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26 2 What Is nature? Natural selection is thus about adaptation to local environments, not about supe- riority or inferiority among organisms. Yet this hierarchical image is so powerful and widespread, that it has dominated the popular perception of Darwinism until today (Foster 2000: 188). And the same goes for the meaning of natural selection. As Bowler (2009) has shown, evolutionism triumphed at least in part because it was adapted to the increasingly popular idea of progress, so that, in fact, Darwin did not present his theory to a public that had never considered the possibility of evolution (partly because geologists had already challenged the literal interpreta- tion of the Genesis by showing that Earth and its inhabitants had changed). But despite the influence of progressivism, Darwin himself emphasized that there is no force behind evolution, and thus no direction for the latter. Therefore, evolution is a naked force that abolishes any teleological explanation for nature's history, let alone the notion that nature has the function of being useful to human beings. However, public perception somehow struggles with this aspect of the Darwinian revolution, maybe because human beings tend to adopt a teleological point of view, thus assuming that change throughout time cannot possibly be a direction- less one. On the other hand, as Worster (1977) has argued, Darwin's theory of evo- lution was grounded in ecology. Dwelling on the Linnean "economy of nature" and Humboldt's description of mutually dependent communities, he saw nature as a web of complex relations and ecological interdependences: a grand scheme of cooperative integration. Yet unlike early ecologists and natural philosophers, Darwin hinted that there was not a fixed amount of natural allotments within this order. On the contrary, ecological divergences take place that increase the diver- sity of organic types in a given area without competition. Deviance from the norm would then be a second law of nature, together with competition itself: the survival of the fittest is thus supplemented by the survival of the newest. As Worster him- self acknowledges, Darwin did not pursue this argument enough, probably influ- enced by how economic matters were framed in his time, and remained unable to reconcile the new view of nature as a diverse collection of organisms striving for self-reproduction and the Malthusian notion that ecosystems contain a limited amount of places to accommodate them. Crucially, though, nature ceased to be considered a passive entity, to be acknowledged instead as an innovative, reproductive force. It thus regained part of the vitality that had been lost under the influence of mechanical philosophy. From this new vantage point, it can even be contemplated as a form of self-unfolding art, as Peter Sloterdijk has it: Viewed through the opera glasses of evolutionary theory, the thing we call life is noth- ing other than a vaudeville with an immeasurable wealth of forms in which every branch of artistry, that is to say every species, attempts to perform the feat of all feats: survival (Sloterdjik 2013: 117) Although this alternative view of nature had been kept alive by Romantic philos- ophers and artists, it was now also pursued by scientists themselves. Somehow, nature's 'creativity' has been displayed over time and by looking into its