Bring Back 'Evolution' In Class 10 Textbook: It Is Too Important And More Common Than You Think

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras brings out an excellent bi-monthly technology magazine 'Shaastra'.

In its March-April 2023 issue, Dr K.Vijayraghavan, one of India's finest biologists and former Principle Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, has written a guest column - 'Wiring the Fly'.

The article deals with 'connectome',  a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain and how they are connected in an organism.

So far, we have studied the connectomes of very simple animals - in only three species.

Dr Vijayaraghavan wrote about a recent major advancement where a connectome of a larva of a fruit fly, 3016 neurons and 5,48,000 connections, has been successfully studied.

The fruit fly is the most favoured of insects by biologists. Incidentally, it was through experiments with fruit flies that the chromosomal theory of inheritance was proved famously by Thomas Hunt Morgan.

Morgan was even called the fruit fly scientist, and his student Alfred Sturtevant prepared the first genetic map - a great achievement in the history of science.

From the studies of fruit flies, a universal understanding of the process of inheritance down to the level of chromosomes was obtained. And now, the study of the connectome of the larvae of the fruit fly pointed out the following in its conclusion:

At the end of his guest column, the biologist wrote quoting Darwin from his recapitulation in The Origin of Species:

"As Charles Darwin said "... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. " And each one teaches us about the other".

This universality that underlies the multiplicity of life is a fundamental law of nature. Darwin unveiled it in biology by uncovering the main (but not the only) process underlying this relation between unity and multiplicity.

Darwin discovered natural selection in the realm of the biosphere. But as philosopher Daniel Dennett says, it is an algorithmic process. It has substrate neutrality. It has process uniformity.

What do we mean by that?

In a rough way, we can explain it like this. If we find life forms that are not carbon-based on another planet, and it has replicators with variations arising, then there will be natural selection, there on that alien planet as well.

So natural selection works on any planet in any galaxy where life exists with reproduction and hereditary processes.

Not just in exobiology.

Even in advanced physics, we have what is called quantum Darwinism.

Remember Schrodinger's cat, with a dead cat and a live cat superimposed? Wojciech Zurek, a theoretical physicist, proposes that a process analogous to natural selection may be at work 'selecting' the more stable quantum mechanical state and from there emerges the classical world of our experience.

Similarly, in art and aesthetics. A Darwinian understanding of sexual selection processes in non-human animals may help us to understand and appreciate the techniques that artists may be employing in making the art appeal to us.

Neurobiologist V.S. Ramachandran points out in his papers, books and lectures how we share the neurological basis of our aesthetic experience across the phylogenetic tree. So on and so forth we can go on.

In religion, there is a natural selection of beliefs. In politics, there is natural selection. And one should remember when Darwinian science talks about survival of the fittest, what it means is the survival of the most adapting organism.

It is not about rigidity. It is about flexibility. The organism that adapts to its environment in the most efficient way survives.

So today, there is no field that can exclude the knowledge of natural selection - that is, if one wants to create innovatively and contribute to the advancement of knowledge.

That is why the explanation given by the Union Minister that evolution has been removed only from the tenth standard and is there in the twelfth standard textbooks is weak.

Class ten is the last schooling year where all the students, irrespective of the elective they choose, study a common science syllabus. Removing Darwin from the tenth standard syllabus would deny the students the right to understand evolution. It is like denying a student the right to know the heliocentric theory.

It may or may not be useful for a child, in their future career, to know whether the sun revolves around the earth. But denying the learning of this fact surely deprives the child of he or she being part of the enlightened human civilisation of today. The same is true for evolution.

Making a student come out of his or her secondary school without knowing evolution is a denial of human rights.

What is amusing is the fact that the opposition political parties, which usually protest over the change of even one word in history with respect to the Mughals, are completely silent in this matter. After all, these are the parties which raised a hue and cry opposing the change of religious belief based 'BC and AD' into secular 'BCE and CE'.

The issue has exposed that the so-called secularism in India is only proto-Islamism and pro-evangelism. It is definitely not positive science-minded secularism.

There is also hypocrisy in the protests. In India, evolution, when taught, is often relegated to one of the last lessons. Teachers usually neglect it. It is not an overarching framework in the syllabus as it should have been taught. One wishes the protesting scientists today have taken care to look into this serious lapse of yesteryears also.

That brings us to the question of what the present Government can do.

This Government has an ideological orientation towards decolonisation. Decolonising means making the science curriculum more dynamic. For that, it can, for the first time in the world, create a separate textbook for evolution through natural selection and introduce it right from class eight to class ten.

Here the students will learn about evolution and natural selection. They will understand how to observe nature for patterns of selection. They will understand how natural selection operates at different levels. It will make them more creative and innovative.

Is the Centre listening?

Also read: Why teaching evolution is a must