Three studies on the work of Charles Darwin

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Rethinking Darwin - A Vedic Study of Darwinism and Intelligent Design

Darwin and Human Evolution (Origin of Species Revisited)

Darwinism and Philosophical Analysis

For more than a century, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has been the theoretical framework - the paradigm - in mainstream biology and related life- sciences. nevertheless, great advances in biochemistry over the past decades have created an Intelligent Design opposition which maintains that the theory of evolution is beset with anomalies.

In Rethinking Darwin, Danish science writer Leif A. Jensen, in Collaboration with leading Intelligent Design proponents such as Dr. Michael behe, Dr. William Dembski, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, points out aws in the Darwinian Paradigm and examines the case for intelligent design. The argument for design is next expanded with further evidence from archaeology, cosmology, and studies of consciousness. Finally based on the irreducible nature of consciousness, the book suggests an alternative paradigm drawn from the Vedic texts of ancient India.

Danish Science writer, chairman of the Danish Society for Intelligent Design, and University lecturer on the subject of Darwinism and intelligent design, Leif Asmark Jensen has written numerous papers and articles exploring the convergence between modern science and traditional eastern philosophy. He is associated with the Bhakti vedanta Institute and is the author of Intelligent Design: et nyt syn pa udviklingen (Intelligent Design: A new Look a Evolution), the most popular book on intelligent design in Danish. He has also written a book on sustainable living and self-sufficient farming and is himself an active ecological farmer. Leif lives with his wife, dorte, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

These words were spoken by Harvard professor Ernst Mayr (19°4-2°°5), veteran evolutionary biologist, when on September 23,1999, he received the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Or. Mayr made the point that although most groundbreaking scientists, such as Albert Einstein, had a marked influence within their own fields of science, they made little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world, whereas Darwin changed the very fabric of our worldview.

And so this book. As long as the ideas of Darwin are so deeply woven into the lives of almost everyone, they will continue to be explored, explained, and critiqued from different perspectives. This book presents an overall scientific critique of Darwin's theory of evolution in a way that is accessible to laypersons, contains novel material and new perspectives that may interest even insiders within the scientific community, and offers an alternative viewpoint to standard modern evolutionary thinking.

One distinguishing feature of this book is that it is written from the standpoint of someone trained in the thoughts of Eastern philosophy, or, more precisely, in the Vedic tradition of ancient India. This naturally has a bearing on the material selected and the issues discussed in the book, and the last chapter directly outlines a Vedic philosophy of nature as an alternative to Darwinism.

Not only is this book about evolution; it is also, in its own right, the result of an evolution. It started as an idea to present some Vedic perspectives on Darwinism in the form of an easy-to-read booklet, to be published and widely distributed during the Darwin bicentennial in 2009. As the material accumulated, I saw that more than a small publication was taking shape. At one point I contacted three of the world's leading proponents of Intelligent Design, professor of biochemistry Dr. Michael Behe, mathematician and philosopher Dr. William A. Dembski, and biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells. They all found the idea of a book with a Vedic angle an interesting challenge, and each agreed to contribute a chapter. Then historian of archeology Dr. Michael Cremo, co-author of the taboo-breaking book Forbidden Archeology - a work directly inspired by the Vedic account of a human presence in ancient times - also consented to write a chapter. Clearly, a unique publication was unfolding. The result is what you now hold in your hand.

Until Darwin's time, mainstream science had concluded that life was too intricate to have been caused by nature alone. Almost a hundred years before Darwin, when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) revolutionized biology by inventing the system of taxonomy we still use today, he created a nested hierarchy showing all living forms as related, classifying them by species, genus, family (order), class, and kingdom. This didn't mean Linnaeus read natural evolution into his biological hierarchy; like almost any other scientist of his day, he saw the hierarchy as the materialization of a divine plan. This view changed when Darwin, in 1859, published On the Origin of Species. Within Darwin's lifetime - perhaps only two decades after Origin was published - almost the only way a scientist could think and still be respected was as a natural evolutionist. This does not mean Darwin's ideas went uncontested. Many leading scientists of his day found evolution unconvincing. But the tide in favor of the theory was so strong that even Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, one of the nineteenth century's most stalwart natural scientists, fell practically into obscurity because of his opposition to Darwinian thought.

In the words of biologist Francisco Ayala, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show that the complex order and function in living creatures can be explained as a result of a natural process - natural selection - without having to refer to a Creator or some other external factor.

