On A Scientist Par Excellence

P R E L U D E

Let me begin with a famous Indian fable - “Six blind men and an elephant,” because a lot of concepts involved herein are better understood with this analogy. There were six blind men who wanted to know what an elephant was. They were hence taken to an elephant itself and given an opportunity to feel it for themselves. Each one touched the elephant and got an idea how it was. When they were asked to describe how an elephant looked like, the first blind man said, “The elephant is like a snake.” That was because he had only touched its trunk! The second blind man having touched only its tusk, described it as a sharp, stout and a weapon-like thing. The third one, having touched only its legs, described it as a hard pillar-like substance and the fourth man, having touched its belly said, “The elephant is a hard spherical mass like a rock.” The fifth one touched its ears and described it as a thick, leaf-like animal and the last blind man, having touched only its tail, concluded that the elephant was a long, worm-like animal! There were serious fights among the six men as to who was correct. Then, they were told that everyone was ‘partially’ right because they had only touched a ‘part’ of the elephant and that putting them all together forms the real picture of the elephant.

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The nineteenth century witnessed some of the greatest scientific discoveries and technological advances. While the discoveries in the fields of Physics and Chemistry were readily accepted and appreciated, the advances in the field of Biology were condemned. The single most important reason was it confronted religious beliefs. There were widespread oppositions from the religious leaders and fanatics. Even though a British natural historian, Charles Darwin came up with a revolutionary idea, he waited almost two decades collecting sufficient evidences to stand the test of the religious opposition.

The situation was not new to the western religions. Scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were ridiculed and punished for challenging the geocentric descriptions (that the Earth was the centre of the Universe and the Sun and other celestial bodies revolved around it) found in the Christian Biblical works like Psalm. Therefore, in the year 1859, when Charles Darwin published his book, “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection,” religious fanatics turned red-hot.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution refuted the Biblical belief of God’s creation of life on Earth and Human Beings in six days and that occurred 10,000 years ago. For Darwin’s theory of evolution to be true it was essential to prove three things. One, the Earth was much older than 10,000 years to have allowed sufficient time for evolution; two, the complex species that exist today had descended from one or a few simpler and common ancestors; and three, the driving force for species to evolve. Even if one of them was disproved, his theory would simply collapse.

The creationists have attacked these assumptions time and again but the judgement has been going in favour of evolutionists at most times. Darwin’s speculation that the Earth is older in the order of millions of years is strongly supported by the radiometric dating by the geologists. They estimate that the Earth is at least 3.56 Billion years old! Darwin was right in his first assumption.

The assumption of common ancestors is now supported by fossil records. Radiometric dating of the fossils now reveals that the simpler fossils were older than the more complex fossils. This supports the origin of more complex organisms from simpler ancestors.

“Natural Selection” – one of the most breathtaking ideas ever – provided the answer for the driving force in nature that causes the species to evolve. Just as a farmer prefers the crops with better yield to the low-yielders for further cultivation, Darwin proposed that the nature selects the individuals with favourable traits to pass them on to their next generation. For example, among the deer’s it is more likely for a deer with faster legs to survive the attack of predators than a normal deer. This is how nature selects the faster deer. There are thousands of such examples.

While the physical evidences were going in favour of Evolution, and against the western religious beliefs, the first serious threat to Darwinism came not by fundamental Christians but by scientists themselves. Towards the end of 19^th century scientists challenged the long term effects of these favourable variations. Their argument was, of course the faster deer was more likely to survive but when it has to mate, it is more likely to mate with a normal deer and so the offspring would be a blend of the two characteristics – a half-faster deer! And when that half-faster deer mates with a normal deer, the offspring would only be a quarter-faster deer! Therefore the argument focussed on successive dilution of the variations which brings the equation back to where it started! Natural Selection was pushed to dark…

The blend of the characteristics into a “half-faster” progeny was merely a hypothesis. None of the scientists who argued on successive dilution of the variations really tested it seriously because it just ‘sounded’ logical. In 1865, when an Austrian Monk called Gregor Johann Mendel presented a paper on the ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization,’ he confronted the belief of the ‘blend of characteristics’ but nobody paid enough attention to it. Next year the paper was published in ‘Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brunn’ but it was criticised and discarded. Darwin passed away in 1882 and Mendel died two years later. Thus, by the end of the 19^th century, the ‘Theory of Evolution’ was written a scientific obituary!

If you consider these theories to be some person, I put it this way – the guy went into Cardiac Arrest! Cardiac arrest is not death, after all. In 1900, two scientists – Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns – understood the ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization’ like never-before and the theory was given a successful Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR), so to say! All of a sudden it sprung back to life and became popularly known as “Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance.” With the ‘Laws of Inheritance’ accounting for the passage of the variations down the generation, Darwinism came back to the scientific front with vengeance!

Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance provided tremendous insight into one’s “Vehicles of Heredity” or “Genes.” The 20^th century made enormous progress on the path shown by Mendel. More and more interesting facts were discovered – the chromosomes, the genes, De-oxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) and its ‘twisted-ladder’ structure and the molecular techniques of comparing the DNA of different samples like Nucleic Acid Hybridisation etc…

These technological advances were at once used to test Darwin’s hypothesis and Bingo! The more it was explored the louder was the judgement in favour of Evolution! Here are some important findings. All living creatures use the same set of 20 amino acids to build their proteins. The DNA code for these amino acids is same in all of them. For e.g., ‘UUU’ codes for the amino acid, Phenyl alanine in bacteria, in fungi, in plants, in crustaceans, in fish, in mammals and name-it-any species! This clearly demonstrates that the blueprint for all the living creatures was derived from one or few common ancestors. It doesn’t stop there. Analysing the DNA samples from different species shows direct relationship between the extent of the resemblance and the proximity of their relationship in the evolution. For e.g., Human DNA is 96% similar to that of the Chimpanzees, 75% similar to that of the Dogs and 33% similar to that of the Daffodils! This clearly shows that we are more closely related to Chimpanzees than Dogs or Daffodils. Darwin was more than right again!

Through most of the 20^th century Darwinism grew exponentially. The sad thing about this is it inculcated ‘Materialism’ into one’s thinking and seemed to support atheism, which it should not have. There were revolts and judicial proceedings on whether Darwin’s theory of Evolution should be taught in high school biology. The intention was not to disprove evolution but to prevent the growing atheism. Judgements seemed to fluctuate between the two ends and the topic remained a mystery for decades until the next big threat to Darwinism came with the proposal of the ‘Theory of Intelligent Design’ by Philip E. Johnson.

This theory wasn’t totally different from the biblical description of creation according to Genesis. It just scientifically altered the theory to sound more logical. It brought into an ‘Intelligent Designer’ who crafted the life deftly and intentionally and opposed the crude undirected ‘Natural Selection’ as the driving force for evolution. Biochemist Michael Behe joined Johnson’s ‘Intelligent Design’ with the concept of ‘Irreducible Complexity.’ Irreducible complexity means, some of the structures like the ‘eye’ in most species and ‘flagella’ of the bacteria are so complex that they cannot be reduced to their components which can function independently. The lens of the eye cannot function independently of the retina and nor can the retina function without lens. His argument implied that the lens and the retina didn’t evolve independently but were designed ‘intelligently!’

William Dembsky’s mathematical calculation to prove that the chances of evolution of Humans from bacteria are so less that such an event is not just ‘improbable’ but ‘impossible,’ became another nail in the coffin for Evolution. Also the evolution could not account for the development of ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Awareness,’ which could be explained by the ‘Intelligent Design.’ The Evolutionists are working on the challenges of propellers of ‘Intelligent Design’ and are successful to some extent but by and large, the tug-of-war between Evolutionists and Creationists has been 50-50 with no clear outcome as of now. Only four out of ten Americans today believe in Evolution, the rest voting for Creationism!

I was wondering which way to go. I asked myself what my heart felt like. I could not find a clear-cut answer. Being an Indian, I decided to explore how the religious India reacted to the theory of Evolution, and was that any similar to that of the western religious society. I found a very convincing answer provided by an Indian Scientist way back in 19^th century itself – so much so that I could close the Evolution-Creation debate with concrete evidence and total conviction!

19^th January 1896, New York

A 33 year old Indian Scientist was addressing an American gathering on the topic, “The Macrocosm.” Mind you, this was a pre-genetic era when Darwinism and the theory of Evolution were still shaky. But the answer was already there with this Scientist!

The lecture opened with some of the basic questions that have crossed almost every sane mind at some point or the other. “What is the Universe made up of? Whence is this?” The scientist continues, “Millions of attempts have been made to answer it, yet millions of times it will have to be answered again. It is not that each answer was a failure; every answer to this question contained a part of truth, and this truth gathers strength as time rolls on. I will try to present before you the outline of the answer that I have gathered from the ancient philosophers of India, in harmony with modern knowledge.”

