The recent elimination of Darwin’s theory of evolution from science curricula is a masterclass on doublespeak, Bharatiya-style.
We practically beam with pride when we tell the world that India is the mother of all sciences. We cast ourselves as enlightened Hindus who, unlike the dogmatic Book-thumping Christians and Muslims, welcome the idea of evolution. We happily rewrite history and claim, following Swami Vivekananda, that it was our own Patanjali who lived nearly 2,000 years before Darwin, who gave the world the first rational theory of evolution.
Our eagerness to be counted as uber scientific knows no bounds.
And yet we think nothing of bringing the axe down on Darwin’s theory of evolution, one of the most foundational and revolutionary ideas in modern life sciences. Without a rational and honest confrontation between Hindu ideas of evolution through karma and rebirth and Darwinian evolution through natural selection, we stealthily and silently make sure that the majority of our children, unless they choose biology as a career, will go through their formative years without ever encountering Darwin and his transformational idea.
How we have gone about Darwin-proofing our children’s minds speaks volumes of the complete unaccountability of our saffron-tinged state agencies. Let those Christian creationists in the United States rage in public against Darwinism and bring lawsuits against its teaching in public schools – and face defeat time after time. In India we do things differently, because unlike in the United States, here it is the state itself that is in the creationist camp – creationism of a Vedic variety, naturally. (More on Vedic creationism below).
The impunity of National Council of Educational Research and Training seems to stem from an unstated belief that because the majority Hindus control the reins of the state, nothing that has the potential to challenge Hindu beliefs can be permitted in schools, regardless of the universal consensus for the scientific validity of Darwinism. Moreover, the New Education Policy has given NCERT the mandate to “decolonise” school education to make it more properly Bharatiya.
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NCERT’s “rationalisation” of school curricula by eliminating Darwin, the periodic table, electromagnetism and discussions about the sustainable use of natural resources has evoked horror and shock in India and around the world. While the horror at this backward step is perfectly understandable, shock is unwarranted because Darwin’s dismissal was pretty much on the cards.
Eliminating Darwin from science textbooks up to senior high school did not just happen out of the blue. There is a long history, going back to the 19th century, of Hindu thinkers playing fast and loose with Darwin – not denying it outright, but subsuming it as an incomplete, merely “materialistic,” lower-level theory within the Hindu scheme of spiritually-guided evolution. This is how neo-Hindu doublespeak works: simply declare your religious dogmas to be “higher” science so that the contradictions with real science get covered up.
This image of Swami Vivekananda was taken by popular photographer Thomas Harrison in September 1893 in Harrison Studio, Chicago. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The promulgation of New Education Policy in 2020 has set the stage where modern ideas, including modern sciences, have to be filtered through “traditional knowledge systems” so that only what comports with our hoary traditions is retained. It is by no means inconceivable that the space once given to Darwin in schools curricula will be filled with Vedic creationist theories of Swami Dayananda and Advaitic spiritual evolutionism of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. What better home-grown theories than these to “root the education system in the rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought” in, to use NEP’s words. It does seem to matter how irrational, outdated and objectively false the content and methods of our “eternal Indian knowledge” may be; but simply because it is our “rich heritage,” such knowledge must take precedence over critical thought.
Let us then take a quick look at the neo-Hindu theories of evolution that may be waiting in the wings to take the space where Darwin and Darwinian evolution used to be.
Let us start with some data that throws light on what a great many educated, English-speaking, Internet-savvy Hindus mean by evolution. We will find that the vast majority of them say that they find “no conflict” between their Hindu beliefs and the idea that living species, including humans, were not created in the forms they exist today, but emerged out of preexisting types over time. We will also find their understanding of how evolution works has nothing in common with Darwin’s theory of evolution through purely material – that is non-spiritual, non-divine, non-intelligent – mechanism of natural selection of random mutations in the struggle for survival.
In 2010, Professor C. Mackenzie Brown, the author of Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma and Design carried out an Internet-based survey of 1,000 self-identified Hindus from around the world. He found that 65% of respondents agreed that “there is no conflict between Hinduism and evolution.” This is in line with the earlier Pew survey of Hindu-Americans in 2009 which found that 80% of respondents reported no conflict between their religious beliefs and the idea of evolution. Hindu and Buddhists in America were way ahead of Muslim Americans, only 45% of whom were comfortable with evolution, while American evangelicals fared even worse, with only 24% accepting the idea.
