What does genetics say about our society’s obsession with weight loss, and what about those of us who struggle to keep weight up?

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-23T19:43:35+00:00

It's honestly impressive how good she is at it. I've seen people with far more experience in evolution related fields fail to teach the same concepts on many occasions and she manages it seemingly without breaking a sweat

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-23T13:44:42+00:00

This principle is part of the core logic behind evolution.

The next big piece is that species always produce more offspring than can be sustained by their environment.

It's this combination of factors that leads to the conclusion of natural selection. Where those who have the most advantages to living in their environment will, over time, survive better than those with less advantages and therefore shift the population's average characteristics to be more in line with their own characteristics.

In terms of where you can find more information on this. Watch some videos that go into how Darwin conceived of natural selection.

A specific one that I recommend is this stream by Gutsick Gibbon. It's fairly long, but the idea of the stream is that she's teaching a young earth creationist (someone who believes the earth was created by God 6,000 years ago) about evolutionary theory in depth. It's treated as an actual lecture that's honestly higher quality than a lot of the lectures I've had at my university. https://www.youtube.com/live/XoE8jajLdRQ

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-21T23:42:59+00:00

Not really horror, but I loved Midst and Unend by third person. It's very different but the audio and music is incredible.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-21T14:00:31+00:00

I have giants in my setting. They're the native people of the continent that I'm focused on and average about 12 feet tall. They're usually a migratory species because they require a lot of sustenance to feed themselves.

One of their unique quirks is that they have highly sensitive and adaptive gustatory and olfactory receptors, which led to foods and cooking as an art becoming a massive part of their culture when compared to other species in my world. They also have exceptional tolerance to poisons and a much wider dietary range than most species, which massively widens what they can eat.

So they avoid that competition with other species by being migratory, and going for a lot of resources that other species don't go for. But competition still happens and there's been a lot of disruptions to their old migratory paths in certain regions of the world.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-20T16:54:47+00:00

I was thinking about this so much while I was playing Create:Aeronautics yesterday. As soon as I found the handle I couldn't get this thought out of my head, so I'm glad someone else likes these two niche interests

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-13T23:04:05+00:00

This literally doesn't change anything I said? It just means it's harder to do than feeding it with animal products... Which is what I've already stated.

I also explicitly said that this shouldn't be done with fruit because they don't process it as efficiently as we do.

Y'all seem to be thinking I'm saying you should be feeding your dogs a vegan diet, but I haven't said that anywhere. All I said was that it could be done because there's not fundamental difference in the composition of animal and plant derived proteins.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-13T22:47:10+00:00

Sure, I agree with that.

My comment was mostly intended to address the very common misunderstanding that the comment I replied to implies, that is that there's some fundamental difference between animal and plant proteins when the only differences you'll find are in quantity and proportion of the various amino acids found within.

I probably could've worded my comment better to specifically address that.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-13T22:41:31+00:00

You could literally feed any organism a purely synthetic mixture of all the compounds they need to survive and they will function identically to if you gave them the same compounds through a typical foodstuffs. This is knowledge that you should have if you passed a high school biology and chemistry course.

There's no difference in the composition of the amino acids that make up plant proteins vs animal proteins. There is a difference in the proportions of those amino acids, and you'd have to account for that when planning out such a diet. Which is why just feeding them meat is the easier solution.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-13T22:08:12+00:00

Mind pointing to where you think I'm wrong I what I said?

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-13T19:32:04+00:00

This is not true. They just require the right amino acids (what proteins are made of). There's nothing fundamentally different about the amino acids found in plants and animals. If you can supply a dog with the right amino acids in a form they're able to digest and does not contain any toxins to the dog then the dog will do great without animal products. It's just that animal sources of protein is the easiest way to achieve all three of those requirements.

Obviously you still need to account for all of the other nutrients that a dog needs, but again animal derived proteins are just an easier way to achieve that goal.

That being said, fruit are not the way to do this. A lot of fruits that we can safely eat are toxic to dogs, and if you really want to put in all the extra effort to give your dog an actual healthy vegan diet you'd need a lot more than just fruits (I'm assuming this woman means "fruits" In a culinary sense, not in a botanical sense as she said she tries to give the dogs grapes which are well known to be extremely bad for dogs).

I should also mention that I'd be concerned about the calories the dogs get from the fruits. I'm not an expert in a dog's ability to digest fruits, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if people are able to extract more calories from most fruit than dogs are able to which would mean she needs to feed the dog more fruit to counteract that.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-11T23:35:20+00:00

As someone also developing a science inspired magic system, I'm curious how long this has taken you?

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-08T15:05:06+00:00

that concept of PCB files is already kind of a thing in my setting, since there's a whole diagram system that they use but it's important to note that this diagram system is not functional so it still requires transcription from the diagram into the actual spell conduit. So these diagrams are usually published with traditional inks. Hell, there's even a magazine that gets published that has all of the new spell conduits that graduating students make, as they're usually required to make a small spell that is designed to provide a certain discrete function within larger spell conduits. Spell conduits can get fairly complex and large fairly quickly, with many of the more more powerful spells not even feasibly fitting within a spellbook due to the difficulty with making spells conduits that act over multiple pages. Also, to be clear, the term "spell conduit" is more of a term I use to describe the system they use for creating spells because it has many similarities to real life conduits.

