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Visit also:
history-and-evolution.com
eonic-effect.net
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Descent Of Man
Revisited
World History:
The Hidden Clue To Human Evolution |
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Descent Of Man Revisited
The book (but not the Kindle version) is lavishly
illustrated with over a hundred classic images in the public domain:
buy the book! |
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From South Fork
Books, 2012
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The debate over evolution has endured for over a century but the
outcome remains uncertain, in a debate that has been muddled by
the ideological agendas of all parties. Even as biological
research explodes in new directions in a robust science of the
organism, the question of evolution, and its theory, seems to be
mired in a concealed metaphysical scientism. In fact, the
question of evolution is not solved by a science taken as the
successor to physics. The issues of theory are confounded by the
fact/value dichotomy, and by the difficulty of truly observing
evolution in action. And this is the reason that the field is
confronted by religion proponents of Intelligent Design. The
debate over design will not go away, whatever it status as
science, because it points to a complexity of natural law that
current science is blind to. Among other issues that of
teleology lurks ominously over the domain of reductionist
thinking, and this is an issue as old as Aristotle, and
commented on systematically by the philosopher Kant.
We can
propose that the deadlock over evolution can be resolved by
looking at the suggestive evidence of world history, which shows
a clear non-random process at work in the sense of
'macroevolution'. We can use this to debrief our obsessive
Darwinian fixations and to consider the hint this gives about
the earlier evolution of man. |
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Online text |
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Due to the iimportance of the issues, the text is being put online
ASAP... |
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Preface
It is remarkable that in an age of advanced technology,
science still has no coherent account of human emergence. The
riddle has not been solved by modern Darwinian theory. It is not
a simple question! The purpose of this book is to demonstrate
the discovery of a new perspective on evolution, and to also
serve as a reminder of our ignorance near the presumptions of
Darwinists that the basic problems have been solved. The
alternative is a dangerous oversimplification used to enforce
conformity to a narrow, and quite false, definition of science.
The result is to cripple human potential. We can offer one hint,
via a look at world history: the realization a clue is right
under our noses, if we know where to look. The fuzzy perception
of evolution in deep time is clear enough. But the attempts to
produce a theory of that set of processes is a task for the
future. The problem lies with insufficient observation. Here
historical chronicles offer a hint.
Introduction
The question of human origins is a great mystery, and
the dogmatic application of Darwinian theory to its study
has produced a great confusion. The reductionist character
of Darwinism has been made to work by postulating a creature
of fiction, the survivor of the ‘survival of the fittest’
scenario, a kind of Social Darwinist untermench, also an
expert, apparently, at economics of the capitalist brand.
This creature has been stripped of his humanity and made
into a mechanical object with no soul, free will, ethical
agency, or much in the way of consciousness. Especially
problematic are tendencies toward altruism. In a market
economy, greed is good. A theory to make this plausible is
an object of supply and demand. As the saying goes, it’s the
economy, stupid.
Chapter 2: Science,
Ideology, and World View
The controversy over evolution
endures as one of the most intractable of modern civilization.
Fueled by the agendas of those ambitious to control the defining
ideology of human origins, the debate has obfuscated the real
meaning of evolution, and created a set of competing
propagandas, religious and scientific. The fact of evolution is
clear empirically as a set of facts about the fossil record, but
becomes entangled in the confusion of theories ambitious to
explain those facts. Darwin’s Origin of Species induced the
sudden public realization of the fact of evolution and ignited
the revolution of thought we associate with the idea of human
emergence from nature. But the theory of natural selection that
came on the back of that breakthrough was problematical and
ignited a controversy, ‘one long argument’, in Darwin’s phrase,
that continues to this day. The subtitle alone is a provocative
ideological confusion with dangerous implications.
