According to Ivan Illich, "To consider what is appropriate and fitting in a certain place leads one directly into reflection on beauty and goodness." The phrase "appropriate and fitting in a certain place" is a wonderful description of an adaptation (or suite of adaptations) in an organism - products of evolution by natural selection. The beautiful, multi-faceted compound eyes of a jumping spider; the astounding ability of a Harris's Sparrow to migrate from its breeding site in northern Canada to its wintering grounds in the central Great Plains and then return the following spring; the tenacity of Death Valley's Cottonball Marsh pupfish, which can survive water temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and salinities almost three times that of seawater: all of these are lovely, "appropriate and fitting" outcomes of evolution.
Or consider the fossilized remains of the orthocone nautiloid shown above, which are preserved in the 340-million-year-old Redwall Limestone formation of the Grand Canyon. Orthocone nautiloids, which had a straight uncoiled shell, existed from the late Cambrian until the late Triassic - a period of roughly 300 million years. In other words, they were very good at what they did, and the very fact of their persistence is to me, beautiful. And then, at some point in the Mesozoic, the last of the orthocone nautiloids vanished, lost to the terrible beauty of a natural extinction, when the once-balanced equation - one life for one death - suddenly went negative. In thinking about orthocone nautiloids - their existence and extinction - recall that the human species, Homo sapiens, has been around for less than 200,000 years, while the earliest ape fossils date to roughly 9 million years ago. . . Evolution and extinction, and the perspective they bring to our lives, are powerful antidotes to hubris and certitude.