10.31.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 12:06 pm by nemo
Descent of Man Revisited
The debate over evolution endures as one of the most intractable of modern civilization. In part this is due to the built-in metaphysical and political agendas of the scientific and religious groups ambitious to control the defining ideology of human origins. Although the idea of evolution is as old as philosophy itself, its reappearance in the modern Enlightenment arose in the wake of the discovery of deep time, and produced a broad spectrum of speculative, but still controversial, beginnings of theory. But it was the Darwinian interpretation, almost a popularization, in the era of Positivism that defined, or contracted, the idea in terms of reductionist science.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection collated with the sudden public realization of the fact of evolution produced the revolution of thought we associate with the idea of evolution. But this also produced the oversimplification of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, thence the confusion that has never gone away. If the basis of science is its empiricism, then the claims for evolution are overwhelming while those for natural selection are insufficiently documented by data. This simple point tends to be lost in the immense noise produced by religious and Darwinian diehards quibbling over the ‘fact’ and the ‘theory’. The result is the classic metaphysical deadlock of the Darwin debate, effectively depriving the public of any clarity or viable options on the subject of evolution.
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10.03.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 12:42 pm by nemo
Ardipithecus Ramidus Shows Evolution of Humans and Apes From Common Ancestor
“Six months ago, we would have said our common ancestor looked something like a chimp,” said Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, a senior researcher on the project. “Now all that has changed.
A lot of prior discussion of human evolution is (thankfully) down the drain. Let’s remember to be skeptical in the future.
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10.02.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 1:12 pm by nemo
Now that a new proto-hominid fossil, Ardi, is in the news, it is important to consider the unknown complexity of human evolution, which really occurs very late in the game: The Great Explosion
This in turn demands a look at the eonic effect: the immense difficulty of evolving humans and their culture is a lot more than just bone discovery.
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Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 12:39 pm by nemo
The 4.4 Million-Year-Old Blow To Intelligent Design
It is hard to see how the discovery of Ardi is a blow to ID, as compared with homo erectus, say, but it is certainly not much of a plus, and it is equally hard to see how we can conclude anything about Darwinian evolution here.
All we can conclude is that the ‘fact’ of evolution seems confirmed.
Let us note how misleading it is to point to even reference ‘human evolution’ here (most biologists would agree here) since to do so implies some kind of teleological process. But then again there might have been one, not due to ‘design’ but perhaps due to an anthropic principle. But most of human evolution per se occurs quite late in the game, please note.
It’s always encouraging to see a science story on the front page of The New York Times (above the fold, no less!). And it’s even better when it’s a piece about the discovery of a specimen that now serves as the earliest known relative of the human branch of the primate tree (in this case, the story involves a skeleton dating back 4.4 million years, making it much older than its 3.2 million year old cousin, Lucy).
Why? For a variety of reasons, but mainly because it, yet again, supports the notion of Darwinian evolution, which means it is another serious chink in the already weak armor of the Intelligent Design movement. For those unfamiliar with ID, it is essentially creationism re-branded with a name that sounds less biblical (but no less unintelligent, oddly). Despite the name swap, the two share the same core idea–that the earth and every living thing therein was created by an “intelligent” cause all at once, and not by random natural selection that occurred over billions of years.
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08.21.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 5:13 pm by nemo
Descent Of Man Revisited
An older mini-book on the eonic effect
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08.03.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 1:08 pm by nemo
The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals
Paleoanthropologists know more about Neandertals than any other extinct human. But their demise remains a mystery, one that gets curiouser and curiouser
It is of great interest to see the ‘natural selection/competition’ perspective fall by the wayside here.
Over the past decade, however, two key findings have shifted the fulcrum of the debate away from the question of whether Neandertals and moderns made love or war. One is that analyses of Neandertal DNA have yet to yield the signs of interbreeding with modern humans that many researchers expected to see if the two groups mingled significantly. The other is that improvements in dating methods show that rather than disappearing immediately after the moderns invaded Europe, starting a little more than 40,000 years ago, the Neandertals survived for nearly 15,000 years after moderns moved in—hardly the rapid replacement adherents to the blitzkrieg theory envisioned.
These revelations have prompted a number of researchers to look more carefully at other factors that might have led to Neandertal extinction. What they are finding suggests that the answer involves a complicated interplay of stresses.
