Why there are no "creatures"
It's not a long story...
(The image above is an aerial view of the Apple headquarters in Cupertino CA)
The use of “creature” arose in the early 13th c. as an expression of Christianity’s picture of the world and its beings as ‘created’ by a deity
But we know that only primates—including humans—create things, in the actual sense of making things unrelated to the instinctive work of survival & reproduction
I’m aware, of course, that “creature” has also become a routine adjective: e.g., “creature of habit,” or “creature comforts”
But adjectival uses are not the matter I’m addressing…
Rather, I’m focusing attention on the early use of “creature” to mSoean “being made by god”
There is no such “creation;” all beings have evolved from more rudimentary life forms; these rudimentary life forms—from their origin in cellular reproduction—emerge in the natural process of adaptation, as Darwin demonstrated with the publication of Origin of Species [1859]
So life-forms—like all process—evolve as circumstances allow or require; Darwin famously, while serving as the naturalist aboard the British research ship Beagle, beginning in 1826, observed that birds of the same species on separate islands in the Galapagos had developed different beaks, owing—he concluded—to their available food sources featuring different kids of seed pods
Note that this last insight—into the adaptation he came to call evolution—is not something you can observe; that is, we can see differences, but you cannot see their origins
That second step requires questioning; that is, it requires asking why
But in the traditional picture of a created world such questions do not arise; it’s assumed that things have been made that way
But we now know they have not: change is the governing rule of existence and all things change—or die out if they do not—as things in the world around them change
Including ourselves: human “energy production” has increased carbon dioxide—CO₂—pollution of earth’s atmosphere; and this pollution has caused climate change over the planet
It’s impossible to say what these changes will produce; we only know that things change but cannot predict how…
To begin with, however, there are not—and never have been—created beings and so there are no creatures…