​The phone call from my Mom last Thursday was disturbing at the very least. My sister, who is six months pregnant, was in the emergency room. Dehydration and a 102 degree fever for three days finally pushed the intensive care unit nurse into checking herself in. Between my mom’s sobs, I gathered that a bacterial infection was to blame. I hung tough while she went on about my sister’s health and the development of the fetus. When the conversation was over, and I was off the phone, I cried as hard as I have for many months. As the strength of the fear subsided, I actually managed a smile at the paradox of working on a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology.

​I love studying ecology and the way organisms interact and survive within certain environments. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that virtually anything can be considered a habitable environment; a creek running through pine forests, an alpine mountain top, a sandy desert, the human liver, a piece of paper, or a computer keyboard (Seriously!). Each of these, and many more, serve as a place where some sort of organism can live and, at times, thrive. So long as the vital components of persistence: water, food, air, (depending on the organism), are available, an organism should continue to live in a habitat for which it is adapted.

​What had produced the smile at the end of my crying session the other day, was the ability of humans to put the world in black and white contexts when it comes to “beauty” in the natural world. Our definitions of “the natural world” and “beauty” are species centric. We categorize certain types of nature and beauty as good and anything outside that definition as bad. In so doing we fail to see the elegant bridge to the world around us. We miss the vast gray area that really links all of us together via evolution and as inhabitants on the planet. The fact is that the evolution and ecology of disease is no less stunning than that for the polar bear, the shark, the peacock, the prickly pear, the scorpion, the army ant, the orchid and close to two million other named species.

​Malaria, ring worm (a fungus), and Salmonella (the bacteria my sister was eventually determined to have) would probably not fall on most people’s top 1000 list of charismatic organisms. Yet the same forces that guided evolution of the species we find so cute and majestic have guided the evolution of the bacteria, fungus and viruses that make us sick and at times kill us. The same mechanisms behind the struggle for survival and adjusting to competitive forces have contributed to the strength and persistence of these microorganisms. Evolution was never proposed to just produce species that humans find aesthetically pleasing. This is what we so easily forget.

​So next time you get the flu, catch a cold, or have some sort of intestinal “issue”, go ahead and blame the litter critters that caused it. But do your best to not take it personally, and give the forces behind speciation a thumbs up. Because without those evolutionary forces there would be a lot of other beauty we would never see.