"It's no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution has no conscience, and if one creature hurts another to benefit itself, such as by eating, parasitizing, intimidating, or cuckolding it, its descendants will come to predominate, complete with those nasty habits. All this is familiar from the vernacular sense of "Darwinian" as a synonym for "ruthless" and from Tennyson's depiction of nature as red in tooth and claw."
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Sources
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), p. 242
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering
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Steven Pinker
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