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Although this study of history, World History and the Eonic Effect, is not as such about Darwinism, the latter's influence on the study of history is indirect, unseen, and very great. Therefore, it is essential, and interesting, before looking at evolution and history, to review some of the critical literature on the subject to be clear that no one is under any evidentiary obligation to take Darwinian selectionism as established scientifically, surprising as some may find that. In fact, in the light of the new knowledge of developmental genetics, the old critiques of Darwinism have won the debate, as the microevolution of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis is (conjecturally) seen as the result of different processes altogether, only to be confounded by the fact that macroevolution has become the microevolution of regulatory genes. As students of the eonic effect, we should rest our case there, suspicious if not dogmatic that the real macroevolution is something altogether different.

Although our approach here starts with an old-fashioned critique of natural selection, our broad scope requires no absolute opinion on such a confusing subject except a willingness to re-ask, 'what is evolution?' Now cosmologists speak of evolution, cultural anthropologists speak of evolution. The emergence of life, the origins of taxa, the origins of species, the origins of virtue, the descent of man, the whole muddle isn't yet a theory on the level of physics. We can induce some Darwin doubt and then make a fast getaway into our study of historical evolution by drawing our focus on the 'evolution of civilization', as this is the only closely sampled record at the level of centuries that we have of the evolution of anything. There, at least, we see that Darwinism is not appropriate, as T. H. Huxley was one of the first to admit. Evolutionary theory must be on the move now that the world of biochemical complexity is eroding the claims of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, so-called. Many of the claims for slow random evolution won't stand up in the world of regulatory genes switching the developmental processes on and off. In fact, this side of the heritage of evolution dates back to the nineteenth century and emerges parallel with Darwinism. These new discoveries have confirmed many of the objections of long-standing critics of selectionism.

In a rapidly changing field these old critiques of natural selection have in fact been amply confirmed, as the question of regulatory genes changes the picture of evolution altogether. The claims for micromutational and incremental evolution are becoming a dead letter as macroevolution is increasingly seen as the result of vaunted 'macromutation' turned into developmental evolution possibly matched with population genetics produces an entirely different perspective on evolution. If basic body plans have remained invariant since the Cambrian, we should be wasting little time on the evolution of major organs by the Darwinian process. Now 'macroevolution' can even, in this perspective, be seen as the 'microevolution' of selected regulatory genes.

The unstated hope of Darwin's theory, in many ways, is to eliminate the quagmire of 'macroevolution', if not supernaturalism. What is macroevolution? We have no closely observed examples. We can agree that this is a difficult area, about which speculation is less than useful, but the persistent problems here arise from the inability to close track evolution in practice. That makes the possibility very large that we will see the 'local' but not the 'global' aspect of evolution. It is an insidious trap.

Questions of evolutionary directionality have never really been settled, a work such as S. Gould's (very important) Wonderful Life are unable to truly make is case. Foregoing the issue of supernaturalism, we can challenge natural selection, to enter and pass beyond this quagmire of macroevolution, with a very simple periodization of world history, and argument that is both transparent, yet whose implications pile up to something remarkable. Even if we can't resolve the issue of macroevolution in deep time, we are almost driven to table the issues it raises, if only to discover how little we know, and to keep open issues declared settled, when we suspect they are not settled. For the study of the eonic effect gives us a little edge, we have 'seen evolution', albeit a very advanced form of 'cultural evolution', but this gives us the strong suspicion something is awry with Darwin's theory. Please note, observational evidence is so far insufficient to settle these issues. Nor are the typical examples sometimes cited sufficient. Therefore it is enough here to simply call in doubt this foundation. There are no extra benefits granted, either as to the argument by design, now raging, or theistic alternatives. Nonetheless, the 'evolution of values', a direct task of the examination of the eonic effect, remains on the agenda of Darwinism, even as it is filtered from discussion. Thus we do not challenge natural selection to claim a religious agenda, but we will find ourselves in theoretical deep waters as to naturalism macroevolution, a subject that we can partially clarify with an empirical historical model.