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07.31.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 6:08 pm by nemo
In Search of History
The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery. There is something almost mythological in the projection of Darwinian scenarios of natural selection onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids stretched over millions of years. Dogmatism in such a situation takes on an almost religious character in Darwinists. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of natural selection and adaptation. Such claims, pressed into service for metaphysical conclusions, are weak in their evidentiary basis. In contradiction to this, flagrantly out in the open, is the evidence of a Great Explosion in the period around 50,000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage, if we can trust the data, call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution’, as opposed to ‘microevolution’. Is not Darwin’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a very detailed record of evolutionary sequences, and this invokes a crisis of correct observation.
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07.02.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 1:28 pm by nemo
Evolution’s revolution
Mike Belbin looks at the emergence of human culture and the vital role of symbolism
“Do materialists really think that language just ‘evolved’, like finches’ beaks …?” – AN Wilson, ‘Why I believe again’ New Statesman April 6 2009
“We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs” – South Amerindian story
What kind of animal are humans? To the crude materialist we are, according to taste, chiefly animal; bundles of needs, habits and reactions; savage or simple. To the spiritual believer, animal matter required something extra, something originally separate, to become human. Is human culture then just another kind of animal behaviour? What does it mean to trace humanity’s development from nature to society? What is the ‘missing link’ between natural history and anthropology? If animals communicate, and they do, is there anything special about human language
The left hasn’t a clue on evolution, which is about the same condition liberals find themselves in. (and everyone else)
This quote from A.N. Wilson (who has done major Wobbles on atheism, now a ‘reconvert’) constitutes a threat to leftist/materialist thinking. The more so since all these people quoting Marx/Engels ad nauseam on these issues simply show their ignorance. And quoting Chomsky is also problematical: he is a postdarwinist who arm has been so twisted by Pinker that he can be considered a victim of torture: silenced.
How is the complex potential for language Chomsky depicts to have evolved?
At least Wilson doesn’t (here) propose the design argument.
These navie leftists are going to lost the argument for us. Time to really consider what Wilson is saying. It is dangerous thinking for old-fashioned nineteenth century materialist. The public is going to regress to religious traditionalism if the left/liberals keep spouting Darwin stupidities.
The study of the eonic effect can help here, if only to remind us that real evolution is so far beyond our current grasp that we may as well be chimpanzees on the subject: Check out the ‘evolution of art’ in the axial period,
Art, evolution, and the tragic genre
Beyond that, a new approach to evolution/universal history can be pursued in two essays here:
http://eonic-effect.net/index_top_1848.htm
http://eonic-effect.net/politics_of_evolution.htm
It is worth remembering that Marx talked materialism but was a post-Hegelian with a sense of ‘universal history’, as in the philosophy of history.
That’s closer to a form of an ‘atheist’ design argument than to materialism.
I wouldn’t be citing A.N. Wilson so glibly here.
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04.09.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 1:33 pm by nemo
Evo–News mulls over Texas Board debate
Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils. … So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true.” But a close look at the evidence, as reported in the mainstream scientific literature, shows that it is Wetherington’s talk that is “not true.” As a preliminary example, a 2004 book by leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated that “The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap” and therefore we are in a situation “[n]ot having any fossils that can serve as missing links.”
This claim is quite outrageous, although the human fossil record does at least suggest a rough outline of human emergence, Australopithecus, homo habilis, homo ergaster/erectus…..homo sapiens, …
To say this record is complete or that it has no gaps boggles the mind. Is this rank ignorance or deliberate deception???
However, debates over gaps in the fossil record miss the point. I remain confident that the massive gaps could in principle be filled. But that would still not tell us who man is, how he evolved, and when/where.
The issue of gaps becomes critical when we realize that the transition to behaviourally modern man seems to have occurred by 50,000 years ago, leaving a monumental gap in the period ca. 100,000 to 50,000 years ago.
The speed of this transition remains a hole in our understanding and doesn’t explicate via natural selection any time before breakfast. The appearance of the FOXP2 gene related to language is the straw clutched at to explain the miracle in the ‘gaps in our knowledge’.
But the real issue with human evolution is to explain first who man is, his nature, consciousness and mind, a non-trivial task. Remarkably science is not able to do this, yet claims to have a theory of evolution.
The question of man’s interior, then, and the culture that accompanied the various stages is not settled even if we did have a continuous fossil record.
Darwinism is so far from being able to describe, let alone explain in evolutionary terms, this invisible complexity of man that to claim otherwise is either the primitive mentality foised on scientists by scientism, or a gross deception by those confident control of the media allows them to get away with anything.
