waiting until we have better evidence before jumping to conclusions. But the problem is that involution might exist and never be observable. All we would see are 'bumps' or lacunae of evidence, about which our desperation to have a theory would force us to 'pretend we have a theory today'.

 
On one level this statement of Dobzhansky seems engaging, elementary, almost trivial. For someone encased in the Biblical account of creation in six days, the idea of evolution came as a revelation, and we can look at Darwin (and Wallace) still struggling with the plain evidence of multiple species in the primeval biological environments, until the reality of evolution sunk in. We must be able to change gears here and support what Darwin really meant without his muddle or confusing the issues of real explanation with description. Thus, fair enough. This statement is one of those things that now seems obvious at first sight. We can accept this in broad strokes, but what does it mean? What's the next step here, stand up or sit down? If the postulate can bend both ways, we're better off skulking away from theoretical schizophrenia.  A close look shows even to a faithful adherent of evolutionary thinking a curious number of difficulties, among them a sense its author was indulging in fiat, thus unsure he was right, and whether the three-headed statement has any meaning. It sounds like a religious proclamation. The first problem is that this does not distinguish the process of evolution from the hypothesis of its mechanism. 

The second is the immense burden of total explanation required from the beginning for any real theory. This is seen in the failure in practice to consider, for instance, value-emergence as evolutionary data unless these are reduced to selectionism, a metaphysical anti-metaphysics in disguise. Any theory has an immense problem here, especially if it is taken as a universal generalization about the entire evolutionary record, as if it were a natural law. Note that the statement is a statement of values, you should....  We cannot replace ethics with survival of the fittest? So the domain of data, of theory, must confront also, the domain of action, historical realization. Thus this confusion leaves the theory deeply ambiguous. This is not a small matter. In one view, 'evolution' meant 'survival of the fittest' and was prejudiced against primitive peoples. In another it meant cooperation, in such as Kropotkin, and was seen in a completely different light. Again, in one view, the implication was slow evolution, with a political twist. In another, it meant outright revolution, and historical discontinuity. Etc,...So the question of 'stand up' or 'sit down' is equivocal. Thanks. A great help. Thus different interpretations in the mechanism make a big difference in the outcome.

E. O. Wilson states the issue directly in his claims for the 'biological basis for morality', 

·         If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.

We are so conditioned to Darwinism that the sheer radical nature of this statement is often forgotten, it claims the talisman of full metaphysical explanation. E. O. Wilson is often criticized, but he is consistent. He at least sees what a selectionist theory must explain. Many proponents of Darwinism wish to have their cake and eat it too. If morality can't be rigidly derived in suchwise form selectionism, then the theory fails.  But this viewpoint flies in the face of the entire philosophic tradition, which does not make it wrong, but certainly as yet undemonstrated. We should respect the attempt, like the gesture of a positivist kamikaze to defy Kantian antinomies, to try, but not let vaporware overtake explanation. For this is surely the Achilles heel of the whole subject, and, in any case, Darwinists claim to have a theory of evolution even as they concede its critical test remains to be passed. The problem is that a close look shows that the original assumption of selectionism is taken in proof, when the issue  remains to be proven, leaving the issue where it was. Note the paradox if you bring this home to the present, unethical acts in our own time should be generating further ethical evolution statistically in our own future, and other such paradoxes, absurd!!! Without the mechanism of evolution, you have no grounds for this deduction. This violates the basic intuitions we have about ethics, that they are not settled by general practice, but resist general practice, i.e. failure today must be compensated by retrials of 'should' in the future, etc,...Further this argument fails what every religion insists on in principle, at least, that the behavior and the sincerity of motive are distinct.  Wilson takes this as a conflict of empiricist and transcendental views, and generally adopts a position against such men as Immanuel Kant. The problem is defining what you mean by 'transcendental', and, whatever the definition, illegitimately tailoring observation to fit this definition. Man as man must be known, as an evolutionary creature, who has evolved as the man that he in fact is. It that means he has 'soul' then 'soul' is by definition 'materialist', a point incidentally made clear in the Buddhist tradition that simply bypasses the 'transcendental', as 'religion'. The trap is analogous to finding electromagnetic fields 'supernatural' because not 'material'. They exist, and science has no further problems with naturalism in this regard. Issues of consciousness always founder in this sterile debate over the transcendental versus the material. This, after much criticism of Kant, seems to have been his point, that we can divide 'determinism' and 'freedom' philosophically as a gesture of thought, and this requires the 'transcendental' (by definition) as a domain of 'evolving action' as 'freedom'. Wilson indicts Kant for a failed model of the brain! No such model is present in Kant, only in journals of neurology, a subject about we as yet know little. But the issue of 'freedom' or (or for that matter 'determinism'!!!!) is 'transcendental, by definition, in the sense 'software' can be distinguished from 'hardware'.

Nonetheless, after putting Dobzshanky's idea in formaldehyde, we can broadly accept this 'lingo' as germane to the game afoot! Evolution seems the proper foundation. But the moment we grant it, the whole confusion starts all over again, to the point, one must fear, a terminological revolution number two will be required. The point is to get the basic intuition about evolution straight. The idea of evolution has an obvious rightness to it, as long as we remember that it is still the point-three approximation  to a pi and that it tends to coalesce hidden assumptions behind observational data. As with history, there are degrees of observation, zoom levels. History shows the small scale is often decisive. We must have data to zoom in on to verify these incidents however. And if we consider the issue, 'how history happens', we see the immediate difficulties, while in evolutionary theory, these difficulties tend to swept aside. The issue is fairly simple, the fossil record doesn't really match the claim for natural selection. We must do what historians do, zoom in to find the particulars we had estimated from ill-conceived generalizations. These particulars can't be derived in general, without evidence. A good example is that the extinction of dinosaurs might have be highly influenced by an invading comet. This abrupt punctuation requires specific particulars of historical incident to be discovered, and the result is different from generalized selectionism applied at all times. This task of critique was clearly accomplished in such works as Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, for history, with some rising questions in that  philosopher's mind about evolution.

The debate over natural selection goes on and on and seems more complex that it should be. In the broadest strokes, we can resolve the issue as a best guess by the simplest argument, in one line. Natural selection, in its plainest meaning, before the usual hedging counter that 'it is not the complete answer, etc,..', tends to imply a continuous record of forms over time since the beginning of life. Emergence should be evenly distributed over time. That we don't see. So the question remains up in the air.  That's that. Beware of Darwinists equivocating over this point. (And also beware of exploitations of this factor of 'punctuation' as evidence contradicting evolution). This argument applies only to 'natural selection' pure, in the sense of pure randomness. Anything extra, from this viewpoint, falsifies the basic argument. It is no doubt true that selectionism is part of the picture, as so frequently pointed out (sometimes in distinctions of microevolution and macroevolution, etc,...). But a part of the answer is not really an answer at all. Getting run over by a truck is certainly natural selection, and will influence future evolution in miniscule fashion, but it won't evolve a better brain. 

Related to selectionism, the basic Malthusian context of natural selection, if looked at closely, also suffers flaws. A  recent, very strident, philosophic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher David Stowe, in Darwinian Fairytales, issues a harsh secular rebuke and cries ‘enough’ to theories of evolution, a disconcerting ‘who cares’, and points out the most obvious fact:

If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.

What do we mean by evolution and how can we use the term for our subject?  One problem, as is demonstrated in the beginning of the book on the eonic effect, is the subtle implication of 'universal generalization' that makes many think all evolution is uniform. We live in the first civilization where theories, in the scientific sense, enter the public discourse as possible ideologies, in their implied injunction, 'this is how it is', 'therefore we should do such and such', this being an unstated, semi-conscious assumption. The range of a theory must be defined. In physics, the universal range and time is not evolutionary. Evolution must join, perhaps, the domain of 'self-organization', in the broadest sense, with a time factor implicit in its formulation. And 'what happens' as a result of theory and as a result of free action require separate considerations, yet this is lacking in Darwinian selectionism. Our use of the term 'evolution' in history must be defined, sui generis. We need at the same time to clarify the meaning of evolution as this is applied to the 'descent of man' and his emergence into history. In history we see that values emerge in a fashion quite independent of the proposed theory of natural selection. Nor does survival of the fittest, despite the confusion over claims for the evolution of cooperation, seem up to the job of generating religion. This is obvious from history, but has become lost in the speculative theories imposed on deep time, times unobserved at close hand.

  Here, precisely, the assumption of universal generalization leads Darwinists to simply assume without proof that man evolved through natural selection, assertion without proof, as the study of history must force us to suspect. As Huxley realized, quite late, culture is moving 'against evolution', as it were. Whence this 'change in gears'? In fact, the word is purely descriptive until we specify a mechanism, but that has never been observed at close hand. Evolution could itself 'evolve' and show different processes at different times.

 Thus natural selection flunks its first and most important test, which doesn't mean it's wrong, only that it should be taken as less than 'certainly proven'. Selectionism is simply out of tune with its subject as we move in the realm of man. We are near an old problem, and debate, seen in the fate of positivism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the many critiques of reductionism. Many critiques of reductionism are themselves flawed and its impulse is valid, but likely to prove misleading.  Generally, we can see theory struggling at the frontiers of thermodynamics (toward a real theory of the future beyond the current vaporware) and the transition between cosmology and life. Mechanics is yielding to some unknown form of information science.  Bare inspection of the complexities of DNA, functional computer programs, does not inspire confidence that random changes can produce evolution. What is most surprising is the failure of so many in the social sciences to grasp that there is even a problem. The issue has created a scientific credibility gap. The quality of the responses to criticism are rote denunciation.  We should rightly then, despite a chorus of critics, stand back and reserve judgment and not give natural selection the free ride it is generally granted.

Indeed,  Darwinists wish to rewrite the entire anthropology of man with some dubious notions, incomplete or nonexistent evidence, and little ability on the part of the public to dissent. We should enquire carefully into its foundations, to see if we are really required to accept its conclusions. We soon discover immense difficulties in all theoretical aspect of Darwinism, along with the reasons the rigor of the hard sciences becomes ambiguous in the Life Sciences. . The hold of Darwinism on secular opinion is such that the burden of disproof is put on the critic when the issue should be the other way around.  We should not by any reckoning of real science think we are required to accept at face value the claims for natural selection as proven given the demonstrations current of its tenets. The point deserves emphasis since an immense amount of social science stands on a poor foundation by taking for granted the assertions of biologists. It is important to remember that in science you have a right to hard evidence. While some boast in Nietzschean fashion of Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a book by Daniel Dennett), we should stand back to remember that we are responsible for the effects of our affirmations, for they can have drastic consequences. Darwin's idea is dangerous, for it suggests a strategy of cultural evolution at variance with the ethical advances of civilization, such as they are, and does so without proper evidentiary foundation. That's a terrible brewing scandal for the reputation of science, one its practitioners cannot seem to grasp. To debunk the supernatural is one thing, but to pit one culture, civilization, or race against the other in theory as a derivative of natural selection (and it is no good denying Darwinists do this between the lines) flies in the face of the historical fact of man's efforts to ecumenize, and integrate the entire range of humanity as one.

Darwinism is inadequate on the issues of values and consciousness.  The emergence of values requires direct treatment, and cannot be reduced to numerical or physical models. They simply cannot be factored out in a simplified model. They are intrinsic to the mechanism of historical 'evolution'. The worst offenders here are the sociobiologists, now we hear that natural selection can induce genes for altruism, and the domain of values is essentially an illusion. This is absurd thinking.  We can induce some bibliographical Darwin doubt and then make a fast getaway into our study of historical evolution by  drawing our focus on the 'evolution of civilization', as this is  the only closely sampled  record at the level of centuries that we have of the evolution of anything. There, at least, we see that Darwinism is not appropriate, as T. H. Huxley was one of the first to admit. Evolutionary theory must be on the move now that the world of biochemical complexity is eroding the claims of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, so-called. Many of the claims for slow random evolution won't stand up in the world of regulatory genes switching the developmental processes on and off.  In fact, this side of the heritage of evolution dates back to the nineteenth century and emerges parallel with Darwinism.  These new discoveries have confirmed many of the objections of long-standing critics of selectionism. Inducing some Darwin doubt, will, as a matter of fact, make you a Darwin student. The parallel study of Darwinism (we never said it wasn't interesting!) and historical theory makes a splendid dialectic. So, we need make no apologies for heresy.

These types of  problems were remarkably foreseen before Darwin by Kant, in another context. Kant's famous Critiques have difficulties of their own,  but they do confront the real difficulties and suggest that the pure empiricism of materialist evolution will founder sooner or later. The opposite is not spiritual, or the invocation of the 'transcendent', but the difficulties of dualism never go away through positivistic bravado.  In relation to morality, Kant demands an ethical will that can act. How could this evolve? It is futile to pick one virtue, 'altruism', and ask how this could arise mechanically. What about the full spectrum of meaningful 'acts and choices'? We are stuck in nineteenth century positivism and behaviorism. Kant would have been a better discipline for evolutionary theorists (in fact, he was for many early scientists), for he lived in the generation that saw Newton fresh, and gave birth to Biblical Criticism, granted the dangers of metaphysical conceptions or the arguments by design, yet foresaw the limitations of biological theories almost before the fact. There is no religious agenda looking at loopholes in order to fudge on theory. Although evolutionists pride themselves on being liberated from metaphysics, their theory encloses the Big Three, and will promptly fail or conceal its failure in ideology. One, two, three, the theory goes through three red lights, the Kantian antinomies of divinity, soul, free will, with a strangely overconfident metaphysical omniscience. The question of 'soul' is fatally ambiguous, but the question can be translated downward to psychology. A theory of evolution requires a theory of psychology complete and ready to ship, otherwise what is you evolving  theory about? Yet psychology is still a developing subject moving in parallel with evolutionary speculation.  And how could we speak about a theory of evolution is the issue of 'free will' is undecidable? Our theory will itself be either undecidable, until the issue is resolved, or an ad hoc declaration one way or the other, taken as an assumption.  

Lamarck is often ridiculed for his theory of the mechanism of evolution, but Darwinian selectionism is hardly less peculiar. The giraffe's neck we are to presume arises through natural selection and survival of the fittest. Near vast fields of gazelle, wildebeest, elephants, in primeval savannahs, apparently with no nutritional difficulties, a Malthusian struggle of giraffes takes place selecting those with longer necks, that they might not starve in droves in a competition for survival. Is this theory serious? Part of the problem is the failure to visualize what requires explanation. A strange incoherence haunts the whole theory. 

Many will now grant that natural selection is only part of the answer. No doubt. But what part? To grant this much essentially retreats from claiming anything. A man could be run over by a truck. Granted that is natural selection, but it is not evolution. The reality is probably reversed. Competition or survival of the fittest may just as well lead away from 'evolution'. Part of the confusion rises from the sheer desperation of survival of primitive men at all times. If a species becomes extinct, then clearly there is no evolution. But this is not the resolution of the evolutionary mechanism. This sense of survival is itself evolutionary, and colors the theory, which is immersed in man's own evolution, and therefore not a theory in a metalanguage of true description.  

Evolution and Religion

s our critique of Darwinism secular or religious? One should not have to say, since this creates a 'party line' effect that is inconsistent, although in broad strokes it is secular: it comes after the Protestant Reformation and Thirty Years War clocked against historical time. One thing we forget is that ancient religionists spoke not of divinity, but of the Tetragrammaton. The use of the term 'god', please note, is forbidden in the study of the eonic effect! (Cf. the Introduction) This is neither theistic or atheistic. The word is so confused that Darwinists understandably recoil from the sophistries here, only to fall in their own ditch. 

·         The 'Eonic' Evolution of Religion:   Why do the great religions all seem to start (restart) in parallel ca. –600? In fact, science,  philosophy, and a great deal more, all spring from this enigmatic period of classical antiquity. What is the enigma of the Old Testament? The irony of our subject will be to find the ‘evolution’ in religion itself!

·         The world of Biblical Criticism is transforming our understanding of the history of monotheism. R. L. Fox, The Unauthorized Version (NY: Knopf, 1992), Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament (NY: Harper Collins, 1995), Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (NY: Summit Books, 1987), Hershel Shanks, Ancient Israel, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988) On Zarathustra, cf. Norman Cohn’s Cosmos and Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale, 1993).

  The question of secularism is difficult, and if the category is so broad, what does the word 'secular' mean? Is it a question of beliefs, or of historical periodization?  The word almost lacks meaning, for the Protestant Reformation initiated the 'secular age'. In any case, we tend to assume the secular is championed by the rise of modern science, and that therefore anything and everything must be 'scientific' to be up to date. It would be nice if it were that simple, but it isn't. Science produces theories, and theories are not objects of behavioral imitation or tablets of the law. If you think natural selection produced the descent of man, this will influence your behavior, often in a negative fashion. If you think natural selection didn't do it all, your behavior will change again. Note the relation of past and future, and the transition from passive process to 'man with theory and future expectation'. This is not physics, and we cannot predict. Darwinism is completely blind to this logical trap. Religion, whatever else it is, constitutes our action for the future, including what we 'should' do. We see the relation of theory to practice is confused, a sign the theory is confused, for it doesn't specify its domain. Therefore, sorry, no theory. Sorry!

