Since we have brought in the idea of evolution applied to history, we should consider the implications of what we have found for the question of human evolution and the descent of man. We have already indicated that something doesn't add up. We have the evidence for 'evolution of some kind' operating in history and we have already mentioned the question of the so-called Great Explosion, the evidence of a sudden crossing of a threshold in the emergence of modern man. Darwinism has offered no reliable account of this phenomenon, except as an additional instance, by prior assumption, of the action of natural selection. We are suspicious that something more complex is involved, something unfortunately without sufficient evidence to arrive at a definite conclusion. 

The claims for the Great Explosion show a considerable uncertainty, with a date often centering around 50000 years ago. Behaviorally modern man appears from Africa armed with language begins to spread across the globe. This can be distinguished from the distinct claims for the emergence of anatomically modern man, which most probably occurred much earlier, ca. 200000 years ago, three more blocks of fifty thousand years.

50K blocks? Man has remained essentially man since the Great Explosion, issues of genetic drift alone being relevant to the differentiation we see in this 50K block since that point. And yet, by Darwinian thinking, we are to consider that three such 50K blocks prior to this were sufficient for natural selection to produce the defining character of homo sapiens. This includes the immensely complex phenomena of art and language, which seem to have appeared virtually on the spot.

These statements are quite vague, and we are in no position to close the argument, which could however be reformulated in several ways, depending on new data. But we can already see that the account of Darwinian stretches credulity, and, in any case, cannot be accepted without further data. The current assumptions about these blocks of fifty thousand years is not a consistent account, especially once we see that while a considerable genetic differentiation occurs in the last of the early blocks, there is no fundamental evolution after this putative 'great explosion'.

 It is not our business to make any assumptions whatever on this issue. Instead we will buffer human history from the misapplication of Darwinian: we have our own defining concept of evolution for the emergence of civilization. But these two different sets of dates taken together already suggest something, the quality of relative emergence that we have already found in history and associated with a system acting on two levels. And this process can act globally at high speed over a five to ten thousand year interval, able to sequence its stages using leapfrog to encompass a dispersed species. We note that this is a prime candidate for a 'stream and sequence' argument, viz. the stream evolution of hominids compared to some unknown series or 'sequence' of distinct stages of man's transition to man. Since our emerging eonic model easily distinguishes two levels, the stream and the sequence, we could easily make some sense of the data as it is: there is obvious a series of relative beginnings, rather than an absolute origin of 'man'. And yet, just as with the eonic pattern, there may be a definite crossing of a threshold as some action, occurring at relative high speed, drives a stream 'over the top' into some new category. We see that with civilization, which is an order of magnitude advance on the Paleolithic itself. What makes us suspicious of the Great Explosion is precisely the high-level nature of the data, such as it is, i.e. the appearance of language, art, signs of religion and creative self-consciousness. 

The point is that, still short of a solution, we suddenly have simple handle on this fuzzy picture of early man. We have adopted the term 'evolution', in and of itself a free definitional act, but now are forced to wonder if it isn't the real McCoy, and mutually exclusive with the Darwinian version (it is not clear what the Darwinian version is). If we see evolution in history (in no contradiction in our emerging model with the record of free action history) over five to ten thousand years, and the emergence of man is a mere fifty thousand years before that, something doesn't add up. The Darwinian arithmetic is a fudge here. What is more, we do see the effects of random genetic drift and the clear documentation of the genomic history of man suggests that the period since the Great Explosion shows a stable species, if not a fully stable genetic constitution. We can easily graft genetic drift onto our account, welcome. There is a possible differentiation into types, varieties, we won't say 'races', but the man we know as homo sapiens is the same throughout the contemporary world, and almost certainly the same man then that emerged sometime in the last hundred thousand years.

Put it to the test with any Paleolithic hunter-gatherer in the current historical world. We can map one to one the 'basics' of human preoccupation and behavior, more or less, as invariants, and we know in our gut the equal natures of such human types, differences of technological acumen being on the surface. We can't close the argument, but we must be left wondering that mere natural selection is too slow for the dates that are forced on us by research. The genetic scenario shows a stable 'man' for fifty thousand years, yet a sudden transformation at the beginning. Could this really be natural selection at work if fifty-thousand year increments are a drop in the bucket, yet a great surge occurred at the beginning of one such interval? The last hope here is some lucky mutation to hox genes created a new developmental sequence in human embryology. Again this may be no contradiction to our argument. But it is hard to see how a few mutations could have so transformed man at one stroke. 

We are stumbling into an inconsistency. And here is the point: if we are near a new way to look at the descent of man, but don't have the final evidence to decide, then we should expect the same from proponents of Darwinism who routinely and very dogmatically assume, with very little evidence, that Darwin's theory has explained a phenomenon of great complexity, sight unseen. We can see that that can't be right. Darwin's theory is mere guesswork on the descent of man. Furthermore, we can see the Darwinian thinking is suffering a reality check: we have unexpectedly discovered, even in history, a late stage of development, a distinct macro factor. A kind of 'Hey, wait a minute' pops up: if history does this and there is a fuzzy boundary to history and evolution, then we are seeing two different reality claims in conflict. The purely genetic scenario of random evolution, and the non-random 'rolling out' of history. 