We need no conclusions here one way or the other about earlier evolution, no one knows. But we must be clear that natural selection is not appropriate in the context of cultural evolution, and is a poor candidate for the evolution of values, art, religion, and much else. Hopefully this page will make you a Darwin doubter. Once a Darwin doubter, you are a better Darwin student. At least separate organismic and cultural evolution. The case for evolution is strong, but for evolutionary mechanism up in the air. T. H. Huxley, with his reservations about selectionism and the continuity of the evolutionary process, would be considered a non-Darwinian by current standards, and we can simply take it from there. His generation fought the battle for evolution in general, armed with a poorly conceived theory, one that Darwin himself equivocated. For Huxley saw in the end that cultural evolution is a new development whose values proceed against 'cosmic evolution', as he called it. The question is simple, we see that the fossil record has resulted in a non-random pattern of evidence. Therefore we are on justified grounds in calling selectionism into question.

Study of the eonic effect reorients our perspective on history and suggests something different indeed. It is also a practical way to bring attention back to the reality of some close historical data. Imposing a theory about unobserved evolution onto the reality given by history is a monumental snafu of bad theory. This can be invaluable as means to separate the confusion of organismic and cultural evolution, and in the process see how unrealistic Darwinism is. A contradiction lurks in evolutionary reasoning. For the Darwinian proposition is often taken as a universal generalization, and then applied to cultural evolution, when that approach is clearly inappropriate, as T. H. Huxley himself realized: culture is proceeding against evolution into ethical self-realization, and the broader context of culture. Darwinism is confusing us, for evolution is far more subtle than we had expected. We assume that we are privileged meta-observers external to what is being observed in a special present as 'theoretical high ground', a dangerous assumption. Although ambiguous the eonic effect is the closest thing we can get to counterevidence against selectionism. It amounts to a reminder that our own history must speak for itself, and cannot be rewritten to satisfy the peculiarities of Darwinian fallacies. We have observed cultural evolution more than the earlier organismic, therefore it is one good place to focus our interest. We need conclude nothing about Darwinism except that it doesn't apply to history. Nothing more complex than periodization applied to world history forces us to ask what we mean by 'evolution'. we can see that 'evolution' operates at high speed in intermittent cycles, must operate on populations over millennia in spotting phases, and be subtle enough to generate art, language, religion in source areas.

The 'eonic effect' is almost a restatement of the obvious, just one step beyond ordinary history into the macro-historical, and is the bare minimum of a 'Big History' argument, significant in itself, and useful as a foil to reconsider the idea of evolution. What are we to conclude if data at the level of centuries doesn't square with inferences about large tracts of time in the unobserved past? Be wary of the evidentiary basis of Darwinian theory. The catch is the porous nature of the data, and the high probability of short term action processes, that are different from the average perception seen in the record. History shows multiple examples of this effect, and we would do well do wonder if similar processes did not occur in the evolution of man. Current arguments in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology make wild assumptions about the descent of man, then reapply those to cultural evolution, the result is completely misleading. History shows us the nature of ethics, religion, we simply have to learn how to understand them. Most of the great foundational advances in the last five thousand years happen at high speed, followed by a slower period of a different type.

Then what do we mean by 'evolution'? How does it apply to our history? The term is almost a fumbled football, we can try a wholesale approach to different meanings. Our 'eonic' meaning nevertheless tends to suggest a long range planetary-scale frequency 'self-organization' process operating at the highest level of culture. Although the issues of so-called 'punctuated equilibrium tend to suffer many confusions making use of the term equivocal, it is remarkable that we see something like this phenomenon in our own history, and it is not quite what we expect, an overall systematic 'evolution'. Originally issued for the observations of trilobites its facile extensions are suggestive but confusing, and the term was immediately rescued for natural selection, which is misleading. We can take our 'punctuated equilibrium' to mean 'high speed' cultural evolution, a 'slow-fast' phenomenon, and then set the biological term aside, for it will provoke only controversies. We can see that world history is embedded in one of these 'punctuated equilibria', although we must change the terminology adapted to compromise with selectionism, for these high speed transformations are almost infinite in scope. In fact, we can see the critical flaw in Darwinism, if applied to cultural evolution: it cannot account for the emergence of values.

