Why the Idea of Evolution of Life
Doesn’t Sell
Until Darwin discovered a plausible explanation for how
complex life came into being from simple single cellular life forms like us, no
one ever in history ever came close to this extra ordinary discovery. Until
then the only explanation that could satisfy the human curiosity was divine
creation of life.
Since the times of Darwin, an amazing range of tell-tale
evidence has been constantly arising from 3.8 billion years of earth’s history to
reconstruct the scene like a detective would for a crime scene. A gigantic
number of predictions, new discoveries, and observations have all been seamlessly
adding up to confirm our evolutionary past and nothing has come up in
contradiction.
It is an old story now and one might have expected the
dust to have settled from the time when this surprising discovery was made. Today,
what is more surprising is the huge number of people who do not believe in this
explanation against all the good evidence.
Why is that? There are perhaps two reasons for this.
First, there are a good many people who are
simply not well educated about the overwhelming evidence in favour of the story
of evolution either because they did not get an opportunity or due to their
lack of interest. After all everybody is not so deeply interested in scientific
subjects or for that matter any subject and it is perfectly normal to pass
through school without really understanding a great many scientific concepts.
That is not so unusual really.
Second and most importantly, this idea of
evolution is so incompatible with the religious explanation of creation of life
which are deeply entrenched and very hard to displace no matter how weird they
may seem to others who are a part of a different religious system or not part
of any at all. It is for that reason that they are called dogmas. They are not
really a subject open to revision every other day on the basis of some new
discovery or the other. That is not how this works.
Here, I do not intend to delve into that vast array of
evidence that should convince anyone thoroughly that complex life forms did not
need any creator and naturally evolved over billions of years. In case anyone
is interested, I can recommend a good book by the biologist, Richard Dawkin’s,
“The Greatest Show on Earth”.
However, I will like to draw your attention to again a
very insightful explanation as to how the religious dogmas hold our minds so
effectively. I will do that by drawing analogies to the process of evolution
itself.
The process of evolution could be possible due to
existence of three things.
First, a mechanism where reproduction is possible. The chemical nature of
DNA which makes copies of itself is an example of that.
Second, some variations in the copies. If the copies were always identical,
evolution cannot happen.
Third, a process of selection bias which would cause some variations to
be more successful in procreating and surviving than others. Howsoever rare it
might be for random variations to work better, but when enough time is thrown
in, it makes a potent recipe.
With the three things in place, the incremental design
improvements can go on and on. In case of life on earth, it has been going on
for 3.8 billion years. This stretch of time is perhaps beyond the capabilities
of human mind’s imagination and it easily trips in comprehending these vast
numbers.
Can we think of some other examples where these three
things are at play?
The evolution of something like mobile phones comes
quickly to mind. Numerous companies are churning out numerous models and
unleashing them into the market. They are copying and imitating the successful
predecessors but after making their own incremental improvements. Many such
“attempted improvements” are variations that do not really find favour of the
market and die out. The ones that do succeed are imitated further as a repeated
cycle.
This is not purported as an exact analogy to
biological evolution but there are interesting similarities and the three
factors are present – copying, variation and selection. The process of
imitation of successful models is analogous to reproduction in biological
world. The process of variation is there too. In biological world, except now
in the hands of genetic engineers, the process of variations is random. Whereas
in the field of technology the variations are due to conscious engineering as
well as randomness or accidents. For evolution to succeed, variation is
necessary, random or not.
Indeed the process of mobile phone’s evolution is
greatly speeded up due to conscious improvements by the human mind. But what is
the mechanics of this “conscious improvement”?
It is an additional dimension of evolution within
evolution because the human mind is learning from predecessor designs and generating
a vast array of variations and even testing the variations if they will work
all within its realm of imagination by again interfacing it with lifetime of learning
and experience. Thus applying a process of pre-selection to the outcome. It has
all the three ingredients: copying, creation and selection of variations.
