Thursday, October 18, 2007

Even the Bible Says so!

I imagine every journalist has three books sitting on their desk: a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a Bible: a thesaurus when you want a better word, a dictionary when you don't know what it means, and a Bible when you want to show that your idea is tried-and-true.

And that is exactly what the New York Times did in a brief article article on the evolutionary function of Grandmothers. Think that grandma's are a product of twentieth-century nutrition? the article asks. Think again:
Plenty of women were living well past age 40, Dr. Hawkes said. Even the Bible recognized that women can live well beyond their fertile years, NAMS executive director Dr. Wulf Utian noted.
See? even the Bible had grandmas. It is a good thing that journalists have their Bibles, or we might not have a cultural history to turn to when we need to check where we are in relationship to where we were. And this is exactly, possibly the only, bible bending we should allow.

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