Pistil or Petiole, Pinnate or Palmate

On Thursday I attended my first 'Master Gardener' class at the county 'cooperative extension service'. For all you rural folks who participated in '4-H' like I did in my youth, you can appreciate what this county office has to offer. I will attend 50 hours of classes and field trips with 14 others who love to get dirty.

The quest speaker, who gave us the basics of botany...you know, the birds and bees of plant propagation...was a character. He's a 76 year old retired professor who became a Master Gardener himself, and was recruited to teach in the program. I caught him twice trying unsuccessfully to be politically correct in his presentation. Once, he prefaced a unique trait of a particular plant by saying, "whoever designed this, (he then caught himself) uh, whatever caused this process..." Another time he was referring to some unbelievably beautiful aspect of another plant saying, "of course, this is the outcome of pure chance, chaos, etc." I caught all this tongue-in-cheek goings-on and looked around and noticed that no one else seemed to enjoy his word-play which presumedly was to placate any hardcore Darwinians, atheists, and agnostics.

As an aside, we Catholics can live with the idea of evolution, in the biological sense. God works in mysterious ways and if He arranged that man develop veerrry slllowwwly from a primative ape-like being it just means His time is not our time. If you extrapolate natural selection into the ethical and philosophical, like Spencer, Huxley, Dewey, and Peirce, then you're talking Darwinism in the broad sense, with lots of atheism thrown in, and I don't play dat.


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