1. INTRODUCTION
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| 1.1 A Glimpse of Evolution | ||||
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The legacy of modern historical research is an ambiguous
one: the conductor’s baton of the Universal Historian
taps the podium, in a concert of art,
science and philosophy, the theme of evolution rising aggressively to the fore,
soon becoming the basis of all further secular generalization about human
origins. Although evolutionary research has proved a success as a project of
empirical discovery, beside its cousin, the archaeological uncovering of man’s
entry into civilization, the claims of evolutionary theory are much less certain
than we might expect. Critics of Darwinism often
point to the fossil record, upon which But it is important to consider the ambiguity at the heart of evolutionary theory itself, where this pursues the timeless ‘laws of nature’ onto nature’s stage of life where time is of the essence, and the timely arrival of an abundance of creatures finds no reckoning in the orbits of mass and force. As if by a new law, the era of life finds refuge in a global moment, hideaway to beasts of a small planet, making engines of machines to consume mass and force. At last we find man whose claim is to cut history from evolution, graduate from all laws into a domain of freedom, as a law unto himself, in the court of small kingdoms and the self-realization of his individuality. In this ambiguity of chance and necessity we might search for the deeper meaning behind our use of the term ‘evolution’. In parallel with the nineteenth century emergence of evolutionary research, the rise of archaeology has wrought a similar transformation of man’s record of his past. This chronicle has often seemed a disparate sequence of cultures and civilizations without overall meaning or coherence. And the enigma of this history has always been the misplaced origin, in classical times, of so much that we see as the content of man’s higher culture. This middle clustering of several civilizations in parallel is an entire mystery in itself, and it is no accident the heritage of the western field preserves its riddle in the haunting echoes of the Hebraic epic. One of the consequences of the archaeological revolution has been to suggest why this intermediate phasing is the case, for we had missed a similar generative period in the earlier interval. It is a phenomenon in sequence. Now Gilgamesh
speaks
to us from the |
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