History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
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
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.
The Post-Modern Ear
By Roger Scruton
This article is interesting, although I don’t buy the title’s use of ‘post-modern’.
But the mystery of modern music resists easy analysis.
I recommend a look at the eonic effect, and its clear demonstration that classical music shows strong correlation with the ‘modern transition’, 1500 to 1800+ , promptly tapering off within a century thereafter. Note the climax near the ‘great divide’, plus/minus a generation around 1800. The pattern is clearly non-random, and makes sense in the context of the eonic effect.
Most students will resist the idea but the evidence is overwhelming that classical musis is an ‘eonic effect’, with an exact correlation to the eonic sequence. It is almost spooky. That the classical tradition would seem to peter out as if exhausted, while I cannot reject the idea out of hand, seems contrary to what happened, which is that as soon as the eonic ‘determination’ factor waned and fell away musicians began to deviate in their creativity.
That may be wrong, but it is clear that the climactic phase of the great rush of classical music from Monteverdi to the Mozart/Beethoven peak, and then the brief continuation into the century beyond (to the time of Wagner and/or Puccini, say) is something deeper than individual genius: it is stimulated by the historical matrix/force of the eonic sequence.
That doesn’t really answer the question of atonal music, and the reason for its sudden appearance at the exact point of the eonic fall off. It merely shows the exact correlation.
Time to study the eonic effect, which is full of these correlations. The world is a lot stranger than you suspect, mon ami (or ‘mon vieux’, or ‘mon semblable, mon frere’, or, well, it gets bad from here on)
The material in WHEE on this will appear soon in the fourth edition version.
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’.
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/
Properly read, the Bible should make you … an atheist?
So our review of The Christian Delusion continues in fits and starts (though mostly in fits).
This time I set out to review John Loftus’s essay “What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate” (a phrase I first encountered not in “Cool Hand Luke” but in Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Civil War”) but I only got as far as the second sentence.
Like most of the contributors to The Christian Delusion John sets out fists a flyin’ with a cold slap from Isaac Asimov who barks out:
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” (181)
It is right there that I got held up. Let’s call this sentence the “Village Atheist Challenge”. In order to analyze it, allow me to present a parallel. I call it the “Tree Hugger Challenge”:
“Properly driven, the Ford GT is the most potent force for horseback riding ever conceived.”
(As you all have probably inferred, the car pictured here is the GT, not to be confused with the equally beautiful, and much more historically significant, GT 40 of the late 60s.)
The Old Testament is actually a book that should in the book zone of the modern secularist. Its core history of Israel/Judah, with a few corrections from Biblical archaeology, is a classic depiction of a transitional era in the Axial Age, and also records the birth of a new religion, another classic evidentiary data set for students of the evolution of religion.
The third edition of WHEE is about to go off line, and some of the material is not present in the new edition: http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap3_1_1.htm
Where does right and wrong come from?: Stephen Smith at Trinity blog links also to a First Things essay on David Brooks, with his recent essay on ‘moral naturalists’.
I think this question is far too hard for humanity to answer, hence the frantic efforts to concoct answers in line with various ideologies.
I shy away from design arguments, but the questions of human consciousness, and thence the questions of ethics, require a deeper knowledge than what we have. And it is very hard to produce mechanical answers to any of them. But design issues have been completely trivialized by Biblical myths turned into dogmas. The real design argument can no longer use the term ‘god’. So be it. It has confused the whole discussion as the story of Adam and Eve invades all discourse and stops thought, cogent as that tale might be.
But my point is that we haven’t ruled out design arguments in this one area where supremely difficult and complicated issues seem hopelessly beyond the idiocy of Darwinian frameworks.
I mention this only because, while I always attack design arguments produced by Xtians, I hold in reserve the types potential to the philosophies of Schopenhauer, and J.G. Bennett. The cosmic actions of ‘being, function, will’ on the many levels of cosmological being could be involved in the bootstrapping of consciousness and ethical action. Such a thing would be a hybrid of ‘will’ a la Schopenhauer and mechanical laws.
The point here is that Samkhya (atheistical) design arguments remind us that design is too metaphysical, and cosmic physics too mechanical. A whole new category must exist that reconciles these opposites. Ask me no more, for I know not.
That’s not very helpful but it at least attempts a ’science fiction’ for an answer, something that is often a generation away from a real hypothesis.
(Like Nemo’s nuclear reactor).
The research into the issue of ethics cannot even depict what it is that has evolved, nor truly distinguish, Kant apart, the criteria of good and evil. That’s a primitive start to the question of the evolution of ethics. Part of the problem is that its action is partly unconscious: we only sense the moment of action.
Beyond this we must first answer the first really hard question, what is consciousness and how did it evolve.
