Join us for a lecture that begins with an uncomfortable premise: in the living world, nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution, and evolution is indifferent to your feelings.
About the Lecture
Before nations. Before gods. Before morality. There was survival.
This talk explores the oldest conflict on Earth: the relentless, pitiless competition to persist. Life did not evolve toward goodness, justice, or design. It evolved through accident, selection, and elimination. What survived, survived. What didn’t, vanished.
Drawing from evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, the lecture moves from the simplest organisms to the strange, self-conscious creatures we are today. From algae to arseholes, it offers a brisk history of unfinished beings , because every life form is provisional, a temporary solution to environmental pressures.
Along the way, the session asks unsettling questions:
- Why competition, not harmony, lies at the heart of biological existence
- How sex emerges not as romance or morality, but as evolutionary strategy
- Whether what we call “soul” is merely a sexual side-effect
- Why you were never meant to exist, and why that may be the most liberating fact about you
This is not a story about cosmic purpose. It is a story about contingency. And about the strange freedom that comes from recognising that life has no script, no destiny, and no mercy.
About the Speaker
Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular and endovascular surgeon, Director of the Vascular Cath Lab at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, and Professor of Vascular Surgery at GRIPMER.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire (2007), a subversive sexual history of the British Raj. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in publications including India Today, The Times of India, Outlook, Open, Tehelka, Time Out, and Hindu Business Line.
About unLecture
unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.
Where it is
Address : Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters | Panchsheel Park, Basement, Ground floor and First floor Building no. 12, Panchsheel Community Centre, Shahpur Jat, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi, Delhi 110017, India
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