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HomePosts Tagged "Evolution"

Evolution Tag

History & Culture, Science & Technology

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the voice of a living creature say, “Come!” As I looked, there was a black horse, and its rider’s name was Famine. Hades followed along behind him. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with hunger.

~ Revelation 6: 7-8

There was once a man who dreamed that through science, we could make a world where no one would ever perish from hunger. And famine would be no more. He gave us a treasure to fulfil that promise, but he faced a terrible choice at a moment of reckoning. To lie about science and live, or to tell the truth and face certain death.

On the Origin of Species

For the first couple of hundred thousand years that we were human, we were wanderers living beneath the stars. We gathered plant life and hunted animals until about ten or twelve thousand years ago when our ancestors invented a new way to live. Think of those geniuses who were the first to realize that inside the plants they foraged, was a means to make another plant: a seed.

That discovery led to the Agricultural Revolution, the single most fateful choice our species ever made.

Our ancestors could continue wandering in small bands or settle down to grow and raise their food. This required sacrifices for rewards that would not come until much later. For the first time, we were thinking about the future.

Of course, these decisions weren’t instantaneous. They unfolded over generations. That seems like a long time ago in human terms, but in the great sweep of cosmic time, it was less than half a minute ago. For the first time, the wanderers were settling down and building things to last for more than a single season. They dared to touch the future.

The tower of Jericho still stands. This is the world’s oldest stairway.

Was it a watchtower for protecting the city from invaders? Or just a way to get closer to the stars? It took 11,000 work days to build. Something that could only be possible with the food surpluses that agriculture provided. It was already 5,000 years old before the first Egyptian pyramid was built. To climb it is to follow in the footsteps of 300 generations. Isn’t it astonishing that people who had barely ceased wandering, were able to create something of such permanence?

The rich and varied hunter-gatherer diet, of plants, insects, birds and other animals, was replaced. City dwellers largely subsisted on a few carbohydrate crops. And when the rains didn’t come or a fungus afflicted the grain, there was hunger on a massive scale: famine.

  • Famines caused by drought and British colonial mismanagement in India in the 18th century killed ten million people.
  • In China, during the famines of the 19th century, more than 100 million people perished.
  • The great hunger in Ireland, also a result of British imperial policy, starved a million to death and forced another two million to flee the country in search of a living.
  • The Brazilian drought and pestilence of 1877 was comparable. In a single province, more than half died of starvation.
  • The dead remain uncounted from the famines that wracked Ethiopia, Sudan and the Sahel in Africa.

For a couple of thousand years, ever since records were kept, somewhere on Earth, people in great numbers have starved.

Could agriculture become a science with a predictive theory as reliable as gravity? One that could consistently produce breeds able to stand up to drought and disease? Farmers and herders knew the advantages of preferentially selecting the hardiest specimens for crossbreeding, to produce a more successful hybrid. This was known as artificial selection. However the mechanism of how those traits were passed on to succeeding generations remained a complete mystery.

Down House, Charles Darwin’s home, where he lived with his wife, and their ten children – and the garden he planted. A strangely pastoral setting for the most influential revolutionary in the history of thought. Even now, almost 200 years later, some people are afraid of his idea.

Charles Darwin discovered that species, including ours, evolve over time through a process of natural selection. The environment rewards those best adapted to its changing realities with survival and with new generations of offspring. Darwin demystified the external reality of life, but no one had any idea what the inner mechanisms of evolution were.

At that same moment, an abbot at a rural monastery in what is now the Czech Republic was trying to become a science professor.

Gregor Mendel flunked his qualifying exam, twice. The only career path open to him was to become a substitute teacher.

In his spare time, Mendel took up the study of pea plants. He bred tens of thousands of them, carefully scrutinizing the height, shape, and colour of their pods, their seeds and flowers. He was searching for a predictive theory of breeding. So that you could know in advance exactly what you would get when you crossed a tall plant with a short one and a green pea with a yellow one. Mendel found that you would get a yellow pea every time. We didn’t have a word for the power of the yellow over the green until Mendel coined it. He called that quality “dominant.” And to his delight, he found that he could predict what would happen in the next generation of peas after that. One in four pea plants would be green. Mendel named the hidden trait that popped up in the next crop, “recessive.” There was something he called “factors,” hidden inside the plants that caused particular characteristics. And they operated by a law that Mendel could describe with a simple equation, like gravity.

Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel didn’t know it, but the two scientists were deciphering the mysterious workings of life at the very same moment:

  • Darwin presented the evidence for a oneness with all life. That despite our pretensions to a mystical higher birth, we were actually relatives to the other beasts and vegetables. As much a part of the natural world as any other living thing.
  • Mendel discovered that there were laws governing the way life’s messages were passed on. The substitute teacher had invented a whole new field of science. But nobody noticed for 35 years. He died never knowing that the world would come to see him as a giant in the history of science.

Mendel’s work was resurrected at the beginning of the 20th century and he had no more vigorous defender than the British zoologist William Bateson. It was Bateson who named the new field of science devoted to studying these factors: genetics.

Bateson and his colleagues worked on developing new breeds of plants and animals. He believed that science and freedom were indivisible and that’s how he ran his laboratory.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a visiting botanist from Russia, took Bateson’s credo deeply to heart. He wanted to use the new field of genetics to learn how to feed the world. He was on his honeymoon but science was his passion.

Winter is Coming

The idea that our planet is a single organism, a unity, has a ring of hollow sentimentality for many people. But it’s just a scientific fact.

Something is about to happen, in remote Southern Peru, in the year 1600 on February 19th at 5:00 pm. Unsuspecting multitudes and distant foreign capitals will never know how this event reached around the world to torment and kill them.

The eruption of Huaynaputina volcano remains to this day the largest explosion in South America in recorded history. This nasty mixture of sulfuric acid and volcanic ash blocked the sun’s rays from reaching Earth.

Winter is coming. Volcanic winter.

For the people of Russia, it brought the worst winter in six centuries. For two years, even the summer temperatures would fall below freezing at night. Two million people, a third of Russia’s population, would die from the resulting famine. It led to the downfall of Tsar Boris Godunov, all because of a volcano that erupted 13,000 kilometres away in Peru.

But that was not the last famine in Russian history. Drought and famines occur frequently. But it wasn’t until nearly three centuries later, in 1891, that the magnitude of suffering was again as ghastly. Winter came early that year and the crops failed. Tsar Alexander III was slow to respond. Wealthy Russian merchants continued to export grain at a profit even as millions went hungry. All the Tsar had to offer his starving subjects was “famine bread”, a miserable mixture of moss, weeds, bark and husks. Half a million Russians perished, while the aristocracy and the wealthy feasted on fresh strawberries from the south of France and clotted cream from England.

The Russian Revolution would not explode for another 30 years, but many historians believe that this famine was the spark that ignited the long fuse. It was to make a lasting impression on the hero of our story, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov. His parents were born into poverty but had worked their way up into the upper middle class. All four of the children would grow up to become scientists. Sergey became a physicist. Nikolai grew up to be a botanist.

In 1911, Russia was the largest grain exporter on Earth, although its farming methods were antiquated. The Petrovsky Institute was the only place in Russia where scientists could hope to modernize food production through the new science of genetics. But it was still a matter of controversy:

Liliya Rodina: Debate topic for today, is plant selection a science or not?
Dimitry Ivanov: It is not a science. A farmer knows best. He's been sowing the larger seeds and crossbreeding the fattest animals for thousands of years. What do we scientists have to offer them? Except fancy equations to confuse the peasants. They don't want that. They want bread.
Nikolai Vavilov: The farmer has wisdom and is worthy of our respect. But tragically, he lacks the predictive powers of science. They cannot foretell which traits will dominate or which will be recessive. The farmer plays roulette and he's about as successful as the average gambler. Gregor Mendel made it possible for him to know the odds. To know what number the ball will land on. The moment Mendel expressed his ideas mathematically, agriculture became a science and our only hope to efficiently feed ourselves. And feed the world.

Up, Up, and Away

In 1914, during the First World War, Vavilov began to wonder. Where did the domesticated plants come from? Who were their ancestors? In a love letter, he wrote:

"I really believe deeply in science. It is my life and the purpose of my life. I do not hesitate to give my life even for the smallest bit of science."

The First World War revealed the deep cracks in Russian society and spurred the outbreak of revolution and civil war.