 Was Luther secular? He was a very 'modern' revolutionary, or he was a very antique religionist.... Here again the point: although modernism generates an intense strain of anti-religion, a religious renewal was one of the first 'modern' events. It should be therefore unsurprising that religion moves in parallel with the rise of the scientific stream, taken as the 'secular' stream. Religion is also a moving target, though claiming to represent tradition, is shifting its ground. Ask any New Ager, they will inform you of as much criticism of religion as any Darwinist, for they wish for a new spiritual creativity of the future, etc...

And all this is quite Euro-centered, what about non-monotheistic religions? What is religion? The term 'religious' is almost as bad as 'secular'. But religion is already visible in Sumerian times, and the temple structures had roots deep in the Neolithic, to say nothing of the world of the paleolithic shaman.

This obsessive secularism does not do justice to the Enlightenment period whose rise was not identically the same as these other two, science and religion, and whose generality encompasses a far broader foundation that the weakened strains of social science that rise in its wake. And into the fray arrives, several generations later, the first rate idea of evolution, the revolutionary discoveries of the fossil, and the second rate 'science for dummies' Darwinist theory claiming this evidence as a triumph for secularism now taken as a talisman of belief. One establishment replaces another even in Huxley's lifetime. The formula works well til it stops working, at which point you can become puzzled. One problem is that one might associate the idea of progress, ideas of temporal succession, with the emergence of 'truth', preferably scientific. That works in the hard sciences to a first approximation, but with theories of evolution, the question is not so simple. Theories of evolution, especially if they are applied to society, might be regressive, or denature a greater totality in the ambition to reduce everything to a consistent whole. Debates over religion and evolution tend essentially to futile bickering over sawdust definitions of the so-called 'naturalistic explanation', and the 'naturalistic fallacy', which is probably a fallacy, but only in our own minds, not nature's. Since nature is still a mystery, the argument seems apt to go astray, values are braided with evolution, look at history.

But the final irony is that evolution will become a foundation for a new post-religious religious consciousness! 

Knowledge is primitive, science an exploration. The basic issues of thermodynamics are barely unraveled. Darwin's achievement (a genuine new perspective on nature) was to point to the context of evolution with its strong suggestion of 'naturalistic explanation', which he then took as 'natural selection', which looks to be a sort of 'default starting point' open to possible extension, revision or falsification. If natural selection fails, evolution doesn't fall with it. Nor is the logical alternative some supernatural explanation. Nor is the prestigious apparition of  advanced models of population genetics a recommendation. They assume what is to be proven. If Darwinism failed tomorrow, on the basis of new evidence, this would be a victory for science, not religion. The debate tends to be a frozen stalemate. The point is that the balance of the evidence points strongly toward evolution, but not necessarily now toward natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution. Confusion over this point is endless and often arises because 'natural selection' and 'naturalistic explanation' tend to blur together. Natural selection is a double entendre, it is always true by definition, every generation, for some reason probably natural, shows a selection of those who came before passing into those who come after. Claims for natural selection are too fuzzy to issue the metaphysical decrees Darwinists have gotten in the habit of pronouncing to the public. Darwinism must produce a genuine post-positivistic resolution of the problem of the evolution of morality, and this it has not done.

Western monotheism forever loses its arguments with science because it posits a 'spirit' against the material. In spite of our criticism of Darwinism, a close look shows a commitment in principle to reductionism in the best sense. Thus 'spirit' is real in practice, but then it must find its place in the context of reductionism, and then be honest if it can't find it. Strangely, this argument can be stood on its head. Science demands the non-existence of 'soul' on material grounds. On may as well deny the existence of electro-magnetic fields because they are non-material. This is mostly a confusion of language in which old-fashioned religious language is sandbanked and ends up claiming exemption to the laws of physics in terms of basic psychology.

The world of the Buddhist does not make this mistake, for issue of the 'spirit' is mostly talk, mental junk that disappears in meditation, decayed language in religious propaganda systems, the 'body' of man includes these aspects as material considerations in a phenomenology of life, nirvana the cessation of life, soul. Buddhist considerations of God, soul, and free will, are a far deeper challenge to Darwinism. And this ancient systems, at their best, distinguished 'soul' and 'spirit'. But the 'soul' factor in these non-monotheistic religions is, at least originally, a material entity, the domain of 'samsara'. Liberation is beyond soul. In the West, 'salvation' confuses 'soul' as non-material immortality. The usage is thus nearly hopeless, the question gibberish. But the denial of soul, now the object of much neo-religious pastiche, nonetheless bids fair to be a problem for selectionist evolutionism. In the age of software confronting hardware, this distinction is seen to have accompanied science all along, and is clearly to be embedded in the very systematics used to create 'materialist' physics. If that sounds outlandish, consider the views of Barrow and Tippler in The Cosmological Anthropic Principle. They even cite Aristotle's De Anima, and pull a rabbit of a software interpretation out of a hat with a software version of the idealist Schelling! Times are changing. 

Part of the confusion lies in the fuzzy half-truth that lurks in the primordial versions of religious history, and the decline in their right understanding. Modern theology has forgotten the great Tetragrammaton, whose lore indicated ancient men well understood the dangers of the 'divine names'. Now the terms are thrown about by rival churches like slogans and soap advertisements. It is an ironic result that a theory of evolution should end being a sort of detergent for the terms of metaphysical reference.  Cosmological theism is one thing, theistic historicism quite another. The latter must reckon with the rising tide of Biblical Criticism, and has evidentiary problems of its own, beside what the philosopher of  science Karl Popper, now with many fundamentalist fans, called the 'metaphysical research program' of evolution. Popper's views should be both welcomed and critized. But the issue of the 'metaphysical research program' deserves more than one perspective. To eliminate 'meta-physics' is not the same as debunking, alone escaping, 'metaphysics'. To declare war on the entire metaphysical heritage of man and substitute poor theories is not really science. Popper seems to have sensed the difficulty with his trenchant, but one-sided, attack on this factor in his famous critique of Marxism. But the resulting idea of the 'Oedipus effect' of a theory is as present in evolutionary thinking. We must sort out the relationship of 'free activity' and the process wishing scientific formulation. No scientific theory has ever done this. Therefore, the elimination of all 'metaphysical research programs from science is a bit hard on man, and results in the current autopsy of Frankenstein that passes for both psychology, and evolutionary history. In any case, metaphysical research as a bugaboo is the scientist's problem, not humanity's. Fitting humanity into the straightjacket of Darwinist natural selection doesn't work, and the sooner scientists do the smart thing Napoleon did in Moscow, head home, the less discredit they will bring on the social sciences, if not the scientific revolution.

·         As much as one might wish to escape the past and put ancient things on a sound scientific basis, the effort to do so provokes all the difficulties of metaphysics in reverse gear.  Much Darwinian thinking is at least as good as ordinary philosophic speculation. It is the false claims that such views are 'science'.  In Created From Animals, James Rachels explores the ground of the moral implications of Darwinism. This interesting book is proof that Darwinists are not the moral monsters some wish to make them, but typifies the illusion that Darwinism has an edge over the labors of philosophers in the resolution of issues of facts and values. The challenge indicated to 'traditional morality' in his study is all very well, but the challenge must be to produce a new evolution toward a higher morality or consciousness. The question of man's origins is of the greatest interest, yet in many ways irrelevant, as far as that is concerned. But he is quite correct in echoing the surprise and countering the resistance many felt in Darwin's time at the association of man with the animal kingdom. But if it was shocking to many at the time, it seems trivial to us now. So what? That man shows a complex relationship to the animal kingdom should be a grand thought, but what does it really tell us about man? We could tip our hat in passing to Darwin here for his determination to bully through, without being pressured into the many, endless, incorrect deductions made from this insight into man's animal-to-human nature. The whole question of 'human nature' can degenerate into a regressive view of man. Evolutionists, to sweeten what they imagine a bitter pill to be served up to humanity, often pontificate about shattering the public's illusions. This genre seems to have started with Sigmund Freud, who, sensing perhaps the weakness in his theory, listed himself along with Copernicus, Newton, (and Darwin) as another victor over man's false consciousness. It's mostly wishful thinking. Theories of man, society, history, and, finally, evolution, don't 'engage the clutch' the way such analysis does in the hard sciences.  Many commentators on evolution have virtually appointed themselves prophets of humanity in their comments on religion, which generally show a D- in basic library work into its history.

