Mentioning institute affiliations is not enough - II

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this - Bertrand Russell 

In his post, Sanjeev says, 'Anything that is not measurable under their telescope or microscope or meters etc does not exist for them.' One reason for relying on instruments is that they are free of human biases. Perhaps the most problematic of these biases is confirmation bias - the tendency of people to look for evidence that confirms what they already believe. As Richard Feynman said, ' The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.' Eyewitness testimony is a very unreliable form of evidence. People see what is not there and don't see what is there. Optical illusions show that people can be fooled by simple lines drawn on paper.

Instruments increase the range of signals that can be detected. For eg., the human eye can detect signals only in a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum and has limited power. Telescopes and microscopes enable us to see objects that are far away and tiny objects respectively, objects that can't be seen by human eyes. For eg., the Hubble Deep Field image is produced by pointing Hubble space telescope at an apparently empty patch of sky.It is revealed to contain many galaxies each with millions of stars many of which are a few billion times dimmer than what can be seen by the human eye.

Dogs can smell far better than humans, bats can hear sonar, insects an see in infra -red, birds can see in ultra-violet.  Then there are signals like the magnetic field of the earth that you will not detect without instruments. Relying exclusively on human senses reveals  a small world enabling humans to harbour the delusion that they are the pinnacle of creation. The vastly bigger universe revealed by instruments is far grander than the tiny universe revealed by human senses.Maybe everything we know about the universe now is wrong but what will replace it will be backed by evidence not dreams.

Sanjeev says, 'They do not have any conclusive logic to justify how they are so certain that no world apart from what can be measured by their scopes and meters can at all exist.' The conclusive logic is the absence so far of evidence to that effect. The personal experiences that people relate are very real and convincing to them but as evidence, they are worthless. As Oliver Sacks shows in his book Hallucinations (I had written a post about it), people can experience many things in many circumstances and be certain that they are real.

Sanjeev asks, “Who guided atoms to become humans?” Nobody. That was the brilliant discovery by Darwin. He noticed how breeders moulded the shapes and qualities of plants and animals in the way they wanted by choosing the breeding individuals in each generation. The entire first chapter of On the Origin of Species is devoted to artificial selection. But in artificial selection human beings are the controlling agents.

Then Darwin had his leap of imagination - why can't the same thing occur in nature with gradual change in wild plants and animals over many generations without the aid of a controlling agent? The individuals that breed in each generation are chosen automatically - those individuals that have the superior equipment to survive in their environment are most likely to reproduce and pass on the genes (a word that Darwin didn't use since he didn't know about them) that helped them to survive.

Sanjeev asks, “Why not slightest of evolution take place in documented history?”. If he means visible human evolution, then the time period is too small. Evolution by natural selection depends on the generation time of the organism and not enough human generations have gone by in recorded history for there to be visible evolutionary change. In organisms with shorter generation times, evolution has been documented. One of the most potent examples of evolution by natural selection which has the potential to cause havoc for humans in the not too distant future is the development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria.

Evolution by natural selection has occurred at the genetic level in human beings in recent times. An oft-cited example is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults in pastoral communities. Another common example is the evolution of genetic resistance to malaria in some African populations due to hetero zygote advantage - When carrying two copies of an allele is disadvantageous (in this case, causing sickle-cell anaemia), but carrying only one copy is advantageous(in this case, conferring resistance to malaria). Isaac Asimov writes in his essay The Relativity of Wrong:

If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly.

Actually, the idea of vast stretches of time should not  faze the Indian mind since such ideas are part of myths.For eg., in Hindu mythology, there are 4 yugas which make up a cycle called divya-yuga, which lasts 4,320,000 years. One thousand of these yugas equal one day of Brahma. Brahma's lifespan is 100 years of this time. The idea of a 6000 years old earth believed by Young Earth Creationists in the US will strike the Indian mind as strange.

Mentioning institute afiliations is not enough - I

Far too many people — especially those with great expertise in one area — are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas, or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge. But taking pride in their ignorance is self-defeating - Peter Drucker.

