The context of our discussion if the Darwin debate, moving to the critiques of natural selection, thence to the ideological confusions of evolutionary theory, thence to an examination of 'history and evolution', thence the eonic effect. We conclude with an 'eonic model' which indirectly addresses the issue of ideology.  

We can start by citing an essay on the Darwin debate, here

The discovery of evolution was one of the greatest turning points in the development of human thought. It changed man’s perspective on himself as profoundly as any other breakthrough in the development of science. First appearing in early Greek and Indian thought during the Axial Age, the idea resurfaced powerfully during the Enlightenment. Then Darwin’s seminal publication of his Origin of Species in 1859 more than anything else precipitated this revolution in thought.  

And yet a tremendous controversy, one long argument, has from the beginning accompanied Darwin’s achievement. This has produced the intractable and almost endless Darwin debate, which has become a central feature of modern culture itself. In part, this is the result of the renewed outbreak of the conflict of science and religion. The appearance of Darwin’s theory of evolution became a defining moment in the emergence of secularism, and resulted in the twentieth century opposition of fundamentalist religious groups whose challenges to Darwin have grown into a series of skirmishes in a cultural war.

But the debate was always much broader than the religion-science divide, or even the question of evolution itself. It was the theory of natural selection, hence of random evolution, that Darwin brought to his data that caused many even of those who embraced the factual discovery of evolution to challenge Darwin’s claims. And this has produced the many, often confused, discussions distinguishing the ‘fact’ and the ‘theory’ of evolution. The fact of evolution is really the discovery of ‘deep time’, the endless vistas of planetary eons stretching from the dawn of life. The crystallization of the fossil record in this progression of geological ages reached an evidentiary threshold that made the idea of development in time an inevitable conclusion. To project onto this almost stupendous temporal field a theory of how life evolved was an audacious step destined to oversimplifications. 

It was on the basis of this theory that the claims for a totality of scientific knowledge came to seem plausible. The theory of natural selection purported to resolve all the key metaphysical issues that block the way to a comprehensive scientific worldview. And yet here Darwin was open to challenge from the beginning, because of the failure to properly document the claims for his theory of natural selection. In some ways Darwin made it easy for his critics, because he attempted an overarching generalization that was simplistic and ideological rather than truly scientific. With hindsight, we can see that the true nature of a science of evolution is not easy to resolve. The problem lies in truly observing evolution. It is relatively easy to conclude that evolution has occurred.  But there are degrees of observation. It is very difficult to track an evolutionary sequence over time in order to get a sense of its real dynamics.  

 

Also, consider this variant of the general series: 

A short introduction to the Evolution Controversy