The most confusing aspect of the study of evolution is the nature of the first step, natural selection. Here the debate rages at its loudest. Yet the very proposition of natural selection would seem implausible. We can hardly suspect, early in school, as we embark on complex study,  that it is the first step that might be wrong, or at least, not established, nor recover clarity if we take this as an established foundation. Robert Reid notes in Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis, "I thought my failure to understand selection theory fully was the result of the specialization of the subject beyond my simple comprehension. Confident that every aspect of natural selection was for the best, I little knew that it had long been criticized for just that Panglossian felicity". 

• Huxley on Natural Selection  The history of the development of evolutionary theory is complex and often confusing. We associate more than any other T.H. Huxley with the triumph of Darwinism, yet might forget that his views were complex: 
  "Huxley's views about evolution 'evolved' over time. Initially a saltationist, he eventually adopted Darwin's gradualist position. In time, he also accepted the doctrine of progressive development after arguing against it for many years. However, he remained skeptical his entire life of the power of natural selection to create new species. What were his reasons, and can he still be called a Darwinian in spite of his reservations concerning the most basic tenet of Darwin's theory?   In Huxley's famous Times review of the Origin, he stated that while Darwin's theory explained a great deal about the natural  world, he personally preferred to adopt Goethe's aphorism "Thatige Skepsis," or active doubt. He did not deny that natural selection existed in nature, but could it account for all the effects that Darwin ascribed to it?"  Thomas Henry Huxley, Sherrie Lyons, p. 231

Some familiarity, that's all, with the critiques of natural selection are necessary for our study of history. There natural selection suddenly becomes a problem. So how did this problem arise, if natural selection accounts for everything? 

This is a speed readers approach to being a Darwin critic. There is no other way. If you are a one book Darwin groupie, you will be brainwashed. If we produce a critique, read it. No excuses. We are not dogmatic. I cannot refute Darwinist assertions, e.g. that language arises via natural selection. But such thinking could never be dogmatic, yet currently is, what a scandal. Just be aware of the tremendous underground literature. 

We do not propose here the design argument as a substitute for natural selection, although this legacy must be considered. The Trojan horse for God has humor, but it tends feed Darwinism rather than refute it. For evolutionary naturalism, which doesn't imply natural selection exclusively, however primitive as yet, seems the highest likelihood The Darwin debate is a two-edged sword. One side gains the upper hand, then the other makes a comeback, then it all goes in reverse gear, an infinite loop.  Although one can be critical of Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, the equal and opposite atheist agenda to the theist agenda requires careful consideration, and exploration. To be an 'atheist' should mean, not just debunking Christian dogma, but encountering, as did Nietzsche, the 'Zoroastrian dialectic' of good and evil. Don't fall for sweet divinities doing punctuated equilibrium, please. It is not a funny subject.   For injecting divinities into evolutionary thinking is part of what drives Darwinism further into its rut. There could be a 'blind watchmaker' that was a watchmaker, but blind, watch out for the trap in Dawkins' provocative thinking. Homer was blind, but produced a complete epic, so...? The problem with Dawkins is that we think he succeeded, when what he does is produce a powerful dialectic. This dialectic devours its children. Also, genetic fundamentalism, as in The Selfish Gene is an inherently limited line of argument, as the world of the genome surely now suggests.

So, study the history and literature of the argument. Most of the early critics summarized the problems, as with Mivart.  Michael Denton's Evolution, A Theory Crisis is a classic critique here, no matter that it has been lambasted many times. Several good texts for anyone suspecting a problem with Darwinism are

Darwinism, Refutation of a Myth, Soren Lovtrup; Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis, Robert Reid, Beyond Natural Selection, Robert Wesson 

 In Beyond Natural Selection, Robert Wesson gives a naturalist's second opinion of the gritty details that mount up and cast a shadow on the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, noting, p. xii: "Natural selection is credited with seemingly miraculous feats because we want an answer and have no other. There probably cannot be another general answer. Biologists, it seems, must do without a comprehensive theory of evolution." To question natural selection does not disprove it. If we doubt it, we can be forced to think creatively for the first time, for it remains to be elucidated. To question it requires engaging its study, thus we lose nothing. Wesson summons up an impressive list of oddities that current theories simply disregard. Simple things, like the absence of selective advantage in dreaming, the failure of sexual selection in practice to feedforward intelligence, the six-leggedness of insects, the archaeopteryx, etc, etc,... Looking at a DNA molecule should make anyone fainthearted. Could any random change in such a fantastic labyrinth occur at all in an evolutionary sense now considered?
 "Many very simple facts, such as that all the millions of species of insects, and no species of non-insects have six legs, might well might well be considered to disprove natural selection as a generalization." Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection

