180 Degree Errors

Have you ever stopped to consider that it’s often easier to be completely wrong than just a little wrong? Consider this; when you’re trying to get somewhere in the car, is it more likely that you miss your destination by a few hundred yards, or that you “turned right instead of left,” or found yourself “going in the opposite direction?” Now, how does that apply to science? The more common way to describe a 180 degree error in science is a “cause & effect reversal.” Let me give you an example of a cause/effect reversal that almost everyone takes for granted: “Clean your plate, so you can grow up to be big and strong.” What child hasn’t heard that admonition, and what mother, father, or grandparent hasn’t uttered it? But in the sense it implies that eating more causes children to grow, it’s completely false. In fact, the reverse is true. As children, we don’t eat more so we can cause ourselves to grow bigger than we already are. We grow bigger than we are, and the effect is that we eat more in order to sustain our larger base metabolism. Growth hormone causes growth. Food is just the raw…