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The Evolution Controversy
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1848+: Theory, Ideology, Revolution

A short blogbook on questions of the ideologies of the modern left

 

 

 

 

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This page will be the grand central station for new files associated with the third edition, not many yet. A similar archive for the old edition can be found at history-and-evolution.com 

The Evolution Controversy

Selections/Overview

1.1.1 In Search Of History: Using The Text
1.3 HISTORY AND EVOLUTION: THE EONIC EFFECT
1.3.1 Falsifying Darwinism: A Theoretical Self-defense
 

The Third Edition

 The Evolution Controversy And The Eonic Effect

 Getting A Grip On The Eonic Effect

 Recalibrating The Idea of Evolution 


A short introduction to the Evolution Controversy
 

 
     

   Blogzone

    A series of 'bloglike' booklets on various issues of the eonic effect

     
   
1. The Eonic Effect: Climbing Mt. Improbable

One of the most tenacious claims of defenders of Darwinism is that of the randomness of evolution. By and large, despite various efforts of writers such as Richard Dawkins to claim that natural selection is 'non-random', Darwinian theory is about random evolution. And yet this assumption is contradicted by world history itself, where we can see clear evidence of a non-random pattern exhibiting the properties of evolution, 'evolution of some kind'. We can call this the eonic effect. This pattern gives real meaning to the phrase 'Climbing Mt. Improbable'. 

2. Enigma Of The Axial Age

One of the enigmas of world history is the phenomenon of the Axial Age. The study of the eonic effect can throw especial light on the resolution of its riddle, and the complexity of its interpretation. The discovery of the Axial Age in the nineteenth century is one of the fruits of modern historiography as it has become a global study for the first time. The Axial data is a reminder to not take history for granted and to consider that the issue of historical evolution must remain open as long we are confined to short intervals of chronicle, or isolated streams of cultural emergence. And the question arises as to how we should understand this spectacular phenomenon in which multiple civilizations in parallel undergo a relative transformation of their content.


3. History And Evolution: A New Model Of History

The rise of science has seen the extension of its methods and perspectives into all fields of human knowledge, and yet it is significant that no science of history has ever been successfully created. In part this is due to its complexity, and more fundamentally due to the failure of the assumptions of universal reductionism. The reasons for the confrontation with this limit are not mysterious and were clearly outlined by the philosopher Kant, whose system of critiques sounded a master chord in the discourse on causality and freedom. In a nutshell, the science of history must confront the reality and significance of the idea of freedom. But if we adopt the perspective of freedom can we create a science at all? This issue is the object of multiple insights by a host of students of history and theory, among them Isaiah Berlin with his critique of the idea of historical inevitability, and Karl Popper with his attack on what he called 'historicism', a term with a long history, but one to which he gave an idiosyncratic, but useful, definition, putting it in close concordance with the issue of historical inevitability.

4. Kant's Challenge: Idea For A Universal History

As we move to study the eonic effect and construct the eonic model we make a strange discovery: the relationship to the philosophy of history. And we also uncover a curious and elegant secret behind the enigma of the eonic effect itself. The idea of a model is to bring home the project of science applied to history, but on the way we are forced to consider the issue of freedom in the context of causality and this summons up the classic discourse of the philosophers of history, most especially that of the philosopher Kant whose sudden, almost mysterious, appearance at the climax of the Enlightenment both fulfilled and challenged or deepened that movement. The irony, and strange secret uncovered, is that the philosophy of history shows strong correlation with the eonic sequence itself. This point is elusive and will dawn on one gradually, to show an extraordinarily deep side to the pattern of universal history the eonic sequence uncovers.

5. The Old Testament: An Eonic Riddle

Our understanding of the Old Testament is in crisis. The tide of Biblical Criticism and archaeology has eroded our sense of divine action, or of divinity acting in history. Traditionalists are frozen in biblical literalism, and heading over a cliff oblivious to their situation, while arrogant Darwinian reductionism only compounds the confusion by offering no insight into religion beyond the Social Darwinist vulgarity of the cadres of scientism.

6. One Endless Argument: Surviving The Darwin Debate

It is not without significance that the Darwin debate has been called 'one long argument', the phrase being Darwin's. The publication of Darwin's Origin precipitated a debate that has never resolved itself, and which was soon joined in the next generation after Darwin by the various religious groups that now seem to cast the conflict as one between science and religion. That polarity is misleading since the real source of the the dialectical immortality of the question would seem rather to lie in a polarity of science with itself, or science with scientism: perhaps science needs a better theory, not a religious replacement. And this suggests that we are in the presence of some kind of 'antinomy' of the type explored by the philosopher Kant in his classic 'critique of reason'.


7. The Oedipus Paradox: The Legacy Of Social Darwinism

One of the most ambiguous legacies of the rise of 'Newtonian' science has been the status of social theories in relation to the successes of theoretical physics. In fact, the issue is arguably present already in the question of biological science, but has shown itself to be especially acute on the issue of cultural evolution, or history.  Is there a science of history? This question has assumed a number of forms, with a number ideological overtones, the most famous being the historical inevitability argument tabled by Isaiah Berlin with respect to 'marxist' theories. Associated with this is another such cousin argument, that of Karl Popper, in his Poverty Of Historicism, where his critique of so-called 'historicism' addresses just this paradox of freedom and causality in the claims of science in leftist 'prophecies' taken as scientific predictions of revolution. 


 

 
     

 

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