The patently stupid remark made by Satyapal Singh on evolution should be condemned
It is not too difficult to find a public personality who makes an off-the-cuff remark steeped in unscientific gibberish, but you do not expect the Minister of State for Human Resource Development looking after Higher Education in India to state that evolution is wrong as nobody saw man descend from apes. Now when English naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the Theory of Evolution he was roundly criticised. In the Christian scheme of things God created everything, nature could not evolve and as Darwin’s followers over the years put the pieces of Darwin’s theory into place it was evident that man and higher apes such as chimpanzees and orangutans had a common ancestor and thus homo sapiens had at one point of time shared a common thread. less than 50 years after Darwin wrote his magnum opus On The Origin of Species it was not so much a theory as an axiom. Studies of the fossil record in the past 150 years have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that nature constantly evolves. Today, we know that dinosaurs evolved into birds and didn’t really die out.
There are some less educated members of the Council of Ministers, but Satyapal Singh does not prima facie, to use his language seem to be one of them. He has an M.Phil in Chemistry in addition to his M.A degree and an M.B.A degree and has also completed a Ph.D. This is a highly qualified, educated man who has also served as the Police Commissioner for India’s commercial hub of Mumbai. For him to have made such a statement is not only bizarre but out of place. Of course, Singh has put his foot in his mouth before by once claiming that claiming that Shivkar Bapuji Talpade flew an aircraft eight years before the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk. Questioning is welcome; there’s no doubt the West often ignored contributions by their colonial counterparts, the case of the brilliant Jagdish Chandra Bose being a case in point, although he has been rehabilitated to his rightful place in the scientific record.
But the Minister needs to look at his day job much more seriously. Indian higher education is in a shambles, and most Indians when they graduate are for the most part unemployable. We have built several institutes of excellence but we have ignored the larger market. The job that needs to be done right now is to prepare the next generation of Indians entering higher education for the inevitable challenges of an automated age, but education has not kept pace. Instead of making ridiculous statements that make Indians sound like uneducated idiots, the minister should do his job and not go beyond his brief. Because if Indian higher education produced a man like Singh it really must be in a state of disrepair.