All ecosystems are shaped by long, intermittent processes of catastrophe and adaptation. They aren’t just creations of deep time, but also relational webs of many different organisms and entities. To grasp these intricate surroundings and to retain a sense of order, humans speak, write, differentiate, compare, and create millions of images that depict nature. In our attempt to classify all living things, we have constructed many different taxonomies.

Children in urban environments practice their taxonomic instincts by memorizing hundreds of Pokémon names and classifying many different dinosaur species. The imagination has always been a valuable place to practice, experiment and play, to create abstractions of realities we know; scientists need their imagination to hypothesize, while poets use it to find new connections between words.

The boundaries between differentiation and creation are not always clear. The biblical creation myth might describe an all-knowing deity inventing new things, but perhaps God simply differentiated light from dark and separated ocean from air. By making selections and divisions in a dark mass, the world took shape and could be comprehended. Evolution might not be about innovations, but instead about endless variations of one beginning.