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02.21.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:35 pm by nemo
2.5.7 History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?
The issue of history and evolution is a confusing one, and it seems as if we are making a category error. But consider the following question: when did evolution stop and history begin? This tricky question will trip up the Darwinian approach and leave it to collapse in a contradiction. The answer of course is that there couldn’t be an instantaneous switch. We can see that to set a specific date is contradictory. So we must specify a transition between evolution and history. What form would this hybrid take, passing from evolution to history? Either it is all evolution or all history?? Or maybe a series of mini-transitions with evolution dominant then history dominant. In alternation. Now look at the eonic effect: it speaks not just of evolution, but of history and evolution, the two braided together, with history emerging from evolution. And this eonic effect takes the form of a sequence of alternating periods, with evolution (in our sense) dominant during eras of transition, and co-related periods with history (in our sense) dominant. Thus we actually see in history the data matching the deduction about transitions, passing from evolution to history.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:32 pm by nemo
5.4.1 Canaan and ‘Israel/Judah’: The Old Testament Riddle
It is hard, in fact, impossible, to think of any other explanation than that of the eonic effect, for what is bequeathed to us by the redactors of the Old Testament, who, incidentally, lived after the events they purported to describe. It is the eonic ‘smoking gun’, for behind its history, however we reconstruct historical incidents from its account, lies an implicit straddling of the period –900 to –600, with a particular intensity in the period between –750 and afterward, an eonic Bull’s eye, and indirect evidence that stands on its own irregardless of the complete facts.
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02.20.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:13 pm by nemo
Freedom’s Causality
As Elizabeth Ellis notes in Kant’s Politics,
What would “bridging nature and freedom” mean outside of politics? For Kant the big questions are nearly always epistemological: thus, bridging freedom and nature might mean specifying the conditions under which investigators of the empirical world (scientists) are able to find evidence of spontaneity in the physical world (that is, of freedom’s causality). Either freedom and nature are strictly alternative perspectives on the same set of empirical occurrences, or there are some things in the world that can only be explained according to freedom (in other words, the second alternative posits empirical evidence that some thing has no antecedent cause). I am not the first person to point out that it is not an easy thing empirical evidence of a lack of a cause. Kant himself assumes that a good scientist will operate under the presumption that absent natural causes may eventually be discovered.[i]
But this is just what we have found, with respect to macrohistory, at least.
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02.18.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:08 pm by nemo
Today’s link on Scott Gilbert is worth reading: Scott Gilbert and developmental biology, follow the link to Scoop-NZ, and that to the information on the imminent Rome conference.
Finding problems with the regime of the modern synthesis should be the most natural thing, as this article implicitly shows.
Instead we have the fanaticism of the Darwin fundamentalists, and we can be sure they won’t even discuss the issues now being raised as to the nature of biological theory.
That said, the projected paradigm change, to me, doesn’t go far enough.
The whole basis of theoretical biology is insufficient for explaining the evolution of man. And that evolution is tough going, because our consciousness as scientists in the present is too immersed to achieve objectivity with respect to the ‘higher peaks of history and human consciousness’ that already precede us in time.
Darwinists can’t even handle Bible Belt religion! What are they going to do with the emergentism of Buddhism/Jainism in the Axial Age.
In light of the eonic effect, we can see that there is a developmental aspect in the emergence (called ‘eonic evolution’) of civilization, and most probably a similar process in the earlier evolution of man.
This is a purely abstract ‘systems’ evolution beyond genetics.
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap5_1.htm
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02.17.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, The Eonic Effect at 8:15 pm by nemo
Last-Minute Changes
Scientific orthodoxy says that human evolution stopped a long time ago. Did it?
The question of whether evolution stopped (ten thousand years ago, the title of the book under review) depends on what we mean by evolution, and whether the definition is correct. We assume a purely genetic interpretation, with a Darwinian backdrop, which confuses the issue. In that sense it is easy to claim that evolution never stopped, and genetic drift, at least, is constant.
The larger point, one that the study of the eonic effect makes clear, is that evolution is both macro and micro: the micro aspect proceeds continuously, while the macro is not always active. Once this point is understood, we can see that the emergence of civilization is ‘evolutionary’ is a special sense, and that indeed evolution in that new meaning has been intermittent/continuous according to the pattern of the eonic effect.
However, despite a host of minor genetic changes, the basic framework of humanity would seem to have remained invariant for over fifty thousand years, and that the evidence, such as it is, for a ‘Great Explosion’ give us tantalizing hints of a period of macroevolution.
In any case, the puzzle of what human evolution really is has not been solved for the case of man, and therefore discussions about whether it has stopped cannot be settled.
Total confusion reigns here, caused by the illusion that Darwin’s natural selection explains everything.
For a contrary view get started with the perception of civilizational evolution, the eonic sequence.
Read the rest of this entry »
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02.14.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 9:10 pm by nemo
Beyond Darwinism: A Theoretical Self-defense
Our demonstration of a non-random pattern in world history is complete, and along the way we have stumbled on much more, a system of macro-history that matches a discrete-continous model, a stroke of luck, and reflecting a process operating over tens of millennia, in a process that we can only call ‘evolution’, by default. The result grants a self-defense against claims of science in the confusions of Darwinism applied to history.
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02.13.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:51 pm by nemo
The (Eonic) Evolution Of Civilization
Visualizing world history is difficult in an age of scientism where the question of historical dynamics suffers from incoherence. The purpose of the eonic model is to show the very simple pattern of dynamic sequencing in world history, and to follow the steps in detail from the Neolithic onwards.
Visualizing the eonic seqeuence We need to construct a (meta) ‘narrative’ outline that is as short as possible in order to visualize world history in one sweep generated by new sense of coherence created by our perception of the eonic effect. We will touch a series of eonic emergents and move on at once. This outline is recast as a database in the Appendix and can expand to any length. We begin to realize that because of the immensity of the data involved it would be impossible to prove any theory of history. What we can do however is falsify the ‘flat history’ assumption, and provide a coherent general outline. If flat history fails then a discrete alternation model is the next likely candidate, and here we see an extraordinary correlation. Further, those ignorant of our model are already using it, e.g. in references to ‘modernity’, or the ‘middle ages’, and ‘age of revelation;, the ‘Greek miracle’, the ‘age of the Upanishads’, the ‘birth of civilization’, etc,… Such terms need to be melted down and resmelted in an abstract periodization matrix.
