Living Longer Is the Best Revenge: "The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of world civilization...
The chief moral lesson I take away from this report is that Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.
But she does want you to eat the occasional Cinnabon, so long as it isn't bigger than Delaware. She wants you to have that fourth glass of wine, and lecture the dinner table on the future of the papacy based on your extensive reading of "The Da Vinci Code." She wants a little socially productive mediocrity.
Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by. As it says in the Good Book, the last shall sometimes be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, and the chubby will get extra biscuits at the breakfast buffet. "
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I hate to skeptical but I take all scientific reports especially anything medical or any sponsored by the government with a grain of salt. (Bad pun...)
UPDATE: I got a kick out of the anonymous comment on this post I received - click on it and read it too. -WAA, 4:15pm, 042405.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
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Brooks Brooks No Scientific Literacy
I was unfit to read Brooks' column today (April 24, 2005) asserting that "fat and happy" somehow disproves Darwin's theory of evolution. Maybe he was trying to be humourous rather than contribute to the theocrats' propaganda against evolution, but it seemed suspicious to say "Darwin was wrong about the survival of the fittest" as if fat people can't be the "fittest." The word fittest doesn't always connote physically fit as in athletic and fat free. To Darwin it meant to be apropriate or suitable to fit in a particular niche of an ecosystem. Plants and animals develop through natural selection of variations that increase the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. So slightly fatter people who survive longer in our modern habitat with its sedentary lifestyle may actually PROVE Darwin's point! But maybe not, because the "fat and happy" research is dealing with people way past reproductive age. I guess Brooks knows that but was using our national lack of scientific literacy to mislead. That's one reason I can't brook Brooks.
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