Vedanta and the Theory of Evolution
CHETHAN BELLUDI
Prelude
Let us recall the famous Indian fable—
‘Six blind men and an elephant.’ There were six
blind men who wanted to know what an
elephant was. They were hence taken to an
elephant and given an opportunity to feel it
for themselves. Each one touched the elephant
to know how it was. When they were asked
to describe how an elephant looked, each one
described it differently depending on the part
he touched and felt. There were arguments
among the six men as to who was correct.
They were told that everyone was ‘partially’
right because they had touched only ‘a part’
of the elephant and that putting them all
together will give the real picture.
Creation versus Evolution
The 19th century witnessed some of the
greatest scientific discoveries and technological
advances. While discoveries in the fields of
physics and chemistry were readily accepted
and appreciated, advances in the field of bio-
logy were condemned. The single most impor-
tant reason was it confronted religious dog-
mas. Scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus and
Galileo Galilei were ridiculed and punished
for challenging the geocentric descriptions
(that the earth was the centre of the universe
and the sun and other celestial bodies revolved
around it) found in the Biblical works. There-
fore, in 1859, when Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species by means of Natural
Selection, religious fanatics turned red-hot.
Dr. Chetan Belludi from Davangere in Karnataka is an alumnus of Sri Ramakrishna Vidyashala (Mysore),
pursuing higher studies in medicine. …
T h e V e d a n t a K e s a r i
Darwin’s theory of evolution refuted the
Biblical belief of God’s creation of life on Earth
and human beings in six days and that
occurred 10,000 years ago. For Darwin’s theory
of evolution to be true it was essential to prove
three things. One, the earth was much older
than 10,000 years to have allowed sufficient
time for evolution; two, the complex species
that exist today had descended from one or a
few simpler and common ancestors; and three,
the driving force for species to evolve. Even if
one of them were disproved, his theory would
simply collapse.
The creationists attacked these assump-
tions time and again but the judgement has
been going in favour of evolutionists at most
times. Darwin’s speculation that the earth is
older in the order of millions of years is
strongly supported by the radiometric dating
by the geologists. They estimate that the earth
is at least 3.56 billion years old! Darwin was
right in his first assumption.
The assumption of common ancestors is
now supported by fossil records. Radiometric
dating of the fossils reveals that the simpler
fossils were older than the more complex
fossils. This supports the origin of more
complex organisms from simpler ancestors.
‘Natural Selection’—one of the most
breathtaking ideas ever—provided the answer
for the driving force in nature that causes the
species to evolve. Just as a farmer selects those
crops with better yield over low yielders for
further cultivation, Darwin proposed that
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nature selects individuals with favourable
traits to pass them on to their next generation.
For example, among the deer’s it is more likely
for a deer with faster legs to survive the attack
of predators than a normal deer. This is how
nature selects the faster deer. There are
innumerable such examples.
Theory of Evolution—Its Ascent and Descent
While the physical evidences were going
in favour of evolution and against the western
religious beliefs, the first serious threat to
Darwinism came not from fundamental
Christians but from scientists themselves. Their
argument was, of course the faster deer was
more likely to survive but when it has to mate,
it is more likely to mate with a normal deer
and so the offspring would be a blend of the
two characteristics—a half-faster deer! The
argument focussed on successive-dilution of
the variations bringing the equation back to
where it started!
The blend of characteristics into a ‘half-
faster’ progeny was merely a hypothesis. None
of the scientists who argued on successive
dilution of variations really tested it seriously
because it ‘sounded’ logical. In 1865, when an
Austrian monk called Gregor Johann Mendel
presented a paper ‘Experiments on Plant
Hybridization,’ where he confronted the belief
of the ‘blend of characteristics’ but nobody paid
enough attention to it. Darwin passed away
in 1882 and Mendel died two years later. Thus,
by the end of the 19th century, the ‘Theory of
Evolution’ was written a scientific obituary!
