The world we inhabit is not an ideal world, except to the ninny. It is not such a world as we would pick out if we were choosing, unless the assortment from which we were to make the selection were a pretty hard batch. It is so full of inconveniences in the first place—so much so that it seems sometimes that it must have been whittled out in some idle hour, without any idea that it would ever be used for anything, and then, when organic beings came into existence, it was given to them as a place to grow up and fight it out in, because there wasn't any other place for them to go. Then, again, it is inhabited by a lot of species that have acquired their natures through an apprenticeship of crime and militancy extending bade millions of years into the past.

The living world is not a single array . . . connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.

. . . little in the world is pretty, except the world itself.

Life isn’t a fairy tale; the knight who kills the dragon doesn’t necessarily get the princess. So what? Who’d want to live in a cosmos less rich and various than the real one?

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, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, 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.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business.

In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects

Living is messy.

We always thought the living earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.

This universe is not an ideal universe. It is impossible, without more fundamental revision of its character than human beings can ever hope to effect, to make of it an ideal place, or anything like an ideal place, for the satisfaction of desires. The cosmic processes which have evolved conscious beings on the earth—and these processes are but the hard-headed tendencies of matter—have so hopelessly nuptialed pleasure and pain that it is impossible to believe that fumbling philosophy will ever be able to divorce them. But we are here, useless and mysterious as it may seem, a set of incompatible vagrants, orphaned here on a dervish-like lump of something, in the midst of immensities so hard and arrogant that no wail from our worm-like larynxes can aught avail. And, so far as we can make out, it is the program of things that we are to remain here. We can not lie down peacefully and perish, for we are possessed by an instinct lashing us to live.

Hundreds of years ago, natural theologians tried to impress their readers with stories of the wondrous symmetries of Nature; now we see that, ironically, it is the departures from those symmetries that makes life possible. It is upon the flaws of Nature, not the laws of Nature, that the possibility of our existence hinges. ...The laws and constants of Nature are features that enforce uniformity and simplicity, while initial conditions and symmetry breakings permit complexity and diversity.