Extravagant landscape of the world

Annie Dillard asks, If you were God, and you wanted to create something, wouldn't you be happy with a nice molecule? If you wanted something to lock up solar energy and give off oxygen, wouldn't you put down a slab of chemicals rather than invent forests?

... creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for. The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough, more than enough. But look what happens... Evolution, of course, is the vehicle of intricacy...

Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today. All other forms — fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains — are utterly and forever gone. That is a great many forms that have been created. Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font...

Quote: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: Harper & Row, 1985, 131, 136.
Ill.: Hallucigenia sparsa, from about 500 million years ago.