10.12.08
The eonic effect and scientific fallacies of cultural evolution
A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change.
One thing that isn’t evolving, apparently, is our understanding of evolution. We are stuck in the Darwin mindset, and can’t get out of it. Physics routinely undergoes scientific method, with the resulting multiple transformatons and paradigms. But Darwinian, repackaged as Neo-Darwinism, is stuck, stuck.
One symptom is the confusion between microevolution, and something else, macroevolution.
The latter is hard to deal with, but the evidence is there, as far as human evolution is concerned, in, for example, the eonic effect.
Seed here pursues the evidence for microevolution, and the genetic issues are no doubt showing a new perspective. But, still, this isn’t evolution.
The influence of culture on all this is, again, compelling. But, still, this is microevolution.
The question of the evolution of culture needs a thorough look at the eonic effect, because the evidence for macroevolution is hard to detect in our current paradigm lockdown, but detect it we can. Then we realize that the enigma of cultural evolution is right under our noses. In terms of the eonic effect this takes two forms, corresponding to the two levels in the eonic pattern, reflected in the eonic model as macroaction, and microaction. Then we see that the macro aspect of cultural evolution is massive inside the so-called eonic sequence. For example the Axial Age. The system action on the macro level is nontheless not constant, but intermittent, witness the brief interval of the Axial period.
In the wake of macroaction we see the resulting field of microaction (human free activity in response to the macro action) whose execution may or may not fulfill or exactly match the eonic action. Thus there are two aspects to cultural evolution. So far, the macro factor outstrips the micro. It is our evolutionary destiny we hope to move beyond evolution (in this form) into history, speaking formally, as an expression of the evolution of freedom into the self-evolution of that freedom.
This is not a genetic form of evolution. But a mysterious, but detectable, form of macro self-organization on the level of civilizations along a mainline of directional emergence which then acts on the whole via diffusion.
Much more to say here. But it is a constant and forever misleading fallacy of the dominant Darwinian paradigm to be misplacing our focus with its obsession on the genetic microevolution of the genome and the injection of natural selection, by definition a constant, into the slot reserved for macroevolutin which we now know is something different.
Note how the seed article stumbles with the perception (which is still unsufficiently documented) of evolution suddenly coming to a stop around 40K BC. There are many versions of this (it may be false, or expressible in other forms) but it squares with the perception of the eonic effect. Once we see the eonic effect we suspect, but can’t yet prove, what the Great Explosion claims seem to be saying, that man rapidly crossed a threshold at some point in the past 100K years and then stabilized, temporarily.
Certainly we have to suspect that this macro factor started up again later, probably from the Neolithic onward.
IN any case it is dangerously misleading to put all our eggs in the Darwinism basket. Scientists in the name of dogma will rise to try and control evolution under the incorrect rubric, in the process making wrong decisions based on incorrect views of what evolution is. Scientists are already in a major snafu over the issue(s) of religion because they assume that a form of genetic evolution is responsible for religious phenomena. And yet a careful look at the eonic effect shows the direct relationship of religion to this macro factor. The same can be said for science, indeed, secularism itself. This has nothing to do with the various science/religion compromises, but refers to looking at the actual facts of religion in world history, both in relation to the eonic sequence, and otherwise, outside of it. This study is complex indeed, and to be confronted with inaccuracies of scientism on this is unsettling. Time to consider the insight of Huxley at the end of his life: there is something missing in Darwin’s account.
I think a close look at the eonic effect will give us a glimpse at what that is.