British zoologist Richard Dawkins put the matter more bluntly:"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.!

Of course, whether creating atheists was Darwin's actual intent is uncertain, even unlikely. At least in Origin, he only argued that the numerous species of living organisms need not have been created separately but could have emerged naturally, on their own, over eons, from one or a few simple and original life forms (I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited). Nevertheless, after Darwin the role of any intelligent agent such as God was pushed so much into the background that for all practical purposes He ceased to exist for the world of biology and for science in general. It was soon taken for granted that if life could have evolved into complex forms on its own, then life itself could have started with- out any intelligent agent.

Darwin's proposal caught on wildly, and in its wake it ushered in a modern era of materialism, or naturalism - the idea that material nature and the universe are closed, self-contained units and that to explain anything within them, including ourselves, our feelings, our thoughts, and our consciousness, we need refer to nothing beyond the laws that govern matter, the laws of physics and chemistry.

But in spite of the widespread acceptance of Darwinism and its attendant materialism, Darwin's theory has always had its scientific critics, and their number has not decreased. Rather, and to the surprise of many, the criticism has greatly increased. Since the late 1980s, evolution has faced opposition from a growing number of members of the scientific community itself. This opposition has gradually united into an Intelligent Design front and pulled the world of science into what has been called "the Evolution War.

What Intelligent Design (ID) entails will be explained in the chapters to follow. But for now let me give a simple definition: Intelligent Design is the theory that infers signs of intelligence from the workings of nature. What this means becomes clearer if for a moment we turn to the field of archeology. Archaeologists study discovered objects, such as flints, and ask the question whether everything about these objects can be explained naturally or whether, on the contrary, certain traits are the result of intentional work by humans. When archaeologists determine that a discovered object could not have been shaped by natural processes alone, they infer design and regard the object as a human artifact. Similarly, ID is the attempt by scientists to draw a line between what could have been caused by nature working alone and what could not have and must therefore have been caused by an intelligent agent.

What makes ID controversial is not that it tries to discriminate between designed and naturally formed objects per se, since this goes on not only in archeology but in many fields of science, but that contemporary design-theorists look for and claim to have found signs of intelligence in nature and life. Living organisms, they say, have features that cannot be ascribed to the laws of nature alone but are best explained as artifacts of an intelligent cause. Of course, this at once puts ID in opposition to Darwinism and evolutionary theory, which precisely claim that everything about life can be explained materially. This explains why the face-off between evolutionists and proponents of Intelligent Design creates such a stir. Critics accuse ID of being veiled religion, whereas design theorists retort that ID is no more a religion than Darwinism - or perhaps only just as much. ID scientists say that since they demonstrate their conclusions entirely from studies of nature and not by recourse to religious concepts or scripture, ID cannot be called "religion" in any usual sense of the term. But if Intelligent Design should be called religious because it has religious implications - which everyone agrees it has - then Darwinism is also religious. The only difference between the two is that Intelligent Design points to an intelligent cause behind nature whereas Darwinism purports to show that an intelligent cause for life and nature is not necessary. Perhaps the real fact is that, whether one likes it or not, the discussion about the nature of life invariably overlaps both science and religion. agent.

What science has to say about the nature of life has implications for more than just an elite group of experts. The question of life's origin and development influences every human being's self-understanding and indeed lies at the foundation of how we each build ideas of what is true and false, right and wrong, important and unimportant, and about the meaning of existence. This may be one more reason why this issue causes so much stir.

In this book, assisted by Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Michael Cremo, I first offer the reader an understanding of what Darwinism and Intelligent Design are. Next, while agreeing with the basic ideas of Intelligent Design, I go one step further by examining evidence normally not a direct part of the Intelligent Design discussion - in particular, studies of consciousness, parapsychological phenomena, inspiration, and evidence pointing to a conscious self that can exist apart from matter. Some may consider this a risky step, but upon examination one finds much high-quality scientific evidence in this field that opens a window on a nonphysical yet still observable reality. This, of course, can have great implications for how we understand the nature of life.

Finally, in the book's last chapter, I try to weave all these disparate strands of evidence together into a whole. Evidence never stands alone in science; it must be interpreted into a broader theoretical framework, often called a paradigm. For most modern biologists, the guiding paradigm is Darwin's theory of evolution. In the words of evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" and "There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination." In this book's last chapter, I take up Dobzhansky's challenge and propose such an alternative.

