Paper presented at at the multidisciplinary national symposium on "Planet Earth: Peoples, Society And Science" (January 23 - 25, 2009) organised by the Indian Academy of Social Sciences, in association with Peoples Council of Education at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, on the opening day.
A Prefatory Note
To put things in perspective, it is necessary to recall that the scientific community now holds that the Earth is slightly over four and a half billion years old [1]. First (...)