Agniveer is a site which, while introducing itself, says, 'Vedas are the best available benchmarks cum workbooks cum textbooks to help us model ourselves.' In it,  I came across an article by one Sanjeev who says, ' I am an alumnus of IIT-IIM and hence try to find my humble ways to repay for the most wonderful educational experience that my nation gifted me with.' Citing the names of well-known institutes can only take you so far. The effect wears off after a while. I think he should have read and thought a bit more before writing his post.

Education is an investment that will yield returns after a while. The returns are increasingly being viewed only in monetary terms rather than about whether you learn something. As a Mehmood song says' 'The whole thing is that ke bhaiyya, sabse bada rupaiyya.'“Why create a generation of thinkers when what’s needed are workers?” seems to be the thinking behind education in most Indian schools. The RSS recently advised the government to  make education 'more practical and less theoretical'. In other words, don't think, just do.

I won't entirely blame Sanjeev for this post. The school system is geared towards training children to jump through the requisite hoops to get to college. Once there, you are expected to know about progressively narrower ranges of knowledge. When working, with the current fashion for staying late in office, there is no time to develop other interests. So people can be very knowledgeable about one area and astonishingly simplistic in their views about other areas.

It will be erroneous to think  that if a person is very good in one field, he is equally good in other fields. I was trapped in this bubble and would have continued in blissful ignorance but then I slipped on Life's banana skin and everything changed. Since then I have been reading about many things (since time is not of the essence, I can indulge in such luxuries)  and the common element in all  of them is that they have very little to do directly with what I studied in college. What I found was that the universe is a lot more complicated (and therefore more interesting) than I had been led to believe.  I agree with what another person said in this post:

All our technical universities seem to have one thing in common: their constant refrain to us to be ‘successful’. Be it the IITs, BITS or of course, the myriad others, anyone observant enough can make out that ‘success’ is the buzzword. ‘Achievement’ is a virtue, and dreams of 50 Lakh p.a. starting salaries seem to be the bench mark of the student who has ‘used his time wisely and worked hard’. And somehow, somewhere down the line, the real point of it all seems to have been lost.

It is simply not enough that universities exhort their students to make something of themselves. It is not enough that they churn out well-educated young professionals who still seek solace in astrology, continue to hold conflicting views about the universe in the face of scientific evidence, and continue to cling to crippling fears and insecurities about themselves and their purpose in life.

The cat is already out of the closet, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that a spurious understanding of science can co-exist with academic brilliance in higher education. If we are to really get anywhere to begin with, we must shed our collective cultural tolerance for faith-supremacy and stop riding on the popular bandwagon of Appeal to Antiquity. This manifestation of Karmic Capitalism comes at the cost of the rational worldview, and feeds off modern insecurity. It festers in a vacuum of discourse and open debate about what it means to be successful, or how we can overcome our anxieties thoughtfully.

Sanjeev seems to think that a scientific theory is a random guess that someone came up with over dinner. A theory is a system of ideas that gives an explanation of a group of facts or phenomena. It begins as a hypothesis and finally becomes a theory that is accepted by the scientific community after it has been confirmed by experiment/observation. If even one observation is wrong then the theory is wrong and has to be modified. The new theory must not only explain the anomalous fact but also explain the facts that had been satisfactorily explained by the old theory. Stephen Jay Gould says:

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Like the theory of gravity or the atomic theory, evolutionary theory is an extensively documented set of principles with evidence from multiple independent sources - morphology, embryology, paleontology, bio-geography, molecular biology, etc. There are multiple books and online sources which give information about evolution in language accessible to the layman. Following the advise of the Bible is useful: 'Seek and ye shall find'. As Jacques Monod said, '[A] curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it."

There are an amazing number of misconceptions about evolution by natural selection, an idea that can be summarized in just a few words - non-random selection of random variation. The use of the word 'evolution' as a synonym for the word 'change' in many contexts like evolution of Indian foreign policy, evolution of cities, evolution of car design etc. are misleading. These processes have nothing in common with the process of biological evolution.