In 1900, two scientists—Hugo de Vries
and Carl Correns—understood the ‘Experi-
ments on Plant Hybridization’ like never-
before and the theory was given a successful
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR), so to
say! All of a sudden it sprung back to life and
became popularly known as ‘Mendel’s Laws
T h e V e d a n t a K e s a r i
38
of Inheritance.’ With the ‘Laws of Inheritance’
accounting for the passage of the variations
down the generations, Darwinism came back
to the scientific front with a vengeance!
Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance provided
tremendous insight into one’s ‘Vehicles of
Heredity’ or ‘Genes.’ Many interesting facts
were discovered—chromosomes, genes, De-
oxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) and its ‘twisted
-ladder’ structure and the molecular techni-
ques of comparing the DNA of different
samples like Nucleic Acid Hybridisation, etc.
These technological advances were at
once used to test Darwin’s hypothesis. The
more it was explored the louder was the
judgement in favour of Evolution! Here are
some important findings. All living creatures
use the same set of 20 amino acids to build
their proteins. The DNA code for these amino
acids is the same in all of them. For example
‘UUU’ codes for the amino acid Phenyl alanine,
in bacteria, in fungi, in plants, in crustaceans,
in fish, in mammals and be-it-any species! This
clearly demonstrates that the blueprint for all
living creatures was derived from one or few
common ancestors. It doesn’t stop there.
Analysis of DNA samples from different
species shows direct relationship between the
extent of resemblance and the proximity of
their relationship in the ladder of evolution.
For example human DNA is 96% similar to
that of the chimpanzees, 75% similar to that of
the dogs and 33% similar to that of the
daffodils! This clearly shows that we are more
closely related to chimpanzees than dogs or
daffodils. Darwin was more than right again!
The Continuing Stalemate
Through most of the 20th century
Darwinism grew exponentially. The sad part
about it is it inculcated ‘materialism’ into one’s
thinking and seemed to support atheism. There
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were revolts and judicial proceedings on
whether Darwin’s theory of evolution should
be taught in high school biology. The intention
was not to disprove evolution but to prevent
the growing atheism. Judgements seemed to
fluctuate between the two ends and the topic
remained a mystery for decades until the next
big threat to Darwinism came with the
proposal of the ‘Theory of Intelligent Design’
by Philip E. Johnson.
This theory wasn’t totally different from
the biblical description of creation according
to Genesis. It just scientifically altered the
theory to sound more logical. It brought in an
‘Intelligent Designer’ who crafted the life deftly
and intentionally and opposed the crude
undirected ‘Natural Selection’ as the driving
force for evolution. Also evolution could not
account for the development of ‘Intelligence’
and ‘Awareness,’ which could be explained
by the ‘Intelligent Design.’ Evolutionists are
working on the challenges of propellers of
‘Intelligent Design’ and are successful to some
extent but by and large, the tug-of-war
between Evolutionists and Creationists has
been 50-50 with no clear outcome as of now.
Obviously, all this is quite mind
boggling. Moreover, how does India’s religious
tradition respond to the theory of evolution?
Well, the best and one of the most convincing
answer to it was provided by a great Indian
scientist way back in 19th century itself.
19th January 1896, New York
A 33 year old Indian scientist was
addressing an American gathering. Mind you,
this was a pre-genetic era when Darwinism
and the theory of evolution were still shaky.
But the scientist had the answer.
The lecture opened with some of the basic
questions that have crossed almost all mind.
‘Whence is this?’ he asked and continued,
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39
Millions of attempts have been made to answer
it, yet millions of times it will have to be
answered again. It is not that each answer was a
failure; every answer to this question contained
a part of truth, and this truth gathers strength
as time rolls on. I will try to present before you
the outline of the answer that I have gathered
from the ancient philosophers of India, in
harmony with modern knowledge.
He began with some of the subtle
observations in the Nature. He observed that
some things in Nature though seemingly
different were actually a part of the spectrum
of a big thing. For example, a seed and a tree.
