The Great Chain of Life

5. The Need for Continuity

5. The Need for Continuity MORE LIVES THAN ONE AT THE BEGINNING of the fifth chapter of Alice in Wonderland Alice has an important conversation with a caterpillar. Thinking of her own recent experiences, she complains that it is very confusing to change size and shape. The Caterpillar - brusque as all Wonderland creatures are - replies: "It isn't." "Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet," said Alice; "but when you have to turn into a chrysalis - you will some day, you know - and then after that into a butterfly, 1should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?" "Not a bit," said the Caterpillar. "Well, perhaps your feelings may be different," said Alice; "All 1 know is, it would feel very queer to me." "You!" said the Caterpillar contemptuously, ''Who are you?" Having reached this impasse they proceed to explore 78 THE G REA T C H A I N 0 F L I F E several others that do not concern us. But this one does. Like all other mammals we human beings take the continuity of our corporeal forms for granted. Except in Wonderland babies do not turn into pigs, or vice versa. If they did we might never have made the important assumption that our souls, our personae, or our egos, are similarly continuous . And if that assumption did not exist there would be no basis for that whole universe of ethical ideas without which men would not be men. Who would dare hold a butterfly responsible for what he did as a caterpillar? The fact remains that for a vast number of all the different kinds of animal creatures on the earth today at least two bodies and two lives - sometimes several - are taken as a matter of course. And in very many cases neither the two bodies nor the two lives resemble one another in any way whatsoever. The legless, vegetarian" gill-breathing tadpole grows legs, develops lungs, completely reorganizes its digestive tract, and crawls out onto the land to live the rest of its life as a meat-eating toad who never need go near the water again until something - it can hardly be memory - tells it to lay eggs in the water from which it came. Who that has seen an ethereal Luna moth fluttering his great delicate wings on the windowpane and looking as though he had indeed come from the moon would ever guess that he was only a few weeks before the sluggish but ravenous green worm so repulsive to most people? Or that the harmless lacy-winged antlion, who looks so much like a miniature dragonfly, was once a flat dark-colored little bug lying hidden at the bottom of a sand pit waiting to seize with THE NEE D FOR CON TIN U I T Y 79 murderous pincers the ant who tumbled into his treacherous trap? The wisest child of such parents cannot possibly know his own father - or for that matter the father his own son. Neither could any human being guess which children came from which adults. To this day it sometimes turns out that some creature long ago baptized by science with a specific name is merely the young form of some other separately named and classified. Even with us, children go through a sufficiently bewildering experience in growing up. They become aware of desires unknown before and they are often painfully embarrassed by minor physical changes, such as the breaking of the voice or the swelling of the breasts. Yet by comparison to the life of a frog or a butterfly the corporeal development of a mammal is extremely uneventful and unimaginative. If variety is the spice of life we have very little of it, and we make such a fuss over this little that it is hard to imagine what the problems of adolescence would be if young people fell into a deep sleep at fourteen and then came to with wings. Your butterfly has to be literally born again. He returns to something like an embryo and then he grows up different - almost as though he were correcting some early mistake. What, aside from the excitement of living two lives, is the point of that? What does the insect gain, and how in the course of what we glibly accept as "evolution" did he ever develop such a design for living? Even the most...