Vavilov established the first of his 400 scientific institutes where the children of peasants and labourers became scientists. All in the service of Vavilov’s dream of ending famine. In 1920, he dared to propose a new law of nature that would make him world-famous:

The same genes perform the same functions in different species of plants. This is because they share a common ancestor. To understand evolution and to guide our breeding work scientifically we must go to the oldest agricultural countries where these common ancestors may still live.

Vavilov knew that every seedling contained its species’ unique message. The content’s different, but all written in a mysterious language that would not be deciphered for decades. He wanted to preserve every phrase of life’s ancient scripture, to ensure its safe passage to the future. He was among the first to grasp the critical importance of biodiversity. Moreover, he came up with an entirely new concept: a world seed bank that he hoped would be impervious to war and natural catastrophes. There was a scientific underpinning to this humanitarian goal. If you could find the earliest living specimens of the plants we eat, you could parse its sentences and decipher life’s language. You could know how it changed over time. This decryption would make it possible to write new messages. To grow food immune to disease, fungus and insects and resistant to drought.

Vavilov would become a hunter of plants on five continents, venturing to places no scientist dared go before him.

Without maps or roads, Vavilov was the first European in modern times to venture into the mountainous regions of Afghanistan. Riddled with tribal clashes and other dangers, Vavilov was suspicious of the prevalent hypothesis that humans invented agriculture in the river deltas. He reasoned that remote mountain strongholds would be a much safer place to farm. Far from the casual plundering of passersby.

As Vavilov risked life and limb, searching for seeds on five continents. His legend as a daredevil equalled his reputation for scientific genius.

In 1927, in what was then Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, Vavilov discovered the mother of all coffee. It was a good thing too. Because he needed to stay awake all night guarding the camp. As he waited for permission to travel into the interior, he was surprised to receive an invitation from the regent and future emperor of Ethiopia, Rastafari. Or as the world would come to know him, Haile Selassie. Vavilov later recalled:

"It was just the two of us. He questioned me with great interest about my country and its revolution. I informed him that Lenin, our founder, had died, and Joseph Stalin now ruled. I told Rastafari how Stalin's armed robbery of a bank had raised $3 million for the revolution and made him a folk hero in Russia 20 years before."
As Vavilov continued his global quest for seeds and knowledge, Trofim Lysenko, one of Vavilov’s numerous protégé was beginning to make a name for himself.

As Joseph Stalin was having all his political rivals systematically murdered, he began to slash away at the structure of Russian agriculture. In the early 1930s, his stated goal was to modernize Soviet agriculture. But the result was catastrophic. Stalin ordered the Kulaks, as the more prosperous peasants were known, to be liquidated as a class. Between five and ten million people perished of famine. But to Trofim Lysenko, this massive tragedy was an opportunity. Lysenko hated Vavilov for his knowledge and fame, and like the snake that he was; he knew exactly when to strike. And ultimately, his venom would be fatal.

"The Garden of Eden must have been somewhere near here in central Asia because this is where the first apples grow."

Vavilov travelled the world identifying the first places on Earth to bear these seeds. Collecting samples of each for safekeeping. All in all, Vavilov brought back a quarter of a million varieties of seeds. But the Russia Vavilov returned to was a different country. One in the grip of the most vicious famine it had ever known. The heady optimism of the revolution had been replaced with dread and despair.

Vavilov’s Institute of Plant Industry, in the city that was then called Leningrad, was now the largest collection of genetic information on Earth.

Vavilov’s team began to sort and catalogue every precious seed. They worked tirelessly as if the life of every hungry Russian depended on them.

In Snakes Lysenko…

Lysenko: Comrade Stalin. I have something of vital importance to our nation's security to tell you. I know why the country starves and I know how to turn famine into plenty so that you may triumph over all those who seek to undermine you.
Stalin: Comrade Lysenko, you must be a very powerful man.
Lysenko: The scientists are lying to you. Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Nikolai Vavilov, all liars. Comrade, why do you think the giraffe has a long neck?
Stalin: A giraffe? Why are you wasting my time? So it can nibble on leaves at the top of the trees?
Lysenko: Exactly. But the scientists say no. They believe in imaginary, invisible entities called genes that somehow get changed by equally invisible forces that tell the giraffe to have a long neck and a chicken to have a short one. I don't believe in imaginary things. But Vavilov does and that's why our people starve. While he's been off collecting souvenirs, I've been devising a way to give Mother Russia the thing she needs most - a harvest of wheat in the dead of winter.
Stalin: If this is true, if you really have this power...
Lysenko: I do, Comrade. I do. But I must have a free hand. No more interference from the bourgeois geneticists. They are agents of our enemies. They want to starve Russia into submission.

