History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
A New Model of History: Eonic Evolution
The eonic effect shows a spectacular process of evolution in action, but the focus is not on cultures or civilizations, but on a master sequence that transcends those, operating on transitional pivot areas in short different time-slices, as with the Axial Age.
Does the Historical Jesus Matter? (yes, he does)
…Jesus is certainly among the great axial age figures…
This statement is a fallacy: the whole point is that the ‘Axial Age’ or ‘interval’ was a short period in which the seeds of many future elements were sown, among them the creation, later, of Christianity (and Judaism). But it is misleading to say that these later religions were created in the Axial Age. The question is important because we can see that these religions are human creations, and not the mysterious process we see in the ‘eonic sequence’, of which the Axial interval is a part.
Religion and Empire
The Old Testament as ‘eonic data’, scroll down for an outline periodization of Old Testament history.
We need to re-understand the Old Testament in secular terms, without the usual ‘god gibberish’ plastered over the account by later theologies. The result is much more insightful.
We should note that the Old Testament leaves hints that its source sages warned against ‘god talk’ by pointing to something beyond words and concepts, IHVH.
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.
The study of Israel from the eonic perspective is in the final analysis the most effective for it can help in seeing that the impulse to find transcendental explanations is automatically suggested by the intangibility of the eonic sequence .
Minimum Eonic Periodization of ‘Histories of Israel’:
1. stream approach
2. transitional period: eonic sequence intersection
3. divide period
4. realization period.
Revolutions Per Second: The Rebirth of Democracy
One of the themes of WHEE is that of the ‘discrete freedom sequence’: the way that the emergence of democracy follows a pattern, and the way if fades away in the wake of that. We can see from the example from antiquity that the crisis point comes two centuries after the ‘Great Divide’ period.
Right on schedule we see that in 2000 the crisis intensifies drastically.
It is sad to watch.
This material on ‘stream and sequence’ was displaced in the fourth edition to the notes, but it can help in looking at the history/evolution in world history to use these concepts to see the way the stream of religion suddenly ‘fixed’ by the eonic sequence. We see two classic cases of that, Buddhism and ‘Israelite monotheism’ in the Axial Age.
To realize that this is evolutionary mechanics of a mysterious kind can also help to get out from under the mystiques of the later propaganda about an ‘age of revelation’.
Aryans, Hinduism, And a Buddhist Revolution
There is a short take on the histroy of Indian religion in WHEE/4th, with some bibilographical references to Danielou who can be helpful, when you are ready. Til then the whole history is confusing.
The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson – reviewJames Buchan enjoys an encyclopedic account of Germany’s ‘idealism with efficiency’
To assess this phenomenon it is important to study the eonic effect and the place of Germany (et al.) in relation to the modern transition.
The spectacular effects at the ‘Great Divide’ are visible in the German case, and help to understand the enigma of modernity.
Transition and Modernity
It migh also help to understand how the whole thing derailed in the wake of that transition.
Looking at the eonic effect we see that empire arises in the ‘mideonic’ periods, while political advances, lately toward freedom, arise during the characteristic periods of the transitions in the eonic sequence.
The American system is showing the two blended in one: the rise of democracy in the modern transition, and the drift toward empire in the wake of the transition (and the decline in the quality of action)>
Chapter 6 of the Fourth Edition is now online: Transition and Modernity
http://www.eonix-papers.com/2010/09/28/wordnik-on-eonic/
My usage of ‘eonic’ was actually a pun on a digital sampling term from the ‘eonix’ brands (check google), next to the adjective creation from ‘eon’, as ‘epochal’ or simply ‘era’. The term has so many echoes that it may have been counterproductive.
Wordnik says the word can’t be used for Scrabble (yet!)
Chapter 5 of World History And The Eonic Effect now online: Symphony of Emergence: World History and the Axial Age!
An entire epoch of higher civilization is now reaching its end, and the world of early Sumer is a forgotten legend buried in the oddities of Akkadian cuneiform, while the civilization of Egypt is in decline. Although we don’t see the total collapse into medievalism that will occur in the next Occidental phase of our history our system comes close to this at many points, as civilization is frozen in the repetition of its basic forms. Most of all the progression of empires has risen to dominate civilization. This creates a crisis of development. Something spectacular is about to occur.
…
We have created the question, then, in relation to our eonic sequence, what next? The stream and the sequence interplay quite obviously stages the competition of two different futures in each case. More specifically, what are the next points of transformation in this ‘eonic’ series? That is, when do we again see a period of phasing onset, of parallel, interactive, zones of accelerated cultural evolution? Now, all at once, the Axial phase makes complete sense.
Big Histories, Universal Histories
The idea of Big History, histories told since the Big Bang, and Universal Histories, which can be taken as histories that assume the action of human freedom, need to meet and become a new and higher form.
This question cannot be answered by Darwinists, since natural selection didn’t generate the orignal ‘evolution’ of man.
Check out the eonic effect, and its take on history and evolution.
Reposted from yesterday, thanks for large response!
New selections online for World History And The Eonic Effect, Fourth Edition!
Chapter 3 is now up and online: Chapter #3: Descent of Man Revisited
Follow the links to the sections of the whole chapter
Chapter 4 coming next week.
New selections online for World History And The Eonic Effect, Fourth Edition!
Chapter 3 is now up and online: Chapter #3: Descent of Man Revisited
Follow the links to the sections of the whole chapter
This edition is going offline tomorrow, to make way for the fourth edition of WHEE (to keep googlebot from getting confused). Some of the material in the theoretical sections won’t return, so you can download what you want.
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 »