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A Devil's Chaplain.

Article Excerpt
Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil's Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.



What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.

A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste them is no doubt. As I have put it before, the racing elegance of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Clumsy and blundering though the process undoubtedly is, its results are opposite. There is nothing clumsy about a swallow; nothing blundering about a shark. What is clumsy and blundering, by the standards of human drawing boards, is the Darwinian algorithm that led to their evolution. As for cruelty, here is Darwin again, in a letter to Asa Gray of 1860:

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.

Darwin's French contemporary Jean Henri Fabre described similar behavior in a digger wasp, Ammophila:

It is the general rule that larvae possess a center of innervation for each segment. This is so in particular with the Grey Worm, the sacrificial victim of the Hairy Ammophila. The Wasp is acquainted with this anatomical secret: she stabs the caterpillar again and again, from end to end, segment by segment, ganglion by ganglion. (1)

Darwin's Ichneumonidae, like Fabre's digger wasps, sting their prey not to kill but to paralyze, so their larvae can feed on fresh (live) meat. AS Darwin clearly understood, blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection, although on other occasions he tried to play down the cruelty, suggesting that killing bites are mercifully swift. But the Devil's Chaplain would be equally swift to point out that if there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. Such kindness as may appear emerges from the same imperative as the cruelty. In the words of one of Darwin's most thoughtful successors, George C. Williams, (2)

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed...