Karandhara: Their idea is that if they can sufficiently understand this process of evolution and know its principles then they can control it, they can manipulate it to their own ends.
Prabhupāda: There is information.
Karandhara: They can produce their own eternal superhuman being. They know how...
Prabhupāda: Superhuman... Kṛṣṇa conscious people, they are superhuman being. They are (indistinct).
Karandhara: They had a big meeting recently in Europe of the foremost scientists, chemists, physicists and researchers, and they predicted that by the year 2050, the scientists will be able to make the superhuman eternal human being. Then they started asking themselves, "Well, who will decide? Who will play God? If we can make an eternal person or manipulate, who will decide?" What if they make a hundred Hitlers or some demoniac scientists who knows how to do this makes a hundred Hitlers. So even if their whole thing is (indistinct), they'll misuse whatever power they acquire by understanding the laws of nature. They've misused the atomic energy.
Prabhupāda: They can produce for human being, many (indistinct)?
Śyāmasundara: They call it the genetical xerox machine.
Karandhara: They can analyze someone's genes. Say they take my genes and analyze their chemical structure. They can reproduce that structure and make a hundred me's, just like me—the same brain, the same body, the same mentality, everything.
Prabhupāda: That's all right. But who made you? Just like I have written one letter; you can make a hundred copies. But I have written the letter. Similarly, there may be hundreds of copies of your personality, but who made you?
Svarūpa Dāmodara: (indistinct) about the genetic code (indistinct) concerned persons taking our material (indistinct) some people are more intelligent than others, like scientists, Einstein said he had a different brain than other people.
Prabhupāda: Our explanation is that from previous life he is modeled. That is coming. It's continuation.
Śyāmasundara: So Darwin said that also, that one's superior traits are passed on to his children, like that. And then the superior traits survive over the inferior traits, and so on.
Prabhupāda: And where he goes? After transferring to the children, where Mr. Darwin goes?
Śyāmasundara: He disintegrates into matter.
Karandhara: It's total materialism because there's no spirit, just a combination of material elements.
Prabhupāda: Then if you are going again to be mixed with the elements, then why you are bothering your head about your children?
Śyāmasundara: He's concerned on a social level...
Prabhupāda: In the beginning, in the beginning you are in the matter. By evolution you have come to, again you are going to the matter. So why you bother in the middle so much. After all, you are matter. In the beginning you are matter and at the end you're going to be matter.
Śyāmasundara: He's concerned that the society can be made better by this understanding.
Prabhupāda: So why do you concern with the society? You are going to be (indistinct). It may be better or no, but it doesn't matter.
Śyāmasundara: He had a vague idea that societies or species would evolve toward something better, so he wanted to help that evolution.
Prabhupāda: That is a fact, but not that Mr. Darwin's foolish theory that he is going to be matter. He'll remain spirit but another species of life, another form of life. That another form of life will decide whether you are degraded or elevated.
Śyāmasundara: Darwin passed on his traits to his son, Charles Darwin, and his son's great contribution to the world was that the moon was moving away from the earth at the rate of five inches per year. So what good is that knowledge?
Prabhupāda: What kind..., in what way you give such an evolution? It may be ten inches or five inches or (indistinct). That conclusion anyone can give. Any rascal can say anything, and what is the contribution? Just like modern day art. You just make your brush like this and it becomes art. You see?
Śyāmasundara: Relative values.
Prabhupāda: Relative values. Now you imagine what is there. This is the mentality.
Śyāmasundara: There's no absolute scale of value in the material world.
Svarūpa Dāmodara: They're speculating that the genes of these supposedly very intelligent people...
Prabhupāda: The superhuman being is already there in what we call demigods. Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Maheśvara, Indra, Candra, they are superhuman beings, already there. What he will make? Let him make one ant first of all. Let me see that you have made one ant; then talk of superhuman. You have not been able to create even an ant, so how do you dare to say superhuman. It is all foolishness.
Karandhara: According to modern information, man now is living longer, is more healthy and is more well off than ever before.
Prabhupāda: That is another nonsense. I have seen my grandmother lived ninety-six years, but I don't expect I shall live ninety-six years. My father did not live more than eighty-one years; so gradually the span of life is decreasing. They are not healthy enough. Decreasing means they are not getting proper food or proper bodily comforts; therefore they're decreasing their life.
