Darwin and the Meaning of Life

Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life. According to Richard Dawkins, life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA.

"I cannot persuade myself," Charles Darwin wrote, "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." The macabre habits of the Ichneumonidae are shared by other groups of wasps, such as the digger wasps studied by the French naturalist Jean Henry Fabre.

Fabre reported that before laying her egg in a caterpillar (or grasshopper or bee), a female digger wasp carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey's central nervous system so as to paralyze the animal but not kill it. This way, the meat stays fresh for the growing larva. It is not known whether the paralysis acts as a general anesthetic or if it is like curare in just freezing the victim's ability to move. If the latter, the prey might be aware of being eaten alive from inside but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it. This sounds savagely cruel, but, as we shall see, Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This lesson is one of the hardest for humans to learn. We cannot accept that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous: Indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

共有位大哥大姐曾到此一遊

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