It’s a well know fact that we have a need to eat, but what is its cause: nature or nuture?. Researchers at the Academy of Lagado recently made the startling conclusion that the drive to eat is a genetic tendency, and does not derive from spoon feeding, breast feeding, Happy Meal coupons, or other purely environmental influences. It seems that long ago, creatures who ate had a decided reproductive advantage over creatures that didn’t eat. Thus the non-eaters would tend to die off, leaving the eating population, and their ‘hungry’ genes around to propagate like crazy. The implications of this are startling. As Dr. Dawson Richard claims in his bold and original book, ‘The Hungry Gene’. According to Dr. Richard, we are but molecular machines that exist to serve an inborn genetic craving for saturated fats, sweets, and special sauces. Richard makes the revolutionary claim that we do not eat to live, but rather live to eat!! Dr. Richard, who is the Ichabod Crane Professor of Neuro-spastic biology at the Academy of Lagado, says that ultimately we can’t help ourselves when confronted with plates of chicken nuggets, potato chips, pizza slices, and chocolates because we are unconsciously driven by genetic puppet masters that have just got to eat. But these genetic puppet masters don’t stop there, but direct even our table manners!!

In a carefully contrived series of experiments, Dr. Richard noted that when left alone in grocery stores, little children helped themselves to all sorts of food, from chips to fruit, and showed no concern about the fact that their behavior was quite rude, obnoxious, and even illegal. He then cleverly deduced that children not only have an inborn tendency to eat, but an equally inborn tendency to be rude, and to act like insensitive little brats. The genetic tendency to be rude probably arose from our early ancestors, who could obtain life supporting nutrients faster if they snatched if from their parents, stole it from another’s nest, or jumped ahead of the line. This conclusion met with great controversy from other Lagado academics, who disputed the claim that we have an inborn tendency to be rude. Indeed, several critics noted that rudeness could not have been genetically favored in our ancestors, since rude behavior can only provide a series of quick snacks at best, which is hardly enough to secure the propagation of one’s hungry genes.

Nonetheless, Richard knew he was on to something by his postulation of genetic puppet masters, since it explained lots of things without a wasteful recourse to unnecessary thinking. Indeed, he figured that the genetic metaphor can be extended to just about anything that involves some sort of selection, from marriage partners to shoes. Take ideas for instance. We often select different ideas by figuring out their value to us. Good ideas crowd out the bad, and can spread like crazy given enough marketing buzz. If we just think about ideas as little viral entities that can spread like cold germs and infest our minds like some mind altering plague, these ‘memes’ provide a whole new way for us to shift responsibility without shifting the way we think. Thus, when you are confronted with some new or imagined fault, just say it’s not my fault, just blame those bad ideas.

Empowered by his insight, in his following great work, ‘The Copyrighted Phenotype’, Richard expanded the Darwinian metaphor from everything from architecture to shopping. Thus the patterns and shapes of lumber that you see at your hardware store are selected because they have fittedness, pants are selected because they must have a tight fit, an adolescents can hardly wait to select each other (particularly if they are looking fit) and pass on their genes and memes. Thus, along with meme and genes, we have selfish beams, blue genes, and teens as new and exciting genetic metaphors that can be used to further our academic knowledge and dementia.

First a mind experiment. Pick a fruit from a garden, and let’s say you are doing this because you are hungry. But what if the tree belonged to someone else, represented the last of its kind, or was in the Garden of Eden? Our fruit picker (let’s call him Adam) has thus broken the laws of man, nature, and God all in one swoop.

Is there anything genetic about this? No, unless you count ignorance to be genetic. Adam wasn’t genetically driven to pick the apple because of any instinct for rudeness, pride, or disrespect for the laws of God or man. He just didn’t know any better, yet would have known better if he was socialized to mentally model or internalize the concerns of the property owner, his impact on the ecology, and the commandments of God.

Recently, two evolutionary psychologists came to the not so remarkable conclusion that men may be genetically conditioned to rape, since our ancestral male forbears would have been more likely to reproduce if they grabbed a woman against her will every now and then. Now to put it mildly, rape is rudeness, but do men really have some hidden genetic inclination to discount the feelings of women?

Psychologically, men of course are very different from women, and it is doubtless true that men are far more sexually precocious than women, or in the words of one wit, would F*** mud. But it also follows from this that that men would very easily generalize from their own temptations to conclude that women, despite their protestations, are just like them. But is rape still rape if the rapist cannot understand let alone feel a woman’s trauma?

