Welcome back to Get Fit Guy. My name's Kevin and I'm the host. This week I watched a fallacious

video on Instagram. I'll tell you about the video, why it was fallacious, and then my take on the message

from the video. So yeah, another Instagram guru had posted a video of a plant,

which he was trying to grow in a little kind of light box greenhouse type situation.

The plant was being watered very regularly and had as much light as it needed to grow. When he came to

transfer the plant out of the greenhouse, it toppled over because its roots weren't deep in the

soil. The message that he gave from the video was that the plant was weak due to it having a perfect

existence. The further message being that

bad things are supposed to happen to you in order to make you more resilient. Nice message,

but why fallacious? Well, because it's leveraging an informal fallacy called the false comparison

or the false equivalence. Humans are humans and plants are

plants. It's quite difficult to take a life lessons from a plant and apply it to a human successfully,

especially when it's a human interpreting the lesson of the plant. Anyway, some plants also just have

shallow roots. Think about crops that you might eat like carrots.

They're really close to the surface and you just pull them out by hand. That doesn't make a carrot

weak. And all organisms adapt to their environment. So the plants in the light box didn't need to

grow really deep roots because they were receiving adequate water. This doesn't mean they

can't grow deeper roots. What I do agree with, though, is that adaptation does require stress.

All organisms respond to the external environment, and people that spend more time in the sun

have darker complexions. People that lift weights have bigger muscles

and plants that receive more water have shallower roots.

This external stress or lack of stress is what drives us to adapt across time.

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