The book is homage to Charles Darwin. It reassessed Darwin and his theory of evolution. Systematic synthesis of Darwinian concepts in the contemporary perspective of research and innovations are the focal points of this book. The Asiatic Society had provided research materials to Darwin for his famous work on evolution. This volume includes works of the scientists who are continuing with Darwin's specimens in the Bird division of Natural History Museum of United Kingdom. There are articles on valuable and enigmatic fossil findings from China, Indonesia and India. Detail description of the fossil remains is given together with their evolutionary implications and settlement histories in Asia. Evolution is viewed from the bio-cultural view point. Recent concepts and researches on evolution from the perspective of molecular biology are discussed. Bio-engineering and genomic programming points out modern techniques for understanding evolution. Above all there are discourses on population structure, biological framework for understanding people of Indian subcontinent. Genomic and cultural studies have established the antiquity of Indian population. Highly acclaimed findings substantiated by DNA analysis of Indian people both of modern and ancient are discussed. Much of the myths in respect to peopling of India is unravelled in this book.

Ranjana Ray is a former professor of the Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University. She has been conferred with Emeritus Fellowship by UGC considering her highly acclaimed contribution in anthropology. She is an elected member of the executive body of the International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, a body of the UNESCO. She is the Anthropological Secretary of the Asiatic Society. There are a number of publications to her credit published in reputed scientific journals in India and abroad.

Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay is the Director, Centre for Research in Nano Science and Nano Technolgoy; Professor in Biochemistry and Biotechnology; Pro Vice Chancellor Academic, Calcutta University; President, Society of Biological Chemists (India); President, West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology; Fellow of Indian Academy of Science (Bangalore); Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India (Allahabad); Biological Science Secretary, The Asiatic Society, Kolkata. His works and research findings are published both in international and national publications.

Samir Banerjee is the former Hiralal Chaudhuri Professor, Department of Zoology, Calcutta University; Fellow of the West Bengal Academy of Science and Technology; Former expert Member, West Bengal Biodiversity Board; Hony. Secretary, the Zoological Society, Kolkata. He is working on Functional Ecology of Wetland, Mangrove and Waste fed ecosystem. He has published 130 scientific papers and authored a number of text and reference books. He is a member of the Biological Science Subcommittee of the Asiatic Society.

Charles Robert Darwin, the British naturalist, was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. Darwin believed that all life forms had evolved from a few common ancestors as a result of a gradual process spanning millions of years. He became famous for this theory of evolution and natural selection.

His Voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, which started in 1831, opened him to the ideas of natural selection. When the Beagle, which was on a British Science expedition around the world, reached South America, Darwin found fossils of many extinct animals. He noticed that many of these extinct animals have characteristics similar to existing modern species. The expedition also took Darwin to the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. After comparing the natural diversity in both the places, Darwin observed the existence of many varieties of organisms of a common general type. The geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils that he collected on the voyage intrigued him deeply.

When he came back from the expedition Darwin analyzed all the observations he had made and then put forward his theories on evolution according to which the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called 'speciation'.

He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and much of the general public in his lifetime, but it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was one of only five 19th century non-royal personages of Great Britain to be honoured by a state funeral, and was buried in Westminster, close to Sir Isaac Newton.

The understanding of evolution has come a long way since the days of Darwin. During the first part of this century the incorporation of genetics and population biology into studies of evolution led to a Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution that recognised the importance of mutation and variation within a population. Natural selection then became a process that altered the frequency of genes in a population and this defined evolution. This point of view held sway for many decades but more recently the classic Neo-Darwinian view has been replaced by a new concept which includes several other mechanisms in addition to natural selection. Current ideas on evolution are usually referred to as the Modern Synthesis.

The Modern Synthesis, also called the Synthetic Theory and the Evolutionary Synthesis, was the marriage of Mendelian genetics to Darwinian theories of evolution.

1. It recognises several mechanisms of evolution in addition to natural selection. One of these, random genetic drift, may be as important as natural selection.

2. It recognises that characteristics are inherited as discrete entities called genes. Variation within a population is due to the presence of multiple alleles of a gene.

3. It postulates that speciation is (usually) due to the gradual accumulation of small genetic changes. This is equivalent to saying that macroevolution is simply a lot of microevolution.

