Darwiniana Sacred and Secular, and an example of non-genetic evolution

[Nemonemini]

Sacred and Secular

Those who, in diverse walks of life, take Darwinism as established to render
judgement on social issues of great import are under a heavy obligation to get
straight whence the sources of their beliefs, and, if necessary, conduct their
own enquiry. The excellence of empirical biological research blinds thinking to
the complications of the theoretical requirements of explanation. Theories of
Darwinian evolution come armed and dangerous and wish to legislate the future
predicted in bogus theory, Karl Popper’s Oedipus effect. Beside the latter
lies Popper’s increasing suspicion, registered in his works, that
evolutionary theories suffer difficulties of ‘falsifiability’, and are
really ‘metaphysical’ statements rather than theories. [i]As the perception
of the eonic effect suggests, you are taking a chance to claimmechanism for the
unobserved. In any case, there are no certified experts inthis field, and every
man is responsible for the effects of the theory he isproposing. Ignorance by
want of specialization is no excuse.Many who drink solely at the well of the
biological textbook are unaware, apparently, of the underground literature of
this subject, although in the age of the Internet that is likely to change very
quickly. It is embarrassing to watch defenders of evolution in schools cut to
pieces by well-coached fundamentalists. In Darwin’s Metaphor, Robert Young
notes, “Natural Selection is still scrutinizing, but the scientist and his
mentors and employers are directly selecting, controlling and selling natural
selection.” [ii] The tide is rising toward new paradigms, although the next
‘paradigm’ won’t just appear with Kuhnian greased wheels. A taking stock
is needed, for we are not dealing with a problem in physics, but categories of
thinking that themselves counsel historical action and change the realization
of the future. And the whole subject is riddled with ideology. A recent, very
strident, philosophic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher David Stowe, in
Darwinian Fairytales, is a forewarning and cries ‘enough’ to theories of
evolution, a disconcerting ‘who cares’, and points out the most obvious
fact: If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every
species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which
only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that
human life is not like that, however it may be with other species. [iii] This
is the most evident contradiction in Darwinism. Nothing in archaeology, the
search for fossils, or DNA, is required to see it, or able to contradict it.
The author targets the confusion generated by Darwinism in the sociobiological
attempt to derive altruism from survivalist scenarios. These theories are
simply misleading, although there is nothing gainsaid here as to empirical
considerations of the genetic basis of ethical behavior. The obvious answer is
that altruism is counterevidence to theory. For a probably simple reason
suggested in our logic, you must first show, by selectionism or not, how the
genome constructs a ‘free machine’, free action, whether disposed to
Freedom or not. Unless you can construct (or correctly dismiss) such a machine
on paper, in advance, it is hard to accept claims that biology resolves the
issues of ethics. Such issues reach a stalemate analogous to ‘mathematical
Platonism’, of which the great mathematician Gödel would seem to have been a
proponent. The constructivist steps can’t be omitted in the presumption that
a harsh view of human nature, itself a dubious concept, has already been
established. None of this can gainsay different approaches to genetic
‘sociobiology’. The structure of the genome tokens the rich complexity
required to really resolve the issues that founder in the metaphysical conundra
reductionists seem to find a mere nuisance. The clear strategy of misuse of
the non-implications of behavioral genetics persists in certain conservative
ideologies, in complete contradiction to their promotion of traditional values,
to use the preconceived selectionist assumptions as a mostly unstated excuse
for arguments of political inequality. [iv]Science will finally take discredit
for allowing this to happen, again, after being warned over and over by its
friends. The idea is that man’s nature is genetically such and such and needs
an antiquated social system, if any change is utopian. The nature of man is
itself the clear object of evolutionary transformations of consciousness. It is
not a fixed entity. Darwinists haven’t even begun to address the complexities
of consciousness known millennia ago. This naivete threatens to discredit
science. From ‘dog eat dog’, we arrive to, ‘Does a dog have Buddha
nature?’ Surprising as it may seem, this is not a rejection of sociobiology
as such. Certainly not of the genetic implications of human behavior, to which
evolutionists, however, have no monopolistic claim. But genetics and
evolutionary theory are two different subjects. The genetics of man may indeed
show some harsh realities. But how in fact did man evolve? The suspicion lurks
that natural selection moves against a directed evolution, that requires a
system with feedback to restore its emergentist realization. Here’s the first
hint of a ‘should’, feedback. Hardly a rigorous argument, except to find
grounds for the opposite of A, given A, in relation to unilinear
