Astrology and the eclipse of Darwinism

Maverick scientists think evolutionary theory needs an overhaul. Astrology says that's precisely what's coming.

A few months ago I considered writing an article about astrology and evolution. A late-night Wikipedia jaunt and some astrological reasoning led me to conclude that evolutionary theory was set to to be dramatically revised over the coming centuries, and that the Darwinian model of gradual change through natural selection would be discarded. You know: the kind of perfectly normal stuff you get into at 3am on a Tuesday.

In the end I decided not to write the piece. My reasons may amuse you: I was worried the subject matter would mark me out as some kind of nutcase—one of those “anti-science” people who believe in irrational stuff that undermines the very fabric of society. Yes, really: as an astrologer, I was worried about what questioning scientific dogma would do to my reputation.

And then, this week, The Guardian publishes this:

If you’re into astrology, you probably feel strongly that science’s conception of our place in the cosmos is in dire need of an update. And thus any reboot to fundamental theories that undergird the way the we think about life itself—such as evolution—is long overdue. With that in mind I commend this particular “long read” to you.

Nevertheless, the appearance of this article annoyed me. Because, frankly, it would have been nice to beat The Guardian to this story using nothing but pseudoscience and Wikipedia. Still, since it’s now open season on the theory of evolution, I may as well say what I was going to say all those weeks ago: astrology says Darwinism is indeed heading for the dustbin, and the “misguided careerists” the article references are—not for the first time in history—going to be proved right.

The ‘modern synthesis’ is dying

The article reports on a growing cohort of maverick scientists who believe the theory of evolution needs to be drastically revised. The so-called “modern synthesis”—the dominant model of evolution for some 80 years—holds that the process works through natural selection and gradual change. You know: apes get ever so slightly smarter, generation by generation, until one day one of them comes up with General Relativity or the Chicken McNugget or whatever.

The modern synthesis views evolution through the lens of “population genetics”, a wide-angle perspective that holds that life is “ultimately just the story of clusters of genes surviving or dying out over the grand sweep of evolutionary time.” It’s the kind of inspiring tale that really brings people together.

But the modern synthesis has other problems. A growing number of scientists say it is, to use the article’s words, “absurdly crude and misleading”. It fails to account for much of what we see in the development of species on Earth. For example, it does a terrible job of explaining how complex biological features—like eyes and wings and placentas—come into being in the first place.

And it fails to account for intriguing phenomena that biologists observe in living species. One of them is “plasticity”: the ability of certain organisms to rapidly adapt to changes in their environment. A fascinating example from the article:

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”.

Another phenomenon that doesn’t fit well with the current evolutionary framework is the relatively new field of epigenetics, which claims that an organism’s life experiences can be passed on genetically to its children. This phenomenon has been heralded as potentially explaining the effects of intergenerational trauma. Epigenetics doesn’t fit the Darwinian model at all.

The upshot is this: the idea that the only truly significant mechanism of evolution is gradual change through natural selection just doesn’t cut it—and a new wave of scientists know it.

But not everyone agrees. As is often the case, a tenured and amply published scientific “old guard” in academia is perfectly happy with the current framework. As anybody who’s read Thomas S Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions will tell you, bold new ideas in science don’t tend to have a shot at acceptance until the dominant, older generation of establishment scientists die off.

And now to get to my astrological point: planetary cycles tell us this is exactly what’s going to happen. Darwinism is about to be outcompeted by fitter competition, and consigned to the history books as an evolutionary dead-end. Sorry Charles, but the planets deem it so.

Friendship ended with Darwin

A principle I keep returning to in mundane astrological work is the idea that events at a conjunction reflect how entire cycles will play out. I’ve given plenty of examples of this in previous articles: the Papal Schism that split the Catholic Church at the Pluto-Neptune conjunction of 1398 that heralded the Protestant Reformation; the United States’ launch of an economic war on Cuba at the Mars-Saturn conjunction of 1962 that heralded the Cuban Missile Crisis at the opposition later that year; the first modern suicide bombings in Lebanon around the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1982 that heralded the September 11th attacks at the opposition in 2001.

