Preach it, Charles.

[Kai]

"It is interesting to contemplate 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, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, as different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

"The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c, will cease to be metaphorical and will have a plain signification. When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, or at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one with a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the posessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!"

"Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation."

"During early periods of the earth's history, when the forms of life were probably fewer and simpler, the rate of change was probably slower; and at the first dawn of life, when very few forms of the simplest structures existed, the rate of change may have been slow in an extreme degree. The whole history of the world, as at present known, although of a length quite incomprehensible by us, will heareafter be recognized as a mere fragment of time, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants, was created."

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become enobled."

"There is a 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."

[Kai]

To clarify, these are quotes from the final few paragraphs of On the Origin of Species, where Darwin, after pages and pages of arguement, is delivering powerful prose on what this all actually means, what the implications are, how it changes our perspective. 150 years later, still fucking perfect, still waiting expectantly, and at the same time, looking back and seeing just how right he was about what incredible wonders would be revealed, and how powerfully empowering it is to know these things. He said, "they seem to me to become enobled", that "there is a grandeur to this view of life", because there's that much more meaning there, with what is here, now, knowing just HOW it came to be that way.