‘evolution’ partitioned into discrete versus continuous effects. Natural
Selection must get the bullet to the bull’s eye far away, so to speak. It
needs a straightener. In any case, we should engage the strongest reminder of a
Gresham’s law of evolutionary theories, and an implicit reminder to beware of
all of them, along with their religious substitutes. (Including, many will
hasten to point out, the author’s, not a theory at all, but a correlation of
world historical data.) Later modern thought, it could be claimed, is selecting
away from the promise of the high potential of the Enlightenment. It is a poor
record for such a body of research as Darwinism and a mark against the legacy
of the scientific revolution a postmodernist world will not forget in the
manner of the team members of short memory, and hankering for the next
paradigm. After such confusion, there is no next paradigm shift. People will
take their business elsewhere.One of the current assaults on Darwinism is that
of the Fundamentalist movement with its neo-creationist challenge to the rising
perception of difficulties in evolutionary theory. Associated with this is a
recent critique, Darwin on Trial, by the lawyer Philip Johnson, not a
Fundamentalist, in a reasonable effort to look closely at the difficulties that
have surfaced in evolutionary research. We seem almost back in the world of
Mivart, one of the first religious critics of Darwin. Reviews of Darwinism by
lawyers seem a new genre, beginning with Norman Macbeth’s Darwin Retried.
Johnson’s arguments are as cogent as any, and reflect the right of any group
confronted with implied non-existence in the name of modernism to hire
themselves a good lawyer! Although it is entirely understandable for such
groups to feel indignant that the evolutionary theory that is also their
nemesis is flawed, as if they are to be secularized out of existence, it is
also true that religious opposition is as much a part of the problem of the
current ‘stuck paradigm’. Any scientist must be concerned that difficulties
in evolutionary explanation should be taken as grounds for religious
demonstration, or that arguments by design associated with historical religions
seem to have scientific backing. The argument by design, in any historical
form, should be claimed by ‘eonic evolution’, there to dwell behind
recessed glass, for this sense of design is itself an evolutionary
consciousness. Our pattern shows a most bizarre design, but it doesn’t
validate theistic (or atheistic) interpretations, which in the Judaic forms are
clearly proto-eonic, i.e. correlated with our pattern as ‘evolutionary
emergentist outcomes’. In a subsequent book, Reason in the Balance, Johnson
engages the lists for a near campaign against modernism itself, with Darwin
placed beside Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the triad of culprits for the evils
of secularism. [v]The themes of postmodernist fashions are now the grounds for
a comeback of the sacred against the domination of the secular. But the dilemma
is false. Modernism will remain quite secure after these thinkers are out of
fashion, indeed, it is outrageous to hold up the views of Nietzsche in this
way, if he was himself the arch-opponent of the modern world itself. Marx,
however, whatever his theories, had a better sense of the effect of ideology on
social thought. In general, this raises the question of what we mean by
‘modernism’ at all. And if we oppose Marx as modern, what of Adam Smith? To
say nothing of Kant, indeed Martin Luther. Is Luther modern? Johnson launches,
in addition, a campaign against scientific naturalism. As with ‘modernism’,
this is the wrong target. The much heralded ‘naturalistic explanation’
remains almost an impostor, if we do not understand how nature works. This
issue is almost unresolvable given complexities of this ‘nature’, another
problem term, the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenacity of claims of the
sacred against the secular. But the naturalistic explanation is all we have. It
is certainly true that the ‘naturalist explanation’ is often misleading,
and can produce its own myths, but the result is likely replacement by still
another such explanation. A good example is the realm of Old Testament study
itself, that has almost entirely revised the picture we receive from tradition,
and yet left the subject almost as mysterious as before. It is doubtful if the
original religionists, such as the Prophets themselves, would understand our
distinction of sacred and secular. They would have thought their interpretation
of history the only natural explanation! In any case, and here eonic
correlation is of help, we see that the distinction of ‘sacred’ and
‘secular’ is almost meaningless, as we see the parallel emergence of
religion and science together. As to the Old Testament, it contains a stubborn
riddle, and has so far not yielded to the obvious naturalistic explanations
desired for it. In general the anti-modernist argument fails, because Darwinism
is not necessarily one of its defining philosophies. It’s that simple. The
rich structure of the Enlightenment died like a candle in the one-dimensional
implications of Darwinism. [vi]The confusion of periodization and content as
ideology is insidious and needs an eonic clarification. Is Luther secular? It
is interesting to consider that the first stage of modernism, before the
Enlightenment, was the Reformation, and that Fundamentalism is a modern
