I agree with Greg Downing (who I?ve just realised only commented on the ?facebook? section of the comments that I?ve just disabled?er?): the correlation between poverty and obesity (as counter-intuitive as this might have seemed any time in history before, say, the the middle of the last century) can't be denied and is often overlooked on the slow news days when the mass-media recycles last year's story about the growing obesity "epidemic." However, Steve Powell's also right to say urban sprawl and U.S. car culture doesn?t help..
...On an unrelated note, though, did anyone else find it a teensy bit disturbing to hear Bob talk about evolution as if it's got a kind of in-built 'onwards and upwards' tendency that weeds out crappier forms of life and pushes towards superior ones? I mean, I know he's mentioning it in the context of a joke, and I'm certainly -not- suggesting that he was expressing some kind of half-fascist social Darwinist vision (he explicitly mentions that he disagrees with such things) but...I....just.... l...can't...fight...pedantic...urges... So...:
Surely, Bob knows that 'survival of the fittest' (Herbert Spencer's phrase not Darwin's) is a near tautology, i.e. that 'fittest' means 'most capable of surviving and reproducing' and is in no way synonymous with being "amazing, intelligent, powerful, innovative, creative et cetera." From an evolutionary point of view, not only are mosquitoes and viruses "as good" as humans (insofar the insects also succeed at thriving and reproduce in their environment), but also, to use a Bob idiom: -douchebags- are as fit as Supermen in that 'fitness' -from (and only from) an evolutionary point of view is nothing more than existing for long enough to pass on your genes. Which as morons the world over prove is not hard. If evolution were 'left to its own devices', it's less likely that we'd have the X-Men and more likely that we'd have a kind of colourful variation on the theme of stupid. It's analogous to the free market: competition does -sometimes- allow great things to emerge and endure, but it can also just as easily lead to the reign of the bland and vacuous (McDonald's, Hollywood, Twilight, first person shooters etc.)
P.S. just realised in attempting to point this that onathantos also made this point.
...On an unrelated note, though, did anyone else find it a teensy bit disturbing to hear Bob talk about evolution as if it's got a kind of in-built 'onwards and upwards' tendency that weeds out crappier forms of life and pushes towards superior ones? I mean, I know he's mentioning it in the context of a joke, and I'm certainly -not- suggesting that he was expressing some kind of half-fascist social Darwinist vision (he explicitly mentions that he disagrees with such things) but...I....just.... l...can't...fight...pedantic...urges... So...:
Surely, Bob knows that 'survival of the fittest' (Herbert Spencer's phrase not Darwin's) is a near tautology, i.e. that 'fittest' means 'most capable of surviving and reproducing' and is in no way synonymous with being "amazing, intelligent, powerful, innovative, creative et cetera." From an evolutionary point of view, not only are mosquitoes and viruses "as good" as humans (insofar the insects also succeed at thriving and reproduce in their environment), but also, to use a Bob idiom: -douchebags- are as fit as Supermen in that 'fitness' -from (and only from) an evolutionary point of view is nothing more than existing for long enough to pass on your genes. Which as morons the world over prove is not hard. If evolution were 'left to its own devices', it's less likely that we'd have the X-Men and more likely that we'd have a kind of colourful variation on the theme of stupid. It's analogous to the free market: competition does -sometimes- allow great things to emerge and endure, but it can also just as easily lead to the reign of the bland and vacuous (McDonald's, Hollywood, Twilight, first person shooters etc.)
P.S. just realised in attempting to point this that onathantos also made this point.