Natural selection is surely no more visible than the deity. And it is also relevant to ask not merely whether natural selection has been proved, but whether it can be proved. Evolutionists are fond of taunting the creationists that their miracles of special creation can, by definition, be neither proved nor disproved. Yet we frequently find evolutionists arriving at propositions that are in the same category. The Bone Peddlers, William Fix

Some obviously feared that if natural selection were discarded evolution would be endangered. They thought the two theories inseparable and foresaw a rebirth of superstition. But dropping natural selection leaves the evidence for evolution untouched. It was not even a question of dropping natural selection, for natural selection is an observed fact. It was a question of seeing--as Darwin came to see--that selection occurs after the useful change has come into being... Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Freud

L. Spetner in Not By Chance explores the clear evidence for non-random variation, noting that Darwin himself saw the problem finally with his original thesis.

An extensive history and bibliography is Origin of the Species Revisited, by W.R. Bird. 

Since Darwin, we turn to a single, singular force, Natural Selection, which we might well capitalize as though it were the new deity. Random variation, selection-sifting. Without it, we reason, there would be nothing but incoherent disorder. I shall argue in this book that this idea is wrong. For, as we shall see, the emerging sciences of complexity begin to suggest that the order is not all accidental, that vast veins of spontaneous order lie at hand. Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that selection comes into play, further molding and refining.  P. 8

Evolution From Space by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, is another classic, with an series of distractions near its main statistical critique, which is the most refuted of unrefuted arguments ever penned. 

Kevin Kelley, in Out of Control, speaks of 'Postdarwinism' and provides some good insights into the limitations of the current paradigm, plus bibliography. 

Issues of the statistical implausibility of random changes in coding sequences of DNA are, and remain, a powerful challenge to the current picture, which has, however, tacitly acknowledged this as it moves on to explications of body plans, evolutionary toolkits, hox genes, and morphogenesis.

Some writers on evolution, acknowledging implicitly the problems of natural selection of coding sequences, tend to suggest that mutations in regulatory processes are the answer. But here again, we must suppose, the problem re-arises all over again. Cf. the objection of Senapathy in Independent Birth of Organisms, p. 138, "Regulatory sequence mutations also can only bring about variants of the same gene or can only lead to defective (or incorrect) expression of a given gene, not to new genes or to a new developmental pathway."

In Sudden Origins, J. Schwartz looks at the important, rarely told, history of the shifting debate over punctuated versus continuous versions of evolutionism in relation to population genetics, and brings in the new research on 'homeobox' genes. Commenting on an attempt to simulate models of the evolution of the eye, "Do we actually need to invoke such an elaborate thought experiment in order to understand the origin of the vertebrate eye, or any eye, for that matter? I think not. And the reasons lie in knowing that there are homeobox genes for eye formation and that when one of them, the Rx gene in particular, is activated in the right place and at the right time, an individual has an eye. When something goes awry with this gene, the other homeobox genes involved in eye development cannot do their job, and an eye does not form. Clearly, the difference between having or not having an eye is a different proposition altogether from the gradual accretion of the bits and pieces that make up an eye. At the genetic level, major morphological novelty can indeed be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. All that is necessary is that homeobox genes are either turned on or they are not. (p. 362)

Macroevolution and Punctuated Equilibrium  The basic argument against natural selection is also one against 'slow evolution' and 'continuity'. Further, these questions have ideological overtones. But the basic issue is that natural selection suggests evolutionary continuity, and the record does not show this. If we can evade the distraction of supernaturalism claiming this fact, we are left with something simple, about which we know little. Confusion reigns, for the next series of traps are anything from vitalism to Bergsonian evolutionism, to what not. That is, these gaps, rate changes, and discontinuities are high level 'perceptions' lacking sufficient data of evolution in action, by mechanisms we do not know, because we do not see them.  It is not safe to speculate. But with history we need not speculate. We can see a remarkable example of 'punctuated equilibrium' behind this history. The problem is that the term 'punctuated equilibrium' is not defined properly, and only describes a pattern, not a process. The term might collate many different processes, from the comet impact that produces dinosaur extinction, to climatic factors that accelerate natural selection, to anything else. Thus the use of the term is too muddled for consistent use. However, we will suggest once the relation to history, using quotation marks:

The eonic effect as 'punctuated equilibrium' (?)  Watch out! The spectacle of world history shows a remarkable example of 'punctuated equilibrium' in the sense of rapid cultural evolution and intermediate periods of 'stasis'. Don't mix this term with the study of history unless you wish a host of useless arguments. The situation proposed by Gould and Eldredge is quite different, and they invented the term.  

