Ethology:
Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “It’s not an illusion, you have free will. It’s just not what you think,” Tom Stafford, NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall):
How Sphex came to be linked with free will is a long story. Charles Darwin was studying this wasp while working on his theory of evolution. We know from his notebooks that its behaviour had a big impact on him. He wasn’t aware that it would ceaselessly check its burrow – that discovery was made decades later by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of ethology, the science of animal behaviour. What interested Darwin was what the wasp does once it has dragged a cricket into its burrow: it lays its eggs in the body of the immobilised but still living prey. When the larvae hatch they eat it from the inside out.
Darwin was so appalled by this behaviour that he cited it as one reason for his loss of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within… living bodies,” he wrote. Meanwhile, his theory wasn’t just undermining God. Some took it as support for the idea that humans are mere animals and that animals are mere machines, fanning the flames of a millennia-old debate about free will.
While I’ve never been religious as Darwin once was, behaviors like these have certainly reinforced my suspicion that there’s either no God, or it’s certainly unworthy of worship.
