Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Did we really evolve

This comes from a discussion I was having the other day with a Friend. Picture this:
My Stone-Age forefathers worked from sunrise to sunset, spent the entire day gathering food while my foremothers stayed at home tending to kids. They worked at constantly improving their toolsets and homes, lived under a constant threat of animals and natural calamities. They were constantly ravaged by disease and malnutrition, and medicine was not yet a Science. They lived to more than a hundred years per person, on an average. They came home at dusk every day and spent the rest of the evening in community activities.

Compare that to my generation: We still work from Sunrise to Well beyond sundown, we still spend the entire day gathering food and amenities, Mothers harldy get to stay at home to tend to kids, since they got to work as well. We still work constantly at improving our tools and Homestead, and live under a constant threat of newer diseases and Natural calamities. In fact, we have added manifold to the list of LIfe-threatening situations: there's terrorism, Genocide, A whole new set of killer diseases, some of which like Hypertension and Diabetes are more of a norm than an anomaly. We have achieved unimaginable hieghts of medicine, but are still ravaged by disease and Malnutrition. We live to an average age of 50 years, going down by a decade with every passing generation. We come home late after sunset, and barely have time to meet our kids awake, maybe once a week. We have means of communication that even Isaac Asimov could barely dream of, but we hardly communicate (Come on: When was the last time you called to check if your ailing Aunt was still alive?)

We've definitely come a long way

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