Will evolution solve the obesity problem?

@Christy
I am glad you have joined. One can be a Christian and accept Theistic Evolution also known as evolutionary creation. As Christians, we should not accept evolution that is “non-theistic.” Therefore, BioLogos would not accept atheism in its statement of faith. However, you may find some people who are not Christians since the BioLogos Foundation opens its forum to various people. On the main screen for BioLogos, you will find a statement of faith for the Foundation. No matter which concept you accept, i.e., Young Earth Creation, Progressive Old Earth Creation, or Theistic Evolution, the only thing that is important is accepting Christ. I hope you will enjoy discussing things with various people. Also, you may want to address something to Christy if you have any questions about the organization. I do not think that she would mind. May God bless you, Charles E. Miller

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@Henry, thankyou for your kind words.

I agree with you 100%! (Would you prefer if I said I ‘concur’? :wink:)
God bless you too Dr Miller.

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I believe a sense of humor is one of God’s greatest gifts.

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“Will evolution solve the obesity problem?”

I suppose there are many ways one could address that question. But my first thought is that obesity does not necessarily interfere with producing offspring. The most serious problems caused by obesity don’t manifest until later on in life. So, for example, shortening lifespan does not create an "evolutionary pressures"which would lead a population to select against obesity.

Indeed, the ability to maximize fat stores for future times of food deprivation has no doubt encouraged allele frequencies which would make that capability more common among Homo sapiens. So, to me, I would be more likely to pose the question as, “Will evolutionary processes continue to enhance the survival prospects of Homo sapiens?”

Of course, human females are somewhat “optimized” by evolutionary processes to store more calories (as percentage of body weight) than males so that during times of famine, sufficient stored calories may be able to sustain a pregnancy to term. This could be why Homo sapiens females, unlike the vast majority of mammalian females, have enlarged breasts even when they aren’t pregnant or nursing. I assume that it can be said that fat is by far the most efficient means of long-term caloric storage, and I’ve seen published calculations claiming to show that the average woman stores enough calories for nine months of a developing fetus’ critical fatty acid needs. (However, I’m not qualified to evaluate when that was simply a convenient calculation which sounded reasonable or if this idea has survived peer-review positively.)

To me, a more interesting question would be, “WHY would evolution processes operate to ‘solve’ the obesity problem?” I don’t obsess over reification complaints (like Ken Ham and Georgia Purdom like to do) but I do try to choose my words carefully when talking about what evolution does or doesn’t do—seeing how it has no will, agenda, or objective other than survival and reproduction.

It is interesting how cultivation of annual grass-related crops like barley, rye, and wheat eventually made carbohydrates available to Europeans in such generous quantities, allowing much larger families, and even allowing convenient calorie storage (along with vitamins) in the form of flour, hard-tack, and beers. Yet today those of us who try to avoid obesity find that we have to very severely limit our grain carbohydrate intake. And the epidemic of diabetes is often linked to these same carbohydrates, including New World maize and the fructose sugar manufactured from it.

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Hi @Mr.Molinist, thankyou for your interesting answer!

I understand your point about obesity not interfering with producing offspring and not not creating the requisite evolutionary pressure to select against obesity.
My understanding of lactose intolerance though, is that neither interferes with producing offspring - nor is it life threatening in that symptoms are gastrointestinal upset. So where did the evolutionary pressure to select for lactase persistence come from?

Stacey

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@gbrooks9

Hi George,

I thought you might find this article about Michel Odent interesting - one of the stand out statements is that “the principles of modern medicine are undermining a natural process, resulting in too many caesarians, which have, in turn, resulted in what he calls ‘an unwelcome neutralization of natural selection’”

Stacey

Hello Stacey,

Are you in the medical professional or in some scientific field? If you have a BSc in Business Administration, you would have studied some science? Am I not correct? Where do you live in Australia? Do you know Beaglelady?
What time is it now where you are? I am just curious. :grinning: It is interesting. I asked you about your background; however, Beaglelady answered first.

Charles

The obvious possibility, and the one that has been most frequently proposed, is that the ability to drink milk as an adult can make a big difference in times of food scarcity – probably especially for women who are pregnant or nursing. The extra supply of calories and fat can aid both in survival and in fertility. But I’ve also seen speculation running from the plausible (hormones in milk increase fertility in human women) to the, well, interesting (men used to have competitions consuming things that made them sick, and ones who could drink milk without ill effect gained status and reproduced more).