Defending natural selection has gone on so long that it is hard to realize it is almost certainly a limited solution to a more complex answer. Most importantly Darwinism provides no conclusive proof that natural selection resolves the complexities of the descent of man. If you assume natural selection, then.... The deductions from this theory should most assuredly have blown the whistle on these claims, e.g. in relation to the questions of ethics. Yet, instead, the various accounts of evolutionary psychology, let us say, as to cultural evolution, are given routine rubber stamp. You don't have to buy it. Darwinian theory accepts a very low standard of proof. As if circle squarers had taken over the American Mathematical Society to claim propositions establised they found desirable on other grounds, Darwinian theory proceeds like a take-over party in power.

This is a question of theory, the broad picture of evolutionary data is fairly clear, bravo, etc, to Darwinists for their meticulous documentation of the 'traces of deep time' that have so transformed our views of the world. And many of the objections of critics are in fact found to be false. But the dynamic of evolution remains elusive. Unfortunately, without the mechanism (and the use of the term 'mechanism' tends to be misleading), many deductions therefrom, viz. as to historical directionality, fail at once. Directionality is not teleology, and is strongly suggested by many indirect arguments. Therefore the arguments such as those in Gould's Wonderful Life or Full House, while of great importance as a caution to teleological confusions, cannot be taken as fully established.

The basic difficulties of theory are reasonably clear. Every stage of the theory is contested. And each step is incomplete. We have many stages of the all-important idea of evolution appearing in diverse contexts:

1. Cosmic Evolution
2. Exobiology, the Cosmology of Life, if any
3. The origin of life on earth
4. The transition from cells to animals, body plans, the origins of taxa, Cambrian issues
5. Transformations of species, extinctions, cladistic questions, punctuated equilibria
6. The descent of man

This is a vast range, and doesn't add up yet to a single theory. One good perspective is that of exobiology, whatever our views here. Is there some cosmological component or necessity to the rise of life in general, and on Earth in particular? Such a vast range is not easily encompassed by one generalization. And in the realm of cultural evolution we are most liable to falsify its axioms by assumptions that are really applied reductionism, and not empirical.

Basically, the theory of natural selection is basically implausible statistically, especially now that we are confronted by the world of DNA. Look carefully at a book on DNA. It is simply not as certain as proponents would like to claim that these structures arise at random. Nor is nonsense about 'exon shuffling' a resolution. Strictly speaking, the theory is about mutation, random variation, and selection, many shades of distinction and traps here, but the basic issue remains. Random changes in the long strips of genetic material, to say nothing of their developmental sequences, invoke some long odds indeed.

Random variation (Lee Spetner, Not by Chance) is itself not completely established. Beyond that the theory and the fossil record are suspiciously out of kilter, starting with the Cambrian era. Pre-Cambrian 'fossils' have, however, established one part of Darwin's conjectures, though this does not confirm natural selection. The emergence of body plans very early, their relative invariance, and the crucial factor of developmental processes, make strict natural selection seem quite weak indeed. Evolutionary rates of change are variable. Species tend to emerge rapidly and stabilize. Explanations of this often invoke the contingency of 'evolutionary history', e.g. the sudden extinction of dinosaurs. This again is not proof of Darwin's theory. We consider evolution as 'random' in the sense that the fossil record shows patterning, e.g. the Cambrian era suggests clustering of general evolutionary process at a high level. There is something missing at each of these points. The argument is confused, because these 'exceptions' are taken as proof of the failure of naturalism, while defenders of evolution indulge in foxhole thinking to defend this naturalism with unverified oversimplifications, to forestall preemption of their subject. Understandable, but liable to a subtler confusion. In general, the overall record is severely skewed and shows a greater complexity near the end, in shorter time, a question not of spiritual evolution, but strong evidence of a naturalistic evolution we don't understand. The generation of advanced organs is an old issue now, but never made any sense, as Darwin feared, and now this is confirmed by the discovery of the importance of regulatory genes. Older critics of Darwin in this respect are confirmed in one sense, yet frustrated in another, if they had expected a non-naturalistic explanation. Darwinists must now argue apparently that mutations will result in the construction of this entirely different process in such genes, but this is simply another assumption. The crux of the process is pushed backwards to the original source of this 'information' which isn't generated by random variation.

