A letter from CHARLES DARWIN
A letter from CHARLES DARWIN
As a proxy for Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882), I wrote this
letter ON SEPTEMBER 9, 2020 which is a mix of facts and fantasies. . -- T. Rama Prasad
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN
Westminster Abbey, LONDON
September 9, 2020
Dear Humankind,
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Once again, read my quote of the 18th century about adaptability. SARS-CoV-2 is 'most adaptable to change'. That's why it is surviving and thriving. That's the secret of success of some species. Some of you might have read my writings on "Origin of Species", "Theory of Evolution", "Natural Elimination of the Weakest", "Survival of the Fittest", etc. You, Humans, are still on earth because of your adaptability. But now you are not able to cope up with Corona. When you can't conquer Corona, you have to adapt rather than to surrender.
It's a pathetic sight to see you all scramble over like a headless chicken and finally locking yourselves inside your homes with absolute uncertainty of coming out. How long are you going to lockdown your means for livelihood and still be alive ?
This novel Corona is a story about 'Much ado about nothing'. OK, it's about 'Much ado about something', because it spread faster, killed quickly and affected many, a tad unlike the previous coronaviruses and pandemics. But it need not cause panic. It is a fitting solution for the overpopulation and indiscipline, and an action of nature in tune with happenings for healthy sustenance of species.
You had 'super-evolved' to manipulate and kill 'Nature' to suit your self-centred materialistic interests. You had altered the course of evolution and invited calamities like droughts, floods, forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, formidable diseases, both metabolic and infective, etc. And now you invited Coronavirus. It will be your permanent guest. Nature has its own ways of controlling ecosystems and maintaining environmental balance. Don't interfere with it too much. Adapt, adapt and adapt.
When you go beyond a limit, nature steps in for a speedy correction of the course of evolution which in normal course takes a very long and sinuous course. The speedy correction is needed in your own interest, to upgrade species and provide them better evolutionary opportunities and perfections. And more importantly to correct your erratic mindset. That's why Corona stepped in. Let it do its job, while you protect yourselves and treat yourselves to the possible extent. But don't go overboard.
The idea of nature is to relieve the hopelessly sick, weak and unproductive, and to endow the rest of the over-populated lot with better living conditions, and to promote more robust genetic pool of human species. You are nearly eight billion and nine per cent of you are aged 65 or over. You were half of this number half-a-century ago. It is the evolutionary necessity to get rid of the dead wood (some of the aged and the chronically ill who are hopelessly vulnerable to serious illnesses and who may soon succumb even without COVID-19) which is more of a liability, health wise and economy wise, at present and in future. Corona may take away some of these people 'naturally'.
In the large context of species preservation, there is not much place for sentiments. This doesn't mean that all the vulnerable would be or should be wiped out -- those with good immunity and who take extra care would escape. And who knows ? The number of these 'natural covid' deaths may be much lesser than the deaths due to your interventions -- and think about the enormous number of deaths that may occur indirectly for various reasons due to consequences of lockdowns. Irrespective of the deaths and the demographic imbalance, the most important benefit accrued due to the pandemic would be the realisation of human values, correction of bad lifestyles, shedding materialistic outlook, and preservation of 'nature'.
This is my recognised theme of ecosystems -- 'Natural elimination of the weakest and survival of the fittest'. What doesn't kill one , makes one stronger, and more immune. Moreover, the virus would have taught all the human beings, by now, how to live a 'good lifestyle' and prevent future calamities, catastrophes and cataclysms.
What did you do when this corrective step by nature struck you ? You mortals interfered with nature again, too much. Didn't allow the virus to do its job. It couldn't 'peak' early, decline early and leave early, leaving you with some sort of 'herd immunity'. You delayed everything and upset your own whole set up. You 'locked down' everything and deployed all your ammunition to kill the enemy. Unmindful of your defences and offences the highly 'adaptable' enemy forayed into every nook and corner of the globe and tanked you all. The lockdowns didn't kill the raging virus, but they sure did kill millions of jobs.
Arrogance against nature. Albert Einstein said: "The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance." When arrogance failed, you went into a fit of fear out of which you went into a mode of "Lockdown." You have sent the whole economy into a tailspin, with jangled nerves and rattled lives, presaging difficult times ahead, and with uncertainty looming large. Your meticulously programmed career schedules, birthday bashes and holiday itineraries are kaput. Oh, how scared you humans are -- non-touch friendship, non-touch romance, non-touch weddings ... ! And all your big investments, backed by prudent actuarial consultants, went bankrupt. The highly ambitious launches of big business barons are going down the sunset. All these could have been avoided if you had sensibly handled the situation without hubris, and with adaptiveness and level-headedness. Industrial ecosystems can't be created by magic nor can they be revived by a silver bullet. You destroyed them, just as you destroyed forests out of your greed. Over the top reaction. Can you reforest by a click on your laptop ? Your greed has no limits and ethics at all -- even in the midst of the corona crisis, you indulged in murky profiteering activities through shameful and fraudulent research publications about anti-corona drugs in reputed journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. And you call it 'Modern Medicine' ! And your 'modern medicine' billed $1.1 million in the US and Rs.16 lakh in India to treat just one Covid patient. Over-charging is so rampant that the General Insurance Council moved the Supreme Court against alleged 'profiteering' by private hospitals in India. When objected, in one case, the bill of Rs.14 lakh was brought down to less than 4.5 lakhs ! And it is reported that your 'modern laboratories and private hospitals' have an unholy nexus to promote hospital admissions based on fake Corona positive lab reports and then to exploit the terrified patients.
Through your stupid 'lockdown reactions', you thought that you saved a lot of lives, but it is insignificant when compared to the overall deaths, death of economy, sliding down of living standards, attrition, recession and severe slowdown over an indefinite period of future.
While taking some basic precautions and necessary treatment, if you had allowed the virus to do its job of "evolution" and allowed yourselves to do your jobs normally, some of the 'dead wood' would have perished, but the remaining lot would have been robust both health-wise and economy-wise. The fear now is that the whole lot may become "dead wood" in course of time for 'non-COVID-19' reasons. And I hate to write a book titled "The Extinction of Humankind."
Long live Homo sapiens !
Yours humanly,
CHARLES DARWIN
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| Westminster abbey |
Dr. T. Rama Prasad
Formerly: Medical Superintendent (Special) of RTS & IRT Perundurai Medical College and Research Centre, Perundurai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Presently: Director, PAY WHAT YOU CAN Clinic, Perundurai, Erode District, Tamil Nadu – 638052.
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