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As I collected my thoughts for this blog, NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday broadcasted "Taking Darwin Personally." The essayist, who used to teach a college course called Origins, described her students' sensitivity during their discussion of the Origin of Species.

Everything would go swimmingly until we hit Darwin. And while many students treated his Origin of Species the same way they did Newton's work on gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity, others got upset. There'd be anger, even tears. Once, a much-pierced, much-tattooed young woman stormed out of the classroom, saying "I am NOT kin to a monkey." Evolution hurts people's feelings. Nobody denies that cells divide or that light travels 186,000 miles per second. Evolution's different. People take evolution personally. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100731606)

Although our class remained composed throughout the discussion of evolution by means of natural selection, we did question many of the same points as the essayist. Before this course, I never thought about the fact that taking evolution personally is an American phenomenon. Because many Americans accept the Great Chain of Being, "Taking Darwin Personally" questioned, does accepting our place in the animal kingdom make us any less miraculous? I agree with the writer, that we lose nothing by admitting that we are part of nature.