The answer is staring everyone in the face: the later types of developmental process have replaced their own evolution, but suggest the same 'developmental sequence' at work on a large scale, in some unknown combination of chance and necessity. In general we ask how life could arise, but it arises every day in ongoing natural events, but these, of course, have covered the tracks of the original evolutionary stages of this omnipresent process. The inability or extreme unlikelihood of natural selection then to produce parallel or synchronous mutations, and not just a few, but thousands, should have been an obvious objection, from the word 'go'. The statistics are hopeless.

Population genetics is now a mathematical subject, but that is misleading. The lingo often speaks in these works of the 'fundamental theorem' of genetics, in a clear echo of a Newtonian model. But this is not adequate to the subject, and is a veneer of rigor. The hybrid of 'causal' and 'statistical' explanation conceals the absence of any real 'causal' factor. There is no 'force' equivalent in the equation, analogous to the forces of physics present in the derivation of physical laws. This apparent rigor of mathematical models of evolutionary populations would silence most amateurs but stand or fall with the evidence and are irrelevant. Natural selection is always the case, but this is not an explanation of the rise of true novelty. We live in a century of brilliant technology and bad models applied to social sciences. These equations invoke parameters that could hardly even be measured, such as 'fitness'. They assume no future or past, only a pseudo-causal present. Without hard proof, it is legitimate to demur, although they work fine in the various fields to which they are applied successfully for other reasons. But they are not the equivalent of Newton's laws for biology.

Most of all, no account of values, morality, art, consciousness or even basic culture has any status as workable in any theory based on natural selection. It is the wildest assumption that ulterior reduction can generate all these later complexities via natural selection. They are not adaptations. Religion, art, these are not adaptations to anything. They are not! They appear by different historically demonstrable processes.

What is our starting point? Since the grounds for reduction lie in physics, not biology, Darwinism is a poor intermediate, and no candidate, for this task. If we can't derive evolution from physics, why should we derive culture from early evolution. We must be suspicious 'evolution is evolving' and that the later stages are simply discontinuous new sciences. The problem is not supernaturalism, but the failure to observe the problem we are trying to explain. Should we wait for the resolution of string theory to start on evolution?

