Reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) this week, three days of 100 degree plus heat wave, we find many of his claims now absorbed as common sense and not controversial: when conditions of life change (flood, drought, extreme heat or cold, virus), plants and animals move, adapt, or perish. But Darwin may have underestimated the speed with which human intervention might disrupt nature’s pace:
“How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! And consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?”
What can we learn from the case of the demise of Florida’s orange groves? We might forget that orange trees are not native to Florida, or not think that 500 years is the wink of an eye in nature time. In any event, Florida’s orange trees, in the relative space of a few years, having been decimated by citrus greening, are being replaced with a new import, the pongamia tree, native to India. But what is said to be native to any given place is subject to constantly changing borders of nature. And natural partnerships are ever being created, renewed, broken, refreshed.
Darwin made prolific use of metaphor, seemingly to his own chagrin, at times almost apologizing for using it.
It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? Every one knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten.
So what are we to do with that “stamp of far higher workmanship” quoted in paragraph two above? And why would what Nature produces be any more true than what man produces when man is simply a part of nature?
But the question blistering the headlines today is about the high tide of these heat waves, tsunamis of heat, every day breaking a new record somewhere, temperatures rising, plants wilting, animals dizzy from heat stress. Is the cause inscrutable Nature on some new unfathomable course, or “truer in character” yet, the stamp of human activity? And what’s to be done?
Man can act only on external and visible characters: Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being.
Where we see “survival of the fittest,” we may read survival of the best at adaptation, and the quicker to adapt, the more successful at continued comfortable living. Learning to live indoors at 70 AC degrees while the temperature outside is 103 degrees is not to adapt, and is not sustainable. Likewise, being able to navigate Death Valley as a tourist by virtue of AC in your Auto is not the same as slow adaptation to climate change. And we’re probably making matters worse. Yet Darwin remained optimistic, that Nature will continue to provide and sustain through change and adaptations, something like Matthew’s “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.” But to describe how something works does not explain why, and Darwin can’t seem to escape either metaphor or reference to “an active power or deity.”
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
But what does it mean or signify to become ennobled if you’re unable to enjoy the status of the moment? But the lily is Nature in all its so-called glory enjoying the sunny field. So is nature not at all anhedonic but hedonic in its random dance toward – toward what? But by definition hedonic pays not much heed to direction or purpose other than the pursuit and sustain of its own pleasure, which is to continue to procreate the game. The answer to that Darwin also suggests optimistically, is simply not to worry:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed
with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the
bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms
crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these
elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other,
and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have
all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws,
taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction;
Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction ; Varia-
bility from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of
life, and from use and disuse : a Ratio of Increase so high as
to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to
Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the
Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of
nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production
of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in
this view of life, with its several powers, having been origi-
nally 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 end-
less forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and
are being evolved.
Reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species is an enjoyable way to spend a heat wave, if you have AC. He can be funny, too, though here probably not intentionally so:
“Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as everyone knows, on the number of cats.”
And on what is the number of cats dependent? The temperature outside today is coming down. We’re done with Darwin for now. So it goes.
The Origin of Species, 1859.
The Coming of the Toads 