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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2158 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm told by reliable yet confidential sources, that the trek to Utah provided ample eugenic pressure. Mostly by killing off the women with inadequate fat stores.

Am I just being stupid by not seeing that this is obviously a joke? In any other context I'd be sure it was, yet The Motte is the sort of place where we love to broadly speculate about even wild evo-psych hypotheticals, so I feel like I can't just dismiss an evo-boobs theory out of hand!

Famously some early emigrants to Utah walked there, pulling handcarts, which does seem like the sort of thing fat stores were made for. But that was only around 5% of even the earliest emigrants, and only around 7% of those died of exposure or starvation. Cutting out 0.4% of the gene pool wouldn't make much of a difference to anything, and in any case the strongest selection effect among that 5% would have been on whatever genes correlated with "go with one of the 8 handcart companies who planned semi-competently, not the 2 who didn't".

only around 7% of those died of exposure or starvation

I be fair to the evo-hypotheticals. You don't have to literately die for there to be evolutionary pressure on selecting for adequate fat stores. Starvation suppresses fertility.

I'm also not sure that @orthoxerox is right that "polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more." If you assume some limited capacity to feed children and support pregnant women per group, maybe the ones with big honkers were more likely to be selected from within a cule.

It is a joke. But I do appreciate the accidental nerd-snipe, that's an interesting tit-bit tidbit!

I have no idea if these ladies came from OG Mormon stock, or if they were made in a lab in Scotland. Presumably plenty of Utah Mormons came from here in the first place, and there's no shortage of (fake) blondes in these parts.

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