Something that we call as insight or intelligence.
Amazing though the human mind is in this capability, it
has its limits. The humans have had to go through the step by step increments
of inventing the wheel, the light bulb, the transistor, the smartphone. It did
take learning from or in other words copying of the predecessor technologies to
create the successive ones. Could the iphone have been abruptly invented by
someone 1000 years ago? The human mind takes the benefit of the knowledge
handed over by others in the past and even present and works out a myriad of
permutations and combinations in its imagination and unleashes some to test the
real environment. Some thrive.
Life as it has evolved is fascinating. The wild life
TV channels constantly amaze us with the breath-taking biological technology that has evolved over the billions of years.
Manipulative Parasites
Nature has thrown up some really bizarre life forms on
earth. There are many manipulative parasites found in nature which infect the host’s
body and multiply there. Over billions of years of these infections they have
used the body of the hosts to aid their own procreation and that’s not all, these
parasites have evolved to control the minds of the host to help them complete
their life cycle even as hosts are driven to alter their behaviour to help the parasites thrive even
while harming themselves. Amongst the numerous examples are these.
Dicrocoelium dendriticum spends a part of
its life cycle in the liver of grazing mammal. Here it mates and lays eggs,
which are excreted in the host's feces. Snail eats the excrement along with the
eggs. The eggs hatch and travel to the surface of the snail's body causing it
to develop cysts which are then ejected as balls of slime... exactly what the
parasites wanted it to do. They slime balls are evolved to seem as a treat for
the ants who devour them with relish. The flukes spread out inside of the ant
and drives them a bit crazy. At night, the flukes make the ant climb up a blade
of grass so that they could be eaten by a grazing animal. If the ant is still
alive at dawn, the flukes release their control and the ant goes about its day
like normal (if the ant baked in the sun, the parasite would die, too). At
night the flukes take over the ants mind again and the cycle repeats until the
ant becomes cattle food.
Cuckoo which lays its eggs in the crows nest
who are fooled into believing that they are their own. The cuckoo egg hatches
earlier than the host's, and the cuckoo chick grows faster; in most cases the
chick evicts the eggs or young of the unsuspecting host species!
Numerous other examples of parasites control
or trickery over mind can be found in nature. This ruthless control over mind
of unsuspecting host has evolved time and over again as it offers an evolutionary
success to the parasites.
Evolution takes place using copying, variations and
selection bias in favour of the most virulent versions. Evolving organisms have
no moral qualms in selfishly using the medium of host bodies to reproduce. They
at times have evolves to manipulate and drive the hosts crazy just so that they
can spread further. The process of evolution with selection bias in favour of
the more and more virulent versions will carry on indefinitely. It is only natural
to expect to find some parasites to evolve so as to drive their hosts crazy if
it helps them thrive. Of course a complete wipe out of the host species is not
very helpful to the parasites and could cause their own extinction.
But the evolutionary process is not intelligent like
the human mind which can try chess moves in its imagination to work out which
will be a success. Evolutionary process actually plays out all the moves but
only the right move wins, rest lose and cause extinction. So it is reasonable
to expect that the parasites will more often than not evolve to become fatal, tilt
the balance and kill the hosts in such numbers as to make them extinct and in
the bargain become extinct themselves. A delicate balance achieved out of randomness
is a rare occurrence.
Huge number of biological species have been becoming
extinct throughout the life’s evolution. What we see today is a bit illusory because
for every species that exists today, there are millions of ancestral species in
direct lineage and other branches which have not survived to this day.
The seeming delicate balance achieved by the parasites
in that they kill to further themselves but limit the mortality of their hosts to
prevent mutual destruction is not preordained by the intelligence of the
parasites but as a result of a random move in the ongoing game of chess. The statistical
probability of the next unintelligent random move to maintain this equilibrium
is quite dim. The ratio of the past losses to wins by such random moves in the
past are a testimony to that. That the losers even though they were so much
more numerous haven’t lived to tell their tale creates an easy illusion for the
human mind.