E. O. Wilson in Consilience takes an extreme view of the issues, in part because of the assumption natural selection is established:

If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.

Great, but where's the proof? This proof is to come in the twenty first century, and anyone who disagrees is either a postmodernist, premodernist, or wooly philosopher. Wilson's position is testimony to a Darwinian triumph, that they are extreme is no longer apparent. Wilson strangely lumps together Kant, Moore, and Rawls ( Wilson's bete noire with Rawls over the years is a strange quirk, and revealing of a conservative agenda). The division of philosophy and science is a positivistic derivative in overspecialized educational systems and is meaningful enough in the context of scientific practice trying to extricate itself from many quagmires, but in the final analysis against the backdrop of history as a whole has little meaning. Philosophy's stock rises and falls, but remains as a basic counsel to science (and vice versa), since the two are the same, natural philosophy. The biological basis of morality is an entirely open question, but requires a very exact theory of evolution, one that Darwinian selectionism can't provide.

Confusion over the conflict of religion and science, or evolution, perhaps forgets that religion in the sense of 'monotheistic historicism' was really a primitive 'scientific hypothesis' dressed in myth. This is perhaps a stretch, but in this context Darwinism was not a foundation, but a dialectical counter-thesis, in the 'dialectical' sense. We cannot deprive Darwinism of its historic challenge to teleology that is present in early religious myth and in Aristotle. That, however, does not make it necessarily 'correct' in a linear progression of   'truth emerging' from time A to time A+. Modern science consistently challenges Aristotle, and all teleology. But a closer look shows that while this was the right medicine for physics, the case in biology is less clear, or still unresolved, and that this is really a creative renewal leading to a new a higher form of understanding, in which the 'facts of the case' are more swiftly arrived at through this play of oppositions. This tends to confuse many into thinking the most recent phase represents an automatic association of Darwinism and 'modernism', but it might not work out that way.

The issues need some common sense. Who knows? It is always good to keep irons in several fires, and always adopt a 'dialectical failsafe'.  This is especially true of the ambiguous venture of 'positivism', with its fierce skepticism, and so on. Much is learned, but like pearl diving, you must come up for air.   Especially with a subject as confusing as 'evolution', it is unwise to claim certainty about anything. The obsession to claim natural selection as proven is a sure sign of a man with a guilty conscience. Forget for a moment the checklist of sophistries about selectionism any critic is supposed to answer, forget Darwin ever existed for a moment, and consider other viewpoints systematically. But who was this Darwin?

The modern mind has forgotten that Christian doctrine was a political compromise to silence these dragons in 'ethical dualism' and its gnostic degenerations. Thus any theistic thread of evolutionism must start from scratch. We see the clue to Darwinism. If it is that wicked why did such unwicked men bother? Standing back we see the historical reality of Darwinism, more a cultural evolution of religion into secularism in search of real man, religious or not. It was just this 'from scratch' renewal, fated to zigzag dialectically. But remember Nietzsche, one of the first Darwin casualties.

·         Evolution and Religion

One of the ironies of history is that the onset of Darwinism, by denying the existence of potential historical directionality, itself changed historical direction, and is almost better seen as a social initiative against the backdrop of world civilization. This tends to lend tenacity to all discussions, debates, and dialectical interchanges, for it seems that it is an issue of progress or retrogression. The results are like a new 'religion'. It is interesting that the term 'dialectic' in its original sense, although vitiated by its many confusions, arose as a way to deal with these deadlocked issues. For debate tends to follow a natural 'dialectic', that is, go from A to not-A to 'neither A  not-A'. This is inevitable in subjects that are not logically axiomatic and cannot derive theorems from assumptions, they zigzag. We can see that 'dialectic', a term we won't use (except that it has a history) is closely related to 'directionality', but not teleology. As in a tiller, or cybernetic mechanism, we get undershoot and overshoot. We have been critical of Darwinism, but its historical effect was extraordinary, and makes better eonic than scientific sense. The 'Wham', like the coming about of a ship's boom, was a massive dose of social change. But the direction of history was better set in the beginning, perhaps, of historical evolution, if we can figure out what that direction was to recreate it in the present. But that we cannot really do, for its 'religious' emphasis has drifted from its initial conditions (note the language of chaos theory), claiming a 'tradition' that is not really there. This doesn't quite make sense. But the study of religion and evolution are destined we can see to collide and end in a stalemate. It is a complex question indeed. But as one example, we cannot use a theory of evolution to restrict the full inclusion of humanity as one man, something natural selectionist thinking tends to do (but not in the minds of most evolutionists, who quite rightly rush to handle the difficulty, with nothing in the theory to justify it). The birth of religion set the tone: man as man is one, defy that with disorderly evolutionism and endless troubles must come your way.

• The 'Eonic' Evolution of Religion   Why do the great religions all seem to start in parallel ca. –600? In fact, science,  philosophy, and a great deal more, all spring from this enigmatic period of classical antiquity. What is the enigma of the Old Testament? The irony of our subject will be to find the ‘evolution’ in religion itself!

Evolutionary biologists are often surprised at the tenacity of religious resistance to their views, but the reason is not far away. Replacing the injunctions of ethical conduct with the implied should of 'natural selection' or any value-free theory is simply a confusion about what a theory is. Occidental religion rose as a failsafe against the degenerations in the Roman Empire. The audience of the theatre of Dionysus in Athens watched Sophocles. The audience in the Coliseum watched gladiators. A great burst of progress simply evaporated. This effect in perfect timing with the eonic effect explains much that a secular age forgets in its quite different revolt against theocratic pre-secularism.   

Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

Religion is not an issue of matter and spirit, but of consciousness. The very solid tradition of Buddhism gives us a hint that the real foundation, at a moment of religious crisis, lies not in the supernatural, but in the domain of consciousness. The 'spirit' of man, the 'sacred', vanish in Buddhism behind the progression of consciousness through self-consciousness toward some mystery beyond consciousness, nirvana. Make of that what we will, the distinction of consciousness and 'self-consciousness', lurks in all the great traditions until the rise of scientific psychology, seeking its own way no doubt, suddenly finds itself without any basis in the issue of consciousness, this because of its reductionist project. This distinction is the crux of the difficulty, a big subject,  totally absent from Darwinism, or anything known to current psychology, although it is not mysterious. We cannot produce good theories, because we cannot even manifest our own potential, let alone explain that fact. And much confusion over religion arises here also. The place of religion in theories of evolution is complex, for history shows religion in two aspects, sourcing and realization periods. We see the difference in the contrast of proto-Judaism and Christianity, or the ur_Buddhism and later Buddhism-Hinduism. One approach to this is to consider the transformations of consciousness.  Theories of Evolution have a problem with consciousness. Man has a complex potential that is not a form of adaptation. The problem that history shows is still more complex: the distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness, the perennial stable of the great sutras of India. We see the distinction in the act of attention, as opposed to passive seeing. This distinction is still present in Hegel (in a different form), but disappears in the rise of positivism, although that is an issue of almost of terminology. There is no reason current forms of psychology cannot revive or rediscover the issue.  Julian Jaynes, in his Origins of Consciousness stumbles on the distinction, but confuses it with a speculative 'emergence of consciousness' in the second to first millennium B.C. This distinction is used generically in the study of the eonic pattern to distinguish between mechanisms of evolution and evolutionary processes that evolve because they are 'anti-mechanical'. Is this metaphysical? No! It is interesting that the original yogis of India in the time of Buddha produced  a 'materialist' psychology. For the issue was not the 'spirit' of man, but beyond that. This 'spirit' could be nothing of the kind, for it was clearly in the bounds of nature. We can consider the difference in octane degrees of some fuel.  Much confusion arises from calling this factor 'spiritual'.  Western thought tends to split into idealism and materialism, leaving different perspectives on a basic unity sandbanaked in metaphysical collision. Darwinists frequently cry foul, or denounce 'New Age Mysticism', on issues of consciousness. But the distinctions of consciousness are a gateway or potential bridge between a positivist reductionist psychology and the history of man as seen in practice, in the antiquity as great as the shaman.

The world of Biblical Criticism is transforming our understanding of the history of monotheism. R. L. Fox, The Unauthorized Version (NY: Knopf, 1992), Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament (NY: Harper Collins, 1995), Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (NY: Summit Books, 1987), Hershel Shanks, Ancient Israel, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988) On Zarathustra, cf. Norman Cohn’s Cosmos and Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale, 1993).

