Jahane Rumi In search of the unsearchable: O, my soul! where would you find your house?

Darwin and the grand unity of life

On the great scientist’s 200th birthday, says Isa Daudpota, let us accept "the single most important idea to occur to a human mind"

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On the great scientist’s 200th birthday, says Isa Daudpota, let us accept “the single most important idea to occur to a human mind”

In the pantheon of great scientists, Charles Darwin ranks right up there with Newton and Einstein. On this 5-year round-the-globe voyage starting at the age of 22 he came up with ‘the single most important idea to occur to a human mind’: the origin of species by the mechanism of natural selection. Through his great insight, natural law replaced divine edict, chance replaced design and competition replaced harmony. On February 12th we will celebrate the 200th birthday of this great man.

The idea of evolution was not new; people including Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had published about it as had the Lamarck, but the mechanisms proposed were wrong. The insights from the voyage, the study of the samples he collected, experiments with plants around his home and deep thinking done over 20 years after his return to England led to his formulating an abstract of his theory, which was turned the following year, 1859, into his magnum opus, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”. Its publication will have its 150th anniversary later this year.

Darwin has shaped the thinking of scientists so thoroughly that his radicalism can be underestimated. The inductive approach used by him to get to the doctrine of material evolution can be traced back to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), before which western philosophy, on the whole regarded consciousness as important, and matter as ephemeral expression of it. Pythagoras described a universe filled with divine consciousness – indeed did anything else exist? Plato with his “Ideal Forms” regarded the material world as a mere representations of things divine, whatever that means. Aristotle postulated that consciousness can be known through the study of the visible world, and helped create modern scientific disciplines, including biology. But he wrote that organism developed according to their non-material ‘form’, or essence: the supreme form of the universe was divine.

Could Jalaluddin Rumi, whose 800th birthday anniversary we celebrated in 2007 have seen deeper than the Greeks? He wrote:

I have experienced seven hundred and seventy mounds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance though death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine, I shall be that.

He however is concerned with conscious evolution that allows him to interact with objective reality through going beyond the constraints of his own material and earthly characteristics. He continues in the Buddhist vein to say, “Let me therefore be nothing.” For him the deepest insight is gained in perfect ‘nothingness’ which is in harmony with divine consciousness, the kind claimed by Socrates and the Semitic prophets. Darwin’s theory overturned such spiritualistic ideas with hard empirically verifiable facts.

While almost all top biologists believe that Darwin’s theory is correct, doubt remains deeply entrenched in the minds of people in parts of the world where science literacy is much higher than in Pakistan. The US has witnessed a very public and ill-tempered debate between the vast majority of scientists on one side supporting Darwin’s thesis and mainly Christian supporter’s of ‘intelligent design’ and other variants of creationism (i.e. that each species, specially humans, was created by a supreme being), who want their version taught in schools. A recent poll discovered that one in three British science teachers thinks that creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary theory and the Big Bang. All this happens despite exposure to wonderful TV documentaries that underline the unity of biological and medical sciences with Darwin’s theory. State institutions such as the US National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society naturally support the Darwinian viewpoint, and over the past three years there have been large exhibitions in major US museums about evolution culminating in the biggest Darwin show in London presently at the Natural History Museum. In an earlier article on Darwin (http://tinyurl.com/ckphl5) I have provided references to what is happening around the world to celebrate Darwin’s achievement as well as links to background theory that can help people understand clearly this powerful theory.

So what about our own Natural History Museum in Islamabad? Sadly, there is no mention of Darwin on its website or any attempt to show how his theory of evolution unifies the different displays set up for visitors. In fact in its Evolution Room it clearly ‘white washes’ the reality of our relationship with other primates. The white column allows the museum staff to back off from committing to the evolutionary tree that shows our close relation with chimpanzees with whom we share 99% of our genes. While readers can update their knowledge of evolution through many excellent websites, many of which are available from the web-address mentioned previously, one would hope that the Museum staff will have the honesty and courage to undo their sad cover-up in this year of Darwin. They ought to introduce, in 2009, displays and programs to teach visitors, especially school children, about the grand unity of life and its processes.

Isa Daudpota teaches at a university in Islamabad

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February 13-19, 2009 - Vol. XX, No. 52

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