Ideologies as Infectious Ideas
Ideas live in the human minds and spread from one to
another. It is quite analogous to spreading of infections. Ideas evolve since
the three things to facilitate evolution exist. Copying, variation and
selection bias. Religious ideas too have been evolving since the time of the primitive
man. The ideas reside in and get passed on through the human minds. Each person
inherited the idea of religion and became a medium for that himself. Each
received a copy with some different variations and virulence and the ideas took
over the persons mind and mutated further. Just like human character traits are
a result of both our own genes and our environment, similarly the religious
orientation of a human mind is varies a bit as a unique product of the religious
indoctrination imbibed from the external environment innate and unique adaptation.
Most may have mild symptoms but nonetheless there are others
deeply affected. A few become super
infectious like active proselytisers, gurus or prophets. In any generation and
geography even to this day there are countless such strong vectors of these
infections or ideologies. Even today, there is no dearth of Gurus and Cult
heads as anytime in human history. As can be naturally expected in the natural
state of evolution, most such local strains spread by hyper vectors simply die
out. We can be sure that there would have been numerous relatively minor gurus
etc who’s fame has not lived on today. But as again analogous to the biological
world, in thousands of years some longstanding successful religious ideologies became
extinct and were replaced by new virulent vectors which have turned the course
of the religious ideologies thereafter.
While these ideologies run their course of their
evolution where the most virulent will thrive, the self-inflicted damage the
vectors or mediums cause to themselves to various degrees from waste of their
time praying to simply blowing themselves up is just as incidental as the worm
that gets eaten by cattle and becoming prey to the machinations of the evolving
parasite.
Over thousands of years these viruses like religious
ideas have mutated and refined and evolved to extraordinary entities, no less astonishing
than the life itself or the smart phone technology. The ideas have gone through
millions of cycles and iterations of selection bias to become very resilient
parasites who have learnt to sit there very deep into the labyrinths of human
minds of their hapless victims. They are dangerous not only in their direct
harm but more so in their capability to manipulate the hosts in a way that the
host becomes an active proponent of the disease like a senseless zombie without
being conscious of the parasite ruling its mind. It has learnt to hijack the
deepest human emotions which humans evolved for entirely different purposes
over millions of years of its biological evolution. The human mind is completely
susceptible to it and succumbs easily and effective resistance is quite rare.
It is like the rabies virus which controls the host
dogs mind to make him aggressive and bite other dogs so that it may spread and
the same time the dog is never even conscious of this. It is like a leech which
sticks to the skin and quietly releases a pain killer so that the hosts do not
feel its presence and then sucks its blood. Some forms of this virus
particularly target other humans which are uninfected to infect them too or
seek their extermination if they are resistant.
These ideological viruses has been the driving force for
humongous numbers of violent killings of its host species to advance the
domination of their own strains over other rival ones. These viruses charioteers
the human hosts as they kill so that it’s own ideological DNA can predominate
and eliminate any other species of religious ideologies. Unlike most biological
viruses, the predominant strain will displace the others in minds of their
hosts. In the medium, only one of the religious strains can survive. Competing
strains cause incoherence in the mind of host weakening their hold over the victim.
Non competing strains of ideologies however may not pose any threat like. Evolutionary
success has been bestowed upon those strains that have acquired and mastered
the traits that can exterminate other competing strains.
Will the human species be able to shake off this
parasite which is evolving on its own trajectory riding on its own DNA using
the human species as merely the unwitting pawns? Contemporary history points to
the contrary, more and more virulent forms of the disease have been wresting
even greater control over the minds of its subjects with the ability in extreme
cases, to make the subjects completely lose their minds, suspend their own
self-preservation instincts and blow themselves up and take the lives of the
members of the fellow species to further the cause of the virus which so
completely has taken control of their minds.
