Darwiniana-History and Evolution: Evolution visible in history
Nemonemini
evolution.
The Eonic Effect
Looking backward, the history of civilization reveals a long rhythm, punctuated
by three great turning points, the birth of civilization in early Sumer and
Egypt at the end of the fourth Millennium, the broad parallel advance at the
onset of classical antiquity, to which increasing perspective should now add
the explosion of change between 1500 and 1800. This mysterious structure,
fragmentary to our perceptions, is the most natural division of world history,
and yet hides an unsuspected dynamism of action. It answers directly to the
mystery of the evolution of human civil existence in a series of discrete
periods. This deceptively simple periodization will be called the aeonic, or
eonic, effect, as evidence of the eonic evolution of civilization.
[Note The term ‘eonic’ can be taken to mean ‘discrete, or stepping’,
as opposed to ‘continuous’, in long term units of time. As a contraction of
a term ‘aeonic’, its usage is taken from the Greek word ‘aionios’].
The first two of these three eras, if we exclude for a moment the modern due to
its proximity in our biased perception and interaction, are seen to be the
crucial generative eras of the development of civilization. The first era shows
the rise of the state, the second the remarkable sources of the great
religions, the beginning of science, philosophy, the first democracy, and,
generally, the foundations of the great traditions, East and West. As we puzzle
over the difficulties in all ideas of evolution, we discover that we can find
the answers very close to home, in the record of world history.
A closer look, in the arduous inquiries at deeper zoom levels, reveals the need
to revise the assumptions of historical continuity with a balanced conception
of discontinuity. The latter is unmistakable in the world of antiquity, ca.
–600, in the extraordinary synchronous emergence of the classical traditions.
Suddenly, in China, India, the Middle East and Greece, the forms of culture
undergo a cultural acceleration in a synchronous parallelism that is quite
mysterious. Everything seems done in a flash. The world of Classical Greece
flowers. Israel sees its age of the Prophets, the Exile, and the emergence of a
new religious form. In India and China, we find the same, in a period that
produces the seminal foundations for a whole era. For centuries to come men
look back at this era. The monuments of the earlier age of Egypt and
Mesopotamia fall into oblivion and disappear in sand.This synchronism began to
be observed in the nineteenth century, but has failed to become well known, for
the nature of its dynamic is difficult to pinpoint. This is not surprising,
since we are talking about fields of free activity that show structure over a
period of centuries, a seeming contradiction. This synchronism implies the
temporal phase is the crucial determinant, independently of any continuous
runway leading to the sudden flowerings of individual areas. It is hard to
reconstruct, let alone visualize, the correct sequence of emergence. We see the
peaks stand out, great religious founders, art, philosophers, new political
forms, then a distinct fall-off. But the overall picture is clear. Its
implications indicate that cultural evolution is, so to speak, hyper-cultural
in a generalized system of evolutionary emergence, an extraordinary fact, and
the one great clue to evolution in action.
It has often been noticed, as in this instance, that the record of human
history shows a strange patchwork of fast advances, and slower periods that are
relatively static. This fact alone should alert us to the existence of
historical dynamism. Our use of the term ‘medieval’ is quite revealing in
this regard. We call the period from the fall of the Roman Empire until modern
times a ‘middle age’. This ‘middleness’ is a clue to how we in fact
take our own history, not quite sure why, although we can see that the source
of this earlier world lies in the onset of the classical age, many centuries
before. This era rose to a height that was never matched until after 1500. The
same relationship is now visible in the era prior to this, at the birth of
complex civilization. The obvious suggestion is that discrete and continuous
processes are blended in the context of a macrohistorical system, if we can
define it.The rise of civilization from the Neolithic takes place quickly
around the end of the fourth millennium, in Egypt and Sumer. This is followed
by the long eras that characterize these distinct forms of culture, more or
less set in their pattern. Then, in the centuries just before –600 we find
civilization on the move again, this time, as noted, in a broad field of rapid
parallel advance. Another period of take-off this time in widely separated
areas suddenly transforms the whole basis of civilization. Then finally the
rise of the modern shows its hand as the next descendant in this suddenly
obvious series. But the spottiness of the pattern is not at first amenable to
