The protein folds as platonic forms: new support for the pre-Darwinian conception of evolution by natural law

Before the Darwinian revolution many biologists considered organic forms to be determined by natural law like atoms or crystals and therefore necessary, intrinsic and immutable features of the world order, which will occur throughout the cosmos wherever there is life. The search for the natural determinants of organic form-the celebrated "Laws of Form"-was seen as one of the major tasks of biology. After Darwin, this Platonic conception of form was abandoned and natural selection, not natural law, was increasingly seen to be the main, if not the exclusive, determinant of organic form. However, in the case of one class of very important organic forms-the basic protein folds-advances in protein chemistry since the early 1970s have revealed that they represent a finite set of natural forms, determined by a number of generative constructional rules, like those which govern the formation of atoms or crystals, in which functional adaptations are clearly secondary modifications of primary "givens of physics." The folds are evidently determined by natural law, not natural selection, and are "lawful forms" in the Platonic and pre-Darwinian sense of the word, which are bound to occur everywhere in the universe where the same 20 amino acids are used for their construction. We argue that this is a major discovery which has many important implications regarding the origin of proteins, the origin of life and the fundamental nature of organic form. We speculate that it is unlikely that the folds will prove to be the only case in nature where a set of complex organic forms is determined by natural law, and suggest that natural law may have played a far greater role in the origin and evolution of life than is currently assumed.     

Ecological laws: what would they be and why would they matter?

There remains considerable debate over the existence of ecological laws. However, this debate has not made use of an adequate account of what a relationship would have to be like in order for it to qualify as an ecological law. As a result, confusions have persisted not only over how to show that ecological laws do (or do not) exist, but also regarding why their existence would matter – other than to whether ecology looks like physics. I argue that ecological laws would have to possess collectively a distinctive kind of invariance under counterfactual perturbations. I call this invariance "stability." A law of physics, such as the law that all bodies travel no faster than the speed of light, is not only true, but also necessary in a physically significant sense. (A body must travel no faster than light; it couldn't do otherwise, even if it were subjected to a greater force.) Likewise, the stability of ecological laws would render them necessary in an ecologically relevant sense. Furthermore, ecological laws would differ from fundamental laws of physics in the range of counterfactual perturbations under which they are invariant. Therefore, I argue, the existence of ecological laws would make ecological explanations irreducible to even the most complete possible physical explanations of the same phenomena. Ecological laws would make ecology genuinely autonomous from physics.     

