David Archibald
Another COP, another call to have meat removed from our diet. The further we depart from what we evolved to do, as individuals and as a society, the less efficient we become. We didn’t evolve to be vegetarian. Quite the contrary, humans are one of the most carnivorous animals on the planet, surprisingly so.
Eating meat is more efficient. Carnivores spend less time feeding than similar-sized herbivores. For example, one of our primate relatives, baboons (Papio cynocephalus), devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding while adult males of hunter-gatherer Ache (eastern Paraguay) and Hadza (northern Tanzania) tribes spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation and feeding. Acquiring and consuming medium-size animals, at a return rate in the range of tens of thousands of calories per hour, is an order of magnitude more time-efficient than plant-gathering. In nature, for humans, plant-sourced calories cost ten times the price of meat if it is available.
The most energy-dense macronutrient is fat (9.4 kcals/g), compared with protein (4.7 kcals/g) and carbohydrates (3.7 kcals/g). Plant proteins and carbohydrates typically contain antinutrients with functions in plant growth and defence. These antinutrients, such as lectins or phytate, limit full energetic utilization and nutrient absorption by humans. Phytates also limit iron absorption from plants. Up to 30% of the iron in meat can be absorbed while iron absorption from plants is limited to about 10%. That is why iron deficiency is a common symptom of vegetarianism.
Then there is the matter of stomach acidity. The acid involved is hydrochloric acid. Carnivores have a stomach acidity of pH 2.2 on average and omnivores are pH 2.9. Obligative scavengers, which feed almost exclusively on carrion, have a stomach pH of 1.3, while facultative scavengers, with a proportion of diet being dead animals they have found, have a stomach pH of 1.8. The human stomach acid level lies between the two types of scavengers with a pH of 1.5 which equates to a hydrochloric acid content of 0.115 percent. This is some 30 times the stomach acid concentration of omnivores.
Figure 1: The acidity spectrum by feed type
pH can be misleading as it is a log scale. Restated as percent of acid in the stomach, humans are well into scavenger territory.
Producing stomach acid and maintaining the stomach walls to contain it are energetically expensive. It seems that our antecedents found that it was easier to eat semi-rotten meat from a large carcass than to hunt for a fresh animal. Note that we would rather eat semi-rotten meat than increase the proportion of vegetables in our diet. We are hyper-carnivores – meat-eaters that keep going even as the meat starts rotting. Vegetables would take us backwards. This is instinctive knowledge.
Another attribute we share with carnivores is low insulin sensitivity which means that our muscles, fat and liver have a weak response to insulin. The role of insulin is to direct these organs to take glucose from the blood. It has been speculated that physiological insulin resistance allows humans on a low-carbohydrate diet to conserve blood glucose for the energy-hungry brain.
Most plant-eaters extract most of their energy from the fermentation of fibre by gut bacteria, which occurs in the colon in primates. For example, a gorilla extracts some 60% of its energy from fibre. The human colon is 77% smaller, and the small intestine is 64% longer than in chimpanzees, relative to chimpanzee body size. Because of the smaller colon, humans can theoretically obtain less than ten percent of total caloric needs by fermenting fibre, with the most rigorous measures suggesting that it less than four percent. That 77 percent reduction in human colon size relative to our closest primate relative points to a marked decline in the ability to extract the full energetic potential from many plant foods. The elongated small intestine is where sugars, proteins, and fats are absorbed. Sugars are absorbed faster in the small intestine than proteins and fats. A long small intestine relative to other gut parts is also a dominant morphological pattern in carnivore digestion.
Another thing about being human, relative to other primates, is the reduced size of our mouth and jaws. While chimpanzees spend 48 percent of their daily hours chewing, humans need to devote only five percent of their day in chewing. The shrinkage of the relative size of the jaw started with Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago.
Figure 2: Dentition change in response to meat – it started with Homo erectus
From left to right, the skulls of Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens
Our energy-dense, high-meat diet also allowed humans to have a lower weaning age than other primates. In orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees, weaning age ranges between 4.5 and 7.7 years but is much lower in humans of hunter-gatherer societies at 2.5–2.8 years, despite the long infant dependency period.
The energy metabolism of humans is adapted to a diet in which lipids and proteins, rather than carbohydrates, make a major contribution to the energy supply. At the same time, humans are limited in how much protein can be converted to energy. This is a third to a half of normal caloric requirements, due to the liver and kidney’s limited ability to remove large quantities of the toxic nitrogen byproducts of protein metabolism – urea and creatinine5. Thus, depending on the relative energetic returns and abundance of plants and animal fat, humans have to obtain 50–65% of their calories from either animal fat or plant fat and carbohydrates. Thus, in the absence of readily available plant foods, humans have an important obligatory requirement for animal fat. Some hunters will give up on an animal once it is perceived to have a low fat content. The targeting of fat, at substantial energetic costs, could point to chronic maximal protein consumption.
Changing a plant-dominated diet to a meat-based one allowed the development of a larger brain. Once that process was underway it was self-reinforcing to the limit of the ability of the brain’s neurons to communicate with each other. The increase in brain size allowed humans to become more successful hunters which ultimately led to the Late Quaternary Extinction in which the megafauna of many continents was killed off. This was a problem for Stone Age hunters as they preferred to hunt larger, adult animals which have a high fat content. Hunting small and medium-sized prey takes more effort relative to the reward.
Dogs were domesticated not long after the Late Quaternary Extinction of the megafuana. As dogs can utilise a higher proportion of protein in their diet than humans, it has been proposed that dog domestication is a form of joint venture between humans and wolves/dogs. Under the arrangement, humans contributed surplus meat protein from relatively fat-depleted animals that dogs could utilize but humans could not. In return, dogs helped humans save energy by helping to track and chase smaller animals. In most ethnographic cases, dogs are employed to aid in hunting smaller animals. It is conceivable that dogs were domesticated as a behavioural adaptation to the increased energetic demands of hunting a larger number of smaller animals as prey size declined. Dogs aren’t the only animals with a symbiotic relationship with humans. For example, honeyguides are African birds that lead humans to bee hives.
When did the rot set in? A high caries prevalence, a sign of intensive carbohydrate consumption, first appears in Morocco about 15,000 years ago, together with evidence for starchy food exploitation. Caries prevalence in humans increased markedly after the transition to agriculture. The transition to agriculture though produced an explosion in human productivity as it removed the repressive effect of group food pooling behaviour which regulated the distribution of meat within a tribe. Group food pooling behaviour, necessary to even out the supply of meat for a family, punished hard work with a higher death rate while not rewarding it with an increase in the food received. The agricultural revolution flipped the scrip and suddenly working harder was rewarded by the ability to store excess food with a survival benefit.
Humans are now in the optimal position of growing grain to feed animals to produce meat. Meat made us human. Vegetarianism is a psychological condition on the spectrum, not as bad as gender dysphoria with its 50 percent suicide rate but self-harm is involved nevertheless.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia.
It’s not so much meat as animal fat which made us human. Without fat, no big brains.
Stone tools gave our ancestors access to fat sources such as bone marrow and brains, plus more accessible body fat.
True. Now, even if you eat meat, you should take fish oil supplements. Our brains need healthy fats to function properly.
Grass fed (and especially finished) meat has a very very good omega 3 to omega 6 ratio. Fish is good too. But red meat, especially if you eat organs beyond muscle, is incredibly nutritious. Said another way, if one had to choose one or the other, my bet is if there was a choice between the cow or the fish but not both – the cow is more nutritious to humans
Ive hardly touched organ meats , I think you need to eat them young to aquire the taste? and sure wouldnt now as the pouron drenches and the internal ones arent so nice and eating the bits that filter those chemicals seems a bit dodgy
I am with you, though I still make the claims.
I do not like the organ meats either so I don’t eat them. Kidneys filter, Liver detoxifies. I used to get those wrong. But still the liver tastes like not eating it will save my life!
I try to fill my nutritional needs with densely nutritious foods like pasture raised eggs and leaning towards organic veggies.
I made a three page primer on metabolic syndrome, which is the root of almost all disease based on a lot of study… that might be a good topic for WUWT to has out!
If you ever get to Scotland, try the haggis. Everyone likes to joke about it, but as my Pakistani friend said: Leave it to poor people to make guts taste good.
We saw haggis on the menu in a restaurant, and ordered it as a side think we’ll never eat this stuff. In a real Mikey won’t like it he hates everything; he likes it hey Mikey. I tried it and loved it.
Haggis is like the best meatloaf you’ve ever had.
The art of cooking organ meat has bee lost with the bygone age of home grown and slaughter meat. Here is PA, liverwurst is good and cheap. Scrapple has become more expensive…which makes no sense as most of it is corn meal.
Nothing wrong with organ meats.
Liverwurst, scrapple, head cheese, pork jowls, pork cheeks, pork shanks, pork liver, kidney pie, mincemeat ( a colonial staple), black pudding, black sausage (blood), sweet meats, beef tongue, etc. etc.
Growing up in south Pennsylvania exposes one to a host of good foods spurned by so many of the ignorati.
While living in Southern Louisiana I was often the only northerner, (north of Memphis) who joined in eating their head cheeses, similar to Amish head cheeses but much spicier.
Head cheese is all of the unused bits from a pork head cooked into an aspic, sliced and served on crackers or fresh bread.
On a side note, visits to England, Netherlands, France and Belgium I often bought pâté and head cheese at the local meat vendors along with fresh made bread. Far cheaper than restaurants and much healthier and more delicious.
A couple cousins that stayed with us arrived and flatly stated that they would never eat “guts”.
Both discovered that they loved crispy scrapple and later, the liverwurst or hogs head cheese sandwiches we made for lunch.
On a side note, the lacy like fat mesh surrounding some animal organs are amongst the priciest, scarcest and priciest organ foods. This is often used to wrap nearly fat free foods for cooking.
As JC says so succinctly, “Nothing wrong with organ meats”.
Mostly correct. One small point: there really is no such thing as grass-finished. Nearly all cattle spend most of their lives eating grass — something like 80-90% of lifetime feedstock. The difference is grain-finished versus not. Grain-finished means corn and soy (sometimes other grains) are fed to the animals before sending to slaughterhouses. While also greatly and more efficiently fattening them, this greatly increases the omega-6 content — which is a bad thing. Many consumers, however, prefer the taste of grain-finished. Grain- and grass-fed labels don’t generally provide insight into health of cow, however.
Willy: I agree with you. There are grass finished and I am not sure I ever ate that meat. But that is still the best. And yes, grain fattened finished probably does taste better. No question on that. But wild animals are generally grass finished – or could I say bullet or arrow finished.
Soy is a bean, ie legume, not a grain, ie grass seed. Legumes and grains together have the amino acids to make proteins.
The issue isn’t legumes or meat…which is healthier!
The issue is a higher authority telling us what we should eat and not eat….which is usually leveraged to profit the authority. The issue is liberty and free markets.
The other issue is you can’t grow legumes on marginal lands but your can graze meat critters on marginal lands.
This fact has no relevance to us who live in an industrial meat economy where most of our meat is raised in feed houses or lots from grain grown on fertile farm land.
The reason this is an issue is because no one wants to personally graze meat critters on marginal lands because we are tied to our phones and computers. The scope of our imagination and desire is held captive to the paralysis created by those devices and to the colluded global industrial farming complex and markets.
Hey Willy,
Most cattle are raised grazing pastured until they are weened then go to the feed lot, which isn’t grass fed, nor grass finished nor corn finished etc.
