by S. Todd Stolp MD
©December 2004
Recently, most notably in local theaters, the obesity epidemic has been portrayed as a foot race between Desire and Rationality. Examining human progress in these realms, or lack thereof, through the lens of natural selection may provide us with some fresh insights, and perhaps may ultimately inspire greater vigilance in our efforts to balance these volatile human capacities. Whether we choose to do so or not is less a matter of earning praise for self discipline than a matter of social responsibility.
One line of reasoning identifies the roots of human intelligence in the interactions between a creature and its environment. This theory has to do with avoidance of noxious environments by single celled organisms. An ameba meanders away from an acidic environment through effects that the acid has on pseudopod movement, resulting in the surviving ameba distancing itself from the environmental threat posed by the acid. Obviously, there is no thought involved – simply action.
More successful is the creature that is “programmed” by experiences with environmental threats to avoid similar future confrontations. Such is the “memory” displayed by an ant colony laying a trail of pheromone to direct the workforce around obstacles in order to feast upon a forgotten cookie. Even more elegant is the memory of the mouse who learns that it is much safer to be the second mouse to attempt to eat the cheese off of the mousetrap.
Now contemplate the human[*]. Consider that the earliest sign of mammals on this planet stems from a shrew-like creature from the Cretaceous Period over 70 million years ago. Recognize that the search for food was as necessary and overwhelmingly important to that first shrew as it was later to Homo sapiens for survival. Ultimately, hunter-gatherer societies devoted a great majority of their time to the development of a complex technology and took life-threatening risks to procure food stores for their communities. To motivate such behavior in intelligent creatures we no longer refer to a bland interaction between a creature and it’s environment, but instead we subjectively recognize the immense capacity of headlong human “desire.” The refinement and embodiment of “desire” in our hardware was emphasized and reinforced by at least 70 million years of experience with our environment, and was in large part responsible for driving our success and technological progress.
If we construct a timeline in which one millimeter represents 100 years, this 70 million years of reverence to Desire would be vaguely represented by a timeline seven football fields long. Now consider that in that last one millimeter of time you provide society with a fast food restaurant within one mile and a means to purchase a calorie-packed meal at will. An obesity epidemic in such a society seems inevitable.
The fact that bariatric surgery, or “stomach stapling,” has increased by nearly eight-fold in the past 15 years is testament to our vulnerability to a flirtatious food industry. With such a stacked deck of cards imbedded in our genes, the evidence would suggest that Rationality is losing the race with Desire.
Whether we successfully harness our desires with the restraints of rational thought or not, we seem to have flung ourselves from the precipice, confident in our capacity to sustain flight on our own. Whether we do so may have as much to do with the food industry as with our Body Mass Index.
[*] In deference to Creationists, I would suggest that evolutionary theory is not exclusive of Creationism.