Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes Read Online Free Page A

apply the standards of my own cherished independence and to pity the poor fused male. It may not be much of a life in our terms, but it keeps several species of anglerfishes going in a strange and difficult environment. And who can judge anyway? In some ultimate Freudian sense, what male could resist the fantasy of life as a penis with a heart, deeply and permanently embedded within a caring and providing female? These anglerfishes represent, in any case, only the extreme expression of nature’s more common pattern—smaller males pursuing an evolutionary role as sources of sperm. Do they not, therefore, teach us a generality by their very exaggeration of it? We human males are the oddballs.
    I therefore take my leave of fused anglerfishes with a certain sense of awe. Have they not discovered and irrevocably established for themselves what, according to Shakespeare, “every wise man’s son doth know”—“journeys end in lovers meeting”?

2 | Nonmoral Nature
    WHEN THE Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, earl of Bridgewater, died in February, 1829, he left £8,000 to support a series of books “on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation.” William Buckland, England’s first official academic geologist and later dean of Westminster, was invited to compose one of the nine Bridgewater Treatises. In it he discussed the most pressing problem of natural theology: if God is benevolent and the Creation displays his “power, wisdom and goodness,” then why are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?
    Buckland considered the depredation of “carnivorous races” as the primary challenge to an idealized world where the lion might dwell with the lamb. He resolved the issue to his satisfaction by arguing that carnivores actually increase “the aggregate of animal enjoyment” and “diminish that of pain.” Death, after all, is swift and relatively painless, victims are spared the ravages of decrepitude and senility, and populations do not outrun their food supply to the greater sorrow of all. God knew what he was doing when he made lions. Buckland concluded in hardly concealed rapture:
    The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfill with joy the functions for which they were created.
    We may find a certain amusing charm in Buckland’s vision today, but such arguments did begin to address “the problem of evil” for many of Buckland’s contemporaries—how could a benevolent God create such a world of carnage and bloodshed? Yet this argument could not abolish the problem of evil entirely, for nature includes many phenomena far more horrible in our eyes than simple predation. I suspect that nothing evokes greater disgust in most of us than slow destruction of a host by an internal parasite—gradual ingestion, bit by bit, from the inside. In no other way can I explain why Alien , an uninspired, grade-C, formula horror film, should have won such a following. That single scene of Mr. Alien, popping forth as a baby parasite from the body of a human host, was both sickening and stunning. Our nineteenth-century forebears maintained similar feelings. The greatest challenge to their concept of a benevolent