He began his explanation with some of the subtle observations in the Nature. He observed that some things in Nature though seemingly different were actually a part of the spectrum of a bigger thing. For example, a seed and a tree. Though seemingly different, they are a part of the bigger spectrum of the plant life, each one leading to the other. The seed is a finer form of the plant and over a period of time it develops into a grosser form, i.e., a tree. The tree in turn dies out leaving behind a finer form, the seed. Same is the case with a chicken and an egg. They aren’t two different things to argue which one came first. They are one and the same. Man and his germ cells are no exception to this phenomenon.

“So is the case with everything in nature by which we are surrounded. We know that the huge mountains are being worked upon by glaciers and rivers, which slowly but surely pounding them and pulverising them into sand, that drift away into the ocean where it settles down on its bed, layer after layer, becoming hard as rocks, once more to be heaped up into mountains of a future generation. From sand rise these mountains, unto sand they go,” explained the scientist.

With these analogies, the scientist derives the equation, “Destruction means going back to the cause.” He continues, “Therefore we learn that the effect is the same as the cause, not different. It is only in another form.” Next, the scientist applies this law to the Universe taken as a whole, because of its uniformity. “This universe must be resolved into its causes; the sun, moon, stars, and earth, the body and mind, and everything in this universe must return to their finer causes, disappear, be destroyed as it were. But they will live in the causes as fine forms. Out of these fine forms they will emerge again as new earths, suns, moons and stars.”

With this new understanding, the creationists and evolutionists seemed to me like those blind men trying to understand a huge elephant called Universe. Both of them were right in their own way but they were only ‘partially’ right. They seemed to me like the components of a jig-saw puzzle – though the individual components seemed to be complete, they lack something. When the components are properly arranged, they merge into one another, revealing a bigger complete picture, of which they are only a part!

The bigger picture was nothing but the finer cosmic energy – call it God or whatever – getting evolved firstly into the earth, sun, moon etc and secondly into the living cell and the organisms which later Darwin explained how they evolved into man. The whole thing was one process. As if man developed from his first cell, the zygote – growing into the blastula, which later on develops into foetus, then comes out the womb as a baby, grows up into an infant, a child and then finally into an adult. If you observe carefully, Man didn’t just ‘evolve’ from the zygote; he was ‘involved’ in it! The young scientist put this concept into words, “No rational man can possibly quarrel with these evolutionists. But we have to learn one thing more. We have to go one step further, and what is that? That every evolution is preceded by an involution.”

He also appealed for peace from the evolutionists, “The whole of this universe was present in the cosmic fine universe. The little cell which becomes afterwards the man, was simply the involved man and becomes evolved as a man. If this is clear, we have no quarrel with the evolutionists, for we see that if they admit this step, instead of their destroying religion, they will be the greatest supporters of it!”

Let me close this discussion with another quote of this scientist, “If that is so, take this whole evolutionary series, from the protoplasm at one end to the perfect man at the other, and this whole series is one life. In the end we find the perfect man, so in the beginning it must have been the same. Therefore, the protoplasm was the involution of the highest intelligence. You may not see it, but that involved intelligence is what is uncoiling itself until it becomes manifested in the most perfect man. It, therefore, follows absolutely that the perfect man, the free man, the God-man, who has gone beyond the laws of nature, and transcended everything, who has no more to go through this process of evolution, through birth and death, that man called the “Christ-man” by the Christians, the “Buddha-man” by the Buddhists, and the “Free” by the Yogis – that perfect man who is at one end of the chain of evolution was involved in the cell of the protoplasm, which is at the other end of the same chain.”

Breath-taking, isn’t it? I am sure, by now, you have guessed who this scientist is. Who else can it be other than the dynamic Swami Vivekananda? He is no politician to make blind statements. It is with logical proof that he derived his famous equation, “Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”

Now please excuse me, I not only run short of words to describe his life and works but also I have no authority to do so. I just happened to share with you whatever little I understood of his lecture, on “The Macrocosm.” Considering only this lecture to explain him makes me just another blind man explaining the elephant, but given my ambit that is all I can do. No matter what the elephant looks like, one thing is sure, it’s gigantic. No matter what Swami Vivekananda looks to you, to me he is a Scientist par Excellence!