Many people might not like the taste of all pastured raised beef…. stronger taste and much less marbling. And now it is boutique item of high cost. Frankly I take fish oil and buy really good pastured raised corn finished beef if I could afford it.
Even up to the1960’s the best beef on the market was pasture raised and then corn finished to give the meat it’s marbling. All that changed as beef went industrial in the 1970’s when feed lots took over the beef industry.
Then in the 1970-1980’s everyone got their cholestoel levels checked. This became the index of health and fat became the evil demon. So the beef people just fed the cattle less on the feed lot. It was a great time for those of us who didn’t give a rip about the latest health care generated food fad…. great beef was cheap in those days.
Bottom line… health care is made up of fallible people who make stupid mistakes just like the rest of us….. only the impact is often massive and massively stupid.
Absolutely. Here in small town ND, we really didn’t notice those trends. Most of us raise our own meat. Most cattle are grass/hay raised and corn finished to fatten; some are grass/hay for whole life — but these take a hour or two longer to get to weight! Down in NE, that’s where a guy sees the big feed lots — not my thing.
Very cool. I live in PA and grass fed/corn finished is a boutique product. There is plenty of marginal lands for grazing but people lost the will to do any farming for themselves….that is except for the Anabaptist Mennonites and Amish and even they are doing less and less and moving towards centralized market- industrial farming. PA regulations are also a hinderance. And for the local middle class family, they have to complete with the huge number of deep pocketed people around Philadelphia for locally grown grass fed beef…. which means they can’t buy it. So they focus on Venison.
Putting a little meat on the ground each rut is great — but tough to feed the family, at least reliably. What happened to the Mennonite in Bird in Hand that was getting harassed by government for selling direct? I lived in Lancaster for a spell and my Meeting was in B-i-H, so i took a bit of interest. The loss of the rancher knowledge is a real shame, and non-trivial risk.
I remember the controversy at Bird in the Hand but I don’t remember the outcome other than he was fined.
American’s have lost a great deal of home economic how to knowledge. Who do you who can shoot a goose pluck it, gut it and cook it. Used to be common knowledge. I grew up in the middle of the grand era of selling people stuff they didn’t really need. Along with it came the meta- message that working in the soil or working hard on the land was low class. So family subsistence farming disappeared .. a gigantic economic loss and a great hedge against centrally controlled markets…. the local people in the Soviet union know this well. You could be truly cash poor and feed yourself and make enough to squeak by. This is how America got by during the depression.
Even in the 1930’s my Grandfather on 400 acres in Iowa, bred and raised 200 head cattle, bred and raised hogs, grew the grain, Bred his own German Gray work horses, harvested the hay, raised chickens and eggs, Butter and cream, apples, Vegetables, grapes. He had a very productive farm and ran it with the help of a hired man and a son…my Dad. He used horses. No electricity or phone until the war. The profit margin was so slim, he made more cash shooting pool and home made ice cream. Today he would have been a wealthy farmer like many of the Dutch Farmers in PA are today.
Yet even a guy with a good job in a top corporation like myself can struggle to fully leverage all he pre and post tax payroll investment benefits and Roth IRA… especially on one income raising babies in my 50’s like I did.
So my wife and I did the urban farming thing in Philly for 10 years with babies. I profited around 12-15 grand a year growing and selling high end produce and eggs…. and food for the family in Philadelphia and then in Burks county. The difference between relying on my salary alone and what we did growing food for ourselves and selling it and leverage the pre-and post tax investments, has been amazing after 20 years.
We still grow 25-30% of our food even as I get to be a bit long in the tooth but it’s worth it… it’s not everything but today everybody has to have a side job…beef in the rut, Goose on the table, urban farming, a simple garden, pool sharking etc. Next door we have two teens who are making good money forging implements from steel If you work in front of a computer all day, you need something to keep you going in the real world. A little legal off grid money helps if put it to work making more money buying capital for a small business or your 401K, HSA etc.
We are in an era when most of the stuff we’re being sold we don’t need but most of all we are being sold the idea that we the folks with votes and dollars buying stuff from the global market supply chain are now the problem.
From 2nd order lies to first order lies.
Uh, no.
Cattle are weaned onto grass. They are still calves at that point.
About 9 months to 4 years later, farmers sell their grass fed cattle to feed lots and butcher houses.
Not when the cattle are weened.
Grain can help fatten cattle, but it is terrible at growing cattle. Cattle are grown on grass or silage (harvested dry grass), preferably with the seed heads.
Dried grass without the seed head is commonly known as hay. Hay is great for bedding animals, but provides poor nutrition to any grass consumer.
Cattle fed all grain or continuously fed grain eventually end up with serious digestive problems as their systems are meant to ferment and digest roughage. Grain ferments much too fast and bloats the first stomachs of a cow. Bloat is very painful to the animal and prevents them from eating more or chewing their cud.
There is a farmer/butcher within ten miles of me. He sells the cattle in quarters, two hind quarters and two front quarters.
The price per pound, on the hoof, is between $2 and $3. Far cheaper than what we pay at the grocery store.
The farmer/butcher raises grass grown cattle and buys grass fed cattle from other farmers. He earns far more per pound than feed lots would pay farmers for their cattle.
Feed lots buy mature cattle and feed them enriched silage if they are keeping them for more than a few weeks. Otherwise they stand to great a chance at losing cattle to bloat if they try and feed the cattle grain for more than 2 weeks.
Enriched silage may contain waste products from beer and distillers, but it is more likely a mix of dried grass and alfalfa.
Down the street from me, literally over a small hill, a farmer raises cattle.
Farms in my area mostly grow various silage plants as the high clay content forbids growing corn, wheat or other intensive crops for feeding people.
Hillier and rockier ground is excellent for cattle, terrible for human consumed crops.
That farmer buys weened Angus calves at auction, releasing them onto his grazing lots for a couple of years. He waits until cattle has reached their full growth.
From the USDA:
I think that’s a marketing message.
Grass fed meat is awesome…real flavor and heft to the meat. Unfortunately, we live i na food world that is fractionalized to the max. Need good Omegas buy it in some fractionalized form as a supplement. It’s cheaper to buy the fractions that to buy the real thing.
I do buy Fish oil… so me too! I like the more flavorful cuts as well.
I find that grass-fed hamburger, being less sexy than delicious steak slabs, is a good value. It’s better for you since they mix in cuts that include connective tissue. I get the 20% fat.
Just knowing that most of every cell’s membrane is made of fat – why would anyone want that fat to be made from polyUNsaturated fat!
Saturated fat is stable and breaks down from the end points of the chain. Mono- has a single unsaturated carbon bond that can break down in the middle.
Poly is very unstable and leads to leaky cells… which leads to the need for repair which leads to inflammation – which leads to all sorts of damage. Taking anti inflammatory drugs stops the healing process which requires inflammation! So – doctors often address the symptom and not the causes of disease.
Once I learned all of this, I turned my life around.
Most of the studies show that supplements don’t do the trick. You need to eat fatty fish or plant material like chia seeds or walnuts. There are other micronutrients in the food that helps you utilize the good fats.
Walnuts are claimed to be all that for omega 3, but they also have high omega 6, which tend towards inflammation, is not a great balance. But the omega 3 in there need to be turned into the omega 3s in our gut… much easier to get from animals or their eggs (pasture raised of course).
It is surprisingly not widely known that the human brain is 60% fat! Much of our ‘cultural’ knowledge about nutrition in the West is totally corrupted by ‘experts’ pushing fads like vegetarian diets. I would think it possible to harm the brain by starving it of nutritious (vitamin B12 and absorbable iron) fat. Maybe a higher risk of dementia or Alzheimers disease could be possible on anti-human diets. We know other deficiencies in diets can have dire consequences.
The long human small intestine is most effective for absorbing nutrients from meat. Replacing meat with all veggies, results in inefficient extraction of nutrients, which largely ferment evolving a large volumes of methane gas in the gut. A number of artificial supplements are required to ‘correct’ the inadequate diet.
Also not widely known because of ‘cultural’ reasons is that the taste buds that detect sweetness also share this function for detecting fat (the other two types sour and salt.)
yup I eat the fatty bits first;-0 yuuum. and while I eat meat its sure dropped due to bad teeth and the price in the last few years and am paying for the lack in low iron and Vit B
The ability to throw a rock vastly improves the hunting success.
Even more if the aim is accurate!
Humans are pretty close to the only animal that can throw with any kind of accuracy. Apes throw stuff, but when they do, it’s only in the general direction of their target.
If we evolved from animal fat, now we are now devolving from cane, beet and corn sugar and potato, wheat corn based carbohydrates. In 1800 American’s consumed 22 lbs of sugar a year now we consume 180 lbs of sugar a year. Owning a cow and a couple of hogs would solve it all.
True, and not just that. The dense nutrients in meat/fat allowed less time needed for eating, and more time for discussion and ideas. Herbivores need to search for and eat almost constantly.
Just ask Russell Upsomegrub
I do like a Ceasar salad with a steak from a cow, deer, moose antelope, etc., ….Romaine, preferably…with a few croutons….
Caesar salad requires sardines, eggs and cheese in the dressing and more cheese on top.
sardines? I think not! Anchovies!
That’s what I meant!
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been known to consume an occasional can of sardines in mustard sauce. But Anchovies are what one needs for Ceasar! And I’m talking the fish, not the paste!
How many here have eaten at Lowery’s in Hollywood? Some of the best prime rib to be found on earth cut at your table and a Ceasar salad made right in front of you. Now that is VERY Human!
Do they make real Caesar Salad there? I can’t find a good Caesar anywhere in N Cal. Every where I go, restaurant food is factory food, there is no more Fine Dining in the US.
Here’s the key to finding fine dining. Ask if they make their own salad dressing. Nope, its all Tony’s Fine Foods, or International Restaurant Supply. A chef once told me that they can’t find good enough kitchen help to make salad dressing anymore.
Yes they make real Ceaser right in front of you at your table.
And some fava beans and a nice chianti…..
Veganism usually requires food supplements to be practical. Human ancestors have not been vegetarian for a very long time, and even cousin genera like chimpanzees are decidedly not vegetarian, either.
How can you tell if someone is a vegan? Wait a bit, and they will tell you.
“How can you tell if someone is a vegan? Wait a bit, and they will tell you.”
___________________________________________________________
Same is true for pilots.
Surely not all pilots are vegan…..mostly Shirley, surely.
I’m not.
Not Shirley? Surely not.
I’m a Carnivore, and don’t call me Shirley.
I’m a pilot, and I’m not a vegan! A good steak makes my day!
“Veganism usually requires food supplements to be practical”
Not usually, always. We make B12, as do other animals, but at a stage in digestion where it is no longer absorbable by the body. Without B12 humans cannot live healthily or reproduce healthy children. And the only source of this, before the 20C, was animal based foods. There are no plant sources.
Try and bring up children on a strict vegan diet and with no B12 supplement, and you will have learning and physical development difficulties. It would probably be actionable child abuse.
There are vegan sects in India, who have historically got along OK. But the reason is grains contaminated with insects during harvesting and storage in a pre modern era. You don’t need much animal produce for B12, but before the arrival of synthetic B12 you had to have some.
LOL. The usual “you can’t possibly survive on a vegan diet, therefore I don’t have to go vegan” argument. Yet there are now tens of millions of vegans in the West, living perfectly healthy lives, with no evidence of ill health, quite the opposite in fact.