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Typical nonsense… from a Creationist or an Atheist ? It doesn’t really matter.

George

Please don’t misunderstand my attempts to clarify. My point about comparing death in child birth vs. eating junk food or the issue of lactose intolerance is that there are dozens and dozens of factors that could be involved in how the human genome could be affected by thousands of years of eating junk food.

If we eat supplements, and have a vigorous medical technology, and junk food becomes incredibly easy to obtain … it’s really hard to say what might happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe someone might develop a mutation that turns potato chips into muscle-building protein. But if ultimately nobody’s survival or fertility rates are affected … how would we ever know?

Whereas, if you are interested in something that really does seem to affect fertility and survival rates (the percentage of women who die in childbirth certainly qualifies!!!) - - then junk food might be one of the least attractive of study topics…

George

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Very good answer. Being able to digest lactose was a big advantage for pastoral people throughout our later evolutionary history. We tend to forget that having a surplus of food (for some of us, anyway) is a relatively recent development. Not to mention that having a Whole Foods market nearby with shelves full of non-dairy alternatives is a very recent development! I believe that it has been shown that people with lactase persistence really do have more viable offspring.

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Doctors should concur :laughing:. I just wanted to let you know that we are getting snow in Hampton Roads, Virginia. I am sure it is hot and sunny in Australia.

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Of course, evolution is neither theistic or non-theistic—just as gravity, photosynthesis, and mitosis aren’t theological positions. And that is why I’ve never liked the term “theistic evolutionist.”

Nobody asks me if I’m a “theistic gravitationalist”. Yet there was a time in Europe when the movements of the planets was explained by “God commanded the angels to push the planets in the courses about the heavens.” Newton’s science helped begin the habit of distinguishing between proximate causation and ultimate causation. Gravity doesn’t make God superfluous—so why should evolutionary processes?

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I love this. I’m going to start calling myself this.

I had assumed the question somewhat rhetorical. My apologies for my ambiguity. Not only does being able to digest lactose milk-sugar allow one to acquire a lot of calories from mediocre-quality pasture grass through the services of a lot of bacteria in the stomach of a cow, precious proteins as well as *high-quality fatty-acids" in milk were huge advantages where hunter-gatherer diets are meager!

Also, the discovery of fungal-processed milk (also known as cheeses) led to the storage of the high-calorie, high-protein food in a solid form that lasted a lot longer than a dead rabbit or pigeon.

Thus, individuals with the genetic ability to retain lactase-production (for lactose-digestion) past infancy had tremendous survival advantages in areas where domesticated ruminants were producing milk. As a result, their survival advantage led to reproductive advantage so that allele frequencies in the population as a whole increased, the very definition of evolution at work.

By the way, eventually humans figured out how to use particular fungi to break down the lactose to a degree where even lactose-intolerant individuals could eat the resulting variety of cheese. And this explains why the US Dept of Agriculture has at times sent some varieties of cheese overseas to disaster areas. Unlike other types of dairy product surplus, such cheeses can be consumed by virtually anyone. (Needless to say, past errors in understanding lactose tolerance used to result in a lot of sick people in refugee camps who tried to mix milk powder in water to feast on the sweet result.)

It is worth mentioning that European populations benefited greatly from a great many fortunate circumstances of climate and available animals with the lactose-gene being just one of many tremendous advantages. Indeed, the very fact that Europeans had so many invaluable domesticated animals in their lives led to fortuitous circumstances like their tendency to bring their hogs, cattle, sheep, and ducks indoors at night (to protect them from predators and theft) and helped build up European immune systems, one of the multiple factors which eventually gave Europeans immunological advantages when visiting new lands such as the Americas. (Native Americans fell by the millions in the wake of the microbes brought by the Europeans, survivors of many centuries of plagues and zoonoses. Evolution brought strong immunity to Europe as the people with strong and “experienced” immune systems became larger and larger percentages of the European populations.Their bodies could deal with the microbes which they took with them to America where the populations had little such immunological experience. Yes, some microbes in America traveled back to Europe and caused disease outbreaks but many centuries of Europeans mixing with populations they visited in Africa and Asia gave them far more “experienced” immune systems. )

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By the way, I carefully chose the word “experienced” to describe European immune systems because “superior immune systems” would be a serious misstatement of the facts. Native Americans also had excellent immune systems, every bit as well-functioning. The differences were in their exposure experiences with the deadly infectious microbes brought by the Europeans. European populations had many centuries to “learn” to deal with those microbes while the Native Americans were very suddenly hit with an onslaught. Indeed, some scholars claim that even the messengers sent by the Inca emperor to spy on and meet with the Spanish conquistadors brought back their infectious microbes to the various villages along the route and even to the capital itself so that by the time the small band of Spanish soldiers arrived there, a huge percentage of the people were already sick and incapacitated.)

