You seem to have forgotten the Jack Spratt part of the equation. What is the sperm count for fat men versus thin men?

Being a slender fit woman, I have always been repulsed by fat men. I admit that I am biased and have always been blessed by a good metabolism, but find it very hard to be sympathetic to grossly overweight people. Therefore, not at all interested in fat men's sperm counts - eeuuuwww!

As to food, like everything else - variety is the key. Eat moderately, keep saturated fats down (not eliminated entirely - we do need some), keep up the good fats such as Olive oil, oily fish, exercise regularly, don't smoke - a glass of wine now and then.

What WAS the point of this debate?

Evolutionary success is measured by the sucessful reproduction of your offspring i.e your grandkids. Take lactose intolerance for example. An inability to digest lactose after infancy will not stop your children from breeding sucessfully in a society with diverse dietary choices and is unlikely to lead to a change in allele frequency ( the dominant and recessive genes that make us slightly different from each other).
For a true evolutionary change, lactose tolerance for example would have to be evident in all humans. During harsh times (i.e ice ages, prolonged drought) lactose intolerance could lead to death by starvation. If dairy products were the main source of food for the planet and the bad times continued for long enough then we might see an evolutionary change wereby all humans were lactose tolerant.
Cooked food reducing bacterial infection may result in us being less able to deal with bacterial infection naturally and when the tough times hit the intolerant would die and the cast iron stomachs would breed more sucessfully.
The ability to store fat has obvious survival benefits in harsh times and apparently does not effect the breeding sucess of humans in good times. The ability to stay skinny is a heat adaption (more skin, less meat means better cooling of the body).
I have heard that it was the higher protein of meat that allowed the human brain to grow(not the cooking process)but watching chimps eat termites which have four times the protein of meat makes me wonder about this. I wonder if they taste better cooked?

Trees

“Evolutionary success is measured by the successful reproduction of your offspring i.e. your grandkids.”

Really? Why not the successful reproduction of one’s self, or the successful life of one’s self?

I consider myself to be a product of evolutionary success, but I am not going to have kids.

Evolutionary success could just as meaningfully be measured by quality of life. My quality of life without kids, with maximised freedom to do my own thing, is just wonderful!

The argument about cooked food reducing bacterial infection doesn’t stack up. In many cases cooked food that was left for a little while (without refrigeration) was much more prone to bacterial infection than raw food of the same sort. This certainly applies with fruit and veges. With meat, it is no less prone to bacterial infection, unless eaten immediately.

“The ability to store fat has obvious survival benefits in harsh times and apparently does not effect the breeding success of humans in good times.”

Yes, but only up to a point. Too much fat does affect breeding, vigour and life expectancy. Obese people generally do have a harder time finding a mate, maintaining a healthy sex life and providing an upbringing for their kids. As I said in an earlier post, trim fit people have all sorts of life options other than having lots of kids, and are much less likely to breed or to have more than on or two kids than they used to be. You could argue that the moderate fatties will outbreed the rest of us!

Interesting thing about chimps eating termites – it seems that the energy gained / energy expended ratio is pretty low. It takes a long time to get a few termites. So much so that it seems to be a taste thing rather than an important food source that has attracted chimps to termites. Surely they would do a lot better if they broke open the termite mounds and got at the critters wholesale, instead of poking sticks in the entrance holes. It seems to be little more than a recreational activity.

Dear Ludwig

I am pleased that you feel you are a successful person, but unless you have children (who in turn have children) your physical characteristics will not be part of our physical evolution. I look forward to giving your memoirs to my grandkids.
Fat people having less kids?? If skinny people have more options in life they are less likely to have children or at least have only one or two(are you skinny?).
I'm glad you agree that cooked food has its own bacterial problems, as it was claimed to have less bacteria and be an evolutionary influence in one of the original arguments in this forum.
Can our fragile egos live with the fact that there may have been very little evolutionary change for the past million years?

Trees, how important is it to pass on one’s own genes?

If you can see past the instinct to do so, and examine it in a dispassionate logical manner, it isn’t important at all. Not in a chronically overpopulated world.

I see lots of people who are mentality more astute or physically more robust or genetically better suited to this north Queensland or Australian environment or better able to cope with the everyday frustrations than myself. Why would I want to breed a couple more average drongos like me?

Taking this line of thought further, perhaps only the best mental and physical specimens should be allowed to breed. Oh uh, now I’m being more Orwellian than Orwell… or perhaps more Hitlerian than Herr Fuhrer!

My fragile ego can very easily cope with the notion that we have hardly evolved at all for a million year or so. But the change that humanity has gone through a different sort of evolution in that time that is so enormous that it has completely overridden the genetic evolutionary process.

This is all the more reason not to bother with breeding – passing on one’s mental or physical traits doesn’t mean much when you can pass on your or philosophies or other significant characteristics by other means. If you are successful, others will take up your life’s work and build on it. As far as I’m concerned, that would be just as good or better than having sprogs, which in all probability would have completely different interests in life and not be very interested in your life’s work.

Why leave any legacy at all? Why not just concentrate on enjoying yourself?….so long as it is not at the expense of others.

Am I skinny? I refer you to my post of 8th of April on this thread.

Cheers