March 08, 2009

The human beings have their downside. There can hardly be a debate on that count. Though we have associated a number of our negative attributes to various animals, many of them would take serious offence if they were to know of such ascriptions. Maybe they do. Who knows?

In fact, they certainly do if you take on face value the words of Charles Darwin, the famed and undisputed father of the controversial theory of evolution whose bicentennial birth anniversary is being marked this year. How else can you describe the decision of the monkeys to stop evolving into human beings? If they are what we were at some stage of evolution, the decision to stop evolving must have rested with them; not with us.

The theory may make sense while dealing with certain species, like, say, the dinosaurs that became extinct because of various plausible reasons. But monkeys are still there and the theory does not rationalise the basic anomaly of one specie evolving into another and still surviving in its original form.

Apparently, the evolutionists believe that monkeys continued to evolve till they had some hope of human beings getting their act right. But there must have come a point in time when the monkeys — maybe a council of senior monkeys — decided that enough was enough and they would be better off being what they are than evolving into a specie that knew more about killing each other than do animals in their own atmosphere.

It must have been a smart decision, I say. Swinging and jumping across trees is better than having to pay hefty fares to commute from one point to the other, right? And no traffic jams, mind you. That must have been cited as a bonus by the senior, far-sighted monkeys to their followers; the monkey-kind. That is sort of funny, isn’t it?

The problem is that science does not make claims, except one: that it knows ‘this’ at ‘this’ point of time because of ‘this’. When it gets new evidence, it changes all the three ‘this’ in the equation and doesn’t feel embarrassed at all. This, in a nutshell, is what a scientific attitude basically is. Some scientists and a lot of so-called self-acclaimed ‘scientific’ minds, however, get stuck with a belief even after it gets dated.

 

Scientific research has come a long way since Darwin first posited the concept of Natural Selection in 1859. In the last 150 years, the world has learned much about how man became the dominant species and about the universe at large which keeps changing all the time. Human understanding of the theory of evolution should have also changed.

 

Scientific research has come a long way since Darwin first posited the concept of Natural Selection in 1859. In the last 150 years, the world has learned much about how man became the dominant species, how the earth and the solar system came into being and about the universe at large which keeps changing all the time.

Human understanding of the theory of evolution should have also changed. Scientists do acknowledge that there is an intrinsic logic to our reality, that there are absolutes, laws of nature. They concede that much remains a mystery, and for every question that science answers, many others arise. Those who shy away from the concept of creation, prefer to call it Intelligent Design so that they may continue with their basic belief about the absence of a Creator.

For once, Muslims are not alone in this debate. In fact, they don’t even feature in discussions on the matter which has generally remained confined to the Western world where Evolution vs. Creation has been equated with a Religion vs. Reason dispute.

When challenged by sceptics to prove the existence of a Creator scientifically, Dr Wernher von Braun, the man who first designed missiles for the Nazi Germany but later headed the American space programme at NASA, famously replied, “Must we really light a candle to see the Sun? … The electron is materially inconceivable, and yet it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airliners through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electron as real, while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive of Him?”

Monkeys or no monkeys, the last word on the issue, fittingly, must go to Dr Wernher. “To simply dismiss the concept of a Creator as being unscientific is to violate the very objectivity of science itself.”

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