any simple explanation, in part because we have no prior grounds of explanation
at all.The worlds of Archaic Greece, the Hebrew Prophets, the Upanishadic era
of India, and the centuries before Confucius in China suddenly emerge
simultaneously. From this we can infer the presence of a larger system doing
cross-sections, one on a scale greater than its manifestations as individual
civilizations. It is hard to imagine how this could be until suddenly we notice
the coordination of this system over millennia. It defies all odds of being
random, and finds its oddities from the inherent nature of large scale culture
evolving on the surface of a planet. A system in a long frequency, we suspect,
performing the tricks of ‘systems’ as we know them, something like
‘feedback return’. We can even spot the probable wavelength, ca. 2400
years, although this is conjectural. The rest of the pieces begin to fall into
place at once. All the disconnected areas are ‘hotspots’ fretting implosion
by a tactic of minimizing evolutionary interaction.We are confronted with a
strange pattern, obviously incomplete, and sourcing in the Neolithic, whose
real symptoms are clearest at the sources of our traditions. Thus, if we
consider this classical era in detail, it becomes evident that it represents a
phase in a greater sequence. The birth of civilization, and the rise of the
modern world, for three centuries after the Reformation, show the same absolute
high speed emergentist structure in phase, and are clearly related in an
overall dynamic of such transitional phases. These three periods, and only
these, show this ‘order of magnitude’ explosion, although the genesis of
Islam comes close. This does not include the period after 1800, or license any
ideological conclusion some might derive from our purely theoretical argument.
Beside this parallelism, then, the long sequence of civilization begins to
reveal as a whole this overall hyper-cultural generative structure. Thus we can
see, in addition, the inner coherence of all of these periods as a unified
system whose realizations we call ‘civilizations’.Suddenly, we have a
non-random pattern behind us in the chronicle of known history.
Our thesis is engaged, we see a macrohistorical ‘evolution’ associated with
the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, suggesting
transeonic feedback, morphing in direct and focalized fast interrupts the large
scale event-space of cultural entities. We are confronted by the apparent
conundrum that a force of evolutionary or historical action, fragmentary but in
plain sight, shows no visible relation to the fact of free activity, except the
pattern of correlation achieved by the extremely long view.Although the eonic
pattern is a short sequence (like three beats from a whole symphony) and fails
any inductive test for universal generalization, it gives us a telling glimpse
of a purely abstract ‘evolution in action’ and suggests indirectly how
emergent sequencing and integration might have occurred. We live in the first
generations of human history with records of any kind stretching across the
five thousand year minimum we will find necessary to establish the minimum
three beats of historical rhythm in a 2400 year wavelength. After this interval
since the invention of writing we seem finally able to document an evolutionary
sequence. The rest is a blank, leaving us one clue to the nature of evolution,
it shows fast system return in three century bursts, and can do ‘cross
sections’ in parallel on fuzzy regions. Thus, for the first time we see
modernism as a unit, and can adjoin also the early starting point of Sumer and
Egypt, to the isolated classical era, which we had thought, if we thought about
it at all, as some sort of mysterious absolute source. We must consider the
relations of these eras to what occurs in between, surprisingly simple to do.
For we can see that the object of historical selection is to embrace the whole.
Thus, we are given a direct insight into the sequencing embedded in world
history, and precipitous new grounds, however inconclusive, for macrohistorical
considerations.
wf...@ptd.net
>A number of people asked what the eonic effect is and how it relates to
>evolution.
>
yeah, im sure glad you cleared THAT up....
Bobby D. Bryant
<wf...@ptd.net> wrote:
Should we ask for a list of names of people here who asked about it? A
show of hands, maybe?
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
mel turner
[Bobby D. Bryant] wrote...
Well, I for one had basically asked what he was talking about and
just what if anything it has to do with biological evolution. The
answers to those questions are not much clearer to me following this
latest explanation, but the excerpt he posted does give an idea of
what his web pages
http://eonix.8m.com/darwiniana.htm
http://eonix.8m.com/index.htm
http://www.geocities.com/nemonemini/index.htm
http://www.geocities.com/nemonemini/intro.htm
etc.
are like.
cheers
Jon Fleming
>A number of people asked what the eonic effect is and how it relates to
>evolution.
