03.03.10

Comment from Arnhart on Lamarck post

Posted in Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 1:07 pm by nemo

Comment on yestereday’s Lamarck post

What is the “something” that does evolution? Is this an intelligent agent? God? If not, then what?

How exactly does this “something” carry out its will? By what natural mechanism does it work?

By what falsifiable test do we determine whether there really is a “something” that does evolution?

There is no such falsifiable test for this approach or for Darwinism. So maybe we should not be dogmatic. The value of this approach is not to hype a new theory but to make some sense of where we are going wrong.

Your questions seem to suggest the way Darwinists are always afraid of finding god, or some designer. I don’t think that god is the issue.

I should start over here and redo/amplify my Lamrarck post from yesterday.
First, I am speaking for Lamarck, but no doubt slightly altering his perspective toward my own. I merely wished to point out that his instinctive gesture to depict evolution seems right, while the Darwinian approach is a mess. We should adjourn briefly to his books. The phrase, ‘drive toward complexity’ is likely to be counterproductive. All we need is a placeholder for a principle of sufficient reason (‘something that does evolution’), i.e. a term like ‘the macro evolver’.

We don’t have to specify the real hidden meaning of the ‘evolver’, all we have to do is find examples where its action is manifest.
That’s why I recommend a careful study of the eonic effect, because it is a rare case where the evolver appears detectably over time. The reason is that its action is super high-speed by the standards of most ideas of evolution: at the level of centuries. Thus we never see evolvers in deep time, no doubt because our data is too coarse.

In the eonic effect we have an ‘evolution formalism’ along the lines of my remarks on Lamarck:
We have the ‘macro’ evolution of the eonic sequence in the eonic effect, that is, a series of transitions operating intermittently. It is clear that these transitions are a drive toward complexity, if you examine the whole history of it.
It suddenly become obvious that a macro ‘evolver’ is present behind the scenes of world history, where least expected. That makes us suspicious of earlier cases.
I will outline the whole thing in more detail, but for the moment, follow the eonic effect and you can see an example of the ‘evolutionary driver’ embedded in an otherwise plain vanilla historical system.

2 Comments »

  1. Darwiniana » The ‘evolution formalism’ and the eonic effect said,

    March 3, 2010 at 3:25 pm

    [...] Comment from Arnhart on Lamarck post [...]

  2. Darwiniana » The distraction of theism/atheism questions said,

    March 4, 2010 at 1:23 pm

    [...] From yesterday: Comment from Arnhart on Lamarck post [...]

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