The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in Consilience ridicules Kant (a failed model of the brain) and claims the resolution of all the problems of ethics. It is worth recalling who Kant was. A student of Kant might in fact simply dive in a foxhole near the chronic debate, and look as a skeptic   ("this theory will come to a bad end") at Darwinian claims to exempt themselves from the rigors of metaphysics and look carefully, indeed expect theory to fail promptly and enter dialectical deadlock, near his various antinomies, or hotspots, divinity, soul, and free will. Modern positivism with its narrow claims of materialism is taken for granted, yet it cannot resolve these issues (religionists can't either, and this argument is no rejection of 'materialism'). We can see that theory enters these three quagmires in turn,  the first reveals itself in the debate with religionists, they will soon have another with Buddhists on the second, and find themselves in hot water on the third: the mechanism of natural selection must either void 'free will' or generate ethical freedom, etc,.... It is interesting that the various theories of sociobiology close the circle on the third difficulty (which doesn't prove them wrong).   

Unfortunately, without natural selection, we cannot conclude all the things the theory supposedly concludes. In a typical version, from Darwin's own words (from Benjamin Farrington's What Darwin Really Said, p.87):

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.

Note, again, that Darwin goes so far as to speak of the 'law of natural selection', and its discovery. Fatal language. Darwin's thesis is not a 'law of nature' in which natural selection is the 'force' replacement. Such a statement fails on the first step. Note the Newtonian ghost in the background. To the extent there is a 'force' replacement, or equational version of evolution, it is in the later population models, and these are quick up in the air, hybrids of statistics, mechanics, thermodynamics. The actual behavior of these populations is not so simple to visualize over such long time periods.  Such equations look impressive, but do not bear conviction.

Darwinian selectionism is a dialectical counterargument, but not proof, concerning issues of design, teleology, even the more limited 'historical directionality', whatever the latter means. Indeed, selectionism probably fails, leaving the broad context of evolution, which is compatible with different interpretations. In fact, it is not even a counterargument, since the issue, separated from teleology, can go both ways. Directionality is not the same as teleology and may only be evidence of a new, different, or unknown natural mechanism. These also bypass the perpetual firestorm of issues of 'design', which is not exactly our topic, although we can pass in their vicinity with a usefully different perspective from both parties to debate. But we must distinguish 'hard proof' from 'balance of the evidence'. And separate issues of 'design' from theism as such.

Thus we need, beside criticism, to rescue Darwin from himself here, considering 'what he really meant', or at least what we really mean. The 'law of natural selection' is quite an apt 'error'. Confronted with assertions that nature was so designed as to show Biblical creation in seven days, Darwin seems to mean, look at all this evidence of 'evolution'. The 'argument by design' doesn't add up. Etc,... In its context, Darwin's version is overwhelming. All those different finches and turtles in one little island in the Pacific, doesn't add up to say these are separate creations, as indeed men still insisted in his lifetime. Out of context, it begins to fail, for it passes seamlessly from observation at particular points to generalization at all times, and that doesn't specify the difference between random emergence, or some 'force'. If you want a law of nature for evolution you find yourself bivouacked in the vicinity of thermodynamics attempting a correct derivation that does justice to physics reductionism and biology both, and there you find such people engaged in the hard uphill mathematical toil as Stuart Kauffman with his At Home in the Universe, or Ilya Prignone with Order from Chaos. The 'force' disappears as a phantom and turns into a complex consideration of some new and different kind. You also find people like Karl Popper, who in The Poverty of Historicism, unwittingly dealt with the overlap of 'evolution' and 'history' and critiqued the idea of 'evolution' as 'law' in terms of the old-fashioned debate over 'historicism' dating back to the nineteenth century. There the 'unique incident' and the 'universal generalization' collide and maul each other, leaving evolution to some new category of combined 'incident' and 'generalization', indeed, the category of 'self-organization' seems to fit this middle rubric. Popper's version is also the grundge point where theories of evolution turn into theories of history and theories of history into ideology and everyone wants to use their theory to take over the government.

One aspect is that an evolutionary system not compatible with selectionism might give the appearance of directionality, without being 'end directed'. 'Self-organization' is one idea that might foot the bill here. Such questions are difficult to solve with current theories. Issues of 'evolutionary progress' also confound the discussion. The idea of progress, again, is not necessarily the same as a notion of evolutionary directionality, and  is essentially one of cultural evolution backdated to organismic evolution, there to confound discussion. We can rescue the idea of progress for some form of cultural evolution, but its place as a name for an 'evolutionary force' is perhaps justly criticized. But the idea of progress confuses, if applied in sloppy fashion, the passive emergence of evolutionary entities, and the 'evolution' of free activity of man in culture. This activity might claim 'progress' to justify a self-interested future, vitiating the integrity of the idea as some phantom historical 'force' disguising ideology. The idea ends by suffering complete discredit because of its ideological abuses or commitments. The idea of progress was born as a challenge of the early modernists against the static antiquity that stood in front of them. 'History is on the move', and so on. Was this (??) evolution or their own free choice? This was a clear ideological script, and an appropriate one in its context, soon changing its meaning, and probably hopeless if taken out of context and applied without qualification to the development of organisms in deep time. The point is to escape this distraction of bad terminology to look at the evolutionary record without preconceptions.

Macroevolution: A Pattern of Universal History

·         The search for a pattern of Universal History has been a long one. The perception of the Eonic Effect shows the issue’s ironic resolution, as a process of ‘abstract evolution’. What does the word 'evolution' mean? Once perceived, this difficult structure causes many of the confusions of historical understanding to fall into place, simply disappear, and accounts for many facts of our view of the past,  or notice in passing and take for granted, but which are actually somewhat mysterious. Why is so much historical advance compressed into isolated areas and periods? Why is the advance of civilization intermittent? Why do the great religions suddenly consolidate around or after –600? Why is the period around –600 so fertile in advances of all kinds simply as a function of time? Why does the classical period show synchronous multitasking parallelism? How account for the sudden rise of the West after 1500? Why is democracy correlated with the pattern? Why did we invent the term modern? Why is there a polarization of Left and Right? Why do many of the most difficult art forms show eonic correlation? Such facts, and a host of others, show that an historical dynamic of evolution is directly in front of us, if we can correctly understand it. Debate over issues of evolution has deprived secular thought of a natural perspective on Universal History, and yet, recast in part as a perception of complex systems, this is the proper antidote  to religious and secular controversy over origins, naturalism, and misplaced reductionism, one that can clarify the evolutionary context of directionality.

 At when Darwinian theory relating to natural selection begins to show its weaknesses, a sense of puzzlement often besets students of evolution, making them cling to the fallacy buried in Darwin's theory.  The difficulty is understandable, in one way, for if the oversimplification of selectionism is seen, the inherent complexity, and ambiguity, of evolution confronts our quest with issues that are almost unknowable. The desire to hold an idea about unobservable deep time is a way of playing ostrich about the real history that we do see, where the idea of evolution suggests something else. The problem is that Darwinism is designed to answer to reductionism, and invoke no laws, forces, or processes that will not square with known mechanisms. This puts a premium on local random evolution. Macroevolution is therefore rewritten as microevolution. But that tactic won't succeed with history anymore, and it makes not difference that our 'evolution of civilization' is, at first sight, quite different from the 'evolution of the organism'. For the basics are the same, the organism and the population, then, the individual and the culture. The resolution of this question  must be empirical, and empirical in a very short time frame, at the level of centuries. For the eonic effect shows us high speed evolution in bursts, that operates far beyond the range of the 'stupid evolution' implied in natural selection. Finally, this is not a question of the spiritual or the material. We can see that this eonic effect, as far as we can tell, is a naturalistic process, although it does impinge on all questions of values. No use calling this crazy either. It is the Darwinist who makes things up. 

 But the tenacity of the basic fallacy preempts seeing what the evidence now plainly shows, a global evolution via hotspots, operating as directional progression in a series of phases. It is interesting that this pattern is nothing of our invention here, for it began to be noticed in the nineteenth century. Karl Jaspers almost got it, but became confused by teleological thinking, which can be fatal. But the data has improved and reached a point where we can see more clearly what is going on. 

Here the study of the eonic effect can help to resolve the question, for we can construct an empirical perspective on evolution, using simple methods of periodization, that will bring out the unseen dynamic operating in the emergence of man from the Paleolithic. This is not what you think, nor can you jump to conclusions without a careful study of what is said. 

