The Strange Inevitability of Evolution - Issue 41: Selection

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the "grandeur" of life, the "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," as Darwin put it. Isn't that enough to persuade you? Ah, but isn't all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? You don't have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin's astonishing theory doesn't fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive.