“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

– Charles Darwin

Beautiful?

But isn’t Darwin all about brutality and competition and death and extinction?

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday.  He doesn’t have the best reputation, especially in America. The word Darwinian — not unlike Orwellian — has taken on a pejorative sense that maligns the profound ideas of the man. In modern usage, it is often associated with the death of “weak” and “undesirable” creatures, and sometimes people, as in pop culture references like the Darwin Awards.

A dim and destructive view of things, yes, but it’s certainly not the only way of looking at Darwin’s work.

There is another perspective: that Darwin’s natural selection (to be more specific about it) is the means  through which life survives and adapts. Adaptability depends on mistakes in reproduction, some of which make a species better able to carry on despite changes in its local environment. If such a process were not in operation, life might have been extinguished long ago by changing circumstances. How much more dismal and destructive history would have been if everything had stayed as it originated! In fact, there wouldn’t be any living history to discuss — nor beings to discuss it.

Static species die, and nourish the tree of life. Dynamic species adapt and evolve.

The Tree of Life (Charles Darwin, 1937)

Darwin’s articulation of evolution was a significant break in the tapestry of human thought, as momentous as the realization that we are revolving around a star, one of many, rather than all the stars revolving around us; that the firmament is not a protective shell encasing us as a kind of cosmic womb, but rather that we are a constituent element of something that is far from firm; that we are a tiny little piece of an immense whole, on a pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan once put it.

If we are not at the center, we began to wonder, then what does that mean?  If Copernicus forced us to think about what we are on the edge of this vastness, the findings of Darwin and other biologists since have us wondering about who we are as a species in the span of time.

If we are designed creatures, each made from a single divine mold, then any attribute that is distinct is a deviation, a flaw, a blemish to be sanded down, or a reason to be sent to the seconds bin by the Quality Assurance team.

But if we are evolved creatures, then diversity and constant variation, the interaction of our distinct forms with our surroundings, and the way we adapt to those interactions all contribute to the ongoing creation of the species. Diversity is the very mechanism through which we have become what we are today, and through which we will become whatever we will be ten or a hundred or a thousand years from now.

Enough of cosmology and biological history: What does this have to do with creative expression?

In our thinking and our work, do we strive to find a single and original expression of an idea, some unreachable urtext or perfect Platonic form? Or do we let our ideas emerge, move into a particular moment and place, gain form through interaction with the minds and ideas and perspectives of others, and be sculpted by time and the elemental forces of history and culture?

Do we hover over our ideas, trying to control and force them towards a particular destination?  Or do we fertilize and nurture and ultimately follow our ideas as they twist and turn and become, recognizing that we are but one factor in the shaping of their future?

Darwin’s natural selection reminds us that even a process without a goal, or a journey without a destination, can produce interesting and useful and meaningful results — such as creatures who evolve to the point of understanding the process through which they became observant and reflective.

On the Origin of Species ends with these lines:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.  This is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Creation is not some dusty fact of history, something that has already happened, something finished.

Life continues to adapt, and we are in the midst of it.