By
Syed Ibrahim Rizvi
A figure of a hundred thousand, which is cumulatively called a la,c, is a large figure by any standard. Even today, a person with lakhs in their bank account is referred to as a lakhpati and is thought of as a man of wealth. Well, such is the value of a hundred thousand.
However, a hundred thousand years in the evolutionary time scale, when viewed about the evolution of life on earth, is just a blink of an eye. This paradox of time makes it difficult to understand many of nature’s phenomena.
It was approximately 3.5 billion years ago that life first evolved on earth. Over the next 3.5 billion years, the journey of life has crawled from bacteria to fungi to algae to fishes to amphibians to reptiles to birds and then has meandered up to humans.
The history of early humans is no more than one million years (ten lacs), however, homo sapiens the variety of humans, to which we belong, have been around on this earth for only two lac years.
Comparing two lac years to the time when life began on this earth is like comparing the distance between New Delhi railway station and Connaught Place to the distance between Sydney and New York!
It is an amazing story that an animal called ‘human’, which evolved on this earth just like any other animal, has been able to grow in population such that within 125 years its population has increased from one billion to eight billion.
The exponential growth in human population is indeed intriguing because humans lack the majority of attributes that other animals possess. Humans do not have strong teeth like many carnivorous animals have, nor do they have claws. Humans intrinsically cannot swim or climb trees, humans need to cook food before eating, and humans are frail compared to many animals.
Evolutionary biologists opine that it is because of the highly evolved brain that humans became such intelligent animals. Because of their brains, humans developed the ability to communicate with each other and started living in groups.
The ability to live in groups multiplied their strengths, and ‘human groups’ became strong entities that made them more powerful than any other animal.
The ability to live in groups was the starting point that catapulted humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder. When in groups, humans could accomplish hitherto unfathomable tasks that were impossible for a single individual.
The ability to live in groups and do tasks in association with many individuals was the reason that humans undertook the great migration out of Africa to Asia and other parts of the world approximately 70,000 to 80,000 years ago.
Thus, having tasted the fruit of living in groups, humans explored ways to make larger groups. This was the beginning of communities.
The communities now became much stronger entities, and humans in such communities could accomplish more complicated tasks. Living in communities, humans became efficient farmers and started living a non-nomadic life. This development happened just 10,000 years ago.
While it was apparent that living in groups and communities was beneficial for the evolution of mankind, humans needed a glue to bind together varied individuals who were part of an extended community.
To make it possible and create a common platform, humans invented traditions and customs that each of the members of that community accepted. Thus was the beginning of culture. Thus, each community had its own culture. Even today, we have different cultures.
Humans continued to prosper and grow in population, using their power to live in extended communities. It was around 5000 years ago that humans started creating a further level of association that went beyond the boundaries of communities.
To make larger communities, a further set of common rules and traditions was required, which all members could adhere to. This was the starting point of a set of beliefs that we now classify as religion. Belonging to a religion was a passport to cooperation from varied individuals who had nothing in common except their common beliefs.
The concept of religion and shared belief was such an infectious attribute for humans that this became a fast-propagating phenomenon.
The power and the strength of the vast majority of individuals could be used to achieve insurmountable goals. Mankind flourished using religion as a cooperative tool for several thousand years. Each religion prophesied that every other religion, and thereby every other belief, was not true.
While religion was working on making larger communities, something else was also growing. Humans, because of their higher cognitive abilities, had no predators and had started using intelligent observation, which came to be known as science, to make their lives easier.
As a result, the population of the Earth started increasing. Humans started using the Earth’s resources with blatant impunity and thus started altering the Earth’s ecosystem.
As mankind entered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the entire population of the Earth was already strongly divided into different religious beliefs.
Thus, while the invention of religion was inherently a human creation, by the turn of the first century, it had become such a dominant force that even humans found it difficult to control.
The impact of religion is probably the same as that of Artificial Intelligence. It is indeed debatable whether AI will remain a passive tool or become uncontrollable.
With the rise in population of the planet, the resources of this earth becamelimitedg and this created a competition between human groups, thereby creating a divide in society in terms of the availability of resources.
However, the experience of humans living in extended communalities and bound together by virtual beliefs had become too ingrained in the human mind.
Humans started competing for resources with other humans on the basis of beliefs. It was in this scenario that religion became a tool of war.
Paradoxically, during the evolution of beliefs, every religion had espoused a set of rules for its believers, but no religion had a clear set of rules governing the situations when there was a clash between beliefs.
Thus, in the twenty-first century, when eight billion humans started competing for resources, religion came in handy to segregate mankind. Several regions of the world have already seen wars and strife between beliefs. These are offshoots of human endeavor to get more resources.
Ironically, the same human evolution that had for centuries thrived on the concept of belief systems, based on virtual acceptance of faith, has grown to such a monstrous level in present times that it has become a tool of war.
The author is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Allahabad.
