Sophie Amundsen begins her philosophical quest after she gets mail from an anonymous Philosopher asking her `Who are you?’, `Where does the world come from?’ The 14-year old girl, the central character in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, finds herself enrolled in a pursuit to untangle the riddle of life. While this novel about the history of philosophy, one of my favourite books, dwells on life’s mysteries philosophically, I can’t help asking the same questions and more from a scientific perspective. Do we know where we come from, why we are here and, most importantly, why we ask why?
I would have been perfectly happy had I believed in the certitudes of religious faith with its cosy idea of god-designed world. But such a divine-created world based on the creation myth in the scriptures has been destabilised after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in the 19 th century. The theory of evolution and natural selection explodes this designed world and shows the stark reality that there is no clearly designed plan in which humans are inevitable. All life forms undergo mutations. A mutation can be a fatal defect and once in a great while that mutation acquires a better chance of survival and reproduction.
I know people who find it very difficult to digest the idea of evolution. This difficulty, however, arises from their failure to understand the gradual process of evolution, changes that occur over a period of a million years or 10 million years. Jonathan Weiner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1995) explains the human difficulty to imagine changes that occur over the vast span of life with the image of frozen waterfalls he used to see during his journeys. Though we can infer from this image that water was trickling down the cliff, that it was gradually frozen and that all those shapes of ice have been formed by the gradually accumulated flow, we don’t see ourselves any of that flow as we drive by, he says.
But science has made it easier for us to understand evolution by unlocking the codes in our cellular DNA, the human genome. According to J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, scientists are yet to find out a gene structure that is unique only to humans. There are some differences in the gene structures of various species, but these differences are minor, he says reminding us that everyone of our genes came from another species at some other time.
Recently, scientists found bacteria that have been locked in salt crystals for 250 million years. In our brains formed by `unimaginably complex matrix of nerve cells’, there are some structures that are similar to the genetic code of this bacteria. Doesn’t it shed light on the mystery of evolution that took an immense amount of time?. The competitive instinct to survive and the ability to attract best mates are part of the story of evolution that is now being unravelled by the study of genes.
According to fossil scientists, Homo sapiens emerged 100,000 years ago, while sharks evolved 100 million years ago and survived the asteroid impact that eliminated nearly everything. Examining the structure of the DNA double helix molecule, the scientists have found that we humans have almost exactly the same code for life of the shark. As Dr. Venter says, a lot of our protein sequences are 100 per cent identical in all mammals. It was three-and-a-half billion years ago that the first DNA molecule began to replicate and acquired complexity though it is based on a simple four-letter code: four amino acids which in endless combinations controlled all of life then and now. “We (humans) are a tiny little blip in time for evolution”, says biologist Rob Shumaker.
Darwin was 26 when he visited Galapagos Islands in September 1835 when he was serving as naturalist at HMS Beagle. Though he stayed there for just five days, what he found there, strange animals, inspired him to do more researches for solving the `mystery of mysteries’. Darwin got his cue from pigeon breeders who could breed a large variety of pigeons. This helped him imagine evolution occurring over a vast time scale. “Human imagination is very limited. We are very bad in making intuitive guess as to how long it would take to evolve something”, says Richard Dawkins.
Imagination is now replaced by technology which allows us to observe evolution in action. The HIV/AIDS virus identified in early 1980s, for example, had been changing itself so rapidly that human immune system can’t keep up with the changes evolving in the machinery of its own cells. We can also see farmers fighting against pests which fight back with their weapon of rapid evolution to equip themselves to survive deadly pesticides.
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the idea that organisms compete to attract mates, explains the use of ornate feathers of peacock. Evolutionary psychologists propose that sexual selection was central to the development of the human intelligence and ability to create music, art and poetry. “…this fantastically elaborated gift that we have for language, for understanding with each other, for empathising with each other…is as fantastic as the peacock’s tail”, says Jonathan Weiner. “We are both highly influenced by both genes and culture”, adds Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine.
What could have happened to Sophie Amundsen as she comes to the end of her philosophical mission to solve the riddle? She realises that the truth is far more complex than she could have imagined as she finds that she is only a character in the novel.
(This write-up is based on `Understanding Evolution’, a documentary produced and written by Ned Judge and telecast by The Science Channel.)
I would have been perfectly happy had I believed in the certitudes of religious faith with its cosy idea of god-designed world. But such a divine-created world based on the creation myth in the scriptures has been destabilised after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in the 19 th century. The theory of evolution and natural selection explodes this designed world and shows the stark reality that there is no clearly designed plan in which humans are inevitable. All life forms undergo mutations. A mutation can be a fatal defect and once in a great while that mutation acquires a better chance of survival and reproduction.