But the constrast of fast evolution and stasis is a mysterious component of the eonic effect.  And this is very close at home indeed, as we look at the non-random pattern clearly visible in world history.  The term 'punctuated equilibrium' can be used once to suggest a different insight to those who are confused about the nature of macroevolution, and then dropped, for we must adopt a new terminology applied to historical subjects. 

Development and Evolution

From Cells, Embryos, and Evolution, J. Gerhart and M. Kirschner, Blackwell, 1997, paperback.  Refer also to H. Keller's The Century of the Gene, for some background.

For the most part evolutionary biologists have relied on theories of selection and population genetics as explanations for evolutionary change. But looking at selection as the cause of evolutionary diversification has some pitfalls. Form is so tied to function that many biologists have been tempted to interpret every feature of an animal as serving some selected purpose. That this temptation exists is sufficient to indicate that there are few frivolous or neutral qualities to life compared with the number of adaptive ones. However, selection only provides a filter on the possible forms. It screens the forms presented to it by development and the activities of cell biology. It is the processes of embryonic development that are responsible for all of the morphological details, and selection only affects those that significantly influence fitness. ... The search for for a biochemical basis for diversification that is selected upon during evolution has recently led to a paradox: whe re we most expect to find variation, we find conservation, a lack of change....p. 1

And in conclusion: p. 587
Has Evolvability evolved and if so, is it the result of clade selection?
Two of the most serious and novel questions raised by our consideration of the flexibility and robustness of cell biological and developmental processes are"
1. Is the capacity to evolve a selected trait in organisms, and
2. Has this trait itself evolved under selection?....

Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical, theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology: for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a peculiar 'Darwinian' vocabulary--'adaptation', 'selection pressure', 'natural selection', etc,--thereby believing that they contribute to the explanation of natural events. They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we shall be able to make real progress in our understanding of evolution.
I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?..."
Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, p. 422

 The study of history requires seeing the dangers of selectionist thinking. To assume natural selection produces all evolution is a recipe for disaster, we should demand the highest standards of proof, instead.... WHOA! Runaway theory. No amount of debate, it seems, will talk Darwinists out of the preconceived notions here. They are simply stone cold and out of it. In part, this is justified by the fact that the counterclaims also tend to fail.  It is essential for one's own understanding to cross this bridge, otherwise nothing will make sense in evolution. Natural selection  is like an aggressively defended bluff, all too conveniently beyond disproof. And there can be no doubt that this is one component of evolutionary processes. But its agency as the sole factor in the progression of major forms is surely open to question. In many ways the traditional critics have won the debate, please note, for we see that developmental processes are involved in many of the biological structures once thought to The basic body plans of animals, for instance, have remained unchanged since the Cambrian.  Most, of course, associate challenges to Darwinism with religious or Creationist views, but such an exclusive association is a false one. The mathematician Johann Von Neuman was skeptical, and many mathematicians have always been wary of the statistics of selection.  In any case, theories of evolution are on the move again after a long period of rigidity. 

Descent of Man

   Paul Davies, Are We Alone? Basic Books 1995, considers the issues explicitly, and notes, page 86

One of the oddities of human intelligence is that its level of advancement seems like a case of overkill. While a modicum of intelligence does have good survival value, it is far from clear how such qualities as the ability to do advanced mathematics, create complex music or develop rich language structures ever evolved by natural selection...This raises the interesting question of when these abilities were selected for. Most biologists believe that the structure of the human brain has changed little over tens of thousands of years, which suggest that higher mental functions were selected long ago and have lain largely dormant until recently. Yet if these functions were not explicitly manifested at the time they were selected, why were they selected? How can natural selection operate on a hidden ability? ...The case of the Australian aborigines is intriguing. These people remained almost completely isolated from the rest of the world for 40,000 years until the arrival of the Europeans. Yet they are today essentially indistinguishable from Europeans in their artistic, linguistic and musical abilities and, when educated, in their mathematical ability too. This suggests that either the 'maths' gene and others were selected for more than 40,000 years ago, and have remained hidden and 'unexpressed' for countless generations, or that these higher abilities have developed in parallel with the rest of humanity as a bizarre form of biological convergence with no apparent use. Either way, there is a mystery as far as orthodox Darwinism is concerned. p. 86

Arthur Koestler,
Janus, Hutchinson, 1978

Arthur Koestler's views on evolution have always been a reminder of how many dissenters on evolution have never reached print, if a well-known author automatically gets work on such a controversial issue published.
The funny charm of Janus, with its remarks on Wallace and the brain, and the tale of Ali, can help to make one simply snap out of the Darwin mesmerization syndrome, to which debate and rational discourse rarely contribute anything. It is a question of assuming you already know, have the endorsement of rocket scientists, that this position is sophisticated science, in a word, a hopeless condition too far gone for anything but a loud sound, a sound beating, or some extraordinary jolt to consciousness.