We can no more answer this question than a Stone Age homo sapiens could explain modern physics.
In any case, we have to be suspicious that, by whatever action, the passage to modern man, homo sapiens, involved the acquisition of whole modules of brain function, language, ethical action, and structures of consciousness/soul occurred in tandem with this.
We must discipline ourselves to our ignorance and not let Darwinists control thinking here with lazy natural selection propaganda. The reality is that we don’t have the facts that must come first: when did language arise, when did consciousness/self-consciousness arise, and what is the ‘common ordinary morality’ that Kant’s speaks of usefully and when does it appear, and how does it work.
It is remarkable that we can’t begin to answer any of these questions. Not an iota of speech beyond being struck dumb to hem and haw.
I think it might help to study the eonic effect, and the Axial Age inside it.
We see in the case, for example, of Axial Age Archaic Greece a process acting over three centuries across a cultural spectrum, to produce a transformation of culture in a blazing spurt of evolution. The action impinges on ethical issues and consciousness, although its outcome is about other aspects of culture, but this gives us a defining moment for correcting our evolution confusions. I mention this example also because a parallel action produced the Old Testament. And this spoke of a mysterious higher power (it did NOT speak of god until later in the decline into ’silly monotheism’ wrecked a great insight) acting across history, The real Israelites, before the distortions of the Biblical texts, whoever they were, had an insight here. But in any case they can’t help us much either, save that they saw the evolutionary context for massive human transformations.
We must suspect the evolution of ethics to have occurred in analog moments and eras of man’s earliest emergence.
Not much help, but a map at least. Not much help because clearly the action is noumenal in its sur-phenomenology. That means, we wouldn’t even see how it happened if we were there. But we can put the pieces together perhaps, someday, to see what happened, and when. Even that is beyond us as yet.
Two comments from Jon Entine: http://darwiniana.com/2010/08/08/email-on-ashkhenazis/comment-page-1/#comment-353620
I am charged with not reading Abraham’s Children: not true, I have read the book twice, actually. The author is welcome to correct any misstatements, however, ….
But the reason for the disconnect doesn’t have anything to do with having read the book as such: Covenental Judaism is a dangerous mindset, and in current Israel politics has created an abortive rogue state where citizenship and the defining canons of who is a Jew are hopelessly muddled. So the reason for my instant criticisms is that any attempt to connect genetics with covenant Judaism is a dangerous game.
The author says he is an atheist, and democrat: news to me, he needs to a comment at my blog to make the point.
That said, I have not rejected his arguments on genetics, and opened the door to a critique of Koestler, so I am puzzled why the author is so angry.
Anyway, set the record straight here, if you must….
More later.
I have posted the comments to post level, due to the interest of the issues.
I have also read the Harpending book, btw, but need to reread it.
My general criticism most probably stands: the evo-psych approach here is a curious mixture of modes.
In any case I have a better approach in my study of the eonic effect of Jewish Axial Age history, whatever the case with the IQ question.
The indignation here is misplaced, and again, none of the protests here against misfacts appear in the book. He needs to comment here….
Jon Entine said,
August 8, 2010 at 8:37 pm ·
I’m the author of Abrahams Children. Your note about it is clearly ignorant of the book–you just haven’t read it. Read the rest of this entry »
The Axial Age and the fine-tuning of Greek Tragedy
The term fine-tuning is a ‘design’ term, for some, and a physics term, for others. For me, in this case, it is neither, simple a statement about the precision in evolutionary transformations as seen in the eonic effect, which sometimes looks like a design thesis (it’s not).
Today’s post on the Arnhart series
The question of liberalism and evolution has an ironic resolution in the different study of the so-called ‘eonic effect’.
World history has a deep structure, and its basic core outline shows a non-random pattern. And that includes the emergence of democracy and liberalism.
A theory as crude and dumbed down as Darwinism (or any other reductionist theory) is totally blind to what is going on.
Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence
The sad thing is the way that proponents of design, because of their absurdly naive religious views, have missed the real design world history, about which we must remain agnostic, foregoing crude design arguments, but not throwing out the perception of non-random processes operating at the most subtle level of historical emergence.
The data of the Axial Age should have been ample warning.
I cannot explain this data, but I can show that world history has an intricate and beautiful deep structure. Darwinism and Social Darwinist ideology always in the background is a dangerous delusion for those in control, and we must fear the swift destruction of liberal democracy once again.
We are left with the uncomfortable realization that greater nature in this historical evolution has twice reinstalled the democracy that man in civilization so swiftly destroys. We can see that a hidden conspiracy has already gravely damaged American democracy. We shall see what the outcome will be.
