12.31.05
Detecting Evolution: The Eonic Effect
Reply to a reader on the eonic model.
The Eonic Effect Theory suffers from a high density of
jargonism: “Punctuated equilibrium,” “non-random evolution…”
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite answer your complaint the first time, and reacted wrongly. The Eonic Effect Theory isn’t a theory, but a periodization construct that explodes most theories.
What you are really saying is that the eonic material is difficult! Not really, although it seems so at first. However world history is a big subject, the logistics of study can be a problem.
Forget the complications of the model and simply look at the facts, using periodization.
Actually, since it contradicts conventional thinking and generates hostility for making a mockery of Darwin, the material is constructed like a time capsule with indestructible thoroughness, and represents an effort to settle the Darwin question once and for all by showing that something they would claim doesn’t exist, isn’t possible, does in fact exist, and most embarrassing of all, in visible history: a non-random pattern. What is that? A strong distribution or clustering of creative advances in a complex sequence, which follows a strange but definite set of rules. To say this is non-random means simply that it is clustered, against the odds. Chance would have favored a steady stream of innovators in each generation, and each geographical region. But the pattern defies the odds, is not random. It is more than the steady probability of human talents, or cultural day to day evolvings.
Look at the Axial Age. In a matter of centuries, a massive social/cultural advance occurs in rapid fire coordinated movement in five independent regions, across Eurasia. With equal rapidity the effect wanes, and the system slowly peters out and settles into its history as usual mechanics. The mysterious eonic effect goes silent for a few millennia, leaving those in its wake to proceed as best they can. In the Axial Age we see the theatre of Dionysos, a great flowering of art and culture.
Then come the Romans, within six centuries the theatre of Dionysos turns into the Roman Colliseum.
Most of the advances are lost. Democracy appears briefly, then vanishes. Science takes off, then peters out. The empire builders arrive. Survival of the fittest rapidly produces the domination of the Roman thugs. Finally even that falls apart.
We see the dilemma of natural selection. Over the long term, gangsters would win out.
The term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ was only intended to put a handle on it, momentarily, and was used on the frontpage of the website, but not in the book. It certainly looks like punctuated equilibrium, in the dictionary sense of those words, but the term is pre-defined by biologists, so perhaps it was a mistake to use it. The Axial Age certainly looks like people got punctuated, after which there was a sort of return to equilibrium.
So this non-random pattern falsifies Darwin’s claims for random evolution, at least for human history/evolution. No point in saying this is history, rather than evolution. You can’t have a pattern like the eonic effect anywhere near the descent of man, and still be talking nonsense about natural selection.
Historical evolution shows a mysterious driver, a truly awesome scale of intermittent transformations, in an exact pattern, with eerie timing.
We are so conditioned to Darwin, they we don’t realize how far off he was. Really upside down, and off the mark. Just flat out, idiot wrong.
This list may not be the place for this, although the connection with Kant, which is designed to be ultra basic, just a crumb from the Kant table, might help to put the issues in perspective.
There is a noumenal aspect to the issues. We can see the Axial Age. But we never see the mechanism behind it. We can detect it, its scale is awesome, stupefying, but it never shows its hand. We only see its effects, and then only with careful periodization study over the long-range. Then we can catch a glimpse.