Bakari Gopala
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By Narasimha das
Life Comes from Dirt Superstitions:
The ancient Greeks, specifically the renowned philosopher Aristotle (384 B.C – 322 B.C.), believed that living things were spontaneously generated from non-living matter.
Aristotle was a naturalist who loved to observe animals and nature while taking long walks through the country. He noticed that ponds were full of various species, such as fish, frogs, and tiny swimming insects. Later, in the summer months, many of these ponds would dry up and appear to become lifeless mud sinks or totally dry beds. But when the rains came, the same dry beds would fill up again with aquatic life. He wondered how all this life became regenerated. After pondering this puzzle for a long while, he finally concluded that earth itself had the power to generate life spontaneously under certain conditions. Observing the life cycles of insects on land, he came to similar conclusions: that rotting meat, animal fur and other nonliving matter had the potency to generate various forms of life under specific conditions.
Aristotle was considered one the greatest thinkers of his era, so naturally his published findings circulated to nearby Arab countries, and gradually such misleading ideas spread west to European nations. Such misinformation gradually evolved into a system of superstitions and beliefs that were taught in school texts on biology and medicine.
Due, perhaps, to the liberating influence of the advent of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu on Earth (1486-1534), Europe started to emerge from the Dark Ages. During the Dark Ages people had no idea how or why deadly diseases like the black plague were spread. City people would pass stool and urine in buckets and then throw it out their townhouse windows, yelling a warning to pedestrians, “Loo!” (This is how the term “loo” came to mean toilet or latrine.) Some streets were, at times, ankle deep in human excrement. Surgeons had no idea of any need for cleanliness. In fact, doctors would often wear their most filthy clothes to perform surgeries with unwashed scalpels, just as field workers and street cleaners would wear filthy clothes for their work, saving their clean clothing for social affairs. Thus, many patients would “mysteriously” die shortly after even routine surgeries.
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#Śrīla Prabhupādas #Biogenesis #Birth #Science
