05.12.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 7:30 pm by nemo
James comments on Self-organization
Your impatience with ’self-organization’ is understandable. The problem, of course, is that the ID people have also said as much, and are critical of self-organizatin as too mechanistic. Actually, I think the problem is more one of expectations. And that work is not likely to prove the solution to the evolution problem in general. Nonetheless, it points to the next step on the ladder, unfortunately a difficult step: e.g. explaining the origin of life. Clearly a case of ’self-organization’, but how explain self-organization?
However, self-organization as a ‘descriptive fact’ is one thing, ’self-organization’ as a theory another.
Check out the ‘eonic effect’, a clear, definite, and spectacular case of ’self-organization’, speaking descriptively, but I can’t think of any current theory of such footing the bill.
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04.27.08
Posted in World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:28 pm by nemo
James asks:
James said,
April 27, 2008 at 11:01 am
When is the third edition coming out?
Soon, I hope, perhaps in June, if there are no problems.
In the meantime here’s the Third Edition site: still a work in progress: http://eonic-effect.net
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04.02.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 2:58 pm by nemo
The Duck Groomers
In my last posting, we saw that Kevin Zeigler placed great emphasis and significance on the fact that science has not discovered objective evidence for teleology in evolution. But as I noted, does this tell us more about evolution or more about the human construct we call science? Zeigler told us there was indeed a purpose behind his essay, but could science ever discover it?
The reason noone can find evidence for teleology in evolution lies in the agendas of those who don’t know what ‘teleology’ means.
A close look at the eonic effect show how the question (taken as ‘directionality’) is easily observable, but the results won’t satisfy either Darwinian or religious propaganda.
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Posted in World History and The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 2:48 pm by nemo
‘Persecution’ of the religious gets curiouser and curiouser
Okay, what with the Internet and print on demand publishing etc., why don’t all these scientists now silenced for their rejection of Darwinism just publish and be damned? It seems they are fearful of speaking out about the censoring of their evidence because they will all lose their government grants.
Already done: check out World History And The Eonic Effect, one of the first POD to be published, with a critique of Darwinism, one not entangled in religious or design arguments.
The basic problems with Darwinism and its distortions on human evolution and history are layed out clearly and decisively.
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03.17.08
Posted in 1848+, The Eonic Effect at 3:42 pm by nemo
Reading: Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America (Hardcover)
by Eric Alterman
and the Times review.
This is a companion to Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and cogently blasts through the near fascist nosedive of the last seven years.
The title is right: the attempted destruction of the term ‘liberal’ by the right-wing commentariat and think-tank battalions has succeeded, only to fail, because ‘we are all liberals’. The point requires an historical argument, to see that conservatives were born confused, always were confused and have failed in their attempt to make this confusion the dominant paradigm.
The reviewer expected perhaps a more theoretical approach, but at this point, a low-key slog through the almost mind-boggling malarkey of the Bush years.
More from the review:
He cites a recent poll showing the incredible transformation in public opinion when a candidate switched from the label “liberal” to “progressive” — from a score of negative 19 points to one of positive 17 points.
That seems a pretty strong argument for ignoring political brand identity long enough to ponder a different sort of problem. Immanuel Kant (a liberal) said the three questions facing philosophy were “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” and “What can I hope for?” Politics is philosophy continued by other means, so these puzzlers still apply.
Well, we know, from the polling data, that the right wing’s claim to speak for the majority of American opinion is untrue. But Alterman never really addresses what liberals (or progressives, or whatever) ought to do. Nor, subtitle notwithstanding, does he ever address what one might reasonably hope for in the post-Bush world.
The question of the history of liberalism is important, and the citation from the ur-liberal Kant is significant. In the era of Kant we see the inchoate (and still problematical) birth of the liberal world view in a form still uncorrupted by the later accretions of ideological capitalist, Darwinist, Social Darwinist, pragmatist overlays.
Liberalism next to the Enlightenment is the first born of the Protestant Reformation and needs to be recast in terms of a broader sense of history(’an idea for a universal history’, as with the study of the eonic effect) that is postdarwinian and not entangled in scientism, informed by the socialist left and able to break out of the retarded state of American democracy that long since fell behind the European social democracies.
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03.05.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 7:35 pm by nemo
An Exercise for readers
I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is,
What is evolution?
You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I’m supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one sentence? OK, knowing full well that it is grossly inadequate, here’s my short answer:
Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms.
Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments. It’s harder than it looks, especially since I feel the itch to expand each word into a lecture.
