@prathameshvg . Excellent capture of fascinating and horrifying natural history. (The image works just by itself without the text/context too. The drops around are magical and the snail sits nicely in the frame)
@Ganesh Shankar. How does the theory of evolution explain this? Well, it's an interesting question. The complexity of the situation here (and the sheer horror for snails to have parasites for eyes and lose sight only to be eaten by birds later) makes one wonder how all this could have come about. Trematode completes its life by infecting snail and occupying its eye stalks and then moves onto birds when the snail is eaten by them. Surely it must be a design process and the theory of evolution should fail to explain it.
Not so quickly if you ask me.
The misunderstanding mostly and for most of us is the assumption that evolution is a directional and a building process of complexity. Lower organisms becoming higher. This is not true. Evolution in biology just means one form of an organism becoming another form (Maybe " transformation “is a better word but evolution is OK as in most cases its lower organism becoming higher. But not always. Cave-dwelling crabs and fishes have lost preexisting eyes and so on). This transformation / Evolution is majorly through natural selection of candidates amongst the diversity to filter the best adaptable.
It's a process of recurring events where a trait suited for better existence through adaptability is favored and rest is phased out. The trematode bubble sorted in billion instances over hundreds of millions of years.
What this recursion means is every crazy pathway that was possible for it to start with and to complete is tried out initially and this one prevailed. " The swollen, pulsating eye stalk resembles a maggot ". The question is not how this coincidence came out. Other trematode sitting in snail's gut did not get picked by a bird. This trematode must end its journey in snail and misses the advantage of bird wings to travel further and establish further.
It can be difficult to convince oneself that this is an emergent phenomenon and not an intelligent design due to how complex the result is and how un-intuitive the explanation according to science is. There was another resistance in the medieval past once they discovered the cruel parasites and it contradicted the ' kind' and ' beautiful ' creator image. How can a loving almighty create horrors?
But I believe science we have is more than sufficient in explaining these things.
Doesn't make nature less magical or less mysterious. But the awe should be from the triumph of science in explaining it and not retiring to a position of just worship/wonder where nature demands our fascination and not examination.
All the unexplained of the past have been explained one by one and the pending too shall be one day.
My 2 cents.
Thanks Vageesha A R
» Last edited by Vageesha AR on Sat Jan 15, 2022 4:32 am; edited 5 times in total
Very well crafted shot I would say, I really enjoy your compositions and specially capturing the unseen / unobserved elements of nature with deep study. Its more than just an image for me. Looking forward to your next research. TFS
Dear Vageesha, thanks for your views. Let me share some more of my views/thoughts/readings so far. I might have said many of these in comments/posts during last few years. I will try to articulate them again here with some more additional thoughts/references.
Prathamesh had shared a similar image of the mystery of nature in another post an year ago here:
For me the current explanation based on Darwin's theory of natural selection as something that happened over "millions of years" of slow and study changes (the ones which Richard Dawkins and others hold on to) is just an hypothesis which can't be elevated to the status of a "fact". I would like to differentiate between "hypothesis" and a "fact" in the sense of mathematics. In biology it appears less precise and has been tweaked to serve one's purpose. When someone says humans and chimpanzees descended from a common ancestor 6 million years ago and arrive at far reaching conclusions it is natural to ask how are we sure about what happened 6 million years ago? Well there are fossil records. How are we sure about that? Did we conclude that just by resemblance of one fossil record with other? Is that a rigorous enough evidence to elevate an hypothesis to a fact? Then there is a discussion about Cambrian Explosion and contradiction related to fossil proofs. Then we have articles like these which suspect much faster evolution rate at times in the history of evolution than what was thought of! As a student of mathematics I find using such information to elevate an "hypothesis" to the status of a "fact" is a very brave attempt.
Many Wikipedia articles seem to conveniently ignore some of the recent scientific knowledge which questions Darwin's theory of natural selection or they seem to refute the link between the new discoveries (like for example Horizontal gene transfer) and evolution theory in its current form. Needless to say I don't expect to find an answer in religion/God and I don't endorse theistic opinions on the same. I do think science is a "work in progress" in this regard (and in many other cases). Not everything is known. It is unclear whether everything that we see is knowable too. Here I probably trust Kant's judgement on limits of human reasoning. That leads to "wondering" and thinking about "mystery" of Nature.
Back to evolution, I had quoted earlier, "Horizontal gene transfer" published in National Geographic and shared a link about "Gene Editing", in this image post below:
Here is another article published in Guardian earlier:
Similarly you will find many questioning the theory of evolution in the current form (survival of the fittest/natural selection).
Further, it must be noted that Prof. Michael Behe, who is the proponent of "Irreducible Complexity" never said that it proves God (in a simple theistic/religious sense). The scientific spirit in him is very clear from a video like this one below:
My understanding is "irreducible complexity" is a hindrance to "slow changes that happened over millions of years" which goes against the interest of proponents of Darwin's theory. To me it appears there is a concerted systematic effort to link "irreducible complexity" with "Intelligent design" and hence with "creationism" in many of the Wiki pages. If you attempt at editing anything in Wiki pages to add even scientific references to papers/articles that question Darwin you may not succeed.
