Humanity's best hope for the future?

Guest column by Dr. Herbert "Hamburger" Helper, Chair of UCSD's Department of Evolutionary Biology

The scientific truth is that two out of every three Americans are overweight, and one out of every three is obese. And it is true that fat accumulation can have deleterious effects on a person's health. Seen from this perspective, obesity is a problem. But when considered from a larger, evolutionary perspective — well, it might just be the next big thing in Natural Selection.

Humanity has long admired the camel's ability to survive in the desert heat. Equally impressive is the bear's ability to withstand the brutal cold of winter. In both cases, the evolutionary trick to staying alive when extreme weather conditions create extreme food scarcity is fat storage.

Nature is smarter than we are, and it's a good thing. Plenty of people have spent the last 25 years denying the scientific fact of climate change and global warming instead of making preparations for the inevitable rise in extreme weather conditions and resultant worldwide food shortages. They've buried their heads in the sand. Well, not really. They've buried their heads in their bags of chips and fast food, sitting still on their couches and packing on the pounds. But in so doing, they've been unwittingly preparing for the very disaster they deny. Nature has been fattening them in preparation for the famine to come. All that stored fat may one day mean the difference between dying of starvation or surviving until the next crop of heat-resistant supercorn has ripened.

Hilariously — or not, depending on your point of view — research has indicated that there is a direct correlation between climate change denial and obesity. For example, in Mississippi, which has the nation's highest obesity rate at 35%, a whopping 67% of the population thinks global warming is "a lot of bull-pucky cooked up by One Worlders and America Haters," according to a recent Gallup Poll. So the very people who refuse to plan for the evil days to come may be the ones most likely to survive them.

My advice to all those health-conscious intellectuals who are concerned about the long-term well-being of our species is this: maybe go out for ice cream tonight.