From the above examples, the problem with assigning a genetic cause for behaviors that have a significant ‘normative’ component is that genetic influences don’t select our norms, cultural influences do. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly, etc. are not absolute but relative concepts, and almost any aspect of our behavior is likely proscribed by somebody, somewhere. All of our instincts from hunger to sex are constrained within the bounds of information that is established by culture, and by our capability to model the thoughts and experiences of other people. A man who is aware of the disapproval of society and the sensitivities of a woman is extremely unlikely to rape, and indeed may suffer equally with a woman if put in a position where he was forced to give offense. To say that an individual has a genetic tendency to be rude or to rape is to confuse a genetic sensitivity to abstract information (e.g. the smell of a hot dog, the shape of a female) with interpreted information (e.g., its ok to rape because women really don’t care) that is derived from culture. The confusion between what amounts to perceptual or learned relationships and our genetic or ‘nativistic’ sensitivity to abstract information represents the enduring problem with evolutionary psychology.

The ‘Problem’ with Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology represents the study of the influences of genetic tendencies on sociological or psychological affairs. The influence of our genetic heritage is pervasive and undeniable, but the big and enduring question is how pervasive this influence is. Unfortunately, too often the boundaries of where nature stops and nurture starts are fuzzy, and it is all too easy to attempt to expand the explanatory power of one side or the other to areas it cannot explain. Thus the awkward attempts by feminists to claim that boys will be boys and girls will be girls because of sexist child rearing practices, and the equally awkward attempts by evolutionary biologists to make rape a genetic predilection.

The point where natures stops and nurture starts is actually quite simple. Nature has hardwired into our brains a sensitivity to rudimentary or nativistic information, however this information cannot be obtained or manipulated unless we are able to interpret it. Interpreted information is however not an intrinsic aspect of nativistic information, and may often be confused with it. This is precisely the problem evolutionary psychology faces.

Consider a bird. A bird has an instinct to build its nest, and will respond to specific abstract shapes that correspond to nesting materials. However, where it will fly and the course it will follow are not determined by instinct, but by environmental information that it must interpret. Thus it may fly high or low, long or far to get to a twig, but these surface or ‘topographical’ aspects of its behavior are not innate, but learned.

Similarly, men have a sensitivity to the abstract qualities of the female form, but that same sensitivity does not provide the interpreted information that will lead a man to rape, culture does. For another example, we may have an innate sensitivity to information that permits us a greater control over other things or other people, but how that sensitivity is displayed is dependent upon interpreted information that comes from our culture. Thus to gain an abstract control over the behavior of other people, we may become a sinner (as in as Hitler) or a saint (as in the Pope). The interpreted information we will choose is dependent upon what society demands of us, as it must be remembered that Hitler chose to conquer the real world only when he failed (to say the least) to conquer the art world.

Sometimes interpreted information is so subtle and universally imparted, it is easily confused with nativistic information. Consider the incest taboo. The classification of an individual as a close kin is purely interpreted, yet individuals still display an aversion to incest even when they are not directly informed by society’s proscription against the practice. Evolutionary psychologists have been quick to note an evolutionary justification to this behavior, since reproductive fitness is best maximized by marrying outside of one’s immediate kin. Thus, close kin form an aversion to incest because of an unconscious imprinting mechanism (Pinker, 1998). However, in lieu of finding the specific neural processes that constitute such a mechanism, an imprinting mechanism can only be accepted if it bestows predictive power that cannot be attained through an appeal to informative causes, which as we will note, work just fine.

In these examples, driving habits, breakfast choices, sexual preferences, and sexual desire are not switched on and off because of some hard wired imprinting mechanism. The mechanism is there all right, but it is enabled by cognitive software that is programmed by experience. We will not be attracted to our mother, cousins, or the girl next door because of some obscure genetic imprinting mechanism, but because of a simple habit of inaction. And habit, for its part, it simply a nonconciously perceived pattern of information. Since we don’t have time to deliberate where to sit, what route to take, or what foods to eat, we have habit dictate it for us. The same thing goes for sex, although we are loath to attribute it to mere habit, since it would seem to be a flimsy barrier to behavior such as incest that is so proscribed by society.

