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Education

Darwin’s theory of evolution and the debate around it

indiatoday.com

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Darwin’s theory of evolution says that different species are related through common ancestry, and is accepted worldwide– or was?

A debate has stirred up recently after the union minister for human resource development on Friday made a striking remark about Darwin’s theory of evolution. Since then, discussion has moved out of classrooms to drawing rooms and opinion columns.

WHAT SATYAPAL SINGH SAID

Union minister for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, calling himself “a responsible man of science,” suggested that Darwin’s theory is “scientifically wrong” and “needs to change” in school and university curricula

The minister of state for human resource development has formerly been an Indian Police Service officer and is a qualified chemist

This Friday, “since the man is seen on Earth he has always been a man,” he told reporters at a conference in Aurangabad

Further, he said that “nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral, have said they saw an ape turning into a man”

“No books we have read or the tales told to us by our grandparents had such a mention,” PTI quoted him as saying

WHAT CHARLES DARWIN’S THEORY OF EVOLUTION SAYS

The Darwinian paradigm of evolution says different species are related to one another through common ancestry, being descendants of a single or very few ancient life forms

It also states that species can give rise to new species, sometimes very gradually, sometimes quite fast

Species can also undergo alteration in their characteristics over many generations, largely (but not necessarily only) through the mechanism of natural selection

These broad ideas have overwhelming support within the scientific community

PROTESTS AGAINST SINGH’S COMMENTS

Singh’s comment stirred commotion on social media and amongst scientists around the country

“What has been said by Dr. Singh is wrong at multiple levels. Indeed, it defies both logic and biology,” Amitabh Joshi, professor at Bangalore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) was quoted saying

An online letter to Singh, signed by over 3,000 people, echoed the sentiment and decried the “overly simplistic and misleading representation of evolution”

Singh is not backing down. Over the weekend, he said his ministry intends to hold a conference in which evolutionary theory and creationism “could be debated openly”

However, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar, was quotes as saying that the government has no plan “for a national seminar to prove Darwin wrong”

DARWIN’S THEORY UNDER SCRUTINY

Since Darwin’s theory evolution emerged in 1859, a number of books have been after advancing scientific research into the biochemical and genetic make-up of living organisms, especially humans– which have challenged Darwin’s theory with scientific backing.

Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

Michael J Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, in his book Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, speaks about how complex the building blocks of life actually are

In his book, he focuses on five factors– blood clotting, cilia, (oar-like bundles of fibre), the human immune system, transport of materials within the cells and the synthesis of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA)

Behe opines that certain systems are too complex, and cannot be reduced down to a step-by-step Darwinian route to creation, as theorized by the 19th century scientist

He suggests a different mode of creation for the complex biochemical systems that we possess– it could be ‘God’, a universal force, extraterrestrials or some other intelligent agents, according to him

The God Delusion

However, Richard Dawkins, author of the bestseller The God Delusion wrote a scathing review of Behe’s second book, The Edge of Evolution in New York Times in 2007:

” Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific” ” the review went.

“…In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it,” Dawkins added.

Darwin’s Doubt

Darwin had only one doubt that he couldn’t explain in his On the Origin of Species– a doubt which is perplexing scientists even today– an event around 530 million years ago called the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ suddenly saw many different types of animal fossils appear in the earth

These “new” animals had no such evolutionary ancestors which could be seen in the earlier layers of soil

Stephen C Meyer, an advocate of intelligent design, in his book Darwin’s Doubt, spoke about the mystery surrounding this period of time, and argued how this mismatch could be explained with intelligent design rather than independent and undirected evolutionary processes

Meyer claims that a simple structure cannot spontaneously become complex without intelligent design

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