Living matter—nexus of physics and biology in the 21st century

Cells are made up of complex assemblies of cytoskeletal proteins that facilitate force transmission from the molecular to cellular scale to regulate cell shape and force generation. The “living matter” formed by the cytoskeleton facilitates versatile and robust behaviors of cells, including their migration, adhesion, division, and morphology, that ultimately determine tissue architecture and mechanics. Elucidating the underlying physical principles of such living matter provides great opportunities in both biology and physics. For physicists, the cytoskeleton provides an exceptional toolbox to study materials far from equilibrium. For biologists, these studies will provide new understanding of how molecular-scale processes determine cell morphological changes.The distinction between being “alive” or “not alive” has been a long-standing question for those interested in our natural world. In many ancient cultures, the difference between living organisms and inorganic matter was thought to be due to innate differences arising from a “vital force,” such that biology operated with different fundamental properties than the physical world. The ability to disprove such theories came about over the course of the 17th to the 19th centuries, as scientists developed theories of atoms and were able to synthesize organic matter from inorganic constituents. Over the past 100 years, developments in molecular biology and biochemistry have provided a wealth of information on the structure and function of biological molecules, much of which was acquired in collaborations between physical and biological scientists. Application of X-ray–scattering techniques first developed to study metals enabled discovery of the structure of complicated biological molecules ranging from DNA to ion channels. Use of laser trapping techniques first developed to trap and cool atoms enabled precise force spectroscopy measurements of single molecular motors. We now know that biological molecules, while more complicated than their inorganic counterparts, must obey the rules of physics and chemistry.This wealth of molecular-scale information does not directly inform the behaviors of living cells. The organelles within cells are made up of complex and dynamic assemblies of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, all immersed within an aqueous environment. These assemblies are somehow able to build materials that can robustly facilitate the plethora of morphological and physical behaviors of cells at the subcellular (intracellular transport), cellular (division, adhesion, migration), and multicellular (tissue morphogenesis, wound healing) length scales. The dynamic cytoskeleton transmits information and forces from the molecular to the cellular length scales. But what is it about the behaviors of biological molecules that endow cells with the ability to respirate, move, and replicate themselves robustly—all qualities we consider essential to “life”? For these questions, understanding of the physics and chemistry of systems of biological molecules is needed. Interactions that occur within ensembles of molecules lead to emergent properties and behaviors that cannot be predicted at the single-molecule level. These emergent chemical and physical properties of living matter are likely fundamentally different from inorganic or “dead” materials. Discovering the underlying principles of living matter provides fantastic opportunities to learn new physics and biology.The fields of condensed matter physics and materials science study the physical properties that emerge when objects (e.g., atoms, molecules, grains of sand, or soap bubbles) are placed in sufficiently close proximity, such that interactions between them cannot be ignored. Interatomic or intermolecular interactions give rise to emergent properties that are not seen in isolated species. Familiar examples involve electron transport across a material or a material''s response to externally applied magnetic fields or mechanical forces. These emergent properties, such as conductivity, elasticity, and viscosity, enable us to predict the behavior of a collection of objects in these condensed phases. In this paper, I will focus on my perspective of how approaches to understanding the mechanical properties of physical materials can inform understanding of the mechanical properties of living matter found within cells.In a crystal of metal, precisely organized atoms are located nanometers apart, and the energies of their interactions are on the scale of an electron volt (40-fold larger than thermal energy or twice the energy released on the hydrolysis of a single ATP molecule). These give rise to an energy density, or elastic modulus, on the order of gigapascals, which underlies the rigidity of metals. For small deformations, the restoring force between atoms means that this metal behaves like an elastic spring: after a force is applied, the metal returns to its original shape. Understanding force transmission through crystalline metals was facilitated by the development of elasticity theory in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fluids, such as water, lack crystalline order, but predictive understanding of fluid flows and forces was captured through development of theories of fluid dynamics. Now think of another material, Silly Putty, which behaves elastically at short timescales (it bounces like a rubber ball) but then oozes and flows at long timescales, acting like a viscous fluid. Silly Putty is made of long polymers that are trapped by one another at short timescales, but thermal energy is sufficient to allow them to diffuse and translocate at long timescales. Silly Putty is also a “soft material,” in that the polymer''s interaction energies are at the thermal energy level, and its length scale is at the micrometer level. Materials like Silly Putty were thought to be too complicated for analytical theory. It was only in the middle of the 20th century that the theoretical framework to understand these “messy” and “disorganized” polymer-based materials was developed.The most powerful theories for understanding these vastly different forms of physical matter were developed in the absence of even the simplest of computers. The theories relied on developing physical properties or parameters to describe the material with a “mean field,” a type of coarse-graining that identifies the essential properties of individual constituents and interactions but ignores many other details. These mean fields give us new intuitions concerning the origin of material properties and give rise to definitions of physical parameters, such as elasticity and viscosity. However, these theories also require materials that do not jostle around a lot and remain close to equilibrium. In fact, understanding materials “far from equilibrium” has been identified as a major challenge in physics for the next century (National Research Council, 2007) .Materials formed by dynamic protein assemblies in the cytoskeleton are disorganized, heterogeneous, and driven far from equilibrium. Motor proteins generate local stresses, and their activity is spatially modulated. The polymerization and depolymerization of cytoskeletal polymers is controlled by a myriad of regulatory proteins. All these dynamic molecular processes endow the cytoskeletal assemblies with unique behaviors that enable them to support complex physiological tasks. It is likely these dynamics also provide underlying robustness of the cells in response to fluctuating and changing environments. These properties make living cells exquisite materials that cannot be captured by existing frameworks of physical matter. I suspect that we have not yet identified the important parameters needed to characterize their properties. The rich dynamics created by active biological matter present a formidable challenge in the area of materials science.How do we hope to understand the properties of these complex cytoskeletal assemblies and materials? It may seem as though understanding cytoskeletal machinery is an insurmountable feat, the approaches that have been successful for physical materials will not work, and we must rely on complex simulations that require modeling of all individual components. This may be true. However, I think that this is a pessimistic view. Just consider how complicated physical materials would be if we did not have the appropriate parameters to describe the macroscopic responses and had instead became obsessed about knowing the details of all the interactions between underlying atoms and molecules? In the same vein, I believe that predictive insights into biological matter will emerge through development of new physical theories that use mean-field approaches to understanding materials that contain active components and are driven far from equilibrium. The burgeoning field of active-matter physics is currently considering these questions (Ramaswamy, 2010) . However, these theoretical approaches require physical measurements of cells and cellular proteins that may not be clearly linked to a physiological process or have a clear biological context. Materials built from cytoskeletal proteins in vitro should also provide an excellent source of experimental measurements, but closer collaboration with theorists working in this field and collaboration between biochemists and experimental physical scientists is needed to develop control over such materials. Developing predictive physical theories of the cytoskeleton will elucidate principles of why “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” that will provide greater control and design over living matter, in the same way that engineering has provided great advances in applications of materials from the physical world.What do biologists gain from theories of living matter? These theories will provide a crucial link between molecular and cellular length scale behaviors and will provide insight into the mechanisms of why specific molecular perturbations alter cell behavior. Moreover, they should provide us with general design principles of living matter. What are the basic aspects of a machine needed to separate chromosomes, establish polarity, or generate contractile forces that is utilized across different cell types? Can knowing these aspects provide insight into the evolution of cellular machines and the robustness of cell behavior? Thus, study of cellular materials both provides new opportunities for physicists and will provide crucial predictive understanding of cell physiology.Open in a separate windowMargaret L. Gardel     

