In part 6 the author explains how biology can be understood in essence only when it is learnt through the lens of evolution. Lack of a correct scientific approach paves the way for introduction of absurd ideas like elephant head being attached to a human torso.
Among the renowned scientists in the world, Charles Darwin was perhaps the only person who was not a scientist by profession, and possessed no science degree from a college. He was an acute observer of nature, of flora and fauna, especially of insects; he studied related materials avidly. In the process he became first a naturalist and finally a scientist in full sense of the term. His devotion to study of nature was so genuine and profound that he attracted the attention of some of the reigning scientists of the time in England. When some geologists went on an academic tour, they would like to take him along in the field study. He passionately and accurately recorded the samples collected and the attributes found. His commitment to these tasks was of a level that often superseded the formal students of the subjects. Those who want to teach and learn science first hand must read the open book called the life of Charles Darwin.
Secondly, one important aspect of his attitude to scientific work was to refuse to accept something as truth only because it appeared to him to be true. First ideas are raw ideas; often based on incomplete and insufficient data as well as subjective fancy; but even then usually very tempting. No, he rather preferred to examine and re-examine his own database and the haunting ideas; explore all the possible alternative explanations; and only when was it evident that the other theories failed to explain the given volume of data and his was the only one to accommodate the large classes of phenomena in their entirety, he dared to conclude that it might be the most plausible one. Julian Huxley called this “extraordinary diffidence, coupled with a passion for completeness and a reluctance … to publish to the world his ideas on the controversial subject of evolution before he had buttressed his arguments with a body of evidence which would overwhelm opposition by its sheer vastness.” [Huxley 1960, 3]
Thirdly, while he had amassed an enormous volume of facts, he seemed to be haunted less by a fear of their wrong interpretation than by the fears of adducing the wrong facts in the wrong places. He himself clarified his stand on such questions: “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.” [Darwin 1889, 606]
This ardour for strenuous and rigorous study, this strict adherence to objective analysis of facts in detail, this devotion to truth and reticence to publicity—these are some of the qualities that made the scientist in him and that we may still safely inherit from his life.
But, fourthly, there was another aspect of his character, a rare quality, which is also rarely known. Most of the people, as much then as now, have the usual tendency to take note of the favourable arguments and disregard the unsavoury. But he attached great importance to any contrary facts and objections that seemed to be, at the time, veritable confutations of his theory; mentioned them in his book in fill; and expressed his inability to answer them with complete satisfaction. He did not try to ignore or bypass them. In his Autobiography he wrote: “I had . . . followed a golden rule, namely that, whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” Thus he himself laid his theory open to rejection should those objections prove unassailable in future. [Barlow (ed. 1993), op. cit.; p. 123]
Fifthly, the theory of organic evolution propounded by Chales Darwin was the most successful scientific theory of the nineteenth Century, which survived through very many scrutinies over the years and despite all the subsequent revision, rectification and addition is still a guiding light to the students of biology. There is hardly another similarly successful theory in science. This fact alone makes it an imperative for the civilized world to educate its school children with a rudimentary idea of this theory.
Lastly, let us point out, Darwin’s impact on the general outlook was visible much sooner and in a much wider canvas than expected.
Let us recall how the great physicist of that century, Ludwig Boltzmann, had extolled Darwin: “In his lecture on the Second Law to the Official Meeting of the Vienna Academy in 1886 Boltzmann called the 19th century, whose achievements he enthusiastically praised, the century not of electricity and not of steel (and not of one of the great physicists, we may add), but the century of Darwin.” [Broda 1983, 61]
In the words of J. Huxley, “the window that Darwin opened into the world of life permitted a new and evolutionary view of other subjects. Men began studying the evolution of nebulae and stars, of languages and tools, of chemical elements, of social organizations. Eventually they were driven to view the universe at large sub species evolutionis, and so to generalize the evolutionary concept in fullest measure. This extension of Darwin’s central idea—of evolution by natural means—is giving us a new vision of the cosmos and of our human destiny.” [Huxley 1960, 18] Ever newer areas of knowledge, one after another, adopted the historical and evolutionary approach, as opposed to the metaphysical pigeonhole approach, in their respective fields of studies, for instances, art, literature, music, drama, religion, mythology, iconography, law, family, marriage, sex-life, social structure, state, and so on. I shall later reproduce a list of some selected books published in the first sixty years after The Origin …, that bear out this oft-ignored truth. The number of such works was very few before 1859 and it steadily grew just afterward—a fact already taken into account by the French Marxist anthropologist Maurice Bloch in 1983. [Bloch 2004, 5]
Similarly, the co-authors of a recent book remarked, “much of science is now relying on evolutionary thinking, from cosmology to biology, and even some aspects of social sciences”, and, “evolutionary thinking is providing a rich framework for the advancement of scientific knowledge.” [Lurquin and Stone 2007, preface]
The renowned physicist, Jean-Pierre Vigier, in an open debate with Sartre and others in Paris in 1961, also emphasized that, “proceeding from the history of biology and the human sciences, the idea of evolution has step by step invaded the whole of the sciences: after astronomy it is today breaking through into chemistry and
physics. This idea of history, of evolution, of analysis in terms of development is for us precisely the profound logical root of the dialectics of nature. It can even be said that in a sense all scientific progress is being achieved along the line of abandoning static descriptions for the sake of dynamic analyses combining the intrinsic properties of the analyzed phenomena. For us, science progresses from Cuvier to Darwin, from the static to the dynamic, from formal logic to dialectical logic.” [Cited by Novack 1964]
There has been and there will be a great lot of changes in the theoretical structure of Darwinism. But its general impact on the mode of thinking of mankind, his methodological approach towards nature, life and society, has achieved an irreversible permanency.
This evolutionary historical approach has so deeply impregnated all fields of knowledge that any discussion on a serious issue leads us to probe into its developmental history, whether of man, society, diseases, economic problems, environment or global warming. We try to follow the course of development of the phenomena under study over time. Most often we remain unaware that we are following the Darwinian methodology outside the precincts of life sciences.
If the students of a country are denied access to this aspect of Darwin’s theory in proper time, many of them will not have the scope to learn it at all in their life. They will then lack a sense of perspective in many of the problems they have to confront in their future post-school life. This is something we must hammer today.