>
>The Eonic Effect
>Looking backward, the history of civilization reveals a long rhythm, punctuated
>by three great turning points, the birth of civilization in early Sumer and
>Egypt at the end of the fourth Millennium, the broad parallel advance at the
>onset of classical antiquity, to which increasing perspective should now add
>the explosion of change between 1500 and 1800. This mysterious structure,
>fragmentary to our perceptions, is the most natural division of world history,
>and yet hides an unsuspected dynamism of action. It answers directly to the
>mystery of the evolution of human civil existence in a series of discrete
>periods. This deceptively simple periodization will be called the aeonic, or
>eonic, effect, as evidence of the eonic evolution of civilization.
<snip>
Anybody think Nemonemini may be Alan Sokal?
--
Change "nospam" to "group" to email
Nemonemini
Everything...Darwinism is so far off it isn't funny.
The passage is the barest introduction.
mel turner
jo...@fleming-nospam.com [Jon Fleming] wrote...
Or inspired by him? If it is a parody it's quite well-done;
it's almost painfully distressing to try to read through this stuff
in search of whatever clear, coherent meanings it might contain.
Maybe someone's come up with an automated PoMo blather-writing 'bot?
There is quite a lot of it:
http://eonix.8m.com/darwiniana.htm
etc.
"I think I speak for everyone here when I say, 'Huh?'"
-- B. Summers
cheers
Nemonemini
I think the statement is transparent. If we look backward, we begin to see a
meaningful structure to history.
The method is not dissimilar to that of the economic historian. If we look
backward, we see, for example, since the Industria Revolution, a stucture to
economies.
The structure indicated is a clear deviation from the purely random and
deserves zooming in for a closer look. Its structure reveals itself as the
answer to a whole series of questions.
Most of all it shows a form of historical evolution contradicting the rote
application of Darwinism to history.
It can be used a theoretical self-defense against misapplication of Darwinism
to cultural subjects. Darwinism flunks all the main tests here. Flunks them
badly, and injects a violent and ill-considered generalization into cultural
behavior.
It is time to see that history follows another process. And that is that.
Danny niccoli
stages
of the sumerians , were in fact Monotheistic...... It's a pity that his
work as
been ever ignored or attempt by, I think only one person.... not to
mention
Schmidt who held a very descriptive account of primitive people that assert
a supreme god..... ( we can define that as a primitive form of monotheism
or an aspect of polytheism, or even henotheistic, But to me heno.....
could
just be a relaxed form of mono or poly ........
u find also that early china as very highly similarities with the old
testament.
Notable I am referring to the shing ti and Ti'en..... ( POSSIBLY)
Nemonemini <nemon...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20010628220054...@ng-bk1.aol.com...
> -600, in the extraordinary synchronous emergence of the classical
> less set in their pattern. Then, in the centuries just before -600 we find
Jon Fleming
>Sokal? How do you bring this in? That's a bit overworked these days.
Perhaps it is. Overworked or not, the fact is that your writing
reminds me of Sokal's hoax.
>
>I think the statement is transparent.
Your writing certainly is not transparent or, IMHO, comprehensible.
>If we look backward, we begin to see a
>meaningful structure to history.
>
>The method is not dissimilar to that of the economic historian. If we look
>backward, we see, for example, since the Industria Revolution, a stucture to
>economies.
>
>The structure indicated is a clear deviation from the purely random and
>deserves zooming in for a closer look. Its structure reveals itself as the
>answer to a whole series of questions.
>Most of all it shows a form of historical evolution contradicting the rote
>application of Darwinism to history.
>It can be used a theoretical self-defense against misapplication of Darwinism
>to cultural subjects. Darwinism flunks all the main tests here. Flunks them
>badly, and injects a violent and ill-considered generalization into cultural
>behavior.
>It is time to see that history follows another process. And that is that.
--
mel turner
[Nemonemini] wrote...
>
>Sokal? How do you bring this in? That's a bit overworked these days.
