Rear-View Epistemology and the Paradox of Evolutionary Endpoints

This paper demonstrates that any single-layer deterministic ontology — most prominently the 4D block-universe model — generates an epistemological self-refutation when applied to evolutionary processes. Human scientific knowledge is necessarily retrospective: it is constructed exclusively from realized (past) nodes within a stratified architecture. While this “rear-view mirror” methodology is reliable for repetitional nodes (closed-loop, low-novelty patterns), it is structurally insufficient for evolutionary nodes (open-system, cumulative informational novelty). Attempting to declare that evolutionary endpoints “have already happened” in a static block therefore constitutes a categorical error. The argument…