EVOLUTIONARY HYPOCRISY

A deep sigh!!!!!...for the hypocrisy (stupidity?) of the emotive age...further reflections on Cecil the dead lion:

"....if humanity owes its existence, along with the lions, to millions of years’ worth of brutal bloodshed in the struggle to survive and pass on our genes, any antipathy against animal cruelty seems a little naïve and counterproductive. After all, if natural selection got us here in the first place, one more dead lion is hardly a tragedy. According to evolutionary opinion, lions appeared on the scene about 700,000 years ago. This means that at least 10 billion lions would have died before Cecil did. And I would hazard a guess that most lions, like Cecil, have not died peacefully in the wild. If the evolutionary story is true, we actually have very little basis to care.

In fact, looking at this from the perspective of all the other animals which have been killed and would be killed by Cecil, it’s hard to see why we should lament rather than rejoice that Cecil finally got his just desserts. What grounds does evolution give us to choose between being a lion-lover instead of an antelope-lover? And why is it commendable to film, for entertainment, animals torturing and killing each other, but wicked and cruel for human “animals” to do the same? A male lion can kill all the lion cubs of another pride, and no petitions are put out for justice to be served, yet when a human kills a lion, culpable of mass animalicide, in the late stages of its retirement, the international community cries ‘foul’.

If nature is intrinsically “red in tooth and claw”, what grounds do we have to protest any bloodshed or cruelty in the world? Within the evolutionary model, death and cruelty are not only necessary for natural selection, but according to Charles Darwin himself, these evils should be seen as “most beautiful and most wonderful”. Thus Charles Darwin wrote in Origin of Species:

Evolution fails to explain why caring for animals is morally superior to torturing them.
“It may be difficult, but we ought to admire the savage instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her instantly to destroy the young queens, her daughters as soon as born, or to perish herself in the combat… maternal love or maternal hatred… is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.” [Martin Duboisée de Ricquebourg]