TENNYSON
In Love Song (from Part Troll), Bill Bailey sings from the point of view of a bitter, rejected lover, who looks at nature and sees only how ‘the deer, now blind, stumbles into a ravine.’
Bill Bailey’s masterpiece parodies the pathetic fallacy, when we project human emotions onto nature: sombre mountains, happily dancing flowers, trees holding out welcoming arms for returning owls. The most full blown pathetic fallacy in all literature comes from Tennyson’s 1849 poem In Memoriam, where a capital N Nature is personified as a mad bitch in frenzy, a cruel, destructive goddess incensed by the very existence of human love:
Man, her last work
[...] trusted God was love indeed [...]
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine shriek’d against the creed.
Unlike those who ‘reject the implications of Tennyson’s famous phrase,’ declares Dawkins, ‘I think “nature red in tooth and claw” sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.’57
Deal with this truth, ye who dare! For Dawkins, Tennyson is being deep and unflinching, rather than just pessimistic and mopey. (I’ll never understand why being pessimistic is seen by so many people as being somehow deeper than being optimistic. The shallowest people I know are always obsessed with dark stuff.) But are people bravely divesting themselves of illusion when they see nature as red in tooth and claw? Or are Tennyson’s fantasies as melodramatic as King Lear’s?
When one of Lear’s daughters refuses to give his drunken posse houseroom, the old king rages:
It will come:
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.
Now, a stuck-up daughter not letting her dad park all his friends in her new house does not usher in a world of human cannibalism. Nor does Tennyson’s friend Arthur dying of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna make nature red in tooth and claw. The biosphere goes on being more green in stalk and leaf than not. Blue-green cyanobacteria are untroubled by Arthur’s death and carry on their lateral gene transfers as before.
What Tennyson’s image actually sums up, far from being ‘our modern understanding of natural selection’, is a Creationist idea of evolution, which he got out of Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Earth is the shadow of the valley of death, nature a gross insult on transcendent human virtues of love and spirituality, but fear not for after the resurrection we go to a place where the lion lies down with the lamb and nothing is red in tooth and claw anymore.
Our modern understanding of natural selection has to deal with the less Romantic fact that the dry weight percentage of biota to which the description red in tooth and claw might reasonably be said to apply is at the level of statistical error.
On how many of the phylogenetic tree’s welcoming arms will we find nature red in tooth and claw? The very trunk? The big branches? The over arching canopy? Let’s do some tree-climbing and find out.
On the phylogenetic tree, if you climb past the Bacteria branch, shin your way along the Archaea branch, and go way out on the Eukarya limb, up past the Trichomonads, flick the Flagellates from your face, haul yourself up through the Ciliates, and carefully part the thick green leaves of Plantea, there at last, nestled between Myxomycota and Fungi you will find the tiny twig called Animalia. Here you will find amniotes and arthropods with claws but not much in the way of teeth.
And where animals do have teeth, like lorises or gorillas, how much time is spent eating fruit and leaves and how much is spent drawing blood? Wolves have teeth and claws and like their meat rare, but the problem is they also possess – in Mary Midgley’s phrase – all the domestic virtues. Not that there were any wolves on the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson lived. And you have to wonder whether the British devotion to the pathetic fallacy of nature being red in tooth and claw might perhaps be linked with our lack of any wildlife more dangerous than the adder.
Among Animalia, by the way, bee species outnumber mammal and bird species combined, so if Tennyson really wanted to eulogise the death of his friend whilst also being true to the living world, then he should have written of nature yellow, black and stripy and hanging around the compost bin.58
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene - Why Are People? |
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Bee Species Outnumber Mammals and Birds Combined, American Museum of Natural Science (2008). |