But wait, that’s not why the giraffe’s neck is long! How could Stalin have fallen for that one!? It was easy. He desperately wanted to believe it. Lysenko was peddling the long-discredited theory of an early 19th-century naturalist named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who believed that acquired characteristics, let’s say the length of a giraffe’s neck from straining to get at those leaves up high, could be inherited by the next generation. He failed to grasp that it took millions of years of evolution and higher survival rates among the generations of giraffes with even slightly longer necks to result in a tall modern giraffe. This increasingly long neck of the giraffe was due to random mutations in the genes that happened to lead to a more successful giraffe. Not their neck stretching exertions. This had been Charles Darwin’s revolutionary insight, evolution by natural selection.

Lysenko whispered in Stalin’s ear that he could fulfil a centuries-old Russian dream and end the famine that threatened Stalin’s grip on the country. Lysenko would soak the wheat seeds in ice water so that they could still thrive in the ice and snow. A process he called vernalization. Lysenko falsely claimed that the plants’ offspring would inherit the resistance to cold. No time-consuming painstaking crossbreeding required. Only one thing stood in his way – Vavilov and his stubborn adherence to genetics.

The bitter irony was that while Lysenko was spinning fantasies of abundance for Stalin, Vavilov and his team were crossing wheat species from higher altitudes that actually would’ve resulted in heightened food production in Russia.

Liliya Rodina: Nikolai Ivanovich, I tell you, we are in the gravest danger. Three days ago, the secret police came for Yevgeny and Leonid. No one has heard from them since. Their wives are frantic. Lysenko takes every opportunity to blame you for the famine. I tell you, we must stop the experiments in genetics.
Vavilov: Carry on quietly with your work. No matter what happens. We must hurry. We must be like Michael Faraday, working hard and keeping accurate notes of the results. If I disappear, then you must take my place. The only thing that matters is getting the science right. It is the only hope of ending this famine and all the others to come.
Rodina: Comrade, they're going to arrest you and all of us. Then we better work that much faster.
Stalin’s forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine led to one of the darkest chapters in human history. It was a famine so severe and widespread that instead of being known by a year and a place, it was given a name all its own – “Holodomor”, meaning extermination by hunger. The National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv stands in remembrance.

Stalin’s zeal to push the kulak peasants off their farms and into factories had become a policy of genocide.

A Botanist Witchhunt

Lysenko: Vavilov and his geneticists continue to speak against you. I cannot bear it.

Stalin knew that getting rid of Vavilov might be trouble. The global scientific community admired Vavilov for his ideas and his courage. They had even been willing to move their international genetics congress to Moscow when Stalin wouldn’t let him travel outside the country.

Stalin: Discredit Vavilov first, then you can do with him as you wish.

Trofim Lysenko now mounted a relentless campaign against Vavilov and science. It came to a head at a two-day conference. All the scientists and enemies of science gathered to debate the future of Soviet agricultural policy.

Vavilov: I regret to report that the biochemists are not yet able to distinguish the lentil from the pea by analyzing their proteins.
Lysenko: I reckon that anyone who tries them on their tongue can tell a lentil from a pea.
Vavilov: Comrade, we are unable to distinguish them chemically.
Lysenko: What's the point of being able to distinguish them chemically if you can try them on your tongue? And so we shall soon see how my method of soaking seeds of all kinds in ice water shall lead to a better-fed Motherland.
Vavilov: What? No experiments? No data?
Lysenko: Perhaps you haven't noticed. Your ranks are thinning. Vernalization is going to provide a huge winter harvest. You are either with our plan or...
Vavilov: You can take me to the stake. You can set me on fire. But you can't make me lie about science!

The crowd had just witnessed a man committing suicide. It would be the last time Nikolai Vavilov was publicly seen.