Just that your writing style often seems overly hard for some of
us to understand [sorry if I was grumpy about that]. It's clear to
me that you do seem to have a lot to discuss about history and
cultures and "cultural evolution". It's unclear that any of this
discussion has any real connection to Darwin or "darwinism" or
to natural selection theory.
>I think the statement is transparent. If we look backward, we begin to see a
>meaningful structure to history.
Fair enough, and no doubt a very interesting subject. It is
nevertheless an entirely separate topic from biological
evolution.
>The method is not dissimilar to that of the economic historian. If we look
>backward, we see, for example, since the Industria Revolution, a stucture to
>economies.
>The structure indicated is a clear deviation from the purely random and
>deserves zooming in for a closer look. Its structure reveals itself as the
>answer to a whole series of questions.
>Most of all it shows a form of historical evolution contradicting the rote
>application of Darwinism to history.
There is no application of Darwinism to history. It's only about
biological species, populations, individuals and genetic traits.
The so-called "social darwinism" was a misnomer and is now a
historical curiosity. It wasn't darwinism.
>It can be used a theoretical self-defense against misapplication of Darwinism
>to cultural subjects.
Fine. Any attempted application of "darwinism" to cultural subjects
is almost certainly a misapplication. [As is your continued linking
of cultural evolution and criticism of "darwinism"]
>Darwinism flunks all the main tests here. Flunks them
No, it never sharpened its #2 pencil or even put its name on the
upper right hand corner of the test paper. It never signed up
for the History class; instead, it stayed busy down the hall in
Biology.
It's an entirely separate subject area.
>badly, and injects a violent and ill-considered generalization into cultural
>behavior.
>It is time to see that history follows another process. And that is that.
Again, fair enough. Darwinism indeed doesn't apply to cultural
"evolution" or to the social history of the modern human species.
Any attempts to link them are misguided. Including yours.
Similarly, does the eonic effect have anything to say about the
evolution of different species of fruitflies or ferns or field mice?
Would it even have anything to say about the evolutionary divergence
of the early human-like hominids and chimpanzees from their last
common ancestor?
If not, perhaps your "Darwiniana" is a misnomer, and you've been
picking on a strawman?
cheers
Nemonemini
fundamental unit of historical analysis, eonic sequence, t-stream and
e-sequence, parallel interactive emergence, sequential dependency, etc...
I mention these because the text is built around these concepts, and once they
are clear, and they are not hard as such, the whole thesis becomes transparent.
The point is to visualize world history as one evolutionary burst in
intermittent focal expansion of fast and slow steps. We see only a fragment.
But we can infer quite a lot from that.
The scale of evolution is stupendous, and it leaves whole cultural
transfromations in its wake.
Bobby D. Bryant
<nemon...@aol.com> wrote:
> Most of all it
> shows a form of historical evolution contradicting the rote
> application of Darwinism to history.
Does anyone here care a fig for Darwinist history?
Does your newsreader display the "description" field for newsgroups?
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Nemonemini
organismic evolution. But at what point does the separation take effect?
Thus we must suspect an overlap as to the descent of man, for we find many
things outstanding in history that resemble the more advanced evolution visible
in the eonic effect, which encompasses the late phases of the evolution of
religion.
An example would be shamanism, whose actual study is quite complex, but whose
origins, speculatively, lie in the relatively late stages of man's descent, but
still well in the Paleolithic.
This must give pause to all too easy assumptions about the early forms of man's
psychological and proto-cultural evolution.
Danny niccoli
shamanism, some think and there is some evidence that it had monotheistic
properties other's feel a more polytheistic one, the problem is that we
can
interpret the evidence in so many way's....... normally it depends on
ones belief on the development hypothesis by Herbert Spencer, whom pre-
date Darwin by about 7 yrs I think???
Nemonemini <nemon...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20010701084601...@ng-bj1.aol.com...
Steven J.
> Just here the ambiguity becomes interesting. We have separated cultural and
> organismic evolution. But at what point does the separation take effect?
>
refers to individuals, and individuals don't (in the Darwinian sense)
evolve. I suppose the separation must take place as soon as "culture"
(behavior which is learned, and taught to new members of the
population, rather than genetically programmed) exists. This quite
possibly started before _Homo sapiens_ came into existence; earlier
hominids made tools, and fire, and surely this was learned and taught,
not instinctive, behavior. As some would put it, biological evolution
involves the mutation and selection of genes, and cultural evolution
involves the formation, alteration and selection of "memes" (ideas).
