[337] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
Re: Local Newspaper Article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (aleung@das.harvard.edu)
Tue Jan 31 00:31:20 1995
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 95 00:27:20 EST
From: aleung@das.harvard.edu
To: dwhiting@cs.stmarys.ca
Cc: ar-talk@cygnus.com, vsg@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.05.9501301816.B8776-c100000@cs.stmarys.ca> (message from Don Whiting on Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:08:16 +0000 (AST))
I don't quite see how the alleged conclusion could be drawn from the
evidences presented in the article. Basically those anthropologists
were saying that because homo-erectus started eating meat 1.8 millions
years ago, meat must be responsible for the high intelligence of homo
sapiens. Their reasoning? Well not much. Only that human has
much smaller gut compared to other mammals, which must be a result of
the "high quality" of the meat human consumed, and that the energy saved in
the digestion process was therefore used in the development of human
brain. They claimed the small size of human gut is a direct result of
the consumption of meat, but never bothered to explain why human gut
is small even when compared to carnivores, which according to their
theory should have even smaller guts. Also they didn't say why the
energy for brain development had to be coming from the savings in the
digestion process. Smells like bad science.
Even if what they claimed were all true. How relevant it is to our
diet today? How much energy (in %) does a modern human being spend on
digestion? I'll say not much. Also the claim that meat is easier to
digest is dubious at best.
From a more philosophical point of view, all these are
irrelevant. I'll eat what I like. If it turns out that I'm an
evolutionary mistake, the force of natural selection will sooner or
later wipe my inferior gene out of the human gene pool. After all I'm
not going to mess up the human destiny, whatever that is.
Andy
Return-Receipt-To: dwhiting@cs.stmarys.ca
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:08:16 +0000 (AST)
From: Don Whiting <dwhiting@cs.stmarys.ca>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
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
