One Apple A Day #121
How many time have you heard the expression “The human body is a perfect machine”?
Personally, a lot. Everywhere and from all types of people. The very religious one use it to prove that God knows his job. Or mother nature, if they are not religious. The healers to convince that you already have what you need to cure yourself. The scientists to explain their never-ending quest to understand how the body works. Even the machine builders use the human body as their blueprint to build robots and machines.
But is it true?
The idea that the human body is an example of perfection can be daunting. If my body is so perfect why I am not? For a long time, I thought that there was something broken in my software. I mean, if the hardware is perfect by definition than the problem must be in the software that runs it. So, there must be some glitches in my mind, or soul, that compromise the system despite the perfection of the body.
A few years ago, during my summer break, I was enjoying a sunny day in the south of Italy. I love to read novels when I’m on holiday but that day I run out of books on my Kindle, and there was no connection to buy something else. So I started reading a book about anxiety and fears by an Italian physiologist. I don’t remember how it happened that have such a book in my library, at that time I wasn’t interested in not fictional books, but it was the only unread one.
I still remember the shiver on my back when the author, at the very beginning, challenged the idea of the perfection of our body.
How can we say that the human body is perfect when cancer can grow inside us without any perceivable sign while a not so dangerous thing like kidney stones are so damn painful?
That was a shock. The idea that our body is not perfect opened up a new world to me. Perfection doesn’t exist. That’s it. Everything is always changing, so there can’t be such thing as perfection. How liberating is it to realise that nothing is perfect?
I am fascinated by what scientists and engineers are doing in fields like robotic and artificial intelligence with their continuous improvement aiming to perfection. But, I think that our natural imperfection is the one things that we can’t recreate and that makes us so human.