Your collective posts are like a bunch of religious fanatics who are incapable of actually discussing what they believe in, dancing around the issues, and criticising anybody who dares to question what you are doing.
Steve says”…living perfectly healthy lives,…”
As Michel said they have access to synthetic vitamins, B12. Without that they are not healthy. Do you dispute the B12 info?
Can you show us documentation that the healthy vegans are not taking supplements?
I didn’t see “without taking supplements” in any of that.
Supplemented diets are not truly vegan.
I did not say that you cannot possibly survive on a vegan diet. You can, on condition of taking supplements. B12 is essential, other vitamin supplements would be wise.
I know of no evidence however that a supplemented vegan diet is healthier than, or even as healthy as, a mainly plant based diet with moderate amounts of meat, poultry, fish and dairy.
The one thing we know for sure is that humans did not evolve to eat a vegan diet. Because before synthetic B12 they would not have been able to reproduce successfully. This makes it very unlikely that veganism is optimal.
Vitamin D among them.
Perfectly healthy means they haven’t died yet.
I have to dispute that, I’m afraid. ‘Perfectly healthy’ lives is not strictly true, supplements aside, there have been scientific studies showing the long-term health issues from vegan and vegetarian diets and other scientific studies, among them the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health, that show that people on vegan/vegetarian diets exhibit far more anxiety and stress, and have twice as many depressive episodes as people who eat meat. Just facts, no hyperbole or histrionics, they speak for themselves.
Richard, there’s a similar correlation with anxiety, stress, and depression with political affiliation, and with AGW belief. Might the causation in this study be reversed? Maybe people prone to more anxiety, stress, and depression tend to be drawn toward these beliefs?
Or maybe the causation is right. I would be miserable too if I were a leftist AGW fearing vegan.
There is a reason India is home to 1/3rd of infant mortality.
Most of India does have the weather to allow green plants to thrive year round, which gives good access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Veg heads don’t consider how far most of their fresh fruit and veggies have traveled. That all goes away with Net Zero though.
As do we.
I came across the attached graph of experimental measurements on a “satirical” (?) website recently.
It is possible that they may be exaggerating a bit (TBC) …
None of what anybody here is writing are actual arguments against veganism.
Is it wrong to cause suffering to another, who has never caused suffering to you or anybody else?
A simple yes or no answer will suffice, but none of you can answer.
You actually believe that it’s absolutely okay and ‘civilised’ to torture and kill an innocent animal for your own, petty desires.
Giving up your desires and fighting against them is a sign of courage.
Vegans “ethics” usually amount to treating people like animals, not vice versa. India has the largest concentration of vegetarians, and their society is aggressively caste oriented, which I find to be unethical.
Of course, how stupid of me. I see you haven’t answered my question:
Is it wrong to cause suffering to another, who has never caused suffering to you or anybody else?
You can’t even think about that question, or you would have to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if you are the ‘good’ person you claim to be, while causing so much suffering to innocent creatures.
Your reply was the usual ‘hand waving’, bait and switch, look over there, not over here at what I am doing…
I disagree with your ethics and animal rights philosophy. I think you are projecting to claim using animals for food is done to cause suffering.
This thread has noted veganism is unworkable, and not normal for humans, aside from its adherents being insufferable crybullies.
I see you haven’t answered my question
Why answer a strawman?
The problem with your argument, one I’ve heard many times before as a wrongheaded ‘ethical choice’, is that ALL living things (including plants) react to pain stimuli – it may take longer to react with plants but they also feel pain. Vegetarians will torture and kill plants, often eating them alive so that they are still in pain as they slowly dissolve in their stomach for ‘their own, petty desires’.
I have made my peace with the decision that, if I am to live, something else must die and that I wish to live. To that end I accept the sacrifice that plants and animals have made to keep me alive and I’m ok with that.
At least I’m not the kind of person that hides from the truth, creates lies and deceits like ‘plants don’t feel pain’ to childishly salve my conscience – grow up, take responsibility for your own life and stop being such an idjit.
There is NO evidence that plants feel pain. There is NO evolutionary advantage to them feeling pain. Sure, some people want to claim that plants might feel pain, but so far there is no reason to believe they are right. Unless you want to subscribe to some form of Panpsychism.
Oh, there was The Secret Life of Plants back in the 1970’s, which is about as rigorous as most other New Age “science”.
There IS evidence that plants feel pain, just not in the same way that animals do – it’s a complex subject but they DO react to stimuli slowly and the analysed behaviour does seem to show a reaction to pain. It triggers chemical reactions in different ways depending on the plants so does actually serve a purpose.
So, you will not reproduce then Steve so you can show us how courageous you are?
Animals are a resource to be exploited, just like minerals or timber. Without getting into the weeds as to what constitutes “torture”, I can agree in principal that unnecessary suffering of food animals isn’t ethical. Christians recognize that we are stewards of the earth, not the owners.
So you are saying that all carnivorous animals are evil? You need to see a mental health specialist.
Killing an animal quickly and efficiently to eat it causes much less suffering than to leave the same animal to die a natural death
Animals raised for food don’t suffer as do those in the wild.
Hens in industrial egg operations are mistreated, but I get mine from my cousin, whose chickens live better than I do, except for abuse by roosters.
“ except for abuse by roosters.” Perhaps it’s just foreplay.
First of all, we don’t torture animals. We give them the best life we can, and the best death we can. Every animal’s live ends in ‘one bad day’, you, me, the mouse, the cow.
Much better for the quick piston to the head, than having your guts ripped out of you in the middle of a long chase you’re losing to a wolf pack.
Without defining what you consider to be “suffering” and what doesn’t, it is impossible to answer your question.
Your question is a good example of not actually thinking through what you want to say. Typical of brains that are misfiring because of a lack of B12 during development.
Doubt arises that if ‘stevejones’s ancestors had not eaten meat, he would be posting.
What would you consider «actual arguments against veganism»?
It’s similar to the way climate science works. It’s only “science” when they agree with it.
Veganism works well if you grown your own beans and grain and now how to process soy beans and ferment them. American’s don’t know how to do anything so yes it is all about fractions and supplements. By why on earth would you want to be vegan unless you are Hindu.
I grew up Hindu and Vegan, Parents were not Indian just early new agers. I learned how to make tempeh and tofu as a kid….and how to do vegan cuisine. I even ran a very successful vegetarian resturant in the 1980 but remained an omnivore as a kid getting my meat at the local burger joint and then buying steak and sausages weekly from then on.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
Why aren’t they running the world?
No opposable thumbs?
And multi syllabic tongues!!! HAHA!
Because we can kill them and eat them into extinction if we so desire.
Seriously, the Bible basically says human’s were created and given dominion over the animals to be good stewards of the land and animals, which is our creation mandate. Human’s are fallen flawed creatures and who prefer to worship the stuff they can control or themselves than to worship and serve their creator. This means we are flawed stewards. Due to this fact, we should always be vigilant to be better stewards seeking grace to better steward ourselves and animals both individually and as a people.
This does not solve the meat vs legume morality conundrum. Climate is a false problem, while good stewardship of land and animal is an enduring Holy imperative and duty.
After the Fall of mankind, God gave animals to the human race to eat as food as well as the plants. This solves the moral conundrum between meat and legumes….. both good.
Some people eat meat only….due to a medical condition for some but others by choice….sounds boring to me…..not sure if carnivore diet provides all vitamins and minerals…not for me.
Vegetarian diet lacks essential nutrients.
What is the ideal perfect human diet…no one seems to know….maybe it depends on the individual to some extent. If I knew the perfect diet…I might try it.
I can tell you what is not good.
These are bad choices
Seed oils
Grains – esp non organic since they all contain glyphosate (Roundup)
Too much sugar year round… yes that includes fruit all the time. You can get away with it if you are working physically all the time
Eating low fat versions of foods
Eating any substitute for the real things – such as fake meat, fake milk, fake cheese, fake butter.
Eating oatmeal thinking it’s heart smart
thinking 3 square meals a day is healthier than allowing yourself to use the glycogen stored… and then tapping into fat stores.
Eating eggs without the yoke
Thinking saturated fat is not healthy – and conversely thinking polyunsaturated fat is healthy. Some poly’s are good, such as omega 3 and omega 7 etc… we need some omega 6 and 9, but we generally get too much of that.
What about beer, you didn’t mention beer?
I dislike beer. Now gin . . . yum!
You, er, you don’t like beer? What are you, some kind of alien? Beer is one of our essential human food groups.
Yeah. I tried to like beer, but it’s too bitter for my liking. Now martinis are a different matter. Plus I don’t have a beer gut.
A lot of the English beers are quite sweet.
Yeah, but aren’t English drinks warm? No ice! Phooey!
As a former English colleague once claimed, “They are room temperature. Have you ever been to England?”
Well, not exactly. I was born there–Harrow on the Hill. But my parents were US citizens, so I’m a derivative US citizen. My naturalization paper says I’m a citizen from the day I was born.
Sorry, that was quoting my English colleague when we teased him about warm beer, not asking you if you’ve been there. That wouldn’t be manners. His point was that room (more precisely cellar) temperature is rather lower in England than in Australia, so room temperature isn’t especially warm.
Having been there in July 2019, I have to concede his point. The English summer was about the same temperature as our Sydney winter.
Historically the main health advantage of beer is that it required boiling the water. The famous London cholera study found that brewery workers didn’t get it. In an era of sewage polluted water supplies this was a huge advantage. Similarly drinking tea, doesn’t matter about the tea, what mattered was boiling the water before drinking it.
Actually it was the fermentation process with beer, boiling water was the method used in Asian or Occidental regions. Different approaches to the same problem of water purification.
Beer has alcohol… it tastes good esp in microbrew. I have come to believe that no amount of alcohol is good for us – which does not stop me from occasional indulgence.
It’s how it’s processed in the liver that is poisonous. We (liver) detoxes, but it’s a negative on net to our health.
So I think of it differently than I did when I calibrated how much I could drink without puking.
Try eastern european kvasa or kvass – it’s black bread beer and is basically fermented from baked black bread. It’s got an extremely low alcohol level (childrens shandy is more alcoholic) and is served as a soft drink in many eastern european countries. We used to have a cafe near me that had it on draught and it was the most delicious and refreshing drink on a warm day.
Made from grains.
Repeating the Organic Farm lobby’s libel against glyphosate is ignorant or malevolent. The acute toxicity it less than table salt. The story line was pushed by the organic lobby and financed by the Church of Scientology.
You read an article and believe in what toxicity is. We can go further in our understanding of what is and what it does.
Glyphosate was developed as an anti bacterial. Put on plants it kills most species not developed to resist it. Look at the life surrounding farms that are not organic (which has its own degrees of benefit and marketing attached).
Without bacteria, plants cannot make nutrients… it’s in the root exchange which is symbiotic. Bacteria do a lot of good work for life.
I have no dog in the fight… but you eat glyphosate and your gut bacteria is diminished as well. We thrive with a healthy gut biome…
I read articles and then I read scientific reports and figure out what happens from a biological, chemical land physics perspective before forming opinions. My opinions change often 🙂
I have followed the issue a fair amount. There is only the IARC concluding glyphosate is associated with cancer, with very heavy influence by one “researcher” who turned professional witness for the liability bar. The IARC has only found one compound it did not associate with cancer, a track record making their opinion worthless.
Every other government regulatory body, including those of the ridiculously risk averse EU, has found glyphosate safe.
