honors 292r respsonse

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.”

My essay

Late one night in my bedroom at the top of the wolf house, I wrote this short essay for a scholarship application to BYU. It's short, to the point, and one of my favorite things I've written. I'm very different than I was when I wrote it, but it's me. Here you go ( :


Every year on the twenty-second of April, my family brings home a tree. On the Earth Day of 1990, my parents brought home me, and planted their oldest child in a Salt Lake apartment. I sent taproots out into the world, and developed within my family’s loving shade. Three years later, I was transplanted to the rich wet soil of Aloha, Oregon.
For five years, I lived and grew in a tiny house on the outskirts of Portland. I learned to sing, to read, and to smell yellow roses in the rain. At six years old, I made friends with the wind and discovered, to my dismay, that I was not the center of the universe. While my father finished his surgical residency at the University of Oregon and my mother taught English at a local college, my two brothers and I branched out into a love of life. In 1998, we returned to Utah, and I grew my first bittersweet fruit in goodbye.
In the next four years, my roots became deeper as I experienced loneliness and discovered that I loved school. Then, one week before seventh grade, a lightning bolt split my heart in two. My Dad left home, and couldn’t tell me when he was coming back.
Miraculously, the divided trunk of my soul did not split. Instead it grew around the hole in my heart, leaving a window. I began to see in other people pain I understood, and in life the beauty I had never before appreciated.
The tree of my heart now has many windows, created by both pain and joy. My branches extend around what I have grown to love: music, friends, challenges to my body and my mind. My roots extend deep into the earth and family that have given me life, anchoring my soul in love and God.

Feet

This Blog

This blog is where I'm going to post my work - papers, photographs, or other things I spend too much time doing. ( : Comments, reactions, and suggestions are all welcome.