The soul evolves through changing bodies according to desire; the body itself never evolves.Listen — Srila Prabhupada Uvaca
Hayagrīva: This is Darwin. Darwin's conception of evolution rests on the contention that, "There is a real genetic change from generation to generation." In other words, Darwin rejects the platonic igos. Igos is the Greek for idea, type or essence. There is no human igos, human type or essence. There are no fixed species. This is in contradistinction to the platonic idea that the species exist in essence. Or as Ka says in Bhagavad-gt: bjam, "I am the seed of all existences." Darwin would not recognize any bjam, or, or seed particular type for any, any species. Rather he sees, "Shifting, evolving physical forms constantly changing."
Prabhupāda: The different forms are already there. Just like the form of monkeys also there, the form of man is also there; other animals; other birds; beasts. So he has no clear conception how the evolution is taking place, neither he has any idea about whose evolution. He simply takes account of the body. A body never evolves. It is the soul within the body--he evolves, transmigrates from one body to another. Just we see that a child becomes a boy. The..., if the child is dead, no more evolves. So it is the soul that is concerned. The soul is within the body, and he desires and evolves. That is Vedic conception and that is life. For example, if a man is within an apartment; the man desires to change the apartment to another apartment, it does not mean that the apartment evolves, but the man desires a change and he goes to different apartment. That is logical. So Darwin has no such conception. He has described the idea evolution from the Vedas in his own way.
Hayagrīva: At first Darwin was a Christian, but his faith in the existence of a personal God dwindled, and he finally wrote, "The whole subject"--that is the subject of religion, or God--"Is beyond the scope of man's intellect. The mystery of the beginning of things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as facts
are shown to be opposed to it." So he didn't argue against Plato or Descartes or Kant or any other philosopher, but he simply presented what evidence he had amassed during a five..., only a five-year voyage, on a British freighter, oh, from 1831 to 1836. But what is considered important is that his book, The Origin of Species, marks what they call the emancipation of science from philosophy.
Hayagrīva: That is to say he simply presented what material he found--that is the fossils. He investigated certain life forms on these islands during this trip and theorized about evolution.
Prabhupāda: That is philosophic; that is not scientific. He found something and he based his thesis on that. He cannot find out all the bodies, because there are, at the end, some section, some sect they burn the body. So how he can get information of dead body, burned? So his theory is not at all scientific. It is always defective.
Hayagrīva: He spent the rest of his life writing about the material he gathered during this five-year voyage, which is a very short time. And according to his theory of natural selection, the best and the fittest survived. Now if this is the case, the race will necessarily steadily improve.