Organic farming is just renamed biodynamic agriculture, a product of preWWI German Grenswirtschaft, the rejection of conventional science, like Ariosophy or World Ice Theory. Heinrich Himmler was a particular advocate for biodynamic agriculture, which is largely why it was renamed postwar.
Tom: You’re making an argument again without acknowledging what I wrote.
Cancer is not an argument I made. I discussed factual information about what glyphosate is. That some article says they could not find it directly caused cancer is irrelevant to what it is.
It is not a binary situation. X does cannot be show to cause cancer therefore… Y.
You’d do well to not consume antibacterial drug laced (and formed) food stuffs for a myriad of biological reasons.
Let’s bring discussions to a higher level rather than pointing to some binary study that does not in any way speak to what I claimed above.
Bruce Ames, et al. (1999) Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural).
Plants have been in continual war with their predators. Their primary weapon is pesticides. Our livers have layered defenses against them — notably P450 oxygenases — that over evolutionary time have become very efficient at detoxification.
And anyone with a belly that they grow as they age shows propensity towards fatty liver (visceral fat). When I took the advice I proffer hear, my gut went away in months. With little exercise. I have gotten type 2 diabetics off of supplemental insulin.
Just because we can detoxify (thank goodness) does not mean it’s a good thing to eat poison.
The fact that we evolved such defenses means plants were a significant part of the human diet over evolutionary time.
Plants provide micro-nutrients, most especially antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, that are not found in meat, eggs, or dairy.
Please be specific: And I do not think categories are binary – good or bad. They are what they are – and cannot just be dismissed.
what “such defenses” are you referring to
what antioxidants “are not in meat, eggs, dairy.”
We can go down the rabbit hole if you want to talk about R.O.S., as it pertains to sugar burn vs fat burn (especially the healthier more saturated fats). So eating polysaccharides (glucose bonds in starch from grains) will cause Reactive Oxygen Species and drive the demand for the need of exogenous anti oxidants to quell the oxidative stress caused by burning glucose. Or the body makes its own anti oxidants such as glutathione… but now I am going down another rabbit hole.
The point is broad based statements do not show the big picture. You cannot just say, here is a benefit without looking at all of the effects.
Archibald’s article is so well written it covers so many supportable things.
Here’s one for you. You eat a grain, and the phytates naturally occurring on the seed shell to prevent germination until bacteria breaks it down, have an “anti-nutrient” effect. The phytates chelates minerals too – meaning they are much less bio-available!
Eating meat delivers ingredients needed to reproduce the organ you ate in a much more ready-to-absorb and less inflammatory package than most plant proteins and meat has much more nutrition than than plants on a gram by gram basis.
By the way – I do eat lots of good veggies and understand which ones have negative effects like boring holes in the gut and causing inflation or malabsorption… It’s much much harder to be healthy without eating healthy animal products.
This is fun stuff… like the weather and climate.
I mentioned the defenses — P450 oxygenases. They’re located in the liver. They modify toxins to be soluble in plasma, so that they can be excreted.
Anti-oxidants/anti-inflammatories: bioflavanoids, plant phenolics, bis-indolylmethane in cruciferous plants. That list is not exhaustive.
That our amazing liver can detoxify is a benefit that we cannot live without, but not a reason to eat poison.
I have no disagreement in the benefits of veggies which I eat – albeit without glyphosate which is poison.
In summary, the bandwidth of the liver’s ability to detoxify should not be taxed by a misunderstanding of glyphosate. And positing some study saying it has not been shown to cause cancer (which I would argue with) does not change the fact of what it is. I described it above and what it in fact does do.
Seems you took something personal assuming you gave me a “-” response, which I did not intend. So apologies 🙂
Plants are full of poisons of their own making.
Bruce Ames suggested that exposure to dietary pesticides should be measured in units of peanut butter sandwiches, to allow a more intuitively obvious estimation of personal risk from ingested pesticide residues.
All peanut butter is contaminated with aflatoxin, which is powerfully oncogenic. By your criterion, peanut butter sandwiches are poison.
J. L. Vicini, et al., (2021) Residues of glyphosate in food and dietary exposure
From the abstract: “Regulatory agency surveys indicate that 99% of glyphosate residues in food are below the European maximum residue limits (MRLs) or U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tolerances.
These data support the conclusion that overall residues are not elevated above MRLs/tolerances due to agricultural practices or usage on genetically modified (GM) crops.
However, it is important to understand that MRLs and tolerances are limits for legal pesticide usage. MRLs only provide health information when the sum of MRLs of all foods is compared to limits established by toxicology studies, such as the acceptable daily intake (ADI).
Conclusions from dietary modeling that use actual food residues, or MRLs themselves, combined with consumption data indicate that dietary exposures to glyphosate are within established safe limits.
Measurements of glyphosate in urine can also be used to estimate ingested glyphosate exposure, and studies indicate that exposure is <3% of the current European ADI for glyphosate, which is 0.5 mg glyphosate/kg body weight.
Conclusions of risk assessments, based on dietary modeling or urine data, are that exposures to glyphosate from food are well below the amount that can be ingested daily over a lifetime with a reasonable certainty of no harm.”
To me, your position seems extreme. So, I commented. No offense taken, no need to apologize. Just a comparison of notes and exposure of alternative modes of thought.
Is there anything left besides air and distilled water?
HAHA… MarkW.
I have too much to say – and you just put another nickel in.
Distilled in a thin plastic bottle scares me… distilled water wants to dissolve stuff. The closest to this in nature would be in rain water, but the atmosphere has “stuff in it” other than N, O, CO2.
If the water tastes like plastic… then what!? Not good.
I do buy RO water delivered by Alhambra in plastic bottles. I add Him’ sea salt and potassium gluconate to it… a squirt of stevia makes it go down nicely. I am not a believer in forcing myself to drink water… but dang, I crave this water, which feels soft in my mouth so I drink more than I would otherwise.
Factoid: Burning a unit of fat creates ~3 to 4 units of water… which makes me theorize that camels use the fat/hump as a water store.
A well mixed diet, meat/fish, veggs, fruits, yoghurt.
I’ve heard it said that the definition of a balanced diet is a dinut in each hand…
Bugger! “donut” (or doughnut for our UK readers).
die nuts are a bit too crunchy.
casein types… A1 vs A2 in yoghurt! I used to eat it… but I refrain for the most part…
Also allergies are mostly caused when there is leaky gut… glyphosate increases gut permeability… when substances pass through before breaking down, into the blood stream, your antibodies detect the material as something that’s foreign… should not be there. Then you stand a good chance of being allergic to that food.
I used to have allergies to most fruits and all tree nuts.
Today I consume all of them on occasion – with no allergic signs. My assumption is that my gut is tighter than it used to be.
I got rid of lifelong asthma and bronchitis 4 years ago.
I won’t go back to just taking a drug to be able to breath and thinking I am all set. The approximate every other year trip to the hospital to go on a nebulizer (albuterol and saline mist) and then steroids to open my lungs so my inhaler would work on me again is over for good.
The accumulation of insults leads to long term problems such as inflammation caused by endothelial permeability. Inflammation is needed for healing, but stopping inflammation does not address the need to heal. Healing will complete when insults stop or decrease.
Think, atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer… all related to constant insults to the integrity of our cells.
You can look at long lived human populations, with a record of good health over many generations. The results seem to be a diet roughly as follows: its mainly based on plant staples like wheat, rye, barley, rice, oats, quinoa etc. These are usually eaten in refined form, and the indegestible bran fed to animals. These are supplemented with moderate amounts of dairy, poultry, meat, fish. Then there are variety of vegetables, including quite a lot of leaves. Soy is only eaten in heavily processed form such as miso or tofu. Vegetable oils, except for olive in some places, are used very little. Sugar is minimal. Small amounts of wine are usually taken, with meals.
You saved me from posting a diet pretty much as my Wife and I entertain, although I believe continued physical activity has contributed to my healthy 88 years. Supplements, also, along with Attitude.
…but fortunately, no one needs to.
Omnivorous.
But Eskimos traditionally survived on only a largely carnivorous diet, with fermentation.
It can be done but it’s a lot of work/time. I doubt most self-proclaimed vegans have sufficient knowledge to do so.
True that: No vegan could survive in nature without modern infrastructure… whereas anyone with a rifle could survive in nature.
anyone with a rifle
And many with only a bow and some arrows.
How can they, when human beings are clearly incapable of catching and killing animals with our bare hands?
And IF a human being were to catch and kill an animal and then start eating their raw flesh, MOST people would regard them as an absolute psychopath, whereas if a human picked an apple from a tree and started eating it, nobody on Earth would find it worrying or objectionable.
None of you have thought any of this through, your entire lives, yet you are on a website dedicated to questioning the ‘official narrative’.
Humans are persistence hunters. Pick an animal, run it to death or exhaustion, kill, process, and eat. Don’t take the dog on this hunt, it will die too.
Humans are persistence hunters.
That’s actually why we find zombies (and Terminators) so frightening. They do to us what we do to animals.
Pack ambush predators by preference, with the persistence hunting as a fallback.
Most of the regular food in hunter-gatherer societies is probably provided by the women and children.
clearly incapable of catching and killing animals with our bare hands?
Ancient humans never developed the ability to use tools. Ancient humans never learned how to hunt in packs. Ancient humans never ate meat.
start eating their raw flesh
Ancient humans never ate raw meat because they always had fire since the beginning of time. Ancient humans never learned the benefits of cooking meat.
Modern humans never order steak “blue”
None of you have thought any of this through
Seems you’re the one who hasn’t thought it through. You are denying most of human evolution, and physiology.
Humans and chimps most certainly can and do catch and kill animals with our bare hands, and with our traps and tools of sticks and stones.
Steak tartar, sushi.
Eating flesh raw is not the sociable phobia that your imagination has made it into.
You left out carpaccio, Mark. Good stuff!
You could totally ignore the fact that most of the food animals would not even have a life if it weren’t for humans.
Those living without being used for necessary human food, would die a sad death of disease or old age or get hunted down by predator animals.
“How can they, when human beings are clearly incapable of catching and killing animals with our bare hands?”
What a load of ignorant BS!!
People have ALWAYS caught/hunted animals and eaten them… usually cooking them before eating them in more civilised countries.
Your comments are incredibly stupid and based on blatant ignorance.
You need to get some proper animal protein into your diet so your brain can start to work properly.
I suggest that dining options at CON29 be limited to fruits, vegetables and bugs.
That should thin out attendance a bit.
That would be the gorilla diet.
They could call it “I’m a delegate, Get Me Out of Here”…
We given our two dogs names which are very similar in pronunciation; i.e., one name starts with an ‘S’, the other starts with a ‘Z’ but is otherwise similar. And yet each dog clearly recognizes its own name when it is called.
So here is my question. Is it possible that dogs who spend a lot of time with each other have their own names for themselves, however it is they might establish and communicate that ‘name’ in their own canine world?
I watched A Dog’s Life. They definitely talk, we just can’t hear them /sarc off. Actually I am a dog man… there is something quite wonderful about how dogs interact…
you dont have to hear them..a look a wag body posture tells you a lot if your’e paying correct attention
Oh certainly I agree. Dogs melt my heart. The facial expression too… twitch of their ears… body language is language —tautologically!
Climate change will kill your dog
Look out!
nonsense!
All climate change predictions are nonsense.
Why should I reduce a perfect “batting average”?
