July 24, 2019 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Intermediate/Transitional Forms
The white British citizens of the British
empire had no doubt that the brown skinned Hindus who were their colonial
subjects as well as theoretical citizens of the Empire were not only inferior
but HAD to be inferior in the minds of white Englishmen.
This is much in a manner the way the upper
class Hindus think of the lower caste, meat-eating, lower socio-economic Dalits
or of the impoverished ghettoized Moslems living in small sections of big
cities.
I would hardly be surprised if the Hindus
(generally from the affluent upper middle class families as was the case in my
failed attempt) who have migrated to the United States holding similar
contemptuous sentiments towards the Afro-Americans of the United States once
they have settled and made it there.
‘The Blind Watchmaker’ has a chapter titled
“The One True Tree of Life” where Dawkins makes an interesting point about the
extinction of so called intermediate forms or transitional forms.
Intermediate forms or transitional forms
are technical terms (technical being the keyword as they are profoundly
misunderstood by the uninitiated and the masses) that are used in evolutionary
biology to refer to an organism that has features intermediate of its ancestors
and that of its progeny.
This is somewhat of a misleading term and a
dubiety-creating definition as every fossil and every member of every species
is in a sense intermediate with respect to some ancestor and some progeny though
of course at the level of an individual these changes are too minute to make
any evolutionary meaning or sense.
On the other hand no single member of any
species or even entire species by itself an intermediate form; it is only with
respect to some evolutionary significant phenotypic trait between its ancestor
and progeny that any species could be sensibly defined to be intermediate.
Thus it is a relative term whose significance
manifests only in comparison with two other groups in much the same way as the name
Middle East only makes sense if you consider North America to be the West and
Japan and Asia to be the East though we all know that these labels are merely a
matter of convention (and perhaps a special category of figure of speech known
as metonymy) for our star the Sun never intends to rise on Japan first.
In fact, the sun hardly “rises” in any true
sense.
It is purely by convention that the right
side of the map is east and thereby east becomes the direction towards which
the earth rotates and therefore the Sun appears to rise in the east.
The term “Middle East” itself is fairly new
appearing only in the 1850s in the British India Office to “designate the area
between Arabia and India”.
Only prominent and novel features of
populations over large spans of time separated by several generations would be
meaningful.
Take for instance my mother.
My mother is a “transitional form” between
me and my grandmother as she shares some traits of both of ours but not
exclusively so.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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