A one-line definition of evolution is an interesting exercise, but in fact it shows our fixation on simplistic explanations, mostly Darwinian reductionist. These oversimplifications are then used to reduce everything else to the rubric of explanation. But a fallacy lurks in this process. The first part of the fallacy is the assumption that we can put a handle on evolution. Because we apply this reasoning to unseen events in deep time we never get the right feedback with the facts, in a word a reality check.
In fact, I doubt if there is such a thing as a general process description of evolution. Any generatlization will always fail, but ‘evolution’ can reveal itself it many different ways at different levels of reality.
I recommend an examination of the eonic effect. There we see a process of evolution in relation to history, one that has no direct connection to genetic evolution. The myth of purely genetic evolution will die hard. If we examine the factor of evolution in history we discover something that outstrips simple process explanations, in terms of laws. In fact, we can only proceed descriptively to see a series of processes that change over time and manifest themselves in a series of complex successive transformations.
The idea that all this complexity can be annexed as a footnote to physical/chemical/genetic explanations is clearly false and pernicious to our views of what evolution is.
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02.24.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 7:35 pm by nemo
Scienceblogs has a topic today (02.24.2008) with a set of links: Does Evolution Design?
Note how the verb structure demands a noun, here a process noun instead of a ‘designer’ noun. The phrase shows how the problem confusing Darwinists is partly linguistic. If we had this problem in physics it would never get anywhere.
The ’solution’ proposed by Miller won’t work because he won’t allow any change to the basic Darwinian paradigm. So what’s the point?
Myers objects that ‘design’ is a loaded term:
Another problem is of even greater concern. The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution!
It is probably false to say that ‘purpose’ is not present in evolution. In any case, purpose, planning, and calculation are not the same thing.
Darwinists are completely confused by the natural selection dogma, and they aren’t un-confused by the proposals of the ID people about ‘design’. Probably a new word is needed.
I invite Darwinists to study the eonic effect and eonic model: http://history-and-evolution.com: I go through six hundred pages of what seems like a ‘desgin’ issue without once mentioning the term ‘term’ (except to distance the ID people, in the Introduction to WH&EE). Biologists just have to proceed without dogma and without getting spooked by ID people.
The way to that is to think in terms of a system that is described over a temporal range. I redescribe the Old Testament historicism in ’system model’ terms without a design argument!!
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 6:27 pm by nemo
Greg Laden is from Greg Laden’s Blog at Scienceblogs and comments onThe d-word bugaboo, along with Hucklebird
Greg Laden said,
February 24, 2008 at 10:58 am
What do you mean by this:
“And concepts of evo-dynamics that are different from selectionist explanation, natural teleology.”
Good question, I was bit brief, since this has been discussed here a number of times.
The ID group has polarized the debate between ‘materialistic’ Darwinism and the ambiguous ’spiritual’ (?) ‘intelligent design’ argument.
My point was to claim that the real debate is always, and solely over natural selection. The failure of natural selection doesn’t require a religious perspective, but a naturalistic study of processes that aren’t based on natural selection.
Beyond that the question of design is crippled by the ambiguity that ID people have given it. We can’t really avoid the issue of design, taken in a very ordinary sense: biological structures show more than just mechanism, they show the design of functional processes that proceed with teleology: they do things as devices. It is a failure of our understanding that we can’t yet quite explicate such things.
The issue of natural teleology was raised by Kant, et al., and represents an attempt to consider the teleological aspect of nature without violating the basic premise of naturalism.
One can, by the way, approach this question very directly by looking at the eonic effect, and the question of ‘evolution in history’ as described by the eonic model. There we see that the question of ‘directionality’ arises naturally in the discussion of the disguised developmental sequence in history. We see a practical application of macroevolution also showing directionality, hence quite probably a form of natural teleology.
Natural teleology takes the phantom ‘designer’ out of design.
Here are some posts here at Darwiniana on:
Natural teleology,
G design, N-design
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02.20.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History at 8:32 pm by nemo
Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin…
I am sure that Wilkins is aware of World History and the Eonic Effect and its revolution in the discussion of philosophy of history. Guess they all have to make sure the subject remains braindead so that Darwinism can survive.
This Blackwell companion will end up being Darwinized, hence worthless.
Darwin’s theory completely cripples any effort to grasp greater history, and makes philosophy of history into a reductionist confusion.
