“Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 109).
There is beauty in complexity. We admire the wilting rose more than the common pebble. There is beauty in the delicate balance between structure and disorder. In one sentence, albeit a full one, Darwin cements a structure that embraces both the chaotic and the infinite. At first, chaos would seem to belie order, but in an organic system the two are dependent on one another. A cell must be more chaotic than a crystal to be acted upon evolutionarily, yet it must also have enough order to take energy from its surroundings, grow, and reproduce. Although the father of evolution and a functionalist at heart, Darwin here fiddles with a proto-structuralist view, one in which the underlying “physical conditions of life” dictate organization and change. Darwin recognizes the deep relationships between all things and that this interconnectedness stems from the ideal of limitless change and “infinite complexity.” Given a proper dollop of time, “nature’s power of selection” would populate and speciate the globe.
What is most striking is Darwin’s universality. He abandons his pigeons, his finches, and his beetles and applies this beauty of adaptation to all forms. There are no longer any needs for specific anecdotes of variety and speciation. Darwin pans back effortlessly for the reader to gasp at the vista of his theory, universal in scope and replete in form. There is beauty in the structure of a theory that can bind the chaos of our organic world. There is beauty in this complexity.
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