DS: On our last program, among other things, we talked about Isaac Newton, the last of the great magicians, the first of the modern scientists. Science is about understanding the world, understanding nature. Modern science is about predicting things, measuring things. If you can predict and measure, you can improve your control over whatever problem you're working on. Prediction and control are what Applied Science and Technology, from medicine to engineering are all about the prediction and control of nature. The idea of the scientific prediction and control of nature arose more than 300 years ago, a century before Newton. Up to that time, science had been deeply mistrusted, especially by the church. But the English philosopher Francis Bacon made a respectable. Bacon's genius was to explain the scientific conquest of nature as God's will, and thus is the human mission. The prediction, control and mastery of nature was not only our right, but also the divine intent. This, the church could understand deeply, and well.

God: "Replenish the earth and subdue it... And have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fall of the air and over every living thing that moveth us upon the earth."

DS: It's been said that Christianity, especially in its Western form, is the most human centered religion the world has ever seen. The most chauvinistic. Animals after all, have no souls. But there must be some reason for their being here.

God: "And the fear of the end the dreaded shall be your bomb every living thing.":

DS: Francis Bacon said, "the better we understand nature, the better nature may be made to serve us." Science is knowledge. Knowledge is power.

DS: Scientific knowledge he said, is a rich storehouse both for the glory of God and for the relief of human inconvenience.

DS: Knowledge is power. Science is mastery.

DS: In order to master anything, we have to understand it first. And in order to understand it, we have to decide beforehand how we're going to analyze it. To analyze the coral reef community for example, modern science decides beforehand to see it as a system, an orderly regular arrangement of interacting parts, a machine. Each component part in any machine has one or more specific roles or functions in maintaining the whole system, keeping it under control, making it turn over properly.

DS: But these are not mere machine parts, they're living sensate beings. Something has to make them go what makes them go modern science believes is striving, striving for survival.

DS: Striving for access to resources, each species, we believe, has certain strategies for resource exploitation.

DS: Sooner or later of course, stresses develop as resource exploitation becomes more competitive. It's this economic tension between supply and demand that holds the system together, or so we believe.

DS: The cheetah, we say has a job to do. The same goes for the lion. The big meat eaters are supposed to be controls over the vegetarian components of the system keeping everything orderly.

DS: Cheetahs tend to take smaller antelopes, but they too are seen as having a specific function in the economy of nature.

DS: These antelopes are wilderbeasts, or gnus, famous for their annual migrations. Sometimes they get into trouble.

DS: Most make it across, but some don't make it nature as they say in the raw.

DS: As they also say, survival of the fittest. It's a tough test.

DS: In nature, red in tooth and claw, compete successfully or perish, you're either a winner or a loser. Those are the ground rules.

DS: We want to see nature as an economic system. So we can use familiar tools to analyze it, to explain it. By measuring the components, we can try to predict the behavior of the whole, we see producers and consumers. And we see both individuals and species competing against each other for resources. This is basic mercantile theory. Competitive striving makes for a healthy economic system.

DS: Relentless competition, eat or be eaten. Your success in the marketplace is measured by your survival. Only for the fittest Is there any tomorrow.

DS: Economic analysis is an attempt to understand nature by casting it in our image. Once we have projected the image we want, we can do the analysis on our own terms. We see ourselves in God's image, nature in ours. Seeing nature in our image has traditionally meant seeing animals as having individual drives, social and sex biases, crass motives, just as we do. Most modern studies of animal behavior have begun from these kinds of assumptions. To struggle it was assumed is for scarce commodities and for the power to obtain them. In social animals, it was assumed that competition is for rank, or with higher rank goes certain social perks that are not available to lower ranking individuals. Few social animals on earth have undergone such intensive examination as the baboons of Africa.

DS: We're forever looking for evidence of aggression in animals. What we see, we find if we try hard enough.

DS: This we see as male dominance, females are the submissive commodities of the ruling males. Females as resources, sexism is natural. Males compete for females and for the other rewards of rank. We come to this conclusion by projecting upon the baboon society, an image of our society. From these familiar images, many traditional scientific beliefs have been drawn.

DS: The traditional view is that baboons live under constant stress. Those who are tough and aggressive enough, will fight their way to the top. Those will be the largest males. For all the rest, male weaklings and all females, the future is preordained: submission, fear, powerless dependence on their overlord. Achievers derive even more than sex, food and power, this male is considered dominant. Dominance is natural. The female provides the personal grooming service worthy of a passion.

DS: This is the way that we have perceived nature for a very long time. Because it's the way most of us were taught to see it. It's important to remember that we usually see things the way we expect to see them the way we were taught to expect them to be. So if we are trained to believe that aggression and strife and competition for commodities and for power are what makes the world go round, then we'll interpret the world that way. But if we shift our perspective a little, shift our expectations, then sometimes it's possible to see the world differently. Sometimes it's even possible to see new things. Let's look at those same baboons again.

DS: Nowadays, in such things as grooming, we're beginning to see bonding, togetherness, friendship. We're beginning to see the focus of this society as family, males, females, relatives, friends, and especially infants.

DS: There's nothing here of stress, it looks positively bucolic.

DS: Sex role reversal? In this particular group, one big male was consistently surrounded by youngsters who would seek out his company. Today's field observers are turning sharply away from many of the traditional interpretations. Baboon societies now appear to be reciprocal, cooperative, benign, the very opposite of savage brutal despotism. Watch this chase, forget about trying to see aggression, and just watch what actually happened. Nothing happens.

DS: Certainly the community looks entirely peaceful. This is a greeting. As in any other community, there are established conventions, manners, and mores.

DS: A newborn infant will be greeted by friends and family members.

DS: It gives every appearance of a society that works, not by infighting and power trips, but by mutual respect and genuine caring.

DS: Which interpretation is the true one? Is baboon society dominated by tyrannical males? Or isn't it? Is baboon life one of bloody struggle for scarce commodities? Or isn't it? Or could baboon life after all, be the very model of peaceful coexistence? Perhaps we'll never know the real answer. But it does seem that what we see is governed very strongly by what we expect to see. In other words, by our beliefs, and inescapably by our values, some people are now saying that the belief in male dominated baboon societies is an example of out and out sexism and that the assumption of marketplace competition in nature as a whole is another kind of chauvinism just as deeply entrenched in our culture. They call it resourceism. Resourcism, the belief that all things are dedicated to the human service. We projected upon inmature, a picture of savage competition for resources. Resourcism is natural, except that the human resource is the entire planet.

DS: Human chauvinism, some people call it speciesism, has been around for a very long time. It would be hard to find any doctrine more fundamental to Western thought. What it boils down to is this. The human species has the right to treat other species and the entire planet in any way it likes. We have this right, because we are more important than other species.

DS: Even before Aristotle, the ancient Greeks believed that all living things have a rank in an ordered linear hierarchy of be, each form higher than the last is more advanced than its predecessor. And it has always been so. The change stretches from the dust to God, or at least to being in the likeness of God. The sequence is universally ordained, the order is eternal. The Great Chain of Being all living things fixed and unchanging, forever and ever. Modern science, especially evolutionary biology, sees it differently. But not perhaps, that differently. There is an evolutionary biology, a fundamental belief in developmental progress. Modern scientists know that all living things are changing, evolving constantly. But we all still see recent forms as advances over older forms, we still see evolution as progressive. We see reptiles as less advanced than birds, birds, less advanced than mammals. Deer are not as highly developed as gorillas. Man is in the usual position, the pinnacle of organic evolution. Modern scientists know that all beings are made of the same basic stuff, and that all have legitimate pedigrees going back to day one, there are no exceptions. But still, we persist in seeing the human being as different, not merely in degree, but different in kind. The human species is special. Now this isn't a scientific statement. It's ideological. Knowledge is power. On this very ancient, but entirely modern view. The human dominion is universal, that remains one world, the human world, man alone.

