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I am not sure what your point is, is what I'm trying to tell you.
My simple mental model is that obesity and fertility are both associated with lower incomes. Obviously this isn't necessarily the full story, but I couldn't immediately find a study that really looked at BMI and lifetime number of kids. Presumably it's not easy since BMI is not constant. Physiological fertility effects are real but may not be decisive, so I'd be curious if you have more reading on this question.
My point is that if you suppress any illness that is selected against through its symptoms, you will get more of it, and that if you aren't providing a cure, you're essentially enlisting future people into the customer base for whatever mitigation you came up with. Insofar as the illness is heritable.
This effect is well understood when it comes to milder things like vision impairments, but it's also one of the somewhat shameful reasons why people abort kids that we can tell will have severe lifelong genetic diseases, or why it's morally questionable to have kids if you know yourself to carry a high risk of such diseases.
Now, obesity is partly heritable, but that's the spectrum you get of potential effects, from easily medicated impediment to significant part of a population has to take meds their whole life to be healthy.
Here's an example longitudinal study of pretty much exactly what we're talking about here.
https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)23299-2/fulltext
Sounds reasonable. My question is how it applies to the obesity epidemic since that isn't genetic. It may be heritable, but I'd bet all the heritability has to do with food habits that parents model for their kids. Ozempic solves that, so if that's the mechanism then the kids might not even need ozempic.
Thanks, that's good stuff. Interestingly, being underweight is about just as bad for male fertility as being obese.
Well, as far as I know the actual cause is still up in the air, and we'd have to bound what is actually meant by "the obesity epidemic", but that's besides my point.
Obesity is in part genetic. That much we know, there's ample literature on the topic, there's plenty of studies on both monogenic and polygenic factors.
I don't think it's actually very clear how much of the 40-70% heritability is genetic, but it's certainly not zero, and thus curing it at large still lands us in this situation where we have a potential dysgenic problem.
I hope that problem is benign enough as to dwarf the positive effects of curing syndromic obesity, but I don't know.
Surely the fact that the obesity epidemic is a phenomenon of the past few decades is dispositive proof that the epidemic is not genetic in origin, though I can believe that some people who were obese before were obese due to genetics. Genetics don't change that fast.
Pre-existing, previously unimportant variation in genetics can result in varying response to environmental changes, at which point natural selection can do its thing on that particular bit of variation.
The generation that's around when that environmental shift happens are going to get affected more-or-less randomly. The generations after that, if the environmental change sticks around, are going to inherit the responses of their forebears.
That's what IGI meant by the obesity epidemic not being a result of genetics yet.
Perhaps. But, why should we care about this in the context of obesity? If the environment remains the same, and we medicate obese people with ozempic, it doesn't seem obvious to me that the obesity susceptible genotype will become more widespread than it already is. If the environment changes, who's to say that genotypes currently more susceptible to obesity won't become less susceptible? Either way, given the obesity numbers over the past few decades going up and to the right, I don't see an obvious natural selection story at play here.
Because there isn't one, yet. We're still in the "environmental shift" part of the scenario. The natural selection part is a prediction IGI is making about future generations.
I'm having trouble understanding why there hasn't been any natural selection yet despite us being sixty years into the obesity epidemic. What, exactly, are the future conditions that we don't have that will bring about the selection part?
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