Beyond Natural Selection Our critique of natural selection is very simple and takes one line: the evidence doesn't match the thesis. This basic criticism has always resulted either in other errors, speculations, or religious agendas, sometimes blunting the impact. Natural selection, all the confusing prevarication aside, strongly suggests a continuous record of evolution, yet we see that the 4+ billion year record simply doesn't correspond to this mechanism. Many other difficulties are confusingly absent from the literature presented to students. Natural selection is taken as the sine qua non of a purely non-teleological naturalism. Hence the reason for its obsessive defense.
Statistics We can debate ad infinitum over the details of natural selection, only to wonder if there is any debate at all. One of the most notable critiques of the past generation is that of Evolution from Space, by F. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who find the statistical difficulties of natural selection to be insuperable. Noting the way in which selectionism (originally proposed and rejected earlier by Edward Blyth) triumphed, the authors note; There was no general perception that the real issue of controversy, as it had existed decades earlier between Blyth and Darwin, had still to be resolved. The difficulty for the few who wished to come to grips with the real question of whether random mutations and natural selection had been sufficient to explain the origin of species, and by implication the origin of life, which Darwin maintained but which Blyth did not, was that in the nineteenth century the theory was impossible to quantify. Before modern microbiology, the evolutionist simply pointed to the long time-scales of geology and there was then no way to demonstrate that it would need a time-scale 10^40,000 times as long to produce the effects that were being claimed. p.133
Note Darwinian theory distinguishes 'non-random' natural selection and randomness, in the random factor of variation. True. But don't be confused by that distinction. Let us note that Darwin himself ended up unsure on this point, for those who invoke his name like a mantra. Random evolution is one thing and natural selection of random variation may be non-random by a technicality, but the basic point is clear. Something is missing in the standard account. Here 'nonrandomness' in our sense means the there is some irregular pattern in the expected continuity suggested by selectionist evolution. The record should be uniform continuity, else there is no other factor. If there is a rustling in the bushes, you suspect a cause, etc... A further twist can be seen in the claims for the contingent, e.g. a meteor impact and the fossil record of the dinosaurs. Thus, and this is confusing, a contingent or random (we presume) meteor impact derandomizes the fossil record. Beware of the hopeless confusion of terms. These accounts are all especially confusing. The nonrandom factor in general is simply evidence of an unknown evolutionary incident, process, or function. It is because religionists always attempt to say this is a sign of a supernatural cause that Darwinists retreat into oversimplification. Then again, some uses are inserting a force into the concept of selectionism, 'selection pressure', the 'force' of selection, etc.. There are no such forces, by definition. If there are, then Bergson deserves rehabilitation. There probably are! But they are not likely to be 'forces' in the physics sense. It's all a muddle. If we knew of one, or discovered one, then selectionism should be set aside as a secondary process. Thus, such language is tantamount to a confession selectionism fails.
Lovtrup At a time when the developmental aspect of evolution is coming to the fore once again, Soren Lovtrup's Darwinism is worth reading, along with, Refutation of a Myth, Robert Reid's Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis, and Robert Wesson's Beyond Natural Selection, which contain general critiques of Darwinism that are very useful starting points for those confused by the general tenor of certainty cast about the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. W. R. Bird's monumental two volume work, The Origin of the Species Revisited, contains 5000 references on Darwinism, including virtually all the critiques. The complexity of the subject makes the challenge seem difficult, but the basic issues are relatively clear.

The Darwin debate forever confuses the different types of evolutionary statements. Especially in public discourse, over and over again, the theme of evolution is sold and taken thence to imply its mechanism. You are left to agree that since you agree to evolution you agree to natural selection. And this creates endless mutual misunderstanding. It is remarkable how little this distinction is addressed in promoters of Darwinism. For it is convenient to win two arguments in one, the bad part never making it to public discussion. Creationists have long been wise to this, hence the endless babble over the fact and the theory. Lovtrup's version more or less finishes the question.

Many of the problems of evolution were foreseen before Darwin by Kant, in another context. E.O.Wilson in Consilience, quid vide, makes some hasty remarks on Kant. But this philosopher will endure after sociobiology goes the way of psychoanalysis. We are so conditioned to Darwinism that we forget the early dilemma arising in the generation after Newton, that the problems of values and mechanical evolution were on a collision course. Kant's system here is instructive. There are difficulties no doubt with Kant's system, but we can by a hunch wonder if Darwinian selectionism will suffer precisely the Kantian crux in three areas, divinity, soul, free will. Sure enough, right on schedule, we see the design debate, as we know, confusion over the definition of organism, less discussed, and, what amounts to the free will debate, confusion over the distinction of cultural and organismic evolution. There is an irony to rejecting Kant. He asked if there is a science of metaphysics. If there is not, it's your theory that will pay the penalty. Physics, and standard definitions of science, are misleading here. Mechanical systems do not produce life in the sense of strict causal systems. This point is granted now in the various formulations of, say, self-organizing processes. Popper's work restates one part of the Kantian thesis, incidentally, as this was applied many times to social theories in debates Darwinist social science would have us forget.