invention of this century. And it was the issue of evidence and the rise of
Biblical Criticism that moved modernism into its ‘secular’ mode, even as
evidentiary confusions pull thinking into new evolutionary considerations. In
general, it seems as if one tremor in the notion of randomness is sufficient
grounds for the abrogation of the secular. [vii]The great irony of Darwinism,
in tandem with Spencerism, is its serendipity as a de facto episode in the
ongoing religious ‘re-formation’ of modernism. After much criticism of the
Darwinian viewpoint we can restore its historical place as a classic instance
of dialectical negation, rendered to the implications of assumed teleology. But
this is historical effect, secularization, not necessarily scientific finality.
The fate of negation is further negation, like overshoot-undershoot in a
tiller. The term itself, ‘secular’, comes from ‘seculum’, age period,
its meaning thus ‘eonic’. The issue is quite ironic, for the core beliefs
of the ‘sacred’ revolve around the issues of the ‘transcendental’ which
are in origin eonic mythology based on downfield perceptions of what in our
terminology will become ‘ET5, Israel’. It is true, but only in the original
sense arising after the Thirty Years War, that what we call modernism is a form
of secularization.It is testimony to the incomprehension of their own subject
by Christians that Darwinism lasted five minutes in the context of religious
objections. And it is remarkable that while most Protestant churches got their
arm twisted for the new dispensation, the Fundamentalists stood their ground.
This violates the secularist’s normal sense of progress, but there is no
contradiction, if we see that the real context of philosophic evolution in
mid-snafu created the reintegration of linear and parallel evolutions. Thus a
recent defense of modernism by the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, Consilience,
attempts to buttress the Enlightenment tradition, with an engaging appeal to
the early Ionian vision of the oneness of nature. [viii]And this is accompanied
by a complaint against the social sciences, and a call for the application of
science, perhaps sociobiology, to ‘finally do the job’, and clear up their
confusions. This Ionian vision was not the brand of nineteenth century
materialism seen as a kind of final answer by reduction, but a spectrum of
thought that includes the same collision, or ‘dialectic’, of materialism
and idealism that we see recurring in modern times. While this focus on the
Enlightenment is an entirely apt invocation of historical perspective, it fails
to consider that the Ionian vision predates the rising of the great religions,
and appeared in parallel with the Old Testament prophets! How do the proponents
of scientific progress explain this? The reason is plain, if we look at the era
of Classical Greece as it passed into the Hellenistic Age; the birth of science
proved stillborn in a field of rising religion. Our ‘eonic evolution’ shows
the reason for this, and also history to be so complex, that any fuzzy
combination of archetypes might on the average do better than the unilinear
failed hypothesis sequence generated by scientific reductionism, an excessively
harsh or partial view, perhaps, of the long waning of ancient science.
Christianity and its Mayflower churches survived the fall of the Roman Empire
and the Middle Ages, and could survive Darwinism with ease, as they took their
ancestry in the Hellenistic age, where the issues of chance and fortune saw a
first dialectic, and resolution precisely in eonic evolutionary terms, however
mythical. These religions have seen it all before. The proposal to replace the
entire history of struggle over religious questions, and their direct interest
in issues of altruism, with an evolutionary confusion of incorrect theory,
simply catches an historical tripwire and leads to religious conservatism
modernist thinking finds so puzzling. Again, part of the reason lies in the
ambiguity of the term ‘secular’. If this refers to a change of period ca.
1500, or after the Thirty Years War (when religion ceased to be a public
issue), that it one thing. But if it refers to some concoction of Nietzschean
nihilism in a wasteland of civilization without values, then the wheel will
turn again toward religion. Darwin’s achievement is clear, and it is easy to
be unfair to him. But he is more or less on record as assuming that survivalism
is at work in the destruction of primitive races and that the achievements of
the Greek classical period are the result of differential natural selection, a
most doubtful viewpoint. What about the Hittites? These were essentially the
same tribal and linguistic stock. Yet they echo Mesopotamia, and shew very
little creative culture. What about the Romans? They are almost a variant
tribe, yet already look backwards to an established tradition. One is just
before, the other just after. In parallel we find the post-Vedic mimic in
concert the Greeks in music of a different key. This has to be a problem of
periodization. The foundations of the Greek classical achievement appeared at
almost record speed from -900 to -600 for reasons, we can strongly suggest,
that were conditioned by zone and period. This remarkable interval, echoed in
the raw structure of the Old Testament, has no other account than as a ‘fast
interrupt’. Even if we thought they had special talents or intelligence as a
culture, this other explanation would hold good. For we will move to see the
