Whereas AFAIK there’s just as much evidence that willpower operates more like a muscle, in that you can build it by exercise but you can also tire it through overuse. Someone who is using all their willpower to control their eating may not have any left over to work on a PhD.

My love handles are just evidence that I’m reserving my willpower for more important things than diet 😉

You can apply his statement to numerous items. Someone already mentioned if you don’t have the willpower to stop drinking…

Aside from that, there is the fallacy of the assumption that excess weight is strictly from excess carbs. And how “fat” is too “fat”? 10 pds, 25 pds–is this a “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it” idea?

What about a skinny person who doesn’t exercise at all and at 25 has the arteries of a 65 year old? Are they not able to do a PhD because s/he lacks the willpower to exercise, improve his health and conditioning?

My sis-in-law is still overweight and has been dieting and exercising for a couple of decades now, very consistently too. So she watches what she eats, she exercises, and has done this year after year despite seeing very slow results…yet this prof thinks she doesn’t have what it takes to get a PhD. With that kind of stick-to-it mentality, she’d probably complete 2 PhDs in the time it takes most people to do one.

If this claim is true, then either (1) an Institutional Review Board approved this research or (2) he is doing unapproved research on human subjects. In the first case, he should be able to produce a copy of the IRB approval for his protocol, and he should be able to produce the detailed protocol that was approved (if he doesn’t have that, either he’s lying about IRB approval or the IRB is so toothless as to be of no value). I would bet on door #2, which only requires us to assume that the guy is a jerk (and the evidence so far, including what Frank @9 turned up, is consistent with that assumption).

2009:

http://www.economist.com/node/14742737

“In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.”

2010:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3d50ch5aiybaocu/2010%20polygenic%20mutations.docx

“We may need to find radical new ways to reconcile the empirical facts about human diversity with our classical liberal values of equality, meritocracy, democracy, and multiculturalism. In short, evolutionary genetics is undermining the old anthropological assumption about ‘the psychic unity of mankind’, and we better learn the scientific and moral sophistication to deal constructively with the consequences.”

I also wonder if he makes his students wear Abercrombie and Fitch.