Ancient India Was 3000 Years Ahead of Science? Theory of Evolution Resemblances in Vedas - FutureIQ

89,004 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jun 28, 2024

Slog Reference: Dashavatar and Evolution

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There are striking resemblances between the theory of evolution and the dash avatars of Vishnu in the Vedas. Does this mean India was way ahead of the world in terms of scientific discoveries and technology? Let's find out in this fascinating episode of the FutureIQ podcast.

Understand the good and bad things about the science of Vedas and whether you should trust everything written in Vedas and in ancient India blindly. While doing that, we also touched upon topics like Vaastu, Vedic Maths, and more. Learn everything in this single video.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

More videos for you:
DNA evidence of Aryan migration: https://youtu.be/9AxXwYGgWK4
Old vs new justice system: https://youtu.be/ipcIZE1cJw4
Science of Indian languages: https://youtu.be/xASDr0nuIf4
Problem with India’s English: https://youtu.be/P4TcPyEt1fg

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:20 Vishnu’s avatars
05:00 Did Indians know the theory evolution?
06:10 Brilliant stuff from ancient India
07:10 The problem with ancient Indian traditions
08:16 Vedic Maths
10:43 Discarding Vedas?
11:52 Ayurveda
14:03 Do traditions have value?

#futureiq #vedas #ancientindia #indianculture

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Dashavatar and Evolution

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Transcript

- Did you ever realize that the avatars of Vishnu closely track the theory of evolution? Really? Yes. My grandfather pointed this out to me more than 40 years ago and it still blows my mind. Okay, let's just go through the 10 avatars one after the other. Okay, the first avatar, matsia avatar, is a huge fish that lives in an ocean. Correct. We now know that life originated in the ocean and fish came before any land-based animals. True. The second aar kma is a turtle, an amphibian which is making its first tentative attempts at living on land, right?

0m 42s Without giving up the comfort zone of water, right? So again, this is something that happened in evolution. Slowly the water-based animals started coming out on land. True. Okay. The third aar vah the bo lives in the mud near the water right hasn't yet completely let go of the water. Exactly. Yeah. The fourth aar narima is half beast half man indicating that first came animals and then slowly animals evolved into man. So that's why there is this half man half beast thing. Right. The missing link. The missing link. Exactly.

1m 24s Okay. The fifth aar Wan the dwarf is short and stunted. Right. It's just like astropythecus and all the early forms of humanoids. Correct. Exactly. Right. Sixth aar persam is a fully built strong warrior who fights alone and is driven by base emotions mostly anger and revenge not a sophisticated person. So up till now we saw the evolution from fish to amphibians to animals to humanoids. Right? Now we are going to see the evolution from of social behaviors among humans among humans from an individualistic base emotions per sharam to sophisticated humans living in society. Right? So the seventh avatar Rama is the guy who follows the rules of society right in letter and its spirit right mostly there was one moment of

2m 23s weakness during the Wii episode but we can ignore that we'll do another episode on the Wii episode I'm sure but the point is so this is you know there is society there are rules of society which need to be followed and we have reached there and plus we think of a whole bunch of things like duty and respect to parents and promises to be kept and so on. Yeah. From from complete anger and base emotion reactions, we've gone to thoughtfulness and uh living in a society with rules and whatn not. So before we continue, let me ask this right. Doesn't this seem like the pinnacle of evolution? What else is there? How can you get better than this?

3m 07s That's a trick question. That's bait. I am not going to answer. How can you get better? The next avatar Krishna is the guy who realizes that if you follow rules right people are going to take advantage of you that's not getting better it is getting better Krishna is the guy who does whatever is necessary to get the right things done right he is the practical guy who knows all the rules and he knows when the rules are to be broken right to get the right result so Krishna okay fine Fine. That's the eighth of correct. Ram is called Mariadapuram, right? The one who follows the rules.

