Much of the controversy over evolution predates the work of Darwin and it was Darwin’s achievement to create an almost packaged formulation of the gestating ideas of evolution, one that the public was prepared to accept. The real founder of evolutionary science was Lamarck whose more cogently intelligible, but still inchoate perspective never survived the radical associations of evolution in the wake of the French Revolution.  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.

A First Eonic Observation The idea of evolution shows, not a birth, but a rebirth in the period of the Enlightenment. Appearing among the Greeks and Indians during the Axial period, it suffered eclipse, as did science itself, in the medieval period. We will soon discover that the idea of evolution itself undergoes a distinct process of its own evolution, and this is not Darwinian.  Evolution: Genesis and Revelations, With Readings from Empedocles to Wilson, C. Leon Harris, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.
The Case of the Missing Centuries As we examine world history we notice the strangely non-random character of the evolution of evolution, and then of science itself. There are really two Scientific Revolutions, one in the era of the classical Greeks, a birth that proves stillborn, then another in the seventeenth century. As we will discover, this is no accident. 

There is something almost mysterious in the creative career of the Enlightenment, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century. The period, which should include the Romantic reaction, and much else, 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. As we proceed to examine the question or non-random evolution we will find that this period is itself one key to the overall periodization of world history in terms of its historical evolution.

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.

 Questions of ideology stalk Darwinian theory but are concealed by the relative sophistication of Darwinists in evading the fallacies of Social Darwinism. Darwin's confusion in this area is often shunted off to Spencer. We should note that the confusion of biological and social evolution arises at the beginning of Darwinism, and the work of Spencer is a giveaway clue to the suspicious resemblance of classical liberal and biological theory. Most especially the influence of classical liberal economics on Darwin's thinking is, or should be, transparent, along with the frequent metaphors of economic self-organization applied to evolutionary processes. 

The issue won't go away for the simple reason that ideology is built into any causal claim about evolution that does not carefully distinguish historical action from evolutionary processes themselves. Later we will see the issue of the so-called Oedipus Effect, in which the subjective adoption of a theoretical construct as stimulus to action creates a paradox in the 'present of the theory'. Here, for example, the sense of the efficacy of natural selection becomes a tacit encomnium to action. And the collation of this, unconsciously, to the economic thinking of classical liberalism is endemic in Darwinian social thought. 

The Oedipus Effect As we generate the idea of new kind of model/system that can coordinate causal and freedom question in tandem we stumble on, and resolve, a paradox first pointed to by Karl Popper. If we propose a 'theory', presumably one that makes predictions, we confront the possibility that its predictive future could be deliberately falsified. A mixed causal/freedom system must carefully distinguish the past and present/future of the theory. This paradox is what creates Social Darwinism, and was also a problem in the various theories of Marxists. 

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 (the Oedipus effect was first pointed out by Karl Popper in Marxist theories), 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, whose work had a conservative banner to wave in the throes of the French Revolution itself. Almost equally so with the figure of Adam Smith, even given the 'real' 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. It is very difficult to grasp this point until we actually see an example of evolution, 'evolution of some kind', that is different from the selectionist scenario.

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 crystallization of Marxist thinking was unable to withstand the confusions of the rising tide of Darwinism, and the enthusiasm of the enthusiastic Marxists of the late nineteenth century preempted the opportunity to put the real critique of ideology into action.

Natural selection, most suspiciously, makes a good foil for the claims of revolutionary change. 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 history, indeed, as a 'dialectical' process in nature. 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 completely 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? 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. That's the catch, and we need a new kind of theory given this confusion of theory, agent, and observer. A curious mixture of theory and the element of free choice constantly befuddles the foundation of that theory.  

Evolution, revolution, punctuated equilibrium One of the key ideological issues of modernity is the place of revolution in the context of social evolution. And this has impinged on the various issues of punctuated equilibrium, to say nothing of Hegelian dialectic. These ideas have never reached a clarification in part because of leftist/conservative ideologies, and, once again, because the contradictory Oedipus Effects of such theories/philosophies.