I find some of the arguments in this below one, especially, David Berlinski's (at around time 30:00) interesting. It is not very difficult to separate chaff from the wheat in many of such discussions on the net. Many of such content on the net (including Wiki pages and videos on youtube) appear to be very biased either towards creationism or towards Darwinism. Similarly it is very easy to pull videos from youtube (of Dawkins and others) or content from the net to get conflicting information on the same too. I just take only what makes sense to me from scientific and philosophical view point without any vested interest.
Here is an interesting link where over 1000 professors/doctors/scientists belonging to various branches of science/mathematics/statistics express their skepticism about Darwin's theory of evolution. While the page seem to belong to Discovery Institute which seem to promote creationism, professors who signed don't. I would give benefit of doubt to these professors (including professors from universities like MIT/Standford/UC Berkley...) who I think would have pledged their character and signed (at least I assume so). I am really unhappy about how Wiki pages have been hijacked in a well concerted effort. Here is the content of the letter signed by many of these professors:
A SCIENTIFIC DISSENT FROM DARWINISM “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
To sum up, I think there are enough skepticism in science today about accuracy/correctness of Darwin's theory. We may say "it is partly correct" etc but the sense I am getting is truth is something else. I hope science will some day find a more beautiful theory than the non-falsifiable "millions of years of slow changes" argument which can be proved only by a person who lives for a million years. As noted above, there are contradictions related to fossil records/evidences too (Cambrian explosion - arguments and counter arguments related to evolution).
To sum up,
"Let us agree with Darwin *till* we find more acceptable theory rooted in science" - I disagree. Absence of other convincing theories does not entitle a possible hypothesis to be elevated to the status of a "fact".
"Let us agree that God created everything in theistic sense" - I disagree, a no-brainer.
"We don't know how evolution actually works, we are yet to find out" - I agree!
Einstein worked very hard for thirty years on unified field theory. At the end he left the world *wondering* about it. Another sixty five years later after Einstein's death, it is still an open question. A century is behind us, physicists are still working on an agreeable interpretation of quantum mechanics. Maybe, theory of evolution too is very elusive.
Sure, human race/science made marvelous discoveries so far. This is not to take anything away from science. However, I would like to see this from the perspective of what is known vs. unknown to human race. Are we sure whether everything can be known? Will some of them remain as mystery forever which we may only wonder about? Am I inferring "God" here? No, in theistic sense but yes in Spinoza's pantheistic sense, where "Nature" and "God" are one and the same.
I don't hold "science" above Nature at all! After all this so called "science" is our humble attempt to unravel the mighty "Nature".
Simply incredible natural history moment n apt presentation too, Prathamesh. I can only say, nature's law is without mercy I am learning much from the embedded text and intriguing dialogues between Vageesha n Ganesh. And this what I love CNP for Thank you Ganesh for the links. Regards.
Amazing creature! Amazing nature. Thanks Prathamesh on this interesting natural history and an excellent photo.
Ganesh, thanks for sharing some interesting thoughts on Darwin theory and Grand Intelligent Design!! Probably, Darwin is like Niels Bohr! Bohr gave a basic atomic model but theory couldn't explain fully except for Hydrogen atom, but the model helped. Darwin has started it with Origin of Species as more complex questions arise then we require new theories to explain many things.
as more complex questions arise then we require new theories to explain many things.
I think that is exactly the state we are in today. Being able to show a few related fossil records here and there does not appear to be a comprehensive proof for the myriads of mysteries associated with evolution. All skeptic voices seem to get linked to "creationism" and are getting suppressed in concerted efforts. Any skepticism seem to get answered in a Wiki page either relating those who expressed it to "creationism" or (when not possible) denying its relevance to Darwin's theory. Questioning Darwin does not mean endorsing creationism/God.
Interestingly, current theory can explain anything since we need to give 100 million years of benefit of doubt (for random mutations and natural selections)! However, that relates to Infinite Monkey Theorem too! Dawkins' Weasel program did not produce Hamlet, just a small phrase ('METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL'). Further, any restricted search of a large state space (for example, as in Dynamic Programming) requires "human intelligence" to narrow down the search space. This process probably is far more involved than the process of natural selection. Further, it is not about BASIC or Pascal as mentioned in Wiki page, it is about complexity of the algorithm (Big O) which may help reduce the very large search space. Anyway, I seem to have delved deeper than I intended on this topic. Let me stop here.
I hope more beautiful comprehensive theory, *still rooted in science*, will emerge some day. Well, maybe we will see another Einstein who will discover "spacetime" of biology.
by Ganesh H Shankar on Fri Jan 14, 2022 8:09 pm 
