Darwinian Evolution and Hindu-Arabic Numerals

Charles Darwin has an entertainingly diverse collection of enemies. Conservative Christians and more recently Muslims object to the general theory on the grounds that it encourages atheism. Feminists and political leftists object to its application to human beings, for they think it encourages stereotypes. A surprising number of scientists object to natural selection because they think it has become "imperialistic," invading disciplines where it does not belong.

A distinction must be drawn two key Darwinian ideas. The sexiest idea is natural selection which I won't deal with here. The other is the idea of the taxonomic tree: all organisms have a common ancestor that lived at some point in the past, and organisms can be grouped together according to how long ago that common ancestor lived. These groups "branch out" as time goes by, and can be represented as a family tree with its roots in very early, very simple organisms.

Virtually all scientists accept this idea, as the evidence for it is overwhelming. Only the most literal interpreters of scripture reject it on religious grounds. I suppose, however, that many people have a hard time imagining the evolution from simple organism to pigs and people because they have a hard time grasping the vastness of the length of time over which that happened.

The most obvious obstacle to imagining geological time is simply that it is unimaginably large. We cannot imagine how long a million years is, let alone 3.5 billion years, just as we cannot imagine how far the earth is from the moon, let alone from distant galaxies.

But it occurred to me for the first time tonight that the way we write numbers may be part of the problem. The wonderful Hindu-Arabic numeral system, precisely because it can efficiently handle large numbers, may be an obstacle to imagining the true vastness of geological time.

We write the number one as 1, and the number ten as 10, using the zero as a place holder. That's very efficient, but also visually misleading. 10 takes up twice as much space on the page as 1; however, it is not twice as large as one but ten times as large. Likewise, the number 100 written that way takes up only three times as much space as one, so the disproportion between the size of the numerals and the actual numbers they represent is much larger.

We have no trouble understanding this, of course, but it might do to reflect that the most natural way of judging the size of any two objects is to look at them both at the same time. One way to see this is to present the numbers in the simplest way possible.

1

1111111111

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Presented in that way, we get a vivid idea of the proportions involved. It strikes me that this might matter a lot with larger numbers. I did a little experiment and continued the above series in a separate document to two more places. I could get 1, 10, 100, and 1000 all on about a third of one MS Word page. When I went to 10,000, it took up almost three full pages. 100,000 little one's required a thirty page document. Copy and paste is great! All that took a few minutes, and I didn't go any further. I am guessing that a million ones would take up about three hundred pages. Be careful not to hit print.

But the number 1,000,000 is only seven times larger than 1 when written in the Hindu-Arabic way. For all of its usefulness, I think this may be psychologically retarding. Writing it the way we do, with ones and zeros, a million years doesn't look all that big. It is in fact so large as to challenge our imagination. What does three hundred densely printed pages look like, spread out on a wall?

Human beings share a common ancestor with the chimpanzees. That ancestor lived about 6,000,000 years (or 1800 pages) ago, give or take 500,000. Mammals show up in the fossil record about 250,000,000 years ago. Multi-celled organisms date back to about 600,000,000 years ago. The earliest fossils of simple photo-synthetic bacteria? That's about 3,500,000,000 ago.

Even the Arabic numerals start to get long at this point, and writers go to decimal notations like 3.5 billion years. Darwinism holds that all organisms are part of one family tree, stretching back over that distance in time. Each generation took care, at least in a mechanical way to provide for the next. 3.5 billion years is time enough for love.

Comments

[Erik Sean Estep]

KB: Some good stuff here. But the real question is how does this fit into Louis Farrakhan's cosmology of oppression? Capturing the notion of time with numbers from different cultures is fascinating. Pardon my ignorance, but what culture started *counting* first?

[KB]

We started counting long before any known cultures existed. Every known culture has words for numbers, as far as I know.

I am skeptical about any "cosmology of oppression." Almost any system of modeling will have some drawbacks.

Thanks for the comment, Erik.

[al james]

what a stupid author who think like medieval european,its was not suprise that
it took 800 år before they adopt arabic numerals system

you make me sick

[KB]

al james: What?

[Naick]

um i really dont get this i need this information for a project and all you give me is this i need more information

[Naick]

how old are you kb