Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Obesity is genetic

The San Francisco same-sex marriage case ruling is filled with fact-finding such as this:
Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation.
The supposed proof for this is statements like these:
Herek: “It is certainly the case that there have been many people who, most likely because of societal stigma, wanted very much to change their sexual orientation and were not able to do so.”

Kendall: “I knew I was gay just like I knew I’m short and I’m half Hispanic. And I just never thought that those facts would change.”
There is actually stronger scientific evidence that being fat is predetermined. There are millions of fat people who have wanted very much to lose weight, but have accepted themselves as fat. Furthermore, there is evidence that obesity is genetic:
According to Thomas Bouchard’s 1990 article in Science, the R correlation for weight between identical twins reared apart is 0.73. and for twins reared together, 0.83. So like IQ, weight is predominately genetically determined. A more recent scholarly article discovered, based on identical twin studies, that change in BMI as an adult is also strongly genetically influenced. (In other words, when one identical twin gained weight in his adult years, so did the other.)
Of course obesity is also completely determined by whether calories consumed exceeds calories expended.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does it make you sad that no one reads your blog? Why not try and write something more interesting and grounded in fact? One study showing that twins have a high likelyhood of sharing a pudgy fate doesn't nullify the strong environmental factors (no fat etheopeans, no fat shiwreck survivors, etc.), and IQ also has a lot to do with environment, mammals reared in rich environments learn better and faster than those reared in poor environments.

Roger said...

That's right, obesity is certainly not 100% genetic. Maybe you could avoid obesity by moving to Ethiopia or becoming a marathon runner. The study just tried to measure the factors.

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