And yet a tremendous controversy has from the beginning accompanied Darwin’s achievement. This has produced the intractable and almost endless Darwin debate, which has become a central feature of modern culture itself. In part this is the result of the renewed outbreak of the conflict of science and religion, and the attempt to press evolutionary theories into the service of the triumph of secularism is the first visible aspect of this sudden crossing of a threshold into a new view of man. And this also precipitated the opposition of fundamentalist religious groups whose opposition has grown into a series of skirmishes in a cultural war.

But the debate was always much broader than the religion-science divide, or even the question of evolution itself. It was the theory of natural selection that Darwin brought to his data that caused many even of those who accepted the idea of evolution to challenge Darwin’s claims. This has produced the many, often confused, discussions distinguishing the ‘fact’ and the ‘theory’ of evolution. The fact of evolution is really the discovery of ‘deep time’, the endless vistas of planetary eons stretching from the dawn of life. The crystallization of the fossil record in this progression of geological ages reached an evidentiary threshold that made the idea of development in time an inevitable conclusion. But to project onto this almost stupendous temporal field a theory of how life evolved was an audacious step destined to oversimplifications. Here Darwin was open to challenge from the beginning, because of the failure to properly document the claims for his theory. In some ways Darwin made it easy for his critics, because he attempted an overarching generalization that was simplistic and ideological rather than truly scientific. With hindsight, we can see that the true nature of a science of evolution is not easy to resolve.   

A standard narrative of the Darwin debate writes the opposition to Darwin in terms of the conflict of spiritual versus material explanation. Those terms confuse all discussion. The reality is more complex. The current phase of such debate sees the so-called Intelligent Design movement at work attempting to revive the natural theology of William Paley. This natural theology is in many ways the original context in which Darwin produced his theory, against which he reacted, claiming that he had superceded the claims for design in nature. This was also in part an institutional question in the context of the English Anglican church, and many of the early students of biology were ordained in the establishment ministry of the Church. This situation made dissenting or secular views a risky endeavor. The triumph of Darwin’s theory signaled more than a scientific breakthrough, it also crested on the tide of the professionalization of science and the formation of a new establishment not bound by the clerical tradition. Indeed, Darwin’s great champion, T. H. Huxley, is clearly seen as one of the first generation of this new cadre of scientists, and his efforts were decisive in the changing of the guard. A considerable irony is that Huxley was open to the criticisms of Darwin’s theory and even prodded Darwin on the inadequacies of his claims for natural selection, this on the eve of publication.

The nineteenth century produced an immense proliferation of the methods of scientific reductionism in the biological and social sciences. Here, the question of naturalism comes to the fore and remains a key issue in the demarcation of scientific thinking from metaphysical speculation. A considerable influence is seen in the figure of Comte, and the birth of positivism, which influenced Darwin at the early stage of his career. One of the problems here is that Comte’s work exhibited its own metaphysical tendency, and the historicist philosophy of history in which the age of positivism was to succeed those of theology and metaphysics induced a sense of the irreversible progression of thought, with the methodology of science in the starring role. Variants of this thinking pervade science, and certainly Darwinists tend to think this way about Darwin. But the odd fact is that while this might be true of evolution, it is hardly the case with Darwin's theory. In any case, a kind of zigzag is a better metaphor, with possible backtracking to 'debug' false starts, or blind alleys. Any such historicism makes a prediction about the future, and we may be in for surprises, as that critic of historicism, Karl Popper, pointed out. And for good Kantian reasons, the age of 'metaphysics' might prove more enduring than cocksure science hotheads suspect, as they dismiss philosophy itself as metaphysic. A point has been lost. The irony is that man's propensity for metaphysics might endure as long as man, in his current phase of evolution, remains man. 

Comte’s view of history itself constitutes an ‘evolutionary’ claim, as a philosophy of history, and the question arises if this progression of stages is simply a myth. And yet the idea of a progression of epochs is itself an ancient one, and the emergence of modernity itself is often seen as a New Age of world evolution. But Comtean thinking has led to the assumption that the ‘positive’ stage of historical development will lead to the rote application of scientific assumptions in all fields, a premature conclusion that does not do justice to the complexities of history. It is significant that the formulation of Darwinism and the so-called age of positivism followed directly in the wake of the collapse of the great era of German philosophy. The end of the reign of Hegelianism was very sudden and the history of the 1840’s shows us the drama of Feuerbach and Marx challenging the legacy of idealism and championing the need for sciences of society. This period produced a clear delineation of the human and natural sciences, with a challenge to the reductionist implications of the expanding scientific revolution. It is nonetheless true that Darwinism thrived on this sense of the epochal transition of modernity attempting to establish the foundations of a new age of secularism. This is not an unreasonable view, once its tacit assumptions are brought out. Our objection is to Darwin's theory, the rest is up in the air. A strong case can be made for the 'new age of science', but this is not something fixed or defined by a passing phase of evolutionary theory.   

