Skip to main content

Offspring of the Jungle

Source: Skeptical Science


Charles Darwin didn’t coin the phrase ‘Survival of the fittest’. It was coined by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer who was a contemporary of Darwin. But Spencer owed to Darwin for the phrase. “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Darwin has called natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” That’s what Spencer wrote in his book, Principles of Biology.
Spencer rephrased Darwin. The meaning is the same: survival of the fittest = natural selection. Nature selects the best and abandons the rest. Life is a struggle in which the fittest win and the others lose. That’s quite the law of the jungle.
In the jungle every creature is born to run, as Christopher McDougall put it in his book, Born to Run. “Every morning in Africa,” he wrote, “a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
Run or perish. Be fit or be killed. That’s the law of the jungle. If the lions have a religion, its first commandment would be: Thou shalt run faster than the slowest gazelle. Who would be its god? A monster with sharp fangs and claws with blood dripping from its snarling mouth? Would the gazelles have worshipped an image of the lion in their temples?
Gods belong to civilisation, not nature. Civilisation is a creation of the animal that was endowed with a more elaborate and complex imagination. This complex animal imagined itself as superior to the other animals and created gods and commandments in order to tame its inner savagery which far surpassed the blood lust of the other animals. The other animals hunted for food usually. Some minor rivalries occurred here and there, no doubt. But by and large, the animals were driven by hunger. They killed for food. Preying is not killing, their first commandment would have read.
The human beings created a lot of commandments, but went on to break every one of them as and when he liked. He remained a beast far worse than his counterparts in the jungle in spite of his numerous gods. He killed for his gods. He killed for his sexual appetites. He killed for paper pieces that he called currency. He killed for truisms that he called ideologies. He killed for anything from greed to jealousy to lust to nationalism. And then he blamed the animals in the jungle for savagery.


Comments

  1. Truly revealing intellectual piece. I agree man is by far more savage and cruel than any of his counterparts in the animal kingďom can be.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm wondering whether I'm becoming a misanthrope.

      Delete
    2. Very few people realize that the theory of evolution was about adaptation, and reproduction of the adaptation while the law of the jungle is basically kill when you are hungry and it is a bio-sphere. I always like reading you. The clarity of you thinking is amazing.

      Delete
    3. I became a little emotional writing this piece, however. What's happening these days in the country is frightening.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...