Another way first world nations die: weight gain kills breeding potential

Before surgery, the morbidly obese men had significantly lower sexual function relative to that of a previously published reference control group of men before surgery, the investigators report.

After losing an average of two-thirds of their excess weight, men experienced significant improvements in sexual function, with the amount of weight loss predicting the degree of improvement.

"We estimate that a man who is morbidly obese has the same degree of sexual dysfunction as a nonobese man about 20 years older," the investigators report.

MSN

Nature designs more complex things to be fragile. This way, if they fail, they get replaced by simpler designs -- a form of lowest common denominator where the design settles its disparate parts into the most basic interpretation it can find. This is why less-advanced populations are usually more diverse. They have more information but it is incompatible, so they end up creating ad hoc compromises in their phenotype and social outlook.

If any population gets fat, nature has at least one way of disabling them so that something dumber but more stable can take over. In essence, nature is always trying to breed us back into monkeys, because monkeys are very stable -- even if they will never explore the stars.