An irritating nurse - II

Once when I asked the nurse to turn the page of a book, she muttered something under her breath that sounded like, 'Why can't this guy just lie down quietly?' After that, I stopped asking her to turn pages. I would read the two pages in front of me and sit quietly. After half an hour, she may turn the page. If she did, I read; otherwise, I didn't. During such times of simple living and high thinking, my favorite pastime was how best to bore you in my next post. So you can blame this nurse for some of your miseries.

The nurse had the habit of saying one thing when people were around and muttering the opposite thing under her breath when she was alone. For example , she will say to people that she had learned my system of communication quickly while the reality was very different. She seemed to temporarily think that I was deaf and couldn't communicate anything to anybody. At these times, I will quietly continue doing whatever I had been engaged in, pretending that I didn't hear anything while she will be sitting with a brilliant smile as becomes the victor in a battle of wits.

She seemed to be the perfect example of the cliché  - a bad carpenter blames his tools. If she couldn't remember where she kept a towel, she blamed the towel; if some piece of clothing that she had put out to dry flew away in the breeze because she had not fastened it with a clip, she blamed the clothing. If she spilled some feeding or urine, she blame my cough even though I had been lying quietly.

Once she spilled urine all over my pant because she had not kept the can properly. At this time, I was lying on the bed and the so the nurse didn't have to call anyone to shift me. She struggled on her own to remove my pants and wipe me clean. I told Jaya about the incident when the nurse was not in the room. We knew she would blame my non-existent cough which was exactly what she did later when she described her struggles in making me clean. Jaya pretended as if she was hearing about the incident for the first time and said, 'Really? You should have called me to help!' I did my best to look on impassively.

When Sujit was discharged from the hospital, I asked Jaya to get the nurse changed. It was the first time I had made such a request. There had been other nurses too who had some similar characteristics but this nurse had them all to a much greater degree. In A damsel in Distress, P.G. Wodehouse wrote:

The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization...Of all the qualities  which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.

Animals care nothing about keeping up appearances.  Observe Bertram the Bull when things are not going just as he could wish.  He stamps.  He snorts.  He paws the ground.He throws back his head and bellows. He is upset, and he doesn't care who knows it.  

As long as this nurse was around, there was always the danger that I might forget my better nature and decide that Bertram the Bull had the right idea.

An irritating nurse - I

Sometime back, I had a nurse  who the agency said was very experienced, had looked after quadriplegic patients and would be able to look after all the needs of the patient without trouble. All agencies say this so not much confidence could be placed on it. The part about experience was not very reassuring because rarely had a nurse handled a quadriplegic who could not speak so any experience would have had limited relevance.

The first and foremost problem with her was that she was never able to understand my basic communication of one blink for 'yes' and no blinks for 'no'. When I indicated that I wanted something, she would ask whether it was about pillow, hand, fan, etc. but was unable to understand what I was saying. She would randomly adjust various things which would make matters worse till my eloquent eyes discouraged further investigations.

I always want the nurses to close the door when my motion is being cleaned. This nurse would often forget it in spite of being told to do so numerous times. On one such occasion, when she forgot to close the door, I kept turning my head towards the door and making some croaking sounds. She understood that it was about the door and kept insisting that she had closed and bolted it which I could see wasn't the case. All she had to do was to turn and look at the door and the mystery would have been solved but she was reluctant to do it.

At times like this it is a good idea to ask the question, 'What would Sherlock Holmes have done?' But this did not help. The famed resident of 221B Baker Street had only handled murders, burglaries and international intrigues. This was a lot more tricky.I could not expect Luck to do the heavy lifting at all times. I had to occasionally give it a push with my own effort.

Not being known to act with promptness and dispatch in sticky situations (or in any situation for that matter), I had to fall back on my tried and trusted eyes to convey the gravity of the situation. They screamed at her in helpless anger, 'Look at the bloody door!' There were some fruity words long suppressed swirling about in my mind struggling for utterance. It is said that meaningful silences are better than meaningless words. I am full of meaningful silences and this was as meaningful as any. (My meaningless words are reserved for the blog.)

