Finished reading Sean Carroll’s “Remarkable Creatures” a couple of days back. I’d actually bought it thinking it would be about odd, impossible fossils and the extraordinary creatures that were to be seen in prehistoric ages. Always been a childhood fantasy of mine, you see. But it was nothing like that at all. Carroll documented the people who were behind the discovery of some of the most important fossils. From Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle to the discovery of tiktaalik, he describes the incredible adventures these people had and the hardships they endured and the effort they put in to unearth these historic finds. And it was an engrossing read. From Wallace to the Leakeys, I was fascinated. Here were the men (and one woman, Mary Leakey alone finds mention) who went out into the most barren, forbidding, wild, unreachable, unexplored, dangerous, inhospitable terrains and step by painstaking step, fleshed out Darwin’s Theory (ever since reading Dawkins elucidation on how this word in misinterpreted, I’m more and more attracted towards the idea of calling it ‘Fact’) of Evolution and gave us a more complete picture of how we came to be. I read how one by one, the arguments against evolution, both in a general sense and in the more personal sense of human evolution, were struck down. In fact, having grown up taking evolution as scientific fact, I was surprised at the level and amount of opposition it faced in the past. This, of course, stands true even today, but that’s another story.
One thing that showed through was our incredible human ego. Our desperate need to place ourselves at the top of the heap that is Nature. First we were the chosen specie, made in God’s own image. When that was struck down (down but not out, mind you), we found it hard to believe we had been on earth for only a miniscule portion of its history (I remember reading somewhere that if the entire history of earth were to be compressed into a week, life came into being on the last day, and we made it onto the stage about 5 seconds before midnight). So it was a hard task believing the earth was billions of years old. Then when that was proved incontrovertibly, we had to believe that ‘our’ line split from that of the apes at least 30 million years ago and we have been different (read superior) since. Of course, that’s another fallacy and has been disproved too. Then we had to believe that at a genetic level we were far superior to other animals so surely, our genome would have thousands upon thousands of genes thereby marking us as so much more complex than the ‘lower’ creatures (I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve learned to hyphenate that word from Dawkins). But when the whole genome was finally unraveled, lo and behold, the entire difference between us and the earthworm, was a few thousand genes! Our pretensions to being the only intelligent specie, or the only one capable of learning and even transmitting that learning are belied everyday in some corner of the world or the other. I wonder what form our ‘specie egotism’ will take next?