Darwin and his Garden of Eden

“The fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys”, was the common introduction given to Charles Darwin when he published The Origin of Species in 1859. The chief argument of the book is evolution and its primary output, Principal of Natural Selection.  The world was not created the way we see it today by the infinite might of the great Architect. It has evolved: arisen little by little from a small beginning. Its complexity has increased with many elementary and some overwhelming forces acting upon it and its inhabitants.

How life has evolved and has taken current shape has been a matter of contemplation for thousands of years. The species that abound today were born so or have been transformed into this form by compelling forces. What are these forces that have impelled elementary and the first living beings like amoeba to develop into a complex creature like human beings?  Book of Genesis implied that cats and dogs, snakes and birds, elephants and tigers, oysters and whales, men and women were all separately created and placed in the Garden of Eden. Empedocles, the Greek philosopher said that all forms of life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth and Water effected by two forces, attraction and repulsion. Some years later, Aristotle grouped all animals with backbones together and called them blood relations to the great consternation of people and Goethe said that all the shapes of creation are cousins and there must be some common stock from which all have sprung.

Algae that are more efficient in extracting sunlight will grow faster; a rabbit that runs faster is more likely to escape its predator. Evolution is also use and disuse. If you have no eyes and want to see, you will finally get eyes, and conversely if you have eyes and don’t want to see, you will lose your eyes like a mole or subterranean fish, if you like eating tender tops of trees and concentrate all your energies on stretching your neck, you get a neck like giraffe. This process by which some traits become common in a population (long necks in giraffes) due to consistent efforts for survival is called natural selection. Here environment acts as sieve through which only certain variations can pass.

Charles Darwin was interested in natural history, which he probably drew from his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. He did not like the medical school at the University of Edinburgh and was later sent to Christ College, Cambridge for Bachelor of Arts. He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and was known as “the man who walks with Henslow”. In the final examination for B.A. he came tenth out of 178 students. It was Prof. Henslow who proposed Darwin as a suitable though unfinished gentleman for now famous journey on HMS Beagle that lasted for five years. He spent most of his time on the ship collecting natural history specimens, investigating geology and kept extensive notes in a Red Notebook where he also talked of a single evolutionary tree and wrote “It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another”. These notes, observations and thoughts were compiled into this magnum opus. The complete name of the book is “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. It revolutionized science, philosophy and theology and till date remains one of the most influential book in natural sciences ever written and a work not just important to its time but to the history of humankind.

In recognition of his work, he was given a state funeral and is buried at Westminster Abbey next to Issac Newton.  During Darwin’s time, many geographical features were given his name, more than 120 species and 9 genera are named after him.  In 1947, Galápagos Islands became popularly known as "Darwin's finches" and all this because he only said there are monkeys without tails. 

Mathematics and Refractory Stomach

A toss of two dice may throw two sixes but it is also possible that it may throw a combination of two other numbers. How many different bracelets can be made by stringing ten pearls, seven rubies, six emeralds and eight sapphires if similar stones are to be kept apart? Answers to such questions demand a laying out of all possible cases but often they are too many to be counted. In such a case, we satisfy ourselves with just having a method to enumerate all possible cases without actually counting them. This is probability. Theory of probabilities is at bottom only common sense reduced to calculation. It is remarkable that this theory has become the most important object of human knowledge.

The founders of the theory of probability were Blaise Pascal and Fermat. This theory was developed in an interesting exchange of letters between them during the year 1654. The correspondences contain methods for tedious enumeration of all possible cases. Pascal suggested a short cut but fell into error and was corrected by Fermat. They began discussing this theory when their friend, Chevalier de Mere, a professional gambler, wanted to know his chances of winning at different stages of any game and sought help from his mathematician friends. Pascal made extensive use of delightful arithmetical triangle in giving his solutions. Arithmetical triangle is given below:

                                                                                                1                                                                             

                                                                                1                              1

                                                                1                              2                              1

                                                1                              3                              3                              1

                                1                              4                              6                              4                              1

                ...................................................................................................................................................................,

In this triangle, the numbers in any row after the first two are obtained from those in the preceding row by copying the terminal 1’s and adding together the successive pairs of numbers from left to right to give the new row.

