Not Lowlife but the Lowly

Stamp from
Faroe Islands with
 agriculture in background

It is delightful how children can be fascinated with animals -- even those animals most of us adults believe to be due little attention.  When I was growing up, a group of us neighborhood kids "adopted" an earthworm, naming it, trying to keep it in a small box with leaves, and even giving it a funeral after its demise (which, I now confess, we probably inadvertently contributed to).  Perhaps that experience is part of why I now have an adult fascination with the countless earthworms working behind the scenes at every moment, helping sustain life on this planet.  And I am fascinated by our attitudes toward them.

Although the Bible generally has a respectful attitude toward animals, the author of one psalm captured with this exclamation the lament of a person whose spirits were low:

"But I am a worm, and not human!" (Psalm 22:6)

In the 16th century, Great Britain's greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, often spoke to humans' limited, mortal condition, sometimes in humorously macabre ways. Here again, worms served the writer's purpose:  In Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo's friend Mercutio is accidentally wounded during a playful sword match, he announces his fatal condition by saying, "They have made worm's meat of me."

In contrast to the Bible’s and Shakespeare's reminders about the commonality of humans and other mortal animals, most of Western Christian culture came to think of the human moral consciousness as something in a quite different category than the brain itself. And Western scientific thought following the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century became strongly influenced by the philosopher René Descartes, who had drawn an absolute contrast between soul and body. At one point, Descartes had written that:

"It is more probable that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically
than that they all have immortal souls."

Even though Descartes treated animals as if they were robots, in the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson -- picking up on the idea of evolution that was already in the air even before Darwin -- made an evolutionary connection between worms and humans. Emerson wrote:

"Striving to be man, the worm 

Mounts through all the spires of form."

From a modern scientific vantage point, however, we can see the flaw in Emerson's thinking:  Worms are not aiming to be humans. Life on this planet is possible only when worms retain their roles as worms (and we humans serve better in our roles as humans).

Darwin's taking
a liking to earthworms
(Punch, 1881)

It took Charles Darwin to discover scientifically the true operations of earthworms in detail.  His small book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms turned out to be his most popular book during his lifetime. It was something of a publishing marvel, selling 3,500 copies in only the first two months -- and even evoked Punch magazine's satire. The hardworking earthworms as Charles Darwin described them seemed to be models of the Protestant work ethic. Darwin uncovered how burrowing earthworms ingested and excreted material in the soil as they progressed forward, thus serving as one of the major aerators of soil and as one of its main fertilizers.  Decades earlier, in Origin of Species (Chap. VII), Darwin had explicitly made a comparison between human labor and that of worms. He wrote:

"The plough [plow] is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions;
but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed,
and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.
It may be doubted whether there are many other animals
which have played so important a part in the history of the world,
as have these lowly organized creatures." 

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any animals "working behind the scenes," as it were?

(Shakespeare quotation is from Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1.)

(Descartes quotation taken from Animal Consciousness by Daisie & Michael Radner, © 1996, p. 80.)

(Emerson quotation is from his Nature,  1849 edition; originally published 1836, frontis.)
(The postage stamp art by Bárður Jákupsson is in the public domain. Detail from Punch cartoon used by Fair Use.)