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Show 268. just as Muir claimed in his King Sequoia letter that the wilderness had transformed him spiritually, so he had also claimed that animals had been shaped by their environments. The wonder of Nature was how well adapted wild animals were in a changing environment. In a revealing analysis of Darwin's thinking, Donald Worster points out that the great evolutionist slowly committed himself to competition as the law of Nature. There was a second major theme in Darwin's thinking, that of divergence and tolerance, but competitive replacement dominated this theme so much that it was not noticed. If one followed the principle of divergence, then one could imagine offspring working out new occupations for themselves, "diverging from their parents and siblings and exploiting untapped resources and habitats." If evolution worked by divergence, it worked toward a constantly increasing diversity of life. And so Darwin's tree of life need not have required that "branches overtop and kill" competing branches. It was possible for him to imagine an open-ended future of a divergent system of life, as long as he ignored Malthus' thesis. Indeed, Muir's geographical tree in the Studies seemed to suggest just such a process, where a new landscape was peopled by plants and animals who followed the retreat of the glaciers. Those which adapted found new and appropriate environments. Muir's essays about the inhabitants of the Sierra suggested such an optimistic view of divergent evolution, perhaps |