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

This led to the era of the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and this has produced the paradigmatic rigidity of evolutionary thinking that we see today. And yet this second resurgence of Darwinism is in many ways as controversial as the first. At each step the demand that evolution fall into a rubric of narrowly defined naturalism left the subject with a demarcation problem and a sense of the incompleteness of the whole science.  The irony is that the claims for natural selection themselves have a metaphysical bent in so far as they attempt to make generalizations sight unseen about the vast stretches of deep time. The candidate to fill the gap is a theory cut from the cloth of positivistic assumptions. Religious critics of Darwinism, especially the more sophisticated proponents of Intelligent Design, have found it easy to point to the flaws in this presumption of ‘methodological naturalism’, and it is clear that a trend of oversimplification has created a blindspot in those trained in these new methodologies of science. The question really goes back to the birth of the scientific revolution itself in the seventeenth century, where the tremendous successes of Newtonian physics created an expectation of the easy annexation of all fields to the physics mold.

Indeed, much of the controversy over evolution predates the work of Darwin and it was in fact Darwin’s achievement to create an almost packaged formulation of the gestating ideas of evolution, one that the public was prepared to accept. Accounts of the history of biology tend to put the central focus on Darwin, even to the point of suggesting indirectly that the idea of evolution was his achievement. But in fact all of the main ideas, even that of natural selection, preceded Darwin, and the real source of the new biology was in the period of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, a period replete with a host of innovations in all fields. As we shall see there is an irony to this fact, and we will discover a different side to the idea of evolution in the development of evolutionism itself. In fact, the birth of conceptions of evolution was a rebirth and we see the emergence of the first inchoate forms of evolutionary thought in the ancient Greeks at the time of the birth of philosophy itself among the Pre-Socratics.

There is something almost mysterious in the creative career of the Enlightenment, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century. The period creates a sort of great divide in which a whole new culture comes into being. We see the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of modern capitalism, the triumph of liberalism in the era of the French and American Revolutions, a cascade of technical innovations, and the crystallization of the secular society struggling to be born since the equally seminal period of the Protestant Reformation. We have a tendency to produce univalent descriptions of this rich and many-sided period of bursting change. But its multifaceted character shows something far more complex, a constellation of dialectical contradictions. For example the Romantic movement tends to be filtered out of our sense of the historical inevitability of the Enlightenment breakthroughs, narrowly defined in terms of a reductionist program.  We often fail to see the real cultural evolution of conflicting oppositions. And in this context we find the strange phenomenon and timing of the classic era of German philosophy beginning with the figure of Kant.

It is significant that the idea of evolution appeared in concert with the era of the French and Industrial Revolutions. After the groundwork of figures such as Linnaeus and Buffon we find the foundations of evolutionary though in Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, the ancestor of Charles Darwin, first formulating explicitly the idea of transmutation or development. To see the inherent ideological character lurking in the idea of evolution, we can look at the birth of the idea under the specter of Jacobinism in the wake of the generation of revolution. Significantly the work of Erasmus Darwin was braided with notions of progressive social change and his participation in the work of the famous Lunar Society at the dawn of industrial production hardly seems accidental in retrospect. The impact of the idea of progress was built into the take-off of new forms of social production. Herbert Spencer quite understandably continued this vein of thinking, but the confusion over social and biological evolution began to make its appearance, and this inability to keep the two straight has persisted to this day. The question is insidious for it persists even as Darwinists try to correct it, or offer disclaimers that they are exempt from these fallacies. But it is the clumsiness of the application of the idea of evolution that is at fault, and Darwin is by no means exempt. 

And then suddenly the period of reaction set in created by the turmoil of the revolutionary generation. It is interesting to compare Erasmus Darwin and Adam Smith in this regard. They share the brief moment of the birth of classic liberal thought, before the tide of revolution completely recast the terms of discourse. A new progressive philosophy of economics enjoyed a brief period of radical notoriety, followed almost within a decade by its ideological rendition as a more conservative liberal ideology. We hardly think of Adam Smith as a radical thinker! We need not agree with the views of Karl Marx to see that by the year 1848 the idea of what constituted radical thinking had undergone a change indeed, and that his depiction of the triumph of a new type of economic civilization, with its attendant ideologies.

