Let's Celebrate Darwin's Anniversary Year
By Q. Isa Daudpota
Islamabad , Pakistan
I do not watch the idiot box anymore; as an undergraduate I got my full share of it. Then what kept me glued were the amazing BBC's nature programs that David Attenbough produced. Given that a 13-part nature special takes almost four years of hard work, and he has done countless ones, after 50 years in this game he is still going strong. And more forceful than ever about the essential and fundamental importance of Darwin's unifying theory of evolution.
Considerable pressure is needed to persuade our TV channels to show Attenborough's one-hour special, " Charles Darwin and The Tree of Life", which aired on BBC on February 1. This is part of a year-long series to mark the 200 th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's masterpiece The Origin of Species and his 150 th birthday anniversary. If they did show this documentary and others about Evolution this year, I would beg a friend to invite me over to see them – a return to my old enthusiasm which has me queue in wet weather to see Attenbough lecture at a Scottish museum in the 1970s.
In the BBC program, according to the clips I have seen on the Net, the focus is on the misconceptions and fears that people have had about Darwin's "Dangerous" Theory. Were it to be aired here, it would clear deep misconceptions in the minds of most Pakistani viewers.
Antagonism towards the theory is widespread in Darwin's own country too. A recent poll showed that a third of UK teachers want creationism (or its new incarnation, intelligent design - ID) to be taught alongside evolutionary theory. A significant source of resistance, other than from those who believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis, comes from feeling devalued by being lumped with the other primates. Were we not the superior special creation above all others living things? No! It is such beliefs, based on a misunderstanding of religion, about the dominion of man over nature that partly cause our environmental crisis. Only when we see other living natural things and ourselves as part of an interacting mutually beneficial system – one no less important than the other -- will we begin to reverse the harm done.
The US has seen the fundamentalist Christians try and use the wedge of the intelligent design (ID) idea to introduce creationism into school science courses. This is a means to discredit the theory of evolution. For them the theory is little more than a conjecture, while for the overwhelming number of biologists, it is as close to a scientific fact as one can get to.
The ID movement's main claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, one would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural — or, more precisely, by any mindless — process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very smart.
All of which puts I.D. at odds with Darwin. His theory shows how the fantastically complex features of organisms — eyes, beaks, brains — could arise without the intervention of a designing mind. According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the combined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random mutation in an organism, like a random change in any finely tuned machine, is almost always bad. That's why you don't, screwdriver in hand, make arbitrary changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organism's genes slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the survival of the organism. In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive patch of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold into a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of organism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the direction of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators, that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of organism will, therefore, be more common in the next generation. That's natural selection. Repeated over billions of years, this process of incremental improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are well adapted to their environments and that look as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after "The Origin of Species" was published, nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved, and by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection was a key force driving this evolution.
Until the 1970s, complicated mathematical and physical models were used to explain complex natural phenomena. It seemed reasonable to think that simple things had simple explanations and complex ones, such as humans, needs intricate ones. A great flurry of activity aimed at understanding complex systems that are invariably nonlinear (i.e. effects are not proportional to causes) can now, in some cases, be explained by simple mathematical rules. Simple equations, often programmable on hand-held calculators, can generate the most complex visual and mathematical objects. This coupled with detailed knowledge of the genome of many living things has shown that scientific explanations about life forms and their interaction with the environment make past creation myths, that have existed in all cultures, valueless. Their study however is interesting, and often amusing, as one tries to understand the evolution of human knowledge.
In Pakistan, fossil finds of whales in the past 15 years have shown how this largest of mammals, came from the sea, became an amphibian, evolved into a land animal and then returned to the sea. Some of the missing links, namely Ambulocetus (49 million year old) and Pakicetus (found in 2001) are now in our museums. See video www.tinyurl.com/bacn48 about the evolution of the whale, which ends with the description of the new find, Indohyus, in Kashmir on the Indian side. With such wonderful finds in the Indus river valley we should be working overtime to get our school children and the public enthused about paleontology and our past. The enthusiasm for dinosaurs in the West can be matched by that for our whales.
For this to happen, the Natural History Museum in Islamabad should stop treating its fossil treasures and other artifacts like a disjointed stamp collection. Only Darwin's beautifully simple and verified theory can bring it order. Today Darwin is unmentioned on its website and its public displays. Such blindness to fact is not worthy of the inheritors of the Islamic civilization, that once pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge. Darwin is as much ours as he is Britain's. We own their old railways, why not him?
