Naturally Elegant

Under The Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,

When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

Under the summer roses

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

~Carl Sandburg, Harvest Poems

To me, not an expert in the science of nature, there seems nothing quite so elegant as our living world. Even the bright colors, loud squawks, pacing around of various of the plants and animals are all there for a purpose. They have been honed by evolution to only be or do what is necessary. Anything else is extraneous, fluff, a burden in the daily work of living and helping the next generation to live.

Scientists who really are experts know, however, that nature isn't always all that elegant. It apparently is true that “Nature doesn’t always find the most elegant solution. 'Evolution just seizes on certain convenient solutions that present themselves…They get frozen in place, reproduced, and used again and again'"(William Newsome, in What Is Elegance In Science? ).

If nature can miss the best solutions, even under the pressure of "survival-of-the-fittest", how will I be able to make sense out of the chaos that life can throw my way?

Like our lives, nature seems both complex and elegant. The most convoluted, dense, big-worded philosophical treatise or symbolically-clandestine mathematical formula can’t hold a candle to the complexity of the human brain or even the process of an ant getting through the day. We study nature, as great scientists like E. O. Wilson have, and explain parts of it but what we don’t know is still a mystery. What we don't know is infinitely more than what we do know.

And we constantly learn how to apply lessons from nature to our own human challenges, as organizations like the Biomimicry Institute have shown. Nature is our teacher, and no student of ours, in this sense. We are the students, the beneficiaries. Once a species is gone, so are all the untaught lessons we might have learned from it.

Science, out of all its research and theorizing and application, seeks elegant solutions and explanations of questions of enormous complexity.

“According to 2010 paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology , “When a theory or a model explains a phenomenon clearly, directly and economically, we say it is elegant: one idea, easy to understand, can account for a large amount of data and answer many questions.” This definition—simplicity plus capaciousness—seems right.”

~From, What Is Elegance In Science?, The New Yorker, Patrick House, August 17, 2015

The elegant is not the superficial, but “simplicity plus capaciousness” as House characterizes it. That gets at it, I think, in all its richness.

How elegant is a harvest moon, resting languorously in an autumn sky? How simple, love? How essence-itial, “a beautiful friend who remembers”?

How profound, in its breadth and depth and presence, is the elegant?

That may be one of Sandburg's "beautiful, unanswerable questions".

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