Comment

When I picked up three of Charles Darwin’s books a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t realise that they were so readily available only because his 200th birth anniversary was coming up. I just thought it was time I stopped borrowing his books from my parents and so was happy to come across them. Since then, the international press has been full of Darwin. The theory of evolution was a ground-breaking event. To many, believers and non-believers both, Darwin made the final push for atheism and science versus Biblical religion: If humans had descended from apes, how did that explain the theory of creation as explained in Genesis?

The literal interpretation of religious texts is fraught with problems, but that’s an issue for another day. For now, the wonder of Darwin’s discovery should suffice. The news today reiterates that humans and chimps are closer than we think. But we know that by now. We also know that fruit flies and humans are closer than we think. In fact, the deeper you get into Darwin and what has emerged from his original hypothesis, the more you marvel at Nature. If evolution shows us anything, it is how closely we are all connected. As life marched through evolution, it picked and chose its way through what worked and what didn’t and as choices were made, new species developed and the magic of life spread outwards and forwards. It was a work of sheer genius.

The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared in 1859, to much expected criticism. This was followed by the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. The first already set the religious and scientific worlds on fire, the second added more fuel. Till today, vast swathes of the United States refuse to accept Darwin and teach “Creationism” in schools to counter evolution — the Scopes (Monkey) trial of 1925 in Dayton Tennessee was a good example of that battle, as also of the sharp brilliance of the defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow. Nothing frightens us as much, it seems, as things we either do not understand or that most threaten our belief systems. In that, lie so much of our bigotries.

Scientists today are amazed at how right Darwin was, in spite of the fact that so much of the technology which we take for granted today was not available to him. Others have pointed out that Darwin spent years in observation and thought and it was painstaking intellectual rigour that led him to his conclusions. Both are formidable accomplishments and achievements by any standards. To put forward a theory to explain the origins of man, to completely overturn conventional belief and to do this by thinking about what you have seen and then turn out to be right — surely that marks a pinnacle of human endeavour?

It makes us realise how much we owe our ancestors, who, minus all the technological tools we take for granted, brought us to where we are now. Celebrating Darwin’s 200th birth anniversary is a fitting tribute, especially since in the 150 years since The Origin of the Species was published, no one has come up with anything better or as convincing. In fact, the evolution of man’s thinking was possibly setting out in that direction as other scientists — like Alfred Russell Wallace — headed that way. In fact, receiving a paper on natural selection from Wallace in 1858 led to Darwin speeding up the completion and publication of Origin.

Given the enormous impact and the brilliance of his theory, the question, though, of the descent — or ascent — from monkeys remain. We all acknowledge that monkeys are clever, yet there is scope for controversy as the Harbhajan-Andrew Symonds “monkey” controversy last year showed. It seems unfair to reduce Darwin to this monkey business, but it is perhaps irresistible. And as a colleague pointed out, if we’re looking for a missing link, why not examine Muthalik of the Sri Ram Sene? Now that’s a joke worth considering but only at the risk of offending monkeys.