I know people who find it very difficult to digest the idea of evolution. This difficulty, however, arises from their failure to understand the gradual process of evolution, changes that occur over a period of a million years or 10 million years. Jonathan Weiner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1995) explains the human difficulty to imagine changes that occur over the vast span of life with the image of frozen waterfalls he used to see during his journeys. Though we can infer from this image that water was trickling down the cliff, that it was gradually frozen and that all those shapes of ice have been formed by the gradually accumulated flow, we don’t see ourselves any of that flow as we drive by, he says.
But science has made it easier for us to understand evolution by unlocking the codes in our cellular DNA, the human genome. According to J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, scientists are yet to find out a gene structure that is unique only to humans. There are some differences in the gene structures of various species, but these differences are minor, he says reminding us that everyone of our genes came from another species at some other time.
Recently, scientists found bacteria that have been locked in salt crystals for 250 million years. In our brains formed by `unimaginably complex matrix of nerve cells’, there are some structures that are similar to the genetic code of this bacteria. Doesn’t it shed light on the mystery of evolution that took an immense amount of time?. The competitive instinct to survive and the ability to attract best mates are part of the story of evolution that is now being unravelled by the study of genes.
According to fossil scientists, Homo sapiens emerged 100,000 years ago, while sharks evolved 100 million years ago and survived the asteroid impact that eliminated nearly everything. Examining the structure of the DNA double helix molecule, the scientists have found that we humans have almost exactly the same code for life of the shark. As Dr. Venter says, a lot of our protein sequences are 100 per cent identical in all mammals. It was three-and-a-half billion years ago that the first DNA molecule began to replicate and acquired complexity though it is based on a simple four-letter code: four amino acids which in endless combinations controlled all of life then and now. “We (humans) are a tiny little blip in time for evolution”, says biologist Rob Shumaker.
Darwin was 26 when he visited Galapagos Islands in September 1835 when he was serving as naturalist at HMS Beagle. Though he stayed there for just five days, what he found there, strange animals, inspired him to do more researches for solving the `mystery of mysteries’. Darwin got his cue from pigeon breeders who could breed a large variety of pigeons. This helped him imagine evolution occurring over a vast time scale. “Human imagination is very limited. We are very bad in making intuitive guess as to how long it would take to evolve something”, says Richard Dawkins.
Imagination is now replaced by technology which allows us to observe evolution in action. The HIV/AIDS virus identified in early 1980s, for example, had been changing itself so rapidly that human immune system can’t keep up with the changes evolving in the machinery of its own cells. We can also see farmers fighting against pests which fight back with their weapon of rapid evolution to equip themselves to survive deadly pesticides.
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, the idea that organisms compete to attract mates, explains the use of ornate feathers of peacock. Evolutionary psychologists propose that sexual selection was central to the development of the human intelligence and ability to create music, art and poetry. “…this fantastically elaborated gift that we have for language, for understanding with each other, for empathising with each other…is as fantastic as the peacock’s tail”, says Jonathan Weiner. “We are both highly influenced by both genes and culture”, adds Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine.
What could have happened to Sophie Amundsen as she comes to the end of her philosophical mission to solve the riddle? She realises that the truth is far more complex than she could have imagined as she finds that she is only a character in the novel.
(This write-up is based on `Understanding Evolution’, a documentary produced and written by Ned Judge and telecast by The Science Channel.)
1 comment:
Though I was never ever riddled with the question regarding life, I was mesmerised when I learnt about Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution. If I remember correctly, it was he who said that the reach of the human mind is so vast, but it would take millions of lives to acknoledge just one glimpse of life in its pristine form.
I bought the Readers Digest Book of Geography and my heart beats wildly as I open the page where they show the planets and the Miky Way and my goodness, our planet is a minuscule of an earth and whatever we have acieved through our knowledge is in itself a vast and excruciatingly attractive phenomenon.
Is it not enough to know that at this point of time, we, the Homo Sapiens rule this planet and each of us rule our own worlds?
But here, we are looking for excuses to kill each other, chop off heads, extinguish our little lives, without once glancing into the singing water and the meticulously silent mountains and the ever shimmering sea.
What would I want from life? Nothing my friend, just a minute to sit on the edge of this forest while the sun fdes from the horizon and a cold wind lingers at my feet. A song in my heart and a muslin clothing for my soul.
No more.
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