[HN Gopher] The unending quest to build a better chicken
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The unending quest to build a better chicken
Author : Hooke
Score : 19 points
Date : 2024-01-09 23:41 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| psunavy03 wrote:
| "As a man myself, perhaps my desire to eat meat is the result of
| brainwashing." Oh, for God's sake. Your desire to eat meat is the
| result of you being a human being whose entire evolutionary
| existence is based on an omnivorous diet. There's such a thing as
| "being so open-minded your brain falls out." And there's a reason
| vegans have to bend over backwards to meet their nutritional
| needs. If you want to do it, knock yourself out, but it's not how
| we evolved.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Evolutionary sociobiology is consistently deployed to reinforce
| pre-existing values (e.g. during the Vietnam war, there were
| books that argued that humans had evolved to be intrinsically
| warlike). The non-falsifiability of the reasoning is a pretty
| good clue.
|
| So if you want to eat meat, knock yourself out, but don't do it
| because you imagine a caveman did it.
| rpmisms wrote:
| But cavemen did eat meat. We know this.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's even how they survived, really.
|
| In addition, I believe that a main theory to explain why
| we're so good at endurance running is that we evolved to be
| good at persistence hunting.
| rpmisms wrote:
| We call them hunter-gatherers. What were they hunting,
| tofurkey?
|
| Edit to respond to edit: Yep! Persistence hunting (and
| tool use in combination) was our huge advantage over
| literally every animal. We're the apex predator through
| unconventional means.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Maybe only in the last few hundreds of thousands of
| years. Pre that, AFAIK we were a prey species. Sans
| spears etc. we're not too hot.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Here's a compendium of similarly-reasoned theories about
| animals:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories
| rpmisms wrote:
| Here's a paper on cultures that practice persistence
| hunting in the modern age:
|
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| What's the point of this comment? To insult without
| bringing anything to the discussion?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Didn't mean it that way. These evolutionary theories are
| often called "just so stories" because of Kipling's book.
| And in my mind, if the reasoning is similar to a kid's
| book, that's a problem.
|
| "The reason humans have opposable thumbs is because...we
| can grip tools better that way."
|
| "The reason we have hair on our heads is...because we
| like to style it and attract mates."
|
| "The reason humans have bellybuttons is...because
| bellybutton lint is a source of entertainment."
|
| They are just speculations. It certainly is possible to
| look at the fossil record and see how traits evolved in
| ways that fit other patterns. But when people look at
| their own bodies, they are highly susceptible to circular
| or fantastical reasoning.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > They are just speculations
|
| So what do you suggest instead?
| luplex wrote:
| This is true, but cavemen also regularly murdered other
| humans, a practice that we rightfully abandoned.
|
| "Cavemen did that too" is not enough justification for some
| behavior. Cavemen also did not use computers. In fact, we
| evolved to communicate using only our bodies!
|
| We have long crossed the point where humanity can decide
| how it wants to live.
| rpmisms wrote:
| We also frequently kill each other, we've just
| abstracted/outsourced the process here in the West.
| Computers also simply abstract or outsource verbally
| communicating and thinking.
|
| Vegans also outsource killing animals to the farmers who
| mow down billions of small (and large!) animals and
| insects every year to grow their vegetables.
|
| We don't have the control you imagine we do.
|
| Edit: here's a source on vegans killing lots of animals
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733
| -8
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Yup, as someone (who I don't remember) famously said: "if
| you want to kill the most animals, be a vegan".
|
| Edit: source (45 seconds):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvFixaZdvCg
| rpmisms wrote:
| I've killed the majority of my own meat this past year.
| That was one cow, two sheep, two deer, and a few dozen
| rabbits. An acre of soy takes orders of magnitudes more
| carnage.
| stouset wrote:
| Nobody was arguing that "cavemen did it too" is an
| argument to continue some practice, just saying that it
| is reasonable to assume that wanting to eat meat is more
| likely to be the result of evolutionary pressure than
| brainwashing.
| tempodox wrote:
| Right, cave paintings of animal hunts were just an early form
| of fake news. /s
| zer00eyz wrote:
| >>> there were books that argued that humans had evolved to
| be intrinsically warlike
|
| Let find the point in human history where the threat of
| physical and sexual violence wasn't massive relative to now?
| We have rules for fucking war because with out them we will
| rape, pillage and salt the earth in our wake. We raped and
| murdered our nearest cousins (neanderthals and denisovans)
| into extinction. We are war like, the dominant monkey gets to
| reproduce...
|
| > So if you want to eat meat, knock yourself out, but don't
| do it because you imagine a caveman did it.
|
| B12, let's take that out of your diet, take away the meat,
| eggs and dairy and see how long you live. Oh wait, you need
| that to live and meat, eggs or dairy are the only source of
| it.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > We raped and murdered our nearest cousins (neanderthals
| and denisovans) into extinction
|
| Mebbe (and that's my suspicion) but that's conjecture
|
| > Oh wait, you need [B12] live and meat, eggs or dairy are
| the only source of it.
|
| I take vit supplements (shrug)
| jiehong wrote:
| Sure, but maybe without going that extreme: it seems like men
| enjoy red meat much more than women on average. Education or
| physiology?
| rpmisms wrote:
| I'd imagine having more muscle mass makes creatine and
| taurine (for easy examples) more needed, so more craved.
| righthand wrote:
| > And there's a reason vegans have to bend over backwards to
| meet their nutritional needs.
|
| This is not true in the slightest sense.
|
| Eating meat is societal conditioning, not really anything to do
| with evolutionary needs. Yeah we enjoy the taste of fats and
| proteins but that doesn't mean we need flesh to evolve. Maybe
| at the rate in which we evolved but not a direct cause.
| GPerson wrote:
| I agree with this other than the part where you say vegans have
| to bend over backwards to meet their dietary needs. It's really
| not hard to eat a vegan diet in 2024. The hardest part is
| running into other people who presume you're judging them when
| you order your vegan cheese or whatnot, and that's really not
| that hard either.
| why_at wrote:
| I think you're leaving out a bit of context there, just before
| that sentence it says:
|
| > Surely culture has something to do with it. Decades of
| advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be
| powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men
| dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more
| authoritarian political viewpoints.)
|
| and also includes a link to another article about this. [1]
|
| Obviously we have evolved to eat meat and that's part of the
| reason we enjoy it, the same reason as sugar etc, but culture
| clearly plays some part. Different countries eat different
| amounts of different types of meat. America eats more beef than
| most, India eats almost none. Most of the world doesn't eat
| very much horse meat, even though there's no reason we couldn't
| eat more.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/14/beef-
| american-m...
| svieira wrote:
| "I received what would be a final email from Cooks Venture: The
| company was ceasing operations immediately ... What would become
| of the chickens? There were perhaps a million of them in contract
| farmers' barns across Arkansas. And what would become of the
| Cooks Venture Pioneer breed in general ... Soon I heard reports
| from the Ozarks that state officials were working to "depopulate"
| the chicken houses with foam, in some cases without permission
| from the farmers who owned the barns. So far, it doesn't seem
| like anyone has been tasked with the responsibility for cleaning
| up the carcasses, which prompted a state senator to appeal to the
| governor to declare a state of emergency."
|
| Shades of Next here (the last novel by Michael Crichton):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(Crichton_novel)
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(page generated 2024-01-10 23:01 UTC)