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[DJ]

what the fuck? my post was ridiculous?

You compared eating meat to organized warfare.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

A functional brain is extremely energy intensive. On a simple herbivorous diet, consisting primarily of leaves, abundant but nutrient poor and difficult to digest, intelligence doesn't provide enough of a benefit to outweigh the cost of operating a stronger brain. When you have an animal that engages in hunting to any extent, two things happen: you have a direct benefit from increased intelligence, and you have a better energy source to power the brain that provides that. In the case of omnivores, that increased intelligence also allowed/required them to more intelligently select and process plants. Considering that the pivotal event that kickstarted human development was the harnessing of fire, and only meat benefits from cooking until you get to more advanced food production, I'd say hunting was pretty damn important to the development of human intelligence, since it provided both abundant energy to fuel a larger, more complex brain, a motivation for developing more advanced tools (though still much simpler than the tools and techniques involved in even primitive agriculture), and a strong selector in favor of intelligence and social interaction.


I suppose, another way to describe it is as similar to a parabolic graph: an herbivore may benefit from increased intelligence, but less than the cost of that intelligence, meaning that as intelligence goes up, so too does the overall efficiency drop, until it passes a non-viable threshold. But, if you somehow continue increasing its intelligence enough, it will eventually pass back over that threshold, and benefit exponentially from further intelligence, even on an herbivorous diet. Hell, it's probably more complex than even that, with a number of stable peaks above the non-viable threshold, since there are definitely semi-intelligent omnivores that have reached a stable point of using what intelligence they have to better live off plants, yet do not continue to increase, while humans reached a point where their increased intelligence allowed them to produce a mind-boggling amount of excess food through agriculture, using techniques that had no simpler version, and thus couldn't be a driving factor in producing intelligence in something that was not already intelligent enough to devise and employ them.

So, if we look for other factors, that greatly benefit from increased intelligence even on a low-level, we find hunting: pointy sticks and rocks are about the simplest tools you can make, they benefit exponentially from even small increases in intelligence (make 'em sharper to stab better wit' 'em!), and their use provides an abundant source of high-energy food, meaning that expensive brain is no longer a dangerous investment. This allows the circumvention of the less/non-viable areas of the theorized graph. And, there are areas of diminishing returns there too, where suddenly the previously too-complex primitive agricultural techniques become apparent, and carry on the flow of progress further, and then that hits a wall until you start domesticating animals for labor and food, and so on, to ever greater feats and accomplishments.

[G-Flex]

A functional brain is extremely energy intensive. On a simple herbivorous diet, consisting primarily of leaves, abundant but nutrient poor and difficult to digest, intelligence doesn't provide enough of a benefit to outweigh the cost of operating a stronger brain.

Herbivores can eat much more than leaves, especially in certain environments. For instance, humans can't really derive energy from leaves very much at all!

When you have an animal that engages in hunting to any extent, two things happen: you have a direct benefit from increased intelligence, and you have a better energy source to power the brain that provides that. In the case of omnivores, that increased intelligence also allowed/required them to more intelligently select and process plants. Considering that the pivotal event that kickstarted human development was the harnessing of fire, and only meat benefits from cooking until you get to more advanced food production

This is very false. Much plant material becomes easier to digest when cooked, and also less toxic. Also, in certain habitats where food is abundant (such as a rainforest), the energy efficiency factor matters a bit less, although it does matter. I'm not saying that being able to eat meat doesn't help, but it isn't strictly necessary either. There are also sources of animal protein/energy that don't really require "hunting", per se, like insectivorous behavior.

I'd say hunting was pretty damn important to the development of human intelligence, since it provided both abundant energy to fuel a larger, more complex brain, a motivation for developing more advanced tools (though still much simpler than the tools and techniques involved in even primitive agriculture), and a strong selector in favor of intelligence and social interaction.

I never denied that. It's pretty clear that eating meat and hunting were influential to mankind's development in some number of ways, and my argument wasn't anything to the contrary.

So, if we look for other factors, that greatly benefit from increased intelligence even on a low-level, we find hunting: pointy sticks and rocks are about the simplest tools you can make, they benefit exponentially from even small increases in intelligence (make 'em sharper to stab better wit' 'em!), and their use provides an abundant source of high-energy food, meaning that expensive brain is no longer a dangerous investment.

Ironically, animals that pretty much never hunt have developed those tools.


