Thoughts on Diversity, Evolution and Creation
iNat is an incredible platform for documenting and learning about the magnitude of biological diversity. That said, it focuses just on singular, dissected aspects of the natural world. It's like how a dictionary serves as an invaluable assemblage of words and their meanings, but the true power of words is revealed when they are strung together to form sentences, paragraphs, stories, concepts, etc. So too does biology come alive when one starts to understand the broader concepts of how diversity derives from ecology, geography and evolution. Still iNat certainly helps me and many others gain a fuller "vocabulary" for understanding the world's story of life.
Some look at the cosmos for awe and perspective on existence, but for me life here on Earth provides fascination enough. Imagine the magic and complexity that goes into a single functioning cell. Then multiply that times the marvel of countless specialized cells needed for just one organism to survive and reproduce. From this perspective, even a single insect, earthworm or mushroom can become a fascinating example of successful natural technology. Now consider trillions of these organisms, from bacteria to blue whales, interconnected in an endlessly diverse, multi-layered and continually dynamic biosphere, and you far exceed a feeble human's comprehension.
There are those who refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of the theory of evolution, seeing it as a threat to their belief in the existence of a higher power. Perhaps if one clings tightly to literal interpretations of religious versions of history that might be the case. But if you consider a broader interpretation of a higher power and how things came to be, you might actually see evolution as supportive of your beliefs. That is, consider "Creation" not in the sense of a one-time physical creation of all things in an essentially static form, but rather in the sense of establishing an elegant mechanism for continually reshaping nearly infinite diverse and complex forms of life, sparked from just bits of elemental soup. That would be a wondrous God indeed.
