History|Evolution
Man In His Pride Sets The Sail While History Chases Its Own Tail
A muse-cum-evolutionary account discussing how history repeats itself
âHistory doesnât repeat itself, but it rhymes.â
â Mark Twain
Elections are around the corner in India, and the familiar human circus is visible on every news channel (More so in whatâs not covered by the news channels).
The similar crooked politicians making castles in the air and handing out lollipops to the ignorant masses. People being swayed by their biases and falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
Fueled by the furnace of illiteracy and compounded by religion, the public very conveniently overlooks the proverbial canary of the coal mines even when the future ramifications stick out like a sore thumb.
But amazingly, we have known all this for centuries. We have seen how it all unfolds. How when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. How the same event gets underlined again and again throughout history.
Yet, we never learn.
History repeats itself in the most fascinating manner. Like the red flags of your lover staring down at you all the time, but which you still choose to ignore, history culminates in the same âIt-was-right-there-in-front-of-usâ sort of conclusion. There seem to be some inherent principles guiding the flux of phenomena a society experiences.
Mahatma Gandhi toiled hard to free his country by peaceful methods and was shot dead. Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr worked hard to change America with nonviolence and was assassinated.
Throughout history, neighboring regions have been fighting tooth and nail organizing themselves into nations; until they wipe out all their resources and realize it is better to live in peace. The pattern is more than evident.
âWars often donât end until both sides have exhausted themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them.â
â Martin Indyk
And it isnât just the sociological aspects Iâm talking about. Biological principles also end up repeating the same phenomena during the evolution of life forms.
Consider the eye, for example. It has evolved about 40 times independently since the origin of life on Earth.
Color vision, in turn, has also evolved independently in the primates.
We now have countless examples of convergent evolution to support our claim.
A land sufficiently isolated from other regions, Australia, so to say, served as a natural laboratory of evolution. The marsupials (pouch-carrying mammals) independently evolved to share the same morphological traits as the placental mammals elsewhere in the world when their habitats matched.
The land-dwelling mammalian ancestor of the whales would have never imagined that millions of years down the line its descendants would be swimming in the oceans with fins instead of limbs, and would never return to the land.
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestorâs Tale, explains that there are a limited number of ways an organism can adapt to its environment guided by the laws of nature and that convergent evolution in this light shouldnât come as a surprise.
Sure, different organisms sense a slightly different range of wavelength of light, but ultimately everybody has evolved to sense the same spectrum more or less â visible spectrum in most cases with a few including the infrared (reptiles) or the ultraviolet light (insects) as well.
History rhymes, patterns recur. It lends an appearance as if it chases its own tail. And in that desperate attempt, ends up recreating the past in the annals of time.
The Unknown Doctor
Sources:
- The Ancestorâs Tale, by Richard Dawkins
- Historic recurrence