In preparation for what was coming, he had warned his colleagues that they must ask for transfers to other institutes to save themselves. His closest colleagues valiantly refused to distance themselves from Vavilov.

Nikolai Vavilov was arrested and questioned, but he maintained his innocence. However, Vavilov’s tormentor had plenty of experience softening up such stubborn subjects. He started interrogating Vavilov for ten, to 12 hours at a time. Usually rousing him out of his bed in the middle of the night. He must’ve been tortured, because his legs were so swollen, he was unable to walk. Vavilov would be dragged back to his cell and crawl to a place on the floor and just lie there, unable to move. It kept on for 1,700 hours, more than 400 sessions. Until Vavilov finally broke. A year after his arrest, he was sentenced to be shot. He was taken to the place of his execution where he languished for months.

The Siege of Leningrad

Just when things couldn’t get any darker, an even greater darkness descended.

In June 1941, Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Stalin, sending millions of German troops and thousands of tanks to invade Russia.

The siege of Leningrad was, by any metric, the most ghastly of all.

This was the world’s genetic inheritance, home to the seeds of the plants that had sustained us since the invention of agriculture. And Hitler, unlike Stalin, knew that it was priceless.
Ivanov: We don't even know if he's alive.
Rodina: Until we do, we must find it within ourselves to do as Nikolai Ivanovich would. If the siege lasts, our fellow citizens will get very hungry. This building contains several tons of edible material. We must figure out how to protect every last seed for the time when the world returns to its senses.

In all of history, no team of scientists has ever been tested so cruelly. They were pushed beyond the breaking point and yet they did not break.

On Christmas Day alone in 1941, 4,000 people starved to death in Leningrad. The city had been under siege by Hitler’s army for more than 100 days. The temperature was -40oC and the city’s entire infrastructure had collapsed. It was only a matter of time, Hitler thought to himself, before Leningrad succumbed to his will. No city could endure such suffering for very long. While Stalin fretted over the safety of the artworks at the Hermitage Museum, he never gave a single thought to Vavilov’s seed bank. But Hitler had already taken the Louvre art museum of Paris. He coveted something much more precious – Vavilov’s treasure. Hitler had established a special tactical unit of the SS, Russland-Sammelcommando, the Russian collector commandos, to take control of the seed bank and retrieve its living riches for future use by the Third Reich. They waited at the ready, like a pack of Dobermans, straining to be unleashed on the institute.

The botanists were now down to a ration of two slices of bread per day. But still, they continued their work. In a way, the German army was the least of their worries. Rats and vermin became a constant bother.

Alexander Stchukin: If only Vavilov were here. I feel so lost without him.
Rodina: Dear comrade, as painful as it is, we must accept that he's gone forever.

But Vavilov was alive… barely. He had been moved to another prison in another city. In a final attempt for freedom, he wrote to the state:

"I am 54 years old, with vast experience and knowledge in the field of plant breeding. I would be happy to devote myself entirely to the service of my country. I request and beg you to allow me to work in my special field, even at the lowest level."

But no answer ever came. The state had decided not to shoot him. They had a crueller fate in mind for the man who did more than any other to eliminate famine and hunger – he would be deliberately and slowly starved to death.

800,000 other human beings had starved to death in Leningrad. Besieged by the German forces from September 1941 until January 1944, the city somehow still managed to hold out against the relentless assault. The meagre rations of two slices of bread a day had run out long before, and the protectors of Vavilov’s treasure began to succumb to hunger amidst the plenty that their sacred honour prevented them from consuming:

  • Botanist Alexander Stchukin, specialist in groundnuts.
  • Liliya Rodina, an expert on oats.
  • Dimitry Ivanov, a world authority on rice.

The botanists perished from hunger, and yet not a grain of rice in the collection was unaccounted for.

Slaying the Horseman

And what of Vavilov’s nemesis, Trofim Lysenko? He maintained his death grip on Soviet agriculture and biology for another two decades until three of Russia’s most distinguished scientists publicly denounced him for his pseudoscience and his other crimes.

After Stalin’s death and the recognition of the damage he and Lysenko had done to the Soviet Union, Nikolai Vavilov could once again be talked about in public. The Institute of Plant Industry was renamed after him, and it still thrives.