Yes, why should you. I’m glad you were being facetious.
climate change NUTTERS would happily kill pets. they dont seem to think (obviously)without pets there’d be a LOT more inedible meat etc without pets to eat it
Zipping to a tipping point was catchier!
of course- in their own pack they know place in it and the scent of parents siblings and friendly aquaintances on walks. they mightnt use “names” as we envision them but in 40+yrs of having 2 and up to 6 at a time they DO communicate and they will specifically “call a friend” if theyre hunting something, not always by sound but by a look at each other.
take note when youre out walking, bigger dogs roaming free will go away then come back and gently brush your hand and then off again, theyre checking in and showing you where theyre going and would like you to follow, they do it with neck/flank touches to each other as well. they also grieve Ive lost 2 this year one just 10 days ago;-((( and the absence and the disarray in status and order now is palpable.
we are all out of order
Have you seen the ABC television documentary ‘Muster Dogs’? The behavior you have described appears to be one of the tools dogs trained to assist cattle ranchers use when they work together with their rancher masters, and with other dogs, to keep a cattle herd under control.
There is a lot to like in this well written article David.
You make a lot of sense, and the science backs you.
Every one of your points could be a chapter in a book, confirming the biological accuracy.
I’m unsure as to the validity of his point that ‘we are well into scavenger territory’ though – we do have lower stomach acid ph than most scavengers and omnivores but most studies appear to place us on the border between scavenger and omnivore. Chimpanzee’s are an interesting case, similar but almost opposite to humans – like us, they are omnivorous hunter-gatherers, a group will happily hunt small monkeys for food then share it between them. They eat fruit as their main non-meat food source and have a very high stomach acid ph level, close to neutral.
Interesting points! I think the pH is important and serves to kill a lot of pathogens before the small intestines… and then we have the alkaline bile that neutralizes the acid for the small intestines… we go through amazing chemical changes in our digestive tract… minerals and ion exchanges etc… to get absorption and balance in our bodies. A big delta seems to be a good thing for being able to eat “rotten” food. Not all rot is bad. There are benefits of eating fermented foods for example… the bacteria converts k1 into k2…
k2 is used to make matrix GLA proteins which interact with receptors to repel Ca from soft tissue and pull it into teeth (dentin) and bones as part of the bone collagen making process.
Interestingly, statin drugs are used to harden arteries in rats… Statin drugs eliminate vitamin k… because k1 helps in clotting. However statins also eliminate k2 which prevents soft tissue calcification as we age especially… think joints and arteries.
The medical papers I read show that the cure to hardening arteries of statin drug takers is to feed them K2 in the MK4 form (several forms of k2 have various half lives… but I’ll stop here.
“ benefits of eating fermented foods”. Red Wine..”but I’ll stop here”.
I am (was?) a big red wine guy. But cancelled all of our memberships since I reduced consumption. We still have 30 bottles or so of Stags Leap area high end wines. I still love it. But it’s no longer a regular part of my life. Instead, special occasions.
Would there have been enough humans to contribute to the decline of the megafauna ?
doubtful, megafauna kept humans/ancestors fit and culled the dross
Yes. There were. It didn’t take many.
I’m a postmodern vegan.
I eat meat with a twist of irony.
(H/T Bill Bailey)
“For example, one of our primate relatives, baboons . . . .”
I think most of our politicians are directly descended from baboons.
I used to argue evolution with many (I’m an evil evolutionist.). Regarding human development, one of the stupidest ideas was the Savanna Theory of human development: “We became bipedal because our ancestors lived on the African Savanna, had to look over tall grasses, the males had to carry back food to the family, and the females had to run around taking care of multiple offspring.” It’s amazing at the large number of people who were taught this nonsense and will continue to believe it until their dying day.
Baboons live on the Savanna. They show no signs of becoming bipedal. Their females and offspring are surrounded by a large number of powerful males that even African lions won’t challenge. If our ancestral males left their females and offspring unguarded, then they wouldn’t return to any females and offspring.
Stupid ideas persist–even in evolutionary science.
Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) was bipedal and lived in a forest. Die Savanna Theory, die!
Ang there is the waterman…
“I think most of our politicians are directly descended from baboons”
How dare you insult baboons. What have they ever done to you?
You’re right. How dare I!
The COPfest delegates all seem to be descended from Bonobo’s! (Just go and look it up)
Australopithecines lived in mixed woodland and grassland, with more trees than a savanna,, but fewer than an extensive, closed forest. They walked from grove to grove and to water across open plains. We have their footprints in volcanic ash over prairie.
Sorry for duplication. I thought this didn’t post.
Australopithecus species and populations lived in various habitats, to include savannas. Some inhabited forests and others mixed woodland and grasslands. Many if not most ranged over all environments in East and South Africa.
They lived east of the emerging Rift Valley, where land was drying out, while chimp ancestors stayed in the wetter, more densely forested west.
Yes, probably all that is true. However, A. afarensis was found in a forest region. Forests don’t lend to fossilization, so Lucy was an extremely lucky find. I also think the AAT could be correct, but it’s an extremely non-mainstream theory. And you have to explain why humans don’t have the baboon virus marker that all other African primates have.
One theory is that we evolved as an asian primate and somehow found our (unspecified) way to Africa before evolving into hominids. It does rely on far too much speculation for me, though.
A. afarensis and humans have the same common ancestor. That’s not controversial if you’re an evolutionist, as every two species have a common ancestor. Our human ancestors are completely unknown. Between 6 million and 12 million years ago, they can’t be found. I think they were trapped on an island when the seas rose during that time. The lemurs in Madagascar don’t have the baboon virus marker, because they were isolated on an island during that time. Apparently so were our ancestors.
You have to explain traits that don’t align with other quadrupeds. For example, we are mouth breathers, but all land mammals are nose breathers.
Not true. Many other adult land mammals, including dogs, can also breathe through either nose or mouth. Others, such as horses and rodents, can’t.
The oldest hominins currently known are Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad (Brunet et al. 2005) and Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya (Senut et al. 2001). Sahelanthropus, dated to between 6 and 7 mya, is known from a largely complete skull and some other fragmentary remains.
Molecular clocks suggest that hominins arose around 7 mya, so it would be surprising to find bipedal African great apes from 8 to 12 mya. But you never know.
Are you referring to baboon endogenous virus?
It was once thought to infect all non-human African primates, but for almost 30 years, that has been known false. In fact it’s limited to a few monkey groups:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15705403_Distribution_of_baboon_endogenous_virus_among_species_of_African_monkeys_suggests_multiple_ancient_cross-species_transmissions_in_shared_habitats
“. . . but for almost 30 years . . . .”
That’s about when I stopped arguing evolution. So I guess my info is way out-of-date.
Science marches on! If it’s real science.
It’s by no means certain Lucy died in a forest. A 2016 study argued she fell from a tree, but her discoverer Lucky Don Johanson and other paleontologists disagree strongly.
A. afarensis lived in various habitats:
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/australopithecus-afarensis/#:~:text=afarensis%20was%20responsible%20for%20the,been%20found%20in%20this%20region.&text=This%20species%20occupied%20a%20range,in%20denser%20forests%20beside%20lakes.
Lucky Don says the cracks in her bones look like those common in fossils, not fractures from a fall. Unless she fell in a water hole, she’d be unlikely to be preserved in a forest. The end of one bone was gnawed on.
A. afarensis was a better climber than H. sapiens however, possibly nesting in trees.
I thought that it was determined that she fell into a stream and was quickly covered by silt–thus the fossilization.
Not determined. One hypothesis. Not shared by Lucky Don.
Just because “Lucky Don” says so, doesn’t make it true.
I was expecting a satire article on climate change and meat but got a very good serious aticle,
I have always advocated for my
You Can’t Beat Meat Food Pyramid
Bacon on top of the pyramid
Followed by pepperoni pizza,
hamburgers and salami
Critics have claimed one would be lucky to live to 80 with such a high fat diet.
My response is
“So what? At least we’ll be happy while we are alive, unlike the health nuts eating awful tofu, Brussel’s sprouts and kale salads, staying alive so long their brains turn into mush, like Jumpin’ Joe Biden”.
A good hamburger includes tomato, onion, pickle, and lettuce. You get the best of both!
I never could work out the pickle on US hamburgers.
Real hamburgers have a slice of tinned beetroot instead of pickles. And barbecue sauce, not mayonnaise.
Lots! of onion.
Yes!
You forgot Swedish Meatballs, you cannot leave them out.
I love Swedish meatballs!
I think it was the philosopher Garfield, who said that diets don’t make you live longer. It just seems that way.
Yet again your kindergarten teacher lied. Humans are NOT carnivores
Also the likes of David Attenborough and countless other ‘Wildlife Documentaries’ we’ve all watched/seen.
Especially, The Big Cats are NOT carnivores either – they do not run down Bambi so as to eat Bambi’s muscles/flesh/meat
They are looking for Bambi’s blood, liver, kidneys, brain, eyes, heart, bone-marrow but especially, Bambi’s fat stores.
Re-watch the documentary carefully next time and see how the buzzards, vultures, hyenas. wild-dogs etc etc get to eat Bambi’s flesh – while the lions tigers are a few hundred metres away, completely satiated while lying under a tree and ‘pushing out zeds‘
We are supposed to eat the exact same as the Big Cats do and us eating the flesh/meat (carne) of animals is insane.
And, in the same way we kill our pet cats, leads to a very unpleasant and drawn out death via kidney failure
(340 new people/patients daily, in the US alone, join the queue waiting for a dialysis machine)
Us eating meat is like when an Amazon delivery truck arrives outside our house delivering ‘a parcel/nugget of goodness‘
Eating meat/flesh/carne is like us rushing outside and consuming the entire delivery truck just to get at the parcel
not clever and certainly, not healthy.
Especially not for our mental health – witness: Climate Science™
Huh?
Your first introduction to Peta?
Apparently. I thought he was one of us.
We climate realists come from all kinds of backgrounds. Not all of them of this world.
try never to ‘get me started’ on Insulin Resistance
The science and thinking behind that is an equally hideous Cause & Effect Travesty as is all of Climate Science.
(The apparent Insulin Resistance is in fact; Sugar Resistance. Nothing could be more wrong nor killing/hurting/Zombifying more people that that little piece of ‘kindergarten garbage’
kidney issues in cats are mostly from the dryfoods heavily salted and ditto the canned muck. aussie cats WILL kill themselves by demanding only Roo meat high protien low fat and idiot owners pander to them
Cats don’t make taurine. They must get it from the food they eat–small animals. If you look at the ingredients of cat food, it should include taurine. So cats need to eat small animals and not plants to get taurine. Your anti-meat nonsense is just that.
Does this mean I should NOT hide in the shadows until I spring out to catch my chocolate bunny?
Probably not right now, you would be hiding for a few months.
Just speculating with little knowledge- but, didn’t hunter/gatherers- when they succeeded in killing an animal, ate more than just the muscle tissue- but also most of the organs- and got a great deal of their nutrition form the organs, especially the liver? So modern people just eating burgers and steaks cannot compare- it’s not the same.
Potentially one of the silliest articles published on this site. I appreciate the factoids provided in nearly every paragraph — actually quite interesting. However, the wholly unnecessary, and in fact counterfactual, ‘evolutionary’ narrative that the author uses to stitch the story together is absurd. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is rhetorically (and logically) the hunting range of dilettantes.
What exactly do you find faulty in the “narrative”?
The author wants to tell a story, a la Bill Nye, about evolution, and meat serves as his main character. But, he isn’t really interested in meat; most of our colleagues here, however, are. I love meat, talking about meat, raising meat, hunting meat, processing meat — and my family has done so for generations upon generations! So, I’m of one mind with nearly all the rest! Haha.
