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Under our very eyes
NOV 20 - ‘Iam not talking about belief, I’m talking about facts.”
Richard Dawkins’ conversation with a die-hard creationist certainly raised his heckles, but it also underlines the biggest drawback to the understanding of evolution as a fact, and not only as a theory. And in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins attempts to put the mistakes right; to put creationists (those who believe a God or a divine being created life on earth) in their place, and overall, to show the world that evolution is not just a theory—instead, it’s a fact, and it’s happening right under our noses.
Dawkins probably needs no introduction in the Western world’s scientific or religious discourse. For evolutionary scientists, he is Darwin’s successor, a stickler to the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory of life, and one of the world’s most vocal atheists. For those who believe in the Christian faith, Dawkins could be the public enemy number one, a constant thorn in the sides of those who seek to proselyte others into believing God indeed created the earth and all life on it in six days, and rested on the seventh.
Let the Western critics of Dawkins be for now. Instead, let’s analyse The Greatest Show on Earth, and in effect, Dawkins’ beliefs with relation to Hindu theology. Let’s for a moment forget the book of Genesis, and divert our attention to the Vedas and the Puranas, for more than the Bhagwad Geeta, it is in these texts that the mystery of life for a Hindu remains hidden, and let’s see how the evidence that Dawkins provides stacks up against what Hindu theology says about creation and evolution.
Creation, in some Hindu texts, has been attributed to Brahma, who is self-created (Swayambhu), who in-turn, created water, the root of all life. There seem to be some eerie similarities between Hindu texts and the general theory of evolution, for Hindu texts also suggest the life-span of the universe to be a day in the life of Brahma—equivalent to four billion years, the age of the earth. And after the day is over, pralaya occurs, a mass extinction that will erode all life on earth into nothing and a new cycle of creation will begin.
Author Carl Sagan suggested that “It (the Hindu religion) is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang…”
Despite these similarities between scientific fact and Hindu mythology, one needs to differentiate between the idea of evolution and that of creation. Creation suggests an invisible hand guiding a life-force towards a particular goal of survival, as well as an ‘intelligent design’ on the part of the hand. Creation at the same time also suggests that evolution is false, for it believes that life that exists as it does today has always existed in its current form—which, if hard fact is to be believed, cannot be true. One doesn’t always need to go back to the dinosaurs and the fossilised mammoths to prove this. Instead, evolution happens all the time, and is happening “under our very noses”, as Dawkins relates in the example of the Podarcis sicula, the common Mediterranean lizard.
In 1971, a group of scientists shifted five adult pairs of the lizard from an island in the Mediterranean where they were common, to another island where they were non-existent. In 2008, another group of scientists studied the second population, which was found to be descendants of the original ten, but with key differences. For one, the lizards had become herbivores. From an exclusive diet of insects in the former island, the lizards had shifted to a diet that now mostly comprised plant matter. And, because plant matter is harder to digest than insects, the population of lizards on the second island had “evolved” to develop a special digestive tract that allowed the digestion of plant matter. This “jump” in evolution happened in 37 years. Yes, you heard me right—37 years, the average half-life of a human being.
The other most dominant idea within Hindu theology regarding life is the idea of the cycle of karma, and within it, the belief that all beings must reincarnate as another being according to their past karma until they achieve moksha. The biggest problem with this idea, if we relate it to what Dawkins says in this book, is that it presents life in a back-and-forth motion, able to relate to ‘past-lives’, and therefore, possessing attributes of the earlier life. What Dawkins instead argues is that no animal evolved from another animal—instead, what they share is a common ancestor from which all sub-species of that particular animal evolved. For instance, it is common to hear that man evolved from apes, but Dawkins dismisses the theory by arguing that what we share with the chimpanzees and the gorillas is a common ancestor that lived about six million years ago.
It is also argued in Hindu mythology that Vishnu, the second god in the trinity, took ten reincarnations to rid the world of evil at subsequent times since the creation, with each successive avatar a more evolved and intelligent being than its predecessors. The dashavatar (ten reincarnations), many may argue, represent steps of evolution that begin from a fish and end as a human. But the dashavatar theory of evolution is flawed because of a mistake that humans make over and over: it argues that human beings are essentially the most intelligent, and the most superior species on the planet, thus allowing us to revel in this super-sized ego. What Dawkins also does in this book is to reduce the human animal to just another species, albeit a more intelligent species than its predecessors, and presents a case wherein all species are in a constant ‘arms race’ to outdo the others—thus evolving according to the best of their needs.
Why this book is an essential read for anyone, and for school-going students in particular, is that it demolishes the idea of a ‘higher being’ who is responsible for life—and if you take into consideration a 2008 survey that Dawkins quotes, at least 80 percent of Americans believe God has something to do with how we have developed, while 44 percent believe the earth is just 10,000 years old. This is a figure that shuffles around in most surveys on the idea of evolution in Western countries, but in an age where our education system increasingly moves towards their education styles, it presents a scary future if our schools begin to deny scientific evidence as fact and instead present theology as reason.
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