TOW #4: Survival of the Sickest (IRB)

            In his classes at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Sharon Moalem's main goal is to completely alter the current understanding of illness for his students. It wasn't until 1990, during the initial emergence of evolutionary medicine as a field of study, that Moalem decided to publish these revolutionary ideas on illness into a complete and coherent piece of literature. This work, titled, Survival of the Sickest, examines the reasons for many conditions that are diseases today and why he believes they actually gave a leg up in what he calls "survival sweepstakes". In Survival of the Sickest, Moalem takes the fundamental idea taught in his classes and generalizes it to wider perspective, expanding it past the science field and thus to a greater audience -- the general public. His true goal in writing this book is not simply to provoke a new way of thinking towards biological sciences (though he does make a point to prove why it is necessary in such an area of study) but, rather, to inspire a new way of thinking in all areas of life in order to end parochialism.
              Though I've only completed half of the book, a significant amount of rhetorical devices utilized by Dr. Sharon Moalem have already become apparent. So far in the book, Moalem has successfully used appeals to logos, satirical humor, and simple diction in order to form a connection with audience members as a way to convince them of the negatives associated with parochial thinking. His appeals to logos include many references to statistics taken from The World Health Organization and a vast amount of medical studies. These statistics then serve to give numerical value to the points Moalem makes, giving logical reasoning to negate simple, linear thought. His humor is utilized in order to create an enjoyable flow to his writing and effectively overcome the negative connotation toward scientific writing. Most effective, however, is his use of the vernacular to describe fairly complex scientific concepts to the everyday person. This simple choice of diction allows for audience members to understand arguments being presented. It is this break from traditional didactic writing that makes the book so successful in achieving its purpose.