Charles Darwin and Animal Sympathy
We were born with five senses, our initial connections to the
world; everyone is connected through these senses. We can share the medium of
worldly experience because, for the most part, the quality and function of a
sense varies very little between two healthy people. The sky is blue for
everyone who can see it. Science is a collection of these confirmable
observations. But for all of the understanding science has brought to the
world, it is rarely used in establishing a connection to the world around us. We
take what is convenient from science and ignore the humbling research that has
us governed by the same natural laws that make cockroaches so difficult to
exterminate. Our origin as a species, explained by Victorian scientist Charles
Darwin, should elicit sympathy to the world and all of its living creatures.
Many people stare off into a sunset and wonder why we are so
attracted to the cascading colors in the sky. This curiosity exists because we
live and die by the sun. Our star starts the chemical reactions essential to
the plants and animals we later consume. The renegade sunflower protruding out
of a large crack in the cemented asphalt and all of mankind are equally
dependent on the sun. As far as the sun is concerned, humans like flowers, use
their time to sustain life and reproduce it. So why can we not stop looking up?
Our cells are programmed to recognize the sun’s importance. They remember, even
if we do not, that for life on this planet, the sun is critical.
Even with most of society writing it off as cancerous, the sun’s
rays continue to permeate our skin, triggering our cells to produce vitamin D,
the nutrient whose absence makes it impossible for the body to absorb other
nutrients. The effect is the same in plants and other animals, tomatoes as well
as chickens. Charles Darwin reasoned that if all life required the sun there
must be a similar origin to all life. To Charles Darwin, all life is a
deviation or progression from a common ancestor. Before Darwin’s pilgrimage to
the Galapagos Islands, paleontology had already highlighted interesting
connections between the fossil records of similar animals. And after the brave
voyage of the Beagle, the small and poorly funded vessel Charles Darwin sailed
on, the Tree of Life, Darwin’s personal analogy for his theory that all life
stems from the same origin, was being confirmed. “[On the Tree of Life] the
green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced
during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species.”
Evolution is denied by conservative Christians that fail to
recognize that Darwinian theology could be used to expand Biblical phrases such
as “God made the beasts of the earth” and
“God created man”. By having animals and
plants inhabiting Earth before man, the Bible supports Darwin’s series of
events. Rejecting evolution has implications beyond the stupidity of foregoing
one or two trivial facts. By refuting the progression from ape to man you
cannot sympathize with life as a whole as easily because you have denied your
primordial connection to living creatures. Evolution
is the foundation of biology, our life science, which we use to treat, cure,
and prevent decease. Natural selection describes the inevitable order of
organisms based on their effectiveness. The beak variations on the birds of the
Galapagos Islands are not accidental, inconsequential, or unnecessary. It
is the driving mechanism for survival, prevalent in the gargantuan woolly
mammoth and microscopic virus. This is how the universe functions and is what
hammers us together. Darwin reveals that this world, differently assembled and
dynamically behaved, is bound together. But fear and vanity have corrupted
Darwin’s incomparable message. Many people, of varying religions, refuse to
acknowledge this biological unity and have missed the source of all beauty in
world. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being evolved”.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published
in 1859, but fails at uniting people as completely and widespread as it should
to the animal and plant life around them. The Victorian response to animal
cruelty lead to the creation of the longstanding Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals in 1824. Moreover, since Darwin, science has expanded our
knowledge of life’s similarities by isolating the DNA molecule. Chimpanzees
share about 96% of human genetic code while the genetic variability between the
author and reader is less than .1%. But compassion cannot be exacted upon
mathematically; it is not the chimpanzees’ minute four percent genetic variance
that invokes kindliness. If you value your life and the struggle for survival,
you must value all life around you. "Be a good [person], be kind to
animals and birds, and read all you can." Animals
are remarkably sentient creatures; their social behaviors “like humans, have
their tragedies and mayhap (perhaps) their romances”.
The more time one spends pondering animals, observing their behavior,
uncovering their human likeness, the sooner it becomes evident “how cowardly it
[is] to hurt the weak and the helpless”. Hunting, purely
for sport, is especially despicable. Even “the wild boar has been known to face
and defeat the tiger, and though his first impulse is to fly before British
sportsmen, he often makes a gallant stand before the unequal odds of horses,
razor-sharp spears, and legions of yelling rustics brought against him.” The
motivation, reason, and pleasures of Victorian hunting are encompassed by
Harriet Ritvo in her book, The Animal Estate. Hunting for sport can be
divided into two groups, rounding up massive amounts of dead animals, or
storing and selling live ones. “Reinforcing the sense of strangeness… animal quarters
were arranged for commercial convenience, the result was a confusing and in
some cases frightening jumble of animals, with predators and prey closely
juxtaposed.” This inconceivable assembly of animals
denotes considerable effort and wasted resources to accomplish nothing
beneficial for the world. “Young animals were considered preferable to older
ones as captures because they were more adaptable and easier to transport.” From a very young age, the natural course of animal
life is disrupted for the brief entertainment purposes of man. Denied any
natural course of life, Victorians had the audacity to wonder why some “mothers
were apt to fight” – “a lioness with her cubs was characterized as one of the
most savage of animals.”
There is
nothing more compassionate about sparing the animal for capture and sell; one
captured animal usually signifies the death of at least one other.
