Second Edition: World History and the Eonic Effect

Site for The Eonic Effect

At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, with the addition now of the new Intelligent Design movement, both parties to the debate are suffering from agendas that limit their ability to deal objectively with the basic issues. The crux of the debate was always the status of Darwin's theory of natural selection, not the empirical discovery of evolution. The inadequacy of Darwin's original theory has always been the source of dissent, and this has little to do with the distractions of the science-religion divide. The fundamentalist and Intelligent Design factions have confused the issue by injecting the issue of theism and design into the discussion. At the same time the obsessive use of Darwinism to promote atheism suffers an equal liability. The basic clarity needed for real evolutionary discussion suffers double distortion of the facts of the case. The public has been held hostage to this theism/atheism dialectic for two long, and the result is the collision of two propaganda machines in a kind of deadlock.
We can only resolve the ambiguities of evolution empirically. Unless we can see 'evolution' we are condemned to produce a metaphysics in a void, and Darwinism is no exception. How can we escape this dilemma? We can break this deadlock observing history itself. Darwinism makes very strong claims with insufficient evidence about random evolution. But we can find a definite process of non-random evolution in history itself. World history shows the signature clue to the dynamics of the descent of man. This process should really be called the transition between evolution and history, and the last phase of this is clearly visible in the data of world history, if we adopt special types of modeling and periodization to detect what we sense but never quite see.
The resulting pattern of historical evolution, called the eonic effect, allows us to get a sense for the first time of what 'evolution' is like, and how the descent of man might have occurred. In any case, we must free history from the ideological straight jackets that reductionist science and supernatural religion have created. The eonic effect is the only evidence at close range of 'evolution in action' that we have, and it tells us what the earlier evolution might have been like.