Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

small goodbye heralding a much larger one.
In the animals our inwardness stands before us in an unknown shape.
If we lose them, we do not just lose precious, fascinating creatures. We
lose ourselves. We renounce something profound about our condition of
being in the world. We forsake ways of being creative, ways of giving
birth. Each species we lose today is the permanent loss of a manner of
expression of a living cosmos. After it has gone, reality will never be able
to express the same gesture. Each species has become a singular
expression of livingness through the fortunes of time and, as the
American naturalist Williame Beebe put it, could be replaced only
through a new evolution, through a new Earth history.
Species are unique creative imaginations, variations on the theme of
being which no instrumental consciousness could have imagined. The
female strawberry poison-dart frog incubates her eggs far from water
and then places the freshly hatched tadpoles individually in tiny ponds,
which have formed on large leaves. Every few days shere-turns to these
ponds and feeds the young with unfertilized extra eggs she produces.
The spawn of the common midwife toad comes in long rows of single
eggs looking like beads on a string. The male adult winds the strings
around his hind legs in order to watch over them, and to carry them for
a swim if they turn dry, until it is time for the eggs to hatch, at which
moment the father looks for an adequate body of calm water and
deposits the spawn.
It is the presence of other beings, the gift of their being here,
bestowed upon us and not created through our powers, that grants
inexhaustibility — and through this, hope. Their presence is that which
does not comply with human measure and which does not obey our
power. It adamantly ignores human logics and planning. Their presence
is a miracle — a free treasure whose value we can barely imagine. An
undeserved, unearned gift that falls from above. An embodiment of
grace.
THE ANIMALS’ GIFT
A couple of years later, during my studies in the southern German city of
Freiburg, I helped toads safely cross a road in the forest for several
nights. It was a mild February, and a fine web of mist often filled the air.
I was alone. I was relieved to be able to walk around in the dark where