On one of my frequent trips to Lübeck, Germany while working for Draeger Medical, I got to talking with a German physicist I met in the gate area. He lived in Hamburg and worked for Philips Electric. During the conversation, he told me about the fact that Philips held the joint patent on the CD disc technology. That caught my attention and I told him that I had a question.
“Suppose that one were to take a CD disc full of information and copy it to another disc. Then they were to copy the copy to a third disc and then copy the copy of the copy to yet another disc and so on, always copying the latest copy to the successive disc. Now, after 1000 copies, if they were to compare the information on the first disc with that on disc number 1000, would they find that all the information was still perfectly intact?”
“Yes!” he told me emphatically. “Philips has developed a very robust copying routine and had built in lots of safeguards and error checking to assure that the data is copied properly.”
“OK,” I said. “Now suppose that you are God, and that you have just put the first human genome onto earth. Your expectation is that this genome will be copied and the copy copied and the copy of the copy copied and so on until here you and I are, many generations later talking together and looking very much like most of the original information has been preserved. Do you think, that if you were God, that you would have built a careful set of rules around that copying process, such as morality, sexual purity, loving parenting, and nurturing family values? Wouldn’t following such guidelines be important for the successful transmittal of our humanness from generation to generation? Wouldn’t they be just as important as all those rules that Philips developed for governing the duplication of data from one disc to another?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I never thought about reproduction in those terms before!”
We often lose sight of the fact that our sexuality is one God's greatest gift to mankind and that we should not use it as some plaything. How often people forget that the rules God places around us are not to make us miserable, but to make us viable!
“Suppose that one were to take a CD disc full of information and copy it to another disc. Then they were to copy the copy to a third disc and then copy the copy of the copy to yet another disc and so on, always copying the latest copy to the successive disc. Now, after 1000 copies, if they were to compare the information on the first disc with that on disc number 1000, would they find that all the information was still perfectly intact?”
“Yes!” he told me emphatically. “Philips has developed a very robust copying routine and had built in lots of safeguards and error checking to assure that the data is copied properly.”
“OK,” I said. “Now suppose that you are God, and that you have just put the first human genome onto earth. Your expectation is that this genome will be copied and the copy copied and the copy of the copy copied and so on until here you and I are, many generations later talking together and looking very much like most of the original information has been preserved. Do you think, that if you were God, that you would have built a careful set of rules around that copying process, such as morality, sexual purity, loving parenting, and nurturing family values? Wouldn’t following such guidelines be important for the successful transmittal of our humanness from generation to generation? Wouldn’t they be just as important as all those rules that Philips developed for governing the duplication of data from one disc to another?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I never thought about reproduction in those terms before!”
We often lose sight of the fact that our sexuality is one God's greatest gift to mankind and that we should not use it as some plaything. How often people forget that the rules God places around us are not to make us miserable, but to make us viable!
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