At any rate, I agree that being able to eat meat is certainly an advantage. I don't know if it would be feasible for an organism to reach human intelligence using primarily vegetable matter for energy, and I think speculation about that is pretty, well, speculative, since we don't actually have any examples of human-level intelligence aside from humans. However, I think that in an environment where food is naturally very plentiful, it still is certainly possible, even if that requires the species having more territory per individual (i.e. less dense population) and so forth.

On the other hand, one of the driving factors behind human-level intelligence is a lack of abundant resources. We wouldn't have needed to develop the skills and tools that we developed if we didn't need to in order to survive in harsher environments. I think we're both overlooking that here.

[Sergius]

Beans benefit from cooking.

Some vegans are crazy enough that they won't cook anything tho, and they eat raw bean mush which they can't actually digest.

But those are called something else...

[DJ]

an environment where food is naturally very plentiful

Can that even exist? Where there's opportunity, there's a specie that'll seize it, and then reproduce to fully fill the capacity of the niche.

Mind you, seasonal abundance is a completely different thing.

[G-Flex]

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to digest beans. Cooking certainly helps, but raw beans are still pretty mushy inside and composed of roughly the same stuff.

At any rate, you're talking about raw foodists (or whatever they like to call themselves). There are actually raw foodists who eat meat as well, which has other interesting problems. Hell, I think people have gotten arrested over getting their children sick by feeding them raw chicken.

Can that even exist? Where there's opportunity, there's a specie that'll seize it, and then reproduce to fully fill the capacity of the niche.

You'd think so, but there are even human populations in some areas like that (e.g. rainforests) who basically don't have to worry about food because it's all over the damn place, and they've managed to exist for quite a long time under fairly stable conditions. Of course, when I say "very plentiful", I'm generalizing, and a species can still make use of all of it if it means being thermodynamically inefficient. In other words, it makes more sense to use up energy by having a huge brain, for instance, if there's a ton of food in your area. It just means that less of you can exist within that area, which is evolutionarily just fine if it improves the survival of your species as a whole (and the genes it possesses).

[DJ]

But how would it improve the specie's chances of survival? Bigger populations are more resistant to extinction simply by the virtue of having more backups and greater genetic diversity. On the other hand, you gain nothing tangible from an increased intelligence if it doesn't take much brains to get food in your environment.

[G-Flex]

You can have significant genetic diversity even in a smaller population; it's about proportions. All you need is a significant amount, not a huge amount.

Anyway, intelligence is simply another means by which to ensure survival. Maybe it means you're better off at fighting things that want to kill you, or better at finding out better foods to eat so you don't have to compete in the first place, or having enough social organization to fend off whatever hardships can occur. Obviously, some species benefit well from having high numbers, but fewer-and-smarter can work just as well as fewer-and-larger can.

[Sergius]

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to digest beans. Cooking certainly helps, but raw beans are still pretty mushy inside and composed of roughly the same stuff.

http://www.living-foods.com/articles/sproutdigestion.html

"Many of the large beans, except for soy which is (theoretically) edible if sprouted long enough, are difficult or unsafe to eat raw. Raw kidney beans are toxic, and some people are allergic to raw fava beans. Most of the large beans - lima, pinto, navy (white), black, and others, have a very strong, unpleasant flavor when raw; the bad flavor is not improved by sprouting. The large beans also contain substantial quantities of enzyme inhibitors which make them indigestible when raw, and the inhibitors are still present in the sprout. Because of this, large beans, even if sprouted, should be cooked, hence are of limited interest to the raw-fooder."

http://www.livestrong.com/article/314192-the-advantages-of-cooking-of-fruits-vegetables/

"Another benefit to cooking fruits and vegetables is that it kills many bacteria and detoxifies some poisons. An example of the latter is a substance called Phytohaemagglutnin, a toxin found in many species of beans. Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences Cooperative Extension says the highest concentration is found in red kidney beans. Within one to three hours of eating as few as four or five raw or undercooked beans, a person experiences extreme nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Sometimes hospitalization is required. It's not advisable to cook beans in a slow cooker, because temperatures do not always get high enough and undercooked beans can be more toxic than raw."

I'm just linking to the easier to read versions of this. Most of this info is available in probably more authoritative sources, and compiled in Wikipedia also.

[G-Flex]

Yeah, I don't know how much I trust a site like living-foods.com, although a lot of that information at least sounds legitimate. I did know about that kidney bean toxin, although its proportions vary depending on the kind of bean (red kidney beans happen to have a lot). Not sure how much I trust "four or five undercooked beans" though, because that really sounds extreme. It might very well be true, though.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

what the fuck? my post was ridiculous?