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I respect you and your knowledge; however, I feel there is a difference between evolution caused by God and a purely Darwinistic view. I like the term Theistic Evolution. In any case, have a good Sunday.

I certainly agree!

Evolution is a set of processes whereby allele frequencies change over time which scientists study using the Scientific Method. The moment you add the words “by God” to evolution, you have commenced a discussion of theology and philosophy. Gravity is a scientific topic.

“Theistic gravity” is not science, it is a discussion in the realm of theology and philosophy. It has no impact upon the science of gravity. Likewise, “evolution caused by God” and “a purely Darwinistic view” are different because theology and science are different topics in different academic domains!

So even though I believe the term “theistic evolution” tends to confuse these topics, I’m fine with the term as long as everyone understands that it is a theological/philosophiocal debate, not a scientific one.

Whether or not the universe is “caused by God” is outside of science because the scientific method has no means whatsoever to observe and test anything outside of the matter-energy realm, such as anything involving deities or “the supernatural”. (If you think “caused by God” is a scientific topic, describe a scientific experiment which would put God’s role of causation to the test. In other words, valid science involves predictions. How would you test your predictions about the role of a deity in any scientific experiment?)

Thus:

Absolutely! “Evolution caused by God” is a theology/philosophy concept. The word “Darwinistic” has so much ambiguity and confusing baggage (including major differences in UK and American understanding of the word “Darwinism”) that I would prefer the term be avoided in most public discussions among non-scientists. Indeed, I find a lot of evolution-denying Christians are far more obsessed with Darwin than any scientist I ever met. Darwin published his science over 150 years ago. The Theory of Evolution just doesn’t care what things Darwin got right or wrong and what he thought about God, etc. (Of course, that is why the preoccupation of some in the apocryphal story about Darwin abandoning evolution theory on his death bed is so irrelevant and lame.)

I constantly have to remind anti-evolution Christians as well as the militant anti-theists among my colleagues that OF COURSE science doesn’t “prove God” or make statements for/against deities. Science is not theology! And its not philosophy. The scientific facts surrounding the topic of evolution certainly matter to and are discussed by theologians and philosophers—as well as scientists who in their spare time reflect upon and even pontificate on their philosophical and/or theological views, just as other people do. Yet it is important that those both in and outside of the academy keep in mind what science is and what it isn’t—and not confusing it with theology and philosophy, no matter how strong they believe certain progressions-of-arguments to be. (For example, when Dr. Dawkins says that the Theory of Evolution gives someone like him reasons to feel like an “intellectually fulfilled” atheist, he is simply saying that he finds his understanding of science to be in harmony with his personal views on theology/philosophy. That personal opinion of his does NOTHING to make evolution inherently atheistic or theistic or anything else outside of science.)

The existence or non-existence of God (let alone his “participation” in evolutionary processes) has no more impact on the content of an evolutionary biology textbook than does God’s involvement in mitosis or photosynthesis. As a Bible-believing Christ-follower, God’s role in everything certainly matters to me—but I don’t confuse my theological views with my understanding of the scientific facts I observe. Personally, I consider evolutionary processes a tremendous testimony to God’s power and wisdom, but that awareness doesn’t change any of the evidence or how those processes operate.

Of course, when someone speaks of a “Darwinistic view”, I have no idea if they are talking about the science of the Theory of Evolution OR if they are talking about something they consider a “Darwinistic” philosophy (which they may define as some sort of atheist worldview.)

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I see what you are saying. I appreciate you taking time with me. God bless. I do have a question that puzzles me. I have been reading both Progressive Creationism-Common Ancestry and Evolutionary Creation. Could Progressive Creationism-Common Ancestry be called Progressive Evolution? Nothing I have read has given me a clear answer.

Thanks

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What? You haven’t heard of Intelligent Falling?