The wildlife of the Galapagos do not write poetry or paint pictures; their lives are more obviously determined than ours by the basic quests of life: for survival, for food, for a mate, for a territory, for play, and for fun. Our civilized life has the fundamental ambition of introducing a degree of order into the primeval struggle for existence. To this day, however, it has only succeeded in drawing a curtain between its harsher manifestations and certain of our human sensibilities.
When a neighbor turns nasty we call the police, when we play rough games we institute rules and time. When we visit the Galapagos Islands and see mockingbirds inspecting us, we take pictures and we start thinking about how beautiful our civilization could be if we human beings could learn about living and co-existing in complete harmony. Man can learn everything he needs to know about the principles of co-existence from the behavior of the Galapagos fauna, where everything is not a hard life and there is a time for peace.