Though seemingly different, they are a part of
the bigger spectrum of the plant life, each one
leading to the other. The seed is a finer form
of the plant and over a period of time it
develops into a grosser form, i.e., a tree. The
tree in turn dies out leaving behind a finer
form, the seed. Same is the case with a chicken
and an egg. They aren’t two different things
to argue which one came first. They are one
and the same. Man and his germ cells are no
exception to this phenomenon. He explained:
So is the case with everything in nature by which
we are surrounded. We know that the huge
mountains are being worked upon by glaciers
and rivers, which slowly but surely pounding
them and pulverising them into sand, that drift
away into the ocean where it settles down on its
bed, layer after layer, becoming hard as rocks,
once more to be heaped up into mountains of a
future generation. From sand rise these
mountains, unto sand they go.
The Myth Debunked
With these analogies, he derived the
equation, ‘Destruction means going back to
the cause.’ And ‘Therefore we learn that the
effect is the same as the cause, not different. It
is only in another form.’ Next he applied this
to the universe taken as a whole.
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This universe must be resolved into its causes;
the sun, moon, stars, and earth, the body and
mind, and everything in this universe must
return to their finer causes, disappear, be
destroyed as it were. But they will live in the
causes as fine forms. Out of these fine forms
they will emerge again as new earths, suns,
moons and stars.
With this new understanding, the crea-
tionists and evolutionists seemed like those
blind men trying to understand a huge ele-
phant called universe. Both of them were right
in their own way. They were only ‘partially’
right. Each dealt with only a part of evolution
akin to the blind men describing the elephant.
They seemed like the components of a jig-saw
puzzle—though the individual compo-
nents seemed to complement, they lacked tota-
lity. When the components are properly arra-
nged, they merge into one another, revealing
a bigger picture of which they are only a part!
The bigger picture was nothing but the
finer cosmic energy getting evolved firstly into
the earth, sun, moon, etc., and secondly, into
the living cell, the organisms which later
Darwin explained how they developed into
Man. The whole thing was one big process.
As if man developed from his first cell, the
zygote, growing into the blastula, which later
on develops into foetus, then comes out of the
womb as a baby, grows up into an infant, a
child and then finally into an adult. If you
observe carefully, Man didn’t just ‘evolve’
from the zygote; he was ‘involved’ in it! The
young scientist put this concept into words,
No rational man can possibly quarrel with these
evolutionists. But we have to learn one thing
more. We have to go one step further, and what
is that? That every evolution is preceded by an
involution.
He also appealed for peace from the
evolutionists,
T h e V e d a n t a K e s a r i
40
The whole of this universe was present in the
cosmic fine universe. The little cell which
becomes afterwards the man, was simply the
involved man and becomes evolved as a man. If
this is clear, we have no quarrel with the
evolutionists, for we see that if they admit this
step, instead of their destroying religion, they
will be the greatest supporters of it!
Let us close this discussion with another
quote of this scientist,
If that is so, take this whole evolutionary series,
from the protoplasm at one end to the perfect
man at the other, and this whole series is one
life. In the end we find the perfect man, so in
the beginning it must have been the same.
Therefore, the protoplasm was the involution of
the highest intelligence. You may not see it, but
that involved intelligence is what is uncoiling
itself until it becomes manifested in the most
perfect man. It, therefore, follows absolutely that
the perfect man, the free man, the God-man, who
has gone beyond the laws of nature, and
transcended everything, who has no more to go
through this process of evolution, through birth
and death, that man called the ‘Christ-man’ by
the Christians, the ‘Buddha-man’ by the Buddh-
ists, and the ‘Free’ by the Yogis—that perfect
man who is at one end of the chain of evolution
was involved in the cell of the protoplasm, which
is at the other end of the same chain.
That is quite a breath-taking statement—
providing such a conciliatory solution to this
knotty issue. And surely the readers must have
guessed the name of the scientist—of course,
it is Swami Vivekananda. The lecture referred
to in the above discussion is in his Complete
Works (2: 207-209). Indeed it is Swamiji’s genius
to harmonise, but to limit his greatness
through just one lecture is another case of a
blind man trying to explain ‘the elephant’! No
matter what the ‘elephant’ looks like, one thing
is sure, it’s gigantic. †
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