The Great Chain of Life

7. The Meaning of Awareness

7. The Meaning of Awareness THE YOU AND THE ME FOR NINE LONG YEARS a large salamander lived her sluggish life in a damp terrarium on my window sill. Before I ·assumed responsibility for her health and welfare she had lived through a different life - not as different as the life of a butterfly is from that of a caterpillar, but different enough. Once she had lived in water and breathed it. Like her parents before her she still had to keep her skin damp, but now she seldom actually went into the water. Before she was even an egg her father and her mother, prompted by some no doubt unconscious memory, had left the damp moss or leaves they had normally preferred since achieving maturity and had climbed down into some pond or pool to mate. The prompt result was a cluster of eggs embedded in a mass of jelly much like that which surrounds the eggs of common American frogs. These eggs had hatched into tadpoles easily distinguishable from those destined to become frogs or toads by the two plumes waving from their 112 THE G REA T C H A I N 0 F L I F E shoulders - gills for breathing the water which frogs manage to get along without even though they too are temporarily water-breathers. Most of my specimen's subsequent history was much like that of the young frogs themselves. Legs had budded, and though the tail had not disappeared the plumes had withered away while lungs fit for air~breathing had developed. Sally, as I called her, had then left the water and become a land animal. All this took place quite gradually without any radical dissolution of the organism as a whole, as in the case of the caterpillar, and without the intervention of that dead sleep from which the caterpillar woke to find himself somebody else. Far back in time, Sally's direct ancestors had been the first vertebrates to risk coming to land, and she recapitulated their history. The rest of my salamander's life was very uneventful but not much more so than it would have been had I left her to her own devices. In fact, returning to the water is ahnost the only interesting thing the amphibia ever do. By comparison with even the butterflies - who lead very uneventful lives as insects go - the amphibia are dull creatures indeed , seemingly without enterprise, aspiration, or any conspicuous resourcefulness. If you or I had been permitted a brief moment of consciousness sometime about the middle of the Mesozoic era, when the amphibia and the insects were both flourishing, we well might have concluded that the latter were the more promising experiment. I doubt that we would have been very likely to pick out a salamander as our ancestor. Yet the evidence seems pretty definite that nature mew better and THE MEA N I N G 0 F A WAR ENE S S 113 that it is from him we come. In Old Testament terms, Amphibia begat Reptile, Reptile begat Mammal, Mammal begat Man. Even before the Mesozoic was over the beetles were far ahead of the salamanders so far as the techniques of living are concerned. "What," we might well have asked, "do the amphibia have that the insects do not?" What potentiality in them was responsible for the fact that, given the whole Cenozoic still to develop in, the one got no farther than the bee and the ant, while the other has ended - if this is indeed the end - in man? Perhaps if that anticipatory visit had lasted long enough we could finally have guessed the answer as easily as it can be guessed today by anyone who has kept both insects and salamanders in captivity and has observed one great difference between them. The insect goes very expertly about his business. But not even those insects who go very expertly about their very complicated business give any sign of awareness of anything not directly connected with that immediate business. It is not merely that they are absolutely, or almost absolutely , incapable of learning anything. A salamander cannot learn very much either. But the salamander has some awareness of the world outside himself and he has, therefore , the true beginnings of a self - as we understand the term. A butterfly or a beetle does not. Hence you can make a pet out of...