True Horizon

As we consider the ramifications and moral implications of the technological push for genetic manipulation, it is enlightening to see how proponents of the associated research view the surrounding issues. Newsweek magazine offers us indications about that topic in its recent article about James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA, who recently agreed to have his entire genetic blueprint sequenced and made public. Watson, who says he was motivated to reveal his genome because he has “always wanted to be a hero,” believes that his example will motivate others to do the same. The result will not only “make people healthier” by giving them information that can prevent disease, he also holds out hope that “it will make people more compassionate.”

Sounds good. But reading a little further gives a glimpse into what Watson means when he says these things. The sound bites resonate with us all, but the implications of those sound bites, in my opinion, are chilling. Remember, Watson is the man who has previously “endorsed designer babies, genetic engineering to make ‘all girls pretty,’ and curing ‘stupidity’ through genetics.”

With those views in mind, consider some of Watson’s other comments:

We’ll understand why people can’t do certain things … Instead of asking a child to shape up, we’ll stop having unrealistic expectations … We’ll want to help rather than be mad. If a child doesn’t finish high school, we treat that as a failure, as his fault. But knowing someone’s full genetic information will keep us from making him do things he’ll fail at.

It is no secret that Watson is a full-blown Darwinian materialist. He is proud of that fact. What is more veiled about that position are the implications that flow from it. Here Watson gives us a sliver of revelation about where they lead. The main point that comes through here is that Watson and his ilk believe that genes are destiny. This is the inevitable end of a pure materialist view of the world. (Read on …)

I’ve been flying airplanes for 25+ years now and it has never occurred to me to jump out of one — unless, of course, it was on fire. So when my wife and kids surprised me for Father’s Day with a skydiving ticket I was, shall we say, less than enthused. They told me I could wait to decide whether or not I really wanted to do it.

“Yeah Dad,” said my oldest (home from West Point with his first two free fall jumps completed and scheduled for his third with me), “we can just go out to dinner or something … and you can wear your dress.”
That was enough to put me over the edge — literally. If you’ve seen previews for the reality show “Wedding Crashers” on NBC, my instructor is the guy who skydives into the wedding party and destroys the gazebo. He’s a piece of work.

While “training” me he covered all contingencies and added, “Now if there is a problem with the reserve chute, I need you to take a deep breath, relax and hold it for about 20 seconds … that way you will be my airbag when we hit the ground.”

Nice.

During the free fall from 13,000′ to 5000′, he seemed less concerned than I was about our situation. Is he really asleep while I’m checking our altitude?!

Anyway, it was the most exhilarating thing I think I’ve ever done. No way to describe it.

I have had an infatuation with flying since I was 5 or 6 years old. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. But after 25 years of actually doing it, flying has become nothing more than a job to me … with four exceptions. The first was my introduction to soaring with my friend Buddy Denham in a two-seat glider at Woodbine, Maryland in 1984. The second was entering “the break” (traffic pattern) at 400 knots, then stopping in mid-air in my first hop in a Harrier in 1986. The third was a Stearman (open cockpit bi-plane) ride in California’s wine country with my best friend (and wife) as a 40th birthday gift in 1999. This was the fourth.

Each of them is burned into my memory forever. When I dreamed of flying as a kid these were what the dreams were made of. Quiet, peaceful, free from “the surly bonds of earth,” gazing down at the majesty of the Creation. It is good to be reminded of what first drew me to the air.

My thanks and love to my wife and kids for an afternoon I will never forget.

I stumbled on two separate stories this week that struck me as too coincidental to ignore.

The first was an article in Discover about a California plastic surgeon’s realization that beauty seems to be related to mathematics. In this case Doctor Stephen Marquardt, seeking to perfect the results of his surgical facial reconstructions, went about trying to uncover what it is that “beautiful” people hold in common. What Marquardt discovered was the “eerie proportional coincidences” that kept recurring in the ratio of the width of beautiful people’s mouths to the width of their noses (1.618), of the width of their noses to the tips of their noses (1.618), or that the triangle formed by their noses and mouths was a strangely recurrent perfect acute golden triangle.

If you are a mathematician you might recognize those ratio and terms as being significant in the natural world. In fact, that ratio (which has been more accurately calculated as 1.61803398874989484820458683436 … but I digress) is defined as a “unique ratio such that the ratio of the whole to the larger portion is the same as the ratio of the larger portion to the smaller portion. As such, it symbolically links each new generation to its ancestors, preserving the continuity of relationship as the means for retracing its lineage.”

This ratio, and the aesthetically pleasing Golden Triangle derived from it, shows up in human-designed objects like the pleasant-to-the-eye, commonly accepted shapes of rectangles used to frame pictures, or the triangle-faced sides of the Great Pyramids – placed there by intentionally by their human designers. But what is more notable is that humans design such things with this ratio in mind in the deliberate attempt to mimic its appearance in the natural world in such disparate locations as the infamous mathematical Fibonacci Sequence, the spirally expanding geometry of the Chambered Nautilus shell, the similarly appealing geometry of flower petals, or in the famously “perfect” proportions of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man.

It seems, in other words, that this mathematical concept not only keeps showing up in our natural world but that, when it does, it invokes in us a sense of pleasure that we have come to know as beauty. Notice however that the real seat of what we call beauty is not, as we have been told ad nauseam, in the subjective “eye of the beholder.” It is really an objective trait built into the object which we, as observers, are only wired to recognize – even if we can’t say why. (Read on …)