Yesterday’s note about a caterpillar and a parasitic wasp reminded me of David George Haskell’s account of watching wasps on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee.
This is from The Forest Unseen, one of the great books on nature:
The wasps’ frenzy has a sharp purpose. They hunt for caterpillars on which to lay their eggs. Wasp larvae will creep out of the eggs and bore into the caterpillars’ flesh, then larvae will eat caterpillar, slowly, from the inside out, leaving the vital organs until last. …
The wasps’ parasitic life cycle inspired one of Charles Darwin’s more famous theological comments. He thought the ichneumon’s trade was particularly cruel. These wasps seemed incompatible with the God he knew from his Victorian Anglican training at Cambridge. He wrote Asa Gray, the Presbyterian botanist at Harvard, “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.” For Darwin, these wasps were the “problem of evil” write in the script of the natural world.
For what it’s worth, I think most thinking about what philosophers call The Problem of Evil is hopelessly muddled. But I love how this passage illustrates the difficulty of being an observer. It’s hard to see what’s there, rather than what we would like to see or expect to see or hope to see.
• Source: David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen; New York: Viking, 2012, pp. 143-4.
No comments:
Post a Comment