You compared eating meat to organized warfare.

i compared one custom that people were advocating because somewhere in the past it helped us develop to where we are in the present to another custom that also brought us benefits but everybody agrees is undesirable.

[Shade-o]

plant eating heped us evolve our brains to the current point just like war helped us develop technologically, does that mean we should respect war and practice it regularly?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

plant eating heped us evolve our brains to the current point just like war helped us develop technologically, does that mean we should respect war and practice it regularly?

nobody is advocating vegetarianism because it helped us develop, but if anybody did, that argument would still make sense. people were advocating meat eating because it contributed to the development of the brain, and i argued that a similar argument could be used to advocate war, to show how meaningless the first argument was.

then somebody brought hitler to the discussion and said my argument was ridiculous

[Sir Pseudonymous]

people were advocating meat eating because it contributed to the development of the brain, and i argued that a similar argument could be used to advocate war, to show how meaningless the first argument was.

I think you're on to something, though in the exact opposite way that you're intending.

Conflict, of which war is one form, has been a major cultural selector for innovation. Conflict is, itself, a sub-category of hardship, which all manners of things operating on evolutionary algorithms benefit from, as being forced into solving problems leads to overall improvement. Therefore, it can be said that conflict and hardship should be encouraged until such a time as it becomes superfluous, for there is no greater motivator than difficult times, at least for those capable of great works.

Of course, not all the cultural developments fostered by hardship are beneficial; as the driving motivator is simply to end or otherwise answer whatever unpleasant circumstance one is faced with, we end up with weak, side-stepping developments meant to address the problems in a way that would remove them, but wouldn't drive us to further, greater heights, and in fact actively discourage such by removing the impetus to progress. These are, obviously, not technological, but social developments, that for instance suggest to solve the unpleasantness of war with "everyone should like, be nice to everyone and shit, maaaan," instead of with "build a better weapon to slaughter your enemies, or otherwise progress to out-compete them."

Some of it could be said to be treating causes, rather than symptoms, but when treating symptoms, there's always room for improvement; you never truly answer the problem, you just become progressively better at doing various things tangentially related to it. If the goal is to become better, the absolute worst thing to do is address the cause, as it removes the reason to become better in the first place. Therefore, decisive social solutions to hardships and conflicts are harmful to society, as progress thrives best when there is a visible problem to attack. They also tend to spawn annoying things like "but, like, if people shouldn't suffer, than like, cows shouldn't either, cause like, suffering is bad or something, and they're like, things and shit, maaaaaaaaaaan."

There: a rational argument on conflict, hardship, and suffering, and the social benefits thereof. Naturally, eating meat doesn't still provide the same benefits (selectors for increased intelligence) it did, and you're misinterpreting why that was brought up in the first place, but conflict still does, though it's hopefully nearing the end of its usefulness (though perhaps the idea of a state where technological progress is given proper support just because it's fucking awesome is just a pipe dream, considering how quick the masses are to forget about anything that's not shiny and answering a pressing need (or compellingly fabricates a pressing need, a la the iPad, also known as the most pointless fucking thing ever marketed to unprecedented success; even snake oil was booze laced with opium...)). I'll leave it to the reader to decide how much of this is facetious.

[Sergius]

Yeah, I don't know how much I trust a site like living-foods.com, although a lot of that information at least sounds legitimate. I did know about that kidney bean toxin, although its proportions vary depending on the kind of bean (red kidney beans happen to have a lot). Not sure how much I trust "four or five undercooked beans" though, because that really sounds extreme. It might very well be true, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#Toxicity

"as few as four or five raw kidney beans"

Source: Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook: Phytohaemagglutinin". Bad Bug Book. United States Food and Drug Administration. http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/FoodborneIllness/FoodborneIllnessFoodbornePathogensNaturalToxins/BadBugBook/ucm071092.htm


Also, a footnote: raw, not "undercooked".

"Undercooked beans may be more toxic than raw beans"

So in fact it could take LESS than four or five undercooked beans than it takes raw beans. So a warning to those "raw foodists" who say that you should only warm, never boil, the food.


EDIT: Sorry about all the emphasis, but I wanted to make sure it didn't appear extreme, or hard to trust or whatever subjective qualitative may be applied to this.

EDIT 2: I also find ironic that you don't trust a site that is pretty much dedicated to promoting eating of raw food about the dangers of eating certain kinds of foods raw.

Or as they put it "The Largest Community On The Internet Dedicated to Educating the World about the Power of Living and Raw Foods". It's like not trusting the president of the NRA when he says that shooting yourself in the face may be harmful.