Dissecting Nature’s Benevolence

Slight change of pace: I’ll try focus each month on a single topic (August is evolution month). I’ll sidetrack of course, but at least this way it appears like I’m going somewhere

Here’s my dog Dusty. Weimaraners are very good-natured, playful, smart, affectionate and energetic. I’d use these 5 adjectives to describe most dogs but especially them. Pretty much all who meet Dusty adore her. Watching her gallop along (with what can only be described as a carefree grin) I might be inclined to think of nature as benevolent. Or that there’s something we can learn from every animal. Or that if we paid more attention to nature we’d be better people.

Matt thinks so from a recent comment:

Can you provide some specific examples? I certainly don’t want to go to the extreme and say we ought to act exactly as all animals act in nature, but for the sake of argument it seems better than the opposite (we must defy all our natural instincts and call this “civilized”). Animals don’t kill their own species. We could learn from that.

The counter-examples are fun enough to warrant this post. So is nature benevolent or not? To start, a similar view from the most appropriate text for evolution, the Babylonian Talmud!

[Even if] the Torah hadn’t been given, we would be able to learn modesty from cats [who cover up excrement], [distancing from] theft from ants [who don't enter others' holes to steal], [distancing from] forbidden sexual relations from doves [who are monogamous] and how to properly engage in relations from roosters [they engage in foreplay] (Eruvin 100b)

For millenia people have had this view of nature. If you discount natural disasters & pests, there’s a general benevolence AND some didactic material…It reminds me of famous Panglossian views like Leibnitz’s that ours is the best of all possible worlds. Logically possible, but neither likely nor interesting. If we actually look at nature we’ll find as much kindness OR brutality as we care to look for. The analysis says more about us. Here’s nature’s “other” side:

• Cannibalism (esp. of one’s own offspring) exists in birds, fish, reptiles, 100 mammal species and a heap more. Not to mention being part of mating for many insects. In a favourite tale of mine, the female praying mantis often bites the head off the male while he’s copulating (which only improves his performance!).
• When there’s population and cultural pressures humans might resort to infanticide. Still, it’s probably many orders of magnitude LESS widespread than in the animal kingdom.
• There’s fratricide in even “placid” birds like swallows. When the 1st chick hatches, it often pushes 1 egg out of the nest.
• Then there’s rape. It’s controversial whether rape is the right word to apply to the animal kingdom & whether doing so trivialises its standard meaning. I think this is a legitimate debate only for animals with very limited cognition. Animals like dolphins and great apes have distinct personalities and preferences, hence I think members of those species are capable of being raped in the sense we understand (just like the concepts of murder might make sense for these animals but not for those with less cognition). Well, dolphins are notorious gang-rapists as are chimpanzees.

All the elements of a great Shakespearean tragedy are present in the animal kingdom in ample amounts. And this is even from the most narrow moral perspective. And I’ve ignored violence done to other species, often simply for the fun of it. When we draw moral lessons from nature, in singling out examples we’re already following our own human inclinations, not some Nature-As-Other.

In fact sometimes nature follows OUR inclinations. Take another look at the Talmud quote. 3 of the 4 examples mentioned are domestic animals, who WE have been designing for over 10,000 years, with whose genome we’ve been tinkering. We’ve bred cows for passivity/stupidity and dogs for loyalty (compare a dog’s personality to that of a wild dog or wolf). Ironically we make nature to suit us and then turn around to draw lessons from it.

Do I adore Dusty any less because I know she’s the end result of millenia of genetic engineering for tail-wagging, obedience and affection? Of course not. If having a history makes something worthless, we’d all be worthless. There’s no unblemished way of looking at nature without using our own human nature. Surely we can appreciate & enjoy nature without needing to (falsely) see it as benevolent?