Peaceable Nature : AN OPTIMISTIC VIEW OF LIFE ON EARTH by Stephan Lackner (Harper & Row: $13.95; 176 pp.) by DAVID GRABER

As a scientist, I have a deep-seated prejudice against people who proclaim they have figured out nature without first doing their homework and reviewing the scientific literature. Oh I know: Science is a club steeped in orthodoxy and dogma; it takes an outsider free of all that rigorous training to think creatively. What foolish arrogance! Let me demonstrate how such thinking is a trap even for finer minds.

Stephan Lackner was educated in Germany, and worked in Paris as a journalist for the Resistance before emigrating to the United States in 1939. He has published fiction in both German and English, as well as a study of artist Max Beckman. “Peaceable Nature” is a translation and revision of the original German edition published as “Die friedfertige Natur.”

“Peaceable Nature” presents Lackner’s philosophy of life: Biosophy, based upon the premise that nature is fundamentally a system of “cooperation and love, not combat.” Only about 5% of the deaths of all organisms are violent, avers Lackner; the remainder die peacefully of sickness, exhaustion, old age. Wherever Lackner looks, he sees a fabric of nature based on interdependency, not the fierce competitiveness proclaimed by Charles Darwin and his followers. The Darwinians’ error has been compounded by a contemporary acceptance of human aggressiveness and competitiveness based on our evident membership in nature. Our realization that nature is a loving and beautiful place, Lackner believes, would lead to a new, biosophical model of conduct.

Had Lackner penetrated the writing of modern evolutionary biologists just a tad, his thesis would not have been based on such simplistic premises. “Nature red in tooth and claw” was largely a Victorian popularization of natural selection. Cooperation is not banned from the biological lexicon, as social animals and symbionts demonstrate. But selection works on relentlessly, passing on the genetic endowments of those who survive and reproduce, abandoning those who do not.

Lackner catalogues four properties of life: “Life wants to preserve itself. Life wants to spread. Life wants to satisfy itself. Life wants to refine itself.” Although biological scientists might quibble with the teleology implicit in the first two properties, and point out that these are the properties of living organisms, rather than “life,” the statements are reasonable.

It is in Lackner’s notion of “refinement” that he utterly parts ways not only with scientific theory, but serious observation of the natural world. “Simply as description of a known phenomenon, the mounting refinement in the phylogenesis of most organisms cannot be denied. . . . You don’t have to believe in mystical forces to register this general improvement of the biosphere.”

Few would dispute that in the several billion years since life began, new forms have arisen periodically that were innovations on that coming before. That is what evolution means. Orthodox biology explains that evolution is driven by natural selection of individual organisms: This sometimes, in stepwise fashion, leads to new “inventions.” Nonetheless, many of the earliest and most primitive forms of life persist, even thrive, so long as there is a niche where they are competitive.

Most frustrating is Lackner’s proclamations about nature that simply aren’t so. He finds in the feathers of peacocks and the song of nightingales a demonstration that life possesses an “immanent” aesthetic drive. As further evidence, Lackner offers that human beings are clearly more attractive than the less highly evolved gorilla. It is simple-minded arrogance to proclaim that beauty as seen through the eyes of one member of one species must be shared by the remainder of the biosphere.

Crickets and birds sing for pleasure and love, says Lackner, utterly ignoring all the naturalists who spent years listening and experimenting. Lackner’s horses evolved into larger and more “graceful” forms through some innate striving for refinement, rather than adapting over time to a world gone from forest to steppe where size and speed were favored.

Lackner is peeved that science does not find the natural world to be a beautiful and grand place, and that its model of existence condemns mankind to brutality. But biologists devote their lives to studying life because it is grand and exciting. Nature has nothing to say about kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, and the role of love. Those are human lenses by which we project our own visions--inherited or cultural--upon our environment. The gander is not more noble because he mates for life, he’s just more like the way we want to be.