I understand food wasn’t always so abundant, and humans were well served to store excess consumed energy as fat for later use. What I don’t understand is why the body keeps storing fat to the point where a person becomes morbidly obese and it puts their entire health at risk. Why isn’t there a point where the body just let’s the extra calories pass through without saving for later?
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Because evolution doesn’t have sentience and isn’t for our benefit. We can intervene, but ultimately, the traits we develop will happen whether or not they’re good for our species, and they’ll either survive or they won’t. We don’t have opposable thumbs because they help us build tools – we were able to build tools because we have opposable thumbs. I find it interesting how evolution is typically described through a creationist lens.
Edit to answer your actual question instead of just my reaction to pop-evolution:
The traits species develop can be pretty random. If individuals of a species survive long enough to reproduce, then they can pass their traits along. If there’s a genetic mutation that stops one from reproducing, it can’t be passed along. It’s not as simple as “good trait gets passed along” and “bad trait is bred out”, but the point is that evolution is more about genetic mutation than it is about what helps us.
We focus on our beneficial traits because they helped us survive, but there are infinite species that couldn’t make it.
We happened to have traits that allowed us to survive on earth. But we’re not actually the main character. There’s no omnipotent force, and we’re not entitled to survival.
The fat storage example is just how our genes react to this new environment. If some humans have genes that allow them to optimize fat storage, then it’s available to be passed along, but how would you even know who has those genes? Obesity doesn’t typically become a health problem until older age, so there’s plenty of opportunity to reproduce before the fat storage is a problem. Most people are going to reproduce with who they want to share a life with instead of for their genetic makeup.
With scientific advances, we can edit genetics, but we still have to work with what’s already available. We can’t yet just decide what would be best for us. We can add blue eye genes to a designer baby, but we can’t give it teleportation abilities.
We can only pass on genes that we have access to, and seeing as there’s no designer, there’s no one to give our feedback about our bodies to.
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