Science Day event backs evolution, Satyapal Singh who doubted Darwin leaves before sessions

The minister did not stay back for any subsequent session. These sessions included one on ‘Why evolution is central to both biology and our lives’, delivered by Amitabh Joshi, professor of evolutionary biology at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru.

In January, Singh had said that “Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong”, and that “it is wrong to say humans evolved from monkeys and such references should be removed from science and history school textbooks.”

At the inaugural session on Wednesday, Singh said there had been a long struggle between science and religion in Europe, which was not the case in India. “According to the definition of our religion (dharma), knowing and following natural laws is dharma,” he said.

MoS Singh said, “Science grows in opposite ideas and sometimes with wrong ideas. Will this growing science teach us values? It will not happen unless we talk about spiritual science. Spiritual science should be there, we should also teach science of intellect.”

Speaking on the event’s sidelines Joshi said it is unusual to see religion-based opposition to evolution in India, unlike in some countries. “As evolutionary biologists, we don’t have this particular problem of religious people saying that evolution is wrong because in some sense it does not violate Indian religious tradition the way it does to some other religions.”

About Singh’s Darwin-scepticism, Joshi gave a possible explanation: “Perhaps he (Singh) has been reading some of these creationist websites, and got carried away…. It is easy to be misled by those websites — they are very well produced and they are unable to discern that (it) is propaganda…. Which is why three science academies came out with a joint statement.”

“The other thing that I think bothers some people may not be explicitly for religious reasons. It (theory of evolution) disturbs our superiority as humans versus all other animals…. Darwanian evolution removes humans from centre of the living universe,” Joshi said.

During his presentation, Joshi said: “Evolution is central to understanding and solving many pressing societal problems. If we don’t have proper training for all biologists in evolution, we are going to miss out on being able to leverage proper solutions to many important problems.”

He said that no single institute in India is dedicated to evolution, and the subject is “very cursorily treated” in school and university curriculum, with much of the material being “wrong or out of date by decades.” He said there is only one small department at JNCASR, Bengaluru, focused on research and training in evolutionary biology.

“The only postgraduate training programme on this topic has been shut down,” he said.

“The irony is that in terms of fundamental empirical contribution to biological knowledge worldwide, Indian evolutionary biologists have done far more than most other Indian biologists.”