The Misleading Case of Fruits and Vegetables

So, I am sure that you have heard the a tomato is a fruit. or a pepper, or eggplant, or pumpkin. Many times people will follow up this claim with a funny joke. Everyone thinks they are very clever for besting the people that first called these fruits vegetables.

You may already see where I am going with this: It is not exactly true.

The confusion stems from how we use the words "fruit" and "vegetable". First, let me provide the relevant definitions of both.

Fruit:

1. The seed-bearing part of a plant, often edible, colorful and fragrant, produced from a floral ovary after fertilization.
2. Any sweet, edible part of a plant that resembles seed-bearing fruit, even if it does not develop from a floral ovary; also used in a technically imprecise sense for some sweet or sweetish vegetables, such as rhubarb, that resemble a true fruit or are used in cookery as if they were a fruit.

Vegetable:

1. Any plant.
2. A plant raised for some edible part of it, such as the leaves, roots, fruit or flowers, but excluding any plant considered to be a fruit, grain, or spice in the culinary sense.

So, it depends on the definition. If you use the scientific definitions of both, then all fruits are vegetables. If you use the culinary definitions, then everything is the same as we have known since childhood. If we use the scientific definition for fruit and the culinary definition for vegetable, then we end up with people telling us that tomatoes are a fruit.


It seems what people have done is set up a false choice. the well-known term: "You're either part of the solution or part of the problem." had been turned into: "You're either a fruit or a vegetable.". Except that in either case there can be other choices. You can be neither part of the solution nor the problem; living in the middle of the woods somewhere with zero carbon foot-print. Just as you can be both a fruit(scientific) and a vegetable(culinary); a cucumber that is the fleshy ovary of the plant while also going in a traditional salad.

This fallacy, a form of the false dilemma, is an example of a logically invalid argument that easily creeps into our minds and wrongly convinces us that something makes sense. And these things are hard to kick, too. As far as I know, they are part of our thought-process.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of logical fallacies if you would like to see which other ones you may unknowingly commit: List of Fallacies.

Hello everyone!

This is the very first post on my new blog, nani gigantum humeris insidentes. That is latin for Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Of course, being the ancient Greek fanatic that I am, I wanted to call the blog νάνοι ίστάντες επί τοῖς ὧμοις γιγάντων (painstakingly translated by me with my limited grammar skills). Alas, I realized the Greek letters would be harder to google let alone read. So, I stuck with Latin.

I created this blog with the idea that I can use interesting topics to educate people about science.  I am going to stick to that idea as much as possible, however, sometimes I may veer off on a tangent. Please bear with me.

To start us off I will give a quick overview of science. <---That image, of course, is not a good representation of science. I thought it was funny.

Today, science is equated with the scientific method. It was not always that way and Wikipedia, fortunately, has a very well sourced article that discusses the history of science. So, we can skip that topic.

What is the scientific method in a nut shell? It is a standardized method for asking questions and attempting to answer them objectively. In essence, it is a highly developed and thought out form of natural inquiry. Ask a question about reality, gather as much information as you can find, form a hypothesis that explains your question, test your hypothesis with experiments. That is scientific inquiry. However, even that is not sufficient to answer a question. It must be shown that the conclusions drawn by the experiments are repeatable and statistically valid.

Eventually we can stitch together many conclusions of many experiemnts to paint a bigger picture of reality. That bigger picture we call a scientific theory. Please do not confuse that with the colloquial term "theory," which is akin to a poorly formed hypothesis.

So you see, we as people stand on the vast body of knowledge that was left by our fellow people before us. We use the knowledge to take one leap further than they did. Always moving forward. Always learning more about the space that we find ourselves in. Science is a standardized and proven method to collect and gather this body of knowledge that has naturally gained favor as the best and most useful method.

By building on this vast knowledge we have characterized  many natural phenomena very well. We have worked out tiny phenomena: a neuron functioning or how muscles work. And we have worked out large phenomena: the composition of stars or plate tectonics.

Hence, the name of my blog. We are all dwarves. However, at this time, we have the advantage of standing on the shoulders of some pretty tall giants.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants" - Sir Isaac Newton


PS as you can see, I enjoy linking Wikipedia articles to my posts. Wikipedia is generally frowned upon because it is a secondary source. However, it is useful for compiling information. As long as you remain highly critical of anything in a Wikipedia article and check the primary sources as they pertain to the specific information you want, then you will be fine. Wikipedia is generally good at explaining well established scientific theory.