The Biosynthesis of Thiol- and Thioether-containing Cofactors and Secondary Metabolites Catalyzed by Radical S-Adenosylmethionine Enzymes

Sulfur atoms are present as thiol and thioether functional groups in amino acids, coenzymes, cofactors, and various products of secondary metabolic pathways. The biosynthetic pathways for several sulfur-containing biomolecules require the substitution of sulfur for hydrogen at unreactive aliphatic or electron-rich aromatic carbon atoms. Examples discussed in this review include biotin, lipoic acid, methylthioether modifications found in some nucleic acids and proteins, and thioether cross-links found in peptide natural products. Radical S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAM) enzymes use an iron-sulfur cluster to catalyze the reduction of SAM to methionine and a highly reactive 5′-deoxyadenosyl radical; this radical can abstract hydrogen atoms at unreactive positions, facilitating the introduction of a variety of functional groups. Radical SAM enzymes that catalyze sulfur insertion reactions contain a second iron-sulfur cluster that facilitates the chemistry, either by donating the cluster''s endogenous sulfide or by binding and activating exogenous sulfide or sulfur-containing substrates. The use of radical chemistry involving iron-sulfur clusters is an efficient anaerobic route to the generation of carbon-sulfur bonds in cofactors, secondary metabolites, and other natural products.     

The uniqueness of biological self-organization: challenging the Darwinian paradigm

Here we discuss the challenge posed by self-organization to the Darwinian conception of evolution. As we point out, natural selection can only be the major creative agency in evolution if all or most of the adaptive complexity manifest in living organisms is built up over many generations by the cumulative selection of naturally occurring small, random mutations or variants, i.e., additive, incremental steps over an extended period of time. Biological self-organization—witnessed classically in the folding of a protein, or in the formation of the cell membrane—is a fundamentally different means of generating complexity. We agree that self-organizing systems may be fine-tuned by selection and that self-organization may be therefore considered a complementary mechanism to natural selection as a causal agency in the evolution of life. But we argue that if self-organization proves to be a common mechanism for the generation of adaptive order from the molecular to the organismic level, then this will greatly undermine the Darwinian claim that natural selection is the major creative agency in evolution. We also point out that although complex self-organizing systems are easy to create in the electronic realm of cellular automata, to date translating in silico simulations into real material structures that self-organize into complex forms from local interactions between their constituents has not proved easy. This suggests that self-organizing systems analogous to those utilized by biological systems are at least rare and may indeed represent, as pre-Darwinists believed, a unique ascending hierarchy of natural forms. Such a unique adaptive hierarchy would pose another major challenge to the current Darwinian view of evolution, as it would mean the basic forms of life are necessary features of the order of nature and that the major pathways of evolution are determined by physical law, or more specifically by the self-organizing properties of biomatter, rather than natural selection.     