DS: So, it turns out that whether you accept the view of the ancient Greeks and the Great Chain of Being, or the view of modern science, the human chauvinist assumption is the same. Mankind is better, more important, more highly evolved, more perfected than the rest of nature. So mankind has special dispensation. This doctrine is the next thing to sacred in our society. Also sacred as we've seen, our conventional notions about power and dominance relationships, and of competitiveness in both human and non human nature. But as we saw with a baboons, it really is possible to shift our perspectives. Another good example of this is the thing we call territory.

DS: Territory is what we're told to look for in the behavior in this case of a colony of yellow headed blackbirds on a prairie marsh.

DS: The singing of the males is interpreted as both belligerent and proprietary. This piece of marsh is mine, keep out. Territoriality is natural.

DS: Interloping male blackbirds will be driven out forcibly, they will retreat in fear. Vagerant females will be chased down for sexual purposes.

DS: Like the real estate, females are acquired by and are the property of the males. The yellow heads are polygamous. The most assertive and competitive males will acquire the biggest territories, room for the most females.

DS: Now, since this is what the textbooks tell us to expect, it's what we see. Aggressive contending for resources, both space and females, constant unremitting struggle for competitive advantage.

DS: To the victor, go the spoils.

DS: But perhaps there might be other ways of seeing and understanding these same things. Just for a start, this certainly doesn't look aggressive. He doesn't seem to be singing at anybody. He's just singing. Perhaps he's not saying this piece of marshes mine, but this piece of marsh is me. Each celebrating not property tenure, but himself, his extended self, the self beyond his body, the piece of marsh, that's him. And perhaps it's possible that chasing might be no more than spontaneous play. All animals play. It's an exciting, invigorating time.

DS: Could it be that the singing male, celebrating his extended self, at the same time respects and acknowledges the other extended selves around him, not in the spirit of competition, but in one of peaceful coexistence. There may be several nesting females to every breeding male. The textbooks insist that they too are territorial, that the females are just as aggressively property minded as the males. The evidence for this is no more compelling than for the males. Perhaps it's because Bird song is so widely believed to be aggressive, and female yellow heads happen to sing. Perhaps both sexes celebrate, both, after all, are engaged in the most cooperative of all enterprises. One in which both are essential.

DS: Far from being a commodity, owned by the male, perhaps the female is part of his extended being and he of hers. Perhaps the two are literally one functioning self. Perhaps this applies to the entire colony. It could be that the sense of belonging and thus of self extends through all the marsh and all of its inhabitants, one identity one being. 

DS: Now, this perspective certainly isn't the conventional one. At least not yet. It may never be. But that doesn't really matter. The point is this. Our views of the world including our scientific views, are governed by the conventions including the beliefs of the society we live in. If society says the earth is flat, it takes a brave person to say it isn't. If society says territoriality exists in nature, then it takes a rare biologists to say it doesn't. The science of any time, including our own time, is one expression of the social belief system that happens to prevail at that time. The cradle of the 19th century theory that still governs evolutionary science today was the Galapagos Islands.

DS: The Galapagos was the site of the most important early evolutionary observations of the young English naturalist, Charles Darwin. That was 150 years ago, what he saw and experienced here, he pondered for two full decades thereafter, before finally publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859. Here in what he called a little world in itself, Darwin found strange and wonderful beings, the like of which were to be seen nowhere else. Notable among these astonishments was the marine iguana.

Charles Darwin: It is a hideous looking creature of a dirty black color, stupid and sluggish in its movements.

DS: His aesthetic judgment notwithstanding, the young Darwin was fascinated by an unprecedented phenomenon. A seagoing lizard that lived on algae had partially webbed toes and could stay underwater for an hour. It was obviously a lizard, something like a South American iguana. But it was dramatically different. Where had it come from? Why was it here?

DS: And then, there was the land iguana,

Charles Darwin: Like their brothers, the sea kind. They are ugly animals. From their low facial angle, they have a singularly stupid appearance.

DS: The giant land tortoises that grace Galapagos contributed more food for thought.

Charles Darwin: I never dreamed that islands, most of them inside of each other would have been differently tenanted the inhabitants state that they can distinguish the tortoises from the different islands.

