Every now and then I think about David Attenborough's brilliant narrative strategy, and how to apply it to my own writing.

I remember a nephew, when young, happily watching baby seals, then happily watching baby polar bears, & then... having his love for both brought into conflict.

Or following a chick's struggle to fly off a cliff face - cheering when he didn't crash! - just to get snapped up as prey.

To hold it all in tension & not despair is one of the greatest challenges of being human.

(History nerd aside:

In the early 19th Century, Malthusian ideas about exponential population growth & natural overshoot took hold, haunting people with the reality that nature was not "designed" for all to thrive.

Darwin was a sentimentalist about this, too - he hated what evolutionary theory suggested about natural cruelty, saw zero sign of a benevolent creator in nature's torturous ways, and suggested that readers try to imagine that death usually came quickly and the "happiest" survived.)

@MLClark I have sometimes contemplated that the true test of a species' evolved sentience is its ability to leap beyond Darwinism by helping along the weaker in its species.

@WordsmithFL

"Social Darwinism" (the policy of 19th & 20th C eugenicists) never did grasp the fundamental fact of natural selection: that what makes one the "fittest" is contextual.

20th-century research built more accurately on this concept by illustrating the evolutionary benefit of so-called altruism, & other facets of herd species life. Discovering the acculturated difference between bonobos & chimps solidified this understanding: we are evolutionarily better together, in many contexts.