Nonmoral
Nature
"The whole subject," wrote Darwin, "is
too profound for the human intellect"
by Stephen Jay Gould
When the Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, earl of Bridgewater,
died in
February 1829, he left £8,000 to support a series of books "on
the power wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation."
William Buckland, England's first official academic geologist and later
dean of Westminster, was invited to compose one of the nine Bridgewater
Treatises. In it he discussed the most pressing problem of natural theology:
if God is benevolent and the Creation displays his "power, wisdom
and goodness," then why are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and
apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?
Buckland considered the depredation
of "carnivorous races" as the primary challenge to an idealized
world in which the lion might dwell with the lamb. He resolved the issue
to his satisfaction by arguing that carnivores actually increase "the
aggregate of animal enjoyment" and "diminish that of pain."
The death of victims, after all, is swift and relatively painless, victim
are spared the ravages of decrepitude and senility, and populations do
not outrun their food supply to the greater sorrow of all. God knew what
he was doing when he made lions. Buckland concluded in hardly concealed
rapture:
The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as
the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its
main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from
the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and
almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease,
and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary
restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food
maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the
surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads
of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its
duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted
to them, fulfill with joy the functions for which they were created.
We may find a certain amusing charm in Buckland's vision today, but such arguments
did begin to address "the problem of evil" for many of Buckland's
contemporaries--how could a benevolent God create such a world of
carnage and bloodshed? Yet these claims could not abolish the problem
of evil entirely, for nature includes many phenomena far more horrible
in our eyes than simple predation. I suspect that nothing evokes greater
disgust in most of us than slow destruction of a host by an internal parasite--slow
ingestion, bit by bit, from the inside. In no other way can I explain
why Alien, an uninspired, grade-C, formula horror film, should
have won such a following. That single scene of Mr. Alien, popping forth
as a baby parasite from the body of a human host, was both sickening and
stunning. Our nineteenth-century forebears maintained similar feelings.
Thew greatest challenge to the concept of a benevolent deity was not simple
predation--for one can admire quick and efficient butcheries, especially
since we strive to construct them ourselves--but slow death by parasitic
ingestion. The classic case, treated at length by all the great naturalists,
involved the so-called ichneumon fly. Buckland had sidestepped the major
issue.
The ichneumon
fly, which provoked such concern among natural theologians, was a composite
creature representing the habits of an enormous tribe. The Ichneumonoidea
are a group of wasps, not flies, that include more species than all the
vertebrates combined (wasps, with ants and bees, constitute the order
Hymenoptera, flies, with their two wings--wasps have four--form
the order Diptera). In addition, many related wasps of similar habits
were often cited for the same grisly details. Thus, the famous story did
not merely implicate a single aberrant species (perhaps a perverse leakage
from Satan's realm), but perhaps hundreds of thousands of them--a
large chunk of what could only be God's creation.
The ichneumons
, like most wasps, generally live freely as adults but pass their larval
life as parasites feeding on the bodies of other animal, almost invariably
members of their own phylum, Arthropoda. The most common victims are caterpillars
(butterfly and moth larvae), but some ichneumons prefer aphids and others
attack spiders. Most hosts are parasitized as larvae, but some adults
are attacked, and many tiny ichneumons inject their brood directly into
the egg of their host.
The free
-flying females locate an appropriate host and then convert it to a food
factory for their own young. Parasitologists speak of ectoparasitism when
the uninvited guest lives on the surface of its host, and endoparasitism
when the parasite dwells within. Among endoparasitic ichneumons, adult
females pierce the host with their ovipositor and deposit eggs within
it. (The ovipositor, a thin tube extending backward from the wasp's rear
end, may be many times as long as the body itself.) Usually, the host
is not otherwise inconvenienced for the moment, at least until the eggs
hatch and the ichneumon larvae begin their grim work of interior excavation.
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