Substance and process: Reappraising the premises of the anthropology of law

Conclusion The anthropology of law works best through the use of the holistic approach that Hoebel recommended in the early stages of the subdiscipline. That approach includes the study of trouble cases, of patterns of actual law-related behavior, and of abstract rules or principles, the last being not the least among them. The quest should ideally be joined, however, so as to generate data that lend themselves to cross-cultural comparison and the formulation of politico-legal principles of a general sort, a goal which numerous anthropologists of law have already espoused in their work. But as Smith and Roberts caution, this is particularly difficult with regard to substantive law content, because substantive law is a particularly culture bound domain: there is considerable variability from society to society in its specific content. The structural comparison of substantive law notions as they occur within the boundaries of particular societies, by contrast, presents one fruitful alternative approach, one which carefully reflects the realities of intergroup politics. Through a political analysis of variability in cognitive models of law can better be seen as a reflection of, and an underpinning to, the socio-economic base that correlates with it.Nader indirectly calls attention to the fact that the law realm is best viewed from an explicitly political vantage. She notes that a lack of interest in substantive law has been accompanied by a relative loss of interest in political development, two tendencies which Koch also cites. But the very element of political developmental dynamics, as has been seen, forms a crucial component in understanding the variability in substantive law models and, more broadly, law's ideational side (see Moore ). Polities that wield considerable power potentials can generate and accomodate co-occurring non-isomorphic law models, and, indeed, it seems advantageous from the elite vantage for them to do so. With respect to their political strategies, societies with more modest power potentials also seem to avail themselves of such discordances to some degree. The result is a complex involvement with substantive law in most societies, and certainly at the state level.Daisy Hilse Dwyer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

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Humans' folk physics is sensitive to physical connection and contact between a tool and reward

Three experiments examined adult humans' folk physics (i.e., their naturally occurring understanding of the physical world) using variations of rope-and-banana problems that are used to study chimpanzees' folk physics. When presented with symbolic versions of these problems, the participants' choices were controlled by both the presence of a physical connection between a tool and reward (unlike chimpanzees' choices) and the degree of contact between these objects (more like what controls chimpanzees' choices). Similar results were obtained when actual ropes and bananas were used. We speculate that the degree of contact between a tool and a reward influenced people's behavior because contact and physical connection are often correlated in people's natural environments and because contact is a reliable predictor of physical connection.     

Environmental effects on behavioural development consequences for fitness of captive‐reared fishes in the wild

Why do captive‐reared fishes generally have lower fitness in natural environments than wild conspecifics, even when the hatchery fishes are derived from wild parents from the local population? A thorough understanding of this question is the key to design artificial rearing environments that optimize post‐release performance, as well as to recognize the limitations of what can be achieved by modifying hatchery rearing methods. Fishes are generally very plastic in their development and through gene–environment interactions, epigenetic and maternal effects their phenotypes will develop differently depending on their rearing environment. This suggests that there is scope for modifying conventional rearing environments to better prepare fishes for release into the wild. The complexity of the natural environment is impossible to mimic in full‐scale rearing facilities. So, in reality, the challenge is to identify key modifications of the artificial rearing environment that are practically and economically feasible and that efficiently promote development towards a more wild‐like phenotype. Do such key modifications really exist? Here, attempts to use physical enrichment and density reduction to improve the performance of hatchery fishes are discussed and evaluated. These manipulations show potential to increase the fitness of hatchery fishes released into natural environments, but the success is strongly dependent on adequately adapting methods to species and life stage‐specific conditions.     

Finding simplicity in complexity: general principles of biological and nonbiological organization

What differentiates the living from the nonliving? What is life? These are perennial questions that have occupied minds since the beginning of cultures. The search for a clear demarcation between animate and inanimate is a reflection of the human tendency to create borders, not only physical but also conceptual. It is obvious that what we call a living creature, either bacteria or organism, has distinct properties from those of the normally called nonliving. However, searching beyond dichotomies and from a global, more abstract, perspective on natural laws, a clear partition of matter into animate and inanimate becomes fuzzy. Based on concepts from a variety of fields of research, the emerging notion is that common principles of biological and nonbiological organization indicate that natural phenomena arise and evolve from a central theme captured by the process of information exchange. Thus, a relatively simple universal logic that rules the evolution of natural phenomena can be unveiled from the apparent complexity of the natural world.     