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03.26.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 6:49 pm by nemo
My original formulation (in a side show to the eonic effect) of the evolution of man still seems to hold up, although I am checking things out for an expanded update for my fourth edition: The Great Explosion.
It is entirely possible that important earlier ‘evolutions’ are relevant (in the challenges to the ‘great explosion’ perspective, pioneered by Richard Klein), for the period ca. 250,000 onward, but the basic finding that ‘behaviourally modern man’ appears after 50,000 falls like ripe fruit into an interpretation along the lines of the eonic effect/model: the value of eonic model is that it can make use of the anomalous finding of the apparent difference between anatomically (after150,000BCE) and behaviourally (after 50,000) modern man in a way that none of the others can. The eonic effect shows the ‘evolution, or realization, of potential’ in a fashion more than the genetic, just what we are seeing here (it seems).
Thus, somewhere in Eastern Africa (or South Africa) in the period after 100,000 BCE the rapid transformations that jumpstart human potential occur. Soon after, visibly from after 50,000 years ago, a small group of this new type of man crosses into Asia (across the Gate of Grief at the southern limit of the Red Sea) and is soon found across Eurasia, triggering the globalization of man.
Scientists simply have no way of dealing with this kind of phenomenon, and are forced to these conclusions by the data, but clutching at straws, e.g. some genetic mutation, the FOXP2 gene, etc, to explain something that has to be much more complex, and which the eonic effect hints at, although at a far later stage of human culture.
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Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 6:35 pm by nemo
I have been looking over recent articles on the ‘out of africa’ research: here’s one, a reasonable summary (and update) of what you can find in Spnecer Wells’ Journey of Man. Because of the prolonged debate (with multiregionalists), and confusion over when man first arrived in Australia, the basic new picture hasn’t yet sunk in: it is only a matter of years that the new paradigm has been vindicated. So it is important for general students to become familiar with this revolution in our understanding of human evolution.
New Research Confirms ‘Out Of Africa’ Theory Of Human Evolution
ScienceDaily (May 10, 2007) — Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry. The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia’s aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.
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03.07.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 2:28 pm by nemo
IN search of history
As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us an insight into the descent of man. We must move beyond the myth of purely genetic evolution, and the fixation on natural selection. We can recalibrate our definition of ‘evolution’ to include man’s past, present, and future, with a new kind of model that can carefully define the nature of our evolving freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
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02.21.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:47 pm by nemo
I have been rereading a number of books on the question (s) of human origins, and ordered this one (cited in WHEE) from Amazon: The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein
This is one of the best on the whole subject, despite the author’s clutching at the straw of the ‘magic mutation’. The basic point is that ca. 50 thousand years ago, in that range, the ‘big leap’ of human evolution must have occured to produce behaviorally modern man.
We need to be careful here and listen to slightly different ‘slower’ style accounts, but the basic issue is clear. The allotments of time don’t (fully) square with gradual evolution.
To put the matter in a nutshell: Darwinian-style accounts make very little sense here because we see the whole sequence of hominids from homo habilis (and/or australopicthecus) to anatomical homo sapies (ca. 150 thousand years ago) over several plus millions of years, yet the crucial period that does almost everything happens suddenly (for 50K years ago, you could also read sometime ‘after 100K’ BCE, before 50K).
This material is prime fodder for the eonic effect: this ‘effect’ shows us a non-genetic, and very spectacular, evolutionary pattern stretching over about ten thousand years, operating with directionality, globally, according to a very specific set of principles.
We can’t be sure, but this is just the kind of situation we seem to see in the Great Leap, or Great Explosion. But biologists are unwilling to let go of their Darwin obsession, even as the evidence points to something else.
I read this book for the second edition, but the issue was only peripheral to the depiction of the eonic effect (lack of space). Read the selection from WHEE here:
The Great Explosion
Make sure you grasp how the dynamics of the eonic effect operates.
This situation is unfair. Contradictory evidence is simply finessed as the critics are ignored.
The Great Explosion Evolutionary theorists have longed puzzled over the sudden advance ca. 50000 (?) years ago at the point man seems to have crossed a threshold to become the recognizably human cultural being that he is in terms of language and culture… Read the rest of this entry »
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02.09.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 3:33 pm by nemo
Darwin Day with Carl Zimmer – and a mini-ScienceOnline09
Talk Overview: Charles Darwin launched the modern science of evolution, but he hardly had the last word. In fact, today scientists are discovering that evolution works in ways Darwin himself could not have imagined. In my talk I will celebrate Darwin’s achievements by looking at the newest discoveries about evolution, from the emergence of life to the dawn of humanity.