Śyāmasundara: Their statistics are so open to error there's no way they can say...
Karandhara: They baffle the population. Everyone believes "Now I'm living longer. I have more chances to live a healthy life than ever before." They think this is what this modern society gives him, a chance to live longer.
Śyāmasundara: By discovering new medicines and new techniques to improve our health.
Prabhupāda: So where is the medicine which stops disease? You are discovering medicine, and many new diseases are coming out, so where is the stopper?
Karandhara: That's supposed to come. That is the promise.
Prabhupāda: Promise, a fool can promise anything. And...
Śyāmasundara: And instead all they do is...
Prabhupāda: That is a different thing.
Śyāmasundara: ...add more wars.
Svarūpa Dāmodara: President Nixon has made a promise that very shortly this cancer disease should be cured. So he has allotted a lot of money for the coming few years and he is giving to all scientists (indistinct). He is saying he is going to stop this death from cancer, but...
Prabhupāda: Suppose he stops death from cancer. Can he stop death at all?
Svarūpa Dāmodara: Not at all.
Prabhupāda: Well then? What is it? He'll direct some other disease come?
Śyāmasundara: If Darwin's theory is correct, some new form of cancer will evolve which will survive...
Prabhupāda: Why? Any disease will be (indistinct). You can check the disease. Therefore our conclusion is that however scientifically you advanced you make, you cannot stop birth, death, old age and disease. That is our conclusion. So why should we waste our time for that purpose? We are utilizing our time, and after giving up this body we may go back to home, back to Godhead. That is our business. But everyone has to give up his body. Mr. Darwin and his company will give up this body like cats and dog. We shall give up this body for higher elevation of life. Therefore our philosophy is better, far better than all these things.
Śyāmasundara: There's a corollary to his theory of evolution that our standards of morality have also evolved from primitive stages. For instance, in a group, within a group of apelike creatures who were normally fighting with each other for dominance, one may develop the quality of sympathy for someone else. So by that sympathy he cooperates with the other person and together they survive when the others die. So that evolution of sympathy, morality, love, compassion—the good qualities of the human being—have evolved due to necessity, evolution, survival of the fittest.
Karandhara: The thing is this whole perspective of evolution... There doesn't have to be a sequence, that one came before the other. They all were there.
Prabhupāda: Yes.
Karandhara: Just like you take a ray of the sunshine that's in this room. It's come from the sun, but simultaneously it's occurring with the sun. It's not there as a sequential evolution of that particle...
Prabhupāda: The sunshine, sunshine... Just like sunshine. You can collect time according to the sunshine. The morning sun shining is called 6 a.m., and then 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m., like that. The shine. But this 6 a.m. shining will be somewhere else also, although here it is 8 a.m.
Śyāmasundara: That's a relative measurement.
Prabhupāda: So the sunshine is existing always the same. It is relatively understood by others. Otherwise sun is fixed up in his position and is shining all over the world.
Śyāmasundara: The speed of light is constant also, it is said.
Prabhupāda: Yes. It does not change as it reaches. When it may reach, it is already there.
Śyāmasundara: It takes one particle of sunlight eight minutes to travel from the sun to here.
Prabhupāda: That may be, but the sun's...
Svarūpa Dāmodara: This constant can be taken (indistinct) astronomy (indistinct).
Prabhupāda: Anyway, the sunbeam, the sunshine, is always (indistinct). How it is constantly coming? Just like heat and the fire. The heat is always coming out of the fire, always.
Karandhara: According to a point of observation, there may appear to be a sequence, or a beginning or an end or an evolution...
Śyāmasundara: If we look back-say our written history goes back three thousand years—if we look back within that span, according to Darwin, our levels of consciousness are getting increasingly higher.
Prabhupāda: No. We say lower. We say lower. Degraded.
Karandhara: They're basing their quality on whether there's a better level of consciousness and what is more (indistinct) sense gratification.
Śyāmasundara: Technical advancements, scientific. Actually, morality...
Prabhupāda: ...is degrading.
Śyāmasundara: ...hasn't evolved. The ancient Greeks had a much higher standard of morality than the British or Darwin's time.
Prabhupāda: Yes.