Also read: Removing Darwin From the School Syllabus Is a Body Blow to Science Education
So far so good: Hindus don’t think the idea of evolution threatens or contradicts their religious beliefs. But the devil, as always, is in the details. Brown probed what exactly Hindus mean by evolution, something that the Pew survey had not done. He wanted to find out what exactly were his Hindu respondents affirming when they said that they, as Hindus, accept the idea of evolution.
Fully 54% of respondents agreed with the statement in Brown’s questionnaire that “karma and rebirth are better explanations of the origin of diversity of life than Darwinian evolution” while only 20% disagreed (the remaining were not sure).
Furthermore, 82% of all respondents agreed that “karma, like the law of gravity, is a fundamental scientific law of nature.”
With such a high degree of belief in the scientificity of karma, it is not surprising that 50% of the respondents agreed, and only 10% disagreed, that “Hindus discovered evolution centuries before Darwin.” More generally, 64% agreed that “Hinduism is the most scientific religion in the world,” with only 7% disagreeing.
As for the mechanisms of evolution, spiritual evolution, intelligent design and the 10 avatars of Vishnu led the pack. More than twice as many agreed than those who disagreed with the following statements: “humans evolved from lower animal species by a process of spiritual evolution” and “intelligent design is a better explanation for the origin and diversity of life than Darwinian evolution.”
The idea that dashavatar (the 10 avatars of Vishnu) describes evolution of species found much favour: twice as many (39%) agreed than those who disagreed (20%) that “the ancient Hindu concept of divine incarnations directly anticipated Darwinian evolutionary theory.”
Clearly, when we say that “we believe in evolution,” we are really saying we believe in Hinduism because we understand evolution largely through Hindu concepts. When we proclaim that “there is no conflict between Hinduism and evolution,” we are completely side-stepping the core of modern evolutionary theory, namely, descent from a common ancestor with modification of heritable genetic material. We are replacing natural selection with our age-old Hindu belief that the atman (self) can assume a lower or a higher body depending upon its karmic burden. Of course there can be “no conflict” between your religious beliefs and evolution when you simply repackage the former as “scientific” explanations of biological evolution.
Note that those who were in a position to respond to an Internet questionnaire posted by an American university professor are by definition part of the educated elite, nearly all with college degrees and a fair number with PhDs and MDs. No similar survey of how ordinary folks in India understand evolution is available, at least to my knowledge. But it is not hard to imagine what such a survey might show.
Also read: If NCERT Has its Way, the Study of Indian History Will Move Entirely Outside of India
The potential harm of NCERT’s decision has to be assessed against this background of an already existing surfeit of unexamined irrational beliefs parading as compatible with science. Any chance of encountering Darwin’s revolutionary idea that has the potential to spark questions in a young person’s mind is now gone. Perhaps this was the intention all along.
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How has it come to pass that 75 years of sloganeering about scientific temper has not made a dent in our collective mindset? After all, Darwin was taught in schools all these years. Why, then, have the old Puranic and Vedantic views of origin and evolution continued to have such a strong hold on our minds? Science education in schools, such as it is, is obviously no match for the vast ocean of religious myths, rituals and spiritual discourses of countless gurus that our young ones are immersed in.
The problem is compounded many fold because of the deeply ingrained modern Hindu habit of conflating myths with extant theories of modern science. Myths pass as “eternal” truths confirmed by modern science, and the ways of mystics are passed on as scientific methods of “seeing” the unseen forces through yogic powers. As Professor Brown’s survey showed, those who believe that karma and rebirth are better explanations of evolution of species accept karma as a law of nature, no different in its scientific status than the law of gravity.
This pseudo-scientisation of Hinduism did not begin with the current Bharatiya Janata Party dispensation. Today’s crop of Hindu nationalists are beneficiaries of nearly two centuries of obfuscation that started with the Hindu Renaissance in the late 19th century. Given Darwin’s global impact, theories of evolution were centre-stage in the writings of the neo-Hindu holy trinity, namely, Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo.
We are familiar with Satyapal Singh, a former minister of Human Resource Development in Modi’s cabinet, who declared an open war on Darwinian evolution not long before the NCERT’s recent decision with these famous words: “Darwin’s theory is scientifically wrong. It needs to change in the school and college curriculum. Since man is seen on Earth, he has always been a man. Nobody, including our ancestors, written or oral, said they saw an ape turning into a man.”
