Darwin: a planetary view of life.
He started in the woods collecting beetles and bird nests... then went to the beaches in college studying the little slimy ineffable creatures, creatures in the inbetween place between plants and animals: sponges and sea anemonies, asking "what at the root of things is the difference between plants and animals, what at root, IS LIFE ITSELF"
and the answer he got was to go on a long 5 year jouney exploring the entire Earth itself as a planet, reading the latest ideas about geology as a long continous process of repeating similar events over and over again, explaining the mountains and islands and coral reefs he explored by imagining surface processes he saw carrying on for unimaginable lengths of time...
and after seeing the breadth and detpth of diversity of creatures in different settings, their weird distribution on continents and islands...
and taking all that quest HOME to his own countryside, watching eatthworms do the slow work in the soil and breeding his pigeons and wondering if the processes he saw in his pigeons of variation and natural selection could be imagined all the way back to his tiny creatures in the ocean in that crack between animals and plants slowly originating and splitting and diversifying over that immensely long geological time that geologists where finding in the record of the strata in Earth...
what WAS the creator? was he a benign cozy god creating some cows and wheat for his beloved humans or was he a WILDER geological process of MANY MANY free agents jostling against each other over these immense spanns of time, WILDER than our cozy desires for an eternal comforting father, for this wild evolutionary process produced a vast array of creatures totally ambivalent about us, creatures that lived inside each other, parasitoid wasps eating their prey from the inside out while their prey still lived, and even to illness coming home, consuming his own bright burst of life 10 yr old daughter who died from a severe caugh and fever who's nature he did not understand (it was probably tuberculosis, a bacteria that finds human lungs to be a paradise...)
When Darwin saw this vast span of RIDICULOUS creatures, created in the most peculiar of fashions, not by conscious willful planning... for instance if a creator wanted to create flying creatures.. why not invent wings from scratch like we did aeroplanes? why was he CONSTRAINED to use the bones that mammals had to make bats, the bones that dinosaurs had to make birds, why when he looked at really WEIRD creatures like barnacles did he find that as peculiar as they were looking like mollusks, with their VERY DIFFERENT KINDS of parts and lifestyles that the creator was constrained to use the exact same parts as shrimp had?
why when the creator built outrageous orchid flowers with their almost miraculous contrivances to trick insects into mating with them in order for plants to get sex on the wing (why not create wings for plants too?), was he constrained to use the exact same parts that every flower on the earth has, but strained into preposterous proportions to contrive the traps..
as for the peculiar animals he found on new continents and distant islands, why did the creator not create AFRESH new parts for their new ecological challenges, why was he constrained to use the same related structures that Darwin saw in the animals he found on the nearest continental masses? It seemed that creatures were created out of creatures that came before them, not afresh, by fiat.
just WHAT kind of being WAS this creator? When Darwin read Malthus and Smith about human demographics and food and economy, and saw how humans breed like rats and constantly overgrow their ability to grow crops and die in famines, he watched humans slowly select from variation of domestic animals and plants from generation to generation, he watched life out in the woods and fields, all manner of animals and plants, selecting EACH other by competition between children that are always produced in numbers too many for the fields and woods to support,
not the careful craftsmanship of a loving father but a WILD earth, wild mothers creating by TRIAL AND ERROR with their children, overproducing and tossing away the plentiful MISTAKES that occur, that are the necessary adjunct to all creativitry
and who, ultimately, did this selecting of children? the tossing away of mistakes and selection of creatures that solved new ecological problems on new islands that the breeding creatures found themselves in? Adam Smith gave a clue, not a planned economy, but the jostling interactions of thousands of creatures chasing each other, eating each other, selecting each other as mates, cooperating with each other in adhoc symbiotic arrangements
and so Darwin was the first to envision a working model of a human like, creative mind, the overproduction of random variations, selecting each other as countless free agents jostled with each other in the vast drama of life, of trial and error over geological eons of generations over the surface of an unimaginably wide landscape of time and space. creating the myriad 2million wildly different or often subtly different creatures we share this planet with.
it is a humbling yet inspiring vision because it means that we ourselves, today, along with our fellow critters are the ones responsible for this creation.
and if wild diversity, wild overproduction of variation, possibly blunders, STUGGLE, FAILURE, working together, is the root of the creativity of life on Earth...
that means the deepest terrors of human existance, failure, all manner of human variation which we have always been horified about, the congenital birth defects of body and mind that we have always stigmatized (always BLAMED OURSELVES for), the horrifying dying of cancer, which is, shockingly, actually the FOUNTAIN OF VARIATION in our own bodies, we watch in our family members causing much pain... all that we have called sin, that seems to require for us to seek some kind of divine forgiveness, is actually the OPPOSITE, it is the source of creativity that makes us human and so there is NO SIN at all that reqires forgiveness, there is no divine forgiver needed, we can accept each other in this cooperative frightening adventure, worship the variation and failure amoung each other and forgive each other.
