The strangest aspect of darwinism is the tenacity of the ‘experts’ in promoting it ad infinitum even as dissent emerges in the background, essentially falsifying the theory. For the general public it is merely sad to see them fall in line while for those constantly preaching faith in science and scientists on the subject the verdict is more harsh because trust in science is at stake.
In almost every other field the flaws in a given paradigm can at least be aired.
In some ways this could be unfair. The issue is one of a failure of intelligence confronted with a puzzle that invites jumping to conclusions because real answers are not only difficult, but so far impossible to unravel. We are driven into the Kantian wasteland where we demand science instead of metaphysics in a field where the unseen reigns over the inevitable production of ‘scientism’: that’s the point: we don’t ‘see’ the full scope of evolutionary dynamics and are driven to produce a reified ‘scientific’ explanation that veils the hidden metaphysical angle. The doctrine of natural selection is the perfect candidate for that and given the abysmal confusion over statistics in public awareness an easy ‘con’ to produce. We say ‘con’ because anyone with any training in statistics should be blowing the whistle. Perhaps they are, in private, fearful in public of the strangely wilful domination of general belief.
Confronted with a problem as difficult as ‘evolution’ we should adopt the agnosticism demanded of subjects still on the threshold of science. We must move on and learn the lesson of darwinism as a paradigm: science itself is at risk of metaphysical capture. This is the same terrain that led to the shipwreck of religious hallucination.
Our studies of the eonic effect can help: we are not attuned to the real Himalayas of evolution, clouded in mist, and see only the foothills studied by conventional biology. We ‘see’ evolution in deep time as a field of evidence, but we don’t ‘see’ the dynamics involved: the result is a void into which we project our theoretical pretense.
The eonic effect suggests in contrast some fairly simple solutions. The idea of punctuated equilibrium stumbled into the right terrain. But the term has already been coopted by the ‘paradigm’ and we dare not use it, save to consider its nugget of wisdom: a process of punctuation appears out of nowhere and this is associated with speciation. This was essentially Niles Eldredge’s idea, then corrupted by Gould. By what confusion (or one suspects deception) inflicted on a great insight Gould (and/or Eldridge) moved to graft ‘natural selection’ theory onto the idea of PE is unclear but the result has been the ruin of an exit point from darwinian blinders. In any case there were problems with PE, at least for those who demand close observation: that’s just the problem we have discussed. The key moment of evolutionary change is invisible and the idea of PE actually invokes the unseen. We see only the long term equilibria and not the ‘punctuations’.
The eonic effect bypasses PE and is a much better version of this intuition and it insures it won’t be compromised by natural selection. The result confronts head on the dangers and difficulties of metaphysical cooptation of models that must in the end be agnostic, and forego the demands of certainly demanded of public ideologies set in motion to maintain our ignorance.
Darwiniana 