In the near future, people have begun to select and engineer their offspring to remove any unwanted physical disabilities. Myopia, rather than afflicting nearly half of the population, is now a mark of weakness branded on the invalid population; that is, the people who were not engineered at birth.
I know a great deal more about genetics now than I did a year ago. I therefore now know that Gattaca is a huge stretch of the imagination. In the film, based on blood or urine samples alone, a person's risk of disease, intelligence, life expectancy, and even likelihood to become mentally unstable, can be determined. What technology could possibly predict these things from just the biochemical properties of a drop of blood, I cannot imagine. I suppose this is my version of being unable to suspend belief. When physicists watch a space opera, their conscious minds scream and yell during every space battle. Here, my own mind writhes uncomfortably at these seemingly magical properties of DNA.
It is much different here, a serious, dramatic story, than from a lighter piece of fiction such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I think of the DNA analysis in Gattaca, I also think of the Total Perspective Vortex, a machine that simulates the entire universe based on the properties of a piece of fairy cake.
Up until actually reading that book, I had no idea that the term "fairy cake" existed. Turns out that a fairy cake is a cupcake.
Cupcakes are to muffins like donuts are to bagels. Bagels are like donuts, but they're lopsided. They taste different. They don't often have a layer of sugar, or white chocolate, or mint cream on them. The bagel is really just a piece of bread that happened to take the form of a torus. There is no reason for the bagel to do so, as the torus conformation of the donut is simply to ensure the lowest amount of calories in its central region. Bagels, seeing as that they are composed mainly of bread, are not rich in calories. Thus, the hole in the middle is not only completely and utterly unnecessary, but also represents the gaping void that the bread overlords(these are real people) store our money in.
In the confectionariosphere, bagels probably share a common ancestor with donuts. However, they would have branched off quite early in their phylogenetic history, an observation supported by how different their biochemical properties are. More likely is the hypothesis that states that bagels evolved their torus shape as a means to keep their kind in existence by mimicking the donut, a far superior organism. I mean, food. This is akin to the way the harmless king snake has a similar coloration to the more magnificent and potent coral snake.
On a side note, I sometimes have dreams where I play Russian Roulette with snakes instead of bullets. It never really works very well. Snake guns just can't happen.
According to On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Flavoured Food Items in the Struggle to be Produced and Sold for Profit, which I will write eventually, all confectioneries share a common ancestor. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the common ancestor is some sort of starch-water conglomerate. However, it is important to note the possibility that certain items may have arisen independently. For instance, the English scone is rather difficult to classify. It has a rather unique property of being unnaturally dense for a bread-type food product. The only other similarly dense food is the muffin, but the muffin clearly falls under the Desserya kingdom, while the scone is sort of a cross between a large wallnut and a stick of butter.
Another interesting grouping to take note of are the cakes. Cakes are traditionally defined by their spongey, sweetened bread-like masses held together by a matrix of coagulated egg protein. Over the centuries, cakes have evolved to become extremely diverse. Many modern-day cakes possess outer coverings of crystallised cane sugar, or fusions of churned milk fat and artifical sweetening agents. Commonly mistaken for cakes are gelatinous cheesecakes. The gelatinous cheesecake is in fact, not a cake, but rather an agar that rests upon a base of delicious cookie crumbs.
Yum.
I actually like the base a lot more than the "cake". I also sense that I should stop writing this now.
-Joe