1.4 Descent Of Man Revisited
Last modified 05/21/2008
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Our perception of the eonic effect suddenly shows us a stark contradiction
between the way we understand world history and the way we take the earlier
evolution of man, from a Darwinian perspective. But in fact we begin to suspect
that our historical understanding is the right one, and that our observations of
world history must call for a reexamination of the usual scenarios of earlier
human evolution. What's more the claims for Darwinian processes to explain that
evolution have never been properly documented, while our perspective has a
unique, hence overriding, data set, one that sets a higher standard. Hence our
sense of the usual account of the descent of humans collapses due to an
unnerving suspicion that we have missed the main event, so to speak.
Further, we encounter just this kind of dilemma, and attendant debate, in the scientific literature itself, with its ambiguous statements about the so-called 'Great Explosion', the sudden crossing of a threshold toward 'modern man'. These accounts, never quite satisfactory, nonetheless induce a sense of recognition: we may be missing precisely the kind of high-speed 'evolution' at the level of centuries, or something related, in the earlier stages of human evolution. We won't make any definite claims in that regard, save that the stock of the Darwinian account starts to plummet, because we have a new and different insight in the 'how' of evolution, as a macroevolutionary process clearly detectable in history itself. But what is the relationship of history and evolution? Haven't we confused two things?
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