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02.12.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 10:43 pm by nemo
James produced a good insight into the eonic dynamics inComment on WHEE: technocratic medievalism?.
If you look at the text (with much of it online) there are two symmetric sections in Chapter Six giving expression to the way in which the post-transition can suddenly seem to be operating on a lower level:
A New Age Begins: From Micro to Macro
System Shutdown: From Macro to Micro
The distinction of micro-action and macro-action pervades the phenomenon of the eonic effect, and the transition from micro to macro, then from macro to micro is clearly visible in the action of the modern transition.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 9:10 pm by nemo
5.6.2 An Evolutionary Psychology: Classical Samkhya
Current science/religion debates are almost completely dominated by wrong assumptions created by the dominance of scientism, and the result inexorably leads to sense of something missing, and thence to a resurgence of religious considerations.
That is why the ancient Samkhya remains of great interest, for it shows a religious culture that never suffered either the extremes of religious mythology/belief, or the spiritual/material contradictions latent in the reductinism of modern science.
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02.11.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:44 pm by nemo
There is a whole series of new selections from World History And The Eonic Effect online. Having discovered the eonic pattern, and created a model around it, a short world history in outline proceeds from the Neolithic to the modern transition, the whole shebang, if not the big bang.
The Eonic Evolution Of Civilization
Follow the links, chapter 5, 6, 7…
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02.10.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 9:48 pm by nemo
I am getting the next batch of selections from World History And The Eonic Effect ready, and will go through them starting tomorrow.
But you can get a first look starting with
Symphony Of Emergence: The Eonic Evolution Of Civilization
I am putting a partial snapshot of the whole book online in time for the Darwin Day celebration brouhaha.
The implications of the eonic effect are to show that world history can’t be reduced to Darwinian theory. No theory such as Darwin’s (of natural selection) can explain the sources of the complex outcome, for reasons that become obvious upon examination.
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02.07.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:11 pm by nemo
I am going to put a lot of further selections online from World History And The Eonic Effectin time for Darwin day. But meanwhile consider what’s online already, here’s a key post:
4.3.5 A Certain Strangeness: Beyond Space And Time?
The Darwin debate goes into deadlock over the question of naturalistic explanation. As defined by current science that is a recipe for failure, since none of the naturalistic explanations known will fit the facts of evolution.
In looking at both the human psyche and the evolution of man in light of the eonic effect we can see that a naturalistic extension would help the situation completely. Kantian transcendental idealism fits the bill very well, if only to make clear what we don’t know! The terms ‘transcendental’ and ‘idealism’ throw people off, unfortunately, but in the Kantian framework nothing is better suited to the Newtonian framework around which it revolves.
Our crude widget model has stumbled onto something remarkable, a resemblance to so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, a scheme tailor-made to rescue Newtonians in distress, but considered now to be an outmoded form of thought. Almost against our will our model forces this on us, due to the two levels it generates in its analysis, and the stunning match to the discrete freedom sequence. Remarkably we have an ‘off the shelf’ philosophic software for just this situation, the critical system of Kant. We tie together all the loose threads of our discussion with a look at his thinking in the endnote section.
Our data has, at first, a strangeness to it in the way it treats discontinuity, jumps between periods and regions, and operates on fuzzy intervals. In fact, it is a consequence of the data we are confronted with, no way around it, and is not indulgence in the fantastic. Examine the data of the Axial Age, for example. Fantastic or not, the data speaks for itself. There is no ‘flat history’ solution to the strange properties we discover there. One reason we are about to discover for this initial sense of oddity is that we may be detecting a system operating behind the scenes, and perhaps one that is beyond the matrix of space and time. Although we can’t establish this formally, we should launch a preemptive strike against the suddenly metaphysical speculations that will arise here, and that will provoke some metaphysical spree on the subject of history and eternity. The latter concept has no scientific foundation, and is speculative, period. That doesn’t mean it is wrong, only metaphysical. Transcendental idealism is the ony way to both embrace and yet discipline this kind of ‘ran off the meter’ once we attempt to include anti-causal thinking in our model.
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01.31.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:29 pm by nemo
The most beautiful part of the eonic model is the way it resolves a question latent in Kant’s essay on history.
And this journey throughout the realm of so-called ‘transcendental idealism’ shows us why it is that the evolution question is so intractable: we are never really seeing evolution, only its outer representation.
The term itself is a problem: don’t confuse Kant’s ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent’ or supernatural.
Transcendental idealism is really well-matched with Newtonian physics, and basic science as an extension or commentary.
See also: Visions Of A Ghostseer
4.4 Kant’s Challenge
Our framework is complete, but it is useful, and appropriate, seeing the resemblance to transcendental idealism, to connect our model with a classic theme of the philosophy of history, in the title of this chapter, in the process solving one of the classic difficulties in this subject. One of the deepest currents of modern thought, beside the rise of theories of evolution, lies in the heritage of the philosophy of history, whose existence is justified by default in the failure to find a ‘science of history’. No use complaining that science has replaced philosophy or that Darwin explains everything. Our simple model with its eonic mainline and discrete freedom sequence stages a lightweight transition through this terrain. Strictly speaking our model based on a stream and sequence contrast, but then in this chapter has annexed the ideas of ‘causality and freedom’ as an adjunct, which requires explanation in the imperfect match. It is also empirical and can’t be used for complex secondary deductions, but we can manage a few hunches with our historical black box, and the embedded freedom sequence tweaks the issues very directly.
4.4.1 The Challenge Resolved And A Kant Fix
Within two centuries the necessary data is emerging for the first time to resolve Kant’s Challenge in unexpected fashion. But we must fix the confusion over asocial sociability that flows into the vacuum of archaeological data, data only now showing a way out of the trap. The great irony here is that we will see Kant caught up most beguilingly in the very turning point that constitutes one aspect of his problem’s solution. The answer needs just a bit more time and perspective. It is a beautiful prophecy and proof of the power of his system of critiques. [i]
Kant’s essay, as a ‘minor’ work, is actually one of the most influential of modern history, for it enters on cat’s paws into the whole struggle of modern philosophy of history and ideology. It seems to foretell the next two critiques, and is a deceptive work in the sense of giving consideration to what Kant calls ‘asocial sociability’, but is really pursuing a different issue, in the process asking a question. Many have answers to questions of history, Kant, with a curious brilliance, had the presence of mind to but ask, and leave some answer to the future, for he must have sensed that he was given inadequate data. The essay arises just after the first critique, and yet seems to foretell the next two.