In other words, the Modern Synthesis is a theory about how evolution works at the level of genes, phenotypes, and populations, whereas Darwinism was concerned mainly with organisms, speciation and individuals. This was a major paradigm shift. .

Newer perspectives of looking at and understanding evolution are now rapidly evolving. Molecular evolution emerged as a scientific field in the 1960s as researchers from molecular biology, evolutionary biology and population genetics sought to understand recent discoveries on the structure and function of nucleic acids and protein. Molecular evolution is the process of evolution at the scale of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Some of the key topics that spurred development of the field have been the evolution of enzyme function, the use of nucleic acid divergence as a 'molecular clock' to study species divergence, and the origin of non-functional or junk DNA. Recent advances in genomics, including whole-genome sequencing, high-throughput protein characterisation, and bioinformatics have led to a dramatic increase in studies on the topic.

Scientists are now utilising the advantages of model organisms such as drosophila, yeast and mice to explore the relationship between genomes and biological function and evolution. Results from multidisciplinary research utilising genomic, molecular genetics and cell biological techniques are helping to probe important developmental and evolutionary questions.

**Contents and Sample Pages**

The book promises to revitalise analytic philosophy by extending its method so that it could be discovered how the mind's rationality evolved. Several novel results of this extension are presented, for example, surprising types of defense of religion, morality and free will. Reinvigorated by Darwinian insights, the author contends, philosophical method can yield greater understanding of self-hood, consciousness of time and the nature of relation of thought to language.

The philosophy that emerges is within the naturalistic tradition as represented by W.V.O. Quine, the eminent American philosopher. The book defends this tradition against its strongest contemporary competitor — the Kantian tradition.

About the Author

Professor Arthur E. Falk did his M.A. at Yale University, USA in 1962 and obtained Ph.D. from the same university in 1965. Earlier he had the distinction of being a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Junior Sterling Fellow at Yale during 1960-62 and in 1964 respectively. He has been teaching at Western Michigan University since 1966 and was elevated to the post of Professor of Philosophy in 1977.

A Visiting Professor in Indiana University, USA in 1968, Dr. Falk was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in Jadavpur University, where he lectured and taught for 10 months. Recently he lectured at Utkal University as a Visiting Professor.

An expert in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mind, Professor Falk's other areas of interest include Logic and Moral Philosophy.

DARWINISM and Philosophical Analysis is primarily the outcome of a project on which Professor Arthur Falk worked and lectured at Utkal Philosophy Department as a Visiting Professor under the Special Assistance Programme of the University Grants Commission during November-December, 2001. Some parts of the contents were also lectured at Jadavpur University immediately prior to his visit to Utkal. In this work, readers will find the uniquely original and a strikingly different approach of the author to philosophical analysis which, when Darwinised, could add significantly to the shaping of our world-view rather than leaving 'everything as it is'.

In biology, Darwinism means the theory of the origin of species from a common ancestor by the mechanism of natural selection — a mindless and thoroughly anti-teleological process. In philosophy, analysis means the elucidation of important concepts and linguistic modes of expression. Arthur Falk proposes that philosophers Darwinise their analytic techniques when they use them to study the concepts of the mind and the person, and thus construed, analysis can reveal ancestral forms of mentality. He promises nothing less than a grand reconciliation of our conception of ourselves — our mentality, our values, our freedom — with the physical world as science is revealing it to be. As he says in chapter 4, Lady Philosophy, embodying our self-conception, will no longer be the reluctant bride in her marriage to the world as science describes it, but will propose the marriage herself. And as he says in chapter 10, she will find Sir Physical kissable even when science reveals him to be stupid, purposeless, and most ugly; naked Fate. In short, this book is about what analytic philosophy could add to the shaping of our emerging world-view, rather than leaving it all to science and other cultural forces. Constructing this world-view surely is a philosophical task and the author makes an eloquent plea for this naturalistic conception of philosophy's task in the postscript to chapter 2.

