CONCLUSION
There are four final points which may be made. The first is the point made by Darwin in the concluding paragraphs of Origin of Species, that all living forms are not special creations. Instead, they are the lineal descendants of a few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited and not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.
The second is that these living forms exist on this planet for no purpose other than their own sake. As Bill Bryson says, expanding on a comment by David Attenborough in The Living Planet in relation to lichens, it is easy to overlook the fact that: life just is. "As humans, we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take full advantage of all the intoxication existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen?... Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life in short just wants to be".[1] (My emphasis)
The third is that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants but have become utterly extinct. In fact, of all the species who have ever hitherto slithered, flown, swum and walked upon this planet, some 98% are now extinct[2]. Why should we anticipate any better prospect for our own? The reality is that the history of all living species on this planet is that they will ultimately go extinct, and the more complex they are, the quicker they will do so[3].
These are depressing though, but from them we may draw upon the magnificence of Darwin's grand finale: "Plants, birds, insects and the worms crawling through the damp earth – all these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us, entailing growth, inheritance, variability following both directly and indirectly from the external conditions of life, and a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and to Natural Selection, thereby entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved".
[1] Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway Books, 2003, 306. "They simply exist" (and on a windswept hillside for hundreds if not thousands of years for no apparent purpose), says Attenborough, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake".
[2] Some estimates place this at 99.9% of all species.
[3] Bryson, op cit, 337. In this context, Bryson points out that, on a 24 hour time scale of the Earth's history, mankind - homo sapiens - with a minute longevity of something like 150,000 years, has existed for something like one minute and 17 seconds, the whole of our recorded history for no more than a few seconds and a single human lifetime barely an instant.
Graphic link: www.reddit.com
There are four final points which may be made. The first is the point made by Darwin in the concluding paragraphs of Origin of Species, that all living forms are not special creations. Instead, they are the lineal descendants of a few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited and not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.
The second is that these living forms exist on this planet for no purpose other than their own sake. As Bill Bryson says, expanding on a comment by David Attenborough in The Living Planet in relation to lichens, it is easy to overlook the fact that: life just is. "As humans, we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take full advantage of all the intoxication existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen?... Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life in short just wants to be".[1] (My emphasis)
The third is that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants but have become utterly extinct. In fact, of all the species who have ever hitherto slithered, flown, swum and walked upon this planet, some 98% are now extinct[2]. Why should we anticipate any better prospect for our own? The reality is that the history of all living species on this planet is that they will ultimately go extinct, and the more complex they are, the quicker they will do so[3].
These are depressing though, but from them we may draw upon the magnificence of Darwin's grand finale: "Plants, birds, insects and the worms crawling through the damp earth – all these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us, entailing growth, inheritance, variability following both directly and indirectly from the external conditions of life, and a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and to Natural Selection, thereby entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved".
[1] Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway Books, 2003, 306. "They simply exist" (and on a windswept hillside for hundreds if not thousands of years for no apparent purpose), says Attenborough, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake".
[2] Some estimates place this at 99.9% of all species.
[3] Bryson, op cit, 337. In this context, Bryson points out that, on a 24 hour time scale of the Earth's history, mankind - homo sapiens - with a minute longevity of something like 150,000 years, has existed for something like one minute and 17 seconds, the whole of our recorded history for no more than a few seconds and a single human lifetime barely an instant.
Graphic link: www.reddit.com