Duria Antiquior–A more Ancient Dorset, a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche, was the first pictorial representation of a scene from deep time based on fossil evidence.
| Photo Credit: Duria Antiquior–A more Ancient Dorset, a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche, was the first pictorial representation of a scene from deep time based on fossil evidence/Wiki Commons
Dear Reader,
My relentless haunting of second-hand bookshops, both online and offline, recently resulted in the purchase of a 2010 book, The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World, by Deborah Cadbury. I picked it up because in another life I would have been a palaeontologist or an archaeologist, sifting the earth for bones and shards. The Dinosaur Hunters, recreating early 19th century England, when amateur enthusiasts were unearthing bones of giant reptiles buried deep within the folds of the earth and wondering what they meant, has proved to be a stellar find.
It is fascinating to read about the controversies the dinosaur skeletons generated: by gesturing at cycles of creation and destruction that have continued for millennia before and after humans arrived, the findings challenged the Biblical myth of the creation of the world in seven days by God. By implication, they also reduced the importance of human existence—if dinosaurs have walked the earth before man and were eliminated in due course, we cannot be as unique to creation as we think ourselves to be. More worryingly, they opened up the possibility that the human race too might go extinct in the future.
While the discoveries shook religious belief on the one hand, on the other they induced wonder and awe at the process of evolution. Who has planned this mightily complex cycle of life and death? Is there a divine planner hidden in the breathtaking variety of creation? In 1802, the English clergyman William Paley wrote Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, where he argued that all creation points at the existence of an intelligent creator, a “divine watchmaker”, who designs the bones and joints and tissues of living beings to minute perfection, with the tiniest part playing an essential part in the functioning of the whole. And this is as true of the human body as of life on earth (remember Tennyson’s lines in In Memoriam? “That not a worm is cloven in vain;/ That not a moth with vain desire/ Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire, / Or but subserves another’s gain”).
We can chuckle at the idea of a benign watchmaker (evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins took down Paley’s theory point by point in his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design), but we cannot stop marvelling at the machinery that runs all living organisms on auto pilot.
Sashikala Asirvatham directs attention to the miracle that is life in her captivating review of Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan’s book, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality. As she puts it succinctly, after admiring, with Ramakrishnan, the constant effort made by our cells to keep the body running: “Maybe we would take better care of ourselves if we realised how much work is involved in keeping us going.” Don’t miss her review in the latest issue of Frontline.
When we look closely, all wee things turn out to be special. In their column, Kitchen Katha, Kalpish Ratna have been writing about everyday kitchen ingredients like the black-eyed bean, the cabbage, the onion, etc.—lentils and veggies that we never bother to admire. But each is one of a kind in the way it is made and in the function it serves. As Vishnu, the creator god in Hinduism, tells the onion when it complains about its smell: “’It was no easy task, that smell! Coaxing all that sulphur out of the soil, transforming it into amino acids to conjure magic molecules that sing in the skillet. You, dear onion, are the bulb that will illuminate humanity. You whet the appetite, you warm the heart, you heal the sick, and you transform the clumsiest cook into chef supreme—”’ (“Vishnu protects the onion”). Read the column to marvel at the extraordinary qualities of seemingly ordinary objects.
I take my leave now to spend the weekend singing paeans to the potato. See you in my next.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
