Tag: Charles Darwin

Of all the predators Man is super predator!!!

Darwin, the father of evolution, had postulated that the species evolve constantly to adjust to the changing environment and climatic changes but this change is gradual in nature and takes place over thousands of years. But man is proving him wrong.

Being an expert killer backed by technical advanced equipment, man is bringing rapid changes which are perceptible within much shorter time. Man is super predator and its peculiar hunting preferences are forcing many species particularly of fish and large sized land animals to evolve at a rapid pace than the nature would have done.

There are stories of attacks by sharks on people venturing into sea and of being killed by lions or other carnivorous animals but they fade away when compared to the man. Scientists at the Victoria university at British Columbia in Canada who are studying the changes and the harm being brought upon the fauna by the man has termed the man as “Super Predator“

In general the man hunts the largest of the animals. For examples adults of lions and tigers to flaunt them as the trophies of their valour and skill as opposed to the hunting animals who generally go far the weakest and younger prey.

Thus the man depletes the mature “reproduction capital” instead of the “reproductive interest” of the hunted species. For example, fish is caught in the nets and nets are so constructed as to retain the larger fish and filter out the smaller ones.

This is causing the the fish to mate early and produce the smaller broods. The size is diminishing. This is because the fish is also evolving techniques to survive and producing fish of smaller varieties which can pass through the larger net openings.

Man has hunted the sea creatures 14 times more than the sea predators and 9 times more than the land animals. Man is going for the bigger animals like sharks, tuna fish and marlin. This is changing the ecosystem at a much faster pace than nature.

Over Killing of the land predators has resulted in the increase of herbivore population. This increase is putting pressure on many resources and robbing the food from insects and birds which we cherish. And also resulting in producing the disease prone herbivorous animals.

Human Eye

Human eye is a very complex structure. It can distinguish about 10 million colors. There are rod and cone cells in the retina which allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth.

According to the evolution theory of Darwin, the living things evolved from simple to the  the complex through gradations. So evolution of the eye poses a challenge to the Darwin’s theory because eye consists of many parts intricately connected to each other.

Human Eye

The critics argue how could something so complex, they argue, have developed through random mutations and natural selection, even over millions of years?

If evolution occurs through gradations, the critics say, how could it have created the separate parts of the eye — the lens, the retina, the pupil, and so forth — since none of these structures by themselves would make vision possible?

Darwin acknowledged from the start that the eye would be a difficult case for his new theory to explain. Difficult, but not impossible.

Scientists have come up with scenarios through which the first eye-like structure, a light-sensitive pigmented spot on the skin, could have gone through changes and complexities to form the human eye, with its many parts and astounding abilities.

Through natural selection, different types of eyes have emerged in evolutionary history — and the human eye isn’t even the best one, from some standpoints.

Because blood vessels run across the surface of the retina instead of beneath it, it’s easy for the vessels to proliferate or leak and impair vision. So, the evolution theorists say, the anti-evolution argument that life was created by an “intelligent designer” doesn’t hold water: If God or some other omnipotent force was responsible for the human eye, it was something of a botched design.

Biologists use the range of less complex light sensitive structures that exist in living species today to hypothesize the various evolutionary stages eyes may have gone through.

Here’s how some scientists think some eyes may have evolved: The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage, perhaps allowing it to evade a predator.

Random changes then created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, a deepening pit that made “vision” a little sharper. At the same time, the pit’s opening gradually narrowed, so light entered through a small aperture, like a pinhole camera.

Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye.

Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.

In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species. The existence of this range of less complex light-sensitive structures supports scientists’ hypotheses about how complex eyes like ours could evolve.

The first animals with anything resembling an eye lived about 550 million years ago. And, according to one scientist’s calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch.

Dr. Stephan Gould Seems to be right

Charles Darwin’s work on the evolution theory is akin to the Laws of Motion by Newton. They stood like indestructible rocks for several decades. Yet as the new evidence gathers, chinks or limitations in these laws have been becoming visible. Einstein came and with his theory of relativity, made the laws of motion into approximation of the true laws at lower speeds. These laws breakdown and cannot explain phenomena at the extremities at both ends, at the sub atomic level as well as the parsec levels. Not only that, it is now doubted that Einstein’s theories which are based on the premise that speed of light is the ultimate barrier are correct or can explain all the observation.

Charles Darwin

Similarly, the Darwin’s theory has been found to have chinks. Its main postulate is that in nature evolution is taking place gradually. Dr. Stephen Gould amassed the available data and announced that things did not happen in gradual  manner but in bursts with periods of lull or nonconformities in between. There were periods of intense activity in which many new species appeared and others got decimated. Now with the passage of every day, this theory seems to gaining strength.

Most obvious is the case of weather. Areas which were deserts are experiencing lots of rainfall, the areas which were previously most rainy are becoming devoid of the rain. Rains fall in torrents of such intensity that it seems that the land will submerge into the sea and it will like the olden times when all of  Indian subcontinent was under the sea.

Then there will be periods of complete dry spells. So we have the perfect recipe for the disaster. First face the floods, then diseases in the aftermath, destruction of crops and increase in hunger. Oh  God, was it the fate of the Earth when I was born?

Evolution of Living Beings

There have been so many attempts to understand the human behavior, yet it refuses to come into the grasp or to follow some universal formula. Wise men started to understand it with animals (we being one of them) and the father of Evolution , Charles Darwin, came up with the formula “The species always compete for the resources and those who the fittest among them survive and ready themselves for another competition”. He called it survival of the fittest. It is the nature’s way of weeding out the weaker among the species. This is the way all living beings have evolved over millions of years. Humans are endowed with most complex brains and sit at the top echelon of the evolution ladder. Charles Darwin assumed that improvement or the evolution is gradual process taking place continuously over millions of years.

Human Evolution of Charles Darwin

There are flaws in this line of approach to explain the observations. Some scientists, most notably Stephan Jay Gould, have come to conclusion that evolution had not taken place at a continual regular pace but in the bursts of intense activity followed by hiatuses of considerably long periods.

Stephen Jay Gould’s Evolution

Then there were people like Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, the Russian prince who renounced his aristocracy and settled in England in a fishing village, who held the diagrammatically opposite view. He argued that human beings tend to live in cooperation and help each other. Not only human beings, he observed so many animals living in groups in the Siberian forests where the food is scarce due to extreme cold. He said that human beings are good at heart.

According to the latest theory the human behavior towards each other is guided by self aggrandization. It says that behind every human action there is a selfish motive which may be tangible or intangible. It is argued that why a person tries to save a child from fire or a person from drowning even if a stranger, is that if he or she does not do it, afterwards his or her conscience will torment and the person will get tension. So to avoid the mental stress, one tries to help the others. May sound funny. I think I am not able to put the argument across properly.

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