A talk by Nagarjuna G (@G_N) was organized by R.N. Podar School (CBSE) on “Evolution: Why don’t we get it?” on 11th July. Students are teachers of the school, along with some of the alumni attended the talk.
evolution is a phenomenon of multitude of agents/individuals with variations
variations can be generated from a simple architecture with varying parameters (demonstrated through simulations from http://www.complexity-explorables.org
existing (surviving) individuals survive because of the other surviving individuals (both living and non-living) in the environment.
no individual can survive independent of the other individuals in a population and environment
the age of the earth was shown as a 12 hour clock, to show how recent are humans and how ancient are single-celled organisms.
some of the evidences of evolution were discussed: geological time-scale, fossils, plate tectonics, molecular basis, DNA and proteins, model organisms
mechanisms of evolution can be seen in fast-breeding organisms
Towards the end of the talk, the participants were invited to join STEM Games and CUBE project.
@GN This is a good representation. From the image, it appears we are just a few seconds old in the 12-hour history of life! And plants (guessing from the latinish expression ‘fotosintesis’) are the oldest, rather earliest living things!
I think, it is even more important to understand this human-other species (nature) relation in a nuanced and clearer manner, given today’s conflicting stance of bio-diversity and economic activity. How has humanity viewed Nature and other species in general? How our understanding of evolution could shape this view, and in turn our actions!
If human history started in the last few seconds, STEM started only few milliseconds back.
Initial views from all around the world suggest that we took human and nature as two substantively different things. The current understanding is human situation is dispensable in the cosmic nature both in time and space. निमित्तमात्र।
The other day, during the lecture series by Sundar Sarukkai, we were reflecting on the way world-views shape the purpose of knowledge, and the way this could shape the questions and the process of knowing itself.
For example, Natural philosophy or science, as a pursuit to know about Nature, takes two forms in two knowledge systems. As we see in the works of Pickering, modern science, mostly historically emerging from Europe, has a sense of control – developing a grip on the object – to understand the underlying laws and modify it. In contrast, apparently, the Buddhist philosophy of knowledge emphasises compassion with the object of study. This reminds me of @Arunan 's reference to something called ‘feeling for the organism’ (Barbara McClintock).
@singh, @drishtantmkawale, @Lydia, @Manpreetheersskp, @ravi312 and all others, what do you think of it? What is the purpose behind us knowing about Moina, Solar eclipse or thermal expansion of material? What do we accomplish in the process?
And more fundamental, what is the nature of the relationship between us (humans) as knower and nature (solar eclipse, Moina, strings of tanpura, mango-slayer etc) as known? And how does this fit in connection to what @GN points at here in the Evolutionary scale?
