10.27.10
An exchange on WHEE and Darwinism
An email exchange on WHEE/4th and Darwinism
from: H-WORLD@H-NET.MSU.EDU
The Darwin debate is controversial, but times are changing, and a book such as Fodor’s What Darwin Got Wrong indicates a new wave of critiques of that theory.
My citation of the Darwin debate was to free the study of history from the evolutionary psychology nonsense that tends to lurk in the background of even those who never refer to it. Darwinism has distorted our views of history, that’s all. The latent Social Darwinism of such accounts is egregious and unnecessary. So let’s be rid of it.
My point here was simply to alert teachers of world history to a new way to approach all that with a unique blend of theory that doubles as practical periodization. Read the rest of this entry »
10.19.10
Aryans, Hinduism, and a Buddhist Revolution
Aryans, Hinduism, And a Buddhist Revolution
There is a short take on the histroy of Indian religion in WHEE/4th, with some bibilographical references to Danielou who can be helpful, when you are ready. Til then the whole history is confusing.
10.03.10
History and Evolution: A Paradox Resolved
Chapter 7 now online at history-and-evolution.com
10.01.10
The Axial Age: repairing the damage done by Armstrong
Chapter 7 coming online
Chapter 7 now coming online, but still needs proofing (the Index software from word collides with the webpage software, a hastle). But the rough spots are not too many, so you can start.
We reach the end of the broad indication of the historical eonic pattern, called the eonic effect, whose structure gives us a strange, and incomplete, glimpse of an evolutionary process that transcends the incidents of civilization, and yet is the source of its generation. Our emphasis has been empirical, avoiding theories, and, using only the simplest methods of periodization, we have uncovered a rich structure of universal history that we have also interpreted as evolution. Read the rest of this entry »
09.30.10
Confirmed prediction of the eonic model
The Great Divide, a confirmed prediction of the eonic model
Modernity, an evolutionary irony. But will Darwin’s theory destroy secularism?
Chapter 7 coming soon!
Meanwhile the issue of history, evolution, and the enigma of modernity is nicely handled by the ‘eonic model’:
Transition and Modernity
The eonic effect and modernity is one of the most spectacular of theoretical claims/discoveries. The connection of the modern transition to evolutionary issues is ironic.
Will Darwin’s theory destroy modernity?
09.28.10
Chapter 6 of WHEE/4th is now online
Chapter 6 of the Fourth Edition is now online: Transition and Modernity
09.27.10
Chapter 5 of WHEE/4th now online
Chapter 5 of World History And The Eonic Effect now online: Symphony of Emergence: World History and the Axial Age!
An entire epoch of higher civilization is now reaching its end, and the world of early Sumer is a forgotten legend buried in the oddities of Akkadian cuneiform, while the civilization of Egypt is in decline. Although we don’t see the total collapse into medievalism that will occur in the next Occidental phase of our history our system comes close to this at many points, as civilization is frozen in the repetition of its basic forms. Most of all the progression of empires has risen to dominate civilization. This creates a crisis of development. Something spectacular is about to occur.
…
We have created the question, then, in relation to our eonic sequence, what next? The stream and the sequence interplay quite obviously stages the competition of two different futures in each case. More specifically, what are the next points of transformation in this ‘eonic’ series? That is, when do we again see a period of phasing onset, of parallel, interactive, zones of accelerated cultural evolution? Now, all at once, the Axial phase makes complete sense.
09.26.10
Why Darwinism always flunks a history test
Chapter Five of WHEE/4th edition coming tomorrow online. Meanwhile digest the foundations for a new kind of world history with the ‘theory’ integrated in the background.
Darwinism will never work on world history, and I think this passage makes it clear why. But if that is the case, the same is going to be true of man’s evolution throughout.
09.25.10
Big Histories, Universal Histories
Big Histories, Universal Histories
The idea of Big History, histories told since the Big Bang, and Universal Histories, which can be taken as histories that assume the action of human freedom, need to meet and become a new and higher form.
09.23.10
Chapter 4 of WHEE now online
Chapter four of WHEE fourth edition is now online: A Short History of The World
09.16.10
World history flunks the randomness test
Note: I hope to have Chapter Four of WHEE/4th up online soon, this week.
Be clear about what is said here: the issue of the eonic effect is an empirical one.
World history flunks the ‘randomness’ test, and a new a distinct kind of evolutionary system appears in its wake.