The period of the Restoration indirectly conditioned the confusions over evolution, and the association of the idea with revolution made the idea highly controversial, even politicized. The dilemma over slow and fast evolution arises here. The very idea of progress or revolution was subject to concerted attacks by the forces of reaction, and this seems almost to have delayed the acceptance of evolutionary thought for a full generation. In fact, it was in many ways Lamarck who first formulated a theory of evolution, and yet by the end of his life he was almost a forgotten figure. In the background the new biology of the embryologists, such as Von Baer and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, was creating the foundation for a new conception of evolutionary development.

Then came the famous Vestiges of Creation by Robert Chambers whose immensely popular but anonymous bestseller paved the way for the work of Darwin twenty years later. In this context we have a better sense of how Darwin managed to succeed where these earlier figures had failed, and the conservatizing of evolution was one of the keys to his success. We can thus see that Darwin’s theory was successful as an unconscious reaction to this political background, and the attempt to fix the idea in association with a triumph of liberalism in its classical version made for an easy passage at the right time. This association of the issues with ideology and the development of modern politics would seem to be irrelevant to the question of science. And yet it can help us to uncover the chronic confusion of cultural and biological evolution that has always been a notable feature of Darwinian thinking.

The explosive generation of industrialization, emergent liberalism, and revolution is the hidden context of Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s social position and genealogy, scion of the family of Wedgewoods so prominent at the birth of the industrial revolution in England, colors his thinking, and his strategy proved to be brilliant in the way he packaged his theory and timed its publication. In fact, the curious phenomenon of the delay in the presentation of a theory that was essentially tabled in the 1840’s has many different aspects. It was sudden appearance of the famous Ternate letter of Alfred Wallace that forced the issue and drove Darwin to make public the nexus of ideas that he had long kept private, even from many of his friends and colleagues.

But the idea of evolution was in the air, always with the built in ambiguity between social and biological development. One of the transparent influences on Darwin’s thinking can be seen in the work of Herbert Spencer whose views on cultural evolution produced the classic phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, beginning the career of ‘traveling concepts’ between evolutionary and cultural categories of development. The crystallizing classical liberalism was a natural companion of Darwinian theory, and the still more vexacious Social Darwinism arising in the wake of Darwin’s work springs from this incestuous constellation of mismatched conceptual themes claiming the title of evolution. The work of Herbert Spencer, now a very dated figure, is often made to take the blame for the Social Darwinist implications of evolutionary ideology, but these deflections of the essence of the problem away from Darwin tend to make us fail to see the ideological core of Darwin’s theory.

The point should be clear from the direct influence of Malthus on Darwin’s formulation of his theory. Malthus was the founder of the science of demography, but he was also a highly contentious conservative figure, one of the most blatant in his propensity to use theory for social legitimation. The polarized and acrimonious debate over Malthus’ work went on for an entire generation, and in many ways prefigured the more complex and subtle Darwin debate, still colored with underground strains of class struggle, revolution, and the reform bill. It is easy to lose sight of a simple fact: the mechanism adopted by Darwin under the influence of Malthusian thinking is open to severe challenge on its own terms. The struggle of populations, and the incidence of natural disasters or sudden population fluctuations, is seldom seen as a very weak candidate for an evolutionary theory. It constitutes one of the first examples of the tendency to conceal the crisis of observation that stalks all claims of evolution. The scale and duration of deep time are an unknown. It is therefore a temptation for a theorist to cast about for what he can observe as a clue to what he cannot. But it is very doubtful if what we mean by evolution is really caused by anything like a Malthusian scenario. Certainly the factor of natural selection is a given, but there is no inherent reason to assume that this generates the emergence of complex forms that we see in the fossil record.

Karl Marx is, of course, the classic critic of this tendency of nineteenth century thought to be colored by ideological bias. Marx’s theories have themselves suffered this very fate, but he was the first to really attempt to grapple with the disguises of ideology that are rife in the legacy of Adam Smith. Marx’s insight is so simple, and yet it has been nearly lost even in the leftist use of his work. The application of lawful generalizations in the social sciences attempts to foist the character of natural or physical law into a normative justification of social practices of exploitation. We are so mesmerized by Darwinian mythology that we fail to see the presence of the ideological factor at work in his thinking The point is completely obvious with someone like Malthus. Almost equally so with the figure of Adam Smith, even given Smith’s genuine concerns about the misuse of his economic corpus behind the stereotyped figure that goes by his name in subsequent literature. Adam Smith, in any case, was an economist. Whatever the status of his views on the nature of markets, it does not follow that we can transfer these to questions of evolution. There seems to be an obvious analog, but the comparisons are misleading and require a very careful consideration of both history and the nature of historical theories.