The unsuspected significance of this work shows us something very elegant about our understanding of history, if we can manage the dangers of historical directionality, and its teleological implications, which we can successfully evade with our ‘discrete-continuous’ model. Kant created a critical system, yet was so curiously wry as to propose not a Critique of Historical Reason, the curious lot of his successor Dilthey (Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism being one attempt at this book), but an Idea for a Universal History. We shall have to hope the first book, still unwritten, appears in the attempt at the second.[ii]
Our treatment of Kant’s Challenge will emerge over the course of the text, but at the same time let us note that we have already resolved the question, in essence, almost without trying. We can say that the eonic pattern satisfies, to a fuzzy first approximation of the Universal Historian, a different but related question to that which Kant posed, as we see in broadest scope that the solution is within the range of the cycl ical driver of an evolutionary emergentism. Note Kant’s wording. It is very similar to our distinction of historical determination and free action, macro and micro.
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01.30.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:47 pm by nemo
Are there really any scientific theories of evolution? Too bad, but maybe not.
Alfred Wallace began to realize the problem. Duncehead Darwin never became the wiser.
Scientists have little understanding of the way that scientific theories begin to lose their objectivity as they ascend from physics through biology into the the realm of history. The Oedipus Paradox, outlined by Popper in his critique of Marxism (it works just as well with any sociological/historical theory, including those that purport to be ‘biological’ and deal with human evolution), shows us that ‘theories’ don’t really apply to historical situations (in the sense of scientific laws along the lines of physics), something new is needed.
In the study of the eonic effect we discover the significant fact that ‘theories’, and science, are historically dependent, and inside history, and more than that inside the ‘eonic sequence’, hence ‘output’ of the system under study. No objectivity is possible in that sense!
The implication is that we should be wary of the claims of scientific objectivity in theories of evolution, especially in the case of man.
The question of the Oedipus Paradox makes this issue explicit.
Another passage from World History And The Eonic Effect on the Oedipus Paradox (not online, but I am putting it up here).
The other passage is here: The Oedipus Paradox, along with Botched Theories And The Coefficient Of Murder
4.2.1 Ideology and Theory: The Oedipus Paradox
We confront one of the paradoxes of evolutionary theory, one in which the observer is himself immersed in evolution, where he is constructing theories that might cause his own behavior to change in the present. This paradox is relatively unimportant with respect to the vistas of deep time, but assumes greater and greater importance as ‘evolution’, albeit transforming into history by our definition, closes on the present. This results in the ‘non-linear’ self-interaction of agent and theory in the present. Consider the difference in your behavior if you believe, or disbelieve, in Darwin’s theory. Popper also indicated one aspect of this in what he called the Oedipus paradox:
The idea that a prediction may have influence upon the predicted event is a very old one. Oedipus, in the legend, killed his father whom he had never seen before; and this was the direct result of the prophecy, which had caused his father to abandon him. This is why I suggest the name ‘Oedipus effect’ for the influence of the prediction upon the predicted event.
Our beliefs about natural selection contain a subtle prediction about what will happen if we ‘act out the theory’. We can see from the eonic effect that no higher culture will be the result! Quite the contrary. If the rules of the game were survival of the fittest the long term trend toward empire would go unchecked, and democracy and equalization, connected with freedom induction, would be superfluous.
If we assume that natural selection is ‘how things are’, the source of all higher complexity, we put a premium on its ‘mechanism’, e.g. competition, and the ‘acting out’ of selectionist presumption as a curiously inverted ethic. We should be wary that something is missing in our understanding! Clearly the generalization about selection must be false, somewhere. We can see this if we consider this paradox: if survival of the fittest produces altruism, then won’t more competition produce greater altruism? Shouldn’t we disregard ethics and altruistic action long enough to produce more ethically altruistic men? This contradiction takes many forms, and strongly suggests, independently of the evidence (which isn’t provided in any case) that natural selection is a false generalization, and that a ‘boundary present’ issue must be taken into consideration in theories of evolution, as opposed to theories of physics.
There would seem to be many evolutions at work, natural selection, and whatever produced its antithetical constructs, viz. altruism. This is the blunder that causes Social Darwinism. The only solution is to remember that theory itself is historically embedded. We have no external observers doing objective theories of evolution. This is why the religionists tend to see the paradox sooner, and so disconcertingly tweak the Darwinist, to his befuddlement. His hi-tech smart theory was supposed to override the issues of religion. But we can see that religion, however primitive, is a series of injunctions, ‘shoulds’, statements about what the ‘observer’ should do in the future, agree or not. Not a theory at all, it nonetheless respects the transition from past to present, to future. It wishes to script the action of the agent, from the present to the future. It is a statement about potential. We need to distinguish then these ‘free action’ scripts, from theories or generalizations taken to be universally valid. And that, with grim finality, is the end of simplistic theories of evolution. The problem is that theories of physics, in their spectacular success, defined from the start the meaning we give to science, but we can see that this definition starts to break down almost at once, and that theories of evolution are going to be an order of magnitude more difficult, confronted with this stubborn non-linear effect.
Note: Popper on Marx We can’t forget the context of Popper’s critique of historicism. Popper’s statement was a scolding challenge to Karl Marx whose ‘predictions’ of a future social state according to some ‘law’ of history collided with the ‘free agency’ of those arriving in the wake of the prediction. Some will protest that Lenin never made such claims in that form, but the example in the abstract is illuminating. And it must be admitted that history records the paradoxical behavior of those successors to Marx who attempted at once to either wait for the prediction to take effect, idling and content to do nothing, or else by some sophistry of theory and ‘praxis’ intent on bringing the prediction about. However, we should note that any historical generalization, even, or especially, the tacit version of Darwin’s selectionist theory, conceals some version of the historical inevitability objection, and that critiques of Marx, on this issue, suddenly fall silent as to the similar charge against ‘laws of economics’ seen in neo-classical economics.