Evolutionary Psychology: The Lazyman’s Psychology for the 21^st Century

Nativistic information is easily expanded to incorporate interpreted information if we ignore, reject, or misperceive how nonconscious information may just as easily elicit behavior. However, when we expand our instincts to include information that comes from interpreted sources, then it is too easy to resist ever again considering those sources, since an answer is obviously at hand. Thus, the problem with evolutionary psychology is not that its principles may be simplistic or even wrong, but that it’s embrace leads to the implicit rejection of the very many informative events that shape behavior. Man is a reasonable animal, but he is reasonable in ways that even he cannot easily fathom. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to ignore such explanatory alternatives, since evolutionary psychology is itself easy to render impervious to refutation by such sources.

Like a child’s excuse, evolutionary psychology is simple, ‘correct’, and essentially unfalsifiable. In other words, to the child at least, it sound good. If little Billy said he bonked his little brother on the head because he ‘wanted’ to, his inner ‘want’ is simple, sounds reasonable, and puts the burden of better explanations on the parent. Generally, however, the parent bonks poor Billy back, and explains to Billy that he was punished because he was wrong. The circle becomes complete as Billy now has to try to figure out what ‘wrong’ means.

This example changes little if moved to the realm of human behavior and its various shades of goodness and badness. As humans, we begin our day at A, process information from our environment, memory, and our body (somatic events like stress and biochemical events like hunger), and then proceed in some circuitous way to B.

Biological models that derive from animal behavior ignore the fact that while man may share many behaviors with bumblebees and orangutans, he possesses a brain that processes information differently. Secondly, biological models use mathematical models for human brain that assume that we computer information algorithmically. But even here, minds do not work like digital computers, and again compute information in highly idiosyncratic ways.

Logical algorithms that purport to model human behavior are concerned with making inputs produce set outputs, and it is easy to factor in evolutionary constants that act like psychic fudge factors to make the equations work. So depending upon what you want to observe there is a ready erector set of metaphorical pulleys, gears, and levers that provide the easy mental mechanisms that 'explain' that outcome. Of course, post hoc or after the fact explanations predict unerringly the past, but the future is a different matter. Although evolutionary psychology can provide post hoc explanations of behavior, and provide comfortable rationales for sociological and behavioral trends spanning millennia, it still cannot explain the amazing elaborateness and plasticity of human behavior that often transcends and even contradicts the nativistic or instinctive sensibilities confidently set down by evolutionary psychology. But this requires a true understanding of how our brains actually work, and that is another chapter and another story.

Gene And Mimi

Once upon a time, when the earth was new, there was this inorganic chemical. Let’s call him Gene. Now Gene was rather simple as chemicals go, as we was made up of only a few simple strands of molecules. Existing as he did in an antediluvian broth, life was, or rather non-life was tough for entities like Gene. Unpleasant things like sunshine, lightning bolts, and temperature extremes always shook up his solution, resulting in unfortunate fractures in his molecular chain. Without thinking, Gene soon came up with an answer to his predicament. He would simply evolve a molecular shell to protect himself from all those nasty events, a survival machine of sorts to provide him a way to inertly repose and from time to time replicate. It came natural to Gene that he would make something out of himself. In his case, it was more of himself, although when he went about this process he was quite divided. Pretty soon Gene was all over the place, as he continued to divide and divide. This Gene pool soon became very crowded, and it was impossible to replicate further without the necessary raw materials. So Gene evolved a new version of his molecular shell that enabled him to cannibalize all his other duplicates that weren’t so well equipped. Having done so, Gene again began to divide and divide. The other Genes however weren’t going to take this lying dormant, and soon they evolved their own molecular add-ons that provided them with a tougher shell, higher mobility, or cannibalizing capabilities of their own. To meet this growing competition, Genes began to cooperate by linking up with one another, with each Gene assigned a specific job. Naturally, certain Genes would do their jobs better than others, and a way was need to select for those genes that could best contribute to the Gene team. Soon, Gene chains were meeting regularly to exchange genetic material. This allowed each chain to test out new combinations of gene talent in the ever more competitive game of life. The evolution of the periodic genetic exchange, which is also known as sex, caused a veritable explosion in the complexity and type of survival machines. More and more genes came together in ever lengthening communities, and soon the world was well populated with a growing assortment of lumbering and colliding molecular robots. Now Gene was a naturally passive and inert sort, and each robot, when constructed and wound up, would only follow the preset instructions that it was originally given. Gene couldn’t modify these instructions when situations rapidly changed, as they surely would; and he needed some apparatus to provide a kind of automatic pilot for his aimlessly cavorting robot. So Gene naturally selected an array of sensors to be attached to the outside shell. These sensors were reactive to a variety of changing stimuli such as water pressure, sound and light, and were hooked up by a series of molecular strings which wound about the machine. This ‘nervous system’ gave Gene the means to automatically coordinate the increasingly complexity of his survival machine.