3m 49s But Krishna is called the purapuram, right? Oh, Ram is incomplete. Krishna is complete. You're going to start a war out there, not just in the comments, everywhere. Well, it's written in the Vedas. Okay. Clearly Krishna comes after Ram. All right. Like the next avdar. Fine. We get it. The 10th Aari is clearly climate change avar to destroy humanity for our sins for the way we are misusing the world. Right. One second. You skipped aar number nine. That's a bit of a mess. Okay. People can't agree on what the ninth avatar is.

4m 31s Okay. Depending on which region and which tradition you follow. Okay. First eight avatar everybody is agreed on. Right. Ninth Aar some people say it is balam some people say it is Buddha some people say it is vithhoba right so I think it's just you know let's just forget about the ninth aar ninth aar is us it's all of us well we can we can say ninth aar is coalition politics so we can just move on from there but uh does this mean that ancient Indians knew about the theory of evolution absolutely not okay I'm just pointing out that the parallels are amazing missing. I don't know how that happened.

5m 11s It is a coincidence of some sort. Okay. But it is important to realize that just because somebody imagined something doesn't make it science doesn't make it true. Okay. My mom loves talking about the pushpakiman and that oh just because they described the pushbakiman flying in the air means that they knew how to make things fly in the air. No. Anybody can dream up any amazing thing, right? Unless you figure out how to build it and there is evidence of it being built, it doesn't really exist, right? Just because the brahastra was described in our ancient wars doesn't mean we knew how to make nuclear weapons, right? We need to be able to distinguish between science fiction and science. Okay? The

5m 57s things mentioned in the Vedas are science fiction. Okay? Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot of brilliant stuff in the Vedas including brilliant science. Okay. So for example uh I mean our mathematicians and astronomers were the best in the world. Right? Uh like Arya who calculated the diameter of the earth thousand years before Columbus screwed it up. Right? Brahma Gupta who first pointed out that things are attracted towards earth. No matter which side on earth you are on. So he was talking about the force of gravity. The word gurutwa kersion which is gravity in Indian languages came from him thousand years before Newton. Right. Madha who discovered infinite series for sin cos and rt tan and knew about convergence of

6m 51s infinite series. This is the precursor the key idea behind calculus. Right? So there was a lot of good stuff. Right? But one problem with the old Indian traditions was very nicely articulated by Alberuni. Okay, Alberuni is the Persian scholar who visited India and in the year 1030, right? He said the following. He said, "I can only compare the mathematical and astronomical literature, as far as I know it, to a mixture of pearl shells and sour dates or of pearls and dung or of costly crystals and common pebbles.

7m 34s Okay, both kinds of things are equal in their eyes since they cannot raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction." Okay, I want you to think carefully about this critique and you will realize this is right. Okay, we have brilliant people with brilliant achievements and then we have charlatans and fakes, right? And we put both sets of people on the same pedestal and we do not have a system to distinguish between the two. That is where the scientific method differs from this is basically this is basically making me question the validity of something I learned as a child vic maths.

8m 19s Well, I mean this is the problem with India, right? Because we don't have systems to distinguish like solid stuff from bogus stuff, right? We end up with Vic maths which is neither Vic nor maths. What do you mean neither Vic nor maths? It is maths. Vic maths was created by Shankarachara Bharati Krishna. Okay. In 1965. 1965. Yes. This guy published a book with sutras which have these mathematical techniques. Yeah. And claimed that these are from the Vedas. Right. Okay. Vic scholars were not able to find this in anything. Right. And when they asked him to point out where exactly which v he said oh this is a parishta a supplementary in an undiscovered version of aturva veda which he had managed to

9m 12s find and of which there is no other copy in existence only he knows about it right okay not just that scholars have searched throughout all the stuff we know about and they have not found anything remotely similar not forget the Vedas right not even in the post Vic period we had some great mathemat mentations later on, right? They did great things, but not this. For example, this thing uses decimals. Our maths was all based on fractions, right? This thing mentions things to do with calculus which didn't exist right then. Okay?