Kant's famous Critiques have no binding force, at least in current thought, but they are a warning, and do suggest that the pure empiricism of materialist evolution will founder sooner or later. Let us note also, that Kant is significant for looking to the elusive 'between', between rationalism and empiricism. We think Darwinism empirical, but its theory is a speculative metaphysics in disguise. Sooner or later, then, so long to this theory. Kant would have been a better discipline for evolutionary theorists (and actually was in the nineteenth century), for he lived in the generation that gave birth to Biblical Criticism, granted the dangers of metaphysical conceptions or the arguments by design, yet foresaw the limitations of biological theories almost before the fact. Although evolutionists pride themselves on being liberated from metaphysics, their theory encloses the Big Three, and will promptly fail or conceal its failure in ideology. One, two, three, the theory goes through three red lights, the Kantian antinomies of divinity, soul, free will, with a strangely overconfident metaphysical omniscience. The question of 'soul' is fatally ambiguous, but the question can be translated downward to psychology without its transcendental trappings. A theory of evolution requires a theory of psychology complete and ready to ship, otherwise what is you evolving theory about? Yet psychology is still a developing subject moving in parallel with evolutionary speculation. Kant's works confuse people, perhaps, because they seem to express 'transcendental idealism'. But that is completely misleading. The term 'transcendental' has a different meaning and is irrelevant here.

To conclude, there is something as peculiar about Darwin's theory as there is about Lamarck's. Lamarck is often ridiculed for his theory of the mechanism of evolution, but Darwinian selectionism is hardly less peculiar. The giraffe's neck we are to presume arises through natural selection and survival of the fittest. Near vast fields of gazelle, wildebeest, elephants, in primeval savannahs, apparently with no nutritional difficulties, a Malthusian struggle of giraffes takes place selecting those with longer necks, that they might not starve in droves in a competition for survival. Is this theory serious? Part of the problem is the failure to visualize what requires explanation. A strange incoherence haunts the whole theory.

Many will now grant that natural selection is only part of the answer. No doubt. But what part? To grant this much essentially retreats from claiming anything. A man could be run over by a truck. Granted that is natural selection, but it is not evolution. The reality is probably reversed. Competition or survival of the fittest may just as well lead away from 'evolution'. Part of the confusion rises from the sheer desperation of survival of primitive men at all times. If a species becomes extinct, then clearly there is no evolution. But this is not the resolution of the evolutionary mechanism. This sense of survival is itself evolutionary, and colors the theory, which is immersed in man's own evolution, and therefore not a theory in a metalanguage of true description.

In history the point is clear that survival is a harsh discipline, but natural selection too frequently destroys the truly innovative, small-scale, evolution. Compare the Assyrians and the evanescent Classical Greeks. The long term effect of the strongest was demonstrably anti-evolutionary in antiquity, the greatest innovators and their eras short-lived and hard put to survive at all.

What do we mean by evolution and how can we use the term for our subject? Proponents of selectionist evolution do this all the time with ideas of 'economic or cultural evolution'. The problem, as is demonstrated in the beginning of the book on the eonic effect, is the subtle implication of 'universal generalization' that makes many think all evolution is uniform. Our use of the term 'evolution' in history must be defined, sui generis. We need at the same time to clarify the meaning of evolution as this is applied to the 'descent of man' and his emergence into history. Here, precisely, the assumption of universal generalization leads Darwinists to simply assume without proof that man evolved through natural selection, assertion without proof, as the study of history must force us to suspect. As Huxley realized, quite late, culture is moving 'against evolution', as it were. Whence this 'change in gears'? In fact, the word is purely descriptive until we specify a mechanism, but that has never been observed at close hand. Evolution could itself 'evolve' and show different processes at different times.