But the tortured narrative is embarrassing first-year university drivel, something out of Dawkins’ or Cronin’s oeuvre. This isn’t science, it doesn’t even round to science — it’s absurdity wrapped in arrogant puffery inside of piffle masquerading as school-boy science.
Evolution is an observation of nature, ie a scientific fact, with a body of theory explaining the observations and other evidence. Its much better understood than the theory of gravitation. It’s a consequence of reproduction.
It is a hypothesis (not a theory) that can’t stand up to basic scientific scrutiny, ie, methodology, relying as it does on stylized, ie, subjective, post hoc narrative, ie, storytelling. It is a fact-free environment. Even many of the most credentialed, though less politicized, evolutionists are embarrassed by Nye and Dawkins and the current state of the modern synthesis party. It’s a bit like virology — everyone in the club argues endlessly about how meaningful the field is, but there’s no there there — where dissenters are labeled anti-science. Or global warming, where dissenters are hounded out of academic or government positions.
Evolution isn’t an hypothesis. It’s a fact, observed every day in every way, in the field and in the lab.
A real threat to humanity is the evolution of drug resistance in pathogens. How can you deny this fact? Or the rapid evolution of viruses?
Speciation can occur in a single generation, via whole genome duplication. It can also happen from a single mutation in one organism, as with sugar-eating bacteria turned into nylon consumers.
Evolution is an undeniable fact. Human teeth are still getting smaller. We retain nonfunctional ear-moving muscles. Our chromosome #2 resulted from the fusion of two small standard great ape chromosomes. Such instances would fill a book.
You ought to study a science before presuming to comment upon it.
Milo, please resist the urge to resort to dissembling and ad hominem attacks. You are better than that.
we have witnessed the arguments about vestigial organs over the many years; they have all been shown to be premature.
And the elision between micro- and macro-speciation is convenient. I should have headed that off earlier. Haha! No one denies the former.
in the end, you rely on a purely material view of reality. Most people in the world do not. It’s fallacious.
Selective breeding of plants and animals has been used for thousands of years.
Darwin’s conceptual advance was to recognise that similar changes could occur due to natural selection.
Mendel made further advances with dominant and recessive alleles.
It wasn’t until Franklin, Watson, Crick and Wilkins identified the structure of DNA that the mechanism became clearer.
Knowledge of the mechganics of replication, ie mitosis and meiosis, showed that evolution can’t help but happen. It doesn’t just produce change, but can maintain selective traits (“fitness”) in unchanging environments.
It’s not ad hominem to point out that you have never studied the subject, but rely on creationist lies. Who is “we”?
What dissembling? I stated facts.
What is your explanation for nonfunctional features?
The only difference between micro- and macroevolution is time. The processes are the same.
Dr. Behe, who hatched the anti-scientific “intelligent design” dodge, was forced to admit under oath in court that evolution is a fact. “Design” in nature is idiotic, not intelligent. Why do human gonads arise in the chest, in the fish position, then descend into the abdomen, and out of it in our case, leaving behind easily herniated openings?
There is no evidence against the fact of evolution and all the evidence in the world supporting it. You havem’t stated any argument against the fact of evolution, because you can’t. Evolution explains everything in biology. Creationism explains nothing.
Science considers the material world. Its goal is natural explanations for observations of nature. Supernatural explanations aren’t the realm of science. The God hypothesis isn’t scientific, because it’s not subject to experimental test based upon predictions capable of being shown false.
An example of how mendacious creationists bamboozle their ignorant, gullible victims:
1) Lying creationist: The characteristic mammalian lower jaw bone and middle ear bones could not possibly have evolved.:There would have to be transitional forms in which the back two jaw bones in other vertebrates are moving into the ear, while the dentary alone stays in the jaw. This means proto-mammals would have to have two jaw joints, the old one with the hinge at the two little bones and the new one with the dentary.
2) Paleontologists: We found Morganucodon, a Triassic synapsid with two jaw joints, in which the old one has already been coopted to aid hearing. Since then, many other transitional proto-mammals have been found.
3) Lying creationist: Now you have two gaps instead of one!
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSVbxSnJvQqBed0v_F-NfkgzV2S_z0qa8YqXfUVc9xbTTSVh2xJ
I stand corrected, Milo. The article above is the second silliest thing that I have read on this site! Haha..
The only difference between micro and macro is time? Two fallacies therein — that’s the two-fer. 1. No, the difference is that one causes adaptive modifications within a species, the other argues that one species becomes another. Think about the fraudulent archeoraptor transitional form used to (try to) make this point, along with Nebraska Man and Piltdown Man. 2. Even good evolutionists know that there just ain’t enough time for all this time-dependent speciation to happen — not by several naughts on the exponent — to go from the single cell to a human, leaving aside the niggling tiny problem of where all the building blocks came from. You see, speciation of this sort is statistically so improbable as to be impossible, and then stringing together just a few contingencies causes the whole series to disappear down a black hole of sheer fantasy. Evolution, a hypothesis, is the enemy of real science.
I am not arguing that this stuff isn’t in many museums and biology text books; it certainly is! But that doesn’t make it true. Evolution simply provides post hoc stories to ‘explain’ how X becomes Y — that’s not science. Vestigial organs and junk DNA are both offered repeatedly as evidence, along with the post hoc fallacies purporting to explain these. But not a one is true! We’ve gone through stories of 180 vestigial organs and clearly demonstrated current use of each. But, and here’s the kicker, these discoveries of current roles were actually delayed — scientific research was delayed by decades — because the stories told by evolutionists somehow convinced the community that research wasn’t needed. Haha! That’s the effect of your religion, Milo.
It took about 4 billion years to go from single cells to humans. You don’t believe that is enough time?
Hiya Mark. Whether one believes the earth is 10,000 yrs old or 10 billion, the answer is the same. Start with Huxley’s bravado-inspired bet that six monkeys, each with a typewriter and a few billion years, could type every book in the English language at the time — not sure if War and Peace had been translated by 1860. The odds of typing just “ We are monkeys” is something like 1 in 2×10^25 (can’t remember the exact figure). With rounding, this is about the same as the total number of microseconds in TWENTY billion years.
Now, let’s get a bit more serious. Those three words likely exceed your time frame, based on only 26 six letters. The simplest bacteria has greater than 1MM nucleotide pairs! The odds of even simple life spontaneously erupting from big bang detritus is “one in 10 with 40 thousand naughts after it.” Know who wrote that? Sir Frederick Hoyle. Carl Sagan guessed, for the formation of a single protein, 1 in 1 followed by 130 zeroes. Finally, Harold Morowitz calculated that the odds of a simple organism forming are 1 in 10^100,000,000,000. These blokes don’t agree, but all are sure that a crazy long time would be needed.
So, No, I don’t think you have enough time to even get the building blocks of life established, much less evolve an opposing thumb. I mean, how many simple organisms, not mighty intellects like Milo, but simple bacteria, were found on Mars? Zippo. Zilch. Nada.
There is no magic cutoff point at which microevolution ceases, such that it can’t lead to speciation, ie macroevolution. As noted, speciation can occur even without macroevolution, as when an organism duplicates its whole genome, becoming a new species in a single generation. This is more common in plants than animals, but has happened repeatedly in vertebrate evolution.
We haven’t been able to survey Mars yet. Whether it has fossil or living microbes remains to be seen, but if not, no worries. Even in its wet period, it was quite different from Earth.
Some moons in our solar system have environments more conducive to life as we know it and as we don’t than Mars.
I think you have firmer belief in the unseen than I do. It percolates through your worldview, blinding you to the counterfactuals. For grins and giggles, I’ll restate: micro-e acts on existing genetic info, macro-e requires new info. But this is an ancillary point. There just aren’t enough billions upon billions of years for to come to any other conclusion than that which I have presented. Something (or Someone) else must have been in the game.
The main point I have strained to make is that post hoc ergo propter hoc arguments are not valid arguments, and yet the article above is one long fancy post hoc story told by an imaginative person. Sadly, that is what most of our school textbooks are — storytelling sans scientific substance, bespoke hypotheses concocted from fertile imaginations. There’s a whole genre of articles, scientific literature, taking apart these so-called ‘just so’ types of fancy.
Without DNA analysis, would you regard the corpses of a chihuahua and a great dane the same species?
Hey OC — Yes, same species — to the extent that they share similar canine characteristics. But, they would have genetic differences (obviously) because of the selective breeding required to get to these to types. So, in a like manner, why to pure bread dogs, let’s take Goldens for example, suffer from hip dysplasia?
this goes back to Milo’s misapprehension of micro-evolution. The two breeds of the same species started with the same genetic library. Through selective breeding, pure types were produced resulting in a loss of many books from the library. That’s micro. Macro-evolution, on the other hand, relies NOT on an existing shared genetic library, but on new books being added to the card catalog in the middle of the night. N’existe pas.
Are Bos taurus and Bos indicus the same species as well because they share similar bovine characteristics?
How about Felis domesticus and Panthera tigris because they share similar feline characteristics?
Differentiating species can be a very slippery slope into nit picking minutiae.
It’s not all pure breeds, and not all individuals of that breed. Propagation of genetic defects is a psychological problem of breeders ignoring adverse attributes in search of desired characteristics.
One word – mutation.
Actually, no. You see, to the evolutionist, any counterfactual is sufficiently addressed by retreating to the safe space of ‘mutations over billions of years’…hahaha! No, that doesn’t work. I have, I believe closed that door through the points above. Materialists can’t even explain the exist of anything, much less how the existing of the life-less can become life, and then evolve into modern man. The only answer is ‘mutations plus time’, with a healthy dose of schoolboy imagination.
Where did I say anything about billions of years?
Where did biogenesis come into it?
You asked about new genetic material and I gave you the most common.
Talk to the plant breeders at any agricultural research station if you don’t think mutations exist.
Or talk to a microbiologist.
Hey OC…You did not say anything about XX billions of years, and I raised that as an objection, which does seem off point. However, in my defense, I’m not concerned with who tells the most compelling stories, but rather with first principles and fast fails.
Very highly respected folks under your own circus tent have calculated the odds of the whole show being plausible at (and I’m rounding up here) zero point zero zero zero zero zero percent. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, but it is certainly not compelling evidence. To believe that it happened in the way you do is to have great faith. Of course there is nothing wrong with that — but let’s not fool ourselves that ‘truth and science’ are on the one side and foolishness on the other. That would be dishonest.
There are other, bigger (first principles or initial conditions) that must come along with the evolutionary worldview — like explains how something came from nothing. You see, you cannot have your cake, without accepting that the cake began its long journey from a farmer’s decision to plant wheat last season without even knowing or thinking about you and your sweet tooth. Yet, more importantly in this discussion is that the purely materialistic view of the world is wholly incompatible with the way you live your life on a day to day basis. The entire edifice of civilization would crumble if people lived their lives as if the material world were all that there is. In other words, materialism is a philosophy, and one that is purely hypothetical.
In sum, the sub-field of materialism known as evolution fails the probability test, the initial conditions test, and the live-it-like-you-mean-it test. So the loss of genetic material that causes hip dysplasia in a goldie is rather marginal, n’est pas?
Whatever are you on?
If selective breeding occurs, evolution occurs. They’re the same thing.
Mutations occur, along with other mechanisms which allow new genetic material to be incorporated.
Do you mean biogenesis? What does that have to do with evolution?
