If The Election Isn't Aggravating Enough...
I was vaguely interested by this article until I got to the part about how "obesity is negatively correlated with intelligence" (oh but don't worry, the article acknowledges that there are some smart fat people) and "overweight people have lower expectations about what they can achieve in looking for a mate and therefore they more quickly decide someone they have found is good enough to settle for."
Well, this is clearly incorrect. After all, if I had low standards and no intelligence, I'd be voting for George Bush! (Thank you! Tip your waitress.)
Thanks to Nomie for the link!
Well, this is clearly incorrect. After all, if I had low standards and no intelligence, I'd be voting for George Bush! (Thank you! Tip your waitress.)
Thanks to Nomie for the link!
posted by mo pie at 3:25 PM
7 Comments:
OH MY GOD. I literally cannot believe it's even OK to say something like that. Think of all of the other minority groups in our society and subsitute that for "obesity"? Is that acceptable? No. Way. In. Hell. SO, why is this?
I'm so angry right now.
This article is yet another example of absolutely atrocious science. You cannot EVER take factoids like "fat people seem to have more kids" and make it that they have more kids BECAUSE they are fat. It's much more likely to be the other way around. Pregnancy and childbirth leading to weight gain (and weight gain that doesn't all come off) is already well documented.
It's even more likely to be because lower income groups tend to be more overweight, and lower income groups also tend to have larger families. So the thing linking the weight and the baby count is the social demographic, not a direct link from one to the other. Both the overweight and the higher birth rate have much more to do with lower income people having far less access to health/nutritional information, and contraception (and places to work out, and education, and legal aid and...you get the picture).
This article is not only prejudiced on the weight issue, it's also a cack-handed, ill reasoned use of the concepts of evolution and natural selection.
Thank you, Rosemary, for that wonderful explanation. I heartily agree with you that the data in this article appears to be faulty. Somebody needs to go back to Intro to Stats class and find out more about my prof's favorite motto: "Correlation is NOT causation!"
Interesting article. Complete nonsense, but still interesting.
The author seems to forget (in addition to the things mentioned in other comments) that fat people face a tremendous amount of prejudice in this society, prejudice which causes many of them to abandon their education as soon as is permitted. (This almost happened to me, though I pressed on through college despite being the fattest kid in any of my classes...) That said, women who chose not to go to college probably do score lower on IQ tests--not because they're dumb, but likely because they have much less practice at taking tests and much less access to the kinds of trivia that make up those tests. (And, yes, as a "gifted" student, I have taken many IQ tests, and they really are made up of trivia.) And women who don't go to college don't just disappear either. Fat or thin, they likely go for the roles that are open to them, motherhood being one of them.
So, yes, this article expresses a prejudice against fat people, against women, and is science illiterate to boot. Typical internet science reporting at its finest I'd say.
Completely unrelated to this entry, but I've noticed that the comments section on this blog don't work for Netscape, not on my PC at home, or the mac I use at work.
Other blogger comments sections with similar templates have been working ok, so it looks like it's just a problem with BFD. Perhaps you need to switch templates and then switch back? Might be an easy way to "reset" the code.
Anyone else been having problems getting to the comments here via netscape?
The comments don't work for me in Firefox or Mozilla, either.
monkeytoe
Check out this introduction article on Overweight:
http://www.articleworld.org/Overweight
Contents
* 1 Definition
* 2 Measurement
* 3 Health
* 4 Cause
* 5 Treatment
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