But first, how can we say that we see 'evolution' in history itself? The question is insulting. Are we blind? We think we have evolved into free men, are fully in charge of our history, and know everything about it. We don't. And physics as an expertise doesn't answer the questions about it (although it is a foundation for a future understanding of the clear dynamics in history). We cannot achieve a 'science of history', in the classic sense, but we can approach its study informed by scientific means. It is ironic that sociobiologists have fallen into the old trap of historical scientism that Karl Popper criticized. We can skirt his critiques ourselves, to find a unique hybrid of the macro-evolutionary and the micro-evolutionary, now translated into the more familiar terms of historical action and process. 

The answer is that we are hardly able to visualize history, have many myths through which we filter perception, and are confronted by so- called history and the legacy of the philosophy of history which both in their opposite ways distract us from fresh insights into what we are seeing. But, with a little effort, we can spot the quite remarkable 'eonic effect' quite clearly, as a sequence of transitions, with a clear indication of the global character, and intermittent action, of this kind of evolutionary process. It is an extraordinary reality, yet the interpretation is very natural. There are very few ways to evolve anything on the surface of a planet, and the eonic effect gives us a partial snapshot of one such process, probably therefore the main, and only process. There can be no going back to the selectionist nonsense that haunts and threatens to corrupt the social sciences with bogus theories of the evolution of ethics. This evolution of ethics, in a very advanced stage, is right in back of us!! The problem is we are inside of it, and subject to its processes. That means we must find a hybrid concept between 'freedom and determinism' to analyze what we see, for any statement of dynamic must collide with our ability to act freely in the present. If we can get over this paradox, we can see the eonic effect as an answer to our quest for a universal history, with a glimpse, and a clue, as to how this connects history to evolution. 

Challenging Darwinism is hard for many, yet, in fact, we need hardly concern ourselves with it. The time has come to change our perspectives on evolution, and be rid of the gross fallacies now proposed by sociobiologists. We cannot refute what Darwinists claim, but we are under no obligation to accept this thesis as applied to the descent of man, and we must maintain our suspicions that what we see in the eonic effect will, in some fashion, also apply to the emergence of homo sapiens. The evolution of ethics, consciousness, and all the complex factors that make up man, simply cannot be reduced to the junky and pseudo-scientific models that are currently offered. They don't work! All we have to do is look at what nature shows us. 

NOTE:  The search for an evolutionary theory of the descent of man must match the implied questions of the philosophy of history, for which no scientism will suffice, and for which a theory of natural selection will not work. Philosophy seems to scare many, but there is no difference between evolutionary thinking and the philosophy of history. The idea of evolution can rescue the philosophy of history from its problems, and vice versa the philosophy of history can rescue (human) evolution from its difficulties. But reductionist theories have reached the end of the line, as far as becoming a general social philosophy (not their purpose anyway). We need not renounce reductionism, but we cannot efface the factual basis of a future and properly conceived naturalism that really does justice to the facts. And these facts show us a form of macroevolution that doesn't correspond to the Darwinian.

To study history is more practical, and honest, although the range of data is incomplete.  We are left with the also controversial search for a resolution of universal history, as a pattern of universal history. The search for this, for a pattern of Universal History has been a long one. It is a question that tends to founder in historicism, but we can infer that there must be one. The better perception given by modern archaeology gives a new line of attack, with an answer that is both unexpected, and yet just right. The perception of the Eonic Effect shows the issue’s resolution, as a process of ‘abstract evolution’. We simply had lacked a sufficient interval of historical observation.  To see this pattern is not the same as explaining it, we must explore its contours, and then attempt to model it. Our data is still fragmentary. We must carefully explore the dangers of 'historicism', 'historical inevitability', and distinguish ideas of evolution, historical law, free activity, and the relations of mechanism and value. Yet the answer is right in front of us. Once perceived, this structure shows a stunning coherence embedded in the random appearance of world history and causes many of the confusions of historical understanding to fall into place, simply disappear, and accounts for many facts of our view of the past,  or notice in passing and take for granted, but which are actually somewhat mysterious.Why is so much historical advance compressed into isolated areas and periods? Why is the advance of civilization intermittent? Why is the period around –600 so fertile in advances of all kinds simply as a function of time? Why do the great religions suddenly consolidate around or after this date? Why does the classical period show synchronous multitasking parallelism? Why do many of the most difficult art forms show eonic correlation? Debates over evolution are confounded by issues of religion. How does the ‘evolution of religion’ fit into our pattern? What light can the eonic effect show on this question? What were the composers of the Old Testament really up to? Why do cyclical myths, especially that of the Great Year, beguile and confuse us? We can easily resolve these confusions in the simplest eonic explanation. Men have always noticed the eonic effect, but didn’t have enough historical data to make sense of what they were seeing. Why does world history produce ‘middle ages’ two times in a row after an interval of acceleration? Why do we speak of medievalism at all? How account for riddle of the modern, the sudden rise of the West after 1500, and why is the solution macrohistorical? Why is democracy, the rise of science, philosophy, and much else, correlated with the pattern? What is the place of the Reformation, the rise of freedom. and the Enlightenment in world history?

These factors, and many more, that we tend to analyze ‘causally’ in isolation suddenly fall into place around a single phenomenology of the eonic effect. Macrohistorical theories have often suffered metaphysical confusions as historicism invoking spurious ‘forces of history’. We can obviate these difficulties with a rigorous argument through simple periodization and by invoking the simple tactic of using a distinction of ‘discrete’ and ‘continuous’ sequencing. If we can detect a punctuating 'derandomizer' at work in history we have a clue to the inherent dynamic, to see evolution at close hand. Surprising, but that is what we find. Although this small corner of the greater stream of evolution cannot resolve the issues of emergence in deep time, it must impinge directly on all aspects of the descent of man and enforce a new perspective not just on evolution but on the transformation between evolutions, between evolution and history. The reason is that we assume ‘evolution’ to be random, although we have never seen it in action. Our own history gives a better example, if we can resolve the interplay of randomness, free activity, determinism, and ‘freedom’, whether realized or not.

This seems complex, our method is ultra simple, like that of the economist measuring economic cycles. And if this seems controversial, we must back it up with evidence, please note. This we can do. But we must zoom in and out over the entire field to ‘see’ world history as one whole, and map a frequency pattern. If we adopt this tactic of periodization as indicated, the data shows meaningful sequence and correlation, for a reason we cannot easily determine, but whose overall logic is transparent. Many argue about evolution, the student of the eonic effect has an edge, he has 'seen evolution', albeit in a partial form, and can spot the errors in much evolutionary theory at once.

The 'eonic effect' is, in one way, almost a restatement of the obvious, just one step beyond ordinary history into the macro-historical, and is the bare minimum of a 'Big History' argument, significant in itself, and useful as a foil to reconsider the idea of evolution. Then it ceases to be obvious, for we only think we know and see our history, even as we discover a clear picture of 'evolution in action'. What are we to conclude if data at the level of centuries doesn't square with inferences about large tracts of time in the unobserved past? Be wary of the evidentiary basis of Darwinian theory. The catch is the porous nature of the data, and the high probability of short term action processes, that are different from the average perception seen in the record. History shows multiple examples of this effect, and we would do well do wonder if similar processes did not occur in the evolution of man.  Current arguments in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology make wild assumptions about the descent of man, then reapply those to cultural evolution, the result is completely misleading. History shows us the nature of ethics, religion, we simply have to learn how to understand them. Most of the great foundational advances in the last five thousand years happen at high speed, followed by a slower period of a different type.

·         The eonic effect deals with a new approach to historical evolution, and demonstrates a non-random pattern in full view, just behind us in world history. It is very easy, dead easy, to demonstrate a non-random pattern in history, yet its implications are considerable... 

Historical Dynamics. The eonic effect is a pattern of universal history suggesting an operative macro-historical dynamic and is seen using a simple 'intermittent' or discrete-continuous pattern and model arrived at through periodization, and enforces a 'walkthrough' of the evidence of history.  This is controversial, and you can be as skeptical as you like, but the exercise of historical theory is illuminating and  we can  produce a whole spectrum of historical theories, wholesale. Most of all it will demonstrate how poorly Darwinism deals with historical evidence. And how well the idea of evolution, taken differently, does fit the historical evidence. 
Oedipus Effects. The Catch-22 in Darwinian theories of natural selection is the effect that it will have on our behavior: if we assume that natural selection produced the brain we will become passive in the attempt to fulfill our behavioral potential, since, by assumption, letting things be in the evolutionary sense will produce future benefits. If such nonsense ever applied in the past, we can at least be sure it won't produce a better future. This trap in the types of theories proposed as universal generalizations enclosing the local present is the simplest exit point from strict Darwinian accounts of history. This kind of argument is clearly presented for historical theories by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism.

