Explaining Life through Evolution

Title: Explaining Life through Evolution

Author: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670095100

Pages: 232     

 

We are said to be living in a post-truth era where truth is not deemed something absolute. People accept anything as truth which they wish it to be. Social media makes a celebrity’s truth the same for all his followers. However, these are philosophical concepts open to interpretation at many levels and ways. I don’t know how scientific concepts which are always true can be reconciled with the concept of post-truth I mentioned above. Touching an electrically live object causes a painful experience is a proposition that is true whether you believe that there is such a thing as electricity or not. But facts in natural sciences cannot be expressed in such outright terms even though a large number of researchers have studied the phenomena and are convinced of its merit. Evolution is one such fact of the development of life on this planet. Since it runs counter to the fundamental postulate of Abrahamic religions on the creation of life, there is widespread opposition to it. We have seen similar resistance in the past when the Church opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory and know what has come out of it eventually. Till that time, evolution will continue to be resisted by believers who propose comic alternatives such as Creation or Intelligent Design. This book is intended to explain the topic of evolution ‘to anyone with an open mind to learning’. It is also meant to be a tool to aid those who themselves want to explain the topic to others. Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He was born in Canada and brought up in the USA.

 

Creationists often ridicule evolution as ‘just’ a theory of the development of life. The author accepts that but adds the clarification that a theory in science is an overarching term that has stood the test of time. A theory is often interchangeably used with ‘law’. But in everyday parlance, ‘theory’ is something questionable that remains to be proven. It is this misconception which serves as a perfect opportunity for religion to teach creation and intelligent design in US schools as ‘alternatives’. Chakrabarty then explains Darwin’s ideas on what happened on earth. There is a single origin of life here. That was a huge leap forward in thinking. Natural selection is the causative mechanism to explain the diversity of all life. This idea was far ahead of its time when Darwin first introduced it. Most scientists then was of the opinion that different human races originated in distinct ways and places in the long past.

 

The book glances upon the period when Darwin’s “Origin of Species’ first appeared. Though Darwin had postulated that species groups mutate over time, he had no idea of how it actually came about. Unknown to Darwin, the ideas of genetics were just taking shape in the garden of Gregor Mendel and anything like DNA was not even dreamed of. That is the beauty and power of Darwin’s theory. Later discoveries corroborated its hypotheses and strengthened it on the face of severe criticism on the spiritual front. The zeitgeist of the time was that offspring were a mix of their parents, which is called blending inheritance. If this was true, variation would be lost in each generation due to the indiscriminate mixing. Mendel’s experiments proved this wrong and established that genetic traits are carried to future generations in discrete form rather than continuous. But Mendel did not know how variation was maintained in the gene pool. Mistakes in copying billions of DNA pairs cause mutations and change in traits. The author also explains how different groups in a species who are separated by geographical barriers change into different species in a process called speciation. Here, isolation and time is the key formula. The gene pool of separated groups will diverge through non-adaptive forces (neutral mutations, genetic drift) and adaptive forces (natural selection) due to the different environments these populations find themselves in.

 

A notable feature in religious revelations of the origin of life is that Man is the perfect creation of God. The Semitic religions claim that Man was created in God’s image. This book punches holes in this argument by highlighting evolutionary accretions in the human body that denigrates God’s talent as a craftsman, not to say of the blunders He has committed in ‘designing’ the human body. Several examples are given, of which the kneecap is one which is a troublesome set of tendons and ligaments where a ball-and-joint like the shoulder would have been a better design. The blood pressure in human body is more than other animals as we took to bipedalism later in the series and a higher pressure is required to pump against the force of gravity. But, only one coronary artery is there to supply blood to heart’s muscles to do the job. Several animals have more. Fish hearts are more foolproof that don’t get easily clogged with fat. As a land animal, we have the advantage of getting more oxygen directly from air than from water, but gas exchange is more difficult through lungs than with gills. Moreover, we use the same tubing for breathing as well as feeding with the attendant risk of choking.

 

The author has not been successful in achieving his objective of making evolution easily understandable to lay readers. But he has made it a guidebook of Wokeism by unnecessary tirades against supposed social injustices that are irrelevant in a book on evolution. In an instance of extremely perverted sensitivity, Chakrabarty advocates that humans don’t need genders. This is not due to any scientific or survival imperative, but due to some individuals in the LGBTQ community show deviant behaviour from their assigned genders. He then picks bones at the scientific community which usually represents a white man on the node to represent all humanity in the tree of life. He argues that representation matters and seeing the same subgroup represented as the ideal human is damaging. He doesn’t mention what it damages – probably wokeism, extreme liberalism or leftism? What in fact is the harm done if a person drawing the tree of life put the image of a person who looks familiar (or similar) to him? If evolution was discovered by African scholars, a black man would have appeared there and the world would have accepted that too. The author brings in Donald Trump into this book by quoting one of his speeches confusing viruses and their supposed vulnerability to antibiotics. Even Narendra Modi is there at the receiving end of the author’s barbs because he and his party are accused to be promoting ‘eugenic-themed pseudo-science’. He then calls Henry Ford ‘Hitler’s Hero’. He even manages to include Hindutva and Dalit-Brahmin hierarchy in this book. This is good political propaganda but a poor scientific treatise. He is more kind to the creationists than the political right.

 

The book is a total disappointment as it is ill-focused on all important topics and dwells too long on side-issues. Each chapter is practically independent of each other and hence the entire ensemble lacks coherence. Here you see the individual VIBGYOR colours but not the composite white light. Concepts are explained by illustrations that are complex, intimidating, not self-evident and probably created by a person who finds evolution confusing to himself. Each of them includes a half-page caption to make it appear intelligible. The book incorporates an irrelevant comic strip on Darwin’s life that is totally redundant with nothing new or interesting. Some illustrations printed in monochrome with detailed captions are repeated as colour plates with the exact same captions. Altogether, this is a miserably failed attempt to explain the subject in a meaningful way. Obviously, the author has wasted much time in this effort and the readers are advised not to repeat the same folly.

 

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star