The really big post (part 1)

It started with a spider in the sink, Monday morning – a Monday morning that had been like most of my days: I was delayed in my driveway by parents dropping off their children for the nearby elementary school, was late to the gym for strength training (part of the rehab program for the hemiparesis that I live with), had shopped, run errands and returned home.

Mr. (Ms.?) Spider (a brown creature of the species I often see in the house and garden) was in the bottom of one side of the sink, feebly trying to get up the polished side of the tub, and not making much headway. I carefully tried to give Spider a boost, at which point he/she pulled in his/her legs and stopped moving, sliding back to the bottom. I let Spider be and went about my rounds.

A few hours later, I saw that Spider hadn’t moved and suspected that my small visitor wasn’t long for this world (a situation that I, too, am dealing with). As I rinsed out a glass in the other tub, a drop of water inadvertently hit Spider, who responded by making a brisk run at the vertical wall of the sink. I provided lift, and Spider escaped into the gap between counter and fridge.

I spared Spider not just because its plight touched me – I’ve alway found living things marvelous, including the icky ones, and have never been in a hurry to annihilate anything with a nervous system. When we’ve had a particularly bold mouse (a situation that Linda is definitely not fond of), I’ve always had to trap it, and release it into the wild, which, in our case, is only a block away. Mushheads – ok, yeah, so be it – we live and let live.

I know that Spider is a predator, and sparing her means some number of other insects will meet untimely ends. Nature is, by gentile human standards, cruel and “red in tooth and claw.”

That line, from Tennyson (In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850), figured in the Victorian debate over Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Darwin’s observations led him to believe that survival (aka natural selection) was all – it didn’t matter at all how much carnage, dishonesty, cheating or misery an individual engendered, as long as their genes were expressed in offspring.

“Civilized” Victorians thought this abhorrent, and a sure reason that God, not evolution, had created all. Of course many Victorians had lived to see (and/or may have been enriched by) such atrocities as the British slave trade and wholesale massacres of aboriginal populations, for various convenient reasons, in The Colonies. In any case, most current observers think Darwin had that part of evolution dead right. It is rare that scientific insights endure as long as Darwin’s have.

Nature, it would clearly seem, has no such Victorian conscience, and God as clearly chooses not to intervene in this state of affairs. Most creatures in the wild meet cruel fates, the kindest of which may be sudden death in the paws of a fearsome predator. Famine, disease, injury, parasites and old age may confer even greater suffering. Animals in the wild have short, brutal lives, as do, truth be known, most humans, especially those who live outside the “first world.”

But, to get to my theme, those of us animals dealing with human disease, in particular “terminal” disease probably all wonder, at some point, “Why?”. Evolution provides a pretty clear answer: diseases, like cancer, that normally strike after peak reproductive years, provide no selection pressure whatsoever. My putative offspring are already in the wild, competing mightily to spread their own genetic contribution to the human pool. I’m a genetic has-been, as are my fellow doomed geezers.

Nature could “care” less if I suffer and die now, and would have “cared” hardly less if I’d died much sooner – in case you haven’t noticed there are plenty of humans walking around this planet – my death, or even the death of a million mes, would be an utterly insignificant blip in the gene pool. Some 57 million people die every year, in any case, and we still manage to grow humanity at a breakneck, likely unsustainable, pace. Darwin, and a number of more modern authors, have weighed in on this… (to be continued)