At the dawn of this century in Australasia and North America, where Falk teaches, the naturalist turn in philosophy has taken a strong foot hold. But the Darwinian manifestation of naturalism, that is, the emphasis on evolutionary continuity between human spirituality and the mindless physical world, is still a minor current within naturalism. Most naturalists there are still engrossed in exploring the computational theory of the mind, very much a non-historical project. Elsewhere, even this naturalism struggles in competition with a Kantian project for analytic philosophy to carry out. According to the Kantian transcendentalist, philosophy is something that must precede science in the conceptual order, because otherwise skepticism will not have been adequately dealt with. On the Indian subcontinent and the British Isles, this transcendentalist project still perhaps has the larger allegiance. Consequently, there is resistance here to the idea that the very methodology of analytic philosophy should be Darwinised, since it compromises the precedence of philosophy to science and undermines the transcendental deductions by which the Kantian hopes to cage the sceptic. A persuasive presentation of this view, combined with a Wittgenstein an tinge, is to be found in a recent work of Professor Ramesh Chandra Pradhan of Hyderabad — a work which Falk cities in this book. It is fitting and also challenging, therefore, for Falk to present his case for a radically historicized naturalism to us in India. If he can convince a few of us here, convincing our American counterparts should be easy — as the author himself tells me.

Perhaps the crux of the methodological issue can be put this way. The human community is not going to relinquish the basic features of its conception of human beings as having states of mind that represent state of affairs and as beings immersed in a world of meanings, purposes and values. The philosophical position in the philosophy of mind called eliminativism is not an option. Both Falk and the Kantians would agree to that. So either Falk is successful in showing that the very analytic methods which articulate and validate this scheme of ourselves grow naturally in a Darwinian direction to make a happy and seamless connection between minds and the physical world, or we shall have to resort to a transcendental argument for the a priori necessity of this conception of ourselves for the very possibility of experience and science of the world. If Falk is right, and I am inclined to think he is, the transcendental argument is not needed.

For those who incline to the view that naturalism gives up philosophy, perhaps an analogy to the dispute over intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics will help reframe the picture and dispel the suspicion. The intuitionist avoids certain assumptions and certain methods of proof, which other mathematicians accept. Today, all mathematicians are at least interested to know what parts of mathematics can be justified with the limited means the intuitionist allows himself. No one denies that the intuitionist mathematician is a mathematician. Analogously we can think of the naturalistic methodology as imposing a constraint on philosophical argumentation. The avoidance of transcendental arguments is like the intuitionistic avoidance of non-constructive proofs. And so, similarly, all philosophers should be interested to see what parts of philosophy as traditionally conceived can be justified within the naturalistic constraints. It may come to seem that 'less is more'.

Although the first three chapters are highly polemical, where Falk strikes the pose of the embattled guardian of the truth, the central chapters, from 4 to 7, extract the evolutionary history of the mind form data that typify analytic philosophy over the last 50 years, indeed over the last decade, including the work of Quine, Dennett, Geach, Perry, David Lewis, Chisholm, Fodor, Dretske, to name but a few. This material is up to date technical philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition. It is not meant for casual reading but for wrestling with; for a least one reason — it is counterintuitive. Falk often rejects the reader's expectations about what a Darwinian should say. For example, he is more concerned with the design flaws in the mind than he is with adaptations. Taking his cue from biologists who find the useless traits of an organism to be vestigial and revelatory of ancestry, Falk looks for the mindlessness in nature's construction of minds. Don't look here for rhapsodies about the functions of the mind. His 'Just so' stories are comedies of errors. Would you believe we are conscious because nature made a mistake in our construction? Falk would say just this.

Falk's capacity for surprise continues in the last three chapters, in which he draws the moral of his central story for our values and active life. Having spent so much effort highlighting the dysfunctional aspects of mind, he comes to the mind's propensity for religion. Would he say it too is dysfunctional? No, he presents a justification of religion that is very much reminiscent of Kant's as well as Pascal's. Falk loves to throw his audience off-balance with paradoxes; it is his chief rhetorical trick for enlivening what would otherwise be dry and soporific. Let me try it too: His chapter on values will scandalize many, since it is a paean to Nietzsche. Having defended the rational permissibility of theism in chapter 8, he implies in chapter 9 that atheism is preferable on the basis of the immoralist (amora list, shouldn't we say?) values that underlie it. Then in the last chapter he manages to suggest that fatalism captures the essence of freedom. Well, if I have convinced you that the book is too absurd to bother with, I will have overshot my mark. Remember, I did say this was rhetoric. The readers will realize that his philosophy is most acute, both in controverting the positions he rejects and in constructing the most novel alternatives he offers and adduces, which have a good chance of being the truth. According to the author, it will be the sort of truth that will make you free.

The Philosophy Department at Utkal has been enriched by Falk's refreshingly novel ideas and will treasure his brief but effective intellectual interaction with the faculty and students here.