The usual clonus set in and my  hands and legs began to have the typical shivering movements. The nurse finally got the message, turned towards the door and found it wide open. Mission accomplished.  If she had looked at me sheepishly, I would have laughed over the incident. What irritated me further was that the nurse pottered towards door muttering under her breath as if she was annoyed that I had pointed out her error.

At this time, Sujit developed some health issues and had to be hospitalised for a few days. This meant that Jaya had to be in the hospital for extended periods of time leaving me to deal with  the whims of the nurse. This was a situation that could not have been avoided and I had no option but to depend on Lady Luck. In  A Damsel in Distress,  Wodehouse writes:

Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours.  From such masterful spirits she turns away.  But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hands in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need. 

I decided that Wodehouse knew what he was talking about. I am pleased to report that my trust was not misplaced. Luck had shaken off her capriciousness and was on her best behaviour. I suffered only the discomforts that I had anticipated and there were no unpleasant surprises.

Harking back back to a glorious past - II

It is claimed that Pythagoras theorem was known in India before Pythagoras. This  is an example of a partial truth - a statement that can't be rejected outright because it has some elements of truth but it can't be accepted without qualification because it is some way from the whole truth. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher,  said that the most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

From what I have read, there were civilizations that knew about the theorem before Pythagoras.and they used it frequently in their construction activities. But they knew specific instances of the theorem. It was true for the instances they checked but they had no way of knowing whether it was true for an infinity of right angled triangles.  The theorem is named after Pythagoras because he was the first person to give a mathematical proof using variables to show that it was true for all right angled triangles.So till Pythagoras provided the proof, the equation was a conjecture.

The PM stated that the creation of Ganesha is proof of the existence of plastic surgeons thousands of years ago. He said that an elephant's head had been grafted on a person's body to create the god. There were claims that Kauravas were born using stem cell technology, that cars and TV existed in Mahabharat times, that a helmet used in the Mahabharata war is found on Mars, that there were inter-planet planes during the Vedic age...the claims keep getting more bizarre. Some of these claims were made at the Indian Science Congress. Here is a discussion about it. By such glorification of myths the real achievement of ancient India like creation of the number zero is  in danger of being brushed under the carpet.

The argument that science has often been wrong and the ancient sages always knew the right thing is underwhelming. Each generation finds out something about the universe that is more true than what the previous generation knew. Isaac Asimov illustrates this idea in a piece he wrote called The Relativity of Wrong in which he said that if you said that the earth is flat, you would be wrong; if you said that the earth was spherical, you would still be wrong; but the first statement is more wrong than the second. Asimov writes:

What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
In IIT Madras, one Dr. A. B. Sudhakara Sastry  delivered a speech on the topic of  “Vedic Sciences: A Treasure waiting for YOU”. He said' 'Vedic literature has every speck of knowledge we need for today. There is no need to invent; we just need to discover what’s already there.' Judging from the videos of the event (Part 1, Part 2), he had a testing time. As Tagore said:

That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought.  We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe, so poor.'
It is all designed to evoke a false sense of pride among the gullible. It is an extension of the trend of taking pride in what you are not. Résumés are about showcasing the outstanding personality that you are not. The inflated marks in schools are about projecting you as the brilliant student that you are not. Liberal use of fashion accessories  is about showing off the trendy, debonair person that you are not. In one commentary stint, Sunil Gavaskar called this generation 'the hyped generation'.  It is all about hype and show; about exaggeration and chest-beating; and reality be damned.

Harking back back to a glorious past - I

It is not difficult to call for a return to the past, to tell men to turn their backs on foreign devils, to live solely on one's resources, proud, independent, unconcerned.  India has heard such voices.  Tagore understood this, paid tribute to it, and resisted it. - Isaiah Berlin

H.L. Menken said, “Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.” One of the biggest delusions that people have is to think that recreating a Golden Age of the past is the answer to all problems. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay alluded to this in a talk quoted in Makers of Modern India.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was one of the Makers who I knew nothing about. Apparently, after independence, she could have entered Parliament, Union Cabinet, become an ambassador etc. but she rejected all offers and preferred to concentrate on social work instead. Ramachandra Guha writes, "That Indian crafts are still alive and, moreover, have a visible national and international presence, is owed more to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay than to any other individual." In a speech quoted in the book, she accuses the Muslim League of spreading 'medievalism' and the Hindus of similarly spreading 'fanatical passions'.

