
Darwin wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. Nature, selection, good, tending: all are metaphors. Nature is evolution personified. She selects and tends. Her work is good.
A hundred years earlier, the great naturalist Comte de Buffon had written that Nature is “attentive … to the preservation of each species.” The metaphors are the same.
Darwin also associated the metaphor “survival of the fittest” with the workings of evolution. It is a metaphor for indifference, one Darwin learned from Herbert Spencer. Nature is not present, or at least, away at a great distance, in this metaphor – the beings struggle to survive on their own, they are not tended by Nature.
It is the metaphor of indifference, survival of the fittest, that one most often hears associated with Darwin, and yet, in Chapter 4 of Origin of the Species, Darwin also associated natural selection with another metaphor – one he called the “preservation principle.” In this other metaphor, Nature tends for the good of each being. This metaphor is the one that Buffon used.
I think it is Darwin’s preservation metaphor that Aldo Leopold appropriated in his land ethic. Darwin contrasted Nature, who selects for the good of each being that she tends, with humanity, who selects for the good of humanity. Leopold tried to change human selection to follow the way of Nature rather than the way of survival of the fittest. It is a religious effort – to try to live by the ways of gods, of Nature.
The cosmos, the order of life and the universe, is a great paradox. It appears both terrifyingly indifferent to life and yet benevolently attentive to life. It is susceptible to investigation by naturalists, and yet it is ultimately knowable only in metaphors.





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