The term 'evolution' is carefully qualified in our sense, so there should be no problem. We can coin a a new usage for the study of history. It is when this is used to challenge the Darwin paradigm that a paradox seems to arise. The problem is merely the assumption that Darwinism explains man suffering a reality check. Actually this floating usage is a deliberate provocation and forces us to ask the meaning of evolution. It is important to confront the discrepancy between claims for natural selection, and what we see in history, because the accounts don't match. That's all. We could drop the term 'evolution' and nothing in our data would change. But it would be misleading to think that man evolved in deep time one way, and that this led into the history we see. 

• We speak of the Great Transition from evolution to history, in a specially defined 'evolution of freedom', We then speak of the 'eonic evolution of Category X', e.g. the 'eonic evolution of civilization'. 'Eonic' simply means the category shows intermittent relative development. This creates a two level evolutionary model, where, for example, the 'system' and the individual's 'free activity' must dealt with separately. This complication is essential for anything as complicated as the 'evolution' of civilization or culture. This looks strange, but it works in elegant fashion to give us an account of the data of the eonic effect. 
  Please note, however, that the result is not a theory, but an empirical map of this kind of evolution. It is designed to be usable with incomplete data, and operates as a model only on the range of the data given, without an absolute starting point, or ending. 

This approach allows to in elegant fashion to create a sliding scale, a rubric that looks at the 'transition from evolution to history'.

• Ask yourself a question. When did evolution stop and history begin? The question, on reflection, seems absurd, but is highly significant. The answer couldn't be on a particular day. We might therefore see a transitional period between the two. That is the clue to how to proceed. 

Sometimes Darwinists say evolution has nothing to do with history. Or else, as with sociobiology, an effort is made to apply evolution to history in a Darwinian sense. But it is simply off the mark to claim that culture, religion, or art arise in some scenario of adaptational evolution, and that 'human nature' was somehow tailored once and for all in the Paleolithic. It just won't work. History shows us something dramatically different. Actually we use the term 'evolution' in a great many contexts, cultural evolution, the evolution of technology or economies, or even the evolution of art, and philosophy. But for the question of the emergence of man, Darwinian evolution holds sway. 

But is there not a problem there? We end up taking speculations about times unobserved in order to explain the history we can observe, but which shows something different altogether. The eonic effect shows us something unexpected, a concealed dynamic operating overall. That may be open to debate, but it makes us lose confidence of what is claimed by Darwinism in earlier stages of man's emergence. The fast way to see this is to restrict the eonic argument to the Axial Age. There we see the smoking gun,  a short acting process, on a stupendous scale, of some kind associated directly with a major advance in several civilizations, and its effect are apparent across the board, in all aspects of culture. It is unsettling. Where did we go wrong?   

In the final analysis we can't be sure what happened to produce man in the past, but what we can do is be wary of misapplying an unverified theory to history. We are so used to the standard genetic account of evolution that we tend to separate in our minds the issues of culture and biology. But can they so easily be separated? At one and the same time we actually turn around and confuse the two, because we think that some kind of Darwinian explanation accounts for the complexity of man's nature, hence the assumption pervades out thinking that natural selection somehow produced to freedom to create civilization. Man 'evolved' and then proceeded to create civilization. As we can see that won't work. We are trying to make one over-simplified process of evolution do too many jobs. 

In part it is because of the emphasis on reductionist fundamentals that the whole subject of evolution tends to suffer a confusion of perspectives. Students in many fields routinely make assumptions about Darwinian theory without confronting the fact that if they actually applied it to their field the results would strike them immediately as inappropriate. The Darwin debate frequently produces the phrase, 'the right way to do science'. It is worth reminding ourselves that science in its current form systematically eliminates questions of values from its pursuit of facts. That may be the right way to do science, but is it the right way to do evolution? The question of values can't be eliminated from the study of evolution. Evolution can't be reduced to a branch of physics.  

That should have been a wake up call at the beginning. But in reality noone notices the oddity of this situation. At the end of the eighteenth century there was a strong response to this implicit attitude emerging from the successes of the new physics, and that is the reason we have put some emphasis on Kant, who attempted to correct the physics of Newton, and to extend the framework of science in order to adapt to the limits of science in the life sciences. But the momentum of science is such that the original viewpoint of reductionism prevailed. The project of mechanizing all explanation has taken its course, and in all cases we have learned something (although in the social sciences, the lessons are thin soup). But a true theory of the evolution of man, at least, has eluded us. 

In a word, we can see that standard scientific reasoning is probably destined to fail at some point. It is not surprising therefore that we endure such a prolonged Darwin debate. There is a snafu at the core the whole enterprise. Let's take take a deep breath and state the matter plain:

Science can't do 'values', and therefore can't do evolution, for man, at least. We 'sort of' knew that all along, but were hoping form some oversimplification like natural selection to work some explanatory magic.