Blaise Pascal is best known to us apart from his theory of probability, for his invention of calculator and his two literary classics Pensees and Provincial Letters. It is little known that he suffered all his life from bad stomach and strange religious inclination of tormenting Jesuits. He suffered from them so badly that it is said that the great gifts were bestowed upon a wrong person. His father banned him from studying mathematics fearing it may strain his brains and therefore his health. He once curiously asked his father about what geometry is all about. The description given by his father launched his interest in mathematics and gave the world, the greatest might-have-been in mathematical history. Legend goes that he intuitively proved several of Euclid’s propositions before he actually saw Euclid’s book “Elements”. His first spectacular achievement was to prove that sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. He is also credited with some of the most beautiful discoveries in mathematics like Cat’s Cradle and Mystic Hexagram.

After their father’s death, he came to Paris with Jacqueline his younger sister. She joined nunnery at Port Royal and converted her brother to Jansenism thus burying his talent forever. In next eight years, he turned his back on the world and quit pursuits of the flesh and the mind. Only once did he fall from grace before his death and that was when he solved the mystery of Cycloid, which is called the “Helen of Geometry” as he contemplated the mystery, as his tooth was being extracted and he was undergoing excruciating pain.

Apples & a Man

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. While it is a useful maxim, it can also be understood as a theory to good health. Apple has given us company for thousands of years. It was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and tempted Adam & Eve once upon a time that brought about the proverbial fall of man. Apple, in a biblical sense also symbolizes knowledge, immortality, temptation, fall of man, and sin.  It has since then stuck in the throat of man and is called Adam’s apple and continues to tempt us today with its taste, look and colour.

Apple has also inspired curious feelings in the minds of men. The most notable being the idea and later the law of universal gravitation in Sir Issac Newton as he observed and then speculated upon an apple falling from a tree in his garden at the Woolsthorpe Manor, his birthplace in Lincolnshire, England. This incident happened in the late English summer of 1666. This apple tree is still kept alive and continues to give a good crop of apples every summer. The physics department of University of York has a grafted cutting from this famous tree in their courtyard.

Gravitation as we are now aware, only says that any two bodies in the universe will attract each other and will attract with a force that depends on their respective masses and the distance between them. Today, we as students of physics, dispose this theory in twenty minutes whereas Newton took twenty long years to develop and perfect it before publishing it. This theory explained a number commonly observed facts like objects falling on to the ground, waves in the sea, elliptical orbits of planets around our sun and many other innumerable baffling observations.

As a child Newton was not sturdy and robust and therefore he avoided rough games of boys however he had an experimental mind and enthusiastic bent. He created Kites with lanterns to scare the credulous villagers at night, waterwheels that ground wheat into flour, work boxes and toys for his little girl friends, drawings, sundials and a wooden clock, to divert the interests of his play mates towards more creative and scientific channels. Newton also read extensively and noted down his experiences that seemed to him out of the way.

Today what is probably more important is how we understand these theories and personalities and the reasons behind them and their behaviour and how they are relevant to our lives and interests. Little wonder then that we find it easier to remember our teachers who have taught us in a way that we continue to carry a picture of their classrooms and images of various subjects and theories that they have taught. 

I seek your help by getting your response to this questionnaire. Thanking you in anticipation. A click on the link below will take you to the questionnaire:


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TV (2) vs ABC....Z(26)

TV has two letters and it promises so much fun. Imagine what we can do with 26 letters. However the words that these letters combine to form are often pronounced differently from how we write them. Phonetics as this study is called, is a character of any language that is present or absent in varying degrees in all languages. Sanskrit and Hindi are highly phonetic where as Bengali, French or English are far less. Pygmalion the play or My Fair Lady the movie elucidated this point very well. Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl in the play Pygmalion speaks English so well that her listeners were deluded to believe that she is too good to be an English lady and must be a Hungarian princess. And she was able to learn her language and pronunciation in less than six months under the guidance of speech coach Prof Henry Higgins.