I can certainly challenge those who realize that Darwin on man is not adequate science to take that to its logical conclusion in a study of the eonic effect:
The Great Explosion
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01.07.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, History at 9:27 pm by nemo
James comment on OIT post
James said,
January 7, 2009 at 8:48 pm ·
That was a link from his 2007 book. Unfortunately, the whole thing isn’t online. I think Elst’s main point about the Dravidian hypothesis is that it is presented as established fact when it was mostly based on a flawed interpretation of the Vedas (acknowledged by pro-AIT scholar Asko Parpola who sees it as describing a conflict with Iranian tribes). Also, his last book isn’t really committed to any scenario; he thinks it could go either way or perhaps another way that nobody has thought of yet.
And I reply:
nemo said,
January 7, 2009 at 9:13 pm ·
This issue hasn’t reached a crystallized level of understanding prior to solution. So I don’t know what to think at this point.
I am puzzled by the history of Indian religion, and this reversal of the AIT to OIT would make a big difference.
As I have suggested, however, at G-con blog, I have often thought that Indian religion with its gurus and all that goes back to the Neolithic, to the period from -5500 to the rise of civilization.
And it is therefore a good question what culture and language was involved with that. It is the instinctive sense of this that is making so many Indians insist on the fallacy of the AIT. But…
Another wild speculation: I was watching the recent PBS program on India.
It pointed out that the ‘Out of Africa’ scenario of man’s evolution and exodus from Africa, brings man along the coastlines all the way from North East Africa to south India, which is in many ways the branching off point for the whole subsequent globalization of man. It is possible that human potential at that point was in some fashion higher than at later points.
And to this day there are suspicious spiritual remnants of cultural archaeology there visible, as the TV program points out in passing, without considering the implications. ‘
I find it worth considering that primordial forms of Indic religion, therefore, have been there all along, issuing from, or preserved and latent in, the southern source zone, in forms that began to exteriorize as yoga/tantra in the Neolithic period.
Note that the differentiation of yoga and tantra is a much later development and their divorce was the object of much confused reunification in later times. Some of the Indus seals make the point very well!
It is not easy for modern man to recognize ’self-consciousness’ in primitive men, when he has often lost it himself. He looks to horizontal advance and forgets the sense of vertical realization that is possible for all stages of man. Thus it is always possible for this kind of self-consciousness to exist very early. It is a species characteristic, although we might not see its signs in primitive cultural manifestations. A confusing point.
Subsequent world travellers would carry this aspect of man’s earliest potential, but without the aspect of its realization, which is rapidly lost in horizontal cultural history.
Speculation, of course.
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11.14.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 9:18 pm by nemo
Last chance for the mini blogbook Descent Of Man Revisited at history-and-evolution.com. It is going into mothballs/offline for upgrade (perhaps). So if you want to download it do so before tommorrow.
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09.27.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 4:22 pm by nemo
Decoding Neanderthals
Research into the lives of Neanderthals is progressing at such a pace that National Geographic could probably produce a new documentary like “The Neanderthal Code” (airing Sunday, September 21, at 9:00 pm ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel) every couple of years and still fill it with new breakthroughs. This program covers a vast amount of science, both old and new, and serves as a thorough and entertaining summary of the latest interpretations and data on our species’s closest fossilized relatives. The show addresses several important questions: Did Neanderthal’s make art? Were they tougher than professional bull-riders? Did they have religion? If so, were they such a bunch of Puritans that they wouldn’t mate with the Homo sapiens who invaded their territory in Europe roughly 40,000 years ago?
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09.17.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, New Age at 6:12 pm by nemo
There are about fifteen good reasons why contemporary science as Darwinism totally fails to explain the evolution of man (whatever else we think of its explanations of earlier ‘deep time’). It just flunks, and can’t be taken seriously beyond the level of social ideology.
The regime of enforced ignorance of the real potentiality of man’s self-consciousness, finally realized by Wallace, who should be the real founder of evolutionary theory (along with Wallace), simply voids the claims of Darwinists on the spot. The debate between science and religion thus tends to be a distraction, neither side can get a grip on the issues. The suppressed questions unaddressed in the socially conditioned public philosophies are really ideologies designed to suppress human potential in the name of control. The shadow world behind that is the permanent crisis of human civilization.