And this is here because of his life and work. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep beneath the Earth at the North Pole. It can hold four and a half million kinds of seeds underground.

So why didn’t the botanists at the institute eat a single grain of rice? Why didn’t they distribute the seeds, nuts and potatoes to the people of Leningrad who were dying of starvation every day for more than two years?

Did you eat today? If the answer is yes, then you probably ate something that descended from the seeds that the botanists died to protect. They gave their lives for us.

If only our future was as real and precious to us as it was to them.

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History & Culture

Feeling, in mammals at least, is mainly controlled by lower, primitive, and more ancient parts of the brain. And thinking, by the higher, more recently evolved outer layers. A rudimentary ability to think was superimposed on the pre-existing programmed savage behaviours. This is the evolutionary baggage we carry with us into the schoolyard, into the marriage, into the voting booth, into the lynch mob, and onto the battlefield.

So, what does that tell us about our future? Will it be nothing more than a series of callous conquests – dreary repetitions of our past – with no escape for our children?

I know a story that gives me hope. A tale of a man whom I deem as the greatest conqueror who ever lived. To date, he remains one of, if not the only, powerful leader in world history who tried to conquer by way of morality. He’s the only person that I know of who lived on both extremes of the good-evil spectrum; From blood-thirsty to tranquil. His life’s saga means we can change:

About 2,200 years ago, much of the world was in the grip of absolute rulers. Their armies rampaged across the planet, bringing torture, rape, murder, and mass enslavement wherever they went.

A young man came out of an obscure backwater called Macedonia and, in less than a decade, carved out an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to beyond the Indus River in India. Along the way, Alexander the Great crushed the implacable Persian army.
At about the same time, King Chandragupta conquered all of northern India.

King Chandragupta’s son, Bindusara, assumed the throne after his death. As Bindusara’s own death approached, he intended to bequeath his empire to a favoured heir.

Legend has it that another son, one who had been rejected by Bindusara, was so ruthless in his quest for power that he murdered every one of his 99 half-brothers and in a fiery pit of coal, he burned alive the chosen successor.

Dressed in the finery that only an emperor was entitled to wear, the hated son stood before his dying father and declared contemptuously, “I am your successor now!”

This was Ashoka … and he was just getting started.

In the 2nd century BCE, the Indian emperor Ashoka initiated a reign of terror known for its new heights of sadism and cruelty. When Ashoka’s ministers baulked at his command to cut down all the fruit trees surrounding his palace, Ashoka said, “Fine, we’ll cut off your heads instead.”

His fiendishness knew no bounds.

Ashoka built a magnificent palace for his unsuspecting victims. They did not know until it was too late that deep inside the palace were torture rooms designed to inflict the five most painful ways to die. It came to be known as Ashoka’s Hell.

But that was not Ashoka’s greatest atrocity.

He now set out to complete the conquest of India that his grandfather had begun.

The nation of Kalinga, to the south, knew no peace could be made with such a madman. They courageously stood their ground as Ashoka’s army besieged the city. When they could bear no more, Ashoka sent his troops in for the kill.

As Ashoka surveyed his triumph, there was one vagabond who dared to approach him, saying “Mighty King, you who are so powerful you can take hundreds of thousands of lives at your whim,” bringing forth a toddler’s corpse from under his robes, he presented it to Ashoka, “Show me how powerful you really are. Give back but one life to this dead child.”

Who was this fearless beggar who dared to confront the vile Ashoka with his crimes? His exact identity is lost to us, but we know that he was a disciple of Buddha, a little-known philosopher who had lived almost 200 years before. Buddha preached nonviolence, awareness, and compassion. His followers renounced wealth to wander the earth spreading Buddha’s teachings by their example. This monk was one of them. And with his courage and wisdom, he found the heart in a heartless man.

Ashoka was never the same again.

He erected a pillar, one of many, on the site of his greatest crime. One of the first edicts of Ashoka was engraved on it: “All are my children. I desire for my children their welfare and happiness, and this I desire for all.”

It wasn’t that Ashoka was violating the laws of kin selection – the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a fatal cost to other distantly related species’ lives – It was that his definition of who was kin to him had expanded to include everyone.