The confusion arose from attempting to imitate the record of past revolutions, e.g. the French Revolution, and their connection to the emergence of freedom. We will examine this point later. The fallacy lies in false ascription of some ‘law’ to the future. The only solution is to be wary of all theories of evolution that do not define the special status of the observer’s present. We may speak of ‘historical determination’ in the past, but we must be wary of such generalizations if they intrude on the boundary of the present.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:53 pm by nemo
Freedom Evolves! Huxley’s Evolution #2
We have discovered Huxley ’s evolution #2, and we are in the strange position of trying to disprove Darwin in practice, the effect Huxley noted. And we should begin to share Huxley’s sense of alarm, for we see that the self-interaction of selectionist theory, as a belief system, with history is producing wrong results. We end up needing to oppose the theory in practice (hopefully!), a built-in falsification, a jamming process so to speak. The whole scenario is cockeyed.
In fact, we have produced an empirical counterexample to the claim that freedom in any sense evolves through an adaptionist scenario.
Freedom evolves The evidence of the discrete freedom sequence, and, indeed, the whole pattern of eonic data, clearly demonstrates that something larger is involved in anything we might call the ‘evolution of freedom’. In the process we detect something remarkable: a macro component to this ‘freedom evolution’.
The factor of macro-action in the emergence of freedom is discovered unexpectedly, and generates a paradox of the Kantian type. And that a cautionary tale as we proceed to examine the ‘realizations of freedom’, the factor of micro-action. Our data gives us two such moments, both at the point of the divide in successive transitions: post-Solonic Greece, and the emergent democratic streams at the divide following the French and American Revolutions.
Huxley’s Evolution # 2 Problems arise with Darwin’s theory and we have seen some crucial ones, among a host of others:
1. Selectionist theory claims that agency or even ‘free will’ in some sense arises in an adaptive scenario. Yet we can see from the eonic data that there is a macro component to the question of freedom. In general, we must demand to see empirical data demonstrating the evolutionary process in action, on the scale of our hurricane argument.
2. Darwinists often speak of the ‘gene for religion’, and would have to claim that religion arises as an adaptive formation. Yet we can see in historical times the way in which religions arise. There is an explicit process of ‘distributed evolution’ that proceeds beyond local adaptation toward a global result.
3. Sociobiologists seem to claim that ‘human nature’ is a given from the selectionist evolution of the Paleolithic. But this is pure speculation, and we see in history something far more complex. We can barely define human nature at all, and can see that historical evolution might be changing that human nature as it goes along.
4. Natural selection is most certainly not the driving force of world history. Survivors often need special help in the eonic sequence, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ produces huge obstracles to a genuine advance, which often does an end run around the ‘survivors’.
There are endless other problems arising with this runaway usage of selectionist thinking. Adaptation is not the issue. It is time to be finished with Darwinian fantasies. Survival of the fittest, and competition, and economic action, are not the laws of macroevolution. All of the advances we see come from high performance intervals of seminal innovation. And these appear in a developmental sequence.
One problem is that we are so used to a different concept of evolution that it is hard to change our semantic and verbal habits. And yet we should persist in our usage, leaving open the option of a completely revised terminology. The reason is that Darwinists, after denying that their theory applies to history, cleverly or unconsciously apply it anyway, and in any case the work of sociobiologists now wishes to Darwinize history.
But we can already sense the disastrous consequences of Darwinian thinking It puts a premium on social conflict, competition, and misleads those who are confronted with the ethical potential in all situations.
Thus the problem is the exact connection to man in the Paleolithic. In general, there are several possibilities. Our eonic sequence is continuous all the way back, and involves all stages of man’s evolution. Or else it is itself discontinuous and switches on at crucial stages in man’s evolution (how would it do that?). We can take the matter no further without more evidence. By showing that more data is required, we must at once caution Darwinists against the abuse of their theory based on theoretical hallucination, and the dangers of theoretical tragedy.
But one thing we can say is that the visible eonic effect gives us a snapshot of ‘evolution of some kind’ and that we see this in history. There is no other possibility, granted our way of defining the sliding scale (evolution to history). The process we see has its finger in too many pies for any other type of evolutionary explanation to work. We can only fit one elephant in a room this size.
We would do well to forget Darwin applied to history, given this broader perspective, since the issue of ethical action is retabled with great vigor and takes the immediate form of the question of qualitative action. Not the winner take all of survival of the fittest, but the high performance levels required to advance the system, is the key. We must take the gifts of nature and render them at the level of the highest motive, lest we degrade our chances in the spectacle of hallucinatory evolutions. We may not easily state the canon of this ethic, but it makes no difference to the fact that this is a system of generated potential, and it requires more than mechanized principles of predator/prey nonsense. The great irony is that the great religions were the fittest survivors, and our eonic system must leapfrog the Eurasian inertia to reseed political freedoms, and indeed a renewal of science, which did not survive the Darwinian thinning out of Axial antiquity.
We have an ingrained tendency to blame history for our own faults. We can see that the eonic sequence is operating on a minimum principle and is always benign, while the realizations in its wake rapidly turn into something else. If, for example, democracy is an eonic emergent, then anything less loses it status by comparison. As our emergent source areas proceed toward a new liberal civilization they also tend to imperialism in their exteriors, spoiling the outcome, one not benefited at all by wrong-headed theories of the Darwinists.
It never occurs to anyone that ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, as a depiction of nature, can be as anthropomorphic as anything from religion. Even a cursory glance at the eonic sequence shows an organized and benign process that is waiting on man to respond with something more than the usual carnivorous logic. It creates a potential for political freedom, for example, but man takes millennia to respond, and even then the realization is inadequate. Best to be forgetting Darwin at this point. It seems to be man that is ‘red in tooth and claw’, projecting his nature onto the universe.
——————–
Here’s the original post and book selection discussing ‘Huxley and evolution #2′:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/25/huxley-and-evolution-2/
Here’s a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect that I didn’t put online: on Huxley’s belated realization that something was wrong with Darwin’s theory.