He wanted Darwin removed from schools because it was corrupting the minds of the young by teaching them to “see our ancestors as monkeys, [and that] we are children of monkeys” and not the “children of rishis”.
What many may not know is that Satyapal Singh is an ardent Arya Samaji who currently heads Gurukul Kangri, the flagship university of the traditionalist branch of Arya Samaj educational institutions. True to its original mission of reviving the traditional system of education, the government-funded Gurukul has full-fledged departments on Veda, Jyotirvigyan and Karmakanda and Yogic Science.
Also read: Bad Medicine, Fake History, Postcolonial Complicity: Ayurveda in the Time of COVID
It is from this thoroughly traditionalist, Vedic fundamentalist background that Sayapal Singh hails. In his war against Darwin, he was only channeling his spiritual master, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj.
Dayananda Saraswati. Photo: Srijut Krishnaravji – Srijut Krishnaravji, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17201146
It is Dayananda Saraswati who first raised the monkey business in a public lecture in Roorkee in 1878: “If man descended from monkeys, how is that the process has come to an end and monkeys don’t evolve into men?” That monkeys remain monkeys these days and don’t turn into humans right before our eyes was proof enough for Dayananda that Darwinism was false.
It is not known if Dayananda ever read Darwin, or knew anything about biology, but he felt competent enough to propound a Vedic creationist theory of evolution. Taking as given that the Vedas are literally and eternally true and that there cannot be a contradiction between scientific and Vedic propositions, Dayananda explained evolution thus: At the beginning of the present cosmic cycle, some 1.96 billion years ago, God assembled the pre-existing atoms and created all human and animal bodies that exist today, and joined them with appropriate souls that had survived the dissolution of the cosmos at the end of the previous cycle.
He (God) distributed souls to bodily forms in accordance with their accumulated karma and thus different species with different levels of consciousness were born – all of them at the same time at the beginning of the cosmic cycle. We have here a counterpart to Christian creationism in which God created the world out of nothing and created all the species within a week pretty much as described in the Book of Genesis.
Vedic literalism of Arya Samaj was overshadowed by the philosophically adroit Advaitic evolutionism of Swami Vivekananda, later elaborated by Sri Aurobindo and accepted as gospel truth by modern, New Age-ish gurus who have made good business out of it. The crux of Advaitic evolutionism is this: Brhaman, pure consciousness, is the ultimate reality that manifests as different kinds of life-forms which are merely vehicles for the karmically-determined level of consciousness of the jiva caught in samsara. The divine consciousness first descends – a process that Vivekananda and Aurobindo call “involution” – into the atomic and even subatomic particles of the universe. Evolution is only the upward arc of the cyclic journey of atman enroute to rejoin its source, Brhaman. What bodily form, or species, this atman will occupy as it transmigrates will be decided by the deeds in all previous births.
Also read: Biology Without Darwin. Next, Physics Without Newton and Einstein?
As Vivekananda would have it, just as a farmer breaks a dam in order to irrigate specific parts of his farm, karma regulates the flow of prana, life-force, leading it up and down the evolutionary scale. It was this theory of karmically-guided spirit-led evolution that Vivekananda found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that he declared to be scientifically warranted and superior to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Aurobindo essentially followed in Vivekananda’s footsteps and offered hopes for a progressive divinisation of human beings.
If Dayananda’s Vedic creationism is the Hindu counterpart to Christian creationism, Vivekananda’s Advaitic evolutionism is the Hindu counterpart to the intelligent design creationism that is becoming fashionable among conservative Christians who can’t accept the lack of meaning and purpose in Darwinian evolution. Creationism and intelligent design, whether Vedic/Vedantic or Christian, are equally pseudoscientific as they lack any empirical support and offer no testable hypotheses.
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The cancellation of Darwin is only the beginning of what is to come. It is merely a ground-clearing operation by the Ministry of Education for fulfilling the objectives of the New Education Policy to decolonise the school curricula and make it more Bharatiya in spirit and content. (Stayapal Singh must be celebrating: No more monkey business in our schools!)
What will fill the gap left behind by Darwin is not hard to imagine. Our Hindu nationalists have an array of options from Vedic Creationism to Advaitic Intelligent Design. There is nothing to prevent NCERT from producing future textbooks which will feature the neo-Hindu Holy Trinity as the real fathers of the theory of evolution. This will surely prove, once again, that Bharat is indeed the Guru the Vishwa has been waiting for!
Goodbye, Charles Darwin. You will be missed.
Meera Nanda is a historian of science.
