Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Splendiferous]

doesn't want to get his *Spider Silk Ropes* dirty.

[Qmarx]

I once had someone argue that humans are biologically best geared to eating raw grains and fruits, just like gorillas, our closest relatives.

It was hard to be nice while correcting this person.

(For the record, I choose not to eat meat, because I don't need to, and I don't like the taste.  But I don't claim I'm doing something natural.)

You know what they say, "there's no accounting for taste."

One of the three reasons I consider legitimate for vegetarianism.

[LegoLord]

I once had someone argue that humans are biologically best geared to eating raw grains and fruits, just like gorillas, our closest relatives.

It was hard to be nice while correcting this person.

(For the record, I choose not to eat meat, because I don't need to, and I don't like the taste.  But I don't claim I'm doing something natural.)

Contrary to popular opinion, a large number primate species are omnivorous, sometimes willing to eat other primates.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Contrary to popular opinion, a large number primate species are omnivorous, sometimes willing to eat other primates.

THIS.

Humans are not the only one in genus homo to eat meat and fruit.

Since cannibalism is practiced since A LONG, LONG TIME AGO, I reckon that one of our ancestors (by the theory of Daruwin)
have practised that too...

[Splendiferous]

We all have two pairs Canine teeth.
nobody has to use them, one could grind the back ones and be just fine (if lacking in protein. but our teeth tell us exactly what we're designed for:

Everything.

[LegoLord]

We all have two pairs Canine teeth.
nobody has to use them, one could grind the back ones and be just fine (if lacking in protein. but our teeth tell us exactly what we're designed for:

Everything.

Well . . . not coral or other solid minerals.  But most things, yes.

[Areyar]

you could make soup out of corral, you never eat the shells: those are for crafting.

[LegoLord]

you could make soup out of corral, you never eat the shells: those are for crafting.

I meant foods that could be eaten without any cooking.  Cooking was thought up, not evolved.

[roguester]

I don't know, we've evolved from using tools and wearing clothes. I don't know that we couldn't have evolved from eating cooked food.

[LegoLord]

I don't know, we've evolved from using tools and wearing clothes. I don't know that we couldn't have evolved from eating cooked food.

Our hands did not develop to fit the tools, the tools were made to fit our hands.  We did not grow into clothes; clothes were made to fit.  We don't evolve from making stuff.  That's not how it works.

[Areyar]

Sure we have. (ed: @ roguester)
Diet is the most powerful evolutionary force there is: we are still evolving to our eating habits.
That is something different from evolving from a behaviour such as tooluse. Sure it is a factor, but more subtle and less an environmental factor.

Obesitas aside for once, people from communities that have only just recently upgraded from hunting to modern agriculture are more likely to get diabetes: their metabolism has not adjusted yet to the increased carbohydrate intake.
Same for lactose intolerance: we are still adapting to it. 

Adapting to a purely herbivoric diet would require some serious human intervention I think though: so many nutritional deficiencies need to be adresed. A streamlined (read meateating) metabolism is a great advantage from an evolutionary viewpoint.
Intestinal mo's would be number one target for optimization.

[LegoLord]

No, we aren't evolving to match our diet, we evolved to be able to eat the stuff we can eat without cooking; cooking makes things more edible.  You've got it backwards.

We evolved to be able to eat a wide variety of foods.  If we eat it now, we've already evolved to eat it.  If we hadn't, we'd get sick over things like dairy, which most people I know don't.

[numerobis]

It's not that hard to have a purely vegetable (well, essentially pure, except for the occasional insect that jumps into the machinery) diet in the modern world, but indeed, it was a huge advantage to be able to eat meat.

There has been rather a lot of evolution since farming came about; a study in 2006 reported recent selection for certain genetic traits in a group of Yoruba.  That got reported all over the papers as the first evidence ever of recent selection, but the article clearly cites a bunch of prior work in the second paragraph of the intro.

Indeed, there are a number of recent reports of genes that show signals of very strong and recent selection in favor of new alleles: for example, in response to malaria [3–5]; at the lactase gene in response to dairy farming [6]; at a salt sensitivity variant in response to climate [7]; and in genes involved in brain development [8,9].

[chaoticag]

Legolord:

Cooking, wearing clothes and living in cities is evolution, just not biological evolution. Scientists call it social evolution.

[LegoLord]

Social evolution is not real evolution.  It is based entirely on knowledge passed on by mouth.  If you were born in the city, but dropped in the woods before you could speak, you would immediately devolve if no one found you.