He stumbled on the basic gap in Darwinism: it doesn’t really answer the question as to how many evolved. We can see that something else is required to explain the man that we see, the photo finish argument that arises to cast doubt on Darwinian claims about the descent of man.
Huxley and Social Darwinism
It wasT. H. Huxley himself who spotted the flaw in the theory of natural selection in his work, Evolution and Ethics, and in the process unwittingly exposed a paradox in the theory he had so long defended. His perception was that there must be something else beside the ‘law of evolution’, survival of the fittest, at work, for man was condemned to oppose its effects in practice, on ethical grounds. Whence, if we accept this dualism, comes this evolution # 2? Here the data of the eonic effect shows us at once two levels of evolutionary action.
Here the effects of Darwin’s theory here were ideological, and misleading, if not disastrous. It is not adequate to point out that Darwin was himself at pains to distance himself from the misinterpretation of his own theory, in the confusion with the views of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer who is blamed for everything. Like software with a glitch, the consequences were immediate. This refers to the controversies of so-called Social Darwinism in this ambiguity of ‘evolutions’. Here ‘theory’ confronts its own effect of the theory itself on history, after it enters this history. For the first unconscious suggestion, in this case, is that unlimited social competition in the immediate present will improve genetic structure in the far future, a gross misunderstanding of a theory taken to be true at all times.
This ‘survival of the fittest’ aspect is, in any case, demonstrably false of man’s social experience, as the mechanism of cultural evolution. Thus extreme competition is met by the response of social law in the evolution of civilization, if not economy. And the place of Adam Smith here is entirely complex and misleading, this philosopher being a de facto source of a new ethics, even as his work is polarized between an economic and moral dimension. Survival of the fittest business firm is simply another process, as is the tonic of Olympiad sports competition. The issue of evolutionary causality in the study of the evolution of civilization has been so confused by assumptions of material causative motive, as in the imputation of economic determinism, that the real evolution of social cooperation seems to have been forgotten. In general, theories of evolution must themselves interact with the near future of all free action, in a confusion of external observer, and temporal participant, ‘acting out theory’. Amoebas had never read Darwin, but after the publication of his book cultural evolution underwent clear changes. We see the danger of factoring the fact-value distinction out of the statement of evolutionary ‘laws’. The record of civilization shows something very different and reveals clear evidence of centuries of ‘idle time’, dark Assyrian centuries, between interrupts as the ‘winners’ of social competition gain control.
These issues invoke the field of original meanings of the term ‘evolutionism’ as they were born from ideas of progress and passed into the radicalism of the period of revolutionary modernism and thence into the conservatizing theme of social competition, and survival of the fittest, in the rise of a new form of economy. We are left suspicious the radical ‘shoulds’ of social justice passed into the ‘musts’ of ‘scientific’ counsel as determinism in a reversed conservative vein, although the later socialists of the nineteenth century, by and large, were adherents to the Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory was hopelessly compromised by ideology and economic thinking. It is the issue of the inability of Darwin’s theory to set the boundary between history and evolution.
The rise of technological civilization has created a new confusion, theories applied to self-realization. But we can see their limitations, especially in the realm of ethics. And none of them explain the emergence of an ethical agent. In the final analysis, theories of evolution must invoke, not this or that principle of ethical behavior, but the full potential of all of them.
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01.29.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:40 pm by nemo
The previous post discussed the issue of a Marxist critique of ID, but Marx’s philosophy of history was the object of a classic critique by Karl Popper, on the gournds of being an ‘historicism’. Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism.
We should note the way that the eonic effect enters this terrain and survives because it is based on a higher and more subtle synthesis of causality and freedom ideas. And this succeeds because the data of the eonic effect shows us how to do this: we distinguish ‘system action’ and the ‘free action’ of individuals inside that system.
4.3 Man Makes Himself
We need to pursue further our discussion of questions of freedom and necessity. It takes time to get the knack of distinguishing a system of macro-action and the free action that makes it up, microaction, especially if changes of consciousness are the only clue. And yet we make this distinction all the time. The eonic effect gives us such a massive wallop that we get a clue to structure we didn’t expect, but only over the long range, millennia. Yet we do this all the time with economies. We speak of free agents, then speak of the ‘behavior’ of an economic system.
The basic issue is very simple, and should be taken empirically by looking at world history with one simple (theoretical) question, Does man make himself? Thus we can restate the whole issue in intuitive form, using the title of a book by Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself. To say that ‘man makes himself’ implies that ‘freedom to do so has already evolved’. But questioning that was one of our starting points, and we can see already from superficial inspection of our turning points that emergent civilization has a hidden driver, and that otherwise it tends to sandbank, slow to a crawl, medievalize, drift from initial states of high advance, degenerate into empire, lose its initial advances. Man enslaves man, while we will see that our discrete freedom sequence (the double emergence of democracy) comes to the rescue twice in a row, and also includes the emergent ‘abolitionism’ by correlation in its ‘eonic effects’.
Notice that science and democracy are born in ancient Greece, then die out until our next turning point. The Roman Republic goes from bad to worse as libertas becomes imperium, and then everything seems to collapse in a Dark Age. There is even a tendency to think decline a form of advance. So the issue is complicated, and we see that while man is the only candidate to self-create his own freedom, make himself, and civilization, there is a helper-driver visible by looking backwards at the globally interconnected way in which advance seems to alternate intermittently. This is a limit on the idea of freedom, and we must be wary not to ‘alienate’ ourselves in a system of determinism in the name of evolving freedom. The answer is simple. Such a system must terminate, and leave man on his own, evolution must become history. That point must come as we begin to observe it, ready or not. And our model will automatically take care of that, in the short term. It switches off in the recent past, as theory goes out the window and is replaced by free action, free or not.
Reverse engineering the eonic effect The pattern we have discovered is one of three turning points taken empirically. It’s obvious, but does it make any sense? A close look shows us that we can try to produce a deduction for this after the fact. And that follows our question, does man make himself? Note that determinism could not produce freedom, while the absence of any ‘determination’ at all would leave only static doldrums among helplessly passive creatures. Thus we need a middle ground process that operates on different degrees of freedom, preferably one that alternates between higher and lower determination, completed by an ‘end of evolution’ turning into ‘history as freedom’. Thus, one way to do this would be intermittent action, switching between system determination at a higher degree of (induced) freedom (or self-consciousness) and simple free action without any interference at all. In some amazement we discover that this is almost exactly what the eonic pattern shows.