“Dead
wild animals symbolized the British suppression of the Afghans… Rows of horns
and hides, mounted heads and stuffed bodies, clearly alluded to the violent,
heroic underside of imperialism.” Public appreciation
for hunting rested upon the “celebration of naked force.”I
agree that animals exhibit an awesome and respectable amount of force, but I
can never understand why, revered and impressive, hunters choose to stop it.
Victorians believed that “the combination of manual and intellectual skill
distinguished the English colonialist from his native charges”, hunting large
game then gave this belief physical trophies of reassurance.
Sadly, the quality of “trophy” was important. Hunting connoisseurs noticed “the
nobler the slain animal, the harder it was to reproduce its living fire.” Many animals were killed and discarded because of this
necessary aesthetic quality.
Hunting
is dominating something; dominating something is establishing superiority. This
was a fiercely popular and savage Victorian sentient that resulted in crudeness
and disrespect of life. “The gratifications of hunting overlapped significantly
with those of dominion… and the association of the big game hunter with the
march of empire was literal.” The hunter is a microcosm
of military invasion and capture of foreign lands. But unlike when two
countries fight man against man, gun versus gun, hunting is much more like
exerting physical force over an eight year old girl. The façade defining
hunting as “a series of increasingly difficult obstacles to be overcome by
superior intelligence, skill, courage, and force” dissipates under any rational
consideration. The speed and range of a rifle’s bullet
far exceed any animal’s strengths. Also, hunters often have the element of
surprise; killing in cold blood is not simply distasteful but prevents the
animal from really rousing its power and brute savagery. Without that primal
excitement, which heightens an animal’s senses in the interest of self
preservation, hunting is reduced to something safe and dull. More times than
not, hunting plays out like this: “he came upon an extremely old and noble
black rhinoceros lying fast asleep… I fired from the saddle.”
If you look for courage or bravery in the animal kingdom,
you will find it. If you wish to discover love between parent and offspring,
you will find it; sadness, happiness, boredom, fright, and excitement are also
all exhibited by animals. Killing sentient animals when unnecessary for
survival is meritless and unworthy of our evolutionary position. Charles Darwin
should be remembered for scientifically confirming that the driving force in
the fiber of your being, as innately personal as it might feel, is the most
common of traits. The
damage humans unsympathetically exert on the planet denotes a lack of
compassion without measure. Global warming would be forgivable if it was the
inevitable residue of an international economy that ended poverty. The cruelty
and mass murder of millions of animals could never be appropriate, but the pain
would boarder on understandable if the profit-bent food industry annihilated
something as offensive as child starvation. The melancholy truth: we have the
means to reduce cruelty, protect the environment, and drastically better the
world, but our disturbing lack of courage damns us. Society can continue raping
the world for a couple more hundred years; feasting feverishly on all of its
natural resources until every life form is threatened. But Darwin defines
you as an organism that knows how to care and love and wonder; be an organism
that has evolved to create and preserve, not just destroy.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species invokes
sympathy; the connection of all species and exaltation of Homo sapiens as the
highest link in the evolutionary chain demands a moral understanding, a caring
for all things around you, a revering acknowledgement for the millions of years
of struggle and adaptation that the simple sunflower represents. If we are the
distant relatives of all life, the bondage of solitude is broken and we are
never alone. Darwin liberates. Freedom from truth was the selfless goal of the
Victorian era.
A sunset represents the end of a day to a multitude of organisms
on this planet. Even some marine life is aware of when the sun sets. The sun’s
light bends differently as it sets, its prismatic effect splashing widely
against the darkening blue sky. Life is like that light. White light bends into
blue, green, red, yellow, purple, orange, and brown the way life branches into
trees, birds, ferns, flowers, lions, elephants, and people. The sun is the
center of our solar system much like a nucleus is the center of an atom. The
universe has hammered together matter in a meticulously coordinated way. Our
origins are in the stars, where heavier elements first came together. Living
organisms are connected as syllables from sound, without care for distance,
ethnicity, size, shape, or religion. When “things come to be turned inside out
and put down for what they are” the sympathy displayed
throughout the world to those less fortunate, less capable, and more needing
will be the real measure of our evolution. Are we evolving towards selfishness?
Or can we overcome materialistic temptation and “annihilate the self” in the
pursuit of blessedness? Charles Darwin’s On Origin
of Species can be wrongly interpreted as a weapon against sympathy. Some
people find Darwin’s book anti-God and regressive; it has spawned social
Darwinism among those that refuse to recognize the path evolution must follow
if we are to prosper as a whole. Sympathy is the only way to understanding the
“knowledge [of animals], which [is] more prompt and perfect in its way, and can
help us save the lives [and souls] of men”.
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URL:
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Charles
Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 63
http://www.detectingdesign.com/images/definingevolution/ape%20to%20man.jpg
“God”, Holy Bible: Genesis
1:25-28, (King James Version)
Charles
Darwin, On the Origin of Species, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2002), 67
Thomas
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2000), 12
John
Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, (London: MacMillan and Co.,
1891), 71
Anna
Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 52
John
Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India, (London: MacMillan and Co.,
1891), 180
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 243
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 246
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 246
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 248
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 249
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 252
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 253
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 254
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 259
Harriet
Ritvo, The Animal Estate, (London: Harvard University Press , 1989), 262
http://exploratorium.edu/imagery/stills/prism.jpg
Anna
Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 52
Thomas
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, (Austin: Jenn’s Copy & Binding, 2008), 607
Anna
Sewell, Black Beauty, (New York: New American Library, 2002), 48