Anomaly and Norm

The Adaptability of Life Between Anatomy and Biology

Anomaly and Norm: a match of terms in apparent juxtaposition. If something is considered “anomalous” it is in relation to a model that is considered “normal”.

But how does the concept according to which something is the norm and something else is an anomaly arise in our culture? In ancient Greece, at the roots of our civilization, the world is “cosmo” word that means order: the world is organized based on an ideal model that is eternal and divine, says the philosopher Platon, and becomes, despite its incompleteness, the norm: humans have to reflect this ideal putting effort to be kalòs kai agathòs, “beautiful and good”, tending to moral and physical “perfection”. Everything that doesn’t conform to this ideal “norm” is not accepted at a social level, it becomes anomalous. This concept passed to the culture of ancient Rome, less inclined to philosophy and more tied to religion in which the anomalous, the deformed ends up becoming a monstrum, a sign that the gods send to humans.

With the spread of Christianity the natural order corresponds to the norm because that’s how the God creator decided it to be like. Everything that is in the world even if imperfect, because humans have committed the original sin, has its own reason to exist: in the history of the world and of humanity there is a “providential” misterious design that forces us to accept even what seems like contrary to the natural order.

From the 17th century experimental science gives little space to the “divine” in the world: the anomalous becomes “pathological”, disfunctional compared to “normal” organs as it is able to maintain the “health” of the body. It is therefore the alteration of a development process of the organism that origins the anomalous, and that an organism that was born normal can get sick over the course of his life. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, developmental biology studies the vital processes that lead to a monstrum in the modern sense of the term: therefore it is understood that the anomalous individual has followed development processes similar to those of a normal individual but at some point that dynamic was interrupted and the anomalous emerged. The anomaly helps us comprehend and define what is “normal”.

With the 19th century the concept of human species destined to stay the same for eternity changes. Charles Darwin discovers that all the animal species, including humans, “evolve” through the appearance of “random variations in individuals” (that today we’ll define them like genetic mutations): these variations make the human species no longer “immutable”. Not all the “genetic abnormalities” have been pathological in the history of the human species, since some of them between the individuals of a population have favored the adaptation to the environment, in other words they have offered material to the natural selection. The transmission through a hereditary path of the “new” characters derived from these variations puts who inherits those characters in advantage as compared to other individuals inside that environment. Without “abnormalities”, therefore, there wouldn’t have been evolution…

Nowadays the anomalies, except those who are clearly identified as pathological, that need to be treated, are indexes of diversification, at the base of the irreplaceable “singularity” of each human being to physical and psychological level: the “ideal human”, defined as an approximation to a rigidly established norm doesn’t exist anymore . Medicine itself is increasingly moving towards a personalization of treatment, society is becoming more “inclusive”, because today we have understood that

anomaly is the norm

“Anomaly” and “norm” are therefore specular concepts that complement each other: the “norm” simply indicates an statistical average that, described like that, doesn’t exist in reality. This is the reason why, seen from up close, we are all a little abnormal… and instead of stubbornly persisting on arriving to an unattainable “ideal”, let’s accept ourselves in our own “uniqueness” that is… perfectly “imperfect”: only a praise to imperfection will save us, helping us to better live the life that destiny has given us.