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animal, we can now see matters more clearly if we keep before us the fundamental structure of captivation and the disinhibiting ring that is given along with it in each case. Every animal and every species of animal actively encircles itself in its own way with this encircling ring, with which it circumscribes and adapts itself to a certain domain. The ring that encircles the sea-urchin is quite different from that of the bee, and that of the bee quite different again from that of the great tit, and this different from that of the squirrel and so on. But these encircling rings belonging to the animals, within which their contextual behaviour and instinctual activity moves, are not simply laid down alongside or in between one another but rather intersect with one another. The woodworm, for example, which bores into the bark of the oak tree is encircled by its own specific ring. But the woodworm itself, and that means together with this encircling ring of its own, finds itself in turn within the ring encircling the woodpecker as it looks for the worm. And this woodpecker finds itself in all this within the ring encircling the squirrel which startles it as it works. Now this whole context of openness within the rings of captivation encircling the animal realm is not merely characterized by an enormous wealth of contents and relations which we can hardly imagine, but in all of this it is still fundamentally different from the manifestness of beings as encountered in the world-forming Dasein of man.
For the everydayness of man in his busy occupation, beings appear quite differently. In our everydayness we also think of all those beings which are accessible to us in the undifferentiated way we have described as though they belonged to the same realm in which animals also reside and to which they too can relate. We then think that the particular animals and species of animal adapt themselves in different ways to these beings that are intrinsically present at hand, present in exactly the same way for all beings and thus for all human beings. Thus the variations of animals and animal species are produced on the basis of the varying adaptation of all animals to beings that are one and the same. Whatever most successfully adapts itself survives the others. In the process of adaptation the organization of the animal then variously develops in each case in accordance with the various kinds of beings (variation). Taken in the context of the survival of the best adapted animals, this variation then leads to increasing perfection. Thus it is that the rich abundance of higher animal species has developed out of the primeval slime.
Ignoring other intrinsic impossibilities in this developmental theory, we can now see particularly clearly that it rests upon a quite impossible presupposition which contradicts the essence of animality (captivation—encircling ring): the presupposition that beings as such are given to all animals and moreover given to them all in the same intrinsic way, so that all the animal has to do is to adapt itself accordingly. But this view collapses once we understand animals and animal being from out of the essence of animality. Not only is it the case