Saturday 31 January 2009

Relevance of Charles Darwin now

Coming february 12th, world would witness a remarkable completion of 200 years of darwin's day of birth and last november we witnessed 150th year of publication of origin of species, his magna cum laude. Very few books have been able to cast their impression upon human mind as strong as charles darwin's work. The atheist community has heralded his concept to a greater heights and creationists have tried and would be trying to keep it under the lid for ages to come adding fuel to his fame.

While everything about darwin and the 'origin of species' have been written in all the languages that accept science , my thought was along the applicability of his concepts in the recent times. Nobody could argue against the darwin's law that only fittest have the highest possibility of survival and there is a (unseen) natural selection which favours stronger candidates over the weak. But is it true still?

If we closely watch, the misfits who(ich) are no longer useful, in the context of bigger definition of society gets eliminated gradually but does this happen nowadays? It looks like the answer is very debatable. The context at which darwin spoke didnt include the advances in technological advances that we are witnessing these times. Technology has been a great leveller and has helped the weak and poor to a great extent that they are working around their weaknesses. Like the democratic systems, where the vote driven and majority based politics could promote weaker individuals to the top places.
In the 1.8 million years of human evolution, the timeframe that we are talking about doesnt even merit a paragraph, but still we could be on top of something which could change the way we perceive the laws of darwin. The human race has reached a pinnacle where it doesnt depend upon the principles of evolution anymore and has started manipulating it rather , through alterations in genetics and technological sophistications that makes a weak strong.
Evolutionary principles have been applied to everything from philosophy, psychology, economy, and several possible walks of life and even there are games like spore built around it. Out of 5% everything spoken and written in the world may be related to it (thanks to the theits and atheists), it is the basis for the study of genetics which john gregor mendel pioneered, it is the root cause for so many exciting journeys into the science, it is the core fundemental of several social networking sites which exploit our inner thirst to be a social animal (which the materialistic society has denied us) and so many other phenomenon around the world. But may be it is time that we revalidate it with the emergence of newer facts. Btw, i need to check that the scrambled egg that i left in the stove is evolving into a good omlette. You?

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