A touch of frost can reveal all kinds of hidden delights. A couple of weeks ago I spotted a spider’s web stretched across the outside of our kitchen window. Reaching from the top middle to the bottom corner of the frame, it measured around a metre in each direction. The moisture in the air had stuck to the web and frozen, and now the morning sunlight was turning it into a dazzling open tapestry of extraordinary delicacy.
My immediate thought: such an amazing piece of work was surely not made just to catch flies. Or was it? Are the drifts of mayflower that cover our hedges just there to attract bees? Is the thrill we get from seeing a humpback whale breaking surface, or a cloud of starlings making patterns in the sky just an accident of nature, a piece of human self-indulgence?
Our ancestors thought not. They believed that the world and all its creatures had been made for the pleasure and delight (as well as the cooking pots) of human beings. And it was this belief that caused a major crisis in human thought, brought on by the discovery of some extraordinary fossils.
In the early 1800s bones of enormous reptiles were being discovered all across Europe. A Frenchman called Georges Cuvier became famous for his skill in putting the bones together, and soon these giants were given the name ‘dinosaurs’. However, by this time Captain Cook and others had sailed to most corners of the world and they weren’t seeing dinosaurs anywhere! Nor were they seeing giant plesiosaurs, like the fossils from the alum quarries of the Yorkshire coast. And authoritative classical authors like Aristotle and Pliny didn’t mention these animals at all.
The logical conclusion was that these giants had lived on the earth in the distant past but had died out before humans (or at least educated humans) had appeared. This was hard to swallow and a movement called Scriptural Geology was formed to combat the idea. Things came to a head at the inaugural British Association meeting in York in 1831. The mayor George Hudson, the famous railway king, was asked by the Dean of York Minster to bar geologists from the meeting, prompting Hudson to declare that, after much thought ‘We’ve decided for Moses and the Dean!’ It was a short-lived victory for the scripturalists, and once Darwin showed that extinction was an essential part of evolution they melted away.
So, it seems that the world was not created for the delight of humans, and is quite able to rumble along without us being there to see it. But in another way the Scriptural Geologists have proved correct. It is, after all, human ingenuity that has unearthed the fossils of extinct creatures and re-imagined the worlds in which they flourished.
And all this we have done so that extinct creatures that died out millions of years before we existed can, after all this time, bring us pleasure and delight.