Why Mormons are like fruit flies and a “Magic Underwear” video tutorial

Brigham Young, second from the left, with fellow Mormons. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Yes! It’s true.  Mormons are like fruit flies because the scientists say it’s so, although at this writing there is no direct evidence to lead the researchers to believe that fruit flies wore magic underwear.  The research however goes on as the scientists are very dedicated to their cause.  Now for a little background on the Mormons:

In the late 1820s, a guy named Joseph Smith, Jr.  said that the angel Moroni gave him a book of golden plates inscribed with a religious history of ancient American peoples. After publishing what he said was an English translation of the plates as the Book of Mormon, he organized a restorationist church known as the Church of Christ.  Now at first the local pastor was skeptical so he asked Smith to talk to God again, while he watched.  Joe set up an appointment and the pastor came over and watched as Smith read the text that was contained on the “plates” that were ostensibly in the bottom of his hat.  This is true.  I couldn’t make this up.    Anyway after a whole lot of trouble from more sensible people who chased him all over the country for being a charlatan,  Smith landed in Jackson County, Missouri (it’s never been the same) and established what is now known as The Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Those golden plates, by the way,  were forever after known as the “hatplates” and they determined what Mormons should believe in, including, one must assume, the whole wearing of the magic undies thing, and, once the undies came off, the “taking” of every woman who walked by.   At least that’s the way it appears on “The Compound” in HBO’s Big Love.

For a better understanding of the Magic Underwear concept please take a minute to watch this little movie from our friends at The Thinking Atheist:

So, now that you’ve had a really good look at the famous (infamous) magic underwear, you must feel compelled to read about the Mormons and the fruit flies.  Here is the story from Guardian.Uk:

In Utah, women used to marry young. In particular they married Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon Church. The religious leader had 55 wives by whom he had 56 children before he died, aged 76, in 1877. His followers had similar polygamous marriages.

But scientists have now uncovered an odd fact about 19th-century Mormons: the more women in a household, the lower the average birthrate. In other words, the more sister-wives a Mormon woman had, the fewer children she was likely to produce.

“Although it is great in terms of numbers of children for successful males to have harems, the data show that, for every new woman added to a male’s household, the number of children that each wife produced goes down by one,” said biologist Dr Michael Wade, of Indiana University.

The result is intriguing, because this is the first time scientists have observed humans being affected by what is known as the Bateman gradient, a phenomenon that gets its name from the geneticist who first observed it in fruit flies. The more sexual partners the male fruit fly had, the lower was the fecundity of each of those partners, the 20th-century geneticist Angus Bateman noted.

In fact, examples of the Bateman effect were generally rare, said geneticist Professor Steve Jones of University College London. “The decrease in fecundity of females in these circumstances is not well established. The only other example that I can think of is the Soay sheep. Males fight furiously for females, but after a few weeks the most sexually active males are firing blanks – they have zero sperm left – which means their mates are not being fertilised.”

In the study of Mormon families, published in the US journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, the researchers surveyed birth, marriage and death records from the Utah population database, which covers nearly 186,000 adults and 630,000 children who lived or died between 1830 and 1894.

It was during this period that polygamy was slowly being phased out under pressure from state legislators. The results were clear: the more women partnered with a man, the fewer children each of those women had. Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina. Wade says: “It could be owing to competition between women within a plural marriage for shared resources, or it could be owing to other unknown factors.”

Neither was polygamy a great deal for males. For every man who had multiple wives, there were many who had none. “For every male that has three mates, there must be two who have none,” said Wade. “If a male has even more mates, then the disparity among male reproductive haves and have-nots can become quite high.”

The failure of the Utah polygamy experiment should therefore not be seen as that surprising.

Now that you have been informed as to the history of the Mormons; their relationship to fruit flies and magic underwear, please let me know what you think.  It doesn’t matter if, while thinking you are wearing magic underwear, or are playing with what might be inside your magic underwear, take a moment to comment.