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.” [iii]
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”.[v] 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”. [vi]
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."[vii] Animals are remarkably
sentient creatures; their social behaviors “like humans, have their tragedies
and mayhap (perhaps) their romances”.[viii] 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”.[ix]
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.”[x] 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.”[xi]
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.”[xii] 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.”[xiii]
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.”[xiv]
Public appreciation for hunting rested upon the “celebration of naked force.”[xv]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.[xvi] Sadly, the quality of “trophy” was important.
Hunting connoisseurs noticed “the nobler the slain animal, the harder it was to
reproduce its living fire.”[xvii]
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.”[xviii]
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.[xix]
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.”[xx]
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”[xxii] 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?[xxiii] 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”.[xxiv]
Count
w/ quotes: 2080
Count
w/o quotes: 1813
URL:
http://forbump08.blogspot.com/2008/03/p2.html