It has...souught refuge in a demagogic past. It tries to cover the complex present with the veil of a vague past, tinting the harsh realities with elusive shades and the gross angles with sentimental contours, conjuring up in short bygone ghosts to lend heroics to commonplace sentiments.

She warns that the selling of this Hindu mirage is trapping immature minds who, being overwhelmed by the present, 'fill the imagination with past achievements, which at least for the fleeting moment gives them a sense of security'. She warns that present problems cannot be tackled by going back to a glorious past but  by 'a bold and courageous reckoning up of existing conditions and their appraisal'.

It is often claimed that the democratic practices of modern India was a tradition of ancient India. Actually, the Indian constitution with its emphasis on equality and fundamental rights is a radical break from a hierarchical past. The hierarchical nature of the society can be seen in many parts of India even now. I can hear many statements of caste, gender and religious biases from supposedly liberal people who will swear that they don't harbour such biases. The idea of caste privileges exists even among educated city dwelling people. It is easy to change laws but it is not easy to change customs. As Sunil Khilnani writes in The Idea of India:

Mere recovery of the past could not make Indians self- sufficient: the necessry veneration of a rich and unusual history had to coexist with a modernist, more self-critical idiom that acknowledged the immense failings of that past. 

Every country has a Golden Age to talk about which in India is usually the Gupta period or the Vedic Age. People who don't know about either the science or the relevant scriptures will  neverthless be thrilled when told that something that science has discoved was actually foretold in an ancient text. It is regularly claimed that NASA has proved something in Hindu scriptures. It would seem as if NASA had nothing better to do than verify the historical truth of incidents in Hindu scriptures.

Instead of providing metaphorical explanations of speculative musings in Hindu scriptures, people will try to pretend as if they are the same as the discoveries of modern science. For instanc some have interpreted Vishnu’s ten avatars as foreshadowing the Darwinian theory of evolution. They know that their audience is science illiterate, that they will remember a few scienc words from school, put two and two together and conclude that philosophical musings and science are the same. Indian gurus do it all the time. 

Nationalism - IV

Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest", but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is. -Sydney J. Harris, journalist and author (1917-1986)  

In his essay The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Ashis Nandy writes:

Once he [Tagore] had dreamt, like Gandhi, that India's national self-definition would some day provide a critique of western nationalism, that Indian civilization with its demonstrated capacity to live with and creatively use contradictions and inconsistencies would produce a 'natianal' ideology that would transcend nationalism. However,  even before his death, nationalism proved itself to be not only more universal but also more resilient than it had been thought. Today, fifty years after Tagore's death and forty years after Gandhi's, their version of patriotism has almost ceased to exist, even in India, and for most modern Indians this is not a matter of sorrow but of pride.

I am one of those few Indians who is not enamored of what Ashis Nandy calls 'the clenched-teeth European version of nationalism' characterised by flag wrapping, chest thumping,Pakistan hating crowds. Or by giving the impression that the sole purpose of scientific missions like Chandrayaan or Mangalyaan is to plant the national flag in their destinations.Or by painting anyone who criticises the government as 'anti-national'. Or by thinking that military strength is the sole barometer of international prestige. (Till recently, India was the largest buyer of arms in the world still there is a constant clamour for more arms.) India is not Pakistan. It is said that most countries have an army but the Pakistan army has a country.

I heard a story about a US scientist who asked for more funding for a cosmological experiment. A politician asked him, 'Will it help defend the country?' He replied, 'It will not help defend the country but it will help make the country worth defending.' Yes, military strength is important but it has meaning only when other fields of human endeavor like science, business, arts, sport, etc. are  flourishing within the country. Blind appeals to to parochialism and past glory sound hollow. Tagore says it all in his poem Where The Mind Is Without Fear.

