People used to be able to calculate large sums and multiplications without the aid of a tool - like an abacus or a digital calculator. The tools (their invention, that is) definitely aided in leveling up our abilities to measure and calculate large values but prior to these, humans still did count and were good at it.
These days, simple calculations are done on the phone’s calculator app. In a general sense, barring a select few, all of us have lost the ability to do “large math” without the tools.
This is the general trend of any organism that outsources a mechanism to other things - to other organisms or other non-organic things (like tools).
Supposing you’re good at ploughing the field by hand - your hand takes on certain characteristics that are moulded by the fact that you plough the field by hand. Your hand becomes a specialist in ploughing the field. This goes on for generations, in which time the whole specialization gets encoded at the DNA-level, thereby making your lineage specialists (or at least capable of being specialists) in ploughing the field by hand.
Now supposing one of your successors finds out that a sharp-edged stone does an okay job of ploughing the field - almost as good as doing it by hand - and decides to employ the stone in the process instead. This goes on and in a few more generations, the tool has evolved into a shovel. By this time, even though the shovel-user’s hand has the genetic capability of ploughing the field, it is no longer used for that purpose and gradually it begins to lose the “memory” of information (a.k.a, DNA) that pertains to ploughing. Eventually, at some point in the lineage, the hand has completely lost the features, characteristics and other evolutionary traits that enabled it to be a good tool to plough the field.
We see validation for this in a lot of things both in humans and in other species. Animals living in dark caves with zero sunlight lose their eyes (replaced by a patch of skin) because their ancestors did not need the eyes anymore and slowly, over time, the eye was dropped out of the evolutionary wealth. Some homonid species lost the tail and the thumb-like design of the toe because it was no longer spending time on trees. And so on and so forth.
It is in this context that I want to set this monologue on the continuous and often-times noisy debate on scientific explanations of ancient practices in India (and in other places). The specific, anecdotal event that brings us to this point is today’s lunar eclipse and the usual practice of fasting during eclipses.
Many, many centuries ago, it was a practice to return home before dusk, to eat supper before sunset and to fall asleep by what would in current time be 7-8pm. The circadian rhythm of the human body would make it easy for people to wake up by what would be 4am - a time that most people used to wake up at. By daybreak, people would venture out to the river bank for bathing, washing and other daily routines. Why was this the case? Why did people not work late into the night? Or wake up at noon? Or have dinners by midnight?
The decisions to do things at a certain time was not always conscious. In fact, it must have been driven by the environmental setting that our ancestors set themselves in. Many, many centuries ago, population was sparse, security was not prevalent, streets and houses weren’t floodlit by Edison’s invention (even the lamps would have shed only so much light) - these are the conditions under which our ancestors operated. If you ate at night, you couldn’t know for sure if a lizard or a scorpion fell into the boiling broth of whatever you were cooking. Night lamps attracted insects and some of them would’ve found their nirvana in your food. Traveling in the dark was always risky - given that civilization lived in tandem with natural predators that sneaked out in the night.
Almost all the actions of our ancestors - including things like not eating during an eclipse - can be traced to one of the two things: either the action evolved out of a natural, environmental constraint (or condition or state) in which case it’s easily scientific or it evolved out of human creativity (in which case, it’s mostly not backed by an evolutionary necessity).
We no longer know the exact reason why people refrained from eating during the eclipses. Science does not have a strong attestable validation for this. Scriptures are full of words, and are not reliable in this regard (given that we have full-fledged descriptions of vimaana but no archeological or anthropological evidence).
But the notion that we should follow it today - in a world that is so terribly different from the world of some centuries ago - is one of the most unscientific ones.
Of the present-day non-questioning followers of tradition, I wouldn’t venture to write about. They are in their own worlds and it is best to leave them there for now.
Of the present-day skeptics, there are two kinds: ones that follow the tradition despite having some doubts, and ones that don’t follow the tradition. The skeptics that follow the tradition do so - perhaps - because there’s this line of thought: we don’t know if the tradition of fasting during an eclipse is proven or not but what if it indeed is harmful? Why take the chance?
Of those that don’t follow, there are two kinds: ones that completely reject the idea that ancients could have known more things than today’s scientific world (and because of this assertion they are treated as arrogant surrogates of the scientific fraternity) and ones that would only accept those ancient traditions that have modern-day scientific backing.
My Mum often argues that almost every traditional practice is well-rooted in proper science and it’s only that we haven’t yet figured the why behind all of them. Many atheists who comment on forums stand on the opposite end of the spectrum. A (good) historian would perhaps tell you that our ancient and medieval ancestry had a good dosage of both the scientifically-backed (or evolved) practices as well as bullshit superstition that can be traced back to human creativity. And that is what we do find.
But there is another layer of incidental fact that does not surface all too often.
Many ancient traditional practices must have made sense as late as the medieval period. For instance, dinner before nightfall would’ve made perfect sense at a time when three-fourths of India was still living in darkness (or sparse light). When homes began to be well-lit, it would have still made sense because the human body at the time would have been accustomed to expect food around sunset. If you suddenly throw it into a late-night dinner mode, it would repel at first. And people take this as a sign of vindication of scientific explanation for all ancient traditions.
Mum hates non-stick tawa for the teflon on it. Scientifically it is said that teflon that enters our body flows out without actually interacting with anything. Assuming that this gets disproven, and that teflon does interact and cause some harmful effect, my generation and the next would be affected by it. Perhaps one more successor too. But the human body would also adapt to the fact that there is a continuous intake of teflon (in minor quants) and if the effect is not fatal, we would evolve into a species capable of digesting or rejecting teflon.
It is in the same vein that we have evolved from people who can’t digest food if eaten late in the night (because that was not our routine) to people who can do just that. Humans are creatures of habit because the underlying DNA is a creature of habit. The gene is a creature of habit.
There is a beauty in this fact. It’s that an ancient tradition can be scientific or not and it does not matter. It does not matter because gene is a creature of habit and today if I choose to start eating a completely raw, uncooked diet and my successor generations keep up the practice (aided by organic and healthy cattle and farming practices), we would have evolved into a species that is only capable of eating raw food. In that future timeline, cooked food may taste just fabulously better but might put our lives at risk.
So it does not matter whether there was a scientific reason to fast during eclipses. We’ve evolved so far and so long into a species that’s capable of not fasting during an eclipse without any ill effects inter-related to these things, that it’s moot to talk about the scientific evidence of it to vindicate the ancients. And this applies to many traditional practices.