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Total Members Voted: 32

[Gamerlord]

Also instinct normally prevents you from eating your own kind, since its counter productive to every animal's ultimate goal, which is to propagate its species. It just isn't natural for humans, though for some creatures it is.

Actually the ultimate goal is to propagate your own genetic line. Not the species as a whole.

[lordcooper]

Also instinct normally prevents you from eating your own kind, since its counter productive to every animal's ultimate goal, which is to propagate its species. It just isn't natural for humans, though for some creatures it is.

You could say the exact same thing about homosexuality.

Oh don't go there. Please don't ruin this thread by doing that. That comment was so inflammatory and unnecessary it hurts.

I've probably slept with a few too many guys to be considered a homophobe.  My point was that your instinct theory seems flawed, as propagating their own species most definitely isn't a goal of every member of said species.

[weenog]

Also instinct normally prevents you from eating your own kind, since its counter productive to every animal's ultimate goal, which is to propagate its species. It just isn't natural for humans, though for some creatures it is.

You could say the exact same thing about homosexuality.

Oh don't go there. Please don't ruin this thread by doing that. That comment was so inflammatory and unnecessary it hurts.

I've probably slept with a few too many guys to be considered a homophobe.  My point was that your instinct theory seems flawed, as propagating their own species most definitely isn't a goal of every member of said species.

Let it go, man.  The best you can hope for if you continue is to temporarily disrupt the thread and have all your comments in it deleted, and expecting that is pretty optimistic.  You'll horrify fewer people than you would if you came out pro-cannibalism in the comparison (just trust me on that one), but trying to tie the thread topic to your personal pet cause is never a good idea.

[Tomcost]

Just don't derail the thread even more, we already went from zombies to the taboo aspect of cannibalism in our society.

Back to cannibalism and instincts: lets say that killing and eating ourselves as a species is prevented by a kind of social instinct, but, what does us prevent from eating already dead people? I think that in this case we don't have instincts interfering with that, but we are socially adoctrinated to not do so.

[Parsely]

Hm. If cooked food counts as carrion then I suppose you could argue that we're capable of being scavengers in the most literal sense of the biological term. But I'm fairly sure that we are primary predators, though we do eat prepared food, stuff that is already dead. So from a diet standpoint, I think that we are averse (though not entirely, of course) to eating anything that is already dead, and therefore a human would not eat a dead person for he would not eat a dead anything.

[Sergius]

I'd say the reason we don't eat our own is that, well, basically all human diseases are compatible with humans.

Getting a cow or pig disease from eating meat is rare-ish. There are a few, sure, like trichinosis, but they're fairly specific. Eating human opens up to every disease that the human had that still leaves microbes lying around.

I think one of the reasons that Mad Cow disease appeared was because they were feeding cows to cows, or something.