It Preys On Us(?)

Posted on July 2, 2003 in Evolution & Creation Prose Arcana

Evolutionary theory teaches that life exists in niches, that each will be filled in time in some fashion. There is, as far as I know, no predator for the human species on the scale of the wasp that hunts the tarantula. (Bacteria don’t count. They qualify as parasites or mere glutting of the channels of life. A predator wants our meat.) Or is there?

Last night, after our writing group, some of us went to an adjacent bar (I stayed sober — I don’t need drugs to get wild ideas) and I raised this issue. Bill J. said “There is. Other people.” But I don’t think that suffices to fill the niche. Other animals war and yet they also have creatures beyond their own species which prey on them. There’s a “Help Wanted” sign out in the window of the natural scheme for the position of that which consumes human beings.

In the wild, predators have developed techniques for becoming invisible to their prey. This is just one of many strategies, but if there does exist a predator of human beings now, I suspect that it has evolved means to avoid being detected by us.

Consider this: we have the ability to make sense of the contact of photons, sound waves, taste particles, scents, and, of course, larger and more solid masses including the wind. We cannot see or feel radioactivity without special instruments. Radio waves pass around us all the time and we do not sense them. A successful predator of human beings would either trick the senses or be of a substance that our five could not detect.

The evidence that such a creature exists? Missing persons reports: people who disappear without a trace. Bodies never found.

We could be like the amoeba slopped up in a glass of water and destroyed in the acids of the stomach. We’d never know or understand what had happened to us. And those around us would only notice our absence and have no explanation for it.

It’s the stuff of science fiction, I grant you, and being a creature of my senses, I doubt that it exists. On the other hand, I can’t prove that it doesn’t any more than I can prove or disprove God.

If it does exist, I just hope that I’m the carrier of an evolutionary advantage that either makes me hard for it to catch or leaves a bitter taste in whatever it uses to ingest us.