That’s a fair description of what we see in the eonic effect. And it produces a characteristic ‘eonic sequence’ as the mainline of emergent civilization.
Upon reflection, we realize that ‘evolution’ on the surface of a planet is not something simple, and that the eonic effect shows one of ways this can happen, one of the simplest and most plausible, however extraordinary. Darwinists just snap their fingers, things just happen. We see that a driver is needed, and a very delicate one that does not overdetermine or underdetermine what emerges. And at some point, like a jump-start process applied to car, that determination process has to yield to a completed or ‘free’ process, i.e. the cars starting, of our evolution turning into history. The gist of it is that the whole can efficiently evolve through the parts, which show intervals of ‘system action’ or eonic determination.
The majestic solution to the antinomy of causality/freedom seen in the factor of self-consciousness resolves all the issues of ‘historicism’ that were Popper’s complaint.
4.1.2 Causality, Freedom And Self-consciousness
We began with a critique of theories of history using Popper’s idea of historicism. But we have found empirically that there is such a thing as macro-history, and our data shows us how to reconcile the contradiction of freedom and causality. The resolution of the paradox of historicism is empirically given by the eonic data, and lies before us in something like the electronic ‘on-off’ switch, to match our intermittent or ‘eonic’ data. That’s crude thinking, but sufficient for large-scale periodization analysis. We have a mixed situation, free agent, and (causal) mechanism. Choice and mechanism operate in tandem. We see our mysterious drumbeat switches on over a brief time scale of centuries relative to millennia in non-contingent evolutionary event-regions. Instead of an on-off switch we see something like ‘switched on’ periods with relative degrees of freedom in the appearance of less conditioned periods able to innovate rapidly. How to proceed with such a strange set of facts? But there is a simple explanation here: change can occur in the agent’s self-consciousness, in the middle ground between determinism and freedom. Look at the eonic effect. Higher degrees of freedom show both deterministic and free influence overlaid. We call that ‘creative action’, in most cases. Note that creativity creates a sense of freedom, but isn’t controlled by its agent. Thus, confusing the question is the fact that ‘free agency’ and ‘freedom’ are not the same necessarily. ‘Choice’ is an observational given, however we explain it. We need not decide about free will to recount the history of ‘choices’, branches of potential outcomes becoming realized. We have the clue to proceed.
Further, as we will see as this logic unfolds, the ‘causal agency’ is trying to ‘cause freedom’. The eonic effect is itself like an ‘evolution of freedom’. This crosses the tripwire into a classic ‘contradiction’ as our subject transforms into something else, that something being somewhere in the vicinity of the philosophy of history. We will see that the eonic effect straddles the twin domains of the deterministic and the emergence of man as a ‘free agent’ with potential freedom. The problem of historicism disappears if we renounce causal laws and predictions of the future, and look only toward patterns of creative action, in the past, taking care to define the transition from this past to the open present. We don’t need a proof of man’s free will, or some scheme of historical laws, and will complete our eonic model without deciding these issues. But we do need a model that shows some kind of ‘determination’ in our pattern, and yet switches off in the present, for the evolution of freedom must have a free future. Such seemingly bizarre properties are in fact everyday occurrences, and will form the basis of a model. That’s very strange, and only an example will help, make it transparent. The eonic effect is such an example.
The issue of self-consciousness can be grounded in nothing more complex than the power of attention, contrasted with states of consciousness that are more mechanized. We don’t need to commit on any psychological theory to consider it this way, although collating creativity and self-consciousness is an oversimplification. No theory of evolution has ever properly accounted for the emergence of the power of attention (which clearly antedates man’s emergence). But we must assume, as an example of our issue of relative beginnings, the man we find, a creature with a complex power of attention, which he can control to some extent. The point is that there is nothing mystical in the issue of self-consciousness.
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01.28.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:17 pm by nemo
We can braid together selections from World History And The Eonic Effect to clarify the basic arguments, beyond the divergent extra material.
Our views of history are still based on a narrow set of facts beginning with the sources of our traditions. But the facts have long since exploded that, and produced a picture of the emergence of civilization that still doesn’t register in public narratives. And that expansion of our knowledge has crossed a threshold: we have enough to see that a long-range dynamism is at work, something we couldn’t quite infer before, but which suddenly illuminates the significance of the Axial Age, so-called, for the first time.
1.1.1 In Search Of History
Historical research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is an unexpected discovery: that of a process of universal history in the action of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern. We call this the eonic effect. Further, the scale of this process is such that we can only call it ‘evolution’. Thus, for the first time we can detect the unmistakable evidence of non-random evolution, and this in world history itself. This leaves us with the question, What is evolution? And this forces another, long overdue, What is the relationship between history and evolution? This could be recast as the paradoxical question, When did evolution stop and history begin?
A moment’s reflection will tell us that no instantaneous passage between the two is plausible and that our terms have been left ragged. We must, by this logic, be able to detect a Transition between evolution and history. Can we find evidence to match this deduction? Indeed, we can, our non-random pattern, the eonic effect. In fact we can say more: if we apply that same logic to our Transition we should expect it to take the form of a series of transitions in an alternation between evolution and history, as if overlayed, the one emerging from the other. The eonic effect shows just this property of transitions in a series. Have we reached the end of the Great Transition? If not, then our evolution still constitutes our present and future. We should ask who man is, with such wisdom as would constitute achievement of the title, homo sapiens.
Our thinking is conditioned by Darwinism, which throws ‘evolution’ into the past, with a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. The result is an enforced incoherence. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of a science of history in the large, and/or any attempt using the philosophy of history to seek historical meaning. A further critique of the idea of universal history comes from the postmodern rejection of the Grand Narrative .
In this context the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper in his critique of historicism insisted, with his rejection of the idea that history has meaning. Yet as the labors of archaeological research proceed a falsification of this perspective emerges. Karl Popper was wrong: history has meaning, and we can discover large-scale coherence in its unfolding. It is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic.[i]
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.
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.
We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. There is an irony to our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here, or that history itself shows the direct evidence of evolution.