Photo finish contradiction Clearly Darwinian thinking is flunking a photo finish contradiction. They say a horse of one color started the race, but the eonic data tells us a horse of another color is present at the photo finish (i.e. the eonic evidence). 

We are stuck with two accounts of evolution, and we can see that our version, in no contradiction to the findings of genetic drift, nonetheless is completely different from the operation of natural selection. And we find that this evolution is on two levels, one at the level of the eonic sequence, the other in the horizontal streams of cultural life. Here is our photo finish punchline: how could the emergence of earlier man be any different? We are surely missing something if history shows non-random evolution while we claim that earlier stages of human evolution are random. Darwinism is strong on genetics, weak on culture. We are strong on culture, and weak on genetics. The two versions are evenly matched, but ours, in search of a genetic connection, bids fair to overtake and make Darwinian evolution a special case of something more general. 

To be more specific, we can propose an hypothesis to the effect that something like the eonic series might have accompanied the Great Explosion. Imagine a ten thousand year sequence of transitions driving man into his current state.This is as yet unconfirmed, obviously,  but the stock of Darwinian natural selection plummets and is no better than our alternate conjecture. It makes no sense to claim that a sudden genetic change could produce language like a rabbit out of a hat. We have already seen that our macro factor is present to drive the art processes of already potentially creative human types in the Axial Age. This 'eonic evolution' assists in the realization of human art potential. We could hardly feel confident claiming one or a few genetic mutations suddenly produced great language and art 'just like that'. Man needs help at each step of the way. Darwinism is simply a blind man's muddle. 

 Let us consider the implications of our eonic data. We have a non-random pattern in world history, visible since the invention of writing, with a strong suggestion that such a pattern is about double that length--since the onset of the Neolithic. That is one fifth the time since this putative Great Explosion, with the onset of anatomic modern man not too much further back. Assumptions about the homogeneity of the history/evolution of man give us an unsettling feeling that something is awry here. This pattern we have called the eonic effect has been granted the term 'evolution', qualified as 'eonic evolution', i.e. a developmental process occurring in an intermittent sequence. Since the term 'evolution' is given to many processes, from cosmological to economic to literary phenomena, etc, there can be no objection to this usage, as such. But there is an irony here: our usage, based on solid evidence, is going to collide with some Darwinian derivative usage. A contradiction is emerging. 

 The scale, depth, and complexity of this clear instance of 'macroevolution' in history forces us to change our assumptions completely about the way in which human evolution occurs. Or else, drop all assumptions. The whole point of the reductionist account of evolution was to narrow the field of explanation to the purely genetic. While this has proven a fertile source of data, explanation, and proximate theory, it has left a series of problems in its wake. Darwinists are thus left to posit that genetic evolution produces the 'freedom to create culture' in its wake, a facile assumption suddenly rendered suspect by our eonic data where the 'freedom to create civilization' (advanced culture?) is conditioned by a macro factor, without which it wouldn't have happened. A sense that something was missing has always haunted Darwinian thinking. We have found that missing something! There must have been a macro factor present in the threshold hold transition of the Great Explosion. 

Let us put it in simplest terms first, by looking at the issues in another way: the problem with the reductionist program is the strict elimination of values from the domain of explanation. Religion, for example, has to be an epiphenomenon of random genetic change. But we see in history, e.g. the Axial Age, a strange 'evolution of some kind' that does religions on a global scale! 

The problem with value-free natural selection as a mechanism is that this enforces the segregation of the two domains. But then the duality of Cartesianists is held against those who mix mechanism and values. Why not simply accept the value domain into evolution? Thus we have found an evolutionary process, at close range, that clearly is involved in the most disparate variety of value processes, from religion to art. Not only that we see that it is driving the value evolution of higher civilization, as a mysterious component or driver. To be sure, this provokes a complexity that is still beyond our theoretical methods, but that was to be expected. We cannot say, as yet, what this involves, but we can detect the presence of the combined processes and we cannot say that it is a question of physics-like laws. 

There is one last possibility for Darwinians: this 'later eonic evolution' invents nothing, but simply provides a yeast factor for the realization, not incipient evolution, of this value domain 'other kind of evolution'. The eonic effect doesn't show the creation of creators, only the creations of 'already creators' coming out of a slump with high octane behavior. That is, man's potential might have come into existence all at once, genetically, and this later 'eonic evolution' merely produces the unfoldment of that, a sort of accelerant. But even if that were the case, this second type of evolution is unaccounted for by purely genetic fundamentalism. In any case, speculation is insufficient, although our speculations are at least as good, and more than arguably better than the Darwinian 'universal generalization' about natural selection.

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