One of the stranger ironies is the way in which the radical left embraced Darwinian theory. But the record should demonstrate the early dissent of Marx on this question. He saw immediately the connection between Darwin’s theory and the ideology of classical liberalism. And yet the tide of Marxist thinking was unable to withstand the confusions of the rising tide of Darwinism, and the enthusiasm of the incipient Marxists of the late nineteenth century preempted the opportunity to put the real critique of ideology into action.

The issue of revolution is almost the mirror image cousin of the Darwin debate. The Burkean gloom that settles over conventional nineteenth century social philosophy disposes Darwin to his conversion to the mythologies of slow change. An almost equal set of confusions is arising in the antithetical tenets of the place of revolution in here. Here Marx, despite his brilliant expose of the place of theory in the processes of legitimation, produces an ambiguous legacy in his casting of revolution as some driving force in history.  The issue of revolutionary change is so discredited now by the outcome of leftist catastrophes in the twentieth century that we can no longer easily discuss the issue of revolution in an evolutionary context. And yet the connection must be direct, if only we can get the matter straight. Here Marx’s thinking is an unstable hybrid of contradictory elements that condemned his successors to an immense amount of theoretical confusion. Marx appears in the spectacular yet brief tide of Hegelian philosophy, just at its climax, and just before its sudden collapse. Moving rapidly between complete different worlds of discourse, Marx carries the elements of a philosophy of history in its classic mode to the attempted scientific study of the economic evolution of society. There the combination of Hegelian notions of dialectic seem to become fused with the legacy of French revolutionary politics to produce a theory of the place of revolution as the historical agent of development. The problem with Marx is that he is right and wrong at the same time. The leftist misreading of the French Revolution produces an expectation of the place of revolution as such in the dynamics of history.

It is certainly true, and demonstrable from historical fact, that the inertia of history must confront the reality of rapid progressive change. Burke’s charges were as apt as they were false. Long delayed social change was itself a provocation to direct interventions of revolutionaries. Too much of history is simply sterile domination of elites. Social tendencies continue for millennia, in the inertia of distorted traditions. There is no case for the slow evolutionary change toward the abolition of slavery. Suddenly in the era of the Enlightenment the initiative to do away with this curse of civilization exploded forth and accomplished the matter in a few generations. In light of the eonic effect, this fact is itself significant. In fact questions of the nature of historical change, slow or fast, require a meticulous study of world history as a whole with the question directly posed in this sense. They also tend to suffer a false or limited metaphor of ‘speed’. But what is the score-card between slow development and induced rapid revolutionary disruptions? But it did not follow that the gesture of revolution taken as a social incident given factually in the past was open to theoretical promotion as the source of future change. And curious mixture of theory and the element of free choice constantly befuddles the foundation of that theory.

A chronic paradox arises therefore, which is that slow change is obviously confronted by the facts of revolution. But theories of revolution suffer their own liabilities. And those of the Marxists proved especially disastrous when carried out on a larger stage.  From one point of view the dialectical thinking of Hegel, passing between idealistic and materialist views of history, proved incapable of resolving the issue. In some fashion the myth of dialectics seemed to grant the status of natural law to the efforts of revolutionary negation. This tendency became explicit in the curious later formulation of Engels, whose ‘dialectics of nature’ seemed to suggest the need for some radical discontinuity in the evolutionary process.  Once again we see that Engels is both right and wrong at the same time. Part of the problem is the inchoate nature of social theories, their clumsiness mixed with insight, and the inability to evade the metaphysical assumptions of the original starting point. And yet, for all this, the facts of evolution in deep time constantly force one to recycle these nearly archetypal antitheses. The resurgence of this kind of thinking in the various claims for punctuated equilibrium in contemporary Darwin debates is an example. The inability of the settled alternatives to resolve the issue is the fate of Marxism and Darwinism both. There is a sly irony in the ‘revolutionary’ tactics of Darwin himself, whose successful conservatizing of the idea of evolution created the basis for the paradigm revolution, if it should be called that, of the evolutionary worldview. But it is born under the sign of its own cryptic politics and ideology, and the enigma of evolution remains as it was before.

