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| Bernd Heinrich |
Or to the insects? I'm reading Bernd Heinrich's stunning book Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003), whose accounts of animal adaption to winter are mind-boggling. I'm not going to quote one of those particular accounts just now, but rather this general statement about insects [pp. 178-179]:
To an entomologist and anyone who aspires to be one, there is no life-form on earth as diverse, varied, tough, and inventive as the insects. In their teeming millions of species, they own the world [emphasis mine]. We may not like many of them that compete with us for food, fiber, timber,or that suck our blood and spread our diseases, but we are obliged to acknowledge their tenacious success, and we may admire many of them for their stunning beauty. Within the animal world they have collectively pushed the limits of things possible, in terms of diversity, beauty, noxiousness, social organization, architecture, powers of flight, sensory capabilities, and ability to survive extremes of climate. And when I contemplate these organsms that are much more ancient than us, and that will long survive us, I wonder about the "secret" of their success....At Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, during coffee with a friend who had retired at the end of February, I thought of the Earth's not belonging to us.
Insects' success is derived from exploiting individual specificity. No one way is best. Insects achieve their success through their diversity, where each individual case is special within the generalizations. Each species is adapted ever more specifically into a specialist niche, catering to specific individual needs. An ever-greater narrowing down to the specific has resulted in miniaturization, and ever-greater diversity. Insects exhibit an exhilaration and a celebration of the exceptions, where anything goes that can. There are few boundaries, because there has been no enforcement or encapsulation by or in laws. That is why they are so successful, and I suspect that it would be difficult to find an entomologist who is also a theist, who believes that there is a force or a power that hands down rules because "he" deems them good. No entomologist could fathom why fleas, mosquitoes, tsetse flies, migratory locusts, and dozens of other insects would have been deliberately created and let loose to cause indiscriminate and unimaginable agony to millions of totally innocent human children and adults over all the ages of humanity.
We had lots to catch up on, mainly books and movies and TV programs. He recommended the 2008 film, Dean Spanley. "If you like dogs [which he knows we do], you'll love it." And did we ever! Last nigth. For it, I could have added another "E" to my "ExtraOrdinary" rating.
We talked about Christopher Hitchens. "No," I said, "he hasn't died, but he is suffering from esophageal cancer. Hitchens said on 60 Minutes that the chance of surviving esophageal cancer is five percent."
I thought of my own "Barrett's esophagus."
My friend asked me if I'd read god Is Not Great. He said he'd only read comments about it.
I was surprised that he hadn't heard of Sam Harris, or his book The End of Faith, which had been a self-affirming book for me, as I've described elsewhere on Moristotle.
I told him about Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape, about its proposed central moral value, the well-being of conscious beings.
"Conscious beings includes other animals," I said.
"Yes," he said. "One of my daughters is a vegan, and [his wife] and I are almost-vegetarians. Respect for all conscious life."
He agreed.
The Earth created us. And insects, too—Bernd Heinrich got it wrong: insects don't own the world, any more than we do.
But they will likely inherit it from us (still be on board after we're all gone).
"Respect for all life." So plants don't count as life? What about bacteria? (When your ill?) What about fungi? What about insects? More like "respect for some life when it suits."
ReplyDeleteCarolyn, thanks. I've inserted a single word into the "respect all life" statement: "conscious," which goes along well with my reference to Harris's proposal for how we might profitably think of morality.
ReplyDelete"Duwamish" surprised me, too, but that's the tribe Wikipedia identifies as Chief Seattle's. However, other websites, including that of the Suquamish tribe, identify him as of the Suquamish tribe. I suspect it's a name change (but didn't attempt to confirm it). Anyway, I made the alternatives apparent in the text.
And I corrected "mush" and removed an extraneous period, which I hope was the other typo you saw. If there's another typo (or two), I haven't it or them.
Hmm, not a name change, but a tribal distinction. I found this paragraph in the Wikipedia article about the Duwamish tribe:
ReplyDeleteThe People of the Inside, the People of the Large Lake, the People of Lake Sammamish and to a little lesser extent, the People of the Snoqualmie were all closely interrelated in a daisy chain following the geography. The Suquamish were also related. Of these, the first two, today's Duwamish, were a relatively dense population on prime real estate, and were the most immediately dispossessed at the time of Whites settlement.
As I said, Wikipedia has Chief Seattle as belonging to the Duwamish, not the Suquamish, among these tribes.