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Writer's pictureShruti Sridhar

Are we outsmarting Darwinism?

Updated: Aug 21, 2019

Published in Homeopathic Medical Panorama (2016); Vol:22, no: 4

Charles Darwin coined the term “theory of natural selection” which became the basis for understanding evolution. The theory simply states that if you are genetically strong and are able to survive, you will procreate and create a stronger species. Eventually the weaklings will be weeded out making the race more adapted for survival. Not rocket science right?

But humans have always been attempting to overpower nature. May it be predicting weather, capturing water resources or curing diseases, we are constantly challenging nature. We have created earthquake resistant buildings, evacuated villages before a volcano and brought back humans from the dead. Everything is a scientific feat; No doubt about it. It is victory of science over nature, science over the very thing that created science.

Medical science today demands answers for every disease in the hope that it can find cures. You have a faulty liver? Let’s replace it. You have an enzyme deficiency? Let’s supplement it. Your lungs cannot breathe? Let’s hook you up with a machine to breathe for you. Achieving this we feel that we have outsmarted nature, fooled her into believing that she can still continue her natural selection. But have we really?

We are creating a generation of humans that are not independently strong or healthy, but that are sick and relying on science to help them survive. We have shifted our focus from curing the illness to fighting death. A sentence by a doctor when my mother was admitted to the intensive unit still rings in my ears as if it was said yesterday. She said, we are not worried about her liver, if it fails we can replace it; we are not worried about the kidneys, if it fails we will put her on dialysis; all we should be worried about right now is the brain, we need to keep it functioning. To what end I ask? Is she still my mother with someone else’s liver and a machine for heart and the lungs?

We are not this body; we are something beyond this body that merely exists in this casing. Every philosophical book you pick up will tell you this and this is true. Imagine a person with no communication, in a vegetative state. What does this life contribute to this race? It cannot even sustain an independent existence, let alone propagate the species further. Why are we trying to play God when we cannot even fathom the reason for the existence of a living corpse?

Medical science today plays to the psyche of humans than to actually alleviate the disease. Our focus has shifted from trying to ease what has caused the dis-ease, to cheating death at all costs. We have also conditioned ourselves in believing that death is something to fear from, something that is the worst of the outcomes. But in truth, dead is merciful, there are things that are far worse and we are embracing those.

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