...in creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor...Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of the ape, whereas he possesses one very little inferior to that of the average member of our learned societies....

This was written by no less an authority than Alfred Russell Wallace, who co-fathered with Darwin the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin instantly realized the potentially disastrous implications of the argument, and wrote to Wallace. 'I hope you have not murdered completely your own and my child.' But he had no satisfactory answer to Wallace's criticism, and his disciples swept it under the carpet.
Why was that criticism so important? There were two reasons. The first is merely of historical interest, in that Wallace's objection demolishes one of the cornerstones of the Darwinian edifice. Evolution in Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory must proceed in a very small steps, each of which confers some minimal selective advantage on the mutated organism-otherwise the whole conception makes no sense, as Darwin himself kept reiterating. But the rapid evolution of the human cerebrum, which some anthropologists have compared to a 'turmorous overgrowth', could by no stretch of the imagination be fitted into this theory. Hence Darwin's agonized response, and the subsequent conspiracy of silence.
The second, and by far the more important, aspect of Wallace's criticism, he himself does not seem to have fully realized. He emphasized that the 'instrument'-the human brain-had been 'developed in advance of the needs of its possessor'. But the evolution of the human brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is also the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use; a luxury organ, which will take its owner thousands of years to learn to put to proper use--if he ever does.
The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo sapiens--Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand years ago or earlier--was already endowed with a brain which in size and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But, however paradoxical it sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an illiterate cave-dweller and, for millennium after millennium, went on manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomical magnitude.  This paradox is not easy to grasp.
Arthur Koestler, Janus, 1978, p. 274

New ideas on Descent of Man *

The Monkey in the Mirror : Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human
by Ian Tattersall


It is one of the mysteries of the twentieth century that everyone thought they had a theory of evolution accounting for the descent of man, when in fact they didn't. And too many books on human evolution, attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, start to beat around the bush and are are so confusing due to dogmatic reiterations of received theory you feel you have been had, if you can finish them. This short book of essays is an exception and cuts to the quick of the issues, and is really a 'must-read' for getting your bearings in this field, once ridiculed by a book called Bone Peddlers by William Fix. First, it makes clear how little we know about human evolution, in the paucity of fossils from which our understanding comes. That is essential, for we imagine that we are required to take on faith everything asserted in this field, when in fact, it is almost void of certainties. Next, it intelligently graduates from the disorderly punctuated equilibrium debate, in its several innings, to avail itself of new insights and proposals of the last generation, among them the idea of 'exaptation', non-adaptive innovations waiting on their realized use in a later context. The work of J. Schwarz in Sudden Origins with its considerations of developmental genes and the spread of recessive mutations comes to the aid of the overall perspective, whose novelty, correct or not, as a new form of evolutionary explanation is refreshing and intriguing. Rejecting the idea of natural selection as a creative force fine-tuning adaptations and distinguishing morphological change from speciation, the work proceeds briskly through the hominid sequence with a clarity not seen in most other works in this area, and makes clear the difference between anatomically modern and behaviorally modern man, and all this in relation to the issue of the Neanderthals. There is still, in this reviewer's opinion, a void in the whole account, centering on the issues of consciousness and language, indeed Tattersall makes this clear, but at least the overall sequence begins to make sense with this ingenious new means to reconcile fast evolution and slow evolution, speciation, and much else. Although short, and at first apparently lightweight, this turned out to be one of the most useful books on human evolution I have read. I recommend not letting Darwinian arm twisters deflect your attention from some basic issues here.

One could way to bypass both Darwin dogma and the problems of controversy in being a Darwin critic is to adopt the perspective of exobiology, just before the point of adopting any particular viewpoint in this field. The exobiologist stands back, and asks, what is the place of life in the universe? Does it arise at random, is it universal or confined to a contingent sequence on earth, and so on. This stance implicitly provokes all the mischief of the Darwin critic with none of the hastles with Darwin fanatics. A good start, Here Be Dragons, by D. Koerner and S. Levay.  Cf. also, Paul Davies, Are We Alone?

The reason we distance ourselves from the design argument is that our operating hypothesis is that natural selection is an incomplete explanation, but that there are possibilities for naturalistic explanation that are not exhausted by empirical research. The criticism that this 'naturalism' might be a philosophic stance or bias must be considered. But much of the criticism is also biased.   But the facts tend strongly toward evolution, reconceived in a broader sense. The fossil record makes no sense without the idea of evolution, and still makes no sense with the idea of natural selection. The sociobiological claims that ethical behavior arises from natural selection, and the various hypotheses of kin selection and group selection are simply ad hoc extensions to Darwin's thesis, and are not very convincing, and stand or fall with the prior assumptions about the universal application of natural selection. Thus the meaning of evolution remains up in the air, the reason for the endless debate, as rival parties attempt to exclude the middle ground, or make theism or atheism a derivative metaphysical conclusion. . 

