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Eating Meat Helped Early Humans Reproduce
PolygamousRanchKid writes "If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. 'Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,' said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. 'This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.' She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat."
Indeed it doesn't seem to indicate much at all as regards what mothers should eat today. I know two vegan mums and their (vegan) kids weaned off early and are very bright, healthy little 5 and 9 year old kids.
I like how the researcher feels the need to close off with a "don't antagonise vegetarian groups" political-correctness statement, lest she risks being eaten alive (pun intended).
Some feminist psychos will nuts of those results, and not over the mens' nuts. Here is an example of meat and sex, gone wrong... Seriously and dangerously wrong:
"The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Sexual-Politics-Meat-Feminist-Vegetarian/dp/0826411843)
"First published in 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat is a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism."
That book can be seen as part of the ongoing degradation of general observations and science into something very dangerous - views and opinions based on random whims, often with a feminist, religious, sexual or otherwise subjective world-view.
One can hope these new results will help raising the arguments to a decent intellectual level.
For a long time, humans were pretty dumb doing little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."
Ponca City, We Love You
Great point. I like how the study apparently holds it to be self-evident that faster brain development is inherently beneficial. There is a tremendous amount of activity, especially development of language processing, that occurs during the infancy phase of humans. We cannot possibly have controlled studies to adequately gauge the overall effects of this -- for ethical reasons alone.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Milk is vegan, if the animal you obtain it from, consents to give it to you ...[snip] But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
The problem with these arguments is where you stop. Many strict vegans I know won't eat honey, because the bees aren't consenting to give up their honey. I've even heard vegans argue about whether we can eat yeasted bread -- or is it "exploiting" the yeast to make it rise for us?
And, of course, once you're getting to the level of yeast, the whole animal/plant thing starts to break down. Why not talk about exploiting the lettuce by tearing off its leaves, exploiting the carrot by stealing its roots. These are essential parts of the plant. Even if you eat only fruit, you should be sure to protect the scattering of the seeds to be sure you're not interfering with natural reproduction.
I'm not at all saying there is anything wrong with being vegetarian or vegan. But everyone has to draw some sort of line somewhere, and it's always going to be arbitrary. Everything below that line is open to exploitation, and everything above that line should be protected.
I don't mean to be cynical, but the vast majority of vegetarians I've talked to don't have any depth to their philosophy. It's usually about some sort of worry about cuddly things; hence, many are happy to eat fish. Others (usually more principled) extend it to all vertebrates, some go down as far as bees and silk worms. In the end, many discuss things like "sentience" and ability to "feel" pain, but even most plants will react (slowly, admittedly) to any significant damage -- isn't that proof that they don't "like" what we are doing to them?
In the end, all of this talk about "consent" and "sentience" and "exploitation" and whatever usually goes out the window the moment an ugly (but often harmless) spider is crawling up your kid's back, and you swat the damn thing down and step on it.