War and Obesity: the human condition

In many places in the world, food is not abundant, and many people starve. But in the US, most people can afford to buy more food than they could ever possibly eat. Some of us can just eat and eat like slobs and never gain a pound (don't cry for me America), while others become overweight. However, bacteria don't get obese, they just make tons of children. In the long term even humans will follow suit, multiplying in the presence of excess food. As Darwin explains, a given population of organisms will grow exponentially until they use all available food. There is no doubt that the human population is growing at least exponentially (and maybe even superexponentially). Even if our current rate of food production were sustainable (which, because it's supported by fertilizers made from fossil fuels, some argue that it's not), we would eventually multiply to fill that vacuum. Until then, we will be overweight.

And once the number of people roughly equals the sustainable food supply, we will start to compete for those resources. We will go to war! Unless we can either a) transcend the laws of biology or b) find an infinite supply of resources, it seems that the human condition is to be at war. Let's examine two possible strategies to resist our fate:

1) The universe is infinite, right? Can't we just colonize every planet? This doesn't work for two reasons. First, while the amount of space is infinite, the amount of energy and mass (i. e. resources) is not. It's a huge amount, but given enough time we could expand to consume it all. Second, that still won't help the problem of local fluctuations in food, resulting in local warfare. Once we colonize the whole solar system, there might be a surplus of food on Jupiter, but we can't bring it to Venus, where people are starving. We have the same problem right now, on Earth, where one country gets fat while another starves and fights.

2) Our brains separate us from the animals, right? Can't we just all agree to have exactly two children per couple, plus a few extra in case of accidental deaths? Well wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all agree, but we won't. Those of us who do agree will pass on our agree-to-limit-procreation genes to a smaller and smaller fraction of the population than those with procreate-as-much-as-you-can-and-don't-listen-to-ecologists-or-bloggers genes. It's exactly the sort of trait that natural selection keeps a collection of on the walls of its hunting lodge.

Mutant Atomic Race of Super Men?

Let me start this like any other good article: by raffirming that I'm not a secret nazi racist. Now that's out of the way. So. I was reading an interesting article on bbc which quotes "Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics" when he predicts that

The human race would peak in the year 3000, before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species.

An interesting concept. First, let's think about how a species could diverge evolutionarily while being in the same geographical place (i. e. all of earth). Let's say you're some kind of squirrel thing. To get food you could either dig up tubers or you could climb up a tree and get some nuts. Let say right now the population has arms that are okay at climbing and at digging. But if they could just evolve thumbs, they might be able to climb a lot better, but no longer be able to dig. Or they could evolve shovelly-hands which would help them dig a lot better, but they wouldn't be able to climb any more. The species might evolve into two, since the child of a shovelly-arm and a thumb-hand would be bad at both things.

Aren't we starting to "decline" already? By that I mean, if all our technology were removed, we would be less fit than a thousand years ago. Our feet can't handle the rough ground. More of us are born with diseases which are merely inconvenient right now, with medical technology, but would be fatal or very bad otherwise. You might argue that we don't do hardly any real stuff now. Our houses are built by human-operated machines. Our food is harvested by human-operated machines from farms. Most of our transportation is by car, plane, or train. Even birth is increasingly being performed through C-Section. Women with poor birthing hips, who in the past would not have been able to pass on their genes, are now fine. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of these things, but it does show our increasing reliance on technology.

However, with the increasing research in genomic technology, there are some quiet murmurings about the possibility of, say, making sure your baby doesn't get a certain gene. If you have sickle cell anemia, for example, you might be able to take your haploid cells to a clinic, and have them filter our the ones without that gene. But would parents always select the most "fit" child? That depends on what we mean by fit, exactly. Right now, in American society, one might say that blonde women are more fit, because they're perceived as more attractive. But other women can just dye their hair. But in the wild, blond hair is less fit for most of the earth. Sunny days require a dark sun-reflector, which black hair (and black skin) do pretty well. No, the parents will choose their children to be the most fit in the framework of the anticipated environment.