10.29.08
The eonic effect: bailing out from the evolution wars
The public is beset with two extremes on the evolution question, the reductionist Darwinism in the context of scientism, and the various brands of creationism or ID. And neither of these perspectives can really resolve the evolution mystery. What is the source of the problem? Failure to properly observe evolution in fine enough grain to be able to grasp the mechanism. And the ID gambit is simply a metaphysical cover story. Look at the claims for the Great Explosion in the descent of man. The claims are equivocal, and the data too thin, to produce certainty. But the data does suggest that something crucial to our understanding occurred, and in a short time-frame, something we are missing.
On the part of science the failure to properly observe evolutionary intervals in sufficient detail is fatal to its claims on evolutionary mechanism (though not for the fact of evolution). And the clear observability of ‘natural selection’ in our present is completely misleading: we do see that, and confuse it with evolution. Note how statements/generalizations about ‘how evolution happens’ are routine by scientists about intervals of time millions of years long. What if an evolutionary dynamic, crucial to real evolution, occurred at high speed in time frames from 50K years, to 10K years, to 1k years, to centuries, to decades? A fatal possibility for any hopes of correct observation, hence a theory of dynamics. This may or may not be a crucial problem for the earliest stages of evolution (the problem could be restated in terms of 1 to 10 million year intervals).These data sets are virtually empty. And yet somehow this doesn’t seem to matter to biologists, the reason being that if they were held to a real scientific standard, they wouldn’t have a theory.
The eonic effect shows us a way out:
Since we can’t observe evolutionary intervals in deep time, we must be wary of jumping to conclusions.
Our only recourse is to retreat to history, where the data is ample to the 1K to centuries, even decades, level. Once we do that, we ask, what is the relation of history and evolution?
We can deduce at once that there must be a kind of transition between the two, perhaps incomplete, and that, therefore, the ‘data for evolution’ must be present in history, if we know what to look for.
We hit paydirt almost at once, if we start looking for some kind of macroevolutionary factor in history itself. The eonic effect.
This pattern of data is transparent. You may not like the term ‘eonic effect’, set it aside and simply study the various elements of structure that arise from systematic periodization. The clue to evolution in a late stage slowly comes to light.
And our suspicions about the Great Explosion are confirmed, that is, we suspect that something crucial is missing at the dawn of modern man. Perhaps the eonic effect shows us something like what it might be. Whatever the case, we need to restrict our judgements about man to what we observe in history and stop the confused and dangerous regime of reducing culture, man, and everything else to natural selection reasoning, which is false and pernicious.