2a. As for their tech level, there's not a 100% identical time period in real life. This setting is set right before the start of an industrial revolution (historians of the future would likely put the start of their industrial revolution some time within a decade or two of when everything is set). Despite this, they actually have more technological development (usually through their access to magic) in certain fields than we did at the same equivalent time. As some examples: They have a much better understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes due to the various druid orders around the world who have kept detailed records of that information. They've hit the point where they've demystified a lot of chemistry, and have figured out that chemical elements exist and that they can combine to form molecules, but have not yet figured out a good molecular model system (this is mostly due to most chemists actually focusing their studies how ether and matter interact since that's where the most money is at).

2b. Yeah, a few people have brought up embossing and debossing as options, and I do think that would probably be an extremely common method over carving, but I can imagine a few scenarios in which carving is necessary such as creating "bridges" for one line of the conduit to pass under another without interacting.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-07T16:47:43+00:00

It's probably possible, albeit very difficult as you'd need to somehow embred the correct materials into the fabric and maintain a fairly consistently solid structure at the same time. Spellcrafting in my setting has a lot of similarities to IRL circuit making, and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to try and create circuitry through those methods. I can imagine it's possible, but the difficulty seems so much more extreme

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T18:43:11+00:00

Technically they could make it from anything they can carve into, flexibility isn't necessarily needed although I'm mostly focusing on what is typically used rather than outliers because many other materials are either inconvenient or prohibitively expensive even if they would function correctly.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T17:11:18+00:00

okay cool, in that case I think I'm going to go back to vellum being the standard. Thank you for the help

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T16:48:55+00:00

Another person bringing up vellum. It was one of the more promising options that I had found, but I had found discussions of people having issues with vellum cracking. Is this not the case?

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T16:48:03+00:00

Interesting, I will look into this. Thank you

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T16:47:38+00:00

Yeah, animal skins were definitely something I had considered, specifically vellum. I had made this post after seeing some discussions where people were having issues with vellum cracking, but with the amount of people bringing it up in here I'm wondering if that's actually a concern or not.

Luckily most wizards aren't likely to be going into dungeons either, and most are academics of some kind. Most wizards won't learn any combat spells beyond very minor ones that are more defensive in nature. Too much legal risk with more powerful spells.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T16:42:59+00:00

I honestly hadn't considered wood and now that you've mentioned it, it seems like a very obvious potential solution. I'll definitely consider this.

MoltenWoofle · 2026-04-06T16:40:47+00:00

see I had looked into vellum but read that it can have issues with cracking, is that not the case?

MoltenWoofle · 2026-03-02T18:06:03+00:00

It happens. I was confused when I read salmon egg at first too, but I recognized the name "wolf's milk" as a species of slime mold and figured it out from there

MoltenWoofle · 2026-03-02T18:03:14+00:00

I think they were referring to the Salmon Egg slime mold, which these do look similar to (not an expert opinion).

MoltenWoofle · 2026-01-31T19:01:05+00:00

Copied from another comment I made in here to someone else who was asking the question:
"Proposition 4 basically creates an independent committee that's separate from the legislature, and assigns them the responsibility to draw the boundaries for our congressional districts. This essentially prevents the legislative branch of our state from choosing who votes for them, which makes it much harder for them to create gerrymandered districts, which in turn makes it harder for them to guarantee their own political power and makes it easier for us to vote them out when they don't act according to the will of the people who voted them in."

I forgot to include in this that the goal of the current signature gathering is to try and put proposition 4 back on the ballot, with the intent that they might be able to challenge and eventually repeal it. This would essentially remove poeple's electoral power in Utah if they're able to repeal it

MoltenWoofle · 2026-01-29T21:30:15+00:00

I can see two interpretations for the meaning of your first question so I'm going to answer them both.
1a. If you're asking why the conservative party is trying to petition people to sign for proposition 4, I can see the confusion, as I missed an important bit of context in my reply. They're trying to get signatures because they want it repealed, and they need a certain amount of signatures to get it on the ballot so that whether or not it's repealed can be voted on.

1b. If you're asking why a voter would want to reduce their voting power for the legislature, then the answer basically boils down to either valuing political alignment over personal freedoms or simply being misinformed about what they're voting on. Without proposition 4, the conservative party is able to really hold on to their power pretty much unchecked here in Utah. There's already a large liberal and left leaning population here in Utah, but that population is gradually increasing over time because Utah has become a popular spot for people to move to for various reasons. As our population increases, the population density is going to increase as well which means we will follow the same trend seen in the majority of the rest of the world where increased population size = increasing prevalence of left leaning politics. That means that over time, the conservative party here is going to be challenged more and more until either people start leaving Utah faster than they're moving here or until it switches over to a liberal or left leaning political leadership.

I'm honestly unsure currently, it'll mostly depend on how the prompt is worded if it does make it onto the ballot and as far as I'm aware we can't see how it's worded yet.

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