The study of the eonic effect will put the historical aspect of evolution in perspective. We speak of the eonic effect, not an 'eonic theory', for the simple reason that confronted with this 'evolution' the complexity is so great we can at best attempt to map out the phenomenon. Nonetheless this pattern of emerging civilization lays the groundwork for a resolution of historical theories, and does embrace the concept of 'evolution'. The problem is that a theory of evolution is tantamount to solving difficult issues of metaphysics, but we see we are still 'evolving' in relation to this knowledge in historical times, even in the historical present. What's going on? Are we outside evolution producing a theory, or inside evolution evolving evolutionism? This paradox befuddles all simplistic theories, and demands some accounting of the range and domain of theory. To apply natural selection universally across the board is simply confusion, for it will have destructive consequences. We cannot apply a theory, it must be an exterior mode of observing a contained phenomenon. Failure to make this distinction is part of the reason evolution generates opposition.

  The eonic effect takes this factor into account.

• History and Evolution The study of the eonic effect shows us direct evidence of an historical 'evolution in action', and this is not at all like the Darwinian. This is a strong statement, so let us be clear, we point directly to evidence, something Darwinists are unable to do to this degree. It is not necessary to agree with this to find this 'close look at history' useful. But almost any careful periodization of world history as a whole will highlight the fact that the evolution of values occurs in a temporal sequence, and independently of any process like natural selection. Emergence is both temporal and geographically focalized in a tempo. This appearance of a derandomizing process, whatever it means, subtracts history from the usual account of natural selection and reminds us that we simply don't know how it all happened in deep time. Probably a similar tempo and focalization process operating at high speed in a frequency pattern generated advance sectors that then reblended with the general population. A complete speculation, but we are instantly suspicious we got it wrong with respect to earlier stages of man's evolution.  The problem with natural selection in history is obvious, the strong, the winners, the victors of struggles, are not necessarily the breaking front of evolution. If anything evolution is a series of end-runs around the bullies. Look really carefully at world history. We see it is focal, i.e. emergentist in zones that are seeders of diffusion. How does this happen? We can't say, but have to proceed phenomenologically to try to piece together the phenomenon. But again, a close look at world history shows some spectacular effects. No one is quarrelling with the broad field of random activity from which also advances emerge. But these tend to be fed by the 'sequence advance' operating on the large scale, and alone able to produce long range results. 
  The catch in Darwinian theory is the porous nature of the record. Between any two fossils bones, many theories might be stretched, and stretched further in the Huck Finn sense. By comparison, the historical record is very full, although only since the invention of writing. With this data set, we can however begin to see an evolutionary structure, with a strong suggestion of its intermittency. This requires a careful understanding on our part, but the indication that even our own history shows 'derandomization' is compelling. And this is 'smart evolution' with a vengeance, at a higher level than man's understanding, and operating we must suspect globally. Very smart evolution.  This type of smart evolution leaves great art in its wake. Was this art a function of evolution or of free creation? Or of both? We need concepts we don't have to look at this ambiguity, for it evolution evolves deterministically, or at random, this is different from the 'evolution of freedom', which, like kibitzing or the extra wheels on a child's bike is logically intermediate, thus voiding normal explanations.  With this evidence, we must be suspicious of Darwinism, although this 'evolution' cannot tell us anything about organismic evolution. You are not required to accept such claims without verification, but verify them you must. And we immediately see the difficulty, the vastness of world history makes it difficult to perceive properly. What is happening, and what does it mean? We see the difficulty of a 'science of history', yet we glibly assume that Darwin got the whole 'science of evolution' straight on the first attempt, with the 'mechanism' of natural selection.  Looking at history in light of the eonic effect, we must become wary of the current accounts of the Descent of Man. Where does evolution stop and history begin? We suddenly become suspicious of the claims for natural selection made with respect to the emergence of man. Visualize what is meant, an immense Malthusian struggle in every generation, leaving better brains at the end. Do you really believe such an account? Natural selection clearly is a liability in history, a disaster from which the advances of civilization must be protected. It is interesting that  Alfred Wallace said as much later in his career. He confused the issue with his language of the metaphysical, but the point is clear. We have no inherent grounds for claiming that this 'higher evolution' is not naturalistic. That is not our point at all, only that current evolutionism is probably off the mark.  Darwinism gives no real account of cultural evolution, the emergence of the ethical sense, the subtleties of consciousness and self-consciousness. It injects a specious reasoning into popular culture, the idea that since natural selection produces complexity, then this fact must inform social realities, a disastrous ethical confusion.

 Darwinism and Ideology

Beside Social Darwinism, religion, and the argument by design, issues of economic ideology becloud the debate over Darwinism. Many who would consider themselves secularists seem convinced belief in Darwinian theory is connected to their economic viewpoints. But it isn't true. Issues of ideology are easily thrown about and often haunt the accuser as much as the accused, but their effect is subtle. And over time, we see, sadly, just how much truth there is in the charges of ideology. Beside Darwinism we have the various economic views of history, passing between Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Once this ideological dust is kicked up, discussion seizes up, and conservative minds slam the shutters shut in slow evolutionary mode. Both economists confound us with confusing subjects, with hybrids of universal history and historical economics. We can also challenge the economic interpretation of history. Marx had a special brilliance, his theory is instructive, whatever our views. For his generation could see the social construction of science coming into being, under the rubric of the classic critiques of ideology. But the frequent association of evolution and the dynamic of  'free markets' is also highly questionable. Thus criticizing the views of one of Marx's great critics, Hayek, is not a communist plot. So we can find Hayek short of an evolutionary theory also.  A deep strain, in the legacy of Adam Smith, of libertarian economics is often grafted onto the legacy of Darwin in a peculiar mix that is very attractive to many evolutionary adherents. Unfortunately, we are talking about quite different types of systems, evolving organisms, economic evolution mixed with technological evolution, cultural evolution, and the evolution of civilization. Further, earlier evolution is in the past, while economic and civilizational evolution intersect with the present. We cannot override this 'free acting present' with assertions about a dynamical system. There may well be a resemblance of the Smithian economy of self-interest, and some earlier form of evolution, but even if there were, the first priority is the culture and civilization of man as man in society. And, the economy of man is the result finally of the choices of men, and the self-sustaining systems they create and in which they become immersed. This factor of volition never enters the dynamical account. If we look at the past two centuries we see the result of trying to set up a pure 'let go economy'. In any case, the evolution of civilization and the evolution of economy are two separate things. No theory of evolution will work that attempts to coalesce the two. Hayek speaks of the rise of 'spontaneous order', but that is misleading, since it does not distinguish between centralizing order (and its economic consequences) and decentralizing spontaneity producing 'order' in a different sense. The modern economy is a reaction against mercantilism, but it is also an experiment in decentralization, which may indeed produce better economies, but which may also have human consequences. The economic analysis taken in isolation is misleading, for it is the choice of a 'bourgeoisie' also to impose an economic 'order' on a whole culture, already a long debate. What is the status of this 'debate' in the 'evolution'? It is the dialectic itself, as Hegel so acutely noted, that is driving the 'evolution', and this take into account the volition of the agents, in a way that a dynamical analysis does not. This type of argument requires a much longer discussion, as in our analysis of the eonic effect.  There we see that theories are themselves evolving inside the system!

These questions of ideology came associated with Marxist critiques but spring into existence in the wake of the French Revolution, the rise of socialism-capitalism, and the struggle for social control of the new Industrial civilization. This strain of ideology clearly sneaks aboard in the field of macroeconomics, in case one should wonder that bias might be present in an advanced mathematical treatment of a subject.  In The Age of the Economist, Daniel Fusfeld, notes "The rise of socialism and its demand for social justice forced the supporters of the existing order to raise their defenses. A theoretical refutation was also needed, because Marx's critique of capitalism was based on the assumptions of classical economics itself--on the labor theory of value and the theory of capital accumulation. He used the weapons of the dominant ideology to attack the very system those weapons defended." Suddenly the labor theory of value (admittedly vexed)  was a laughingstock, and the socialists never really recovered the high ground. What then is the connection between this and the next generation's complex mathematical models of economy, dressed up in calculus, and much else? Doesn't all this scientific mathematics show scientific objectivity? Can higher mathematics blow in the wind of social ideology? We can leave it to the reader to find a book on calculus, study his way to the subject, and decide for himself. The point is that two central theories that define modern society are easily shown to be flawed, ideological. That should buttress the courage of those forced to confront these establishments of scientific expertise, including those with such expertise. 

