Just a thought....

Social discrimination against fat and short people is wide spread and deeply ingrained, although there are some cultural variations. Could it be that the propensity to discriminate against such people was naturally selected? If the population at large discriminates against fat and short people than they are less likely to reproduce (as this article confirms) and less likely to pass on their less desirable (from an evolutionary perspective) genes?

This is in no way meant to justify discrimination per se, but as a way to explore the causes of such social austresism.

Evolutionary discrimination could certainly be a part of it. In the hunter / gatherer sense a typical person needs around 2,000 calories to be healthy and if they see a person consuming 5,000 calories, becoming fat, it threatens their own survival. If there were a need to find food every day to survive and one person of the tribe is consuming two to three (and in some cases over five) times what it takes for one individual it would be instinctual to cast out that member who threatens the survival of the rest of the tribe.

Evolution does play a role, but not the one you think it does. The abundance of food in modern life is a very recent phenomenon. Throughout most of history, food was scarce. Human beings evolved to conserve calories (i.e., gain weight, or at least not lose it). That's why a low-calorie diet will reach the point of diminishing returns, when weight loss slows way down. The body gets the signal, "I'm starving!" and metabolism slows down accordingly. Thus, we have the current rise in overweight/obesity, when an abundance of food meets thousands of years of evolutionary biology.

In many periods of history and in some cultures today, overweight is not scorned. It's valued as a sign of prosperity. Discrimination against the overweight is not universal and is not found throughout human history.

Overweight and what we've got in America today are different things though. A healthy plump can certainly be attractive, but has 5'3" and 350 lbs ever existed any other time in history?

Nashoska and others: evolution has to do with survival of the species, not the individual. As another poster mentions, we are wired for storing food in times of plenty so we can make use of it in times of shortage. If there are many shortage of food (through natural,social, or cultural/dieting factors) than our bodies will become ever more efficient in making use and storing calories.

Stygmatizing fat people has nothing to do with evolution because being fat was a socially desirable trait barely 100 years ago. Evolution works in millions of years, not a ridiculous small hundreds.

As for stygmatizing short people because of evolution, that's too absurd to respond. However, bear in mind that short people need less food than tall one, so their chance of survival and of reproducing in times of penury or of natural or manmade catastrophes are better than that of tall ones.

At any rate the whole argument is moot. Our species has survived and expanded through our ability to communicate through our intricate languages and to store and accumulate knowledge and hand it down to following generations so that they can continue the process. Body size has nothing to do with intelligence......

Tomk3: "Evolutionary discrimination could certainly be a part of it. In the hunter / gatherer sense a typical person needs around 2,000 calories to be healthy and if they see a person consuming 5,000 calories, becoming fat, it threatens their own survival. If there were a need to find food every day to survive and one person of the tribe is consuming two to three (and in some cases over five) times what it takes for one individual it would be instinctual to cast out that member who threatens the survival of the rest of the tribe."

Hunter and Gatherer had (and the few remaining ones) survive on much less than 1,000 calories per day, and so does most of the world's population (there is no abundance of food on this earth. It's just an illusion that we in privileged countries have, particularly as we import food such as rice from India and other areas where chronic hunger among much of the population is still prevalent ). Hunters and Gatherers had no means to store food, so food was shared between members of a group so sharing was a major survival value....

Average Caloric Requirements and Physical Activity

Most analyses of hunter-gatherer diets assume caloric intakes of approximately 3000kcal/day

(1,4) a surprisingly large figure that exceeds typical contemporary intakes. The level of energy

expenditure necessitated by pre-agricultural lifestyles, however, was much greater than that for

average modern individuals. For instance, total energy expenditure in the !Kung and Ache

peoples averaged 206kJ/kg/d, compared to roughly 134kJ/kg/d for contemporary humans (13).

This difference is accounted for both by the fact that hunter-gatherers had, on average, higher

resting metabolic rates, due to greater proportions of lean to adipose tissue, as well as greater

levels of vigorous physical activity. Typical !Kung and Ache males have been estimated to

expend an average of 105kJ/kg/d in the course of their regular occupations; to compete with such

a figure, the sedentary male of today would have to walk approximately 19km/d in addition to

his other pursuits (12).

It is probably as a result of their increased energy throughput (moderately elevated caloric intake

coupled with greatly increased energy expenditure) that the health consequences of metabolic

imbalance occurred only rarely in non-acculturated hunter-gatherers. Unlike contemporary

Americans, hunter-gatherer groups practicing traditional lifestyles showed little tendency toward

obesity, non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus, and other associated disorders (8). The process

of acculturation, however, has been found to greatly increase the prevalence of such diseases in

hunter-gatherer groups, as indicated by the recent experiences of Australian Aborigines (14), the

Pima Indians of the American southwest (15), and others.

Hemlock: "Most analyses of hunter-gatherer diets assume caloric intakes of approximately 3000kcal/day"

Sorry Hemlock, you've badly misinformed. Just look up any book on nutritional anthropology, on Hunter and Gatherers life style, or just a simple anthro 101 course. It's wealthy Medieval Europeans who consumed these large amounts of calories...