• Theory and ideology  Darwin's theory is malformed in the sense of not specifying the domain of its application. And this results in the confusions of ideology. 

Evolution, History of an Idea

 The history of the idea of evolution, and the evolution of evolution, is a complex one, often confusing correct study. The idea is clearly born in antiquity, as with so much else,   in tune with the rise of Ionian Enlightenment. Reemerging in modern times, during the Enlightenment, we find early ideas of cosmic evolution in the philosopher Kant, whose stance, along with that of Hume's, is and remains of significant interest as the question of directionality and 'evolutionary causality' remains forever up in the air.  For the dilemmas of rationalism and empiricism that he addressed resurface in disguise in the great debate ignited by Darwin's theory. Kant's views on the argument by design were far more sophisticated than what came later, either from traditionalists or Darwinists. In many ways, in the endless confusion over the fact and the theory, Lamarck is the first major theorist of evolution, with the popularization of the idea occurring in the remarkable episode of Chambers' Vestiges, which paved the way for Darwin's success.  The exclusive emphasis on Darwin's publication of his Origin forgets that long gestation of the idea 

•  Evolution, The History of an Idea, Peter J. Bowler: "We can no longer believe that the [theory] simply  rolled back all opposition by virtue of its demonstrable technical advantages. On the contrary, Darwinism flourished despite a number of crucial objections that were to give a great deal of trouble later on, until resolved by the synthesis with Mendelian genetics. "p. 23. The great success of Darwin was followed by the near eclipse of the theory toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the work of Mendel was rediscovered. For a theoretical account of the rise of the Synthesis, cf. Sudden Origins, by Jeffrey Schwarz, along with Bowler's The Eclipse of Darwinism. 

• For a dissenting view of the history of evolution just before Darwin, cf. Soren Lovtrup's Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, with its account in light of the four theories of evolution   Currently resurfacing in the age of the genome is the significance of the early developmental tradition. As Lovtrup notes, the early so-called 'transcendentalists', such as the two Saint-Hilaire's, von Baer, Owen, Chambers, were really what he calls 'macromutationists' with their insights into embryology and development. It is significant that Huxley was greatly influenced by this side tradition. 

Complexities...and Complex Systems: Dynamics on the Move

Because of the legacy of Newtonian physics, and the educational lag in absorbing new advances, we see the 'unconscious' implications of causal modeling haunting the spread of fundamental science into the social and biological sciences. And yet we have no grounds for assuming such models could really work. Many of the problems of the social sciences spring from the difficulty of correctly understanding or keeping up with physics and the real nature of reductionism and its implications. Even before the world could digest Newton, the field of mathematics and dynamics was moving on. One could even argue that 'Quantum Mechanics' was born at the end of the eighteenth century in the formalism of Langrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, as Newtonian social science was getting underway. And the existence of a whole new dimension behind mechanics was spotted by Poincare at the end of the last century. This has now produced the fascinating new world of Chaos, and the various efforts, not quite successful, to extend the range of the old types of theories into new realms. But even if we find this new form of mathematics unable to account for the realities of evolutionary systems, its extension of thought automatically opens the window for some fresh air. The lesson of previous scientific triumphs now appearing stale in their range of false applications should induce a more seasoned perspective on the natural account by scientific means. In any case, the eonic effect shows many distant cousin similarities to this type of dynamics, once we isolated psychology from sociology, man from the vehicle of social evolution. The world or research is now tackling the new 'science of complexity'. Man's history shows plenty of complexity, but also a strange simplicity.

But the complexity is tremendous. A revealing thing happens as we bring evolution home to human history, the number of topics, sub-theories, descriptive corners, theoretical preliminaries starts to take off stratospherically, and it becomes difficult to state exactly what phenomenon is to be explained! Complex indeed. And we must struggle with our historical resolving power. What really happened in the period -900 to -600 in ancient Greece, or Israel? We at least have some information. What happened to man in the period -50000 to -25000? We don't have any information. Yet we are certain how man evolved in the periods about which we have no information, but suddenly unsure about the periods where we have some. There are simply no simple explanations of such complex developmental processes. We are always closing on a more detailed record of the facts. It is confounded by our means of observation, our historical resolving power.

But we may get lucky: can nature handle such complexity? Or will it start to break up into strange 'evolutionary patches' defeating the intractable nature of the whole. We see a curious simplification of this kind in the eonic effect. We can chase nature, for a brief five thousand year glimpse.