DS: But it was a dozen species of small birds that were the clincher. They all look much the same. The best way to tell them apart is by their bills, poking bills, picking bills, cracking bills, crunching bills,

Charles Darwin: Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago. One species had been taken and modified for different ends.

DS: Darwin was onto something. What, he wasn't quite sure, but he feared the worst. He was a respectable young man who believed in the Biblical story of creation. But he'd read evolutionary theory. And he'd also read political and economic and other social theory.

DS: Early 19th century establishment England from which Darwin came, believed that societies improved progressively, and that the mechanism of such improvement is competition between individuals, between nations, between races. Competition in the free marketplace, was what natural liberty was all about. And improvement flowed from a divinely ordained struggle for existence.

DS: We often forget that Darwin did not invent evolution. Lots had been written about it by among others, his own grandfather. What Darwin proposed was a mechanism for evolution, a theory of how it works. It turned out to be the same mechanism that prevailed in social theory. It's a harsh and merciless world out there on the Galapagos lava. You've got to be fit to survive, fitter than the next one. You've got to compete to exist here. You've got to struggle. Darwin you already that competition in the open In marketplace means improvement and progress, like Francis Bacon. He also knew that improvement and progress were God's will.

Charles Darwin: More recent forms must be higher than the more ancient, for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life. This process of improvement has affected the organization of the more recent and victorious forms of life in comparison with the ancient and beepies born

DS: it was as though the Great Chain of Being had sprung to life evolving, changing to be sure, but still progressive, still hierarchical, still in rank order.

DS: The mechanism which Darwin proposed, he called natural selection. By this he meant sinking or swimming in the ongoing battle for survival. If you can't be a winner, you're out, selected out. The idea of natural selection was not new, but no one had applied it to nature before. Thomas Malthus had already thought about human population and food supply. He could see only two answers to the plight of the poor, first, hard work and self discipline. Second, although he didn't call it that, natural selection, some will not make it. Others will. And those that do make it will be improvements over what went before.

DS: Mid 19th century England with its ethos of social competition, was as cruel a place as any Galapagos.

DS: Darwin was surprised to find nature quite so harsh, but he had been well conditioned by his culture. Every human being including every scientist, is the product of his cultural environment. Darwin was no exception. His entire theory rests on what he called the struggle for life, which in turn, rests on Victorian British chauvinism.

DS: Now, you and I, all of us are civilized people. And civilized people reject and condemn chauvinism in all its forms. But for example, racism lives. Chauvinism is everywhere. For a man to see a woman as a commodity is sexist. For any person to see a nonhuman animal as a commodity is speciesist. For the human species to see the planet as a commodity is resourcism. In spite of our rejections of chauvinism, we still see a planet for the taking. We still believe it is our mission to subdue the earth, we still see the Earth as a vast warehouse of commodities, for the exclusive use of humankind, the dominant species.

DS: The human species is dominant in more ways than one were the most abundant large animal. But we've also produced a staggering population of very large machines. In the olden days, we simply didn't have the machinery to exploit the planet to any significant degree. Now, we do.

DS: Knowledge is power.

DS: The trouble with our machines is that they are as insatiable as we are. An amazing proportion of environmental degradation is in the service of our machines. We must have technology in order to subdue the earth. Francis Bacon said so, but our machines must be fed. We can't or won't change their basic diet. So we have to devise new and colossally expensive ways of extracting their food from new sources.

DS: It's actually been calculated that it takes more units of energy to drive our gigantic modern farm machines than there are in the crop they harvest. This deficit budgeting of energy is what very much of our planetary pillage is all about. Our servitude to the machine, and to sheer volume of product outweighs all other considerations.

DS: Our dedication is not to the quality of our output, not to nutrition, but to volume. And of course, that volume has to grow and grow and grow. Perhaps the real tyrant is not the machine after all, but rather the treadmill of growth, growth for its own sake. Here, growth is symbolized by pieces of paper. In the real world, as Thomas Maltus knew the consequences of unchecked growth are anything but pretty. Why is it that even though the limits to industrial growth are literally staring us in the face, we persist in pretending they don't exist? Why do we go on so stubbornly when we know perfectly well, that it simply cannot continue? Well, there are lots of reasons, commercial and political vested interests, individual insatiability for material goods as status symbols, all that kind of thing. We know all about that. But it goes much deeper. In many ways. industrial growth is an ideology. We might even say, a secularized religion, complete with its own orthodoxy. It's usually called the development ethic.

DS: How in the world can a gigantic hydro installation be a development over what was here before? The forest that one stood here and the watercourse that ran through it, we're home for 1000s of different species, the place was already fully developed. But the ancient human centered concept of development knows nothing of ecology, nothing of life. The idea that undersea drilling is development of the seabed, presumably means improvement of the seabed. In Darwinian terms, every development is progress, not to develop, would be to deny nature, its sacred destiny in the human service. It says though, in some strange way, the earth we're being accelerated toward salvation, rushing headlong to be born again, through its sacrificial transformation by industry. Undeveloped nature is nature, not yet saved. Not yet, in our image, still in the image of the animal, the heel, we know what happens to the unrepented teeth.

DS: Adherents of the religion of development genuinely believe that they are a liberating force, just as Francis Bacon did more than 300 years ago. The purpose of science and technology is to liberate humankind from nature. The purpose of resource development is to liberate nature to save it, to humanize it. Most resource developers see the subdual of the Earth as not only necessary, desirable and profitable, but also natural. Survival of the fittest. The struggle for dominance has to have losers and it has to have winners. That's the way it is.

DS: In many ways, the fullest expression of the development ethic in our time was the conquest of the moon. The moon was liberated into the service of one superpower from possible enslavement by the others with full military trappings. The Enterprise arose in ideological competition and the struggle for technological dominance, advertised as being dedicated to the Peaceful Uses of space. In spin off technology brings us closer to Star Wars every day. Knowledge is power. At last, the moon in our image, vehicle tracks, just like home.

DS: We've had a few things to say about salvation and liberation and survival. On the Darwinian view, every living species in the world and every individual is a survivor. If it weren't a survivor, it wouldn't be there. But there are survivors and there are survivors. The Arabian oryx has survived only because of its removal from its natural habitat for breeding overseas. At The Zoo in San Diego, a California born oryx is on its way to a home it's never seen in this case, to Oman.

DS: At one time in this unlikely environment, the Arabian oryx was fruitful and multiplied, but then came firearms and vehicles. Now fences. The compound is to let the new arrivals settle down both physically and socially before they're set free. Three animals, the first nucleus of a breeding herd, were taken from Aiden to Arizona in 1962. Others followed and the program expanded to the point at which release into the wild could begin

DS: Trucks and jeeps and machine guns once nearly wiped out the Arabian oryx.

DS: Today in Oman, the trucks carry game wardens and biologists. Under these circumstances, perhaps we can find new meaning in salvation, liberation, survival.

DS: Perhaps we can find new images of what is fittest what is improvement, what is development. Perhaps we can find a new image of conquest in the conquest of dominance.

DS: Perhaps we can even find a new image both of nature and of human progress.

DS: The oryx was not born free, but the next generation maybe? You know, this whole story causes more questions about people than it does about antelopes. In the face of the devastating industrial consumption of the earth, in the face of our obvious zeal to subdue and dominate the planet, in the face of our ancient beliefs, in the necessary supremacy of humankind, we have these strange contradictions. People cared enough to go to a very great deal of trouble to say nothing of expense to rehabilitate the Arabian oryx. What was their motive nation merely to reintroduce one endangered species? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe the oryx story illustrates not just a feeling of human responsibility for the planetary changes we've wrought. But something more than that. Perhaps, as biological beings, we can actually need other biological beings, other species on the planet with us. Perhaps, in our orgy of consumption. We've deprived not only nature, but also ourselves. Who needs nature? You might well ask. We'll look into that next time.

DS: Human societies exploit nature outrageously, but at the same time, we seem to want to maintain contact with non human beings, not just for fun, but for our own benefit, our own well being who needs nature next week.