honors 292r respsonse

So, I posted this on my other blog, too...but I wanted to put it on here. The end. ( : 

Jessie Riddle

Honors 292R

October 31, 2009

Dr. Kenneth R. Miller

            Dr. Miller’s lecture on evolution and the debate surrounding scientific education in the United States gave me a reason to think, and also reminded me that I greatly admire Charles Darwin and his philosophies.

            As a student at BYU in several biology courses, I have lots of questions on a daily basis about the process of speciation in the history of the world, and how that relates to what I believe. I see the ‘evolution’ of the landscape around me, the spiritual ‘evolution’ I experience as I process new information and feelings and grow in my personal development. I also read about the evolution of matter and our physical bodies – the materials that make up the world we know.

In the face of all this information, two things seem clear to me. First, we are built out of the generations of people that have preceded us. Second (to quote my father), we are more than the sum of our parts.

I enjoyed learning about the recent transitory fossil discoveries from Dr. Miller. I was also interested to learn about the court cases that have been causing such a separation of ideas in the neighborhoods of my country. I agreed with Dr. Miller in his final analysis – this does not have to be a divisive issue. Although I’m sure people will continue to argue about evolution and God, I thought the final quote form Darwin’s Origin of Species may have resonated more deeply with me than anything else in the lecture – “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”