A theory tends to be defined (at its most restrictive) as a predictive model about a phenomenon. Or else a 'how it works', at a minimum.  With the eonic effect we can see no theory in this sense is possible, even though the apparent antithesis is also false, that there is no action of evolution except free activity. We see a law that is no law.  For we indirectly see mechanism, but are granted no predictive resolution. And this mechanism, as we close in, simply disappears and leaves no traces. At high zoom levels, we can infer its existence. At deeper zoom levels, it disappears. That is a strong indication we are inside 'evolution'. We could never in practice detect its mechanism (perhaps). Instead of  'still another theory', we can assess the scale and terms required for any such theory, and they are tremendous.

It is also true that what we will call 'the eonic evolution of civilization' might have nothing to do with the organismic evolution of primordial populations. We can argue that there is probably a very close connection, a master clue. But, one way or the other, we don't even need the term 'evolution' to study the eonic effect. Nevertheless cultural evolution is not a matter of cultural selection, cultural competition, value-free historical laws, or economic market emergence. It isn't any of those things. It is important to be clear that this 'eonic evolution of civilization'  precludes pretty much any implications Darwinism applied to human cultures. The sociobiological claims are simply confusing the issues, thus the claim that religion is a form of evolutionary adaptation dies hard, and in fact doesn't die at all. It is hard to deal with reasoning that assumes altruism must be explainable by selectionist arguments, since natural selection must be true. Maybe the whole theory is disproven just there. The dangerous fallacy of 'cultural selectionism' mixed with economism has passed into currency and been granted a license it does not deserve, and one whose effect on society cannot go unchallenged.  Study of the eonic effect is useful because it demands everything all at once, and shows the strong suggestion of a large scale evolutionary process in just what we might have deduced by hindsight, one that is however  a conjunction of both historical mechanics and value emergentism.

• A-Life: Although the claims for artificial evolution seem exaggerated if they are pressed into service as substitutes for Darwinism, the interest in the subject is great, for we do indeed get a glimpse of new possibilities of theoretical explanation beyond what we could have imagined.  Cf. Steven Levy's Artificial Life, and Kevin Kelly's Out of Control. Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton, 1994). 

Thermodynamics & Self-organization

Theories of evolution are confusing because they leapfrog thermodynamics, or wish to but fail, and we can look back on Darwin's reaction to Kelvin's criticism of his theory with some wariness. This was the issue of the significance of thermodynamics to the time-scales needed for evolution. We might indulge in another heresy here by suggesting that Darwin and Kelvin were both 'right' for the wrong reasons. Kelvin was oddly out of sorts about Darwin, became dogmatic and is given short shrift now, but surely his wrong view, with some bias against Darwinism,  was still a fresh impression and  his point was simply to see a catch, the dilemma of statistics in the selectionist thesis, while Darwin could see that 'evolution' was a fact irregardless of objections of the physicists. The subtle fallacy in the debate over the Second Law is now seen to revolve around the dangers of applying the law to systems that are not closed. We cannot simply apply it to the whole universe. We see clearly that self-organization is a fact. The problem with Darwin's view was his confusion (and ours) over the shadow meanings of 'natural selection', stretching from passive process to active ordering force. Note the cryptic appearance unmentioned in semantic terms of the sasquatch 'force'. Kelvin's real intent would be to have considered that randomness degrades order, and that some active creation of order is needed to account for life. Thus the issue of the time-scale is irrelevant. No amount of time is enough. It is completely obvious that order and disorder alternate in life, as order seeks restoration, and that Darwin threw the baby of anything like 'feedback' out with the bath. We imagine a remote random evolution. But in actual life, we would never bet on it. We see that initiatives decline over time, and, while they may find refreshment, this doesn't 'just happen' all the time in a continuous fashion.

A useful review of the new issues of thermodynamics can be found in Hans Christian Von Baer's Maxwell's Demon, where the issues of  'algorithmic complexity' are beginning to impinge on the statistics of entropy with the 'new kid on the block', Information. The term 'order' is very treacherous and is not defined in the various arguments of thermodynamics in a way that really applies to cultural evolution. There self-organization is very real, but its meaning is a little different!! What is social self-organization? The order created by cops, or the loot of market systems created by robbers? Here it's Marx versus Hayek, the latter a wrongheaded but brilliant prevaricator on Darwinism, who saw there was a problem, even though his spontaneous evolution is a typical blend of classical liberalism and evolutionism. Historical systems don't need to apologize for being statist, the libertarian response being something later. Marx began his life in the world of Hegel's proto-evolutionism, and his views on Darwin are in part later fabrications. No student of Hegel would dwell long on Darwin, unless he saw the tidal wave of Darwinism as inevitable, and what he really thought here is not clear. The book reviews some aspects of macroeconomics, and distinguishes the 'econosequence' from the general 'self-organization' of civilization.

