The third edition of World History And The Eonic Effect is almost a new book, and shows a much more integrated structure, and would make a good survey of world history, or a one year course in the subject, public ideologies permitting, which at the moment they might not. Grab hold of the subject, skeptic or otherwise, and start constructing a Rolls Royce perspective on universal history, to free yourself from the dreary and monotonous Darwin debate, whose output is mostly noise and the promotion of agendas of the evolution establishment and the various religious groups that, whatever their correct perception that Darwinism is flawed, attempt to promote a false dualism: if Darwin is wrong then everything claimed for religion is true, and faith can fill the gaps. 

We can approach the eonic effect in two ways, from the perspective of history or of evolution. The eonic effect is, or was to begin with, first a discovery about history, and only after that a discourse about evolution. Attempts to discover a science of history, or, at the opposite pole, to devise 'philosophies of universal history' have a checkered history and have generally suffered from metaphysical overreach, leading to their discredit, and their supposed demise at the hands of science, or biology, or economics. Karl Popper, in his classic attack on Marxism, thought he had skewered the genre of the philosophy of history, dismissed as historicism, to use his somewhat distorted term. But Popper, we should note, was as well a critic of the claims for a science of history. But Popper missed something in the process of an acute insight, and ended up declaring that history had no meaning. Popper was wrong, history has meaning. 

We can simply adopt Popper's critique, which demands reckoning with the idea of freedom in relation to causal analyses, and construct a new and different type of historical model based on an empirical set of facts: the eonic effect. The data itself does all the work, and shows us how to construct that model, at once a play on the theme of a science of history, and a project for a universal history (i.e. a history that discusses freedom). The eonic effect emerges as a discovery based on the archaeological revolution beginning in the nineteenth century. We could not have suspected that world history shows a definite coherent pattern, one that could only have been discovered after the mapping out of at least five thousand years of the record of civilization. This bare minimum threshold was crossed in the late nineteenth and then more so in the twentieth centuries. We see the earliest glimmerings of that in the surprised discovery of the Axial Age, for example, in the generation of Darwin (how ironic), the data for which was codified much later by Karl Jaspers. This data upon examination drives us to take a closer look at the whole chronicle since the Neolithic, and, lo and behold, we discover a remarkable pattern of 'macrohistory' behind the disparate 'infinity' that is the whole of world history in its totality. 

We proceed then to explore this discovery, and as we do that we begin to realize that something on the stunning scale of the eonic effect must collide with our sense of the way man evolved, that is, with the standard view of human evolution. Given that realization we can swiftly decode the eonic effect as an 'evolutionary' sequence, in a new sense, and create a kind of model for it that unites the perspective of evolution and that of history together. The result is quite elegant, and resolves a host of confusions that haunt the Darwin debate. 

The eonic effect thrives on its data set, which is immense, and the text of WH&EE will lead you stage by stage to a completely transformed perspective on world history and evolution both. The nice thing about this approach is that it 'leaves the data alone' and doesn't impose a strange metaphysics on the facts, save only the foundational enquiry into the 'metaphysics' of causality and freedom and how we can practically take these twin concepts together in the same analysis. The result, instead of proposing some new and weird theory, is a matrix of periodization built around a time line, one that simply frets the data in a coherent form that hides a hidden dynamic, the enigma of the eonic effect itself, which is finally the enigma of evolution. This novel method of indirect dynamical reasoning in the context of factual chronicle can help to bring the theoretical issues close to the factual basis, without the entanglement of speculation that has spoiled most efforts in this vein up to now. 

The result can show you in practice what is wrong with current theories of evolution applied to man, and lead to a general historical protocol that does justice to science, yet demands the treatment of the idea of freedom, and the consciousness of man that is factored out in Darwin's unrealistic reductionism. 

The basic issue is very simple: Darwinists make claims about random evolution. The eonic effect shows us a non-random pattern in world history, something that is not supposed to exist. Once we do see such a pattern in closely observable history, we have grounds to revise our thinking about how early evolution occurred.  

There are a number of tutorials and guides to this material, but the first requirement, or recommendation is the text itself, since short expositions have to leave out much that is important as a foundation for seeing the finally ultra simple eonic effect. 

Blogzone: blogbook essay series: A series of short 'blog-like' booklets to jumpstart some understanding of the eonic effect, and introductory to the book: 

1. The Eonic Effect: Climbing Mt. Improbable
2. Enigma Of The Axial Age
3. History And Evolution: A New Model Of History
4. Kant's Challenge: Idea For A Universal History
5. The Old Testament: An Eonic Riddle
6. One Endless Argument: Surviving The Darwin Debate
7. The Oedipus Paradox: The Legacy Of Social Darwinism

Please be sure to start with the book, after some quick browsing of these online materials, which jump into the middle of some of the topics relevant to the eonic effect.