The BBC/Discovery Channel series Planet Earth has been on my mind lately. If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you do so. Soon. Do yourself a favor and watch the version narrated by David Attenborough, not Sigourney Weaver.

Not only is the series full of staggeringly beautiful photography, but the scale of its project is almost inconceivable. It took five years to make, and it shows.

I've been thinking about how to approach this, you know? I guess I could establish the primal mating instincts of the animal world and wonder how those innate habits somehow translated into what modern homo sapien now recognizes as romantic, monogamous relationships. I could write about watching female lions fell an entire elephant as the be-maned male lion watched his harem from a safe distance until the meal was ready. I could even write about the world's largest single mom (the humpback whale) and how she selflessly starves herself for months for the good of her calf.

But all of that philosophical connective flimflam seems to betray the revelations that occurred when I watched the series. Like so many things in nature, these revelations occurred not because I wanted them to, but because they are truths—absolute and necessary. They do not exist because they are pretty, they exist because they have come to be, and that they remain in a state of being is essential; survival is all that matters. One: if you don't believe in evolution, you are a moron. Two: in nature, something is going to try and eat you.