ABSTRACT
Imagine that you are on an intercontinental flight and that immediately after takeoff the pilot makes the following announcement:
Dear passengers, I hope you will join me in celebrating a wonderful achievement of one of our navigators. His name is Vincent. Vincent's childhood dream was to become an airplane navigator but unfortunately he was declared unfit for the job because of his serious heart condition. True, he does occasionally have symptoms of heart disease, like shortness of breath and chest pain, yet he is certainly not the kind of person to be deterred from pursuing his dream so easily. Being quite convinced that he is up to the task and that everything would be fine Vincent decided to falsify his medical records. And indeed, with the clean bill of health readily forged and attached to his application, he smoothly managed to get the plum job and is very proud to take care of your safety today. Can we please get some applause for Vincent's accomplishment and perseverance in the face of adversity? And, by the way, keep your seat belts tightly fastened during the entire flight.
I somehow doubt that in such a situation you would clap enthusiastically, or that you would vote for Vincent as the airline employee of the month. I bet that, on the contrary, you would be outraged that he used deception and irresponsibly put other people's lives at risk to achieve his selfish goal. But why then do we react so differently when we are confronted with that other Vincent, the main character in the movie Gattaca (1997), who basically does the same thing? Why do we admire him? I will try to show that this is all the work of silver screen magic. The remainder of this essay will provide a detailed explanation of how this illusion of heroism has been produced. But just to pique your curiosity, let me just briefly describe the main trick that the Hollywood wizards pulled on us here. They first dramatized things by building into their science-fiction scenario some very strong assumptions about the power of genetic predictions, but later they did everything to suppress the awareness of clear logical implications of these very assumptions.