One of the most tenacious claims of defenders of Darwinism is that of the randomness of evolution. By and large, despite various efforts of writers such as Richard Dawkins to claim that natural selection is 'non-random', Darwinian theory is about random evolution. And yet this assumption is contradicted by world history itself, where we can see clear evidence of a non-random pattern exhibiting the properties of evolution, 'evolution of some kind'. We can call this the eonic effect. This pattern gives real meaning to the phrase 'Climbing Mt. Improbable'. 

History and evolution This pattern forces us to ask, What is the relationship of history and evolution? In fact, a careful consideration of what we mean by evolution suggests that the two must be braided together in some way, since the transition between the two could not be discontinuous. This leaves us suspicious about the current claims for the evolution of man. Darwinism makes very strong claims, not only about evolution, but reality itself, based on the thesis that natural selection generates all the complexity that we see in the emergence of biological forms. 

These claims are more projections of a set of assumptions about how things should be than properly verified assertions of science. One irony in the study of history is that it enforces a discipline of factual verification. Darwinists see no problem with assertions about unseen periods of deep time, while the historian is committed to an exact and continuous chronicle of 'what happened' at the level of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It is, so far, able to apply this standard to but a few millennia of world history, with considerable data nonetheless in the range of millennia to centuries stretching back to the onset of the Neolithic. The achievement of this data set is very recent and if we examine the result a very definite overall pattern begins to emerge. In fact, we begin to see what we can call the 'transition from evolution to history', and this is a definite process of what can only be called 'macroevolution', and it doesn't square with wild generalizations about natural selection.

Climbing Mt. Improbable World History And The Eonic Effect sets as its prime objective the demonstration of a non-random pattern in world history itself, the eonic effect. And this leaves us suspicious about what is often called the Great Explosion, the sudden transition to modern man that we deduce from the woefully incomplete data of the Paleolithic. Armed with a perception of the eonic effect, we are left suspicious that current theories have completely missed the main event. Although we cannot draw definite conclusions without the same standard of evidence that we apply to history, we can quarantine world history and block the misapplication of Darwinian assumptions to cultural evolution.

We have lost any sense of universal history. Modern science, confused by the tenets of Darwinism, has produced a very distorted picture of the historical evolution of man. The study of the eonic effect can help to correct this distortion, by generating an idea for a universal history, in a phrase of the philosopher Kant. We can do this by generating a simple model to the data we find, and then seeing how this resolves the classic paradoxes of causality and freedom applied to historical evolution. The result is an elegant introit to a 'science of history' in the form of an 'evolution of freedom'.

Theoretical self-defense One of the classic confusions of Darwinian theory is the misapplication of natural selection to cultural action in the present. This makes the theory a dangerous piece of bad social software. Our new approach can resolve this difficulty. And one of ironies of our study, and model, is that we can bring evolution into our present and future even as we free history from the evolutionary straightjacket. This is an effect of the type of model we develop, based on two levels, and able to distinction properly the 'macro-action' of evolution and the micro-action of history. It can be hard to defend oneself against the authority of 'experts' on the issue of evolution. Armed with the data of the eonic effect we have the incontrovertible piece of evidence for the basic problem with Darwinism. 

In a theme of last and first men, from chimpanzee to man, we find ourselves confronted with the implications of our evolutionary past and the potential of our future action as the realization of our species character, as man.