So Darwin wasn't that wrong
by Hamdu Mia

IN the beginning there was darkness, and God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light. Then eventually came our ancestors, Adam and Eve. They had nothing much to do all day and thus they ate the forbidden fruit. Hence they were sent to Earth and mankind came into existence. From the look of things it appears that as their descendants, human beings have had nothing much to do as well. Otherwise our world wouldn't have been the way it is right now. Had Isaac Newton not discovered gravity, I could have always dreamt of being Superman without being aware of gravity pulling me down. Had Christopher Columbus not discovered America, there would have never been anything as "globalisation" and Chris Tucker might have been born speaking Swahili rather than that irritating accent he has. Finally, had Charles Darwin not struck upon the theory of evolution, you might not have seen me make my comeback to the Rising Stars with yet another boring piece just when everyone was thinking I was gone for good.

I always considered what Darwin said to be plain old trash. How disgraceful! The mere thought of human beings, the greatest creations of the Almighty (like me, of course), to have descended from crooked hairy apes is eerie enough to give us human beings and our so-called cousins the creeps! However, I finally realised Darwin's genius ever since I discovered climbing trees and hanging and jumping from them was a million times more fun than watching Italian club football. Evolution seemed a cool new concept too. Evolution is everywhere you just need to have the eyes to understand it. Take our police force for example and compare it with the police force that was around during the British reign. Here's a comparative analysis:

· When the British ruled this region, policemen wore shorts. When our elected people rule this country, policemen wear trousers.

· When the British ruled this region, the police officers in lower ranks were brown people with weak thin bodies, who maintained ill-fed families. When our elected people rule this country, the police officers in lower ranks are brown people again, but this time they're people with huge bouncy pot-bellies who maintain high living standards.

· When the British ruled this region, the police officers in higher ranks were foreign people who used official cars and had stables full of horses. When our elected people rule this country, the police officers in higher ranks are local people who use official cars and have garages full of imported automobiles.

· When the British ruled this region, the police constables beat up their innocent fellow countrymen at the will of their foreign masters. When our elected people rule this country, the police constables beat up innocent fellow countrymen at the will of their local masters (both official and non-official) and even at their own will.

· When the British ruled this region, the chief troublemakers were people who had sworn to build a free nation. When our elected people rule this country, the chief troublemakers are people who have sworn to rebuild a crippled nation.

· When the British ruled this region, the police were forced to free arrested criminals (the revolutionaries) at the pressure of the common public. When our elected people rule this country, the police are forced to free arrested criminals (the terrorists) at the pressure of the uporer mohol .

· When the British ruled this region, policemen would have said "B = Breakfast = Bread". When our elected people rule this country, policemen will say "B = Breakfast = Bribery".

· When the British ruled this region, the police force used latest firearms. When our elected people rule this country, the police force use firearms the British would have termed "latest", recalling the news that a police officer got killed by some terrorists a couple of months back because his age-old worn-out rifle wouldn't fire during battle.

After going through all that nonsense, we may reach the conclusion that our police force has shown signs of change, or should I say signs of "evolution", as we have left back the colonial ages and are going through times of sovereignty.

To keep pace with the police, the criminals have evolved too. Revolutionaries like Gandhiji and others were arrested for participating in anti-British riots and protests. When they were taken away to prison or to the gallows, they showed signs of happiness and determination by waving and bowing to the huge crowd of people around them. Nowadays convicted criminals show such signs of happiness and determination too, as the two brothers Shumon and Sujon did after being sentenced to death. Their crime was a bit different though. They hadn't been in any riots or protests for the country they had actually killed two people and cut each of their bodies into twelve parts. (Big deal!) Their way of celebrating was a bit different too. They had given million dollar smiles and raised their fingers to show "V for Victory". Well, you've got to admit: the "V" sign was extremely necessary. After all, the "V" sign is modern stuff. The waving and bowing is all too backdated. Another thing was different the reason behind their exuberance. In case of the revolutionaries, the exuberance was shown because they were proud to be able to forsake their lives for the sake of their motherland. In case of the "Brothers Evil", the exuberance was shown because they were aware that ultimately their godfathers are going to come and rescue them from being hanged for the "measly" cold-blooded murder of two "measly" people.

So we have evolved, haven't we? I don't know how Westerners have evolved. They were always imperialistic are still the same way. However, we, the proud people of this nation, have surely shown signs of evolution. With the way we are evolving, I wonder to what extent we'll go on evolving. Now our criminals cut people into twelve pieces, soon they may cut them into twenty-four. A geometric progression with a common ratio of 2! Cool, huh! The police do all sorts of things nowadays, maybe they'll victimise the politicians, their own masters, in the near future. You know, you've got to evolve? Ever thought how drug addicts are going to evolve? Now they kill their own parents for money wonder who else is left to be killed? I know I'm not making much sense right now. Maybe I'll evolve too and then I will make sense to you guys. Till then, let's hope for the better. Long live Darwin! He sure wasn't all that wrong!

Note: By writing about the police force, I'm not demeaning the entire police force. There are always some fresh nice-looking eggs in a bunch of rotten eggs emitting hydrogen sulphide. Similarly there are good policemen (otherwise Bangladesh would've been a lot worse). Then there are a few good politicians too. However, unfortunately, when you look at the whole lot, it'll be hard to look at the good sides through all the evil stuff.

Mighty Winds on Saturn Calm Down

Saturn, one of the windiest places in the solar system, is undergoing a dramatic weather change.
Just over two decades ago, snapshots of the distinctive clouds in Saturn's equatorial region showed a jetstream that sped along at a bruising 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) per hour.
Now the winds have slowed to a relatively pedestrian 1,100 kph (690 mph), according to astronomers writing in the current journal Nature. Outside the equatorial belt, the planet's wind speeds appear not to have changed.
Saturn's atmosphere is comprised mainly of hydrogen and helium, which means it is a very light planet. It is more than nine times bigger than Earth, but has just a ninth of its density.

These are samples from the Allende meteorite conta ining carbon building blocks of life

Meteorite Reveals Signs of Life from Space

Unique carbon building blocks of life called fullerenes did indeed crash to Earth in meteorites, new British research has found.
The work by Peter Harris from Reading University has provided the first direct evidence of fullerenes a special type of carbon molecule associated with the origins of life in meteorite samples. The analysis of samples from the Allende meteorite which fell on Mexico in 1969 is published this week online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Fullerenes are a type of carbon molecule first discovered in the mid-1980s, the most famous of which is the buckyball, which is a closed spherical molecule the shape of a soccer ball. The fullerenes discovered by Harris and colleagues were completely closed and relatively large, containing around 6,000 to 10,000 carbon atoms each, and with a generally disordered structure.
Since the Allende meteorite has been shown to have formed at the same time as our solar system's planets, the findings, which show fullerenes are capable of surviving for billions of years in space, provide a further step towards understanding where life came from.
"One possibility for where the organic building blocks for life came from is that they came from space," said Dr Jeremy Bailey from the Anglo Australian Observatory in Sydney. "Not so much that life itself came from space, but the organic molecules that you need to make the primordial soup could have come from space.”
By Danny Kingsley, New Scientist