"I understand that people want to believe that Mother Nature is looking out for them but HOW can they reconcile that idea with the existence of jellyfish, cone snails, spiders, scorpions, bees, ants, wasps, and snakes... If Mother Nature is so loving, why are there so many venomous creatures out there and why do so many venoms contain chemicals that do nothing other than increase the pain for the victim? Some would argue that venoms provide many useful chemicals to scientists trying to develop drugs and that's totally true, but I think it's a stretch to pretend that that's why nature put them there. The fact is, we humans have learned to take advantage of nature in order to thrive as a species... Nature isn't taking care of us - she's trying to kill us, and we're taking care of ourselves."
The story of our species is a funny one, riddled with paradox. We spent the past few millennia building cities, wrapping ourselves in clothes, and developing increasingly artificial foodstuffs, all while cultivating religions and worldviews that demarcated us from all other living things as the superior beings. Then, we've had a planet-wide crisis of conscience, with many people becoming obsessed with finding our place in the natural world. Today, "Natural" is the golden adjective. You can make any product seem better by marketing it as "natural" for food to cosmetics to cleaners. In every aspect of our lives, from parenting to workplace politics, people justify their behavior by saying we should do "what comes naturally."
But maybe we shouldn't.
Biologist Dan Riskin has spent most of his life studying the natural world, and has seen much of it up close and personal. Sometimes very personally, as was the case with the botfly that took up uninvited residence in this head. He loves plants and animals and other living things with a passion and has always been driven to learn more about them. At the same time, looking very closely at nature has left Dr. Riskin with one very clear message that he'd like to share with his audience - it's not quite the paradise that people make it out to be.
"Mother Nature Is Trying To Kill You" is Riskin's opus on the subject of the sinister underbelly of biology, given the telling subtitle, "A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World." In it, Riskin takes the reader through a comically gruesome, detail-filled tour of the many, many ways in which plants and animals, predators and parasites, are manifestly unpleasant to one another. The book is organized around the Seven Deadly Sins, with the author demonstrating that when it comes to Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, or other moral failings, humans have nothing compared to nature. Such delightful topics as infanticide, parasitism, rape, cannibalism, and envenomation are explored, each with an emphasis not merely on shock value, but on how these behaviors make perfect sense for those species in their quest for survival.
Riskin reminds me of every really, really smart person that I've ever sat down and had a one-sided conversation with, who is so overflowing with ideas and stories and anecdotes that they tend to run together. The book's clarity does suffer a little bit from the author's tendency to chase tangents. There are plenty of books which I've read where I've felt the author had a really sound idea, but the writing and ideas backing it up were wanting. This is sort of the opposite. I feel like the problem is that Riskin has two major ideas - 1) that nature is not the idyllic paradise that we are often led to believe, and 2) that our bodies are merely slaves ("meat robots" is the term that the author enjoys) of our DNA and its desire to spread itself, and that all of our emotions are lies (the author struggles with the question of whether his love for his newborn son is real, of just the manipulations of his DNA). These two ideas, each going off on a separate track, are glued together with an amazing assortment of facts and stories, that sometimes it seems like the narrative is meandering to nowhere. Perhaps two books might have been the better option.
If Dr. Riskin sometimes looses me throughout the body of the book, he brings me back to rapt attention with his conclusion. Without giving too much away, Dr. Riskin admits that nature, while beautiful, can be a savage, brutal place that encourages selfishness and violence... but that DOESN'T mean that this is how we humans have to act. We are products of nature, but we don't have to be slaves to it. Yes, it was perfectly natural for millions of years for women to give birth without medical assistance in the middle of a field, but many of those women - and their infants - died as a result, so if we have the option to prevent that suffering, we should, "nature" be damned. Caring about human rights, or justice, or the conservation of other species, is not "natural" - reducing your own competitive advantage to help others makes no evolutionary sense - but doing so is still the right thing to do. Trying to justify sexual abuse, or bigotry, or sheer naked greed just because you can find an analogue in the natural world makes no sense and has no place in our very unnatural world.
I once heard another zookeeper quip that, if animal rights' groups saw how horrible life in the wild was, they'd demand that it be shut down. I feel like Dr. Riskin could, if he was so inclined, do another entire book on the unnatural world of conservation. We have a responsibility to protect nature. We're closely tied to it. We don't have to follow all of its rules.
Over the course of my career, both in and out of the workplace, I've heard so many people try to use nature to excuse whatever behavior they were displaying as proof that their position was unassailable... even (especially) if they didn't know what they were talking about (i.e., a recent post claiming homosexuality is unnatural, only to be smacked down by the Denver Zoo). I'd love to send a copy of this book to each and every one of them. You want to live more naturally, do you? Dr. Riskin might very well say, be careful what you wish for.
