Yesterday afternoon’s service for Tim Moy was impossibly sad and impossibly beautiful. Looking around Keller Hall, I was amazed at the different communities who Tim had touched so deeply, from the other parents at Luke’s elementary school to the big thinkers at Sandia’s Advanced Concepts group to his students to the faculty to the stalwart defenders of evolution in our schools to his extended family.
I cried when I sat down and opened the program they had prepared for the service to find this:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. 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 into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling 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.