Good grief. > Indeed, most of the illnesses and conditions that are the focus of epigenetic research, except for cancer, are contested conditions. One reason t

Good grief. > Indeed, most of the illnesses and conditions that are the focus of epigenetic research, except for cancer, are contested conditions. One reason they are contested is that many of them have come into being through measurements and statistics that effectively define illness as a deviation from a norm rather than as an underlying pathology. Just as type II diabetes is now defined by elevated blood-glucose levels (rather than a set of symptoms), the Body Mass Index (BMI) clinically diagnoses obesity as a larger than average (or what used to be average) weight-to-height ratio. It does not actually measure adiposity; in fact, a high BMI can be the result of large amounts of bone or muscle as easily as fat. Meanwhile, IQ has long been under attack as a culturally biased and non-objective way to measure intelligence. Type II diabetes: does the author not believe a disease can be present before noticeable symptoms? Obesity: the shortfalls of BMI are well-known; I doubt there are a lot of doctors out there who see an athlete with a high BMI and think, "time to burn some of that muscle" Brain damage: the author is attacking their own choice of metric for the condition, in order to... deny the condition's existence??