Charles Darwin was a poetic naturalist. The final passage of his 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection illustrates this best of all. Who would have thought that all the complex beauty of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” could have been created by the perpetual “war of nature”? The great truth and paradox of nature was that competition, death, and extinction were directly tied to the origin of what Darwin felicitously described as “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” Darwin was clearly in awe of the natural world, but, during