09.11.07
The eonic effect: the first word, and the last
Reading The First Word (see yesterday’s post), on the evolution of language, I am struck once again by the short depiction of the emergence of man, as it unwittingly shows the smoking gun clues to something Darwinists don’t suspect, but which the evidence suggests in the various statements about the Great Explosion, and the take-off after that.
Even without that evidence, the pattern of the eonic effect stages a challenge to Darwinian thinking by showing 1) the connection of history and evolution, 2) staging a ‘photo finish’ contradiction between Darwinian claims and historical facts, 3) and making history itself the final arbiter of claims for the descent of man. Here’s an older post on the connection of history and evolution.
History and Evoluton
Although history doesn’t show us the facts of the case for the early evolution of language, it does show us, not the ‘first word’, but, so to speak, the ‘last’.
As we examine the eonic series we discover that the flowering of advanced linguistic phenomena (poetry and drama) in that series shows strong ‘evolutionary determination’ in the sense of the eonic model.
That gives us a warning that really high-speed evolution, hard to detect, and operating over the level of centuries, can act on evolving populations producing prodigious effects in the total construct of culture.
Thus, selectionist accounts are mostly a form of speculative Darwinian metaphysics.