Subroto Mukerji 1

Nature meets her nemesis

It is an observable truism that most things contain

within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. The
dictator who encourages sycophants—to the extent of
ignoring or even eliminating dissent—paves the way for his
own downfall. Hitler brought down the Third Reich by
silencing the dissenting voice of Reichfeldmarschal Erwin
Rommel, his one-time friend and greatest military asset.
Ancient cultures, like those of the Greeks, Romans, and
Egyptians stultified and degenerated, choking on their own
affluence. Hugely wealthy and dynamic systems have a
history of succumbing to the lethargy that often follows
success. The fat and lazy make easy targets for the lean and
hungry.
That is as Nature meant it to be. The rich and fat are
food for their hungry successors. The nutrient-packed flesh
of the fruit is food for the seed that lies within it. Nations
that focus solely on achieving the materialistic aspects of
life, wealth and power, usually end up creating internal
conditions that undermine the entire structure. Lack of
healthy competition and over-abundance can bring
complacence in its train. Weaker, poorer, under-privileged
peoples will look with growing envy, hatred, and bitterness
at the ease and affluence of their well-to-do brethren.
These emotions, in turn, fuel a growing tide of
resentment in the less-developed countries of the world.
Tortured by memories of colonial exploitation that crippled
Third World economies, these under-developed regions are
now a time bomb that can explode any day into a global
crisis. Nature stands for harmony and sharing…disharmony
and imbalance produce cataclysms that level playing fields.
Since all things are involved in their own cyclic processes of
Rise and Fall, it is difficult to disengage from this inexorable
process without conscious acts of will at all levels.
The battle of the sexes that Nature has engineered
and set in motion is no exception. We should be aware by
now that there resides in every man a little bit of woman,
and in woman a little bit of man—the Ying-Yang concept of
eastern philosophy.. While this was limited, in earlier
epochs, to personal traits and predilections, the latter half of
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the twentieth century marked the beginning of chaotic shifts

in sexual parameters that show no signs of abating. As the
lines between gender and sexuality blur, 'anomalies'
become commonplace and 'sexual transgressions' are an
everyday affair. It is a world at odds with itself. Those of an
evangelical bent of mind might even call it a latter-day
recreation of the Sodom and Gomorrah syndrome, with all
its unthinkable consequences.
The latter half of the twentieth century also witnessed
the emergence of a meaningful emancipation of women
across major portions of the globe. Improved transport and
communication facilities going hand-in-hand with intricately
intermeshed national economies will advance this process
through globalization on a scale never before seen on this
planet. They have already given birth to the phenomenon of
a global culture that is merging the sexes as never before.
Unisex fashions and the common language, music, and
values of the youth of the planet are harbingers of a much
greater revolution; we are in the process of making a major
evolutionary jump, one that will not take millennia but mere
decades.
Mapping of the human gene is leading us far beyond
surrogate mothers and egg-and-sperm banks, artificial
insemination and in-vitro fertilization. Man is in the process
of shedding his dependence on the Egg—and-Sperm route
and to take charge of his own evolution, a process whose by-
product will be the ultimate elimination of decrepit old age,
disease, and even death as we know it. Love is liberated
from gender, if not sex—but as very different form of
mating, one involving same sex coupling and parenting.
Along with physical death will vanish the traditional
concept of the mating ritual. Always in love with himself,
Man will fall in love with his own Self, as predicted in the
scriptures.
Let us examine how this can come about. In the first
place, Nature herself has to evolve and adapt, and, like
everything else, she contains within herself the bug that will
destroy her earlier programs. Through the process of eternal
selection of the fittest, she has created men who are
sufficiently advanced in science to anticipate her. Thus is
revealed the greatest secret of all: Nature is always
evolving! She applies all her rules to herself! When all things
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change, so does she. She carries within herself the seeds of

the Nature of the future.
Man can now evolve as he wishes. This is the Great
Choice before us; we have: to guide our own evolution
wisely, or to submit to short-term considerations and evolve
ourselves into extinction.
Today, we have the technology to create identical
copies of ourselves, or even genetically compatible body
parts. Donated—or even artificial—organs for the human
body will become mere options. The laboratory will meet the
indent, and the surgeons will do the rest.
The day will soon come when our organs will be
programmed to constant self-renewal and newt-like
regeneration in ways we cannot imagine, vastly extending
the scope of extant programs that see to the repair and
maintenance of the body. However, due to accident, major
body parts may suffer irreparable damage, in which case
laboratory-grown ‘spares’ produced from the body's own
genetic material will be made available as replacements.
An old dream of Man, locked away in some ‘Garden-of-
Eden’ atavistic memory in his mind, will be realized: the
dream of eternal youth. The mythical Fountain of Youth is
almost within reach, as is eternal life a la Lazarus Long in
Robert Heinlein's speculative fiction book Time Enough for
Love.
In the early twentieth century, if anyone had dared to
proclaim that within the next hundred years Man would go
to the Moon, replace failing hearts with transplanted or even
artificial ones, and develop the technology to clone himself,
he would have been institutionalised.
Today, these things aren't even worth discussing.
Momentous breakthroughs are coming into view over the
curve of a shimmering horizon. 'It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it
was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it
was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to
heaven, we were all going direct the other way …' Yes,
Charles Dickens had been there, seen that, in his own way.
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We have come to realize that the exponential pace of

progress has demolished the mental barriers that hinder
achievement. What Man can think of doing today, that will
he achieve tomorrow. It’s a new twist to the old adage that
truth is indeed stranger than speculative fiction. In fact,
those of the generation that reached adolescence in the
sixties and are alive today have actually seen their science
fiction become science fact. Man’s only hurdle to
achievement appears to be the limitations acknowledged by
his own mind. If he thinks he can do it, he will (another age-
old saying given a fresh lease of life). In other words, Man is
limited only by his imagination.
But Nature has a trick up her sleeve: she but stoops to
conquer. For in giving Man the ability to improve his physical
body to the extent where it will become, for all practical
purposes, immortal, it also frees Man from that self-same
body. Down the ages, the intellectuals, sages, philosophers
and saints have stressed the pre-eminence of soul over
body.
But the body was so fragile, so prone to destruction by
disease or accident that—sorely needed as it was for
purposes of maintenance of self and family—Man was totally
obsessed with it. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do if
something went wrong with it. Incidentally, this weakness
encouraged the emergence of medical science, as also
charlatans who claimed to have a better way of preserving
it.
Chained to his body, and to constant worry about its
maintenance, Man found it difficult to give much credence to
the wise men who said the body was of secondary
importance….it was the mind that determined the state of
the body.
By drastically weakening the ancient instinct of self-
preservation through a demonstrated ability to manage the
physical self, science has unwittingly ushered in the age of
Self-realization.