The Hindu Business Line : Growing genes and hardening hearts

Genes are evolving. They have to. They have no choice. Yet, hearts are hardening. If only the media takes it upon itself to promote truth and non-violence, it can make a difference. School, the teachers, social and political leaders and the opinion makers at large have the responsibility to nurture the nation.

Bhanoji Rao

According to UN estimates, at the dawn of the first century AD, the world population was just about 300 million. After some 1,500 years, it was at the 500-million mark, since climatic conditions, diseases, famines, wars, etc., took toll from time to time. From the 17th century, advances in agriculture, industry, housing, water and sanitation, medicine, and political and social organisation contributed to mortality reduction and relatively high rates of population growth. T oday, the Earth sustains around 7 billion people.

Given the backdrop of such monumental demographic changes, it is natural to expect some — even if not readily perceptible — changes in the pace of evolution. Latest research indicates that mankind has been evolving relatively rapidly in “recent” times. It is “rapid” population growth that has been behind the speeding up of human evolution, since “more people means more mutations”.

Evolution Speeding Up

According to research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, genetic change has occurred in the past 5,000 years at a rate hundred times higher than any other period. This flies in the face of the earlier view that we have reached the end of the road to evolution. Despite increase in the speed in the evolutionary process, there is diversity too.

One of the researchers involved in the study, Professor Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, notes that while genes have been evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, the processes have been distinct to the continents of origin. The Professor told a BBC commentator on December 11: “We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.”

In Europe, natural selection is concerned with pigmentation — light skin, blue eyes and blond hair. Asians have genes selected for light skin, but they are not akin to the genes of the Europeans. As Professor Harpending puts it, both Europeans and Asians are ‘bleached Africans’, though the way they get bleached differs.

Some researchers think that evolution has speeded up in the sense that we have changed from animals to humans over a relatively long span of time; that is the speed. But to find changes in the recent few thousand years may be guesswork.

Some of the facets of speedy evolution are of interest: Europeans developing lactose tolerance 8,000 years ago, enabling them to drink fresh milk; spread in Asia of genes that suppress body odour and dry ear wax; and growth of genes in Africa that provide resistance to malaria.

Evolution’s Other Side

Rapid population growth and gains in overall well-being owe a lot to the practice of two core values of non-violence and truth by the vast majority of people over the millennia. If each strong man were to routinely kill the weaklings, the earth would not be hosting today its seven billion guests. If each producer and trader were to routinely tell untruth, industry and trade would have come to a grinding halt long ago.

Rapid population growth, supported by advances in medicine, agriculture and industry has also supported relatively high rates of improvement in income (purchasing power), health and education, the chief ingredients of what we have come to think as human development, measured by the popular human development index (HDI), which in its newest incarnations includes the extent of political freedom enjoyed by people as well.

Yet, it is a sad commentary on our daily lives that HDI improvements need not mean that society is moving towards greater peace and less violence. The shameful aspect of life today across the entire world is that people of all income classes feel insecure. They do not lead contented lives, despite achievements in terms of income, health, education and freedom. True, we enjoy a lot of political freedom and, in some free societies, a few enjoy the freedom to disrupt and destroy the lives of others. Yes, law takes its course; people suffer meanwhile, nonetheless.

Freedom to voice opinion and freedom to protest have not led to the growth of explicit recognition of the value of the twin human values of truth and non-violence, and the conscious cultivation of those values by the people. In their absence, none could ever know, even in the best of debates, what the truth is and who is telling lies.

International agencies have done a great service in devising and publishing indicators of bribe paying, corruption perception, freedom, human rights violations and so on. Hidden under such efforts is the perception that true development should not permit such maladies. At the end of the day, however, those maladies are the resulting “outputs” from the lack of practice of truth and non-violence.

Why is it that we do not explicitly refer to non-violence and truth as integral to human development? Part of the reason is our habit to sideline staunch practitioners of those human values such as Mahatma Gandhi as outliers on the normal pattern of our own construction of the human race. That attitude itself has to change via the explicit emphasis on the value of cultivating the twin human values of truth and non-violence.

We do aim for a world free of high levels of infant mortality, illiteracy, poverty, pollution, gender inequality, AIDS, and so on, and set targets and ideals with reference to such ambitions. Yet, we seldom set targets for reduction of corruption and violence, respectively resulting from the absence of a routine adherence to truth and non-violence.

Media too must take a chunk of the blame. None of the so-called morning discourses on the electronic media contains at least a moving blurb to emphasise corruption as an evil and non-violence as the greatest virtue, appealing to people to shun the first and practice the second. Of course, once the ‘spiritual’ hour of the morning is over, TV serials take off, often portraying worst forms of violence.

Human Values

A school boy using a gun, undergraduates ‘partying’, terror attacks; we have all of them. In that sense, we are mimicking the US, the bastion of free polity and free economy. Missing sadly is the adherence to human values via conscious promotion of the same. With regard to that, the greatest responsibility rests with the highly educated.

Genes are evolving. They have to. They have no choice. Yet, hearts are hardening. If only the media takes it upon itself to promote truth and non-violence, it can make a difference. The school, the teachers, social and political leaders and the opinion makers at large have the responsibility to nurture the nation and it involves the cultivation of the tow core human values by practice and precept.

(The author, formerly with the National University of Singapore and the World Bank, is a Member of the Governing Board of the GITAM University, Visakhapatnam and Visiting Faculty, Sri Sathya Sai University, Prasanthi Nilayam. He can be reached at bhanoji@gmail.com.)

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