Ecology of Wildcards

In the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Darwin sums up his thoughts and feelings on what today we would call ecology and evolution. His phrases are so beautiful and the meaning so profound that this little piece of text has been mined for mottos, quotes, and titles almost to exhaustion by hundreds of authors since. The title of American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s famous long-running column This View Of Life in the magazine Natural History was taken from the very last sentence in the paragraph where Darwin says, on the mechanistic world view he has just become the flagbearer of: ‘There 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.’ Snippets from the same sentence have been used, for example, for the evolution books Endless Forms and Endless Forms Most Beautiful. And ‘evolved’ of course gave rise to the term ‘evolution’ itself, a word that Darwin did not use.

But the paragraph’s most prolific quote-generator has indubitably been its opening sentence, where Darwin says: ‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’ Although this is the more famous sentence, the same entangled bank already made its appearance earlier in Darwin’s book, where he doubts that chance has anything to do with the numbers and relative proportions of species living on it, as we saw at the end of Chap. 4.