Reposting link to the web series, The Politics of Evolution:
The real way to consider politics and evolution is via the eonic effect:
http://eonic-effect.net/politics_of_evolution.htm
World history shows a deep structure that makes a mockery of the silly debate over Darwinism and liberalism
For the Fourth Edition of WHEE:
At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. Into the void flows the propaganda of Darwinism attempting to control the myth of human origins. The reign of Darwinism is a pretense of dumbed-down science, and one that cannot explain biological complexity, human consciousness, or the evolution of ethics, in a short list of confusions. Read the rest of this entry »
The debate over evolution has continued since the time of Darwin without resolution, in part because it is a metaphysical contest that is conducted beyond the limits of observation. The claims for natural selection have turned into an ideology short of real science, a kind of metaphysical reductionism. The result has thrown the study of history into confusion, and handed an ideological pseudo-science to many with Social Darwinist agendas. History should be the antidote to this kind of speculative excess, for it enforces the discipline of observation at short range, a century or less, something entirely absent in the study of deep time where generalizations about immense intervals of time are taken for granted without direct empirical observation.
A devastating question haunts standard thinking on evolution: Read the rest of this entry »
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/nongenetic-selection-and-evolution-flies-use-bacteria-to-adapt-to-parasitic-worms-2/
The usual fiction about Darwinian (non-)evolution.
The statement about cultural evolution is false: check out the eonic effect to see that the real evolution is probably macro-cultural in the sense given: http://history-and-evolution.com
Evolution by natural selection requires three things:
1. A trait shows variation
2. The variation in that trait must be capable of being passed on from parents to offspring (i.e., the variation is “heritable”)
3. The variation in that trait must make a difference in its likelihood of being passed on from parents to offspring. (Usually, but not always, this requires that the trait affect the survival or reproduction of its carrier.)
If all this is true, those forms of a trait that are better at proliferating will gradually increase in a population.
Although these statements are the basis of Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, note that the above characterization doesn’t use the word “gene.” Even if a trait has a nongenetic basis, it will evolve, via a form of natural selection, if it satisfies these conditions. Much of cultural evolution works in this way, although there are profound difference between cultural evolution based on cultural natural selection (or selection among “memes”) and biological evolution based on genes.
It is nice to remind us what the ‘Theory’ says, because it becomes unbelievable almosty instantly.
My press release again: I have been sending it out to mutiple places. It was an experiment if not being devious in issuing PR’s. But such things backfire, usually. Time to move on to still another version. Meanwhile check out the fourth edition.
At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. Into the void flows the propaganda of Darwinism attempting to control the myth of human origins. The reign of Darwinism is a pretense of dumbed-down science, and one that cannot explain biological complexity, human consciousness, or the evolution of ethics, in a short list of confusions. Read the rest of this entry »
No more Mr. Nice Guy: My new press release: http://history-and-evolution.com
At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. Into the void flows the propaganda of Darwinism attempting to control the myth of human origins. The reign of Darwinism is a pretense of dumbed-down science, and one that cannot explain biological complexity, human consciousness, or the evolution of ethics, in a short list of confusions.
The result is a parody of the nature of human nature, and an evolutionary fiction passed off as hard data. The result is Darwinian pseudo-science exploiting oversimplification and foisting the abstraction of natural selection onto unseen times and places. Darwinism persists as an ideology disguised as theory, with a Social Darwinist agenda concealed behind the facile claims of hard science. Darwin’s theory is thus suspiciously convenient as a neutralizer of ethical action and serves well as a justification for metaphysical reductionism, scientism, economic ideology, and ideological nihilism.
In a further confusion, Darwinism is under siege from the Intelligent Design movement, in a renewed collision of science and religion. The ancient and honorable design argument is now the agenda of conservative interest groups who are up in arms against Darwinian liberals and secular modernism itself. This perspective, which has coopted the criticisms of many scientific critics of Darwinism, has paralyzed the potential for an orderly paradigm change on the issue of evolution, as the cult of Darwin closes ranks around their limited perspectives. The evolution debate has degenerated into a metaphysical contest over the nature of secularism, and a cult of atheism as a surrogate of the Enlightenment battles fundamentalist theism in a contest fought on the field of evolutionary theories for postmodern sweepstakes.
This situation leaves us suspicious that deception here is deliberate, and that all we are offered on the evolution question is propaganda. Religious and scientific groups have done everything they can to hide the real meaning of evolution. Academic and scientific groups graduating from an educational system dominated by ideology are nonetheless true believers and are able to provide a front of sincerity to the cynicism of this biologico-industrial complex in the era of Big Science.
A new perspective is needed. And we are on our own. Scientific bodies and academic institutions are simply untrustworthy on the evolution question. The Darwin propaganda machine maintains itself through outright distortion and cannot be said to represent even the wish for science. The realm of professionals shows a successful reign of intimidation, making public commentary unbelievable.