Those trying to get their bearings as they enter collision with this shadow world are simply stricken from the lists, to navigate alone through the uncharted terrain of man’s greater invisible culture alone.
Science, Christianity are of no help here. Buddhism, a little better, at least in principle, is, finally, another ideology along the same lines. Best of luck, you are on your own.
General Propaganda Machines And Occult Proxies
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08.29.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, Third Edition, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:46 pm by nemo
Selection from World History And The Eonic Effect
The Great Explosion
Man’s emergence from the Paleolithic is both his entrance into history and his attempt to discover the meaning of that transition. The search for the significance of history and the resolution of its enigma is the most existential commitment of man and his most ancient of legacies, the question of Gilgamesh himself. The quest for some pattern in the surface incoherence of historical events takes form with the birth of civilization and the invention of writing, and inspires the traditions of sacred history, reborn in the secular philosophy of history, then challenged and recast by the idea of evolution.
The discovery of evolution is the gateway to its greater significance, the great clue, yet in revealing the unknown the idea of evolution is still confronted by the mystery of the known, man in history. The idea of evolution seems destined to fulfill the ancient hope in its new form by its revolutionary transformation of our perspectives of deep time. Indeed it is a precondition and foundation for any enquiry into man’s origins And yet this ambition to claim man’s view of his nature by the very invocation of universal evolution at first merely compounds the enigma and demands the answer of one and the same riddle, as universal history, that has always accompanied the chronicle of kingdoms, states, and empires.
Even as evolution yields one part of the riddle of history, it is history, ironically, that yields us a further clue to evolution, and to the unobserved drama of man’s transition from the lost world of his evolutionary infancy. As we observe the eonic effect, we begin to see, or detect, an ‘evolutionary’ process in the ‘rolling out’ of emergent civilization. This effect is too massive, and too high-level to coexist with what is currently claimed as explanation, even if we grant the possibility of confusing cultural and biological evolution. In many ways, history is a crucial test for any theory of the descent of man, the only record at close range, at the level of centuries that man has of the evolution of anything. The reason lies in a subtle contradiction in our thinking concerning the relationship of history to evolution, with particular regard to our freedom and ideas of that. The eonic effect highlights a discrepancy. Although man at the beginning of history has a clear dimension of ‘freedom’, this is limited, and the overall development of civilization shows a clear ‘helper’ evolution. Can we suppose that much earlier men succeeded without this? Read the rest of this entry »
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07.21.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, The Eonic Effect, Third Edition, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:16 pm by nemo
A new file on the eonic effect, and the third edition: World History
And The Eonic Effect, Civilization, Darwinism, And Theories of Evolution
Third Edition
We have a secret here at Darwiniana: we know Darwinian thinking is wrong, because we have a reality check, a ‘glimpse of evolution’, that can tell us instantly where standard reductionism goes wrong. Nor is there any license given to the design alternative. http://eonic-effect.net
The result is not ‘another theory’ but a framework for observing historical evolution in its great complexity, in a condition of some wonder!
The meaning of evolution has been lowballed by Darwinists and the generation of current science. It can only try to ape the ‘laws of physics’ with a ‘law of evolution’. There is no such law, such as that of natural selection. The emphasis on natural selection is a complete fantasy, as can be seen easily by looking at the eonic effect.
It is hard to accept that the people who are experts in physics, in medicine, in technological innovation could be so off the mark on evolution, but that’s the case. We have to come to terms with this fact, or we will effectively destroy modern civilization. No use whining over creationism. The idiots (though not barbarians) are at the gates. If the professionals of science at this stuck on a nineteenth century theory culture is going to move on in a new direction, with a vengeance. Time is up here. All that is required is an admission of ignorance, and a willingness to stop hyping a theory as violent as Darwin’s.
The eonic model brings evolution into history. How can that be? Isn’t that cokeyed? Not at all. Why? Because we recalibrate the meaning of evolution around a powerful data set that gives a much better interpretation of ‘evolution’. That data set is the ‘eonic effect’, a non-random pattern in world history, a most remarkable discovery.
The net effect here is to create a buffer between deep time and the history of man: world history shows its own ‘evolution’ and this can never be reduced to genetics.
