Destiny and Civilization: The Evolutionary Explanation of Religion and History

Charles Brough

Format ISBN Price   Paperback (6x9) 9781438913605 $ 11.60   Dust Jacket Hardcover (6x9) 9781438913599 $ 16.60

Can world history be explained by means of Natural Selection? This book does, and specifically avoids Social Darwinism. The work chronicles the whole human story by showing how Natural Selection works on societies.

It defines “society” as “the maximum sized group we all intuitively use a common world-view and closed system of thinking to bind us into and which substitutes for the small hunting-gathering groups which millions of years of evolution evolved us to function in.”

The work is remarkable for its objectivity. In order to avoid institutional bias, the author re-interpreted the social science theory consensus interpretation of the data without using any of the twenty-one subjective word-use stratagems (see Appendix) commonly used in academic social theory, also by using key social science terms from a special Glossary in which all the terms are defined only one way, and most often functionally.

CHARLES BROUGH passed the entrance exam to Stanford University, but instead of attending, he spent six years in colleges studying biological, medical, and natural sciences. He decided that the reason social theorists were unable to explain how social evolution works---his specific interest---had to be because of university system subjectivity due to the nature of the subject. So, he spent the next fifty-three years doing independent research in more than twelve social sciences and related fields.

But it was not all academic; he traveled to thirty-five nations, lived in six, had marriages, two daughters, and a divorce. His first book, “The Cycle of Civilization,” was edited by Dr. Linus Pauling.

Brough's writing has appeared in Skeptic Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous newspapers. He has given speeches at the Plato Society of UCLA, Missouri Southern State University, and the Institute of Social Realism in Los Angeles.

                                           PART 1

one --- NATURAL SELECTION

The millions of years of evolution that preceded us shaped us into a distinct social animal, one that has since then managed to accumulate an immense cultural heritage that has helped us to rapidly populate the Earth.

But who are we? We are not just another “HOMINID” or a fellow Neanderthal---nor are we just an evolutionary blur. The anthropological consensus currently points to our emergence about 195,000 years BP (before present) because that is when we had attained the same gross anatomy and gross genetic structure we have today, but for the next 155,000 years, those archaic Sapiens continued to have the same primitive and unchangingly static Mousterian tool-weapon technology as the Neanderthals. Those Sapiens were archaic; we are not. They were not “us.”

Speech began to develop in our ancestral line millions of years ago, but its development was mostly genetic. It evolved through the brutal and ponderously slow process of biological natural selection. What is most important to note is that snail's-pace biological evolution essentially stopped when the brain's speech center ceased to evolve further. Since then, some small biological changes have occurred---such as a slightly smaller brain case, thiner leg bones and a better immunity to influenza---but none of that in any way accounts for the since-then rapid improvement in our technology and, hence, the rapid growth in our numbers here on Earth. The biological evolution of further speech capability came to a halt because no further biological evolution was needed. Fast-paced social evolution had replaced it. It is that point of transition between biological evolution to social evolutionary progress (see Glossary) which separates us from our simian predecessors. No matter how anthropologists classify us within the various hominid species, what we are, what is human, the human race, began at the transition point when social evolution replaced biological evolution 40,000 years ago. It is the least arbitrary point.

Not only is it proposed here that the demarcation point occurred about 40,000 years ago, but also that natural selection has increased the total human cultural technological heritage ever since then. The evolutionary natural selection process developed and describe here also explains how and why societies and their civilizations rise and fall. In 1896, Benjamin Kidd's used the term, “Social Evolution” to explain that natural selection occurred between societies based on major religions. His thesis had important implications that seemed offensive to both the religious faithful and to secular-system-based Free Thinkers as well. As a result, the concept has been developed very little since then. Instead, during the half century that immediately followed, such social theorists as Arnold. J. Toynbee, Pitirum Sorokin, Ellsworth Huntington and others tried in other ways to explain, for example, why civilizations rise and fall. They and others theorized that “great men,” climate change, “free-will,” “Challenge and Response," . . .