One of the strangest aspects of the evolution question is that noone really knows as yet what evolution is. And here Darwinism has confused us because of the way Darwin's theory of natural selection has come to monopolize public understanding with an ideology of scientism. That natural selection is not the answer, and that evolution conceals mysteries still unknown to us is one of the dawning realizations of the discovery of the eonic effect. We detect a hidden force/process micromanaging the emergence of civilization, often down to the details. What are we to make of it? 

Our theories have tended to reify the evolution question around genetic explanations, and this has greatly enriched our understanding in many ways, but as we examine the eonic effect we realize that behind the genetic component lies a deeper, and larger, process, or set of processes, whose action is barely on the threshold of our possibilities of understanding. It is thus highly misleading to biologize, geneticize, Darwinize historical/cultural questions. We need to adopt a new recalibrated definition of what we mean by 'evolution' in the case of human emergence. 

The term 'evolution' means 'rolling out', and we can detect many processes that therefore deserve that title. Why should we give foundational status to the genetic version? 

The presentation of the eonic effect uses the idea of an 'eonic model' of transitions to reformulate the question of what we mean by historical evolution, and suggests that this might also tell us something about the early stage of human evolution, about which we know very little. Darwinism has thrown us out of whack by its obsessive emphasis on natural selection. But with the eonic effect, at least, we can draw up a moat and restructure our sense of the meaning of evolution around a new framework. That framework must harmonize itself with the correlate definition of what we mean by 'history'. That is easy to do, since there is, in this view, a reciprocity between evolution and history, which we can take on different levels, the level of a macro process, by definition 'evolution', and a micro process associated with human free activity, or 'history'. The interaction of the two must be considered very carefully, but is directly visible in the phenomenon of the Axial Age, and the differentiation of macro and micro in that context can help us to define an associated matrix of evolution and history taken together. 

This judicious recalibration of the meaning of evolution for the case of history is completely legitimate, and empirically robust, despite the remaining mystery of this hidden factor, whose dynamic is veiled from us, but whose traces are relatively easy to track, once we get our focus on the very high level of culture on which it operates. 

Bringing the idea of 'evolution' into history, thence into our present and potential future, involves a series of paradoxes that are addressed in our model, and the result is designed so that we adopt a disciplined approach to this novel approach. 

In the end we remain ignorant of evolution in deep time, as yet, and it is therefore inappropriate to be forever grafting biological theories onto a whole, including history, for which they are inappropriate. It is therefore essential to rescue history, which we do observe, from spurious explanations derived from deep time, which we barely observe at all, except to the point of detecting the 'fact' of some kind of evolution, that of organisms as body forms. This cannot resolve or explicate the full sense of the term 'evolution' which must be discovered in each case that we come upon processes of 'rolling out'. History must answer to its own questions and become its own source of understanding, and the genetic reductionism of biological is simply incapable of doing that.