The perception of the Axial Age, and the suspected larger pattern of which it is a subset, forces the issue on the question of evolution in history and also demands that we begin to reexamine the question of the emergence of man himself at the earlier stages of human evolution. 

Historical research has greatly expanded our understanding of the data of world history, and in the process transformed our knowledge of the emergence of civilization. As we proceed we will need to avail ourselves of immense ranges of this enlarged chronicle, which creates a considerable logistics of study. Part of the problem with such a study lies in the influence of Darwinism itself, which enforces a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of what has been called ‘Big History’, and any attempt using the philosophy of history to generalize about history in the large. A further critique of any idea of Big History comes from the postmodern rejection of 'metanarratives'. In this field the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper with his critique of historicism makes clear. And yet as the labors of archaeological research come to fruition a broad overall picture emerges, beginning with the Neolithic, followed by the rise of civilization, the Classical period, and finally the rise of the modern world. 

The prejudice against Big History As the data of world history reaches critical mass the question of Big History arises spontaneously, limited only by our inability to produce theoretical tools to deal with such an entity, seen to be the all time classic case of a mixed causal/freedom system. 

Deconstructing flat history We can turn postmodern critiques of Big History against themselves by deconstructing the idea of flat, random history. Such histories are infested with fallacies of the Social Darwinist type, and reject teleology only to create unconscious teleologies of conflict. 

One of the key thresholds is the invention of writing in the period of the early Sumerians, the point from which we can for the first time assemble a record that is more or less continuous at the level of centuries, or less. This circumstance has created a unique dataset, the historical record itself, the only such record that we have at all. And there, lo and behold, we have the evidence for the existence of non-random evolution. As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us a sense of the descent of man revisited and thereby freed from our current preconceptions about how this occurred. 

 The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery.  There is something almost foolhardy in the projection of selectionist scenarios onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of adaptation. And yet such claims are as extraordinary in their implications as they are weak in their evidentiary basis. One of the principal strands of evidence is that of a Great Explosion in the period around 50, 000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. Competing with this are the various datings of anatomically modern man around 150,000 B.C. There is also the question of where all of this began, its principal theatre of action, and the various hypotheses of the ‘Out of Africa’ variety. In fact, the absence of sufficient data should give us pause, and it is certainly true that we have no solid grounds at all for the facile assumption of Darwinists. We will soon see that drawing conclusions about this period is very difficult, which will lead us to ask if we can really trust the Darwinian account.

Looking at the descent of humans forces the issue on questions of random evolution. The very existence, however incomplete, of the so-called Great Explosion shows us directly the very clustering of rapid advance against the backdrop of slower development that challenges the basis of the gradualist assumptions of Darwinians. It is almost impossible to conclude anything one way or the other without close examination of the actual episodes of evolution, which raises the question of what we mean by observing evolution at all. A considerable confusion exists over the meaning of random evolution. Almost by definition the claims of evolution in the Darwinian sense are those of random evolution. And yet such statements are now confronted with the various statements by some authors that natural selection is itself non-random. But the meaning of the term has changed here, in the sense that environmental adaptation is in some fashion non-random. But this is misleading. The antithesis of random evolution must be the claim for some sort of long-range factor that operates over and above the causal chaining of relatively random incidents. And that is precisely what Darwinists are most adamant in rejecting.

This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution’, as opposed to microevolution. Is not Darwin’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a complete transformation in our assumptions about evolutionary epistemology. Most of all it requires resolving the crisis of correct observation.  We are operating in the dark in all cases prior to the rise of history where the beginnings of closely tracked evidence are to be found with the invention of writing. As we shall see that immediately suggests something different from what we had expected.

Considerations of 'Big History' have always failed, but the data of world history has finally reached critical mass and we discover unexpectedly that there is an overall logic to the whole. We have to stress this point, since it is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic. The trick to this system is the way that it operates on parts, regions, in short bursts, to further the whole. The quest for universal laws of history won't work. We find instead a nimble 'evolutionary driver' that operates in an intermittent timed sequence.    

We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. There is an irony in our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here. The problem is that the historical record is relatively short compared with the immense vistas of the earlier stages of evolutionary emergence. But it is significant that in reviewing the history of the idea of evolution we have discovered an odd fact indeed: the evolution of the idea itself is closely bound up with the pattern of evolution itself that we are about to discover!