The Three Horsemen of an Evolutionary Apocalypse, Part 1: Obesity

Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Silenus, c. 1618 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

As a tentative evolutionist, I must acknowledge limitations for human progress due to certain unchanging characteristics of men. Contrary to the blank-slate theoreticians of the post-Enlightenment, man is not a fundamentally rational or good creature.

Evolutionists of the racialist stripe, however, sometimes indulge in their own wishful thinking, grasping at Nietzschean straws about “supermen” seeking their own evolutionary destiny. This is but the Enlightenment error with a naturalistic veneer. No creature, including man, is truly naturally rational in the sense of pursuing fitness directly, but rather relies on a set of signals that merely represent fitness. While these signals may have been more-or-less reliable in the original environment for which they were designed, they have become increasingly dysgenic in the contemporary world.

As a Christian and a Calvinist, I see man as a fallen creature who, short of the supernatural, will degrade himself progressively with animalistic urges even unto death. Without the threat of supernatural accountability, men will, given the opportunity, seek to gratify their appetites for these false signals even if they are rationally aware that these are paths to destruction, not fitness. Even with a belief in supernatural accountability, men will still struggle their entire lives to combat false signals from their lower brains with explicit pursuit of fitness from their neocortex.

In this series I will explore three of these false signals: fast food (or more generally, the obesity epidemic), pornography, and video games. The evolutionary cul-de-sac before us is represented by a 20 to 40-something male in our society who consumes Taco Bell for nutrition, Internet porn for sex, and seeks fulfillment through the simulated accomplishments of video games.

Fair disclosure: I am agnostic about claims of human origins, finding both theistic evolution and intelligent design to be compelling but mutually contradictory arguments. Thus, like many evolutionists, I will use terms like “designed” and “evolved” interchangeably but any particular use of these words should not be an interpretation of my yet still unformed opinion on these matters. I will also note that either of these beliefs is compatible with race realism. Race realism is such a blindingly obvious fact (for those sufficiently rational to overcome the peer pressure against it) that it is akin to acknowledging that birds have feathers, which they obviously do whether evolved or designed.

Fast Food and Obesity

Man finds foods attractive on a sliding scale more-or-less correlating with calorie density. The reason for this is not hard to grasp: in times of scarcity, a healthy appetite for calorie-dense foods, when they were available, would result in an individual more likely to build up fat deposits in the good times in preparation for the bad. For primal man the name of the game was caloric intake for survival.

Thanks to Western science, food is now plentiful beyond the wildest hopes of our ancestors. Our most serious nutritional problem is now obesity, as the Darwinian free market provides a cornucopia of choices perfectly matched to our primal instincts. Outlets such as Burger King and Taco Bell offer plentiful meat, cheese, starches and sauces to satisfy our desires for high-density, high-variety food. These companies spend millions on research and development to determine which combinations of flavors will most stimulate our senses of smell and taste.

Yet there is a twist in our design. Implanted deep inside each of us is an innate idea of the ideal of the human form. This ideal, for some reason, is not that of the obese which is of necessity the consequence of human desire matched with unlimited food. However, this does not seem to make much sense. If these desires evolved in a time of scarcity, why wouldn’t more of a good thing (fat deposits) be itself a good and attractive thing to our sexual natures? I am happy to accept it as it is, but I’m sure evolutionists have a clever explanation.

My guess: the opportunities in our primal world for obesity would be non-existent, even if theoretically such a state might offer additional marginal fitness, though at some extreme the acute effect on health and mobility would quickly supersede any benefit from increased stored calories. However, if human microevolution has indeed accelerated over the last 10,000 years (as theorized in the groundbreaking new book The 10,000 Year Revolution), one would expect obesity in early civilization to be associated with status, and status to be associated with sexual attraction.

Since older, fatter men would tend to have higher status in early civilizations, you might expect women to have developed some tolerance for such a male phenotype. Indeed, this is what we see in human nature, where women are generally less concerned with the physical attractiveness of a male IF the male is high status.

Men, on the other hand, tend to care only about physical attractiveness (and to some extent, personality, another ornamental feature of a well-developed mind and good genetics) and not so much about the status of a woman. This is probably because for most of our recent evolutionary history women have had comparably little opportunity nor any natural proclivity to acquire status through property and wealth, rather relying on their charms, both physical and otherwise, as their primary marketable characteristics in the sexual marketplace.

Another obvious biological problem with modern obesity and attractiveness is that our lower brains, at some level, must be coded with some template of what is and is not “human” in body shape. The extremes of modern obesity may prevent individuals from finding each other attractive because of this circuitry.

Feminists have their own sexist beef with this idea of an embedded ideal body form for attractiveness hard-coded into human DNA; in short, our women’s studies’ professors want to eat Twinkies and emasculate men, but resent the idea that men might find them less attractive for doing so.

The essence of feminism, of course, is that men are responsible for women’s happiness, whatever that might entail at a given moment. So we get demands for equal pay, but also demands for paid maternity leave. They want the freedom to behave immorally sexually, but also dislike the idea of pornography (i.e., imposing a standard of morality on men but not themselves).

The journalist Steve Sailer has coined his own “Law of Female Journalism,” which too is eerily predictive: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

So it is with feminists who dominate the “fat acceptance” movement who explicitly challenge the idea of men being naturally attracted to a certain body shape. Like other tabula rasa adherents, they blame “culture” for propagandizing men to prefer highly fertile 19-year-olds over hirsute, obese 40-something female sociology professors. Among their claims is that in ancient civilizations men preferred larger women.

Certain Roman ruins to call into question this assumption, but there may be a nugget of truth to it, to a certain well-defined limit. Some have identified a trend in the popular culture towards promoting thinner and thinner ideals of female beauty. Marilyn Monroe, for example, wore a size 8 dress for most of her career. In today’s Hollywood she would be considered a bit on the heavy side. Another study by Wired Magazine documented the decreasing Body Mass Index of Playboy centerfolds over the last 40+ years.

Hypotheses for this trend are widely varied, including A) men really do naturally prefer thinner women (thinness being a proxy for youth) and this trend reflects businesses serving their market, B) homosexual designers in the fashion industry prefer thinner women to better showcase their clothing, and this combined with the cultural phenomenon of the supermodel, served to distort ideals of beauty, which are somewhat socially influenced and flexible or C) the increasing obesity of the American population makes thinness even more relatively attractive as it becomes a highly desired, hard-to-attain and largely fake-resistant public indication of fitness.

Nevertheless, Homo sapiens finds himself in an interesting position in the early 21st century. His acquired habits make it extremely hard for him to resist plentiful, tasty food to excess while the demands of his sedentary lifestyle make it more likely he will permanently retain these fat reserves. These excess fat reserves, society-wide, not only result in increased mortality but also make him both less attractive to and less attracted to the opposite sex.

On top of this, the mass media constantly push impossible images of beauty, showcasing the idealized, airbrushed forms of the top 1% of the population. Every now and then the supermarket tabloids will feature candid beach or vacation photos of these airbrushed celebrities, and the difference between their projected, airbrushed media image and their appearance in real life is striking. Not even the “beautiful people” meet the standard of beauty in the age of Photoshop.

How might man escape this sexual dystopia? We will explore the escape of pornography in the next installment of this series.

Read Part 2 here.