Re: Evolution Discussion - Landon's and Prugovecki's Posts

The relationship of history and evolution is currently incoherent, due to the confusions of Darwinism, with its purely genetic interpretation. In my interpretation is I look at history as a transition from evolution to history, in the sense of moving from something passive to something active. Thus the 'evolution of freedom' might be seen as such a transition. The eonic model shows one way to harmonize the two contradictory ideas.
 
My point was merely the danger of Darwinian thinking applied to culture, especially in the context of nutty confusions surfacing in terms of Judaic culture and Darwinism, and the dangers of that in a context like that of Israel. 
Judaic exceptionalism mixed with Darwinian thinking, especially the tacit variety couched in religious or other language, as indicated in Progovecki's link, is a current version of Social Darwinist paranoia. And it is dangerous. 
Jews are smart people, but I am often surprised, they don't seem smart enough to see the flaws in Darwin, or get out of the rut of their own (beguiling, to be sure) historical myths.  People like Stephen Gould, whom I admire, is a good example. He simply cannot get out of the rut of positivist Darwinism. He got the whole thing wrong. 
It is important to wake up a bit. 

As to the other matter, I am always suspicious, looking, say, at current Israel politics, that dangerous people are all set to take Darwin into their own hands and exterminate the opposition in a deadly combination of religious, Darwinian, and political thinking. We seem to have to live through each successive phase of the dangers of Social Darwinism, now this new Judaic version. 
What can I say? If you think Darwin got it right, these horrors keep resurfacing. 

It is essential therefore to be clear that extermination and social competition generally do not constitute evolution, whatever there basis as an historical sideshow. 
The sad fact is that Darwin seems to appeal to a lot of stupid people! Natural selection is always the case by default. But as the Holocaust shows, unchecked natural selection killed off six million people who were culturally progressive. 
The regressive dangers of unchecked natural selection could not be more dramatically illustrated. 
Left to its own natural selection would probably cause evolutionary decline. 

The point is to see that something completely different is going on in history, in the sense of evolutionary theory. The irony is that Judaic history shows a connection to the eonic effect, but only at the Axial connnection point. The whole point of these religions, spiritual issues apart, was to connect humanity as one. But the hopeless confusions of Darwinism have about destroyed that idea, I guess. 

As to smart Jews, some people get into a tizzy there. Who cares? 'Smart people' are not an evolutionary vanguard, blah blah.  
It just doesn't work that way, as the case of Israel shows ironically. IT DOESN"T WORK THAT WAY.
I have to throw up my hands. Darwin's appeal to dumb people is extraordinary, and it makes them think they are smart. 

We could as well be glad some group of humanity pulls ahead to some degree and is able to contribute to the whole. 

But real evolution is not, NOT, darwinian, and the current regime of Darwinian thinking will probably end up wrecking the whole contribution of Jews, witness the lost cause of Isrealite politics. 



In a message dated 5/11/2003 9:45:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time, larondin@yahoo.com writes:

> Re: Evolution Discussion &John Landon's/Eduard Prugovecki's message: I find these comments here to be most interesting and helpful to me in my own considerations of the Darwinism issue.  My own reply is interspersed in with each of the messages. John Landon Wrote:
>
>  <Observing the confusion over evolution in some current threads I thought it worth reiterating the need for a challenge to basic Darwinian assumptions about evolution … The whole set of assumptions is wrong, whatever the limited evidence for variational evolution, by random mutation, genetic drift, and indirect pseudo-evolution by natural selection. Real evolution is almost terra incognita and we need a stabilizing macro model that applies to history and separates history from earlier evolution. Otherwise the standard fallacies of Social Darwinism forever resurface.> 
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> I agree with this assessment.  Evolution (as Evolution)(and for the time being, not as biological adaptations …) is unknown territory  What is it?  What are we dealing with?  Is this Evolutionary Macro-Process a subset of Complex Systems Dynamics or something akin to Quantum phenomena (that operates on the level of cosmology rather than on the level of subatomic systems)?  While it may display characteristics that are in line with any of these things, we just don’t know what it exactly is.  I mean, the process’s physicality (meaning its structured operative matrix of matter, energy, force relationships)(rather than its physicality as ‘essence’ or ‘whatness’) even is of a quality we are unsure about.  It is an environmental factor that determines the adaptation of physical and biological systems over time?  Or, if is ‘naturalistic’, how does its physicality differ from the causality of environmental determination?  That is the problematic catch of this discussion.  I might be willing to venture a guess that “environment” differs from “nature” here in terms of its being an interior feature of material systems rather than an exterior one (that is, a process whose only indicators are looking at a system over a long period of time and seeing its results, considering a physical entity in terms of WHOLE-PART distinctions wh/ X constitutes a physical thing existing in a universal, environment Y, with nature being the systematic structural-operative linkage between X and Y).  It’s probably not a satisfying explanation of the topic; still it ventures forth a hypothesis of the nature-environment dilemma for our discussions.
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>  One other concern:  I’m a little bit puzzled about this need to separate history from earlier evolution.  Why do we need to if they are part and parcel of the same operative function over time (first in biological adaptation on this planet and then in human social development)?  If evolution does “behave like [world] history” [World History and the Eonic Effect], then why possibly would we even have to make such a distinction?  The only thing we’d be changing in our analysis might be the circumstances under which CHANGE takes place; but the same overall Eonic evolutionary mechanism would still be the same.  The drum and drumbeat wouldn’t change; what would be affected by this drumbeat would change, and the specifics of how that drumbeat played in with the things that were affected would change.   True, we wouldn’t see exactly the kind of “free action scripting” we see in human societies; but the “fast action” “spikes” of development, the “transitions”, and the “stream”/ “sequence” of evolutionary development would still be there in earlier evolution, wouldn’t they? …
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> <Darwin's theory is always dangerous because it makes people unconsciously suspicious some form of mayhem is the clue to cultural advance. This nutty idea is concealed in Darwin PR, but always lurks there. So be apprised of the limits of Darwin's theory.> 



John Landon
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