—
And the evidence for the non-random patterning in world history:
Mysterious Drumbeat
Looking backward, world history since the invention of writing reveals the evidence, contradicting Darwinian assumptions, of non-random evolution, an image of nature climbing Mt. Improbable. We assume the flow of world history follows random logic, conditioned as we are by Darwinism . The rapid growth of archaeological knowledge since the nineteenth century has greatly expanded our views of the emergence of civilization and, significantly, crossed a threshold of five thousand years, the bare minimum interval, we are about to see, for grasping the logic of historical evolution. A non-random pattern on this scale shows us something missing in Darwinian thinking and falls into the category of ‘evolution’, ‘evolution of some kind’, with a question, ‘What is the meaning of evolution?’. This pattern can be seen from two perspectives…
And then the attempt to find the meaning of this ‘mysterious drumbeat’:
A Frequency Hypothesis,
but we soon discovery the elusive character of this outer appearance of the eonic sequence, as we stumble on its deeper aspect, beyond observation:
A certain strangeness: beyond space and time?
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01.27.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:52 pm by nemo
From yesterday: brought up to today:
As promised over the weekend, the third chapter of World History And The Eonic Effect is now online: 3.1 AN EONIC SEQUENCE, AND A FREQUENCY DEDUCTION The first section tries to deduce the reason for this strange cyclical pattern. Maybe skim through it, and read through the whole chapter briefly first.
The chapter is designed to be short: move backwards from the present in stages to the Neolithic, to get a bird’s eye view of the elegant and simple patterning of major historical blocks, almost like clockwork.
You can see the point which is not speculative in any way by considering the sequence we unconsciously accept already:
Classical Age starting point (Greece, time of Buddha, Confucius, Old Testament)
Mediaeval interval (or middle interval)
Modern Age (from ca. sixteenth century to eighteenth) starting point.
Wait, the same thing happened just before that:
Rise of high civilization (Egypt, Sumer ca. 3000 BCE)
Mediaeval interval (or middle interval)
Onset of classical period (ca. 900 BCE to 600 BCE).
This pattern is as simple as it is provocative, and we are moved to keep on going backwards, but the data starts to thin rapidly, so, while we can clearly see that this process is present in the whole Neolithic, we can’t quite document it in the earlier intervals starting about 8000 BCE, although remarkably the data falls very roughly into place in the two earlier cases.
So what is the meaning of this simple, yet quite amazing regularity in world history?
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:41 pm by nemo
Continuing with the selection series form World History And The Eonic Effect, the chapter on the ‘frequency hypothesis’, has a discussion of the resemblance of the eonic effect to what we can only call ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The resemblance is uncanny to something that ‘punctuates an equilibrium’, 3.5 The Eonic Effect: Punctuated Equilibrium
The problem is that the term is already tied down with Darwinian debates and controversies, so we have to imagine that we are coining the phrase as if for the first time.
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01.26.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:37 pm by nemo
The question of a science of history has been never been answered, for reasons a study of the eonic effect makes clear; consider this selection from WHEE here, which just came online this week: 4.6 Critique Of Historical Reason
It is remarkable that just at the modern divide appears German classical philosophy. Its philosophies of freedom are themselves a part of the discrete freedom sequence! Furthermore we see that the eonic effect contains an expression of Kant’s Third Antinomy in its actual structure, a remarkable discovery. Kant’s system is quite difficult, but his essay expresses the crux of the philosophy of history, and the problems of almost all methodologies. Kant performs a kind of duet with Newton, and makes sense especially to a modeler, as the progression from mechanical to ethical, then esthetic/teleological modes arises from dealing with our data.
A Science of History? What is the relation of our method to Kant’s actual system? There is a direct one in his so-called Third Antinomy.
“Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.†Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.â€
We confront the enigma of the thesis, that freedom generation and physical causality somehow are both the case. The dilemma is immediate from the periodization of our model, remembering that this is only an empirical discovery, not a deduction.
Kant’s Third Antinomy is reflected in our pattern, but on such a large scale, and such a different mode, that we must proceed with caution. From the way we set up our model (for another purpose) we can see how the stream of history seems interrupted by a second different ‘causal initialization’ that has no continuous lead up or antecedents. Our transitions are formally analogous to the noumenon, but quite different. They stand in conjunction to the limits of historical representation.
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01.25.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:30 pm by nemo
Here’s a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect that I didn’t put online: on Huxley’s belated realization that something was wrong with Darwin’s theory.
He stumbled on the basic gap in Darwinism: it doesn’t really answer the question as to how many evolved. We can see that something else is required to explain the man that we see, the photo finish argument that arises to cast doubt on Darwinian claims about the descent of man.
Huxley and Social Darwinism
It wasT. H. Huxley himself who spotted the flaw in the theory of natural selection in his work, Evolution and Ethics, and in the process unwittingly exposed a paradox in the theory he had so long defended. His perception was that there must be something else beside the ‘law of evolution’, survival of the fittest, at work, for man was condemned to oppose its effects in practice, on ethical grounds. Whence, if we accept this dualism, comes this evolution # 2? Here the data of the eonic effect shows us at once two levels of evolutionary action.
Here the effects of Darwin’s theory here were ideological, and misleading, if not disastrous. It is not adequate to point out that Darwin was himself at pains to distance himself from the misinterpretation of his own theory, in the confusion with the views of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer who is blamed for everything. Like software with a glitch, the consequences were immediate. This refers to the controversies of so-called Social Darwinism in this ambiguity of ‘evolutions’. Here ‘theory’ confronts its own effect of the theory itself on history, after it enters this history. For the first unconscious suggestion, in this case, is that unlimited social competition in the immediate present will improve genetic structure in the far future, a gross misunderstanding of a theory taken to be true at all times. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.24.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:51 pm by nemo
I have put selections from World History And The Eonic Effect, chapters 3 and 4, online, and will introduce them starting Monday, after checking/proofing the webpages. But you can sneak preview them this weekend:
A Frequency Hypothesis,
Idea For A Universal History
After that I will only put up a thinner set of selections, so buy the book!