Yet, even when equipped with a wide range of reflexes, the Gene machine could only react when it confronted a new situation, and not before. To react before a situation occurs demands that the probabilities of certain events be calculated before a certain movement was made. To do this, an internal simulation of the outside environment has to be performed that would give the machine the foresight to react to impending events. A computational device was obviously needed. In short, Gene need his own PC, or personal cerebrum. Since Gene needed to model external events internally, that means that his PC had to categorize and classify all of the information that he received from his sensors. Larger PC’s and sensory modems gave Gene increasing capabilities to process and receive ever-greater amounts of information, and soon Gene’s centralized nervous system became very specialized. Marvelous optical, acoustical, and olfactory devices were evolved as attachments to the PC. These knob like devices, also called the eyes, ears, and nose, were hooked up in close proximity to the PC, which was by then encased in a bone colored shell that was able to swivel about on its vertebrate stand. Soon the PC was able to make extremely detailed models of the outside world in three dimensions, and in living color. These models were stored in memory, and the PC was able to call up former memories at will and project out all sorts of what-if situations. As the PC’s memory grew, it became able to perform an every increasing array of mental tricks, such as controlling many thousands of operations at once (multitasking), and making models of the models of the models it created. The PC itself was able to perceive itself perceiving, and soon it became quite conscious of this fact. The PC thought, therefore it was, and it became oblivious to the fact that it was after all just a machine built to serve Gene. Some gratitude!

The latest version of the PC, called the homo-sapiens, was hampered by this pesky self consciousness, yet it nonetheless followed Gene’s programmed imperative and shortly became the PC standard. Soon other non-human PC’s were destroyed to make room for the new model, or else they were consigned to PC museums (zoos) for the instruction of young homo-sapiens.

The current model of the homo-sapiens PC most commonly in use is the PC-XT, or short for Xtra threatening. This PC is equipped with external memory storage devices (books) which allow it to access more information than ever before. With such information available, homo-sapiens is able to construct for itself a near infinite array of devices to improve its mobility (the car), hallucinatory powers (TV), and competitive capabilities (guns and nuclear missiles).

In spite of the PC’s unpredictable hijinks, Gene still retained control over the important PC programs that were crucial to his continued duplication. The most important was the automatic orientation and duplication mechanism, or in other words, the sex drive. Sex was obviously a more complicated trick for Gene than in the good old, old days, when all that was needed was a cup of nutrient broth and a willing cell or two. For the homo sapiens gene machine, special input and output ports had to be designed for the easy transfer of genetic material, and triggering mechanisms had to be in place to signal when the gene machines were to hook up. Random coupling was undesirable given the homo-sapiens PC’s ability to visually sort our prime reproductive candidates. To do this, the PC was programmed with special pattern recognition subroutines which were directly hooked up to the sex drive. Upon recognition of a suitable form, the PC would orient towards the object, input port at the ready, in preparation for a possible interface leading to coupling. For the male of the species, this form takes an hour glass shape, with special attention drawn to two round bulges located in the front anterior. For the female, a more blockish shape is preferred, with special emphasis on rippling striated musculature. For both sexes however, Gene was quite unadventurous regarding facial features, preferring t link up with those males and females who had rather regular and bland facial designs. Gene had always had his best success by staying with tried and true designs, and these extended to a uniformity in those optical acoustical, and olfactory knobs, which when set to an oval face, made something rather ordinary looking. However, to the homo-sapiens, it was beautiful.

