We need to reexamine the meaning of evolution itself, for we suspect that its current purely genetic interpretation is misleading, and fails to account for a broader component that we can only call ‘macroevolution’. The term 'macroevolution' tends to refer to the process of speciation. But in the case of man we confront the ambiguity of that definition of man as man, the species Man. Perhaps that speciation is still incomplete, and history itself is an exhibit, evidence, in this process! It will turn on a question of 'evolution' becoming 'self-evolution', the passage from passive to active, as if it were an 'evolution of freedom'. 

The question of evolution and history can begin with a very simple question. If history and evolution are distinct, when did evolution stop and history begin? Clearly they could turn the one into the other in an instant. Thus it would seem that man 'evolved' toward 'history' but that something like history was coming into being while he was still evolving. And this still could be the case. So the two overlap. And this makes sense. Something that doesn't happen all at once has to happen in a transition, or a series of stages. On the one hand, the control of a passive process doesn't allow any freedom. But the total freedom to begin and continue is, at the beginning, an empty possibility. Chimpanzees are free to create civilization, but it won't happen. So between underdetermination and overdetermination we have some kind of overlapping evolution/history in which the balance is shifting toward freedom. One way to balance the under/overdetermination would be a series of 'transitions' of an intermittent character: strong direction, then a stop to see something actively emerge, then more direction, then stop again, and so on. But wait, that's what we see in the eonic effect! A series of on-off transitions! Looks familiar.  

It is peculiar to bring the term 'evolution' so close to home in our own history. We tend to have romantic image of wild and primordial evolution, and like to think that we evolved into free men in a jungle somewhere, tearing raw flesh off of wild beasts, the fourth chimpanzee cooking steaks on a fire, and then after some lucky mutation we just walked away with full-blown Kantian moral to greater things from then on. But the eonic effect is a cautionary tale. Its action seems to be still coaching man at the point where he is producing his own art, so what are we to think? We underestimated what it means to be man, perhaps. And in history we detect something that is not supposed to be there, something truly stupendous, a system leapfrogging millennia, able to morph whole cultures comprehensively in short time-slices. Most of all we see a process of directional evolution that can operate globally in selected localized regions, as seen in the ingenious placement of the zones of transition. Thus as we examine the eonic effect we are confronted with something that demands to be called ‘evolution’, although it seems paradoxical to apply this to history.  But in fact Darwinists have no monopoly on the use of the term. We speak routinely of ‘cosmic evolution’, ‘economic evolution’, the evolution of technology or religion, even the evolution of science or, indeed, of evolution as an idea. The evolution of civilization as a concept poses no problem, save that unexpectedly we find it to be a genuine type of macroevolution in collision with Darwin's version. So let us ask, why the emphasis on Darwin's version? Scientific evidence? As we have seen the evidence of Darwin is not adequate and our different evidence indirectly suggests that he is in fact wrong about natural selection. So, as they say, 'we are free to go', and redefine the meaning of evolution by redefining our line of attack on its mechanism. The fact of evolution, however, is quite secure, and the overall research project of the biologists remains in place as a foundation for any use on our part of the term evolution.