Darwinists have gone to sleep, and into automatic mode. They have done something dangerous, created a monopoly of opinion and belief as impregnable as that of religion, and will still be peddling their nonsense a century from now. Everyone else has a need, and an obligation, to pass beyond its frozen paradigm game. We owe such a deceptive paradigm, and such a dishonest group of scientists, nothing whatever, leastwise the label of scientific expertise. By not being an expert, you have a residual common sense that can outflank the cadre of brainwashed experts whose livelihood depends on the deception. This deception has become internalized, and hides behind the fine words of scientific high talk.
The Altenberg 2008 gives us hints that many creative scientists have jettisoned the ‘synthesis’, wary of the dangers of doing so in public, but finally unable to continue the deception any longer.
But the Altenberg indications, e.g. the emphasis on ‘self-organization’, or other perspectives, are not sufficient. Self-organization is a description of what evolution does, not yet a theory. The eonic effect automatically fulfills the requirement, or the label, but that explains nothing.
The model of the eonic effect is not ‘another theory’ but a framework to observe something, something quite stupendously large, whose study will make the real meaning of evolution intuitive, to the degree that we can visualize such a large-scale process (not easy).
This approach almost certianly applies to earlier human evolution, although we don’t need to claim any such thing to proceed.
This is in many ways the answer to Huxley who realized finally something was wrong somewhere with Darwinism. As he noted we contradict Darwinism in practice. Why is that? It is because there must be a secondary evolution somewhere that we had missed. The eonic effect gives us a glimpse of what we missed.
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07.16.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 5:19 pm by nemo
Europe’s Ancestors: Cro-Magnon 28,000 Years Old Had DNA Like Modern Humans
ScienceDaily (July 16, 2008) — Some 40,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons — the first people who had a skeleton that looked anatomically modern — entered Europe, coming from Africa. A group of geneticists, coordinated by Guido Barbujani and David Caramelli of the Universities of Ferrara and Florence, shows that a Cro-Magnoid individual who lived in Southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern European, genetically as well as anatomically.
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07.05.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 2:46 pm by nemo
Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves
ScienceDaily (July 5, 2008) — Thousands of years later, we can view stone-age art on cave walls, but we can’t listen to the stone-age music that would have accompanied many of the pictures. In many sites, flutes made of bone are to be found nearby.
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06.23.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 5:54 pm by nemo
Britain’s Last Neanderthals Were More Sophisticated Than We Thought
ScienceDaily (June 23, 2008) — An archaeological excavation at a site near Pulborough, West Sussex, has thrown remarkable new light on the life of northern Europe’s last Neanderthals. It provides a snapshot of a thriving, developing population – rather than communities on the verge of extinction.
And many have the Darwinian delusion (in various forms) that selectionist evolution, or competition between humans and Neanderthals, or of the extermination of the latter (perhaps by the latter) is good evolutionary theory. Thence the delusion continues into the present with respect to subsectors of humanity.
The evolution of ‘man’, ‘men’, and the rest of it has been systematically misunderstood by Darwin influenced biologists. Social Darwinism is built in, and it is dangerous for the correct development of modern populations in relation to each other.
I recommend a close look at the logic of the eonic effect here: what we mean by ‘evolution’ is very complex and we see many different stages and types of that.
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03.26.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, links, you've got mail at 2:18 pm by nemo
Fossils unearthed in northern Spain are around 1.1 million years old
and represent our earliest known European’ hominin ancestors
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13537-first-european-had-a-mountain-retreat-in-spain.html
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03.17.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 1:30 pm by nemo
Pedal to the metal for human evolution
Mass migrations, the population explosion, and city living fuel rapid rate of genetic change
We can’t see it in our short lifetimes, but human evolution is going faster than ever before. Today, the rate of our evolution is over 100 times faster than it was in the depths of time, according to a paper published in PNAS called “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.â€
These statements are misleading since they confuse microevolution with ‘evolution’ itself, in the sense of that which produces Man as Man. And they can lead to passive complacency about the effects of ‘civilization’.
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03.15.08
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited at 7:43 pm by nemo
Conversation: Evolution OverdriveVolume 61 Number 2, March/April 2008
The human genome is changing faster than ever
While it is of tremendous interest to study the genetic compoent of ‘recent’ evolution, the fact remains that human evolution began to go in a different direction in the wake of the Great Explosion (ca. 50000 years ago), especially with the Neolithic/Rise of Civilization. And this is driven by a different form of (macro) evolution visible in the dramatic, and decisive, evidence of the so-called Eonic Effect.
(Courtesy John Hawks)
Human evolution has been gathering speed for the past 50,000 years, Read the rest of this entry »
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