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Don't hate your body too much, it's the most amazing machine on the planet
Thursday, 14 December 2006
We live in a society fixated on machines and gadgets. The media obsesses over iPods, BMWs, laptops and phones. And we consumers gobble up every titbit of information available on those topics.
Yet all of these appliances are mere toys compared to the most amazing machine on the planet - your own body. Just spending a few moments thinking about what an astonishing piece of equipment it actually is can be a worthwhile exercise.
The human body is a machine that builds itself. At the point of conception, little exists of it except an instruction-set contained in genetic material. This instruction-set grabs resources from its environment, and starts building a machine from them. It takes years to finalize itself into an adult human body, but is still an astonishing process.
And what a machine!
Consider just one part of it - the heart. It's a device which generally operates 3600 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 70 years or more without stopping to rest for even one minute. Or think of the liver, a chemical factory which deals with all sorts of inputs as they arrive and turns them into the complex outputs the body requires.
Each of your hands are manipulating devices with a versatility that engineers have never come close to equaling. They can punch, lift, type, play the piano, thread a needle and communicate (thumbs up!).They can maneuver objects with amazing accuracy and grace. Our hands have built the human world we live in, either directly or by creating and operating the machines that do so.
Your arms and legs are amazing transport devices. Sure, a car or a train may be faster, but they're also much less flexible. There aren't many environments that get the better of our legs. They can walk on ice, plains, mountains or boulders. Combined with our arms we can climb a tree, swim a river, or crawl through a tunnel.
Our brains are the most powerful computers in the world. They can't add as fast as a silicon chip, but they can write poetry, compose music, design bridges and invent games. All the products in our human world - from the space shuttle, to the chair, to the English language - are the products of our minds. Our brains and hands built everything you see out of nothing but the rocks, water, fire and other basic parts nature provided us with. Tasks that our brains consider trivial have baffled computer scientist for decades.
As well as having the ability to combine all these incredible parts into one living, thinking whole, our bodies also have a remarkable ability to heal themselves. Medicine may have advanced greatly in the last thousand years, but its ability to fight injury and disease pale in comparison to the mechanisms the body already has in place. Indeed, most medicine merely leverages these existing systems.
The body has the ability to filter poisons from the blood, fight diseases, and heal broken parts of itself - often without any outside help. What man-made machine comes close to having such amazing self-defense systems?
For all our remarkable engineering achievements, we've never come close to producing machines as elegant, flexible and useful as many of those in our bodies. We're also a long way from machines that can build and heal themselves.
Yet despite all these things, many people hate their bodies. They think they're the wrong shape, the wrong height, the wrong color or have hair in the wrong places. They obsess over the minutia of their body's imperfections instead of appreciating the genius of its design.
This is a shame, because your body is the most amazing machine on the planet. Take some time to appreciate it every now and again.
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