I can go on for pages and pages explaining why so much of science simply not as you wish to believe it is. (Probably this central ignorance of science beyond what is popularly known is behind Gandhi’s interesting ideas) To use the most stereotyped example Einstein’s Theory was not born to explain some data! (and even today there is only a little bit of data in support of it but then there are deeper considerations why it is rightfully considered to be central to our understanding)

If the only reason people did science was to explain some freaking piece of data then just so many things would never have been done! I wonder whether geometry would have been at all discovered.

If the purpose of scientific pursuit was merely (or even largely!) to produce a “grammar” to explain phenomenon then I am pretty sure that even today we would have been hopelessly breaking our heads to trisect angles using ruler or compass or to write computer programs to find integral solutions to polynomial equations.

{Thankfully intelligent souls have shown us that both of these things are impossible to do and clearly there was no phenomenon they had in sight to find an explanation for!}

Also about birth of universe in a finite time in the past, I would strongly urge you to provide evidence for why you believe this to be right and not forever existence theories or many others alternative scenarios. I am not withstanding a possibly abominable reading of the literature and miscommunication to the public on the flimsy pretext of a “charged” section of a text! (which thoughtful writers would have learnt to avoid by the time they are in their “CriticalTwenties”)

Thanks for your reply.

* Can you provide evidence in support of this claim that human beings evolved from single celled organisms? I didn’t mean that you should be able to track back the predecessors for any particular human being, but I was asking if you can trace it generically even for the species as a whole.

* Your evasive claim of “popular” science is not something I am impressed about. Popularization of science can’t be tolerated at the cost of ridiculous reductions of it. Hence even if I am ready to believe that no paper ever testing entropy increase claim of yours on eggs, I am going to demand evidence for the principle of monotonic increase of entropy that you seem to claim. I don’t know what you are hiding in the murky caveat of “to a high degree of certainty” !

I think Gandhi the spiritualist may also have genuinely appreciated the oneness with nature that human beings share which science has revealed (especially through the study of cosmology and evolution).

Needless to say, my respect for Gandhi not withstanding, most of his view points on technology and science are highly ignorant in the first place, regressive in the second and reflect a political fear of ‘threat to a moral civilization’ from an amoral force.

Quickly on all three:

(1) Ignorant:

In most of his writings, it appears that Gandhi does not get the scientific methodology at all. Science is about discovering the underlying causes of nature, giving a conceptual framework of thought that is derived from a few underlying principles having being derived by close and continuous observation of how nature behaves.
It appears that Gandhi does not think that a close study of nature and understanding how nature operates is a scholarly endeavor worth pursuing.

(2) Regressive:

Gandhi’s fears about materialism is not a fear of science per-se but a fear of engineering, or technology if you wish.

Needless to say, the questions of whether technology is useful or not and has added ‘value’ to human societies is a legitimate question, fit for debate and a very hard one as well.

However, the view point that somehow technology civilization can be reversed cannot be substantiated considering it is now closely interlinked to all spheres of human economy and human life and will stay here, like it or not. So a statement like ‘India is fortunate to have escaped the technology civilization’ is missing the point that sooner or later to acquire economic capability, India WILL need to acquire a technology muscle.

(3) Political fear

Gandhi’s struggle was closely interlinked to the freedom struggle of his country, so most of his view points are naturally closely linked to the struggle.

In many of his writings, criticizing the west, it is obvious that Gandhi places India on a higher moral plane (at places he has called India ‘the cradle of spirituality’ etc.) vis a vis west, whereby the special moral quality of India then needs to be sheltered from ‘immoral forces’.

Such a thinking is driven by a highly charged political panic and distorts his view point to an extent where in many of his writings, he is unable to give an objective appraisal of the scientific and technological achievements of the West that has come through much effort, hard work and perseverance.

Can you elaborate why you think this notion of “science” is confined to experimental regions? My understanding is that all of science tries to make hypotheses which can then be believed with a certain degree of certainty given the data available at that point. Can you give a counter example?

“Can you illuminate it with an example like tracking down the past descendants of this blog writer back to its single celled predecessor?” One *cannot* track back the descendants of a *particular* blog writer to a single-celled organisms. Instead evolution provides us with a consistent picture about how a particular species evolved from unicellular organisms and since I am a part of a species I can make a statement “I evolved from a single celled organisms”

“I am very curious to know what experiment {on eggs?} showed such a thing and what is precisely meant by “high degree of certainty”)”
If you have noticed then this was meant to be a fairly “popular” science post and the eggs example is used again for rhetorical purposes! So there are no research papers which use eggs (at least none that I know of).

Again, before you read too much into the article- remember its a popular science post. I might write more detailed posts on evolution etc. at a later point where we can have a more detailed discussion.