Selfish jeans

Aircon makes you fat? Keith and coworker (including Nick Dhurandhar), writing in the International Journal of Obesity, draw attention to other factors that may affect the increasing prevalence of obesity in the west. It's not just a sedentary existence and lousy diet (though it definitely is those) - there's a contribution from things also late nights and air-conditioning. The air-con hypothesis works like this: recent Western generations do not spend as much metabolic energy keeping themselves warm or cool in the face of climatic extremes but instead occupy cossetted environments where the calories budgeted for maintenance and homeostasis are instead stored as body fat. (via)
A corollary: We are the only species to use clothing. Clothing, it seems, may in some small way contribute to excess body mass. Which in turn means we need bigger clothes. Richard Dawkins summarized (in The Selfish Gene), the properties of self-replicators that will find themselves subject to natural selection: survival, imperfect copying fidelity, reproductive activity. This paper suggests that clothes are selfish replicators.