Rocks of Ages (17 page)
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
and also the boastful answer of our vainglorious dreams:
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor,
followed by the false construction of nature, as previously quoted (see
this page
):
Thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.
In other words, “all things under his feet” finds meaning in nature by touting our superiority over other creatures, or advocating the more extreme position that nature exists to serve our needs. If this first solution focuses on the human side, the second strategy of “all things bright and beautiful” identifies warmth, fuzziness, and moral rectitude as the unambiguous pattern of nature. If we wish to integrate ourselves into this ennobling totality, we must, in the closing words of the parable of the Good Samaritan, go and do likewise.
Both of these “all things” solutions founder upon nature’s intransigence. The solutions, recording our hopes for domination and solace, require that nature be constructed in a particular way. But nature resists our implied architecture by flaunting a set of contrary factual patterns discovered within the magisterium of
science. (Under NOMA, these contrary facts do not confute “religion,” or even the prospect of a religious conception of nature; they speak only against particular interpretations advanced by some religious people, and by many nonreligious folks as well.)
I will not rehearse
in extenso
the familiar arguments against “all things under his feet”—see my previous book
Full House
, or almost any contemporary volume on principles of evolution or the diversity of life.
Homo sapiens
may be the brainiest species of all, but we represent only a tiny twig, grown but yesterday on a single branch of the richly arborescent bush of life. This bush features no preferred direction of growth, while our own relatively small limb of vertebrates ranks only as one among many, not even as
primus inter pares. Homo sapiens
is a single species among some two hundred species of primates, on a branch of some four thousand species of mammals, on a limb of nearly forty thousand species of vertebrates, on a bough of animals dominated by more than a million described species of insects. The other boughs of life’s bush have longer durations and greater prospects for continued success—while bacteria build the main trunk and have always dominated the history of life by criteria of diversity, flexibility, range of habitats and modes of life, and sheer weight of numbers.
The complementary fallacy of “all things bright and
beautiful” may be illustrated by the standard example from classical literature on natural history—a case glossed over by supporters, but squarely faced by Darwin, and therefore providing a segue to the next section on Darwin’s seminal defense of NOMA against the psychological impediment.
In fairness, honorable supporters of “all things bright and beautiful” have always recognized that they cannot prove their case with furry pandas, gaudy butterflies, or the noble solicitude of Bambi’s father. For the contrary argument does not deny that some creatures charm our aesthetic sense or evoke our moral approbation (because we have read their overt actions in the inappropriate light of human judgment, not because we have understood the evolutionary basis of such behaviors for the creatures themselves—often an entirely different matter). But,
prima facie
, nature also seems replete with behaviors that our moral traditions would label as ugly and cruel. And these frequent cases of ostensible opposition, not the familiar examples of apparent support, set the challenge that “all things bright and beautiful” must overcome if advocates really wish to argue that the moral meaning of life lies exposed in nature’s factuality. For if we allow nature to define morality, then we must either claim that nature’s ways embody traditional values of love, kindness, and cooperation—or we must admit that Kellogg’s German
generals were right after all, that the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments represent unattainable fantasies, and that the moral order includes frequent murder and rapine.
The obstacles faced by “all things bright and beautiful” are steep indeed. Just consider Darwin’s incisive argument that most cases of apparent support record an opposite reality when we dig deeper:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.
Therefore, advocates for nature’s intrinsic goodness had to find a straight and narrow path down a street with dangers on both sides. Against one flank, they needed to reassert the traditional interpretation of conventional appearances in the face of Darwin’s counterargument, quoted above. But, to avoid the other flank, they had to face the even more difficult task of convincing people that cases of nature’s apparent ugliness really embody moral rectitude when understood in a deeper sense.
In mounting a defense for such an improbable argument, supporters of “all things bright and beautiful” adopted the “ichneumonid wasp” (a group of several hundred species, not just a single creature) as a test case. In translation to human values, the reproductive behavior of these insects could not possibly be more disgusting, or more grisly. The mother wasp seeks another insect, usually a caterpillar, as a host for her young. She then either injects her eggs into the host’s body, or paralyzes the host with her sting and then lays the eggs on top. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the living, often paralyzed, host from the inside—but very carefully, leaving the heart and other vital organs for last, lest the host decay and spoil the bounty. (In the spirit of false comparison, we might analogize this behavior with the old punishment of drawing and quartering for treason, a procedure devised for the same grim purpose of postponing death to extract maximal torture.) J. M. Fabre, the most famous entomological writer of Darwin’s century, described the situation in his customarily graphic manner:
One may see the cricket, bitten to the quick, vainly move its antennae and abdominal styles, open and close its empty jaws, and even move a foot, but the larva is safe and searches its vitals with impunity. What an awful nightmare for the paralyzed cricket!
Now, how can “all things bright and beautiful” be defended in the face of such horrendous realities (in the inappropriate light of human judgment, to be sure, but “all things bright and beautiful” explicitly shines such a light as its central premise)? Several resolutions have been proposed by scientists who, denying NOMA, wish to assert that nature’s facts can set a foundation for human morality. Consider three examples, all from leading naturalists of Darwin’s time, not from marginal figures.