The homo-sapiens is complex, and takes about nine months to construct. The female homo-sapiens is provided with an internal factory which builds to order new gene machines from the DNA blueprints, half of which are kindly ported over by the male. The internal duplication factory takes up most of the resources of the female, whereas the male can continue to hop from female to female making genetic deliveries. If he’s good, he’d soon become a captain or should we say father of industry, and have many factories humming along merrily and at little cost to himself. Naturally, the female can’t go hopping about like the male, as she needs a full time male to help take delivery of her bundle of joy. If the gene machine was male, then Gene could theoretically leverage out his genetic blueprints to make literally hundreds of baby gene machines in his image. Not so for the female gene machine, which can only make a few machines in her lifetime, and raise them only with the help of the male. Depending upon whether he dwelled in a male or female machine, Gene would be at an advantage or disadvantage relative to his peers. To help solve this problem, Gene became sexist. The male gene continued to impart operating instructions which spelled no limit to acquisition and merger activity. All that was needed for a ‘go’ signal was the right visual signal, of hourglass shape of course, that denoted the reproductive potential of the female. For the female, the visual image of a male didn’t so obviously denote the characteristics which were crucial to her and her offspring’s survival. She could ill afford to respond so reflexively to the male form, so she took her time in examining the male, and favored traits that demonstrated the male’s reliability, power, and devotion to her. Now all this demanded time and deliberation by the female PC, yet Gene quite reasonably couldn’t wait forever. So he gave the PC a little shove which turned ambivalence into action. He did this by making the PC into a drug addict.

Now Gene was a quite sensible drug pusher, wanting only that the PC opt to fantasize about devotion and coupling before he would give it a pleasurable high. Even the male gene got into the act, and to make the male PC compromise its own worldly ways, drugged it from time to time as well. This drub induced stupor was called ‘falling in love’, and it served Gene by putting an abrupt halt to the sexual dilly dallying that could make male and female gene machines circle each other endlessly in fruitless negotiation. It was quite an underhanded tactic of course, but Gene would do anything to survive; it came of course quite naturally.

Now Gene had developed a marvelous personal cerebrum, or PC, to attend to his large and ever growing information processing needs. But what was behind this trend towards greater personal computing? Obviously, there was very little the homo-sapiens could do with his onboard equipment except swing his arms about and wiggle his pinkies. Yet by being equipped with flexible hands, stereoscopic vision, and a PC with rudimentary memory, Gene gave the early homo-sapiens the ability to manipulate all sorts of devices which extended many fold the functionality of the homo-sapiens. These devices were called tools, and even the most primitive of them, like a sharp stone, could be put to a multitude of uses. These varied and often complex functions were infinitely numerous, and each function was useful only in very specific and changeable circumstances. Gene placed the instructions of programming for them in RAM (readily absent memory). Thus, functions like home building weren’t pre-wired into the PC’s memory like say, a bird’s, but had to be programmed into memory through the use of programming languages like English, French, or any number of others. With the advent of programming languages and external storage devices (books), an extensive library of software was soon developed for the PC. With the right programming, the homo-sapiens was able to accomplish all sorts of specialized and complicated roles. He could be a homo-sapiens mechanic (doctor), PC repairman (neurosurgeon), systems analyst (psychologist), or he could specialize in developing procedural languages of meaningless complexity (lawyer).

The most popular programs are utility programs. These programs assist the homo-sapiens in forming social networks, and establish a standardized set of response patterns for everyday situations. These local area networks are collectively known as ‘society’, and allow the homo-sapiens to work in harmony for the greater good of the entire PC network. Sometimes a PC receives programming which places it at odds with society, hence forcing the latter to disconnect the PC from the network and place it in a reprogramming center (prison). Usually, just the threat of partial disconnection (embarrassment) is enough to bring an errant homo-sapiens in line, since as we shall soon see, reprogramming can be a difficult task indeed.

The wide range of software available to the PC inevitably led to the popularization of many software packages that either were superb in handling their desired functions, or else were the first on the market and were able to become a de facto standard. Many of these programs were copied down from generation to generation, and are know collectively as ‘culture’. A curious thing about cultural programming is that it to represents chains of information that exist, replicate, and grow ever more complex. But unlike Gene, these entities don’t dwell in the real world, but achieve a different sort of reality in minds. So, how would Gene confront this new sort of reality if imagination permits a friendly introduction?

