Is Being A Feeder = Dispose Socially Related Evolutionary Advantage/s? Agree Or Disagree?

[John Smith]

Share your thoughts and experiences related to this topic and explain whether why you agree or disagree about it.

[bangs15]

weight gain is a traumatic body transformation that weirded us out as a kid which grew into a fetish through adolescence

 

pseudo science speculation on this topic sounds delusional

[John Smith]

On 09/04/2018 at 4:27 PM, bangs15 said:

weight gain is a traumatic body transformation that weirded us out as a kid which grew into a fetish through adolescence

 

pseudo science speculation on this topic sounds delusional

Not a matter of pseudoscience or not, but rather about what do you think about it or not and whatever the answer, why.

[Guest grateful]

Never thought of this from an evolutionary standpoint. Excellent idea for a discussion.

If I understand your topic correctly, you are asking if feeders help evolution in the same way that a woman who wants to stuff when there is food and stores that weight for lean times has a better chance at bringing children into the world and thus helping evolution (?)

My drive to feed comes out when I am in love and suddenly I just want to surround my SO withe endless food.

I thought that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, I may have lost a loved one to starvation at some point in history.

(It is so strong).

Maybe it is a general genetic trait and my design has evolved into being a "good provider" so the females can have enough fat to successfully have thriving children even in lean times.

I never thought of it that way... 

Well, time to feed everybody!

Thanks for the topic.

 

[Dr. Feeder]

In The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Jared Diamond describes some traditional societies (they don't call them "primitive" anymore!) that have periodic food shortages. The people gorge themselves in times of plenty to gain weight to get them through lean times. In such places Feedism would be adaptive and be selected for. It's called evolution. If you don't believe in evolution I can't help you. Of course, in many societies (including modern ones) they figured out ways to store food so they didn't have to do the gorging thing.  Storing food in a granary or whatever is usually much more practical than storing it as fat on your body. So genetically I figure we're a mixed bag. We have ancestors from both kinds of societies. So some of us have Feedist tendencies, some don't. 

I imagine those tendencies will dwindle over the coming millennia since gorging and gaining is no longer adaptive. But we won't be around by then anyway! 

[Guest fishmish]

The fact that feedism exists, and is distributed across all general ethnic groups (not talking specific populations, but large clades, i.e. caucasian, asian, etc.) says that it is either evolutionarily advantageous or evolutionarily irrelevant (provides no benefit and does not harm). All I'm saying is, the trait hasn't been selected out. It's also a possibility that is is evolutionarily disadvantageous but evolved recently enough that it hasn't been selected out yet. This is unlikely, I think, considering how relatively widespread it is, but you never know.

It was likely more advantageous in the past than during our current environment. But you could say the same thing about fat storage. At our present moment in history, abundant food is so readily available to most that we would probably do fine without body fat stores. We can't predict the future, though, and it could potentially be very dangerous if we were to lose this trait.