The issue of verification haunts Darwinian theory. To state that complex structures arose via natural selection demands far more proof than what Darwinists have given us. Full stop. Beware of those who wish to change the subject here, confronted with this challenge. The question is very simple: were there any witnesses to the facts claimed? No. We are done. Evolution could be, and probably is, something entirely more complex, and we would never know, unless we mapped out the scale and temporal intervals for the real thing. The chronic Darwin debate should end right there with a little humility, but the agendas of all parties need to make the issues look complicated. They aren't. 

• Evidence Density: Darwinian theory suffers from low evidence density, i.e. the balance of observations over long intervals AND the fine-grain observations of short intervals possibly showing high-speed changes. 

• The Axial Age as 'evolution': The study of the eonic effect deals with data such as that connected with the so-called Axial Age. This is a prime example of high-speed cultural evolution in a matter of mere centuries! Suppose such data were needed for earlier stages of man's evolution! We would apply natural selection in a completely misleading way to such periods of man's early emergence. 

The latter is missing in current biology, although various theories of punctuated equilibrium note the problem. The eonic effect warns us of the dangers of extrapolation such as we seen in theories of natural selection. Look at history. NOTHING LESS than a full account of all events at all times on the total surface of a planet is acceptable as an answer to 'what happened'. We may be able to manage something at a lesser standard, but the dangers of jumping to conclusions is always there, and the comparison with Darwinism is obvious. What happened 'when human language evolved' falls into this category. 

The eonic effect warns us of the foolhardy character of Darwin's oversimplification and suggests something is missing in Darwin's theory as to the descent of humans. And, further, that the historical component of evolution overlaps with an evolutionary component of history, which means historical evidence probably has direct relevance to Darwinian claims.  Therefore Darwin's claims are on hold, and that is that. If you gainsay this, you are violating the rules of science. In science, evidence rules. If we suspect better evidence, then the stock of Darwin's theory falls. We make no claim to refute Darwin, or to produce a better theory. Only that false claims of certainty here are dogmatic. That, with grim finality is that. 

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

So we have these facile claims for natural selection. Great, but where's the closely tracked proof? These are big claims, based not on evidence but plausibility arguments.  Claims about events noone ever observed in deep time.  Hypothesis is one thing. But this is taken as 'must believe', and highly promoted for reasons many consider ideological.  

What is 'proof'? Darwinian accounts do not represent closely tracked evidence at the level of centuries, such as we see in the eonic effect, where the complexity of full-scale global evolution forces retreat at once from easy assumptions. The sudden suggestion of high speed processes regulating macrohistory should, by a kind of photo finish argument, makes us retreat from thinking natural selection is the sole component in the descent of man. Early evolution is--who knows?  

Hurricane argument: Consider a hurricane, ultra-simple by comparison, as a global 'system evolution' on the surface of a planet. We know a hurricane when we see one, but its dynamics, mechanism, and full progression require incremental 'closing' on degrees of evidence and observation, a task not fully accomplished until the advent of satellites able to map global coordinates. In the same way we know evolution when we see it, roughly speaking given the fossil evidence, but its dynamics, mechanism and full progression require incremental 'closing' on degrees of evidence and observation, a task not indeed fully accomplished, not at all!! Note the analogy suggests global positioning satellites over the entire planet over millions of years, to observe drifting species and their changes! Inside this event we have the 'free action field' of men reacting to this 'event'. Perhaps natural selection takes place in this event field. Note how misleading it is to consider this natural selection the full explanation of changes in population.

 

People stand around passively accepting outrageous statements on the subject of evolution. Don't fall for it. At one and the same time, students of evolution are making progress in their own way. Many of the fossil gaps are being filled, or shown to be less drastic than once thought. Fine. But the basic objection will always remain. There is a kind of mental block here.  The clear evidence of some success with claims of random variation and selection simply do not prove this to be the case in all the manifold aspects of man's evolution, which is very difficult to fathom.  

Darwinists have claimed a fully developed theory on the basis of which all views of culture and ethics are to be changed, and they claim this aggressively, calling all other views unscientific. We should therefore demand to see what grounds they have for this. In fact, we discover a theory with severe flaws, and we are therefore released from this obligation, in the sense of proof. The real issue is the incompletion of the theory.  There is no conceivable way the Darwin paradigm can work to explain the complexities of human historical evolution. The study of the eonic effect can help in debriefing the whole subject. 

