Parivartan.. By Paul king

Continuous change is one of those concepts that is very hard to wrap one’s head around, and change that happens on a scale of more than 1 million years is just so far outside the timeframe of the human lifespan that it is practically meaningless to us.

This is why it is so difficult to imagine monkeys evolving into humans.

Continuous Change

Ironically, continuous change occurs around us all the time. When you put the dough into the oven, at what point does it change into bread (or cookies)? There is no one point where it stops being dough and starts being bread. But bread and dough seem so different from each other that it doesn’t really make sense that one evolves into the other. If you didn’t watch bread bake in the oven, would you really believe that the dough on the left changed continuously into the crisply structured bread on the right, with no single point of transition where it was no longer dough and was now bread?

The same is true of babies growing into adults. Human babies look nothing like adults other than basic features. If all you saw were 3-month olds and 30-year-olds, with nothing in between, you really would not believe that one can evolve continuously into the other. Which person did this baby continuously change into?

Slow Continuous Change

The added problem is dealing with timescales that are so vast relative to the human lifespan.

When does a river become a canyon?

When over the course of millions of years does a hill become a mountain?

We accept that these changes must have happened because geologists say so, but it is not really imaginable and we can’t see it happening… and never will.

So how was the first human created? It wasn’t. Humans are the latest form of a very slow and continuous process. And because the process is so slow, we will never be able to see it, just as we can never see mountains and canyons forming.