16/11/2016 0 Comments Evolution......My heart, a companion of the clouds
Soars towards the distant horizons Towards the endless void With lyrical pulse of the monsoon downpour; My mind glides on swan-wings, Amid slight, startling spurts of lightning; How the storm flashes her ankle-bells, Resonating with fierce delight! Mountain springs call out for a tempest Gurgling with deep resonance; Blowing in from the Eastern sea The wind gushes over Boisterous, bubbly waves of the river; My heart darts, stirred by a savage current Surging in tune with Clamorous branches of the forest groves. The above is a loose translation of a poem – “Mon mor megher shongi” - by my favourite poet, Tagore. It is not my translation, but one that I found on the internet and thought was quite nice. There is merit in the argument that translations can never do justice to the beauty of compositions in the original language. The essence is always lost. Poets have always painted a canvas of myriad emotions with a magical use of words - words when strung together in a lyrical manner carry the poet’s thoughts beautifully to us, the readers. Complex, yet beautiful, emotions are conveyed in this manner through words. Similes. Metaphors. Imageries. Thoughts that strike a cord in the deepest nooks of one’s heart. The poet is consummate in his manner of wielding the language as a tool as he casts a spell on our minds through his skilled use of words. Language. Grammar. Syntax. Yet, as recently as a few millennia ago, there was no language to speak of. Our species, Homo Sapiens, attained cognitive skills through the process of evolution about a hundred thousand years ago, but language skills appeared much later. Perhaps, the earliest words that man used to communicate with each other were nothing more than grunts or mere indicative noises. Earliest “written” communication was through paintings on the walls of caves, or carvings on stones. Words and sentences came much later. It is certain that verbal language developed much earlier than the written form. Language, as we know, is rather recent. In fact, it is an infant in evolutionary terms. Let us take the English language, for example. It is one of the largest spoken languages in the world today. Even the average reader of the English language is aware of the beauty of the writings of Milton and Pope, Wordsworth and Byron, Keats and Shelley. Through drama, ballads, epics, sonnets, etc, these poets have traversed the entire gamut of the language through their compositions. But, much as we might marvel at the beauty and complexity of the English language, the fact remains that the language is all but a mere combination of just 26 letters that form the English alphabet. Historically, the proto-sinaitic script of Egypt was the first case of the written alphabet, dating back by almost four millennia. The Greek alphabet came much later. Nevertheless, the different languages of the world evolved variously over the centuries into their current forms. Today, a reading of Shakespearean drama appears comparatively difficult to understand since contemporary English is significantly different from the language that the bard used in his plays. A language like Gaelic, for example, is nearly incomprehensible to the speakers of modern day English. Language has evolved over time. The following excerpt from Wikipedia gives a small example of such evolution – “The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wen, which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.” So, the modern alphabet did not just drop out of the sky. It evolved gradually over the centuries – adding, deleting and modifying the letters. In my native language, Bangla, there are two letters that I can immediately think of that are no longer in use – “ree” and “lee”. Language will continue to evolve as time goes by. The English of the twenty-fifth century, for example, will certainly be distinctly different from the English that we speak and write today. Coming back to what I wrote at the beginning – an admiration of the beauty of poetry and the wonderfully complex use of words as a form of language can easily make one become disbelieving of the fact that language once had very rudimentary beginnings; of the fact that language began with mere grunts and simple sounds among prehistoric cavemen. Yet, the truth is that it did indeed have extremely modest beginnings, despite the complexities of the modern day languages. Much of what we see as immensely complex and complicated in today’s world had similar elementary origins centuries or millennia ago. Prof Richard Dawkins’ “Mount Improbable” concept is a wonderful tool at explaining the above. It is a simple idea of a person standing at the base of a very tall, vertical cliff, looking upwards towards the top of the cliff. Up there, he sees a lamb standing at the edge of the precipice. The observer is unable to comprehend how a lamb, that has no wings to fly with, could have possibly reached the top unless it was deliberately placed there by an external agent. Hence, the name Mount Improbable! However, if the person just walked around the cliff to the other side, he would notice a gradual slope in the hill leading to the top of the mount. Once, he is aware of the slope on the other side, the manner of the lamb’s ascent to the top of the mount becomes a simple idea to understand. It becomes clear that the lamb has climbed up the slope in sure, but gradual steps. The lamb did not need an agent to place it up there. An everyday experience might explain this even better. We can see high-rise buildings all around us. With an explosion in the human population and a consequent shortage of land space, civilisation has been expanding vertically upwards. In Hong Kong, which I visited a few years ago, seventy storey buildings are a common sight. Standing below on the road, if one looks up, one can see people hanging their laundry out of their windows on the fiftieth or the seventieth floors. Yet, one wonders if anyone ever even pauses to question – “How did the people reach the seventieth floor?” We have become so accustomed to the knowledge that buildings are equipped with elevators to carry people to the upper floors that the manner of travel to the top floors is a never debated fact of our daily lives. Even in the absence of elevators, people can still climb to the top using the stairs – slowly, one step at a time. Yet, the well proven concepts of evolution are hotly debated and disowned by religious believers. The process of evolution works similarly in every aspect of our lives, without our even being aware of it. And, when we stretch our imagination backwards over millions of years, the evolution of species by natural selection becomes a not so difficult concept to comprehend. And, that is how we are here. Like the lamb on top of Mount Improbable, we were not placed in the Garden of Eden but arrived here in gradual evolutionary steps. Facts must be treated as facts and myths, well, as myths!
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