Challenging Mother Nature

What caught my attention from chapter seven was that Dawkins mentions how the natural way of things is actually chaotic and miserable. Creatures living in their natural environment usually do not live long. They often die of starvation, predators or disease. All these get to them before old age, and many die before they even hatch. What I find ironic, is that I have heard that people in the past, had an increasing number of children with the purpose of having a fair amount of them surviving in case some of them died. Dawkins explains in this chapter, that it is the other way around. He says that a large amount of offspring leads to starvation, resulting in only a few of them surviving and growing to reproduce. From this I get the feel that Dawkins supports the idea of contraceptives and birth control, for he thinks that a state of good health and welfare is unnatural and cannot be achieved unless these strategies are used to do so. This leads me to asking myself about the so called perfect and precise ways in which we have been taught the world of nature is built. If animals do really live under such degrees of misery, where barely any of them achieve old age, then I think Mother Nature should be questioned. This gives me to some extent, a small degree of hope for mankind. Maybe we haven’t messed the world up as much as we thought we had. Mother Nature didn’t build everything to be so perfect to begin with.