Nonmoral Nature
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, victims 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 co-extensive 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 [doom 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. Their 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 s but
pass their larval life as parasites feeding on the bodies of other
animals, 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. Among
ectoparasites, however, many females lay their eggs directly upon the
host's body. Since an active host would easily dislodge the egg,
the ichneumon mother often simultaneously injects a toxin that
paralyzes the caterpillar or other victim. The paralysis may be
permanent, and the caterpillar lies, alive but immobile, with the
agent of its future destruction secure on its belly. The egg hatches,
the helpless caterpillar twitches, the wasp larva pierces and begins
its grisly feast.
Since a dead and decaying caterpillar will do the wasp larva no good,
it eats in a pattern that cannot help but recall, in our
inappropriate, anthropocentric interpretation, the ancient English
penalty for treason drawing and quartering, with its explicit object
of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive
and sentient. As the king's executioner drew out and burned his
client's entrails, so does the ichneumon larva eat fat bodies and
digestive organs first, keeping the caterpillar alive by preserving
intact the essential heart and central nervous system. Finally, the
larva completes its work and kills its victim, leaving behind the
caterpillar's empty shell. Is it any wonder that ichneumons, not
snakes or lions, stood as the paramount challenge to God's
benevolence during the heyday of natural theology?
As I read through the nineteenth and twentieth-century literature on
ichneumons, nothing amused me more than the tension between an
intellectual knowledge that wasps should not be described in human
terms and a literary or emotional inability to avoid the familiar
categories of epic and narrative, pain and destruction, victim and
vanquisher. We seem to be caught in the mythic structures of our own
cultural sagas, quite unable, even in our basic descriptions, to use
any other language than the metaphors of battle and conquest. We
cannot render this corner of natural history as anything but story,
combining the themes of grim horror and fascination and usually ending
not so much with pity for the caterpillar as with admiration for the
efficiency of the ichneumon.
I detect two basic themes in most epic descriptions: the struggles of
prey and the ruthless efficiency of parasites. Although we acknowledge
that we witness little more than automatic instinct or physiological
reaction, still we describe the defenses of hosts as though they
represented conscious struggles. Thus, aphids kick and caterpillars
may wriggle violently as wasps attempt to insert their
ovipositors. The pupa of the tortoise-shell butterfly (usually
considered an inert creature silently awaiting its conversion from
duckling to swan) may contort its abdominal region so sharply that
attacking wasps are thrown into the air. The caterpillars of Hapalia,
when attacked by the wasp Apanteles machaeralis, drop suddenly from
their leaves and suspend themselves in air by a silken thread. But the
wasp may run down the thread and insert its eggs nonetheless. Some
hosts can encapsulate the injected egg with blood cells that aggregate
and harden, thus suffocating the parasite.
J. H. Fabre, the great nineteenth-century French entomologist, who
remains to this day the preeminently literate natural historian of
insects, made a special study of parasitic wasps and wrote with an
unabashed anthropocentrism about the struggles of paralyzed victims
(see his books Insect Life and The Wonders of Instinct). He describes
some imperfectly paralyzed caterpillars that struggle so violently
every time a parasite approaches that the wasp larvae must feed with
unusual caution. They attach themselves to a silken strand from the
roof of their burrow and descend upon a safe and exposed part of the
caterpillar:
The grub is at dinner: head downwards, it is digging into the limp
belly of one of the caterpillars . . . At the least sign of danger in
the heap of caterpillars, the larva retreats . . . and climbs back to
the ceiling, where the swarming rabble cannot reach it. When peace is
restored, it slides down its silken cord... and returns to table, with
its head over the viands and its rear upturned and ready to withdraw
in case of need.
In another chapter, he describes the fate of a paralyzed cricket:
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!
Fabre even learned to feed some paralyzed victims by placing a syrup
of sugar and water on their mouthparts-- thus showing that they
remained alive, sentient, and, by implication, grateful for any
palliation of their inevitable fate. If Jesus, immobile and thirsting
on the cross, received only vinegar from his tormentors, Fabre at
least could make an ending bittersweet.