Another Crisis in Psychology

A psychologist in Hungary today does not necessarily want to be acknowledged for what he does as a scientist; actually, the number of those who fancy themselves artists or magicians is growing. On the other hand, those of us who make a point of our theoretical or practical work's being of a scientific nature are willing to consider psychology a natural science. But how could something be scientific if not in the same way physics, chemistry, and biology are?     

God's magnificent law: The bad influence of theistic metaphysics on Darwin's estimation of natural selection

Conclusion It is natural for us — living after the Darwinian Revolution and the neo-Darwinian synthesis — to consider the adoption of evolution by natural selection as unconditionally rational, because it now seems the best theory or explanation of many phenomena. Nonetheless, if we take historical inquiry seriously, as allowing us to probe into the ground of our knowledge, the roots of even this rational Darwinism might be unearthed. Darwinian doctrine betrays a deceptive desire for unity and simplicity of principle, and belief that the mechanistic aspect of nature is of the highest significance. Such crucial but questionable presuppositions are more easily discerned historically, insofar as they chronologically preceded Darwin's particular theoretical conviction and were even set off as a metaphysics of divine law.We have seen how Darwin's teaching about nature emerged within that theistic metaphysics. It emerged in a prior metaphysical debate in his mind between the contemporary belief in special creations and the belief in a designed hierarchy of physical laws. One can hardly deny that Darwin favored the superior side in this contest; but the contest was a narrow one whose basic premises he never clearly criticized. On the one hand, of course, his conviction about a lawful genesis inspired him to take a broad view of things and to seek out important general phenomena. But, on the other hand, it ensured that his new empirical notions would be easily drawn into the preferred cosmology. Historically, this seems to have occurred in Darwin's adoption of Malthus' principle of population and his extension of it to the whole account of descent: Malthusianism was readily attached to an ultimate scheme of things. Consequently, the key concepts that Darwin developed out of his Malthusian views — perfect adaptation and selection — reflect his cosmological prepossession, his desire to express a total and teleological process of creation. Perhaps our most valuable, and most undervalued, token of Darwin's metaphysical orientation is his reliance on a human technique (selective breeding) to explain Nature's way. In sum, to understand Darwin's faith in his grand view of life, we should not ignore the metaphysics that preceded and structured it, the metaphysics that linked the principles of contemporary science to primordial creation. Nor should we fail to see that such a metaphysics leads natural philosophy into a shadowy realm, where system can come to look like science, and one insight like an absolute.     

Language Metaphors of Life

We discuss the difference between formal and natural languages, and argue that should the language metaphor have any foundation, it’s analogy with natural languages that should be taken into account. We discuss how such operation like reading, writing, sign, interpretation, etc., can be applied in the realm of the living and what can be gained, by such an approach, in order to understand the phenomenon of life.     

A generic geometric transformation that unifies a wide range of natural and abstract shapes

To study forms in plants and other living organisms, several mathematical tools are available, most of which are general tools that do not take into account valuable biological information. In this report I present a new geometrical approach for modeling and understanding various abstract, natural, and man-made shapes. Starting from the concept of the circle, I show that a large variety of shapes can be described by a single and simple geometrical equation, the Superformula. Modification of the parameters permits the generation of various natural polygons. For example, applying the equation to logarithmic or trigonometric functions modifies the metrics of these functions and all associated graphs. As a unifying framework, all these shapes are proven to be circles in their internal metrics, and the Superformula provides the precise mathematical relation between Euclidean measurements and the internal non-Euclidean metrics of shapes. Looking beyond Euclidean circles and Pythagorean measures reveals a novel and powerful way to study natural forms and phenomena.     

Application of the biogenetic law to behavioral ontogeny: a test using nest architecture in paper wasps

General principles derived from studies of morphological ontogeny are useful in ethology. Behavioral ontogeny may be interpreted from an holistic view in which a series of behaviors is treated as an ontogeny toward a larger, complex, behavioral product. If the component behaviors are defined broadly, many taxa may be compared to find general principles that are not evident when behaviors are dissected to their smallest recognizable units. Flow charts can illustrate such general ontogenetic sequences in a manner that shows what sorts of modifications have evolved from the general pattern. Certain changes may illustrate forms of ontogenetic evolution that are well known for morphological development, such as addition or embellishment of terminal ontogenetic steps, or compression of ontogeny by acceleration or deletion of early steps. The major modifications in nest construction behavior of 28 genera of paper wasps are presented to test the predictions of the biogenetic rule with respect to character polarity. Cladistic analyses of separate morphological and behavioral data sets show that polarity is accurately inferred with respect to the five major patterns of nest construction in paper wasps.     

