Learnings from Lichens

Even the tiniest beings can teach us a thing or two

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

From times immemorial, human beings have been on a quest to know the real purpose of life. There is this innate urge to know the 'point" of everything, to know the hidden meaning or a motive that drives and moves everything around us.

The simplicity of 'the survival instinct' driving evolution towards the fittest of living beings to go onto live and survive longer appeared too practical and mundane an explanation for such a lofty and wonderful thing called life on earth. As intoxicated as we are with life and its multitude of possibilities, we want to press onto our faith that it has to have a superior meaning. After all, aren't we the exalted culmination of evolution's efforts, we ask.

This is just our ego speaking. The last thought is based upon certain faulty assumptions as highlighted below:

We are not the culmination:

The first thing is that we, human beings, are not the target of the evolutionary process. The latest evidence shows that we are as much an accidental product of evolution as the first hint of life on the earth happens to be. Evolutionary success or extinction could both be many a time attributed to pure chance - of being at the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

It is human vanity that makes us think of evolution as a constant upgradation towards creating a complex entity such as a human being, as though evolution was preprogrammed to producing human beings.

Many anthropologists till recent times stuck to this linear concept, till they started witnessing a lot of inexplicable side trails that totally challenged this concept.

We are not the strongest