Beavers and Bears

John J. Audubon’s lithograph of the North American beaver, printed in 1844. Image from the collections of the Brooklyn Museum.

I’m currently reading two books for two separate projects. The first is Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter for an upcoming blog post and the second is Gloria Dickie’s Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future for the two books I plan on writing once I’ve defended my dissertation. We like defining all things in relation and distinction from ourselves, making it clear that we are unique among nature. Through Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy, we know more about the genetic relations between different species, beavers are rodents and are closest to kangaroo rats and pocket gophers in relation, while bears are carnivores and are a part of the same superfamily as dogs. The Field Museum displays this well in their mammalian gallery with individual cases displaying each of these superfamilies.

Yet while our taxa clearly delineate different species from each other, we still have more in common than we let on. We humans call ourselves Homo sapiens, or wise people in a loose English translation. We define ourselves by our know-how and our ability to build on our ideas and improve ourselves. If we call ourselves by Henri Bergson’s taxon Homo faber––as I described in my last devotional––for our ability to build and invent, then is that construction from new ideas something new or merely us following our natural instincts? If indeed it is nature that drives us to create, then what philosophical difference is there really between we humans and beavers, who have the same drive toward invention?

I believe we can only know so much, that our capacity for knowledge is limited by the physical restraints of our nature. It is therefore the human characteristic to seek to overcome those limitations and transcend our nature through our invention. Our memories last far longer than our nature allows because of the invention of many methods of recording thoughts, light, and sound. Through this, figures who may or may not have existed in our deep past whose stories enriched our ancestors’ spiritual lives still enrich our own today. Do beavers or bears then have something similar? I don’t know yet. And can we seek to know God beyond all our ordering and classifying of things? That, dear reader, is the great mystery.

Oh Lord, thank you for the mystery of our nature. Amen.

Seán is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University in Upstate New York living back at home in Kansas City, Missouri. His dissertation is now titled "André Thevet's Brazil in Sixteenth-Century Natural History." He is making a name for himself as an up-and-coming historian of French Renaissance zoology and is editing his translation of Thevet's 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. He also writes The Wednesday Blog which comes out weekly, and occasionally comes up with good quotable lines.