Tagore's warning about the fetish of nationalism ultimately 'making the cult of self-seeking exult in its naked shamelessness' is shown by this report about Mein Kampf having booming sales in Delhi. Apparently, many management students 'see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it'. If this is how management students think these days, be afraid. As a poor villager, who was part of the group that was being rounded up like cattle by government officials to meet sterilisation targets, says in Rohinton Mistry's novel, A Fine Balance, 'What to do, bhai, when educated people are behaving like savages?'

Nationalism is the human equivalent of group identification among other primates. Within countries, different states; within states, different regions; within regions different groups; all think they are superior to others.  The VP Hameed Ansari's comment  that the idea of a homogeneous nation is problematic was called controversial but I think he is perfectly correct. The public discourse is shaped in such a way that everyone is hypnotised into thinking that being a homogeneous nation is the only way to survive. In this conversation Ashis Nandy tells of a lament by a Bhil woman for her dead son. The Bhils are among the poorest and most marginalised sections of Indian society but the woman says:

Come back to me in your next birth only as a Bhil, 

Take care not to be  born as a Brahmin because then you will spoil your eyes by reading and writing,

Do not be born as a baniya because you will be only counting money and will not learn the true value of things,

Do not be  born as a Kshatriya because  you will be unnecessarily violent all the while, 

You must be born only as a Bhil because that is the best community in the world.

Do not make a mistake, come back to me as a Bhil.

 I often hear people say that Indian culture is the best. What they mean of course is that the culture of the group they belong to is the best. An orthodox Brahmin from Tamil Nadu will find the habits of an orthodox Brahmin from UP strange. It substantiates a point that Nehru made in his Autobiography (a book that I have not read but I came across the quote in Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India): 'Indian culture was so widespread all over India that no part of the country could be called the heart of that culture.'

The human instinct for group identification can be seen when a class is randomly divided into two groups, those sitting on the left and those sitting on the right. They will soon develop group loyalties and start competing against each other. Once, talking about peace between India and Pakistan, the Pakistani cricketer Moin Khan said, 'Hamme farak hi kya hai?' ('After all, what is the difference between us?') Perhaps the similarity is the problem? I came across this Chinese poem in Anti-Utopia:

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs 

 I am compelled to conclude  

That man is the superior animal. 

When I consider the curious habits of man 

I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

In the video I linked to above about Ashis Nandy, he observes that like Indian epics, perhaps both gods and demons are required to make the world; only the definition of who the gods and demons are varies from community to community. He tells of the Zapatista world-view: one should cherish the 'otherness' of others, not the sameness of others. Again like in Indian epics, there is something of a demon in a god and something of a god in a demon.

In Mahabharata, Krishna cheats several times to make his side win. For eg., he tells the Pandavas to lie to Drona that his son had been killed which would make Drona depressed and thus easier to kill. On the other side, when a dying Duryodana (who had been defeated by Bhima aganist the rules of war due to a hint from Krishna) deplores his behavior, Krishna has no answer because he knows that he has done a wrong. The heavens shower petals on Duryodana thus acknowledging his unconquerable spirit and that he had been felled by unfair means. Similarly in Ramayana, Rama kills Bali by deceit and shows himself to be a poor husband by being quick to suspect Sita; while on the other side,  Ravana is skilled in Ayurveda and music and is a big devotee of Shiva. There are Ravana temples in India.

Gods are only gods most of the time and demons are only demons most of the time. Thus gods and demons are not wholly good or wholly bad; they are only relatively good and relatively bad. William Golding shows in his novel Lord of the Flies how evil is innate inn the nature of civilised man. As he said, one lot of people is inherently like any other lot of people and  the enemy of man is inside him.  In a nationalistic fervour one is likely to forget a warning that I saw in a Radiolab podcast - "As we act, we must  not become the evil that we deplore."Or as Nietzsche said, 'Not only the wisdom of centuries - also their madness breaketh out in us. Dangerous it is to be an heir.'

Group identification is an evolutionary instinct but the human brain has grown large enough to thwart it. Every time people use contraceptives, they show that human brains can overcome evolutionary instincts. As Richard Dawkins, who has struggled to reconcile his life-long liberal values with Darwinian evolution, says:

 Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.