The 26 letters in the English alphabet seemed to pose a challenge to linguists who wanted the language to be simpler, to have a more phonetic orthography and to reduce the difficulties of conventional spelling. George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, proposed a research to evolve an alphabet with minimum 40 letters, the letters to correspond with their sounds and the alphabet should be distinct from the current Latin letters. On his death, George Bernard Shaw in his will bequeathed a part of his fortune to further research in this area and the alphabet, so developed, was named after him as Shavian alphabet. In the new alphabet however only one book could be published due to paucity of funds and general indifference. It was one of the popular and most notable plays of Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion.


Bernard Shaw, as he is popularly known, was Irish and had the quirkiness that is normally associated with Irish people. He is the only person to have won both Nobel Prize and an Oscar and refused to take either. Shaw as a person probably comes closest to the idea of a modern Socrates, and was often called a social gadfly. Through his works and his life, he raised uncomfortable questions about prevailing issues and concerns of contemporary society. He did this also by writing very long prefaces to his not so short plays. His prefaces are some of the best commentaries available in literature and philosophy. The Trial of Christianity and the objective analyses of the trial of Joan of Arc are some of the most illuminating articles that one may read on the subjects.


Bernard Shaw wrote sixty three plays, five novels and innumerable essays, letters and articles. Shaw died at the age of 94 in 1950. His ashes mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend were scattered around the statue of Joan of Arc in his garden. He in his inimitable style composed his own epitaph and said “I knew if I stayed around long enough, something like this would happen”.

The Haunting Beauty of Music

What we know is knowledge, what we do not know is probably ignorance. Our knowledge helps us in understanding the life and world around us however what we do not know, affects our lives in a subtle and sometimes profound way.

The universe gives us immense opportunity to revel at our ignorance, the precision with which day and night occur every day, trees are green but flowers are colorful, all of us have same eyes, nose, ears, lips, cheeks and chin yet  none of us are alike, we speak and everyone understands, one sings and others get ecstatic. There are many such instances that we may choose to ignore or contemplate them with wonder and as we wonder, our minds widen with intensity and hearts warm with feelings. Music is an outpouring of intensity and feelings and when it is inspired by a painful realization of haunting beauty and tireless striving for its understanding and consummation, it becomes a supreme offering at the feet of the infinite. This state is often experienced by mystics and saints. It is also experienced by poets, artists and lovers.

Amir Khusrow, the sufi mystic, poet, scholar and musician is one personality in whom the feeling of wonder and later ecstasy transformed itself into timeless creations in the field of art, music, literature and poetry. He gave us the delightful musical instruments of tabla, which he split from the old pakhawaj, and sitar. He created what we today know as Qawwali and introduced khayal and tarana in hindustani classical music. One of his popular poems depicts beautifully the paradox of love:

Khusro! the river of love has a reverse flow
He who floats up will drown, and he who drowns will get across.

Interestingly there is a parallel in Greek mythology of Orpheus, who is a dim but interesting figure. He was called, “the father of songs” and he perfected the musical instrument lyre. It is said that with his music and singing he could make birds and beasts dance and divert the course of rivers. He sang such dolorous songs and played such mournful music at the death of his wife, Eurydice that Gods relented and gave him his wife back. He lost her again as he looked back at her before both could be in the upper world as per the condition of the Gods. He then became objet du desire for all girls and when he spurned them, they hit him with sticks and stones though even the stones refused to go near him as his music were so beautiful. He was later torn to pieces by love-struck women. One of the most enduring images of Orpheus is that of a thracian girl carrying his head on his lyre. He and his followers believed that Man is partly of earth and partly of heaven and with pure life, the heavenly part increases.

Awe, beauty, sublimity are the feelings, when inspired in the hearts of men, give birth to timeless creations and produce geniuses that influence even distant posterity. Such a genius lives in the full light of their haunting beauty. What others faintly seek, he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge is ignorance. It is not a mere coincidence that their expression often takes the form of music.