Ever since man began to exist as a conscious being on the surface of the earth, he has been agitated by the questions regarding the evolution of the Cosmos, the origin of life and the development of societies and civilizations. And except for a minuscule period of past hundred and fifty years, the answers to the above-mentioned questions limited their scope within the realm of a supreme creator. The divine creation theory commanded the intellectual sphere of the society, just as Darwinism and Big Bang Theory command the intellectual sphere of our own society. However, when man climbed many steps up the ladder of knowledge with more and more resolved forms of ideas and advanced methods of exploration, he has been forced to change his conceptions. Darwinism is one such conception which desperately needs a timely revision.
No doubt, Darwinism itself was an evolutionary concept. The hypothesis of Darwin, which initially depended on Paleontology, Embryology and Morphology for its main assertions, seemed to have achieved the status of an uncontestable theory with the help of Genetics and Molecular Biology. However, with the passage of time, when more and more light was shed on the phenomenon of life, the worst fear of Darwin, which he himself recognized as the absence of interlinking evidences, became an unavoidable reality. The net result is that except for the concept of a limited speciation by natural selection, all central ideas of Darwinism, including the descent of man and the tree of life, stand today as no more than hypotheses which need substantiation.
The new theory of evolution in this book tries to understand the phenomenon of life that is different from the form of an organism. Just as water is not water cycle, the form of an organism is not life. Life consists of a chain of self-activated chemical processes sustained by various energy forms. Therefore a fulfilling theory of evolution must deal with the evolution of life, along with the evolution of its form which actually forms a part of its growth. All major theories of evolution so far have dealt with the form of organisms, disregarding the concept of life which is more important than the form of the organism.
Evolution as a concept is not just limited to the evolution of organisms. It deals with the philosophies of cosmic existence and social existence. Moreover, it is a philosophy of life which has tremendous potential to shape our belief, attitude and behavior. An essay on the introductory part of the book details the scope of the work. The author of this book earnestly believes that an effort to understand life will serve as a new chapter in the saga of efforts by rational community all over the world in understanding the process of evolution. The book is available on Google Play.
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