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Evolution & Career Choices
- Santosh Helekar
It has been a while since I have posted on Goan mailing lists, but my inseparable buddy, Pandurang Fernandes alerted me to the recent post on evolution.
As someone who is convinced that cows are higher up on the evolutionary ladder than some humans, Pandurang was offended by the content of that post, but at the same time, he was reassured that he may be right about his theory of bovine evolution.
I don't blame him. That post does in fact demonstrate that some of us think like horses with blinkers, I was silently greatly appreciative some of the posts on career choices, when along came this post that reminded me about my own career choice to become a biomedical scientist.
I was indeed inspired by that singular, brilliant and enchanting idea that all living beings on earth are related to each other through a common ancestry. It veritably is one of the greatest scientific ideas of the past millennium. How refreshing to think that a simple combination of systematic observation and clear rational thinking can lead an ordinary man, not a messiah, not a divine incarnation, to such a profound insight!
That was how I felt when I read with great difficulty as a teenager, "The Origin of Species by Natural Selection".
Yes, I could read some old sacred books instead, and believe everything that they said as literal truths, notwithstanding the fact that they contradict each other, and that they have been translated and transliterated countless number of times.
But even if I surrendered my faith to one of them, in accepting what it says blindly, I would be suspending my ability to think for myself. Surely, if there is a God, any kind of God, He would want me to use my brain, my mind, my intellect, and my ability to think, observe and question, that He has given me, albeit in my case, mediocre.
Charles Darwin showed
me by example that if I used my "God-given" power of
observation, and thought really hard, I might achieve a new understanding
about some aspect of
ourselves and of the world we live in. That mere possibility has been the
driving force behind my decision to become a scientist, and it continues
to motivate me in my scientific pursuits.
Therefore, no matter what Bambino Martins calls me and my kind, in the
absence of any clear scientific evidence in favor of Biblical or any other
creation, and against evolution, I will continue to accept (not believe)
evolution by natural selection as the best scientific explanation for the
origin and diversity of life on this planet.
The mere fact that modern creationists have to resort to innuendo and misrepresentation of statements of famous scientists, taken out of context, indicates that they do not have a substantive argument, either in favor of their borrowed religious idea or against this central explanatory thesis of Biology.
Why would any one want to hint that evolution is a scientific fraud perpetrated by self-serving scientists, or that it is a world-wide scientific conspiracy hatched by political left-wing extremists? Steven Jay Gould's statement about scientific fraud was not made by him to refute evolution. He is in fact one of the strongest advocates of the evolutionary argument.
Fred Hoyle and
Chandra Wickramsinghe (who, by the way, is from Sri Lanka) were arguing by
making post-hoc probability calculations that spontaneous emergence of
life from non-living organic chemicals was highly unlikely to have
occurred on a tiny
planet like Earth. However, they thought that it was very likely that it
occurred in the vast expanses of outer space, in the interstellar gas and
dust.
The fact is that Lamarck preceded Darwin. Darwin improved upon Lamarck's
idea. So Darwinian evolutionists could not have been "excited"
by Lamarckism. Evolutionists did not have to wait for Hermann Mueller to
discover mutations to find out that evolutionary variations could be
detrimental. Darwin stated that his mechanism involved the survival of the
fittest. The unfit organisms were unfit because they had detrimental
variations in them.
I will conclude by
stating the single most powerful evidence for evolution. We all know that
the surest way of finding out
whether two individuals are related or not is by examining the
similarities between their DNA. The more similar their DNA sequences, the
more closely related they are. Applying this rationale to all organisms,
if different species are related to each other through a common ancestry,
then they should
share similar DNA sequences. As it turns out, this is indeed the case.
Many sequences in our genes are virtually identical to those in every
other organism, including bacteria. There may well be an "Intelligent
Designer" who designed it to be that way, but He certainly did not
even allude to it, let alone literally describe it, in any old sacred
book.