One of the striking aspects of biological theories of evolution is their inability to differentiate themselves from those purporting to address the issue of cultural evolution. The echoes of Spencer in Darwin, and Darwin in Spencer, and the runaway development of Social Darwinism testify to this failure. The issues of agent, theory, and historical law create a complicated triad of interacting elements, the undoubted reason no proper theory of social change has ever been able to come to the fore. The perfectly natural impulse to extend the scientific enquiry into nature into the realm of history produces nothing but one-sided or misleading reductionist results. And the question must impinge on the resolution of evolutionary theories. What does it mean to say that man evolved at all? We tend to treat historical questions in one way, and then posit an evolutionary law projected onto deep time. If we bring that law into the realm of culture, or into our active present, the results are unsatisfactory. That might forewarn us that we may be making the same mistake as we apply laws to earlier stages of evolution, particularly that of man.

A classic critique of this type of confusion lies in the work of the philosopher of science Karl Popper, who, in his work The Poverty of Historicism, defined ‘historicism’ in terms of this confusion of historical laws and free agents. This critique was focused on the fallacies of Marxist theory where the historical transition to socialism was considered in some fashion a law of history. The question of historical inevitability, to use the phrase of Isaiah Berlin, who produced a similar critique of historical generalization, creates the paradox that the agent of history is both the source of the historical data to be generalized, and of the theories attempting to explain that activity. The problem arises at once, that he might decide to act in a perverse way with respect to what his theory predicts! The whole nexus of ideas here, inherited from the model of physics, suffers a breakdown in its basic coherence, in two ways. First, as to the subjectivity of the agent/theorist, and secondly as to the special status of the present in any generalization about society or historical action.

There have been many criticisms of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But this paradox of agent, theory, and law, especially haunts Darwin’s theory of natural selection as it impinges on human evolution, and notwithstanding its ambiguity as to causality or chance in Darwinian formulations. If look backwards at evolutionary facts, thereby to conclude that complex forms arose via selectionist scenarios, we would naturally tend to conclude therefore that this constitutes the discovery of some kind of law. Stated plainly we might find that to be a fallacy indeed, and yet the unconscious application of the sense of the term ‘law’ in the biological sense, is immediate. If we claim that natural selection and the survival of the fittest, produced bigger brains in early hominids, in some unknown or vaguely defined period of deep time, we have essentially made a generalization about ‘how things happen’ in a causal sense, and therefore in the process we tend to eliminate from our minds all other factors that could be at work.

Projected onto our present or future, the future of our own choices about how to act, this generalization begins to interact with our own behavior, as we assume that certain courses of action will fit this pattern we claim to have observed in the past. But we have surely stumbled on a fallacy, one embedded in a violation of correct scientific methodology, and at the same time burst asunder the canon of what it means to do science at all. The sources of our action are complex. A theory might tend to contract the full potential of that action. The theory of natural selection is especially vulnerable to this fallacy since it is liable to produce a complete reversal in the ethical potential of action in the present. That is, we assign a value to the evolutionary sequence of brain development, and we eschew all other forms of explanation save those of the mechanized action under the rubric of selection.

We should certainly begin to wonder if this is how brains evolved! For it is the case that ‘theory’ has itself become an historical or evolutionary variable, one not taken into account by the theory itself. It is a curiously non-linear situation. Clearly the original incidents of development and our current state of civilized scientific endeavor don’t match at all. They are two different worlds. It is not appropriate, furthermore, to saddle the potential of present action with the implications of a theory, for that is not the basis of action at all. A theory should be a disembodied or timeless truth about phenomena seen in their full scope or interval of realization. We cannot inject a non-linear element of the observer into that which is to be explained.  Something altogether misleading has entered into our thinking. The problem, as Popper, and others, saw is that the free agent in the present is in a special relationship to his own production of theories. Clearly we are not dealing with theories of the type of physics. They could not apply at all, in principle. This clue should forewarn us that something is awry in Darwin’s thinking. And it is not surprising given this insight that the sloppy character of the original formulation should so rapidly have produced the degenerate Social Darwinist ‘fallacies in action’ that history records.

