If we ask how creatures [bees] that act so elaborately against their private advantage can have evolved, the answer lies in their mode of reproductio… - Mary Midgley

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.

Let us start by considering why the attempt to glorify science on its own cannot work. This is because human thought operates as a whole. It is an ecosphere, a vast and complex landscape, including, but not confined to, common sense. Science itself is, of course, not a single compartment but a large, thickly wooded area comprising many sciences, an area that merges into those around it. Those sciences vary from physics to anthropology and all of them are shot through with problems coming from areas outside them, such as philosophy and history. Biology, for instance, has to deal with philosophical problems about the concept of life and also with vast historical problems about evolution for which it uses historical methods, not those of physics.

But my present point is a much wider one. What we need, in order to feel at home in the world, is certainly not a belief that it was made for us. We are at home in this world because we were made for it. we have develped here, on this planet, and are adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaptation. We are not fit to live anywhere else (the possibility, such as it is, of surviving briefly, and at ruinous expense in space-craft and the like is just parasitical; it depends on extending the conditions we are used to into a few bizairre corners, not on our being able to live in other conditions.