Louisiana Heron--Audubon
David Attenborough narrates an astonishing DVD, Life in the Undergrowth, about insects. One sequence begins, innocently enough, without any portent of the dark things to come, Attenborough's soothing, proper British voice carrying you along, as he describes the adaptation of a certain larva which attaches itself to the underbelly of a spider.
In the beginning, it all seems innocent enough, as the spider weaves its lustrous web,oblivious to its papoose, riding along. But, as things progress, the spider becomes disoriented, is no longer able to weave, owing to a neurotoxin released into it's circulation by the larva, which grows larger and larger, gradually sucking the vital fluids from inside the spider until all that is left is an empty husk of what was once a spider, and then the larva discards the spider husk and transforms itself into a wasp.
This relationship between predator and prey has been, no doubt, going on for at least a millennium, and while it is essentially the relationship of predator to prey, it is not the "clean" kill of a lion snapping the neck of a gazelle, but a slow, agonizing, brutal and ruthless malignant disease. It is the stuff of horror movies, and in fact likely has been; I think I saw a version of this once where some alien explodes out of the abdomen of an unsuspecting space explorer to the horror of Sigourney Weaver and the rest of the crew.
Yes, I know, there are tapeworms and other parasites which sap their victims' strength, but they are symbiotic enough to allow their host to continue to live because if they kill the host, they have no more living thing from which to derive sustenance.
This thing is more like the alien of Independence Day, which does not wish to negotiate peaceful coexistence. It is simply there to kill and feed and then discard its victim.
Now, I understand, in the natural world there are no good guys and bad guys and one kills another without remorse, and goes on to breed its own kind and we apply our values to what we see based on our own cultural needs.
But really, this whole scene is horrific.
And watching this, my son, who is a college graduate, the victim of a liberal education--and we are still trying to figure out what he majored in. He created his own major, that much we knew, but really, we never knew what it was beyond something about the harmony of opposites--anyway, my son watches this sequence and observes, "Now there is one powerful argument against intelligent design, an omniscient creator and all that. This one story argues for evolution."
How does he figure that?
No God, in any culture, is that vicious. Oh, men have conceived of an indifferent God, and certainly men have thought of a benign God, who is the source of all good, but none really hold up a God who would design a bug which would suck another living being slowly dry.
Now I argue, this is too grand a statement. After all, he did not major in comparative religion. There must be some religion somewhere which looks at the law of the jungle, the predatory nature of carnivorous life, which observes animals eating each other without punishment or remorse, and create a god or two to explain how that's okay. And the Greeks had gods who looked down on battlefield slaughter and even participated or at least encouraged it.
And there were those who saw the horrors of the concentration camps and asked how could there be a God in Heaven who would allow this?
Well, the concentration camps were a single event in history, not a way of life. This spider wasp repeats this behavior generation after generation.
And nobody says any spider wasp goes to eternal hellfire as a result.
But it is an interesting thought. If we are believers in a benign God. The creator who rewards the good life with Heaven and punishes evil doers with Hell, and who creates every living thing, who knows when a single sparrow falls dead to earth, then how do you explain this good God who creates the wasp spider and this horrible cycle of sucking the vital juices right out of an unsuspecting spider who is only trying to weave this gorgeous web every day? (A web, it must be admitted, he uses to trap some victim whom he will crawl up to and eat alive.)
What I wonder about is how many people have watched this DVD before my son and asked how you could believe in the Sunday school God once you know the story of the spider wasp?
Speaking for myself, I just thought, "That's pretty harsh," and popped another episode of The Wire into the DVD player. Predatory behavior is easier to stomach among the fictional denizens of the human being city.
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