The Glorious Evolution of Humanity

As centuries passed, the body and brain of this primordial human being moved on – they went on evolving. His nerves and glands grew, with each taking on growing complexity and specialization.1 New patterns of behavior continually presented themselves. After still more thousands of years, emotions and feelings became a part and parcel of this new human being – feelings never expressed before in earlier forms of life. It was at this point that the dawn of man had arrived. It may have been the most auspicious moment on our planet – this dawn of man. Those same thought waves - those same emotions and feelings – reverberate unconsciously even today in the deep mental recesses of all human beings. All human beings today carry within themselves the memory of that first glorious sunrise of the dawn of man. All of us carry within us the memory of lives and eras far beyond that moment – extending into the darkest realms of antiquity. For this very reason, we human beings are intimately connected, intimately intertwined with all other forms of life.

Charles Darwin made a tremendous contribution to the intellectual understanding of human beings by explaining this intimate, ecological connection in a rational, scientific manner. Darwin removed the chasm between human beings and animals. His liberated, scientific mind opened the window for what we can call a positive Darwinism – one that stresses this ecological connectedness between all forms of life. Animals and human beings are not separate. They are related. This is what modern science tells us also – that modern chimpanzees have 92% of the genes held by human beings. It is unbounded proof of our family connection. It means, rather than looking at other species with the idea of competing with one another, Darwin looked at all species as belonging to one family. Before Darwin, the philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted that our universe was the product of gradual change over the millenniums of time. 2 Geologists further contributed to this idea by their study of the earth going back billions and trillions of years into its historical evolution. The idea of the evolution of animals over long periods of time was already in the mind of Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Hence Charles was in a good position to create the framework for the origin and evolution of species. It was relatively easy for the intellectuals of his time to accept Darwin's theory of natural selection: (1) that all organisms reproduce, (2) that even within a given species, each organism differs from all other organisms, and (3) that all organisms compete for survival. 3

Darwin's theory of the evolution of human beings was by no means perfect, in the sense that he could not manage to completely step outside the 'values' of the era in which he lived. But, his rationality took him at least partially out of that deeply racist box to the extent that he became intimate with a "full-blooded negro" and based on this experience found hardly any differences between white and black people. In other words, the experience only confirmed his idea of the supreme commonality of all human beings. His thinking was a giant leap forward from the mindset held by the intellectuals of the 18th century who held to the Christian belief that human beings were created in six days. It was a further giant step forward from the prevailing mindset that races of other colors were not even human beings but were rather sub-humans, or a form of animal.

After Darwin came other intellectuals and scientists who brought forth multifarious theories under the banner of what is referred to as social Darwinism, which sadly included a barbaric racism and sexism. While things are a bit improved, still we need to all ask the question, how much better are the issues of racism today? A small percentage of blacks have managed to excel and stand out amidst their peers. But what about the masses of blacks today in America? What is their situation, and why are they still at such a low educational level compared to the average white person? What is their possibility to evolve in this life when their annual income (as in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, Ohio) is less than $10,000 annually? What about the black people all over Africa – ignored and neglected by affluent white people for centuries? What about the plight of women – in America, where up to 15 percent of wives are raped by their husbands, where four women are battered to death every day by their spouses? What about the women of India, where every second a woman is doused with kerosene and set on fire by her husband or mother-in-law for whatever reason? What about the women of Pakistan and Afghanistan who may be kidnapped, raped, tortured, and at the end of it all buried up to their neck and stoned to death for what most assuredly were a man's offences? This topic, this process of evolution may have continued to some extent – but we have a long way to go.

What we need today is to develop an alternative social Darwinism – based on the idea that all species are closely, ecologically intertwined. Instead of basing our ideas of social Darwinism on the idea of survival of the fittest and natural selection, we need to be developing an alternative ecological Darwinism and from this we can develop a new social ethic called Neo-Humanism, which can verily be defined as a state of being wherein there is a greatly expanded human consciousness and intensification of the human heart. This consciousness exists in all cultural traditions. Based on this expanded consciousness, Neo-Humanism attempts to heal the pathologies of narrow sentiments that distort the human spirit by putting human beings into little boxes of race, class, caste nation, ethnicity and religion – exactly what the majority of social Darwinists have done, as described by Carl Degler in Invoking the Darwinian Imperative.4 Imbibing the idea of an alternative social Darwinism means getting embedded in the concept that not only is there one culture in this world – called the human culture – with all its multifarious diversities and variations from region to region, but there is also just one garland of life on this earth, with each and every human, plant and animal forming one flower in that garland. With this expanded Neo-Humanist mindset, human beings will no longer feel any differentiation between themselves and plants and animals. It will surely lead to a Neo-Magna Carta, a new Charter of principles or bill of rights to be included in a future world constitution, which will guarantee the complete security not only of human beings but of all the plants and animals on this earth. It will further mean that human beings will not be able to tolerate wars and genocides in other parts of the world. Let this "alternative social Darwinism," this Neo-Humanism – be the new social ethic to guide human beings towards higher stages of evolution in the 21st century.

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• 1 Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, Supreme Expression I, in The Thoughts of P.R. Sarkar, Kolkata: Ananda Marga Publications, 1981, p. 4.
• 2 Carl Degler, "Invoking the Darwinian Imperative," in In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 5.
• 3 Ibid, p. 6.
• 4 Ibid, pp. 5-30.

Copyright The author 2005