Where did that come from? This is a purely technical discussion on whether offspring can be different from their parents. When it’s all boiled down, that’s what “evolution” is.
btw, I should have mentioned that Gregor Mendel would have been rather bemused on being told that he had a purely materialistic view of the world.
Haha… I see your father never taught you manners.
In the interest of my time, let me be brief:
Both your main ‘points’ are broadly answerable by the same response. But as to selective breeding being equivalent to evolution, perhaps I was not clear — no one disputes micro-e, which is what that it is.
As for biogenesis and what one could call The Big Picture, one is not fair to oneself or others if one holds to a point of view, or in this case, hypothesis, regarding the material world’s composition and dynamics that is wholly incompatible with lived life. One cannot constrain the scope so much that the field of inquiry becomes unmoored from the real world, and expect it to actually mean anything, my dear fellow.
To hold to macro-evolution even though it cannot explain or accommodate origins, or humanity’s complex interplay (that is, daily life) and is, for all practical purposes and according to its own prophets, impossible is probably not worth dying in a ditch over.
Right, so evolution exists, but not macro-evolution or biogenesis?
We weren’t discussing the latter two.
Now, at which level is your definition of macro-evolution? Species level, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom or domain level?
Neither biogenesis nor speciation, by convention referred to as macro-evolution, have the proverbial snow ball’s chance because of the sheer odds associated with contingent probabilities; there just ain’t enough sand in the hour glass — as the church of evolution’s own prophets demonstrated.
No, I do not agree that you may restrict the terms of reference to your comfort zone. You cannot talk of anything adapting or evolving if you cannot account for how it got there in the first place, or what it actually means for you as a person, living in community if all that evolving were true.
You are acting on faith. I am acting on faith. The only difference is that those two hugely critical missing bits from your state of the world hang together rather neatly in my faith. Well, that difference plus your church has more tithe revenue than mine, so you control the printing press and (thus) narrative. But that doesn’t make your church ‘right’.
Around and around we go. How do you define what is a different species?
Bos taurus and Bos indicus quite happily interbreed, and there are a number of breeds such as Santa Gertrudis and Droughtmaster which have been developed this way.
I think you’re thinking of genus level rather than species.
Selective breeding (hence evolution) is a long established and proven technique in the agricultural field. If you want to take it beyond that, go ahead. It won’t be with me, though.
By analogy, one shouldn’t put money in the bank if one doesn’t have a full understanding of macroeconomics, or walk down steps without understanding both quantum mechanics and relativity.
By ‘how it got there in the first place’, I’m not referring to the Himalayan cat, I’m referring to how anything at all exists, the existence of something and not nothing. Where the building blocks of the world came from. But I fear you and I are not going to even agree on the terms of reference for s discussion. So enjoy your, ahem, Christmas holidays.
It’s quite a leap from selective breeding to the origin of the Universe.
Not if the goalposts have moved that far, no.
Thank you. And a merry midwinter (it’s midsummer here) to you and yours as well.
Yet again you display your profound ignorance and pitiful gullibility, having fallen for the blasphemous lies of paid creationist liars.
Archaeopteryx is not a fraud, nor are the other valid transitional forms in the fossil record.
Microevolution within species leads to new species, ie macroevolution. Both observations in the wild and the lab show this fact repeatedly, as of course so do the fossil and genetic records. Now we can see the mutations in genomes which led to the observed anatomical changes.
Another transition in the fossil record besides dinosaurs to birds: lobe-finned fish to tetrapods. Evolution makes predictions found top be true. Creationism never, ever. Paleontologists knew precisely when and where to look in the rocks to find “fishapod” Tiktaalik. Same goes for locale of land artiodactyls transitioning to whales.
The heads of early tetrapods are bone for bone the same as the lobe-finned fish from which we evolved. But the stegas show microevolution in their development of finger, toe, wrist and ankle bones from their prior cartilaginous fin rods.
But of course you’re not interested in any facts contrary to your blasphemous calumny of God. Science isn’t a religion, but your satanic cult sadly is one, however perverted.
As I said, you can’t respond to my requests for evidence of creation because there are no good answers for creationists.
In the past 30 years, dozens of additional feathered dinosaurs and dinobirds have been found, mainly in China and Mongolia, but throughout the world. In the slightest anatomical detail, maniraptroan dinos and birds are homologous. Even on the biochemical level, they’re the same, as shown by their beta keratin and medullary tissue.
Tyrannosaurs were feathered.
As I said, there is zero evidence of the creationist fairy tale myth and all the evidence in the world in favor of the fact of evolution.
Hiya Milo. I appreciate your concern for my intellectual welfare. As noted above, I do not judge the veracity of a worldview by the criterion, “Who tells the neatest stories.” I’d like to think that I look at the overall body of work, its internal consistency, the initial conditions that allow it to exist, and its implications. Evidence? Well, that’s an initial conditions question — and my argument is at least as compelling as yours, without the downside risk. Likelihood of truth? Again, mine is, evidentially, as likely as yours, but without the shiny just-so stories holding it together. And, my life is lived consistently with my worldview, whereas a materialist’s life is not (or only by the pathologically flawed) so lived. In fact, your welfare depends directly on my worldview being true and yours being false! Much like a Frenchman during the Cold War, your existence depended upon the US nuclear umbrella, regardless of your military posturing.
“Dr. Behe, who hatched the anti-scientific “intelligent design” dodge, was forced to admit under oath in court that evolution is a fact.”
Behe was a blood expert. He claimed that it is impossible to simplified the clotting sequence, because if you left out any step, either the blood wouldn’t clot when necessary, or it would clot when it wasn’t necessary. So there should be no cases of blood clotting sequences with steps left out. Unfortunately there’s a sea snake that didn’t read his book. And I believe whales didn’t read his book either. Behe was ignorant of such cases.
Behe claimed that some systems are irreversibly complex. For example, it’s impossible to make, say a mousetrap, from incremental changes. However, evolution doesn’t directly build a mousetrap from incremental changes. It’s only required that each incremental change be useful. Evolution takes advantage of previous changes for each step, and a mousetrap, if required, is the last useful step. I used to live with living mousetraps, but I prefer dogs now.
Instead of raking in ill-gotten gains the easy way from the Discovery Institute, Behe could have investigated how supposedly “irreducibly complex” structures, such as bacterial flagellae, evolved. But he didn’t go the scientific route, so other researchers achieved that result.
Behe gave us a testable hypothesis: “irreducible complexity.” He presented the blood clotting sequence as an example, but it fails. There may be a more simple blood clotting sequence that had to be designed, but now that possibility will always be in question since the more complex pathways are reducible.
It was comical in the Dover trial when ID literature was shown to have been copied verbatim from creationist drivel and lies, but some words that should have been changed were missed.
It’s more a case of each incremental change not being too harmful.
”
It’s more a case of each incremental change not being too harmful.”
Usually such changes are terminal.
Usually, but some changes are advantageous, some are neutral and some are mildly disadvantageous (eg red/green colour blindness)
Also, traits previously detrimental or lethal can become beneficial in a changed environment.
Consider again the point mutation which turns sugar-metabolizing bacteria into nylon eaters. Innumerable such mutations occurred for billions of years, and were always deadly to the microbes, until nylon entered the environment, at which point the previously negative mutatioin became adaptive.
“we have witnessed the arguments about vestigial organs over the many years; they have all been shown to be premature.”
The loose connective tissue that supports our organs aren’t vestigial? Quadruped’s organs are held in place by this connective tissue–similar to ligaments. They are like meat hooks that hold a quadruped’s organs in place vertically–not laterally. They attach to the backbone. However, we are rotated ninety degrees, so these attachments won’t work for our organs.
A designer would move these attachments to somewhere overhead, like the clavicle, or a rib, or higher up on the backbone. Instead, there’s no difference in where they are attached to our backbone. Obviously, they are of no use in supporting our organs like quadrupeds.
The evolutionary fix was to provide abdominal muscles that wrap around to hold our organs in place. It’s effective, but it wasn’t done without problems. There are holes in the wrap-around that allow for hernias.
feeding grain except in low grass times and the poor grade/damaged is insanity cows sheep and others do fine on green pick and will founder on too much grain, and pigs sure do fine as ferals who see little grain looking at the size of the buggers in the wild
Oats and barley are less of a problem than wheat or corn. Drought feeding those is a recipe for disaster.
More laughable rubbish from people who think they are ‘sticking it to the man’ by desperately clinging to something that is obviously evil and wrong (torturing and killing animals).
If humans were meant to eat animals, we would have claws, long canines, we would be able to open our mouths wide enough to break the neck of a cow, we would be able to run fast enough to catch and kill, with our bare hands, animals. Obviously we are not capable of doing this, and eating animals is completely unnatural. Just because lots of people do something, doesn’t mean it’s ‘natural’.
The most important aspect of all this is the psychopathy aspect: people who work in slaughterhouses, killing animals all day, are without exception, psythopaths, who are incapable of feeling the pain of others. (Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to torture animals all day.)
The psychopathic comments from the majority here, who actually think that their incredible selfishness is worth the agonies of (mainly baby) animals, are the norm for most of humanity: who cares if 1,500 animals have to be tortured and killed so that I don’t have to ‘go without’. How brave and courageous of you.
This is what happens with so many people who are faced with the prospect of facing the suffering that they cause through their diet: they double down and refuse to look at reality, to convince themselves they are still ‘good’ people.
Nobody can justify killing even ONE animal for your own pathetic greed, let alone the 1,500 animals that are tortured and killed for the food of the average person during their lifetime. But please, try to argue otherwise. I won’t hold my breath. I expect lots of hand waving and bait and switch, but no substantive rebuttal of anything I’ve said.
As I mentioned some way above, all living things feel pain, ALL living things. And yet, I do not call you out for being a psychopathic plant torturer, for eating plants alive, for inflicting needless pain and suffering on plants whilst laughing and joking about it. Grow up and stop hiding behind incorrect childish drivel.
That plants emit sounds doesn’t mean they feel pain. The authors of a recent paper in Cell anthropomorphically called water stress sounds “screams”, but plants lack nerves to sense pain.
Plants react by moving (slowly) away from a stimulus proving that they can sense without sensory organs or a nerve network. Admittedly using the same language as we use to define an animals pain reaction is confusing but plants do react to pain stimuli.
Plants don’t sense stimuli. They react to them in a tropism. Stimuli include light, water and gravity. Some can even react to touch.
I’m going to guess that you’ve never ever watched a nature documentary (especially none about Africa’s savannah and its wildlife) in your life. Perhaps only a Disney-fied one suitable for little children….
Better yet, go on the web and look up videos of various predators attacking and killing their prey. Especially wild dogs and hyenas. Both of these animals lack the ability to (as you said) “break the neck of a large ungulate” with their jaws. So instead they seize the prey by the flanks and then go for the underbelly, eviscerating the animal and even starting to bolt down chunks of meat while it is still alive. Wolves also bring down large prey this way. Talk about torturous…..
A predator will utilize whatever tools it has to stalk, chase and bring down prey. Nature is indeed red and in tooth and claw… Or worse, imagine being a caterpillar that has been stung by a parasitic wasp and a bunch of eggs have been injected into it, Alien-style. These hatch and literally eat the caterpillar alive from the inside out before emerging as adults from the empty husk of the caterpillar’s body. Nature has provided for some pretty horrendous ways to die.