As we approach the study of history, the question of the science of history arises in an ironic fashion next to the claims for a science of evolution. Issues of Big History, Universal Histories, and historical dynamics coexist next to the sense that history is somehow exempt from the search for causal laws. In fact, world history is a complex unknown, difficult to observe, and to visualize. The term 'black box' arises in electronics or modeling and its usage often proposes to isolate some entity to look at its 'input/output' relations, to determine some unknown interior. In many ways world history is a black box, or more accurately, the output of such a device, and it is our challenge to determine what we are to understand not from what we do see, but from what we don't see. What is the design behind world history, if any? Note the ambiguity of this term. On the one hand we consider history, from a Darwinian perspective, to show nothing but random patterning. And yet if find something like a causal structure behind the free flow of history this would generate a sense of design.

The problem is that this term collides with another current usage. And one of the recent challenges to Darwinian theory lies in the revival of the traditional design arguments by religious critics of evolution. The design argument has a long history, but its status has been subjected to considerable philosophic rebuttal, the work of Kant and Hume being examples. Kant, for example, subjects all the proofs for the existence of God to an acute analysis, and in the context of his famous critique proposes the category of natural teleology. And this issue arises once again in a subsequent essay on history. The point here is that we are confronted by a series of possible confusions, between causal, teleological, and supernatural arguments, and we should be wary of the ambiguities possible here. Contemporary proponents of so-called 'intelligent design' seem to exploit the ambiguity in the term 'design'. Is this a theistic argument?

The term 'black box' has also become famous because of Thomas Behe's book on intelligent design, Darwin's Black Box. The resurgent 'design' argument associated with this is mixed with prime examples of the metaphysical questions forewarned of by Kant. The point is that the breakdown of claims for natural selection do not logically entail anything about 'design'.

As we approach the study of history we can adopt the metaphor 'black box', in the first usage of the term, and look at the relations of historical periods in a finite interval to study, if not their input/output factors, then the factors of sudden change associated with that interval. This involves a form of periodization. This leaves the question of theistic historicism in limbo, where it belongs. We can turn the design arguments against its proponents by asking is the history presented in the Old Testament is evidence of intelligent design! The answer will be, very simply, that any claims for theistic action in history suffer one and the same problems of the limits of observation that we found with natural selection.

The point here is that claims for design are inherited from claims for theistic action in history. Most of these claims are under assault from the legacy of Biblical Criticism. But the question remains, how do we explain the various structures of history once we abandon their theological mythologies? Note that secularized interpretations of history are all very well, but suddenly the attempt to demythologize history suffers a stumbling block, the evidence of the Axial Age being an obstacle in the way of this project. But why should it be a stumbling block? It is in fact an opportunity. The Old Testament is quite a remarkable text in evidence, for our enquiry, and will become evidence for a new conceptual approach to evolution. The point is that ironically the source of much design thinking lies in prior assumptions, granted by faith, for historical design. But we can see that the design argument fails in this its most significant instance.

To make the point clear, we can take the case of Axial Greece or Indian Buddhism as neutral examples. As we compare these examples we will see that they show a strong resemblance in terms of what is called the 'Axial Age'. We could not apply theistic interpretations selectively in these two cases. In fact, world history shows us no evidence of theistic action at all.  The Greek example shows a sudden period of rapid cultural evolution. This interval shows itself to be part of a larger historical pattern. We can wrest these historical intervals from the metaphysical by simply studying them as 'interval black boxes' in an empirical fashion. As to the question of the Axial appearance of Buddhism, we confront the strange Axial dialectic whereby our 'historical design' shows the emergence of two religions, one theistic, one atheistic. And the Greek interval shows an emergent nexus we can show to be isomorphic to that of the Axial Old Testament (the core of it, at any rate, as we will discover). We are left holding a bag, called 'design', but as we look inside, we see nothing. 

In general, the sense of design arises equally from the perception of self-organization processes at work, and it is especially easy to indulge in confused terminology of the design category in describing such processes. The question, finally, is simple, we have no evidence of theistic action in history, and we will discover that our 'black box' approach will prove especially effective with the legacy of the Old Testament. This approach is neither theistic nor atheistic. It simply exposes the enigma of Biblical history to the category to which it belongs, the 'eonic design' so visible in the powerful spectrum of evolutionary realization we discover in the Axial period.

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