The Known World

The known world keeps getting larger and more complex.  I like the term "known world."  It is the dividing line between ideologies.  It has become, for me, the intersection that divides us.

The world is larger for some of us than for others.  "The Known World" is a compilation  against which we stake the world we know.  Neither world is "The True World" in that each keeps changing.

Truth.  There is another concept that divides us.  Just the concept. How we think of it is a median that is difficult to cross.  Do you believe that truths are out their waiting to be discovered like some lost treasures, or do you subscribe to the notion that they are inventions of the human mind?

Today, the known world expanded.  A census of life in the world's oceans was released that reveals thousands of new species.  The oceans and seas are richer in life than we ever knew.  Twenty percent of ocean life is composed of crustaceans.  The richest waters in the world surround Japan and Australia.  This news expanded my known world but did not shake it.  Another seemingly innocuous bit of information released yesterday did, however.  It will seem minute to you, probably, but for me, it was world-shattering.

Fat.  Science has long held that there were two types of fat cell growth, hypertplastic and hypertrophic.  In childhood, it was believed, hyperplastic growth occurs, that is, the body increases the number of fat cells in the body.  Children who were overweight in childhood, it was thought, would have the potential for retaining more body fat as adults.  Hypertrophic growth, growth in the size of a fat cell, occurred in adults, but the body no longer created new cells for fat storage.

I remember reading that in the medical library at college while doing research for a paper I was writing.  I was a zoology major then and loved scientific truths, for they were so rare in the common, daily world from which I came.  Scientific truths were gems that sparkled in a dull land full of misinformation and opinion.  I remember the very table where I sat in the library that day close to the shelf of books from which I was working.

Today, I received the contradiction.  It has been found that in parts of the body, hyperplastic growth continues throughout life.  Not everywhere, but in the femoral parts of the body.

You are astounded, no?

It sounds crazy, but for reasons I can't explain here (or anywhere really), that information has been important to me.  My world has shifted, but there is something else, too.  Those who have not held that "truth," those who didn't care, those who didn't believe--they've been "right" all along.  And I. . . I have been "wrong."

I try to succor myself with the new census of sea life.  It reifies what I always believed.  The ocean is rich.  It is responsible for most of the world's oxygen.  It tempers our climate and absorbs CO2.  It is our mother.  It is boundless.

Now I must think about the new genetically altered plants that will absorb more CO2 and give off more O2 than the ones humans have grown up with.  And there is a man who has had an implant that lets him turn the lights in his house on and off just by thinking.

The "known world."  Try it sometime.