Elocution Speech: Creation Vs Evolution

[This is what won me the Department's elocution competition today. My speech pattern was pedestrian...]

Good evening, respected teachers and my dear friends. My name is Kush Meshram, and I am here to talk about evolution Vs creation. I know its a slightly dry topic, so for those of you who want to go off to sleep, I promise I'll wake you up in 5 minutes. But for those interested in rock music, spiderman and breakups, hold on...

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light." Thus begins one of the most famous paragraphs in the history of mankind. It goes on to talk about how God created the sun and the stars, the flora and the fauna before finally creating "Man".

A sufficiently detailed explanation of how life came into existence. But is that how it really happened? That, i guess, is the million dollar question we are here to debate today.

The bible isn't the only source which talks about how life came into being.Hinduism with its 33 crore gods, has multiple stories of creation.
Consistent in all these explanations is a belief in a higher supernatural power which brought life into existence.

And if we really accept, that yes, a higher power exists, that God exists,then we must accept the related symbolisms too. But do thunder and lightning really mean that God is angry with us? And does the falling of rain-drops indicate that God is shedding tears? Infact, I distinctly remember studying that rainfall is nothing more than evaporation followd by condensation. And that lightning is just an atmospheric discharge of electricity.

But what about modern day miracles which continue to occur to this date? And you needn't even look very far for such miracles. In our very own city of Mumbai, statues of Lord Ganesha drank milk on September 21, 1995. Yes, statues of stone and clay drank milk. A miracle, isn't it? Yet,scientists at CSIR and IITB dismissed the claims of a miracle by saying it occured mainly due to capillary action and surface tension.

Conversely, a religious person may cynically argue that science tries to justify everything and anything. In the words of St. Bernadette of Lourdes ”For those who believe, an explanation is unnecessary. For those, who don´t believe, an explanation is impossible.”

But the real question here is, is the scientific approach correct, or rather justified? On one hand religion asks us to accept ideas on blind faith, while on the other hand science presents us with hypothesis verified by empirical data and rigourous experiments. Religion asks us to trust while science teaches us to reason. Religion has answers for everything while science has explanations for some.

In such a case how feasible is it, to ask that we believe in the scientific approach? Not very feasible you'd say. But, in the words of Aerosmith's rock music legend Steve Tyler "life is a journey, not a destination"; and sometimes the path we take is more important than the goal. This is probably why the followers of the scientific approach of evolutionism continue to increase with each succeeding generation while the believers of creationism continue to diminish. Naturally, the next question that comes to mind is, how does science explain the origin of life?

Scientists have used techniques like radiometric-dating to determine that the earth came into existence around 4600 million years ago when fragments of a young solar system combined. During this period the the heavier molten iron sank to the core while the lighter material rose to the the earth's crust.

OK, one might say, this was how Earth was formed. But how do you go from here to today's advanced civilizations? How did mere dirt and rain water give birth to life? How did living organisms come into existence?

The credit for an answer probably goes to Stanley.(pause) I know what some of you are thinking. Spiderman first created life on Earth and now goes about saving it. Actually, I wasn't talking about the comic writer Stan-Lee who gave us Spiderman, but a scientist called Stanley Miller who recreated the early earth's primitive conditions in a lab experiment in 1950. His tests showed that repeated lightning strikes on a mixture of water, methane and ammonia can lead to the formation of amino-acids, which are the basic building blocks of protiens. Thus Miller showed how organic life originated from inorganic matter.

So now we have amino-acids, which could form protiens, and lead on, to the eventual formation of primitive bacteria. But, it still requires a great leap of over-active imagination to go from bacteria to human beings. I mean, imagine you went up to your girlfriend tomorrow and told her, "You are a descendant of bacteria", Result: Break-up! MTV Splitsvilla! World War 3! So how does Science make this great leap of imagination? Magic?

Well science doesn't have much use of magic, just logic.

There are two major mechanisms that drive evolution. The first is natural selection, a process causing genetic factors that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common in a population. It is also known as Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest". The second is genetic drift, an independent process that produces random changes in the genetic factors. So primitive bacteria gave way to algae which in turn gave way to amphibians. Then came reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and a long long time later, primates like apes. Man, of course, descended from apes.

So this is how evolution explains the origin of life.

People might say, I have talked of creation,I have talked of evolution, but I haven't really talked of evolution vs creation. And wasn't that the real topic? Well, lest you think that I have digressed, I 'd like to say that I have just done what science would have wanted me to do. The speech was an experiment. This giant hall in which you are sitting is a test tube. And YOU are the subject.(pause) I have given you the facts. I have shown the methods. Good luck with the results.