Ashoka would govern India for another 30 years, and he used that time to:

  • Build schools, universities, hospitals, and even hospices.
  • He introduced women’s education and saw no reason why they could not be ordained as monks.
  • He banned the rituals of animal sacrifice and hunting for sport.
  • He established veterinary hospitals throughout India, and he counselled his citizens to be kind to animals.
  • Ashoka saw to it that wells were dug to bring water to the towns and villages.
  • He planted trees and built shelters along the roads of India so that the traveller would always feel welcome and animals would have the mercy of shade.
  • Ashoka signed peace treaties with the small neighbouring countries that had once trembled at the mention of his name.
  • He instituted free health care for all and made sure that the medicines of the time were available to everyone.
  • He decreed that all religions be honoured equally.
  • He ordered a judicial review of those wrongfully imprisoned or harshly treated.
  • Ashoka sent Buddhist emissaries to the Middle East to teach, compassion, mercy, humility, and the love of peace; transforming Buddhism from a small philosophical sect into a global religion.

The temples and palaces of Ashoka’s reign, and most of the pillars he erected throughout India, were destroyed by generations of religious fanatics, outraged by what they considered to be his godlessness. But despite their best efforts, his legacy lives on:

  • Buddhism became one of the world’s most influential religious philosophies.
  • Ashoka’s edicts were carved in stone in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, a couple of hundred years before his birth.
This is one of the few temples of Ashoka that survived the vandals, a cave in the hills of Barabar in India. It’s famous for its echo. Inside the temple, the sound waves of your voice ricochet off the walls until they’re completely absorbed by the surfaces of objects, and there’s nothing left at all.

But Ashoka’s dream is different. Its echo grows louder and louder with time.

Who are we? You tell me.

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History & Culture, Science & Technology

Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business right here in East Africa.

In the following millennia, it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in a lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.

Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before but have very little idea of what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

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History & Culture, Science & Technology

Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experiences. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother God and a father God, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know.

We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we’ve not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominant hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the King of Kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.

Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, and that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. It contrasts starkly with the childishness and narcissism of our pre-Copernican notions.

And, again, if we’re not important, not central, not the apple of God’s eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long and to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain, sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare.

What do we want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.

Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of nature and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants.

We recognize that even revered religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no Gods, one God, or many gods.

If you lived two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.

We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident.

Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunking of our conceits:

  • We’re Johnny-come-latelies
  • We live in the cosmic boondocks
  • We emerged from microbes and muck
  • Apes are our cousins
  • Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control
  • There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere.
  • On top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.

The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course, we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs—in time, in space, and in potential—the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors:

  • We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang and plumb the fine structure of matter.
  • We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star.
  • We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth.
  • We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our own origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects.
  • We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death.
  • We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions.
  • We communicate at the speed of light and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half.
  • We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars.

To our ancestors, there was much in nature to be afraid of—lightning, storms, earthquakes, volcanos, plagues, drought and long winters. Religions arose in part as attempts to propitiate and control, if not much to understand, the disorderly aspect of nature.

How much more satisfying had we been placed in a garden custom-made for us, its other occupants put there for us to use as we saw fit? There is a celebrated story in the Western tradition like this, except that not quite everything was there for us. There was one particular tree of which we were not to partake, a tree of knowledge. Knowledge and understanding and wisdom were forbidden to us in this story. We were to be kept ignorant. But we couldn’t help ourselves. We were starving for knowledge—created hungry, you might say. This was the origin of all our troubles. In particular, it is why we no longer live in a garden: We found out too much. So long as we were incurious and obedient, I imagine, we could console ourselves with our importance and centrality, and tell ourselves that we were the reason the Universe was made. As we began to indulge our curiosity, though, to explore, to learn how the Universe really is, we expelled ourselves from Eden. Angels with a flaming swords were set as sentries at the gates of Paradise to bar our return. The gardeners became exiles and wanderers. Occasionally we mourn that lost world, but that, it seems to me, is maudlin and sentimental. We could not happily have remained ignorant forever.

There is in this Universe much of what seems to be designed. But instead, we repeatedly discover that natural processes—the collisional selection of worlds, say, or natural selection of gene pools, or even the convection pattern in a pot of boiling water—can extract order out of chaos, and deceive us into deducing purpose where there is none.

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us for our errors, and to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

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