And as for us lacking sharp teeth and claws, we also lack wings – and yet we still fly! Most humans cannot dive more than a couple hundred feet down in water and can only hold their breath for a few minutes. Yet plenty of humans have lived for weeks deep under the ocean’s surface at a time – because we have the intelligence to build submarines.
We don’t have X-ray vision to detect broken bones and stress fractures in metals, but we have built machines than can do just that. Unlike dolphins and bats, we don’t have the ability to make and hear ultrasonic sounds. But again, we build machines that can.
So I’m guessing that because we have no wings, we should never pilot or board an airplane? The Wright brothers should have never invented aircraft?
Ethical eaters must live far from survival and reality.
I grew up in the rural south. One and two generation ago my ancestors use kerosene lamps and wood burning fireplaces. My father called a fireplace the hole in the wall where all the heat went. They grew corn, beans, peas, potatoes, peanuts, etc. and pecans. They had Victory Gardens long before WWII. Gardening was a requirement for life. They raised chickens for eggs and when a chickens stopped laying it was found in a pot for supper. Cows were kept for milk and when that stopped they were slaughtered. But old cow meat is tough so calves were slaughtered because their meat is better tasting. A hog was raised once a year and slaughtered for the fat (lard) and the salted pork that was stored in barrels under the house (no refrigeration). Oh, dogs were kept for hunting and not considered as pets. They were not abused but were treated like farm animals. The hunting dogs were used to hut foxes. Foxes were a problem because they killed chickens and scared the chickens so they did not lay eggs for days. Foxes also killed wild birds which were hunted for food as well including quail and morning doves. Other favorites were rabbits and squirrels. Squirrels chew the new growth from pecan trees reducing the nut harvest. So they were and still are dealt with accordingly. Bambi, deer meat was and is usually mixed with pork unless one knows how to cook it to remove the “gamey” flavor. But some like it gamey. Currently there are about 3 million people living in Mississippi with a similar population of deer. The deer population must be controlled to keep the population free for disease. Also almost all hunters eat what they kill, birds, squirrel, and deer, etc. One blessing with having milk and eggs is adding some sugar and you have ice cream. My father was a master ice cream maker!
City living has created fantasies. What will city folks do when the the natural gas and fuel pipelines stop flowing? No more veggies for you.
One of these fantasies is veganism which I consider a form of mental illness. Other perceived as a religion.
We are only a few months of supplies away from returning to the 19th and early 20th century way of life. It’s best to have some skills.
“free from disease” lol. Yes, and a very important function of those bandit meat eaters.
Humans have been carnivorous since long before the genus Homo emerged. I really doubt anyone would consider an Australopithcine a person. So your animal rights Just-So storytelling is antiscientific.
Try to consider just how much you are projecting.
I respect your view point as a religious-ethical conviction. My Mom was an early animal rights activist and Hindu convert and I was raised vegan in the 1960’s.. I have no desire to tear your argument apart. We all have to live in a country where we are free to hold our convictions and pursue our happiness. I agree that our industrial meat culture is wrong at so many levels. but I am not convinced killing animals and eating them is unjust due to my own religious convictions , (which were never Hindu).
We as a people are never fully consistent with our beliefs and ethics and our morality is as much about building comfortable fences of self-righteousness as it is about actually being convinced about what is truly right or wrong and living by it.
It is never right to categorize people as good or bad based on one’s personal convictions. Our personal convictions are not high enough for that kind of authority. What we end up is prejudice and bigotry.
It took my Mom 20 years to be convinced of the pro-life position. if unjust killing is wrong then unjust killing of humans is wrong. I
Various monkey and ape species hunt and kill in order to eat meat, and they don’t have any of the features you claim are necessary to be a carnivore.
Humans don’t need them either because we evolved other ways to capture prey.
Where does this “torture” nonsense come from? Have you perfected the art of ignoring reality all in service of protecting you crazy world views?
Every single person who works in slaughterhouses is a psychopath? Would you care to back up your insanity? For once.
As to being a psychopath, you are definitely one. Incapable of dealing with reality and inventing ever more fantastical myths in order to make yourself feel good about yourself.
I blame B12 deficiency.
BTW, if you truly believe that nobody has rebutted your claims, it can only be because you haven’t actually read any of the responses.
If god didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?
And so tasty !! 🙂
This fool is welcome to his vegie diet.. with associated grubs and insects as his protein..
You poor little sap.
Your organic vegetables would not exist without cow manure.
But you would rather they die an agonising death of old age, than a quick clean death that benefits humans.
Food animals are NOT tortured.. Your blatant ignorance is there for all to see.
How can you be so sick in the mind…
Oh.. from not getting enough animal protein.. that’s how.
‘It’s not Madness, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of deep meditation. ‘It’s Meat.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.
‘Meat, ma’am, meat,’ replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. ‘You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It’s quite enough that we let ’em have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.’
— Ch. 7 Oliver Twist
Cattle (and sheep, goats, pigs etc) are carbon based life forms. They all contain an amount of carbon, which originated in the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
If all the cattle in the World contain X amount of carbon, then doubling the numbers of cattle in the World will double the carbon stored to 2X (which comes from the atmosphere).
Simply put, if planting a tree (carbon life form) takes carbon out of the atmosphere, then adding one more cow to the herd also takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
Only dishonest activists and morons believe otherwise.
Change my mind.
The human stomach acid matching a scavenger makes sense. We cook food to neutralize the harmful elements in carrion. Probably learned thru repeated observation of eating fire killed animals
On wolves to dogs and human interaction.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my observation as a geologist working in a remote exploration camp in Alaska … strange sights under the midnight sun and all that.
I have come to the conclusion, domestication didn’t begin when wolves come to the fire for scraps. More likely, humans stalked the wolf packs robbing the victors of their gain. This led to coopting the hunt to finish off the worn-down quarry. Humans take the prey, throwing scraps to the wolves. It only takes one gravid female familiar with the clan to domesticate wolves.
Humans have been omnivores from the beginning. Civilization takes hold when grain farming and fruit growing takes hold. Goat sheep herding provide meat and fiber and but no one eats 8 oz of meat daily. No one could afford to kill off the herds for meat except for the kings and their family. Industrial Beef takes off in the USA during the corn glut of the late 19c into the early 20th c. There was so much beef, the profit margin for the farmer was miniscule. Now it’s all controlled within the context of the global commodities market centrally controlled like everything else (collusion now happens at the level of AI algorithmic machinations).
This is the reason why the Green meanies and their political power sector are emboldened enough to have the UN say: “you need to eat less meat” because they can enforce it.
People are already eating less meat. Half the US are struggling to have enough money to eat meat like they used to. How much meat people eat is a matter of personal liberty. Unfortunately, our dollars no longer have the power they once had in the market place. Dollars mean nothing in a matrix of regulation and colluded commodities markets under central control. The people who lived through the last decade of the Soviet Union can attest to this.
With the growing tyranny of the global market, we must do everything to enable local independent markets to be free. There already is a local economy but it won’t last long if we don’t protect it.
My point is, American’s need to fight off the matrix of regulations that prevent or inhibit families from:
Most of all we need tp pass anti-lockdown laws that prevent the government from kicking the stool out from underneath local economies of family owned businesses and farms…. and churches.
Not everyone is able to or wants to live grinding it out at the key board all day long…. or to live in a paycheck/payroll tax consumer central economy that is being shoved down our throats constantly.
People need the liberty to do something different if they want to. And have the power to laugh at people who tell them to eat less meat as they eat their home grown, home slaughtered and home made pork sausages with home made hard cider.
We should be voting with our dollars, not with our yap on the internet. If meat is scarce, then make it less scarce by side stepping the global market altogether. Take your dollars buy some land and grow our own meat. Unfortunately, in some states you will need to lobby of lawyers to do so.
BTW I am no luddite nor left or right agrarian…. All I want is a free market where I can do what I want without the fear of some idiot looney in Davos who doesn’t care about my vote or my dollars making all the decisions for me.
Tech is great when it empowers expansion of my family’s economic capacity. Tech stinks when it is designed to “hook ya” and lock the scope of our imagination and desire into a small life of enduring paralysis. Words help but taking economic action works better.
We still are Americans? We can’t be totally hooked and dependent consumers of the globe markets.
I am the great grandson of a PA union solider who lost his left leg on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Soon after the war he pioneered to South Western Iowa and was so prosperous farming he was able to give his 4 sons 400 acre farm, one of which my grandmother grew up on in Griswald Iowa, There are no families there now just a globally owned giant industrial farming complex. The county seat is now a welfare economy.
Good Post! Thanks.
Thanks….Seems America threw the baby out with the bath water in the past 40 years. We lost sight of who we are because we allowed ourselves and our children to be glued to nonsense. So much so that we have become another country. Not a country rooted in progress and progressive change, but a country that gave up it’s deepest desires and imaginations to a formatted life run amoral megalomaniacs who want to rule the world.
Some interesting comments! And I think the main article is full of half-truths and outright fabrications. But it’s true that humans have always eaten meat, I think it would be straight up foolish to want to pretend otherwise. The natural diet of human beings is really whatever we could eat from our local environment that didn’t kill us, and even then I am willing to bet we even ate things that DID kill us until we adapted (dairy could be an example, which, incidentally, most of us have not yet adapted to).
And to be actually promoting the growing of grains to feed domesticated animals in CAFO systems is outrageous.
But rubbishing veganism is pretty dumb. If we boil down what veganism is really about, I don’t think most people disagree though they probably don’t realise it. What people who whine about veganism are complaining about is how some people go about it. Veganism is a really simple idea – we should have moral concern for other species whenever we can do that. That’s it.
This is one of top most informative articles I have read on this site.
As we used to say in the Navy BZ (bravo Zulu).
No worry since people aren’t going to be renouncing various forms of meat for decades or even centuries. It’s worth noting that as developing world nations improve their living standards, the demand for meat increases. So those eco-alarmists advocating a reduction of meat consumption are just engaging in what they do best; namely, wishful thinking that’s ignored by 95% of the population.
Very nice.
Grass fed meat has a better mouth feel. Grain finish makes meat greasy, grease that coats the inside of ones mouth. Good grass finish is fatty, not greasy. You’d have to try it to know what point I am making. Milk is the same. Grass fed dairy and grain fed produce wildly different milk with grass fed being much superior.
Caesar describes the Germans’ diet:
Neque multum frumento, sed maximam partem lacte atque pecore vivunt multum sunt in venationibus; [9] quae res et cibi genere et cotidiana exercitatione et libertate vitae, quod a pueris nullo officio aut disciplina adsuefacti nihil omnino contra voluntatem faciunt, et vires alit et immani corporum magnitudine homines efficit. –Caesar’s Commentaries (IV 8, 9)
They do not live much on corn, but subsist for the most part on milk and flesh, and are much [engaged] in hunting; which circumstance must, by the nature of their food, and by their daily exercise and the freedom of their life (for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination), both promote their strength and render them men of vast stature of body.
I would love to see the references related to the article, thanks
I thought that the use of fire to cook food was a contributor to our smaller physique, gut and jaw size? compared to chimps and gorillas
My mother, who was a depression child, used to say that one thing she learned from her father was they could eat spoiled meat, so long as it was cooked properly. How spoiled? Rank is the term she used.
With her Irish, Scottish and Native American ancestry, that meant boiling and more boiling, without spices.
One of the problems anthropologists face, but often do not understand, is identifying pathways humans took for their migrations. All too often they fail to take into consideration diets specific pathways can provide.
My Grandmother on my father’s side, Ukrainian, used to call pork fatback, “candy” and she loved eating it raw.