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What previous views of nature does Gould cite and find inadequate? What justifications for the predation of animals on one another had been made by previous commentators?

What does Gould find especially troubling about the ichneumon wasp? Have others agreed? With what emotions have they described the inner destruction of one species by another?

How had some nineteenth-century scientists responded to this phenomenon? (Lyell, Kirby, St. George Mivart, 107-9) How had Darwin responded to the spectacle of animal suffering? (109, 111)

What response had the evolutionist Thomas Huxley given to the problem of nature’s pattern of rewarding rapaciousness? (107-108) What is Gould’s response to this?

Could one give counter-instances of animals who sacrifice for the life of others? Of ways in which cohesion enables animals such as bees to survive? Do you agree that nature is “nonmoral”? “Amoral”? Are humans as a species more commendable than wasps?

What does Gould believe have been some evil consequences of an attempt to posit nature as a moral guide? (109)

How does Gould interpret Frost’s poem, “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white”? What does he mean by the claim that (as he reads it) one cannot see any beneficent design in nature as “the most liberating theme of Darwin’s revolution”?

If nature is not moral in any sense, what inferences can we make? What must humans use to construct an ethical framework?

Is this a good essay? Persuasive? Does it answer the questions it raises, and if not, may it be impossible fully to answer them in directly human-ethical terms?

Page nos. from A Forest of Voices