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1. INTRODUCTION |
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| 1.3. History And Evolution: The Eonic Effect | ||||
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It is world history itself that shows us the clue to evolution. Darwinists, by distracting attention to times unseen, have confused us completely. We are ready to examine the phenomenon of the eonic effect, the evidence of a non-random pattern in world history. The discovery of that pattern uncovers something more, but the basic demonstration of non-randomness in world history is conclusive, final, and almost devastating. That’s enough. And that’s that. But we see that this pattern is hiding something more in
plain sight, the ascent of Darwinists claim that evolution is random, and that this applies to history also. Has anyone bothered to check the data? Against this, we discover, since the invention of writing, a rich patterning, a definite derandomized structure. So Darwinized thinking is wrong about history. That’s that. The eonic effect is a warning that the whole project of selectionist theory fails with history. In general, the eonic effect is an empirical pattern, free of the ‘theory’ trap, and is a strong challenge to all views of history and evolution applied to man. Any law of history, theory of cultural evolution, religious teleology, transcendental explanation, or political ideology of universal history, or theory of economic determination, ought to explain this pattern if it claims any degree of authority. Any science of history must begin here and resolve the eonic effect. Darwinism fares very badly here. Spiritual or design arguments are not proposed as an alternative. We can adopt a neutral idea of a system. You can use this data as a theoretical self-defense against being led into the reductionist scenario that reduces man in the name of hard science to something he is not. Darwinian selectionism is pseudo-science. Darwinism is said to
claim that evolution is non-progressive and without purpose. This is one of the
most defended assertions of Darwinists. The eonic effect throws such assertions
under a cloud, notwithstanding the dangers here of ideology. Evolutionary theory is beset with the difficulty that large-scale directionality, perhaps as evidence of teleology , is hard to observe. It is easy to pretend it doesn’t exist. Even in history the question is not intuitive. Scientists are adamant on this point, because any such evidence shows that current scientific thought is incomplete, somewhere. And yet we must suspect that teleology is a factor. The pattern of the eonic effect can be of great help as the only real evidence, however tenuous, that humanity has at close range of such ‘evolution in action’ in this sense. We will however restrict ourselves to empirically demonstrable directionality. It seems paradoxical
at first to bring evolutionary thinking into history, and yet this recalibration
of our thinking, and terminology, can help in resolving the concealed
contradiction latent in current Darwinian
forms of theory. The point
can be easily grasped by asking at what point evolution stopped, for history to
begin? That this could not happen at a single instant, that the question
generates a paradox, is almost a deduction in the abstract, after the fact, of
the eonic effect itself. The human chronicle is one of free activity. And there
is no easy separation of this chronicle from that of ancient man, the emerging
species homo sapiens of the
Paleolithic. This chronicle of free activity is one of the evolution
of
freedom, in some very general sense, as we observe in the large the transition
from hominid passivity to the relatively active self-consciousness, if not free
will, in the becoming of man as man. We then ask, What causes this emergence of
freedom? The eonic effect shows us that, in the last phase of this transition,
there is a distinct macroevolutionary process at work. Hard to detect, yet
clearly visible if we have sufficient data, and use careful periodization. Falsifying
Darwinism Once we see that history and evolution are braided together and that the
descent of man is ‘all of a piece’, we can use the data of history to assess
the earlier stages of human evolution. Armed with the eonic effect we see at
once that something is missing in standard accounts. In the process we can see
that natural selection is not what is driving historical macroevolution. Our conclusion then
is that if the human chronicle is one, and if a macroevolutionary process,
non-random evolution, exists in one part of this partially observed sequence,
then our prior assumptions about the earlier unobserved intervals of deep time
are as good as falsified. We see the discrepancy in the Darwinian speculative
assumptions, and as well the fact that the contrary evidence was always already
there in the intimations of the so-called Great Explosion
. Thus we can proceed by legitimate
reasoning to use the record of history to falsify the Darwinina claims about the
descent of man. Thus
history and evolution are like two overlapping processes, the one the chronicle
of man’s emergent free activity, the other the greater process of an
evolutionary driver behind this emergence. The two stand in a reciprocal
relationship, one clearly visible, still, in history itself. Indeed, we must ask
if man’s evolution is, in fact, complete. His evolution and his emergent
freedom are braided together, and the question remains as to the ‘end of
evolution’ and the completion of man’s epic self-evolution. The speciation
of man as homo sapiens is thus still
underway, preempting easy definitions of its significance and meaning. To proceed we must also confront the issue of a science of history, the orphan twin of evolutionary science, for this category, in search of laws of history, is in principle a valid one in the legacy of reductionism. There is no such science, and all the efforts to decree one into existence have failed. Now a species of vulgar Darwinism in the form of sociobiology is starting to get foisted on data where it won’t fit, producing a hopeless muddle in the dangerous mechanization of ethics. The eonic effect provides the perfect test, as an empirical study, of the hopes for such a science. In fact, the eonic effect shows how a modified discourse for such might be constructed. We should wonder why the standard criticisms of a science
of history are not applied to a theory of human evolution. Why are historical
theories metaphysics and Darwinism hard science? The first have a wealth of
data, the second very little. Where then is the division? Darwinists would like
to claim there is none, and apply Freedom
evolves? The discrete freedom sequence
One of the striking features of Darwinian thinking lies in the rote application
of selectionist and adaptational thinking to all circumstances and situations,
the series of ‘Just So Stories’ that purport, without direct observation, to
explain complex features of organisms seen in nature. With human evolution this
becomes an increasingly strained activity, amounting to little more than the
fiat of methodological naturalism. A good example is the inevitable conclusion,
as in Dennett’s Freedom Evolves
, that free will evolves by natural
selection, as an adaptation! Not a shred of evidence is offered for this
incoherent deduction from speculative selectionism. As we close in on the eonic
effect we can actually produce a counter-example, the so-called discrete freedom
sequence, showing a macroevolutionary component to the emergence of freedom, in
the process defining human evolution in terms of the idea of freedom taken
together with causality as a chord of two opposites. [i]
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