( I had to break this essay into three parts so that it doesn’t burden the reader too much. I am not sure If I will write all three parts in succession, but I have the outline ready for the other two and intend to post them as quickly as possible)
Part One:
Though the name Darwin was known to me, my first brush with the idea of evolution itself happened in the most unlikely of places and from an unlikely book. It happened in a house of God in the year 1990. I vividly remember the year and the day. It was a Sunday evening at the newly constructed and architecturally beautiful Ramakrishna math’s ( monastery) library in Hyderabad. I had gone there to listen to a discourse on the Bhagavad Gita. Realizing, I had some time before the talk began at 6 PM, I walked over to the library, which was my usual practice. That particular day, my eyes fell upon a blue-colored hardbound copy of a book titled “ Wonderful Life, The Burgess Shale and the nature of history” by Stephen Jay Gould. The frontispiece had a beautiful picture of marine life in the deep sea, and the book flap announced that this book had recently won the prestigious Rhone Poulenc and the National book awards for science writing. My curiosity was piqued, and I picked the book, entered my name in the library registry, and retired to a quiet corner to read the preface and the first chapter before the lecture began. Those forty minutes of reading were intense and exhilarating, and when I emerged from the reading room, something irrevocably shifted within me.
There is one particular sentence that caught my attention and has stayed with me ever since. In the preface Gould writes: “Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chances become vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay”. At nineteen years of age, filled with the arrogance of youth, steeped in the notion that Man was a special creature of God, this dismissive statement written with so much conviction by one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of the era blew me away. A few pages later in the first chapter of the book, Gould debunked the theory of the “ladder of progress”. That iconic representation of the ascent of man from his crude origins as an ape to that of the fullness of a modern erect homo sapiens is all too familiar to any school-going student. That is the picture, our teachers used ( and unfortunately still continue to use) to explain the appearance of man on the world’s stage – as a magnificent consummation of nature’s long journey from simplicity to complexity, and as a fulfillment of God’s will, who made man in his own image. Until that day Darwin’s theory of evolution was, in my mind, a vindication of the march of progress, from the simple to the complex, and that Man was the crown jewel of creation; at least that’s how I understood it. But Gould challenged that view with the findings that resulted from the exploration and reinterpretation of the fossils from the Burgess Shale. Those fossils were from an age called the Cambrian explosion – a period of time nearly 250 million years ago when there was a proliferation of new species on the earth’s surface, an age when nature experimented freely with form and design.
Stephen Jay Gould’s book “Wonderful life” kindled a deep interest in the idea of progress and the power to question it rigorously, got me hooked into the study of what evolution really meant from the evidence we have and not what we wish it to be, and a tremendous interest in Charles Darwin, the man, the accidental natural biologist, who recast and launched this atom-bomb of an idea in 1859, when he finally decided to publish one of the most important books of all time, “ On the origins of species by means of natural selection”. Let me acknowledge, these ideas are not easy to understand, not because of the weight of the scientific nomenclature that suffuses this study, but because it is quite difficult to undo the opinions and strong sense of anthropocentric delusions we carry around. Not our fault. We become what we are taught. And the one idea that is taught early in life is: Man is created by a special act of God ( creationism) and not quite a branch of any species – least of all an ape. We are gently taught that there is a theory known as evolution, but quickly hasten to add, that it is only a “theory” and not facts. And furthermore go on to add that even if evolution were true, we are safe because Man epitomizes the goals of evolution as shown in the standard ape-to-man drawings and cartoons inspired by the British Physician Charles White, who, in 1799, pigeon-holed the entire diversity of life into categories that ended in the appearance of ( not surprisingly) the superior white male. ( see pics below).
All three facts are incorrect: Neither is man a special protege of God, nor is evolution just a theory but a self-evident, scientific, and a fact proved beyond any doubt whatsoever, and lastly, how much ever we would like to believe that we occupy the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder and that nature has waited and sculpted its organic design, bit by bit, muscle by muscle, bone by bone, for 4.5 billion years ( estimated age of the earth) to produce man as the finest product of its labor, it is nothing but a self-deluding fancy that is an unfortunate by-product of the self-consciousness we possess, and nothing more. Nobody remarked on this predicament better than the great American writer Mark Twain. In his 1883 essay “ Was the world made for man?”, he juxtaposed the height of the Eiffel Tower with geological time and observed: “Man has been here 32,000 years ( Note: this was based on Lord kelvin’s calculation at that time). That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno and Man’s place in it”
Since the time Darwin’s book, Origins ( that is how the book is commonly known), was published nearly 175 years ago, the implications and ramifications of that revolutionary idea are still not widely accepted, even though the idea, the principle of evolution, has been worked out fully and thoroughly in the light of modern science and scientific methods. It would very look foolish to deny it. Every educated man knows and uses words and stock phrases like “evolution”, “survival of the fittest”, and perhaps even “Natural selection” ( if one has read something about Darwin) but the irony is that a vast majority still haven’t digested it. We may speak about evolution with confidence in public, and even argue that we have evolved from apes ( which by the way is incorrect, apes are our cousins and we did not “evolve” from them); but deep down, we would still like be comforted with the thought that we are special and that a God made us in his image. We like the standard ape-to-man diagram; it makes us special. This dichotomy, this gap in knowledge and understanding has been the plague of Man’s intellectual journey.
Darwin himself was not confident that he had struck upon something important and consequential when he first observed evidence during his voyage aboard the Beagle. He procrastinated, wished, postponed, and fervently hoped in his heart that he was wrong. But that is another story that I will attempt to lay down in the next installment of this series. Stephen Jay Gould’s writing introduced me to the world of Darwin and the implications of evolution. For four decades, every month, Gould wrote an essay for the Scientific American magazine, picking on a stray story, or a common observation, or a historical or literary reference, and explored the theme to reveal something beautiful about the idea of evolution. All his essays were published as collections under titles such as “Ever since Darwin”, “ Bully for the Brontosaurus”, “Panda’s thumb”, “ Hen’s teeth and Horse’s toe” and many others. Gould also published full-length books on difficult subjects and presented them in exquisite style without dumbing the subject matter down for lay audiences. Of the many collections I have in my library, Gould is represented in his full range. I have every piece of work he has ever published, excluding a textbook that he wrote for a specialist ( about 1400 pages in length). I believe anyone who has an interest in understanding evolution can begin their journey with Gould as their guide. His writings have been the window for my own exploration and understanding of evolution. And of course, Darwin’s own Origins is an incredible piece of literature by itself, and a fine example of how an intricate subject should be written and presented for a general readership.
We will talk about Darwin, his discovery ( or reframing) of evolutionary principles, and his journey from discovering a pattern in what he observed to eventually publishing the book in 1859 in the next part of this essay.