Can the Humans Shake off This Virus?

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.