This is simply how cycles work.

So to understand why evolutionary theory is set to change, we need to look to a cycle I’ve touched on many times before: the Pluto-Neptune cycle. Lasting around 492 years, this cycle relates to the shaping of human consciousness. It concerns our deepest beliefs about the nature of the cosmos and our place in it.

Right now we’re about 130 years into one of these Pluto-Neptune cycles. The current one began with conjunctions in 1891-92. That was a fascinating period in history in which revolutionary new ideas and technologies were coming into existence at a rapid clip: flight, the internal combustion engine, Nikola Tesla’s remarkable electrical inventions and many more. It was also when the revival of modern astrology was beginning, as well as the modern UFO phenomenon.

But there was something else going on at that time that’s interesting for our purposes: “the eclipse of Darwinism”, a phenomenon distinct and important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. I quote (italics mine):

Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism"to describe the state of affairs prior to what he called the modern synthesis, when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism. Historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler have used the same phrase as a label for the period within the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s to around 1920, when alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored—as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong guess on Charles Darwin's part, or at least as of relatively minor importance.

Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche, has said that conjunctions begin to make their effects known when outer planets are around 20 degrees apart. That would mean the period when Pluto-Neptune was in effect was roughly 1876 to 1908. That’s our conjunctional window, and it lines up remarkably well with the eclipse of Darwinism.

Of course, the term “eclipsed” suggests a temporary occultation of acceptance for Darwin’s theory. But as astrologers, we should read that “eclipse” as an omen. We should read it as a harbinger of how the full sweep of the 492-year Pluto-Neptune cycle that was beginning at that time will play out, and specifically of how it will see Darwinism discarded in favour of alternative theories of evolution. As I said: this is how cycles work—conjunction as microcosm, full cycle as macrocosm.

Now [redacted] is my best friend

The obvious question, then, is this: what will replace Darwinism? Going back to Wikipedia, here are the rival evolutionary theories scientists were dabbling with during the “eclipse”:

• Theistic evolution, the belief that God directly guided evolution

• Neo-Lamarckism, the idea that evolution was driven by the inheritance of characteristics acquired during the life of the organism

• Orthogenesis, the belief that organisms were affected by internal forces or laws of development that drove evolution in particular directions

• Mutationism, the idea that evolution was largely the product of mutations that created new forms or species in a single step.

The Guardian’s article makes direct reference to Neo-Lamarckism and Mutationism as growing in influence. The period of the conjunction was also when the Theosophists were preaching their doctrine of spiritual evolution. There were problematic dimensions to the Theosophists’ ideas—they were very much of their time. But it’s notable that the very idea of spiritual evolution, so prevalent in New Age thinking today, seemed to grow roots at the time of the conjunction.

Here’s my prediction: the coming centuries will see us completely revise our understanding of our place in the cosmos. This process of revision will necessarily have spiritual dimensions, and will involve the reintegration of powerful ideas discarded in the post-Enlightenment bonfire of old wisdom. And, with the “eclipse of Darwinism” in mind, it will also include a new conception of evolution and the purpose of our existence.

I’m writing this not because I want it to happen—although, full disclosure, I do—but because the logic of planetary cycles says it will. And while The Guardian and the scientists it’s reporting on are inevitably uninterested in the “woo” dimensions of the evolutionary question, it seems they at least smell change in the air. For those of us hoping to see the hegemonic view of “what’s really going on” advance beyond the grey genetic determinism of pure Darwinism, that has to be a good thing.

I love history. And what I *love* doing in consultations is using traditional techniques to dig into *your* history. Unearthing hidden threads of meaning running through your life. Helping you into moments of revelation. And giving you clarity about where things are going. Book a consult with me and let’s go through that process together. I still have a few slots in my books for the coming weeks.