[336] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
Re: Local Newspaper Article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Raphael)
Mon Jan 30 22:29:49 1995
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 19:26:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Daniel Raphael <raphaeld@elwha.evergreen.edu>
To: Don Whiting <dwhiting@cs.stmarys.ca>
Cc: Animal Rights <ar-talk@cygnus.com>, Vegetarian Support <vsg@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.05.9501301816.B8776-c100000@cs.stmarys.ca>
This really isn't too difficult, I think. If we find the notion of
evolution to be a meaningful one, then the notion of moral evolution
shouldn't be too awfully difficult to grasp, either. In a state of
nature, the first hominids had what I think most people would think to be
a rather rudimentary ethical sense. Does this mean it was (is?) "OK" for
people to indiscriminately mate, etc.? Are we saying that because
something WAS the case, it therefore SHOULD BE or IS STILL the case?
So far as meat-eating goes, what the article does not say is that meat
has ALWAYS been part of a scavenger's diet--humans have NEVER been
carnivores (we descended from fruitarians, remember)--rather, we have
been OMNIVORES. Our teeth reflect that fact.
What distinguishes us from other animals is that we are tool-users and
rule-choosers. (Yes, I know that chimps use sticks to get termites out
of termite mounds, but that's the RARE exception.)
Hope this helps.
Dan
On Mon, 30 Jan 1995, Don Whiting wrote:
> Hello, I'm new to both lists that I am sending this too.. don't kill me. (-:
>
> I've been on a local BBS discussing vegetarianism and a lot of people were
> agreeing with the premise of AR. However, as we all know, there are a great
> number of people who don't agree with AR (IMHO, it's because they *ENJOY*
> oppressing animals) - and I was handling these people quite well until this
> weekend when a local newspaper printed the following article:
>
> STEAK MADE HUMANS SMART, SCIENTISTS SAY by Robin McKie
>
> Carnivores, take heart. Meat-eating is what made humans brainy.
> Scientists say the move away from an all-vegetarian diet triggered
> the growth of human intellect.
> Until early humans began eating protein and carbohydrate-rich meat
> their metabolic resources were absorbed by energy-demanding digestive
> systems that had to process vast amounts of vegetation, according to a
> forthcoming paper in the journal Current Anthropology.
> But about 1.8 million years ago, our predecessors, homo-erectus,
> changed behaviour. They stopped being vegetation-only foragers. Around
> this time, primitive scrapers start appearing in the fossil record, near
> the bones of pigs, hippos, buffalos and other animals. Either humans were
> killing them, or they were scavenging in the wake of other carnivores.
> "It was not just meat, but fat and bone marrow that were being
> consumed", adds Dr. Leslie Aiello, of University College London's
> anthropology department. "And such easy-to-digest foods require smaller
> stomachs and intestines, which use up less energy. That surplus fed our
> brains, which began to grow significantly.
> "It was a loop. We started to eat meat, got smarter and thought of
> cleverer ways to get more meat."
> However, Aiello said meat wasn't the only nutritional trigger.
> Once we started to get smarter, we were able to obtain other rich, but
> easily digestible forms of nutrition, such as nuts.
> The paper by Aiello and her colleague, Dr. Peter Wheeler, of John
> Moores University, Liverpool, points out the human gut is the only
> energy-demanding organ that is markedly small in relation to body size
> compared with other mammals - about half of what one would expect.
> "And small guts are compatible only with high-quality,
> easy-to-digest food", they add.
> On the other hand, the size of the human brain is strikingly
> large. It should weight about 280 grams for a mammal of our body size. In
> fact, it weighs about 1.3 kilograms.
> And if you look at the fossil record, and at apes, you see
> anatomies that support this point; both display pyramid-shaped rib cages
> that get larger as you move further down the body - to make way for
> massive stomachs and coils of intestines.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The members of the BBS took this article to mean (a)Meat is necessary for
> brain development, (b)meat is easier to digest than vegetables and
> therefore is better for the body, (c)meat takes less energy to digest and
> therefore to conserve energy, they should eat far more meat than
> vegetables.
>
> They also took the article to show that man is *MEANT* to eat meat and
> therefore no moral obligation is due to animals. If humans need meat to
> survive as humans, as the article suggests, or even *HAD* the need to eat
> meat to become human - then it must be "proper" for us to eat meat.
>
> This has humiliated the ethical and health arguements I have presented on
> vebetarianism and was wondering if anyone had a response to the article or
> any documentation to the contrary?
>
> Thanks,
> Don
>
>
>