This ideological twist tells us more about Herbert Spencer than about Darwinism. Darwin and Wallace (a socialist) were not such desperado ideologists, but the effect of the theory was a very severe one in the confusions over social and organismic evolution. We cannot easily detect the issue of ideology in a direct fashion. But in one direction, it revolves in disguise around that of  'equality'.  Suddenly the theory of evolution was a godsend, the basis for the spiritual equality of man had lost its foundation. The philosopher Nietzsche saw the point with venomous clarity. The exact effect of the theory on social attitudes was very complex, and requires careful study, in the emergence of racism, eugenics, social Darwinism, ideas of economy and conservative social views. 

In general, the field is so vitiated by addlepated hybrids of economic sociology and the shotgun marriage of the views of Adam Smith and Darwin that the credibility of the subject has been lost. And the world of Social Darwinism has come and gone, perhaps not gone yet at all. But the study of our eonic pattern does show a most suggestive resolution of the contradiction, as the evolution of free action. The trick is, to contradict yet embrace Popper's critique of historicism by seeing the dramatic view of history all over again, as a structure of free action. This is too much for a webpage....proceed to the book. The section 'History and Evolution' discusses this to some degree, an appendix from the book. All this 'theory'.... It is not really needed for the study of the eonic pattern, which proposes a mini-theory, the frequency hypothesis, and comes in for a soft landing around theory-less narrative history.

One gets the suspicion social thinking selected out of all the emergent evolutionism of the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century the one individual and version that suited its ideological purposes. An old charge, made over and over, to little avail. In the famous words of Karl Marx, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the Bourgeoisie.

·         Any study of evolution is well-accompanied by the study of the history of economic theory, the history of liberalism, the course of the idea of progress, the nineteenth century relation to the Enlightenment,  to say nothing of the history of 'evolutionism', and the general tenor of nineteenth century social beliefs. Cf. R. Ekelund & el., A History of Economic Theory and Method (NY: MacGraw-Hill,1990), A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984)

·         For Social Darwinism, cf. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1945), Robert Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Cf. Thought (Philadelphia: Temple, 1979), Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee, 1997), John Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View, (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1981), Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985). Terence Ball in Reappraising Political Theory, Chapter 10, "Reapprasing Marx and Darwin" summarizes the research finding little evidence for the connection between Marx and Darwin, the issue of the famous letters.

The relentless 'darwinization' of all the social sciences on such a poor foundation is a strange phenomenon protested many times, mostly in vain.( Note: This refers to a new book that will soon disappear into libraries by an old critic of Darwinian ideology, the social historian John Greene, Debating Darwin, reviewed in New York Times, 7/10/99. He is also the author of two other books relevant to the discussion, Science, Ideology and World View, and The Death of Adam). Part of the reason is that many in the humanities and various sciences themselves, not connected with biology, simply take the findings of the various specializations as 'plug in' components, requiring consistency in all other fields. This false consistency is a possible trap. As is the breakup of subjects into multiple specializations. We can see from broad perspective that the term 'evolution' used in cosmology, biology, cultural anthropology, and economics (to say nothing of 'time evolution' in differential equations as a phrase of mathematicians) is simply a roving generalized concept. These findings are also taken as science, when they are really at the level of general philosophy. The project of greater 'consistency' is none other than 'scientific reductionism' itself, a project we should indeed consider and respect, without forgetting its tendency to produce misleading oversimplifications in a converging (?) sequence.

• Darwinism succeeds a generation that struggled with the confusing legacy of Malthus. And the two subjects resemble each other for their interplay of claimed science and ideology. Cf. Hungry Generations, By Harold Boner. The author notes, "This book is not, therefore, a study only of the influence of certain elements of Malthus' theory which are still of concern to the sociologist or statesman today, nor is it a study of the relationship between these elements and actual facts of population growth. It is a history of the long and dramatic struggle by which hist theory as a whole was exposed a an invidious and fallacious instrument for concealing exploitation and economic injustice."

Sounds familiar.

At this point, a moratorium on theory is required, until the confusion of data and model is clarified. For the problem is not the data, resolved by the model, but the three-way effect of past data, the model, and the effect of the model on future data, in the 'Simon sez' entanglement of scientized ethics. The foundations of social science have never been laid properly, and the cycle of overhyped theories proceeds with abandon to claim the mantle of science, from Auguste Comte through psychoanalysis, behaviorism, now sociobiology, ad infinitum.

All that is required is simple doubt and the airing of second opinions. But even that seems an uphill journey. The refusal of the majority scientific community to allow any doubts is quite puzzling, given that significant sectors of both scientific and non-scientific communities have consistently shown  dissent.  The fact is, we simply do not know how evolution works, and the stunningly complex biochemical systems now being investigated are simply beyond the simple explanations inherited from Darwinism, which does not mean they are beyond natural explanation. To claim certainty is prima facie evidence of ideology at work. There is apparently no  body able to give the public an informed neutral or two-sided opinion on the issues. But that second opinion is clearly there in field of evolutionary biology itself. Let us hope the reason for rigidity is theoretical paralysis created by the sheer complexity of real evolution. Case not proven (one way or the other) is the only safe conclusion one could draw from the 'debate', and the renewed implausibility of the original theory of evolution. Such wavering doubt was always a feature of this subject, and should be par for the course. In fact, Darwinism was nearly flat-tired near the turn of the century, and only thence arrived at its current version, once again suffering the immediate onset of new difficulties. And, by an additional complication, it is simply unnerving that society should be approaching the difficulties of the new world of genetic engineering with such an unrealistic view of man, and a direct commercial interest on the part of a considerable body of scientists in these fields.

A new biography of Darwin, Darwin, Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (with a companion volume by the co-author Adrian Desmond, Huxley, From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest), gives a closer picture of the man behind the theory.

'Social Darwinism is often taken to be something extraneous, and ugly concretion to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin's image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality, were written into the equation from the start--'Darwinism' was always intended to explain human society. p. xxi

Finally, we find another Darwin behind the honest theorist of early evolution. For the whole episode of the sudden and rapid rise of the 'Darwin paradigm' is beset with a strange and suspicious scandal that is rarely discussed, as pointed out by A. Brackman in A Delicate Arrangement, where Darwin's competition with Wallace for scientific priority muddled the beginning of the whole venture, climaxing in the publication of  The Origin of the Species by indirection. By rights, as if it mattered, the title should have gone to Alfred Wallace, unquestionably the first clear public proponent of the theory of evolution as it is now taken. He caught Darwin by surprise, perhaps with the theory in his drawer, about to lose his priority, and the resulting skullduggery of Darwin and his cronies to rig the record has nearly been forgotten, and casts the great icon of modern secularism in an altogether shabby light. Always observe the way authors deal with this issue, it is revealing. To say that Darwin had formulated the theory already is irrelevant to anyone not in the Nobel Prize hustle. Darwin was reluctant to publish his work, why? Note, evolution was not a discovery. Larmarck, Chalmers, many others, had broached the general idea. To be original, Darwin needed a mechanism, yet he hesitated until he was back to the wall, ??

But it is significant for the same reason that Darwin, to his credit, was a chronic doubter of his own thesis, in a complex delay whose instinct was a correct distinction between his data and the nature of explanation. But the shoals of fraud lurk in this strange shadow of triumphalist Darwinism. One must remain suspicious, for he was apparently stuck, and, for this and other reasons, dawdled for years in the formulation of his theory.   In desperation at Wallace's challenged, he must have settled for a swiftly presentable version, the one that suddenly took off ( and which so many at the time found questionable, and which was nearly defunct by the turn of the century). But this is speculative, and it is very difficult to decipher this episode, dismissed, if it is mentioned at all, by most commentators. We can at least declare the whole chimera for what it is, a century of unnecessary belief-dynamics triggered, in part, by one of the first successful public relations efforts of modern times. The theory of evolution should have been called Wallaceism. Wallace had a very different view of primitive man. One of the frightful aspects of nineteenth century racism was the confusion that primitive men were less evolved than modern man. Here the fallacy of absolute evolutionary continuity wreaks havoc. Once we adopt our stance of 'relative eonic evolution of civilization', we see that even though selective populations start advancing the full species is always one and the same man. This evolution is not survival of the fittest, but selective advance march that will return to integrate the whole. 

Our perceptions are relative to scale, and we should wonder if our brains could process data on the scale of evolutionary sequences, leaving us to hallucination. And we are confronted with the relative speedup of evolution, and in particular of emerging man. It simply doesn't square with incremental evolution. Not only Darwin but Wallace was the 'discoverer' of evolution. And it is important to recall that he acknowledged the problem and adopted a different view on the descent