Flights of Finches: Exploring Trajectories of Evolutionary Biology
A.K.Purohit
Kamdhenu Knowledge Center
Rajasthan Go Seva Sangh, Bikaner India
Email: transciencesociety@gmail.com

Abstract

Evolution and philosophy have an intricate relationship as old as the idea of evolution itself. This can be attributed partly to the fact that the theories proposed in both the sectors were temporally segregated and largely because the evolutionary biology, particularly the Darwinian theory of origin of species, did not support revered doctrines.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) brought preserved bird specimens from his entourage aboard HMS Beagle to Galapagos archipelago, Ornithologist and artist John Gould made illustrations of group of birds and recognized them all to be different species of finches. Darwin, like Archimedes (c.287-252 B.C.), possibly had a shadow of theory in his subconscious, could understand that finches’ beak size must have changed over the generations to accommodate differences in the size of seeds or insects available for consumption on various islands. The birds are known as Darwin’s finches.
Since then much water has flown in Ganges or Thames. The article attempts to portray that science and philosophy exist in helical anastamosis, at times close and complementary, conflicting and distant on several other occasions.
Amid the bicentennial and sesquicentenary decade of celebration of the birth of the author and the book- On the origin of species respectively, it should fascinate to track the trajectories of advances in evolutionary biology in tandem with the spiral counter strand of the philosophy, the realm where human mind is the only laboratory and logic the only instrument as it is often said about the scientific pursuits of Stephen Hawking.
The article attempts to explore formative influences on Darwin and track chronological events which offered support to ideas of natural selection and survival of fittest as well as raised furious controversies over issues like ancestry of humans traced back to primates.
Many tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution have been put to rigorous scrutiny of logic, mathematics and statistics. Despite the temptation, the author of the present article, recognizing the limits of comprehension, has tried to tangentially touch upon the philosophical issues like tautology, teleology, typological essentialism and epistemology, genospsych, creationism, intelligent design, and design without designer etc. and focused on the advances in evolutionary biology after Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1900-75) famous statement- Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
The status of evolutionary biology after the discovery of structure of DNA by Watson and Crick (1953), specially the molecular explanation of variation, natural selection, fitness, and speciation has been discussed in the light of modern laboratory and field experiments. It is observed that natural selection is a more active area of biology than it was two decades ago. Scientists are addressing the questions of its commonness, underlying molecular mechanisms and its relative contribution in evolution per se. Recombination and mutations are among the favorite mechanisms contributing to the origin of a new species, ultimately bestowing a reproductive isolation through reproduction itself and/or mutation. The lethality of mutation is being described as Random tweaks are far more likely to disrupt function than to improve it. Population geneticists are trying to prove mathematically that fitter types are more likely to increase their frequency, and natural selection can identify small advantages to fitness to the extent of one ppm.
The question (that what proportion of all evolutionary change in DNA is driven over millions of year, by natural selection, as opposed to other processes?) is driving a U turn to traditional answer (almost-all) to neutral theory i.e. they do not contribute to fitness and acts silently through genetic drift, the core of neutral theory of molecular evolution.
The phrase Social Darwinism came up because Darwin had postulated that moral men might not do any better than immoral men but tribes of moral men have an advantage over immoral pack. Evolutionary theorist-Williams expressed that group selection might be possible but group related adaptations did not exist in reality.
William and William, in their exciting experiment with procaryotic unicels, Pseudomonas fluorescens, observed a ray of hope that altruistic type of bacterial colonies had a better chance of survival than freeloader mats.
Thus, the essay attempts to dovetail flight trajectories of Darwin’s finches on an optimistic note.