I've been reading the Origin of Species this week, because I've often found pre-20th Century physics unreadable (notationally), and it's enjoyable to engage with great science in the original from time to time. Just finished the first chapter, where Darwin makes his famous case for the analogy between artificial and natural selection. This bit caught my eye:
If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture. It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up to a standard of perfection comparable with that acquired by the plants in countries anciently civilised.
This brought immediately to mind Jared Diamond's opposite view in Guns, Germs and Steel, that the usable plant and animal species had geographical distributions that directly affected the trajectory of (pre)history. It seems like that particular set of arguments from Diamond was the weakest portion of his book, substituting a 'straightforward' explanation with a rather ad-hoc and mysterious one, with somewhat flimsy justificatory argumentation.
So, man "civilized" the environs to suit his purpose and not the other way around. Could this also explain the relatively domesticable nature of the Asian elephant compared to its wild African cousin?
What do you think of the 16th century Malayali poet's vision of the origin of man that Sujatha quotes below your post? If he was indeed taking his cue from the Sankhya Veda, I must note here that the only numbers inspired volume of the ancient vedas apparently contains isolated gems of scientific insights cluttered by a lot of unintelligible mathematical gibberish that purports to explain the universe, its contents AND the non-existence of god. Or so I have heard. When Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (ICV) was clashing with the Hindu obscurantists over his support of widow remarriage in India, some of his atheist supporters asked him to quote the Sankhya Veda to upend the Upanishads based religiosity of his critics. ICV in his infinite wisdom and steely determination declined, saying that there was no point in fighting crap with more crap.
Posted by: Ruchira | December 10, 2010 at 04:22 AM