Climbing Mt. Improbable: The Eonic Effect
09.12.10
Mt. Improbable, not a la Mr. Dawkins
World history shows us what evolution is really like: check out the fourth edition selections online: here
09.11.10
Climbing Mt. Improbable: WHEE/4th edition, Chapter 3
Reposted from yesterday, thanks for large response!
New selections online for World History And The Eonic Effect, Fourth Edition!
Chapter 3 is now up and online: Chapter #3: Descent of Man Revisited
Follow the links to the sections of the whole chapter
Chapter 4 coming next week.
09.10.10
More online selections from WHEE
New selections online for World History And The Eonic Effect, Fourth Edition!
Chapter 3 is now up and online: Chapter #3: Descent of Man Revisited
Follow the links to the sections of the whole chapter
09.07.10
History and the meaning of evolution
http://history-and-evolution.com/
Putting WHEE/4th online is not easy, with multiple link checks for each webpage, so it will take a few weeks. More selections on the way tomorrow, at least.
In all the debates over evolution and ‘god’, the terms of discourse are lost to semantic muddle. As a result the term ‘evolution’ has become misdefined, and the term ‘god’ has become a meaningless glyph without a definition.
The original idea of the Old Testament was about something beyond ‘god/gods’ and warned against the abuse of language.
It pointed to a ‘higher power’ beyond history, whose referent was itself open to challenge.
Evolution has become a fantasy in the minds of Darwinists who speculate that an abstraction, natural selection, does all, in an ironic creationist sentiment.
The study of history can remind us to shelve ‘god’ verbiage for some close examination of the evolutionary sequence visible there, one that gives us the meaning of evolution for the first time, with an ironic commentary on the trans-theism of the original Israelities.
09.01.10
Fourth edition: man’s unfinished evolution
Get started with the online edition WHEE/4th.
The point here is that history and evolution overlap, so speak. Further, human evolution is not yet complete, and is proceeding via civilization to the real completion of homo sapiens.
The Janus-faced connection of history and evolution allows us to detect evolution in historical terms, and thus understand where were are going wrong with Darwinian mythology
08.31.10
Fourth edition, models, and an evolution formalism
A passage from an email to a new reader of WHEE. For the online text, starting up, go to history-and-evolution.com
The theory is more in evidence in the third edition, while the fourth uses only what I call an ‘evolution formalism’ which is just to one side next to a world history, starting in Chapter Four.
The eonic model is deep and elegant and shows a direct correlation to a Kantian idea, but I have never met anyone who understood it!
So I replaced it with a simplified ‘evolution formalism’, which is simply a variant of the punctuated equilibrium macro/micro distinction, which was invented but not understood by S.J. Gould. We can use this to optionally connect the old model to the evolution formalism. But this is not ‘theory’, but a device to describe the remarkable set of punctuations and the semi-equilibrium bewteen them, in world history.
The eonic effect is (descriptively) a remarkable case of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, inthe dictionary sense of the words. The terms should have been used for this from the start.To get the idea of the old model: ‘Evolution in quotation marks’ appears as the intermittent macro sequence, while the historical component appears Janus-faced as ‘History’ in the micro stream. It is a unique and beguiling variant of a type of dynamical alternation model, which can be expressed as an ‘evolution of freedom’.
To see the strange reality of this relationship of ‘system’ and ‘agents’ I often give the example of a ship and the passengers, and a distinction the Action of a System (the boat, the macro) and the ‘Actions of the Individuals’ (inside the boat, the micro). This relation of a ‘system action’ and the ‘free activity’ of people related to that system is actually an idea we have in our repetory, but the minute you explain it to the centipede he gets confused and can’t walk.Armed with these concepts we can unravel the mysteries of, e.g. the Axial Age, which as you saw Karen Armstrong couldn’t get straight.
We don’t understand what we are seeing world history.
Don’t worry if this isn’t clear at first. Just follow the logic of the outline of world history, and its embedded transitions.
08.30.10
Online edition of WHEE/4th edition
The issue of a non-profit book on evolution is important.
Books on evolution always compromise, even if they are critical of Darwinism.
It helps to get out of that racket, and look at the issues without the built in bias.
I have put the first two chapters of World History And The Eonic Effect, Fourth Edition online at history-and-evolution.com: Scroll down to the section #2 box for the menu image of the Chapters to the book.
The links work for the Introduction, Chapter 1, the Appendix and the first section of subsequent chapters, to make the links all work on the menus.
