Charles Darwin is well known for his portrayal of the endless struggle in nature, the view that Tennyson immortalized as “nature red in tooth and claw” (Fig. 48.1). In addition to the fangs and claws of predators, Darwin’s “red view” also incorporated more subtle mortality factors, such as competition for food or mates, crowding, disease, parasitism, and climate flux (Plate XXXVII). Darwin detailed the central features of his red view in chapter 3 of Origin of Species (derived from chapter 5 of his unpublished “big species book”), entitled “The Struggle for Existence,” wherein he argued that the rate of population increase was so great that it regularly outstripped nature’s resources, compelling a constant struggle that had to be alleviated through a compensatory rate of death (Darwin 1859, 60–89; Darwin 1975, 172–212). Darwin proposed that the primary agent responsible for subduing this growth was “natural selection,” which drew upon the environment’s factors of mortality to eliminate the less favorable individuals and populations, thereby shaping the kinds and numbers of organisms found in nature. For Darwin, environment not only imposed the limits to growth but also applied the pressures to mold the population’s fitness. He explained that it was because of environmental “checks” that natural selection was “daily and hourly scrutinizing [for the] improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life” (Darwin 1859, 84). Environment, according to the red view, was an engine of “warfare” among and within species, or what his friend T. H. Huxley characterizes as a gladiatorial blood sport, in which “the creatures are fairly well treated and set to fight, where the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day” (T. H. Huxley 1894, 200; La Vergata 1990).