Chapter 3: World
History: A Hidden Teleology
The issue is not science versus religion, but the promotion
of Darwinian pseudo-science beyond the limits of
observation, and the metaphysical projection of natural
selection as a universal law of biological evolution. In
reality those limits make the empirical demonstration of the
mechanism of evolution very difficult. We can see that there
are degrees to the discovery of the fact of evolution. We
might detect evolution, but even so we must zoom in to study
the process in detail before we can get a sense of how it
works. This is a tremendously difficult thing to do. The
task assumes we can observe the entire record of a species
over a vast terrestrial space and over many thousands, or
millions of years to verify the claimed mechanism. Put that
way we see that actually observing evolution in full is
close to impossible, and the result is that we are left with
inferences. It is here that the temptation to make natural
selection a ‘law of evolution’ not requiring verification in
all cases arose as if in imitation of physics. But there is
no such universal law. If we are to have ‘laws of evolution’
they must be something far more complex than what science
currently considers. A study of history shows at once the
fallacy of this kind of thinking. We take for granted the
need for a continuous chronicle of all events. But with
evolutionary histories a lesser standard has somehow become
the norm. The situation is almost preposterous, and there is
every possibility we have missed the key to the dynamics
altogether. We must retreat to the stance of chronicling
evolution, wary of premature speculative theories of its
mechanism. In fact, this is what scientists actually do, if
we observe the reality beyond the endless debates.
Chapter 4: The
Evolution Controversy
The
modern discovery, or rediscovery of the idea of evolution,
was one of the greatest turning points in the development of
human thought. First appearing during the Axial Age, in
Greece and India, then reemerging in the period of the
Enlightenment (note how it follows our non-random pattern),
it begins a complex development in multiple dimensions,
beside its track toward science, from the Kantian philosophy
of history, the teleomechanists, Hegelian Naturphilosophie,
and the embryologists. The work of Lamarck and Erasmus
Darwin foretells the coming of evolutionary science with the
first theories. The marriage of Darwin’s theory to
population genetics will lead in the twentieth century to
the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.
Lamarck, especially, had
the gist of a true theory of evolution, despite his thinking
about acquired characteristics. But in the next generation,
in the fall-off of the Enlightenment kleiglight we see the
onset of positivism, and the crystallization of Darwinism as
a brand of reductionism.
As in the tale of the blindmen
and the elephant, we find a dialectical field of candidates,
each with a piece of the answer, and then a collapse into an
obsessive reductionism armed with a fragmented piece. The
result is the classic metaphysical deadlock of the Darwin
debate, effectively depriving the public of any clarity or
viable options on the subject of evolution. The sudden
crystallization of positivism reduced science to what is
sometimes called ‘scientism’, the obsessive application of
reductionist universalism to all forms of explanation. This
is part of the mystique of natural selection. The result is,
for example, a disregard of the fact/value distinction. But
if this distinction is essential for understanding
evolution, then a new category of methodological science is
needed.
Chapter 5: History and
Evolution
Our
historical outline has uncovered the unexpected evidence
of the non-random in world history. We have set this as
a minimal claim, about randomness, but our pattern is a
clue to something deeper. We could stop there, our job
done, and leave the example of the non-random as a
challenge to Darwinism, and erect a counter to any
attempt to darwinize world history. But our discovery is
really a gateway to a deeper set of insights. As we zoom
in it shows us far more, beginning with a clear
sequential logic in a series of intermittent intervals,
at the middle of which we find the so-called Axial Age.
It is hard at first to grasp the full sequential logic,
and we can focus on the data of the Axial Age in
isolation. And anyone who thought ‘slow development’ was
a law of nature is in for a shock. High-speed changes
over discontinuous intervals make selectionist ‘slow
evolution’ look mythological.
Chapters 1, 2, 3, Conclusion
Our expedition through world history is complete,
and our discovery of a resolution to the riddle of evolution
springs from a giveaway pattern of non-random dynamism in
plain sight, one whose sequential logic shows a
meta-historical directionality that in turn demands
reopening the question of teleology. The macro effect shows
dramatic evidence of ‘self-organization’, minimally, and
more cogently the action of mysterious ‘global bio-fields’
operating over time and space, and almost biospheric in
their range. These bio-fields must act globally, over tens
of millennia, scan their action areas, and seed
ultra-complex elements of culture, i.e. art, religion,
literature... That provokes a crisis with our ‘brown paper
bag’ usage of evolution, but the term remains the basic
descriptive category of choice.
All this provokes a question about a
Gaian interpretation of evolution.
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2012
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Descent of Man
Revisited
World History:
The Hidden Clue to Human Evolution
Now Available!
Available
from:
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
LCCN
2011917995
ISBN
978-0-9847029-0-9
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