The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Here is the story that Alma wanted to tell: The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive. In this struggle for existence, the strong endured; the weak were eliminated. This in itself was not an original idea. Scientists had been using the phrase “the struggle for existence” for many decades already. Thomas Malthus used it to describe the forces that shaped population explosions and collapses across history. Owen and Lyell used it as well, in their work on extinction and geology. The struggle for existence was, if anything, an obvious point. But Alma’s story had a twist. Alma hypothesized, and had come to believe, that the struggle for existence—when played out over vast periods of time—did not merely define life on earth; it had created life on earth. It had certainly created the staggering variety of life on earth. Struggle was the mechanism.