Thus natural selection flunks its first and most important test, which doesn't mean it's wrong, only that it should be taken as less than 'certainly proven'. Selectionism is simply out of tune with its subject as we move in the realm of man. We are near an old problem, and debate, seen in the fate of positivism, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the many critiques of reductionism. Many critiques of reductionism are themselves flawed and its impulse is valid, but likely to prove misleading. Generally, we can see theory struggling at the frontiers of thermodynamics (toward a real theory of the future beyond the current vaporware) and the transition between cosmology and life. Mechanics is yielding to some unknown form of information science. Bare inspection of the complexities of DNA, functional computer programs, does not inspire confidence that random changes can produce evolution. What is most surprising is the failure of so many in the social sciences to grasp that there is even a problem. The issue has created a scientific credibility gap. The quality of the responses to criticism are rote denunciation. We should rightly then, despite a chorus of critics, stand back and reserve judgment and not give natural selection the free ride it is generally granted.

Indeed, Darwinists wish to rewrite the entire anthropology of man with some dubious notions, incomplete or nonexistent evidence, and little ability on the part of the public to dissent. We should enquire carefully into its foundations, to see if we are really required to accept its conclusions. We soon discover immense difficulties in all theoretical aspect of Darwinism, along with the reasons the rigor of the hard sciences becomes ambiguous in the Life Sciences. . The hold of Darwinism on secular opinion is such that the burden of disproof is put on the critic when the issue should be the other way around. We should not by any reckoning of real science think we are required to accept at face value the claims for natural selection as proven given the demonstrations current of its tenets. The point deserves emphasis since an immense amount of social science stands on a poor foundation by taking for granted the assertions of biologists. It is important to remember that in science you have a right to hard evidence. While some boast in Nietzschean fashion of Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a book by Daniel Dennett), we should stand back to remember that we are responsible for the effects of our affirmations, for they can have drastic consequences. Darwin's idea is dangerous, for it suggests a strategy of cultural evolution at variance with the ethical advances of civilization, such as they are, and does so without proper evidentiary foundation. That's a terrible brewing scandal for the reputation of science, one its practitioners cannot seem to grasp. To debunk the supernatural is one thing, but to pit one culture, civilization, or race against the other in theory as a derivative of natural selection (and it is no good denying Darwinists do this between the lines) flies in the face of the historical fact of man's efforts to ecumenize, and integrate the entire range of humanity as one.

Finally, this theory has always been under ideological suspicion. It is immersed in a great cultural shift to secularism, whose momentum is tremendous and will make thought lazy because it will succeed even without a correct theory. A puzzling fact, but it is clear that the tide of Darwinism carried the day in the wake of Darwin and his promoters, even as Darwin virtually seesawed about his original claims. And the onset of Social Darwinism was momentous. And the era of conservative reaction in the wake of the revolutionary times of democracy and the struggle for equality found pleasing the suggestion 'top dogs' were the 'forefront of evolutionary survival'. It was an altogether curious free gift to powerful social elites who quite like this view of things and are essentially given an ethical free hand in the name of hard science by the theory, with the payoff and justification absurdly projected on the future of evolution. The mentality of economic or sports competition has overtaken the theory, this is locker room jock jargon, not science. We should hire Sherlock here, fishy. The evolutionary idea emerging in the midst of early nineteenth century evolutionary radicalism suddenly became mainstream in Darwin's conservatizing rendition around natural selection as 'slow evolution' adapted forthwith to economic thinking. The unfounded equation of economic competition and organismic evolution is dubious in the extreme. The idea that competition generates higher biological complexity is simply unproven, and implausible. Competition seems as likely to degrade structure. The odor of ideological fix lingers distastefully over the entire subject, one repeatedly pressed into service as economic justification. In this context, as they say, 'the evidence better be good'. In fact, there is essentially no evidence that natural selection has produced a new species, a complex organ, or a major evolutionary transition. And our own history shows the dangers of a theory promoting endless social competition. This theory claims subliminally that competition will generate higher evolutionary types over the long term, a species of absurdity, and a disservice to culture.