Beauty War

In Chapter three, I was most impressed by Darwin’s ability to maintain the sense of beauty and harmony of the interconnectedness of organisms in the struggle for existence, and yet how he simultaneously dismantles the special place humans feel they have in this web, that is, that nature and its beautiful interconnectedness are like a present given to human beings to be enjoyed (with the implication of a “Giver”). At the same time that Darwin can speak about adaptation as something that’s been ‘perfected,’ and as natural selection having a sort of formal beauty that fits the form of the organism so adroitly with the content of its struggle and situation (i.e. the ‘beautiful adaptations’), that perfection hides the sort of gory battle, involving millions of casualties, that humans don’t see on the everyday. Darwin uses the metaphor of the ‘face of nature’ to show how humans miss what goes on to make that face full of life and “gladness,” and that our perception of a beautiful and perfect figure of nature without its more sinister processes is a selfish, naïve, and misguided one. Darwin can both acknowledge the harmonious webs of life and how they do inspire a sort of wonder, and yet how that harmony comes at a large price, of constant ‘struggle’ and ‘destruction’ in the life of species, and sometimes, their ‘extinction,’ which is something that constantly astonishes humans. Even when and where an organism seems to be most abundant, there is still a struggle, belied by the very number of organisms present.

Darwin understands that an affective, wondrous response to what he’s observing in nature is key to keeping the reader enthralled, while at the same time, he sort of shames that human reader’s reaction, both by his assertion that “Natural selection…is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts [artificial selection], as the works of Nature are to those of Art,” and by implying that what is hidden by the formal beauty of adaptation is the inherent struggle and destruction that fuels it. This implicates the reader and any sort of aesthetic response to natural selection as being sort of blood-thirsty, and even un-beautiful, and of course continues his hint from chapter two that humans are both responsible for some adaptations and certainly responsible for part of that struggle and destruction. He’s also implying a causality, that the perfection of the organisms and the way they have adapted through struggle is not something set out ahead of time that simply has the purpose of existing for the enjoyment of human beings, but that there’s a process, a dire reasoning behind it, that contradicts the sort of receiving of a benevolent gift that characterizes human response to nature. The Judeo-Christian idea that everything has a purpose (with the implication that the purpose was fashioned by God, and more audaciously, for the benefit of humans), Darwin completely turns on its head in chapter two and certainly three, even as he asserts a new ‘purposiveness’ to adaptation and how organisms interact with each other.