Mimi was just a good idea waiting to happen, and when man began to think, Mimi felt right at home. Now Gene was a modest, relaxed, and undemanding sort who rarely called attention to himself. He built the mind that Mimi moved into, and scarcely complained when Mimi started to arrange his mental space in her image. Mimi was flexible, changeable, and rather flighty, and she could move about from one mind to another with breathtaking speed. Often, Mimi would move against Gene’s better instincts, and sometimes Mimi would prevail, sometimes not. This was indeed a strange pairing. Whereas Gene loved to tinker about, and make over the eons Gene machines of wondrous diversity, Mimi was the very embodiment of philosophy, literature, and the fine arts. Gene loved hardware, whereas Mimi was always out shopping for the latest in software. Soon, as education opened up a vast Bloomingdale’s full of ideas, Mimi began decorating the PC with dozens of ideas of every shape and hue. She lived for such things, and indeed wouldn’t be without them. Soon her influence was overwhelming, and she made sure that any baby homo-sapiens would have the benefit of all her mental decorative ideas. Many of these ideas Mimi was quite fond of, as they encouraged the homo-sapiens to behave better, entertain itself better, and even to think about life without Gene and Mimi.

So the homo-sapiens now only lived to eat and reproduce, but to revered modesty, truth, and other humanly virtues, enjoy the music of Mozart, and wonder about the possibilities of existence without a physical body and mind. Gene became more and more a forgotten influence, as the purpose of man was merged into a symphony of ideas. Soon the whole world marked nothing less than this cultural legacy. The world was indeed made in his image, the image of his mind.

Dr. Mezmer’s Fairness Policy

Some of you who have just read the preceding learned commentary on evolutionary psychology will probably take umbrage at my unfair attack on a very reputable field of science that is full of folks with important sounding titles making important sounding claims. Thus, to be fair, I have included the following article from "The Onion", America’s News Source, a remarkable article that demonstrates indeed that those darn genes are behind behavior that I Dr. Mezmer thought we due to mere gluttony. Dr. Mezmer stands corrected on this one.

Scientists Discover Gene Responsible for Eating Whole Goddamn Bag of Chips – by Chip Lays

Ithaca, N. Y. – In an announcement with major implications for future generations of big fat slobs, Cornell University geneticists announced Monday that they have isolated the specific DNA series that makes an individual susceptible to eating a whole goddamn bag of chips.

"We have long known that the tendency to sit down and eat the whole goddamn bag runs in certain families," said team leader Dr. Edward Alvaro. "However, until we completed our work, we weren’t sure whether the disposition to cram chips down your greasy gullet was genetic or whether it was a behavioral trait learned from one or both fat-fuck parents. With the discovery of the gene series CHP-48/OZ-379, we have proof positive that single case serial chip eating is indeed hereditary."

For years, scientists have been aware of the numerous health complications linked to a person’s disposition to plop down and mow through a whole bag of chips, but it wasn’t until now that they were able to isolate the gene that carries the trait.

According to the Cornell team, series CHP-48/OZ-379 is a set of "alleles", or collections of genetic material, that cause chip eaters to develop a markedly larger number of chip responsive nerve endings in their cerebral material.

"People with this gene have up to four times the amount of fritoceptors normally found in a human," Alvaro said. " This increases their pleasure response to snaxamine-2, the human body’s principal chip-eating hormone, which is released to giant handfuls of chips being shoveled into the mouth. This tends to promote entire-goddamn-bag-eating behavior in those individuals who possess the series."

One of the most interesting characteristics of the newly discovered series, researcher Dr. Paul Bergleiter said, is its tendency to appear more thanonce in the gene strands of a human subject.

"Series CHP-48/OZ-379, because it is a fairly large, or ‘fat-assed’, allele, tends to lie around at convenient sites on the DNA sequence," Bergleiter said. "Though many subjects exhibit only one instance of this gene, on others we have found as many as four. This, of course, led these rather rare subjects to eat four times as many whole goddamn bags of chips as those in our control group."

Thought many more fatsos must be studied to determine CHP-48/OZ-379’s transmission pattern, conventional wisdom seems to indicate that the gene is recessive.

"Who would want to pass on their own intact genetic material to someone who just sat around eating chips all goddamn day?" Bergleiter asked. "Unless, of course, that was the only person you could find because you were such a big lard ass yourself. That would probably be the only source of friendly RNA-transcriptive culture you could find."

Carriers of the CHP-48/OZ-379 gene are hailing the Cornell find.

"It is about time science took steps to help people like me—people who eat bags of chips like it’s fucking popcorn," said 370 pound Erie, PA. Resident Russell Roberts. "I can’t get jogging pants in my size anymore."

The discovery is considered the most significant in gene mapping since a University of Chicago team isolated the DNA strand that causes people to shovel spoonfuls of ice cream into their mouths while standing in front of the friggin’ freezer with the door wide open.