Although our approach here starts with an old-fashioned critique of natural selection, our broad scope requires no absolute opinion on such a confusing subject except a willingness to re-ask, 'what is evolution?'  Now cosmologists speak of evolution, cultural anthropologists speak of evolution. The emergence of life, the origins of taxa, the origins of species, the origins of virtue, the descent of man, the whole muddle isn't yet a theory on the level of physics. 

We can induce some 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.

  The unstated hope of Darwin's theory, in many ways,  is to eliminate the quagmire of 'macroevolution', if not supernaturalism. What is macroevolution? We have our own historical definition. We have no closely observed examples in Darwinian deep time. We can agree that this is a difficult area, about which speculation is less than useful, but the persistent problems here arise from the inability to close track evolution in practice. That makes the possibility very large that we will see the 'local' but not the 'global' aspect of evolution. It is an insidious trap. The study of the eonic effect can help. 

It is good to be skeptical. It is your scientific right. Too many parties are playing social football with evolution. Double agendas, Creationist and Scientific, divide the unknown for reasons of cultural politics. Agendas of naturalism, although productive and fruitful, tend to distract attention form the real complexity, and the real unknowns. And man, let alone his evolution, is a mystery. Darwinists collide with fundamentalists, and this tends to set the 'spiritual' against the 'material'. But Buddhism, at least originally, was as materialist as you can get, yet saw a side of man that is lost to modern thought. Millennia of Buddhists have confirmed the deep psychology of man. No spiritual or reductionist argument is likely to gainsay this history that has evolved (!) in a world parallel to the rise of the west. This is an example of the way cultural evolution, as theory, tends to be swamped by its own subject. We can insist on naturalism, but if the Buddhist is right, even 'soul' as a factor of organism is material. Such statements don't amount to much, except to remember that we hardly have a definition of man, let alone a theory of his evolution. And we have very little knowledge of the descent of man, with to say of our inability to even penetrate easily the transparent record of historical religion, documented in any library.  It is a word to those who will listen, there are many direct failures of the theory that are simply oblivious to the evolution of man in history, and yet are uncomfortably obvious to those who have no agenda against evolution, but can't square with the current conceptions.  Darwinists wish to impose their views on the entire culture, with a theory repeatedly criticized, and it won't work. 90% of the research project is fine, and requires no final absolute theory just to gain domination of social belief. Claims for that final absolute theory look solid in the beginning, then tend to fail at the last point. Homogenizing the immense diversity of human culture under a flawed theory is a disaster in the making. We live in a diverse world. As noted, Darwinism flunks the Buddhism test in the first round, and few Buddhists are worried about the supernatural, and not against science, but will simply boot Darwinism out the door.  It is thus a puzzling attitude that defenders of evolution frequently take, in part because of the legacy of the great debate itself. They have won the debate over naturalism, only to lose the theory. As against all this, the tactic adopted by science is reductionist, and this is both the good part and the bad. It thus automatically calls into question the old, and asks the whole to be recast. The problem is that this initiates a series of flawed or incomplete stages bootstrapping toward some final answer, one that is still far off. Thus it is legitimate to stand back and never be too sold on anything.  

 We need no conclusions here one way or the other about earlier evolution, no one knows. But we must be clear that natural selection is not appropriate in the context of cultural evolution, and is a poor candidate for the evolution of values, art, religion, and much else. Hopefully this page will make you a Darwin doubter. Once a Darwin doubter, you are a better Darwin student. At least separate organismic and cultural evolution.  The case for evolution is strong, but for evolutionary mechanism up in the air. T. H. Huxley, with his reservations about selectionism and the continuity of the evolutionary process, would be considered a non-Darwinian by current standards, and we can simply take it from there. His generation fought the battle for evolution in general, armed with a poorly conceived theory, one that Darwin himself equivocated. For Huxley saw in the end that cultural evolution is a new development whose values proceed against 'cosmic evolution', as he called it. The question is simple, we see that the fossil record has resulted in a non-random pattern of evidence. Therefore we are on justified grounds in calling selectionism into question.