A new approach is needed, and is not hard to find. The critique of Darwinism has proceeded beyond public awareness almost from the time of Darwin himself and is a ready resource. If the problem is that we have not observed evolution, then the solution is to observe it. And an unexpected new perspective has emerged from the archaeological revolution that has uncovered an evolutionary dynamic in world history itself: world history, observed at close range, holds the clue if we can understand it. The discovery of the Axial Age is one aspect of this transformation of our knowledge. We see a global process at work in the emergence of civilization in a process of non-random evolution that is non-genetic and almost biospheric in its action. A little detective work can uncover the larger significance of this data, and help us to bring an empirical understanding to the questions of evolution for the first time.
In the light of such data, a devastating question haunts standard thinking on evolution: what if the real force of evolution acts intermittently at high-speed over a range of mere centuries? The vastness of deep time would swallow up such brief episodes and leave no trace whatever. As we examine world history precisely this possibility becomes confirmed, and it shows one of the most obvious solutions to the evolution mystery. We must learn to consider evolution as a chronicle of factual history, remaining wary of the reign of theories disguising the agendas of their proponents. Here world history seen at close range is the bottom line on the evolution question.
The myth of Darwinism endures because it maintains media dominance, and need not answer to the realm of fact, substituting speculation, and educational indoctrination, for science. In the phrase of Karl Popper it is a metaphysical research program, and not a falsifiable theory. The antidote is a dose of empiricism that can show us the real meaning of evolution. And the irony is that world history itself holds the key to the riddle of evolution. It is right that this should be so. We must refrain from imposing speculations about deep time, which we cannot observe, on our historical chronicle, which we do observe. It is an upside down situation and one that cannot persist without throwing discredit on science itself.
We live in the first generations with enough historical data to detect a pattern of historical dynamics. We see the real evolution of man as the Great Transition, the human passage from evolution to history, in the chronicle of the once and future Origin of the Species, Man.
Darwinism is a theory created to snare stupid people, making them fell smart in the process.
Check out some alternate paradigms
The text for World History And The Eonic Effect Fourth Edition is finally online at Amazon.
Check out history-and-evolution.com for some info on the new edition/
This book has survived through four editions.
When all the other crap passes away this snapshot, a glimpse of evolution, will remain.
If you found the earlier editons hard, this is the edition for you.
Note: the publication date says April 27! Nonsense. And they didn’t allow pre-orders.
The publication date is today. Juen 22! These people always try to sabotage this book somehow.
Note: in the ‘customers who also bought…’ section, they is Heidegger’s Being and Time. And that’s all. Bullshit.
These people are constantly trying to sabotage this book.
Reposted from yesterday:
From the new edition: The Legacy of Darwinism
At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. In the face of much criticism from religious Creationists, now accompanied by the Intelligent Design movement, adherents of Darwinism forever defend a flawed theory that has been challenged from its first appearance. The objections of the first reviewers of Darwin’s book, indeed even of T. H. Huxley, the original champion of the theory, were never quite answered in the tide of paradigm change that swept modern culture. The perennial issue is natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. The assumption that evolution occurs, and must occur, at random is the crux of the dispute, one unreasonably confused by the claims of religion versus science.
The rise of molecular biology shows a complexity of structure that cannot easily survive statistical challenges to claims of random emergence. The new genetics and the emergence of developmental biology have exposed the limits of Darwin’s original theory, in the remarkable findings of complex biochemical systems and evo-devo. Therefore the critics, whatever the public pronouncements of Darwinists, have essentially won the debate, and retabled the views of many of Darwin’s predecesssors at the birth of embryology in the generation before Origin. We might proceed on that basis, beyond the distracting cultural politics of evolutionary theories, which now sees the resurfacing of the design theology of the generation of Paley. Nothing in the methodology of science requires us to accept the claims of natural selection as established.
Fourth edition out!
As noted already today, the fourth edition of World History And The Eonic Effect is out, with the cover image already corrected.
Note: the publication date is not April 27, but today June 22! (Idiot publisher)
It is hard to believe a publisher would backdate the publication date by two months. Unbelievable.
The text for World History And The Eonic Effect Fourth Edition is finally online at Amazon.
Unfortunately the printer gave them a wrongly cropped cover image. They also ommiitted the new blurb text. The stupidity is almost hard to believe. It took them six weeks to get it wrong.
Not to worry. Amazon is not sloppy and should correct it by tommorrow. Click here for the
Correct cover image, uploaded in the extra images section.
Check out history-and-evolution.com for some info on the new edition/
If you found the earlier editons hard, this is the edition for you.
Note: the publication date says April 27! Nonsense. And they didn’t allow pre-orders.
The publication date is today. Juen 22! These people always try to sabotage this book somehow.
The wrong cover on the first try. Stop pulling my leg.