Truth vs. truth: What do claimants to Truth have in common? Whatever it is, it's not truth.
Perfection Isn't: The author explains why describes how the human notion of perfection isn't always the optimal choice for a situation, highlighting the common misunderstanding that evolution designs organisms towards a perfect state.
My baby has eczema. Eczema is an inflammatory condition of the skin characterized by redness, itching and oozing vesicular lesions which become scaly, crusted, or hardened (and thank you for that, Merriam-Webster!). What this means for my baby is that his face, trunk and upper arms are spotted with itchy red sores, which obviously distress him, lead to poor sleep (for him and therefore everybody), and cause him to scratch so vigorously as to routinely bloody himself. The eczema has also put a stop to what would surely otherwise have been a promising career as a plus-sized baby model.
I was sitting in Starbucks the other day reading a book and drinking my coffee when I chanced to overhear two people at the next table. One of them was working on getting the other one enrolled in a distributorship for MonaVie. This is a fruit drink which contains, as it's main ingredient, the Acai berry. I'm not going to speak to the medical claims and supposed curative properties of this berry, but lets say it sounds like it can cure everything from the common cold to chronic fatigue to cancer. In fact it was so good at what it did apparently the FDA forbids the company from making any claims about it's curative properties. Very curious indeed.
The weight loss industry is lousy with outrageous and untested claims, but probably none more egregious than this one. Beyond being outright professed everywhere from infomercials to the supermarket, this claim underlies much of the misinformation floating around regarding nutrition and metabolism. As we'll see, the idea that you'll lose weight as you gorge yourself with Twinkies (or whatever whatever you want constitutes) violates a physical concept so basic to the universe that you probably didn't even know that it has a name.
You don't need to be a doctor. You don't even need to play a doctor on TV. These days, if you want to give medical advice to the population at large, it's enough to merely be on television.
The problem of celebrities dispensing dangerous nonsense about medical science is nothing new, but it recently reached a new level with the publication of Jenny McCarthy's Louder than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism.
The simple word "truth" means different things to different people. Deeply religious people might consider their faith to be "truth," while researchers might strive to find "truth" via confirming their scientific hypotheses in the laboratory. Are these people talking about the same thing when they say "truth"? If not, are the competing "truths" reconcilable or are they fundamentally opposed; that is--is one group of "truth"-seekers wrong? More importantly, is it even meaningful to discuss "truth" at all?