 The paradox of freedom and necessity that this example shows us has a considerable history of its own, and a direct relevance to the development of theories of evolution. We have already noted the rival strains in the inchoate beginnings of evolutionary thought in the period of the late Enlightenment. This period is itself a kind of ‘evolutionary’ watershed, with its spectacular clustering of creative individuals and innovations. The first generation of Larmarck, Cuvier, and the developmentalists were at work in a period that also saw the flowering of the philosophy of history, and the great period of German classical philosophy. It is hardly surprising that one of the key themes of the seminal work of Kant, who ignited this brief flowering of idealist thought, is just this concern over the relationship of agent and law.

Working under the aegis of the Newtonian revolution, Kant, and here the influence of Rousseau is also significant, produced a series of critiques, the first of which, his Critique of Pure Reason, attempted to mediate the basic inherent contradiction in the claims of science as these began to stake their ground in the realm of the humanities.  Kant’s classic challenge to the liabilities of metaphysics, visible in his unmasking of the pretensions of rational cosmology, took at its core these antinomies of free will and determinism provoked by the implications of the consolidating physicalist paradigm. Perhaps because of the excesses of the renewed metaphysical claims of the post-Kantians the cogency of these critiques was lost, and we see the naïve disregard of the fallacies of theory arising spontaneously in the development of Darwinism. Darwinists, we should note, are left with the need to claim that anything that goes under the name of ‘free will’ has to be the result of a series of selectionist scenarios, or of adaptationist mechanisms. It is at this point that we must ‘cry foul’ and review the way in which Darwinists have simply superceded the demands of proper documentation of their claims for evolution according to natural selection. A theory of the evolution of man will be forced to take into account some form of the ‘evolution of freedom’.  Such a thematic is highly abstract, yet it contains a solid core that can allow us to put current thinking to a test, especially as we close in on the detailed record of human history.

The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery.  There is something almost foolhardy in the projection of selectionist scenarios onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of adaptation. And yet such claims are as extraordinary in their implications as they are weak in their evidentiary basis.  One of the principal strands of evidence is that of a Great Explosion in the period around 40, 000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. Competing with this are the various datings of anatomically modern man around 150,000 B.C. There is also the question of where all of this began, its principal theatre of action, and the various hypotheses of the ‘Out of Africa’ variety. In fact, the absence of sufficient data should give us pause, and it is certainly true that we have no solid grounds at all for the facile assumption of Darwinists.

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

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

In general, it is surely insufficient to claim we know anything solid about man’s evolution based solely on the sequence of skeletal remains. We are hard-pressed to understand the context of cultural change associated with such developments. We see the rough passage from the first hominids to homo erectus, the Neanderthal, thence to homo sapiens, this over many millions of years. Then all at once we find intimations of a Great Explosion, an incident, if we had observed it properly, stretching over a mere ten thousand or so years. That must tell us at once that we are liable to be jumping to conclusions about what we know, can know, and may never know.  But we begin to sense that we are in the presence of the mysterious ‘macro’ factor without which the whole account is reduced to the selectionist scenarios we increasingly suspect are flawed in their foundations. That these are not idle objections can be seen from the record of history itself, for there remarkably we can detect right in our historical backyard a clear indication of processes of non-random evolution in the true sense of the word.

Before we take a look at this evidence, we need to consider what it is that constitutes real evidence for a theory of evolution of any kind. We are beginning to suspect that something like ‘evidence density’ is a critical factor. We assume looking over the entire record in deep time stretching over billions of years a something that we call ‘evolution’. The evidence for this is in fact at a much lower standard than that for any claims on the mechanism. We can with a fair degree of confidence infer the descent of forms in an evolutionary sequence. The problem arises when we consider scientifically the abstract analog to physics. There inertia and force are given an interplay of theoretical significance.  Things proceed according to the law of inertia until they are the object of forces that act to create sudden or impulsive changes. Now it may be that such Newtonian considerations are completely inappropriate for a biological subject. And yet in there most abstract formulation they represent a core methodology that is at work in any attempt to create a science of anything.

The problem confronts us at once that we may be concocting the equivalent of the law of inertia via the claims for natural selection, and that the ‘force’ factor, the driver of evolution, acting at short range perhaps, is entirely invisible to us in the interstices of the immense time we see for the development of new species. It is precisely this kind of resurgent abstraction that biologists themselves have brought to certain points of the record, that is the various claims for punctuated equilibrium. It is almost inevitable that such thinking should spontaneously occur in a field dominated by Darwinian gradualism. For the suspicion is that we have missed completely the real incidents of change that really drive the whole process.

We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. 

But it is significant that in reviewing the history of the idea of evolution we have discovered an odd fact indeed: the evolution of the idea itself is closely bound up with the eonic effect itself!