Beyond Bee Sting

I had a bee sting yesterday and I didn't have to pretend working long hours as I usually do. So I came home sooner than usual and was going over Time's annual list of the world's most influential people. Getting stung by a bee will have devastating effect on your morale. Because, you know that there are millions out there who could have got stung by a bee, but were not. It happened to be only you. At times like these you tend to ask yourself, "Why me?” As I was asking this question and starring at Time's annual list, it struck me that I should create a list of my own to prop up my sagging morale. I thought of coming up with a list of ten most important living beings ever lived on this planet. Then, out of sheer laziness, I settled down for three.

As I began thinking this list through, I was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of modesty. What I know about all living beings ever lived on this planet is so minuscule, that an attempt to rank them can only be an arrogance of astronomical magnitude. To put this arrogance into better perspective, we will consider an analogy. Let us assume that the entire 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history is written down chronologically in a book of 900 pages. Let's say each page of this book has approximately 1000 words. Then the whole of recorded history, spanning over 6000 years, from Euclid, Sun Tzu, Vatsyayana and Thucidides to Barack Obama, Beijing Olympics and Chandrayaan-1, will be confined to last one word of this book. Homo sapiens would have evolved somewhere in the beginning of last paragraph. One of our ancestors would have climbed down the tree and started walking upright somewhere in the middle of eight hundred and ninety-ninth page. When all the multi cellular organisms were confined to ocean and the land was devoid of entire animal kingdom, a fish would have pioneered out of the seas and walked into the land somewhere in the middle of the eight hundred and ninety-third page. And the first organic molecule capable of self replication would have come into existence somewhere in the end of three hundredth page of our book.

On a retrospective glance down the past, all these moments are crucial and all these living beings are important in their own sense. If you can look back far enough, you can even argue that, one particular flap of a bacterial flagellum is the single most defining moment of evolution and that bacterium is the most important living being ever lived on this planet. But I am not a scientist and I do not have the time and resources to peer far back into Earth’s history and pick out a unicellular hero. As my lack of resources and sagging spirits (remember, I am bee stung as I write this post) are forcing me to pick out the most important living beings from the last letter of our book and pretend as if they are the principal characters spanning across the entire book, I can only hope I am not stretching the courtesies of my readers a bit too far. I would also like to assure that the exclusiveness of Homo sapiens in this list is purely accidental and is definitely not an offshoot of my species affinity. Here are my top three candidates and my attempts, however inadequate those attempts may be, to explain their importance.

Charles Darwin: We always tend to explain things around us in terms of their purpose rather than what they are. If someone looks at a watch and ask ‘What is it?’ the answer will most probably be ‘It is the thing used for checking time’ and if it is about a modem the answer will be ‘It is used to connect to internet’. So it is no wonder that humanity has always been curious to know the ultimate purpose of living beings. Before Darwin, defining the purpose of living beings was relegated to the realm of mysticism and the answers were always pointing to one or other form of a God. Answers, pointing to God, posed a serious problem to scientists and philosophers alike, because now they had to explain the purpose of God. Explaining one supernatural God with another extra supernatural God was not helping since it resulted in an infinite regress of mysteries. It took a gaping 3.5 billion years for the inhabitants of Earth to come up with an answer. And the answer came from this man, Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection explains the purpose of life without any supernatural crutches.

Adam Smith: Russel Roberts explains how free market emerged in a P.O.W camp with the supplies from Red Cross, “Starting with simple direct barter, such as a non-smoker giving a smoker friend his cigarette in exchange for a chocolate ration, more complex exchanges soon became an accepted custom. Within a week or two, as the volume of trade grew and rough scales of exchange values came into existence.” I am not surprised at the emergence of free and fair market in a P.O.W camp. Because I believe all Homo sapiens have an Inherent propensity for voluntary exchange and Adam Smith was the first one to explain how this propensity to exchange goods for our own self interest can make societies prosperous. His discourses on division of labor and propensity for voluntary exchange have helped us to come a long way towards free and fair markets. His words, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" will reverberate across civilized societies for ages to come.

Ayn Rand: Before Rand, morality and ethics were in desperate need of divine authority. Skeptics were asked, “If we refuse to accept divine authority, who would tell us what is morally correct?” Rand summed up her philosophy in one single question, when she retorted, “Who told us how to build a steam engine?” We discovered. We discovered that the laws of nature can be harnessed to our good when they are studied rationally and applied within the confines of reason. Had the men, who discovered steam engine, were waiting for the words from heaven we would still be riding bullock carts. If it is true that right course of action to harness laws of heat can be discovered for a steam engine, it should also be equally true that right course of action to harness laws of nature for our progress and happiness can be discovered. Rand led the way for humanity to discover what is right rather than accepting subjective whims of others.