Even as a reductionist viewpoint comes under attack, a real 'reductionism', the cosmic context of life itself, might see a stepping stone in physics to a real biology in eras unfolding since the Big Bang. Thus Eric Chaisson, in The Life Era shows there is no inherent reason that evolution cannot have a proper footing in terms of universal processes. For discussions of the new field of self-organizing systems, cf. The Arrow of Time (NY: Ballantine, 1990), by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Ilya Prignone et al., Order Out of Chaos (NY: Bantam, 1984), Paul Davies The Cosmic Blueprint (1988). Unfortunately, 'self-organization' has two directly opposed interpretations, and the modern market economy would like to claim the term from what is surely its primordial meaning in the emergence of civilization: the rise of the state, before the contrapositive of the interior 'freedom emergence' inside the state, another reason for seeing history break up into separate 'evolutions'. It was the philosopher Hegel who saw this contradiction first. He saw that the evolution of civilization (he did not use the term evolution!) was reacting against its own first structure, more monster feedback. The modern critique of government-stifled economies is just that, a modern one, and an economic question, not a thesis of cultural evolution. The capacity of markets to 'self-organize' seems obvious, but has never been defined properly, let alone proven by any theory, and remains an observation of the actual functioning of economies starting in the early modern period. The French government, among innumerable other instances, so strangled its economy with bad regulation that it actually contracted severely, leading close students with economic horse sense, climaxing in Adam Smith, to try to decipher what was going on. This heads for some quite controversial issues! But the attempt of a writer such as Hayek, challenging Marx, to speak of spontaneous natural evolution of a 'market order' works fine for classic liberal economies, but isn't a theory of cultural evolution, which has produced all sorts of economies, and is therefore a more general category. Our approach is different. The mesmerizing confusion of Adam Smith and Darwin is implicitly foretold in the leftist reaction of a whole century.

Any critic of Darwinism is beset with all sorts of  nonsense about being 'scientific'. It would be good to say what this means, if  'science' presumes the value-free analysis of phenomena and the study of society must by definition assume the evolution of values. If it means the collection of evidence, then the history of evolutionary research is impressive indeed. But the claims of theory are a shambles. The question of what constitutes science in the realm of  'evolutionary theory' has never been clarified.  It is obviously important  to remember that science is first about evidence, and Darwinism cannot provide any really conclusive evidence whatsoever, of any kind, in favor of Darwin's thesis as this pertains to the mechanism of evolution of, for instance, early man. We have never really seen what we are trying to explain. The debate confuses theory and data, explanation or model, and sequential data of record merely suggests the fact of evolution, without explaining the process involved. Credentials to produce a theory of evolution therefore do not exist, and the demands they be compatible with the current forms of science incoherent. 

We should not wonder too long at the difficulty. Evolution is a three dimensional time stream of loose populations undergoing transformations over centuries, millennia, eons. Experience with a can opener won't help. The study of eonic effect shows that at a beggar's minimum we should be able, if our ambition is theory, to model an entire social system over three centuries in a fuzzy region that is neither bounded nor unbounded, as relative transformation. One must explain how non-random patterns of independently dispersed artistic creativity occurs in waves.  It is difficult to even visualize any such thing, Cecil Demille's Ten Commandments won't do it. The only thing comparable is the well-known World Systems models, which promptly degenerated into bickering over their limited assumptions. And that was confined to the purely measurable variables available. A real simulation of man's cultural value evolution must encompass everything in all categories, especially unique instances and weak evolutionary firsts, as in the arts, to be realistic. The social sciences have produced too lame-ducks in the realm of theory, Darwinism, and the macro-economic model. The latter, apart from its general interest, shows insufficient mathematical potency to get anywhere. There (and the subject is an interesting one, despite severe criticisms) the problem is clearer, you can't really quantify the motivations of man, unless you amputate every factor in man except pure utilitarian quantity. That may be valid economics, but it is not cultural evolution. Everyone turns to the same book of differential equations, and starts flycasting for some data that will fit, or else the Newtonian straightjacket is put onto the 'evolution' of an economic system. It is always the same book of differential equations, and one is better off simply admiring its contents in the abstract. Here physicists always get lucky, while students of social science muddle through with one-legged theories that fall over and collapse after a fashionable run. And the method has graduated in physics to the fabulous strange world of higher analysis and Hilbert spaces. There we find, not free will, but 'free activity', the explicit act of measurement by the scientist interacting with an otherwise deterministic system. We might take note of this contrast of double systems. In any case, this situation makes clear that complex theories that look scientific may be nothing of the kind. The point is less obvious in early Darwinism, until, voila, the models of population genetics are put forth. They might work to a degree with bacteria. But after that their claims are certainly open to question.