9m 45s So, this guy just made this up and called it Vic maths. Now, the other problem is that it's not even maths because this is calculation. just doing mental calculations fast. Okay, it's arithmetic. It is arithmetic. Maths is not about calculations. Maths is about proofs. Maths is about deduction. Maths is about logic. Right? Fast calculations is such a small part of maths. And in fact, some of these techniques are decent techniques, right? Most of them are not even very good. They're actually slower than just doing the normal method. Okay?

10m 22s The argument I've heard is if you practice them frequently enough, you'll get faster at them and it'll make your life easier and what not. No, it will not make your life easier because you practice regular maths enough, you will get fast at that, it'll be faster than this stuff. Okay. Okay. So, so are you saying we should discard all of the knowledge of the Vedas and No, no, no, no, no, no. Right. Let's be very clear about the fact that the Vedas have pearls and dung.

10m 49s Okay. What we need to do is we need to figure out ways of being able to pick out the pearls from the dung, right? We have a tendency to say that if it was in the veda, it must be something amazing, right? No, it contains all kinds of crap. Okay? Things to note. Much of the stuff about philosophy, spirituality, right? All of that is really good stuff. Okay. Okay. We had lots of philosophers, lots of them arguing with each other and their arguments getting strengthened and so on. So lovely place to look for spirituality uh and things related to religion including atheism. We have a very strong tradition of atheism in Hinduism. Right?

11m 32s Yes. Problem is with the more scientific things. Right? There we need to understand what is the way to separate the pearls from the dung. Right? Okay. If something has been mentioned in the Veda, right? Is it true or not? Is it still applicable or not? Right? So I want to take two examples. Okay? One is Ayurved. Okay? I mean homeopathy is complete [ __ ] but Ayurved is not. Right? There is actually a lot of useful stuff there. The problem with modern Ayurved is that it's really difficult to know which part is really good and which part is bogus.

12m 12s Right? That is one because there aren't enough studies. It is just a whole bunch of claims in a 2,000-y old book which might or might not be applicable. Second problem is that there are no standardized processes, no quality control, right? You go to a V, an Auroric V, you have no idea whether that person is any good or a quack, right? Because where are the bodies? Accreditation, right? Yeah. The accreditation bodies. Sorry. Yeah. Similarly with wasu. Okay, wasu is this whole thing about these rules to follow for your house to be a really good house.

12m 49s East to west facing. I can completely imagine these being really useful rules when we all lived on the gangetic planes where water all came from this direction and went in that direction. It was all on the planes, right? The plumbing was not indoor plumbing, right? And the sun rose in the east, set in the west and there was no uh artificial lighting other than like you know candles and the and earth and whatnot. Correct. Now how much of that is applicable today? A few things might be the sun still rises in the east. Right?

13m 27s But indoor plumbing means that most of the stuff about water is no longer useful. Right? Makes sense. uh similarly things about the construction methods are different and what was done is that instead of modernizing instead of figuring out which ones are applicable and which are not they're just importing everything wholesale and saying you're just you have to follow all of this because 2,000 years ago this guy said it right it it basically comes down to blind adherence to something that has been handed down to you via tradition.

13m 59s Exactly. And that is not always good. Correct. There are some cases which we have discussed previously where it does hold good in very specific situations. For example, we did an episode on old justice system versus new justice system and we did a short small comparison of in general see traditional things have a lot of value. Okay. But you have to realize that the world is not the same. The world is different. Right? So you have to know which things to keep and which things to throw out, discard.

14m 34s Yeah. Yeah. So do check out that episode on traditional justice systems versus the modern justice system. It has an interesting story at the beginning which I'm sure uh you'll appreciate and enjoy. Uh we'll line that episode up next for you. But he's right. We need to be absolutely aware of which parts of tradition we are following blindly and which parts of tradition need to be updated keeping in mind the current situation of the world the current uh changes that have happened since that tradition was put into practice. Lots to think about there. Anything to add?

15m 13s Shriatin, future IQ.