Blackwell link
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02.13.08
Posted in World History and The Eonic Effect, Booknotes at 8:45 pm by nemo
History and Evolution Site
Announcing the third revised edition of World History And The Eonic Effect, the self-published/Internet book and underground theoretical self-defense kit in relation to the Darwinian paradigm. The basic text has been extensively rewritten, even as the basic argument has remained the same. There is much new material and it has been reorganized to show a more integrated structure, with a few changes in the terminology of the eonic model. The basic model has remained stable over three editions, and that leaves the author with increased confidence in the method and demonstration.
& an Overview of new edition
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01.28.08
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, The Eonic Effect at 3:41 pm by nemo
Michael Shermer on The Market As An Evolutionary Process
Michael Shermer of Scientific American fame has a new book out (which will be arriving in the mail soon, I hope) about evolution and economics, called The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, And Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. His theme is how the market, like evolution, is a process of spontaneous order—a “self-organized emergent order.”
Shermer is peddling an undiluted ideology, much of his thinking derivative from Hayek and Mises. The question of ’spontaneous order’ (Hayek) is a Darwinian spinoff, and as a thesis it is clearly false. There is nothing spontaneous about the emergence of order in world history and the development of civilization.
A careful look at the eonic effect shows a complex directionality in the developmental sequence of human historical culture.
But the Darwin fetish is almost beyond correction in these market fanatics, with their mythology of Darwinism as backup.
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01.20.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 5:35 pm by nemo
…does ID have predictive value…
Response:
Complete series of transitional fossils will not usually be found because most proposed series have never existed. Eventually, researchers will give up on ideologically driven nonsense and address the history that IS there. They will focus on discovering the mechanisms that drive sudden bursts of creativity.
Positive prediction: Discovering the true mechanisms of bursts of natural creativity may be of immense value to us, especially if we need to undo some significant harm to our environment.
What about the burst that produced the Axial Age?
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01.06.08
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 7:57 pm by nemo
Shermer’s Mind of the Market
How did we make the leap from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumers and traders? Why do people get so emotional and irrational about bottom-line financial and business decisions? Is the capitalist marketplace a sort of Darwinian organism, evolved through natural selection as the fittest way to satisfy our needs? In this eye-opening exploration, author and psychologist Michael Shermer uncovers the evolutionary roots of our economic behavior.
How indeed did we make the leap? I think Shermer is trying to avoid the eonic effect, which shows directly the form of evolution behind this. But the myth of Darwinism mixed incestuously with the myths of markets is all the ideologists of modern scientism will allow themselves, and the combination of two sets of fallacies is fallacy squared.
Meanwhile the term ‘mind of the market’ exposes the cult of the tribal ‘market god’ worshipped by the devotees of Darwinian economic religion.
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12.29.07
Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 4:43 pm by nemo
Evolution’s Arrow.
It is actually very dubious to claim that evolution has no direction, what to say of a predetermined end. Even a cursory glance at the eonic effect shows this to be false of world history, hence probably of the descent of man. Wallace grasped the point, but his methodological ideas of spiritualism weren’t up to the task of expressing his dissent from Darwinism. It should be noted that Lamarck’s basic framework (not including his eccentric theory of adaptation) of two levels of evolution allows one to sort out the confusion here. The model for the eonic effect is even better and shows how two overlaid levels are at work. In any case, teleology is too strong and is taken as a sole driver, if taken in the sense of evolution. It is easy to refute on that basis. We need to look at the directionality and its expression, as in the eonic effect.
history-and-evolution.com
The evolution of life on earth has no direction and no predetermined end; what is adaptive today might not be tomorrow, and the scores of extinct creatures preserved in the rocks of this planet attest to an ongoing process that results in what Charles Darwin rightly called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” The man hailed as the co-discover of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, would not agree with my opening remarks, though. While Wallace contributed much to biological science in his own right, the incorporation of anthropocentric spiritualism into his hypotheses caused a good deal of controversy amongst naturalists concerned with evolution, and at least in terms of our own species Wallace favored a teleological view of evolution that involved some sort of supernatural intervention several times in the history of life on earth. Such beliefs are likely a large part of the reason why Darwin is most closely associated with evolution and Wallace often remains a footnote, and while this might not be entirely just in light of Wallace’s other contributions to areas like biogeography his allowances for the supernatural to intervene in the process of evolution got under the skin of other scientists of the time. Even so, ides of a teleological or orthogenic process of evolution survived and even thrived for a time, and even today debates over whether evolution is “directed” or not remain.
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12.24.07
Posted in Philosophy, The Eonic Effect at 4:07 pm by nemo
I am putting this under the category of The Eonic Effect. Anyone remember why (after reading WH&EE)?
The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey
Raymond Tallis’s book The Enduring Significance of Parmenides (Continuum) will be pu