Nature doesn’t care about you. That may seem harsh, but strictly speaking, nature doesn’t care about anyone or anything, except passing genes into the next generation. We know this if we’ve studied evolution. It was Darwin’s great achievement to explain the adaptation of organisms without appeal to God’s design or mystical idealism. Darwinian evolution is true (corroborated by mountains of evidence), but it’s also a cold metaphysics. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould described it as a “cold bath view” of nature — not warm and fuzzy in the way religion characterizes nature.

Reflect for a moment on the Rhizocephala, or “root-headed” barnacle, which lives its life feeding inside crabs and other crustaceans. It gets inside the crab as a seed and begins to spread throughout the host in a series of complex root systems, often infiltrating, like a creeping vine, every limb of the crab. This root system castrates its host (preventing the crab’s continuation of gene line), stops the crab’s molting cycle and keeps it alive (all the while feeding off it) for years. Or consider the tarantula hawk, a giant wasp that hunts tarantulas as a food supply for its larvae. The wasp paralyzes a tarantula with its powerful sting and lays an egg on the spider’s paralyzed body. When the wasp larva hatches out, it feeds slowly on the still living tarantula — even carefully avoiding at first the consumption of working vital organs, to guarantee extended freshness. Not even the most inventive Hollywood writers can spin tales this fantastic, yet it is the bread and butter of everyday biology.

Should we thank the E. coli in our guts that help us to digest? Should we alternatively fault the virus that is breaking down our immune systems and spreading through the host population? These organisms are not evil or noble, intentionally wreaking havoc on our health — they are simply doing what comes naturally, surviving and reproducing. This is not meant to sound callous or insensitive. It’s obvious that our struggle with other organisms matters a great deal to us — causing real despair and tragedy. But from the more general evolutionary perspective, this drama is value neutral. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even a drama because there is no plot in nature.

Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.