This painting illustrates my fascination with natural selection, and specifically the simultaneous discovery of it by Wallace and Darwin. I kind of wish I lived in a time period where you could still make a living as a naturalist- traveling, cataloging, and sending specimens to natural history museums. It is thrilling (and difficult) to imagine how groundbreaking Origins must have been. Life and chaos suddenly had a direction through time, and biology was given a central theme. The human species could finally be put in context, and the mystery of our existence explained. Artificial selection could have a conceptual basis, and could be honed as a science as well as an art (or an accident). Biodiversity came to be understood as stability, and the intricacies of biological structures could be given an explanation that was equivalent in elegance. Beauty was not created by God, but rather chance, competition, adaptation, ecological niches, and biological innovation. In short, beauty was created from sex and a fear of dying.
ataloa 