When Charles Darwin propounded his work in the path breaking “The Origin of Species” in the year 1859, most and Clergy understandably, could not relate to the musings he underwent on his trip around the globe on HMS Beagle. I blame them not, for our interpretation of truth and right is limited by our understandings and the cognition we build unknowingly by the culture and societal background we come from. We often tend to resist anything which is novel and alien. It has got to do more with the nature. As Newton would’ve said to it: A body in rest or motion will continue to be so and will always resist the application of external force on it. Our blood cells will always resist and assail anything which is foreign. We are often so much brainwashed since our childhood by the nearby agents that any doctrine which says no to conventions and mundaneness is resisted as vehemently as possible by our cognition. Change, in fact, needs continuous application to become accepted. Hence we always require efforts to get out of our comfort zones. Also, a sufficient amount of time is required before this change becomes mundane. When Galileo came up with his heliocentric theory, he was again so much chided by the Church that he had to revert back to his statement to escape what we now call the capital punishment. Today it sounds very obvious because this is what has been seeded into our cognition since childhood.
To put it simply, change of any form, although is inevitable, is always opposed and require a certain timeline to get accepted. The magnitude of this timeline is directly proportional to the intensity of change. Now if the timeline is small, the change will create devastation with certitude. This is what happened to the giant reptiles called dinosaurs which ruled our planet in the Mesozoic era. If everything is in sync, this change brings another greater change which Darwin mentioned as ‘adaptation’. Adaptation will then be observed in forthcoming generations and will slowly penetrate into a greater scale. The survival of species depends a lot on its ability to adapt. The ability to adapt to various external factors and to get in the groove of change by casting off our inherent dogmas and sometimes our physical and biological attributes will define with how much success will one survive in the Capitalist era of today. Laws of nature stand the test of time. Darwin brought forward which was very much in the essence of nature but unobserved. The flaws in the theory just point out to the observations we haven’t made yet.
Now try applying Darwin’s theory to the proposition of the theory itself. At prima facie, it was resisted as intensely as possible by the cognition of the common and more intensely by the cognition of the clergy (their cognition was/is less susceptible to change ) because it was trying to make changes which were at radical level and which were cent per cent contrary and opposite. Also the timescale of change was very minute. As the timescale has extended to over fifty and a hundred years, the resistance of our cognition has diminished and the theory is being mused over by a large scale of intelligentsia and with a lot less scepticism. To textbook educated populace, it will appear as obvious as the heliocentric theory. Change we always resist, may be that is why, Men love history and cling to dogmas and cultural aspects of the past. This is why exactly we hate iconoclasts and revolutionists. Both bring change. Darwin brought change.
©Rakesh 2011