1. The paralyzed hosts may suffer, and the whole system isn’t very nice, but nature exists for humanity, and any device for human benefit records nature’s good intentions. For example, Charles Lyell, in his great textbook on
Principles of Geology
(1830–33), argued that any natural check upon noxious insects, including the death of many as hosts to wasp larvae, could only record nature’s construction for human benefit since these insects might destroy our agriculture “did not Providence put causes in operation to keep them in due bounds.”
2. Some features of the system may seem to fall on the downside of moral worth, but, considered as a totality, the good guides for human conduct greatly outnumber the bad. William Kirby, Rector of Barham and Britain’s leading entomologist, waxed poetic about the
love demonstrated by caring mothers in provisioning infants they would never see:
A very large proportion of them are doomed to die before their young come into existence. But in these the passion is not extinguished … When you witness the solicitude with which they provide for the security and sustenance of their future young, you can scarcely deny to them love for a progeny they are never destined to behold.
Kirby also put in a good word for the marauding larvae, praising them for their forbearance in eating selectively to keep their caterpillar alive. Would we all husband our resources with such care!
In this strange and apparently cruel operation one circumstance is truly remarkable. The larva of the Ichneumon, though every day, perhaps for months, it gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time it avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect upon which it preys! … What would be the impression which a similar
instance amongst the race of quadrupeds would make upon us? If, for example, an animal … should be found to feed upon the inside of a dog, devouring only those parts not essential to life, while it cautiously left uninjured the heart, arteries, lungs, and intestines,—should we not regard such an instance as a perfect prodigy, as an example of instinctive forbearance almost miraculous?
3. The paralyzed, but pulsating, caterpillars surely seem to suffer in thrashing agony, but we have been misled. First of all, the wriggling of the caterpillar arises as a mechanical consequence of movement by the foraging larvae inside! Second, lower animals are automata and feel no pain. St. George Mivart, an eminent critic of Darwin, argued that “many amiable and excellent people” had been misled by the apparent suffering of animals. Using a favorite racist argument of the time—that “primitive” people suffer far less than advanced and cultured folk—Mivart extrapolated further down the ladder of life into a realm of very limited pain indeed. Physical suffering, he argued,
depends greatly upon the mental condition of the sufferer. Only during consciousness does it exist, and only in the most highly organized
men does it reach its acme. The author has been assured that lower races of men appear less keenly sensitive to physical suffering than do more cultivated and refined human beings. Thus only in man can there really be any intense degree of suffering, because only in him is there that intellectual recollection of past moments and that anticipation of future ones, which constitute in great part the bitterness of suffering. The momentary pang, the present pain, which beasts endure, though real enough, is yet, doubtless, not to be compared as to its intensity with the suffering which is produced in man through his high prerogative of self-consciousness.
No one has ever matched Mark Twain for roasting scientific arrogance, particularly when extended into areas (like morality) where science has no business. In a satire titled “Little Bessie Would Assist Providence,” Twain chronicles a family conversation. The daughter insists that a benevolent God would not have given her little friend “Billy Norris the typhus” or visited other unjust disasters upon decent people. Her mother responds that there must be a good reason for it all. Bessie’s last rejoinder, which summarily ends the essay, invokes the ultimate and classical case of the ichneumons:
Mr. Hollister says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground—alive, mama!—and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he—Dear mama, have you fainted!
In 1860, after reading the
Origin of Species
, Asa Gray wrote to Charles Darwin, explaining (as discussed on
this page
–
this page
) that he could accept natural selection as God’s mode of action, but that he still felt compelled to find a moral purpose behind all evolutionary results. Darwin responded, in his wonderfully honest way, that he could not, as a scientist, resolve issues about moral purposes and ultimate meanings—but that he simply could not imagine how nature’s factual particulars could possibly be squared with traditional values. Interestingly, he cited two examples of behaviors that can only be judged as intensely disturbing if we analyze them (wrongly, Darwin insisted) in terms of human moral values—a common (and troubling) observation of
many pet owners, and the less familiar but ultimately grisly “standard” of the ichneumons:
I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
In their different styles, Darwin and Twain provided the proper response, and rang the death knell over “all things bright and beautiful”—indeed, over any false argument that seeks the basis of moral truth (or any other concept under the magisterium of religion, including the nature and attributes of God) in the factual construction of the natural world. NOMA demands separation between nature’s factuality and humankind’s morality—dare I say that never the Twain shall meet?
The ichneumonid story is nothing but horrendous when rendered in our ethical terms. But framing such a factual issue “in our terms” cannot be defended in a natural world neither made for us nor ruled by us—and quite incapable, in any case, of providing any moral
instruction for human propriety. The devouring of living and paralyzed caterpillars is an evolutionary strategy that works for ichneumons, and that natural selection has programmed into their behavioral repertoire. Caterpillars are not suffering to teach us something; they have simply been outmaneuvered, for now, in the evolutionary game. Perhaps they will evolve a set of adequate defenses sometime in the future, thus sealing the fate of ichneumons. And perhaps, indeed probably, they will not.