Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, Kevin Kelly, 1995 [read online >]

links
501a 3.1 Plantillustrations hires
501a 3.2 John Golud (1804 – 1881) [ornithologist and bird artist >]
501a 3.3 Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847-1909) [english zoologist >]
501a 3.4 John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912) [dutch bird illustrator >]
501a 3.5 William Matthew Hart (1830-1908) [english bird illustrator >]

Thomas Malthus wrote the Essay On Principle of Population in 1798
He was a intellectual, he was actually a cleric and he had religious studies and was interested in a range of different questions that had to do with ethics, but he was also a mathematician who was interested in applying statistical thinking or the thinking of numbers to the various questions that arouse from People like Adam Smith and some other figures he talks about in his book, William Godwin is one, and Condorcet the french philosopher – whom where enthusiast for progress who really felt that human process was almost unlimited, could be counted on developing for generations and generations and delivering humans into an area of incredible wealth and comfort.

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life.  

It (501a 1.1) always makes me think of Helos vegetative principle,
The idea, the world has emerged to some kind of process, that is best compared to growth, rather than fabrication.
Fabrication is something that we purposely create and make, growth has an innate force that drives it.
[…] So this sort of organic metaphor is what dominates Charles Darwins book (On the Origin of Species, 1895), this sort of sense of groth, constantly growing, everything massively making a massive effort to reproduce.
It is taking Malthus, or it is an expansion of the Maltusian idea of production into a fundamental force of nature.