>
Of course, it seems reasonable (at least to many people) that both the
ability to create, alter, and select cultural ideas, and mental
predispostions to prefer certain kinds ideas to others, are
biologically based and evolved. However, this sort of evolution is
*much* slower than cultural evolution, and it's very doubtful that
evolutionary changes in the human brain, in the last couple of
thousand centuries, had any important effect on cultural evolution.
>
> Thus we must suspect an overlap as to the descent of man, for we find many
> things outstanding in history that resemble the more advanced evolution
> visible in the eonic effect, which encompasses the late phases of the
> evolution of religion.
>
evolution of religiosity, or human tendencies to create or adopt
certain kinds of religious beliefs. Many scholars think that
Neanderthals had some sort of religion(s). I don't know if earlier
hominid species did. Again, specific religious traditions are not
instinctive, or biologically based, and are the result of cultural,
not biological evolution. Darwinism, however you define it, has
nothing to do with this.
>
> An example would be shamanism, whose actual study is quite complex, but whose
> origins, speculatively, lie in the relatively late stages of man's descent,
> but still well in the Paleolithic.
>
brains, and intellectual and emotional potentials, were virtually
indistinguishable from our own. It is, in short, a cultural artifact
of modern humans, not an earlier stage of biological evolution.
>
> This must give pause to all too easy assumptions about the early forms of
> man's psychological and proto-cultural evolution.
>
assumptions" about these subjects do you think "Darwinists" make?
-- Steven J.
Nemonemini
transition of evolution into history. Therefore the entire account of the
descent of man remains open to question. For what we see in history is likely
to exist at the earlier stages of man's development, especially in relation to
cultural evolution, for which there is no Darwinian theory whatever. And the
baloney about memes is not even worth dwelling on. Bullshit.
History shows the 'evolution of man's freedom, consciousness', and its
realizations as art, culture, philosophy science, and much else. These follow a
demonstrable macroevolution, as shown in my 'eonic effect'. Therefore the
application of Darwinian thinking, denied or never claimed, but always
indirectly present in thinking, has served to completely confuse the issue.
The relation of general evolution and that of the individual must be made
explicit, and this is not done in Darwinism.
Steven J.
> My more general point was that in fact we cannot set a boundary to the
> transition of evolution into history. Therefore the entire account of the
> descent of man remains open to question. For what we see in history is likely
> to exist at the earlier stages of man's development, especially in relation to
> cultural evolution, for which there is no Darwinian theory whatever. And the
> baloney about memes is not even worth dwelling on. Bullshit.
>
you please; it is no great matter. *My* more general point was that
Darwinism is about the evolution of species, not cultures.
Evolutionary theorists don't, I think, worry a lot about "the
transition of evolution into history." History -- even if you start
with cave painting and scratched reminders on bones rather than proper
written records -- starts well after fully modern human bodies and
brains had evolvled. There isn't supposed to be a Darwinian theory of
cultural evolution, so there isn't much hope of your "eonic effect"
either adding to it or replacing it. I'm not sure what you mean by
"what we see in history is likely to exist at the earlier stages of
able, were they born in our world, to adapt to it as well as we
ourselves do, existed in the old stone age, who doubts it?
>
> History shows the 'evolution of man's freedom, consciousness', and its
> realizations as art, culture, philosophy science, and much else. These follow > a demonstrable macroevolution, as shown in my 'eonic effect'. Therefore the
> application of Darwinian thinking, denied or never claimed, but always
> indirectly present in thinking, has served to completely confuse the issue.
> The relation of general evolution and that of the individual must be made
> explicit, and this is not done in Darwinism.
>
even creationists, commonly use it. Macroevolution involves one
species giving rise to another; the evolution of consciousness
presumably involved macroevolution, but art, culture, philosophy, and
science all arose and developed in a single species, _Homo sapiens_,
which has undergone only microevolution. "General evolution" and the
evolution of the individual are quite separate topics, and quite
separate meanings of the word "evolution."
>
-- Steven J.