If a process or adaptation seems too smart for nature, that's a failure of your imagination, not the hand of God. I can make that claim because we have a working model of life's morphing and molding without it.

Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.

A rainbow is the product of physics working for your appreciation of beauty.

Cancer is real-time evolution, and your body is the selective pressure.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising."

[The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest, May/June 2009)]

All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always.