Science — the kind that requires evidence and reason.
The Zone has to have a science group. What else protects us from religion?
Group Admins
Mommy, do the udder moo cows eat meat?
This topic contains 31 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Reg,
“Formed?” “Designed?” Right there indicates that the cow isn’t thinking right. She probably stampeded over to Ken Ham’s museum and masticated his porcine regurgitations. 🐮🐷😁
While I agree that there probably is more nuance to what made human brains bigger and smarter, there is also nuance to the practice of most meat-eaters as well.
It was human and bovine Zombies eating “B-R-A-A-A-A-I-N,S!” that lead to Kreutzfeldt-Jacob Disease and Mad Cow Disease. (You can tell the cows who have Mad Cow Disease because they go: “MOOOO-WHA-HAHAHA!”) 🐂🤪
Speaking for myself and many others as an Omnivore, my meat-eating is mostly confined to the muscle-y, sinew-y portions of the beast.
Liver is the only organ meat I’ve ever liked. The liver of the cow or chicken braised with onions and bell pepper slices and served with ketchup on the side are super, and pig liver in the form of fried, sliced loaves of liver pudding or liver mush is a great Southern breakfast treat with eggs and grits. Chicken gizzards are too bitter for my taste and just the mentions of brains, tripe, haggis, and chitterlings are disgusting and right out! 🤮
So, my dish and spoon and knife follow the cow over the Moon and back, but only certain parts and as part of a balanced diet.
🍖🍗🥩🥓🍔🍕🌭🥪🌮🌯🫔🥙🥦🧄🥒🫑🌶🍅🥕🍓🍒🍉🍇🍈🍏🍎🍍🍞🥖🥨🥯
-
This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by
TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum. Thogh some like liver pudding and liver mush cold, fried is best
I am only quoting what the cow said. It is enough having to put up listening to the fronkeys all day long.
I’m noticing our innate tendency to simplify our scientific explanations, even among scientists, but especially in journalism. While I’m personally still struggling with how to discuss further nuances with people, without putting them to sleep. Please feel free to brew a pot of any caffeine-laced beverage… I’ll get further and farther into “meat” in a moment.
Brief asides, did you know that caffeine evolved as an insecticide? Ditto for nicotine, and various mint-like aromatic chemicals that have hexagonally structured molecules and are more intensely sensed by olfactory organs that have evolved to do so. I’m guessing that insects were among the first to evolve such sensors.
So now, head-first into metaphorical meat, in this meet, and a deeper dive. The study of human evolution is necessarily complicated and nuanced by the fact that a number of evolved primate traits evolved relatively quickly and haphazardly, especially in the case of humans.
This or that hardware trait, like dexterity in hands, upright walking, brain size, loss of fur plus ability to sweat to cool off and out-endure prey on the run, increasingly fine-tuned vocal tracts for increasingly nuance- and information-filled verbal communication, and software traits like increasingly complex cultural behaviors that include theory-of-mind abilities to help bands and tribes learn more quickly how each human member feels, what they might need and how they might behave later, increasingly expanding and culturally-perpetuated language abilities alongside our evolving hardware… these are just a few of the uniquely human traits that rapidly incurred extraordinary abilities to survive as individuals and groups, out-pacing (and sometimes even usurping) Mother Nature’s usually-slower pace of typical hardware-centered evolution.
Speaking of communication (and humany self-reflection and word invention), I’d normally break a paragraph like the previous one into more easily edible sentences. But I’ll likely never sufficiently hone this post, anyway. Somewhat related to another point, about how we invented and culturally honed and/or abused our story-telling abilities, thespianism, and the ways to store and disperse or mangle information.
So while trying to account for all the various and interelating, new kinds of human capabilities we’ve inherited and customized, imo it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a bit of both physiological and behavioral chaos was (and still are) significant byproducts of our unnaturally rapid evolution. (Or reword that to “unusually rapid evolution“, for those people whom I’ve seen insist “but all kinds of evolution are ‘natural‘, brah”.)
Word, brahs and shorties! The bulk of our recent, rapid evolution is an accelerating, supremely enhanced and self-enhanced, unplanned/accidental process, and our cultural evolution adds more new and unexpected capabilities and quirkiness than ever before — take Facebook and Meta, please! –, more even than our natural genetic evolution. We choose how culture evolves, in spite of Mother Nature, for better and for worse. (Albeit “Not all choices matter”, if I may culturally appropriate and inappropriately invert and corrupt a recently invented, cultural meme.) [Obscure Meta Q: Too many parens in this post? But meta and meat use the same letters.]
As for the scientific subject of real meat and fat, and/versus vegetables in our diet, our appendix is an example of an organ that hasn’t had enough evolutionary time to optimize its design to work well with all our newly discovered, newly-periodically available edibles made possible by our overall (and sometimes overly) successful evolution; it has shrunk but hasn’t completely disappeared, and we can live without it. It still maintains some helpful functioning like in the digestion of vegetable matter, and in triggering some immune responses to pathogens detected in food that reaches that far into the intestines, in spite of its significantly life-ending threat when it’s unable to neutralize its own infections.
Forgot to mention how our ability to cook food most certainly enhanced which foods — including meats, we could survive on. And it’s important to highlight the high costs of big brains, including the necessary simultaneous evolution of larger birth canals, and the additional necessity of needing more calories in the diet to support it. Sometimes the brain uses up 80% of the all the energy that our body requires! The availability of calories in fat are very high, and whether or not the question for today is if humans can live without it, there really is no question that the ability to procure and cook fat (and the meat that comes with it) had a major impact on long-term survivability of the species. Whether or not it was rarely available, or often available. Abilities to procure and cook a wide range of foods, the procurability of which varied over time and geography, added greatly to survivability. Archeological evidence is anecdotal and still incomplete. Arguments shouldn’t be in either/or terms, but in analog terms of probabilities over short and long periods of time, which, I’m sorry, is just not as easy to come up with as the either/or questions and answers.
So, trying to summarize the above, while mostly in agreement with other observations and while appreciating looming questions in this topic: 1) Human evolution, due to its rapid and often haphazard processes, including (not mentioned earlier), periodically required re-adjustments to physically environmental and biospheric survival pressures, is still a novel and complicated topic! 2) It is a topic ripe for charlatan opportunism, especially when the questions and answers concern individual people’s health, for which simple answers cannot work for everyone in all circumstances.
Although I’m categorically not in favor cannibalism outside of movies, tv, and operas.
Reg, I hope I haven’t detracted from anyone’s interest in this awesome topic!
-
This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by
PopeBeanie. Reason: pretty sure i had to add a semi-colon somewhere in there
PopeBeanie,
Have you tried fava beans with that? (Just thinking this reply might be a clever way to introduce another nuance wrt our evolution-related meat-eating behaviors.)
Nope, no fava beans nor a nice Chiante. 🤪
And I believe I’ve mentioned before that cannibalism, by it’s very nature, could never be a sustainable way of living for any species.
Not only does eating brains spread brain-damaging diseases, which adversely affects survival practices for individual members, but cannibalism would narrow the gene pool of the species which would make for less adaptability in the face of changing environmental conditions.
This may be just idle speculation, but I’ve heard it said that part of the Reason the Romans persecuted Christians is because they heard this talk of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus and thought it was a cannibal cult.
-
This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling
-
This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.