There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution…Darwin was quite unable to demonstrate the infinitude of connecting links, the existence of which he admitted was crucial to his theory.
Michael Denton
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 69

3.1 The Limits of Observation
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.

The Limits of Observation Darwinian speculation greatly underestimates the difficulty of observing evolution, and tends to substitute assumptions about natural selection for the hard work of observing evolution in action. Once we really begin to observe ‘evolution’ we see that it is a non-random process that stands out against the backdrop of deep time

.

Observing Speciation? The Hurricane Argument (inset box) shows the problem with ‘jungle surface’ observations of life (the source for Darwin/Wallace of their theories). That surface suggests natural selection. But the reality of speciation is ‘seen’ only over millions of years in diverse sections of a global environment. Not surprising the problem is confusing.
The problem of evidence is especia

lly critical in the case of the descent of man whose emergence is a mystery still unresolved by the speculative assumptions of current reductionist science. Further, man is still a mystery even to himself, what to say of how this mystery evolved. The facts working biologists themselves have uncovered don’t inspire confidence in the Darwinian interpretation. The appearance of man is uncomfortably sudden in the reckoning of periods enforced by the evidence we have.

If the observation of evolution in deep time is difficult, we are left to ask if there is any data set available to us that can demonstrate evolution in action. The answer is a surprising one: world history itself.

History and Evolution: Some Empiricism The problem with the theory of Darwin lies in the verification of its claims for natural selection, and random evolution. We need an independent test of the issues. The study of history might help. Properly documented sequences of evolution are rare to non-existent. The only intensively observed historical/evolutionary sequence, one with data in real time and at the level of centuries or less, is that of world history since the invention of writing. As we examine world history in the light of recent discoveries since the nineteenth century the suspicion arises that the clue to evolution lies there, if we can understand it.

Some systems analysis The Axial Age might confuse us. There is another approach, which we will try in this chapter. Any complex entity can be analyzed with a generalized systems analysis (which is looser than causal analysis). Does the system show coherent behavior or have any structural properties? That is an important tactic since given the diffuse chaos of world history we might not think to try this. One technique is a frequency analysis, does the system show cyclical behavior of any kind? To our stunned surprise we can see that it does, in the interval where we have continuous data at the centuries level, showing a clear baseline cycling.
This unique data set, five thousand years in length, with less complete intervals rapidly filling in, is just barely long enough to put the idea of natural selection to a test. Lo and behold, we do see a process of evolution in action, a statement requiring careful delineation. The result suggests something entirely different from the mechanism claimed by Darwin: innovations appear discontinuously in a non-random fashion. At first, it seems preposterous to bring the term ‘evolution’ to history. But it is not hard to derive a rationale for this: evolution and history must overlap, so to speak, and the resulting transition should be visible empirically. With this clue we discover to our surprise the secret to world history.

3.2 World History: The Non-random In Plain Sight
It was the biologist Dobzhansky who noted that ‘nothing makes sense’ except in the light of evolution. But the corollary we suspect is that nothing makes sense in the light of natural selection and the perspective of random evolution. It is suspiciously the kind of theory those who have never truly observed evolution might adopt.

 Chapter 3: World History: A Hidden Teleology

Introduction
Chapter 2: Science, Ideology, and World View
Chapter 3: World History: A Hidden Teleology
Chapter 4: The Evolution Controversy
Chapter 5: History and Evolution
 Conclusion