12.15.08
Macroevolution impossible to study?
Is macroevolution impossible to study?
Once again, the Discovery Institute is playing word games with educational systems, trying to give legal protection to religion-based incompetence. I refer, of course, to the ongoing debate about standards in Texas, and the insidious influence that the DI is wielding.
As Wesley Elsberry notes in his summary of the alleged weaknesses of evolutionary theory, an oft-repeated mantra rears its head yet again. This ID tenet holds that macroevolution is either not possible, or cannot be observed, or cannot be studied (or any combination of the these). Apparently, Board of Education member Ken Mercer is of the opinion that macroevolution has not been observed.
History And Evolution//Macroevolution
Once again the religious critics of Darwinism have seized on something important, and confused the issue. The inability to make use of macroevolutionary thinking is characteristic of Darwinism.
In the study of the eonic effect a new method is adopted: a systematic approach to a double evolution from the start, evolution micro and macro, this applied only to the evolution of man. (This double evolution on two levels was present in Lamarck in inchoate form, we should note.)
Thus we see the macroevolutionary process visible in the eonic sequence, and the microevolutionary process connected to this via that sequence, but proceeding independently, and this is simply history itself, the chronicle of human free action.
Note that natural selection in the eonic model doesn’t even rate microevolutionary status. It is simply an additional process on the side. It is always present, but not the crucial factor.
Thus we have (in many descriptions)
macroevolution microevolution
macroaction microaction
eonic sequence free action sequence
evolution history
eonic-determination self-determination
(self-consciousness in different degrees)
(Consider the Axial Age, one part of the eonic effect. The macro process is visible in the synchronous action over a brief interval of that ‘age’, the micro process is visible as the action of individuals in the resulting transformation of their cultures. The one is evolution, the other is history in the wake of that brief transformation. The point of intersection is not genetic evolution, but the changing gears of human consciousness as ‘self-consciousness’ (describable in many ways, e.g. as ‘creativity))
Thus the outcome of (eonic) evolution (macro) is the rising degree of freedom in the free action sequence (history) (micro). This takes the form of fluctuating self-consciousness in man as his evolution accelerates in the alternating rhythm of the eonic series.
This terminology is a lot clearer if you follow it in relation to specific examples as given in World History And The Eonic Effect.
Macroevolution in this sense is indeed hard to observe! We can’t observe evolution (macro) at all so far in deep time, thus the constant confusion over the place of natural selection. We have hints and suggestions, such as ‘The Great Explosion’, but this is so far insufficiently documented.
To observe ‘macroevolution’ for the human case requires data at the level of centuries, since, as the case of the Axial Age makes clear, massive transformations of whole cultures occur at high speed, in intervals on the order of three centuries. Data at that level is absent for earlier human evolution, therefore we can’t be sure at all how man’s evolution occurred. But the eonic model is at least as good and probably better than the Darwinian approach. The value of this approach is that it allows us to blend evolutionary and historical thinking together without the two getting in the way of each other (as they do with Darwinism and its inevitable b-product, Social Darwinism).
This form of macroevolution is not about apes becoming men in the usual sense, long long ago, but about apes becoming men (not yet!) in the present in a resumed period of intensive of the evolutionary driver we see in the eonic effect. This resumed evolutionary interval, whose outcome is history at a higher degree of freedom, is probably in the process of terminating, leaving man in its wake with the necessity of his own historical ‘self-evolution’.
This approach to evolution allows us to completely box off the spurious Darwinian account applied to human culture that we see. It is way beyond the oversimplification of ethics and deals with all aspects of culture/organism.
This approach remains faithful to its original intent, macroevolution as speciation. The eonic sequence shows man evolving toward ‘true man’, as it were, renewed speciation, something as yet incomplete!