New perspectives through brackish water ecology

According to conventional wisdom, the brackish water ecology of the Baltic, like all ecology, is a secondary science. That is, the phenomena it considers can be decomposed into series of more elementary events acting under a sequence of laws that culminates either in the netherworld of quantum physics or in the realm of the cosmological. Ecology, however, is not a derivative science; it is fundamental in its own right. The Baltic ecosystem, for example, is a complex system of many-components. Using combinatorics one may argue that most of the whole-system configurations which ecologists encounter comprise unique and original events that elude treatment via the conventional Baconian approach. Chaos does not reign, however, because there exist among the populations of the ecosystem self-reinforcing mutualistic loops that exert a form of selection upon their constituent members quite different from the `natural selection' of evolutionary theory. This feedback gives rise to what Karl Popper described as `propensities' that serve in contingent systems in lieu of conventional forces to maintain the coherence of the ecosystem. The ensuing autonomous `ecodynamics' can be quantified using information theory, resulting in measures that can be used to compare the status of the Baltic ecosystem with those of similar bodies of water, such as Chesapeake Bay.     

Patrick Matthew's law of natural selection

Patrick Matthew is the little‐known first originator of macroevolution by natural selection. I review his ideas, and introduce some previously unnoticed writings (catalogued at a new website: http://smarturl.it/patrickmatthew ) that clarify how they differ from Darwin's and Wallace's. Matthew's formulation emphasized natural selection as an axiomatic ‘law’ rather than a ‘theory’, a distinction that could still be of use to us today. © 2015 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2015, ●● , ●●–●●.     

Revisiting the syntactic abilities of non-human animals: natural vocalizations and artificial grammar learning

The domain of syntax is seen as the core of the language faculty and as the most critical difference between animal vocalizations and language. We review evidence from spontaneously produced vocalizations as well as from perceptual experiments using artificial grammars to analyse animal syntactic abilities, i.e. abilities to produce and perceive patterns following abstract rules. Animal vocalizations consist of vocal units (elements) that are combined in a species-specific way to create higher order strings that in turn can be produced in different patterns. While these patterns differ between species, they have in common that they are no more complex than a probabilistic finite-state grammar. Experiments on the perception of artificial grammars confirm that animals can generalize and categorize vocal strings based on phonetic features. They also demonstrate that animals can learn about the co-occurrence of elements or learn simple 'rules' like attending to reduplications of units. However, these experiments do not provide strong evidence for an ability to detect abstract rules or rules beyond finite-state grammars. Nevertheless, considering the rather limited number of experiments and the difficulty to design experiments that unequivocally demonstrate more complex rule learning, the question of what animals are able to do remains open.     

New developments in the law for obesity discrimination protection

Background:

Obese individuals are frequent targets of weight‐based discrimination, particularly in the employment setting. Victims of weight discrimination have sought legal restitution like others who have suffered from different forms of discrimination. However, in the vast majority of the United States, body weight is not a protected class and weight‐based employment discrimination does not provide a basis for a legal claim. Some have attempted to seek legal recourse under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (collectively, the ADA), which protect against discrimination based on mental or physical disabilities in a variety of settings. Until recently, claims of weight discrimination under the ADA have also been largely unsuccessful. However, Congress recently passed the ADA Amendments Act, expanding the definition of what constitutes a disability and incorporating a broad view of ADA's coverage.

Objective:

This short communication provides an update of the law as it relates to employment based discrimination of obese people. The authors propose a legislative direction for future legal recourse.

Design and Methods:

The authors conducted legal research into the ADA Amendments Act, and synthesized this work relating to discrimination against weight in the employment context.

Results:

In light of the ADA Amendments Act, courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have provided protection for severely obese people from discrimination based on actual or perceived disability in the employment context.

Conclusion:

The authors discuss this positive legal development and additionally propose a targeted solution to address weight discrimination in the employment setting. National polling suggests there is considerable public support for such a measure. The authors thus recommend the implementation of a “Weight Discrimination in Employment Act” modeled after the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to adequately address this pervasive and damaging injustice toward individuals who are affected by obesity.