The Great Chain of Life

3. The Animal's First Need

3. The Animal's First Need PROTEIN AND ORIGINAL SIN Is A VOLVOX any less remarkable than a bird, or a bird any less remarkable than a man? Of course it is - in a sense. But miracles cannot be compared. One is quite as incomprehensible as the other and if man did not exist a Volvox or a robin would be as difficult to "explain" as man himseH. To compare the three is like trying to compare infinites. You cannot say how many times greater one is than another because they are larger than anything that can be Imagined. Everything that lives is incommensurate with everything that does not. It has characteristics no nonliving thing even hints at, and in that sense life is an absolute. Of all these characteristics, the most indescribable is consciousness . To be and to know that one is is the ultimate privilege, and the ultimate burden, of Man. But whether or not consciousness is an essential and universal characteristic of living things we cannot possibly know. All that lives may 40 THE GREAT CHAIN OF LIFE or may not be at least dimly aware of itself. But whether it is or is not, there are other characteristics - like the ability to grow and to reproduce - which are possessed by the smallest, the simplest, and the humblest. And perhaps the most fundamental of all is the ineluctable necessity for food. Because the inanimate does not necessarily either change, or grow, or reproduce, it is self-sufficient. But even the potentially immortal amoeba must nourish itself or die. Of Volvox, we admitted that we could not say decisively whether it was plant or animal, though between many of even the one-celled organisms the distinction is already quite definite. But what, after all, is this distinction which we so take for granted? Since we are to be concerned from now on ahnost exclusively with the animal rather than the plant, we should no doubt ask. And what the answer will finally come down to is: Food. A delightful and still popular nonsense book is called How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers. This, you may say, is not usually very difficult. But if you generalize the question a little further, if you ask how to tell the animals from the plants, it is not so easy. In fact, biologists are usually hardpressed when it comes to finding satisfactory definitions for such fundamental things or making fundamental distinctions in terms that will stick. In the case of Volvox they give up. As regards the higher creatures the best they have ever been able to do is to say: "Animals are compulsory protein feeders ; plants are not." This may seem pretty farfetched, or at least pretty irrelevant to what we have in mind when we think of an animal. THE A N I MAL'S FIR S T NEE D 41 "I love animals" means something. "I love compulsory protein feeders" is nonsense. Nevertheless the definition really is foolproof and it is the only one that is. "Compulsory" has to be put in because of such insect-eating plants as the common sundew, the pitcher plant, and the Venus's-flytrap. All of them consume protein though they can get along without it. No animal can. What this means in plain language is that all animals must eat something which is or was alive. It may be either a plant or another animal but only plant or animal matter contains protein and without it they cannot live. No animal, therefore , can be innocent as a plant may be. The latter can turn mere inorganic chemicals into living tissue; the animals cannot. All of them must live off something else. And that, perhaps, is the deepest meaning of Original Sin. The soul- if there is any such thing - IS unknown except as it inhabits an animal body. And the animal body must be nourished by what is, or has recently been, living a life of its own. Hence the first necessity for every animal is the necessity of finding something to eat. He mayor may not require shelter to protect himself and he mayor may not have to discover or provide some sort of home for his offspring. But find something to eat he must. Of the temperamental Madam Fremstad it is said that when she sat down to a certain dinner she flung the roast on...