Social systems don't respond so far to these analytic methods in any direct fashion, as Karl Popper pointed out. If a theory must predict, someone will be stubborn enough to try and do otherwise. There is no inherent reason this failure of theory should be so. If mathematics works so well in one domain of nature, its distant cousin should exist. Thus, at one and the same time, our eonic 'theory' tries a new way to prove this wrong. We see a hint of an answer. Throw out prediction, allow free activity, and search for 'trends'. It is a point that has been better debated in the historical sciences, and by such thinkers as Karl Popper, with his views on 'historicism'. But this argument also has its flaws. The connection of history and evolution, notwithstanding the ambitions of sociobiologists, is elusive and the two subjects remain in two worlds. They quite naturally wish to find one subject in two, to biologize culture. But first you must have a rock solid theory of general evolution. The trick to finding this unity is to first abolish it. We have already pointed to our own 'trick' of  'connecting to disconnect' the two subjects. Sociobiologists wish to biologize ethics, invade culture, create a comprehensive theory. Good idea, much railed at. But if natural selection fails, it won't work. This discussion sometimes confuses genetic determinism and Darwinian mechanism. The existence of genetic mechanisms of behavior is not proof of Darwin's theory. Our 'freedom when' question allows us to approach the question indirectly, in the gray area between 'free activity' (which might be robotic) and Free 'free activity', which might, or might not, exist. 

Some Critiques of Darwinism

One of the most comprehensive bibliographies of Darwinism and its critiques is Origin of the Species Revisited, W. H. Bird, (Regency, 1991) Also, Lovtrup

The literature criticizing Darwinism is considerable and increasing. If  you have never read a Darwin critique, your opinion on evolution is not worth much. This literature is also treacherous, but is rendered significant by the strange dogmatism of Darwinian accounts, which makes criticism easy for amateurs. Beware of claims for the argument by design, which deserve respect and a hearing, but cannot be taken as proven.  Some critics do in reverse what Darwinists do, with reversed agendas. The purpose of these critiques should be to assist in reading the standard literature, beyond its defects, which can be confusing. The amount of wrong research created by taking Darwinism at face value is tremendous, a scandal  Cf. Icons of Evolution, by J. Wells for some examples. The religious agendas of some of these critics will avail them nothing. 

The field of criticism is changing in the age of hox genes, cf. Dear Mr. Darwin, Gabriel Dover, and Sudden Origins, J. Schwarz

Before recommending some Darwin critiques, it is important, obviously, not to forget the mainstream literature, if you can survive it (bibliographies are legion). Always be wary of the claims made, and, as an exercise, at least, consider that natural selection is inadequate as explanation without being intimidated by the scientific wrapping. Critiquing Darwinism is one of the best ways to become a Darwin student, you will have to think, and dig into the literature to determine, as an amateur, the thinking of the experts. Not always easy. but don't abdicate. 

 

 Lee Spetner, Not By Chance, Soren Lovtrup's Darwinism, Refutation of a Myth, Robert Reid's Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis, and Robert Wesson's Beyond Natural Selection, contain general critiques of Darwinism that are very useful starting points for those confused by the general tenor of certainty cast about the NeoDarwinian Synthesis. The classic critique is Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. W. R. Bird's monumental two volume work, The Origin of the Species Revisited, contains 5000 references on Darwinism, including virtually all the critiques. The complexity of the subject makes the challenge seem difficult, but the basic issues are relatively clear. Cf. Robert Reid, Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis (NY: Cornell, 1985), Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (NY: Adler & Adler, 1985),. Pariannan Senapathy, Independent Birth of Organisms (Madison: Genome Press, 1994), Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester: Vermon, Park Street Press, 1997),  Robert Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (1996).   I.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (Greenvale, NY: New Research Publications, 1984), J. Rifkin, Algeny (NY: Viking, 1984),   Evolution From Space (London: Dent, 1981), Robert Shapiro, Origins, A Skeptics Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (NY: Summit Books, 1985).   Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order (NY: Oxford,1993). Also, Mae-Wanho, The Rainbow and the Worm (NJ: World Scientific, 1993), Genetic Engineering ( Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1998),The Planetary Mind, Arne Wyler, MacMurray and Beck, 1996. 

Cf. also Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (NY: Doubleday, 1958)  Arthur Koestler, Janus (NY: Random House, 1978). 

  For a picture of Darwin and  his milieu, cf. A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin: Life of a Tomented Evolutionist.