full counter-experiments in all combinations, the comparable Hittites, and
(Greek) Mycenaeans before, the Romans just after. In general, evolutionary
theory assumes that selection for intelligence is a foregone conclusion in the
evolution of the brain. Even the small snapshot we have of human history shows
the ‘survivors’ too often to be a very restricted range of men. Uphill
selection requires unique conditions for success.We must especially note the
falloff of theeffect in this parallel case of the Romans, for they almost seem
to be there torescue something from the onset of post-transitional chaos. In
general,selection can decrease potential. Our transitional periods seem to
increase it.And all the great advances of civilization show eonic period
conditioning attheir source, temporally and geographically. Selectionism could
hardly be themechanism of this evolution for we see the same population streams
switched onand off, although it would be of great interest to know the
geneticpreliminaries and consequences of these waves of advancing civilization.
Thedanger is that realization from high potential will select away from
itsinnovations, the abortive classical birth of science being an example. For
it ispossible to consider that outstanding abilities or cultural assets
enableparticular groups to respond to the eonic effect more
readily.Civilization simply does not arise through the survival of the fittest,
and frequently shows signs of logjam as the ‘fittest’ induce stasis in the
persistence of sterile themes of domination, power, and militarism. One can
only wonder at the ‘genetic cost’ of civilization itself, and the effect of
centuries of warfare, political submission, and hangman judges. Nor is the
runaway suggestion of the nature of social competition in public thinking a
helpful contribution to an already stressed environment of colliding parties
whose first need is mutual cooperation. The game of the survival of the fittest
makes no sense in a context where we see religions emerge in periodic rhythm,
along with science and philosophy.One of the most remarkable aspects
ofantiquity is the uphill selection against inertia, indeed, the focal
selectionof advancing areas. Against the restriction of potential in selection
we seeseparate worlds mapped out in parallel. The entire spectrum of
humanconsciousness is explored during a particular show of emergent culture.
Thesystem anticipates its own transitional outcome, as whole literatures appear
toservice a coming oikoumene. The system seems to focus on the
operationalinstruments of its evolutes in their highest potential, as heights
of thoughtare reached with almost instantaneous bursts of advance, the example
of emergentGreek tragedy being one of the most remarkable examples.
[i]Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (NY: Routledge, 1963).
[ii]Robert Young, Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge,1985), p.247.
[iii]David Stowe, Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995).
[iv]For an example of this ‘playing both sides of the fence’, cf. National
Review, December 1997. The reader is assured Darwinism is compatible with
religion, even as an extreme sociobiological conservatism is held to derive
from fresh fields of research.
[v]Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Wash: Regnery Gateway, 1991), Reasonin the
Balance (1995), Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (Boston:Gambit, 1971).
[vi]This is itself, perhaps, a slightly one-sided view of the
‘Enlightenment’. The Scottish Enlightenment of Hume and Smith and its
progeny, such as Darwinism, are simply one strain in the complex perspectives
of what we will generalize as ‘eonic transition’.
[vii]In God, The Evidence (Rocklin, Ca: Prima), Patrick Glynn, anthropic magpie
and jungle theologian, suggests that evidence of the non-random, as seen in
recent speculations about the anthropic principle, entails the complete
resurrection of every divine fairytale of Biblical antiquity. Such tactics of
indirect institutional pleading make the life of public enquiry very difficult
indeed, and might also consider endorsing the authority of Islamic Mullahs—if
was Darwin wrong. The confusion is thus entirely double, and works in both
directions. It is simply unfair to pick holes in the difficulties of Darwinist
theory on the grounds of evidence in order to justify metaphysical beliefs
where the issue of evidence is conveniently reclassified as a issue of faith.
[viii]Edward Wilson, Consilience (NY: Knopf, 1998).

John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
nemon...@aol.com

[RepackRider]

nemon...@aol.com (Nemonemini) writes:

>Those who, in diverse walks of life, take Darwinism as established to render
>judgement on social issues of great import are under a heavy obligation to
>get
>straight whence the sources of their beliefs, and, if necessary, conduct
>their
>own enquiry.

Darwin's theory applied to biology. Only a moron would attempt to apply it to
social issues.

Would you apply engineering principles to the practice of law?

Who *are* these morons who are attempting to apply biological principles to
social issues? Can we just lock them up? It's tough enough defending the
theory of evolution against most morons, so when people misuse it in the
fashion you have described it makes our job of applying rational principles
even more difficult.

~~ Repack Rider ~~

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