Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable.

The idea of people as autonomous individuals has become something of a mantra in recent years, but in fact most of us make decisions within a social or family context.

And liposuction (not, admittedly, something that most doctors would recommend) would be expected to make things worse, since it would get rid of the source of the hormones that regulate lipids.