The second theme, ruthless efficiency of the parasites, leads to the
opposite conclusion -- grudging admiration for the victors. We learn
of their skill in capturing dangerous hosts often many times larger
than themselves. Caterpillars may be easy game, but the psammocharid
wasps prefer spiders. They must insert their ovipositors in a safe and
precise spot. Some leave a paralyzed spider in its own
burrow. Planiceps hirsutus, for example, parasitizes a California
trapdoor spider. It searches for spider tubes on sand dunes, then digs
into nearby sand to disturb the spider's home and drive it
out. When the spider emerges, the wasp attacks, paralyzes its victim,
drags it back into its own tube, shuts and fastens the trapdoor, and
deposits a single egg upon the spider's abdomen. Other
psamunocharids will drag a heavy spider back to a previously prepared
cluster of clay or mud cells. Some amputate a spider's legs to make
the passage easier. Others fly back over water, skimming a buoyant
spider along the surface.
Some wasps must battle with other parasites over a host's
body. Rhyssella curvipes can detect the larvae of wood wasps deep
within alder wood and drill down to its potential victims with its
sharply ridged ovipositor. Pseudorhyssa alpestris, a related parasite,
cannot drill directly into wood since its slender ovipositor bears
only rudimentary cutting ridges. It locates the holes made by
Rhyssella, inserts its ovipositor, and lays an egg on the host already
conveniently paralyzed by Rhyssella), right next to the egg deposited
by its relative. The two eggs hatch at about the same time, but the
larva of Pseudorhyssa has a bigger head bearing much larger
mandibles. Pseudorhyssa seizes the smaller Rhyssella larva, destroys
it, and proceeds to feast upon a banquet already well prepared.
Other praises for the efficiency of mothers invoke the themes of
early, quick, and often. Many ichneumons don't even wait for their
hosts to develop into larvae, but parasitize the egg directly (larval
wasps may then either drain the egg itself or enter the developing
host larva). Others simply move fast. Apanteles militaris can deposit
up to seventy-two eggs in a single second. Still others are doggedly
persistent. Aphidius gomezi females produce up to 1,500 eggs and can
parasitize as many as 600 aphids in a single working day. In a bizarre
twist upon "often," some wasps indulge in polyembryony, a kind
of iterated supertwinning. A single egg divides into cells that
aggregate into as many as 500 individuals. Since some polyembryonic
wasps parasitize caterpillars much larger than themselves and may lay
up to six eggs in each, as many as 3,000 larvae may develop within,
and feed upon, a single host. These wasps are endoparasites and do not
paralyze their victims. The caterpillars writhe back and forth, not
(one suspects) from pain, but merely in response to the commotion
induced by thousands of wasp larvae feeding within.
The efficiency of mothers is matched by their larval offspring. I have
already mentioned the pattern of eating less essential parts first
thus keeping the host alive and fresh to its final and merciful
dispatch. After the larva digests every edible morsel of its victim
(if only to prevent later fouling of its abode by decaying tissue), it
may still use the outer shell of its host. One aphid parasite cuts a
hole in the belly of its victim's shell, glues the skeleton to a
leaf by sticky secretions from its salivary gland, and then spins a
cocoon to pupate within the aphid's shell.
In using inappropriate anthropocentric language in this romp through
the natural history of ichneumons, I have tried to emphasize just why
these wasps became a preeminent challenge to natural theology--the
antiquated doctrine that attempted to infer God's essence from the
products of his creation. I have used twentieth-century examples for
the most part, but all themes were known and stressed by the great
nineteenth-century natural theologians. How then did they square the
habits of these wasps with the goodness of God? How did they extract
themselves from this dilemma of their own making?
The strategies were as varied as the practitioners; they shared only
the theme of special pleading for an a priori doctrine--they knew
that God's benevolence was lurking somewhere behind all these tales
of apparent horror. Charles Lyell, for example, in the first edition
of his epochal Principles of Geology (1830-1833), decided that
caterpillars posed such a threat to vegetation that any natural checks
upon them could only reflect well upon a creating deity, for
caterpillars would destroy human agriculture "did not Providence
put causes in operation to keep them in due bounds."
The Reverend William Kirby, rector of Barham and Britain's foremost
entomologist, chose to ignore the plight of caterpillars and focused
instead upon the virtue of mother love displayed by wasps in
provisioning their young with such care.
The great object of the female is to discover a proper nidus for her
eggs. In search of this she is in constant motion. Is the caterpillar
of a butterfly or moth the appropriate food for her young? You see her
alight upon the plants where they are most usually to be met with, run
quickly over them, carefully examining every leaf, and, having found
the unfortunate object of her search, insert her sting into its flesh,
and there deposit an egg . . . . The active Ichneumon braves every
danger, and does not desist until her courage and address have insured
subsistence for one of her future progeny.
Kirby found this solicitude all the more remarkable because the female
wasp will never see her child and enjoy the pleasures of
parenthood. Yet her love compels her to danger nonetheless:
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
prey 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?