I will put the rest up as time goes on, i.e. soon, (it is a huge job to get all the links to work right), along with a guide to the exit, which seems formidable to some, but which is a lot simpler in this edition.
The eonic effect shows us that the riddle of (human) evolution can be solved by looking at world history. This can seem counterintuitive at first, but only because Darwinian propaganda has confused the issue.
In this edition,theory has gone into the background, and you can simply follow the short world history and outline as an ‘idea for a universal history’.
08.29.10
Coming tomorrow: online fourth edition of WHEE
Coming tomorrow, I hope: the (first pages of the) online edition of World History and The Eonic Effect, fourth edition.
http://history-and-evolution.com/
08.25.10
A dose of empiricism
The remarkable fact about evolution is that after all the endless discussions and debates, noone has actually observed evolution in the right way, or even at all.
We need a sense of what evolution is like.
The Eonic Effect: A dose of empiricism
The revolution in our knowledge of world history has uncovered something that must challenge the Darwinian assumptions about random evolution and natural selection. As we extend the scale of history to the scale of five thousand or more years, the empirical given of the historical development of civilization in a remarkable portrait of spontaneous self-organization shows us something that Darwinism cannot explain, and, further, the result looks like a complex hybrid of history and evolution. Instead of botched theories that distort our thinking we can follow the empirical outlines of episodes of evolution using periodization and descriptive analysis.
08.16.10
Natural selection, theories and the Oedipus Paradox
08.10.10
WHEE, Limits of Observation
From WHEE, 4th ed…
The statements Darwinists make about natural selection refer to complex situtions stretching across time and space, making them speculations.
2.2.1 The Limits of Observation
The debate over natural selection has gone on too long. Darwinists should have long since confessed the metaphysical speculation and methodological abuse of right science latent in Darwin’s theory. We need to be finished with the matter by demanding proper proof. It is an issue of science, not religion. Where did Darwin go wrong? Darwin’s theory is a provocative generalization applied to immense vistas of time that are unobserved. Those unobserved intervals in deep time can fool us badly. We can exit the chronic debate by simply demanding proper evidence. The demand for evidence of the fact of evolution is far less stringent than that for natural selection. Demonstration that the latter is the key to all forms of higher complex structure has never been demonstrated scientifically. The task is exceedingly difficult, for starters. The difficulty may preempt easy hopes for a theory of evolution. One way to see the problem with claims for natural selection is to look at history, and we will proceed to an examination of non-random evolution in the dynamics of historical emergence.
The Hurricane Argument Consider a hurricane, a very brief event by comparison, as a global ‘system evolution’ on the surface of a planet. We know a hurricane when we see one, but its dynamics, mechanism, and full progression require incremental ‘closing’ on degrees of evidence and observation, a task not fully accomplished until the advent of satellites able to map global coordinates. In the same way we know evolution when we see it, roughly speaking, given the fossil evidence, but its dynamics, mechanism and full progression require incremental ‘closing’ on degrees of evidence and observation, a task not fully accomplished. Note the analogy suggests global positioning satellites over the entire planet over millions of years, to observe drifting species and their changes. Suppose an observer in outer space only had loosely sampled data on pre-Neolithic man, and post-twentieth century man, and then conjectured that some mutation caused this dramatic change
.
This analogy shows at once where Darwinism departs from scientific practice. Historians routinely assume they must close on the facts in such an analysis, yet Darwinists wish to claim exemption. We have no fully observed datasets in Darwinian deep time. It is an insidious trap.
In all the noise of the Darwin debate, this judgment is final, and it is important therefore to grasp that no one is under any evidentiary obligation to take Darwinian selectionism as established scientifically, surprising as some may find that. We put it that way because we can’t refute Darwinists in their provocative claims that routinely ignore the basic objection. The question is very simple: were there any witnesses to the facts claimed? No. We are done. If we find evidence of ‘evolution’ in history, Darwinian claims are void as counterevidence.Wallace and Darwin in wild or jungle scenes We should note that Darwin and Wallace observed ‘evolution’ as they worked in scenes of teeming jungle life or natural environments in the wild. That can be misleading because the (micro-) evolutionary processes visible (and which seem to explain speciation, especially in special cases such as insect populations) to the naked eye neglects the larger dimension stretching over tens of millennia which alone might throw light on ‘how (macro-) evolution happens’. In any case, this selectionist frenzy visible in nature fails at many points, such as the evolution of man, to provide a satisfying set of answers.