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01.23.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:39 pm by nemo
The promotion of Darwinism is completely overhyped, and never really answers the main difficulty, the inability of reductionist science to really address the issue of ethics and evolution. Here are two selections, one in relation to the other, as it were, before and after we look at the historical data of the eonic effect, Evolution And Ethics, and Evolution And Ethics–At Close Range
We discuss the question too much in the abstract, but once we sit down and look at world history we detect the way in which questions of ethics and values emerge as part of the overall evolution of civilization.
This reminds us that the reductionist accounts of ethics (e.g. with kin selection/group selection theories) proposed to save Darwinism from itself are somehow beside the point.
The evolution of an ethical agent and his freedom to make ethical decisions is never addressed by Darwinism, with misleading arguments to the effect that it doesn’t matter.
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01.22.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:27 pm by nemo
History And Evolution
The issue of history and evolution is a confusing one, and it seems as if we are making a category error. But consider the following question: when did evolution stop and history begin? This tricky question will trip up the Darwinian approach and leave it to collapse in a contradiction. The answer of course is that there couldn’t be an instantaneous switch. We can see that to set a specific date is contradictory. So we must specify a transition between evolution and history. What form would this hybrid take, passing from evolution to history? Either it is all evolution or all history?? Or maybe a series of mini-transitions with evolution dominant then history dominant. In alternation. Now look at the eonic effect: it speaks not just of evolution, but of history and evolution, the two braided together, with history emerging from evolution. And this eonic effect takes the form of a sequence of alternating periods, with evolution (in our sense) dominant during eras of transition, and co-related periods with history (in our sense) dominant. Thus we actually see in history the data matching the deduction about transitions, passing from evolution to history.
Before going on to chapter 3 of World History And The Eonic Effect, it is worth lingering on the derivation of the relationship of history and evolution.
The eonic effect/pattern is little more than a matrix of periodization until we discover that we can make some clear deductions concerning its discernable structure, and that makes us realized that we have detected a complex macro system at work in world history. Remarkable.
This approach has a interesting consequence: we can bring evolution into our present and future, without the collision of theory and action that we see in Darwinism. This is because we separate two levels, the action of the system, and the action of the individual. The confusion here in the usual theories shows that evolution cannot be reduced to the kind of theory we see in physics. We are talking about the evolution of a large scale system and the actions of individuals inside it, both taken together.
The crude hack work of Darwinian-style theories should have been relegated to obsolescence long ago, but the current crop of ‘scientists’ think this Darwin mess represents science.
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01.21.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:52 pm by nemo
The online selections for chaptr 3 of World History And The Eonic Effect are coming soon, in the meantime here is one section, on one of the most remarkable and elusive discoveries of the eonic effect, the so-called discrete freedom sequence, visible in the double emergence of democracy over the range of the eonic sequence, in an exact timing.
The problem of ‘evolving freedom’ is a problem for Darwinism, or any standard theory, but the eonic effect shows how the riddle is solved.
This set of properties shows us the hint we need to decipher the significance of the evolutionary process we see in the eonic series, the ‘evolution of freedom’, in a specific sense connected with the data.
Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence
Our eonic periodization is about to uncover one of the most remarkable mysteries of human history, and evolution, a windfall that leads us to the core of the Kantian philosophy of history. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.20.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:33 pm by nemo
After chapter 2 of World History And The Eonic Effect, the text begins the analysis of the ‘eonic effect’, to see what we are dealing with and what kind of model can help to elucidate the properties of the mysterious historical/evolutionary system detected.
The material from chapter 3 isn’t online yet but here is one section:
3.5 The Eonic Effect: Punctuated Equilibrium
We have it, the resolution of a dynamic in world history, the eonic effect, in a series of three turning points seen as eonic transitions, or stream and sequence intersections. And we have a remarkable answer to our question, made into a frequency hypothesis, does world history show evidence of general sequence? Please note, however, that this is a description of a non-random pattern, not an explanation of how it works. We can, however, still call this ‘evolution’, and use the data to critique any and all accounts of the descent of man. Thus world history is our reference of last resort in the claims on theory for the descent of man. It is truly a remarkable result, with some very deep structure indeed, such as the ‘discrete freedom sequence’, the double birth of democracy in successive transitions. In the middle of a fuzzy data set we have some almost uncanny timing mechanisms at work. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.18.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 10:00 pm by nemo
Maybe tommorrow we can begin Chapter 3, in the online selections of World History And The Eonic Effect, but once again here is: Mysterious Drumbeat
Darwinism has gotten human evolution almost totally wrong, upside down wrong, and perniciously wrong, as only a reductionist can get things wrong.
The eonic effect shows us that human evolution springs from a global process that shows directionality, can reach across millennia, to generate transtions that remorph whole cultures. The evidence is there, but the current science public is too conditioned and controlled to wish to see it.
Evolution is just there, just behind the surface, on a scale of millennia, just slightly beyond our ability to see it clearly, just beyond our level of understanding, perhaps intelligence. The alternation pattern, and the relationship of system and freedom requires careful study (later chapters), as does the at first confusing relationship of evolution as process to history as free activity. The eonic effect shows us how that can happen.
On to Chapter 3–soon.
>Buy the book!
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 9:36 pm by nemo
Painting and the Pleistocene
The Art Instinct author Denis Dutton on the arts as evolutionary adaptations.
I find this line of argument completely barren. But even so it is completely speculative.
How is it that anyone who tries to approach this problem in its real complexity is called unscientific, while any crackpot use of Darwinian adapationism is considered OK.
With these guys, soon speculations become dogmas, so let’s insist on some data here.
The sudden flowering of art at the dawn of homo sapiens, and its connections with the transition to man suggest something completely different.
Meanwhile check out this, and the question of art, evolution, and the eonic effect.
Art, Evolution, And The Tragic Genre
In your book, you distance yourself from Steven Pinker’s theory that art is “mental cheesecake” and from Stephen Jay Gould’s “spandrel” theory. In your opinion, how does evolution explain art?
The arts, in my view, are largely extensions and intensifications of Pleistocene adaptations. I think that we evolved as natural storytellers in the Pleistocene, and that the survival value that accrued as a result of our fluent imaginative capacities was immense. That’s why storytelling is so pleasurable. It’s a way to think hypothetically about the world and its problems. It’s a low-risk way to solve survival problems in the imagination. It’s also a source of information. It grew along with the size of the human brain and accounts for our domination of other species.
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