[The last three quotes come from the 1856, and last pre Darwinian,
edition of Kirby and Spence's Introduction to Entomology.]
This tradition of attempting to read moral meaning from nature did not
cease with the triumph of evolutionary theory after Darwin published
On the Origin of Species in 1859-- for evolution could be read as
God's chosen method of peopling our planet, and ethical messages
might still populate nature. Thus, St. George Mivart, one of
Darwin's most effective evolutionary critics and a devout Catholic,
argued that "many amiable and excellent people" had been misled
by the apparent suffering of animals for two reasons. First, however
much it might hurt, "physical suffering and moral evil are simply
incommensurable." Since beasts are not moral agents, their feelings
cannot bear any ethical message. But secondly, lest our visceral
sensitivities still be aroused, Mivart assures us that animals must
feel little, if any, pain. Using a favorite racist argument of the
time--that "primitive" people suffer far less than advanced
and cultured people--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 [from Genesis of Species, 1871].
It took Darwin himself to derail this ancient tradition--in that
gentle way so characteristic of his radical intellectual approach to
nearly everything. The ichneumons also troubled Darwin greatly and he
wrote of them to Asa Gray in 1860:
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.
Indeed, he had written with more passion to Joseph Hooker in 1856:
"What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy,
wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!"
This honest admission--that nature is often (by our standards) cruel
and that all previous attempts to find a lurking goodness behind
everything represent just so much absurd special pleading--can lead
in two directions. One might retain the principle that nature holds
moral messages for humans, but reverse the usual perspective and claim
that morality consists in understanding the ways of nature and doing
the opposite. Thomas Henry Huxley advanced this argument in his famous
essay on Evolution and Ethics (1893):
The practice of that which is ethically best -- what we call
goodness or virtue -- involves a course of conduct which, in all
respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic
struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands
self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect,
but shall help his fellows. . . . It repudiates the gladiatorial
theory of existence. . . . Laws and moral precepts are directed to the
end of curbing the cosmic process.
The other argument, more radical in Darwin's day but common now,
holds that nature simply is as we find it. Our failure to discern the
universal good we once expected does not record our lack of insight or
ingenuity but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral
messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for
philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all
thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature;
they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual
state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good
and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.
Darwin himself tended toward this view, although he could not, as a
man of his time, thoroughly abandon the idea that laws of nature might
reflect some higher purpose. He clearly recognized that the specific
manifestations of those laws--cats playing with mice, and ichneumon
larvae eating caterpillars--could not embody ethical messages, but
he somehow hoped that unknown higher laws might exist "with the
details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may
call chance."
Since ichneumons are a detail, and since natural selection is a law
regulating details, the answer to the ancient dilemma of why such
cruelty "in our terms" exists in nature can only be that there
isn't any answer--and that the framing of the question "in our
terms" is thoroughly inappropriate in a natural world neither made
for us nor ruled by us. It just plain happens. It is a 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.
Another Huxley, Thomas's grandson Julian, spoke for this position,
using as an example--yes, you guessed it-- the ubiquitous
ichneumons:
Natural selection, in fact, though like the mills of God in grinding
slowly and grinding small, has few other attributes that a civilized
religion would call divine. . . . Its products are just as likely to
be aesthetically, morally, or intellectually repulsive to us as they
are to be attractive. We need only think of the ugliness of Sacculina
or a bladderworm, the stupidity of a rhinoceros or a stegosaur, the
horror of a female mantis devouring its mate or a brood of ichneumon
flies slowly eating out a caterpillar.
It is amusing in this context, or rather ironic since it is too
serious to be amusing, that modern creationists accuse evolutionists
of preaching a specific ethical doctrine called secular humanism and
thereby demand equal time for their unscientific and discredited
views. If nature is nonmoral, then evolution cannot teach any ethical
theory at all. The assumption that it can has abetted a panoply of
social evils that ideologues falsely read into nature from their
beliefs-- eugenics and (misnamed) social Darwinism prominently among
them. Not only did Darwin eschew any attempt to discover an
antireligious ethic in nature, he also expressly stated his personal
bewilderment about such deep issues as the problem of evil. Just a few
sentences after invoking the ichneumons, and in words that express
both the modesty of this splendid man and the compatibility, through
lack of contact, between science and true religion, Darwin wrote to
Asa Gray,
I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the
human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of
Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.
Stephen J Gould, "Nonmoral Nature." Wide distribution permitted. Natural History, Vol. 91, No. 2. Copyright by the American Museum of Natural History, 1982.