The Darwin debate is probably the most intractable controversy of modern times, one doomed to never go away in large part due to the rigidity of the parties to that debate. We now see the Intelligent Design movement renewing the opposition from the direction of basically conservative religious groups. There isn't anything especially complex about the debate. Darwinism, based on the excessive claims for natural selection, constantly provokes opposition from those who see a limited form of scientism at work in the creation of a reductionist perspective on the whole of life and culture. On the side of religion, there is a whole spectrum of confusions, ranging from obsessive defenses of Biblical creationism to the recent resurrection of the long challenged design argument. 

This polarization of science and religion has now become a polarization on the political front as liberal and conservative factions fall into place around the religious/secular divide. It is mostly a false debate, and it is important to keep in mind the many scientific critics of Darwinism who have pointed out from the beginning that Darwin's formulation of the question of evolution was doomed to just the kind of endless controversy that we see. In the American sphere, liberal Darwinists have ignored the ideological conservatism lurking in Darwinian so-called science, and conservatives have made a temporary alliance with Bible Belt culture wars, forgetting the Social Darwinist implications of Darwin's crypto-conservative Whiggishness, or classical liberalism. None of this is likely to lead to a clarification of the issues. It seems as if both parties, sensing they know nothing, are intent on imposing their own ideologies on a void, to win the public in a fight for market share. 

World History And The Eonic Effect, in its discovery and exploration of the eonic effect, provides a way to move beyond this false polarization by doing something very simple: looking at history itself. The basic problem with Darwinism is the oversimplification that is created by looking only at a restricted range of evolutionary phenomena, and then, on the basis of insufficient observation, pronouncing natural selection to be the complete explanation. In all the debate over science, the point is lost that Darwinists violate correct scientific procedure here. To apply selectionist explanation sight unseen to the vistas of deep time without zooming in to see the full picture has resulted in a kind of scientific mythology. 

One of the persistent criticisms of Darwinism has been that it sees only one aspect of evolution, sometimes called microevolution, unable to take into account the possibility of a larger factor, what can be called 'macroevolution'. The later is likely to be very hard to observe, and requires a much higher degree of close observation than is considered sufficient in current accounts. Note that most statements about evolution see no problem in generalizing about intervals millions of years long, without the slightest awareness of just how problematical that might be. What if some macro factor operated at high speed over a much shorter range? We would be hard pressed to even see it. Not a single account of evolution by Darwinists is able to present data at the level of millennia, or even more, at the level of centuries. What if this is the fatal flaw in current Darwinian reasoning? 

The study of the eonic effect approaches the question of evolution on precisely this issue, by asking if we have in fact any closely observed intervals where we have data in real time, or in a global context, or with data at the level of millennia, more, of centuries. That seems a very drastic requirement, and in deep time we have no such data sets. There are no such real intervals of closely tracked observation, except one: world history itself. 

Therefore, what happens if we examine world history itself for evidence of evolution? A remarkable thing happens: we discover at once the long lost 'macro' factor in the form of a large-scale historical dynamic at work in the emergence of civilization since the Neolithic. The interval of observation is either five thousand years, or ten thousand if we include the Neolithic. All at once we get a glimpse of what real evolution is like, and the way in which there are two levels at work, macro and micro, and how these interact. This insight is arrived at by simply following world history closely to see if there is any kind of systematic overall process at work on a global scale. Once we formulate the problem in that fashion we resolve the Darwin paradox rather quickly. This refers, however, strictly speaking, to the evolution of man. For example, the discovery of the Axial Age shows us immediately the one thing we couldn't have suspected, a global dynamic at work on a stupendous scale, one with no genetic connection, and clearly evolutionary in its display of cultural emergentism. 

We are not accustomed to thinking of history in terms of evolution, but that is only because of the preconceptions enforced by Darwinian logic. We speak of 'cosmic evolution', and this is visible on its own terms, and we are not obliged to cast that in Darwinian terms. So why the fixation here for the evolution of man?  There is no contradiction, in principle, in going in search of 'evolution in history', and the eonic effect shows us how to approach the issue, and how to recalibrate our definitions of evolution so that they reflect its real meaning in this case. In fact, the very definition of what we mean by 'evolution' is up in the air, and the emphasis on genetic evolution has missed the point that evolution can take many forms and be applicable as such only over a restricted range of data. It is hard to avoid such conclusions if we examine, for instance, the origin of life. We are confronted by the clear fact of evolution, howling creationists notwithstanding, yet one that is  'pre-genetic', in some fashion that we don't understand. It follows that, to the best of our knowledge, 'evolution' here is not genetic, and probably with just the sort of hidden 'macro' factor we have detected elsewhere. 

A similar issue confronts, most probably (and we won't make any claims, as such, here), the question of the Cambrian transition, once again muddled by the Darwin vs design controversy. The problem could be resolved at once if we could apply two levels of analysis, and, more, actually arrive at the detection of the interplay of those two levels. So far, the data intervals observed are too diffuse for any such approach. But in principle the problem is most likely not the Darwinian vs the design perspectives, but some new and more comprehensive understanding of evolution, macro and micro.   

Thus as noted the study of history itself gives us a unique point of entry to the empirical analysis of two-level evolutionary processes which are not exclusively genetic, and which take into account the real sense and significance of what we mean by evolution. The way we do this is very simple, and starts with simple observation and periodization. A simple timeline approach and systematic correlation of data shows us very quickly that world history demonstrates a non-random pattern. One of the most defended assertions of Darwinists is the claim that evolution is random, although recently figures such as Dawkins have confused the issue by saying that natural selection is non-random. But he has changed the meaning of the word here. The point is that non-random evolution is evidence of some derandomizing 'macro' factor, as evidence of real macroevolution, or evolutionary directionality. In this sense we see, all at once, a non-random process at work in the emergence of civilization. And, with a little reflection this should also be called non-random evolution, evolution of some kind. Here the analysis on different levels can help us to sort out what are clearly random events, and what are clearly something different. 

It is easy to see how this can be if we ask a simple question, when did evolution stop and history begin? This question provokes a paradox, since the relationship of the two is ambiguous, and there could hardly be an instantaneous switch between the two. The answer is that there must be some kind of Transition from evolution to history. Indeed, this Transition itself would likely take the form of a series of short transitions, perhaps in an alternating sequence. We arrive at once at an understanding of the eonic effect, which shows just that, a series of transitions in which the factors of 'evolution' and 'history' are braided together in an interactive fashion.

We are confronted in some surprise with the resolution of many of the paradoxes that haunt Darwinian thinking with a new understanding of evolution, and in the process are forced to recalibrate what we mean by evolution to a form that is more reasonably reflective of the data of man and his nature than the reductionist account which is forced to put human cultural realities into the straight jacket of selectionist accounts of adaptation. In fact our new understanding is Janus-faced, with the question of evolution and the question of history braided together in a complementary fashion, which we can call in formal fashion an 'evolution of freedom'. This relationship between passive evolution and active history connected with a sequence of transitions is the master clue to unraveling the hopeless confusion of wrong theories applied to history, and especially the Social Darwinist implications of theories of natural selection applied to human history.