Chapter Summary: The Origin Of Species

Prompt 1 One of the greatest and most renowned biologists of all time, Charles Darwin, wrote a fantastic novel The Origin of Species. The Origin of Species begins with an extraordinary image of existence as coexistence. Darwin describes this through the process of how multiple beings rely on each other for survival. Morton describes this as, “Water and air are like hair and feathers. Living and nonliving beings become the medium in which other beings exist.” (Morton 61) He also goes on to say, “There is no static background. What we call Nature is monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through.” (Morton 61) Morton is describing that the evolution of the beings that live on Earth has been a strange cascade of mutations resulting in the strange and vast variety of beings that exist today. Now interpreting these beings and how they are named/related/viewed today …show more content…
Morton makes the reader second guess that the strange stranger is something else when he says, “And since the strange stranger is us, the void is us, too.” (Morton 80) He also says, “The inbuilt uncanniness of strange strangers is part of how we can be intimate with them.” (Morton 80) What Morton is essentially trying to do is make us think the big picture by looking at tiny segments of the picture first and building up. He alludes to the strange stranger in the begging of his book when he says, ““In my formulation, the best environmental thinking is thinking big-as big as possible, and maybe even bigger than that, bigger than we can conceive.”(Morton 20) Using earth and space as an explanation for this he says, ““Our eyes have to “return” as we venture out into the space on the right of the page, then voyage back to the next line. We’re placed in the position of one of the far-off worlds, gazing back at Earth.” (Morton,