Pine Nuts with McAvoy Layne: Love Your Mother
Submitted by editor on Tue, 04/12/2022 - 9:36am
Reason suggests that if nature exhibits symmetry and design, nature must have a designer, so mankind has been kept pretty busy over the ages crediting that design to various deities and creators. Were I superintending, I would give full credit to the rightful designer, the original creator, our dear mother herself, in all her glory, Mother Nature.
Well, help is on the way. In a paper published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers are discovering that nature produces symmetry because it’s easier to follow the building blocks of symmetrical genetic code than it is to produce and follow asymmetry.
We do have to admire Mother Nature, the artist. Have you ever taken a close look at a Fox Glove flower? How she sprinkles those little spots inside the flower is a mystery to me, and gives me cause to wonder if there might be a deity guiding the brush strokes that create Mother Nature’s art. Maybe we’ll find out on the other side, I hope so.
As I gaze daily upon Tahoe’s scenic splendor, I try to capture her waters as they evaporate, but I can’t seem to do it. There are many fascinating things operating around us that we cannot see because we are, well, only human.
It follows, that if there is symmetry in the cosmos, we might be one of those little spots that adorn the inside of the Fox Glove flower.
Better minds than mine have examined the possibilities inherent in such imaginings, but I am satisfied, for the moment at least, in siding with Mother Nature as the original creator, and tipping my hat to her holiness.
Personally, the older I get the more I notice and appreciate symmetry. How does Mother Nature, I ask you, produce a Tahoe snowflake that is so absolutely perfect?
Some folks I have talked to about this matter have suggested that it is my being a Virgo that makes me sensitive to symmetry, and I plead guilty to that charge.
If I see a car parked just a little bit wonky, I always feel an urge to ask the owner of that car for the keys so I can climb inside and park it straight. Perhaps that explains why I am so much in love with Mother Nature. She’s not perfect, I would like to have a gizzard or two, and a second liver maybe, but until I can get my arms around Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, I will be happy to skip along jaunty-jolly with the little symmetry Mother Nature has gifted me.
Yes, for now I will be content to gaze out upon the Masterpiece of the Creator, Lake Tahoe, and take comfort in knowing that in my not being a symmetrical person, well, I might at least be scientific proof that symmetrical people do make better dancers.
— For more than 30 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American."
Go here to listen to this and other McAvoy Layne columns.
