The whole world, along with me celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin. He had a kick-ass work life. Well, whats better than vacationing in a lonely island and calling that your "laboratory". Have you seen ours??? Ok the scientist in me continues further, so here we go!
Born at a time when studies could not be done at the molecular level, Darwin and spencer "rightly" correlated origin of species to the origin of the universe. It gave rise to some agnosticism, triggered by the conflicting concept of God sending the 13 spp. Also, it gave a lot of scope for science fiction for years to come.
They were born to be skeptical, to question everything giving rise to 'science' as such. To think of what was achieved centuries agao, I speculate if we as a group of scientists are even reaching anywhere. Nothing really has changed over the last twenty years. With advance in technology like having a whole genome sequenced in less than five minutes, we havent achieved breaking success with either cancer or AIDS. We have only added to the list with mutant varities of bird flu and salmonella.
In my opinion, scientists today compared to 100 years back, are more concerned about short term success and material recognition. (like publishing a paper). Added to the fact that we have made education comprehensive and rigid that there is no scope for thinking beyond. Like for example, what if our categorization of animals and birds were all wrong? Anything that lays an egg outside itself is a bird, whereas anything that breast feeds is a mammal? We have learnt and accumulated so much knowledge, that we are not sure when to give our radically different ideas a chance. Should we go unlearn everything to give ourselves a broader perspective?
