Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [19]
Some of the ways that animals benefit others of their kind perplex biologists who do not look widely enough. The lineage that
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tried to perpetuate itself by unions of brothers and sisters or other close relatives would probably fail because of the debilitating effects of continued inbreeding. Organisms need others to provide unrelated partners for their progeny. Among the conspecifics saved by a bird's alarm cries, as among the young that it adopts, may be mates for its own descendants, or parents of such partners. Since no lineage is likely to survive long apart from a well-established species, an individual does well to promote the prosperity of its species. Paradoxically, thoughtless genes appear sometimes to see father than the clever mathematical biologists who try to interpret, in the light of their theories, behavior controlled by these genes.
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The Twofold Nature of Animals
Life is an intensification of harmonization. A living thing, of whatever kind, contains a greater variety of components than any coherent inorganic formation of equal size, each part is more closely dependent on the others, and together they perform more diverse activities than one will find in any lifeless body of comparable extent. Because of its complexity, an organism is highly vulnerable to extremes of all sorts, and its life depends on the maintenance of a delicate balance with its surroundings. Thus it thrives only by preserving a high degree of both internal and external harmony, and where there is harmony we recognize goodness. Yet when, in chapter 1, we surveyed life broadly, trying to discover its most distinctive features and its relation to the environment that supports it, we found it aggressive and responsible for bringing evil into the world. Although violent collisions are frequent in lifeless matter, we detect there no evidence of destructive passions, malice, or the consequent frustration and suffering, which are the distinctive marks of evil as we feel it. Accordingly, it is above all in the realm of life that the universality of the impulsion toward order and harmony produces strife and evil as a secondary effect.
As products of a process that moves toward an ever more comprehensive harmony yet incidentally entangles itself in discord, living things could hardly have a perfectly consistent character. They inevitably bear the marks of the contradictions in which they
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are involved, displaying both good and evil qualities. We wish to know how these contrasting traits occur in them. Is there stratification, with one sort more superficial than the other, or do both penetrate to the core of animals' lives? Although consideration of their mode of origin suggests that goodness is central to living things and destructiveness more peripheral, the subject is so important that we must investigate it from another angle, trying to discover from their behavior what is the primary fact about them, and how this can be distinguished from all the accretions that mingle with and often mask it.
Contrasting Modes of Behavior
The question that now engages us will emerge in sharper outlines when we survey, even superficially, the temper and behavior of ourselves, our acquaintances, or the animals most familiar to us. All of us, people no less than other animals, are compounded of contrasting and even contradictory impulses, some so incompatible with others that, when we pause to reflect, as we too seldom do, we wonder how they could coexist in the same individual without incapacitating him or her for effective action; as two calves, tied together by a rope, each with its own notions about where the grass is sweetest, rarely wander far.
Once I had a colt who grew up in the same pasture with a gelding past his prime. From the first, the two were close companions,