"Once Darwin fathomed natural selection, he surely saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values it implies. The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp, the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse — these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the amount of suffering and death that can be the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this "advance" — longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say — is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Robert Wright
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Robert Wright →
Related Quotes
"One chronicler of Eskimo life has observed, "the best place for [an Eskimo] to store his surplus is in someone else's…"
"That biological evolution has an arrow -- the invention of more structurally and informationally complex forms of lif…"
"Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral im…"
"The comprises the most biodiverse region in the world, but, despite being highly threatened by human-induced s, littl…"
"Forests clean the air, filter water, control and support biodiversity (Acharya et al., 2019; Aznar-Sánchez et al., 20…"
"In the 1920s about 60 percent of Haiti still had forest cover. In the 1980s it was estimated that between 1 and 4 per…"
"Whether or not the artistic quality of the bullfight outweighs the moral question of the animals’ suffering is someth…"
"There is an image I will never lose, much as I wish I could. It is of a man standing with half his face held in his r…"
"The crowd are on their feet, stamping and cheering, but El Cid just stands and stares at the bull in grave silence, h…"
"What you are interested in is the art whereby a man using no tricks reduces a raging bull to his dimensions, and this…"